Past Tense

by Catherine Aird

  Janet Wakefield started to cry. ‘And I believed you!’ she quavered, now shaking an unsteady fist in Joe Short’s direction. ‘You…you…you’re so plausible, you…that’s what you are…just horribly plausible.’ Her eyes widened as the realisation dawned on her. ‘You killed that poor girl, didn’t you?’ She didn’t stop talking even as Detective Constable Crosby slipped a pair of handcuffs over Joseph Short’s wrists. She went on in an ever-rising crescendo ‘You knew all along that she was called Lucy, so don’t you try to tell me that you didn’t.’

  ‘Janet Wakefield might have gone on a bit, sir, but Short didn’t say a thing. He kept his nerve up all along,’ reported Sloan to Superintendent Leeyes later. ‘Very cool, calm and collected, he was. And charming with it, still, even with the cuffs on. Kept smiling and insisted that there must be some mistake somewhere.’

  Leeyes didn’t go for charm. ‘What I don’t get, Sloan, is why he came back to England in the first place. Couldn’t he have stayed over in Lasserta and done everything – claimed the inheritance and all that – by post?’

  ‘He didn’t know what was still here in the way of incriminating evidence and couldn’t be sure without checking,’ explained Sloan. ‘And he needed to put his photograph into his grandmother’s room and take away any of the real Joseph Short that there were as well as see what was in Lucy Lansdown’s house. She’d been very friendly with the real Joe Short – they had first met at the hospital when his grandmother was in there – until the engagement was broken off, you know.’

  ‘By Brian Brenton?’ The telephone wires between Lasserta and Calleshire had been very busy. Brian Brenton was the name of the employee of United Mellemetics who was said to have gone missing, just as the man calling himself Joseph Short had reported for his new job at Cartwright’s Consolidated Carbons in his stead.

  ‘Yes, sir. Brian Brenton couldn’t risk keeping up the link with Lucy Lansdown after he’d killed the real Joe Short so he broke off the connection. That’s what brought about the end of her love affair and made her so unhappy.’

  ‘That’s definite, is it?’ asked Leeyes. ‘That Brenton’d killed Joseph Short, I mean?’

  ‘The two men had worked together at United Mellemetics and Brenton had picked up a lot of the history of the Short family there from Joe. Certainly enough to get by, anyway. Then, after the aircraft accident, he saw his chance. After all, he knew then that there was no one around in England any more after that to contradict what he had learnt. Don’t forget that the Short boy had been educated all over the place – not in England at all – and so there wasn’t anyone around here likely to remember him well. Brenton’d altered the photograph in Short’s passport…well, fudged it a bit, anyway. That’s not too difficult and most people don’t look at passport photographs too closely.’

  ‘Passport photographs don’t tell you a lot,’ pronounced Leeyes sagely, ‘but I suppose it was better lost.’

  ‘Not for that reason, sir,’ said Sloan, sticking to his narrative. ‘He lost the passport because it had Joseph Short’s height in it. Brian Brenton is much taller.’

  ‘So that’s what all that business with the table was about, Sloan.’

  ‘Yes, sir. That was the proof positive. The clincher, you might say. That’s why he had to lose the passport – after Simon Puckle had seen it but before anyone cottoned on to the height difference.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Joe Short had applied to Cartwright’s after he lost his parents and got the job there. Brenton killed him when they went on a trek in the jungle the weekend Short was supposed to leave United Mellemetics and go to Cartwright’s. The body’s never been found, and according to the ambassador there, isn’t likely to be, the jungle being what it is. Then all Brenton had to do was turn up at Cartwright’s as Joe Short. It’s a big island, you know, and the two places are a long way apart and in a slightly different way of business.’

  In the maelstrom of investigations, Sloan had found an atlas and turned up the island of Lasserta.

  ‘Then,’ he carried on, ‘when Brian Brenton didn’t turn up for work at United Mellemetics as usual and the false Joe Short turned up at Cartwright’s Consolidated Carbons as planned, everyone out there thought it was Brenton who had gone missing.’

  ‘Malice much aforethought,’ observed the superintendent judicially.

  ‘Very well planned indeed by a very cool customer,’ agreed Sloan. ‘All he had to do was wait until the old lady died and then come back and claim the inheritance. A big one, mind you, that he must have known all about. Don’t forget that she was blind and deaf by then and wasn’t alive anyway when he did turn up.’

  ‘There being nobody still around here in Calleshire to say he wasn’t the real McCoy,’ Leeyes played with a pencil, ‘since nearly all Josephine’s family had fallen out with her in the past and weren’t in touch now anyway.’

  ‘Nobody around except Lucy Lansdown, that is. Don’t forget, sir, as far as she was concerned the Brian Brenton whom she saw at the funeral could have been any member of the family. She didn’t know – had no reason to know – that he was there masquerading as Joe Short. He came in late, remember, and she didn’t go to the wake. All she was supposed to think was that Joe Short hadn’t come back from Lasserta for it, which wouldn’t have been unreasonable considering the distance.’

  ‘And he finds out where she was living these days from those little cards the undertaker gave Janet Wakefield?’

  ‘Yes, sir. He might have known it already but Lucy Lansdown had moved from Calleford so he mightn’t have done.’ He coughed. ‘I’m afraid Mrs Wakefield feels very guilty about passing them on as she did. Naturally he would have destroyed that one straightaway.’

  ‘I think she should feel very lucky that Brenton didn’t kill her as well,’ said the superintendent robustly. ‘You got there just in time, Sloan.’

  A noticeably shaken Janet Wakefield had explained to Sloan that she had been about to ring the police and tell them that she had noticed the slip the so-called Joe Short had made by mentioning Lucy Lansdown’s name when no one was supposed to know this. Then, before she could do anything about it, the man himself – as amiable and plausible as ever – had turned up on her doorstep suggesting a farewell visit to the grave on his part.

  ‘Then,’ she had told Sloan, ‘while we were driving there he actually led the conversation round to that very thing. He asked me if I’d noticed and I said yes.’

  ‘Did you indeed?’ said Sloan, glad to be interviewing her in her own home and not looking down at her dead body in the morgue. ‘And what did he say?’

  She had given a shaky little laugh. ‘He made me promise not to say anything about it because that dim young constable of yours had let it out by accident but he didn’t want him to get into any trouble.’

  ‘Plausible,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, but not unkindly. ‘I understand Crosby feels the slur deeply.’

  This was, in fact, an understatement. The detective constable was still muttering about it when Sloan finally reached his own office.

  ‘Hanging’s too good for some people,’ declared Crosby. ‘He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.’

  ‘I don’t think he will, Crosby. The evidence against him is pretty conclusive, although that slip over the girl’s name was the only one he seems to have made.’

  ‘That’s good, sir.’ He pushed a report under Sloan’s nose. ‘This’ll help, too. The Met confirm that, although a man calling himself Short arrived from Lasserta when he said he did, and booked into the airport hotel for the night, he actually hired a car later that same night – a quite different one from the one he collected the next morning. He used Brian Brenton’s passport and driving licence the first time…’

  ‘His own, actually,’ Sloan corrected him mildly. ‘I expect he posted them straight back to Lasserta first thing the next day.’

  ‘To come down to Berebury and break into the nursing home to plant that photograph there,’ carried on Cros
by who, once started, was difficult to deflect. ‘Pretty silly that, if you ask me, to use his own passport and driving licence.’

  ‘Not really,’ mused Sloan. ‘If anyone had got as far as finding that much out, he knew he’d be sunk anyway. And the first hire company would have wanted some evidence of identity and a driving licence before they let him take one of their cars away so he would have had to use Brian Brenton’s for those. He couldn’t very well use Short’s passport then, now could he?’

  ‘It’ll all take a bit of explaining away, anyway,’ observed the constable with some satisfaction.

  ‘There’ll be fingerprints and so forth coming from Lasserta now that the cat’s out of the bag,’ said Sloan, who had been busy with the assembling of evidence for the Crown Prosecution Service. ‘He’s still keeping his cool, though.’

  ‘Even he can’t pretend he’s six inches shorter than he is,’ said Detective Constable Crosby incontrovertibly.

  ‘And even a defence counsel shouldn’t be able to talk his way out of that,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘At least, I hope not,’ he added, a man given to hedging his bets as far as the Crown Prosecution Service was concerned.

  It was some time later before the reinterment of the body of Josephine Eleanor Short took place in the churchyard of Damory Regis. Janet Wakefield had had no hand in making the arrangements this time. Instead the formalities had been accomplished by Simon Puckle in his capacity of sole executor and trustee of the deceased’s estate. He stood beside the coffin now, solemn and respectful.

  The Reverend Derek Tompkinson, the vicar, was there, murmuring that canon law didn’t really cover reinterments but that he would be saying a few suitable prayers. It was he who had told them that people called Arden had lived in the village for a long time, although there were none of them now there. ‘The last one – that is George Peter Arden – was killed flying over France in the war,’ he had explained. ‘Dangerous, hectic days…’

  Tod Morton was there in his best frock coat, and supervising the lowering of the coffin back in its place. ‘No dummy screws this time, Inspector, I promise,’ he whispered in Sloan’s ear as he led the way past him. He had pointed to the war memorial nearby and said, ‘At least we know now why the old lady chose to be buried just here in the churchyard.’

  The police had come there dressed in uniform for reasons too indefinable to put into words. Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby were solemn and respectful, too. And silent on the matter of a recent raid by ‘F’ Division’s Drugs Squad that had discovered a Sri Lankan sapphire ring in the home of a notorious drug dealer. And equally silent on the matter of a proposed raid on the home of Matthew Steele, scheduled for dawn the next morning, although as Crosby had said, ‘I don’t know why we should bother, sir. The diamond ring must have gone ages ago and he still hasn’t been back home.’

  ‘It’s a loose end,’ said Sloan.

  Superintendent Leeyes had expressed himself forcefully on the matter of loose ends. ‘I don’t like them, Sloan. You tell me that you think Steele had tried to break into the undertaker’s first.’

  ‘That’s right, sir. And when he couldn’t get in there he went for the grave.’ Sloan had told him that the young man was in dead trouble with a dealer at the time, as if that completely explained his behaviour – which perhaps it did. ‘We’ll get him in the end, sir,’ promised the inspector. ‘He hasn’t got any brains.’

  ‘See that you do,’ ordered Leeyes grandly.

  Janet Wakefield was there. She had dressed with great care for Josephine Short’s first interment at Damory Regis. She had dressed with equal – if not, greater – care, too, for Josephine Short’s reinterment in the churchyard there.

  But differently.

  ‘I’m going to be wearing my black,’ she had informed her friend, Dawn, at one of their coffee sessions.

  ‘But, Jan, I thought you—’

  ‘I feel I really know Josephine now,’ Janet insisted, ‘and that even though she’s dead she’s still part of our family.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ said Dawn frankly, ‘I should have said it was more of a case of your being part of her family.’

  ‘Yes, well, maybe…Anyway, I wished I’d known her when she was alive.’ Janet went on earnestly, ‘She must have been…well, very feisty in her day.’

  ‘In spite of losing everything,’ Dawn reminded her. ‘And I don’t mean just her faculties.’

  ‘She had lost everybody who was anything to her,’ said Janet sadly. ‘How she stayed sane, I don’t know.’

  ‘At least she was spared knowing that her grandson had been murdered,’ said Dawn, metaphorically looking for crumbs of comfort in a notably bare larder.

  Janet kept her head turned away towards the coffee pot, not meeting Dawn’s eye, while she said, ‘Bill and I have decided that if we have – if we were ever to have – a girl, that we’d call her Josephine.’

  Dawn looked up sharply enough to catch sight of a blush creeping up her friend’s cheek. True friend that she was, she merely said diplomatically, ‘What a nice idea. How long now before Bill comes home again?’

  ‘He’s working his notice out now and then he’s coming back for good. Not,’ she added hastily, ‘that Simon Puckle says we can assume anything on timing as far as inheriting the estate is concerned. Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘Not until it can be proved that the real Joe Short is dead, I suppose?’ said Dawn, who had been briefed on the matter by her husband, an insurance man. ‘Don’t you have to wait for seven years or something awful like that without him being found?’

  ‘We understand from Simon Puckle that it may not be necessary,’ said Janet, pushing a coffee cup towards Dawn.

  Dawn sat up. ‘How does he work that out?’

  ‘Actually…I know this sounds silly…but Brian Brenton is being very helpful.’

  ‘I can’t believe that, Jan. Surely not?’

  ‘He is. He’s told the police exactly where in the jungle to look for the body.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ She frowned. ‘It seemed very odd at first and I didn’t understand, but they told me he’s hoping to be charged with murdering Lucy Lansdown and to go to prison for that here in England.’

  ‘Hoping? He must be mad.’

  ‘They have the death penalty for murder in Lasserta,’ Janet explained simply.

  Lucy Lansdown’s brother was also there at the interment, soberly dressed and still sad. ‘It’s nice of you to come,’ Janet said to him.

  ‘It doesn’t do to think of what might have been, does it?’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Poor Lucy.’

  Janet shuddered and nearly lost her composure. ‘No.’

  ‘Poor Lucy,’ he said again.

  ‘Poor everybody,’ said Janet.

  Matthew Steele wasn’t there. He was in custody on charges, various, carefully drawn up under the Theft Act.

  Mrs Linda Luxton wasn’t there either. As she had explained to Simon Puckle, there was someone else in room 18 now and she was very busy. ‘And one has to move on, hasn’t one?’

  Also by Catherine Aird

  The Religious Body

  Henrietta Who?

  The Complete Steel

  A Late Phoenix

  His Burial Too

  Slight Morning

  Parting Breath

  Some Die Eloquent

  Last Respects

  Harm’s Way

  A Dead Liberty

  The Body Politic

  A Going Concern

  Injury Time

  After Effects

  Stiff News

  Little Knell

  Amendment of Life

  Chapter and Hearse

  Hole in One

  Losing Ground

  CATHERINE AIRD is the author of more than twenty crime novels and story collections, most of which feature Detective Chief Inspector CD Sloan. She holds an honorary MA from the University of Kent and was made an MBE. Her other
works include Hole in One and Losing Ground. Apart from writing the successful Chronicles of Calleshire, she has also written and edited a series of village histories and is active in village life. She lives in Kent.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  PAST TENSE. Copyright © 2010 by Catherine Aird. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Aird, Catherine.

  Past tense : a Sloan and Crosby mystery / Catherine Aird.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-4299-5356-6

  1. Sloan, C. D. (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Crosby, Detective Constable W. (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Police—Great Britain—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6051.I65P35 2011

  823'.914—dc22

  2010042896

  First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby Limited