“Without the reel –” Hebbinge chose his words with great care – “you can’t actually prove anything about anybody, can you?”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, sir.” Sloan still hadn’t drunk his tea. “Crosby, give our friends a shout, will you?”
Crosby lifted his voice. “You can come out now, boys.”
Round the corner of the stable wall appeared Norman Burton, the schoolmaster, with young Mark Smithson and Peter Pearson in tow.
“I understand,” said Sloan to Hebbinge in a voice of steel, “that these two boys saw you place a reel of wire behind the cloth covering the table on which the tomatoes were displayed.”
“You promised not to tell,” stammered Mark Smithson tremulously.
Peter Pearson scowled at the agent. “We didn’t tell on you.”
Edward Hebbinge started to struggle to his feet.
“Watch him,” called out Crosby. With prestidigitatory skill something steel appeared in his hand.
“He’s going to run for it,” shouted Norman Burton.
“No, he isn’t,” said Detective-Inspector Sloan. An arm like an iron band descended on the land agent’s shoulder. “Edward Hebbinge, I am arresting you for the murder of Joyce Mary Cooper. You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so but what you say may be put into writing and given in evidence …”
Two small boys looked on pop-eyed in wonder and excitement as Detective-Constable Crosby slipped a pair of handcuffs on the struggling man.
What Edward Hebbinge said was not fit to record.
“Come along, boys,” said the schoolmaster primly. “It’s time you went home.”
17
Piccola choir
The steward at the Berebury Golf Club was highly skilled at fending off enquiries about gentlemen members who were playing out on the course. He was even more adept at dealing with enquiries about those who were actually in the bar.
“If you’ll hang on, madam,” his usual patter ran, I’ll just go through to the changing rooms. I rather think I saw him come off the course a moment ago.” He got this sort of call every day but particularly on Sundays from wives with joints of meat spoiling in the oven.
“I’m not quite sure,” he said diplomatically now to Sloan’s request, “exactly how far round Mr Leeyes has been able to get. The course is very crowded today. Can I take a message?”
“I’ll ring later,” said Sloan. He toyed for a moment with the notion of leaving some triumphant but ambiguous message for Superintendent Leeyes along the lines of – say – ‘the rabbit being in the bag’ or ‘having the bracelets on chummie’. Someone had once explained to him about the British commander who had reported the victory at Sind in India with the single word Peccavi – Latin for ‘I have sinned’; but enigmatic messages, however punny, wouldn’t do for the Superintendent.
“Very well, sir. Who shall I say called?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Sloan resisted that temptation, too. Some humorist who had once said ‘007’ had had a real earful when the Superintendent had got hold of him.
He replaced the receiver and sat back, thinking.
He was back in Hebbinge’s office at the Priory, sitting at Hebbinge’s desk, surrounded by Hebbinge’s files. Somewhere here, he supposed, would be clues to Hebbinge’s motive. Not that he was going to be able to find it as easily as all that. Edward Hebbinge hadn’t struck him as the sort of man to leave traces of perfidy in the files.
Watergate had taught everyone the danger of keeping records. Besides, Stephen Terlingham hadn’t said he’d suspected anything: not even a kickback from Maurice Esdaile. And the solicitor would automatically have been on the lookout for that.
So it must be something more subtle than palm oil.
He swung one leg over the other. It wasn’t Richenda Mellows whom the agent was frightened of. It was her Trustees. The Bank, the Solicitor and the Rector. Not people at all. Institutions. Money, law and … and what? Sloan considered what the Church stood for in the administration of the affairs of a minor.
Fair play, he decided after a bit.
And local knowledge, he added a moment later.
He pulled open the drawers of the desk – in spite of Watergate. Some luckless police officer – he hoped his name wasn’t C. D. Sloan – was going to have to spend a lot of time opening and shutting desk drawers until the police found out exactly what Edward Hebbinge had been up to that wouldn’t stand the searching light of three Trustees – the Bank, who would know all about money; the Law, who would know all about land and property; and the Church, who would know all about – what?
Almstone, anyway.
And wickedness.
Sloan paused while he revised this. No. All three institutions met and matched cupidity in their daily work. It wasn’t the prerogative of any one of them any more than it was of the police. The police just had the eventual clearing up to do.
He thought about Edward Hebbinge with distaste. It had been a mockery of a man whom Crosby had led away to the waiting police car. He sighed. The Mellows family wouldn’t be the first to find that honest stewards were hard to come by. Rich men had been having trouble with cheating stewards from time immemorial. Calling them to account was a notoriously disappointing business …
He stopped in the act of getting out of his chair.
Old Mrs Wylly wouldn’t have called on Edward Hebbinge to give an account of his stewardship. Things would have been allowed to go on as before with minimal disturbance. Richenda Mellows’s trustees on the other hand undoubtedly would have looked at the present and the future – if not the past.
He sat back in his chair.
He lifted his eyes and met for the umpteenth time the map on the wall.
Only this time he looked at it in a different way.
Fool that he was.
He looked at one large farm and two smaller ones. He remembered two highly prosperous farmers at the two smaller farms and one unprosperous farmer, struggling along with a large farm, glad at the prospect of paying less rent.
“Thou fool,” said Sloan to himself.
He thought of Herbert Kershaw and Cedric Milsom, oozing evidence of the good life, and Sam Watkinson doing his own milking on a Saturday afternoon. Sam Watkinson, churchwarden and Chairman of the Bench, wasn’t likely to have come to a shady agreement with anyone. Cedric Milsom, philanderer, and Herbert Kershaw, not very efficient sheep farmer, might very easily have done.
“No man can serve two masters,” he murmured to the empty office. “I reckon Edward Hebbinge had been serving Mammon all right.” He looked at the estate map again.
The answer had been staring him in the face all the time, after all. It was set out in the Gospel according to St Luke, too.
“Richenda Mellows’s three Trustees would have spotted the discrepancy straightaway, sir,” he reported to Superintendent Leeyes, when that worthy police officer had reached the Club-house again. “The Rector alone would have wanted to know why old Sam Watkinson was paying so much more rent per acre for Home Farm than Milsom and Kershaw were for Dorter End and Abbot’s Hall.”
That, decided Sloan, was where local knowledge came in. The Bank wouldn’t have been satisfied with the rate of return on the estate and Stephen Terlingham would have been entitled to a closer look at the income and expenditure account.
Leeyes grunted.
“Thinking back, sir,” went on Sloan, “I’m not sure that Terlingham didn’t have doubts himself and that that’s why he’d dug his toes in about the succession. He might have suspected funny business without knowing what it was or exactly where to look.”
“He’s too canny to say,” said Leeyes.
“Anyway, Hebbinge was getting every penny that the Agricultural Tenancy Acts would let him out of Sam Watkinson.”
Leeyes grunted. “Paying it into the estate, though?”
“Oh yes, sir. His paperwork was perfectly all right. The auditors don’t seem to have had any qualms.”
> Leeyes said something disparaging about all members of the accountancy profession.
“Not all crime shows up on a balance sheet, sir.”
That which was Cæsar’s would have been rendered unto Cæsar, though.
“Figures mean what you want them to mean,” said Leeyes in an unconscious parody of the Red Queen.
“Watkinson’s farm was bigger anyway,” said Sloan, “so it would look all right at first glance anyway. Everyone would expect the rent to be higher than the two others. There could be other things, too.”
“Other things?” said Leeyes.
“The two farmers could have had benefits charged to the estate that they should have paid for and split the difference.”
“Such as?” demanded Leeyes. There were no benefits about being in the police force. At football matches a policeman kept his eye on the crowd, not on the ball.
“Fencing,” suggested Sloan. “Piped water. Maintenance of farm roads. Anyway, sir, things were not as they should have been.”
“Monkey business,” said Leeyes succinctly. “That letter of Mrs Agatha Mellows about the colour of the baby’s eyes?”
“Not only found by Hebbinge,” said Sloan, “but probably written by him, too. It’s a passable forgery but the scientific people say the paper he used isn’t old enough.”
“They always forget something,” said Leeyes complacently.
“Since the Brigadier died,” said Sloan, who had been very active indeed in the last hour or so, “I think there had been what you might call unjust enrichment.”
“So the other two,” said Leeyes, “Milsom and Kershaw – they’d had their fingers in the pie, too, had they?”
“As far as I can determine,” said Sloan cautiously, “the rents of Dorter End and Abbot’s Hall were well below what they should have been.” He hadn’t had anything like enough time to investigate in detail. “The leases were sound enough but Terlingham didn’t come into the rent negotiations.”
Leeyes grunted.
“If you ask me,” Sloan forged on, “those two farmers were splitting the difference with Hebbinge. The difference between what the rent could have been and what they were paying, I mean.”
“I told you to look for who benefited, Sloan.”
“Yes, sir.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know that we shall ever be able to prove anything …”
“Come, come, Sloan,” clucked Leeyes bracingly, “that won’t do. What did Milsom and Kershaw say when you tackled them?”
“Shut up like a pair of clams and started talking about their solicitors.”
“That proves it then,” said Superintendent Leeyes, jumping several sacred legal principles on his way to a conclusion. “What more do you want?”
“Very little, sir, thank you,” said Sloan sedately. “We shall get our conviction for murder and no doubt the – er – children of this world will get their just deserts, seeing,” he added, “that they are in their generation wiser than the children of Light.”
His mother had been a great reader of the Bible. “What’s that, Sloan? What’s that …?”
But Police Superintendent Leeyes did have the last word after all.
Though not until the next day: the Monday morning. Sloan had laid the rough outline of a draft report on his desk a little earlier.
“By the way, Sloan …”
“Sir?”
“There was one thing I wasn’t sure about.”
“Sir?”
“I don’t like loose ends.”
“No, sir.” Sloan knew that already.
“What became of the water otter?”
“Ah yes, sir. The water otter.”
“It was in the tent on the other side of Nurse Cooper.”
“Yes, sir,” said Sloan weakly. “I put Crosby on to looking into that.”
“Well?”
“You see, sir, it was like this …”
“Forget all about it, did he? Just like …”
“No, sir,” said Sloan hastily. “He didn’t forget. He found out all right.”
“Sloan, are you keeping something from me?”
“No, sir,” Sloan swallowed. “They didn’t hear anything in that tent.”
“Too much splashing about?”
“In a manner of speaking, sir.”
“Sloan, what do you mean? What exactly was in that tent?” he asked peremptorily.
“A kettle, sir.”
“A kettle?” A rising note of disbelief came into his voice. “Is that all?”
“On a primus stove, sir.”
“A kettle on a primus stove …” began Leeyes. “How the devil …” Then the Superintendent’s voice fell away.
“It was,” added Sloan, greatly daring, “getting – er – warmer.”
“I get it,” said Leeyes. He sounded a broken man. “Don’t tell me …”
Sloan nodded. “A water ’otter,” he said hollowly.
About the Author
Catherine Aird is the author of more than twenty volumes of detective mysteries and three collections of short stories. Most of her fiction features Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan and Detective Constable W. E. Crosby. Aird holds an honorary master’s degree from the University of Kent and was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for her services to the Girl Guide Association. She lives in a village in East Kent, England.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1980 by Catherine Aird
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1064-1
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Passing Strange Page 19