His Burial Too

by Catherine Aird

  Fenella forbore to say that she had never known her father not come home for the night either.

  “I was just drifting off,” she said instead. “I remember thinking ‘Oh, good, he’s home’ and then I turned over and went to sleep.”

  “The key isn’t there, miss. Must have been the night before.”

  She nodded uncertainly. “I suppose so. Unless …” Fenella suddenly stood stock still in the middle of the kitchen floor. “… unless he got as far as the garage and then something happened.”

  “Oh, Miss Fenella, surely not.”

  Fenella girded up the long trailing skirts of her dressing gown. “I’m going to see.”

  “Wait for me, miss.” Mrs Turvey snatched at a towel with wet, dripping hands. “Wait for me.”

  “Come on then. Hurry!”

  “Now, don’t you go down to that garage on your own …”

  Fenella took no notice.

  She opened the back door of the Dower House and sped across the lawn, her bedroom slippers brushing a faint trail over the dewy grass. She was closely followed by a slightly panting Mrs Turvey.

  Both of them came to an abrupt halt in front of the garage doors.

  “Why, miss, they’re shut,” declared Mrs Turvey in manifest surprise.

  “That’s funny,” agreed Fenella. “They were open. I opened them myself yesterday evening while I was waiting to be called for.”

  Mrs Turvey nodded approvingly. “There’s nothing your father hates more than having to get out of the car of a night to open them himself. A real nuisance, he calls that.”

  Fenella advanced.

  “Now, don’t you open them doors,” entreated Mrs Turvey urgently. “Miss Fenella, leave them alone. Let me go in there first.”

  She was too late.

  Fenella had already pushed the garage door open.

  A long blue car stood there.

  It was quite empty.

  MERE ACCIDENT.

  3

  Two matters conspired to delay Detective Inspector Sloan leaving Berebury Police Station for Cleete that morning.

  The first was a sad disappointment for him.

  He wasn’t going to be able to take Detective Sergeant Gelven—the staid, resourceful, and utterly reliable Sergeant Gelven—with him after all. When Sloan sent for him it transpired that Sergeant Gelven had been summoned—literally—to attend the Assizes at Calleford, the county town of Calleshire.

  “To give evidence, sir,” reported Gelven regretfully, “in one of the nastiest cases of perjury I’ve ever come across.”

  Sloan groaned aloud.

  “I’m very sorry, sir,” said the sergeant. “I’m sure I don’t know why they bother myself. The accused wouldn’t know an ethic if he saw one, for a start. Not if he met it on the stairs, he wouldn’t. He says,” added Gelven drily, “that he doesn’t understand the meaning of the charge.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Sloan, who knew the gentleman in question. “I don’t suppose he does. Do you realise, Gelven, that that actually could be the truth?”

  “First time he’s spoken it in a month of Sundays, I’ll be bound,” said Gelven fervently. “And then by accident. Perjury wouldn’t mean a thing to him.”

  “A real no-good boy-o …”

  “That’s the ticket, sir. If you happened to need someone to sup with the devil for you, he’d be just the man for the job. Otherwise there’s not a lot he’s any good for, I’m afraid …”

  “It means that I shall have to take Crosby with me instead,” said Sloan anathematising the unnamed perjurer under his breath. He did not relish making do with Detective Constable Crosby instead of the sergeant. Crosby was young, brash, and the perennial despair of all those at Berebury Police Station who had dealings with him.

  “And why aren’t you being a traffic light for Inspector Harpe?” demanded Sloan with unwonted savagery when Crosby reported to him. “Everyone else is.”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Sloan, who could guess, had told him to get the car out. “We are about to venture into the interior, Crosby …”

  “You mean ‘the hush,’ sir,” he said reprovingly.

  Constable Crosby prided himself on being up to date with the new colloquialisms. This was one of the factors which made him unpopular at the Police Station.

  “The hush,” he repeated. “That’s what it’s called now, sir.”

  “Is it indeed?” Sloan had managed between clenched teeth—before going to check that nothing was known about Richard Tindall.

  Nothing was.

  Not “known” in the police sense, that is.

  There was one rather odd incident on record, though, from the day before.

  Odd in the circumstances, that is.

  In the ordinary way there was nothing unusual about a man dropping by the Police Station to report traffic chaos. People were always doing just that.

  Especially these days.

  What was odd was that the man who had done it the day before had been called Richard Mallory Tindall.

  It was Inspector Harpe who told Sloan about it.

  “It was all because it was such a hot day yesterday,” he began cheerlessly. Inspector Harpe had the misfortune to be in charge of the Traffic Division of the Berebury Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary. He was known throughout the Force as “Happy Harry” on account of his never having been seen to smile. Inspector Harpe maintained that so far there had never been anything in Traffic Division at which to smile. “It doesn’t suit me, the heat, Sloan, but it suits tar.”

  “Tar?”

  “The Divisional Surveyor decided to resurface the road south. You know—the one between here and Randall’s Bridge.”

  “I know.” Sloan inclined his head. Cleete was one of a cluster of small villages beyond there. The roads from all of them crossed the river Calle at the village of Randall’s Bridge.

  “Well, yesterday might have suited his tar,” grumbled Harpe, “but the blighter forgot it was Market Day here in Berebury.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Chaos,” said the traffic man succinctly. “Absolute chaos. And every manjack of ’em who’d been grumbling about the state of the road ever since that bad frost we had back in February forgot every pothole there’d ever been while they waited to get past the steamrollers.”

  “More than one?”

  “Two,” said Harpe. “Doing a stately schottische, this chap Tindall said they were, fore and aft of the tarspraying lorry.”

  “At nought miles an hour,” said Sloan sympathetically.

  “That wasn’t all,” groaned Harpe. “The roadmen went and got into a muddle with their flags. Roadmen!” He rolled his eyes expressively. “They might have been roadmen but men of the road they most certainly were not. One of them had never ridden anything stronger than a bicycle in his life. The other one apparently gets a power complex every time anyone puts a red flag into his hand.”

  “How did you find all that out?”

  Inspector Harpe looked gloomier than ever. “Had a bit of an up-and-a-downer with the Divisional Surveyor, if you must know. Asked him where he got his men from. He said he couldn’t get ’em from anywhere and how were police recruiting figures.”

  “And then what?”

  “Both these characters showed their green flags at the same time.”

  Sloan grinned at his colleague.

  “It wasn’t funny, I can tell you, Sloan. There was this chap Tindall’s car sitting in between the two advancing steamrollers. Their drivers couldn’t hear what was going on—you know what a din they make—and the foreman didn’t want to know, what with all that hot tar about and everything.”

  “I don’t blame him. Then what happened?”

  “I gather Mr Tindall practically stood on his horn for a start. Then, he said, at the eleventh hour the inexorable gavotte changed into a majestic minuet.”

  Sloan looked up.

  “That’s just what he said,” insisted Harpe
, whose accurate verbal memory had stood him in good stead as a young police constable. As an Inspector in charge of traffic it served only to keep him awake of nights. “Full of dancing words, he was. He said that after that the two steamrollers crunched away from each other again—for all the world like retreating partners on a dance floor.”

  “Everything but the bow and curtsey,” agreed Sloan.

  “Then he dropped in here to let us know what it was like out there,” finished Harpe. “A queue two miles long on the Berebury side. What it was like the other way, I daren’t think, being Market Day and all.”

  “How did he complain?” enquired Sloan with interest. In his experience that told you more about a man more quickly than anything else.

  “More in sorrow than in anger,” said Harpe promptly. “Thought one of our chaps might soothe things down a bit. He hadn’t said anything to the roadmen, if that’s what you mean.”

  Sloan decided then and there that the unknown Mr Tindall possessed that rare quality, judgement, if nothing else. “What was he like?”

  Harpe screwed up his eyes in concentrated recollection. “Seemed all right to me. Tallish, middle-aged—you know, going a bit grey at the edges—quite active, though. Got in and out of his posh car a jolly sight easier than I could have done.” Harpe glanced down at his own portly figure: he enjoyed his tunny and his contour had not so much gone to seed as gone to pod. “Nice car, though, except for getting in and out of.”

  “One of those, eh?”

  “Well, I must say I wouldn’t have wanted a couple of steamrollers doing a nutcracker act on it if it had been mine. They don’t give them away with a packet of tea. Anyway”—Harpe quickly reverted to his own troubles—“I couldn’t send Jenkins because he was caught up with a flock of sheep on the Kinnisport road and Bailey was out teaching school kids how to be responsible traffic-minded citizens of the future—Heaven help us all—so I told Appleton to go out there and sort things out. A pity, but there wasn’t anyone else available by that time. They were all around at the Market.”

  “A pity?”

  “He was down keeping an eye on the Calleford road junction. That’s always a bad spot on Market Days. I didn’t think it would make a lot of difference in the long run if that did get snarled up yesterday.”

  In the event this was not so.

  It did make a difference.

  The obstruction of the Cleete to Berebury road and the snarling up of the Calleford junction on the outskirts of Berebury—the London road—were but two of the minutiae which were later to contribute to the building up of a complete picture of the day in question.

  Sloan thanked Happy Harry and went on his way.

  There was subsequently no doubt in the collective police mind that Richard Mallory Tindall of Cleete had been alive and well and in no sort of apparent difficulty at a quarter past nine on the morning of the day before—that is, Wednesday, July 16th.

  Fenella Tindall had only just finished dressing when she heard a car turn in to the Dower House drive. She went straight down to the front door and answered it herself.

  A well-dressed man stood there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, barely concealing his impatience as she opened the door to him.

  “Mr Tindall?” he said as soon as he saw her. “Is this his house?”

  “It is.” The man was a complete stranger to Fenella. “But …”

  “Will you tell him that I’m here, please?”

  “Who …?”

  “Cranswick,” he said crisply. Everything about him was crisp: from his regulation haircut down to the caps of his highly polished shoes. He produced an engraved visiting card with prestidigitatory swiftness: Gordon Cranswick of Cranswick (Processing) Limited.

  Fenella took the proffered business card. “I’m very sorry, Mr—er—Cranswick. He’s not here as it happens and …”

  “That won’t do, you know.” Mr Cranswick shook his head from side to side. “Not for me. It’s not good enough. Not now. I know exactly where I stand, you see, after yesterday. He must know that. He’ll just have to see me now whether he likes it or not.”

  “He can’t,” she said.

  “I must see him,” said Cranswick peremptorily. “It’s important, my dear. Very important.”

  “He isn’t here,” repeated Fenella.

  “Where is he then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come, come, now.” Cranswick gave her a hard look. He was a squarely built, contained sort of man, with a mouth and chin which could only be described as firm. “There’s nothing to be gained by playing about. What’s the matter anyway? We agreed that it could all come out today. He doesn’t usually keep me hanging about like this.”

  “He doesn’t usually not come home for the night either,” retorted Fenella vigorously.

  Gordon Cranswick stopped as suddenly as if he’d been hit.

  “Not come home? That’s different. Why didn’t he come home? Where was he last? Who was he with?”

  “Friends. Some people called Osborne. As it happens. Not that that’s got anything to do with …”

  “After that,” he interjected quickly, dismissing friends with a wave of his hand. “Where did he go after that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Fenella steadily. “Not yet.”

  “What I don’t like about this, Miss Tindall—it is Miss Tindall, isn’t it?—is that your father promised …”

  “He wouldn’t break a promise,” she put in swiftly. “You can count on that.”

  “I had to go back to town yesterday to see our bankers and tie things up with them but he promised to see me today as soon as I cared to get here.”

  “Then,” said Fenella with dignity, “I am sure that he will as soon as he can.”

  Gordon Cranswick changed his stance on the Dower House doorstep and began more pompously: “It is a matter of some considerable importance to me, Miss Tindall, that I see your father at the earliest possible moment.” He paused impressively. “I may say that it is important to you, too …”

  “Perhaps,” said Fenella helplessly, “Miss Holroyd at his office …”

  “His secretary? I’ve seen her already. She’s not saying anything either.”

  “Mr Pysden, then,” suggested Fenella. “He’s my father’s deputy …”

  “I know. He was too busy to see me,” declared Cranswick. “Not that I blame him for that. He isn’t going to like the new set-up and I daresay he knows it. I never have seen eye-to-eye with Mr Henry Pysden.”

  “What new set-up, Mr Cranswick?”

  “Cranswick Processing have made an offer for Struthers and Tindall.”

  “An offer?” Fenella was visibly startled. “For my father’s firm?”

  “That’s what I said. What’s more, I think I may tell you that it’s already been accepted.”

  “When?” asked Fenella faintly.

  “Yesterday afternoon. That’s when your father agreed to sell me Struthers and Tindall …” He brought his right fist down on his left one for greater emphasis “… lock …” smack “… stock …” smack “… and barrel.”

  I AM I’ TH’ WAY TO STUDY A LONG SILENCE.

  4

  Twenty minutes after leaving Berebury Police Station Detective Inspector Sloan had brief cause to be grateful for the road works of the Divisional Surveyor.

  The sudden chatter of loose surface stones hitting the underside of the police car was the only thing which persuaded Detective Constable Crosby to reduce speed—and then only fractionally—on all the journey south into the country. Sloan glanced up and noted where yesterday’s tar spraying had left its mark on the road.

  Crosby soon picked up speed again.

  Sloan averted his eyes from the road.

  Driving fast cars fast was the one thing—the only thing—which Crosby did seem to be good at, but he might be wrong. Disastrously wrong.

  “Cleete’s a long way out, sir,” remarked the Detective Constable presently, putting his foot
down still farther on the accelerator.

  ‘I’ve got some beads for the natives,” responded Sloan tightly. “Mind that tractor …”

  “Bags of room,” said Crosby easily.

  Sloan ran the passenger window down and tried looking out of the side of the car instead. That let a bit of air into the vehicle, too. It was going to be another hot day like yesterday. The hedgerows flashed past.

  “There isn’t that much hurry,” he said more mildly, allowing his mind to drift back to his roses. He thought they were flagging a little after yesterday’s great heat. June had been a disappointment from the point of view of weather—and it had come after the latest and driest spring in a decade. So only now—in mid-July—were his precious roses in really full flower. He was nurturing a truly magnificent bloom of Princess Grace of Monaco for the Horticultural Society’s Show on Saturday …

  “Coming into Cleete now, sir. What are we looking for?”

  “A man.”

  “What’s he done?” Crosby’s view of police life was an essentially simplified one.

  “Gone missing.” With an effort Sloan withdrew his mind from contemplating his roses and opened his notebook.

  “Perhaps he’s been abducted,” suggested Crosby cheerfully. “Like the Duke of Calleshire’s daughter who was taken away by that disc jockey fellow last year. You remember, sir …”

  “I remember,” said Sloan repressively.

  No one who read the Sunday newspapers was likely to have forgotten the antics of Lady Anthea. Or the agency pictures of Calle Castle with the drawbridge up and the portcullis down.

  “That was ransom,” Crosby reminded him, “except that the Duke wouldn’t pay it. Said they were welcome to her.”

  “That was dowry,” said Sloan firmly, “except that the Duke wouldn’t pay it. If this is ransom …”

  “Yes?”

  “There has been no mention so far of a letter of demand.”

  “That doesn’t mean a thing, sir,” said the Detective Constable blithely.