His Burial Too

by Catherine Aird

  That was the moment when Police Constable Hepple came in to announce that the car had come to take her to the mortuary—and found Gordon Cranswick there.

  And when Gordon Cranswick insisted with something of a return to his old manner, “I want to buy the company, Miss Tindall. Now. And I’m not going to take no for an answer. Your father said I could and that’s good enough for me.”

  “But, Mr Cranswick,” she said, “how do I know that?”

  The search—police-fashion—of the premises of Struthers and Tindall at Berebury’s Wellgate was being conducted by the portly middle-aged Police Sergeant Wharton. His team had moved from the churchyard at Randall’s Bridge.

  It was no different from other searches anywhere else.

  Sergeant Wharton ended up staring dispassionately at the crop of incongruities reaped during it.

  It was a strange harvest and some of it was not his concern.

  Like the reading matter of one of the technicians in the Testing Department who was apparently cherishing body-building notions. Wharton looked the man up and down and decided he wouldn’t do for the Force, not unless his subscription had a good bit to go …

  Or the small bar of plain chocolate kept by Miss Holroyd in a drawer quite clearly marked Carbon Paper.

  Or the crossword puzzle—nearly completed—on the desk of someone else.

  Some of it was his concern.

  Like the books which the firm’s accountant was standing over like a stag at bay. Wharton had sequestrated them nevertheless—without being unduly impressed. In his experience accountants were given to defending with their lives figures which could be seen by anyone in the published balance sheet; and it would take another accountant to establish whether there was anything to hide or this behaviour pattern was just habit.

  The photocopy was his concern.

  It was of one of Struthers and Tindall’s patents and it had been folded neatly inside a telephone directory in Paul Blake’s room. Sergeant Wharton gave his man full marks for finding that.

  And Paul Blake none at all for his vehement denials that he knew anything about it.

  Overdone, Wharton thought.

  The experiment on which Henry Pysden was working was his concern. On sea-water magnesia, or so he was told. Wharton followed his instructions and noted the model number and the name of the makers of the time punch machine attached to the apparatus.

  There was the petty cash which the office boy had put into his own pocket. But this, he insisted, he had only done as a precaution because there were so many policemen about.

  “None of that, young man,” Wharton had said with dignity, “or I’ll take a magnifying glass to that old scooter outside. It is yours, I take it?”

  The youth had paled into silence and Wharton had continued his stately way.

  The foreman of Testing was speechless at the interruption to work but vocal about the police, the heat, United Mellemetics …

  Wharton had pinned him down about United Mellemetics.

  He—the foreman—didn’t know what all the fuss was about. He had set up some experiments on detailed instructions from Mr Tindall last week. They were to do with the strength of pipes, their tensility, testing to see how ductile they would be under certain specified conditions—that sort of thing. The tests had been duly done and the results sent back to Mr Tindall.

  The next thing he knew about them was this morning when Mr Pysden was round saying someone had lost the ruddy file. That was just before they heard the sad news about Mr Tindall. Well, he, the foreman, had certainly given the United Mellemetics stuff back to poor Mr Tindall; not that he could very well confirm it now, could he?

  When.

  Yesterday morning. The foreman didn’t hesitate. The Wednesday. Put all the workings and results on Mr Tindall’s own desk, he had, himself, and if anyone was going round saying anything different he would like to be told this minute …

  Wharton, primed by Sloan, asked at what stage Paul Blake had checked the calculations.

  The foreman assumed an expression which would have been recognised the world over as that of any seasoned noncommissioned officer on being given the opportunity to comment on the efficiency or otherwise of a junior officer. He very nearly took it, then discretion raised its careful head.

  “Mr Paul Blake,” he said precisely, “came down to Testing on Monday and checked our calculations, and also some which Mr Tindall had done himself.”

  Sergeant Wharton looked at the foreman man-to-man. “Everything all right there I take it?”

  “Or I’d want to know the reason why,” said the foreman comfortably.

  Sergeant Wharton went back to Henry Pysden’s room.

  One thing was apparent from the search.

  United Mellemetics might not have existed at all for all the physical traces it had left at Struthers and Tindall.

  He took out his notebook and said to Henry Pysden: “I’ll begin with you, sir, if I may. I need to know exactly where you were between the hours of ten-thirty last night and two o’clock this morning …”

  THAT LAY IN A DEAD PALSY.

  15

  Fenella Tindall wasn’t worried about her tummy. At least, not in the way Detective Constable Crosby had been.

  In her case lunchtime had come and gone unremarked by either hunger or food. If she felt anything at all it was slightly sick.

  That would be the smell of antiseptic in the mortuary.

  She had already forgotten everything about the journey from the Dower House at Cleete to the police mortuary at Berebury. She had travelled there in silence beside an experienced policewoman who knew better than to try to distract her with kind words.

  And she had walked into the mortuary in such an aura of disbelief that it was as if she were standing outside herself as she did so—watching dispassionately as a slight girl with auburn hair wearing a brown dress and a necklace of white beads took the few steps between car and door. It might have been someone else—not Fenella Tindall at all—she felt so detached.

  The mortuary attendant said: “This way, miss,” in totally matter-of-fact tones.

  Fenella followed.

  As she did so a tall good-looking young man uncoiled himself from beside the doorway.

  The policewoman watched impassively as he went to Fenella’s side.

  “Paul!” Fenella halted. “How kind of you to come.”

  Paul Blake made an awkward gesture with one hand and with the other propelled her gently along the passage after the mortuary attendant.

  “Sorry about all this,” he said. “Thought I’d better turn up.”

  The white-coated figure of the mortuary attendant disappeared down the passage and through another door beyond that. The smell of antiseptic got suddenly stronger, welling up ahead of them as they followed him.

  “Oh …” Fenella gave way to a momentary pang of surprise as she saw the white-sheeted figure in the mortuary.

  Paul Blake moved up behind Fenella and murmured, “It won’t take a minute.”

  “Now, miss …” the man lowered his voice, “if you’ll just take a look …”

  He needn’t have bothered to speak in undertones. Fenella wasn’t listening anyway. She was thinking about something else.

  About Italy.

  She’d seen death there, but it had been different. Not clinical and antiseptic like this. Not with clean white coats wrongly speaking of life not death. In Italy death was dark and medieval. The men near it—the Misericordia—were garbed in long black robes and hooded save their eyes. It was a dress which went back to the Plague.

  She took a look at the face revealed by the mortuary attendant and nodded.

  “That’s my father.”

  She would have liked to have said it was her grandfather whom she had seen—death had added a generation to her father’s face.

  “Richard Mallory Tindall,” she said in as firm a voice as she could manage.

  “We can go back now,” said Paul Blake.

 
; Actually the face Fenella wished she didn’t have to look at was the mortuary attendant’s.

  She now knew why it was those men of the Misericordia—the Brethren of Mercy—were covered all over in black except for their eyes. It meant that the bereaved saw no face round the deceased—no face to associate forever with moments like these. It would have meant that she would have been spared the memory of the mortuary attendant chirpily steering them back to his little office.

  “Just one more thing, miss, and then we’re done. Little matter of his effects.”

  She stirred involuntarily at the word and then remembered.

  The dead didn’t have possessions, they had effects.

  She became aware that he was asking her to identify some objects laid out in an orderly row on a table. There was some small change, his house keys, a wallet, a few notes, a slide rule, a pen and pencil, two handkerchiefs …

  “Sign here, miss, please, that they’re his.”

  She made a slight movement away from the proffered form. “They’re not all there. There was his diary. It’s a little leather one. I gave it to him. He always carried it with him. Always …”

  The mortuary attendant sucked his teeth. “That’s gone to the Inspector, miss. He wanted that double quick.”

  Detective Constable Crosby handed the diary—duly fingerprinted—to Detective Inspector Sloan.

  Sloan took the small leather covered book and turned to Wednesday, July 16th.

  That was yesterday.

  Was it only yesterday?

  His eye strayed involuntarily to Saturday, July 19th. That was the date engraved on his mind.

  Show Day.

  He looked out of the Police Station window and sighed. This strong sunshine would be bringing his Princess Grace of Monaco along too soon. She was a perfect rose, of course, but if it stayed as hot as this for too long she was going to be a perfect rose on Friday not Saturday.

  “If you look under Wednesday, sir …” Crosby was getting restive.

  Sloan switched his gaze back to the left-hand page. There was just one entry in the little oblong space with that date on it. It was quite brief.

  It said: G. 12.30.

  “That’s going to be a great help, Crosby, that is. G …” he said ruminatively. “G for Giuseppe, do you suppose?”

  The Superintendent, he was sure, was going nap for Fenella.

  “Or G for Gordon?” countered Crosby brightly. “That’s that fellow Cranswick’s name, isn’t it?”

  “Or G for Osborne?” said Sloan.

  “G for Osborne, sir?”

  “George Osborne. He who has a wife and an invention.”

  “Oh,” Crosby subsided. “I’d forgotten about him.”

  “A good police officer,” Sloan reminded him, “can’t afford to forget anything.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Ever.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sloan put the diary down and moved over to the wall. A large-scale map of Calleshire hung there.

  Crosby joined him. “We know, sir,” he said eagerly, “that he left his works at twelve.”

  “Miss Holroyd said he did,” murmured Sloan, unheeded, “which isn’t quite the same thing.”

  “That gives him half an hour,” continued Crosby, missing the point.

  “Fifteen miles at the outside,” said Sloan.

  “Twenty, sir. Surely.”

  “In an old van,” Sloan reminded him. “Not in a souped-up police car with you at the wheel.”

  “Fifteen then,” conceded Crosby.

  “So where does that get us?”

  It didn’t get them very far.

  Mahomet had agreed to go to the mountain.

  Police Constable Hepple had been very persuasive. Not for nothing had he mastered the art of the quiet life. And the first rule for a quiet life is to arrange for all action to take place somewhere else.

  Anywhere else.

  That was how it was that Mr Gordon Cranswick found himself being interviewed by Detective Inspector Sloan at Berebury Police Station. In this case “being interviewed” was something of a euphemism. It seemed at times as if the boot might be on the other foot.

  Mr Gordon Cranswick, Chairman and Managing Director of Cranswick (Processing) Limited, was not only firmly planted in one of Sloan’s office chairs, but was also making it quite clear that he wasn’t going to budge from there until he himself took the decision to do so. He was, in fact, very busy demonstrating the fact that when Mr Gordon Cranswick was around Mr Gordon Cranswick took the decisions, sundry police detective inspectors notwithstanding.

  “Now, what is all this about?” he demanded as soon as he set eyes on Sloan.

  “The death of Richard Tindall,” said Sloan mildly.

  He asked Cranswick what had brought him to Cleete.

  “What brought me? Tindall, of course. Well, Struthers and Tindall, I suppose, to be strictly accurate.”

  “The firm rather than the man?”

  “It’s the firm I’m interested in. Literally. Have been for some time. Just what Cranswick needed—their sort of business would back up our sort of business very nicely.”

  “Your sort of business being …” enquired Sloan.

  “Processing.” He waved a hand. “Oh, I know that processing covers a multitude of sins but in the case of Cranswick it means that we take a patent belonging to a customer and do the lot with it.”

  Sloan was guarded. “The lot?”

  “Develop, manufacture and market. Struthers and Tindall are primarily testers.”

  “So they would go rather well with you.”

  Cranswick nodded vigorously. “We realised that when we added up what we were paying them for their feasibility studies and so forth.”

  “So?”

  “So I set about trying to buy them.” Cranswick sat back in his chair. “I won’t say it was easy.”

  “Oh?”

  “Tindall wasn’t all that keen on selling at first and then his wife died and that changed things a bit.”

  Sloan nodded. It would.

  “And then,” the businessman stirred irritably, “something else cropped up.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Another buyer.”

  “Who?”

  “Tindall wouldn’t say. Just told me that he’d had another offer better than mine.”

  “You believed him?”

  Cranswick shrugged. “Why not? I could always prove it by leaving him with it if I wanted to.”

  “You didn’t want to?”

  “I did not. I wanted Struthers and Tindall and I knew I’d have to pay for it. It’s a good firm, you know. Sound. But it wasn’t going for a song.”

  “So someone else wanted it, too.”

  “Pretty badly, I should say, from what they were willing to offer. Still, I reckoned that if it was worth it to them it was worth it to me.”

  “Quite,” said Sloan. People wrote books on political economy but in the end decisions came down to homespun yardsticks like this whatever the professors had to say. “So in the end yours was the better offer?”

  “No,” said Gordon Cranswick unexpectedly, “it wasn’t. They—whoever they were—were prepared to overbid me.”

  “But …”

  “But,” he said heavily, “Tindall wasn’t prepared to sell to them. Said he’d found out something about their methods which he didn’t like and if my offer was still good he’d take it.”

  “When?”

  “Tuesday evening.”

  “Where?”

  “Ah,” Gordon Cranswick leaned forward. “That’s just it. He rang me from a call box and suggested a quiet meeting somewhere simple where nobody knew us.”

  “At twelve-thirty yesterday?”

  “That’s right. At Dick’s Dive. It’s a transport cafe halfway down the Calleford road—on the way to Luston …”

  “We know it,” said Sloan. All policemen knew all transport cafes in their area.

  “Actually,” admitted Cr
answick, sounding surprised, “the food was pretty good.”

  “It has to be,” said Sloan, “or the customers vote with their wheels.”

  “What? Oh, yes, of course … Well, that’s where Richard Tindall told me that he was willing to cut these other people out and sell to me at my last offer and on my terms …”

  “On your terms?”

  “I wasn’t prepared to be hamstrung by any silly agreements about keeping people on. I run Cranswick my way and if the Struthers and Tindall people didn’t like it they would have to go …”

  “These other people who wanted to buy, he didn’t tell you who they were or what methods he didn’t like?”

  Cranswick’s brow wrinkled. “Not exactly but he did say I needn’t worry. He’d deal with them before he left.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I went back to Town to see my bankers and solicitors and arranged to come down here first thing this morning to sign on the dotted line.”

  Sloan nodded and pushed his notebook into a slightly more prominent position. “Now, sir, if you would tell me exactly where you were between ten-thirty last night and two o’clock this morning …”

  The next call Sloan had was from the mortuary.

  Dr Dabbe was ready for him.

  Being Dr Dabbe it was a case of being ready and waiting.

  “I’ve started on some of the groundwork, Sloan. That blood on the floor, for instance, was Tindall’s all right. And it had splashed down while he was lying there. While he was alive, of course. There was no more blood after the sculpture came down. That was what killed him.”

  Sloan nodded.

  “I should say he was hit a yard or two short of the sculpture—say just inside the door—and then dragged across the floor until he was lying practically beside the sculpture. As to what he was hit with …”

  “Yes?”

  “You couldn’t call the edges of the wound well-defined but whatever it was it was enough to knock him out—sorry—render him unconscious—got to mind my p’s and q’s with you people …”

  Sloan grinned. There was English, Police English and medical words, and nobody knew this better than the pathologist.

  “… Say something like an old sock filled with sand—I’ll look out for grains of sand presently. And the blow was well aimed.”