Giant articulated trailers obligingly screened the car in which the dead man lay from the view of all but those who passed very near. It was parked well away at the back, beyond two Continental trailers resting on their way to Rumania.
It had been the Rumanian drivers who had spotted the crumpled driver and—to their eternal credit—who had then drawn attention to him.
“Take their numbers,” ordered Sloan automatically, “and everyone else’s. Nobody to leave the place until I say.”
He had help this time.
Two of Inspector Harpe’s men, whose patrol car was never far from this stretch of main road, were there for the asking. They would take all the numbers and stop anyone slipping away from the cafe. At the moment it looked as if—rather than go—everyone at Dick’s had decided to stay.
They were all clustered round a large black car.
“We get all sorts here,” said Dick, the proprietor. He was referring to the opulence of the car and its gleaming chromium. “Nowhere else to eat and park for miles.”
“Had he been in?” asked Sloan.
The cafe owner shook his head. “Not that I’d noticed.”
The dead man was slumped forward over the steering wheel, folds of flesh overlapping a tight collar, his face an unhealthy white. Sloan went round and peered in through the windscreen. Even his best friends might not have recognised the man now—not with his glazed eyes staring sightlessly at nothing and his jaw hanging slackly downwards.
Sloan certainly didn’t.
The car had a Calleshire registration number, though.
“Crosby, take this number and find out who the car belongs to.”
He turned to the watching crowd of men.
“Anyone see anything?”
Nobody answered. One or two at the edge of the crowd started to drift back towards the cafe.
“Anyone notice how long this car has been here?”
This was more productive.
A driver and his mate with strong Yorkshire accents hadn’t seen it when they had hauled their giant load onto the forecourt.
“’Bout ’alf an hour ago that would have been, mate. At least. Happen a bit more. That’s us over there.” He pointed to a loaded lorry. “Hobblethwaite Castings. T’car wasn’t ’ere then.”
The time of their arrival was confirmed by Dick himself.
“Two pies and peas, wasn’t it, lads?”
They nodded.
“Just finished them, we ’ad, when we ’eard there was summat up out ’ere.”
“You won’t get quicker service on the road anywhere in Calleshire,” said the cafe proprietor proudly. “Nobody waits long for his dinner at Dick’s.”
Sloan cut this commercial short. “Anyone notice any other private car on the park?”
Nobody had.
Crosby came back from sending his radio message about the car number and Sloan packed his audience back into the cafe with Inspector Harpe’s two men.
Then he turned to Crosby. “Well?”
“Hit hard on the back of the head, sir.” Crosby peered forward. “No weapon in sight.”
“We’ll search for that presently. Anything else?”
Crosby took another look. “Was he hit here, sir? In the car?”
“Looks like it.” Sloan stared at the big car that had everything: including room to swing a cat. Or a weapon.
“You could do it from the back seat easy, sir. Plenty of elbow room.”
“Anything else?”
“Not very long ago?” offered the Constable tentatively. “The engine’s still a bit warm.”
“It isn’t the only thing,” said Sloan. The sun was getting hotter by the hour.
“Nothing else to see,” reported Crosby.
“Pity,” said Sloan. He hoped that the Superintendent’s famous exchange principle would still hold good.
“And no signs of a struggle.”
“Someone he knew perhaps …”
Both policemen were still standing looking at the dead man when the police radio in their car started to chatter.
“Foxtrot Delta one six, Foxtrot Delta one six …”
Crosby went over to the car and made an answer.
The voice of the girl at the microphone in the control room at the Constabulary Headquarters in Calleford echoed nasally across the cafe forecourt.
“Foxtrot Delta one six … the car number which was the subject of your enquiry of fourteen thirty-seven hours …”
Sloan listened impatiently. Time and number, that was all County Headquarters cared about. That and making a record of everything.
The girl’s voice droned on, oblivious of his thoughts “… is registered in the name of the firm of United Mellemetics Limited, Jubilee Works, Luston, Calleshire…”
Fenella wondered how it was that she could ever have thought that the Dower House had seemed empty before. It was nothing then to how it felt now.
The same police car which had taken her to the mortuary brought her back to Cleete. It was inevitable, she supposed, that their route had lain through Randall’s Bridge. All roads to the south crossed the river there. There was no other way. Even so she could have wished that they did not have to pass that grey square tower …
Why the church at Randall’s Bridge anyway …
She shook her head ever so slightly. She knew the answer to that. Someone had told her. The Detective Inspector. She remembered now. It was when she was still thinking in terms of an accident.
Not an accident, he’d said, hadn’t he?
When she’d asked why it was that the sculpture hadn’t just slipped.
Ever so kindly he had explained that heavy sculptures don’t just slip on their own at eleven-thirty at night in church towers that may or may not have been locked—and that they slip more easily still if they happen to have had little wedges driven under their plinths to help them on their way …
The house echoed to her footsteps as she walked through it again. Her first thought was to open a few windows. Even an hour with them closed on a day like this gave the building a stuffy shut-up feeling. The policewoman had offered to stay with her but Fenella had declined. Mrs Turvey, too, had gone home. She had a husband to feed, but she would be back. Fenella knew that.
The house seemed so empty that presently Fenella began to find the feeling oppressive. She took herself out into the garden. Gardens never felt quite so empty in the way that houses did … there weren’t objects everywhere you looked which reminded you of people who weren’t there any more.
She wandered about looking for somewhere to sit. There was too much sunshine for any of the usual places. Besides, living in Italy had conditioned her to seek shade not sunshine.
She gave a short laugh to herself.
Who would have thought that so brief a time in Italy would have made such an impression on her?
She would go back.
Not straightaway.
When everything here at Cleete had been sorted out.
When the police had got to the bottom of all that had happened.
When they had found out the naked truth.
Once she’d wondered why people called the truth naked but not after she’d been north to Florence from Rome with Principessa Trallanti and the children.
The Principessa had watched her enjoy Florence, take in the mellowed red roofs, the black and white churches, the sculpture and the paintings before remarking in her dry, precise English: “Everyone, Miss Tindall, is either a Florentinian or a Roman at heart. One or the other. Never both. Even Signor Mardoni.”
The last had been because of Giuseppe Mardoni. Roman to his fingertips, his frequent visits to the Palazzo Trallanti had been noticed even by the Principessa.
Much as Fenella herself loved Rome she had plumped for being a Florentinian.
“Most English people do,” the Principessa had said, unsurprised.
It was on that visit to Florence that she had seen the Naked Truth.
In a picture in the U
ffizi Gallery.
A Botticelli.
The picture wasn’t called Truth. It was called Calumny.
It was a painting of a mythical Hall of Justice, with an enthroned judge. Only this judge was seated between two figures representing Suspicion and Ignorance. Two other figures—Spite and Calumny—were dragging a naked figure—Truth—before the judge. Duplicity and Deceit were attempting to adorn Truth, while a grim figure—old and dressed in deep black—called Penitence—looked on.
“They’re all women,” she remembered stammering to the Principessa.
But that worldly noblewoman had seen nothing out of the ordinary in that.
Nor in Penitence’s mourning garb.
“But she’s so … haggard,” insisted Fenella.
“You are still young, Miss Tindall.” The Principessa had raised a hand that was gloved in spite of the heat. “In time you will see what penitence does to people.”
Fenella found a nice patch of shade under an old beech tree and settled herself there. She could see the front of the house from where she sat and it was as good a place as any to be while she considered what had to be done. Her father had some cousins still—they would have to be told—so would her aunts—her mother’s sisters …
She heard a car crunch up the drive and from her position under the trees saw a man get out and go up to the front door. He seemed to ring the bell and then step back quickly and do something with his hands in front of him.
She stayed where she was.
When there was no answer to his second ring he stepped off the gravel drive and onto the grass and repeated the action.
Fenella froze into immobility.
What he was doing was taking photographs …
The Press.
He must be from the Press.
A reporter.
She watched as he made his way round the house taking pictures as he pleased. He didn’t catch sight of her shrinking against the bole of the beech tree though, and eventually he went back to his car and drove off.
It must have been something over half an hour after that when another car drew up at the Dower House. She did stir herself then and walked over towards it. She’d recognized the woman who’d got out of the car. Only one woman of her acquaintance would have set out for the depths of the country in the middle of the afternoon in a heat wave so impossibly overdressed.
Marcia Osborne.
Fenella made her way across the grass as Marcia picked her steps carefully over the gravel towards the door bell. Fenella almost grinned. The gravel wasn’t so rough but no doubt Marcia’s shoes weren’t up to anything stronger than carpet. They never were.
“Fenella! Coooooeeeee …”
Marcia had seen her at last and turned away from the front door and the painful gravel towards the grass.
Now that she was nearer Fenella could take in the full splendour of her outfit. Marcia Osborne was wearing a grey silk suit shot with green which was very very smart. Her handbag and gloves and shoes tied up with the green colour in the suit in a way that must have taken days of careful matching. The whole ensemble was topped by a wide-brimmed hat designed to make absolutely sure that not a single ray of sunshine beat down on Marcia’s precious complexion.
It was the wide-brimmed hat which concealed the earrings from Fenella’s view at first. Fenella herself would not have considered wearing earrings at teatime but she was not particularly surprised that Marcia had them on. Marcia was like that. And her earrings, inherited from her Great-Aunt Edith, had frequent airings.
She had nearly reached Fenella—having done the lawn very little good with the heels of her shoes on the way—before Fenella got a really good look at her.
What she saw sent a cold shiver down her spine.
Besides the earrings Marcia was wearing a pair of matching clips.
They were unmistakably emerald and diamond.
I AM ARMED ’GAINST MISERY.
18
“Who?” howled Superintendent Leeyes. He was never a man to count up to ten anyway.
“Sir Digby Wellow,” repeated Sloan.
He was tired of saying the name now. He’d said it again and again and had been met on all sides with shocked disbelief. There was a posse of incredulous men even now on their way from Luston making all possible speed just to confirm this very fact.
Not that Sloan himself was in any doubt. Not since he’d heard who the car at Dick’s Cafe belonged to, and done a few calculations. Sir Digby Wellow must have left Luston just before Sloan had tried to telephone him there.
“Wellow of United Mellemetics?” asked Leeyes. He had come back to the news after his weekly session with the Chairman of the Watch Committee. “The one whose secret file is missing from Struthers and Tindall?”
“That’s the one,” said Sloan, adding flatly, “and he’s been murdered too.”
“This file then …” began the Superintendent excitedly.
“Is still missing.” Sloan finished the sentence for him. “Struthers and Tindall have turned their place upside down and still say they can’t find it. I had the whole building properly searched and Sergeant Wharton can’t find it either.”
“But what was in it, man? That’s what counts.” Sparring with the Watch Committee Chairman always made Leeyes tetchy. What it did to the Chairman Sloan could only imagine.
“Your guess, sir,” responded Sloan evenly, “is as good as mine. Or anyone else’s, sir, come to that. As I said before all the paperwork—even the scrap—is kept with the file and goes back to the customer. And Struthers and Tindall keep no records. That’s even part of their contract apparently.”
“Someone must have worked on it, Sloan.”
“Paul Blake and Richard Tindall himself.”
“Well …”
“Blake says that all he did was to check some workings that Tindall had done on the coefficients of expansion.”
“United Mellemetics must know,” said Leeyes.
“No, they don’t,” countered Sloan, who had had a long telephone conversation with a bewildered deputy chairman at United Mellemetics. Edward Foster had sounded to Sloan like one of those who have had greatness thrust upon them … unless he had got the way he had through perpetually working in the shadow of the forceful Sir Digby Wellow.
“But …”
“United Mellemetics didn’t even know Sir Digby had taken one of their problems to Struthers and Tindall, sir. Could have been anything, this chap Foster said.”
“He must know what sort of work they’ve got on the go there, Sloan.” Superintendent Leeyes always knew what was going on in his manor.
Sloan consulted his notebook. “Foster says they’ve just designed a new instrument for checking the performance of a solar energy source to provide impressed current for cathodic protection of underground pipe lines.”
“Nice work,” said Leeyes cordially, “if you can get it.”
“And another,” pursued Sloan, “for measuring internal corrosion rates of lines.”
The Superintendent took a deep breath and rapidly reduced the situation to police level. “Sir Digby Wellow sends an unknown problem to Struthers and Tindall and Richard Tindall goes and gets himself murdered in this peculiar fashion.”
Sloan agreed.
“Then the file on this unknown problem disappears.”
“Yes, sir.” That was true, too.
“Then,” declared Leeyes incontrovertibly, “Sir Digby Wellow gets murdered as well.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was no denying that, either. Dr Dabbe had been and gone and said the same thing about the body on Dick’s Cafe forecourt.
And muttered about the wound. The pathologist wasn’t prepared to commit himself at this stage but the two head wounds had a lot in common.
“Someone arranged a meeting there,” went on Leeyes. “Set up the whole thing, I daresay.”
“I think so,” said Sloan carefully. “It’s where Tindall met Gordon Cranswick yesterday, too.”
<
br /> “After which,” remarked Leeyes with celerity, “he came back to Berebury having told this fellow Cranswick he was willing to sell out Struthers and Tindall to Cranswick Processing?”
“So Cranswick says, sir. So Cranswick says.”
This time when he got back to his own room again there was only one piece of paper on Sloan’s desk.
It was the slightly tattered critical path analysis which he had drawn up that morning after the finding of Richard Tindall’s body in the church at Randall’s Bridge.
He looked at it for a long moment and then laid it gently on one side.
Critical path analyses took no account of suddenly dead Chairmen in Company cars on the forecourts of good pull-ups for carmen.
Then he had a second thought.
It could go the same way as the normal distribution curves which had so intrigued Superintendent Leeyes the month before. He punted it across the desk and into his wastepaper basket, sent for Crosby and a car, and got down to business.
“Luston first, Crosby. United Mellemetics’ Jubilee Works. And then back to Struthers and Tindall. Any more news from Dick’s Cafe?”
“They’re still taking statements out there, sir.”
“Get some photographs for them, too. Show them one of everybody.”
“Everybody?”
“The lot,” repeated Sloan wearily. “The Mayor, too, if you like. Paul Blake, Gordon Cranswick, Henry Pysden, this fellow Osborne, that Italian … Interpol will get you a photograph of him—and Sir Digby, of course.”
“Sir Digby, sir? All the people at Dick’s Cafe have seen him already.”
“He didn’t look like he did today yesterday,” Sloan reminded him grimly. “His own mother mightn’t have known him today.”
“No, sir.”
Nor Lady Wellow, thought Sloan, making a note.
Sir Digby wouldn’t be grunting when he undid his shoelaces tonight. Somebody would have to talk to her, too, soon.
Crosby swung the police car out onto the big roundabout on the outskirts on Berebury and pulled over towards the Luston road.
There was one other matter on Sloan’s mind.
“You put someone to keep an eye on those two odd old women at Vespers Cottage, Crosby, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir. Like you said. An unobtrusive watch.”
His Burial Too Page 15