“I think they’re material witnesses,” said Sloan. “Not that I particularly want them in court for Defence Counsel to play with.”
“No, sir.” Crosby changed gear.
“And someone who could kill Richard Tindall and Sir Digby Wellow would kill them without batting an eyelid. In cold blood.” Sloan scratched his chin, recalling something. He went to lectures, too. Not as often as the Superintendent but now and again. In the line of duty. At one of them he’d heard the lecturer say something about how a man killed …
“But, sir,” Crosby interrupted his train of thought, “what they saw was at two o’clock this morning. Dr Dabbe says Richard Tindall was killed at half-past eleven last night.”
“Dr Dabbe,” said Sloan tersely, “only has to report on his findings. You and I, Crosby, have also to do a little thing called solve the case—which is something quite different.”
“Yes, sir.”
Blinkov had been the name that the lecturer had quoted. Sloan had remembered it because half the audience had thought the speaker had been having them on. Blinkov the Russian. Cousin to Inoff the Red, a billiards man had suggested derisively.
Blinkov, if he remembered rightly, had argued that the coarse murdered coarsely, the refined and delicate temperament found a way of doing the job in a refined and delicate way.
And the scientific scientifically?
Sloan glanced down at his notebook.
“Do you realize, Crosby, that all these men we’ve been dealing with have something in common?”
“No, sir.”
Sloan sighed. At least Crosby never pretended to knowledge that he hadn’t got. Perhaps in an odd sort of way that was something to be thankful for.
“They’re all clever types, Constable, that’s what.” His mind went back to the church tower. “Very clever types you might say.”
Crosby assented to this. “That was a clever way to kill someone over at Randall’s Bridge, sir. Getting that sculpture to fall on the poor chap without being in there with him to do it at the same time.”
“You can say that again.” Sloan ran his finger down the list and wondered what Blinkov would have made of it. “Henry Pysden and Paul Blake are working scientists. We know that. And George Osborne’s the Physics Master at the Grammar School. Who’s gone round to keep an eye on him when he does turn up, by the way?”
“Appleton, sir.”
“Good.” Sloan went back to his list. “Gordon Cranswick and Sir Digby Wellow presumably know their technical stuff seeing that they’re heads of scientific firms.”
He paused.
Logic demanded that he strike the late Digby Wellow off any lists he was making now. But his scientific knowledge might still be a factor.
He shrugged his shoulders.
It was all very well for Dr Dabbe to give him all that guff about factors and equations. In this case he still didn’t know what was a factor and what wasn’t. And you couldn’t do equations without any factors at all.
“Then there’s the …”
Crosby saw a woman making for a pedestrian crossing and raced her to it.
Sloan closed his eyes. “Then there’s the Italian,” he said again. One day some one would write to the Home Secretary about the way this particular police car was driven. “Even he’s an engineer of sorts.”
“Roads,” said Crosby, “that’s what they’re good at, isn’t it, sir?”
“A civil engineer. That’s what the girl said he was.”
“That’s roads, isn’t it, sir?” said Crosby.
“It is,” agreed Sloan wearily. As a sounding board, Detective Constable W. Crosby definitely lacked something.
“That,” said Crosby insouciantly, “just leaves the Mayor then, sir, doesn’t it?”
Sloan folded up his notebook. “I suppose it does, Crosby. I suppose it does …”
“He’s a gents’ outfitter …”
Fenella Tindall gave Marcia Osborne afternoon tea.
They carried it out under the beech tree because Fenella found the house stifling and everything at which she looked there redolent of her father. It was scarcely cooler in the garden at this time of the day but under the beech tree’s shade it seemed so.
“You’re to tell me to go away,” insisted Marcia from time to time, “if you’d rather be alone.”
“Of course not,” Fenella replied wanly.
Marcia meant to stay.
Anyone could see that with half an eye.
“And say if there’s anything you want doing.”
Fenella thanked her with due gravity.
That was easier than explaining that there was nothing she wanted except peace and quiet and a chance to mourn her father decently and in private. And to mourn without worrying about emeralds and diamonds, or the destiny of a small family firm which had somehow tumbled overnight into her lap.
“Sugar?” Life being what it was Fenella poured out tea instead.
Tea was something that she hadn’t learnt to do without in Italy. Countless small cups of black coffee throughout the day were no substitute for tea.
“I daren’t, my dear. I just daren’t.” Marcia Osborne patted her wasplike waistline. “Too, too fattening.”
Fenella kept a mechanical smile on her face. That, too, she found, was easier than changing her response to whatever Marcia said next. A veil—a black veil—was what she could have done with just now. Then she could have just nodded or shaken her head as the spirit moved her. That would have kept Marcia Osborne happy …
“And he was so alive and well last night,” Marcia was saying wonderingly. “He was just as pleased about George’s patent having come through as if it had been his own. They were as excited as two little boys.”
Fenella nodded at that. Her father had been a whole man—generous-spirited and ready to share in other people’s joys and sorrows …
She saw that Marcia’s lower lip was trembling. “We’re all going to miss him a lot, Fenella. Poor Richard.”
Amen to that, seconded Fenella silently.
But the centre of Marcia Osborne’s small universe was still Marcia Osborne and inexorably all events were seen in that particular perspective.
“It would have to happen today of all days and spoil everything …” she said.
“Today?” enquired Fenella bleakly.
Marcia Osborne gave up the struggle to stop her lower lip from quivering and said tearfully. “It’s my birthday.”
She started to fumble about in her handbag and at the same moment the telephone bell back in the Dower House started to shrill.
“I’ve got a spare handkerchief …” offered Fenella, getting to her feet to go indoors to answer the telephone.
“No, it’s not that.” Marcia fished something out of her bag. “It’s this.”
Fenella stared. She was looking at a small presentation box bearing the name of Adamson. Marcia pointed to the matching pair of emerald and diamond clips.
“They were such a lovely surprise,” said Marcia in a choked voice. “It would all have been quite perfect except for … for the other thing.”
“A lovely surprise,” echoed Fenella tonelessly.
“They match my earrings perfectly. They—George and your father—took one of them, you know, without my knowing—I never even thought—to send to Adamson’s for a pattern. I quite thought I’d lost one of Great-Aunt Edith’s earrings and I was really upset …”
The telephone was still ringing in the distance.
Marcia sniffed audibly. “I was going to show them to you today anyway. They’re my birthday present from George. Your father did all the arranging for him on the strength of the patent coming through and so that it should be a big surprise. Aren’t they lovely? Fenella … what on earth’s the matter? Fenella, stop laughing like that this minute …”
THIS IS TERRIBLE GOOD COUNSEL.
19
In due course the police car with Detective Constable Crosby at the wheel trickled through the outskirts of
the industrial town of Luston. The pattern of traffic had changed from tractors to articulated trailers and heavy lorries but Crosby forged on. They found the firm of United Mellemetics’ Jubliee Works in a part of the town even more industrial than the rest.
There was no doubt at all about whose Jubilee the works were named after. However modern their production methods, the United Mellemetics building was pure Sixty Glorious Years. And it wasn’t only the architectural design—Victorian Imperial Neo-Gothic—which dated it. The philosophy of Her Late Majesty’s reign was also well to the fore. Only in the days of the Old Queen would the sentiment—couched in bad Latin—Labore et Profitas—have been so conspicuously carved in stone over the arched entrance.
Sloan found a good deal of un-Victorian hand-wringing going on in the management offices.
“In fact, sir,” he reported back to the Superintendent on the telephone, “the whole firm’s running around like a chicken that’s had its head chopped off.”
Leeyes grunted.
“I don’t think,” continued Sloan, “that it ever occurred to anyone here that Sir Digby would die.”
“One of the Immortals, eh?”
“Well, they did call him God. Or so I’m told. Behind his back, of course.”
“Did they, indeed? Well, which of them didn’t like him enough to kill him? Tell me that …”
But Sloan hadn’t been able to answer that question. From what he could make out Sir Digby Wellow had been one of those larger-than-life characters who hadn’t inspired dislike so much as sheer exhaustion.
“They don’t want to buy Struthers and Tindall, too, do they?” enquired the Superintendent.
“They haven’t said.”
“They’ve got a couple of rivals if they do.”
“A couple?”
“Your friend Gordon Cranswick isn’t the only one after the firm.”
“Oh?” said Sloan alertly.
“Some outfit by the name of Hallworthy’s want to buy it as well. They’ve just rung the Tindall girl from Birmingham to say so. Made her an offer. Told her they’d been after it for quite a while. And she rang us.”
“Birmingham?”
Leeyes was irate. “Sloan, do you have to repeat everything I say.”
“I was thinking, sir,” he said hastily, “that Birmingham is a long way from Berebury.”
“I know it is.”
“Too far for these people—what did you say they were called?”
“Hallworthy’s. The Hallworthy Small Motor Company, Birmingham.”
“Too far for them to have heard about Richard Tindall in the ordinary way.” Sloan looked at his watch. “We missed the one o’clock news and the evening papers would scarcely have got hold of any of this yet, even if they’re on the streets by now which I very much doubt.”
“Well?”
“Someone went out of their way to tell them specially.”
“Ha,” said Leeyes, “a nigger in the woodpile?”
“More likely just a spy in the camp,” said Sloan moderately, “but interesting. Very interesting. Tindall told Cranswick that he didn’t like the other people’s methods. They could be the other people and a spy in the camp could be what Tindall didn’t like. And that was why he was offering it to Cranswick Processing.”
“And what,” enquired Leeyes heavily, “have Cranswick Processing and Hallworthy’s Small Motors got to do with United Mellemetics?”
“I don’t know.”
Leeyes grunted. “Well, on past performance if I were Chairman of either company I wouldn’t walk under any ladders for a bit. Who’s in charge at United Mellemetics now?”
“The Deputy Chairman’s a man called Edward Foster, though I wouldn’t say,” added Sloan doubtfully, “that he’s actually in charge …”
The unfortunate Edward Foster struck him as being like a man making a gallant attempt to steer a rudderless ship.
“The Board,” Foster kept on saying to Sloan, “the Board. I’ve called a Board Meeting. To decide what to do now. We need a Board Meeting …”
Sloan was less sanguine. He didn’t suppose the Board would know what to do without Sir Digby any more than the works did.
“If my constable might just start to go through Sir Digby’s papers, sir, in case there is any reference at all to Struthers and Tindall there which might give us a lead …” Crosby could keep a weather eye open for any mention of Cranswick Processing and Hallworthy’s Small Motors, too, but Sloan didn’t say anything about that to Edward Foster.
“By all means. Go ahead.” Foster ran a hand distractedly through his hair. “We’ve already had a quick look ourselves without finding anything. I’m not surprised—and it doesn’t prove anything either way. Sir Digby never put pen to paper if he could help it. You couldn’t say he was one for paperwork at all …”
Tycoons, in Sloan’s experience, rarely were.
“Or for confiding in people,” added Sir Digby’s deputy painfully.
“So,” said Sloan to Crosby as he showed him Sir Digby’s office, “there’s not a lot of hope of your finding anything useful here either. Seems as if the big boss played his cards close to his chest all the time. I can’t say,” he added, “that I blame him. Foster doesn’t strike me as man to exactly lean on …”
That was one thing that didn’t happen in the Police Force. You didn’t have anyone undermining your authority.
Not after the moment when you first stepped into uniform.
You were on your own, all right, then, whether you liked it or not.
You and your notebook and the Name of the Law.
Crosby was still thinking about Edward Foster, Deputy Chairman.
“Probably never had a chance, sir. Not with a chap like Sir Digby Wellow breathing down his neck all the time. I’d rather have had Tindall myself from the sound of things.”
“Pysden seemed able to handle things quite well,” agreed Sloan. He pushed open the door of Sir Digby’s room. It was pretty plush.
Crosby, too, took a look round the late Chairman’s office.
“Well, there’s one thing I must say, sir. It’s better to be a big bug in your own rug than a little bug in someone else’s rug.”
“Quite the philosopher, aren’t we?” said Sloan tartly.
There was much work—police work—to be done at United Mellemetics but Sloan proposed to leave that to someone else. There were detectives in plenty attached to Luston Division. They could take statements, note who had been doing what and where at the material times and tell him when they came up with something.
If they did.
Crosby hadn’t found any mention of Struthers and Tindall anywhere in Sir Digby Wellow’s room.
“Or of Cranswick Processing or Hallworthy’s Small Motors either, sir.” The Detective Constable climbed into the driving seat of the police car and switched on the radio in one automatic movement. “I don’t know where we go from here …”
“Struthers and Tindall. That’s where it all started …” He paused as a message started to come up on the radio and then relaxed again.
“The White Swan, Calleford,” announced the girl at Headquarters laconically. “Trouble …”
Somewhere in Calleford Division a car would peel off its route and go and sort out the trouble at The White Swan.
“They aren’t the only ones with trouble,” remarked Crosby, tapping the radio receiver affectionately. “What about us, Doris, dear? Trouble? We’ve got two murders, a take-over battle, and dirty work at United Mellemetics for a start …”
“Their file is missing,” said Sloan. “That’s all. We don’t know what was in it yet.”
“But it stands to reason, sir …”
“No, it doesn’t, Crosby. Not to reason.” If there was a word he didn’t like to hear used lightly that was it. “Not yet.”
“Sir?”
“All we actually know about the United Mellemetics file so far is what we have been told about it and that is not evidence …”
&nbs
p; The radio had started chattering again.
“Three nines call,” said the announcer. “Injury at the bottom of Kinnisport Hill. C.A.B. attending …”
That would be the Calleshire Ambulance Brigade having its customary race with the police boys to see who could get to the scene first.
“There is one thing we have got though,” said Sloan martially. “One thing we’ve always got.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“The old adage that crimes are usually committed by those who benefit from them.”
Crosby’s brow furrowed. “The daughter?”
“Among others …”
“Bravo Delta One Three,” interrupted the radio appositely. “Bravo Delta One Three to go to Fourteen Hart Crescent, Luston. A domestic.”
“… she won’t be the only one who benefits. There’ll be others. Bound to be.”
“The Italian?” offered Crosby promptly.
Sloan sighed. He had been right about Crosby and the Superintendent. They thought alike.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not,” he said. “There were big changes about and change doesn’t always suit everybody.” He waved an arm. “It works both ways. There are always those who gain and those who lose by it.”
“So,” said the constable, “we’re back where we started, aren’t we?”
“Except,” remarked Sloan acidly, “that instead of one dead man we’ve now got two.” It was difficult to know if Crosby was trying to be helpful or not. “And not everyone will call that progress …”
The newspapers would have a field day tomorrow: especially if the reporters had caught Superintendent Leeyes in a combative mood, warmed up for the fray by a couple of rounds with the Chairman of the Watch Committee.
“But,” said Crosby thoughtfully, “if Dr Dabbe is as right as he thinks he is …”
Counsel for the Prosecution and Counsel for the Defence would fight that out in open court—and they would phrase the sentiment better: but not much.
“… then, sir, we’ve only got one bloke with a cast-iron alibi, haven’t we?”
“Henry Pysden,” supplied Sloan, “who was working his time machine at Berebury when the doctor thinks Richard Tindall died. Sergeant Wharton is checking on the time machine alibi.”
His Burial Too Page 16