Learning Curve

by Catherine Aird

  ‘Besides, Inspector,’ Kate Booth reminded him from the back seat, ‘the whole cave has been flooded ever since the roof fall. You can only get so far into it now.’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ said Sloan evenly. In fact that was what had convinced him that they were going to the right place. That and a missing snorkel mask. ‘Tell me, did Paul Tridgell ever ask you about the death in the cave?’

  ‘Over and over again,’ said Kate Booth. ‘Especially why I was bringing up the rear that day. Apparently beginners were not supposed to be last in line.’

  The scenery began to change as they travelled east, an outcrop of limestone here and there testifying to the likely presence of caves underneath the ground. Crosby slowed the car down as they approached a crossroads.

  ‘Straight ahead,’ said Kate. After another mile she sat up and leant forward. ‘Take the next turning off to the left. It’s quite soon now. Look,’ she said, pointing, ‘there’s the road.’

  Obediently Crosby swung the police car onto a lane that was little more than a single dead-end farm track through a narrow valley. Limestone protruded from the hillsides and towered over the road. As the car bumped over the rough surface she said, ‘It’s not far now. Just round that bend ahead.’

  Presently a long, low stone building came into sight. ‘That’s old Bartlett’s place,’ she said, pointing to her right. ‘Over there.’

  Crosby brought the police car to a scorching stop beside two cars that were already there.

  As he did so a woman came out of the farmhouse. ‘If it’s my husband you want,’ she said, holding back a sizeable dog at her side, ‘he’s gone up to the top field with Rover to see to the sheep. There’s a ewe there in trouble.’

  ‘Do you know whose those cars are, madam?’

  ‘Never seen them before,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘Walkers, most probably, going through to the pub at Curlington. They often come this way Saturdays.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan opened his notebook and consulted a registration number. It wasn’t a walker’s car. It was Derek Tridgell’s old one. He snapped his notebook shut again and turned. ‘Crosby, get on with finding out who owns that other car as quickly as you can.’

  Somehow Sloan felt he already knew whose vehicle it was.

  ‘Yes, sir. Straightway, sir.’

  ‘We’ll find Mr Bartlett ourselves then,’ he said, turning back to the woman. ‘The top field, I think you said.’

  She nodded indifferently and went back indoors.

  Sloan turned to Kate Booth. ‘Now, miss, which way do we go?’

  ‘Follow me,’ she said, hefting her gear onto her back and stepping out. ‘This way …’

  ‘Sir,’ it was Crosby calling after him from behind the wheel of the police car. ‘I can’t get a signal here.’

  ‘There isn’t one,’ intervened Kate, waving an arm. ‘It’s a dead spot because of all these hills.’

  ‘Then go back down the road until you do get one,’ Sloan instructed Crosby swiftly. ‘And call for some backup with lights and quickly. Then come after us and tell me. We’ll leave a trail. Look sharp, now.’

  ‘Come this way, Inspector.’ Kate stepped forward. ‘Ordinary walkers don’t know where to find the cave entrance but I do in spite of its being blocked off by the farmer.’ She shuddered slightly. ‘I haven’t forgotten the last time I was there.’

  Sloan turned his head and looked back down the hill. There was no sign of Crosby now.

  ‘Paul Tridgell knows where it is,’ Kate was saying. ‘His dad brought him up here once but he insisted he didn’t like caving. He told me so.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, shod for urban streets, was already slipping on the grass behind her. The rocky terrain did not make for easy walking either but he followed doggedly uphill in the girl’s footsteps. Ten minutes later a slightly breathless Kate Booth came to a halt under an outcrop of limestone and pointed a finger at a bare patch in the grass.

  ‘That it?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘You’d never notice it if you didn’t know what you were looking for,’ he said.

  ‘You weren’t meant to,’ she said. ‘Not after poor Edmund died, anyway.’

  They had reached a little overhang under which a hole was now visible. Beside it some stones had been loosely cast aside to reveal an entrance in the ground.

  Christopher Dennis Sloan, a one-time keen member of the Owl Patrol of the 3rd Berebury Scout Troop, dropped to his knees to examine the grass round the entrance. Some of the stalks had been recently bent and broken. You didn’t need a tracker’s badge, he thought to himself, to know that.

  ‘The way in, Inspector,’ said Kate, indicating what to Sloan seemed a very small gap in the terrain.

  ‘It’s not a very big hole,’ he said doubtfully.

  ‘It doesn’t need to be,’ she said. ‘If there’s room for your head there’s room for the rest of you. One shoulder at a time, mind you. Like cat burglars,’ she added.

  Sloan had to take on board the fact that you’d only ever find your way in if you knew exactly where to look so he’d dropped empty pages from his notebook to guide Crosby as they’d toiled up the hill.

  Kate Booth slipped her caving gear off her back and dumped it on the grass. She got out a hard hat and crammed it over her hair. ‘It’s always better, Inspector, that any entrance to a cave is inconspicuous. You don’t want anyone else going in there by accident, let alone an animal.’

  Sloan nodded.

  ‘And you know how boys are,’ she said, strapping on a pair of knee pads.

  The police knew how boys were if anyone did but what Detective Inspector Sloan was worrying about now was whether anyone had gone in the cave there not by accident but on purpose. The stones had certainly not been removed from the entrance except with intent. And if the bent and broken still green grass in front of it was anything to go by, the removal of those same stones had been very recent indeed.

  What he didn’t know either was whether one person or two had gone through the hole and if so, together or separately. He slipped out of his jacket, leaving it conspicuously at the entrance to the cave, at the same time slipping a pair of handcuffs into his trousers pocket.

  Kate was looking him up and down. ‘You’re going to get a bit grubby, Inspector, and you’ll scrape your knees.’

  ‘Can’t be helped. I need to get in there and fast.’ He left another sheet of paper under a stone beside the entrance. Even Crosby ought to be able to work that out.

  ‘This way.’ Kate Booth had already wriggled inside the entrance, a light shining from the lamp on her head. ‘It’s easy going to begin with but it gets more difficult as the ground slopes downwards. You’ll just have to follow me, that’s all.’

  Obediently, Sloan squeezed through the entrance and, on his hands and knees, followed where Kate led. The light on her head danced about like a will-o’-the-wisp as she advanced further and further under the ground. As she turned a corner ahead of him, Sloan was momentarily without any light, the expression ‘Stygian gloom’ coming into his mind again and for the first time he appreciated what the phrase really meant: real darkness, unrelieved by any light at all. True, he had a torch tucked in his belt but he had found out the hard way that a man needed both hands to crawl on his hands and knees.

  ‘Mind your head here, Inspector,’ she called back to him over her shoulder. ‘There’s not a lot of room. You really should have had a hard hat on.’

  ‘No time,’ he said. And meant it.

  ‘Health and safety would have a fit.’

  Sloan said something very disrespectful about health and safety, bizarrely reminded at that moment that he needed to check why they had gone back to Luston Chemicals after so long.

  ‘Any respectable caver would have a fit, too,’ she was saying. ‘We do have risk assessment when we can, you know.’

  They had risk assessment in police work, too, when they could but in Sloan’s view proper policing took pri
ority over it whatever his superiors thought.

  He felt rather than saw the ground under him start to slope downwards. Kate’s boots moved temporarily out of his line of vision as he slowed down to escape spurts of grit coming up towards his face from them. He put his hand up and gingerly felt the low rough roof above his head, something coming back to him from a plea once made by defence counsel. The lawyer had argued that his client couldn’t possibly have tunnelled his way into a bank vault because he suffered from taphephobia. The judge had politely asked for the meaning of the word to be explained to the jury. That it was a fear of being buried alive was something that hadn’t meant anything to Sloan until today. He understood it now.

  ‘Now, swing round to your right,’ commanded Kate, interrupting his morbid thoughts, ‘and follow me until I stop. We’re traversing a narrow ledge well above the cave now.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan wasn’t sure if this was something he wanted to know.

  ‘Be careful here, Inspector, and keep as close to the right-hand side as you can. It’s a big drop.’

  Sloan suddenly became eerily aware of a deep void to his left even though his range of vision was so limited. And was aware, too, of the sudden drop in temperature that came with an upward draught from a cold place.

  ‘When I tell you,’ Kate went on, ‘put your right hand out to feel for the rung at the top of a ladder. It’s made of iron and it’ll be very cold to the touch.’

  Sloan inched his way forward until he felt something blessedly solid. What he’d heard about abseiling hadn’t appealed to him one little bit even though Kate Booth had insisted that plenty of people did it for fun. He liked his feet to be under him – not at right angles to perpendicular surfaces, however well harnessed.

  ‘Hang on,’ she said, suddenly coming to a stop, ‘I can hear water splashing.’

  Sloan advanced and listened carefully. ‘So can I. Can you put your light out?’

  Kate dowsed the lamp on her hat in an instant.

  ‘And keep quiet,’ he whispered as he crawled forward to try to get a glimpse of the cavern far below them. He could just about make out that there were two figures struggling in the water, the lamps on their respective heads the only indication of where they were. The two lights danced up and down, intertwining like the heads of necking grebes. It soon became apparent to the watchers above that the two people below were not struggling to keep afloat but with each other. One of them had a face covered with a snorkelling mask, whilst the other was brandishing over his shoulder something short and stubby. Its exact nature was unidentifiable in the poor light emanating from the headlamps of the two below but Sloan could see that it was held as a weapon for all that. Unbidden, a lesson on glassing delivered during his training came into his mind: glassing as an offence depended on how the glass was held and how it was swung in the direction of another man. And exactly where it cut his face.

  ‘Move over, miss, and let me pass you,’ he whispered. There was barely room for them both on the ledge as it was and he slithered beyond her with great difficulty, Kate shrinking back away from the edge as he did so. He grasped the top of the iron ladder with relief, swinging himself round to get a better grip on it. His feet firmly on a rung, he descended into the greater darkness, guided only by the sound of the water thrashing about below. There was so little light that it was only when he felt his shoes getting wet that he realised he had reached the water level.

  He paused then to snap one half of the pair of handcuffs in his pocket onto the lowest rung of the ladder. Then he kicked his shoes off and lowered himself into the water, its coldness momentarily taking his breath away.

  He started swimming towards the tussling pair with a vigorous crawl. As he did so, one of the two in the water brought down whatever it was he was holding in his hand in the direction of the head of the other man, who ducked out of range.

  Sloan shouted ‘Police!’ at the top of his voice.

  Both men turned their heads and looked towards him, the one holding the weapon immediately dropping it out of his hand and letting it sink out of sight into the water.

  ‘Thank goodness you’ve come,’ gasped one of the figures. ‘Paul Tridgell has been trying to kill me.’

  The next two things happened absolutely simultaneously. There was a noise from the ledge above and a great spotlight was targeted on the water, illuminating a scene that might have been drawn by Gustave Doré. And at the same time Detective Inspector Sloan became aware of a figure slithering down the ladder towards them. Then he suddenly felt himself being dragged down in the water by unseen hands. His lungs bursting, he kicked out as vigorously as he could, conscious only of a great turmoil in the water above his head and an even greater pressure in his ears. He didn’t know how long it was before other hands took over and mercifully dragged him back to the surface and blessed air.

  It had seemed an age.

  ‘We’ve got him, sir,’ spluttered Detective Constable Crosby. He had one arm round the neck of a man still in the water and the other round a lower rung of the ladder.

  ‘He nearly did for you, Inspector,’ gasped another voice which he dimly recognised as that of Paul Tridgell. ‘Me, too, come to that.’

  Sloan coughed as he trod water and tried to get his breath back. He pointed speechlessly at the handcuffs dangling from the bottom rung of the ladder. The other two men towed the third man, still struggling, towards the ladder and snapped the man’s right wrist into the empty half.

  He himself also hanging onto the ladder, Detective Inspector Sloan drew enough breath to say, ‘Simon Mytton Thornycroft, I am arresting you for the murder of Edmund Leaton.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘Are you quite sure, Sloan?’ asked Superintendent Leeyes sceptically. ‘I do hope you know what you’re doing, arresting that man. We can’t afford to have the force getting it wrong.’

  ‘No, sir, of course not, sir. I mean yes, sir.’

  The superintendent tapped the report on his desk. ‘Why should this Simon Thornycroft want to go and kill a man like Edmund Leaton for?’

  ‘His wife,’ said Sloan pithily.

  Leeyes grunted. ‘Like that, was it?’

  ‘She’s a very beautiful woman still, sir.’ Actually Sloan had to admit that Amelia Thornycroft hadn’t looked at her best when he had last seen her. That was when he had interviewed her after Simon’s arrest, but nothing could diminish the glory of that auburn hair or the attraction of that wide open face. Or quell the intelligence behind those piercing blue-green eyes. She had been both sad and shocked at what he had said but it had quite been impossible for him to decide whether she was surprised. What he did have to decide, policeman on duty that he was, was whether or not she was likely to have been complicit in the murder of her first husband.

  He explained now to the superintendent that he didn’t think this had been the case.

  ‘It has been known,’ said that world-weary upholder of the law.

  ‘I think, sir,’ offered Sloan diffidently, ‘that this murder was something just short of a Uriah scenario.’ It had been his churchgoing mother who had long ago explained to him that David had arranged for Uriah, husband of Bathsheba, to be put into mortal danger so that the man would be killed and he could then marry his widow. Without any questions being asked, so to speak.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about, Sloan?’

  ‘A death, sir, planned by Thornycroft.’ The Bible, Mrs Sloan, senior, had always insisted was a great sourcebook for murder. That this had been in the interests of getting him to go to Sunday school he had only realised much later but what had been learnt there had stuck.

  ‘And how, pray, may I ask,’ said Leeyes, sitting back in his chair and sounding at his most Churchillian, ‘did he contrive a roof fall in a cave at just the right moment when the man was under it?’

  For a wonder Leeyes seemed to have used the right word. ‘He’s a civil engineer, sir,’ said Sloan.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?�
� asked the superintendent testily.

  ‘He knows about explosives.’

  ‘Explosives?’

  ‘The roof fall wasn’t accidental.’

  ‘Explain yourself, Sloan.’

  ‘We think Thornycroft had been down there before and stuck a couple of sticks of small diameter gelignite into the rock face above the Baggles Bite. He knew the way into that particular cave – the cavers had fixed a ladder there to save abseiling down to the bottom of the cave, ready for their great attempt on the Baggles Bite.’

  It wasn’t an accident that Detective Inspector Sloan had used the plural in what he had said. He’d been talking to – no, listening to – another police officer, an expert in explosives. The man had already been down in the cave wearing a wetsuit, and with breathing apparatus strapped to his back. He had a very powerful waterproof torch with him, too, as well as an underwater camera.

  And when he surfaced he’d brought a heavy spanner up with him from the bottom of the cave. ‘One of your weapons, Inspector,’ he’d said as he handed it over. Even now, forensics were looking for Simon Thornycroft’s fingerprints on it.

  ‘It was a very professional job,’ the expert had reported to Sloan. ‘Not that explosives are ever something for your amateur to play about with and they usually know it. The living ones, that is.’

  ‘The accused was a civil engineer,’ Sloan told him. It was something he should have remembered earlier. He knew that now. ‘He had explosives on-site and would have known how to set a charge all right.’

  ‘And he planned it well,’ conceded the expert. ‘I reckon all that he had to do after that was to connect some dark twinflex to the gelignite sticks and hide it up somewhere out of sight until the time came. Then it was just a case of waiting until his victim was well into the tight bit of your Baggles Bite, retire and then attach the ends of the leads to a battery.’