Little Knell

by Catherine Aird

  Marcus Fixby-Smith didn’t respond to this. ‘Howard, the police asked if we knew of any missing persons.’

  ‘And do we?’ asked Howard Air, his pen held at the ready.

  ‘Only Rodoheptah,’ said the museum man, true to his calling. He gave a high uncertain laugh. ‘We don’t know where he is, do we? Not now.’

  Howard Air stopped, his pen suspended in mid-air. ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ he said seriously.

  * * *

  ‘You’ve got a problem with a fractured skull, Seedy, have you?’ echoed his old friend, Inspector Harpe, from Traffic Division. ‘Well, funnily enough, we’ve got a problem with a fractured skull, too.’

  ‘Tell me,’ invited Sloan. He had joined the man from traffic at his table in the police station canteen and was trying to snatch some food while the body was being brought over to the mortuary in Berebury.

  ‘Remember that bloke who was hit in his car over at the Larking crossroads over towards Edsway? Name of Barton, David Barton. Well, he’s got one, too. A bad one.’

  ‘But that was weeks and weeks ago…’ Sloan’s problem fractured skull was much worse than bad but he let his friend have his say.

  ‘Six weeks,’ said Inspector Harpe succinctly.

  ‘So?’ asked Sloan cautiously. He wondered what was coming next since Inspector Harpe’s pessimism was legendary. The officer was known throughout the Calleshire force as ‘Happy Harry’ on account of his never having been seen to smile. Inspector Harpe, for his part, always maintained that there was never anything in Traffic Division at which to so much as twitch the corners of the lips. ‘How come he’s still traffic’s problem?’

  ‘Still unconscious, that’s why.’ Harpe shrugged his shoulders. ‘His wife thinks he’s beginning to respond to her voice but the people at the hospital aren’t as optimistic as she is.’

  ‘I dare say they’re being pretty careful not to raise false hopes.’

  ‘If you ask me, the doctors there don’t believe he’s ever going to come round.’ Harpe sank his fork into a sausage. ‘I’m coming to believe that the Larking and Edsway junction is jinxed.’

  ‘Bad driving,’ said Sloan briskly.

  ‘Crossroads were sacred in pagan times,’ said the traffic man. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘Don’t you start, Harry. I’ve had enough of the ancient past already this morning.’

  Harpe ignored him. ‘And after that,’ he said, ‘they hung felons there and then buried them on the spot. No wonder the place is spooked.’

  ‘If it isn’t bad driving,’ asserted Sloan firmly, ‘then it’s driving under the influence of drink or drugs.’ He was aware that his own anger at the invasion of the countryside, his countryside, by drug dealers was irrational, but he couldn’t be doing with superstition either. Not in this day and age. ‘There isn’t anything else left, Harry.’

  Inspector Harpe speared another sausage.

  ‘Drugs cause a lot of accidents,’ went on Sloan earnestly. It wasn’t the only damage they caused, he reminded himself. That was the trouble. There was no end to the criminal consequences of drug dealing. And now all he could do was to sit back and wait to learn the consequences of a dearth of heroin. For all he knew, the absence of heroin could be worse than its presence.

  ‘You’ll have to watch it, Seedy,’ advised his old friend. ‘You’ve got drugs on the brain these days.’

  ‘We always knew that they were coming in through Kinnisport,’ said Sloan, ‘and now we can prove it, but that’s all. Customs and Excise pick up what they can but they can’t stop all the traffic. No way.’ He looked curiously at his old friend. ‘Harry, if you had more hard cash in small denominations than you could account for, what would you do with it?’

  ‘Put it in the bank,’ said Inspector Harpe promptly. ‘They could count it, too.’

  ‘No good. The banks have a legal duty to inform the regulatory authorities.’

  ‘Pay off my mortgage, then,’ said Inspector Harpe. ‘And buy a bigger and better house.’

  Sloan shook his head.

  ‘No good?’ said Harry.

  ‘No. The conveyancing solicitor could rat on you – should rat on you, come to that – if you couldn’t show the dibs had been come by honestly.’

  ‘New car? I’ve always wanted a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud myself.’

  ‘A man can only have so many new cars without the neighbours talking.’

  ‘Ours even notice if we have a late night,’ conceded Harpe. ‘The stock market?’

  ‘Your name goes on the register of shareholders.’

  ‘Difficult.’ Harpe screwed up his face. ‘Could I take it abroad?’

  ‘You could try,’ said Sloan. ‘A lot of drug dealers do.’

  ‘I’d change it into francs or guilders or something. Big notes, of course.’

  ‘Smurfing.’

  ‘Are you having me on, Seedy?’

  ‘No. That’s called smurfing.’

  ‘Sounds like it’s from a kid’s comic.’

  ‘Nothing funny about it. It goes on all the time. We’ve been watching that Bureau de Change down by the station for yonks.’

  ‘No joy?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘It wasn’t drugs at that crossroads.’ Harry came back to his own field. ‘It was drink. The blood alcohol was way over the limit in the driver who hit that poor fellow Barton, but he’s the one who’s in hospital still dead to the world. He was lucky not to be T-boned.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan sipped his mug of tea. ‘He doesn’t sound to have been all that lucky to me.’

  ‘His wife says that his employers are going spare without him,’ said Harpe. ‘He’s a senior audit clerk with Pearson, Worrow and Gisby, you see…’

  ‘The accountants?’ Sloan knew Jim Pearson for a busy man but one still with time to lend a hand with good causes.

  Harpe nodded. ‘Mrs Barton says they don’t know which way to turn, they’re so busy. Apparently, her husband’s a real workhorse and accountants need workhorses. Mind you, Seedy,’ he added with unconscious brutality, ‘all we’re doing is holding our horses. We’ve charged the guy who hit Barton with driving under the influence. Just to be going on with, mind you.’

  ‘You can’t do a lot more with everything hanging in the balance,’ agreed Sloan, aware that Harpe’s difficulty was a procedural one. ‘At least your problem is still alive. Mine’s too dead for my liking.’

  ‘Talking about holding our horses,’ went on Harpe, undiverted.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We had trouble over at Edsway last night with real horses.’ The faintest glimmer of what might have been a smile crossed his features. ‘Had to hold them ourselves.’

  Sloan cocked a professional ear. ‘My sort of trouble or yours?’

  ‘A couple of mares got out of the animal sanctuary over there and created merry hell with motorized traffic on the road to Larking.’

  ‘Horses and cars don’t mix,’ said Sloan profoundly, echoing, had he but known it, the sentiments held by that old horse soldier, Colonel Caversham.

  ‘They’ll have to mend their fences at the sanctuary,’ growled Harpe, pushing his plate away, ‘or they’ll have more trouble.’

  ‘Only literally,’ said Sloan neatly. Alison and Jennifer Kirk had more friends and supporters in Calleshire than most people. The Sloans’ own cat, Squeak, had come from the Calleshire Animal Sanctuary as a rescued kitten. Sloan pushed his chair back. ‘Well, Harry, I hope your driver survives.’

  ‘Talking of surviving,’ riposted Harpe unkindly, ‘I’m surprised that that young driver of yours hasn’t come to grief yet.’

  ‘Crosby?’

  ‘Him.’

  ‘Luck, I expect,’ said Sloan mordantly.

  ‘Or the devil looking after his own,’ said Inspector Harpe, still determinedly superstitious.

  * * *

  ‘Fractured skull, Dr Meadows says, does he, Inspector?’ Dr Dabbe shot a quizzical glance in the direction of the do
or leading from his office to the mortuary. ‘Well, Steve should know, shouldn’t he, Ruth?’

  The radiographer, who was clutching some X-ray photographs under her arm, nodded energetically. Detective Inspector Sloan was standing, his notebook at the ready, while Burns, the pathologist’s perennially silent assistant, was hovering between office and mortuary in the manner of an old-fashioned butler. They were all gowned and masked, and had been offered the opportunity of opting out of being present at the postmortem in case remnants of dangerous diseases were still lurking in the mummy case. None of them had, although Detective Constable Crosby had removed himself to the furthest corner of the room.

  ‘And, of course,’ said Dr Dabbe genially, ‘there’s a very famous precedent.’

  ‘There is?’ Detective Inspector Sloan pulled himself together and tried to take a proper interest in the past.

  ‘In the year 1352 BC, give or take a year.’

  ‘Really, doctor?’ The pathologist was as bad as Happy Harry. Sloan didn’t like to say – not yet – that it was the present that was so very pressing.

  ‘Tutankhamun, too, so it is said, Sloan, received a fatal blow to the back of the skull…’

  ‘Did he, doctor?’ The original occupant of the mummy case might have been Egyptian but the present one wasn’t.

  ‘In a place on the cranium where an accident is most unlikely.’

  ‘We’d call that suspicious circumstances, all right,’ conceded Sloan, his mind still on the here and now but keeping the police end up withal.

  ‘Probably while he was asleep, or at any rate lying down,’ said the pathologist. ‘Upon his secure hour, as Shakespeare put it so well. I’ve always found the murder of Hamlet’s father very interesting, Sloan. That ear poison…’

  ‘Some other time, doctor, please,’ pleaded Sloan. ‘Some other time.’

  ‘Right.’ He picked up a hand microphone and started dictating into it the fact that in view of the nature of the subject of the examination, all present had consented to be present and were clad in their extra-special precautions outfits.

  ‘Dr Meadows thought you might like some straight X-rays in situ, Dr Dabbe,’ said Ruth, a trifle shakily. ‘And I could do some A and P ones for you now but not an encephalogram, of course.’

  ‘A and P?’ queried Sloan quickly. He had a rooted objection to being excluded from the shorthand of other people’s trades and professions. Jargon for in-groups – a badge of belonging – was what it was and he didn’t like it.

  ‘Anterior and posterior, Inspector,’ replied Ruth.

  ‘Full frontal,’ interpreted Dr Dabbe cheerfully.

  ‘That’s if the foil could be opened up a bit more,’ the radiographer said, wincing.

  ‘Your pretty pictures would be very helpful,’ said the pathologist gallantly. ‘We’re going to need X-rays sooner or later.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan hoped that the radiographer was not a militant feminist.

  ‘And you, Inspector,’ went on Dr Dabbe courteously, ‘I take it you already have all the photographs you need of the – er – cartonnage?’

  Sloan nodded as Burns advanced with a trolley laid out with instruments.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Dr Dabbe in a businesslike way, ‘that you’ll be wanting a time frame first, Sloan.’

  What Detective Inspector Sloan wanted first was the chance to get started on the hunting of the coroner’s nark, but he did not say so.

  Chapter Seven

  Frayed

  ‘I am given to understand, sir,’ said Detective Constable Crosby to the young man on the doorstep, ‘that last week you reported a woman as missing from this address; that is, if you’re Colin Thornhill.’

  ‘Jill Carter,’ said the young man tightly. ‘Have you found her?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Crosby.

  ‘So why have you come round here?’

  ‘Just checking, sir. That’s all.’

  ‘Not again!’ protested Colin Thornhill heatedly. ‘Do you realize that you’re the third policeman to want to ask me questions since Jill went missing?’

  ‘Am I, sir?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby. He was standing on the doorstep of a big old house opposite the park in the middle of Berebury. ‘Well, I never.’

  ‘There was the one when I reported that Jill hadn’t come home last Friday…’

  ‘That would be our Station Sergeant,’ offered Crosby helpfully.

  ‘And then another policeman came round here to ask me the same questions all over again. And now you.’ Colin Thornhill stood back from the threshold and said grudgingly, ‘I suppose you’d better come in then.’

  He led the way up to the top flat of a house that had come down in the world. Where once a successful Victorian merchant had proclaimed his worldly achievement in architectural curlicues, now half a dozen souls made their individual homes. The apartment under the roof into which Thornhill showed the constable had clearly begun life as a set of night nurseries.

  ‘Jill disappeared, you see,’ the man said, ‘without a word to anyone. Just didn’t come home that night.’

  ‘There’s no law against disappearing,’ said Crosby.

  ‘I understand that.’ He essayed a thin smile. ‘I’ve been tempted to do it myself often enough when things haven’t gone well, but Jill just isn’t that sort of person.’

  ‘If you want to drop out, then you can,’ said Crosby. This was a credo oft-repeated to the families and friends of those who had done so by those who moved in police circles. The families and friends invariably remained unconvinced of this truism. ‘There’s nothing to stop you or anyone else going off if you want to without saying why.’

  ‘Jill wasn’t a drop-out,’ Thornhill came back at him swiftly, exhibiting the first sign of animation that he had seen so far.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Besides, she’d just started a new job.’

  The constable looked down at the report in his hand. ‘As a trainee with Pearson, Worrow and Gisby, the chartered accountants.’

  He nodded. ‘It was beginning at the bottom, of course…’

  Crosby nodded. So was detective constable.

  ‘But it was a foot on the ladder.’

  So was the office of detective constable.

  ‘And,’ he said wanly, ‘we hoped it might lead somewhere.’

  ‘Naturally, sir.’ Where Crosby wanted his career to lead was straight to Traffic Division.

  ‘My own employment being in the nature of things uncertain.’

  Crosby glanced down again at his notes. ‘Actor?’

  ‘When I get the chance, or even half a chance.’

  Detective Constable Crosby, being still young himself, probably understood the scenario better than his seniors: boy meets girl who is in work when he isn’t; girl meets boy in need of support and gives it. Colin Thornhill was probably a sort of caveman in reverse.

  ‘But Jill hasn’t been back to the office either,’ Thornhill was saying. ‘That’s what’s so very worrying.’ He hesitated. ‘They weren’t best pleased about that; what with her being new and them being so busy just now.’

  ‘Overworked, was she?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head with an instant understanding. ‘It wasn’t like that at all, officer. Jill just isn’t the sort to consider suicide. I’m sure about that. Quite sure,’ he added with emphasis. ‘I can’t see her having a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘Good,’ said Detective Constable Crosby with a wholly artificial enthusiasm; it wasn’t suicide that the police were worrying about. Women with skulls fractured by a heavy blow on the sinciput did not then proceed to immolate themselves in mummy cases in empty houses.

  ‘Oh, she was working hard enough, all right,’ Thornhill went on, ‘because the firm was very short-staffed. But the actual work wasn’t too much for her or anything like that. She said the more she did, the more interesting she found it.’

  ‘And how long ago did you last see her?’

  ‘I haven
’t set eyes on her for nearly a week now,’ he said dully, lapsing back into his previous weariness of manner, ‘and neither has anyone else.’

  ‘And where were you when you did?’ Crosby had been taught that quite a lot of police work amounted to asking questions to which he would already know the answer. The importance of the procedure lay in the way in which the answer was given the sixth or seventh time round, and in particular whether or not the response was exactly the same as it had been the first and second time the question had been put. Most experienced police officers held that way to be better than any number of lie detectors.

  ‘The Ornum Arms at Almstone,’ said Thornhill, naturally oblivious of this train of thought. ‘It makes a nice walk. We’d just been having a drink together there after she’d finished work on Friday.’

  ‘And she left?’

  ‘And I left, not her. She stayed on at the pub. She said she’d spotted someone she knew who she wanted to talk to.’

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Search me,’ said Thornhill. ‘No, hang on. I heard her call him Nigel as she went over but I didn’t know him. So I made myself scarce.’

  ‘You did, did you?’ said Crosby, projecting considerable scepticism. ‘I’d like a description of this man, please. And then?’

  ‘Then I went to do a bit of shopping on my way home. You see, Jill didn’t like shopping.’

  ‘But you’d had this row…’

  ‘We hadn’t had a row.’ He flared up instantly. ‘That’s not true.’

  Crosby looked down at the report in his hand again. ‘Over some curtains.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ he challenged him.

  ‘I couldn’t say.’

  ‘But all Jill and I had been doing,’ he said carefully as if repeating something he had said again and again, ‘was discussing what colour our new curtains should be.’

  ‘A row,’ repeated Crosby.