‘Good Lord, yes,’ said Harpe. ‘I’d forgotten that bit about all your troubles being little ones. How are things?’
Sloan looked at him with dawning horror as he realized that he, too, had momentarily forgotten all about his wife and the unborn baby.
And in favour of murder.
‘Fine, fine,’ he said hastily.
CHAPTER XIV
For all our cunning, when all’s tried and done
That stone won’t yield itself to anyone
‘There is one thing,’ pronounced Superintendent Leeyes heavily, ‘that doesn’t make sense.’
‘Sir?’ As far as Sloan was concerned there were a lot of things about the death of Beatrice Gwendoline Wansdyke which didn’t make sense.
‘We still don’t know for certain that any of these people really expect anything more than peanuts from Beatrice Wansdyke’s estate.’
Sloan sighed. There would be no mileage, he knew, in reminding the Superintendent that as a motive for murder peanuts were good enough any day of the week. Dotty as it might seem, traditionally the stakes did not have to be as high for murder as they usually were for burglary.
‘Not one of them,’ persisted Leeyes, ‘has given us the tiniest clue that they know they’re in the big money league.’
‘Someone hit Crosby.’
‘People are always hitting policemen,’ said Leeyes largely. ‘It’s an occupational hazard.’
‘Someone changed insulin for water.’
Leeyes accepted this without contradiction. ‘Ah, that’s different. I grant you that, Sloan.’
‘It means that the malice was well aforethought,’ said Sloan. That was something he’d been thinking about quite a lot. The planning. This murder had been well-contrived.
‘I can see that without the missing insulin there would be no case to answer,’ agreed Leeyes, submerging the assault on Constable Crosby’s person without a backward thought.
‘There isn’t exactly a case,’ Sloan reminded him. ‘Not yet, anyway. But there will be.’
‘Up boys and at ’em,’ murmured Leeyes absently.
‘I have been checking on one or two points with the bank, though, sir.’
‘A clammy lot, bankers.’
‘There were one or two crumbs they were prepared to let me have.’
‘Well?’
‘They gave me the cut-off dates of their current account statement cycle.’
‘You could have worked that out for yourself.’
‘Perhaps,’ remarked Sloan philosophically, ‘that’s why they disclosed them.’
‘Big deal.’
‘And, quite unofficially, mind you, we’ve established the exact date the big money reached Beatrice Wansdyke’s account.’
‘You have, have you?’
‘Her bank statements were in the bureau in her sitting-room.’
‘So it wasn’t beyond Crosby.’
‘No,’ Sloan coughed. ‘When we tackled the bank again after that they did reveal – saw no harm in letting us know – that the large sum we were – er – interested in was received as one lump payment.’
‘Some lump.’
‘Some chicken, some neck,’ agreed Sloan, adding, ‘Perhaps that’s why it attracted attention.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Leeyes robustly. ‘A hundredth part of that sort of lump going into my current account would positively startle the manager.’
‘Yes, sir.’ The Sloan family income was modest, too. Police incomes were.
‘And when exactly did Miss Wansdyke hit the jackpot?’
‘I’ll give you one guess,’ said Sloan.
‘Sloan,’ said Leeyes testily, ‘are you trying to tell me something.’
‘That payment didn’t appear on her last bank statement, sir?’
‘So it’s come in since the cut-off date?’
‘The day after,’ said Sloan. ‘That’s when it arrived.’
‘So it would be how long before she got her next statement?’
‘A calendar month.’
‘Do you mean to say that if for any reason she didn’t know about the money it would be the best part of four weeks before she would find out?’
‘Unless she went into the bank to ask what her current account stood at.’
Superintendent Leeyes considered this. ‘Is what you are getting at, Sloan, the idea that she might not have known it was there?’
‘All we know is that it wasn’t on her last bank statement because we’ve looked at that. And,’ Sloan added judiciously, ‘that she hadn’t gone in for being one of the last of the big spenders since it arrived.’
‘How did you work that out?’
‘Crosby again, sir,’ he said, giving credit where credit was due. ‘Her cheque-book was in the same drawer.’
‘He might make a detective if he lives long enough.’
‘Somebody,’ said Sloan flatly, ‘tried to see that he didn’t.’
Leeyes grunted.
‘At least,’ said Sloan, ‘it explains the Ridley Road lifestyle. I should say that up until last month she had a Ridley Road income to match.’
‘The bank,’ rumbled Leeyes. ‘Surely they’d have told her that it had arrived.’
‘They say that they hadn’t notified her of its arrival because they had been instructed that no notification was required.’
‘And they,’ said Superintendent Leeyes cynically, ‘always obey the last order too, do they? Who do they think they are? The Army?’
‘They obey instructions,’ said Sloan a little wearily. ‘They don’t take decisions.’ He often wondered if those whose only duty was to carry out instructions ever realized how well off they were.
Leeyes snorted. ‘In our way of business you have to do both.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘That’s what sorts out the men from the boys.’
‘Yes, sir.’ There was no absolution to be had from blind obedience to orders in the police line of duty. Sloan knew that well enough. But all the same there was still always hell to pay if you broke the rules and followed your own nose and it didn’t work.
And sometimes even if it did.
‘If it wasn’t for the insulin being tampered with,’ said Sloan fervently, ‘I’d have said the money was there by mistake.’
‘Get anything else out of the bank?’ enquired Leeyes.
‘Only that the Wansdyke family had banked there for three generations. They didn’t seem to mind telling me that.’
‘That’s not information,’ said Leeyes gratuitously. ‘That’s advertising.’
‘No, Inspector,’ repeated George Wansdyke with some firmness, ‘I have not seen Nicholas Petforth since my aunt died.’ He did not sound regretful. ‘We put an obituary notice in the newspaper and hoped he would see that, though I believe he keeps in touch with his sister Briony from time to time.’
The businessman was sitting at his desk in his office at the works of Wansdyke and Darnley. At the other side of the same desk moving restlessly from foot to foot was Bill Benfleet, the public relations man who had also been there earlier in the day. Wansdyke pushed the piece of paper they had both been studying into Benfleet’s hands saying, ‘Some other time, Bill …’
Benfleet shook his head. ‘Sorry, Mr Wansdyke, but no.’
‘Look, Bill, this really will have to wait for a bit.’
‘It won’t wait,’ said Benfleet flatly.
‘It’ll have to,’ said Wansdyke more than a little briskly. He indicated Sloan. ‘Can’t you see that, man?’
The public relations man stood his ground. ‘It won’t wait any longer. Not if you want it for Friday.’
‘Of course we want it for Friday,’ snapped a goaded Wansdyke. ‘That’s the whole point.’
‘Then,’ Bill Benfleet was adamant, ‘it’s got to be done now.’
‘But …’
‘I’ve got my girl staying on to type this tonight,’ said Benfleet with the air of one unanswerably clinching his argument. ‘Late.’
Detective-Inspector Sloan found it in his heart to be sorry for any man caught between the Scylla of his employer and the Charybdis of his secretary.
Wansdyke, too, must have seen the force of what Benfleet was saying. He ran his hand through his hair and capitulated. ‘You’ll just have to do it yourself then, Bill.’
‘I can’t,’ explained Benfleet patiently. ‘I’ve told you before I don’t know enough about the product.’
Sloan turned his head with Wimbledon-like interest to see how George Wansdyke would take that particular ball.
‘You Public Relations people don’t usually let a little thing like that stand in your way,’ said Wansdyke with an attempt at lightness.
‘I’m an advertising man,’ Benfleet came back with a straight volley. ‘Not an industrial chemist.’
‘Then ask one of them.’ Irritably.
‘Nobody seems to know enough about it to say the right things.’
‘I’ll grant you that,’ said Wansdyke more gracefully. ‘It’s Mr Darnley’s pigeon really.’
‘And he’s somewhere over the Atlantic,’ said Benfleet. ‘I hope.’
‘So do I. All right, Bill. I’ll do it just as soon as the Inspector’s gone.’
Sloan came in as on cue. ‘We’re just checking really, sir.’
‘Sorry about all that,’ said Wansdyke as Bill Benfleet withdrew at last. ‘Friday’s the day for a new product launching and we’re just tying up one or two loose ends.’
‘So am I,’ said Sloan simply.
‘What – er – oh yes, of course, Inspector. What can I do for you now?’
‘You can tell me a little more about Petforth.’
‘Nicholas? There’s not a lot to tell you. Typical of his generation, I suppose. Never settled to anything. No money. Not particularly good at school. My aunt always said he had brains and she should know but he never used them that I know of.’
Sloan didn’t trouble to write down what he was saying. ‘Did he ever want to come into your firm?’
Wansdyke gave a short laugh. ‘And do some real work? Never, Inspector. He prefers to live by sponging on his sister and his aunt.’
Sloan said nothing. The motorway site hadn’t sounded like a cushy job to him.
‘Beatrice always had a soft spot for him, whatever he did,’ said George Wansdyke.
‘She’s proved that, hasn’t she, sir?’
‘What? How do you work that out?’
‘She left him half her worldly goods, didn’t she, sir?’
‘Oh, her Will. Yes, of course. I was forgetting that.’
‘Does he know about it?’
‘Not from me,’ said Wansdyke. ‘I don’t know where he is.’
‘From his sister?’
‘Possibly.’ Wansdyke shrugged his shoulders.
‘From his aunt herself, maybe?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Wansdyke. ‘She might have told him.’
‘She didn’t tell you she had?’
‘No,’ said Wansdyke. ‘Beatrice only told me that I was her sole executor.’
‘So Petforth might have known for some time that he was going to inherit?’
‘Maybe.’ Wansdyke pulled his lips down. ‘Not that half of Beatrice’s estate will keep him in comfort for the rest of his days and I suspect that that’s the sort of support he’s looking for.’
Sloan said, ‘Aren’t we all, sir?’
Wansdyke looked up sharply.
‘Your new product, sir, that you’re launching on Friday.’
George Wansdyke smiled thinly. ‘You win, Inspector. Of course we’re hoping that will do the same for us. I must say, comfort for the rest of our days would suit us all here at Wansdyke and Darnley very well.’
‘How near did Miss Wansdyke get to having a press release of her own?’
‘I don’t really know, Inspector. My partner, Malcolm Darnley, is the technical one – I’m responsible for the business side of things – so I couldn’t say for certain how far she’d got. He’d know. They used to chat a lot.’
‘She spent a lot of time down here?’
‘Oh yes, indeed. It was a fascinating quest for a chemist.’
‘Something from nothing,’ said Sloan appositely.
‘I think she found it a relaxation after a week’s teaching,’ said the other man.
‘She would have made notes.’
Wansdyke’s face relaxed into a rueful grin. ‘Inspector, all research chemists make notes. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Filing them, I assure you, is a nightmare.’
‘Where would they be, sir?’
‘Beatrice’s notes? At her home, I should think. They’re not here.’
‘Perhaps, sir,’ he said, ‘you’d let me know if you come across them.’ Detective-Constable Crosby hadn’t found them there but Sloan did not say so. They’d be searching the house in Ridley Road again anyway now that they knew about the insulin not being insulin, so to speak.
‘Of course, Inspector.’ Wansdyke frowned. ‘Naturally, if you want them.’
‘Then,’ said Sloan courteously, ‘I won’t come between you and your press release any more.’
It was the best meal he had eaten for days. Detective-Inspector Sloan said as much to his wife as he set his knife and fork down.
She smiled and murmured, ‘We both had too much.’
‘Couldn’t very well waste anything as good as that, could we?’ he said comfortably. ‘It wouldn’t be right.’
‘It’ll be the other sort of waist we’ll have to watch soon, won’t we?’ said Margaret Sloan. ‘The one that needs a tape-measure.’
‘Fulfilled has two meanings, too,’ he said, settling into his own fireside chair, ‘seeing as we’re playing with words.’
She fetched coffee and poured out two cups.
Presently she asked, ‘Went the day well?’
Over the years of married congress the two of them had devised an unwritten formula for the policeman’s wife’s equivalent of the business executive’s wife’s routine enquiry, ‘Had a good day at the office, dear?’ Margaret Sloan never put the question until she had seen to his bodily comfort. She always left out the verbal endearment too. There were other – better – ways of expressing that …
And to her eternal credit she never pursued a negative response.
Today, though, she got a full answer.
‘Crosby caught a packet.’ Her husband told her all about the attack on the young constable’s person.
She shuddered. ‘Poor boy.’
‘We think it may have been Nick Petforth.’
‘The nephew?’
‘He was around at the time. We do know that.’ Propinquity came into crime no matter what the moralists said, else why pray to be delivered from temptation?
‘Around where?’ asked his wife, setting down her coffee cup.
‘Fleming Ward.’
She frowned in recollection. ‘That’s where the niece works, isn’t it? The one I overheard talking to Dr Elspin.’
‘It is.’
Margaret Sloan stared into the fire and said, ‘It’s like a horrible mixture of two parlour games. Both jumbled up together.’
‘Two?’ Sloan looked up quizzically. He’d never been much of a man for parlour games. Not of that sort, anyway.
‘Murder,’ she said. ‘Surely you remember playing that?’
‘In the dark,’ he assured her.
‘And …’ her voice trailed away.
‘And?’
‘And –’ she didn’t even like saying it – ‘Happy Families.’
She got an unexpectedly earnest answer.
‘It’s in families that there’s the greatest danger of murder,’ he said seriously. Nervous old ladies, afraid to go out in the dark, never believed it, of course. Nobody liked to believe that the greatest danger of murder came from one’s nearest and dearest; that home was where the real danger of violence lay. The bedroom for the woman, the kitchen for the man, and the bathroom for the baby – where t
hey were most likely to be strangled, stabbed and drowned – in that order. The Home Office did their sums and said so.
‘Miss Bun, the Baker’s daughter, and all that,’ she murmured.
‘I thought for a moment,’ he admitted, ‘that you were going to say the other game was consequences.’
‘I’d forgotten that one.’
‘It’s the one that nobody bent ever plays,’ he said quickly. ‘If they did and sat down and worked out all the consequences of what they were doing there wouldn’t be any crime and I’d be out of work.’ This inability to see the consequences of malefaction was what marked out your criminal.
But not your murderer.
Sloan knew that too.
Your murderer murdered to bring about consequences that were desirable to him.
Which was quite different.
‘And Crosby?’ asked his wife. ‘How is he now?’
A slow grin came over Sloan’s face. ‘Better than Humpty Dumpty.’
‘And all the King’s horses …’ she began.
‘And all the King’s men – if that’s what you call the National Health Service.’
‘Have put him together again?’
‘Well, a young house surgeon was going to have a try. So young that Crosby was affronted.’
‘Poor boy,’ said Margaret Sloan again. Ambiguously.
‘They’re keeping him in hospital, though, tonight, to be on the safe side.’ His mind still on his own excellent meal Sloan said: ‘He won’t have eaten as well as this in there.’
‘No.’
Something in the dryness of her tone made him look up, his face crinkling into a smile. ‘I’ll smuggle you something in to the maternity ward, love,’ he promised, ‘in a paper bag under Sister’s nose.’
‘You’ll be too busy chasing villains to come to see me,’ she said mischievously.
‘You wait,’ he said. ‘I’ll be like those natives who camp at the bottom of the bed.’
‘You haven’t seen the ward sister,’ said Margaret Sloan.
‘Not friendly to natives?’
She smiled the rather remote smile of the heavily pregnant. ‘More coffee?’
‘We never found a ransom note for the dog,’ he said, passing his cup. ‘I forgot to tell the Super that. We did look in the house, just in case.’
‘You may be sitting in your own home, Detective-Inspector Sloan,’ she observed, ‘but you haven’t really left off working, have you?’
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