Sloan looked down at a series of pipes running along above the skirting board. ‘That would have done it, would it?’ he murmured thoughtfully.
The pathologist jerked his head in assent. ‘The human body can take a much higher steam heat than it can dry heat. Any Turkish bath attendant could tell you that. The name of this game, Sloan, is thermal shock.’
‘Could she have been unconscious first, doctor?’ asked Sloan. ‘There must have been some reason why she didn’t just walk out of here when it started to get too hot.’
‘She tried,’ said Dr Dabbe. ‘Look at her fingernails. See where she had been clawing at something?’
‘The door wasn’t locked when we arrived,’ said Sloan carefully, ‘though the key was in the lock.’
‘That’s as may be, Sloan. Not my province, that.’ He frowned. ‘All I can say is that there might have been some physical reason why she couldn’t get out but I shan’t be able to tell you that until after the post-mortem.’
‘She could have shouted.’
‘Not for long,’ said Dabbe chillingly. ‘This show was over long before the fat lady sang.’ He straightened up. ‘Who is she, anyway?’
‘A Mrs Bessie Culshaw. According to the manager of this outfit—who’s called Graham Pattman, by the way—she and her husband are long-time regulars here. Been coming for years, the manager said. The husband comes here for the golf and she comes here to try to lose weight.’
‘Not her life,’ said Dr Dabbe absently. He was squinting at the soles of the dead woman’s feet.
‘The manager’s wringing his hands in the hall,’ said Sloan. ‘A death like this isn’t going to do this place any good.’
‘I can’t tell you whether it’s an accident or murder,’ said Dabbe, answering Sloan’s unspoken question. ‘Only the cause of death.’
‘And the husband’s waiting in one of the quiet rooms with his head in his hands,’ continued Sloan. ‘I’ve left my constable sitting with him. He’s taking down a statement from him now.’
‘You’ll have mine when I’ve done the postmortem,’ said Dr Dabbe briskly, ‘but in the mean time I can tell you that she died from the effects of a temperature too high to be compatible with human life.’
The manager’s choice of words was nothing like so well ordered or cogent.
‘I can’t imagine what can possibly have happened, Inspector,’ he said, distractedly. ‘Or why poor Mrs Culshaw didn’t just walk out of the Hot Room. Janice is quite sure the door wasn’t locked when she went in to tidy up and found her.’
‘Although the key was in the lock,’ said Sloan again. That was important.
Pattman wasn’t paying attention. ‘We’ve been using that Hot Room ever since we opened and we’ve never had any trouble there before.’
It was a refrain which Detective Inspector Sloan had heard many times in his daily round. Battle, murder, sudden death, accident and sundry other Jovian thunderbolts had seldom struck ordinary people before in most of the situations that came his—and their—way. Hard as it seemed, all that that meant in practical police terms was that those concerned had had no previous experience in confronting disaster.
That, he decided, listening to the manager now, could be both good and bad.
‘I just can’t think of anything that could possibly have gone wrong either …’ said Pattman, his natural volubility made worse by stress.
‘Tell me about the Hot Room,’ said Sloan.
‘It’s where clients—patients—go to—er—perspire a lot from the steam heat,’ he said, mopping his own brow. ‘After having a massage and so forth. Perspiring is the quickest way of losing weight, although,’ he added honestly, ‘it comes back again as soon as you drink.’
What was it that Sloan had heard that process called? The rhythm method of girth control, that was it.
‘Then,’ swallowed Pattman, ‘they’d go and have a swim in the tepid pool and end up feeling fine.’
Sloan nodded. It sounded to him a perfectly harmless way of spending the morning if you hadn’t anything better to do. Anything better to do except eat, of course.
‘It’s quite terrible, Inspector. Quite terrible. I don’t know what will happen now.’ The manager’s shoulders drooped as a vision of how much less than fine Mrs Culshaw must have been feeling in the Hot Room before she died clearly swam into his mind.
‘No.’ Sloan could offer no comfort and didn’t try. He couldn’t decide whether a verdict of murder or accident would do the more harm to the health farm. There probably wasn’t much to choose between the effect of the two evils. What mattered to them would be a third evil—bad publicity. ‘And I can’t help you at this stage.’
‘There’ll have to be an inquest, of course, won’t there …?’ The manager’s shoulders sagged even further when he contemplated the damage that news of this death would do to the health farm.
‘And a police investigation,’ said Sloan, adding firmly: ‘First, we shall need to find out exactly how Mrs Culshaw died.’ The police would want to know why she had died, too, but that would come later. ‘It would seem that for an unknown length of time the inlet pipe delivered hot air instead of steam to the Hot Room.’
‘Mike—that’s our resident maintenance man—is quite adamant that there’s never been any trouble in the hot-water system before,’ said the manager, a last-ditcher by nature. ‘I’ve got him waiting in my room now, like you said, Inspector.’
‘I’ll see him as soon as I’ve had a word with the husband,’ said Sloan.
Mr William Culshaw lifted a drawn, anxious face when the Detective Inspector entered the lounge where he had been giving his statement to Detective Constable Crosby.
‘Poor Bessie,’ he said. ‘And all she wanted to do was to be able to tell me she’d lost a few pounds. She always liked it here, you know, Inspector. We’ve been coming for years. It’s—well—restful.’
‘I’ll need to know about this morning, sir,’ said Sloan.
‘Of course’ said the husband, readily enough. ‘We had breakfast together as usual in our room. My wife wasn’t a big breakfast eater—sometimes they’d say that was bad for dieters and sometimes they’d say it was good. If you were to ask me, Inspector, I’d say they didn’t know …’
Detective Inspector Sloan was an English breakfast man himself but didn’t think this was the moment to say so.
‘They all knew, all right, Inspector, how she came to be overweight …’
It was interesting, noted Sloan, how no one here seemed to use the word ‘fat’.
‘Oh, yes,’ said William Culshaw bitterly. ‘Bessie never had a chance of being anywhere near normal weight.’
‘How was that, sir?’
‘Barclays’ Biscuits,’ he said.
‘Barclays’ Biscuits, sir?’ Sloan knew Barclays’ Biscuits, of course. Who didn’t? Their packet with the picture of the happy, plump little girl eating one on it was part of the national culture and had been for years … Light dawned. He said: ‘She wasn’t …?’
‘She was,’ he said, nodding vigorously. ‘Little Miss Barclay. She was always being photographed eating one of Barclays’ Famous Biscuits when she was small. She liked the Bourbon ones best …’
‘With the chocolate cream,’ endorsed Sloan, back to his own childhood in an instant. He could conjure up the taste even now …
‘You can work out what happened,’ said William Culshaw with a certain melancholy. ‘A moment on the lips and a lifetime on the hips. And they always say a fat child is a fat adult.’
‘Yes,’ said Sloan. His own theory was that it was the sweetness of the apple not the attractions of Eve that had led to the downfall of mankind in the Garden of Eden. This didn’t seem to be the moment to advance that either. Instead he said: ‘You were telling me about this morning, sir …’ William Culshaw said: ‘After breakfast, I left Bessie and her friend, Eileen Smith …’
‘Eileen Smith?’ said Sloan sharply. ‘Was she in the Hot Room, too?’
‘
No,’ said Bessie’s husband, ‘but I thought she would be. She and my wife always booked the time there together. Seems she was called away. That’s what Graham Pattman told me’—his face crinkled—‘afterwards.’
Sloan made a note. ‘Go on …’
‘I did what I usually do—collected my clubs and walked over to the golf course.’
‘And what sort of time would that have been, sir?’
‘I should say about half-past nine, give or take ten minutes …’
Dr Dabbe had given it as his considered professional opinion that something measurable in minutes at a high temperature would have been long enough to kill Bessie Culshaw.
‘And then?’
‘I played a round with the husband of another resident here—Stanley Cox—and then came back here in time for luncheon.’
‘Were you,’ asked Sloan delicately, ‘expecting to have this with your wife?’
William Culshaw, whom Sloan’s mother would have described as thin as a darning needle sideways, shook his head. ‘Bessie had to have her meal in the Salad Room with the others on light meals.’
That made sense to Sloan. Exciting the gustatory senses of the starving by the sight of a square meal didn’t make any sense at all: especially for this Jack Spratt and his wife.
Culshaw said: ‘There is what you might call a normal dining-room here, too, for non-patients and those who have been—er—very good.’
Detective Inspector Sloan ignored the moral overtones implicit in the statement and enquired instead when William Culshaw had got back from the golf course.
‘It must have been something after twelve, Inspector. I put my clubs away and went into the bar for a drink with Cox before we ate.’
‘When would you have expected to see your wife again?’
‘Tea-time,’ he said promptly. ‘She needed her rest in the afternoon.’ His face clouded. ‘Otherwise I’d have gone looking for her myself.’
Janice, the staff member who had found Bessie Culshaw when she had gone in to tidy the Hot Room, was still in shock but Sloan did not say so. Instead he went back to the manager’s room and saw Mike, the maintenance man. He was very glad, when he did, that the first thing he had done when he got to the health farm was to have had the man pinned down in his office by the manager in much the same way as Detective Constable Crosby was making quite sure William Culshaw didn’t leave the Residents’ Lounge.
As soon as the fellow started talking it was clear that he had one object in view and one only—that of minding his own back.
‘Never had no complaints from anyone this morning about no water,’ Mike said belligerently, his arms folded tightly across his chest. ‘Nobody reported nothing, not to me. And them lot in the kitchen’d’ve shouted pretty quick, too, I can tell you if they hadn’t had anything to wash their fancy vegetables in.’
‘Here at the Health Farm,’ said Graham Pattman, in an agony of concern about putting up a good public relations front, ‘we try to compensate for a shortage of—er—substance—in the diet with an emphasis on the first-class presentation of—er—such food as is allow—recommended.’
‘Moreover,’ said Mike with the confidence of one who knows, ‘the house stop-cock’s under the kitchen sink so no one can have got at that without them lot in there noticing for all that they’re mostly foreigners.’
‘Jacques, our head chef,’ intervened the manager swiftly, ‘has an international reputation for this sort of cuisine.’
‘And the outside stop-cock where the water main comes in?’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, house-owner himself.
‘A Sabbath day’s march down the drive near the front gate and I haven’t had a chance to look at that yet,’ said Mike, aggrieved. ‘Not what with being put in here and told not to move.’
Sloan remained unmoved.
‘First thing I know about anything’s being up the creek’s when Mr Pattman here sent for me,’ he said. ‘Just before you lot got here, and I haven’t been able to look at anything yet, have I?’
‘Then we’ll do it now,’ said Sloan. Crosby could carry on keeping an eye on the deceased’s husband.
‘It’s under some bushes …’
‘Before we go out there,’ said Sloan, ‘you can show me where the water supply to the Hot Room comes from …’
Mike led the way back past the Hot Room, now occupied by two fingerprint experts and a Scenes of Crime Officer, and into the adjoining room. It was a combined flower room and cloakroom—a relict of the days in which the health farm had been a large country house. A couple of golf trolleys were parked against the further wall and a pile of suitcases stood in front of another. There was a deep sink and a large draining-board on which stood an electric kettle and an empty mug. ‘You can see where the pipes come through the wall and run along above the wainscot,’ said Mike, stooping and tapping the woodwork, ‘and then through this wall and into the old morning-room.’
‘That’s where our masseuse works,’ said Pattman. ‘Mrs Culshaw had had her massage before she went into the Hot Room.’
Detective Inspector Sloan bent down to examine the water pipes. He had to move the two golf trolleys out from the wall—one, the electric one, was quite heavy, a large battery contrivance sitting on its cross-bar—to see the entire length of the pipes. To the naked eye they looked undamaged. There was no sign of a water leak either in that room or the next—or indeed in any of the rooms which the pipes traversed on their way round the building from the boiler-room. Nor was there any form of additional stop-cock between the boiler-room and the health farm’s Hot Room.
‘What did I say?’ demanded Mike triumphantly. ‘Nothing wrong with the system, like I said.’
Sloan’s personal radio crackled. ‘Now we’ll go outside,’ he said, after listening to the message.
The three of them made an unlikely trio as they trooped down the drive of the health farm. Waiting for them at the entrance gate were the two Berebury Police photographers, Williams and Dyson.
‘Mike here,’ announced Sloan, ‘is going to show us by pointing exactly where the outside stop-cock is. He is not,’ added Sloan meaningfully, ‘going to move off the path while he does so.’
‘If you was to look to the left of that post over there,’ offered Mike, ‘and scrape the leaves away I reckon you’d find a little metal cover.’
The cameras clicked and then very cautiously Sloan advanced through the carpet of last year’s beech leaves which covered all the ground in sight.
‘A “Babes in the Wood” job is it, then, Inspector?’ said Williams, the senior photographer.
‘No,’ said Sloan shortly. ‘We’re looking for evidence that some person or persons unknown turned this stop-cock off for a short time this morning.’ That it would have been almost certainly at the same time as the same person or persons saw fit to turn the key in the lock of the Hot Room door he saw no reason to say.
The camera clicked again and then very, very carefully Sloan started to clear away the natural debris of several seasons to expose an iron plate. It was just where Mike had said it would be. It couldn’t have been called a manhole because it was only big enough to take an arm.
The photographers took shots of the undisturbed leaves before Sloan indicated that they could advance on the stop-cock.
‘I don’t check it all that often,’ said Mike, ‘seeing as how there’s never been any trouble in that department.’
The detritus round the metal cover would seem to Sloan’s gardener’s eye to have drifted there rather than been arranged over it. It was therefore no surprise to him, when the metal cover had been prised open, to see no sign of human interference.
‘Reckon what you want, Inspector,’ said Williams, the photographer and the humorist of the party, as a pair of centipedes and a leatherjacket scuttled away from the sudden light, ‘is one of those forensic entomologists. I dare say they could tell you when this was last opened up by counting their legs.’
‘If you were to ask me,’ chimed i
n Dyson, ‘I should say not since the old Queen died.’
‘I shan’t ask you,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan tartly, ‘but remember that defence counsel might.’
It was Graham Pattman who blanched. ‘It must have been an accident,’ he said. ‘A most unfortunate accident …’
Detective Inspector Sloan said nothing. True accidents were the province of other people—Coroners, of course; the Press, naturally; the public utilities, sometimes; insurance companies and their assessors, usually but not definitely not—the police. If Mrs Bessie Culshaw’s death was an accident then he could pack up here and now and go back to the Police Station.
But he was beginning to be sure it wasn’t. And he had already put a man on to establishing exactly how the victim’s intended companion in the Hot Room—Eileen Smith—had come to be called away when she had been.
He left the group and walked across the ample grounds towards the golf course.
‘Staying here must cost a bomb,’ he remarked to the young golf professional when he got there.
‘It does,’ said the young man simply. ‘And if the fat ones played they could get thin for nothing but it doesn’t seem to work like that.’
Sloan asked him when Mr Cox and Mr Culshaw had gone out and come in that morning.
‘’Bout half nine, Inspector, and they must have got back something round about twelve. It’s not a long course,’ he said a trifle defensively, ‘seeing how it was designed for the older man.’
‘You’d need to be rich to come here,’ agreed Sloan, tacitly acknowledging that as a rule money and age marched hand in hand more often than did wealth and youth.
The young man wasn’t as discreet as the manager. ‘From what I heard she had the money,’ he said. ‘Just as well because his firm had folded. It was in the papers. They don’t get a lot of young people up at the farm,’ admitted the professional.
‘So you don’t get many good games,’ said Sloan. Age and corpulence went together too, more often than not.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ murmured the golf pro. ‘I go round with some of the oldies myself sometimes if they haven’t got a partner.’
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