‘Back again, Anthony? You’re earlier than usual this morning.’ Charmian Lingard appeared in the grounds of the Grange at Pelling as if by magic as the garden designer was working there. She was wearing trousers so well-cut that they shouted as having come from a London couturier. They were of a light brown check, the outfit being topped by a plain cream blouse of expensive simplicity.
‘Nothing like as soon as those poor old monks would have been at their first office when they lived here. They had to get going really early.’ Anthony Berra straightened up and leant on his spade. ‘I wanted to get Flora’s plinth settled in.’ He gave the statue an affectionate pat. ‘I’m just finishing checking the levels of the base so that I can fix her properly. It’s very important to get her standing up straight.’
‘I quite agree,’ said Charmian Lingard whose own
excellent deportment had been refined at the Swiss Finishing School. ‘We can’t have her doing a Leaning Tower of Pisa act. Not here.’
‘She’d look drunk and that would never do,’ agreed Anthony solemnly.
‘You’re teasing me, Anthony.’
He reverted to business. ‘I’m hoping to get everything ready before I go and then I’ll have to leave the concrete round the plinth to set. I’m going set off next and do another round of nurseries to see if I can replace some of the plants we’ve lost …’
‘You’ve lost,’ she corrected him, a touch of steel in her voice.
‘I’ve lost,’ he conceded at once, hiding a grimace. ‘I’ve already been to Jack Haines’ place and over to the nursery at Capstan Purlieu …’
‘I’ve heard of them. One of them’s a bit fierce, isn’t she?’
‘I wouldn’t want to tangle with Anna Sutherland myself,’ admitted Anthony Berra, adding hastily, ‘very sound on her subject, all the same. But I’ll have to try some other places too. And you’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve drawn up a new planting plan.’
‘You don’t waste much time, do you, Anthony?’
He essayed a smile. ‘It’s not so much time and tide that wait for no man, Charmian, as the length of time the plants are in the ground that matters.’ He added, grinning, ‘And we do have a deadline, don’t we?’
‘You know we do and I know you’re teasing me again,’ said Charmian Lingard sweetly. ‘The garden party. I’m already working on the draft of the invitation to the printers. I’m really just waiting for the proof to come back
and then I can give them the go-ahead.’ She gave a sigh of great satisfaction. ‘It’s going to be a great occasion. I do hope I can persuade the admiral to come. He’s such a game old chap and I’m sure he’ll turn up if he can. Besides, he must know the bishop and his wife.’
‘And everyone else who matters in Calleshire,’ added Anthony Berra, but under his breath.
‘It’s a bit like being in church, sir, isn’t it?’ whispered Detective Constable Crosby. ‘Sitting on these hard chairs and being so uncomfortable.’
The two policemen were in the waiting room of the offices of Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery, Solicitors and Notaries Public, of Berebury.
‘What you are sitting on, Crosby,’ Sloan informed him, ‘is what is known as a flea chair.’
The constable jumped to his feet. ‘I have never had fleas and I don’t want them now.’
‘But if you had, Crosby, they wouldn’t have jumped off you and onto these wooden chairs because they haven’t got cushions on them for the fleas to settle on. You may sit down again.’
Crosby resumed his seat with a certain caution.
‘You don’t need to worry,’ said Sloan kindly. ‘They’re hall chairs and they’re what the hoi polloi were supposed to sit on while they waited for the local nobs to ask them what they wanted.’
‘We’re not hoi polloi,’ objected Crosby. ‘We’re different. We’re sworn police officers.’
‘Just so,’ agreed Sloan as Miss Fennel appeared and said that Mr Puckle would see them now.
‘As you know, Inspector,’ said Simon Puckle pleasantly, ‘I can’t give you any information about any client – not without a court order, that is.’
‘We were just wondering,’ Sloan said to the solicitor, ‘if that applied to the affairs of deceased clients. I understand that death cancels all contracts.’
Simon Puckle frowned. ‘Inquest reports, probate records and court judgements are all in the public domain …’
‘Let alone what they put in the newspapers,’ grumbled Crosby who felt he had been misreported after making his first arrest. ‘Everyone sees that.’
‘That is,’ carried on the solicitor urbanely, ‘they all become available in the public domain in due course.’
‘The law’s delays,’ murmured Crosby, sotto voce, still put out over the mention of fleas.
‘What we are looking for,’ explained Sloan, ‘is missing money.’
‘Theft, you mean?’ Simon Puckle’s eyebrows went up.
‘Not necessarily.’
‘In that case you might need a forensic accountant rather than a solicitor.’
‘What I want,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan in a straightforward manner, ‘is to know what the late Mrs Ann Beddowes did with the money that she took out of the bank every month.’
‘Nobody else seems to know,’ contributed Crosby in an antiphon.
Simon Puckle sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers while he gave the matter some thought. After a moment he said, ‘Presently neither do I. Nor indeed does
anyone else to whom I have spoken.’ He coughed. ‘As her executor I have a duty at law to establish the extent of her estate and …’
‘No joy?’ suggested Crosby.
‘Not so far,’ he temporised. ‘And I think I am in a position to tell you also that her family haven’t been able to help in this respect. There is no trace of where it went every month although I still have the requirement to establish that it hasn’t been salted away somewhere and thus requires to be included in her estate. If it has simply been disbursed by the deceased in any way whatsoever it is not my responsibility as her executor to know on what. In my capacity as her executor I am only concerned with what remained in her estate at the time of her death.’
‘And it’s not there?’ asked Sloan, rising to take his leave. Solicitors, he had been told, unlike policemen, measured their time in minutes.
Simon Puckle shook his head. ‘Not to my knowledge, Inspector.’
‘Come along then, Crosby,’ said Sloan. He paused with his hand on the door, struck by a sudden thought. He thanked the solicitor and then said, ‘If you can tell us that perhaps you could tell us something else.’
‘Perhaps.’ Caution was obviously the watchword with Simon Puckle.
‘The late Doctor Heddon of Pelling. Did you act for him?’
The solicitor nodded. ‘Our firm were his executors and we duly submitted details of his estate for probate.’
‘And these aren’t secret?’
‘No. Probate was granted in due course.’
‘We would like to know how much money he left to Miss Enid Osgathorp. How do we find out?’
Simon Puckle said, ‘I can tell you that myself, gentlemen. He didn’t leave her anything at all. If I remember rightly – I could check for you if it’s important – everything went to a niece of his in Calleford.’
As the two policemen walked back from the solicitors’ premises through the streets of Berebury to the police station, Detective Inspector Sloan remarked to his subordinate, ‘So that’s someone else who didn’t like Enid Osgathorp either.’
‘Simon Puckle?’ said Crosby.
‘Doctor Heddon,’ said Sloan. ‘Enid Osgathorp had worked for him for years and years out there at Pelling but he didn’t remember her in his Will.’
‘I’ll have worked for the Chief Constable for years and years,’ said Crosby stoutly, ‘but I bet he won’t remember me in his Will either.’
For a long moment Sloan toyed with the idea of trying to explain to the constable the concept that he worked for the well-being of the populace as a whole, not that of the superintendent, but just as soon decided against it as being too abstract. Instead he said, ‘We know that Enid Osgathorp had a large enough income in her retirement to support a long series of exotic holidays abroad and luxurious ones in this country although she still lived very simply when she was at home.’ The fact reminded him that they still hadn’t got any further with identifying the blood and hair on the broken glass at the back of her house. He resolved to give this his attention as soon as
he could – not that he knew where to begin. All that he could deduce was that whoever it was who had come in through the front door with a key was more likely to have got it from Enid Osgathorp somehow, somewhere, than whoever had come in through the broken window at the back. This could hardly be described even by an optimist as progress on that investigative front.
The police station came into view as they turned the corner. ‘My guess,’ continued Sloan, ‘is that the money to finance her lifestyle came from people such as the late Mrs Ann Beddowes by way of blackmail, which is why the money can’t be found, and that is also probably why the poor woman committed suicide.’
‘But she was the rector’s wife,’ protested Crosby.
‘That, I am afraid, Crosby, does not automatically convey blamelessness, although,’ he added grimly, ‘it does make the appearance of blamelessness very important as far as her husband’s parishioners were concerned.’ His own mother, a great churchwoman, always reminded him that Caesar’s wife was a woman above suspicion but even that was something, police officer that he was, that he had always taken with a pinch of salt.
The superintendent greeted his return without enthusiasm. ‘The fact that nobody liked the missing person, Sloan, is not evidence.’
‘But it may be relevant …’ began Sloan.
‘She sounds to me like that “fat white woman in gloves”,’ interrupted the superintendent.
‘Enid Osgathorp was short and thin,’ pointed out Sloan, somewhat mystified and not knowing where this was leading. ‘Everyone has said so.’
‘“Who walked through the fields missing so much and so much”,’ quoted Leeyes. ‘It’s a poem, Sloan.’
‘Ah,’ said Sloan. That explained it. Once upon a time the superintendent had started to attend a series of lectures on modern verse but had left declaring to all and sundry that poems weren’t what they used to be when he was a lad and what had happened to the works of Sir Henry Newbolt? Sloan thought what was more important from a police point of view was whether they too – like the fat white woman in gloves – were missing so much and so much.
And, if so, what.
Answer came there none and Sloan made his way back to his own office. There was a report on his desk awaiting his return. Crosby was waiting for him there too.
The report was from Charlie Marsden, the Division’s senior Scenes of Crime guru. He wrote that, as instructed, he had examined the remains of a bonfire in the garden of The Hollies at Pelling, the home of Benedict and Mary Feakins. He had retrieved a half-burnt gentleman’s hairbrush and the handle of a toothbrush from the embers, the fire being out but its remains still warm by the time he and his team had got there. He had also found traces of fibres and substances that could have been ivory, horn or bone, and did Detective Inspector Sloan want them sent for forensic examination.
‘Not half,’ said Crosby when he had read this too.
Charlie Marsden had appended a footnote to the effect that Benedict Feakins had appeared very anxious when he and his men arrived and kept on saying that he had only been burning some items that had belonged
to his late father because he found it upsetting to have them around and that wasn’t illegal, was it? ‘I assured him that it wasn’t,’ wrote Charlie, ‘since under my understanding of English Law a man could do what he liked provided there wasn’t a law against it, unlike some benighted countries where you could only do it if the law allowed you.’
‘It doesn’t sound as if Feakins was cremating Enid Osgathorp,’ said Sloan mildly, leaving aside Charlie Marsden’s world view. ‘It’s not something you usually do in full view of the neighbours and he would have had to park the body somewhere out of sight and smell for the best part of three weeks which wouldn’t have been easy.’
‘Someone’s done it somewhere, though,’ observed Crosby. ‘If she’s dead, that is.’
‘I asked the bank to let me know if she had made any withdrawals since she went missing,’ said Sloan in passing. ‘And they haven’t so far. The trouble is if she was only using her credit card any purchases wouldn’t show up quite yet.’ He pulled his notebook towards him. ‘What I want to know is why should Feakins need to dispose of anything on a bonfire at a time when any sort of movement gives him so much pain?’
‘And why get so twitchy if he hasn’t done anything wrong?’ Crosby responded. ‘That’s important.’
‘You must always remember, Crosby, that the appearance of guilt does not prove guilt,’ said Sloan, an early lesson by his own mentor fixed for ever in his mind. It was something juries need to be reminded of too.
‘Yes, sir. I mean no, sir.’
‘It looks to me as if he was trying to destroy evidence of his father’s DNA,’ remarked Sloan thoughtfully.
‘I can’t think why he should,’ said Crosby.
‘Neither can I,’ said Sloan seriously, ‘but if for a moment we suppose that our Miss Osgathorp was blackmailing both him and Mrs Beddowes we ought to be able to find out why.’
‘And why he’s so frightened now.’
‘There’s something else you’re forgetting, Crosby.’
‘Sir?’
‘If they are victims, then you can bet your bottom dollar that they’re not the only ones.’ He pushed the report to one side. ‘Our trouble, Crosby, is that we’ve got a jigsaw with too many pieces and we don’t even know if they come from the same puzzle let alone our having a pretty picture to go on.’
‘That’s makes them too easy,’ opined Crosby. ‘Anyone can do a jigsaw with a picture.’
‘Then,’ said Sloan with a touch of asperity, ‘you tell me what deliberately frost-damaged plants, a missing woman and one who has taken her own life have in common.’
‘If anything,’ said Crosby, adding casually, ‘Oh, I rang the admiral’s house like you said. No point in going out there just now, sir. The woman what does for him said he’s just been taken in hospital. He’s gone and broken his hip.’ He grinned. ‘I asked her “Did he fall or was he pushed” and she said it had just broken but he wasn’t in any pain. Hard luck for the old boy, though, all the same, isn’t it?’