Some Die Eloquent (20 page)

‘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 they 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?'

‘It's all this nourishment,' he said. ‘My brain is responding to it.'

‘Coffee coming up.' She frowned. ‘So someone killed the dog for another reason?'

‘To stir her up, perhaps. Dr Dabbe did say a missing dog could upset someone in her state quite a bit, if they were attached to it.'

‘If Miss Wansdyke wasn't well for any reason,' said Margaret Sloan intuitively, ‘could the dog have given the alarm? It was an Airedale, wasn't it?'

‘If it's all the same with you,' said her husband, ‘I'll stick to a St Bernard when I'm lost in the snow. They've had the practice. You can send one of those with the brandy in that little keg round its neck.'

‘In the sort of places where you're likely to get lost,' she came back smartly, ‘a working ferret would probably find you quicker.'

‘That's right – bite the hand that feeds you.'

‘I like that, Dennis Sloan.' She started to struggle out of her chair. ‘Just you wait until I get my figure back.'

‘Not in your condition, please,' he begged. ‘Don't do anything rash.'

‘Rash!'

‘The dog,' he said, hastily reverting to the late Beatrice Wansdyke, ‘might have barked if it couldn't get out of the house after she got really ill.'

‘Except that it was already dead.' Margaret Sloan subsided into her chair again. ‘I wish I didn't feel so much like a stranded whale.'

‘Or if someone came to the house.' He regarded her affectionately across the hearth. ‘It won't be long now, love …'

‘The Airedale would have barked then,' agreed his wife, adding fervently, ‘The sooner, the better.'

‘I was thinking,' said Sloan, ‘that it also might have been killed in case if and when anyone called at the house and the dog didn't bark …'

‘You've been reading Sherlock Holmes again.'

‘… in the night.'

‘I thought “Silver Blaze” was going to come into this,' she said, reaching for her knitting.

‘Bound to,' agreed Sloan gravely.

‘I can knit and listen …'

‘If the dog didn't bark when someone called …'

‘Because it wasn't there to bark.'

‘Whoever called would assume that Beatrice Wansdyke was out.'

‘And go away again,' she said.

‘While all the time she was lying there getting more and more ill.'

‘Poor thing,' said Margaret Sloan compassionately.

‘You come along to Court when the time comes and remind them of that,' said her husband. ‘Usually by the time Defence Counsel has said his piece on behalf of the murderer everyone's forgotten all about the victim …'

By the time the following dawn had broken Detective-Inspector Sloan had forgotten all about the victim too.

For the time being.

Hours later a tiny tug at his shoulder woke him from deep, carefree sleep.

‘Have you got indigestion?' enquired a voice in the region of his left ear.

‘No,' he said sleepily.

‘I have.'

‘Best meal I've had in days,' he murmured dreamily.

‘I think I ate too much.'

‘I'm sure I did. And very nice too.' He grunted. ‘What time is it?'

‘Two o'clock.'

He promptly turned and buried his face in the pillow.

‘If it isn't indigestion,' said the same voice tightly, ‘then I think it's the baby starting.'

CHAPTER XV

It's made us squander all we ever had,

Losses enough to drive us mad.

It is a fact universally acknowledged by all experienced policemen that babies, which come in all shapes, sizes and colours, arrive in only two ways: before reaching hospital and after reaching hospital. In the nature of things it is only the first alternative that finds its way into both the Occurrence Book at the police station and the private nightmares of the officer concerned. It was naturally also the one which weighed on Detective-Inspector Sloan's mind as he dressed with speed and backed his car out of the garage with unusual haste (and at considerable danger to the lawn-mower).

‘If it comes on the way,' he joked between lips that had gone unexpectedly dry, ‘you'll have to christen him after me anyway.'

A rather abstracted smile was all he got by way of answer to that.

‘It's the done thing,' he insisted. Rumour – unconfirmed rumour, it is true – even had it that somewhere down in the town of Berebury was a youth (otherwise to Fame unknown) who as a lusty and precipitate infant had been named after Superintendent Leeyes. Even superintendents, it was conceded down at the station, must have been constables once.

‘Have you got my suitcase?' asked his wife more practically.

‘In the boot,' said Sloan. ‘Come on …'

‘Your supper's in the larder.'

‘Supper?' he said momentarily bewildered. ‘It's the middle of the night.'

‘You'll be hungry by supper-time,' she forecast. ‘It's on the middle shelf.'

‘Do come on.'

‘Unless you're going to go over to your mother's, of course.'

‘Margaret Sloan,' he said firmly, ‘are you coming out to the car or aren't you?' This was no time to be talking of mothers-in-law.

‘Have you locked the back door?'

‘I have.'

‘Well, what are we waiting for then?' she asked with feminine perversity.

Sloan clamped his lips together.

She was sitting beside him in the car before she said suddenly, ‘The cat!'

‘Out,' snapped Sloan.

‘I only asked.'

‘Sorry, love.' The cat had had its kittens one night in the spring in the garden shed unbeknown to all until after the happy event. Sloan felt a swift upsurge of admiration for the animal kingdom.

Once out on the main road he stepped up the speed of the car, sparing an anxious glance to his left from time to time. He started to search around in his mind for something comforting to say … the right phrase for the moment …

‘I forgot to leave a note for the milkman,' she murmured before he could think of the
mot juste
.

‘Just asses' milk from tomorrow?' he said, caught off guard.

‘You'll only need one pint.'

‘I propose drinking nothing but pink champagne tomorrow.'

‘It may be a boy.'

‘Blue champagne, then.'

‘Fool,' she said affectionately.

‘Asses' milk,' he said. ‘I was right the first time.'

He negotiated two bends in the road and then drew up as a lonely set of traffic lights showed red. There seemed something faintly idiotic about their stationary car standing at a halt in solitary splendour in front of a red light in the middle of the night. He shot a quick glance at his wife. She seemed all right.

‘If the Martians landed now,' he said, ‘they'd have a job working out human behaviour – us sitting here like this without anybody about until the yellow light shows up.'

‘Until the green light shows up,' she said. ‘I'm not having Harry Harpe pinning anything on you tonight. His boys will be about somewhere. They always are.'

At right-angles to the traffic signals for motorists were the pedestrian ones, the forbidding red man dimmed, the permissive green one glowing.

‘I wonder what the Martians would make of the little green man over there,' he said.