A Going Concern (15 page)

‘Then I'll arrange it myself,' snapped Keen, half-way through the door. ‘Glad to.'

Amelia glanced at her watch as she hurried along through Berebury's streets to a shop opposite the market-place. She wanted to catch it before closing time. In the event she needn't have worried. Mr Henryson was still there, surrounded as always by piles of books, badges, old uniforms, and other relicts of the battlefield, loosely called militaria.

She squeezed inside the door between a giant shell-case, which now did duty as an umbrella stand, and a rack of steel helmets from every war and country and period imaginable. The shop door of Undertones of War still had a bell that jangled as the customer went in and Mr Henryson looked up with the mild uninterest of the secondhand bookseller as Amelia entered. He had been deep in a book and certainly wouldn't have noticed her or anyone else but for the bell.

He nodded, keeping a finger at his place in the book. ‘Want any help?'

‘Please,' said Amelia. ‘I'm not really sure myself what I'm looking for.'

‘Ah,' said Mr Henryson gently.

‘But I thought that you might be able to tell me.'

‘I may,' he said, a soldier manqué, a fireside fusilier who had never been to war himself but who had made a long and diligent study of the god Mars and his descendants.

‘I think I want a book about regimental mottos,' she said, ‘but I don't know for sure. It's what you might call rather a long shot.' Now that she came to think of it, that expression had probably begun life as a military term.

‘Tell me …' said Mr Henryson with mild interest.

‘I want to know if “
Nec Temere, Nec Timide
” is a regimental motto.'

Mr Henryson stroked his chin in thought for a moment. ‘Fortescue would know,' he said, ‘Sir John is always very good. I haven't got a Swinson but we could see if F. Tytler Fraser …'

‘Where would I find them?' she asked anxiously. ‘It's rather important …'

‘On the shelves over here, my dear.' Mr Henryson led the way towards the back of the shop. Stepping aside to avoid a stack of second-hand armour, Amelia followed him, negotiating her way round some Sam Brownes and what appeared to be inert limpet mines.

‘This is even better,' he said reaching for a dust-covered volume. ‘I think you'll find them all in here somewhere, if you don't mind doing a bit of research.'

‘No, I don't mind,' she said eagerly. ‘I've got to find it.'

‘It'll take time,' he warned her. ‘Especially if, like me, you tend to get carried away.' He smiled absently. ‘I was just crossing the Somme when you came in.'

Amelia searched her memory. ‘1916?'

He shook his head. ‘1346. Crécy. I just can't see how our army got across it where we did. It would have been far too wide there and then for our people …'

‘When are you due to close?' she asked him rather too directly.

‘About half an hour ago,' he said, sounding genuinely apologetic. ‘My wife doesn't like it if I'm too late because of keeping the supper hot. I have been known to forget supper altogether if I'm enthralled. Battlefields can be enthralling, you know. It's like dice and gambling. So much hangs on so little – the outcome, I mean.'

Amelia eyed the book he had found for her. It wasn't a very thick one and Phoebe wasn't going to be home until late. She said: ‘If I was to go and have some supper in the White Hart …'

‘I'm afraid Richard II was no soldier,' said the bookseller, ‘white hart or not, but Edward III' – his eye gleamed – ‘now he was different …'

‘In the White Hart,' said Amelia, ignoring this tempting diversion, ‘over the other side of the market, and slip this back through your letter-box when I've done with it, would that be all right?'

The book, propped up on the inn table, all about regiments, might not have been large but it was certainly densely printed. Amelia had both eaten and then had her coffee in the lounge before she was half-way through. She ordered more coffee and reapplied herself to studying the crests and badges of all the regiments, her eye inevitably straying to their battle honours too.

She was almost through the book – and very nearly asleep, too – when she came across the crest of the Fearnshires, the words
Nec temere, nec timide
suddenly staring out of the page at her. The Fearnshires, were, it seemed, a Highland Regiment of ancient origin, having their beginnings as ‘men-at-arms' to the chief of their clan and only regularized and brought into line as members of the British Army after 1745 and the Battle of Culloden Moor (‘otherwise known', ran the text, as impartially as it could, ‘as Drumossie').

Amelia spotted a writing table in the corner of the inn's lounge and went across to pen Mr Henryson a note of thanks, adding a postscript asking him if he had by any chance got a copy of the regimental history of the Fearnshires for sale in his shop. She tucked this missive into the book, pushed both through the letter-box of Undertones of War, and set off through the streets of Berebury for home, quite surprised to find how late it now was.

Someone else late home that evening was Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan: so late that even Madame Caroline Testout did not get her customary evening visit, whilst ‘the son who should have lisped his sire's return' had been long in bed and asleep.

At some time in every policeman's life he himself has to decide how much of his work he could or should talk to his wife about. The ideal was somewhere between the ‘nothing' advised by those who trained him and the ‘everything' advocated by those whose professional concern was with marriages lasting. How soon after marriage that a man took the decision was important, too …

The old sergeant who had taught him a lot in his early days in the Force had always counselled him along the lines of the old advertisement for shaving soap – ‘not too little, not too much, but just right', adding: ‘But whatever you do, lad, never tell her when to expect you home. The night you're late back she'll have you dead and buried within the hour and you'll never hear the last of it.'

In the event Sloan had done what most men did. He brought home palatable titbits from the day's work and hid the dreariness and the danger under the cloak of the pedestrian and routine.

Tonight was slightly different. Pushing his now empty plate to one side, he asked his wife, Margaret, how many words she knew beginning with the letter ‘Z'.

‘Zigzag,' said Margaret, frowning. ‘Zircon …'

‘Zebra …' said the policeman.

‘Zero,' said his wife.

Sloan capped that with: ‘Zenith … oh, and Zenana.' His grandmother had always been a great supporter of Zenana missions.

‘Zeus,' contributed Margaret Sloan, ‘or aren't real names allowed?'

‘We don't know. We think the “O” stands for “Operation” but the “Z” could be for anything.'

‘Zeppelin?'

‘Could be. All this “OZ” stuff was going on in the last war. Then there's always Zion,' added Sloan, dutiful son of a church-going mother.

‘Isn't there a musical instrument …'

‘Zither,' said Sloan.

‘And zinnia,' said Margaret Sloan. ‘You should have got that, Chris. You're the gardener.'

‘And you're the cook,' he said. Canteens were no challenge to home cooking.

‘Sorry. There's no more left. Bring young Crosby round one evening and I might make a steak and kidney pudding. It's not worth doing for only two.'

‘When he's done a bit of work on this case.'

‘What's all this about the letter “Z” then?'

He told her.

He was still talking about the case when his telephone rang.

Gregory Rosart had stayed on at the offices of Chernwoods' long enough to get Joe Keen's phone call.

‘I'm not sure you were right, Greg, about squashing Claude's idea about a press release,' said the chief chemist.

Rosart bit back the obvious retort that it had been Keen who had been against it to start with. ‘And what do you suggest?' he said with the self-control of the skilled public relations man.

‘Had you thought that a little bit of publicity might produce that woman you're looking for from way back?'

‘Miss Catherine Camus?' guardedly. ‘No, Joe, that hadn't occurred to me.'

‘You never know what'll come out of the woodwork once the newspapers get going,' said Keen.

‘Joe, do you think Harris and Marsh have stopped buying because they've got what they were looking for?'

‘Perhaps, or …'

‘Or?'

‘Or they've dreamed up another way of getting it. Hadn't thought of that, had you?'

‘No,' said Gregory Rosart thoughtfully. ‘No, I hadn't.'

Amelia had made her way home through the dark streets more than satisfied with her evening's researches. With only a modicum of luck she soon should be able to find out exactly what the Fearnshires had been up to in those crucial months of March, May, and December 1940. And even perhaps glean from its history what its connection with a young Octavia Harquil-Grasset had been – although now she was beginning to think that she could work that out for herself.

Just as her great-aunt would have expected of her …

She would now start to look for someone called Kate and the location of the cross on the photograph Great-Aunt Octavia had so carefully left for her. After, that is, she had studied the regimental history of the Fearnshires. Tomorrow, too, she would go over her great-aunt's Will again. Since the old lady had taken such care with it there might be clues that had escaped her this morning – had it only been this morning? She hadn't really studied the Will properly either … what was that saying which had popped up in her history lectures? ‘Documents don't speak to strangers'… she would look at the Will with new eyes in the morning …

Amelia turned into her own road, wondering if, after all, Phoebe had got back from her clinical meeting before her … she herself had certainly been out for quite a time. She crossed the road behind a parked car. She pushed open the gate, noting only subconsciously that it was unlatched and that she remembered closing it carefully after her when she had gone out earlier in the evening.

Amelia turned her gaze towards the garage but its doors were shut and she couldn't tell at a glance whether her stepmother was back indoors or not. She started up the path … and nearly fell over something lying on the ground.

As she regained her balance she looked down more carefully.

She had almost fallen over the figure of a girl – a girl from the back of whose head was oozing something dark and sticky.

SIXTEEN

Plant his poor grave with whatever grows fast
.

‘Good grief, Sloan,' exploded Superintendent Leeyes, ‘can't you even keep young girls safe at night in the streets of Berebury now?'

‘This girl wasn't in the street, sir,' returned Sloan levelly. ‘At least, not when she was found. She was in the garden of Amelia Kennerley's house. We don't know yet exactly where she was attacked.'

‘By an unknown assailant, I suppose?' said the superintendent sourly.

‘Unknown to us, sir,' conceded Sloan tacitly. ‘We don't know whether he – or they – were unknown to her because she's still deeply unconscious and can't tell us.' Actually to Sloan the girl in the hospital had looked more like a lay figure than a living person.

Leeyes grunted as Sloan went on.

‘Amelia Kennerley remembered noticing a small blue car parked in the road when she crossed it and that's all.'

‘That's not much help.'

‘Then her stepmother, Dr Plantin, arrived back from a medical meeting at Calleford. She dressed the girl's head wound while waiting for the ambulance and got her off to hospital.'

Leeyes grunted again.

‘And neither she nor Dr Plantin knew the girl by sight,' said Sloan before he could ask.

‘Does Tod Morton?' asked Leeyes, whose own Monday night had been spent in bed undisturbed. ‘He saw a girl.'

‘We're getting him to go to the hospital to take a look-see,' said Sloan. ‘She wasn't carrying anything to say who she was. We're going to get the rector of Great Primer to go up there, too, but I want to talk to him myself first.'

‘You've set up a bed-watch on the girl, I trust.'

‘I have, sir,' said Sloan, returning to his narrative. ‘The girl was attacked from behind with something smooth and heavy about an hour before she was found and that's about all we can tell at the moment …'

‘And, Sloan,' said the Superintendent acidly, ‘do we know whether this girl was assaulted in her own right so to speak or in mistake for Amelia Kennerley?'

‘No,' said Sloan frankly, ‘we don't, but it's not as simple as that, sir.'

Leeyes groaned. ‘I didn't think it would be. Go on …'

‘We aren't sure why the girl was at the house anyway but –'

‘Getting nowhere fast, then, aren't we?'

Detective Inspector Sloan said: ‘Only in a manner of speaking, sir. But there is also the house …'

‘This is no time for riddles, Sloan. You should know that. What do you mean?'

‘Someone was doing there, sir, what I think they'd already done at the Grange last Friday.'

‘Looking for something …'

‘Just so, sir,' said Sloan wearily. His own night had not been spent undisturbed in bed. ‘I think that they – whoever
they
may have been – can't have found what they were searching for at the Grange …'

‘Whatever that might have been,' said Leeyes, whose highly idiosyncratic approach to algebra had never – without argument – got past the point of letting
a
equal one thing and
b
another. He was a little better about allowing the letter
x
stand for the unknown quantity: but not much.