A Going Concern (6 page)

The pathologist nodded and started to take his gown off. ‘I'll be showing this case at our next Mortality Meeting, Sloan, as one of great clinical interest.'

‘Oh, yes, doctor?' said Sloan, adding, with a caution born over the years, ‘And in what way is it interesting?'

‘The cause of death …'

‘Yes, doctor?' Sloan had his pen ready now. ‘What was it?'

For the very first time ever, in his memory, Dr Dabbe said to Sloan: ‘Not ascertained.'

‘“Not ascertained”?' echoed Sloan. Even the phlegmatic Burns paused in his duties and looked up. Crosby was still looking at his shoes.

‘Perhaps when the reports on some of the sections I've taken come back,' said the pathologist, tossing his gown into the bin, ‘I may be in a position to tell you more. In the mean time …'

‘Yes?' said Sloan.

‘I fear I can't help you any further, and I shall tell the Coroner so.'

‘Not ascertained?' echoed the superintendent indignantly down the telephone line. He, at least, had gone home for the weekend. ‘What does he mean, Sloan? That he doesn't know?'

‘That he can't find out,' said Sloan.

‘I thought they were using post-mortems for quality control these days,' said Leeyes unhelpfully.

‘He's put on his report,' said Sloan reading carefully, ‘that he's now going to await the outcome of some diagnostic paraffin-section histopathology.'

‘Nice work, if you can get it, I suppose,' grumbled Leeyes. ‘All the pathologist can tell us, then, is that it isn't all that obvious what knocked the old party off?'

‘He doesn't usually say he doesn't know,' pointed out Sloan.

‘Makes a nice change, does that,' said Leeyes. ‘And what are you going to do now? Got an appointment with a rose, have you, Sloan?'

‘No, sir. I was hoping for a quiet weekend, though …'

In which hope he could not have been more disappointed.

‘Just wanted a quick word, miss,' said Tod Morton over the telephone. ‘I thought I might catch you before you went out to Great Primer. I wanted to let you know that I've had the rector on the blo – line.'

Amelia frowned. ‘A Mr Fournier, wasn't it?'

‘That's right, miss. Seems as if he went round to the Grange yesterday afternoon to leave you a note asking whether you would want an organist and the church choir and so forth at the funeral …'

‘Probably,' said Amelia.

‘And he met a young woman walking away from the Grange as he arrived. She had some flowers and said she'd come to try to see Mrs Garamond.'

Amelia murmured under her breath, ‘“Too Late the Phalarope”, I'm afraid.'

‘I didn't quite catch that, miss,' said Tod. ‘Anyway, the rector told her to get in touch with me seeing as he didn't know anything about you, does he?'

‘No …' said Amelia, catching his drift.

‘Anyway, this woman asked when the funeral was going to be, and I told her. Very upset she was, too, miss. She asked about any other relatives being alive and I could only tell her about you.'

‘I'm not a blood relative,' said Amelia.

‘That's just what the woman said, but I took the name down just in case. It's Baskerville, miss, Jane Baskerville. That name ring a bell at all with you, miss?'

‘Never heard of her,' said Amelia cheerfully, ‘but I dare say I shall. Mr Morton, I'm going over to Great Primer presently with my stepmother and I'll be in touch with you later …'

‘Right you are, miss. Keep left by the church and you're practically there but I don't think you and Dr Phoebe will have any difficulty finding the Grange.'

They didn't.

Amelia was aware of a strange sensation of unease, though, as they walked up to the old house. Dismissing it as a compound of curiosity and sudden responsibility she set the key of the Grange into the big old-fashioned lock of the front door.

That barely identified feeling was swiftly succeeded by a very much more definite and devastating one as the two women stepped over the threshold.

The house had been ransacked.

SIX

Bird, beast, and goldfish are sepulchred there
.

‘Looks to me, sir,' said Detective Constable Crosby profoundly, after he had set eyes on the interior of the Grange, ‘like a game of Hunt the Thimble turned nasty. Very nasty.'

He had just delivered his superior officer to the village of Great Primer at a speed that in any other circumstances would have rightly been deemed deplorable.

Detective Inspector Sloan was still getting his breath back and listening to Amelia Kennerley at the same time.

‘I don't know who did it or what they were looking for, Inspector,' she said steadily, ‘but they certainly made a good job of it.'

‘Seems that they could have had all the time in the world anyway,' murmured Dr Phoebe Plantin, ‘if Mortons' removed the body yesterday morning.'

Amelia immediately protested: ‘But Phoebe, that would mean that whoever did all this knew straightaway that Great-Aunt Octavia had died when she did …' Her voice fell away and she looked uncertainly at Sloan. ‘Doesn't it?'

‘It looks as if someone knew, all right, miss,' said Sloan, regarding the havoc of books and paper strewn everywhere, ‘although we can't say exactly when they knew. Or even if they did know, come to that. Not yet, we can't.'

‘And it also looks as if they knew what they were looking for, too,' remarked Dr Plantin gruffly. ‘See over there. Inspector, on that sideboard …'

Sloan switched his gaze to follow her pointing finger.

‘They didn't touch those Dresden shepherd-girls and you can take it from me that they're worth a bomb.'

‘It rather seems,' observed Detective Inspector Sloan cautiously, ‘as if they might have been in search of the written word.'

‘It must have been a very comprehensive search,' murmured Amelia, finding just the right adjective for what she was looking at with difficulty. ‘Come through here, Inspector …'

The chaos in what was obviously a combined library and study was indescribable.

‘It looks,' said Amelia, ‘as if every single book in the room has been taken off its shelf, thoroughly shaken and then dropped on the floor … and as for that …'

She pointed at a fine burr-walnut bureau which stood open, its drawers upturned and empty on the floor.

‘It wasn't locked so it's probably not badly damaged,' said the policeman with a wisdom born out of years of experience. ‘No, don't touch it, miss. Don't anyone touch anything. Crosby, get a scenes of crime officer out here and the photograph people – Dyson and Williams if they're free.' He stood for a long moment on the threshold of the library, gazing at the scene of chaos before him.

Amelia shivered at his side and said: ‘It wasn't an ordinary burglary, was it, Inspector?'

Sloan shook his head. ‘And it wasn't an ordinary search either, miss. Now, if you two ladies will just wait here, my constable and I will take a quick look round upstairs.'

He didn't know how old the house was but it was big and comfortable and there was an old-fashioned pre-war opulence about its fixtures and fittings that had never come back after August 1914. The staircase was wide and the treads deep and the banister had been crafted out of cedarwood and was well polished for this day and age. The two policemen mounted it carefully, mindful of the possibility of the impression of footprints on the thick Turkey carpet.

Sloan sent Crosby to examine all the lesser rooms while he himself made for what the house agents call the master bedroom. He was not unbearably surprised to see the disturbance of the library replicated there.

Some person or persons at the moment unknown would seem to have been looking very hard indeed for something. The degree of devastation was so wide as to suggest that the search had failed. With luck, time would tell whether or not this was so.

Time and hard work.

Not forgetting luck, though.

If there was one thing which Sloan had learned over the years it was that you should never underestimate the element of luck in detective work.

Whoever had been conducting the search of the Grange hadn't scrupled to heap the contents of the bedroom drawers on to the bed so recently occupied by a dead woman. Here was no ceremonial
lit de mort
but a stripped bed, the mattress ticking covered with a single sheet, but otherwise bare.

To begin with Sloan stood just inside the doorway, letting his first impressions sink in. A medical oxygen bottle, mask still dangling from the knobs, stood to the far side of the head of the bed. On the side nearer the door, standing on a little cabinet that William Morris himself might have designed, was a telephone and two bottles of tablets, both nearly full.

Whoever had been in the room, then, since Mrs Garamond's death, had either not been concerned with removing her medication or had wished it to be seen and examined.

Examined it would be, he decided, shifting his gaze to the bed itself. It was a double one, with a second bedside cabinet at the further side. Also on the far side was a bed-light. It was of the movable vintage that sat on the bed-head, a pull-cord hanging down from it. On a tallboy beyond the bed had clearly been a small selection of books between ornamental book-ends. Books and book-ends were now all scattered on the bedroom floor.

Sloan stooped and tried to read a title or two without touching anything. Bedroom books, he reminded himself, were the books a person usually read – Gault and Synge's
Dictionary of Roses
lived by his own pillow – and he was beginning to be very curious indeed about what sort of a person the late Mrs Octavia Garamond had been.

Educated, he decided at once.

Widely educated, he decided a few moments later, having found one of the works of Sigmund Freud on the carpet cheek by jowl with Fyodor Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment
. Sloan himself, when an aspiring young constable, had – like many another – been drawn by the title. It had seemed almost required reading for a budding policeman but he had soon taken the book back to the public library. There had been no more connection between crime and punishment in the novel than there was in real life …

‘Ain't nobody about, sir, but us chickens,' said Crosby, ‘though all the other bedrooms are in pretty much the same state as this one.'

‘Upside-down?' It was a calculated understatement.

‘And how! Whatever it was they wanted, sir, they sure wanted it pretty badly.'

‘And,' observed Sloan, moving carefully in the direction of the fireplace, ‘we don't even know whether they found it, do we?'

‘No, sir.' Crosby squinted down at the floor. ‘Funny book-ends …'

Sloan took another look. They still seemed vaguely ornamental to him. Metal but stylish.

‘Made from shrapnel,' said Crosby confidently. ‘There's a chap with a shop down by the market who still sells that sort of thing. Undertones of War, he calls himself.'

Sloan peered more closely. ‘So they are.' He started to study the photographs on the mantelpiece. They were all in silver frames but did not seem to have interested the searcher since they appeared quite undisturbed. In the centre was an amateur snapshot of a tall, laughing girl, her hair swept back from a fine face. One hand was waving gaily at whoever had been taking the photograph, the other engaged in holding her coat together in a high wind.

‘That the girl downstairs, then?' asked Crosby over his shoulder.

‘Not in that style of coat,' said Sloan. ‘But there's a family likeness, I'll grant you that …' The next two photographs were of a man taken decades apart but pipe-smoking in both.

‘Youth and age,' commented Crosby. ‘Wore quite well, didn't he?'

‘And here, Crosby, at a guess, is where the shrapnel came from.' He pointed to a picture of a large factory building covered in camouflage paint, with three rows of staff standing and sitting outside. There was an inscription in the bottom right-hand corner, which read
Chernwoods' Dyestuffs, May 8th, 1945
.

The day peace broke out.

In Europe, that is.

For the time being, anyway.

‘Chernwoods' doesn't look like that now,' said Crosby. ‘I passed it last week.'

‘It isn't covered with camouflage paint any longer, that's why.' Sloan searched the faces in the photograph carefully until he found the one he wanted – it was halfway along the middle row. ‘And they've repaired the bomb damage.'

He knew the building well enough as it was now. Chernwoods' Dyestuffs was still one of the biggest employers in Luston, which was Calleshire's only really large industrial town. Sloan turned back to the door with the distinct feeling that his mind had failed to register something significant. He would have to come back again later, although he knew for a start that there would be no point in examining the back of the wardrobe, now or then. Anyone ever searching a woman's bedroom always went straight to her wardrobe first.

And with good reason.

Especially if the woman was a drinker.

Instead, Sloan bent down and had a look at the jumble of books on the floor.

There was no Bible.

He would have expected to have found a Bible. His own mother always had one at her bedside. Old ladies in chronic heart failure usually had a Bible by their beds. And inside their Bible was where they often kept their really precious mementoes.

He looked on the floor and beside the bed again.

There was definitely no Bible.

Sloan and Crosby were half-way down the stairs when they heard the telephone bell ring.

Amelia Kennerley picked up the receiver in the hall and said: ‘Hullo …'

‘Great Primer Grange?' enquired a male voice. ‘The late Mrs Garamond's house?'

‘Yes,' said Amelia, conscious that everyone in the Grange was watching her face. ‘Who is that speaking, please?'