Dead Heading (9 page)

‘Or if they knew she wasn’t ever coming back,’ said Sloan softly. ‘Had you thought about that, Crosby?’

‘But …’

‘That is, if she ever went away and they knew that too,’
said Sloan soberly. ‘Remember Crosby, in police work all eventualities always have to be considered.’

‘But two people saw her leave,’ objected the constable. ‘The woman next door and that gardener guy.’

‘Two people said they saw her leave,’ Sloan reminded him, ‘which is something quite different. Better make quite sure she’s not upstairs, Crosby.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Crosby stolidly, dutifully peeling off and doing as he was bid.

‘And watch where you’re standing when you come back,’ called Sloan after him. ‘We know someone’s been in and out of here through that back window as well as the front door and we need to take some carpet prints.’

‘Yes, sir,’ repeated Crosby. After a moment he said ‘Why didn’t that one go out of the front door instead?’

‘Because, Crosby, the front door has a mortice lock. Presumably the missing person locked it behind her when she left and took the key with her.’

‘But someone else came in and out with it,’ said the constable, ‘didn’t they, sir?’

‘It looks very much like it,’ said Sloan, liking the situation less and less. ‘Now, get upstairs, Crosby.’

Detective Inspector Sloan, himself sticking to the outer edges of the carpet, made first for a little bureau in the corner of the sitting room. It was unlocked. Donning rubber gloves and prising its lid open without leaving his own fingerprints on the wooden flap, he examined its contents carefully. Inside were a series of pigeon-holes and a little drawer. This drawer, too, was unlocked. It contained a few photographs of a child – one of which had ‘Me at four’ written on the back – and a locket. This
had a lock of hair in it. The words ‘Little Lucy Locket’ welled into Sloan’s mind from his sister’s infancy – before he started to make notes.

‘Anything there, sir?’ asked Crosby, bringing Sloan’s attention back to the matter in hand. ‘Nothing to speak of upstairs except that I would say someone’s had a good rummage through the wardrobe, everything else being neat and that a bit topsy-turvy. If that’s where she kept her gin, it’s gone.’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary here, either,’ said Sloan, replacing bundles of carefully tied domestic accounts in their pigeon holes one by one, ‘except that I think someone’s been looking for a secret drawer in here. Someone who didn’t know about secret drawers in desks.’

Detective Constable Crosby, who obviously didn’t know anything about them either, leant over Sloan’s shoulder for a better look. ‘Made a bit of a mess of the wood, didn’t he, sir?’ he observed. ‘All those scratches …’

‘Whoever it was brought a screwdriver with him – I expect he thought the bureau might be locked – but it didn’t get him anywhere because I should say this bit of modern furniture hasn’t got a secret compartment of any sort. They don’t make ’em liked they used to,’ said Sloan and stopped. He would have to be more careful about expressing that sort of sentiment, afraid that he was beginning to sound like the superintendent.

‘So, sir,’ said Crosby, screwing up his forehead into a prodigious frown, ‘that means that someone’s been in here just looking for something not someone.’ His expression brightened. ‘Unless the old lady’s been abducted.’ 

‘And perhaps not finding anything,’ announced Sloan presently, after leafing through the last of the contents of the pigeonholes, ‘although I should say that they – whoever they are – have probably been all through this bureau. There’s nothing but receipted household bills and plant stuff in here, though some of the bundles have been put back upside down. Oh, and there are a couple of receipts for deposits for two pricey foreign holidays this summer. Very pricey indeed.’

‘Some people have all the luck,’ said the constable, who was saving up to go to the motor-racing at
Spa-Francorchamps.

‘We don’t know, though, whether the intruders had any luck or not,’ mused Detective Inspector Sloan, moving away from the bureau. ‘They might well have found what they were looking for and taken it away. Either of them.’

‘Or both,’ said Crosby.

Sloan nodded absently as he paused at a framed photograph on the mantelshelf. It was of a group on a platform where a clergyman was presenting a bouquet and an envelope to a dumpy late middle-aged woman who was holding out one hand to receive them and shaking the clergyman’s hand with the other. The words ‘Happy Retirement, Miss Osgathorp’ could be picked out on a banner at the back of the platform.

‘Get on with circulating copies of the picture of this woman getting the presentation, Crosby,’ commanded Sloan, picking up the photograph, ‘and chase the railway people for a sight of their CCTV record of people entering Berebury station the day she was meant to be catching a train there now we’ve got a picture to go on.’ 

‘When exactly would that have been, sir?’ the constable asked, searching for a pen. ‘Do we know?’

‘We do. Norah, the woman next door, told us, remember? It was the day after Mrs Beddowes, the rector’s wife, committed suicide. You can find that out quite easily.’ Sloan paused and took another look at the man in the clerical collar in the photograph making the presentation. ‘And that presumably is Mr Beddowes, the rector, widower of the deceased. We might have a word with him in due course. And with that landscape designer fellow – Anthony Berra – again. He seems to have been the last person to see Enid Osgathorp alive.’

‘So far,’ said Crosby lugubriously.

‘Not much luck with those replacements, boss,’ said Russ Aqueel, his foreman, leading Jack Haines out to the truck standing in the yard. ‘A bit of this and that, that’s all. Nothing like enough to replace what’s been lost, though.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘As for keeping it all quiet, it’s a laugh. The Leanaig boys guessed something was up straightaway when they saw what it was we were looking for and the people at Staple St James had heard already over the grapevine …’

‘Some grapevine,’ commented Haines richly.

‘So I told Bob Steele at the Berebury Garden Centre anyway.’ He studied his employer’s face. ‘I hope that’s OK?’

‘It’s OK, Russ,’ said Jack Haines quietly. ‘I reckoned word would get around pretty quickly.’

‘Bound to,’ said the foreman, pausing.

‘It’s not every day that someone sabotages a firm’s working stock, is it, Russ?’ said Haines, giving the man a very straight look.

‘Definitely not,’ said Russ.

‘The plants we were wanting …’ prompted Haines.

‘Bob Steele at the Berebury Garden Centre didn’t have anything we wanted.’

‘I didn’t think he would have,’ said Haines almost to himself. ‘Not him.’

‘But he did say that he had run out of Erysimum Bowles Mauve and if we had any to spare could I drop them over to him,’ said the foreman.

‘Sure,’ said Haines dully.

Russ shot him a quizzical glance before going on. ‘The Leanaig boys had quite a bit that would do for us and so did Staple St James Nurseries but both of them only had some of the things we lost – not all of them.’

Haines sighed. ‘That figures. Anthony Berra was very precise. That’s part of the problem.’

‘I’d call him a right fusspot myself,’ muttered the foreman.

‘But none of them has had any trouble themselves, have they?’ asked Haines quickly.

‘Not that they said or I saw,’ replied the foreman. ‘I guess that it’s just us.’

That it wasn’t just Jack Haines who had had trouble overnight was not borne in upon him until Marilyn Potts arrived at his nursery.

Jack Haines had made his way back to his office deep in thought. He had only just sat down and Mandy Lamb had only just automatically put the kettle on when she
looked out of the window and suddenly said, ‘Here comes trouble …’

‘There can’t be any more trouble,’ said Jack Haines, staying where he was.

‘Have a look for yourself,’ said his secretary.

He lumbered to his feet and went to the window. ‘I don’t believe it. Not her. I thought we’d seen the last of her.’

‘Well, you haven’t,’ said Mandy Lamb, not without a certain relish.

‘What does she want, do you suppose?’

‘Half your worldly wealth, I expect,’ she said pertly. ‘That was what Norman wanted, wasn’t it?’

‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ he said, turning back to his chair. ‘And it’s not quite true anyway – what he wanted was all of his mother’s worldly wealth, not half of mine.’

‘Hello, Jack,’ Marilyn Potts said cautiously, putting her head half way round the office door.

‘Long time, no see,’ said Jack Haines.

‘I suppose I’d better throw my hat in first,’ she grimaced, ‘and see what happens to it.’

‘No need for that,’ he said gruffly. ‘That’s unless you’ve brought that no-good ex-husband of yours with you.’

‘God forbid,’ responded Marilyn Potts explosively. ‘I’ve had enough trouble with Norman to last me a lifetime, thank you.’

‘Me too,’ grunted Jack.

‘No, I’ve come to pick up Enid Osgathorp’s orchids – I’m standing in for her at a talk she was supposed to be giving over at Staple St James tomorrow night because she seems to have gone walkabout.’ 

‘So what’s happened to our Miss Osgathorp, then?’ asked Jack.

‘No one knows. She’ll turn up sooner or later I expect like the proverbial bad penny. She won’t be happy when she hears what’s happened to all my infant orchids, that’s for sure … they’re all dead and she reckons she’s a bit of an orchid fancier.’

‘Yours too?’ Jack Haines’ eyebrows shot up. ‘God Almighty.’

Marilyn Potts launched into a histrionic account of the devastation at the nursery at Capstan Purlieu.

‘Every last orchid,’ declared Marilyn bitterly. ‘There was the devil of a frost last night.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ said Haines savagely. He peered at her closely. ‘But let me ask you something else, Marilyn. Do you know Bob Steele at the Berebury Garden Centre?’

‘Don’t be silly, Jack. Of course, I do.’

‘Has he been over to your place recently?’

She frowned. ‘I think Anna said that he’d called round to pick up some Aeschymanthus a couple of weeks back. Said he’d run out of Mona Lisa.’ She looked at him suspiciously. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Nothing. I just wondered.’

‘You lie, Jack.’

‘I suppose I do,’ he admitted. ‘You see rumour has it that Bob Steele has plans to go in for orchids himself.’

‘Rumours aren’t everything.’

‘He made an excuse to come over here to pick up some stock he didn’t need.’

‘He might have really wanted the Aeschymanthus from us,’ she said doubtfully.

‘He might,’ agreed Haines, ‘but I wondered if he was really casing the joints – yours and mine.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Seeing how he could undermine the opposition, perhaps.’

Her voice rose to a high doh. ‘Are you suggesting Bob Steele targeted our orchids?’

‘He could have done …’

Marilyn Potts took a deep breath and drew herself up to her full height. ‘I know you won’t want to do anything of the sort but let’s face it, Jack, the only person we know who hates both of us enough to wreak real damage on the pair of us is Norman Potts.’ She swallowed. ‘And you know that as well as I do so don’t pretend that you don’t because it won’t wash.’

‘If we look sharp,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, clambering into the police car, ‘we might just be able to see those other two customers of Jack Haines who’ve lost their plants before we get back to the station.’ He latched his seat belt into place, adding ‘And that, I must remind you, Crosby, doesn’t amount to a licence to kill.’

‘No, sir. Of course not, sir.’ The constable sounded injured.

‘The Park at Pelling first,’ decided Sloan. ‘We’ll see what the Navy has to say.’

The Navy in the person of Rear Admiral Waldo Catterick, R.N., retired, and as bald as a billiard ball, thought that there was altogether too much vandalism about everywhere these days and had the policemen seen the graffiti on the cricket pavilion? 

‘Not yet,’ said Sloan ambiguously.

‘Deplorable. Don’t know what the world is coming to. Come along in anyway.’

‘We’re checking up on some unexplained losses at Jack Haines’ nursery, including yours,’ explained Sloan as they followed him down a corridor, the old gentleman’s right leg giving an odd involuntary little kick forward as he walked. ‘And out at Capstan Purlieu too.’

Sitting the two policemen down in a small morning room overlooking a lawn, the admiral leant forward and asked what exactly he could do for them.

Detective Inspector Sloan regarded the wizened face opposite him, made to seem smaller and older somehow by a nose so depressed as not to have a bridge. ‘We’re trying to make sure, sir, that there isn’t anyone out there with a grudge against gardeners in general or any of Jack Haines’ or Capstan Purlieu’s customers in particular and I have been given to understand you are one of them.’

The admiral took the question seriously and said in a curiously high-pitched voice, ‘None that I am aware of but as you will know yourself, Inspector, if you’ve ever been in command, you’re bound to have upset somebody at some time or other. You can’t run a tight ship without doing that.’

‘Put him in the scuppers until he’s sober,’ chanted Crosby under his breath.

‘Comes with the job,’ said the admiral, who did not appear to have heard this.

It came with the police job too. Detective Inspector Sloan had upset a good many bad men in his time and said so. 

‘You’re not in the Service to make friends,’ barked Waldo Catterick in his best quarter-deck manner, ‘although of course you do. Old shipmates and all that.’ He looked up with a distinctly rheumy eye at the photographs of ships’ companies that adorned the walls of the room. ‘Most of them are dead now.’

You weren’t in the police force to make friends either, thought Sloan to himself. On the contrary, often enough, it was in the nature of police work that enemies always outnumbered friends. ‘We’re also,’ the detective inspector went on almost conversationally, ‘looking into the disappearance of an old lady from the village. A Miss Enid Osgathorp. Do you know her?’

The admiral stiffened perceptibly, his back suddenly becoming ramrod straight. ‘She used to work at the doctor’s,’ he said frostily, in tones that would have paralysed the lower deck, ‘and that’s all I can tell you about the woman.’

His body language, though, was saying something quite different to the police inspector, a man perforce experienced in these matters. Whether it was all he could say or not, the admiral refused to be drawn any further on Enid Maude Osgathorp. Perhaps, thought Sloan, a boyhood reader of Bulldog Drummond and similar clubland heroes, it wasn’t done then to mention a lady’s name in the Wardroom any more than it was in an Army Mess. He couldn’t begin to think what today’s young women would make of that.

Detective Inspector Sloan came away from Pelling Park with the uneasy feeling that he had missed something. Oddly enough he was sure it was nothing to do with the
missing person but try as he might he couldn’t put his finger on what it was that was eluding him.

‘I expect he got them to walk the plank as well,’ said Crosby as they left the Park.

‘There’s one thing for sure,’ said Sloan, ‘and that’s that our missing person is not the flavour of the month. I think, Crosby, this is something we should be looking into. I wonder why the admiral didn’t like her.’ He tucked the fact away in the back of his mind for further consideration.

It was Mary Feakins who answered the doorbell at The Hollies, more puzzled than alarmed by a visit from the police. ‘Benedict? Yes, he’s here. He’s off work with a bad back just now.’ She led the way through to the kitchen where her husband was sitting uncomfortably wedged in a Windsor chair, his back cushioned against a hot-water bottle.

If his wife had been calm enough as Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby arrived, Benedict Feakins certainly wasn’t. He started to struggle to his feet. ‘Police?’ he echoed. ‘What? Why?’

‘Routine enquiry, sir,’ said Sloan comfortably.

Feakins subsided back into his chair. ‘What about?’

‘I understand you had some plants being grown for you by Jack Haines,’ said Sloan.

‘Yes,’ he agreed warily. ‘But I changed my mind about them and I told Jack I didn’t want them any more. To be quite honest …’

‘Always a good idea,’ said Crosby under his breath.

‘I didn’t think I – that is, we – could afford them after all.’ 

‘Mortgage trouble, sir?’ said Detective Inspector Sloan sympathetically. The state of their mortgage was a monthly topic with his wife in his own home.

Benedict Feakins shook his head. ‘No, not that. I inherited this house when my father died but even so we’re finding the upkeep’s quite a struggle. I did tell Jack Haines that I’d still have the shrubs I’d ordered, though, and he seemed to be all right with that.’

‘For the border in the front garden,’ explained Mary Feakins. ‘It was digging that up to get ready for them that did for Benedict’s back.’

‘We saw he’d been at it in the way in,’ remarked Crosby conversationally. ‘Didn’t get very far, did you, sir?’

‘I had to give after a bit,’ admitted Benedict Feakins. ‘I did too much at one go. I’ve been bent like a hoop ever since.’

‘Easily done,’ said Sloan, who grew roses because a policeman could tend them in small pockets of time and leave them at short notice when summoned to attend to malfeasance anywhere in ‘F’ Division. ‘I see you’ve just had a bonfire too,’ he remarked, looking out of the kitchen window and observing wisps of smoke rising at the bottom of garden. ‘Back not too bad for that, then, sir?’

Feakins flushed and mumbled something about having some things to burn.

Mary Feakins cast her husband a sympathetic wifely look and then said, ‘Inspector, I must explain that my husband was getting rid of some personal things of his late father’s. He’s only just lost him and he was finding it very distressing to have them still around and reminding
him of his recent loss so he decided to get rid of them.’

‘Quite so,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. He rose as if to leave, something every policeman knew caused the person being interviewed to lower their guard. ‘Well, since we don’t at this time know why Jack Haines’ greenhouses were damaged, we’re just checking that none of his customers with plants in them had any personal enemies.’

The expression on Benedict Feakins’ face was one of comic relief. ‘Inspector,’ he said solemnly, ‘you can put me down as a latter-day Kim.’

‘Sir?’

‘Kipling’s Little Friend of All the World.’

‘Really, sir?’ said Sloan. He’d always found that author’s poem ‘If’ set an impossible standard of male behaviour and – worse – made a man feel a failure if he didn’t measure up to it.

Crosby merely looked sceptical.

Benedict Feakins turned to his wife. ‘That’s right, darling, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t think we’re very popular with the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker just now,’ she said obliquely.

Benedict turned back to the two policemen. ‘As I said, we’re finding living here a bit expensive, Inspector, that’s all.’

Sloan nodded. ‘Thank you, sir. We’ll be on our way, then. Come along, Crosby.’ He made another move to leave, paused and then he said casually, ‘By the way, we’re also quite concerned about someone who’s gone missing from Pelling. An Enid Osgathorp. Did you know her?’

There was another change in the man’s demeanour. He
sank back in his chair and seemed somehow diminished. ‘Oh, yes, Inspector,’ Benedict replied in a hollow voice. ‘I knew her all right. She’s been around in Pelling a long time. She worked at the doctor’s.’