Injury Time

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Injury Time

Collected Mysteries

Catherine Aird

For Brian

in appreciation

CONTENTS

Steady as she Goes

The Man Who Rowed for the Shore

A Fair Cop

Double Jeopardy

Lord Peter's Touch

Memory Corner

Slight of Hand

Cause and Effects

The Hard Sell

One Under the Eight

Bare Essentials

Home is the Hunter

Blue Upright

Devilled Dip

The Misjudgement of Paris

Her Indoors

About the Author

STEADY AS SHE GOES

‘The facts of the matter,' declared Superintendent Leeyes, ‘are quite simple.'

Detective Inspector Sloan waited without saying anything. In fact, had there happened to have been a salt-cellar handy in the Superintendent's office in Berebury Police Station he might very well have taken a pinch from it. In his experience, open-and-shut cases seldom came his way anyway and never if the Superintendent had had a hand in matters to date.

‘The deceased,' said Leeyes, ‘died from poisoning by antimony.' He grunted and added, ‘According to Dr Dabbe, that is.'

Sloan made a note. In his book, if not in the Superintendent's, that constituted a solid fact. Dr Dabbe was the Consultant Pathologist for their half of the County of Calleshire and not a man to say antimony when he meant arsenic.

‘The doctor,' swept on Leeyes, who was inclined to treat medical pronouncements as the starting point for discussion rather than the end of it, ‘says in his report that the Reinsch test was positive for antimony.'

Detective Inspector Sloan made another note. By rights it was Detective Constable Crosby sitting by his side who should have been taking the notes but unfortunately as it happened the detective constable actually was a man to write alimony when he meant antimony and Sloan thought in a case of poisoning it was better to be on the safe side and do it himself.

‘The deceased's sister,' growled the Superintendent, ‘alleges that the poison was administered by the husband …'

‘Most murderers are widowers,' remarked Detective Inspector Sloan, that most happily married of men. ‘And certainly almost all male murderers are.'

The Superintendent rose effortlessly above the Home Office's statistics. ‘And,' he continued with heavy irony, ‘the husband is insisting that the sister did it.'

‘Hasn't that got a funny name, sir?' Detective Constable Crosby's wayward attention seemed to have been engaged at last.

‘Funny!' barked the Superintendent. ‘Since when, may I ask, has there been anything funny about murder?'

‘Not murder itself, sir,' responded Crosby earnestly. ‘I meant that I thought that the word for that sort of murder was a funny one.'

‘Murder is always murder,' Leeyes was at his most majestic, ‘whatever Defence Counsel chooses to call it at the trial.'

Detective Inspector Sloan's hobby was growing roses and he was just thinking about the parallel where they smelt as sweet by any other name when Crosby put his oar in again.

‘They said so, sir,' persisted the Detective Constable with all the innocence of youth, ‘at the Training College.'

‘Fratricide,' managed Leeyes between clenched teeth. Older and wiser men than Crosby knew better than to mention Police Training College to the Superintendent. Not only was the very concept an anathema to him but there was nothing in his view better than the time-honoured walking the beat with a sergeant or ‘sitting next to Nellie' way of learning.

‘But that's when you kill your brother, isn't it, sir?' persisted Crosby. ‘Shouldn't it be “sorocide” if it's your sister? Or is that satricide?'

‘The word “homicide” will do, Crosby,' interposed Detective Inspector Sloan swiftly before either of the other two thought about the killing of satyrs—or kings, come to that. He enquired if such a thing as a motive for the poisoning existed.

‘According to the sister, yes. According to the husband, no.'

‘Gain?' suggested Sloan, veteran of many a domestic murder. So far the case hadn't struck him as ‘open-and-shut' in any way at all.

‘The love of money is the root of all evil,' quoted the Superintendent sententiously.

This seemed to be the view, too, of Miss Kirsty McCormack, sister of the late Mrs Anna Macmillan.

She was a thin, rather dowdy woman, with thick glasses, living in a modest bungalow set in a very large garden on the outskirts of Berebury. Miss McCormack seemed only too anxious to talk to the two policemen.

‘We came here about twelve years ago, Inspector, Mother and I,' she said, ushering them into a preternaturally neat and tidy sitting-room. ‘Won't you sit over there, Constable? On the settee. Inspector, I think you'd be more comfortable in Mother's old chair by the fire.'

‘Thank you, miss.' Sloan could not think at first what it was that was so odd about the room and then it came to him. All the walls were bare. There was a not a picture or a photograph to be seen.

‘It was after her first heart attack that we moved. We thought she would be better not having to climb the stairs.'

‘You've got rather a lot of land, though,' observed Sloan, no mean gardener.

‘Indeed, yes, although as you can see I had to let it go.' She sighed. ‘The garden is part of the trouble.'

‘Upkeep?' suggested Sloan, not unsympathetically. ‘It would be considerable.'

‘Oh, no, Inspector. It's much too big even to try to keep it up without help. Besides, I was too busy looking after Mother, especially towards the end.'

‘Quite so, miss.' He waited. ‘And …'

‘And then Mother died,' she said flatly.

Sloan coughed. ‘She can't have been young.'

‘She wasn't. I decided to move—there was a dear little flat on the market in Calleford and I'd always wanted to live over there.'

‘A very pretty city,' said Sloan, who would have found it stifling himself.

‘That's when the trouble started.'

‘Trouble?' Sloan's head came up like that of an old war-horse and even Crosby looked faintly interested.

‘We found that this dreadful old garden was just what the developers had been looking for.'

‘I see, miss.' Detective Inspector Sloan, husband and father, who had to think carefully each autumn how many new roses he could afford to add to his collection, wasn't sure that he did.

‘Anna and I suddenly became rather well off,' she said.

This time Sloan thought he was beginning to understand. ‘You and your sister were coheirs, I take it?'

‘That's right, Inspector.' She looked him squarely in the eye. ‘So Paul had quite a lot to gain from killing Anna.'

‘Her share of your mother's estate,' hazarded Sloan, ‘would come to him in the ordinary way should his wife die?'

‘Exactly,' said Miss McCormack. A glint of amusement crossed her flinty features.

‘Unless she had willed it to you,' pointed out Sloan.

‘She hadn't,' said Miss McCormack. ‘If Paul outlived her it was to go to him.'

There was a small movement from the direction of the settee. ‘And if he didn't?' asked Detective Constable Crosby.

‘It came to me.' There was no mistaking the sardonic amusement in Miss McCormack's expression now. ‘There are no children, you see.' She gave a wintry smile and said, ‘Paul, of course, insists that the same argument about gain applies to me.'

‘And does it?' enquired Sloan.

‘Either Paul would have to be found guilty of Anna's murder or I would have had to kill them both to inherit.'

On the settee Detective Constable Crosby stirred. ‘And did you try?'

All trace of amusement vanished from Miss McCormack's face and she looked merely sad and weary. ‘No, Constable, I didn't. And I don't know either how Paul killed Anna but I can tell you one thing. He did it before my very eyes and I can't for the life of me think how.'

‘Perhaps,' said Detective Inspector Sloan, falling back on formality, ‘you would tell us about the day in question …?'

‘I'd gone over to their house after tea—not that they were tea drinkers—at about a quarter past five. Paul was there but Anna hadn't come home from the hairdressers'—she was a bit later back than she expected. The traffic's always pretty bad then, you know.'

‘We know,' said Sloan moderately.

‘Paul said he'd only just got back from the office and he hadn't been home in the middle of the day because he'd had a business luncheon.'

‘So there was no way that he could have given his wife any poison before you came?' said Crosby. ‘Is that what you mean?'

They hadn't, apparently, taught the Detective Constable at the Police Training College anything about not accepting statements by interested parties at face value but Sloan let that pass for the time being.

‘Exactly,' said Miss McCormack as if to a promising pupil. ‘Anyway, Anna came in just then, very smart from the hairdressers' and with loads of shopping, and said she was dying for a drink.'

‘And die she did,' said Crosby incorrigibly.

Sloan decided that there was perhaps something to be said for the ‘sitting next to Nellie' school of learning after all. No self-respecting mentor would have let him get away with that.