Injury Time (15 page)

‘Jacques, our head chef,' intervened the manager swiftly, ‘has an international reputation for this sort of cuisine.'

‘And the outside stop-cock where the water main comes in?' said Detective Inspector Sloan, house-owner himself.

‘A Sabbath day's march down the drive near the front gate and I haven't had a chance to look at that yet,' said Mike, aggrieved. ‘Not what with being put in here and told not to move.'

Sloan remained unmoved.

‘First thing I know about anything's being up the creek's when Mr Pattman here sent for me,' he said. ‘Just before you lot got here, and I haven't been able to look at anything yet, have I?'

‘Then we'll do it now,' said Sloan. Crosby could carry on keeping an eye on the deceased's husband.

‘It's under some bushes …'

‘Before we go out there,' said Sloan, ‘you can show me where the water supply to the Hot Room comes from …'

Mike led the way back past the Hot Room, now occupied by two fingerprint experts and a Scenes of Crime Officer, and into the adjoining room. It was a combined flower room and cloakroom—a relict of the days in which the health farm had been a large country house. A couple of golf trolleys were parked against the further wall and a pile of suitcases stood in front of another. There was a deep sink and a large draining-board on which stood an electric kettle and an empty mug. ‘You can see where the pipes come through the wall and run along above the wainscot,' said Mike, stooping and tapping the woodwork, ‘and then through this wall and into the old morning-room.'

‘That's where our masseuse works,' said Pattman. ‘Mrs Culshaw had had her massage before she went into the Hot Room.'

Detective Inspector Sloan bent down to examine the water pipes. He had to move the two golf trolleys out from the wall—one, the electric one, was quite heavy, a large battery contrivance sitting on its cross-bar—to see the entire length of the pipes. To the naked eye they looked undamaged. There was no sign of a water leak either in that room or the next—or indeed in any of the rooms which the pipes traversed on their way round the building from the boiler-room. Nor was there any form of additional stop-cock between the boiler-room and the health farm's Hot Room.

‘What did I say?' demanded Mike triumphantly. ‘Nothing wrong with the system, like I said.'

Sloan's personal radio crackled. ‘Now we'll go outside,' he said, after listening to the message.

The three of them made an unlikely trio as they trooped down the drive of the health farm. Waiting for them at the entrance gate were the two Berebury Police photographers, Williams and Dyson.

‘Mike here,' announced Sloan, ‘is going to show us by pointing exactly where the outside stop-cock is. He is not,' added Sloan meaningfully, ‘going to move off the path while he does so.'

‘If you was to look to the left of that post over there,' offered Mike, ‘and scrape the leaves away I reckon you'd find a little metal cover.'

The cameras clicked and then very cautiously Sloan advanced through the carpet of last year's beech leaves which covered all the ground in sight.

‘A “Babes in the Wood” job is it, then, Inspector?' said Williams, the senior photographer.

‘No,' said Sloan shortly. ‘We're looking for evidence that some person or persons unknown turned this stop-cock off for a short time this morning.' That it would have been almost certainly at the same time as the same person or persons saw fit to turn the key in the lock of the Hot Room door he saw no reason to say.

The camera clicked again and then very, very carefully Sloan started to clear away the natural debris of several seasons to expose an iron plate. It was just where Mike had said it would be. It couldn't have been called a manhole because it was only big enough to take an arm.

The photographers took shots of the undisturbed leaves before Sloan indicated that they could advance on the stop-cock.

‘I don't check it all that often,' said Mike, ‘seeing as how there's never been any trouble in that department.'

The detritus round the metal cover would seem to Sloan's gardener's eye to have drifted there rather than been arranged over it. It was therefore no surprise to him, when the metal cover had been prised open, to see no sign of human interference.

‘Reckon what you want, Inspector,' said Williams, the photographer and the humorist of the party, as a pair of centipedes and a leatherjacket scuttled away from the sudden light, ‘is one of those forensic entomologists. I dare say they could tell you when this was last opened up by counting their legs.'

‘If you were to ask me,' chimed in Dyson, ‘I should say not since the old Queen died.'

‘I shan't ask you,' said Detective Inspector Sloan tartly, ‘but remember that defence counsel might.'

It was Graham Pattman who blanched. ‘It must have been an accident,' he said. ‘A most unfortunate accident …'

Detective Inspector Sloan said nothing. True accidents were the province of other people—Coroners, of course; the Press, naturally; the public utilities, sometimes; insurance companies and their assessors, usually but not definitely not—the police. If Mrs Bessie Culshaw's death was an accident then he could pack up here and now and go back to the Police Station.

But he was beginning to be sure it wasn't. And he had already put a man on to establishing exactly how the victim's intended companion in the Hot Room—Eileen Smith—had come to be called away when she had been.

He left the group and walked across the ample grounds towards the golf course.

‘Staying here must cost a bomb,' he remarked to the young golf professional when he got there.

‘It does,' said the young man simply. ‘And if the fat ones played they could get thin for nothing but it doesn't seem to work like that.'

Sloan asked him when Mr Cox and Mr Culshaw had gone out and come in that morning.

‘'Bout half nine, Inspector, and they must have got back something round about twelve. It's not a long course,' he said a trifle defensively, ‘seeing how it was designed for the older man.'

‘You'd need to be rich to come here,' agreed Sloan, tacitly acknowledging that as a rule money and age marched hand in hand more often than did wealth and youth.

The young man wasn't as discreet as the manager. ‘From what I heard she had the money,' he said. ‘Just as well because his firm had folded. It was in the papers. They don't get a lot of young people up at the farm,' admitted the professional.

‘So you don't get many good games,' said Sloan. Age and corpulence went together too, more often than not.

‘I wouldn't say that,' murmured the golf pro. ‘I go round with some of the oldies myself sometimes if they haven't got a partner.'

‘And knock spots off them, I suppose?'

The young man shook his head. ‘Not if I can help it, but it's not always as easy as that. Some of these old boys may not hit a long ball but they're deadly round the green.'

‘And they don't always have to lug their trolleys round with them,' he said. ‘Which of the two,' he asked idly, ‘had the electric trolley?' William Culshaw had looked a fit man to him—he had yet to interview Stanley Cox.

The professional frowned. ‘Neither. Not if you're talking about Mr Culshaw and Mr Cox.'

‘I am.'

‘Then they don't have electric trolleys,' said the professional firmly. ‘Either of them. They went round this morning without and I know because I was behind them all the way round.'

Sloan stiffened. ‘Don't leave here until I come back …' He went straight back to the health farm and into the old flower room. The two golf trolleys were still there, one with its battery contrivance on the cross shaft. He bent down to examine it. It certainly comprised electrical equipment of some sort. Two leads came out of it, one now clamped to each leg of the golf trolley.

He straightened up and started to think hard.

At a guess the two leads could have reached the water pipe above the skirting board—but something was beginning to make him think they had. He'd need a magnifying lens to know for sure if they'd ever been clamped to the pipes instead of the golf trolley legs—not that this told him anything.

Yet.

Nor did the name plate on the equipment, which was German.

He stood there alone for a long minute and thought hard. There was something stirring in his memory—something to do with his brother-in-law's house. That was it. That house had been a real jerry-built affair of bodged workmanship and they'd thought they'd have big trouble when they'd needed to drain the hot-water system. There hadn't been a drain tap, that was what had worried his brother-in-law, not a mechanical man.

It hadn't fazed the plumber one little bit.

No, he'd come along with a big box of tricks, plugged into the electricity, cut through the pipe and put a drain tap in the hot-water system without losing a drop of water. ‘Behold, the iceman cometh,' was how his brother-in-law had described it.

Detective Inspector Sloan left the flower room and went back to the lounge where William Culshaw was having his statement read over to him by Detective Constable Crosby.

‘Just a few more questions, sir,' said Sloan at his smoothest. ‘Can you just tell me again what you did when you got back from the golf course?'

‘Had a bit of a wash and brush up,' said Culshaw, ‘put on a tie and so forth—they're quite particular here—and went along to the bar to have a drink with Stanley Cox.'

‘And then?'

‘Went into luncheon with him.'

‘Did you go back to the flower room before you went to eat?'

‘I did,' said Culshaw, nodding. ‘I thought I might have dropped my pen there and I had.'

‘I think,' said Detective Inspector Sloan coldly, ‘that you went back to the flower room to remove two connecting leads from the hot-water pipe leading to the Hot Room and to unlock the door of the Hot Room which you had locked as you came in from your round of golf.'

The colour of Culshaw's face told a tale all of its own, incapable of subterfuge by its possessor.

‘You had applied these when you came in from golf,' said Sloan, ‘and while you were having a drink the apparatus refrigerated the water in the pipe causing it to freeze and block the pipe …'

The man's colour had gone from grey to putty.

‘Thus cutting off the water supply,' continued Sloan, unmoved, ‘from which the steam for the Hot Room was made for about twenty minutes.'

And from putty colour to paper white.

‘Which,' said Sloan, making a sign to Detective Constable Crosby, ‘was long enough to bring about the death of your wife.'

HOME IS THE HUNTER

‘Ever had anything to do with an Extradition Order, Sloan?' asked Police Superintendent Leeyes.

‘No, sir,' said Detective Inspector Sloan warily.

‘Now's your chance, then,' said Leeyes.

‘Sir?'

‘It's never too late to learn,' said Leeyes. ‘All the good books say so.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Sloan, since this was very true.

The Superintendent consulted a piece of paper on his desk. ‘It's from France.'

‘A friendly power.'

The Superintendent, suspecting irony, ignored this. ‘A Madame Vercollas of 17 rue de la Pierre Blanche, St-Amand d'Huiss … Huisse …' Leeyes gave up the unequal struggle to pronounce Huisselot. ‘Anyway she's here in Berebury now, which is all that matters to us.'

‘Keeps it simple,' agreed Sloan.

‘Nothing like your own patch.' The Superintendent's xenophobia was well known to embrace the next county to Calleshire as well as the next country to England. He had always been one to equate stranger with enemy.

‘And the French would like her back, would they, sir?' asked Sloan, getting out his notebook.

‘They would,' growled Leeyes. He pushed the Extradition Order from the Home Office across the desk. ‘She's wanted on a charge of murdering her husband, Louis Vercollas, at a place called Corbeaux last September.'

Sloan picked up the paper. ‘I take it, sir, that the fine detail isn't anything to do with us.'

‘Not really,' said the Superintendent, a trifle wistfully. He always liked to have a finger in any pie that was going.

‘Just a matter of handing her over to the French, then?'

‘That's all. The Home Office has agreed to her extradition.' Leeyes sounded regretful at this. It went against the grain with him for the British to co-operate with any foreign power, but especially with the French. The Superintendent blamed metrication entirely on Napoleon Bonaparte. ‘It should be all quite straightforward …'

‘Does she speak English?'

‘She is English,' said Leeyes. ‘It's her husband who was French.'

‘I see, sir.'

‘And Sloan …'

‘Sir?'

‘You might as well take Crosby with you. It'll get him off my back for the afternoon.'

If possible, Detective Constable Crosby was even more insular than the Superintendent. ‘Do we have to deport her ourselves?' he asked as they drove down Berebury High Street.

‘She's not being deported,' explained Sloan patiently. ‘Deportation's when we're kicking someone out of the country. Extradition's when they're being asked for by another country with which we have a treaty.'

‘Vive la difference!'
said the Constable, changing gear.

In due course the police car reached a neat semi-detached house in a quiet street in a residential area of the town. The doorbell was answered by a pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman.

‘Madame Vercollas?' began Sloan.

The woman shook her head. ‘That's my sister. I'm Anne Pickford. Come in and I'll get her for you.' She led the way into the sitting-room, calling out: ‘Laura, someone to see you! Can you come?'