Losing Ground (7 page)

‘Of course not,’ said Wendy instantly. ‘We will always act within the law.’

‘What would be a help,’ said her husband acidly, ‘is if everyone else did.’ He turned to the young man at his side. ‘And that goes for you, too, Jonathon, remember.’

Detective Constable Crosby was bored. Standing on sentry duty to one side of all the action was not his idea of fun – or policing. He therefore looked up with interest at the approach of a fresh face, and a fairly young one at that.

‘Sorry, sir,’ he said to the new arrival. ‘No admittance beyond this point.’

‘That’s OK,’ said Stuart Bellamy. ‘I just came to see what’s going on here.’

‘A lot of fire-raisers do that,’ remarked Crosby in an offhand way. ‘They like to see the fire engines and the flames. Touches the spot or something.’

‘I know arsonists are usually male,’ said Stuart Bellamy. ‘It’s not women’s work and all that.’

‘So what brings you?’ asked Crosby, taking out his notebook. He wasn’t hopeful of gleaning much useful information since the man had left his car in clear view but from force of habit he wrote down the registration number of the vehicle.

‘Curiosity,’ replied Stuart Bellamy immediately. ‘You see, I’d just made an offer to buy the place…’

‘Rather you than me,’ said Crosby. ‘I mean, just look at it – it’s practically falling down as it is.’

‘And it’s beginning to look as if someone doesn’t want me to have it,’ said Stuart Bellamy, continuing his own train of thought.

‘Does a bit, doesn’t it?’ agreed Crosby, looking over his shoulder at the smouldering building, and making a mental note to tell his superior officer just that. ‘You can see that even without the fire that it’s going to cost a pretty penny to put it right.’

The cost of repairing Tolmie Park was something Stuart Bellamy hadn’t raised so far with Jason Burke. He knew what his answer would be if he did because it happened every time his manager warned the musician about spending big money. Jason would first quote his old granny, who had always said that it was your economies that you regretted, and then he would sing a couple of lines of an old song beginning, “There’s a hole in your bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.”

This would evoke the peerless follow-on by Jason himself in a different key of “Then mend it, dear Liza, mend it, dear Liza,” and a little lecture about if you had the money then there was no point in not spending it, was there? Even if Bellamy had finished his articles with the accountancy firm, he felt he would have had no answer to this.

Stuart Bellamy said aloud to Crosby now, ‘And I wondered if you people had any idea of who might not want me to buy it?’

‘Not at this stage, sir,’ said Crosby magisterially. ‘And, of course, if we had, I wouldn’t be in a position to tell you. Now, if you would tell me your name and address I’ll pass it on to the inspector in charge and keep you informed.’

In another part of the forest of charred timbers that had once comprised the roof of the billiard room at Tolmie Park, someone else besides the conservation officer was trying to wheedle his way past authority.

‘No, doctor.’

‘Just a few yards,’ pleaded Dr Dabbe. He had risen to his feet, dusted off the trouser legs of his white suit and made for a point even further into the ruined room than before. ‘I only want a
coup d’oeil.’

‘No, doctor,’ repeated Charlie Burton, the fire officer. ‘Whatever one of those may be, you can’t have it.’

Undeterred, Dr Dabbe said ‘I think if I went in only a little further up here, I might just get a slightly better look…’

‘No, doctor.’ The fire officer shook his head. ‘Everything’s still much too hot.’

‘You see,’ went on the pathologist persuasively, ‘there is something very interesting about the little bit of bone that I can see from here.’

‘That’s as may be,’ pronounced Charlie Burton authoritatively, ‘but since there’s no question of human life being at stake, it would be as much as my job’s worth to let you get yourself burnt.’

‘If what I’m looking at is the distal end of a femur,’ continued Dr Dabbe as if the man had not spoken, ‘then it’s got a very funny medial condyle.’

‘I don’t care if it’s got a serious one,’ exploded the exasperated fire officer, ‘you aren’t going any further in until I say so.’

‘And if I could just get a proper look at the trochantic fossa at the proximal end of that bone…’ The pathologist started to inch his way forward again, binoculars at the ready, with all the enthusiasm of the specialist. ‘I haven’t had a case of excarnation for years.’

‘And what’s that when it’s at home?’ demanded the fireman in exasperation.

‘Leaving bones out to be picked over. By the way, for the record I should say that the bones are sitting on some sort of calcined material. I can’t quite see what.’

Charlie Burton clambered over some wreckage to get back to the side of Detective Inspector Sloan, hissing in his ear ‘What part of “no” is it that he doesn’t understand?’

Sloan regarded the prone figure of the pathologist advancing on his tummy with a certain dispassion. ‘I would say that what the good doctor is looking for is wriggle room.’

‘Very funny,’ snapped Burton. ‘Well, if you ask me I think he’s going to get his fingers burnt.’

‘His, though,’ pointed out Sloan. ‘Not ours.’ Self-preservation was something learnt early on the beat.

‘You stop him then, mate,’ said the fireman, shrugging his shoulders. ‘It’s no skin off my nose if he does himself an injury.’ Having thus metaphorically washed his hands of the matter, Charlie Burton started to move away. Then he stopped and said over his shoulder, ‘But by my reckoning, nobody’s supposed to enter a crime scene without your permission anyway.’

‘And yours,’ said Sloan politely.

‘Mine?’

‘Arson, I think you said.’ Sloan waved a hand. ‘The probable cause of the fire. It’s a crime.’

‘What? Oh, yes.’ The man halted in his tracks and gave him a tight little smile. ‘We leave all that to our investigative experts and they do like a clear field.’

Taking the hint, Detective Inspector Sloan advanced
towards the pathologist himself. ‘Doctor, I must remind you that this is an active crime scene…’

‘Not as far as I’m concerned, it isn’t, Sloan, arson apart.’

‘If those are human bones…’

‘Ah, that’s just it, Sloan,’ said Dr Dabbe. ‘I don’t think they are.’

‘Not human bones?’ echoed Superintendent Leeyes indignantly. ‘Is he sure?’

‘That’s what he says,’ said Sloan. ‘He can’t really get close enough to them to be quite sure because of the heat so we haven’t got his official report yet.’

‘If they’re not human bones, then what are they?’ demanded Leeyes down the telephone line.

‘His unconfirmed opinion is that they’re animal but he can’t get near enough to confirm that either until the whole place has cooled down. All he will say is that they are big and not human.’

‘From our point of view I would have thought there were only two sorts of bones,’ observed Leeyes loftily. ‘Homo sapiens and the rest.’

‘Quite so.’ From a police perspective and animal cruelty apart, Sloan agreed with him. He said ‘I’m afraid there could be a joker in the pack.’

Leeyes sniffed. ‘Literally.’

Sloan forged on. ‘I think it would be as well, sir, also to allow for the possibility that they could be either animal bones or artificial ones.’

‘Like I said, someone having us on, do you think?’ growled the superintendent.

Sloan coughed. ‘Don’t you remember, sir, that the Berebury Preservation Society has a bit of a reputation for the exotic? Their Jonathon Ayling’s a bit of a wild card. What you might call their stunt-man.’

‘Is it them who’s doing it?’ snorted Leeyes combatively. ‘If so, then just wait until I…’

‘We don’t know yet that it’s anyone,’ said Sloan, adding sedulously, ‘And, of course, sir, it may not be us that they’re having on.’

‘Who else then?’ growled Leeyes, who was inclined to take things personally.

‘There’s the planning people for starters and then there’s the developers.’

The superintendent wasn’t listening. ‘Sloan, you don’t think that the bones could have come from an aurochs?’ He sounded almost wistful.

‘Sir?’

‘The extinct European bison.’

‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ responded Sloan warily. The superintendent’s expertise in some fields was as reliable as his lack of knowledge in others. The trouble was that members of the Force couldn’t be certain of either.

‘Also known as the urus or wild ox.’

‘Really, sir?’ That must have come from “Archaeology and Anthropology for the Uninitiated”, an early evening class from which the superintendent had retired, hurt. This was after crossing swords with the lecturer on the thorny question of the descent of man – or, more specifically, the ancestry of criminal man.

‘They had a collection of bones from one of them in the
museum. We went to see it.’ Leeyes added, hit by a sudden thought, ‘You don’t suppose somebody’s stolen them from the Paleolithic Room there, do you?’

‘I’ll check, sir,’ promised Detective Inspector Sloan, adding that to his growing to-do list. ‘The museum people didn’t mention it this morning but there is definitely something very odd about the break-in there.’

‘And don’t try to tell me, Sloan,’ said Leeyes, tacitly agreeing with this, ‘that the nicking of that painting of Tolmie Park hours before the place was set on fire is just a coincidence.’

‘I shan’t,’ promised Detective Inspector Sloan truthfully.

‘Looking for Lionel Perry, are you?’ said Jock Stirling, the professional at the Berebury golf club, to the ginger-haired young man standing in front of the counter in his shop.

Ned Phillips nodded.

Stirling jerked his shoulder towards the course. ‘That’s him and his pals just putting out at the seventeenth now.’

Phillips looked enquiringly in the direction of the course.

‘Far right, middle distance,’ said Stirling. ‘As you can see, he’s playing in a four-ball and they’re always slow.’

‘Is he any good?’ asked Ned Phillips. ‘At the game, I mean,’ he added hastily.

‘Not bad for his age,’ responded Jock Stirling, reaching for a metal wood club and starting to polish the head with a soft duster. ‘Not bad at all.’

Ned Phillips, who didn’t realise that this was the other man’s stock response to any enquiry about a member’s play, nodded and said ‘I’ve got a message for him from work.’

Jock Stirling sucked his lips. ‘Me, I wouldn’t want to disturb anyone’s game. Not at the seventeenth. Not for anything less than an earthquake.’

‘It wasn’t an earthquake,’ murmured Ned Phillips.

‘Players only like it if they’re hitting the ball badly or already losing their match,’ said the professional from long experience. ‘That’s the only time when they don’t mind walking back in with the world watching.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Phillips easily. ‘They said at work that it wasn’t important enough to disturb his game. Just to wait and give it to him when he got in.’

Jock Stirling looked curiously at Ned Phillips. ‘Lionel Perry’s the boss man over at your place, isn’t he?’

‘Too right, he is,’ said Ned, leaning over the counter of the professional’s shop and starting to toy absently with a handful of loose tees.

‘That’s if you’re from that big house-building outfit of his, Berebury Homes.’ Jock Stirling held the shining club-head out in front of him and studied it critically.

‘I am,’ said the young man, ‘but I’ve only just joined the firm so I don’t really know him – or it – yet.’

‘You from away then? I haven’t seen you up here before.’

‘Too right I am. The North.’ He grinned. ‘And tennis is my game, anyway.’

‘You’ll come to golf, then,’ said the professional comfortably. ‘Later.’

‘All in good time,’ said Ned Phillips with unimpaired goodwill.

The professional said, ‘Your boss’d be a better player if he spent more time up here.’

‘Really?’ Ned Phillips didn’t know that this, too, was one of Jock Stirling’s standard remarks.

‘But I daresay he’s a very busy man these days.’ The golf professional gave the club-head a final rub and restored it to a display on the wall. ‘Unfortunately by the time most men find out that time’s more important than money they’re too old to enjoy the game properly.’

‘I suppose they feel they’ve got to make their pile first,’ ventured Ned Phillips.

‘That’s what I mean,’ said Jock Stirling, selecting another metal wood from the rack. He grimaced. ‘I don’t think we need to worry too much about Lionel Perry’s pension. The word on the street is that Calleford Construction wants to buy him out and since they say he and his wife are big shareholders in Berebury Homes that shouldn’t leave him short of a penny or two.’

‘Keen on money, is he?’ enquired Ned Phillips negligently.

‘Aren’t all businessmen?’ responded the golf professional, applying the soft cloth to the shining head.

‘So they say, so they say.’

‘Those I see up here are,’ said the professional warmly. ‘And all with this fixed idea that time’s money. You can’t concentrate on your game if you’ve got one eye on the clock while you’re playing.’

‘True,’ agreed the young man amiably.

The professional turned his glance towards the shop window. ‘Looks as if it’s a needle match out there. See, they’re still fighting it out on the eighteenth.’

‘I guess the game isn’t over until the fat lady sings,’ responded Ned lightly.

‘I always say myself that it’s not over until the last ball’s in the cup,’ said Jock Stirling.

‘How long does it take them to get round the course?’

‘All depends on who’s asking,’ said the other man.

‘How come?’

‘If it’s their wives that ask then whenever they ring, their hubby is still out on the course,’ said Stirling, winking. ‘Get it?’

‘I’m not married.’

‘Then,’ advised the older man, ‘when you do, whatever you do don’t ever tell the little woman when to expect you home. Causes more trouble than you might think, does that.’

‘I’ll remember that,’ promised Phillips. He went on casually, ‘So my boss-man hasn’t got the time to play better. That it?’

‘All your boss is ever after,’ remarked Jock Stirling, ‘is dry land.’