‘Ah, Sloan, there you are.’ It was first thing in the morning and Police Superintendent Leeyes looked up from his desk at his subordinate, sounding surprised. He had somehow contrived, as usual, to make Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan feel invisible until then, in spite of his standing there in front of him.
‘Yes, sir.’ Since he hadn’t been invited to sit, the inspector stood.
‘I thought you were supposed to be tied up with the Faunus and Melliflora case.’
‘Not until Friday, sir. That’s when it comes to court.’ Faunus and his partner in crime were a notorious pair, professional criminals both of them. The court case was the culmination of months of hard police work and Sloan was due to give evidence at their trial.
‘Good,’ grunted Leeyes. ‘That means you’re free now. So what can you tell me about a sudden death yesterday over at Bishop’s Marbourne?’
‘Nothing, sir,’ replied Sloan truthfully. ‘In fact, I didn’t even know that there’d been one.’
‘I’ve had a letter this morning from a solicitor about it, that in my experience is pretty quick off the mark for the legal profession.’ Leeyes picked up a piece of paper from his desk. ‘Apparently the deceased was a Mrs Susan Port.’
Sloan shook his head. ‘The name doesn’t ring a bell at all, sir. Nothing’s come my way about it this morning. Not yet, that is.’ Detective Inspector Christopher Dennis Sloan (always known as ‘Seedy’ to his friends and family) was the head of the Berebury Force’s tiny Criminal Investigation Department and as such all crime in ‘F’ Division fell within his remit. He asked now, ‘Should it have done, sir?’
‘I couldn’t say – not at this stage, anyway – but Simon Puckle, this solicitor from Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery, seems to have a bee in his bonnet about her death. They’ve never been ambulance-chasers, have they? That outfit?’
Since the firm had been practising in Berebury high street since long before ambulances appeared on the world scene, the inspector said that they hadn’t. ‘As you know, sir, they’re a firm of long-established family solicitors of good repute.’
The superintendent waved the letter in question in his hand. ‘Their senior partner, Simon Puckle, wishes to know if the cause of Mrs Port’s death has yet been ascertained since he understands that in some cases sudden deaths are referred to the police.’
‘And has it, sir?’ asked Sloan pertinently. ‘Been referred, I mean.’
‘No, not yet,’ said Leeyes, the letter still in his hand, ‘unless this counts as doing so.’
‘Good point, sir,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. In his experience, buttering up the superintendent never did any harm.
‘It would seem from this letter,’ carried on Leeyes, still waving it about, ‘that the woman is said to have died following an attack of food poisoning. Or so the writer of this has heard.’
‘Ah,’ said Sloan. There was, he knew, quite another meaning to the common expression ‘food poisoning’. That was ‘eating food that had been poisoned’.
‘Exactly, Sloan,’ said Leeyes as if he had been reading his subordinate’s mind.
‘And I take it that the family want to sue someone?’ concluded Sloan. ‘That is, if they’ve asked a solicitor to act for them quite so smartly.’
‘No, Sloan, on the contrary,’ Leeyes came back on the instant, ‘it doesn’t seem like that at all. Firstly, apparently there isn’t any immediate family around the deceased to instruct him to sue anyone – she was a childless widow – and secondly, it is Simon Puckle himself who has a professional interest in her death as,’ the superintendent applied himself to the letter again and read aloud, ‘“a trustee of the estate of the late Algernon George Culver Mayton”. Ever heard of him, either?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Nor me,’ said the superintendent.
‘And what does the deceased’s general practitioner have to say about it?’ enquired Sloan, himself interested now. In his experience, solicitors’ letters usually followed any action rather than initiated it. ‘Unless she died in hospital, that is.’
‘That’s just what you’ll have to find out, Sloan. You’d better make sure everything’s in order in case there’s anything in it for us.’ Leeyes laid the letter back on his desk and leant back in his chair with the air of a man having done his share.
‘Or for Simon Puckle, I suppose,’ said Sloan slowly.
‘Him too,’ said Leeyes. ‘And you can take that young fool, Crosby, with you.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Sloan stoically. Detective Constable Crosby was not the brightest star in the police firmament – more a hindrance in any investigation than a help, in fact.
‘He should have been assisting Sergeant Perkins today,’ said Leeyes, ‘but she won’t have him at any price.’
‘Really, sir?’ said Sloan warily. The redoubtable Woman Police Sergeant Perkins, always known as Pretty Polly, was considerably outranked by the superintendent but she held a trump card in her dealings with him and he knew it. It was called ‘Women’s Rights’.
‘Extra help is all very well in its way, I suppose,’ grumbled Leeyes, ‘but of course that’s only if it knows what it’s doing.’
‘Or does what it is told,’ supplemented Sloan, who knew the detective constable in question only too well himself.
‘Sergeant Perkins,’ sighed the superintendent, man to man, handing Simon Puckle’s letter over to Sloan, ‘said she was a very busy warranted police officer with a full caseload and not a babyminder.’
‘What’s up, sir?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby, easing the car out of the police station yard and into the stream of traffic swirling around in the road outside.
‘A sudden death,’ said Sloan, telling him to head out to Bishop’s Marbourne, one of the smaller villages in the rural hinterland of Berebury. ‘We want a Pear Tree Cottage in Church Lane there.’
He brightened. ‘Suspicious, then?’
‘Too soon to say, Crosby. Much too soon, although,’ he added fairly, ‘a local solicitor has written to tell us that he has worries on that account.’
‘So who’s bubbled?’ asked Crosby as he threaded the police car through the main street of the town.
‘“Bubbled”, Crosby?’ Detective Inspector Sloan had long ago decided that one of the signs of early middle age was not grasping the new argot prevailing among the younger element in the force.
The constable translated. ‘Spilt the beans, then, sir.’
‘If it weren’t for the fact that solicitors, like priests, aren’t supposed to, Crosby, I would say it was Simon Puckle himself.’
Crosby then used an old expression that Detective Inspector Sloan did understand for all that it came from the racetrack. ‘That’s a turn up for the book, sir.’
Sloan agreed it made a first for him, too.
The detective constable changed the engine down a gear as the traffic ahead thickened. He pointed out a couple of rough sleepers huddled in the doorway of a derelict building as they passed. ‘The woollies have been told to move them on, sir. The mayor doesn’t like them.’
‘And the uniformed branch doesn’t like being called woollies,’ Sloan came back smartly. ‘Remember?’
‘You’d think those two over there would be up and about by now, wouldn’t you, sir?’ said Crosby, swiftly changing the subject. ‘Like us,’ he added virtuously. He wasn’t at his best early in the morning.
‘Rough sleepers have nothing to get up for,’ Sloan reminded him absently, reverting to the matter in hand. ‘The solicitor has also asked if we would be permitted in due course to give him any information about the death.’
‘And are we, sir?’
‘No. We wouldn’t if we could and we can’t anyway,’ said Sloan pithily. ‘Not at this stage. Not until after a post-mortem or an inquest, either of which there will have to be, Crosby, unless the deceased died of natural causes. And if it’s an inquest then the whole caboodle will be in the public domain, newspapers and all. We’ll soon find out.’
No one answered the door at Pear Tree Cottage but the sight of the police car in the road and the sound of Crosby’s knocking soon produced the next-door neighbour. Detective Inspector Sloan explained who they were.
‘I’m Doris Dyson,’ said the woman, jerking her shoulder in the direction of the house next door. ‘You’d best come along home with me.’
Sitting round the woman’s kitchen table, Sloan got out his notebook and asked, ‘What happened?’
‘Food poisoning, the doctor thought at first,’ she began, ‘that is to say, we all thought it was food poisoning in the beginning. It had almost cleared up and then poor Sue took a turn for the worse.’
‘Did anyone else have it?’ asked Sloan.
Doris Dyson shook her head. ‘No. Well, not me or my husband, anyway. I never heard about anyone else being ill like Sue was.’
‘Funny that,’ said Crosby.
‘But you ate in her house sometimes?’ persisted Sloan.
‘Course I did, Inspector. Well, not ate, exactly, but I’d go over to her for a cup of coffee and a biscuit in the mornings every now and then,’ the woman sniffed, ‘and she’d come over to me for a cup of tea and a piece of cake some afternoons. She was a friend, you see.’
Detective Inspector Sloan nodded gently. In his book that was probably as good a definition of friendship – well, neighbourliness – as you could get these days. ‘Tell me about her.’
Doris Dyson brightened immediately. ‘Oh, she was ever so nice. She’d come to Bishop’s Marbourne to retire two or three years ago. Always wanted to live right out in the country, she said, so she bought herself this little cottage next door to me with a big garden and got really stuck in.’
‘Gone native,’ muttered Crosby, who wasn’t enamoured of green fields himself.
The woman ignored him. ‘Started to grow her own vegetables, bake her own bread, take up quilting. You know the sort of thing.’
Sloan did. It was the daydream of many a hard-pressed worker in a city.
‘Not that this year has been good for gardens. Too much rain for most of what she’d planted.’
Crosby yawned.
‘Then,’ said Doris Dyson, ‘when she wasn’t in the garden, she’d sit in front of that there computer of hers for hours. Doing her family tree, she said she was.’ The woman sniffed again. ‘Can’t understand it myself. If we wanted to do that – hubby and me – all we’d have to do is go over to the churchyard and read the gravestones. We’re both Bishop’s Marbourne people, you see, and we’ve all been buried there since for ever.’
Crosby yawned again. Wider this time.
‘She got a dog, too, to make sure that she went for a walk every day.’ Doris Dyson’s face clouded over. ‘But that was a mistake. He wasn’t properly trained and pulled her over a couple of times. She broke her wrist the last time. Very upset about Todger, she was – that was just about the time when she became so ill all over again.’
‘Man bites dog, no problem, dog bites man, the dog it was that died,’ said Detective Constable Crosby almost – but not quite – under his breath.
‘I reckon having to have Todger rehomed didn’t help,’ said Mrs Dyson austerely, ‘not with her having all those pains in her tummy and being so sick with it all time after time. Not that she would have been in any fit state anyway to take Todger out for his walk, although I would have done that for her if I had had to.’
‘I expect,’ said Sloan, ‘that you did all you could for her.’
‘Changed the sheets, anyway – she was perspiring something remarkable for all that she complained of being cold all the time. And of having to run to the bathroom all the time, too. Night and day.’
‘I get the picture.’ Sloan nodded. ‘And then what?’
‘I made her go to the doctor and he gave her something for food poisoning – gastric upset, he called it at first. She got a lot better after that and we thought it had all cleared up.’ Her face drooped. ‘And then, blow me, it all came back again quite sudden and she had to go back to the doctor.’
‘Which doctor?’ asked Sloan.
Detective Constable Crosby, a young man with a low boredom threshold, muttered, ‘They’re all witch doctors. They should wear pointy hats.’
Doris Dyson, not understanding, ignored this and replied to Sloan. ‘Dr Browne, of course. He sees to everyone round here.’
‘And what did he say?’ asked Sloan. Dr Angus Browne’s surgery was going to be the next port of call for the police, but he didn’t say so.
‘Like what we had thought – still some form of food poisoning, although he couldn’t say what. Not without doing some tests.’ Doris Dyson sniffed once more. ‘It’s what the doctors say all the time these days, isn’t it? Won’t make up their minds without them now.’
Detective Inspector Sloan nodded gravely. In his book that was an improvement on the past. His own grandparents had lived at a time when pathology wasn’t advanced enough for any tests for some dire conditions that exist, let alone be reliable, or for there to be a cure for those same dire conditions, once diagnosed.
‘Anyways,’ said Mrs Dyson, ‘whatever they were he didn’t get the results back in time to prescribe anything useful.’
This was something Sloan did understand. Many of his own cases had been held up because forensics hadn’t got back to him quickly enough for his liking. The fortnight that seemed commonplace to the police laboratory to report results nearly drove him to despair. The importance of keeping up the heat of an investigation was something those bench-bound boffins just didn’t seem to comprehend.
‘Then what?’ he asked now.
‘She got worse,’ said Doris Dyson lugubriously. ‘Much worse. She started to feel the cold so much that I had to bring some of my own blankets over from my place for her, not that the weather had turned or anything. I piled them on top of her, but even then she still complained of being cold. Then …’
‘Then?’ prompted Sloan.
‘She started not being able to sleep. Time and again she went all night without dropping off. The doctor gave her something for that, too, but it didn’t work either. That’s when I started to get worried. Not that not having slept a wink all night seemed to make her tired. That was the funny thing.’
‘I’ll say,’ said Crosby, himself always notably irritable after a bad night.
‘We could none of us understand that,’ she said.
‘Go on,’ said Sloan.
Doris Dyson drew breath and said impressively, ‘Then quite suddenly she went into meltdown.’
‘Meltdown?’
‘She started to see things that weren’t there,’ said Mrs Dyson.
Detective Inspector Sloan metaphorically sat up. ‘What sort of things?’
‘Animals, mostly, she told me, and in ever such bright colours. Not,’ Mrs Dyson went on, ‘proper animals, mind you, but weird ones.’
‘Such as?’ prompted Sloan.
‘Such as lizards with horns in funny places, men with tails and eggs with people’s parts sticking out of them. Bats, everywhere, with swords coming out of their mouths, too. She said it was like a painting by someone – I can’t remember the name now – it sounded like Bosh, and if you ask me pure bosh it was. But she said it was the colours that really frightened her.’
‘On the magic mushrooms, was she?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby with an informality that Sloan, officially his mentor, could only deplore. It was no way to begin a delicate line of questioning.
Detective Inspector Sloan might have taken the query amiss, but Mrs Dyson didn’t.
‘That’s what I wondered,’ she said frankly, ‘seeing as how that was how young David from the pub behaved after he’d been on them for a bit. Don’t know exactly what, but David had certainly been on something. He saw elephants.’
‘Sounds to me as if she was away in La-La Land,’ scoffed Detective Constable Crosby.
Sloan had to make a heroic effort not to remind the constable that his opinion hadn’t been sought, deliberately postponing a reproof until they were alone. It was the duty of a police officer to listen, not to pontificate, a fact that it seemed Detective Constable Crosby had not yet grasped.
‘They had to stop young David from the pub from jumping off the belfry tower,’ Mrs Dyson informed them. ‘In fact, I did ask her if she’d been mushrooming. Plenty of ’em in the woods round here – good and bad. Being from the town she wouldn’t have known one from t’other.’
‘And?’ said Sloan.
‘She did say she’d gathered some mushrooms but not lately,’ said Mrs Dyson. ‘I told her next time she had to ask me before she ate any of them.’
‘Goes with the territory,’ said Crosby, who had not long ago been on a course on the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. ‘Jumping off high places, I mean.’
Doris Dyson’s face hardened and she said tonelessly, ‘Then she took a real turn for the worse and we had to send for Dr Browne in a hurry. She’d climbed up on her kitchen roof – it was one of those cat-slide ones that you can get up easily − and she was talking gibberish. The doctor came straight out here and said he’d get her into hospital at Berebury immediately, but before the ambulance arrived, poor Sue had slipped down off the roof, fallen and died. Just like that, poor thing.’