‘What do you mean, Sloan, the solicitors say they can’t find a man?’ Back at the police station in Berebury first thing the next morning, Superintendent Leeyes sounded sceptical. ‘People can’t just disappear these days.’
‘According to what Simon Puckle told us, sir, this man has,’ said Sloan. ‘The solicitors have tried all the usual ways of finding someone – by advertising and so forth – and put a firm of professional enquiry agents on to it with no joy either, except that they discovered that he was made bankrupt quite some time ago.’
‘Ah.’ Bankruptcy ranked high in the superintendent’s personal Newgate calendar. He said, ‘He would have been allowed to keep his car. He could have gone anywhere, then.’
‘He didn’t have one,’ said Sloan. ‘We checked with the vehicle registration people. Not under his own name, anyway.’
‘And the tools of his trade. He could keep them after bankruptcy.’
‘He ran a business,’ said Sloan. He couldn’t think offhand what those tools would have been. The Midas touch, a lack of scruple and a willingness to do his rivals down were all that came immediately to mind. Then perhaps he, a policeman, might be prejudiced as he usually only met the criminal ones.
‘Mind you, Sloan, even if he does come into this Mayton money, his creditors will have a prior claim on it. The preferential ones – the ones that have the first go at it – I imagine will be the Inland Revenue. Crown debt always takes precedence. I understand it’s different in the United States.’
‘Quite so, sir,’ said Sloan, murmuring under his breath, ‘No Crown.’
‘So,’ carried on Leeyes, ‘presumably after that there was nowhere for him to go but downhill.’
‘Well, he was a bit old to start again, sir.’
‘Start again was what all those monks turned out by Henry VIII had to do after he shut all the monasteries down,’ said the superintendent, whose recondite areas of knowledge were a source of constant wonder at the police station. ‘The ones who couldn’t or wouldn’t go away were known as sturdy beggars.’
‘Really, sir?’
‘And you’re actually telling me that even though there’s a mountain of money waiting for this missing person when he’s found, you still can’t put your hand on him?’ He sounded sceptical.
‘So I am given to understand, sir.’ He coughed. ‘Of course, they don’t know quite how much yet. The recipients, I mean.’
‘I should hope not, otherwise they’d be breaking Simon Puckle’s door down.’
‘Quite so, sir.’ He paused and then said, ‘And it would appear that the other four present in his office when they were told about the legacy hadn’t known anything about the inheritance at all until then, either. Or anything about the other people who were there come to that, except Clive Culshaw, who obviously knew about his brother but didn’t mention the fact.’
‘A bit odd, that,’ said Leeyes.
‘Yes, indeed,’ agreed Sloan. ‘And those two who weren’t there presumably didn’t know anything beforehand either.’
‘Two?’
‘The brother was late.’
Superintendent Leeyes ignored this and unerringly put his finger on what mattered. ‘You say one of those who was there at that meeting was Mrs Susan Port, the deceased.’
‘So I understand, sir.’ Sloan looked at his watch. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I must go. We’re due at the hospital for her post-mortem any minute now.’
‘Which, I take, is what’s got Simon Puckle worried?’
‘He is the sole administrator of the Mayton Trust,’ said Sloan with apparent inconsequence. ‘And he tells me that none of the estate can be distributed until all of the beneficiaries are found. It’s this man called Daniel Elland who’s missing and causing the hold-up in the settlement.’
‘Do we know him?’ asked Leeyes.
‘The Police National Computer doesn’t,’ said Sloan cogently.
‘So, he’s not in prison either.’
‘First thing we checked, sir.’
‘He could have died.’
‘They’ve searched the death registers.’
‘And he could have changed his name – there’s no law against that – or just be living under an alias.’
‘Yes, sir. Either. Or both.’
‘First catch your hare, of course,’ said Leeyes.
‘Sorry, sir, I don’t quite …’
‘You catch your hare,’ said Leeyes elliptically, ‘before you start to make hare pie.’
‘Really, sir?’
The superintendent asked, ‘How old is this Daniel Elland supposed to be?’
‘Sixtyish, sir, by now. Nothing’s been heard from him since he was divorced ten years ago. We got his old address from the solicitors, but he was chucked out by his wife at the time. Seems she took him for half of everything.’
The Married Women’s Property Acts passed through Detective Inspector Sloan’s mind as he pondered on the rights and wrongs of this. He thought of Soames Forsyte, too – it didn’t sound as if the equal division of the marital assets after a divorce would have suited him either. He would have to check on that with his wife, this evening. Perhaps the law could only get some things half right. ‘She’s still there, sir, in their old home,’ he said. ‘Elland’s wife, I mean. She’s married again, though.’
‘Sounds to me as if she’s sitting pretty,’ grunted Leeyes. ‘Some women are good at housekeeping. I mean at keeping houses after a divorce,’ he explained as if Sloan hadn’t understood him.
‘She swears she hasn’t heard from him since the divorce and made it quite clear to us that she didn’t want to either.’
‘And where, pray, does this big money come from? They didn’t have lotteries and sweepstakes then, surely?’ Leeyes paused. ‘Though now I come to think of it, there was once a racket called the Numbers’ Game. You took big money from lots of little punters, gave a very small modicum of it back to the lucky winners and kept the rest.’
‘The fortune came from something phony but very successful called Mayton’s Marvellous Mixture, sir.’ They had had big wagers, though, in the old days, thought Sloan, with the fate of an entire estate determined by the turn of a playing card. Men had fought duels for high financial stakes too then, as well as their honour. They must have needed the excitement if there didn’t happen to be a war on at the time; today’s equivalent of extreme sports, perhaps. Or boy-racing. Or even old-boy-racing, a real thorn in Traffic Division’s flesh – men only now able to afford the sports car of their adolescent dreams but beyond handling its fancy acceleration.
‘I knew it would be phony if it was that big,’ said the superintendent cynically. ‘Honest money doesn’t grow on trees.’
‘It was guaranteed to be a miracle cure and sold as such.’
‘Just what I said. Phony.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Leeyes tapped Simon Puckle’s letter. ‘There were six legatees and now there are five. That right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So, Sloan, just make very sure that you keep it that way.’
Dr Hector Smithson Dabbe, Consultant Pathologist at the Berebury District Hospital Trust, hastened to welcome Sloan and Crosby to the mortuary. ‘Come along in, gentlemen,’ he said genially. ‘I understand that you may have an interest in the cause of death of Susan Mary Port here.’ He indicated what looked just like an unclothed shop window mannequin lying on the steel table.
‘That all depends on what you have to tell us, Doctor,’ said Sloan cautiously. ‘It’s much too soon to say otherwise.’ That there was a crime scene to examine only applied if there had been a crime and he didn’t even know that yet.
‘Then, Inspector, to quote Mr Asquith, we’ll just have to “wait and see”, won’t we?’ said the pathologist, who appeared to be in a jovial mood.
‘Your opinion, Doctor, would be a great help,’ said Sloan.
‘That’s as may be,’ responded Dr Dabbe philosophically. ‘The post-mortem laboratory is a place where science and law meet, so sometimes I set people’s minds at rest and sometimes I don’t.’
‘Quite so,’ said Sloan.
‘And sometimes I upset the apple cart, too,’ said Dr Dabbe. He grinned. ‘And more often than not I upset the insurance companies as well.’ He did not sound too upset about this. ‘And some families,’ he added mischievously.
‘I can believe that,’ muttered Detective Constable Crosby, already beginning to edge his way towards the further wall of the mortuary. He didn’t like attending post-mortem examinations.
‘All I can tell you at this stage,’ said the pathologist, ‘is that it’s not often Angus Browne can’t say what someone’s died from.’ The pathologist gave a wolfish grin. ‘So at least this isn’t an open-and-shut case.’
Detective Constable Crosby visibly winced at the similarity with a post-mortem.
The pathologist nodded in his direction. ‘Your trouble I expect, young man, is that you didn’t have a gerbil or, better still, a hamster as a pet when you were a child.’
The constable looked bewildered. ‘No, Doctor, I didn’t.’
‘Pity,’ the pathologist said elliptically. ‘Hamsters and gerbils have short lifespans – they die quite soon, you see, which is a very good thing. It gets children used to death.’
For a moment Sloan toyed with the idea of saying that it was young policemen, newly on duty, not children, who had to get used to death and its ten thousand doors, but he decided against it.
‘And dissection gets everyone used to it,’ said the pathologist. ‘Just as the sainted surgeon William Hunter said, “Anatomy is the basis of surgery, it informs the head, guides the hand, and familiarises the heart to a kind of necessary inhumanity”.’
Detective Inspector Sloan nodded. A necessary inhumanity came into some police work, too. The arrest of a man that left his wife and children homeless and destitute as a consequence was one of the instances that never sat well on his conscience.
Dr Dabbe was still talking. ‘The history of the deceased’s last illness is a bit confusing, gentlemen, to say the least, which is why Angus Browne wasn’t prepared to sign a death certificate. A good man, Browne.’
Detective Inspector Sloan nodded. The general practitioner had a reputation as a canny Scot of a notably careful disposition.
‘Are we ready, Burns?’ Dr Dabbe asked his taciturn assistant. Burns nodded and the pathologist, already gowned and now masked, pulled an overhead microphone down over the steel post-mortem table, adjusted it to the level of his mouth and began his report. ‘Body of a well-nourished female, identified by a next-door neighbour, Mrs Doris Dyson, as Susan Mary Port, age given as …’ He looked round for Burns. ‘Age given as what, Burns?’
‘Sixty-six, Doctor,’ said the mortuary attendant.
‘Sixty-six,’ the pathologist said into microphone. ‘On macroscopic examination the body appears a little but not seriously jaundiced. It is also very dehydrated, consistent with the history of much vomiting and diarrhoea.’ Dr Dabbe peered systematically all over the body on the examination table. ‘Some recent bruising of the right trochanter and a fracture in the right talocrural region …’ He turned away from the microphone and said, ‘That’s an ankle to policemen.’
‘She is said to have slid down on to the ground from a low roof,’ volunteered Sloan, not rising to the translation.
‘That would explain it, Inspector.’ He raised his voice to a hortatory tone and resumed speaking into the microphone. ‘No signs of any other external injuries visible … Ah, hang on, there’s an old appendectomy scar in the right iliac fossa, if you call that an injury – more of a surgical assault if you ask me, if not even wounding with intent – near where what we used to say was McBurney’s point, only they don’t call it that any more. Strictly Latin names now, more’s the pity. You knew where you were with McBurney.’
‘Nothing stays the same,’ said Sloan sententiously. There had been many changes in the police force since he was a constable, too − only some of them for the better.
‘And a healed Colles fracture of the left wrist. Hullo, hullo,’ said the pathologist alertly, examining the arm further, ‘what have we here?’ He was bending over the body now, peering at the tips of the subject’s fingers. ‘A little bit of gangrene in both hands. Now what’s that doing on the deceased, I wonder?’
Since Sloan had no answer to this, he kept silent while the pathologist moved swiftly down the table to stare at the deceased’s feet. ‘And in the toes. Now that is interesting, Sloan. Very interesting.’ He straightened up. ‘Let’s have a look at her back, Burns.’
His assistant moved forward and turned the body over.
‘There’s many a good pathologist caught out by not looking at the deceased’s back, Inspector.’
‘I’m sure, Doctor.’ The police equivalent was failing to look everywhere – but everywhere – for fingerprints at a crime scene. And these days, DNA, too.
‘Gangrene,’ murmured the pathologist absently. ‘I haven’t seen gangrene like this in a month of Sundays. Not common nowadays.’
Detective Inspector Sloan had never seen it at all ever before and wished he hadn’t now. Crosby had moved himself out of the line of vision to a spot where he couldn’t see anything of the body.
‘And I wonder what gangrene’s doing here on her digits, now?’ mused Dr Dabbe.
‘That I couldn’t say,’ said Sloan.
Detective Constable Crosby might not have had the body of the deceased in direct view but nevertheless he winced visibly as he heard the pathologist starting to open the subject’s brain.
Sloan decided that this organ must have passed muster, until the pathologist said that there was some congestion there. ‘Now the thorax, Burns.’
‘Yes, Doctor.’ His assistant moved forward.
‘Congestion of all internal organs,’ reported the pathologist a few minutes later. ‘Burns, there’s quite a lot for the path lab here, bearing in mind that food poisoning is suspected.’ He turned to Sloan and remarked, ‘The Radio Doctor described that sort of pathologist as a man who sits on one stool and examines others.’
‘Really, Doctor?’ murmured Sloan as Burns advanced obediently with a variety of little bottles and collected and labelled specimens wherever the doctor pointed.
‘Gastrointestinal tract shows distinct inflammation.’ The doctor peered at Sloan over the top of his mask. ‘Browne did say that he suspected food poisoning, didn’t he?’
‘At first,’ temporised Sloan.
‘There’s quite some degeneration of the internal layers of the smaller arterioles, too, and there are thrombus formations all over the place. Interesting, Inspector, all very interesting.’
‘Yes, Doctor, I’m sure.’ He cleared his throat and asked, ‘But what does it all mean?’
The pathologist tugged his mask off. ‘I can’t tell the coroner exactly what killed this woman. Not yet, that is. Not until I hear back from the laboratory about those specimens and do a little more research but …’
‘But?’
‘I can tell you one thing, Inspector, something you do need to know. In my opinion, whatever it was this woman died from, the immediate cause was the ingestion of a noxious substance of some sort.’
‘Not natural causes, then,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, opening his notebook and turning over to a new page.