‘Ah, Sloan, come in.’ Superintendent Leeyes laid his hat upside down on the top of the filing cabinet in the corner of his office and tossed his gloves into it. Then he flopped down into a chair at his desk and waved an arm at Sloan to sit down as well. ‘They told me that you wanted to see me as soon as I got back this morning. So?’
‘Yes, sir,’ began Sloan. ‘It’s about the post-mortem examination on Susan Mary Port.’
‘The mayor’s a real old windbag,’ grumbled Leeyes, pushing a pile of papers on his desk to one side.
‘Yes, sir, so I’ve heard,’ said Sloan, tugging his notebook out of his pocket and opening it out.
‘And as for the town clerk, or the chief executive as he likes to be called these days,’ snorted the superintendent sarcastically, ‘all he wants is his precious town cleared of anyone sleeping rough in it. He kept on talking about reclaiming the streets as if it was some sort of a mantra.’
Sloan decided against saying that it had been a famous slogan somewhere once.
‘The mayor insists that the corporation underground car park be properly policed, too,’ snorted Leeyes. ‘I’m not surprised that the homeless are sleeping down there since it’s the warmest place in town to spend the night in if you’re sleeping rough in winter. They will congregate there as well as behind the Berebury supermarket – you know, near St Peter’s Church in Water Lane.’
‘Yes, sir, now I’ve just come back from the—’
‘As if we’ve got the men and the time to do any such thing, Sloan.’
‘No, sir, of course not.’ Sloan opened his notebook at the new page, gave a preliminary cough and began again. ‘As instructed, sir, I duly attended the post-mortem conducted by Dr H. S. Dabbe this morning on Susan Mary Port.’
‘But what has really upset our worthy councillors, Sloan,’ continued the superintendent, still mentally in the mayor’s parlour, ‘are the couple of alkies living on the roundabout on the West Polsby road. They need to get on with evicting them.’
‘Living?’ echoed Sloan, in spite of himself.
‘They’ve pitched a tent on the grass and insist they’re quite happy staying there, thank you very much. They’ve even had the nerve to say that they’ve quite got used to the traffic noise by now and they don’t have any difficult neighbours either.’
‘I should hope not, sir.’ The detective inspector could see that the site would be very handy for the supermarkets and their shelves of cheap drinks but kept his own counsel on the matter. ‘It was Mrs Port’s sudden death at Bishop’s Marbourne, sir, if you remember,’ he said, ‘that so interested Simon Puckle.’
‘I told them,’ said Leeyes, ignoring this, ‘that Highways should get a warrant for trespass. After all, it’s their roundabout. A court order should do the trick, all right.’
‘Quite so, sir.’ The County Highways surveyor was an old enemy of Superintendent Leeyes. His unsporting response to all requests and suggestions from the superintendent could best be described as ‘extended bureaucratic’.
‘And you won’t believe what that man, Holness, from the homeless charity wants now. I ask you, a shooting gallery.’ He sniffed. ‘We had to explain to the mayor that it meant somewhere quiet and private to shoot drugs not stuffed toys. The mayor wasn’t happy.’
‘No, sir, I’m sure.’ Sloan plodded on, ‘Dr Dabbe has found that the deceased had died as the consequence of ingesting a noxious substance.’
‘If the pathologist means poison why doesn’t he say so?’ demanded Leeyes truculently, his full attention engaged at last.
Sloan knitted his eyebrows. ‘Perhaps, sir,’ he suggested, ‘it’s because the word “poisoning” automatically implies an illegal action.’
‘And ingestion doesn’t?’
‘It can do but it doesn’t have to. The deceased could have swallowed a noxious substance by accident. We don’t know yet.’ He wanted to say that you needed malice aforethought for the other sort of poisoning, but the superintendent had no time for the antiquarian language of the past.
‘The food that you eat,’ said Leeyes sententiously, ‘can also be poisonous if you eat too much of it.’
‘Quite so, sir,’ said Sloan, averting his eyes from his superior officer’s incipient paunch. ‘In fact, as it happens that was exactly the point the pathologist made. Dr Dabbe would only say that his post-mortem findings were suggestive of ergot poisoning – I think that was because of the gangrene.’
‘That’s a first,’ observed the superintendent.
‘Not exactly, sir,’ said Sloan. He chose his words with care, since contradicting his superior never went down well. ‘Dr Dabbe said there was a famous outbreak in France in 1951.’ Actually, any mention of the French didn’t go down well either, since Superintendent Leeyes was inclined to blame them for everything that had gone wrong since the Norman Invasion. He hurried on before Napoleon’s name cropped up. ‘He said that ergot poisoning used to be known as St Anthony’s Fire.’
‘And from where might I ask, Sloan, would anyone get ergot that wasn’t in France?’
Sloan explained what he’d learnt, then looked down at his notebook. ‘Of course, we don’t actually know yet if it was from rye or, if so, how it got into the deceased’s system – or even if it actually did.’
‘Splitting hairs,’ pronounced Leeyes flatly. ‘Just like lawyers do.’
‘It could have just been bad luck, sir, like eating the wrong end of a sausage.’
‘It’s more likely that the pathologist doesn’t really know himself exactly which poison,’ said Leeyes uncharitably, ‘and isn’t saying so.’
Detective Inspector Sloan saw fit to ignore this since he intended to talk to the police laboratory himself as soon as he could. Instead he swept on. ‘I’ve been back to Simon Puckle and he says he’s quite sure that the deceased didn’t have any immediate family. Her husband had predeceased her many years ago and there had been no children. Apparently, his firm – Puckles, that is – had gone into her antecedents quite carefully in the course of planning to wind up this Mayton Trust.’
‘Then you’ll just have to do all the groundwork yourself, Sloan, won’t you? And if you ask me, Sloan, you should follow the money. First principle of policing. And don’t forget that cash cows, even potential ones, are an endangered species. So get out there and check on the other legatees before anything happens to them, too.’
‘Yes, sir, of course, sir.’ He cleared his throat and went on, ‘Simon Puckle says as far as he had been able to establish, Mrs Port was a retired civil servant with an impeccable record.’
‘I’ve met some of them in my day,’ said Leeyes. ‘Dangerous people.’
‘Civil servants?’
‘No, Sloan, people with impeccable records. They need watching.’
‘Sir?’
‘It’s not natural, is it? Think Dennis Nilsen.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Sloan smoothed down the page in his notebook and said, ‘We’re going to need access to the deceased’s house next. Now that I know it’s possibly a case of poisoning, however brought about, I’m arranging for scenes of crime to give it a good going-over soonest while forensics get on with the lab work. Then I’ll just check that all those other people who saw her at the solicitors don’t know anything more about her than Simon Puckle thought.’
‘Let’s hope nobody’s been in the house first and tidied it up,’ said Leeyes pessimistically.
‘PC York will know,’ said Sloan. It would have been Ted York who, as coroner’s officer, would have arranged for Mrs Port’s body to be conveyed to the mortuary. ‘Bound to.’
PC Edward York, when consulted on the matter, agreed that he had indeed locked up the house at Bishop’s Marbourne after supervising the removal of Mrs Port’s body to the mortuary.
‘And, Seedy, I checked with the neighbour that there weren’t any animals to be taken care of.’
‘The dog had been rehomed,’ said Sloan absently. ‘Anything out of the ordinary about the house, Ted?’ he asked. ‘No signs of disorder, panic and so forth? Or intruders?’
‘It was all a little bit untidy, like you’d find when someone’s been ill for a while, but that’s all. I did give it a bit of a going-over since food poisoning had been mentioned, but I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary in the kitchen before I locked up. I looked in her medicine cabinet in the bathroom and there was nothing there except a bottle of tablets from the hospital labelled “Take two every four hours for pain” and the usual home remedies – for indigestion, mostly. I’ve seen worse in my time, I can tell you.’
‘I’ll bet you have. Tell me, did you look for the name and address of any next of kin?’
‘I sure did. It was in her bureau, all written out nicely, her having been a civil servant and all that.’
‘Find anything?’
‘You’re going to like this, Seedy.’
‘Go on.’
‘A godson called Terry Galloway domiciled in Australia, who,’ he grimaced, ‘is said from his postcard to her to be presently backpacking his way across Europe to England.’
‘Mobile phone?’
‘Not responding to calls.’
‘Him or it?’
‘It,’ said the coroner’s officer pithily. ‘He must be out of range of any mast. Looks as if he was last heard from in that postcard from India. I found that in her bureau, too.’
‘And I daresay that wasn’t sent yesterday,’ said Sloan with some experience of holiday postcards arriving long after the traveller’s return.
‘Over a month ago, Seedy.’
‘You can travel a long way in a month, Ted.’
‘Sure, you can. But – wait for it, Seedy – there was the address of the deceased’s own solicitors, a small family firm in south London, in the bureau, too.’
‘That’s a help.’
‘And they’ve got her will.’ He grinned. ‘Guess what?’
‘Don’t say everything goes to her godson?’
‘Got it in one, Seedy. Only son of her oldest and dearest friend, it says in the will.’
‘Therefore,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, the cogs of his mind working slowly and surely, ‘it would naturally be very interesting to know if the deceased had told her godson about the potential inheritance before he left Australia for England.’
‘It would indeed,’ said the coroner’s officer.
‘And if she had done so,’ went on Sloan, still choosing his words with care, ‘it would also be very interesting to know whether he had left for England immediately after learning that fact.’
‘It would. Very,’ agreed York. ‘Of course, on the other hand, there’s always a chance that the godson doesn’t know yet that she’d come into a basketful of readies or perhaps even that she’s dead.’
‘Well, I for one very much hope that he doesn’t,’ said Sloan, snapping his notebook shut. ‘For obvious reasons.’ He got up to go. ‘I’ll ask the neighbour to keep an eye open for a visitor, although she always does, anyway.’
‘Tell our local man out there to look out for a stranger,’ added the other policeman.
‘That too,’ said Sloan, taking his leave.