The Calleshire Chronicles Volume Five by Catherine Aird

Author:Catherine Aird
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

Silent through summer, though other birds sing

In their separate ways both Police Superintendent Leeyes and Detective Constable Crosby had some difficulty in coming to terms with Detective Inspector Sloan’s behaviour on the Wednesday morning.

He spent it sitting at his desk in his office.

Detective Constable Crosby was the first to disturb his reverie.

‘Where to this morning, sir?’ he asked from the door, car-keys at the ready.

‘Nowhere,’ said Sloan, ignoring a pile of reports on his desk. ‘Oh, Crosby, you could go and check that nothing more on the whereabouts of Miss Kate Camus has come in.’

‘If she was important, sir, wouldn’t the old lady have had her address?’

‘Perhaps, Crosby. And if wishes were horses, beggars could ride.’

‘Sir?’ He sounded injured.

‘One, we don’t know that Miss Kate Camus remained unmarried – she could be Mrs Anybody for all we know – and two, Mrs Garamond’s address book, if she had one, isn’t at the Grange any more. We checked.’

‘Stolen?’

‘Very probably.’

‘To stop us finding her?’

‘Or to enable others to find her.’

‘First?’

‘That is among my worries, Crosby.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The fact that Miss Camus was of an age to be working during the last war means that she, too, will no longer be young.’

‘If she’s still alive,’ said Crosby.

‘But,’ pronounced Sloan, ‘the fact that if she is alive she will now be old does not mean that she is not entitled to live out her days as she wishes rather than have them truncated by violence as would seem to have happened in the case of Octavia Garamond.’ Sloan waved a report in his hand. ‘Dr Dabbe and his friend Professor Agate seem sure that Mrs Garamond was murdered.’

‘Yes, sir. So am I.’

Sloan looked up, surprised. ‘You are, are you? Why so sure?’

‘Men in pubs don’t ask total strangers to drink with them by way of a celebration at the end of the evening,’ said Crosby simply. ‘It’s not natural. They’d do it when they first came in, wouldn’t they? Stands to reason.’

‘True,’ agreed Sloan. Perhaps they’d make a detective of Crosby one day after all.

‘I reckon, sir, that he slipped Mrs Shirley Doves a Micky Finn so she’d sleep extra well that night.’

‘Then you’d better check on how the description of your stranger with something to celebrate jibes with that of all the other males in the case. Except the doctor. Mrs Doves knew him.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Crosby, jangling the car-keys hopefully. ‘And then?’

‘And then you can come and help me with some paperwork,’ said Sloan, thus ensuring a prolonged absence on Crosby’s part. ‘I’m going to be working on two lists – what we know and what we don’t know.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And one list is a good deal longer than the other …’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘In fact, what we know would go on one side of a piece of paper.’

‘We do know there’s something that someone’s looking quite hard for,’ said Crosby. ‘And small.’

‘But not what it is.’

‘Something pretty valuable, though, sir, or there wouldn’t have been all this fuss.’

‘If by “fuss”, Crosby, you mean murder, then yes, valuable to someone.

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