Little Knell by Catherine Aird

Author:Catherine Aird
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466873513
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter Nine

Loose

‘Don’t touch the mummy, Sloan,’ ordered Superintendent Leeyes equally swiftly; but for different reasons.

‘No, sir.’

‘And notify the coroner before you do anything else at all.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘He isn’t going to catch us out twice.’

‘No, sir.’ He decided it was no use trying to explain to the superintendent that Mr Locombe-Stableford hadn’t actually caught the police out the first time; or that Her Majesty’s Coroner for East Calleshire had patently been manipulated just as the police had been by some person or persons unknown – and both from motives that were still obscure to Sloan.

‘And neither is anyone else, Sloan,’ growled the superintendent. ‘Remember that.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘All the same, it seems to me,’ Leeyes pronounced weightily, ‘that someone somewhere is having a very good try at catching us out a second time.’

Sloan didn’t attempt to deny this. He simply said, ‘We’re going over to see the boyfriend next.’

‘Quite right, Sloan.’ The superintendent was a great believer in the fact that murders were usually family affairs.

‘And,’ went on Sloan, well aware of this, ‘we’re trying to get a lead on a man called Peter Caversham, in Luston.’

‘Don’t forget to see Jill Carter’s employer again, too,’ Leeyes reminded him. ‘The one who was the last person to say he’d seen the girl alive. Nigel Worrow.’

‘I won’t forget,’ promised Sloan. ‘There could well be something funny going on at his place.’ As far as he was concerned, accounts could cover a multitude of sins any day of the week. Even the Calleshire Constabulary’s own income and expenditure accounts listed buns and bribery under one single heading so that no one ever knew exactly how much was really spent on informers. The last person to query this had very swiftly been reminded how Sir John Falstaff had got it in the neck for his ‘but one half-pennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!’ and been sent on his way no wiser.

The superintendent was still speaking. ‘Surely the colonel’s house over at Stable St James isn’t all that far from The Ornum Arms, as the crow flies?’

‘No, sir,’ replied Sloan, ‘it isn’t, but no one saw anything in the pub car park the night the girl went missing. Crosby checked.’

‘Doesn’t mean a thing.’ His superior officer sniffed. ‘Negative evidence in both senses.’

‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Sloan, since this was true.

Leeyes grunted. ‘As I remember too, Sloan, Whimbrel House is a bit on its own, isn’t it?’

‘Quite isolated, sir.’

‘Then they were lucky not to have had squatters in there, seeing it was empty for so long.’

What Sloan wanted to check was that they hadn’t had drug distributors in there. Large, empty and isolated houses were ideal for the calculated division of big consignments of heroin into smaller, marketable amounts; and as he would have been the first to agree with the man from Customs and Excise, this work had to be done somewhere. And safe houses were hard to come by these days. He wondered how they had got to hear about it.

If they had.

‘By the way,

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