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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Sloan and Crosby
- Sprache: Englisch
Much-loved Calleshire research chemist Derek Tridgell has been ill for some time. On his deathbed, his incessant, but unintelligible mutterings culminate in a very clear cry of foul murder. Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby are brought in to investigate whether these are just the ramblings of a man at death's door, or a real confession at the final hour. Their enquiries uncover three tragic deaths that may or may not be linked to the deceased's last words: an accidental drowning at a rival chemist manufacturer; an old friend of Derek's killed in a caving expedition whose body was never retrieved; Derek's son Paul walking away unscathed from a fatal car accident that killed one and left others irrevocably injured. With a tight-lipped Paul knowing more than he's letting on, Sloan and Crosby have their work cut out if they're going to untangle this complex case . . .
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Seitenzahl: 307
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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CATHERINE AIRD
For Andrew, Alex, Angelina and Sebastiano with love
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
‘Is it all right to come in, Mum?’ called out the girl anxiously as she hurried up the flight of stairs towards her parents’ bedroom. She pushed open the door without waiting for an answer, asking through lips unusually dry, ‘How is he?’
‘Much the same, dear,’ answered Marion Tridgell, her mother, quietly. This wasn’t strictly true – the man in the bed was clearly sinking – but his wife didn’t want to put the fact into words. That would have meant recognising the reality of his impending death, and this was something Marion Tridgell wasn’t quite ready to do.
Not just yet.
‘Is he still talking as much as he was?’ enquired Jane Tridgell, reluctantly making her gaze travel in the direction of the familiar figure of her father. He was propped up against the pillows in his bed, his face an unhealthy shade of grey tinged with bright yellow, his skin stretched tautly over the bone structure of his face, and his breathing laboured.
‘He is,’ sighed the man’s wife.
‘Poor old Dad,’ murmured Jane. Until now her conception of dying had been based on Sir Anthony van Dyck’s highly stylised painting, all white lace and jewellery, entitled Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed. Not any more. Now it was Nicolas Poussin’s painting Extreme Unction that flooded into her memory, the distraught wife and daughter at a bedside as the priest anoints the eyes of the dying man in the centre of the picture. She had begun to study art at college and had already started to see the world through its prism. Only now she was beginning to discover that art wasn’t quite the same as life.
‘Ninety to the dozen,’ sighed Marion Tridgell, her own face like her husband’s, quite pale and drawn, too. ‘But I still can’t make out what about.’ She was sitting on a chair placed by his bedside, stroking his face from time to time with the lightest of touches.
As deathbeds went, this one had appeared ordinary enough to everyone around it, everyone, that is, except the patient’s daughter, Jane. She hadn’t encountered death before and everything about it was very new and strange to her and quite unlike what she had read in fiction. There was, though, one feature about it that seemed different to all the dying man’s family, although it was one thing that nobody else seemed to find at all out of the ordinary.
Derek Tridgell just wouldn’t stop talking.
‘But what exactly is he saying?’ asked Jane – and not for the first time. Her father had been gabbling away for days now.
‘And,’ said Marion, herself quite mystified, ‘who on earth is he talking to? That’s what I would like to know. Not me, anyway. That’s for sure.’ There was a quaver in her voice when she added, ‘He doesn’t even know who I am any more.’
‘He’s talking to someone neither of us know anyway,’ said Jane decisively, moving to put her arms round her mother. ‘I’m sure about that, unless, Mum, you know someone called the remainderman.’
Her mother shook her head. ‘I’ve never heard the word before.’
‘Me neither,’ said Jane.
Marion Tridgell, markedly anxious, said in a choked voice, ‘I keep telling Dr Browne about your father’s talking so much but he just says not to worry about it. Some patients do at this stage, he says. It’s the drugs.’
Jane moved swiftly round the room to the other side of her father’s bed and put her ear close to his mouth; today she could only catch – but not understand – the odd word. She was the person to whom this death – any death – didn’t seem ordinary simply because she hadn’t seen any human being so near to the end of his or her life before.
‘I do wish, though, that I knew what he was talking about, let alone who he was talking to,’ said Marion in a strained voice. ‘You listen again, Jane, and see if you can tell me what’s weighing so much on his poor, sick mind. Nobody else seems able to.’
The deathbed had seemed ordinary enough, pedestrian even, to all those professionals visiting the dying man’s bedroom at Legate Lodge in the Calleshire village of Friar’s Flensant who had had some previous acquaintance with death or, rather, with the process of dying. This naturally included the visiting doctor who had tried to convey to the family the difference between postponing death and prolonging the act of dying. Dr Angus Browne had chosen his words to the relatives with a skill honed from long practice.
‘Your husband shouldn’t be in any discomfort now, Mrs Tridgell,’ the doctor had said on his latest visit as he had begun to repack his bag, after noting the patient’s advanced cachexia and giving him a particularly large injection of painkiller, ‘but let me know if he seems to be in any way really distressed.’
If asked – but only if asked – the general practitioner could have gone on to explain the so-called double effect of the drugs he was administering – in that they killed the pain all right but at the risk of killing the patient, too – but he saw no good would come of doing so at this particular stage.
And, more importantly, the family hadn’t asked him.
At the time Marion Tridgell had nodded her total understanding of what he had been telling her. She was one of those coming and going in the bedroom mature enough and experienced enough to have seen death before and importantly knew what to say and what to leave unsaid. She had glanced towards her husband in the bed and said to Dr Browne, ‘Derek’s still talking nonsense, though, Doctor. We can’t understand it at all. He keeps going on about someone called the remainderman. The wrong remainderman, whoever that is.’
‘It happens sometimes,’ said the doctor sagely. ‘The mind’s a funny thing as death approaches and we have no means of knowing what any patient is thinking at this stage. Nobody has.’
‘He keeps on saying the same thing over and over again, though, as if there’s something worrying him,’ persisted Mrs Tridgell.
‘And is there anything you know of that he was particularly worried about?’ asked the doctor, unconsciously using the past tense.
She shook her head. ‘No, Doctor. We can’t imagine what on earth he’s talking about because no one can quite catch his words. It’s only now and then there’s one that makes sense.’
‘It’s probably not too important – I shouldn’t let it worry you,’ said the doctor kindly, snapping his bag closed and taking his leave. ‘Do try to get some sleep yourself if you can.’ The words ‘While you can’, he left unsaid.
The patient’s daughter, Jane, had sniffed when she had been told what the doctor had said. ‘That’s all very well for him to say that but I think whatever it is about, it’s worrying Dad. He sounds to me very upset about something.’
‘But we don’t know what,’ seconded her mother. ‘I have no idea who or what the wrong remainderman is but Dad’s certainly talking to someone.’
‘Someone who isn’t here,’ pointed out Jane astringently.
‘Paul, you mean?’ said Marion, adjusting her husband’s oxygen mask a little as she spoke. Paul was Jane’s brother, and the son of the increasingly breathless man on the bed.
‘Yes.’
Marion shook her head. ‘No, I’m sure it’s not Paul he’s talking to.’
‘So where exactly has my dear brother got to now?’ Jane asked impatiently.
‘All I know is that he’s well on his way to the airport. He rang about an hour ago.’
‘Where from this time?’
‘He’s still in Brazil,’ replied Marion, defensively. Her son, a dropout from university and two jobs, was something of a nomad, always moving to one country after another in search of a better life, which he still hadn’t yet found.
‘He couldn’t be much further away when he’s wanted, could he?’
‘I’ve told you, dear, that he’s been keeping in touch on his mobile whenever he could get a signal,’ said Marion. ‘You know what he’s like.’
‘And how,’ said Paul’s younger sister unsympathetically.
‘He says he’s not far from the nearest airport now, wherever that is. Rio de Janeiro, I think. He’s promised he’ll get there as soon as he possibly can and catch the first plane out.’
Jane was tempted to ask if Paul had been stuck up a creek without a paddle again since this had literally once happened to him on a tributary of the River Amazon but she didn’t. Instead she murmured something about hoping that he would get here in time. What she was actually thinking was that a banshee would have come in handy. A female Irish spirit giving a shriek just before a death in the family would have been very useful at this point.
‘I hope he does, too,’ said Paul’s mother sincerely, ‘for his sake as well as ours, but Dr Browne says we’ve just got to let nature take its course now.’
‘Perhaps Dad’s ramblings will mean something to Paul when he gets here,’ suggested Jane doubtfully.
‘I would like to hope so because they certainly don’t mean anything to me and it would help,’ said Marion, very near to tears now. She lifted her head. ‘Listen, Dad’s started talking again. You see if you can understand what he’s saying.’
Jane bent down over the bed and put her ear to the patient’s mouth, listening intently. After a while she reported, ‘I think that what he keeps on saying is that he’s coming as soon as he can. And that someone’s got to wait for him.’
‘But coming where?’ asked the other woman.
‘Search me. I don’t know. All I can say is that it seems very odd to me,’ murmured Jane, who thought she could guess where it was her dying father meant he was coming to but she didn’t like to say.
The next world.
But where in the next world Jane did not know. Heaven and Hell were just abstract concepts in her philosophy – however imaginatively the artists she was studying depicted them. Her father, although something of an old-fashioned churchman, had never been one to talk about his beliefs to her. And, she thought ruefully, it was too late now to explore the subject.
Suddenly the sick man became more audible and announced quite clearly again to some unknown person, ‘I’m coming. I’m nearly there now.’
Before the mother and daughter could do more than exchange puzzled glances, two young carers came into the bedroom. The deathbed had seemed quite ordinary to them, practised as they were at attending them. They had come and gone to the house throughout the last few weeks but then they had treated everyone – including the patient – with a cheerful over-familiarity that the family found irksome and intrusive but were too polite and preoccupied to remonstrate about with them.
That these girls were more sensitive than they were given credit for had become apparent as Derek Tridgell had inched his way towards his necessary end. Since then and as time went on, they had increasingly tempered their attempts to amuse the patient. Weeks had passed now since they had last gone in for the gallows humour of such remarks to him as ‘If you wake up dead, I’ll kill you.’ It had amused the patient greatly then – but that was then, not now. And today as swiftly as they had come, they were gone, leaving their patient comfortable and the bedclothes tidy.
There had been other visitors, too, but only at the beginning of his illness. Preoccupied as she was, Marion had registered the different approaches they had made to the ill man. Jonathon Sharp, the head of the firm where the patient worked, Berebury Pharmaceuticals, had called more than once, delivered a bit of harmless shop talk and gone on his way. At that stage Derek Tridgell had been quite happy to talk.
‘Anything more on that ghastly accident at Luston Chemicals, Jonathon?’ he had asked on one of his visits.
‘Nothing definite,’ said his boss.
Tridgell shuddered. ‘I’m sure that Michael Linane was the man behind all our troubles with Ameliorite, seeing as he is – was – their head of sales.’
‘So am I, although I don’t know that we could ever prove it.’ Sharp nodded in tacit agreement. ‘Difficult thing to try to do anyway now in view of what happened and his chairman isn’t going to help us one little bit.’
‘Ralph Iddon’s only interested in Luston Chemicals – I’ve said that all along.’ Tridgell waved a thin, wasted, hand. ‘It might just have saved our bacon, though, that man Linane dying when he did.’
‘I sure I hope that it has,’ said the chairman firmly, ‘although I wouldn’t wish dying like that on my worst enemy.’
‘I wonder what will happen now,’ mused Tridgell, who didn’t want to talk about modes of dying just then.
‘I think it’s too soon to say,’ the chairman hedged. ‘All the same, I wish we hadn’t gone over there that particular day. Apart from anything else, it was a complete waste of time.’ Like all businessmen, Jonathon Sharp cherished his time as if it was his working capital, which perhaps it was. ‘And,’ he snorted, ‘they weren’t going to play fair with their precious product Mendaner whatever we offered. I’m sure about that.’
‘Damn silly name for a drug,’ pronounced Derek Tridgell. ‘It sounds like one of those funny bicycles that they used to call a Neracar. Or was it a tricycle?’
‘I’m afraid time alone will tell what will happen in the end,’ said the chairman, some of whose skill lay in taking the long view and the rest in ignoring irrelevances.
Derek had smiled weakly at that and said, ‘And I’ll never know, will I?’
Or will I? He had asked himself when his boss had gone but, unsurprisingly, there came no answer.
His old friend and caving companion, Simon Thornycroft, had come to see him too. ‘Amelia sent her best wishes,’ Simon said, ‘and if there’s anything either of us can do, you know you only have to say.’
Derek Tridgell had nodded then, this action sometimes being easier than talking with a mouth made increasingly dry by analgesics.
‘The whole club’s thinking of you,’ Thornycroft went on.
Tridgell tried to moisten his lips. ‘What did the lads try at the weekend?’
‘The Hawecroft Chimney.’
‘Get anywhere?’
Simon Thornycroft grimaced. ‘Only about halfway up. It’s just a bit too wide for comfort and we haven’t any ladders long enough. Not yet, anyway.’
The ill man raised an enfeebled hand and said in a weak voice, ‘You’ll get to the top one day, Simon. Not in my time, though.’
His visitor, embarrassed, ignored this last remark and said instead, ‘The opening must be grassed over. I reckon we’ll only find it when a cow falls through the turf and lets in a bit of light.’
‘Good luck, anyway,’ Tridgell managed to say through his drug-dried lips.
There was an awkward silence between the two men and then Simon Thornycroft coughed and said hesitantly, ‘The club is thinking of naming that new ghyll we’ve found after you, old man.’
‘Very kind of them,’ said Derek, ‘but any memorial ought to be to poor Edmund Leaton. You know that.’
A shadow passed over the other man’s face. He winced as he said, ‘It’s Amelia who doesn’t want that. Not me. She can’t bear to think of his death. Not even now.’
Just then the patient’s wife, Marion, appeared at the bedroom door, bringing the visit to an end. It was impossible to tell whether the patient was pleased or not about this. Marion thought her husband was now beyond caring about anything in this world but nevertheless she thanked Simon Thornycroft warmly as he went upon his way.
The vicar’s approach had been tentative and tactful. ‘I thought I’d just look in and see how things were,’ said the Reverend Mr Derek Tompkinson. Friar’s Flensant was one of the half a dozen small parishes in his care in this rural part of the Calleshire diocese and he was a conscientious man.
‘Going south,’ said Derek. ‘And quite quickly now.’
The vicar didn’t attempt to deny this. ‘But you’re not in pain, I hope.’
‘Not yet,’ said the patient grimly.
‘I shouldn’t worry too much about that if I were you. The doctors have a lot of shots their lockers these days.’
‘So they keep telling me,’ said the patient.
The clergyman sat in companionable silence beside his parishioner until it was broken – as he had known it would be – by Derek Tridgell. ‘I want to be buried,’ he said suddenly. ‘Not cremated.’
‘Right.’
‘And I’d like a muffled peal of bells at the funeral.’
‘I won’t forget,’ the vicar promised.
Derek stirred. ‘And proper hymns. No need for the choir, though.’
The other man smiled. The church choir wasn’t what it had been. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’
‘What I really want, though, now, Vicar, between you and me and the gatepost is for someone to – what did that poet fellow say? “Let me go”.’
‘He will, I promise you.’ The vicar rose, and touching the man’s shoulder lightly in passing, said, ‘God bless you.’
There had been no visitors admitted to the sickroom for several days now and Marion was glad. She didn’t have to be polite and welcoming any more. Or preternaturally self-controlled.
Abruptly now the attention of both Derek Tridgell’s wife and daughter was again caught by a voice coming from the bed. ‘Dammit, dammit, dammit,’ the dying man said loudly and clearly. ‘For God’s sake, dammit.’
Jane ventured a wry grimace. ‘I must say that’s not like Dad. He can usually manage something a bit stronger than dammit.’
‘He’s not himself,’ said Marion unnecessarily.
Her daughter managed a faint smile. ‘You can say that again, Mum.’
The man in the bed suddenly became increasingly agitated, his voice taking on an urgent, pleading note. Now Derek Tridgell was staring, his eyes unfocused, into the distance. He said, ‘I’m coming, man. Wait for me. I’m on my way.’
‘It happens, Mrs Tridgell.’ The community nurse, older and more experienced than the care assistants, had been a frequent visitor to the bedroom, and had been reassuring about the patient’s continual talking. ‘You mustn’t let it worry you.’
The deathbed had seemed ordinary enough to the visiting nurse, too, she having seen it all before, but she was old enough now to have begun to think about her own end. A single woman, she knew she wasn’t going to be surrounded by any genuinely grieving relatives at hers. The Tridgell family would have been very surprised to learn that in some ways she envied them. There would be no loving kindness evident at her solitary demise. Professional to the last, though, she had always done what she had come to do and then left, displacing all thoughts about herself as she did so by concentrating instead on her next visit.
Derek lay quiet and apparently calm for so long after the carers had gone that day that Jane said, ‘What about a cup of tea, Mum?’
‘I’d love one, dear.’
‘And something to eat?’
‘I don’t think I could manage anything just now, thank you. I’m not hungry.’
‘I’ll be back in a jiffy,’ she promised. When she came back with a pot of tea on a tray she said, ‘I cleared the answerphone while I was waiting for the kettle, Mum.’
‘Thank you, dear.’ Marion had only answered the telephone when it had been her son on the line, there being no one else to whom she had wanted to speak at this time.
‘Kate Booth sent good wishes from all the cavers, so did someone from the firm – I’ve forgotten who – Jonathon himself, I think it might have been but his voice wasn’t very clear – and Amelia Thornycroft sent her love and said she and Simon were thinking of us and if there was anything at all we wanted we were to say.’
‘That was nice of them,’ said her mother absently, not really listening.
‘And,’ here Jane’s voice quavered a little, ‘the man from Barnett’s said that lawnmower’s been serviced and is ready to be picked up.’ The lawns at Legate Lodge had been Derek Tridgell’s pride and joy, always carefully trimmed, but they were already showing signs of neglect. Jane was surprised to discover how much she minded about this.
‘Paul can see to cutting the grass when he gets back,’ said Marion absently.
Suppressing her immediate response that chance would a fine thing, Paul having to her certain knowledge never having handled the lawnmower in his life, Jane set about pouring the tea. It was then that a change came over her father. He suddenly sat bolt upright in the bed and announced in a loud and clear voice, ‘He did it, you know.’
‘Did what, dear?’ asked Marion, investing her words with a great tenderness that she hoped would get through to her dying husband.
‘Killed him, of course,’ announced Derek Tridgell loudly, giving a shuddering gasp and then falling back on his pillows, quite dead.
CHAPTER TWO
‘It’s not exactly a great deal to go on, sir, is it?’ ventured Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘Something a dying man is said to have cried out at the moment of death.’
‘But whichever way you look at it, Sloan,’ pronounced Superintendent Leeyes grandly, ‘what the deceased did say just might be a genuine reference to a killing and therefore we can’t ignore it.’
‘No, sir. Of course not, sir.’
‘However much we might like to,’ added the superintendent more realistically. ‘Remember, a man’s last words are considered to be the truth.’
The two policemen were at the headquarters of ‘F’ Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary. These were in the market town of Berebury where Detective Inspector Christopher Dennis Sloan, who was known as ‘Seedy’ to his family and friends, was head of the force’s tiny Criminal Investigation Department. Such crime as there was in the eastern half of the county – save on the highway – usually ended up on his desk.
‘I don’t think, sir, that we’ve got any unsolved murders on our patch,’ said Sloan, adding cautiously, ‘that is, of course, any ones that we actually know about.’
‘That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any at all,’ countered Leeyes briskly. ‘There could be any number of accidents and suicides that weren’t what they were said to be.’
‘On the other hand, sir, even if we had some on the books, so to speak, and were able to solve one of them, the court couldn’t very well convict on the spoken evidence of the dead man since he can’t be cross-questioned. You can’t even libel the dead,’ he added irrelevantly, a little bit of common law coming back to him.
‘We could clear up a case, Sloan. That would be good,’ said Leeyes.
‘Naturally, sir,’ said Sloan smoothly, ignoring this volte-face on the part of the superintendent who usually had no time for criminal statistics.
Or, come to that, the past.
‘It would go down well,’ mused Leeyes, his own track record always a matter of great importance to him. ‘Clearing up an old case, I mean. Quite the done thing these days, DNA being what it is.’
‘Quite so, sir,’ Sloan said, trying to recollect who it was in history whose body had been dug up in order to be hanged by revisionists, a later mob wanting its pound of flesh. Had it been the late Oliver Cromwell, dead of disease, who had been so treated for past misdemeanours reconsidered by history? He couldn’t remember. ‘That is, if the person who committed the crime is still alive and we are able to get a conviction without the testimony of the deceased, to say nothing of any DNA.’
‘Even so,’ agreed the superintendent after some little thought, ‘I don’t see how we could very well have a trial with a dead witness.’
‘Quite, sir,’ said Sloan, although he knew there were benighted regimes where this did happen. But then he knew, too, that once upon a time animals had been tried in this country for the murder of other animals: he reminded himself that therefore it didn’t do to be patronising of other nations – or of what had happened in the past either.
‘Even though we would know where to find the accuser,’ said the superintendent, heavily humorous. ‘He’ll be in the cemetery by then.’
‘Presumably there hasn’t been time for him to have been buried yet?’ said Sloan. He hoped that it was interment the family of the late Derek Tridgell were indeed planning. The superintendent didn’t like cremations, preferring the remains to be available to be seen both now and in the future should it ever become necessary.
The superintendent shook his head. ‘No, not yet, Sloan, although apparently the doctor is quite prepared to issue a death certificate for the deceased since there is no doubt about the cause of his death – I’m told it was pancreatic cancer. I understand the family are awaiting the return of the deceased’s son from South America before they start to arrange the funeral.’
‘The only doubt, then, sir, seems to be about the death which the deceased declared at the point of his own demise that someone else, unnamed, had brought about,’ sighed Sloan, as he tried to encapsulate the problem as it affected the police and leaving aside the intriguing question of whether murderers could now be buried in consecrated ground. ‘I suppose the late Derek Tridgell didn’t by any chance say how this unknown someone had killed someone else equally unknown?’
‘No, all that the two women said he did talk about was somebody called the remainderman. That word mean anything to you, Sloan?’
‘No, sir.’ He took a deep breath and, getting back to the matter in hand, pointed out carefully, ‘So, sir, all we can say for certain is that it was a very nearly dead man talking.’
He had decided against discussing with his superior officer exactly what constituted a killing since all the legal eagles he knew were prepared to debate the definition ad infinitum. Besides which, in his experience, every motorist he had ever known who had been at the wheel in a fatal accident – and that was a killing if ever there was one – found it difficult to forget for the rest of their lives, and that was whether guilty or not, and whether convicted or not.
‘It’s what the man said that’s important, Sloan,’ the superintendent reminded him reproachfully, ‘and precisely when he said it.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Sloan, making a mental note to look up the validity of deathbed confessions. He thought he remembered that that which was spoken in imminent expectation of death by the deceased came into a category all of its own in criminal law. He would have to think about this.
The superintendent adjusted the message sheet on his desk in front of him and read it out aloud. ‘The man’s wife – his widow now, of course – and his daughter were both present in the room at the time and heard him quite clearly say someone had killed someone.’
‘But not who or how?’ asked Sloan hopefully, although two witnesses were always better than one, unless their testimony differed.
Or, perhaps, even if it did.
Perhaps especially, then.
‘I’m afraid not, Sloan. They say that he then fell back on the bed without speaking again and was confirmed as dead very soon after by their general practitioner.’
‘Is that all the evidence we have, sir? If I may say so, it doesn’t seem to amount to a great deal.’
‘And I’m afraid they said he’d been talking nonsense for quite a while before he died,’ said Leeyes, glancing down again at a message sheet on his desk.
‘So what we don’t know, I take it, sir,’ said Sloan, ‘is whether this statement was nonsense, too.’
‘Exactly, Sloan.’
‘Then I’d better try and find out what the patient had been prescribed in the way of medication first,’ said Sloan. No policeman needed to be reminded of what some drugs did to the human mind. ‘And get some witness statements.’
‘Witness statements, Sloan,’ barked the superintendent severely, ‘which I must remind you that we can’t ignore and mustn’t put on the back-burner.’
‘Of course not, sir,’ said Sloan virtuously. He wasn’t sure whether or not in this instance witness statements would come into the category of circumstantial evidence. It was too soon to say.
‘And, Sloan,’ went on the superintendent, ‘don’t forget that the two women’s accounts of what was said agree in every particular. So far,’ he added lugubriously.
Sloan suppressed an automatic rejoinder that this could also mean collusion: or that mother and daughter might have had an agenda all of their own. Instead he asked if the two women had also both agreed to the police being told about the dying man’s last words or just one of them had insisted on it. ‘Since if they hadn’t, sir, we wouldn’t have known anything about what had been said, would we?’
Sloan thought that fact was interesting in itself and tucked it away in the back of his mind.
‘I couldn’t begin to say about that, Sloan.’ Leeyes pushed a piece of paper towards him. ‘All we’ve got to go on so far is the message we had from the daughter.’
‘I still wonder why they told us?’ mused Detective Inspector Sloan aloud, reaching for his notebook. ‘I’d better have the wife’s name and address.’
‘Marion Tridgell, of Legate Lodge, High Street, Friar’s Flensant.’
‘And the daughter’s?’
‘Jane, of that ilk and address,’ said the superintendent. ‘She’s an art student,’ he added in a tone of voice that could only be called condemnatory.
‘Right, sir. I’ll get on to them straightaway.’ There was other work on his desk awaiting his attention – an outbreak of more petty theft in Cullingoak and a case of serious fraud in Almstone to say nothing of what looked suspiciously like a Ponzi scheme at Pelling – but they would have to wait until he had reported back to the superintendent. He knew that.
‘And it would be a great help,’ added Leeyes, heavily sarcastic, ‘if you would be so kind as to take Detective Constable Crosby out to Friar’s Flensant with you and therefore out of my sight.’
‘Sir?’ said Sloan. Detective Constable Crosby, the most jejune recruit to the division, was not an asset in any investigation but he was usually kept at a safe distance from the superintendent.
‘He tore a strip off a man who was in a car using my reserved parking place at the station yesterday …’ said Leeyes.
‘But, sir …’ began Sloan, since the superintendent’s reserved parking place at the police station was the nearest thing to hallowed ground that he knew.
‘But the man in the car was doing it by prior arrangement with me, seeing that he was one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary,’ snarled Superintendent Leeyes.
A loud clatter at the front door of Legate Lodge at Friar’s Flensant heralded Paul Tridgell’s arrival home. He stepped in through the doorway at the same time as letting his rucksack slip off his shoulders with audible relief. It landed with a noisy bump on the floor of the hall.
Marion Tridgell hurried forward and greeted him with a little hug of welcome. He put his arms round his mother’s shoulders and squeezed them gently. He was dishevelled from lack of sleep and badly in need of a shave. ‘Sorry to be too late, Mum,’ he said. ‘I did try.’
‘I know you did, dear.’ Marion gave her son another hug, ‘but South America’s a long way away. I know that.’
‘And I was up country, which didn’t help.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Besides, I hadn’t realised poor old Dad was quite so ill.’
‘I’m not sure that any of us did to begin with,’ said his mother sadly. ‘I don’t think I quite took in what the doctor was telling me at the time. One doesn’t, you know. Anyway, I know Dad would have quite understood.’
Paul looked back over his shoulder as there was a knock at the front door behind him. ‘Oh, I forgot. Mum, can you rustle up the taxi fare? I haven’t got any English money on me.’
As his mother went to get her handbag, he called after her, ‘Where’s Jane?’
‘Making tea.’ She gave a shaky laugh as she came back, purse in hand. ‘Drink tea – that’s all either of us seem to have been able to do since – well, you know.’ Mother and son nodded their complete mutual understanding: it didn’t need speech.
‘I know. I’m not hungry either,’ he said, giving a great stretch. ‘What I really need now is a bath and a shave. Let me pay the driver and then I’ll go and give Jane a hand with the tray.’
After paying the taxi driver, Paul made his way into the kitchen and greeted his sister. ‘Hi, Jane, I’m back at last.’
‘Hi,’ she said, notably low-key and busying herself over the kettle.
‘Sorry and all that – about not being here.’
Jane passed a hand over tired eyes. ‘Honestly, Paul, I don’t think it would have made any difference if you had been so I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you. Dad didn’t even know Mum at the end, let alone me. It was awful.’
‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘Oh, Paul,’ she sighed. ‘Poor Dad. You mightn’t even have recognised him if you had got back in time. I couldn’t believe that he could have looked as wizened and old as he did when he died. He was yellow all over, too.’
‘But he wasn’t old, was he? I mean not really old. And he was so fit and active, too.’
‘Squash and speleology,’ she said. ‘That’s what he always said kept him fit. Although Dr Browne did say we should remember that being fit and being healthy were two very different things.’
‘Good thinking.’ He went on awkwardly, ‘You know I wouldn’t have stayed away for so long if he’d been really old. You know that. Or if I’d known how very ill he was. Mum didn’t tell me, not properly, until last week that he was actually dying. You know what she’s like.’
She nodded. ‘I know she didn’t want to worry you. But that wasn’t it.’
‘No?’
‘No. The worst part was that towards the end Dad just wouldn’t stop talking.’
‘What on earth about?’ Her brother stared at her and listened to her account of their father’s last days. Then he said with elaborate casualness, ‘Was he talking about anything particular? While he still could, I mean.’
‘He talked all the time, although we weren’t sure what it was all about,’ she said. ‘That was what was so funny. Then he started to go on about someone called the remainderman being wrong, if you know what on earth that means.’
Paul Tridgell wrinkled his nose. In one of his many attempts to find a career which he liked, let alone one to which he was suited, Paul had briefly worked in a bank. ‘If I remember rightly, the remainderman’s the person who gets the dibs in the end – however many other people have had their hands on it along the way. To put it another way: in the long run, the survivor wins.’
‘The last man standing, I suppose you might call it,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘Or he who laughs last laughs longest,’ said her brother, more cynically.
‘So who could the wrong remainderman be?’
‘Search me.’ He gave a prodigious yawn. ‘Actually, it’s a bit like a tontine used to be but they’re not legal any more. Too many people got knocked off in the process.’
‘What he was saying didn’t mean a thing to me or Mum,’ she said, putting a milk jug on a tray, adding, ‘Neither does a tontine for that matter.’
‘Here, I’ll carry that,’ he said, moving forward. ‘Did he say anything really important?’
She lifted her head at that. ‘What do you mean exactly?’
