Sky High (8 page)

‘But he did get there, didn’t he,’ said Tim.

‘He was an acting Lieutenant-General when he commanded at Cologne.’

‘And how old? Thirty?’

‘Thirty-one.’

‘On top of the world.’

‘So you might think,’ said Liz. ‘He’d just been offered a job in England, too. Commandant of the newly-opened School of Chemical Warfare.’

‘Was it a good job?’

‘It was a job. Even by 1920 any job was a good job. It carried the acting rank of Brigadier.’

‘I see,’ said Tim. ‘But as he happened to die a Lieutenant-General, you got a very much higher pension.’

‘That’s right,’ said Liz.

‘Well, I don’t believe it,’ said Tim. He suddenly looked very red-faced, determined and young.

‘Don’t believe what?’

‘What you’re trying to tell me. That he might have killed himself because he saw the slump coming. No one would do that, at thirty-one, for himself, or anyone else.’

Liz looked calmly at her son for a moment and said, ‘I don’t really know that I believe it myself. But Bill wasn’t a straightforward character. He was a terrific soldier. People who ought to know say that if he had lived he must have been at least an Army Commander in this war. He might even have run the whole show. Everyone who knew him trusted him, but at the heart of it all, he wasn’t quite sure of himself. Bob understood him as well as anyone. You should ask him about it sometime. And another thing you’ve got to remember. After a long war a lot of people who have fought in it – really fought, I mean – are queer for a long time. Often it doesn’t show, but it’s there, and you’ve got to make allowances for it.’

‘You may be right,’ said Tim. ‘I wouldn’t know. I never did any real fighting. I was just a bag-snatching cut-throat. Ask the General.’

Rupert Cleeve sat on the piano stool in the small drawing-room and kicked his heels against the mahogany of that long-suffering piece of furniture.

Then he rotated solemnly, until the stool was as high as it could be made to go, reversed direction, and came down again to keyboard level. Then he looked at the clock on the mantelshelf, shut the lid of the piano with a bang, and walked across to the window.

The cook’s cat, a large, dangerous animal, was squatting on the flat top of the ashlar wall that ran, knee high, round the sun garden. He was not easy to see, because he was so arranged that the dapple of evening light through the hedge blended confusingly with his tortoise-shell camouflage.

He was waiting for birds.

Rupert went up to his bedroom and pulled the bottom long drawer of his chest of drawers right out. Behind it, held in clips to the woodwork of the chest, and invisible whilst the drawer was in position, were a number of implements. One of them was a powerful looking catapult of thick rubber on a steel frame.

He took this out, and pocketed two marbles from a box beside his bed.

Then he shut everything up and went downstairs again. All his movements were neat and self-contained. He lived comfortably in the fifth dimension which a lonely child inhabits.

Back in the small drawing-room he went over to the window and eased it very carefully open.

It was a tricky shot. Rupert considered it with gravity. Safer to aim low, perhaps, and trust a ricochet off the coping.

He stretched the elastic, held his breath, and let go. There was a twang, a ‘tock’ of marble on stone, and a sharp oath from the cook’s cat as it disappeared into the shrubbery.

When Rupert had retrieved the marble and put everything away neatly, he went to look for his father. He found him in the breakfast-room, struggling with a report on juvenile delinquency.

‘Who got blown up last night?’ he asked.

Cleeve looked up vaguely. Statistics. Trends. Home influence. Graphical reproduction of repeated offences.

‘Who got what?’

‘Blown up.’

‘Major MacMorris.’

‘Ah,’ said Rupert.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s pretty obvious who did it, I should think.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s that Bramshott Choir. They’re trying to bitch up our Anthem.’

‘Who taught you that disgusting expression?’

‘It’s not disgusting,’ said Rupert. ‘It simply means—’

‘That’ll do. And it’s time you went to bed.’

It was time he went to boarding school, too. Time. Time. Time.

The Chairman returned to his report.

Berowne:

‘A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound

When the suspicious head of theft is stopped.’

‘We’ll give you all the help we can, of course,’ said Tim. That’s why we’ve come along. The only thing is, I’ve simply got to be in London by one o’clock.’

‘I quite appreciate that, sir,’ said Inspector Luck. He had hair that had once been auburn and plentiful but was now a sparse ginger, and a face like a tired fox. ‘It’s very good of you and Mrs. Artside to come along at all. Mind that step. That’s right. I’d better go first and see if the door’s open.’

He led the way out of the back door of Bramshott police station, and into a sort of large shed at the back. Battered furniture was piled round the walls. On trestle tables, under the long skylight, a jumble of smaller objects had been sorted out. An elderly police sergeant was making entries in a book.

‘It’s everything we could find,’ said Luck. ‘There’s probably a good deal more, under the rubble, but we shan’t get it until the demolition team has finished.’

‘It doesn’t look much for the contents of a fully-furnished house,’ said Liz.

‘As a matter of fact it wasn’t all that fully furnished,’ said Tim. ‘On the ground floor I only went into the living-room, but I looked into the front room as I went by and it seemed pretty bare. Upstairs there was practically only one bedroom furnished at all, and one bed in another room.’

They inspected the sad miscellany of household goods laid out on the tables; disembowelled cushions, strips of curtains, pillows, bedclothes, a plaster dog, a selection of kitchenware, mostly intact, pictures, some of them almost unrecognisable, some undamaged. It took Tim back to Italy and Greece, and the collection of household goods which he had so often seen, heaped on to handcarts, dumped beside roads, torn, scattered, trampled on, soaked with their owner’s blood.

He searched among the glass and woodwork of the pile of pictures and pulled out two framed photographs.

‘I noticed these when MacMorris was talking to me on Wednesday night. They’re Regimental groups. I don’t know if you’re interested in his background, but these might be a help.’

Liz and the Inspector came over and peered at them.

‘That one’s the Suffolks,’ said Liz at last. ‘It’s a Minden Day photograph. You can see the roses. But it was taken a long time ago. Those pill-box hats went out before the South African War. I don’t believe MacMorris was as old as all that.’

‘This one looks as if it was taken in India,’ said Tim.

‘I don’t suppose they belonged to him at all,’ said Liz. ‘It wasn’t his house, was it? I mean, he hadn’t bought it.’

‘I understand,’ said Luck cautiously, ‘that it was rented furnished from a Miss Anglesea.’

‘Oh, that’s right then,’ said Liz. ‘Dolly Anglesea’s father was in the Suffolk Regiment, and he went to India with them. Those photographs are nothing to do with MacMorris at all.’

‘All the same,’ said Tim. ‘There was one that was him – or his twin. Quite unmistakeable. Dressed up as a one-pipper. And he had some sort of gong up, too. Not a campaign ribbon. Might have been the M.C.’

As he spoke, he was piecing together the fragments on the table. Seeing what he was doing the other two came and helped him. But nothing even remotely resembling a photograph of a Second Lieutenant appeared.

‘Did you find the letter?’ said Tim suddenly.

‘Which letter, sir?’

‘The anonymous letter.’

There was a pause. Then the Inspector said. ‘Yes. Yes, we found that. The desk wasn’t much damaged, you know. But just how did you happen—’

‘Oh, don’t be so mysterious,’ said Tim. ‘He showed it to me that night. In fact, he asked me what he ought to do about it. It wasn’t the first he’d had.’

‘And what did you advise him, sir?’

‘I told him to show it to the police.’

‘I see.’

‘For some reason he wasn’t too keen to do that himself. So he asked me to mention it to Sergeant Gattie. He knew I knew him.’

‘And you did?’

‘I work for my living during the week. There didn’t seem all that urgency. I was going to cycle over on Saturday morning.’

‘Pity,’ said the Inspector non-committally.

Tim said angrily, ‘I didn’t know he was going to be blown up.’

‘Of course not, sir.’ The Inspector paused for a second and then said, ‘You think the letter may have had some connection with—with the explosion?’

‘Good Lord, but of course. I mean, that’s rather more up your street than mine, but I should have thought it was obvious. Here’s a man gets a letter threatening unpleasant consequences if he doesn’t get out. Which he doesn’t. So the consequences happen.’

‘Yes,’ said the Inspector. ‘We’ve got all the papers back in my office. The letter’s with them. There’s not much more we can do here. Lock up when you’ve finished, Lawley. There was one thing we noticed straight away about that letter, and it did just make us wonder. It was stuck on to a quarto size sheet of paper. It’s a common make, sold in all the shops round here. In fact – up these steps, Mrs. Artside – there was an opened packet of it in the bottom drawer of the desk. And another thing, all the letters and words which had been used to make it up came out of a local paper – the
Bramshott and
Alderham Reporter
– it’s an unusual type-case you see, so they were able to identify it for us at once. MacMorris was one of the people who took it – after you, Mrs. Artside – and so it did occur to us to wonder whether, for some reason – we shall never know just why – he might have rigged it up himself.’

‘Lots of people take the
Reporter
,’ said Tim. ‘We do.’

The Inspector swivelled his faded eye on him.

‘Why would anyone do a thing like that?’ asked Liz.

‘It’s not unknown for a certain type of person to send themselves anonymous communications. I’m afraid we often have cases like that reported to us.’

‘”Faire l’importance”,’ said Liz. ‘Yes. It’s possible. I shouldn’t have thought he was quite the type. Is there any other reason to suppose that’s what he did?’

‘Well,’ said the Inspector cautiously, ‘there haven’t been any other complaints round the neighbourhood lately. Once these anonymous writers get going they don’t often confine themselves to one victim. Particularly if he doesn’t seem to take any notice of them.’

‘Something in that,’ said Liz.

In spite of the Inspector’s impeccable manner she was not at ease. She had never been very fond of Inspector Luck. His seedy bonhomie hid, she felt, an essentially vicious mind. She was fair enough to admit that he had given her absolutely no grounds for such feelings. Her two previous encounters had been when she had given away the prizes at a police Fete which Luck had been organising, and the occasion, some years since, when there had been some irregularity over Anna’s status as an alien, which he had dealt with efficiently and courteously.

‘Now, about Wednesday night,’ said the Inspector, turning on Tim. ‘Would you mind telling us about that?’

‘Of course not,’ said Tim.

When he had finished the Inspector said, ‘About this noise you both heard—’

‘He
said
he heard it. Me, I’m not sure.’

‘Yes. Well, suppose for a moment there was a noise—’

From the way in which he said it, Tim felt some doubt as to whether he was being offensive or not. He decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. ‘Suppose it wasn’t the cat, or something like that. Did you happen to spot any way anyone could have got into the house without your knowing?’

Tim considered.

‘It wouldn’t have been impossible,’ he said. ‘Whilst we were talking in the living-room there’s no real reason why someone, being a bit careful, shouldn’t have got in at one of the ground floor windows and gone up the stairs. They don’t creak much. I noticed that when I went up them myself, later. Or else, perhaps easier, he could have put a ladder up to a first storey window and got in that way.’

‘Without being seen?’

‘Oh, yes. I think so. It’s the end house. And anyway, the next one’s empty.’

‘And you suggest he might have got out the same way
before
you went up to look for him. Which would account for your not finding anyone.’

‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ said Tim.

‘Very properly,’ said the Inspector smoothly. ‘But you thought you heard a noise, and as a result of this you searched the house – quite thoroughly.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you didn’t find anybody.’

‘No.’

‘Or anything suspicious.’

‘I’m not sure that I know what you mean.’

The Inspector searched about, pulled a buff paper out of the litter on his desk, looked at it, and said,

‘Well, you know, there was quite a lot of explosive in the house somewhere.’

‘Is that the report?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I look at it?’

The Inspector’s hesitation was momentary, but both Tim and Liz noted it. Then he pushed the paper across.

Tim scanned it quickly.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I see. Cordite. Probably in jelly form. Yes. It must have been quite bulky to produce an effect like that.’

‘How bulky?’ said Liz.

Tim demonstrated with his hands. ‘A couple of ordinary sized suit-cases would do it.’

‘Perhaps it
was
in two suit-cases,’ said Liz. ‘Did you look under his bed?’

‘The explosion didn’t occur in MacMorris’ bedroom,’ said the Inspector.

‘How do you know?’ said Liz. She was beginning to find these ex cathedra pronouncements irritating.

‘The explosive experts have ways of deducing,’ said the Inspector cautiously. He looked at Tim.