‘Good stuff, Inspector, all this,’ he said, waving a fork with half a sausage impaled on the end of it about in the air.

  ‘Too right,’ said Sloan, taking the seat opposite the SOCO and starting to tackle his own sausage. ‘So how did you get on over at Bishop’s Marbourne?’

  ‘There was nothing much of interest that our team could find, Inspector. We took the remains of a loaf and a bag of that heavy flour for baking it away with us, like you said, and got it off to forensics for analysis. Otherwise there wasn’t a lot to find out, short of a strip search.’

  Sloan raised an eyebrow. ‘Strip search?’

  ‘You know, Inspector,’ he said, taking a bite of his sausage. ‘We didn’t split open the cushions or go through the books for microfiches.’

  Sloan nodded. ‘I take it,’ he said, mindful of a word often used by Dr Dabbe, ‘that the official word for your examination of the premises then would be “superficial”?’

  ‘If you like,’ said SOCO, finishing off the sausage and giving his attention to the bacon. ‘Not fingertip, if you take my meaning,’ he conceded.

  ‘But fingerprint, I hope?’

  The SOCO nodded his head. ‘Oh, yes, even though I understood that there was not much call for that since I was told she died out of doors. We found a lot of one set everywhere and odd sets of someone else’s in the kitchen and bathroom. We can always go back if you want us to.’

  ‘No need,’ agreed Sloan. ‘Anything else at all?’

  ‘Everything seemed OK to me. A few home remedies in the bathroom cupboard and a bottle of painkiller tablets from the hospital.’ He frowned. ‘They had their name on them – the tablets, I mean – and hers, too. I didn’t make a note but I’m having them checked.’

  ‘Good man.’

  ‘Oh, and a lot of jars that looked like honey. I took one away to check.’

  ‘If it looks like honey and tastes like honey and smells like honey, then it probably is honey.’

  ‘Actually, Inspector, now I come to think of it, it was labelled honey.’

  ‘Doesn’t have to be,’ Sloan, ever the detective, reminded him.

  The SOCO looked reproachful. ‘You having me on?’

  ‘Just pointing something out, that’s all. Things aren’t always what they seem.’ Sloan speared a fried tomato and asked, ‘Did she have a computer? You can never tell with those, either.’

  ‘Computer, yes. And what we did notice was what she was doing with it. It was still on the screen.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Family history. She’d obviously been working on someone’s family tree. There was a lot of paper about with death certificates and the like pinned to it. And there was this thing like half a roll of wallpaper with lots of names scribbled on it all over her dining-room table.’

  Suddenly alert, Sloan asked if she had dated her work.

  ‘Come again, Inspector?’

  ‘I’d very much like to know when she started work on this family history,’ said Sloan, tugging his notebook out of his pocket. ‘Such as whether it was begun before or after a certain meeting at Puckles, the solicitors, a few weeks ago.’

  The SOCO wrinkled his brow. ‘To be honest, I never thought to look.’

  Sloan changed the subject. ‘Never mind, I can always check with Puckles. She could have got a lot of guff from them. Anything else?’

  ‘Nothing to speak of. The cottage all looked pretty normal to me. We had a bite at the village pub afterwards and chatted up the natives, who were talkative enough. They said the deceased seemed a harmless old biddy.’

  ‘So did Madame de Brinvilliers,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A French mass poisoner,’ said Sloan.

  ‘And there was this nosey old bag next door who kept a pretty sharp lookout on us while we were there. She made out that the deceased’s solicitor in London had asked her to keep an eye on the place for him seeing he’s not local. She’s got a key and forwards the post and that sort of thing.’

  ‘All right if she’s all right,’ said Sloan with a wisdom born of long experience. ‘I can’t honestly say yet that it’s a true crime scene, though, but thanks all the same for what you’ve done so far.’

  The detective constable who slunk into the canteen a few moments later bore no relation to the demon driver of ‘F’ Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary. Clearly crestfallen, he dealt the canteen chair a savage blow as he swung it into place at the table. He plonked himself on the chair, scowling.

  ‘And what have you done?’ enquired Sloan.

  ‘Brought disgrace on the force,’ Crosby muttered miserably.

  ‘How come?’ asked Sloan with interest.

  ‘I attacked a child verbally with abusive language unbecoming to a member of the police force. Furthermore, I raised my hand to him as if I was going to attack him and threatened to knock his block off.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ said Sloan, demolishing a fried egg with enthusiasm.

  ‘You know Larky Nolson’s boy, sir?’

  The SOCO leant forward. ‘Is that the one they call the Varmint?’

  ‘Him,’ said Crosby richly.

  ‘Even if you were severely provoked,’ said Sloan, conscious that he was supposed to be a mentor to the young, ‘you shouldn’t rise to it.’

  ‘Provoked!’ echoed Crosby bitterly. ‘I’ll say I was provoked and made to look a fool into the bargain, too. He said he had come in for charging.’

  ‘Not like him,’ observed Sloan. ‘Quite out of character, in fact. We usually have to winkle him out from under his bed before we can charge him.’

  ‘I didn’t know that, did I, sir? I thought he was admitting to something when he said that.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I got out a charge sheet and started to write it up like everyone says it should be done and called the station sergeant up to tell him what I was doing.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The little blighter whipped out his mobile phone and charger and said would we plug it in for him and he’d be back for it later.’

  The SOCO burst out laughing although Sloan heroically kept a straight face.

  ‘That’s when I said something I shouldn’t have, sir, and raised my fist to him. I didn’t actually hit him, sir, but it was a near thing.’

  ‘And the station sergeant isn’t happy?’ said Sloan.

  ‘Not with me or him. He said I’d brought the force into disrepute. And that he’s as sure as eggs is eggs that Larky’ll be round in the morning with an official complaint and what did I propose doing about it.’

  As was her wont, Miss Florence Fennel presented herself in her employer’s office at ten o’clock precisely on the Thursday morning. She took with her, as always, a folder in which reposed the day’s post, neatly docketed, and her own notebook. Whilst more modern methods of communication existed they hadn’t yet penetrated the stately premises of Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery, Solicitors and Notaries Public. Already on Simon Puckle’s desk was a typed list of his appointments for the day but this routine meeting with his personal secretary always had its own priority.

  ‘And while you were in court yesterday, Mr Puckle,’ she began, ‘there were a number of messages for you.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Miss Fennel enumerated these, finishing with the information that Detective Inspector Sloan had requested a note of the exact extent of the family histories of the prospective legatees that he had had explored.

  ‘Tell him,’ he said, pointing to her notebook and poised pen, ‘that we have copies here of the death certificates of all their parents and their own birth certificates of all of the potential beneficiaries. And that he is welcome to inspect them, if he so wishes. They are, after all, documents already in the public domain.’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Puckle.’

  ‘Oh, and those of their offspring, where applicable.’

  Many a younger secretary might have responded with a laconic ‘Will do’. Miss Florence Fennel belonged to an older school. ‘Certainly, Mr Puckle. I’ll attend to it at once.’

  Which she proceeded to do.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘Well, Sloan?’ barked Superintendent Leeyes. ‘Are you getting anywhere with that dead woman out at Bishop’s Marbourne yet?’

  The morning meeting of principal and subordinate at the police station in Berebury was rather less formal than the similar one at the solicitors: but equally to the point.

  ‘In some respects, sir,’ said the detective inspector warily. ‘For a start, I’ve been taking a look at last year’s accounts for Culshaw’s Bakery.’

  ‘Piece of cake?’ said Leeyes, baring his teeth to show he was making a joke.

  Sloan acknowledged this with a politic smile, bearing in mind that he had his pension to think of. ‘On the contrary, in fact, sir. He’s sailing pretty close to the wind. It would appear as if the firm’s been running at a loss for a good year or two now. He’s getting a lot of opposition from the multiples.’

  Leeyes drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘So the man could do with the money?’

  ‘Looks like it. I’m not an accountant, but Fixby and Fixby are and they set it all out very clearly in his last set of accounts for Companies House.’ Sloan offered the folder to the superintendent, who promptly waved it away, so he carried on. ‘The place is mortgaged to the hilt and while it would seem he’s keeping his creditors at bay just now, they’re not getting any fewer. And there’s a history in that family that needs looking into. Sibling rivalry, big time.’

  ‘A touch of the Cain and Abel, you think?’ The superintendent sat back in his chair and reasoned aloud. ‘If one of them killed the other there would be gain for the survivor, all right.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan forbore to remind him that, if caught, the survivor couldn’t benefit from killing his brother, profiting from murder not being allowed by ancient statute.

  Leeyes ploughed on. ‘If either of them were to come to grief, the survivor of the pair would get twice as much as they would have done from this old trust, I’ll give you that, because he’d come into all the deceased brother’s share.’

  ‘True, sir. Very true.’ Christopher Dennis Sloan, proud father of a son, resolved that should he and his wife have another baby, sibling rivalry would not be allowed.

  ‘But all the same, the economic enemies are at the bakery gate, then?’ said Leeyes, whose early reading had been of the G. A. Henty and Kipling school.

  ‘Head just above the water, sir,’ said Sloan, as good at mixing a metaphor as the next man. ‘I should imagine that a big cash injection would come in very handy.’ Not being an accountant, he wasn’t sure how you circled the wagons for financial protection.

  ‘Not in itself a reason to suspect him of anything,’ said the superintendent, whose usual credo was that a man needing money badly was automatically a prime suspect in any case of wrongdoing that came his way.

  ‘Certainly not, sir,’ said Sloan robustly. ‘Besides, the death of one childless beneficiary already has only increased the sum available to the survivors by a sixth. A sixth of what exactly, of course, we don’t know.’

  Leeyes grunted. ‘Something divided by five instead of six doesn’t usually amount to a hill of beans.’

  ‘I reckon it would have to be a very big sum indeed to start with to get Culshaw’s bakery out of trouble,’ said Sloan. He wasn’t a money man but even he could see that from the number of brackets indicating a loss on the balance sheet.

  The superintendent leant back in his chair and gave it as his considered opinion that it wouldn’t be all that long then before Clive Culshaw joined the down-and-outs on Berebury’s streets. ‘Which the mayor won’t like,’ he said. ‘Or the natives there already.’

  ‘No, sir. Or uniform, either, come to that.’ Thankfully, it wasn’t up to his Criminal Investigation Department to sort out the human detritus littering the streets of Berebury.

  ‘They’ve got better things to do than make arrests under the Vagrancy Act, which doesn’t usually get you anywhere, seeing that the offenders never have any money for fines,’ growled Leeyes. ‘So what next, Sloan?’

  ‘Something or nothing, sir. I don’t know which yet. A bit of Mayton family history, anyway. The SOCO found something interesting in the deceased’s cottage.’

  ‘Makes a change,’ grunted Leeyes. ‘SOCO finding anything interesting, I mean, beyond fingerprints and DNA.’

  ‘Quite so, sir,’ He coughed. ‘It would appear that the deceased had started to research her own family history – the Mayton connection, that is.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘That we don’t know yet, sir.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We don’t know why or what either, but it needs looking into seeing as it could be tied up with this inheritance business. I’m going out there as soon as I’ve heard from Puckles to pick up her computer and take a look at what she was doing with the family tree.’

  ‘No stone unturned, eh?’ said Leeyes, sounding unusually jovial. ‘You’ll take Crosby with you, won’t you? I’d rather he was out of my hair. By the way, you’re in court tomorrow morning, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir. The Faunus and Melliflora case.’

  ‘Make sure Crosby doesn’t crash the car today, then. And Sloan …’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘If you win tomorrow, no grandstanding outside the court afterwards, please, if you don’t mind, whatever the public relations people say. And no apologising if you don’t win. I don’t like it either way.’

  ‘Certainly not, sir,’ said Sloan, who didn’t either.

  There was a neatly typed note from Miss Fennel awaiting Sloan’s return to his own desk. It stated that the firm had done an exhaustive search of the birth and death registers and had thus established from these the bona fides of all of those whom they considered eligible beneficiaries under the terms of the Mayton Trust. Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery, the note stated, had no reason to suppose that all of the potential recipients of the trust money whom they had listed were other than legitimate claimants.

  Or that there were any others.

  Detective Inspector Sloan slipped the paper into his pocket and summoned Crosby. ‘Bishop’s Marbourne, please,’ he said. ‘And without undue haste, Crosby. I have to give evidence in another case tomorrow morning and would like to still be in one piece to do so.’

  Mrs Doris Dyson welcomed the two policemen over the garden fence as they drove up to Pear Tree Cottage. ‘I like to keep an eye on who’s coming and going,’ she said, dangling a set of keys. ‘Want to have another look round, do you?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, who had in fact got another set of keys from Ted York, the coroner’s officer, thanked her and let her lead the way in. ‘I come in to see to the post and that sort of thing most days,’ said the neighbour. ‘There’s been another postcard from the son of that old friend of hers. Can’t rightly say where it’s come from, though.’

  Sloan peered at a blurred postmark and a picture of a snow-covered mountain and was very little the wiser himself. ‘Could be Kashmir,’ he decided, placing it carefully in his notebook, ‘or Uzbekistan.’

  ‘There was some other post,’ she said, ‘but they looked like bills and I’ve sent them on to her solicitor for him to pay, like he said to do.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Sloan, who wished he could do the same with those that reached him.

  ‘Come to have a look for anything in particular, have you?’ she asked. ‘I’ll leave the windows open while you’re here, Officer. Things start to smell musty if you leave a house shut up for too long.’

  ‘We just want to have a general look around,’ said Sloan vaguely. ‘Oh, and to collect Mrs Port’s computer while we’re here.’

  ‘I can’t be doing with them things,’ said Doris Dyson. ‘But poor Sue, now she was never off hers.’

  ‘They call them silver surfers,’ offered Crosby. ‘Oldies who use them a lot. Nothing better to do, I suppose,’ he added with the insouciance of the young.

  ‘She said she’d worked with them in her old job, so she knew all about them,’ said Doris Dyson, leading the way into the cottage’s dining room. ‘Me, I wouldn’t know what do with one. Nasty things that know too much about you.’

  ‘If you let them,’ agreed Sloan. The deceased’s computer sat on the edge of the dining-room table. He carefully saved what was on it, then shut it down, unplugged it and put it to one side to take away with them. The rest of the table was taken up, just as the coroner’s officer had said, with what looked like the underside of a roll of wallpaper. On this were numerous scribbles under a set of names, starting at the top of a pyramid with the name of Algernon Culver Mayton at its apex.

  Detective Inspector Sloan rolled this up, pointing out to Crosby the names of the six beneficiaries of the Mayton Trust, which ran along the base of the pyramid. ‘Just as in the case of the Culshaw Bakery accounts, Crosby, I suspect it’s the bottom line that matters.’

  It was at exactly a quarter to seven on the Thursday evening when Jim Stopford’s mobile telephone rang. He was just on his way to his car and stopped in the farmyard to answer it.

  A voice said that he was ringing from the reception desk at the Bellingham Hotel in Berebury. ‘I’m very sorry to say, sir, that we’re experiencing a considerable power outage here. I’m afraid that the electricians have told us that it will take some time to restore the power, so we’ve had to cancel all this evening’s bookings and I’m told that you were one of those expected.’

  ‘I am – I mean, I was.’

  ‘However, sir,’ went on the voice, ‘I’m happy to say that the Almstone Towers Hotel has agreed to take all our customers this evening.’

  ‘It’s big enough,’ conceded Stopford. ‘But a bit posh for rugby players.’

  ‘Indeed, sir. I take it you know how to get there?’

  ‘Sure, but it’s a fair way from Capstan Purlieu so I’d better get cracking.’ Stopford switched the phone off and made for his car. Almstone village was well off his usual route so he knew he would have to step on it if he was going to make it for half past seven. He managed the journey with minutes to spare, drawing up with a screech of brakes in front the hotel’s impressive green awning lined with bay trees.