As he did so a uniformed figure emerged out of the shadows of the entrance and said, ‘From the Bellingham, sir?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Stopford, opening the car door. ‘For the Berebury Rugby Club meeting.’

  Trevor Skewis, trainee assistant manager at the Almstone Towers luxury hotel, and conscious of the very considerable tip presently residing in his back pocket, went into his well-rehearsed spiel. ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir, but we’ve had to send your party over to the City Arms at Calleford tonight. We’re having a big conference here at the Almstone Towers ourselves and couldn’t accommodate any extra bookings.’

  ‘Calleford? Good Lord, that’s miles away.’

  ‘I do apologise, sir. In the ordinary way we’d have been happy to help the Bellingham out. I may say the others in your party left some time ago.’

  Jim Stopford didn’t bother to reply. Instead he revved up his engine, did a quick U-turn and was soon gone while Trevor Skewis faded back into the shadows of the entrance to the Almstone Towers portico, patting his back pocket in a very satisfied way indeed as he did so.

  Jim Stopford had a very different reception at the City Arms in Calleford when he finally skidded to a halt in their car park and hurried inside. The receptionist made it abundantly clear that she had never heard of the electricity outage at the Bellingham in Berebury or the conference at the Almstone Towers Hotel.

  Or, indeed, the Berebury Rugby Club.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Clive Culshaw decided that he would begin his quest for the missing Daniel Elland at that evening’s monthly meeting of the Berebury Chamber of Trade while his wife was safely occupied at her bridge club. He could most easily canvass its members there. After the speaker had said his piece the businessmen congregated round the bar for their usual drinks and gossip. ‘Anyone know what became of Daniel Elland?’ he asked the man standing next to him at the bar as casually as he could.

  ‘Went to the wall,’ answered the man, unaware that it was an ancient way of describing those too old and frail to stand through a church service.

  ‘I heard he got caught out by a very big outfit over Luston way that went broke owing him zillions,’ said a man on his other side, overhearing them. He himself ran a furniture store on the high street and gave credit to no one.

  ‘Big mistake to put all your eggs in one basket,’ contributed another man sententiously. A successful optician, he’d never taken a financial risk in his working life.

  ‘There’s many a man walking the Embankment because he didn’t pull trumps,’ said Clive Culshaw elliptically. It was a well-known bridge expression he’d picked up from his wife over the years.

  ‘Big customers are always dangerous,’ opined someone else. He was an ironmonger whose clientele seldom bought more than one item at a time. ‘They get above themselves.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ agreed Culshaw, most of whose customers were quite small, too. Actually, he could have wished some of them were a bit bigger and as usual he anathematised all diet gurus in his mind in passing.

  ‘I heard Elland lost everything,’ said the first man.

  ‘Game over,’ contributed the owner of a shop that sold computer ones, who was doing very nicely, thank you.

  ‘Could happen to anyone,’ murmured someone nearby more sympathetically as a corporate shudder passed through the group.

  ‘True,’ said Culshaw with real feeling. Those accounts from Fixby and Fixby had really frightened him. But not half as much as the thought of what his late mother would have said. ‘Another drink, anyone?’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said his neighbour, setting down his empty glass on the bar. ‘Elland was damned unlucky if you ask me. Decent chap. Just as well there were no children.’

  ‘It seems Berebury Sound Ltd wasn’t sound after all,’ said the wag of the group.

  ‘I heard he’d taken to the bottle,’ said a passing trader. ‘Don’t blame him if he did. Nothing else left. I’ll have another gin and tonic if it’s all right with you, Culshaw.’

  ‘Probably living in the stews of Berebury,’ added the wag, who had no idea what or where stews were. ‘No room at the inn, anyway. Or anywhere else, come to that.’

  ‘Some of those dropouts down by the Postern Gate in Water Lane tried kipping under cover at the back of my supermarket,’ said its owner. He took a sip of his drink. ‘I soon put a stop to that.’

  ‘What’s a postern gate?’ asked a newcomer to the town. He was hoping to do well in selling saddlery to the horse riders roundabout.

  The man next to him grinned. ‘You should know that in your line. It’s a medieval gate only big enough for a man, not a horse.’

  ‘Elland? I heard he’d dropped out of circulation like a stone after being made bankrupt,’ contributed their chairman, a banker, inching his way to the crowded bar. He was always careful never to say anything directly attributable to himself. Or his bank. Elland hadn’t been his customer; time was, though, when he wished he had been, his business once having been so successful.

  ‘Don’t blame him dropping out,’ said someone else. ‘I’d have done the same myself in his place. Never heard what became of him after that – went to the dogs, I expect. By the way, Culshaw, I heard your brother did a good job for an old friend of mine the other day. He’s a real lateral thinker, isn’t he? Quite ingenious.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to mind what he takes on these days,’ said Clive Culshaw amiably enough but who always hated any mention of his brother. ‘Jobs that other people can’t or won’t do, certainly,’ he gave a light laugh, ‘but business tycoon he surely isn’t.’

  ‘Likes a challenge, I expect,’ said the chairman, passing on.

  Clive Culshaw came away from the meeting aware that he was no nearer finding his quarry in the streets of Berebury or anywhere else. It didn’t help that he had no idea at all – distant relative or not – of what the man even looked like or what name he might be using now. Probably not his own. He didn’t even know if the Mayton family shared any facial characteristics.

  Or if they did, what they were. In any case, as far as he was concerned family likeness was not a good thing.

  Sister Samantha Peters regarded the two dishevelled and injured men in front of her in the Accident and Emergency Department of Berebury Hospital later that evening and then looked at her watch. It was nearly midnight. ‘It’s too late in the day for you two to have been playing rugby,’ she concluded. ‘Besides, it’s dark now.’

  ‘We weren’t,’ muttered Martin Pickford. He sounded as if he had a broken nose.

  ‘Have the pair of you taken up boxing instead, then?’ the nurse asked drily. ‘Or Sumo wrestling, perhaps?’ she suggested.

  ‘Sort of,’ mumbled Jim Stopford. He too had a missing tooth now. He pointed at his adversary. ‘He was playing a much nastier game than rugby, I can tell you, Sister.’

  ‘I noticed that you two came in the same ambulance. Does it,’ she enquired icily, ‘by any chance mean that your injuries are connected?’

  ‘Got it in one, Sister,’ lisped Jim Stopford, who was having difficulty in speaking between rapidly swelling lips.

  ‘Connected in a way, Samantha,’ admitted Martin Pickford. ‘He hit me first.’

  She turned on him. ‘I’ve told you before now that when you’re here you call me Sister.’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’ He hung his head penitently. ‘Sorry, Sister.’

  ‘And there was I,’ she marvelled, ‘thinking that Thursday was a quiet evening and that I’d take Friday as my night off this week instead because that’s usually very busy.’

  ‘His fault, not mine,’ muttered Jim Stopford. ‘He started it.’

  Martin Pickford flushed. ‘I didn’t say it was your fault. I said I was blaming you.’

  ‘I like that,’ spluttered Jim Stopford. ‘Splitting hairs.’

  ‘Even so, Sister, he didn’t need to go for me like he did.’

  ‘I did need to,’ growled Stopford. ‘You rotten, deceitful bastard, you. Of all the dirty, low-down tricks to play on a fellow player …’

  ‘How did you know it was me, anyway?’ the other man responded.

  ‘Because nobody else had any interest at all in keeping me away from the selection board for the county team, that’s why, you cunning toad,’ he hissed.

  ‘It worked, though, didn’t it?’ smirked Pickford. ‘I’m in the team and you aren’t. The selection committee put you down as a “No Show”.’

  ‘I’ll tell them what you did and get you banned from the game, if it’s the last thing I do.’

  ‘Too late, mate. They’ve offered me a trial place in Saturday’s match against that crack side that calls themselves the “Calleshire Wanderers”. I’ll be playing for our side this week.’

  ‘Not if I’ve got anything to do with it, you won’t,’ snarled Jim Stopford indistinctly. No lightweight, he started to move aggressively towards the other man, his right fist clenched.

  ‘That will do,’ pronounced Sister Samantha Peters, in a tone of voice honed by centuries of a nursing tradition founded by Florence Nightingale in the Crimea. It carried an authority that could have given points to a company sergeant major. ‘Or I will call security and they – whether you like it or not – will call the police, who will undoubtedly charge you with assault. Both of you,’ she added, taking in the injuries to each of them.

  ‘He started it,’ insisted Pickford.

  ‘That’s rich coming from you,’ said Stopford scornfully, ‘after what you’d done. You … you …’ At this point words failed him and he subsided rather suddenly on to a chair.

  ‘There was I, Samantha … Sister, sitting quietly in the bar at the Bellingham Hotel …’

  ‘Which hadn’t had a power cut at all,’ muttered Stopford indignantly.

  Pickford carried on, undeterred. ‘Sitting in the bar, chilling out with a peaceful pint with some other players, when this lunatic comes rushing in and starts knocking me about.’

  ‘Peaceful be damned,’ snapped Stopford. ‘He was sitting there gloating. I’m the better player – he shouldn’t have been there at all. It’s me who should have been in the county team and he should have been in here with all those deadbeats over there.’ He waved a hand in the direction of a couple of unshaven men walking unsteadily into the unit. One of them had string round his jacket, the other sported an overcoat worthy of a fashion museum.

  The sight of them spurred Martin Pickford into speech with an idea. ‘I say, Sister, you haven’t ever had that man Daniel Elland in here, have you? Much the worse for wear and all that?’

  ‘I have no idea and wouldn’t tell you if I had,’ she said tartly. ‘Mostly when those types come in they either refuse to give us their names at all or use false ones. Jack the Ripper’s quite common, but patient confidentiality still holds.’

  ‘Afraid of the police, I suppose,’ murmured Stopford, temporarily forgetting his own troubles.

  ‘Police? You’re joking. This lot couldn’t care less about the police.’ Sister Peters gave an ironic smile. ‘No, what they’re frightened of are social services who want to make sure that they have a bath.’

  ‘I can see why. They stink.’

  ‘And they don’t like do-gooders who want them to come off the drink, either,’ she added.

  ‘Fat chance of that,’ said Pickford. ‘Now, about my nose …’

  But Sister Peters wasn’t listening. She’d gone for a wound trolley.

  It was the middle of the afternoon the next day when Detective Inspector Sloan got back from attending the Crown Court in the county town of Calleford. He had duly been sworn in and in due course given his evidence in the Faunus and Melliflora case. He’d spotted the two defendants exchanging glances in the dock as he did so and then saw the older one of them sending a note to their defence counsel.

  That gentleman rose to his feet and swept his gown round him in a theatrical gesture that would have done credit to a thespian, which perhaps after all was what the barrister was at heart. His clients, he announced after a brief consultation with them, had decided to change their pleas to guilty, but would have a great deal to offer in the way of mitigation.

  The judge, old and unsurprised, adjourned the case for sentencing later and Sloan got away without being cross-examined. And much sooner than he had thought he would. A guilty plea didn’t provoke the public interest of a ding-dong court battle, especially without the savour of sentencing. This was something he always considered ghoulish, and he thus was also able to leave the Crown Court at Calleford without having to make a statement about the case to the press. He made his way back to the police station and checked in the wallet of papers that he had taken with him. He then joined his friend, Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division, for a bite of lunch in the canteen.

  ‘Mitigation? That lot?’ said Harpe. ‘That’s rich, that is.’

  ‘They’ll think of something,’ said Sloan realistically. ‘Or their brief will.’

  ‘True. By the way, Seedy, you might have a word with that young constable of yours …’

  ‘He’s not mine,’ protested Sloan with some vigour.

  ‘Well, whosever he is, you can tell him from me that he shouldn’t be practising doughnuts in our car park after the super’s gone home.’

  The unexpected release from the Faunus and Melliflora case had left Sloan oddly deflated, but it gave him his first chance to study the Mayton family tree on which Susan Port had been working on her computer so assiduously. He went back to his desk to take a good look at it and at the same time study the message from Simon Puckle. Whilst the solicitor had simply stated that he had had the lineal descent from Algernon Mayton of all six beneficiaries checked out beyond doubt, the late Susan Port had gone into greater detail, especially with her own family tree. And beside the name of Tom Culshaw she had put a small question mark.

  ‘I can’t explain it, Margaret,’ he said later that evening to his wife, ‘unless she had somehow found out that he wasn’t his father’s child in spite of his birth certificate saying that he was.’ The two of them were sitting companionably together, drinking coffee at their fireside. ‘That would put the cat among the pigeons with a vengeance, because it would put him out of the running for Algernon’s money. The old boy sounds to have been pretty strait-laced.’

  ‘Except in the little matter of duping the public with his product,’ she pointed out.

  Detective Inspector Sloan, world-weary policeman, said that was different.

  ‘Though you did say, Chris, that the two brothers seemed to be permanently at loggerheads.’

  He shook his head. ‘Brothers can be like that.’

  ‘Are there any family characteristics shared by the pair that would help?’ Unspoken was a decision still to be made by the Sloans whether or not to have a sibling for their small son.

  Sloan thought about this. ‘They’re about the same height. I wouldn’t know about the colour of their eyes – I’d have to look at them both again. They have roughly the same sort of physique – that’s something that usually runs in families − but then they do share a mother. That seems certain enough.’

  ‘All the same, Susan Port must have had a reason for querying something,’ argued Margaret Sloan. ‘She doesn’t sound to have been silly.’

  ‘She wasn’t. She had the details of the birth certificates of all the legatees on her computer and the marriage certificates of those of them whose inheritance comes through their mothers.’

  Margaret Sloan’s head came up at that. In her own way she was as much a feminist as Woman Sergeant Perkins.

  ‘To account for the different surnames,’ said her husband hastily. ‘Martin Pickford, for instance. His father doesn’t come in to it.’

  ‘More coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Why not,’ he said, passing her his cup. ‘As I don’t seem to be getting anywhere with the case.’

  ‘Don’t forget what Izaak Walton wrote, Chris,’ she said, picking up her own cup, too. ‘You’ve often said to remember what he said about the good angler.’

  ‘A good angler isn’t always a good detective, my love.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he is,’ she retorted. ‘I haven’t forgotten what he thought, even if you have.’

  ‘What was that?’ asked Sloan, who had indeed forgotten.

  ‘He said the good angler not only brings an enquiring, searching and observing wit, but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience to the art.’

  ‘So he did,’ conceded Sloan. He hadn’t realised his wife took his work so seriously. He admitted now that he’d got plenty of patience but not a lot of hope in the matter of the death of Susan Mary Port.

  ‘Tomorrow is a new day and something might come up,’ she said, yawning.

  What did come up first thing the next morning was a frantic telephone call to the police station from an agitated woman who insisted on only speaking to Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘It’s Doris Dyson,’ she gasped down the line, ‘from Bishop’s Marbourne. I’ve just gone in next door to see to the post and there’s a dead man lying on the garden path.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  At very much the same time Martin Pickford was knocking on the door of the home of Tom Culshaw. This also doubled as the offices of his firm, Gordian Knots Cut.

  Tom answered the knock himself. ‘Good Lord, Pickford, what on earth’s happened to you?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m fine. It all went a treat.’

  Tom Culshaw grinned. ‘Did the best man win, then?’

  ‘I’ll say he did,’ Pickford managed to utter between swollen lips. He had an incipient black eye, too.

  ‘Ah, well I suppose all’s fair in love and war.’ Culshaw stood aside. ‘You’d better come in.’