The solicitor went on. ‘As a result of this, the police have suggested that for the time being you all take reasonable precautions.’

  ‘Against what?’ demanded Tom Culshaw. ‘Being hit on the head, too?’

  ‘They advise against any of you going around the Postern Gate area and the riverbank at night and alone,’ said Simon Puckle firmly. ‘There appears to be rather more at stake in the distribution of the Mayton Trust than I had first thought.’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ said Martin Pickford.

  Samantha Peters said that it did mean, though, didn’t it, that Daniel Elland must be there?

  ‘I understand, Miss Peters,’ said the solicitor, ‘that that is the police view, too, now. I am not, of course, privy to their plans in the matter, but I am sure they will be taking some appropriate action in due course.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ‘Why me, sir?’ wailed Crosby plaintively.

  ‘It’ll be a new policing experience for you,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘Do you good.’

  ‘But, sir …’

  ‘You’re not bricking it, surely, are you?’

  ‘No, sir,’ he said hotly. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘All you have to do, Crosby, is to go over to the other end of town and buy some old clothes in one of the charity shops there. It doesn’t matter if they don’t fit you – in a way it might even be better if they didn’t. More in keeping, you might say. And get yourself some bashed-about shoes. Policemen’s shoes are a dead giveaway.’

  ‘And then what?’ asked Crosby mutinously.

  ‘Scrounge a grubby sleeping bag from somewhere and stuff it with newspapers. Tabloids, mind you. Not broadsheets.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To help you keep something like warm, that’s why. Then, after dark, creep into a doorway down there and try to get a good night’s kip.’

  ‘Fat chance.’

  ‘All the better for keeping your ears open. Oh, and have a good backstory ready – lost your job, stepfather threw you out, just come out of prison and nowhere to go, wife trouble, drink, drugs. Take your pick.’

  ‘I never—’

  ‘I know you didn’t, Crosby,’ said Sloan patiently, ‘but it won’t be me sleeping in the next doorway. It’ll be someone seeing what he can steal from you and someone suspicious of your being there in the first place.’

  ‘I’ll be cold.’

  ‘And hungry, so have a good meal before you go there, and Crosby …’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Don’t wash or shave for a bit.’

  ‘Why can’t I shave?’

  ‘No money for razors, no hot water, and no soap and if you did once have a towel someone would have nicked it soon enough. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And Crosby …’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Mind how you go. That lot over there don’t like the police all that much.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to be doing down there, anyway?’

  ‘Either finding Daniel Elland or better still finding out why someone else there wants him. It shouldn’t be too difficult now we know where he is.’

  ‘And how am I going to find him if I don’t know what he looks like?’

  ‘Use your ears and your imagination, man. And don’t get injured yourself. That won’t help anyone.’

  ‘It won’t help me, anyway,’ muttered Crosby. ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘Remember Daniel Elland might be in danger himself. We know that there’s someone else round there looking for him, too. That’s as well as us and the solicitors.’

  ‘But we still don’t know why, sir,’ he protested.

  ‘No, but we know that the man’s both a Mayton and may be in danger, which ticks all the right boxes for me at the moment. Besides, he’s got a lot of money coming to him one day if nobody kills him first, and that might be a good enough reason, too, for some other person or persons unknown to have a go at him. It often is. Believe you me, Crosby, it often is.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Although technically we have no reason to suspect him of doing anything untoward, it would nevertheless be of interest to locate him. You have no need to take any action should you do so. You only have to report back. Understood?’

  Superintendent Leeyes was not a happy man either. ‘I don’t like it, Sloan,’ he said from the comfort of his own office. The detective inspector had duly reported that Constable Crosby had been dispatched to lie low among the rough sleepers by the railway in the east end of Berebury and keep his eyes and ears open, since they had reason to believe that Daniel Elland was there. ‘But I suppose,’ Leeyes sighed, ‘that everyone else in the force except him looks like a real policeman and would be sussed out before you could say “knife”.’

  ‘He might get away with it, sir,’ said Sloan, mentally crossing his fingers.

  ‘Let’s hope so, for his sake.’ Leeyes tapped his desk. ‘There’re far too many loose ends in all this business for my liking and this missing man, Elland, is only one of them.’

  There were far too many loose ends for Detective Inspector Sloan’s liking as well.

  Principal among them was still the death of a woman that turned out to have been a poisoning by ergot, in what form it was not known.

  Or why.

  That had been a couple of months after big money had come into the picture – its connection with her death not yet proven. Then, later still, had been the death of the man at the woman’s cottage at Bishop’s Marbourne – another loose end.

  ‘There’s this Terry Galloway, too, sir,’ he reminded him, ‘turning up on Susan Port’s doorstep half-dead.’

  ‘And then dying,’ Leeyes pointed out acidly.

  ‘It’s that he died at all,’ Sloan said to the superintendent, ‘in spite of the fact that the doctors at the hospital thought he might live that worries me.’ He himself wasn’t at all happy about this. While he didn’t confuse – as some patients, and indeed some doctors themselves did, too – members of the medical profession with God, he did respect their judgement. And if they had given it as their opinion that Terry Galloway was starting to regain consciousness – and not dying – then he probably had been.

  ‘I’m having another interview with the man we put on bed watch at the hospital,’ he said.

  Leeyes nodded. ‘Soon, I hope.’

  ‘I can see that the assault on Terry Galloway might very well come into the picture, sir, but I can’t see how or why yet. We’re still awaiting the man’s full post-mortem results, of course. Dr Dabbe was a bit cagey at the time – he said he didn’t like something he found in the liver, but I don’t know what – and he didn’t want to say too much.’

  ‘That means he doesn’t know,’ concluded Leeyes flatly.

  ‘Or that he just wasn’t going to say until he gets the lab results back.’

  ‘Watching his back, that’s what he’s doing,’ said Leeyes unsympathetically. ‘No help to us.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Lateral thinking, Sloan,’ pronounced Leeyes. ‘That’s what you need now. Very important, lateral thinking.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘At this stage in an investigation you just have to think outside the box to get anywhere. Not that everyone appreciates it, I can tell you. Some people have absolutely no imagination whatsoever and won’t listen to new theories.’

  Sloan paused and searched his memory for a moment and then it came to him: ‘The Causes of World War I’. That was it. A series of lectures attended by the superintendent – but not for very long. The usual events attributed to the start of that conflict – the Algeciras crisis, the Fashoda Incident and even German territorial ambitions – had been dismissed out of hand by Superintendent Leeyes, who had opted instead to blame the Kaiser’s midwife for being responsible for the start of that war.

  Leeyes had told the lecturer that in his opinion it was the midwife’s carelessness in delivering the baby’s shoulder at the time of the Kaiser’s birth that had led to the Erb’s palsy in his arm. And that permanently damaged shoulder and arm, Leeyes had asserted, had led to the grown man’s notable inferiority complex – something he was sure was only ever to be compensated for in the German leader’s mind by aggression. ‘Like chips on the shoulder usually are,’ he had said neatly.

  The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife at Sarajevo, advanced by the lecturer as another important factor in the start of the war, Leeyes insisted as having had nothing to do with it. That it was just one of your usual Balkan foibles was his parting shot to a bemused academic already considering giving up teaching in adult education.

  ‘It’s a case of knowing exactly where to start, sir,’ Sloan admitted now. ‘With a death or with the money.’

  ‘Both,’ said Leeyes, his usual bracing self. ‘Now about the old lady who died …’

  ‘The death of Mrs Susan Port might still have been a case of accidental poisoning, sir.’

  ‘Not until you find out how she ingested it and who gave it to her,’ said Leeyes flatly.

  ‘We still don’t know for certain that it was murder – only that she died from something that had ergot in it in some form or other. And that was nearly two months after the legatees had been told about the Mayton Trust.’

  ‘No, not her, Sloan. I meant the very old lady who died in a care home, kick-starting the Mayton Trust off.’

  ‘Clementina somebody …’ He reached for his notebook.

  ‘Dangerous places, care homes,’ said Leeyes meditatively. ‘The opposite of maternity ones. Ending-life ones, you might say. Some of them on purpose, I’m sure.’

  ‘They’re dealing with both ends of life, you might say, sir,’ ventured Sloan, not sure where this was leading.

  ‘I always think of care homes more as eternity ones,’ said his superior officer. ‘And as I said, dangerous. Very, because by the time someone’s in one of them nearly everyone in sight wants the inmate dead.’

  ‘The solicitors did say that they had checked Clementina’s death out,’ offered Sloan.

  ‘Nullius in verba, Sloan,’ said Leeyes unexpectedly.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘It means “Take nobody’s word for it” in Latin,’ he said. ‘It’s what the ACC is forever banging on about. First principle of policing, he always calls it.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’ That explained it. The assistant chief constable was always quoting Latin. He was a man cast in a very different mould from that of the superintendent, who resented it. ‘Simon Puckle is quite sure she died of natural causes,’ he said, hastily adding, ‘but we’ll check it out ourselves, of course, sir.’

  ‘And while you’re about it, find out whether any of the legatees had any previous knowledge of the money coming to them when the old lady died.’

  ‘Simon Puckle says that it was one of the conditions of the trust that Algernon Mayton set up that no one was to know in advance about it and he left strict instructions to that effect.’

  ‘No flies on old Algernon, whoever he was,’ said Leeyes appreciatively. ‘Great expectations can do a lot of damage. You’ve only got to look at the children of the very rich and see what they get up to.’

  ‘And can put others at risk,’ said Sloan, mindful of two dead people on his patch. Already.

  ‘What we need to know, sir,’ he went on, ‘is whether the inheritance has any bearing on Mrs Port’s death or that of her godson.’

  ‘Try drawing up a timeline,’ advised the superintendent. ‘Can be quite useful things, timelines.’

  ‘In the beginning there was the money,’ began Sloan. There was a saying about never asking a successful businessman how he made his first million pounds, but he already knew the answer to that in Algernon Mayton’s case: faking a useless pseudo-medical product. ‘And money makes money after that.’

  ‘And usually marries it, too,’ said Leeyes. ‘Does that come into things?’

  ‘No, sir. The solicitor said that all that mattered in the settlement of the trust was the direct descent from Algernon Mayton, male or female. Who the descendant had married had nothing to do with the inheritance. It was an absolutely straightforward case of father to child or mother to child, irrespective of whom they had married. The spouses didn’t come into the trust.’

  ‘Bully for them,’ said the superintendent colloquially. ‘That should make your enquiries simpler, Sloan.’

  ‘I’ve looked at that family tree we found on Mrs Port’s dining-room table and on her computer until I’m blue in the face, without seeing anything that looks in the least significant, except the question mark against the name of Tom Culshaw.’

  Superintendent Leeyes leant back in his chair. ‘It must mean something, Sloan. What about Tom Culshaw’s war with his brother, Clive? Perhaps they aren’t blood brothers after all? Had you thought about that?’

  ‘Not in depth, sir,’ admitted Sloan.

  ‘You should. Suppose the mother had had Tom by a different father – perhaps she’d been raped and took against the child because of that? Or had an affair within marriage and the natural father had let her down. Or wasn’t disclosed to her husband?’

  ‘I have no means of knowing whether or not Simon Puckle had considered those particular possibilities, sir, but at least he’d had the birth and death certificates of all the legatees checked and found them to be in apparent order.’

  ‘In my young day, Sloan, a child born within wedlock was deemed to be of that marriage and the birth certificate filled in accordingly,’ countered Leeyes immediately, ‘and therefore legitimate whoever the actual parent was, great Edwardian country house parties among the nobility notwithstanding.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Sloan, who was familiar with the legend of children being known as ‘of the house but not of the family’ and of that historic one concerning a royal warming pan as well.

  ‘These days,’ said Leeyes, a man with never a kind thing to say for the present compared with the past, ‘I suppose everything’s hunky-dory unless proved to the contrary by DNA.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, sir,’ said Sloan, before the superintendent could start talking about the good old days. ‘You’re suggesting, sir, are you, that Tom Culshaw doesn’t have to be the child of his putative father?’

  ‘It’s quite possible.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan gave thought to this. ‘In his case, sir, it would matter since his inheritance comes through the father. The brothers could actually be stepbrothers.’

  ‘And if it was proved that their father wasn’t Tom’s father after all – then the younger one – Clive, did you say his name was? – would collect both their shares of the dibs.’

  ‘Yes, sir. If it could be proved, that is. There’s another theoretical possibility, though.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He might have been the father’s love child born outside the marriage but brought into it and reared by the mother. I’ve known that happen, too.’

  ‘That would explain Tom being excluded from his mother’s will and his failure to get on with her,’ agreed Leeyes. ‘If she wasn’t his mother, that is. If he was his father’s son it wouldn’t matter – he’d still get the money.’

  ‘All we can do, sir, would be to try to persuade them both to take a DNA test.’

  ‘Fat chance of that if they didn’t want to,’ responded Leeyes promptly, ‘defence lawyers being what they are. All the same that tick of the deceased is our only lead in that family. She could have found something out. You’d better work on it.’

  ‘And then there’s still Daniel Elland on the loose, sir.’

  ‘Find him, Sloan,’ ordered Leeyes, adding ominously, ‘and before anyone else does.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Detective Constable Crosby was the unhappiest man of them all. He had waited until darkness had fallen and then slipped silently into what he had begun to think of as a commune. That he was wrong about this was made abundantly clear to him after he had selected a likely looking corner in which to sleep and sunk to the ground against a wall. He hadn’t been there long enough to finish his first sandwich before a hoarse voice said, ‘You there. Get out of it. You can’t stay there.’

  He scrambled to his feet, a hand descending on his collar as he did so. The voice said, ‘That’s my pitch, mate. Not yours.’

  ‘My mistake,’ mumbled Crosby, moving away, crab-like, as quickly as he could. He stood stock-still then for a moment, unsure where to go next. After a little while he set off again and wandered down the next street he came to, still searching for a likely looking doorway. There weren’t many of them out of the wind, and those that there were all seemed to have someone huddled in them already.

  Attracted by the noise, he then came across two men who appeared to be fighting over a bottle. He instinctively started to approach the pair to break up the disturbance but halted suddenly, remembering just in time that while he was a policeman, he wasn’t meant to be one just now and here − especially here. Instead he had to school himself to watch a lawless activity he had been trained to deal with carry on regardless. It ended with one of the men caving in and uncertainly tottering away into the shadows. The other triumphantly applied his lips to the bottle and then when it was finished, tossed it after the retreating man, muttering something slurred, the only word of which that Crosby could catch being ‘loser’.

  The detective constable moved swiftly away himself, seeking another shelter against the cold. He had forgotten how very cold it could be out of doors in the early hours. He next came across a pile of cardboard boxes on the pavement at the back of a shop and made for them, hopeful that they might provide some protection against the increasing nocturnal chill.

  He selected the largest and was making to lift the cardboard up and take shelter under it when someone from inside the box growled like a badger disturbed in his sleep and said, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  Taking this literally Crosby said, ‘Looking for somewhere to sleep.’

  ‘Not here, mate,’ said the voice emphatically.