‘Besides,’ supplemented Dr Chomel, ‘it also sends them to sleep very quickly, their pain notwithstanding. You have to be quite careful with the dosage. Too much can quite easily damage the liver.’

  ‘Amphetamines,’ added Samantha Peters. ‘There would have been some of them there, too, although we don’t use them so much these days either.’

  ‘They can help in some cases,’ said the young lady doctor earnestly.

  ‘Uppers,’ remarked Crosby colloquially, making another note. ‘And downers. Anything else?’

  ‘We only record stocking in that cabinet those medications that come under the Dangerous Drugs Act,’ said Dr Chomel.

  ‘You don’t count the aspirins, then?’ said Crosby.

  ‘Life’s too short for that,’ said the doctor, adding ‘especially if someone’s been stabbed.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Samantha Peters wryly, ‘that the down-and-outs have been having a lovely time since Saturday evening with what has been taken.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, more mindful of a young man whose last evening it had been but whose assailant they seemed no nearer finding. He hadn’t had a lovely evening at all.

  Tom Culshaw, proprietor of the firm of Gordian Knots, would have been the first to acknowledge that a number of the homeless denizens of the Postern Gate part of the town were still showing signs of the consumption of noxious substances when he spent the night there a few days later. Like all young men of his generation he was able to identify the slurred speech, glazed eyes and the slow, almost mannered movements of the men as having their origins in drugs of almost any description.

  Or a great deal too much alcohol.

  Dressed for the part, Tom had insinuated himself seamlessly amongst the other men there, some of them already well away from the real world. Others, though, were obviously still in their customary state of cold, hunger and homelessness, their hopelessness apparent in their lassitude and malnutrition. Neither of these conditions of man deterred Tom from doing what he had come to do, which was to look for Daniel Elland. He was carrying a picture in his mind of an image created by a computer of what an older, raddled, unshaven and undernourished Daniel Elland might look like ten years after that plump, well-dressed boardroom photograph had been taken.

  Tom Culshaw’s first encounter was with the burly leader of the homeless charity Latchless, John Holness, at his base in St Peter’s Church in Water Lane. ‘Daniel Elland? Never heard of him, mate, and even if I had I wouldn’t tell you.’

  ‘You could tell me, though, couldn’t you if you’d seen him around here?’ Before the man could answer Tom had pulled the computer-simulated image out of his pocket and held it up in front of him.

  ‘I could,’ said Holness, after studying it, ‘but I’m not going to.’

  Taking that for a ‘yes’, Tom Culshaw shook his head. ‘Pity that, because he’s got a lot of money coming to him.’

  ‘All that means, take it from me,’ said Holness wearily, ‘is that he and his mates – that is, if he’s got any left – will drink themselves to death that bit sooner with it than without it.’

  ‘The devil drink – that’s what they used to call it, wasn’t it?’ murmured Tom absently, taking back the picture and stowing it away again. ‘Never signed the pledge, did they, this lot of yours?’

  ‘There’s plenty of other things around than drink these days that these fellows have to worry about,’ said Holness, ‘including some that weren’t discovered in the old times.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Culshaw. ‘Some of them look altogether out of it now.’

  ‘Break-in at the hospital last Saturday evening,’ said Holness elliptically. ‘The drug cabinet was smashed in Accident and Emergency. Whoever took the stuff sure spread it around – and for free, too. They think Christmas has come early. I don’t know exactly what they’re on now but most of ’em here have been half-cut ever since. Some of them couldn’t even tell you if it’s Wednesday or Calleford.’

  ‘What sort of stuff?’ asked Culshaw curiously. He had no idea what Daniel Elland’s favourite poison was.

  If any.

  ‘Take your pick.’ Holness waved an arm to encompass the whole area. ‘Heroin …’

  ‘“The loving drug”,’ quoted Culshaw.

  ‘If you say so, mate,’ said Holness, ‘but not from where I sit. Give me alcohol any day of the week – you know where you are with the drink, but not with some of the other fancy substances.’

  ‘Pethidine?’ hazarded Tom.

  ‘Anything you like as far as I’m concerned except K, if you don’t mind,’ said Holness.

  ‘K?’ queried Tom Culshaw, more out of his depth in today’s drug scene than he had realised. He decided he must be getting on.

  ‘C is for the cat that sat on the mat all right, and K is for ketamine, which isn’t all right.’ He said sardonically. ‘Special K they call it. The horse-killer.’

  Culshaw frowned, the faint memory of a song coming back to him. He murmured, ‘They shoot horses, don’t they?’

  ‘Not any more, they don’t,’ said Holness. ‘They kill horses with ketamine these days. And people, too, if you’re not very lucky.’

  Tom Culshaw’s next move was to try to take a good look at every face that he passed. This proved exceedingly unpopular with almost every man, especially with those whose faces were swaddled with tattered scarves or were patently on drugs of one variety or another. Whether this garment was worn against the cold or to hide the face of a man who didn’t want to be identified he couldn’t decide. His first thought was to emulate what his brother had done and ask for Daniel Elland by name, but this time that plan evoked no response from any of the men to whom he mentioned the name. Nobody now responded by saying that they were looking for him either.

  A thinking man, Tom Culshaw could only assume that somebody had found Daniel Elland since. A resolute man, too, he concluded that therefore he ought to be able to do so as well.

  And then it started to rain.

  Really rain.

  Tom turned up his jacket collar and made for the nearest doorway to shelter in but to his surprise he found he was alone there. The usual crowd that he had expected to be huddled under what cover there was to be had there was nowhere to seen. Instead, he was aware of a general slow movement in quite another direction. Curious, he followed a cohort of men shuffling through the darkness towards the covered loading bay at the back of Berebury’s supermarket.

  So did Detective Constable Crosby, there on duty.

  ‘And I wasn’t the only one looking for Daniel Elland, sir,’ said the constable, reporting to Detective Inspector Sloan the next morning. ‘That clever clogs from Gordian Knots, Tom Culshaw, was there, too. I saw him asking around and showing what looked at a distance like a photograph to everyone who would look.’

  ‘He was, was he?’ responded Sloan vigorously. ‘We’ll have to have a word with him about that. Elland’s wife wouldn’t give us one, remember?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure, though, that he didn’t have any joy in finding the man either because he stayed there a long time, asking around.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘All those old boys were crowded in there under that canopy out of the rain,’ said Crosby. ‘And the funny thing is that it wasn’t at all like it was there last time when I got so dizzy. They weren’t sick or falling about like I was then, sir.’

  ‘None of them?’

  ‘No, sir. Not even the dog that was there.’

  ‘So, something had changed,’ reasoned Sloan.

  ‘Yes, sir, but I don’t know what. It was quite all right under there last night out of the rain.’

  Sloan frowned. ‘Odd, that.’

  ‘And I didn’t get that dreadful headache this time either, thank goodness. It was just the rain that got me.’

  ‘So what happened to you last night, Crosby? Were you really all right there?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir, thank you, sir. I squeezed in alongside a couple of grizzled old men – it was very wet and crowded – and a bit niffy they were, too, but I didn’t feel anything at all last night. Not like before. That was awful,’ he added, the unhappy memory still rankling.

  Detective Inspector Sloan considered this.

  Usually in a criminal case there was much evidence to be assembled, examined, tested and evaluated. In the matter of the deaths first of all of Susan Port and then of Terry Galloway there was an absence of firm evidence of any real value other than the causes of death. Mrs Port had undoubtedly died of ergot poisoning and Terry Galloway with a fractured skull but from Ameliorite poisoning. That, unfortunately, seemed as far as it went.

  ‘There was something else, too, sir,’ volunteered Crosby. ‘I only got to the canopy out of the rain after most of the other men had taken cover there, but as I approached it, I heard a sort of cheer go up and a bit of clapping and shouting. Funny that, wasn’t it?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan nodded, his mind now elsewhere. It had rather belatedly occurred to him that a childless Daniel Elland dead was worth more than a childless Daniel Elland alive – that is, worth more to a particular small group of legatees.

  And though they might want him alive to access their inheritance, they might want him dead that they might have it more abundantly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘That is certainly true, Inspector, as far as Daniel Elland is concerned,’ admitted Simon Puckle cautiously to the two policemen sitting in his office later that day. ‘While it doesn’t matter from the point of view of enacting the inheritance whether in the event Elland is found to be dead or alive, it would matter considerably in the distribution of the Mayton Trust.’

  ‘All the more for the others,’ said Crosby simply. ‘Like when Susan Port was killed.’

  ‘Obviously, Inspector,’ went on the solicitor, ‘I did not have any situation like that in mind when I used the expression “dead or alive” at my original meeting with the legatees.’ He gave a little deprecatory cough. ‘Perhaps in the circumstances it was a trifle too colloquial.’

  ‘More of a figure of speech, you might say,’ agreed Sloan, who had been something of an armchair cowboy in his schooldays, reading as many of the works of Zane Grey and J. T. Edson as the library stocked. Posters usually had the heading ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ over a picture of a fugitive from justice on the covers of the literature of that genre.

  ‘I was, of course, Inspector, talking purely from the point of view of the conditions of the inheritance, which is my only remit.’

  ‘I quite understand, sir,’ said Sloan, whose own remit was wider and included the enactment of justice.

  ‘And, of course,’ pointed out the solicitor, ‘at that stage Mrs Susan Port was still alive.’

  ‘Hadn’t been killed,’ said Detective Constable Crosby insouciantly.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said the solicitor.

  ‘Nor had Terry Galloway,’ said Sloan, professionally concerned at what might just have been bystander bad luck.

  Or not.

  ‘Very worrying,’ agreed Simon Puckle.

  ‘That leaves four other legatees besides Daniel Elland,’ stated Sloan.

  Simon Puckle coughed. ‘I’m afraid that is not theoretically correct, Inspector. You would agree, I am sure, that all possible outcomes have to be considered in cases such as this.’

  ‘Four, Mr Puckle.’ Detective Constable Crosby had been counting them off on his fingers. ‘The two Culshaw brothers, Martin Pickford and the nurse, Samantha Peters.’

  ‘That, Constable,’ explained Simon Puckle, giving another little cough as a preliminary to delivering a legal point, ‘is without taking into consideration the possibility – I trust only the very remote possibility – that one of the five remaining legatees whom you’ve mentioned could be indicted for … er … grave malfeasance.’

  ‘Murder, you mean,’ said Crosby.

  The solicitor nodded in acknowledgement of this. ‘In theory, should one of the other five be convicted of causing the death of Susan Port then they would be automatically excluded from their inheritance, as a murderer is not allowed to benefit financially from the death of his victim – in civil law, that is.’

  ‘Or hers,’ said Detective Constable Crosby, more afraid of Woman Sergeant Perkins than of anyone else in the force.

  ‘Not criminal law?’ said Sloan, surprised.

  For a wonder Simon Puckle permitted himself a small smile. ‘And you will well know, Inspector, the burden of proof in civil law is lower. You then only have to show that the person is guilty of murder on the balance of probabilities, rather than beyond reasonable doubt as in criminal law.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Detective Constable Crosby, looking up, interested at last. ‘That helps.’

  ‘It depends,’ said Puckle drily, while Detective Inspector Sloan privately marvelled at the capacity of all solicitors never to deliver an answer without a proviso. ‘Muddying the waters’ was what they called that down at the police station. The wider question of whether murderers could nevertheless benefit in other ways than financially from the death of their victim he left for the forensic psychiatrists to evaluate – revenge being high on the list.

  ‘Back to the station, sir?’ suggested Crosby hopefully, as the two policemen left the solicitors’ offices.

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Crosby, but the canteen will have to wait.’ It wasn’t the pound signs of the greedy that Sloan could see in the constable’s eyes but mugs full of tea and perhaps a Chelsea bun. ‘We need to go out Calleford way next to have a word with Tom Culshaw.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Very good, sir.’ He slipped the car into gear and swung it round, heading out of the Berebury traffic as swiftly as he dared.

  ‘We need to find out what that legatee was doing down among the dropouts.’ Sloan had strapped himself in the front seat of the car and now he took out his notebook. ‘In my opinion, Mr Tom Culshaw is a great deal cleverer than he wants us to think. I’m not quite so sure about the abilities of his younger brother, Clive, though. Spoilt when young, probably. It sounds to me as if he’d been a right mother’s boy in her day.’

  It was one of the things that Sloan was determined on – that his own young son wouldn’t ever become spoilt. Naturally it was a bit too soon now to start to toughen the boy up, so he’d have to wait a while before getting stricter with him. Besides, his wife wouldn’t like it – probably wouldn’t even let him, anyway – so perhaps he wouldn’t try to make a man of him just yet. He was sure he’d know when to start, and in the meantime, it couldn’t do any harm just to enjoy the boy, could it? This thought served to assuage the slight feeling of guilt he’d experienced that morning about the little toy truck he’d bought for his son on his way to work.

  ‘Right, sir, we’re on the Calleford road now,’ Crosby said, bringing Sloan’s mind back from childcare. The police car was nearly out of the town and the road less busy. The constable was keeping his eye on the speed limit, balancing it on the legal needle to a nicety.

  ‘And, Crosby …’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘There is no urgency about the journey. Remember that “softly, softly, catchee monkey”.’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘An expression that as far as the human animal is concerned means go gently if you want to catch someone out.’

  ‘Drive ordinarily you mean, sir?’ he said with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

  ‘I meant drive as other people usually drive,’ said Sloan, heavily ironic. ‘Law-abiding people.’

  ‘No blues and twos, then?’ said Crosby, disappointed. He hadn’t driven fast for days.

  ‘Neither. We should keep everything as low-key as we can with this fellow. There are no flies on our Tom Culshaw, remember, which is how he is able to run a successful outfit such as Gordian Knots. I think it’s high time we found out what he was doing down among the dossers.’

  ‘Just following the crowd, Inspector,’ insisted Tom Culshaw when the two policemen reached his house. He was sitting at his kitchen table playing with five metal balls. They were suspended by thin cords from a miniature gantry in a row alongside each other. ‘My brother went there looking for Daniel Elland and got clobbered for his pains, so I thought I’d have a go myself and see what I could see.’

  Sloan, policeman on duty, who hadn’t for one moment discounted the possibility that in spite of all appearances to the contrary the two brothers might be acting in what the law called ‘concert’, merely nodded and said, ‘I see, sir.’

  ‘Brotherly love?’ murmured Crosby almost – but not quite – under his breath.

  ‘Professional curiosity,’ said Culshaw, who had heard him.

  On the other hand, thought Sloan, ignoring them both, that the two Culshaws might each have had a different agenda was something that hadn’t occurred to him before.

  And it should have done.

  Besides, for all he knew Tom Culshaw might be the murderer they were seeking. After all, somebody was and the man sitting across his kitchen table from him now was still in the running. All of the legatees were, although whether innate ability came into the picture he wasn’t sure. He’d known some very dim murderers get away with it in his day. Mostly from keeping their mouths shut.

  Tom Culshaw pulled back the ball at the beginning of the row of his plaything and then he let it go. It hit its neighbour but it was a different ball at the opposite end of the row that responded by moving forward to exactly the same degree. The middle ones didn’t move.

  ‘What are you doing with that thing?’ asked Crosby, fascinated.

  ‘Thinking,’ said Culshaw.

  Detective Inspector Sloan was anxious to pursue quite a different line of thought of his own. ‘And what exactly came into your mind, sir, when you were down at the Postern Gate?’

  ‘All I thought about,’ interrupted Crosby by way of encouragement, ‘was getting out of the rain.’