Inheritance Tracks, page 17
Crosby took a deep breath and added, ‘And looking for a man called Daniel Elland.’
‘You’re not the only one,’ said the man unexpectedly.
‘Why?’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’ bristled the man, instantly hostile. ‘Get lost. Now, before I kick you out.’
‘OK, OK,’ said Crosby, starting to move away.
‘But if you do find him, whoever you are and wherever the clever sod is, tell him that old Bert wants a word.’
Detective Constable Crosby, deciding that absence of body was better than presence of mind, left without opening his mouth any more. Fading silently back into the darkness, he stepped in another direction still. He was a bit luckier here in that there was an angle in the wall of a building created by the addition of an outhouse that was sheltering it from the eastern wind that was now getting up. Although there were already men trying to sleep there it looked to him as if there might be just room for him to tag on at the end of the row and out of the wind.
He lowered himself to the ground, careful not to disturb the man beside him. Not carefully enough, though, for a small terrier nestling against the side of the greatcoat of its owner. It aroused the man to his arrival who now turned a florid unshaven face in his direction, hiccupping the while. ‘Got anything to drink?’ he asked Crosby, raising himself up on one elbow and putting out a hand.
That was the moment when Crosby realised that the plastic bag containing his sandwiches and bottle of water had gone.
‘No,’ he replied, although from the smell of the man he deduced without difficulty that the drink his neighbour had in mind was not Adam’s ale.
‘Or anything else? I don’t care what. Anything will do.’
‘Sorry, mate,’ said Crosby. ‘I’ve only just left home.’ He had carefully considered the choice of reasons for sleeping rough suggested to him by Inspector Sloan and decided that his story was that a wicked stepfather had thrown him out. He trotted this out now.
‘Bastard,’ said the man at once.
‘I’ll say,’ agreed Crosby vigorously. ‘An absolute bastard. I can’t see what my mother saw in him.’
‘Clink, clink, I expect,’ said the man, sinking back, a tear starting to trickle from one eye towards his beard. ‘That’s all women ever care about. Money.’ Another tear succeeded the first and made its way down a bruised and emaciated face. ‘And more money.’
Crosby began to edge away from him and his dog, deciding that the man was best left to his own maudlin thoughts. As soon as he made the first movement, though, the little dog drew its upper lip back and bared its teeth.
‘Quiet, Isaac,’ commanded its owner. He put out a hand to restrain the dog and tried to struggle to his feet. He soon lost his balance in the attempt and fell back to the pavement with a loud cry of pain as his skinny body hit the unyielding stone. ‘God, that hurt,’ he cried aloud.
‘I’m looking for a man called Daniel Elland,’ carried on Crosby gamely.
‘So what?’ He rubbed his hip where it had met the ground.
‘Do you know him?’
The man raised a head covered with long, unkempt hair and glared at him. ‘Who wants to know?’
‘I do.’
‘What for?’
‘That’s my business.’
‘Well, it’s not mine so get out of it now.’ He put a hand out to the dog and said, ‘Go get him, Isaac.’
Detective Constable Crosby took the first opportunity he could to make his escape and slid off in yet another direction. This one seemed a more hopeful one as he thought he could see lights ahead. Attracted to them like a moth, he advanced a bit further and found himself in the delivery area behind another row of shops. Orienting himself, he realised that he was standing at the back of Berebury’s supermarket and thus near their unloading bay. This had a canopy over it and showed every sign of being as sheltered as possible. Slightly surprised that it appeared to be empty – perhaps there was a caretaker who did the rounds during the night – he hunkered down in a corner as far away from the road as he could. He found out the hard way during the small hours that a night sleeping rough was a good deal worse than one on night duty. He did eventually drift into an uneasy sleep but awoke with a jerk a little while later. He lay on the ground of the shelter as still as a hunted animal but there didn’t seem to be anyone about. Any human, that is. His next thought was foxes: people were always talking about the increase in urban foxes. Failing to spot any foxes, his mind ran to rats, but he couldn’t see any of those scuttling about.
Something had undoubtedly woken him, though. Listening intently he could hear – but not place – a low-pitched whine. He tried to sit up to see if he could establish where it was coming from but was immediately overcome by an attack of nausea so acute that he straightaway fell back to the floor. Quite disorientated now, he became aware that he was starting to have a headache, too, even though the noise of the intrusive whine seemed to be abating a little.
He tried to sit up again and promptly vomited. Dimly recognising on its way back the half of the sandwich he’d eaten earlier, he retained enough of a sense of humour to realise the state of his clothes now could only reinforce his pretence of being a genuine vagrant.
A bout of dizziness had succeeded the nausea and he gave up any thought of standing. Instead he crawled out of the loading bay and collapsed on the ground outside with the worst headache he’d ever had in his life.
And knew no more until morning.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Sister Samantha Peters sailed down the Accident and Emergency ward like the old wooden man-o’-war ship the fighting Temeraire in its heyday and on the offensive. ‘Dogs,’ she proclaimed thunderously, ‘are not allowed in the hospital. You know that. You’ve been there before.’
‘Sorry, Sister.’
‘Go and tie him up outside at once.’
The man who had brought the dog in with him fumbled slowly and carefully with the string that was presently doing duty as a belt round his greatcoat and then equally slowly and carefully threaded it through the dog’s collar. ‘Come along, Isaac,’ he said, leading the way to the door. ‘You’re not welcome here.’
‘Nor are his fleas,’ murmured Samantha Peters under her breath. She sat down at her desk and waited for the man to come back. As he did so she plucked a new form out of a rack in front of her and asked him his name this time.
‘Still Little Sir Echo.’
She wrote this down without comment. She’d heard worse – much worse – from patients from the east side and wasn’t disposed to argue.
‘And I need some painkillers,’ the man added.
‘Oh, yes?’ Painkillers were what everyone sleeping rough always asked for, being the nearest thing the hospital handed out to the addictive drugs they really wanted. ‘And what is it that brings Little Sir Echo into the hospital at three o’clock in the morning asking for painkillers?’ she asked without trace of sarcasm. Once upon a time she used to ask new patients what was wrong with them but had tired of the usual wisecracking response of ‘That’s for you to tell me’ and had accordingly changed her approach.
‘A fall.’
‘How far?’
‘Not far, Sister, but I really could do with some painkillers.’
Samantha Peters sighed.
‘I do think I’ve done myself an injury to my back, Sister,’ he insisted.
‘And did you fall or were you pushed?’ she asked. That question was mandatory in the Accident and Emergency ward these days, since litigation usually followed hot on the heels of any injury the blame for which could conceivably be laid at someone else’s door, especially those of either the victim or the hospital.
‘I just fell back on the pavement when I was trying to get up,’ said the old man simply.
‘You’ll have to let me take a look,’ she said.
‘Can’t you just give me some painkillers?’ he asked, his eyes beginning to fill with tears.
‘Sorry,’ she said, not unkindly, aware that he wouldn’t want her to see the state of his threadbare clothes under the greatcoat he was now so determinedly clutching round his thin, unwashed person. ‘Not without examining you properly.’ She waved a hand towards the couch in the corner. ‘Can you get up on that?’
He tottered over to it and, aided by two steps, climbed on it. She drew the curtains round him and promised to return when he was ready. It was a while before she heard his call and stepped between the curtains. His spindly wasted flanks and undernourished back were now fully exposed to her view.
‘I’m afraid you’ve got some trouble here, Mr Echo,’ she said after taking a close look at his spine. No way was she going to address him as ‘sir’. ‘You’ve got a considerable haematoma – that’s a blood blister to you – over your hip and a lot of swelling on the edge of the bone above it. You’re going to need an X-ray of your hip and I’ll have to get Dr Chomel to look at your haematoma and perhaps drain it. I think we should keep you in hospital overnight in case it bursts and goes septic.’ That it would inevitably go septic in his circumstances she did not need to say. She pulled her watch up into view. ‘It’s three o’clock and I have to go on my break now, but I want you to wait here until Dr Chomel can get to see you. I don’t think she’ll be long.’
Pulling the curtains of the cubicle together behind her she set off for the staff canteen, even though she found food was seldom appetising at this indeterminate moment in the night that hung somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow.
By the time she got back to the ward, he who had called himself Little Sir Echo had got dressed and both he and his dog had disappeared back into the night.
‘There’s something very funny going on down by the Postern Gate, sir,’ said a weary Detective Constable Crosby the next morning. ‘Lovely and warm in here, isn’t it?’ he said, rubbing his hands and looking round the police canteen appreciatively for the first time ever.
‘Go on,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, who was sitting across the table from him, having his own breakfast.
‘Whenever I mentioned Daniel Elland’s name to any of them, sir, they acted like they were sure he was there with them somewhere but that they didn’t know exactly where.’ Crosby had crept away from the east end of the town under cover of darkness and was reporting back, still unwashed and unshaven, to Sloan. There was a dark shadow on his chin now and another one under his eyes as well but for a different reason. ‘Or exactly who Daniel Elland was. They didn’t know that either. But they knew they wanted him. Funny that, isn’t it, sir?’
‘Not if he isn’t using his own name, it isn’t,’ said Sloan. ‘Down-and-outs don’t always want you to know who they are.’
‘But if they don’t know who he is why should they want him so badly?’ said Crosby, applying himself to the canteen’s ever-popular all day breakfast.
‘He might know something they don’t,’ suggested Sloan.
‘Or someone,’ said Crosby glumly.
‘Unknown factors come into a lot of police business, usually at the beginning of a case,’ said Sloan prosaically. ‘You have to learn to live with them.’
Crosby hadn’t been listening. ‘I mean, what could they possibly want him for?’
‘That is something we don’t yet know.’
‘But they must know all right,’ he said, spearing a sausage. ‘Why they want him, I mean.’
‘I’m sure they do,’ said Sloan warmly. ‘But we don’t and you haven’t found out yet. Tonight, perhaps you will.’
He groaned. ‘Must I, sir? Heavy rain’s forecast for tonight.’
‘Police work’s never only “job and knock”,’ said Sloan. ‘You don’t just do what you choose to think is your job and knock off like ordinary workers can do sometimes when their work’s done.’
‘Yes, sir,’ he said glumly.
‘Besides, Crosby,’ Sloan added, ‘it’ll be good experience for you, learning how the other half lives. It might even influence you when deciding whether or not to make an arrest.’
‘How come, sir?’
‘It’s the small matter of their being fined for whatever they’ve got up to that they shouldn’t have done, such as aggravated begging.’
‘Even though they wouldn’t be able to pay it?’
‘Exactly. The Chairman of the Bench, the redoubtable Miss Hettie Meadows, is always saying that she has to take that into consideration when passing sentence. Or not.’ Sloan took a mouthful of tea and said reflectively, ‘You can be sent to prison for not paying a fine.’
‘I do know that, sir.’
‘It’s nice and warm in prison in winter and I understand the food’s not too bad, either.’
‘I get you, sir.’ Crosby attacked a rasher of bacon with some ferocity. ‘My sandwiches got nicked in the night,’ he said by way of explanation of his appetite.
‘Tough,’ said Sloan. ‘It might have been your throat. You do realise that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ he said, shivering in spite of the warmth of the canteen. He turned his attention to the fried bread, demolishing it at speed. ‘Sir, why are we looking for this man Daniel Elland like the people from Puckles are doing and some of the men down by the river, too? What’s he done that he shouldn’t have done?’
Detective Inspector Sloan pushed his plate away and sat back. ‘Probably nothing at all. As far as we’re concerned he’s just one of the five surviving beneficiaries of the Mayton Trust and we only want to interview him in connection with the unexplained death of a fellow legatee of that trust.’
‘Mrs Susan Port?’
‘Who died in circumstances that are not entirely clear.’ That went, too, for the death of he whom the police were fairly sure was Mrs Port’s godson and heir, Terry Galloway. Where his death came into the equation Sloan still didn’t know, Dr Dabbe not having been back in touch to date with any results from the forensic lab. ‘And remember, Crosby, there may be no connection at all with whoever wants him among the dropouts, so beware of jumping to conclusions.’
‘But,’ Crosby objected, ‘that only explains the other people – Puckles lot – they want him because of the money, don’t they?’
‘They want him for perfectly obvious reasons,’ said Sloan, draining his cup. ‘Financial ones. They can’t get their hands on the dibs until Daniel Elland is found – the Mayton Trust can’t shell out until then. That’s why they want him, but why Clive Culshaw got clobbered down there for his trouble we don’t know, and why anyone else down there should want him we don’t know either.’
The constable nodded and said, ‘Money talks, though.’
‘It hasn’t talked to Daniel Elland yet because he doesn’t know about it,’ pointed out Sloan. ‘Can’t have done because nobody can find him to tell him he’s come into big money.’
Detective Constable Crosby downed the last of the tomatoes on his plate and gave this some thought. ‘Suppose those guys in that squat there know about the money and he doesn’t and that was why they were trying to find him?’
‘A good try, Crosby, but unlikely. That Miss Fennel at Puckles didn’t strike me as someone who’d rat on a client, let alone on the firm.’ He found he could quite easily envisage Miss Florence Fennel going to the stake rather than break a professional confidence.
The constable sighed. ‘Actually, sir, it wasn’t having my sandwiches nicked that really got me.’
‘Oh?’
‘It was something that I didn’t understand going on behind the supermarket.’
‘What exactly?’
‘That covered delivery bay. It looked quite all right, and I thought I’d be safe enough for the night there, seeing as it’s so sheltered.’
‘But you weren’t?’
‘You can say that again,’ he said feelingly. ‘I felt awful. First of all, it was this funny whine …’
‘The air conditioning?’
‘No, it wasn’t like that at all. More like one of those insects in the jungle that go on and on in Eastern films.’
‘Cicadas?’
‘That’s right, sir. The sound drives you mad in the end. It was something that I couldn’t quite make out, however hard I listened. I felt as if I’d been concussed.’
‘Nobody had hit you over the head, I hope.’ Actually, if they had done, the police could have gone into the area with a vengeance looking for a policeman who had been assaulted in the execution of his duty.
‘No, sir, but it upset my hearing for a bit – I went quite deaf – and then I was sick.’
‘Even though you hadn’t had anything to eat?’
‘That’s right, sir. It can’t have been my sandwiches because I didn’t have them.’ He looked mournfully at Sloan. ‘I did tell you that they’d been stolen, didn’t I?’
‘You did. Then what?’
‘I was ever so sick again. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t stand for quite a while and when I was on my feet again, I felt so dizzy I had to hang onto the wall. But that wasn’t the worst of it.’
‘No?’ said Sloan, frowning.
‘That’s when the headache started. I’ve never had one like it, sir, and I don’t ever want to again.’
‘And then?’
‘I came away from there just before it got light. The night duty sergeant let me have a bit of a kip in the custody suite.’
‘Good. Don’t wash or shave, though, before you go back there tonight. Are you all right again now?’
‘Oh, yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Quite all right now that the headache’s gone.’ He paused and then said, ‘Sir, that sausage you’ve left on your plate, would you mind if I had it, now that you don’t want it?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
‘Oh, it’s you again,’ said Tom Culshaw. He wasn’t particularly welcoming to the young man standing on his front doorstep that morning. He sighed. ‘You’d better come in and tell me what you want this time.’
‘Don’t be like that, Tom,’ said Martin Pickford. ‘We’re supposed to be family, remember?’
‘So I have been led to believe,’ said the other man. ‘Well, if you ask me, you can keep your families. There’s a famous poet who wrote about exactly what your mum and dad do to you and it’s not nice. But now I come to think about it,’ Tom added soberly, ‘it’s quite true.’
