“Watch her carefully, Crosby.”
“Inspector Bring-’em-back-alive,” murmured Crosby, but fortunately Sloan was out of earshot. He was stumbling among the trees looking for Harold Cartwright. He found him at the far corner of the reviving fire and drew him to one side.
“There’s just one question I want to ask you, sir. Did you or did you not telephone us about this guy?”
“Me, Inspector? No. No, I heard about it in The Bull and came along to see what was going on. I would have rung you as soon as I saw the guy, of course, if I hadn’t heard the fire siren.”
“Of course.”
Cartwright gave him a tight smile. “I’m glad to see the Lady’s Not for Burning. Funny thing for them to do, wasn’t it?”
“Very.” Sloan stumped back to the car and climbed in beside Crosby. He sniffed. “Something’s burning— the guy…”
“No, sir, it’s me.” Crosby flushed in the darkness. “A jumping cracker. One of the little perishers tied it to my coat.”
“Get him?”
“No.”
“Let’s hope it’s not an augury, that’s all.”
7
« ^ »
Back in Berebury Sloan dissected the guy with the same care that Dr. Dabbe had gone about his post-mortem. He was joined by Superintendent Leeyes.
“Who is this man Cartwright?” he demanded.
“He says he’s her cousin, sir.”
“And he just appears out of the blue asking to see her the afternoon after she’s killed when he hasn’t seen her for twenty years?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What does he want to do that for?”
“I don’t know yet, sir.”
“Find out about him for a start. If he hadn’t come to the Convent this afternoon was there anything to connect him with this woman?”
“Only his name and address in the hotel register. It needn’t have been the right one but it was.”
“So he has a reason—a good reason—for coming, Sloan, hasn’t he? Otherwise he would have cleared off as soon as he could.” Leeyes grunted. “Perhaps it was to make sure she was dead.”
“Or that he’d clobbered the right one.”
“If he’d waited to hear in the ordinary way about that death he might have waited quite a while, of course. There’s no obligation on their part to tell anyone, I suppose.” He shrugged his shoulders. “They call it a Living Death so perhaps there’s not a lot of difference.”
“We’ve got a lead, anyway, which is something. I’ll go to see the mother in the morning and also find out a bit more about this man. We’ve checked on The Bull already. He arrived at about seven-thirty, spent an hour over his meal, had a couple of drinks in the bar and then went out for a stroll.”
The superintendent’s head went up. “When did you say she was last seen alive?”
“About a quarter to nine—at the end of Vespers.”
“When did he get back?”
“The landlord didn’t notice. Says he was busy with the usual crowd.”
“What’s he like?”
“Not a fool.”
The superintendent wasn’t a fool either. “What was he doing at this bonfire?”
Sloan shook his head. “I don’t know, sir.”
“And who rang here and told us about it?”
“A man’s voice, it was, but that’s all that switchboard can tell us.”
Leeyes indicated the guy. “Someone wanted us to see this before it was burnt to a cinder. Why?”
“I don’t know, sir. Not yet. There’s one thing—the footprints we found weren’t Cartwright’s.”
“Those glasses—are they the missing ones?”
“I don’t know that either, sir, yet.” Sloan undid them very carefully. “We’ll try them for fingerprints, but I doubt if we’ll get anything worth while.” He undid the habit and coif and slipped them off, leaving a large stuffed farm sack lying on the bench. The habit, deeply scorched in places, was old and darned. He felt its thinness between his fingers.
Superintendent Leeyes grunted. “I don’t get it, Sloan. This woman, Sister Anne, she wasn’t naked or anything?”
“Oh, no, sir,” said Sloan, deeply shocked. “It’s not that sort of place at all.”
“Perhaps she was killed in her Number Ones,” said Leeyes. “Or perhaps this tomfoolery has got nothing whatsoever to do with it and you’re wasting your time, Sloan. In that case,” he fingered the charred habit, “it would seem that the wrong one’s wearing the sackcloth and ashes—eh?”
“Yes, sir,” said Sloan dutifully.
Sloan had been married for fifteen years.
Long enough to view his wife’s nightly ritual with face cream with patient indifference.
Long enough for her to be surprised as he slipped into bed beside her when he pulled the white sheet right round and across the top of her forehead.
“Denis, what on earth are you doing?”
He tucked the blanket as far under her chin as it would go and considered her.
“That’s all you can see of a nun.”
“I should think so, too. What more do you want?”
“Funny what a good idea of a woman you can get from this bit.”
She shook her head. “Don’t you believe it, dear. Men always think that. It’s not true.”
“No grey now.”
“Beast,” retorted his wife equably. “On the other hand, you can’t see my ankles.” Margaret Sloan had very good ankles and very little grey hair.
He relaxed his hold on the sheet and lay on his back. “Margaret…”
“Well?”
“What would make a woman go into a convent?”
“Don’t they call it having a vocation or something? Like nursing or teaching.”
“They can’t all have felt a call, can they? There’s over fifty of them there.”
“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “Perhaps they were religious-minded anyway and then something happened to drive them there.”
“Like what—as Crosby would say?”
“Being lonely, would you think, or jilted perhaps, or the man in their life loving another. That sort of thing.” She tugged at the pillow. “Or not having any man there in the first place, of course.”
Sloan yawned. “Escape, too, would you say? Not facing up to things. Running away from life.”
“There’s always that, I suppose.”
“Not my idea of a life. The superintendent called it a living death.” He pulled the eiderdown up. “Can’t see you going in one either, dear.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said his wife.
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose something had happened to you after we got engaged. What should I have done then, do you think? A living death wouldn’t have mattered very much then, would it?”
He turned to face her, oddly disconcerted. “I… I hadn’t thought of that.”
She snuggled down in the bed. “Mind you,” she said sleepily, “I don’t think I would have made a very good nun.”
Marwin Ranby’s study at the Agricultural Institute looked almost as comfortable in daylight as it had done in the cosy, shaded light of last evening. There was a young woman with him. She had pale, auburn hair and the delicate, almost translucent skin that often goes with it. The clothes she was wearing were deceptively, ridiculously simple, and Sloan was not at all surprised to find himself being introduced to Miss Celia Faine, the last of her line and Marwin Ranby’s fiancée.
“I have been telling Miss Faine something of last night’s excitement,” said the Principal.
“But, I suspect, not everything,” said Celia Faine with a smile. She had a pleasant, unaffected voice. “Marwin’s being very discreet, Inspector.”