“But it really comes down,” Cartwright was saying, “to asking who could possibly have wanted to kill my cousin Josephine.”
“Just you,” said Sloan pleasantly.
There was no spluttering expostulation. “I didn’t kill her,” said Harold Cartwright.
“Perhaps not,” said Sloan. “But it’s saved you a lot of trouble, hasn’t it?”
The man eyed him thoughtfully. “I’m not sure, yet. That’s why I’ve come to see you. To ask for something.”
“You don’t want,” said Sloan gently, “the chairman of Cartwright’s Consolidated Carbons to be publicly connected with the late Sister Anne of the Convent of St. Anselm at Cullingoak who died in dubious circumstances on Wednesday—which is why you have stayed here in this village holding yourself ready for questioning rather than gone back to London where we should have had to come to see you.”
“Inspector, should you ever leave the police and want a job, come to see me.”
“Thank you, sir, but I feel I’ve earned my pension. And I’m going to enjoy it. This request for no publicity —I take it that you would like it to hold good until after one minute past ten on Thursday morning?”
Cartwright exhaled audibly. “Just until then, Inspector. It’s very important.”
“So,” said Sloan, “is murder.”
Bullen came to the telephone readily enough.
“Warm milk?” he echoed stupidly.
“Something about milk,” said Sloan. “Think, man, think. What exactly did Tewn say about warm milk?”
“Nothing,” said Bullen promptly.
Sloan signed. “A witness has told me that while you were watching the guy burn, Tewn made some remark about warm milk…”
“Oh, that,” said Bullen. “I didn’t know you meant that.”
“I do mean that.”
“I should have to think, Inspector.”
Sloan waited as patiently as he could while Bullen’s thought processes ground their way through his memory.
“There was this man there…”
“What man where?”
“Some town fellow, a stranger, who came to see the fire. He made some sort of crack about the nun’s habit and our getting hold of it. I said it was dead easy.”
“As easy as stealing milk from blind babies?”
“That’s right, Inspector, and Tewn said it was all a matter of getting the milk warm enough.”
“What did he mean?”
“He was being funny, Inspector. We’d been having a study lesson on feeding calves that afternoon. We’d all been having a bash—all the second year that is:—when the Principal came in and said it was all a matter of getting the milk warm enough and then everything else would be all right.”
“Oh, I see,” said Sloan.
“Jolly clever of poor old Tewn, wasn’t it? Made us all laugh at the time. All the second year anyway. Was there anything else, Inspector, that you wanted to know?”
“What? No, no thank you, Bullen. That was all.”
Luston was the biggest town in Calleshire. Calleford had its Minister, its county administration, its history. Luston got on with the work.
Sloan and Crosby found Frederick Street in the decayed, once genteel, now shabby quarter of the town, by-passed alike by the glass self-service stores and the council’s redevelopment schemes. They were there well before four o’clock, having fought their way through the crowded shopping centre into the suburbs. Most of the inhabitants of Luston seemed to be out shopping—but not the occupant of 144 Frederick Street. The lace curtain twitched as the car drew up at the door, but for all that it seemed an age before the door was opened. A woman stood there, ineffectually dressed in clothes off the peg, her hair combed oddly straight.
“Good afternoon?” she said uncertainly.
“Miss Eileen Lome?” It couldn’t be anyone else, thought Sloan, not with that hair.
She nodded.
“I wonder if you could spare us a moment or two? We want to talk to you about the Convent of St. Anselm.”
Her face lit up spontaneously and then darkened. “You’re not from the Press?”
“No, I’m Detective-Inspector Sloan of the Berebury C.I.D. and this is Constable Crosby, my assistant.”
“That’s different. Won’t you come in?” She led the way through to the sitting-room. “I don’t want to talk to the Press. It wouldn’t be right.”
“We quite understand.” Sloan was at his most soothing. “We shan’t keep you long.”
The sitting-room was aggressively tidy. Miss Lome ushered them into easy chairs and chose a wooden one for herself.
“I can’t quite get used to soft chairs yet,” she said.
Sloan stirred uncomfortably in a chair he wouldn’t have had inside his own home let alone sat in. “No, miss.”
“Can I make you some tea?” suggested Miss Lome. “My sister’s not back yet, but I think I know where everything is.”
“No, thank you, miss.. We’d like to talk to you instead.”
She cocked her head a little to one side attentively. Sloan put her at forty-five, perhaps a trifle more. There was a youthful eagerness about her that made guessing difficult.
“When did you leave the Convent?”
“Twenty-four days ago.”
“Why? I’m sorry—it’s such a personal question, I know, but we have to…”
“I began to have doubts as to whether mine was a true vocation.”
“How long were you there?”
“Twenty-five years.”
“Twenty-five years?”
“Time has a different meaning there,” she said tonelessly.
“Nevertheless,” persisted Sloan, not unkindly, “it’s quite a while, isn’t it? One would have thought…”
“It’s different,” she said defensively, “for those who come in later. They seem more—well—sure, somehow. They know that all they want then is to be there, and they’ve proved it to themselves, and in any case they’re older.”
Sloan nodded. The word she was looking for was “mature.” He did not supply it.
“But for the rest of us,” she said, “who think we are sure at seventeen—you can’t help but wonder, you know. And it grows and grows, the feeling that you aren’t a true daughter of the Church.” She shook her head sadly. “It is a terrible thing to lose your vocation.”
Crosby’s face was a study.
“I’m sure it is, miss,” said Sloan hastily. And it was. no use asking a policeman where to find one of them.
They didn’t deal in lost vocations. “So they let you out, miss?”
“It wasn’t quite as simple as that, but that’s what happened in the end.” She brushed a hand across her straggly hair. She made it into a gauche, graceless gesture. “It’s getting a bit less strange now. My sister’s taken me in, you know. She’s being very kind though she doesn’t understand how very different everything is. Every single thing.”
“Yes, miss, it must be.”
The disaffection of the former Sister Bertha, now restored to her old name of Eileen Lome, seemed unlikely to have any bearing on the death of Sister Anne. In that the Mother Superior appeared to be quite right. Sloan sighed. It had seemed such a good lead. Apart from making quite sure…
“I don’t know if you’ve had any news from the Convent lately,” he said.
“You mean about Sister Anne? My sister showed me the newspaper this morning.” She smiled wanly. “She thought it would interest me.”