Losing Ground by Catherine Aird Read Free Book Online Page A

grounded in statute law. ‘That goes for you, miss, and the fire brigade and everybody else.’
    It didn’t, unfortunately, seem to have gone for Dr Dabbe. The pathologist was now lying flat on the ground on his tummy, a pair of binoculars glued to his eyes. They were pointing in the direction of a pile of charred rafters heaped on what had been the parquet floor of the billiard room. ‘I justneed to get them properly focused,’ he said to nobody in particular, ‘and I might see something.’
    ‘That’s all I want to do, too,’ pleaded Melanie Smithers, still at Sloan’s elbow. ‘See something.’
    ‘Back to the main road,’ repeated Sloan. ‘Now.’
    ‘Please, Inspector – it is Inspector, isn’t it? – all I need is a really good look at exactly where this new building joins on to the old one before anyone starts knocking it about.’
    ‘What new building?’ asked Sloan.
    ‘The Victorian one.’ She dismissed the wrecked billiard room with a wave of her hand. ‘It’s very important that I take a look now.’
    ‘And why won’t it wait?’ asked Sloan with professional curiosity. The good books on policing stressed that note should always be taken of all those at the scene of any incident, but especially those very near and anxious to speak there and then. ‘Everything’s going to be much too hot to touch for hours.’
    ‘Because the developers will want as much of the building pulled down as soon as they can,’ she said. ‘I’m the local conservation officer and I know just how they operate.’
    ‘Fast?’ suggested Crosby, drawn to Sloan’s side and his interest engaged by the presence of a pretty young girl.
    ‘They’ll get some demolition people in with the speed of light if they possibly can,’ she said, ‘and get the work all carried out with the speed of light under any pretext they can dream up.’
    ‘It’s a white elephant, then, is it?’ said Crosby, waving an arm in the direction of the house.
    Melanie Smithers made a face. ‘If you ask me, as far as thedevelopers are concerned the whole of Tolmie Park here isn’t so much a white elephant as an albatross round their necks.’
    Detective Inspector Sloan’s mind had been working along quite different lines and the
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
hadn’t come into it. He said casually, ‘Could the house that you’re talking about by any chance have been the one shown on the painting of Tolmie Park in the museum?’
    She turned an eager face to him. ‘That’s right, Inspector. How did you know that? In the Filligree portrait there. But this later part…’
    ‘Later?’ he said.
    ‘Well, Victorian, anyway…’ she nodded quickly. ‘We think that at the point where it was joined on to the old building that you ought now to be able to see the obscured parts of an even older building. The original core, so to speak.’
    ‘The nearly new, the old and the very old,’ remarked Crosby.
    ‘The very oldest parts were probably the remnants of a cross wing,’ said Melanie Smithers, taking this seriously. ‘With a bit of luck they were still visible as part of the existing Tolmie Park when the painting was done.’ She sniffed. ‘Most of the remains were probably cleared away when they put up the billiard room. They were so ignorant in those days.’
    ‘I see,’ said Sloan. He didn’t see anything except that it was important to her. And therefore perhaps to the police. That is, if the portrait missing from the museum with its old view of the house had anything to do with the fire and the bones. Melanie Smithers didn’t know about the bones. At least, he hoped she didn’t.
    ‘What sort of old building would it have been you were looking for, miss?’ he asked.
    ‘Early medieval.’
    ‘Early Filligrees?’
    ‘No, no. Not the Filligrees,’ she said dismissively. ‘They were only sixteenth-century parvenus.’ She looked at the two policemen. ‘You know, Johnnies-come-lately.’
    ‘Up like a rocket, down like stone,’