Stiff News by Catherine Aird Read Free Book Online Page B

there was holding their collective breath while a confrontation took place.
    â€˜Well, Hamish…’ said Mrs Maisie Carruthers.
    â€˜Well, Maisie,’ said Brigadier Hamish MacIver.
    â€˜It’s been a long time.’
    â€˜A long, long time.’
    â€˜Sir, sir.’ Someone was tugging urgently at Sloan’s sleeve. ‘Sir, please can you come?’
    He turned, missing the rest of the scene in the dining room, to see his detective constable standing directly under the head of a stag fixed to the wall above his head. ‘Well, what is it, Crosby?’
    â€˜The pathologist says he’s waiting to start the post-mortem on Gertrude Powell now, sir.’
    The detective constable had kept his voice down but the Matron had heard him. She, too, slid quietly out of the dining room and into the corridor, closing the door behind her.
    â€˜I’m sorry, madam,’ explained Sloan, ‘but we’ve got to go now.’ He hesitated. ‘We will have to come back, you understand.’
    â€˜I think you should,’ said Muriel Peden unexpectedly.
    Sloan looked up.
    â€˜I didn’t say anything before,’ the Matron murmured awkwardly, ‘because I couldn’t imagine that it could be important.’
    â€˜Circumstances alter cases,’ said Crosby prosaically.
    â€˜But now…’ she said as if the constable hadn’t spoken.
    â€˜Now?’ said Sloan.
    â€˜Now, I think you ought to know, Inspector,’ she said, ‘that I – we, that is – have reason to believe that someone may have been into Mrs Powell’s room very soon after she’d died.’
    â€˜Been into?’
    â€˜All right then,’ she conceded unwillingly, the word almost wrung out of her, ‘searched.’

Chapter Six
    And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crookèd scythe and spade
    â€˜And what have we here, Sloan, may I ask?’ said Dr H.S. Dabbe, Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury and District Hospitals Trust, by way of welcome to the two policemen standing in the mortuary. His taciturn assistant, Burns, was already helping him into his green operating gown.
    â€˜Body of a female aged eighty-two,’ responded Detective Inspector Sloan, ‘who died six days ago.’
    â€˜And what brings you two here as well?’ Dr Dabbe raised his eyebrows quizzically as he started to tug on his rubber boots.
    â€˜A written allegation by the deceased,’ said Sloan succinctly, ‘that she had been murdered.’
    â€˜Well, well.’ The pathologist grinned and said, ‘We don’t get a lot of self-referrals in this branch of medical practice. Come to that, Sloan, I don’t get many people brought in here in a shroud. You two been body snatching?’
    â€˜Only in a manner of speaking,’ said Sloan, explaining the circumstances. ‘Her name is Gertrude Eleanor Murton Powell.’
    Dr Dabbe reached for a form. ‘Place of death?’
    â€˜The Manor at Almstone.’
    The doctor’s pen hovered above the paper. ‘Where did you say?’
    â€˜The Manor at Almstone,’ repeated Sloan, adding, ‘I believe that technically speaking its classification is as a residential care and nursing home for the elderly.’
    â€˜One of God’s waiting rooms,’ said Crosby. In the constable’s book, decrepitude set in soon after the age of thirty.
    â€˜The Manor at Almstone…’ Dr Dabbe frowned. ‘That rings a bell, you know.’
    Under his breath Crosby chanted, ‘Oranges and lemons, said the bells of St Clement’s.’
    Sloan decided he hadn’t heard this and raised an enquiring eyebrow towards the pathologist. At this moment anything – anything at all – to do with the Manor and its residents might be of interest. ‘It does, doctor?’ he said encouragingly.
    â€˜It’s coming back to me now. What it was,’ the pathologist said, ‘if I