Stiff News by Catherine Aird Page B

what happened?’ Superintendent Leeyes wanted to know. As was always his wont, he was sitting comfortably in the relative calm of his own office.
    â€˜He rolled over and played dead,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, who was standing uneasily at the other side of the Superintendent’s desk. He and Crosby had got back to Berebury Police Station at long last only to find Leeyes ready and waiting, spider-like, to rush out and ensnare them in his web. ‘For all that he’d been a judge in his day.’
    â€˜Which he wasn’t, I take it?’ Leeyes said. ‘Dead, I mean.’
    â€˜No, sir,’ said Sloan. ‘Far from it, in fact.’
    â€˜Alive and kicking,’ contributed Crosby.
    â€˜Oh, we whistled up a couple of care staff pretty quickly,’ said Sloan, ‘and they brisked about a bit. Got him cleaned up and so forth and then into bed, but…’
    â€˜But he wouldn’t talk to us at all after that, sir,’ put in the detective constable. ‘Couldn’t get a dicky bird out of him for love nor money.’
    â€˜And we can’t make him talk,’ said Leeyes more than a little wistfully. Some of the more liberal provisions of the new Police and Criminal Evidence Act had not gone down at all well with the Superintendent of F Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary.
    â€˜No, sir,’ replied Sloan rather more firmly than perhaps he should have done. ‘We can’t.’
    â€˜Was he mute of malice?’ enquired Leeyes with interest. ‘We might get him for that.’
    â€˜More like mute of enlightened self-interest,’ said Sloan, who had himself picked something up from the class the Superintendent had once attended on ‘The Whig Supremacy’.
    Leeyes glared at his two subordinates, the reference now quite lost upon him. ‘So what exactly is going on out there?’
    â€˜Something, I’m sure,’ said Sloan fairly, before Crosby could speak, ‘but we don’t know exactly what. Yet.’
    â€˜Well, you’d better find out pretty quickly,’ said Leeyes, ‘because we’ll have old Locombe-Stableford on our backs in no time at all. To say nothing,’ he added gloomily, ‘of the press. I can see the headlines now.’
    So unfortunately could Sloan. And you couldn’t get anything cornier than ‘Mystery at the Manor’. Or ‘Who Moved Mysterious Figure in the Bedroom?’ Bedrooms always made good headlines. Figures in bedrooms, even better.
    Leeyes shuffled some papers about on his desk. ‘All I can say, Sloan, is if the pathologist can’t come up with the answer, then you’ll have to.’
    â€˜I don’t know about the deceased and her last letter, sir,’ he said, ignoring this, ‘but my own feeling is that Judge Gillespie knew exactly what he was doing when he dropped his sherry glass and started playing dumb crambo with us.’
    â€˜It seems to me,’ pronounced Leeyes crustily, ‘that the only people out there who don’t seem to know what they are doing are you and Crosby here.’
    Crosby took this literally. ‘Could be, sir. All the others seem to be sticking together. After all, they or their husbands were all in the same regiment together.’
    â€˜And,’ pounced Leeyes, ‘I suppose that any minute now one of you is going to tell me that everyone in the place has been trained to kill silently and without trace as well.’
    Sloan was only half listening. His mind was already running through all that would have to be done the next day. Like those who had buried Sir John Moore at Corunna, he too could only bitterly think of the morrow.
    â€˜All the men, anyway,’ he responded absently.
    *   *   *
    The coming of Saturday morning had created something of a dilemma for Mrs Maisie Carruthers. On the one hand she itched to appear at breakfast and glean the very latest news. On