“Do they hold out any hope?”
“No one’s saying. I haven’t been here long. Out all day. Got back around four and saw what happened. God!”
“Any idea of the cause?”
Harry turned to look at me. “You trying to be funny, mister? She’s a dipso. She smokes. Okay?”
“Have they said she was drinking?”
“They said nothing.”
Out of consideration I did the same. I disliked the man, but this wasn’t the time to question his logic. I sat opposite him and tried to catch up with my thoughts. I know there are all kinds of theories about coincidences, but it was incredible to me that this should happen on the afternoon Sally had promised to meet me. I wanted to know the cause of that fire.
We waited some twenty minutes before a doctor came out. He’d slipped his face mask down. Harry had his head bowed, so the doctor caught my eye and said in a voice too stiltedly considerate to be bringing good news, “Mr. Ashenfelter?”
I inclined my head towards Harry.
NINETEEN
The bad news wasn’t over. On the stairs, my way was barred by a busybody in a brown suit. He raised his hands, palms facing me, in an officious manner that I thought was a shade excessive for the National Health Service. Probably a nut case, I decided.
He said, “Hey.”
To humor him I nodded as I stepped sideways.
He put his hands on my arm and said, “We’d like a few words with you.”
“Who are
He produced from his pocket a card in a plastic folder. “Detective-Inspector Voss, CID, Bath Police.”
I gave it a glance. It appeared to be an authentic police identity. I raised my face. Looked right into his brown eyes under thick black smudges of eyebrow. I’d read somewhere that policemen attach a lot of importance to the way our eyes first react to theirs. If you blink and look at the back of your hand, they start filling in the charge sheet.
When I reckoned I’d passed that test, I took in the rest: the squat nose, the lumpy chin, and the muscled neck that looked ready for a scrumdown. Quite ten years older than I, yet in good shape physically. A fit forty. Not one to raise my stick to.
He said, “Is that your MG outside?” and for an optimistic moment I wondered if this was simply a complaint about the place I’d chosen to park in.
It wasn’t. He wanted me to drive behind his car to the central police station.
I asked, “What’s this about, exactly?”
“You’ll find out.”
“Do you want to know what I’m doing here?” I asked, prepared to be cooperative. “I can tell you that now. We don’t need to go to the police station.”
He eyed me as he decided between asserting brute authority and providing a reason. Either way, he wasn’t amenable to suggestions from me. “This is the casualty department of a hospital. They don’t want us here, getting in their way.”
So we drove in convoy to the station where I parked beside his Triumph and followed him inside. Give the police their due, they found me a cup of coffee in a paper cup before they left me on a bench in front of a notice board. I may be cynical, but I interpreted that to mean that I was in for a long wait, and I was right. I spent an hour and twenty minutes with the notice board. By the time I was called, I could have passed an exam on foot-and- mouth disease or the Colorado beetle.
Inspector Voss had removed his jacket and looked ready to take on the All Blacks football team at Twickenham single-handedly. From the angle I had in the chair in front of his desk, he was hunched forward with his shoulders at the level of his ears. It was some comfort to have a uniformed man seated in the corner behind me, though I could have taken that as a bad sign.
I was right about the aggressive posture. He started with a head-down charge. No apology for keeping me waiting. Just: “I’ve been hearing things about you, Dr. Sinclair.”
“From Harry Ashenfelter, I suppose.”
He tensed and pulled back a fraction.
I explained, “He must have given you my name.”
He said with derision, “This is the CID, chum. We’re not incapable of finding out a man’s name.”
“By asking Harry Ashenfelter?”
He thrust his jaw forward aggressively. “How long have you known Mr. Ashenfelter?”
“I met him twenty-one years ago when he was with the American Army, based at Shepton Mallet.”
“And since?”
I hesitated. If only to keep this inquisition to a minimum, I didn’t want the entire story to come out now, yet I couldn’t be sure how much Harry had said already. “Last Sunday afternoon I visited him and his wife. The first time since the war. His stepdaughter, Alice, had called on me, and I helped her to find Harry in Bath.”
“A family reunion, then?”
“In a way.”
“So Alice is a friend of yours?”
I sidestepped that one. “She just turned up at the university where I work-that’s Reading-and made herself known to me.”
“Why didn’t she go straight to Bath?”
“Didn’t have their address.”
Voss curled his lip in disbelief. “Didn’t have her stepfather’s address?”
“I gather he walked out on her mother years ago and they lost touch.”
“So she met Mrs. Ashenfelter-the lady who died in the fire-for the first time on Sunday?”
“Correct.”
While we were talking, he’d picked up a pencil and inscribed a thick, asymmetrical circle on the notepad in front of him. Now he lifted the pencil off the sheet and jabbed it down heavily in the center. “Let’s talk about you. You’d met Sally Ashenfelter before.” He expressed it as a statement.
“When I was a child.”
“Of what age?”
“Nine.”
“The circumstances?”
“It was the war. I was evacuated to her village. She happened to work on the farm where I stayed.”
“Where does Harry Ashenfelter fit in?”
“He was a visitor to the farm, helping with the harvest. A GI.”
Voss inched his face closer to mine to add impact to his next observation. “The friend of the GI who murdered Clifford Morton.”
If it was calculated to throw me, it didn’t succeed. He was policeman, after all. He would have been pretty incompetent if he hadn’t made the connection. I simply gave a nod and returned his look.
He said as if he were accusing me of something, “You were the boy who gave evidence for the prosecution.”
“An unsworn statement.”
“And twenty years later you come back to Somerset with Alice Ashenfelter in tow, disturbing people with all kinds of questions about the case.”
I said, “Why should anyone be disturbed?”
By the way of a response he treated me to a gratuitous bit of nostalgia. “Matt Judd handled that case. I
