the sovereigns were safe. She was indoors again by ten o’clock that night but, tired out after the journey, went straight to bed.
“If I’d known my life’s savings had been stolen, I wouldn’t have slept a wink,” she said. “First thing after breakfast I went to the hiding place and I nearly had a seizure on the spot. The tin was empty all the money I had scraped and saved for, my little nest egg, my burial money all gone. They should bring back hanging.”
Poor old girl, thought Webster. “Where did you keep the tin?”
“In the piano.” She waddled to the corner, removed two piles of newspapers and opened the piano top, then, standing on tiptoe, plunged her hand into the depths. With a twanging of strings, she pulled out a biscuit tin decorated with pictures of King George V and Queen Mary. This she opened, holding it out by the lid to demonstrate its complete emptiness.
“It’s empty, all right,” agreed Frost. “I’ve never seen a tin more empty. Who else knew where you kept it hidden?”
“No-one!” she said.
“The thief knew,” said Frost.
“Was anything else taken?” asked Webster.
She wobbled the wig from side to side. “No, thank God. I’ve checked everywhere. Just my seventy-nine golden sovereigns.”
“What sort of sovereigns, Lil?” asked Frost.
“They were all Queen Victoria,” she answered. “My old mother, God rest her soul, left them to me on her deathbed.”
“Would you know them if you saw them again?”
“I know every mark, every scratch on them. I’d know them as if they were my own children and I miss them as much as if they were.” She dabbed her eyes and trumpeted loudly into a large handkerchief which looked as if it, too, dated from Queen Victoria’s time and hadn’t been washed since. The wig slipped down over one eye.
“And the tin was put back again in the piano?”
She nodded.
Frost prodded his scar. The same old pattern, a quick in-and-out job, but this time the thief knew exactly what he was after and where to find it. So how did he get in? The window, perhaps?
He squeezed past the table and pulled back the curtain, then tried to open the sash window. It wouldn’t budge. Early in its life it had been thickly painted with cream paint which had seeped over the catch to seal it tight. So the thief didn’t get in that way. More than likely he came in through the front door.
The front door almost wilted under the weight of the hardware attached to it bolts, bars, and various heavy- linked security chains. But none of these could be applied from the outside, and when Lil went to visit her sister, all that had secured the door was the door lock. It looked solid enough, but, as in many of these old houses, the pattern was such that the lock could easily be snapped back with a flexible piece of plastic.
“Odds are he got in through this door,” he told Webster, ‘but you’d better take a look around the rest of the house in case there’s any sign of forced entry.” He gave the old dear a grin. “You’d better go with him, Lil, in case he pinches anything. You know what sticky fingers we cops have.”
Webster didn’t think it at all funny, especially as Lil took the remark seriously and followed him suspiciously through every room of the house.
Left on his own, Frost quickly began opening drawers and peering inside. Then he lifted the bundles of newspaper off the piano lid so he could get to the keyboard. Lying on the yellowed keys were various bank-deposit books, post-office savings accounts, and building-society savings books. He quickly thumbed through them to see how much money the poor old dear had. That done, he shuffled through a wad of family-allowance books kept together by a thick rubber band. These were at the other end of the keyboard. He was prevented from studying these in detail as he heard footsteps descending the stairs. Quickly, he replaced everything where he found it, moved to the window, and put on his most innocent expression.
Webster had found no signs of forced entry, but he was shocked at the poverty-stricken conditions in which the old lady lived. The bedroom was a horror with no heating, bare boards on the floor, and old coats on the bed instead of blankets.
They knocked on a few doors, but none of the neighbours would admit to seeing anyone suspicious lurking about the house the previous day. There was little else they could do, apart from Lil’s suggestion that they should inform Interpol.
The biscuit tin was dropped into a plastic bag to be tested back at the station for alien prints, and then it was time to go. She saw them out, plucking at Frost’s arm as he was about to leave. “Please get my money back for me, Mr. Frost.”
Frost shrugged. “If we can, Lil, but we’ve got a lousy track record.
We haven’t recovered a penny of anyone’s money up to now.”
With her lower lip quivering she looked pathetically at Frost, as if he had told her that her entire family had been wiped out in an air crash.
“It was my burial money,” she said, blinking hard to hold back the mascara-streaking tears.
Webster felt choked-up as he slid into the driving seat. “Poor cow,” he said. “I feel so sorry for her… and you should see the rest of the house. She probably hasn’t got two half-pennies to rub together.”
“You should see her bank book,” said Frost. “She’s got at least twenty thousand quid in the building society, fifteen thousand in the bank, and God knows how much more in her other accounts.”
“You’re joking!” exclaimed Webster.
“I’m not, son. I had a little nose around while you and she were up to no good in her bedroom. Years ago she used to carry out back-street abortions fifty bob a time, including a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit afterward. She was known as the “Fifty Shilling Tailor.” If it weren’t for Lil and her crochet hook we’d be suffering from a population explosion. But as soon as the government made abortions legal she went over to money lending… short-period loans at exorbitant rates of interest to people desperate for ready cash housewives who’ve spent the housekeeping on Bingo and don’t want their old man to know, loan club organizers with sticky fingers. She also makes loans to young people behind on their HP payments, usually taking their family-allowance books as security. There was a wad of them in her piano. You needn’t get your beard wet with tears over her, my little hairy son.”
Time was hurtling on. The visit to Mrs. Cornish would have to wait until after they had attended the post- mortem on her son. Webster broke all speed records driving to the mortuary, pulling up with a screech behind a Rolls-Royce hearse, all agleam with black and silver like Mullett’s new uniform.
Out of the Cortina, up a slope and through double doors into a small lobby where the notice on the wall read All undertakers to report to porter before removing bodies. At the inquiry counter two undertaker’s assistants in funereal black were arguing with a little bald-headed mortuary attendant who was firmly shaking his head as he thumbed through the papers they had presented to him.
“But I keep telling you,” the exasperated undertaker was saying, ‘the bloody funeral is in an hour. We’re burying him at twelve.”
“Don’t you swear at me,” said the attendant, drawing himself up to his full height. “Without the death certificate you’re burying bugger all!”
“Excuse me,” said Frost, elbowing his way through like a referee parting two boxers. He showed his warrant card. “I’m here for the Cornish post-mortem.”
The attendant craned his neck up at the clock. “You’re a bit late, Inspector.”
“Don’t tell me it’s started?” asked Frost.
“Nearly finished, I think. You know how punctual Dr. Bond is. He don’t sod about.”
They pushed through another set of double doors into the white chill of the green-tiled autopsy room where a sharp antiseptic smell held a cloying aftertaste of something nasty.
A sheeted trolley stood against the wall to the left of the entrance doors. Frost twitched back the sheet and looked down on the blue, shrivelled, waxen face of an old lady. “Sorry, love,” he murmured gently, covering her. “I thought you were someone I knew.”
At the far end of the room a rubber-aproned mortuary attendant in abattoir-style Wellington boots was hosing down the guttered and perforated top of a post-mortem operating table. Water suddenly overflowed as something blocked one of the drains, but the assistant cleared the blockage with his finger and carried on with his
