None of the houses were once 'wrong' ones now 'done up' for 'right' people. There was, too, a refreshing variety of coloured paint The door of number twelve was a deep green. Sloan knocked on it.
There was no immediate reply.
'Just our luck,' said Crosby morosely, 'if he's gone to a football match.'
It was implied—but not stated—that had Detective Constable Crosby not had the misfortune to be a member of Her Majesty's Constabulary, that that was where he would have been this Saturday afternoon in early March.
'Berebury's playing Luston.'
'Really?'
'At home.'
That was the crowning injustice.
Next Saturday Crosby would have to spend good money travelling to Luston or Calleford or Kinnisport to see some play.
Sloan knocked again.
There was no reply.
He looked up and down the street. There would be a back way in somewhere. The two policemen set off and walked until they found it—a narrow uneven way, leading to back gates. Some as neatly painted as the front doors. Some not. None numbered.
Crosby counted the houses back from the beginning of the row. 'Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.' He stopped at a gate that was still hanging properly on both hinges. 'I reckon this is the one, sir.'
'Well done,' said Sloan, who had already noticed that that back door was painted the same deep green as they had seen in the front. 'Perhaps he's one of those who'll answer the back door but not the front.'
They never discovered if this was so.
When they got to the back door it was ever so slightly ajar.
It opened a little further at Sloan's knock, and when there was no reply to this, Sloan opened it a bit more still and put his head round.
'Anyone at home?' he called out.
Cyril Jenkins was at home all right.
There was just one snag. He was dead.
Very.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Superintendent Leeyes was inclined to take the whole thing as a personal insult.
'Dead?' he shouted in affronted tones.
'Dead, sir.'
'He can't be…'
'He is.'
'Not our Jenkins,' he howled. 'Not the one we wanted…'
'Cyril Edgar,' said Sloan tersely. That much, at least, he had established before leaving number twelve and a pale but resolute Crosby standing guard. 'As for him being ours…'
'Yes?'
'I should think the fact that he's had his brains blown out rather clinches it.'
Sarcasm was a waste of time with the Superintendent. 'Self-inflicted?' he inquired eagerly.
'Impossible to say, sir, at this stage.'
'Was there a note?'
'No.' Sloan paused. 'Just a revolver.'
He wasn't sitting in the comfort of Inspector Blake's office now. He was in the cramped public telephone kiosk in Cul-lingoak High Street hoping that the young woman with a pram who was waiting to use it after him, couldn't lip-read. At least she couldn't hear the Superintendent.
Sloan could.
'What sort of revolver?' he was asking.
'Service.' Sloan sighed. 'Old Army issue.'
'Officers, for the use of, I suppose,' heavily.
'Yes, sir.'
Leeyes grunted. 'So it's still there?'
'Yes, sir. Silencer and all.'
'Not out of reach, I suppose?'
'No, sir.'
'I didn't think it would be.'
'By his right hand.'
'That's what I thought you were going to say. No hope of him being left handed?'
'None. I checked.' Sloan had searched high and low himself for signs which would reveal whether Cyril Edgar Jenkins had taken his own life or if someone had taken it for him.
'I don't like it, Sloan.'
'No, sir.' Sloan didn't either. There was nothing to like in what he had just seen. The recently shot are seldom an atsight and Cyril Edgar Jenkins was no exception. He had been sitting down when it had happened and the result was indescribably messy. Experienced—and hardened—as he was, Sloan hadn't relished his quick examination. At least there hadn't been the additional burden of breaking the news to anyone. 'He lived alone,' he told Leeyes. 'Mrs. Walsh out at Holly Tree Farm was quite right about his wife. She did die about eight years ago.'
'Who says so?'
'The woman next door. Remembers her well.'
'Which wife?' demanded Leeyes contentiously.
Sloan paused. 'The one he had been living with ever since he came to Cullingoak.'
'Ah… that's different.' Sloan could almost hear the Superintendent fumbling for the word he wanted. 'She might have just been his concubine.'
'Yes, sir, except that we couldn't find any record of a marriage between Cyril Edgar Jenkins and Grace Edith Wright in the first place…'
'I hadn't forgotten,' said Leeyes coldly. 'Now I suppose you're going to set about finding out if he was really married to this second woman…'
What Sloan wanted to do—and that very badly—was to set about finding out who had killed Cyril Jenkins.
'Yes, sir. In the meantime, do you think Dr. Dabbe would come over?'
'I don't see why not,' said Leeyes largely. When he himself was working through a weekend he was usually in favour of as many people doing so as possible. 'What do you want him for?'
'Inspector Blake is handling the routine side of this, seeing as it's in his Division,' said Sloan, 'but I want to talk to Dr. Dabbe about blood.'
There was no shortage of this vital commodity in the living room of number twelve Cullingoak High Street.
Sloan had vacated the telephone kiosk with a polite apolto the girl with the pram. In the manner of a generation brought up without courtesy, she had favoured him with a blank stare in return. Oddly disconcerted, but without time to wonder what things were coming to, he had hurried back to the house.
His friend, Inspector Blake, had just arrived from Calle-ford and was standing surveying the scene.
'Nasty.'
Sloan could only agree. Crosby, who had been surveying the same scene for rather longer and more consistently than either Blake or Sloan, was looking rather green at the gills.
'He got wind that you wanted a little chat, did he then?' asked Digger Blake. He had brought his own
