machine just as if nothing had happened.
That was in the daytime.
It was a constant source of wonder to her that after the day when her own heaven had fallen and “The hour when earth’s foundations fled” she still got through the days at all.
The nights, of course, were different.
In a world that had tumbled about her ears the nights had turned into refined torture. There was no routine about the long watches of the night, no demands on her time to be met until morning, and no requirement of her body that could be satisfied—not even sleep.
Especially not sleep.
The nighttime was when she could have walked mile after mile—however weary she had been when she dropped into bed. Instead custom required that she spend it lying still in a narrow bed in a small room. The room— her room—got smaller and smaller during the night. She could swear to it. There had been a horror story she’d read once when she was young about the roof of a four-poster bed descending on the person in the bed and smothering him…
She’d been of an age to take horror in her stride then, to laugh at it even. Horror in those days had been something weird and strange. Now she was older she knew that horror was merely something familiar gone sadly wrong… that was where true horror lay…
Why, she thought angrily to herself as she shook out a duster, hadn’t someone like Wilkie Collins written about the bruising a girl’s soul suffered when she’d been jilted? That should have given any novelist worth his salt something to get his teeth into…
3
Tell the Sheriff’s Officers that I am ready.
« ^ »
Detective Constable Crosby—he who could most easily be spared from the police station—brought the car round for Detective Inspector Sloan as that officer stepped out of the back door of Berebury Police Station.
The constable was patently disappointed to learn that there was no hurry to get to wherever they were going.
“No hurry at all,” repeated Sloan, climbing into the front passenger seat. “You can take it from me, Crosby, that this particular problem isn’t going to run away.”
The other man withdrew his hand from the switches to the blue flashing light and siren.
“On the contrary,” forecast Detective Inspector Sloan, “I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s not going to be with us for quite a while.”
The trouble with Superintendent Leeyes was that his gloom was catching.
“Yes, sir,” said Crosby, immediately losing interest. “Where to, then, slowly?”
And the trouble with Detective Constable Crosby was that he was only nearly insubordinate.
Sloan settled himself in the car, reminding himself of something he knew very well already: that Detective Constable Crosby wasn’t by any means the brightest star in the Force’s firmament. As far as he, Sloan, could make out, the only thing that Crosby really liked doing was driving fast cars fast. That was probably why Inspector Harpe, who was in charge of Traffic Division, had insisted that the constable was better in the plain clothes branch rather than the uniform one.
“Call us ‘Woollies’ if you like, Sloan,” Harpe had said vehemently at the time.
“I don’t…” began Sloan; though there were those in plenty who did.
“But,” swept on Inspector Harpe, “I’m not stupid enough to want that boy Crosby behind the wheel of one of Traffic Division’s vehicles.”
“No, Harry.”
“First time he was tempted,” sniffed Harpe, “he’d be after a ton-up kid.”
For Adam and Eve temptation had been an apple.
For a traffic duty policeman temptation was a youth behind the wheel of a fast car ahead of him and going faster, ever faster. The driver would be showing the world in general—but the police car in particular—what his car would do. If it was his car: ten to one it would be somebody else’s car. Taken for a joy ride. Taken on a joy ride, too.
Luring on the Law was practically a parlour game.
And as Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division knew only too well, what was begun “sae rantingly, sae wantonly, sae dauntingly” usually ended up on Robert Burns’s present-day equivalent of the gallows-tree—a fatal motorway pile-up. Because, as a rule, the Law’s cars could do rather better than anyone else’s, and the Law’s drivers were trained. They were trained, too, of course, not to respond to taunting behaviour. That training, though, took a little longer than learning to drive well.
“The first time someone tried it on Crosby,” Harpe had predicted, “he’d fall for it. You know he would, Sloan. Be honest now.”
“Well…”
“Hook, line and sinker, I’ll be bound,” said Harpe. “I’m prepared to bet good money that he’d go and chase some madman right up the motorway until they ran out of road. Both of them.”
“But…” Even Superintendent Leeyes wasn’t usually as bodeful as this.
“Catch Crosby radioing ahead to get the tearaway stopped instead of going after him.”
“Oh, come off it, Harry,” Sloan had said at the time. “You were young once yourself.”
At this moment now he contented himself with telling Crosby where to go. “Dr. Dabbe is expecting us at the mortuary,” he said as the police car swung round Berebury’s new multi-storey car park and out onto the main road. Crosby automatically put his foot down.
“In due course,” said Sloan swiftly. “Not on two stretchers.”
The consultant pathologist to the Berebury District Hospital Group was more than expecting them. He was obviously looking forward to seeing the two policemen. He welcomed them both to his domain. “Come along in, Inspector Sloan, and—let me see now—it’s Constable Crosby, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Doctor.” Crosby didn’t like attending post-mortem examinations.
The pathologist was rubbing his hands together. “We’ve got something very interesting here, gentlemen. Very interesting indeed.”
“Have we?” said Sloan warily. Cases that were “open and shut” were what made for a quiet life, not interesting ones.
The pathologist indicated the door to the post-mortem theatre. “What you might call a real puzzler.”
“Really?” said Sloan discouragingly.
“As well as being ‘a demd, damp, moist, unpleasant body’ as Mr. Mantalini said.”
“Not drowned, anyway, I hear,” advanced Sloan, who did not know who Mr. Mantalini was. The case was never going to get off the ground at all at this rate.
“Not ‘drowned dead’ anyway,” agreed the pathologist breezily. “You know your Charles Dickens, I expect, Sloan?”
Sloan didn’t but that wasn’t important. What was important was what the pathologist had found.
He waited.
“In my opinion,” said Dr. Dabbe, getting to the point at last, “confirmed, I may say, by some X-ray photographs, this chap we’ve got here… whoever he is…”
“Yes?” said Sloan, stifling any other comment. The body’s identity was something else that the police were going to have to establish.
Later.
“… and however wet he is,” continued the pathologist imperturbably, “was dead
“Ah,” said Sloan.
“Furthermore…”
