‘Really?’
‘We had another bit of a landslide down here. Farming land, luckily, so there were no casualties, but the road’s like Southend beach when the tide’s out.’ And on this somewhat cosmopolitan simile Superintendent Underbarrow extracted himself from the back seat and left it to MacGregor to rouse his master and explain the situation to him.
Dover was not pleased. He retaliated with a mixture of nonco-operation and bloody-mindedness so effectively that it took over ten minutes to carry out the transfer to the Land-Rover. Dover, as if of right, installed himself on the front seat next to the driver and left MacGregor and Superintendent Underbarrow to crouch miserably in the truck part at the back. The canvas roof leaked and they only had a couple of narrow wooden benches to sit on. With Dover’s head already beginning to sink on to his breast, MacGregor had no choice but to carry on with the conversation.
He eased his kneecaps away from Superintendent Underbarrow’s. ‘You were talking about casualties, sir. There were several up at Sully Martin, weren’t there?’
‘Five dead and twenty injured,’ agreed Superintendent Underbarrow proudly. ‘Not bad for what the experts keep on insisting was a minor quake, is it? Mind you, they were only speaking seismographically.’
‘And all these casualties were in the area of the cliff that broke away?’
Superintendent Underbarrow nodded. ‘That’s right. They reckon there was some sort of fault there and the earthquake just split it off. Freakish, really. One chunk of the village collapses and slithers off down the hill but, in the other part, you get nothing much worse than a few ornaments toppled off the mantelpiece.’
‘So there was no damage in the rest of the village?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice.’ Superintendent Underbarrow tried, unsuccessfully, to stretch his aching back. ‘Well, the church steeple came down, of course, but you can’t exactly count that. It was riddled with dry rot.’
‘Really?’
‘The vicar’s been warning ’em for years, seemingly, but nobody was interested.’
‘But I thought Sully Martin’s church was part of our national heritage ?’
‘Oh, it is. A twelfth-century gem – scheduled and everything. But the steeple’s much later. Mock Victorian Gothic, I think they call it. Anyhow, they’re all as pleased as Punch it’s gone.’
‘Every cloud has a silver lining,’ said MacGregor with a callous triteness he regretted as soon as the words were out.
Superintendent Underbarrow’s mind, however, was more literal than sensitive. He bent double and glanced upwards through the windscreen. ‘I wish those buggers up there’d show theirs,' he grumbled. He gave the policeman driver a poke in the neck. ‘Get your foot down, Rowney!’ he admonished. ‘We don’t want to have to tackle that last bit in the dark.’
Rowney nodded, and the mud splashed up even higher from the wheels of the Land-Rover.
Superintendent Underbarrow settled back and regarded MacGregor glumly. ‘That’s why we didn’t recognize it was murder,’ he said abruptly.
‘Sir?’
Superintendent Underbarrow sighed. He didn’t hold with making excuses but his chief constable had been quite specific. The Scotland Yard men had to be told the whys and wherefores of the situation and made to realize that the local police were in no way to blame. It was the sort of cock-up that could have happened to anybody – given some rather exceptional circumstances.
The superintendent examined the polished toecaps of his shoes with great concentration. ‘The earthquake happened just on two o’clock in the morning,’ he began thoughtfully, ‘so pretty well everybody was in bed. The whole thing only lasted ten or fifteen seconds so, by the time people had got up and thrown some clothes on, it was all over. The cliff had split off and a dozen or so houses and shops had gone down the hillside and were spread out all over the place. The main electric cables went and a couple of gas and water mains cracked open. Well, the villagers did what they could – rescuing people from the houses that were still tottering on the brink and all that sort of thing. Luckily the telephone wires were all right and they got a message through to us. We were on the scene in pretty quick time, all things considered, but we couldn’t get any equipment up, of course. We did what we could but it wasn’t until it was light, round about five, that we got the last of the wounded out of the mud and the debris and started on the corpses. I suppose it was well on into the afternoon before we’d got them all sorted out and identified and everything. That’s when we first got a bit puzzled about Chantry.’
‘Ah yes,’ said MacGregor, taking considerably more interest now that this name had been mentioned.
‘All the other dead and wounded had come from the houses that had collapsed and slipped down the cliff. They were all in their night clothes and we found them mostly still in bed, or still in their homes at any rate. Now, Chantry was in gum boots and a thick mackintosh and his house hadn’t even been damaged. Well, we sort of jumped to the obvious conclusion.’
If MacGregor had a fault, it was that he tended to be too clever by half. He was finding Superintendent Underbarrow’s recital rather tedious and he couldn’t resist the temptation to try and speed things up a bit. ‘You deduced that Mr Chantry had been engaged on the rescue operations, sir, and that he had somehow been killed accidentally?’
‘That’s about it, sergeant,’ agreed the superintendent, quite without rancour. ‘After the ’quake was over there were naturally several more landslips and odd bits of buildings kept falling down. Chantry still had his pyjamas on under his outer clothing and he was just the sort of chap who would have been first on the scene. It looked like a hero’s death. That was before the doctor had a look at him, of course.’
‘And then?’
‘Manual strangulation.’ Superintendent Underbarrow sighed. ‘That put the cat amongst the pigeons, I can tell you.’ 'The Land-Rover stopped with a jerk
