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.’Leeyes pounced.‘Disinheritance?’‘Perhaps.Perhaps not.’‘Then find out, man.’‘Yes, sir.’‘That all, Sloan?’Sloan hesitated.‘Nearly, sir.’‘Well?’‘After the – er – incident, Crosby found something lying on the ground just where the wheelchair had hit the Brigadier.’‘And did he recognize it this time?’ enquired Superintendent Leeyes.‘Yes, sir.’‘The distance wasn’t too much for him, then, I take it?’ he asked sarcastically.‘No, sir.’ Detective Inspector Sloan coughed.‘It wasn’t exactly difficult to identify either.It was the missing dirk.’* * *The Matron was prepared to swear to this being the weapon taken from the library.‘No doubt about it, Inspector.’She had not, however, seen Lionel Powell at the Manor before or since the accident.‘Just look at that lovely carved handle, Inspector,’ she said.‘It must be an antique.’‘Don’t touch it,’ adjured Sloan quickly.He himself held out little hope that there would be any fingerprints on the dirk, but he was determined that the detective decencies should be maintained in front of strangers – especially professional ones.The Matron, her hands full of gauze and bandages, had showed no inclination to touch anything.‘Get a general call out for Lionel Powell, Crosby, as well as Morag McBeath,’ Sloan instructed the constable wearily.‘He won’t get far.And, Matron, can we have the names and addresses of Walter Bryant’s two daughters?’‘Certainly, Inspector.I’ll go and get them for you now.’ She tied the last bandage neatly round Crosby’s elbow, saying before she left the room, ‘You’re going to have a big bruise there tomorrow, Constable, I’m afraid.’Detective Constable Crosby pulled out his pocket radio and then rested his injured elbow gingerly on the kitchen table.‘I’m hungry,’ he said as soon as he had transmitted his message.‘The cook seems to have gone,’ said Sloan.It was only one of the many disappointments crowding in on him now.‘She’s not here, anyway.’‘What are we going to do then, sir? Toss for it?’‘For what?’‘Which one of those two old boys it was who had that knife.’‘Three.’‘Three?’‘You’re forgetting the man on the terrace.He could have dropped it in the wheelchair.’The constable leaned over and squinted at the dirk again.‘It doesn’t looked as if it’s been used lately but you never can tell.’‘No,’ agreed Sloan.‘Not just by looking.’ He was conscious of a great wish to find out more without invoking the specialists.Detection shouldn’t be just a matter of assembling reports from other professionals, each expert only in their own field, none interested in the whole picture.Detection should, instead, be a question of studying the evidence and going on from there to reach a logical conclusion – and preferably the only possible correct conclusion at that.And then proving it.It didn’t look as if this was going to happen in this case – if there was a case.He didn’t even know that for certain yet.For all he knew, Gertrude Powell might have died from natural causes, just as Maude Chalmers-Hyde had been demonstrated to have done.Just as the doctors said she had …‘And we still don’t know for sure who that dagger thing was meant for either, sir,’ said Crosby insouciantly.‘Do we?’‘I think we might have an educated guess,’ said Sloan absently, his mind elsewhere.‘The old girl who’s gone missing?’‘I think she might have thought so,’ murmured Sloan, ‘which is what matters.’ Now he came to think about it, none of the textbooks on the investigation of homicide that he had studied ever mentioned lunch.He decided that it was a serious omission.‘Presence of mind and absence of body,’ said the constable.‘Can’t beat it, can you, if it’s safety you’re looking for?’‘Thinking she was in danger is the best reason for her taking off,’ agreed Sloan, ‘although not the only one, of course.’Detective Constable Crosby carefully adjusted his bad elbow on the table.‘If she is safe, that is.’That was Detective Inspector Sloan’s greatest worry.As far as he was concerned the first principle of first aid, ‘Remove the patient from danger or the danger from the patient’, applied to all police work, too.There was a quite different convention – and one which didn’t apply to police work.He was beginning to wish now that it did.It was known as the ‘Alan Smithie’.If a film director was given work on a second-rate production with which he did not wish his name – and therefore his loss of reputation – to be associated, he was allowed to use instead the dud name of Alan Smithie [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]