Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

“Oh, you’re in order, Dick.” Sergeant Rollason, bluff, sandy, matter-of-fact, nodded to himself. “One of our lot dies with their boots on, you start thinking the worst.”

Flinders had waited three hours in the Bull & Mouth, sipping light ale at an unvarying rate of a pint every sixty-five minutes, to encounter Rollason. The Bull wasn’t the nearest pub to Caldwell Green police station, just the best. And Dick Flinders had been around for a long time; it wasn’t such a long chance, having served with Cyril Rollason ten years earlier.

Rollason, a raincoat over his uniform, lit a cigarette. “Mary wasn’t that popular, she didn’t bow and scrape the way some people like. But she was a bloody good copper. I’ll miss her.”

Flinders felt a stab of jealousy at the other man’s easy use of her name, and told himself not to be daft.

Sergeant Rollason’s gaze was steady through the smoke. “What’s all this about, son?”

Flinders spoke to his clasped hands. “There was never any monkey business, Mary wasn’t the kind. But she’s the one I’ll measure all the others against, until I’m in my long box. Pick of the litter, was Mary.”

“Ah,” said Rollason. “Well, amen to that, she was a bit special. Even if everybody didn’t see it. What do you want to know, Dick?”

“Everything.”

Rollason took a measured gulp of whisky and ginger wine, smacked his lips, and nodded again. “Fair enough. You know her old man’s a right cupful of cold spit, no use to man nor beast?”

Curling his right hand around a phantom glass, Cyril Rollason agitated it violently. “Too much of that. He’d gone on the spree, Mary went home off late duty, that’d be around half past ten last night. Neighbor saw the lights still on this morning, knocked, peeped in the downstairs window, saw her laid out on the floor, and called us.”

“Mockridge said something about spring cleaning.”

“Cobblers,” Rollason retorted. “Mocky’s got a thing about working women copping out from their rightful destiny of being unpaid bloody servants, that’s all.” Dick Flinders remembered that Rollason’s wife, to her husband’s ungrudging pride, was a doctor.

“No, she was tired,” the uniformed man said harshly. “Probably steaming mad as well, with her old man off drinking and whoring as per usual. The light bulb had burnt out, in the front room. A chair was lying on its side — the linoleum floor’s pretty slippery.

“Poor Mary got up on a chair, people will do it, to change the bulb, and over she went. If you stop to think how dangerous a house is, you’d take to living in tents.”

“He was off drinking and whoring?”

“Yeah,” Rollason grimaced. “Mocky Mockridge found our Mr. Taylor at a house three streets away, later this morning. In bed with a bird who’d mislaid her own husband. Her mother says Taylor and the woman rolled in, legless with drink, about half past nine, and never stirred from the bed where Mocky found ’em. Ain’t romance wonderful?”

“Just an accident, then,” Flinders observed stonily.

“Looks that way. What am I saying? It was.”

“Maybe. What was Mary working on?”

Rollason, about to finish his drink, replaced the tumbler with finicky care. “Hold very hard now, son.”

Flinders shook his head. “Just for talking’s sake, what was she up to in the last couple of weeks?”

Sergeant Rollason started to say something, changed his mind, drummed his fingers on the table. “How would I know? Wooden-tops, the CID calls us, Noddy-cops, figures of fun. They don’t confide is what I’m saying.”

Then he did have the drink. “All right, I could find out.” Eerily, Sergeant Rollason echoed Mary Taylor: “Not a good idea, though. You’re way off your patch, in every sense of the word. And Mocky’s a stickler for the book, he’ll have your courting-tackle for a paperweight if he catches you trying to interfere.”

Flinders nodded. “I’ll ring you at home, first thing tomorrow. Best time to snoop around a nick, when the shifts have just changed.”

Rollason sighed heavily. “Anything else?”

“Of course. Give my best to Helen. And tell me who’s the pathologist.”

“Professor Craigie, remember him?”

“You’re joking. What’s more, he’ll remember me. I got his car back for him once, on the quiet. It’d been nicked outside the wrong block of flats, if you get my drift.”

Liam Craigie, called out from a bridge session at his West End club, didn’t ask what Flinders’ interest was. A man with a long memory for favors, he simply passed on information.

“If it’s any consolation, Richard, your friend didn’t suffer long, if at all. She did not die at once, but she would have been unconscious or feeling no pain, throughout. The crucial event occurred and was over in a split second.”

“Good. Least she deserved. And it was an accident?”

Some Scots speak the purest English in the British Isles, as measured as their minds. Professor Craigie sounded old-maidish. “I’m a... technician who, by the very nature of my calling, must eschew certainties. Accidental death? Very probably; there’s hardly any reason to think otherwise.”