Some Die Eloquent by Catherine Aird Page A

the blaze in the hearth. ‘At least it means that I know what tomorrow’s first job is going to be.’
    She looked up. ‘What’s that?’
    â€˜Find Master Petforth.’
    â€˜Not,’ she enquired ironically, ‘a search and destroy mission – destroy with great wealth, I mean.’
    â€˜No.’ He shook his head. ‘We’ll just put the word out. That’s all. If he’s in Calleshire, we’ll pick him up tomorrow. If we have to ask questions outside the county, of course it’ll take longer – What is it?’ His whole tone changed suddenly as he saw a spasm of pain crossing her face. ‘Margaret – Margaret, what is it? What’s wrong? Is it …’
    â€˜I’ve just thought … that horrible nursery rhyme.’
    â€˜Oranges and lemons?’
    She stared at him. ‘I’ve remembered how it finishes.’
    â€˜Don’t look like that, my love,’ he pleaded. ‘You frightened me. For a moment I thought …’
    â€˜â€œHere comes a candle to light you to bed”,’ she intoned, ‘“and here comes a chopper to chop off your head.”’
    It was Detective-Constable William Edward Crosby who found out where Nicholas Petforth was.
    People who went native these days usually did so in one of two ways. They either took to the road or they joined a commune.
    Putting the word out in the county had had the desired effect.
    They learned down at the Berebury Police Station fairly early on that their man wasn’t on the road in Calleshire. He was too young for that game for a start and those who were walking the countryside – that pathetic group whose worldly possessions were clutched to them, who tramped from somewhere to anywhere like a variety of land-locked Flying Dutchmen, without either anchor or rudder, answering to any wind or to no wind at all – had not come across anyone sounding like Miss Beatrice Wansdyke’s nephew. There were fewer of such travellers about these days but those that there were were conspicuous, and – up hill and down dale – they obligingly stopped long enough to tell the police that Nicholas Petforth wasn’t one of their number. Mind you, stopping wasn’t something they liked to do. If you stopped, you had to think: and for them thinking was the only unbearable activity.
    Today’s drop-outs didn’t walk the countryside. When they wanted to cast off Society’s links they squatted: especially the younger ones. If enough of them squatted together, somehow the community became a commune.
    It had fallen to Detective-Constable Crosby’s lot to call on the one in the town of Luston.
    â€˜You can’t miss it, lad,’ the friendly station sergeant at Luston had told him, adding, ‘I dare say there’ll be a bite left to eat in our canteen when you get back.’ He chuckled. ‘If you still feel like eating, that is.’
    Any connection between what went on in this Calleshire commune and the dreams and the reality of the days of the French Commune of an earlier age must have been purely coincidental. Urban decay had reached the old centre of the industrial town: urban renewal hadn’t. Constable Crosby made his way to a faded early-nineteenth-century town house that in its prime had had some considerable style to it. Now its paintwork was peeling and some of its windows were boarded up. Other windows sported blankets doing duty as curtains. Somehow, though, the once-graceful building had contrived to retain an air of decayed gentility – distinction, even.
    Detective-Constable Crosby’s pounding on the front door shook it visibly but produced no answer from within. Immediately, however, the door of the house next door flew open and a raven-haired woman put her head out.
    â€˜If you’re the gas,’ she said, ‘you’re wasting your time. It’s cut off.’
    Crosby said he wasn’t