The Drowned Man
A Peter Cammon Mystery
By David Whellams
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2013 David Whellams
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-148-7
CHAPTER 1
“There’s nobody else for the job,” Sir Stephen Bartleben said from his side of the massive thumping desk.
Body duty. Any other senior detective would have recoiled in outrage, perhaps even stood up and stalked out of the office. It happened from time to time that a Scotland Yard officer was needed to accompany the corpse of a British national homeward, in this case a Yard colleague who had been killed in Montreal. The assignment was a distinctly secondary one, usually handed off to a junior officer.
But Peter Cammon, veteran chief inspector, retired, though he considered leaving the office, stayed in place on his side of the big desk. He was in a sour frame of mind, ready to provoke his former boss, and sometimes the best way to throw Bartleben off his conniving game was to wait him out. Oh, bolting would be justified, Cammon reasoned: Bartleben hadn’t called in eight months, and now was throwing him the most meatless of bones.
Peter Cammon decided to give it two more minutes. Then he would turn down the job.
They let three minutes go by. This, in fact, was not a long silence by Cammon-Bartleben standards. Because he knew that Sir Stephen had more to disclose, Peter stifled his impatience. The sheer routineness of the assignment mildly intrigued him. There had to be something more critical at stake for the Yard, and the boss was holding back. Why? Bartleben’s gambit had been two-headed: did he mean that no other officer wanted the task or that only Peter was capable of doing it?
Peter had come up to London on a drizzly summer morning. Out of habit he had worn his black suit and black brogues, but had left his black bowler at the cottage. If Sir Stephen took this as a sartorial sign that Peter was open to returning to work, he was mistaken. Peter had fully retired. But the root of his hostility was Sir Stephen’s bad form: he had failed to attend the funeral of Peter’s brother, Lionel, several months back. Sir Stephen had sent a card of condolence, nothing more. In his general depression, Peter considered this a betrayal of almost fifty years of hand-in-glove trust. At least, that was what he told himself was the reason for his mood. Even if Peter was being unreasonable or muddling the causes of his depression, Sir Stephen was in for a rough time.
Peter continued to stare across the ridiculous desk. They had had no contact in all these months. Did Stephen believe that a simple turnaround trip to Montreal was enough to revive Peter’s taste for crime? The tension in the room could not have been higher. Peter watched as Sir Stephen fussed with a small snow globe that housed Machu Picchu. Stephen seldom travelled anywhere and Peter guessed that it was a gift from his grandson. He resolved that if the boss turned the toy over and started shaking the snowflakes over Machu Picchu, the gesture would confirm that he was holding back something crucial.
He could easily read Bartleben’s uncertainty. A take-it-or-leave-it offer would result in Peter telling him to bugger off. The boss shot a glance at two file folders on the desk, as if they might contain the seeds to foster Peter’s curiosity. A fifth minute passed.
Peter wondered why Bartleben had failed to mention that he was no longer deputy commissioner of New Scotland Yard. Shunted aside. Superannuated. Just like me, Peter thought. Of course, if Bartleben truly was on the shelf, what gave him the authority to send anyone across the Atlantic? There were rumours percolating that open scandal was about to hit the Yard on
Wow! eBook
