Past Tense by Catherine Aird

mind the paperwork now, Sloan,’ snapped Leeyes. ‘I want you to get over to Billing Bridge pretty pronto. There’s a dead girl there. On the north bank.’
    â€˜Right, sir,’ promised Sloan, snapping his notebook shut, getting to his feet and starting to edge towards the door.
    â€˜She was pulled out of the water first thing this morning,’ said Leeyes, consulting a message sheet. ‘Two men out fishing saw the body and grabbed it.’
    Detective Inspector Sloan noted that between sentences, so to speak, the dead body of the girl – whoever she was – had gone from being referred to as ‘she’ to the more depersonalised ‘it’. It wasn’t a good sign.
    â€˜Any name known?’ he asked. The girl would have been a person still to somebody.
    â€˜There’s been nobody reported missing so far today,’ said the superintendent elliptically, starting to scrabble about amongst the papers on his desk again, ‘but it’s early days yet.’
    Rightly taking this to mean that decomposition had not yet set in, Sloan said he would go straight to the riverside. And he would take Crosby, he added to himself, even though it would be puppy-walking again; the dead were beyond harm.

Chapter Five
    â€˜Mr Short? Good morning to you.’ Simon Puckle rose to his feet as his visitor was shown into the solicitor’s office. He welcomed him with a handshake and waved him into the client’s chair. ‘I have here,’ he began without further preliminary, ‘the last will and testament of Josephine Eleanor Short of the Berebury Nursing Home, St Clement’s Row, Berebury…’
    â€˜My grandmother,’ said the young man opposite him.
    â€˜Precisely,’ said Simon Puckle. ‘It is dated – let me see now – just under three years ago.’
    â€˜That would have been when she first went into the nursing home,’ supplied Joe Short, nodding, ‘which was soon after my parents were killed. She sold her house then and almost everything in it.’
    â€˜Just so,’ said Simon Puckle, specialist in the winding-up of homes as well as estates. ‘If I may say so, that is quite clear from the provisions of the will.’
    Joe Short visibly relaxed. ‘That’s quite a relief, Mr Puckle. Sorting out my parents’ estate is being quite a problem, my being out in Lasserta and the airline people and the airport owners there still being at loggerheads after the accident. I just can’t get anywhere with them yet…’
    â€˜And you are described here as an employee of United Mellemetics plc in Lasserta…’
    â€˜I was with them,’ replied Joe Short immediately. ‘I moved to Cartwright’s Consolidated Carbons not long after I lost my parents. A good friend of mine had gone missing about the same time and I thought a change of scene might help…’
    The solicitor, a man still working in offices in a fine early Georgian house bought by his great-great-grandfather and by both nature and profession therefore constitutionally opposed to change, nevertheless nodded sympathetically.
    â€˜But it didn’t,’ admitted the younger man, ‘at least, not much.’
    Simon Puckle, mindful of a famous legal comment made when people were straying from the point, soon got back to his muttons. ‘The will appoints myself and failing me, members of this firm, as sole executors of the will…’
    Joe Short nodded again. ‘That figures. Granny knew I couldn’t get back to England very easily or often and she didn’t want me to have to. And anyway she always said her family’s obligation was to the living not the dead and that was what mattered.’
    Simon Puckle, who dealt with the estates of the dead as much as with those of the living, and did feel an obligation to them, made no comment on this and said instead, ‘In my capacity as sole executor I can