Quotes from Catherine Aird

If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.

Though,' observed Sloan profoundly, 'where there's a will there's usually a relative.

He did his best to explain this to Inspector Sloan afterwards. 'A funny feeling, sir.' 'Yes?' Funny feelings were not encouraged at Berebury Police Station.

Although the last enemy might be death, in long and sad police experience, the first enemy could usually be found, Cain and Abel fashion, within the family circle.

If there was one thing which Sloan had learned over the years it was that you should never underestimate the element of luck in detective work.

Death went well with bare stone and it was the little crowd of modern men who looked incongruous.

Neither task appealed to a man of his temperament. One required action and the other thought. Both were anathematical to Constable Mason. His working life had been centered around the skillful 'referral to higher authority' of anything involving any effort.

Not even the Superintendent could play about with gravity.

Sloane wasn't interested. As a police officer he was concerned with crime, not punishment.

That's the idea sir, he said heartily, Smaller villains.

Gone out to look for a hair to split, I expect.

You know, Eric, I could have sworn I heard a goat bleating while I was working in the slype yesterday evening. I expect the Dean had separated it from the sheep, Eric said solemnly. Isn't that what clergy are for?

WHO HAS HIS BIRTH DAY, HAS HIS BURIALL TOO; AS WE INTO THE WORLD COME, OUT WE GOE.

Your amateur's not cluttered up with academic prejudice, Miss Holroyd," Richard Tindall was fond of saying. "He hasn't read every single thing that has ever been written on the subject. The amateur sees a problem in its simplest form and it doesn't occur to him that it's insoluble.

Pax Intrantibus, Salus Exeuntibus

In detective work you thought in much the same way as you would pick your way across a swamp, testing for firm ground each time you took a step forward.

Dead and never called her mother, in fact," misquoted Sloan, who had once seen the Berebury Amateur Dramatic Society play East Lynne, and never forgotten the searing experience.

I never touch nothing with writing on it.

Heads are useful ... And should be kept.

about them always.

We know hardly anything about anything.

Since the coat has absolutely no intrinsic value, Inspector, I must regretfully conclude that the choice lies between an outbreak of gesture politics or the damage being the work of a mind deranged.' Sloan tried another tack. 'And which would you think the more likely?' 'Malice or madness? I've no idea at all, Inspector.

Really,' she exclaimed, stumping into the kitchen and plonking herself down on the nearest chair, 'this place is getting worse than Nightmare Abbey. Whatever next?' A grammatical purist might have wondered why Miss Bentley hadn't said 'whoever' rather than 'whatever' but the former headteacher belonged to the Superintendent Leeyes school of taking bad news as a personal affront rather than as an occasion for sympathy for the victim.

What condition?' 'He's got a bad heart as well as the leg injuries he got in the war which put him in his wheelchair.' 'Ah.' If there was one thing which every policeman knew it was that families were bad for every medical condition, but especially for heart ones. Legs were less important.