Ice Blue (4 page)

Hetheridge nodded, hiding his approval. He
wanted to see how Kate functioned without influencing her actions.
Expression neutral, he gestured once again for her to enter first,
then followed her into the library.

Both the library’s lamps were still burning.
One, an amber-shaded banker’s lamp, cast a wedge of light across a
roll-top desk swamped with papers. The other lamp, a tall, golden
Art Deco torchiere, illuminated the center of the room. On either
side of the torchiere, two leather wingback chairs were placed,
facing a brass-screened fireplace. The fire, wood rather than
electric, had guttered down to sullen red embers. Crumpled before
those embers was a man’s body, on its knees before the long marble
hearth.

The victim, Comfrey, looked as if he’d died
while flailing out of the chair. The victim’s hands, loose at his
sides, were bloodied and scored with black streaks. Similar marks
marred his throat, and black marks scored his shoulders, where his
shirt had offered only slight protection. Comfrey was propped
against the chair, his head thrown back. Ordinarily a corpse in
such a position would fall forward, pulled down by the head’s dead
weight. In this case, the weapon that had dealt those injuries to
Comfrey’s hands, chest, and neck, a brass poker from the hearth’s
collection of fire irons, had been driven into his right eye. The
poker had been shoved into the skull with enough force to leave it
sticking out of the eye socket. And the poker had sufficient heft
to keep Comfrey’s head thrown back, maintaining his body in the
kneeling position, hands loose at his sides like a supplicant.

Hetheridge, absorbing the details of the
corpse, nearly missed the soft sound beside him. Glancing over, he
took in Kate’s ashen face and tight mouth, and knew she had never
been exposed to such a crime scene before. Beads of sweat had
broken out across her upper lip, and her hands were clenched
awkwardly in front of her.

“I need assurance this wasn’t a home
invasion,” Hetheridge snapped, in a tone that suggested Kate had
been seriously delinquent. Immediately, her hands unclenched, and
her gaze shot to him, startled.

“Examine the balcony. Check behind those
curtains and see if the windows have been disturbed. Then go
downstairs and inspect the ground beneath the balcony. Determine
what tools or physical skills would have been necessary for an
intruder to enter from that balcony.”

Nodding, Kate moved toward the balcony. It
was several paces away, and Hetheridge hoped the fresh air wafting
in through the still-open French doors would be enough to steady
her. Violent death was hard enough to view, to catalog, to study.
But it was the smell of it, the blood and the shit and the piss,
that brought such a death home to Hetheridge – that gripped him
viscerally, making him imagine he might actually die the same
death, if he contemplated it long enough.

Hetheridge wandered slowly around the room.
He kept to a tight path, taking no extra steps and – despite the
blue gloves – touching nothing. Until CID finished with the scene,
he was hesitant to do anything that might compromise their efforts.
Instead, Hetheridge visually inspected the roll-top desk, which was
stacked with unopened mail, some handwritten papers, and what
appeared to be business reports. He examined the small round table
positioned between Comfrey’s wingback and the torchiere lamp. A
book had been put there, closed, the reader’s place held by a
tasseled book mark. A drink sat beside the book: two fingers of
amber liquid in a crystal glass. Both book and glass were spotted
with red pinpricks of blood and flecked with what was probably
flesh.

Hetheridge turned back to the dead man. Had
he been introduced to Comfrey, during one of those endless social
obligations, sometime in the last ten or twenty years? The name
still nagged at him. Hetheridge, who prided himself on his
excellent powers of recollection, hated admitting he had forgotten
something, even to himself.

Comfrey’s face had taken the brunt of the
assault. If Hetheridge had ever been introduced to the man, he had
no chance of recognizing him now. The man’s nose was flattened, hit
so often white bone showed through the mess of flesh. His front
teeth were broken off. And the smell of burnt skin and hair
emphasized the obvious – the killer’s poker had come directly from
the fire.

Hetheridge had studied the requisite
psychology of the homicidal individual from books and scholarly
papers, as well as from life experience, but in this case, advanced
powers of psychiatric deduction seemed unnecessary. This killer was
no intruder-stranger. This killer knew Comfrey, and vented his rage
– his or her rage, Hetheridge corrected himself dutifully – on
Comfrey’s face, as killers so often did when the motivation was
intensely personal.

Hetheridge glanced at his Rolex. He believed
he’d been examining the scene for five to ten minutes, and was
startled to learn he’d spent nearly a half-hour in the library. The
blonde constable, whom Hetheridge had nearly forgotten, was still
waiting just outside the door, looking strained and eager for
dismissal.

“Constable,” Hetheridge called. “Were you
sick in this room?”

“No, sir,” the man replied, taking a
reluctant step into the library. “I made it outside. It was Mrs.
Comfrey, sir. She found the body, was sick, and called 999.”

“Of course,” Hetheridge said. He took a last
look around the library, then smiled at the constable, amused to
see that the man did not relax at all. He recalled Kate’s
characterization of him in his evening dress, sweeping into a
murder scene to terrify hardworking young officers. Surely, she
exaggerated.

“Take me to Mrs. Comfrey and her daughter,
please.”

This time, the constable led Hetheridge down
the grand staircase, scarlet-carpeted, oak-banistered, and lit by a
glittering crystal chandelier. From there, they entered the parlor,
a gracious and airy room with modern furniture, mostly white, and
bowls of yellow chrysanthemums. Kate stood near the cold fireplace,
composed again, tapping on her smart phone. Two women sat on the
long white sofa. A slim, angular brunette in her late teens or
early twenties, presumably Jules Comfrey, turned toward Hetheridge
as he entered. Her face was pale, but he saw no tell-tale splotches
of redness to indicate she’d been crying. Another woman, also
brunette but older and softer-faced, glanced at Hetheridge and
froze, her hand going to her throat.

“Tony,” she cried, rising from the sofa. “Oh,
Tony, thank God it’s you. Malcolm’s dead. What am I going to
do?”

Kate stopped her rapid-fire notation into her
smart phone. Tony? she thought, shooting a glance at
Hetheridge.

“Madge,” he murmured. No reaction, no
mirroring of Mrs. Comfrey’s instant intimacy – her outstretched
hands, her pleading look. Had it not been for Jules Comfrey,
reaching up to catch her mother by the arm, Kate thought Mrs.
Comfrey would have rushed across the room to embrace
Hetheridge.

“Who are you? How did you get in here?” Jules
Comfrey demanded, taking in Hetheridge’s tuxedo with narrowed eyes
and curled lip. She seemed to assume he was a guest from a
neighboring house, wandering in to see what all the fuss was about.
Kate wasn’t surprised by the young woman’s irrationality, or her
knee-jerk hostility, for that matter. The level of emotion in the
room was palpable, sizzling around both women, Jules in
particular.

“This is Chief Superintendent Hetheridge, of
Scotland Yard,” Kate said quickly. “He came directly from a black
tie event to take charge of this investigation.”

“Inspector?” Jules looked up at her mother.
“Then how do you know him?”

“We were friends, once,” Madge Comfrey said
softly. The naked pleading in her eyes disappeared, as if Jules’s
question had recalled her to herself. Face going blank, she sagged
back down on the sofa beside her daughter. “Forgive me, Lord
Hetheridge. When you appeared so suddenly, almost out of thin air,
I thought … I thought I was losing my mind.” She gave a short,
shrill laugh. “Maybe I am.”

“Let’s hear your account of what happened,
from the start,” Hetheridge said, in the same authoritative tone he
had used on Kate, when she felt herself close to losing control in
the library. As he seated himself opposite Jules and Madge Comfrey,
Kate’s stylus paused. She considered the pair, taking them in not
as witnesses, but as women.

Madge Comfrey was about fifty, with thick
brown hair arranged in a wavy, gravity-defying halo Kate associated
with upper-middle class mavens. Her dress was printed with tea
roses and long green vines – Laura Ashley, Kate thought, or one of
her imitators. Madge exuded the air of a woman who had once been
beautiful, and told herself she still was. Hers was the frozen
forehead and taut, line-less eyes of someone under an aggressive
surgeon’s care. Her make-up was also a fraction overdone: fuchsia
lips, frosted eye shadow, and a thick black line drawn beneath each
eyelid.

Under normal circumstances, Jules Comfrey
would have been pretty, perhaps even uncommonly lovely – she had
precise features, excellent skin, and thick, glossy brown hair that
fell to her shoulders. But tonight she was bone-white and trembling
with ill-contained fury, fear, or both. She was slender enough to
look sickly when tired, and her clothes – baggy blue jeans and a
rhinestone-accented T-shirt – were poorly chosen, as if she had
tried to borrow a bolder girl’s style and wound up looking like a
poser.

“Begin with dinner,” Hetheridge said,
settling himself on an overstuffed armchair. “Why did it end
prematurely?”

“That was my fault,” Madge said. “I had
arranged for a small dinner party – two couples and a single friend
of Jules’s – but Malcolm didn’t feel up to entertaining. He asked
me to call the whole thing off. But I felt it was too late to
cancel. Malcolm didn’t take much interest in our guests, I’m
afraid, and some of them felt slighted. Everyone decided to take a
rain check on dinner and let Malcolm get his rest.”

“Rubbish,” Jules snapped, not with surprise,
but with the triumph of one eager to seize on a lie. “Mother, you
can’t keep covering for him, especially now. He was a pig and a
complete rotter, and he ruined what was supposed to be my night. It
wasn’t just a small dinner party,” she continued, voice rising. “It
was my engagement party, and he destroyed it! He treated Kevin like
shit and everyone left because no one could bear to be around him
for one minute longer!”

“Your father held some animosity toward your
fiancée?” Hetheridge asked.

“He thought Kevin wasn’t good enough,” Jules
added, lip twisting into what Kate suspected was a habitual look of
disappointment. “He didn’t care how I felt or what I wanted. He
just wanted a son-in-law who would impress his friends.”

“Jules, please,” Madge murmured.

“When did the guests leave?” Hetheridge asked
Madge.

“Early. Six o’clock, at the latest.”

“What did you do as they were leaving?”

“I saw them off, instructed the staff
regarding the clean-up of the uneaten food, and left Malcolm to be
alone,” Madge said, lifting her chin slightly and putting on what
Kate could only describe as a brave, insincere smile. All in a
day’s work, the smile seemed to say. Every wife is forced to
overlook some sort of bad behavior, once in awhile.

“When Malcolm felt under the weather,” Madge
continued, “he liked to take a cup of tea up to the library and
drink it by the fire.”

“Or whiskey,” Hetheridge said,
expressionless.

“Or whiskey,” Madge agreed, still smiling.
“My husband wasn’t an alcoholic. If he wanted a drink, I never
objected.” She waited, but Hetheridge seemed content to let the
silence stretch out. Jules shifted again, looking more
uncomfortable, and finally Madge drew in a deep breath.

“Very well,” she said, compelled to fill the
silence. “I was angry. I don’t deny it. I was disappointed in
Malcolm’s behavior. I didn’t care if he had tea or whiskey, I just
left him alone and went up to bed. I fell asleep for awhile, until
about ten-thirty, I think. Malcolm still hadn’t come to bed, and
that wasn’t like him. I decided we’d been angry long enough, so I
went to the library to make peace, and found him there. The French
doors were wide open, and I knew someone had broken in and killed
him. I was sick, I couldn’t help it – it was such a shock, I still
see him there, whenever I close my eyes. Then I ran away, found a
phone, and rang 999.”

Hetheridge didn’t reply. The silence
stretched out again, still more uncomfortable and heavy with
something unspoken, until even Kate found herself shifting from
foot to foot.

“What?” Madge burst out at last. “What else
is there to say?”

“This is a large house,” Hetheridge said.
“But the library and the master bedroom are on the same floor. Not
many wives in your situation could sleep soundly from around six in
the evening to ten-thirty, and hear no intruder, no struggle, and
no assault.”

Madge stiffened. The black-rimmed eyes
narrowed; the fuchsia lips pursed. “If you can be bothered to
remember, Tony, you will recall I have suffered from insomnia all
my life. Valium is the only thing that allows me to sleep. I took
some before I retired, after a long day of planning a party that no
one, including myself, was permitted to enjoy. You will find the
prescription bottle in my medicine cabinet upstairs.”

Hetheridge nodded, unperturbed by Madge
Comfrey’s offense, or her reference to a past when they had been on
a Christian-name basis. Kate studied Hetheridge’s profile, trying
to imagine when he might have been friends with Madge Comfrey, and
precisely how intimate the connection had been. Unlike many of her
fellow detectives, Kate did not find it hard to believe that
Hetheridge hid a personal history beyond his biography in
Who’s Who
. She could even imagine a sensual
side to him, cached somewhere within that wintry exterior. But the
idea of him wasting his passion, his lust, on someone like Madge
Comfrey, with her stiff halo of waves and her Laura Ashley dress,
irritated Kate in a way she couldn’t precisely defend.