Nor All Your Tears (11 page)

‘What does that mean?'

‘He was very happily married, Lance,' she pointed out. ‘Maybe he can swim.'

I found that remark curiously unsettling, but didn't know why. ‘Maybe there are sharks in the pool now,' was all I could find to say. She nodded and didn't reply, which I thought slightly unfair because it forced me to say something more. ‘Are you implying I'm worried about my inheritance?' I hissed. Our two ever-busy clerical staff worked even harder as they began to listen even harder.

Jane laughed. When Jane laughed it was because she was amused, not because she wanted to make someone feel small. ‘No, Lance. I know you better than that.'

‘Then what?'

Jane had been nursing for nearly twenty years. During that time she had been forced to cope with every possible situation, whether it involved physical injury, lunacy, tragedy, farce, complete anarchy or total idiocy. She had come through it all but, more than that, she had come through it all with her humanity intact, and that was a miracle. She had never married; when I had asked her why that should be, she had replied simply, ‘I found I only had enough emotion for my patients.' In that simple statement, I found both joy and sorrow in such amazing quantities, it left me almost breathless, and certainly in awe of her.

‘I think you're worried about your mother . . .'

‘What?' My voice was unexpectedly loud.

‘And I also think . . .'

‘Rubbish!' I was astonished. Aware that Sheila and Jean were ever ready to be the best and most attentive of audiences, I lowered my voice even more. ‘I'm not twelve years old, you know, Jane. I think I'm adult enough not to be still fixated on my mother.'

‘And I also think,' she went on, her own tone considerably more confidential now, ‘you're afraid of losing your father.' Which was patently absurd as my spluttering, wordless response told her. She added, ‘And I think that's wonderful.'

‘Rubbish,' was all I could find to say.

The phone rang and for a moment neither Jean nor Sheila moved, as if they were transfixed. I turned to Sheila, raised my eyebrows at her and nodded at the phone. She came to and picked it up. ‘Brigstock Road Surgery.'

She listened for a moment, then held the receiver out to me. ‘It's for you.'

It was Sergeant Abelson. My immediate assumption was that she wanted to arrange a time to take a formal statement from me concerning George Cotterill's death, but I was wrong. ‘Can you come to 121 Keston Road immediately?'

It was half-past eleven and I didn't have any house calls until one. ‘I'll be there in twenty minutes. What's the problem?'

‘We have a suspicious death.' Her tone was odd, although I couldn't identify why.

SEVENTEEN

H
ave you noticed how the police like to play things down? They don't interrogate people; people ‘help them with their enquiries'. When there is a demonstration, police estimates of the numbers are always half the demonstrators'. When they tell you that a death is suspicious, it's bound to be blindingly obvious that it's a murder.

Keston Road was long and almost completely straight, only dog-legging slightly to the right; it ran from Thornton Road almost to the London Road. It was not a particularly prestigious address – even less so, now – with its small front gardens and general lack of recent painting. Number 121 was just beyond the dog-leg, distinguished only by the attention it had now acquired – three police cars, an ambulance, sundry police officers, a lot of plastic yellow tape and a crowd of onlookers. This last was composed of the usual motley assortment – those who whispered to each other, those who pointed whilst whispering to each other, those who gawped and then whispered to each other, and those who just gawped.

The object of their attention was not your average terraced house. Although architecturally I suspect it was nothing for Christopher Wren to get too excited about – upstairs were three bedrooms (although one was little more than a cupboard) and a single family bathroom, and downstairs were two living rooms and a reasonably sized kitchen – it proved yet again what an interesting creature is
Homo sapiens
.

Not that, on first sight, it seemed to be anything too much out of the ordinary. The exterior was drab and somewhat in need of redecoration, the hall ornamentation lacklustre and, although not dirty, somehow utilitarian and without inspiration; indeed, my first impression was that these were students' digs and not a family home and I wondered who lived there. I had trouble making any progress once past the front door because of the number of sweaty male police officers there were in the hall, as if they were attempting to break the world record for cramming constabulary into domestic premises. I even began to feel slightly dislocated; perhaps it was the heat of the day made so much worse by the concentration of foetid male pheromones. At the end of the hallway, Masson was standing in the doorway of what was presumably the back living room; despite this being a crime scene, he was smoking and staring through the doorway, a look of concentration on his face. When I came up to him he said nothing but stood back to let me see what it contained.

At one time, this room would probably have looked just like most people's idea of suburban normality. There was a two-seater sofa in loose covers with a floral pattern, a single armchair that was similarly attired, a fake stone fireplace in which there was a three-bar electric fire, a wooden trolley on which was a bottle of British sherry with three glasses, an oval wooden dining table with two fold-down flaps and an elderly television set that looked as if it had heard there was a third television channel, but was going to have nothing to do with it. On the floor was an ornately patterned square carpet that was slightly worn in the middle and surrounded by a border of bare linoleum. The windows looked as if someone had been cleaning them and then got bored halfway through – which was odd – but, all in all, it reminded me slightly of my grandmother's sitting room, although she had been dead some twenty years.

I say ‘slightly', because there were one or two alterations to this room that I'm fairly sure Granny would never have had in her house. Firstly the room had been wrecked – all of the cushions ripped and thrown on the floor, all of the drawers rifled, even the television set destroyed. Secondly, there was a body of a woman, and this woman was lying on her front and covered in blood. Indeed, she almost seemed to rise out of the stuff, so much of it was there on the carpet. Even from the doorway I could see several long, deep gashes in her arms and on her back.

Masson said, ‘I can't get hold of a pathologist at the moment – the bugger's in court.' He made it sound as if Mark was skiving. ‘We've got Scenes of Crime on the way to take the photographs; I just need you to confirm death and give me your opinion on the likely cause.'

It was a peculiarity of English law that even a decapitated corpse required a doctor to confirm death; plainly ludicrous and I knew it, so I could understand Masson's frustration and anger. Biting back the urge to be facetious that always seemed to rise to my lips whenever I was in Masson's company – ‘I can't be absolutely certain, Inspector, but I have the strangest feeling she may have been stabbed' – I put my bag down in the hallway and gingerly entered the room. From what I could see of her (which wasn't much) she was about fifty years old, with blonde, permed hair, and sharp, pinched features giving her a suspicious face, even in such a death. She was short and quite stocky. I fished out some disposable gloves from my jacket pocket and put them on before crouching down beside her, aware that I would be lucky to come away without at least some of the blood transferred somewhere on to me. What I saw then made me freeze with shock. I hadn't noticed it before – probably no one had – because of the considerable quantity of blood and because the head was in the far corner and in some shadow, but up close you couldn't miss it.

She had the point of a compass sticking out of her right eye.

Deep breaths, Lance
, I told myself.

I gently touched the neck, feeling for a pulse, and finding myself actually hoping that I wouldn't find one. The blood was markedly congealed and she had obviously been there for some time, so it was no surprise when I was unsuccessful. In doing this, my fingers found one of the cuts, found how deep it was. Then, still being as gentle as I could, I tested as best I could for body warmth and for rigor.

I stood up, stepped away backwards.

‘Well?'

‘You won't be surprised to hear that she's dead.'

‘How long?'

I had known he would ask that and my insistence that precise timing of death was as much a thing of crime fiction as Sherlock Holmes with his calabash, Inverness cape and deerstalker cap would be as but a whisper in a whirlwind. ‘This is only approximate,' I replied.

‘I know that. It's what you lot always say.'

‘
Very
approximate . . .'

His colour was forever somewhat unhealthy – sometime sallow, sometimes grey – but the rising deep puce did little to enhance the impression of rude health; indeed, he looked as though it would not be long before he came dangerously close to apoplexy. I said hurriedly, ‘Less than six hours, since she's still slightly warm and there's little sign of rigor. I'd say maybe as little as three hours.'

‘And did she die of the stab wounds?'

‘I would say so. Obviously I can't say if there was a decisive one or it was just blood loss, but she's got quite a deep one that could have reached her right internal jugular . . .'

But he wasn't listening. ‘A frenzied attack,' he said.

‘You could say that. She's got a compass stuck in her eyeball.'

Even he winced at that one.

‘Who was she?' I asked.

He didn't reply directly, instead moving back along the hallway (magically finding a clear path opening before him) to the foot of the stairs. He called up them, ‘Sergeant?'

Abelson's voice came from the first floor. ‘Sir?'

‘Would you show Dr Elliot what we've got upstairs?'

His face was unreadable as he gestured up the stairs to me.

The back bedroom, at the top of the staircase, might have been a back bedroom in any one of a million homes in the UK, except that it had also been ransacked. There was a double bed with an identical bedside cabinet to right and left, made out of white laminated wood or wood substitute; a mechanical alarm clock was on one, on the other was a Teasmade. Beside the clock was a hardback copy of
Humboldt's Gift
; beside that most decadent of household appliances was a paperback copy of
Salem's Lot
. The bed had a pink quilted cover pulled over it and there were fluffy white cushions on the pillows. In the window was an ornate dressing table in a similar laminate, before which was a stool and above which was a round tilting mirror; the table was crowded with cosmetic products. Fitted wardrobes – same laminate – ran across the wall behind the door. A shag-pile carpet covered most of the floor area.

All had been thrown about and disordered in what seemed to me to have been a furious search.

It would have been a good place to sleep, I thought, but I soon discovered that this was not something that could be said of the front bedroom. Sergeant Abelson was standing in the open doorway, but she stood aside as I approached and looked around it. There must have been a look of some awe on my face, for Sergeant Abelson said, ‘Impressive, isn't it?'

Looking back, I'm fairly sure that impressive was one of the adjectives running through my wonder-filled brain, but it was only one among many, jostling for attention with
surprising
,
shocking
,
amusing
,
titillating
,
staggering
and
puzzling
and many others. I could find only one thing to sum it all up.

‘Wow.'

The room was a sexual torture chamber.

The walls were painted a deep red, as if to hide the blood stains, and the woodwork matt black. There was no bed, merely a flat wooden tabletop, although one that had been erected on some sort of tilting mechanism, and that had manacles at the top end. At the bottom end were poles at either corner, on each of which was a stirrup; it brought to mind the slightly less than pleasant memories of hot and embarrassed days spent in the gynaecology outpatients' clinic when, as a callow medical student, not yet amnesiac of puberty, I had been introduced to the emotionally draining world of bimanual pelvic examination. On the wall to the left of the window was hung an assortment of leather goods, by which I most definitely do not mean high heels and purses, but this was less unnerving than the wall opposite, which was the home of a shelving unit that had been emptied of its contents, again apparently in some sort of search. On the floor beneath it were various ‘toys' but, try as I might, I could see no Lego, no Stickle Bricks and definitely no Barbie dolls.

The good Sergeant said, ‘I've been doing this job for ten years and I'm still amazed by what our citizens choose to do in their private time.'

‘And to their private parts. My eyes are watering.'

She said at once, ‘They would if you were trapped in this place.'

‘Who lives here?'

Masson had joined us and Abelson deferred to him. ‘The house is in the name of Yvette Mangon. We're assuming at the moment that it is Yvette Mangon downstairs.'

My head was overflowing with questions about Yvette Mangon's domestic arrangements, chief amongst which was, ‘Was she married?' If so, her husband could hardly have been in ignorance of what had presumably been going in the front bedroom. Either he had been her manager – by which, of course, I meant ‘pimp' – or she had been unmarried.

‘Did she live here alone?'

Masson's voice was dry, but that wasn't unusual; when he really wanted to convey sarcasm, he tended to desiccate everything within a ten-foot radius. ‘Of late, she had been.'