Nor All Your Tears (4 page)

I had not laid eyes on the Inspector for some months and I was pleased to see that he had yet to take advantage of any available anger-management classes. Dad and I were still in the office and the confrontation took place just outside, so we had a grandstand view, complete with sound (at least to start with); Sergeant Percy Bailey, who was in the office with us, decided it wise to shut the door after the preliminary exchanges, and so thereafter we could not hear what was said, but as a mime, it was second to none. Percy, too, found it fascinating; in fact he even commented that it could take off as a professional sport. At first, it did not appear to be an equal contest; Masson was shorter than Mr Silsby by a good head, and the headmaster clearly had a longer reach, which he demonstrated early on by jabbing his finger at Masson, then pointing all over the place, as if demonstrating the general geography of the school to a particularly stupid parent. Masson's face clearly showed that he did not appreciate being on the receiving end of a bony finger, because he tried a little bit of his own, preferring to wave it somewhere in the vicinity of Mr Silsby's nose, which, I noted idly, was sprouting a few stray hairs. Then Masson fronted up to him, hands on hips, mouthing something through rather tense lips, eyes aglow.

At this point, Mr Silsby's face changed and I would guess that this was the point when it was brought in upon him that the local constabulary hadn't taken over his school on a whim, and that they didn't call out multiple squad cars and senior police officers because someone had stolen a box of HB pencils. The curtains that could divide the main gym hall had been pulled across obscuring the body, so he had had no idea of the atrocity that had occurred. Apparently now fully apprised of the situation, his demeanour changed; he shrank slightly, stepped back and looked a trifle wan. Masson, never a man to let the quarry go without giving it good mauling, took advantage and apparently put Mr Silsby fully in the picture regarding who gave the orders to whom.

There was worse to come for Mr Silsby, for Masson clearly needed someone to identify the victim of the slaughter. The look on the headmaster's face was testament enough to be able to work out what he thought of that particular idea, but Masson did what Masson always did and, having established just who was the alpha male in the vicinity, Mr Silsby was prevailed upon by the good Inspector to enter the gym hall.

He emerged about five minutes later and although when diagnosing people I generally like to take a full history and do a thorough examination before reaching a diagnosis, I was fairly sure from just looking at the headmaster's face and posture when he passed the office that he had been affected by the sight within. Masson followed him out, there was a brief exchange of words which ended with Mr Silsby nodding in a slightly bemused way and then he made his way out of the gym, presumably to find a bottle of something strong in the top drawer of his filing cabinet, or maybe to have his shoulders massaged by Mrs Ponsonby, his rather aged and prim secretary.

Whereupon Masson, now thoroughly steamed up, made his way back into the gym hall, but not before shooting a venomous – not to say, toxic – glance towards Dad and me. Percy turned around and smiled sadly. ‘I don't think he's happy.'

They let me phone the practice so that I could give my colleagues, Brian and Jack, the happy news that they would each have a fifty per cent increase in workload that day, and Percy even took pity on Dad and let him contact Ada to know that Texas Homecare was off for the day. Then we just sat there and waited. During the next hour, there was a lot of coming and going past the office, mostly police, although I did see one face that I recognized but couldn't name. ‘Who's that?' I asked of Percy.

He was reading a copy of yesterday's
Daily Mirror
and, I suspect, might even have been about to drop off. He just managed to snatch a glance at the man I was pointing at as he went into the gym. ‘Dr Bentham. He's our new pathologist.'

Of course. I had been at St George's with Mark Bentham but had lost touch with him. I had known that he had gone into pathology, but not that he had specialized in the forensic area. Time passed, as it generally does, after which Masson came out the gym followed by his new female friend and together they entered the office. He had not noticeably calmed down. He nodded curtly to Percy – who interpreted this as a suggestion that he might like to go forth – and I sought for a suitable adjective that could be used for his expression; I came to the conclusion that ‘baleful' just about fitted the bill perfectly.

‘Why me?' he asked. Before either Dad or I could suggest an answer, he then added in a somewhat anguished tone, ‘And why you?'

I said nothing, although it was hard; I am a doctor and I do not like to see people in pain. All Dad could manage was, ‘Ahh . . .' in a sorting sad, dying fall. He offered something of a shrug and his face was a picture of unalloyed commiseration, but Masson just scowled. It began to feel, I thought, quite like old times.

SEVEN

‘
T
his is Sergeant Abelson,' Masson said tiredly. ‘She's new to Thornton Heath, so treat her gently.' He indicated me. ‘This is Dr Lance Elliot, local GP.' Then he gestured at Dad. ‘And this is his father, Dr Benjamin Elliot. He is a retired GP.'

We both smiled and nodded at her and she managed to reciprocate with a twitch of her lips that was difficult to read. It could have been shy, but equally it could have been embarrassed, defensive, even arrogant. Masson went on for her benefit, ‘Welcome to the local slaughterhouse; these two seem to be the caretakers of it.'

I enquired, ‘Is that fair?'

I might then have tried a bit more in the way of conversation had Masson not transgressed the rules of etiquette by answering my question with one of this own. He asked immediately, ‘Do you know how many murders there are every year in the Greater London area?'

This was one of those questions that I have found through bitter experience not to answer; if you get it wrong you're probably going to look a dork by being out by an order of magnitude and, if you get it right, the questioner hates you until you die. I therefore remained shtum on the issue and allowed Masson to say, ‘Two hundred and ninety. That means that in this area, there should be just six.' I looked at Dad and he shrugged slightly; we both waited for Masson to give us the punch line. ‘In the past fifteen months, there have been eleven . . . and your faces keep cropping up every time.'

‘I
am
a police surgeon,' I pointed out.

To which he said witheringly, ‘More like the angel of death.'

Dad tried to appease him. ‘It is odd, isn't it? I mean, we do seem to have a penchant for stumbling across things like this, don't we? Who'd have thought it?'

‘Who indeed?' asked Masson with enough sarcasm to burn sun-sensitive skin.

‘Anyone would think we were somehow cursed,' continued my pater, in one of those flights of rumination to which he was prone and which, in turn, were inclined to aggravate even the most sanguine of listeners. ‘But, of course, it's merely coincidence, random events falling as they will; people think that randomness means uniformity, but exactly the opposite is true . . .'

Masson held up his hand, palm forward, a gesture that had undoubtedly come in useful when, as a young and wet-behind-the-ears rookie, he had been on traffic duty. ‘Enough,' he commanded angrily. To the comely Sergeant Abelson, he said, ‘Take notes.'

For the next half-hour he took us through the events of the morning; why we were there (Dad still had the replacement alternator in his pocket, which he produced as proof), why we had gone into the gym, what precisely we had seen when we had done so.

‘This man, George Cotterill, he was lying on the floor just outside the main hall?'

‘That's right.'

‘Facing which way?'

‘He was on his back. Head towards the body.'

‘And was he conscious?'

Dad considered. ‘In shock. Almost concussed.'

‘A head injury?'

Dad shook his head and I said, ‘Not that we could see. The ambulance boys might give you a better idea, though.'

‘Was the door to the hall open?'

‘Yes.'

‘But he wasn't in the hall?'

‘No.'

‘How long elapsed between the cry that you heard and you finding him in here?'

Dad said, ‘No more than five minutes?'

‘What does that mean? One minute or four minutes fifty-nine?'

I was proud of Dad, then. He frowned as if concentrating intently and after several seconds said in a completely serious voice, ‘Four and a half.'

Masson stared at him and, for the first time that morning, sought refuge in a cigarette. Whilst he was lighting up, I asked, ‘Do you know who she is?'

A deep puff and then he asked, ‘Do you?'

‘She was a PE teacher, I think. I saw her last night.'

He said at once, ‘Yes, tell me about last night. It was an open evening for parents, I understand.'

‘That's right.'

‘And you were both here?'

‘Dad helps out running a garden club for the older pupils; Max and I came along to support him.'

‘Miss Christy?' he asked in a pained voice. ‘She's involved as well?'

I nodded; only a man with a heart of stone would not have felt compassion for him, although when he turned to Sergeant Abelson and said, ‘Miss Maxine Christy is an unconvicted housebreaker and serial accomplice to these two, whose various misdemeanours include obstructing the police and interference with a crime scene,' I did have to bite down hard on a witty, withering response. He made us sound like Croydon's three most wanted. ‘Take me through your recollections of last night, including the times you arrived and left, what you did, where you went and what, if anything, you noticed that was unusual.'

It didn't take long and after it, he looked no happier, no more informed. He was nearly at the end of his second cigarette and just sat staring at its lighted tip for a while when, abruptly, he said, ‘OK, come with me.'

He stood up, and followed by Dad, then me with Sergeant Abelson bringing up the rear, we made our way out of the office, through the foyer and into the gym hall.

EIGHT

W
e knew, of course, what to expect, but I still felt a palpable nervousness – and from the look on Dad's face, so did he – as we followed Masson across the echoing gym hall and beyond the curtains that had been drawn across.

Things had changed, but not noticeably for the better. The body had been lowered to the floor and was now laid neatly out in a symmetrical pose, the thick rope trailing away from it. Mark Bentham was leaning over it, making notes and directing a photographer. There were three uniformed officers acting as go-betweens and four more in plain clothes who were dusting various surfaces for fingerprints, examining the floor through magnifying glasses and plucking invisible fibres from the clothing of the corpse.

Mark did not look up as we approached and Masson did not try to disturb him. In a low voice, Masson said, ‘As you so astutely observed, the body is that of Marlene Jeffries . . .' The pause was not hard to read; my easy identification of the battered body was potentially incriminating in his book; it was a book that began with the sentence,
Anyone called Lance Elliot is at best an idiot, at worst a criminal, and always a source of dyspepsia
. Having left the nasty implication of his words hanging for a while, he continued, ‘As you said, she was a PE teacher at the school, one of four. She'd been at the school for five years, according to the headmaster.'

And someone had done something horrible to her face; from the degree of distortion, it looked as if most of her facial bones had been smashed, one eye pulped; there was a huge amount of congealed blood but not enough to hide deep gashes in her forehead and cheeks, some of which appeared to be slightly curved. Dad, who was by no means squeamish, winced and whispered, ‘Oh, dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear . . .'

‘Someone didn't like her,' remarked Masson in his characteristically sour tone.

Mark looked up, suddenly aware of our presence. When he saw me, his face was momentarily blank before a small smile of recognition appeared. ‘Lance?'

‘Hello, Mark.' We would have shaken hands except that he wore disposable gloves and on them was rather a lot of Marlene Jeffries' colourful vital fluids. ‘It's been a while.'

Mark had fair hair and faded blue eyes bracketed by laughter lines; I remember him in the bar at St George's singing rugby songs about ‘dickey-di-do's' with various things attached. It was a memory that contrasted vividly with our present situation. The smile was the same, though. ‘It certainly has.'

‘I didn't realize you were working in the area.'

‘Just started.' He glanced at Masson, who was clearly in no mood to stand idly by for a friendly reunion between old student chums. ‘I've heard your name mentioned a few times already, though.'

‘If we could all get on with the task in hand,' Masson said testily, at which Mark winked at me and said, ‘We'll catch up later.'

‘So, what have you got for me, Dr Bentham? The usual airy waffle that I get from all you pathologists?'

It was clear that, although he might not have been around Masson for long, Mark had clearly already developed a certain degree of immunity to his waspishness. ‘Now, now, Inspector. If someone could get you all the information you need without having to have an autopsy done, I'd be out of a job, wouldn't I?'

Masson's face did something that only an eternal, incurable and quite possibly terminally myopic optimist would interpret as a smile. ‘Can you tell me anything concrete at all?'

Mark indicated Marlene Jeffries. ‘I can't at the moment find any other significant injuries apart from those to her head. I'm not sure what was used, though. Curious, slightly curved shapes to some of the injuries.'