Nor All Your Tears (9 page)

‘Oh, dear,' was all I could find to say. I could understand how the working environment might predispose to a distinctly pessimistic view of life.

At the end of the corridor was a T-junction at which seated at a desk was another uniformed police officer, this one no sunnier than his colleague. Along the sides of the perpendicular corridor were arrayed the cells, sixteen in all. The smell here was a heady mix of odours that did not so much assault the olfactory organs as decimate them, while there was an equally disagreeable attack on the auscultatory apparatus from the cells' inhabitants as they sang, groaned, shouted and profaned with gay abandon. This custody sergeant – for thus it was – looked up after writing with intense concentration something in a ledger. He was a tall, well-built man of middle age, running to fat and beginning to lose his hair. Fearful that he should consider me a felon and instantly incarcerate me, I said quickly, ‘I'm Dr Elliot, the police surgeon,'

This evoked no enthusiasm, even when my escort nodded assent at the questioning look from this stout guardian of the cells. Returning his attention to me, he said without noticeable gusto, ‘He's in number three. Making a terrible fuss, he was.' How he had determined this given the unholy cacophony that seemed part of normal life down there was beyond me. My escort, keys clanking on his thigh, moved forward and I followed. We turned left and walked perhaps twenty yards along the corridor, passing through a bedlam of sound that changed with every three steps. We stopped before a door that was like all the rest; it was made of heavy steel, painted in a sort of green-grey paint that was curiously reminiscent of the contents of a boil. There was a small semicircular indentation in the door at eye level at the base of which was a small window of thick glass; the constable grasped his key ring but looked into the cell through this before selecting a key.

He said suddenly, ‘Oh, Christ!' and began fumbling in earnest for the correct key.

‘What is it?' I asked.

He didn't reply and I was in the metaphysical dark until I followed him as we hurriedly entered the cell. There was a body, face down on the floor by the side of the bunk; the feet were near the slop bucket but thankfully they hadn't made contact with it. There was vomitus on the floor under the head. ‘Get out of the way,' I ordered, feeling some enjoyment at being able to boss him around. He obliged at once and I was able to lean down beside the body, although there was precious little room. I felt around the side of the neck for a pulse and, albeit with some difficulty, found one. I said, ‘Help me turn him.'

The constable took a moment to react, but then squeezed in beside me. Together and with some difficulty in the cramped space, we turned the man over. It was George Cotterill.

FIFTEEN

‘
H
e died shortly after we got him to Casualty.'

I was cooking. For my A-levels I had done chemistry, biology and physics, and got A grades in all of them, much to the delight of my father. It had always seemed to me that cooking was just the practical application of these three academic subjects and, moreover, most cooks, no matter how bright, were not particularly academic. The logical corollary of this was that I should have been a brilliant cook, since I was both bright and knew the theory.

How wrong I was.

My father had had occasion in the past to pass adverse comment on some of the products of my culinary experiments that had passed the frontier of his false upper-plate gnashers. The first time that this had occurred, I had laughed it off as mere envy, but the years had gone by and he had been joined in adverse commentary by most of the people who had summoned the courage to partake of my cuisine. One of my early girlfriends had once left the table while I was dishing up the dessert only to be heard throwing up in the toilet.

Max's problem, though, was that she was completely incapable of any kind of cooking at all. Until she met me, I think she was quite cheerful about it, not seeing it as a particularly major problem; she had a career as a vet and, presumably, she thought she would either meet a man who could cook any matter of delicious repast at her whim, or she would soon be earning enough to live her entire gustatory life in restaurants. Unfortunately, she ended up with me. She had yet to regurgitate my attempts (at least within my earshot or eye line), but there had been times when even I, a man with the social sensibilities of a rhinoceros, could see that things were proving a strain.

On this particular Sunday, I was preparing roast beef. I would say ‘with all the trimmings' but all I had been able to manage was roast potatoes, carrots and cabbage. I had just opened the oven door to discover that the cookery book had lied yet again and what should have been a nicely browned rolled silverside looked more like an incinerated dinosaur turd; thankfully, all I could smell was charcoal. Add to that the fact that I had previously over-boiled the spuds and now they were rapidly becoming over-roasted potato sludge, the carrots had been on for nearly an hour and were still slightly less hard than my grandmother's wooden leg and the cabbage had turned to soup as soon as it had hit the water, and all in all I could sense that I was building to a repast of climactic awesomeness.

Max was sitting in the garden, unaware of what delights were heading her way, enjoying the arid, waterless delights of my own personal slice of desert, whilst drinking deeply of a glass of Black Tower. She said, ‘That poor man. What a horrible place to spend his last hours on earth.'

She could have been talking about the casualty department of Mayday Hospital, but I guessed she was referring to Croydon Central nick. ‘It certainly isn't my favourite place to spend Saturday evening,' I agreed.

‘Why do you think he died?'

‘I would say his heart.'

‘So it was natural?'

‘I think so, but there'll still have to be a post-mortem.'

‘Why?'

I poured myself some Riesling. ‘Because he died in police custody.'

‘What difference does that make?'

‘People get skittish when suspects die in the cells. It's just to reassure the public.'

She was astonished. ‘Why would the public need to be reassured?'

This innocence was part of Max's attractiveness (and it was the same part that made her the most irritating person I have ever met); she lived in a world parallel to the one that housed the rest of the human race, one in which the police were incapable of wrongdoing for no better reason than they were the police and in which, unbelievably, my father was a sane and rational human being (and not one of the most irksome entities that has ever bothered the universe).

‘Because it has been known for the police to treat people in their cells without due care.'

‘Really?'

In reply to this I said only, ‘Sometimes, yes.'

I got up and went back into the kitchen, having become aware of a strange odour emanating thence: it was the carrots that were the perpetrators of this; having silently suffered total dehydration, they were beginning to turn into carrot caramel on the bottom of the saucepan. ‘Is everything all right?' called Max through the kitchen doorway.

‘No problems,' was my response, with quite breathtaking mendacity as I furiously scraped sweet brown toffee off the bottom of a copper-bottomed saucepan that had once been a wedding gift for a marriage that had lasted only one tenth of the period of the pan's guarantee.

Max's expressions told the story, although she said not a word of criticism. I have to admit that it was a curious culinary experience; the vegetables had the texture of partially digested seaweed and the smell of inspissated mucus, while the meat (I always like to create different textures in my cooking efforts) defied any attempt at mastication; nor did it have much flavour, although I did on rare occasions detect the tang of sweat-soaked lederhosen. The only way it could be ingested was by cutting extremely small pieces, and even that took a great deal of effort. This was a cow that had clearly decided that, dead though it might be, it was not going to go gentle into that good night; conversation died as we struggled to overcome this curiously obstinate foodstuff. Eventually I gave up, and although I was only halfway through the meal, put my knife and fork down; my right arm was tired and the exertion combined with the heat was making me sweat rather uncomfortably. Max took my surrender as a cue that she could do likewise; there was, I think, an air of relief as she did this.

The doorbell rang and a few moments later I opened the door to Inspector Masson. He had his jacket over his shoulder and his tie was at half-mast. ‘May I come in?'

I stood aside and showed him through to the back patio where we had been eating. He nodded at Max. ‘Miss Christy.'

‘Hello, Inspector.'

‘Something to drink?' I asked him.

‘Iced water,' he said, without appending the usual niceties. He sounded even more exasperated and tired than usual. When I returned with his libation, he was seated at the garden table eyeing the remains of our recent repast with something that I can only describe as a jaundiced eye, while Max attempted the impossible and tried to make small talk with him; I could see from her expression that he was proving as sociable as ever. He grunted something – possibly thanks, possibly not – and took a deep draught. Then he put an empty glass down and, gesturing with his chin at the half-eaten meal, said acidly, ‘What the hell is that muck?'

‘Roast beef,' I responded, and I think I did so in a voice that told him he had overstepped the mark.

‘It was very nice,' added Max loyally.

Masson curled his lip. ‘It looks it,' was his only comment. His fingers were fidgeting with each other, with the edge of the table, with everything and nothing; anyone who didn't know him might have assumed that he was nervous, but I knew that the reason for this unconscious finger-jiving was indicated by patchy yellow-brown stains on this fore and middle fingers, and by the ever-present odour of stale tobacco smoke that he moved around in, as if he were an alien creature who required his own atmosphere. Since we were (in theory at least) still eating, I reckoned he could wait a while longer to knock another seven minutes off his life.

‘Aside from your part-time role as visiting food critic for the
Croydon Advertiser
, what brings you to my house, Inspector?'

‘I need a statement from you.' He actually sounded as if he needed nothing less.

‘What about?'

‘Your part in the death of George Cotterill.'

Well, there we were. I'd played a part in his death, apparently; and there I had been thinking that I'd played a part in trying to save his life. Presumably the good Inspector suspected me of slipping him a capsule full of potassium cyanide during the twenty minutes I had been in the cell giving him mouth to mouth (I could still remember the taste of that particular experience); I had, after all, been on my own for most of that time. ‘I beg your pardon?'

He was preoccupied, staring at the green plastic surface of the table, whilst Max did a bit of her own staring at me, hers with some shock, clearly seeing me with new eyes. ‘Inspector?' I prompted.

He came to. ‘You were there in the cell and thereafter accompanied him to hospital where he died. All deaths in custody have to be investigated; all the witnesses have to be interviewed and statements taken.'

Did Max look disappointed that I was not suspected of manslaughter? I fancy she did.

Whilst Masson consumed a second glass of iced water, and Max and I had some Riesling, I recounted what had happened; he did not take notes. Eventually, I ran out of things to say and he ran out of questions to ask, and everyone ran out of things to drink. I asked, ‘Do you know what George died of yet?'

‘The post-mortem examination was done this morning by Dr Bentham. Pending further investigations, he's fairly certain it was heart disease.'

Max asked, ‘What about the murder?'

‘What about it?'

‘Are you satisfied that George Cotterill did it?'

He laughed, as ever, sourly. ‘Oh, I am. Trouble is, I doubt I'll be given the time and money to prove it now. Even if I was, I doubt whether I could, he was too clever.'

‘Was he really?' Max had a knack of asking such questions; the words said one thing, the tone of voice another entirely. She sounded even to my ears to be entirely genuine; for all I knew, she was.

Masson's face told me that he was unsure of whether she was being authentic. Momentarily bereft of speech, he soon came back with, ‘Yes.' I thought that, as a witticism, it probably wouldn't even have made Oscar Wilde's discard pile.

Before she could say any more, I intervened. ‘You can chalk up another successful case, though.' I don't know what it was, but whenever I was around Inspector Masson, I felt this irresistible desire to try to cheer him up. I think it was the medical training; the Hippocratic oath probably had a word or two to say on the subject of bringing cheer to misanthropic members of the police force.

‘Can I?' he enquired, demonstrating that my bedside manner could have been improved.

‘Well, nobody can prove he
didn't
do it.'

‘The point, Dr Elliot,' he said tiredly, ‘is that I can't prove he did. That's the important thing. There'll always be a doubt now.'

I wondered why that mattered to him but didn't dare ask. There was then a pause, the like of which I can only recall when I was a small child and barged in on my Auntie Barbara when she was doing number twos in the downstairs cloakroom; inevitably it was Max who broke it. ‘Maybe he didn't do it,' she suggested. ‘Maybe he was innocent.'

And, thankfully, the phone rang inside the house; it stopped what I feared would be a fit of apoplexy that would see the end of my good friend Inspector Masson. I said, ‘Max, could you answer that whilst I fetch another glass of water for our guest?'