Shooting Elvis

Shooting Elvis

STUART PAWSON

‘Don’t touch him!’ Dave ordered, alarm giving his words a sharp edge. ‘He might still be alive.’

I looked at the eyes rolled back in their sockets like one of El Greco’s saints, at the silver streak of dried dribble from the toothless cavern of his mouth and at the flies homing in on the corpse, attracted by the smell of corruption that was as inviting to them as freshly baked bread is to hungry coppers.

‘Pardon?’ I said.

‘I don’t mean living and breathing alive,’ he explained. ‘I mean electricity alive.’

I withdrew the hand I’d extended towards the man’s neck in the hope of making a snap judgement on the time of death – nothing precise: this morning or last week would have done – and straightened up.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I see what you mean.’

I’m Charlie Priest of Heckley CID, and Dave is big Dave ‘Sparky’ Sparkington, one of my detective
constables. We work together most of the time and over the years Dave has stopped me making a prat of myself on numerous occasions, plus saving me from stabbings, shootings, various custard pies, and now, electrocution. The body was sprawled in an easy chair with the man’s arms resting on his knees, the palms turned upwards as if in supplication. An orange electric cable like the one for my vacuum cleaner snaked away from him and terminated at a wall socket. At this end the wires were bared and wrapped round his thumbs – the brown wire around his left, the blue around the right. A whisky glass was wedged between the man’s leg and the chair arm, together with a set of lower dentures, and an empty Bell’s bottle lay on the floor. The upper dentures sat in his lap.

I followed the cable to the wall socket. It was plugged into a timer that looked to me as if we were now in an
off
part of the cycle but I wasn’t taking any chances. I switched the socket off, using the end of my thumbnail, and Dave wrote the details of the timer in his notebook.

‘So did he jump or was he pushed?’ he asked, clicking the top back on his pen.

‘It’s a good way to murder someone,’ I said, ‘if you can get them to stay still long enough.’

‘That’s what the whisky’s for.’

‘And not a bad way to commit suicide.’

‘God, you’d have to be desperate. There’d be no going back.’

We’d both seen enough suicides to know that the person usually changes his or her mind when it’s too late. The water closes over them, paralysingly cold, and they make a desperate attempt to swim to the side. Or they kick the chair away and as the cord bites into their neck they try to climb the wall. We’d both seen the arcs of skid marks that trainers have left on cell walls, testament to a change of heart.

‘What do you think?’ Dave asked.

The deceased’s home help, who came once a week to clean for him, had found the body and sent for an ambulance. The ambulance men had sent for us. My job was to decide on the degree of police involvement. It was a suspicious death but that didn’t mean anything criminal had taken place. An old man – he looked about seventy – had topped himself. That’s all. He’d grown tired of life, perhaps he had some medical history, and he’d decided to get out while he could. It happened all the time and I had a certain sympathy for that point of view. Sitting gaga in a nursing home staring at a wall or, worse, daytime television, had little appeal to me.

A suicide would be tidy. We were overworked and over budget, and needed another murder enquiry like giant pandas need contraception. I looked at the old man and the shiny orange cable that connected him to the national grid as if he were a Christmas tree. We were in a depressing room in the downstairs flat of what are known as
maisonettes in this part of the world. They are blocks of four flats, each with its own outside door, which have now been taken over as sheltered housing for older citizens. Some are carefully looked after by sprightly ladies and gentlemen, and some have fallen into neglect, inhabited by folks too tired to care, worn out but defiantly clinging on to their independence.

This one was in the latter stages of decay, but in a week or two it would be cleaned out, given a fresh lick of paint and a new tenant would move in. It’s a natural progression and it’s strictly one way. I looked around the room, trying to read the signs that would tell me about the dead man.

There wasn’t much. Three days’ worth of tabloids – the raunchier ones with bare breasts and crutch shots (
Danielle has a degree in accountancy, she can massage our figures anytime!!!
) – and an assortment of beer cans, all empty. The stale air in the room stank of tobacco smoke, the mantelpiece and a small table by his chair were fringed by a pattern of cigarette burns and there was a piled-up pub ashtray down by his feet. So he liked a drink and he smoked. They pay me for deductions like that.

The furniture was shoddy and the curtains were dingy. He’d probably inherited them with the flat. I couldn’t imagine anybody bringing and installing stuff like that, but he may have lived there a long time. He owned a couple of cheap candle holders,
complete with half-burned candles, and a decorative plate celebrating the centenary of Oldfield brass band. The pendulum of a clock in a glass dome swung dispassionately to and fro, to and fro, measuring the passage of time, as if we could forget it. The television was off, plugged into an adaptor it shared with a table lamp and a convector heater. The plastic adaptor, discoloured brown with overheating, lay on the floor under the fateful socket.

I walked over to look at the clock. A little plate screwed to its base bore the inscription:
To Alfred, from his mates at Ellis and Newbold’s, April 1996
. Fifty years’ service and they buy you a clock. How thoughtful. The home help had told us that he was called Alfred Armitage.

‘Have you been in one of these flats before?’ I asked.

‘Mmm,’ Dave replied.

‘Where would you keep the vacuum cleaner?’

‘There’s a cupboard under the stairs.’

We moved out of the room into the hallway and Dave pulled open a wooden door with a sloping top. The cupboard was piled high with the normal household junk, but the front item was an ancient upright Hoover, complete with coiled cable.

‘It might be faulty,’ Dave said, so I lifted the cleaner out of the cupboard and carried it into the tiny kitchen. He plugged it in, I pressed the button and the Hoover roared into life.

‘Not much wrong with that,’ I declared, after it had whined to a standstill.

‘So why’d he buy a new length of flex just to top himself?’

‘Good question.’

‘Ring the pathologist?’

‘Yeah, we’d better. And the rest.’ I glanced towards the door into the room where the old man lay. The Superintendent would not be pleased. ‘All is not what it seems,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit late, now, but let’s see if we can give the poor old sod some attention. He probably deserves it.’

‘Tell me again,’ the superintendent, Gilbert Wood, said, glancing at the clock on the wall behind me. We were in his office on the top floor of Heckley nick.

‘He looks a good candidate for suicide,’ I told him, ‘but a few things don’t add up. Wiring your thumbs to the mains and then drinking yourself into oblivion might seem a good way to go out, but it does require a certain amount of technical aptitude.’

Gilbert said, ‘There was a case somewhere a few months ago where a fellow erected this complicated guillotine and went to sleep under it. When he was well away the blade dropped and decapitated him.’

‘I remember it. But I’ve no doubt he had some mechanical know-how, not to mention imagination. Poor old Alfred Armitage had worked at a company called Ellis and Newbold’s all his life, as a storeman.
They made brass castings for plumbing accessories until they went bust. I suspect his electrical skills were about the same as mine – nil, and his imagination didn’t extend beyond whipping the knickers off the bimbos in
Sunday Sport
. There was no knife lying around for baring the wires, there was no note and he bought bread, bacon and beer at Morrison’s two days ago.’

‘Sounds like a good diet.’

‘It does, doesn’t it?’

‘So where are you with it now?’

‘PM scheduled for five o’clock. Jeff Caton’s on his way there. The rest of the troops are knocking on doors and talking to the neighbours, looking into his background, anything that might help. Ellis and Newbold’s closed down in 1998, so we’ll have problems finding anybody who worked with him.’

‘Big meeting in the morning?’

‘I think so. When we know a bit more about the man and his background we’ll be in a better position to make a judgement. Who knows? He may have connections with Colombian drug cartels.’

‘Or he might be a harmless old codger who reached the end of his tether.’

‘You could be right.’

‘Either way, tomorrow could be a long day, so I suggest you get off home while you can.’

‘I’ll drink to that.’

Back downstairs the troops were filtering in. I asked them all if there was anything
earth-shattering
and they all shook their heads. ‘Then save it for the meeting in the morning,’ I told them. In my own office I rang High Adventure, an
indoor-outdoor
pursuits resort over in Oldfield, and asked to speak to the assistant manager.

‘It’s Charlie,’ I said, when Sonia Thornton answered the phone. Sonia was an international athlete until a car accident smashed her knee two days before she was due to fly out to the Atlanta Olympics. I met her six months ago, after her
ex-boyfriend
was murdered, and we’ve been seeing a lot of each other since.

‘Hi Charlie!’ she said, brightly. ‘What sort of a day have you had?’

‘Busy, as usual. We have a suspicious death on our hands.’

‘Oh! Does that mean you’ll be late home? The casserole in the slow cooker should be OK for a while. You can leave stuff in them for days and they never dry out. Well, maybe not days, but a long time. Should I have mine or wait for you? Or I could make you…’

‘Sonia!’

‘What?’

‘Shut up. No I won’t be late home. Remember what you promised?’

‘Um, I’m not so sure…’

‘It’s tonight or never.’

‘Do we have to?’

‘Yes. You promised.’

‘It’s been a long time.’

‘I know, and it’s not easy for you, but you’ll be OK.’

‘Right, if you say so.’

‘I do. And you want to, don’t you?’

‘I think so, but I’m a bit scared.’

‘Uncle Charlie will look after you.’

‘Then I’ve nothing to worry about, have I?’

‘No. What are you wearing?’

‘My office clothes. I’ll change at your place.’

‘Don’t be late.’

‘Or you.’

On the way home I called in B&Q and bought ten metres of flex like the stuff that lit up Alfred Armitage. Sonia had run the fastest 5,000 metres in the world in 1996 and was a serious contender for a gold medal. She was unknown outside Yorkshire until the Olympic trials, when she strode home an easy winner and Britain had a new golden girl. After a race in France the press there dubbed her
La
Gazelle
and the name stuck. A lot was expected of her.