The Scribbler

by Iain Maitland

  He looked from one to the other to check that all were paying close attention. Gayther thought that he was little more than a puffed-up buffoon. Sitting there in his peacock finery.

  “There was a moment or two’s confusion due to the assistant’s incoherency. I surmised quickly that the Reverend Lodge had fallen from his window and I led the way through reception and along and out to the path by the back garden. Sadly …” the doctor dropped his voice in a professionally sympathetic manner, “… he had passed away.”

  “Cause of death?” asked Carrie.

  The doctor smiled at her, and Gayther and Carrie exchanged a glance, both thinking much the same thing at the same time: “patronising bastard”.

  “The open window … the nine-metre fall … the concrete path … an octogenarian skull … osteoporosis in the bones … need I go on?” Dr Khan smiled at them and then added, “Let me put it simply.” He paused for effect. “He fell and fractured his skull … severe intracranial hemorrhage … death would have been rapid, if not instant … to a layman. He would have been unconscious on impact.”

  “Time of death then?” said Carrie sharply.

  “Ah, now that is interesting,” The doctor replied. “He was alone from 8.30pm until he was found at 10.00pm. From my professional assessment, I would put the time of death at closer to 8.30pm than to 10.00pm. Rigor mortis. What surprises me is … let us say this happened, for argument’s sake, before 9.00pm, why, when he was in full view of anyone looking out of the window, walking in the garden, did no one see him for a full hour?”

  “Mrs Coombes?” Carrie turned her attention towards the care home manager.

  “Well,” she replied, “your colleagues spoke to everyone here and I believe that we were all busy at that time, seeing visitors out, putting the patients to bed, sorting their medication … no one has time to stand around, especially at that time of night. I myself was back and forward from reception to the rooms … a hundred and one things to do as usual. Anyone on the top floor who looked out would have had to have looked straight down rather than outwards to see … him. Those patients on the ground floor tend to need the most care. It was just a very busy time.”

  “Did anyone hear anything?” Carrie persisted. “The neighbouring rooms? The ones below and to either side? Anything out of the ordinary, anything unexpected? Surely, he must have cried out … or there would have been the sound of impact.”

  Mrs Coombes shook her head. “The room to the left was empty, has been since Mrs Vincent passed away the month before. The other side had, still has, a Mr Simkins in it. He’s a rather lively chap, still quite mobile, wandering hands, even at his age, seventy-eight, but he is deaf as a post. He didn’t get along with the reverend, called him the Reverend Todge.”

  DI Gayther and Carrie exchanged glances again.

  “Below, the three rooms, directly and to the left and right, have three dementia patients: Miss Bright, Mrs Howes and Mrs Smith. Two, Miss Bright and Mrs Smith, had music on loudly at the time and Mrs Howes had the television turned up. Two assistants, with Miss Bright and Mrs Smith, thought they heard a thump, about a quarter to nine, and both stopped for a moment to listen, in case someone had fallen from their bed and was calling out. They then carried on.”

  Carrie turned to the doctor, “Would you not expect a man falling out of the window to cry out as he fell … or after he had hit the ground?”

  “No, not necessarily. He would have been taken by surprise. It would have been over almost instantly. He landed on his head and would have been unconscious immediately.”

  Carrie pressed on, “If he fell out of the window and landed head-first … is that not unusual, to fall head-first?”

  “Again, not necessarily, he could have tripped over and his momentum and weight could have taken him to the window and out. He may have leaned out to see something that caught his eye and lost his balance. He had mobility issues. And let us not forget he suffered from dementia. You cannot apply logical reasoning to illogical behaviour.”

  Carrie then said, “So, everything you’ve seen … An old man with dementia and who struggles to walk … crosses to the window … opens tight bolts and catches … a frail man, doing all this … and then goes head-first out … and that’s death by misadventure?”

  The doctor nodded and smiled slightly. “It would seem to be the case.”

  “Not suicide?”

  He raised his hands, palms upward, and smiled blandly as if to say, ‘it could be, but an accident suits everyone better’.

  “Or murder?”

  The doctor laughed out loud. Mrs Coombes laughed too, although her laugh, thought Gayther, was a nervous, uncertain one. Carrie ignored the look that DI Gayther gave her as she asked again.

  “Could it be murder?”

  DI Gayther interrupted before the doctor could answer. “The drawing on the stomach, the criss-cross scratches … what are your thoughts on those, Doctor Khan?”

  The doctor paused and waited for a few moments before replying. DI Gayther thought he enjoyed being the centre of attention, his moment in the spotlight.

  “A crudely scratched face possibly, a few lines back and forth – patients like Mr Lodge … it’s not commonplace for elderly dementia patients to self-harm, but it’s certainly not unique. I have seen other cases during my career.”

  “And the cuts, were they old or fresh?” pressed Gayther.

  “Oh, fresh, there were lines of blood on his pyjama top. From just before his fall.”

  “Did Mr Lodge have the strength to get out of bed unaided and cross to the window?” asked Carrie.

  “I believe so.”

  “And open it?” added Carrie.

  Gayther noted how Mrs Coombes stared fixedly ahead as the doctor answered.

  “It’s conceivable.”

  “So that’s that, end of,” concluded Carrie, a touch of anger in her voice.

  Gayther tried to catch her eye, but she avoided it.

  “I’m not sure why you persist …” the doctor started to answer Carrie and then stopped before saying, in a calm and steady voice, “Everything I have seen … the coroner has seen … Mrs Coombes and her team have seen … points overwhelmingly … conclusively, I would say … to death by misadventure. If …” He added, looking straight at Carrie, “… you want me to be blunt with you, it is a simple and straightforward matter. The Reverend Lodge died from his own foolish mistake.”

  3. MONDAY 12 NOVEMBER, LUNCHTIME

  “Here’s the reverend’s room,” said Mrs Coombes, unlocking the door for Gayther and Carrie. “If you want to take a look, I’ll go and see if I can find Sally and Jen. They’re both in today.”

  DI Gayther nodded his thanks as she left the room.

  “What do you reckon, then … Doctor Khan … Mrs Coombes?” Carrie asked.

  “They toed the line, said what they were expected to say. The doctor seemed to believe it more than Mrs Coombes … maybe he’s just a better actor.”

  “You don’t think … you know, they could be right? That it’s just that, a stupid mistake.”

  “A foolish accident? No, and even without The Scribbler’s mark, I’d be hard pressed to accept suicide. No family, see, no friends, no one to fight his corner, ask awkward questions. No one bloody cares … cared … if he lived or died at all. He’s old. He’s gay. He doesn’t matter … well, he does to me.”

  “The room’s still empty?” queried Carrie, looking across to the windows. She noted the anger rising in Gayther’s voice and thought it best to move the conversation on.

  “I doubt anyone’s going to want to send their loved one to a home in special measures, let alone one with patients falling out of the windows willy-nilly,” answered Gayther. He scanned the room too, taking in the soft grey carpet, the lemon-coloured walls, the cheap white furniture and the hospital-looking bed. “Not a place I’d want to die. Soulless. Antiseptic.”

  “You’d think …” said Carrie, crossing to the window, “… in this day and a
ge, all care homes would have locks on windows that allowed them to be opened only a fraction, not the whole way. This isn’t good, is it? My friend’s grandad’s in one on the south coast and when we visited in the summer he was complaining about the heat because he couldn’t open his windows enough to let in a breeze … guv, look at this …”

  She pointed to a dark, centimetre-long mark on the inside ledge of the windowsill. “Blood? Mr Lodge’s as he struggled to stop The Scribbler throwing him out?”

  Gayther moved across and looked at it and shrugged, “Could be … anything really. Even if it is blood, it could be the window cleaner’s from last week or the fellow who fitted the window however many years ago.”

  “Forensics? Is it worth asking?”

  “For what? To come and check it, and the room, because an old has-been and a new DC working on a file of LGBTQ+ cold cases from ten, twenty, thirty years ago think they’re on to something that no one else noticed? It would be a black mark, Carrie. We just need to keep our heads down, do this quietly. If I, we, you and I, can solve this case, well, I think you’ve probably heard they’d really rather have me out the door. I’m not going to give them any reason to do that. Not until I’m good and ready to go, anyway. And I’d rather go out on a high, bringing in The Scribbler.”

  As Carrie went to answer, the door behind them was opened and the two care assistants, Sally and Jen, stood there. Late forties, early fifties, thought Gayther. Sally, a small and petite Chinese woman, smiling and open-faced; Jen, a straggly beanpole sort of woman who would not meet his eye at first but who, as the silence lengthened into a sense of tension, spoke first.

  “We have been over this with the regular police already … do we need to do it all again? We’ve so many things to do.”

  “We’ll be quick,” replied DI Gayther. “We just have to tick various boxes so we can say we’ve done what we should have done. Red tape, the curse of us all. You must have it too. Great boxloads of it, I expect?”

  Sally and Jen nodded in turn, both half-smiling at Gayther.

  “We’ve established that Mr Lodge had been declining physically and mentally since he’d been here. He took a turn for the worse, at the fete, just before his death. He said he’d seen someone who he called The Scribbler …?”

  Sally and Jen looked briefly at each other. They, thought Gayther, have discussed this and prepared what they are going to say. Sally spoke first.

  “He was very quiet, withdrawn and subdued, after the fete, where he’d had a little accident. He said he felt ashamed, although we’re used to it here. Many of them have dementia, most of them downstairs are quite advanced, so it’s an everyday thing for us. Every hour sometimes.”

  “Yes,” added Jen. “He started … his wild talk the day after that. Muttering to himself angrily. Shouting incoherently. Now and then the fog would clear and he would whisper things to us … about a man … with staring eyes and velvet gloves … who had come back to kill him … even when he was rational it made no sense. It was like something off the telly, except he doesn’t watch it.”

  Sally then spoke further, as if this were all rehearsed carefully, thought Gayther. “I remember the day he died, I was tidying his bedside cabinet and he sat up suddenly, grabbed my arm and squeezed it really hard – so hard it left a bruise. Jen, he said, he always got our names the wrong way round, The Scribbler knows I am here … he is going to come and kill me … you must call the police.”

  “And did you?” asked Carrie.

  “Do not go gentle into that good night …” Sally replied and then added, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day … Rage, rage against the dying of the light … they often get like that, angry and frightened, as they realise they are … at the end of their days. Paranoid too. Some don’t let go easily.”

  Jen spoke next, “I did Google this Scribbler and there were a few things on there about him, a sort of Jack the Ripper figure from Norfolk years and years ago. It seemed so extraordinary and I couldn’t work out the connection with the Reverend Lodge. I wondered, myself, if this Ripper character had confessed his crimes to Mr Lodge and it all eventually came back and haunted him. Perhaps he felt guilty he didn’t go to the police at the time?”

  “Did he say who The Scribbler was? Someone on the staff here? Someone who had been at the fete?”

  Sally interrupted, “I asked the reverend how he knew this Ripper … Scribbler … and he just turned his head away and wouldn’t speak. It was like talking to a child. He’d either be shouting at you to call the police – ‘Danger! Help! Murder!’ – or, when you tried to have a proper talk to him about it, he just clammed up.”

  “I think we decided,” she looked at her colleague and waited for her nodded agreement, “well, we don’t know how he came to hear about it, maybe he read something in a newspaper when he was lucid and it stuck in his mind and he started imagining things. They often do.”

  “Tell me, about the residents, physically, mentally?” Carrie asked. “Did Mr Lodge mix much with them … Did they visit each other’s rooms?”

  Jen sat on the bed and answered. “No, not that we know of. There are usually about twenty residents, over the two floors. We tend to have those with dementia issues on the ground floor, those with mainly just physical needs … I say ‘just’ … on the top floor. There are stairs at either end, gates too, of course, and a lift at the far end. Mr Lodge would have been moved to the ground floor soon, once a room became available … because he was worsening so much.”

  “Did any of the residents fall out … ah, have an argument … with Mr Lodge those last few days?” Carrie queried. “Or visit him unexpectedly … anything out of the ordinary … that might have upset him, disturbed him in some way?”

  Sally, sitting down on the bed next to Jen, took over. “No. Generally, they keep themselves to themselves and the ones on the ground floor are not really with us. Their minds are elsewhere. The Reverend Lodge did not mix really, except, well, residents come into the main lounge from time to time when we have an event; a lady brings in her golden retrievers and we have two young girls, Sophie and Frances, who come in to play the piano … and sing and dance to old-time songs … and a chap who does magic tricks and doubles up as Father Christmas in December.”

  Gayther, standing quietly by the window, listening to them talk, suddenly cleared his throat and spoke.

  “Have there been any new members of staff, around the time that Mr Lodge took fright … or anyone who came in, with their dogs or magic tricks, or any unexpected visitors who stood out that you noticed? Men, rather than women, older men, my sort of age … who might have known the reverend before he came here.”

  Sally and Jen looked to each other. “You first,” said one. “No, after you,” replied the other. Sally spoke. “Not really,” she said, “no new patients, anyway. We’ve two new care assistants come in, young girls, to replace the girls who were leaving, Karen and Sue. I’ve not met them yet. Not to talk to properly anyway.”

  “There is a new handyman, Alan,” added Jen. “He joined a week or two before the fete because I remember him putting out tables and chairs and wondering who he was.”

  “Would he have mixed with Reverend Lodge?” Carrie asked.

  Sally shrugged. “It’s possible, they would have both been at the fete. And he … Alan … is here and there, doing bits and pieces as needed. Mostly weeding. Planting bulbs for the spring, things like that. So, yes, I think their paths may have crossed, possibly. I couldn’t say for sure, though. I doubt they would have spoken, what with one thing and another.”

  Jen interrupted. “He’s not English. Eastern European, I think, and he doesn’t really talk. He says ‘Good Morning’ if you speak to him and it’s a very thick accent. I mean, very heavy. He only does a few days a week. I don’t see him every day. He’s not on the staff, I don’t think. He’d have been checked, though, DBS and all of that, so he’ll have passed various checks.”

  “And there was that man who came and sang son
gs. From the 1960s,” Sally said. “On that Sunday teatime. Mr Lodge was at that because I remember him trying to sing along with some of the songs. The singer, I forget the name, got them all clapping. I hadn’t seen him before. He’s not a regular. He did one or two Elvis Presley songs and did an impression and jiggled about a bit … a few of the old folks seemed to remember him, Elvis, and laughed.”

  “How old was the singer, young, old?” Carrie pressed.

  Sally and Jen looked at each other. “Fifty?” said one. “Sixty?” said the other. They both smiled.

  “He was in his fifties, maybe?” Jen said, glancing towards Gayther, who gazed back at her with a blank expression. “But he dressed quite young, in denims.”

  “And this was the day before or the day after the fete?” quizzed Carrie.

  “The day after,” both Sally and Jen said.

  “You haven’t told anyone this before?” asked Gayther.

  “Well, no,” replied Jen. “No one asked.”

  “Oh, and there was that visitor who came to see Mrs Smith. Do you remember, Jen? Perhaps we should have mentioned him to someone before,” Sally said. “That would have been the day after the fete, her nephew, was it? He came to see her out of the blue. It was so sad. She had no idea who he was. I’m not sure he knew her very well either as he went into Miss Bright’s room first and was talking to her by mistake. He hadn’t seen her for years.”

  “That’s right,” replied Jen. “I’d forgotten him. Karen had taken him in and thought it was very funny. She said he then started to ask if there was a vicar in the home who could say a prayer. Karen said there was one in the room above but that he couldn’t be disturbed as he’d be taking a nap at the time. He then left and said he’d come back. I don’t know that he did, though. Karen left a week or two after, so we can’t ask her for you.”

  There was a moment’s silence and then, as Carrie, Sally and Jen all turned towards DI Gayther, expecting him to speak, to ask more questions, the door was opened again and Mrs Coombes was standing there. “All done?” she said. It was more of a statement of fact than a question. She stood in silence as Gayther thought and then slowly nodded his agreement, farewells were said, and Sally and Jen slipped away.