The Murder Map

by Danny Miller

  ‘I’ll tell you why, son. Not only because of the noble history and tradition that lie behind the blue and what it represented: a beacon of hope and security to the law-abiding decent citizens of Denton; people saw you and they knew they could come and ask you the time, directions, and approach you to get help. It wasn’t all that. Which was bloody annoying enough.’ Clarke and Simms laughed. ‘No, it was also the fact that it saved me having to think about what to wear every bloody morning.’

  At this, everyone in the incident room turned around slowly in unison, like in a well-rehearsed Busby Berkeley routine, to look at Frost. He was stood there in his battered leather bomber jacket, a pair of Lee Cooper beige cords that looked like they’d spent the night discarded on the floor, a burgundy Slazenger V-neck jumper whose creases had caught a fair bit of ash over the years, worn over a yellow Fred Perry tennis shirt, and a pair of cherry-red Doc Martens. His pillar-box-red scarf had fallen on the floor. It didn’t look like a lot of thought had gone into the combo. And it was one that was very familiar to everyone at Eagle Lane – though the cherry-reds with the bright yellow stitching were new, and much frowned upon by Superintendent Mullett. Frost had pointed out that all coppers wore Docs, to which Mullett argued, ‘Not that model, they don’t.’ Black and polished was the accepted norm – cherry-reds were the preserve of unsavoury elements. With everyone looking at him in dismay, Frost suddenly felt very naked. He mustered a defence.

  ‘Einstein had five suits all the same so he didn’t have to think about what he wore in the morning, thus giving him more time for his Theory of Relativity. You’d do well to remember that, Simmo.’

  Frost turned on his bouncy Airwear heels and headed to his office.

  ‘He’s off to split the atom.’

  ‘I heard that, Rita!’

  Frost entered just in time to catch the tail end of a dull and buried ringing. Knowing he’d need both hands to burrow under the heaps of files and papers on his desk (it was a recurring problem and one proving harder to solve than the Theory of Relativity), he quickly stubbed out his Player’s in a Mr Kipling’s foil cake cup. This had been used incautiously as an ashtray, and was already filled to the brim with cigarette butts. He located the cord, and with some careful tugs he managed to yank the phone out from under the debris on his desk and into the flickering strip-light of day, with just the loss of an empty Lilt can (filled with more fag butts), a salt and vinegar crisp packet and a file marked Urgent in 1982, which all ended up on the floor. Before he could get his name out, Chief Pathologist Gerald Drysdale told him to ‘get down here, sharpish’.

  ‘I would suggest he put up a fight, or as much as a man in his condition could. But it was a brief struggle, as the markings indicate,’ said Drysdale, aiming the business end of his stainless-steel Sheaffer ballpoint pen at purplish and grey markings around the corpse’s collarbone, the base of his neck, and on his upper arms and shoulders.

  Frost peered down for a closer look at Ivan Fielding laid out on the slab, and at the unmistakable bruising and red marks around his neck. He then considered Gerald Drysdale, whose pallor was about the same as Ivan Fielding’s, who had been dead at least twenty-four hours. Tall and cadaverously thin, with his grey hair turning translucent and ghostly white, the Chief Pathologist really did suit his sobriquet, Dr Death, and not just because of his profession.

  ‘Interesting, Gerald, very interesting.’

  ‘Indeed. But let’s not get too excited. Alcohol abuse causes cirrhosis of the liver, makes the skin bruise easily. But the marks are undeniably there. And whilst hardly the clear indent of a handprint, they could suggest that. What do you think?’

  ‘They look pretty conclusive to me, like someone tried to hold him back or push him down. Or even pick him up, which is wholly possible, considering how drunk he was.’

  ‘Yes, he was definitely inebriated. I’ve got the numbers there.’ Drysdale gestured at a file on his desk. ‘His blood-alcohol count is off the chart. The numbers give us some perspective on his condition: they’re just a tad lower than yours, Frost.’

  ‘Funny.’

  ‘The problem with his condition is that he could have picked up the marks on his skin even whilst sleeping, just by rolling over on his hands.’

  ‘Really?’

  Drysdale shrugged. ‘Devil’s advocate. Putting up a spirited defence, if you manage to get someone in the dock. But they’ll throw the cirrhosis back at you. Of course we’ll conduct a full post-mortem tomorrow.’

  Gerald Drysdale slipped off his blue scrubs to reveal he was dressed in as funereal a manner as ever, sheathed in his customary dark suit with a black tie knotted as neat and tight as a hangman’s noose.

  ‘Off anywhere nice, Gerald?’

  ‘Cocktail party, wife’s friend, something in the charity sector. So no, nowhere nice at all.’

  ‘I know how you feel, you’d rather be cutting open a cadaver, up to your elbows, as it were?’

  ‘No, I’d rather be in my favourite chair in my study listening to Elgar on my handcrafted and ridiculously expensive stereo whilst enjoying a balloon of Hennessy cognac with my feet up. Still, needs must. Although looking at our friend here … the pleasures of the grape and the grain are rather paling. God knows what his liver will be like, though we’ll find out tomorrow. But as Maltby no doubt told you, it was his heart packing up on him, along with him choking on his own vomit, that killed him. The classic alcoholic’s end. However, before the choking and the heart attack – as the marks suggest – I put it to you that he may have been involved in a struggle, and that’s what may have triggered the event.’

  ‘He choked on his own vomit, you say?’

  ‘Very common alcoholic’s death, the bile fumes alone can cause asphyxiation.’

  Frost considered this, then laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny, apart from la condition humaine?’

  ‘Sorry, funny film I saw last year, This is Spinal Tap?’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘It’s about a rock band whose drummers keep dying. One died the same death as Ivan, but he choked on someone else’s vomit. Another self-combusted.’

  ‘Sounds ghastly, glad I missed it. But gallows humour, Frost, it’s what gets us through, I suppose.’

  ‘But it makes you think, they were both messy deaths, very messy.’

  ‘I’ve seen self-immolation, not a pretty sight, but not spontaneous combustion. Sounds like the messiest of all deaths.’

  ‘Do you have his clothes here?’

  Gerald Drysdale gave a lavish sigh and shot up his shirt cuff to commune with his watch. He then led the way to the adjacent room where Ivan Fielding’s clothing was boxed and bagged in plastic. Like their owner, they too had a tag identifying them. The clothes were themselves in some sort of purgatory; they would either be released to the next of kin, or taken to Forensics to be combed for clues, depending on Drysdale’s autopsy and final conclusions on the cause of death.

  ‘The shirt looks crisp and fresh and very clean. No vomit on it,’ Frost commented.

  ‘Like I said, he choked on it. If he’d vomited on his shirt, he’d probably still be alive.’

  Frost threw Drysdale a quizzical look. Too fresh, too clean. Frost pulled some latex gloves from the dispenser on the table, opened up the sealed plastic bag and took out the shirt, cream-coloured with a fine blue thread darting through it. It had a white cutaway collar that was slightly fraying. Even through the gloves, the detective could feel the quality at his fingertips. Thick and soft Egyptian cotton. And the label spoke of quality too: ‘Turnbull & Asser of Jermyn Street’.

  ‘The world’s finest shirtmaker,’ announced Drysdale, impressed. ‘I’ll warrant this shirt is older than most of the PCs you’ve got running around Eagle Lane, and probably cost more than their combined monthly pay packets. A man of some sartorial discernment, our Mr Fielding.’

  ‘I’m more Marks & Sparks myself,’ said Frost.

  Drysdale looked him up and down, then look
ed doubtful, as if even that was beyond Frost. Careful not to disturb the evidence too much, the DI peered inside the shirt and found a ticket for Wilson’s the dry-cleaner’s in Market Square pinned to the washing-instructions label.

  ‘A man of discernment would take the safety pin out of his expensive shirt before wearing it, wouldn’t he?’

  Gerald Drysdale conceded the point by pursing his dry thin lips and emitting a low growl that took a sudden upward inflection.

  Frost continued, ‘Looks like after Ivan expired, someone changed his shirt for him.’

  ‘Gussying him up to meet his maker?’

  ‘Or hiding something. My money is on hiding something. It usually is with murder, if that’s what we’re calling it.’

  ‘That’s up to you. But I would suggest the bruising, as we’ve discussed, might indicate further investigation is needed. As for the business with this shirt, well, again, that’s your whole field of play. Mine is in there,’ said Drysdale with a nod to the adjacent room.

  Frost watched as Dr Death stalked gleefully towards the corpse awaiting him next door. It sent a shiver down his spine, not just because it was always cold down here, but because he’d always hated the County morgue. Hardly an original aversion, he told himself, but enough to send him into a palpable panic when Drysdale turned the lights off without warning.

  Monday (1)

  ‘Foul play? Is that what they call it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s one of the terms,’ said Frost. ‘Of course, we won’t fully know the causes of your father’s death until the autopsy later today. But there are certainly some signs that warrant further investigation.’

  Sally Fielding took this news with some solemn nods. She was a strikingly attractive woman of twenty-eight with lustrous raven hair worn in a Purdey style. Frost compared her with her briefly glimpsed mother, but more fully with the pictures of her mother scattered about the flat. They shared the same high cheekbones that gave them both an effortless unadorned beauty.

  ‘She’s still sleeping,’ said Stephen Parker apologetically as he entered the living room. ‘Do you need me to wake her up?’

  Sally said, ‘She took a tranquillizer, I think.’

  ‘Sleeping pills, actually.’

  ‘Same thing, no?’

  Parker shrugged. ‘I leave the medicine cabinet to Vanessa. It’s a bit of a minefield, she has trouble sleeping, and with her nerves.’ He smiled and injected some optimism. ‘But she’s getting better with more rest, calmer.’

  Sally, pre-empting the two detectives, said, ‘She’s been exhausted by it all, wouldn’t be much good to you, I’m afraid. There isn’t anything that she knows about Dad that I don’t.’

  Frost doubted the veracity of that last statement when it came to husbands and wives. Clarke said, ‘No, that’s fine, we can talk to her another time.’

  Parker came further into the room and sat down on the free armchair. ‘It’s been a terrible shock for her. I’m sure Sally will tell you the details.’

  All eyes turned to Sally.

  ‘As I said in my statement, I went round there yesterday at lunchtime to check he was OK, make sure he’d been eating. We have someone, Moira, who comes in three times a week, to clean, and prepare some meals.’

  ‘When was the help last there?’ asked Frost.

  ‘Saturday morning, early.’

  Clarke looked at her notes. ‘Simms had a brief conversation with her yesterday evening. She’s coming in to make a formal statement, but it seems she dropped in early on Saturday morning just to leave a meal in the fridge. On her way out, around nine, she took Mr Fielding a cup of tea. But he was fast asleep on the sofa, snoozing away, she said, so she left him to it. Didn’t have the heart to wake him.’

  ‘That sounds like Moira. She’s a lovely woman; thank God she didn’t find him. Mum used to do the shopping … But they hadn’t been speaking these last few … well, probably four or five months now. As you know, my father had a drink problem. A severe one that just got worse and worse. We’ve almost been expecting something like this, a fall or just his body packing up on him. He was very frail. I try … tried to visit him as much as I could. But I have a young daughter, so it’s difficult. And, well, he was difficult. His drinking made him almost impossible to talk to … like a child, a badly behaved one. It does that, the drink, infantilizes you.’ She took a sharp breath, seemingly determined not to cry. ‘My mother couldn’t deal with him, and thankfully she didn’t have to …’ She looked over at Stephen Parker to take over the reins on the narrative.

  He was in his early to mid-forties, with a soft boyish face, lineless and pale. If it hadn’t been for his full head of almost uniformly grey hair that was on the cusp of turning white, he’d have looked at least ten years younger. It was a kind face, in a timid way, and matched his profession, thought Frost.

  ‘Vanessa lives with me now.’

  ‘How long have you been together?’

  He looked surprised by this question, like it was none of Frost’s business. Frost fixed him with an insistent look that told him everything was his business now.

  ‘Three, almost four years. And without doubt, they’ve been the happiest years of my life.’

  Frost glanced at Clarke to see if people really did say this sort of thing, outside of retirement communities. Clarke went out of her way not to look at Frost. He took it that they obviously did say this kind of thing, and his cynicism was misplaced. He watched as Sally Fielding smiled at this fact, like her mother deserved every minute of happiness.

  ‘And you work at the university … Professor, is it?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m in the social sciences department. I’m a lecturer, not a professor. Not yet. I hope to—’

  ‘So what do you think happened, Inspector Frost?’ asked Sally, cutting Parker off.

  ‘As I said, we won’t know until the post-mortem, but we just need to be sure. We discovered there may have been a burglary at your father’s house, probably very recently.’

  ‘And you believe this has something to do with his death? He was … murdered, is that what you’re saying?’

  She had been stoic up to this point, but now Sally raised her hands to her face and began to cry. Stephen Parker sprang to his feet, went over to the packed bookshelves that lined the walls and brought back a box of Mansize Kleenex that Vanessa had obviously been grappling with earlier, as it was severely depleted. Sally followed suit; she plucked out a handful and buried her face in them. Stephen sat on the arm of the chair, his hands on her shoulders to comfort her.

  The inspector was studying Stephen Parker, and his comforting gestures towards Sally. After all, in age difference, he was practically equidistant to the mother and daughter. But Frost couldn’t spot anything untoward. In fact, he seemed ill at ease with the whole emotional element, patting Sally awkwardly on the shoulders like she was a child. She eventually gently shrugged him off and he took his seat again, a face full of stilted concern.

  Frost thought he looked like the typical academic: analytical, theoretical and quantifiable, more at home with his books, research and references than the harsh and messy realities of life and death and grief.

  ‘So how did he die, was he hit or anything? He was so fragile, it would just be too awful to think …’

  Frost sparked up the last Player’s in his pack and explained, ‘No, nothing like that. We know he died of a heart attack, but we also believe there was someone else in the house. There was a window in the kitchen that had been forced open. The glass had been cut to gain access, a professional-looking job. And considering your father’s profession, and the valuable items he had in the house, not that surprising. We’d like you to come to the house with us, to see if anything has been stolen.’

  ‘If you’re feeling up to it,’ added Clarke.

  Stephen Parker looked concerned at the cigarette Frost was puffing away on. A long striated rectangle of ash was already forming, and would soon be falling. There wasn’t an ashtray on the table �
� never a problem or even a hint for Frost – so Parker got up to get one.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Parker,’ said Frost, stopping him, ‘but we’ll need to know your movements for twenty-four hours before Mr Fielding was discovered.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. Actually, everyone’s. Just routine, to eliminate as many people from the enquiry as possible. Just as we’ll need to take everyone’s fingerprints, again purely for elimination purposes, in case we find anything of interest.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, of course.’ Stephen Parker looked like he understood the logic, and sat back down to answer Frost’s questions, and watch him drop ash on his oatmeal carpet.

  Monday (2)

  Grey Gables was the name of the house, built at a time when all houses of a certain size and stature had an official name rather than just a number. It was by far the biggest house in the village, which could have given its occupants a certain lord-of-the-manor status. But the building was in such a state of disrepair that it was probably a status the rest of the inhabitants of the village were happy not to have. It was Georgian and ran over three floors, if you included the attic rooms, which were closed off and home to squirrels and bats. The garden was overgrown, with a greenhouse that was boarded up due to nearly every one of its panes being broken. And as Frost had already spotted, if the brickwork wasn’t attended to soon, the old pile would be reduced to a pile of rubble.

  Still, the inside had not been subject to the elements too much. Some of the Regency-style striped wallpaper was peeling away and there were black speckles of damp in every corner, but it was clean and tidy and still very impressive.

  Frost, Clarke and Sally Fielding were in the living room. Sally stood by the fire, looking at the dead ashes, her long navy woollen coat wrapped around her to keep out the cold, which the house, now devoid of its owner, could no longer do on its own.

  ‘I was never very happy in this house. We moved here when I was eleven, or twelve, from London. It belonged to my grandmother, Dad’s mother. She was still here when we moved in. Always made us feel like lodgers. But she died shortly after we moved here. I’d hoped she would throw us out so we could go back to London. But even after she died, we didn’t – that was never possible.’