The Clutter Corpse

by Simon Brett

  All I could think of were Hilary’s words, how Nate Ogden had killed his live-in girlfriend. ‘He hit her over the head with a frying pan.’

  But I knew I was allowing my mind to move too fast. The only verifiable fact I now had was that I was at a crime scene. And when you’re at a crime scene, the first thing you do is ring the police. Which is what I did.

  But I did something else before that.

  There were still three rooms I hadn’t been in. Two of the doors were closed, one was ajar. The door next to the sitting room opened on to the bathroom. The bath itself was so full of dusty boxes that it clearly hadn’t been used for a long time. Narrow passages through the debris ended at the toilet and the washbasin. The latter was the only place where any washing had been done for a while.

  The other closed door was opposite as I came out of the bathroom. Also over-crammed with stuff, but here some attempt had been made to make the space more liveable. There was more order to the piles of boxes, as if they had been stacked up recently. Space had been created around the single bed. It actually had a duvet, which had been straightened and smoothed down. On a bedside table was a clock radio, also a tin of roll-up tobacco and a packet of Rizla papers. It looked like the habitat of someone trained in the disciplines of prison.

  I didn’t think I was leaping to conclusions by reckoning that it was Nate Ogden’s room. Maybe in the run-up to his release, he’d had some days out when he’d been allowed to visit his mother and prepare the space where he would be living.

  I closed the door behind me, as I had done with the bathroom, and moved to the one that was ajar. I had to pick my way gingerly between the clutter, almost toppling it over at one point.

  I assumed this was Maureen Ogden’s room. It had a sour old woman smell. But even if she had been in there asleep and not at the hospital, it would have taken me some time to find her. The space was so full of furniture, blankets and magazines that the bed had no recognizable outline.

  I went back to the kitchen to ring the police and wait for them.

  If they remained unaware that I’d visited all the rooms in the house, then that was fine by me.

  They arrived within ten minutes, a Panda car, two male officers in uniform. When I showed them what I had found in the sitting room, their reaction showed that murders were way above their pay grade. One of them got straight on to his phone, presumably to summon specialist support. The other asked if I’d mind stepping downstairs into their car to answer a few questions. They didn’t want to contaminate the crime scene more than was necessary.

  In the car, rain still drummed on the roof and slid down the windows. The young man was very uneasy. ‘I just need to get a few basic facts about you. I’m sure there’ll be more detailed questions when the others get here.’ His tone suggested he hoped the ‘others’ got here soon. He didn’t like murders. He’d rather be back dealing with handbag snatches in Gunwharf Quays shopping centre.

  After a cursory check round the flat, the second officer came and sat in the Panda. He had locked the place up with the keys I had been given. He seemed less anxious for the ‘others’ to arrive soon. Maybe had ambitions in the direction of detective work. His colleague was happy for him to take over the questioner’s role.

  Their first assumption was that I must have lived in the block, and it took a while for me to persuade them that I had nothing to do with the Ogdens. I pointed to my brand-marked Yeti parked in front of them as validation of my profession.

  The aspiring detective then asked if I’d been in any other rooms apart from the kitchen and the sitting room. So, the one detail I’d hoped to keep quiet didn’t stay quiet for long. But there was no point in lying. In my experience, it always gets you into worse trouble.

  Of course, it struck me, my questioners knew as little as I did. Probably less. Being a policeman on patrol must be a little like being a GP – you never know what problem you will be dealing with next. It could be a brawl in a pub car park, a slashed tyre, some old biddy who’s locked herself outside her house, or a child snatched in a supermarket. The cops have to be prepared for anything and get as much basic information about the situation as quickly as they can.

  So, though I found their questioning slow and tedious, I remained very amenable. They were only doing their job. Besides, I needed time to process what I had seen in the sitting room.

  The ‘others’, the specialist support arrived, in the form of a male and a female officer. They wore plain clothes and came in an unmarked car. Having asked the two uniforms what was to be expected inside the house, they donned white protective suits and face masks before entering the block.

  It felt like an achingly long wait before they re-emerged. By then it was well after six thirty. I asked permission to text Ben. I’d told him the night before I’d be home in time to cook supper. There was now no chance of that.

  In the course of the next half-hour, the two police cars had been joined by a parade of other vehicles, from which more white-clad figures emerged. The sight of a single Panda was probably not uncommon on the Hargood Estate, but this cluster of cars and vans left no doubt that there had been a major incident. The rain had stopped by then, people started to emerge. Curious local children – and not just children – were ushered away, and soon the police had ringed the area with tapes attached to plastic bollards. It would only be a matter of time before the press arrived.

  Now the experts were there, the two uniforms couldn’t wait to leave. They passed me over to a plain-clothes Detective Sergeant, whose name I instantly forgot, and the Panda sped away. It struck me I hadn’t got the names of the two uniforms either. Strange, I’m normally good with names. It must have been the shock getting to me.

  The detective sergeant led me to a van equipped with seats and a table. ‘If you don’t mind waiting here, madam. We’ll be with you as soon as we can.’

  As he left the van, he had a whispered word with a female officer with a yellow hi-vis gilet over her uniform. Her job seemed to be keeping the snoopers of the Hargood Estate at bay, but I got the clear impression that she was also on guard to see I didn’t make a run for it.

  That was not something I was about to do. But the wait did seem interminable. Sitting down allowed the week’s exhaustion to catch up with me. I longed to be back at home, a bottle of Merlot open, sitting opposite Ben, eating the meal I’d just cooked for us.

  He hadn’t responded to my text. Funny, he usually did, even if it was about something trivial. Another anxiety to add to my general unease.

  It was pushing nine o’clock by the time they got round to me. A tall, weary male officer, and a shorter female. Both in plain clothes, dark suits, looking like office wear. Neither with a wedding ring, and the woman had no other jewellery either. Nor make-up. I don’t know why I always notice such details, but I do.

  Other details I’m not so good at – or I wasn’t that evening. They introduced themselves, but again – a sign of my stress – the names didn’t register. He was a detective inspector, she a detective sergeant. Perfunctory apologies for keeping me waiting. They gave the impression that keeping someone waiting when you’re starting out on a murder investigation is a minor detail. And I could see their point.

  Basic questions about who I was, where I lived, what I did for a living. Not very difficult to answer.

  And then they got on to the more detailed stuff. What was my relationship with the Ogdens? Did I recognize the murder victim?

  They seemed to keep circling round these points, rephrasing the questions slightly but still reverting to the same subjects. Their approach wasn’t exactly adversarial, but I began to wonder how I would respond to it if I were guilty, if I did have anything to hide. And I didn’t. The one piece of information I’d considered keeping secret, the fact that I’d explored the rest of the flat, I had already revealed to the uniforms in the Panda.

  And yet I couldn’t lose a residual feeling of guilt, the kind one used to feel, regardless of one’s innocence, in the pre
sence of a headmistress.

  The detail that seemed to obsess the police was why I had come to the flat on the Hargood Estate. I explained exhaustively what my job was, but they still didn’t get it. I told them how the visit had been arranged by Hilary through the Housing Association and gave them their contact details. That didn’t seem to help. They went back to asking me whether I’d ever met Maureen or Nate Ogden. It took a long time for them to accept no as an answer.

  By then, it was a quarter to eleven, and they couldn’t come up with any reason to detain me longer. The detective inspector did warn me that further questioning might be necessary at a later date. He gave me his card, with numbers to ring, and an email address, in case I remembered anything else that might be relevant to their investigation.

  Then he asked me to let them know of any travel plans I might have.

  ‘What, you think I might flee the country?’ I asked, to lighten the tone a bit.

  My interrogator had no desire for the tone to be lightened. ‘It has been known,’ he said lugubriously.

  Rarely have I been so glad to get back into the Yeti.

  I had to concentrate like mad on the journey back to Chichester. I was so exhausted I genuinely worried about falling asleep over the steering wheel. And my worry about not hearing back from Ben grew uncomfortably.

  It vanished when I got back, mind you. He was absolutely fine. More than fine, he’d cooked a really nice chilli con carne for me to come home to. And opened a bottle of Merlot.

  I thought I’d be too exhausted to eat, but the first glass of wine relaxed me. And Ben was in one of his very chatty, funny moods.

  ‘So, what kept you so late, Ma?’ He only calls me ‘Ma’ when he’s feeling good. It’s one of those things that started as an affectation, almost a joke, and kind of stuck. But he still always says it in a slightly ironic way, as if he’s sending up his usage of the word. ‘Fancy man?’

  ‘I should be so lucky. No, it was work.’ I didn’t elaborate on how I spent the evening. Ben wouldn’t have found that odd. I do have a strict confidentiality deal with my clients. I might sometimes speak about a job I’m on in the abstract, mentioning no names, but Ben respects my choice when I don’t discuss work.

  Besides, thinking about the nastiness of the evening I had just been through, I could never be sure what was likely to upset Ben.

  The chilli con carne was excellent. Cooking is just one of many skills Ben has, along with his artistic talent and his empathy with computer technology. And as I sat opposite him, eating the food he’d cooked for me, drinking the wine he’d poured for me, I realized all over again how much I love my son.

  And how much I worry about him.

  I’m in utter darkness. There’s a strap diagonally over my front, hard against my sternum, dividing my breasts. Another is tight across my thighs. I’m anxious and sweaty. I need fresh air. I swallow.

  What I breathe feels like air. But it does not refresh like air. I gasp, taking down more of it, hoping that this mouthful will bring the release of oxygen. But it gives me nothing. A dry rasp at the back of my throat, a taste of metal, a tightening sensation behind my eyes. Pain, a gasping, rasping pain, that scours my throat and chokes me with the certainty that I will never breathe again.

  I wake in a tangle of sweaty bedclothes. What I thought was a strap across my chest turns out to be a tightened twist of sheet. Even the darkness is no longer utter. The red glow of my clock radio tells me that it is 3.17 a.m. I am not confident of finding sleep again that night. And it’s too late to take a Zopiclone. If I do, I’ll be even less fit for anything in the morning.

  I haven’t had the dream for a long time. I dared to believe I’d grown out of it. But, like recurrent depression, it has come back. And like the return of a depression believed to be defeated for good, it leaves me completely without hope. I thought I had made advances in the last nine years. Now I know I haven’t.

  It must have been the shock of discovering the corpse that brought the dream back that night.

  FOUR

  I try not to work weekends. Sometimes impossible to avoid it, but I’m always so knackered by the end of Friday that I need my recharging time. If I don’t get a break, I know it’ll catch up with me the next week.

  Of course, when I say I don’t work, I’m referring to SpaceWoman work. The house doesn’t keep itself clean and tidy. Nor does the shopping get done automatically. And though Ben could surprise with a spontaneously prepared chilli con carne, his brain isn’t wired in a way that might make him check in the fridge to see what essentials need replenishing. Or make him take the next logical step of doing the replenishing.

  Anyway, by the time I got up on the Saturday, I felt totally drained. As anticipated, there had been no more sleep after 3.17 a.m. when I woke from the dream.

  And the recurrence of the dream had really unsettled me.

  No sound from Ben’s room. I had the normal dilemma about whether I should open the door while I was on the landing, or call up to him from downstairs, or just go straight out to do the shopping. I opted for silence. But just as I was passing through the hall, my mobile rang.

  Hilary. She had heard about the corpse on the Hargood Estate through her contacts at Gradewell. They had rung to warn her they’d given the police her number, because she’d been involved with Nate Ogden in her lifers research. The police, in their turn, had rung and asked if he had ever talked to her about a woman he wanted to get revenge on. Had she ever heard him threaten violence towards anyone?

  Through the fuzzy, sleep-deprived haze of my brain, I could recognize that was the obvious question to ask. A murdered woman has just been found in the house of a man who was shortly to be released at the end of a long sentence for murdering a woman. He had recently visited his mother at the house … it’s not rocket science. And the police are, generally speaking, better at the obvious than they are at rocket science.

  ‘Did they asked any detail about the research you’d been doing at Gradewell?’

  ‘No, just general stuff. They knew that I’d come into contact with Nate. Asked if I knew where he might be.’

  ‘“Where he might be”? Nate Ogden hasn’t been released yet, has he, Hilary? Surely he’s still in Gradewell?’

  ‘No. He’s gone over the wall. Well, there’s not much of a wall to go over there. You just walk out.’

  ‘When was he last seen at Gradewell?’

  ‘Thursday evening. He had a meeting with the governor.’

  ‘About his forthcoming release?’

  ‘No. The governor gave him the news that his mother had been taken into hospital. The Queen Alexandra in Portsmouth. Nate was given permission to go and visit her.’

  ‘Unaccompanied?’

  ‘Yes. He was so near the end of his sentence. He’d had un-accompanied days out to visit her at home before that. And he’d always got back to the prison at the time he was meant to.’

  ‘So, did he go to the hospital?’

  ‘On the Friday morning, yes. Just in time. His mother died round noon.’

  ‘Poor man.’

  ‘But that was the last sighting of him. The guy I spoke to at Gradewell reckoned there was a pretty strong chance that Nate might have gone straight from the Queen Alexandra to his mother’s flat.’

  ‘Which would place him there early on the Friday afternoon,’ I reasoned.

  ‘Yes. Before you arrived and … found what you found.’

  ‘Maybe he found the body first?’

  ‘If he did, all he had to do was call the police.’

  ‘Come on, Hilary, is someone with his history going to call the police? I would think he just panicked.’

  ‘But it’s terrible.’ There was despair in Hilary’s voice. ‘To abscond so near the end of his sentence. He’s worked so hard to get to this point, and now he’s screwed the whole thing up.’

  ‘So why do you reckon he didn’t go back to Gradewell?’

  ‘The obvious answer would be because he’d killed th
e woman you found in his mother’s flat.’

  ‘Do you believe that? You think he’s likely to have turned violent again?’

  ‘Everything I know about him would make me say no. All right, physically, he’s a very strong man and he’s not very articulate. He killed a girlfriend with whom his relationship, from the case notes I read, had always been volatile. One day he just lost his rag. A long build-up of anger which he had limited ways of expressing, so he just lashed out. That doesn’t make him a psychopath, not someone who gets pleasure out of killing for its own sake.’

  ‘And presumably the victim isn’t another of his girlfriends?’

  ‘It seems nobody knows who the victim is yet. But, generally speaking, twelve years in Erlestoke and two in Gradewell are not very conducive to building up new relationships.’

  ‘I can see that … though you do read of these cases of women starting to write to men in prison and—’

  ‘There was nothing like that in Nate Ogden’s records.’

  ‘OK. I just thought—’

  ‘Really,’ Hilary interrupted me again, ‘we can’t get any further in thinking about the murder until the victim’s been identified.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘You found her, Ellen. You’d didn’t recognize her or …?’

  ‘If I had recognized her, I would have told you straight away. After telling the police, obviously.’

  ‘Yes, of course you would.’

  ‘But, no, her face was horribly bruised and …’

  ‘Oh God. And you … you’re all right?’

  ‘A bit shaken, inevitably. And very tired. I didn’t get much sleep last night.’

  ‘The dream? Did the dream come back?’

  ‘No,’ I lied instinctively. Hilary was one of my closest friends, and a trained therapist. I had told her about the dream fairly soon after I met her. Once I knew she was someone I could trust. But at that moment I wanted to process recent experiences on my own. ‘Anyway, I was just on my way out to the shops, so …’

  ‘Sure. And, incidentally, after what’s happened, you may well not feel like it, but the offer’s still on for tomorrow evening.’