The Clutter Corpse

by Simon Brett

  FIFTEEN

  That was, of course, why I rushed home after receiving Ben’s message, ‘I’m not so good, Ma.’ Finding out who killed Kerry Tallis became a very minor consideration when my son needed me.

  Whether it was the trauma of his father’s suicide that triggered it, or whether it was just genetic (‘like having red hair’, as I know Oliver would have argued), Ben soon started to show depressive tendencies.

  His sister reacted the other way. Juliet constructed a carapace around herself, through which she did not allow emotions to penetrate. She became Jools, apparently shallow, flippant, even glib. Though she was present on many family occasions, she ceased to be an active participant in family life. She turned against me even more and, perhaps just to annoy me, cosied up to Fleur. She deliberately went against my green principles and became a major consumer of everything. She developed the unassailable persona which was later to make her such a success in the London fashion world.

  Her father’s suicide ended her dependence on me.

  Whereas, with Ben …

  He adored Oliver and was just on the cusp of adolescence when his father died. He went into his first major catatonic depression about three months later. I had to collect him from school, unresponding, locked into his own darkness.

  He had to have time out. I was obviously in a bad state myself, but I’ve never had a depressive bone in my body, and maybe dealing with Ben’s traumas gave me something outside myself to focus on. I consulted doctors and psychologists. Appalled by the waiting time for NHS consultations, I went private. Ben was questioned and probed and medicated. And for a time he’d be ‘normal’ (whatever that means).

  Then the Oliver pattern would repeat itself. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to rescue Ben from school and, later, university. He’s doing graphic design – and he’s bloody good at it, genetics again – at Nottingham Trent. The areas he’s particularly interested in are animation (all done on the computer now) and typography. He once confided in me that his long-term ambition is to design a new font that becomes as famous as Baskerville or Helvetica. He stores all kinds of examples on his laptop and is constantly accessing old newspaper archives to check out their printing styles. Ben is, needless to say, like all of his generation, extremely proficient with computers.

  Very promising student then. Talented, creative, inventive. But already he’s had to start the course again, after a major breakdown in his first year.

  Mothers, it’s said, never cease to worry about their children. With Ben, given the family history, my anxiety is on a different scale.

  Oliver’s death meant we had to make some practical changes to our lives. Though I’d been good with money, we couldn’t keep on the Funtington house without any new income coming in. Besides, I could never relax in the place after what had happened there. Nor could I bear to buy another house with a garage. So, we got the place in Chichester.

  Had to get rid of a lot of furniture. Good training for when I started SpaceWoman. I kept the cartoons of Oliver’s that I’d had framed, but I didn’t put any on display. They stayed in the cupboard under the stairs. I wouldn’t be strong enough for a long time to hang any of them where I could see them.

  The few people I’ve talked to about Oliver’s death have all asked me if I feel guilty about it. The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is no. Oh, sure, I have guilt about practical things – that I wasn’t there when it happened, that I didn’t come back to the house an hour earlier. But I do not feel personal guilt. I know that Oliver didn’t kill himself because of anything I did. Indeed, being with me probably saved him from doing the deed much earlier. I do understand that much about depression. Oliver suffered from an illness that never fully went away.

  But knowing that doesn’t stop me from missing him every day of my life.

  As I hurtled the Yeti back towards home and Ben, I berated myself for not recognizing the signs. My study of the subject had taught me that depressives very rarely commit suicide when they’re at their lowest. At such times, their energy and initiative are so drained that they are incapable of organizing anything. But, as they emerge from the depression – particularly if it’s been a long one – then they feel capable of taking positive action. And of ensuring that they never have to undergo such pain again.

  It was what had happened with Oliver. He’d been remarkably chipper in the days before he killed himself. And when I last spoke to Ben, I now realized, he too had sounded dangerously perky.

  My son was sitting at the kitchen table. There was a glass and a half-empty bottle of whisky in front of him. And, neatly piled up, about ten boxes of paracetamol. The government’s restricting of the contents to sixteen was probably a well-intentioned safety strategy, but any potential suicide is capable of stockpiling.

  I looked at Ben. He evaded my eye. I looked at the paracetamol. ‘Have you?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’ Then he dissolved into tears. ‘I’m sorry, Ma.’

  It had happened before. It was my nightmare. Jools knew about her brother’s suicidal tendency. I think Hilary probably suspected it. I didn’t advertise the details. I didn’t want people talking about ‘cries for help’. I would have hit them if they had.

  Given the family history, I had taken Ben to any number of doctors and psychiatrists over the years. He had been put on all kinds of medication, and he was very good about taking it. He knew the pain his condition caused me. He fought against it. No one could have fought harder. And he was determined to live an independent life.

  But always the depression returned. Like Oliver, Ben sometimes wanted to kill himself. He even used his father’s expression for the inherited illness. ‘It’s like having red hair.’

  I never knew. If I’d arrived half an hour later, would I have found him dead? I’ve asked that question so many times. Of course, it hasn’t always been me who’s found him in that state. Schoolfriends, university friends, passers-by on bridges, someone has always got there on time to stop the final destructive act.

  As I said, there are few people I’ve ever talked to about Ben’s situation, apart from the medical professionals who have dealt with him over the years. Hilary sometimes, she at least understands the issues of mental illness. I never raise the subject with Fleur, but often she brings it up. She doesn’t put her view into words, but the implication goes back to her reservations about my marrying Oliver. She told me he was unstable, but did I listen? The corollary of that is that Ben’s condition is my fault. But then my mother has spent her life trying to convince me that everything is my fault.

  I certainly will not allow her to blame Ben. I get atavistically maternal and defensive if Fleur talks about ‘drawing attention to himself’. I find that particularly rich coming from someone who has spent her entire life doing that very thing.

  Like his father, Ben suffers from an illness. He hates that fact as much as I do. But his moments of despair are absolutely genuine. He never makes stuff up.

  After one of his thwarted suicide attempts, there are two ways he can go. Either he turns very listless and lethargic, sleeping for whole days and nights. Or he becomes manic.

  My son in manic mode is very charismatic. Like his father, he can be remarkably witty, ideas spinning out of him, unlikely connections being snapped together. I can fully understand why, at such times, he is devastatingly attractive to women. I can also understand why his inability to sustain that mood mean that all of his relationships have, sooner or later, fallen apart.

  That evening, the one when I had been diverted from the search for Nate Ogden, Ben was manic. The whisky was talking a bit too.

  ‘I’m wasting your time,’ he said. ‘You’re busy. You were going somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter,’ I said, suppressing the powerful curiosity Hilary’s text had fired in me. ‘I’ll stay here with you.’

  ‘No need. I’ve been a naughty boy. Rap over the knuckles.’ With one large gesture he swept up the paracetamol packets
into his arms and dumped them in the pedal-bin. ‘No danger now. Get on with your life, Ma.’

  ‘You know I’m not going to leave you tonight, Ben.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. Ready to do battle. With my trusty broadsword to defeat the Giant Depression. My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure! Well, not entirely pure, perhaps, but then that’s difficult for my generation with so much porn readily available.’

  Inevitably, I found myself laughing. Ben quoting Tennyson, for God’s sake! What had got into him? At such times, he was so like Oliver. He had the same feverish sparkle in his eye. And, for me, laughing was better than crying.

  ‘So, look, here I am, a knight errant looking for an errand for the night. What can I do to aid you, fair damsel in distress?’

  ‘I’m fine. Don’t need any aid.’

  ‘But you do. Everyone needs aid. Here I am, spurred and booted on my gift horse. Don’t look me in the mouth. And, talking of mouths, Ma, yours might be less dry if it were irrigated by a glass of whisky.’

  Not waiting for agreement, he leapt up to get another glass and filled it for me. He raised his to clink. ‘To putting recent events behind us!’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said.

  I did. The spirit burnt comfortingly down my throat.

  ‘So, tell me, Ma, what was the quest from which I distracted you? Which particular made-in-China replica of the Holy Grail were you searching for this evening?’

  ‘I was looking for someone who might be a murderer,’ I replied.

  Ben was instantly hooked and wanted more details. I could think of no reason to deny them to him. The entire nation knew about Kerry Tallis’s death. The disappearance of Nate Ogden had also been publicized in a way that implied a connection between the two events. There were photographs of both of them all over the papers. The only new information I’d be giving Ben would be how I came to be involved in the situation. And he already knew about my discovering Kerry’s corpse.

  My son’s eyes sparkled as I came to the end of my narration. ‘And you don’t think you should leave me alone tonight, Ma?’

  ‘I’m not going to leave you alone tonight, Ben.’

  ‘No? Good.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I’m going to come with you. We’re going to search for the murderer together.’

  At the time, that seemed to me like a very good idea.

  ‘You’re mad,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ said Ben, with his father’s grin. ‘Lucky I’m not suicidal, though, isn’t it?’

  SIXTEEN

  As the Yeti approached the destination entered into the satnav, I realized why the postcode seemed familiar. It was familiar because I had been there before. On Friday, the day that I had found Kerry’s body. My headlights caught the hanging sign. Walnut Farm. The empty property I’d been summoned to earlier that same day.

  It was definitively dark by the time we got there. Moonless, clouds overhead. Ben switched on his phone light, while I got the torch out of the boot.

  The beam moved across the dusty windows of the untended frontage. There were no lights from inside. But this time, when I tried the front-door handle, it gave inwards.

  ‘This is fun,’ Ben murmured, close behind me.

  In the hallway the torch beam revealed faded wallpaper, here and there torn and sagging. Though by origin a stable or workshop, the building had been converted into living accommodation. But the work was rough and ready. The place couldn’t be dignified by the description of ‘barn conversion’. And it looked as though no one had lived there for a long time.

  The left-hand door off the hall revealed a kitchen. Dusty sink, empty shelves, it hadn’t been used for years.

  Through the door opposite was a toilet, bowl cracked and grey, chain to overhead cistern broken, a smell of damp and dust.

  The remaining door opened on to a large space, twice as high as the hallway. This had presumably been the main part of the building, with space enough to house carts and farm machinery. As my torchlight scoped upwards, between the struts and rafters were revealed the undersides of the roofing slates.

  From a cross beam at the far end hung what I somehow knew I would find there. The heavy body of Nate Ogden.

  The noose tied around the rafter and constricting his angled neck was made of orange polypropylene. On the floor beneath him, on its side, lay the chair which he must have kicked away.

  I, as transfixed as the corpse was, kept the torch beam on the still body, cursing myself for having brought Ben into this scene of tragedy.

  But I had underestimated my son. Suddenly masterful, he stepped forward towards the scene of the crime. ‘Have you got your tape measure, Ma?’ he asked.

  Wordlessly, I reached into my pocket and handed across the ribbon of fabric. I watched, fascinated, as Ben checked the distance between the dead man’s dangling feet and the floor. I still watched, immobile, as he measured the height of the chair lying on its side.

  ‘There’s no way he could have got so high from standing on the chair,’ said my son. ‘Someone strung him up there. He was murdered.’

  He’s bright, my son.

  SEVENTEEN

  Of course, it had to be the police again. Of course, it didn’t take them long to identify me as the woman who had discovered the corpse in the Hargood Estate flat. Nor long to come to the view that such a coincidence was possibly grounds for suspicion. To be the first person to find a murder victim was one thing. To then be the first person to discover the corpse of the man who was suspected of murdering her … well, that was, to put it at the mildest, unusual.

  As on the previous occasion, the initial response to our mobile call to the police was a couple of uniforms in a Panda car. Though a summons went through pretty quickly to Detective Inspector Prendergast, there was a good hour of waiting around till he appeared. We sat in the Yeti. The sidekick this time wasn’t Prasad. A black woman with a Caribbean rhythm to her voice, whose name I didn’t retain. What is this habit I have of not registering the names of police officers? A result of stress, probably. Most things are.

  The only good thing about the questioning I underwent was that Ben was with me. Since we had found Nate Ogden’s body together, there was no point in separating us. This was good for me. Not only did I have his moral support, I also knew where he was. I was worried about how he might react to what we’d just encountered. Didn’t know whether Ben had ever even seen a dead body before. But what he’d witnessed at Walnut Farm seemed to have left him on a high, almost manic. I knew that mood could not last for ever. And I was fearful of what would happen when it shifted.

  Among the many other thoughts flooding my brain was the permanent undercurrent of worry about Ben. What should I do after this latest manifestation of his illness? Back to the GP to try yet another change of medication? Back to one of the many psychiatrists we’d consulted over the years? Please, not back to one of those grim mental institutions in which he had at times been incarcerated. With these thoughts recurred the bleak feeling that nothing was going to change his personality in a permanent way. He would always be a depressive.

  To the police, Ben showed no sign of his recent trauma. I was proud of the way he dealt with them. He was polite and accurate in his answers, the perfect witness. He was also discreet. He made no mention of his views about how Nate Ogden had died. Let the police reach their own conclusions in their own good time.

  It was inevitable that, in my replies, I would mention Hilary. It was, after all, through her agency that I had gone to Walnut Farm. And, as Detective Inspector Prendergast patiently questioned me, I realized how suspicious her actions might sound to someone who didn’t know and trust her the way I did.

  It’s dark again. And I’m strapped in, belt diagonally across my chest, tight over my thighs.

  And again, though I breathe, there is no sustenance in the air. What I gulp down is vile and metallic. I feel it cl
ogging my lungs. I feel it evaporating all the saliva in my throat. I feel it choking me.

  I know what Oliver felt in the final moments of his life.

  And I wake up. The clock radio reproaches me with the fact that it’s only 12.43 a.m.

  I go to check on Ben. I’d given him a Zopiclone. He is sleeping deeply, breathing with that easy rhythm which I have listened to and warmed to from the moment of his birth.

  Sometimes I cannot believe how much I love him.

  EIGHTEEN

  I did get back to sleep for a few twitchy hours but woke irreversibly at 6.17. I lay there trying to think what I could do about Ben. He was a grown man. I didn’t want to mollycoddle him. And yet I had to protect him from himself. I couldn’t spend every moment of my life monitoring his moods, though. There were other demands on my time. I had to keep SpaceWoman running. And, increasingly, I was intrigued by the two murders in which I had inadvertently become involved. I’ve never thought of myself as an amateur sleuth, but I do have my fair share of natural curiosity. More than my fair share, some would say.

  Round 6.55, when I was about to switch on the Today programme, I had an idea. It was something I’d contemplated before, but never followed through on. I knew he kept early hours, so I rang straight through to Dodge.

  He sounded pleased to hear me. He always seems more relaxed on the phone, once he knows who he’s talking to. Though he can’t look anyone in the eye in face-to-face encounters, phone calls remove that problem.

  ‘Dodge, I have a favour to ask you.’

  ‘No problem. What is it?’

  I had never talked to him openly about Ben’s mental health, but Dodge seemed to have intuited that there was a problem. In the same way, I’ve never talked to him openly about Oliver’s suicide, but he seems to know about that too. So, I chose my words with care. ‘Look, I’ve got a large, strong son loafing around at home … university vacation and all that … and I just wondered if you might need some help with anything today …?’