Russian Roulette

by Sara Sheridan

  Mirabelle Bevan Mysteries

  Brighton Belle

  London Calling

  England Expects

  British Bulldog

  Operation Goodwood

  Russian Roulette

  A Mirabelle Bevan Mystery

  Sara Sheridan

  CONSTABLE • LONDON

  CONSTABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Constable

  Copyright © Sara Sheridan, 2017

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-47212-238-4

  Constable

  is an imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  This book is dedicated to Molly,

  my very own mystery

  Contents

  Prologue: True friends stab you in the front

  Chapter 1: The wise are instructed by reason

  Chapter 2: Everyone is made for some particular work

  Chapter 3: A cat in gloves catches no mice

  Chapter 4: Doubt grows with knowledge

  Chapter 5: Imagination decides everything

  Chapter 6: I cannot but give way to music and women

  Chapter 7: Undercover: to disguise identity to avoid detection

  Chapter 8: Mysteries are not necessarily miracles

  Chapter 9: We make war that we may live in peace

  Chapter 10: An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day

  Chapter 11: There is no instinct like that of the heart

  Chapter 12: Love is not a fire to be shut up in the soul

  Chapter 13: A clue is guiding information

  Chapter 14: Vices are only virtues carried to excess

  Chapter 15: All evil comes from a single cause: man’s inability to sit still in a room

  Chapter 16: All travel has its advantages

  Chapter 17: Make the most of your regrets

  Chapter 18: No one ever became wicked suddenly

  Chapter 19: Silence is one of the great arts of conversation

  Chapter 20: Grit: courage, resolve, strength of character

  Chapter 21: Experience is the name we give our mistakes

  Chapter 22: The woman who deliberates is lost

  Chapter 23: The savage is never quite eradicated

  Chapter 24: The greater the difficulty, the greater the glory

  Chapter 25: When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers

  Chapter 26: No one can give you better advice than yourself

  Chapter 27: What you seek is seeking you

  Chapter 28: Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at

  Chapter 29: Evil is easy and has infinite forms

  Chapter 30: Never befriend a man who is not better than yourself

  Chapter 31: Every earth is fit for burial

  Acknowledgements

  Questions for readers’ groups

  Prologue

  True friends stab you in the front

  Brighton, 6.45 a.m., Thursday 19 April, 1956

  Phil turned over in bed, pulling the sheet around his shoulders. The orange curtains his wife had bought were not lined and early morning sunshine leached into the room. From the garden the sound of birdsong punctuated his thoughts as he stirred and cursed silently. He found it difficult to block out the noise of the dawn chorus. It was worse than an alarm clock, though at least when he and Helen had moved out of their old digs near the front, they had left behind the gulls. Up here it was all blackbirds and doves. Still, there was something difficult to ignore about the noise and now the mornings were getting lighter it had begun to annoy him.

  Phil didn’t want to open his eyes. It had been a disturbed night. He’d had strange dreams, which he couldn’t fully remember. Only half awake, he hovered like a bee over a flower, his consciousness suspended. If he was choosing, he’d go back to sleep, but how likely was that, what with the birdsong and the light? He’d have to get up for work soon anyway. Bluntly, he nudged Helen, hoping she might fetch him a cuppa. Usually she was good that way, but today she didn’t move. He couldn’t blame her. They were both done in last night when they’d fallen into bed.

  Still groggy, he turned over, curling his arm around his wife’s sleeping frame. She lay on her side, facing the window. He smiled as he ran his fingers across her skin. She always felt like silk. Sleepily, he planted a hot, early-morning kiss on her shoulder and, feeling suddenly inspired, he continued kissing all the way to her hairline. She smelled of soap, perfume and deep sleep – a familiar combination. He nudged her again and slid his hand downwards, along the curve of her waist until it came to rest on her plump behind. Phil was an arse man. Always had been. The day he’d met Hel, she had been wearing a tight red skirt that framed her bottom perfectly. It had been a joy to behold – love at first sight. He remembered watching her dancing with her mate at the Palais, thinking this was the woman he was going to marry. She’d let him walk her back to her digs and, when he’d pulled her close for the first time, she’d smelled of cotton wool and lavender. He’d wanted to grow old with that smell from the moment he breathed it in.

  Feeling frisky now, he snuggled closer, stroking her stomach and nuzzling her neck. Then it came to him that the bed was wet. She was wet. His fingers were sticky.

  ‘Hel,’ he tried, nudging her. Then, more urgently, ‘Helen.’

  He pulled away, opening his eyes and staring at his hands as they came into focus. His fingers were covered in blood.

  ‘Hel.’ His voice was panicked.

  He recoiled as he pulled back the sheet. She was hurt. A crimson stain spread from her stomach outwards. The blood had seeped into the mattress. Some had even dripped on to the thin carpet. She was deathly pale. Phil scrambled to the floor, tripping over his feet. His chest was heaving. A strange, animal-like sound emanated from his throat. His fingers fluttered as he shook his wife’s body, leaving a red handprint on her marble-white shoulder and a smear on the lace-edged strap of her nightdress.

  ‘No.’

  The word came out strangled and very loud. Then he backed out of the bedroom and, barefoot, crossed the hallway, banging the front door as he burst outside wearing only striped pyjama bottoms and a white vest. He stumbled down the path, trampling a small line of daffodils that Hel had planted in February. His eyes darted, looking frantically for help. Far off, there was the sound of bottles rattling on a milk cart. Uniformly, all the houses along Mill Lane still had their curtains closed.

  ‘Help,’ Phil said, quietly, and then louder. ‘Help.’

  This was a nightmare, surely. The thoughts came in a jumble and he couldn’t order them. ‘Help,’ he barked again. At first there was no reaction from the early-morning suburb. Across the road a curtain flickered in one window and then another. Old Mrs Ambrose appeared in the doorway opposite, at the same time as Billy Randall walked into the garden next door, pulli
ng a brown woollen dressing gown round his frame and knotting it with a red cord.

  ‘What is it, mate? Are you all right?’

  Phil held up his blood-smeared hand as if he was a child. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said.

  Billy sprang over the low fence that separated the two gardens and, passing his friend, he walked straight into the house. He’d served in Italy. People used to say that he’d seen a thing or two, whatever the ins and outs of the Italian campaign. ‘Helen,’ he called. ‘Mrs Quinn.’ He checked the rooms one by one. The small kitchen smelled of dripping. A loaf of white bread had been left on a crumb-strewn board and the door to the larder was askew. Nothing there. He moved on to the living room where a half-drunk bottle of London gin lay open next to two smudged glasses. The wireless had been pulled out from its place against the wall. They’d been drinking and dancing the night before. It looked perfectly normal – not dissimilar to his own house.

  Then, crossing the hallway and opening the bedroom door, he started when he came across her body. The room smelled bad – though only faintly. Still, a dry retch rose in Billy’s gullet. Then his training kicked in. He checked, hoping for a pulse, though he knew it was too late. Helen Quinn seemed too peaceful for what had happened to her. Her dark hair was curled in a loose bun and her hand was splayed awkwardly, like a child’s in sleep. The spill of blood was a shock. She’d been knifed, he reckoned. It must have been violent and it would have taken a while for her to bleed out. When you got hit in the stomach it was agonising. You could last for half an hour before finally slipping away. It was the acid that killed you. Once the stomach was pierced, it leached out and dissolved your organs. It was a horrible way to go. Mystified, he stared at Helen Quinn’s corpse as he consciously took in the scene. He knew he’d have to describe it later. Then he turned. The Penroses at number five had a telephone. Their house was closer than the public telephone box, which was four blocks away. He’d rouse them and call the police.

  Outside, old Mrs Ambrose had waddled across the road and was attending to Phil Quinn. She cast an accusatory stare at Billy that clearly said, I might have known. She had never given anyone an inch in her life, and she wasn’t starting now. It was Mrs Ambrose who had told Billy’s wife she thought Hitler had got away. ‘I don’t trust that one,’ she had said, ‘not even to die.’

  Billy didn’t give anything away about what lay inside number fifteen. The old woman, after all, never thought a good thing when she could think a bad one. Still, however it looked, Phil was a nice bloke. Even with his fingers covered in blood, Billy didn’t want to believe Phil Quinn had killed his wife. Not Helen who always had a smile for everyone. Not Phil who kicked a football around in the street with the Harrison kids.

  ‘I’ll fetch the police. You stay here. Don’t disturb things.’

  Mrs Ambrose shrugged and her housecoat shifted across her ample frame. She was a busty old woman and her clothes never seemed to fit. At the bottom of the path the latest addition to Billy’s household, a tabby cat he’d brought home, sat and watched with its head cocked to one side.

  ‘I don’t understand how it happened,’ Phil Quinn said again. ‘I was asleep.’

  Billy wondered momentarily if he was leaving the old woman with a murderer, and if that was wise. But someone had to call in Helen’s body. He eyed his friend who, frankly, didn’t seem in any state to shoo the moggy at the bottom of his path, let alone hurt anyone.

  ‘I’ll come right back,’ Billy said sternly.

  He headed down the pavement with only a glance behind him. It was too beautiful a morning for something so horrible to have happened. Cherry blossom spilled over the privet hedge at number ten and another cat, a ginger one, with its tail twitching, pawed at the flickering petals. Everything seemed too normal. Billy had encountered death before, but not like this. Nothing so domestic. Passing his own house, he noted the curtains upstairs were still closed. He’d raise his wife later. He didn’t like to scare her. Not in her condition.

  Chapter 1

  The wise are instructed by reason

  Superintendent Alan McGregor took the stairs to the office at a lick, and burst into McGuigan & McGuigan Debt Recovery without knocking. Inside, Mirabelle Bevan and Vesta Lewis looked up from the paperwork strewn across their desks. Vesta smiled.

  ‘Good morning.’ She got up to put on the kettle.

  Without indulging the niceties, McGregor launched himself in Mirabelle’s direction. He slammed down a copy of the Argus, the early edition. ‘They’ve given it to Robinson,’ he said. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  Mirabelle cast her hazel eyes over the headline, which declared ‘Murder in Portslade’. Behind her, Vesta turned on the tap and let the water run.

  ‘I don’t want any damn tea,’ McGregor snapped. Vesta turned off the tap and, in the same moment, Mirabelle looked up in an icy stare. Poor manners were not acceptable in the Brills Lane office no matter what might have happened to get the superintendent worked up. ‘I’m sorry.’ He recovered his equilibrium. ‘It’s been a difficult morning. I walked out of the station and came straight here. You’re the only one who can help.’

  He proffered the paper. Mirabelle nodded at Vesta to acknowledge the apology. Vesta fiddled with the buttons on her cardigan. Mirabelle shrugged off her friend’s inattention and leaned over to read the story – a young housewife stabbed in her sleep. Her husband had been taken into custody. There was a picture of a cosy-looking brick house and another of the couple, titled ‘Mr and Mrs Quinn on their wedding day.’ In it, Mrs Quinn gazed into the eye of the camera, her white dress framing her tidy figure, her hair coiffed elegantly in a chignon and her lips set in an easy smile. It struck Mirabelle that photographs of murder victims were always strange because they hadn’t a clue what was going to happen. With the hindsight of a dead body, it seemed odd that they had simply got on with their lives – taking holidays, attending christenings, or, like Mrs Quinn, clutching her new husband’s arm.

  ‘You’re the detective superintendent,’ she said. ‘If you don’t want Robinson on the case, can’t you ask for it to be assigned to someone else? It seems like you want it, Alan.’

  McGregor’s eyes burned. ‘They won’t give it to me. And Robinson has hauled in Phil Quinn for questioning. Straight off on the wrong tack.’

  ‘Well, the husband is the most likely suspect.’ Mirabelle lifted the paper as if it underlined her point.

  ‘Quinn didn’t do it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know him. And, worse, I know Robinson. The lazy so-and-so won’t look beyond the obvious. Someone’s framing Phil, don’t you see?’

  ‘Why would anyone want to do that?’

  ‘If I knew . . .’ McGregor sounded exasperated.

  ‘And how can you be so sure that this friend of yours didn’t have a hand in the poor woman’s death?’ Mirabelle turned the page as she read the rest of the story. ‘According to this, he’d have had to have slept through someone stabbing the poor woman in the bed next to him. It doesn’t seem likely.’

  ‘Phil Quinn’s on the square.’

  Mirabelle raised a quizzical eyebrow. She didn’t like Masonic terms. Both she and Superintendent McGregor had had a run-in with the Brighton Lodge a couple of years before and she still found the terminology Masons used, suspect. ‘How do you know Mr Quinn? Exactly?’

  ‘I’ve known him for years.’

  Mirabelle waited. McGregor hadn’t answered her question. Vesta leaned against the sink and slowly crossed her arms. The shocking pink of her nail lacquer stood out against her dark woollen cardigan. This discussion was highly irregular. She was enjoying it tremendously.

  ‘I know him from back home,’ McGregor admitted. ‘I’ve known him since I was a kid. In Scotland.’

  ‘And he ended up living in Brighton too?’

  ‘Phil was here when I came down. A friendly face. We were in the same year at school but we lost touch afterwards. He moved to the south coast after the
war. He served in the Logistic Corps. He was an army mechanic. Once the fighting was over he went in with a couple of other guys. You know Hove Cars?’

  ‘The taxi company?’

  ‘That’s Phil.’

  Mirabelle eyed McGregor. They had been involved with each other for, well, she couldn’t say exactly how long. The before and after of it seemed to have merged lately and it was impossible to pin down precisely when their affair had started. The superintendent had never mentioned this man.

  ‘If he’s such a good friend, how come I’ve never met him?’

  McGregor shrugged. ‘We only see each other now and then. You know me. I’m hardly the sociable type. It’s like that, isn’t it, with old friends? You just pick up where you left off. And it’s not as if I’m the only one who knows him, I mean that’s what I said when they wouldn’t give me the case. Lots of blokes on the force know Phil. My old boss used to say hired cars were the pumping blood of the city. Taxis and coppers go hand in hand. Every man on the force knows Phil Quinn – from beat bobbies up.’

  ‘Are you saying your friend is a police informant?’

  McGregor shifted. ‘Nothing so formal as that, Mirabelle, but yes, Phil always helps if he can. And Hove Cars don’t only run taxis. They’ve got a couple of Rollers for weddings. The Grand uses them as a chauffeur service. They’ve pretty much got Brighton tied up. Phil Quinn loved his wife. He was crazy about her. Can you imagine what it must be like, losing her like this and then being banged up, subjected to Robinson’s puerile interrogation?’

  Mirabelle folded the newspaper smartly. ‘Well, I suppose our first stop will be his business partners, if you want to bring me along.’

  McGregor shook his head. ‘That’s the trouble. I can’t be seen to be part of this. I’m sorry to ask you. I know it’s irregular. Wrong, even. But you’re so good at this kind of thing.’

  A smile played around Mirabelle’s lips as she realised what he was asking. It wasn’t that she was gratified in any way by the murder, but still. ‘Alan, you’ve spent years shooing me away from police business. If I recall, once you locked me up to stop me continuing with an investigation.’ McGregor tried to interject. He always insisted that had been a mistake. Mirabelle raised a solitary finger. She had the air of a headmistress and wasn’t going to be diverted. ‘So, just to be clear, are you saying you want me to look into this case? You want me to undercut Robinson’s investigation? I mean, that’s exactly what you usually object to me doing.’