Quick and the Dead

by Susan Moody

  ‘Thank you.’ I walked away once more. So there was no connection between him and Helena, which was all I was trying to establish. And so far, I had to admit, I was no further on in finding the slightest clue to Amy’s killer – and thus possibly to Helena’s whereabouts – than I had been when I first started looking.

  Except this anonymous letter-writer. Who might that have been? Could it have been one of the rich old codger’s girls, now grown? Who lived in Boston? And resented the upstart wife? Was there any suggestion that Amy had been involved in his death? It was something to check.

  Back in my own kitchen, waiting for the coffee to brew, I forced myself to relive the scene of Amy Morrison’s demise. Had I missed some telling detail, something that might lead me down one or another of the two avenues of investigation I was trying to pursue. I could think of nothing. Since I prided myself on my powers of observation, I tried not to feel like a failure. Perhaps there simply wasn’t anything to observe. Okay, so once I had been a reasonably high-ranking police officer – that didn’t mean I was some kind of modern-day Sherlock Holmes, deerstalker on head and magnifying glass in hand, the way Sam Willoughby wanted to be.

  I wondered how soon I could get back into Helena’s house. See if something would ring bells, trigger recall. Although I had not told Inspector Garside this, once I had contacted the police to report a suspicious death, I had opened some of her drawers, using a piece of tissue to conceal any fingerprints, then stood at the door of the bedroom and covered it fairly comprehensively by sight, noting and collating the information as far as I could. Was there anything at all I could focus on? I had no idea whether Helena had even been at the scene.

  Where was her computer: had that gone from the house? Trekking carefully through the house, as familiar to me as my own flat, I hadn’t noticed one. But she might well have had it with her when she set off to meet me. If she ever had.

  Even as the question occurred to me, my phone rang. Garside. ‘Mrs— sorry, Doctor Drummond. Your colleague,’ he said. ‘Did she have a computer?’

  So, my question answered. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He rang off.

  ‘Thank you too,’ I said into the dialling tone.

  Again the phone rang. Paul Sandbrook of the antique shop. ‘I’ve remembered,’ he said.

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘That Peter person that Helena was flirting with? I mentioned him last time we spoke.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘His name is Peter Preston. He works for some fancy car dealership on the edge of the city. Can’t remember the name of it.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Sandbrook. That’s very useful.’ And might help me discover what Helena did after she and her friends had finished eating at the restaurant. I got out the Yellow Pages, looked up car dealerships, found two on the edge of town. The first one was engaged both times I tried it. A courteous voice answered the second. ‘Peter Preston.’ Sauve. Young. Efficient.

  ‘Oh, Mr Preston,’ I said. ‘My name’s Quick. Alex Quick.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was given your name by Paul Sandbrook.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s about the evening you went out with him and some other friends on Monday, after a concert in the cathedral. I understand that Doctor Drummond went home with you after you’d had dinner at Prego’s.’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘May I ask if she stayed the night with you?’

  ‘May I ask what business it is of yours?’

  ‘I’m her collaborator, and I’m wondering where she is since she seems to have vanished. Temporarily, I hope. You’re the last person known to have been with her and I’m hoping you can help.’

  There was a pause. Then he said, ‘Hang on, while I transfer to another phone.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  After some seconds of dead sound, he spoke again. ‘Sorry about that. This line is a bit more private. Now, Helena … yes, she did stay the night at my place. We’re very old friends.’

  ‘Of course,’ I murmured.

  ‘She got up about seven thirty the next morning, moaning about having to get back to her house and car, got dressed, refused my offer to call a cab. Said she’d take a bus, since they stopped right outside her door, and the bus station is only a few minutes’ walk from me.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Obviously I was a bit concerned, since it was only just getting light. I watched out of the window, saw her start off down the street, and then this bloke appeared on a motorbike. He stopped, started talking to her, obviously offering her a ride on the back of his bike. Which she equally obviously accepted, since he gave her a helmet and she climbed up behind him and off they went.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Darth Vader, to be honest. Black helmet with dark visor, black gauntlets, scarf tied round the bottom half of his face against the cold, leathers. The whole bikey thing. I assumed it was one of her students who happened to appear by some lucky chance.’

  ‘I wonder who it was.’

  ‘Can’t help you there. Look, I’m supposed to be on duty in the showroom, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘And thank you.’

  I wondered how fortuitous it was that the bike rider should have shown up just as Helena needed a ride. Not very, I suspected. And I doubted he was one of her students.

  ELEVEN

  I couldn’t sleep. Although violent crime scenes were nothing new to me, the horrific sight I had walked in on at Helena’s house was constantly at the back of my mind, lurking like an alligator, waiting to emerge from the muddy shallows when I least expected it. And the more it did so, the more I felt that there had been something in that bedroom which jagged a nerve, but I simply could not remember what it was. Obsessively I went over the details again. And yet again.

  Nor could I work out what Amy Morrison had been doing in Helena’s house in the first place. I clearly recalled Amy’s launch party and Helena telling me that she hadn’t been in contact with Amy since she left college, twenty years before. Adding that Amy probably wanted to show off how far she’d come since then, which was why Helena had been invited.

  By now, the papers were full of Amy’s murder. There were hints of the mutilations, though no specific details were printed. Glamour shots of her had appeared in the tabloids. The Mail interviewed the neighbours on either side of Helena’s house and tried to work something up, but neither of the two households, nor anyone else in the street, had seen or heard anything useful. ‘A motorbike was revving around nine thirty,’ one of them, a thin older woman, very erect of carriage, had told me. ‘It got on my nerves a bit, quite honestly, especially as I was trying to listen to The World Tonight. But no, apart from that, there was nothing out of the ordinary that day.’

  The plain fact of the matter was that most of the people nearby had been lounging about on their sofas, glued to the television, or lying in a bath or listening to music, completely unaware that someone was being butchered nearby. One woman had said that there was a constant stream of visitors coming to the house – male, of course. Which while it had little to do with Amy Morrison, nonetheless translated immediately into Helena being completely promiscuous. Which she was not. The idea that her students might occasionally show up for an off-the-cuff tutorial didn’t seem to strike her.

  Interestingly, so far nobody had been able to dig up any information about Amy’s past. No former school friends, no teachers. It was surprising that none of her fellow students from her art-school days had had anything to say about her, though one of Helena’s colleagues had made a statement about her being very reclusive and not often seen at lectures, concluding with the information that she had not been granted her degree.

  Eventually, I got up, made coffee and went into the second bedroom, which served as my office. I reviewed all I knew so far about both Helena and Amy Morrison, which proved to be remarkably little. Both of them seemed to keep their private lives quite separate from t
heir public faces. Where they came from, what their background was … not that there was any reason why they shouldn’t have done so. It was their right, after all. Yet it seemed odd that although Amy featured, with her recent accomplishments and a few personal details, on Wikipedia, there was nothing about where she was born, who her parents were, where she grew up, whether she had siblings, or even children.

  Some of her history was common knowledge, of course. Hence the fact that I had been able to talk to three of Amy’s four husbands. But even then, as far as my researches into the three men were concerned, I felt I had hit a blank wall. Nice guys but, in my opinion, completely harmless – though I was far too seasoned in the ways of murderers to believe that nice guys were incapable of vicious killing. Even Mark, the present incumbent and the one with most to gain from her death, had a rock-solid alibi. The others seemed almost irrelevant. I wished now that I had thought to ask them if they had learned any personal details about her past during the days of their marriages to her.

  Nonetheless, someone had hated Amy Morrison enough to kill her. I had to keep that constantly in mind.

  I reflected on Helena’s husbands, of whom she so rarely spoke. Here again I had received very little information. Once again, I checked her out on the internet, but there was nothing of any use. When the working day started, I would try to contact someone in the university personnel department – or Human Resources, as they called it these days. I tried hard not to worry about Helena, pushing away from me the police mantra about mispers: if in doubt, think murder …

  Focus, Alex, focus. Think of the crime scene. Think of that lamp-lit room, the shades of red and orange, the crumpled bed, the rolled-up pages of manuscript shoved inside the victim, the vicious tearing apart. That took strength and anger, as did the damage perpetrated on the eyes.

  Eyes. Vagina. Why had the murderer concentrated on these two particular areas? The eyes might have something to do with Amy’s profession, which like mine involved a constant looking at pictures and paintings. Was someone trying to deny or negate her link to the world of art? The attempt at mutilation of her genitals could point to sexual jealousy, or frustration, or even anger. And what significance was there in the papers, almost certainly taken from the typescript of Amy’s book?

  I glanced at the clock. It was still far too early to telephone anyone. I took my mug of coffee back to bed.

  It was after nine thirty when I woke again, having drifted off to sleep. Beneath my pillow, my mobile was buzzing. I reached under and hoicked it out.

  ‘Quick? How’s it going?’ It was DI Felicity Fairlight.

  ‘If you mean my painstaking search for Amy Morrison’s killer, in a fruitless attempt to prove that Helena is not guilty: badly,’ I said.

  ‘No reason why it should be anything else. A lone woman, with nothing going for her but brains and ingenuity, pitted against the mighty resources of the force? It’s a no-brainer.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said. ‘What about your lot? How are they doing?’

  ‘Same as you, I believe. Focussing on Doctor Drummond instead of the Morrison woman. Which means they’re not getting anywhere – though you didn’t hear it from me. It’s like your friend has just vanished off the face of the earth. Are you sure you don’t know where she is or where she might have gone?’

  ‘Would I lie to you?’ I said. ‘Seriously, I have no idea what’s happened to her. Anyway, why are the cops so sure Helena did it? Apart from the fact that the murder took place in her house.’

  ‘Partly because she’s known to have had a deep-rooted dislike of Amy Morrison.’

  ‘As does everyone who’s ever come into contact with the woman. Including me.’

  ‘And partly because she had both the means and the opportunity. And partly because she seems to have fled the scene, which as you know is a sure sign of guilt.’

  ‘And partly because they don’t know who else to point the finger at.’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘I was going to call you, except you got in first. It’s about those pages which were pushed up inside Amy Morrison’s … ahem … twat.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Has any analysis of them been done?’

  ‘I’m not certain. Not in any detail, I’m sure. Not yet, anyway. But didn’t you say you thought they were from the woman’s book?’

  ‘I did. But not from the final version which she would have presented to her publisher, they looked like proof pages.’

  ‘She probably had various versions before the final one.’

  ‘Not fully printed out, I wouldn’t have thought. When we do one of our anthologies, Helena and I might print out odd paragraphs along the way, while we’re still putting it all together. But the one at the scene of crime, as far as I could see, seemed like a completed typescript, with pictures and everything. The real question, Fliss, is where would the murderer have found the manuscript pages? It’s hardly credible that Amy would be carrying them around with her. Or if she was, where are the rest of the pages?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can find out and get back to you.’

  Something struck me. Maybe this was in response to the niggle in my head. Morrison must have worked on her book for years, because the paper thrust inside her was clearly not in mint condition. It had that faintly yellowish edge to it, and the letters were infinitesimally blurred, as though produced on an older printer.

  As soon as I had disconnected, my phone buzzed again. When I picked up, a man with the deepest voice I had ever heard, said, ‘Is this Alex Quick?’ He sounded as if he had just stepped off the boat from Sydney and wasn’t too thrilled about it.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘This is Liam Hadfield. Professor Hadfield. I’m calling from Oxford.’

  There was a pause, as though he were waiting for me to react with cries of unbridled joy.

  ‘And you’re what, going to award me an honorary doctorate?’ I said.

  He gave a half-amused grunt. ‘That might come later. For the moment, I’m wondering whether you have any idea where my wife might be.’

  Why the hell would I know where his wife was? ‘Do I sound like Lost Property?’ I asked. Then realizing I was being a little discourteous, I went on: ‘I’m awfully sorry, I’m not quite sure … do I know your wife?’

  ‘Doctor Drummond,’ he said, crisp as a poppadom. ‘Helena is my wife.’ Emphasizing the final word, in case I thought she was his local butcher or his manicurist.

  ‘You’re Helena’s …’ She had told me she was divorced and single, and had nothing to do with either of her former husbands. ‘But I thought …’

  ‘I know what you thought. But it’s not true.’ He was even crisper. ‘I’ve been trying to contact her, to tell her I have to give a lecture at the University of Kent at the end of the week, and I’d be happy to take her out for dinner afterwards, in return for a bed for the night. I’ve telephoned, but I’m getting no reply. It occurred to me that you might know where she’s gone.’

  ‘I wish I did.’

  ‘I’d just arrived from Australia, when one of my colleagues informed me that she’s all over the papers, under suspicion of murdering one of her former students. Amy Morrison. That can’t be right.’

  ‘Unfortunately it is. At least, it’s right that the police think Helena did it, not that she did it.’

  ‘Well, what can be done about it?’ A man used to finding solutions, I could tell.

  ‘Believe me, Professor Hadfield, I’ve been racking my brains, trying to think of something.’

  ‘She can’t hide forever.’

  ‘You think she’s hiding?’

  ‘She must be.’

  ‘She’s hoping to avoid the police, I should imagine, since they’re convinced she’s a killer.’

  ‘Helena? A killer?’ He laughed deeply. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Which is why I’ve been working from the other end, looking for someone with a reason to kill Ms Morrison, in order to take the heat off Helena.�
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  ‘Doing the cops’ job for them? Very commendable.’

  Though the more I thought about it, the more random it all seemed. How could the killer have known Amy would be at Helena’s house, for a start? Unless, as I had already conjectured, Helena was the intended target. The two women were just about similar enough to be confused, in a poor light, and from a distance. But even so … I tried to envisage a different scenario but failed to come up with anything that was both plausible and fitted the facts.

  ‘If she gets in touch by Thursday evening, please let me know immediately.’ His deep voice rasped at the base of my spine as he gave me his phone number. A graphic illustration of the phrase shiver me timbers.

  I remembered something. ‘Perhaps she’s staying with your daughter,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t have a daughter,’ he said impatiently. ‘Nor, for your information, a son.’

  ‘I understood she had a daughter?’ Though in fact Perry Nutley had amended his statement and decided he was mixing Helena up with another colleague. Still, it was worth checking out.

  ‘Not with me she hasn’t. And I think I would have heard if the old boy in France had fathered one with her.’

  Was he referring to Ainslie Gordon? ‘Would it be a good idea for us to meet up?’ I asked.

  ‘Why?’

  Is there a difference between brusque and plain bloody rude? Probably, but right then I wasn’t certain what it was. ‘If you’re coming down this way anyway,’ I said, my tone permafrost cold.

  ‘I can’t see much point. Cheers.’ He rang off before I could say anything more.

  Leaving me with a puzzle. Was Helena still married to Hadfield, or wasn’t she? He seemed to think so, while she had been quite firm on the subject, the one time we had discussed it. ‘I’m free of them both, the bastards,’ she said. ‘Free and clear.’

  I hadn’t questioned it. Why would I? Now I felt that this new information might be significant. If Helena had lied about her relationship with Liam Hadfield, she might have lied about other things as well. Or was it simply that the man was Catholic and despite the legality of the process, didn’t believe in divorce?