by William Paul
Chapter Sixty-One
Saturday, 04.31
The casualty waiting area at the hospital was empty and quiet. The chairs had been knocked out of their orderly arrangement and were strewn about haphazardly, like the aftermath on board a ship that has sailed through a bad storm. The light inside the tea and coffee machine flickered annoyingly. Moya and Fyfe sat side by side waiting for news of Lambert. Fyfe invented a story about walking into a door to explain the damage to his other eye. Moya didn’t believe him. He told her about Norma’s rare blood group and her guaranteed total liver failure in four days’ time. She believed that.
Matthewson had vanished. A nurse carrying a clipboard passed by and asked them if they were Mr and Mrs Stewart. She looked puzzled when they denied it, wandering off talking to herself. A few minutes later baby-faced Dr McInnes appeared round the corner of the reception desk and they rose together as he began to walk towards them.
‘What do you think then?’ Fyfe asked Moya.
‘I reckon he’ll live.’
‘I reckon he’ll die. Remember the prophecy.’
‘What?’
‘It is right that my killer will die.’
Moya grunted. ‘I think we have effectively demonstrated that there is no supernatural influence to the course of events under investigation.’
‘Don’t be so sure.’
‘He’s just a bad bastard like the rest of them.’
‘He deserves to die then.’
‘If only we all got what we deserved.’
‘If only.’
They exchanged a look that took them both back to the New Town flat, and the bathroom when she had him backed up against the sink. A smile almost broke the determined horizontal line of Moya’s lips. Fyfe tried to raise his eyebrows in a humorous gesture but the bruised muscles round his eyes wouldn’t respond. McInnes stood in front of them like a white-coated minister about to perform a marriage ceremony.
‘Well, it was touch and go,’ he said.
‘And?’ Moya prompted when McInnes showed no signs of continuing.
‘He’s gone.’
‘You mean he’s dead?’
‘As a dodo.’
Fyfe nodded knowingly. He wouldn’t say to Moya that he had told her so but he thought it and rather enjoyed the guilty feeling of superiority it gave him. Moya darted an accusing glance at him. The brief paramedic panic at the funeral parlour and the wailing ambulance through the city streets had all been in vain. Fyfe could have told them at the time but nobody would have listened to him.
‘What killed him?’ Moya asked.
‘A deadly cocktail of brandy, arsenic and nitrosulphuric acid.’
‘Sounds exotic,’ Fyfe said.
‘Embalming fluid. Not the brandy but the other two. He was an undertaker I understand. Embalmed himself. Neat huh?’
‘It was a close run thing. If he had been found maybe ten minutes earlier he might have stood a chance when we pumped him out. As it was he was dead in the ambulance.’
‘Thanks doc.’
‘I’m going to get some sleep now,’ McInnes said. ‘I’d be grateful if you didn’t bring any more bodies in for a while. Remember my advice about those black eyes of yours.’
‘Consider it done.’
McInnes shambled off. Fyfe stuck his hands in his pockets. Moya picked up her bag and looped it over her shoulder.
‘That’s that then,’ she said.
‘It is.’
‘We didn’t beat Isotonic’s record for solving a murder but we got there in the end.’
‘Just like the magazine said.’
‘What do we do now?’
‘You’re in charge DI McBain but if it was me I would go home and get some sleep before we claim the credit and tackle the paperwork tomorrow.’
‘Later today you mean.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Can you give me a lift?’
‘I always stop for good-looking women.’
Fyfe drove Moya across the city. Jill sat on the floor between her legs all the way with her head in her lap. Number Five whined in the back because she was missing out.
‘It’s been good working with you,’ Fyfe said, hoping it didn’t sound too condescending.
‘Likewise I’m sure.’
‘We must do it again sometime.’
‘Is that a prophecy?’
‘Might be a threat.’
In the street outside the flat Moya kissed the dogs goodbye and climbed out of the car. It was almost dawn. The darkness was turning grey around them.
‘What about me?’ Fyfe said. ‘Don’t I get a farewell kiss?’
Moya hesitated half in and half out the car, facing him, her face framed in tumbling hair. This time she could not stop herself smiling.
‘We had our chance, Dave,’ she said. ‘We missed it. Let’s stay friends.’
‘And colleagues.’
‘That too.’
She kissed the tips of her fingers, held them up to her mouth and blew. Fyfe snatched at the air in front of his face and pressed the palm of his hand to his mouth. He watched Moya go round the car and mount the steps to the front door of his flat. He waited until it was opened and she had disappeared inside.
‘Missed my chance there,’ he told the dogs. ‘Story of my life.’
Chapter Sixty-Two
Saturday, 05.20
Halfway home, halfway along an arrow-straight piece of road that descended into a shallow U-shaped valley, there was a layby screened from the road by grassy mounds. Dawn was breaking when Fyfe drove into it. The sky had turned a delicate shade of purple and a milk-white three quarter moon hung low on the foreshortened horizon.
‘One last thing to do, girls,’ he said to Jill and Number Five as he let them out to run. ‘Then we can all go home and I can have a shave.’
He sat in his seat for several minutes, staring up at the moon, trying to make some kind of sense of the contours scrawled over the shadow-rich surface, seeing the thin line that described the perfect hidden circle. The air in the interior of the car was warm around him like the water of a deliciously warm bath. His head was sore. His injured eyes were throbbing. He phoned Sally and listened fondly to her sleep-slurred voice, anticipating her nearness.
‘I’ll be home soon, darling,’ he said. ‘Very soon.’
Her reply was unintelligible. Fyfe reached into the glove compartment and took out the piece of steak. He tore off the plastic wrapping and held the sweet-smelling meat in one hand as he got out of the car.
He walked over to where Jill and Number Five were sniffing in the grass. On the other side of the low mound that marked the edge of the lay-by a sheep fence had been trampled into the earth in a morass of hill-walkers’ bootprints and rabbit droppings. The rotten posts had broken and lay on their sides with rusty wire stretching between them as if they were holding hands. Fyfe stepped over the fence onto a bare patch of earth.
Once more he looked up and the moon and its crescent seemed to shine even brighter. He tilted his head right back and draped the cold, heavy steak over his eyes. He began to howl, softly at first but then more loudly. Again and again the ululation came from his throat and soared towards the moon. The two dogs stopped sniffing at the grass and sat down where they were, silently looking across at him as if he was mad.
SLEEPING PARTNER
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapte
r Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter One
Saturday, 23.10
The second surgical glove snapped into the soft flesh above his wrist with a satisfying tightness. The action caused a tiny puff of talcum powder to disperse into the air. There was already a skin of dried superglue painted on each fingertip underneath the thin rubbery surface. Valentine Randolph was nothing if not exceedingly thorough in his preparations.
He held both hands up in front of him and flexed the fingers three times to remove any remaining bubbles of air. He was already wearing a one-piece, dark-coloured overall zipped up to the neck and tucked into socks at the ankles. On his feet he had cheap canvas shoes. On his head he had a closely woven woollen hat pulled down to the top of his ears and his eyebrows. The bulky ridge of wool showed that it would unroll further to cover his whole face. He picked up a pair of dark glasses and put them on to complete the extraordinary outfit. He called it his Saturday Night Special.
He patted the fat bunch of keys in his pocket and checked his watch through the transparent latex sleeve of the glove, having to hold it close to his face to be able to make out the time. It was dark outside, a moonless night with a red sky containing heavy-bellied clouds hanging low and smouldering like a banked-up fire. From his first-floor bedroom window the electronic glow of the hidden city all around him suffused a narrow section of the sky above the tall trees that marked the boundary of his garden. In the distance, bats flickered clumsily across his line of sight. Close up, a large moth tapped its paper-thin wings against the glass, condemned to suicide in hopeless pursuit of a love affair with an unreachable light source.
Randolph turned away from the window and went over to a table entirely covered by photographs in silver frames. There were pictures of his wedding, of his wife Joan, of himself, and of his family. The three children grew up inside successive frames and then appeared as adults with their own children. He matured from the tall, fresh-faced youth smiling hugely at the church door, to the grandfather with newest grandson on his knee. Joan also grew old in the pictures, transformed from shy, slim bride to proud, Rubenesque matriarch. He reached out and lifted a portrait of her on her own inside a particularly ornate frame. She must have been about forty when it was taken; in her prime, more attractive then than when he first met her. That was more than twenty years ago and, to his loving eye, she had changed little although she had changed such a lot. If there was a life after death, and she had always insisted there was, she would be watching him now, shaking her head at his behaviour, sighing at the confirmation that the loss of her earthly influence had meant him going so badly awry.
He held Joan’s picture against his mouth for several seconds, leaving an outline impression of his lips on the damp glass. The oval shape covered her whole face. He wiped it clean with his elbow.
‘This one’s for you, Joan darling,’ he said, as he replaced the frame on the crowded table-top. ‘As always.’
A trace of bitter-tasting silver polish had found its way on to his tongue. He tried to spit it out daintily as he made his way downstairs through the empty house with its ghostly furniture and old paintings watching from the walls. In the alcove inside the front door he switched on the alarm at its main console and hurried along the entrance hallway into the kitchen before the time-lapse ran out and the place was filled with a lattice-work of orange laser beams reflecting the particles of drifting dust. At the interior door at the back of the kitchen he programmed another control panel and went down into the garage before another set of lasers kicked in.
The garage was big and spacious, cooler than the house. The air seemed thicker. It smelled of oil and decaying grass cuttings. A long strip light operated by a dangling cord revealed two cars side by side but didn’t penetrate to the walls where a host of untidily cluttered shelves and stacks of boxes and garden machinery lurked in the shadows. Randolph moved past the big red Mercedes and slipped into the driver’s seat of the white Vauxhall Corsa. He pulled the sun visor down and the ignition keys dropped into his hand. He checked his watch again. Exactly on schedule.
With the engine running quietly, he flicked the remote control that started the door tilting. He couldn’t hear the sound of the motor that slowly opened it, showing him the familiar driveway and the grey evening as though somebody was taking a hand away from in front of his eyes. Ahead of him between the two stone gateposts he saw the shape of another small car. He flashed his headlights and the other car returned the message, sending its beams of light off at right angles, pointing the way to be followed and momentarily illuminating in silhouette its lone driver.
Now as Randolph edged his car forward out of the garage the nervousness that he had successfully suppressed while he was getting ready to leave began to affect him. He had to grip the steering wheel tightly to stop his hands trembling. The plastic squeezed them, made them feel uncomfortably dry. He was breathing rapidly, pushing himself back into the driving seat. His stomach felt hollow and his bowels uncomfortably loose. His heartbeat accelerated violently. A sudden stabbing pain in his left shoulder made him wince and reach up to relieve it by pressing hard. The woollen hat made his scalp sweat and when he tried to scratch it his rubber-capped fingers got tangled in his hair and didn’t make much difference. He was on the main road and heading into the city at an even pace, well within the speed limit.
Behind him the garage door was folding back into the closed position. It would be simple again tonight, he told himself. Nothing would go wrong. They would come through again and he would have another little trophy to add to his collection in the cupboard.
Randolph had assumed that after a few times he would become hardened and less fearful. But it wasn’t turning out like that at all. Each time he went out on the Saturday night trips it seemed to get a little worse. He shifted another notch towards outright terror and panic. The odds against them getting caught were shortening with every outing. He realised that. He had taken that into account at the beginning and he wasn’t going to let it stop him no matter how bad it got. That was the best bit of the game anyway. Joan wouldn’t have understood but that didn’t matter now. He didn’t have to explain himself to anyone any more. Wasn’t life grand?
Chapter Two
Saturday, 23.22
Sixty-two, sixty-three. With slow, measured strokes Zena McElhose brushed the mare’s tail of silvery grey hair that hung over her shoulder and almost down to her waist. It would be one hundred and twenty strokes for the topside and then the same number for the underside. She had performed the same ritual virtually every night since she was a little girl. Her hair was fine and lustrous. Its whiteness carried with it a certain kind of elegance, the beauty of maturity and experience, symbol of a long life lived wisely and productively. If only now she was able to go back to being a young woman again, to reverse the ageing process that had already taken her beyond her biblical allotted span. If only the silver could be turned back to auburn, and the lines on her face and neck smoothed out, and the dull aching in her ancient bones quietened. If only. If only.
The bedroom seemed to be doubled in size by the number of mirrors. It w
as one of her self-indulgent vanities: she liked to watch herself when she was alone. She could sit for hours, virtually motionless, trying to catch out the several images by surreptitiously moving a finger that was not part of the reflections. But it was impossible to defeat them as they could so easily defeat her by growing old in front of her eyes. She certainly didn’t feel old. Her heart beat powerfully, the blood flowed freely, her mind was undimmed. She was a lonely widow, sitting all alone in her big mansion house with all of her friends dead and her family living far away. She could travel, of course. She was fit enough and could afford it, and she did. But she didn’t like to stray too far from home too often, not now. She had intended to take the train down to London to see her granddaughter Carole. It had been all arranged for the previous night but she had changed her mind at the last moment on the platform with the tickets in her hand. No real reason. Just a whim. She wanted to stay at home. It was her prerogative. She controlled her own life.
The sad widow McElhose, sitting at her dressing-table in her yellow silk robe surrounded by mirrors and perfumes and beauty aids, let the hair fall from her fingers. It fanned cool air against her cheek. Mustn’t get morbid, she thought. Mustn’t get morose. She had plenty to be thankful for. She was rich and the investment portfolio long-suffering Sidney had bequeathed her was growing nicely. The regular meeting with her lawyer had been a pleasant one on Friday afternoon. If you were the Chancellor the country would be in a far better state, he had joked. Big Gregor always flattered her, always took time to make a fuss of her in his office. She liked it when people took trouble over her. Another of her vanities. It was a harmless failing.
She had her health too, which was more than poor little Lorna in the old lodge by the gates had. A tiny girl, only three years old yet she would almost certainly die soon and there was nothing anybody could do to help her. An expensively dressed old woman with long silver hair wound tightly into a bun would weep at her funeral.