by William Paul
Sapalski looked down on the pathetic dead body of Zena McElhose. This was different. This was not suicide. It was a killing and any idea that it might have been an accident caused by her falling and striking her head on a sharp corner somewhere was easily dismissed. Evidence for that would have been immediately obvious but the kitchen was immaculately clean and ordered with not a pot or pan out of place. The violence was contained closely around the huddled body on the floor and he was in charge of finding out what had happened, the first time he had had to call the shots in a murder investigation as opposed to simply following orders. A few years from now he would look back on it as a character-building experience. In the meantime, with the shock of death and the weight of responsibility, he would be doing well to keep the contents of his hurried breakfast down.
Sapalski stood up slowly and turned to face the two uniforms who were with him in the kitchen and the big bruiser of an odd job man who had found the body. Forensic were on their way. The crime scene was sealed. He reached out and flicked off the gurgling coffee machine with a fingernail. He hadn’t forgotten anything.
The big man had been standing at the front of the house when Sapalski had arrived simultaneously with the uniforms in a dramatic hee-hawing of sirens and spray of gravel. In his bare feet, he had taken them down a side path and in the back door to show them the mortal remains of poor Mrs McElhose. Now he stood uneasily in front of Sapalski, refusing to look at him directly, opening and closing his huge fists. Sapalski tried to find some fellow feeling for their shared Polish heritage but there was no empathy there, no acknowledgement, no easy banter about where their parents and grandparents hailed from. He didn’t want to be prejudiced against the big man but it was hard. There was an emptiness in his eyes. He looked dangerous. He had to be a suspect.
‘You found her as she is lying now, Mr Ramensky?’
‘No. Marianne found her.’
‘Ah yes. Your wife found her. It is your wife, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Common law wife.’
‘And she keeps her own name.’
‘We like it that way.’
Marianne Dunne was being questioned by Detective Sergeant Graham Blair. She was too distressed to return to the big house, she said. Sapalski couldn’t handle weeping women. He was glad to delegate the job to Blair. Let her pull herself together a bit before he had to face her.
‘She comes up every morning to make Mrs McElhose’s breakfast,’ Ramensky was explaining. ‘The key is under the frog at the door. I heard her scream. I came running up. This is what I saw.’
‘What exactly is your role in the household?’
‘I do the gardens, a bit of painting. Sometimes I would drive her to the shops.’ He shrugged. ‘I work elsewhere as a security guard.’
‘And your wife was the housekeeper?’
‘Something like that. She only did breakfast.’
‘Not evening meals.’
‘Never in the evening.’
‘Why not?’
‘She had to stay in. I work in the evenings mostly. Besides, Mrs McElhose liked to be on her own without fuss.’
‘You said your wife had to stay in. Why?’
‘Our daughter Lorna.’
‘How old is Lorna?’
‘Three.’
‘No grandparents? No babysitters? Couldn’t she come up here as well?’
‘No. Lorna is ill and can never be left alone. One of us always has to be with her.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
Ramensky lifted his head and stared straight at Sapalski. His mouth flickered in a sneer then his body settled into a posture of weary resignation with his fists loosely clenched by his sides. Sapalski wished he hadn’t asked the question. He was due to be a father soon. His wife was heavily pregnant. He constantly dreamed about healthy babies and rosy-cheeked young children bouncing on his knee. He regarded his wife’s swollen stomach containing the promise of new life with awe and reverence. Now he was going to hear about an alternative version of fatherhood and it was going to be horrible.
‘Because she could die at any moment. She has leukaemia.’
The nausea forced its way back up Sapalski’s throat. He coughed and a liquid squirted against the inside of his mouth. He had to swallow it again, trying not to make too much of a show of how distasteful it was. Now it was his turn to avoid eye contact, regretting his aggressive line of questioning. He rubbed his dry lips and half turned to face a door he hadn’t noticed before. He needed to change the subject.
‘Have you checked the rest of the house?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t gone beyond the kitchen,’ Ramensky said. ‘I never thought. It’s only been an hour since we called.’
The uniforms shook their heads to confirm they hadn’t looked further either. There was a knock on the outer door and the doctor arrived with the first of the forensic team. An unwieldy stainless steel box was lugged over beside the dead body and the doctor began surveying it with detached professional curiosity. Sapalski went over to the other door. Ramensky followed him, moving disconcertingly lightly for such a big man.
‘Where does it lead?’ Sapalski asked.
‘It comes out behind the main staircase at the entrance hall.’
Sapalski went through slowly, feeling vaguely absurd but unwilling to rush it just in case there really was a psychotic murderer lying in wait for his next victim. The hall was empty. Its arched ceiling was reflected dully in the polished marble floor tiles. Carved wooden doorways, antique tables and coat stands lined the walls. There was a hollow elephant’s foot full of umbrellas and walking-sticks. A life-size porcelain Dalmatian watched him with a haughty expression. A huge mirror in an ornate gilt frame made the dog one of a pair and doubled the size of the place. Beside Sapalski the stairs rose to the first floor, slightly tarnished brass carpet rods slotted across each step. At the other end of the hall a door with stained glass in its top half was ajar, giving on to a large alcove with the main outside door behind it. Ramensky grunted and pointed to the alcove. Sapalski followed the line of his finger and saw what was holding the inner door open. It was the sole of a shoe, attached to an ankle.
Sapalski ran forward. He did not hear Ramensky beside him but knew he was there. The door opened freely to reveal a body face down on the floor, one arm outstretched ahead of it, fingers curled round a large-headed mallet used for tenderising meat. The first thought into Sapalski’s head was that it was like the Statue of Liberty in overalls, the second that it was like a swimmer doing the front crawl. His third thought was more of a question. Why did the body have a head knitted out of wool? The answer, he realised, was that it was wearing a terrorist-style balaclava.
Sapalski knelt down, noticing more and more details. The overalls were cheap and shiny. The outstretched hand looked waxen and barely human. The fingers did not seem to be quite grasping the mallet properly. There was blood on the jagged surface of the mallet head. He had found murderer and murder weapon in another clearly defined pool of latent violence, contained by unaffected ordinary surroundings like the victim back in the kitchen. But there was no obvious wound on this man. What had killed him?
‘He’s not dead,’ Ramensky said.
‘What?’
‘Look. He’s still breathing.’
Sapalski pulled the overall collar down and the balaclava up to the chin, searching for a pulse on the side of the neck. He found it, a very faint beat of blood but enough to show he was indeed still alive. Sapalski rolled the man on to his back, stripped the balaclava from his face and began to give him the kiss of life.
‘Get an ambulance,’ he shouted between breaths, sensing that Ramensky was still standing over him.
And as Sapalski blew more air through the cold lips of the motionless body he saw a bloated bluish-green bruise on its pale forehead and a trickle of blood that seemed to come from the corner of an eye, like a tear. And as he lowered his lips on to the cold flesh of the unconscious man he was able to make out the outl
ine in sweat of a bare footprint on the tiles just in front of the impassive Dalmatian’s paws. Within the space of three deep breaths and exhalations the footprint had evaporated and vanished.
Chapter Nine
Sunday, 10.20
The hymn-singing was slow and frustrating, ponderous voices struggling to maintain a decent pace through the verses. Maureen Gilliland stood alone in her family pew with the hymn book laid flat in the palm of her right hand and moved her lips without uttering a sound to compete with the wheezing of the organ, the creaking of the upright wooden-walled pews, and the rhythmic moaning of the congregation. The hymn book wasn’t open at the right page anyway.
Looking out over the top of her half-moon glasses she saw the minister as a roly-poly black and white smudge above the shifting landscape of hats and balding heads. Her short-sightedness caused the back-lit cross hanging above the pulpit to lose its branching arms and become a single shaft of fuzzy light like the flame trail of a rocket taking off. The pair of stained glass windows behind were patchworks of multi-coloured sunshine. The arched ceiling flowing from the line of tall stone pillars was a grey blur of solidity, as though somebody had stuffed the roof space with cotton wool.
Maureen’s thoughts were wholly unsynchronised with her outward appearance of a middle-aged woman in her Sunday best dress at morning service. All she could think of as the people around her in the church praised the Lord was how she desperately wanted to break one of the ten commandments: Thou shalt not commit adultery. She wanted to and she wanted to do it with her long-time boss, Valentine Randolph. She had come to church that morning all puffed up with courage to lean forward to the row in front where he always sat, tap him on the shoulder and whisper secretly that she was ready now. Of course, it wasn’t just to be one of those fleeting secretary-boss things. They had been together too long for that. More than twenty years, and she pretended to herself she had enough Christian respect to suppress her desires and wait for a proper interval after the death of his wife. Technically, it would not be adultery, of course, because he was a widower and she was unmarried. But it would feel like adultery because the desire had been with her for so long. He was free now, and so was she; free to declare her love and surrender herself to him.
Except he wasn’t there. She had never known him not to be there on a Sunday morning when he had nothing else planned. It was totally out of character. Unless there was a good reason he always attended church, and she knew there wasn’t one because she presided over his diary, both social and business. This weekend had been a normal one. He hadn’t been booked to go anywhere.
Maureen, vicious butterflies thrashing about in her stomach, had anticipated returning to his house and letting him make love to her there. He might have been shocked at her forwardness, but no doubt delighted. He had propositioned her after all, blatantly tearing down the formal barrier that had separated them as employer and employee. He had made the first move. She had hesitated but now she was keen to seal the bond between them with a rush of physical energy.
She had never married, never even slept with a man in her forty-two years. Valentine knew that. He had told her he knew that and it made her doubly exciting for him. She had thought sex was something she would never experience and it had not seemed that great a sacrifice, but just lately it had been nagging at her again, distracting her. Dormant hormones were stirring unaccountably, and then there was Valentine, the man whom she now realised she regarded as a husband in every sense but the biological one. He had changed radically since his wife’s death, become more extrovert, more demonstrative, more accessible. He touched her when previously he scrupulously avoided contact. He kissed her. He made suggestions. Sometimes he worried her. He told her what he wanted to do to her and she trembled with the force of the wicked desire it kindled inside her.
Why should she not go for it? Time was short and she craved excitement. She had taken stock of a blameless life and was ready to embrace sin eagerly, unable to convince herself that sexual love was not a sin. She had her mother to look after, but no other ties. There was the possibility of marriage, children even. Why not? Hopefully, Val would want the same.
The singing ended. The creaking pews became the loudest noise until the minister held up his hand like a traffic warden to give the valedictory benediction. At the signal word Amen the organ started playing again and he set off down the aisle to place himself four-square in the doorway to shake hands with each of his departing audience in turn. Only those right at the back had the opportunity to escape before he got into position. Everybody else had to wait in the slowly shuffling queue.
Maureen waited with the rest, not joining in the small talk, telling herself that her intended lover was not trying to avoid her and that there would be a simple explanation for his absence. He was not the only person missing from the church, after all. Gregor Runciman, Val’s partner in the law firm, wasn’t there either. And Zena McElhose, occupier of a pew right at the front, was another regular attender conspicuous by her absence. The firm handled her investments and business affairs. Val often spoke of her in affectionate terms, but Maureen had presumed it was because she was such a valuable client. Mrs McElhose was a widow, much older than Maureen, of course, but reasonably well preserved. Old friends sometimes found they had a lot more in common than they realised. Was it just a coincidence she and Val weren’t at church? Maureen and Mrs McElhose were both on the flower-arranging rota for the church. Sometimes, for major services at Christmas and Easter, they worked together. They didn’t speak much. They didn’t have much in common. Perhaps Val had turned to her for comfort in his widowhood. Perhaps they were lying in bed together at that very moment, caressing each other, kissing, touching. Maureen closed her eyes and tried to force the image out of her mind but it wouldn’t go. Jealousy made the muscles in her thighs twitch.
‘Ah, Miss Gilliland. I hope you are well.’
The minister was holding Maureen’s hand in both of his, rubbing it gently. Close up his round face, speckled with tiny blood vessels behind the beard, came into sharp focus. She regretted putting on too much lipstick and eye make-up and dyeing her hair. He must surely notice and suspect her true motivation. He was probably thinking what a brazen hussy she was.
‘You are looking very well this morning, Miss Gilliland. You must let me in on whatever secret it is you have.’
Was he speaking in code? Did he really know what she was thinking? Did he know about Valentine and Zena’s secret affair? Was he mocking her? Maureen muttered something non-committal and hurried past him out into the pale daylight with its watery threat of rain in the air. She went straight to her car, taking off her hat so that the brim didn’t scrape the roof and exchanging her reading glasses for the pair she used for driving. She drove away from the church, feeling her courage dwindle as she did so, knowing that she would no longer have the courage to be sexually assertive if she saw Val coming towards her.
She doubled back and drove past the entrance to his house. There was no sign of life. The garage door was closed, the curtains open at all the windows. She should have been in there, engaged in sinful pleasure, but she wasn’t. Maybe she had been saved from herself. Maybe not. Or maybe Val was ill. Should she go up and knock on the door? What would she say then if he answered? She would say she had been concerned about him. She would say she had missed him at the church. That was respectable. That was friendly. No one could take that amiss.
After five or six passes, Maureen steeled herself sufficiently to park her car in the street and walk up to the door. She rang the bell and listened to its hollow ringing resonate inside. There was no one at home. He must be with Zena. Where else could he be? She had no choice but to turn away, her whole body prickling with a combination of relief, frustration, and jealousy. She sat in her car and wiped off her lipstick with a tissue, glaring impotently at the red stain it made. Tears built up behind her eyes and forced themselves out. Everything around her was transformed into one amorphous blur. She removed her
glasses and lowered her head. The tears began to drop from the point of her nose on to her hands.
Chapter Ten
Sunday, 12.43
A seven iron again. David Fyfe had decided what club to use before he walked up to his ball on the edge of the fairway and went through the rigmarole of estimating distance and tossing some grass in the air to check the wind strength. The seven iron was always the club he used when he managed to land on a fairway. He was comfortable with it, confident he could at the very least make decent contact between club head and ball and move it forward in the desired direction. He didn’t want to start getting too smart now and worry overmuch about the subtler nuances of the game. He was striding down the eighteenth fairway at Gleneagles, one up with one to play. His drive had been left of the trees. His second an arrow-straight seven iron leaving him with a simple one hundred yard approach shot to the green ahead. He would take the seven once more. It was too much club but he would hold back a bit. He had never before won a tie at the challenge outing. Whatever happened he couldn’t lose but he wanted to win. This was his best chance. Dun Roamin, the hole was called. ‘Don’t blow it now,’ he kept repeating to himself. ‘Don’t blow it now.’
On the right side of the fairway Eric Bradley was up to his knees in the rough, cursing under his breath as he tried to find a firm stance in the damp grass. Bradley had changed from his normal happy-go-lucky self on the back nine as his game had collapsed about him. Five up at the turn he was now one behind and in a foul mood. It was not because Fyfe had played particularly well, just steadily. He had achieved only one hole in par in the entire round, but it had been at the sixteenth, Lochan Loup, the hardest hole on the course, and it had been a real sickener for Bradley when the ball soared over the water in front of the green and rolled to within ten feet of the flag. Bradley’s early run of three birdies in a row on the front nine had him jumping in the air and clicking his heels but it had been cancelled out by another run when he couldn’t get below seven strokes a hole. That was when the clubs started to be slammed into the turf. By contrast Fyfe enjoyed the Perthshire scenery, regarding his sclaffed drives and fluffed chips with equanimity.