The DCI David Fyfe Mysteries

by William Paul

  ‘The doctors tried everything,’ Marianne repeated. ‘They can’t say for sure but she’s probably got about six months left. That’s why I never leave her for long. The drug doses just kill the pain now. They’re not fighting the cancer itself any more. It was too much for Lorna. Her hair fell out, her gums were bleeding, all the usual sort of things. It was killing her. Literally. But there’s always hope, isn’t there? Miracles have been known to happen. We’re patiently waiting for one to happen to us.’

  ‘Marianne,’ Sapalski said. ‘May I call you Marianne?’

  ‘Of course you may.’ She sat rocking slightly with her arms wrapped loosely round her child, smiling faintly. Would he take it so well if he was in her position? Pin-points of light reflected on the pupils of the little girl’s glossy brown eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to bother you, Marianne, but I really do have to ask about Mrs McElhose.’

  He gestured back over his shoulder with a clumsy flick of his head, meaning to indicate the big house at the end of the drive. He didn’t want to mention death or dead bodies while Lorna was looking at him so intensely. The words would have stuck in his throat.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I know you’ve already done it for another officer but can you just tell me in your own words how you came to find Mrs McElhose?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  She told him, explaining the sequence of events in coherent sentences that left nothing out. She showed him the cuts on the soles of her feet now covered with sticking plasters. She was so relaxed sitting there with her dying daughter clinging to her and watching the stranger anxiously. There was a serenity about the mother, Sapalski thought. It was suggestive of sainthood or martyrdom. She would probably have gone through an angry phase, then suicidal, then maybe apathetic. And here she was in front of him, still waiting, perhaps still changing. How many more phases might there be?

  ‘Did Mrs McElhose have many friends?’

  ‘Not a huge number. She was a church member. Sometimes people would come back for afternoon tea. Not often. She liked her own company mostly.’

  ‘Family?’

  ‘Spread to the four winds. They kept in touch. Regular letters and phone calls. She used to visit them quite a lot. They’re being informed, your colleague said. A granddaughter lives in London. Her name is Carole, I think.’

  ‘She was a widow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Long?’

  ‘As long as we’ve been here and that’s five years now, before Lorna was born.’

  ‘How old was she?’

  ‘Over seventy, I think.’

  ‘Did she have any . . .’

  Sapalski struggled to find an alternative description for boyfriends. It seemed completely inappropriate to talk about boyfriends and a woman of seventy. Lorna made a tiny mewing sound, like an injured kitten. Sapalski wanted to reach out and comfort her. Her mother glanced down fondly and began to rock her animatedly.

  ‘Do you mean were there any gentlemen callers?’ she said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘No. I don’t think so anyway. I only did breakfast for her and the cleaning, but I would have seen the cars go up the drive. No, she was the epitome of respectability. There was the minister but he doesn’t count, does he?’

  Sapalski laughed with her and imagined he saw the ghost of a smile flit across little Lorna’s face.

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t leave us much to go on.’

  ‘What about the man behind the front door?’

  Sapalski shook his head. In the model investigative scenario, she wouldn’t have known what he knew about the man behind the door. But she had seen the ambulance, of course, and she had been allowed to talk to her husband Sandy who had been with Sapalski when they found him. Ideally, they should have been kept apart until separate statements had been taken from them. He should have engineered that but it was too late now. She hadn’t been aware of the stranger before Sandy told her, she said.

  ‘Any idea who he is?’ he asked.

  ‘None. Have you?’

  ‘A housebreaker?’

  ‘Are balaclava and overalls not a bit melodramatic for a simple thief?’

  ‘An over-dressed housebreaker disturbed in the act,’ Sapalski suggested.

  ‘Why did he kill her then?’

  ‘Panic. He didn’t mean to. She was old and frail. The blow wouldn’t have killed a younger, stronger person.’

  ‘And who knocked him out?’

  ‘His partner? Or he was alone and fell and hit his head in the scramble to escape? Have there been any other housebreakings in this area recently?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I’ll check that.’

  Lorna coughed and her entire little body trembled with the aftershock. Her eyes blinked slowly and then she was watching Sapalski once more. He noticed a darker patch of skin on the contour of her jawbone and wondered if it was caused by the cancer inside her.

  ‘If that’s all, Inspector, I’ll put Lorna to bed. She likes me to lie down with her until she falls asleep. I like it too.’

  Sapalski stood up as Marianne left the room. He felt guilty that he was glad she was going, glad he didn’t have to look at the dying child any longer. She was really getting to him. He had written hardly anything in his notebook, just a series of unfinished sentences and meaningless doodles. He was reminding himself to phone his pregnant wife and ask how she was when Sandy Ramensky was shown in for the next interview session.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sunday, 13.04

  David Fyfe’s parked car rocked in the sudden slipstream of an articulated lorry that was travelling too fast as it came into the lay-by. The wheels locked and squealed, skidding on the greasy surface, spitting out little chips of stones. Black marks appeared behind it on the tarmac, like fingers clawing to prevent it going over the edge. The sound rose to a crescendo and then stopped abruptly. The lorry came to a halt, its line broken by the obtuse angle of the beginning of a jack-knife. The air brakes gasped. Vapour rose from the tyres, accumulating in the wheel arches and then sliding up the grey canvas sides blazoned in huge red lettering with the legend Steady, Safe and Sure pierced by a yellow bolt of lightning.

  ‘What on earth was that?’ Angela asked over the phone.

  ‘Nothing really,’ Fyfe replied. ‘An accident that didn’t happen.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘On the motorway.’

  ‘Am I distracting you?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ he lied.

  ‘Times have changed then.’

  Fyfe regained a little of the composure that had deserted him when Angela’s voice had so unexpectedly invaded the car. He was, he told himself, confident he could handle this latest complication in his life. He had it all sussed out. Angela, his partner in crime, had as much to lose as him so she wouldn’t make trouble. She was the scorpion and he was the fox swimming across the river, each dependent on the other as the old proverb said. Only in the proverb the scorpion stung the fox. Why did you do it, the fox asked? Because it’s my nature, the scorpion said. And they both drowned.

  ‘So we’ll have lunch then?’ Angela said.

  ‘If I can get away.’

  ‘You’ll get away.’ The way she said it, it sounded like an order. ‘You can’t stand up an old friend, an old lover.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘What? To stand me up?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Good, better, best. Never let it rest, till your good is better and your better’s best. It’s a rhyme I learned at my old primary school. Funny how you remember things like that, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. Funny.’

  Fyfe remembered all sorts of things about Angela. They went a long way back. He had first met her to inform her of the untimely death of her husband, an armed robber called Mad Mike Barrie who preferred to blow his own head off and incinerate more than one million pounds in used notes rather tha
n surrender to the police. One thing led to another and, since Fyfe was going through a difficult episode with his wife Sally at the time, he and Angela ended up consoling each other in the biblical, not the professional sense. That had been the first time, a time so far in the distance he thought of it in black and white rather than Technicolor.

  Fast forward to almost a decade later when Barrie’s sidekick, John Adamson, the one without the death wish, got out of prison and Barrie’s big-time brother decided the cash hadn’t gone up in smoke and went looking for him so that he could return it to Angela, the grieving widow, and have her say thank you very much. And then there was Fyfe stumbling across this situation, in among the glittering shards of shattered glass and the stiffening of dying bodies and blood blooms floating sedately in a swimming pool like underwater cumulus clouds. There he came face to face with Angela for the second time, standing beside a pile of black plastic bags stuffed with used banknotes. He remembered she was wearing exactly the same kind of short black figure-hugging dress that Hilary had worn at the party only the night before when his head was trying to get round Zeno’s paradoxes and old Zena whatshername was being murdered elsewhere to add an extra dimension of intrigue to the riddle. Funny how things that happened around him always seemed to fit into some kind of weird, incomprehensible pattern.

  Anyway, it was just over a year since he had done his duty, turned Angela and the money in, written up his report and lived happily ever after. Except, ever the sucker for a damsel in distress, he had done the opposite. His dogs, not even born when he had first comforted Angela, had taken kindly to her so she couldn’t be all bad. He had hurried her and the money away from the scene of carnage, then slept with her to confirm her innocence of involvement in murder and his own weakness for carnality at moments of stress. And he had sent her on her way at dead of night on the sleeper in the direction of Europe. In return she had given him one of the suitcases full of cash, the great bulk of which he still had hidden in biscuit boxes under the floor of his garden shed. Bloody hell, talk about a night to remember.

  Now Angela was back in his life for the third time, whispering in his ear while he sat at the side of a busy motorway and in front of him the driver of an almost out of control articulated lorry kicked a smoking tyre. Fyfe switched on the air conditioning to keep out the smell of burning rubber. Good things always came in threes, he thought. And bad things.

  ‘My treat,’ Angela said. ‘At the Caledonian. One o’clock.’

  ‘You’re not short of a bob or two then? I mean, it’s not cheap at the Caley.’

  ‘Did you ever know me to worry about money?’

  Fyfe had tried to raise the subject of money with subtlety, but knew he had failed. Now they were both thinking about the weight of those notes straining the plastic of the bags and the sound of the glass being crushed under the soles of their shoes so they had to pick out the specks like bits of silvery grit. Did she want her money back?

  ‘Where are you just now, Angela?’

  ‘I’m in London. A posh hotel in Park Lane. Nothing but the best for me these days.’

  ‘What are you doing with yourself?’

  ‘The usual. By the way, I’m a wife again.’

  ‘Congratulations. How many times is that?’

  ‘Fourth, I think. Or it might be fifth. It’s easy to lose count.’

  ‘Who’s the lucky man?’

  ‘Felippe. He’s a widower, has a big estate near Barcelona and he’s a member of the European Parliament.’

  ‘Sounds cosy.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘So what are you doing over here?’

  ‘I’m with Felippe. We’re part of an official delegation investigating tourist facilities in various countries. It’s just a single day in Edinburgh. We’re flying up on the last shuttle tonight but I can’t get out of the dinner. Besides, I want to look my best for you, David darling. By tomorrow I’ll be all rested and much better company.’

  ‘Just one day here. Are you sure you can fit me in?’

  ‘Definitely. You have special dispensation. I would be extremely upset if we missed each other.’

  Was it a threat? Was she warning him that if he stood her up she would expose him? But then she was guilty too. Was she coming back to reclaim the money she had given him? Was this blackmail?

  ‘So tell me what you are doing with yourself.’

  ‘I’m investigating a murder.’

  ‘A nice juicy one?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. You interrupted me on my way to view the battered corpse.’

  ‘We seem to make a habit of meeting while people are dropping dead around us.’

  It was the first direct reference to the circumstances of their last meeting. The implication of it buzzed in the short silence that followed. They were the only two people in the world who knew their secret. He pictured Angela’s astonished eyes staring at him when he had found her beside the swimming pool surrounded by the dead and dying. Then the eyes had been pleading for his help. He wondered what he would see in them now.

  ‘Is that good or bad?’ he asked.

  ‘Depends who’s dropping dead.’

  ‘As long as it’s not us.’

  ‘You and I are survivors, David.’

  ‘So far, anyway.’

  ‘Look, I’ve got to go. Felippe’s calling me. See you tomorrow. Don’t be late. Good luck with your murder.’

  She was gone before he could say anything else. He was left staring out from the purple car he had bought with a small handful of his stolen money. Tiny pin-points of rain were appearing at widely spaced intervals on the glass of the windscreen. He tried to find some pattern in their arrangement but knew full well it would make no sense.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sunday, 13.29

  Ramensky seemed almost too big for the armchair. He sat awkwardly hunched up with his elbows on his knees and his knuckles pressed together in front of his mouth. He looked over at Sapalski the way his daughter Lorna had, except his eyes were older, wiser, wilier. The skin around them was creased and wrinkled. Underneath hung dark crescent shadows like pencil marks. There was yellow nicotine staining on his fingers but he didn’t produce any cigarettes. Sapalski listened to his story, thinking that he couldn’t trust anything this man told him.

  ‘So that’s it, you’ve no idea who our friend by the front door is?’

  ‘No idea at all,’ Ramensky replied, his words muffled behind his fists.

  ‘Or how he got in?’

  ‘Through a window somewhere, I suppose.’

  ‘The house has a fairly elaborate alarm system. How would he manage that?’

  ‘Don’t know. Nothing’s perfect, is it? Maybe he found the key under the frog?’

  ‘Maybe somebody told him where it was?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Have there ever been break-ins before?’

  ‘No.’

  Sapalski focused his thoughts on the alarm system because he hadn’t considered it before. Now he remembered there was a complicated box of tricks inside the back door. It must have cost a lot, yet these things were easily bypassed by the use of shaving foam and the like if you knew where to squirt it. A cursory inspection of the property had found no sign of any forced entry. The back door key was still under the stone frog. It could have been used to unlock the door and then replaced. Or could old Zena have let her murderer in willingly? Unlikely, given that he was wearing a balaclava, or maybe they were lovers into kinky sex games? At her age? Surely not? The key under the frog was favourite.

  ‘It’s ironic, don’t you agree, Inspector?’ Ramensky said, dropping his hands from his face.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Mrs McElhose’s death.’

  ‘Ironic? In what way?’

  ‘Well, she was old and probably didn’t have very long to go anyway. Then there’s Lorna, who is so young and has her whole life in front of her. Yet she’s going to die soon. And here they were, the old and the young, living within a
few hundred yards of each other. Don’t you think that’s somehow ironic?’

  Sapalski didn’t answer. He couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say. Yes, it was cruelly ironic. Yes, he thought, it’s Sod’s law all right. And he blushed because he wanted to say he was sorry but knew just how futile that would sound. Ramensky was no longer looking at him but right through him.

  ‘When I think about it, I sometimes wonder if it would have been possible to transfer some of her life into Lorna,’ Ramensky said. ‘Not just hers, not just Mrs McElhose, but anybody. There are all these people going about who don’t need it all. Me, for example. Why can’t I just hand over some of my life to my little daughter? I would willingly. I desperately want to but I can’t. I thought about it for a long time and I almost convinced myself I was on to something. It was like when you try to remember something, a name or a place, and it’s a complete blank but you know it’s there, you know it will come to you eventually. That was what I thought for a long time, that the secret to save Lorna would suddenly come to me and it would be so simple and straightforward I wouldn’t be able to understand why I hadn’t thought of it before.’

  Ramensky paused, staring into space. His eyes were pink, pupils gaping black. The chair his large frame was perched on looked like a piece of doll’s furniture behind him. Where Marianne had been serene, Ramensky was angry and bitter. Sapalski sensed the repressed violence emanating from him and it wasn’t a great leap of the imagination to be able to picture him killing Mrs McElhose, lashing out because he believed through warped logic that her death would help his daughter live. It was a motive of sorts. ‘I’m a big man, a powerful man, as you can see,’ Ramensky said. ‘I take after my father. He was second generation. My grandfather came across in 1938 to settle here. I’ve still got relatives in Poland though I’ve never been across. Never felt the urge.’ He stopped talking, cutting himself off in mid-sentence then beginning again a few moments later. ‘When you’re big you don’t feel threatened by many things. People don’t bother you because they know that if they do they’ll come off second best. You always feel you can cope no matter what. That was how I felt all my life. And I’ve been healthy. I’m never ill. So here I am now, a big man and I can’t do a thing to save the life of my baby daughter. All my size, all my strength isn’t worth as much as a fart in a thunderstorm.’