And this disclosure brought the mother to the point of the most bitter sorrow, and Mrs Emmer sobbed wretchedly into her hands for the son she now knew she had lost. And then the realisation that he had actually been wrenched forcibly from her by the hand of another human being struck at her heart, and she somehow managed to cry even harder. Her husband stared ahead, his grinding teeth managing to make him appear more angry than recently bereaved.
‘Would you like some tea, Mrs Emmer? Shall I put the kettle on?’ asked Kanjaria gently.
Her husband answered for her. ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid,’ he shouted. ‘Our son’s just been murdered and all you can think of is guzzling tea. And don’t you dare put your hand on my wife’s shoulder,’ he barked again, shaking his finger. Mr Emmer did not think to offer comfort to his wife by cuddling her himself. ‘How did Sebastian die?’
Hart answered calmly, remaining unruffled for the sake of the wife and also because he recognised it was only fair to make concessions to a father whose son’s brain had recently been exposed to the gaze of the world. ‘He was found lying in an alley this evening. It appears he was hit on the head with a hard object.’
‘It appears? Don’t you bloody well know, man?’
‘We know very little as yet, which is why I would like to ask you just a few questions; we want to find the person who did this as quickly as possible. And then we’ll leave you in peace.’
‘Get on with it then.’
‘What time did you expect Sebastian home this evening?’
Surprisingly, it was Mrs Emmer who lifted her head from her hands and spoke. ‘Well, he gets home pretty much when he likes, you see. After all, he’s eighteen and so we don’t feel the need to keep tabs on him too much. Usually he stays at the school, it’s a boarding school of course, but he may come home occasionally, especially at weekends. He comes and goes when he wants to.’
‘Did he have a car?’ asked Hart, although the key found in the lad’s pocket had already told him the answer.
‘Yes. We bought him one for his eighteenth birthday. Quite a nice one, although I’m not sure what kind it is.’ Clive Emmer knew but he wasn’t telling anybody. His abject distress seemed to be embedded inside a brooding bitterness.
‘So why would he have been walking? He was found in an alley, Mrs Emmer. Why didn’t he drive?’
‘I really couldn’t tell you that, I’ve no idea. He will have driven to Lockingham from school, that’s for sure.’ She had stopped crying now. She was almost cheerful. In her subconscious she was talking proudly about a son who was still alive; the previous ten minutes had not happened.
‘Did he have any friends in the area?’
‘He does have a few but I’m not sure where they live. Most of his friends are from school, and that’s a fair way from here. And kids from there come from all over.’
‘Do you mind if we have a quick look in his room?’
‘Well, I don’t mind, but whatever for? There’s nothing up there. I know that because I keep it tidy for him when he’s away. You know, change the sheets, that sort of thing, put his clothes in his drawers, so I know pretty much everything he keeps in his bedroom.’
‘It’s just routine. We won’t be long.’
‘Just go up the stairs and the door’s right opposite when you get to the top.’
‘Nobody’s asked me whether you can snoop around, and it’s my bloody house,’ snorted Clive Emmer, still staring straight ahead.
Now that she had stopped talking, Mrs Emmer began to cry again.
Sebastian Emmer’s bedroom was just like that of any other schoolboy. Well, any other schoolboy of wealthy parents and a mother who keeps it looking as dapper as the barrack-room of a regimental sergeant major. On a desk sat his computer, a pricey one boasting all the top of the range bits and pieces and sockets for this and that. An LED TV connected to a digital recorder stood on a wide shelf next to a docking station which had been used to drive his parents crazy. In the wardrobe hung a collection of shirts, jackets, trousers and a few silk ties with half a dozen pairs of shoes at a hundred pounds a pair neatly arrayed underneath them. The few posters papering the walls were of old rock bands like Led Zeppelin and the Stones, as perversely befitted a modern young man.
Hart knelt down and stuck his head under the bed as Kanjaria pulled open the top drawer of a small cabinet by the boy’s pillow.
‘Got anything?’ he mumbled.
‘Nothing much, Sir. A few coins, pens, pencils. A book: Female Sexual Fantasies Deciphered. And a stack of Mars bars. Must have had a very sweet tooth.’
At the mention of Mars bars, Hart’s head jumped up just enough to hit itself on the bottom of the bed.
‘Ouch,’ he exclaimed as he dragged himself up from his hands and knees; he had never felt the need to generate more colourful expletives in order to appear matey in front of junior colleagues.
As they were delving inside drawers of socks and upmarket underpants, another bedroom door opened and footsteps passed by on the landing. Hart and Kanjaria silently opened the door wide and watched the back of a girl descend the stairs, long blonde hair trailing down a light blue dressing gown. When she reached the living room, they began to hear voices. Hart moved along the landing and poked his head around the girl’s bedroom door. He saw an old fourteen-inch television on a shelf next to a cheap stereo unit. Little stickers of the girl and her friends contorted into zany poses were plastered onto any available spaces. Clothes were slumped over the backs of chairs, and books and garish copies of mizz lay haphazardly on the floor. Pictures of Becks, Justin Bieber and lots of pretty boys pretending to play guitars kept watch.
‘Let’s go,’ said Hart as he returned to the boy’s room. ‘There’s nothing else to see, although that computer will have to be taken away pretty sharpish.’
A voice called up from the hall. ‘How long are you two going to be? We’re not inviting you to stay the bloody night, you know.’
After they had reached the bottom of the staircase, Kanjaria sat down on a stair so that her brown eyes were level with the wretched girl’s red ones.
‘Was Sebastian your brother, Love?’
A single faint nod.
‘We’re so sorry, we really are.’ And the policewoman risked the father’s wrath by rubbing the young girl’s shoulder.
‘Mrs Emmer, just one last little thing,’ said Hart on the way out. ‘Did Sebastian have any illness that you know of?’
‘Illness? No. Nothing, apart from the sniffles we all get at this time of year. He’s always been healthy. Likes his football and rugby, that sort of thing.’
‘No history of diabetes or anything like that?’
‘No, of course not. I’d know about that, wouldn’t I?’
‘Yes, of course you would. Thank you.’
And Mrs Emmer closed the door against a heartless world.
Walking back to the car Hart and Kanjaria said nothing, but as they lowered themselves into the front seats they simultaneously released a pair of huge sighs.
‘I liked your comments to the little girl, Constable. There’s always plenty of sympathy dished out to the parents at times like these, but the siblings who have lost a brother or sister get forgotten.’
‘Thanks, Sir. I’m glad to be out of there, though, that’s for sure. We didn’t learn a lot either, did we?’
‘Nonsense,’ replied Hart. ‘We found out loads of stuff. We found out my rule about bringing a tea waitress along doesn’t always hold true. And the necessity of having a female officer as a sidekick turns out not to be a rock solid law, I think we discovered that.’ Kanjaria smiled as she appreciated him mocking himself. ‘You might as well have been a hermaphrodite from Neptune, it wouldn’t have made any difference in there tonight. Whatever we had done, whoever we had been, Clive Emmer would have despised us, as he seems to despise the world. His wife? She just does as she’s damn well told.’
‘But are we any closer to finding out who killed him, Sir?’ After all, this w
as a murder enquiry, and Kanjaria’s young voice was tinted with excitement.
‘Well, there’s always a chance that the lad’s computer will tell us something. And all that chocolate you found in his drawer makes me think a little idea that’s been rattling around in my head might not be completely daft, but I’ll tell you about that on the way back to the station,’ he added as he started the car.
*****
Hart settled himself down in his office and set his mind pondering about the little he knew regarding the case so far, and also whether he should get the kettle on for a cuppa before he went home. His musings were interrupted by a familiar clicking noise advancing along the corridor, which stopped as the pair of shoes reached his open office door.
‘Harry, I’m glad to have caught you,’ said Chief Superintendent Rodgers. ‘You missed out on a very fine dinner.’
‘Yes, sorry I had to leave like that, Sir. But I couldn’t really not turn up to lead a murder investigation just so I could get myself fed.’ Hart quickly decided the Chief deserved a more generous comment. ‘And it was very kind of you. I really do appreciate you inviting me along like that.’
‘Not at all, Harry. And you’re right that you had no choice about leaving, especially when a youngster has been murdered. But Patricia Luft was sad to see you go. You seemed to be getting on so well together.’
‘Sir?’
‘Harry?’
‘Her ex-husband is in the nick because I put him there.’
‘Exactly. Ex-husband. That water has well and truly flowed under the bridge. She divorced him as soon as she found out what he had been up to. And now she’s become a school governor, wants to be elected to her town council and is fast becoming a pillar of her local community.’ Rodgers gave the side of his nose a couple of conspiratorial taps. ‘And we took some time to have a little chat about you after you had gone.’
Hart didn’t fancy encouraging that line of conversation. ‘What’s caused you to nip into the station, Sir? I thought you would have gone straight home after your dinner.’
The Chief shuffled from foot to foot, looking sheepish. ‘Had to pick up some work. Well, best be off, my wife’s waiting in the car. Goodnight, Harry.’
‘Goodnight, Sir.’
As the clicking shoes moved away from his door, Hart smiled. Since the Chief’s hands were empty and he was walking towards the stairs which led to the station’s exit, perhaps he had forgotten that work he had come to pick up. After all, he surely couldn’t be so suspicious of Hart that he had popped by just to make sure that he hadn’t made up the story of the murder to get himself away from the dinner.
*****
Hart drove himself home, picked up a couple of brown envelopes from the hall doormat, chucked them unopened onto the kitchen table and went straight upstairs. Toilet, teeth, bed.
He was hungry after missing out on his fancy seafood dinner but, more than that, he was exhausted. Absolutely knackered. It wasn’t so much physically, but these things take a mental toll like nothing else on Earth. Murder. Bereavement. Supporting and encouraging the other police officers. Doing the same for anonymous families. Encountering every emotion known to humanity, and a few more besides. And you’re in charge of the whole blessed show. Everybody’s looking at you, expecting you to track down the killer of a young man, a boy really, just starting out on life. If you caught him, well then you were only doing your job so you couldn’t expect anyone to pat you on the back for that. And if you didn’t get this monster behind bars, then you had let them all down. You had failed family, friends, the force, the community; everybody who was looking to you to get justice done, to make the world a better, fairer and safer place. That was the burden of leading a murder investigation, and only a very few understood just what lonely work it was.
After hauling himself into bed and pulling up the covers to his chin, Hart leaned over and clutched the photo on his bedside cabinet. His eyes studied the smiling woman as she sat among the flowers in the garden, looking so beautiful to him in the happy summer sunshine of her life.
He whispered to her, as he did every night before he turned off the light. ‘Why did you have to leave me, Maggie old girl? Why did you have to go? You know I loved you so much. Still do. Always will.’
Hart kissed her, and then gently placed her back on her perch overlooking the bed. He pressed the switch on the bedside lamp, rolled over, and eventually drifted away into a heavy but troubled sleep.
6
The following morning Hart arrived at the police station car park bang on time to pick up Redpath for the journey to Highdean School. The price he paid for his punctuality was to miss out on the bumper breakfast, including a pile of mushrooms that were turning decidedly mangy, which he had promised to cook for himself that morning. He stayed behind the steering wheel since he would do the driving, as he always liked to do, with Redpath settling into the seat beside him.
‘I hear you took that new girl to the Emmers’ place last night,’ noted Redpath, starting them off on a subject which interested him. ‘It’s good to have an Asian working at the factory.’ He turned his head to the right and winked. ‘Especially when she’s drop-dead gorgeous.’
‘She’s not Asian, Darren, wherever her ancestors may have come from. She’s British. If she wasn’t she could hardly have joined up to a British police force now, could she? Think about it. Centuries ago, your forebears may have sailed over to this idyllic isle from Normandy or Germany. Just because they hauled themselves out of a Baltic bog you wouldn’t expect people to say, It’s good to have a Saxon working at the factory, would you?’
‘So what’s on the programme of events today then, Guv?’ enquired Redpath with a yawn after having his ignorance of ethnography put right.
‘Call me that again and you’ll be walking to school.’
‘Sorry, Sir.’
Hart prodded a button on the dashboard to silence the news on the radio; more journalists and minor politicians prattling on about horrors committed in faraway places.
‘First we have a word with the head, someone called Annalee Hargreaves, and then we interview as many teachers and pupils as we can get through today. There’ll be other coppers arriving later and they can take a fair bit of the workload, but I want you or me to see all the staff who taught him, and the boy’s best friends, those who were closest to him.’
‘Anything to look out for in particular?’ Another yawn.
‘Nope. A plain sheet of paper is what we’re writing on at the moment, but I reckon we’ll have something jotted down on it before the morning’s over, even if it’s only a bit of scrawl. And you’re not picking up a sergeant’s salary to spend your time taking a holiday in the land of Nod, Darren, so you can put that idea out of your head right now.’
As the sergeant lifted himself up out of his slouch he thought he was entitled to a bit of revenge. ‘Did you enjoy that seafood dinner last night, Sir? What there was of it, I mean.’
‘Stop taking the blooming mickey. You know full well that when I’m out with people like that I feel as comfortable as if I’m sitting in a sauna wearing a towel that’s been steeped in itching powder. I somehow can’t stop wriggling and sweating.’
‘I don’t know why, Sir. You’re a bright chap, very bright if popular opinion’s to be believed, and as good as any of them.’
They were travelling south towards London beneath a crisp starry heaven, with the large crescent Moon rising on their left telling them the sky wouldn’t be brightening for another hour or so.
‘Perhaps the brain’s still in fairly good nick, but bright isn’t posh. Not the same thing at all. God only knows what the Chief was doing trying to pair me up with Patricia Luft like that, and he’s not telling. It was me that got her husband banged up, for heaven’s sake.’
‘Perhaps the Chief thinks there’s a chance she may actually like you, perhaps he’s trying to do you a favour in his clumsy sort of way. Have you ever thought of that?’
‘What! No I blin
king well haven’t.’ Hart darted a shocked expression to his left. ‘Patricia Luft is rich, divorced from that old money-bags of a lawyer who was put away for sticking his hand into the pocket of a multinational; she speaks English like it should be spoken, is more likely to drop her drawers than an aitch; and she understands the foreign bits on a menu.’
‘Never be surprised by women and what gets them hot. Think about all the females who drool over me, for instance.’
‘I’d rather not. It’s coming up on the left.’ Hart changed the subject with relief, and an abruptness which caught his passenger off guard.
‘What is?’ asked Redpath as he furrowed his brow.
‘The sign. We’ve just passed it. We have now crossed over the frontier which segregates us coarse bumpkins from the suave sophisticates of Greater London, and have therefore placed ourselves into the loving and tender arms of a police force which, despite compiling a catalogue of farcical and tragic catastrophes, still looks in the mirror and perceives the world’s most wondrous constabulary. Welcome to Metroland.’
A few minutes later, at just after a quarter past seven, they drove past another notice, this one declaring that they had arrived at Highdean School: A prestigious school for day and boarding pupils between the ages of 11 to 18 years. Headteacher: Mrs Annalee Hargreaves, BA (Hons.), MA (Cantab.). The fees required to place your child under Mrs Hargreaves’ care and guidance were not displayed, but they were known to be pricey to say the least. Hart nestled the car into the parking space nearest the main door and they braved the freezing air.
Hart and Redpath followed the arrows to reception, guessing correctly that the Head’s office would be somewhere close by. There was nobody about at that time of the morning, prompting obvious exchanges about the security of the place, so they sat on a pair of comfy chairs and waited.
Their eyes panned around an administrative block which was the nerve centre of the school. No teaching was done here but it was where the queen bee lived and from where the orders and messages emanated which allowed the rest of the colony to function. Were it to flounder, then the whole nest would wither away from the inside. The walls were swathed with framed documents from eminent bodies proclaiming the excellence of the institution, and from grateful charities lauding its generosity.
Dead Unlucky Page 4