Troubled Midnight

by John Gardner

  “Want you to stay here, Sarn’t Cox.”

  “Sir.”

  “Stay here and get this office sorted, draw stores, look to Mr Turnbull for me. This’ll be our Murder Room. Open a Murder Book. Got it?”

  “Right Chief.” Knowing that he meant her to keep an eye on things.

  “Help Mr Turnbull with getting our billets organised as well.”

  “Sir.”

  Turnbull had been trying to get an edge in, “Oh, there is one other thing…”

  Tommy almost at the door to the street, signalling Dennis Free to follow him, hand out towards Brian, pausing, looking back, and an elderly lady hurrying in, making small ‘oh’ noises. Confused.

  “… There’s a bit of an oddity looking for you. Came here. Sent him on to Portway House.”

  “Oddity?”

  “Hush-hush. Probably because of the Colonel.”

  “Yes. Of course, yes.” His voice rising, “Brian, come on man.”

  Behind them the elderly lady, bent from the waist, a slow mover, was at the front counter. “It’s about my ‘Pooh-Pooh,’” she said. “My Siamese.”

  * * *

  TOMMY GAVE BRIAN the instructions in clean, brittle orders – “You’re clear left so into the Market Square, keep right … keep right … exit left … straight on … what’re those bloody cars doing, playing at Giddy Goat?… straight on.… turn right up here by The Royal Oak … slow down Brian … it’s only about forty yards up here on the left.… Yes.… Behind the ambulance…”

  And they arrived, a bit fast but sliding in neatly behind the slab-sided ambulance with Dennis bringing the other Wolseley to stop almost touching their rear bumper.

  Tommy was out of the car almost before it stopped and Suzie had her door open, just behind him, and Cathy out before either of them. There was a uniformed constable on the door – Portway House in black on the little plaque – who hadn’t had the practise of recognising police vehicles.

  “You can’t come in here, sir. Sir, if you could…” Tommy flashed his warrant card and the constable looked very puzzled, so Suzie calmed the man and went in after Tommy leaving Cathy to sort things out. The others were slower getting out of the second car and Tommy had to shout from the top of the cellar steps, behind the stairs, “Dennis. I want Dennis down here. Everyone else wait upstairs.”

  The scent of death mingled with that chill, cold brick smell you get in cellars, wonderful on a hot summer’s day, not so pleasant in early winter. The walls were of rough stone, whitewashed showing up the blood splatters all the more clearly when they finally got to them.

  “Livermore, DCS Reserve Squad,” Tommy intoned extending his hand towards a large man, tall and strapping, with a lively open face and amused very intelligent eyes.

  A younger man stepped forward, “This is the doctor, sir. I’m DS Stimpson. Blinder, they call me. Blinder Stimpson.” He didn’t introduce the other young man standing near the cellar steps.

  “The senior CID man,” Tommy said, almost absentmindedly, to himself.

  The curved ceilings had to be over six feet high in the tallest places because the doctor’s head almost touched the brickwork, under foot there were grey paving stones, big and laid without care so they produced an uneven patchwork. The whole place was built in an L-shape, about twenty feet long and some twelve feet wide, spacious, ending in a reinforced archway leading to the ninety degree angled cross-piece. Naked light bulbs were set in the wall, low-wattage and clouded, diffusing the light and putting up shadows that added to the eeriness of the place.

  Tommy, turned down the corners of his mouth and began to walk forward, towards the arch, sensing the doctor and Suzie behind him and pretty certain that the bottom of the L was where the bodies lay.

  They were both there, very dead. The male, in uniform except for his boots and socks and his trousers that had been pulled off. You could see round his genitals where the lighted cigarettes had burned holes into the flesh, horrible, black and red you could almost hear the screams. He was tied to a wooden stand chair, the kind of thing you might have kept in your kitchen, and his body was slumped forward against restraints so you couldn’t see the agony written on his face. Suzie thought the back of his head looked like a loofah that had been dipped in blood. She remembered the family story that had her Auntie Nan – her dad’s sister – going into a chemist and asking in her often confused way, ‘I want a foolah, please’.

  Then she saw the man’s hands and feet, unnaturally bent and marked, oozing blood with a shard of bone sticking from the middle of his right foot.

  The woman had not been in a chair: she had probably been kneeling in an odd and awkward position, bound with what could have been a clothesline that passed tightly around her neck, pinioning her arms. Finally the ropes were anchored hard to her ankles, biting into the flesh, and bending her legs up so that the feet were drawn up behind, almost to her buttocks. She had probably knelt in this uncomfortable position but now she was tipped forward, the upper half of her body lying on the floor, inclined onto her right side, her face pulled back as if in a retch of agony, the rope digging hard into her flesh and the skin around her lips and cheeks now bluish, mouth half open as if in a terrible last cry, tongue lolling, the eyes still open, glazed, gazing into eternity.

  Tommy made a dismissive sound. Then, “If she relaxed she’d put intolerable pressure on her own throat, on the windpipe. That’s what finally happened?”

  “Not all by herself,” the doctor said from behind him. “She had a little help from someone.”

  Tommy walked between the bodies, moving carefully, watching where he put his feet, making certain he didn’t disturb anything: bending, peering.

  Snooping, Suzie thought. Doing his job, intruding on the two deaths.

  “You know who she was?”

  “Yes. She was a patient of mine. Emily Bascombe. Mrs Emily Bascombe.”

  “You can formally identify her?”

  “I can. Mrs Bascombe.”

  “You’ve examined the bodies?”

  “Haven’t moved them, but yes, as far as I could.”

  “Come to any conclusions?”

  “Neither had what you’d call an easy death. Badly treated.”

  “Ever seen the man before?”

  “Colonel Tim Weaving. I’d met him several times. Glider Pilot Regiment. He was the CO over at Brize Norton.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Someone bashed the back of his head in. Unless when I do the PM I find he’s been shot, stabbed or poisoned, I think the bash on the back of his head’ll have done the business. Nasty.”

  Tommy sniffed the air, turned and began to walk towards the stone steps leading back into the small hall but stopped when he saw DC Free coming down.

  “Got your box of tricks Dennis? Good, then take some snaps for me. It’s unpleasant but I suppose you’re used to it now.”

  “I don’t think you ever get used to it, Chief.”

  “Maybe not. Doctor?”

  “Yes Mr Livermore.”

  “Was that just plain sadism back there? Or have I missed something?”

  “It looked as though someone – maybe two – was like a child doing horrible things just because he could: pulling the wings off flies.”

  Tommy nodded, turned round and walked back to watch Dennis taking pictures of the bodies. It was as though he couldn’t bear to leave them, standing waiting as though they’d suddenly give him a clue to how they died. Suzie stood apart, not even peeping into the section of the cellar where the bodies were.

  After a couple of minutes watching Dennis Free, Tommy gave a big shrug, sighed and turned back into the long narrow room, with its whitewashed walls and uneven floor. He motioned for Suzie to go ahead of him and as she reached the slabby stone stairs she saw, with surprise that Cathy Wimereux had been standing at the top and realised she shouldn’t be surprised because she had seen her move out of the way to let Dennis down.

  “It’s all a bit nasty, Cathy,” S
uzie said, out of the corner of her mouth.

  “So I gather.” Cathy Wimereux didn’t even look at her.

  The door at the top of the stairs had been left unpainted or treated on the inside but nicely cleaned off and fresh with cream paint in the hall, like the rest of the woodwork. Was there some kind of analogy here? she wondered, giving a wan smile to Ron Worrall and Laura Cotter who both stood close to the cellar door. God, she thought, what horrors have gone on under this roof: fears, night-shriek, dread? What awful things happened? She shuddered.

  Ron carried the big leather case that held all the gubbins for latent prints, evidence bags, a small tool kit and some lenses. They called it the Murder Bag but it was often used for more mundane crimes. Laura carried a small electric sweeper. Before the day was out they would have removed every tiny piece of what they called ‘foreign matter,’ which meant everything that couldn’t be tied to the two bodies.

  Tommy, coming up the stairs behind Suzie, thought; Lord, how that girl’s body moves inside her clothes. Never have I known a girl who can so set me up by just being herself.

  Tommy was concerned. When he had first taken her as a lover she had no other desire but to learn from him and please him. She appeared to believe that she would only be happy if she was married to him, but of late the desire seemed to have slackened off, lost its urgency. No telling with women, Tommy thought as he emerged into the hall. Women? Mysteries. You never knew with any of them.

  He told Ron and Laura to go down and do whatever they did around the bodies of people who were dead from murder: collect the minutiae. Someone’s done some dreadful things to that pair. So what was the purpose? What the motive? Just for the fun of hurting someone, hearing another human cry out? He shook his head, not saying any of this out loud. Then he walked towards the door. “See everybody back at the station,” he said as a uniform moved to open the door for him.

  Then he seemed to change his mind again, stopping and leaning back towards Suzie. “The way that woman was tied up, heart. The Bascombe woman, Emily Bascombe.”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “The way she was tied, I think Molly told me about that tie. They teach it up at Achnacarry. Use it on prisoners, deprives them of sleep. Relax and you strangle yourself.” Achnacarry was where the Commando Training Centre was located. Anyone said he’d been to Achnacarry you knew he was a tough bugger.

  “Not very Agatha Christie is it, Chief?” Suzie tried to lighten the load.

  “Neither Christie nor Dorothy L Sayers, heart. They don’t really describe battered bodies much, do they?”

  “Don’t describe them at all.” She stood back to let him precede her to the front door, but he changed his mind again, turned around strode across the hall and started to go up the stairs. Suzie followed him: like a little poodle, she thought. Follow him everywhere like a little snuffling bloody poodle.

  Tommy went from bedroom to bedroom, standing in the doorways and taking in each room. The master bedroom had been slept in. Double bed, pillows dinged both sides, curtains still drawn. The other rooms showed no sign of having been occupied and they ended up to the far left of the big landing, the large bathroom, floor covered in grey and black lino, all nicely set out. Victorian fitments, a big bath with claw feet, set high from the ground. A lavatory with a heavy polished seat and a good-sized hand basin. On the inner wall there was a fireplace with glazed tiles, Dutch scenes in blue, man and a woman in costume, a couple showing a barge and another with a windmill. Delft? Suzie wondered. Glazed tiles round the fireplace with the hearth blackened and cleaned: a mantelpiece above with a small alarm clock in the centre.

  “You could swim in that,” Tommy said, nodding towards the bath. Then Suzie followed him out onto the landing again where he loitered, looking down from the balustrade into the hall with its black and beige tiles, and smaller tiles making an ornamental edging: a long oak table pushed under the stairs with a sit-up-and-beg telephone just visible, a notepad sitting beside it.

  Tommy paused for a moment as though wondering about something as he looked down, then Suzie found herself following him downstairs and, this time, out through the front door.

  A little knot of people had gathered across the road, against the red brick wall marking the boundary to one of the large houses on the other side. They just stood there, these people, not talking but whey-faced, shocked, looking at a house where murder had been done as if the bricks and wood were crying out, giving a sign.

  He started down the steps with Cathy in the bodyguard position, just behind the left shoulder, as poor Molly always said, Suzie close behind Cathy.

  As they reached the pavement, so a figure detached itself from the group across the road: navy blue double-breasted blazer, brass buttons, well-pressed grey flannels, highly polished shoes, the tanned face of what Suzie always thought an adult male angel should look like (until Sister Margaret Mary spoiled it all by saying they were neither masculine nor feminine angels; all angels were genderless). His walk was so languid that Suzie had the distinct impression he had been forced to push himself off the wall in order to assume a standing position: not so much a walk as a stroll, and hair the colour of light gold, smooth, silky and of that infuriating consistency that allowed it to be hit by a gale force wind, but then returned to its normal, smooth, unruffled state without recourse to hand or comb: every single hair back in its place.

  She was aware now of Tommy, suddenly stock still and a shade pale by her side.

  “My God,” he muttered. “A spectre from my past.”

  The young man sauntered across the road, approaching slowly, a thin smile flicking over his lips, lifting and twinkling around his cool grey eyes.

  “Curry?” said Tommy. “Curry Shepherd?”

  “Hello Tommy.” The voice was not Tommy’s Eton drawl, but it was as languid as the man’s walk.

  “I was told that you’d been killed. Belgium, May 1940.” Tommy looking and sounding puzzled, frowning, deep furrows and eyes partly closed.

  “Yes,” said Curry Shepherd.

  “In fact there was a memorial service for you.”

  “I know. I heard about that.” A smile and a raise of the hand. “Seems they got it wrong didn’t they? Very much alive, Tommy. Come back to haunt you.”

  Chapter Four

  TOMMY SAID IN his world-weary drawl, “Gave me quite a turn, Curry. Thought I was seeing things for a moment: the dead walking and all that.”

  Curry Shepherd’s mouth curved into a smile, and the smile turned into a grin. He didn’t look straight at Tommy but stared at Suzie, like a man delighted with an unexpectedly wonderful view.

  “Rude to stare, Curry!” Tommy barked, and Suzie noticed the younger man start as though a lightning bolt had struck nearby.

  “WDS Mountford. Curry Shepherd.” Tommy waving a hand between them, meticulous about introductions.

  “How d’you do?” said Curry, looking her straight in the eye. He had, she noticed, lovely grey eyes.

  Suzie smiled and gave a little nod, and went on feeling uncomfortable.

  They shook hands. He really is beautiful, she thought, felt a distinct frisson coming through his fingers, like an electric current.

  Tommy was speaking again. “Curry was with me at m’tutor’s.”

  “A shade after you, Tommy.” Curry corrected. “You were head of house when I was at m’tutor’s.”

  Suzie knew the language because she had met a couple of other people who had been at Eton with Tommy Livermore. M’Tutor’s was the la-di-da Etonian way of saying they were in the same house at school. But she felt even more uncomfortable. Couldn’t explain it. Didn’t know why. Young Curry Shepherd made her feel strange, was all she knew. Edgy. Gave her a little tingle. You know.

  “Your people here wouldn’t let me have a shufti at the bodies, Tommy. Really should see them y’know.” Curry talked in the same quirky shorthand all these upper class Harry Poshers spoke, but Curry was not quite as straight-faced as most of them: didn’t take hims
elf too seriously, which made a change, and there was melody in his voice: what her mum would’ve called a ‘brown velvet voice’.

  “Why on earth should I let you peep at the corpses, Curry? You working for one of those comics down the Street? Or d’you just like looking at dead people? Necrophiliac are we? Aren’t you in HM Forces at all, old son?”

  “Oh, I’m in HM Forces all right, Tom; and, yes, I was posted missing presumed dead. Near Ypres of all places.” He gave one of those now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t smiles, his face going back to normal. “Got to talk to you privately, Tommy. Save embarrassment, eh?”

  Tommy looked at him hard and suspicious for a good twenty seconds. “WDS Mountford shares all secrets in this outfit, Curry, but we’ll get as private as we can.” He raised his voice, calling for Brian who trotted round the car, holding open the rear door. Tommy ushered Curry into the back seat. Then Suzie. Finally he climbed in and sank down in the seat, closing the door as he did so.

  Suzie felt the padding move as Tommy’s weight dinged it, she also felt Curry’s left thigh against her and wondered why she was once more starting to feel uncomfortable; but she didn’t move, covering whatever confusion she felt, putting her mind as far away from lust or discomfort as she could. Which wasn’t really all that far.

  “Right, James Morrison Shepherd. Let’s hear your story.” Tommy seemed to physically relax, putting his head against the leather seatback.

  “End of May ’40.” Curry spoke as though delivering evidence in court.

  “I was with General Brooke: that is General Sir Alan Brooke. On his staff. Intelligence Officer – trained, done a dozen postings to get experience. Now I had ended up in a shooting war. We all had. Went up to look at the 5th Division near Ypres: the General gave us a short lecture on the unpleasant connotations the place had for those who served in the ’14-’18 show. Round about 26th, maybe 27th May. The 5th Division were getting into position along the canal. The old man wanted to see what the Belgians were doing about defending the place, but they’d buggered off, excuse my polemics, Suzie. I can call you Suzie, yes?”