Past Mortem

by Ben Elton

  ‘He drugged me. Effing coward. Got a swab straight on me face. Next thing I know I’m all taped up in the kitchen staring at Juanita.’

  ‘Who was also restrained?’

  ‘Yes, not that you’d need to restrain her. Like a lap-dog, that woman.’

  ‘You didn’t see your assailant?’

  ‘I felt his arm around me neck, that’s all. I can still feel it now. I reckon he was a fit sort of bloke, not big, but wiry. That’s what I think, anyway.’

  ‘And you’re certain it was a man?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so. Of course, these days you don’t know, do you? There’s some women down at my gym, muscles like navvies. Lezzers, I reckon, I mean it’s the fashion, innit? Madonna an’ all that, looks like a bloke these days. Turns your bleeding stomach.’

  ‘And what happened after you came to?’

  ‘Nothing. Me an’ Juanita just had to sit there staring at each other all day an’ all night listening to my own stereo which the bloke had put on in the lounge. Full bleeding bore, Everly Brothers and ‘Move It’ and Del Shannon and the Platters over and over again. And whenever there was a gap between tracks or a quiet song we’d hear Ad screamin’ in the bedroom upstairs. All night…’

  Once more Mrs Bishop’s impressive composure threatened briefly to desert her, but she recovered quickly, finding strength this time in the weakness of her maid. ‘Juanita pissed ‘erself an’ all, on my floor. Dirty cow. She ain’t staying, I can assure you of that. Anyway, in the morning Ad stopped screaming an’ we could hear the bloke leaving and I was thinking that if I ever caught him I’d castrate him, and after that we just kept sitting till my Lisa Marie let herself in, bringing her kiddies round, and that was when we called you lot.’

  The Bishops’ maid was no more help. She testified that Mr Bishop had let the man in and shown him into the lounge. She’d gone in to ask if they required anything and had been dismissed. She recalled that Mr Bishop was serving drinks himself and, even though it was early, was offering whisky. The intruder had been sitting with his back to the door, and Juanita had only seen the top of his head. She could not recall the colour of the person’s hair.

  Newson noted that Juanita was in the habit of avoiding eye contact and focused her gaze instead on the ground in front of her. He imagined that the Bishops would not have been the kindest or most considerate of employers.

  At the end of the interviews Mrs Bishop conducted Newson and Natasha to the front door, the same door through which she claimed no hostile intruder could have forced their way. Perhaps it was that that reminded her of Newson’s speculative questioning.

  ‘And I ain’t forgetting what you said either, mate,’ she snarled. ‘Don’t you worry about that. Adam woulda killed a bloke for less, and let me tell you there’s an awful lot of family left who’d feel the same way if I was to tell them.’

  ‘Are you threatening the inspector, Mrs Bishop?’ said Natasha, and once more Newson wished she would not feel the need to fight his battles for him.

  ‘Threaten ‘im?’ Mrs Bishop sneered. ‘What? Inspector Shortarse here? Bit beneath me, love. Maybe I’ll get one of my little grandkids to do it. The eldest is only nine so that’d be about fair, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I think I won her over in the end, don’t you?’ Newson remarked as he closed the garden gate behind him.

  FIVE

  At the end of the second day of the inquiry Newson and Wilkie agreed to compare notes over a pizza.

  ‘You don’t have to get back?’ Newson enquired. ‘Aren’t you seeing Lance tonight?’

  ‘Lance is a dickhead,’ Sergeant Wilkie replied.

  ‘We all know that, but it hasn’t stopped you going home to him before.’

  ‘It’s just amazing that he thinks he can say the things he says to me and get away with it.’

  ‘It’s not at all amazing, for the simple reason that he does get away with it, because you let him.’

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘So you’re finishing with him.’

  ‘If he carries on the way he’s going I will.’

  ‘So you’re not finishing with him.’

  Newson and Wilkie had had this conversation or something very like it on numerous occasions and Newson could never work out how such a clever and apparently together girl as Natasha could be incapable of finishing with a man who was so obviously a waste of her time. Lance had been a shadow on Detective Sergeant Wilkie ever since Newson had known her, a boyfriend whose sole contribution to her life appeared to be to eat her food, spend her money and put her down.

  Except, of course, Newson knew that Lance did far more for Natasha than that. He excited her. He thrilled her. He no doubt made love to her in a way that delighted her and left her gasping for more. To Newson it was a given that Lance was born to be sexually appealing to women in exactly the same way that he himself was not. Newson had met Lance once or twice and his charm had been clear. His mischievous smile and cocky manner were obviously what Natasha wanted. What girl wouldn’t? He was tough and handsome. He made Natasha laugh and carried himself with a devil-may-care, don’t-give-a-fuck swagger. In fact, the things that made Lance such a bad thing in Natasha’s life — his arrogance and fecklessness — were exactly the things that Natasha liked and that kept her close to him. Newson often wondered what malign stars had been tugging at the firmament when nature had decreed that a man like Natasha’s Lance would get a girl like Natasha while a man like himself never would. He knew that he could wait until the end of time and he would never see Detective Sergeant Wilkie naked. He would spend the rest of his life scavenging for the tiniest glimpse of some small part of her, while Lance, Lance who only made her sad, could glory in every inch of her almost any time he wanted. This thought truly and deeply depressed Newson.

  It was his own fault, of course. When first he had realized that he fancied Detective Sergeant Wilkie he should have brought down the barriers. Experience had taught him that flames burn hotter when you fan them. He knew that he’d had a choice and that he’d made the wrong one. He hadn’t been obliged to seek out Natasha’s company. He could have prevented himself from looking forward to her entering the office in the morning, wondering what she would be wearing, hoping that it would be a skirt. He should have affected disapproval of her chatty, bubbly personality and her girlish penchant for gossip instead of exalting and basking in it. He shouldn’t have shared jokes, sneaked glances at her legs when she crossed and uncrossed them, and he certainly should not have discussed her dreadful boyfriend with her, wallowing in the false and sterile intimacy that such conversations afforded him. He was the architect of his own obsession, but it was too late to do anything about it. He loved Natasha and the pain would simply have to be endured.

  ‘So, d’you still think our bloke’s a serial perv, then?’ said Natasha now, oblivious to Newson’s torment.

  Newson hauled his mind back to the job in hand. ‘I have absolutely no idea who or what our killer is. Let’s look at what we know, shall we?’

  ‘Right,’ Natasha agreed. ‘For me the most salient fact of all is that Bishop let his killer into the house and drank with him. Which tells us that he knew him.’

  ‘Or at least was expecting him.’

  ‘We know that Bishop had a million enemies. Almost everyone he knew thought he deserved to die. The local police have given us the names of any number of colleagues and associates who could potentially profit from Bishop’s death. I don’t see any need to drop some shadowy internet pervert into the mix.

  ‘Bishop has gone through his life being hated,’ said Newson. ‘He’s been surrounded by enemies since he first drew breath. Nothing remotely like this has happened to him before.’

  ‘You could say that about any killing. Nobody dies more than once.’

  ‘The killer came prepared with his little skewer and his snake venom. How could he have known that he’d be invited in? If he was someone with a motive to kill Bishop, then Bishop would have been aware of that. He woul
dn’t have got into the house, let alone been served a drink. He certainly wouldn’t have got Bishop up to his bedroom. We know Bishop was a sadist and lots of sadists are masochists too. Let’s imagine that cruel, brutal Adam Bishop harbours secret desires. He wants to be punished, but he can’t possibly risk exposing his perversion in his own circle, so he advertises on the internet for a torturer. Bishop lets the man into the house, they have a drink, then he allows himself to be bound to the bed — ’

  ‘And invites this mystery man to repeatedly stick a skewer into his testicles, anus and eyes.’

  It was at this point that the waitress appeared. She had clearly overheard Natasha’s last sentence and her welcoming smile turned into a look of nervous alarm.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Newson assured her. ‘We’re police officers.., discussing a case.’

  The waitress looked at Newson in disbelief. He toyed momentarily with the idea of producing his warrant card but dismissed the thought. It was embarrassing enough to have a girl think he was lying about being in the police without compounding the situation by pathetically frying to prove to her that he was.

  ‘I’ll have a mushroom pizza,’ he said, and the waitress took their meal order.

  ‘What about the maid?’ Natasha continued after the girl had gone. ‘What about the wife? One was in the house and the other was bound to return. If Bishop had a dirty secret he’s not going to indulge it while they’re around.’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe arranging to have his wife brutalized is part of the fun. Maybe he wanted her to hear his screams.’

  ‘To hear him die?’

  ‘He didn’t know he was going to die. That would’ve been part of the other fellow’s plan. Or else it simply all went too far.’

  ‘Honestly, Ed, this is just silly. It’s like you’re deliberately trying to come up with the least likely theory.’

  ‘Look, of course there’s a good chance Bishop was the victim of some terrible feud. And you’ll no doubt see to it that everyone he ever knew is checked out until you come up with a psychopathic business rival with a blood-stained skewer buried in his back garden. But in the meantime you can’t deny that this is a very strange case. The killing was so specific. I believe that if Adam Bishop hadn’t died in the manner in which he did, the killer would have deemed his murder a failure and gone away unsatisfied. That suggests to me that this murder is as much about the killer as it is about Bishop. Something made him kill the way he did, and what worries me is it may drive him to do so again.’

  The food arrived and as it did so Natasha’s phone rang. Having glanced at the display to see who was calling, she excused herself and took the phone outside. When Natasha returned her face bore a defiant expression as if to say, ‘Yeah., do you have a problem?’ and Newson knew that, as usual, he would be dining alone.

  ‘You have to rush? Aren’t you going to eat your pizza?’

  ‘Lance is cooking.’

  ‘I thought you’d had a row.’

  ‘He wants to make up. He’s reaching out to me.’

  ‘What’s he cooking?’

  ‘Steak.’

  ‘That’s nice.

  ‘If I can get any. Do you think they’d have it at Seven-Eleven?’

  ‘So he’s reaching out to you to bring him home some steak?’

  ‘We’re a couple,’ Natasha responded angrily. ‘We can do a bit of shopping for each other if we like. It’s not a sign of weakness, you know.’

  Newson borrowed an Evening Standard from the cash desk and read it while eating both pizzas and drinking a bottle of Chianti. The paper carried a report on the Willesden murder. Adam Bishop had been a major player in North London Tarmac and his killing was deemed news. It was a short article, tucked away on page seventeen. The horrific details had not yet found their way into the hands of journalists, so Newson didn’t need to fear a copycat killing.

  He finished his meal and, slightly drunk, asked the waitress for the bill. When it came he placed a credit card on the saucer and in so doing allowed the girl a glimpse of the police credentials displayed inside his wallet. When the transaction was completed and feeling by now like a complete idiot, Newson absentmindedly picked up the copy of the Standard he had been reading and headed for the door.

  ‘That’s our paper,’ the girl said, pausing before adding, ‘Officer.’

  SIX

  Newson lived in a small terraced house between West Hampstead and the Kilburn High Road. He had once shared it with Shirley, his ex-partner, but had bought her out after what they always called ‘the divorce’, although they had never actually been married. Shirley and Newson had split up when Shirley’s infidelities had become too common and indiscreet even for Newson to miss. She claimed afterwards that seeing as how he was such a successful detective and all, she had presumed he knew and didn’t mind. Newson had not known and he did mind.

  They had met as students studying law at university. Their relationship had always been more mental than physical. Shirley was smart, but Newson was both funny and smart and she found this attractive. She used to tell people that when it came to brains, size really did matter, and that her boyfriend had a whopper. After a time Newson came to hate it when Shirley said this, because he felt that it implied that he had a small dick. He used to wish that Shirley would add ‘and although he’s short his dick’s actually quite a decent size too,’ but she never did.

  During the death throws of the relationship Shirley informed Newson that she had faked every orgasm she had ever had with him. She explained that she had developed the deception early on in order to take the pressure off her in the hope that it would lead her to relax and thus encourage the real thing. Unfortunately, Shirley felt obliged to report, it never had. Interestingly, she told him, she had not experienced the same problem with any other lover. He told her that he was thrilled for her.

  Now Newson lived alone.

  On arriving home after his solitary supper he took a can of Guinness from the pantry and went into his study. Newson kept his beer in a cupboard because of his belief that only lager should be served chilled. It was a point he had attempted to make to the bar staff at the Scotland Yard club, thus provoking more derision from his colleagues, who to a man believed that all beer should be served near freezing regardless of whether this rendered it tasteless. He sat in the darkness of his study for some time, thinking about skewers and snake venom and Detective Sergeant Wilkie’s breasts.

  After a while, at the point at which Sergeant Wilkie’s breasts had forced all other thoughts from his mind, he decided to do something he’d been thinking about for months. He woke up his computer and dialled up the website Friends Reunited.com.

  Until now he’d resisted the temptation. Something had always stopped him, but that something wasn’t stopping him now. Later he would reflect on this and wonder what it had been that led him to finally surrender to the urge to visit that strange virtual world where fantasy could be made real as long as you stayed online and did not venture far from your computer. Perhaps it was just a simple twist of fate, but for a man with a first in law who had also been top of his year at Hendon Police Training College (in everything except fight training and all sport) that was no answer at all. The truth, which Newson hated to acknowledge, was that his infatuation with Detective Sergeant Wilkie had grown painful and obstructive. Perhaps, somewhere in cyberspace, he could displace it.

  The Friends Reunited page was on his screen. Newson had already pressed the Union Jack and arrived at the British version, and now he had only to log on to join the happy throng of virtual teenagers. ‘Christine Copperfield?’ he whispered into the shadowy, screen-lit room, the booze giving voice to his secret hopes.

  ‘Are you out there, Christine?…Hanging on the wind, crackling amongst the ions, walking in cyberspace? Dancing? Are you, Christine Copperfield?’

  Or David, as the class wags had christened her on that memorable day when she had first walked boldly into Newson’s form room halfway through their second year.
Did she still wear a ra-ra skirt? He typed in the details of his school and his years of attendance. Such important years to him and to those with whom he’d lived them. The years when he was young. 1981 to 1988.

  That skirt. That pure white ra-ra skirt. He could see it still, with its shiny red sash tied low at the waist, knotted across her hips, ‘spread tight across her buttocks. Waists were low that season. How enchantingly she’d worn it, and with such natural grace. White and bright, scarlet for Christmas at the school disco in the deep midwinter, long, long ago.

  Did she still wear pink pixie boots?

  Probably not, Newson’s logical mind told him, but he was quite sure that her legs would still be exquisite. They simply couldn’t not be. It would take more than twenty years to mess with a pair of legs with the genetic advantages that Christine Copperfield’s had enjoyed. Slim to the point of skinny, but to the point of skinny looks good at fourteen, and Christine’s had looked so very, very good. December 1984. It simply did not get any better than that. Or, at least, in Detective Inspector Newson’s case it hadn’t.

  Newson entered his name, credit card details and school information. Now he had only to push the search button to see if she was there. But instead, he hesitated, fearful of disappointment, and allowed the screen to grow dim, stretching out the thrill of expectation for as long as he could. And so, as his details and dates stared back at him, challenging him to take the plunge, he closed his eyes and sought company in the ghosts of Christmas past.

  In his mind’s eye he could see his school once more, swathed in winter mists, the red brick cold, dark and unforgiving despite the coloured lights. He could see the sports field hard with frost, the prefabricated additional classrooms twinkling beneath the icy dust of a winter’s night…And he could see teenagers, nearly a hundred and fifty of them, flocking to the Christmas disco, which was being held in the main hall, the hail which also doubled as a gym and which for one night only had been transformed into the home of dreams.