Past Mortem

by Ben Elton

  Eventually Newson tried to put murder from his mind and instead indulged himself further with stolen glances at Natasha’s shapely legs. They were coming into London by this time, in dense traffic, and Natasha was forced to work the clutch of her little Renault Clio, causing the muscles in her legs to ripple attractively above her little boots. Natasha’s legs were the part of her to which Newson felt most connected, they being the only part of her over which he could be said to have ever had any influence.

  When he’d first known Natasha she’d rarely worn skirts or dresses, explaining that she had no high opinion of her legs, which she thought were too short. Newson had informed her that she was either mad, blind or both. He had assured her, in what he fondly deluded himself was a disinterested and offhand manner, that viewed objectively Natasha’s underpinning was in the premier league, and that outside the world of haute couture it was well known that length was no substitute at all for shapeliness.

  ‘Nobody really fancies those weird, skeletal, nine-feet-tall fashion models,’ he told her. ‘They’re just there to make the dresses look long.’

  Since then Natasha had ‘got them out’, as she put it, on a much more regular basis, and had been kind enough to give Newson some of the credit for giving her the confidence to do so. Newson could not decide whether this confession had caused him more pleasure or pain, since it was so obviously meant in an entirely sisterly manner. Eventually he concluded that it was too close to call.

  Newson’s mobile rang, returning his thoughts to murder.

  ‘Inspector Newson? It’s Dr Clarke.’

  ‘Hello, Doctor.’

  ‘That Manchester case, the man with the mashed brain. Rod said he thought it was phone books, didn’t he?’

  ‘Rod? So you phoned him, then?’

  ‘Yes. Is there a problem?’

  Newson could hear the defensiveness in her voice. ‘No, no problem.’

  ‘I looked him up on the Friends Reunited site as you suggested, and he sent me his number.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What do you mean, ‘Right’?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t mean anything.’

  ‘It was very nice to speak to him.’

  ‘I’m sure it was.’

  ‘What do you mean, ‘I’m sure it was’?’.

  ‘What do you mean, what do I mean? I don’t mean anything. Why should I?’

  ‘Exactly. There’s no reason.’

  ‘No, there isn’t. You mentioned the phone books. I presume you discussed the Manchester unsolved?’

  ‘Yes, we did, as a matter of fact, and those fibres he found in the scalp — I think they’re from a book cover. Books used to be cloth-covered; they still are if you get them from the Folio Society. I reckon that’s what the fibre was. Nothing to do with telephone directories at all.’

  ‘You think that Warrant Officer Spencer was murdered with an old book?’

  ‘Well, several of them, or new books with cloth covers.’

  ‘I see. Well, thanks for that. I’ll have somebody do a little research into book bindings. I’m sure you’re right.’

  ‘I’d have looked into it myself, but my husband’s having three days at a folk and jazz festival so I’m a bit busy.’

  ‘Three days at a folk and jazz festival? Is there that much folk and jazz?’

  ‘They’ll scarcely scratch the surface. I doubt they’ll even get out of minor keys.’

  Newson thanked Dr Clarke for her trouble and hung up. So her husband was away and the first thing she had done was look up Rod Haynes on Friends Reunited? Newson felt uneasy. He wished he hadn’t passed on Haynes’s message. He knew that Dr Clarke was a steady, sensible type, but Newson was discovering that the past exerted a powerful force. Its reach was long and its grip was tight.

  When he finally arrived home its grip had tightened a little further over him. Two members of his old class had chosen to contact him, Gary Whitfield and Helen Smart. Sadly, neither of them was Christine Copperfield, but nonetheless it was pleasant to think that the class had begun to reassemble.

  Newson opened Gary Whitfield’s email first.

  It was good to see that you had joined the class again, Edward. You always made people laugh, which is a valid and valued skill. My partner and I attend a downing workshop and believe strongly in the therapeutic power of laughter. I’m writing to say that I’m sorry about saying that I hated you all. I didn’t really hate most of the class and I certainly didn’t hate you, you were always quite nice to me and let’s face it, you got your fair share of crap from people like Jameson. Funny, you know, because cockney rhyming slang for queer is ‘ginger as in ‘ginger beer’. Did you know that? I’ve occasionally been called a ‘ginger’ over the years and when it happens, I sometimes think of you. We’re both gingers! We should be proud.

  Newson did not think so. To him, being red-headed or homosexual was a symptom of your genetic makeup, something to be neither proud nor ashamed of. It simply was. He was happy for Gary Whitfield, though. Clearly adult life was for him a great improvement on childhood, which was surely the right way round. The cruelty of other kids had hit Gary much harder than it had hit Newson and the ‘pride’ that he had found was his way of fighting back. So good luck to him. Newson thought about writing back in ginger solidarity, but then he remembered the clowning workshop. Newson did not want to be in email contact with somebody who attended clowning workshops, even if he had been at school with them.

  Newson harboured no special memories of Gary Whitfield, but he and Helen Smart had been real friends. She’d been his closest friend for some time and probably the best that he’d had at school. It had been twenty years since she and Newson had spoken to each other. Nonetheless her letter was couched in terms reminiscent of the familiarity they had once shared. Newson had noticed that about emails. They were so immediate, so spontaneous and personal, yet also so private and alone. Emails were dangerous things. Newson had a rule: never say something in an email that you wouldn’t say to the recipient’s face. It was a rule lie often broke.

  Hello, Ed, Helen wrote.

  A policeman? A policeman? A POLICEMAN! Wow. Or were you joking? Maybe you were, I don’t know.

  Maybe this E address is a hoax and I’m about to be groomed by an internet pervert who thinks I’m still a schoolgirl. Except I suppose we’re all still at school on this site, aren’t we? Fourteen forever. At least I’m fourteen because that’s how old I was when I left you all. I imagine you left at eighteen. I always regretted that I never did the sixth, wearing jeans to school and swanking about in the sixth-form common room, but it was a small price to pay to get out of that dump. I’ve never contacted a stranger like this before, by the way, so you don’t need to think I’m sad or mad. Although of course you’re not really a stranger at all, are you? Or are you? Has your life made you into a different person to the one I knew? I suppose if you’ve become a policeman it must have done. To be honest I thought there was a height restriction. I remember there used to be items in the papers about boys having themselves stretched in order to make the grade. Did you stretch yourself, Ed? I can’t imagine you did. You used to say that you were normal height and all the other boys were freaks. Maybe the Home Office changed the rules. I expect it’s illegal to discriminate against someone because the/re vertically challenged anyway. Shit. I’m waffling. You will think I’m mad. OK, cut to the chase. I work for a charity and I live in London. Seeing as how you’re with the Met (if it really isn’t a joke) you live in London too. Do you fancy a drink? If you do then get in touch. Maybe we can work out why the miners lost. Perhaps it was our fault. I’ve got a kid but I can usually get a sitter. Bye.

  She was the same Helen. Same old friend. Newson replied immediately.

  Helen! Please don’t worry if you hate me for being a copper. All my colleagues at Scotland Yard hate me for being a copper too. Some of them even call me Ginger Minge, so in many ways it’s like I never left school. Anyway, what about you? Working for a charity? I rem
ember you saying that Band Aid was aptly named because that’s what it was, a little sticking plaster trying to staunch a great and terrible wound! I haven’t got any kids myself but then why would I? I haven’t had sex since 1987. I’d love to have a drink. Sieg heil.

  Detective Inspector Newson of the Nazi Party.

  Helen must have been online as Newson wrote, because moments later she replied.

  Great and terrible wound! Was I really that pious?. No wonder you dumped me at the Christmas disco. How does tomorrow sound? Pitcher and Piano in Soho, eight? Ping back yes or no with alternative suggestion.

  What a strange and uncharted planet was the worldwide web. To be conversing in such spontaneous intimacy with a ghost from the past who was nowhere to be seen but could be in the next room. It felt both exhilarating and uncomfortable.

  Exhilarating? Of course exhilarating, because inevitably Newson’s mind had turned to sex. It seemed to know no other route. Helen had scarcely been in Christine’s league but she had been cute with her big bovver boots and cropped hair. Plump, certainly, but also pretty, and when you saw beneath her baggy clothes as on one occasion Newson had done, she had been shapely despite the puppy fat. Newson remembered her breasts particularly, for he’d held them once, and if he’d had to describe them the word he’d have used would have been ‘perky’. Perhaps all fourteen-year-old breasts were perky. They probably were, but Newson wasn’t sure, because he hadn’t held enough of them at the time to mount any kind of statistically significant study. But Helen’s had been very perky indeed. He closed his eyes and revisited them across the years. Firm, despite her adolescent fat, taut, springy skin, he remembered, almost waxy to the touch, and puffy nipples. That had definitely been the most specific feature of Helen Smart’s breasts, puffy nipples. Gorgeous in a quirky kind of way. Newson wondered what effect time would have had on perky nipples.

  He pinged back ‘Yes’ and the date was made.

  TWELVE

  Dumped you?’ Natasha asked. ‘So she was your girlfriend, then?’

  ‘Not as I recall it. I mean, she was my friend and I’d kissed her, but I don’t remember feeling that we were official in anyway.’

  ‘Had she let you grope her?’

  ‘We-ll.’

  ‘Aha. Thought so.’

  ‘Only once. It was the night Arthur Scargill was arrested outside the Orgreave steel plant and we were feeling very angry and emotional.’

  ‘Christ, I’ve heard some excuses.’

  ‘Well, we blamed Mrs Thatcher for everything in those days.’

  ‘Did she let you grope her upstairs, or upstairs and downstairs?’

  ‘Only upstairs.’

  ‘Inside or outside?’

  ‘I’m not answering this.’

  ‘Come on. It’s important.’

  ‘Oh, all right. Inside. Briefly.’

  ‘Only inside blouse or inside blouse and bra?’

  ‘I really don’t remember.’

  ‘Don’t be pathetic, everyone remembers.’

  ‘All right. Inside bra.’.

  ‘I have to say that letting a boy put his band inside your bra is quite a big thing at fourteen, particularly if you’re a serious, boring girl like this Helen sounds.’

  ‘She wasn’t boring. Just because your generation gave up on politics — ’

  ‘Were you pissed?’

  ‘We didn’t get pissed when we were fourteen.’

  ‘Shit, we did.’

  ‘The nineties were very different from the eighties. We blazed the trail, you reaped the benefits. Look, I was at her house and her parents were out. I’d gone round because we were planning to launch our own school magazine. We were having an editorial meeting.’

  ‘Just you and her?’

  ‘Yes. She was going to be editor and I was going to be principal feature-writer — well, only feature-writer, in fact.’

  ‘God, you two must have been right pains in the arse.’

  ‘We thought we were great. The only real people in the school.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Newson remembered the night quite clearly. He and Helen had been filled with wild dreams of creating a fabulously successful and influential fanzine. Then they had turned on the news and it was filled with footage of policemen fighting miners, and famine in Ethiopia, and they’d got upset and righteous about the iniquities of it all, and suddenly Helen had asked him to hold her.

  ‘She asked you to hold her?’ Natasha said.

  ‘I think that was how it happened, you know, like in fraternal solidarity, so to speak, and then one thing led to another, and…’

  ‘Suddenly you had her boobs in your hand?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘If it was her who asked you to hold her, then she fancied you big-time.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘Not rubbish.’

  ‘She just wanted a hug.’

  ‘No one ever just wants a hug.’

  They had returned to Kensington and Chelsea, but this time they were north of the river, walking past the gracious, white-pillared Georgian terraced houses of Onslow Gardens.

  There was a scrum of press on the pavement ahead of them.

  ‘It’ll be Dr Clarke again,’ said Newson. ‘The Chelsea pathologist is still on that rail disaster inquiry so please try to control your irritation.’

  ‘I don’t have a problem with her. It’s her who has a problem with me.’

  The victim’s name was Farrah Porter, and until her untimely death she had been a rising star in the Conservative Party. Attractive, blond and still under thirty, she had been the darling of the previous year’s Brighton conference, living proof that Conservatism was youthful and dynamic once more.

  ‘The only youthful thing about Farrah Porter was her age,’ Newson remarked. ‘Politically she was a Neanderthal. Hang ‘em, flog ‘em, eat their children then send the bastards back to where they came from.’

  ‘I thought she was all right. I mean, at least she had a bit of style, didn’t she? And you have to admit she wore great shoes.’

  Once more Newson was ashamed to recognize that observations he would have found downright silly in others he found cute and feisty when made by Natasha. Why was it,. he wondered, that having become attracted to a girl he ended up uncritically wallowing in every aspect of her?

  ‘I can’t take any politician seriously who works as hard on her tan as that woman did,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a media world. Presentation’s important. You’ve got to walk the walk, haven’t you?’ Natasha replied.

  Farrah Porter had been famous for her tan; it was her trademark. When she won the Fulham by-election the Sun’s headline was TANFASTIC! She attended her victory party in a backless Versace mini-dress that was slashed at the front to below the navel, and at the sides from hip to armpit. Almost every square inch of her elegant, upright breasts was on full view, and it was quite clear that she sunbathed topless. Overnight, that dross turned Farrah Porter into the Conservatives’ greatest asset, a politician of real significance, far and away the most recognizable figure in the parliamentary party, more so even than the leader himself. Her gorgeous presence sent Labour Party talent scouts scurrying out into the provinces in search of personable activists with whom to counter the Porter threat.

  ‘She looked great and she was a laugh,’ Natasha insisted. ‘If I had the time and the money I’d probably have a tan like hers.’

  ‘Well, don’t. Your skin is just right as it is. You couldn’t improve on it.’

  There was a slightly uncomfortable pause. Newson had, as usual, gone too far, allowing his secret infatuation a momentary public airing.

  ‘Thanks. That’s nice,’ Natasha said, looking at him quizzically.

  The pause that followed lasted until they gained access to the building in which Ms Porter had lived and died. The victim was found by her mother, a woman who, having been married to a philandering cabinet minister, had spent most of her life dealing with painful public crises. It w
ould be generally agreed later that she had risen to this most horrible of all her trials with real guts. Faced with the unspeakable sight of her daughter’s body, she had nonetheless been able to alert the police and the Home Office in such a manner and at sufficiently high a level that the crime scene had been sealed very quickly and none of the appalling details of what had occurred had so far leaked out. The press mob that had assembled on the steps of the building were there only because they could see that the police were there. They did not know what had happened, that Farrah Porter, media darling and, due to her daring dress sense, potential Prime Minister, was dead.

  Newson knew that Porter was dead, of course, but he had no idea of the manner in which she had died and was not prepared for the macabre horror that awaited him in the ensuite bathroom of the dead woman’s bedroom.

  ‘Brace yourself,’ said Alice Clarke as they walked through the dressing room, past the many pairs of beautiful and beautifully ordered shoes. ‘She’s been bleached.’

  ‘Bleached?’

  ‘Well, I say bleached, because I think that was the’ intention. She’s been soaked in a combination of trichloric acid and Phenol BP. Two very nasty skin-whitening agents.’

  Farrah Porter’s naked body lay in her kidney-shaped whirlpool bath, and she had indeed been bleached. Her famous rich tan had been replaced by a pale, redraw, blotchy nightmare of ruined skin.

  ‘He must have soaked her in it for hours,’ Dr Clarke remarked. ‘Probably sat on that toilet there and watched.’

  ‘How do you know he stayed to watch?’ asked Newson, mindful of the two cases he was looking at already in which the victims had been left to contemplate their fate alone.