Past Mortem

by Ben Elton

  ‘Your detailed acquaintance with the minutiae of girly pop is quite scary.’

  Newson and Natasha sat next to each other in the baking hot tube. Natasha was not wearing tights, and her bare legs were so close that Newson could watch them in relative security as he pretended to read case notes. Such sweet legs, stretched out straight, scarcely reaching halfway across the aisle.

  ‘How do you get your legs so smooth?’ He’d asked it before he even knew that he was going to.

  ‘Just soap and a Bic,’ she said. Her voice was perfectly friendly but she must have thought it a strange question to ask She drew her legs in, tucking the feet beneath the knees. Now she knew he had been looking at them. But it had been worth it. Closing his eyes for a moment, he imagined Detective Sergeant Wilkie in her bath, shaving her legs with soap and a Bic.

  Stop it. Stop it.

  Newson distracted himself by focusing his thoughts on the other women in the carriage. None was a patch on Natasha. He thought about Helen Smart with her skinny body and funny little breasts. Fat puffy nipples, they were cute, she had been cute…but damaged. Not like Natasha.

  Detective Inspector Newson threw back his head and stared at the ceiling. He had to stop this.

  Christine! That was who he needed. Christine — strong, confident and happy Christine. Not mad like Helen, not damaged by the years. No, Christine had been enhanced by time, in the case of her boobs, it seemed, quite literally. Christine, in her cocktail dress with her glass of champagne, queen of all she surveyed. Perhaps, Newson thought, if he could only win her once again, punch above his weight in the battle of love for a second time in his life, then maybe, just maybe, he could shake off the chains with which he had bound himself to his detective sergeant. Could Christine do it? Could she save him from the agony of love and lust into which his life had collapsed?

  Natasha’s voice interrupted his thoughts. ‘I’ll have to jump ship at six;’ she said. ‘I suppose you’ll work on all night, unpaid as usual.’

  ‘Ours is not a nine-to-five job, Sergeant.’

  ‘Yeah I know, but Lance says I’m being exploited.’

  ‘You are being exploited. By him.’

  ‘No I’m not, he’s my boyfriend. I owe him my time. I don’t owe it to the Home Office.’

  ‘What about the victims of crime?’

  ‘Look, Lance and I have made an agreement. We’re going to be there for each other in a much more meaningful way.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We think that the reason our relationship reached a crisis point was because of a shortage of ‘us’ time.’

  ‘He said that, did he?’

  ‘No. We said it, smartarse.’

  ‘You can’t call me smartarse. I’m your commanding officer.’

  ‘All right, Detective Inspector Smartarse.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Newson did not like holding conversations on the tube. He felt the proximity of strangers too keenly. Natasha, on the other hand, was the sort of girl who didn’t mind who knew about her boyfriend problems.’

  ‘So no more unpaid overtime for me,’ she said loudly. ‘Sorry, but I’m going to be less career-focused until my relationship’s self-inflicted wounds have healed.’

  Newson waited until they were on the escalator at South Kensington before replying.

  ‘Tell me, Sergeant, on the subject of your career focus and the promised reduction thereof. Exactly what lifestyle adjustment will Lance be volunteering as his contribution to the nurturing of your new togetherness?’

  ‘He’s going to…well, I suppose he’s going to be nicer.

  They were walking down the Old Brompton Road now. Natasha was annoyed with Newson and picked up her pace in a defiant manner, moving -a few paces ahead of him. The sun shone on her bare shoulders and glowed on the delicate dusting of soft hair on her forearms.

  For a moment he found himself thinking of those other forearms. Of that flash of light in the darkness on the night before when the shape of a little boy had appeared silhouetted in a doorway and he had seen the scars that the boy’s naked mother had inflicted upon herself.

  ‘I see,’ he said, hurrying to catch Natasha up. ‘So he chucks you and calls you all sorts of names, and his price for your taking him back is for you to give him more ‘ ‘us’ time.’

  ‘Yes, as it happens,’ Natasha snapped, without looking back. ‘And I think he’s right. I’ve been selfish.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Detective Sergeant Wilkie! Listen to yourself.’

  Natasha stopped and turned. Her dark eyes flashed in her small face and her chest heaved in anger. ‘Look, Ed, just back off, OK? Lance has promised to stop being a bastard and that’s fine by me. All right? Just because I love my bloke does not make me a victim… ’

  ‘I never said you were a victim.’

  ‘You imply it all the time! And just because you’re not getting any doesn’t give you the right to give me all this shit, OK?’

  Newson felt as if Natasha had kicked him in the stomach. She was right, of course. His position in her life gave him no rights at all.

  They were standing beneath one of the scaffolding erections that seem to encase every busy pavement in London and on which builders sit during the lengthy periods when they are not doing any building. ‘That’s right, gel!’ one shouted down. ‘You give the little twat what for.’

  In an instant Natasha had pulled her warrant card from her shiny black leather bag. ‘Shut your ugly face, you prick, or I’ll nick you for being an arsehole! Capisce?’

  The man shut his ugly face and it being lunchtime Newson and Natasha went into one of the many patisseries that litter the streets of South Kensington.

  ‘Capisce?’ Newson enquired, ordering coffee and a croque monsieur.

  ‘Yes. It’s what they say in The Sopranos.’

  ‘Which is of course why it sits so well on the lips of a London police sergeant.’

  They sat down at a table, squeezing themselves between the huddles of rich old ladies of Continental origin. Natasha’s remark about not getting any had hit home with Newson and he toyed with the idea of telling her that on only the previous night he had most definitely got some, and what’s more he reckoned that if he felt like it he could get some more. But he thought better of it. Screwing a lonely ex-schoolfriend whom he’d pulled over the internet was scarcely proof of great skill or insight in the game of love.

  Lunch was consumed mainly in silence, and when it was finished Natasha slapped four pounds on the table and walked out, leaving Newson to pay the bill. He caught up with her outside the house in which Farrah Porter had died.

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ Natasha said curtly, -and they made their way past the constable on the door and down the stairs to the basement flat, which was situated below Farrah Porter’s.

  Mr and Mrs Goldstein were two of the oldest people Newson had ever met. Both in their mid-nineties, they had lived in their flat in Kensington for nearly fifty years. They sat together in their stuffy, heavily draped living room awaiting Newson’s questions.

  ‘Tell us about Farrah Porter,’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve always been happy here.’

  ‘Until -Miss Porter moved in.’

  ‘We never knew such a woman,’ Mrs Goldstein said, rolling her eyes to the ceiling.

  ‘What was it about her that you found so objectionable?’ Natasha asked.

  ‘I do not like to speak ill of people who are dead, Sergeant, but she was a bully. She wanted us out, you see. Her dream was to create a ground-floor maisonette connecting her flat to ours. The landlord was on her side, of course. You see, we are on a fixed rate and he has wanted us out for years. We have cost him many many thousands, but that is not our fault.’

  ‘He thought we’d be dead twenty years ago,’ the old man chuckled.

  ‘So Miss Porter and the landlord together have been trying to intimidate us. She makes complaints, she says that there are noise and smells -and although this landlord knows the
complaints are rubbish he takes them seriously and so we are given warnings.’

  ‘She said it -was obscene that she should pay nearly half a million for her flat and that we should have ours for two hundred a week and that she had to live with dirty immigrants ruining her property. Immigrants! I have lived-in England for longer than she’s been alive, I told her. We experienced life under Hitler and came here with nothing but the clothes on-our backs. She didn’t scare us.’

  ‘But she did, of course.’

  ‘Not any more, though!’ the old man said, and he was unable to hide his smile. ‘To think that we were angry that night with the music,’ he added.

  ‘Yes,’ his wife agreed. ‘We thought we would make our own complaint. Of course in the morning we discovered there was nobody left to complain about and that while we had banged on the ceiling to stop her noise she was actually being killed.’—

  ‘There was music?’ Newson enquired.

  ‘Yes, it’s the first time we heard any from her.’

  ‘Do you remember what the music was?’

  ‘It was pop music. Not good music at all’

  ‘What type of pop music?’

  ‘Good heavens, Inspector. There is only one type, isn’t there? Rubbish.’

  ‘So you don’t remember what was being played?’

  ‘If you mean what singer was it, I have not the faintest clue.’

  Newson and Natasha took their leave of the Goldsteins and stood in the stairwell discussing what they’d heard.

  ‘So there was music,’ he said. ‘As with Bishop and Neil Bradshaw in the seed shed. Maybe the others too, we don’t know.’

  ‘Well, he played it to cover up the screams, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, except that Farrah Porter was gagged. You know, there was something about that music that always struck me as strange in the Bishop case.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We had any number of statements testifying to the Bishops’ musical taste. The whole street knew exactly what they listened to.’

  ‘Middle of the road, easy listening.’

  ‘Exactly. Early seventies, as I recall.’

  ‘It’s a common aberration, and what’s more it’s on its way back.’

  ‘And yet on the night of the murder the music coming from the house was late fifties rock ‘n’ roll.’

  ‘Which tells us?’

  ‘Ah, that I don’t know.’

  §

  They made their way up the stairs past Farrah Porter’s flat and on up to the one above it. This was occupied by a young stockbroker and his wife and their baby twins. Farrah Porter’s natural constituency, without doubt, but in this case there had been no love lost.

  ‘The first time the baby cried she just went berserk,’ Mrs Lloyd reported while the nanny served tea. ‘I must admit they are loud babs — both boys, you see. They’re asleep at the moment, thank God, but what can you do? Babies are noisy creatures.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe it the first time she complained,’ the nanny added. She was a confident Australian girl who clearly felt entirely at home butting in. ‘I was on my own with Harry and William, the doorbell goes and there she is, ranting and raving, saying that an apartment block is no place for babies and she was entitled to an adult environment to work in and we should move to a detached house.

  ‘Can you believe the nerve?’ Mrs Lloyd added.

  ‘I said to her, I said, listen, darling, I’m just the nanny, but I’ve got two screaming babies to deal with already so I can do without another one storming up here and ringing on the doorbell.’

  ‘Which may have been a little confrontational, Jodie.’

  ‘And Mr Lloyd?’ Newson enquired. ‘I presume his relationship with Ms Porter was as bad as yours?’

  Newson had not really been probing but instinctively he could see that he had hit on something. The embarrassed pause that followed and the way the two women glanced briefly downwards was enough to tell both Newson and Natasha that while Farrah Porter objected to the Lloyd babies, she had not objected to their father.

  ‘My husband has had very little to do with Miss Porter since…Well, for some time.’

  ‘She was a total bitch, Jodie added.

  ‘Did either of you hear anything going on downstairs on the night of the murder?’ Newson asked.

  ‘No, Inspector. As I told your constable before, with two small babies in the house one has quite enough to listen to.’

  ‘I was thinking in terms of music. Did you hear any music playing?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say.’

  ‘I did,’ the nanny said. ‘Definitely. Someone was playing music down there. I’ll tell you why I remember it, too. One of the tracks was ‘Love And Kisses’. You’ve probably never heard of it.’

  ‘Dannii Minogue’s first single, apparently,’ Natasha said.

  ‘That’s right. First record I ever bought. I was six. Haven’t heard it in fifteen years. I noticed it because it seemed like such a weird choice for an up-herself, oh-so-sophisticated bitch like Farrah Porter to be playing.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Newson. ‘It does, doesn’t it?’

  The lady at the top of the house who ran the residents’ association had no better opinion of Farrah Porter than had the Goldsteins or the Lloyds, and both Newson and Natasha were relieved to get out of the house. As they stood on the sunny pavement they reviewed the situation.

  ‘I admit that the victim profile is very similar to Bishop’s,’ Natasha conceded, ‘in that in both cases the victim has been deeply unpopular with their neighbours.’

  ‘And the reason for that is the same. Both subjects were powerful, brutish personalities, domineering, selfish and cruel.’

  ‘You think we’ve got a killer who’s got it in for bastards?’

  ‘I think we have to consider the possibility.’ —’Then why the weird methods? They seem to’ve come from nowhere.’

  ‘Except I bet they didn’t.’

  ‘And then there’s the other three murders that you’ve unilaterally decided to credit to our — single killer. What about those victim profiles? Were they all bastards?’

  ‘Spencer was a warrant officer in the army, wasn’t he? I don’t wish to speak ill of — non-commissioned officers or lump them all into the same category — ’

  ‘Particularly seeing as I’m a sergeant.’

  ‘Yes, exactly. But it certainly offers job opportunities for the bullying type, and there were no mourners at his funeral, were there? He must have been pretty unpopular.’

  ‘You can bet there’ll be plenty of people at Porter’s funeral, and Adam Bishop may have been hated but he still rated a full-scale old-style cockney cortège.’

  ‘Hatred can take different forms. I think a lot of people wanted to dance on Adam Bishop’s grave.’

  ‘Well, what about the other two? Angie Tatum was a model and Bradshaw was a museum curator.’

  ‘That doesn’t preclude them from being intimidating and antisocial, does it? I think we need to find out.’

  There was a roar of motorbike engine in the quiet street and Lance’s Kawasaki screeched up. Natasha had asked him to pick her up in Kensington.

  ‘Come on, doll. If you’ve got any money I’ll buy you dinner.’

  Natasha laughed prettily at Lance’s sledgehammer wit and put on the big full-face helmet he offered her before daintily climbing aboard the bike behind him. Newson noticed that Lance did not even glance back to see if his girl was properly seated and settled before kicking down, twisting the throttle and roaring away, causing Natasha to wobble alarmingly as they swerved into the traffic. If she had fallen off and been injured; Newson swore that he would have spent the rest of his life making Lance pay.

  SIXTEEN

  When he got home Newson poured himself a drink and sat for a long time thinking.

  He was emotionally and sexually dysfunctional. He had no girlfriend and no life. He was in love with someone who did not love him, and the only sex he’d had t
hat year was with a woman he’d dragged up out of his past who was even more dysfunctional than he was.

  He had to get a grip. He had to sort himself out.

  He also had to find a serial killer. A serial killer who in Newson’s opinion had already murdered a minimum of five people.

  It was early evening and Newson resolved that the best thing he could do to put pointless thoughts of Natasha and Lance from his mind was to get straight back to work. He brought out his file on the Bishop case, picked up the phone and dialled. A nervous foreign voice answered the phone.

  ‘Meeesis Beeshop ‘ouse.’

  ‘Oh, hello. Is that Juanita?’—

  ‘She no here no more. Goodbye.’

  The phone went dead. Newson dialled again.

  ‘Hello, I’d like to speak to Mrs Bishop, please. This is Detective Inspector Newson.’

  It took some time, but eventually he heard the hard estuary tones of Adam Bishop’s widow on the line. ‘Yeah. What is it? You caught the bastard yet?’

  ‘Sadly not.’

  ‘Then what you doing phoning me for? I’m being sprayed.’

  ‘I was just wondering, Mrs Bishop, whether your record and CD collection contains much music from the fifties or early sixties?’

  ‘Are you having a laugh? I’m having an all-over treatment.’

  ‘This is a police inquiry, Mrs Bishop. Just answer the question, please.’

  ‘Oh, I see. So I’m still getting treated worse than you lot treat the villains, am I? Well, let me think, then. We chucked a lot of that stuff out when we went over to CDs. We preferred more modern sounds. We’ve got Elvis, of course, you know, greatest hits and that, and I suppose a couple of compilations for parties.’

  ‘Do you own any Everly Brothers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Early Cliff Richard?’

  ‘Piss off.’

  ‘So you don’t have ‘Move It’?’

  ‘Oh, I see what you’re getting at. What the bastard who done Adam in was playing? Yeah, that weren’t our stuff. I coulda told you that at the time. He brought his own bleedin’ -music with him. Can you imagine! What a cunt.’