Past Mortem

by Ben Elton

  Struggling to get himself upright, he racked his brain to orientate himself sufficiently to locate the telephone. He had to answer it, he knew that. He must answer it, because he knew that it would be his alarm monitoring service, and if he didn’t they would send the fire brigade, and above all else Newson did not want them to send the fire brigade. There was very little clear in Newson’s mind at that moment but of one thing he was certain: he did not want half a dozen large men trying to force their way into his house with axes.

  He grabbed the phone and heard Helen’s voice. She must have picked up the extension in his bedroom.

  ‘Yes, I can smell burning,’ she was saying. ‘I think there must be a fire in the kitchen.’

  ‘No!’ Newson blurted into the phone, ‘there isn’t!’

  ‘I think there is, Ed,’ Helen replied. ‘I can definitely smell burning.’

  ‘Well, yes, there is, but — ’

  ‘So there is a fire?’ a third voice interjected.

  ‘A small one…’

  ‘Do you require the fire service?’

  ‘No!’ Newson shouted.

  ‘The lady said she smells burning, sir.’

  ‘Of course she smells burning. That’s why the alarms have gone off.’

  ‘So there is a fire?’

  ‘It’s just the potatoes. They boiled dry.’

  ‘So there’s no fire,’ the third voice said.

  ‘No,’ Newson replied.

  ‘No, there isn’t a fire? Or no, there is a fire?’

  ‘THERE IS NO FIRE. IT’S THE POTATOES.’

  ‘I’m not deaf, sir. You understand I have to be sure.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s extremely easy for misunderstandings to arise under stress.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘And if there was a fire and I failed to respond to an alarm alert, and death or injury resulted, you would hold me responsible and you would be right to do so.’

  ‘Yes, I see. You have to be sure.’

  ‘Yes, I do, sir. But in this case, there is no fire?’

  ‘No…I mean, yes! Yes, there is no fire. However, unless I go and turn the gas off immediately there will be.’

  The woman at the monitoring service thanked Newson and he heard a click as she put the phone down.

  ‘Come back upstairs,’ said Helen, who was still listening on the extension.

  Newson turned off the gas beneath his charred cast-iron saucepan and returned to the bedroom.

  Helen was lying exactly where he had left her, except that she had thrown off the sheet and was once more completely naked. ‘I want more,’ she said. ‘The night is young.’

  ‘Helen,’ Newson replied. ‘I really think you should get up and get washed now. I have to strip this bed.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘It isn’t fine.’

  ‘We’ll only mess it up again.’

  ‘No. No, we won’t.’

  ‘Yes, we will. I want you to do it all to me again.’

  ‘Helen. I think we should go downstairs now and I should make us something to eat, and we should have a talk, and then I can take you home in a taxi.’

  ‘I haven’t got any trousers. I cut them off so that you could get into me more easily.’

  ‘Helen, we both know what we did. We had enthusiastic consensual sex and I don’t appreciate these implications that somehow this has been just for my benefit.’

  ‘Well, hasn’t it been? Just like before, you have your bit of fun and then walk away when you feel like it.’

  ‘Get up, Helen. I have no intention of buying into a guilt trip of which I’ve been unaware for twenty years. I’m really sorry that you felt that way then and I’m sorry you feel this way now, but I was a fourteen-year-old boy and fourteen-year-old boys get off with whoever they can. Besides which, I had no idea that you felt the-way you say you did.’

  ‘You just dropped me. Even as a friend you dropped me.’

  ‘Look! I was excited, all right? I was besotted with Christine. I had been since the second year. She was the dream girl and I was a horny little nobody. As for you, I’d have called you in the end; I thought you’d be back and -that we’d get back to our magazine and rolling back the frontiers of Thatcherism. But you didn’t come back, Helen. You left, and that was it. We all moved on. Now get up, have a shower and I’ll find you some trousers and a fresh T-shirt.’

  To Newson’s intense relief Helen got up and went into the bathroom. Moments later, as he was pulling the damp sheets from his bed, he heard a groan of pain. Not a shout, but a low, resigned groan.

  The bathroom door was half open and when Newson opened it he saw Helen looking at herself in the mirror, still naked but for the absurd rags of trouser that remained attached to each ankle. There were tears running down her face and blood streamed down the side of her body. She had stabbed herself in the nipple with Newson’s nail scissors, pushing the blades all the way through, where they remained, while she stood with her scarred arms hanging limply by her side staring at herself with abstracted curiosity.

  Newson was not a man to panic easily. He was a senior police officer and good in a crisis. Without saying a word, he went to the open bathroom cabinet from which Helen had taken his scissors and grabbed a bottle of Dettol and some cotton wool.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly.

  The blood was now running off her foot and on to the floor. How much more could she mess up his house? He took hold of the scissors and with one quick movement removed them from Helen’s nipple. She grunted with pain but did not move and allowed him to pour Dettol over the wound. Next he put a wad of cotton wool on either side of the bleeding nipple, covering the streaming cuts.

  ‘Try to pinch those together,’ he said. ‘Push and pinch, put some pressure on it while I try to tape them down.’ Helen held the swabs and Newson dried her chest with toilet paper so that he could tape down the makeshift dressing.

  ‘A nipple is not the most convenient thing to dress,’ he said, ‘even a protruding one.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Helen for the second time.

  Eventually Newson managed to attach the dressing to Helen’s chest and the blood flow began to slow. ‘We have to go to Casualty,’ he said.

  ‘No, that’s stupid.’

  ‘Helen, I don’t know the first thing about the anatomy of a nipple. You’ve impaled yours with a pair of scissors, and I don’t know what damage you’ve done. It may need a stitch, it may need cleaning out. If you ignore it and it goes septic you could be in big trouble.’

  ‘Can’t I just stay here? You seem like a good doctor.’

  ‘No. I’m taking you to hospital.’ He rang for a mini-cab and then, having sponged Helen down to wash off the blood and urine, found her a baggy shirt and some trousers. He dressed himself and while they waited for the car to arrive he made coffee. It was less than an hour since he had been about to prepare dinner.

  ‘Helen,’ Newson said gently, ‘you have to see someone. You need to speak to a professional about this.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’

  ‘You’ve got to think about Karl. You have a child. He’s your first responsibility. I’m going to be very frank now, Helen. From where I’m standing I have a duty to report this situation to the social services. You’re a single mother given to self-harm.’

  ‘I never do any real damage.’

  ‘What if you made a mistake one day? What if you were alone at home with Karl and you went too far and he found you bleeding on the floor?’

  ‘I won’t. I never have.’

  ‘Will you try and get help?’

  ‘I can’t afford therapy.’

  ‘If you talk to your GP he should be able to refer you on the NHS.’

  ‘And run the risk of him doing what you’ve just threatened to do? Take Karl? No thanks. I’ll be fine. Are you going to report me to anyone?’

  ‘No, I suppose probably not.’

  ‘Lucky for
you, Ed, because -if you did I’d make up stuff about you and what you did to me that would stick to your record for ever.’

  The cab arrived and Newson was relieved when Helen picked up her overnight bag and got into it without further protest. ‘You don’t have to come with me. I’ll be fine,’ she said.

  ‘I want to,’ Newson replied, which they both knew was a lie.

  ‘All right.’

  In the car Helen asked Newson if he had replied to Christine’s email about the reunion.

  ‘Yes, I thought I’d go,’ Newson said.

  ‘After what I told you about what a bitch she is?’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, Helen, but I had different experiences at school from you and I have different memories. I can see that you were unhappy then and you’re unhappy now, but that’s you, it isn’t me. I’d like to go to the reunion and I’d like to see Christine again. If you think that makes me a terrible human being, then I’m sorry but there it is.’

  ‘And by comparison you never want to see me again in your entire life, do you?’

  ‘Helen, I don’t need this. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. It’s understandable. And don’t worry about me. Like you say, I have Karl. I have to keep things vaguely together for him, don’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  It was still relatively early in the evening so there was only a two-hour wait in Casualty before Helen could have her wound dressed properly.

  ‘The doctor agreed with you,’ said Helen as they waited at the hospital cab rank, Newson having insisted on taking her back to Willesden. ‘He said I should get my GP to refer me to a psychiatrist.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Perhaps.’—

  ‘Please try. You really should.’

  ‘I might. Don’t worry about the condom thing. You’re the first man I’ve been with in more than a year.’

  ‘You really shouldn’t have done that, Helen.’

  ‘Will you come in?’ she asked. ‘We really could just have coffee.’

  ‘Helen…I’m sorry.’

  ‘But you really do want to get away from me as quickly as possible.’

  All Newson could do was shrug pathetically. It felt so cruel, but whatever she might believe, this woman was not his responsibility.

  ‘Bye,’ she said and got out of the cab.

  Newson arrived home shortly before eleven and spent the following hour cleaning up his house, mopping the kitchen floor, washing the sheets, disinfecting the bathroom. It was all so horrible he almost had to laugh. There he’d been, planning a polite supper for two, and here he was now cleaning up olive oil, urine, pools of congealed blood, ripped and sodden clothing and a stinking bed. It had been the strangest evening he had ever spent. He thought on balance he would probably not tell Natasha about it. Helen had said that she would not contact him, but in fact she did inasmuch as his address was included on a general email that she had obviously composed and sent immediately after he had dropped her off.

  Hello everybody,

  Maybe some of you remember me. I’m Helen Smart. I left halfway through the fourth year. I see that Christine Copperfield is planning a reunion. Well, I thought I’d get in early with my reminiscences so as to give you something to talk about. Christine Copperfield was an evil bitch…

  She gave a detailed description of the tampon story she had told Newson on their first evening together.

  SEVENTEEN

  Newson had woken up the following day feeling depressed. It was a Saturday and he’d been intending to lunch with friends, but instead he’d phoned to cancel. He was hung over, he felt queasy and he was overcome with feelings of disgust and self-loathing. Every time he closed his eyes one aspect or other of Helen Smart’s spread-eagled anatomy rose up before him. His dick was red and sore from having been so roughly pulled about.

  It was not like Newson to feel so low.. He had a naturally optimistic disposition and had never been prone to depression, but his evening with Helen, shocking both in itself and as evidence of his own empty personal life, had really brought him down. He decided that he needed a break.

  ‘You’re where?’ Natasha said when he phoned her on the Monday morning.

  ‘Fort William. It’s in Scotland. I took the sleeper up on Saturday night. I can’t tell you how good it feels. The air’s like champagne.’

  ‘What are you doing in Scotland?’

  ‘Right now I’m walking up a mountain.’

  ‘Why are you walking up a mountain?’

  ‘I’m having a day off.’

  ‘In Scotland? You’ve gone six hundred miles to have a day off?’

  ‘Well, I had Sunday too. It’s what you call a mini-break.’

  ‘It’s what I call bloody barmy. Why didn’t you go to Brighton?’

  ‘No mountains in Brighton.’

  ‘But sea.’

  ‘Yes, but no mountains.’.

  ‘What about our duty to the Home Office and to the victims of crime?’

  ‘It’s only a day. I’ll be back tomorrow morning. There’s a six a.m. flight from Glasgow. Besides, I’m thinking while I walk. Working on the case. Like Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He used to go for a long tramp to clear his head. By the time he got home in the evening he’d usually cracked an entire German spy ring.’

  ‘Have you cracked any spy rings?’

  ‘No, but I’ve had one thought. Could you look at the murder scene inventories and see if there was a CD or cassette left in the sound systems at Spencer’s or Angie Tatum’s?’

  ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’

  ‘Compilation albums.

  ‘You mean like The Greatest Air Guitar Anthems, or whatever?’

  ‘No, I’m thinking more of compilations based on year. Now ‘84. Something like that.’

  ‘Any specific year?’

  ‘Sergeant, I don’t think we need to go into that amount of detail at the moment. If you find that there was a music cassette or CD in the stereo at the Spencer or Tatum murder locations tell me, OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Right then, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Have a nice walk. Ring me if you have any more brilliant thoughts.’

  ‘I won’t hesitate.’

  That evening as Newson sat in the tiny bar of his guest house, nursing a single malt whisky of startling intensity, he reflected that taking a couple of days out of London had been a sensible idea. He felt sharper and was sure that the keen winds blowing at the summits of the three Munros he’d climbed had done something to clear from his mind the grimmer aspects of his evening with Helen. He’d even felt sufficiently himself again to order the trout with new potatoes.

  Newson looked up to discover that the landlady was standing before him.—

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Newson, could you possibly repeat your order?’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I’m rather distracted. You see, Craig has not come home from school yet and it’s nearly six.’

  Newson had noticed Craig, a small, shy boy who cleaned the guests’ boots at seventy-five pence a pair. He was a ginger, like Newson, but of course in Scotland that was less noteworthy.

  ‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ Newson said. ‘When’s he supposed to be back?’

  ‘Well, it’s not normally later than five. John’s been out looking, but he’s just phoned to say Craig’s not to be seen anywhere on his usual route.’—

  ‘In the police we don’t normally think of an hour late as being cause for alarm. Kids are dreamy types and so often it turns out that the child’s just been distracted and lost track of the time.’—

  ‘You don’t think I should call the local police, then?’

  ‘You could, but I’d give it another half-hour. I’m sure Craig’ll be back by then.’

  Just then the door opened and Craig walked in. He looked dishevelled and had clearly been crying. His mother turned on him, half in relief and half in fury.

&n
bsp; ‘Craig! Where have you been? Your father’s out looking for you. I was about to call the police! What’s been going on? Why have you been crying?’

  ‘I haven’t been crying.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘I haven’t been anywhere.’

  ‘We’ve been worried sick!’—

  While the landlady went to call her husband with the good news that Craig had returned, Newson studied the boy. Something had happened to upset him. He was obviously hiding something.

  ‘What’s wrong with your arm, Craig?’ Newson asked. The boy was gripping his arm as if in pain.

  ‘I fell over,’ he replied. ‘My shirt got ripped and I grazed my arm.’

  He was lying. Newson wondered why, and a picture flashed into his mind of Gary Whitfield cowering in a corner while Jameson and his cronies closed in with their indelible marker and he, Newson, stood by, doing nothing.

  ‘Bit of trouble at school, eh?’ Newson suggested.

  ‘No, I just fell over.’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  ‘Yes,’ said his mother, coming back into the room. ‘That shirt’s nearly new. If you’ve ruined it I shall be furious.’

  Craig slowly removed his blazer. One of his shirt sleeves was bloodstained, and he had clearly been trying to wash it.

  ‘I fell over,’ Craig repeated. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. Is the shirt totalled?’

  Newson looked at the boy’s sleeve. ‘It doesn’t look torn at all.’

  ‘It’s only tiny,’ said Craig.

  ‘I can’t see anything. Why were you bleeding?’

  ‘I told you.’

  The boy’s mother took hold of Craig’s arm and inspected it. Now Newson could see that in the middle of the bloodstain were two small nicks in the fabric of the shirt.

  ‘Funny sort of tear,’ she said, unbuttoning the cuff and rolling up the sleeve. There on Craig’s arm were two tiny puncture marks.