Past Mortem

by Ben Elton

  ‘That what I said,’ Chambers chipped in. ‘How long is a piece of string?’

  ‘Was there much bullying at your school, Mr Crosby?’ Newson asked. ‘I remember your speech at the benefit show in Hyde Park. It was very inspiring.’

  ‘I suppose we had our share and I copped the usual quota. I wasn’t a billionaire then, you see, just a scholarship boy at an expensive public school. We’re always targets, us social climbers, aren’t we? But, as you can see, I got over it.’

  ‘I think perhaps that’s something of an understatement.’

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you here today, Dick,’ Chambers interjected.

  ‘I came in because of this awful Tiffany Mellors business,’ Crosby said. ‘The media want some comment and I thought I’d do it here to give Kidcall a push. It would be good to get something positive out of such a tragedy. I looked her up, but she’d never contacted us. If she had perhaps she’d be alive now.’

  Newson took his leave of Crosby and of Henry Chambers, intent on heading back to New Scotland Yard. However, on emerging from the office he saw that Helen Smart was waiting for him.

  ‘Can we have a coffee?’ she asked.

  Newson had not wanted to have this conversation, but it could not be avoided. He accompanied Helen reluctantly to a nearby Starbucks, expecting further unpleasant recriminations or possibly a demand to stuff her orifices with white chocolate muffins and ejaculate into her skinny latte. Fortunately, however, she was in a relaxed, almost conciliatory mood.

  ‘I wanted to apologize,’ she said, attacking a bucket of mocha-flavoured soymilk foam. ‘I’ve been acting appallingly.’

  She still looked tired and unwell but she’d washed her hair and was nicely dressed, a contrast to the casualty she’d appeared to be when Newson had interviewed her at her flat only two days before.

  ‘You reported me to my superiors, Helen. You said I was harassing you. I could’ve got into terrible trouble.’

  ‘I know, it was a shitty thing to do. Totally shitty. But I was angry. I’m not angry now.’

  ‘So what’s brought about this change, then? Not that I’m not happy to accept the apology.’

  ‘Well, they’ve put me on Prozac for a start, but that won’t kick in for a while. In the meantime I’m doing my best with what inner resources I have.’

  ‘So you did see a doctor, then?’

  ‘Yes, she’s given me medication and arranged for counselling, which I’m dreading. I’m suffering from depression, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I rather think I’d worked that out.’

  ‘But the point is that suddenly I can see that what I’m depressed about is myself. I’m my own problem. I have to get out of it my own way.’

  ‘What happened, Helen?’ Newson was now used to Helen’s mood swings and he took nothing for granted.

  ‘The kind of wake-up call only a mother can get,’ she replied. ‘It happened straight after you left on Sunday. Kelvin was really pissed off about cops being round.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed. Who was Kelvin, by the way?’

  ‘I’d met him the night before at a club in Camden.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I know, I know, picking up strangers, eh? Not a good look.’

  ‘Certainly not strangers who look like Kelvin.’

  ‘I did it after the Hyde Park show. After I saw you with Christine.’

  ‘So, my fault again, then?’

  ‘No, that’s what I have to come to terms with. I mean, I still think it was a pretty shitty thing to do, turning up with her and all — ’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry but — ’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Ed. Like I say, I need to start recognizing that what happens to me is my responsibility. I’ve been acting like an angry schoolgirl. In fact, not acting like one. Being one. I’ve been a jealous, angry schoolgirl all my life.’

  Newson said nothing. This was a new Helen, contrite, self-analytical. The edge of bitterness had gone. Was he meeting the real person at last, or was this just another paranoid creation from a disturbed mind? Was there any such thing as the real Helen? Had there ever been?

  ‘I had a check-up by the way,’ she continued. ‘At a clinic…you know, after that evening we had together…‘ She stopped there. Neither of them was anxious to relive the details of that particular night. ‘I felt I owed it to you. You know, to get checked up.’

  ‘Slightly a case of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.’

  ‘Yeah, well, anyway the result was clean on all counts and you and Kelvin have been the only blokes I’ve been with in a long time.’

  Newson was not at all sure he believed her about this, or what a ‘long time’ might mean. The sort of things that Helen seemed to feel the need to do and to have done to her were not urges that could be easily suppressed.

  ‘So what about this wake-up call? What happened with Kelvin?’

  ‘Short story. He was angry and weird about you guys being around in my flat and he was being a bit aggressive and then suddenly he got his works out of his bag and started free-basing. I told him to stop and that I didn’t want that shit in my house but he just told me to piss off and kept right on cooking up just lying there on my couch, with no shirt on and his jeans unzipped, sneering and doing his drugs and refusing to budge, and I thought, oh my fucking God, another bully, I’ve gone and got myself another bully.’

  ‘Trouble really likes you, doesn’t it, Helen?’

  ‘That’s right, it does, doesn’t it? But you make trouble for yourself. It’s obvious. Anyway, I knew that Karl was coming back from his nan’s at teatime. I had no food in the house and this aggressive stoned weirdo was hanging around doing the worst kind of heavy and highly illegal grade-A shit, and then he said that we should get back into bed and I thought I was going to be raped, so I started looking around for a knife and all I could think of was that I had actually brought this bastard into my home. Into Karl’s home. I’d done it, it had been my choice, and I was the worst fucking idiot on earth.’

  ‘Kelvin certainly didn’t look like good news to me.’

  ‘He looked shit even when I was pissed and stoned. And I picked him up in a crappy club and paid for a taxi to bring him into my son’s home. But sober on a Sunday afternoon after a visit from the police and with no food in the house, he looked like the fucking devil come to take me to hell. And I’d picked him up! I mean, what’s all that about?’

  ‘I don’t know. Lack of self-respect on your part?’

  ‘Exactly. I hate myself and don’t think I deserve any better.’

  ‘That sounds like a reasonable analysis.’

  ‘Anyway, that was the wake-up call. Don’t worry, there’s no punchline, thank God. In the end Kelvin ran out of drugs. I had no food, scarcely any money and I wasn’t volunteering to shag him, and since there was nothing in it for him, being a man he just got up and staggered off. Didn’t even say goodbye, like I gave a shit. When I closed that door behind him I nearly shouted I was so relieved. But after that, sitting around waiting for Karl to come home, all I could think about was what might have happened, if he’d turned violent, if Karl had come back with my mum to find me beaten and raped and robbed. Or even if Kelvin had still been there, Mummy’s new bully doing drugs on the couch while Karl wanted his hot chocolate and a story. Shit, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Anyway, that’s why I went to the doctor. It’s why I’m talking to you now. I have to get myself together. I’ve been a victim for too long. Twenty years, maybe all my life, and there comes a time when you have to do something about it.’

  Newson noticed that Helen’s fists were clenched, knuckles white. For a moment her eyes seemed to shine with a dark evangelical light. He’d seen that light a few days earlier, in the eyes of Roger Jameson as they’d stood together in the corridor at the Hilton Hyde Park discussing the brutal murder of a homeless New Yorker. Jameson had used the same phrase. You have to do something about it.

  Had Helen done something about it?

/>   He had dismissed the idea earlier but now he was not sure. Was that the reason she was suddenly emerging from her long darkness? Because she had turned out Christine Copperfield’s light? Had she broken out of her prison of weakness and, pain using Christine’s choked and bleeding body as a battering ram?

  ‘You do realize that when Kelvin walked out he took your alibi with him, don’t you, Helen?’

  She looked up from her latte bucket. There was froth on her lips. ‘Ed, I didn’t kill Christine Copperfield.’

  Could she have done it? She certainly had a motive, her hatred of Christine, which had festered for twenty years. But what about the other murders? Could the self-loathing that Helen had worn like a coat ever since childhood have provoked such a cruelly psychopathic pattern of behaviour? She did work for an anti-bullying charity. Her life was devoted to the victims of bullying. Her working day involved a never-ending reliving of the pain that she had suffered as a girl.

  ‘Ed,’ she repeated in a strange, abstracted voice, ‘I did not kill Christine Copperfield. I thought you knew that.’

  Newson was not so sure. Had Helen been the surprising visitor whom Christine could not wait to tell Newson all about? It fitted, very neatly.

  Because Newson knew the killer. How many mutual acquaintances did Christine and he share? Not many. Only their old classmates, Helen Smart foremost amongst them.

  He looked at Helen, small, skinny Helen with her drawn face and scarred arms. Did those arms have the strength to haul a struggling woman round a cluttered room, forcing that woman’s bleeding loins down on to one chair after another? Could Helen have wrestled Christine Copperfield’s body through the bedroom door and on to the bed? It was possible, but not probable. And what of the others? Helen Smart couldn’t have dragged an unconscious Adam Bishop up the stairs of his house, or gained entrance to that house in the first place.

  Newson felt Helen’s hand on his. ‘I was sort of hoping that we could at least still be friends,’ she said, gently squeezing his fingers. ‘I mean, it’s probably not on, but it would be nice, if you thought that some time or other you could see me again.’ Her face was open, the eyes wide and sincere.

  Newson smiled but removed his hand. Her eyes glanced downwards, disappointed but accepting. She smiled a sweet smile and then her eyes were on him again, now with a hint of an appeal in them.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know where I am. I’ll leave it with you. We all get lonely sometimes. I know you do. And we did have some fun that evening, before I spoilt it, didn’t we? Weird, fun, but fun. You enjoyed yourself. I know you did. I saw how much you enjoyed yourself…because, my, my. You are hung, Detective Inspector Newson. Oh yes. You can make a lady very happy.

  Newson could scarcely believe it, but out of the blue he was feeling that old familiar stirring. It was the last sensation he had been expecting to feel. Helen was weird, Helen was crazy. She was damaged and vulnerable. Perhaps the danger was part of her attraction. He knew that there was no way on earth he would ever go to bed with this girl again, but the fact that the thought had even crossed his mind was astonishing. Helen Smart knew how to appeal to a man, there was no doubt about that.

  Could she have got into Adam Bishop’s house that way? Was Helen Smart capable of springing a honey trap?

  Looking into those eyes now, Newson thought that perhaps she could. Men were fools when it came to sex, Newson knew that all too well. How would big, bullying Adam Bishop have reacted if a little spiky haired, puffy-breasted pixie like Helen had appeared at his door? He certainly wouldn’t have suspected danger.

  Could she have got Bradshaw into the van?

  And tied Spencer to his chair?

  In the space of a few minutes Helen Smart had made Newson do things to her and to himself that he had never done before, things that he had never dreamt of doing. He had been trying to prepare supper, poached trout in the microwave. She’d got him from fish to fisting in scarcely three minutes.

  But what about Farrah Porter? How would Helen have got into Farrah Porter’s sumptuous Kensington flat? She couldn’t have. And Angie Tatum? Newson doubted that Helen Smart’s kooky charm would have had any effect on that equally tough, equally damaged lady.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ said Helen. ‘You’ve got my number.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got your number,’ Newson replied.

  Helen sat back in her chair. ‘So you’re looking for somebody who was bullied, then, aren’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. Or somebody who was a bully. How did you work that out?’

  ‘It’s a bit bloody obvious, Ed, your coming round to get that idiot Henry to profile victims for you.’

  ‘Idiot? You don’t like him?’

  ‘He’s a creep.’

  ‘I think he’s in love with you.’

  ‘You don’t miss much, do you? God, it’s a pain. He’s always staring, you know? He thinks I don’t notice, but I can sense him out of the corner of my eye, trying to look at my legs or down my front.’

  Newson felt as if he had been kicked. Was that how Natasha felt about him? Because Helen could have been describing him in his own office, looking at Natasha.

  ‘He always comments on what I’m wearing,’ Helen continued, ‘and pays me little compliments when we should be talking about work. It’s a form of harassment, but of course if I brought it up he’d probably burst into tears or something. Either way I can do without it.’

  Helen was describing his own behaviour exactly. Was this how Natasha felt about him?

  ‘I’m really glad we got back in contact,’ Helen said.

  ‘Yes, me too,’ Newson replied.

  ‘Liar. Of course you’re not. For you it was a bloody disaster.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Ed. You ended up with a dysfunctional fuck-up stabbing herself in your bathroom. No man wants that when he’s looking for a quick shag. But for me it’s been a catalyst. The truth is that if there is an answer to what’s been screwing me up all these years it’s not you and it’s not poor, self-deluded, dead Christine Copperfield. It’s me. Nobody else can provide the solution. You’ve taught me that.’ She leant forward and kissed him on the mouth. He felt some of the foam from her upper lip transferring itself to his.

  ‘Goodbye, Ed.’

  ‘Goodbye, Helen.’

  Helen turned and left. Newson picked up a napkin and wiped his mouth.

  On the tube back to his office Newson resolved to seek out an opportunity to question Natasha about his behaviour in the office. He couldn’t bear the possibility that she viewed him in the same manner that Helen looked upon the unfortunate Henry. How to approach it, though? Not easy to march up to a girl and say, ‘Are you aware that I’ve been seizing every opportunity to look at your tits and if so I was wondering if you have a problem with it?’

  When he got back Natasha was researching the last three names on the victim’s victim list.

  ‘I’m afraid Pamela White can’t be of any further use to us,’ she told Newson. ‘She committed suicide thirteen months ago.’

  ‘Ah, before Bradshaw was murdered?’

  ‘Yes, but I’ve been talking to her mother and it does seem to have been the result of the note she left on the internet. I told you that Bradshaw was a slippery character, didn’t I? Well, lots of people have very different memories of him at school.’

  ‘She got hate mail?’

  ‘Yes, and plenty of it. People wrote all sorts of things, calling her a liar and accusing her of making it all up because she’d been secretly in love with Bradshaw. Her mother thinks that Bradshaw orchestrated the replies amongst the girls who’d been in his thrall at school.’

  ‘Jesus, the victims are certainly piling up, aren’t they?’

  ‘It’s incredibly sad. That one bloke ruined Pamela White’s life and was the direct cause of her eventually ending it. From the age of twelve or thirteen he basically was her life.’

  Newson decided that it was as good a time as any to speak out
. ‘Sergeant, I was wondering, speaking of…well, speaking of nothing, really. Are you…are you entirely happy with my conduct in the office?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s a simple question, Sergeant. One has to be very careful these days about these things…and quite right, too. I fully support that. So on that subject let us acknowledge that I am…a man and you are…let’s face it, a woman.’

  ‘Ri-ght?’

  ‘And, you are, of course, without doubt, an…I mean it’s clearly beyond dispute…urn, any independent observer would accept the fact that you are an…attractive woman. Yes. That’s it, that’s the phrase I’ve been searching for. You are an attractive woman and as such will inevitably.., in a sense…without any active promotion on your part…draw the eye. Yes. Draw the eye is a useful phrase and what I’m seeking to establish is — ’

  ‘Do I mind that I sometimes catch you checking me out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Terrific. Just checking, best to be sure. Now, the other two victims’ victims that we were looking at…‘ Newson began furiously sorting through the papers on his desk, aware of Natasha’s quizzical gaze.

  ‘Katie Saunders and Mark Pearce,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right, Katie Pearce and Mark Saunders.

  What about them, Sergeant? What can you tell me?’

  ‘Both have alibis. Katie Saunders has gone to live with a cousin in the States. Her mum says that plastic surgery is in a different league over there and she’s saving up for another operation. Those guys are expensive.’

  ‘You’re right there. ‘New fits, that’s the game to be in, all right.’ It was the sort of vaguely humorous comment that Newson often made, but on this occasion it caused him a stab of pain and elicited no answering smile from Natasha. Christine Copperfield had made her contribution to enriching the business of plastic surgery. That fact must have been clear to everyone who had seen her corpse lying face up on the bed. Christine’s artificial breasts had stood out from the blueing flesh and drawn the eye even more surely than they had done when that flesh had been living. Death makes a mockery of personal vanity and those twin domes had made Christine’s corpse look silly, almost. Newson was painfully aware that she had deserved much better.