Headcase

by Peter Helton

  A small noise, like the quiet opening of a door, made me stop in my tracks. “Tim?” I pointed my light down the aisle and slowly advanced but the beam seemed to be swallowed up by the canyon of crates. A small rustling sound, perhaps a scrap of paper disturbed on the ground, perhaps a cockroach. In the next aisle. I killed the light. The result was complete blindness. No doubt my eyes would adjust again in a minute. It turned out I didn’t have a minute. The first blow struck me across my left side and threw me against the nearest shelf where I crashed my face against something cold and unyielding that left a metallic taste in my mouth. My first thought was to switch the torch back on but my arm had gone numb and seemed completely useless. I wasn’t even sure I still had the torch. I had just enough of my wits left to let myself tumble to the ground away from my silent attacker who was unlikely to wait long for his second blow. I could sense rather than see a bulky shadow advance, and a split second later lights danced before my eyes as his weapon glanced off the side of my head and hit the ground, metal on skull on concrete, sending sparks across the floor and through my temporal lobe. Great circles of whirling colours filled my vision as lightning pain shot through my skull and down my spine. Whoever it was had to have fantastic night-vision, while I was worse than blind. I knew I was just crawling now, trying to find a space, a hole, anything to hide my head from the next blow which I instinctively knew would finish me off. Not a word had been exchanged but I could hear myself groaning, feeling unable to stop. The metallic taste in my mouth mingled acidly with that of blood and my head seemed to have become a dead weight filled with electric whirring sounds and burning lights. There was light now, I had a brief, blurred impression of a dirty spurt of blood on concrete, frantic movement, jumping shadows. I tried to shout but produced nothing but a spray of pink froth and a gurgling sound in my throat. The light advanced and added to the pain behind my eyes. For a brief moment I could see the black-clad legs and laced boots of my assailant. They suddenly disappeared into the air and the whirring light filled my entire vision. Then my brain tilted like a torpedoed freighter, rolled over and slid into the dark.

  CHAPTER VI

  Swept into brief snatches of consciousness on waves of nausea I had fractured impressions of being on the move, paralysed or restrained, in the dark, of being talked about (“Shit, he’s puking again!”) and later of being manhandled in a way that made me want to scream. Perhaps I did, it was hard to tell above the fierce electronic screech in the middle of my head.

  When the lights did come on again they took a while to stop dancing nauseatingly across the little room. “Hey, Honeysett, welcome back.”

  I forced my eyes to focus on Annis’s face and eventually succeeded but the effort tired me out and I soon closed them again. Some bastard yanked them open and shone a light down the tunnel to the pain factory in my brain.

  “Shit, my head hurts,” I thought I said but it seemed to come out as a string of rasping sounds.

  “Told you he’ll be all right,” said Tim’s unmistakable voice.

  “He doesn’t look it,” I heard Annis say.

  “I’m Dr Martin — can you hear me, Mr Honeysett?”

  I just grunted but it seemed to satisfy the man.

  “You’re lucky to be with us, Mr Honeysett. Please try and open your eyes again.”

  He sounded pleasant so I tried. He was a tired-looking, clean-shaven guy who smiled at me as though I’d given him an unexpected present. Then he gave me an unexpected present. He jabbed a needle in my arm, shone the light back in my eyes and repeated, “Very lucky.” Finally he gave me some water to drink. I guzzled down three glasses and he smiled again. Annis supported the glass for me, it seemed extraordinarily heavy in my hand. He asked all the usual questions to test the extent of my brain damage and warned Annis and Tim, “You can’t stay long, I’m afraid. Ten minutes at the most. He needs to rest.” Finally he left us alone.

  The drink of water had unglued my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “You didn’t tell anyone we were in Leonard’s warehouse when it happened, did you?”

  “’Course not. You were mugged waiting for me in Locksbrook Road, where I found you seconds after,” Tim primed me. “That’s what I told the PC but they’re bound to want to talk to you too.”

  “What really happened? Why am I alive?”

  “Because I saved your arse in the nick of time.” Tim grinned from the foot of the bed. “I guessed. Cheers, Tim. How?”

  “Pointed the forklift truck down the aisle and made to run him over. He jumped out of the way though. Climbed the shelves like an orang-utan and scarpered.”

  “Good effort. Did you run me over instead? Feels like it.”

  “The doc was right, you were damn lucky.” Annis nodded gravely. She sat down on the side of the bed and nearly patted my head but fortunately thought better of it.

  Strangely enough I didn’t feel lucky. Quite apart from the fun and games going on inside my skull the feeling had returned to my left arm, which I wished it hadn’t, and my whole left side protested every time I drew breath.

  “A couple of hairline fractures to your ribs, nothing too dramatic, and you didn’t break your arm either. It’s your head they were worried about,” Annis said reassuringly.

  “Don’t worry, I’m in here somewhere,” I grumbled. “Tim, did you get a good look at him?”

  “Guy from the picture, with the bad jewellery. I don’t think he’s too fond of you.”

  “He couldn’t have known who I was in the dark, unless he saw us go over the wall and saw you coming out. Jesus, he never said a word, just laid into me like I was vermin to be exterminated.” In retrospect I found the silence of this guy’s attack the most frightening thing about it. “I don’t suppose you had time to check out the safe, then?”

  “’Fraid not. I heaved you out of there and into the car and made tracks to A&E. Rang Annis on the car phone on the way there. You kept puking, I was afraid you’d choke on it.”

  “How did you get here from Cornwall so quickly?” I asked Annis.

  “I didn’t really. Fortunately I’d got a bit bored out there and fixed up Alison’s old

  Beetle. So I jumped into that but broke down halfway here, so it actually took me ages. She said I could keep the car, which I thought was nice of her.”

  “Great, more junk. So you’re saying I’ve been out for a whole day? Today is tomorrow? If you know what I mean.”

  “Told you.” She focused the green beam of her eyes briefly on Tim. “Sound as a bell. You groaned and rasped and snored a lot but wouldn’t wake up. We were bloody worried but they said your brain scan showed up normal. Just some swelling.”

  “Which surprised everyone,” Tim chipped in.

  “Blimey.” I’d never lost a whole day. I’d been robbed after all. “Right, help me get out of here.”

  “You want to go home?” Annis said, outraged.

  I thought about it for a moment but fell asleep in the middle of it.

  Next morning, once the nurse had finished prodding me with an electronic thermometer and had taken her excessive cheerfulness to wherever she wanted to spread it next, I thought I was feeling much better. Until breakfast arrived. Fancy offering a man cornflakes when all he really needs is Nurofen on toast. There was also an offering of two types of brown water, which I politely declined, but I emptied a whole bottle of orange juice instead which just made me hungrier.

  Having previous experience of discharging myself from the RUH with various body parts in questionable working order, I hurried to get dressed in the change of clothes a forward-thinking Annis had left for me. Arguments with nurses and doctors are won much more easily if you can show you can dress yourself like a grown-up. It took some doing though. I found I couldn’t straighten my left arm or do a lot else with it for that matter and twisting my torso was out of the question. When I finally managed to struggle into my clothes I felt quite proud. I should have avoided the mirror in the bathroom though. My right ear had been painted orange f
or some reason and the area above it shaved around the place where the stitches had gone in. Combined with a three-day growth of beard it gave me a dubious, moth-eaten flair. The orange washed off, it was probably disinfectant.

  I called Annis, then argued in turn with a nurse, her superior and a doctor, signed a waiver absolving them, the RUH and the entire National Health Service from all responsibility for the inevitable disaster that would befall me as soon as I quit the premises, then hobbled out with prescriptions for painkillers and anti-inflammatories.

  Annis had picked up my DS and was waiting when I stepped outside. It had rained overnight. The air smelled fresh and the sky was full of scurrying clouds. Our little heat wave had broken.

  “Was that wise?” she asked as I slid behind the wheel. I raised my eyebrows, even though it pulled on my stitches. “Okay, so you’ve had that conversation,” she concluded. “Where are we going?”

  “Breakfastland.”

  Lovejoy’s, named after Jonathan Gash’s rogue antique dealer, is at the heart of the only surviving antiques centre in Bartlett Street. Service is minimal and grudging but nowhere else in the city can you have a full Edwardian breakfast with devils on horseback and enough toast to build a shed. I worked my way methodically across my plate while Annis nibbled distractedly on cinnamon toast.

  “Did you have any more trouble in Cornwall?”

  “No. No, not really.” Annis came alive again. “I was just thinking about that. We didn’t have any more visitors or anything like that. But something’s happened with Alison, she’s so different, and I couldn’t get anything out of her. She’s clammed up. We went out for walks, hung out on the beach, went to every decent restaurant in the area, but…It was as if she wanted to spend as little time as possible at the cottage. And she never touched her brushes once. I had the feeling she wanted someone with her but wanted to be alone at the same time. I was quite glad to leave in the end, but I worry. Perhaps I just caught it from her but I did feel uncomfortable down there.” She acted out a shudder for me. “I was beginning to feel watched and caught myself looking over my shoulder more than once, especially in the dark. And that was with your gun in my pocket. Thanks for the loan by the way, it’s back in your car now.”

  “You think you should go back?”

  “I would if I knew what it was all about but I can’t go riding shotgun for her without her laying her cards on the table. I tried to push her but she told me to mind my own business. My business is here.” She shrugged. “Aren’t you going to eat your kidneys?”

  “Don’t even think about it, I’m leaving the best till last.”

  “I used to do that. When I was a little girl, that is.”

  “And now that you’re all grown up what are your immediate plans?”

  “Looks like you could do with a bodyguard, doesn’t it? State you’re in, a four-year-old could beat the crap out of you.”

  “Can’t they always?”

  “Are you sure you want both your kidneys?”

  “I was told you can survive with one,” I admitted reluctantly and surrendered my fork.

  Puddles of milk, eggshells, lots of eggshells. Congealing mincemeat, some brown stuff, a lot of black stuff. Vegetable peelings, slices of cheese curling and hardening. Burnt toast floating in the sink with an orange and some teabags. The freezer lid open, the contents defrosting, the hot tap running. Every saucepan used. An enthusiastic sprinkling of flour, a mangled tin of tomatoes, lying on its side, bleeding quietly into a tea towel. Chris Honeysett, Food Detective.

  “See? Told you they could look after themselves,” Annis said triumphantly.

  I had worried that Anne and Linda, institutionalized and unused to feeding themselves, had in my absence been reduced to living on cornflakes but the evidence pointed to some kind of cooking activity. The recipe was harder to guess at. Anne and Linda soon cleared up that mystery. “I made pie,” Anne said, her speech completely cleared up. “But it’s not easy.”

  “I made frozen spinach,” Linda said, pointing to the charcoaled pan by the sink. She frowned angrily at it. “The spinach didn’t work.”

  “Must’ve been faulty.”

  “So I made eggs.”

  “Sounds yummy.” I introduced Annis who surveyed the kitchen with dispassionate interest. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be here, I had a little accident, needed some stitches. But I’m back now and I’ll take over the kitchen again. After you’ve cleared it up, that is.” While Anne and Linda set themselves to the unusual task of clearing up after themselves we withdrew to Jenny’s office. The first drops of blustery rain hit the window pane and a pleasant twilight filled the little room. I sat behind the desk where the wall chart for June was still spread out, Annis pulled up a chair and planted her trainer-clad feet on another one.

  “Were you and Jenny ever an item?” she asked out of the blue.

  “No, never, why?” I lit a Camel, took a deep draught of smoke into my lungs and instantly regretted it. I tried to exhale quickly but the coughing overtook me halfway. I thought I could hear my ribs cracking. It felt like someone was beating me up all over again. “Gahh.”

  “Stupid mutt, put it out. I was just thinking, she had no boyfriend, did she?”

  “No time,” I rasped out.

  “Don’t think you’ll get sympathy from me. So no jilted ex, driven to murder, no crime of passion. What about the druggy bloke…”

  “Matt Hilleker,” I supplied, breathing a little easier with the cigarette stubbed out. I desperately wanted one though.

  “Could he have done it?”

  “Needham’s got his money on it. The Matt I remember couldn’t have…wouldn’t have done it, I’d like to think. But that’s a fatuous thing to say, really. Everyone is capable of murder, given the right circumstances. Which includes motive. Drug money is a powerful motive. Drugs change everyone. Change everything.”

  “What they don’t change is Dave drowned in the lock with the murder weapon.”

  “And Gavin missing.” Spotty, shy little Gavin. “If they dig him up somewhere, and I mean literally, then Somerset Lodge is finished. You should have seen the fuss people kicked up when it was first established. Objections, complaints, petitions, the whole neighbourhood up in arms and united, trying to stop the Culverhouse Trust from setting it up here. The same had happened everywhere else they had tried, naturally.”

  “Not in my back yard. Curtains twitch a lot in this street, I noticed when we got out of the car.” Annis groaned. “Did you read the letters to the Bath Chronicle?”

  I had studiously avoided looking at the local press. I shook my head vigorously. The whole room sloshed, slewed and went dark for a second before things zoomed back to normal. Sweat had risen from every pore in my body in an instant. Now I felt cold and queasy. I’d have to watch my head movements for a while.

  “They were full of I-told-you-sos and wasn’t it time they closed the place down.”

  “House prices,” I got out, still trying to steady myself.

  “Oh, they weren’t coy about that either,” Annis concurred. “Said it affected the value of their properties as well as endangering their children’s safety and so forth.”

  “Look out of the window,” I suggested. “To your right? See the huge fence?”

  “Hard to miss.”

  “The neighbours put it up as soon as the Culverhouse Trust took over the house. It’s probably mined on the other side. And they think they’re the sane ones.”

  “One in four,” she said cheerfully.

  “You what?”

  “One in four of the population needs psychiatric help at some stage in their life. Told you I read in bed. So I wish them all the best,” she said with a smile that could have frozen the rain on the window.

  “So there we have it,” I speculated, “Jenny and Dave were murdered by a first-time buyer trying to depress house prices in the area so they could get on the property ladder.”

  “If Somerset Lodge folds house prices are sure to r
ise, though. First one to sell in the street after that might be our man. Case closed. Not that the houses round here are a first-time buyer’s kind of property. Certainly not Somerset Lodge. With that huge extension, six bedrooms, study, the garden’s massive…It’s the biggest house in the street, a bit of an anomaly, really.”

  “What would the price tag be, half a million?”

  “No way, closer to a million. House prices in Bath are rising by close to twenty-five per cent a year right now.”

  “At that rate you’d have to exterminate everyone in the street to depress the prices enough for the average mortgage holder.” I took a deep, satisfying breath. Despite the fact that both of us were hideously sober we had managed to slip back into the easy humour with which we usually discussed Aqua cases. I had turned a corner. Or perhaps Annis had gently pushed me around it.

  “Right, let’s go over this whole thing again,” she said now, “there’s bound to be something we’ve missed somewhere.”

  And that’s what we did. We took it step by step, making notes of every detail, discarding all speculation, just sticking to the facts. We laid out a time plan for the events and eliminated everyone with an alibi, without a motive and anyone too unlikely or wholly unconnected.

  “Looks like it was you after all, I’ll be making a citizen’s arrest,” Annis concluded as the list dwindled.

  After that we pored over the wall chart. The Friday of Jenny’s murder had acquired an ominous but somehow appropriate halo of a stain where Linda had set down a mug of coffee the day I took charge of the house.

  “What’s ATD and ATG?” Annis wanted to know. I had wondered that before. It was noted in tiny capitals in Jenny’s writing at the bottom of each rectangle for the Fridays, before and well after the fatal date. “ATD…Anarchist Tea Dance?”