Menage_a_20_-_Tales_with_a_Hook

by Twenty Goodreads Authors

  No problem for me; I didn’t have a life. Debbie Dean never talked about hers, so I guessed she was in the same boat.

  This case had some interesting points though.

  “DD,” I called. My invisible partner betrayed her presence by slamming a drawer shut. I steadied her pile of paperwork before it could cascade halfway across the office.

  “Oh, DD,” I coaxed. “Come and see. You’ll like it…”

  She stood, glaring at me. I smiled and salaamed.

  She snorted reluctant laughter and came round the desks.

  “What, Phelps? This better be good.”

  “Says here that something rammed straight through the guy’s ribcage. Had to be something hot, ‘cos it cauterised the wound. His skull was shattered by lateral pressure on both sides; same with the woman.

  “Oh, and their hearts and brains are missing.”

  Our victims were dentist Peter Simms and his nurse, Karen Day. Routine digging produced nothing at all interesting about them.

  He’d been an average student, an average dentist, living an average life. Home in the cheaper suburbs, a wife, two kids, and two cars. No debts, and no bad habits. He’d never been in any sort of trouble with the law. She’d been arrested once for public intoxication, after graduating from college; hardly a career criminal.

  “This guy must have been a barrel of laughs,” Dean said. “I bet he was a train spotter at the weekend.”

  “Stamp collector,” I guessed.

  We gazed at the pristine front garden as we walked down the path and banged on the late Simms’ front door.

  If I’d had to imagine an average widow to fit the average Simms, I’d have thought medium height, vaguely pretty, probably brown haired; the sort of suburban housewife who went to flower arranging and Yoga classes during the week.

  I’d have been spot on.

  Of course, Miranda Simms wasn’t so pretty this morning, without makeup, eyes red and puffy.

  We flashed our ID cards and made suitably condoling noises as she showed us into the tiny lounge.

  “What is the DSI?” she asked.

  “Department of Scientific Intelligence,” said Dean. “We’ve been called in to assist the police because…”

  She looked at me, bewildered, as Miranda started crying. I made encouraging motions with my hands. She sat on the sofa, putting an awkward arm around Miranda’s shoulders, patting and soothing.

  Dean had been my partner for six years. She was tough, smart, watched my back and supported me, no matter what. I did the same with her. We had no complaints. We made a good team. We were good at our job. We weren’t good with the touchy-feely stuff. Consoling grieving widows was not our forte. Between sobs, Miranda gasped out a coherent sentence.

  “You’ve been called in… because of the way Peter died,” she choked.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I know it’s a horrible time, but we need to get some understanding of what Peter was like. What sort of man was he? What did he do when he wasn’t working?”

  Peter Simms, it appeared, was a creature of habit. He played squash at the local club on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and on Sundays did the gardening. He did some do-it-yourself in the basement, which he’d fitted out as a little workshop. Went to parents’ evenings, read, watched the occasional film. Did research into things that interested him–—his current favourite was Egyptology. That about summed up his life.

  “The children are with my sister,” Miranda said, slightly more composed. “I didn’t want them to be here for all this…” She waved a hand vaguely.

  I crossed the little room, smelling of old furniture polish and recent emptiness, looking at a picture on the mantelpiece above the gas fire.

  It showed Peter and his wife. Living, he had been perhaps my height, five feet eight, but considerably thinner. He had less hair, even though he was two years younger than my thirty-five. A pleasant, anonymous face; he looked like an affable man, reluctant to cause trouble. Not the sort to have enemies.

  Miranda confirmed it.

  “What was he doing in Whitechapel?” asked Dean.

  “He did his free clinic there on Mondays,” sobbed Miranda. “Free dental care for the homeless.” She wiped her eyes with a sodden bunch of tissues. “Yesterday evening, he went to the clinic like he had for the last two years. If only…”

  Simms’s basement was neat. Everything was in place, laid out in orderly fashion. His books and notes on Egypt were orderly, written in a neat hand.

  I sat in his seat, behind his desk, reading his notes by the light of the Tensor lamp on his desk. I read while Dean prowled, tapping walls, searching the room.

  Finally she gave up. “Anything in his notes?” she asked, perching herself on a corner of the desk.

  “Nothing original, as far as I can see, although he was raving about some old book he’d stumbled on,” I answered. “De Vermis Mysteriis by someone called Ludwig Prinn. Ever heard of it?”

  Dean shook her head.

  “Nope,” she said. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  We took his Egyptian research, made our excuses and left the desperate, little house as fast as we could.

  “The morgue next?” asked Dean.

  I nodded.

  She was silent through the car journey, finally exploding as we parked outside the pathology building.

  “I mean, who the hell would want to butcher a dentist like that? It seems he was a nice, inoffensive man, didn’t drink or take drugs, loving husband and father, never argued with anyone. Why?” She sounded baffled.

  “Maybe he was a crap dentist,” I suggested.

  Dean punched my arm. “I’m being serious.”

  “Me too,” I protested. “I’ve had a few dentists I’d like to kill. I mean, no one actually likes dentists, do they?”

  Dean looked at me, pushing her curly brown hair back from her forehead.

  “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps he was killed because he was a dentist, not because he was Peter Simms. And you really need to do something about your teeth before they fall out.”

  “I hate dentists, and besides, my teeth are perfectly healthy.”

  “Oh really?” she mocked. “They’re meant to be brown and green then, are they?”

  We were much more comfortable dealing with the mangled remains of the dentist and his nurse than we had been with his widow. We bent over the corpses as the pathologist in charge, the unfortunately named Erasmus Slyme, detailed the wounds.

  “If I had to guess,” he said, in a pronounced Scottish lowland burr, “I’d say that someone took a red hot metal bar and rammed it straight through their sternums and ribs. There was decided charring of the wound edges.”

  “But then it looks as if someone grabbed the edges of the wound and tore the chests open,” I said.

  “Aye, that’s how I see it,” he agreed. “Then they cut the hearts free of the bodies with some sort of curved blade, like a little sickle.”

  “What about the damage to the heads?” asked my partner.

  “Again, I’d say something like a heated metal vice was closed on the temples, and tightened until the skulls just collapsed. You can see the charring there.”

  Dean sniffed. “What’s that smell?”

  I could smell it too. A heavy, rotten odour.

  “I’ve sent samples for analysis,” said Slyme, “but in my judgement, that would be sulphur. Burning sulphur is still sometimes used as a fumigant.”

  “I don’t suppose there was any trace of a red hot vice, or a metal bar, or sulphur on the crime scene,” I asked.

  Slyme shook his head.

  “Not a trace,” he said with the easy cheerfulness of someone who spends his time cutting up dead bodies. “But there was the burned cadaver as well.” Dean and I looked at each other in surprise. “A vagrant,” Slyme added, “burned down to just bone and teeth. Like your others.”

  Over the last couple of weeks, we’d been investigating the deaths of five homeless people, who had all burst into fl
ame and burned to a skeleton. No trace of accelerants, no motive, no witnesses. I didn’t believe in spontaneous combustion.

  “See?” I said to Dean. “It’s now the same case as our previous. Aren’t you glad I persuaded you to work on it?”

  Dean sniffed, but gave a tiny nod of her head.

  The last job was to go through the sad, somehow diminished pile of personal effects. Nothing out of the ordinary - save for one key we couldn’t account for.

  “Safe deposit?” suggested Dean.

  “Left luggage,” I countered. “Run the number through the database when we get back to the office.”

  We put Simms’s and Day’s effects back into the brown envelopes.

  “Crime scene next,” I said over the noise of Dean’s cell phone, echoing in the tiled acoustics of the post-mortem suite.

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “Croydon. There’s been another one. Another dentist, and his staff. Just like this one.”

  Dean looked pale when she left the charred shell of the building in Croydon High Street. I expect I did as well.

  Once, perhaps four hours ago, downstairs had been an optician’s shop. Upstairs had been a small dental surgery with a staff of three—dentist, nurse and hygienist.

  The optician and his assistant were fine, though without premises.

  It was very hard to tell which bits belonged to the dentist, the nurse and the hygienist. All I could say for definite was that they hadn’t died in the fire. The fourth body, just cindered bone, had died of the fire; had been the cause of the fire. Another selfincinerating tramp.

  There was a survivor though, en route to Croydon General.

  Bet he’d have an interesting story to tell.

  We had to wait four hours to hear it. Even then, the doctor wasn’t too happy about letting us in, but her patient, Simeon Wilkes, insisted.

  “You’ve got to hear this, mates,” he wheezed. “I’ll go barmy if I have to keep this to myself any longer.” Wilkes was a sparse, wiry little man, probably approaching sixty. Broken capillaries in his cheeks and a layer of grime indicated he’d spent a good many of those years living rough. The spreading bruise that covered the left side of his face emphasized his sallow complexion. When he tried to smile, he revealed a row of rotting stumps, jagged spikes where his teeth should have been. I could smell his breath from six feet away.

  “There I was in the dentist’s, see,” he said. “He was a good sort, was Mister Cole. Once a month or so, he’d do some jobs for free for the homeless and such.”

  He paused to sip water from a straw. His voice was a husky whisper.

  “Anyway, he’d just got me in the chair, like, and he was sticking that mirror thing and the spray in my mouth, when the door comes flying open.” He shook his head in bewilderment.

  “I swear to God, I’ve never seen nothin’ like it.”

  Sip, pause. Sip, pause.

  “Great big bloke comes chargin’ in. Dressed like a tramp, he was; all hair and beard and such. He sort of backhands the nurse, and down she goes. Then he lifts Mister Cole off his feet like he was a doll, and fetches me a right good clout across the side of the head.”

  Sip, pause. Sip, pause.

  “Well, I goes flying across the room and bangs my head on the wall, so everything goes a bit hazy like.

  “When I comes to, he’s got the women what scrubs your teeth, the what-you-call-it…”

  “Hygienist?” Dean suggested. Wilkes nodded vigorously.

  “Yeah, that’s her. Well, he’s holding her by the throat in one hand, and he just rams his other hand into her chest, like you would into a suet pudding. He tears her chest open, clothes and all, and pulls out her heart. And he starts eating it.”

  Sip, pause. Sip, pause.

  “Well, I pissed myself. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you.” Wilkes shook his head at the memory, shivering. “Then he cracks her head open, easy, like a boiled egg, and starts cramming handfuls of brain into his mouth, champing and dribbling and spilling stuff all over the shop. And he was growling to himself all the time, see.

  “Proper nutter, he was, that’s for bleedin’ sure.”

  As Wilkes took more refreshment from the glass, Dean and I looked at each other in confusion.

  Wilkes continued.

  “He does just the same for them other two. Tears out the hearts and eats them, and splits open their bones, and eats the brains too. An’ all the time, he’s growling and sort of chanting, though I didn’t know what the ‘ell he was saying, ‘cos his mouth was full and he was chewing all the time.

  “Then he turns on me. Now all this time, I’m tryin’ to get up and away like, but I’m all dizzy on account of that right hook he’d given me, so I’m falling all over the place.”

  Wilkes went even paler. He looked shamefaced.

  “That’s when I shit myself. He turns on me, and he’s got burning eyes.”

  “You mean he was red eyed?” asked Dean, as engrossed as I was. Wilkes shook his head.

  “Nah, I mean there was flames comin’ out of his eyes. His hair was starting to burn, and there were flames shooting off his hands too.”

  He looked at us. The laugh he made was bitter.

  “Yeah, I know how it sounds. OK, I’d had a bang on the head, so maybe I was imagining it, but that’s what I thought I saw.

  “He comes over and lifts me off the floor by the throat, and I think he’s gonna eat my heart as well. Instead, he kisses me smack on the lips. Disgusting it was. I’ve never been that way inclined.”

  Sip, pause.

  “And all the time, there’s more and more flames coming off him, like he’s a human candle or somethin’.

  “Then he goes and throws me out the window!

  “Next thing I knows, I’m in the ambulance coming here.”

  I looked at Dean. She looked at me. We both looked at Wilkes, who met our combined gaze with defiance.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I know. But look at this and then tell me I’m nuts.”

  He lifted his head, exposing his neck.

  Plain to see were the scabbed prints of four fingers and a thumb, where a burning hand had gripped Wilkes’s neck.

  “What do you reckon then?” asked Dean as we walked down the ramp and out through the glass doors. A chill drizzle hit us in the face, welcome after the stifling heat of the hospital.

  “I don’t have a clue. I do know that whoever killed Cole and his staff must have been hellishly strong. He tossed Wilkes a good twelve feet into that dumpster. Otherwise the fall would have killed him. As it was, he landed on all the garbage bags, just got a few more bruises.”

  I stopped short. Dean carried on for a couple of steps before realizing I was no longer by her side. She turned to face me.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Simms did his free clinic in Whitechapel on Mondays,” I said, excitement gripping me. “Cole did free work on a Wednesday.”

  I started walking again. “Work with me here. Simms is treating someone, looks like a tramp, on Monday night. The guy kills him and his nurse, then bursts into flame and dies himself.”

  “So, what about Cole,” Dean demanded.

  “Another vagrant comes along to him, when he’s doing similar work on a Wednesday, and takes him out too. Also bursts into flame. Hypnotised assassins, with some sort of remote controlled internal incendiary device?”

  “Oh, that’s thin,” Dean offered with a sceptical glance at me. “A killer with a vendetta against dentists who treat down and outs? Why?”

  “Trial runs for more important victims?” I suggested.

  “I’d want a better motive before I’d be happy with that solution.” She turned to look at me. “At least you’ll be happy to know that I now agree with you about something.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “There are people around with worse teeth than you.”

  What could I say to that? OK, I smoke; drink vast quantities of tea and coffee, and my
teeth are yellow and crumbling. Nowhere near as bad as Wilkes’.

  I gave an offended sniff instead of replying. Dean sniggered as she started the engine.

  The morgue stank of sulphur and charred meat. The unknown killer vagrant was lying on the centre slab, still steaming slightly in the chilled air. Other slabs held collections of body bits.

  Even curled in the typical foetal position of burns fatalities, his skeleton seemed massive. Alive and extended, he would have been nearly seven feet tall.

  His mouth gaped, and I felt a mild sense of justification. His teeth had been worse than mine as well. That made two people in the world.

  Slyme whistled something from an operetta as he worked. “This laddie had the constitution of an ox,” he said as he cut and sawed. “I’ve sent a couple of marrow samples off to the unit.”

  Contrary to popular TV-driven belief, it would be months before the DNA analysis returned.

  “What caused him to burn up like that?” I asked.

  “No idea, yet. No trace of any external accelerants, and I don’t believe in spontaneous combustion,” offered Slyme, echoing my thoughts of earlier. “You’ll get your full screen in time.”

  Yeah, about the time my pension was due.

  Dean had gone hunting a lock that fit Simms’s key. Everyone else had left the office. However, there was a note to ring Miranda Simms—marked ‘urgent’.

  I got through first time.

  “It may be nothing,” she said, “but I found some notes and a gun when I was going through Peter’s wardrobe, looking for stuff to take to the charity shop. It seems important. Can you come and take a look?”

  “What do you make of it?” asked Miranda; leaning over me as I read the note Simms had scribbled in a diary.

  ‘Must warn Cole and Galton,’ the note said. ‘He is everywhere. He uses them. I’ve put silver ball bearings in the bullets. That should stop him.’

  I leafed through the rest of the book. It was filled with appointments and reminders to pay bills; typical stuff.

  And hieroglyphs everywhere, long passages of them.

  “Is this from your husband’s Egyptian phase?” I asked, showing her a page.

  She leaned closer. I caught a whiff of her perfume. She looked prettier this evening, more the attractive middle-class suburbanite I had envisioned.