Death Watch

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  At least at the old morgue, Cameron had confided to Slider once, it was too cold and uncomfortable to attract the crowds. It was Freddie’s custom to pass round the extra-strong mints before beginning. ‘This new place is costing me a packet,’ he said.

  When the preliminaries were over, he picked up his long scalpel with the nine-inch blade, ventured a little pathologists’ joke – ‘Shall I carve?’ – and shaped up to the body. ‘Have we got a name yet?’ he asked after a moment.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Slider.

  ‘Just as well,’ said Atherton. ‘It isn’t etiquette to cut anyone you’ve been introduced to.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Cameron.

  ‘Alice – Mutton; Mutton – Alice.’

  The ‘Alice’ gave Slider the clue, and he shook his head at his colleague sadly. One of these days he must get round to reading that damned book. When Atherton and Joanna got together it was like being the only person at a dinner-party who’d never heard of Salman Rushdie.

  ‘So, we’re looking for a suicide, are we?’ Cameron said.

  ‘Head’s looking for a suicide. Or an accident will do. As long as we can crash the case. He’s got our clear-up rate to worry about.’

  ‘Thank God we don’t earn his salary, eh?’ said Cameron.

  He whistled almost soundlessly as he worked. Atherton realised, with an inward smile at the massive incongruity, that the tune was The Deadwood Stage.

  ‘Your ligature mark’s coming out very nicely, Bill,’ Cameron remarked. ‘I’ve no doubt about it, but I’ll take some sections for slides, make a few nice piccies for the Coroner and his chums. Now let’s see …’

  He worked on, interrupting himself with comments from time to time. ‘Well, I don’t know. Very little bruising here. Windpipe intact, no rupture of the large veins and arteries. Cricoid, arytenoids intact. I’ll take the hyoid, see if there’s any fracture to be seen under the microscope, but it doesn’t look like a very serious attempt at hanging, old chum …’

  ‘No carbon traces in the nostrils, and the exterior burns are all post mortem. We’ll take some sections of lung. Looks like anoxia caused by occlusion — the plastic bag over the head to you and me and the Coroner’s jury. These suicides like to make sure, don’t they? Let’s see if he poisoned himself as well…’

  As he opened the stomach, even Atherton, standing back and sucking hard at the Trebor’s, caught the smell of alcohol.

  ‘Dutch courage. A brandy man, too,’ Cameron said with a mixture of approval and regret. ‘Must have drunk the whole bottle. Precious little to eat, though. I wouldn’t say he hadn’t had a pint or two, as well, earlier on.’

  ‘How drunk would he have been on that lot?’ asked Slider.

  ‘As a sack, old boy. Legless. If he hadn’t hanged himself, he’d have probably died of alcoholic poisoning. We’ll send this off to the Lab for analysis, just in case.’

  Slider exchanged a glance with Atherton. It was beginning to look better. A man as drunk as that could have set fire to the place by accident. ‘Perhaps it’s going to be Head’s lucky day.’

  But a little later Cameron said in a quite different voice, ‘Hullo-ullo-ullo. Now here’s a thing. This is a bit nasty. Come and have a look, Bill.’

  He had plunged a pair of forceps into the area of the groin, and as Slider stepped closer he saw something which gleamed dully between the jaws.

  ‘It looks like wire,’ Slider said.

  ‘Plastic covered wire. The plastic’s melted, look, here and here,’ said Cameron. ‘You see how it was twisted right around the scrotum, too?’

  Slider felt his own balls trying to creep for safety up into his pelvis. ‘What about the wrists and ankles, Freddie?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell,’ Cameron said at last. ‘You see here and here where the skin’s intact? It could be a ligature mark. I can’t be sure without microscopical examination. The subcutaneous layers aren’t entirely destroyed, fortunately. I’ll take some sections: there could be hemp fibres amongst the tissue. But I’d say the arms could well have been tied. It might account for the arms not having contracted as the legs did.’

  ‘I suppose you won’t get anything from the ankles, they’re so badly burned.’ There was virtually nothing left of the feet but bones. ‘Was there something wrong with his feet, d’you think? The bones look funny.’

  ‘So would you if you’d been roasted in the fiery furnace,’ Freddie said. He bent closer, went in again with his forceps and lifted something triumphantly. ‘Ha! A fibre. Carpet or rope? We shall see.’ He looked over the top of his half-glasses at Slider. ‘Trussed up like the Christmas turkey, and a bag over his head. You know what this begins to look like, don’t you, Bill?’

  ‘Sexual strangulation,’ Slider said reluctantly.

  ‘Come again?’ said Atherton.

  Slider turned to him. ‘Hanging perversion. Haven’t you come across it? Well, it’s not all that common, I suppose.’

  ‘Bill and I have met a couple of cases in our time,’ Cameron said. ‘One of the pleasures of working Central. The victim brings himself to orgasm by strangling or suffocating himself. Sometimes both, as it would appear in this case. They like to tie themselves up, too, with particular attention to the arms and genitals. And of course, sometimes they go too far, and find they can’t release themselves in time. That’s when they usually come to my attention.’

  ‘What some people will do for pleasure,’ said Atherton.

  ‘The odd thing is, they so often seem to be quiet, respectable men,’ Cameron went on, taking tissue sections of the wrists. ‘Their families never have the slightest idea of what they get up to, despite the fact that they must have a suitcase full of equipment hidden somewhere in the house.’

  ‘Equipment? You mean the ropes?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘And hoods,’ Slider said neutrally. ‘And strop magazines. And women’s underwear, sometimes. It takes a number of forms.’ He sighed. ‘It begins to look, then, like an accident rather than suicide. I don’t know if that will make it any easier to tell the next-of-kin.’

  ‘When you find out who he is, of course. Or was,’ said Cameron.

  Atherton looked at his superior’s sad frown. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Guv, that Earth may be some other planet’s Hell?’ he said comfortingly.

  *

  Beevers burst into the CID room, his moustache bristling with excitement like a sexually aroused caterpillar.

  ‘I think we’ve got him!’

  Everyone looked up. There were a lot of empty desks, but it was still a gratifying audience. DC Tony Anderson was just back off leave from having moved house. He had shown photographs of his new semi taken from twenty-two different artistic angles to everyone, even the patient Andy Mackay, despite the fact that since Mackay had helped him move, he already knew what it looked like.

  WDC Kathleen ‘Norma’ Swilley was conversing in a low voice with WPC Polly Jablowski, who was known, largely for onomatopoeic reasons, as The Polish Plonk – plonk being the current slang for policewoman. Polish was doing a tour with the Department, which she hoped to join. Norma, in anticipation, had been advising her on how to cope with the differing advances of ‘Gentleman’ Jim Atherton and Phil ‘The Pill’ Hunt – equally persistent but far from equally tiresome.

  And most gratifying of all, Slider was there, consulting in an undertone with Atherton, who was already deeply distracted by having caught the sound of his own name on Norma’s lips, which had made it difficult for him to concentrate on what Slider was saying.

  Slider straightened. ‘The motel corpse?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Beevers said smartly. It was quite a coup, he felt, and his inward gratification was so great that his left leg jiggled all by itself even while he stood to semi-attention. ‘It was one of the cars parked in Rylett Road, a red Escort XR3—’

  ‘Ah, a prat car,’ Anderson murmured knowledgeably. Hunt’s customised XR3 was what he spent most of his salary on, and Beevers longed for one just like it.


  Beevers didn’t even break stride. ‘The registered owner’s a Richard Neal, address in Pinner. His wife says he’s supposed to be away on business for a few days, up north – left Sunday evening. She doesn’t know of any friends or business acquaintances or any reason he’d be parked in Rylett Road. We’ve checked the hotels he’s supposed to be staying at, and they haven’t seen him; and her description of him fits, as far as age and height.’

  ‘She hadn’t reported him missing?’ Norma said. ‘Wouldn’t she have expected him to ring home by now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Beevers admitted reluctantly. ‘Perhaps he didn’t usually.’

  ‘All right,’ Slider interposed, ‘we’d better look into it.’ It sounded promising, but he wasn’t going to send Beevers, who despite his cosy looks was as soothing as an attack of piles, to tell Mrs Neal she might be a widow. This looked like a job for Superman. ‘Atherton, you’d better go and talk to her. Take the photofit, see if she recognises it. Norma, I think you’d better go too, just in case, to give her the option.’

  ‘What about giving Polish a chance, sir?’ Norma said generously. ‘Good experience for her.’

  ‘Yes, all right, why not. Let us know straight away if she gives us a positive ID, and we’ll bring the car in and let forensic go over it.’

  ‘How much should we tell her about how he died?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘As little as possible. I’ll tell her the rest myself, once we’re sure. See if she’s got a recent photograph of him, and we can try it on Pascoe. If he confirms, we’ll have to arrange a formal identification at the morgue, but I don’t want to put her through that unnecessarily.’

  ‘Right, Guv.’ Atherton unfolded his Viking length and projected it at the door. ‘Come on, Polish. We’re off to strange foreign parts, so keep your harpoon handy. I’ll steer, you keep watch for sharks.’

  ‘I thought she lived in Pinner?’

  Atherton favoured her with a bolting look. ‘Have you ever been to Pinner?’

  Pinner was typical Metroland, a tiny rural village untouched by time until the coming of the railway, and now just part of the anonymous sprawl of Greater London. The original village was still visible in a high street of crooked half-timbered houses and a pretty church with a clock-tower, but the architecture grew increasingly bungaloid as you headed outwards from the historic centre. It was the kind of suburban landscape that made Atherton shiver: he liked town or country, one or the other – not the bleakness of this compromise which lacked the advantages of either. It was one of the reasons he never went back to his own birthplace of Weybridge. That, too, had been quite rural when he was a child …

  ‘You’ve just passed it,’ said Polish suddenly. ‘That was Cranley Gardens on the left.’

  ‘Was it?’ Atherton glanced in his mirrors, then stood on everything and did a violent U-turn, and turned right. Polish, accustomed to squad cars, didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘What number?’

  ‘Nineteen. There it is.’

  Atherton pulled up. ‘Blimey! Imitation Georgian front door, Tudor windows, and Swiss chalet-style false shutters. It’s a good job the Governor’s not here.’

  ‘Why, wouldn’t he like it?’

  ‘He’s very sensitive about architecture. You might say he has an edifice complex.’

  She missed that one. ‘Well, I think it’s very nice.’

  Atherton sighed. ‘Polish, you have no discrimination.’

  ‘Discrimination’s a luxury. You should live where I live, in a room in a house, not even a nice room, and the kitchen’s always full of other people’s washing up.’

  ‘Don’t, you’re making me cry. All right, I take it back, and I’ll cook you dinner at my house to make it up to you.’

  ‘Okay.’ She smiled. ‘It’s a funny logic, but okay.’

  Mrs Neal was a good-looking woman, forty-nine passing forty-five; well preserved and smartly dressed, but with a discontented look about her mouth and a certain puffiness around her eyes which Atherton, of his vast experience, believed came from not making love often enough.

  She looked at the photofit for a long time, her face working between doubt and fear. ‘It looks a bit like him. It could be him. I don’t know – how can I tell?’ She looked up, tracking between Atherton and Polish and settling finally on Atherton. Her voice rose half an octave. ‘What’s happened to him? Where is he? Where did you get this picture?’

  ‘Mrs Neal—’ Atherton began, but she cut him off.

  ‘What’s he done? Why can’t I see him? He’s my husband, you can’t stop me seeing him. I know my rights!’

  ‘Mrs Neal, we don’t know yet that the man we’ve found is your husband. That’s what we’re trying to establish—’

  ‘What do you mean, found? He’s dead, isn’t he? That’s what you’re trying to tell me.’

  Atherton eyed her in the manner of a barman judging whether a customer could safely take one more.

  ‘The man in question is dead, but we don’t know whether or not it was your husband. There was nothing on him to identify him.’

  ‘But you’ve found his car, you said?’

  ‘His car has been found near the scene. That’s what led us to you. If you can’t account for its presence there, it may be—’

  ‘Oh God.’ She sat down abruptly, crushing the photofit in her hands. Her face was suddenly haggard, as though she’d gained five years, but her mind still seemed to be working.

  ‘It’s that woman – she’s killed him. What was it, drugs? Or his heart?’ She laughed mirthlessly. ‘I always thought his heart would give up one of these days if he carried on the way he did. I told him, I said you’ll be found dead in bed with one of your whores one day. I said you’re fifty, not twenty-five, but you carry on like—’ She stopped abruptly and bit her lip.

  Polish sat down on the chair next to her and leaned forward sympathetically. ‘Whores, Mrs Neal?’

  She looked up with a flash of her eyes. ‘What else would you call them? Girls young enough to be his daughters, most of them, just after a good time. No morals, no manners. He splashed his money about. What did they care if he was married? And this latest one – red-haired trollop! I saw her getting out of his car at the station, with a skirt right up to her ears, the little bitch. Leaning in to kiss him goodbye, showing her knickers to the world. The wonder of it was she was even wearing any!’

  Atherton sat down very carefully. Tour husband was having an affair, was he?’

  ‘He was always having an affair,’ she said bitterly. ‘Ever since we first met. We’ve been married sixteen years, and he’s been having affairs for fifteen of them. He doesn’t even bother to hide it any more. All these business trips! Does he think I’m stupid? I told him last year, after I tried to phone him at the Dragonara in Leeds and they’d never heard of him, I told him not to bother lying to me any more. He used to phone up and pretend he was at some stupid hotel, when all the time he was in some little tart’s flat having a—’ She gasped as the tears began to rise. ‘I told him not to bother to lie any more.’ Her face crumpled. ‘And he didn’t. The bastard didn’t.’

  She wept, noisily and angrily. Atherton sat quietly, waiting for her to go on. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Polish looking embarrassed and trying not to, and he caught her eye and shook his head just slightly. Mrs Neal wanted to talk, and at the moment she didn’t see either of them as real people. They were just someone to spill it all out to.

  After a moment she stopped crying enough to go on, dragging her breath in tearing sobs between phrases. ‘I should have known better than to marry him. I mean, it goes with the job. Oh, they gave him a fancy name, but when it came down to it he was just a rep. A travelling salesman. Well, it’s a joke, isn’t it? Like a long – a long distance—’

  She stopped and fumbled in her sleeve for a handkerchief and blew her nose heartily. Atherton waited until she’d finished, and then put in another question, anxious to keep her talking before she recovered a normal degree of self-consciousn
ess.

  ‘What did he sell?’

  ‘Fire detection systems and security systems, for offices and factories and hotels, places like that. He used to be a security guard when I first met him, but he gave it up after we got married. He said it was too dangerous, it wasn’t fair on me to take the risk. Fair on me!’ She gave a bark of ironic laughter, and then suddenly seemed to see them again, and to hear her own voice. She pulled her lip in under her teeth with embarrassment. She had exposed herself to strangers. ‘Well,’ she muttered, ‘you know all about it, don’t you.’

  ‘Mrs Neal,’ Atherton said, ‘does your husband have any distinguishing marks? A mole or a scar or anything like that?’

  Her face sharpened as she remembered suddenly what this visit was all about. She’d gained ten years now. Atherton doubted if she’d ever look forty-five again.

  ‘Yes,’ she said unwillingly, as though she’d been asked to incriminate her husband. ‘He had a scar on the back of his hand, here. An old scar, from before I ever met him.’

  She searched Atherton’s face, and a dead look came into her eyes, a look of hope ending. There would never now be that reconciliation scene, the dream of which had sustained her for years, in which he repudiated all the other women and told her that he realised it was her he loved, only her. This time he wasn’t coming back.

  ‘It is him isn’t it?’ she said in a flat voice. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘The man we’ve found does have a scar in that place,’ Atherton said gently.

  ‘Oh my God.’ She said it quite automatically, her bruised mind still functioning. ‘But I don’t understand – he had business cards in his wallet, and his credit cards. And there was his driving licence – he always carried that with him. Why didn’t you know his name?’

  ‘We didn’t find any of those documents.’ Atherson was aware of Polish looking at him, a brief, keen look of mingled enquiry and alarm.