A Pleasure to do Death With You

by Paul Charles

  Mactoo rolled over twice, coming back into Chada’s path; they collided and ended up in a heap on the road.

  “Miss Chada, I presume,” Mactoo announced, as he cuffed her and dusted his uniform and his pride down. “A pleasure to meet you, I’m sure. I’ve heard so much about you. Now tell me this, I’ve got this shooting pain, which starts in my hip and works its way back down into my ankle. It only happens when I stand around a lot. Any treatment you would recommend?”

  With that Mactoo frogmarched her into the Kelly Street station, keeping her securely at arm’s length in front of him.

  Kennedy was back in sheer liquid agony. He felt as bad as he had felt two Saturday mornings ago in his house in Camden Town when he quite literally found it impossible to bear the pain. Kennedy realised how guilty he had been of taking his better health for granted. When he felt bad, he promised himself that he’d look after his back properly; he’d get preventive treatment regularly; he’d never ever let it get into the state it had been before. That was then. But recently he’d grown totally unaware of it. That probably had a lot to do with being in the company of a certain Grace Scott.

  Grace was now doing her utmost to take care of him. She was trying to help him, but the reality was she couldn’t. He couldn’t stand, he couldn’t sit; he couldn’t lie down without experiencing excruciating pain. Kennedy didn’t want to feel as bad and as helpless as he felt in anywhere else but his home. Illness is always somewhat more difficult to endure when away from one’s home. At that moment he longed for his cosy house in Primrose Hill more than he had ever done.

  “Okay, Inspector,” Grace said gently, “this is going to hurt, but I can’t think of anything else to do. I’m scared if I don’t get you some treatment you’ll be permanently crippled.” With that she hauled Kennedy up from the pavement. The pain was so unbearable that tears freely flowed down his face. Grace, as determined as she knew how to be, decided she was going to have to keep hurting him if she was to be of any help. She nudged him into the back of her car and pulled him face down across the back seat. She kept repeating, “I’m sorry, Inspector, I’m really sorry.”

  Eventually she had him sprawled fully across the back seat. By dropping his left knee over the edge of the seat down towards the floor and keeping his head face down as opposed to the left or the right, he was slightly more comfortable. The only problem with that position was he was nose down directly where Miss Chada had been sitting, and her unique blend of aromas infused his nostrils.

  Kennedy’s panic subsided a little at that point. He’d managed to get himself into a position where the pain was manageable. That was of course until the vibration caused by Grace closing the car door set off his trouble again. She gingerly put the car into gear, and Kennedy could feel every pebble in the station house car park as she drove over them. She hit a bump and Kennedy screamed out in pain again.

  “I don’t know any other way to do this, Inspector,” and with that she slammed the car into the next gear and stuck her foot down. For three minutes Kennedy was in sheer agony again and covered head to toe in a film of sweat, but at last they were now where she wanted them to be. He could hear her get out of her car. Thankfully she didn’t close the car door. He could hear her running away. All Kennedy could see was the dark leather of the back seat of her patrol car. He imagined she had taken him to a hospital, and soon help and relief would be with him.

  Then he got a panic attack. He surely wouldn’t be in a mental or physical state to interview Miss Chada for at least a few days, maybe longer. How long could the Half Moon Bay police keep Miss Chada in custody without either charging her or letting her go. It was probably the same as the UK ­- two days - and then they could go to court and apply for an extension. But they’d have nothing to use to get an extension granted. Even if Grace had the suss to charge Miss Chada with grievous bodily harm, a good lawyer would get her out on bail, and then she’d be off into the wilds of the United States of America. She’d never be found.

  He heard feet running towards him, then Grace saying, “Please be careful, he’s in very bad shape.”

  Kennedy heard a new voice in the back of the car with him.

  “Christy, my name is Pam. I’m a friend of Grace, and I need you to trust me, okay?”

  “Okay,” Kennedy whispered. He even found it painful to talk.

  “Now don’t be alarmed,” she continued in a gentle soothing voice. “I’m going to gently touch your back, and I want you to guide me to where Sharenna put her hands when she hurt you, okay?”

  “Okay,” Kennedy whispered.

  She was so gentle Kennedy could barely feel her hands on his back.

  “Lower,” Kennedy whispered.

  Her fingers continued to feather over him. He could sense but not see Grace near by, monitoring Pam’s every move.

  “Ah! There!” he screamed.

  “Okay, Christy,” she continued when he’d calmed down, “I think I know what she did. We’re gong to need to get you out of the car before I can help.”

  Kennedy didn’t want to move. Not an inch.

  “We can give you an injection which will help the pain until we can fix it,” Pam offered.

  “No,” Kennedy replied. He’d always been told never to accept injections for back pain.

  “Okay, we have what we call a surfboard; we can slide that underneath you and lift you out.”

  The exercise wasn’t as painful as Kennedy imagined it would be, and eventually they lifted him clear of the car and into a standing position. Pam got behind him, put her arms under his oxters and brought her hands up behind his head where she interlocked her fingers.

  “Now I need to wait here until one of my team fetches me something from inside.”

  Kennedy relaxed, thinking that treatment, pain, call it what you will, was probably some time away; but the second she felt him relax into her arms, she quickly leaned backwards and swept him off his feet.

  Kennedy heard a loud crack. He saw a flash of white light. He felt heat in his neck and in the small of his back. He felt sure he was going to pass out with the pain.

  He saw Grace Scott directly in front of him, the look of concern obvious in her eyes.

  Pam disentangled herself from Kennedy. Thinking he would fall over, he reached out for Grace to steady himself and was surprised when he found he didn’t need her support.

  “A miracle, Inspector,” Grace said with obvious relief as she slowly let Kennedy go.

  “That was very cruel, Grace,” Pam said. “She dislocated the nerve between his second and fourth lumbar vertebrae. I just stretched it back into place. You’re good to go, Christy, just no gymnastics or any...any strenuous exercises for a few days, okay?” she said, now glaring at Grace.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  When Miss Chada was shown into the interview room in Half Moon Bay police station, Kennedy was already standing against the wall and Grace was sitting on one of the only two chairs in the room, one either side of the table.

  After Grace had introduced the proceedings for the sake of the tape and video recorder and had asked Miss Chada to confirm, for the benefit of the recording equipment, that she was giving up her right to a lawyer, Kennedy made a bit of a stage fuss over there being only two chairs in the room.

  “Not to worry,” he said. “I’ll nip out and fetch one.”

  Grace announced this interruption, again for the benefit of the expensive equipment, and thirty seconds later, “Inspector Kennedy has returned to the interview room with a... with an object to sit on.”

  “My new masseuse says this is good for my back,” Kennedy announced as he brought the fully inflated orange exercise ball back in with him, plonked it down at the end of the table between them and balanced himself carefully on it.

  Miss Chada would have made a good poker player; her face gave nothing away. Well, it was more that she appeared like she was giving nothing away. But that was it, Kennedy thought: she looked like she had something to give away and she was c
arefully ensuring that her body language didn’t betray her, which in a way of course it did.

  “Okay, Sharenna, first off I should tell you, you needn’t worry about my back. Thanks to Pam at Livingston House, it’s better than it’s ever been. But it’s interesting that you ran.”

  “I was within my rights to run. I thought I was being kidnapped.”

  “Yeah, right,” Grace snarled. “How many people get kidnapped and taken to a police station.”

  “This has nothing to do with you,” Miss Chada snapped back viciously at Grace. “Did your new man tell you where he was when Mr Mylan was being murdered?”

  “Actually, that was the very first thing he told me,” Grace said.

  “Then how could I possibly be responsible?” Miss Chada replied. “This is no sense,” Miss Chada continued, focusing intently on the tape recorder.

  “For the record,” Kennedy said, as he ripped the patch he had carefully affixed yesterday to the now fully inflated exercise ball beneath him, “here’s how you managed to be in both places at once.

  “You rang me two Saturday mornings ago around ten o’clock to set me up. You already knew, because of your, shall we say, manipulation, that I would be in a bad way with my back. You told me you could come and see me after two-thirty at my house. You’d never been to see me in my house before, but for your plan to work you had to.

  “You said you had a very busy morning’s work ahead of you before you could come and see me.”

  Miss Chada didn’t reply. She occasionally stole a glace at the exercise ball Kennedy was sitting comfortably and safely on.

  “You knew that Patrick Mylan, as a creature of habit, liked his Saturday mornings to himself, so you knew he would be alone.”

  “You enticed him into the swimming pool. Maybe you also got him drunk; there was certainly a lot of alcohol found in his blood. Mrs Littlewood said you were the only one who had the power to control him. She claimed he always had a weakness for you. We’ve been advised by more than a few people that Mylan always, but always, fell into a deep sleep after sex. You made love to him beside the pool, maybe even on this very ball I’m sitting on. True to form, Mr Mylan immediately fell asleep. You suspended him by a belt around his neck. The belt was attached to a hook on the back of the swimming room toilet door.

  “You’d removed several items of his clothing, but put other items on him in order to humiliate him when he was found. You carefully positioned the body and left him hanging there as though he were involved in an autoerotic enterprise.”

  Grace raised her eyebrows at Kennedy’s bizarre choice of words.

  “But then, if he’d choked himself on his belt then...” Miss Chada asked, again stealing another glance at Kennedy’s seat, “how come he died later when I was with you? I believe as was the case?”

  “You’re 100 per cent right, and that is a very good question, Miss Chada,” Kennedy said largely. “So we both agree what you needed to do was to find some way of delaying his choking until you could be elsewhere. In this particular instance, in fact, you were with me, securing your alibi.”

  Kennedy smiled, Grace smiled, and even Miss Chada smiled. Kennedy smiled because Miss Chada was still maintaining that she couldn’t have done it and not that she didn’t do it. Grace was smiling, Kennedy figured, because the penny had finally dropped with her and she had figured it out. Miss Chada was smiling Kennedy figured, because Kennedy had just admitted in front of a witness just how watertight her alibi was.

  Kennedy was rolling around aggressively now on the ball, and the more he moved around, the more he expelled air from the balloon and the more he expelled air from the balloon, the lower he sank.

  “Now, say you were to have an exercise ball, such as this exact exercise ball, for instance, and you were to put a few pin holes in it, as in say five small pinholes in a small circle, and you were to place Mr Mylan seated on the ball with his back to the door and his neck strung up to the coat hook using a belt…”

  Miss Chada twitched a little, but only a little.

  “Securing Patrick Mylan in this position, you could then nip around the corner to me to establish your alibi, while leaving poor Mr Mylan to suffer by the laws of physics and gravity until, eventually, sometime later that day when we were in bed and the air had run out of the exercise ball until it was totally deflated and Mr Mylan had sunk accordingly and was choked to death.”

  “That’s just plain stupid Mr Kennedy,” Miss Chada shot back indignantly, shaking her head from side to side several times before continuing. “How a detective with a reputation such as your own could suggest that I entered Patrick’s house, enticed him into the swimming pool, made love to him, waited until he fell asleep, undressed him, put suspender belts on his legs, hung him up from a coat hook on the back of the door to the toilet, sat him on an exercise ball, punctured the exercise ball with a pin, and then left him to die... please, that is just so stupid. I have lost all respect for you and I think I will be going.”

  Kennedy had never heard Miss Chada say so much at once, or use so many commas in all the time he’d known her. He was so shocked by the duration of her statement that he nearly missed the most important part of the statement altogether.

  “Could you please play Miss Chada’s last answer back for me, Officer Scott?”

  Grace rewound the last few minutes of the tape and hit the “play” button.

  “…entered Patrick’s house, enticed him into the swimming pool, made love to him, waited until he fell asleep, undressed him, put suspender belts on his legs, hung him up from a coat hook on the back of the door to the toilet, sat him on an exercise ball...”

  This time Kennedy jumped up from his deflating exercise ball, stopped and rewound the tape, but not quite so far as Grace had before he hit the “play” button, to hear: “...undressed him, put suspender belts on his legs, hung...”

  Kennedy pressed the stop button.

  “Sharenna, how did you know about the suspender belts?”

  “You said it to me just now,” Miss Chada claimed, fright now visible in her lonely, sad eyes.

  “No I didn’t,” Kennedy claimed, and he replayed his part of the tape to prove the point. “That particular bit of information is not public knowledge, Sharenna. You only knew it because you were the one who put the suspender belts on him to humiliate Patrick Mylan further when he was discovered.”

  Miss Sharenna Chada had pride. She looked less annoyed than shocked and surprised that he’d actually worked out how she had done it. She was now finally ashamed of her action. Was that part of the secret of a successful murder, Kennedy wondered? People don’t feel the massive guilt and consequences of what they’ve done because they think they’ve been clever enough to get away with it. Consequently, they don’t feel bad because they don’t feel accountable. Like Miss Chada, perhaps they only felt accountable when someone else knew for sure that they did it.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Miss Chada confessed her guilt, chose a Jesuit priest and the court appointed lawyer - Manny Langenstein stepping up again for his busiest couple of days in years - to make her full and frank confession. She chose not to fight extradition on condition Kennedy would agree to visit her daily, by himself, until her paperwork was processed. Chief Edward Donohue could not agree to that, so eventually a compromise was reached where Kennedy’s daily visits to Miss Chada would be “supervised” by an officer other than Grace Scott.

  As Kennedy had suspected, it was Maggie Littlewood who’d made the initial introduction. Maggie and Sharenna’s mother had taken a night class together and had become good friends and frequent visitors to each other’s houses. Around that time, or shortly thereafter, Maggie started dating Patrick Mylan, and he would accompany her to visits to the Chada’s house. When Sharenna had first met Patrick, she was thirteen years old. She went to great trouble to ensure Kennedy knew that nothing untoward happened with Mylan until after she was twenty. In the meantime, it appeared, Mylan and Maggie Littlewood ceased
to be romantically involved but continued to be friends. Kennedy figured Sharenna was Mylan’s second concubine after Gina Webb, and he groomed and prepared her, just as he had with Chloe Simmons and Gina Webb. He also imagined the relationships with his three concubines were different from the relationship Mylan had enjoyed with Maggie Littlewood, which would be the reason why they were still friends.

  Again, as was the case with Simmons, Patrick Mylan was generous, courteous, and honest, in that he never pretended their relationship was anything other than what it was. That is to say, convenient and sexual.

  And, as was also the case with Chloe Simmons, when it came time to cross that line from pupil to concubine or lover, call it what you will, Sharenna was the one to take the initiative.

  “I reached a point where I couldn’t resist my desires any longer,” Sharenna whispered, but not shyly. “It just became impossible for me to delay the act of pleasuring him for the first time. I didn’t have his patience. Afterwards I wished I’d resisted my urges just a little longer so that I would have had more memories to savour and heighten my enjoyment in my many replays.”

  It became clear that Mylan changed his concubines not, as Kennedy first thought, when he tired of one, but when his new concubine, or mistress, was ready. What Mylan hadn’t figured on was the fact that Sharenna would fall deeply in love with him. Yes, he’d invested several years in teaching her how to love him, but the only love he wanted from her was physical.

  Miss Chada said she hadn’t seen the end of her relationship coming. Perhaps, Miss Chada claimed, if Mylan had let her down easier, maybe allowed her time to wean herself off him, the situation would have been different. She admitted she should have been prepared for it. He had always told her that eventually she would be replaced; it would have nothing to do with her, but all to do with his inability to share a love with a woman.