by Derek Fee
‘Where to?’ George asked.
‘Belfast International,’ Jeff said.
‘It’s night,’ George said. ‘There are no flights.’
‘Belfast International.’
CHAPTER 4
Stephanie Reid looked at the ceiling above her head. She ignored the young man who was doing his pneumatic best on top of her. She had picked him up in a bar earlier that evening, and she was already sorry to have consented to what would definitely be a one-night-stand. Her lothario took a break from pumping and looked at her. The smile froze on his face as he realised that her facial expression wasn’t one of ecstasy but boredom. She felt his penis wilt inside her and she smiled. She wondered whether she had destroyed his confidence permanently. She hoped so. She had listened to several hours of bullshit, which was intended to get her in the mood to have this dope drive her to nirvana, and she realised it was giving her intense pleasure to stick a pin in the lothario’s balloon.
He rolled off her and stared at the ceiling. ‘This never happens to me,’ he said.
‘That’s what they all say. Why don’t you put on your clothes and get out of here?’
‘Can’t we wait a while?’ he asked, the pleading clear in his voice. ‘I’m not sure what happened there. I was really into it but then it just went off the boil. Give me a chance and I’ll get it going again.’
She got out of bed. He was ‘into it’; this from an arsehole who had learned his sex technique from watching someone poke a fire. ‘I’m going to the toilet, and I’d be grateful if you weren’t here when I get back. Close the door on your way out.’
‘Can I have your phone number?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said just before she closed the door to the toilet. She sat on the toilet bowl and wondered what the hell she’d been doing bringing that creep back to her apartment. Every time she met a new man she supposed he might just measure up to Ian Wilson, but so far no luck. Careful, girl, she thought. You’re becoming obsessive. The message was clear enough. Wilson didn’t want her. That’s what his mouth said, but it wasn’t what his eyes were saying. Belfast had been quiet over the past three months, so they hadn’t had an opportunity to work together. That didn’t stop her from following his progress. What was she doing sitting here? She didn’t want to pee. She realised that she was waiting for her stud to vacate her home. She flushed the toilet and opened the toilet door. Thankfully, he had received the message, and the bedroom was empty. She stared at the rumpled bed and knew that she didn’t want to sleep there right now. She put on her dressing gown and went into her small kitchen. She plugged in the electric kettle and made herself a cup of tea. She carried the cup into the living room and switched on the television. Funeral in Berlin, one of her favourite films, was just about to start, and she settled down on the sofa.
She woke to the noise of the telephone ringing. The cup of camomile tea she’d prepared was sitting on the coffee table untouched and for a moment she was confused. Then she remembered her pneumatic friend and the Michael Caine film on TV. The phone continued to ring, and she prised herself away from the couch and to the nearest handset. ‘Reid,’ she said glancing at the clock. One thirty in the morning. She listened attentively. ‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes to half an hour.’
There was not much activity when Reid arrived at the house in Lawrence Street in the University area. The coroner’s ambulance had already arrived and was parked at an angle in front of the house. A police car was parked in order to block access and two police officers, one male and one female, were standing on either side of the house.
‘What’s the story?’ Reid asked as she approached the police officers.
‘Suicide, I suppose,’ the male officer said. He had a half smile on his face as he spoke.
Reid took an instant dislike to the man. ‘Is there something funny about suicide?’
‘Look inside.’ He pushed the door open. The stupid grin was still on his face.
Reid ignored him and moved through the open door. She found herself in a narrow hallway with a staircase on the left. At the end of the hallway a man dressed in female clothing was hanging from the stair post. The man’s head was lying on the top of his chest and from a distance the figure looked like a broken Pierrot doll. The smell of defecation hung in the air. ‘Who sent for me?’
The male officer shrugged his shoulders.
‘Do you know who I am?’ Reid said sharply.
‘A doc,’ the male officer replied.
Reid looked at him. She knew the type. He looked over fifty years old, meaning he’d been in the RUC before the creation of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. He was obviously not au fait with the ethos of the new softer policing in the Province. Or, maybe he’d just skipped the course on how a police officer should behave. ‘I’m not just a doc as you put it,’ she said staring into his face. ‘I’m the pathologist, and I’m only supposed to be called out when there’s some doubt as to the cause of death. If the man hanging inside is a suicide, he could have been pronounced dead by a general practitioner, maybe even his own doctor.’
‘No need to get your knickers in a twist,’ the officer said. ‘We called it in and someone at the station must have given you the call. Now do you want us to try and find the guy’s doctor?’
Reid sighed. ‘Since I’m here, and I suppose everyone wants to get on with their lives as quickly as possible.’ She picked up her black bag and re-entered the hallway. Not a nice way to go, she thought as she walked around the body. The man’s face had already turned puce, and his eyes bulged in his head. The face was engorged, and the tongue protruded from his mouth. She noted the drop from the chair and concluded that the deceased didn’t die from hanging but from strangulation. The difference was not solely semantic. Death by strangulation was agonizing whereas death from hanging could be mercifully short. The deceased had died a death that had been protracted, grisly and painful. She tried to ignore the flaccid penis hanging over a pair of lady’s briefs. The only feature of note was that the deceased was circumcised. She looked up and stared into a face that was definitely cyanotic. Petechiae, little marks on the face and in the eyes from burst blood capillaries, a classic sign of strangulation, were clearly visible. She gazed at the floor and saw a stain indicating that the deceased had ejaculated either shortly before or after death. A line of dried faeces ran down his bare leg.
‘Ma’am.’ The male policeman entered the hallway.
Reid turned. ‘You may call me Professor or Doctor but I am certainly not a Ma’am. What’s your problem?’
‘The meat wagon is outside,’ he said sheepishly.
‘Tell them to wait. I’ll let them know when I’m finished.’
She continued her examination of the face and noted that a bruise had risen on the temple. The welt showed that the injury had been pre-mortem. She had never seen the body of someone who had died from a failed attempt at erotic asphyxiation. She was well aware that the technique was dangerous and could lead to accidental death. She walked up the stairs and examined the knot that had been made around the post at the top. She slid the knot down a fraction and saw that there was no indentation in the wood. It looked like it was the first time that the rope had been tied around the post. The deceased was unlucky on two counts. First, he had given himself a very nasty death, and second, it looked like he was a first-timer. She went slowly down the stairs. Something didn’t seem right. It should have been clear-cut. The deceased accidentally died in an attempt to reach erotic bliss. He wasn’t the first man to die like this, and he wouldn’t be the last. She looked at the body again and wondered why she wasn’t buying it. She took out her mobile phone from her pocket and opened the camera. She started taking photos of the hanging man, his face, his torso, the position of the rope, and the stain at his feet. After taking more than twenty photos, she put away the phone and went to the front door.
Two men dressed in high-visibility jackets, and trousers with high-visibility strips along the legs, were leaning
back against the outer wall. One was sucking hungrily on a cigarette while the other simply looked into space. For them it was just another boring night shift.
‘I’m done,’ she said as she exited the house.
‘Thanks be to God,’ the ambulance man who had been smoking flicked the butt of his cigarette into the air where it lit an arc like a damp squib firework.
‘I want him at the Royal Victoria,’ Reid said sharply. ‘He’ll need to be autopsied.’ She turned and walked towards her car. The sound of guffawing came from the open door of the house. Reid thought about returning and giving the ambulance men a piece of her mind but the idea of a return to the sanity of her apartment kept her heading in the direction of her car. Men suck, she concluded for the second time that evening.
CHAPTER 5
Detective Superintendent Ian Wilson sat in the living room of the apartment that he and his partner shared in Belfast. He was directly facing a large picture window with a stunning view across the early-morning city. He loved that view, and he had been staring at it since he’d risen at seven o’clock. As soon as he had woken, he had stretched his hand out in the bed and felt the empty space beside him. He wasn’t surprised. Kate was waking up earlier and earlier, and the effects of the lack of sleep were beginning to show on her face and in her shortness of temper. He had expected to find her at her desk poring over some legal papers, but she had already left for the office. He remembered sitting at her bedside in the Royal and promising that things would not change. He knew then that he was a liar, but he hadn’t realised how big the lie was. Losing their child had been a tragedy for him but for Kate, it had been a catastrophe. She had been told a million and one times that it wasn’t her fault. A miscarriage is nature’s way of dealing with some deeper problem with the foetus. However, the patina of grief hung over Kate like a veil of darkness. It began with the guilt that led to the sleeplessness that in turn led to the tiredness. Kate was beginning to run the full gamut of the symptoms of loss. It wasn’t a question of nothing changing. It was beginning to feel like everything was changing.
‘Sunrise over Belfast is a bit special.’ The voice came from behind Wilson.
He turned and smiled at Helen McCann. Kate’s mother had returned to Belfast from her home in Antibes as soon as she had talked to Kate on Skype. They say that girls generally grow up to resemble their mother. If that was the case, Kate had nothing to worry about. Her mother was well north of sixty but was still strikingly attractive. Her all-year-round tan was subdued, more sun kissed than sun blessed. She was wearing a silk kimono that probably cost more than Wilson earned in a month, and although she had just left her bed there wasn’t a stray wisp of hair on her perfectly coiffed head. ‘Aye, I love this view.’
‘It’s rare to have the city bathed in gold,’ she said.
‘That’s why you live in Antibes.’
She put her right hand on her heart. ‘Ulster is in here. And as the ad says “for everything else there’s Antibes”.’ She smiled. ‘Kate gone?’
Wilson nodded.
‘I’m worried about her,’ Helen said. ‘She’s taken the miscarriage much worse than I thought. She was always such a strong girl but behind that strength was a vulnerability that once breached ...’ Her voice trailed off.
‘It’ll pass,’ Wilson said. ‘It’s bereavement, and it has to go through the various stages that a death entails. Eventually, she’ll accept that it wasn’t her fault, and that she’s young enough to have a lot more children.’
‘You’re right about the process,’ Helen said. ‘But you may be wrong about the timing.’ She looked at the man sitting in front of her. He was rumoured to be one of the best detectives in the PSNI but to her, he was just one more man who had a very incomplete knowledge of women and how they work. She knew her daughter a lot better than this Johnny-come-lately. Kate was in pain, and she was a long way from healing. A superintendent in the PSNI was by nature inured to people’s pain. That wouldn’t serve him well when dealing with her daughter. ‘Would you like a coffee? I’m nothing in the morning until I’ve had my first coffee.’
‘I’d love one.’ Wilson wondered why he didn’t believe that it wouldn’t take a cup of coffee to switch Helen McCann on. He didn’t know much about her, but he noticed people’s reaction when her name was mentioned. ‘We’re both grateful that you took time out to help Kate.’
‘I love my daughter,’ she said from the kitchen. ‘And I had some business in Belfast.’
‘What business is that?’ Wilson asked getting up and making his way to the kitchen.
Helen McCann stood with her back to him, busying herself at the Nespresso machine. ‘You like a long coffee, I assume?’
‘Yes, thanks. You said that you had business in Belfast. What business is that?’
‘Not really business.’ She deposited two cups of coffee on the breakfast bar. ‘I’m so bored these days that I consider lunches and dinners with my old friends as business. I have a few board meetings to attend, a few charitable functions. I come to Belfast when I want to be busy.’
Wilson stirred with the spoon that Helen had provided although he took neither milk nor sugar. He was the square peg in a round hole as far as Kate and her mother were concerned. They had all the advantages of money. They were educated at the best schools and colleges. They travelled the world, and not in economy class. His father had been an RUC man, and his mother was a teacher, the quintessential middle-class family. He wondered how his mother would feel at one of Helen’s lunches or dinners. He knew she would be out of place. Just like him in the sphere of the McCanns.
‘Kate is tired all the time,’ Helen said, sipping her espresso. ‘I’ve convinced her to hire a housekeeper.’
Wilson’s eyebrows rose. He hadn’t been informed about the employment of a housekeeper. But then why should he be. Until something more permanent was announced, he was simply the lodger.
‘Do you see your mother often?’ Helen asked.
‘My mother’s dead,’ Wilson said.
‘No she’s not,’ Helen sipped her coffee. ‘She’s living in some Godforsaken town in Nova Scotia, as you very well know.’
Wilson was stunned. ‘How do you know?’
‘I am one of the wealthiest women in this Province. I have one daughter to whom everything I own will pass one day. Surely you don’t think that I would be so remiss as to not check into the man who currently resides with her.’
‘I haven’t seen my mother since she remarried and left Ulster.’
‘How very peculiar. You haven’t seen your mother in more than twenty years.’
‘She gave up that right when she married within one year of my father’s death, and when it transpired that she’d had a relationship with her new husband over a period of years when she’d been married.’
‘You’re too harsh.’
‘This subject is closed,’ Wilson said.
Helen was about to speak when Wilson’s mobile rang. He picked up the phone and looked at the caller ID, it was Stephanie Reid. He thought for a moment before pressing the green button. ‘It’s a bit early,’ he said as soon as the line opened.
‘And Good Morning to you too,’ Reid said. ‘You’re a right grump in the morning.’
Wilson wanted to kick himself for his brusqueness. Thinking of his mother tended to leave him on edge. ‘Thanks. I wasn’t expecting a social call.’
‘It’s not totally unrelated to work. Are you busy today?’
Wilson wanted to answer ‘yes’ but that would have been a lie. And Professor Reid might discover that lie. ‘Not really,’ he said finally. ‘Why?’
‘I’m not actually sure,’ Reid said hesitantly. ‘I was called out by mistake last night. It appears that a Belfast City Councillor by the name of David Grant had an accident while performing erotic asphyxiation. Something seems to have gone terribly wrong, and he ended up strangling himself.’
‘But,’ Wilson said.
‘It didn’t look right.’
&nb
sp; ‘Accidents rarely do. That’s why they’re called accidents.’
‘I can’t put my finger on it but I think there’s more to this than an accident.’
‘What might he local GP think?’
‘That the chair slipped while Mr Grant was trying to get his rocks off by simulating a hanging. I should mention that he was dressed in bra, panties and black stockings at the time.’
‘That must have been quite a sight. And you want me to do what about it?’
‘Maybe it wasn’t an accident. It looked to me like one of those tableaus they used to do on stage. It looked set up.’
‘Most deaths look set up. The corpse generally looks like a mannequin that has been positioned in death. You’ve been down that road as many times as I have. Who was there from our side?’
‘Male and female cop team, they obviously discovered the body and called it in.’
‘Anyone from CID?’
‘Not that I saw. By the time I was through with the preliminary examination of the body, an ambulance crew had arrived and were anxious to get the body away. It’s in a morgue at the moment.’
‘Was there any sign of foul play?’
‘Not that I saw.’
‘How about the police team?’
‘They called it in as accidental death. We’ve all heard about erotic asphyxiation. It looked like the classic set up. Maybe that’s what spooked me. It looked a bit too much like the classic set up. I took some photos if you’d like to see them.’
Wilson sighed. ‘I respect your opinion but I really don’t see the point. Belfast is full of people who are into bondage, domination, sadism and masochism. They hang around in clubs and beat the shit out of each other. The only surprise is that more of them don’t end up in the hospital or even the morgue. Half the thrill is in the pain mixed with the pleasure.’
Reid laughed. ‘I didn’t know you were so well up on the Belfast sex scene. Another string to your bow?’