AHMM, October 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  She said flatly, “I don't think he had any.” She then conceded, “He never spoke of anyone, anyway. I'm sure he never went out, either."

  Helena watched Eisenmenger, knew that he was ticking boxes, joining dots, working his way through a maze. He asked, “Were there any candles or nightlights in the house?"

  "No, I don't think so."

  "Hurricane lamps?"

  "No."

  "Paraffin heaters?"

  "No, nothing like that."

  He paused, and Helena was about to ask about Daniel Hunt's epilepsy when he suddenly asked, “What about your colleagues? There are five of you in this area, is that right?"

  She nodded.

  "So how does it work? Do you all visit each client?"

  "That's right. Some of the older people we have to get up, bathe, and dress, as well as feed three times a day; it works out that we tend to visit every two days."

  Eisenmenger lapsed once more into silence, and this time Helena just waited for him to speak again.

  "Tell me about your colleagues."

  "They're a great crowd. We get on really well."

  "You've worked together for a long time, have you?"

  "Oh yes ... well, all except Audrey."

  "Audrey?"

  "Audrey Ramsay. She hasn't worked for the company as long as the rest of us."

  "Was she working for the company when Daniel Hunt died."

  "Yes, I think so. She'd just started."

  "How long before?"

  Emma wasn't particularly bright, but she was careful and conscientious and she wanted to get the answer as near to accurate as she could manage. Her expression was pained, as if she had a suppurating boil somewhere; she appeared actually to be chewing her tongue.

  "It must have been nine or ten weeks."

  "But you get on well with her?"

  "Oh yes. She's really nice; quite sweet, actually."

  Eisenmenger was nodding thoughtfully, and perhaps he might have continued to question Emma Bell, but Helena was suddenly struck by suspicion.

  "Tell me, Emma. You said that Daniel Hunt had been recently agitated, that he'd recently begun to drink. Did that start about the time that Audrey Ramsay started to care for him?"

  She frowned and was silent for a while before, “Well, yes. Now you come to mention it, I suppose it was."

  * * * *

  It was a small, semidetached Victorian house, surprisingly unspoiled. Only the boarded windows spoke of what had happened inside. The small front garden had been laid to gravel, the external paintwork not too flaked; at first glance it appeared to be quite smart, but it didn't take the third glance to spot that it had been lacking any care for a long time now.

  They didn't want to go in, feeling the superstitious dread that the living feel for the places of the dead, but Eisenmenger resolutely put the key that Amanda Hunt had given them into the lock.

  They were in a small hallway, the stairway running away from them on the left, the kitchen ahead, two doors to the right. It was the archetypal British home, one of millions. They smiled uncertainly at each other, looked briefly around the hall, then went through the first door on the right.

  Someone's died here. There will be traces, almost certainly a scent...

  And there was an odor. It wasn't strong but it was there, and it was the first thing that they noticed. It wasn't immediately repulsive, but it was at once different, with familiarity becoming intrusive and somehow anonymously unpleasant. It might have been because they knew what had happened, knew that the slightly incongruous rug in the center of the room covered the sight of Daniel Hunt's death, and could see the smoke stains on the ceiling, casting into curiously arresting relief the ornate plaster moldings. The wall to the room at the back had been knocked down to make a large space.

  It was simply furnished. A small two-seater sofa and two armchairs around a fireplace in which there was a two-bar electric fire, a dining table in the window at the back that was accompanied by three matching chairs, a sideboard, a television with a third armchair in front of it, and a small table on which was a lamp. There were various ornaments, mostly old and cheap mementos, as well as a scattering of photographs. Helena recognized a younger Amanda Hunt in one; she was with a young boy and an older man and woman—presumably Daniel and his parents. On the sideboard was a tray on which stood two tumblers and a carafe of clear liquid. One of the tumblers was turned upright; Eisenmenger noticed that it had a brown stain at the bottom.

  He went first to the fireplace. Crouching down, he checked the flex of the fire, then reached across to the wall socket and switched it on. It started to glow fairly quickly with no sign of malfunction. He stood up, then took the stopper from the carafe and inhaled deeply, then repeated this action with both tumblers; it was water, not alcohol. He went then to the rest of the electrical outlets examining them minutely, testing them all by plugging in the table lamp. He examined the windows, then the two light fittings that hung from the ceiling. He checked—sniffed even—the single ashtray (a souvenir of Yarmouth), as well as the wastepaper basket. Then he paused in one corner of the room, looking around. While this was going on, Helena searched through the letters, bills, and other documents that she found in the drawers of the sideboard.

  "Anything?” she asked, looking up when she became aware of the silence that had settled around the room.

  He continued his scrutiny, and she had to strain to hear him say, “Not yet."

  She sighed. “Nothing here either."

  He moved forward into the center of the room, standing just by the rug. “He would come in here in the evening to watch television, sitting in this chair. He would have sat here and had a drink and probably a cigarette or two.” Eisenmenger went across to the rug that covered the site where Daniel Hunt had burned to death. It was behind the chair, about a meter and a half away. “Yet the tumbler is on the sideboard with the remains of a whiskey drink in it."

  He stared down at the rug. Helena got up, closed the sideboard, and came to stand beside him, knowing what he was thinking. He looked across at her. “Shall we?"

  She shrugged and he bent down, picked up the corner of the rug, and flipped it back.

  She supposed that she had been expecting far worse than she saw—perhaps the burned outline of a human being in the midst of an agonizing death—but there was nothing as emotive as that. The burned area was large and irregular—at its center deep enough to consume not only the carpet but full thickness floorboard—but it was no recognizable pattern. Surrounding it were smaller patches of ash, some down to wood, some merely singes in the pile. Eisenmenger reached out to touch the center of the patch, then examined his fingertips, sniffing them; Helena fought a brief spasm of nausea. To the carpet Eisenmenger said, “Somebody's Hoovered.” He sounded disappointed.

  "Do you blame them?"

  He considered. “No,” he decided. “I suppose not. Still, it's a shame."

  The odor had grown stronger, belittling the attempts that had been made to eradicate the past. Eisenmenger felt in his jacket pocket and brought out a penknife, which he opened.

  "What are you doing?” Helena asked this even though it was quite obvious. He was cutting holes in the carpet.

  "To be absolutely honest, I don't know,” he admitted, as he sawed with the blade, cutting a semicircular segment about two centimeters across from the edge of the main burn. “I suppose you could say that I'm covering the bases."

  He didn't touch his sample. Leaving it where it was, he repeated the exercise at the edge of one of the peripheral burn marks. He asked Helena, “Could you find an envelope in the sideboard to put these in?"

  She had no trouble in locating a long buff envelope, and he picked the carpet pieces up on the penknife blade and slipped them into it.

  "What now?” she asked.

  He replaced the rug, stood up. “We'd better check all the drawers and cupboards."

  "What are we looking for?"

  He didn't know. “Anything."


  "Or everything?"

  He smiled. “That too."

  She went into the room at the back. After a few minutes, she called out to him, “There are some capsules here."

  "What kind?"

  "Painkillers or something. They must be old, they're going off, or something."

  Eisenmenger stopped abruptly what he was doing and walked across to the bedroom doorway. “Can I see?"

  She brought the bottle out to him. He unscrewed the lid and examined the contents by tipping some into his palm. They were entericoated capsules, half white and half red. Some of them were covered in an oily sheen, as if they had sweated. “How odd,” he murmured.

  "What is it?"

  "They've two years to go before they're out of date. They must be practically new."

  "Perhaps they're a faulty batch."

  He stared at the capsules for a moment, then carefully put them back into the bottle without saying anything. He placed the bottle on the mantelpiece, his face still pensive as he did so.

  * * * *

  That evening they met with Amanda Hunt again.

  "Well?"

  She was clearly desperate for something, anything to explain how her brother had died.

  "Nothing definitive, I'm afraid."

  He had tried to sound deadpan, not too enthusiastic. To no avail.

  "But...?"

  "What tablets was your brother on?"

  "He took an anticonvulsant—Epanutin, I think—also an anti-depressant, one of the SSRIs; and some sort of painkiller—I forget which."

  "Why was he taking painkillers?"

  "He suffered from severe migraines. It was another consequence of the accident."

  "And the carers dispensed the tablets?"

  "Not the painkillers. He took those when he needed them."

  He nodded, and in the absence of any more questions from him, she asked, “Is there something about his medication?"

  He shook his head. “I'm just trying to get a picture of how your brother lived his life."

  Her face, held into a tight smile by expectancy, relaxed into disappointment. “Oh."

  Helena, until then silent, said, “It must have been a very bad accident."

  "It was. As I said, he was in a coma after it."

  "Before the accident, what did he do?"

  "He ran his own business, selling CDs and DVDs on the Internet."

  "Was it successful?"

  "Very."

  "What happened to it?"

  Her attitude changed, subtly but noticeably. She said dismissively, “He sold it."

  Helena didn't look at Eisenmenger although she could sense that he too had heard something in her reply.

  Eisenmenger had his hands clasped, forefingers pressed together as he tapped the point of his chin. “Does the name Audrey Ramsay mean anything to you?"

  She shook her head. “No, I don't think so. Should it?"

  "Just a thought."

  It was Helena who asked, “What happened in the accident?"

  "What does that matter?” The question was peculiarly defensive, the tone even more so.

  Helena smiled; she was well used to smiling at clients, no matter what they said or how they said it. “Forgive me, Miss Hunt, but you've asked us to look into the death of your brother, haven't you?"

  "Yes."

  "You suspect that the death might be suspicious, don't you?"

  "That's a possibility, I suppose."

  "So we need to know if there's anything in your brother's past that might have a bearing on his death. Generally speaking, people don't just kill someone without a reason."

  "I really can't see what bearing the accident might have on this."

  Eisenmenger had been listening intently to this exchange, and he said now, “Was anyone killed in the accident?"

  Amanda Hunt's expression changed quickly from angry to hesitant, then to something that might have been shame. Certainly she dropped her head as she said in a low voice, “Yes."

  Helena suggested, “Perhaps you'd better tell us the details."

  * * * *

  Daniel Hunt had been successful enough to buy and run a Porsche 911, even though at the age of twenty-four the insurance had been cripplingly high. He had enjoyed his success as only a single man without any responsibilities could. He had had, it appeared, an essentially hedonistic lifestyle, and perhaps the gods had grown jealous.

  The accident had happened on a seemingly innocuous stretch of road that ran through a small village called Corse, situated on the edge of the Cotswolds. Here the terrain was flat, and for a long distance the road ran straight, but at its end there was an unexpectedly sharp turn, first to the right, then to the left. Daniel Hunt had spent the evening enjoying a drink with friends at the Corse Lawn Hotel and was driving northward toward Worcester when he miscalculated the bends, lost control, and collided with a car heading south.

  "What happened to the occupants of the other car?"

  Her whole attitude had become confessional, hushed, ashamed, as if she had been responsible for the tragedy. It was painful just to listen, let alone to have to pose the questions that seemed to cut deeply into her.

  "It was a young mother and her four-year-old daughter. They'd been to visit the grandparents for the day."

  She paused, and neither of them even moved.

  "They both died.” Her tone was resigned, as if she had come to terms with this terrible thing.

  And then abruptly she began to snivel—not cry, just snivel. They both found this peculiarly shocking, as if she were doing something outrageous. Into their embarrassment, she said suddenly, “She was pregnant."

  She looked up at them and repeated this. “The mother was pregnant. Three people died, not two."

  What was there to say in the face of such calamity? Neither Helena nor Eisenmenger had any idea.

  Blowing her nose she added, “When Daniel found out, it was effectively the death of him. It was that more than the physical injuries that tortured him."

  "Had Daniel been...?"

  But Eisenmenger's question was never to be completed because Helena said loudly over him, “Well, I think that's all we need to know for now, Miss Hunt."

  Eisenmenger, somewhat taken aback, could only stare. Their visitor nodded slowly, smiled faintly at them, and said, “I hope it helps.” She sounded bitter.

  When she had gone, he asked, “What's going on?” He was genuinely puzzled, at a loss to comprehend why the meeting had been so abruptly terminated.

  She sighed in exasperation. John Eisenmenger was not without compassion—far from it—but he was without a single whit of common sense. She explained, “Couldn't you see how distressed she was? The whole thing was clearly a family disgrace. She didn't even want to mention it in the first place, let alone go into all the grisly details."

  "I realize that, but we still have to know more about it."

  "It was a fatal road traffic collision. It won't be hard to find the details."

  He drew in breath, perhaps ready to argue his position, but the bitterness of experience closed it again, and he said nothing more.

  * * * *

  Helena was proved right. The death of a four year old would have been good copy, but the icing on a tasty media cake was the demise of her pregnant mother, and the cherry on top was the conviction of a young Internet entrepreneur whose level of blood alcohol had been just over the limit for driving.

  Four years for causing death by dangerous driving, he had served just under three years.

  Until he had finished, Eisenmenger read through the newspaper reports that Helena handed to him without comment. Then he looked up at her. “A little more to the story than we've been led to believe."

  "But is it relevant?"

  "Ah. Therein lies an interesting question."

  He turned back to the reports. Helena remarked, “We need to find out more about the woman who was killed."

  "Jessica Strauss. Yes, we do."

  "Her hu
sband would have a pretty strong motive, and according to the reports, he was pretty vocal in his condemnation of the leniency of the sentence."

  "He was, wasn't he?"

  Kenneth Strauss had, unsurprisingly, been devastated by the loss of his entire family, and had stated in no uncertain terms his dissatisfaction with Daniel Hunt's treatment at the hands of the law.

  "Shall I take care of that?"

  She had lost Eisenmenger, a not uncommon occurrence. He was looking toward but not actually at the documents she had given him; his thoughts were busy elsewhere. She asked patiently, “And what will you do?"

  A moment to bring himself back to her, another moment to play her question back in his head, then, “I think it's worthwhile doing a little analysis on the carpet. The fire department would have looked for things like petrol and paraffin, but I think it might be interesting to be a little more fundamental than that."

  She didn't know what he meant, but before she could ask, he added, “And I think we need to talk to his other carers."

  "Especially Mrs. Ramsay. She was perhaps the last person to see him alive, and don't forget, it was when she started as a carer that he apparently became uneasy."

  That last made him pause. He said thoughtfully, “You know, if I were going to commit the perfect murder, I'd make sure that it was a random act."

  "What does that mean?"

  "If you were the murderer, you wouldn't want to be connected with the act in any way, would you? You'd want it to happen well away from you, both in time and space."

  "Of course, if I could arrange it like that."

  He said nothing for a second before, “So you'd try to kill someone by something that occurred at random, like a bolt of lightning or something."

  "You're not suggesting..."

  He shook his head. “Just an illustration."

  She considered. “I suppose if you could do it like that, that would be a pretty foolproof method."

  And, as if to demonstrate that he was constitutionally the most infuriating entity on the planet, he said then, “But would it?"

  "What?"

  "The trouble with random acts is that you can't control when they happen."