'What about Halfway?'
'She considered it a small church, with a small congregation, and therefore not worthy of particular consideration.'
'Sounds like she might have made some enemies in that time?' I throw in.
'No doubt she did,' says Brian, the minister. 'She did not suffer fools, nor adhere to much notion of Christian forgiveness and understanding.'
'Had anything happened recently to make matters worse? Had she said anything to you that might indicate that she'd had enough? That she was so fed up with it all, so miserable, that she might commit suicide?'
He stares at the floor in that slightly affected way that people do when they're talking to us coppers. Thinking things through, not giving the first answer that comes into their head.
'She must have been murdered,' he says finally, looking up.
Jesus.
Manage to keep that ejaculation to myself.
'Why do you say that?' asks Taylor calmly, as the vicar threatens to toss our straightforward, snappy wrap-up suicide in the bin.
'She was so full of fight. Listen, she was never in a position to actually influence the vote or influence the way this was carried out. She wasn't a church elder. She was on no committees. She was an outsider to the politics, but she loved her church. She loved the Old Kirk. I really think she'd been there every single Sunday since she'd been born, and I cannot believe for a moment that she would give up the fight quite in this way.'
He looks between the two of us. Neither Taylor nor I immediately jump in, so he adds, 'She must have been murdered.'
'Everything about her death looks like suicide,' says Taylor.
'That's what these people do, isn't it?' he says.
'What people?'
'They fake suicides to cover up a murder.'
'Who does that?' asks Taylor.
'You see it on the TV all the time.'
'You mean like on NCIS and Lewis?'
The minister looks slightly sheepish at the direction the conversation has taken, which is at least some measure of self-awareness.
'And Poirot,' he adds, although he does it with almost comic timing. Funny guy. Cannot even remotely get a handle on him.
'You know how many fake suicide/murders I've seen in my thirty years in the police service?' asks Taylor.
'Nevertheless,' says Brian, 'you're here to get my opinion and to find out what I know, and I really do genuinely believe that Maureen would never, ever have killed herself.'
'And the wings, you heard about them?' asks Taylor.
He nods, but doesn't venture anything further.
'Any ideas?'
He sits back and makes a general, all-encompassing hand gesture. 'Given the church connection, it's easy to imagine that it was meant as an angel metaphor. Difficult, however, to think that anyone had that view of her. She certainly did not think that of herself. Perhaps her killer was being ironic.'
Irony and metaphor. Jesus.
The door opens. An older woman, wearing a pinny, for all the world with the word housekeeper tattooed on her forehead, smiles benignly upon us all.
'A cup of tea?' she asks.
6
Poirot. That's what the guy said, that was his reference for the potentially strange death, and possible suicide of this old woman. And in its way, Poirot is what it feels like.
Day-to-day police work is so often carried out at ground level. Poor people trying to get richer; drunks disturbing the peace and abusing the family; clubs and bars tipping out at 3 a.m.; drug addicts doing anything to score; the desperate and the down-on-their-luck fighting for their one and only chance. All of them trying to catch up.
The people they're trying to catch, the middle classes with their own sets of problems, don't cross our paths so much. Sure, there's the sleazy world of white collar crimes, the fraud and embezzlement, there's domestic abuse and child abuse in every level of society, there's the occasional argument over a hedge, sporadic kerb crawling busts, but it's largely on a different level and they make up a small percentage of what we have to do. Consequently, the shitty domestic stuff aside, when we're sucked into their world, it feels like you're stepping onto the set of Midsomer Murders or Murder She Wrote. All safe and cosy, with slightly eccentric music playing and passions running like lava beneath the genteel world of amateur dramatics or the village cricket team or the local church.
And here we are, on a Tuesday that could have been any given Tuesday, with junkies and whores and child beaters and doped-up, fucked-off teenagers, and instead we're plunged into the world of Miss Fucking Marple.
I'm sitting in the pub. On my own. I don't know where I am at the moment. Somewhere in between, that's all. In between the last thing and the next thing. And I don't mean cases. Should go home and watch the football, get me out of this place.
Spent summer last year on suspension after banjoing that arsehole, DI Leander. Spent summer this year on sick leave after coming off worst in the investigation into the Plague of Crows, whoever she or he was. Had my moments of thinking that I wouldn't be back after that. Given that I'd been injured on duty, I could have walked off into the sunset with a decent pay-off, no one would have mourned my passing and, shortly afterwards, few would've even remembered that I'd been there in the first place.
Ended up lying on a floor crying my eyes out, having stubbed a cigarette butt into my arm. What a dick. Think that was the low point, but since then I've just levelled out into nothingness. Total, fucking, God-awful nothingness.
Yet every time I contemplate leaving, I can't think of what it is I'd be doing instead. This has been my life now for sixteen years. It seems utterly depressing that I can't think of anything else to do with myself, but I can't. So three days after lying on the floor, a total train wreck of a whacked-out psychotic, I returned to work.
Yes, madam, you're safe to walk the streets with me on the case.
Shouldn't have slept with my psychiatrist, but however much I shouldn't have slept with her, it doesn't suck the toes of how much she shouldn't have slept with me. That didn't end well either. Afterwards, we saw each other twice professionally, then we made some incredibly unprofessional agreement that she would sign off on my well-being, and we could go about the business of never seeing each other again. Like ever.
If I kill someone in the course of my duties, and there's an investigation into why I was allowed back, she's going to look pretty fucking bad.
Had a brief relationship just after returning to work. Met a girl, had some sex; soon enough, she was my ex. How many times could I sing that to myself? She was working downstairs in records, some shit like that. I never even bothered finding out.
After the whole Plague of Crows bullshit, and my five-month absence, I suppose there must have been some talk about me. All those who'd been at the station when it happened would have known that I was a worthless, wasted, alcoholic fucktard, a sideshow curiosity, a walking car crash. However, those few who arrived in the time I was on sick leave were bound to be curious. Especially the women.
No, seriously. I'm not talking myself up, or any shit like that, but really, you find out some guy you've never met before has had sex with a bunch of women in the same workplace, you're going to be curious, no matter the amount of bad things you hear about him. It's human nature. Curious as to what the attraction is. Curious to know why so many women ended up with this unattractive, deadbeat arsehole.
Then I came back to work, and I looked like this. Hadn't touched a drink for three days – ha! three fucking days! – eyes were clear, had lost some weight, and I had that look about me. Lost. Haunted. Alone. Filled with melancholy, yet not pathetic. Not desperate. Looking like the last thing I wanted was help from anyone. Strong, yet consumed by remorse, consumed by the past, weighed down by something so great it was hard for others to imagine what it might be.
If you could bottle that look for men, each and every one of us would be sleeping with a different woman every night. Women love that shit. They want to
know. They want to help, precisely because they can tell I don't want to be helped.
Of course, back at the station this only worked with the newbies. The women there that knew me, well they might have recognised the look, but on the other hand, they also knew that I was beyond repair, utterly unreliable, and as likely at the crunch to be unpleasantly not worth it as I was to be enigmatically melancholic.
So they all steered clear, and the new girl had a free hand. She spoke to me at the coffee machine a couple of times. Maybe she planned it, I don't know. People plan these things. How does anyone ever know if a little coincidence is what it seems? Not that it mattered in this case. She wasn't a psychotic knife-wielder after all. She was just curious, wondering whether or not she should be attracted, and presumably not caring that she might be joining a list.
Went out for dinner one night. Back to my place. Fucked her. She was good. Been around. At some point I had the thought that I was getting added to her list, rather than the other way round. Which was fine, as it meant there was little chance of anyone's bunny taking a bath in boiling water.
We got on all right, although at no point did I feel my emotions get off my own one-yard line. Didn't care. It was just what was happening at that point.
The third time we had sex – third time in a week – she asked me if I wanted to do anal. That was unusual. I said no. She said she loved it, so don't think I'd be taking advantage of her or anything. I said, no really, I don't want to. I might have used the word minging. Think I was a bit drunk. We moved on, finished having sex, but that was the changing of the tide.
I wondered if she gauged a man by whether or not he wanted to have anal sex. Funny way to gauge, but each to their own. And that was the last time we saw each other out of work. So, actually the tide didn't just change, it turned in a moment and said, 'fuck this, I'm off,' disappearing out to the horizon.
There have been one or two others since then, although no one from the station. Don't think there's anyone left that there'd be any point in even trying. Mrs Lownes possibly. She's pretty fit, and actually older than me. But I believe there's a Mr Lownes, and she seems to have one of those comfortable, normal lives that some people have. The kind of lives where you have a house and a couple of kids and regular jobs, and life passes by without ever having casual sex with a fucked-up dickhead at the office.
Despite my total paucity of spirit, every now and again something edges through. The occasional strong feeling pushes its way to the surface. Of course, it's never joy, never excitement, and by God it's never expectation.
Anger. That's it. Always at other people, always at moments of total insignificance. Walking to the shops. Sitting in a queue of traffic. Overhearing people on the street, thinking, 'Jesus, you sound like such a dick. Shut up!' In supermarkets. I get angry in supermarkets. You're walking around with your little list in your head, you make for the frozen onions or the pasta or the grapes or the shower gel or the whatever the fuck, and fifty per cent of the time there's someone standing right in front of the pasta or the frozen onions or the grapes, studying them, trying to decide precisely which packet to buy, and you stand there, and you know that if the person is over eighty, chances are you'll be standing like that for quarter of an hour, waiting for them to choose between linguine and cannavaro.
But the thing is, of course, it's not as though you're ever standing there that long. It's not fifteen minutes, is it? Tops it'll be thirty seconds, and more than likely it'll be less than five. Yet, less than five seconds is all it takes. Such a minor inconvenience, such a base annoyance at others.
The thought flashes through my brain, an instant image, of stepping forward, planting my fist in the back of their head, shouting, 'Get out the fucking way, you stupid fuck!' Comes out of nowhere. The image. The feeling. Like a snap of the fingers.
So far, on the plus side of this malign affliction of my character, I haven't actually done it. And I hope, if I ever finally snap and lash out at someone, it's for something far more fundamentally deserving than taking a while to choose between blue or green milk.
*
There's a peculiar feeling about searching through the things in the house of a pensioner. Nowadays so much searching and background checking is done on computers, and endless trawling through Twitter and Facebook and the rest of them. Suddenly, when you have to investigate the personal effects of an old person, it's like going back to the 1950s.
All right, keep your toupee on old man, yes I know there are plenty of old geezers who use the internet. But line up a hundred teenagers and ask them how many have never used the internet, and you'll come away with a big fat zero. The over-70s? You're looking at thirty to forty per cent, and Maureen Henderson was one of them.
Wednesday morning. Woke with a start, woke with the awareness of having been talking to someone, but the memory of it was gone in an instant.
In to work, and then back out with Morrow. We spend a morning at Maureen's home, rooting through her things. There's still been nothing definite to indicate that she might have had her suicide thrust unwillingly upon her, the words of the minister aside, but going through the dusty old sideboards and the small desk, and the kitchen drawers crammed full of stuff, it's evident she was no stranger to a protest letter. There are, at any rate, a lot of defensive replies.
Between us, Morrow and I have so far accumulated about fifteen names of people who'd had to write to her defending their position. Some of them were blunt, and some of them quite wonderfully offensive, but you get the feeling that was in response to the tone of Maureen's original.
This is confirmed when Morrow finds an envelope where the sender was returning Maureen's robust screed of outrage. Maureen's letter had used the expression “fuck-brained twattery” in the first sentence, and had become gradually more vitriolic from there.
The more we look, the more we find. On those occasions when you stumble across something at the start of the search, you wonder if that might be it for the duration. However, this is the search that keeps on giving. Old Mrs Henderson was as involved in the church and its amalgamation as someone who wasn't technically involved in it could have been.
A full list of all members of the four congregations and their voting intentions, colour-coded depending on how definite she considered the information; files on all those she considered the main players in the piece, full of newspaper clippings and gossip, lots of gossip; confirmation of all those letters we assumed she sent, with a folder containing photocopies of her outgoing correspondence.
At some point, I catch Morrow staring out the front window at the grey November morning. The street outside is deserted.
'All right?' I ask.
He turns.
'Sure beans,' he says. I must remember never to say sure beans. Like, ever. 'Just taking a break. Tell you what, sir, if they do decide she was murdered, we've got about fifty suspects.'
'Ain't that the truth,' I mutter.
7
'Well, we've got one thing going for us,' says Taylor.
Sitting in his office, a quick recap on the kind of thing we've found. Morrow and I have three barrel loads of paper waiting on our desks, a brilliant afternoon ahead of us, making a list of the most likely.
'If she was murdered,' he continues, 'whoever did it had no idea she'd left all that shit at her house.'
'Maybe,' I say. 'Could be they knew about it, extracted anything related to themselves, and left all the other shit hoping there'd be a variety of other people implicated.'
'Fair point' he says. 'Any hint of that?'
Shake my head. Glance at Morrow, who joins me.
'Well, gentlemen, you know what to do.'
Taylor's phone goes, and he makes a small gesture towards the door. Morrow and I rise to head on our way.
'Yep,' says Taylor, lifting the phone. He pauses, catches my eye as I get to the door, indicating that we should wait. Morrow and I move back into the office, spectators to the phone call.
It's not the greate
st spectator sport.
'You watch the Celtic last night?' asks Morrow, his voice low.
I nod. Did I watch the Celtic last night? Jesus. Got in the from pub, had a crappy pizza – and really, Dr Oetker, whoever the fuck you are, eating your pizzas in front of the TV perfectly replicates eating a crappy pizza in front of the TV, not eating with some fit bird in a fucking Italian piazza – and two bottles of Stella Artois – yep, I gave into the advertising on that one as well – and then I fell asleep when it was still mind-numbingly 0-0 with Celtic playing ten at the back at home, and missed the inevitable sending off and defensive capitulation.
'Shite,' he says.
I nod again.
'You're fucking kidding?' says Taylor, but not in a big fucking wow! kind of a way, just a low mutter, the tired policeman's tone. The tone that says this isn't going to make anything any easier.
'And you couldn't have spotted that any earlier?... Whatever...'
Another short pause, and then he hangs up without saying goodbye.
'Balingol,' he says.
Morrow and I both take a further step back into the office. Never a good sign when any detective says you're fucking kidding to the pathologist. He stares at us for a moment, and we wait for the announcement.
'Right, gentlemen,' he begins, 'seems we might have a murder investigation on our hands.'
I smile. Of course we do. Morrow glances over his shoulder, as though there might be someone from the Daily Mail lurking behind the nearest desk.
'There are significant traces of a sleeping drug in her blood.'
'Maybe she was an insomniac.'
'Maybe she was, Sergeant. Or maybe she was drugged so she wouldn't struggle. What did you find in the drugs cabinet?'
'Nothing interesting, I don't think,' I say. 'We've got it all in a bag.'
'Go through it, anything that isn't off the shelf at Tesco, take down to Balingol and get him to have a look.'
The Blood That Stains Your Hands Page 3