A Good Way to Go

by Peter Helton

  ‘Apart from that bit of clothesline everything says it’s a different killer.’

  ‘Go try that line on the super,’ McLusky said and gestured ahead to the superintendent’s Range Rover. Denkhaus was sitting at the wheel, waiting. As they drew level the driver window slid down.

  The superintendent had watched the two detectives come up the lane. For some reason he was feeling his age today and those two looked too bloody young. Austin of course really was young, still just inside his twenties, with a fashionable haircut and suit. And McLusky. Half gifted, tenacious police officer, half Peter Pan. And now he had chocolate round his mouth like a five year old.

  McLusky had just been told about it by Austin and was licking his lips while hunting for a tissue in his jacket.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ Denkhaus asked him.

  ‘What happened to your meeting, sir?’

  ‘Postponed. Well?’

  ‘It’s a possible,’ McLusky admitted. ‘It’s thin so far but two similarities is a lot: the gag, the clothesline. Three major differences, though. Barbara Steadman was drowned. She was alive when she went into the canal and the whole thing has a ritualistic feel about it. Killing her there in that fashion had lots of unnecessary complications. Unnecessary unless it somehow made sense to the killer.’ McLusky nodded the back of his head towards the tent which was barely visible from here above the lip of the railway cutting. ‘This one wasn’t killed here, he was dumped, and I mean dumped. Driven to the end of the track and tipped down the slope. No attempt at concealment, no ritualization about it. Just got rid of. If it really is the same killer then it’s almost as though the first victim meant something to him, while the second didn’t.’

  ‘Yes, I buy that. You said three major differences.’

  ‘Yeah. First one’s a woman. This one’s a chap.’

  Denkhaus sighed. ‘It hadn’t escaped me. Right, keep looking for similarities. And why was he dumped here? Why choose this place?’

  ‘You can get to it without passing CCTV. Fly-tipping down the railway embankment is quite a sport round here.’

  ‘But you’d have to know about this lane, first. Perhaps there is a connection with the allotments.’ McLusky just pointed over the super’s shoulder. ‘Ah, of course,’ Denkhaus nodded. ‘The playing fields. Yes, you’re right. I very much hope these two bodies aren’t connected.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, sir.’

  Denkhaus nodded, then nodded some more, thinking. ‘Would you excuse us a moment, DS Austin?’

  ‘Sir.’ Austin nodded and walked off down the road.

  Denkhaus waited until the sergeant was out of earshot. ‘It’s your show, McLusky, unless something suggests the two are definitely unconnected. I don’t have to remind you that both your conduct and progress will be minutely scrutinized.’

  ‘I never doubted it, sir.’

  ‘What will also be scrutinized is your continued work relationship with DS Austin. Fortunately he was uninvolved in your misdemeanours or you’d have found yourself paired with someone new. But make no mistake, everything is up for review, depending on your future conduct.’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

  ‘I hope so. But if you do decide at any point to throw away your career, don’t drag DS Austin down with you.’

  ‘I won’t, sir.’

  ‘Good, good. Well, you’ll be busy, McLusky.’ He started the engine. ‘Very busy.’

  Standing a few yards apart on the tarmac the two detectives watched their superior drive off. ‘Anything I need to know about?’ Austin asked.

  ‘Nope, not a thing. He just wanted to tell me again how happy he was to have me back.’

  The sun was sinking behind a bank of dust-grey cloud by the time the site was wound-up. The fingertip search had yielded a large selection of detritus that generations of Bristolians had flung towards the railway lines: broken glass, broken trowels, bicycle tyres, condoms, a hamster wheel and a car door were among the items recovered. Nothing that immediately suggested a connection with the dead body; the corpse was merely one more thing a citizen could not be bothered to put where it belonged. They had now rectified this: the body had been sent to the mortuary, the rubbish removed. McLusky had spent another hour in the incident room, talking, talking, talking and asking rhetorical questions of the team: why, how, where. Some of these questions would not be answered until the autopsy had been done, others would take much longer. Forensic laboratories worked slowly and were getting slower. Now samples were sent off to whatever laboratory lay within a reasonable radius from the locus of the crime and had the smallest backlog to work through.

  When McLusky left his car unlocked near his flat he was thinking of what constituted a reasonable radius to solve his nutritional problems. He needed a drink but also something to eat. Rossi’s was closed. He had no appetite, yet too many chocolate bars and instant coffees had left his stomach fizzing acidly and something had to be done about it before he added a few pints of stout to the mixture. He considered the Barge Inn directly opposite, only he could see through the windows that it was quiz night. Apart from the daftness of the occasion it meant there was no food to be had apart from rounds of tiny triangular sandwiches for the quizzers. McLusky turned away and walked the quarter mile up to Rita’s on Stokes Croft. It was while he was making his way back towards the pub, eating cheesy chips with a plastic fork, that he heard her laugh. Laura’s laugh. He would know the sound anywhere. For three years that sound had been his reward, though quite a rare currency in their last year together in Southampton. Now that she had moved to Bristol for her studies, rarer still. He only saw her occasionally now, mainly through chance encounters, and to this day she had not told him her Bristol address.

  There was nowhere to hide. He walked on and seconds later Laura rounded the corner. She was flanked on one side by a much younger woman, a teenager still, he guessed, and on the other by yet another of those attractive, long-haired young men which archaeology courses appeared to attract. Laura slowed as she recognized McLusky and stopped in front of him. Her hair had grown longer and her clothes become younger since she had started her studies.

  ‘Liam!’ She seemed genuinely pleased to see him. ‘This is Liam, guys. Erm, this is Val, and that’s Ethan.’

  Val smiled at him, Ethan said: ‘How’re you doin? You must be Laura’s policeman friend.’

  ‘I must. You’re American?’

  ‘Canadian!’ Ethan and Laura said in happy unison. Ethan waved McLusky’s apology away. ‘I get that all the time. I don’t blame you. I’m only just beginning to tell all your Scotch and Welsh accents apart.’ All three of them were flushed with drink and all were carrying hold-alls, rucksacks and sleeping bags.

  ‘Off to a festival?’ McLusky suggested.

  ‘Not this time of year,’ Laura said. ‘We’re going on a dig tomorrow. Three days, close to Stonehenge. Chance of a lifetime.’

  McLusky was beginning to feel self-conscious about the parcel of chips he was holding. ‘Three days in a tent? In the first week of April? In England?’ he asked.

  ‘I know,’ said Ethan, ‘they’re mad in this country.’

  ‘It’s Val and me in the tent,’ Laura said, impressing the point on McLusky with a well-rehearsed look. ‘Ethan’s in the year above us and says he’s learnt his lesson. He’s invested in a van to kip in. I’m thinking of getting one myself, maybe in autumn …’ Laura stopped herself, realizing that the bottle of wine she had shared with Val earlier was making her gush. ‘You’re … back at work?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah. Just knocked off.’

  ‘The murder? Are you working on that? The woman in the canal?’

  He nodded. ‘And a second body has been found. A man this time.’

  ‘Another one!’

  ‘Perhaps it’s not a bad time to get out of town,’ Ethan said.

  ‘You may be right,’ McLusky said without taking his eyes off Laura. ‘Well, have a good dig. I hope it stays dry for you.’ He walked on
with a nod at Laura’s companions while a small irritable part of him began to pray for three days of heavy rain. His chips had cooled down to an unpleasant temperature and he ate them quickly out of a sense of duty to his stomach. He dropped the remains of the parcel into a wheelie bin and made for the Barge Inn. Laura. All excited about digging holes and staying in a tent. She had previously always said she hated camping, like all sensible people.

  Laden with supermarket shopping, DI Fairfield fumbled open the door to her maisonette, squeezed through it, then shouldered it shut. For a moment she leant her back against the door, letting out a deep breath through puffed cheeks. What a bloody awful day. She thought she could fall asleep right here, leaning in the hall, shopping bags and all. After a few seconds, however, she launched herself forward towards the kitchen. She set down her shopping on the kitchen table and, still wearing her coat, she attended to priorities, like opening the bottle of wine she had bought to allow it to breathe. She let it breathe for as long as it took to get a clean glass from the draining board, then poured it brimful of the ruby liquid. It would breathe more freely in a glass, surely. She took a large, thirsty gulp out of it before setting it down on the worktop next to the cooker, turned on the oven, then shrugged out of her coat. I wish someone would uncork me and let me breathe, she thought, then berated herself for being melodramatic again. She sometimes thought it was being Greek that made her prone to exaggeration and melancholy. Not depression. She preferred the word melancholy to describe the long grey moods she fell into, and it was a good Greek word after all. Kat Fairfield, née Katarina Vasiliou, had after her divorce thought hard about going back to her maiden name but had decided that Fairfield was an easier name to make a career with in CID. Detective Superintendent Vasiliou … DSI Fairfield. Would either of them make it that far? Neither of them would impress Louise, she felt sure. Fairfield took another gulp of wine and started clearing away the shopping, all except the lasagne ready-meal she would shove in the oven later. Hey, it was a step up from the microwave, so moving in the right direction. No, rank would not impress Louise. Neither would a supermarket’s own-brand lasagne from the Pay the Difference range. It was the culture thing. She just didn’t have the schooling. Louise and her friends could talk so easily about stuff like history and the classics. They knew all the characters of classic novels and could quote from poems. They could tell all the Jane Austen stuff apart and it wasn’t from the telly, either. She had tried to catch up. She had started reading one of Louise’s books, The Mill on the Floss, picked almost at random off one of her crammed shelves. She had fallen asleep over it several times. How tedious could books get? Surely there was more action in her average work day than in that entire tome. She really did want to improve her mind, and she would go back to her art classes next term. She enjoyed life drawing and it wasn’t something she had done to impress anyone either. Unlike the thing with the telly. Louise had convinced her that television was vulgar and that it ate up what little free time Kat had. Get rid of it, she’d advised, and suddenly you’ll find you have time for all sorts of things you’ll otherwise never get around to.

  Like cooking. Fairfield drained the glass, ripped the packaging off the lasagne and shoved it into the noisy fan oven. Yup, it was true. She hadn’t gone as far as selling the thing but had unplugged it and stuffed it into the cupboard under the stairs and so she would be awarded a gold star by Louise for it. At first this had made her feel mature and sophisticated but recently, on those many evenings when she was too tired to read, the siren call of the banished set had become louder.

  In the sitting room, in place of the TV set, now stood a radio. She turned it on but reception in her area was notoriously bad and she soon gave up trying to find anything appealing and turned it off. A ticking silence ensued, only enhanced by the background hum of the fan-assisted oven next door. Fairfield let herself sink on to her sofa. She wanted to get into some comfortable clothes but found it hard to summon up the will power to go upstairs. She was looking at the mantelpiece. The little black mantel clock said it was eight thirty. Only, the clock wasn’t in its usual place. Fairfield stood up to look at it. It was usually on the left, where she could easily see it from her favourite corner of the sofa. Now it had changed places with the Moroccan sugar bowl, usually on the opposite end. She must have somehow put them down the wrong way around last time she dusted. Weird. She swapped them over. And went upstairs to change out of her work clothes.

  EIGHT

  Two in the afternoon in the incident room. McLusky had talked himself full circle around everything they knew about the two killings. He was no longer standing by the whiteboard addressing the rest of the detectives in the room, he was sitting at a desk like all the others, arguing. They had talked for a long time and no one had come up with a new avenue to explore. Frenchie – DC Claire French had given up trying to resist her nickname – had only one Jaffa cake left to get her through the rest of the shift and struggled to resist it. DC Dearlove sat tapping a plastic spoon against his front teeth: his thinking pose. Austin sat staring unhappily at the brown sludge at he bottom of his coffee mug and decided to give up dunking biscuits. McLusky was holding a full cigarette packet between the nails of his index fingers, twirling it with his thumbs. ‘The first killing has something weirdly ritualistic about it.’ He stopped twirling and sat up straighter. ‘OK, I’m killing someone. I’ll either do it in a fit of temper; I’ll hit them, stab them, strangle them or if I have a gun handy, shoot them. Then I think: shit, I killed her, what am I going to do with the body. Right? Or I plan it. I’m cool and calculated. I work out beforehand where to kill them, how to kill them, how to flee the scene or how to get rid of the body, possible alibis, the works.’

  ‘Unless you have a degree in forensics and/or a lot of luck you’ll get caught,’ Austin said. ‘Eventually.’

  ‘Hopefully. But this one is different from either of those. Yes, it was planned. But that woman was alive when she went into the canal. She was snatched from in or near her car. Trussed up and gagged. Transported across town, brought by boat to the place where she was drowned. That’s not cool and calculated, that’s sustained rage, surely. Or insanity, of course. He had plenty of time to think about what he was doing. Plenty of time to change his mind, relent, find some compassion with the struggling woman. But no. There doesn’t appear to be a sexual motive, either, though her tights were missing. We checked with her husband who says she would not normally walk around with bare legs. But otherwise she’s fully clothed and has not been raped.’

  ‘She had had recent intercourse,’ said French. ‘Perhaps she laddered her tights in a passionate clinch.’

  There were a few titters. ‘Possible,’ McLusky said. ‘Good thinking.’ Then he returned to his previous thought. ‘Killing her the way he did meant taking an awful risk. Even in the middle of the night he could easily have been spotted lowering her into the water from a passing car. The second bod had his head bashed in and was unceremoniously dumped by the railway line. The way Barbara Steadman was killed must mean something to the bastard.’

  ‘Unless that’s what he wants us to think,’ French said. ‘Make it look like the killing is down to some weirdo with a psychotic agenda. To make us look in the wrong direction?’

  ‘Still too complicated, too much effort. If you were faking the weirdness surely you’d leave a weird note or stuff her mouth with butterflies or something corny out of the movies, but this was hard work. And too risky. No, Frenchie, he meant it.’ McLusky was tapping his desk to the rhythm of his speech for emphasis: ‘This is your actual, genuine, bona fide weird shit.’

  And everyone knew McLusky hated weird shit. French gave a Gallic shrug and realized she had popped her last Jaffa cake into her mouth without thinking; now the rest of the day stretched like a desert in front of her. Unless she went to buy more, of course, but that would probably mean she’d end up eating two whole packets in one day. Again.

  ‘Ordinarily a killer is most concerned with concealm
ent,’ McLusky went on. The phone nearest him rang and he snatched it up. ‘Incident room …’ He listened, nodded, nodded. The superintendent had managed to bully the mortuary into bringing the autopsy of the second body forward. Even so there had been a day’s delay. McLusky hung up and kept talking while gathering his things to leave. ‘We have a PM at last. I may return with words of wisdom but don’t hold your breaths, and get on with all the routine stuff. We still haven’t identified the boat he used.’

  McLusky was trying to resign himself to a life punctuated with post mortems: having to look at corpses being cut open, have their innards taken out, inspected, weighed and bagged up; prodded, scraped and poked in every orifice, filmed and photographed in this state of ultimate undress until eventually most of it was returned into the corpse in more or less the right order and the cavity neatly sewn up. McLusky had always maintained that he didn’t much care what happened to him after his death, by which he meant whether he’d be buried or cremated, yet he definitely hoped to die in a bed and of known causes and so be spared the procedure he was about to witness.

  ‘Your superintendent can be quite persuasive.’ This was how Coulthart explained the fact that the autopsy had been given priority.

  ‘Don’t I know it.’

  ‘Ah. Would that also be the reason why you are yet again gracing these procedures with your presence?’ He flashed McLusky a look over his glasses but didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Let us begin, then, I have a busy schedule here and a lecture to deliver in town later. Dead male, in his early-to-mid thirties …’

  ‘Are you sure?’ McLusky interrupted. ‘Hard to tell from what I saw of his face of course but his hair is completely grey.’

  ‘Yes. Dyed grey. Perhaps a disguise but I think more an affectation. His real hair colour is closer to that of his eyebrows and pubic hair, a rather boring, mousey brown.’

  ‘He’d have coloured his eyebrows too if he wanted to really change his appearance enough to deceive anyone, surely. Did he die from his head wounds?’