by Paul Charles
The Hissing of the Silent Lonely Room
First published by The DoNotPress 2001
This edition first published 2017 by Fahrenheit Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
www.Fahrenheit-Press.com
Copyright © Paul Charles 2017
The right of Paul Charles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.
F 4 E
The Hissing of the Silent Lonely Room
By
Paul Charles
An Inspector Christy Kennedy Mystery
Fahrenheit Press
For words on words, big thanks to Catherine, Jim, Ciara and Anthony. For energy and support, thanks to Edwin, Denis & Justin and Eamon & Anita. For in the beginning (without whom) thanks to Andy and Cora. For being my best friend and much, much more, thanks to Catherine.
PROLOGUE
TOMORROW WOULD be better.
She promised herself that tomorrow would be better. The children would behave like she dreamed children should behave. No devilment, cute as it was. They’d eat the food she wanted them to, when she asked them to. They wouldn’t play with it and make a mess at the table in her small kitchen. She wouldn’t have to shoo them off into the equally small living room, only to find they’d soon be making a mess in there as well.
They weren’t all that bad, really. They could be loveable and cute when they wanted to be, even if ‘when they wanted to be’ always seemed to coincide with when she was telling a visitor how naughty Jens and Holmer were. Then they’d just act as good as gold and the visitor would be thinking, and sometimes even saying, ‘are you sure you’re all right on your own?’
Tomorrow would be better because he might come back. He was always saying that they were meant to be together; that they would end up together. The novelty would soon wear off with Droopy Drawers and he’d be back and they’d be a family again. Tomorrow would be better, easier if they were a family again. For heaven’s sake, how could a father behave like that? Even apart from the infidelity, she had to admit that she was somewhat disappointed in him as the father of her children. As a father he had responsibilities; morally, legally, emotionally, every way you could think of, and all of them ending in -ly. Hell, even her father… She decided that she didn’t want to dwell on thoughts of her father. That was just too painful.
Tomorrow would be better. Some of her songs (works in progress) would resolve themselves; her downstairs neighbour would continue to be as pleasant as he had been recently and maybe her friends would stop wanting too much from her. Tomorrow would be better and the maisonette wouldn’t feel so cramped. The smallness of the maisonette really galled her. She was supposed to bring up two children in it, while he lived in their cottage. Her money, her hard-earned money, had paid for the beautiful cottage in the Cotswolds. They’d named it Axis together. Axis had been the name of her most successful – both critically and financially – album and it had been his idea to name the cottage after it. Yes, his idea to use her title. It was unbearable to think about that now. Their cottage, and he was there, in their bed, with her now.
Tomorrow she would have these thoughts – thoughts like how firm Droopy Drawers’ young body was. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it? She was only twenty-three years old. Yes, twenty-three. She hadn’t had two difficult pregnancies within eighteen months. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the infatuation wore off. He was a better catch on paper than he was in bed. She’d found that out to her cost. Sex wasn’t everything, but it was something. Something she could happily do without if it meant eventually getting him back, if it meant the children having their father back and if it meant all the bad thoughts she was having would disappear.
Tomorrow would definitely be better, but only if she could manage to get a good night’s sleep. She wound herself up so tight these days, it took at least three barbiturates to send her into blissful, painless, trouble-free slumber. He’d found out about the best pills for her. He’d said she needed something to help her unwind so that her sleep would be rewarding and would recharge her batteries.
Yes, tomorrow would be better. The storm blowing outside her window would dispel all the bad clouds. The windows were rattling incessantly in their frames. She hoped they would stop, at least until the pills kicked in and she fell under. She thought she heard her front door open but it was probably just the wind rattling. The storm seemed to be dying down, but she was sure she could hear floorboards creaking. She was wondering about how safe the trees on her beloved Primrose Hill would be against the wild winds when her ‘mother’s little helpers’ at last began to take effect. Now, securely in her bloodstream, they were working their magic, transporting her on the fast track to tomorrow.
There was something she needed to do before she surrendered to the drug, something vitally important. She summoned all her physical and mental resources, rose giddily from her bed and made her way through the maze in the general direction of the kitchen. She bumped into several objects on the way. She could hear things fall around her and the sound slowing down, echoing on and on until the sound of another fallen object overtook it. The echoes all seemed to roll into one as she stumbled onwards. She knew she needed to complete her task. If she succeeded, tomorrow could be the beginning of a better time.
Chapter 1
DETECTIVE INSPECTOR Christy Kennedy was prowling up and down the hallway like a bear with a thorn in his paw. Bear-like, he used the back of his hand to knock on the door of the ground-floor flat. There was a sickly-sweet smell wafting around the hallway, even though the hall door was wide open and the cold winter wind was blowing through. The wind could send a shiver down your spine; chill you to your very bone, but it didn’t seem able to remove the smell of gas from the house.
The house of death.
‘The next-door neighbour, Mrs Mason, says he’s still indoors sir,’ Detective Sergeant James Irvine began. ‘She says he’s regular as clockwork. Says he, Edward Higgins, wakes up at seven thirty and turns on the radio; Radio Four. She claims she can hear it clearly through their adjoining wall. He leaves the house at eight, goes up to Primrose Hill, buys a copy of The Telegraph and picks up a cappuccino and a toasted poppy-seed bagel on the way back. He returns home, reads his paper, drinks his cappuccino, eats his bagel and continues to listen to the radio until ten, at which time—’
‘Okay, okay, I get the picture, sergeant,’ Kennedy cut in.
He was being uncharacteristically short with his trusted bagman, but having seen the scene upstairs, well…he just ‘wasn’t himself’, as his mother might have put it.
‘If he’s in here let’s make a racket until he hears us,’ Kennedy said, proceeding to bang on the door with his fist and kick it on every third beat.
Perhaps he was trying to use the noise to dispel the scene he’d witnessed twenty minutes earlier, when he’d walked into the first-floor maisonette.
An incident had been reported at 123 Fitzroy Road, literally a two-minute walk from Primrose Hill. Just before 8:00 a.m., the children’s nanny, Judy Dillon, had been about to let herself into the first- and second-floor maisonette, when she smelled gas. She immediately called the police on her mobile phone. Four minutes later a patrol car pulled up, followed within sec
onds by a gas company van. The gasman immediately turned off the supply to the entire house. The children’s nanny led the police into the flat, automatically opening the first door on the left. As soon as she had looked into the kitchen she screamed like a banshee and immediately collapsed with an almighty thud on to the floor.
Her employer, Esther Bluewood, lay on the kitchen floor.
The first constable on the scene, PC Allaway, felt Esther’s throat for a pulse. He evaluated no signs of life and granted the gasman access to the property. The gasman appeared very cool under the circumstances, tugging on a pair of polythene gloves turning off the gas supply to the cooker before opening all the windows in the flat. Meanwhile, Constable Allaway called in the incident to North Bridge House and about three minutes later the back-up team, including Irvine, began to arrive at the scene.
By the time Kennedy arrived, ten minutes after Irvine, the team were so busy, silently going about their business, they’d failed to notice two children standing outside the kitchen door, staring at their mother’s body. Kennedy knew he would never forget the scene for as long as he lived. The boy stood to the right. He wore white pyjama bottoms and a Wallace & Gromit sweatshirt. His long, curly blond hair was dishevelled from his recent adventures in dreamland. He was holding, very tightly it appeared, the hand of his sister. She also had a head of blonde curly hair, was about two-thirds the height of her brother and was dressed in a pair of Winnie the Pooh pyjamas. She was holding her scruffy teddy by its arm. The well-loved and battle-bruised bear was dangling in the air, as lifeless as the body of the woman on the kitchen floor.
As Kennedy climbed the darkened stairwell, the sadness of the silhouette of the two children and the teddy bear hit him with such power that he was momentarily overwhelmed. Images of wasted lives, happy families, laughter-filled rooms, unfulfilled dreams and broken promises filled his head. He felt his eyes well up and he had to fight back the tears.
Kennedy took a second to compose himself before he proceeded up the stairs, placing a hand gently on to each of the children’s backs. As they turned towards each other and looked over their shoulders at the new presence, the detective said, ‘Let’s go and find a room of our own.’
The wee girl asked, ‘What’s wrong with our Mummy?’
The boy asked, ‘Why is she sleeping on the floor?’
Kennedy gently broke their clasped hands apart. He had to use a little force, as the boy didn’t seem to want to let go of his sister’s hand. Kennedy took each of the recently freed little hands and led them up the hallway and away from the death scene. As he did, he nodded to WDC Anne Coles to follow him.
They discovered that the living room too was packed with SoC (Scene of Crime) investigators. Kennedy noticed a door that seemed to lead to another flat. He took the children through it and up the stairs that led straight to their bedroom. The wee girl and boy simultaneously broke free from the detective and sat together on the nearest bed. The boy put his arm around his sister’s shoulder and the wee girl hung on to her teddy as if her life depended on it.
She smiled at Kennedy.
Kennedy tried to smile back. He found himself trying to compose what he imagined would look like a smile but because he was so self-conscious of the exercise he sensed the grin on his face probably looked hideous.
The boy looked more warily at the policeman.
‘Is Mummy sleeping now because she cries at night?’ the wee girl asked plaintively.
‘No, no,’ the boy answered, wiping the sleep from his eyes, ‘I told you, she cries because Daddy has found a new Mummy.’
Chapter 2
KENNEDY WAS still banging on the door of the flat downstairs as these thoughts swam around his head. It would have been easy to force the door but he was mindful that it was someone’s private property; someone would have to clear up the mess, get a carpenter and locksmith in and then chase up the police to pay for the damage. All of which was a major hassle and was to be avoided if at all possible.
At the same time, the lady upstairs was dead. Gassed! Either gassed to death by person or persons unknown, or by her own hand. Could harm have been done to Edward Higgins as well? Coal gas is heavy and falls, and, if he was asleep on the floor directly below, perhaps he too could have been gassed? Kennedy couldn’t be sure but he thought he could hear stirrings somewhere inside the flat. A few seconds later the door opened and who should be standing there but the resourceful PC Allaway, claiming he’d found an open window at the back of the house. Kennedy, Irvine and Allaway trooped back into the flat, and in a small dingy bedroom they found Higgins alive, but only just. They’d arrived barely in the nick of time. He was taken immediately to hospital, suffering from gas poisoning. With a bit of luck he’d end up with nothing more than a chronic hangover-type headache. A hangover without the buzz of the night before.
That little mystery solved, Kennedy found it easier to return upstairs and concentrate on the SoC or perhaps SoS (Scene of Suicide). Easier still because Coles was entertaining the two children up in the bedroom.
Irvine had discovered a small study-type room, stolen from the space that should have separated the bathroom and the kitchen. While forensics scoured the kitchen with a fine-tooth comb, Kennedy had Irvine fetch the nanny, Judy Dillon, to the study. The windowless room was no more than eight feet square. He positioned himself in one of the room’s two seats. It was a captain’s swivel chair, guarding the desk, which in turn was positioned against the wall opposite the door. Above the desk a brown, cork noticeboard stretched to the ceiling. It was packed to overflowing with cards, torn articles from newspapers and magazines, photographs and a few picture postcards. Kennedy was immediately drawn to a family photo of the two children he’d met, a young woman (the woman now lying lifeless on the kitchen floor) and a man. All four were ignoring the camera, three of them engrossed in the antics of the small girl, who appeared to have them all in stiches of laughter. Very much a happy family. The remaining walls were shelved floor to ceiling, broken only by the doorway.
The shelves were absolutely crammed with books, magazines, files, records, compact discs, cassettes, diaries, journals, notebooks, and two cylindrical boxes containing a generous supply of pens and pencils. The shelf to the right of the desk was deeper than the rest and contained a Sony midi-stereo system with cassette player, CD and radio. No record deck was visible, despite the presence of the vinyl collection. The corner away from the desk and to the right of the door housed a guitar, resting on a stand; a beautiful old Gibson L100. Beside the guitar stood the second chair, a green and purple basketwork affair with no arms. The shelf directly beside it was empty, apart from a Sony Professional Walkman cassette recorder with a stereo microphone, and an open yellow foolscap notepad with a felt-tip pen resting on a clean page.
Kennedy felt a strange sensation. It was as if he was trespassing in someone’s very private space, a hallowed room where an artist worked. A space where magic happens and wonderful things are created, pulled from out of the sky. There was a power in the small room. The young woman, Esther Bluewood, may at that moment have been lying lifeless on the dull red and orange oilcloth no more than three yards away, but her presence, her spirit, was still evident in her room. Kennedy was reminded of times of death when growing up in Portrush, Northern Ireland. When relatives passed away the grown-ups would tell him that the banshees would come and free the spirits of the faithful departed, and that if he didn’t go to sleep early he’d be sure to hear their wailings as the banshees went about their spooky business of stealing the souls of the dead. Was Esther Bluewood’s spirit waiting to be freed? Or might it still be hanging around this very study, maybe trying to tell Kennedy something? How close were the banshees?
Balderdash, Kennedy thought. Get real. Esther Bluewood was positively dead. Dr Taylor had confirmed that. She was on her way to somewhere. If she’d taken her own life, the belief was that her soul would never reach heaven. No matter where she was bound, she wouldn’t be telling Kennedy anything abo
ut her untimely demise. He’d have to figure it all out for himself – and he’d better be getting on with it.
Kennedy realised that the study was a computer-free zone just as DS Irvine led the nanny into the room. The senior detective stood and offered the distraught nanny the choice of chairs. She wisely elected to rest her limbs in the armless model.
Judy Dillon was in her early twenties, Kennedy assessed, with a physique chunky enough to feel blessed when shapeless training gear came into fashion. Flopping-out clothes were great for flopping-out in; they saved the figure-conscious from having to be conscious of their figures. Maybe the modern attire even encouraged that additional late night tub of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Kennedy knew exactly how irresistible that Chunky Monkey could be, but he had a belt around his waist and its tightness acted as a reminder.
Surprisingly, her face seemed more suited to a smaller body. It was a beautiful face, in a Jessica Lange kind of way. She used no make-up and wouldn’t have benefited from it anyway. Her hair (dyed a two-tone blonde and red) was pulled up on to her crown and held precariously in place with an electric-blue plastic clasp.
‘Oh, the poor kiddies, whatever will become of them?’ Judy Dillon asked through her sobs. Kennedy considered volunteering something about the father, or social services, when sobbing Judy continued, ‘She was great to them, you know. No matter what her own troubles were, the kiddies always came first. It all must have become too much for her in the end, I suppose.’
‘What were her troubles?’ Kennedy asked softly.
‘Now then, there’s a question.’ The nanny twitched nervously on the basketwork seat. Every move she made caused an aftershock of ripples, which followed through the rest of her body. Kennedy could tell she was trying to decide how candid she should be with him.