by M. J. Trow
‘Hasn’t it though?’ Hall looked at him straight faced (how else?) but he drew the line at shaking the man’s hand. He knew all too well where it had been.
The sun had already set that evening over Dead Man’s Point. John Mason had borrowed his dad’s car and driven out beyond the Shingle as another long July day came to an end. Next to him was Louise Bedford, an absolute little cracker who lived three doors down from the Mason’s along Shillingworth Road. John and Louise had known each other for years and had gone all through Junior School and the abyss that was Leighford High, thumping each other, sitting apart and making ‘disgusted of Sussex’ noises when they’d had to pass each other in the corridor.
Then, suddenly last summer, the daft pair had realised that they’d actually loved each other all along, in that squabbly way that kids do, and now they were off to different universities. John had gone north to London, where he languished in the flesh pots of Camberwell, learning to be a doctor at King’s College Hospital. Louise had gone west, to be crammed into the concrete excrescence at Duryard Halls near Heart Attack Hill on the Exeter Campus.
So the last nine months had been an endless flurry of texting and phone calls, mobile to mobile and heart to heart, while the Masons and the Bedfords kept footing the bill and praying that common sense would prevail. But it hadn’t. John and Louise were still very much Love’s Young Dream as they wandered hand-in-hand along the coastal path that leads from the Point. They watched the dying embers of the sun much as Jacquie and Maxwell had only twenty-four hours before. They faced each other and kissed, slowly, deeply and held each other as if there’d be no tomorrow.
And, for the man in the gardens some yards behind them, there wasn’t.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I never thought I’d be here in a professional capacity.’ Jim Astley was still just about able to kneel despite the passage of the years and his variety of medical problems. He was poised over the body of a man, half-hidden under a gigantic rhododendron that stood huge and black against the purple of the night sky.
Around him SOCO were just setting out their wares, with the usual panoply of cameras, measuring devices and grids. They all knew the score, ever since that smug old bastard Edward Locard had come out with the dazzling ‘Every contact leaves a trace’. Leo Henshaw, the Ridley Scott of Leighford CID, was treading warily with his camcorder strapped to his shoulder. Everybody was treading warily, come to think of it, in latex suits and shoes, armed with Magnabrushes, tweezers, see-through plastic bags and gummy labels.
Nobody thought they’d be here in a professional capacity. Least of all DCI Henry Hall. It was way past his bedtime and he was getting too long in the tooth for calls in the wee small hours. There was a time when Margaret had got up with him, put the kettle on, made some toast. A time when he’d gone into the kids’ room, to check on them, and remind himself that despite the horror he was likely to see, this was the real world, his world. But now the kids had gone and Margaret had been through all this once too often; she just turned over in her sleep and he didn’t even pause at the top of the stairs.
So here he was, at another scene of somebody else’s horror that would become his own. Less fond of the grape than Jim Astley and several years his junior, Henry Hall could still squat. ‘Do the gardens often, do you, Jim?’
‘Used to,’ Astley muttered. ‘When Marjorie could still walk upright and was able to tell one flower from another. I always used to find it quite soporific wandering through the Australian garden and the Jungle Room. Gave me an extra frisson, I suppose, that there was a hospital on the site.’
‘Ah, yes. Chest, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right. Bracing south sea air. The wards all had balconies and they all faced this way. Over there, where the gravel path starts. The South Coast used to be full of ’em. If you were consumptive or asthmatic and couldn’t afford Switzerland, you came here. Or they sent you to Ventnor, but that must have been like going to Van Diemen’s Land.’
‘So what’s all this about?’
The SOCO’s arc lights were throwing lurid shadows across Leighford Botanical Gardens, the giant cedars echoed in shade in all directions – three trunks where there had been one; a hundred branches where fifty would suffice. The evening wind had dropped and there was a hush here despite the traipsings of the law. Nothing but the rustle of plastic, the click of cameras and the sibilance of the sea.
‘This,’ Jim Astley had to shift to get some feeling back into his right leg, ‘is murder, Henry. But then, you knew that already.’ Astley was probing with his torch, flicking it this way and that. He’d known more difficult, out-of-the-way murder sites, but half-crawling under the rhododendrons hadn’t done him much good. ‘Middle-aged male. Well nourished. Large amounts of blood around the chest area. I’d say he’s been stabbed, maybe four or five times. The heart was the target, but he’d have bled to death quickly. The lungs have been punctured; at least the left one. Know who he is?’
Hall waited until Astley’s torch framed the corpse’s face. The eyes were open. So was the mouth. A look of horror. And of incomprehension. ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘You?’
‘Never seen him before. This was quite an attack. Frenzied. There’s a lot of anger here, Henry.’ Astley looked out across the gloom where men in white coats moved like ghosts across the carefully manicured lawns. ‘How far are we from Dead Man’s Point?’
‘About half a mile as the crow flies.’ Hall stood up. ‘And, yes, I had made the connection. Thank you, Jim.’
‘I’ll send you my bill in the morning,’ Astley chuckled and got back to work.
The DCI crossed the gravel path that led to the foundations of the old hospital. A metal plaque still marked the spot – The Leighford and District Hospital for Pulmonary Diseases, Opened January 21st 1883 by Sir William Anstruther M D. Different days, Henry Hall guessed. Different days, Peter Maxwell knew.
Three people huddled around a Polo Golf parked beyond the azalea beds. One was a lad about twenty, dark-haired, good-looking in an ovine sort of way. He was cuddling a girl about the same age. She was freckly; even the darkness couldn’t hide that, and she’d been crying, her pretty face streaked with tears and her mascara all over the place. The third was Jacquie Carpenter.
‘Sir, this is John Mason and Louise Bedford.’
‘You find the body?’
‘Er…yes,’ Mason told him, numbed as he was, still a little taken aback by the DCI’s brusqueness. ‘Yes, we did.’
‘What time was this?’ Hall wanted to know.
‘Um…’
‘It was half past nine,’ Louise sniffed, glad after so much waiting around to be doing something, moving it all on. John Mason wondered why police people always asked the same questions over and over again. In the hope you’d suddenly remember something? In the hope they’d catch you out?
‘Which way were you going?’ Hall asked.
‘We were taking the coastal path,’ Mason said. ‘From the Point.’
‘Dead Man’s Point?’ Hall checked.
‘That’s right.’
‘You didn’t notice the police cordon? The tape?’
‘Of course. But we’d parked by then. At the Point car park. We didn’t cross the cordon, if that’s what you think.’
‘This is your car?’ Hall asked.
‘Um…my dad’s.’
‘How did it get here?’
‘I thought it advisable to go with them to get it, guv,’ Jacquie said. ‘Bring it round here for somewhere to sit and keep warm. I sensed it would be a long night.’
Hall nodded. He’d been a little tough on the lad, on the girl. You don’t expect to have your romantic evening walk punctuated by stumbling over a dead man. Or to be asked questions several times over by people who seemed to believe you’ve done it. ‘Does somebody know where you are?’ he asked. ‘Your dad?’
‘Yes,’ Mason told him. ‘I rang him earlier. Louise rang her mum.’
‘Good. Can you give us a minute, please? I shall need
you to accompany one of my officers to the station, to make statements. Is that all right?’
The pair nodded.
‘Jacquie,’ a nod was as good as a wink to DS Carpenter and she followed her guv’nor into the gloom. ‘What do you make of them?’
‘Straight, guv,’ she said. ‘Wrong place, wrong time, that’s all.’
‘Yes,’ Hall nodded, watching as the SOCO tent went up over the body and the incongruous sound of sawing began as half the rhododendrons were torn away. ‘Yes, we’ve had rather a lot of that in the last few days. When Jim’s finished, we’ll need to get that lot to the lab; try and establish an ID.’
‘No need, guv,’ Jacquie told him. ‘I know who it is.’
Hall looked her in the eyes. Grey, clear, even in the short July night. ‘Who, for God’s sake?’
‘He’s a builder from Tottingleigh. His name’s Gerald Henderson.’
‘Gerald Henderson?’
Maxwell had waited up, even though she had told him not to. He wasn’t wearing his curlers, tapping his foot and cradling his trusty rolling pin in time-honoured tradition. He knew better. Before they’d become one, Jacquie Carpenter would call him in the wee small hours, her voice tired, her nerves shredded; and he’d known. Or, there’d be a ring at the doorbell at 38 Columbine. And a small, frightened girl would stand there, in the wind, in the snow, in the rain. And she’d thrown her arms around his neck. And he’d known. She’d said nothing. She didn’t have to. Murder does that to you. Words? Well, what use are they?
This time it was a little different. The man in the gardens wasn’t a stranger, Mr Nobody without a life in every sense of the word. This time they both knew him. He was the man they’d got their au pair from and Peter Maxwell had been talking to his wife not ten hours ago.
‘Stabbed, Doc Astley thinks.’
‘In the gardens?’
Jacquie shook her head, cradling the cocoa between her hands. Even though it was nearly the shortest, warmest night of the year she felt cold, chilled to the bone as she always was when she walked in on sudden death. ‘No, Astley thinks he was dragged there and dumped.’
‘When was this?’ Maxwell sat opposite her in the kitchen-diner, a fluffy clown perched next to his elbow, grinning at them both.
Jacquie managed a chuckle. ‘You’ve obviously never worked with Jim Astley,’ she said. ‘“Miracles,” he is wont to say, “take a little longer.”’ It wasn’t a bad take-off.
‘Hmm,’ Maxwell muttered. ‘Ever the man of cliché was our Jim. Was he prepared to guess? Isn’t that, after all, what most forensic science is?’
‘Don’t get me started on that one,’ Jacquie shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t be drawn, but stands to reason it was after dark.’ ‘Or the body would have been found earlier?’ Maxwell was thinking aloud. ‘What time do the gardens close?’
‘Well, that’s just the point,’ she said. ‘The glasshouses, shop, café, etcetera close at six in the summer months, but of course the gardens themselves actually never do. They’re wide open all along the coastal path. There’s a fence of sorts, but it keeps getting broken down and they’ve stopped replacing it. Uniform are for ever moving on winos, glue-sniffers and fornicating couples.’
‘Ah,’ Maxwell made light of it. ‘What would you boys do for a living without Leighford High School?’
‘Which means,’ Jacquie ignored him. ‘Henderson was dumped, if that’s what happened, between six and nine-thirty when the body was found.’
‘But it was still pretty light at nine-thirty last night. Astley’s being logical, but not accurate. Whoever our boy is, he dumped him in daylight. He’s taking a hell of a chance.’
‘Perhaps that’s it,’ Jacquie looked up at him suddenly. ‘A thrill killer. He’s testing us, taunting us even. He’s saying “Look, I can kill where I want, how I want and leave my work in broad daylight. What are you going to do about it?”’
‘“Catch me when you can, Mr Lusk,”’ Maxwell said, his mind suddenly far away.
‘What?’
‘The Ripper,’ he reminded her. ‘One of the crackpot letters purporting to be from the Whitechapel Murderer back in the Autumn of Terror. Serial killers?’ he asked her. ‘“Funny little games”?’ He was quoting again.
‘There must be a link,’ Jacquie said. She was on her feet now, rinsing out the cocoa cup, doing stuff. Her brain had got over the initial numbness; she was back on the case. ‘David Taylor and Gerald Henderson.’
‘Brainstorm?’ he asked her.
She checked the kitchen clock. Nolan would be awake in half an hour and he did hate his breakfast goodies to be spoiled by the ‘zicker zicker’ of criminal conversation. The other problem was that Peter Maxwell’s brain was bigger than hers. But she consoled herself that her reflexes were faster.
‘Heads or tails?’ she whipped a coin from her pocket and tossed it. He caught it and slapped it down between his hands, ‘Not that coin,’ he said. ‘I choose tails.’ He opened his hands again.
‘Tails it is,’ she told him in wide-eyed innocence. ‘Who do you want to be?’ She was practising for when he was finally in the Home for Retired Teachers.
‘Henderson.’
‘You go first.’
‘Haunted house,’ he quipped. He and Jacquie had played this game before. ‘Gerald Henderson. Rich as Croesus. Money comes from the building trade. Lives in Tottingleigh in a house about five hundred times the size of this one. Has a pool like an inland sea.’
‘Wife?’ Jacquie had flicked the kettle on. Then was cocoa time. Now it was coffee. Keep awake. Move it all on. Push the boundaries.
‘Fiona. Attractive woman.’
‘Oh?’ She arched an eyebrow, in a jealous housewife sort of way.
‘…if you like that sort of thing. Daughter, Katie, at boarding school.’
‘No longer has an au pair,’ Jacquie added.
‘Indeed,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘But then, who has?’
‘Kind of bloke?’ she prompted him, sensing Maxwell going off the point.
‘Based on half an hour’s meeting, Christ knows. Er…full of himself. Self-made man. Decision-maker.’
‘Taurus,’ Jacquie commented.
‘Bollocks!’ the great man snorted. ‘We’re not talking about the Zodiac killer here, Jacqueline. Stay with the plot.’
‘All right. My man.
‘David Taylor.’
‘Known as Wide Boy. Petty crook.’
‘Domicile?’ Maxwell checked.
‘Wherever he hung his hat, basically, but most recently, Brighton.’
‘Not exactly Graham Greene, though, was he?’
Jacquie wasn’t quite sure who Graham Greene was, so she let it go. ‘He’s got more previous than History, an ex who hates his guts and a kid who worships him.’
‘Does he have a link with Leighford? With Dead Man’s Point?’
‘None known at the moment,’ she told him. ‘But I bet he came here as a kid.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ Everybody did. Either Leighford or the Isle of Wight. Take your pick. The Island might have dinosaurs and Blackgang Chine, but they couldn’t compete with Willow Bay, the Shingle, the Little Folks’ Castle. And now, Leighford could add another attraction to the Tourist Board’s glossy literature – the murder scenes at Dead Man’s Point. ‘So our first boy’s a bit of a lad, eh?’
‘The Brighton boys have had reason to invite him to the station for a good smacking a few times,’ she concluded. ‘Some of them see the light, eventually write their memoirs, do charitable work in the East End.’
‘Yes, but we’re not talking about coppers now,’ Maxwell said. ‘Perhaps that was Taylor’s intention,’ he reasoned. ‘To grass somebody up big time. Perhaps he had seen the light – a born-again type. Perhaps he was just a man who knew too much.’
‘We’re working on that,’ Jacquie said. ‘Pursuing, as we persist in saying, our enquiries. Nothing yet.’
There was a sudden cry over the baby alarm, followed by a gurgle as Nolan
Carpenter-Maxwell rediscovered his toes all over again and found them fascinating. Maxwell was on his feet.
‘No,’ she held his arm. ‘I’ll go.’
He smiled and patted her hand, kissing her on the nose. He understood. She needed to smell his neck again, to nuzzle into that beautiful fairies’ knitting hair and to watch his face light up as he saw her for the first time all over again. He understood.
‘You know, Donald,’ Jim Astley said. ‘It only seems the other day we were doing this very same thing.’
Donald grunted. He’d got his NVQ in swabbing down mortuary slabs, but he was, after several years of it, beginning to wonder wistfully what people meant when they talked of job satisfaction. He’d wanted to be an undertaker really, but his Careers Teacher had recoiled in disgust and few people talked to him after that without a sideways glance. Besides, these days they didn’t make black suits big enough.
‘Tell the nice man what we’ve found.’
The nice man was DCI Henry Hall, sitting behind Jim Astley in the corner of the morgue, a discreet distance from the mortal remains of Gerald Henderson. He wasn’t exactly squeamish, was Henry, but he didn’t have the gung-ho, viscera-and-all attitude of some of his colleagues, up to their elbows in somebody else’s body cavity.
‘We have a middle-aged Caucasian male,’ Donald said, consulting the clipboard and its bloodstained contents. ‘Certain signs of high blood pressure, cholesterol…’
‘Cut to the chase, Donald, dear boy.’ Astley switched off the light strapped to his forehead and gratefully pulled the contraption off. He sank down on a stool, going head-to-toe with his sciatica at the moment. Unfortunately, the sciatica was winning. ‘Mr Hall will be retiring in forty years or so.’
‘Mr Henderson was killed in a knife attack.’ The fat man flicked over the page. ‘Six cuts to the torso, the deepest of them twelve point five centimetres. Judging from the pattern, our man is right handed, pretty strong.’ He looked up at Hall. ‘And pretty annoyed.’
‘Crime passionelle?’ Hall asked.
Donald thought you found those in a box of Black Magic, but he didn’t want to commit himself.