Chapter - 32.
The walk back to the hotel was quiet. There was no light hearted conversation or venting of pent-up frustration or even disappointment at David. They just walked, fixated on the journey. When they reached the hotel, Lori broke the silence only to suggest that tonight she’d opt for room service, forgoing the nightly dinner and drinks ritual. The suggestion was accepted by Devlin as a great idea, but Ikel protested that he’d adhere to his routine regardless of whether or not he had company.
Just as Lori turned her back for the stairs, Devlin remembered the note that David asked him to deliver. He hadn’t forgotten his errand, at least initially, and not surprisingly it had felt inappropriate to raise the matter after watching David’s first foray into video pornography. “Wait!” he called after her. “David asked me to give you this.”
On receipt of the message, Lori read it and thought for a moment. “Did you read this?” she asked, holding up the note.
“No. Why?”
“When did he give it to you? What state was he in?”
“He was getting pissed. I wanted to talk to him, but by the time I got to his room he was already draining his bar. He cut short our chat and told me to deliver the note.”
Lori checked her watch and did a little mental arithmetic. “So, what, you last saw him about an hour or so ago?”
“Thereabouts. Maybe a little more. What’s the problem?”
“Fuck!” Lori exclaimed. “We need to get to him now!” She removed her low heeled court shoes and started to run for the lifts. Devlin followed, inspired by the urgency that warranted her use of an expletive.
The speed of the lifts had not been an issue before, but now Lori was impatiently shouting in the vain hope that it might make them go faster. “Come on!” She watched the above door display indicating the current floor as it progressed slowly to their floor.
Devlin remained distant from Lori’s urgency for a while, but the entry of other hotel guests to the lift slowed the lift even more and threatened to force her over the edge. He considered it high time to find out what was happening, as much to appease his curiosity as to prevent Lori from openly abusing the new lift occupants for their role in slowing the lift. “What was on the note?”
Lori looked at Devlin, suddenly appreciating that he was oblivious to what was so clear to her. “All the note said was that ‘Derrell had it right’. Of course, that means nothing to you, but Derrell was a reader like us. He left before even David joined LastGasp’.” Lori paused to allow the other lift passengers to alight at their floor. As soon as she and Devlin were alone again she continued. “I never knew him, but I remember the day he died. I’d not long joined, and one day Glen was emotional. You’ve known Glen for a little while now, so you can appreciate how out of character that was. David and I asked him what the matter was, and he told us.”
“Told you what?”
“That Derrell was dead and that he was a reader, but more than just any reader, apparently, his words. Glen also told us that Derrell had committed suicide. And that’s what I’m worried about.” On cue, the lift doors began to open and Lori forced them open still further and faster, desperate to resume her race to check on David.
David was not answering his door or his phone and Lori’s concern was obvious. She rang the hotel manager, Morris, requesting that he arrange for the room to be unlocked. She was sparing with the details, but keen to impress him with the urgency.
Morris arrived almost immediately with an aide and tried to open David’s door with a master-key, but failed on account of the internal latch. This at least seemed to confirm that David was in his room, but did little to quell Lori’s concern. Morris resigned himself to the necessity to break in the door, and nodded his approval to his offsider who braced himself, and shoulder charged the door.
Chapter - 33.
As a child, Devlin had visited a working whaling station in the days before public pressure or a change in economics saw it become a whaling museum cum tourist attraction. He remembered the sights and smells of that experience vividly. He remembered the smell of the blubber being rendered, and the resultant stench that seemed to remain with them long after leaving the site and even persisted after several changes of clothes. He also remembered the sight of the butchery, and the lifeless masses of the queued whales awaiting their turn for processing. But most of all, Devlin remembered the blood. Pooled blood on the ground, blood stained equipment, and rivers of blood draining away into the adjacent ocean.
As soon as Devlin entered David’s room, his first thoughts were childhood memories of the whaling station.
Devlin was no expert, but first impressions suggested that David had committed suicide. Not content to just slash his wrists and sit in a nice warm bath, David appeared to have also hung himself naked from the ceiling fan. At the speed he was spinning, it was difficult to identify the exact source of his bleeding. Perhaps there was more than one source, Devlin couldn’t rightly tell. The fact that the fan was spinning on a fast cycle while David bled out had meant that centrifugal force had played a pivotal role in spreading his fluids widely. A substantial proportion of the flooring, furniture and much of the walls were splattered liberally. Morris would need to fund substantially more than just a new door frame.
Devlin didn’t bother entering the room as there was clearly nothing that could be done. He simply closed the door behind Morris and his assistant and started to comfort Lori.
Chapter - 34.
As ever, Detective Reymond hadn’t waited to be formally assigned to the suicide call. In truth, he wasn’t in the mood, but he knew there was little point in denying the inevitable. Suicides were ‘dead’ jobs as far as any police were concerned, with no upside. There was no chance of a happy ending, no positive interaction with people, and nothing that might make a career. As such, anyone with an interest in professional advancement would always avoid anything resembling a suicide.
Reymond had long since lost interest in the pursuit of greatness, and by pure virtue of his age, was beyond his prime and he knew it. Old or not, he’d found a comfortable niche which had allowed him to remain with the only job he’d known, short of parenting, long beyond what would be considered typical. The deal was simple; he’d pick up the slack that detracted from the work of ‘real’ Police officers, and in return he’d be able to continue in his role for so long as he was able, legally and physically. This left him all of the un-glamorous jobs but not the mundane administration which would continue to be done by a civilian, proving that he was still off the bottom peg in the office hierarchy. Theoretically this meant a variety of work, but seasonally, particularly at Christmas, he was almost full time dealing with suicides. The rest of the time he ‘wasted’ at the hospitals and a miscellany of other tasks, none of them prestigious, none of them career building, but all of them necessary from the perspective of the mandate of the Police force in general.
Reymond was in familiar territory when he paced across the parquet flooring of the hotel foyer. He’d been there before, though the details of his past visit were somewhat blurred with those of what amounted to hundreds of similar cases and surrounds. If this was another suicide, as the hotel manager who’d called had insisted, then it would not be the first where a poor soul had decided to take his own life in the relatively modest surrounds of a mid-range hotel. Nor was it likely to be the last. He met the hotel manager who escorted him to the incident location.
“Did you make the discovery?” Reymond asked.
“Yes. With my assistant and another two hotel guests. They are both workmates of the … deceased. Is ‘deceased’ the right word?”
“If he is, then deceased is fine,” Reymond laboured a smile. He appreciated that this was invariably not a pleasant experience, despite its almost banality to him, but it was important to keep the dialog open. “I’ll need to meet with them later, of course. No real rush.”
“Of course.” The hotel manager opened the door to David Yeardley’s floor from
the stairwell and drew Detective Reymond’s attention to the only room in the corridor with a uniformed staff member loitering at the door.
“I cut him down from the fan and checked for a pulse. To do this I had to turn off the fan at the wall and I used the sharpest knife that was at hand. It was most likely the same blade that he’d used. Other than that, I’ve done nothing else except post my assistant at the door to keep other guests away.”
“Thanks Morris. You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
“Yes, some time ago,” Morris sighed. “It’s one of the joys of the hospitality industry. There was another incident here some months back, but I was at head-office, and so the police would have spoken to the duty manager.”
“Security?” Reymond nodded and raised his eyebrow towards the domed security camera mounted unobtrusively on the ceiling as he caught his breath after the near sprint up the stairs. He fought the thought of being too old to take stairs when there were invariably perfectly operational lifts available for use. If he was truly too old to take the stairs, then surely he was too old to be on the job. “Video?”
“Generally yes, but this floor is for less transient, longer term guests. So we afford them a little more privacy,” Morris answered the question in a matter-of-fact fashion. “In any case, the only door to the room was secured from the inside. You’ll see that I had to get Nigel here to bust the door in.”
A distant bell alerted them to the arrival of the lift at the floor. The doors opened and a pair of paramedics exited the lift for the corridor with their gurney. They both smiled and nodded their recognition of Reymond, and one grunted the room number.
“You guys took your time,” said Reymond.
“You done?” the paramedic dragging the gurney asked.
“Not yet. I haven’t even been in to see the scene.”
“Then what does it matter that we took our time,” the paramedic replied smugly. “Based on the call, I didn’t figure he was going to need immediate care, so we allowed ourselves to be distracted by more pressing, and living, patients.”
“Touché!” Reymond smiled. “You guys go and have a smoke, and I’ll send for you in a bit. On that point, Morris, your offsider can go too, but I’d like for you to wait a while. Just give me a moment on my own.”
Reymond watched the others leave via the lift as he started to fit gloves from his pocket. He pushed the ajar door open wide enough for him to enter, and started to take stock of the room.
Had his eyes been closed on entering the room, Reymond would have felt his senses heighten in sensitivity based solely on the pervasive smell of blood. Nothing smells like it, not even other bodily fluids, and in this room, there was a smell, not just a scent, that indicated a sizeable volume of it. Angie had that right. Eyes open, the room amounted to a frightening sight, reminiscent of a farcical b-grade horror flick. Blood covered what looked to be the whole room, almost floor to ceiling. There was a single body, a man, lying impossibly comfortably on the blood sodden sofa.
Detective Reymond checked the door and its damaged frame, confirming what he’d been told about it having been forced open. He stepped forward carefully towards the body. There was no way to avoid interfering with the crime scene, but he did need to minimise contaminating the site if at all possible. He felt the squelch under his shoe, and then the residual stickiness of the congealing blood with each step. Up close to the body, it was even more obvious that the man was dead. A film of dried blood over much of the glass window wall tended to give everything a magenta hue, but even so, the man had a distinctly lifeless colour about him. Reymond checked for a pulse as a matter of routine, but he was realistic about his expectations, particularly when at first touch it was obvious that the body was at room temperature.
Primary formalities over, Reymond set about his immediate secondary purpose, confirming the cause of death. More importantly, he needed to confirm that it was indeed suicide. He inspected the wounds, which all appeared to be self-inflicted by a right handed individual, but the wounds would have been far from painless, particularly as they were being inflicted. The incisions had been made by a sharp, but far from surgical blade and it was apparent that it had taken quite a lot of effort, in much the same way as a standard cutlery knife would struggle with a gristled piece of meat. If the man did die at his own hand, it proved only that he was committed. He’d need some kind of pain relief too, but judging by the plentiful array of empty bottles of wine and spirits spread on the adjacent coffee table, Reymond figured that alcohol had sufficed.
Morris said he’d cut the man down from the fan, but Reymond was interested in what this meant in terms of the chronology of the man’s death. He scanned the room after looking at what remained of the haphazard noose around the man’s neck; fashioned simply as a long loop out of a bed-sheet. Judging by the smear of blood on the fan switch on the wall, Reymond theorised that the last few steps that the deceased had taken were to turn on the fan after cutting himself. He’d then slung the sheet over the fan and waited for the slack to be reeled in, lifting him from the ground and spinning him around until being discovered. There was no significant damage to the man’s throat or neck and it appeared to him that the noose had little to do with the man’s death, other than to expedite the bleeding.
Reymond was satisfied in as much that it was in fact suicide. He removed a camera from his pocket and started taking photographs of everything. He called the paramedics, inviting them to do their job and left the room.
Chapter - 35.
Devlin was keen to provide some support for Lori, though he knew the feeling was mutual. He was getting the support that he himself needed by just being among friends. Ikel had joined them in the bar which seemed the only appropriate place to be. They sat, quiet on the main, but periodically breaking into casual, reminiscent banter about David. “Remember when ….” With each outbreak of talking, the mood would lighten temporarily and smiles would appear from nowhere, only to retreat with the greyness of silence.
Not surprisingly, the collective recollection, spoken at least, was overwhelmingly positive about David. Just as eulogies tend to focus on the good in someone, there was no talk about what everyone knew. Devlin was tempted to ground the conversation and add a little sobering honesty about what he thought about David. He could have said that David was difficult to get on with, bordering on obnoxious, self-righteous in the extreme, and as it turned out, was probably a closet sex addict. Devlin decided that now was not the time or the place and it would serve no purpose other than to distance himself from the others. He opted to keep his malevolent thoughts to himself.
It was early evening when they were joined in their corner in the bar adjacent to the restaurant. They had the perfect vantage point to see each and every person entering the area, and it was obvious that the newcomer was making a direct route to join them. An old guy in a cheap suit, coming towards them with a purpose could only have been Police.
“My name is Detective Alan Reymond, and I’d like to talk about David Yeardley,” the newcomer announced. “I’m assuming that at least two of you are Ms Hinkley and Mr Bennett.”
Ikel rounded out the Detective’s information. “I’m Michael Donovan. I work, or worked, with David. But I was in my room when he was found.”
“That’s fine. I’d just like to talk to you all for a while.” Reymond made himself comfortable, sitting in one of the deep armchairs around a central drinks table. He ordered a soft drink from the waitress and casually looked over the others as he waited for the drink to arrive. “Can each of you please start with your name, and then tell me anything that you think that I need to know.”
Lori was the least composed of the three, so she paused expecting either Ikel or Devlin to start briefing the Detective.
“I’m Devlin Bennett. I live just down the corridor from David, and I worked with him, until today.” He thought about continuing, but once more he resisted any inclination to oversupply information. He allowed himself a moment to have
a drink and wait for the Detective to steer the passage of disclosure.
“Where do you work?”
“We’re all employees of Independent Media Analysis,” Lori answered on behalf of Devlin, finding her voice. “We’re media analysts. We live down the corridor too.” She pointed her finger erratically, alternating between Ikel, Devlin and herself.
“You worked with David until today. What happened?” Reymond continued questioning Devlin directly after an acknowledging nod to Lori.
“He left,” Devlin answered succinctly, glancing briefly at Lori for her concurrence. “An internal matter, or perhaps a personal matter. It doesn’t matter which.”
“It might,” Reymond encouraged subtly.
“He broke a well understood, internal company directive. As much as any of us know, either he was asked to leave or left of his own choosing when confronted on the matter. In any case, he left.”
“When was this?”
“Earlier this afternoon. I left work a while after. We work in a small office, and having someone leave left a bit of a cloud in the air. I figured that I’d go and clear my head. I came back here and then I went to speak to David.”
“Why?”
“Why not? He was a workmate who just upped and decided to leave. I’ve only just joined the company and so I was interested. He didn’t say much, and he was hitting the wine way too hard, and early, for me. He gave me a note to give to Lori here, and then I left.”
“What time was this?”
“Mid-afternoon I guess. I didn’t look at my watch. I just made a bee-line for the office. Our boss filled us in, of sorts, as to why David left and then he sent us all home for the day.”
“So when did you make the discovery?”
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