The Case of the Fallen Hero (An Inspector David Graham Cozy Mystery Book 3)

by Alison Golden

  It was then that he heard it.

  For an experienced police officer, there is something absolutely compelling about a woman’s scream. This one was long, urgent, and panicked. Graham dashed at once in its direction knowing only one thing: something terrible had happened. When he came upon the source of the desperate, guttural cry, what he saw confirmed this finding and told him immediately that his plan for a relaxed Sunday was surely done for.

  A woman was kneeling on the stone walkway that ran beneath one of the taller of the castle’s battlements. As Graham approached, fairly sprinting out of the dark passageway and into the courtyard where she knelt, he could see she was cradling someone who was lying at a worryingly unnatural angle on the ground. From the size and shape of the body, he deduced that it was a man, and judging from the panicked wailing of the woman, kneeling by his head, Graham immediately feared the worst.

  “Police, ma’am,” he said, as he skidded to a halt by the body. “What happened?” The woman continued wailing, as though Graham were invisible, her hands under the stricken man’s head. “I’m trained in first aid,” Graham told her, following the received script. “Let me help him.”

  His condition, Graham could see, was extremely grave. Blood was rushing onto the stone from at least one serious head wound. Both ears were bleeding, which was never a good sign, and from the jagged position of his hips, Graham quickly diagnosed substantial fractures. “Did he fall?” Graham asked, but the woman stared at the sky and howled.

  Graham gently moved her hands aside – they were covered in blood – and reached for a pulse. Finding nothing, he leaned in to listen for breathing and felt not even the slightest whisper in his ear. “We need to get him to hospital immediately,” Graham told her, already certain in his own mind that medical help would prove futile. “Have you called for an ambulance?”

  Receiving no answer, Graham stood, finding his own shirt bloodied now, and reached for his phone to dial 999. “This is Detective Inspector Graham of Gorey Constabulary,” he told the operator. “I need an ambulance at Orgueil Castle immediately. A man appears to have fallen and has serious injuries.” He listened while the operator confirmed the details and promised that an ambulance would be with him shortly. Turning back to ask the woman, once more, whether the gravely injured man was known to her, he was astonished to see her fleeing down the stone path, out of the castle grounds, and toward the village. “Wait!” he shouted. “Attendez-vous!” he tried next, but the woman either heard nothing or ignored his pleas.

  “Well,” he said, still slightly out of breath. “Well. Bugger.” The man at his feet, now almost certainly a victim of some kind, remained resolutely inert. “What happened to you, eh?” A few early risers who, like Graham, had been strolling around the castle, were arriving now, attracted by the shouts. “Please stay back!” Graham ordered them. Then more quietly, almost as though the injured man might hear, “I don’t think there’s anything we can do. He’s gone.”

  One of the first on the scene, his face etched with horror and panic, was Stephen Jeffries. He grabbed Graham, who was keeping people away from the body, imploring them not to take photos. “You’re the police?” Jeffries asked, and then, stuttering over his own name, he explained who he was. “He was married… only yesterday,” Jeffries told the detective. “Only hours ago…” Jeffries could barely speak. “Beautiful ceremony.” Then it occurred to him. “Jesus… his wife! Did someone find her?”

  It didn’t take long to establish that the woman who had fled, wailing, into the village, was the grieving widow, Marie Ross. “I called after her, but she ignored me. Perhaps overcome with grief,” Graham speculated, his phone to his ear.

  “She ran?” Jeffries said, trying to piece together the scene. “Just ran off?”

  “You’d be surprised what a sudden shock can do to a person,” Graham told him. “I’ve seen people sprint off like an Olympic gold medalist seconds after getting the worst news of their lives.” Finally, his call went through. “Sergeant Harding?”

  A very sleepy voice confirmed what Graham had guessed; Janice was just waking up. “Boss?”

  “I’m afraid so. Sorry to disturb your Sunday morning. Can you get over to the castle, right away?”

  “Huh?” Harding managed.

  Graham explained for a few moments while Jeffries wrung his hands. Two waiters from last night’s wedding, who had volunteered to come in early to clean up, arrived to cover the body with a pristine, white tablecloth. It remained perfect for mere seconds before inevitably staining red.

  “I’m…” He heard a strange clatter and deduced Harding must have dropped the phone in her haste. “Bloody hell, boss…” Harding muttered. “I’m on my way.”

  “Harding?”

  “Eh? I mean, yes, boss?”

  “Get Tomlinson on the horn and make sure he’s up and about as well, would you? We’re going to need the full works. You’ll see for yourself how this looks, but if I’ve learned anything in this business, it’s not to judge a book by its cover. You know what I mean?”

  “I do, boss,” Harding answered, struggling into her uniform blouse. “I’ll call him next. Be there soon.”

  One of the saddest tasks relating to the death of a newly-deceased person, Graham found, was the necessity of establishing their identity. Beyond the bloodied remains now at his feet, he knew this young man had probably enjoyed a full life, was cherished by a circle of friends, and had a family who loved him. In this especially tragic case, he had a wife so new that the wedding guests had not yet dispersed following the festivities. He reached for and found the man’s wallet in his trouser pocket.

  “Mr. George Ross,” Graham read from the man’s local driver’s license. “Thirty years old.” Graham shook his head sadly. “Not nearly good enough, old chap.” The remainder of the cards were the usual assortment of debit and credit cards, memberships to a couple of organizations, and store loyalty cards. There was the ubiquitous photo of his beloved, barely recognizable as the distraught woman who had wailed so inconsolably before vanishing into Gorey. Graham found some cash, in the form of the – still to him – rather unfamiliar Jersey banknotes and a room key marked “Bridal Suite.”

  “Not a lot to go on there,” he admitted to himself. He set the license aside to await an evidence bag. He found himself repeating, “Thirty years old.” He imagined himself at that age, also newly married, a baby in the planning stages, documents drawn up for their first house, a future of togetherness and promise and possibility. “Poor bugger.”

  CHAPTER 2

  HARRY TRINGHAM CLUTCHED his very welcome – if slightly gritty and questionable – take-out coffee as though it were the Elixir of Life itself, and ambled up the final few steps to the castle’s visitors center. He was not used to early starts, especially on Sundays, and it showed.

  “A little the worse for wear?” Emily asked brightly. She herself was looking energetic and ready for adventure in hiking boots, jeans, a bright red blouse, and a colorful silk scarf.

  “You give musicians access to what is billed as an ‘open bar,’” Harry retorted, “and you expect them not to make liberal use of it?”

  Leo grinned sheepishly. He wasn’t exactly feeling a hundred percent either, having helped put away some of the “spare” champagne from the previous evening’s function with relish. “I tend to feel like one of those fourteenth-century troubadours,” he related, “accepting the scraps from the table as part-payment for my musical services.”

  Emily finished organizing their tickets at the visitors’ desk and pooled their contributions to pay the entry fee. “Here you go,” she said, distributing the tickets. “Now, children, remember to hold hands, take only photos, and make sure you don’t wander off without telling a teacher.”

  “Yes, Miss,” the others chorused, and then giggled as they always did. Having performed in a good number of Europe’s most fascinating cultural centers over the years, this was a cherished routine of theirs. Emily often thought that the
Spire Quartet suited ancient spaces, chapels, museums, old libraries, and the like, having begun their days as a student ensemble amid the medieval splendor of Oxford University. Although hailing from four different colleges, the quartet had formed an instant bond, become a fixture on the local wedding and event circuit, and even produced a couple of CDs just after graduating. Then, “work intervened,” as Harry put it, sending Emily and Marina to London, Harry to Cambridge, and Leo to the respected history department at the University of Warwick.

  “Lead the way, Mister Historian,” Marina told Leo.

  Leo immediately assumed his role and led them down a passageway into the bowels of the castle. He launched into his spiel with gusto. “Let me know if I get boring,” he added after a long explanation of medieval building techniques.

  “Sure will,” Harry muttered but then smiled. There was a genuine affection in the ensemble, which had survived the near-death experience of graduation from Oxford and their geographical dispersal, as well as more than one emotionally fraught “romantic complication,” as Emily called them. None of the four were yet married, and only Leo had been in a long-term relationship. Even that had faltered after his girlfriend, a scholar of Italian literature, had received an offer she couldn’t refuse from a university in Milan. In more ways than the four were comfortable to admit, they were already in a complex and rewarding relationship – with music, with each other, and with the euphoria of their very togetherness – perhaps sufficient in itself to ensure that none sought satisfaction elsewhere.

  As they proceeded down the narrowing tunnels of the castle’s well-lit interior, sounds of the surface receded entirely. “Three feet thick,” Leo told them, patting the cool stone of the passageway’s walls. “Designed to withstand years of siege.”

  “This morning, I feel as though I already have,” Harry moaned. His hangover, the group’s worst by some measure, was responding only sluggishly to the coffee and painkillers. “What is it about growing older that makes hangovers exponentially worse?”

  Marina had the answer, and she lectured Harry briskly on liver chemistry as they continued through the passageways. Leo bid them halt at an exhibit on the castle’s history as a prison. King slayers and traitors had been given accommodation here, some “as recently as” four hundred years ago, before the island’s jail was moved to a “newer” facility at St. Helier.

  “Jesus, imagine being stuck down here in the dark,” Emily wondered morbidly. “They’d have gone out of their minds.”

  Leo peered into the gloomy mock-up of a sixteenth century jail cell. “I don’t know. They were made of pretty stern stuff back then. It’s remarkable how spending a lifetime sitting on wooden benches or horseback toughens you up.”

  “How the hell would you know?” Harry sputtered. “You’re just another pampered toff like the rest of us. When was the last time you were on horseback?”

  Leo’s impulse was to bristle and complain, but he remembered to bear in mind Harry’s fragile state. “Good point,” he conceded, as the two women got a good laugh from the ham-fisted sparring of their men folk.

  Marina felt a little sorrier for Harry than she otherwise would. Their fling, only eighteen months ago, had turned out to be rather more complicated than she’d hoped. There had been some acrimony, but she still felt a lingering affection for him which surfaced more as care and concern than any romantic desire. Certainly, their tryst – known to the others as was their policy – had not been the quartet-shattering cataclysm Leo had predicted. Besides, he’d made no such prophecy of doom, Marina noted, when he had asked her out a while earlier. Her refusal had sent Leo scuttling under a rock, and the quartet hadn’t met for nearly four months, an unusually long hiatus.

  “This was the magazine,” Leo announced, gesturing to a vaulted space in the deepest part of the castle. The air was decidedly cool down here, a testament to their depth and the insulation provided by many feet of thick, ancient stone. “They stored gunpowder and other weapons here, for use in sieges or potential attacks against the French mainland.”

  “That’s more like it!” Harry growled. “About time we got to the part about besting the horrid French.”

  “Those same horrid French who gave us a spectacularly successful recording contract?” Emily reminded him, hands on hips.

  “Even though we were just out of Uni and hadn’t the foggiest clue what on earth we were doing?” Marina added. The French label, specializing in string repertoire and young quartets, had given them a tremendous boost and the opportunity to record some much-loved treasures.

  “The very same,” Harry continued. “Enemies of our blood, they are.” He stood tall, like a Beefeater at the Tower of London, his dwindling coffee aloft in salute, bringing a good laugh from the others.

  “That’s the thing about you, Harry,” Leo commented. “You know full well that you make absolutely no sense, and you just don’t care.”

  “Nope,” he replied. “I’ve got Union Jack underpants on. That’s how I feel about the French.”

  Shaking their heads in unison, Emily and Marina moved on to the next exhibit, about one traitor who was locked up in the dungeons for a dozen years, despite a marked paucity of evidence against him. “Well, at least he wasn’t sentenced to death,” Emily observed.

  Marina peered into the tiny cell and imagined for an uncomfortable second the life of someone incarcerated there year after year. “I don’t know which I’d prefer,” she admitted. “Might be better to get it over with quickly. Being stuck down here,” she said, pausing to shiver slightly at the prospect, “would be my worst nightmare.”

  CHAPTER 3

  THE AMBULANCE CREW carried out their routine checks for signs of life. Finding none, they decided that given the extent of the poor man’s injuries and the twenty-five minutes – at least, Graham estimated – since the discovery of the body, that no attempt would be made to revive him. “We’ll only complicate things for the autopsy,” the paramedic explained. “Tomlinson on his way, is he?”

  The elderly pathologist arrived minutes later, partly winded after the long walk from the visitors’ entrance. “Inspector,” he wheezed in greeting, loosening the top button of his shirt. Then he saw the body, covered in stained white linen, with the small crowd of wedding guests and staff, curious and horrified by turns, keeping a respectful distance. “And I’d hoped you were joking. That it might have been an exercise or something.”

  “Afraid not, Marcus. Found him myself. The wife was here, kneeling over him, but she did a runner. I’ve got Barnwell and Roach looking for her.”

  “Ah, the dynamic duo?” Tomlinson asked. “We need have no fear, then,” he quipped. Graham let him have his little joke and escorted him to the body.

  Tomlinson went through his initial routine, checking the state of the victim’s pupils, taking notes on the skin tone and assessing the position of the body as well as its location. “Well, we can’t rule out anything at this stage,” Tomlinson began in his all-too-familiar way, “but these injuries are entirely consistent with a fall from a great height. Beyond that, I’ll need to get in there and take a look.”

  Tomlinson’s idiosyncratic style (Graham thought of the man as a little overly-familiar, even cavalier at times, if he were entirely honest) was merely a result, the detective knew, of his many decades of experience. Tomlinson was beyond shock and grief. He’d seen death in as many guises as anyone, whether arrived at through accident or misadventure, despair and suicide, or through violence.

  Tomlinson made arrangements with the ambulance crew to have the body transported to the local hospital where he would carry out his post mortem in due course. “What’s your gut telling you, Marcus?” Graham asked.

  “I don’t believe in speculating about something as serious as this,” Tomlinson replied, a little haughtily. “But off the record, I wouldn’t be surprised if something fishy went on here.” He polished his glasses with his handkerchief and seemed unwilling to elaborate.

  “Oh?” Graham
prompted, ever hopeful that the elderly man might dispense more of his hard-earned wisdom.

  “Well… How many men choose to end it all the day after getting married?” Tomlinson wondered aloud. “Most chaps wait eight or ten years.” When Graham didn’t respond to his trademark black humor, he continued. “And most suicides have empty pockets. Did you know that?”

  “I think I did,” Graham replied.

  “This chap brought his driver’s license with him. Very unusual in cases where there’s no foul play.”

  They glanced up together at the looming battlements. “Hell of a fall,” Graham commented. “He’d have needed to be absolutely resolved. You can imagine someone with suicidal thoughts getting all the way up there, distracted by this amazing view of the Channel, and then looking over the edge and thinking…”

  “‘Sod this, I’m going to go slit my wrists instead,’” Tomlinson said. “It takes real guts to throw yourself from a high place.”

  Graham rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I do wish the wife hadn’t done a runner.”

  “Now why would she do a thing like that?” Tomlinson asked. It was a rhetorical question.

  Graham walked the pathologist to the two waiting medics who were ready to depart with the man’s body. “Thanks, Marcus. Stay in touch, okay?”

  “I have a feeling, old boy, that I’m going to have to.”

  Graham took a seat in the castle’s reception area, just a row of chairs beneath the huge arch of the main gate and made a point of taking some deep breaths. Short of a cup of tea, something that he’d been without for far too long, a quiet moment to calm the senses and oxygenate the lungs was a surefire method of invigorating his deductive abilities. Frustratingly, though, his interviews with the staff and guests had so far revealed little more than he already knew. No one had seen a thing. Few were even awake at such an early hour, certainly not after the excesses of the evening before. The two witnesses who had come forward claimed to have heard the scream and only then come running.