by Janet Neel
A Timely Death
The 5th John McLeish/Francesca Wilson mystery
“Intriguing and excellent in every respect.
Her best novel yet.”- T. J. Binyon.
William Price is a dodgy businessman involved in over-selling unfinished time-share properties in Spain and not above embezzling from his own children’s inheritance. Price is already under investigation by the Fraud Squad but when he is discovered dead – by a Member of Parliament no less – as a result of what appears to be a bizarre sexual experiment, his activities become a matter of interest to Detective Chief Superintendent John McLeish. Virtually everyone involved in the firm of Price Fleming seems to have a good reason to see Price dead, not to mention his immediate family – a family beset by problems involving money (or the lack of it), gambling, drugs and a history of domestic violence.
JANET NEEL is the maiden name of Baroness Cohen of Pimlico. She read Law at Newnham College Cambridge and qualified as a solicitor in 1965. She worked in the USA designing war games and in Britain as a civil servant in the Department of Trade and Industry; then moved into a career in merchant banking and also founded and financed two successful London restaurants. She was appointed to the House of Lords in 2000 and sits as a Labour peer with a particular interest in trade, industry, taxation and communications. Married with three children, Baroness Cohen lives in Cambridge and is Chairman of the Cambridge Arts Theatre. Her first crime novel as Janet Neel, Death’s Bright Angel, won the Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey Award in 1988 but she has also written novels as Janet Cohen.
The Ostara Crime imprint aims to collect and republish quality crime writing for new readers. The Series Editor is Mike Ripley, an award-winning crime writer who was also the crime fiction critic for the Daily Telegraph and then the Birmingham Post, reviewing almost 1,000 crime novels in 18 years. He now writes the monthly ‘Getting away With Murder’ column for Shots Magazine (www.shotsmag.co.uk), the UK’s leading website for fans of crime writing and has been the editor of Ostara’s Top Notch Thrillers imprint since its launch in 2009.
Also by Janet Neel:
Death’s Bright Angel
Death On Site
Death of a Partner
Death Among the Dons
To Die For
O Gentle Death
Other Ostara Crime Titles
Christine Green Deadly Errand
Christine Green Deadly Admirer
Christine Green Deadly Practice
Denise Danks The Pizza House Crash
Denise Danks Better Off Dead
Denise Danks Frame Grabber
Lesley Grant-Adamson Patterns in the Dust
Lesley Grant-Adamson Guilty Knowledge
Lesley Grant-Adamson Wild Justice
David Serafin Saturday of Glory
David Serafin The Body in Cadiz Bay
David Serafin The Angel of Torremolinos
James Melville The Wages of Zen
James Melville The Chrysanthemum Chain
James Melville A Sort of Samurai
James Mitchell Sometimes You Could Die
James Mitchell Dying Day
James Mitchell Dead Ernest
A TIMELY DEATH
* * *
JANET NEEL
Ostara Publishing
First published 1996
Copyright © 1996 Janet Neel
Ostara Publishing Edition 2015
The right of Janet Neel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN 9781909619289
CIP reference is available from the British Library
Printed and Bound in the United Kingdom
Ostara Publishing
13 King Coel Road
Lexden
Colchester CO3 9AG
www.ostarapublishing.co.uk
For my mother and loyal supporter
Mary Neel
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Epilogue
1
Thursday, 31 March
Annabelle Brewster sat on a small, uncomfortable high-backed chair and hated everything around her. The high-ceilinged room which must once have been elegant, was now dishevelled and dirty, with ill-drawn children’s pictures thumb-tacked up at random, yellow, scarred paint and raw plaster pockmarked with holes. A square of carpet, the design so obscured by dirt and age as to be unintelligible, lay unevenly across dusty, greying floorboards. The room was crowded with humanity and smelled, faintly but distinctly, of feet. Opposite her a small Indian woman in a sari was failing to control three racketing small boys in jeans and anoraks; next to her a large woman in her thirties, feet in slippers, hair hanging lankly, was smoking non-stop and talking at the same time to a patient, weary Jamaican woman.
Annabelle stared straight ahead, reminding herself that if she walked out of this awful place she had nowhere else to go. She straightened her back against the inadequate, creaking chair. The door opened, for the fifth time since she had arrived, revealing a tiny office, occupied by a small, rickety desk, and a woman of the sort she resented: the Young Superwoman type. This was a prime example of the genus: tall and slim in an expensive yellow jacket, good shoes, short, efficient, dark hair, neat gold ear-rings and a pricey black leather briefcase, casually resting on the floor beside her. She looked like the headmistress of Annabelle’s expensive boarding-school and she was using the same casual competence to deal with the variety of demands being made of her.
By the time Annabelle was called to the tiny office she was in an incoherent rage with her surroundings and everything about her situation. She got up stiffly and stalked across the room, trying to rise above the bruise which was slowly closing her right eye, the nagging pain in her right shoulder and the chilly sensation of having nothing on her feet but an old down-at-heel pair of court shoes half a size too small for her.
‘You’re Annabelle?’ Superwoman had risen to greet her; as she had feared the woman topped her by a couple of inches and smelt, prosperously, of lily of the valley. ‘You’ve just arrived?’
‘I’ve been here an hour and a half.’
‘I’m sorry about that. I’m new, so I’m slow.’
She had a ladder in her tights and the leather heels of her smart shoes were scratched, Annabelle noticed, in a moment of vicious pleasure. The small room was as scruffy and as decorated with pictures by untalented infants as the big room, but a gas fire flared and popped on the wall, and it was warm.
‘May I take your coat?’
‘I’ll keep it on.’ Annabelle knew she was sounding churlish and did not care. Superwoman poured her a cup of coffee without asking if she wanted it and she decided to take it rather than throw it down the woman’s good jacket.
‘Oh dear, I’m afraid you need to see a doctor and I should have done that first. That bump on your head needs looking at.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
‘Perhaps later.’
‘It doesn’t anyway.’ She put the coffee cup to her lips, drawn by the smell, and tasted it cautiously. It was thick with sugar, which she normally detested, but she gulped it down and waited, dumb with anger.
‘Would you like another coffee? No? My name’s Francesca. I’m the duty officer tonight. You need a bed for the night.’ It was a statement not a question and Annabelle nodded reluctantly. ‘And a bath, and some night clothes?’
‘Yes.’ It was all she could manage without weeping or screaming.
‘There’s a small single room as an emergency room, apparently. I mean for people who … well … who …’
‘Come in off the street.’
‘Indeed. Yes.’ Superwoman consulted a piece of paper. ‘Is there someone we can ring, or that you would like to ring?’
‘If there was I wouldn’t be here.’
‘No. Quite. Sorry.’
Annabelle, relaxed by seeing that this Francesca was satisfactorily rattled, considered her covertly. Tired and pale with dark circles under the blue eyes, and younger than she had seemed at first too, perhaps only in her early thirties.
‘The thing is it’s my first night,’ Francesca was saying anxiously. ‘I’m substituting for a much more experienced person – well, for my Mum, actually. I knew what to do with the people who are already here but I don’t seem to have done the right things in the right order for you. Look, shall we just get you to bed and you can explain to someone competent in the morning, or would you like to talk to me and I’ll write it down and leave it for the next day’s duty officer?’
Annabelle was sufficiently disarmed by this anxious chatter to put her cup out for a refill, and the other woman smiled in relief.
‘Mum’s a regular, you see. She’s been here ever since this refuge opened. But she’s got flu and they’re short-handed, so I’m doing two of her shifts this week. It turned out to be me or no one.’
‘You’re a social worker?’
‘No. Mum is. I work for a women’s college.’ She held up the coffee jug enquiringly. ‘Yes? What do you do, Annabelle? Blast. Yes, Margaret?’
The large woman who had been in the waiting-room put her head round the door, lank hair dull under the lighting. ‘I’m sorry, miss, but de kids in Room J, dere all crying and dey’ve all got spots.’
‘What sort of spots?’ Francesca put her coffee cup down unevenly.
‘Here, Patrick.’ She produced from behind her back a flushed and weeping small boy, aged about six, dressed in faded pyjamas made for an older child. ‘Show de lady.’
Annabelle watched as Francesca squatted beside the child Patrick, laddering her tights further, coaxing him to show her the spots then, there’s a good lad. Nice with him but useless. She watched as long as she could bear it, then when Patrick started to weep again, got to her feet wincing as the too-small shoes caught the blister they had rubbed. She scooped the child up and sat him on the desk under the only half-way decent light in the room and tilted his head to look as his neck, then felt his forehead. ‘Do you have a headache, Patrick?’ she asked, as one grown-up to another, and the child stopped grizzling to consider the point.
‘A little.’
‘Where? Which part of the head?’ She flicked his pyjama top up while he was giving the question his best attention and received with due gravity the answer that it was sort of everywhere, miss.
‘I want to look at your throat now, please.’ She reached round for her coffee spoon and reversed it, holding his tongue down with the shaft. She straightened up, feeling the pain in her ribs, and met Superwoman’s interested and respectful regard. ‘Patrick has measles, I’m afraid.’
The lank-haired Margaret clasped the child to her so that he started crying again. ‘Oh, never say dat, miss. Dey’ll all have it.’
‘I suppose there can be no doubt, Annabelle?’
‘No. The spots inside the mouth are definitive for diagnosis.’ Francesca rose from the floor, removed the elegant jacket and dispatched Margaret and Patrick back to their room with a promise of attendance and extra blankets.
‘Well, what a good thing you were here,’ she said briskly, and checked, coffee pot in hand. ‘That really does come under the heading of things which might have been better put, doesn’t it? I am sorry, for the third time tonight. Just before I work out what to do about measles – we have over twenty children under this inadequate and leaking roof tonight – let me install you in a bedroom.’
‘It’s these bloody shoes,’ Annabelle heard herself say. ‘If I could get something different on my feet, I’d give you a hand.’
‘We have a clothing cupboard. It was the second thing they showed me.’
By two in the morning Annabelle was eating egg and bacon in the huge kitchen, cooked by Francesca on one of the five gas stoves arranged in a row along one wall. She pushed her plate away and reached for her mug of tea, narrowly avoiding slopping it over the navy tracksuit, a size too large, somewhat out of shape, and bearing the insignia of a local sports club, in which she was now dressed. Her feet were wreathed in two layers of thick cotton socks and some aged trainers. Her head still ached, but Francesca had given her three Anadins with the tracksuit and the pain had receded.
‘I didn’t ask. Have you had measles, Francesca?’
‘Badly, when I was a child, as I had everything. My own little William has not yet had the injection though.’ Francesca was drinking her tea almost solid with sugar, living on borrowed energy, hands dirty, and hair flattened, but retaining her air of competence and command. Of the twenty-three children and sixteen adult women crammed into every corner of the Acton Refuge that night, five children definitely had measles and a further ten had ominous symptoms. Only five of the total child population had been vaccinated so the rest would probably suffer the full rigours of the disease. This was bad enough but, as Annabelle had immediately seen, the worse problem might lie with the adult female population. All the women were here because they had fled, after unbelievably many years of serious ill-treatment at the hands of their men. All, by definition, had lost self-respect, all had neglected themselves and their physical health, and seven of them had lived their childhood abroad, in countries where they had not been exposed to measles. Adult measles was rare in the normal UK population, but serious at any time; in this suffering, uprooted, crowded community it could be devastating.
‘Any of the women who get it will have to go to hospital,’ Francesca said wearily. ‘But it’s January. We aren’t going to be very welcome in the modern NHS. Still, come the dawn I’ll get on to the practice that looks after this place. They’re good, but I was under instructions – that was the first thing they told me even before the clothing cupboard – not to call them out unless we had to. They always come at night if someone comes in wounded, and we want to keep it that way. With you here, I was sure we could manage until surgery hours, or that you would tell me if we couldn’t.’ She poured Annabelle another cup of tea which she gulped thirstily along with the thumping compliment so casually implied.
She sat, quiet, listening to the noises of the house and reflecting on the last few hours, the feverish children, the women in every corner in the house, and the sheer ugly untidiness of the place, with its dirty battered paint, and faded curtains that did not quite fit. The room in which they sat was a case in point; five clean but ancient gas stoves, linoleum, the colour faded beyond recognition, chipped cupboards, piles of mismatched plates and rickety uneven chairs. She took mental refuge in the bright, sparsely furnished bedroom which she and Antony had shared, with the cool, narrow-striped blue duvet cover, and the blue towels in the white and silver bathroom.
‘So what brought you here, Annabelle?’
That was what annoyed her so much about Superwomen, she thought, returning reluctantly to the acid yellow walls and chipped plastic table tops of the present reality, they didn’t go with the flow, they pushed on, destroying the mood and other people’s escapist fantasies. She cast round for a rebuff, but Francesca was apparently concentrating on getting five spoonfuls of sugar into a small mug of tea. Well, she could do that too, so she cut a small slice of bread and proceeded very slowly to wipe up the last morsel of egg from her plate.
‘Where did you train?’ Francesca asked, as if she had never started on the previous question.
‘St Mary’s. After Bristol, that was.’
‘Are you still there?’
‘No. I’m half-way through t
he GP training. I wanted at first to be a consultant, but …’ She hesitated. ‘The hours were too long and Antony – the person I live with – well … it was too difficult.’ She gripped the table, daring Francesca to ask why or what was difficult.
‘What sort of consultant did you want to be?’
‘Oh, a paediatrician. A children’s specialist.’
‘Why? I mean, do you like children?’
‘Not particularly.’ She let go of the table in sheer surprise. ‘I’ve never quite said that to myself. But it’s not necessary. You can be rather bored by children and still be a good specialist.’
‘Indeed. I don’t myself like children in the sense that people mean, but I don’t think I’m a bad mother. So do you regret giving up?’
Annabelle let herself think, as she had not for over a year, of the ward at St Mary’s, and the way that the chronically ill children looked at you, carefully, weighing you up, against their experience of smiling adults bent on carrying out yet another incomprehensible and painful procedure. And when you actually managed to deal with the disease or the defect, how the children forgot instantly that they had ever been ill, and rushed off to their families with joy untouched by any adult perception that the future might hold the same again. She found she could not answer and looked down, feeling tears at the back of her eyes and in her swelling throat.
‘Tell me about Antony.’
Still overwhelmed by the realisation of what she had given up, so casually, she talked as if she was by herself, barely noticing Francesca getting up to light one of the ovens so as to get warmth into the kitchen, chilling now in the dead cold before dawn. ‘Antony’s a doctor too. He was just qualified when I met him. I was in my second year at Bristol and he came down to recruit for the medical school. The university department’s got a good name. He’s terribly good-looking, and he was so nice; everyone – well, all the girls – wanted to go to St Mary’s. Six of us went up to see it and at the end of the tour Antony got me by myself and asked me out.’ She stopped to remember that heart-stopping moment. All through the afternoon of visits to clinics and pep talks with harried consultants she had reminded herself that Antony was being nice to everyone in the group, unwilling to let herself hope that such a dazzler was attracted specifically to her. She thought herself not plain exactly, but nondescript; medium-sized, light brown curly hair, ordinary round face. And she had no opinion of her ability to attract wonderful men like Antony. Her admirers had been confined to serious young men typically coming from Yorkshire like herself, having to work hard to hold their place in the department and equally hard to manage on their grants. Antony had seemed like a golden star from another world with his aura of easy success and casual riches and, of course, the looks that drew all eyes.