A Spider on the Stairs

by Cassandra Chan

  “That would be very good of you, lad,” said MacDonald. “Somersby, you’ll have to hold off till Superintendent Brumby gets here.”

  “Really, Freddie,” said Somersby, “it’s getting on for two A.M. You could at least hazard a guess as to how likely it is this Brumby will want my services.”

  Gibbons had turned aside to make his phone call, and Bethancourt found himself suddenly very much in the way. He edged away from the burgeoning argument between MacDonald and the doctor, and, not wanting to eavesdrop on Gibbons’s conversation, retreated to the doorway, there to observe the scene more discreetly and wonder what it was all about. After all, how many coincidences could one case have?

  Gibbons rang off and paced over to the body, kneeling to inspect the dead man more carefully. Bethancourt shuddered: though not as gruesome as he had feared, he had no desire for a closer view. Gibbons showed no such delicacy, however, pulling a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and slipping them on before reaching out to lift the paisley vest away from the torso.

  “Have you got anything there, Sergeant?” asked MacDonald, clearly looking for an excuse to get away from his dispute with Somersby.

  “I’m off home,” announced the doctor to MacDonald’s back. “Young Stephens here can get the body back to the morgue once Scotland Yard’s had their say.”

  MacDonald sighed. “Fine, fine, Neil,” he said. “I’ll ring you in the morning. What did you say, Sergeant?”

  Gibbons had not, in fact, said anything, but Somersby let his prey go, grumbling under his breath as he turned to his assistant and began to give him instructions. MacDonald joined Gibbons by the corpse and they conferred together in low voices, while the officer with the camera moved on to another portion of the room.

  Bethancourt, still leaning against the doorjamb, let his eyes roam over the room. He was unpracticed at picking the salient details out from a crime scene, but he was a naturally observant man, and as long as he was there, he reckoned he might as well have a go. He could not help thinking, however, that it was ever so much more convenient when Gibbons did the gleaning and came to him with the facts already established.

  The wait was not a short one. Bethancourt gave up on observation, wandered out in the rain to smoke and check on his dog, and finally joined the medical examiner’s assistant, who had gone to sit in the hall. They struck up a conversation, and passed the time in discussion of murder, Yorkshire, and the merits versus the drawbacks of the medical profession, while nearby a uniformed officer chatted with a couple of idle forensics-team members, and in a chair on the other side Biddulph tilted his head back and fell asleep.

  At last the door swung open to admit Brumby and Detective Inspector Howard. Both men bore the rumpled appearance of people who have been woken from a sound sleep and made to dress while only half awake.

  All conversation ceased in the hall with their entrance, and all eyes turned in their direction while the two men shook the rain off and looked about, taking stock.

  “Can someone show me where Superintendent MacDonald is at?” asked Brumby in a mild tone when no one came forward.

  The uniformed man started, looked at his cohorts, who shrugged, and said, “I can, sir. It’s just this way.”

  “Thank you, Constable,” said Brumby, falling in behind.

  Stephens, the medical examiner’s assistant, looked after them and then shifted in his seat, saying to Bethancourt, “I suppose I’d better follow along in case they want me.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Bethancourt.

  Gibbons and MacDonald had moved on from the body and were examining marks in the carpet. They looked up at the sound of purposeful footsteps, and Gibbons rose to his feet. MacDonald, however, merely grinned up from where he was squatting on his haunches.

  “Ah, there you are, Superintendent,” he said. “Come to join our little party, have you?”

  “I’ll never say you didn’t do your best to keep me occupied while I was here,” replied Brumby dryly. “What’s happened then? Give me the details, if you please.”

  MacDonald rose laboriously to his feet while Gibbons led his superiors over to the body, speaking rapidly as they went. Stephens followed them, cutting around the group to stand in a proprietary way at the foot of the body, but nobody paid any attention to him, apart from Brumby’s automatic polite nod.

  Bethancourt hovered just inside the doorway, trying to listen in on the discussion discreetly, without attracting attention. He was not convinced that there was much here to occupy him: the psychopathic behavior of serial killers did not much interest him, and he could not see any tie to the Mittlesdon murder, aside from the fact that Sanderson had been a very good customer of the shop. Certainly, in Gibbons’s exhaustive search of Jody Farraday’s contacts, Sanderson’s name had never surfaced. The one firm connection he possessed was his relation to Tony Grandidge, but it seemed hardly likely that Jody’s murderer had begun killing random relatives of her onetime co-workers.

  Eventually, as the police conferred about the crime-scene details, bringing in instances from the mysterious Ashdon’s past crimes, Bethancourt gave up and returned to the hallway, where at least he did not have to look at dead bodies and it was only a step to the front porch, where he could smoke.

  Gibbons was intensely aware that this could be the big breakthrough in the Ashdon case, yet at the same time he could not make up his mind if it was indeed that, or merely the work of a clever copycat killer. He kept returning, time and again, to the fact that the victim was a middle-aged man, not a young woman, and had been murdered in a country house rather than a shop. Was it possible that such a wildly variant crime had been committed by someone aping Ashdon’s modus operandi?

  Brumby and Howard seemed equally perplexed, and although Brumby had agreed almost at once to take over the case from MacDonald, it was clear that he was doing so as a precautionary measure. They were therefore awaiting the arrival of the Scotland Yard forensics team, but Gibbons noticed that MacDonald had not yet left or sent home his own men, signaling that there was some doubt in the Yorkshire detective’s mind.

  “But it must be Ashdon,” said Howard, sounding uncertain despite his words. “No copycat could possibly think we’d assume this was Ashdon’s work, not when the victim and setting are so different.”

  “That’s true,” said Brumby reflectively.

  “But,” put in Gibbons, “perhaps the killer wasn’t trying to pass this off as Ashdon’s work. What if he was only copying Ashdon in an attempt to get away with the murder?”

  Brumby and Howard looked at him, apparently startled by this train of thought, but MacDonald nodded immediately.

  “You’ve got the nub of it there, Sergeant,” he said. “Say I’m a fellow with a desire to rid the world of Sanderson here—and believe me, there’s no shortage of such folk about. Only I’ve never taken to killing before and I’m feeling a bit intimidated by the efficiency of the Yorkshire constabulary. And then there’s a murder at Accessorize, and the papers are full of this serial killer, and how he’s got away with a half-dozen murders or more. If I’m a bright lad, mightn’t I just take a page out of Ashdon’s book with the idea that if he can bring it off, so can I?”

  “I’ve never known it to happen before,” said Brumby thoughtfully. “On the other hand, there’s a first time for everything. Is that your reading of the matter, then, Superintendent?”

  But MacDonald shook his head. “Nay,” he said. “It’s just a thing that occurred to me. To my mind, there’s nothing yet to say it’s one or the other. Ashdon might have had some personal grudge against Sanderson and decided to do away with him.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” admitted Howard, with a glance around the room. “If it is Ashdon, there’s no denying this isn’t a typical crime for him.”

  “Let’s say for the moment that this is Ashdon’s work,” said Brumby. “That puts the Accesorize murder in an entirely different light. It was already singular in occurring so far north, but th
is makes it look as though Yorkshire is actually Ashdon’s home ground.”

  Howard was nodding. “And it indicates an escalation. At long last, may I say.”

  “And by ‘escalation,’ ” asked MacDonald, “do you mean more frequent killings?”

  “That’s right,” said Brumby. “It’s a stage in a serial killer’s pathology. There are exceptions, of course, but generally over time a killer will need to kill more frequently to satisfy his cravings. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that we don’t catch most of them before they reach that stage.” His eyes, as he said this, were bleak.

  “A lot of the time,” said Howard, “we don’t even know there’s a serial killer out there until he reaches the escalation point—the murders are too scattered, and often the killer is still developing a recognizable modus operandi, so that the crimes aren’t connected with each other at once.”

  “I see,” said MacDonald. “And in this Ashdon’s case?”

  “He’s been a challenge from the first,” admitted Brumby. “We’ve not been able to connect any earlier crimes to him before the murder at the antique shop in Ashdon—earlier crimes can give us additional information to build a profile with. Usually, serial killers operate in one area, but Ashdon’s killings are all over the map, and that makes it extremely difficult to profile his next possible victim.”

  “We can profile her,” corrected Howard, “but without a geographic area in which to identify women who fit the profile, well, we can’t have an eye on every woman in Britain who fits the description.”

  MacDonald rubbed his jaw. “Nay,” he agreed. “I can see how that might not work so very well.”

  Brumby’s eyes wandered back to the body. “But if this murder is what it seems, then we might at last have more to go on,” he said. Abruptly, he turned back to Gibbons. “You say you’d met the victim, Sergeant?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” answered Gibbons. “He was a regular customer at Mittlesdon’s and turned up the other day when the shop reopened. The friend I’m staying with had met him at a party and they remembered each other from that.”

  MacDonald had raised his eyebrows. “Well connected is he, this friend of yours?” he asked.

  “I suppose you could say that,” replied Gibbons, a little uncomfortable with this line of inquiry.

  “Why do you ask that, Superintendent?” said Brumby alertly.

  “Because Sanderson was a social climber,” said MacDonald bluntly. “The only party he’d deign to be seen at would be a posh one.” He turned back to Gibbons. “This is the friend who brought you tonight?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Gibbons, looking round and finding, somewhat to his surprise, that Bethancourt was not in sight. “He must have gone outside.”

  “Let’s have him in,” said Brumby. “I’d rather like to hear about this party.”

  Gibbons nodded and went in search of his friend, whom he found outside on the porch, sheltering from the rain while he smoked a cigarette in company with two men from MacDonald’s forensics team.

  “Brumby’d like to speak with you,” Gibbons told him.

  Bethancourt raised an eyebrow. “With me?” he asked.

  “I told him you’d met Sanderson once,” said Gibbons.

  “So did you,” retorted Bethancourt, but he held his cigarette out into the rain to douse it, and then handed it to one of the forensics men, who deposited it into a plastic evidence bag. “Cheers,” he said, and followed Gibbons back inside.

  He went without any real trepidation, having had enough experience of police procedures to know that talking to anyone with a scintilla of knowledge about the case was de rigueur. But he had yet to meet Superintendent Brumby, and the sharp glance of the detective, along with the sober atmosphere at the scene of the crime, combined to immediately make him feel as though he were facing a tutor whose lecture he had failed to attend.

  In the face of this, he smiled amiably, held out a hand, and, as Gibbons pronounced his name, said, “Good to meet you, sir.”

  Gibbons continued with the introductions, and Bethancourt dutifully shook hands with Howard while MacDonald eyed him narrowly.

  “Bethancourt, eh?” he said. “Seems to me there’s a magistrate who goes by that name out in Skipton.”

  “That would be my father,” replied Bethancourt.

  “Skipton,” repeated Brumby thoughtfully. “Is that out in the Dales?”

  “Right you are,” said MacDonald. “It’s one of the many ‘gateways to the Dales.’ ” He was running his eyes up and down Bethancourt’s figure. “So where does your family hail from then?”

  “The family house is in Appletreewick,” answered Bethancourt evenly.

  “Hmm,” said MacDonald. “Wharfedale, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bethancourt.

  “And you live here in York?”

  “No, I live in London.”

  “But I thought,” interrupted Howard, “that Sergeant Gibbons was staying with you?”

  “I am,” said Gibbons, thinking it was time to intervene. “The Bethancourts also own a house here in York, in St. Saviourgate.”

  “My, my,” murmured MacDonald.

  Bethancourt grinned at him.

  “If you’ve finished placing our witness?” said Brumby.

  “Oh, aye, I’m done,” said MacDonald. “Just like to have firm ground underfoot.”

  Brumby turned to Bethancourt. “Where and when did you meet the deceased?” he asked.

  “Just the other night,” said Bethancourt. “I attended a cocktail party at the Heywoods’ house. In Monkgate,” he added to MacDonald, who smiled in acknowledgment. “Mr. Sanderson was present, and I was introduced to him there.”

  “Do you know these Heywoods well?” asked Brumby.

  “I’ve known them a long time,” said Bethancourt. “They’re friends of the family, and I saw them regularly while I was at school here, but I haven’t kept up since I left the area. But they’re very sociable people—they tend to hold open house during the holidays.”

  Brumby glanced at MacDonald, who nodded and said, “Donald and Mary Heywood are leading citizens hereabouts, well known for their philanthropy and for their parties. A cocktail party of theirs would be an event Sanderson would have aspired to. I hear,” and he raised an inquiring eyebrow in Bethancourt’s direction, “that if you’re generous in your donations to certain causes, it’s not too hard to come by an invitation to the Heywoods’, though it’s far more difficult to breach the inner circle. But Sanderson likely wouldn’t have known the difference.”

  “It’s true enough,” agreed Bethancourt.

  Brumby was nodding as he absorbed this information. “And what did you make of Mr. Sanderson?” he asked.

  Bethancourt thought for a moment before replying. “I took him for a self-made man,” he answered, “and one who thought quite a lot of himself. He was commenting,” he added, “on the Ashdon case when we were introduced, in fact.”

  “And?” asked Brumby.

  Bethancourt smiled. “He was of the opinion that if only the media would stop covering such things, then the killer would give up murdering people.”

  “God, if only it were that easy,” muttered Howard.

  “Indeed,” said Brumby. “Very well, Mr. Bethancourt, you’ve been very helpful. If you think of anything else, do let Sergeant Gibbons know.”

  “Certainly,” said Bethancourt, recognizing a dismissal when he heard one and retreating toward the doorway. This time, however, he stopped in the hallway, hoping to catch Gibbons’s eye. In a moment he succeeded, and his friend came out to him.

  “What’s up?” he asked. “Have you thought of something else?”

  “No,” answered Bethancourt, a trifle impatiently. “I just wanted to ask if you can get a ride home from somebody.”

  Gibbons was surprised. “You’re leaving?” he asked.

  Bethancourt gestured. “There’s really nothing for me to do here,” he said. “I don’t know anything a
bout serial killers, and I’m hardly likely to be helpful at a crime scene. And it’ll be hours yet before you’ve got more information to share.”

  “True,” said Gibbons, who had not thought of it in that light. “Yes, I expect anyone here will give me a lift back. You go ahead, and I’ll let you know if anything exciting comes up.”

  “Thanks,” said Bethancourt. “I’ll see you later then.”

  Before Gibbons could turn back to the crime scene, he saw Brumby’s forensics team arriving, led by Dave Mason carrying a formidable case, and went to meet them while Bethancourt made his escape.

  “Sergeant Gibbons,” said Mason, nodding a greeting. “Are we back there, then?”

  “That’s right,” said Gibbons, gesturing. “Jim, you might want to talk to that gentleman napping there in the hall—he’s the local electronics genius, and he’s the one first spotted Ashdon’s signature here.”

  “Good, good,” said Jim, glancing back over his shoulder. “What’s his name?”

  “Biddulph,” answered Gibbons. “Here, come along and I’ll introduce you.”

  Gibbons was thoughtful as he returned to the crime scene, and he looked at the room with fresh eyes. It had never occurred to him before to think what an outsider would make of the slow progress of police procedure at a scene. To him, the room was burgeoning with hidden information that had to be carefully collected, and he knew as well as any trained detective that a foot put wrong at the crime scene could result in an unsolved or at least untriable case. But there was, he had now to admit, a certain tedium that accompanied all the details that had to be attended to.

  Brumby, Howard, and MacDonald were still discussing the case, now having moved on to a scenario in which Ashdon had not committed this murder, and MacDonald was expounding on the wide range of suspects they would then have.

  Gibbons moved up and asked, “Do you think there might be anything to the Mittlesdon connection in that case?”