A Spider on the Stairs

by Cassandra Chan

  MacDonald shrugged. “Doesn’t seem likely, not at least from the point of view of motive. Sanderson made a lot of enemies on his way up, and he was known to be a rather abrasive sort. So far as I know, his only connection with Mittlesdon’s was that he bought books there—hardly a motive for murdering the poor sod.”

  “And his nephew works there,” said Gibbons.

  MacDonald raised a brow. “Does he now?”

  “Obviously,” said Brumby, “our first step must be to either rule in or out the Ashdon angle. But if we conclude this is Ashdon’s work, then, well, we’ll have to look at people in Sanderson’s life who fit our serial killer’s profile.”

  He looked almost hopefully at MacDonald, as if this suggestion might prod the Yorkshireman into a sudden remembrance of a homicidal associate of Sanderson’s. But MacDonald merely nodded thoughtfully.

  “What’s the setup here, by the way?” asked Howard. “I mean, who lives here besides the victim, who found him, all that kind of thing.”

  Automatically, MacDonald recited, “Sanderson lived here with his wife, Amy. Youngest daughter is currently in residence, though mostly she’s away at university. There was a large party here for the holidays, but the last of them left for home yesterday. Tonight’s the servants’ night out, and Mrs. Sanderson and her daughter went out to a show in town. Because of the rain, they were planning to spend the night at the Sandersons’ flat in York, but when Mrs. Sanderson couldn’t get her husband on the phone, she became concerned and drove home after all. She’s been sedated,” he added. “She was quite overcome.”

  “It would be a disturbing sight for anyone,” agreed Brumby, though Gibbons noted that Brumby himself did not appear to find it disturbing in the least. Nor, to be honest, had Gibbons, and he wondered at his own reaction. That made him think of Bethancourt again, and he was curious as to what his friend’s feelings about it had been.

  But his thoughts were interrupted by one of the forensics team, who rather pointedly began vacuuming for trace evidence on the carpet near their feet.

  “Sorry, Syms,” said Brumby. “Are we in your way?”

  “It would be helpful if you could move into the hallway, sir,” said Syms respectfully but firmly.

  Brumby smiled at MacDonald. “Run off from my own crime scene,” he said. “Let’s adjourn, shall we?”

  “Right,” said MacDonald, pushing away from the chair back he had been leaning on. “If you’re all finished here, I’ll just give my lads the word they can take themselves off.”

  “Of course,” said Brumby, leading the way out. “And naturally all our findings will be available to your people.”

  MacDonald bustled off back to the front of the house and his waiting team, while Brumby and Howard stopped just outside the door, ready to be called in if anything interesting turned up. But as the hours passed, not much that was worthy of note appeared. And Ashdon was notorious for leaving a very clean crime scene.

  10

  In Which Bethancourt Is Rudely Awakened, Gibbons Reaches the End of His Endurance, and They Both Take Naps

  Bethancourt had indeed found the crime scene disturbing. Quite apart from the dead man himself, the whole room bore the stink of an unclean mind, and he had found the contact disquieting. He felt he had been somehow contaminated by the exposure, which was evidenced by the fact that, though it was close on 5:00 A.M. when he returned home and he was undeniably tired, he still felt it necessary to shower before seeking his bed. He was weary enough that, once there, he fell asleep almost instantly, but his dreams were restless and permeated with a vaguely threatening atmosphere.

  All things being considered, it was not so very surprising that when his aunt stormed into his bedroom at eight the next morning, he was not only considerably startled, but also disoriented.

  “I can’t imagine what’s wrong with you,” she said.

  Bethancourt started awake, heart pounding, and half sat up. He peered myopically at the figure marching into his room.

  “Aunt Evelyn?”

  “This is really unconscionable, Phillip,” she continued, brandishing a sheet of paper in her fist. “How could you leave this kind of thing out for the children to find?”

  Bethancourt was looking blearily about, trying to ascertain his place in the space-time continuum. “Aunt Evelyn?” he said again. “What are you doing here?”

  This seemed to enrage her further. “You had better get yourself out of bed this instant,” she said, “and get yourself downstairs to clean your mess up, young man.”

  “Yes, all right,” said Bethancourt, hoping that agreement would make her go away.

  “I never heard of such a thing,” she fumed. “Leaving that kind of graphic display out where anybody could find it, much less impressionable children. I want it out of the kitchen at once.”

  And she stuck out the paper she held.

  Bethancourt reached an arm out from under the covers and took it, squinting at it uncertainly. Without his glasses, he could not make out much, and all that he could think of was that he had certainly not been looking at pornography in the kitchen.

  “I’ll be right down,” he said.

  She did not seem in the least appeased, but the sight of his naked arm had brought her to the realization that her nephew had no clothes on and thus was hardly likely to get out of bed while she was in the room.

  “I’ll be waiting,” she said, and abruptly turned and left.

  Bethancourt sank back into the pillows, trying to force his brain into action and make sense of it all. A phone conversation with his father came back to him, and he cursed loudly. He had completely forgotten that his aunt was due in to take her daughter and friend back to school.

  That just left the question of what all the fuss was about. He groped for his glasses on the nightstand, then refocused his eyes on the photograph he held. He was prepared, as unlikely as it seemed, to be faced with a graphic image of a naked woman, but what met his gaze was infinitely worse. It was the graphic photograph of a dead woman.

  “Christ,” he swore, flinging out of bed and grabbing his dressing gown. “The case files!”

  He shoved his feet into slippers and went dashing downstairs, still tying up his belt as he went.

  “So sorry, Aunt Evelyn,” he said, making a beeline for the kitchen. “There was another murder last night, and Jack and I ran out without a thought. I’m afraid I didn’t even remember it was today you were coming.”

  His aunt had never been one for excuses, though the apology seemed to count for something.

  “Surely,” she said, following him, “these files are confidential in any case. You shouldn’t be leaving them about where anyone can find them.”

  “I didn’t,” replied Bethancourt shortly. “I left them in a locked private house.”

  “Where there were children,” said his aunt indignantly.

  “There weren’t any when I went to bed,” muttered Bethancourt, swinging off the last stair and moving rapidly down the passage to the kitchen door. Out of the corner of his eye he saw two heads peering out from the dining-room door and he stopped abruptly, startled, which caused his aunt to barrel into him.

  “Phillip!” she protested.

  “That’s not Bernadette and her friend,” he said, staring blankly at the now empty dining-room doorway.

  Evelyn glanced back over her shoulder and frowned. “It must be the boys,” she said. “I told them to go upstairs.”

  She took a step toward the dining room, but stopped as Bethancourt, now thoroughly bewildered, asked, “Boys? What boys? I thought you were bringing Bernadette and her little friend back for school.”

  “And Jeremy and Arthur,” said Evelyn, and, when Bethancourt looked blank, she added impatiently, “Humphrey’s youngest sister, Denise’s, children. You’ve met them.”

  “Oh, right,” said Bethancourt, who dimly remembered a Christmas visit some years ago and two very small tow-headed boys. “They’re that old already?”

  Ev
elyn rolled her eyes at him and proceeded down the hall, calling sharply, “Jeremy! Arthur! Have you been back in the kitchen again?”

  Bethancourt, momentarily reprieved, continued on to the kitchen, and swore when he opened the door and beheld the broad oak table.

  Gibbons had, as he recollected, left a good half of it covered with notes and reports from the various case files, but there had been a kind of order to it, which he was certain they had not disturbed in the course of their hurried departure the night before.

  It had been disturbed now. The reports had been tossed aside in the search to uncover the photographs of the bodies. There were, of course, other photographs as well, but it was naturally the ones of the corpses that intrigued the boys, and they had made a thorough mess of things to get to them.

  “Dear God,” said Bethancourt, stooping to pick up an errant lab report that had landed on the floor. “And all before coffee,” he added, detouring to collect a sprawl of papers that had slid off one of the chairs.

  He carried them over to add to the mess on the table, surveying the damage there and realizing with a sinking heart that all the files had been mixed together like shuffled playing cards. He was going to have to go through every sheet and determine which case it belonged to. He stared at it all for a long moment and then said firmly, “Not without a coffee first.”

  He was adding coffee to the pot and waiting for the kettle to boil when Evelyn came in through the butler’s pantry, saying with a decided air, “That’s the boys sorted—good Lord, Phillip, you haven’t made a start at all.”

  Bethancourt regarded her with a baleful eye. “I was at a crime scene until five o’clock this morning,” he said.

  “That hardly means you can’t clear away some papers,” Evelyn retorted, moving to make the required start herself. “Really, Phillip, you may have become quite accustomed to this sort of thing, but you should remember most of us aren’t so jaded.”

  “I am not accustomed to it,” contradicted Bethancourt, who had set the coffee brewing and now went to help her. “This stuff gives me nightmares—or it would, if I’d had any sleep. No, just put it all in a pile and I’ll take it upstairs to sort.”

  He made good his escape as quickly as he could, piling case files and coffeepot on a large tray and carting the whole thing up to the bedroom. He darted back out for a moment to peek into Gibbons’s room, but, as he’d suspected, his friend was not there. He fled back to his own bedroom with a sigh of relief, closing the door firmly behind him. Cerberus, who had not moved from his bed in the corner, opened an eye.

  “And a great lot of help you were,” Bethancourt told the dog. “You might have warned me she was coming in.”

  Cerberus closed his eye again, and settled his nose under his tail. Bethancourt looked at his bed longingly, but decided he had better get Gibbons’s files and notes back in order before the detective returned and wanted them. Resigned, he poured himself some of the coffee and then sat down on the floor with the stack of case files.

  It took quite some time to sort them all out, and he could only hope that the boys had not absconded with any of the photographs. He decided, upon consideration, to leave the pictures till last, judging them to be too much for his newly opened eyes. He sipped his coffee and selected a forensics report from the pile: at the top of the page was a lengthy file number. He placed it on the carpet to his right, and next picked up several sheets stapled together. They bore a different number, so he set it to the left of the first page. And so on, and so forth, through the entire stack.

  He did not read the reports, although he did not think Gibbons would have minded if he had. Still, a line here and there jumped out at him: “. . . body was arranged like a display . . .”; “upon arriving at the crime scene . . .”; “. . . chemical analysis of the stains found that . . .”; “The victim was identified as Veronica Matthews, of number 4 Privet Drive . . .”

  Bethancourt frowned at that last one; the name struck a chord, but he could not remember where he’d heard it before. He skimmed over the sheet in his hand, discovering that Veronica Matthews had been Ashdon’s first victim, her body found in the window of an antiques shop in Essex. So, very likely he had read about the murder in the papers. And yet, it seemed to him that he had heard it more recently than that.

  “Jack probably mentioned it,” he muttered, laying the report aside and reaching for the next one.

  By the time he had got it all sorted, he had finished the pot of coffee he had brought up with him and was beginning to feel hungry. He dressed and went cautiously downstairs, finding to his relief that Evelyn had apparently taken the children out somewhere. He let Cerberus out into the rain in the back garden and found Gibbons just coming home, looking pale and tired.

  “You’re up,” said Gibbons, surprised, as he bent to greet Cerberus and then hurried to join his friend in the shelter of the porch. “I thought you’d still be asleep or I would have rung.”

  “By all rights I should be asleep,” said Bethancourt. “But we were invaded this morning by my aunt Evelyn, come to take the children back to school. Are you just coming back from Upper Poppleton?”

  Gibbons shook his head. “We’ve been at the incident room for the last couple of hours, going over everything with London.”

  “Do they still think it’s Ashdon?” asked Bethancourt.

  “No one knows.” Gibbons spread his hands. “It seems as if it must be, but it’s so very unusual a development that nobody knows what to make of it. Brumby and his entire team are completely flummoxed.”

  “And what about the Mittlesdon case?” asked Bethancourt. “Do you think there’s any connection?”

  “Not likely, is it?” said Gibbons, staring out at the rain. “And yet . . .” He looked back at Bethancourt with a shrug. “Nobody else thinks so.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, then Bethancourt said slowly, “Still, it’s a bit odd, you know, that they should both be connected to Mittlesdon’s.”

  “I know.” Gibbons sighed. “I keep thinking the same thing. But I’m damned if I can see how they’re connected.”

  “I can’t either,” admitted Bethancourt.

  “Well, it’s on the back burner now, in any case,” Gibbons said. “I’ve apparently been elected liaison between Brumby and MacDonald, and I’ve got to get back to it. I only came by to pick up my notes and computer. And,” he added, “a change of clothes.”

  Bethancourt looked at him with some concern. “Are you going to be all right?” he asked. “You’ve only just come off the sick list, you know.”

  Gibbons brushed this aside. “I’ll manage,” he said. “A wash’ll put me right.”

  “I’ll put on some coffee whilst you change,” said Bethancourt. “And I’m just about to make some breakfast—do you have time to eat?”

  “It would be heaven,” said Gibbons appreciatively.

  Bethancourt whistled for Cerberus, and they turned to go inside, where Bethancourt got to work in the kitchen while Gibbons repaired upstairs. Bethancourt was not usually much of a breakfast eater, but little sleep and early rising had made him hungry and he thought Gibbons could probably do with a large meal. He was a good cook, and busied himself quietly, and when Gibbons came down he found a traditional English breakfast spread upon the kitchen table.

  They were mostly silent as they ate, Gibbons because he was wolfing down his meal at a great rate, with one eye on the clock, and Bethancourt because he did not want to distract him.

  “Thanks,” said Gibbons at last, drinking off the last of his coffee and rising from the table. “That was marvelous. I’ll ring you whenever I get a free moment and let you know how it’s going.”

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

  And Gibbons ran back out into the rain.

  Left to himself, Bethancourt could not help but poke at the idea that Jody’s murder and Sanderson’s were connected. As he cleared away the breakfast dishes, he mulled over both cases, trying
to determine if there was anything other than Mittlesdon’s Bookshop to connect them. Not, he decided, if Sanderson’s death was the work of Ashdon; in that case, Jody’s murder stood out as an anomaly. But if Sanderson’s was a more prosaic murder, perhaps there might be some tie between the two cases. It was then that he remembered that it was Sanderson’s nephew, Tony Grandidge, who had introduced Jody to Mittlesdon’s in the first place. It did not seem to be much of a connection, but it was worth looking into, he thought. So, when he had finished with the dishes, he rang the bookshop and asked for Alice.

  “Did Tony Grandidge come in to work this morning?” he asked her.

  “His uncle was killed last night,” said Alice, sounding shocked. “Murdered.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Bethancourt patiently. “It’s why I was asking if he had come in.”

  “Oh!” said Alice. “Of course you would know, wouldn’t you? I’m sorry—we’re all feeling a little stunned here this morning. Yes, Tony came in. He said he’d rather keep his mind occupied.”

  “Perfectly natural,” said Bethancourt. “I think I’ll drop round—I have a quick question for him.”

  “Well, then, I’ll see you when you get here,” said Alice. She sounded as though she was anticipating a long discussion of this latest event.

  “Er, yes,” said Bethancourt. “Till then.”

  He rang off, shaking his head over Alice, and went to pull on a pair of Wellies and a coat before calling to his dog and leaving for the bookshop.

  Bethancourt found Tony Grandidge working in the stock room amid stacks of boxes and carts half full of books. It seemed, at first glance, utterly chaotic, but as Bethancourt took it all in, he realized there was an order to it after all. Smaller and odd-size boxes, representing the special orders and rare books, were stacked by the door, ready to be taken up to the office, and were separated by addressee, while the larger boxes were divided between the used stock and the new.

  Grandidge was sorting the books out of the boxes and onto carts, but he paused and looked up as Bethancourt came in, a puzzled frown on his face.