A Good Death

by Chris Collett

  ‘Yes.’

  He had to ask. ‘Does this have anything to do with …?’

  ‘No, it really doesn’t. And anyway, you seem to be over it. You could come too,’ she said brightly.

  ‘I couldn’t,’ said Mariner. ‘Jamie.’

  ‘Of course, Jamie. Sorry.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Mariner, short of any better response.

  ‘I know,’ said Suzy. ‘You don’t mind?’

  Did he? He swallowed the lump that had suddenly developed in his throat. ‘Of course not. It’s a fantastic opportunity and you must take it.’

  The following afternoon Suzy’s parents arrived, though being introduced to them seemed somewhat irrelevant now. They were, as Mariner had expected, a charming couple, the kind of people who would have produced a charming daughter like Suzy. Their feelings about Suzy’s news were mixed. Her father seemed delighted that she would be going back to his native country and returning to her Cantonese roots, while her mother, Mariner thought, looked more wistful and would have preferred it if Suzy’s news had been closer to what he’d thought it was. Only when they had set off for Stratford did she begin to cheer up.

  After dinner at the RSC theatre restaurant, overlooking the River Avon, they went in to the performance, where her parents’ excitement was shared equally. And certainly the play was entertaining enough and the language no barrier. The actors seemed to play it for laughs and though Mariner was sure he missed many of the nuances, the main plot seemed to him much like a pantomime, jokes included. As far as he could tell, the whole tale was predicated on women pretending to be men and vice versa, even though it was pretty bloody obvious who was—

  ‘Fuck …’ He said it under his breath, but still Suzy turned to fix him with a disapproving glare.

  Sometimes in an investigation a breakthrough presents itself as a tangible sensory experience; a chink of bright sunlight penetrating the darkness, the satisfying clunk of a cog dropping into place, or the emergent shape of a calcifying thought. It was part way through the first act, watching Viola disguised – to his mind pretty unconvincingly – as Cesario that Mariner suddenly knew for certain that Sam Fleetwood was dead, and understood why he had been killed and who had killed him. It was as much as he could do to resist leaping out of his seat, when what he wanted to do, right away, was get on the phone to Millie Khatoon. No chance of doing that right now. But the instant the stage darkened and the interval applause began, Mariner was on his feet. ‘Sorry,’ he said to Suzy. ‘I’ve got to go.’ He didn’t wait around long enough to see how she felt about that. Outside, Mariner found he had three missed calls from Kevin Bingley’s Granville Lane number. He rang back.

  ‘I think I might know who killed Sam Fleetwood,’ said Bingley. ‘Though I don’t really understand why.’

  ‘I do,’ said Mariner. ‘Meet me at Clive Boswell’s house.’ He gave Bingley the address.

  As he drove, Mariner put a call through to the McKinnons and asked to speak to Tanya. ‘You told DC Khatoon that Sam came to your house to check the bridesmaids’ dresses, but that wasn’t quite true.’

  ‘No,’ she said quietly.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘He asked me to alter another dress. I assumed it was for Gaby.’

  ‘But it wasn’t, was it? You could have saved us a lot of time, Mrs McKinnon, if you’d been honest.’

  ‘I promised Sam I wouldn’t tell anyone, even Laurie.’

  ‘Even though he’s now dead?’

  ‘Oh no …’ she began, but he could hear, then, slow realisation dawning. ‘Oh God.’

  Mariner got to the Boswells’ house to find Bingley waiting outside. Everything was in darkness and no amount of ringing the doorbell raised anyone. It was stretching the rules, but fortunately the next door neighbour had spare keys and the alarm code, and Mariner’s warrant card was persuasive enough.

  ‘We need to be quick,’ said Mariner, disabling the alarm. ‘And see what we can find before they come back. We’ll start with Gaby’s room.’ He ran up the stairs, with Bingley following. ‘What made you realise?’ he asked, as they checked all the rooms, finally locating the one belonging to Gaby.

  ‘I had to take Mum’s car into the garage this morning,’ said Bingley, opening wardrobe doors. ‘She’s smaller than me, so I had to move the driver’s seat back. I don’t know … that action … there was something about it that kind of nagged at me all day. Then it suddenly hit me. When I found Fleetwood’s Astra in Carter’s yard, I remember thinking that the driver’s seat was way too close to the steering wheel, even for me. We knew Sam Fleetwood was tall from the position of the bike saddle in the garage. And Mike Figgis, Clive Boswell and Danny Carter are all quite tall. So I came in to check the forensic photographs that I wasn’t mistaken. Hey, I’ve got something.’

  From the bottom of the wardrobe, Bingley pulled out a leather holdall, like the one described as belonging to Sam Fleetwood. Mariner stopped what he was doing and watched as Bingley unzipped the bag and began to remove the contents: women’s clothing and underwear. There was also a loyalty card for the Rookery Hotel, in the name of Hayley McQueen.

  ‘Who the hell is she?’ said Bingley.

  ‘She doesn’t exist,’ said Mariner. They both jumped as the phone in the hall rang, puncturing the silence. Mariner started down the stairs, but before he could reach it, the answer machine cut in and bizarrely there was Charlie Glover, speaking as clearly as if he was standing right beside them, and sounding slightly drunk.

  ‘Hi, Clive; hi, Gaby,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m afraid we’ve lost track a bit of what the time is over there, but Helen and I just wanted to wish you all the best for your big day. We’re sorry we couldn’t be …’

  But Mariner didn’t hear the rest of the message. ‘What’s the date today?’ he asked Bingley.

  ‘It’s the twenty-third,’ said Bingley. ‘Saint George’s Day.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Mariner. ‘They’re not coming back. Clive Boswell is taking his daughter on her honeymoon.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  While Bingley drove, Mariner called ahead to the Airport Police Unit, linked to Solihull OPU.

  ‘But I don’t get it,’ said Bingley, squealing round a corner. ‘Who’s the other woman? Who’s “Little Bear”?’

  ‘There isn’t one,’ said Mariner. ‘Your mum helped me with that too. You know the photograph on her mantelpiece of you and your teddy? Fiona Fleetwood has photographs on her wall too, of Sam, all with his faithful bear. I think that Valentine card was from her. It’s probably something their mum started, and she’s kept up the tradition.’

  When they got to the airport, Clive and Gaby Boswell had been detained and were being kept in one of the holding cells, waiting to transfer to a PACE cell at Granville Lane. As the handover took place, Clive Boswell was livid. ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but you need to understand that this has been a very stressful time for us. We deserve a break after all that has happened. It’s the least that Gaby can have.’

  ‘Whose idea was it, Mr Boswell, to go to Antigua after all?’ asked Mariner, as they set off back to the station.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Indignation had set in. ‘I’ve paid a lot of money for this holiday.’

  ‘Was it Gaby’s suggestion that you should go anyway?’ asked Mariner.

  ‘She’s been under an enormous strain these last few weeks,’ retorted Boswell. ‘I don’t think you can imagine—’

  ‘Oh, I can, Mr Boswell, I really can,’ said Mariner. ‘But I wonder how far your imagination stretches. Do you have any idea why your daughter would want to leave the country, especially now?’ He glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw Gaby Boswell calmly staring out of the car window. She said nothing on the drive back to Granville Lane, but once they’d got her in the interview room it was as if she had to offload the whole thing, and they couldn’t stop her.

  ‘I never meant it to happen. I don’t expect you to believe that, but truly I didn’t,’ she said, all inno
cence. ‘After the do at Helen and Charles’, Sam said he was going over to the house to put up the shelves.’ She looked at Mariner. ‘What I told you was true; I really did have a headache after the party, so I planned a quiet night in. Then Dad went out and I thought, what am I doing here, on my own on a Saturday night? My headache had lifted, so I decided to go and surprise Sam, I mean really surprise him. So I packed my waterproof backpack, put on my wetsuit – in the dark it doesn’t look that different from running clothes – and went over to the nature reserve. I ran through the woods on the opposite side of the lake, then swam across to our house.’

  ‘Sam isn’t the only triathlete,’ said Mariner. ‘The club where you met is a triathlon club.’

  She smiled. ‘We used to do events together. And this was so exciting. I felt like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible or something. I knew Sam would love it. We’d talked about the idea of role play, and I knew he liked that kind of thing. But when I let myself into the house, I got the shock of my life.’

  ‘He wasn’t assembling the shelves?’ said Mariner.

  ‘Actually he was,’ she said. ‘It was what he was wearing to do it.’ Whether for dramatic effect, or whether she really couldn’t help it, she gagged. ‘I hardly recognised him at first; couldn’t work out what was going on. It was grotesque. He was wearing trousers and a top but they were skin tight, like a woman’s. The top had a plunging neckline and he had – he had fake boobs! And he was wearing this awful wig, and make-up. It made my skin crawl.’ She shuddered. ‘I just screamed. Then he tried to explain it to me, as if it could be justified. Said it was something he’d always done, but that he hadn’t told me because after we were married, he’d decided he would never do it again.’

  ‘He was prepared to give it up for you,’ Mariner pointed out.

  ‘How could he?’ She was defiant. ‘I mean, if that’s what someone is like, they don’t just change overnight, do they? How could I possibly trust him? And now I’d seen it, I could never think of him in the same way. He told me to wait while he got changed; said we should talk about it, like adults; that he could help me to understand. So he went upstairs, and I was just left there, my mind racing through it all. I couldn’t bear it, the thought of him—’ Her face contorted with distaste. ‘I couldn’t marry him now. The idea was repulsive. I knew I’d have to call off the wedding, but then I imagined breaking the news to everyone. Hey, I’m not getting hitched after all, because the man I’m marrying likes wearing women’s clothes.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Oh God, the shame!’

  ‘Surely you could have worked something out together?’ said Mariner. ‘You could have fabricated an affair, perhaps?’

  ‘That would have been dishonest,’ she said, the irony lost on her. ‘And Dad. Oh God, Dad,’ Gaby went on. ‘What would it do to him?’

  ‘So what happened?’ prompted Mariner.

  She took a breath. ‘I was pacing around downstairs, not knowing what to do, and then I saw it, the brand-new knife block, and I thought how much easier it would be if something just happened to Sam. It would be beyond my control. It wasn’t a serious idea, not to begin with. But the more I considered it, the more it seemed like the only option. Those knives are razor sharp, and I thought about how easy it would be to cut him and make it look like suicide. People would feel sorry for me then, but in a kind way. Then when it came to it, it all went wrong. Sam came down into the living room and I tried to slash at his wrists. But all I did was stab him and then the blood started pouring out. Oh God, there was so much blood, and the wounds looked nothing like suicide. And the look on his face; it was terrible. And then he passed out. It all happened so fast. Suddenly I realised he was dead.’ She shivered. ‘But amazingly that was when I started to think really clearly, and everything seemed to fall into place, as if it was meant to be.’ Her eyes gleamed and Mariner saw that this was what she really believed.

  ‘Sam had fallen on the plastic covering the floor,’ said Gaby. ‘And I realised I could wrap him up in it, put him in his car and drive him away. No one had seen me arrive, so they would just think it was Sam leaving. The rest of it came to me bit by bit. It was quite thrilling really.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I managed to wrap him up and get him into the boot of his car. It was tricky, but I’m strong. The hardest part was cleaning up any traces of blood. Then I put down fresh polythene. The workmen were coming back on Monday and they make such a mess. I couldn’t rely on them to cover the floors again before they started. My wetsuit was covered in blood by now, so once I’d made sure everything was clean, I had a shower and got changed into the clothes I’d brought with me. Then I put my bike in the car. It wouldn’t go in on top of Sam, so I had to use more polythene and put it on the back seat. Dad’s got a development just outside Redditch. I’d been there the week before and I knew that they were about to start filling in the utilities ditches. So I drove up and got as close as I could – there was no one around at all. I put Sam in the ditch and piled soil on top to cover him, knowing that on the Monday the ditch would be concreted over. I went into the site office to clean myself up again, before driving back to a spot near Carter’s. Sam took me there once, when he was keeping them under surveillance. I got my bike out of the car then just threw in a lighted match and left it there. I rode back along the canal and came home.’ She was delighted with her own ingenuity and Mariner had a sudden and uncharacteristic urge to slap her and wipe the self-satisfied smile from her face. ‘Dad wasn’t back yet,’ she added. ‘I know about him and his whore, by the way. I know he thinks I don’t, but I followed him once in my car.’

  ‘What about Sam’s wallet?’ asked Mariner. ‘How did it find its way to Chantelle Brough?’

  ‘That was down to you,’ she said, with a knowing smile. ‘When you asked about Sam’s bank details, I realised that could be helpful. So, that weekend, I drove through Redditch and threw it out of the window. I put the pin number in to make sure his bank card would get used.’

  When Mariner went to tell Clive Boswell his daughter had confessed to murder, Boswell was dazed and diminished. It was beyond his comprehension and Mariner guessed it would be a long time before he would be able to make sense of it. Right now, he simply didn’t believe it. Neither, at first, did Charlie Glover, when he returned after his holiday, and for some weeks after he would suddenly stop what he was doing and stare into space, trying to rationalise it.

  It was real enough when Sam Fleetwood’s decomposing body was recovered from the ditch Gaby had described, and there was nothing about his remains to contradict her version of events. It was Mariner’s unhappy task to break the news to Fleetwood’s sister, Fiona. She had a lot of questions, which he did his best to answer, but then he had one for her. ‘Out of interest,’ he said. ‘Did you send Sam Valentine cards?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Mum used to send us both one from our favourite toys. It’s a tradition that Sam and I continued. It got to be a daft joke between us.’

  Following Gaby Boswell’s indictment, as was the custom, Mariner and his team went out to celebrate in a Harborne pub, joined by Gerry Docherty and some of his crew. Mariner was standing at the bar, getting a round in, when he noticed the clock on the wall above the optics. Suzy would be in the air by now, two-thirds of the way through her flight to Beijing. They had said goodbye outside Y Worry, after the storage firm had been to collect all her things, and before Suzy set off to spend a few days with her parents, prior to flying out. She seemed to have forgiven him for deserting them at Stratford. ‘Told you Shakespeare wasn’t my thing,’ he said.

  ‘How are you holding up?’ asked Sharp, coming up alongside him now. Having put in an appearance, she would soon tactfully retreat and leave them to it.

  ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ said Mariner.

  ‘It’s been a strange time,’ said Sharp. ‘A possible honour killing that turned out to be a mercy killing, a MisPer who was really the victim of honour killing, and for you and Suzy, a mercy killing that wa
s murder.’

  At that moment the door opened and an attractive young woman walked in, scanning the room, as she took off her coat. Having staked out the group in the corner, she went straight over to Kevin Bingley and gave him what was evidently rather more than a friendly kiss, to the accompaniment of cheers and wolf whistles that left Bingley red-faced.

  ‘Who’s that?’ said Mariner.

  Ralph Solomon was by his left shoulder. ‘That’s Sasha Petrovic from Forensics,’ he said.

  ‘So she’s the one who’s been fast-tracking the results for us,’ said Mariner. ‘Bloody hell, that’s a turn up.’

  ‘I know,’ grinned Solomon. ‘You wouldn’t think he had it in him, would you? Pete Stone isn’t impressed though.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with him?’

  ‘Stone hit on her, but she went for Bingley.’

  ‘Is that’s what caused the animosity?’ asked Sharp.

  ‘Well, that and Bingley showing him up at a domestic,’ said Solomon. ‘Stone bottled it, so Bingley had to step up, and got whacked by a baseball bat. Bingley always plays it down, which gets Stone’s goat even more.’

  After a couple of hours, copious amounts of alcohol had been consumed and things were beginning to get loud. Mariner felt strangely detached, as he generally did in these situations. Vicky Jesson and Gerry Docherty seemed to be engaged in an intense conversation that required a lot of physical contact. Seeing them alongside Bingley with Bingley and Sasha draped all over each other, made Mariner think about what he was missing. Taking out his work phone he scrolled idly down through the contacts. Except he wasn’t entirely without purpose. He was checking if one number was still there. Finding it, he escaped to the corridor. Once outside Mariner dialled Eleanor Kingsley’s number. Apart from that day at the hospital, it had been about a year since he’d last seen her. He hadn’t asked, but she could be married with a kid by now for all he knew.

  ‘Hello?’ She sounded sleepy.

  ‘Hello, it’s Tom Mariner.’ He allowed her a couple of seconds to digest this. ‘You may remember, I—’