Deadly Stuff

by Joyce Cato

  Who was the last person that she’d seen wearing such a suit?

  Jenny swallowed hard and took another step closer and then all she could see was scarlet. It seemed to coat the top of the white shirt with a glossy sheen, and was also pooled around arms and elbows, which were lying against the floor at a rather peculiar and downright uncomfortable-looking angle.

  Maurice Raines had been wearing a blue suit during his speech, she thought.

  Maurice Raines was now lying down in the middle of the tables, oozing scarlet all over the place. He looked distinctly untidy. She couldn’t see his face very well, for his head was tilted back behind him on the hard wood floor.

  He looks really uncomfortable lying like that, Jenny thought, and she couldn’t imagine that the fastidious Maurice would be very pleased to be making such a mess, either.

  Jenny took another step closer and now she could see his face. His salt-and-pepper hair looked matted with rust. His bright blue eyes, so startling and attractive in life, looked a little like glass now, somehow clouded and dimmed, as they stared sightlessly along a length of floorboard. Jutting out of his neck at an obscene angle was something long and metallic. Scalpel-like.

  ‘Oh,’ Jenny said.

  Well that explained a lot.

  She looked down, saw that if she moved any further she would step in Maurice’s blood and took a careful step back. And then another. And then another.

  Beside Maurice, she noticed vaguely that a space on the table had been cleared, and that two cups of coffee had been set down there. They both had just the faintest whiff of steam coming from off the top of the dark-brown liquid. Neither cup looked as if they had been drunk from.

  At the entrance to hall, Jenny Starling paused and took a long, deep breath, and told herself not to be an idiot. With fingers that felt curiously numb, she reached into her handbag and drew out her mobile. It seemed to take her a few seconds to remember how to use it, but then she pressed the number nine three times, and waited to be connected.

  When a pleasant female voice asked her which emergency number she required, she asked for the police.

  Jenny found a chair out in the corridor and sat down. It felt a distinct relief to take her not inconsiderable weight off her feet, which were feeling curiously cold, and far removed from the rest of her.

  She’d been told to wait, not to enter the room again or let anyone else enter the room, and that an officer would be with her shortly.

  And all of that was fine by her.

  So Jenny sat and waited. And thought.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d found a body – or been present when someone else had done so, if it came to that. Once, she’d catered a birthday party when someone had been poisoned, which had been a bit tricky, you had to admit. She’d also cooked on board a river-boat when someone else had been killed and dumped in her pantry, if you please. She’d even been snowed in at a remote farmhouse where a killer had been on the loose, when for the first time ever, she’d nearly burned the brussels. She’d even, for Pete’s sake, helped out an aristocratic family when someone had had the bad manners to bump off the governess.

  And now here she was, in that bastion of genteel aloofness, an Oxford college, and someone else lay dead a few feet away. There was no getting away from it – she seemed to have a knack for dead bodies. Well, for those and Yorkshire puddings and Dundee cake.

  Which was something that any investigating officer called out to this particular crime scene was quickly going to cotton on to.

  Gloomily, she wondered what the chances were that before the day was out, she’d have to telephone one of her parents to get her out of jug and stand her bail. They had to be pretty fair, she supposed, which posed all the usual problems. Would she be able to even get in touch with her mother who was no doubt off somewhere inaccessible saving the planet? She couldn’t see her dear mater wanting to climb down out of a tree house in some doomed forest simply in order to get her only offspring out of the pokey. Her father wasn’t much of a better bet either: a celebrity chef, he was probably either in Hollywood cooking for a double-D bra-sized starlet, or maybe in Paris making some five-star hotelier’s life miserable. Either way, getting on a jet and riding to the rescue was probably not going to be his number one priority.

  She glanced up as she saw two uniformed policemen walking towards her. One of them was talking into a radio attached to his collar. Perhaps she should have called the bursar, or Art McIntyre for back up. Then she realized that the bursar would put the college first and foremost, and, if throwing her, Jenny Starling, to the wolves would save his establishment from embarrassment, he’d probably do it in a heartbeat, and with all the will in the world, Art would probably be about as useful in a crisis as a well-known odoriferous commodity in a colander.

  Jenny watched them bleakly as they approached her, and then stopped by the entrance to ask her if she was the lady who’d reported a dead body.

  Jenny briefly contemplated whether or not to admit to being a lady, then decided that now was probably not the time for semantics, and simply nodded curtly, and pointed into the hall with one finger. One of the uniformed men went inside whilst the other remained standing just in front of her.

  Jenny wondered if he really thought she was going to make a run for it, and sighed gently. Her Junoesque curves weren’t exactly built for speed, but even so, if she’d thought that her knees were in any shape to take the strain, she might have given serious thought to giving it a go. As it was, she was still feeling distinctly shaky and so decided to stay put.

  She took a long, deep breath as the uniformed officer came out and gave his companion a speaking look. Without looking at Jenny, he bent his head to talk into the radio again, no doubt confirming that this wasn’t a crank call and asking for back-up and a SOCO team.

  Here we go again, Jenny thought grimly.

  Detective Trevor Golder indicated left at the Martyr’s Memorial and said, ‘Bloody Chief Inspector Morse.’

  Beside him, Sergeant Peter Trent bit back a grin.

  When their boss had called them in to tell them that they had a suspicious death at St Bede’s College, and that the case was theirs, Peter Trent had known that they’d be in for it. Whilst Inspector Morse, that wonderful creation of an Oxford don, had been popular for so many years with the public in general, DI Golder was known not to be a fan. Inevitably, once word got around down at the station that he’d got a live one – or rather, exactly the opposite – in an Oxford college, prime Morse country if ever there was any, then every lowly constable up to the know-it-alls who ran traffic would soon be taking the Michael.

  Sergeant Trent could hear them now: and just how long would it be before the comedians started calling him Lewis? Not that he minded being thought of as Morse’s loyal sidekick, now that he’d been given his own TV series!

  ‘The first snotty-nosed little sod who mentions Morse around me is going to find himself working in Records for a month,’ Trevor Golder muttered darkly, as he drew the car to a halt on double yellow lines on the Woodstock Road.

  ‘Better park over there in the pub car-park, guv,’ Peter Trent said, helpfully pointing.

  Trevor grunted but did as he was advised. He wouldn’t put it past those twits in Traffic to have him towed; that seemed to be their level of humour in traffic these days.

  The two men crossed the busy main road and stepped into the hallowed portals of St Bede’s. There, the porter took their names and directed them to hall. No doubt, by now, the word was spreading, and Trevor wondered what officious college bigwig he’d have to placate before he could start to do his job properly.

  The porter watched them go thoughtfully.

  Trevor, despite being the senior man in rank, was nearly a decade and a half younger than Peter Trent, who was now in his early fifties, and could have retired the previous year had he wanted to. Whereas Trent was white-haired, with a neatly trimmed white beard and pronounced crows’ feet at the corner of twinkling brown eyes, Gol
der was heavier, taller and had thinning light-brown hair. The porter continued to watch the two police officers disappear into one of the main residential blocks, then was immediately on the telephone to the bursar.

  He knew better than to telephone the principal’s office.

  Everyone knew that the principal was hardly ever in college. In the Orient, yes. On the golf-course, yes. In a country cottage belonging to a former disgraced politician, yes. In college? No.

  ‘So what do we know so far?’ Trevor asked, as they made their way to the crime scene, more out of habit than because he hadn’t been paying due attention to his superior officer’s brief initial instructions.

  ‘A woman caller from the college logged a triple nine at eleven fifty-eight. Responding uniforms confirm a deceased male in suspicious circumstances. SOCO is already on site,’ Trent confirmed crisply.

  Trevor sighed as they stepped into a large hall, redolent with the scent of history and academic achievement.

  ‘Bloody Morse,’ he said morosely.

  The two men walked up a wide wooden staircase, past paintings depicting prior smug or aloof academics, and found themselves in a long landing. A stuffed owl in an alcove stared out at them as they passed and halfway down, Trevor saw a young constable in uniform straighten up a little at the sight of him.

  He was standing next to a striking-looking woman who was sitting, straightbacked, in a chair pressed against the wall. He glanced at her curiously as he stepped by her and into the hall, where white-suited technicians were already at work.

  What he saw was a tall, large-boned, beautiful, dark-haired woman with the loveliest eyes he’d seen in a long time. And she gave him an enigmatic look back that made his toenails curl.

  Trevor made no move to go further into the room until he was spotted by one of the SOCO team, who pointed down at some temporary wooden partitions and beckoned to him that it was all right to come closer. As they did so, Trevor was surprised to notice that a large, stuffed, black bear was standing in pride of place on a slightly elevated platform that housed high table. Beside it, was a porter’s trolley, and an empty case.

  Dragging his eyes from it, Trevor and Peter Trent moved in for their first view of the victim.

  ‘One Mr Maurice Raines,’ the pathologist, who was kneeling beside the body, looked up at them and held out a black wallet, now neatly encased in an evidence bag. ‘Aged between forty-five and fifty-five, I’d say. A little overweight, but relatively fit, for all that. No signs of defensive wounds that I can see, and I don’t see why the cause of death shouldn’t be the obvious one.’

  Both police officers looked at the metal implement still embedded in the body’s neck.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Peter Trent muttered graphically.

  ‘Bloody hell is right,’ the pathologist agreed cheerfully. He was a smallish, compact man in his early thirties, who’d worked for a long time in the A&E departments when he’d been earning his stripes, and had the confidence of a man who’d seen it all. Or thought he had. ‘As you can see, he bled out. I’d say it was odds on that he died from either shock or exsanguination. If he was lucky, his heart would have given out fairly quickly and it would have been lights out before he really knew what was happening.’

  Peter Trent swallowed hard and looked away.

  ‘OK. We won’t get in your way,’ Trevor said, turning around and nodding curtly at his sergeant to follow him. He was a great believer in letting the professional technical staff get on with the how, when and whats, whilst he concentrated on the who and the why.

  ‘Constable,’ – he nodded at the young man in uniform and then glanced curiously at the striking woman who was still waiting patiently in the chair – ‘I take it this is the young lady who called us?’

  ‘Yes, sir. A Miss Jennifer Starling. She was hired by the bursar of the college a few days ago to cater to the summer conference season here.’ The constable, a bright lad who was anxious to get on, clearly hadn’t wasted his few moments alone with the principal witness so far.

  Trevor nodded gravely. ‘Ah,’ he said. So she was not a college regular then. That could prove very helpful indeed. He was already anticipating that the college would quickly close ranks against him once it realized the severity of the situation. Unless he missed his guess, their main priority would be in keeping the publicity to a minimum whilst interrupting their money-making enterprises as little as possible. The fact that a man lay dead would probably only be construed as unfortunate. He could almost see some gown-wearing, bespectacled college bigwig saying as much even now.

  ‘Did you know the victim, Miss Starling?’ Trevor asked quietly.

  ‘Not really. That is, I knew who he was. He was the driving force behind the current conference that we’re hosting right now. Or at least, that is how I’m sure that he saw himself,’ she corrected herself quickly. Remembering some of the less than reverential comments she’d heard others making about him, she doubted that the late Mr Raines’s opinion of himself was shared by everyone.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I think they’re called the Greater Ribble Valley & Jessop Taxidermy Society,’ Jenny said. ‘I just tend to think of them as them as the Great Jessies.’

  Peter Trent grinned over his notebook.

  ‘Right,’ Trevor said, blinking slightly.

  Jenny glanced at him curiously as she was sure she’d heard him mutter something under his breath about bloody Morse but she must have got that wrong.

  ‘You found the body just before noon? Did you call us right away?’ Trevor asked next.

  ‘Yes. I was just leaving to have a walk around town. I won’t be needed in the kitchens for a few hours, and wanted to stretch my legs. When I was passing hall, I looked in, well, mainly because I was curious to find it empty, and then saw Mr Raines lying on the floor. I realized he was, well, dead and called you right away. I didn’t step in any of the blood: I didn’t touch the body in any way, I didn’t see anyone else leaving the Hall or going down the corridor in front of me, and I didn’t hear anyone talking or any footsteps. I noticed nothing in particular when I was in there.’

  She paused and waited.

  Trevor Golder stared at her hard for a few seconds, and then nodded slowly. ‘OK. That was a very concise and pertinent statement. Thank you. You said you didn’t really know Mr Raines? Had you in fact met him or talked to him?’

  ‘Briefly. I checked up on them after dinner last night, just to get some feedback on their enjoyment of their first meal in college. I spoke to Mr Raines briefly, along with Vicki Voight, who’s the society’s treasurer and one or two other members. A Mr Ian Glendower, and his girlfriend, Pippa Foxton. I should tell you that I was also present in hall this morning when Mr Raines gave his opening address, and later spoke to the journalist whom the conference hired to cover their event, a Mr Charles Foster. Also, at breakfast, I spoke to one of the older members, I think his name was Robert Llewellyn. Oh, and a newer member of the society called Mr James Raye.’

  Peter Trent listed the names with silent admiration. If only all witnesses could be this clear-thinking and methodical, his life would be a lot easier.

  Trevor’s eyes narrowed as the college cook continued speaking. He could see that she was pale, and her hands were clasped still and tight in her lap, both signs of shock, he was sure. Yet she was keeping a remarkably clear head. It was almost as if she’d done all this before. The moment he got back to the station, he’d be sure to have a computer search made on Miss Jennifer Starling as a matter of priority. Not that he thought her a serious contender. Whoever had killed Mr Maurice Raines must have bloodstains on their clothes and probably hands as well.

  Of course, the college cook could have killed him, gone back to her room, washed and changed and then called it in. Being the first person to find the body always kept anyone at the top of the suspect list, in Trevor’s opinion.

  ‘Do you know of any reason why anyone would want to kill Mr Raines?’ He asked the stock question without any
real hope of anything useful coming of it. So, when the witness was curiously silent, he found his interest peaking.

  Jenny hesitated uneasily. ‘Not of my own knowledge,’ she said eventually.

  Trevor glanced at Trent, who raised one white eyebrow. ‘That’s a rather carefully worded statement, Miss Starling,’ Trevor said at last. ‘Do you think you could be a bit more forthcoming?’

  ‘Like I said, Inspector, I mingled a little with these people. Like people anywhere, they’re fascinated with and by themselves, and they… gossip.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with gossip, not in my line of work, anyway,’ Trevor said cheerfully. ‘Please feel free to pass it on,’ he encouraged.

  Jenny sighed, not for one minute fooled by his hearty and friendly demeanour. Still, he was being canny, and that was a good thing. All in all, she rather liked her policemen to be wily. It made her feel safer.

  ‘I had the impression from several people, that Mr Raines was a bit of a ladies man,’ she said carefully. ‘I also sensed that things were a little… cool, perhaps, between Mr Raines and the treasurer, Mrs Voight. And I think Mr Glendower might not have appreciated the attention Mr Raines had been paying to his girlfriend.’

  And as if mentioning her name had somehow summoned her up, Pippa Foxton’s attractive form suddenly appeared at the far end of the hallway and began to walk towards them. She slowed as she took in the uniform of the younger police constable, and her pretty face sharpened with curiosity. ‘Hello? Something wrong?’ she asked uncertainly. ‘Don’t say we’ve had a robbery! Oh good grief, don’t tell me someone has made off with Emily’s damned hedgehogs! We’ll never hear the end of it.’

  She laughed uncertainly, and glanced from Trevor to Peter. She was wearing very tight-fitting jeans and a white silk top that clung to every curve she had. Both Jenny and Pippa noticed both men noticing.

  ‘This is Miss Foxton,’ Jenny said neutrally, but with a wry twist to her lips. She was rather curious as to which of the two men the little minx would vamp first.