Black Heart

by Anna-Lou Weatherley

  It had been handwritten on bonded paper, just as she’d requested, and she took it from the briefcase along with a fancy ballpoint silver pen. Walking barefoot back into the bathroom she casually took his arm and placed the pen between his fingers, pressing down hard. Then she placed the note next to the bath and randomly dropped the ballpoint on top. She looked at the mantle clock, just visible from the doorway: it was 3.45 p.m. She’d been in the suite for just three quarters of the hour she had set herself to complete the task, and she was pleased she’d managed everything in such good time. But had she forgotten something? A nag in her solar plexus told her she had. She stood for a moment, mentally going through the list. The razor blade! Jesus, she berated herself silently as she retrieved a fresh one from her make-up bag and returned to the bathroom. She dipped it in some of the congealing blood on the floor before attempting to place it between his thumb and forefinger. Clearly however, he no longer possessed the ability to grip. On the third attempt she cursed him and gave up, watching as it remained in his fingers for a split second before falling into the pool of blood next to the bath. That could figure, she surmised.

  Returning to the main suite, she removed the rubber gloves and placed them into her tote before taking a final look around her, running through her mental checklist. Once she was satisfied she had not overlooked anything, she took the small soft toy bear from her tote and threw it onto the bed, picked up her bag, slid into her boots and opened the door with the sleeve of her jacket.

  ‘Adios, Daddy Bear,’ she said quietly as she shut the door behind her, removing the ‘Do Not Disturb’ notice on the handle.

  Chapter Two

  Suicides. They’re a hazard of the job. One of many you encounter as a copper, you’re probably thinking, but suicides especially bum me out. I have empathy for suicides, for the people that top themselves and those they leave behind. Believe me, not so long ago I wasn’t too far from that kind of despair myself. Still, my heart sank when I got the call from my governor, Ken Woods.

  ‘We’ve got a body down at that fancy hotel on Knightsbridge, La Reymond. Some banker in the penthouse suite. He’s been ID’d as a Nigel Baxter, forty-seven. It looks like possible suicide.’

  ‘Why a suicide?’

  ‘His wrists were slit,’ Woods says dispassionately.

  ‘The chambermaid has just found him in a bath full of blood.’

  I hang up, sigh, make a U-turn and head over there.

  * * *

  The maid’s crying when I reach the hotel. She looks shaken up, understandably so. She’s not getting paid enough to have to deal with this kind of shit. Come to mention it, neither am I.

  ‘I… I find him this morning.’

  She’s Eastern European, I can tell by the accent. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Irena,’ she sniffs, wiping her nose with her sleeve.

  ‘Irena, can you tell me, was there a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door of the suite?’ I keep my tone as gentle as possible, poor girl looks like she’s about to collapse.

  ‘No… No sir, it was not there… I check… and is why I go in.’

  I nod, make some notes. The manager’s standing next to her – looks full of his own importance, but perhaps I’m being too quick to judge, another hazard of the job. His name is Martin Spencer, a pretty un-fancy name for a pretty fancy hotel.

  ‘A standard double room in this establishment costs around the £600 mark,’ he tells me, as if this of any relevance.

  ‘A night?’

  He casts me a look.

  ‘Yes, a night, and the penthouse suite costs around £3,000.’

  I raise an eyebrow. For that sort of money, I’d expect Angelina Jolie to change my sheets.

  ‘Was Mr Baxter a regular client?’

  ‘No,’ he says sharply, ‘not that I’m aware of, but we have a lot of clientele, Detective and I don’t get to know them all personally. I can double-check on the system to see if he’s been here before though.’

  Helpful.

  ‘Do you know if Mr Baxter arrived alone?’

  ‘Yes, according to the concierge, and no one checked in as his guest either.’

  The maid looks like she’s going to throw up, so I quickly ask her what time she entered the suite this morning and she looks at her manager as though asking permission to speak.

  ‘I think… maybe 11 a.m.,’ she says nervously.

  It’s now 11.38. Apparently there are already two PCs in the penthouse with the body, so I nod and immediately head up in the lift. I hope to God they haven’t disturbed anything.

  As I step out of the lift, my phone beeps. I have a good idea who it might be and I’m right: Shirley, the online date I met for the first time a couple of days ago, after a week of sending pleasantries through cyberspace. For the most part, the few women I’ve actually met since I began my online quest to find happiness again after Rachel – if that could ever be possible – have seemed intrigued by the fact I’m a copper, a detective copper no less. Maybe a couple have even been impressed. But one or two have clearly been put off by my career; no doubt by the thought of long hours, shift work and the potential emotional residue that can come with dealing with murders, rapists, paedos and life’s ne’er-do-wells.

  Rachel never minded my work. She was the woman I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with. She was also going to be the mother of my child, maybe even children. But then she was taken from me. One day she was here, and we shared a life together, and then it was all over. Finished. Done. The piece of shit who ploughed into her motorbike got two years. Death by dangerous driving. Me and her family got a life sentence instead. A life without Rachel. Oh, and a life without our ten-week-old baby who was growing inside her.

  I don’t read the message and it’s already left my mind as I enter suite 106. The stench of death and of perfume are the first things I notice when I walk in. My sense of smell is acute; Rachel used to say I could smell a sparrow’s fart from ten paces.

  ‘Hello Sir,’ two PCs greet me respectfully with a nod, ‘we’ve ID’d the body, there was a wallet on the bedside table,’ the male PC says.

  ‘Good,’ I say, giving the room an initial once over. ‘Has anything else been touched?’

  ‘No Sir,’ the female PC responds, ‘forensics are on their way now.’

  I nod. ‘Nice job.’

  The suite is huge, a massive studio-type room with white leather couches and glass bowls filled with green apples. There’s a large zebra-print rug on the floor and a low glass table with an open briefcase on it, plus a posh kitchen area with one of those huge American-style fridges that dispense ice, and plenty of other high-end gadgetry. It looks like nothing’s been touched. One of the PCs shows me Nigel Baxter’s ID – his driver’s licence – and I note it’s registered to a Chelsea address. The shutters are drawn so I open them to let some light in and get a better perspective, before putting on a pair of blue latex gloves. I see a Rolex watch on the bedside table and a small teddy bear on the bed. The bed is round and large – big enough for an orgy – and it looks as though it’s been occupied, or at least laid on, as the pillows are a little out of place and there are slight indentations on the sheets. There’s a pair of men’s Calvin Klein briefs on the floor next to the bed. They appear to have been discarded in haste, gusset side up.

  I nod to one of the PCs and he shows me into the bathroom. Baxter is lying in the bath, his head tilted back onto one side with his eyes and mouth open. His left arm is flopped over the side of the large tub, covered in blood from the wrist down. The wound looks deep and I note that it’s vertical. He’s naked. There’s a considerable amount of blood on the tiles next to the bath – drips, splashes and spray, no doubt from the artery explosion when he, or someone else, cut his wrists open. His toes, which have taken on a touch of blue, are sticking ghoulishly out of the red water.

  ‘It smells of perfume in here,’ I say to the PCs.

  I hear forensics arriving and leave the bathroom for a mome
nt to brief them.

  ‘Seal off the room, bag up his belongings and the bear after you’ve done the scene pics. Okay? There will be a standard inquest.’ I hesitate. I haven’t decided what’s what yet, but my subconscious is nagging at me. ‘Oh, and dust for prints, yeah?’

  One of the forensics looks up at me. She knows that’s not standard procedure in a suicide.

  * * *

  Paramedics arrive and I let the PCs deal with them. I need to get a handle on things first, make an assessment. There’s a letter on the floor beside the blood, a silver pen and a razor blade – standard men’s single edge. It’s almost completely covered in blood and I tell forensics to bag it up. The note says: ‘My beautiful darling, I’m sorry, please forgive me’ and it’s signed with a kiss. There’s a heart-shaped empty box of chocolates. They bag that up too.

  I scan the bathroom and notice that there’s only one bath towel on the rail. There’s a flannel missing too. I get a whiff of perfume again and I have a weird feeling I know what it is. It’s a familiar smell and I wonder if it might be a scent that Rach used to use? She wasn’t a particularly girlie woman, not high-maintenance at all, but she was still feminine somehow, even in her biker leathers. And she liked perfume. I wish I’d bought her more.

  I look at the products and make a note to ask the hotel about them, to check and see if any are missing. There’s nothing in the waste bin.

  The coroner, Vic Leyton, is on the body now. I like Vic; she’s eccentric but warm, witty and very good at her job.

  ‘What’s the estimated TOD, Vic?’ I ask.

  She shrugs a little by way of greeting me. A gesture that suggests we shouldn’t keep meeting like this.

  ‘I’d say anywhere between 2 and 5 p.m. yesterday afternoon.’

  I nod.

  ‘And what do you reckon?’

  ‘Difficult to tell… obviously he, or whoever, meant business though. The cuts were vertical.’

  ‘Vertical?’

  ‘Yes, verticals open a larger amount of the vein, therefore he would have bled out faster, plus it’s more difficult to stop the flow by applying pressure. He hit an artery both times by the look of him, but as the song goes, the first cut was the deepest.’

  I smile. Good old Vic. She could still crack a funny joke even when faced with such a miserable scene.

  * * *

  The paramedics begin lifting the body from the tub. Poor bastards. Then I notice the towel wedged behind his back, almost like some kind of support. This is odd. Why would you place a towel behind your back while you were in the bath about to commit hari-kari?

  I let the paras do their job and go back into the main suite. As I walk through the room I get a whiff of furniture polish, like the place has already been cleaned. I spy an ice bucket and a bottle of champagne, one of those magnums, the big ones all those Formula One drivers empty over themselves when they win – I’ve always found that quite vulgar, a gross display of excessive wealth. There’s a solitary glass on the marble kitchen worktop with a drop still in it, and a second glass that appears unused still in the ice bucket with the bottle.

  I start summing up: there’s a rudimentary suicide note that gives nothing by way of explanation as to why Nigel Baxter opened himself up in the bath; he’d ordered a magnum of champagne and eaten chocolates – a final meal? The teddy bear on the bed and the bath towel behind him, the perfumed smell of the bathwater and the polish, like the place had been given a once over. On the surface, it appears as though Mr Baxter had been alone and had decided to kill himself in in the most brutal way. But the post-mortem might shed more light. And I need to speak to the maid and hotel staff in more detail, check the CCTV. But there is something… my intuition mainly, that makes me think that Baxter wasn’t, or hadn’t been, alone in this room. Over the years I’ve come to trust that feeling. Like Rach used to say, ‘I’m a professional cynic’.

  My phone rings. It’s Woods.

  ‘I’ve got Janet Baxter down in one of the interview rooms,’ he said. ‘She came in to report her husband – Nigel Baxter – missing. Can you get back here now?’

  I inwardly sigh, feeling my lungs deflating as I reply, ‘Yes Sir, on my way.’

  Suicides: I really fucking hate them.

  Chapter Three

  Janet Baxter looks as you might imagine someone who has just discovered that their husband of nigh-on twenty years has just done himself in would look. Her round face is puffy and red from crying and she’s hovering precariously somewhere between shock and full-blown hysteria. I feel for Janet: I’ve been there too, and it ain’t a nice place to be. ‘Can I get you some coffee, or a tea perhaps? She shakes her head. ‘Is there anyone I can call for you, Janet? Anyone you’d like to be here with you?’ She continues to shake her head.

  ‘There is no way my Nigel would have done this,’ she hiccups, pulling her coat around her solid frame in an obvious bid to comfort herself. ‘We’ve got two beautiful children, our youngest has only just started secondary school, and Lara, Lara’s halfway through her GCSEs… Those kids were his life; we were his life. He was happy… no, no I won’t have this… my Nige would never have taken his own life!’

  I try not to say too much at this point, I just let Janet speak, or shriek; let her vent, release some of the anguish, frustration and pain that’s visibly tearing through her like a tornado. I can see she’s in denial, the early stage of disbelief when she’s heard the words but they’ve yet to sink in. I know that stage: it’s fucking painful. But worse, I know the real anguish is yet to come.

  ‘When did you last see your husband, Janet?’

  ‘Before he left for work yesterday morning. He kissed me goodbye.’

  ‘Did you notice anything unusual, any cause for concern?

  ‘No. Nothing, nothing at all. He seemed in a good mood, normal… just Nigel… but when he didn’t come home that evening… well, naturally I panicked. Nigel often travels for work, mainly to Japan and the US, but those trips are planned in advance and he always, always makes me aware of them,’ she splutters. ‘We’ve been together over two decades,’ she says, pain evident in her voice, ‘and Nige has never, ever not once come home without telling me first… without calling.’

  I nod, understanding as she goes on to tell me, through mucusy sobs, that they would’ve celebrated their twentieth anniversary next week and that they were planning a big family gathering at their Chelsea home.

  ‘Instead’, she says, ‘I’ll be planning his burial now,’ and finally breaks down.

  The female PC with me, Jill Murray, who looks young enough to be Janet’s daughter, attempts to comfort her, but it seems futile – and all three of us know it. Still, Janet seems like a nice, unremarkable kind of woman: your average middle-aged, stay-at-home wife and mother, devoted to her husband and kids, putting herself last in the process. I feel for the woman because we both know – though it’s of course unspoken – that after today her life will never be the same again and that everything she has known is going to irrevocably change. And she never asked for any of it.

  I broach my questions with gentle consideration, wishing I didn’t have to ask. ‘Janet, can you offer any explanation as to why Nigel might have been occupying the penthouse suite at La Reymond hotel? Did he tell you he was going to be there? Was there any indication that he was suffering from depression, you know, lack of appetite, unusual behaviour, loss of libido? Was he under pressure at work? Did he have any financial issues, family or health problems? Had he lost a loved one recently?’

  Each question is met with a resounding ‘no’.

  ‘My Nige loved his food and he loved his job, even if it was a little stressful at times, but then whose isn’t?’ she asks.

  I like her for that. Even now she’s considering others. But now I have to ask the question I really don’t want to ask, the one that always sends the wives into an even darker abyss. ‘Janet, could Nigel have been having an affair?’

  She breaks down again, crumples like paper in fro
nt of me, almost shrinks before my eyes.

  Hazard of the job.

  ‘No! No… I don’t think so…’ Her face reddens. ‘We were happily married Detective, in every sense, even though… well… the honeymoon phase had long since passed.’

  I nod, manage a small smile.

  ‘We got on well, rarely argued. We were happy.’

  I tell her about the note and she cries harder; I don’t tell her about the champagne, the teddy bear, the smell of perfume or the towel. I’m judging this one on a need-to-know basis.

  ‘I don’t know how I’m going to tell the kids,’ she says, as much to herself as to me. And I nod again and give her the spiel about family liaison and victim support, and ask Jill to provide her with whatever she needs. Only, what Janet Baxter really needs is for Nigel Baxter not to have topped himself.

  * * *

  ‘I want his computer checked by forensics, his phone records gone through, his schedule scrutinised,’ I tell the team back in the incident room. ‘I want to dig deep into Baxter’s life, find out his movements, find out what, or whom he’s been hiding. We need to wait for the inquest outcome, but in the meantime I want CCTV from the hotel, and the staff questioned.’ There are nods and murmurs from the team as they gear themselves up for business. Suicides usually leave an open verdict, but there’s something, besides his adamant wife, about Nigel Baxter that tells me that something is not quite right, that things are not as they seem in this case.