To Die For

by Janet Neel

  ‘Well, they can’t do much else. They’re better off waiting for probate.’

  ‘Did Selina … is there any cash as well as the shares?’

  ‘You must be joking. She had some from her trustees, wouldn’t tell me how much, but she spent it. I’m going to post them all her credit card bills. See if they’ll do those at least.’ He hesitated. ‘I asked Michael Owens if he would lend a bit on her shares. He’s thinking about it.’

  The advantages of having that sober banker tied financially into a sale were considerable, and Brian Rubin was cheered. ‘He’s known you a long time, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Since we were nine. Never lent me any money. Not sure he’s going to start now.’

  ‘I would if I could, you know, Rich, against those shares. But the fucking bank took it all this month. I don’t know how they expect me to stay in business.’

  They parted, gloomily, and Brian slid into his car just as his mobile started to ring. ‘Hello.’ The voice was as irritatingly cool and detached as the rest of the broker’s personality. ‘Is Richard Marsh-Hayden still with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mm. Brian, we think you should consider looking elsewhere for a deal.’

  ‘I bloody have looked elsewhere. Café de la Paix is the only thing around.’

  ‘I know it’s disappointing. But it occurred to us there may be another problemette here. Don’t know how well you know Marsh- Hayden? It’s his wife that was murdered, and most murders are domestic. And if, God forbid, that’s what happened then he can’t inherit those shares anyway. Chap who did the killing mustn’t benefit. Makes sense really. Brian?’

  Brian Rubin was sitting in the car, heart hammering and an odd ringing in his ears. ‘Yeh, I’m here.’ He rallied. ‘But then the shares just wouldn’t get voted, and the Café shareholders who want to sell would still have a majority.’

  He heard the man at the other end take a long, careful breath.

  ‘Don’t say it,’ he pleaded. ‘You’d never get the institutions to commit.’

  ‘Would make a difficult introduction to the placing document, yes. I’ve asked Joscelin to do a trawl, on the chance we know something or someone you don’t. Very bad luck.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I agree. But you never know. In six months’ time all this will be past, one way or another, and if you stay in touch you could get the Caffs a good deal cheaper than now.’

  ‘So, we’ve no idea when she died?’

  ‘That’s the point about deep freezing, John. It stops all the processes from which I might have been able to offer you an approximate time of death. There was no decomposition, until we got the corpus thawed out. The murderer had had to fold her up to get her into the black bag as well.’

  John McLeish considered, despondently, what he was being told. ‘So she’d have been put in the freezer immediately – I mean, right after she died.’

  ‘Yes, I think so. When I say there was no decomposition, well, that’s almost right, but it probably took twenty-four hours to freeze the corpus to the point where nothing could happen. So there are some signs.’

  ‘What about rigor?’

  ‘Oh, all that happened. Or the rigor did. She was put into the freezer on the side doubled up – knees up to the chin – so he must have done all that before rigor set in. Then it set in and didn’t wear off until we defrosted the body. So she probably went in within a couple of hours of death. But as to which day she was put in, well, you’re back to police work, John. And you, Inspector.’

  Bruce Davidson received this as a signal to join in. ‘Thanks, Doc. Now, you reckon she was strangled from behind. With a rope?’

  ‘No. See, here.’ He jabbed a finger at one of the photographs spread all over his desk. ‘Cloth – it didn’t cut as a rope would have. Even a tea towel – something like that.’

  ‘What’s the blood?’ John McLeish was bent over the photographs.

  ‘Her own. A nosebleed. All that’ – he indicated the blotchy picture – ‘is hers.’

  ‘Might have got on the murderer’s clothes, though.’

  ‘Difficult to move a body with a nosebleed without getting it on yourself. He might have waited, though. It would stop, you know, a few minutes after death.’

  Yes, McLeish thought, suddenly in the scene, seeing a heavy figure relaxing as the struggling creature in his hands went limp and heavy, but he wouldn’t have liked waiting, would he? He’d have wanted to shift the body immediately from wherever it was he’d killed her and get it hidden. So the best bet is he got some of her blood on himself. He saw Doc Smith look at his watch.

  ‘Anything else useful? Sorry to badger you ahead of the report, Doc. Did she struggle?’

  ‘Yes, poor girl. Torn fingernails, bits of white cotton under them: but probably not very effectively. Not easy to struggle, you know, if you’ve got someone behind you who knows what they’re doing. You can’t scratch their eyes out, or kick them in the goolies …’

  ‘So he knew what he was doing?’

  ‘Or she. Deceased was a small woman. About eight stone and chicken-boned. Strong girl could have done it.’

  ‘Take long, would it?’ Davidson asked, seeing McLeish disconcerted.

  ‘Four to five minutes. And the victim probably didn’t make a lot of noise.’

  ‘Could she have scratched the murderer’s hands?’

  ‘She could, but there’s no traces under the fingernails. Her first instinct would have been to try and loosen the noose, do you see? Get some air. So she seems to have pulled at the cloth that was strangling her and she may have pulled at his wrists as well. There are two sorts of fibres under the nails, it’s all in the report.’

  ‘She didn’t get at the murderer’s hands at all?’ McLeish asked, coming out of his trance.

  Doc Smith, on the edge of his chair to leave, changed his mind. ‘Sit down, Inspector Davidson. There. Now I’m coming round the back of you with my handkerchief – dear me, not that one, but I’ve a better one here. Now I’m putting it round your neck – it’s too thin, but it’ll do for demonstration purposes – and I’m twisting it. What can you do?’

  ‘I can dive forward, pushing the chair into your stomach and breaking your grip.’

  ‘You’re young, you’re a policeman, you’ve had a moment to think about it and you’re not really choking. Try again.’

  Davidson put his hands to his throat to loosen the noose and Dr Smith tightened it sharply. Davidson reached behind over his head to make a grab but could only find air.

  ‘I’m leaning back. And I’m still tightening the band.’

  Davidson reached behind his own neck and tried to impede the strong hands, clawing at the wrists and finally succeeding.

  ‘Very good, Inspector.’ Doc Smith was out of breath and wheezing distressfully. ‘But you only just managed to get to my hands, and you’re bigger and younger than I am, not an eight-stone female. And you weren’t really running out of air or frightened.’

  ‘Sit down, Doc, for God’s sake.’ McLeish guided him anxiously to a chair. ‘My Commander will never forgive me if I’ve done in our best doctor.’

  ‘Flattery will get you a very long way.’ Doc Smith sat down, still wheezing, but turning a better colour. ‘I’ve made my point, I hope. You’re not looking for a gorilla here, male or female.’

  ‘And I’m grateful.’ McLeish eyed him uneasily. ‘I’d like to go and talk to Forensic, but …’

  ‘I expect to live, John. Ask that young woman to give me some coffee. Stimulates the heart.’

  They went over to Forensic after waiting to see a coffee into the hands of the police surgeon. Some of the paperwork had caught up with them by then; Bow Street had sent over everything they had and they stopped for a preliminary run through, comparing the statements. They agreed that the statement from Antoine Dhéry would need immediate investigation. Antoine was a sous chef – I must get a grip of the hierarchy, McLeish observed – a French native with not very good English but
nonetheless clear that the deceased had come in to see Chef about 5.30 p.m. on the Thursday and they had had an argument, from which the deceased had retired pink in the face and angry. Chef had also been agitated, according to Antoine, observing that management was a pain in the backside and an obstacle to progress in all institutions. Davidson fished out three other statements to confirm that Chef was not a Frenchman like his sous chefs – whatever they were – but Irish born, Tony Gallagher. His own statement confirmed that he had indeed had an argument with the deceased but had forgotten about it as soon as she had left the kitchen.

  McLeish thought about Tony Gallagher and the unidentified cotton under the dead woman’s nails all the way to Forensic, up to the moment when he was staring at the enormously enlarged fibres through the microscope.

  ‘What’s that bit of green?’

  ‘A thread. Same stuff. Bit of the design on the tea towel. These bits here are different, they don’t come from a tea towel. Different cloth, stronger, closer weave.’

  ‘A uniform perhaps?’

  He had hardly been surprised after this to discover from Judith Delves’ statement that the kitchen staff at Café de la Paix all wore white jackets, as provided by management, and that all tea towels were white with a green logo. ‘Start with Gallagher,’ he said, and Davidson left to run him to earth. ‘Get him here, not the restaurant.’

  He waited, reading as fast as he could while Davidson made phone calls.

  ‘He’s bringing his solicitor,’ Davidson reported.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Graebner. In the person of Mr Matthew Sutherland, our old friend.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ McLeish said, remembering that Francesca had told him Matthew was advising the chef at Café de la Paix. Well, even the cocky Matthew could not have expected a murder investigation. He sighed; he found Matthew tiring, but on the other hand and in fairness, that young man had saved a life the last time they had met by deciding precisely where danger lay while he himself had been still hesitating.

  He shook hands with Matthew and asked him how he was, only because it gave him and Davidson the chance to observe his client, Tony Gallagher, in his late twenties, fair, stocky, carefully dressed in a good jacket and tie which could not disguise the wide shoulders. And he had enormous hands and a good, strong grip. The dead girl would have been almost as tall but nowhere near his weight and no match for those big hands, the palms so wide and thick as to make the long fingers look stubby.

  He started gently, taking Gallagher through his previous statement, then moved on to ask about the kitchen jackets and tea towels, observing that Gallagher was showing no surprise at this line of questioning, nor was his solicitor. Well, Sutherland was a clever lad and would have known there would likely be something under the fingernails. And Gallagher had all the details clear. There were at least five dozen tea towels, to his knowledge, stored in the linen shelves, next to the kitchen staff’s tunic jackets, the waiters’ aprons, and all the spare paper goods – napkins, lavatory paper, and so on. Anyone could pick up a tea towel as they passed, yes, and it would go quite unremarked.

  Armed with the information, transmitted by a phone call from Forensic, that some of the fibres beneath Selina’s fingernails did match the jackets worn by kitchen staff, they moved on to what he hoped would be more useful ground. There were, he was depressed but not surprised to learn, no fewer than eighty white jackets on the go, each kitchen person had four issued individually, but the laundry was done centrally; everyone stripped off their jackets at the end of a shift and dropped them into a giant wicker crate supplied by the laundry, which was collected every morning. All laundry including the tea towels went in the crate, yes. A kitchen shift consisted of ten to twelve people, so every morning twenty to twenty-four were taken away and, yes, twenty to twenty-four returned. Except on Sundays, and no, Detective Chief Superintendent, all kitchen staff changed every day, but by Tuesday morning there would hardly be a clean jacket on the shelf. The laundry fortunately arrived at 9 a.m. just ahead of Tuesday’s incoming day shift.

  ‘So every jacket gets washed every four days?’ Davidson asked.

  ‘Yeh. Yeh, must be right.’

  It was a full two weeks now since Selina Marsh-Hayden had been missing. If her murderer had dropped his jacket into the laundry, along with the tea cloth, both would have been washed three or four times in heavy duty bleach and detergent. Not a lot left for Forensic to do anything with.

  ‘Are all the jackets the same?’

  ‘Different sizes, but yes, small, medium and large. Some of the girls wear small, I wear large, so do about half the blokes. The rest wear medium.’

  ‘But they’re all the same design and material?’

  ‘Design, yes. We had a new batch the other day, like I told you. They go into holes after a bit with what the laundry uses and I told Judith we needed some new ones. You can’t work with your elbows out and the cuffs frayed. And the Health don’t like it. The material was different. Bit lighter.’

  ‘So it’s the laundry who provide the jackets?’ Davidson asked.

  ‘And all the linen. It’s a contract, isn’t it, they provide it, launder it and replace them in the end. Costs a fortune, but saves a lot of hassle.’

  McLeish thought about the process as described, and remembered the gleaming kitchen and immaculate storage rooms he had been briefly shown that morning when he had paid a site visit. ‘Where do you put the dirties then? Where is the laundry box, or crate?’

  There was a slight pause and Matthew Sutherland uncrossed his long legs and crossed them the other way.

  ‘In the passage. Down the back.’

  ‘Where the old freezer was?’

  The freezer in which the body had been found had been moved from the dank corridor to the Forensic laboratories. Neither at the time on site, nor with extensive forensic effort in the laboratories, had any fingerprints been revealed. Or indeed anything much at all, except that the top and sides had been wiped clean before a faint recent accumulation of dust. Whoever had done that could hardly have failed to notice the panel light indicating that the freezer was on, so the working assumption had to be that it was the murderer who had cleaned the surface with his victim chilling inside.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So anyone dropping dirty laundry in the basket could have seen the freezer. Would no one have noticed it was on?’ It was a point that had bothered him when he read Gallagher’s statement.

  ‘They would of.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Except that some bugger had put a pile of black dustbin bags on the top of the cabinet. I saw them but didn’t bother to shift them. We’ve been waiting, oh, three weeks, for Broughtons to fetch it away. I’d just stopped seeing it, know what I mean. It was the Health shifted them, and then they saw the light was on.’

  McLeish had an unpleasant but vivid picture in his mind of the big man opposite him stripping off a torn jacket with blood on it and chucking it and a tea towel into the laundry crate, secure in the knowledge that by the next day it would have been laundered – in bleach and very hot water – along with the rest, destroying any evidence. But would he have dared? What if the body had been found that very night, by some accident? What if the bloodstains had been so widespread as to be remarkable even to the disillusioned eye of someone sorting soiled kitchen laundry? Another question occurred to him.

  ‘When did the new batch of jackets come in?’

  ‘Two weeks ago – tell you what, I can get it exact, or Judith can. It was the day we had a meeting in the office, me, Judith, Selina, Richard, Michael, all the shareholders.’

  There was a distinct note of pride as he explained the meeting, McLeish observed. Perhaps the extension of a shareholding democracy was the answer to crime prevention. Tony Gallagher’s back-ground could hardly have been less promising, or more violent, but here he was, with his stake in a successful business, working as hard and conscientiously as any son of an orthodox property-owning middle-class fam
ily. ‘They were delivered then, were they? On that day?’

  ‘Must have been. They was all still in packets then, so was the new tea towels and gloves. And we moved the tea towels and gloves, sent them down in the hoist, but Judith said not to send the uniforms until we’d tried them for size and marked them. We tried them on then, see, while we was waiting for Selina.’

  McLeish blinked and extracted a description of the incident. Gallagher’s sardonic account of Selina’s arrival reminded him of his next question.

  ‘I understand you and Mrs Marsh-Hayden had an argument. What was it about?’

  The man’s eyes glazed. ‘Can’t really remember. I told the other cop … policeman.’

  ‘And I’d like you to tell me, so I understand it.’

  ‘Yeh. Right.’ He licked his lips and glanced at Matt Sutherland, who was sitting absolutely still. ‘Tell you the truth, I didn’t really know what she was on about. She was asking why the plate costs on the steak dishes were high. I ended up telling her she didn’t know what she was talking about. Well, she didn’t. She never got her hands dirty doing the hard graft, working out costs, me and Judith – Miss Delves – done all that.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘She went off.’

  ‘Anyone else hear all this?’

  ‘At the beginning there was Antoine. And a wash-up. You could ask them, if they heard.’

  This last came out with a sudden access of confidence and Bruce Davidson realised they had been round this loop, and Gallagher knew no one had heard – or was admitting to have heard – any detail of the conversation.

  ‘What are these plate costs Mrs Marsh-Hayden was asking about, then?’

  Tony Gallagher considered him, warily. ‘There’s a rule – well, it’s not a rule really, but close – that the costs of the raw material – yeh? the food, know what I mean – must not be more than one-third of the menu cost. Without VAT, that has to go on top, see? So if your menu price less VAT is a tenner, everything that goes on that plate has to cost less than £3.30. And that means everything, parsley, presentation, the lot.’

  Bruce Davidson did a swift calculation. ‘That’s a two hundred per cent mark-up, isn’t it?’