Death by Indulgence

by A B Morgan

  Buxham’s had a different feel to it. An undercurrent of mystery and notoriety that made it a more exciting place to be. It should have been exhilarating, but Annette didn’t crave excitement. She would have been quite content for her night out to be ordinary and selfishly indulgent, but, as friends do, she and Barney were on a quest to help solve the unanswered puzzle of who killed Harry. They listened in as the talk around the table turned to the events of the last pudding club and what the members had seen of Harry Drysdale that fateful evening. There was a debate between two amateur sleuths as they put their differing theories to the test; grasping at various possibilities but not realising that two amply proportioned, beautifully dressed women sat at booth eighty-eight, thankfully out of ear shot.

  The fact hadn’t escaped the notice of Barney and Annette who kept an eye on table eighty-eight and the two fat ladies that sat there.

  ‘There’s the black woman that’s always with you know who,’ Barney said, careful not to breach club rules.

  ‘Mr C.’

  ‘No sign of him tonight, by the looks of things.’

  ‘Kon will be proven wrong then. He reckons the manageress woman said that Mr C continued to come every Wednesday, rain or shine, even though he knew Mr D was dead. The ruddy balls of the man.’

  Annette made her excuses and left the table as if requiring a trip to the ladies toilet. She took a circuitous route and aimed for the restaurant reception desk where the new hostess was checking the screen of her terminal.

  ‘Hello, Ada. How are you settling in to your new role?’ Annette asked. A broad smile lit up Ada’s face as she recognised her customer.

  ‘Not too bad, madam. How are you?’

  ‘I’m very well. Hungry and salivating at the prospect of spotted dick and custard.’

  They laughed.

  ‘Is there any news on how your predecessor is doing? Is she any better?’ The accepted story, told to club members, was that Ella had left because of a sudden illness. Not a lie as such. Annette watched as Ada wrestled with her response, a note of true sadness could be heard in her voice.

  ‘Coincidently,’ Ada said, ‘I tried to call her again this morning but her phone’s switched off. I’ve been a bit worried about her, there was something in her voice that wasn’t quite natural but when I spoke to her a couple of days ago, she sounded brighter somehow. She kept apologising for being a nuisance. My poor little chicken,’ she said wistfully. ‘Silly old thing, eh?’ Ada shook herself. ‘I’ll let her know you were asking, shall I?’

  Annette smiled. ‘That would be nice.’ She glanced across at the booth containing table eighty-eight and its occupants. ‘Have they been stood up?’

  ‘It certainly looks like it,’ Ada said. ‘They won’t be too impressed with that, I don’t s’pose.’

  ‘No. Unusual.’

  ‘Very. I would have bet my wages on him being here by now.’

  Annette made a noise, humming in agreement and then continued on her way. No Marcus Carver. Why hadn’t he turned up, she wondered.

  ‘Barney, we have to alert someone,’ Annette said on her return to her seat, whispering as close to her husband’s ear as she could get.

  ‘Can’t you tell Kon later?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I think this could be a police matter. Ella’s off the radar. Lorna tried calling her this afternoon and her friend Ada over there hasn’t been able to get in touch with her either. Malik Khan hasn’t heard from her since before he left the nick late last night. He rang Kon and Lorna asking for help.’ Annette bit her bottom lip. ‘You don’t think she’d do anything stupid, do you?’

  Barney shook his head and Annette could tell that he wasn’t really listening to her. He was watching the waitress place a bowl of steaming chocolate sponge pudding onto the tablecloth in front of him. Taking a long sniff, he said, ‘Cor bugger me, that smells cracking.’ He lifted his spoon. ‘Do you need to deal with this right now, my lovely? Aren’t you over reacting?’ he asked plaintively. ‘Malik Khan will no doubt be with the young lady somewhere. He’s bound to have found her by now. Stop worrying. They’ve had a rough time, so perhaps they don’t want to be found… nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean?’

  ‘Is sex all you think about?’

  ‘No. I’m generally more obsessed by food and motors… oh, and beer. That goes without saying.’ Barney squeezed his wife’s knee. ‘Let it drop. Time to indulge ourselves instead of getting dragged into other people’s problems. Eat up.’

  47

  Earlier that Wednesday

  Ella climbed the last step of the loft ladder and crawled onto the chipboard that lined the attic space. In amongst the suitcases, dusty forgotten board games, Christmas decorations, and a doll’s house, a coil of white coaxial cable caught her attention. That would do the job, she thought, turning on the light; a single bulb in an industrial fitting secured a few feet away at the apex of one of the roof timbers.

  The length of white cable looked strong, but was it flexible enough not to snap? It was long enough to secure to a roof truss and have spare for her requirements, so she picked it up and tugged hard at one end, it stretched a little. Perfect. What she had in mind was simple enough to execute if only she could time it correctly and accurately judge the drop, but the loft ladder was going to get in the way.

  Peering over the edge of the opening she examined the hexagonal heads on the bolts that secured the wooden ladder to the hatch. The door was no obstacle. Once she had unscrewed the fittings that held the ladder in place, it would swing out of the way to hang vertically, but the ladder itself would have to be dealt with.

  ‘Why is everything in this house such good quality? Just for once couldn’t he have made do with a step ladder like other people?’ Ella eased herself back over the edge and onto a creaking rung. Taking her time, she tested the strength of each rung, and noted its distance from the hatch above. When satisfied, she landed gracefully on the carpet and padded back down the stairs.

  Ella returned to the cloakroom cupboard where she was certain to find the tools she needed. ‘Aha, electrical tape. That will come in handy,’ she said pushing a reel of black tape into the pocket of her jeans before picking up the metal toolbox.

  By the time she had pushed it into the loft space, away from the opening, she was panting. It had been awkward to undo the fixings at the joint where the two halves of the ladder folded, without breaking it completely, but it was important. She wanted the retractable loft ladder to look just as it should be. Complete.

  Safely back in the loft, she scrabbled around in the toolbox for the right implement to undo the bolts at the top of the ladder. After three failed attempts she finally found the correct size of socket in a small set. She undid the nuts and removed the bolts, taking care not to dislodge the ladder from resting in its usual position.

  Looking around her she spotted the blue golf hat where she had placed it carefully in the angle of a cross member. ‘Bugger. I should have left the cap downstairs before I did all that,’ she said, berating herself for not thinking each step through properly. There was no real disaster. She would sort it out once everything else was in place.

  It was a matter of waiting for Marcus Carver to return home. She had a surprise for him. Cross with herself for getting the order of events wrong, she spent a few minutes going through the plan in her head one last time as she sat fiddling with the Ping golf cap, running her fingers around the edge of the peak. Her fingernails were short, unpainted and practical. Looking at them she reflected on how unusual that was for her. Where had her colour disappeared to? It was a rhetorical question, she knew the answer.

  Preparations were nearly complete. The coaxial cable, left over from the fitting of a TV aerial, she guessed, wasn’t too easy to wrap around the cross member above her head, but she managed. Each end was tied tightly, knot upon knot, and she used black electrical tape as added insurance. She did not want to get this wrong, so she rehearsed, again and again, visualising the moment she would ta
ke that final irreversible step.

  She didn’t hear a vehicle, and it was only when the door opened downstairs in the hallway far below, that she poised over the square hatch, keen to hear confirmation of the return of Marcus Carver. Hurriedly, she tugged the light pull, extinguishing all but the faint glow coming up into the loft via the open hatch.

  The house alarm put her on full alert with a series of beeps as Marcus punched in the six-digit code to neutralise the system. With precious time in hand, Ella leant over the gap of the loft hatch, holding the golf cap upside down before allowing it to drop onto the carpeted landing. It wavered and floated erratically like a sycamore seed, eventually coming to rest about four feet from the spot she had intended. It was close enough. Satisfied that she could do no more, she readied herself by coiling three loops of cable and holding them between her hands rested them on her legs, waiting for the right moment to launch. Peering out of the darkness, rigid with concentration, her senses were gathering vital clues as to his whereabouts.

  She could hear him moving from room to room below, whistling a random set of notes as he strode across the hallway towards the stairs muttering. ‘Pack a bag. Must call Lionel. Check the trains...’ He continued his to do list as he climbed the stairs. ‘Re-read the press release, sue the police for defamation of character, find the—’ He stopped mid-sentence. Ella looked down from her high vantage point, glaring at his back and shoulders as he stooped to pick up the golf cap.

  ‘Fuck. Where the hell did this come from?’ He threw his head back scanning up the ladder into the darkness. ‘Who’s there?’ he bellowed, a slight quaver undermining his efforts to sound brave.

  He gingerly stepped to the bottom of the loft ladder. ‘Who’s up there? Thelma?’ Placing his hands either side of the wooden ladder he put one foot on the bottom rung and hesitated. He peered upwards again but hearing no sound, seeing no light, he took the next step, then the third and the fourth. He got to half way and placed his left foot onto the upper ladder, beyond the join.

  ‘Hello, Dr Carver,’ Ella said, placing her feet on the edge of the hatch.

  Marcus stiffened.

  As the coiled cable dropped over his head onto his shoulders, his right foot gave way beneath him taking him off balance and cutting short a yelp as the whole ladder collapsed. He dangled by his neck, fighting to grasp at the cable with his hands, scratching at his own skin, swinging his legs madly as the coils tightened. Ella, with legs braced across the hatch, held the two lengths of cable together in her clenched fists, pulling backwards into the loft. Taking the strain. She grunted.

  ‘This is for Val from me with love. Goodbye.’

  48

  The Apology

  He’d spent many hours in various prisons in his career, interviewing murderers and deviant minds. Thus, for Konrad, this was not his first time inside a special psychiatric forensic unit. However, on this occasion it was an uncomfortable, if not unnerving, experience. He had travelled there on his own, no film crew, no sound technicians, no director.

  The “clop-clop” of his handmade leather brogues sounded on the concrete path as he and the consultant psychiatrist headed towards a single storey building in the grounds of the hospital. There was no telltale jangling of keys, and with an absence of iron bars at windows and a distinct lack of anguished cries from the patients, he could just as easily have been strolling around a posh conference centre. The general peacefulness of the place was undisturbed, apart from the sounds of the birds in the gardens, flitting from the hedges and shrubs that lined the walkways.

  ‘How did she take the news?’ he asked.

  The consultant, Dr Yellnow, wasn’t what Konrad had predicted. For a start, she dressed more like a teacher than a doctor. Comfortable but smart trousers, topped off with a neat blouse and sensible shoes. A name badge and ID were the only indicators of her role and status. She was slight, dainty and softly spoken. Not at all the type of person designed to manage patients detained under strict Home Office orders; psychopaths, scoundrels and miscreants, all of whom had a diagnosis of mental illness to boot.

  ‘It’s always rather difficult to say when it comes to Ella. She’s not easy to read. On the whole she was relieved to have her name cleared as far as one death is concerned, but it doesn’t undo the fact that she murdered Marcus Carver. In fact I doubt it will make a difference at her next review tribunal or the one after that.’

  ‘Do you have any advice as to how I should approach the subject?’ Konrad hadn’t felt this unsure of himself for a while. He had an apology to make and he wasn’t familiar with humility. Lorna had demanded that he make good his gross error in person, face to face with Ella Fitzwilliam, before he made a public one on national television.

  After a lot of internal wrangling, the executive board at Channel 7 had granted him free rein on his series of documentaries about secret private members’ clubs. Dino Ledbetter in particular had been delighted with the initial broadcast. The first programme of the series not only exposed the peculiar world of adipophilia but also recounted the tragic events surrounding barrister Harry Drysdale and his friend Marcus Carver the eminent surgeon. Konrad had expounded his theory about how Ella Fitzwilliam had killed them both.

  He had been wrong.

  Dr Yellnow thought for a while, considering Konrad’s question. ‘Shall we sit for a moment,’ she said, extending one arm towards a wooden garden seat. Konrad sat to her left to see her better as she sought to reassure him. ‘I’m not sure why you are so nervous about this meeting. Ella isn’t a wildly unhinged nutcase who’s going to fly at you in a rage. She’s well maintained on regular treatment and she’s a bright intelligent lady for whom a tragic set of circumstances unravelled around her and tipped her into a manic episode. We all have our limits.’

  ‘It’s good to hear that she’s doing well.’ Konrad relaxed against the bench. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been left with images of her being dragged from Carver’s home, screaming and kicking after a police siege of nearly four hours’ duration. It wasn’t easy persuading her to leave the loft. Frankly, I’d never seen a detective sergeant wearing a doll’s house on his head before then.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you were there at the time. Why was that?’

  ‘Her friend Malik called me. We put two and two together and by the time we’d made four it was way too late. When we worked out what her intention might be, we called the police and got to the house before them. I flipped open the letterbox on the front door and when we heard Ella’s wailing, Malik broke in through a window to get to her, and we scrambled up the stairs towards the noise. There he was, Marcus Carver, as dead as a proverbial dodo. The electrical flex round his neck had stretched until it snapped and he was in a heap on top of a set of pine loft steps, limbs at most unnatural angles. She was in the roof space laughing. I’ve never heard such a laugh. Apart from the wicked witch of the west…’

  The diminutive psychiatrist had allowed Konrad time to reminisce about the day Ella had lost her personal battle and won a war, but interrupted his reverie by making an unexpected statement. ‘She watched your documentary with interest, although she didn’t think much to the title.’

  ‘Table eighty-eight and the two fat ladies - what’s so wrong with that? The marketing boys loved it.’

  ‘She thought it was derogatory. She said the ladies in question were strikingly good looking as well as overweight. However, you failed to explore the reasons behind why men who have relationships with big women are viewed as perverted when it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Making it a deviancy only encourages people like Marcus Carver to go underground, to take advantage and to abuse. I think you disappointed her.’

  Konrad was bemused. ‘Wasn’t she angry?’

  ‘No. She still can’t remember what happened the night Harry Drysdale died or most of the days after that, so she accepted your version, until …’

  ‘Until now.’ Konrad bowed his head and cast his one good eye downwards as he rubbed his tacky palms down his thigh
s, hoping the material of his suit would absorb the sweat.

  ‘Do you mind me asking how the evidence came to light?’

  Konrad let out a derisive snort. ‘It’s a great story but a bit long-winded so I’ll give you the short version. A waitress by the name of Saskia helped herself to a customer’s hairpiece. That customer was Ella, who lost it the day she also lost the plot after apparently killing Harry Drysdale. Believe it or not, in that hair accessory was hidden a tiny surveillance camera. The waitress eventually discovered the device when its existence was mentioned in the documentary. Are you with me so far?’

  ‘I think so,’ nodded the psychiatrist. ‘The waitress had been using the hairpiece but handed it in because of your TV show.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘You played back the recording, discovered the truth and gave it to the police.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘You are now asking to see Ella to apologise for assuming that she killed Harry Drysdale, and to invite her to take part in a second film.’

  ‘Yes. Will she agree?’

  ‘Shall we find out? Follow me.’ Dr Yellnow sprang to her feet and Konrad had trouble keeping up with her as she trotted at full tilt towards the main door to the modern building nearby. The sign on the door read Creative Arts and Social Entertainment.

  ‘How long will she be kept here?’

  Dr Yellnow stopped to answer him. ‘At this unit? Oh, maybe another six months, then she’ll join the mainstream prison population. Not that she’ll thrive there. I hesitate to predict what will happen to her in the long term.’ The doctor cast her eyes towards the door handle, breaking Konrad’s inquisitive stare.

  As they entered the building, the doctor put a cupped hand to one ear. ‘Listen. You can hear her. This is her speciality. She’s brilliant at it and the other residents love it. Twice a week she does this.’