Stench

by AB Morgan

  ‘Maybe you should ask her to work for you, Kon, she seems to have been on to something.’

  ‘From what I overheard at the nick, the cops managed to work their technical magic on her laptop and accessed the footage from her iCloud account. That footage seems to have sealed Dylan’s fate.’

  ‘Wasn’t he the one who took the other girls back to the steam rally?’

  ‘So they say …’

  ‘What happened when the police searched your place? Didn’t they check everywhere?’ Konrad was still fishing for his story.

  ‘I thought your man on the inside would have given you the necessary.’ Rory recalled in detail his time with DS Quinn, in his cottage, and later at the police station. He had been taken there while the gardens and workshop were searched. The waiting seemed never ending and it was late in the afternoon before DS Quinn and DC McArthur set about asking him to explain certain ‘irregularities’.

  ‘What did they mean by that?’ Konrad asked.

  ‘They wanted to know why I appeared to have an obsession with dates on food in the fridge, air fresheners, air conditioning, use of a tumble drier instead of hanging out my washing, smoke alarms … that sort of thing. DS Quinn had made a note of my eccentric habits when we went to the cottage on Wednesday.’

  ‘Are these all to do with your anosmia?’

  Rory conceded a smile. ‘You’re not as daft as you pretend to be are you?’

  ‘I don’t get it. Why would you need to use a tumble drier?’ Barney asked as he tore at some naan bread.

  ‘I knew that the odours coming from next door were foul in the extreme because everyone told me so. Therefore, I couldn’t hang my washing out to dry because my clean clothes would have ended up stinking and I would have been none the wiser. I’m terrified of inadvertently smelling bad, which is why I shower more than I should, change my clothes more than necessary, use a tumble drier to make my clothes smell fragrant, clean my teeth … etcetera … etcetera.’

  ‘And the food?’

  ‘He can’t smell if it’s off. I get that,’ Barney chipped in. Rory gave him an encouraging grin, ‘You lot are much quicker on the uptake than DS Quinn. That man could not seem to understand the compensations I’ve had to make, no matter how many ways I tried to explain it. He went bleating on about the fact that it had been Anna who’d caused my injury in the first place. Making it a good enough motive for me to have abducted her. However, while he was hammering away trying to extract a non-existent confession from me, the technical department managed to find the film from the CCTV camera on my greenhouse that Anna put there. The police had searched the workshop, the gardens and found nothing else of interest.’

  Konrad seemed to have discerned an uncomfortable thought as it crossed Rory’s mind. He rested his fork against his plate and mopped at the side of his mouth with a paper serviette. ‘There must have been a good reason for you deciding not to phone the police the night the girls from the rally were there.’

  Barney was listening intently to the conversation and watching every interaction between Rory and Konrad. He knew Konrad and his techniques for wheedling information out of an unsuspecting individual, and as with any poker player there were “tells” that gave away what Konrad was up to. Investigative journalism was his life and he was always on the hunt for a good story.

  Rory had his eyes fixed on his dinner plate but the firming of his lips and resigned sigh indicated that Konrad had targetted a sensitive issue.

  ‘I’ve thought about nothing else since that night. Believe me. Maybe it was the beer, tiredness, or simply having become desensitised to the antisocial behaviour of the tossers next door, but I didn’t recognise any cries for help. No screams of distress, no protests from any of the women. It never occurred to me they had been drugged.’

  ‘The papers are saying that you were somehow complicit by not taking any action. Let’s face it, you must have seen other things in that yard that should have been reported.’

  Rory sat up straight and stared Konrad out. ‘Shall we get this straight? I did report the vast majority of the goings on in that place. I’ve emailed the local authorities several times about concerns to do with the environmental risks and I only ever get an automated response. You know the sort of thing, “We have registered your complaint and will be dealing with the matter once it has been allocated to a member of staff who will contact you …” but I never heard anything. I’ve phoned them as well.

  ‘Last week I emailed about rats, but have the borough council replied? No. I’m sure the nasty bastards are coming in from next door and nesting under the floor.’

  Annette turned her nose up. ‘Oh, rats … nasty. Get some poison down. That’ll sort it.’

  Barney shook his head. ‘No, don’t do that. They’ll curl up and die under your floor and stink the place out. You could try ferret shit.’

  ‘Where the hell am I supposed to get hold of ferret shit, and what good would that do?’

  ‘Apparently it deters them. They hate the smell and move on. Drippy-nose Duncan used to keep ferrets in his back garden, but I’m pretty sure he had to get rid of them. I’d get old-fashioned traps and use chocolate. Mind you, I’m surprised there are any rats left. I thought Old Man Fewtrell used them as target practise.’

  ‘He does, but there must have been some big bastards scrabbling about because they made a hell of a racket. I’ve got traps already. I’ve only caught two big’uns so far and already the noises from under the floorboards seem to have stopped.’

  35

  After the Body was Found

  The air was still inside the police cell. Rory rubbed at his wrists and arms to ease the aching of his muscles and the indentations in his flesh from where the handcuffs had dug in. His nails were dark soil-filled crescents at the end of grubby hands and as soon as the door shut he searched in vain for a sink.

  Banging on the door he protested. ‘Excuse me, Sergeant, but there’s nowhere for me to wash my hands. I need to wash.’

  The custody sergeant had only made it part way down the corridor to the main desk at the entrance to the custody suite. He returned to inform his prisoner that he was in a dry cell in order to preserve forensics.

  ‘What the hell for? We’ve been through this dozens of times. I didn’t kidnap her. I didn’t hold her against her will and I didn’t kill her. I didn’t even know she was there.’

  ‘Right. Pull the other one, son. My old granny could have smelt that body a mile off.’

  ‘I’ve got no sense of fucking smell! How many more times do I have to tell you that? Look, Sergeant, this is insane; you’ve already arrested and charged someone for the same fucking crime. When’s Quinn coming?’

  His shouts and questions received no response, leaving him little choice other than to wait. For the first forty minutes he paced the cell floor, back and forth like a caged bear, his anger bubbling to the surface in waves. Occasionally he would approach the heavy door to protest again.

  ‘Sergeant. Who searched my house? The police. Who examined the CCTV footage taken of Fewtrell’s Yard showing Anna Chamberlain being thrown out of a truck? The police. Do you hear me? Is my solicitor on his way? Sergeant?’ Rory slammed his fists against the door and didn’t relent until the sergeant reappeared outside his cell.

  ‘Keep it down, Norton. You know the drill. The DS will be here as soon as he can to question you again, and your solicitor will be here when he is able. In the meantime you are disturbing the other detainees and you are giving me a headache with your noise. So, cut it out.’

  Rory could barely contain his frustrations. ‘But you are wasting your own time and mine, and my solicitor’s. It’s already been proven that I could not have done any of the things you’ve arrested me for. I’ve been questioned three fucking times. If you lot had done your jobs thoroughly in the first place Anna might be alive and I would be getting on with my own insignificant little life.’

  The sergeant chose to wait for Rory to settle before giving a response
. ‘Then I expect you’ll have the last laugh won’t you?’

  Rory found it hard to comprehend how obtuse the sergeant was being. His flippancy was almost cruel. ‘You think any of this is funny? What is the matter with you? Please, I need to wash.’

  ‘So you can smell?’

  ‘No, I can’t, that’s the problem. I know I must stink, but I can’t smell how much or of what and it eats me up. Please let me wash!’

  ‘Sorry sir, not until I’m given the green light. You’ll have to wait. It’s no big deal.’

  ‘Try it some time, you ignorant twat,’ Rory mumbled as he approached a blue vinyl-covered mattress. It was just like the ones used in secure psychiatric units up and down the country; washable, tamperproof, and germ resistant. Standard.

  He was tired and needed to rest although he didn’t particularly want to sit down on the mattress, as he was covered in dirt and splinters of wood from the floorboards ripped up in his frenzy to free Anna. The police had dragged him away before he caught sight of her full face, but he instinctively knew who it was.

  Sitting alone in the cell, the sadness of the situation hit him full force. It hadn’t been rats scraping at the pipe-work; it had been Anna trying to escape. Why had she chosen to dig through his floor? Why didn’t she call for help? The thoughts and questions whirled around in unproductive circles until emotional exhaustion eventually forced him to rest. He lay back on the mattress holding his hands clenched together against his chest to reduce the shaking from adrenalin overload.

  Echoes of the first time he met Anna screaming like a thing possessed, crowded into his head uninvited. She had only been admitted to the unit the night before and had caused merry hell. He saw a vivid flashback to the chair she had held. One hand on the backrest, one hand on the seat, she had swung it above her head in an easy flowing movement as if it weighed nothing. Rory had known what was coming and rushed forward to push his colleague out of the way. Anna’s eyes had been crazed and filled with evil intent, she was screeching and spitting and yet he hadn’t managed to get himself clear or protect himself in time.

  The agony as the chair crashed into his nose was relived and, lying there in the bleak empty cell, Rory reached with one hand to rub the bridge of his nose easing the phantom pain. He hadn’t remembered much after that, other than his head slamming into the wall, but he did have clear recall of becoming fully conscious again some hours later. Most of his focus had been on the throbbing in his head and it was a while before he realised that his sense of smell had disappeared. Its loss had so many impacts he’d never contemplated before. He’d never had to.

  To keep occupied in the hours waiting for the police to realise their mistake, he compiled a list of what odours he missed most. He tried to be positive by pretending that one day his sense of smell would recover.

  ‘The smell of freshly ground coffee, then probably grass - mown grass. I used to love that smell. Warm bread, and summer rain, but not at the same time. Yes, and clean sheets on the bed. Old books - that would have to be up there in my top one hundred. The seaside, all of it, like a bottled rock pool.’

  Tears spilled over the lower lids of his eyes. He couldn’t prevent them.

  ‘Myself. If I could get part of my sense back it would be that one I’d wish for. Smelling myself. Being able to know for certain that I am clean, that my breath is fresh and my feet don’t reek.’

  Rory stared at the ceiling and more tears flowed unchecked.

  ‘No that’s not true. If I had that one wish, I’d wish to smell Sara. Sara’s neck. Sara’s smell.’ He sat up and curled in a ball around his knees, wedging himself into the corner of the cell. In his mind there was a picture he had of himself, finding some of his wife’s clothing in the water-soaked, fire-damaged house. His mother had found him holding one of Sara’s jumpers to his nose, desperate to smell her, standing inside the shell of their home, howling.

  That had been the last time he had been wracked with such sobs and pain.

  Despite willing it to happen, he’d smelt nothing on that priceless jumper and had decided from then on to cut off from his feelings, to walk away, to hide his despair and never revisit his life with Sara. His strategy was a poor one. She usually came to him in his dreams and now she had trapped him. He couldn’t escape to work, to the pub, or to the shed. The visions in his head replayed as a long forgotten film.

  They began with the call from the unit in the middle of the night.

  ‘Rory Norton.’

  ‘Hello, Rory. It’s Audrey here at the unit. Fiona is really unwell. She ought to go home but there are no other staff nurses on duty. We tried the wards upstairs but they’re in the same position with only one qualified nurse on duty. We’re not clear what else we can do.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll come in and cover the rest of the shift,’ he’d said without a second thought.

  Sara had groaned in protest at being woken by the sound of the phone ringing. ‘That’s the third time this week.’ She’d managed to wave at him with her fingertips from beneath the duvet as she snuggled back under the covers. He had kissed her forehead. ‘See you later.’

  When he saw her next she was lying in a funeral home in a coffin. She could so easily have still been sleeping, and when he recollected that scene Rory wanted to reach in and wake her. The inquest had confirmed that smoke inhalation had been the cause of death and one thoughtful member of the fire service had tried to bring him comfort by saying that she would have died peacefully.

  She may have done, but Rory had not experienced peace from the second he had taken the phone call telling him the news about the fire. An electrical fault, they said, in the airing cupboard. Part of the emersion heater coil. It had set fire to the tank lagging and had been smouldering before he left the house. He hadn’t smelt it.

  After that he had noticed how so-called friends and colleagues had stared at him with pity or suspicion in their eyes. Those closest to him didn’t know how to react and it was a relief when he could drive off to a new life.

  In the months since Sara’s death he had been angry with himself, but never once had he realised that without that call from work asking for help, he too would be dead - until he was alone in the foetal position in a cell, grieving.

  He rocked as he wept.

  When he unravelled two hours later, he sat on the edge of the mattress feeling strangely unburdened. He had reached a turning point, a conclusion. He had decided to accept his disability. Not hide it away.

  When he analysed his current life he had been amazed to acknowledge how happy and content he had become in Lower Marton. He had developed great friendships and loved his job.

  ‘Right then Rory, it’s time to stop feeling so bastard sorry for yourself. Get a grip on your misery and allow yourself some fun for God’s sake. Cheer up man. It could be worse. You could be dead.’

  36

  The Accused

  When DS Quinn arrived in the custody suite, there was a flurry of activity and an indignant Quinn blasted at the officers on duty for a lack of action in not calling the duty police surgeon in response to Rory’s bizarre response when the body was found.

  He appeared to be empathetic towards Rory as he sat him in a formal interview room with DC McArthur present. ‘Do you know why you’ve been arrested today?’ Quinn’s voice still had a nasal twang to it, and he wheezed before taking out a packet of menthol cough sweets to unwrap one. Rory waited for him to finish this task before replying.

  ‘Yes. I’ve no idea who they were but a couple of officers hauled me across the carpet and out of my house. I’m not surprised. I was a screw-up at that point. They drove me to the station, told me I was under arrest and banged me up in here. It’s a bit of a blur. I must have looked like a proper mad man but for some weird reason I actually thought she could still be alive.’

  ‘No. No chance of that I’m afraid. The charge sheet states that you have been arrested in connection with the death of Anna Chamberlain and with the disappearance of her c
ousin Gemma Waterford. While we await identification of the body, I need you to confirm to me when it was that you last saw Gemma Waterford. Are you sure you wish to proceed without your solicitor present?’

  Rory couldn’t speak. As luck would have it Quinn’s breath was caught in his throat and he hacked several times into a crumpled handkerchief, giving time for Rory to take in the enormity of the accusations.

  ‘Well? When did you last see her?’ McArthur asked.

  Rory tried to hold his rising anger in check. ‘You have to be kidding!’ The looks on the faces of the detectives in the room told him they were not joking and he completely forgot about his right to have legal representation. He grabbed at the edge of the desk. ‘I was with her on Wednesday in the churchyard at Lower Marton. I don’t know the exact time, seven thirty maybe, after you finished questioning me. You can check my phone. I made a call to my friend Keith Grayson. He’ll confirm.’

  Quinn leant towards him. ‘Confirm what, Mr Norton? The call would only identify where you were and that you spoke to Mr Grayson, not whether you saw Gemma Waterford. I’ve just spoken to the Reverend Fairbrother and he places you there all right, but he didn’t see Gemma with you.’

  ‘But he must have walked straight past her.’

  ‘No. That’s not what he says.’

  Rory could feel droplets of sweat running down his flanks from both armpits, but could do nothing about it. He put his hands against either side of his face and slid them to his chin, ending up as if appearing to pray. ‘Christ.’

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that I’m afraid.’

  Rory struggled to think clearly and sat in silence.

  McArthur took over the questioning. ‘You were seen having an argument with Miss Waterford at Swandale rally on Bank Holiday Monday. You physically dragged her through the fairground, we are told. Is that correct?’