An Empty Death

by Laura Wilson

  By five-thirty, Byrne was back in his office, and insisted on reading out a lot of guff about rectal temperatures and the condition of the natural orifices before giving Stratton the general gist, which was – once you’d stripped away all the medical terminology – that he didn’t know exactly how, or even where, Reynolds had died, but he hadn’t had any booze on board. ‘You mean,’ Stratton asked, ‘you can’t actually tell if someone walloped him or if he simply fell over and hit his head?’

  ‘Not precisely,’ said Byrne. ‘But I should say he was struck – there are, after all, three distinct wounds, and it seems unlikely that he should have fallen backwards three times at almost the same angle.’

  ‘What if he were pushed? Or if someone rammed his head down repeatedly?’

  ‘That’s certainly possible, but it’s pretty unlikely.’

  ‘Could the wounds have been made by a brick? I mean, if someone hit him with it.’

  ‘Well, there’s not much leverage. It isn’t like a cosh or an iron bar. You could certainly knock someone out with a brick, but I should think it would be quite difficult to kill them – an adult, anyway. However, it’s a possibility. I take it you haven’t had the results of the analysis of the matter found beneath the head.’

  ‘Not yet, no.’

  ‘Well, if the weapon was a brick, or his head was banged down on one, there should be some hairs adhering to it.’

  Stratton, who’d worked that out for himself, asked, ‘How much force would be needed?’

  ‘Hard to say…A well-nourished woman could have done it, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘But she’d have to be rather tall, wouldn’t she? Assuming they were both upright, I mean. The wounds are on the top of the head, and Reynolds was…what? Six foot?’

  Byrne glanced at his notes. ‘Five foot eleven. But it depends where she was standing. The ground’s very uneven.’

  ‘Pretty hard to keep your balance, especially if there was a tussle…But you said Reynolds might not have been killed at the bomb-site. If someone was dragging him around, there’s more chance they’d have been spotted, even in the dark. Still…’ Stratton sighed. ‘What about the time of death?’

  ‘Judging from the temperature, I’d say, with the conditions during the night, he’d probably been dead between four to eight hours by the time we saw him.’

  ‘So…’ Stratton did a quick calculation. ‘Between two a.m. and six a.m.’

  ‘That would be about right.’

  ‘I suppose that narrows it down a bit. It would have been light at, what…quarter to six?’

  ‘Thereabouts.’

  ‘Surprising no-one spotted him earlier. My sergeant said it was reported at…’ Stratton thumbed through his notebook, ‘five-and-twenty past eight. If he fell, or was attacked, elsewhere – when it was getting light – and managed to get to the bomb-site under his own steam before he died, perhaps someone noticed him staggering about.’

  ‘He might not have been staggering,’ said Byrne reprovingly. ‘He might have been walking normally until the effects of the exertion caught up with him.’

  ‘But he’d have had blood on him, wouldn’t he?’ said Stratton. ‘He wasn’t wearing a hat to hide it, was he, and my chaps haven’t found—’

  A knock at the office door stopped him.

  Byrne sighed. ‘Come!’

  The bespectacled woman from the Administrative Department appeared, looking on the verge of hysterics. ‘Inspector, thank heavens you’re still here! A terrible thing, quite dreadful…’

  ‘What is it, Miss Crombie?’

  ‘One of the nurses, Dr Byrne – Leadbetter – we’ve just found her in one of the upstairs operating theatres. One of the porters found her. He fetched me. I told him not to let anyone in there until you’d seen—’

  ‘What’s happened to her?’ asked Stratton, gently.

  ‘She’s dead, Inspector!’ For a moment, impatience overrode distress. ‘The porter says she’s quite cold, and her face is blue – I saw that for myself. You must come at once.’

  ‘We’re not using the upstairs theatres at the moment,’ said Miss Crombie, as they went up the stairs. ‘Everything was moved to the basement when the bombing started. Otherwise she’d have been found immediately.’

  ‘Why was the porter there?’ asked Stratton.

  ‘He went to fetch a screen and she was behind it. The room’s being used for storage, you see.’

  An elderly porter, grey in the face and shaken, was outside the door to the operating theatre, bent over with his hands on his knees. ‘Gave me quite a turn, seeing her laying there.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Stratton. ‘Why don’t you go and get yourself a cup of tea? But not too far away, because I’ll need to talk to you later.’

  The man looked relieved. ‘Right you are.’

  ‘Perhaps, Miss Crombie,’ said Byrne, ‘you could organise a trolley?’

  A similar look of relief passed across the administrator’s features. ‘Of course, Dr Byrne. At once.’

  Miss Crombie having left, Stratton and Byrne entered the theatre. It was full of pieces of medical equipment, and the dead nurse was not immediately apparent. ‘Must be over there.’ Byrne pointed to a folding wooden screen in the corner. Stratton pushed aside various bits of clinical paraphernalia to make a path through the room.

  They saw Nurse Leadbetter’s feet first, then a pair of long, slender legs. She was lying on her back with her stockings torn and her uniform rucked up over her knees, stained dark round the crotch where her bladder had emptied itself. There was a red woollen scarf around her neck and the face above it was purple and suffused with blood, the tongue lolling obscenely from the mouth. Bulging brown eyes as big as gobstoppers stared up at the ceiling and tendrils of copper hair had escaped from the cap, which was askew. She couldn’t, Stratton thought, have been much older than seventeen – not much more than his own daughter. He turned away from the body, gripped by the mixture of anger, grief and disgust that always threatened to engulf him at such times.

  ‘Strangulation by ligature,’ said Byrne, kneeling beside her. ‘She was only young, poor lamb.’

  Once again, Stratton was taken aback by the unexpected compassion. Byrne had always seemed so dry…Perhaps I’ve got him all wrong, he thought. ‘Let’s just hope,’ the pathologist continued, ‘that she wasn’t interfered with, as well.’ Very gently, he unwound the scarf from her neck. ‘Abrasions. You can see the grooves – horizontal, not very deep, but pretty uniform…some bruising…’

  ‘How long do you think she’s been dead?’

  Stratton expected the question to be greeted with exasperation, but Byrne said, ‘She’s cold, and there’s some rigor in the face and neck, but…’ the pathologist felt the arms and chest, ‘not much further, so probably not more than six hours.’

  ‘That would be…’ Stratton checked his wristwatch, ‘any time after midday.’

  ‘That’s right. I’ll make some sketches, but I can’t do much more here. Do you want to see if the trolley’s coming?’

  ‘Right away. Do you mind if I use your telephone? We’ll need to lock up the room and put a policeman outside overnight, and I’ll have to speak to Fingerprints, too. Although, to be honest…’ he glanced around him at the assorted medical clutter, ‘if every Tom, Dick and Harry has been hauling this stuff all over the place, I don’t hold out much hope…’

  ‘Of course,’ said Byrne. ‘Help yourself.’

  The last thing Stratton saw before he turned away to make for the door were Byrne’s fingers gently brushing over the dead girl’s face, closing her eyes. ‘There we are,’ he murmured. ‘You poor, poor lass.’ Just shows how little I know the man, Stratton thought.

  Stratton found the trolley and made his telephone calls, then returned to the Administrative Department with Miss Crombie, where they ascertained that Leadbetter’s Christian name was Marian, and that she was an orphan with a brother serving overseas. He then spent ten completely unenligh
tening minutes with the old porter and a fruitless half-hour going through the dead girl’s unremarkable belongings in the nurses’ quarters in the hospital basement, before returning to the station for a very unpleasant half-hour with DCI Lamb, who seemed to hold him personally responsible for Leadbetter’s death.

  In each of the three different buses that took him home – diversions caused by flying bombs – he turned the problem of Reynolds over and wondered if his death, and Nurse Leadbetter’s, might be connected in some way. One male, one female, one bashed with a brick, one strangled, perhaps raped; one outside the hospital, one inside. It didn’t seem likely, but it was best to keep an open mind…Reynolds’s wife had said that she was expecting him back by nine p.m., but hadn’t worried at first because he was often kept late and sometimes slept at the hospital. So, as none of the other doctors had seen him after half past eight in the evening, he must have stopped off somewhere en route home. An appointment? An affair? And, if an affair, could it have been with Nurse Leadbetter? Stratton guessed that, in life, she must have been nice – or, at least, presentable – looking. Had Reynolds been taking advantage of the poor girl? Or was it some utterly senseless, random thing – one of the patients going berserk for some reason, but in that case, surely anyone out of bed would have been spotted…? Whatever it was, they’d need to interview everyone at the hospital, and do a house-to-house enquiry around the area for Reynolds, and that would mean putting more men on the job, which would undoubtedly annoy DCI Lamb. He spent a miserable moment reflecting that, whatever happened, he was bound to end up with the wretched Arliss, who could break into a sweat just by standing still. It was just his luck to find himself going arse over tit on the thin ice of half-knowledge, with nothing definite to hold on to. And he’d have to talk to all the doctors again about Nurse Leadbetter, and Ballard would have to do the same with the nonmedical staff…e rubbed a hand over his face, feeling depressed. Poor, poor girl. What a waste of a young life…If only someone – other than the usual lunatics and time-wasters who presented themselves at such times – would come forward and tell them something, they might get somewhere…

  Fourteen

  Todd, who had knocked off before Nurse Leadbetter was discovered, was smartly clad in his jacket and tie, sitting in the Black Horse pub on Rathbone Place. His plan was to go into several pubs in the area and discover, by enquiry, which one Dr Wemyss (and therefore his friends) frequented. With a description – and, by good fortune, Wemyss, being tall and red-headed, would tend to stand out in a crowd – it simply sounded as if he was trying to catch up with a chap he knew, and, if pressed, he could give a false name. This was his first attempt.

  The barmaid, fleshy and middle-aged with unhealthily pallid skin and a predatory eye, whose thick slash of scarlet lipstick made her look like a ghoul that had forgotten to wipe its mouth, hadn’t recognised his description.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘perhaps I’ll wait a bit, and see if he comes by. I’m sure he mentioned this pub.’ Tired after only a few hours’ restless sleep the previous night on one of the mortuary slabs, he thought that he might as well butter up the woman a bit on the off chance of a second whisky before continuing his search. Taking his newly acquired (or rather, stolen) psychiatry book out of his knapsack, he put it on the bar.

  ‘What you got there, then?’

  ‘This? It’s about things that go wrong in the mind.’ He tapped the side of his head.

  ‘That doesn’t sound very nice, dear.’

  ‘It isn’t. It’s about senile deterioration.’

  ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘Some people get it when they’re older. They lose their mental faculties.’

  ‘You a doctor, then?’

  Todd gave her an enigmatic smile. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  Concluding, as he’d meant her to, that he was the sort of doctor who was rather more than just run-of-the-mill, the barmaid asked, ‘Can you cure that, then? Losing your…’ Now she tapped her head. ‘Because that’s what happened to my mum. She’s not been herself for a couple of years, now. Keeps asking for sweets – we give her our ration, but we can’t get no more, and she’s always making a fuss…And knitting. The whole time. I’ve been unpicking things she done before, so’s she’s got enough wool to keep going. She don’t make nothing, just knits. It gets on your nerves. Can you do anything for it?’

  ‘Not at the moment, I’m afraid. We’re looking in to various treatments, but these things take time. The brain is a complicated organ, you know, and we don’t understand everything, not by a long chalk. Your mother is very fortunate to have you to look after her with such sensitivity,’ he added, gallantly.

  Ten minutes’ more sympathetic listening and some pseudo-scientific comments got Todd his second Scotch (‘This is meant for regulars only, so don’t say nothing or my life won’t be worth living’), after which he decided it was time to try another pub. As he left, however, he saw Inspector Stratton marching down the opposite side of the road. The big policeman was easy to recognise, being at least half a head taller and several inches broader across the shoulders than anyone else on the pavement. Todd stood watching him for a moment, thinking that even though the man wasn’t wearing the uniform, he would have spotted him for a copper; it was something in the upright carriage and the measured nature of the walk.

  Stratton tramped to the corner of Oxford Street and turned left. Realising that he wasn’t heading back to the police station – Higgs had said he came from West End Central – Todd decided that it might, on the basis that information gleaned nearly always came in useful, be a good idea to follow him. Besides, he was curious.

  It was harder than he expected. For one thing, it was still light, and although the big policeman seemed preoccupied, he got on and off several buses, forcing Todd to dodge about and, on two occasions, duck down so that he was hidden by the seats. They were heading north, but it was a part of London he didn’t know. They left the West End and went through the City, and then some of the East End, before Stratton boarded a bus – his last one, it turned out – heading for Tottenham. When he finally alighted, Todd, keeping a cautious distance, followed him down the high street and right into Lansdowne Road, which was full of small, semi-detached mock Tudor houses, built between the wars, which reminded him of the ones in Norbury. How dismal, he thought, to come home every night to this, as the policeman did, as his own father had done, and as he himself would have done, if he had not struck out for better things…

  He halted abruptly as Stratton stopped, opened a garden gate, and went up a path. A second later, before he’d had time to take out a key, the front door flew open and a woman appeared, talking animatedly while at the same time removing, and then folding, a cretonne overall. Even from a distance of about fifty feet, with his view partially obscured by a privet hedge, Todd could see that she was pretty and slightly plump, and, moreover, she looked delighted to see the policeman who was, presumably, her husband. As he watched, Stratton bent to kiss her on the cheek, then took his hat off and set it lightly on her head. She gave a little shriek and, whipping it off, patted her chestnut hair self-consciously as she followed him into the house.

  Todd leant against the hedge and lit a cigarette, disconcerted by the sight of their fond silliness. They are in love, he thought. Of course, there was no reason why they should not be – it was simply that he hadn’t expected it. Why, he didn’t know, but it bothered him. Troubling, too, was the pang of disappointment he’d experienced when the front door closed, the feeling that he was being deliberately shut out from the light and warmth of a happy place. Even though – and this was truly strange – it was the type of place he despised.

  Disturbed by his reaction to the undistinguished little home, Todd walked up the road and, turning a corner, saw that there was a muddy, rutted alley, with high wooden fences on each side, that separated the Lansdowne Road back gardens from the ones of the next street down. He wandered into it, trying to estimate how many gardens he’d h
ave to pass before he reached the Strattons’. When he judged he’d got there, he stood on tiptoe to look over the fence and saw, through a back window, Stratton’s wife moving about in what looked like a scullery. The garden was neat, but fairly nondescript: about sixty feet long, with an Anderson shelter and a couple of apple trees on a scrubby-looking lawn, some flowerbeds, a small shed, and a hen house with a run made of wire netting.

  He ducked out of sight as Stratton’s wife approached the window, and then, gingerly raising himself once more on his toes, he saw that she was standing, her eyes cast down, in front of what must – because he could see a tap – be a sink. Stratton, hatless now, entered the little room and, standing behind his wife (he was at least a foot taller than she was), he put his arms round her and kissed her on the top of the head. Todd saw her look up and smile, and then, as she twisted round to face the policeman, Stratton’s eyes met his. An instant later, Todd was sprinting down the alley in the direction of the high street, but it was unmistakable: the man had looked straight at him. He half expected to hear a roar of rage and footsteps pursuing him, but none came. Once he reached the main road, he forced himself to slow down so as not to draw attention to himself by charging down the pavement where there were people milling around. In any case, Stratton had only seen him for a second, and it was pretty difficult to identify someone from a glimpse of their eyes and the top of their head.