Only the Dead Know

by C. J. Dunford

  By now, he could drive back to his flat blindfolded. He drives on automatic until he hits the Bridge. There he joins a long slow crawl of traffic — repair work again. The final run-up to the Bridge is blasted through black, rough rock. The kind of scene that reminds you of the antiquity of the earth and all that existed before you in the pre-human era. Something about this disturbs Truce. He tries to analyse the feeling, but knows this sort of thing isn’t his strength. He decides that it has reminded him of the briefness of the human life span and that one day, he too will be no more than compressed carbon in the ground. Flooded with a desire to seize the day, or at the very least make something of a difference, he turns his car towards the area of Perthshire where June lived. He’s on his own time. Rose can hardly complain.

  ***

  Truce finds himself at the local station, where they remember both him and June. He discovers which mortuary her body had been sent to. It’s the very same one he took June to when he was investigating her theory. The thought she’d end up here too had probably never crossed her mind.

  He strides in, in his smart suit, tie slightly askew, flashes his warrant card, and frightens the young receptionist into giving him June’s file. He stands in front of her and flicks through the file. She can’t be more than twenty and is chewing her hair nervously. Her pink nail varnish is ragged. He thinks that this is no place for a nervous person to work.

  Truce is more familiar than he wants to be with the details of a PM. He’s used to reading about more dramatic injuries caused by weapons, or about minor ones resulting from bar brawls. June’s report is somewhere in-between and beyond his frame of knowledge.

  He reads it through twice to make sure he hasn’t missed anything among the unfamiliar medical jargon. From what he can decipher, the taxi driver was right. June more or less died on his lap of internal haemorrhaging from most of her major organs — except her brain. The chances are that she was both fully aware and experienced the full pain of her mortal injuries.

  Truce’s eyes prickle, and he swipes his hand quickly across his face. “Where is the toxicology report?” he snaps at the girl, who jumps and swallows a mouthful of split ends.

  The girl’s eyes widen and her face pales.

  Truce waves the file at her. “This is at best a poor effort at a PM. Organs not weighed. Blood loss not estimated. Stomach contents not analysed, as far as I can see, and no sign of a toxicology screening. It’s as if she was cut up by a bloody butcher.”

  The girl lurches forward under the desk and is noisily sick in the bin. Truce shakes his head.

  “I’ve no idea how long you’re been working here,” he says to her. “But you’re paid to do a job, so do it. Now go and find the doctor who did this.” He consults the notes. “Pettiman. How fitting. I’ll wait here. And take the bucket with you.”

  She scurries away, looking like a chastened twelve-year-old. Truce knows he should be more sympathetic, but his head is still raging with pain from his earlier mind-storm, and he can’t bring himself to care that he’s upset her.

  The girl doesn’t reappear, but a young man in scrubs does. He is walking quickly with a gait that suggests he thinks highly of his own importance. His nose is lifted almost cartoon-like in the air. The scrubs are mostly loose, but tight at the thighs and in his neck. Truce can see that although still in his thirties he is overly fleshy. Too fond of fine dining, perhaps. He has the kind of short, wiry, blond hair that breaks combs, and his small eyes are squinted in anger.

  “What you do mean by upsetting Sophie like that? Girl’s just a student on a university summer placement. I don’t know who you think you are, but you’ve no right—” All this is said with a clipped English accent of the Home Counties that irritates Truce even further.

  “What kind of student?” he snaps back.

  “A medical student, of course.”

  “Well, she should switch courses. If she can’t even hear the details of a PM, she certainly shouldn’t ever be allowed to work on a live human.”

  “If you’re suggesting that working in a mortuary is a lesser form of medicine—”

  “I don’t care if it is or not,” Truce snarls, shoving the file into Pettiman's face. “What I care about is the half-arsed PM you’ve done on this woman.”

  Pettiman snatches the file from his hands. He leafs through it, scowling. “Nothing amiss here,” he says with a smirk. “Victim of an RTA. Minimal information required.”

  “Oh really?” says Truce. He’s tipped forward onto the balls of his feet. A more self-aware man, he thinks, would know he was about to be punched. Dr Pettiman has no such inkling. Truce readies himself.

  “I had orders from on high to close this one up as soon as possible. Minimal disruption to the body so as not to cause distress to the family. And I did a bloody good job. Unless you’d opened up her chest and seen the jumble of organs, you’d barely have known she’d been opened.”

  Truce forces himself back onto his heels at the words “on high”.

  “So, it's normal here not to do a toxicology report when someone steps out into traffic?”

  “On a little old lady?” says the medic. “I hardly think I’m going to find opiates flooding her system.”

  Truce frowns. He’s missing something. “What about alcohol?”

  “Look, we checked with her GP,” says Dr Pettiman, in a slightly more reasonable voice. “She wasn’t on regular medication, so there was no question of accidental overdose or even that she’d been given the wrong pills by some dopey pharmacist. It was all clear and above board. I’m sorry if you knew her, or she was important to some case of yours, but I can hardly bring her back from the dead.” He gestures at the walls around him. “Wrack ‘em and stack ‘em ready for the funeral home. That’s all we do here.”

  “What about alcohol?” Truce repeats, more forcefully.

  “Possibly,” Dr Pettiman sighs. “But what difference would that make?”

  “It would give a reason why she stepped out into traffic,” says Truce very slowly as if speaking to an idiot. He’s eyes flicker down to Pettiman’s badge, checking that he’s actually a doctor.

  “But she’d written a suicide note,” says the doctor, confused.

  Truce straightens in surprise before blurting out, “Never!”

  “I’m very sorry, but I saw it. She clearly stated her intent to end her own life.”

  “Then why isn’t that mentioned in the file?” asks Truce, trying to hide his shock.

  “It should be,” says Pettiman. He leafs through the file again and again. “But I saw it,” he mutters. Truce notes that his blink rate has increased fivefold. He feels under stress. Then Pettiman suddenly yells, “Sophie!” so loudly that Truce’s head is lanced with pain. “Sophie, get in here!”

  Sophie appears at the doorway and edges nervously into the room.

  “There was a suicide note attached to this file. Bring up the copy you scanned in.”

  “I don’t remember one, Dr Pettiman,” the girl says in a low voice.

  “I’m not interested in your personal recollections, I want you to bring it up.” He glances at the file. “June Mills. RTA.”

  The girl gives both men a slow, wide berth, then bolts for her desk. Part of Truce’s mind registers that Leighton would find the situation comical.

  Whatever else she is, the girl is certainly computer savvy. It takes a few clicks to bring up June’s file and show both men that there is no record nor mention of a suicide note. Dr Pettiman pinches his eyebrows together and starts to bluster in a self-defensive manner.

  Truce nods at them both, and leaves him to it. He drives back to the police station that sent him to the mortuary and explains his problem to the desk sergeant. The one person he thinks might have a clue about what’s going on.

  “Podgy Pettiman,” says the sergeant and rolls his eyes. He leans forward over the desk and lowers his voice. He’s well into his fifties, a man with a spreading bald patch and pubic-like curls of hair like a to
nsure. His face is lined with experience, and he comes across to Truce as a man who is exactly where he wants to be — a true master of the front desk. Truce gives due deference.

  “Looks like that where’s June Mills ended up,” Truce says. He follows the sergeant’s lead and also leans in. “I’m tying up a few loose ends for the family. Nothing official. But she was a nice old girl.”

  The sergeant nods. “Game old bird,” he says and his eyes flicker with amusement. “You’re the one who was given the job of shutting her up, weren’t you?”

  Truce nods.

  “It was good to see someone doing it with consideration,” he says. “Far too much modern policing is about figures, targets and bloody charts nowadays. When I started, it was much more about the human touch. Community policing was a real thing, not a bloody catch phrase. When I heard they’d assigned her a new inspector, I not only suspected the flow of baked goods would cease, but that we would be dealing with a weeping widow. You know, the kind, helpful member of the public turns to an outraged pensioner, who tries to get nasty stories about the uncaring police in the local rag. Guess I was wrong about both of you.”

  “So, would Podgy Pettiman have done a proper job?” says Truce.

  The sergeant’s voice drops even lower, and Truce has to strain to hear him. “Between you and me, the man’s a corpse hacker. Bloody butcher. You met him?”

  Truce nods again.

  “Then you’ve heard the way he speaks. Got connections.”

  “He claims there was a suicide note,” says Truce.

  The sergeant’s eyes widen. His jaw doesn’t drop, but it slackens, and his neck goes more rigid. “Is that what that bastard is saying? What did he forget to do this time?”

  “Among other things, no toxicology screening.”

  “What you checking?”

  Truce looks him straight in the eye and decides to be as truthful as possible. This man hasn’t read book after book about tricks, but his experience will tell him if Truce is lying. “The family need to know if she had been drinking. Seems she used to have a little problem. But she’d been dry fifteen years. They want to know if recent events had knocked her off the wagon.”

  The sergeant nods. “You can’t simply tell them no?”

  “I would,” says Truce, “but her daughter and her husband are both doctors. They might ask to see the PM. I’m trying to lay it all to rest for the whole family’s sake and June’s.” He takes a deep breath. “I could wing it and tell them toxicology was clear and hope they don’t want to see it, but then this business about a suicide note has come up. Pettiman insists he’s seen it.”

  “Anyone else?” asks the sergeant.

  “Not as far as I know. The girl covering the desk checked on the files and there’s no scanned copy of it.”

  “There might not be,” says the sergeant. “Between you and me, it’s not unknown for small pieces of evidence to go missing. You know the sort of thing, so we’re mighty careful about recording everything found on a victim. If she’s already dead, we’ll even do it at the scene. It’s not unknown for a kindly nurse to ‘remove’ such a note to spare the family pain. Can cause us no end of problems in our investigations.”

  “So, you think there was no suicide note,” says Truce.

  “I know there was no suicide note. My men would have spotted and recorded it.”

  “Pettiman says he had orders to finish this one quickly and not disturb the body more than necessary.”

  The sergeant frowns. “Give me a mo,” he says. “We have the attending officers’ reports on file here.”

  The sergeant logs onto the machine by the desk and with surprisingly swift fingers, checks online. “Nope,” he says. “You’ll be able to see this stuff yourself at your own terminal. Simply says PM requested on RTA victim, late 60s. There’s no further instructions.”

  “Could Pettiman have been told something by someone in person — or misunderstood something?” he adds quickly, as he sees the sergeant’s eyes darken at the implication that any member of the force might have been involved.

  “It’s possible the idiot misunderstood something, or he wanted to get away for a dinner date. Single and playing the field from what I’ve heard. Takes local girls to some mighty fancy places. None of the dates seems to last though.”

  “I can see why,” says Truce with a swift smile. “I think I better go back and have a word with Dr Pettiman.”

  “No, you don’t want to be doing that,” says the Sergeant. “Prone to litigation is Dr Pettiman. When he thinks there’s mud around to be slung, he lawyers up. Not the kind of thing a career man wants to get involved with.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?” says Truce, raising his voice in frustration.

  “I’m afraid I don’t see there is much you can do,” says the sergeant. “My best guess is the suicide note and all that nonsense is Pettiman’s way of getting out of a botched job. It wouldn’t be the first time. But he’s clever. Do you want to be on record calling him a liar? Not worth it. None of this will bring poor Mrs Mills back. I’ll have a word with him about his behaviour and let it be known that ‘people’ have noticed his slacking. Nothing he can do to me. I’m up for retirement shortly. Besides, he wouldn’t dare.” And for a moment the sergeant’s voice is filled with menace.

  Truce has to suppress a laugh. This man is old school — the effective old school. He thanks the sergeant for his help and says he will tell the family the toxicology report came back clear. As he leaves, he looks back over his shoulder, promising to drop off a box of apple turnovers next time he’s passing.

  When he gets to the car, Truce pops open the glove compartment and fishes out a blister pack of paracetamol. He needs the throbbing in his head to stop if he’s going to be able to drive home. He rests his forehead on the steering wheel.

  He wants to believe Pettiman is a fool and sloppy worker, but the man gave no tell-tale signs of lying when he first mentioned the suicide note. He was angry. Probably had Sophie in the cross-hairs for a dinner date before today, but every action he took underlined his belief that the note existed.

  It’s possible for anyone to mix up cases, but though Pettiman didn’t recall her name at first, Truce is sure he remembered the work when he read the file. He didn’t touch his tie, shift his feet, show a facial or verbal tick or even breathe differently when he mentioned the note. Unless he is the world’s best liar, and Truce can find no reason to rate his intelligence that high, Pettiman truly believed in the suicide note. As for the bit about orders from above … Truce can’t even be halfway sure about that. By that point the doctor had become wary of incriminating himself, and his anger had been increasing. The signs he gave off were muddy. He might have been told to hurry. He might have misheard.

  But Truce is just as certain Pettiman believed in the suicide note, as the desk sergeant was certain none had ever existed.

  A fresh onset of pain triggers a wave of nausea. He opens the car door and is sick onto the road. It’s no use. He has to get home. He focusses only on his driving.

  But at the back of his mind, a voice keeps repeating: None of this makes sense.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Going to phone in sick again?” asks Leighton, looking up from the newspaper. “Even if Rose is one clip short of a load, she’s gonna realise something is up.”

  “She did tell me to take some personal time, but that’s the sliding slope to being invalided out. I’m not letting that happen again. I’m going to tell the Bob to register me as working away from the station. I’ll fill in the reports when I get back.”

  “Is it usual to treat police officers like primary school kids? Do you have to raise your hand and ask to go to the toilet?”

  “Nah, nowadays they let us buzz through our request to go pee-pee on the phone.”

  “Ha. Ha.”

  “I told you, Rose is a control freak.”

  “Either that, or she’s still afraid you’re going to screw up,” says Leighton.
r />   Truce throws a cushion at his head and picks up the landline.

  “Don’t even know why you have that,” says Leighton.

  “Computer, you Neanderthal.”

  He dials the number and waits. For a long moment there is silence, then the Bob picks up. Truce explains. He waits for the Bob to hang up first. He continues to listen. The line is dead, except for the occasional clicking sound. “Odd,” he mutters, putting the phone down.

  “Takes longer to get through, and there’s clicking sounds?” Leighton asks.

  “Have you been phoning your bookie again?” says Truce.

  “Of course not. Well, maybe once. Okay twice. But it’s not nearly as much fun as running illegal gambling on the base.”

  “That was you?” says Truce, shocked.

  “I thought you knew,” says Leighton, stretching his long legs across the sofa. “Thought you were turning a blind eye as I’m a mate.”

  “No, and I wouldn’t have,” says Truce sternly.

  “You’d turn in a mate?” says Leighton. “Even me?”

  “Yes, I’d bloody turn you in,” says Truce. He pauses and sighs. “Okay, I’d turn you in only if you didn’t stop when I asked you.”

  “God, you’re a wet blanket. You never want me to have any fun,” says Leighton.

  “You sound like a nagging wife,” says Truce.

  “Nah, darling,” says Leighton in falsetto tones. “You’re just not my type.”

  Truce shakes his head as if he is trying to dislodge water from his ears.

  “You look like a dog,” says Leighton. “You need a haircut.”

  “You’re distracting me again,” says Truce. “I was on to something and you diverted the conversation. Why do you keep doing that?”

  “I’m only trying to keep you out of trouble,” says Leighton. “Fancy a bacon sarnie? I’ll make ‘em.”

  “Someone’s tapping my phone, aren’t they?”

  “And the penny finally drops,” says Leighton.