Deadly Errand

by Christine Green

  Deadly Errand

  The first Kate Kinsella Medical Mystery

  ‘An excellent first novel featuring a female medical private eye who sneaks chocolate bars rather than sips from the office bottle. Unlikely heroine comes through with flying colours.’ - Daily Telegraph.

  Every small town in the English Midlands needs a nurse and an undertaker. Private eyes and shoe-fetishists are less common.

  In Longborough, Kate Kinsella is the nurse who wants to be a detective; local undertaker (and shoe-fetishist), the ‘gloriously weird’ Hubert Humberstone is her enthusiastic side-kick.

  Christine Green's ‘constantly enjoyable’ Kate Kinsella medical mysteries updated the cosy village ‘whodunit?’ to small town Middle England in the 1990s and spiced her stories with a generous helping of traditional British seaside postcard humour.

  CHRISTINE GREEN was born in Luton but escaped at the age of 17 to train as a nurse in London at the Royal National Ear Nose & Throat and Hampstead General hospitals. She has worked in District Nursing and Health Visiting, as a midwife, a teacher, a youth worker and as a prison visitor. She and her nursing sleuth Kate Kinsella made their debuts in fiction in 1991. Since then Christine Green has written fifteen crime novels and two historical novels centred on the famous Coronation Street during the years of World War II. Twice married, with two daughters (both nurses), Christine Green now lives on the Isle of Wight.

  Ostara Crime is a new imprint which aims to collect and republish quality crime writing for new readers. The series editor is Mike Ripley, an award-winning crime writer and editor who was crime fiction critic for the Daily Telegraph and then the Birmingham Post reviewing almost 1,000 crime novels in 18 years. He now writes the Getting Away With Murder column for Shots E-zine on www.shotsmag.co.uk and is also the series editor of Ostara's Top Notch Thrillers imprint.

  Also by Christine Green

  Deadly Admirer

  Deadly Practice

  Deadly Errand

  Christine Green

  Ostara Publishing

  Copyright © 1991 Christine Green

  Ostara Publishing Edition 2012

  The right of Christine Green to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 9781906288754

  A CIP reference is available from the British Library

  Printed and Bound in the United Kingdom

  Ostara Publishing

  13 King Coel Road

  Lexden

  Colchester CO3 9AG

  www.ostarapublishing.co.uk

  For Katherine Clare,

  for her patient reading

  Contents

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  Prologue

  The hand in mine had grown progressively colder. It was three a.m. and raining. I felt inside the bedclothes and touched the patient's feet, but death had crept there first; they would never be warm again. The only sounds in the room were the sonorous ticks of an alarm clock and the wispy breaths of the old lady. Breaths that paused in erratic punctuation and I knew that by daylight the pauses would have become a full stop.

  I gently unwound the hand from its feeble grip, walked to the window and pulled back the curtains. I hoped to be cheered up by the view – I wasn't. Outside, the bare branches of trees thrust against the glass like demented bats. Yet the sound didn't penetrate the room. Only inside the room seemed to exist. I closed the curtains, sighing. It was as though the two of us were waiting in a slow-motion world, but only I prayed for a fast-forward.

  The clock seemed to tick louder and faster when Miss Florence Boughton finally reached her full stop. I straightened her legs, combed the thin silvery hairs, placed a pillow under the chin and, leaving Florence's face uncovered, walked quickly out of the bedroom. I'd never felt brave enough to be alone with a body with its face covered. There always remained the slight feeling that the corpse might suddenly sit up. Uncovered, I could pretend to myself that Florence still lived.

  Downstairs, I passed the grandfather clock in the hall. There were traces of dust on the clock face and I paused beside it for a moment to tap the glass, willing the hands to come to life. There was no response.

  In the kitchen I switched on all the lights, huddled over a onebar electric fire and watched the rain spatter against the kitchen window. I wanted to close my eyes but couldn't. There's no need to stay awake now, I told myself, but sleep was chased away by the night sounds: a trickle of water along a pipe, a creaking floorboard, the hum of the refrigerator, even the sound of my own breathing.

  At seven a.m. the rain stopped and the house became silent again. Relieved, I rang the GP and the undertaker and then made tea and toast to celebrate the arrival of morning. The combination of daylight, food and caffeine made the world seem a marginally better place. In fact, I began to feel quite cheerful, an hysterical cheerfulness that needed fuelling with company. I resisted an urge to check on Florence, who lay, stiffening and untroubled upstairs. She had been a one-nighter, just another patient. But I still hoped Florence had believed that the hand that held hers belonged to someone special, someone she knew.

  Chapter One

  As I walked towards the side entrance of Humberstones Funeral Directors I was aware that Hubert Humberstone watched my arrival from behind the slatted blinds. He wasn't exactly watching me, he was merely waiting for a glimpse of my shoes. Duty shoes – black and low-heeled – would be a disappointment to him, not only for sight but for sound. Shoes that padded rather than clicked on the bare floorboards were no fun at all to Hubert.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Kinsella,’ he called as he crept up the stairs behind me. I half turned and his eyes registered, in an instant, the shoes. The expression could only be described as his fondle-foot look.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Humberstone. I didn't hear you,’ I lied. I always heard him.

  ‘Good night, was it?’ he asked, moving closer.

  ‘Yes, thank you. The patient died this morning.’

  ‘One of ours?’ Hubert asked hopefully.

  ‘Pritchards, I'm afraid. Family tradition.’

  Hubert shrugged and wiped his hands across the stray hairs on his head. ‘Never mind', he said. ‘I've got some good news. We've got a client coming today.’

  The ‘we' irritated me but I managed to force a smile, even though as he sidled closer a smell of bacon wafted from his black suit.

  ‘You'd better come in,’ I said, opening the office door so that he could go through first. ‘Sit down, Mr Humberstone. I'll make some coffee.’

  Reluctantly he sat in the jumble-sale chair in front of my desk. It was more a deep pit than a chair and I could tell he felt at a severe disadvantage. As I filled the kettle I flicked on the light to cheer up the drab room. The light worked but the gloom didn't lift. The bulb, covered by an off-white paper shade with green leaves, cast its light in the middle of the small room, leaving the corners in shadow.

  ‘This room gives me the creeps,’
I said, more to myself than Hubert. ‘I must buy a lamp.’

  ‘Be able to afford it now,’ said Hubert. ‘Now that you've got a client.’

  Relieved that he'd dropped the ‘we' I asked if he wanted sugar.

  Hubert nodded, still looking ill at ease in the chair with its saggy bottom nearly touching the ground. He stretched out his long legs and pulled nervously at the sleeves of his jacket, which were too short to accommodate his gangly frame. His skin was also at full stretch and his brown eyes sat below a high forehead like raisins set in dough. Poor Hubert wasn't handsome, but I had become fond of him, in the same way I had been fond of some psychiatric patients. I found his oddness strangely reassuring, his dour moments quite cheering.

  ‘How's business?’ I asked, handing him a mug of coffee.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Good month to look forward to. The old always snuff it in droves in the cold weather.’

  ‘Do you have to be quite so blunt?’

  ‘It's my life, my bread and butter,’ Hubert replied in a hurt voice.

  I nodded and drank my coffee. Hubert may be slightly weird, I thought, but he is my landlord and eventually I'll get used to working above a continual conveyor-belt of corpses.

  ‘Tell me about the new client, Mr Humberstone.’ I always called him Mister but in my thoughts he remained for ever Hubert.

  ‘Nice woman,’ he said slowly. ‘Expensive shoes, comes from Short Brampton. I buried her mother—’

  ‘What does she want me to do exactly?’ I interrupted, trying to chivvy him along.

  ‘It's a murder case,’ he announced.

  ‘Medical murder or common or garden murder?’

  ‘Murder. Proper murder. A stabbing.’

  ‘Your burial?’

  Hubert nodded. ‘It's on Friday. The police have been hanging on to the body for three months but now the inquest is over, they've released it.’

  ‘I've never dealt with murder. Did you recommend me?’

  Hubert looked embarrassed. ‘You can do it,’ he said. ‘The dead girl was a nurse. Right up your street.’

  I laughed. ‘The last case “right up my street” was that woman who wanted me to investigate the reasons for her husband's loss of sex drive after his prostatectomy.’

  ‘He was eighty.’

  ‘That's the point,’ I said. ‘Then there was the woman with the breast lump who wanted to file a complaint against her GP for examining both breasts.’

  Hubert smiled, opening up his crow's-feet so that his eyes practically disappeared. ‘This is a paying one, though. Plenty of money in the family. The publicity will do you a treat. You could even have a gold-plated plaque outside with “Medical and Nursing Investigations” engraved in big letters and Kate Kinsella SRN, RMN underneath it.’

  ‘I don't want publicity,’ I said. ‘I want to get this agency a steady supply of solid cases. Not just cranks trying to get back at the medical profession for imagined misdeeds. A plaque outside would only attract passing nutters and I'd be swamped. Word of mouth and my card spread around the local solicitors is quite enough.’

  Hubert looked a little crushed but was obviously going to persevere. ‘I could let you see the body.’

  ‘You're disgusting,’ I said, feeling my stomach tense like a boxer's biceps. Bodies you'd been with as they died, people you'd known, were quite different from the corpse of a stranger, especially one kept in a fridge for three months. Be charitable, though, I told myself. To Hubert, dead bodies were as normal as clapped-out cars are to a used-car dealer. ‘I might not be able to handle this one. I'll have to think about it.’

  ‘Don't think too long,’ said Hubert, checking his watch. ‘She's coming at two – thought two might be a good time. You can have a proper kip.’

  ‘Thanks. I don't want to keep you any longer, Mr Humberstone. I'm sure you've a funeral to attend or a bit of embalming to do.’

  Hubert, thick-skinned but not stupid, raised himself from the chair with as much difficulty as, if not more than, Lazarus and walked to the door. ‘Sweet dreams then, Miss Kinsella, and think of the spondulicks.’

  I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Money, dough, bread, spondulicks,’ he said. ‘This could be the making of you. I'll give you any help you need. And remember, wear the right shoes and you can conquer the world.’

  ‘I'll remember that. What's her name by the way?’

  ‘It's Mrs Marburg. I told her you'd be sure to find the murderer.’

  ‘Don't expect any commission,’ I murmured under my breath.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Thanks for the commission.’

  Hubert smiles. ‘My pleasure.’

  I locked the door when I'd heard him reach the ground floor. I trusted him to a certain extent, but I did know that occasionally when I left the office, he touched the shoes in my cupboard. It was a violation of sorts, but it didn't worry me as long as he didn't touch the shoes with me in them. Hubert wasn't yet in his dotage, though his exact age was hard to guess, he being the type who passes from youth to middle age with a mere hairy diminishment.

  Although I worked from and occasionally slept at Humberstones I did try very hard to keep separate from the undertaking part of the building. The full-time receptionist, Daphne Gittens, a cheerful pleasant woman, tried to encourage me downstairs but I resisted. Hubert relied mostly on casual staff and my chief fear was that he would try to involve me in the laying out of the bodies. Also, Humberstones consisted of two houses knocked into one and Hubert lived above the ‘shop'. I hadn't yet been invited to Hubert's flat. And if I was invited, I knew I would refuse.

  I was at the foot end of my wash, standing on one leg with my size six in the sink, when I realised I didn't even know how to begin a murder investigation. And if I couldn't start, how could I ever finish?

  I'd come to Longborough to start a new life. I'd got bored with nursing, although I didn't want to give it up entirely, and I'd been given some money. A few months after Dave, my detective inspector live-in lover, had been killed, not in the course of duty, a friend of his brought round a cheque. Dave's friends and colleagues had had a whip-round because not being married I didn't qualify for a pension. I'd eventually accepted the cheque feeling like a widow but minus the orphans. And then I hadn't known what to do with the money so I stuck it in a building society and waited for inspiration to strike. That took some time, until a chance remark overheard in a bus queue gave me the idea of setting up my own investigation agency.

  ‘Any fool can be a private detective these days. You don't need any qualifications, all you need is a room and the bottle to go for it.’

  Dave hadn't been that bright, I told myself, and he had a habit of blundering into situations, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, even being in the wrong place … Surely, I thought, I could do as well, if not better. Naïvely, I had expected to function as a cross between Mata Hari and a young version of Miss Marple. Now, faced with my first interesting case, my ‘bottle' was fast emptying.

  ‘Oh, sod it,’ I said aloud, consoling myself that it was only tiredness that was making me so jittery.

  Extricating my foot from the sink, I dried it quickly, took the phone off the hook, and went through to the ‘bedroom'. A windowless box, it contains a sofa-bed in permanent readiness, a folding chair, an alarm clock and a small cupboard. This room also needed a lamp, but I didn't care, it was just a place to sleep in and the darker the better.

  The alarm clock buzzed at one and although I switched it off, it was only a reflex action, and it was one thirty when I finally woke; heavy-eyed and irritable that I felt worse than before I'd slept. But after two mugs of strong coffee and a face salvage job, I looked, and felt, quite decent, quite optimistic even.

  Mrs Nina Marburg, punctual to the minute, arrived closely followed by Hubert who announced her as though to a packed ballroom, and then hovered as if expecting to be asked in. I tossed my head at him, and with a disappointed sag of his shoulders he left, to do whatever undertakers
do to dead bodies. One day I'll ask him.

  ‘Please sit down, Mrs Marburg.’

  She gazed at my faded floral in a mixture of amusement and disbelief.

  ‘It won't bite. Really it's quite comfortable.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  I knew then that she wasn't sure I could do the job.

  Nina Marburg eyed me with slight suspicion from the depths of the chair. She had the look of an anorexic pixie – tiny oval face, beginning to wrinkle at the moving parts. ‘You're younger than I thought,’ she said.

  ‘I'm twenty-nine.’ And I would have liked to stay twenty-nine but thirty loomed next month. My offer of coffee and chocolate biscuits she declined.

  ‘You can never be too thin,’ she said, glancing at my size fourteen pityingly.

  ‘How may I help?’ I asked, breaking my chocolate biscuit delicately into pieces and trying to eat it very slowly. It was my breakfast after all.

  ‘My niece Jacky Byfield – I expect you read about it in the papers. She was murdered, stabbed, in the grounds of St Dymphna's three months ago. Just twenty-three, a lovely girl, very religious, really dedicated to nursing. Everyone liked her.’

  Well, almost everyone, I thought uncharitably. But I nodded, to encourage her to go on.

  Mrs Marburg's eyes, the colour of dish-water, began to overflow and she rummaged in her handbag for a hankie. She eventually found an embroidered job, and with it she dabbed her eyes with careful deliberation.

  ‘Do you have a photo?’ I asked.

  Producing a passport-sized one from her purse she handed it to me silently.