Over My Dead Body

by Dave Warner

  Lenny, Leonard Chester, thought Holmes, keeping this knowledge to himself.

  ‘Something about a phone call,’ said a young fellow, Jordan, who wore a tee-shirt under a V-neck sweater that looked like it had been hit with a shotgun blast. Holmes sensed opiate addiction at some time in his past, and a constant struggle to keep it there.

  ‘What was the big deal about this phone call?’ asked Holmes.

  They all shook their heads.

  ‘He wasn’t even here,’ said Jordan, and some of the group seemed to know this and nod while others stared blankly as if wondering if there would be any more beans.

  ‘So who answered the phone?’ asked Holmes.

  As one, at least three of them said, ‘Barron.’

  ‘He acts like it’s his job’, said Arty. ‘Phone rings, he jumps on it.’

  ‘Is Barron here now?’

  No. Barron, he was assured, would only come in five minutes before the doors were bolted at 10.05.

  ‘He likes to drink at The Duchess,’ said Arty, who had earlier explained that booze was not allowed at Sunrise House, although you were allowed to drink off premises so long as you didn’t turn up dead drunk. Holmes had joined old Arty and three strangers in the single-night dormitory and claimed the top bunk in the big, cold room. A stack of worn but clean blankets was piled on a chair near the doorway. Holmes had taken one and lay under its coarse skin the way a million innocent maidens must have lain at night under the body of their husbands: farmers, miners, gangers and dockers with calloused hands and chins of rough whiskers, and the smell of coal, or earth or salt seas emanating from their heavy, crude bodies. Almost none of these men meant harm to their wives, the opposite, they were embarrassed at their roughness. Holmes was pleased he was from an earlier time where femininity was allowed, perhaps even encouraged, to be the greatest mystery a man could encounter. It confused him that the thinking of this era equated femininity with weakness, where the difference between sexes was rubbed down and painted over, where the heroes of those ubiquitous screens seemed to be women who could shoot and fight and curse. If a man was not constantly reminded of his physical dominance, was not inculcated from his first angry shake of the rattle in his sister’s face, of the damage he could do and the restraint he must show, how on earth were women to be kept safe, how was the inner brute that dwelled within a man’s bosom to be tamed? From what he had seen, there appeared to be a belief that slogans and campaigns could somehow achieve what had formerly been a continual process of education that a boy was given from the time of his first tooth: stand when a woman enters the room, throw your coat over a puddle or ditch; and never, ever, whatever the provocation, raise one’s hand to a woman. True, women now could be prime ministers, lawyers, soldiers, and well they should be. It had always irked him that fifty percent of the population had a lid placed upon their opportunities, but remove from men the idea that women were divine – more noble, more caring, more delicate … more special than men – and you risked the catastrophic consequence of the chained brute breaking free.

  There appeared to be so many murders of women now, that the public only seemed to stir at the most outrageous, like those of Noah. And the likes of Noah, in any era, would remain immune to any moral education. He chided himself for not having treated the murder of Rebecca Chaney with the same application he had reserved for Noah’s victims. Perhaps he would be able to make amends.

  Perhaps.

  Or maybe he was like a champion pugilist who tried to resurrect a glorious career. You are an anachronism, Holmes. He heard the words in the voice of John Watson, his dear friend who had preserved him in the belief that he could made a difference. Thus far the evidence had shown that confidence misplaced. Perhaps this is where you belong, he thought. On a thin mattress under a coarse blanket surrounded by a chorus of coughs and splutters and men who must have had dreams of their own, families no doubt, lost to alcohol or drugs or Fate’s ill wind. What had they done to wind up here, playing out their days among the props at the back of a dusty stage with the warm houselights and the well-dressed audience all pointing in another direction? Every one of them had once walked with a swing in their step, money in their pocket, love for a mother or a girl in their heart. They had waded through streams casting for fish, lain on their belly in hot desert sand while cannon fire exploded around them, rode the bus with the tiredness of hours standing behind a shop counter throbbing in their calves, run behind bicycles trying vainly to catch them, rolled stiff paper into a makeshift horn to put to their lips and blow, or to one eye like a telescope, forked a last morsel of bacon, swilled tea, applauded a sportsman who had cut across the tennis court like a cat, sat on the stern of a small boat staring at the infinite heavens, danced joyfully with a woman to music that even now stirred their toes with the memory, swung a heavy ax to dissect a fallen tree, jumped aboard a wagon for a free ride, tumbled down a grassy slope, sung a Christmas carol with snow falling outside the window, missed a stop because they were engrossed in a newspaper, held a baby in their big hands as if they alone were responsible for the wellbeing of the whole world, knelt in supplication for forgiveness or a favor or a proposal, pushed an umbrella against the falling stream of cold rain, cried over the death of a pet.

  They had all not just tasted life, but been life, as life had been them, the boundaries of skin and bone and self-reflection lost in a oneness with the humanity of the moment, nature and man, man and nature. He had felt that, of course, but now something more, something different, stratospheric, the intimacy of a man and woman, indivisible, his breath against her neck, his hand across her beating heart, the hook and eye becoming something new, a clasp, an entity, a wish, a hope, a steam vapor. Perhaps that was what Noah felt in that moment when he took the life of his victims, a majesty, a vastness beyond the worldly. The opposite side of the same coin, the transcendental and the abysmal, good and evil, Cain and Abel.

  When he had held Georgette, what he experienced must have been something like what the first person to have encountered Victoria Falls had felt, not Livingstone but the tribal hunter or daring girl who, drawn towards the roar had pushed aside the frond, and felt not just that they were seeing something divine but they were fused with it, that they had become the moment itself. And so, for once in his life, he allowed himself to imagine what might be. And these men with him in this room tonight, and those that had preceded them and would follow them, he had no doubt, had experienced such moments in their lives too, yet here they were, rusted hooks on rotting piers.

  Without Georgette, this was where he must inevitably arrive, the hold of doomed men for whom the world no longer had a use. And there was no possibility of Georgette. There could not be. He was dying. He felt it, not much physically, not yet, but mentally, oh yes. It was wrong for him to even contemplate a future with her. But he could attain justice one more …

  He heard the big door close, muffled voices, the sound of a heavy bar dropped into place and then footsteps. He checked his watch: 10.03. He did not know exactly where Barron’s room was, and he did not need to. He held his phone and dialled the number of Sunrise House.

  The phone in the hall rang. Barron Langdon walked towards it and answered it, thinking that at least he’d not had to get up out of bed. There was no point leaving the phone for anybody else, they all expected him to answer it.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Barron?’

  He turned at the voice behind him and saw a tall slim man standing there studying him carefully.

  She was worried, couldn’t help it. It was after seven now, an hour since she’d texted Holmes without reply. She’d tried calling but there had been no answer. She was aware of Harry, making pancakes, looking over at her.

  ‘I’m sure he’s fine. Probably forgot to charge his phone.’

  She had drilled that into Holmes. Surely, he hadn’t forgotten? What if he had gone off chasing Noah on his own? Or what if he had forgotten because his cognitive function was diminished? That in turn made
her think of her hamsters and the autopsy. She needed that, as soon as. The phone rang. Holmes.

  ‘Where are you?’ the words were out of her mouth before she even had it to her ear.

  ‘Returning on the train. My phone had no charge.’

  ‘I told you to charge it!’

  Harry was nodding sagely to himself as he dished pancakes.

  ‘Sunrise House had nowhere to do that. I shall see you back at the apart–’

  The call ended. No charge. Idiot.

  How damnably infuriating, thought Holmes. He had wanted to get a message to Benson but now that must wait. Oh well, there was much to occupy his brain and there was something about rail travel inherently conducive to pondering the inconsistencies of a case. In his day, it had been the rocking motion of the carriage on its steel tracks but there was minimal rocking in these carriages. When he had left for Boston yesterday, he had carried with him not even a hunch, simply a notion that a stay had not been properly tied. His mind slid back to last evening as he found Barron and asked if they might discuss the matter of the police visit.

  ‘We might,’ he said, ‘but the police never spoke with me. What’s it to you anyway?’

  Barron was late-fifties, estimated Holmes. At least five of his teeth were still housed in his mouth. Holmes offered the cigarette packet.

  ‘I am a curious man,’ said Holmes.

  Barron looked at Holmes, looked back at the proffered packet.

  ‘The whole packet?’ he asked, not willing to believe such bounty might truly be his. Holmes flipped it to him. Barron looked about suspiciously.

  ‘Best we go private,’ he suggested and Holmes followed him to a swing door that led into the shared bathroom. It was several degrees cooler in here on account of the tile floor, the large space and lack of any heating. A shower head dripped somewhere. A fug of soapy drains, disinfectant and stale urine welcomed them.

  ‘I wasn’t here when the cops turned up,’ explained Barron.

  ‘But it was you who answered the phone?’

  It was. The toff on the other end – not his vernacular but Holmes’ – had asked not for Leonard Chester, or Lenny, or Chester, but for Mat.

  ‘Who is Mat?’

  Mat was a young fellow it seemed who stayed infrequently at Sunrise House and never for longer than one night. He kept to himself. Barron was not sure what Mat’s poison was but nobody, according to Barron, stayed at Sunrise House by choice.

  ‘They’re not all junkies or booze hounds,’ he said, somehow distancing himself a step from his cohabitants, ‘only ninety percent.’ Sometimes it was just people with no money, ‘urban poets, rappers, them kind’, or men who had been kicked out by their women and needed a bed. According to Barron about half who fitted these categories had ‘issues’.

  ‘Such as?’

  In the universal gesture to denote lunacy, Barron wound his finger around the space in front of his ear.

  ‘Was Mat that way?’

  ‘Don’t know, like I say, never spoke to him really. But he had that look.’

  ‘The look of a mental patient?’

  ‘The look of Davy Travers.’

  ‘And who is Davy Travers?’

  ‘Used to stay here. Grabbed the breadknife one day in the kitchen and stabbed two guys who he said were Gestapo.’

  First thing that morning, Holmes, at his most presentable, had spoken to the female supervisor of the house about Mat on the pretext that a friend might be able to offer him a job. She could not help with Mat’s surname either.

  ‘We don’t pry into any of you’, she said. ‘I can pass a message on if he comes back here.’

  ‘When was the last time he was here?’ asked Holmes.

  ‘At least three weeks,’ she replied, peering at him now, suspicions aroused. Barron had estimated three to four weeks since Mat had been there.

  Over breakfast Holmes enquired of the other Sunrise House clients if any knew Mat. A few said they did, but like Barron, none of them had so much as a surname for him, nor any idea of his occupation, if indeed he did have one.

  Now as the train powered on, Holmes evaluated. He had uncovered no solid evidence to suggest Mat might be Noah. Barron was credible, Holmes did not believe him a liar, yet it was possible he was mistaken. He was after all, a regular at Sunrise House and as Barron himself had admitted, nobody stayed there unless they had some issue. Even if Barron weren’t mistaken, there might be a number of valid reasons why Scheer had made a covert call to Mat. He could be Scheer’s homosexual lover or drug supplier. But equally, he could be some mentally unstable patient who had somehow become exposed to Crimini d’Italia and began imitating the murders therein.

  Harry had lost none of his touch with pancakes but all Georgette could think about now was Holmes. And the hamsters. And Holmes. She could have gone straight to the lab but the apartment had all she needed and was more comfortable. She nixed Harry’s offer to get time off work to mind her.

  ‘None of those people I met with Holmes can be the killer, and Benson has a team on them anyway.’

  Reluctantly Harry came around but he had insisted on driving her and now he demanded he accompany her inside. She waited while he checked around, just as Holmes had done.

  ‘All clear,’ he announced. ‘You go to your lab, you have the driver meet you right out front.’

  She assured him she would. He hugged her.

  ‘And make sure your sister is on for Thanksgiving.’

  When he left, she savored that previous night she’d spent with her father. I wonder if it will just be him and me growing old, she thought with a touch of self-pity. There was a knock on the door. He must have come back for something. She opened the door. Avery Scheer barged in and slammed it shut.

  ‘You played me, Georgette.’

  ‘Get out of here right now.’ Like the feet of a falling mountaineer, her brain sought solid ground.

  ‘Or what? You’ll call your police pals? I wouldn’t be counting on any help from them.’

  She tried to back towards the kitchen and potential weapons but Scheer moved as she did, shutting her down.

  ‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘I understand. In fact, I admire you, even though it does wound my pride. I need you to help me.’

  She made a dash. He seized her arm.

  ‘No, please!’ he cried.

  She’d practiced the scenario in this very room. Rather than pull away she went with the momentum and drove herself forward, slamming her foot into the side of his knee, felt him buckle, pivoted and threw him over her hip. He landed with a crash. She grabbed her phone from the table, ran to the bathroom, locked it.

  22

  Holmes was still on the platform, having barely left the compartment, when he sensed movement behind him. He swung around to defend himself and was confronted by a uniformed policeman.

  ‘Percy Turner?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Wait here, sir.’

  The policeman made a call on his radio.

  Oh my God, thought Holmes. It’s Georgette, something has happened to –

  A familiar face speared through the crowd. Holmes recognized Feeney, Harry Watson’s partner.

  ‘You need to come with me,’ he said.

  A savage fear ripped at Holmes’ heart.

  The body lay on the carpet in a pool of sticky blood. Avery Scheer’s head had been caved in by the marble bust of Freud which had been dropped on the floor nearby, scalp and hair still attached to the base. Five techs were working the room, checking the walls, the carpet. Georgette stood with Benson at the doorway. Less than an hour earlier she had been shaking, terrified in her bathroom as she dialled Harry and yelled that a deranged Avery Scheer was loose in her living room. Within minutes, her father was holding her in his arms but her heart was still a locomotive. Of Scheer there had been no sign. Harry had called Benson. Teams had been sent to Scheer’s house and office. Being a Sunday there had been a slight delay in getting a key for the office but when they opened it
they found Scheer sprawled dead on the floor. The blood was still fresh.

  ‘Scheer must have come back here straight away,’ said Benson, who explained that he had chewed out the two men he’d had on Scheer. ‘But to be fair they were in a difficult situation. There was a shooting two blocks from where they were watching his house and they felt they had to respond. If I’d have had more eyes on him, he wouldn’t have slipped away.’

  ‘Any cameras?’

  ‘We’ll check. This door was locked. The killer went out the window.’

  ‘You think Scheer let him in?’

  ‘Looks that way.’

  ‘Watson!’ The cry turned her head to the end of the corridor. Holmes was striding towards her, Harry at his side. She felt an urge to rush to him but withstood it. Not only would that have been severely embarrassing under any circumstances, she reminded herself that what he felt was entirely different.

  Holmes wanted to wrap her in his arms but knew that was risible. His eyes traced every inch of her body. Thank God she seemed unharmed. He’d been hollow with worry until Feeney assured him that Georgette was fine. Harry had been waiting at the reception area here for him and had filled out the events.