Dead Unlucky

by Andrew Derham

  ‘No thanks. Can I have a Coke instead, Mum?’

  ‘Go on then. But don’t tell your dad.’ Mrs Emmer turned to Hart and whispered, ‘Clive would go mad if he found out she’d been drinking Coke at this time of day.’

  When they returned to the living room, Hart handed the child her cola and then got cracking on the purpose of his visit as soon as he sat down.

  ‘The reason we’ve come round, well, two reasons really, is to see how you’re getting on of course, and also to ask a few questions about Sebastian. Was there anybody who wasn’t too keen on him? Anybody at all?’

  ‘No one,’ replied Mrs Emmer. ‘He has lots of friends, more like.’

  ‘Did they come here to your house a lot?’

  ‘Not really. Well, perhaps one did. Timothy his name was. He came round a fair bit.’

  ‘Had Sebastian had any arguments recently? It doesn’t matter how small; it’s amazing how these tiny things can sometimes lead on to more important clues.’

  ‘No. None at all.’

  ‘Mum, that’s not true!’ Rebecca Emmer startled them all with the vehemence of her interruption.

  ‘I’ll pour the tea,’ said Mrs Emmer. She leaned forward and tipped tea into the three flowery cups on the coffee table in the centre of the room.

  ‘Go on, Rebecca,’ said Hart, declining the offer of sugar with a small shake of the head.

  ‘They were nothing at all, Mr Hart,’ explained Mrs Emmer. ‘Just the odd little spat. No more than all families have, I’m sure.’

  Hart received his cup and saucer with a smile. ‘That’s okay. Don’t forget, every little piece of information helps.’

  Rebecca began her story as her mother turned a tad pink.

  ‘Sebastian and me were always rowing. He just wouldn’t leave me alone, picked on me all the time. He could have his music player on, turned right full up, but if I just wanted to listen to mine quietly with my bedroom door shut, he just came in and took the disc out and threw it on my bed. I wasn’t hurting him, he just didn’t want me to have any fun, that’s all.’

  Rebecca started to sob, but not hard, a mixture of frustration and anger spilling from her, rather than a wretched outpouring of grief.

  ‘I come down to watch the TV and he says he wants a different programme on, but he doesn’t, he just wants to stop me watching the things I like. So he gets the remote and changes channels. It’s not fair, he’s got a really good telly in his room but he says he wants to watch the one down here.’

  And it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair for Rebecca Emmer to have to suffer such a contradiction of emotions, to have to bad-mouth her brother at the same time as mourning him. But she couldn’t help it and, in some strange way, it was a relief for her to let the bile surge out.

  ‘Did he ever hit you, Rebecca?’ asked Hart.

  ‘Never,’ stated her mother eagerly. ‘Sebastian would never do a thing like that.’

  Rebecca carried on as though Mrs Emmer had not spoken. Her words were gushing now and the flow wouldn’t be stopped.

  ‘He didn’t hit me, but it was somehow worse than that. If I had something in my hand he wanted, or pretended to want, he would take it. But always by twisting my wrist or bending my fingers, just to hurt me. And he would stick his face right up to mine and knock my forehead with his and say horrible things about me, things like I was going with boys or my friends were slags and stuff.’

  ‘Was he like this at school?’ asked Hart, sipping at his tea to try and make it all seem like a cosy chat rather than an interrogation.

  ‘They don’t go to the same school,’ volunteered Mrs Emmer. ‘Clive said it was too expensive to send them both to Highdean and so Becky goes to the local one, just round the corner.’

  Rebecca hadn’t finished. ‘He was horrible to you too, Mum.’

  ‘No, he was just being a boy, that’s all, Love.’

  ‘What about last weekend? He came home on Friday and you made his favourite for dinner, that fish thing in yucky sauce that I hate. You told him on the phone he was going to have that for his tea, something special for him to look forward to. You got it out of the oven all proud and stuff and put it on the table. I remember you standing back all pleased, waiting for him to say something nice to you but he just walked off and said he wasn’t hungry. I looked in your face, Mum, and I just wanted to cry because he hurt you so much.’

  And then Rebecca did cry herself, properly this time, because her unadorned despair simply boiled over and out of her. Her mother wrapped her arm around her back and pulled her close on the sofa.

  Redpath looked at the clock on the sideboard to give his eyes something to do, somewhere to point; whenever people started crying he always just wanted to get back in the car.

  Even in the few minutes he had been there, Hart had learned what he had wanted to know about Sebastian Emmer, learned more than he had bargained for, and it was nearly time to leave them with just their misery for company. There was still a little more work to be done, however.

  ‘How did Mr Emmer relate to Sebastian?’ he asked.

  ‘He just let him do what he wanted,’ came the muffled reply from Rebecca as she nuzzled into her mother’s cardigan. ‘If he wanted something like a phone or a watch, Dad just gave him the money. He could have everything.’

  Hart thought back to the tatty stuff in the girl’s bedroom and the stylish electronics and clothes in her brother’s and noted that she didn’t follow up her observation with and I didn’t get anything, and he admired that lack of self-pity, that uncomplicated goodness, in her.

  ‘Where does your husband work, Mrs Emmer?’

  ‘He’s got his own business. It’s importing goods from abroad. He gets things cheap from overseas and then sells them here. Makes a good profit, he does, which is why we can afford to live here.’

  And send one, but only one, of your children to a very expensive school, thought Hart.

  ‘Where does he get his goods from?’

  ‘All over, I think. Asia, South America. It’s furniture and rugs mainly, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Mrs Emmer. And you, too, Rebecca. We’d better be on our way.’

  But before the policemen had time to lift themselves out of their seats, a key rattled in the lock of the front door and Clive Emmer was in the living room within a moment; he had presumably noticed Hart’s car outside. His eyes burrowed into the stranger sitting in his chair. ‘So that’s okay, I’ll just sit on the bloody floor then.’

  ‘You’re home early, Dear. I didn’t expect you back at this time,’ said Mrs Emmer.

  ‘I haven’t been hanging around at my office, I called in at the undertaker’s. The funeral’s next week and you needn’t think any of you lot are going.’ He ignored his wife, making certain his unsolicited comments were aimed at Hart. ‘You should be getting out and finding the bastard who killed my son, not swanning around my family poking your nose into our business.’

  Had his wife or daughter wanted him to stay away from the funeral, Hart would have considered it. But he wasn’t going to allow this man to speak on the whole family’s behalf.

  ‘Mr Emmer, any member of the public has the right to attend a church service, whether it be a wedding, christening, funeral, or midnight mass. No invitation is necessary and nobody can be refused, unless they are deemed to be a public nuisance,’ he countered, a bit more primly than he’d intended.

  ‘Yes, well you are a bloody nuisance.’

  ‘Thank you for the tea, Mrs Emmer. We’ll see ourselves out.’

  As they reached the end of the hall, Hart and Redpath were surprised that Rebecca was just behind them and beat them to the latch to twist it and open the front door.

  ‘Look after your mum,’ whispered Hart as he crossed the threshold.

  ‘I will,’ replied the little girl, and she held the door ajar as she watched them get into the car.

  ‘Seems a nice lad, our Sebastian,’ observed Redpath as they drove out of the close. ‘Li
ke father, like son, I suppose.’

  ‘Yep, a real pair of charmers,’ agreed Hart with an equal dollop of irony. ‘I wonder what sentence little Becky will have to serve for committing the crime of supping Coke at this time of day.’

  ‘Makes you wonder why we bother, Sir. I mean, all these resources, all this effort, all on behalf of someone who seems to have taken a malicious pleasure in bullying his mother and his sister.’

  ‘But it’s not for him, Darren. He’s dead. He won’t know whether or not we catch the person who whacked a chunk of his skull into kingdom come. It’s for those who knew him and, believe it or not, loved him. He may have been as kind and considerate as a fox in a henhouse, but he was a brother and a son. They’ll want the person caught, all right, and they won’t know peace until he is. That’s if they’re ever lucky enough to truly know peace again.’

  16

  As Hart and Redpath arrived back at the station, Redpath spotted Arthur Rhodes getting into his car. Hart let the window down and called out.

  ‘I thought I’d missed you, Harry,’ said the big man as the three of them stepped inside the building together. ‘I wanted to bring you something over myself, not leave it at reception.’

  ‘You’ll be spoiling me, Arthur. A senior forensic pathologist must have more to do than play postman.’

  As they walked along the corridor to Hart’s office, Redpath was given a job to do. ‘See if you can track down the lab reports on the boy’s computer and his rooms, will you Darren. And if they haven’t done them yet, tell them to get a move on, it’s been nearly three days.’

  When Rhodes was inside his office, with the door safely closed, Hart rolled his swivel chair to the front of his desk so there would be no barrier separating the pair of them. Rhodes lowered himself into a tatty but comfy bamboo chair, olive-green cushions supporting his back and behind.

  ‘So what news have you managed to find out for me about poor Nicola Brown, Arthur?’

  ‘I’m not sure whether it’s what you want or not, but there’s no news at all really. What little there is you’ll find in here,’ he said, passing over a foolscap envelope to add to the pile on Hart’s desk. ‘The post-mortem said the girl died due to strangulation by hanging. And there’s no doubt about it.’

  ‘No complications? No broken neck? No injuries inflicted before she died?’

  Rhodes shook his head. ‘Death was due to strangulation, almost certainly while conscious, nothing else. This was a hanging where the victim had only fallen through a short drop, Harry. There was no great jolt to break the neck, like you’d get from a substantial fall, and there was no heart attack or contributory cause of death that the pathologist could find. Nothing in the blood, no drugs or sedatives or anything like that.’

  ‘So that means she just hung there until she suffocated, then? That’s a heck of a grim way to go.’ Hart was used to hearing bleak tales of macabre death, but the less gruesome the better as far as he was concerned. He hoped for a morsel of news to tell him that the manner of Nicola Brown’s passing was not unspeakably awful. He was out of luck.

  ‘I’m afraid it is. It’s ghastly. It probably took a good minute or two before she passed out due to lack of oxygen as the supply to her brain was cut off by constriction of her windpipe and the blood vessels of her neck. There was considerable bruising on the neck, due to her thrashing about on the rope, no doubt, which suggests she was awake as she hung there. The discolouration was at an angle to the circumference of her neck, so that helps lay to rest any notion that she may have been strangled first and then hung up.’

  ‘Anything else?’ enquired Hart gloomily.

  ‘Nothing of a harmful nature in stomach or lungs. No other marks on the skin to indicate a struggle, and they went over her with a fine toothcomb.’

  ‘Could they have missed anything?’

  ‘You can always miss something, Harry. There must be an infinite number of ways for a human being to die, and that means it’s impractical to search for everything that can kill a person.’

  ‘What did they give as the time of death?’

  ‘Early hours of the morning. Best guess between two and three o’clock.’

  ‘So she got herself out of bed in the middle of the night to kill herself? That’s a bit odd.’

  ‘There’s always something odd about someone taking their own life, it’s a decidedly odd thing to do.’ They sat thoughtfully for a while, until Rhodes broke the silence. ‘Harry, I believe this tree is the wrong one to be barking up. Everything here is consistent with suicide.’

  ‘A rotten way to kill yourself though, isn’t it?’ Images painted themselves in Hart’s mind, pictures of the poor girl kicking and juddering, bobbing and spinning, choking in agony as her fresh life emptied away while she dangled from a noose.

  ‘Absolutely awful,’ agreed Rhodes. ‘Still, the choices are a bit limited, of course, there’s no truly joyous way to do the deed. Slit wrists? Painful, and there’s loads of blood, which puts some people off. And it hardly ever works anyway. Overdose? Sure, not too bad, but uncertain and may leave you as a living vegetable instead of a dead corpse. Throw yourself in front of a train? Only if you hate yourself and want to humiliate your own body.’

  ‘So there’s a countless number of possible ways to meet your Maker, but only a few of them are actually chosen by the people who set up the appointments themselves?’

  ‘That’s about it. And hanging rides somewhere near the top of the popularity chart.’

  ‘Thanks Arthur, you’ve been a real help,’ remarked Hart unconvincingly.

  ‘What’s set you on this path anyway, Harry? Just that a suicide and a murder involving two kids at the same school are too much of a coincidence? Is that it?’

  ‘That’s what got me started, but there’s a bit more to it than that. I rang up Cambridge and got the rundown on her application for medicine. There was no doubt about it, she would have got in, unless she’d turned out to be a complete fruitcake at interview, but we know from what everyone’s said about her that she was articulate and a joy to have around.

  ‘Kids nowadays have to write a personal statement, a bit about why they want to go there and why the universities would be daft not to have them. This girl’s was one of the best the Dean of Admissions had ever read, and they get some top minds applying to that college. She passed ten exams in Year 11, the lot of them A-star grades, played the flute and piano, was a one-woman Red Cross Society in charity work, and had great references from her teachers.’

  Rhodes finished for him. ‘So why does a youngster with so much to look forward to kill herself a year before she goes off to fulfil her dream?’

  ‘Exactly. And because the evidence points so strongly to suicide, I’m not sure anybody’s asked that question. Not forcefully enough, anyway.’

  ‘And your boss won’t let you ask it because the Met’s already put the case to bed?’

  ‘Right. Like I’ve said before, Arthur, you should have been a copper.’

  ‘Well, I’m not, and poor old Sebastian Emmer’s not the only person to die in Lockingham this week, so I’d better get back to my slab.’

  *****

  Hart thanked his mate again, asked him to shut the door on the way out, and wheeled his chair back behind his desk. And then he embarked upon an enterprise which was the most risky undertaking of a career in which he had never been afraid to stick his neck out. But if he were caught doing this, he’d lose his proverbial head, and he could forget about ever working on a murder case again, or any other case for that matter. For a year or two, he’d be sitting on his backside shuffling paper from one tray to another until he couldn’t stand the boredom and indignity any more. Then he’d be shown the front door and walk straight through it, right after listening to oily platitudes and polite clapping over drinks, and all the jolly speeches kindly spoken to celebrate his distinguished career. However, this affected adulation wouldn’t quite make up for his reduced pension.

  Hart lifted a cle
ar plastic folder from his desk and skimmed his finger down the names of the pupils who attended Highdean School until it stopped at the best friend of Nicola Brown. Then he pushed his hand into his right trouser pocket and pulled out his personal mobile.

  And he used it to dial the Egyptian embassy and make an appointment to visit the father of Hiba Massaoud.

  17

  ‘I’ve got all those reports about Sebastian Emmer you wanted, Sir,’ announced Redpath triumphantly as he entered his boss’s office just after lunch. ‘I had to exert all my authority, of course,’ he joked. ‘The boffs said that if they were for Chief Inspector Hart then he would just have to wait until after Christmas, they were too busy for the likes of him right now. I told them they were for me and so they’d better hand them over pronto.’

  ‘Good job, Darren. If we need any behinds kicking again, then we’ll send you in to be the bad guy.’ Hart wondered if he had been a bit hard on the lad of late. It was good to have the chance to give him a bit of credit, even though he knew the lab boys and girls were usually pretty obliging on important cases like these. ‘Let’s have the forensics on his rooms first.’

  Redpath handed him the documents as he sat down.

  ‘So what have we got here?’ muttered Hart as he extracted the papers from yet another manila envelope. He answered his own question with disappointment. ‘Nothing. Absolutely naff all. Both his rooms, at home and school, pristine except for a bit of cocaine on his pillows due to a touch of rhinorrhoea, which is to be expected.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Runny nose to the likes of you and me.’

  ‘So he didn’t do drugs there, then? He restricted himself to clubs and places like that?’

  ‘Looks like it.’ Hart straightened his back as his eyes scanned the report regarding Sebastian Emmer’s computer. ‘This is interesting, though. Very interesting. There are a few messages written on the machine. They’d been chucked into the recycle bin and then deleted, but the computer boffs got them back easily enough, of course.’