The Red Chairs Mystery

by L. D. Culliford

  ‘No, I haven’t. It just came to me in the shower.’

  ‘Okay. The match jumped an extra year between 2001 and 2002. See if you can work out why!’

  ‘Really… The 9/11 terrorists managed to put the Ryder Cup off track for a year?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it… Well done! Play would have started at The Belfry less than three weeks after the twin towers attacks, at the end of that same September, so the two captains and the officials agreed to wait a year; but they did also agree to play with the same two teams already chosen in 2001, so maybe not all of them were on such good form when it came to it twelve months later.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was a good match. The teams were tied after day two, but Europe won the singles convincingly on the Sunday, resulting in an overall win of 15½ to 12½.’

  ‘It sounds exciting!’

  ‘It always is… That’s the terrific thing about the Ryder Cup. The players are not paid a penny to represent their countries, but they give everything to win if they can. That seems to make it more special each time. You wait and see… Why not come over on Sunday evening and we’ll watch the climax together?’

  Holly said that she might.

  ***

  Soon after nine o’clock, the Micra turned into the staff car-park behind the hospital in Chichester. Looking at the combined mortuary and pathology building in front of her, Holly could not help but vividly recall the embarrassment of the first post-mortem she had seen there years earlier during police training. Eight probationers were supposed to go that day, but Holly arrived first. Two or three other spectators, student nurses from elsewhere in the hospital, went into the building, so she followed them. Once inside, unsure what to expect, she hung back against the wall where the light was dim. At the front, a demonstration table under bright lights held a body covered by a green linen sheet. Everything was still and silent, then a small, dapper man in a fully buttoned-up black suit appeared through a side door, followed by an attendant. The demonstrator slowly took off his jacket and passed it absent-mindedly behind him with his right hand while stroking his fussy little toothbrush moustache in a nervous gesture with his left. The attendant passed him a starched white laboratory coat, which he donned swiftly and moved to the table, tugging mercilessly at the covering, leaving his minion to gather the green billows and fold up the sheet.

  Holly had been mesmerized. It was as if a conjuring trick had magnificently gone wrong. The pale, mottled naked female body lay there still, when according to expectation it should have vanished, or maybe come alive. Suddenly, confronted by the finality of death for the first time in her life, and by thoughts of its inevitability, she felt dizzy and slightly nauseous. Afraid she might actually be sick, and anxious not to disgrace herself, she made her way along the wall and back into the fresh air, where she quickly began to revive. She then noticed that the other seven recruits in her group had arrived and were mustered there like docile cattle. While remaining outdoors herself, she motioned the other cadets forward into the building. Five or so minutes later, when she was sure the risk of humiliation was over, she decided to go back inside. Her earlier departure had not been spotted so, on re-entry, people naturally assumed she was late.

  Catching sight of her, the demonstrator abruptly stopped showing off the cadaver’s internal organs. Appalled at her apparent tardiness, he fixed Holly with a withering stare and shouted loudly, ‘Go! Go! Get out! You’re late.’ He clearly felt personally insulted. Holly was utterly shocked. Nevertheless, to her credit, she stood her ground and stared back at her irate accuser until, with a slight shrug, he resumed his macabre task, ignoring her totally after that, but paying special attention to Lizzie, the other female recruit.

  ‘What was I supposed to do, caught in the headlights between a rock and a hard place?’ Holly thought to herself as she remembered that unhappy encounter. ‘He should have let me explain.’ But there were no qualms or dizziness this time as she entered the building. There was a different, more scrupulous atmosphere. For a start, everyone wore full protective clothing, including Wellington boots, partly to negate the risk of cross-contamination. The old professor in his street clothes would immediately have been asked to leave.

  Holly was even smiling to herself as she changed in an ante-room. Peter Narayan, though serious as ever, seemed in a friendly mood when she stepped into the examination room. ‘Have you got something to show me?’ she asked, approaching a clean, modern table, rather different from the simple slab of former times. And this time, of course, the corpse upon it was one she had already met.

  ‘I think I have’, the handsome pathologist replied affably. ‘But first… Tell me what you see here.’

  Holly studied the body again. ‘She’s exceptionally thin’, she began, ‘Even thinner than I realized when I saw her yesterday. I wondered if she’d been deliberately starved by someone.’

  ‘You might find it better just to observe for now, and only speculate about causes when you’ve finished the full inventory of your observations’, Narayan said quietly. ‘That’s what I teach my students.’

  ‘Okay’, said Holly before continuing. ‘Her hair is very soft, like babies’ hair. And she’s older, isn’t she? She’s not a teenager just reaching puberty, as I first thought.’

  Narayan nodded in agreement. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Well, I can’t see any signs of trauma or any other obvious cause of death.’

  ‘So what does what you have seen so far suggest to you?’

  ‘That she may have had a serious eating disorder. Anorexia, I imagine.’

  ‘And where would you want to look now?’

  Holly had a hunch. ‘In her mouth?’ she asked. ‘I think I’d want to take a look at her teeth.’

  ‘Yes. Here you are.’ The pathologist leaned across and arranged the head a little to one side. Then he adjusted an angle light to shine directly into the mouth, which he then held open. Holly, peering in, made a mental note of the marked wearing away of the enamel of the blackened back teeth on either side.

  ‘That’s classical in cases of bulimia, Holly. You know that, don’t you?’ Narayan was explaining. ‘Anorexia nervosa affects mostly women. It is a kind of extreme form of slimming addiction, so that sufferers also make themselves vomit after ingesting food or drink. That’s the ‘bulimia’ part; and they do this especially if they’ve been on a high-calorie binge. In severe cases, though, they just get into a habit of making themselves sick after eating anything at all. The teeth get worn down by acid from the stomach, which is normally there to help digest the food we eat. In this case, some acid is refluxed into the back of the mouth whenever a person makes themselves sick; and it affects the teeth particularly when there’s only a little food to regurgitate.’

  ‘That’s not very nice, is it?’ Holly was determined not to let herself feel sick again in that miserable, sterile room.

  ‘No. It is not nice at all’, the pathologist sounded sympathetic. ‘And you can only wonder what damages a person’s self-esteem to such an extent that they want to make themselves so small as to disappear entirely from the face of the planet.’

  ‘Yes. It is sad’, Holly responded. ‘Do you think that’s what it was like for her?’

  ‘Who knows? I don’t think anybody properly understands what makes people do this kind of thing to themselves, but it must be pretty awful to overrule the basic human instinct to survive, don’t you think?’

  Silence held sway in the room momentarily. Holly had begun to notice a chill in the air when the doctor turned from the body, facing her with a serious look on his face. She sensed he had something important in mind.

  ‘I am a Hindu, you know’, he spoke quietly in a confidential tone. ‘I would not say I am religious, but my people are, my grandparents especially. I don’t go to the temple, but we do have a small shrine to one of the many gods, the elephant-headed Ganesh, in
the house, and my wife does ‘puja’, says prayers, every morning and night. We’ve two girls, and we try and teach them to respect the truth at the heart of all religions. I always tell them that they are indivisibly linked by a powerful energetic life-force to a magnificent universal whole. We all are. So I suppose it means I do believe in something… something truly great… Some kind of order in the universe, the order we understand, partly anyway, through science. And, you know what? This idea sustains us. It speaks of some kind of seamless bond between people as individuals, and also between people and nature. This, I call it a ‘spiritual’ bond, is what gives us a comforting feeling of belonging, a sense of responsibility, and thereby too a sense of purpose. This, anyway, is what helps me get through all the hardships and bad days.’

  Realizing that Holly was growing embarrassed by his earnest tone, the pathologist quickly apologized. ‘I’m sorry’, he said. ‘I shouldn’t go on like that… But what I mean is that people, religious or not, need to take some kind of account of life’s sacredness, of its spiritual dimension. This is the only way to properly make sense of things; and it makes it so much easier to cope with life’s challenges. Otherwise you risk ending up here, on one of my dissecting tables, dead from anorexia, alcoholism, drug abuse, from a cancer caused by smoking, obesity or some other destructive form of behaviour. If only people could all see how they end up!’

  ‘I think, perhaps, you need a holiday’, said Holly, trying to be helpful. ‘Your job seems to be getting to you.’ She was certainly not yet prepared to think of herself, or even her father – already in his late sixties – as ending up on one of these slabs.

  ‘And my job’, she said then, bringing her mind back to attention, ‘Is finding out who this person was and what happened to her. What set of circumstances brought her here to your gloomy little fiefdom? And, for that reason, I must ask, do you think self-starvation is the main cause of death?’

  ‘I am sorry.’ Peter Narayan had relaxed and was cheerful again. ‘It’s just a hobby-horse of mine, despite my background in science, that people need to look deeper than the common superficialities of everyday life, shopping, social media, what’s on television and whatnot, for their own good… But this woman? Yes. She certainly had advanced and severe anorexia nervosa with secondary bulimia. In addition to the signs you’ve seen, we’ve checked her bone density and she has advanced osteo-malacia. That’s thin, brittle bones caused by a prolonged inadequate diet, lacking especially in protein. That’s why her body is rounded over. Some of her spinal vertebrae have become squashed or have even collapsed completely. I was just going to take some X-rays when you arrived. The condition must have been very painful while she was alive… And, before you ask, I reckon she was about forty, plus or minus five years when she died.’

  Involuntarily, Holly began reaching out to smooth back a wayward strand of wispy hair from the pallid, lifeless face, then caught herself and withdrew her hand. She knew the rules: ‘Do not touch anything’. But she had felt and acknowledged a wave of tenderness towards this hapless individual that was going to feed her commitment to uncovering what had happened.

  ‘So, yes,’ the doctor was continuing blithely, ‘She had anorexia, but did she die of it? She may have. It’s possible. But equally, she may not have. Frankly, I don’t know… Not yet. Not until we get the toxicology results back, to see if she was drugged or poisoned. So far, I have seen no bruises or other signs of foul play, but you will have to wait until I have completed the examination. I’ll let you know if I find anything. Also, I have one more thing to tell you at this stage… She was frozen.’

  This was unexpected. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that, after she died, someone put her body into a deep freezer, and only took her out again to transport her to her resting place on the golf course.’

  ‘Can you be sure?’

  ‘Well, I’ve already looked at her heart muscle under the microscope and found cell damage characteristic of the type we see in animal hearts that have been frozen and thawed out again. There were no ice crystals as such, and I may be wrong, but it seems likely… The problem, of course, is that now I won’t be able to give you an approximate time of death. In fact, I could not reliably tell you even in which month she perished!’

  Holly was disappointed. There were now almost too many questions. She decided she needed to concentrate only on one for the time being: Who was this unfortunate woman? Before leaving, she called her boss, who told her to return to headquarters for a briefing with the Superintendent later in the day. Decisions about the investigation were going to have to be made.

  The 4th

  Chapter

  Holly’s next appointment that Friday involved a longstanding missing person case that she and a colleague from Brighton had been working on together. Jack was an old friend. They had first met years earlier when, as a newly-appointed detective-constable, Holly had been sent to an address in the Brighton suburb of Moulsecoomb. It was a hot summer’s morning and she had to park at the foot of a steep hill, more than a hundred yards from the terraced house in question. A raid by the Drug Squad was in progress on the premises, and the roadway was blocked by a number of their vehicles.

  Grabbing her satchel, the novice detective made her way up towards the target building. She was still on the street, showing her warrant card to a uniformed constable at the foot of the steps, when plain clothes officers filed past leading three men wearing handcuffs. They could have been brothers, swarthy, scowling, unshaven, thickset men in heavy gold necklaces, dirty singlets and billowing black trousers, with only thongs on their dusty feet.

  As this group made its way towards three separate police cars, another prisoner emerged from the house, a tall West-Indian woman of about fifty, thick, tangled hair pulled back, her angry face like thunder, wearing a tight black top, matching skirt and a strong pair of sandals, her arms pinned behind her, escorted by a uniformed policewoman on either side. Suddenly, coming alongside Holly, raising her head, this woman, like a cornered wild animal, spat vigorously in her direction. Fortunately, Holly moved quickly enough to avoid the arc of saliva hitting her face.

  ‘Charming!’ she said, as the bland-faced women officers simply tightened their grip on the prisoner.

  ‘Are you alright, Love?’ In contrast, the deep voice from above sounded genuinely sympathetic.

  Holly looked up, squinting in the sunlight. A tall man in sunglasses and a dark suit stood by the open door, his hand held up in greeting.

  ‘I’m fine’, she said, getting a wipe from her shoulder-bag to clear a few splatters of spit off her lapel. ‘It will take more than a few gobs of that Madam’s phlegm to get me upset.’

  ‘That’s the spirit!’ said the detective admiringly. ‘I’m Jack, by the way… Jack Sylvester. You must be the Angel they’ve sent me… And not a moment too soon, thank goodness! Wait till you see what’s inside!’

  It was hard to see anything at first. The windows were covered by thick blankets, firmly tacked around their frames. Firearms and forensic officers were already combing the place for weapons, drugs and other evidence as Jack Sylvester ushered Holly into one of the front rooms, where a standard lamp showed four pale thin ghosts huddling together on a large couch under a couple of filthy duvets. As Jack pulled blankets back away from the windows to let in light, Holly watched as the ghosts turned into pale young women, dressed only in skimpy underwear. She spotted needle tracks on all their arms. Those who were awake, or not narcotized in some way, seemed utterly terrified. None of them, however, made a sound.

  Jack explained that the drug squad people had broken in an hour or so earlier, without realizing that the pushers were also people smugglers, slave traders and prostitution-ring managers. The girls were from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. None of them spoke any English. He and Holly were to interrogate them, but realized that they now had to wait for three separate interpreters. With a stoic, ‘all-in-the
-line-of-duty’ look, Jack added that it could be a long wait. One of language specialists would be coming from London.

  So they had spent the day together, baby-sitting these terrified hapless girls, one of whom appeared no older than sixteen. Even the oldest was only about twenty, and when this one came out of her daze, she railed at them persistently in what seemed like Arabic for half-an-hour, before finally lapsing back into silence when she could not make herself understood. Eventually, when she was allowed to go into the kitchen, Holly made a pot of tea and brought in some biscuits she found there, but none of the girls touched a drop or a morsel. Later, one by one, she escorted them to the bathroom and tried to get them to shower, but all they wanted was make-up, to try and look pretty again. She found clothes for them, and later she and Jack were forced to shepherd the little flock into the other front room, dirtier and less comfortable, the men’s room, while the forensic work continued where they had been.

  Finally, a social worker turned up, but soon left again when she realized the extent of the communication problem, leaving a number for Holly to call when the interpreters arrived. Time passed and, as it did so, the girls grew increasingly restless and distressed. Jack soon realized that the effects of the drugs were beginning to wear off.

  ‘They’re going to go cold turkey soon if we don’t do something’, he said. ‘I’m going to call the Super and see if we can get a psychiatric nurse over here.’

  It did the trick. The nurse arrived at almost the same time as the first two interpreters, and swiftly decided that all four girls needed methadone and had to go to A & E. This meant two ambulances, with Holly and Jack in one each.

  Once at the hospital, there were more hours of waiting around. Jack kept checking that Holly was feeling alright, and she kept reassuring him that she was. Eventually, the original social worker turned up and said she’d found temporary accommodation for the girls in a hostel in Hove, and she would arrange transport for them when the doctors said they could leave. The third interpreter arrived and, by late afternoon, Holly and Jack had the brief statements they needed. The oldest of the girls wanted asylum. The other three wanted repatriation home. Finally, the detectives were free, but their vehicles were stranded in Moulsecoomb so they decided to share a cab back.