by Peter Helton
My perfect morning was a little tarnished now but there was enough of it left in the hedges and fields around Compton Dando. Ever aware of the possibility of a tractor blocking the next bend I drove carefully through the narrow lanes, though I didn’t really feel like it. Once I reached the A39 I put my foot down. The DS surged forward eagerly, oblivious to its impending MOT ordeal. The air blast through the open windows made no impact on the bad smell I had picked up at Starfall House. The whole thing stank, as they say. I just didn’t quite know what of yet. I had to talk this over with Annis and give Tim some work to do as well, and then I’d see what I was left with. Not a straightforward burglary, of that I was certain. A window had been broken, sure enough, and it was certainly large enough to admit a person. But the dust on the frame was ancient. Nobody had squeezed their body through there. The window had been broken to make it look like a burglary. A burglary by someone without a key. An insurance scam? There was no way the Dufossees could collect insurance money without the police being involved, and they would know it. The insurer would never pay up without an official investigation. So what was left? Dufossee senior could not bear to be parted from these particular paintings and had taken them with him to the clinic without telling anyone. The window had nothing to do with it. Remotely possible. What was I saying? Bloody unlikely. But I would still ask Virginia about it. Did she visit him there? I’d find out. Next. One Leonard, two cars, one unstable crate of wine, one black eye. Which car was Leonard’s? The Mercedes 500S or the BMW3 series job? Where, while I was lifting fingerprints and indulging my passion for Pissarro, was the other driver? Why weren’t we introduced? Was it the gardener’s? If so, I would consider retraining. One of the cars had to be Leonard’s. Question was, how was I going to identify the owner of the other one without the help of Needham’s boys? Well, I’d ask him, of course. Eventually. Did I buy the tumbling-crate-of-wine scenario? Not bloody likely. Next. The trusty Mrs Ibbs had after years of faithful service decided to furnish herself with a decent pension by carrying off some blue chip British art. Distinctly possible. Not knowing how old Mrs Ibbs was I nevertheless had a mental picture of a kindly woman of late middle age, even older perhaps. Maybe it was the mention of her widowhood that put the picture into my mind. I could also see a handbag, an unfashionable one, keys in that handbag. I could picture Mrs Ibbs in a deckchair in her own lovely garden while the keys were at the nearest Mister Minute, being copied. A son, a no-good nephew or similar, who had broken the window to deflect suspicion from his mum/auntie or similar. Mrs Ibbs got more interesting by the minute. Visiting relatives? Probably by now retired to a Costa somewhere. Next. A highly professional burglar who had done his research, knew where all the keys were and when. Borrow keys, quick Mister Minute, return keys, goodbye paintings. Then why break the window? Inviting suspicion to concentrate on an insider job would suit him much better.
The A39 gave way to the A36. I slowed down. My driver’s licence had acquired certain endorsements during a recent car chase along the Wells Road. Traffic division had been unimpressed. The precise terms they used to describe me at the hearing were “Mr Honeysett is a danger to himself and a menace to other road users.” No one seemed to care that I got the guy, with only perfectly reparable damage to himself, his car, and a length of chain-link fence owned by the MOD. Ungrateful, see? But I needed my licence more than speed now.
Where was I? A highly professional burglar who walks straight past several Turners, a Francesco Guardi, a Constable and a Pissarro, their names engraved on brass plaques on each frame, to get to a Spencer Gore? Now in no way am I trying to detract from Mr Gore’s artistic achievements but the Pissarro alone was worth more than Starfall House and all that was in it. Including the handheld bronzes and the lustre ware cluttering up the place. The Guardi was priceless, the Constable a national treasure. The paintings might have been stolen to order but what burglar would not want to line his pockets with a few extra millions by taking out four more screws? To sum up, then. I’m looking for a man or woman who has a key, original or copy, who unscrews British art from other people’s walls for the love of it. Whose exclusive interest is twentieth-century painting. Who doesn’t want to enrich himself beyond measure and who is cheap enough to take the screws with him when he leaves! When I finally found this guy I’d have serious words.
I realized I was at the back of the railway station and made an odd decision. Perhaps it was the thought of housekeepers that made me do it. Maybe I was hungry again. Perhaps I wasn’t quite ready to present my fumbling thoughts to the crystal-sharp analysis of one Annis Jordan. Perhaps.
I turned the DS around. Drove up Wells Way, to Poet’s Corner and turned into Boswell Avenue. Parked the car in the little offroad parking bay of Somerset Lodge. Opened the rickety wooden door that led from there directly into the garden. My perfect morning was fast receding into history, forever out of reach, impossible to reclaim.
I’d expected to find Jenny or one or two of the residents enjoying the sun on the lawn but the garden was deserted. Linda was still doing a good job with her watering can, it seemed. Annis and I are not great gardeners, we only just manage to hang on to my late father’s herb garden, the rest is running pretty wild. Here a lot of quiet thought and effort had been expanded, creating an orderly profusion of life. The lawn had been mown in perfect stripes. At Mill House, when the meadow gets out of hand, we borrow a few black-faced sheep from our neighbour in the valley.
The aroma of Jenny’s cooking greeted me when I walked in through the open back door. The television was burbling in the sitting room but I walked straight through to the kitchen to locate the source of the smell. It emanated from Jenny’s new oven, its digital timer blinking nonsensical numbers at me. I couldn’t resist it. I donned oven gloves, prayed I wasn’t destroying a soufflé, and took a peek. A quiche, latticed with strips of bright red peppers and flecked with herbs. Feeling protective I prodded the centre with a fork. It would need a good ten minutes yet.
So Jenny was around somewhere. I found her in the sitting room. I briefly threw up on to the carpet. Not much, just a short heaving, a little liquid spilled out, then it stopped. Everything stopped, apart from a curious racing in my lungs and a tingling in my arms.
Jenny had crumpled between the two sofas, in front of the little table that held the residents’ phone. Her body looked twisted, with one arm underneath her, but her face was turned towards the ceiling. I was quite sure it was Jenny. I recognized some of her features. Not too many were left. Her face appeared blue under the blood. There was a lot of blood. A great deal of it had soaked into the carpet, into her yellow dress, already drying in the lunchtime heat. There were streaks and splatters of blood on both sofas, turning the green covers black. I knelt next to her, circled her wrist with my fingers, feeling for a pulse. Her hand was cool, twisted back on itself. There was no pulse. One eye, her left eye, seemed to be half open, but I might have been mistaken. That part of her face had taken such a battering I couldn’t be sure. But I was sure Jenny was dead.
Only after I’d made the call to the police did I notice that the right knee of my trousers had soaked up some of Jenny’s blood when I knelt next to her to take her pulse. In the kitchen I switched off the oven. Poured myself a tumblerful of cheap brandy Jenny kept for cooking. On the mantelpiece in the dining room I found her cigarettes. I lit one, sucked the perfumed smoke deep inside myself and had to sit down immediately as the tingling in my arms returned. Only then did I remember the residents. I took up a smoking and drinking vigil sitting on the floor in the door frame of the sitting room, not wanting anyone to stumble on to her disfigured corpse. There just wasn’t enough brandy to go around.
Some of the efficiency of the police machine that descended on Somerset Lodge eventually rubbed off on me. I stopped hitting the brandy and got behind Jenny’s desk in her little upstairs office, with a very young uniformed constable sitting on a chair by the door. He tried to look bored but probably wasn’t. Detective Superintendent
Needham had snapped at him not to let me out of his sight in a way that suggested I might try to squeeze out of the office window as soon as his back was turned. Downstairs, Scene of Crime Officers, the forensics team, uniformed police, Needham and Detective Inspector Deeks, his preferred sidekick, went through their routines. The pathologist was on his way from the Royal United Hospital. Of the residents only Linda and Anne could be found. Both were in Anne’s room, with a WPC, and both were very upset. Anne was hyperactive, keeping up a loud and near hysterical lament, Linda just sat, rocking slightly, humming frightened little tunes and fixing and refixing the tight little ponytail she wears her hair in. The sooner they got some support the better.
I opened Jenny’s big phone register and started ringing around. Most of the residents had different social workers, assigned to them in their original “catchment areas”. I spoke to as many of them as I could get hold of and left messages for the rest. I informed the mental health team. A community psychiatric nurse was on her way.
After that I alerted the charity who ran the house, spoke to as many committee members as I could raise. Gordon Hines, whom I had met many times and who lived locally, promised to be at Somerset Lodge in twenty minutes. The more familiar faces the better.
For the moment I couldn’t think of anything more to do for Somerset Lodge. The short spell of activity had done me good, had distracted me, given me a temporary purpose. The instant I put down the receiver my mind went dark again. Must take that quiche out of the oven, I thought ridiculously. Do something, do something. Anything.
“Thank you, Constable.” Needham dismissed the uniformed officer, making much-needed room for him and DI Deeks in the cramped office. Fortunately Deeks is tall and wiry. Needham takes up a lot of space, perhaps that’s why he keeps Deeks around. I couldn’t think of any other reason. DI Deeks always seemed slow and uninspired to me. Needham had lost weight since I’d last seen him but still showed the effects of too many canteen meals, fry-ups and takeaways around his waist and chins. He had probably lost a little more hair, too. Pushing fifty now, at the height of his power and probably his career. Deeks had taken the spare chair by the door but Needham eschewed the one in front of the desk. He hovered by the window, looked down at the clutter of police vans and cars in the street.
“Why don’t you sit down, Mike?” I asked. Once, over a rare drink together, I had offered first-name terms, mainly because he kept calling me Mr Honeypott, and he had accepted. His face suggested he regretted that now. Mike dragged the chair away from the front of the desk and positioned himself at an oblique angle, didn’t like the implication of behind-and-in-front-of-desk, letting me know who was boss here now.
“You reek of booze, Chris. Are you pissed?”
Was I? I didn’t think so. Should have been after a few tumblers of brandy but decided I wasn’t. I shook my head.
“Can we agree on verbal communication? Detective Inspector Deeks is taking notes, make it easy for him, will you?”
“Okay. No, I’m not.”
“Were you pissed when you got here by any chance?”
“I was perfectly sober. I’d just come from a client. I don’t drink and drive.”
“I’m glad to hear it, your driving is bad enough when you’re sober.” Presumably Mike was referring to my little car chase. Unfairly so, I thought. After all it was the other guy who crashed. “And you were alone.”
“I already told you.”
“You didn’t have the Jordan woman with you and send her home to keep her out of this? Or the Bigwood chap?”
“Nope.”
“Then tell me again what you were doing here, it doesn’t seem your style somehow.”
I’d already given him the rundown on the whys and wherefores but when dealing with the police you have to get used to repeating yourself, they simply love hearing the same stories over and over, like children. But unlike children they don’t like you to use the same words and expressions. It makes them think you’ve prepared a script. Which means they’ll make you go through it ad infinitum. To be fair, my first account had probably been none too coherent. I told him again.
“Right, I forgot you’re one of those blokes-who-cook. I blame television. All pukka food, I presume?” This was Needham at his wittiest. He doesn’t get much funnier than that. “Miss Kickaldy was dead when you found her?”
“Can we agree to call her Jenny? Yes, Jenny was dead.”
“How did you establish that?”
“I felt for her pulse.”
“So you touched the body.”
Deeks was scribbling on his pad, not his little notebook but a large spiral pad.
“Did you move her at all?”
“No, I didn’t move her.”
“Are you absolutely sure? You were shocked. Could she have been lying face down and you turned her around? Natural thing to do.”
My thinking apparatus slowly engaged first gear. “You mean she was moved after she died?”
“Let me ask the questions, we might solve a murder that way, all right? Did you move her?”
“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t see anybody at all, none of the residents, didn’t hear a thing on the stairs?”
“That’s what I said.”
“You arrived at one forty. Went to the kitchen, looked in the oven and poked the flan, then walked across to the sitting room and found Miss Kickaldy’s body.”
“It’s a quiche.”
“For Christ sakes, Chris, I’m not investigating a food crime. You called us straight away?”
“As soon as I was sure there was no pulse.”
“You certain about that? Last time you found a body it took you twelve days to pick up the phone. Uniform got here in six minutes, they inform me you appeared pretty blotto by then. How do you get pissed up in six minutes, Chris, unless you were drunk already when you got here?”
“Half a bottle of brandy.”
Mike used the back of his hand to wipe the perspiration from his forehead. “Shit, Chris, I shouldn’t even be talking to you. I should keep you incommunicado in a cell at Manvers Street until you sober up and work you over when your hangover has blossomed.”
That moment didn’t seem too far off. My insides were rumbling and my mouth was full of feathers.
“The television was on when you found her?” This from Deeks.
“No, Deeks. I found Jenny’s body, made sure she was properly dead, then thought I’d catch a bit of Neighbours. I’m a fan, see?”
Mike was about to give me a hard time about this when there was a tap on the door. Deeks opened it. The young constable stuck his head in.
“Professor Myers has finished,” was his message. All three of us piled out of the room and down the stairs to catch the busy pathologist before he disappeared.
Earnshaw Myers was somewhere in his sixties and white-haired. Needham always asked for Myers, considered him the best. He looked to be retirement age but had looked like this for a very long time, Mike had assured me. Myers was poised by the front door like a plane ready for take-off. I stood behind Deeks, for the moment forgotten. Myers gave no indication that he resented my presence. We had met before.
“Hi, Prof,” Mike started, “what have you got for us?”
Myers lifted bushy eyebrows. “Heavy object. Not too thick, perhaps a length of piping.” The eyebrows came all the way down now. “Can’t tell yet. Several blows. Delivered with considerable force.”
“Time of death?”
“Sometime before one forty,” came the smug reply.
“Don’t play silly buggers, Prof, we know that, that’s when Chris says he found her.”
“And I can confirm it. For the rest, read my report.” He relented, but not much, “Okay, no longer than two hours before that. It probably won’t get closer than that anyway but you never know your luck.”
“The bruising on her face. Around the nose. Was she beaten before she was attacked with a heavy object?”
“Could be. My
guess is not, though. That’s all I’m prepared to say.”
“Has the body been moved after death?” Mike quickly got in.
“Oh, the body has definitely been moved.” This with a firm look over Deeks’ shoulder at me. “And that’s all I have for you at this stage. Goodbye, gentlemen.” Myers released his brakes and took off, swinging his aluminium case like a picnic hamper.
So it wasn’t me who found the body. Or rather it was, only someone had discovered Jenny before me, had turned the body over to see who it was, which explained her twisted attitude, which I had taken for the result of her falling in an awkward position. It also meant that what had looked like bruising was probably lividity, where the blood had sunk to the lowest level of her body after she had died.
And whoever found her before me had not called the police.
The forensics team in their white paper overalls and galoshes were packing up too. A psychiatric nurse had arrived and called a doctor for Anne, who was feeling worse. Through the open door I spotted Gordon Hines sitting at the long dining table, looking forlorn. He rose as I entered the room and came towards me. “Oh, Chris!” He awkwardly embraced me, patted my back. Not his usual style but he meant well. “I only saw her this morning. I can’t quite take it in. But to have found Jenny. It must have been ghastly. You look like you’re about to keel over, better sit down.” He was right about that. It had been ghastly and still was. And I did need to sit down again.
Needham however was right behind me. “Hey, we’re not finished yet. And who are you?” he confronted Gordon. I introduced them, explained Gordon’s function in the running of the house and the charity.
“All right then, let’s all sit down together. Constable!” he called over his shoulder while he took a chair at the table. The forever nameless PC was dispatched to find out if forensics were finished with the kitchen, “and if so put the kettle on, there’s a good chap.” DI Deeks had pen and paper ready again for his superior’s round two.
