Death on the Levels

by David Hodges

  She discovered the stains on the collar of the shirt as she was extricating it from the bundle. It was one of Hayden’s – a fawn, short-sleeved M&S casual she had bought him in a sale maybe three or four months before. She flattened the collar on the draining board and studied the stain. At first she thought it was blood, but closer examination revealed that it was nothing of the sort. It was lipstick – no doubt about it – and it was the sort of vivid red colour that she would never have had the nerve to wear herself. She lifted the shirt to her nose and sniffed, at once detecting a lingering scent above the damp smell of the dirty linen basket. Perfume, and it wasn’t hers. She remembered the perfume smell she had noticed in their living room when Hayden had been off sick, and swallowed hard. It seemed like the same brand.

  There was a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach as she sat down heavily on one of the breakfast bar stools, and it had nothing to do with her alcohol intake the previous night.

  What the hell was going on with Hayden? Perfume, lipstick? Where had that come from? Certainly not from her and if not her, then who and in what circumstances? The thought that he could be over the side with someone else just didn’t seem possible – not her Hayd. That big, lovable lump had never shown any interest in any other woman as far as she knew. He was only interested in food, vintage cars, and his beloved football. And her, of course – at least, she hoped so. He was eccentric, lazy, untidy and pompous, but he was also principled and loyal, with moral, old-fashioned values that made him the butt of frequent jokes in the department. Infidelity could never be his bag – or could it? Was there another side to him she knew nothing about? They had been together for over five years now, but with the job taking up so much of their time, they rarely had the opportunity for meaningful, intimate conversation and often passed each other like ships in the night. Maybe Hayden had become frustrated with their lifestyle? Maybe he resented being subordinate to her at work? Maybe he had turned to someone outside the force for some sort of release? Someone younger and less bossy than the woman he had married?

  She shook her head fiercely, then winced at the pain that lanced through her temple. All this was nonsense. What the hell was she thinking? There was probably a perfectly rational explanation for it all. Okay, a voice snapped inside her head, so what is it? But she had no answer for that one and banished the divisive interjection to the back of her mind.

  Climbing to her feet, she tossed the shirt back on to the bundle of clothes and bent down to shove the lot into the washing machine. She spilled some of the washing powder on the floor while pouring it from the packet under the sink into the plastic drawer and her hand felt cold and shaky as she closed the drawer again with more force than was needed before slamming the washing machine door shut and switching on the programme.

  She stood there for a moment, staring unseeing at the circular window as the machine throbbed into life. She realized that she was in the process of washing away evidence she could have used in a confrontation with Hayden, yet she made no effort to halt the programme to retrieve the shirt. It was ironic. She had always prided herself on being the tough, no-nonsense cop, prepared to face up to any situation in order to get to the truth, and yet here she was, unable or unwilling to tackle her own husband over a festering suspicion of infidelity. Maybe deep down she didn’t want to know the truth anyway, and believed that by destroying the evidence she could avoid having to face up to reality and the potential risk this posed to her marriage. If so, then she was not only a coward, but based on the persona she had always projected, a hypocrite too.

  She grimaced. But no, it wasn’t as simple as that, was it? After all, what real evidence had she uncovered anyway? A smell of unfamiliar perfume and a couple of red streaks on a shirt collar? That was hardly enough to point the finger, was it? And she would look bloody stupid if it all turned out to be perfectly innocent. Not only that, but it would cause immense hurt and indicate a lack of trust that could be just as damaging to a marriage as a proven infidelity.

  So, common sense dictated caution. Say nothing, do nothing. That was the wisest course for the present, while at the same time keep a watchful eye open, just in case.

  Her decision made, she re-boiled the kettle and poured herself the strong black coffee she had been gasping for, but it made little difference to her mood and she was still brooding over things half an hour later when the telephone rang.

  It was the control room. ‘There’s been another incident,’ the operator said tersely. ‘Guv’nor wants you over at Street pdq.’

  Kate banished her worries about Hayden to the back of her mind. ‘Street?’ she echoed, thinking of the large village close to Glastonbury, once famous for its shoe-making industry and now for its factory outlet shopping site. ‘That’s way off our patch. What sort of incident is it – another stiff?’

  ‘Mr Roscoe didn’t say. He just said to call you out.’

  ‘But Hayden and I are on lates.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that, but those were his instructions. And it was just you. He said your other half can report for late duty as per normal.’

  ‘So, I’ll be on a double shift then?’

  There was a chuckle. ‘Think of the money, skip,’ the operator retorted. ‘And anyway, you can’t do enough for a good boss, can you?’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Kate replied drily. ‘Now unless you’ve got any more funnies, you’d better give me the address, hadn’t you?’

  She headed upstairs to get washed and dressed before undertaking the mammoth task of waking Hayden to tell him the change of plan.

  *

  The bungalow was on the outskirts of the town, in a small development, and it couldn’t have been easier to find. Two marked police cars had been parked illegally in the narrow road outside – half on, half off the pavement – and what she recognized as Roscoe’s battered Honda Civic appeared to have been abandoned at an angle a few feet away from them, its rear wing projecting at least two feet out from the kerb. She smiled grimly. Her boss was not known for his driving skills and that was a fact.

  Leaving her own Mazda MX5 in a layby several yards away, she walked quickly towards the knot of casually dressed figures, some with cameras, who were standing by a rickety looking garden gate. Press, without a doubt.

  The group surged towards her as she approached, firing questions, as cameras clicked and bulbs flashed. She ignored the babble of voices and pushed through them to the gate, which was opened by a burly uniformed constable.

  ‘Mr Roscoe’s inside, skipper,’ he advised in a low voice and stepped aside to let her through before adding, ‘with the doc.’

  She frowned. ‘The pathologist, you mean?’

  He shook his head soberly. ‘No, skip, not this time. Local GP. But it was a close call, I can tell you that.’

  ‘SIO not here then?’

  The constable grinned. ‘On her way apparently, though I think Mr Roscoe wishes she wasn’t.’

  Kate threw him a critical glance after the insubordinate remark. ‘Just make sure you keep the press out,’ she said coldly and pushed past him.

  She found the DI in a small, comfortably furnished sitting room. He was talking to an elderly, white-haired man with horn-rimmed glasses and he turned quickly as she entered the room, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘Dr Fuller,’ Roscoe said by way of introduction, waving a hand towards her as the other man also turned to face her. ‘This is DS Lewis, one of my team.’

  The doctor nodded gravely. ‘This is a bad business, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Mrs Strong is very lucky to have survived, but she is in a bad way.’

  Kate frowned in puzzlement and Roscoe coughed and started to fill in the blanks.

  ‘Mabel Strong. Another widow. Lives here alone. Apparently, she got a visitor this morning who waylaid her in her kitchen and tried to give her neck a terminal massage.’

  It was the doctor’s turn to frown at Roscoe’s insensitive terminology, but he said nothing.

  ‘The perp was interrupted by the arrival
of her carer, who had her own key,’ Roscoe continued. ‘Belted the woman, then fled.’

  Kate grimaced. ‘A tall man dressed in a dark coat and Fedora hat?’ she suggested.

  Roscoe gave her an old-fashioned look and pushed a roll of chewing gum into his mouth. ‘Something like that,’ he growled reluctantly. ‘And that’s why you’re here. You claim to have some personal experience of an arsehole dressed like that, so I want you to talk to the carer and see what she can add to your description of that dosser. Maybe she can remember something significant, eh?’

  ‘What about Mrs Strong?’

  ‘That will have to wait, Sergeant,’ the doctor put in before Roscoe could respond. ‘She is well over eighty and apart from nasty bruising to her neck, she is severely traumatized. I have dispatched her to hospital in an ambulance. Fortunately, the carer’s injuries are superficial, but she is still very shocked and should be handled with care.’

  In fact, the carer had a fast-developing black eye and noticeable heavy bruising to the right side of her face. She was a slight woman in her early twenties and she was still trembling in the carver chair at one end of a highly polished table when Kate walked into the dining room.

  ‘You should have gone to hospital, Miss … er—’ Kate began with a smile.

  ‘Dawn Frobisher,’ the young woman replied in a soft, shaky voice and shook her head. ‘And I don’t need to go to hospital. I’m not badly hurt and this,’ she pointed to her eye, ‘will soon heal.’

  Kate raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, that’s very brave of you,’ she said, pulling out a chair and sitting down next to her. ‘And it seems you saved Mrs Strong’s life.’

  Dawn shrugged and smiled briefly, though there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘I just happened to turn up at the right moment,’ she replied. ‘Poor Mabel, she didn’t deserve this at her age. That … that brute, picking on an old woman like that. I mean, why her? She’d hurt no one.’

  ‘Which is why we have to catch the swine before he strikes again,’ Kate said with feeling. ‘Any idea how he got in?’

  Dawn sighed and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief.

  ‘I’ve warned Mabel a million times about locking her front door,’ she replied. ‘She lives in the past – still thinks it’s the nineteen fifties, when people were more trusting. He … he must have slipped in without her noticing. She’s an early riser and was probably making herself a cup of tea when he attacked her.’

  Kate nodded slowly. ‘And you walked in on him?’

  Dawn took a deep breath. ‘I heard her cry out as I opened the front door and thought she was having a heart attack. I … I ran down the hall and saw … and saw—’

  She broke off and began to cry again. Kate waited patiently, reaching out to touch her wrist in a gesture of reassurance.

  Frobisher cleared her throat and straightened in her chair, wiping her eyes again with her handkerchief.

  ‘He was standing behind her, with his hands around her neck. She is a tough old lady – a former Wren – and she was putting up quite a struggle, despite her age. The man heard me come in behind him and let her go. As she fell on the floor, he hit me hard across the face with the back of one hand, knocking me flying. Then … then he just ran off.’

  ‘You were very lucky,’ Kate commented soberly. ‘He could have killed you both.’

  Dawn nodded. ‘I think he just panicked,’ she said.

  ‘Good for you that he did.’ Kate paused, then asked, ‘Can you describe the man? What he looked like, what he was wearing, anything strange about him?’

  Dawn frowned, evidently trying to marshal her thoughts.

  ‘Well, he was very tall, but did not seem particularly muscular. He was wearing a long, dark coat and a wide-brimmed hat – like the sort you see men wearing in the films about the forties—’

  ‘Like a trilby?’

  ‘I … I don’t know what that is, but it had a very wide brim.’

  ‘What colour was it?’

  ‘Dark – black, I think.’

  ‘And his face, what did he look like?’

  Dawn frowned again. ‘He had glasses, gold-coloured glasses, and was wearing brown leather gloves. Oh yes, and he had blond hair, I think. I could see it sticking out in places under the hat.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  The carer shook her head. ‘He just hissed as he hit me, as if irritated, then promptly ran off.’

  ‘Nothing else you can remember about him?’

  Dawn shook her head, then hesitated. ‘Well, now I think of it, there is one thing.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was his eyes.’

  ‘His eyes?’

  Dawn shivered. ‘Yes, they were really strange, cold, lifeless. I can’t explain what I mean, but it was almost as if—’

  She broke off, staring at the floor, then she raised her head and stared directly at Kate. ‘As if they belonged to a fish or … or a corpse. Empty of any expression, any emotion, just … just dead.’

  Kate shivered inwardly. ‘You saw all this in that split second?’ she queried doubtfully.

  Dawn nodded. ‘His face was just a couple of feet from my own and those eyes will haunt my sleep for a very long time, I can tell you.’

  CHAPTER 9

  Ted Roscoe was incredulous. ‘Funny eyes? What the hell does that mean? First our suspect is a tall, blond-haired bloke with gold-coloured glasses, dressed in a Fedora hat and a long, dark coat – a cross between John Lennon and Doctor Who. Now we’re told he also has funny eyes. Unbelievable! Next, someone will be telling me that he has horns instead of ears.’

  Kate glanced quickly at Deidrie Hennessey, who was leaning back in her swivel chair behind the battered wooden desk, and risked a small smile at the DI’s frustrated outburst, guessing what was behind it.

  Hennessey had insisted on this pre-briefing in the SIO’s office shortly after Kate had got back from the crime scene, and it was evident that it rankled with their truculent, misogynistic boss. Roscoe obviously resented having to submit to the demands of a senior female colleague who had been the same rank as himself just days before. To his mind, it relegated him to a position of unforgivable subservience and the fact that on this inquiry she had also laid claim to the chair and desk that were usually his, only served to rub salt into the wound.

  Hennessey, on the other hand, seemed either unaware of his barely supressed animosity or was simply indifferent to it and she ignored his facetious comments, instead staring directly at Kate as if she was the only other person in the room.

  ‘So, we have a vague description from a witness of a man she saw at the murder scene, who may or may not be connected with the murder and whom you say resembles your dosser. But what else do we have, Sergeant Lewis?’ she said.

  She began counting the points off on the fingers of her left hand with the index finger of her right as she summarized the facts.

  ‘One, he seems to have a particular hatred for certain unnamed elderly women whom he refers to as “aunts” – first murdering Elsie Norman and then attempting to murder Mabel Strong. Two, he sent us a letter with an advance warning of his intention to commit murder, though why he would make a point of giving us the heads-up is unclear.’

  She frowned and cast Roscoe a scathing glance as he slipped some gum into his mouth and began chewing noisily.

  ‘Three, considering his MO, it seems he strangles his victims manually after gaining access to their homes on some sort of fraudulent pretext. In the case of his first victim, he applied a thick layer of lipstick to her mouth, scrawled a message on the floor – also with lipstick – and either forced sherry down her throat or drenched her clothes in the stuff. Hopefully, the PM will provide some clarity on this aspect in due course. And four, if the assumptions you put forward at yesterday’s pre-briefing turn out to be correct, it is possible that he was an inmate of Talbot Court at an early stage in his life and that the elderly women he has attacked were aunts of his.’

  Kate nod
ded. ‘Or maybe even female employees at the orphanage who acted as surrogate mothers to the kids and were each accorded the title of “aunt”,’ she replied, referring to the DCI’s last point. ‘In any event, I firmly believe that there is a Talbot Court connection. As I said at the briefing, the man I confronted in the basement of the derelict mansion definitely matches the description of the suspect spotted close to the scene of Elsie Norman’s murder, and the graffiti we found on the wall of the upstairs dormitory seems to have been written by someone called George and carries a threat to punish “the aunts”. This effectively ties the author of the graffiti, and therefore Talbot Court itself, into the letter we received.’

  ‘So, what would George’s motive be for multiple murder then?’

  ‘Maybe he was an orphan and was put into care at Talbot Court because of behavioural problems, which would explain his return there on what could have been just a nostalgic visit—’

  Hennessey cut her off with an irritable wave of her hand. ‘That doesn’t answer my question. Why would being an inmate of Talbot Court lead to a hang-up about aunts? After all, going by his letter, all his aunts ever did was disgust and torment him. There’s no mention in the letter of them doing him any physical harm or putting him away in Talbot Court, yet he says they ruined his life – so, how did they do that?’

  Kate made a face. ‘Not sure, ma’am,’ she replied, unable to think of a suitable answer, but anxious to give the DCI something to bite on. ‘But as you know, we’ve been doing a bit of digging into the background of Talbot Court itself and some interesting facts have emerged.’

  ‘Which are?’

  Conscious of the fact that what she had to give did not amount to much as far as the inquiry was concerned, Kate provided a summary of what Hayden had discovered, omitting only the less relevant facts about the history of the building, but including the new information that had come to light regarding the murder of Alistair Scarsfield and its possible connection with their suspect.