Death on the Levels

by David Hodges

  Scowling angrily, she jerked the offending device from her pocket and peered at the tiny screen. It was Ted Roscoe. For a second, she thought of ignoring the call – after all, she was off until the afternoon – but her sense of duty won the day.

  ‘Guv?’ she answered sharply.

  Roscoe cleared his throat. ‘Where are you?’ he rasped. ‘Tried your home phone, but no reply.’

  ‘Er … Weston,’ she replied.

  ‘Weston? What are you doing there?’

  ‘Shopping,’ she lied, adding sarcastically, ‘Presumably I am allowed to go shopping in my own time? I’m not on until this afternoon.’

  There was a grunt. ‘Cheeky cow! Well, you’re on now. I want you to get yourself over to the hospital to see Mabel Strong. It seems she is well enough to be interviewed and it would be better for her to be seen by a female officer. While you’re there, don’t forget to go into this family background thing the DCI mentioned.’

  Kate glanced at the hotel entrance and muttered an oath under her breath, away from the phone. She was so close to getting to the bottom of things regarding Hayden’s infidelity and to be pipped at the post like this was just too much.

  ‘There are other female officers on the inquiry, guv,’ she reminded him tartly.

  ‘All tied up,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I want an experienced detective on this one. The old biddy could have valuable info for us and it might have to be teased out of her. I don’t want her being discharged or pegging out on us before she can give us the necessary SP. Report back as soon as you’ve seen her, understood? I should be back from Elsie Norman’s PM by the time you finish there.’

  Before Kate could think of anything else to say, he cut off.

  ‘Shit!’ she said aloud, glaring at the phone as if it was directly responsible for frustrating her plan to confront Hayden’s secret lover. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’

  It occurred to her that she could still do what she had set out to do and head to the hospital afterwards, but even as the thought was born, she discarded it. If her plan went wrong – for example, if the desk clerk took exception to her questions or there was a hysterical reaction by ‘the other woman’ – the whole thing could end badly, resulting in an unforeseen delay as she tried to smooth things over or, at worst, some of her uniformed colleagues being called. That might prevent her getting to the hospital at all, plunging her into some very deep water indeed, and it could even cost her the stripes she had not long earned. That didn’t bear thinking about.

  With another rueful glance at the hotel entrance, she turned and marched angrily back to her car, but as she drove away, she promised herself one thing – this business was definitely not over.

  *

  Mabel Strong had had enough of the hospital. She was an independent soul and hated all the fuss that the assault on her had generated; smiling nurses trolleying her to the X-ray suite, then plumping up the pillows on her bed and asking how she was feeling after her return to the private room she had been allocated. The thin, grey-haired doctor in his white coat in and out seemingly every hour to check her over and assess her suitability for release, and the young police officer stationed outside the room regularly poking her head round the door with an even bigger smile – maybe to make sure she hadn’t escaped out of the single window, she mused drily.

  ‘You’ve had a terrible experience,’ her doctor had told her. ‘You have a badly bruised throat, and some nasty cuts and abrasions to your face and arms. You’re also suffering from shock, and at your age that could cause serious complications.’

  ‘Bum!’ she’d retorted. ‘I am fine and I want to go home.’

  But deep down she knew that he was right and she succumbed to the light sedative he gave her without a murmur, and almost immediately drifted off to sleep.

  She awoke much later, feeling very thirsty and conscious of someone moving about close to her bed. Through a haze she glimpsed the white coat and smiled slightly. The doctor was back, making sure she was all right. He really was a nice man. Then her vision cleared and the smile froze on her lips, her eyes widening as she shrank back against her pillow under the gaze of the figure standing there.

  ‘You’re not the doctor,’ she gasped.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ her visitor replied, treating her to a thin, humourless smile and producing a bottle from under his coat. ‘But let’s keep that to ourselves, shall we?’

  CHAPTER 12

  The receptionist seated behind the imposing wooden desk in the hospital foyer had the bored look of someone who could hardly wait for her shift to finish, and she gave Kate’s warrant card just a cursory glance when it was thrust under her nose. Then, checking her computer screen with a long yawn, she gave directions to Mabel Strong’s private room before turning back to the newspaper crossword she had been trying to complete, as if this was the most important task of the afternoon.

  The lift to the first floor was a long time coming and, in the end, Kate lost patience and went for the stairs instead, mounting them with the weariness of someone twice her age as her thoughts once more centred on Hayden and what he had done to her.

  It was probably because of her preoccupation with her domestic situation that she failed to notice the door swinging open at the top of the stairs and the white-coated figure on his way through. The collision was inevitable and as she slammed into him, the clipboard holding the statement forms she would need for her interview with Mabel Strong flew out of her hand and skated across the landing.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she exclaimed. ‘I wasn’t looking where I was going.’

  She received a thin smile in return and the doctor bent down to pick up her clipboard and papers, and handed them to her.

  ‘No problem,’ he muttered. ‘My fault too.’

  Then he was on his way again, no doubt late for an appointment as he took the stairs two at a time.

  Feeling angry with herself for allowing her personal problems to intrude on her official duties, Kate pushed through the double doors and marched smartly along the corridor to where a uniformed police officer was sitting on a plastic chair outside a room at the other end.

  The constable stood up quickly when he saw her approaching.

  ‘Everything okay?’ she snapped, flashing her warrant card.

  ‘All quiet here,’ he replied. ‘Doctor’s just been in to see her, but he’s the only one.’

  She nodded. ‘Good. I expect she will be discharged shortly anyway.’

  He grunted. ‘Can’t happen soon enough as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t join this job to be a bloody nursemaid.’

  Kate gave him an old-fashioned look, but made no comment on the insensitive remark.

  ‘I might be a while in here,’ she said, jerking open the door. ‘Depends on what Mrs Strong has to tell me.’

  As it turned out, however, she was no more than a matter of seconds, for it was apparent the moment she entered the small room, smelled the strong distinctive odour of sherry, and saw the elderly woman in the hospital gown hanging over the side of the bed that Mabel Strong would not be telling anyone anything ever again. Someone had strangled the life out of her.

  *

  ‘I must have actually bumped into the bastard on the stairs,’ Kate breathed half an hour later. ‘He was dressed as a doctor – white coat, stethoscope sticking out of his top pocket.’

  Roscoe chewed rhythmically, his boot-button eyes fixed on the corpse in the bed through the open door with an intensity that might have suggested he was trying to will the life back into the tiny wasted frame.

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied, a note of resignation in his tone, and for once making no effort to lambast anyone for the murder of the old woman. ‘He slugged a casualty doctor downstairs and stuck him in the laundry cupboard before borrowing his stuff. Cool customer, this one. Plod on the door never had any doubts that he was a doctor when he let him go in.’

  ‘If I had got here just five minutes earlier,’ Kate went on miserably, ‘I might have caught him in the
act.’

  The DI seemed not to have heard her. ‘Lipstick plastered all over her mouth and this time with “Bye, Bye, Auntie Mabel” scrawled on the wall above her bed,’ he summarized tonelessly. ‘And that stink of sherry – how the hell did he get that in here?’

  But Kate was too committed to wallowing in her own self-recriminations to comment on his observations or answer his question.

  ‘I should have suspected something when he bumped into me,’ she said bitterly. ‘He was wearing dark glasses – you couldn’t see his eyes – and he smiled, he actually had the audacity to smile at me after … after doing … doing this.’

  Roscoe surfaced from wherever his own musings had taken him.

  ‘Dark glasses, you say? That means he must have changed his appearance again. The swine is a bloody chameleon. Anything else you noticed about him?’

  Kate frowned and the next second snapped her fingers, her blue eyes widening.

  ‘Yes, there was. He was totally bald, I remember that now, with a gold earring in his left ear, and he had a number of abrasions to his scalp. It was as if he had shaved his head himself.’

  ‘Clothing?’

  She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t see what he was wearing under his white coat, but maybe hospital security cameras picked him up walking in?’

  ‘Good point. We’ll have that checked out pdq.’

  He spat his chewing gum into a large tissue and dropped it into a nearby wastepaper bin.

  ‘Meantime, pathologist and SOCO are on their way, plus’ he added, ‘our better-late-than-never boss, so you should make yourself scarce.’

  Kate looked puzzled. ‘But the DCI will probably want me to brief her about this.’

  Roscoe shook his head firmly. ‘I’ll do that. I’ve got another job for you.’

  ‘What job?’

  He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, studied it for a second, then handed it to her.

  ‘Vicar at a church out on the Levels apparently clocked a character answering our man’s original description loitering in the church graveyard, following Elsie Norman’s murder. Rang us after the news story on TV. Get over there and see if you can find out what he may have been up to. Name and address of the vicar is on the note. Bloke called Glover.’

  She frowned again. ‘But why me? What’s wrong with someone from one of the other teams doing this?’

  He scowled. ‘Because I’ve told you to do it, that’s why.’

  She met his hard gaze without flinching. ‘I’m not trying to duck out of the job, guv,’ she persisted, ‘but officially I’m on lates this week and it’s going to look pretty funny to our colleagues if you keep calling me in to do jobs that those already on duty should be doing.’

  ‘So?’

  She hesitated. ‘It’s just that they might begin to think you don’t trust them and that I’ve become your personal gofer.’

  There was a glint in his boot-button eyes now. ‘Well, haven’t you?’

  Kate took a deep breath. ‘Guv, why do I get this feeling that you are hell-bent on running your own inquiry, outside the official one?’

  His scowl broke into a humourless grin. ‘And why on earth would I do that?’

  ‘Maybe to steal a march on the DCI?’

  He emitted a throaty chuckle. ‘What a thing to suggest!’ he retorted, refusing to confirm or deny the fact.

  Then abruptly he returned to the job he had just delegated. ‘Incidentally, while you’re closeted with the vicar, you might ask him for some sort of divine guidance to help us catch this killer before he adds someone else to his list.’

  *

  The church was over 400 years old – or so it said on a plaque attached to the wall in the porch – and the heavy, creaking door certainly looked as if it was old enough to have been witness to the very first parish service.

  Kate had always experienced a sense of unease on the few occasions in her life that she had had to visit a church. Awe perhaps? Or maybe guilt as a non-practising Catholic who had not taken Communion or uttered so much as a prayer within the sacred portals of any church since she was confirmed as a child? Whatever it was, she felt that unease now as she stood in the nave, inhaling its musty gloom.

  Her leather boots rang on the flagstones as she approached the white-frocked priest crouched in apparent supplication before the altar, but he didn’t stir until she was standing behind the raised bar of the communion rail and had given a less than discreet cough, which raised a multitude of mocking echoes.

  ‘Yes, my child?’ he said, climbing slowly to his feet and turning to face her. ‘Can I help you?’

  She forced a smile and produced her warrant card. ‘DS Kate Lewis, Reverend Glover,’ she said. ‘Highbridge CID.’

  ‘How can I help you?’ he said, returning her smile. ‘Is it to do with our visitor in the churchyard?’

  Kate nodded. ‘Yes, sir. Did you get a good look at him?’

  He shook his head and produced a pair of spectacles from his vestments. ‘Sadly, no. I didn’t have these on at the time and my sight is not so good these days. But I did see that he was dressed in some sort of long, dark coat – black, I think – and he had a hat on. I believe they call it a Fedora. But I didn’t see his face clearly enough to describe him. I did catch a glimpse of his car, though.’

  Kate pricked up her ears. ‘His car? What sort of car?’

  ‘It was difficult to see clearly as it was quite misty at the time and the vehicle was parked in the lane, mostly hidden by the wall of the churchyard, but I am sure it was a VW Beetle – an old one by the sound of the engine – and it was red.’

  ‘No number?’

  ‘’Fraid not, sorry.’

  Kate thought about that for a moment. ‘Any idea what he was doing in the graveyard?’ she said.

  ‘Well, he appeared to be looking at the headstones. When I approached him, he was studying a particular grave and muttering something I couldn’t catch. He seemed to be very agitated.’ He sighed. ‘I had no idea that he was a police murder suspect until I saw the news.’

  ‘Could you take me to the spot where you saw him looking at the headstone?’

  ‘Of course.’

  A few minutes later Kate was standing beside him in front of what appeared to be a recently erected headstone, bearing the name ‘Beatrix James.’

  ‘The lady was a dedicated member of my congregation,’ the clergyman explained. ‘Never missed the Eucharist or evensong services, you know, and so generous to our church too.’

  ‘Beatrix James,’ Kate murmured. ‘Why on earth would he be interested in her?’

  ‘I have no idea. But at least she died in peace and from natural causes, unlike her poor sister.’

  Kate raised an eyebrow. ‘Why, what happened to her sister?’

  He gave a sad smile. ‘You would know that better than me.’

  Kate looked puzzled. ‘I don’t follow you.’

  It was his turn to look puzzled. ‘Elsie Norman – your department is currently investigating her murder, aren’t they?’

  Kate’s jaw dropped and her mind flashed back to the DCI’s comment at the last briefing about possible family ties.

  ‘Beatrix James was her sister?’

  ‘One of four actually. I understand that they were all born in this diocese to Hector and Elizabeth Quigley – a very religious couple who lived not far from here, out on the Levels. Long since dead now, of course.’

  ‘What do you know about them?’

  ‘Well, all their girls were staunch Christians – their late parents saw to that – and all were married in this church by my predecessor many years before I came here. There was a son too – John, I believe he was called. Didn’t worship here and I don’t know a lot about him, except that he was also apparently a very committed Christian and quite rigid in his beliefs. Inherited the old Quigley house too, and continued to live there after his sisters got married and moved out. Got married himself to a nurse from down south somewhere before settling up here, I h
eard – Margaret or Margery somebody? Can’t quite remember. Anyway, tragically, he and his wife were killed in a road accident on the A39 some years afterwards. Bad business.’

  Kate’s mind was working fast. ‘So, who were the other two sisters?’

  ‘Well, there was Iris Naylor and Mabel Strong, and I gather poor Mabel is now in hospital after also suffering a nasty assault, like Elsie.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  He shrugged. ‘Local radio, following the police press conference yesterday.’

  ‘The identity of the victim would not have been revealed at that stage.’

  ‘Ah, but news travels fast on the local grapevine, Sergeant, you should know that. I only hope poor Mabel recovers from such a dreadful ordeal. I had it in mind to visit her in hospital this evening.’

  Kate grimaced. ‘I’m afraid the lady died earlier today, Reverend Glover,’ she said with brutal candour. ‘So, your visit would have been a waste of time.’

  Glover was visibly shocked. ‘Mabel dead too? How absolutely awful. And she was so looking forward to her eighty-ninth birthday. Elsie told me that just a week or so ago.’

  ‘And how come you know so much about the sisters?’

  ‘Beatrix, as I have said, was a loyal member of our congregation, and she often brought Elsie and Mabel with her when they were visiting. I got to know the ladies very well, particularly Elsie, who became a regular here, just like Beatrix, after her sister died.’

  ‘Can you remember whether John Quigley or any of his sisters had children – a boy perhaps?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Two of the sisters, Elsie and Beatrix, had daughters – they were both christened at this church – and I believe John and his wife had a daughter too. Well, so one of the sisters told me. But there were no boys as far as I know.’