Death on the Levels

by David Hodges

  Wrenching open the main bedroom door, she was presented with an unbelievable sight. Iris Naylor was sitting upright in bed, her back against the pillows and a heavy-looking revolver grasped in both hands. Just feet away, Georgina Lupin was backing away, one hand held out in front of her, palm raised in an apparent defensive gesture and a twisted expression on her face in which anger and disbelief were clearly mixed.

  That the bullet had missed its mark was apparent from the gaping hole in the wall plaster above the psychopath’s head, but the old woman’s finger was already tightening on the trigger and the gun was shaking in her unsteady grip.

  ‘Devil’s child!’ she admonished in a high-pitched theatrical voice. ‘I cast you back from whence you came!’

  But even as she pulled the trigger, it was already too late. Moving with surprising speed, her would-be target hurled herself to one side, slamming into Kate before she could employ the CS gas spray and bowling her over. At the same moment the revolver blasted another hole in the wall where the killer had been standing. Then George was gone, lunging through the bedroom doorway and hammering down the stairs like some grotesque creation from a Gothic horror story, before merging with the patchy shadows of the moonlit street.

  CHAPTER 24

  ‘I’ll take that,’ Kate snarled, relieving Iris Naylor of what turned out to be a Webley revolver. ‘Where the hell did you get this?’

  The old woman gave a slow, secret smile. ‘My hubby was in the army once,’ she replied simply. ‘He kept it as a souvenir after demob.’

  Kate took a deep, trembling breath, feeling the room swaying around her as she tried to stay in control.

  ‘And you thought you would use it to execute your niece?’ she choked through the bile once more rising in her throat.

  An unrepentant shrug. ‘I knew she would come for me, so I slipped the gun under my pillow and waited for her to appear.’

  Kate stared at the hole in the wall where the first shell had ended up and closed her eyes tightly for a second to shut out the vision of Jenny lying on the bed.

  The old woman made a face, seemingly unaware of the policewoman’s distress.

  ‘Well, I did manage to load it all right with some spare bullets hubby left in a drawer, but I thought it would be easier to use than it was. I’ve never fired a gun before.’

  Kate placed one hand against the wall to help her to keep her balance as waves of nausea swept through her.

  ‘So … so all this talk about a police surveillance operation was just rubbish?’ she grated in a voice that did not seem to belong to her. ‘You … you were using us as back-up in case anything went wrong?’

  Another shrug and the old lady eased herself out of the bed and felt for her carpet slippers before staring up at Kate defiantly.

  ‘She is an abomination and has to be destroyed,’ she said. ‘I have a duty to my faith and my poor sisters to send her back to the demon that created her.’

  Kate came off the wall and shuddered as she stared back through the open door to the body of her colleague still lying crosswise on the bed in the next room.

  ‘A duty which has now cost the life of a dedicated police officer,’ she rasped, making no attempt to conceal the disgust in her voice as she tore her gaze away from the grisly sight. ‘An officer who was put here to protect you.’

  The old woman peered round her, across the landing, and instantly paled, raising a hand to her mouth.

  ‘God help us,’ she gasped. ‘Are you saying she’s … she’s dead?’

  Kate turned away from her and headed unsteadily for the door as flashing blue light suddenly washed across the walls through the thin curtains, announcing the arrival of the back-up she had been shouting for.

  ‘As she’ll ever be,’ she threw back over her shoulder. ‘Dead at twenty-four years of age – and all because of your stupid underhand plan.’

  The ambulance crew were up the stairs first, a man and a woman in their green paramedic uniforms. Kate waved them into Jenny’s room as a uniformed police constable thumped up the stairs, closely followed by a furiously scowling Roscoe.

  Kate lowered her gaze as he brushed past her into Iris Naylor’s room where she was sitting on the edge of the bed, wringing her hands and sobbing quietly. He threw her a scathing glance, then turned and stared at the revolver still grasped in Kate’s hand.

  ‘She … she had it under her pillow,’ Kate said tremulously in response to his unspoken question. ‘Tried to waste George. It was what she was up to all along.’

  He took the weapon from her and handed it to the uniformed officer standing awkwardly on the landing behind him.

  ‘Bag it,’ he rapped, then turned sharply to push past Kate to the threshold of Jenny’s room, where he paused, taking in the scene with one sweeping glance and noting the ambulance woman’s helpless shrug with a grunt.

  ‘Get hold of the Home Office pathologist,’ he shouted at a plainclothes officer who was just starting up the stairs, ‘and we’ll need to secure this crime scene and get SOCO here pdq.’

  As the ambulance crew left, the DI treated Kate to a hard stare.

  ‘You okay?’ he said, studying her face intently, and when she nodded, he jerked his head in the direction of the stairs, adding, ‘We need a private talk.’

  Joining him in the sitting room a few moments later, Kate waited for the outburst she was expecting. Instead, he sank on to the arm of the settee and ran the palm of his hand over his face. He looked about ten years older than he actually was and his eyes seemed to have shrunk into their sockets.

  ‘No trace of the bloody psycho,’ he said. ‘Pulled four units off the fire as soon as I could after control sent out your call, but by the time we managed to get ’em mobile the bitch was away on her toes.’

  He scowled. ‘Turned up a stiff at the blaze too – security officer, looks like. What a bleedin’ mess!’

  Kate sat down carefully on the edge of an armchair, feeling a sudden weakness in her legs, which had also begun to shake.

  ‘Have … have we called for a dog unit?’ she queried a little too abruptly, her desperate attempt to maintain a professional stance after the awful shock she had received betrayed by the faltering tone of her voice.

  He threw her another keen glance, but kept any observations he’d made to himself and nodded.

  ‘No dice. Apparently, any dogs that were available have been sent to a major incident – triple stabbing and near riot at a biker’s so-called convention near Bristol. Waste of time anyway. Our killer will already be long gone by now.’

  She clenched her teeth briefly, feeling hot and clammy as waves of nausea threatened to engulf her.

  ‘Do you think Lupin started the fire as a diversionary tactic?’ she said, still trying to sound as normal as possible, but acutely aware of the fact that she sounded anything but.

  ‘Highly likely, I would think – and it friggin’ well worked too.’

  ‘At least she … she didn’t succeed in adding Iris Naylor to her hit list …’ she blurted on impulse, then broke off with a gulp as she thought of Jenny Grey lying dead upstairs, but he seemed not to have heard her.

  ‘Don’t suppose the old girl managed to wing the bitch, did she?’

  She swallowed hard, then shook her head. ‘Put holes in the wall, that’s about it.’

  ‘So, Lupin is uninjured then?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Must have nine lives, that one – like a soddin’ cat – number of times she’s got away.’

  ‘They say the devil looks after his own,’ she said bitterly.

  He gave her an old-fashioned look, then stood up quickly, some of his old vigour returning.

  ‘Yeah, well let’s hope the guv’nor thinks of it that way when she gets here. Meantime, we need to get Naylor away to a safe house.’

  Kate made a supreme effort to get a grip on herself and cleared her throat to strengthen her voice.

  ‘Could be risky – moving her, with Lupin still out there.�
��

  He slipped some gum into his mouth and shrugged. ‘No choice. She can’t stay here after this and it’s a crime scene now anyway, which will have to be preserved before every hairy-arsed plod walks all over any evidence that may be present.’

  ‘Anywhere in mind?’

  ‘Nope. But the boss might have when she deigns to arrive. If I had my way, though, it would be somewhere like Afghanistan.’

  *

  Georgina Lupin studied Elsie Norman’s bungalow from just inside the broken-down gateway with a keen intensity. After fleeing the crime scene, she had brazenly doubled back, returning to the very observation point she had used before breaking into the bungalow and strangling the woman police officer.

  The spot suited her purposes admirably. She had a clear, unobstructed view of the rear of the bungalow, from the gateway of the small cottage, with its high, ivy-clad perimeter walls completely shielding it from the moonlight on the other side of the lane. She was confident that the comforting gloom kept her well hidden from prying eyes, particularly those of nosy neighbours and the police – though it was unlikely it would occur to the latter that she’d have the gall to return to the crime scene anyway. They would assume she was at least a couple of miles away by now and still running – which was exactly what she was counting on.

  It would have been better, of course, to have found somewhere at the front of the bungalow where all the action was, but that had presented too much of a risk and, from what she’d remembered of the cul-de-sac, it offered no suitable places of concealment anyway, so it was not worth considering.

  No, she was in the best possible spot, she was sure about that. The only problem was what to do next. There was no way she was going to abandon her vendetta and let Iris Naylor off the hook – not when that evil old crone was the principal cause of the misery inflicted on her throughout all those long, nightmare years. The other three sisters had been guilty too, of course. After all, they had gone along with everything Iris had proposed and, although this had probably been due to their own spineless reluctance to stand up to their more dominant sister, they were still complicit, so it didn’t lessen their culpability. But it was Iris who had been the prime mover in it all, so it was Iris who had to face the most elaborate punishment.

  How to get to the old woman, though? That was the point. In her present position, George obviously had no real idea what was happening inside the bungalow – exactly where Iris was and whether or not she was now under even tighter police protection. She knew from the multitude of news and documentary programmes she had watched on her bedroom television during her long period of incarceration at Larchfield that the bungalow would now have been made a crime scene. That meant it would have been put under heavy police guard to await the arrival of the Scenes of Crime forensic teams, so not even a mouse would be able to slip in unnoticed. It also meant that no one, save the SOCOs, would be allowed to remain inside and that would include Iris Naylor. In fact, there had been the sound of doors banging and vehicles pulling away at the front of the place a short time earlier, which suggested that the exodus had already begun, and a marked police car had now been parked across the bungalow’s back entrance, just feet away from her, almost certainly as a very visible security measure.

  She scowled in the darkness. So, where the hell was Iris Naylor? Had the old woman already been spirited away to some secret address by one of the police cars that had just left or was she still in the bungalow, waiting to be escorted out? And if the bird had already flown, how would it ever be possible to find out where she had gone?

  George’s frustration was reaching boiling point – the memory of decades of childhood abuse and institutionalized misery once again burning a lava-like path through her brain as she thought of all that she had been subjected to, all that she had lost, and all that was to be denied her because of the cruel, agonizing death soon to cut short the remainder of her wasted life.

  There would be no last-minute reprieve because of past sufferings or injustices. No review or reconsideration. Not even a temporary stay of execution. The clock was already set and ticking and its progress could not be reversed or halted. Death was inevitable – yet obscurity was not and George was determined that, with her last act, the world would know the truth and be ashamed. But to achieve that end, she needed to get to Iris Naylor and the prospect of locating her looked to be fading by the minute.

  George was so wound up that at first, she took little notice of the second police vehicle – a long wheelbase Ford Transit van – turning into the back lane. But she was jolted out of her self-pitying reverie when she saw the uniformed police officer climb out of the patrol car parked across the bungalow’s rear gate and step into full view of the Transit’s headlights. The police officer in the big vehicle flashed his lights, then accelerated past the patrol car to another gateway further along the lane. George watched as the Transit reversed into the gateway, turned, and drove slowly back to the patrol car to park a short distance in front of it.

  The driver climbed down from the vehicle, nodding briefly to his colleague as he sauntered towards him with his hands thrust deep in his pockets and George stiffened, her heartbeat suddenly accelerating, when she heard him announce loudly what he was there for.

  ‘Sent to pick up some old biddy – an Iris Naylor?’

  ‘Yeah,’ the patrol car driver replied. ‘She’s just packing her stuff. Guv’nor wants her out of here asap. I’ll take you to her. She might need a hand with her suitcase.’

  He led the way round the patrol car and through the bungalow’s back gate.

  ‘Any trace of the bleedin’ psycho what did poor little Jenny?’ George heard the Transit driver query.

  ‘Nah,’ the other replied. ‘Guv’nor reckons she’ll be halfway to Taunton by now.’

  And as their voices faded, just thirty feet away in the gloom of the ruined gateway, ‘the bleedin’ psycho’ gave a triumphant smile.

  CHAPTER 25

  DCI Hennessey was in a foul mood when she arrived – pale, tight-lipped and radiating aggression. And she was in an even worse mood once she had climbed the stairs to see Jenny Grey’s contorted body laid out on the bed in the upstairs bedroom, beyond the crime scene tapes.

  But she said nothing there, merely issuing a sharp explosive hiss before leading the way back down the stairs to the front room.

  ‘How could this have happened?’ she demanded harshly, studying Kate with undisguised hostility.

  Kate swallowed hard, tears still evident in her blue eyes. ‘Lupin forced her way in through the back door while I was on watch in here,’ she said. ‘I heard nothing, until … until …’

  To her surprise, Roscoe quickly came to her rescue. ‘Lupin taped up the window to deaden the sound of the breaking glass, then reached through to turn the key,’ he said. ‘No one would have heard anything from in here.’

  The DCI closed her eyes briefly in resignation. ‘We left the key in the door?’ she exclaimed. ‘Why didn’t we just put a notice outside inviting the murderous swine in?’

  Kate had no answer for that and simply stared at the floor.

  Hennessey shook her head in disbelief to reinforce her point, but didn’t pursue the issue any further.

  ‘So, what made Lupin take off without first wasting Iris Naylor?’ she went on and cast Kate a cynical glance. ‘It seems unlikely that Sergeant Lewis here managed to put the fear of God into her on her own.’

  ‘The old girl had us over,’ Roscoe explained. ‘Her whole purpose was to lure the nutter to this place, then top the cow herself. She had her dead husband’s revolver hidden under the pillow in her bedroom and went for a couple of pot-shots.’

  The DCI raised an eyebrow. ‘And?’ she said tersely.

  ‘She missed,’ Kate replied.

  Hennessey shook her head and uttered a short unamused laugh. ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’ she said, then after a brief pause, released a heavy sigh, adding, ‘Well, for the information of both of you, I’ve just h
ad ACC Operations on the blower and he’s not a happy man.’

  ‘Object to having his beauty sleep disturbed, did he?’ Roscoe commented drily.

  Hennessey scowled at him, but ignored the remark. ‘SOCO been called?’ she went on tersely, changing the subject.

  The DI grunted. ‘And the pathologist. ETAs of both around half an hour, we’ve been told.’

  ‘And our “sharp-shooter”? Where is she now?’

  ‘Shut in her bedroom,’ Roscoe replied. ‘But we need to get her out of here pdq. I’ve got a unit coming to pick her up and take her back to the nick.’

  ‘To go where?’

  ‘I thought you might want to decide where we should place her for the rest of the night.’

  A curt nod in response. ‘The nick will do for the time being. Any news on Lupin?’

  Roscoe shook his head. ‘Got all units out looking. Nothing so far. She seems to have completely disappeared.’

  ‘But it’s possible she might have gone to ground somewhere close by, with the intention of having another go at her target when the opportunity presents itself.’

  ‘Unlikely, but yeah, I suppose that’s feasible.’

  ‘So, we’ll need to make sure Iris Naylor is kept under close protection until we can feel Lupin’s collar.’

  ‘Already in hand. We’re going to move her out the back way under escort to avoid attracting attention.’

  Hennessey grimaced. ‘Press will be all over this thing at first light,’ she pointed out. ‘We’ll have to have an official statement prepared before some eagle-eyed stringer pips us at the post and calls the story in.’

  She raised her gaze to meet that of the DI. ‘And what about Grey? Was she married or what? Close relatives will need to be informed before this gets out.’

  ‘She was single, I believe,’ Roscoe said gruffly. ‘But I’ll see to it.’