“So was anyone charged with Kelly’s murder?” Burns asked, leaning back in his chair.
“Kelly had a mistress who lived with him in the flat where our new body was found – Linda Parker: she was his secretary but their relationship wasn’t common knowledge at work. He’d recently altered his will so that she got everything and she disappeared around the time Kelly’s body was discovered. It was thought at the time that she’d killed him during a domestic and did a runner – disappeared into thin air – so they never really bothered looking for anyone else.” Burns looked at the sergeant and raised his eyebrows. “But this new development changes things a bit, doesn’t it. The case’ll have to be re-opened.”
“Who else was living in those flats back in 1965?”
Jones looked pleased with himself. “I managed to track down a Doctor Jim Watts; he trained at Liverpool University and he had a flat on the ground floor. He’s now a GP up in North Yorkshire. Nice bloke. Very helpful. He was interviewed by the police at the time Kelly was found dead – and Linda Parker went missing. I’ve dug out his original statement and in it he says that a young man, aged around eighteen, called at the house the evening before Kelly’s body was found and asked about vacant flats…which Doctor Watts thought was strange because they were all occupied at the time. Watts told him to ring the landlord’s bell and he heard the door being answered and the boy going up to Kelly’s flat. The statement mentions the name the boy gave – John McCartney. Watts had remembered it because of the Beatles – John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They were never able to trace this John McCartney at the time; not that they made much effort because Kelly’s murder seemed to be an open and shut case.”
DC Burns picked up the photographs of the body found under the floorboards of the first floor flat in Ullet Road. The builders had been gutting the place in preparation for its metamorphosis into luxury apartments when they had made their grim discovery. The body had been found next to the hot water pipe and the dry heat had caused partial mummification of the remains. It was still recognisable as a human being. “John McCartney, eh. Think he could have killed her?”
“Who knows after all this time? But it was strange that she was found with a knife clutched in her hand and the postmortem found no sign of stab wounds on the body or the clothes. The pathologist reckoned she died of an injury to the back of her skull that fitted exactly with her falling against the marble hearth in that room – it’s got an unusual moulded edge.”
“So she could have gone for someone with the knife and they pushed her away so she fell backwards? And then they panicked and pulled up a few loose floorboards and hid her underneath. Case solved, sarge?”
Jones smiled. He doubted if it would be that easy. “I’d better let the Chief Inspector see the papers…see how he wants to proceed. If he can be bothered – it’s his retirement do next week.”
* * *
As his car was in for service, Keith O’Dowd perched on the front seat on the bottom deck of the eighty bus and looked out of the window at the passing urban scenery, so much smarter now than all those years ago: cafe bars and gentrification had taken their toll on the city. The bus still ran down Ullet Road…just as it had all those years ago. But now it had lost its pea-green livery; times had changed. And these days Keith avoided this route when he drove into town. The sight of that house made him feel uncomfortable.
As the bus turned into Ullet Road Keith gave an involuntary shudder and felt a sudden longing for a cigarette. But he’d given them up years ago. Susan, his wife, wouldn’t allow them in the house and the office was a no smoking zone so it was no use swimming against the tide.
Kelly’s old house was a mess with skips and builders’ rubble everywhere. And police crime scene tape had been festooned around the place like a Christmas garland. The time he had been dreading since 1965 had finally arrived: she had been found. And with modern forensic technology – he was sure he must have left some trace somewhere – it would only be a matter of time before the truth came out.
But it had been self-defence. When Linda had come at him with the knife and he had pushed her away, he hadn’t intended to kill her. They already thought that she had got rid of Kelly after he had altered his will in her favour and his statement would just confirm it…surely. He was bound to be believed.
He stared out of the window at the blur of shops and streetlights. When his involvement was discovered it would be an ignominious end to a successful career but he couldn’t avoid the truth. He only hoped that Susan would understand and that all the questions could wait until after his retirement party.
When Detective Chief Inspector Keith O’Dowd reached the bus stop near his home, he climbed down stiffly from the platform, holding firmly on to the rail. Then he stood and watched as the bus disappeared down the road in a cloud of diesel fumes.
Sins of Scarlet
Robert Barnard
Cardinal Pascona stood a little aside from his fellow electors, observing the scene, conjecturing on the conversations that were animating every little knot of cardinals. The elderly men predominated, of course. The young men were not only in a minority, but they were unlikely to want any of their number to be elected. A long papacy was the last thing anybody wanted at this juncture. So instead of forming up into a clique of their own, they separated and mingled with the older men. They were all, in any case, related in some way or other to earlier popes, and their opinions for that reason tended to be discounted. That was unfair but understandable.
Cardinal Borromei.
That was the name that kept coming towards him, through the sticky and fetid air of the Chapel. It was clear to Pascona that opinion was drifting – had already drifted – in that direction. Borromei was related to a previous pope, like the young men, but his promotion to the rank of cardinal at the age of twenty-three was now so long ago that everybody had discounted it. He had proved his worth to the College by a long life of steady opinions, safe hands on the tiller, and general mediocrity. He was a man to ruffle no feathers, stir up no hornets’ nests, raise no high winds.
Ideal.
Or ideal in the view of most of his fellow electors. And promising in other ways too: aged sixty-seven and obese from a fondness for rich and outré foods. That, and a partiality for the finest cognac, marked him out as likely to be present before long in the Chapel in mummified form only.
Cardinal Pascona stepped down from the chapel stalls and began mingling with the knots of his fellows. The conversations were going as he had expected.
“The situation in France is becoming worrying,” that old fool da Ponti was saying to a little group of like-minded ciphers. “Borromei has been used to a mediation role in Venice. Couldn’t be bettered at the present time.” He turned with mischievous intent to Pascona. “Wouldn’t you agree?” He continued looking at him, and Pascona knew that any dissent would be discounted as the bile of an unsuccessful candidate. Everyone in the Conclave assessed Pascona as papabile but there was a distinct reluctance to vote for him.
“Absolutely,” Pascona said with a smile. “A perfectly safe pair of hands, and accustomed to bringing peace to warring factions.” He could not restrain himself from adding: “Though whether the Bourbons – fair weather friends to us, at their best – deserve the services of the Church’s best mediator is another matter. The unkind might suggest that they deserve to stew in a juice of their own making.”
And he moved on, with a peaceful, delightful glide as if, having just dispensed a Christ-like wisdom, he was currently walking on air.
The bowls from their light supper were just being cleared away.
Pascona nodded in the direction of the robed and cowled figures who silently served them and waited for them to bring the silver goblets with their nightcaps in them. A vile red wine from Sicily in all probability. It was generally agreed among the cardinals that everything was done to make their stay incommunicado from the real wo
rld (if Rome and the Vatican was that) as unpleasant as possible. The aim of the Vatican officials was to persuade them to make a decision as quickly as they reasonably could so that a return to normality could be achieved. After all, for those officials, it was only a matter of one old man being succeeded by another old man.
Nothing much happened during the last reign, and (unless a surprising choice was made) nothing much would happen in the next one.
Cardinal Pascona took up his goblet. It was indeed a vile wine, quite incredibly sour and thick. Prolonged indigestion or worse could well be the consequences for many of the elderly and infirm electors if they did more than sip at such muck. Confident in his own stomach the Cardinal drank, then went over to another group.
“It is a sobering thought,” he injected into their small-talk that was by now a mere prelude to slumber, “that the world is waiting on our decision, but when the choice is announced everyone will say ‘Who?’”
The cardinals smiled politely, though one or two of the smiles were sour. Not all of them liked to be thought totally insignificant in the wider scheme of things. Now the cowled figures were going round extinguishing the nests of candles on the walls. They rolled out the down mattresses and put on top of them a pillow and a pile of blankets hardly needed in the close atmosphere of the Sistine. Beside these bundles they put a nightlight. No great comforts for a long night. Cardinals removed their red robes and lay down in their substantial undergarments. Bones creaked as they levered themselves down. Cardinal Pascona took great care not to creak himself. He was still fit and active in every way. That ought to be noticed. He was not going to live forever, but he had a few years yet in him, and good ones too.
He lay on his back looking up. Nothing could be seen of the ceiling, but in the murky light cast by the few remaining nightlights he could distinguish the contours of the Chapel. He had loved the Chapel since he had first seen it, fifty years before. It spoke to him. Twenty years before, when he was barely forty, he had become part of a commission to report on the state of the Chapel, in particular on the state of Mazzuoli’s restorations at the beginning of the century. Pascona had sat on the scaffolding day after day, eventually dressing as a workman, sharing their bread and wine, getting to know every inch of the ceiling and the altar wall and the Last Judgement fresco. The Commission had reported, but nothing had been done. Business as usual at the Vatican!
He altered the position of his bed so that his head was towards the altar. He did not want to think of the Last Judgement. Fine, terrifying, but the Christ was not his Christ – too commanding, too much an obvious man of action. A general, an organiser, that was Michaelangelo’s Christ. Whereas his was gentler, more of a healer, more forgiving. He would be forgiving, surely?
He lay in the darkness, his eyes fixed on the panels he could not see, recreating the scenes he knew so well, that had been imprinted on his soul some twenty years before. The drunken Noah, a rare scene of comedy, and to the right of that panel his favourite of all the ignudi – the naked men holding medallions. A boy-man, infinitely inviting, conscious of his own appeal – delightful, inexhaustible.
But then he let his eye sweep across the darkness of the ceiling and fix on the central panel. The masterpiece among masterpieces in his opinion.
The moment of creation. And in particular Adam: beautiful, languid before full awakening, holding hope and promise for all those of Cardinal Pascona’s tastes. And so like his own beloved Sandro! The yearning face, the beautiful body – it was as if Sandro had been created for him in the likeness of our first father.
He slept.
He awoke next morning to the sounds of disturbance – shouting, choking, vomiting and groans. He leapt from his bed. The Chapel was now fully illuminated and he ran to a little group of cardinals in a circle, gazing down in consternation. In the middle of the circle, writhing on the stone floor, lay the obese figure of Cardinal Borromei. Pascona could only make out one word of his cries.
“Aiudo!”
He immediately took control.
“Help he must have. Summon a doctor!”
Cardinal da Ponti stepped in with his usual statement of the obvious. “You know we cannot allow one in. The best we can do is get him out of the Chapel to be treated there.”
“And that of course is what we must do.”
“But he should be here. Today might be the day when… And it might be just indigestion.”
Cardinal Pascona paused, momentarily uncertain.
“Cardinal Borremi is someone who enjoys the pleasures of the table. But there have been few pleasures of the table on offer here in the Chapel. Spartan fare every day so far. The wine last night was disgraceful.”
He was about to put aside his indecision and insist that the tormented man be removed and treated outside the Chapel when the whole body of cardinals was transfixed by a terrible cry. The flabby body on the floor arched, shuddered, then sank motionless back to the floor.
“E morto?” someone whispered.
Dead was certainly what he seemed to be. Cardinal Pascona knelt by the body, felt its chest, then put his face and ear close to its mouth. He shook his head.
“Dead,” he said. “We must – with the permission of the Cardinal Chamberlain – remove the body. Then we must put out a statement to the waiting crowds. I think it should specify a colpo di sangue as the cause of death. A stroke.”
“But it didn’t look—”
Cardinal Pascona put up his hand and turned to Cardinal da Ponti.
“I specify that because it is easily understood by the least sophisticated member of the crowd. Everyone there will have had some family member – a grandfather, an uncle – who has died of a stroke. It is a question of getting the message across with the least fuss. If some amendment is needed after the doctors have examined him – so be it. But I do not anticipate any need for it.”
“But a death in Conclave – and such a death: a man who, if I might put it so, was the favourite.”
Cardinal Pascona was brusque in the face of such tastelessness.
“But what could be more likely? A large number of elderly men, shut up together in an unhealthy atmosphere, on a diet which – to put it mildly – is not what they are accustomed to. And the candidate in a state of extreme excitement. It has happened before, and it is a wonder that it hasn’t happened more often.”
The thought that there had been a precedent excited them all.
“Oh, has it happened?” asked Cardinal Morosi, a new boy of fifty-five.
“Indeed. The procession from the Chapel out to the great Square at the time of Pope Benedict XIV’s inauguration was delayed for two hours by one of the cardinals falling dead. Excitement, of course.”
“But then the choice had been made,” muttered Cardinal Morosi.
Pascona ignored him. He addressed the whole College, summoned from their beds or from the prima Colazione by that terrible last cry.
“The need now is to remove, with all appropriate ceremonies and mourning, the deceased brother, and then to continue our deliberations. The whole world awaits our decision. We must not be found wanting at this crisis in our history, and that of the world.”
It struck nobody that for Cardinal Pascona “the whole world” meant effectively the Western half of Europe. They busied themselves, summoned the waiting monks who were clearing away the breakfast things, and had Cardinal Borromei removed from the Chapel. Having someone willing and able to take charge enlivened their torpid and aging intellects, and they settled down to discussions in groups with zest and vigour. What was a death, after all, to men for whom it was only a beginning?
Yet, oddly, the initiative and address of Cardinal Pascona had an effect on the discussion which was the reverse of what might have been expected. Put bluntly (which it never was in this Conclave), it might have been summed up in the phrase “Who does he think he is?” The fact that they w
ere all grateful to him for taking charge, were conscious that he had avoided several hours of indecision and in-fighting, did not stop them asking by what right he had taken control at that moment of crisis in the affairs of the Church.
“He takes a great deal too much on himself,” one of them said. And it did his chances no good at all.
For though Pascona was papabile, he was not the only one to be so.
There had been a minor stir of interest in the early days of the Conclave in favour of Cardinal Fosca, Archbishop of Palermo. He was a man who had no enemies, usually spoke sense, and was two or three years on the right side of senility. True, there was one thing against him. This was not the fact that he had something of an obsession about a rag-tag-and-bobtail collection of criminals in his native island. It was the Mafia this, the Mafia that the whole time, as if they were set to take over the world. That the cardinals shrugged off and suffered. But what was really against him in many cardinals’ eyes was his height. He was barely five feet tall (or 1.5 metres, as the newfangled notions from France had it). Just to be seen by the crowd he would have to have several cushions on his throne when he went out on the balcony to bless the masses. It was likely to cause ridicule, and the Church was aware, since Voltaire, of how susceptible it was to wit, irony and proletarian laughter.
But suddenly, it seemed, Fosca was a decidedly desirable candidate.
Vintage Crime Page 33
