Death's Bright Angel

by Janet Neel

  Davidson arrived at his side and stood silently; McLeish realized, touched, that he was there to offer what support he could in McLeish’s own difficulties. Hopeless, he thought dispassionately, and managed to turn away from Francesca and concentrate his mind on the formalities of arrest.

  Henry, supporting the shivering Francesca, was equally realistic in his assessment and started to concern himself with getting her into a police car and off to hospital. She checked him as he gently pushed at her.

  ‘What do I do, Henry?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About John.’

  ‘You could try apologizing. There’ll never be a better moment, lass, if you can do it.’

  ‘John!’ The clear voice cut through the general background noise, and McLeish turned reluctantly back towards her. She was shivering uncontrollably, her eyes enormous, and he felt a dreadful pang of loss. He moved towards her, noticing how her brothers bunched closer to protect her.

  She is in shock, John,’ Perry said anxiously. ‘And I think her wrist is broken.’

  ‘Perry, I need two minutes with John. Go away.’ She pushed at him gently, and the crowd around her melted. Henry carefully withdrew his supporting arm, and she swayed slightly, finally causing McLeish’s temper to snap.

  ‘If you want to talk, come and sit in a car like a Christian.’ He hustled her to the nearest police car Biff had driven, whose occupants abandoned it as if it were on fire, and sat her down in the front seat, conscious of four wide-eyed Wilson boys left standing on the pavement and an equally wide-eyed Davidson pretending to adjust a radio aerial on another car.

  He shut the doors firmly, and glared at her. ‘All right. Let’s have it.’

  Her head came up and she gave him a long look which reminded him that although down she was not out, and that there was a functioning intelligence at work. ‘I am here to apologize. I nearly got myself killed, and I have made a fool of both of us in front of your colleagues. I’m sorry.’

  McLeish, the wind taken out of him, sat and looked at her. She was using everything she knew not to cry, where any other girl he had ever known would have made it easier for both of them by weeping.

  ‘Just before the boys and Henry take me away, I want you to know I didn’t go to bed with him. I wanted to once, but Perry arrived at a key moment.’ Only Francesca, he thought, would have added that rider. She stared out of the windscreen, the long nose and the strong jaw looking particularly stark. ‘Then I found I missed you very much, and I wanted you back. But Peter’s company was put into receivership this morning and it didn’t seem the moment to tell him so.’ She swallowed, painfully, and eased her right shoulder carefully. ‘I don’t want you to go away. I don’t know if that will do. Now, I mean, after all this.’ The lifted chin indicated comprehensively the crowded scene outside the car, two other police cars with flashing lights, two ambulances, into one of which Peter Hampton was being lifted, and some forty assorted policemen, members of the Wilson family, and general spectators.

  The silence in the car deepened, as John McLeish decided what he had to say, win, lose or draw.

  ‘It’s not on if you want to sleep with other blokes. I can’t cope with it.’

  ‘I understand that. I found I couldn’t cope with it, either.’ Tears of strain finally started to pour down her cheeks, as she bowed her head and with a huge sigh of tension released he hooked his arm round her and turned her face to kiss her.

  You’re freezing. You’ve gone blue,’ he discovered. ‘Why didn’t you say?’ He reached across her, wound her window down, and paused for a second at the sight of Perry, standing contemplating his wrecked car with simple interest and studiously avoiding looking in the direction of his sister.

  ‘Peregrine! Come here, and go with Frannie to St Mary’s immediately. She’s in shock.’ He looked again at her left hand, awkwardly angled in her lap. ‘Your wrist. Christ, it is broken.’

  ‘I told you,’ Perry pointed out from the driver’s side. ‘If you get out, John, I can get in.’ McLeish blinked up at him, as Charlie and Henry scrambled into the back and leant over to pat the weeping Francesca on the shoulders, and the twins appeared anxiously at Francesca’s side of the car and peered in, stroking the bits of her they could reach. He realized that all four of the boys were watching him carefully, caught Henry’s sardonic eye, and took a grip on the situation.

  ‘Listen boys,’ he said firmly. ‘Charles and Perry, take your sister to St Mary’s, don’t follow the ambulance because it and I are going somewhere else. They’ll want to keep her in for the night, and you are to see they do.’ He put a firm protective arm around Francesca, dislodging Charlie as he did so, and heard a faint, collective sigh of relief from her brothers. ‘I want her somewhere where I don’t have to worry about her getting properly looked after, because it is going to be a long night for me. Frannie, I’ll come when I can.’ He leant over and kissed her on the lips, in a deliberate signal to all observers. She touched his cheek, painfully freeing the unbroken arm, tears still pouring down her face.

  ‘Off you go, Perry,’ he said, getting out of the car, and stood for a moment to watch its departure, before turning to the night’s business.

  Epilogue

  Francesca woke, and lay cautiously still in the blessed absence of pain, wrapped in a warm cocoon of blankets. She considered the ceiling and the decor and realized she must be in a hospital but no longer in Casualty, which she did dimly remember; watched the light, and decided it must be late afternoon. She felt a twinge from her right arm, and moved it cautiously before realizing that it was attached to a tube into which an elevated bottle of clear liquid was dripping. Her left arm seemed to be outside the bedclothes and curiously rigid, and she peered at a clumsy white plaster.

  Then suddenly she realized there was someone else in the room, and lifted her head carefully to see John McLeish asleep in a chair in the corner, awkwardly folded into rather too small a space, and with his left arm in a large khaki sling. He looked utterly exhausted, and she watched him, remembering that she had seen him like this before after a very long shift. Even abandoned in sleep he looked formidable and not at all childlike. She fidgeted her left arm which rewarded her with a sharp painful twinge that brought tears to her eyes. She must have made a noise because he was awake, straight from a sound sleep, and beside her instantly.

  ‘Mind that drip,’ he said, warningly.

  ‘What’s it for?’ she asked, teeth gritted against a recurrence of the pain from her wrist.

  ‘In case they have to get your blood pressure up in a hurry.

  ‘It’s always low. Didn’t the boys tell them?’

  ‘Many times, apparently, but it wasn’t just low last night, it disappeared. Your mum was here, but she went off to get some sleep when I got here about eleven this morning. Henry Blackshaw was here half the night, too. To keep order, he said.’

  They smiled momentarily at each other, but she was watching his face. ‘What is it John?’ The faint colour vanished from her cheeks, and he cast a harassed look at the drip, before pulling a chair close to her.

  ‘Darling, Hampton is dead. I’m sorry, but I must tell you because the evening papers have it.’

  Because Charlie hit him?’ She started to shiver, and McLeish, swearing, leaned over her and pressed the buzzer.

  ‘No, no, no. Nothing to do with Charlie.’ He looked apologetically at the arriving Sister, who glanced at the drip and stood, hand on Francesca’s wrist, counting her pulse rate.

  ‘Go on, John,’ Francesca urged, shivering, ‘I promise not to die, but I must know that it wasn’t Charlie.’ One might, McLeish thought, with exasperated love, have remembered that brothers outranked lovers in Francesca’s world.

  ‘He killed himself. Took an enormous overdose of heroin which no one spotted until too late.’

  ‘But where … I mean, how …’ her voice tailed off, and he nodded.

  ‘Yes, we slipped up there. I was with him in the ambulance, and we took t
he cuffs off so the ambulance men could handle him more easily. Then I distracted them by passing out — I’ve got a chipped collar-bone, it turns out — and he must have taken it then. No one spotted the overdose in the prison hospital because they were looking for a skull fracture, and another bloke in there ran amok, and they had to X-ray my shoulder; and one way and another he was dead three hours later before anyone did anything sensible. No skull fracture, by the way.’

  She was staring at him, absolutely white, her eyes very blue and narrowed with concentration, and the Sister looked up, sharply, in warning.

  ‘Was he a murderer?’

  ‘Yes. At least once, and possibly twice. He killed William Fireman all right. Bruce found the presentation watch with Fireman’s name on it in Hampton’s car. I imagine he took it to try and delay Fireman’s identification and give himself a chance to get clear away to Yorkshire but he must have been distracted, and he left Fireman’s card case on him. Then he took the watch up to Yorkshire with him and couldn’t dump it anywhere there because, if found, it would have told us there was a Britex connection and that it wasn’t just a London mugging. He moved it after you and Martin found it in a cupboard.’

  ‘He did it for money? I mean because he was on the take and Fireman had found out?’

  ‘I’d not be able to prove it very easily, but yes. In fact, but for that watch, and of course for the fact that he attacked you, I’m not sure we could have made the case stand up. There were two others in the fiddle, William Blackett and Simon Ketterick — you met him once. He was a heroin addict.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘Oh God, you don’t know about him either.’ He looked anxiously at the Sister who scowled at him warningly, but he decided to ignore her. ‘He died of an overdose yesterday.’

  Francesca looked up at him intently. ‘Did Peter kill him too?’

  ‘Probably, but I couldn’t prove it. No fingerprints on the three syringes in the room, but smudges as if someone were wearing gloves. Blackett swears he found him dead, and I believe him. Too frightened to do anything but go and get hopelessly pissed and weep all over a tart he’d only met once before. But even if I didn’t believe him we’d never get a conviction now, with Hampton dead.’

  ‘Was Peter an addict?’

  ‘Forensic say no, that’s why what he took killed him.’

  He realized as he spoke that she had suddenly turned even paler, and her wrist went limp in the Sister’s hand. The Sister reached across him without apology and pressed a bell, and within ten seconds a young doctor had banged unceremoniously into the room.

  ‘That’s much too low,’ he said briskly. ‘Inspector, sorry, but out. Change the drip please, Sister.’

  McLeish moved reluctantly back from the bed.

  ‘No, please.’ Francesca opened her eyes with an enormous effort of will. ‘Please don’t go, I must know what happened, I’ll be worse if I don’t.’

  The medical help, struggling with the drip, ignored them both, and McLeish moved quietly back to her side, stroking her cheek. The doctor stood back, and the Sister picked up Francesca’s wrist again while they watched. She nodded to the doctor after a couple of minutes.

  ‘All right,’ he said to McLeish. ‘But don’t do anything exciting.’

  Francesca’s eyes opened. ‘Why did Peter try to kill me?’

  ‘He knew that you had seen the Alutex table and the presentation box. I don’t know how he realized you were dangerous to him. Did you suspect him?’ He was acutely aware of the young doctor and the sister, both obviously fascinated.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ she said, flatly, ‘I’d never make a detective.’ Then she looked up, eyes widening, and a faint pink blush crept over her cheekbones. ‘Oh God. I know.’

  ‘What, Frannie?’

  ‘I told him I’d seen the Alutex table — I was teasing him about losing his temper. And he knows I have a photographic memory.’

  ‘And he didn’t know you’d written it all down and passed it on to Martin and Henry.’

  ‘No. God, what a fool I am.’ She looked at him. ‘And, as you are not saying, I made it easy for him by going running by myself.’

  McLeish managed, he thought commendably, not to move his face at all, contenting himself with stroking her cheek. ‘Would you have caught him if it hadn’t been for me?’ she asked, hesitantly, but McLeish, even knowing her overdeveloped sense of responsibility, was unwilling to equivocate.

  ‘No. If it hadn’t been for your being involved with Britex, I expect I’d have called it a mugging in the end. Would you rather he had got away with it?’

  ‘No. No, of course not. Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Don’t you be silly, then. That’s what my job’s about.’

  Both of them glanced at the hovering medical help. ‘She’s all right.’ The young doctor selfconsciously made a minor adjustment to the drip, and took himself and the Sister reluctantly out of the room.

  ‘I know what would help my blood pressure, but I can’t move either arm,’ Francesca said apologetically, and he leant over her and kissed her till they were both out of breath.

  ‘Oh, darling John. What a time to break my wrist.’

  ‘We’ll manage,’ he said, with love.

  He sat down in the chair beside the bed, totally at peace with the world, watching while she drifted back into sleep.

  Also Published by Ostara

  O Gentle Death

  Janet Neel

  The fashionably liberal boarding school Faraday Trust has a number of issues to address. Exams are approaching and added to concerns over its position in the league tables a raging battle for the headship is about to begin. Then one of the students is found dead in a bath. Disruptive, moody, and sexually precocious the likelihood of Catriona Roberts’s death being suicide is questioned when it is revealed that she was three months pregnant. Was it murder? Was the suspect a gifted and arrogant pupil from the same fashionable boarding school, or possibly his father or maybe a teacher she had accused of sexual harassment? Another mystery for Detective Chief Inspector Mcleish

  Pages: 206.

  ISBN: 978-1-906288-52-5.

  Size: 216 × 140.

  Price: £ 10.99