Invitation to Die

by Barbara Cleverly

  In his abstraction, he had relaxed his grip on Snapper.

  The dog hit the ground, all four paws scrabbling for takeoff. In a second he had shot through the narrow gap between bars in the iron fence and disappeared into the graveyard between Redfyre’s house and the northern side of Jude’s College.

  “Snapper! Heel!”

  The training had not taken, evidently. Redfyre watched in dismay as the tall, unkempt grasses stirred, marking the progress straight through to the centre of this dog’s paradise. Rats, cats, the rotting remains of tramps’ ancient fish-and-chip suppers, bones rising to the surface as the earth beneath the stones rose and fell with the seasons and the rainfall—there was enough here to keep Snapper busy all day.

  And there was nothing for it but to plunge in after him.

  As nimble as the dog and with the advantage of longer legs, Redfyre vaulted over the railings and began to track his way over the higgledy-piggledy tombstones, around unmarked mounds, watching out for broken beer bottles and other lethal traps as he went. As he drew nearer to the spot he’d marked as the place where Snapper had come to rest, he heard him call out. It was as plain as a human cry for help. A peremptory yap that Redfyre had heard often before. It invariably meant, Where are you? Over here! Come see what I’ve found!

  He’d feared he would have to report the fresh digging up of a grave to the local vicar and offer his apologies with due restitution, but as he ducked around the low-lying branches of a concealing yew, he relaxed and smiled with relief at the comical and entirely harmless scene before him.

  Snapper had found a friend.

  The dog loved the gentlemen of the travelling brotherhood. The men of the road. Redfyre could never work out whether it was the dog who cast a spell on them or they who were able to magic the dog. It was undeniable that not a single tramp’s hide had ever been punctured by Snapper’s awful little teeth, and they never failed to make much of him. The surest way into the owner’s pocket? It certainly worked. Not a week went by without a tap on the door, an ear-tugging and a few kind words for the dog, preliminaries to the handing over of whatever change Redfyre had in his pocket. Half a loaf or a cake from the table usually followed. He had never spotted a tramp’s chalked sign near his door, but had no doubt that one of their secret signals was present and constantly renewed. He wondered which symbol expressed: “Nice dog lives here. Master, easy mark.” In return, he had to admit that one or two of the knocks had alerted him to trouble in the neighbourhood of “Bum-bailiff coming on a bit strong with the little missis at number twenty,” or “Old lag down the Anchor bragging about that robbery at the co-op . . . Just thought you’d like to know.” He recognised that he had become the approachable face of local law and order, and was pleased enough to go along with that.

  “Ah! There you are, you ghastly, disobedient little beast! Are you going to introduce me to your new friend? Perhaps he has room in his life for a Jack Russell who’s about to be made homeless. You can wander off into the wide blue yonder together! And good riddance! Hullo there! Anyone at home?”

  Redfyre had been talking deliberately loudly to alert the sleeping tramp to his presence. As he approached, he waited for the startled cursing to pour forth, but the man remained silent. Sleeping off a Saturday night drinking bout, he guessed. Quite a binge that must have been if he could remain oblivious of sharp spring sunshine slanting down onto his eyelids, the nerve-jangling yapping and the copper’s bluff nonsense!

  But, of course, no sentient being this side of the grave could have done that.

  Suddenly alert, Redfyre paused in his advance to take in the scene. Snapper was now tugging at the sleeve of the man’s overcoat. Redfyre recognised the uniform of the wanderer. A second- or thirdhand, worn-out, ex–army greatcoat. Warm, reasonably waterproof and a good stand-in for a sleeping blanket. The wearer of this useful garment was stretched out on top of a low-lying marble-topped grave with his head resting against the headstone. His feet, clad in heavily darned socks, offered themselves to the newly risen sun, heels together in a mocking V formation, one lividly white big toe sticking through to strike a discordant note of pathos. A pair of resoled brogue shoes had been lined up at the base of the stone with the care of a child going to bed. Or would that be a soldier’s careful routine gesture? The man’s face recalled that of a waxen effigy, time-darkened ivory, skin tight about the bones, the mouth slightly smiling. Though on approaching, Redfyre thought—perhaps a grimace? His hands must have been crossed over his chest until Snapper in his eagerness had leapt up and snatched one down to his level for an affectionate nuzzling.

  Idiotically, Redfyre’s first thought was, Lord! How do I tell the poor little animal his new friend is a goner?

  “Come away, lad!” he said, scooping up the dog. “He can’t hear you.” He took out the lead and tethered him, grumbling, to the yew tree, then proceeded to investigate the tomb sleeper.

  No pulse. Dead. Cold body. He judged the man to have been dead for some hours, perhaps even days. It was entirely possible for a bloke to have had a heart attack, realised that his moment had come and laid himself out to wait for death on an available and entirely appropriate piece of marble, Redfyre reasoned. His knowledge of the process of decomposition had been acquired over four years fighting in Flanders fields and was reliable, but he now entrusted such professional decisions to men in lab coats with thermometers and microscopes. He was most probably contemplating a death by natural causes that would lead to a five-minute enquiry by a bored coroner and a quiet shovelling away, unnamed, in a pauper’s burial ground.

  He sniffed the air above the body. A keen sense of smell was a trait the inspector shared with Bernard Spilsbury, the Home Office pathologist so revered by the CID. Not that it needed to be particularly keen to distinguish two sharp scents against the green background of mayblossom and sun-warmed grasses. Alcohol. Fruity alcohol rather than whisky or ale . . . brandy, perhaps? And, less pungent, the inevitable smell of rotting lilies, reeking of death.

  There were no visible signs of violence. No blood, no torn clothing. Fights in defence of territory or simply drunken squabbles were the second-most-frequent cause of death, after disease, in the down-and-out fraternity. They left traces on the primary target—the face. Here was no broken nose, no black eye, no scratches or bruises. Redfyre turned his attention to the hands. He took hold of the right hand Snapper had been tugging at and inspected the knuckles. No signs of fighting. He checked the left. No broken bones or skin here, either. They were the hands of a hardworking man of middle years that he had expected, but oddly, they were clean, the nails freshly trimmed. The face had the austerity of one who was aware that death was close, but gave out the impression of peaceful acceptance. The eyes were fully closed. There was certainly no expression of horror—Redfyre had yet to encounter such in a corpse. He had begun to suspect that the dying eye roll of terror was no more than an invention of Victorian novelists. The face was well shaped—intelligent-looking, as far as one could judge. It would certainly not have appeared as an illustration in the pages of Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente. Anthropological criminology was not a theory Redfyre subscribed to. He had known too many villains with the features of the Angel Gabriel and one or two plug-uglies with hearts of gold and morals to match. Nevertheless, this was a face he would have been pleased to have engaged with, if only it could have sprung alive again.

  The professional policeman surfaced, and Detective Inspector Redfyre of the Cambridge CID went about his business in a methodical way, scribbling on the pad he always kept in his trouser pocket, noting first of all precisely the condition of the scrubby grass surrounding the gravestone. He dropped to his knees and crawled about, much to the fury of Snapper, who was not invited to join in the game, inspecting bent stems and establishing the route the man had taken to arrive at the stone. With the sequence of light shower followed by flood of spring sunshine, you could almost hear the grass surging
upwards, repairing itself, standing straight. By lunchtime, Redfyre reckoned, the track would no longer be discernible.

  Scarcely believing what he was noting, he got to his feet and took his bearings. He sighted along the barely visible path of disturbed herbage and spoke to the corpse. “Now, what the hell were you doing coming straight out of the back of Jude’s? The master’s garden, no less! Leading to the master’s lodge. Impressive friends you have! And which of them, I wonder, unlocked the door in the eight-foot-high wall so you could get through to die in here and ruin my Sunday?”

  Chapter 9

  Cambridge, Sunday, the 18th of May, 1924

  “Well, at least someone’s happy,” Dr. Beaufort commented. He nodded to the police photographer, who was hopping about the gravestones, eager, busy, in a world of his own. “It’s not every day you boys get a whack at an outdoor scene in full spring sunshine with a subject that looks like a Plantagenet king laid out on his funeral bier. Who’ve we got? King Richard the Lionheart without his crown and longsword? Very photogenic . . . is that a word?”

  “I know what you mean!” Redfyre agreed, responding to the doctor’s flight of fancy. “My lads are more used to exposing their lenses to battered sides of meat on stormy nights down a dark alley . . . With this one, I looked for the embroidered cushion under the head, the pet whippet at his feet.”

  “I’ll give your Man Ray over there a minute to indulge his artistic impulses before I swat him away,” Beaufort said, eager to make a start.

  The pathologist on duty was the one Redfyre would have requested if requesting had been possible. Dr. Beaufort was every detective’s first choice. The doctor’s bag remained unopened on the ground by his side, and Redfyre knew it would remain so until he had looked about him and absorbed the bigger picture. Then out would come the rubberised gloves, the tweezers and the sample bags. He could have sworn Beaufort had undergone police training, so attuned was he to their requirements. Redfyre smiled to himself. On the many occasions the venerable pathologist had worked with Redfyre’s boss, Detective Superintendent MacFarlane, he would have been subjected to a regime of strict adherence to the Scotland Yard’s Detective’s Handbook.

  Unhurried, the wise old eyes ranged around the graveyard, taking in the presence of tall, gangly Sergeant Thoday beating the bounds, returning to concentrate on the track through the grasses. “I say, Redfyre, have you noticed . . . ?”

  “Yes, that was the first thing I asked the photographer to record. The sergeant is doing a preliminary sweep. We’ll have the uniformed lads down on their knees later for a fingertip search, should it be necessary.”

  “You’re hoping I’m going to take one look and say, ‘Heart attack. Feel free to cart away and bury,’ I suppose.”

  “Much depends on whether that gate is locked and where the key is. We can follow where it leads when we’ve had a closer look at the body. I hope you’re in the mood to talk aloud, in words of no more than five syllables and, above all—indiscreetly—as you work?”

  The doctor grinned. “You’ve never held me to what I say in the first flush of enthusiasm, so—yes. And my first indiscretion will be to say—are you sure, Inspector, that this is indeed a corpse we’re about to check over? Do I need to remind you where we are? In the middle of university territory. You know what the young folk are like for practical jokes. When pissed out of their wits seeking a distraction from the stressful demands of examinations or just because it’s a Saturday night, they often burst out into undergrad humour. The medics are the worst, with their access to body parts, real or faked. And they have a fertile imagination. Combined with a strong stomach and a head for heights, apparently. I’ve been called out to attend skeletons in indelicate poses on rooftops, severed heads—papier mâché, of course, and dripping gouts of tomato sauce—dangling from the chubby fingers of Henry VIII. This one looks particularly waxen to me from this distance. Someone made a clandestine visit to Madame Tussauds gallery and made off with one of her rogues? Ah! Your photographer’s done with the camera. Shall we cease blethering and move into the presence?”

  “Why do I feel as though we ought to be doffing our hats?” Redfyre murmured as they approached. “No idea who he is, but I can tell you this—he’s no waxwork! He’s real, all right, just lacking a pulse. Not exactly hiding, is he? I say—do you think that’s part of it? Either he was some kind of a joker who thought he’d lay himself out with a last dashing gesture or—”

  “Someone did it for him. Laid him out all neat and tidy, eyes closed, hands crossed over the breastbone. Regretful? ‘Sorry about this, old chap. Least I can do . . .’”

  “It did occur to me, though I can’t see any sign of violence on the few bits of him that are visible. I haven’t yet looked below the greatcoat. It covers him capaciously, from chin to calf. Could be anything under there from a pair of nail scissors to a harpoon.”

  They stared together in pity and curiosity at the body, automatically making a respectful sign of the cross.

  “They say Death’s a leveller,” the doctor murmured, “but I don’t know. It’s hardly a scientific view, but it always seems to my jaundiced eye to accentuate differences. And sometimes it distorts. Subjects take on a deceptively saintly aspect—and the reverse. Looking at our bloke, I’d say ‘saintly,’ wouldn’t you? He may have been an utter blackguard in life, of course. That’s up to you to discover, my friend.”

  “Should we really go on calling him ‘subject’ and ‘bloke’?” Redfyre said. “Seems a bit discourteous to me.”

  “Right. Look, it’s the eighteenth of May today. St. Dunstan’s Day, my diary told me when I opened it on receiving the phone call this morning. Let’s call him after the good old Saxon saint, shall we? Dunstan?”

  “Seems appropriate,” Redfyre said, glancing wryly at the surroundings. “He rests surrounded by good old Saxon bones, after all.”

  After an inspection of the head and hands, the doctor declared his intention of removing the greatcoat, and they both set about undoing the strong horn buttons. “This was a splendid coat, two or three owners previously,” Beaufort commented. “Great War: ‘Officers for the use of,’ I had one just like it. Not standard issue, sewn up in a hurry by the thousand, either. Specially tailored in London, I think we’ll find, when we dig a bit deeper. Ah yes, here we are. Label intact. Jermyn Street. Do you want to note down the details? . . . Not that a London tailor will be able to help. The secondhand stall on the market may have more useful particulars to offer. Whichever—it’s had careful owners, or lucky ones. No sign of damage—no bullet hole, no bayonet slash. Even the buttons are all intact and stoutly sewn on.”

  “No helpful regimental badge in the lapel?”

  “No,” Beaufort replied, smoothing down the front folds. “But look here. Two tiny holes. From a lapel tag? Right where you’d expect to find it. That could have come adrift when the body was moved—dragged along?”

  “I’ll tell the chaps to watch out. No marks of grass or damp stains down the front from pulling the body along. Perhaps they’re on the back.” Redfyre made a note.

  The doctor silently assessed the condition of the limbs, and noting that they were in a sufficiently loose state, he began with Redfyre’s help to peel the coat from the arms.

  “You know, I think your guess at timing is a bit out, Inspector. Your Dunstan’s been dead rather longer than you think. I’ll let you know later when I’ve had him on my slab, but—first estimate—not last night. The night before? Friday night? I’ll be able to get the night temperatures and a meteorological report from the boffins and hear what they have to say. They’ve solved more murders than we have, those chaps. Now, then . . . take this, will you? You’ll be wanting to look through the pockets.”

  Redfyre peered with interest at the body revealed. “Good suit. Dark blue, loose weave, summer weight. Hardly worn. Sort of thing you’d buy for a wedding or a funeral and put on once. You can get them
by the dozen on the racks in the secondhand shops down Mill Road in April when the maids have finished spring cleaning. Clean shirt. Tie slightly out of kilter owing to the murdering hands, which made those weals on his throat, would you say?” He paused for a moment, head cocked to one side. “The tie, Inspector? You’re a Cambridge man . . . Anything strike you as odd?”

  “Good Lord! It’s a Girton College tie. I haven’t seen one in use for years. Another thing he picked up at the secondhand stalls, I expect.”

  “I reckon. And one tie’s as good as another when it comes to a strangling. But it hasn’t been used for that purpose. He’s been throttled by fingers on his throat. Elderly gent on a sparse diet . . . It can’t have taken much force to kill him. Sniff, Redfyre. Notice anything?”

  “Oh yes, I’d noticed. Spirit of some sort. Not whisky . . . that’s brandy, surely?”

  “Yes. I think when we test those stains down the front of his shirt, that’s what we’ll find.” Beaufort took the man’s right hand and looked at the first two fingers. “Smoker, I see. Well, at least the old bugger indulged in a few pleasurable activities before he snuffed it.”

  He peered again at the neck. “Murder. We’re definitely looking at a case of strangulation. Not a hanging, which could well have been self-inflicted and tends to leave other traces, like a noose or other ligature, and a high point from which to dangle. I think we’ll find our Dunstan was strangled to death, most likely by hand, possibly elsewhere, then laid out later in this place. No signs of a struggle hereabouts?”

  Redfyre shook his head.

  “Well, I think that’s as far as I need go here.” The doctor looked about anxiously. “And if we linger, we’ll get caught up in the morning service. The organ’s tuning up, and I noticed the vicar cycling up to the vestry door just now, corset creaking and moustache starched. I’ll leave you to do the honours, if you don’t mind, though the temptation to hang on and torment humourless old Reverend Turnbull with a few heavy jests about the carelessness of leaving bodies lying about in a graveyard is getting the better of me. I’ll thumb a lift back to the morgue with the blokes in the meat wagon and get straight on with this. Ask your constable to nip off and tell them to give us ten minutes before bringing in their stretcher, will you, John?”