Death's Privilege

by Darryl Donaghue

  Death's Privilege

  Darryl Donaghue

  Editor: Jane Adams

  Copy-editor: Shannon Cook

  Cover: Stuart Bache

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental

  eBook Edition

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this publication may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  First edition published 2016

  Copyright © 2016 Vellichor Press

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  One

  Joel Johnson, trainee detective constable, felt his shoes sink into the mud as he walked towards the crime scene. He’d had a few compliments on his shoes last week; they say it’s the first thing a woman notices in a man. He’d searched men’s lifestyle websites for a suitable guide and settled on ‘How to shine your shoes like a soldier’, having to replace the horsehair brush with a standard Kiwi.

  There’d been no time for compliments that morning. Within twenty minutes of getting to the office, Detective Sergeant Matt Hayward had him make the coffee, subjected him to another dry story of a fishing trip with his son and then asked him about his weekend, hanging on his every word, before telling him to get the keys and the Sat Nav and to set it for Amblin Park via the McDonald’s drive-through. It’d rained all night and Joel’s black Oxfords struggled to shine through the splatters of mud on the caps.

  The limp body gently swayed in the morning wind. ‘Poor sod,’ said Hayward, biting into his sausage and egg McMuffin.

  ‘Yeah.’ Joel tugged on his trim trousers at the knees, trying to limit the damage to just his shoes. Tailor-made suits didn’t come cheap, especially for a man of his taste. London boutiques situated in secret side streets, far from the wallets of the common shopper, had designed his look from top to bottom. This particular piece, crafted in the back rooms of Saville Row to the exact millimetre of his broad-shouldered dimensions, was meant to be worn after work for a night at out at trendy wine bars, not deep in the woods, being windswept and sinking slowly into the softened earth in front of a suicide victim.

  ‘Want some?’ Hayward held the greasy, half-eaten McMuffin out towards him. ‘Even you pretty boys must eat something.’ Joel shook his head and raised an eyebrow. ‘Suit yourself.’ Hayward finished his breakfast in one large final mouthful and threw the wrapper on the ground.

  ‘I had oats before coming in.’

  Hayward wiped his hands on his white shirt, leaving a grease stain where his belly met his belt. ‘You’ll never become a substantive DC on oats, my boy. Wait ‘til the late nights kick in, you’ll replace your builder’s tea with whipped cream lattes and your salad bowl with a bucket of chicken. This skinny sod was probably brought up on oats.’

  Police tape was tied at awkward angles between the available trees and Hayward lunged uncomfortably under the cordon whilst Joel stepped over it. The officer guarding the scene noted down their names and collars. ‘What do we know, Grasshopper?’

  ‘Found by a jogger at 07:10 this morning and called in by the park warden at 07:26. Uniform are talking to both of them in the car park and obtaining statements. No ID as yet, the duty sergeant wanted to wait for us to conduct the search as per the new policy.’ Joel flicked through the brief notes he’d managed to make at the station before being rushed into the car, an urgency driven more by Hayward’s grumbling stomach than concern for the dead.

  ‘Typical uniform. Policy used to be something to sidestep, bend and break in pursuit of the crooks. Now it just shelters the workshy. CID didn’t come out to suicides until some dozy duty sergeant called a clear murder as non-suspicious. Now they want us to rubber-stamp every one.’ The fresh-faced scene guard looked uncomfortable, but didn’t bother tackling Hayward’s view of current policing methods. Joel looked at the guard and rolled his eyes, as if apologising for a rambling uncle at a posh function. ‘Well, get your gloves on.’

  The body was drenched. His maroon T-shirt clung to his slender frame and his beige chinos had turned a wet shade of brown. The tongue of his boots fell forward and his untied laces hung below the base of the clean soles. Joel paid particular attention to the labels—All-Saints Ramskull motif on the t-shirt, D&G jeans and Ted Baker boots. It’d started raining around 20:30 last night; Joel had been on the way to Harper’s Bar for a friend’s baby shower and had felt the first drops as he’d walked in. The body had been hanging here before the ground had soaked through. The rain had only really started coming down at around 22:00. Joel remembered the exact moment, when a rush of socialites entered the bar, previously having tried to tough it out under the low-rent parasols.

  Hayward was on his phone. This was their first scene assessment together and Joel worried what Hayward’s report would say if he wasn’t even paying attention. The deceased’s right pocket bulged. Joel peeled it open and reached his forefinger and thumb inside. He pulled out a damp brown leather wallet. It was falling apart and contained a provisional driving licence, a prepaid debit card, three loyalty cards for video game shops and two out-of-date slim-fit condoms.

  ‘Scott Enderson, born sixteenth of March 1992, lives in Rhystown. Nice patch.’

  ‘Full of poshos.’ Hayward looked up from his phone. ‘Initial thoughts?’

  ‘Bit of a loner, underachiever, maybe. I mean, who has a prepaid debit card in their twenties? And a provisional licence issued two years ago? The contents of his wallet indicate a completely different lifestyle to his clothes.’ Joel peeled back the other pocket and produced a generic-looking smartphone. Hayward showed some interest, but on seeing the battery was dead went back to moving his own phone in a figure of eight, trying to get some signal. Joel jotted down the details from the cards and then placed the wallet in one exhibit bag and the phone in the other, then sealed them both. ‘The rear of the body isn’t as wet as the front, indicating the direction of the wind during the period he’s been hanging there. With the branch about twelve feet from the ground and no fallen stepladder to assist, it’s likely he climbed the tree, tied the blue rope in a noose, and jumped from the branch, snapping his neck on the way down.’

  Hayward nodded along to his assessment. ‘Happy it’s self-inflicted?’ Hayward tapped his phone one last time and looked smug about something.

  ‘About ninety percent, Sarge. Can’t be sure until we’ve done a bit more digging.’ Joel reached inside the pockets looking for any last minute scribbled thoughts—nothing. ‘Seems like another tragic suicide so far.’

  Joel stood back and took a good look at the soaked corpse. He looked like a boy. His hairless, puffy cheeks gave his face the roundness of a toddler, head to one side and asleep, dreaming of who knows what. The tight blue tow rope, created to pull people to safety, dug into his neck, giving it a border of red flesh, pulling him from this world into the next. His body hung, devoid of whatever spirit it once had, covered in glamorous garments used to hide the inner trauma that led him to be there. Somebody’s baby, swinging from a tree.

  They signed out in the scene guard’s book and went back to the car park, being careful to walk the exact same route as when they came in. The uniformed officers passed them the statements and contact details of the witnesses. Hayward told the duty sergeant to cut the body down and wait for the undertaker.

  ‘Have one hoist the body up, the other cut above the knot. We’re almost certain it’s not suspicious, but let’s be on the safe side. Ideally we’d leave him in place for the forensic teams to do it, b
ut this is a little too public to leave him hanging there.’

  Joel walked past them. The uniformed sergeant looked bored of being lectured to, something he wondered if Hayward cared about, or even noticed. He put the seized evidence in the boot, opened the driver’s side door and sat behind the wheel before glancing in the mirror and rubbing his face to try and wake up. His phone beeped; it was tonight’s date. She wanted to meet straight after he finished work as she’d be in the area anyway. The shoes he could clean, but the suit was ruined. There was no hiding the mud that crept up the hemline. He wished he had a taste for simpler women, ones happy to slum it with takeaway in their pj’s. He unlocked his phone and agreed to meet at 17:00, with the usual caveat that in the Mavenswood CID office, there was no such thing as a guaranteed finish time. She replied, mocking his use of the twenty-four-hour clock.

  ‘Right, my boy, what time do you think he hung himself?’ Hayward opened the door and leant into Joel’s arm as he wiggled himself into a comfortable spot in the passenger seat. He took out his phone and pressed buttons with a smile on his face.

  ‘Prior to 20:30. There wasn’t any mud on his shoes and that’s when it started raining. Had it been after 22:00, his feet would have been caked in the stuff.’ Joel glanced over to see a weather report from the previous evening on Hayward’s phone and a disappointed look on his face.

  ‘Yeah. That ties in with last night’s weather report. I’d have had it sooner, but the signal back there was terrible.’

  ‘No worries, Sarge. I was out last night. Nearly got caught in the storm myself.’

  ‘That’s right, it was raining whilst the missus and I were watching Come Dine with Me. We record it on the Digibox and wait for when we have some quality time together. Out fawning over some female, were you?’ Hayward nudged him. His smile moved the dab of ketchup on his cheek.

  ‘Something like that.’

  Hayward took the Sat Nav from the glovebox and struggled to type their destination in with his clumsy fat fingers. Hayward brought his own Sat Nav with him whenever he left the nick. The job provided two that were shared amongst the whole office, but they were old and could never be found when they were needed.

  ‘No need, Sarge, I know my way back to the nick.’ Joel turned the keys and the engine spluttered like a mangy cat coughing up a purr for the crowd.

  ‘Just a little detour. I’ll call Dales, have him get that tutee of his to make the teas.’

  The Sat Nav took a few minutes to find a signal before announcing Hayward’s intentions. ‘Drive fifty metres and turn left. Four miles to Mavenswood Police Station via Greggs bakery, Mavenswood.''

  Two

  She turned on the TV. The glow from the screen lit the otherwise pitch-black room. A reporter on the evening news, a thin, gangly man, stood outside a typically middle-class house on a typically middle-class road somewhere in typically middle-class Mavenswood. She listened with one ear from the kitchen, washing her hands to make sure no trace of substance had gotten on her skin.

  ‘What must be going through your heads at a time like this?’ The reporter posed his ghoulish question at a red-eyed lady sobbing into a tissue and a man in his fifties with a distant look and trembling bottom lip.

  ‘We’re absolutely devastated. He was a loving son. He was doing well at university and everyone who met him loved him. We want to raise awareness to try and prevent this happening to anyone else.’ The man spoke as his wife could hardly raise her head to look at the camera.

  Her fingers still ached from pulling on the wire. The force had left a red imprint on her palms. It’d been worth the effort; the press had been fooled at least, but next time would be a cleaner kill.

  ‘There has been an outpouring of grief on social media. Everyone expressed deep shock at what happened. Many have been saying, with the lifestyle he was given—wealthy parents, a good home, a seemingly perfect life—how could he possibly be depressed?’

  She picked up her newly-acquired special bottle and sat on the sofa to watch. She liked the reporter, as much as she could manage to like any man. He was scraping every morsel of emotional anguish from the suffering couple. He was gutsy, a quality all but lost amongst his kind. The men she’d known were cowards. Cowards who acted as they pleased and still demanded pity alongside their privileged treatment. Her father had been one of those men. Too arrogant and self-absorbed to understand what his own children were going through.

  Outward appearances offered little to indicate inner character. People deceived with appearances, purporting to be one thing whilst being quite another: a lesson she’d learned at too young an age to ever forget. She stroked the bottle’s lid in an absent gesture of affection more fitting for a loyal cat than a translucent glass of death.

  ‘He was a quiet lad. We gave him the best life we could.’

  He was now the quietest he’d ever been. Dead quiet. Just the way she needed him to be. Had he gone to the police, it would all be over. They’d come with their gloves and dogs and unravel everything she’d worked for. She couldn’t have that. She had someone to cry for too. Someone important, unlike the pathetic boy who’d hit the headlines tonight.

  The reporter held a mic up to the father’s face. ‘I know you want some good to come from this tragedy. What’s your message to people out there watching this now?’

  ‘I want to raise awareness about mental health and suicide in young men. Men don’t want to talk about things affecting them and we need to listen and support our sons, our brothers, our fathers. There are numerous—’

  She threw the remote at the screen. It shattered and the room went black.

  Three

  ‘Valerie is a very wealthy woman and, at her age and her...mental infirmity, people are apt to take advantage. Sorry, I don’t know the correct term. Mental health issues?’ Mr Semples, the duty manager of the Oxlaine Hotel, scratched the white hairs just above his ear. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man who’d kept in shape into his later years.

  ‘Mental health issues is fine. What specific concerns are we talking about?’ Sarah Gladstone sat opposite him in one of the Oxlaine’s large conference rooms. The room catered for meetings of around thirty people, with a projector screen at one end and microphones and power outlets fitted into the long table. The Oxlaine was an impressive hotel set on a country estate just outside of Mavenswood, and Sarah imagined this room was selected to give an impression of opulence that a smaller office wouldn’t have displayed. Her tutor, DS Dales, sat next to her. He’d stayed quiet for most of her conversation with Mr Semples, letting her take the lead.

  ‘When she was young—and she won’t mind me saying this I’m sure—her father walked out on her. Upped and left without a word. She struggled through. I didn’t know her back then of course, but since working here I’ve become more of a friend than an employee, or so I like to think at least. Later in life, the poor woman’s husband left her and it all came flooding back. She went into a deep depression and hasn’t recovered since. The doctor’s have likened it to post-traumatic stress.’ Mr Semples had the dour demeanour of someone talking about a friend rather than just a boss. Sarah had investigated similar, lower-level cases involving questions of mental capacity. Since starting on the detective fast track programme, she’d worked on increasingly more serious cases. A few months ago, she had been in uniform dealing with minor assaults and thefts of sweets from Tesco. Now here she was, taking a report of fraud potentially into the millions with a victim who may or may not have the presence of mind to know she’d been defrauded at all.

  ‘How did the missing funds come to your attention?’

  ‘We were chatting about a friend of mine from my military days, who I’d spent a weekend with. We’d gone to the Lakes. Valerie mentioned she had a friend too. She sometimes comes out with these stories; she doesn’t often leave the house, you see, except to come to the hotel from time to time. I humour her for a bit and that’s the last I’ll hear of that particular person and before long there will be anot
her one.

  ‘This time, however, she mentioned she’d given her friend some money. I asked how much and she wouldn’t tell me. I asked who it was and she just kept saying “my friend, my friend”. After a while, she refused to talk about it altogether. Sorry I can’t help any more than that, DC Gladstone.’

  ‘Have you looked at the accounts? Has any money been taken out?’ Sarah wasn’t strictly a DC yet; she still had an exam to pass and a portfolio to complete. She was one of two officers chosen for the detective fast track programme and was yet to qualify. Dales had told her that it was an administrative title and to simply use DC with the public as, despite everyone accepting that training had to go on, no one wanted their investigation being fed to a guinea pig. For all internal communications it was TDC: Trainee Detective Constable.

  ‘There’s nothing unusual on the hotel’s accounts. Everything is accounted for as best it can be for a place of this size. I don’t have access to her personal accounts, but she is incredibly wealthy. Like I said in my initial call, it could be nothing, could be all in her imagination, or it could be millions. She won’t tell me. Her husband was very well-to-do and the divorce settlement was a handsome payout.’

  ‘They often are.’ DS Dales had been divorced twice and had the bitter tone to prove it.

  ‘Well, it may seem that way, Sergeant, but let me tell you, that poor woman suffered for it. Money is nothing to be celebrated when it costs as much as she’s had to pay.’ Mr Semples jutted his head forward towards Dales, and looked angry at the assumption.

  ‘No offence intended.’ Dales raised his palms in an apologetic gesture and went back to his stoic observations.

  Sarah quashed the tension before it festered. ‘Would her family have access? Any children, brothers or sisters?’