Soft Summer Blood

by Peter Helton

  ‘For the record, where were you both last night between nine and midnight?’

  ‘I was at home,’ said Gotts.

  ‘Can anyone confirm that?’

  ‘Nope,’ he said, almost cheerfully.

  Emma seemed less relaxed about the question. ‘I was out with friends. At a pub. Then a club in town. You can ask them.’

  ‘We will. Give their names to my sergeant here.’

  McLusky told them they should go home since the garden remained out of bounds. They left the kitchen just as Mrs Mohr returned. ‘Mrs Mohr,’ McLusky asked, ‘the safe in the study …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It has a combination lock. Is it worth asking his son for the combination?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, giving him a shrewd look. ‘I certainly don’t know it, Inspector. But Charles could not even remember his own phone number. He once told me he could never remember the combination, which is why he kept it somewhere in his study.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Mohr.’ McLusky turned towards the door.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me where I was last night, Inspector?’

  McLusky turned back and raised his eyebrows at her.

  ‘I was at home. And no one can vouch for me, either.’

  In the hall he ran into the forensics technician. ‘Not a thing on the safe or the picture frame. Both wiped clean.’

  Back upstairs, McLusky and Austin once more donned gloves. ‘It would save a lot of hassle if we could find the combination.’

  ‘We could try his date of birth or something,’ Austin suggested.

  ‘Rubbish. No one’s that daft.’ He opened his notebook anyway and tried Mendenhall’s date of birth in various combinations, without success. ‘Told you.’

  They opened and closed drawers, sifted through papers, looked in margins and front papers of books, even at the wall behind paintings. They got in each other’s way and became irritable and short-tempered. McLusky recognized the signs of an underfed workforce and stopped. ‘Forget it, Jane; we’ll go and get lunch and come back to it.’

  Austin gladly complied and slipped out into the corridor. McLusky stood in the door and gave the study one last scrutinizing look. ‘If it were your safe, Jane, where would you put the combination?’

  ‘Dunno. On a yellow Post-it note on the door of the safe, probably.’

  McLusky closed the door. ‘Not the clever thing to do. Mendenhall, on the other hand, was clever … and he was a painter.’ McLusky opened the door again.

  Austin turned back too. ‘Found something?’

  ‘The painting that hides the safe. It looks as if it’s one of his but it’s painted in an odd way. Different. There’s all those boats huddled together over here, the people on the beach are all in a row, there’s a flock of seagulls … Let’s hope they’re in the right order.’ He kept checking back with the painting as he entered the numbers. ‘Six boats on the left … eleven sunbathers on the right … nine seagulls left … ten ice creams right.’ A barely audible click came from the mechanism. ‘Well, what do you know – a McLusky hunch that paid off.’ He depressed the short steel handle and opened the door to the shallow interior of the safe. Bent into the space was a blue plastic-covered file. He liberated it carefully, holding it up. ‘Copy of his will.’

  ‘But nothing else. No jewellery. Weren’t we expecting his wife’s jewellery?’

  ‘We were, Jane, and we are bitterly disappointed. Right. At least I feel we’ve earned our lunch now.’

  THREE

  ‘Missing person, sir? Surely that’s a job for uniform, if it is a job at all.’ DI Fairfield, sitting in front of the DSI’s desk, tried and failed to meet Denkhaus’s eyes.

  The superintendent swivelled away from her in his chair towards the window behind his desk and pretended to be interested in the shaft of light that had pierced the grey clouds and shimmered on the dark waters of the harbour, just visible between the buildings. ‘Yes, of course, normally I’d agree with you.’ The police had long given up investigating missing persons, unless the disappeared was a minor or otherwise at risk. With three hundred thousand people reported missing each year, there was really no alternative. ‘This is different.’

  Fairfield looked with disgust at the sheet of paper Denkhaus had pushed across at her. She was reluctant even to touch it. A badly printed photo of the girl was clipped to one corner of it. ‘Says here she’s nineteen. She can do as she pleases. There’s no indication of foul play, is there?’

  Denkhaus swivelled back to face her. ‘Not as far as I know. Look, she’s the daughter of an Italian government minister and we’ve been asked to look into it.’

  ‘So he gets special treatment because he’s a politician. If he was an Italian – I don’t know – car mechanic, presumably we wouldn’t bother.’

  ‘Yes, DI Fairfield, that’s precisely how the world works. Politicians have a lot of influence, car mechanics rather less. From an Italian politician via the Italian embassy, via the Foreign Office, the chief constable, the assistant chief constable, to this superintendent and finally it lands in your lap, DI Kat Fairfield. You are the bottom of this illustrious pile of buck-passers and you will please get on with it. I can’t give it to anyone below the rank of inspector because if whatshername …’

  ‘Fulvia Lamberti,’ Fairfield read.

  ‘If Fulvia does come to harm, we have to be able to demonstrate that we took it seriously.’

  ‘She’s an art student. It’s summertime. Term’s nearly finished. She’s somewhere in Devon lying on the beach, surely.’

  ‘Most likely, Fairfield. Stop fighting it and get going.’

  DI Fairfield closed the door to the superintendent’s office with great self-control, then stormed past Lynn Tiery, his secretary, and out into the corridor, where she stopped, tempted to scrunch up the info sheet on the missing girl and kick it down the stairwell. McLusky had just been put in charge of a murder investigation while she was told to find a bloody foreign student who couldn’t be arsed to turn up at college. She trod heavily down the stairs. This would never have happened if DCI Gaunt was here. Most people disliked the chief inspector, but Fairfield found she could press Gaunt’s buttons. With the superintendent she completely failed to do so; in fact, she was not sure if he had any buttons a lowly DI could reach. Missing bloody person’s inquiry. She slammed into her office and made straight for her cappuccino machine.

  ‘That’s the problem with the bloody countryside: they allegedly grow all the food we buy but no one will let you have any.’ After leaving Woodlea House, McLusky had driven around in search of lunch, wilfully ignoring anything that wasn’t a chip shop, until they ended up in the small town of Keynsham. He had finally settled on the Keynsham Fish and Burger Bar in Temple Street, which Austin suspected he had been aiming for all the time. They found a window table with a view of the Iceland store opposite where, judging by the posters that were obscuring its windows, everything was priced at one pound.

  Austin broke up the crisp batter coating of his portion of cod with a flimsy fork. ‘I wonder why Denkhaus hasn’t made you acting DCI while Gaunt is away?’

  McLusky was concentrating on drowning his chips in ketchup, mustard and tartar sauce. ‘Mmm? Because just saying the words would give him apoplexy.’ He crammed his mouth with chips. ‘I hope you realize that working with me doesn’t do your prospects of promotion any good at all. If I were you, I’d get a transfer to Trinity Road and work with someone who is going places.’

  Austin, who had shared many a meal with McLusky, understood most of it. ‘I’m happy where I am. Are you trying to get rid of me?’

  ‘Lord, no. Hate to lose you. I’m just saying.’ McLusky attacked his portion of fish as though it were still alive and possibly dangerous. ‘OK. David Mendenhall. Did he shoot his father?’

  ‘Hard to say.’

  ‘Working late by himself in the office. It’s not much of an alibi. And he’s got motive. According to his father’s will, if the version
we found is the most recent one, he gets the lot, apart from the paintings which go to one of his friends – I forget the name …’

  ‘Longmaid,’ supplied Austin who remembered names effortlessly.

  ‘Him. And a few grand for the housekeeper – not enough for a motive unless she’s got a marzipan habit. We’ll do a check on all of them – gardeners, too.’

  ‘Heavily armed gardeners? Unusual.’

  ‘Yes, I can’t see it myself. Rat poison or secateurs, surely. My money’s on David “it’s-behind-that-painting-I-believe”. I believe? I’m sure he knew exactly where the safe was and how to get into it.’

  ‘But why would he steal the jewellery if he’s going to inherit it anyway? Oh, I see, he could have stolen the jewellery a while ago and flogged it or pawned it. Perhaps he killed his old man because he found out.’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a bit of a leap from theft to murder. But someone took the jewellery as well as any other valuables that may have been inside and then wiped the prints off the safe.’

  ‘Which means they expected us to be dusting the thing for prints eventually.’

  ‘Quite.’ He watched with disinterest through the window as a traffic warden stuck a parking ticket on the windscreen of his car which was parked just outside on double yellow lines. McLusky’s car attracted a lot of parking tickets, but he had not paid a single parking fine since joining CID.

  A few minutes later they were once more on their way back to Woodlea House, the parking ticket crumpled on the back seat. ‘Are we setting up an incident room at the house?’ Austin asked.

  ‘So that I can call all the suspects into the library and terrify the killer into revealing himself?’

  ‘Yes. It’s what you always wanted.’

  ‘Told you: what I want is a vicar with a dark past battered to death in the vestry with a euphonium.’

  ‘Ah, yes, that’s the one.’

  ‘No, we’re close enough to town. Briefing back at Albany in two hours.’

  The area in front of the house was still full of cars. McLusky parked on the grass so as not to block anyone in, then marched into the garden. The blue-suited army of technicians was now concentrating its efforts on the boundaries of the property, looking for signs of entry. The lily pond had been dredged in the search for the weapon; the three-foot-wide band of mud the SOCOs had deposited on the grass around it made it look like a giant bruised eye.

  ‘Anything?’ McLusky asked.

  The team leader was sitting on a bench seat near the statue of Hebe, holding a sandwich. He had just opened his mouth to bite into it but closed it again. His walrus moustache almost completely hid his mouth, but McLusky thought he might be smiling. ‘Found the bullet,’ he said. He dropped the sandwich back into the lunchbox beside him and virtually skipped to his aluminium case on the lawn. ‘But it won’t tell you much, sir.’ He handed it over inside an evidence bag. The bullet was barely recognizable as such. ‘Flattened like a crashed cream cake. It’s a ricochet, which is why it took us ages to find it. Went through his neck then bounced off that cast-iron arch-thing there. We found it near the greenhouse.’

  ‘Oh, marvellous. See if ballistics can do something with it. How did the killer get in?’

  The SOCO shrugged. ‘Front door? No sign of forced entry anywhere. No sign of a ladder being used or anyone climbing the walls and jumping down, though we’re still looking.’

  ‘Would an intruder necessarily leave a trace?’

  ‘Not if they’re careful, no.’

  The summer weather had disappeared under a dark bank of low cloud. Woodlea House now looked desolate to McLusky, as though its uncertain future had become visible in its grey façade. Would David Mendenhall keep the house? Would Mrs Mohr and the gardeners keep their jobs? As they crossed the lawn, he saw David behind the French window, holding a cup and saucer, watching them. ‘Of the four people here, the son has the only convincing motive. And his alibi is vague.’

  ‘He could have paid someone to do it, of course.’

  ‘No, Jane. If he had done, he’d have found himself a cast-iron alibi for the time of the hit. That’s the whole point. You have a strong motive but you were patently elsewhere.’ McLusky stopped while still on the lawn near the edge of the veranda and looked directly at David who had not moved. After a few seconds David drained his cup, then turned away. ‘I fancy him for it. We’ll need to talk to his secretary and look into his business.’ His phone chimed and he answered it.

  Detective Constable Dearlove had been interviewing the nearest neighbours. ‘None of them heard a shot but the couple living closest heard a car driving very fast along the lane around the time of the murder – about twenty to eleven. And they said it had an unusual sound. “Old-fashioned” was the closest they came to describing it.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Dunno. That’s all I got.’

  ‘Thanks, Deedee.’ He pocketed the mobile. ‘Old-fashioned car engine heard bombing down the lane about ten forty,’ he relayed to Austin.

  In the kitchen they found Mrs Mohr sitting by herself at the empty kitchen table, straight-backed, her hands in her lap, scrunching up a piece of kitchen tissue she had been dabbing her eyes with. Only reluctantly did she look up at the officers with red-rimmed eyes.

  ‘Mrs Mohr, did Mr Mendenhall have a computer? Only there doesn’t seem to be one in his office.’

  ‘Charles? A computer?’ She steadied her voice. ‘No. He had one when he was still in business but he got rid of it. Said it was a privilege to be able to give it away and never have to touch one again. Same with the telephone. He refused to have a mobile. He told me once that one of the things he enjoyed about being wealthy was that he could afford to have nothing to do with the whole digital thing. He thought he had been born into the wrong era.’

  McLusky thought that explained much about Woodlea House.

  There was a permanent incident room at Albany Road station, often referred to as the murder room. The windows faced the streets and the blinds were permanently at half mast. The room was well equipped with banks of computers, phones, printers and a whiteboard, next to which hung what McLusky called his storyboard; on to this he pinned two photographs of Charles Mendenhall – one supplied by Mrs Mohr, showing the man in life, the other a close-up of his face in death, courtesy of the SOCO team.

  ‘We could be right back in the 1930s,’ he told the assembled team. ‘No mobile phone records, no browsing history, no digital photographs, no computer.’

  A lanky detective constable in a polyester suit spoke up. ‘I thought the guy was loaded?’ DC Daniel Dearlove – Deedee to his friends and enemies alike – had been born into the age of computers and mobiles. In his world, electronic gadgets were minor status symbols and he refused to imagine life without them.

  ‘He didn’t have any because he was loaded.’ McLusky could see that Dearlove did not quite follow him there, but he could not be bothered to elaborate. He turned to DC French instead. ‘Frenchie, check out the two gardeners and the home help, Mrs Mohr, and anyone else who might go in and out of Woodlea House.’ French nodded and took a sip of long-cold instant coffee; the legend on her mug read I Should Be Out There Catching Murderers and Rapists. ‘I’m attending the autopsy at four.’ He looked up at the wall clock; it showed twenty past two. ‘That can’t be right?’ He checked the time on his wristwatch; it was a valuable 1940s Rolex which McLusky believed to be a cheap fake. It kept perfect time and said ten past three. ‘That clock’s wrong. Someone set it to the right time, please.’

  ‘It’s stopped, sir,’ said French. ‘Batteries run down; happens once a year.’

  ‘OK, then call maintenance and tell them to put new batteries in the thing; we can’t have a clock showing the wrong time in here.’

  ‘Done that: no joy.’

  ‘Eh? Oh, no, don’t tell me. It’s tea kettles all over again, isn’t it?’ Electric kettles had for a time been outlawed by Health and Safety as too dangerous for CID p
ersonnel to handle, but they had soon made a comeback.

  ‘First thing they asked: how high was it off the ground? They’re not allowed to use stepladders any more. Anything more than a foot off the ground now requires scaffolding or something.’

  ‘Marvellous. Well, by my watch it’s time I left; traffic is rubbish this time of day.’

  The mortuary was situated in Flax Bourton, a village on the outskirts of Bristol. It was only a five-mile drive from Albany Road, but Bristol now officially had the slowest-moving traffic in the country and McLusky hated being late. As it was, it took him half an hour to cover the five miles, which meant he could have got there sooner by walking.

  The body of Charles Mendenhall was already on the examination table when he entered the viewing suite. ‘Perfect timing, Inspector.’ Dr Coulthart seemed as eager as ever to get his hands on the victim’s innards. ‘Let us proceed without delay; I have a full diary.’

  McLusky did not attend autopsies because he hoped to learn anything intriguing, as detectives on TV invariably did. He did it because it was a legal requirement. And he hated it. He maintained that he had never learnt anything at an autopsy he could not have gleaned from a well-written report. His eyes unfocused as the pathologist made the first Y-shaped incision. Most of the commentary that Coulthart was giving for the benefit of the microphone washed over him, until the pathologist said, ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this chap. Apart from being dead, of course.’

  ‘Fit and healthy?’

  ‘Yes. He was in very good condition. Maybe could have done with losing a few pounds. But jogging might have taken care of that eventually.’

  ‘Really? The man used to own a brewery.’

  ‘He can’t have drunk much of his own brew.’

  ‘So, what’s your prognosis? How long would he have lived had he not been shot?’

  ‘There’s no reason why he shouldn’t have lived another twenty years. Perhaps more. He was a wealthy man – that usually puts another five years on someone’s life span. Good food, warm house, early retirement, less stress.’