Soft Summer Blood

by Peter Helton

  ‘Shall we go back to the house?’ asked Jennifer. ‘We’ll be more comfortable there.’

  McLusky looked around him; three armchairs and a nineteenth-century chaise longue were standing idle. ‘By all means.’

  Back at the house, McLusky was invited to sit in an antique armchair facing the bearded Assyrian statue. Jennifer Longmaid offered tea or coffee, both of which he declined, after which she prepared to dance from the room as though he could not possibly want to ask any questions of her.

  McLusky stopped her. ‘When did either of you last see Mr Mendenhall?’

  Jennifer stopped and turned back. The Longmaids looked at each other. ‘I last saw him about a month ago,’ said Nicholas. ‘I missed our last regular meeting. But Jenny saw him more recently. Didn’t you.’ It was not a question.

  ‘I saw him only the other week,’ she confirmed, settling herself on an armrest of the sofa, crossing her legs, then immediately uncrossing them again for better balance.

  ‘My wife was very fond of Mendy, weren’t you, Jenny?’

  She stood up and smoothed down what there was of her skirt. ‘Very.’

  ‘But, unlike myself, my wife makes friends easily. She’ll soon get over it. Won’t you, darling?’

  Jennifer gave McLusky the ghost of a smile and walked from the room.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you more impolite questions. Where were you the day before yesterday? In the evening?’

  Longmaid nodded understandingly. ‘I was here, Inspector.’

  ‘And … can anyone confirm that?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said, unperturbed. ‘My wife was out, I believe, at the cinema.’

  ‘Do you own a handgun?’

  ‘I do, as a matter of fact.’

  McLusky knew from his routine background check that Longmaid held several firearms licences. ‘Let me see your gun locker.’

  ‘Sure. This way.’ He led McLusky from the room and up the stairs, then along a short corridor to a mournful study overstuffed with old books in dark bookcases that reached to the ceiling. McLusky was willing to bet that none of them were ever touched by anyone except by whoever kept the house immaculately dust-free. ‘I have a handgun licence that allows me to trade in antique and historic guns. Which I haven’t done for a while now. It doesn’t really interest me.’ The tall gun safe was concealed inside a dark wood cabinet. Longmaid had no trouble remembering the combination which he keyed into the electronic lock. He opened the door wide, then stood aside, gesturing invitingly.

  For someone who had no interest in guns, Longmaid was well equipped with them. McLusky also had no more than a professional interest in guns but recognized what he was looking at: a beautifully engraved over-and-under shotgun, a plain but antique-looking fowling piece, and wooden gun cases on several shelves. A double-barrelled Derringer was lying loose on top. ‘Can we have the handguns out, please?’

  Longmaid made a show of being unconcerned. ‘Of course, of course.’ He opened the cases one by one: two sets of duelling pistols including all the accessories, a highly decorated Colt revolver and a .38 Webley service revolver. ‘You’ll find none of these have recently been fired.’

  ‘To your knowledge,’ qualified McLusky.

  ‘To the best of my knowledge,’ Longmaid admitted.

  ‘Does anyone else have access to this safe?’

  ‘I’m the only one who knows the combination.’

  ‘But there is an override key.’

  ‘There is.’

  ‘And where is that kept?’

  ‘Usually at the back of a little pencil drawer in my writing desk.’ He indicated the gloomy antique under the window.

  ‘Usually? Can I see it, please?’

  ‘Well …’ Longmaid looked uncomfortable for the first time. ‘I have mislaid it. Quite a while ago. Simply can’t find it.’

  ‘That’s not good enough. A mislaid key makes this safe no longer secure. I will have to take away the more modern handguns for forensic examination anyway, but you will find alternative secure accommodation for the remainder of the guns by the end of the week if you don’t want your licences revoked. Understood?’ McLusky hated cavalier attitudes to gun safety.

  He tipped the small Derringer into an evidence bag, which he slipped into a jacket pocket, and carried the cases of the two revolvers under his arm like a couple of books. ‘I saw a copy of Charles Mendenhall’s will; unless a more recent version comes to light, you will inherit his paintings and the contents of his studio.’

  Longmaid stopped for a moment in the corridor to consider it. ‘Really? I had no idea. I wonder why he did that? Probably because his son and heir would make a bonfire of them.’

  ‘The will states that you should “dispose of the paintings as you see fit”. Any idea why he worded it like that? Why would he assume you would dispose of them?’

  ‘That was Mendy being his modest bloody self. He always pretended to think nothing of his own talent. He was a good painter. Born entirely into the wrong century, of course.’

  ‘Like yourself, perhaps?’

  ‘Entirely so.’

  Downstairs, Longmaid opened the front door for him and made a show of admiring McLusky’s Mercedes. ‘Oh, is that really yours? Bit unusual for a police officer. Not quite vintage enough for me but …’ Longmaid had just launched himself on to the neutral waters of vintage car talk when his wife also exited the house, carrying a jacket and handbag which she dropped on to the passenger seat of her Mazda. Inside the house the phone rang. ‘You must excuse me, Inspector.’ He hurried back inside and closed the door behind him.

  Jennifer Longmaid had already swung her legs inside her car. ‘Mrs Longmaid—’

  ‘I’d prefer it if you called me Jenny.’

  ‘When you last saw Charles, how did he seem to you?’

  ‘He was on good form. Charles and Leon – a mutual friend of ours – the three of us went to see an exhibition at the Arnolfini and had a meal afterwards. He was his usual self.’

  ‘Your husband did not join you?’

  ‘Not that time.’

  ‘And where were you two days ago – say, between nine and midnight?’

  ‘On a night out in Bath.’

  ‘At the cinema.’

  ‘Lord, no! That’s just a euphemism for “Jenny going out and enjoying herself”. I went to a pub, then a club, and afterwards went back for coffee with someone who turned out to be a disappointment.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He fell asleep.’ She started her engine and raised her eyebrows to say, ‘Is that all?’

  McLusky drummed a short finger tattoo on the gun cases. ‘Do you shoot, by any chance?’

  ‘No, of course not. I don’t shoot any more than I dig potatoes or milk cows.’

  ‘And do you do any painting yourself, Mrs Longmaid?’

  She waggled one hand at him while she put the car in gear with the other. ‘I don’t even paint my own fingernails, Inspector.’ The Mazda’s wheels spat gravel at the house as she sped towards the main road.

  ‘Naturally, we have no influence on what students get up to outside the college but that doesn’t mean we’re not concerned. Students do drop out each year but Fulvia appears to have done more than that. No one knows what has happened to her.’ Carol West, the fine arts tutor whose tiny office Fairfield and Sorbie were crowding, opened her hands in a helpless gesture of surrender. She was in her forties, had very short silver hair and one earlobe perforated with five silver studs and rings. DI Fairfield, who abhorred piercings of any kind, found her eyes drawn to them in fascinated disgust.

  ‘Someone knows what has happened to her,’ she corrected the tutor.

  ‘Yes, of course. But you know what I mean. And now we are coming under considerable pressure from her father and, would you believe it, some snooty voice at the Foreign Office.’

  ‘Yes, I can well believe that.’

  ‘I know Mr Lamberti is a politician, but is he an important man?’


  ‘I have no idea and I don’t care,’ said Fairfield. ‘Fulvia is nineteen and can do what she likes; we just need to satisfy ourselves that nothing untoward has happened to her. We need to speak to her contemporaries, any students she hung out with – that sort of thing.’

  Sorbie had remained standing behind his seated superior due to a lack of chairs in the room. ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’ he asked.

  ‘Or girlfriend?’ added Fairfield for the sake of political correctness.

  ‘Ah, now you’re asking.’ She glanced at the monitor on her desk as though for inspiration. ‘She did have a boyfriend. Would have been a surprise if she hadn’t. She’s quite stunning, even prettier than in your photograph – quite the Mediterranean beauty. She is also bright and has the sexy accent to go with it. She had to fight them off with a stick as soon as she walked through the door. But she did go out with one chap – another student in her own year – but not for long and there was a bit of trouble.’

  ‘OK, I need his name. What kind of trouble?’ asked Fairfield.

  ‘His name is Marcus Catlin. She finished with him and he couldn’t cope with it. Got quite upset.’

  ‘That’s par for the course. And the trouble?’

  ‘He wouldn’t take no for an answer. Kept trying to change her mind, and when she dumped him rather more forcefully, he lost it a bit. Tore up some of her drawings, vandalized one of her paintings. They’re both painters.’

  ‘How long ago was this?’

  ‘That’s six weeks ago now.’

  ‘How did you deal with that?’

  ‘Marcus is a very talented young man; we didn’t want to lose him. He received an official warning: any repetition and he’d be out on his ear. We made him apologize, publicly, to Fulvia and to the rest of the students in his group. And there’s been quiet ever since. But now Fulvia has disappeared and you say she hasn’t been at her address?’

  ‘Not for quite a while, which means she must have had other accommodation all along. Right, we’d like to speak to’ – Fairfield consulted her notes – ‘Mr Catlin.’

  ‘He’ll be in the painting studios today.’

  Fairfield gestured towards the door. ‘Which way?’

  ‘Oh, the painting studios aren’t here at Bower Ashton; they’re at Spike Island.’

  Having handed the gun cases to DC French for dispatch to ballistics, McLusky went downstairs into the windowless neon-lit dungeon that was the Albany Road station canteen. Down here, time seemed to stand still or at least move to a different beat. Only the type and amount of food on display hinted at the time of day, while there were almost no clues as to what century the food was cooked in; most of it – beige cauliflower bake, colourless fish pie, anaemic salads, wrinkled sausages in unfeasibly dark gravy – would all have felt at home in a 1950s school canteen. Plaice in bright orange breadcrumbs served with chips and peas was the most grown-up meal McLusky could find. He espied Austin sitting at a table by himself and carried his tray over.

  Austin had completed half of the challenge of digging through the stringy gloop of his macaroni cheese. ‘What did you make of the Longmaids?’ he asked.

  McLusky ripped open three sachets of ketchup for his chips, one of mayonnaise for his peas and one of tartar sauce for his fish. ‘They’ve started charging for these; they’re eight pence each now.’ He indignantly jabbed at a few chips. ‘I think Nicholas Longmaid lives in a fantasy world. No wonder he and Mendenhall were friends. You thought his place was a time capsule? You should see Longmaid’s place. That’s a time machine. He’s an antique dealer and the whole place is kitted out in period stuff – not sure which, though. His studio looks like an illustration from a coffee-table book on the Impressionists. Even his car is an antique.’

  ‘More antique than yours?’

  McLusky ignored the dig at his choice of car. ‘His wife – let’s call her Jenny because she likes that – looks about twenty years younger than him and lives entirely in the present. When I talked to them together, there was a tiny bit of bickering that hinted that Jenny may have had a thing for Mendenhall. Or even with. She doesn’t make a secret of looking for sex elsewhere.’

  ‘There could be a motive right there.’

  ‘Yes. Longmaid also has a gun safe full of the tools for the job. I sent them off to forensics just in case they can find a match but I doubt it very much.’

  ‘He’s got a licence?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, all in order.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have returned the gun to his safe, would he?’

  ‘Quite. He’d have faked a sale or even a burglary. Also, being a dealer he could easily have obtained another thirty-eight from the last war, undocumented, shot Mendenhall and dropped the gun in the river on his way home. Interestingly, though, he says he lost the override key for his safe.’

  ‘Really? But that means his wife could have borrowed a gun. Or the cleaner or whoever else visits the house as long as they have the key to the thing.’

  ‘Absolutely. I gave him a week to find a secure place for the rest of his guns. What about the gardener? Any hint of weapons use?’

  ‘Gotts? Strictly fists. Threats, brawls, fistfights. Gave one bloke quite a kicking, but not even a baseball bat – all hands-on stuff. And by the looks of it, he’s going straight.’

  ‘We’ll have a chat with him anyway.’ McLusky did not trust criminals to reform any more than he trusted leopards to change their spots. ‘About his choice of work mate, too. And we need to check her alibi – whatshername?’

  ‘Emma Lucket. What about the Longmaids? Do they have alibis?’

  ‘Not him. And she was out on the town.’

  ‘What if it was a burglar after all?’ Austin mused. ‘Mendenhall runs into him in the garden, confronts him and gets more than he bargained for. Intruder flees in panic. Nothing nicked, no dabs, no DNA. We’ll never find him.’

  ‘That’s what I love about working with you, Jane: your irrepressible optimism.’

  ‘Just saying.’

  ‘You’re ruining my appetite. If that’s how it went, then we’re stuffed.’

  ‘Well, I am stuffed already.’ Austin pushed his unfinished food away from him. ‘Are we checking out the gardeners?’ McLusky nodded and grunted with one too many chips between his lips.

  ‘In that case I’ll go find out where they are.’

  ‘No, I’ll do that,’ said McLusky. ‘You chase up the people Emma Lucket says she was out with that night.’

  Still air. Low cloud. Rooks on chimney pots. Woodlea House sat mournfully in its well-kept gardens, its colours subdued by the low light. More rain was forecast. McLusky had called ahead to find that nearly everyone he wanted to speak to was at the house.

  ‘There’s so much to think about,’ said David as he ushered McLusky into the sitting room. ‘It’s not like someone dying after a long illness. You know – then you’d expect it. At least the body has been released now and I can plan the funeral.’ He let himself fall into an armchair. ‘I don’t suppose you’re here to tell me you’ve identified my father’s killer?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. Early days yet. I have spoken to two of your father’s friends – the Longmaids. Do you know them well?’

  ‘No, but then why would I? They were my father’s friends and all they ever talked about was art or antiques.’

  ‘And what would you have preferred to talk about?’

  David looked at him, puzzled. ‘I don’t know … stuff.’

  ‘You’re not married, are you, David? You don’t mind if I call you David?’

  ‘Suit yourself. No, divorced. Long time ago. What does that have to do with anything?’

  ‘I just like to get a clear picture of everyone involved.’

  ‘Involved?’

  McLusky had taken a dislike to David Mendenhall the moment he had met him. He was the main beneficiary of his father’s will, and since there was a great deal to inherit, in McLusky’s book that made him number one suspect. He looked around the room and though
t that a few things had changed since the last time he was here. The family photograph had disappeared from the mantelpiece and other items seemed to have been moved or removed. Already David was taking possession of the house, changing it to suit him. McLusky had checked on his address in Kingsdown and on his BMW 5 Series; the flat was rented, the car relatively new but second-hand, which might mean that his business was not going too well. He studied David’s soft hands, his aquiline nose that looked as though it belonged to a leaner face, his small, almost insignificant ears. Did he kill his father? McLusky had met enough killers to know that looks did not give the slightest indication as to a man’s criminal propensities, and yet a small part of him remained convinced that he should be able to see it, pick up on it, sense it, smell it. Looks were naturally deceiving, while words, trying to deceive, often failed to do so. Which is why police officers asked so many questions. ‘So, David, how’s the wine business?’

  David looked as though he regretted having given McLusky permission to use his first name. ‘Not so bad, not so bad. People don’t give up boozing just because there’s a recession; they simply look for cheaper booze and they find it online, which is where I am. I can sell you a case of drinkable wine at a price that would buy you nothing but cooking plonk at a supermarket. Of course … people are lazy and chuck any old rubbish into their shopping trolleys. But I believe more of them will catch on and change their shopping habits. Are you a wine drinker, Inspector?’ He did not wait for an answer but droned on in a speech that McLusky felt David Mendenhall had given many times, perhaps to convince himself. ‘People go to the supermarket and spend five pounds on a bottle of wine. Do you know what goes into a five-quid bottle of wine? I’ll tell you: two pounds of that price is excise duty. Even more if it’s from outside the EU. About sixty pence goes on the bottle, the label, handling, transport and filling the thing in the first place. Then the supermarket takes a third as profit. You know what’s left over? Twenty pence. That’s what the wine in your five-quid bottle is worth. That’s not a bargain, Inspector …’

  McLusky had the feeling that David was glad to be able to talk about a subject other than his father’s violent death. He also thought that he was probably talking it up; he would be urgently looking into Mendenhall’s business.