Soft Summer Blood

by Peter Helton

  The drive was already crammed with vehicles, among them the night-blue Jaguar of the pathologist. Superintendent Denkhaus was exiting the front door of Stanmore House just as McLusky got out of the car. ‘Does Denkhaus teleport everywhere? I think I’ve yet to arrive at a locus before him. Afternoon, sir,’ he called to Denkhaus. The superintendent was shedding his scene suit, meaning he would not re-enter the house, which immediately cheered McLusky up. ‘What have we got, sir?’

  ‘What we have is a dead man upstairs in his study and his self-possessed and extremely composed widow in the sitting room.’ He checked over his shoulder that no one was close. ‘And she’ll catch a cold if she’s not careful.’

  ‘The body … another shooting?’

  ‘Very much so, as you will see.’

  McLusky realized what the DSI meant by that when they had pushed their way through the forensics team into the study. He already felt too hot and sweat pricked on his skin even before he took in the scene. Dr Coulthart was kneeling by the body and studying the bloody mess of Longmaid’s head.

  ‘Any sign of the weapon?’ McLusky asked.

  ‘No such luck,’ said a SOCO.

  Coulthart didn’t even look up. ‘Please don’t ask me any questions, gentlemen. I have only this minute arrived myself.’

  The crumpled figure of Nicholas Longmaid lay face down in front of his open gun locker. The locker was empty. The worn Persian rug in front of it had soaked up a large amount of blood that had both spattered and pooled. The pervading smells in the stifling room were the metallic smell of blood and the nauseating odour of warm plastic scene suits. McLusky turned to the team leader of the SOCOs. ‘This how he was found?’

  The man with the blonde walrus moustache confirmed it. ‘We didn’t move him. From the blood spatter, I would guess he was bending down in front of that empty safe when the bullet hit him.’

  ‘That safe is a gun locker. It had two shotguns in it the last time I saw it.’

  The SOCO shrugged. ‘No sign of them.’

  ‘What about this overturned chair?’

  ‘Well, if you look carefully at the outside of the door, you can see it has been kicked. There’s a partial boot print; it’s faint but it’s there. We’re speculating, but it appears the door was wedged shut from inside. There’s no key, see? If that is a gun locker, then my guess is that the victim came up here and wedged the door shut to keep the killer out while he armed himself with a shotgun.’

  Austin stayed by the door where he could breathe more easily, but McLusky, despite his revulsion, leant in close enough to take in the wound at the back of the bald head and, when Coulthart gently moved it, the much larger exit wound at the front. Not much of Longmaid’s upper face remained; the rest of it was stained with his blood. His gold-rimmed glasses had been crushed and deformed when, probably already dead, he fell to the ground. He was wearing his blue painting smock.

  ‘Shot right here at close range, probably from the open door,’ said the pathologist. ‘DS Austin, would you extend one arm towards the victim?’ Austin did so. ‘From the hand that held the gun to the back of the unfortunate man’s skull can’t have been more than five feet.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the SOCO. ‘If that’s a gun locker, then my guess is he was just getting to his shotgun when the killer caught up with him. Bad luck.’

  ‘Any sign of a struggle? That mess in the hall?’ They had walked past the shards of a broken Chinese figurine on the hall floor when they came in.

  ‘Inside the house, only that broken statue thing in the hall. That had stood on the little rococo table and had always been in danger of being knocked over, according to Mrs Longmaid. And she is glad it finally was. Her words, not mine. The studio out the back is a total mess, though.’

  ‘The bullet?’

  ‘We’ve recovered two bullets, one of them missed. But you won’t like them, Inspector. One went right through the man’s brain and hit the inside wall of the safe, then the back before it was spent. The other one missed the victim, caromed round the inside of the safe.’ He held up the evidence bag with the projectiles inside. ‘Both extremely deformed.’

  McLusky managed not to swear as he glared at it. ‘But we’ll be able to tell if it came from the same gun?’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

  ‘Damn it.’ McLusky would have bet that the SOCO enjoyed delivering bad news. His unglamorous job was to scrape stuff off floors and walls and pack it off to a forensic lab somewhere, and he didn’t have to worry about apprehending criminals. In fact, the more crime there was, the more scenes of crime to visit and the safer his job. McLusky’s career, what there was of it, depended on getting results. ‘Who found the body?’

  ‘Mrs Longmaid.’

  ‘You spoke to her? How did she seem?’

  ‘I only spoke to her about the statuette in the hall. She was drinking. I thought she was already quite plastered.’

  ‘For want of a better word.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘No, no, plastered will do.’ McLusky squeezed out of the room. ‘No sign of forced entry anywhere,’ he said as he descended the stairs with Austin.

  ‘The killer charmed his or her way in or was known to him,’ Austin speculated.

  ‘Or married to him.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘And you don’t have to charm your way in with a gun in your hand. You open the door to someone pointing a thirty-eight at you, what do you say?’

  ‘Not today, thank you.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  They found Jennifer Longmaid in the sitting room, which had already been gone over by scene-of-crime officers who had now moved on to the painting studio. Looking at her, McLusky thought that both the superintendent and the SOCO team leader had a point. Mrs Longmaid had indeed been drinking, though probably not to drown her grief; she had drunk the better part of a bottle of vintage champagne. At first glance she seemed to be sprawled on a sofa in her underwear, but she was in fact wearing a very insubstantial black silk dress and a pair of patterned black tights. She had kicked off one high-heeled shoe and was balancing the other on one toe. She let it drop when the officers entered the room and pulled her legs under her.

  ‘That outfit doesn’t suit you, Inspector; it makes you look like a sanitation worker. And I loathe the sound it makes when you move. I don’t suppose you’ll join me in a glass of champagne? I opened a bottle of the good stuff.’

  From the armchair in which he had sat down, all McLusky could read of the label was the name Alfred Gratien. He disliked champagne and the only champagne house he recognized was Bollinger. ‘I realize this must be a difficult time for you and I’m sorry to have to bother you with questions …’

  ‘No bother at all.’ She lifted both glass and eyes towards the ceiling. ‘I’m not grief-stricken. Shocked? Yes. Outraged at the violation of my home? Definitely. But not wracked with grief. Of course, it may hit me later but I doubt it somehow.’ She drained her glass and leant forward to replenish it from the bottle on the coffee table, affording McLusky a look down her dress. Since he was clearly meant to look, he did so and confirmed to himself that Mrs Longmaid wore no bra.

  ‘Was it you who found the body?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Would you mind going through the events for me?’

  Jennifer Longmaid’s account was brief. She had been shopping for clothes in Bath. On her return to the house, she had found the broken statuette in the hall. She had called her husband’s name and, when she received no answer, looked for him in the studio. It was a shambles. Back at the house, she had found her husband’s body in his study.

  ‘I couldn’t even bring myself to go inside. It was obvious he was dead.’

  ‘You did not call the police from up there? Didn’t use the phone in the study?’

  ‘No. I went into the garden. I went all the way down to the bottom and looked at the cows. I like watching the cows; it calms me. I needed a bit of time before calling the police. I knew the pla
ce would get busy with people and first I wanted a moment to rethink my life. I had to reimagine my future. Then I called Elaine to let her know.’

  ‘Elaine?’ Austin queried.

  ‘Elaine Poulimenos. She lives not far down the road, now that she’s left Leon. She always wanted me to leave Nick. I called to tell her she could stop going on about it.’ She snorted into her glass.

  McLusky rose. ‘Thank you, Mrs Longmaid. We’ll talk again later.’

  They left the non-grieving widow and made their way to the painting studio. ‘Fresh overshoes!’ a SOCO warned as Austin held the door open for McLusky. ‘You’ve just walked through the house and the bloody garden with those.’

  Contrite, the officers exchanged theirs for the new ones proffered by the man before entering. They were told to stay close to the entrance. ‘This will take us a while,’ the SOCO promised, ‘as you can imagine.’

  McLusky could. The place had been trashed. Easels and tables lay overturned. Houseplants, knocked to the ground and their pots shattered, radiated shards and compost across the floorboards. Brushes, pencils and multicoloured pastels were strewn across the floor, along with torn paper. Many canvases had been damaged. ‘In your opinion, is this the result of a struggle?’ he asked.

  ‘Could be, but not all of it. See all those coloured pastels on the floor? Not one has been stepped on. Also, someone damaged a whole load of paintings, all in the same sort of area.’ He pointed at a group of strewn canvases. ‘Looks like someone kicked them. The canvas is dented but not broken. Tough stuff, canvas. Perhaps the killer hated still lifes? They’re all paintings of pots and bottles and stuff. And right at the back there, someone burnt some paper in the wood burner. Quite a bit of paper.’

  ‘Can you tell what it was?’

  ‘Not offhand, no, but my guess is they were artworks done on paper. We’ll empty out the ashes later but there were a couple of corners that hadn’t burnt away and that was heavy paper, drawing paper, not the stuff you’d write on.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s any way of telling whether it was burnt by Longmaid or a third party?’

  ‘None at all, the ashes are stone cold. We might get a fingerprint off the bits of unburnt paper, but that would be a miracle.’

  ‘I believe I’m due one of those.’ McLusky turned to Austin. ‘This was quite a cosy sort of place – creative chaos, romantic mess, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Do you think anything is missing?’ Austin asked. His inflection showed he had anticipated McLusky’s answer.

  ‘Are you taking the piss, DS Austin?’ He gave the smashed-up studio one more disgusted look and walked out.

  Austin followed him, thinking that he recognized the symptoms: McLusky’s hypothesis that David Mendenhall was the killer now looked shaky. The inspector impatiently shed his scene suit by the door, then walked off through the garden to the wooden boundary fence beyond which grazed a herd of reddish-brown cows. Austin followed his example, despite a suspicion that McLusky would prefer to be alone. He watched him light a cigarette and noticed with satisfaction that it no longer made him want one himself, but he moved upwind from him all the same.

  After a few furious drags on his cigarette, McLusky sighed and leant with both hands on the waist-high fence. ‘Well, what do you know? Mrs Longlegs was right: cows calm you down.’ He turned his back on them and folded his arms in front of his chest. ‘Perhaps I should get a picture for my wallet.’ He spoke without looking at him. ‘What’s going on here, Jane?’

  ‘Buggered if I know. We don’t have any proof that the two killings are connected. Could still be a hideous coincidence.’ When McLusky snorted contemptuously, he added, ‘I know, I’m just saying. We need to find the connection. Do you think it has somehow to do with painting?’

  McLusky lit a fresh cigarette from the glow of the first one. He thought of Gotts the gardener and hesitated for a fraction of a second before flicking his cigarette end into the grass. ‘Who knows? We don’t even know the sequence of events. Longmaid was wearing his painting gear. Stands to reason he was painting or at least in his studio. Could be it was he who burnt the old drawings or whatever it was in the stove.’

  ‘In comes the killer with his thirty-eight.’

  ‘Then why isn’t Longmaid’s body lying by the stove?’

  ‘They struggled, he got away and ran into the house.’

  ‘He makes it upstairs but can’t lock the door because there’s no key. He wedges the chair under it and starts fumbling with the safe. Ammunition has to be kept in a separate place, of course; you’re not allowed to keep loaded guns, even in a gun locker.’ McLusky’s hand slid into his jacket pocket and closed around the loaded Derringer pistol which had lain on top of the gun cases in Longmaid’s safe.

  ‘The killer got to him before he could load a weapon,’ Austin completed for him. ‘At least that tells us that he didn’t believe he was in any danger, or else he’d have kept a gun ready loaded and to hell with the law.’ He looked across at McLusky who was staring up towards the house with a deep frown, keeping silent. When the inspector pushed himself off from the fence and walked briskly away, he called after him, ‘Don’t you think that’s how it happened?’

  McLusky did not slow down or look back. ‘I’m sure you’re right, Jane.’

  Austin followed him. ‘If you disagree, why don’t you bloody say so?’ he said quietly, not entirely caring whether the boss heard him or not.

  Later that day they found themselves at the Clifton Antiques Emporium where Longmaid had been one of eleven antiques dealers who shared the rent of large Georgian buildings to sell to the general public. Much of buying and selling was now done online and they found every one of the dealers there staring at an iPad or other computer. They took names, asked questions and searched Nicholas Longmaid’s stall. Most dealers had special areas of interest, like the man in the unit next to Longmaid’s, who sold nothing but silver items.

  ‘No, he was a boring sort of chap. Hated being here and knew nothing about silver. I think he was mostly interested in painting paraphernalia, nineteenth century and earlier, but he’d never sell any of it. It’s really just general antiques that he has here. Don’t get me wrong, he runs a successful business. All this is valuable but it isn’t interesting. I hear he keeps all the interesting pieces at home.’

  McLusky, who had a good mental picture of Stanmore House, agreed. The items Longmaid was offering for sale at the Emporium had little flair and were chosen for commercial value. McLusky looked around at the items in the rooms and all he could think of were the dead hands that had once bought them and used them when they were new. It was as though he could feel the weight of the dead that had left them behind dragging him down and all at once he felt tired enough to sleep. He gave up looking through Longmaid’s desk and instead took a dozen photographs of the entire place on his mobile, then marched off. ‘Let’s get out of here, DS Austin, and rejoin the living.’

  ‘Fulvia Lamberti. She has a scooter registered to her. Find it, Deedee.’ Sorbie slapped a photocopy of Fulvia’s photograph and name on DC Dearlove’s keyboard and went to make himself a cup of instant coffee. Daniel Dearlove reluctantly put down his bag of Hula Hoops and pecked at his keyboard with his left hand while continuing to feed the cylindrical potato snack into his mouth with his right. Sorbie returned, blowing on his hot coffee, and eyed Dearlove with undisguised loathing. The man’s suit was covered in cat hair, chicken soup stains and minute fragments of crisps. His thin hair was caked with gel. His work station was covered in empty crisp packets and Styrofoam cups that attested to his chicken-soup addiction. He was good with computers – he would give him that – but utterly unconvincing as a copper. ‘Since she’s driving around in town on a scooter, we’ll just sit back and let traffic scoop her up for us.’

  ‘You won’t, you know,’ said Dearlove, returning both hands to the Hula Hoop feed.

  ‘And why the hell not?’

  ‘Because she reported it nicked three weeks ago?�
��

  ‘Oh, bloody hell. Where was it nicked from?’

  ‘Corn Street.’

  ‘Was it a Clifton address she gave?’

  Dearlove fashioned two Hula Hoops into binoculars and peered through them at the screen. ‘Erm … no, address in St Pauls.’ Dearlove wrote it down.

  ‘Bingo, found the bint.’ Sorbie snatched the paper with the address from Dearlove’s hand and went to see Fairfield in her office. ‘She reported it stolen three weeks ago and gave a St Pauls address.’

  Fairfield swiped her car keys off her desk. ‘Three weeks is a long time in policing, Jack.’

  A few minutes later she shoehorned her red Renault into a tight parking space in Albert Park. ‘It’s that one, with the purple door.’

  Sorbie made a vague sound of disapproval. ‘Look at this place. Why would anyone with a perfectly good place in Clifton Village prefer to live in some dump in St Pauls, with drugs and prostitution and muggings?’

  ‘To be with other students? For the frisson? Anyway, we don’t know that it’s a dump yet,’ she said. ‘Could be nice inside.’

  ‘You wanna bet?’

  Broken glass crunched underfoot outside the front door which was deeply scored and gouged near a Yale lock too shiny to be more than a week old. There was an electric bell push dangling from a wire that protruded from a drill hole in the middle of the door. Sorbie pressed it and was rewarded with a mechanical snarl from the other side. They could hear voices but none approached and the door remained unanswered. He supplemented a second snarl with an open-handed policemen’s knock. A moment later a girl with a mass of frizzy blonde hair wrenched the door open. ‘Yeah?’ Behind her could be heard confused voices, all talking at once.

  Fairfield held her ID aloft. ‘We’re looking for Fulvia Lamberti.’

  ‘She’s not here. Sorry, we’re having a bit of an emergency in the kitchen.’ She made to close the door again.

  ‘Perhaps we could be of assistance,’ said Sorbie and pushed past her inside the narrow hall. The floorboards were bare and in need of repainting. There was a door immediately to the left giving on to a tiny front room. Next were the stairs curving up steeply; the battered banister was missing every other baluster and the newel post had come adrift from the handrail. Sorbie gave Fairfield a quick told-you-so glance and marched on into the kitchen which lay straight ahead. Some of the voices came from here.