Soft Summer Blood

by Peter Helton

  ‘Would you mind if I had a look through the things in the trunk?’

  ‘That’s what we’re here for.’

  McLusky proceeded gently, watched by Kahn. Without disturbing things too much, he lifted and inspected items and let them sink back into the dim past. He lifted the lid of a scuffed shoebox. It was full of letters.

  ‘They’re from my mother,’ Kahn commented. ‘Most from before they were married.’

  McLusky ignored them. Tucked into the space beside them were two rolls of thirty-five-millimetre film. He teased them out with one finger and held them up.

  ‘Yes, my father took a lot of photographs as well. Black and white; he printed them himself. I have a lot of them downstairs.’

  ‘Did he take photographs the day he disappeared?’

  ‘No, he didn’t take the camera on the boat.’

  ‘These two rolls have been exposed – you can tell. The end bit’s not sticking out. But they haven’t been developed.’

  ‘They’ve probably gone off by now.’

  ‘That’s possible. Would you mind if I had them developed?’ Kahn shrugged uncomfortably. ‘It might help us,’ McLusky said.

  ‘Yeah, OK. Most of his photography was landscapes and trees and stuff.’

  ‘Could I see some of your father’s paintings?’

  ‘Yes, sure. It’s just … I don’t like looking at them. I know them all, of course, but they don’t have a good influence on me. I’ll be downstairs. Just be careful with them and don’t make dents or scratch them or anything.’

  ‘I’ll be very careful.’ McLusky started turning paintings, which were stacked six-deep against the wall, inspecting them with a criminal rather than artistic eye and returning them gently in the right order. Many were landscapes. Unlike those of the other painters he had seen, however, these did not look back towards the nineteenth century. There were portraits of people he did not know, and these also had an edge that took them far beyond the search for likeness. McLusky could tell because among them were portraits of Charles Mendenhall and of Leonidas Poulimenos. In both they looked much younger. The canvases were painted, according to the dates on the back, in 1993. The longer he stayed in the claustrophobic little room, the more uncomfortable he became, until a squirming irritability made him rush out of the door and down the stairs. He had the distinct feeling that he had been wasting his time and a strong sensation that he was in the wrong place. He thanked Kahn, who was now deicing the freezer compartment with a hairdrier, and left the house to reverse along the track to the road.

  Austin drummed his fingers on top of the steering wheel and peered along the narrow road at the small Edwardian house. They had come in his Micra, which they hoped would look less conspicuous in a street in St Pauls than McLusky’s car. They had checked out James Fife on the computer and found he had a string of convictions, some for drugs, many violent, but none involving firearms. ‘If Jamie Fife is the owner of the gun, should we not have got armed response out?’

  McLusky had thought about it and decided against it. ‘If he’s renting out the gun, it’ll be either out or hidden under the bathtub. He won’t be sitting around with it strapped to his arse. Anyway, we’re only acting on a tip-off.’

  ‘How reliable is your source?’ Austin had asked who had supplied the information but had received no answer.

  ‘We may be about to find out.’ McLusky believed that it was entirely possible that James Fife was making a nuisance of himself on the big man’s patch and Hotchkiss was only using McLusky to harass or arrest him. If that was so, he would find a way to harass Hotchkiss. ‘Well, there’s no movement. The longer we sit here, the more likely he’ll get wind of it. Let’s knock on doors. You take the back. Give me a buzz when you’re in position.’

  These were back-to-back working-class houses with tiny backyards separated by the narrowest of alleys. Austin found the entrance to the alley smelling sharply of urine, but the alley itself surprisingly free of the usual rubbish. He found the back of Fife’s address: an eight-foot wooden fence and narrow door that had once been painted white, now peeling and overgrown with ivy and half swallowed by some kind of shrub on the other side. Austin often complained that he was always given the door-kicking and fence-climbing duties, but he didn’t actually mind it; it made for better memories at the end of the shift than keyboard tapping and form filling. ‘I’m at the back. A fence needs climbing. Give it thirty seconds.’ He pocketed his mobile and pulled himself over the fence which swayed precariously under his weight. Apart from recycling boxes, the concrete yard was completely empty. He was at the back door in four strides.

  McLusky reached the front door at the same moment and immediately started ringing the bell and hammering open-handed on the door. After half a minute of that he stopped to listen. The door remained unanswered, the net curtains untwitched. He bent down and lifted the aluminium letterbox flap to look into the hall. ‘Shit.’ He thumbed the emergency button on his airwave. ‘Alpha Nine to control, requesting backup at my position, ambulance and the full works. Possible homicide.’ He called Austin. ‘I have a possible body right behind the door. Can you get in there?’

  ‘Yeah, half-glazed kitchen door. No problem.’ He tried the door, found it locked. A loose lump of algae-covered concrete did for the glass. The key was in the lock; Austin reached through and pushed open the door which crunched reluctantly over broken glass. He rushed across the kitchen and into the hall. ‘Jeez.’

  At this moment he only had eyes for the body in the hall. A woman was lying crumpled on her side on the vinyl floor in a pool of blood. Her hands were clutching at her midriff. He squeezed past her in the narrow hall to open the door for McLusky. There was not much room. McLusky half inserted himself into the hall and looked down. ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘Just checking.’ Austin bent down and felt for a pulse at the neck. The body felt warm. He thought he could feel a faint pulsing but couldn’t be sure. ‘I think she’s alive.’

  ‘Got a first-aid kit in the car?’

  Austin lobbed the car keys at him. ‘In the boot.’

  McLusky disappeared. Austin could hear him run down the road. He could smell nothing but blood. The woman was young, perhaps twenty-five, and she was dying, dying in front of his eyes. He had seen dead bodies before but never anyone whose life was trickling away while he looked on. Half of his mind was here, scrutinizing the woman, half outside following McLusky’s footsteps. Her face was pale, her mouth and eyes closed; she wore blue eye shadow. He could hear McLusky slam the boot of his car. Some of her eyelashes were caked together with excessive mascara. There were many silver rings on her hands; blood still trickled through her clasped fingers. Her blue denim shorts were turning purple with blood. Her white top was wicking up blood, a line of it creeping like a slow tide towards her breasts. McLusky’s footsteps pounded outside and then he was there, first-aid kit open. He held it out to Austin who was close to tears.

  Austin scrabbled for anything that could be used to stem the tide of blood – gauze, bandages, cotton pads – and slid them under and around the victim’s hands. It was impossible to make out what the wound consisted of and whether he was making it better or worse. His hands were slick with her blood. ‘I’m not sure I’m doing it right.’ His voice was verging on tearful.

  ‘You’re doing something. Press down on it. Best we can do.’ They stood, a tableau of frozen helplessness, in the dingy blood-spattered hall, waiting, straining their ears for a siren, willing the ambulance to arrive. Austin thought it would never happen. He felt himself fuse to the centre of the woman’s body as though he had grown into it. His nose itched and he let it; he was grateful for it, for the tiny bit of distance it gave him from the life trickling away under his hands. McLusky shut the lid of the kit and withdrew through the door. ‘Going round the back.’ Austin wanted him to stay, did not want to be alone. His knees were beginning to scream at him but he did not dare shift to relieve the pain. It’s just pain, just a bit of pain, he thought. It
’s the least you can do, the very least, having a bit of pain.

  McLusky scrambled into the backyard with a little more difficulty and more swearing than the athletic Austin had done. He crunched across the kitchen and pulled on latex gloves as he went. The kitchen looked cold, functional and tidy. ‘It’s me,’ he said to the back of the crouching Austin as he entered the hall. ‘How’s it going?’ When he got no answer, he added, ‘Can’t be long now.’ He was right. The single squawk from an ambulance siren nearby announced the imminent arrival of the paramedics. As the first one inserted himself into the hall, a bright yellow energetic bundle of medical efficiency, McLusky breathed a sigh of relief and pushed open the door to the front room to give everyone more space.

  He didn’t make it far into the room. Slumped over the blue sofa under the window lay the body of James Fife, dressed in tracksuit bottoms and faded blue T-shirt. His skin was very pale, turning to grey. His hair was almost black, his eyebrows bushy and his face unshaven. McLusky had seen enough murder victims to know that Jamie Fife would not need to be seen by the paramedics who were working feverishly in the hall. The victim’s lower body had slid off the sofa on to the floor. There was less blood here and most of that soaked into the T-shirt from around the knife that was still stuck in the region of his solar plexus. Not a knife, McLusky mentally corrected himself, but a dagger of some sort, its hilt and guard smeared with blood. He did not want to approach the victim without first donning a scene suit. The slumping body had pushed the flimsy coffee table into an angle to the sofa without upsetting the half-drunk mug of tea and half-eaten fried egg, sausages and beans on toast. Knife and fork lay neatly crossed on the plate. The rest of the room looked undisturbed and tidy – no ash trays, no drugs paraphernalia, nothing disturbed. A face appeared at the window, nudging McLusky away from the acute observation of every detail. It was the face of PC Hanham. The officer cupped his hands around his eyes, trying to peer through the net curtains, then his face disappeared only to be replaced by DC Dearlove doing the same.

  ‘Round the back!’ McLusky called. Dearlove gave a thumbs-up and disappeared.

  In the hall the body of the woman had been stabilized on a stretcher and was receiving plasma and oxygen. Austin stood ashen-faced, apart from a smear of blood where he had finally scratched the itch on his nose. He held his bloody hands away from his body. ‘Got to wash,’ he said dully and started towards the kitchen.

  McLusky stopped him. ‘Not in here, Jane; it’s a crime scene. Go outside.’

  Mutely, Austin turned and followed the stretcher to the front of the house where PC Hanham found him some mineral water and tissues from his vehicle. The narrow road soon filled up with cars and personnel. Some of the neighbours, having been questioned, were persuaded to move their cars elsewhere so that forensics vans, police cars and the coroner’s van could take their place. A large command vehicle turned up and was promptly sent home again by McLusky for being impractical. Both ends of the road were sealed off.

  Austin, now with his hands cleaned with the aid of water, wet wipes and other tissues, still held them as though he did not trust their cleanliness. ‘Do you think we could have saved the other one had we known he was there? We should have looked, shouldn’t we?’

  ‘Not a chance.’ They were standing outside beside a police van. McLusky was pulling on a scene suit. ‘Are you OK to go back in there? It’s all right if you want to stay out here.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ Austin tore open a scene-suit pack. ‘I can handle the dead. It’s dying girls I’m not keen on.’

  The little house was now crowded and the synthetic sound of scene suits swishing past each other was everywhere. McLusky knelt next to the body with Austin standing behind him. Flash photography glittered around them, a strong light on top of the video camera made shadows sway. ‘The handle is very ornate.’

  ‘It’s called a hilt when it’s a dagger,’ said a forensics technician.

  ‘Ah, thank you,’ said McLusky.

  ‘And the curved crossbar below it is called the guard.’

  ‘Thank you again. Now shut up.’ McLusky shifted to get a better all-round look at the weapon. ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘What?’ Austin leant closer.

  McLusky stood up to give him a chance to scrutinize what was visible of the weapon. Austin peered at the other side of it. ‘A swastika. Two swastikas even. It’s a bloody Nazi dagger.’

  ‘You said it.’

  A scene-of-crime officer clattered down the stairs and waved McLusky over. ‘There’s a couple of blood stains on the way up and plenty of blood residue in the bathroom. Someone went upstairs to wash blood off themselves and then tried to rinse it all away – not very well, though.’

  ‘Anything disturbed up there?’

  ‘The lid’s off the cistern and there’s wet plastic bags lying on the floor.’

  ‘I have a fair idea of what that’s about.’ McLusky waved Austin to follow him and they stepped outside into the backyard where a SOCO was examining the fence and locked gate.

  ‘I’ll need fibre samples of your clothing in a minute,’ said the SOCO, ‘for elimination. You both went over this, didn’t you?’

  McLusky just nodded and lit a cigarette. ‘All right, Jane, what happened here?’

  ‘Fuck knows. Can I have a cigarette?’

  ‘No, you can’t; you gave up, remember?’

  Austin gave his hands one more scrutinizing look before he stuffed them into his trouser pockets. ‘Someone comes to the house, carrying a Nazi dagger. The girl opens the door and is knifed in the hall. Fife is in the front room having his tea. In comes killer with dagger …’

  ‘Now dripping with blood.’

  ‘Walks up to Fife and kills him with it.’

  ‘Not until Fife has politely crossed his cutlery on his unfinished plate of grub.’ McLusky took a luxurious drag from his cigarette and blew smoke skywards.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m thinking. Killer goes upstairs, washes hands and takes something out of the toilet cistern. Told you it’s always in obvious places. Killer leaves, without blood stains, by the front door.’

  ‘Tight squeeze with the girl lying there.’

  ‘He doesn’t mind banging the door into the body because he thinks she’s dead. He wouldn’t leave a live witness behind.’ He took a hasty drag on his cigarette, then dropped it on the concrete and walked to the back door. ‘Deedee?’

  Dearlove appeared, scene-suited and armed with his notebook. ‘Where did they take the woman?’

  ‘Hospital.’

  ‘Which damn hospital? Find out. And then arrange twenty-four-hour protection for her until further notice; I’ll clear it with the super. I want an officer with her from the moment she comes out of the operating theatre.’ Dearlove turned on his heels.

  ‘If she survives,’ said Austin gloomily.

  ‘If she doesn’t, you have my permission to blame yourself for the rest of your life. Can’t say fairer than that.’

  When eventually they left the crime scene in his car, Austin remained gloomy. ‘The killer came out of the front door. And we were watching it for ten minutes, while she was lying there. We must have missed the killer leaving the house by a whisker.’

  ‘I know. But did we just miss Jamie Fife’s killer or was Fife killed by the same person as the others?’

  ‘OK, the dagger could have come from Poulimenos’s collection, but the MO is totally different. Shooting someone with a thirty-eight is one thing but stabbing is very close up and personal.’

  ‘Think about it, though,’ McLusky objected. ‘All the other victims lived in their bloody Agatha Christie villas in the country. Who cares about gunshots out there? But a shot in Fife’s pokey hovel would bring the neighbours out on the street.’ When Austin locked his Micra in the station car park, McLusky dug around in his jacket and produced two rolls of thirty-five-millimetre film. He dropped them into Austin’s hand. ‘Before you sign out, send these to be develope
d. I want them pronto.’ He walked away towards his car.

  ‘Where will you be?’

  McLusky kept walking. ‘I’m going to see a man about a cigar.’

  McLusky drove fast. Distracted, thinking intensely about the recent deaths, he triggered every speed camera between Bristol and Cold Ashton. He did not slow down until he had a near head-on collision with an ancient Citroën on the narrow road to Ashton View. It was dusk by the time he stopped in front of the gates. Working the bell had no effect and produced no answer. McLusky reached in through the car window and worked his horn a few times, then went back to the gate and stared through the bars. Now he could see the dark silhouette of a figure in the garden to the left of the house, simply standing in the gloom. McLusky parped his horn a few more times. Eventually, the silhouette moved towards him, slowly and carrying, McLusky now saw, a garden fork. He stared at the approaching figure with murderous impatience. ‘Take your time, I’ve got all night.’ The silhouette sharpened into a man wearing blue trousers stuffed into black Wellingtons and a faded checked shirt. McLusky noted with relief that it was not Tony Gotts who looked after Mendenhall’s garden.

  The man, fortyish, fair-haired and tanned, stopped fifteen paces away from the gate. ‘What do you want? There’s no one here.’

  McLusky stuck his hand through the bars and held out his ID. ‘Where’s Hotchkiss?’

  ‘Mr Hotchkiss has flown out to Turkey. For a holiday. He has a house there.’

  ‘Do you have a contact address or number?’

  ‘Nah, he doesn’t tell me stuff like that. Sorry.’ The man turned around and walked leisurely back towards the house, cradling his fork on the crook of his arm.

  THIRTEEN