by Paul Charles
What words would make Alfie understand? What was there to understand, anyway? All he really had to do was accept that in this world the rule, ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die’, applied.
Not content with strangling Mrs Mavis McCarthy, a former ticket seller at Camden Town underground station, the two funsters had totally wrecked the house. Destroyed everything, every piece of furniture; and, to add insult to injury, had spread their own shit on the walls and carpets. What kind of people do this? Do they do it because they know they can get away with it?
Kennedy had lost his temper in the squad room that morning, angry not at the police but at the injustice of the situation. There had been a briefing on the case and no conclusions had been offered, no suggestions made. It wasn’t a ‘sexy’ (the new corporate word) enough case for that.
‘Look, I want every one of you – every single one of you – to get out there on the streets. I want you to sit on every fucking druggy you know. I want you to talk, and I want you to look, and I want you to do everything you have to do to get these two bastards. The caretaker has given us a credible description of both of them and I want them in here by the end of the day. I don’t care what you have to do to get them, either. Please,’ Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy seethed with liquid anger, ‘go out and find them!’
Off they scurried, shocked but not surprised at his fury.
‘Aye, of course we’ll get them. We’ll get them, put them into the legal system and some do-gooder will put them back on the street again,’ DS Irvine whispered to WPC Anne Coles as they left the briefing room.
‘I know,’ she replied in a return whisper. ‘But at least he, all of us, will feel that we’re doing our bit.’
Later that evening Kennedy was still fuming. When he had first started to see ann rea (and the relationship had had a shaky start), he had made a mental note of all the dos and don’ts which, if adhered to, would (hopefully) help it work. And Kennedy wanted it to work. The probable number one on Kennedy’s list was, ‘Don’t bring your working troubles home.’ Now there he was, breaking rule number one.
Luckily, ann rea understood. Sometimes she had to cover pensioner muggings for the Camden New Journal. And anyway, she was anxious that Kennedy should talk about his anger rather than bottle it up and hurt himself.
Kennedy allowed himself to be calmed by ann rea. She was an extraordinary woman. He never had to pretend with her and she seemed happy with him as he was. He wondered who had helped or taught her how to deal with her own pain. And then, on top of all her consideration and understanding, she had the most beautiful body he had ever seen in his life. Kennedy knew this was a sexist thought, but shit, wasn’t it true? There were times when he literally could not keep his hands off her. He couldn’t believe that they had found each other, but he was happy that they had.
Particularly on a night like that. After a drink in The Queens they walked up to the top of Primrose Hill to gaze at one of the most amazing views in London and to have a good old-fashioned snog, but not necessarily in that order.
***
Suitably recharged, he entered his office the following morning to find that the two suspects in the Mrs Mavis McCarthy murder had been picked up. The two herberts were still so high they had readily admitted to the murder; indeed they seemed quite proud of it. ‘Yeah, like, the old bag, like, we had to do her in, didn’t we mate, she got in our faces, know what I mean?’ one of them had sniffed.
Kennedy was relieved that he didn’t have to interview them or suffer any contact.
On his desk was a note saying that Mary Jones had rung him late the previous evening. He called her back, fully expecting to be told that Peter O’Browne had returned to the office, that all was well and everyone was going to live happily ever after.
This seldom, if ever, is the case.
Mary was distraught again. ‘You know Inspector, I’ve been thinking. Peter knows I never arrive in the office before nine in the morning, ever. He just wouldn’t ring me here before that. He would have called me at home. I’ve checked with the receptionist. She’s new and she couldn’t remember anything about the call apart from the fact it was brief. If someone wanted to pretend to be Peter, then early morning would be the best time, before I got in. Do you see what I mean?’ she pleaded into the electric void.
‘Yes, I see where you’re going,’ Kennedy replied, wondering how many more Miss Marples would turn up on the case. ‘But equally we would have to accept that whoever is ghosting for Peter knows both his and your usual movements.’
‘This has been driving me mad. After I got over the feeling of euphoria of thinking he was in contact again, I started to wonder why he was behaving so weirdly. Then I started to get a bad feeling about it all and it won’t go away. I didn’t know what to do apart from to ring you,’ blurted Mary.
‘Okay, look here’s the thing,’ Kennedy soothed. ‘By about eleven this morning, I’ll have the results of the handwriting tests on the credit card receipts from Waterloo and Corfe Castle. Let me ring after eleven and we’ll talk some more.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Oh the water,
Let it flow all over me
- Van Morrison
As it happened, Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy was too preoccupied to get back to Mary Jones quite as quickly as he’d promised. ‘A little hush, please,’ he announced to the packed briefing room. In five seconds, he had a lot of hush.
‘Okay, we are now treating the Peter O’Browne case not as a missing person but a murder,’ he advised his captive audience. The hush evaporated in an instant.
The body of Peter O’Browne had been found in a building in Mayfair Mews, a tiny cul-de-sac impassable to cars, between No 75 and the florists, Fitzroy’s, at No 77 Regent’s Park Road, Primrose Hill Village.
The scene there was still as vivid in Kennedy’s mind as the wagging jaws that aced him. Peter O’Browne had been lying lifeless on the cold concrete floor of a building he had hoped to convert into a recording studio. The corpse looked as if it had been laid out by an undertaker. The heels, tight together, faced the door of the building, the arms were crossed, outstretched hands resting on opposite shoulders. Someone had placed a penny – an old penny – on each eyelid.
There were no visible clues. The floor was clean, though perhaps only to the naked eye, Kennedy had thought. O’Browne looked so peaceful, and there were no outward signs of violence. His clothes – brown cords, bottle-green long-sleeved pullover (not designer) – were unruffled; even his hair appeared to have been recently combed. But that would have been too bizarre, wouldn’t it?
Trusty Dr Leonard Taylor and his new stunning assistant Bella Forsythe had carried out their examination in Kennedy’s presence. Kennedy was still queasy about being around or touching a corpse but Dr Taylor, chubby, affable, theatrical, moved effortlessly about the dead body as he worked.
‘Ah!’ he had exclaimed, proud of a find. ‘Rope burns around the neck.’ He continued his search respectfully, but not apologetically. ‘More of them on the wrists,’ he added as he moved instinctively to the feet. ‘Yes, and more on the ankles.
‘The burns are darker around the neck. Perhaps the rope carried his weight.’
Kennedy refrained from commenting, or questioning, knowing he would only provoke the ‘Too early to tell’ report.
‘See how the skin is lighter around the mouth?’ Dr Taylor continued, happy in his solo performance on the stage. ‘He had tape stuck over it.’
Kennedy left Dr Taylor to finish his examination, his fingers unconsciously flexing as he paced the room. It was a large room, about forty-by-twenty-foot, built of white-painted breeze blocks. The roof was of corrugated zinc resting on A frames. Every eighth roof sheet was Perspex which allowed some natural light. To the left, as you entered the main room from the mews, was a door which took you back on yourself to a little kitchen area through to a larger sitting room, serviced by a small bathroom. A badly-painted staircase led to another floor which had what was perhaps
a bedroom, though it was a bit on the small side, and a full bathroom with a bath and sink. The annex was covered with a cheap grey carpet throughout.
There was no through-route from the upstairs of the annex to the double-height area where Peter O’Browne’s body had been found.
Kennedy returned to the main room and made his way past the corpse to the wall opposite the mews door. This wall, about eight feet high, was mostly glass, (double panes about ten feet apart) with double sliding glass doors, obviously a sound-proofing device. The first door was stiff. One of the SoC officers came to Kennedy’s assistance. The doors led into a lower-ceilinged room with no natural light, whose walls were covered with a bulky fawn canvas-like material.
All the areas, with the exception of the main room, were littered with rubbish: cardboard boxes, broken chairs, tables with three legs, old newspapers, parts of an (obviously defunct) air-conditioning system, disconnected electric flex and a very sad-looking broken acoustic guitar with a single string, which had apparently played its last note a long time ago.
Perhaps someone had made the effort to tidy up the main room by distributing its rubbish to the remaining rooms, so crowded were they. The only furniture left behind was what looked like two mobile platforms, both eight-foot square with one-inch solid tops and skeleton sides. ‘They look like drum-risers, sir,’ one of the SoC officers suggested. ‘I’ve seen them at concerts where the drummer will set up his entire kit on one of these.’
Kennedy wandered, fingers furiously flexing, back towards Dr Taylor. DS Irvine was carefully removing the two pennies from Peter O’Browne’s eyelids. ‘I haven’t seen that in a long long time,’ he commented. ‘Not since I was a lad at a wake in Stirling.’ He cautiously placed the pennies in individual plastic evidence bags which he duly sealed and marked up.
‘Yes,’ Dr Taylor explained, ‘sometimes the eyes of a corpse won’t close and this tends to bother people: the piercing eyes of death. So coins – usually ten-pence coins these days – are placed on the eyelids. Hides the glare from the other side.’
‘But why use old pennies?’ DS Irvine said, his eyes still on the corpse.
‘Look at the body. Look at the hands, at the feet. This body has been “laid out”. As if someone is emphasising the death. “There, it’s done: you’re dead.” Death marked a finality of some sort, apart from the obvious finality of death itself. This is a statement, a resolution. The murderer has taken the trouble to show off his corpse.’
Kennedy walked around the body, studying it, looking for something, anything, to give him a hint of the killer’s intention.
Something was troubling him about the smell in the atmosphere. Yes, there was a smell of death and a smell of mustiness from the rubbish, and the smell from a large damp patch on the floor about six feet away from the body. But there was another smell too, something he remembered from his youth. He couldn’t quite put his finger, or even his nose, on it.
How unlike the corpse of Marianne MacIntyre and the scene of her murder. There, clues had littered the place, vying with each other for attention. Together they had revealed the most obvious aspect of her death: that although Marianne had been killed unlawfully, her murder had not been premeditated. To some degree Brian Hurst had been a victim of circumstance (certainly of his own circumstances), and things, to use a well-known cliché, had just got out of hand.
But as the three of them knelt around the body of Peter O’Browne, Kennedy couldn’t help feeling that this time the perpetrator had been proud of his (or her, as in fifteen per cent of cases) work and had probably spent many a long hour planning it.
Such people scared Kennedy. People who could wake up one day and over breakfast plan the end of another’s life, offering them as much compassion as they did their eggs. This was something with which Kennedy would never come to terms. These were people with whom he would never come to terms.
On that cold morning Kennedy felt that the calm, so different from the usual murder scene, was deceptive.
‘I would say,’ offered Dr Taylor, ‘that our friend here has been dead for at least twelve hours.’
‘I would say,’ came the reply from Kennedy, ‘that you had better wait until you carry out the autopsy and come up with a more accurate time for me.’
The doctor bowed one of his ‘touche’ bows.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
If songs were lines
In a conversation
The situation
Would be fine
- Nick Drake
Kennedy stopped off at ann rea’s on his way back from Mayfair Mews. This was a very rare occurrence, so rare in fact that it had only one precedent, an occasion when he had picked her up for a dinner date. Kennedy broke the news of how Peter O’Browne’s body had been found early that morning by a British Telecom engineer who had arrived to reconnect one of the studio phone lines – a line that was now being used by Kennedy’s colleagues as a SoC site phone.
The BT engineer had picked the keys up from Camden Town Records the previous afternoon. Mary Jones had seen no reason to refuse him the keys. Despite her misgivings, she was hopeful that Peter would soon return, and anyway she didn’t want to risk waiting another three months for the BT chaps to fit in another visit.
‘I’ll have to go and tell Mary Jones the bad news and I wondered whether you’d like to come with me. She’ll need a shoulder to cry on.’
‘Sure, sure.’
Kennedy was in ann rea’s souped-up maroon Ford Popular. As they drove up Delancey Street, she asked him, ‘So what was all that business about Corfe Castle and the phone calls?’
‘Oh, stalling, some kind of delaying tactic, I would imagine. Maybe the killer was trying to prevent us from looking for the body. The good doctor reckons he died around nine thirty yesterday evening.’
‘So what was he doing from Friday last through to Wednesday evening?’ ann rea questioned as she crossed the lights where Delancey Street runs into Parkway. They turned right into Gloucester Crescent, where ann rea parked her prize possession.
‘For some reason someone was stalling us, diverting our attention,’ Kennedy repeated as he ascended the steps of Camden Town Records.
The extremely hip receptionist, a follower of ‘stares-at-shoes’ type of bands, took ann rea and Kennedy straight through to Mary Jones’ office. When Mary saw the solemn look upon both their faces, the colour drained from her cheeks and she sank into her chair.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he? You’ve found him, and he’s dead. He’s dead.’ Mary spoke like someone using a Walkman and headphones, unaware of the volume of her voice.
‘Yes. I’m sorry, yes. Peter O’Browne was found about two hours ago, and he is dead. We have reason to believe–’ Kennedy was just getting into official-speak when she cut him off.
‘But why?’ Tears gathered in her eyes and started to roll down her cheeks. She hadn’t heard a word Kennedy had said after ‘dead’.
ann rea crossed the room to comfort the Welsh woman, holding her close as she sobbed uncontrollably.
Kennedy left them alone for a few minutes to order up some tea with extra sugar for Mary. When he returned he inquired, ‘Is there anyone we can ring?’
‘No. No, I’ll be okay.’ Mary coughed through the sobs. She blew her nose and tried to dry her face, as best she could with a tear-stained handkerchief. ‘No, it’s okay, really. I’ve been dreading this moment since Monday lunchtime and I…’ ann rea gently patted her on the back with one hand as the other hand gently soothed her luxurious black curls.
‘I just kept telling myself that I wanted to know. It’s not knowing, that’s the worst. But now I’m not so sure. At least then there was always some kind of chance that Peter would turn up, but now… You know, he really was very, very, good to me. I’ve been with him eight-and-a-half-years.’ Mary tried a watery smile. ‘And he was always, always great to me. No funny business, if you know what I mean. And not a lot of girls in this industry can say that.
‘He was
hard work some of the time, but…but…’ she subsided into ann rea’s arms, her face creased with grief.
Kennedy admired the silent strength of ann rea. ‘Perhaps we should ring Leslie Russell,’ ann rea offered.
‘Yes,’ agreed Mary as Kennedy lifted the phone.
‘Three, eight, seven…’ Mary recited as Kennedy punched the digits thoughtfully on her phone. ‘I told you it wasn’t Peter who rang me yesterday morning,’ she said. ‘I think that’s when I really started to panic. I knew that he wouldn’t ring me here, so early. Oh my God.’ She had caught sight of her reflection in the mirror just behind Kennedy’s left shoulder as he sat at her desk on the telephone. ‘I’m a mess, a complete mess. I’m going to be no use to anybody like this.’ She excused herself and made for the lavatory.
‘I thought she would take it a lot worse,’ ann rea offered as soon as Mary had left the room.
‘Yes, perhaps. But there is always a delayed reaction, which hits even harder once the reality has sunk in,’ Kennedy replied. He raised his right hand to signify that he had Leslie Russell on the phone.
After the telephone conversation, he advised ann rea, ‘Leslie Russell is on the way over. He’ll be here in a few minutes.’
A thought occurred to ann rea. Startled, she shared it with Kennedy before it had even properly formed. ‘Do you think Mary is in any danger? You know, being Peter’s secretary and all, that perhaps she knows something of why Peter was killed?’
Kennedy had no time to reply before Mary Jones re-entered the room, followed very closely by Leslie Russell who took her in his arms and gave her a huge, warm hug which, in an instant, destroyed all of Mary’s repairs she’d just effected in front of the mirror in the lavatory.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
