River Deep

by Priscilla Masters

  Martha was at the hairdresser’s. As usual Vernon had picked up her unruly red locks and scolded her for leaving it too long between cuts. Vernon Grubb was not the archetypal camp hairdresser but a stocky he-man with the build of a rugby player. Whenever she visited him (too infrequently) she was invariably intrigued as to what had led him along this particular career path and how he had coped with hairdresser college. One day, she vowed, she would ask him.

  Not today. He seemed in particularly tetchy mood. His x-ray vision homed in accusingly on her split ends as though she had deliberately nurtured each one. She knew he considered so many of them on a client an affront to his profession. She let him rant for a minute or two, reminded of the restaurateur who had first uncovered her inability to set a table properly (a penalty of being left-handed) when she was a waitress during the university vac. Vernon provoked the same mix of guilt and apprehension. However he finally handed her over to a junior shampooist and she was draped in a black nylon gown, her shoulders padded with towels and her head lowered over the sink before the blissful feeling of warm water and rich, creamy shampoo being massaged into her scalp. She closed her eyes, luxuriated …

  And was rudely awakened by her mobile phone. She apologised to the shampooist and clamped it to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Martha. It’s Detective Inspector Wendy Aitken, Oswestry police. Sorry for …”

  She sat upright. Water dripped down the towels.

  “I’m afraid we’ve found another body,” she said, “almost certainly our missing man. He’s in a bit of a state.”

  The stylist was watching her with round eyes and scarcely concealed curiosity. Martha responded quickly. “I can’t talk at the moment. I’ll call you back.” She glanced at the number display. “On your mobile. I’ll be about forty minutes. Don’t move the body please.” She ended the call and lay back, her hair drowning, Ophelia-like, in the sink, while she pondered. Two bodies. One killer? Or two? Make no assumptions.

  “Conditioner?” She glanced up at the shampooist’s face. And nodded.

  Twenty minutes later she was admiring the back of her hair in the mirror and again running the gauntlet of Vernon’s scolding. “Now don’t leave it so long next time. Your hair. It needs trimming – once a month. Or else the condition. Mmm.” He stood back, pursing his lips, patted a lock into place and appraised again.

  Martha agreed with him, took a last glance at the unfamiliarly neat, shining bob, slipped out of her gown, paid her bill, tipped the shampooist and escaped. As soon as she was in the privacy of her car she re-dialled Wendy Aitken’s mobile number. The detective answered in a tense voice.

  “Whether it’s Haddonfield or not his throat’s been cut,” she said. “Some time ago I would think.”

  Martha put her hand in front of her eyes to block out the vision. “Has Mark Sullivan seen him yet?”

  “He’s with him now.”

  “Which is where?”

  The answer surprised even her.

  “In the supermarket, Aldi, in the clothing bank.”

  She was appalled. “And no one realised?”

  “Not until the number of flies began to proliferate.” She paused, adding quietly. “We’re lucky. It was due to be emptied later on this week.”

  “And then what?” The possibilities were endlessly mind-boggling.

  “Don’t worry.” She could hear a smile in her voice. “They do sort it out before it gets distributed to the refugees.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  As she covered the few miles to Oswestry she couldn’t help thinking. She put clothes in the ragbank. Lots of people did. She drove into the Aldi carpark, disturbed.

  Half of it had been sealed off, police tape strung across, a white canopy shrouding the sensitive area. A couple of police cars blocked the entrance and their lights strobing the dull day gave the growing clumps of voyeurs some drama to focus on.

  A young, uniformed police officer tried to stop her until she explained who she was and watched his face turn a dark shade of beetroot in embarrassment.

  The clothing bank was a large, square metal container with a huge letterbox in the front which folk generous with last year’s fashions posted their offerings through. Behind, the PVC sheeting lights had been erected throwing moving shadows against its sides. She lifted the flap and joined Wendy and Sullivan minutes before they noticed her. They were too intent on two plain-clothes officers removing the back of the container with a oxyacetylene cutters.

  It was a sordid sight: the pile of castoffs, wool, linen, silk, rayon, every conceivable colour of acetate, plain and multicoloured, cheap and expensive, rubbing shoulders and knees with each other lit by two powerful arc lights. Some of the top layer of clothes had already been removed and bagged. The smell was overwhelming, every single jaded adjective moving through Martha’s mind to describe it, rotten and stinking, musty, fusty, unwashed and dirty, and even in the cool afternoon the scent attracting marauding flies drawn irresistibly towards their raison d’être: their breeding ground, their fun, their food.

  Martha watched only the flies for a moment. “I,” said the fly, “with my little eye. I saw him die.” And wondered. Haddonfield had been hidden in the rags.

  Except his hair, thinnish, gold-brown, cut short across a white, unlined forehead, and dark eye sockets in which something writhed. Martha’s eyes sorted out anomalies from the tangle of old clothes.

  “Rag and Bones, Rag and Bones.” Bound hands, white skin, clothes that were not empty, a pair of grubby blue trainers tossed on the top, a rust-stained nest. Yearned after, dreamed for, borrowed or paid for. Treasured clothes become rags. Loved, adored, feared, hated people are all finally bodies.

  The smell was overpowering. Martha backed away, towards the flap rattling hysterically in the rising wind.

  March – in like a lion; out like a lamb.

  Randall arrived. He raised his eyebrows in greeting and otherwise said nothing, addressing his remarks to the pathologist.

  “How long has he been dead?”

  “Over a month, I think.” Wendy Aitken tried to explain. “There were a lot of clothes on top of him.”

  “How often do the council change the container?”

  “Every month to six weeks.” Wendy Aitken again.

  Randall looked around. “Is there CCTV here?”

  Wendy turned to look at him. “They don’t keep the tapes longer than a fortnight or so. So effectively – no.”

  Martha’s turn now. “And is it Haddonfield?”

  “We think so. The clothes match the description of what he was wearing.”

  Martha was busy working it out. “So he did come back to Oswestry that night. Watkins must have been mistaken. He simply didn’t recognise him. Maybe not surprising on such a dark, wet night.” Surely the simplest explanation is the likeliest?

  “Is he in a fit state to be identified?”

  “That’s up to his wife. It isn’t a problem, Mark. We can always use dental records.”

  Alex was staring at her. “Well I hope she’s got an iron constitution, Martha. Put it like this. If it was my wife I wouldn’t want her last memory of me to be this.” Haddonfield’s dead, empty face stared back.

  Martha moved outside to speak to Randall. “So,” she said, “if Mark’s reckoning is right the two murders took place within a short time of each other.”

  He nodded. “DI Aitken and I will work together. We’ll try and get some identification and then the post mortem.”

  She glanced back at the canopy flapping in a rising wind. “Good luck,” she said impulsively. “It’s a lot to unravel. But this must have made the case much easier.”

  “Yes.” Randall’s eyes flickered and he pressed his lips together. “There’ll be some story behind this,” he said. “Some fraud, some business gone sadly wrong. Money. Greed.”

  Martha threw her head back. “Why, Alex,” she mocked. “You’ve got it solved already.”

  His face softened
with a touch of humour. “In my dreams.”

  “By the way,” she said, “who was the guy in the puffer-jacket sitting at the back of Gerald Bosworth’s inquest?”

  “His brother. Not too fond of his sister-in-law, it seems.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’d offered to do the identification but Freddie was having none of it. And she’s the one with all the rights, as next of kin.”

  “Quite,” she said.

  Then, “I’ll be in touch,” he promised.

  Wendy Aitken and Sullivan appeared behind him. “I think we’ll have the body brought back to Shrewsbury for the post mortem. All right by you, Mark?”

  He nodded.

  “Wendy?”

  “I’m happy at that,” she said.

  “So – we’ll get the body moved now and post mortem in the morning? Nine am?”

  All three agreed.

  To her surprise when she arrived at the mortuary on a fresh, March morning, a little after nine, (the traffic had been bad), Mark Sullivan was washing his hands in the sink. Haddonfield’s body was already laid out on the slab and Peter was using his rotary saw to remove the cranium.

  “I thought we were going to get him identified first.”

  “Too late, Martha.” Alex joined them. “Lindy Haddonfield was adamant she wanted to identify him. She was here at eight thirty.”

  She gave him a swift, puzzled glance. “I’m surprised,” she said. “He’s … Well he isn’t my husband but -”

  She glanced at the face herself. “Did you warn her what he looked like?”

  “Oh yes.” Mark was examining the brain already, taking neat slices for histology. “Nothing here.” He looked up. “I did warn her but Peter and I tidied him up. He didn’t look too bad. And it is so much easier once you’ve got positive ID. Easier for all of us.”

  “Mmm.” She was surprised. But then, maybe, nothing in the case should surprise her.

  “I don’t suppose she could shed any light on his death?”

  “You guessed right, Martha.”

  Half an hour later Mark Sullivan straightened up. “Well,” he said. “No surprises here. Cause of death aspiration of blood following single deep incised wound to the throat. Not that it helps us but it was left to right.”

  “Thought that would tell you whether the killer was left-or right-handed.”

  “In your dreams.”

  Wendy Aitken sighed. “Homicide or suicide?”

  “We-ell.” Mark Sullivan’s eyes were bright. “If he made the knife vanish into thin air, moved his own body, after death, bound his own hands and laundered a ragbank full of blood-drenched clothes I might swallow the suicide theory.”

  “So homicide.” She allowed herself a tight smile at his levity. “Just checking.”

  He nodded. “All the hallmarks of homicide are there. No tentative wounds. Bruising under the chin from the restraint. Death would have been very quick.”

  “And the weapon?” This was Alex, showing interest.

  “A very sharp knife. Sorry, Alex. I can’t be more specific than that. Something – oh smaller than a carving knife, about the size of a paring knife. Very sharp indeed.”

  “Thank you, all. So – Clarke Haddonfield, death homicidal. Probably about a month or so ago. And his body was brought to the clothing bank. How did the killer get his body in there?”

  “The flap’s big enough – just. There are some quite nasty grazes on his chest, arms and lower limbs done post mortem as the killer shoved him through the opening.” It seemed the final lack of respect.

  The file landed on her desk at the end of the week, during a bright, sunny Friday lunchtime. Spring was definitely in the air. Clipped to the front was a typewritten note from Wendy Aitken.

  “Lindy Haddonfield formally identified the body as being that of her husband, Clarke Haddonfield, of 14, Playton Gardens, Oswestry, last seen when he left to travel to Shrewsbury on Monday morning, February 11th, at approximately nine thirty am.

  She denies he had any criminal leanings or contacts, describes him as an unambitious, unexciting sort of man whose big love was his hi fi. She says he had no enemies, had not been threatened and had caused upset to no one.

  (Here Aitken had inserted an exclamation mark and a handwritten comment. He seems to have led a blameless life!)

  She coped well with the identification and did not seem unduly upset, only reflective. She declined the company of a WPC, an offer of Victim Support or Trauma Counselling.”

  She’d signed with a flourishing “W”

  Martha read through the post mortem report, noting the damage which had led to Haddonfield’s death: destruction of both carotid arteries, the jugular veins, the trachea, the damage almost extending right back to reach the cervical spine. Blood had been found in the airways and bruises underneath the chin. Haddonfield’s hands had been bound.

  Cause of death had been listed as:

  a) asphysxia secondary to

  b) inhalation of blood

  c) due to a major incisional injury to the neck.

  Reading between the lines, someone had bound Clarke Haddonfield, then approached from behind, jerked up his chin and sliced along his neck. It was a completely different assault from the attack on Bosworth. Bosworth’s had been one precise and incisive stab to the front. This had been the very opposite, the killer stealing up behind, a clumsy strong swipe to the neck. The killer had dumped the body without caring whether it was found – it was pure chance that it had taken so long. And he might well have been spattered with blood on his sleeve. She couldn’t see that the two homicides bore any marks of having been committed by the same person.

  Martha returned to the PM report and read under the heading Comments. Mark Sullivan had noted that Haddonfield’s hands and feet had been tightly bound with nylon yachting rope causing extensive chafing to the wrists and ankles indicating that he had been bound for some time before he had died.

  Why? If you’re going to kill someone why would you tie him up? To keep him still. Make him more easy to kill. To intimidate him? To imprison him and prevent escape. Where? And what was the connection – if any – between the three men – a philandering car salesman from Slough recently decamped to rented accommodation in Shrewsbury, a businessman from Chester, who was supposed to be on a business trip to Germany and a window cleaner from Oswestry? The little questions continued to buzz around her mind like a huge, noisy bluebottle. Calliphora.

  The frustrating thing for her was doing nothing … Well not exactly nothing. She had her in-laws and her parents coming for the weekend.

  17

  It was always tricky mixing her mother-in-law with her own parents. Martin’s father had died suddenly a year before his son had been diagnosed and the double shock had proved too much for the quiet, family-orientated woman. Martin did have a sister but she was an elusive, secretive woman, constantly butterflying from one career to another, never quite settling down to either house, husband, family or anything else for that moment. It was as though Martin had inherited all the family stolidness and pedantry, leaving none for his sister. Sneakily Martha quite liked Valentine though she found her unpredictable. Unpredictable to her was exciting.

  Martin’s mother, heavy with her bereavement, had the unfortunate habit of clinging on to the twins as though she was contacting her dead son through them. She would scrutinize first Sam then Sukey searching for resemblance to their father. With Sam it was easy. He was almost a clone for his father. But when she stared, for long, silent, disapproving minutes, at her granddaughter, she would shake her head, as though disappointed. And this upset the child. Both children. Because twins share each other’s disappointment as well as their elation. And twelve-year-olds are more perceptive than folk give them credit for.

  A result of Martin’s mother having failed to shake off this terrible burden of grief meant that when she came for the day Martha felt guilty for any smile, any outward sign that she was not still grieving herself. She could not e
xplain that she did grieve. But it was a private, permanent scarring grief and she preferred to deal with it alone.

  Her own parents were hugely different. Her mother was a quixotic, intuitive and intelligent woman, her father a quiet pipe smoker who would study her for minutes before removing his pipe and making some long, deep comment. Her mother was a busy, practical woman, who always liked to be doing something. Otherwise she fidgeted and fretted. She found some ironing Vera had left, tidied rooms which Martha preferred ‘lived-in’, baked cakes no one would eat, washed up when there was a perfectly good dishwasher which, truth be told, did the work more efficiently – polished the glasses without smears, removed baked-on food.

  Her father sat around, smiling at Sam when he confided his dreams in him, watching Sukey’s Abba-antics, talking to her when she dropped into a chair, exhausted at keeping going. She loved her father. He was a tonic. An encourager. A rock. She loved her mother too but found her constant restlessness tiring.

  The two mothers may be different. But one thing united them. They deplored her continuing widowhood, finding the situation unsatisfactory – a failure on Martha’s part. If it was possible they felt the loss of a husband and father even more keenly than she and the children did. And in some perverse way Martha resented this. It was her family’s problem. Not theirs. And they made it no easier. In their attitude they reflected that Martha was too young to be a widow and the situation had continued for too long. This was their inward emotion, which they manifested in their different ways. Martha had a suspicion her mother found it easier to bustle than to talk and Martin’s mother sighed and asked whether Martha had any life. Only her father, banished to smoke his pipe on the bench in the chilly outdoors, brought her real comfort.