Rules, Regs and Rotten Eggs (A Harriet Martens Thriller Book 7)

by HRF Keating

  ‘However, an intruder did enter.’

  ‘That is as may be. But I can assure you it was not through any default in our system. The Masterton advertises its high degree of security all over the country. We have had in our care on many, many occasions actors and actresses of the highest standing.’

  ‘Yes, I have heard that was so. But nevertheless someone got into the house, entered Mr Roughouse’s room and suffocated him.’

  ‘Well, it is your business to deal with that. We pay enough towards the upkeep of the Greater Birchester Police. We are entitled to see some activity from you.’

  Harriet suppressed a new flare of rage. Wearily she put a few more questions, each of which was answered with much the same bureaucratic rigmarole, none of it hiding the fact that security at the Masterton, whatever it once might have been, had been penetrated. At last she stood up to go.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, stamping down the least trace of irony, ‘I think I have learnt all I wanted to know. If anything else arises, I will not hesitate to come to you again.’

  Outside she found Bolshy looking, surprisingly, very unlike his usual gloomily resentful self.

  ‘Got it,’ he said the moment he saw her, his ever-darting pale eyes positively shining. ‘Needed a bit of looking for, but there to be found.’

  ‘Good work, DS. And your it, what exactly is that?’

  Bolshy produced a rare grin.

  ‘Just a little splinter of wood.’

  Harriet reined back her impatience.

  ‘And just where did you find this splinter?’

  Bolshy’s air of satisfaction visibly grew.

  ‘Thought I’d first of all take a bit of a prowl round the whole outside. Best way. And what d’you think I came across?’

  This time Harriet declined to provide any idiot question.

  ‘A little old tucked-away window, that’s what,’ Bolshy said, after a long moment. ‘Down at the end of a narrow sort-of passageway, left when that wing-building was tacked on some time. Dirty great bush, all over bloody thorns, growing all the way along it.’

  ‘I think I know where you mean. I noticed the bush when we were sitting in the car looking at the house. So there’s a window hidden behind it?’

  ‘Yup. But what you don’t know is just at the edge of that little square of a window — ain’t been painted since the end of World War Two, ask me — there was my tiny splinter of fresh wood. Oh ho, I said soon as I spotted it, someone been digging a good strong knife-blade in here, or maybe a biggish screwdriver. So 1 followed suit, gave the frame a gentle hoick. Always carry a useful knife, you know.’

  ‘Good practice,’ Harriet put in by way of urging the story on.

  ‘Certainly is. ’Cos I got that window open without making so much as a mark on it. Put my head inside, careful of dabs of course. And what did I see? Old storeroom or something, looked as if no one been in it for years. Nothing but a few empty crates on the floor. ’Cept a nice line of footprints. Wet shoes on the dust. Man’s, of course, an’ a nice pattern of ribbed stitching round the edge of the soles. Just like, I’ll be bound, the shoe pattern old Monty-tonty was so chuffed at seeing. The prick.’

  ‘You didn’t go into that store-room?’

  ‘No, ma’am. I am a detective. Went back in the house, worked my way round to where that store had to be, and, plain enough, its door — hadn’t been opened for years, ask me — showed every sign of having just once been pushed wide and then shoved back into place. Rubbish swept right to one side.’

  So the not unusual answer to any sort of a locked-room mystery: someone years earlier had not done what they ought to have done.

  ‘Right then, DS. Go back up to your friend Monty-tonty and get him to send the photographer down there fast as he can. Then we’ll have some useful evidence.’

  ‘Be a pleasure,’ Bolshy said.

  ‘And one thing more, DS.’

  Something that had been tapping obscurely at the back of her mind abruptly found its answer. Mrs Fishlock, in one of her not-so-subtle digs at the Greater Birchester Police, had complained about the number of times I had inquired about Roughouse’s condition. But she had also implied there had been other persistent inquiries. Now it was clear they had been made by whoever it was who wanted to find out if unconscious Roughouse would ever be able to talk again.

  But who that was —

  ‘OK, ma’am, if I nip out for a smoke?’

  She brought herself back to the immediate reality. Bloody Bolshy taking advantage.

  ‘No, it’s not OK. There’s something I want you to do. As soon as the nurse who found the body is available I’ve got to hear exactly what she saw when she went into that room. But I’d also need to have a word with young Tonelle. I’d like to find out if, by any chance, someone came to the house last evening saying they wanted to know something or other about the clinic’s routines, making out they were looking for somewhere for a rest cure, anything like that. Because, if there was, that’ll have been the person who hoped to get to Roughouse without having to break in.’

  ‘Could be, I suppose. Worth asking that Tonelle anyhow.’

  Hearing Tonelle called something other than a black bitch, Harriet abruptly remembered the present she had intended to give her.

  ‘No. Wait a moment.’

  She scrabbled in her bag, found an old shopping-list — one of several — put a line firmly through it, and on the back wrote What’s putting up a tent called? What happens to a blonde if in place of O for Zero you put E for East? And what has to be dug out of the earth? Pitchblende, that’s what. She added her two initials, and folded the flimsy list firmly in half.

  ‘Give this to Tonelle from me before you ask her anything,’ she told Bolshy. ‘Let her have a moment to look at it, and then I think you’ll find her as helpful as can be.’

  Bolshy, of course, flipped the little piece of paper open.

  ‘All gobbledygook to me,’ he said.

  ‘Never mind. See if it works.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘And congratulations, DS. I think you’ve solved the mystery of the house that couldn’t be broken into, even if it was no more than a mystery created by that bloody woman in the office behind us.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nurse Smithson told Harriet that her night-duty colleague when they exchanged shifts had said that when she had last looked in on Robert Roughouse at midnight she had noticed nothing amiss. Consequently it had not been until 8.30 a.m. that, in accordance with standing instructions, she had gone to wake the patient, take his temperature and check his pulse. As soon as she had opened his door, she had seen the pillow over his face, one she even recognised as left ready not far from the bed. It had needed then no more investigation than touching the hand protruding from the bedclothes and finding it lifelessly cold. She had at once raised the alarm.

  Very well, Harriet said to herself, after making sure Nurse Smithson had told her everything she could, what happened here during the night is surely clear now. Someone came into the building via Bolshy’s little storeroom, probably well after midnight. They then cautiously made their way to where they saw that brass card-holder Mr Robert Roughouse. In the room, snatching up the convenient spare pillow, they had held it over the sleeping victim’s face until they were sure life was extinct.

  No struggle, no chance of a shouted cry. Robert Roughouse’s enfeebled state would have seen to that. And afterwards his murderer had simply opened the nearest convenient window and escaped down the ancient ivy.

  But who was it? I’ve nothing to go on. Nothing at all.

  Unless my guess turns out to be right and someone did come here in the afternoon or early evening and ask Tonelle a few careful questions.

  Bolshy. Has he learnt anything from her?

  Where is he anyhow? He ought to have got the answer by now, certainly if my shopping-list note made her as cooperative as I’d hoped. Is the damn fellow, puffed up by his moment of glory, idling away somewhere with one o
f his damn cheroots?

  Right, I’m going to find out.

  *

  She discovered Bolshy, as she had more than half-expected to, sitting comfortably in the car, and, yes, enveloped in drifts of nose-wrinkling smoke.

  ‘Oh, hello, guv,’ he said. ‘We off back to the nick now? Don’t seem to be much more to do here. Or nothing Monty-tonty and his merry men can’t take care of.’

  ‘That’s as may be, DS. But why haven’t I heard from you whether anybody came to the door here yesterday asking questions?’

  ‘Weren’t nothing much to tell you.’

  ‘Nevertheless I asked you to make an inquiry, and I expected to be told the result.’

  ‘Oh, well then, if that’s what you want. Yeah, there was a bloke come just after they’d locked the doors.’

  ‘And what time was that, DS?’

  ‘I dunno. Oh, yes. Yeah, I do. That Tonelle said. Doors locked every day at six sharp. Dunno why early as that. But what she said.’

  You may not know why the doors are locked precisely at six, Harriet thought. But I do. It will be because Dragon Fishlock has laid it down. For no particular reason. Except that she likes issuing regulations of any sort, whether they serve a purpose or have just come into her head. I know the type. There’s more than one or two of them in the Service.

  ‘And did Tonelle by any chance,’ she demanded, ‘tell you what this man who came to the door looked like?’

  ‘Yeah. Did get some sort of descrip out of her. White bloke, tall, six foot maybe, had a hat well down over his face, sort of brown felt like you see people wearing at the races on telly, she said.’

  ‘Anything more than that to identify our man? If he was our man.’

  ‘Could have been him,’ Bolshy said. ‘Like I told you when I went off to see that Tonelle.’

  Oh, how I’d love to point out to this bloody insolent fellow that I was the one who thought the killer might have made an earlier recce. But, no, if I do, he’ll just try and clam up on me, and I need to hear every scrap he learnt from Tonelle.

  ‘So what did he actually say, this man?’

  ‘Well, she weren’t that interested in him. Far as she was concerned someone had just come making some sort of inquiries for some friend of his. Wanted to know if the beds were comfortable, bloody pooftah.’

  ‘Did she say that? Tonelle? That this man appeared to be gay?’

  ‘Nah. That’s just what most of what they call patients here are, ask me.’

  Damn it, damn it, damn it. I’m going to get rid of this wretched fellow, one way or another. Never mind how clever he was finding that means of access. And, no, she added to herself, I’m not even going to ask him now what reception my note to Tonelle got. Quite possible he never even remembered to give it to her.

  ‘All right, DS,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing more for us here at present. What I need now is for you to drive me down to London, fast as you like. There are people whose whereabouts last night I’d very much like to know, before they hear the news and have time to make up tales. Zip up and tell Mr Montague-James we’re going. Then it’s look in at the incident room to put in hand a house-to-house round the whole area here. Got to be done, even though there are hardly any houses to check. Somebody may have seen a stranger hanging about between six and whenever he got in through your little window. Then off to London.’

  ‘Monty-fucking-tonty,’ Bolshy muttered as he plodded off.

  *

  In London, despite her urgent need to check where at the time of the murder those Cabal members she knew of were, Harriet had no difficulty in deciding to see Charity Nyambura first. Somebody has to break the appalling news to her before it reaches the media, she thought. And she deserves to have it told her as thoughtfully as possible.

  Yet, as they drew up outside Daley Thompson House, she found poking up in her mind the question she had asked herself after her last visit, Isn’t there something unexplained about Charity saying that she knew Tonelle?

  She tried to thrust the question to the back of her mind. Charity had terrible news to hear. Not the time now for catching her out over the fact that when, quite casually, I asked how it had come about that she had been a patient at the Masterton, far away from London, she had stayed silent for almost a full minute before saying the Masterton specialised in sports injuries. Something I didn’t know it did, or does. A dark fly-spot on the immaculate surface I thought I was seeing? But this not the time now, in any way, to go probing into it.

  She gave a firm buzz to the entry-phone. Faintly purring semi-silence from the grille of the little loudspeaker. Charity out? She may, somehow, have already learnt the news and is she wandering the streets stupefied with misery.

  But no …

  ‘Who’s there?’ Charity’s unmistakable African voice, in it even just a touch of apprehension.

  Harriet quickly identified herself, asked if she could come in.

  ‘Yeah, come up, come up. Good to hear you.’

  So plainly she hasn’t learnt yet.

  Straightening her shoulders she began climbing the stairs.

  Up, she thought, to a by no means Good to hear you encounter. Still, I’ve had to break terrible news like this before. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times. A policeman’s lot, not at all a happy one. Or, more often, a policewoman’s lot, some cowardly male having passed over the burden.

  Yet, somehow, I feel it’ll be a lot harder here. Charity, such a figure of hope. Her long journey from — what? — a comparatively impoverished life in distant Kenya to … to, in a way, the centre of the world. Or at least the centre of the sports world that plays such a part in so many people’s lives now. Now very much in her grasp, come the year 2012 and the Olympics, a Gold. Her name enshrined in the records for ever. And she’s about to hear that her lover, top-flight Robert Roughouse, ex-MP, Party leader, is dead. Has been murdered.

  Inside the flat there was no immediate chance to say the words that had to be said. Charity, looking little different in jeans and T-shirt than she had done at their previous encounter, reached at once for her green kettle and busied herself, with a muttered OK?, in spooning coffee grains into mugs.

  Harriet stood watching, somehow feeling herself cast back in time. Almost as if in a dream, she was thinking of Robert Roughouse as still alive, lying there in the big hygienic bed at the Masterton slowly recovering from his injuries. And soon able to answer every question fully and clearly.

  But then, as Charity put a hot mug into her hand, the wishful daydream vanished.

  ‘Charity,’ she said, still standing there. ‘Charity, I’m sorry, but I’ve got some bad news. Sit down. Sit down straightaway.’

  Charity, her face suddenly a picture of dread, almost collapsed into the nearest little furniture-store armchair, and Harriet saw that telling her the news would be now a mere formality.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid it’s what you think. But it’s worse. Even worse. You see, in the middle of last night someone broke in at the Masterton and got into Robert’s room. They put a pillow over his face as he slept and — and smothered him. He must have been dead for some time before Nurse Smithson — you must know her from when you were there — went in to wake him at eight-thirty this morning.’

  Charity sat there in the too-small armchair saying nothing. Slowly she lowered her coffee mug to the floor, only at the last moment tilting it and spilling a spoonful or two of milky liquid on the battered old grey carpet.

  Harriet wondered whether this was the time to put an arm round her shoulders. But after a moment there came a few leaden words.

  ‘Rob dead? You’re telling me Rob’s been murdered?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I was. I am. Someone deliberately killed him. You have to face that. And, of course, I’m here not only to tell you he’s gone, but because it’s my duty to find out who it was who killed him.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, you’ve got to find out who. Poor, poor Rob.’ A long moment of reverie. ‘The one who did that broke the wor
st law of all, the law everybody in the world knows. Thou shalt not kill. Yeah, Harriet, it’s your duty to … bring them to justice. Put things right again.’

  ‘I promise you, Charity, whatever I can do to see that duty is done, I will. And I’ll make sure everyone in the investigation, too, does their very best from start to finish.’

  Then, into her mind, came Bolshy’s pallid, freckled face, dampened cheroot between his lips.

  Have I promised too much? And it’s not only Bolshy. Detectives are human beings. However determined they are the moment they’re informed of a murder, they cannot all go on day after day working at the same demanding rate. And some of them will hardly try. Look at Bolshy. Did he even bother himself this morning to give Tonelle the shopping-list note I sent her? The friendly message that, shocked by the murder as she must be, would have induced her to tell him every last detail she had noticed about the man who came to the Masterton’s doors, Rob Roughouse’s murderer.

  She realised then that the phone on the little table beside her was ringing, had possibly been ringing for some time. Charity seemed, equally, not to have taken notice of it.

  She put down her still brimful mug.

  ‘Shall I?’ she said, her hand on the receiver.

  Charity did not respond.

  Harriet picked up, gave the number, and waited to see who this was. Charity’s trainer saying she was late? Somebody selling something? Someone, at last, ringing with the appalling news?

  ‘Is — Is that Charity?’ a voice said.

  A voice Harriet thought she recognised. Knew she had, despite its unexpectedness.

  ‘Tonelle?’

  ‘Yeah? That’s me. But that ain’t Charity.’

  ‘No, it’s Detective Superintendent Martens. Harriet Martens. Tonelle, were you ringing to tell Charity what’s happened?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. ’Course I was. Didn’t think it’d be clever to do it with the Bill all around. But you must’ve gone a long time ago, if you’re down in London now.’