by Peter Helton
Lane seemed to think the same. He didn’t linger over anything in particular until he got to the centre where the little Rodin dancer stood, presumably because it was recognizably human, I thought uncharitably. He spent some time admiring it from all angles, then made for the exit. It was no hardship to tear myself away and I followed him outside into the dancing rain. Lane took a left up Bridge Street, then turned his back on the Abbey and walked to the post office where his bus stop was. I had a pretty good idea where this was going and I had no intention of tagging along again. Not once had he given the slightest indication that he didn’t need the stick, not a single lapse and no exaggerations either. He just looked like a guy who had a slight problem in the walking and staying upright department.
I scanned the street for anyone following Lane. I could still hear Deeks say ‘brand new detective constable, good exercise for him’ but I couldn’t see any evidence of a tail on Lane. Or perhaps the DC was better than I’d thought. I didn’t much care because I was starving by now and had been running around long enough. A reward was in order so I steered a course towards the Abbey Church Yard. The rain and the lateness of the season had cleared it of tourists but all too soon it would be sporting a giant Christmas tree. I crossed to the Pump Room. Water is Best some abstemious wit had chiselled on top of the sandstone façade, in ancient Greek no less. Yes, water was all right, I’d called the business after the stuff, but right now I felt I’d seen enough of it. I was shown to a table near the low stage where the Pump Room Trio were playing Mozart at an unobtrusive volume. Here, everything was calm, relaxing and reassuringly expensive. As always the service was swift and efficient. I ordered Eggs Benedict and a pot of Earl Grey and sat back to enjoy the salubrious surroundings. By the south window a bloke in Georgian costume still dispensed the warm mineral water that came out of the ground here but there weren’t many takers today. Apparently the water that bubbles up is an amazing twelve thousand years old. It tastes like it, too.
It didn’t take long for the perfectly proportioned columns, the splendid chandelier and the excellent ambience of the room to convince you that you were indulging in real luxury, even before you looked at your bill. The tea arrived first. My stomach gave a delicate rumble as the waitress poured the first cup for me. Naturally as a private eye I was supposed to drink mugs of stewed tea and eat eggs-over-easy in a ‘greasy spoon’ somewhere but apart from the fact that you’d be hard pressed to find such an establishment in Bath it just wasn’t my style. This, I was telling myself, as the white-aproned waitress wended her way towards me with my Eggs Benedict, was my style. Just then dirty jagged shadows fell across the pristine white of the table linen. The waitress slowed, then stopped.
‘Thank you, we’re not hungry,’ said DI Deeks. The waitress hovered uncertainly.
‘And he’s about to lose his appetite,’ added DS Sorbie, pointing at me.
Quite the comedy duo. There was no sign of hangover in Sorbie today; he was well shaven, neatly pressed and frighteningly alert.
‘What’s up with you two?’ I asked, annoyed because the waitress was retreating with my order towards the manager at the cash desk.
‘We bring glad tidings,’ Deeks said. ‘We found your car.’
My heart sank. ‘Did they trash it? Where’d you find it?’
‘Not much damage but then I’m told it wouldn’t have looked much different before you said you lost it.’
‘Very funny. Where is it?’
‘In the middle of a field in Lower Swainswick.’
‘So it’s not a total write-off? They didn’t torch it?’
‘No,’ said Sorbie reassuringly. ‘It’ll be just fine. Once we’ve scraped the dead body off the back seat.’
Chapter Four
The car zipped fast up Lansdown hill. DS Sorbie was driving, I was in the back of the big Ford with Deeks. Neither of them answered any of my questions though where we were going was becoming obvious when Sorbie screeched right, down a minor road which soon turned into a network of muddy farm tracks. ‘We really want a Land Rover for this kind of thing,’ Sorbie complained as he cranked on the wheel to avoid the worst ruts and holes.
‘Dream on,’ Deeks encouraged him. He turned to me. ‘Now, I should really have cautioned you at the Pump Room only the Super said there was no need. But you do anything stupid or even think about doing it and I’ll cuff you, clear?’
So Needham had put in a word for me. Obviously not a huge one or I’d be finishing my Eggs Benedict just about now but a word nonetheless. ‘Yeah, no sweat.’ Then I gave an involuntary groan because as we splished past yet another cluster of dripping farm buildings I could see it there below us. Smack in the middle of a gently sloping field of pasture stood my car. Three doors were open. The tracks on two sides of the field were clogged with police vehicles: Land Rovers and saloons and a noddy car, vans, a minibus and an ambulance. There was a large white tent in the field, just below and to the left of my black DS21. Police tape fluttered everywhere.
When we got there Sorbie simply abandoned the car on the track and we all got out into the thin rain. We hopped and zigzagged and took unnaturally long strides to avoid the puddles and waterlogged ruts until we got to a uniformed constable stoically guarding the remains of a wooden five-bar gate. It looked like someone had driven the DS straight through it. It also looked like it was half rotten anyway which meant somebody had been lucky; only on TV do wooden gates simply crumble when you drive through them. The small field was bordered by hedgerows on all sides and this appeared to be the only way in. Scene of Crime Officers were busy along the hedge, around the car and the tent, all in their white space outfits. At the entrance to the tent stood the bulk of Superintendent Michael Needham, sensibly clad in a blue rainproof over his suit. He’d stuffed his trousers into a pair of black wellies but even so he’d managed to get his suit splashed with mud. His deep-set intelligent eyes under thin, dark eyebrows dispassionately followed our slithering progress up the slick slope. Needham’s sparse grey hair was closely cropped, his broad face pale and tired, his mouth set in impatient contempt. By the time we got to him the bottoms of our trousers were dark and heavy with moisture and mud.
I noticed Needham had lost a bit of weight recently yet I preferred him when he wasn’t on a diet. Diets really did make him grumpy. He missed his Danish pastries and absolutely loathed tea without sugar. Just now he took a sip from a plastic mug, pulled a sour face and splashed the remainder of the grey liquid on the ground, which probably meant it was missing that vital ingredient. He dropped the mug on to the trestle table behind him without looking where it fell and attracted my full attention by grabbing my arm hard. ‘You’re in deep shit this time, Honeysett, so no arsing about. Do exactly as you’re told, touch nothing, answer all questions in full, stay behind me. Got that?’
‘Got it,’ I agreed soberly.
‘Deeks, Sorbie, stay here.’ Needham talked to them like they were a couple of hounds.
I followed him up to the Citroën which stood, mud-spattered and with a crumpled bonnet, just above us, nose pointing to the right. Forensics were still busy all around and a bloke with a large video camera took sweeping panoramic shots of the valley.
The offside rear door was closed. Inside, against the window, slumped the body of a man. A blue and white face below a mess of bloody skull pressed against the pane. Blood streaks and mud nearly obscured the glass. There was a hand print in the middle of it all. Someone was moving around inside on the back seat and two technicians in moon suits, both women, were standing by the open door on the other side.
‘Let’s move round,’ said Needham who was quite surefooted in his boots. I slithered on. ‘Give us some room,’ he said to the techies, who stepped well back to allow for Needham’s circumference. ‘So you left the body but took the car keys,’ he said to me conversationally.
‘I didn’t drive the damn — ’
‘How’re you doing in there, Prof?’ Needham called.
Professor Earns
haw Meyers, the white-haired Home Office pathologist, was sitting comfortably on the rear seat next to the slumped corpse. ‘Just finishing,’ he said, scratching away with a fountain pen on a pad of forms on top of his fat aluminium briefcase that was lying across his knees. I stuck my head around the corner. Meyers looked absolutely ancient, with sparse white hair and parchment skin, but apparently he’d always looked like that and was nowhere near retirement age. ‘Mr Honeysett,’ he said by way of greeting without bothering to look up. We had met before. He finished scribbling, pocketed the pad and pen and slid his bum out of the car. The smells of blood, urine and faeces that came out with him nearly made me retch.
‘What have you got for me then, Prof?’ Needham said chummily. ‘And don’t make it too polysyllabic, I’m not in the mood.’
‘One dead male, aged between sixty and sixty-five, I’d say. Not particularly tall but you’ll get all that later. Trauma to the front of the skull, abrasions to the face and hands. Could have been an accident but — ’
‘Did you run over him, Honeysett?’ Needham interrupted.
‘As I told Deeks — ’
‘Go on, sorry,’ he said to Meyers.
‘His injuries appear to be consistent with having been involved in a vehicular accident, though his head injury suggests some kind of attack prior to that. Could turn out to be the Gobi. I estimate the time of — ’
‘Wait!’ I said. ‘The what?’ The Gobi? What was he talking about? The desert? Some kind of ghost?
‘Good Old Blunt Instrument,’ Needham supplied. ‘Did you hit him with your car jack?’
‘I never saw the bl-’
‘Sorry, Prof, you were saying about the time of death?’
‘About six, seven hours ago. Sometime between five and six this morning.’
‘You said it could have been an accident. So he wasn’t killed in the car?’
‘Oh no. It looks very much like he entered the car after he received his injuries. And died quite some time later. Enough time to move about and lose a considerable amount of blood. That’s all I’m going to say at this stage.’ He nodded to us. ‘Gentlemen.’ Then he took off down the hill, swinging his aluminium case like a schoolboy on a field trip.
‘Right,’ Needham said. ‘Who is he, Chris? Don’t touch the car.’
I bent down, hands on my knees for support, and took a long look at the dead guy. Even before his accident or fateful meeting with the Gobi he’d been no oil painting. He had large fleshy ears, now looking waxy, practically no lips and false teeth. I knew this because his mouth hung open and the upper plate of his dentures had fallen down, giving him a double row of shark’s teeth at the bottom. His sparse, bloody hair still had some dark in it. He wore a cream weatherproof jacket and olive green, well-worn cords, now half pulled down after Meyers had taken the rectal temperature. Accident or murder, there was no dignity in the man’s death.
I shook my head. ‘Never. .’
‘. . seen him before in your life,’ Needham finished for me. ‘All right, let’s go and we’ll have a nice long chat down the station.’
The Bath cop shop is a no-frills concrete lump of ugliness, sitting shamelessly between St John’s and the Manvers Street Baptist Church. No amount of flowerpots on the outside or corporate colour scheming on the inside was going to dispel the air of architectural depression that the concrete walls sweated out. Even the Superintendent seemed heavier, slower, unhappier when walking its hard-wearing carpets and looked gloomier than ever once we had all settled in a cheerless interview room. Deeks was there too. After he had done the preliminaries with the tape — time, date, who was there and the fact that I’d waived my right to have a solicitor present at this stage — Needham began to patiently ask me the same damn questions over and over. How come my keys were missing? When had I first noticed I’d lost them? When could they have been stolen? Who was the dead guy, where had I met him, did we have an argument, what did I hit him with, did I run over him? Perhaps I was going to drive him to hospital and he died on the way and I panicked? Completely understandable, he assured me. Best come clean now, save us all a lot of bother. Or did I find him already hurt and then decide to give him a lift? Did I crash through the gate then bail out when I found he had croaked on the back seat? Deeks supplied the odd question but mainly it was the good old Needham-Honeysett ding-dong. Cop-shop tea arrived and was drunk — Needham produced a plastic dispenser of sweeteners from his pocket and stirred in a hailstorm of them with his biro — while my stomach rumbled indelicately in protest and then it all started again from the beginning with exactly the same questions. Their patience and capacity for going over the same ground for hours and hours always astounded me and drove me up the wall. Which is of course where they wanted me. There was no way Needham thought even for one minute that I had bashed the guy’s head in, then stuffed him in the back of my car and parked it in the middle of a field for someone to find. If he did then police would be swarming all over Mill House by now and I’d be wearing paper clothes while all my gear was on its way to a forensics lab in Chepstow to be analysed for traces of blood. But of course he still had to do the due process and good copper thing and I was all he had so we spent the afternoon angry and bored at the same time, with rumbling sour stomachs from too much tepid quick-brew while futility filled the space between us like a fog.
All this was eventually followed by a written statement. I hung around for another half-hour waiting to sign the printed version. Needham grabbed it from under my biro almost before I’d finished my signature. We were all as irritated as each other. ‘Right, you can go. We’ll do it all over again as soon as we know who he was.’
Naturally I didn’t say so but I had the unenviable certainty that the dead man’s name was Albert.
The one good thing about autumn and winter as far as I could make out was the plentiful and cheap supply of pheasants. For many landowners it was the shoots that kept them from going under and new ones were springing up everywhere. Pheasant shooting had become the fashionable pastime for townies now. At some companies it had even replaced paintball games as a team building exercise. They taught their employees to shoot, then took them to the country and let them blast pheasants out of the sky to boost their morale. The staff’s, not the pheasants’, obviously. (It struck me that you had to be quite sure of your staff’s loyalty to hand them all a shotgun, though.) It was rumoured that at some shoots the bag was so great that the majority of it was simply buried. The upshot (sorry) of all this was that the price of pheasant was tumbling and had now fallen to that of non-cardboard chicken.
It was dark and still raining by the time I left Manvers Street behind. By now I was seriously hungry. I just made it to Bartlett amp; Sons, the butcher’s in Green Street, before they closed their doors, then rattled home on the Norton with a brace of pheasant strapped to the tank. When I splashed into the waterlogged yard I could see light up in the studio — Annis was working late. I was thoroughly wet and cheesed off with the day, and famished. I stabled the Norton and promised myself that I’d devour the first edible thing I clapped eyes on when I got inside. I walked into the kitchen. At the end of the long table stood a big stripy pumpkin, an annual gift from one of our neighbours in the valley. Not exactly convenience food. Okay the second thing then. I found some seriously ripe cheese oozing on to a plate in the pantry and set to work on it. I instantly felt better. Not exactly at one with the world but better. I could faintly hear the phone ring in my little office in the attic but had no intention of answering it. Now or ever.
There’s nothing wrong with just shoving pheasant in the oven as long as you drape some streaky bacon over it to stop it from drying out but I felt I needed a serious treat. After a shower and a change of clothes I grabbed the big oval casserole, browned one of the birds in oil and butter on top of the stove and flamed it with a good splash of brandy. Then I chucked in some herbs from our straggly herb garden by the kitchen door and ladled in a couple of pints of stock. Some double cream, just a
criminal amount, would finish it off nicely. I stuck the lid on and shoved it on the back of the stove to simmer. Then I poured myself a brandy, put my feet up on another chair and tried to relax while listening to the pot bubbling on the Rayburn. It didn’t work.
Dead bodies, especially bloody ones, can have that effect on me. So who was the dead old boy in the back of my car? How did he get there? What had killed him? I could leave that question safely to Prof Meyers. But should I have told Needham about Albert, about Cairn and Heather’s attempt to hire me? Should I have told him about ‘the witch’ and the conversation Cairn overheard? It would have sounded like I’d made the whole thing up and I’d probably still be at Manvers Street answering useless questions. I sat up again and gulped my brandy. It didn’t have to be Albert, did it? No. It was the same area Cairn had been talking about. So what? And even if it was the aforementioned Albert what was I supposed to do about it?
