The Hissing of the Silent Lonely Room (The Christy Kennedy Mysteries Book 5)

by Paul Charles

  Irvine laughed. ‘Well, I suppose it makes a lot of sense.’

  ‘Yes, he’ll change things around so he’ll appear to have some artistic input. He’ll maybe put together a compilation of his own choosing and write the sleeve notes for it. With his new-found power he could eventually control what’s out there of Esther’s. This way he’ll have the final say on how she would eventually be judged. There might even be some unfinished work, demos or whatever, that he’ll finish, giving himself a co-songwriting credit.’

  ‘Nah. He’d never be allowed to do that, surely?’

  ‘Well, look at The Beatles, they did it to John Lennon’s demo of “Free as a Bird”. Yoko was obviously in the thick of it, but we’ve come to expect that from her. But the other Beatles, how could they do that to their mate?’ Kennedy asked. It wasn’t really a question. ‘The other thing Yeats may choose to do, is to release inferior material never planned for public airing, just to water down the strength of the legend. You know, “This genius who created Axis was also responsible for this”. He’d obviously argue that the fans had a right to it. A right to it when Yeats deemed appropriate.’

  ‘Or when his bank balance needed it?’ Irvine chipped in.

  ‘Exactly,’ Kennedy replied.

  ‘But how could he have managed to murder her and make it look like the classic suicide case everyone is claiming it is?’

  ‘And that is another question altogether, James,’ Kennedy said, turning to look into the kitchen again. He stood in silence for a few minutes without saying a word.

  ‘Look James, I’m going to stay here for a while, you go ahead. I’ll walk back to North Bridge House later when I’m finished.’

  ‘If you’re sure,’ Irvine said.

  ‘Positively. Look, check with Tim Flynn on the will situation when you get back. I’ll see you and the rest of the team in about three quarters of an hour, and we’ll go through the new info we’ve picked up since last we met.’

  *

  Kennedy was picking up a weird vibe in the kitchen. He took a pair of plastic gloves from the inside pocket of his Crombie. He pulled them over his hands. He always had a slightly uncomfortable feeling when doing this. Not quite as bad as when someone scraped a pane of glass with their fingernails but perhaps number two on that particular Richter Scale. He turned on the gas tap; the one he assumed would release the gas to the top right rim of the hob. There was nothing, no reaction. No evil hissing to interfere with the silence of the lonely room.

  The taps had been dusted for fingerprints, brush-coated with metallic powder. He wondered if any had been found. What if Esther Bluewood’s fingerprints were the last set of prints on the taps? That would almost certainly mean that she had committed suicide. Kennedy went through the procedure in his head. He realised that the prints of the person who turned the gas off, Judy Dillon, would be on the tap. But in her statement she hadn’t said that she’d turned the taps off. She’d discovered the body ahead of the police and gasman and collapsed into a heap. Had the man from the gas company turned the tap off? If so, it would be his prints, or (if he was wearing gloves) his smudges, that would be on the tap? Kennedy made a mental note to check the report and confirm with the man from the gas company. Either way he couldn’t remember anybody saying they’d turned the gas taps off. So, if the gas had been escaping all night, how come there hadn’t been an explosion or how come the children hadn’t been harmed by it?

  Yes, the downstairs neighbour had been affected, but only in a minor way. The heavy gas had obviously fallen and found its evil way to the storey below. The children, contentedly sleeping above, had been totally unaffected.

  Kennedy returned that tap to the off position and tried the three others that controlled the remaining rings. Again nothing, nothing foul and sickly to contaminate the fresh, cool air. Kennedy could imagine that in the right mood, the sickly smell might be quite intoxicating, in much the same way a cheap bottle of wine would be or even, he supposed, the way meths appealed to a meths drinker.

  If one was gassing oneself, at what point in the procedure would you feel in danger? Would you be so enraptured with the power of the poison filling your eager lungs, you’d willing give yourself up to the feeling? Could there become a point in the procedure where you wouldn’t resist ‘surrendering to the rhythm’?

  Kenney guessed that if you gassed yourself it wouldn’t be a cry for help, it would be because you felt a compulsion to kill yourself. Hugh Watson had told him about the difference. The likable therapist had said Esther’s earlier American suicide attempt had been exactly that, a cry for help. Other people, Watson had assured the detective, were sadly destined to take their own lives and were beyond help. Some even went as far as to seek our help and flirt with redemption for several months, sometimes even years, before eventually ending their lives and finally succumbing to the lasting peace they felt death brought.

  Why was there no gas escaping now? Kennedy knew the gas company had felt it safe enough to turn the supply to the house back on, and had done so. He looked behind the cooker, as close as he could get to the wall. He saw a thick pipe come out of the back of the cooker and he followed it behind the cupboard and out the other side, where it connected to a coin meter.

  There was no gas because the money had run out. Why hadn’t it expired in time to spare Esther Bluewood her life? Kennedy sat on the floor in front of the meter and stared at it. Why hadn’t Esther enjoyed the luck of the gas running out? Had someone ensured there was enough gas available to pollute her body? How would they have done it? Same way as with a parking meter, his inner voice answered him; someone had fed it.

  Kennedy studied the gas meter. It ate fifty pence pieces. Surely if the meter had been fed there must be a chance that the fifty pence pieces would have fingerprints on them? But then for someone to carry out a murder as clever as this, they’d obviously have worn gloves, wouldn’t they? Maybe not. Kennedy resolved to have the meter emptied the following morning and have the coins dusted for prints.

  That also could have been the mechanism the murderer had used to turn off the gas when the deed was done. The meter would have done the murderer’s work for him. How would he have known how many fifty pence pieces it would take to kill someone? Why was Kennedy continually referring to the killer as ‘him’. Could it be that the ‘him’ in question might have had a conscience and wanted to ensure his children’s safety, by minimising the risk of the building blowing up or his children being gassed?

  Clever though, Kennedy thought. But how had he turned it on, activated the flow of the gas in the first place? Some mechanism that dropped the coins into the meter, maybe using a timer? Kennedy’s mind raced through various devices, including candle wax, chewing gum, lollipop sticks, rubber bands, pieces of paper folded into funnels which might have been dismissed as scraps of paper when the police where doing their investigation.

  Whoever had killed Esther Bluewood knew that Judy Dillon would have been the one to find the body. Probably even concocted the plan with her in mind. Wouldn’t it be convenient if Judy Dillon herself was the murderer, then she would have been in the best position to destroy any and all evidence? But Kennedy chastised himself for making the mistake he often reprimanded his team for. He was racing ahead of himself, making the crime fit the facts. He’d a lot more work to do yet; he’d a lot more information to collect before he was going to be in a position to start making choices.

  But having thought all of the above, he had to admit that Judy Dillon’s position as nanny afforded her the best opportunity to remove evidence from the scene of the crime. He then started considering her possible motives. His mind was racing ahead of itself again. As ann rea kept telling him; your head’s got a mind of its own.

  Kennedy decided it was time to get back and compare notes with the rest of the team. Perhaps he was closer to solving this case than he’d dreamed possible just twenty-five minutes earlier when Irvine had left.

  Chapter 30

  KENNEDY RETURNED to N
orth Bridge House, only to find no mention in the file about either the gasman or Judy Dillon claiming to have turned the gas taps off. That was something that would have to wait until tomorrow – as would the news on the will, as Time Flynn had gone off duty.

  Kennedy and his team then spent an hour swapping the information they had learned during the day. For the next day, Thursday, they were assigned to follow up leads on the gas tap, check the will and hopefully interview Rosslyn St Clair and see what her side of the story was.

  The detective inspector was surprised to find that ann rea had telephoned twice in the late afternoon. He checked his watch as the last of the team, Coles and Irvine as usual, departed his office. Eight twenty. Too late to ring her at the newspaper. Should he continue to try to stay professional and leave it until the morning, or should he ring her at home?

  After all was said and done, he claimed to be her friend and she might well need him as a friend. She, like him, didn’t have a generous scatter of friends to call from. With a solitary image of her burning in his mind, he dialled her home number.

  ‘Kennedy?’ she said immediately, before he’d even had a chance to offer a word of greeting. Was she so lonely that no one other than Kennedy rang her at home? Or was it just a wishful reflex?

  ‘Hi,’ Kennedy said, trying to sound as friendly and as casual as he could possibly.

  ‘God, Christy, I miss you so much,’ ann rea gushed. ‘There, I’ve fecked up already haven’t I? It’s okay to think that stuff, it’s not okay to say it, is it?’

  ‘It’s best to be honest when expressing your feelings, ann rea. It hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses for me either, you know,’ Kennedy said. He’d just been saying, as in the last few seconds, that it was best to be honest when expressing your feelings and here he was saying, implying, that he was missing her. The truth, as ever, was that he was consumed on his case.

  Kennedy felt it was very important not to lose sight of the edge of the pit in case you fell in. He felt you could do better work if you were able to ‘turn off’. It was easier to be rational if the demons of the working day weren’t constantly inside your head. Even so, he had an inkling that at some point in his life all the corpses he’d ever looked at were going to return to haunt him. Was that why he was so scared of all these corpses? Scared was the only word that really expressed how he felt.

  When he’d started on the crime squad, he’d been rendered so distraught by the sight of his first corpse, he thought he’d either have to quit the police or else move to traffic or some other equally boring branch of the service. In the 1970s he’d been stationed in Hammersmith, and a nineteen-year-old girl’s body had been found behind the Odeon, which – according to The Guinness Book Of Records, at least – is the biggest cinema in Europe. Kennedy had just joined the crime squad as a DC and he was proudly accompanying his detective inspector, a compassionate Yorkshireman, to the scene. Everything went well until it came time to examine the body. The vision still burned a hole in Kennedy’s mind. She lay lifeless on top of a pile of rubbish bags, micro skirt (not much more than a belt) tucked up around her waist, thigh-length platform boots, and arms sprawled in a lazy X-shape. Eyes wide open and a look on her face Kennedy interpreted as, why me?

  It wasn’t so much that it made him want to be sick, he was repulsed, and his stomach heaved a few times. But the overwhelming emotion he felt was anger; he wanted to go and find the person who had done this terrible thing. Seek out the animal who had ended this young life, shattered her dreams and the dreams of her parents, and her friends. He wanted to find this person and kill them. Actually he wanted to find a way to not just kill them, but to make them suffer more than she had suffered, more than her parents and friends had suffered.

  ‘Don’t get mad, get even!’ the Yorkshire DI had come up and whispered into his ear, only too aware of what was going through Kennedy’s head.

  ‘You’re no good to her and you’re no good to me if you’re going to want to satisfy the fire I can see burning in your eyes. We can never ever make up for the loss of this life. Listen to me, and listen to me good. All we can do, all we must do, is be logical and methodical about this and go out and forget revenge and use the brains God gave us along with our eyes, and find out who did this. We must use our guile and our cunning to track them down and hand them over to the courts. That’s it, that’s where our job ends. If we do this and do it good, perhaps in some small way we send out a message that says, “do this on our patch and you’re not going to get away with it”. That’s all we can do. To do it any differently, no matter how popular they make it appear in movies, make us no better than the scum we are up against.’

  The Yorkshireman’s words didn’t make dealing with corpses any easier for Kennedy but they did give him the resolve as to what he wanted to do in the police. Perhaps that initial drive and enthusiasm had carried him along to the extent that he didn’t need or want to get mixed up in the world of police career politics. He was happy to get on with his work as long as he was allowed the freedom to do what he was best at; solving crime, leaving the politics to the likes of Superintendent Thomas Castle.

  ‘Kennedy,’ the voice at the other end of the phone called out, ‘you still there? You still with me?’

  ‘Sorry, yes, of course.’ Kennedy hoped his reply didn’t sound like a sigh.

  ‘Kennedy, I don’t want to be by myself. Can I come over?’

  He wasn’t sure of the wisdom of such a visit, but he could hear how much ann rea wanted it.

  ‘Of course,’ he replied.

  Eleven minutes later, after she rang his door bell at ten twenty-five, the first thing she said was, ‘Thanks, Christy.’

  ‘No. No, no, goodness, no thanks,’ he said awkwardly.

  ‘No, I meant thanks for saying, of course, and not saying, yes but I’m tired so can we not talk about us and all this stuff between us?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Let’s just have a pleasant evening like we used to and forget about all this stuff. Can we do that, Kennedy?’ she said, interlinking their arms and snuggling up close to his shoulder, making it difficult, but not impossible, for him to shut the door.

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Kennedy announced.

  ‘Great idea,’ ann rea replied and they went through to Kennedy’s family-room-cum-kitchen. ann rea always said this was her favourite room in Kennedy’s house, his room of food, chat and music. She was always suggesting to him that if he discreetly managed to fit a mattress somewhere in his kitchen, it would surely be the perfect room!

  Kennedy uncorked a chilled bottle of wine, poured a couple of glasses and set about cooking one of his specialties; fresh bread rolls stuffed with crispy bacon and baked beans.

  ann rea wandered through to the adjoining front room and fired up the stereo system. Soon Esther Bluewood’s deep voice filled the speakers. The opening electric guitar chords, so hypnotic, so compelling, with the repeat echo effect teasing before the big drum sound introduced the lead guitar, which, in turn, played across the echo guitar, heralding the arrival of the most comforting of voices. Although the voice was comforting, the lyrics were always stimulating and sometimes disturbing. Now she was singing about how the body was in trouble. The song got to Kennedy every single time he listened to it. It never ceased to move him. That was before Esther Bluewood had been found lifeless on her kitchen floor. Now the song totally destroyed Kennedy. Now some of the feelings he’d felt behind the Hammersmith Odeon returned and he found himself wanting to grab hold of Paul Yeats’ neck and twist.

  Kennedy sipped on the wine, trying to concentrate on his HP sauce-flavoured bread roll, leaving ann rea to dance gently around the front room, totally engulfed by the music, her panic attack now apparently over. Kennedy had to admit, no matter what bad stuff went down between them, at that moment he still felt a lot better knowing that she was there with him.

  Was that to do with his insecurities? He’d accepted that ann rea was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of this
life with. He’d equally accepted that this was not the case for her. He even gone further than that and accepted the fact that it was time to deal with it all and get on with his life. Coincidentally, Esther Bluewood started singing “New Way, New Day”, which dovetailed perfectly with Kennedy’s thoughts. It was time for the new way on the new day, but the new day could wait until tomorrow. Today he was happy to be sharing this time, and space, and music, with ann rea, the woman he’d been closest to in his life.

  In the front room, ann rea drifted on in her dance; she needed this time as much as he did. Kennedy went through and refilled the wine glass in her hand, and he was sure she didn’t even notice. Her movements were so gentle she barely caused a ripple in her drink. Her dance might have been gentle, but it was also sensual. Now Esther was singing about one love not being enough, but how there is only one love. The song was about moving much better when you’re happy.

  It was just when she sang, When you know why you’re happy, it sounded like a plea, like a cry. The power of her voice at that point was so effective she pulled you into the heart and soul of her song. Right into her heart and soul. Esther was so brave she held absolutely nothing back from her listener. All of this was set to a gentle semi-reggae beat. That was the thing about Esther Bluewood’s music; it was so beautifully melodic with concise, perfectly visual lyrics, but, at the same time, intensely rhythmic. It drew you to your own natural dance and a little movement was enough to make you feel that your body was being washed by and immersed in her glorious sound.