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

by Paul Charles

  Kennedy and Irvine parked illegally, directly outside the solicitor’s office, and waited and waited. Eventually Jill and Jim Beck came out through the front door. The solicitor’s door opened for a second time and Kennedy and Irvine, suspecting it was going to be Yeats, prepared to get out of the car.

  It was Yeats.

  The snag, however, was that their exit from the car was blocked by a traffic warden. A total nutter who ignored Irvine’s quiet explanation about them being members of the local constabulary. The warden, proud in his green piped suit, retorted, loudly, that if they were in fact members of the local police force then they should know better than to park illegally.

  Paul Yeats witnessed all this and jumped over the adjoining fence and ran through the neighbouring gardens.

  Irvine was about to give chase when the warden quoted subsection D stroke oblique 19c and restrained him.

  ‘You can’t leave this car, man. This is my patch man, and I suggest you do as I say. You do what I say when I say it. You come on to my territory, you have me to answer to. Okay, Scottie? Okay, Paddy?’ The traffic warden was now playing to the gallery, an ever-increasing crowd had gathered, interested in the commotion.

  Kennedy and Irvine looked at each other in complete disbelief.

  ‘What’s wrong, boys, you don’t understand the Queen’s English? Well, let me spell it out for you. You’re getting a ticket and if you try to leave this car here against my orders, you’ll be further breaking the law of the highway and be liable to—’

  ‘Okay that’s enough, DS Irvine arrest the stupid tosser. Cuff him, dump him in the back of the car and throw him in the cells when we get back to North Bridge House.’

  The warden turned vicious, and began screaming and shouting, but at the same time backing away from Irvine.

  ‘Oh, and DS Irvine,’ added Kennedy, ‘if he resists arrest, do whatever you need to restrain him.’ The crowd were now whooping and cheering just like on the Jerry Springer Show.

  The hapless warden attempted to turn and make a run for it, but some of the crowd, obviously those with a civil consciousness and not, as later claimed, bigots and haters of the traffic regulators, restrained him until such time as Irvine could handcuff him. Derek, the warden, meekly allowed himself to be put in the back of the car and as the police drove off with prisoner restrained in the rear of the car, the gallery burst into applause.

  Irvine and Kennedy turned Derek over to Sergeant Flynn and asked him to book him on charge of ‘impeding the police while in pursuit of their duty’. Kennedy further advised Flynn that because Derek had in effect helped a potential criminal escape, they, the police, were going to have to address the matter of apprehending said criminal before they would find time to attend to the paperwork associated with Derek.

  Derek, realising he was being done up like a kipper, shrugged and fell into an ‘if only’ mood. Kennedy hoped the main thought was ‘if only I’d kept my big mouth shut!’.

  In the meantime, Paul Yeats was in the frame but on the loose, so Kennedy had Irvine put out an all-points bulletin on him. Over the course of the next day, Yeats was going to get more publicity than he’d enjoyed his entire career.

  ‘Well, that was a great bit of fun, wasn’t it?’ Irvine said, when all the excitement had died down.

  ‘Yeah. It was his own fault, though. I tell you, if these traffic wardens don’t cool it, pretty soon we’re going to get a call saying one of them has been killed by an irate motorist. They’re unbelievable.’

  ‘Come on, sir, with respect, some of them must be okay.’

  ‘Perhaps, but if they had any brains they’d surely be doing something else, don’t you think?’

  They were back in his office now, enjoying a cup of tea after all the excitement. The phone rang. It was Sergeant Flynn advising Kennedy that a Phil Green from the gas company had turned up in reception asking for either Kennedy or Irvine.

  ‘Good. We’ll be out to see him in a second,’ Kennedy said. On the way to the front desk Irvine advised Kennedy that he had put out a trace on Phil Green, the first man at the scene of Esther Bluewood’s supposed suicide. Irvine had been advised that Green was out on a call. The DS requested Mr Green check in with either himself or Kennedy at North Bridge House as soon as possible.

  And here he was in reception chatting with Sergeant Flynn. He apologised to Irvine for being so hard to pin down, but he’d been over in St John’s Wood on a call and didn’t get the message from Camden CID until about ten minutes ago.

  Phil Green was an elongated version of Hannibal Lecter – well, at least of Sir Anthony Hopkin’s interpretation of the gourmet serial killer. Perhaps it was the blue boiler suit and blue wellingtons with burgundy toe pieces that provided Kennedy with the flash. The friendly, yet demonic, eyes and semi-bald head also helped create the illusion.

  ‘I was the first on the scene, my oppo, Packo and myself. We were responding to the call on the gas emergency line from Miss Dillon,’ Phil said in his soft Geordie accent. He continuously consulted his notebook as he relayed information to Irvine and Kennedy. ‘I think she must have dialled the police and you guys advised us. On the way over to Fitzroy Road I checked the records. We have a little computer in the van. Bugger me, it’s great. All mod cons these days. I wanted to see what the installation was. It was a coin-operated meter. A lot of landlords who don’t want to be lumbered with former tenants’ gas bills make sure meters are fitted so that the tenants have to pay for gas as it’s used. When we arrived I turned off the gas in the street as a safety measure although, unless someone had intentionally fed the meter, there was always a good chance that the coins would have been used up. Miss Dillon opened the door for us. She followed us in.’

  ‘Is that usual, surely she could have been in danger?’

  ‘I told her to stay behind us, but she wouldn’t listen. Bugger me, if she wasn’t there beside us all the time, very nosey she was. When we came to the kitchen door, it was closed. I opened it slowly. That was when we saw the body. The next thing I knew, Miss Dillon had collapsed in a heap behind us.’

  ‘You are quite sure that Miss Dillon collapsed before she got near the oven?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘Bugger me, yes, and what a thud. That’s a lot of weight to hit the floor. She collapsed just by the door.’

  ‘What happened next?’ Irvine asked.

  ‘After we’d made sure she was okay, I checked all the outlets to be sure they’d all been turned off. They were all already off. I remember wondering who’d done it. I assumed Miss Dillon had been in there already and had faked the passing out to make it look like she was seeing the body for the first time. But that’s probably just because I watch too many television detective stories.’

  ‘What else did you see?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘Well, let me think now, there was a neatly-folded lemon-coloured towel placed inside the oven and a dark blue towel folded up along the back of the door. I thought about that, sir. Surely if she or anyone else had already been in the house, the towel would have been pushed back to the extreme of the door’s opening arc?’

  ‘Did you notice if the towel was back there, in the fully-opened position?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘I have to say, I think I was opening the door for the first time,’ Phil said. His Geordie roots were obvious by his accent, and he spoke slowly, clearly and confidently. ‘I opened the door very slowly. I thought I could feel a little bit of resistance, which would have been the towel. You know all the signs make me think it was a suicide. Like that towel carefully placed inside the oven so that the head doesn’t get too uncomfortable as the gas does its evil work. And a towel behind the door to make sure gas doesn’t escape to the rest of the house.’

  ‘So, to get this totally clear – you definitely did not turn off the gas taps on the cooker?’

  ‘No. They were all turned off already.’

  ‘You’re quite sure about that?’ Kennedy pushed further on this point, stressing its importance.

 
; ‘Bugger me, yes. They were all off. That was when I thought about whether or not Miss Dillon had already been in and turned them off and planted the towel. But I couldn’t work out how anyone could plant a towel like that behind a door,’ Phil said.

  ‘That part’s quite easy,’ Kennedy said, offering a possible explanation. ‘You close the door to its narrowest position but just enough that you can still get out. You lay the towel down carefully along the back of the door and then you squeeze out through the small opening you have left. When the next person through the door opens it, they will invariably open it wider than you. So they think they’ve pushed the towel back as they opened the door.’

  ‘Only with Miss Dillon, sir…well, bugger me, she’d sure have needed the door at the fully-opened position in order to get out.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Kennedy said breaking into a warm smile, ‘well observed. What did you do next?’

  ‘I checked the meter,’ the Geordie said. ‘The coins had run out. That was obviously why the gas hadn’t continued to escape. I thought that was quite clever myself. I thought the woman who had committed suicide had obviously worked out how much gas she would have need to kill herself and put the coins in to match the volume required. She was allowing just enough gas to escape to kill herself but not enough to hurt the bairns or blow up the house.’

  ‘How would she have done that?’ Irvine asked, enthralled by the information they were receiving.

  ‘Bugger me if I know,’ Phil replied honestly. He thought for a while. ‘Well, I suppose you could light the oven and time how long each fifty pence piece lasts. I’m sure some doctor or some expert somewhere has written a book about how long it takes to gas yourself with a domestic appliance; they’ve written books about every other bugger thing.’

  ‘True. If you’re desperate enough to kill yourself, or someone else, there’s always somewhere you can find out the expert way to do it,’ Kennedy said, thinking about his next question. ‘Any leaks from anywhere else?’

  ‘No, we checked the rest of the building. It took us a while to get in down below,’ Phil said checking his notebook. ‘Mr Higgins was slightly overcome. The gas from Miss Bluewood’s flat had fallen through the bare floorboards under the sink and cooker. But as you know he was fine and when we checked the rest of the house it was okay too. I turned on the house supply from the street again before we left. And that’s pretty much it, sir.’

  ‘You’ve been very helpful. Thank you very much Phil, we really do appreciate you coming in,’ Kennedy said. ‘DS Irvine here will see you out.’

  When Irvine returned from his chore, he said, ‘Well, that was interesting, sir. Should I have discovered all of that myself?’

  ‘Nah,’ Kennedy sighed. ‘Just so long as we found it out in time to fit it to the picture we are building. If indeed it does fit the picture.’

  ‘But you do have some kind of picture forming now, don’t you? Is it Yeats?’

  ‘Well, it would certainly be a good idea to have a chat with him, wouldn’t it? Let’s see how we’re getting on with finding him,’ Kennedy said, lifting the phone.

  Chapter 37

  MID-AFTERNOON and nothing new to report, except that Kennedy had put out an all-points bulletin on Josef Jones. It seemed Jones’ social conscience had vanished as quickly as it had arrived. Kennedy now had just two names on his noticeboard suspect list:

  Paul Yeats

  Josef Jones.

  Both were missing or in hiding. But where were they? It would be fractionally harder for Yeats to hide out than Jones, as he still had something of a public profile. Could the two of them have been involved in the murder together? Or could it be that Yeats murdered Esther Bluewood, and Jones murdered Judy Dillon in a totally unrelated incident?

  Kennedy didn’t feel quite ready to confront either suspect, but Yeats had left him with no alternative following his flight over the gardens of Camden Square. Jones, on the other hand, needed to be in custody, if only for his own safety. Kennedy still had part of the puzzle to work out. It was all a wee bit uncomfortable for him, as he usually liked things to fall into place of their own accord. He decided to spend his time waiting for Jones and/or Yeats to be apprehended by rereading Esther Bluewood’s journal. Judy Dillon had possibly lost her life because of something that was in that journal.

  Reading it, Kennedy was surprised at how different an atmosphere it created compared to the classic Axis album. Kennedy liked her free-flowing style, and was sure he would have enjoyed her work had she ever got around to writing a novel. If, in fact, she hadn’t already written one. Deciding what would come out, when it came out, and how it came out, was now ann rea’s problem.

  An edited version of the journal would make good reading. He wondered whether provisions been made for such an eventuality in her will. On and on he read, searching for something, anything that would give him a clue.

  Suddenly he had a thought. What if there were no clues in the journal. What if Paul Yeats was merely desperate to control everything of Esther’s and had heard through the fan grapevine about Judy’s copy? Perhaps even from Josef Jones. Perhaps Yeats had paid Jones to retrieve the journal? Perhaps Yeats knew he was out of the will and the copy of Esther’s journal was as close as he was going to get to her estate. That certainly would have made him desperate to get hold of it.

  Josef Jones could have heard about the journal from Judy. He, in turn, could have dropped the news to Yeats. It certainly wouldn’t have come cheap. If Jones was prepared to kill for it, he would most definitely be making Yeats pay through the nose.

  But something just didn’t fit. Kennedy felt the threads of the case drift away from him. This usually happened when his theories began to veer too far from reality. One minute he was quite happily working his way through the murder, the method and the suspect, and then, all of a sudden, his premise would go down the dumper. This was no bad thing, because it continually made Kennedy reassess his information. Frequently during this rebuilding process, the missing piece of the puzzle would miraculously appear.

  So, his own sister had put Yeats firmly in the frame. If Yeats could murder his own wife, then surely that made him capable of murdering Judy Dillon. Hadn’t he described her as the ‘nanny from hell’? But that was no reason to kill someone, was it? And as for Josef Jones – had he in fact had sex with Judy Dillon because he knew in advance he was going to kill her and by having sex with her he was eliminating vital evidence he might have left about her person and apartment?

  Was he being very clever? Kennedy, like everyone else, found himself thinking that if Josef Jones had murdered Judy then he’d hardly have raced into a police station first thing the following morning claiming to have been intimate with her the night before. Or would he?

  Kennedy made a decision. He decided, for now, to treat both murders separately. Then he would try to find any thread that might tie them together afterwards. He felt happier for making that decision and set about his task afresh. He hadn’t progressed very far when the telephone rang.

  Surprise, surprise, Victoria Lucas had just walked into North Bridge House with her brother, Paul, who was voluntarily surrendered himself to Camden Town CID.

  It was turning out to be one of those cases, Kennedy thought. All he had to do was sit behind his desk and every suspect seemed prepared to walk in from the street and offer themselves up.

  *

  ‘I, sorry, detective inspector, I have to apologise,’ Victoria Lucas announced for the benefit of the tape recorder and for those present in the interview room at the rear of North Bridge House. Those present were the aforementioned Tor Lucas; her brother, Paul Yeats (aka Paul Lucas); WDC Anne Coles; and Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy.

  ‘And may we know what you want to apologise for?’ Kennedy asked quietly.

  ‘Earlier today I may have inadvertently led you to believe that I felt Paul was in some way responsible for Esther’s death.’

  ‘Oh,’ was all Kennedy could find to say.

&n
bsp; ‘Oh indeed,’ Yeats said. He looked more bedraggled than when Kennedy had spotted him outside the offices of Leslie Russell earlier that day. He was dressed in his usual uniform of corduroy brown suit, well-worn and threadbare around the elbows and knees. He wore a green high-neck sweater identical to his sister’s, perhaps even it was his sister’s.

  ‘This has all gotten out of hand, inspector,’ Yeats said, directing his voice to the magic eye of the tape recorder. A common mistake, and Kennedy never ceased to be amazed by the number of witnesses who felt the best way to transfer their voice to the tape was by speaking to the recorder and not to the microphone dangling above them like some minute prehistoric exhibit at the Natural History Museum.

  ‘Look, inspector, I’ll admit I was so mad at Paul I’d have been quite happy for him to go to jail. But I think that the only thing you’ll find him guilty of would be making me angry. And I’m still livid with him. I still can’t believe the Rosslyn story. He assures me he didn’t know anything about it, the abortion I mean—’

  ‘I didn’t, of course I didn’t,’ Yeats said, jumping up from his chair. ‘I love children. You know that. Rosslyn knew it too. She felt because of Esther’s death it would have been bad blood for us to have a child born out of that time. She’s very spiritual, you know.’

  Coles rose from her chair. The threat was enough to make Yeats return to his seat.

  ‘Did Rosslyn feel Esther would have disapproved of the baby?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘I think she would have thought…’ Yeats hesitated.

  ‘She would have felt sorry for Rosslyn,’ Tor announced, cutting her brother off. ‘Esther knew what Rosslyn would have been letting herself in for. Esther probably thought that if Paul couldn’t keep it together with her and Jens and Holmer, how on earth would it have worked with anyone else? Esther also knew that if it hadn’t been Rosslyn, it would most definitely have been someone else.’