A Timely Death

by Janet Neel

  McLeish ran up the stairs to get out of the way of bearers from the police mortuary clattering downwards past him. He turned off to wash in the little cloakroom he had noticed as he came in. He had touched nothing in the basement kitchen and had in any case been wearing gloves which he stripped off and stuffed into a pocket but his hands felt dirty and the smell of the room was in his nostrils.

  ‘I won’t be a minute, Bruce. I need to air off.’

  ‘Not very nice, was it?’

  ‘Well. Probably three days dead. Doesn’t do anyone much good. Can you tell Mr Arnold I’m coming?’

  He stood on the front steps drawing in air to his lungs, causing a stir among the loiterers who always appeared in London when you put a constable and a couple of police cars outside a house. He had fogotten it was a bus route and was disconcerted to find himself the centre of attention for an entire double-decker. It reminded him that this was a busy street, with people up and down it all the time in substantial numbers, not an anonymous deserted residential area where a house-breaker would be much more conspicuous. He stopped to look at the front door, and indeed it was undamaged, all three of the triple locks properly set in, no signs of any attempt to force them.

  He turned to Bruce Davidson who opened the door for him, and announced him. The room was occupied by a tall, blond, rangy man, hunched irritably over a pile of the day’s newspapers. He looked up to greet the police party and sprang athletically to his feet. Close up you could see that he was forty, rather than thirty, but it was a credible impression; the blond straight hair was thick and full of colour and the skin hardly lined except round the eyes. He was admirably slim, showing no signs of too much good living, and McLeish furtively sucked in his own stomach muscles.

  ‘I’m sorry we had to keep you waiting, Mr Arnold.’

  ‘No, no, not at all.’ The man was burning with suppressed energy, or tension, and McLeish watched him as he got the party sat down at the good mahogany table full of neat piles of magazines which constituted the room’s principal piece of furniture.

  Coffee appeared with a young constable and McLeish took it gratefully, heaping in sugar in a way that he recognised would not help his waistline. Miles Arnold accepted but took sweetener.

  ‘Mr Arnold, would you like just to tell us when you arrived and what you did? If I may, I will ask questions as you go along.’

  The MP considered him. ‘Have you – did you – go into the kitchen?’

  ‘Yes. That is why we kept you waiting.’

  ‘Right. Yes. Well. I arrived about ten o’clock. I was going to meet Bill – William Price – here. It’s his office as well as his house. I met Margaret Howard, his secretary, on the doorstep. She’s here, of course – have you asked her?’

  ‘Not yet. I wanted to see you first so you could go on to your appointment.’

  Miles Arnold took this piece of deference as his due. ‘She rang the bell and said to me she always did that just to let Bill know she was here, but when he didn’t answer she unlocked the door.’ He looked suddenly uncertain as the possible impact of what he was saying struck him. ‘So, well … anyway … we came in together, I think she called out something like “Good morning” but there was no answer so she turned into her office and said to me she’d find out where Bill was first and then she’d make me a cup of coffee.’ He paused, reliving the moment. ‘I was starving for a coffee, I’d driven over from Richmond and the traffic was bloody awful, and I’d had a slightly late night, so I decided to go and do it myself. I went down to the kitchen and opened the door.’ He stopped to swallow, convulsively. ‘It was the smell I noticed first, of course,’ he said, shoulders hunched, eyes focused somewhere to McLeish’s right. ‘I don’t know what I thought it was. It was dark, you see, the curtains were still drawn, so I switched on the light. And there was this thing – sorry, but I couldn’t even think what it was for a minute – hanging from the ceiling. Then I realised – I mean, not that it was Bill, but that it was a person, but I’ll tell you something that really got to me. The legs were different lengths. I mean, one was longer than the other, and it panicked me.’ He moistened his lips, the muscles in the long jaw knotting. ‘I just made it to the bog before I chucked up my last two meals, or that’s what it seemed like. I hope I didn’t leave a mess there.’

  McLeish glanced sideways at Davidson who got himself quickly out of the door. It would be important that the squad downstairs knew what had happened; the downstairs lavatory could be important.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’ Miles Arnold was tense and alert.

  ‘Just to have a word with the scene-of-crime squad. No need to wait for him.’

  ‘You can take notes, can you?’ The man was genuinely if briefly interested, and McLeish understood one of the attractions of a political career was that contact with people of all sorts came with the territory.

  ‘If I need to. We can get it down between us for the record anyway. So when you’d recovered a bit?’

  Davidson came round the door silently; he had left it just open and closed it with a click, sliding back into his place without looking at either of them. Miles Arnold looked uncertainly at him.

  ‘Well, I did know I mustn’t touch anything.’ He looked at McLeish for acknowledgement of his sagacity. ‘I mean, it was clear whoever it was was dead. So I just looked enough to be sure whether it – he – was a man or a woman. I thought it must be Bill, who else would it be? And I had some idea of what he’d been doing – I mean, one’s read books after all, not to say the News of the Screws. So I just thought, poor sod, thank Christ one’s roughly normal.’ He gave them a careful look to see that they had registered the point. ‘Then I heard Margaret calling me and I rushed upstairs to keep her away – I closed the door again because of the smell. She’d found the office safe had been robbed and couldn’t think how anyone had got in and wanted me to come and look round the place with her. So I broke it to her and we rang the police.’

  ‘And you didn’t go back downstairs?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I still wanted a coffee – in fact I wanted it even more – so I went up to the corner and brought some back for both of us. I’d hardly got back here before your lot arrived, or rather I suppose the local lads, not your lot. You’re Scotland Yard?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because of me?’

  ‘For a variety of reasons, but certainly your involvement is one of them.’

  ‘When you say my involvement, I’m a parliamentary consultant to Price Fleming. I wouldn’t usually be here on Monday mornings. If they want anything Bill rings me or comes and sees me at the House. One gets too busy as the week goes on.’ He drank another gulp of coffee and considered McLeish. ‘I mean, he must have been dead for days. To smell like that.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Let me think … sorry, but my life at that place is such a madhouse I sometimes don’t know who I have seen. No, I didn’t see him Friday but I did on Thursday, now I think of it. In my office – my secretary will remember.’

  ‘And you had an appointment with him this morning?’

  ‘No. I came by on the off-chance. There was something I wanted to discuss.’ Miles Arnold was fidgeting, shifting in his chair, discharging tension by rubbing the band of his watch; a heavy gold Rolex. ‘Look, I wonder if we could possibly do any more you want on another occasion, later today? I will make myself available of course, but I’m running late – I’ve got a Question down today in the House – and I feel bloody awful, and I think I’d better try and eat a late breakfast, or an early lunch. I’ve told you all I know about actually finding Bill. Not very useful, I’m afraid, but it’s not as if you can’t find me when you want me.’

  ‘Of course.’ McLeish had been expecting to give ground from the moment parliamentary business had been mentioned, and proceeded to do so with good grace. ‘Just two points, if you will. First, when you opened the kitchen door did you see if the French door was open? The one into the garden.’

&nbs
p; ‘No, I didn’t. I’m sorry, it was dark, and there was just a chink of light up that end. Was it?’

  ‘It was unlocked and the window broken.’

  ‘Oh, you mean it was a burglar? Who surprised Bill in medias res, as it were?’

  ‘We are not yet in a position to draw any conclusions. But could you just, finally, tell us what Price Fleming do, and how long you have been connected with them?’

  Miles Arnold stopped fidgeting and looked down at his hands for a minute. ‘Well, they started out as financial consultants and brokers in a small way. Then Bill found that all the regulatory stuff that we so carefully put in place to catch the villains was just too difficult to cope with, so he closed that business – much, I might say, to the customers’ regret. He did them rather well. My sister was a client, that’s how I met Bill. But he’d always been interested in property and he’s got a house in Majorca anyway, so he bought another one and a small hotel. Then it just grew, and he’s got thirty now, in various bits of Majorca.’

  ‘So he’s a hotelier. Or a travel agent?’

  ‘Bit of both. People buy shares in the flats or the hotels for specific times each year.’

  ‘What I call timeshare?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Essentially. On a large scale.’ He hesitated. ‘To be honest I’m not closely in touch with all the detail, but it’s been very successful. Look, the best person to ask about all this is Luke Fleming, Bill’s partner – I imagine Margaret’s found him by now.’

  McLeish, who knew he was on borrowed time, agreed that this would be a sensible course of action, and saw Arnold to his car, a large Jaguar. Somebody was paying this one more than an MP’s salary, and he must as a priority get the Register of Members’ Interests looked up. He ran back up the steps to Davidson, who was improving the hour by chatting up a bouncy young WPC. He would be, of course; Bruce was a darkly good-looking Glaswegian with all his Irish mother’s charm and had always been spectacularly successful with women. His technique, like all effective methods, was simple; if he fancied a girl he asked her to go to bed with him, achieving about a seventy per cent success-rate which as he said was more than enough for one bloke. Francesca’s theory was that as soon as he hit forty – which was five years away – he would marry a dumpy little creature, father eight children and never look at another woman. He caught McLeish’s eye and detached himself.

  ‘Dodgy business, you reckon?’ McLeish asked.

  ‘Oh aye. Very glossy brochures, lots of expensive kit in the office. Bound to be.’

  ‘Lots of perfectly legitimate firms have glossy pictures,’ McLeish objected mildly. ‘But Mr Arnold was pretty keen to tell us he wasn’t involved in the details, wasn’t he? What have we got here?’

  This turned out to be Margaret Howard, a small, dark woman in her fifties, red-eyed, but with all her buttons on, as McLeish’s mother would have said. He invited her to join him after coffee in the waiting-room, and backed out of the room, closing the door hastily behind him, to shut out the sounds associated with four men getting a heavy swollen body up narrow stairs without doing any further damage. He waited in silence as the heavy feet went past the door, glancing up just to see the laden, covered stretcher going down the broad front steps to the mortuary van parked directly outside. There was a delay; someone had misplaced the keys to the back of the van and burdened men were waiting by the stretcher while the driver cursed and hunted for them.

  Just then a big BMW, crisply driven, pulled up short of the police tapes. A woman, irritation and tension in every line of her, got out of the driving seat. He watched as she came up the road, expensive black coat tugged by the wind, brown hair in a neat chignon, and realised she was making for the house in which he stood. He stepped back hastily so she would not see him and got a clear view of her as she was stopped by one of the policemen at the edge of the barrier. Older than she had seemed, walking briskly up the pavement; good bones in the face, carefully made up, but the flesh round the jaw was drooping a little and there were lines round the eyes. She looked up suddenly towards the house, and he saw her face on, wide dark eyes, a good high forehead set off by the severe hair-line. A customer perhaps: everything about her spoke of money.

  ‘Mr McLeish.’ It was Margaret Howard, panic added to distress. ‘That’s Mrs Price with the police outside.’

  The stretcher was still there, and the driver still seemed not to have found the keys. Galvanised, he got himself out of the door but the young policeman on duty had let Mrs Price through the barrier and was leading her towards the house to find himself face to face with a tableau of grotesquely laden stretcher and four men, frozen in embarrassment. McLeish saw the wide eyes turn up in her head as he ran down the steps and only just managed to catch her before she hit the pavement in a dead faint.

  4

  Monday, 11 April

  Francesca parked on a single yellow line outside the big house with the unmarked door and ran up the steps to ring the bell, watching the car anxiously as if it might escape. When the bell was not immediately answered she rang it again, hard, swearing under her breath.

  ‘I’m coming, fuck it.’

  She breathed out, releasing tension, and waited while the person at the other side worked through the triple locks. The door opened to reveal Matthew, dark red hair spiky above a purple velvet jacket of antique cut and a dress shirt.

  ‘Just the man I want.’

  ‘Why? Where’s your mum, or is she ill again?’

  ‘She’ll be back. I am looking for Annabelle – Dr Brewster, and I hoped you knew where your client was. She moved out of here last week.’

  ‘I know. But she’s not my client.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, that’s not her fault. We had a conflict – minor thing, but we’d acted for one of the prospective defendant’s family. Old Peter’s very orthodox about that sort of thing. We passed her on.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But the silly bitch decided not to take the boyfriend to court.’

  ‘Oh dear. Oh, mistake.’

  ‘You can say that again. The boyfriend greased round her by giving back all her things – and the money he’d nicked. That’s an indiscretion and if you tell her I’ll be unfrocked or whatever. So she decided not to do him for assault.’

  ‘She didn’t go back to him?’ Francesca forgot her own worries in horror.

  ‘No. She’s got a room round the corner here. But she’ll be working now. She does the nine o’clock surgery on Mondays.’

  She looked at him doubtfully. ‘I suppose only a tactless old bat would ask you how you know so much.’

  ‘Yes, but I could see you were going to. I quite fancy her but it’s one of my little rules, don’t mess with them if they’re still attached, you waste your time. You’re probably spitting in the wind too, trying to tell her what not to do.’

  ‘I am not here to remonstrate with her. I want a medical opinion.’

  ‘Don’t you have a doctor of your own?’ He peered at her. ‘What’s the matter, Wonderwoman? You’re looking frazzled. Rest the feet, I’ll find coffee.’

  Francesca sank into one of the Refuge’s awful chairs then started out of it as she remembered her illegally parked car.

  ‘Sit down, I’ll keep an eye on the car. Now. What?’

  She looked into the competent, impatient face and tried to gather herself. ‘My secretary – well, I share her – at Gladstone where I work. She’s pregnant, about seven weeks, and she told me yesterday. And I can’t remember whether I’ve had German measles. Nor can my useless parent; she says she thought I did but it may have been just the twins. She says some of us did.’

  ‘Francesca. Where is this going?’

  ‘Well, eight weeks is the worst time for exposure to German measles, and the kids here who don’t have measles have German measles. But I can’t have caught it – German measles, I mean – or carry it if I had it once, I think. Only I never knew any biology and I can’t remember if I ever had the beastly disease and I
don’t know what to say to Jo. My secretary.’ She picked up her coffee clumsily, spilt it and gulped back tears.

  ‘Dear God,’ he said, mopping up the mess competently. ‘Let’s get some facts here. The Refuge does have German measles, one, yes? Take a slug of the coffee and think, don’t just witter.’

  ‘Piss off, Matt,’ she said, reduced to her teens. ‘Yes. Annabelle diagnosed it, and the local practice confirmed it. And Jo is pregnant.’

  ‘It’s a matter of ordinary general knowledge that you can’t transmit the disease unless you’ve got it. So you don’t have it, lady, and you aren’t cooking it if either you had it as a kid, or you had the injection.’

  She stared at him over her cup. ‘The injection?’

  ‘For rubella. You have it, or all the girls in New Zealand do, at about thirteen. Yes? Cast your mind back.’

  She put her cup down, slowly turning scarlet, warm all over with a flooding sense of relief. ‘Oh Matt, oh thank God. It all comes back to me. Of course I did. Everyone did, it was compulsory, unless you could prove you’d had German measles. And then as now Mum couldn’t remember.’

  ‘Will I take you round to your doctor in that posh car just to make quite, quite sure?’

  ‘No, dammit. Nor do I need a sweetie to make me better, although you might be excused for thinking it.’ She looked at him, and he was watching her carefully. ‘What?’

  ‘How’d you get in such a state, Wonderwoman?’

  ‘I’m tired,’ she said, defensively, and closed both hands round her coffee cup. ‘William’s ill, so he doesn’t sleep, and my husband John is very busy.’

  ‘He’s the policeman? Well, they are.’

  ‘I do understand that, Matthew, I’m just telling you why I’m tired.’

  She was, she could see, cutting no ice with Matthew, who was sitting watching her, large hands quiet in front of him.

  ‘I’ll buy you lunch. I’ll drive and we’ll go to a steak place where they owe me.’ He had got up from the desk and was shrugging himself into one of his layers of clothing. He took her cup away and led her to the door, leaving her no room to object or demur, and she found herself handing him the car keys and relaxing into the passenger seat with a sigh of relief.