"The paperwork . . ." Vieri began.
". . . is your problem. This is your case. You get the credit. Tell them you sent me out to see Dinicu's father on a hunch. It all fell into place from there. You've got someone itching to confess to two murders and cut a sentencing deal. No one's going to ask a lot of questions."
The inspector nodded.
"And if none of this had worked out? All your hunches came up empty?"
Peroni grinned.
"Then you'd never have been any the wiser. Here."
He gave him the minion's notepad, the phone with the recorded exchange in Finnish between Eva Spallone and Sven, and the keys to the unmarked police Fiat.
"I stole the notebook from your guy. A translator might find something useful on the phone. And me and Prinzivalli . . . it may be more than one beer. You get someone to deal with the car."
"Fine," Vieri said and started to turn on his heels.
"Hey," Peroni called. The man stopped and looked at him. "You should come for a pizza with me and my friends. Falcone, Costa, Teresa. Well . . ." He shrugged. "She's more than a friend. You'll like them."
Inspector Vieri laughed. It made him look human.
"Oh," Peroni added.
He reached into his pocket, took out a nougat, held out it for the man from Milan.
"Welcome to Rome."
Copyright © 2012 by David Hewson
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FICTION
KAREN OVENHOUSE AND THE RUIN SNOOPER
by Peter Turnbull
Since Peter Turnbull's last appearance in EQMM, he has won an Edgar Allan Poe Award and received Barry and Macavity nominations for his EQMM story "The Man Who Took His Hat Off to the Driver of the Train." His Hennessey and Yellich series, to which that story belongs, has a new novel, The Altered Case (Severn House/June 2012). A newer Turnbull series, set in London, has its third book (The Garden Party) out this December.
Joseph Kelly, ruin snooper, walked the walls from Baile Hill to Lendal Bridge knowing, as do all citizens of the fair and famous city, that most often the quickest way to get from one part of central York to the other is to walk the medieval battlements. When opposite the railway station, which when it was built in 1870 was the largest structure in the world, he glanced to his right and picked out the angular roof and stone-slabbed platform of the original station, a much, much smaller version, which had been built "within the walls" so that the Victorians' steaming leviathans entered and exited the station via a small tunnel still visible underneath Queen Street. At Lendal Bridge, Joseph Kelly turned and made his way to the railway station, outside of which he would be able to get the bus he needed to catch. He was a man of middle years, rotund in most people's view and with a faraway look in his eyes. He wore plus fours and a Norfolk jacket even on the hottest days and presented an image of a man from a different era, an image completed by a box Brownie camera on one shoulder and a canvas knapsack on the other which contained his lunch and a flask of coffee. Atop his head on this warm April day was a battered felt hat.
Joseph Kelly had supported himself throughout his life by doing odd jobs, or by sporadic work on the buses as a driver or conductor. He had once driven a taxi but had given that up when a spate of attacks on taxi drivers served to remind him that beneath the medieval facade of wynds and ghosts and cholera pits, and behind the ecclesiastical splendor of the Minster, and behind the prestigious university, was a violent little town. York has a city charter, but it has not the size nor the dynamism of a true city, so thought Joseph Kelly, but he was born in York and had always been happy to live there. It was during the winter months that he worked, in the main; the summer months he chose to devote himself to this true passion. For Joseph Kelly was a committed "ruin snooper." The passion he felt for ruins had dominated his life to the exclusion of all else. He had snooped ruins since he was a boy when, fishing rod in hand, he had pushed open a rusty gate on which was a sign which read trespassers will be prosecuted because a sixth sense had told him that fishable water lay in the foliage he could see beyond the gate. His sixth sense had been correct, for he came across a large pond, just too small to be called a lake, in a wood, which teemed with roach and trout and perch. As he sat on the bank that summer's day he noticed that the foliage which at first had seemed wild and random had in fact the remnants of a formality about it, and that many of the trees were "nonindigenous," as his geography master would have said. Then he realized that he was sitting beside a man-made lake in the midst of what had once been a magnificent formal garden, probably laid out in the eighteenth century during the Augustan Age of Classicism which had given England such buildings as the Royal Mint and the Bank of England, streets like Regents Street and the Royal Crescent in Bath, and the great gardens like Castle Howard. Joseph Kelly then realized that if the place he was in was a long-abandoned garden, there may, nay must, also be a long-abandoned house. So he left the fish he had caught in the keepnet and went exploring. What he found changed his life. What he found detoured him down a path in life from which he was never to deviate. Joseph Kelly had found his first ruin.
It had been a small house as the great houses go, or went, but it was Augustan. Those columns, those grand staircases, those frescoes, by then rotten and decayed, the lawn taken over by trees, a tree which had grown in the greenhouse and had burst up out of the glass. He had entered the house, a small boy alone in the vastness, probably, he thought, the first person to do so in many, many years. He walked up one flight of a creaking staircase and down the other back, or servant, stairs, exploring, touching history, never knowing what was going to be behind each closed door. That particular house had been Wadden Hall, subsequently demolished, the garden cleared and the fishpond concreted over to make way for a housing estate. But Joseph Kelly had seen it, had wandered its echoing corridors and great halls, and had seen it in its last days of ghostly mystique, when the echoes of its days of former grandeur were faint but discernible. That day he had returned to the pond, released the fish in the keepnet, and returned to York. He sold his fishing tackle and with the proceeds bought a box Brownie and a roll of black-and-white film. Then, a day later, he returned to Wadden Hall and photographed it, inside and out. For the next thirty summers Joseph Kelly had travelled England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, but mostly England because it is in England that such abandoned magnificence is chiefly to be found. And knowing that he was visiting buildings which were fast disappearing as the English landscape changed, he set out to document each ruin he visited, using only black-and-white film, using the same box Brownie camera. He had wandered the great halls of yesteryear photographing as he went, and had found things that had been abandoned: a tray of gold and silver coins; another tray of Roman coins, neatly labelled; oil paintings, clearly valuable, which still hung on the walls; huge silver and crystal chandeliers still hanging from ornate ceilings; but if he took anything at all it was only in the form of a photograph. He came to see the houses as living things that allowed him to enter. He didn't want to violate that trust, or his own integrity, with theft.
On that hot Tuesday in April, perspiring in his Norfolk jacket and felt hat, he boarded a bus outside York Railway Station which took him out to the village of Great Keld, from where at a half-hour's brisk walk there stood Pately Hall, or rather the ruin of the same, which he did not know had existed until he read an article about it in the Yorkshire Post. It was a ruin to be snooped: so conveniently close to York too.
He alighted the cream Rider York double-decker at Great Keld in the square beside the war memorial and noted wryly that Great Keld had clearly not been one of the seven "lucky" villages of England that did not have to raise a stone in memory of its war dead in the years after 1918. In fact, going by the size of the stone, and the generous number of names on four sides, Great Keld appeared to have suffered particularly badly in the "war to end all wars." He walked past a parade of buildi
ngs which he felt had a 1920s or 1930s feel to it, shops with awnings and wares placed for inspection on the pavement, and then beyond the pasty grey road, he drove out between the gently undulating green of the Yorkshire Wolds. He left the road and followed a pathway beside a pasture in which a herd of Herefords grazed contentedly, black and white on the green, under the blue. Leaving the path, he picked his way through trees and shrubs and came across Pately Hall and did so quite suddenly, the garden having been colonised by the woodland and the ancient walls covered with ivy. But it was one of the great houses of the eighteenth century, distinct Palladian style, built, thought Joseph Kelly, just prior to the French wars, when the English gentry could afford such indulgences. Later the wars would bankrupt the gentry and allow the rise of trade and manufacture as a source of wealth for the English.
He found the first body hanging in the main hall. Just hanging there on a thin nylon cord which had been threaded through a chandelier which Joseph Kelly, experienced ruin snooper, knew would have been attached to a stout beam by means of heavy-gauge bolts and chains and would be well able to support the extra weight of what was a light and small and frail-looking human of the female sex. The other end of the cord was attached to the cast-iron fireplace surround which Joseph Kelly knew was also well able to support the weight of the dead woman. The hall was huge, and the length of the cord from fireplace to narrow neck was perhaps fifty feet. A very tall pair of stepladders lay on the floor, looking old, as if they belonged to the house, but they nonetheless explained how the cord had been threaded through the chandelier. Beneath the suspended body was a small upright chair, lying on its side as if having been pulled or kicked away, which indicated the way in which the deceased had been propelled into the hereafter. The deceased herself appeared to have a parchmentlike skin, a rotting flesh; there was a carpet of dead flies beneath her. Her time had not been yesterday.
Joseph Kelly pondered the body and then took his box Brownie and photographed it. It was the manner of the man. Ruin snooping had hardened him to surprise and had hardened him to death too, because this was not the first human corpse he had found. Often he came across the decaying corpses of men or women surrounded by a few meagre but twentieth-century artifacts such as plastic food containers or bottles of still-available alcohol: down-and-outs had sought shelter and had slept their final sleep. But this was the first suicide. If it was suicide.
The age first. Difficult to tell, because she was partly skeleton, but the impression was of a young woman in her twenties; the clothing was denim, cheap, now crumbling. Her hands were dangling beside her. The noose was of a simple circle, her feet were just six inches from the floor, allowing plenty of leverage to kick the chair away. But he thought it a terrible way to go, the way you'd kill someone if they didn't know the difference between hanging and lynching. That in hanging there is a "drop," causing the neck to snap and death to be instantaneous. In theory. Lynching, Joseph Kelly had once read, derives its name from Dr. Lynch of the University of Cambridge who, in the fourteenth century, put a noose around his son's neck and suspended him from his study window, in full view of the people in the street below, until he expired. It can take fifteen minutes to die when being lynched, most of the time in a state of consciousness; and the neck is stretched. Here, the neck may have been long and swanlike in life or it may have been elongated as she died, flailing her arms and legs about, her feet just six inches from the floor.
Joseph Kelly left the room and walked a long, echoing, musty corridor with a vaulted ceiling. He entered a room at the back of the house and looked out. There was a motor vehicle, an old van, a Ford Escort van, that had been able to approach the house along a track that could be made out winding among the foliage. The tires were now deflated, the doors open.
The vehicle puzzled him. Had someone driven up to the house to commit suicide? Why then go into the house at all, what with all those good stout branches in the woodland surrounding the house? He had a sense of a story unfolding: Here amongst this decaying pile of grandeur was a much more recent decay and loss.
He returned to the corridor and climbed the back stairs. The corridors upstairs were narrower than the corridors on the ground floor, as he had found was most often the case in old houses, and he also found that the rooms, as most often happens, had been well coveted by birds and bats, the long-ago broken windows allowing them easy access.
The second body was also semi-skeletal. It was in a near-sitting position, propped up against the wall beneath a window. Male, by the clothing. Heavy footwear and a male wrist watch. Joseph Kelly photographed the body. He noticed a knife on the floorboard beside it, the blade still black with congealed blood. He photographed the knife as well.
Joseph Kelly then travelled the house, opening doors and cupboards, finding, as he occasionally did, silverware, porcelain, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clothing, but he was satisfied that there were no other corpses. He went outside to the rear of the house and examined the Ford Escort van. A length of cord similar in nature to the cord which suspended the first body was coiled in the rear of the van by the spare tire. The keys were in the ignition. All very strange.
Joseph Kelly walked away from the house and back towards the road, pausing en route to admire and photograph an ancient yew, which had clearly been planted on the platform when the original garden was laid out. He strolled back to Great Keld, and from a phone box in the square he phoned the police. "There is no great hurry," he said. "None whatsoever. . . . They've both been there for at least twelve months."
Two constables in an area car collected Joseph Kelly. He was sitting where he said he would be sitting, on a bench outside a pub he could see from the phone box. "The Green Man," he said. "I'll be outside the Green Man." As the car pulled up, he drained his pint of brown and mild and slid, as invited, into the rear seat. He directed the driver to the road he had taken to walk to Pately Hall and suggested a suitable place to leave the car when they came to the path by the field of Herefords. He took the constables to the house but declined to enter. A few moments later, the constables exited the house and approached him.
"Ever hear of criminal trespass?" one said icily as his colleague radioed to the Friargate Police Station in York that the caller had been genuine and that there were indeed two bodies, repeat two, and in one case the death seemed suspicious. The other, he said, may have been a suicide.
"Oh yes," Joseph Kelly said, glancing over the facade of the house, noting, where the ivy allowed it to do, how it still glowed becomingly in the sun.
"And you're not worried about being prosecuted?"
"No." Kelly smiled. 'No, I've done my homework. Ferreting around an old ruin of disputed ownership and not doing any damage is not trespass. The only property that can be trespassed upon without damage being done is the railway, because your presence is deemed a threat to the safety of the railway users. I've been exploring ruins all my life. I've been invited to leave the premises once or twice but never even threatened with prosecution for trespass because I do not damage or steal. Done my homework, like I said."
"Halfway home."
"Sorry, sir?" Carmen Pharoah glanced sideways at Ken Menninot.
"Nothing, just thinking aloud. I live in Beverley, this drive is taking me halfway home. Then we'll have to return to York, then I'll do this drive again, only I hope to complete it this evening."
"Much better to live over the shop, sir. My journey to work is a brief walk of a few hundred yards. Buckingham Terrace to Friargate via Lendal Bridge. Ten minutes on a good day."
"Not the right time of life anymore, Carmen. When you get married and start your family, you'll know the value of living off the patch."
"Yes . . ." Carmen Pharoah returned her gaze to the road. At thirty-two she heard her biological clock ticking ever more loudly. D.S. Menninot's words had reached her . . . and Wesley hadn't kept his word. . . . She'd left Stoke Newington Police Station in London, where a black face is accepted, and with the promise of marriage hummin
g a pleasant tune in her ears, had moved to York, where a black face is still an oddity. She had bought property and then Wesley had phoned her and said he'd been thinking. . . . He thought he ought to make his first marriage work . . . and she was on her own. Again. Ken Menninot parked his car behind the Land Rover he recognised as belonging to Bill Hatch, which itself was parked behind an area car. A constable stood by the roadside, ready to escort them to the old house.
Bill Hatch bumbled out of the house as Ken Menninot and Carmen Pharoah emerged from the foliage. "Dead," he said, smiling, brushing his wild hair from his eyes. He rested his black leather bag on the ground. "Oh yes, very dead."
"Do tell." Menninot smiled. "I recognise the expression of an intrigued pathologist from a hundred yards."
"Intrigue is the word. Exactly how they died I can't tell, but I would be surprised if the initial impression is not correct. The male in the upstairs room died of a stab wound to the chest, the female in the grand hall suffered death by strangulation with a ligature. But confirmation, and in what order they died and by whose fair hand, is, as yet, to be ascertained." He wiped his brow. He was middle-aged and a little overweight, and suffered even in the mild April heat. "They're both young . . . in their twenties, possibly early twenties. They've been dead for at least twelve months. Both were dark-haired. He was about five ten, and she a diminutive five nothing. About. I'll have the bodies removed as soon as Scene of Crime has finished popping their flashbulbs and have them taken to the York City. Do you know if the mortuary van has arrived?"
"Not by the time we arrived," Menninot answered. "Just your beloved Series One and the area car."
"So I dare say you'll like to go and view what you must view? Who'll be representing the police at the P.M.?"
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 12/01/12 Page 12
