Fenton's winter

by Ken McClure

  "Isn't this burglary?" whispered Kelly as it opened.

  Fenton ignored the question and stepped quietly inside. "Saxon?" he called out softly, repeating it as he moved along the passage. There was still no reply.

  "I smell burning," said Kelly.

  Fenton sniffed and agreed. "As if someone had singed their hair," he said.

  The flat appeared to be completely empty. "I don't get it," complained Fenton after he had tried the last room. "Why the hell did he ask us here?"

  "What's this?" asked Kelly tugging at a door in the hallway.

  "Cupboard?" suggested Fenton.

  Kelly pulled it open and a yellow light shone up from the floor.

  "Stairs!"

  "A sub-basement," whispered Fenton.

  They descended the spiral stone steps, steadying themselves with their hands on the white washed walls.

  "God, what a stink," said Kelly as the burning smell got stronger and threatened to overpower them.

  "Look at this," said Kelly. He was standing in front of a large door that had been tooled in leather and inset with heavy brass studs.

  "Try it," said Fenton.

  "I feel like Jack and the Beanstalk," said Kelly as he turned the heavy ringed handle. The door swung slowly back to reveal a stone floored dungeon lit exclusively by wall torches set in wrought iron holders. In the middle of the floor lay the black smouldering remains of something they both recognised barely as the body of a man.

  Fenton covered his face with a handkerchief and approached slowly. He knelt down beside the bundle as smoke rose from charred flesh like the pall from burning leaves on an autumn day. He recoiled in revulsion as he suddenly realised something. Kelly looked at him and then the corpse and saw the same thing.

  "He's…not dead," said Fenton, unwilling to believe what he himself was saying.

  Kelly saw the smoke come from the man's blackened mouth in short regular breaths. "He must be," he whispered. "Is it Saxon?"

  "Yes," murmured Fenton, steeling himself to kneel down again. "Saxon?" he whispered. He looked for some part of the man that he could touch without hitting raw nerves, some way he could make contact but it was useless. A groan came from Saxon's throat and threatened Fenton's own nerves. "Die man, for God's sake…die." he murmured. As if in response a convulsion quivered through the burned flesh and a hoarse gurgle came from Saxon's throat. It culminated in a brief sigh and his head moved to one side.

  "He's dead," said Fenton.

  "Thank God," said Kelly.

  Kelly looked round the room and said, "Will you look at this?"

  Fenton could see what he meant for the dungeon theme had been pursued in meticulous detail. The bare stone walls were decked with manacles and other articles of bondage. Whips of varied size and material stood erect in a long chain link rack next to some kind of table equipped with stirrups and iron wrist clamps. The whole place was the manifestation in wood and iron of some medieval nightmare.

  Kelly found a leather bound book and opened it. It was a photograph album. "Jenny was right," said Fenton as he saw the photos. "She thought that Saxon was bent, sounded too macho, tried too hard, she said."

  "Bent is not the word," said Kelly, looking through the pages of the album.

  "Takes all sorts as my grandmother used to say," said Fenton.

  "So what happened here?" said Kelly, putting down the book and looking at Saxon's body. "Some trick go wrong?"

  “ No," said Fenton. "His hands are still bound. He couldn't have set light to himself." He looked at the blackened corpse for a moment before starting to search round the room. He found a green jerry can and sniffed the contents. "Paraffin," he said to Kelly. "Some bastard shackled him, doused him in paraffin and started throwing matches."

  "Where does that leave us?" asked Kelly quietly.

  "Up to our necks in something I'd rather you didn't make waves in," said Fenton ruefully.

  Fenton could see that he was in trouble no matter which way he turned. If he phoned the police it would be tantamount to admitting that he had known the whereabouts of Nigel Saxon and had failed to inform them. If he kept quiet and Jamieson found out later then that might even be worse. Jamieson might even suspect that he had been Saxon's killer with revenge for Neil Munro as the motive.

  "You are sure it's Saxon aren't you?" Kelly asked.

  Fenton nodded. "I'M sure," he said. "Even like that, I knew him well enough to recognise him."

  "So what do we do?"

  "Get out of here and pray that no one saw us come in," said Fenton.

  ELEVEN

  Fenton and Kelly stood still for a moment in the quiet of the basement area and courted the shadow of the wall while they listened for sounds coming from above. When they were sure that all was quiet they climbed the steps quickly to the pavement and started walking.

  Like Christians cast into some Georgian Coliseum they looked furtively out of the corners of their eyes for signs of lions. They saw nothing but Fenton was far from convinced. He imagined hidden faces behind every tall rectangular window. Their description was already being noted and telephones were being lifted. They suppressed the urge to run but doing so filled them with the nervous tension of thorough-bred horses held under rein.

  "Up here," said Fenton, seeking the earliest opportunity of returning to noise and bustle. The lights of a white painted pub attracted them like harbour buoys and the crowd inside absorbed them into welcome anonymity.

  "God, I needed that," said Kelly after downing his whisky in one gulp. Fenton ordered two more and they began to take stock of their surroundings. The clientele were mainly young, fashion conscious and noisy. The bar list boasted sixteen different cocktails. It said a lot about the customers.

  "Why! Steven Kelly!" said a loud female voice behind them. Fenton froze but he felt Kelly's eyes on him before he turned round.

  "Fiona Duncan, how nice," said Kelly, failing his audition for RADA, thought Fenton.

  "Whatever brings you here?" continued Fiona at the top of her voice. Kelly was struggling but Fenton realised that it did not matter for Fiona was not listening to the answers. She was only interested in her own performance. Fenton knew the type. Conversations were opportunities for self projection, chances to display an ever changing slide show of facial expression to whoever might be watching. The loudness of the voice was designed to swell that number.

  "Tom, meet Fiona Duncan," said Kelly looking like a wet spaniel. "She used to be a nurse at the Princess Mary."

  Fenton nailed Kelly with a glance before shaking hands with the loud girl. "And where are you now Fiona?" he asked politely.

  "The Western General!" said Fiona. She announced it like the winning number in a raffle and her right hand gave a little cheer.

  Fenton smiled, passing her back to Kelly.

  "So what are you doing with yourself these days Steve? Behaving?” asked Fiona.

  Fenton saw the look that passed between Kelly and the girl and knew what had gone on in the past. He marked time with a fixed smile on his face until Fiona decided that she had to 'dash'. Her friends were waiting for their drinks. He almost felt the spotlight go out as she moved her cabaret to the bar.

  "Sorry about that," whispered Kelly, looking sheepish.

  "They should have cut them off at birth," muttered Fenton.

  Jenny welcomed them with a sigh of relief and a barrage of questions that made Fenton hold up his hands. "You had better sit down," he said. He told her what they had found, trying to leave out as many of the gory bits as possible. Jenny kept probing. He added the gory bits.

  "But supposing he lies there for weeks before anyone finds him?" Jenny pointed out. "Could our nerves stand it?"

  The consensus was no. "How should we do it?"

  "Anonymous call," said Kelly. "I'll do it on my way home. Go to 24a Lymon Place. There's a dead man there."

  The story was too late for the morning papers but local radio carried it in their morning bulletins. Nigel Saxon, son of the owner
of Saxon Medical, the company at the centre of the lethal plastic affair, had been found dead in a city flat and the police were treating the death as murder. There was no more. Fenton thought that it seemed so clinically clean and tidy, nothing at all like the hellish reality of what had lain in that basement. Nothing to convey the sight, the smell. Only the police would know that. It made him wonder how many other stories were deodorized every day, cellophane wrapped, sanitised for public protection. Did it matter?

  The evening paper seemed to think that it did.' New Town Funeral Pyre for Plastics Boss' concentrated on the charring and disfigurement of Saxon's body, managing to use the phrase 'barely recognizable' three times in the story. For the first time the police admitted publicly that they had been looking for Saxon in connection with their enquiries into the death of Neil Munro. The simple statement invited the public to draw their own conclusions, the very reason they made it, thought Fenton. No mention was made of the sex angle however, something that made Jenny suggest cynically that the police were going to sell it to the Sundays. She was wrong. The tabloids got it on the following morning and made a meal of it with, 'Sex Secrets of New Town Basement.'

  No 'secrets' were actually revealed but the suggestion of homosexuality and the persistent use of the word 'apparatus' was enough to alter the nature of the crime for the law abiding citizens of Edinburgh. Outrage at the murder became muted. The unspoken view that this was an affair that God-fearing folk were better off not knowing about became the prevalent one. Some perverted creature from a strange twilight world had got his just deserts. I'll make the cocoa Agnes, you put out the cat.

  Fenton could not help but feel that the police had orchestrated the whole thing and it had worked. The pressure was off them for, to all public intents and purposes, they had tracked down Neil Munro's killer and he was dead, better than a conviction for the rate payers. As for Saxon's killer? They would go through the motions, follow routine but there was very little pressure on them this time. No one cared about Saxon or his seedy society. At least this was what Fenton had concluded but he had to change his mind when the police issued a description of two men that they wanted to interview in connection with the New Town murder.

  Fenton held his breath as he listened to the descriptions. Two men aged between twenty and thirty, one six feet tall and dark, the other slightly shorter with fair hair and broad shoulders. Both had been seen leaving the area of the basement flat on the night in question

  Fenton's first instinct was to phone Steve Kelly but he talked himself out of it, deciding that it was a panic reaction. Kelly phoned him. There was nothing really to say.

  Kelly phoned again in the evening just after eight when Jenny was leaving for the hospital. "We've got trouble," he said and Fenton's heart sank. Jenny, who had been in the act of leaving, paused in the doorway and said, "Should I wait?"

  "No," said Fenton. "Just go, see you in the morning."

  Jenny threw him a kiss and closed the door behind her.

  "What trouble?" asked Fenton.

  "Fiona Duncan called me. She pointed out that 'The White Horse' is very near Lymon Place and I've got fair hair and broad shoulders."

  "Just what we needed," muttered Fenton, trying to think at the same time.

  "I'm sorry about this," said Kelly.

  "I think we had better go to the police before they come to us." said Fenton.

  "Do you think if I strangled Fiona I could ask for one other case to be taken into consideration?"

  "I'll come round to your place," said Fenton.

  Fenton apologised to Mary Kelly for having got her husband into his present predicament but she was in a less than forgiving mood and her look came straight from the freezer. As they left Kelly gave his wife a peck on the cheek and said, "See you later."

  Don't bet on it, thought Fenton.

  "Good evening sir," said the desk sergeant, expecting a lost dog story.

  "I think you are looking for us," said Fenton, feeling as if he were throwing away a key.

  The sergeant stared at them until he saw a six foot tall dark man accompanied by a shorter man with fair hair. "Good God," he said and lifted the telephone. Jamieson was summoned from home.

  Fenton and Kelly were held separately during the wait, each accompanied by a silent constable. Fenton found his room oppressively quiet and free from distraction, furnished only with a table and four chairs and painted in institutional pastel green. At least the table creaked when he put his elbows on it and, in this respect, it was more communicative than the constable. There was a vaguely unpleasant smell of disinfectant about the place, something that made Fenton wonder why it had been necessary to use it in the first place. It conjured up visions of lice and filth and vomit and generally added to his feelings of unease.

  "Any chance of a cup of tea?" he asked.

  The constable shook his head mutely.

  An awful thought struck Fenton. As yet, no one had asked for his name or any other details. Everything was being saved for Jamieson. It would be a surprise for him when he walked through the door. He wondered what he would say.

  "Oh Christ! This is all I needed," said Jamieson. "Mr smart-arse Fenton.

  Fenton struggled to adopt the right facial expression but couldn't find it. Aggression was out, definitely out in the circumstances, but contriteness went against the grain, especially with Jamieson. He settled for something along the lines of a British tourist being harangued by a foreign official in a language that he did not understand.

  Jamieson finished his opening salvo and settled down to enjoying his work. He was going to play this particular fish for a while.

  "Why did you do it Fenton? Revenge? Was that it? He cooked your mate, you cooked him?"

  Fenton spluttered out a denial but the truth was that he had not seen the poetic justice angle. Things were even worse than he thought.

  "How long have you been a practising homosexual Fenton?"

  Fenton clenched his fists.

  "Is that why you got beaten up in that pub Fenton…in the toilets wasn't it?"

  Fenton made for him. The constable dived in to restrain him while Jamieson just smiled.

  Jamieson was in his element, he had not had so much fun for ages. He ran rings round Fenton, laughing away denials, playing him out, reeling him in, digging the hook in deeper until, at last, he saw the fight in Fenton begin to subside. It was always the moment he enjoyed most. He brought his face close to Fenton's and said threateningly, "Let me tell you this laddie, it gets very boring being taken for a mug by every half-arse who's seen The Pink Panther. You might just ponder on the fact that Nigel Saxon would be alive today if you had contacted us as soon as he called you. Fenton pondered the fact.

  Fenton and Kelly were released at a quarter past midnight, a sober and wiser pair. They exchanged stories of their questioning as they walked down the High Street to collect Kelly's car. "Do you know, he suggested I was queer," complained Kelly. Fenton managed to summon up a smile in the darkness while a distant clap of thunder echoed over the roof tops. "Bloody rain," he said.

  Fenton went back to the Kellys' flat where Mary Kelly was waiting up. She seemed much happier to see Fenton this time and apologised for her earlier frostiness. Fenton said that it had been understandable.

  "So what happened?" asked Mary Kelly.

  "We got our bottoms smacked," replied Kelly.

  "About sums it up," agreed Fenton.

  Mary Kelly went to bed leaving Fenton and Kelly drinking whisky and mulling over the past two days.

  "Did Saxon kill Neil Munro or didn't he?" asked Kelly.

  Fenton tilted his glass slowly from side to side, keeping the fluid level horizontal. "It pains me to say it but I think he might have been innocent. I think he was about to shop the real murderer when he got killed for his trouble. The killer must have got wind of what he planned to do and turned up early."

  "The same man who called on Sandra Murray?" suggested Kelly.

  "He could have killed S
axon but not Neil. The killer must have been in the lab when Neil discovered the truth about Saxon plastic. It couldn't have been a stranger.

  "You do realise what you are saying?" said Kelly softly.

  Fenton nodded. "If the killer wasn't Saxon it must be someone in the lab. Someone who primed the fair haired man to ask the right questions. Someone who knew what would happen when you added hydrochloric acid to potassium cyanide…"

  The thought put both men to silence.

  "But why?" asked Kelly.

  Fenton shook his head.

  "Did you tell the police about Sandra Murray's visitor?" asked Kelly.

  "No, did you?"

  "No."

  "Here we go again," said Fenton.

  Fenton got up and went over to the window. "The rain's stopped." he said. He drained the contents of his glass.

  It was very late and the streets were practically deserted as Fenton walked home. The temperature had fallen with the clearing of the skies but the air was still and the stars twinkled brightly above him as he rounded a corner and saw the source of the eerie white light that lit up chimneys on tenement roofs. A full moon hung in the sky like a communion wafer. A cat fled from a dustbin and dissolved in shadow.

  Fenton fell into a troubled sleep but kept waking at almost hourly intervals until at four o'clock he got up and made coffee. He had gone through each member of lab staff in turn at least three times and had still failed to find any motive for killing Neil. It was safe to eliminate all the females for Neil's murder had demanded physical strength but that left all the men. The motive had to be linked to the Cavalier organisation Fenton decided. That was the link between Saxon and the fair haired man. It was reasonable to propose that that was the connection between Saxon and the killer in the lab.

  Charles Tyson? He had defended Saxon plastic throughout and had done everything possible to dissuade him from pursuing the faulty plastic angle. What was more Jenny had noticed that he had known what Ross had been talking about when he mentioned the 'Tree Mob.' He was also unmarried and never spoke of his personal life. But what about Ross himself? Ross had told him about the club in the first place but that might have been cleverness on his part, a ploy to make himself the least likely suspect…Fenton gave up. There was no way he was going to guess who the killer was. The fair haired man was the key to the puzzle. He must know who Neil's killer was. Fenton resolved to contact Jamieson in the morning.