Dead Alone

by Gay Longworth

  The doctor and local detective were startled to see her. More so when she produced her badge and informed them that she’d had Cosima down on her missing list for some time. The Viscount had obviously failed to tell them about her call. Jessie wondered what he had told them.

  Cosima was curled up under a blanket. Jessie could tell from the smell that she had been dead for a couple of days. Stacked up in the corner of the wooden hut was a box of croquet mallets, leaning against the wall were the metal hoops painted white with pointed rusting ends. The layer of dust was several autumns deep. There was no furniture in the hut, just spider webs and the skeleton of a decapitated mouse. Owl’s work. The only sign of life in the Wendy house was the pathway in the dust from door to corpse, cleared by the soles of her busy family. All that coming and going merely confirmed Jessie’s suspicions. She bent down to peel back the grey woollen blanket. Cosima was naked; there were marks around her wrists and her feet were black and swollen. Her femoral artery, however, had not been cut. Jessie sat back on her knees.

  ‘She’d been drinking heavily,’ said the doctor. ‘Look at the red wine stains –’

  ‘Are you a pathologist?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how can you be sure?’ said Jessie, crouching next to the corpse.

  ‘I am a very –’

  She waved him away. ‘Yes, I’m sure, a very good friend of the family. What did he tell you? Drugs? That she took drugs. And drank in excess. That she was out of control. Hush it up, there’s a good fellow.’ The doctor stepped back. ‘You think the marks around her wrist were self-inflicted? You think this looks like an accident?’

  ‘She had a history of self-harm, she used to cut herself a lot. I’ve treated her many times.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Cuts, bruises, burns, you name it.’

  ‘And you never questioned that the injuries were self-inflicted?’

  ‘Her father wouldn’t lie about such …’ His voice trailed off. ‘He is a fine man.’

  ‘What did Cosima say?’

  ‘That she –’ he coughed into his handkerchief – ‘she deserved it. She hated herself, you see.’

  Jessie looked up at him. ‘What do you really see here?’ She paused. ‘And this time, think before you answer.’

  ‘She got drunk, passed out and died of hypothermia.’

  ‘Wrong.’

  ‘Accidental drug overdose.’

  ‘Wrong again.’

  ‘Positional asphyxia?’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, Doctor. Not here.’

  ‘Where, then?’ he asked challengingly.

  ‘I don’t know. But not in the fucking Wendy house, I know that much.’ Jessie stood up.

  ‘She drank. She was out of control,’ insisted the doctor.

  ‘I don’t think so. Niaz, guard this site and let no one in except me. You, Doctor, will accompany me to the house. There are a few inconsistencies I’d like to clear up.’

  ‘I really should be –’

  ‘I don’t remember saying please, Doctor.’

  He followed her across the saturated lawn, her leather boots slipping on the frictionless blades. She was relieved to get on to the stone path. Either side of the path were beds of purple and blue heather, neatly clipped and well tended. A perfect country house. Jessie returned to the drawing room. Coral was smoking now. Her husband’s voice could be heard from behind another oak door.

  ‘Please ask your husband to join us,’ said Jessie. The red-rimmed eyes made Coral look more like a rabbit caught in the glare of an oncoming car. A sick rabbit. Sick and scared. Coral returned empty-handed, so Jessie went through to the study, walked up to the telephone, cut him off and returned to the drawing room. He was furious.

  ‘I have had enough of your –’

  ‘Why did you move your daughter’s body?’ she said.

  Coral let out an involuntary squeal.

  ‘You are upsetting my wife,’ bellowed the Viscount.

  ‘Not as much as I will, if you don’t start telling me the truth.’

  ‘Coral found her this morning. She is very upset.’

  Jessie turned to Coral. ‘Is that true?’

  Coral nodded but didn’t speak. She turned the wide silver bangle on her wrist nervously.

  ‘In the Wendy house?’

  ‘Of course in the Wendy house,’ he answered for her.

  ‘I’m not talking to you,’ said Jessie without looking at the man. ‘Viscountess?’

  She nodded again. ‘Call me Coral.’

  ‘Why did you go to the Wendy house?’

  Coral looked at her husband.

  ‘She was taking the dogs for a walk.’

  Jessie turned on the older man. ‘Stop lying. Your daughter was strung up somewhere. The blood collected in her legs and feet – anyone in the profession could have told you that.’ She could feel the doctor shrink without even looking at him. ‘You can’t cover this up. This isn’t another little scandal that you can control.’

  He didn’t pick Jessie up on the use of the word ‘another’.

  ‘Cosima has marks on her wrist.’

  ‘My daughter had a history of self-harm. So, for the last time, my wife found her in the Wendy house,’ said Geoffrey Lennox-Broome. Slowly and clearly.

  ‘I’ll give you one more chance. We are going to take the body and perform an autopsy. From that we will be able to determine how and in what position she died. I know what the outcome of that investigation will not be. It will not be that your daughter died of hypothermia lying on the floor of a disused Wendy house having passed out from ingesting too much alcohol. Then I will come here with an arrest warrant. It is a criminal offence to pervert the course of justice and I don’t give a damn what high-powered judges you may think you have in your fraternity, I will not rest until this goes to court.’

  ‘You’ll be hearing from my lawyer,’ he barked.

  ‘Your daughter was murdered. Here. On this property.’

  ‘My daughter died after a drinking binge in the Wendy house.’

  ‘Why would your daughter crawl naked into a dirty, empty Wendy house in the middle of the night?’

  The Viscount looked at his wife with scorn. ‘There were a lot of things my daughter did that I didn’t understand.’

  The door to the drawing room opened. Jessie swung round angrily. Sally Grimes stood in the doorway holding a plastic phial in her hand.

  ‘Sally!’ exclaimed Jessie, relieved to see a kindred soul. ‘How did you –?’

  ‘I changed my mind.’

  ‘Have you seen the body?’

  ‘Yes. Lady Cosima Lennox-Broome drowned,’ said Sally.

  ‘Drowned?’ came the simultaneous response.

  ‘Where? There isn’t a lake here,’ said Jessie.

  ‘Not where. In what.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, sir, but your daughter drowned in alcohol. I used an in situ test we do at crash sites. Your daughter’s blood-to-alcohol ratio was off the scale.’

  Jessie’s eyes widened. She knew what that meant.

  ‘It is impossible to drink that much and stay conscious,’ said Sally.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Coral, who was walking towards Sally, her eyes focusing through the vodka, adrenaline-induced clarity.

  ‘She means,’ said Jessie, ‘that Cosima was force-fed alcohol until it was running through her veins.’

  Sally continued, ‘That amount of additional liquid to the system would ordinarily have caused her brain to swell, and that in itself would have killed her. But she was cut on the soles of her feet and drained of blood. What little blood she had left in her system would not have been able to carry the oxygen to her brain. She drowned.’

  ‘Sit down, Coral,’ said the Viscount firmly.

  Jessie kept her eye on the rapidly ageing blonde. ‘All you’d need is a plastic tube, a funnel, and a large quantity of alcohol – wine, for insta
nce,’ she said, taking hold of Coral’s arm as she walked past. ‘Oh, and somewhere to tie her up.’

  ‘Get your hands off my wife,’ shouted Lennox-Broome.

  ‘Somewhere like a cellar,’ said Jessie. ‘Imagine how scared she’d have been. Tied up, force-fed … She’d have vomited and urinated on herself.’ Jessie dropped Coral’s arm. ‘But you know all this, you found her. Now, I’d like to see your cellar.’

  ‘We don’t have a cellar.’

  ‘Yes you do. I saw the windows through the grate in the ground. If you lie to me again, sir, I shall arrest you for obstruction. This is a murder case. Show me your cellar.’

  Jessie, Sally and Niaz followed the couple into the subterranean level of the house. The doctor had opted to stay near the drinks cabinet. An earthy, damp corridor stretched out in the darkness, running the full length of the house. The smell of alcohol intermingled with damp and dust. Their footsteps were swallowed whole by the dense stone below their feet. Off the central corridor were skinny archways opening to brick-lined antechambers. Those on the right had dirty windows to the outside world above, those on the left did not. A few naked light bulbs glowed a pale orange, but the brickwork seemed to suck up their weak light as it had absorbed the sound of their footsteps. It was an eerie place, thought Jessie. No place to die.

  They checked each antechamber, Jessie pointing her torch into the dark corners and along each curved ceiling. Most were full of wine, row upon row of cold, smoky green bottles. Masonry dust had collected in a thin line along the length of each bottle. Some of the labels had dried up, cracked and fallen away. If Jessie hadn’t told the portly man to remain silent, they would have had the full sommelier’s tour. This collection of fortified fruit juice was his pride and joy, shame he hadn’t shown the same interest in his daughter. They came to the end of the corridor.

  ‘Is that it?’ Jessie asked. She remembered the door to Eve Wirrel’s secret studio, the door in the garden wall at P. J. Dean’s. ‘And before you answer me, you should know that I am aware of the existence of a hidden doorway. I don’t know where it is, but I will find it. You don’t want the police crawling all over your house, do you? Imagine the press.’ Jessie touched the wall. ‘I estimate the length of this passageway is sixty feet, which takes us just under your library. So which is the switch? Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Animal Farm? Quater-mass and the Pit? Lord Jim? Death in a White Tie…? Am I getting warm?’

  The Viscount began to walk away from her. ‘It was built as a hiding place in case of invasion.’

  Jessie told the others to stay where they were and followed his booming voice in the darkness. ‘Invasion from whom?’

  ‘The bloody Protestants.’

  ‘And what do you use it for now?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Suddenly she remembered the black-and-white photograph above Eve Wirrel’s bed. Chained up, hanging from a hook, feet hovering off the ground. ‘You’re sure about that?’

  The Viscount led her back up the stairs and through the house to the library. He pushed a hidden button and one section of the bookcase swung open to reveal a similar set of stone steps descending into darkness. Jessie pointed her torch downwards and stepped on to the cold smooth surface.

  ‘There is nothing down there,’ he said confidently.

  Jessie could smell the bleach before she was all the way down the steps. The middle of the floor was damp with disinfectant, darker than the surrounding dust. There was a drainage hole in the floor and hooks in the ceiling.

  ‘We used to hang meat here, before BSE.’ Jessie gave him an impenetrable look and began tapping on the walls.

  ‘What the bloody hell are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘This place wouldn’t be much good as an escape route if there was no way out.’

  ‘It was a place for the Catholic priest to hide.’

  Jessie carried on tapping. ‘Sally? Niaz? Can you hear me?’ No reply. She turned back to Cosima’s incomprehensible father. ‘You have destroyed vital evidence by cleaning this place up.’ And then it dawned on her. The murderer knew that was what would happen. That was why the registration number had been left on the boat. It was all part of the game. ‘The murderer relied on you doing exactly this, knowing that all the evidence would be washed down that drain along with your dirty habits and guilt. Don’t you want your daughter’s killer caught?’

  ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’

  Jessie heard a noise to her left. The brick wall began to move. Then Coral slipped through the narrow gap to join them. Once inside, she stood and stared at the hooks in the ceiling.

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think you are doing, Coral!?’

  ‘We found Cosima hanging there,’ she said quietly.

  ‘We?’

  ‘Shut up, Coral! Shut up now, you stupid girl. You’re all the same!’

  ‘Who? Who are all the same, sir? Women?’ She turned back to the now shaking woman. ‘What were you doing down here, Coral?’

  There was a long, tense silence before she answered. ‘Looking for Cosima,’ she said eventually and started to cry. Jessie went to put her arm around her, but something caught her attention and instead, she gently raised Coral’s arm.

  ‘Get off my wife!’

  Jessie took hold of the shiny silver bracelet on Coral’s wrist and pressed the release mechanism. It sprung open.

  ‘Coral, get away from that woman. We hang meat in here.’

  ‘Meat?’

  Coral was limp, her strength had seeped into the stone floor, along with light and sound and Cosima’s blood and vomit. Jessie unclasped the other bracelet and held both wrists up to the thin beam of light. The raw markings stood out angrily on the alabaster skin of her thin wrists.

  ‘What sick sort of punishment do you go in for?’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about. My wife hurt her wrists riding, the reins gave her a burn – didn’t they, darling?’

  Jessie lowered Coral’s arm into Sally Grimes’ hand. Sally examined the injuries.

  ‘Exactly like the ones on Cosima’s arms.’

  ‘What have you done with the chains and handcuffs? Where is the tube, the funnel, the wine bottles. What wine was it?’ Jessie walked back through the narrow gap. She started reading off the wooden crates. ‘La Baunaudine ’63 Châteauneuf-du-Pape? St Emilion … Rothschild’s ’52 Claret?’ She picked up a bottle from a rack and returned to the room. ‘Chateau Lafite ’51? It’ll all come out in the postmortem.’

  ‘That bastard poured two crates of vintage Don Perignon down Cosima’s throat. Forty-four thousand pounds’ worth of champagne!’

  ‘You’re the bastard!’ shouted Coral. ‘Cosima is dead and all you care about is your fucking wine.’

  ‘As opposed to my fucking wife!’

  ‘Niaz, get him out and get forensics down here. We need to find Cosima’s car; the murderer probably drove her here in it.’ She turned to Coral. ‘Tell me you still have whatever you found down here.’

  She shook her head. ‘He made me burn everything.’

  ‘But you didn’t, did you?’

  She shook her head and sobbed. ‘I kept her dress.’

  ‘Good. Where is it?’

  Coral was staring at the hooks in the ceiling.

  ‘Coral?’

  Coral kept shaking her head, the horror of unknown things passing over her eyes.

  Jessie took the woman’s shoulders. ‘What’s been going on here?’

  ‘Sugar and spice and all things nice,’ whispered Coral. Then she looked at Jessie. ‘Geoffrey doesn’t like naughty little girls. Poor Cosima, poor sweet beautiful Cosima … I loved her. She wanted those men to love her, but she was just a conquest to them. Her father never loved her. He wanted a boy, of course, so Cosima was punished for merely being alive. Running in the corridor, falling over, eating too slowly, eating too fast. Then she noticed the markings on my wrist and it all came out. I would have killed myself if it wasn’t for her. I really love
d her and she loved me.’

  Jessie pulled out the photograph of Cosima and the woman she now knew was Coral. ‘Do you want to tell me about Ray St Giles?’

  She shuddered. ‘He wanted Cosima on his awful show.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We refused. And now Cosima is dead. You get him, you get the bastard that did this.’

  ‘Can you vouch for your husband?’ asked Jessie.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  Jessie led Coral up the stone steps and waited for her to retrieve the dead girl’s dress. ‘People envied her. Isn’t that ironic?’

  ‘Tell me, did Cosima ever receive death threats or hate mail?’

  ‘No, never. Just endless proposals of marriage. She used to laugh at those.’

  Coral stared at Cosima’s soiled dress: Chloe. ‘When I was a nurse, I used to read all the glossy magazines. It looked like such fun – the glamour, the parties, the famous people. But it isn’t. It’s lonely and destructive and the only thing worse than going on with it, is going back. Obscurity is more feared than loneliness.’

  CHAPTER 80

  Four cars were parked in front of the rusting iron gate of Woolwich Cemetery. It was a few minutes before dawn. South East London was ghostly quiet. Their torchlight picked out the thick, furry weeds growing in clumps around the base of the crumbling brick pillars. Majestic once. But no longer.

  Jessie walked alongside Clare Mills in silence. Removing a child from the ground, when that child should have been a man of her age, saddened Jessie. Time stands still for no one. Except the dead. Shovels and spades would bring this boy back to the world of the living, twenty years too late. Jessie put her arm gently on Clare’s shoulders as they approached the fizzing portable lights. Three chunky men leant against spades, watching them approach, next to the six foot of earth that had been removed and hidden under a blanket of acid green Astroturf. Jones peered into the hole. The wood had kept well. The coffin was still intact. Jones summoned the four morticians forward. The labourers wouldn’t touch it. This little boy had more power dead than alive, thought Jessie, watching the men and their spades withdraw to a respectful distance and light up imported cigarettes. Clare gasped when she saw the coffin.