Dying to Know (A Detective Inspector Berenice Killick Mystery)

by Alison Joseph

  Dying to Know

  A Detective Inspector Berenice Killick Mystery

  Alison Joseph

  © Alison Joseph 2013

  Alison Joseph has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  Extract from Philosophical Investigations by Steve Attridge

  Chapter One

  Falling

  It is the end of the story.

  She imagined him on the beach, pacing out the last moments of his life. She thought about him climbing, somewhere high up, up on the cliffs along the coast. Standing, on the top, gazing out to sea. Breathing. Jumping. Falling. One, two, three seconds. And then you hit the water.

  After that…

  Water in the lungs, they’re saying.

  Which means, still breathing. For a while, anyway.

  And now, here, washed up, a silent twisted heap in the midst of noise, the wind across the beach, the crackle of police radios, the flap of blue and white tape in the breeze.

  ‘Berenice. What you thinking, Boss?’

  She blinked. ‘Oh. Mary.’ She looked across the shingle that sparkled in the sunlight. ‘I was thinking…’

  ‘About death, was it?’

  ‘Do you think he fell by accident? Do you think he jumped?

  ‘Usually it’s the high points near Folkestone that wash up this way.’

  ‘But wanting to die…’

  ‘You always ask those questions.’

  Berenice gave a brief smile. ‘Do we know who he is?’

  DS Mary Ashcroft shook her head.

  ‘Someone will have missed him,’ Berenice said.

  ‘He’s been in the water at least twenty four hours, they reckon,’ Mary said. ‘He’s what, forty odd? Well dressed, at least he was till those crabs fancied a bite of Harris Tweed…’

  ‘No one just disappears these days.’ Berenice said. She held out her hands in their blue latex gloves. ‘The SOCO gave me these. He said, seeing as I was the investigating officer…’

  ‘Of course you’re the investigating officer,’ Mary said. ‘Detective Inspector Berenice Killick…’

  ‘Look.’ Berenice held a see-through plastic envelope up to the light. ‘Stuff from his pockets.’

  ‘No ID?’ Mary took the envelope.

  Berenice shook her head. ‘We should get back to HQ.’

  ‘“… whence is it that the sun and planets gravitate towards one another without dense matter between them?”’

  ‘What?’

  Mary was peering at the envelope. ‘That’s what it says here. Writings.’

  ‘You’re making it up.’

  ‘I’m not. Look.’

  Berenice stared, read the words. ‘Clever bloke, then. It’s always the brainy ones. Do you remember that poor man in Wetherby? Wrote out a ground-breaking formula for a new TB drug and then blew out his brains?’

  ‘We were still Yorkshire-women then.’ Mary turned towards the cars.

  ‘Perhaps we are still.’ Berenice fell into step beside her.

  ‘You mean, you can take the girl out of Yorkshire…’ Mary smiled.

  ‘Something like that.’ The pebbles shifted under their feet. The sea had withdrawn into quiet, distant waves, as if to declare itself incapable of killing.

  Further inland, beside the pale ribbon of the Hythe road, stands a haphazard arrangement of concrete buildings, which make up the East Kent Lepton Research Institute. Here, in a swish of automatic doors, Liam Phelps, physicist, walks into the control room.

  ‘Elizabeth. You called?’ In the wide, bright room there were banks of screens. At one of them sat a woman, in crisp shirt and trousers, her pale brown hair tied back.

  ‘Where is he?’ She looked up from her screen. ‘It’s not like him to disappear.’

  ‘Murdo? Perhaps he went for one of his walks.’

  ‘He can’t have done. Not today. Have you seen this?’

  He leaned on the nearest desk, one arm on her chair. She sat, smart, upright and nervous. He stared at the data in front of him. Two lines, one red, one blue. ‘Full beam – ’ he began to say.

  ‘No, Liam, look. Look at the chart for the last half hour.’

  He stared some more. ‘But these can’t be B-mesons…’

  ‘Exactly. It’s the same thing again.’

  ‘The same as yesterday?’

  ‘And the day before,’ she said. ‘Something weird’s going on. That new pattern - these collisions…’

  He leaned towards the screen. ‘Did you check luminosity – what about charge errors?’

  ‘We’ve checked. Look.’ She pulled up a screen, scrolled down it. ‘Everything’s clear. We’ve checked and checked. The results don’t make sense.’ Her voice was soft, with a trace of an American accent.

  Liam looked at her. ‘And Murdo’s missing.’

  ‘It’s too weird. This is his experiment – ’

  He turned to go. ‘We’d better call a meeting about these results. Just us five. And the director. OK?

  She reached up and touched his sleeve. ‘Liam – what about Murdo? It’s not like him to disappear.’

  ‘Maguire? I’ll keep trying his mobile,’ he said. ‘Unless you want to?’

  She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not me.’

  The screens murmured their gentle beeping, and her gaze travelled back to the graphs in front of her. ‘Perhaps we should phone the police,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s part of their brief to worry about changes in the make-up of the universe - ’

  She gave a thin smile. ‘I meant, Murdo.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘Although I guess they’re tired of hearing from us.’

  ‘A broken window is different from a missing man,’ he said. ‘Even if it was a deliberate attack on this building.’

  ‘Just bored kids.’

  ‘Three nights running? And what about the hate mail?’ he said.

  ‘Superstition. Or Sci Fi heads. Anyway, Richard has got security guys at both entrances now.’

  He glanced down at her. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said. He turned back to her. ‘No one else must know about this. Only the team. Understood?’

  She nodded, her gaze fixed on the screen.

  She got out her phone, called up his number.
Murdo Maguire. Her finger hesitated over the name. She clicked it off. In front of her the red and blue lines lurched upwards, crashed downwards.

  DI Berenice Killick splashed water on her face. Her face in the mirror stared back. She ran a finger through her long black hair extensions.

  It is my case, she thought. A man washed up on the beach, with no ID but his pockets full of weird writings about gravity. I should be in charge.

  Had she imagined it, she wondered. That sneer from the SIO on their return, Detective Chief Inspector Stuart Coles, ‘Well, Miss Killick, there’s no point asking me where he might have fallen from… of course, a little local knowledge might come in very handy at this point…’

  Something about the word ‘local’. A tone of voice…

  The door creaked open. ‘Thought I’d find you here,’ Mary said. ‘We’ve had a call from Hythe. Missing person. Physicist, works at the lab there. Murdo Maguire, aged 43, white, grey-haired, blue eyes, not been seen for a couple of days. Not out of character, they said, but they were worried about him. He’s got a wife up the coast here.’

  ‘That’s our man, isn’t it?’

  ‘His car’s been found too,’ Mary said, ‘abandoned on the Hythe Road, right by that old lighthouse there. Looks like he drove there with the intent of climbing that tower.’

  ‘And jumping off?’

  Mary shrugged. ‘Who knows. Anyway, Stuart said, as we know who it is, you and I can go back on the warehouse raid case for now. He wants us to follow up the number-plate sightings.’

  ‘Doesn’t that need local knowledge too?’

  Mary looked at her. ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘I didn’t just imagine it, then?’ Berenice sighed. ‘Is it the Yorkshire bit he doesn’t like? Or the women bit? Like he would prefer it if everyone was Kentish, male and white?’

  ‘You don’t regret the move, do you?’ Mary glanced at herself in the mirror. She was wearing a neutral navy suit, and bright red shoes.

  Berenice shook her head. ‘You know my reasons for coming south.’ She took a lip-gloss out of her bag. ‘Physicist?’ she said. ‘Explains that stuff in his pocket about matter and thing. Funny the fish didn’t eat that too.’

  ‘Nah, too clever for fish.’

  Berenice studied her reflection. Mary met her eyes in the mirror. ‘You’re thinking about Him, aren’t you? Talking of reasons for leaving Yorkshire. Like, how would his wife react if some DC turned up on her doorstep in Leeds – ’

  ‘I wasn’t actually.’ Her voice was sharp. ‘I was thinking about these extensions? I mean, really honestly, I know you said you liked them but maybe a short Afro is best for a new DI.’

  ‘Berenice, would I lie to you?’

  ‘– Like, I look like I’m doing an Alicia Keys cover on the X Factor–’

  ‘Listen, Boss, I had blonde extensions all last year and I didn’t look like white trash, did I?’

  ‘I never said trash.’ Berenice turned away from the mirror. ‘And as far as “Him” is concerned, drowning’s too good for him.’

  ‘You know the physicist’s wife didn’t report him missing. Weird eh? He’d been gone two days and a night.’

  Berenice shrugged. ‘As far as I’m concerned, nothing’s weird between man and wife. Come on. Let’s go and talk to that villain about the warehouse stuff. While we’ve got time.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, there’s a dead physicist in the fridge. God knows what that’s going to do to the universe.’

  ‘What is there in places almost empty of matter, and whence is it that the sun and planets gravitate towards one another without dense matter between them?’

  Virginia Maguire sat in the shadows of her cottage, the book on her lap. She ran her finger along the parchment-thick paper.

  ‘Whence is it that nature doth nothing in vain; and whence arises all that order and beauty that we see in the world? What hinders the fixed stars from falling upon one another?’

  She tutted loudly, her lips tight with disapproval.

  ‘For if Nature be simple and pretty conformable to herself, causes will operate in the same kind of way with all phenomena, so that the motions of smaller bodies depend upon certain smaller forces, just as the motions of larger bodies are ruled by the greater force of gravity…’

  She held the book in her lap. Perhaps I should throw it in the fire, she thought. She looked at the fireplace at her side, its dusty black surfaces, the cold ash in the grate.

  And what would he think, my husband, to find I’ve thrown his precious book into the fire…

  She picked it up and read some more.

  ‘The Imprint of the origin of the universe can, in the right hands, be detected in its ancient chemistry. It is a creation of infinite duration, and yet, the question we must ask is, how did matter become matter? Who, or what, set this universe in motion? It is this that we are working to uncover – ’

  ‘Hah.’ She spoke out loud. She turned to the very first page, and ran her finger along the line where her husband had written, in pencil, his own name. ‘Murdo Maguire.’

  Her finger, roughened through age and hard work, brushed against the words. ‘We have the authority of those the oldest and most celebrated philosophers of Greece and Phoenicia, who made a vacuum, and atoms, and the gravity of atoms, the first principles of their philosophy…’ She slammed the book shut.

  The thick window panes let in a dusky daylight which picked out the grain of the wide oak window sills, the faded whitewash on the old stone walls.

  There was a knock at the door. She stared at it. Another knock. She got to her feet and went to open the door.

  A uniformed policewoman was standing there, with a police officer next to her, a man. He gave his name, Detective Sergeant something or other, but she felt only weariness at the sight of them, standing there on her doorstep.

  ‘Mrs. Maguire?’ they said. ‘Mrs. Virginia Maguire?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Do come in.’ But she knew, as she showed them in, as she went to the kitchen to put on the kettle, she knew as they told her about the body found on the beach, a man, drowned, that the moment she had always dreaded, had thought of as inevitable, had come.

  She would show no emotion. Like the quiet hiss of the kettle as it sat on the stove, as she listened to their words, ‘body found on the beach… initial identification suggests… we’re very sorry, Mrs. Maguire…’ her feelings would stay hushed, simmering quietly. There would be no rage. Even when the kettle came to the boil, even when its whistle shrieked through the air around her, she would sit there, quiet and pale, her head on one side, listening politely.

  Alone at her desk, Elizabeth Merletti, physicist, sat by her computer. Her gaze was fixed on the screen as she clicked between images. Click: multi-colour lines emanating outwards from the chaos. Click: two lines, one red, one blue, intersecting where the beams collide. Click, a graph, a sharp upward black line. Click: a photo; him, standing, in sunshine, by water, head turned towards her, smiling. The blue of the lake, the blue of his shirt, the sun on his hair, the warmth of his smile…

  And now gone.

  Beneath her feet, sixty metres under the ground, there is a tunnel of ice-cold nothingness and infinite collidings, its giant, glinting engineering conjuring the figures on to the screen in front of her.

  But all she sees is a blue and blonde picture of life itself. Her eyes shine, perhaps with tears.

  She murmurs to herself, one word. It sounds like ‘cheated’.

  Tyres sliding into mud. Engines silenced. The flash of head lights on the black bare branches of the trees. Berenice Killick opened her car door. DS Mary Ashcroft did the same.

  They surveyed the scene before them. One ancient white van, one caravan, their wheels mired in mud.

  ‘That’s the van all right.’ Berenice nodded towards it. Mary took a photo of the number-plate.

  Silence. Grey afternoon light, grey of the concrete wall behind the caravan. They knocked on the door.


  Still silence. They peered through the windows. There were sleeping bags heaped on the seats, empty beer cans on the table.

  Berenice stepped back on to the mud.

  ‘So what’s that, then, over the wall there?’

  Mary looked at the high concrete, the barbed wire on top. ‘That’s the lab. The physics place, where they’re smashing atoms.’

  ‘So that’s where he worked, our drowned man?’

  ‘Secret of the universe in there, Boss. Keeping the whole show turning.’

  ‘Shame it can’t stop just long enough for us to find our villain at home - ’ She stopped, short. There was a flick of curtain in the window of the caravan. ‘There’s someone there.’

  Berenice knocked loudly. ‘Or do you want us to break this door down – ’

  The door swung open. Standing there slouched a girl, in a huge red sweatshirt and tattered leggings.

  ‘Who are you?’ Berenice said.

  ‘I’m Lisa.’

  ‘Police,’ Berenice said, as Mary flashed a badge.

  ‘Yeah yeah, I know.’ The voice had a teenage weariness.

  ‘D I Killick and DS Ashcroft. We’re looking for Clem Voake. Is he your dad?’

  The girl laughed. ‘My dad?’ She shook her head. ‘Look at me, blad. He’s a white man, innit.’

  Berenice had her foot in the door. ‘My dad’s a white man too.’

  Lisa eyed her. ‘You saying you black like me?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’

  ‘Black you may be, but you’re gavvers all the same.’

  ‘Do you know where he is, Clem Voake?’

  The girl met her eyes. ‘Don’t know. Don’t care. Berenice turned to go.

  ‘He’s at a funeral,’ the girl said.

  Berenice turned back. ‘Thought you didn’t know where he was.’

  ‘Just remembered.’

  ‘Whose funeral?’

  She shrugged. ‘Dunno. Shall I tell him you called?’ She gave an empty laugh.

  Berenice faced her. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And tell him we’ll call again.’

  At the car, Berenice handed Mary the keys. She sank into the passenger seat, as the wheels span in the mud before skidding out on the track.