The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Funny!” Broadhurst snapped, and he looked along the basin-tops, down to the floor and then along beneath them. There was a basket beside each one.

  Hey, that’s where they were.

  The young waiter’s voice sounded clear as a bell in his head. Broadhurst could half see him, stooping down to lift an armful of toilet rolls.

  Then Sidney Poke’s voice chimed in. Bloody idiots . . . Do anything for a laugh.

  Broadhurst frowned.

  The ghost of Billy’s voice said, That’s right, doesn’t matter where he is or who he’s with. Come ten o’clock he has to disappear to do the deed. It’s legendary around town – everybody knows.

  Broadhurst turned around to face the cubicles

  everybody knows

  and walked slowly towards them, his back straightening as they came nearer. He started at one end and walked slowly, pushing open each door and staring at the empty tissue holder

  Hey, that’s where they were

  attached to the wall of each cubicle, right next to where an arm would be resting on a straining knee . . . where so many arms had rested on so many straining knees

  It’s legendary around town

  until he reached

  everybody knows

  a cubicle with toilet paper. The cubicle.

  He stared down at the now empty floor and closed his eyes. He saw Arthur Clark writhing in agony, crying out for help . . . so much pain that he could not simply unlock the cubicle door and crawl for help.

  Broadhurst removed his handkerchief from his pocket and, stepping into the cubicle, wrapped it around the toilet roll.

  Seconds later he was going up the steps away from the Regal’s Gentlemen’s toilet, two steps at a time . . . and wishing he could move faster.

  Sundays in Luddersedge are traditionally quiet affairs but the events of the previous evening at the Conservative Club’s Christmas Party had permeated the town the same way smoke from an overcooked meal fills a kitchen.

  In the tiny houses that lined the old cobbled streets of the town, over cereals and toast and bacon butties, and around tables festooned with open newspapers – primarily copies of the News of the World, the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday Sport – voices were discussing Arthur Clark’s unexpected demise in hushed almost reverent tones.

  Conversations such as this one:

  “I’ll bet it was his heart,” Miriam Barrett said from her position at the gas stove in the small kitchen in 14 Montgomery Street.

  Her husband, Leonard, grunted over the Mirror’s sports pages. “Edna said not,” he mumbled. “Said he hadn’t had no heart problems.”

  Miriam was unconvinced. She turned the sausages over in the frying pan and shuffled the ones that looked sufficiently cooked across to the side with the bacon and a few pieces of tomato that looked like sizzling blood-clots. “All that business with his . . . toilet,” she said, imbuing the word with a strange Calder Valley mysticism that might be more at home whispered in the gris gris atmosphere of a New Orleans speakeasy. “Can’t have been right.”

  Leonard said, “He was just regular, that’s all.”

  “Yes, well, there’s regular and there’s regular,” Miriam pointed out sagely. “But having to go in the middle of your meal like that, just cos it’s ten o’clock, well, that’s not regular.”

  Leonard frowned. He wondered just what it was if it wasn’t regular, but decided against pursuing the point.

  But not everyone in Luddersedge was talking.

  In his bedroom over his father’s butcher’s shop at the corner of Lemon Road and Coronation Drive, Billy Roberts opened his eyes and stared at the watery sun glowing behind his closed curtains. His mouth was a mixture of kettle fur and sandpaper and using it to speak was the very last thing on his mind. It was all he could do to groan, and even then the sound of it sounded strange to him, like it wasn’t coming from him at all but maybe drifting from beneath the bed where something crouched, something big and unpleasant, waiting to see his foot appear in front of it.

  Billy turned to his side and breathed deeply into his cupped hand. Then he stuck his nose into the opening in his hand and sniffed. The smell was sour and vaguely alcoholic, almost perfumed. He slumped back onto the pillows. It was those bloody whiskies that did it. He should have stuck to the beer, the way he usually did. It didn’t do to go mixing drinks.

  Billy had had a bad night, even after all the booze. He supposed there was nothing like messing around with a dead body – particularly one that had smelt the way Arthur Clark’s had done, Arthur having so recently dumped into his trousers – to sober a person up. It had taken Billy more than an hour to drop off after getting in – despite the fact that it was three in the morning – and even then his dreams had been peppered with Arthur’s face . . . and the man’s ravaged stomach.

  Work had been underway in the ballroom of the less than palatial Regal Hotel for several hours when Billy Roberts was beginning to contemplate getting out of bed.

  The wreckage was far worse than usual somehow, even though the festivities had been cut short by the tragic events in the gentlemen’s toilet. But at least most of the explosive streamers were still intact and there were fewer stains than usual on the cloths and the chairs. The most surprising thing was the number of personal possessions that had been left in the cloakroom, particularly considering the very careful population of the town. But then the unceremonious way the guests had been dispatched for home after been questioned made a lot of things understandable.

  Chris Hackett had arrived after the clear-up had begun, clocking into the ancient machine mounted on the green tiled wall leading to the Regal’s back door at 7.13. He didn’t think anyone would object to the fact that he was almost a quarter of an hour late, not after last night.

  He set to straight away, throwing his yellow and blue bubble jacket onto one of the chest freezers in the kitchen and emerging through the swing doors into the ballroom. It was a hive of activity.

  Jeff Wilkinson was busy dismantling one of the trestle tables over near the stage. Several of the tables had already been folded up and were standing propped against the ornate pillar beside the steps leading up to the stage, and chairs were stacked in towering piles against the side wall.

  In the centre of the floor, Mervyn Frith was adding to a huge mound of tablecloths lay jumbled up – the cloths were waiting for somebody to fold them, an unpleasant job given their size and the amount of spilled food that still clung to them.

  Elsewhere, various young men and women were loading glasses and bottles and plates and cutlery onto rickety wooden trolleys, the sound of their labours dwarfed by the sound of similar items being loaded into the huge dishwashers in the kitchens.

  Wondering where he should start, Chris Hackett saw a table that had been untouched, over by the far wall. He went across to it, moving around to the wall side to begin stacking the plates. Halfway along the wall he caught his foot on something and went sprawling onto the floor, knocking over two chairs on the way.

  Somebody laughed and their was a faint burst of applause as Chris got to his feet and looked around for the culprit of his embarrassment.

  It was a ladies’ handbag.

  Malcolm Broadhurst sat smoking a cigarette. He had been up since before dawn, having snatched a couple of hours’ fitful nap lying fully clothed on the eiderdown.

  He had watched the sun pull itself languidly over the rooftops of Luddersedge and had then spent the next 40, 45 minutes trying to get something resembling decent reception from his TV. In the end, faced with either the Tellytubbies or an Open University programme on quantum physics, he gave it up and sat waiting for the day outside to catch up with him. That and thinking about the previous evening.

  The call came through at a little after ten o’clock.

  A man’s voice said, “You up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Been to bed?”

  Broadhurst grunted. “Didn’t sleep, though.”

  “Well, you were
right not to,” the voice said. “We’ve been on this all night – well, all morning would be more accurate.”

  “And?”

  “We’ve not finished yet but we’ve got a pretty good idea.”

  The voice with the pretty good idea belonged to Jim Garnett, the doctor in charge of forensic science at Halifax Infirmary and who doubled as the medical guru for Halifax CID. He chuckled. “It’s a goodie. You were right to be suspicious.”

  The policeman shook another cigarette from his packet and settled himself against the bed headboard. “Go on.”

  “Okay. Two hours ago, I’d’ve been calling you to tell you he’d had a heart attack.”

  “And he didn’t.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly true: he did have a cardiac arrest . . . but it wasn’t brought on by natural causes.” Garnett paused and Broadhurst could hear the doctor shifting papers around. “What made me a little more cautious than usual – apart from your telephone call last night . . . for which Yvonne sends her thanks, by the way – was the list of symptoms, all classical.”

  Broadhurst didn’t speak but it was as though the doctor had read the question in his mind.

  “There were too many. Profuse salivation—”

  “Profuse – is that like, there was a lot of it?”

  “You could say that,” came the reply. “The poor chap’s shirt was soaked and he’d bitten through the back left side of his tongue; he’d vomited, messed his pants – diarrhoea: most unpleasant – and there were numerous contusions to the head, arms and legs.”

  “Suggesting what?”

  “The contusions?” Garnett smacked his lips. “Dizziness, auditory and visual disturbances, blurred vision . . . that kind of thing – and not the kind of thing you want to experience when you’re stuck in a WC. It’s my bet he shambled about in there like a ping pong ball, bouncing off every wall. And, of course, the pain would have been nothing to what he was having from his stomach – that’s why he’d clawed at himself so much. By then, he’d be having seizures – hence the tongue – and he’d be faint.”

  “Why didn’t he just come out, shout for help?”

  “Disorientation would be my guess. And panic. He’d be in a terrible state at this point, Mal.”

  Broadhurst waited. “And?”

  “And then he’d die. I’ve seen cases before – cardiac arrests – with two or three of the same symptoms, but never so many together . . . and never so intense. This chap suffered hell in his final minutes.”

  Garnett sighed before continuing. “So, we checked him out for all the usual bacteria – saliva, urine, stool samples . . . and there were plenty of those, right down to his ankles – and—”

  “So he hadn’t even been to the toilet?”

  “No, he had been. His large bowel was empty. This stuff came as the result of a sudden stimulation to the gut and that would release contents further up the bowel passage. Anyway, like I said, we checked everything but it was no go. Then I checked the meal – bland but harmless – and the beer . . . nothing there either.”

  Garnett moved away from the phone to cough. “God, and now I think I’m coming down with a cold.”

  “Take the rest of the day off.”

  “Thanks!” He cleared his throat and went on. “So, in absolute desperation, we started checking him for needle marks . . . thought he might be using something and that was why he always went to the toilet so regularly. But there was nothing, skin completely unbroken. And then . . .”

  “Ah, is this the good bit?”

  “Yes, indeedy – and this is the good bit.”

  Broadhurst could sense the doctor leaning further into the phone, preparing to deliver the coup de grace.

  “Then we turned him over and we found the rash.”

  “The rash? All that and a rash too?”

  “On his backside, across his cheeks and up into the anus . . . nasty little bastard, blotches turning to pustules even five hours after he died. At first I thought maybe it was thrush but it was too extreme for that. So we took a swab and tested it.”

  The pause was theatrical in its duration. “And . . . go on, Jim, for God’s sake,” Broadhurst snapped around a cloud of smoke.

  “Nicotine poisoning.”

  The policeman’s heart sank. For this he had allowed himself to get excited? “Nicotine poisoning?” he said in exasperation.

  “Nicotine as in cigarettes?” He glanced down at the chaos of crumpled brown stubs in the ashtray next to him on the bed.

  Garnett grunted proudly. “Nicotine as in around eight million cigarettes smoked in the space of one drag.”

  “What?”

  “That was what killed him – not the heart attack, though that delivered the final blow – nicotine . . . one of the most lethal poisons known to man.”

  “And how did he get it . . . if it wasn’t in the drink or in the meal, and it wasn’t injected? And assuming he didn’t smoke eight million cigarettes while he was sitting contemplating.”

  Garnett cleared his throat. “He got it in the arse, Mal . . . though God only knows how.”

  Broadhurst glanced across at the solitary toilet roll sitting on his chest of drawers. “I know, too,” he said. “But the ‘why’ . . . that’s the puzzler.”

  “And the ‘who’?”

  “Yeah, that too.”

  Edna Clark sat at her kitchen table, her hands wrapped around a mug of steaming tea. Sitting across from her was Betty Thorn-dike.

  When the knock came on the front door, Betty said, “You stay put, love – I’ll get it.”

  Hilda Merkinson had been in every room in the house but her sister was nowhere to be found.

  Worse still, she couldn’t find her handbag.

  “Harry?” She had already shouted her sister’s name a dozen times but, in the absence of a more useful course of action, she shouted it again. The silence seemed to mock her.

  Hilda knew why Harriet had gone out. She had gone out to clear her head, maybe to have a weep by herself. No problem. She would get over it. It might take a bit of time, but she would get over it – of that, Hilda was convinced.

  They had lived together, Hilda and Harriet Merkinson, in the same house for all of their 53 years . . . just the two of them since their mother, Hannah, had died in 1992.

  They had a routine, a routine that Hilda did not want to see altered in any way. It was a safe routine, a routine of eating together, cleaning together, watching the TV together, and occasionally slipping along to the Three Pennies public house over on Pennypot Drive for a couple of life-affirming medicinal glasses of Guinness stout. It was a routine of going to bed and kissing each other goodnight on the upstairs landing and of waking each morning and kissing each other hello, again in the same spot; a routine broken only by Harriet’s job in Jack Wilson’s General Store – a sop to his love of America – and Hilda’s work at the animal testing facility on Aldershot Road, where she’d been for almost seven years. The same length of time that Harriet had worked. Since their mother had slipped finally into a coma in a small side ward in Halifax General, her six-stone body reduced to wattled skin and brittle bone.

  During that time, the routine had persevered.

  It had been all and its disappearance was unthinkable.

  Not that there hadn’t been times when things looked a little shaky . . . namely the times when Ian Arbutt had cornered Hilda in the small back room against the photocopier and sworn his affection – despite Ian’s wife, Judith, and his two children. But basically, Ian’s affection had been for Hilda’s body and Hilda had recognized this pretty quickly into the relationship – if you could call the clumsy gropes and speedy ejaculations performed by her boss on the back room carpet a relationship.

  Hilda had had to think of how to put an end to it – thus maintaining her and Harriet’s beloved routine – while not having it affect her position at the testing centre.

  The solution had been simple, if a little Machiavellian. She had sent an anonymous letter to
Judith Arbutt saying she should keep a tighter rein on her husband. “I’m not mentioning any names,” the carefully worded – and written – letter had continued, “but there are some folks around town who think your Ian’s affections might be being misplaced.” Hilda had liked that last bit.

  A very anxious and contrite Ian had suggested to Hilda, on the next occasion that they were both alone in the centre, that he felt he wasn’t being fair to her. “Trifling with her affections” is what Hilda imagined he was wanting to say but Ian’s pharmacological expertise did not extend to the poetic. “I hope you’re not leading up to suggesting I look for other work,” Hilda had said, feigning annoyance, brow furrowed, “because that would mean something along the lines of sexual harassment, wouldn’t it?”

  The answer had been emphatic and positive. “A job for life”, is how he worded it. “You’re here for as long as you want to be here, Hilda,” he said. And he had been true to his word, at least Hilda could give him that.

  No, Hilda would have nothing come between her and her sister. They were all either of them had and their separation was something she could not contemplate. She had thought that Harriet felt the same way.

  And then came the fateful day, almost a week ago – was it really only a week? It seemed so much longer – that had threatened to change all that.

  Every Thursday, without fail, Harriet always walked along to the fish and chip shop on the green – Thursday being Jack Wilson’s early closing day – and had the tea all ready for Hilda when she got in. But on this particular Thursday, following four days of solid rain, when Hilda – a little earlier than usual because Ian also had flooding and wanted to get off – had gone past the General Store, she had seen Harriet helping Jack with moving boxes around due to the leakage through the front windows. He had asked her to stay back and give him a hand, and Harriet couldn’t refuse . . . despite her other “commitments”.