A Corpse Called Bob

by Benedict Brown

  The story was complete so I sat back down in my place and watched as first David, then Jack were read their rights. I watched as the police led away my boyfriend. I had solved Bob’s murder. My goal was achieved; my heart smashed to pieces.

  As the two suspects stepped from the conference room in cuffs, a wave of shock passed across the office. I could hear my deskmate Suzie’s high pitch squeal and Pauline from accounts’ unmistakable grunt mixed into a chorus of shouts and gasps. Amara followed on with D.I. Irons and then Wendy went out to greet the mob.

  In the end, only Ramesh, Will and I stayed behind. I poured us each a glass of water from the jug in the middle of the table and handed them out. We drank in silence, with our thoughts for company.

  Wendy had shut the door after her and the world beyond that room seemed very far away. I didn’t have to hear what the bitchy secretaries would say about David or how Wendy would repaint every last detail to impress her friends. For another few minutes I could sit there in peace.

  It was Will who finally broke the silence. “Thank you…” He struggled to find the right words. “I know it will come out eventually, but I appreciate what you did for me.”

  Ramesh looked over at him but said nothing.

  “I can’t explain what happened with Bob because I don’t understand it myself.” This wasn’t the Will we knew. His anger had been wiped clean away and I could see that he needed to talk. “He had a weird hold over me that I’ve never experienced with anyone else. I didn’t want to go along with his plans but I was in awe of him. I could never say no and he used that against me. It took me until the night he died to see who he really was.”

  I suppose I felt bad for Will. I could understand him pretending to be someone he wasn’t in order to fit in. I could even understand the influence Bob held over him. The one thing that didn’t make sense to me, though, was the way he’d treated us for years. No matter what he’d been going through, that didn’t excuse his cruelty.

  He turned to look at me. “I’m sorry for what I did to you. It was all part of the act. When they found out I was gay in the last place I worked, the blokes in my team treated me like a traitor. People who I thought of as friends turned their backs on me completely. I didn’t want that happening here, so I created a character – I played a part. But it took too much out of me and it’s over now. I just hope you forgive me.”

  When our silence refused to break, he stood up from his seat. He cast one last look at us from the door before a burst of noise floated in from outside. I heard someone crying, several men shouting in disbelief and Amara trying to quieten everyone down. The door swung closed again and calm returned to the conference room.

  Ramesh put his hand out across the table and his tears triggered mine.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I hadn’t been able to visit David at the police station. His family took precedence of course and he had to be processed and interviewed and all sorts of other things before being formally charged. I didn’t go to the magistrate’s court for his initial hearing either. Chloe called to say that David thought it was better if he did it on his own.

  It probably goes without saying that I’d never visited anyone in prison before. I mean, I’d seen it on TV and in movies and stuff. In fact I’ve watched every season of Orange is The New Black and Oz, and even a few episodes of Prisoner Cell Block H when I was a kid, but it’s hardly the same.

  I had to take two buses to get there and I hate buses, but that obviously pales in comparison to what David was going through. I’ll skip the details of the long, dehumanising process I had to go through to gain entry. Signing in, bag searches, stern looks and security doors all featured heavily before I was allowed to sit at a small table in a large room with the murderer I’d recently started the process of falling in love with.

  Once we were finally there together, I struggled to form a whole sentence. I finally went with, “I don’t think I’ve seen you in anything but a suit before.”

  In his black jogging bottoms and grey sweatshirt, he looked like an entirely different person. “That’s not true. Team-building day last October, I wore some nice comfortable chinos.” More than anything, he looked tired. Not older, or thinner, just tired.

  “I stand corrected.”

  There we were, David and I and a big silence between us. I’d been longing to see him. I hadn’t thought about anything else for days but now that my wish was a reality, it was hard to know what to talk about.

  “Thanks for coming,” he eventually tried. “I wasn’t sure you’d want to.”

  “Thanks for having me.” I always know just the wrong thing to say.

  I put my hand on the table for him to take but he shook his head and after a brief moment of agony, I realised that he meant it wasn’t allowed.

  “I’m so happy to see you,” he said instead and it was almost as good. “If I try really hard, I can imagine we’re in a bar together and, after this, we can go to mine and I’ll make something easy to eat that looks impressive.”

  “Sounds delicious.” I laughed a little. “May I recommend homemade guacamole? If you’ve ever accidentally sat on an avocado, then you’re already halfway there.”

  He smiled and I wanted to kiss him. “Have you ever sat on an avocado?”

  Don’t tell him the truth! He might still think we have an ounce of sophistication.

  “Urmm… once or twice. But only because my favourite bag has a hole in it and, for some reason, Mum always makes me buy avocados on my way home from work.”

  I smiled. He smiled. It was sweet.

  “I don’t think you came here to give me recipe advice.”

  “And I doubt you get many avocados in here anyway.”

  Silence. Silence. Silence. Pain. Pain. Excruciating pain.

  “How did you know it was me?” Why did he have to ask that? As long as we were being sweet and flirty, we could pretend that everything was okay with the world. “I mean, I know about the evidence you found, but what convinced you deep down that I could have done it?”

  I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly dry. There was a café area over by the entrance but I didn’t want to waste a second of my time with him – even if it meant having to live through this conversation.

  “It might sound weird but you were the only one who cared enough. Ramesh was hurt, sure, but he had no idea how evil Bob really was. Wendy, Amara and Jack didn’t give a damn about him and Will somehow still liked him. So that only left one person.”

  “Right. I figured it was something like that.”

  “Every time you spoke about Bob after he died, it sounded like you were in pain. I thought at first that you felt sorry for the guy, but when I found out what he’d done to Jack’s daughter, I started to understand what you’d gone through. Right up there on the list with all his other crimes, Bob was trying to destroy you.”

  “Sounds about right.” He breathed in sad and slowly. I wished that I could whisk him off to pretty much anywhere else on earth. “Bob loved to see the effect he could have on me. The nastier he became, the more I suffered. He knew the guilt I carried and he took advantage of it. If I’d called the police when he assaulted Pippa, none of this would have happened.”

  “There was something else as well.” The only other people I’d explained everything to were Irons and Brabazon. It felt odd to be saying it so openly. “No matter how many times I ran through the evidence, I couldn’t find anyone who’d want me dead except Bob. He was the only one cruel enough to pay for the hit. When I realised that, it didn’t take much for me to guess what was on the list he talked about in his final e-mail.”

  The silence between us returned for a moment and, when David finally spoke, his voice was hurried, nervous. “I want you to know that I had no idea he was planning to kill anyone. I would have gone to the police immediately if I’d thought that was possible. He told me each time he crossed something off his ‘bad bucket list’ – that’s exactly what he called it – but he never showed me what
was on it. I knew about Wendy, Ramesh, bits and pieces about Jack – there’d be notes on my desk each morning or e-mails and texts if he couldn’t be bothered to leave his office. But even on that last night, all he said was that he had something big planned. His grand swansong.

  “He said he’d been a good man all his life and got nowhere so it was time for a change. Said he’d had his punishment, but there was still time to commit the crime. He used to laugh and call me soft whenever I tried to reason with him. He was right of course, I didn’t want to upset Mr Porter, or lose my job, so I did the minimum to soothe my conscience. I told myself that there was no other option, but the truth was killing me. I wasn’t just his witness; he’d turned me into an accomplice. That’s why I went there that night. Bob kept dropping hints about what he was up to and I thought, if I caught him together with Will, I could blackmail him into giving up on his plan.”

  There were other conversations going on at the tables all around us, but I tuned them out and focused on our own. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. D.I. Irons told me that Bob had already paid the assassin on the morning before he died.”

  David shook his head wearily. “You might not want to hear exactly what happened that night, but you’re going to have to one day and I’d rather it came from me.” He looked around at the couples and families we were surrounded by as if he hadn’t noticed them before. “I need you to know that I wasn’t planning to kill him. I went into the office through the fire escape, but that was only to be able to catch them at it.

  “When I got inside, they were together in the main office. Bob was standing over Will, shouting out boasts and insults as Will quietly sobbed. It made me sick to see Bob’s cruelty first hand but I didn’t have time to stop him because, a few seconds after I arrived, Bob was doing his trousers up and it was all over. Will begged him to get the hard drives from the server room and Bob eventually gave in. Now that his goal was achieved, I could see how little he cared about his friend. He barely glanced at the poor man as he walked out still in tears.”

  He looked away for a moment, no longer able to hold my gaze. “You worked out most of the rest. Bob went off to have a shower. He was gone for ages, so I waited for him in his room. He was furious when he found me there and demanded that I leave, but I stayed firm. I told him to sit down and shut up and he plonked himself in the free chair.

  “He took his time, poured himself a drink and said, ‘What are you going to do? Tell on me? I’d wait a bit longer if I were you, there’s so much worse still to come.’

  “That was when I hit him.” David swallowed hard, like he wanted to take the words back and never utter them again. “I could see there was no sense in arguing. My hand shot out to grab the bottle and I smashed it across his face. Even as he felt the blow, he was smiling and it made me wonder if that was what he’d wanted all along. Perhaps that was on his bloody list; making me just as bad as he was.”

  “He fell unconscious, but it wasn’t enough. The knife was on the table and I knew what I had to do if I wanted to stop him.”

  It was more painful to listen to his story than I’d imagined. I thought that, after everything I’d already discovered, I’d have become hardened to it. I was way off and it felt like every cell in my body was rebelling against me.

  I didn’t want to dwell on all those emotions – I could deal with them at home – so I kept talking. “What about the letter opener? It probably ruins any defence of seeing red and losing it. It makes the whole thing seem more deliberate.”

  His luminous blue eyes looked so sad right then and I had to resist reaching out to him.

  “I guess some stupid part of me worried that it would be mistaken for a suicide and I couldn’t stand that. I wanted the world to know that someone truly hated the man. And I did; I despised him.”

  He looked away, out through the high windows that showed nothing but chalk-white skies, so I nudged him on. “Keep going. Tell me what happened after.”

  “I never thought I’d get away with it, but I did what I could to hide my guilt. I took the bottle, the knife and Will’s champagne glass. I rubbed the door handle clean, just in case. Then out in the office there were bits of Bob’s clothing strewn about. I didn’t want to leave anything that might incriminate Will.”

  “The missing clothes confused me at first. Wendy said that Bob took his socks off when they did it and I eventually put three and three together and came up with sex.” I can never resist a bad joke.

  He didn’t smile. I could see how badly he wanted the story to be over. “I was laden with stuff. It was ridiculous. I should have found a bag or something but, after I went downstairs with my hands full, I tried to wipe my fingerprints off the exit and dropped the bottle. I picked up the big pieces and stashed them in my coat pockets then emptied them in a bin a mile from the office.

  “I slept better that night than I had in months. And when I woke up the next morning, I decided that I wouldn’t do anything more to cover up my crime. I made a silent promise that, if anyone else was arrested, I’d turn myself in to the police. That’s why I insisted on going to the station with you to see Ramesh. I spent the whole time we were in the car wondering if I should confess but I couldn’t until it was absolutely necessary.”

  “Why not?” My voice came out colder than I’d intended. “If you thought it was inevitable I mean.”

  “I had something worth being free for.” I let his words hang in the air about between us.

  I’d gone to see him to be the loving and supportive girlfriend he needed, but now that I was with him, other feelings were rearing up. There was a question I hadn’t been willing to ask myself before and it was about to jump out into the world. “David, why did you start a relationship with me after everything you knew?”

  Another breath, another pause. “Selfishness, first and foremost. I guess I wanted to enjoy my last days of freedom the best I could – a bit like Bob really. But there was more to it than that. The night that I saw you in the supermarket, you were so bright and full of energy.”

  “Me?”

  “In your shiny blue dress you were like a meteorite streaking across East Croydon.” A hush descended as David attempted to put his thoughts in order. “I meant what I said, Izzy. I’ve always known you were wonderful, seeing you out in the street that night, you were effervescent. I dreamed of another life. I even kidded myself that it might still be possible.”

  Tell him it is. Tell him it’s not too late.

  I wanted to comfort him, but I couldn’t. I cared for him but the words wouldn’t come so I changed the subject.

  “I’m probably just as much to blame. You were my very first suspect. I couldn’t imagine who else Bob would have given up his chair for and, you were so weird on the phone the next day, I immediately thought it was you. I could have asked you about the e-mail Bob sent at any time, about the list, but I never did. I didn’t want to believe you were capable of murder. And even after I’d worked it out, when I rang you at home, I prayed that you’d run away and never look back but I knew you were too good for that. So here we are.”

  His face became one big smile like he was opening his door to me on our first date. “Here we are.”

  I couldn’t do the same. I couldn’t pretend that everything was okay. I put my hands on the table in front of us and linked them together because I couldn’t touch his.

  “So… What now?”

  Author’s Note

  My family are total book-junkies and, like Izzy, I grew up on murder mysteries. I even did a detective fiction module at university – not that I’m trying to show off or anything.

  I’d always planned to write a murder mystery so, when faced with a long summer holiday, and feeling determined to produce something that could connect directly with an audience, I dug out a project I’d started five years earlier.

  To my surprise, I’d already written a third of “A Corpse Called Bob” and had only put it aside because I’d got distracted by life, work and othe
r writing projects. Re-reading the text after so long away from it was a unique experience and I immediately fell in love with Izzy and Ramesh and all their oddball companions. I laughed and gasped and tried to remember who the murderer was supposed to be and, when I got to the end, I knew that the time had come to finish the story. A furious summer of writing (and playing with my one-year-old daughter) ensued and the result is this book.

  I hope you’ve enjoyed the novel as much as I’ve loved every moment writing it. I adore these characters and can’t wait to revisit them in the next Izzy Palmer case, which I plan to release early next year. If you’d like to have an early peek or find out when it’s going to be published, make sure you sign up to my reader’s club where you’ll also be able to access free, exclusive novellas depicting Izzy’s adventures.

  Acknowledgements

  Before I go, I should probably say sorry and thank you. Sorry to anyone in Croydon if I failed to put across that I actually really like the town I grew up a fifteen-minute bus ride from. Izzy’s childhood recollections of what a magical place it seemed are purely autobiographical and I still have lots of affection for the place.

  A second sorry belongs to the whole nation of Wales. I spent every childhood holiday visiting my maternal family there and loved it so much that I moved to Aberystwyth when I was eighteen. If I ever make enough money from my writing, I’m going to buy a cottage on the Gower. Despite or maybe because of all that, I couldn’t resist Izzy’s Tom Jones singalong.

  Which only leaves the thank yous. Thank you to Lucy Middlemass – my favourite person I never got to meet – for encouraging me over seven years when no one else wanted to read our books. I wrote this book for you to laugh at, I’m glad you got to read at least a bit of it.