Dead Money (A Detective Inspector Paul Amos Lincolnshire Mystery) (18 page)

“Norman has certainly not admitted to killing Jones, or did I ever expect her to. On the contrary, she continues to deny it emphatically, as I discovered when I spoke to her half an hour ago.”

“But,” the Chief Constable spluttered, “but David has just passed to me a draft press release saying you made an arrest yesterday and the suspect would be appearing in court this morning. In fact,” he continued, getting hot under the collar, “when I challenged Swift last night she told me you had arrested Norman for the murder.”

“I’m afraid that was a little white lie, sir,” Amos interrupted with the air of a penitent, “to buy me time to catch the real killer. The murderer has indeed been arrested and will appear in court today but it is a he, not a she.”

“Are you telling me,” Fletcher demanded as the potential of the situation dawned on him, “that you deliberately arrested an innocent woman?”

Then suddenly realising that a hole could be blown in his budget, he exclaimed in exasperation:  “She can sue us for wrongful arrest!”

“I think that is highly unlikely,” Amos replied calmly. “She will be charged with the equally unpleasant though lesser offence of blackmail.

The chief constable’s jaw dropped. “Blackmail?” he gasped.

“Blackmail. It struck me as odd from the start of this case that a woman of apparently limited means, who previously lived in a rented flat in a rundown block, could suddenly afford to buy a luxury apartment. We don’t yet know her original victim or victims but clearly she had put together enough cash by the time the refurbishment was complete and she naturally picked her old home, affording as it did an excellent view of the entrance to the block where she could keep an eye on various comings and goings.

“Quite recently she gained a hold over Jim Berry. He was desperate. He had already seen his life destroyed once when his business went belly up. Now he relied for a meagre living on Ray Jones, a born-again puritan who would certainly cut him off if he knew that Berry was being pressed to divulge his business deals for sale to his rivals.

“Norman was threatening to shop Berry to the authorities for claiming social security without declaring his income from Jones. Poor chap. I doubt if he was earning over the limit that social security allows anyway but by this time Berry was pretty unstable. He’d lost his firm, his wife and his wealth. He was eating too little and drinking too much. Norman pushed him over the edge.

“The night he murdered Jones by mistake he had sneaked into Killiney Court while the guard was round the back of the lifts smoking. He went up to Foster’s rooms and gained entry, using a spare key he had been entrusted with when he was helping to rewire the block and had not bothered or forgotten to return.

“He took the duplicate set for the whole block that he knew Foster kept and removed the fuse for the lighting on the stairs, plunging them into darkness so he wouldn’t be seen if he bumped into anyone.

“Berry then made his way upstairs. He knew the block had been renumbered, making the ground floor level one, but he hadn’t reckoned on Foster’s landing being counted as level two. Hence his foolish remark that all the residents thought they had gone up one level in the world.

“He let himself into Jones’s flat in the dark and, knowing the layout of the identical apartments from working there, was able to get into the bedroom. With the curtains drawn there was just enough light to see a vague lump under the bed covers. Berry battered what he thought was the sleeping Elsie Norman, months of frustration and anger boiling over in the savage blows.

“Then he switched on the light. He probably intended to search for any incriminating evidence that Norman was using against him so that he could remove it. Imagine his horror when he found that the body he had savaged belonged not to his tormentor but to he man he saw as his benefactor, Raymond Jones.

“Berry fled, not even bothering to switch off the bedside light. He stumbled back down the stairs, returned the keys, restored the lights and slipped out before the errant guard had returned to his post.

“Worse was to come. Norman had photographed him coming into the block. They weren’t very good pictures, taken through her window into poor artificial light, but you could just about recognise Berry.

“Little did Norman realise as she stepped up the pressure on Berry that he had actually come into Killiney Court that night to murder her, not Jones. She stepped up the blackmail and Berry, who was already under suspicion, feared the photographs would be enough evidence to put him in the dock for Jones’s murder.

“Berry now had little choice but to lie low. Killiney Court was crawling with police for several days. Even after that we had a night-time presence in the building, mistakenly guarding Joanna Stevens. Besides, we were putting more pressure on Berry and he couldn’t risk making a move.”

“But what about the bundle of notes Elsie Norman gave him?” the chief constable butted in, finally finding his voice. “I thought he was supposed to be blackmailing her.”

“On the contrary, the package contained prints of the photographs of Berry. When heard that we had called off the inquiry, he was unleashed like a greyhound. I took great care that no-one would know I had removed Norman from the premises, not just to charge her with blackmail but for her own safety.

“I feel sorry for Berry. He has been dealt some pretty harsh blows in recent years – and I fear that I delivered the cruellest.”

If you enjoyed Dead Money, you might also enjoy Remains of the Dead, also published by Endeavour Press.

REMAINS OF THE DEAD, BY ANNE MORGELLYN

Prologue

It sits there alone in the dark like a peach in brandy left over from Christmas. But now I will switch on the light, to shatter its illusion of uniqueness, to show it that there are others. This region of the hospital is packed with the oddments of two hundred years’ worth of patients, all of them pending, not all of them great or good. Glancing behind me to check I am not being followed, I make for the Hearts and Lungs cupboard. There are so many jars, I know that nobody will miss one.

Gotcha, I say, sticking up to him for once, knowing he cannot get back at me. I load the jar into the Liberty bag I use for vegetable shopping and make for the double doors. Outside, the street is smelly and damp with last night’s rain. I like to pretend it is the stage door of a theatre that I am leaving, toting my luvvie rehearsal gear, an eye out for autograph hunters, but nothing plays this far east. No one gives me a second glance as I quit the mortuary, except old Elias from medical records out in the alley on his smoke break. I jiggle the bag at him and hurry by in case he pesters me for a date. My dating days, I think, are over.

And so I make my way home, my head full of Eddie, his heart under my seat. It rides the Tube with me, becoming slightly agitated on finding the lifts out of commission on our stop on the Northern Line, a line which Eddie isn’t used to taking. What am I going to do with you? I say, but gently, with consideration for his feelings. And I feel that I am doing for him far more than he would ever have done for me. Because Eddie broke my heart. It was trashed, binned off, trodden loosely into the topsoil where the cat could dig it out and sick it up.

Now there’s a notion, I whisper, as we wheeze up the steps from the Tube, crossing the bridge still emblazoned with the legend ‘Third Term – Third Reich’, which I wish I had sprayed on myself, except I was on the wrong side then, marking time with the wasted ticker I dangle under my hand. We reach my house, its multiple bells and flaking stucco signalling its long establishment as common lodging house in this street of newly gentrifieds. Before I unlock my door, I deposit the jar in the bogey hole at the bottom of the basement steps where it settles, peevish and cross, in the gap between the wall and the communal washing machine, posing a question to which I know already I will never have a proper answer: why did I not put it behind me?

***

Chapter One

People ask how I can work in a morgue, and I say there are good days and bad days and days of grey in between. Just like your job. And mine does have its advantages. The dead don’t steal your parking space or try to take you down a peg or two. The dead don’t jump you from behind, except in horror movies. The dead have no delusions of grandeur. In fact, the dead have no illusions whatsoever. Naked, it says, we come into this world and it is sure that we can carry nothing out. Working where I do has given me the necessary respect for this bald truth.

But the day that they brought Eddie in, I can say I was feeling a bit off-colour. I had clocked on at eight and spent the morning labelling specimen jars, a troublesome task which prompted me to think about my lot. My sort of job is commonly thrown to the swine: old lags, the educationally backward, or – in Germany – conscientious objectors. I know a German, in fact, who worked his national service in a mortuary, doing what he termed the civil job of anal seamstress. I thought that funny-sick at the time, but now I justify to myself that it is not so bad here, that my boss is well and truly on my side, that with my record, I am lucky to have a job at all, that honourable services to the dead are a better way of earning a living than some ways I could mention. Politics, for instance. The butcher’s trade. Stocks. Cleaning up after the dead is like cleaning up after babies. Life, as they say, must go on.

So I tried not to think about dishonourable services to the dead as I labelled my jars. I tried not to think about the other jars, huddled shoulder to shoulder behind the distempered walls. We look after them, sure: the worms and the rats are no match for preserving fluid. But they should have been dust long ago, interred with the cadavers that contained them. They should have been asleep, not kept up in this airless dungeon which has processed corpses since Robert Walpole ran the House of Commons and Henry Fielding speeded up proceedings on death row. The Charitable Hospital of St Roche Without-the-Walls, or Charity’s, as it is popularly known, was founded in 1750 by financier William Fenn, a shifty-eyed party whose portrait overlooks the staff canteen. Having enriched himself on the savings of Bubble investors, the lemmings of the first stock market crash, he tried to atone for his greed by establishing this place, which still screams scoundrels and gulls like a Hogarth etching. In fact, when I think of what some of the scoundrels upstairs in their surgical caps and gowns have done to the gulls who lie down for them, dreaming anaesthetised dreams, my mind is as dark as that unquiet grave.

I brooded on the store as I finished the stale samosa which was all the canteen could offer me by way of a vegetarian lunch. But it was the mortuary, not the jars, that required my services that afternoon. The lights were up full when I returned and Doctor Chas Androssoff, the chief pathologist, was stamping into his rubber boots, his crow-dark plait already up and netted. Chas is to the scoundrels upstairs what chalk is to cheese, as fish to fowl, as a whale to hammerhead sharks. But his bark is far worse than his bite, which means the scoundrels never take him seriously. He looks less like a senior doctor than a cross between a Russian priest and a Hell’s Angel, with fervent blue eyes like Rasputin’s. Living patients wouldn’t have him near them – not because he is dirty (no one in this job can afford poor hygiene) but because he is unconventional. And there is nothing so conventionally unchallenged as the medical profession, at least at this stuffy London hospital, which has been a law unto itself long before Rasputin was a twinkle in his father’s eye. But I feel all right around Chas. He doesn’t patronise me much, and he obviously appreciates the way I respond to his charnel house humour, suitably impervious, suitably unfazed, like a Hollywood butler.

‘Another one gone on the job,’ he said, nodding at the stiff on the section table, still zipped in its body bag. It was my job to unzip it. ‘His cleaning lady found him on the bathroom floor.’

I started prepping instruments, an acid sensation in my stomach which I at first put down to the rancid excuse for a meal. A purple haze seemed to fill the room, which I attributed to the faulty strip lighting and the greasy windows several feet below street level. Chas switched on the tape and told me to look sharp. Sometimes, if I’m favoured, he allows me to close the corpses up after he has done the business, cause of death determined and duly set down, but I really wasn’t up to it that afternoon. In fact, when I unzipped the bag, I felt my legs give way like the first time I saw a dead child lying there, but now the purple haze stretched out its arms and broke my fall. There is a scabby little bump on the back of my head to prove I hit the freshly swabbed tiles, but I don’t remember that. Just Eddie: I remember saying his name in a slurred, gutted kind of way. Then, nothing.

When I came to, I was slumped in the office chair with Chas’s chunky arm about my neck and something astringent in my nose. Through the frosted glass of the mortuary door, I glimpsed a rigid mound which used to be someone I knew – someone who had been very wrong for me. Then I knew my biliousness had nothing to do with either the hospital air or the rotten samosa. I was simply experiencing the morgue technician’s worst nightmare: being asked to prep the corpse of someone known to you. Eddie I knew all too well. In fact, it was Eddie’s face I saw now, superimposed upon Chas’s broad shoulders like Marley’s ghost. It was Eddie’s mouth, purple and open, quivering over mine with sight of tongue. It was knocking back a glass of pink champagne. It was laughing at me.

‘You want to tell me, Louise?’ Chas said, pulling off his hair-net and beetling his brows. I expect he was thinking, pig of a shift on Monday if we don’t clear this by tonight. We had had a glut of sudden deaths to deal with recently, as well as all the tumours and suspect organs Chas was supposed to write up for the scoundrels upstairs. They called him Dr Rush-off, jibing at his Russian name and his Harley Davidson. But he seemed to suffer them gladly.