Dead Money (A Detective Inspector Paul Amos Lincolnshire Mystery) (19 page)

‘You carry on,’ I said. ‘It’s just something I’ve eaten.’

So I sat, gulping brandy, and stared at the frosted glass door, which became a kind of personal monitor for the scene going on behind it. Break through breastbone, pull chest apart like the seam of a peach, expose heart.

‘He only has one lung,’ I called, but Chas was already stuck in, the buzz of the saw assailing the firmly-shut door. It’s just a job, I told myself. Routine Post Mortem examination. We get a lot of coronaries, source of much hilarity from the collection men, who make snuffling, laddish jokes like how stiff was the stiff?

I waited until I heard the hose, and then I forced myself to go into the mortuary. I wanted to see Eddie, even though I had long ago sworn to myself that I never wanted to see him again in this world or the next. As though death gives a shit where you buy your ties, Eddie, I thought, or fasten your aggressive braces with those little leather straps from Jermyn Street. As though death is some kind of gentlemen’s club.

Slowly, I approached the table, my throat swelling up with ululations. For very oft we pity enemies. Eddie had been what is known in certain circles as A Fun Person, and I had had fun with him once, riotous fun, which went as suddenly sour like a bottle of dud champagne. Chas had already covered his ruined chest, but before I covered his face, I smoothed his clipped moustache, still more blond than grey, like the rest of the hair on his body. Then I lingered, wavering, until Chas put his hand on my shoulder. His gown was undone and the hairs on his chest were black and vigorous.

‘I’ll give you a lift,’ he said. ‘Put that jacket to its proper use.’

Harley-man Chas always gets a rise out of my biker jacket, though in a friendly way, not mean like Eddie. I watched Chas wheel him over to the fridge, as it were putting him to bed for the night. And then I noticed the jar, solitary and glistening on the bench. I had often called Eddie heartless, now this was a physiological fact. ‘What’s this for?’ I asked Chas. ‘What was wrong with him?’

‘Embolism. Common as muck, though hard to predict until it’s rubbed under your nose.’

‘So why are you keeping his heart?’

‘This is Eddie Kronenberg, Member of Parliament, a junior health minister, no less, under the late-lamented leaderene. You remember Eddie, don’t you? – Private healthcare, only way to go. In view of who he was, and what he thought of the Service, I think we’d better cross his t’s and dot his i’s. Let’s get you home now.’

I didn’t like the sound of this at all, although it would be fair to say that Chas wasn’t one for keeping viscera. In fact the numbers going into the collection had dwindled under Chas’s regime. He had been on and on to the Trust about the question of the store, particularly about the overzealous stocking of his predecessor, Dr Rudyard, who during the 1980s, (Eddie’s Reich, in fact) had removed and stored some three hundred uteri, all perfectly healthy as far as Chas could see. We keep the jars in the dark like the stolen eggs of rare birds, praying that no one will bring them to light. So Eddie’s heart, and the business of replacing it, was in the forefront of my mind as the Harley raced through traffic on Camden Road, the cold air forcing up under my helmet. I wanted to yell slow down, because however well things may have been going between Chas and me, I needed to consider this alone on the sad old sofa which still smells faintly of my landlord’s grandma. But Chas stopped off to get a bottle and a take-away. A message was recording on the answering machine as we went in. It was Callie from Party People, offering me a taster event at the bargain price of fifty pounds. Now Chas would know that I was a lonely heart too.

‘Who’s that?’ he asked. ‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?’

Callie, it is true, has the voice of a man on a sex-change programme, the female hormones presenting. I explained that he ran a dating agency for quality people.

‘Explain quality,’ Chas said, handing me a glass of white Burgundy.

Party People does not take time-wasters. Only the well-spoken pass the initial telephone interview. You must be under size eighteen and younger than forty six, unless you are a gentleman, in which case you must be over five feet eight and under seventy five. Statistics sanction this exclusivity. Statistics prove that men will not respond to size eighteens over forty-seven years old who speak like characters from Eastenders or, God forbid, from Coronation Street or Brookside since that implies the outer limits of the known world where quality is non-existent. And on an intellectual level, Callie says, there are millionaires on his books whom he could not introduce to me because they are just barrow boys at heart.

Chas said: ‘We don’t live in a perfect world.’

‘Some of it makes sense,’ I argued. ‘At least he was right about the types I attract, like The Ratbag and The Weakling, and the one you did the PM on today.’

‘Ah.’ Chas fixed me with his mad monk eyes. ‘Not you and Eddie Kronenberg, MP? There’s quality for you.’

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ I said, meaning he could not know that Eddie had got beneath my skin as surely as the red briar rose I had tattooed below my collar bone, as though to disassociate myself (I see it now) from Eddie’s plans to dominate the nation. But it was an innocent enough mistake, I told Chas, to meet a man like Eddie through the temping agency I worked for which specialised in unambitious graduate women who hadn’t a clue what they wanted to do after college. While the clued-up ones bought power suits and had their hair cut in a serious style and competed for trainee positions in PR and Marketing, I carried on like a pillion rider, dying my short crop black and wearing my biker jacket to assignments, over the skirt, of course, a tailored stipulation insisted upon by our booker. I treated it all as a joke until around the time I met Eddie, when I was beginning to realise that the odds of finding a permanent job were stacked pretty heavily against me. At least I knew, from several recent attempts to secure an opening, that doors to PR and Marketing were bolted shut.

And so I ended up at The House of Commons. Eddie Kronenberg (Conservative) should have been a short-term assignment since his superannuated PA took exceedingly short holidays, even working throughout the recess to service his business dealings. But in less than a week, I managed to undo the delusion the old bag had given him for twenty years that she was indispensable. No one is indispensable, Eddie laughed, and it never crossed my mind that one day this would mean me. I guess I was a talking point for him, with my punky hair and leftish inclinations: an incongruously comical addition to the ranks of Fun People – not just Eddie’s confreres in Fun at the House, but all the Funsters of his business acquaintance, those whom the opposition would later term the paper bag brigade. It started after my first day in the job when he peeked his blond head around the office door and asked if I was finished with typing that nonsense. He wanted to eat, and he didn’t like eating alone. So we trekked along the river and up to Kettners. Eddie may have already been an MP for fifteen years when I met him, but his heart remained in Soho. It was not, strictly speaking, cappuccino Soho, nor the bondage shop Soho that peddles rubber underpants with inverted tails. It was more of a good old boho type of place, circa 1959: an attitude of mind which Eddie shared with many of his contemporaries. They thought they were liberal at heart because they had stood next to Francis Bacon in the gents. They thought they would live forever.

‘Why didn’t you say?’ Chas asked, when I had finished my somewhat overwrought history.

‘Say what?’

‘Say who he was.’

‘You know who he was,’ I said. ‘Eddie Kronenberg. Sixty-two. Coronary embolism.’

‘I mean who he was.’

‘If you mean he was famous,’ I said, ‘I didn’t think he was especially, except in certain circles. He knew a lot of people.’

‘So do I,’ Chas said. ‘I bet he was lousy in bed.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Circulatory problems.’

‘You would know, of course,’ I muttered.

‘He was a classic case.’ Chas ticked off the odds against Eddie on his long white fingers. ‘Professional male, a stressful occupation, smoker, drank far more than was good for him, high blood cholesterol.’

‘Best cut out the chicken tikka then,’ I said. I hadn’t touched my vegetable biriyani. I was thinking about Eddie, growing stiffer in the fridge, his sectioned heart locked up with thousands of others. It was Dr Fell’s shift tomorrow and I didn’t want Yorkie, her assistant, appraising Eddie with his bone-headed stare. Yorkie had served six years for a crime of passionate revenge committed against the lowlife who had raped his eight-year-old niece. He had come home on leave from the merchant navy, ambushed the rapist outside the pub and shoved a broken bottle up his backside. ‘Which puts new meaning into the job of anal seamstress,’ Chas joked. Dr Fell was a semi-retired incompetent, but she kept her hand in, as she put it, thanks to her younger brother, a director of the hospital. Her older brother was something high up in the College of Pathologists. Chas referred to them all as The Fell Monsters and was vehemently opposing their proposals to privatise the mortuary by franchising it out to an American funeral home corporation on whose board, it was rumoured, sat the younger Fell brother, wearing his entrepreneurial cockade. ‘Although I’d be more than happy to see them sell off items from the archive to private collectors,’ Chas said, ‘if it meant raising money for waiting list patients, which it won’t, of course. The Fell Monsters will just get rich on the commission they make from Last Rites, where for a few dollars more the loved one gets a shot of forma in the neck to spruce him up nice for his mother.’

These things considered, I knew I would have to go in to work tomorrow to watch over Eddie. Chas was off to a Harley-owners rally in Hertfordshire. I had a fleeting image of myself holding on to his waist as we sped along those country lanes, then dismissed it.

‘I’ll call you when I get back,’ he said. ‘Don’t let this thing get to you. It’s par for the course in this job. Think of it as a rite of passage, like fox hunters when they get blooded.’

But it got to me. Of course it did. I kept on seeing Eddie’s jar in the bathroom of the house which overlooks the garden square, a bathroom from the Deco age when Funsters like Eddie’s grannie would sluice themselves down in Mitsouko and imbibe a glass of something pink. Only this was, strictly speaking, mistress territory, the bathroom Eddie shared with I-Am-It girl Mafalda. And it was Mafalda’s Oleg Cassini scent, reeking of Eighties excess, with which I had dabbed myself to hide the vomit smell of too much Kettners pizza, too much pink champagne, and too many brandy chasers. Never mix the grape and the grain, Eddie warned, which is why I had stuck with the grape up the scale of its fermentations and lived to rue the day.

I took ages in that bathroom, cleaning myself up and growing increasingly anxious in case he came to get me. Only he never did. When I emerged, overlaid with scent of Oleg, he was sitting with his feet up in the drawing room, smoking a full strength Rothmans and nursing a brandy liqueur. There were some old African sculptures about the room and a Roman head. On the largest of the five sofas sat an automaton with Negroid features. I remember that, and the first edition of Saint-Exupery’s Petit Prince in the bookcase. Absolutely my favourite book, Eddie said when I commented on it. Absolutely was a word he used a lot, as in: Absolutely, this is an age of relatives. And Absolutely, I believe that you should do whatever takes your fancy, as long as you don’t hurt anyone in the process.

Mafalda, it was implied, would not find out. I can’t remember where she was that night, probably away at a conference somewhere, testing the tide of public opinion, daring to express the views that others might hold but not speak of, views such as: in a free enterprise society, body parts must constitute a legitimate item for trade on a free and unregulated market. Market Forces Mafalda was the absurdly young director of the Think Tank to which the Funsters of Eddie’s party would rally for gourmet lunches and discuss the campaign tactics needed to capture the votes of those popular shareholding proles who would secure them a fifth, sixth, seventh term, until the rising generations truly knew no different authority than they, and they became a shining, thousand year Reich. That was the way to do it, Eddie said. We don’t need gas camps here. The wogs will just piss off and live in Euroland. Mafalda was beautiful, well-connected, brainy, and earned far more than he did on the face of it. So what was he doing with me?

I have never really fathomed that one out. In the cavernous Victoria watering hole where we used to stop off for a pint, I remember some deadbeat coming up to us one night and asking Are you two in love? – Not yet, Eddie answered, quick as a flash. And he bought the guy a drink. To Percy Luckraft, who was Eddie’s researcher at the time, I was known as the secretary bird, though Eddie always presented me as his assistant. He introduced me jokingly to Mafalda as a mole, a card-carrying member of the opposition. She failed to get the joke, but never took me seriously. Why should she?

I kept seeing him hitting the bathroom floor, slipping off the loo onto unyielding marble. Was he naked, dressed? Was he wearing an aggressive shirt and amusing braces? Those braces were a talking point. As I handed the dim sum at a reception once, I overheard him arguing the merits of leather straps with Count somebody or other. These, I thought, are the people who run the country, these vicious amateurs. It was OK then to be an amateur. In fact, you absolutely had to be an amateur to be in Eddie’s club. Woe betide anyone who took things too seriously, who appeared to work too hard, who showed that they were trying. Percy Luckraft took flak for this, although he had to try really hard to cover Eddie’s tracks. Percy is a creative, Eddie would jest. Sensitive type. Eats toenail bread.

Had he hit the floor right after his morning shower? Was that before or after he’d shaved, before or after he’d put on his Floris cologne? Eddie liked nice smells, even though he joked about how poncy they were. Eddie was well groomed, a Fifties dandy in baggy salt and pepper suits, updated with aggressive shirts and migraine-inducing ties. He would never wear blue, even though it was the party colour, because all those he dubbed the new boys and girls had taken to wearing it with po-faced uniformity. The Meritocracy, said Eddie. Pause for laughs.