No Cherubs for Melanie (4 page)

Bryan gave him a few moments, then enquired again about the electronic organ that Bliss had played to a rapturous crowd at the pensioner's concert.

“In the bedroom, Guv,” said Bliss, his eyes immediately lighting up. “I've got a new one actually. Cost a bloody fortune.” In an instant he was out of the chair and guiding the DCI to another room, another world — a world of music.

The single bed looked under siege, squashed against a wall surrounded by Yamahas and Technics that, combined, could outperform a thousand-piece orchestra. Bliss waved the DCI to the bed while he flicked a couple of switches and started playing.

“Recognize it?” he asked after a few bars.

Bryan nodded, “‘Time to Say Goodbye.' That's beautiful Dave. You're wasted in the police force.”

“Yeah, I know, Guv. Too bloody sensitive, that's my problem.”

He finished the song and they wandered back to the main room.

“Look, I'm not going to get on my bloody knees,” said Bryan, “But if you think this act of being round the twist is going to let you retire and draw a cushy disability pension, you're wrong. You're as sane as I am. I know that doesn't necessarily mean a lot in the police force, but you're one of the best blokes we've got and I don't want to lose you. Got it?”

Bliss nodded.

“OK. I'll give you twenty-four hours. Either see the doc tomorrow and tell him you're as fit as a bloody fiddle, or damn well resign and stop pissing everybody about.”

Bliss's eyes found the stain on the carpet again as his senior officer unlatched the front door and stepped out. But Bryan paused on the threshold, jammed the door open with his foot and turned back into the room. He looked as though he was having second thoughts as he called, “Dave.”

“Yes, Guv.”

“Interesting case, eh!” he suggested cheerily. “Who murdered the murderer?” Then his eyes swept the room. “Oh, and get this place cleaned up before the council declares you a health hazard.” The door slammed, and the old cat cringed again.

An untidy queue in the police station lobby blocked Bliss's access to the enquiry counter the following morning. An old lag, well known for spending more time in other people's houses than his own, was last in line, waiting to report to the police as a bail condition. He spun lazily to view the newcomer; a hint of recognition animated his keen eyes for a second, then faded under the force of Bliss's black stare. Bliss knew the lag's face well, and he had no intention of striking up a conversation.

Bypassing the disparate line-up of criminals, victims, and bloody nuisances, he reached over and tapped lightly on the enquiry desk window.

“Stop that,” yelled the elderly woman clerk, accustomed to dealing fiercely with irate and impatient people. She hadn't looked up from where she was painstakingly recording the details of an errant motorist's driver's licence, but Bliss recognized the blue-rinsed thin
white hair and precariously balanced spectacles. He considered thumping harder, but decided to wait until she had finished. He'd tangled with her before — a crusty crone, the sort of woman who could cause a stink in Harrod's perfume department.

A mumble of annoyance swept through the habitués at the prospect of someone barging in, and a balloon-chested spinster with a fistful of charity raffle tickets buddied up to a bailed rapist to make it clear that Bliss would have to wait his turn. Half a dozen pairs of eyes stung the back of his neck and he smiled to himself, avoiding eye contact by casually studying the notice board. Little had changed in ten months, he thought, scanning the few ‘Wanted' posters, several legal aid lawyers' business cards, and a 1960s Ministry of Agriculture poster warning of the ravages of the Colorado beetle. Little had changed outside either, he had noted on his way to the station from the doctor's surgery. But what was there to change? The west London landscape, where grime-encrusted red bricks — Victorian terraces of a bygone suburbia — met the limestone Georgian mansions of the City, had not changed for over a hundred years, and would not change without another war or a new motorway. He found it somewhat disconcerting that the people, sights, and sounds, had not changed either. During his ten-month absence, the world had apparently got along perfectly well without him.

The clerk slipped the driver's licence back through the contraption under the window and took a breath to shout, “Next,” through the metal sieve. Bliss banged hard on the Plexiglas with the side of his fist. A gawky young man, next in line, bumped him roughly out of the way. “Oy. Wait your turn.”

Frightening the youth off with a vicious stare, Bliss defiantly banged again. The frosty-voiced counter clerk
took off her glasses, preparing for a fight, and glowered at him from behind the safety of the armoured glass. “Stop that. What do you want?” Flipping open his wallet he fished out his ID and slapped it against the glass.

“Detective Inspector Bliss. I work here!”

Understanding flooded her face. She smiled, and sympathy sweetened her tone to a sickly whine. “Oh, yes, Inspector. Of course. I'm terribly sorry — I didn't recognize you.”

She knows, he thought with swift realization. Damn. I hope they're not going to treat me like a bloody invalid.

The latch on the side door clicked open with an electronic buzz. “Please come through, Inspector. Are you feeling better now?”

“Thank you,” he replied, his worst fears confirmed.

Stepping into the corridor, he cringed under the onslaught of ghosts from a thousand old cases. Complainants, villains, and witnesses — distraught, violent, supercilious, and contrite — seemed to spring to life in front of him and he dragged his feet, fearful of confronting the ghosts. He was fearful, too, that doors would jerk open to reveal the faces of his colleagues reproachfully asking if he were better, mindful that they had been slaving while he had luxuriated in his sorrows.

Three chatty secretaries swanned past without recognition or acknowledgement, leaving him a trifle disappointed. Scornful indifference might actually be worse than condemnation, he thought, stopping outside the chief inspector's office to straighten his tie and flick a few cat hairs off his jacket.

DCI Bryan had cleared away for action. A couple of potted plants, a brass desk lamp, and a black plastic pen rack were grouped geometrically at one end of his desk, and a couple of telephones had been pushed off to the other end, while a thin file marked “Gordonstone. M.”
sat squarely and solely in the middle as if it were the only case for which he was responsible.

“Pot,” suggested Bliss, noisily sniffing one of the plants, knowing it wasn't, but still surprised that an unmarried, relatively young, university-type high flyer like Bryan should spend so much time rooting about in his garden.

“
Rosmarinus officinalis
, actually,” Bryan said, pulling it from under Bliss's nose. “And, no, you can't smoke it.”

“How did you know I would come back?” Bliss asked, pointing to the file as Bryan motioned him to sit.

“Easy. The doc called. Surprise, surprise. Apparently you're as fit as a dog with two pricks.”

Bliss's confused expression showed that he wasn't satisfied. “But you didn't know I'd come back today.”

Bryan slid the file toward him. “I would have bet my next pay packet you'd be dying to have a go at this case.”

Bliss fingered the folder and cocked his head, waiting for the truth.

Bryan smiled like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “OK, OK. I watched you on the security camera trying to use your old code on the back door. We changed the codes last month, so make sure you get a new one before you leave.”

Satisfied, Bliss relaxed and flicked through the slim file. “Not much here. What's the story?”

A spiky-haired clerk clutching a bunch of files wandered halfway into the room. Bryan gave the interloper a fierce look and barked, “Not now.”

The young man froze; his lower lip trembled.

“Oh for Christ's sake, get that ring out of your nose and shut the bloody door behind you,” Bryan shouted, not waiting for the man to leave before rolling his eyes and venting his feelings. “Where do we get them from?
Anyway, where was I?” He paused, arranging his thoughts, and plucked a few leaves off the little rosemary bush, rubbing them under his nose for a few seconds, before picking up where he'd left off. “Like I told you, Gordonstone's dead and buried. Classic symptoms of heart attack: red face, short of breath, clutching his chest — you get the picture. No one really questioned it, and the staff at the restaurant didn't call an ambulance for nearly three hours, thinking he was just paralytic, as usual.”

“That wasn't very thoughtful.”

“Especially as he was such a natural for a heart attack. Fat geezer, drank like a fish, smoked bleedin' great cigars, and he was always up in the air over something.”

“Could one of the staff have done it, then?”

“Quite probable, I'd say. The problem is it took a few weeks for the toxicology boys to get round to running some tests on a few bits of Gordonstone's innards the pathologist put aside at the post-mortem. They called me at home yesterday… No, make that Saturday. Anyway, turns out it was poison. Some unpronounceable, exotic stuff that attacks the nervous system. They would have done the tests sooner but there didn't appear to be anything suspicious; nothing obvious like a knife in the back.”

“So theoretically it was a heart attack, then.”

“Yeah,” continued Bryan scanning the pathologist's report. “Though there was nothing natural about it.”

“So where do we go from here, Guv? This happened weeks ago.”

“Well, it's too late to turn up mob handed and pull the place to pieces. Whoever did it has had plenty of time to clean up anything remotely embarrassing. That's why I wanted you on the case.”

Surprise lifted Bliss' voice. “On my own?”

“Just for starters.” The chief inspector raised his eyebrows. “Unless you don't think you're up to it?”

Flattery or blackmail, wondered Bliss. Probably a bit of both. “I can handle it.”

“Good. I was hoping you'd say that. To be honest we're a bit stretched at the moment. I need someone to get the ball rolling and I'll give you some help later. Start with the staff at the restaurant and be ever so subtle. Tell 'em it's just routine. Don't let 'em know what we know.”

“They're bound to guess something's up if I start nosing around after all this time.”

“Let 'em guess all they want. You never know, somebody might let something slip. Might say something weird, drop themselves, or someone else, in it. Give 'em the idea you're just tying up a few loose ends, a bit of background work just for the record. Let 'em think they got away with it.”

“Let who think they got away with it?”

“The staff. It must've been one of them.”

“Have you forgotten your basic training, Guv? Remember: never assume anything, never dismiss anything.”

DCI Bryan shook off the suggestion that his intuition might be misplaced. “It must've been an inside job. He lived in a flat above the place; the only people who had access were the staff.”

“Guv!”

“OK, OK, I get your point,” conceded Bryan. He snatched the file back from Bliss and shuffled through it. “Look, here's a statement from the head waiter. Took Gordonstone his dinner at seven-thirty as usual and said he was right as rain. Thirty minutes later he was dead.”

“The head waiter could be lying. He could have been the one who did it.”

“Granted. But if he were, that would still make it an inside job wouldn't it?”

Bliss gave way on the point with a grudging nod. “So what was the poison?”

“Like I said, it sounded pretty exotic; probably organic according to the egghead who called me. I haven't got his report yet. They're still running tests but he thought we should know straight away. Apparently there's dozens of possibilities and he was asking if we had any control samples that they could try to match it against.”

Bliss shuffled through his rusty memory bank of training courses and came up with very little on the subject of poisons — just a couple of lectures from a doddery old doctor shaking with Parkinson's disease, and a few photocopied sheets of common symptoms.

“Apparently, this type of stuff comes from mushrooms, jellyfish, even plants,” continued the DCI. “It paralyses fairly quickly — in maybe ten to fifteen minutes — but the brain keeps working as the nerves go haywire. The last few minutes seem like forever, and he must've been screaming for help, but his mouth wouldn't have been working right. Everyone in the restaurant thought he was being his usual obnoxious self — thought he was pissed.”

“I know the feeling,” admitted Bliss.

Pretending not to hear, the chief inspector continued, “He was almost certainly dead when he hit the floor.”

“And no one called an ambulance?”

Bryan shook his head. “Probably fed up with him. They'd seen it all before.”

“Surely this was different?”

“Apparently the restaurant was full. The staff just wanted him out of the way. A couple of flunkies dragged him into his office and shut the door on him. Nobody realized he was dead until they were locking up and somebody thought to check on him. They were just grateful they'd had a peaceful evening.”

The chief inspector continued leafing through the file. “The investigation went pear-shaped right from the beginning,” he snorted. “Looks as though a green-horned uniformed lad asked just enough questions to fill out the sudden death report, then he copped a quick statement off the head waiter and the head chef — the last people to see Gordonstone alive — and left it at that.”

“I don't suppose he had any reason to suspect murder…” said Bliss, his voice trailing away as his eyes were drawn by a scuffle in the car park outside the office window. Several officers were struggling with a runty youth whose frenetic kicking and squirming made him slippery as an eel. A burly policewoman stepped in, grabbed the kid's long greasy hair, and hauled him across the tarmac to the cellblock door. Bliss lost his focus and found himself confronted with an image of Gordonstone — not the revolting, fat drunk who died in his restaurant, but a slim, polished man who, even in the midst of questioning about the death of his daughter, carried himself haughtily and spoke with an arrogance that made Bliss want to get his investigation over and flee back to the police station as quickly as possible. Rushing to fill out the preprinted forms on the life and death of Melanie Gordonstone, he had summarized in a few dozen words an entire lifetime of hopes, fears, successes, and failures. Name, date of birth, last known address, next of kin; time, date, and place of death. Witnesses.