The Happier Dead (5 page)

“We are all deeply saddened by Mr Egwu’s death. It was a tragedy,” she said impatiently.

Oates looked into the old eyes in that flawless young face. “He had a good innings. And it comes to us all in the end.”

Miranda met his gaze for a few moments, and then looked away with a sigh. It was as if a favourite pupil had disappointed her with some act of minor stupidity, and she was cast back into the loneliness of her own superior understanding.

Oates was struck by the renewed power of platitudes. It was one of the most enduring effects of the Treatment, the way it had re-vivified certain old expressions. Language had grown up around the human condition like a rose around a wall, and now part of the wall had fallen the blooms of cliché swayed wildly, unsupported in the air. Miranda nodded to herself and he sensed she was steeling herself for a final attempt to enlist him.

“Have you ever looked into someone’s eyes as they died?” she said.

“Yes.”

“And what did you see there?”

“Pain and fear.”

“How about surprise?”

“Shrapnel in the stomach is a surprise, whether you die or not.”

“Aren’t you afraid of death?”

“No.”

“How about the deaths of those you love then?” she said, as surprised by her exasperation as he was.

They stared at one another, and for a fraction of a second Oates felt the violence in him stir in its sleep. It was a terrifying feeling. Most of the time, he could almost forget it was there, and the comforting sound of his better angels chatting to one another about traffic jams and money worries drowned out the sound of it snoring. Then someone like this said something like that to him, and the terrifying specter of his own potential rose before him once again. There was a knock on the door, and Charles inserted his head into the tension. The atmosphere made him grin.

“Not intruding am I? Only the Sergeant was asking if the Inspector might be free to visit the crime scene.”

“No, we were just concluding our discussion,” Miranda said, “Unless there’s any last questions you have for me?”

“The Superintendent told me you have a man in custody.”

“Mr Ali…” She looked to Charles.

“Farooz.”

“Mr Ali Farooz. He’s being held in one of the maintenance rooms outside of the main school.”

“How did you come to suspect him?”

“Joe, our head groundsman, was doing his rounds in the small hours this morning, and saw Mr Farooz running across the road from the students’ quarters. He called out to him – the domestic staff aren’t supposed to be inside St Margaret’s at that time, but they sometimes come inside to enjoy the warmth and the atmosphere at night. I’m told it has been quite a cold winter outside our little enclave. Joe didn’t think anything of it until Mr Egwu was found this afternoon. When we spoke to Mr Farooz he simply admitted it.”

“I want to speak to him as soon as I’ve seen the body.”

She nodded. “Of course. One would hope that given his confession, you and your men could wrap up your investigations overnight. Charles will be able to get hold of me if there’s anything further you need. In the meantime I trust you will encourage your team to respect the parameters laid out in this evening’s meeting. Your Superintendent has requested a full report from me on your departure.”

She put out her hand to him, and he shook it. Her skin was very pale in the gloaming. Oates turned as he left the room, and watched her collecting her notes from the desk at the back. She paused, her features still with thought. In that moment she appeared to him like a white marble statue of a pagan god, dredged from the earth, cleaned, restored and put on gleaming display in a modernist museum.

She was layered with time – on the surface, a freshness borne of recent attention. Beneath that, an aged thing who had absorbed more than a natural lifetime of human experience, who had watched a century of history accrue from behind her impassive beauty. Underneath it all, as with the ancient gods, there was a bedrock layer that predated her creation, a force of nature to which she had given a human face. As Oates turned to walk down the stairs after Charles, he realised he did not have the requisite learning to reference the symbols in her neat dress and well-groomed hands, and he wondered what it was she embodied for those who worshipped her: wisdom, hunting, lust or war.

C
HARLES WALKED AHEAD
of him down the stairs, and he managed to restrain himself from talking to Oates until the two of them had passed through the narrow doorway into the great court. Supper was over, and the students were dispersing in twos and threes from the dining hall. The long evening was drawing in, and lights glowed in the high Victorian Gothic windows of the chapel, the bulbs of chandeliers showing warmly through stained glass.

In the fresh air with Charles’s giggly curiosity beside him, Oates felt again like a schoolboy who had emerged unscathed from the headmaster’s office after an interview about some crime the two of them had committed together. He knew he would have to work hard to retain his suspicion of the ebullient public relations officer, and so when Charles asked him how fierce the old woman had been he remained non-committal. Charles however had correctly judged the atmosphere when he put his head around the door, and with his prior knowledge of Miranda he seemed to intuit exactly the nature of their exchange.

“She can be quite evangelical about what we do here. Bloody hard work for a PR man like myself, to keep the wheels on when the boss goes all starry-eyed. Still, never a dull day. And she’s got more of a personal interest.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, in perfecting the Treatment, obviously.” Charles pulled his plump cheeks back in a parody of Miranda’s youthful skin.

“She suffers from this… Tithonus Effect?”

“She’s never talked about it. You’ve met her, she never talks about anything outside of her work. But I would have thought so, wouldn’t you?”

“How old is she?”

“Oh, DCI Oates! You should know better than to ask that of a lady! But I should say it’s a safe bet she was bent over her textbooks in these very halls when you and I were mere glimmers in our fathers’ eyes, and peering into the human soul whilst we were trying to figure out what the big and the little hand do.”

As they passed under the old gatehouse that housed the school reception, Oates found himself marvelling once again at the sheer size of the spa. A further street opened out beyond, with a couple of students milling around in the light of the streetlamps. Another groundsman was positioned just outside the gate. He had one of the long mechanical arms which council cleaners use to retrieve rubbish from hedgerows, and he was using it to pick up a dead swallow from the gutter. Oates had seen three of the groundskeepers now, and they all had the same bearing, the indelible imprint of a life spent in the military.

They crossed the road, and just before they entered a doorway on the other side, Charles put a hand up in front of Oates’s chest, bringing him to a halt. He cocked his head and grimaced.

“Do you hear that?”

Oates listened. From a window somewhere he could hear music. It had the unmistakable sound quality of a record-player, speakers turned outwards on the summer night. He didn’t recognise the song, a seventies lounge-ballad. A man’s warbling voice mounted a scale whilst a female chorus ladelled sugar into the backing vocals.

“What is it?”

“It’s the soundtrack to my working life. What you can hear is Demis Roussos, with The Demis Roussos Phenomenon, the only EP to climb to the top of the UK hit parade in 1976. Demis spent just one week at number one, but after that we’ll have Kiki Dee and Elton John demanding we don’t do anything untoward to their hearts, then ABBA will be resurrected to inform us of the age and temperament of the Dancing Queen. When we were still at the planning stage for life inside St Margaret’s I begged Miranda to bring forward the freeze date by just a couple of months so we could have The Clash and The Ramones, but she thought them redolent of a social upheaval that might disrupt the therapeutic atmosphere. Demis may only have lasted from the 17
^th
to the 24
^th
July in the real world, but here he plays on a loop for a week every new term. You wouldn’t believe the royalties we pay his estate. It’s like working behind the counter of a shop at Christmas for all eternity, with Let it Snow playing on repeat. If it turns out this Ali chap went on a rampage, and you’re short a motive, my money’s on Demis.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” Oates said.

They entered a second court, a small functional space compared to the grand open vistas of the main body of the school, where the students had their accommodation in a mix of Victorian brickwork and sixties concrete and glass. Charles explained that each guest had their own room. Outside one of the staircases was a rope of old-fashioned blue police tape, and a young officer was chatting to a couple of the students who had gathered there.

All the time, Charles kept up his friendly patter, and Oates continued to resist the insinuation of his camaraderie. Charles rebounded from each rebuff with the clumsy enthusiasm of a teenage suitor. As Oates walked past the stout dormitory walls, the spa felt like a fairytale palace – the cold queen, her oafish jester, and her personal army of ex-special forces in blue overalls.

O
ATES LEFT
C
HARLES
to supervise the conversation between the young policeman on guard outside the stairwell and the small crowd of students. The first flight of stairs was wide, but the second flight was half a ladder, a skinny little passage between the walls. He could smell death about half way up, the heavy metallic odour of spilt blood. By the time he arrived in the room, the SOCOs had already set up the Oracle and taken their readings.

The tripod, with its various sensors and lenses hanging like mechanical fruit from its limbs, stood a few feet from the body. Tiny sound waves probed the wounds, and the cameras fed the pattern of the blood spatter back into the program. The thermometers registered the ambient temperature of the room and of the corpse. Further instruments probed the stiffening of the joints, and the degree to which the blood had settled in the lower veins and arteries. When all the data had been stored and processed Oates and his fellow officers gathered around the screen to watch the preliminary analysis. In the simulation the bright orange figure of the assailant entered the picture from the left of the screen, and brought the knife down on Prudence Egwu.

The murder weapon, which lay now on the floor beside the dresser, was a distinctive African knife with a bone handle. As the scene played out, the computer registered the vital statistics of the attacker – height, six foot. Weight, 90 kilos. Probability male, eighty-six per cent. Probability age range eighteen–thirty-five, sixty per cent. Oates frowned in irritation at the data lines. He had specifically told the SOCOs to switch off the probability metrics, because it was bloody obvious that most violent crime was committed by young men, but there was a homicidal old lady or two in the world, and seeing the odds in black and white made it harder to spot her.

On the screen Prudence raised his forearm, and the first blow sheered to the bones in his wrist, partially severing the hand. Oates had only to look up to see the fan of blood pumped from the wrist across the neat cream walls of the room. The Oracle emitted the victim’s facsimile scream, together with the distance at which it would likely have been audible, through the walls and on the ground below. The attacker advanced, stabbing over and over again, raising the knife almost above his head each time and bringing it down into Prudence’s chest. It was those long arching blows and retractions that had thrown spatters across the ceiling. He kept striking after the victim had fallen to the floor, the assault continuing long after death. The timer running in the corner of the screen showed three am the previous night.

“Is that thing calibrated to the time in here, or the time outside?”

“In here. There’s no other way to fix it, otherwise it gets upset about the temperature.” The technician patted fondly at the steel legs of the Oracle.

“So that’s, what… about seven pm outside of Wonderland?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Figure it out. Any fingerprints, DNA?”

Bhupinder shook his head. “We’ve run one sweep. We’ll do another just to be sure, but I’d guess what little we’ve found will turn out to be the victim’s. It’s weird, after an attack like that, not to leave anything behind. Someone must have done some cleaning up. I just knew this would be a long one.” He gazed morosely at the floor, toeing the edge of a pool of blood with his plastic slipper.

“Chin up. It’ll all be over by Christmas,” Oates said, and his subordinate grinned ruefully. “Can someone please find me a pack of cigarettes I can smoke in this place?”

He walked over to the bed, where a large photo album lay on the bloody covers. He lifted it up in his gloved hands, and turned through the pages. The first few shots of the family Egwu were truly ancient, pictures of a large unsmiling African holding a spear and wearing a crown of bones and feathers with several woman clustered around him on his ornamented chair. The brown sepia tones of the early portraits gave way to the bleached colours of nineteen seventies snaps, as the crown, frown and feathers gave way to sharp suits, afros and smiles in the later generations of Egwu men. By the time the camera had travelled all the way to the early twenty-first century, the pictures had the flat quality of print-outs from digital, and the formal portraits had disappeared entirely in favour of graduation and wedding snaps. There was even one of Prudence Egwu as a young man on safari with a smiling African guide.

Oates flicked through the last of the snaps, and was about to toss the book back down on the bed when he noticed one blank page. A picture had been removed. It had a place and date written underneath it in a neat hand:
Prudence and Capability, my two boys! London, Chelsea, September 2005.
Oates looked at the space, the white shadow cast by a little mystery.