Midnight Murders (3 page)

‘When you've dealt with as many cases as I have, you learn to take your time. Rush and you're apt to make mistakes.'

‘I can't stop thinking about that poor woman… '

‘How do you know there's a woman down there?' His drawl, coupled with his nitpicking, irritated her.

‘Because she has long blonde hair. She's also wearing bright-blue eye-shadow.'

‘Could be a gay,' Dan countered.

‘It looks like a woman, and as she's been murdered… '

‘Murdered,' Dan mused. ‘How did you come to that conclusion?'

‘Because she's buried here, in the hospital grounds. Someone wanted to hide the body from the authorities.'

‘Or someone couldn't afford to pay for a funeral. They're getting pricier every day. Mint?' He thrust a crumpled paper bag under her nose.

‘No, thank you,' she refused stiffly.

‘You should learn to relax, constable… '

‘Grady. Michelle Grady, sir.' She drew herself up to her full height of five-foot six-inches, but she still felt like a child next to him

He pushed his fingers through his fair, thinning hair and looked at a battered blue estate car edging its way through the gates.

‘Here's the pathologist. Ever meet Patrick O'Kelly?'

‘Not to talk to, sir.' She'd heard a lot of stories about Patrick O'Kelly, and all of them had been reinforced by the compulsory post mortem that she, and every rookie, had been forced to attend.

‘You're in for a treat.' Dan Evans pushed another mint between his lips, before stepping forward to open O'Kelly's car door, as it drew to a halt on the lawn.

‘What have you got?' O'Kelly left the driver's seat and heaved a battered wooden case from the back of the car.

‘A face, partially uncovered in fresh-dug earth,' Dan replied shortly, ‘although our constable here thinks it could be murder.'

‘Could be someone wanting to avoid funeral costs.'

‘That's what I told her.'

‘Police ambulance here?'

‘Not yet.'

‘I'll make a start anyway.' O'Kelly glanced from the hole to the lawn around them. ‘Who's been tramping over this site?' He peered suspiciously at Michelle.

‘The trainee who dug the hole,' Michelle recited. ‘The patient who ordered him to do it. The gardener. And myself.'

‘What patient ordered the trainee to do what?' Dan asked.

Michelle pulled out her notebook and flicked through the pages. ‘A Mrs Vanessa Hedley insisted she saw someone bury a body in the garden the night before last. When she told the staff on her ward, they wouldn't believe her; and when she persisted in repeating her allegations, they sedated her. According to the hospital administrator, Mr Tony Waters, given her history they were justified in ignoring her. Mrs Hedley wasn't allowed out of her room until this morning. She found and dressed in a white jacket in the hope that she would be taken for a doctor. Then she came out and ordered one of the trainees to start digging… '

‘And he obeyed an inmate?' O'Kelly questioned incredulously.

‘He thought she was a doctor,' Michelle reminded him.

‘I'm confused,' Dan chipped in. ‘Who exactly is in charge of this place?'

Patrick pushed his glasses further up his nose, and snapped on a pair of rubber gloves.

‘I stepped in the footprints of Mrs Hedley and Dean Smith, the trainee,' Michelle continued. ‘Since I arrived I have succeeded in keeping everyone away from the site.'

‘Coming with me, Dan?' O'Kelly stepped across the lawn.

Dan followed Patrick to the lip of the hole. A few seconds later Patrick shouted for a spade and Michelle handed him the one Dean had abandoned. When she returned to her post, she stared disapprovingly at the crowd of patients and domestic staff who were teetering on the edge of the lawn, and shooed them back. She enjoyed wielding the authority that came with her uniform. When she'd forced them to retreat a couple of token feet, she returned to her post and tried to listen in on Dan Evans' conversation with Patrick O'Kelly. But all she could make out was a succession of ‘Steady's', ‘There she goes', and ‘Look at that', none of which proved enlightening.

A second police car arrived with her immediate superior, Sergeant Peter Collins. As he directed the erection of canvas screens around the site, she continued to stand her ground. Within minutes the entire area around the hole was shrouded off, much to the disappointment of the crowd of onlookers.

Peter Collins stepped back, stood in the crowd for a few moments to test the efficiency of the screens then joined Michelle.

‘I hear you were first on the scene.'

‘I was,' she answered.

‘What's the run-down?'

‘A trainee gardener uncovered part of a face in the flowerbed… '

‘Just a face, or is it attached to a body?'

‘I think it's attached to a body,' she ventured, suddenly unsure of the facts.

‘Stupid place to put a body,' he observed, ‘where a gardener's going to dig it up.'

‘He wouldn't have, if a female patient hadn't ordered him to do it.'

‘Have you asked the patient how she knew there was someone buried here?' he enquired.

‘She claims she saw someone burying a body in the garden the night before last.'

‘Saturday night.' Peter recalled Vanessa's ramblings during the rumpus on Trevor's ward. Instinctively he fingered the cut on his cheek. What had Jean Marshall called her? – Hedley – that was it. ‘Vanessa Hedley,' he said aloud.

‘You know about her?' Michelle was crestfallen at relinquishing her edge on the case.

Peter didn't hear her. ‘Well I'll be damned,' he muttered. ‘Some lunatics aren't so mad after all.'

For the first time since Spencer Jordan had taken over the art therapy classes, the patients grew restless before the end of their allotted time. They abandoned their sketch pads, pastels and easels for the greater attraction of the police cars and the mysteriously veiled area on the lawn. Only Trevor remained apparently indifferent to the drama being played out in the grounds.

Spencer allowed the group to disperse ten minutes before time. When everyone except Trevor had left, Spencer moved quietly around the room, collecting portfolios, gathering together pastels and picking up the odd pencil that had fallen to the floor. The whole of the time he was clearing up, Trevor continued to work diligently and silently in his corner. The hands on the clock crept around to one o'clock, and still Trevor remained engrossed in his sketch.

At five minutes past one, Spencer lifted down a rucksack from a peg behind the door. Picking up a chair, he carried it over to a table close to where Trevor was working.

‘Sandwich?' Spencer opened a packet wrapped in greaseproof paper.

‘No, thank you,' Trevor replied distantly, without looking up from his drawing.

‘They're salad and goat's cheese. A friend of mine made the cheese, and I mixed the salad. Guaranteed organic, no chemical, no fertilisers – unnatural fertilisers, that is.' He pushed the packet closer to Trevor.

Trevor looked up, stared at the sandwiches for a moment, then, after dusting off his hands on his sweatshirt, took one. ‘Thank you.' His voice sounded strange, rusty from disuse. He opened the sandwich and peered inside the twin slices of rye bread.

‘No butter,' Spencer apologised. ‘I try to eat healthy.'

Trevor closed the sandwich and took a small bite.

Spencer produced a bottle of mineral water from his rucksack, and a paper cup. He filled the cup and handed it to Trevor, forcing him to take it. ‘Harry Goldman told me you're allowed out for short periods. Would you like to have a drink with me in the Green Monkey this afternoon? They do a nice line in non-alcoholic wines that don't interfere with medication.'

‘No, thank you.'

Spencer took a sandwich, and bit a chunk out of it. ‘You're going to have to make that first move sometime soon,' he cautioned. ‘You don't realise what you're missing until you go outside. I know. It's not that long since I was sitting where you are now.'

‘You were a patient?' The question was timidly phrased, but it was still a question, and Spencer understood what a profound step forward that represented for someone in Trevor's depressed state of indifference.

‘Yes, I was a patient. In America first, then here.' Spencer ran his fingers over the scars that radiated from the glass eye in his right socket. ‘I'll tell you about it sometime.' He hoped Trevor wouldn't press him. If he put him off, it might close the chink he'd just made in Trevor's defensive armour, and that could prove disastrous to a man teetering on the brink of re-establishing communication with the rest of the world. But…

The “but” was the agony that Spencer had failed to live with for nearly three years. The present – including Trevor – faded as he remembered California. A sun-drenched sidewalk in the pedestrian-only area of Main Street. The beat of popular music echoing from the fashionable boutiques that catered for the young and well-heeled, drowning out the classical music from the art gallery behind him. He saw again the gilded window that held a selection of his originals, and glimpsed the walls inside, hung with limited and exclusive signed editions of his prints.

The smart set, the wealthy smart set – Alfredo, who owned the gallery, checked the bank balances of his clients before their titles and social standing – smiled at him as they made their way into the gallery. Spencer had returned their smiles. He'd had reason to be grateful to his patrons. His house had been Californian redwood built on stilts on a fashionable hillside that commanded a sweeping view of a breathtaking wooded bay. It had glass walls designed to frame the scenery. It had been furnished with designer Italian furniture, designer linen, designer crystal – in fact everything he owned and wore was the best that new and up-and-coming talent had to offer.

It would have been churlish and miserly of him to stint himself and his family, when the world's wealthy were queuing to buy his signed prints at five thousand dollars a time, and his originals at anything from fifty thousand dollars upwards. He had all that a man could possibly want. The sun, the lifestyle to go with it, a sweet beautiful wife, sweet, beautiful babies…

‘Spencer Jordan, isn't it?'

Still back in California, Spencer stared blankly at the cropped hair and steel grey eyes of the man who appeared suddenly in front of him.

‘Spencer Jordan?' the man repeated. ‘I'm Peter Collins. Sergeant Peter Collins,' he emphasised. ‘I'd like a word with Trevor.'

Spencer wrenched himself out of the past. He'd promised himself that he would never allow himself to drift back. It was too raw, too painful. And here he was again, only this time in broad daylight. He didn't even have the excuse of insomnia, loneliness and darkness. What had prompted it?

Trevor – he'd told Trevor that he'd been a patient.

‘Use this room, Sergeant Collins.' He rose from his seat. ‘I have things to do in the staff room.' He turned to Trevor. ‘See you later?'

‘Thank you for the sandwich.'

It was difficult to judge who was more astounded by Trevor's response; Peter Collins or Spencer Jordan.

CHAPTER THREE

After Spencer had retrieved his rucksack and left the room, Trevor moved from behind the easel and sat in a chair in front of the window. Peter pushed aside a mess of paint pots, jars and brushes on a table and perched on it, facing Trevor.

He studied Trevor critically, making no allowance for sentiment or friendship. Depression was etched into every inch of his sagging body, from the lank, greasy hair that straggled, badly in need of a cut, over his forehead and collar, to the limp colourless hands that lay inert and lifeless in his lap. Thin at the best of times, Trevor was gaunt. His pale sunken cheeks were covered with black stubble and he was dressed in the same faded, threadbare clothes he had worn the day before.

‘I looked in on your flat,' Peter said. ‘After I dropped in the take-away. Did you eat it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good fish and chips?'

‘It was curry.'

‘Just testing. It's the same mess as usual – your flat,' Collins explained. ‘No burglar has been in to tidy up. Frank was locking up the shop downstairs. He'll be glad to see you back; the local kids have been giving him hell for the last couple of months. It didn't take them long to realise no one was sleeping in the building. Frank's window has been smashed in three times since Christmas, and his cigarette and chocolate machines have been vandalised so often he's had to take them down.' Peter took a packet of cigars from his shirt pocket. ‘Anyway, Frank said to tell you he'll call in to see you. Probably on a Sunday afternoon, because that's the only time he can afford to leave the shop.' He lit a cigar and puffed a cloud of smoke. A year ago Trevor would have protested mildly or strongly, depending on his mood. Now he sat passively breathing in tobacco fumes.

‘Your mother phoned me. I lied and said that you were making progress, and that you'd write or phone her soon. Do you think you could manage that?'

‘Yes,' Trevor answered absently.

‘You noticed the rumpus outside?'

‘Yes.'

‘Aren't you interested in what's happening?'

‘No.'

Peter rose, turned his back, and walked to the window. After witnessing Trevor's earlier animation, it was as much as he could do to curb his instinct to pick him up and shake him. Despite the doctors' explanations, he ascribed Trevor's continuing depression and monumental indifference to lack of effort.

If Trevor had ranted and raved against the injustice of a fate that had broken his arm, legs and head, he would have sympathised with him. But Trevor hadn't ranted and raved; instead he'd withdrawn into a monosyllabic melancholy that had erased the personality of the old Trevor, replacing him with a stranger he no longer knew nor liked.

Trevor's detachment hung between them, threatening to smother what little remained of their close, if fraught relationship. Peter contemplated the human wreckage hunched before him. Trevor had been a good friend; probably the only real friend he'd ever had. He couldn't sit back and allow him to drift into nothingness. For the first time since Trevor had been hospitalised, he let rip, allowing emotions he usually kept tightly reined to erupt.

‘I never thought I'd say this, but work is a swine without you. That damned girl guide Bill's dumped on the squad is bloody useless. She's got a degree in anthropology. Do you mind telling me what bloody good a degree in anthropology is to the Drug Squad? A degree in fortune telling would be better. God only knows, it's difficult enough to cover your own bloody arse in this filthy business without having to watch out for a useless female as well.' He turned from the window and paced back to the table. ‘So, the sooner you get off your backside and out of here, the better it will be for all of us. Then Bill can push Mary Poppins into a quiet corner where she can sit behind a desk and anthropologise – or whatever it is that females like her do. And you and I can get on with the job.' He confronted Trevor. ‘What do you say to that?'

‘I told you, I might not be coming back.'

There was a sharp rap at the door, and Michelle Grady stuck her head around the door. ‘Sergeant Collins, Inspector Evans is asking if you'd go to the administration office, to check if there are any plans of this place.'

‘I'll go in a few minutes,' Peter barked.

She shut the door.

Trevor wanted Peter to leave, so he could be left alone with his portrait, but Peter continued.

‘A body is buried in the grounds of this place under your nose, and you saw bloody nothing when even the craziest female nut on your ward saw it happen. Where were you? Dead, or off the planet?' He walked away in disgust, slamming the door behind him.

Trevor continued to sit on his chair. After five minutes, he raised his eyes so he could once again look at his portrait.

* * *

‘What's the verdict, Dan?' Superintendent Bill Mulcahy had been on site for less than five minutes, and already the constables and rookies were acting more alert, snapping to attention whenever he passed, trying to look as busy as any officer can who has nothing more to do than control a passive crowd.

‘Patrick's still down there. We'll know more when he's ready to tell us what he's found.' Dan pulled a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands. ‘But, for the moment, I can tell you she's young. Early twenties, Patrick thinks, and she was probably buried alive.'

‘Alive? Is he sure?'

‘Her mouth had been glued. Probably with one those bond-in-seconds, stick-anything jobs, and her nose and her throat were jammed with earth. Patrick thinks she struggled for breath until the last minute.'

‘Poor bitch.'

Dan inspected his fingernails. ‘It couldn't have been pleasant for her.'

Bill suppressed his dark thoughts. ‘You've begun interviewing hospital staff and inmates?'

‘Yes, but I need to draft some good coppers on to my team.' Dan looked hopefully at his boss. ‘Do you have any to spare?'

‘Do I ever? There isn't a section that isn't pushed to the limit.' Bill stared at the sky, as though he hoped to find a solution in the heavens. ‘You can have Constable Grady, she's a rookie, but she's keen. And Peter Collins has become impossible since I transferred her to the Drug Squad as a short-term replacement for Trevor Joseph.'

‘Is Trevor still sick?'

‘Sick and in here.' Mulcahy didn't even try to keep the contempt from his voice.

‘Is he, now?' Evans rubbed his chin reflectively. ‘That could prove useful.'

‘Don't pin any hopes there,' Bill recalled the false premise that the murderer always returns to the scene of his crime, and studied the crowd gathered behind Michelle. ‘Trevor's cracked; nutty as a fruit cake.'

‘I thought he had depression.'

‘It amounts to the same thing.'

Evans debated whether it was worth arguing the point, and decided against it. ‘I'll take Grady, and anyone else you can spare. ‘I'd like to have at least twenty men working on this by the end of the day.'

‘You'll be lucky, but I'll look around and see who I can come up with. I might be able to lend you Peter Collins for a while.'

‘I thought the whole idea was to separate him from Grady?'

‘He needs separating from the rest of humanity. Trevor Joseph is the only one who could put up with his bloody moods.'

‘I've a feeling there'll be enough legwork on this one even for the prima-donnas,' Dan returned his handkerchief to his pocket.

Peter Collins sat in the office of Tony Waters, Compton Castle's chief administrator. Dan had asked him to check the layout of the building, but a quick glance at the plans had told him everything. The place was a nightmare from a policing and a security point of view.

‘As you see, Sergeant Collins,' Tony Waters waved his manicured hand over the papers on his desk; he was a tall man, six-foot-one or two, in Peter's estimation, with startlingly white-blond hair and pale-blue eyes, ‘the whole place is a mishmash of bits and pieces from every building that's been erected on this site since Norman times.'

‘It looks that way.' Peter noted the ruins of the outer wall of the Norman castle on the southern boundary and the sketched-in blob of masonry marked “Folly.” He jabbed his finger on it, with a questioning look at Tony.

‘It's down as Victorian, but the foundations are Norman, like the name of this place. It was easier for the Victorian architect to dovetail the solid Norman bits into the building than demolish them.'

‘You sound as though you know what you're talking about,' Peter allowed grudgingly.

‘I take an interest in my surroundings, Sergeant,' Waters smiled without warmth. ‘If you look at these contours,' he ran his thumbnail over the plan, ‘you'll see the remains of the old moat.'

Collins noted a steep-sided depression on the northern edge of the old hospital, before turning his attention to the main building. The mid-Victorian edifice was an example of Gothic architecture at its most ornate and, in Peter's eye, most horrendous, housing a vast network of narrow passages and steep staircases that led to communal wards the size of ballrooms and servants' attics that were mouse holes in comparison. There were cavernous storerooms, towers and turrets that seemed about as useful as the stone gargoyles that decorated the main facade of the building.

The rabbit warren of rooms extended from a vast cellar, which had been partitioned off to hold the incoming electrical supplies and central heating boiler, to the fourth floor attics originally designed as accommodation units for live-in skivvies.

From what Peter had seen on his way to the administrator's office, only a few cosmetic changes had been made in the old building since Queen Victoria had sat on the throne. Scratched and stained vinyl tiles lay over whatever flooring the Victorians had walked on, but the walls were still covered to shoulder height by brick-shaped dark-green tiles topped by a strip of oak dado; and if the sickly yellow paint that darkened the walls from dado to ceiling wasn't the original, it should have been.

‘Are all these wards?' Peter pointed to the first, second and third-floor plans.

‘No, all the wards have been moved to the ground floor. The first and part of the second-floor house the administration department of the local Health Authority.

‘And these.' Peter indicated units that had been erected behind the hospital. Units he knew were connected to the main building by tunnels of opaque Perspex.

‘Therapy units,' Tony informed him. ‘They're demountables that were erected as a short term temporary measure in the 1970s, and have never been replaced.' He shrugged. ‘Financial constraints. You know how it is.'

Peter didn't comment. He turned back to the plans. As if the buildings weren't headache enough, the grounds were vast. Laid out in a park of lawns, wooded areas and shrubberies, they could have concealed a battalion, let alone a solitary killer carrying a single body.

‘These gates?' Peter indicated four openings marked in the external wall that surrounded the grounds. ‘Are they locked at night?'

‘All but the main gates fronting on to the main road. We leave those open in case of emergency.'

‘Are they manned?'

‘They used to be, until our security budget was halved.'

‘So anyone can walk in and out of here during the night?'

‘The grounds are patrolled by a guard with a radio transmitter, and the entrances to the hospital blocks are manned at individual reception areas. This building is locked at night.'

‘Do you have a problem with prowlers?'

‘Frankly, yes,' Tony replied.

‘Now that we've established any lunatic can walk in here off the street, what about the ones already here?'

‘I presume you mean our patients?'

Peter sensed Tony Waters' temper rising, but that didn't deter him from pressing his point. ‘Could they walk out of their wards at night and take a stroll around the grounds?'

‘I told you, the reception areas in the ward blocks are manned.'

‘Continuously? By more than one man?'

‘Obviously not by more than one. The hospital budget… '

‘Doesn't stretch to cover him when he goes for a pee, or to fix himself a cup of coffee.' Peter pushed the plans aside. ‘What you have there, Mr Waters, is a bomb waiting to explode. The only wonder is it didn't go off sooner.'

Tony Waters insisted on accompanying Peter when he left the office. They walked through the long corridors and out of the back entrance, entering one of the perspex tunnels that connected the administration block with the wards. Neither spoke. Tony was preoccupied with thoughts of the paperwork the discovery of the body in the grounds would generate, and Peter was too busy mentally filing his initial impressions of the place to make polite small talk.

Peter Collins was not a sensitive man. He relied on logic to take him through life, but even he felt uneasy as they entered the perspex tunnel. Its floor and walls were white. No image penetrated the opaque arched walls, only an intense, eerie light. He felt as though he had stumbled into a surrealist painting. And, almost as soon as they entered the tunnel, it curved sharply. He turned his head and looked back. All he could see behind him was the tunnel disappearing into itself. Ahead, the same thing. He was beset by the most peculiar sensation, of being disembodied in time and space.

‘If you're not nuts when you come into this place, you could well be nuts by the time you leave,' he observed caustically.

‘You don't like our tunnels, Sergeant Collins?' Tony asked.

‘Do you?'

‘They're cheap, and secure. No one can get into them from the outside, except by the exit and entry points, which have been kept to a minimum; and they provide a dry, direct route from the wards to the therapy blocks. The staff can send patients through them with confidence, knowing they will turn up safely at the other end.'