The Lately Deceased (14 page)

Chapter Fourteen

A split second later, there was a violent explosion in the depths of the house and the glass of the door and two side windows flew outwards in a thousand fragments. A blast of flame and hot air flung Masters and his chief down the steps to the garden below. They picked themselves up, staggering dazedly for a moment as they got to their feet.

The driver of the police car came dashing up the path and reached both detectives in time to steady them as they found their feet.

The entrance of the flat above was a wreck, the door was now hanging loose in its frame and a cloud of dust hung around the porch. More ominous still was a thin wreath of smoke that began to curl out from the inside of the house.

Meredith put his hand up to his face and shook his head like a dog after a bath. He felt blood running from several small cuts caused by the flying glass but otherwise he seemed to be unhurt. Masters' face was the same, cut in two places and blackened by soot and dust. Their raincoats looked like something off a junk barrow.

‘You all right, sir?' asked the driver, his eyes wide with astonishment. He seemed more surprised than the two who had suffered the brunt of the explosion.

Meredith rubbed his eyes and waved his arms about experimentally.

‘Yes, I'm OK. What about you, Masters?'

The sergeant was wiping his mouth; he had a deep cut on his upper lip and he began to spit blood.

Meredith turned to the uniformed man: ‘Get to the car and call up the fire brigade on the radio. This place looks as if it's alight inside. Step on it!'

As the constable ran back down the path, Old Nick turned back to Masters and put an arm around his shoulders. The sergeant had been standing directly in front of the door as he pressed the bell, while Meredith had been to one side. ‘How are you feeling,' the superintendent asked him.

‘All right, sir, only a small cut. The blood keeps running into my mouth,' he muttered thickly. ‘No other trouble – but what in hell happened?'

The driver ran back to report that he had radioed for the fire brigade and for another police car. ‘Shall I go in, sir?' he asked. ‘There may be someone still inside.'

‘Yes, I'll come with you,' said Meredith. ‘You sit here, sergeant.'

The two men climbed the steps, and Masters, ignoring his chief's order, followed them, still holding the handkerchief to his face.

‘Must have been gas, sir,' said the constable, ‘I saw the same thing in Stepney once. A gas leak, then a spark from the electric bell and up she went!'

They pulled aside the shattered door and went inside. There was a long central passage leading to a kitchen at the far end and it was here that the explosion had had its origin. The furniture was thrown about, the windows were smashed and the walls blackened. All the pictures had been blown off the wall in the passage. Some curtains were smouldering and, in the hall, some hangings over an alcove were burning.

‘Pull those curtains down and chuck ‘em down the steps,' ordered Meredith. As the policeman was doing this, Meredith looked in through the doors leading into the other rooms. There were four of them, all blown wide open by the blast. Two of them revealed bedrooms and the third the lounge, apparently undamaged apart from pictures and ornaments thrown about in confusion.

‘Looks as if these three were closed when it happened,' said Masters through his handkerchief, ‘but this one was clearly open.'

The room, of which they could see about half from where they were standing, appeared to be the study. The walls were scorched and a hair rug on the threshold was smouldering. They could not see the rest of the room, as a tall bureau just inside the door had been blown across the entrance, effectively blocking it.

‘Get that damn rug out of here,' said Masters. The driver picked it up and pitched it over the balustrade into the garden below. They could hear the distant clanging of a fire engine as it raced up the narrow roads.

‘Too late, I reckon,' said Masters. ‘Nothing else burning. They won't be needed.'

‘No, but the ambulance will,' said Meredith grimly from inside the study door. He had gone farther into the room than Masters and had stopped short, gazing over towards the window. ‘There's a body here,' he said. ‘It's the elusive Mr Moore and I should say at a guess that he was dead long before we tried to blow his house up!'

The other two joined him and looked at the wrecked room. In a bay window overlooking the garden was a table with a heavy office typewriter. The whole of the window had been blown out and the curtains streamed in the breeze. On the floor, in front of the table, lay the body of a man, looking stiff and bent, with a chair overturned beside him. Some of the other furniture was toppled over and a large area of the ceiling had come down, covering the room with a drift of white plaster.

Meredith sniffed vigorously, looking about the room intently. ‘Still gas about - better find the escape before we blow up again.'

Simpson, the driver, went over to the hearth and knelt down at the side of an armchair, which was too massive to have been blown over, though the chintz was scorched. ‘Here it is, sir. I'll turn it off,' He stood up holding a length of flexible metal gas tubing, attached to a tap at the side of the fireplace.

‘What's that on the end of it?' asked Masters, curiously.

‘Looks like a plastic bag,' said the constable. Tied to the free end of the gas pipe was a large polythene bag. A hole had been made in the bottom and the end of the pipe had been passed inside, being held in position by several turns of a rubber band. The open end of the bag showed a ragged edge.

‘There's the rest of the bag around his neck,' exclaimed the sergeant, bending over the rigid body. ‘It must have torn off when the explosion blew him off the chair.'

Meredith spoke to the driver again: ‘Get on to the divisional surgeon and tell him to come here as soon as he can.'

‘Right, sir. Shall I use the phone there?' He pointed to an instrument lying on the floor under the table, apparently undamaged.

‘No. Leave things as they are. Use the car radio.'

As Simpson went out, the fire engine roared to a halt outside and a couple of firemen dashed into the flat. Meredith introduced himself and waved a hand at the feeble remnants of the blaze. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but it looked worse than it really was.'

The leading fireman pointed to some still smouldering curtains. ‘We'd better fix those, anyway, sir.'

‘If you can, disturb things as little as possible. This business has potential criminal aspects and we shall want fingerprints,' requested Old Nick.

‘Right, we'll just give it a squirt or two of carbon dioxide; that won't hurt anything.'

As the firemen trampled around in the shambles of the room, Meredith and Masters took a closer look at the body of Colin Moore, lying stiffly on the floor between the table and the fireplace.

‘Think this is the answer to Mrs Walker's murder, sir?' asked Masters.

‘Looks mighty like it,' replied his superior. ‘He nearly took us with him, though I don't expect he intended that!'

‘Must have been a lot of gas in the house to have caused an explosion like that. I still feel a bit weak at the knees,' Masters confessed.

‘I feel a bit groggy myself,' the superintendent admitted. ‘We'll clear off and get a cup of tea as soon as the doctor's been.' Mutual disaster had made Meredith lower his customary reserve a little.

Masters straightened up from the corpse and looked at the typewriter. ‘What's this, then? Here's a note, sir, still in the machine.'

The heavy machine had withstood the blast and, in the carriage, a sheet of quarto paper was still in place. Only the top couple of inches were visible, there being only three lines of print on the sheet. Meredith left it in the machine and read the message aloud without touching it.

‘“
I'm sorry it proved to be Margaret. It was meant for Pearl – a whore if ever there was one. May this last letter that I write crucify her as she has crucified me.
”'

Masters whistled through his teeth.

‘If the news boys ever get hold of that note,' he said, ‘“crucify” will just about sum it up for Pretty Pearl and her TV fan club.'

Meredith said nothing for a few moments, then he said quietly: ‘The poor devil must have been half-demented when he wrote that. What a bitch the woman must be!'

‘It's made our job easier, sir,' said Masters. ‘There can't be any room for doubt now.'

‘It certainly looks that way, Masters, but it never does to jump to conclusions. We'll have to give this place the full routine all the same. Those fire chaps finished yet?'

‘They're just carting their stuff back to the engine. A senior fire officer has turned up in his van, so has the other patrol car. Took them long enough,' he added with a sniff.

The hall echoed to the crunch of regulation boots. A white ambulance had arrived and the little cul-de-sac was now jammed with vehicles; a crowd of about twenty or so people had miraculously appeared from somewhere and now stood open-mouthed around the garden gate.

Meredith looked with exasperation at the horde of uniformed figures all jostling to get into the flat.

‘God, if ever there were any traces of anything, this herd of bloody elephants will pound it into a fine dust,' he exploded, and strode out of the study to head them off. He instructed the ambulance men to wait outside for the arrival of the police surgeon, and the other patrol car was dismissed.

Only the fire officer came into the flat and had a look round.

‘An unusual happening,' he said of the explosion. ‘But not as rare as it should be. The gas must have been escaping for hours for it to have seeped down the passage and built up an explosive concentration in the kitchen, where the bell is.' The police surgeon arrived; a harassed-looking general practitioner, he had been called from his second morning surgery to answer this call. Large and flabby, his sad eyes took in the scene as he came into the room.

‘Morning, Superintendent. Bit of a mess, isn't it? I should have thought that coal gas suicides were a bit off your beat?' Meredith explained how they came to be there.

‘We happened to have caused this lot ourselves,' he said. ‘We're lucky that you're not attending the sergeant and me.'

The doctor's eyes widened and his jowls wobbled as he heard the story. ‘Huh! Looks as if the Old Bailey has missed a spectacular trial. “‘
Model's husband tells all
” sort of thing in the Sunday papers.'

He knelt over the body and looked closely at it. ‘Does it matter if I move it a bit?' he asked.

‘Help yourself, Doctor. We did our share of moving it when we pressed that doorbell! Was it seated in that chair before the bang?'

‘Looks like it from the position of the legs. Must have been in the chair for a long time.'

‘When do you think death occurred?'

‘The sixty-four thousand dollar question!' smiled the doctor sadly. He produced a thermometer from a metal case and slid it under the dead man's coat into his armpit. Masters noticed that it was a good deal longer than the usual type carried by GPs.

‘This may be of some help but it will have to be done more fully when he gets to the mortuary,' the doctor said. ‘That is, if time of death is important to you.'

While the temperature was registering he gently felt the condition of the eyelids, jaw and limbs, and looked carefully at the colour of the skin. Then he took out the thermometer and looked at the mercury level.

He clambered to his feet and faced the detectives.

‘A long time, Mr Meredith, quite a long time. The rigor has gone from the jaw, though there are traces still in the limbs. His temperature is down to room level, so I would say anything up to forty-eight hours. That's the best I can do for you with any honesty.'

Meredith nodded. ‘That would fit in with the period of the gas escape, would it, do you think?' He turned and addressed the fire officer.

‘Yes, it would take many hours to build up an explosive mixture in big rooms like these.'

Meredith turned back to the police surgeon. ‘Any doubt as to the cause of death, Doctor Hoyle?'

‘Well, the skin isn't particularly pink, but that doesn't mean much. Have to wait for a blood analysis. Your pathologist will be able to tell you more.'

Old Nick called the ambulance men in and pointed to the body. ‘Dr Hoyle has certified death, so you can take it away.' The men looked dubious at this.

‘We're not supposed to move dead bodies, sir; only to take them to hospital to be certified dead.'

Meredith rolled his eyes to heaven. ‘Yes, I know. Red tape says that if you find a body with no head, he's still alive until a doctor tells you he isn't! But this is a special case, connected with a murder inquiry. So this time, lads, do me a favour and drop him in at the mortuary on the way back. I'll take the can back if there's any fuss.'

Still doubtful and reluctant, the men took away the remains of Colin Moore.

‘Let's go and change these rags,' said Meredith to Masters. ‘Has your lip stopped bleeding?'

‘Yes, it's fine now,' replied the sergeant. ‘Who do you want to look after this lot when we go?'

‘There's a local PC at the gate; I'll get him to keep the gawping crowds away. I'll get the Yard squad to give this place the once over this afternoon. I want to make sure of that note, to compare it with the type on this machine.'

They drove off to the station, where Meredith, remembering his appointment with Walker's solicitor, instructed Stammers to go in his stead. Then he and Masters went home to bath and change their clothes.

Stammers arrived at the lawyer's offices in Theobald's Road and announced himself to the prim secretary in the outer room. She was expecting him, and went straight through into the inner sanctum to tell Forbes-Talbot of his arrival. She came back to the doorway and beckoned Stammers to go in. The lawyer, who looked like Mr Pickwick in modern dress, quickly got down to business.