The Malcontenta (7 page)

‘I’m particularly interested in when he was last seen alive, you see. You were about to tell me when you last saw him.’

He examined his even fingernails, and it seemed to Kathy that he was making a decision. ‘I saw him yesterday afternoon, as a matter of fact. I suppose that added to the shock, having seen him so recently.’

‘Sunday afternoon. Did you have treatment or something?’

‘Not exactly. There’s a small gym downstairs. I go there sometimes for a workout. He has … had… charge of the place. He opened it up for me at three, and was there when I finished.’

‘What time was that?’

‘Oh … an hour later, probably. Around about four.’ ‘Do you know if he’d arranged to meet anyone after you?’ ‘I really couldn’t say.’

‘He said nothing at all about his plans for the rest of the day? Please think carefully, sir.’ Long frowned, shook his head.

‘Please let me know if you can be more precise about the time you left him. Were you aware of him being depressed at all, moody, worried?’

‘No … I’d never have guessed.’ Something seemed to occur to him, then he shook his head again. ‘Good Lord.’

‘You’ve thought of something?’

‘No.’ He blinked at her as if he’d momentarily forgotten she was there. ‘No, no.’

Perhaps,
she thought,
perhaps things are getting on top of you at work. Perhaps you’re going through a bad time with your wife, or your teenage children. Perhaps you’re not sleeping well, having difficulty concentrating. Who knows? But if you hadn’t been who you are, I’d have said you were hiding something for sure. Something you don’t want me to know about.

‘I’ll have someone take a statement from you, sir. I’d be particularly interested in your conversation with Petrou. Anything he might have said. Any indications of his plans for the evening.’

‘I’ll try.’

Kathy broke off her account while Brock went to make a fresh pot of coffee. Now that she was well into the story, she was feeling much more confident and relaxed. The visitors got up from their seats round the fire and stretched their legs. When Brock returned, Dowling was casting his eye over the titles of the books piled on the worktop, keeping well clear of the live computer, and Kathy was having another look at the enigmatic little artwork on the wall.

‘Mr Schwitters did me a big favour,’ Brock said, setting down the pot. ‘I’d never be able to get anything as good again, and I’ve never had the nerve to put anything second-rate beside it. If it hadn’t been for that, these walls would have been a mass of flying ducks and faded Gauguin prints.’

Kathy laughed, but he saw the expression on her face and added, ‘Really, it may just look like a mess of old tram tickets, but it is in fact a milestone of twentieth-century art. How I came by it is another story.’

It seemed to Kathy that it was very like Brock to own a treasure that you wouldn’t recognize inside a house you couldn’t find.

‘Well, it’s a great house,’ she said. ‘I love it.’

‘I rented a room here many years ago, when my life was going through a change. Then later, when my landlady died, I bought the place from her estate. They were glad to get rid of it. It was a tiny, crooked little terrace house, and buyers couldn’t find it. A few years later the one next door came on the market and I bought that too and knocked them together, and gradually it’s just sort of grown. What about you, Kathy? Have you kept on your flat in North Finchley? I remember you had a very protective next-door neighbour and a splendid view.’

‘Yes, I kept it on.’ She smiled at the memory of his visit, when she had almost pushed the bunch of flowers he had brought, his peace offering, down the sink disposal unit. ‘While I’m away, a friend is staying there. He’ll move on when I return to London - if they’re prepared to have me back at the Met.’

‘Perhaps your friend will have grown attached to the place, like I did here. Not want to leave.’

She thought that remark was a little sly, and didn’t respond.

‘Well, you’re welcome to use this place as a base any time you need to come up to town - both of you, I mean. There’s plenty of room. Are you married, Gordon?’ Brock asked.

‘No, no.’ He shook his head.

‘Well, why don’t you both stay over tonight? Return to the wild south tomorrow.’

‘Oh,’ Gordon said nervously, ‘I think, if you wouldn’t mind, sir, I really ought to get back today.’

‘Of course, whatever. I just thought your tale may need plenty of time to do it justice. I must say I’m intrigued by the body in the Temple of Apollo. Whips and carrot juice. And the brass swastika, Kathy, you haven’t explained that yet.’

Intrigued, and also a little worried. Kathy had become more confident, swifter in her decisions, than when he remembered her last. But he was concerned at her obvious antagonism towards Tanner, Beamish-Newell and Long -all of the main male characters in her account so far, apart from Dowling, whom she seemed to be mothering. He worried whether she was being objective enough in her assessments.

The building was brand new, the sharp smell of fresh paint and new carpets still strong in the air. They showed her through a door into a narrow viewing area separated from the examination room by a glass screen. She hardly noticed the three or four people present, as the sudden vision of Petrou’s naked body on the stainless-steel tray just a couple of metres away leaped up at her. In the rush to get here, she hadn’t consciously prepared herself for this. It was true that she had seen any number of corpses before, and with much more horrific injuries than this - her three years in Traffic Division had ensured that. But the immaculate
objectivity
of the setting gave the body a startling presence. Naked, blotched, its head thrust dramatically back by the block beneath its neck, eyes closed in the total self-absorption of the dead, it formed the focus of the brilliant lights overhead, of the silent attention of the watchers; the focus, too, of threat and danger, underscored by the plastic visors covering the faces of those who shared its space on the other side of the protective glass screen.

All except Professor Pugh, whose only head protection was his horn-rimmed glasses, which he continued to click absent-mindedly against his teeth when he needed to think.

‘Ah, Sergeant!’ he called to her, his voice distorted by the speaker system between the two halves of the room. ‘Glad to see you.’

‘Sorry I’m late, Professor. I came as soon as I could.’

‘Don’t worry. We haven’t really started without you. We’ve undressed our friend, as you see, and we’ve been taking photographs and swabs and so on, as you’d expect. One or two interesting things for you. But tell me, any idea of a last sighting alive?’

‘The best we have so far is around four o’clock yesterday afternoon. He was apparently fit and well then.’

‘Excellent. That should give us plenty of time, then. Well now, definite recent anal intercourse, but his partner used a condom. We’ll be able to identify the type by the lubricant. And the UV lights have given us suspected semen traces on his legs. The swabs will go for blood type and DNA analysis.’

Well, I’m not sorry I missed that bit.

‘Nothing obvious in the finger-nails. We’ve been having a good look at the lividity, of course.’ ‘Can you say any more about that?’

‘Not at this stage, I’m afraid. Our earlier impression is clearly confirmed - the pattern is unmistakable. What I can’t do is put a timetable to any changes in the body position. Analysis of tissue samples may help us there.’

‘What about cause of death?’

‘There’s quite a confused pattern of contusions to the throat - can you see? At present there’s nothing to indicate a cause other than ligature strangulation.’

He took his glasses off, holding them in his gloved hand, and tapped them on his teeth. ‘There are some marks on the torso which need some explanation. Difficult to see in this light, but clearer under UV. Like the marks of straps or bonds of some kind. We’ve got a photographic record for you. And the clothing has some points of interest. There are traces of a gritty dust on both the outside and the inside of the material of both top and bottom of the tracksuit. I’d guess the stuff on the inside has been transferred from the skin, where there are also traces, rather than the other way round. And I’d also be willing to speculate that it comes from the stone floor of the chamber where we found him.’

‘You’ll make tests for all the standard drugs, won’t you, Professor?’

‘Do you have something in mind?’

‘Only that, if he was in that cold place in the middle of the night for fun, he must have been high as a kite.’

‘Good point. But I’d say there has to be some doubt about that - I didn’t mention the shoes.’

‘The shoes?’

‘Yes.’ Pugh reached behind him for the plastic bag and brought it over to the glass for Kathy to see. ‘Look like new, don’t they?’

Kathy looked at the sparkling white leather of the elaborate boots.

‘Amazing what people put on their feet these days, eh?’ Pugh raised his eyebrows. ‘Pumps and valves and gadgets. Basketball baroque. Whatever happened to plain old plimsolls? Anyway, the point is, it doesn’t look as if these have ever been out of doors, let alone walked through the wet grass and mud between the house and the temple.’

Kathy felt her skin crawl with excitement once more. ‘He was carried there.’

‘Well, that’s for you to establish, Sergeant. I can only tell you what I see. Now, I think we might as well get on with the normal procedures, eh?’

He stepped back and nodded to his assistant, who had been hovering watchfully in the background. In a gracefully balletic movement the young man came gliding forward, raised a syringe over Petrou’s upturned face, and plunged the needle down into his left eye.

Kathy swallowed and felt her eyes water in sympathy. It took her a moment to realize that something was wrong. The assistant was hesitating, frozen in position for a moment with the needle still in the eye. He glanced across at Pugh, then slowly retracted the needle, stooped and pulled Petrou’s eyelid open. Pugh had moved to his side, wondering at this interruption in the smoothly predictable drill of collecting the first samples from eye and bladder. He stared at the eyeball, his brow furrowed in puzzlement. He reached forward and opened the other lid, then looked up at Kathy watching them through the glass.

‘Someone’s already taken a needle to this eye. It’s punctured in several places,’ he said. ‘It’s stupid of me. The lids have been closed all this time. I only examined the other eye. There was nothing wrong with that. The lids are intact.’

He turned and looked at his assistant.

‘It just felt different - softer,’ the young man said, consternation on his face.

‘I don’t understand,’ Kathy said. There was an unpleasant constriction in her throat. ‘What does it mean?’

‘I haven’t the remotest idea,’ Pugh replied slowly. ‘Someone has punctured his eyeball. God alone knows why.’

A hundred people, their paths crossing and recrossing during the course of the day.
Kathy had thought that Belle Mansfield might have been able to help. A Canadian who had married an English engineer with IBM, she was a systems analyst who had been working as a civilian at County CID for the past year.

‘This is a classic, Kathy! The English country house, with Miss Scarlet in the drawing room with the lead pipe. Only you’ve got just too many Miss Scarlets.’

Kathy smiled, buoyed by Belle’s infectious North American optimism. She hadn’t thought of it like that, but it was true. Sixty years ago the house and a dozen or so occupants would have made a perfect setting for Agatha Christie. Now both house and occupants had been recycled and it would take Belle’s computer to sort it all out.

Before she had left for the post-mortem, Kathy had worked out with Belle a pro-forma sheet for each person interviewed, identifying where they were at each hour of the previous day, and who they were with or had seen. A separate sheet was to be used to note what the person knew of Alex Petrou. Photocopies of both sheets were run off, and by the time Kathy had left they were in the hands of half a dozen interview teams huddled over card tables around the edge of the games room, with Belle collating results on the table-tennis table in the middle. On her return from the autopsy Kathy found the games room empty apart from Gordon Dowling, who was sitting at the central table reading from the pile of interview reports.

‘Where is everybody?’ Kathy said, irritated. The rain was falling heavily now, and she had been soaked again just running from the car park to the front door.

‘It’s the clinic’s rest hour from two to three, and the Director didn’t want people disturbed during it, so I decided to let everyone go and get some lunch at the pub and start up again during the afternoon treatment sessions.’

Kathy nodded, conceding the point.

‘How did it go outside?’

Dowling shook his head. ‘Nothing. The rain didn’t help.’

‘No signs of any similar rope?’

‘No.’

‘Wheelbarrow or trailer, or anything that might have been used to move a body?’

He shook his head doubtfully. ‘We found a wheelbarrow, but it was full of water. Do we know the body was moved?’

‘From the state of his shoes, it doesn’t look as if he could have walked from the house across to the temple.’

‘Ah. Well, we didn’t come across any obvious footprints or tyre tracks, or signs of anything being dragged … Sorry, Kathy.’

She smiled at him. ‘Have you had anything to eat?’

‘No. They offered me something, but I didn’t fancy it. Just the smell of the food in here makes me feel sick. How about you?’

‘No. Looking at other people’s internal organs doesn’t do much for my appetite.’ She looked around. ‘Where’s the list of people we’ve seen so far?’

Gordon showed her a clipboard. ‘We’re concentrating on the patients, pulling them out of their treatment sessions individually without bringing the whole thing to a halt. They have two morning sessions, nine to ten thirty and eleven to twelve thirty, and one in the afternoon, from three to four-thirty. After that is free time until dinner at six, and we thought we should do the staff during that spell.’