Want You Dead (20 page)

‘Mummy can make that better,’ she whispered. ‘Oooh, you’re such a big boy. So big! So handsome. So many women will want you, but they are dirty women, unclean women. You’re too good for the trash out there. You are Mummy’s very special boy, Mummy’s big boy. Let me feel my big boy inside me.’

Now Bryce was remembering Valentine’s night, three months later, when he was sixteen. He had been out drinking, for the first time, with the only person he connected with at school. Ricky Heley. They were tall and mature-looking for their age, and no one had challenged them in the pubs. Ricky was an outsider like himself. He had a pretty face and a clumsy, gangly body. They were the only two boys in the class who didn’t have girlfriends – not even a crush – let alone dated a girl. Bryce didn’t dare chat any girl up – he was scared of how his mother would react.

That morning he and Ricky had each received ten Valentine cards, much to the apparent astonishment of their classmates. They were filled with individual and deeply personal declarations of love and cravings from secret admirers. For a brief while they were taken in, until the smirks of their classmates gave the game away.

That night he and Ricky went on a drinking binge. They walked through Kemp Town to a series of pubs, several where Ricky said he knew how to get free drinks. In each of them much older men stood them pints and whisky chasers, and chatted to them. In each pub, as soon as they had drained their glasses, Ricky would grab Bryce’s arm and lead him away, ignoring the pleas of whoever had bought them the drinks to stay.

It was the first time Bryce had drunk alcohol, and as he staggered home up the steep hill, past Queen’s Park, veering unsteadily across the pavement and clinging to an equally unsteady Ricky Heley, he felt anger smouldering inside him. They staggered into Freshfield Road and crossed the wide street to the terraced house where he lived.

‘Thanks,’ he slurred to Ricky. ‘For helping me home. Not sure. Not sure how.’ He stopped, his vision blurry. Suddenly Ricky lunged forward, pressing his lips against his.

‘Hey!’ Bryce pushed him away.

Ricky persisted, cupping Bryce’s face hard with his hands, pressing his lips against his mouth and pushing his tongue inside. Bryce responded by bringing his right leg up as hard as he could into Heley’s groin. As his friend staggered back, Bryce took several steps forward and punched him on the nose. Blood spattered around his friend’s mouth. Heley took a further few steps back and fell over.

‘Don’t ever fucking do that to me again, you poof,’ Bryce said. Then, leaving him lying on the pavement with blood pouring from his nose, Bryce let himself into the house and closed the front door behind him. As he did so, he heard his mother’s slurred voice.

‘That you?’

‘Urrr.’

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Out.’

‘You’ve been drinking?’ There was sharp accusation in her voice.

‘I’m sixteen.’

‘Have you been with any women?’

‘I haven’t, no.’

‘I need you so badly. Come to Mummy!’

He climbed the stairs slowly, unsteadily, reluctantly, hating this, hating himself, hating what the other boys at school would say if they ever found out. He stumbled along the landing and stood in the doorway of his mother’s room. She was sitting up in her wide pink bed, a cigarette between her lips, an almost empty glass of wine in her hand, her breasts practically falling out of her low negligee, leering at him. ‘Come here, my baby,’ she said.

‘I’m tired, Mummy.’

‘Come and satisfy your mummy! Your mummy needs it so bad tonight, my baby.’ Without removing the cigarette from her lips, she drew on it, then snorted the smoke through her nostrils, and tapped the ash into a saucer overflowing with butts on the bedside table. A movie was playing on television, one of the hard-man action thrillers she watched incessantly. ‘Bring it here to me, darling,’ she said.

And suddenly, as if the anger smouldering deep within him had set light to the kindling, there was a burning explosion inside him. He stared with absolute hatred, clenching his fists. He looked at her mahogany Victorian dressing table. At the mass of perfume bottles and make-up containers, bottles and tubes of cream and lotions, and a canister of hairspray.

The hairspray.

Suddenly, despite his drunkenness, he was thinking with clarity. He dug his left hand into his pocket and wiggled his handkerchief out.

‘Come to Mummy!’

‘I have to blow my nose.’

She frowned as instead of blowing his nose he wound the handkerchief around his right hand.

‘What are you doing, my darling?’

He stumbled over to the dressing table, grabbed the hairspray in his handkerchiefed right hand, pushed off the top with his thumb, then lunged at his mother, pressing the button down hard, directing the jet straight at her face.

She stared at him with a look of total surprise. An instant later, as the spray flared up the burning cigarette, there was a fierce roaring sound and it erupted into flame. She screamed. He kept his finger on the button. Kept spraying as flames caught hold of her hair. She screamed again, wriggled desperately. Her nightdress was on fire now, and the bedclothes. Still he kept the button pressed down. As the flames blackened her skin her screams became less and less strong, turning into a rasping gasp. Until she fell silent, her face all black now, her eyes moving but sightless, two tiny white orbs swivelling in their darkened sockets, her mouth opening and shutting.

The whole bed was burning now. He backed away, and stood watching in the doorway as the curtains caught fire and the flames crept up to the ceiling. He could still see his mother, her body making small movements, and he could smell roasting meat.

Then, with his handkerchief still around his hand, he put the spray back on the bedside table, picked the top off the floor and pushed it back on, then backed out of the room, leaving the door open, and went through to his own room. Keeping the light off, he peered down into the street. Heley had gone. Good. There was no one there. Good. As quietly as he could, he opened the window, letting in the night air. Opened it as wide as it would go. Moments later he heard the roar of flames intensify.

Hastily he removed his clothes, pulled on his pyjamas and dressing gown, with the glow of the streetlamps outside giving him just enough light to see by, pushed his feet into his slippers and staggered, still unsteadily, back out onto the landing. His mother’s entire bedroom was now an inferno. The heat was burning his own face. But still he waited, until her door frame started burning and the flames began licking their way along the landing.

He walked slowly downstairs, steadying himself on the handrail, smiling, removing the handkerchief then cramming it back into his pocket.

He waited at the bottom of the stairs for some more minutes until the entire upstairs was burning fiercely. Then he pushed open the front door and stumbled out, screaming and sobbing for help.

‘Fire! God, fire, fire, fire! Help me! Help me!’

He stumbled around to the next-door neighbour’s and rang the bell, pounding on the door frantically. ‘Fire! Please help, my mother’s trapped, please help me!’

52

Wednesday, 30 October

Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Skerritt was a popular man within Sussex Police, a hard man, an old-school no-nonsense copper who had little truck with political correctness or bleeding-heart liberals. A former Commander of Brighton and Hove, he’d had a high level of experience both in uniform and in the CID. Fifty-two years old, he was due to retire at the end of the year. He had told Grace a few months back, over a drink at another officer’s retirement party, that what he looked forward to most of all about retirement was the idea of being able to go into a pub and tell people what he really thought about any issue, without being quoted in the press the following day – and then harangued. His views were, in general, pretty right wing, but he was no bigoted fool.

Skerritt was not in a good mood this morning; he was close to apoplectic over the news of Cassian Pewe’s appointment. Grace and Branson sat at the twelve-seater meeting table in his spacious office, along from Grace’s office in the mostly open-plan CID area on the first floor of Sussex House, while the Detective Chief Superintendent vented spleen. ‘Tom Martinson’s a top bloke,’ he said. ‘I don’t get this. I’m going to be having words with him. Bringing that bastard back is like putting a lunatic in charge of the asylum. Shit!’

When Skerritt had finally calmed down, Grace summarized the situation, then allowed Glenn Branson to explain in depth the reasons for his concerns that Dr Karl Murphy’s death might not have been suicide.

Skerritt shook his head. ‘I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not convinced, I’m afraid. I’ve had my balls chewed off by ACC Rigg over this department’s expenses recently, and I can’t support you stepping this up to a murder enquiry, with all the costs that entails, from what I’m hearing from you both. If you go ahead, Roy, it’ll have to be your decision, with clear justification for it.’

‘So what the hell do I need, Jack?’ Roy Grace asked fractiously. He seldom lost his temper, but his lack of sleep, combined with Skerritt’s intransigence, were taking him perilously close to losing it now.

‘You’re experienced enough, Roy,’ Skerritt replied. ‘You have good instincts about when something’s a murder. But I don’t think you’re there with this one. I’m not convinced.’

Grace tapped the side of his nose. ‘My copper’s nose. That’s telling me this is a murder investigation, sir.’

‘Despite there being a suicide note, checked out by a graphologist, and despite the pathologist’s report?’

‘I’m still not convinced about the suicide note. But I haven’t got anything to substantiate this.’

‘Separately, Roy, has any forensic link between the fires been established?’

‘I’m on that at the moment. I’m discussing everything that’s happened with the Chief Fire Investigator.’

Skerritt nodded. ‘Look, one thing is for sure, no one knows the state of mind of someone in the moments before they commit suicide, Roy. But Dr Murphy was hardly likely to be in a rational state. You don’t kill yourself when you have two small children if you’re in a rational state.’

Grace looked at Branson, then back at the Detective Chief Superintendent. ‘What would it take to change your mind, sir? To support my upgrading this to a murder enquiry?’

‘If you can cast doubt on the note, that would change things. If you can convince me it was written under duress, then we’d be getting somewhere.’

Roy Grace smiled grimly. Skerritt wasn’t an idiot; he was probably seeing the overview more clearly than he himself was right now. And perhaps it was the right decision for him to make this call based on what he had been told. But in his heart, Grace was still convinced there was more to it.

Skerritt raised both his hands in the air. ‘I have to leave it with you. I’m sorry – but feel free to talk to me about it again.’

53

Wednesday, 30 October

Roy Grace and Glenn Branson returned to Grace’s office shortly before 10 a.m. in silence. The pair of them perched, pensively, at the small round meeting table.

‘Want a coffee?’ Grace asked.

Glenn nodded gloomily. ‘I’ll get them.’

‘No, I’ll go—’

Branson silenced him with his hand. ‘You need to keep up your strength for your wedding night, old timer.’

‘Haha!’ Then Grace pursed his lips, balled his right fist and thumped his left palm. ‘Convince him it was written under duress? So where the hell do we start with that one?’

There was a sharp rap on the door, and Norman Potting barged in without waiting for an answer, holding a sheet of paper in a plastic folder and looking pleased with himself. Then he stopped as he saw the grim expressions on the faces of his two superiors. ‘Sorry, am I interrupting something?’

‘It’s okay, Norman,’ Grace said. ‘Something urgent?’

‘Well, it might be, chief. The suicide note from Dr Murphy that you asked me to look at? I think I may have found something.’

Suddenly he had their rapt attention.

‘Tell us,’ Grace said.

Potting removed the sheet of paper from the folder and placed it on the table. It was a copy of the suicide note, with several words circled and annotations in blue ink above them and in the margins. He sat down. Grace and Branson followed, moving their chairs closely either side of him.

I am so sorry. My will is with my executor, solicitor Maud Opfer of Opfer Dexter Associates. Life since Ingrid’s death is meaningless. I want to be united with her again. Please tell Dane and Ben I love them and will love them for ever and that their Daddy’s gone to take care of Mummy. Love you both so much. One day, when you are older, I hope you will find it in your hearts to forgive me. XX

Potting pointed at the name of the solicitor. ‘I decided to start by contacting the law firm to have a word with this Maud Opfer, to see if there was anything I could glean from her. That’s when I learned there is no such law firm as Opfer Dexter Associates.’

Grace frowned. ‘I didn’t recognize the firm as being a local one, but I supposed it was either a London firm or one somewhere else in the UK.’

Potting shook his head. ‘That obviously alerted me that something was not right. I did wonder about the name Dexter, the character on television who is a serial killer – know the programme I mean?’

Grace nodded. ‘Cleo watches it.’

‘I’ve watched a few episodes too,’ Glenn Branson said.

‘Opfer is a strange name,’ Potting continued. ‘I wondered what the significance might be, so I tried it in Google Translate – that detects the most likely language of any word or phrase you type in. It came back that it means “victim” in German.’

‘Shit!’ Branson exclaimed.

‘Karl Murphy spoke fluent German,’ Potting went on. ‘His mother was from Munich – hence his Germanic first name. Now, in crossword parlance Maud is not a big jump to
mord,
the German word for “death”. As a keen crossworder, Karl Murphy would probably have known that. Put those two together into Google and up pops “murder victim”.’