Dying to Know (A Detective Inspector Berenice Killick Mystery) (54 page)

Lastly,
I wish to add that without the faith and encouragement of my husband, Tim Boon, this book would never have been written. I dedicate this book to him with gratitude and love.

If you enjoyed
Dying to Know
by Alison Joseph, then you may be interested in
Philosophical Investigations
by Steve Attridge, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
Philosophical Investigations
by Steve Attridge

Chapter I

‘When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you.’

Nietzsche

I
walk around the supermarket, dividing things into three categories: fatal, near fatal and tasteless. I also plan the murder of my best friend, David, and invent a new illness to avoid going to work. I call it moroniphobia – a fatal aversion to idiots. My head of department, Jeremy, a man of few parts, none of them working, will use it as another spanner to try and lever me out. It’s hard to sack an academic, especially one who does so little, like me – how can they find fault with what doesn’t exist? Our horns are locked and I am now determined he will fail which will drive him closer to the breakdown he so deserves, and even this will be an indifferent, mousey affair. Travel back with me three months and you’ll understand the vehemence of my Jeremy project. He asks me to resign. I refuse. A week later I am summoned to a disciplinary hearing where Jeremy accuses me of propositioning a young female student. She is so anxious, he says, growing dewy eyed and sincere, that she does not wish to appear herself, or even be named, and as Head of Department, he must protect her confidentiality. Of course, she doesn’t exist. I am given a formal warning, nothing more, but mud sticks, as Jeremy knows. That was the moment I decided to destroy him.

I
am not naturally bleak; it’s a view I worked hard to attain and constantly fine tune, a view emanating from a settled conviction that the darkest thinkers are the most joyful: we have no illusions and can gleefully dissect the world with our cynical little scalpels. I settle on a bottle of Rioja, another of Famous Grouse and some Applewood cheese and grissini. At the checkout a bleached angel with bad skin, a lip piercing that makes her look like a hooked herring, and a nametag that says her thin chest is called Stacey, asks if I need help.

“I
think I’m beyond it,” I say.

“With
packing,” she says, no flicker of irony or recognition.

I
know what she is looking at. A middle aged man with circles under his eyes, scuffed leather jacket, tallish, thin. I could add: rakishly attractive, enigmatically self destructive, oozing sex, but even I wouldn’t believe it. Some things I am very good at, but they don’t endear me to the human race. Then I get a call that distracts me from my self obsessing. Not just any call, but from the most dangerous man in England. Psychotic, unwired, voice like a South London box of pins, the charm of a tarantula in a children’s party hat. God is in his coffin and all is wrong with the world. His name is Tony Steele, or Tony the Blade as he likes to be called, and he is a son in the principal crime family in South England. They make the Borgias look like soap fairies. Tony once nailed an enemy to motorway tarmac. It was the only corpse in police records to be found in three different counties.

“Five
o’clock. The Castle. Directions follow in an email. Don’t be late. It’s about an hour away from you.”

Leave
at four. That means cutting my three o’clock seminar down to half an hour. Bliss. On the drive into the discount warehouse that thinks it’s a university I ponder what the Steeles would want with me. No point in wondering if it is safe to go to the Castle, their family home; that would be like asking if it is safe to invite a pyromaniac to a firework party. You need to know why they would even ring me in the first place – a disgruntled, self pitying middle aged man lost in the past and drowning in the present, more inert coward than action hero. I am like a bat: my real life is in the dark. I am ostensibly a disgruntled philosophy lecturer, but I am also Rook Investigations – a private investigator. Look me up in the Yellow Pages and you won’t find me. I only work for those who don’t want the police involved, and that usually means criminals, or at least people with secrets. But here’s another contradiction – I am addicted to danger. It is one of the side effects of a path I chose some years ago. Nothing comes for free. I thought that by becoming a shadow in the underworld I would find someone I desperately need to meet – my father – but so far I have only found other shadows, and like reaching for the bottle I need a constant fix of danger. An odd and pathetic addiction for a coward, but then consistency was never my forte. Perhaps that’s why my wife Lizzie skewered my love on a kebab stick. I shouldn’t blame her, but I do. It’s easier.

I
finish the seminar early by upsetting a student – always a good ploy. On the whiteboard I scrawled “GOD IS MY FAVOURITE FICTIONAL CHARACTER” and asked who said that. No one got it. Homer said it. Homer Simpson. A girl with a pinched face and a mouth like a hairpin looked upset, and asked why I said something derogatory about Christianity every week. I said that I must be slipping if it was only weekly, and that if God was upset with me then he should complain in person and not send sad teenage envoys. It isn’t Christianity that upsets me; it is religious piety that makes me want to gun down baby ducks.

“Do you want to be a myrmidon all your life?” I ask her.

“I
don’t even know what that means,” she says, her neck flushing behind her silver cross.

“Then
spend less time in church and more thumbing through a dictionary. It’ll do your soul more good.”

I
am being a complete bastard but it has to be done. Ultimately it’s an act of Mercy. The atmosphere soured and I sent everyone off to the library, which means they’ll all sit in the refectory gawping at apps on their smart phones.

Only
one student remained. I suppose she had a right to. She’s my daughter, sometimes my keeper. The lovely, impossible, annoying, full of light and razorblades, Cass. My soon to be ex-wife Lizzie also looks out of her cornflower eyes, which squeezes my heart into a tight ball of madness. Lizzie is a sitting tenant in what used to be my mind.

“Why
do you do it?” She asks. “If you get sacked you’ll be even more miserable.”

I
smile and start to pack up. Was it just due to serendipity that I was teaching my own daughter? Did she really forget to sign up for her Phil 1 options and be forced to take mine – “Fictions of Evil” – thankfully the least popular course in the whole department? Less essays, less students. Or is she up to something?

“I
saw Mum last night.”

She
was up to something.

“Sharpening
her broomstick? Putting pins in my effigy?”

“Dad,
that is so childish.”

She
was right. I am ridiculous, but unlike most, I know it. The elephant in the room is David, MP for Nuneaton. Idealistic, intelligent, now humping my wife on a regular basis. When I imagine them – as I frequently do – my mind feels like a blister. Much of my dreamtime is spent on exactly how I can arrange his death. It’s possible. I know a lot of strange people who need money and like the action.

“I
wish I didn’t feel so anxious about you,” she said.

“Read
your Heidegger. ‘Mere anxiety’ is at the source of everything.”

“I
hate it when you’re smug.”

“I
love it when you’re annoyed,” I said, and kissed her cheek.

In
the car park Jeremy flounced up to me, with florid cheeks and waving a piece of paper. He looked close to a heart attack.

“What
the hell is this?” He hissed.

“Piece
of paper, Jeremy.”

“It’s
your assessment form. Your bloody assessment of the Faculty, which means of me. The Vice Chancellor was on the phone to me at eight o’clock this morning. Wanting to know if any of it was true.”

“And
is it?”

He
purpled. Surely the pump would give way any moment now.

“You
wrote the bloody thing. The VC wants to know why a member of this faculty would say I am a practicing Druid and that I am not...”, and here he read, “...in principle, against either bestiality or incest.”

“Very
liberal of you, Jeremy.”

“Your
juvenile lunacies have gone far enough. I would like you to resign.”

“I
can’t. I need the salary. I suggest you go home, get Mrs. Jeremy to pour you a nice big glass of supermarket sherry, and listen to your Bobby Crush tapes. You need to relax.”

He
wanted to kill me. How far must I go before he actually tries? As an experiment it was almost interesting. He’s not a formidable opponent, but he will be good practise and he’s a bully. Worse still, he’s mediocre.

Time
to go. I had a date with a different kind of devil.

Chapter II

‘There are certain clues at a crime scene which, by their very nature, do not lend themselves to being collected or examined. How does one collect love, rage, hatred, fear…? These are things that we’re trained to look for.’

James
Reese

The Steeles were old school. Pop Steele had been a South London crime gang soldier – gambling, protection, robbery, but unlike most criminals, he could see the big picture and planned for the future. Worked his way up inch by inch, blow by blow, pound by pound, deal by deal, risk by risk, matching streetwise savvy, natural flair and an instinct for survival against rivals and what are dizzily called the forces of law and order. Before anyone knew it he had an empire. You can’t build an empire without drugs, that’s where the big money is, but Pop was clever enough to keep it all at a distance and pay others to do the deals, take the risks. It was a calculated payoff and it worked. Now his legitimate business interests were so bound up with his criminal ones that it would take a galaxy of criminal lawyers to unpick them. As he once said when he’d eeled his slippery way out of an injunction: “There’s only the business of crime and the crime of business.”

Little
did he know that the enemy was always within. Pop had carefully planned how to keep outside threats at bay, but his world was in turmoil because of those closest to him – his children. They were a national soap opera, much to Pop’s chagrin: Jimbo, clever but burnt out and wired, Tony the psycho, Philly the wayward daughter, a son who died in a car crash years ago, and Danny, recently murdered, though details had been withheld. I suspected that’s why I’d been summoned. The Steeles would not embrace a police investigation. At an age when Pop was doubtless hoping to enjoy good wine and afternoon naps he was trying to control this wayward bunch and stop his world imploding. His wife, Ma Steele, a bulldog of a woman who showed that you could take the woman out of a Bermondsey slum, but not...you know the rest, protected Pop in her own inimitable way, but some thought family cracks were spreading fast. I’d soon be able to decide for myself.

The
offensively opulent Castle had more CCTV cameras than a presidential palace. I smiled and felt the familiar cold prickle of excitement that accompanied entering the lion’s den. Like going on stage, I imagine, but with infinitely more at stake. Excited and shit scared, the possibility of not returning. Nothing so simple as a death wish, more an embracing of uncertainty and the adrenalin rush of knowing you cannot control events. The boxer chooses to go in the ring but does not wish to get hurt, which is a likely outcome of going into the ring. We are all bee boxes of contradictions. I can go on like this for hours.

Gold
tipped iron gates, a driveway long enough to land a Boeing 707. A front door the size of a small bungalow and framed by Corinthian pillars, opened as I approached the house which stood like a giant wedding cake; inside were Rococo architraves, rooms you needed a taxi to cross and the hall had a ludicrous ceiling fresco of the whole family as Olympian figures. My guess was that this was not Pop’s doing, nor Ma’s, but a result of the gargantuan ego of Tony. As Jimbo, all sugared up burnt out energy in a bomber jacket and jogging bottoms, showed me in, he smiled as I looked up and took in the full tastelessness of the thing.