Midnight Murders (2 page)

‘Out of there, Vanessa,' Jean commanded.

‘You can't order me around, bitch,' Vanessa retorted.

‘No one is ordering you around, Vanessa.' Lyn clasped Vanessa's arm. ‘We're concerned for you and we don't want you to get hurt.'

‘You think I'm stupid' Vanessa peered into Lyn's face. ‘You think I don't know about you and my Ian. You're all the same. Bitches!' Vanessa's eyes rolled in her head as her final words pitched high, ending in a screech. She flailed her arms wildly. Catching the edge of the trolley she flung it back against a shelf, forcing Lyn into a corner. Sweeping her hands over the trolley, she picked up and threw everything she could lay her hands on. Bottles and jars flew into the air, landed on the tiled floor and shattered in a crescendo of splintering glass, pills and potions.

Lyn tried to duck past Vanessa and out through the door, but she wasn't quick enough. An enormous jar filled with small white pills thumped between her shoulder blades. She fell heavily, crying out in pain when she landed on the carpet of broken glass.

Laughing crazily, Vanessa grabbed a set of cast iron scales. Long since obsolete, they'd been relegated to the back corner of the shelves, but she found them. She waved them above Lyn's head. Peter and Jean both ran towards the cupboard and, like a bad comedy sketch, jammed alongside one another in the doorway. It was left to Trevor to crawl between their legs and offer a helping hand to Lyn. She grasped his fingers, but he gripped her wrist and heaved her forward, ignoring her cries as shards of glass sliced into her flesh through her thin uniform.

When Jean stepped back to allow Lyn through the doorway, Vanessa quietened. She stood for a moment in the midst of the wreckage, surveying the havoc she'd created. Peter seized the opportunity to make a move towards her.

‘I know what I saw,' Vanessa whispered, staring at him.

‘I don't doubt you do.' He reached out, preparing to take the scales from her.

‘Come on, Vanessa,' Jean crooned, easing her way into the doorway. ‘You're tired. You'll feel better after a lie down.'

‘I don't want a lie down.' Vanessa lifted the scales higher. ‘She's there I tell you. In the flowerbed. Planted in the garden like a tulip bulb. All of that earth on top of her. Shovel-full after shovel-full. She won't be able to move,' she assured Peter gravely. Her eyes grew rounder, the whites more pronounced. ‘Do you think he wanted her to grow into a people tree?' she burst into mirthless laughter. ‘She's dead,' she said finally with a sudden eerie calm. ‘She would be with all that earth on top of her. Dead as mutton. She's dead and not one of you cares enough to move her to the cemetery. That's where they put dead people. I know.' She lunged towards Peter and he succeeded in sliding one hand on to the scales. ‘I wanted to put my Ian there, but they… ' she glared at Jean and Lyn, who'd been helped to her feet by Trevor, ‘… they stopped me. If I'd put him there,' she moved closer to Peter and he took advantage and laid a second hand on the scales. ‘I'd have him where I'd want him. He'd still be mine because he'd have to stay there and wait for me to visit him with flowers, wouldn't he? He wouldn't be able to do anything else.'

She heaved her hands back, intending to hurl the scales at Jean, but Peter wrenched them from her hands.

‘You're in league with those bitches.' Snatching the one remaining pill bottle from the trolley she flung it in his face. Holding on to the heavy scales Peter ducked, but not low enough. The bottle hit his cheek bone, splitting the skin.

‘Ian's probably still with the whore, but not the whore I found him with,' Vanessa rambled. ‘She wouldn't be pretty enough for him. Not after what I did to her… '

‘Vanessa!' Peter commanded. ‘Look at me.' Staring into her eyes, in an effort to hold her attention, he fumbled blindly for the shelf at his side and deposited the scales on them. As soon as his hands were free, he moved like lightening. Grasping Vanessa's wrists he hauled them behind her back. ‘Where do you want her?' he asked Jean.

‘Out of that damned dispensary for a start,' Jean said hollowly, sickened by the chaos Vanessa had wrought in the secure drug cupboard.

‘You should have locked it.' Peter yanked Vanessa into the corridor.

‘The lock jammed three months ago. When we asked for it to be repaired they put a padlock on the outside, which is a fat lot of good when you're working inside. I've complained every day for three months and got absolutely nowhere.'

‘I phoned security, they're on their way. I've also asked for a couple of porters and an extra nurse,' Lyn whispered from the open door of the ward office. Trevor had helped her into a chair and she was sitting, dabbing ineffectually at the glass-studded cuts on her arms and legs with a handkerchief.

Jean studied her with a professional eye. ‘Phone for an ambulance to take you to casualty in the General.'

‘I'm fine,' Lyn sipped the water that Trevor had brought her from his room.

‘No arguments, telephone now. I'll check how “fine” you are as soon as I've dealt with this. Can you keep a grip on Mrs Hammond, Sergeant Collins?'

‘I'll manage.' Peter tightened his grip as Vanessa tried to kick his shins. It was an ineffectual gesture given that she was wearing slippers.

‘I thought everyone was in the garden.' Lyn apologised.

‘It appears everyone was, except us and this lady.' Peter gave Vanessa a crocodile smile.

Jean retrieved the key to the padlock from the debris on the floor and pushed the door to the drug cupboard over the carpet of broken glass. ‘Talk about bolting horses and stable doors.'

‘I'd rather not think what could have happened if any other patients had been here, or you hadn't.' Lyn handed the glass back to Trevor.

Peter sensed Vanessa becoming restless under his grip. He saw her staring at a security guard, two porters, and a male nurse who were making their way up the corridor towards them. Jean snapped the padlock shut.

‘Bring Mrs Hammond into the treatment room please, Sergeant Collins,' Jean asked.

Peter pushed Vanessa inside. The male nurse joined them.

Jean continued to speak softly while the male nurse primed a syringe behind Vanessa's back. The moment the syringe was ready, she pulled up Vanessa's sleeve. Vanessa quietened within seconds and Jean had no difficulty in leading her out of the room into a four bedded ward.

‘Here we are, Vanessa, a nice clean bed. All we have to do is draw the curtains and you can take a nap,' there was more than a hint of irony in Jean's voice.

‘I don't want to sleep,' Vanessa slurred. ‘You bitch… you bloody bitch… ' she fell silent and Jean joined Peter in the corridor.

‘Thank you, we couldn't have managed without your help.' She led him back into the treatment room.

‘Any passing visitor would have done the same.'

‘Most visitors wouldn't have been able to keep a hold on her. If you come in here, I'll put something on that cut on your cheek.'

‘Shouldn't you see to Lyn Sullivan first?' Peter was reluctant to allow Jean near him.

‘She needs more attention than I can give her here. Besides, I wouldn't dare encroach on Karl's territory.'

Peter looked into the office and saw the male nurse bending over Lyn while Trevor stood ineptly by, still holding the glass of water. He ran his fingers over his left cheekbone and when he withdrew them he was surprised to find them covered in blood.

‘It always looks and feels worse than it is, when it's on the face,' Jean commented.

‘I've discovered that the hard way.' Peter allowed her to clean up the cut and cover it with a plaster.

‘Vanessa would have to choose visiting hours on a Sunday afternoon to go berserk,' Jean complained when she washed her hands. ‘Weekend cover is barely half of normal, and a quarter of the few staff we have are on tea break at this time of day.'

‘Sod's law.' Peter winced as the cut stung viciously back to life.

‘Do me a favour?'

‘I didn't see or hear anything. I wasn't even here.'

‘It's not that I want to deny you a medal, but I'll never see the end of the paperwork if they find out that I allowed a visitor to manhandle a patient.'

‘What visitor?' Peter wasn't slow in demanding a return favour. ‘Can I come back later with a take-away for Trevor? He looks as if he hasn't eaten for months. He used to enjoy late night suppers in the station.'

‘It will be a miracle if he eats it.'

‘I'd like to try.'

‘Be my guest.' She led the way out of the treatment room and locked it with one of the keys that hung from a belt at her waist. They passed the storeroom, where the porters were clearing the mess of broken glass and spilt drugs under the supervision of the security guard. ‘As ward sister it's not my place to say this, it's Mr Goldman's. You do know there's nothing we can do for Trevor. He's depressed, but not clinically so, at least no more than anyone who's been through what he has is entitled to be. And certainly no more than anyone who's capable of reading the daily papers from cover to cover. But he's become institutionalised. It's long past the time when he should have returned to the real world. Mr Goldman's been suggesting short solitary afternoon outings since the second day he was admitted. As far as the front gate would be a start. If Trevor doesn't make an effort and take his advice soon, we'll be putting the boot behind him.'

‘We were on the way out when you distracted us,' Peter said.

‘I appreciate you trying to help, but the effort has to be his, not yours,' Jean halted when they reached the office.

Peter looked inside where Trevor was still hovering behind Lyn's chair. ‘He did drag Lyn Sullivan out of the cupboard.'

‘So he did.' Jean watched Karl bandage Lyn's leg. ‘It could be the first small step.'

‘I'll give him the push he needs to make the second.' Peter felt better about Trevor than he had done since the day the doctor in intensive care had told him that his friend was going to live.

‘Make sure you come in with that meal before I go off at eight,' Jean warned, artfully. ‘The night sister isn't as accommodating as me.'

‘I'm on duty myself at nine, so I'll probably make it around seven.'

Peter's reply wiped the smile from Jean's face. If he'd come at the end of her shift she had hoped to inveigle him into the Green Monkey.

It had been almost four years since her scrap metal dealer husband had left her for a beauty queen less than half her age. She'd picked her lawyer well and paid him enough to ensure that she'd come out of the divorce financially sound. Her share of her husband's assets included their luxurious four-bedroomed apartment on the marina, a five-berth yacht, and enough gilt edged securities to make work a pastime she could give up any time she chose.

But she had discovered that money was no substitute for emotional and sexual satisfaction. She was tired of singles groups, the bridge club dominated by obscenely happily married couples, and sleeping alone. Peter Collins was a hard man, but he was physically fit, more than passably good-looking in a clean cut, military way, and she had a shrewd suspicion that if she ever succeeded in enticing him into her bed she'd find his soft centre.

She didn't doubt that he had one. In her opinion, all men did. It was just a question of the right handling. All she had to do was make the initial breech through his defences.

CHAPTER TWO

‘Take this wheelbarrow and shovel,' Jimmy Herne, the chief gardener at Compton Castle, thrust the implements at Dean Smith, his seventeen-year-old trainee. ‘Proceed to that point beneath the willow tree, where I've marked the turf with lime,' he continued. ‘You listening to me, boy?' he bellowed.

Dean shrugged his shoulders, which irritated Jimmy even more. Dean was used to being screamed at, and not only by Jimmy Herne. His parents had done so for as long as he could remember, and as soon as he was old enough to go to school, his teachers had followed suit. As a result, he was immune to any display of anger from anyone in authority.

He lived for the hours he spent shooting aliens and outwitting commandos in the gaming arcades, and ogling girls while downing pints of illicit beer with his mates in the Little Albert – the only bar in town that catered for under-age drinkers.

‘I'll check on you in ten minutes,' Jimmy threatened. ‘And if you haven't finished lifting the turf, and digging out a good couple of inches by then, you can look out. You hear me, boy?'

‘Yes, Mr Herne.' Dean threw his spade into the barrow and trundled to the willow tree. He poked the spade half-heartedly into the grass, and gingerly lifted the turf he'd cut. If he didn't trim the edges neatly, it would set the old geezer off again, and that would mean sweeping leaves and clearing gutters for the rest of the week. He and Jason Canning, the other trainee assigned by the council's horticulture department to Compton Castle, constantly vied with one another for the dubious privilege of being the lowest common denominator in Jimmy Herne's bad books. Fortunately for him, today was Jason's turn. Jimmy had caught him chatting up Mandy Evans in the kitchen when he should have been bedding out geraniums, so it was Jason who was doing the dirty work.

Dean lifted out four square inches of turf, laid the tiny sod in the centre of the barrow, leaned on the shovel and rested before lifting out the next section. A fat, pink worm was oozing back into the darkness of the soil. It didn't ooze quickly enough. Dean chopped it in two with his spade, and watched both ends writhe.

‘Here, boy.'

A prod in the back with the pointed end of an umbrella diverted Dean's attention from the worm.

‘Dig over there.' The umbrella swung in the direction of the flowerbeds he'd dug out the week before.

The woman was short, with a beaky face that reminded him of a teacher who'd taught him in primary school. But she was wearing a white jacket. And that put him on his guard. Only doctors wore white jackets, and even Jimmy Herne listened to doctors.

‘I dug out those beds last week, miss.' He lapsed into the jargon of his recent schooldays.

‘I don't care when you dug them out. You will dig that one out now!'

The “now”, coupled with her air of authority, made Dean jump to it. Throwing his spade into his barrow, he wheeled it to the flowerbed.

The woman reached the spot before him. She ground the heel of her shoe into the loose earth, and pinpointed the place where she wanted him to dig. ‘Here, and put your back into it.'

Dean lifted his spade from the barrow and pushed it into the earth. It slid in easily. The soil was loose, crumbly and fairly dry.

‘Don't put what you take out in the barrow, idiot. A deep hole's needed here, for a – tree. There'll never be room for everything you take out in there, and I don't want you wasting time carting it around. Pile it up on the grass.'

‘It won't be easy to clean up afterwards. Mr Herne…'

‘Mr Herne nothing,' she dismissed. ‘All you'll need to clean it up is a stiff brush. Pile it up. I want to see a hole deep enough for a mature beech in ten minutes.'

Dean wanted to ask why the rush, when he couldn't see a tree, but he didn't dare. The woman stood over him, while he dug slowly downwards. Occasionally she looked over her shoulder, scanning the garden as though she was expecting someone. Dean presumed it was the someone with the tree. And, in between, she chivvied him as though her life depended on his progress.

‘An old man of ninety could dig faster than you, boy. Put more swing into it. There's no time for that.' She clouted him on the arm with her umbrella when he rested momentarily on his shovel. He glared at her. Not even Jimmy Herne had dared hit him, but he pushed the shovel back in the hole, which in his opinion was already deep enough for any tree.

‘What the hell do you think you're doing, boy?' Jimmy Herne thundered over the grass towards them, a look of fury darkening his wizened monkey face.

‘He's working for me.'

Dean continued to dig, happy to delegate the explanations to the woman.

‘A deep hole needs to be dug here, for a tree. And it needs to be dug this minute.'

‘First I've heard of it, and this is my garden,' Jimmy asserted. ‘This here is a flowerbed, not a tree site, and it's been dug out enough. All it needs is a barrow or two of manure and it will be right to plant out the roses.'

‘Not before this hole has been dug.'

Something in her manner rang a warning bell in Jimmy's mind. ‘You're one of
them
, aren't you?' He laughed and slapped his thigh. ‘Boy, have you been had. Had, good and proper.' He grinned at Dean, who was staring white-faced into the hole he'd dug.

‘Mr Herne, look at this.' Dean stared at Jimmy through dark, frightened eyes. The gardener stepped forward, and peered into the hole.

Locks of blonde hair had clumped and bunched around a single eye set in a segment of grey face. It stared upwards from the earth in blank, blind terror. Jimmy gripped Dean's shoulder.

‘Inside, boy. Tell them to call the police. Tell them I said so.'

The woman in the white jacket was dancing and skipping around the pile of earth heaped on the grass, chanting, ‘I told them so – I told them so – I told them all, but they wouldn't listen.' She clutched at Dean's shirt when he passed her. ‘But you listened, didn't you, boy? You listened, and you found her.' Her face loomed close to his. He could see hairline veins of red in her eyes, deep pores that pockmarked her skin, her make-up caked into creases that lined the valleys of her wrinkles. ‘You hit the jackpot, boy.'

Her cackles of laughter followed him as he ran headlong into the main building.

* * *

Spencer Jordan, the resident art therapist at Compton Castle, was respected and liked by both patients and staff, but everyone conceded that it took time to get to know him. New patients were intimidated by the sheer size of him. Six-foot-seven, with the slim, strongly muscled frame of a basketball player, a physique he'd put to good use during the year he'd spent after art college, studying textiles in a Californian university. His hair was long and neatly trimmed, as were his beard and moustache. He was quiet, softly spoken, and dressed casually in jeans or black slacks with sweaters – and his sweaters were the first thing that people noticed about him.

They were wild, colourful affairs, some mirrored abstract modern art; others illustrated with animals and scenery. The one he'd chosen to wear that Monday morning depicted ferocious-looking black and white rabbits gambolling over a background of bright-red grass, sprinkled with green and purple daisies. And the most amazing thing about Spencer Jordan's sweaters was he knitted them him himself, between art classes.

‘Good sketch, Trevor.' Spencer glanced over Trevor's shoulder as he stood silently rubbing pastels on to an easel propped in the darkest corner of the room. ‘I like the background colours. I take it that's the same lady we've seen before, long dark hair, grey eyes. Am I allowed to know who she is?'

‘A figment of my imagination.' Trevor picked up a grey pastel to darken the clouds above her head.

‘Pity. She looks like the kind of person I'd like to get to know.' Spencer stood behind Trevor for a few moments, inviting further conversation. When none came, he moved on to the next easel, where his youngest male patient, Michael Carpenter, was working on a chocolate-box picture of a country cottage. Straw-thatched roof, roses climbing around a peaked wooden porch, small leaded-glass windows and, sitting dead centre of the picture, an auburn-haired girl clutching a bunch of bluebells on her Laura Ashley clad lap.

Just as Trevor Joseph always sketched dark-haired women, so Michael Carpenter always painted girls with short auburn curls. Spencer knew Trevor was a police officer suffering from depression after receiving life-threatening injuries. He had no idea where the dark-haired lady fitted into his past, if indeed she did, but he knew about Michael's lady.

Michael's sole topic of conversation was Angela and Angela was the reason he was in Compton Castle. Michael had been a bank clerk with no interests other than work, his girlfriend Angela, and building his model railway. When Angela told him there was someone else in her life and she wanted out of their relationship, he couldn't take it. He began to stalk her and her new boyfriend. He took to camping out at night in her parents' garden whenever she stayed in. Threats and warnings from her family and the police, the supportive concern of his own family – none of it had any effect.

One night, an hour after the last light had been switched off in Angela's house, Michael had cut a hole in the dining room window, set fire to rolls of newspaper he had brought for the purpose, and pushed them through the hole so they'd land on the carpet close to the drapes. The room had been ablaze in a matter of minutes and, if it hadn't been for the timely intervention of a retired police officer neighbour who had seen the flames through his living room window, the family would have burned to death in their beds.

Michael had arrived at Compton Castle, via the courts, prison, and an order that he undergo therapy. But Spencer was beginning to doubt whether the treatment Michael was receiving offered a solution to his problem. Michael had been attending his art class for six months, and he was still drawing idyllic cottages with his ex-girlfriend sitting in the garden. Sooner or later Michael had to accept that Angela was no longer part of his life – and wouldn't be, ever again. While he continued to reject that concept, he may as well resign himself to living out the rest of his life in an institution.

‘Spencer, look at my work please.' Alison Bevan, a professional mother suffering postnatal depression after the birth of her ninth child, the result of her fourteenth “serious” relationship in as many years, fluttered her sparse eyelashes at him. Spencer walked over to her easel. She'd drawn a childlike picture of children at play. No figure had arms or legs of the same proportion and all their mouths were fixed in upturned grins. In the left-hand corner were the outsized figures of a man and a woman. The woman's face bore the same determinedly bright smile as the children, but the man's face was devoid of features.

‘Isn't he happy, Ali?' Spencer pointed to the matchstick-like figure.

‘He wouldn't be,' Alison retorted. ‘He's a man, and everyone knows men have to do the work and bring in the money.'

‘So he carries all the responsibility.'

‘Isn't that what it's like for you, Spencer?' she questioned artfully.

‘No, Alison, it's not.' A warning note crept into Spencer's voice. ‘I've only myself to consider.'

‘You must get lonely then,' she persisted.

‘Your picture's coming on.' He ignored her final comment. ‘I like the touch of the flowers on the ground matching those in the children's hands.' He moved on to Lucy Craig, a plump, nervous seventeen-year-old, who had cracked under the pressure of studying for her A Levels.

‘Look, Mr Jordan.' Despite Spencer's prompting, Lucy could never bring herself to use his Christian name. ‘There's a police car driving on the lawn. It's churning up Mr Herne's turf. He won't be pleased.' She glanced at Spencer, but he was watching Trevor. Head down, Trevor was diligently smudging pastels, evincing no interest in what was happening outside. Spencer wondered how much truth that lay behind the maxim, “Once a policeman, always a policeman”.

Constable Michelle Grady stood twenty yards from the hole Dean had dug in the flowerbed. The stubby heels of her walking shoes had sunk into the turf, and her uniform was hot, prickly and stuffy in the warm spring sunshine, but she didn't move an inch from her post. She'd heard a number of stories in Police College about rookies allowing crucial evidence to be destroyed at a crime scene, and she was determined that no one would be able to accuse her of negligence.

Her trained eye had spotted flecks of earth amongst the blades of grass, some distance from the pile of earth Dean had heaped up. She smiled at the thought of pointing this out to her superiors, then imagined Sergeant Peter Collins' voice, loud in contempt.

“
Of course the hole must have been dug out more than once you stupid woman. If it hadn't, the damned body couldn't have been buried there in the first place.”

She rocked back on her heels. She must be careful not to state the obvious. Sergeant Collins wasn't the only superior officer in the station with a sharp tongue.

She wrenched her heels out of the soil and stamped up and down. Waiting was the worse part of every day – waiting for her superiors – waiting for the serious crimes squad – waiting for the pathologist. Didn't
anyone
care about the poor victim lying at the bottom of the hole?

‘There's no need to stamp your foot, Constable. Whoever's down there isn't going to complain about being kept waiting.' Dan Evans, an inspector in the Serious Crimes Squad, appeared behind her.

‘Inspector.' She nodded. Dan Evans was a mountain of a man who'd been an international weightlifter. At six-foot-four, heavily built and twenty stone, he towered over everyone in the station. Before he'd joined the force he'd been a farmer, and she knew his family still worked land around Carmarthen, which explained his lilting Welsh accent and his exasperatingly slow speech.