Midnight Murders (5 page)

‘Feel better?'

‘Yes thanks,' Trevor said diffidently. ‘I don't want to keep you if you've a class.'

Spencer walked to the window, moved the curtains, and looked outside. ‘I haven't a class for another hour and a half, but if you'd rather be left alone, I'll go.'

‘I don't want to be a bore and monopolise your time, when you have something better to do.'

‘You're not a bore and I've nothing better to do,' Spencer answered easily.

‘Just one more job in your crowded day,' Trevor said dryly.

‘You're not a job.' Spencer looked him in the eye. ‘You remind me of myself, of where I was a few months ago. In fact, until you came along, I was beginning to wonder if I'd made any progress at all.' A ghost of a smile hovered at the corners of his mouth. ‘Then, when I saw you, I realised I had moved on.'

‘So, I'm good as a progress indicator, if nothing else.'

‘You're different from the others. Your depression stems from your physical injuries and sometimes doctors are too ready to dismiss the havoc that severe physical damage can do to the mind, as well as the body. It's all very well for them to tell you that you're fit enough to start again where you left off, as though nothing had happened. You and I know it's not that easy. First, you're weak as a kitten because you've done nothing except lie around hospitals for months. Second, while you've been gone, the world has become larger, noisier and more threatening. Even simple everyday things like getting up in the morning, washing, dressing, talking, walking out through one door and in through another, take more effort than they did before; and that's without taking crippling pain into account.'

‘You really have been through it, haven't you?'

‘Yes.' Spencer went to the door. ‘But today you took your first and biggest step. You went outside of your own accord.'

‘But I panicked… '

‘And next time you'll pick a better time, when there are fewer people around. You'll walk two or three steps more than you did today before you turn back. The day after, it'll be further. One day you'll reach the gate. And sometime after that you'll get on a bus.'

‘You really think it will be that easy?'

‘It won't be easy because every step and every move will take enormous effort. But as I said, you took the biggest and most painful step today. Nothing will ever take as much effort again. Keep reminding yourself of that, not the panic that drove you back. But that's enough of me lecturing. Want to come down to my room, and finish the drawing of the mysterious lady with the dark hair?'

‘No, thank you.'

Spencer didn't try to persuade him. ‘Perhaps later. I'll be there all afternoon.'

‘Perhaps,' Trevor echoed before Spencer closed the door.

Y
ou took the biggest and most painful step today.
Nothing will ever take as much effort again.

Trevor wanted to believe Spencer, but at that moment all he wanted to do was crawl into his bed, pull the sheet over his head, curl up, and never emerge again.

‘There are six modern single-story ward blocks. Corridors straight down the centre linking with rooms on either side; toilets, bathrooms and sluice rooms, at the far end. Kitchens, linen cupboards and day rooms at this end; patients' double, single and four-bedded rooms in the centre. The single rooms tend to be reserved for difficult patients.'

Peter listened to Harry, recalled Trevor's single room, and suppressed an urge to thump the diminutive psychiatrist.

‘This particular block is for people suffering from Alzheimer's… ' the roar of a helicopter hovering overhead drowned out Harry.

Dan looked at Peter. ‘Headquarters hasn't wasted any time.'

‘… They are very confused… ' Harry continued.

Peter peered through the glass wall of the day room. Twenty elderly men and women were sitting in a circle. The room was neat, clean, and sterile, the furniture upholstered in green vinyl, the walls decorated in the same shade of yellow as Goldman's office, and hung with a series of pastel landscapes. Two nurses were trying to evoke the patients' interest in books of old photographs.

‘I hope they shoot me before I get to that stage,' Peter muttered to Dan.

‘Something I can help you with, Sergeant Collins?' Harry enquired.

‘I hope not,' he replied.

‘As I was saying, each block accommodates patients with various symptoms, some severe, some mild – although we try to treat most of the mild cases as outpatients. We do, however, try to group like with like. It simplifies the arrangements for therapy. The ward that your friend Trevor Joseph is on, for instance, principally houses patients who have been admitted for observation, alongside those who are clinically depressed. The block across the way,' Harry pointed to a parallel block, ‘is where we place the majority of our phobia cases. The one directly in front of us caters for manias. The block behind us is the drug and alcohol dependency unit. We also have a block for women suffering from postnatal depression. It is slightly larger than the rest, as it has a nursery for the children.'

‘If you group like with like, how come Vanessa Hedley is on Joseph's ward?' Peter asked.

‘I said that we try to organise things that way, Sergeant Collins. Unfortunately, we don't always succeed. Because we try to treat as many patients as possible as outpatients, especially those with depression, your friend's ward tends to be the one with the least pressure on its resources. Vanessa is being evaluated at present, and as there was a bed available on that particular ward… '

‘How long has she been here?' Dan interrupted.

‘On the ward or in the hospital?' Goldman replied.

‘Both.'

‘I'd have to check the records. But if my memory serves me correctly, I'd say she's been on the ward about two months.'

‘And in the hospital?'

‘Longer.'

‘Did she come here directly from prison?'

‘I really shouldn't be discussing… '

‘It doesn't matter.' Dan knew he could find out all he needed from the records. He glanced at the plan he was carrying. ‘All six blocks are connected to the main block by perspex tunnels?'

‘They are,' Harry concurred.

‘But not with one another?'

‘Not directly. You'd have to walk to the main block then retrace your steps down one of the other tunnels to reach a separate block.'

‘And all the therapy units lie in this area here.' Evans jabbed his index finger over a large space set behind the old hospital building, in front of the modern blocks. It was dotted with the outlines of demountables.

‘Not any longer. We're in the process of relocating the therapy units in the old hospital alongside the administration offices. Those blocks were purpose-built in the seventies. And, like most buildings of that era, they're sadly lacking. Their roofs are flat and leaking, there are damp patches on the walls, the windows are metal-framed and draughty… '

‘In short, they are cold and wet with rotting fabric. There isn't much you can tell us about buildings built in the seventies,' Dan interrupted. ‘Our station is one of them.'

‘We all have our crosses to bear, Inspector Evans. All the blocks, apart from the postnatal depression ward, are identical, and our staff man them round the clock. If anything untoward happens in any of them, we know about it immediately. There's little point in you looking over all of them. It would gain you nothing, and the patients would be upset at the intrusion. If you have to enter any of them I would appreciate it if you and your men were accompanied either by me or Dorothy Clyne.'

‘And where would we find you in an emergency?'

‘The switchboard can always reach us.'

‘We will have to visit them, if only to interview the patients, but I'll bear your directive in mind, Dr Goldman. We are here to conduct a murder investigation,' Dan reminded him.

‘Where do you want to go next?' Harry asked.

‘The therapy units, then the old hospital.'

‘The therapy units, like the wards, are the province of the patients. I would appreciate it if you entered them only with a staff escort.'

‘You mentioned there were some areas of the hospital to which we could have free access,' Dan said. ‘Perhaps now would be a good time to tell us where they are.'

‘The floors of the old hospital that have been taken over by the Health Authority's administration unit, but it might still be as well if you cleared your movements with our administrator, Tony Waters.' Harry looked at his watch. ‘If you'll excuse me, I have an appointment with a patient. If you wait here, I'll ask a porter to take you to Tony's office.'

He left them in the corridor and disappeared into the ward office. Through the open door Peter saw a male nurse talking to an attractive blonde sister.

‘That sod doesn't trust us,' Peter informed Dan.

‘He has a hospital to run.'

‘Or something to hide.'

‘That's what I like to see, Peter, coppers assuming everyone guilty until proven innocent.'

Harry Goldman returned with the blonde. ‘Sister Ashford has volunteered to give up a few minutes of her free time to take you to Mr Waters' office. If you'll excuse me gentlemen.' Goldman wandered off down the corridor, then turned back. ‘You will keep me up-to-date with your progress, Inspector?'

‘If we make any you'll be the first to know,' Evans assured him.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘Dirt's clogging the sink again.' Patrick O'Kelly shouted to his assistant as he peered through the magnifying glass he was moving slowly, centimetre by centimetre, along the thighs of the body laid out on the slab.

‘I thought I'd got rid of it all,' his assistant grumbled as he left the earth he was sifting, from one side of a body-bag to the other, through a fine mesh.

Patrick inched the glass upwards on to the torso. ‘Superintendent,' he acknowledged Bill who walked through the double doors.

‘Anything for us yet?' Bill surveyed the body stretched out on the slab and the body-bag opened out on the slab next to it.

‘I haven't finished examining the body,' the pathologist retorted irritably.

‘Sorry to press you, but at the moment we know absolutely nothing. A few basic facts might kick off our investigation.'

‘Like?' Patrick asked, although he already had an idea what Bill was looking for.

‘Like who she was, and how and why she died?'

‘The “who” I can't help you with. The “how” I told you on site.' Patrick straightened his back, discarded his magnifying glass, and walked to the head of the corpse. Pushing back the eyelids with his thumb and forefinger, he prodded at the burst blood vessels that had flooded the whites with scarlet. He indicated the evidence of several smaller haemorrhages on the forehead. And those are just the ones you can see. I found more in the internal organs. Asphyxiation.'

‘She was buried alive?'

‘Even without the haemorrhages the build-up of dirt in the nostrils and lungs confirms it.' Patrick pushed aside the bone-cutter he'd used to open the ribcage, and removed the square of tissue he'd used to cover the slit in the skin, not out of any finer feelings for the corpse, but from the need to keep contamination of the other body parts to a minimum. ‘Judging from the amount of earth and debris in the bronchial tubes,' he palpated a tube he'd slit open, and crumbs of black dirt fell into his hand, ‘she struggled for breath until the last.'

‘How long would that have taken?' Bill flinched at the thought of the young girl stretched out dead and naked before him, fighting for air, while being smothered by shovel-full after shovel-full of earth.

‘Impossible to fix an accurate time. A lot depends on whether he worked quickly or slowly. And, then again, he might have dumped her at the bottom of the pit some time before he buried her.'

‘How long would it have taken from the first breath that was more dirt than air, to the last?' Bill pressed, refusing to allow Patrick to fob him off.

‘Going by what I've dug out of her tubes and lungs, I'd say somewhere between five and ten minutes; but she wouldn't have been fully conscious towards the end.' Patrick retrieved his magnifying glass and resumed his minute study of her skin. ‘I was right about the lips. They had been super-glued together. She managed to tear them apart, but not that long before she died, judging by the bleeding. Bingo!' he shouted gleefully. ‘Puncture marks, upper right arm. A whole beautiful series of them. Some bruised and old, some fresher, and one very fresh.' He spoke into the voice-activated dictaphone that hung above the slab before marking the sites with blue ink. ‘I've taken blood samples, if it's detectable, we'll soon know about it.'

‘How long has she been dead?'

‘You know I hate that question.'

‘And you know I have to ask it,' Bill replied.

‘Body temperature was that of the surroundings when I examined her in the pit, so that puts death at least eighteen to twenty-four hours before, taking into account that asphyxiation causes body temperature to rise, not fall, immediately after death. No rigor mortis, little deterioration – that means your guess would be as good as mine.'

‘I hate it when you say that.'

Patrick tore off his rubber gloves and threw them in the bin at the head of the table. He switched off the water that was rippling around the corpse, folded his arms, and leaned against the tiled wall. ‘But there is something that might interest you. The stomach was completely empty, and the body dehydrated.'

‘Which means?'

‘She'd been starved before death. No food or water.'

‘For how long?'

‘After examining the small intestines, I'd say at least forty-eight hours – possibly longer.'

‘Then she could have been taken and kept somewhere.'

‘That's for you to find out.' Patrick looked at her face. ‘Pretty girl.'

Bill looked at the corpse, really looked at it, for the first time. O'Kelly's assistant had combed the shoulder-length curls away from the face and brushed off the dirt. He had to agree, whoever she was, she had been a pretty girl.

‘Have you taken new photographs?' Bill asked.

‘Digital print outs are in the office.'

‘Anything on her?'

‘No identification. Rings, one gold, set with a red onyx stone, one silver in the shape of a wishbone, a gold chain, crucifix and Saint Nicholas, all nine-carat, and a lot of good they did her. The patron saint of travellers must have been on tea break when she was being buried.' Patrick nodded towards two piles; a small one of jewellery and a larger one of clothes heaped on a side table. ‘We found a key ring with two Yale keys in the pocket of her skirt. Everything has been dusted for prints, so they're safe to handle.'

Bill picked up the key ring and fingered the tab, a miniature rubber troll with his thumbs in his ears and fingers extended.

‘The clothes have chain store labels, no name tags, no markings, and nothing except the keys in the pockets,' Patrick continued, ‘I've taken dental X-rays. There are fourteen fillings, so she should be on someone's records. No foreign fibres on the skin or clothes. The dirt, as you see, is still being sifted.'

‘Sexual assault?'

‘No signs of it. Clothes are soiled but appear undisturbed. Vaginal swabs tested negative for semen. There's a tattoo.' He took a small rubber sheet, wrapped it around the right leg and rolled the corpse on to its side. The back, thighs and calves were dark with stagnant blood. ‘Butterfly high on right thigh. Nice work.'

‘Age?'

‘Early twenties. Blue eyes, dyed blonde hair; the rest you can see for yourself. I've told you just about everything, but if you want to listen to the tape in my office you're welcome. Word processing facilities being what they are in this place, it won't be in print until tomorrow.'

‘I can wait.'

‘Coffee?'

‘No, thanks,' Bill refused, as Patrick's assistant left the office with three specimen jars filled with murky beige liquid.

‘Bring the chocolate biscuits, Alan,' Patrick called out.

Alan dumped the jars on an empty slab, opened one of the refrigerated body drawers, and removed a packet of chocolate wafers.

Bill had met O'Kelly the man after hearing about O'Kelly the legend. The first time he'd visited the mortuary he had walked in on Patrick, his assistant, and the senior surgeon from the staff of the General, sitting in a row on one of the slabs, facing an opened corpse while eating pasties and drinking cans of lager.

Patrick called it a “working lunch”. They were trying to determine cause of death, but they were, as Patrick had delighted in telling him, spoilt for choice. The man had lung cancer, heart disease and liver failure. At first he'd thought that Patrick had set out to deliberately shock him, or any copper who dared to trespass unannounced on his domain. Ten years on, he knew better. The pathologist had lived with corpses for so long, he simply treated them as inanimate objects to be examined and studied with the same unemotional regard he bestowed on his instruments or the laboratory furniture.

‘I'll let you know if we find anything in the dirt,' Patrick jumped up and sat on a spare slab.

‘I'd appreciate it.'

‘We'll carry on as soon as we've finished this.' Patrick held up his coffee.

Bill knew Patrick was dismissing him, but he lingered in the formaldehyde-ridden atmosphere. ‘Lot of work on at the moment?' He glanced around the mortuary. There were no other bodies in sight, and apart from the slabs the body bag and victim were laid on, they were all clean and scrubbed, but Bill noticed that three-quarters of the mortuary drawers were tagged. And that either meant there'd been a rush for the pathologist's services, or one was about to start.

‘The usual.' O'Kelly peeled the silver paper from his biscuit. ‘Why?'

‘We took aerial shots of the grounds of Compton Castle an hour ago.'

‘Heat-seeking cameras?' Patrick looked warily at Bill.

‘We can't be sure of anything yet.'

‘How many sites have you earmarked to dig?'

‘Three. But they could be buried compost rotting and generating heat.'

‘Close to the kitchens?'

‘No.'

Patrick looked to his assistant. ‘Clean and repack my site kit as soon as we've finished break.'

‘It's probably nothing,' Bill was afraid he'd said too much and made a fool of himself.

‘I'm no detective, but even I noticed the compost bin outside the kitchen door.'

‘The spots are in the flowerbeds.'

‘Concentrated spots? Not a thin spread?'

Bill nodded. Patrick pushed the remainder of his wafer between his lips and finished his coffee.

‘Get moving, Alan, we've work to do,' he mumbled through a full mouth.

* * *

‘As you see Sergeant, Constable,' Tony Waters smiled at Michelle, who'd been foisted on Peter yet again, much to the sergeant's disgust, ‘these attics haven't been used in years.'

Tony halted on a landing above a steep, narrow staircase, and opened identical opposing doors, on to long, low-ceilinged galleries. Both were strewn with dust balls and decorated with spiders' webs. Peter walked into the right-hand gallery and opened the door at the far end. Box upon cardboard box, all covered with layers of grey dust, were piled up in a long narrow room lit by a small, narrow window.

‘Old records?' Peter asked

‘I presume so. I've only opened one box. They were here when my department moved into this building,' Tony followed Peter into the attic.

‘It seems bizarre to build new blocks out in the grounds with all this space going begging,' Peter commented.

‘The stairs are steep. The banisters have dry rot, and compliance with the county's disabled access policy would mean ripping the fabric of the building apart to put in lifts. Even if we found the money, it would be wasted. Compton Castle was put on the list for demolition in the 1980s. We've been trying to run it down for the past ten years. If it hadn't been for the cutbacks that held up the building of new psychiatric wards in the General, it would have been a pile of rubble years ago.'

Peter turned his back on Michelle and Tony and walked down the gallery until he reached another steeper and narrower staircase than the one they'd ascended.

‘There are three staircases on this floor,' Waters informed him. ‘The central one we came up by, another like this that serves the left-hand side of the building and an outside metal fire escape at the back.'

‘Does each floor have access to the fire escape?' Peter noticed that Michelle was writing down everything that the administrator was telling them in her notebook.

‘Yes, there's an outside landing on every floor except the ground-floor.'

‘You do realise this is only a quick once-over,' Peter informed him, ‘before we bring in teams to conduct a thorough search.'

‘As far as this building is concerned, you can search all you like. But we'd rather that you searched the ground-floor therapy units either late at night or early in the morning when they're not being used by patients.'

‘We'll bear your request in mind,' Peter replied.

‘The only thing you're likely to find on this floor is spiders.' Tony hit a web.

‘And mice,' Peter observed a pile of mouse droppings by the cardboard boxes.

Tony led the way back down a narrow staircase. ‘Built for the maids,' Tony reached out to support Michelle's arm when she caught her heel in a stair-tread.

‘Miniature maids,' Peter grumbled, as his shoulders brushed both the left and right-hand walls.

When they reached the floor below, Waters opened a door directly in front of them, and led them through a series of high-ceilinged, wooden-floored old wards packed with computers, printers and office desks.

‘This looks strange,' Michelle commented.

‘What?' Peter asked.

‘Modern office furniture and technology in these surroundings.'

‘The furniture was bought for the new County Hall offices. We had to move out last year because of pressure on accommodation.'

‘God bless civil servants and the local authorities,' Peter remarked irreverently. ‘You can always count on them to expand to fill every available inch of space.'

‘General office,' Waters ignored his barbed comment, as he headed towards the centre of the building. He nodded to the clerks, mostly middle-aged women, with a sprinkling of young girls and boys. ‘Most of the assistant administrators are on the floor below; reception and my own office are, as you know, on the ground-floor.'

They walked through the administrators' offices below the general office. They were housed in what had been one single vast ward. But the area had been subdivided by plasterboard and glass partitions to provide separate cubicles.

When they reached a door that opened on to a landing, Tony produced a key. ‘These rooms are kept locked. Our cleaning bill for this place is astronomical without opening up the disused areas.' He unlocked the door and stood back to allow Peter to look in. ‘Old kitchens,' he explained as Peter looked at a series of small rooms that still contained stone sinks and zinc-covered cupboards and tables. ‘And pantries and storerooms.'