No Cherubs for Melanie. James Hawkins
a bunch of files wandered halfway into the room. Bryan gave the interloper a fierce look and barked, “Not now.”
The young man froze; his lower lip trembled.
“Oh for Christ’s sake, get that ring out of your nose and shut the bloody door behind you,” Bryan shouted, not waiting for the man to leave before rolling his eyes and venting his feelings. “Where do we get them from? Anyway, where was I?” He paused, arranging his thoughts, and plucked a few leaves off the little rosemary bush, rubbing them under his nose for a few seconds, before picking up where he’d left off. “Like I told you, Gordonstone’s dead and buried. Classic symptoms of heart attack: red face, short of breath, clutching his chest — you get the picture. No one really questioned it, and the staff at the restaurant didn’t call an ambulance for nearly three hours, thinking he was just paralytic, as usual.”
“That wasn’t very thoughtful.”
“Especially as he was such a natural for a heart attack. Fat geezer, drank like a fish, smoked bleedin’ great cigars, and he was always up in the air over something.”
“Could one of the staff have done it, then?”
“Quite probable, I’d say. The problem is it took a few weeks for the toxicology boys to get round to running some tests on a few bits of Gordonstone’s innards the pathologist put aside at the post-mortem. They called me at home yesterday… No, make that Saturday. Anyway, turns out it was poison. Some unpronounceable, exotic stuff that attacks the nervous system. They would have done the tests sooner but there didn’t appear to be anything suspicious; nothing obvious like a knife in the back.”
“So theoretically it was a heart attack, then.”
“Yeah,” continued Bryan scanning the pathologist’s report. “Though there was nothing natural about it.”
“So where do we go from here, Guv? This happened weeks ago.”
“Well, it’s too late to turn up mob handed and pull the place to pieces. Whoever did it has had plenty of time to clean up anything remotely embarrassing. That’s why I wanted you on the case.”
Surprise lifted Bliss’ voice. “On my own?”
“Just for starters.” The chief inspector raised his eyebrows. “Unless you don’t think you’re up to it?”
Flattery or blackmail, wondered Bliss. Probably a bit of both. “I can handle it.”
“Good. I was hoping you’d say that. To be honest we’re a bit stretched at the moment. I need someone to get the ball rolling and I’ll give you some help later. Start with the staff at the restaurant and be ever so subtle. Tell ’em it’s just routine. Don’t let ’em know what we know.”
“They’re bound to guess something’s up if I start nosing around after all this time.”
“Let ’em guess all they want. You never know, somebody might let something slip. Might say something weird, drop themselves, or someone else, in it. Give ’em the idea you’re just tying up a few loose ends, a bit of background work just for the record. Let ’em think they got away with it.”
“Let who think they got away with it?”
“The staff. It must’ve been one of them.”
“Have you forgotten your basic training, Guv? Remember: never assume anything, never dismiss anything.”
DCI Bryan shook off the suggestion that his intuition might be misplaced. “It must’ve been an inside job. He lived in a flat above the place; the only people who had access were the staff.”
“Guv!”
“OK, OK, I get your point,” conceded Bryan. He snatched the file back from Bliss and shuffled through it. “Look, here’s a statement from the head waiter. Took Gordonstone his dinner at seven-thirty as usual and said he was right as rain. Thirty minutes later he was dead.”
“The head waiter could be lying. He could have been the one who did it.”
“Granted. But if he were, that would still make it an inside job wouldn’t it?”
Bliss gave way on the point with a grudging nod. “So what was the poison?”
“Like I said, it sounded pretty exotic; probably organic according to the egghead who called me. I haven’t got his report yet. They’re still running tests but he thought we should know straight away. Apparently there’s dozens of possibilities and he was asking if we had any control samples that they could try to match it against.”
Bliss shuffled through his rusty memory bank of training courses and came up with very little on the subject of poisons — just a couple of lectures from a doddery old doctor shaking with Parkinson’s disease, and a few photocopied sheets of common symptoms.
“Apparently, this type of stuff comes from mushrooms, jellyfish, even plants,” continued the DCI. “It paralyses fairly quickly — in maybe ten to fifteen minutes — but the brain keeps working as the nerves go haywire. The last few minutes seem like forever, and he must’ve been screaming for help, but his mouth wouldn’t have been working right. Everyone in the restaurant thought he was being his usual obnoxious self — thought he was pissed.”
“I know the feeling,” admitted Bliss.
Pretending not to hear, the chief inspector continued, “He was almost certainly dead when he hit the floor.”
“And no one called an ambulance?”
Bryan shook his head. “Probably fed up with him. They’d seen it all before.”
“Surely this was different?”
“Apparently the restaurant was full. The staff just wanted him out of the way. A couple of flunkies dragged him into his office and shut the door on him. Nobody realized he was dead until they were locking up and somebody thought to check on him. They were just grateful they’d had a peaceful evening.”
The chief inspector continued leafing through the file. “The investigation went pear-shaped right from the beginning,” he snorted. “Looks as though a green-horned uniformed lad asked just enough questions to fill out the sudden death report, then he copped a quick statement off the head waiter and the head chef — the last people to see Gordonstone alive — and left it at that.”
“I don’t suppose he had any reason to suspect murder…” said Bliss, his voice trailing away as his eyes were drawn by a scuffle in the car park outside the office window. Several officers were struggling with a runty youth whose frenetic kicking and squirming made him slippery as an eel. A burly policewoman stepped in, grabbed the kid’s long greasy hair, and hauled him across the tarmac to the cellblock door. Bliss lost his focus and found himself confronted with an image of Gordonstone — not the revolting, fat drunk who died in his restaurant, but a slim, polished man who, even in the midst of questioning about the death of his daughter, carried himself haughtily and spoke with an arrogance that made Bliss want to get his investigation over and flee back to the police station as quickly as possible. Rushing to fill out the preprinted forms on the life and death of Melanie Gordonstone, he had summarized in a few dozen words an entire lifetime of hopes, fears, successes, and failures. Name, date of birth, last known address, next of kin; time, date, and place of death. Witnesses.
Witnesses, he mused to himself, remembering the simple form with Melanie Gordonstone’s name on the top line. None, he had written, knowing the untruth of the word, knowing that Margaret, Melanie’s older sister, must have seen or heard something. But he had calmly written, None, and, at the time, had been thankful to escape from Gordonstone’s clutches without having to ask too many questions.
Bliss broke out of his reverie and pretended he’d been admiring a bowl of cacti in Bryan’s window. “What about his wife?” he asked, having no idea how long his mind had been adrift.
Bryan scanned the report, apparently unaware of the hiatus. “There’s no mention of his wife.