Dear Departed (26 page)

‘I don’t know.’

‘I thought I heard someone call out for help. Very faintly. There, again. Did you hear that?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I think so,’ she said, her eyes so wide now he was afraid they’d fall out of their sockets. Thank God for suggestible females, he thought, took a step back and kicked.

The Yale gave at the third blow – or, rather, the wood around the Yale, being of the normal standard used in modern building, crumbled like Madeira cake. The door swung back and hit the wall behind with a bang that made Manda Hare squeak. Atherton, adrenaline in place, took in the scene with a single scorching glance. The same mess and muddle, the same smell of frowst, tobacco and stale food, but with something else added that made his stomach sink and his adrenaline rise yet further – the smell of blood.

Toby was sitting on an upright chair at the far end of the living room, naked to the waist, his hands dangling between his knees. The curtains were drawn and his pale face and body gleamed weirdly in the dimness. On the carpet in front of him was sprawled a male figure Atherton had no difficulty in identifying as Jasper, by the clothes he had been wearing last night. He was immobile, and there was a dark stain underneath and around him on the fawn carpet. The blood had evidently soaked through and had run along underneath because it had appeared in an interesting flow across the exposed parquet inside the door, dark, in the gloom, like oil.

Manda made a muffled sound. She had managed to cram the fingers of both her hands into her mouth and her eyes were fixed and bulging dangerously. Atherton moved slightly to block her view of the scene.

‘Don’t look,’ he said. He spoke firmly but calmly. ‘Go back to your own flat and dial 999. Tell them to send police and an ambulance. Go and do it now, there’s a good girl. Go on. Hurry.’

She went, dragging her eyes away like pulling off a plaster. Atherton turned to the scene again. His nerves were singing with tension and played again and again the image of Toby leaping into sudden action, springing from the chair and across the room like a pale cat. Where was the knife? There must be a knife. It was so hard to see in this twilight. Yes, there it was, on the floor, half under Toby’s chair where he must have dropped it. Could he get to it before Toby did? Make a rush for it, or try creeping up? The muscles of his stomach seemed to twitch with their own memory of harm. God, he hated knives!

The cautious approach, he decided, trying to breathe evenly. He spoke quietly and began to edge forward. ‘Toby. Toby. Are you all right? Toby, can you hear me?’ There was no response. He reached into his pocket carefully for his handkerchief as he advanced. Though Toby’s muscles seemed genuinely relaxed, a madman could feign this state of shock and leap into lethal action at the last moment. Atherton’s adrenaline peaked as he stooped and secured the knife with the handkerchief, expecting the sudden violent movement; and then subsided with a rush as Toby remained motionless. Sweat was standing cold all down his back, and his legs were trembling. He drew a few deep breaths and backed off a step or two.

The next most important thing, having got the knife, was to check the status of the victim. Jasper was face down and limp, and Atherton thought he was probably dead, but on squatting (keeping his eyes on Toby) and applying two fingers to his neck, he found a faint pulse. Thank God for that! If he survived, he could be a witness to what happened, because Toby didn’t look as if he would ever speak again.

But just as he thought that, Toby spoke. ‘He defiled her,’ he said. The sound of his voice coming out of that still figure made Atherton jump

‘What?’ he said involuntarily.

‘That’s why I killed her. I had to do it. And then I killed him. You can only wash away things like that in blood.’ Atherton almost held his breath. ‘You killed her?’ ‘She’s mine now,’ Toby said, in that same dead, toneless voice. ‘She’s mine for ever.’ And then he drew a great shuddering sigh, put his head into his hands, his elbows resting on his knees, and began to rock.

Slider met him at the hospital, at the entrance to the emergency unit. As they walked through, Atherton filled him in.

‘They’re both being looked at now. Toby still seems completely out of it. There was a lot of blood on him and plenty of it round the walls, so I don’t know if it was a fight and they’re both wounded, or all the blood is from Jasper. God, it’s a mess,’ he finished bitterly.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Slider said.

‘Well, maybe it is. I was pushing Toby last night, and Jasper had already told me he was unstable.’

‘He only said all oboe-players are mad. And you know that’s an orchestra joke, like viola-players being thick.’

‘But I knew he was on the edge. That’s the very reason I went after him.’

‘Stop beating yourself up. It doesn’t help. We’ve got a job to do and we do it.’

They sat on moulded chairs in the corridor until a young doctor with seventy-two-hour-week eyes came out to them.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Jasper Stalybrass is stable for the moment, but he’s lost an awful lot of blood. There is some internal bleeding into the chest cavity and in the abdomen so we have to send him up to theatre to see what’s going on.’

‘Will he survive?’ Slider asked.

‘It depends on what we find up in theatre. From observations here I think a lung may have been punctured, but that’s survivable. It depends where the rest of the bleeding is coming from. However, he’s young and healthy so he ought to have a pretty good chance. He’ll be very weak for some time, and there’s always a danger of complications, but as long as we don’t find anything too bad up there, he should make a full recovery.’

It was as near as you could get to an opinion from a doctor,
these days. They were all so scared of being sued. ‘What about Toby Harkness?’

‘Ah, yes. Well, there was so much blood on him we thought he’d been wounded too, but when we cleaned him up we didn’t find any injuries. The blood must have been all the other man’s. So he’s not physically hurt, but he’s very disturbed. We had to sedate him in order to examine him, and we’ve got him under restraints at the moment, pending a psych consult.’

‘Can I talk to either of them?’

‘Well …’ he hesitated ‘… I know it’s important for you to know what happened. You can talk to Jasper Stalybrass very briefly before he goes up. Two minutes only. And you can see Toby Harkness, but I don’t think you’ll get much out of him. As I said, he’s very disturbed – and, frankly, we don’t want him made more so, so if he becomes agitated I’ll have to ask you to leave.’

‘I understand. I’ll be careful. By the way – about the clothes?’

‘Yes, it’s all right, I know the drill. They’re all being bagged and listed and you can take them away whenever you like.’

Jasper Stalybrass was lying on a trolley under a sheet than which he was not less white. His eyes were closed, the lids delicately blue, his skin with the transparent, waxy look of extreme blood loss. He barely seemed to be breathing. Slider warned Atherton back with a look, and said, ‘Mr Stalybrass. Are you awake?’

He hardly expected a response, but the eyes slowly opened.

‘I’m Detective Inspector Slider,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

Stalybrass tried to speak, licked his lips feebly, and then said, in a breath of a voice, ‘I drove him home. Went in. For a drink. Sat down. He went – kitchen. Came back – stabbed me. In the back.’

He stopped, panting shallowly. Slider nodded, holding his eyes. ‘I understand. Take your time.’

He resumed. ‘He was raving. I tried – struggled – get the knife.’

He closed his eyes and Slider waited. The nurse, who had been standing back, came to his elbow. ‘We’ve got to get him up to theatre,’ she said quietly.

‘I know. Just one minute more.’

Stalybrass opened his eyes again. ‘He kept – stabbing me. Raving – about Chattie. Me and Chattie.’

He stopped again. The nurse said, ‘Sir—’

Stalybrass held Slider’s gaze with feeble urgency. ‘There’s more,’ he said.

‘Go on, I’m listening,’ Slider said. ‘What is it?’

‘He said – said
he killed her,’
Stalybrass finished. ‘Because of her and me.’

Slider nodded calmly. ’I understand. Well, don’t worry about it now. We’ve got him safe. You just concentrate on getting well. We’ll talk to you again later, when you’ve been taken care of.’

He stood back and Stalybrass was wheeled out. Slider met Atherton’s eyes. ‘So,’ he said, ‘your plan last night worked.’

‘At a price,’ said Atherton.

They saw Toby briefly in the emergency room where he was being guarded by a uniformed policeman – it was Ridpath, from Hammersmith, who looked at them curiously, but said only, ‘He hasn’t said anything, sir.’ Toby was lying on the examination bed, his eyes closed, the restraint straps round his body. A nurse was also in attendance.

‘Can we talk to him?’ Slider asked her.

‘You can try,’ the nurse said, ‘but I don’t know if he’ll answer. Try not to agitate him.’

Slider approached the bedside. ‘Toby, can you hear me?’

The eyes opened. They looked unfocused, wandered a little like those of a new baby. Slider could feel Atherton’s tension like heat radiation behind him. ‘Toby, I’m Detective Inspector Slider. Can you tell me what happened?’ No answer. ‘Back at your flat. Jasper came in with you—’

A shudder ran visibly through Toby Harkness, through his body and up his face.

‘Did you do something to him?’

‘I couldn’t bear it,’ Toby said, and his face drew into an exaggerated mask of tragedy.
‘He’d had her.
Defiled her. I had to kill them both. Better that way.’ And he began to cry, weak, tearless sobs, more like the whimpering of a puppy than any expression of humanity.

‘Toby,’ Slider said, ever more gently, ‘are you saying that you killed Chattie?’

Toby moaned, and began rolling his head back and forth slowly on the flat pillow. The moans grew rhythmic, and louder.

The nurse touched Slider’s arm. ‘I think you’d better leave him alone now.’

Slider obeyed, seeing that he wouldn’t get any more sense out of him anyway. He paused on the way out to say to Ridpath, ‘Stay with him and write down anything he says. I’ll arrange for you to be relieved by one of ours.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Outside in the corridor, Atherton said, ‘Well, I don’t think that would stand up as a confession, but he did say it to me
and to
Jasper. Assuming Jasper survives. But you heard Jasper say it. I wish he’d confessed to me in front of the neighbour, but I’d already sent her to call an ambulance, damnit.’

‘Settle down,’ Slider said. ‘Toby’s not going anywhere, not for a long time. And if he confessed to killing Chattie in a fit of remorse, he’ll probably say it again, many times over.’

Atherton looked at him carefully. ‘There’s something in your tone of voice. A confession and a second attempted killing, what more do you want? With a similar sort of knife. It was a kitchen knife, which is what Doc Cameron thought Chattie was attacked with. A Sabatier, if you want to be picky. Might even be the same one. God, if we could get a bit of Chattie’s DNA from it—’

‘If,’ said Slider. ‘Don’t get too excited. Confession is as confession does.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Toby said he killed Chattie because Jasper had defiled her. Presumably in a rush of blood to the head. But he attacks Jasper
three days afterwards.’

‘That’s not much of an objection,’ said Atherton. ‘He’s a coward. Stabbing a female’s one thing, stabbing a man taller than him’s another. Took him time to get his bottle up.’

‘False confessions aren’t unknown,’ Slider said. ‘Especially from young men in emotional turmoil.’

‘Going after Jasper had to wait until he was drunk enough and the opportunity presented itself.’

‘It could be his way to make himself important to Chattie in retrospect, so to speak, when he knows he wasn’t important to her in life.’

‘If it was a false confession, then it was my fault for pushing him so hard last night,’ Atherton said.

‘Oh, we’re back there, are we? All right, if you want to punish yourself, think of all the extra work it’s going to cause us.’

‘What does that matter, if it gets us our man?’

‘Attaboy. You can go back to the scene and direct the search of the flat, see if you can find anything useful to back up your theory.’

‘Ugh. The thought of searching that flat. You haven’t seen it.’ ‘You’ve described it to me. I thought you wanted to be

punished?’ said Slider.

There was no point in thinking about a day off now. Slider went back to his office to begin the procedures surrounding this new event, the back of his mind occupied with wondering whether Atherton was culpable in any way, whether he could have known how close to snapping Toby Harkness was. But you have to trust your men. By all accounts Toby had been sinking further into the mire all on his own. Did he kill Chattie? Motive, no alibi, and now a confession. Slider would have been happier about it if she really had been stabbed to death. There was something about that drugging and fake stabbing that didn’t fit with jealous rage. But, then, jealousy often did smoulder rather than blaze, sickening its host: the slow, brooding burn. And someone had said that Toby wouldn’t hurt a fly. So maybe the only way he could kill her was to subdue her first. If the prime purpose in his mind was that she had to die, he might have plotted how reasonably he could do it. But where did he get the drug from?
If he only knew about Chattie and Jasper on Tuesday night and killed her on Wednesday morning, he would either have had to have the drug to hand anyway (in which case, why?) or have put in an amazingly hard night’s work between eight p.m. Tuesday and eight a.m. Wednesday.

Of course, they couldn’t be sure he hadn’t known about Chattie and Jasper for much longer. He said he had only found out that night, but he could have been lying. A lot would depend on what he said when they were finally able to interview him properly. And what, if anything, Atherton found at the flat. The time lapse between Chattie’s murder and the search reduced the chance there would be anything to find; but blood was a persistent little chap, and, as the poet had it, would out.