Death Bed (28 page)

G
eraldine was aware that her intuition about the gallery owner, Edward Barrington, might be wide of the mark but she couldn’t suppress her excitement as Sam drove them along the Holloway Road and up Highgate Hill. It was possible they were about to come face to face with the man responsible for the deaths of Jessica Palmer and Donna Henry. She gazed out of the window at shops flashing past, and thought about the two dead women. Jessica Palmer had probably never walked along the High Street but Donna Henry might have shopped in Highgate or gone there to meet friends for lunch in one of the many cafes.

When they reached the corner of Highgate West Hill they turned off the main road, approached a pub on their left and slowed down alongside a small green, a church spire visible on the far side.

‘This should be it,’ Sam muttered.

She braked sharply and turned right up the gentle slope of a narrow road screened from the green by trees. They drew in opposite a row of large terraced houses that looked like authentic seventeenth century Queen Anne buildings. The row of properties was fenced off from the roadway by high black metal railings, apart from the final one to their right which stood slightly apart from the rest of the houses, the ground floor completely concealed behind a tall brick wall with heavy wooden double gates wide enough to let a car through.

Looking at Edward Barrington’s house Sam seemed to tune into Geraldine’s sense of foreboding.

‘Shall I call for back-up?’

‘We’re only going to question him,’ Geraldine reminded her. ‘Let’s check it out first.’

As they approached the dark gates Geraldine’s gut feeling of suspicion returned and she felt an almost unbearable sense of urgency. It was possible they were standing outside the murderer’s home right now, only a wooden gate and a brick wall separating them from another victim chained to a filthy bed, another life at risk. They might already be too late to save her.

Peering through a gap between the gates, Geraldine could see a parking space in front of a square brick garage. There was a large window on the first floor of the house and immediately above that a skylight. The right side of the house was covered in ivy and tall shrubs screened it from the property next door. Sam tried a narrow wooden door to the left of the gates and it creaked open so they went in, crossed in front of the garage and rang the bell. They waited a moment then tried again. Sam rapped briskly on the door with her knuckles but no one came to open it.

While Sam went to check the garage door Geraldine followed a narrow passageway which led round the back of the house. A window on the corner rattled when she nudged it but she couldn’t wrench it open. She went back to see how her sergeant was getting on and as she walked across the front of the house noticed something glinting on the ground beside the path. She crouched down and saw a shiny black evening bag with a broken golden chain hanging from it, half concealed in the bushes.

‘What do you make of this?’ she called out in a low voice. Sam hurried over pulling on her gloves and bent down to pick up the bag, holding the chain delicately between a finger and thumb. Geraldine watched as she snapped the clasp open and together they examined its contents: a mirror, a silver make-up bag with lip gloss and mascara, a comb, a key ring attached to a Yale door key and a tiny pink fluffy mouse, a wallet containing around thirty pounds in cash, debit and credit cards and an Oyster travelcard in a black plastic holder. Sam drew out the credit card and turned it around.

‘It belongs to someone called Victoria Benning,’ she read aloud.

Sam looked up and saw her own alarm reflected back at her from Geraldine’s eyes.

‘Isn’t that the name of the woman reported missing a couple of days ago?’

Geraldine nodded, almost breathless with her growing sense of unease.

‘Yes. Come on, there’s no time to hang about. I saw a window round the back.’

She led the way, Sam’s feet pounding along the path behind her. Reaching the window at the corner of the house, Geraldine turned to Sam.

‘Let’s do this.’

‘Are you sure?’

For answer Geraldine bent down and picked up a large stone which she hurled at the window. The glass shattered. She nodded at Sam who knocked out a jagged shard before reaching in to open the window while Geraldine pulled out her phone to call the station.

‘Shouldn’t we wait until back-up arrives?’ Sam asked when Geraldine had finished speaking.

Geraldine shook her head.

‘We may already be too late - ’

She didn’t finish the thought aloud.

Sam hoisted herself nimbly over the window sill, dropped silently inside and reached out with both hands to help Geraldine.

‘I can manage,’ Geraldine whispered and Sam stepped back to give her room to climb over.

The window was higher than Geraldine had realised. Scrambling clumsily over the sill, she almost fell to the floor inside but Sam caught her by the elbow and she managed to preserve her balance. Splinters of glass crunched beneath her feet. The room they were in was empty apart from a small polished wooden desk and upright leather chair, a kind of study. They stared at one another for a second before Geraldine turned and led her colleague away from the broken window to explore the silent house.

F
iona watched people flitting past the window. Outside the sun was shining but it was pleasantly cool inside Barringtons, the gallery in Bruton Place where she worked on Saturdays. She glanced at her watch. It was gone half past four, nearly time to pack up and go home. Only a few people had been in to look around but that was typical. The gallery specialised in artefacts from antiquity and had a reputation for acquiring ancient works of art, and the objects on sale were generally too expensive for impulse buying by visitors wandering in off the street. The owner, Edward Barrington, had contacts all around the world and they received enquiries from buyers in far-flung places, some of them larger galleries and museums, others wealthy individuals with private collections.

She was about to fetch her bag and find Edward to ask if she should close up when an old man entered the showroom.

‘Is it alright if I look around?’

‘Yes, of course.’

She smiled politely, hoping he wasn’t going to linger. It was ten to five. People who walked in off the street usually left after a cursory look, but they sometimes hung around for ages in front of the classical Greek and Roman artefacts displayed in glass cases on top of white plinths. As a rule, Fiona didn’t mind people looking. It helped to pass the time, especially when they stopped for a chat, but it was nearly five o’clock and she wanted to go home and get ready for her night out. As the man shuffled slowly around the showroom she glanced at the staircase which led down to the basement, willing her boss to appear and tell her she could leave.

At last, Edward came trotting up the stairs. Fiona thought he had probably been quite attractive once although he was nearly forty, and ridiculously old-fashioned; she sometimes caught him glancing her way, as though he might be interested in her, but all he ever talked about was the gallery. He knew everything about antiquity. She had studied art history at university and her interest in ancient Greece and Rome had landed her the job at Barringtons, but she knew very little about it really. Edward was an expert. He could date an old pot just by looking at it and was obsessed with all his ancient artefacts. Some of them were beautiful, and it was amazing to think they had been made thousands of years ago, but she didn’t share Edward’s enthusiasm for all of the items in the gallery.

‘They’re incredible,’ she fibbed when he took her down to the basement and showed her the oldest remains stored there. Just because they were ancient, Edward treated them like holy relics when some of them were nothing more than ugly shards of chipped pottery.

‘I’ve got another collection at home.’

‘A private collection?’

She had been intrigued, but wary at the same time in case he invited her to go home with him and see it.

‘It’s private for now but one day I’ll open it to the public, and it’ll all be on display here. That’s why I’m keeping this place going.’

‘Why don’t you bring it here now?’

‘My collection’s not finished yet.’

He spoke about it as though it was something really special, his face alight with passion. Fiona nodded, although privately she thought he was a bit weird, getting so worked up over his relics of the past.

By five o’clock Edward was engrossed in conversation with the old man who had wandered in.

‘Excuse me. Is it alright if I go now?’ Fiona asked.

‘Oh my goodness, is it really that late?’

The old man glanced at his watch in surprise, and Edward nodded at her to indicate she could go. Fiona smiled as she stepped out into the sunshine, thinking about the Saturday evening that lay ahead.

Alone in the gallery Edward tidied up, set the alarm and locked the door. It was nearly half past five on a warm afternoon and the pavements were crowded with pedestrians as he made his way to the station. The tube was packed and uncomfortably hot. He didn’t get a seat but leaned against the glass partition watching the other passengers, their brief existence punctuated by petty desires and schemes dreamed up to distract them from their future oblivion. He struggled to understand why they bothered going on from day to day, hour to hour, for no purpose. The newspapers exasperated him with their announcements that a footballer was injured, a politician had claimed expenses, a drought was forecast – as though these things mattered. Journalists earned their keep churning out headlines that appeared for a day and were gone, feeding the illusion that human existence was dynamic. No one cared what they printed as long as it offered diversion from the terminal reality of life.

Edward had more in common with the ancient Egyptians than these tired, sweaty commuters who would spend Saturday evening hiding from transience in stupor; drinking themselves senseless, or slouching comatose in front of the television. It wasn’t just one ancient Egyptian who took the afterlife seriously, the whole society had appreciated its significance. He smiled, thinking about the breakthrough that would follow the opening of his collection to the public. Like Darwin, he would be the catalyst for an inevitable shift in consciousness throughout the Western world and beyond, because the human spirit couldn’t struggle on indefinitely ignoring the truth. He understood that death didn’t have to be the end and soon everyone would be liberated from the fear of dying. Books would be written about Barrington’s contribution to the history of mankind, and the word would spread in an unstoppable wave.

He looked around the train carriage, travellers cocooned in bubbles of self-importance, and was immediately filled with pity for their pathetic lives and a renewed sense of urgency to complete his collection and reveal it to the world. Other people needed his knowledge. But despite his eagerness to share the collection, anxiety about its reception held him back. None of his visitors so far had appreciated what he was offering. What would happen to his life’s work if everyone proved equally obtuse? At first he had dismissed the repeated rebuffs as stupidity, but although he told himself that women who allowed themselves to be picked up by strangers lacked sufficient intellect to appreciate his work, their folly infuriated him. And it wasn’t only women who obstinately refused to share his vision. For the first time he had brought a man home to view the collection and in spite of his initial interest, he too had turned out to be a disappointment.

What if no one understood? He would be pilloried for the gift of knowledge he brought to the world. Worse, he might be ignored, his collection overlooked, forgotten. He tried to be patient with his visitors but they let him down every time until frustration overcame him and he lashed out. He had beaten both of his guests unconscious before leaving for work that morning. They should be awake by now, and he would try again. He had to make them listen, had to make them understand that he wanted to save them from death, eternal and absolute.

N
ot much light penetrated the house with the blinds closed, shielded as it was on all sides by high walls and trees. There was something unnerving about the silence as they walked from room to shadowy room. With velvet curtains and upholstery, antique wallpaper and polished wooden panelling on the walls, the place was well maintained but in spite of the luxurious décor the atmosphere was cold and forbidding.

‘It’s like a funeral parlour,’ Sam whispered and Geraldine shivered.

They went upstairs. None of the bedrooms looked lived in. Everything was pristine but old-fashioned, as though the house had been untouched for decades. Geraldine ran her finger along the top of a radiator. There was no dust. An unpleasant smell permeated the rooms. Sam gazed enviously at a king-sized bed and fitted wooden wardrobes in the main bedroom. A pair of leather slippers were arranged neatly beside the bed. It was like a show house.

‘Very nice, but it stinks. He should get his drains seen to.’

‘It’s not the drains.’

Having checked the upstairs rooms they returned to the landing where a narrow staircase led up to what must be the attic. Geraldine remembered having seen a skylight from the street. She nodded at Sam who went first. Reaching the top step she glanced round at Geraldine before rattling the door handle. The door was locked.

‘Hello?’ Sam called urgently.

The smell was much stronger now, like rotting eggs.

‘Is anyone in there?’

‘Let’s not wait,’ Geraldine said, unable to curb her alarm. Sam took a step back down the stairs and rushed at the door, which burst open with a deafening crack. An overpowering stench hit them. Geraldine recognised the smell from the morgue, horribly out of place in this elegant house.

Sam found the light switch and flicked it on while Geraldine looked from the doorway in stunned silence. At her side she heard Sam gasp. In the centre of the room a man lay spreadeagled on a blood-stained bed. He didn’t stir and when Geraldine approached she saw his wrists and ankles were attached to the bed by chunky metal chains. Quickly she checked for a pulse and reached for her phone, but there was no point summoning urgent medical assistance. The man was dead, his face beaten and bloody.

‘Oh my God, there’s another one!’ Sam burst out, suddenly flinging herself to the ground.

Geraldine ran round to the other side of the bed where Sam was kneeling beside the body of a fair haired woman who lay on the floor staring rigidly up at her. The woman’s wrists and ankles were also shackled with heavy chains, her face bruised and smeared with blood. Sam raised a stricken face to Geraldine and shook her head.

‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘We’re too late.’

Geraldine stared past Sam’s bowed head at the dead woman, her pale face streaked with blood and dirt, her mouth stretched wide in a silent scream. Across the woman’s chin a trickle of dried blood led from the corner of her mouth to a dark pool glistening on the bare floorboards. Her limbs appeared intact.

‘Are any of her teeth missing?’ Geraldine asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Sam muttered. ‘We should have got here sooner. If I hadn’t held us up arguing – if I’d listened to you - ’

Geraldine shook her head.

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference.’

She turned away and looked around the attic, for the first time seeing the bare plaster walls, wooden rafters and floorboards, the only source of light a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. The skylight was covered with a dark blind. She half turned and noticed shelves almost covering the entire wall facing the door. Running her eyes along the misshapen objects on display her gaze was arrested by a human skull, then another, smaller, one. A child’s skull.

She walked slowly over to the shelves.

‘Bone doesn’t decay,’ she muttered, staring at rows of curiously hewn artefacts: irregularly shaped bowls, a chunky ring, a whip, interspersed with more human skulls. Gaping eyeholes stared balefully at her above grinning jaws. She looked from a skull to a bowl and back again, and realised the bowl was in fact the inverted top of a human cranium. She glanced along the shelf. More skulls. More bowls. An oddly shaped button. A large needle. It was a vile, grisly collection, all seemingly made of bone which she suspected was human. She wondered how fresh some of the bones were and felt her whole body go rigid with horror.

Pulling on her gloves, Geraldine reached out and picked up a large round tin. Inside were a stack of small brown envelopes, each one dated in neat handwriting. Not all of the dates were from long ago. She flicked through them. With a shock she recognised what must have been the date of Donna Henry’s death and picked the envelope out of the tin. It wasn’t stuck down. She already knew what she would find inside it but lifted the flap and made out two molars with bloody stumps. Donna Henry’s missing teeth. Running her finger over the envelopes she guessed there must be at least a dozen. A dozen different dates. A dozen pairs of teeth.

The tin was trembling in her grasp and she took a deep breath to steady herself.

‘He’s been busy, adding to his collection,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’ Sam asked.

She was still kneeling beside the dead woman.

‘No ID,’ she added.

Geraldine held up a hand in warning.

‘Shh.’

‘What?’ Sam whispered.

‘I thought I heard something.’

When the door burst open Geraldine barely recognised the urbane gallery owner in the figure framed in the doorway. His eyes glared, bulging from his face, and came to rest on her as she stood clutching the open tin. With a roar of anger, Edward Barrington launched himself at her. He elbowed her out of the way, knocking her sideways and slamming her head against a shelf as he made a desperate grab for the tin.

‘Don’t touch it!’ he yelled.

Gathering her strength to defend herself against Barrington’s frenzied attack, Geraldine lost her footing. At once, his arm was around her neck, squeezing her throat until she was suffocating. Thrashing wildly, her eyes fell on the row of skulls grinning at her. As her chest tightened with the effort to breathe, she had a chilling premonition that she was going to be number eighteen, her polished skull displayed on a shelf in this cold attic.

Before she could recover, she was aware of Sam leaping at Edward Barrington from behind. He released his grip on Geraldine and she saw Sam kick him on the back of his knee to unbalance him, following this with a punch in his side with a straight palm, her fingers bent at the first knuckle, aiming up towards his heart. At the same time she seized his left wrist with her free hand and twisted it up behind him towards the middle of his back. He yelled out in shock.

‘This is an act of desecration! Put that down at once! The collection isn’t ready. You’ve got no right to be here, no right to touch anything.’

As Geraldine slumped to her knees, the tin slipped from her grasp and crashed to the floor with a startlingly loud clatter. Small brown envelopes spewed out, spraying teeth across the room like a shower of hail stones.

‘Those are mine!’ Barrington shouted as his legs gave way and he dropped to the floor.

Sam wrenched his arm until he screamed in pain.

‘Stop it! You’re going to dislocate my shoulder.’

‘Are you alright, Geraldine?’ Sam called over her shoulder.

Slightly dazed, Geraldine scrambled to her feet and cuffed Barrington.

‘Fine. Where the hell did you learn that manoeuvre?’

Sam grinned.

‘Shikan ken? It’s something I learned at ninjutsu. It comes in handy.’

She climbed off Barrington, who lay groaning on the floor, and pulled out her phone.

Before long, the attic was crowded with scene of crime officers and had become an official crime scene. Photographers were busy recording images of the bodies in situ, the shelves of bones, and a grisly collection of saws stacked neatly in one corner of the room.

‘But what made you so sure it was Edward Barrington?’ Sam asked. ‘I still don’t get it.’

‘We all have our dark side,’ Reg Milton answered for Geraldine.

She smiled uncomfortably. It seemed the detective chief inspector understood her better than she had realised.

Geraldine leaned against the wall and watched a scene of crime officer delicately collecting up teeth, vestiges of vanished lives.