Death Watch (3 page)
When she smiled, her face lit up like Harrods on Christmas Eve. She was his own personal Santa’s Grotto – and full of goodies with his name on them. ‘Yes please,’ she said.
The night clerk from the motel looked haggard. He was Roger Pascoe, an Australian, twenty-three years old, travelling round the world by working in hotels, bars and restaurants – anywhere they were desperate for staff. He’d just
had a hectic season as a barman in Miami: Canadians, down for the winter, drank like sinks when released from their own draconian liquor-laws. He’d come to London for a rest before going to Europe for the summer.
He’d deliberately chosen a quiet job in an out-of-the-way spot, and expected to be reading a lot of novels through the nights, sleeping through the days, and saving a great deal of money. What he hadn’t expected was strife of this order. A registration clerk who allowed a suicidal guest in to torch himself and destroy the entire building would be about as popular with future potential employers as a fart in a phone box.
‘No, he asked for number one,’ he said to Atherton. ‘At least, he said could he have the end cabin, the furthest away one.’
‘You didn’t find that surprising?’
Pascoe rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘Why should I? I didn’t know he was going to top himself. He could have any one he wanted. He could have ’em all, for all I cared, as long as he paid.’
‘Was that before or after he signed in as John Smith?’
‘Christ, I don’t know! After, I think. What does it matter? You think I should have asked him for his ID, asked him what he was up to? My bosses wouldn’t agree with you. He paid cash up front, he could do what he liked in there.’
‘Your bosses wouldn’t want their premises to be used for illegal purposes,’ Atherton suggested mildly.
‘Going with a prozzie isn’t illegal.’
‘Is that what he was doing?’ Atherton said, interested.
Pascoe looked wild. ‘Oh look mate, I been up all night. Don’t lay traps for me. A lot of blokes bring tarts back there, and mostly they don’t want anyone to know. Married blokes, you know? It’s not my business. I’m not the Archbishop of Canterbury.’
‘But you said this man was alone?’
‘He came in alone. I don’t know who he might have had waiting for him outside, do I?’
‘True.’ Atherton smiled a little. ‘Take it easy, guy. I just
want to know what you know. Did he seem as though he might have a girl waiting for him outside? Did he seem excited, nervous – what?’
Pascoe looked away, remembering. ‘He’d been drinking. He wasn’t drunk, but I could smell it on him. He was – I don’t know how you’d put it. Happy? A bit lit up? Not sad or depressed, anyway. Yeah, he could have had a girl waiting for him. Or a bloke.’ He gave Atherton a serious look. ‘We get a lot of the other sort in, you know.’
‘Yes, I know. Did he seem that way to you?’
Pascoe shrugged. ‘You can’t tell. I wouldn’t have said so, but, Christ, a bender can seem like Joe Normal nowadays. He didn’t mince in and call me duckie, for what it’s worth. He was just a middle-aged bloke in a suit. If I’d known he was gonna fry himself I’d have taken more notice.’
‘All right. And you don’t know if he had a car? You didn’t hear a car pull up? He didn’t mention a motor at all?’
Pascoe shook his head numbly. ‘You can’t see outside from my desk. I already told your mate all this, the one with the beard. Why can’t you get it from him?’
‘Because I want you to tell me. You might just remember something else, something you didn’t tell him.’
‘What, like the bloke had a wooden leg, or one eye missing?’ Pascoe sneered, and then he stopped, his jaw sagging ludicrously. ‘Blimey, you’re right! I’ve just remembered something – he had a scar on the back of his hand.’
‘Which one?’
‘His right hand. When he was signing the register. An old scar – a strip of shiny skin, about an inch wide, from his wrist right up to his knuckles.’ He looked at Atherton, pleased, expecting praise. ‘I never told your mate that. It’s only just come to me.’
‘You say it looked old? It wasn’t puffy, or puckered, or red?’
‘No. Smooth, pale pink and shiny. Years old. You’d hardly notice it, if you weren’t looking. It wasn’t ugly.’
‘It sounds as though it could have been a skin graft.’
‘Yeah. Like that. Maybe he’d had a bad burn—’ Pascoe’s smile came slowly to pieces. ‘Christ, the poor bastard. Did you see that cabin? What a way to go.’
‘He would probably have been overwhelmed by the smoke in the first few minutes,’ Atherton offered him, for comfort. ‘Do you think you could help us put together a photofit of him? Do you remember what he looked like?’
‘Remember?’ Pascoe stared, putting two and two together, and going slightly green. ‘Yeah, I could give it a shot. He was a good-looking bloke. He was—’
He closed his mouth tightly.
‘Don’t think about it,’ Atherton advised.
FORENSIC PATHOLOGISTS WERE AS DIFFERENT from each other as God makes all men, but they generally had two things in common: they smelled of peppermints, and they didn’t wear ties.
Freddie Cameron wore a bow-tie. Today’s was navy-blue silk with a tiny crimson spot, to match the remote-crimson stripe in his dark blue suit. His wife Martha chose his clothes, and he sometimes felt her taste was too conservative. Spending most of his life in morgues, he could have fancied something a touch more cheerful from time to time. He’d once had a yellow waistcoat, when he was much younger. Now that’d be the thing to brighten up the place! But he’d thrown it away when Martha said it made him look like a bookie. Not that he had anything against bookies, of course. Some of his best friends were bookies. But at the time he’d been trying to make his way in his profession, and what he really wanted to look like was a top-class pathologist.
His old friend Bill Slider would never look like anything but a policeman, he thought. He did at least seem a lot more cheerful these days. There’d been a time – during that Austen case – when Cameron had been worried old Bill was going to have a breakdown. He’d got extremely twitchy, and did some very strange things, but he seemed to be back to his old self now, thank God.
‘Well old chum, how are you?’ Cameron greeted him breezily. ‘You’re looking fit. Are you getting enough?’
‘I’m getting so much I’m thinking of taking on a lad,’ Slider said inscrutably.
Cameron made the obvious connection. He had never liked Irene, and felt that Joanna was much more the thing, but since Bill was apparently still living with his Madam, it made things a little awkward. In the normal course of events he and Martha would invite Bill and Irene over from time to time, but Cameron didn’t feel able either to do that, or to tell Martha about the new circumstances. Martha was a bit old-fashioned about that sort of thing. Well, women were, weren’t they? They felt threatened by it. So he’d had to make excuses both ways.
‘How is your young woman?’ he said politely.
Slider had a fair idea of what was going through Cameron’s mind, and said blandly, ‘You must meet her, Freddie. Perhaps the four of us could go out for a meal sometime.’
Cameron’s eyes bulged a little. ‘Ha! Yes, why not, why not? Good idea! Well, perhaps we should get on.’
He led the way, a dapper figure looking to Slider’s eyes strangely out of place in this modern chrome and steel setting. They had finally closed down the old morgue of glazed bricks, porcelain sinks and enamelled herringbone tables with which Slider always associated Cameron, and the posts were all done in the hospital’s path department now.
Inside was the usual merry throng of onlookers, known in the Department as the Football Crowd – Lab liaison officer, Coroner’s officer, photographers, Hunt as exhibits officer to oversee the sealing and labelling, and D’Arblay, as first officer on the scene, to identify the body as the one from the motel. The morgue attendants hovered in the background like mothers at a ballet exam, and there were a couple of white-coated hospital researchers and some medical students along for the ride.
At least at the old morgue, Cameron had confided to Slider once, it was too cold and uncomfortable to attract the crowds. It was Freddie’s custom to pass round the extra-strong mints before beginning. ‘This new place is costing me a packet,’ he said.
When the preliminaries were over, he picked up his long scalpel with the nine-inch blade, ventured a little pathologists’ joke – ‘Shall I carve?’ – and shaped up to the body. ‘Have we got a name yet?’ he asked after a moment.
‘Not yet,’ said Slider.
‘Just as well,’ said Atherton. ‘It isn’t etiquette to cut anyone you’ve been introduced to.’
‘Eh?’ said Cameron.
‘Alice – Mutton; Mutton – Alice.’
The ‘Alice’ gave Slider the clue, and he shook his head at his colleague sadly. One of these days he must get round to reading that damned book. When Atherton and Joanna got together it was like being the only person at a dinner-party who’d never heard of Salman Rushdie.
‘So, we’re looking for a suicide, are we?’ Cameron said.
‘Head’s looking for a suicide. Or an accident will do. As long as we can crash the case. He’s got our clear-up rate to worry about.’
‘Thank God we don’t earn his salary, eh?’ said Cameron.
He whistled almost soundlessly as he worked. Atherton realised, with an inward smile at the massive incongruity, that the tune was
The Deadwood Stage.
‘Your ligature mark’s coming out very nicely, Bill,’ Cameron remarked. ‘I’ve no doubt about it, but I’ll take some sections for slides, make a few nice piccies for the Coroner and his chums. Now let’s see …’
He worked on, interrupting himself with comments from time to time. ‘Well, I don’t know. Very little bruising here. Windpipe intact, no rupture of the large veins and arteries. Cricoid, arytenoids intact. I’ll take the hyoid, see if there’s any fracture to be seen under the microscope, but it doesn’t look like a very serious attempt at hanging, old chum …’
‘No carbon traces in the nostrils, and the exterior burns are all post mortem. We’ll take some sections of lung. Looks like anoxia caused by occlusion — the plastic bag over the head to you and me and the Coroner’s jury. These suicides like to make sure, don’t they? Let’s see if he poisoned himself as well…’
As he opened the stomach, even Atherton, standing back and sucking hard at the Trebor’s, caught the smell of alcohol.
‘Dutch courage. A brandy man, too,’ Cameron said with a mixture of approval and regret. ‘Must have drunk the whole bottle. Precious little to eat, though. I wouldn’t say he hadn’t had a pint or two, as well, earlier on.’
‘How drunk would he have been on that lot?’ asked Slider.
‘As a sack, old boy. Legless. If he hadn’t hanged himself, he’d have probably died of alcoholic poisoning. We’ll send this off to the Lab for analysis, just in case.’
Slider exchanged a glance with Atherton. It was beginning to look better. A man as drunk as that could have set fire to the place by accident. ‘Perhaps it’s going to be Head’s lucky day.’
But a little later Cameron said in a quite different voice, ‘Hullo-ullo-ullo. Now here’s a thing. This is a bit nasty. Come and have a look, Bill.’
He had plunged a pair of forceps into the area of the groin, and as Slider stepped closer he saw something which gleamed dully between the jaws.
‘It looks like wire,’ Slider said.
‘Plastic covered wire. The plastic’s melted, look, here and here,’ said Cameron. ‘You see how it was twisted right around the scrotum, too?’
Slider felt his own balls trying to creep for safety up into his pelvis. ‘What about the wrists and ankles, Freddie?’
‘It’s hard to tell,’ Cameron said at last. ‘You see here and here where the skin’s intact? It could be a ligature mark. I can’t be sure without microscopical examination. The subcutaneous layers aren’t entirely destroyed, fortunately. I’ll take some sections: there could be hemp fibres amongst the tissue. But I’d say the arms could well have been tied. It might account for the arms not having contracted as the legs did.’
‘I suppose you won’t get anything from the ankles, they’re so badly burned.’ There was virtually nothing left of the feet but bones. ‘Was there something wrong with his
feet, d’you think? The bones look funny.’
‘So would you if you’d been roasted in the fiery furnace,’ Freddie said. He bent closer, went in again with his forceps and lifted something triumphantly. ‘Ha! A fibre. Carpet or rope? We shall see.’ He looked over the top of his half-glasses at Slider. ‘Trussed up like the Christmas turkey, and a bag over his head. You know what this begins to look like, don’t you, Bill?’
‘Sexual strangulation,’ Slider said reluctantly.
‘Come again?’ said Atherton.
Slider turned to him. ‘Hanging perversion. Haven’t you come across it? Well, it’s not all that common, I suppose.’
‘Bill and I have met a couple of cases in our time,’ Cameron said. ‘One of the pleasures of working Central. The victim brings himself to orgasm by strangling or suffocating himself. Sometimes both, as it would appear in this case. They like to tie themselves up, too, with particular attention to the arms and genitals. And of course, sometimes they go too far, and find they can’t release themselves in time. That’s when they usually come to my attention.’
‘What some people will do for pleasure,’ said Atherton.
‘The odd thing is, they so often seem to be quiet, respectable men,’ Cameron went on, taking tissue sections of the wrists. ‘Their families never have the slightest idea of what they get up to, despite the fact that they must have a suitcase full of equipment hidden somewhere in the house.’
‘Equipment? You mean the ropes?’ Atherton asked.
‘And hoods,’ Slider said neutrally. ‘And strop magazines. And women’s underwear, sometimes. It takes a number of forms.’ He sighed. ‘It begins to look, then, like an accident rather than suicide. I don’t know if that will make it any easier to tell the next-of-kin.’
‘When you find out who he is, of course. Or was,’ said Cameron.
Atherton looked at his superior’s sad frown. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Guv, that Earth may be some other planet’s Hell?’ he said comfortingly.
