The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (4 page)

Yet whatever the sources of his situation, the effect was that she had a luxurious life, he a relatively penurious one. The need to insert the word, "relatively" would have been little problem (he could not deny his salary was not small) but for the fact that he didn't have enough money. This was partly due to the fact that he had a taste for luxury, partly due to the need to keep up in appearance with Annette, and partly because he owed twenty-three thousand pounds in a variety of gambling debts. This last accompanied him at all times, a shade that lurked unseen but watchful over every thought, action and dream.

And the letter that he discovered that night, amongst the circulars and bills, proved to be an incarnation of that spectre. It was a letter from his turf accountant threatening court action if he did not make an immediate repayment of sixteen thousand pounds.

From the sitting room he heard his father-in-law's booming patrician laugh and he began to cry.

*

When they were preparing for bed, Hartmann said, "Don't forget, I'm away for the weekend." He was undressing and Annette had just gone into the en suite. From there her tired voice came back. "Are you? Where are you going? You didn't say."

He knew that he, too, was tired and that he was in a bad mood. He couldn't help this show as he replied, "Yes, I did. I told you weeks ago. It's a conference near Glasgow. Lymphomas."

"Did you put it on the calendar?"

She always asked that, but only because she always knew that he would not have done. He always forgot. It was one of his many faults.

"I don't suppose so," he said belligerently.

"Well, how am I supposed to know? I've got a professional life of my own, you know, Mark. I can't be expected to keep track of you if you don't write it all down on the calendar."

The calendar. The bloody calendar. A sort of totem pole around which he was supposed to dance his life.

"Well, I bloody forgot, didn't I?"

If he thought that was the end of it, he was once again wrong. After a pause Annette demanded, "What the hell was your problem?" Her voice was harsh, demanding.

He remembered once that he had been to see her in court. The case had been one of complex, and therefore tedious, fraud and the pomp of the law always left him scathing, but he had been impressed by the skills of the counsel. Annette in particular had seemed to him to be almost supernatural in her art; he had watched and listened in admiration as she had used all the components of classical oratory combined with quick-wittedness, bullshit and a charming smile to make her case. It had been a turning point in their developing relationship.

Where now, he wondered, were those oratorical talents? Were they tucked beneath her wig in the locker by her walnut-veneered desk in chambers?

It was then that he decided he wanted an argument and was at once delighted to realize this. Coming to the door of the en suite, he demanded, "What do you mean?"

She was rubbing some sort of lotion on her face — she never actually put soap or water on it. "You were bad enough when you came in, but after you'd fetched the port, you were completely impossible. You hardly said a word and there was one occasion when you were positively rude to Dad."

Only
one
?
I
must
be
slipping
. He had lost count of how many times "Dad" had been subtly but quite mercilessly rude to him.

"Missed one of his jokes, did I?" he enquired, his voice slightly more bitter than he intended. Before he could stop himself he went on, "Failed to guffaw with the required amount of gusto?"

She had her back to him but he knew that with this he would score a palpable hit. From over her shoulder he saw her frozen in mid-lotion, staring into the mirror at him. "There's no need to be so nasty about Dad. He's been very good to us — to you, in particular."

He gazed at the flatness of her reflection.
Good
?
Good
? If by good she meant condescending much as Zeus might have come to earth for a spot of rape, or she meant making damned sure that plebeian son-in-law was caged in both socially and financially — a clear glass cage in which he was exhibited as an interesting example of a lesser thing, a social-climber, a piece of human excrement — then yes, it could be said that her father had been "good" to him.

He turned away and she said to his back, "Are you short of money again?"

She used the phrase much as she might have asked if he had a venereal disease again.

"No," he said. He tried to impart a tone of dismissiveness;
the
very
idea
, he wanted to suggest. She stared at him for a while, then recommenced her work with the lotion, more vigorously than ever. He found himself wishing it were vanishing cream.

It was the guilt at this last thought that drove him to sigh, to throw his trousers to the floor and to come up behind her. "I'm sorry," he said, taking her shoulders. They were cold and she was thin enough to make the contact hard. She responded by dropping her hands and putting her head on one side. "Do you like that?" he breathed in a whisper. Her reply was a murmur and a breath combined. He began to kiss her skin and she moved around so that he was kissing her neck.

He pulled away. "Tired?" he asked. She picked up a face flannel and wiped the excess lotion from her face. "Not especially."

They had just undressed when the inevitable cry came from Jake's room. "Mummy? Mummy?"

Hartmann flopped back on to the bed with an irritated groan while Annette reached for a dressing gown. Four seconds later and there it was again. "Mummy?" This time it was the cry of someone in desperate peril. "Fuck," he whispered to himself, but not quietly enough for Annette caught it and frowned at him as she went to the four-year-old. Annette had a puritanical dislike of profanity.

While he waited for her to return he tried to work out what he was going to do. Even if he admitted to his debt, Annette would refuse to advance him as much as sixteen thousand pounds; whatever money she did deign to impart to him would be accompanied by severe disapproval, possibly even an interview with his father-in-law. He had an overdraft facility of five thousand pounds and he supposed that the bank might consider upping that to six, but since he was already five and half thousand pounds in the red, the effort hardly seemed worth it.

A mental image of a shiny bright, black and beautiful soft-top roadster drifted into his head, the thought not so much unbidden as completely forbidden. He did not want to think about having to sell his new car.

Annette returned. "Jake's been sick," she announced. "Everywhere." This was not a news report; this was a call to arms. She disappeared again, along with Hartmann's erection. He climbed out of bed just as Jake's elder sister, Jocasta, began to join her brother in the weeping and wailing.

*

Lambert made Wharton drive them to the autopsy rather than use a driver. Wharton knew what this meant, knew that this was an excuse for a little private discussion between them. She knew also that it was likely to be quite forthright on Lambert's part.

He sat in the passenger seat and stared straight ahead, erect as if in back pain or embarrassment; his mouth was set into its perpetual disapproval, his eyebrows lowered and his brow wrinkled. The silence, Wharton had learned, was a usual thing. She changed down a gear and was aware that her skirt had ridden up slightly over her left knee, exposing much of her leg. Most men that she had known would by now have been making covert glances at it, but not Lambert. If he saw it, he saw it in a different way to most of the men that surrounded her.

She almost missed the start of the conversation. They had just stopped at some lights and the ratchet of the handbrake almost stifled his comment. "I want you to be certain that I know all about you."

His eyes were still looking ahead, ostensibly at a dog that was crouched in a defaecatory position beside a lamp-post. The owner was glaring around, daring anyone and everyone to point out the sign by his head promising a five-hundred-pound fine for such canine habits.

Wharton glanced quickly across then back at the lights. She said, "Sir?"

Lambert turned to look at her profile. If he saw beauty in it, he masked the discovery well. "I said that I know all about you, Inspector."

The lights had changed. She had the car in third before she replied. "I'm afraid I don't know what you mean, sir."

"Really, now. Don't you?"

She kept looking in the mirror because there was an idiot behind them who wanted to overtake. Perhaps that was why she didn't respond.

He went on. "I was told that you're a tart, Inspector. I was told that you've slept your way up the tree and out of trouble on more than one occasion."

She kept her face passive. The idiot behind had turned off but now she had to negotiate her way into the right-hand lane and there were two artics who wanted to hold hands and she could fuck off. "And you believe that, do you?"

He had had enough of her profile and was now back to straight-ahead. "I believe you were something of an embarrassment at your last posting. Something about the Exner case. Our superiors wanted you somewhere else and unfortunately I was that somewhere."

At last she managed to break her way between the two friendly truckers at the cost of a few unheard profanities and some flashing of lights. "There's nothing in the official reports to suggest that my conduct in the case was in any way negligent or corrupt," she pointed out.

Lambert seemed to find that amusing. "And we all believe the official reports, don't we, Inspector?"

They had to wait to turn right, which was giving the trucker behind some sort of apoplexy, and she took the opportunity to look directly at Lambert, although he was still staring outside. "I heard you were a cold-hearted bastard, but I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt,
sir
."

There was silence in the car until she saw the chance and shot suddenly across the oncoming traffic. It was only when they were safely in the side road that he replied. "You heard right, Inspector. I am a cold-hearted bastard."

In the three weeks that she had been working with him, she had seen no evidence to call him a liar. There had been not one sign of a thaw in the frozen, harsh facade with which she had been first greeted. She had spent several off-duty hours asking questions of her new colleagues, from whom she had learned only that Lambert was in a stable, unmarried relationship, but nothing more. He was remote and cold with everyone — superiors, equals and subordinates — although it had been hinted that especially cryogenic conditions had been presented to Wharton; why that should be so, her informants either could not or would not say.

She had taken the implication and kept herself very much to herself in her first three weeks.

And now this. At least she was being supplied with a few answers to her questions.

"Not everything that's said about me is correct."

His uninterest was a weight around his words. "Really? So what's the truth and what's the lie?"

They were driving along the perimeter of the hospital, heading for the back entrance to the mortuary. She thought about denying the rumours of her promiscuousness, but she saw that there was no point. He would believe what he wanted to believe. She decided that if there was a way into his approval it would not be a path of words. She said only, "I'm a bloody good copper, for a start."

She turned left into the discreet, screened area that was used by the undertakers' cars. She stopped under the metallic canopy over the doors to the mortuary. As he got out, Lambert said only, "Prove it, Inspector."

*

Hartmann could have done without being on the rota for Coroner's autopsies but he certainly couldn't do without the money it brought. He sat in his office, having arrived in the department some twenty minutes earlier, still in his coat, still with the scarf draped around his neck, still wishing a thousand wishes that could never come true. The night had been awful, constantly broken by the cries of his children, the smell of vomit and the thoughts of his financial predicament. It seemed to him as he sat in his drear office that morning, tired and depressed into morose introspection, that he had escaped none of these by coming to work. The traffic had been awful, the weather had been uncompromising and the pollution had seeped into his stomach like poison.

He closed his eyes, hoping for peace, perhaps even perpetual peace, allowing his head to tilt back and his mouth to hang open. The office was cold, even though the fan heater was busy vibrating itself into orgasmic glory, and even with his coat on he still shivered at irregular intervals, partly from cold and partly, he suspected from self-indulgent self-pity.

Why did he keep spending so much money?

The monthly question, usually provoked by his credit-card bills but made even more urgent by the rather nasty letter from his turf accountant, was asked again and passed into time unanswered. "Turf Accountant" — that was a joke; like calling a bin man a "refuse operative." It was a nice name for a nasty, offensive job.

Where did all the money actually go?

This question, asked with greater frequency, was as ever unaddressed and doomed to slip away from him. No matter how often or hard he perused his bank statements, there was no solution. Perhaps there
was
no solution; it was an irrational number like pi. He wasn't, he considered, profligate, although he was forced to admit that he could never be described as thrifty. He preferred to think of himself as "generous," although this preference did not extend to probing to whom he was generous.