Death of a Nobody Read online

  She moved unsteadily across the tiny lawn in her inappropriate high heels and selected a place among the shrubs which screened the rear of the property. It did not take long to make a small hole, even in that clay soil. It was only about eight inches deep, but that would be enough. She took a last look at the car keys, then dropped them neatly at the bottom of the hole.

  They disappeared quickly as the loose soil tumbled back over them. It was almost as if the small white hands which manipulated the trowel belonged to some other, anonymous female. She slid the sole of her unsuitable shoe lightly back and forth over the surface, as if confirming to herself that the deed was done, and went swiftly back into the garage with her trowel. She thought she caught a movement behind the curtains to her right, and had a moment of panic. Then her feeling of relief returned: if any curious eyes had indeed watched her, they could surely not have realized what she was about.

  Once she was back in the house, she felt more at ease. And with that relaxation, energy returned to her. She emptied the books from the glass-fronted bookcase, then tugged it three feet along the wall until it covered the stain of the wine. That would have to do, until she could get down to some more permanent repair. When she had shifted the two arm-chairs and moved the standard lamp into the corner where the bookcase had been, the arrangement did not look too contrived. She restored the books to their shelves and made herself a hot drink before she subsided rather breathlessly into her armchair. The exercise had been good for her, she decided, as she sipped her tea and studied the results.

  She wondered when the police would arrive.

  13

  Cyril Burgess, M.B., Ch.B., was working late. Policemen are accustomed to pursue crime outside office hours, but Burgess was a civilian. He had agreed to speed the investigation into the death of James Berridge by conducting his autopsy as immediately as other pressing work allowed.

  It was now eight o’clock on this early spring evening, and he was feeling virtuous. He was also pleased with his findings, and prepared to exhibit his pleasure to his old friend and sparring partner, John Lambert. He peeled off his polythene gloves and said, ‘Set up to look like a suicide, John. But not one, in my opinion. I’ll do you a written report tomorrow, when my scribe returns to duty, but I can tell you the essentials now.’

  Lambert thought how different Burgess looked now from the man he saw in his office, where his Savile Row suits and immaculate shirts made even much more dapper plain-clothes men than himself feel shabby. The pathologist looked larger and heavier now, in his green overalls and short green Wellington boots. The loose jacket made his arms seem massive; the rather ridiculous green denim hat completed the effect which made him seem more like a butcher than the doctor he had once been. That is what he was in essence, thought Lambert: a butcher, but with a scientific interest in the processes of dismemberment and analysis. He said, ‘If it isn’t suicide, that won’t be altogether a surprise. He was a thoroughgoing villain whom we were about to arrest on drugs charges. We should probably have charged him with murder as well, in due course. But what makes you so certain this wasn’t suicide?’

  Burgess swept the sheet from the top of the corpse with the casual expertise of a stage magician. Lambert flinched a little, but his reaction disappointed Burgess, who had hoped to derive a little innocent fun from the squeamish stomach of the superintendent. Lambert had been prepared for this, and the fact that he had seen the gory scene in the garage made the remains of the head less shocking. The pathologist said, ‘The weapon was held against the left temple of the deceased: as the bullet blew most of that side of the head away, you’ll have to take my word for that. But you can see at least one edge of the cavity where it emerged. Incidentally, there was blood all over the interior of the car, as you probably saw. Whoever shot him must have had blood on his clothes. But I expect he’ll have disposed of those, now that he’s had twenty-four hours to himself. Or herself, of course.’ Burgess appeared to find these reflections quite satisfying.

  He turned to what remained of the skull; Lambert found it disturbing that it was obviously so light, so that it moved like the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy. The blackened flesh of the lower half of the face grinned an awful grin at him, like an eroded gargoyle. He said, ‘Yes. We found the bullet in the wall on that side of the garage. And the man wasn’t left-handed.’

  Burgess was disconcerted. It looked as though the detection team had already come to the conclusions he thought so clever in himself. He said, ‘Almost certainly a right-handed man committing suicide would have shot himself in the right temple. Incidentally, scarcely anyone shoots himself in a car. The pipe from the exhaust is the popular method, and with good reason. It is reasonably painless and one sinks into oblivion without leaving a mess like this for others to discover and clear up.’ He gestured towards the various human items he had chosen to investigate, all of them at present decently hidden under covers on the surface next to the stainless-steel sink where water still ran, slowly and silently washing away the human detritus deriving from his efforts.

  Lambert said, ‘You saw where the body lay?’

  ‘Yes. With only the feet still in the car. I asked the SOCO’s team not to move the body until the photographer had shots of it from three different angles.’ Burgess loved not only the diversion of an ‘interesting’ death but the processes of detection. If he could involve himself in those, that would be his idea of a perfect professional day.

  Lambert was prepared to indulge him. He knew that a pathologist who was anxious to help, who did not think merely in terms of providing safe legal testimony about a suspicious death, was a valuable aide. ‘You thought the position of the body significant?’

  Burgess paused, savouring the moment when his expertise was at the centre of an investigation. ‘What was the weapon involved?’

  ‘A Smith and Wesson .357 magnum handgun.’ Which would no doubt be ‘Exhibit A’ in due course. ‘Forensic should have the report on it available in the morning.’

  ‘Right. So let me tell you what I think happened. In court, I should have to say that “the injuries were commensurate with…” or some other convenient circumlocution, but I’m telling you now that this is what I think happened. Someone was waiting in the car for your Mr Berridge. Probably he or she was crouching in the well behind the front seats; probably the victim never saw him. He pressed the revolver against the side of Berridge’s head and fired. He was at a slight angle — the shot would have blown the whole of the head away otherwise. As it was, the impact was sufficiently violent to lift the corpse sideways, out of the car and into the position in which it was eventually discovered.’

  Lambert nodded. ‘Someone could also have got into the car with him — someone he thought was of no danger to him. If he wasn’t expecting to be attacked, the element of surprise could be just as great.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ As Lambert had intended, Burgess was a little deflated; he had seen the event so vividly in his imagination that he had permitted himself no alternatives.

  ‘Anything else about the death wound?’

  ‘Only that a silencer certainly wasn’t used. That single report must have been pretty deafening. Didn’t anyone hear it?’

  ‘No one that the door-to-door enquiries have flushed out so far. That garage is in effect a concrete box in the basement. The noise in the immediate area would be deafening, but it would be contained. The garages have a thick concrete ceiling and the communal entrance hall is immediately above that particular section.’

  ‘Isn’t there a porter?’

  ‘Not a twenty-four-hour one: the number of units in the block doesn’t justify it, even though they’re luxury flats. The porter lives on the site, but his flat’s at the other side of the building. He certainly wouldn’t have heard the noise from there if he was off duty.’ What Burgess had given him so far did little more than confirm what the police team had decided before the body was brought here, but the pathologist’s official view had its own value in days wh
en any independent police opinion seemed to be open to challenge. It was time to get at the information which would pinpoint their questioning. ‘What about time of death?’

  ‘An impact such as this cadaver has suffered completely destroys the nervous system. That makes some of our tests difficult. But some of the old things are still useful. Stomach contents, for example.’ Burgess slipped off his absurd hat, revealing the immaculate parting in his plentiful silver hair, and moved towards one of the smaller trays on the surface beside the sink. ‘Would you like me to…?’

  ‘No, thank you. No demonstrations; just your findings, please.’

  Burgess mimed his disappointment, though he had always known that Lambert would prevent him revealing what lay hidden. He wrinkled his nose a little, implying that he preferred the smell of decaying human remains to the all-pervading formaldehyde, which was after all a poison. ‘Very well. Your man consumed a meal which looks to me like lasagne, with a custard tart and about half a bottle of wine. It was probably eaten four to five hours before he died.’

  ‘Which was when?’

  Burgess paused, enjoying the situation. ‘Last night rather than this morning. Probably between ten p.m. and two a.m. — I wouldn’t like to be more precise than that. If you could find out exactly when he ate, I could probably be a little more definite.’

  And whom he ate with, thought Lambert. He wondered how many people had seen Berridge alive after he had left Sarah Farrell; that period had just been dramatically narrowed. Had someone been waiting for Berridge’s return to Old Mead Park? None of the residents had so far admitted to seeing or hearing anything suspicious. The time of death might explain why no one had heard the shot. If it had been before midnight, there would have been televisions or radios on in most of the flats which were occupied.

  He said absently to Burgess, ‘Thank you for your help, Cyril. I’ll keep you informed of developments. This isn’t the usual tragedy. I suppose someone will mourn for Berridge, but I for one won’t be shedding any tears. He was a thoroughgoing ruffian: God knows how much misery and horror he’s brought into other lives through the drugs he’s supplied.’

  ‘But he has the same right to have his murder investigated as any other citizen. The police can’t discriminate about the way they uphold the law. Some superintendent told me that, only a couple of days ago.’ It was so nearly what Lambert had emphasized at the time of Charlie Pegg’s death that it was almost an echo. Cyril Burgess must have been aware of that, for he looked quite insufferably smug.

  Lambert sighed. For the first time, he realized what a long day it had been.

  ‘You’re right, of course. Sometimes you want to set yourself up as judge and jury, but that way disaster lies. I warn young coppers about the danger often enough.’

  They went out together into the darkness. The mortuary car park was deserted apart from Burgess’s Jaguar and Lambert’s old Vauxhall. They were on the edge of Oldford here, far from any streetlighting. The heavens were perfectly clear, so that remote planets were visible against the navy sky. Burgess mused:

  ‘…fairer than the evening air,

  Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.’

  Satisfied that death had been decently dressed with a quotation, he climbed into the Jaguar and drove off.

  Lambert contemplated that vast and lonely silence for a moment, knowing that the intelligent and cultivated man who had just driven away felt as insignificant as he did beneath that sky. There was no sound, until the distant bleating of a tardy lamb brought him gently back to this earth.

  He could not place the words Burgess had quoted. He tried to dismiss them and concentrate on the case as he drove home through the Gloucestershire lanes. When Burgess confirmed his findings in his report, it should make the ‘Murder’ verdict at the inquest straightforward. It would probably have to be accompanied by the standard ‘By person or persons unknown’, but a swift confession was still a possibility.

  Perhaps the morrow would bring him the energy he had found so elusive so far. John Lambert could remember no murder hunt which had aroused less enthusiasm in him than that for the killer of James Albert Berridge.

  He was almost home when the source of Burgess’s quotation came belatedly to him; by that time he had ceased to puzzle over it. It was Marlowe’s Helen, that starting point for so much disaster, who was ‘fairer than the evening air’. Perhaps it would be the women in the case who would throw some light on this death.

  He wondered why it had taken them most of the day to locate the wife of James Berridge.

  14

  Gabrielle Berridge was interviewed by Lambert and Hook at ten-thirty the next morning at Old Mead Park.

  Less than an hour before this time, she had identified that shattered head at the mortuary as belonging to her late spouse, James Albert Berridge. They had been prepared for extreme distress at the grisly sight. But the widow had apparently found the experience less disturbing than might have been expected. She had driven her own car to the mortuary, composed herself in five minutes alone after the identification, and refused the offer of a lift home in a police car.

  When she opened the door of the penthouse to admit them, the smell of percolating coffee drifted through from the kitchen behind her and she smiled at them as if they were welcome visitors, rather than outsiders intruding upon the intimacies of a widow’s grief. It was almost as though she had the apartment up for sale and was greeting prospective purchasers. The officers had so wide an experience of bereavement and its effects that nothing could now shock them. But they found Gabrielle Berridge’s reaction to this death interesting.

  Lambert began with an apology for his team’s searching of the rooms around them on the previous day. ‘We made every effort to contact you before we entered.’ He paused, but she busied herself with the tray and the coffee, offering neither resentment nor an explanation of her absence. It’s our immediate routine, you see, in the case of a violent death. To take the commonest instance, there may be indications in the home of the deceased as to the reason for a suicide.’

  She nodded her dark head, motioning them towards the armchairs of the big three-piece suite in the sitting room. ‘A note, you mean. And did you find such a note here?’

  ‘No. Does that surprise you?’

  She fastened her dark eyes upon his face, looking for clues about his thoughts, as if she, not he, was conducting this exchange and seeking for information. ‘Nothing about James surprises me anymore, Superintendent. I suppose I should now say “surprised”.’ For no more than an instant, her features brightened, as if the thought that her husband was now in the past gave her pleasure.

  Lambert, deciding already that he need not tread too carefully through this woman’s grief, studied those features for a moment before he spoke, but the mask had dropped back again. Beneath the ink-black hair, falling a little over her right eye as she turned to pour the coffee, her face was pale but composed. There was no sign of the puffing around the eyes which would denote that tears had been shed before their arrival. As she handed him the delicate china cup, her hand shook a little, but she looked excited rather than grief-stricken. She said, ‘So when did James kill himself, Mr Lambert?’

  Lambert was here to study her, as well as to acquire information, and he did so coolly, almost insultingly, now. Spouses were always the prime suspects in domestic murders, and this one had absented herself mysteriously in the hours after the death. ‘This was not suicide, Mrs Berridge. There is no reason why you should not know that; I am already quite sure that the Coroner’s Court will return a verdict of “Murder”.’ Not, in fact, as sure as he pretended, for that would involve a jury, and juries, like committees, are unpredictable devices. An ‘Open’ verdict was still possible, unless he could produce more evidence than the forensic findings on the way that pistol had been used.

  Gabrielle Berridge raised her dark eyebrows. ‘That makes sense. I would not have expected him to kill himself. And he certainly had plenty of enemies.’ She see
med as objective as if she had been a colleague, one of the small but increasing number of female detective inspectors, giving the proposition her objective assessment and approval.

  Lambert tried and failed to hide the irritation he felt at this mantle of composure. ‘So which of these many enemies do you think blew his head away, Mrs Berridge?’

  She looked at him, acknowledging the brutality of the phrase, knowing how she had provoked it. There was no smile upon her lips, but there was perhaps a look of satisfaction in her eyes, which were of so dark a blue that they looked black, except when she turned to the light of the window. He was reminded of an opponent who made a telling chess move and waited to see the effect upon the player across the table. She took a sip of her coffee, apparently found it satisfactory, and said, ‘I have no idea who might have killed him. I suspect that you know far more of his business dealings than I do. I took care to know less and less as the years went on.’

  ‘That was no doubt very wise of you, from a personal point of view.’ But you didn’t spurn his ill-gotten gains, he thought; without leaving her face, his eyes took in a peripheral view of the wide acreage of fitted carpet and the huge picture windows which lined the wall of the penthouse. ‘Your ignorance is, of course, rather distressing from the point of view of officers investigating his murder. I ask you again: have you any idea who might have killed your husband?’

  He expected a denial to spring too quickly from those wide lips; that would have denoted a refusal even to think about the question. Instead, she switched her gaze from his face and cast it for a moment upon the long low table, where a tiny wraith of steam rose from the mouth of the coffee pot. Eventually she said calmly, ‘I should like to help you, because I do not approve of murder, even when… well, even when the victim has perhaps invited it by his own conduct. But I’m afraid I cannot. My guess is that it might be a rival from the murky waters in which he moved.’