The Case of the Screaming Beauty Read online

  “I’ve seen them, and they’re fantastic,” Amelia replied, leaving the important and inevitable ‘but’ unsaid.

  “Not now,” Cliff concluded. “You’ve said that before. More than once.” His disappointment was real, and he refused to hide it. Forty years of work as a structural engineer, then an assessor, then a trainer and mentor to the young’uns…. He was ready to put aside this unexpected windfall of the Lavender and get on with his master plan for retirement by lying on warm, dry sand, dipping his toes in the Pacific, and having someone bring him martinis on the hour. But month by month, he could feel it slipping away.

  “We need more time, and we need more money,” Amelia told him, ever the practical one of the pair. “Even if we sold up tomorrow, how long do you really think the money would last?”

  “Depends if you let me blow the whole lot on coke and strippers,” Cliff joked.

  She took his hand. “Darling,” she began, still deadpan, as was their way, “I know it’s your life’s dream to snort Bolivian marching powder off some pretty girl’s unmentionables, but I need you here, with me, back on planet Earth. Just for a couple more years.”

  He was deflated, despite his fooling around. “Well, bugger.”

  “I’m sorry. Soon, I promise. All the strippers in Tijuana.”

  Cliff finished his wine and gave his wife a smile laden with subtle meanings: I love you and trust you; I’m slightly gutted about not being in Mexico quite yet; but we’re a team, and this is where I belong. Just don’t promise paradise and then deliver another four years of fishing the pin-bones out of salmon and chopping up mountains of dill. I couldn’t take it.

  They finished their wine and headed to bed. Cliff lay awake for longer than he would have chosen, picturing the simple, relaxed life he had worked so hard for. She’s right, again. As always. Why did she have to be so damned pragmatic? It was Amelia who had steered him away from those expensive and alluring mid-life distractions, twenty years ago: the sports car, not unexpected but certainly expensive; the mad, medically inadvisable plan to hike from Lands’ End to John O’Groats and back again; and his simmering, exotic pipedream of a beach retirement in Mexico. The arguments had been fierce, but once he understood that she loved him and wanted to help, he realized that he had floated a little adrift as he hit forty-five. They needed a solid plan, not a high-end coupe worth four years of his old salary. It was then that a peaceable calm returned to the Swansbourne household. Amelia had stood by him as he’d shrugged off the “bloody nonsense,” as he’d taken to calling it and risen to the top of his profession. She would stand by him now, he felt sure.

  Remarkable woman, he reflected as he turned over for the last time that night. Wouldn’t trade her in. Not even for a luxury yacht full of strippers.

  * * *

  Doris Tisbury wheeled her cart, piled high with towels and sheets, along the second-floor hallway of The Lavender, humming a tune which had been stuck in her head all morning. Was it Tchaikovsky? Or from an opera? She couldn’t remember, but it was a jaunty, up-beat tune that fit her mood. There were rooms to be cleaned. Each time she closed the door on a room she knew now to be immaculate, there was a tiny jolt of satisfaction. The world was as it should be, with everything in its place, because Doris made emphatically sure of it.

  Approaching sixty and with the sturdy forearms of an artisan baker, Doris was the original no-nonsense housekeeper. She had infinite patience for the apparently tedious chores with which she was tasked but absolutely none whatsoever with people who “mucked about,” as she put it. Her children and grandchildren knew this expression far too well. The penalties for “mucking about” were the forfeiture of dessert, or pocket money, or – horror of horrors – additional household chores. She was no brute, but rather a disciplinarian, because she believed in quality and rigor and getting done what was needed without fuss or delay. She brought a forthright thoroughness to The Lavender, and the inn thrived, in good measure, due to her firm dedication to duty.

  Most of the guests were early risers, if not to travel to one of the attractions close by or in London, then to enjoy one of Cliff’s massive, traditional, cooked breakfasts and enjoy the gardens with a good book. On the odd occasion, she would knock, wait a polite interval, enter the room, and find the guest either still asleep, or doing something they’d rather Doris had not seen. She’d have dared to boast that, during her years at the Lavender and at other hotels previously, she had been exposed to just about every sordid human pastime, whether it were happening right in front of her, or through the casual discarding of incriminating evidence. Nothing could shock her, Doris would claim. Not even that business last year with the Maltese businessman and his suitcase full of…

  Norah Travis’ door was next. She knocked her accustomed three times, calling through, “Housekeeping!” in as bright a tone as she could and knocked again. She counted to five, as she always did – just to lessen the frequency of those awkward encounters – and then used her master key to open the door. The bed had not been slept in, there was no doubt about it. Even if Norah had, for some reason, chosen to make it herself, there’s no way she’d have matched the precise, geometrical perfection that Doris brought to her work. There was certainly no sign of the young lady.

  Doris patrolled the room, emptying the trashcan and giving the dresser a little squirt of furniture polish. The room smelled slightly musty, so Doris opened both of the windows to air the place out. Then she stepped through to the bathroom, anticipating the usual towels on the floor. Instead, she was shocked to look down and find a pair of shoes. As she pushed the door further open, she saw that the shoes were attached to Norah Travis, and that she was sprawled on the bathroom floor, immobile.

  “Ms. Travis?” she breathed. “Oh, goodness, I’ll get help, dear…” But as she turned, she saw that Norah’s once-pretty face and long blond hair were thickly coated with blood that was staining her blue blouse and that the skin of her exposed neck and shoulders was an unearthly, alabaster white.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CLIFF LOOKED UP from mixing a giant bowl of salad for lunch as Doris rushed into the kitchen. He knew at once that something terrible had happened.

  “It’s Norah Travis,” Doris managed to say, hands to her mouth. But then the grim news stuck in her throat and wouldn’t come out.

  “Doris?” Cliff said, dropping the salad tongs and walking across the kitchen to his dumbstruck housekeeper. “Doris, what’s happened? Is something wrong?” The awful truth was etched on her face so clearly that Cliff needn’t have asked.

  “She’s dead, Mr. Swansbourne. In her bathroom. On the floor.”

  “Jesus.” Cliff was away, taking the stairs two at a time. When he arrived at the door of the bathroom, one glance told him everything. The attractive blond was beyond all help and had been for some hours. A guest of The Lavender, dead. He gasped, recoiled from the sight, and seized the wooden doorframe for support. “Oh, no.”

  He looked up to see a familiar face. “Cliff? What’s wrong?” asked Tim Lloyd, a guest so regular he was almost a family friend. “Oh, God, is it Norah?” he asked, brazenly stepping into the bathroom to survey the tragedy for himself. “Christ, Cliff…Have you called anyone?”

  “Just… Just now found her,” Cliff said, his heart racing worryingly. “Doris saw her first. Amelia’s in the village.” He made himself look back into the bathroom. “Norah, she’s… I mean, there’s no hope, is there?”

  “Call 999,” Tim told him. “I’ll stay here with… the body,” he struggled to say. He was fresh from the shower after his morning walk in the garden. He pushed black hair out of his eyes as he leaned over Norah.

  “Alright. Don’t let anyone else in. I’ll be right back.” Cliff gathered his resolve and headed downstairs to the lobby phone.

  Tim could hear the call going through, Cliff’s sombre relaying of the events, his sadness as he told the dispatcher that CPR would be of absolutely no use at this stage. The body at his feet was Tim’s first, an
d he found himself remembering how he’d always assumed it would be a grandparent or old neighbor, not a blond in her twenties. Downstairs, Cliff was quiet for a moment and then confirmed the address and some other details that Tim couldn’t hear, perhaps instructions about not moving the body or keeping people away until the police arrived.

  “It’s done, Tim. They’re on their way,” Cliff told him as he reached the doorway of Norah’s room. “You haven’t touched anything, have you? I wouldn’t want your fingerprints all over this.”

  “Oh, no,” Tim replied. “But I want to help in any way I can. This is such a… a terrible tragedy,” he said, eyes downcast.

  Cliff kept his distance, staying by the bathroom doorway, while Tim stood over the body, not two feet from Norah. “I think it’s better if we leave this one to the professionals, don’t you?” Cliff advised the younger man. “They’re sure to want to interview you and our other guests.” The specter of negative publicity gave Cliff an unpleasant shudder.

  “I feel a little responsible,” Tim was saying. He stared at the body again, in a way that, at least to Cliff in those anxious moments, seemed rather odd.

  “Guilt is a natural response to something like this,” Cliff cautioned, shaking his head. “You had nothing to do with it, I’m sure.”

  “But I recommended that she stay here, you see. Norah needed a place to go. A safe place,” Tim said. His eyes were fixed on the recently departed woman, almost as though in hope of sudden reanimation.

  Cliff took a step closer to Tim. “Are you saying she was in some kind of trouble? In London?” he asked.

  Tim pursed his lips. “There was a divorce. Very messy. And the husband is not a nice character at all. He threatened her, followed her around. Norah needed a quiet place to collect her thoughts, figure out what to do next. I thought The Lavender was perfect for her. It’s just,” he said, welling up, “so sad that it ended this way. Do you think it was an accident? That she slipped and fell?”

  Cliff watched Tim leaning over the body, inspecting the terrible impact at the back of Norah’s skull. “There’s no way to say until the professionals get here,” Cliff found himself repeating. “I’m going to wait in the lobby and bring them up. Please,” Cliff said sincerely, “don’t touch anything. I don’t think you should even be in here.”

  But Tim was still staring at the awful wound, his eyes flitting from the basin to the bathtub, figuring out how Norah might have met her end. Investigative journalist, Cliff remembered as he descended the stairs in a strange, unpleasant fog. Tireless seeker after truth. Or maybe just a juicy story.

  * * *

  Cliff opened the inn’s front door and found himself looking up at a tall, burly police sergeant. “Thank you for coming so quickly,” Cliff said. “This is just dreadful.”

  Sergeant Harris removed his uniform cap and stepped inside. “I’m sure it’s been a difficult morning,” he said in a low baritone. “But we’ll take care of it. We’ve got one of our very best on the way here. Happens to live in Chiddlinghurst, as a matter of fact.”

  Cliff showed Harris upstairs, but even before they reached the room, there was another knock at the front door. Cliff returned downstairs and opened the door. “Good morning, Mr. Swansbourne,” Cliff looked up at the man standing on the doorstep. “Detective Inspector Graham.”

  After peering briefly at the badge which Graham held up for his inspection, Cliff said, “Yes, of course,” and invited him in. The DI was in his thirties, in a grey suit, and was already scrutinizing the establishment with the air of one very much accustomed to doing so. Graham was silent for a moment as he took in details, his eyes moving quickly among the paintings by the stairs, the ornaments on the side tables, the Persian rug on the floor. The DI seemed to be absorbing the scene as though he’d be called upon later to describe its every last feature.

  Graham reached the top of the stairs, and confirmed the basic details with Cliff. “Our housekeeper, Doris Tisbury, found her at about 9:45 this morning,” Cliff reported.

  “And has anyone else been in the room since then?” Graham asked, notebook open.

  “Only myself and Tim Lloyd, a guest,” Cliff replied. Although he felt sure that Tim had acted inappropriately, Cliff knew it was important to tell the police every detail.

  DI Graham reached Norah’s room and continued his careful visual survey of everything in the room. Cliff watched him, finding something of the savant in the way Graham drank in the colors and shapes around him. The detective turned to look into the bathroom, noticing the same pair of shoes on the victim’s feet that Doris had first seen. Beside them was Tim Lloyd, kneeling by the body, as if in the middle of carrying out his own examination.

  “Sir, stand up, please!” Graham said at once. Tim paused where he was for a moment, and Graham was about to repeat the order when Tim rose, rather nonchalantly, Cliff felt, given the circumstances.

  “I’d say she’s been dead for about twelve hours,” Tim opined, rubbing his chin.

  Graham took a firm grasp of Tim’s arm and led him from the bathroom. “You are Mr. Lloyd?” Graham asked.

  “I am.”

  “You understand that this is a potential crime scene?” Graham asked, holding onto his temper only with some effort.

  “I’ve assisted in police investigations as part of my work. In New York,” Tim explained. “As a journalist.”

  “A journalist. But not a medical investigator. Or a coroner. Or a police officer,” Graham said, glaring at Lloyd.

  “No,” Tim admitted.

  “Or, indeed, as anyone remotely linked to the professional business of solving crimes.”

  The anger was still only barely under control. If there was one thing Graham couldn’t abide, it was nosy people contaminating crime scenes with their unschooled amateurism, however well-intentioned. Six months before, Graham had flown completely off the handle, yelling into the face of a terrified volunteer who’d had the misfortune of finding the body of a missing bank teller in the woods during a massive search. Graham had initially thanked the man for his efforts – the woman had been partially buried in a remote copse and was extremely difficult to see – but once Graham learned that the volunteer had moved strands of the woman’s hair from her eyes upon finding her, he’d virtually exploded. With all the popular CSI-type shows on TV, Graham had thundered, you’d have thought people might have learned to keep their bloody hands to themselves.

  “Return to your room, Mr. Lloyd. And stay there. Do you understand?” Tim understood and was gone in moments. “Mr. Swansbourne? Tell me everything you know about the deceased. Was she a regular guest?”

  Cliff related what he knew and was feeling woozy enough to consider sitting on the edge of the bed, but he quickly rethought the notion in light of DI Graham’s rigorous crime scene attitude. “It was her first time staying with us. A friend of Tim Lloyd, as it happens. He said something about her being recently divorced and her husband being a nasty character.”

  Graham’s pen filled two pages of his notebook with what seemed to be Egyptian hieroglyphs but were actually a finely honed set of abbreviations, combined with old-fashioned shorthand. Graham was more than a trifle behind the times in some ways, but his note-taking was far more efficient, he felt certain, than typing anything into one of those tablets for which he felt considerable disdain. There was no need for professional police officers to resemble extras from an episode of Star Trek, he sometimes found himself grumbling.

  “Alright, then.” Graham closed his notebook. “Thank you, sir. You did everything right.” Cliff’s reply was to give the DI a lopsided smile. “I’m going to call our pathologist, a top man, actually, and we’ll see if Mr. Lloyd’s childish crime-fighting enthusiasm has left any trace of what might actually have killed this poor woman.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  GILBERT HATFIELD – BERT to his friends – struggled simultaneously with London’s Monday morning traffic and the knowledge that whatever had befallen Norah Travis, shedding light on
it would almost certainly mean his having to miss the afternoon game. Life as a Charlton Athletic fan was tough enough without being stuck in a morgue while your team kicked off their first home game of the season.

  As he gradually left the busy streets behind, entering the far more pleasing landscape of the rural county of Surrey, the pathologist, who was heading reluctantly into his sixties, negotiated the tight lanes with special care. After narrowly missing a fellow motorist who wasn’t paying enough attention, he found himself turning right, then left, then straight on at a crossroads before rolling down a gently sloping street into the almost too picturesque Chiddlinghurst. It reminded Bert of those preserved villages from the nineteenth century that were transplanted brick by brick to create a museum celebrating times past. High-end cars in driveways and the range of satellite dishes mounted as discreetly as possible on the sides of centuries old dwellings were the only signs of encroaching modernity.

  The Lavender, for its part, could very well have been plucked from the past, its shining white paintwork and deep black beams a pleasing contrast. And the gardens… even a non-horticulturalist like Bert was apt to be staggered; the planning and hundreds of hours of hard work that had gone into them were instantly obvious. It was an unfortunate fact that someone staying here had either chosen to or been obliged to come to the end of their lives while overlooking the gardens’ formal splendor.

  Apparently overwhelmed – or perhaps simply understaffed – on this busy Monday morning, the local ambulance service arrived only minutes before the pathologist. Bert found them glum and feeling a little pointless as the crews sometimes did when there was so obviously nothing to be done. Mostly in these circumstances, they kept the fire fighters company, if there were any, or talked things over with the police. This case was an exception. Never one to shirk from recording details, DI Graham was on his own, noting down pages of medical data.