The Case of the Screaming Beauty Read online

  “And if there are?” Cliff wanted to know.

  Always the same. People are curious and happy to help, but ultimately succeed mostly in slowing me down. “Then we’ll probably have found the murder weapon. Unless the denizens of the local golf courses are given to smearing blood on their clubs as part of some gruesome and ancient golfing ritual,” he said. It was the closest thing to a joke Stevens had uttered since he’d arrived, a record which would stand all day.

  “Well then, I’ll leave you to it.” Cliff started to leave, a nice cup of tea and a bacon sandwich firmly on his mind, when the old groundskeeper from the golf course arrived.

  “Morning, there, Clifford!” he called. Bob Sykes was one of those men who had been very old for a very long time. If Cliff were pressed, he’d have guessed Sykes was pushing ninety, but the man himself claimed to have long since forgotten. “Old age,” he was fond of saying, “always comes at a bad time.”

  “Morning, Mr. Sykes.” There wasn’t a person in Chiddlinghurst who would dream of referring to Mr. Sykes by his first name, his advanced age engendering a certain respect.

  “Now what’s this I hear,” he asked, his voice a reedy tenor, “about a pretty lady coming to grief in her bathroom?”

  Cliff handled the introductions. “I’m afraid it appears that we’ve had a murder, Mr. Sykes,” Stevens explained. “We’re investigating exactly what happened, and we’re getting closer every hour.”

  Sykes leaned on a weather-beaten golf club. “Well, I heard about it, and it’s a rotten thing to happen, ain’t that right, Clifford?”

  “Damned tragedy,” Cliff told him.

  “I says to the wife,” Sykes related, “I says, ‘A murder at The Lavender? Never in a million years. There’s scarce ever trouble with the Swansbournes,’ I told her.”

  The stress of the past few days, and the inevitable damage to The Lavender’s reputation, showed momentarily on Cliff’s lined face. “Well, it’s poor Norah I feel sorry for,” he said finally. “We’ll muddle along alright, but she’s…”

  “In a far better place,” Sykes said, curling a bony finger toward Cliff. “Mark my words, Clifford. Far better and more beautiful than any place we’ve ever seen with these mortal eyes.”

  Stevens raised his head from his work. “I’d like to believe that.”

  “Are you getting spiritual in your advanced years, then, Mr. Sykes?” Cliff asked.

  The old man cackled an affectionate laugh. “Wait ‘til you’re as old as I am,” he told Cliff. “Spend a moment staring mortality and eternity in the face, and then tell me there’s no splendour and comfort to be found in a vision of the celestial city. There’s power in that message, young’uns, I tell you.”

  Stevens dropped another swab into its tube and filed it away in his backpack. “Three more to go,” he said. “Then I believe I’ll be off.”

  “Or perhaps,” Cliff said, happy to give Sykes a good-natured dig in the ribs, “you’re squaring things with the Divine before you shuffle off to meet him.”

  Another cackle; he sounded like an old witch when he really laughed, especially if he’d had a jar or two of sloe gin. “It certainly wouldn’t do,” the old man said, “for me to get all the way to the Pearly Gates and find my name’s not on the list.” He leaned once more on the golf club and only then looked down at it with a funny spark of realization in his eyes. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. I was nothing more than a hair’s breadth from forgetting what I came over to say!”

  “What’s that, Mr. Sykes?” Cliff asked. His bacon sandwich daydream had receded alarmingly, and he was keen to get it back on track.

  “I found this driver in the bunker on the fourteenth,” he said, lifting the club on which he’d been leaning. “Wondered if one of your guests had forgotten it. Funny place to have a driver out, wouldn’t you say? The middle of the fairway, with bunkers all around?”

  Cliff wisely decided not to touch the driver but motioned to Stevens, who took it between gloved thumbs and forefingers as though it were a holy relic. “Where precisely was this found, Mr. Sykes?” Stevens said, excitement in his voice.

  “Half-buried, it was,” Sykes reported. “Like someone tried to hide it there, and either did a rotten job or someone else dug it up part of the way. I found it sticking out of the bunker like a bit of old shrapnel on a beach.”

  “And when did you make this discovery?” Stevens asked, already preparing to swab the metal where the club would meet the ball. Or the back of Norah Travis’ head, he allowed himself to hope.

  “Not an hour ago,” Sykes replied. “My first thought was that somebody had forgotten it,” he repeated, “but then I thought about The Lavender. You know, there was word going around the pub last night that the young woman was hit over the head with a golf club. Of all the sorry ways to meet your maker,” Sykes marveled. “That was the rumor, anyway, unless my old hearing let me down again?”

  “No, you’re quite right,” Stevens said. “We’re pretty confident the murder weapon was a driver.”

  “Well,” Sykes said, relieved not to be entirely losing his marbles, “I got myself wondering if one of your policemen might like to have a look at it.”

  Stevens gave Cliff a meaningful glance and then reached for his cell phone. “DI Graham?” he confirmed. “Chris Stevens, SOCO… Yes, I’m in the shed in the back garden. I think I’ve just met the world’s oldest man,” he quipped. “Yes… At least a hundred and fifty…” Sykes grimaced comically, enjoying the moment. “And the thing is, sir… I’m pretty sure he’s just brought me the golf club which was used to murder Norah Travis.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  EMILY HOVERED NERVOUSLY by the doorway to the crime lab, as if afraid of being accused of trespass. Or, as her boss sometimes called it, “lurking.” She was always hesitant to disturb Bert Hatfield when he was in one of his “beautiful mind” moods, as he called them. One wall of the lab was covered by the largest whiteboard in the office supply catalogue, and Bert had spent the first hour of this Thursday morning scribbling on it with zest and purpose.

  “Er, sir?” Emily tried, tapping tentatively at the door frame.

  Bert didn’t miss a beat, his marker squeaking noisily on the board. “Emily, my dear, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times. My colleagues call me Bert,” he explained, still writing, “and you’re my colleague.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was another animated squeak. “Oh, for pity’s sake,” he said with a reassuring smile. “With what can I help you, oh timid shrew?”

  Lurking – yes, that was definitely the word – immediately behind Emily was an even more reluctant figure, a teenager in a smart, grey and black school uniform.

  “Bloody hell,” Bert exclaimed, finally capping the pen and slotting it onto the board’s metal rail. “Do they still make you wear those ghastly things?”

  Emily found her voice once more. “This is Fiona. From St. Aidan’s.” The silence betrayed Bert’s having entirely forgotten about this long-planned work experience visit. “It was in your calendar,” Emily added.

  “Bugger,” the pathologist muttered. “Quite alright, quite alright. Come on in, Fiona. Sorry about all that.” He ushered her into the room and politely dismissed Emily, who returned to her front desk duties. “You’ve arrived on a rather auspicious day, as it happens.”

  “Really?” the fifteen year-old asked. She had bright blue eyes and a quiet curiosity which Bert decided he found both pleasant and rather admirable, particularly given that his lab dealt almost exclusively with the lamentable and gruesome.

  “You’ll have heard about the murder over in Chiddlinghurst?” he asked, leading Fiona around two tables stacked high with books and papers, towards his desk in the corner. In truth, there could have been almost anything under the tremendous weight of documentation Bert had accrued and, for want of a better word, “stored.” It gave the lab the feel of a much loved but very slightly shabby library whose main topic was death: manner
s of bringing it about, and the people guilty of having done so.

  “Norah Travis,” Fiona replied crisply. “Very sad. Only twenty-seven, wasn’t she?”

  “Well done for reading the news,” Bert told her. “I didn’t think young people bothered with it.”

  Fiona was not, as Bert would find during the course of a memorable morning, a typical fifteen year-old. She had bent over backwards to be assigned this rather special position, writing letters and using her father’s modest influence as a human resources manager for a local pharmaceutical company. To be a pathologist had been her dream since childhood, and she had little interest in any other type of career. Hers was no morbid fascination with death, however. She was passionate about the process, the hard science of sleuthing one’s way from complete confusion to stand-up-in-court certainty. She wanted to catch bad people, of course, and bring closure to families, but her main focus had always been on how a murderer was brought to justice. “It just revs me up,” she’d explained to a slightly perplexed careers counselor at her school. “I can’t explain it.”

  “I read the news all the time,” Fiona reported honestly. “Are you working on the evidence in her murder?” The question was accompanied by a flash of excitement in her eyes. I might be able to help solve a murder! On my first day!

  “I am,” Bert reported. “We’ve had a couple of strokes of luck, but we’re not there yet.”

  He opened three different files on the computer and allowed Fiona to read them. She did so quickly, perched on a black stool by Bert’s desk, taking notes on a spiral-bound pad. Then he had a thought.

  “You’ve signed all the non-disclosure stuff, right?” She nodded. “Good. Because you really can’t discuss any of this with anyone. Certainly not until we’ve taken the case to court. Alright with you?”

  “You can trust me,” she said. Bert believed her at once. There were some people you just knew wouldn’t let you down.

  Once she’d finished reading and taking her notes, Bert filled her in on the rest.

  “Thankfully, we’re blessed with a truly gifted SOCO. You know what one of those is, don’t you?”

  “Scenes of Crime Officer,” she replied. “Mr. Stevens, isn’t it?”

  “Good girl. Now, Stevens is very thorough, really one of the best. But sometimes,” he said, reaching across to an object wrapped in plastic used for sealing evidence, “we get a lucky break, and something like this falls into our laps. Care to identify it?”

  Fiona took the golf club in her hands as though being handed a piece of the original Cross. “I don’t play golf, so I don’t know what type. But it seems heavy,” she said, weighing the thick-handled club in her hands.

  “It’s a driver,” Bert said. “Heaviest of the lot. If someone raised this and brought it down,” he said, mimicking the motion, “or swung from the side, they’d cause a serious injury. Wouldn’t you say?”

  She tried swinging the club in an imitation of the murderous impact. “Fractures, for sure,” she said.

  “Now,” Bert said, taking back the club. “We’ve got a theory that Norah Travis was hit, very hard, just once, by a golf club. See here,” he said, returning to the computer screen and bringing up images from the post mortem. “Notice this pattern of crossed lines? They’re different in every manufacturer, of course.”

  “And this pattern,” Fiona said, almost touching the screen, “matches the club Mr. Stevens found?”

  She was brimming with an excitement kept under control only by the severity of the case and the gravity of her surroundings. Before this moment, Fiona would never have dared believe she’d be allowed even to see this lab, never mind to help examine the evidence it collected. She was on cloud nine.

  “It does. Within tolerances. But there’s a way we can make sure, and that’s how I was going to spend my morning,” Bert said, giving her an almost conspiratorial grin. “Care to join me?”

  * * *

  Detective Inspector David Graham sat rather gloomily in the dining room of The Lavender bed and breakfast at just after 9am on this promisingly bright Thursday. He was not, by his own admission, at his best in the mornings. His doctor had warned him about this, though without providing any concrete method of setting aside the feelings of fatigue, ennui, and dissatisfied, restless agitation he generally felt in the hours between waking and mid-morning. They assailed him with a regularity and severity that created a debilitating and vicious cycle. He had a depressed sense that he would be unable to achieve anything; that this new day, and his hard work, would certainly come to naught.

  The thought that plagued him popped into his head unbidden and repeatedly during these lulls: he was a charlatan, a failure. The dark whirling of those thoughts had conspired to drive him to the edge more than once. He knew, intellectually, that giving into his demons would only take him over that edge. He cursed happenstance for shaping the dining room in such a way that the well-stocked bar was easily visible. Not now, his better self said yet again. Not now and not ever.

  Instead, he drank tea. The depressed mind, he’d come to understand, has less ammunition with which to shellac its victim when it is provided with constant novelty. Silencing the demons had seemed impossible until they’d shown themselves usefully appeased by regular and various infusions of caffeine. He’d never have believed it, and his doctor was surprised enough to write up his case in a minor journal, but tea – perhaps the neurochemical opposite of booze – was saving David Graham’s life.

  Amelia had been helpful enough, after Graham’s initial request, to serve him a rotating assortment from the six teas they had in the kitchen. On this bright Thursday morning, David was trying to lift his gloom with a jasmine tea from Anhui province in China. It was rather complex, he found to his satisfaction. If its taste had had a color, this tea would have been lilac or rosy-pink, gentle on the senses but certain of its own virtues. Within moments of inhaling its vapors, and only a minute after finishing his first cup, DI Graham’s view of the world was very quickly changing. He began to welcome the sunshine not as a chronometer of his regular morning depression, but as a warming, healing light which would ensure a good day. Synapses began to fire anew. He felt as though an MRI of his awakening mind would show a riot of yellows and reds as energy filled those parts of his mind kept dormant and shadowed by his sadness.

  After the second cup, to his great relief, the blues were banished. He turned to his notebooks with a fresh alertness and began interrogating, for the third or fourth time, everything he knew about this frustrating case. The pieces, he’d found, simply would not fall into place. Anyone who might have been a suspect, who had harbored any ill will towards Norah, had provided a convincing alibi. And she was not a woman who made enemies. No, he’d been thinking about it all wrong. And as his mind began to race in that way that he loved, like a greyhound finally given its druthers to chase an elusive rabbit down the track, he stopped and re-read a note he’d made on Monday, during his initial interviews.

  A note that he hadn’t followed up. Come on, Dave… You’re slipping. You’re better than this.

  “Is Mr. Swansbourne in this morning?” he asked Amelia as she brought a fresh pot of the Anhui jasmine.

  “Yes, I think he’s just finishing having a shave. Would you like to see him?”

  Cliff was looking a little better, not quite as drawn and stressed as he had in the days prior. “Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” he said as he took a seat opposite Graham.

  The now cheery, almost giddily contented part of Graham’s mind obliged him to agree, but there were far more serious topics at hand than the sunshine, however welcome it was. “Cliff, I’ve got to ask you about something you said, back on Monday.”

  Amelia chipped in from the kitchen. “Good luck with that, Detective Inspector. Our Cliff could tell you what he had for breakfast in 1976 but he’s like Swiss cheese on anything more recent.”

  Her husband scowled good-naturedly, and then asked Graham, “What was it I said?”

  �
��You told me,” Graham said, referring to his notes, “that you’d heard voices coming from Norah’s room on Sunday evening. I’d like to know more about what you heard.”

  Cliff gave a funny, bashful smile and rolled his eyes. “Well, you know… I didn’t want to say anything at the time. And it seemed so…irrelevant.”

  Graham said nothing but readied his pen and notebook.

  His discomfort very obvious, Cliff muttered, “It’s hard to know what to say. You know…”

  Graham exuded patience, but inwardly his investigative self burned to hurry the truth from Cliff, even at the risk of being rude. “Let’s say that I don’t,” he said.

  “They were… A couple, you know. Tim and Norah.” Cliff fidgeted under the table like a seven-year-old called into the headmaster’s office.

  The DI held his temper by a narrow margin. “Go on.”

  “It was… love,” Cliff murmured. “The sounds of love.”

  Amelia returned to the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, her hands on her hips. “For heaven’s sake, Clifford. It’s not the sodding 1950s anymore. They were at it, DI Graham.” Cliff winced in shame. “Having some nookie,” she continued. “Bonking for Britain, most likely.”

  “Amelia Swansbourne!” Cliff gasped.

  His wife was unmoved. “Well, what should we call it, you impossible man?” she demanded. “’Marital relations’?”

  DI Graham had a hand up in mute appeal. “I get the picture, believe me. Did you hear this, also, Mrs. Swansbourne?”

  She shook her head. “No, my husband enjoyed that all on his own. And it’s hardly the first time, Cliff. You should hear some of the things Doris says she’s walked in on, down the years.”

  Acutely uncomfortable, Cliff sat, reddened and hunched. “That’s what I heard,” he said simply. “Hope it helps.”

  “It might,” DI Graham observed. “You’d be surprised how many big cases are broken open by the tiniest detail. Thanks, Cliff. Feel free to continue what you were doing. I’m sure you’re a busy man.”