Cruel as the Grave Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  CRUEL AS THE GRAVE

  Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2020

  in Great Britain and 2021 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2021 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.

  Copyright © 2020 by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9085-6 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-743-9 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0471-4 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  ONE

  Another Day, Another Douleur

  Atherton was singing, in his Dean Martin voice. ‘When you’re down by the sea, and an eel bites your knee, that’s a moray.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Slider muttered.

  ‘I thought you liked my singing.’

  ‘I’m cursing the traffic. I love your singing. Your singing fills me with transcendent delight.’

  ‘Well, if you’re going to be like that about it, I shall sit here in wounded silence.’

  It was a warm day for November, but a glum one, under a sky like wet dishrags. There were roadworks in Holland Road, with a coned-off lane and contraflow, turning the normally heavy traffic to automotive molasses. Behind the cones, eight men in hard hats and hi-vis jackets stood with their hands in their pockets staring at the tarmac. Well, it was a rotten job, but somebody had to do it.

  And why did everyone these days choose grey cars, Slider wondered. The only bit of colour anywhere was the big red bus he was crawling behind.

  Now a motorcyclist was trying to overtake him, despite the fact that there was no possibility of getting past the bus. ‘There’s no hope for mankind, is there?’ Slider said.

  ‘No, there is no hope,’ said Atherton. ‘But don’t let it get you down. Next on the right.’

  Russell Close was a short side turning, now taped off to traffic and full of the various police vehicles generated by a murder shout. Its right boundary was the high blank end-wall of the terrace of houses on Holland Road. Its left was a parade of four shops: a laundry and dry cleaners; the Kwik-Fix Heel and Key Bar; a rather dusty-looking shop called K D Electronics, its window obscured by venetian blinds; and a newsagent-tobacconist. At the end of the close was a newish block of flats.

  Atherton, Slider’s bagman and friend, gestured towards them. ‘That’s it. Russell Court.’

  ‘There used to be a pub there,’ said Slider.

  ‘I remember. Called The Russell. Big Victorian place.’

  ‘They did live jazz at weekends. I went there once with Joanna because a trumpeter friend of hers was playing. Shame it’s gone.’

  Pubs were closing everywhere. More and more, people didn’t want to go out and mingle with live human beings, preferring to stay at home with their screens. Slider wondered where it would end. Already teachers were reporting that children were starting school almost unable to talk; and there were teenagers with such poor communication skills they had trouble ordering food in restaurants, or buying ket from their local dealer.

  Where The Russell had stood there was a square, three-storey block of nine ‘luxury’ flats, in yellow brick, with blank, surprised-looking windows. Anti-glare glass gave them the blankness, but why, Slider wondered, the surprise? Then he realized it was because each embrasure had an arc of decorative end-on bricks over it: supercilia. Well, at least the architect had made the effort. It was marginally less ugly than most new buildings.

  They got out, and Atherton stretched, catlike. Tall, elegant, sartor’s plaything, he was as out of place at a dreary crime scene as an orchid in a vegetable patch.

  He consulted the note. ‘Flat six, it says here. Deceased is Erik Lingoss. With a k. Why?’

  ‘Perhaps we shall never know,’ Slider said tersely. It was too early in the day for questions that could not be answered, especially a day that began with a murder and wretched traffic, plus heartburn from last night’s pizza. Joanna was heavily pregnant and hadn’t felt like cooking, and Dad, who lived in the granny flat with his new wife and could usually be relied upon to don the white cap, had been out at a Scrabble tournament. Slider had promised Jo to bring something home and had planned on fish and chips, but had forgotten that their local chipper was closed on a Tuesday. By that time he had been too tired to look further afield than the convenience store on the corner, where the only immediately edible thing available was a heat-it-yourself pepperoni pizza. Slider had never liked pizza. Now he hated it.

  The street door was wedged open. The unfortunately-named PC Organ was keeping the log, and marked them in. The entry hall still smelled faintly of plaster, and the exhibition-grade beige carpeting was not yet filthy: the block was only a couple of years old.

  Another uniform, the handsome and agreeable PC D’Arblay, filled them in as they trod up the stairs.

  ‘Cause of death is several heavy blows to the head. The girlfriend called it in at about a quarter to eight this morning. She’s a Kelly-Ann Hayes, age nineteen. She says she found him like that when she arrived this morning, but there was blood on her clothes and her hands and face, and no signs of break-in and no apparent robbery.’ His exposition ended on a hopeful uptone. It was good to have an obvious suspect.

  Slider merely grunted. Crimes of passion were often easy to solve, especially when the perpetrator was found standing
over the body with a bloodied poker saying ‘he was asking for it’; on the other hand, they could be the most harrowing.

  ‘Forensics have nearly finished, sir, and Doc Cameron’s here.’

  ‘And the suspect?’

  ‘She was hysterical and we couldn’t get any sense out of her, so Lawrence has taken her back to the station to get swabbed, bagged and checked over by the doctor.’

  The flat’s door was also wedged open, and all the lights were on. A small army in ghostly white coveralls was padding about inside performing their mysterious rituals, and it wasn’t a big flat to start with (‘luxury’ in developer-language meant there was a street door that locked and a lift: size didn’t come into it). Bob Bailey, the Scenes of Crime Manager, confronted them prohibitively in the doorway. ‘We’ve nearly finished,’ he said loftily, ‘then you can come in.’ SOC Manager was a civilian post, so not under police discipline, more was the pity. Bailey waved a transparent evidence bag temptingly before Slider’s nose. ‘Deceased’s in the bedroom. We’ve got the murder weapon. Nice bloody fingermarks on it, and they look good for the girl, so you shouldn’t have any trouble with this one.’ They carried a field kit for the preliminary matching of fingerprints: of course, more detailed analysis would be needed for a court case, but often it gave a useful early indication.

  ‘Nice of you to do our job for us,’ Atherton said with delicate irony. After all those American CSI shows where a man in sunglasses with his hands on his hips solved the crime through science alone without bothering the detectives, it was hard to be gracious to the forensic bods.

  The object in the bag was a three-kilogram neoprene barbell, with obvious blood and matter on the hexagonal head. The weight was helpfully embossed on the end.

  ‘Deceased was obviously a fitness nut,’ Bailey went on. ‘He’s got all the kit in there. And we’ve got his laptop, but no mobile.’

  ‘That’s odd,’ Slider said. What young person these days didn’t have a mobile? They practically popped out of the womb welded to them.

  ‘Maybe the girl’s got it on her,’ Bailey said indifferently. ‘Oh, the doc wants you.’ His men were drifting out of the bedroom. ‘Yes, all right, you can go in now,’ he concluded grudgingly.

  The bed was a super-king-sized mattress on a frame which was all-of-a-piece with the headboard and cabinets – what looked like a custom job in light oak with a built-in overhead shelf and reading lights. The wall to the right, as you lay in bed, was covered with a mirror-doored fitted wardrobe. The wall opposite the end of the bed was also completely mirrored, and in front of it the wooden floor was laid with rubber gym mats, on which stood a weights bench, a weights rack of dumb-bells, and a complicated resistance machine, all chrome and black leather, for working the arms and legs. The overhead lighting was from sunken halogen lamps. Something struck Slider as odd, and it took a moment to realize that there was no window in the room. From the position of the flat, it must have been behind the mirrored wall. Obviously having the mirror to work in had been more important to the occupant than daylight: reflection trumping refraction.

  Freddie Cameron, the forensic pathologist, greeted him. ‘Bill! I hoped it would be you. Long time no see. How’s Joanna? She must be due any moment.’

  ‘Another three weeks,’ Slider said. ‘End of the month.’

  ‘But all’s well this time?’

  ‘Yes, thanks. She seems blooming.’

  Cameron gave him a canny look. Slider was in any case a worrier, and Joanna had had a miscarriage last time. ‘Well, nearly over now,’ he said. ‘Then you can relax.’

  Slider almost laughed. ‘Yes, relax with a newborn in the house! Tell me about deceased.’

  ‘Seems to be in his early thirties, extremely fit-looking, probably about five foot ten. Appears healthy and well-nourished, no apparent drug use, no apparent injuries apart from the blows to the head.’

  The body was lying prone beside the bed, wearing only a pair of grey sweatpants that even Slider could see were expensive and well-fitting. The naked upper body was well-muscled and unblemished, the bare feet were clean and the nails unusually well-kept, suggesting he had visited a pedicurist. Few people could cut their own toenails that well.

  ‘This was the first blow, you see,’ Cameron said, ‘to the left temple. It would have felled him, may have caused him to lose consciousness, but it didn’t kill him, to judge from the quantity of blood. Scalp wounds do give rise to a lot of passive leakage even after death, but the spread suggests more active bleeding.’ There was a considerable pool under the head. ‘Then there was a second attack with several blows to the back of the head, probably four, given with extreme violence. They would have been fatal.’

  They had been powerful blows, Slider noted. The skull had been smashed and grey matter as well as blood clotted the hair.

  ‘In my estimation,’ Cameron went on, ‘there was a gap of a few minutes between the first blow and the second attack, otherwise the bleeding would not have been so extensive.’

  ‘She must have thought she’d killed him first off.’ This was Bailey, looking over their shoulders. ‘Then he started to move, and she had to finish him off.’ Simple, said his look. I could do your job, easy.

  Cameron’s assistants had now turned the body over, so Slider could see the face. It was firm-featured, with a straight nose and attractive mouth; so far as any face could be when dead and devoid of animation, you’d have called it unusually handsome. The hair was dark brown, springy, expensively cut and highlighted; the hands were professionally groomed. The skin was smooth and lightly tanned. There was no jewellery, no tattoos. A man who took care of his body and his appearance.

  ‘Primed and ready for love,’ Atherton commented.

  ‘Until she killed him,’ said Slider.

  Freddie nodded. ‘He probably loved not wisely but too many. Looks the sort. The “frenzied attack” of phrase and fable so often stems from plain old jealousy.’

  ‘But she said she found him like this,’ Slider mused.

  ‘Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?’ said Bailey impatiently.

  Slider ignored him and looked at Cameron. ‘I didn’t ask – what about time of death?’

  Freddie nodded to his men to start bagging the body. ‘From the condition of the blood, the temperature, and the lividity and rigor, I’d say six to twelve hours – probably closer to twelve. You’re looking at late yesterday evening.’

  ‘Not this morning?’ Atherton said, the disappointment apparent in his voice.

  ‘Define “this morning”,’ Freddie said, with a shrug. ‘But if you mean just before she phoned it in, then no. Most likely, it was between ten and twelve last night.’

  With the forensic team pulling out, they could look round the rest of the flat. The kitchen had new-looking expensive fittings, and everything was sparkling clean. If anyone had eaten here recently, they must have washed up and put away the dishes. In the fridge were bottles of water, cartons of energy drink, an unopened tub of cottage cheese and one of natural yoghurt, a carton of oat milk, a bottle of probiotic drink, a box of eggs, and a lonely pack of tofu. The vegetable drawer was full of salad and vegetables; in the freezer were several steaks, chicken fillets and portions of fish.

  In the first cupboard there were boxes of cruelly fibrous cereal, energy bars, tubs of protein powder, packets of brown rice, quinoa, oats and spelt, and instant couscous mix. Opening a second, Atherton ducked as something fell out on him. The cupboard was packed with vitamin and mineral supplements. Atherton looked at the little plastic tub he had caught on the rebound from his bonce. ‘High strength omega 3,’ he read.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘Super fish oil injuries. The man’s a health nut.’

  ‘The body is a temple,’ Slider reminded him.

  ‘Up to a point. Let he who is without sin bore the pants off everybody else.’

  The living room was smaller than the bedroom: obviously he had chosen the larger room for his bedroom so as
to accommodate the gym equipment. It was very spare and modern, with a bare wood floor, everything done in shades of grey, cream and beige. There was an enormous fawn leather sofa, two punishingly avant-garde canvas and chrome armchairs and a glass-topped coffee table. Opposite the sofa was an enormous TV. In one corner was a small round table with two upright chairs, and a sort of low sideboard on which stood several framed photographs – the only sign of personality in the room. Everything was inhumanly clean and tidy, as if the developers had just left and no one lived here yet.

  The photographs turned out to be of deceased himself. One was a moodily-lit black and white sports shot, a close-up of him lifting a weight, muscles bulging, and looking sidelong and sultry into the camera. One showed him in dinner jacket on a stage of some kind receiving a scroll from a well-kept older man with bouffant white hair and a Hollywood tan. Deceased was beaming with film star teeth and the bouffant one looked as if he’d been taxidermied. The third showed him in chinos and a sweater over a checked shirt, sleeves rolled up, sitting on a country gate, feet up on a lower rung, smile casually charming, hair slightly windblown – why was it, Slider wondered, that one felt the wind had co-operated in the shot? It looked like an illustration from a men’s fashion catalogue. The fourth was a studio portrait, in a close-fitting, V-necked jumper, looking slightly away from camera, the lighting throwing his cheekbones into relief, making him appear lean, serious, and uncommonly handsome.

  ‘Somebody likes himself,’ Atherton commented sourly.

  Slider was fighting down his own feeling of irritation with the man. ‘Notice there are no women in the shots. No trophy hanging on the arm.’

  ‘Likewise no dear old mum,’ Atherton added. ‘No family shot. No jolly group of pals. He was the star of his own show, all right.’

  There were two more frames, larger, and they were not photographs, but certificates fancily done, with an embossed scrolled heading and elaborate colophon, issued by David Gillespie Fitness and Leisure Clubs Ltd: awards for Personal Trainer of the Year for each of the past two years, with the name Erik Lingoss, with a k, inscribed in heavy black italic inkwork.