Fifth Member
Also by Claire Rayner
A STARCH OF APRONS
THE MEDDLERS
A TIME TO HEAL
MADDIE
CLINICAL JUDGEMENTS
POSTSCRIPTS
DANGEROUS THINGS
LONDON LODGINGS
PAYING GUESTS
The Dr George Barnabas Mysteries
FIRST BLOOD
SECOND OPINION
THIRD DEGREE
FOURTH ATTEMPT
Claire Rayner
FIFTH MEMBER
A Dr George Barnabas Mystery
ebook ISBN: 978-1-84982-028-8
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First published in Great Britain 1997
Copyright © Claire Rayner 1997, 2010
All rights reserved.
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reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
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e-ISBN 978-1-84982-028-8
The moral right of the author has been asserted
For Colin Maitland, a most charming outlaw.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks for advice and information about death, detection, aristocracy, Parliamentary goings-on and sundry other matters are due to: Dr Trevor Betteridge, Pathologist of Yeovil, Somerset; Dr Rufus Crompton, Pathologist, St George’s Hospital, Tooting, London; Dr Azeel Sarrah, Pathologist, Queen Elizabeth II Hospital, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire; Mr Richard Bark-Jones, Lawyer, of Formby, Liverpool; Peter Angel, Lawyer, of Kenton, Middlesex; Robin Corbett, MP for Erdington; Debrett’s Peerage Ltd; Detective Chief Inspector Jackie Malton, Metropolitan Police; many members of the staff of Northwick Park and St Mark’s Hospital, Harrow, Middlesex; and many others too numerous to mention, and are gratefully tendered by the author.
1
‘Is she annoyed?’ repeated the Member of Parliament for Westleigh. ‘Annoyed? She’s bloody incandescent.’
‘She can be unreasonable,’ said the Member for Central Casterbridge, uneasily aware of how often she herself had missed a two-line whip; she’d only made it to the lobby for this three-line one by the skin of her teeth. ‘The man could be ill, or his kids in trouble or something.’
‘Sam Diamond ill? The man’s made of solid leather. And he hasn’t got any kids.’
‘Well, you know what I mean. People do have emergencies, after all.’
‘Not unless they’ve paired first, they don’t,’ said the Member for Westleigh. ‘They wouldn’t dare. She’d murder ’em. Look, I’m off. Want a lift?’
‘Umm. No thanks,’ said the Member for Central Casterbridge, glancing at the door of the Chief Whip’s office. ‘I’ve one or two things to sort out first.’
‘I’ll bet you have,’ said the other, grinning knowingly, and left her there, painfully aware of the fact that she’d been slotted into the brown-nosing category by her colleague, and not liking it much. But what the hell, she told herself, that’s politics. She composed her face into an expression of exhausted but indomitable support and went into the office.
In the event, hanging around did the Member for Central Casterbridge no good at all. Mary Bodling, who had the reputation of being the toughest Chief Whip the Tories had ever had, with bigger and harder balls than any man on the Front Bench, was in no humour for an erratic backbencher with a lousy voting record, and sent her away smartly, while making a mental note to speak to her sometime about the way she did her hair and the sort of clothes she wore. She looked entirely too left wing with that scruffy haircut and heavy boots under a long skirt. Tory women should look like Tory women, in Mary Bodling’s opinion, and while she sat in this office they bloody well would. But that was for a later date; right now she wanted to get hold of Sam Diamond and excoriate him. She wanted that very badly.
But however many calls her staff made, however they scurried through the contact lists, he wasn’t to be flushed out, and Bodling’s frustration had built steadily until now she was scowling like a character in a Disney film, as one of the junior people murmured under his breath to the man at the adjoining desk.
Mary Bodling heard him. She made another mental note to deal with him too in a way that would make life exceedingly disappointing for someone as ambitious as he was; a fact which would have alarmed him greatly had he known. One of the things that made Bodling so formidable was her elephantine memory: she never forgot a slight and never overlooked a peccadillo, though she took swift compliance with all her requests as her just due. The Prime Minister adored her, Central Office thought she was the Angel Gabriel come again, only less namby pamby, and the press loved nothing more than reporting her latest exploits.
It was the press about which she was concerned now. The vote had been an important one involving the Government’s response to another piece of Brussels legislation, dealing this time with the importation of costly drugs from European pharmaceutical companies, and journalists had been scrabbling around excitedly looking for more evidence of Government splits on the issue. The fact that the Government had been so nearly defeated this evening for the sake of one vote had sent them baying like so many bloodthirsty wolfhounds. It had been a long time since there had been a hung vote like this, needing the Speaker’s intervention to carry the day. The TV and radio people had already had their fun at the expense of the Speaker, who was known privately to be as ardent a Labour man as he had ever been and who must have tasted very bitter gall indeed when he had to give his casting vote to the Government as the rules of the House demanded, and now they wanted to sup Bodling’s blood. Tomorrow’s papers could be a PR disaster, and Mary had no intention of allowing that, or at least not till she herself had had her fill of Diamond’s.
But even his wife, who might be expected to have news of him, couldn’t be found. She was, reported the anxious and most junior member of Mary’s staff who had been set to work to find her, in Italy on a buying trip.
‘Buying trip?’ roared Mary Bodling. ‘Buying? She’ll need to go shopping for a new husband when I get my hands on him.’
‘It’s stock,’ said the wretched junior. ‘For her shop.’
Mary, who knew perfectly well what the trip was about, almost snorted her disgust. Alice Diamond, who was altogether too blonde, too thin and too expensive for Mary’s tastes, had a wickedly pricey establishment in Sloane Street where she made a great deal of money selling wisps of silk and suchlike to American tourists. Mary had told the Diamonds several times that it was her opinion – which of course should have been regarded by Sam and Alice as Holy Writ – that a Tory wife’s place was in her husband’s constituency. Why didn’t Alice sell nice tweeds and cashmeres down in Hedgington? But Alice had gone on her own sweet way, and now Sam Diamond had defected on an important vote. It was too bad; worse than bad: downright wicked disloyalty than which there was no greater crime in Mary’s decalogue. Steps might have to be taken regarding deselection, Mary told herself darkly, and set about harrying her staff again. Last night’s vote wasn’t the only crucial one that had to be dealt with. There was the NHS Financing Bill to push through somehow, with far more provision for the Private Finance Initiative than ever (‘privatization by the bloody front door’, as its opponents sourly
put it) and the fuss about NHS consultants’ merit awards, and the legislation designed to protect the House of Lords from the reformers, the Right to Inheritance Bill. All of them mattered and all of them, Mary had told the Prime Minister, would be buggers to get through with a majority as wafer thin as the one the Government currently suffered. And so much bad temper and contrariness on the Lib-Dem benches! So some pretty thorough and comprehensive bullying would be needed over the next few weeks.
Mary set to work with a relish. Bullying, after all, was what she did best.
‘All I wanted was a slash,’ the man said again, his voice muffled by the way his head was held between his hands. He sat on the kerb, his whole posture one of sick misery. ‘I had a few drinks with my friends, and I needed a slash. You know how it is …’ He peered up owlishly at the two men standing above him. ‘And I didn’t like to stand out here in the street. You never know who might come by, and, well … it isn’t nice.’
The two men exchanged glances, amused, and then looked back at him.
‘We’ll need a statement, sir,’ the taller of them said in a soft Scottish accent. ‘We’ll arrange for you to be taken back to the station to do that.’
‘Oh, shit,’ the man on the kerb said. ‘Do I have to? I feel lousy and I’ve told you all I know. I went into the alley to pee, and didn’t see – see anything till I turned round to come out. I mean, I was desperate. I didn’t wait or look about. I just got on with it, and then, after, feeling better you understand, sort of did. Look around, I mean. And there it was …’ His face went a little paler as he remembered. ‘Made me sick, it did. It was seeing it, you see, made me feel awful.’
Durward Street was beginning to fill up with passers-by, even at this time of night. Detective Sergeant Urquhart glanced at them and scowled. Half past one. ‘Get those gawpers out of here,’ he said over his shoulder to one of the hovering uniformed men. ‘And then see if we can clear the area of unwanted staff too. The Guv’s on his way and I doubt he’ll need any uniforms. Leave just one of the cars, send the others on their way and we’ll see where we go from there.’
He stopped at the mouth of the alley and looked back into the dark street. There was a low mist hugging the pavement and he took a deep breath and smelled the river which, though it was a fair bit south, still managed to make its presence felt. Murder, he thought. The Guv’nor’ll like this one. Not that he likes people to be killed, of course. Just that he likes oddities. And this one is bloody odd.
‘Come on,’ he said to Bob Pennington, the Soco. ‘This way.’
They stepped over the wet patch left by the man on the kerb, who had now identified himself as Mr Piers Wilson, and was now in the car on his way back to Ratcliffe Street station to give his statement, and went on into the tiny yard beyond. It was little more than a patch of old cracked concrete, some twenty-five feet by forty or so, with dustbins in the corner, a bit of scattered rubbish of the broken-down bicycle and old tin can kind, flanked by dead walls, dirty windows and back doors, the whole a remnant of the way the entire area had been before great swathes of buildings had been culled to make room for a vast supermarket and a couple of blocks of modern flats. But here, the old East End lingered on in the huddle of battered buildings that gave on to the courtyard. The doors were locked from the inside; Mike had had that checked as soon as the patrol car, which had stopped to investigate the man sitting on the kerb rocking and retching miserably, had called in with their find. Calls had been sent out to bring in the buildings’ keyholders, since all three of them were clearly used for offices or small workshops, and empty at night; so all there was to pay much attention to was the figure lying on its back to the left of the alley’s opening into the yard.
When Mike had first arrived it had taken him a moment or two to assimilate what the patrol man’s torch had shown him. He had stood looking down in amazement and with a sort of detached sense of horror, just as he did now, a little to his surprise. He had been in the force long enough to be inured to most horrific sights; but he’d never seen one like this. And it was as revolting to look at now as it had been when he had first seen it, half an hour ago.
A man, portly, well dressed – as far as it was possible to tell – his head thrown back and a great grin disfiguring his face. Only it wasn’t his face. His throat had been cut, hugely, gapingly, and the effect was ludicrous as well as horrifying, like a vast mirthless smile. The darkness that was blood puddles showed on each side of the throat, though there did not appear to be as much as might have been expected with so ferocious an injury. ‘Lots underneath,’ he murmured aloud and the Soco, seeming to read his mind, nodded.
‘The other one too,’ Mike said then, and took a deep breath. With a conscious effort, he made his glance slide downwards to follow his torch beam. The man’s trousers had been pulled away and the skirts of his overcoat flung aside. The underclothes had been ripped and the belly and groin exposed. But that was where normality, if it could be called that, ended. Where the man in life had had beneath his rotund belly an expanse of pubic hair and his genitals there was just a wide, deep darkness, fringed with clotted blood. Nothing else at all.
‘Oh, my God,’ breathed the Soco and Mike put one hand on his arm, feeling a need to offer a fellow worker in a foul field some comfort.
‘That’s not all of it,’ he said in a flat voice, shifting the beam of his torch up again and then to the left, settling it on the man’s outflung right arm. It was there, lying on the point of the shoulder, that the missing parts of the body lay, spread out neatly for all the world like meat on a butcher’s slab.
By the time Detective Superintendent Gus Hathaway, head of the Area Major Incident Team, arrived, Bob Pennington had finished. The photographers had recorded every inch of the yard and the alley and the pavement on Durward Street outside, and Bob had taken a sample of Mr Wilson’s body fluid, an unusually pernickety step, but one which he felt necessary with so terrible and bizarre a killing. ‘Anything could be evidence,’ he said heavily to Mike as he stoppered his bottles. ‘You never know. And I didn’t want the Doc on my back because I didn’t collect it if she decides she wants it.’
‘Ye’ve a point there,’ Mike said and grinned briefly. ‘I’ll tell her as soon as she gets here.’
‘She coming with the Guv’nor then?’ Bob asked.
Mike shrugged. ‘Mebbe. Your guess is as good as mine. Will you be wanting to talk to him?’
‘I’d rather get all this worked up ready for the morning,’ Bob said. ‘If I know the Guv he’ll want the reports on his desk at sparrow’s fart. See you in the nick.’
‘Yes,’ said Mike and watched him go, glad to see his car passing the Super’s as it came swinging round from Brady Street to pull up with a shudder of hard-used brakes.
‘What’s all this I hear about weirdies?’ Gus demanded almost before he was out of the car. He was looking very dapper, Mike thought, with his usually all-over-the-place dark curly hair smoothed down and an expanse of white evening shirt between black satin revers. Gus caught his appreciative glance and reddened slightly. ‘Bloody hospital dinner,’ he growled. ‘Another one of those buggers of professors discovering something and gettin’ an award. You’d think they had more’n enough bleedin’ diseases to get on with without discovering new ones. I came straight here.’
‘And – er – the Doc?’ Mike murmured.
‘Sent her home to change first. She’s wearing a dress that cost her the best part of three hundred quid and if you think I’m going to let her muck that up you’ve another think coming. She won’t be long. So, fill me in.’
Mike did, swiftly and with much graphic use of language as well as gesture. Gus listened, his eyes glinting in the meagre light from the one remaining set of rotating blue lights.
‘Getaway!’ he said. ‘You’re makin’ it up.’
‘Would I do that, Guv?’ Mike shook his head. ‘Come and see for yourself. Soco’s finished. We just need the doctor and then … anyway, come and see.’
‘Yeah,’ Mike said, sliding a sideways glance at him. ‘That’s what I said. Or something like it.’
‘Makes you hold your knees together, don’t it?’ said Gus. ‘Jesus, what a thing to do to a bloke.’
‘What I can’t fathom,’ Mike said, ‘is why.’
‘Hmm?’
‘I mean, I ask myself, why should someone do a thing like that? Cut off his wedding tackle. All right, take it away or something, but arrange it all neat and tidy like that, on his shoulder? It’s crazy.’
‘Arranged on his shoulder,’ Gus repeated. He looked vague. ‘Yeah. That’s just what he did, isn’t it?’
‘Look for yourself,’ Mike said. ‘I mean, it’s not that he, well – threw them up there, is it? That’s arranged, sort of planned, I’d say. Wouldna you?’
‘Now you point it out, maybe so.’ Gus seemed abstracted. ‘It reminds me of … Oh, so you’re here at last!’
‘I’d have been here sooner if you hadn’t been in such a sweat over my dress.’ The figure which had materialized beside them was wearing jeans, a loose sweatshirt with ‘Buffalo’ written on it in faded letters, and battered trainers. Her hair, which was thick and dark and as curly as Gus Hathaway’s but much longer, was piled on her head and pinned in an untidy but beguiling knot. She was wearing large round glasses and carrying a square attaché case which she stooped to set on the ground beside the body. ‘What’s the story?’
‘Look for yourself,’ Gus said, pulling the torch from Mike’s hand. ‘Mike, go and organize some lamps here, will you, so Dr B. can see what she’s doing. I’ll give her the details.’
Mike lingered, clearly torn. ‘Are you sure you wouldna – that the Doc wouldna prefer …’ He subsided as Gus turned and stared at him.