EIGHT

We knew, of course, what to expect, but I still felt a palpable nervousness – and from the look on Dad’s face, so did he – as we followed Masson across the echoing gym hall and beyond the curtains that had been drawn across.

Things had changed, but not noticeably for the better. The body had been lowered to the floor and was now laid neatly out in a symmetrical pose, the thick rope trailing away from it. Mark Bentham was leaning over it, making notes and directing a photographer. There were three uniformed officers acting as go-betweens and four more in plain clothes who were dusting various surfaces for fingerprints, examining the floor through magnifying glasses and plucking invisible fibres from the clothing of the corpse.

Mark did not look up as we approached and Masson did not try to disturb him. In a low voice, Masson said, ‘As you so astutely observed, the body is that of Marlene Jeffries . . .’ The pause was not hard to read; my easy identification of the battered body was potentially incriminating in his book; it was a book that began with the sentence, Anyone called Lance Elliot is at best an idiot, at worst a criminal, and always a source of dyspepsia. Having left the nasty implication of his words hanging for a while, he continued, ‘As you said, she was a PE teacher at the school, one of four. She’d been at the school for five years, according to the headmaster.’

And someone had done something horrible to her face; from the degree of distortion, it looked as if most of her facial bones had been smashed, one eye pulped; there was a huge amount of congealed blood but not enough to hide deep gashes in her forehead and cheeks, some of which appeared to be slightly curved. Dad, who was by no means squeamish, winced and whispered, ‘Oh, dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear . . .’

‘Someone didn’t like her,’ remarked Masson in his characteristically sour tone.

Mark looked up, suddenly aware of our presence. When he saw me, his face was momentarily blank before a small smile of recognition appeared. ‘Lance?’

‘Hello, Mark.’ We would have shaken hands except that he wore disposable gloves and on them was rather a lot of Marlene Jeffries’ colourful vital fluids. ‘It’s been a while.’

Mark had fair hair and faded blue eyes bracketed by laughter lines; I remember him in the bar at St George’s singing rugby songs about ‘dickey-di-do’s’ with various things attached. It was a memory that contrasted vividly with our present situation. The smile was the same, though. ‘It certainly has.’

‘I didn’t realize you were working in the area.’

‘Just started.’ He glanced at Masson, who was clearly in no mood to stand idly by for a friendly reunion between old student chums. ‘I’ve heard your name mentioned a few times already, though.’

‘If we could all get on with the task in hand,’ Masson said testily, at which Mark winked at me and said, ‘We’ll catch up later.’

‘So, what have you got for me, Dr Bentham? The usual airy waffle that I get from all you pathologists?’

It was clear that, although he might not have been around Masson for long, Mark had clearly already developed a certain degree of immunity to his waspishness. ‘Now, now, Inspector. If someone could get you all the information you need without having to have an autopsy done, I’d be out of a job, wouldn’t I?’

Masson’s face did something that only an eternal, incurable and quite possibly terminally myopic optimist would interpret as a smile. ‘Can you tell me anything concrete at all?’

Mark indicated Marlene Jeffries. ‘I can’t at the moment find any other significant injuries apart from those to her head. I’m not sure what was used, though. Curious, slightly curved shapes to some of the injuries.’

‘Some sort of curved blade? Like a scythe?’ asked Sergeant Abelson, speaking for the first time. She had a slightly husky, soft voice.

Masson grunted. ‘Are you suggesting,’ he enquired of his sergeant, ‘that Death himself was the killer?’ It was asked in a tone that might well have shrivelled a delicate flower.

Dad, helpful as ever, was not backward in coming forward. ‘Or it could have been a very old farmhand,’ he offered.

This contribution did not help the chief investigating officer cope with his customary incendiary temper, one that he appeared able to control only by several deep breaths and pulling so much air through his cigarette that it was in danger of imploding into his upper respiratory tract.

Mark frowned. ‘Hardly anything like that. It wasn’t very sharp. These are heavy blunt injuries.’

Abruptly Masson swivelled around to Abelson, a delicate pirouette that I thought he did rather well. ‘Any news on her personal circumstances?’

She shook her head but did so almost defiantly and I found myself warming to Sergeant Abelson; she was not about to go readily into that good night. Although Masson was not happy, she did little in the way of flinching, even as he said, ‘Well, get some.’

He then turned to us. ‘Thanks for your help.’ Which, it appeared, was as close as he came to a gentle dismissal. I smiled at Mark and then Dad and I trudged away; we had almost reached the doors when a cry came from our right, one that echoed around the vast room. Everyone turned. A middle-aged, emaciated man in plain clothes was calling from a side room. ‘Sir? We’ve found something.’

Everyone converged, of course; Dad and I were quite close so we had a head start, but Masson did a bit of battling and pulling of rank so that he got to the front. We were crowded into a side room on the floor of which was a padded mat, perhaps used for judo or something; there was a trail of red – clearly blood – across the diagonal,

At the back was an array of body-building equipment – dumb-bells of all sizes, medicine balls, complicated pieces of torture equipment – and a man and a woman were standing to one side at the end of the red trail across the mat. Masson walked a parallel line to the bloodstains as he crossed the mat; Dad and I, along with everyone else, walked around the edges.

The exhibit?

It was a small dumb-bell that seemed to have been dropped in a puddle of blood in the corner of the room. You didn’t have to try too hard to fit the curves of the weights to the curves in the head and face of Marlene Jeffries.