He’d meant to head back home to his flat in Empire Dock, but the encounter with Juliet changed his mind. He wasn’t hungry or in the mood to cook. Besides, his idea of cooking was to rip the clingfilm from a ready-made meal in a box and sling it into the microwave. He’d wander into town for a drink. Maybe two.
Half a dozen middle-aged Japanese men dressed up to look like John Lennon boogied across Water Street. A bus screeched to a halt in front of them and the driver waved his fist, but they took no notice. There was a Lennon convention this week and the city was packed with tourists singing ‘Give Peace a Chance’.
He crossed the road and headed for the Stapledon Bar in Drury Lane. It was frighteningly trendy, and the prices chilled his spine, but they served good beer. Accountants and bankers packed the place at lunchtime and for the first couple of hours after work, but now they’d be speeding home to their luxury barn conversions, making way for people from apartment blocks on the waterfront. Later on, chances were you’d be shoved aside by the bulky minders of rock singers and football stars en route for the VIP lounge, accompanied by a swarm of slinky blondes. Flashbulbs kept popping; the bar staff must have a hotline to the paparazzi. The celebrities basked in the free publicity and the Stapledon boosted its reputation as a happening place. In the fame game, everybody played to win.
The entrance to the Stapledon was inconspicuous, but the bar area was much larger than you would have guessed from outside. The walls were covered with huge murals depicting a graphic artist’s lurid interpretations of scenes from sci-fi classics. A kraken waking alongside a horde of extra-terrestrials wielding ray guns, a troop of triffids that looked like refugees from the foyer at John Newton House. On half a dozen TV screens suspended from the ceiling, Tom Cruise fled from Martian invaders in The War of the Worlds. A synthesised buzz hummed in the background; Harry recognised the theme from Blade Runner.
A notice by the door explained that the bar was named after a Thirties sci-fi novelist, Merseyside born and bred, yet boasting the unlikely first name of Olaf. He wrote novels about forms of intelligent life beaten down by an indifferent universe. A theme refined, Harry suspected, during Olaf Stapledon’s wage-slave years, spent clerking at the Blue Funnel Line’s office, round the corner from here.
Someone tapped Harry on the shoulder. The way today was going, he half-expected to come face-to-face with something slithery out of Alien. Not quite, but a short balding man with a wispy moustache and protuberant eyes between small rimless glasses. If he hadn’t been wearing a blue and white football shirt, he might have been mistaken for a cryogenically unfrozen Dr Crippen. This was Victor Creevey, the building manager from John Newton House.
‘What will you have, Harry, my old friend?’
They weren’t old friends. Harry doubted they ever would be, and not only because Victor supported Everton Football Club, but where was the harm in a drink or two? This evening he could use the company.
‘Pint of Cain’s, thanks.’
‘You were last out?’
‘From our office, yes. There was a cleaner…’
‘I don’t count the cleaners,’ Victor said. ‘The supervisor has a key to the alarm system so they can come and go as they please. Usually they knock off half an hour early, but I turn a blind eye.’
‘This girl seemed in distress.’
‘Lithuanian, was she?’ Victor asked, as though this explained everything. ‘The agency keeps sending kids from places you’d never believe. Estonia, Latvia, wherever. Illegals mostly, but it’s not for me to ask questions if the contract price is right. Most of the girls don’t speak proper English, you know.’
Harry knew plenty of English people who didn’t speak proper English, but he let it pass. ‘She’s not Lithuanian.’
Victor shrugged. ‘You know what these kids are like, Harry. She’ll have rowed with her boyfriend or one of her mates. Happens all the time. I only hope she hasn’t hung around after the rest of them have gone and triggered off the alarm.’
‘She left before I did.’
‘There you are, then. Nobody stays later than you and Jim Crusoe. The other folk usually scoot out the door by half five. The developers have only signed leases on two or three other offices. You rattle around like peas in a tin. At least it makes my job easier.’ His grin revealed small discoloured teeth. ‘That’s why it doesn’t hurt if I play hooky once in a while.’
‘The flats are moving, aren’t they?’
Victor wrinkled his snub nose. ‘Seen the prices they’re asking? You could buy a five-bedroom detached in Woolton Village and still have change. When the agents released the first phase of flats, two dozen were snapped up. Buy-to-let speculations. Take a gander at John Newton House from the Strand one night. You won’t see many lights. It’s like the Marie Celeste.’
‘I ran into someone who lives on the top floor this evening. Woman called Juliet May.’
‘Keep your hands off, mate,’ Victor leered. ‘Do you know who she used to be married to?’
Harry was all innocent surprise. ‘Mr May?’
‘Not any old Mr May, my friend.’ Theatrical pause. ‘Casper May himself.’
‘Ah.’
‘Not a man to cross, Harry, take it from me.’ The drinks arrived. ‘Good health, mate.’
‘But you said they are divorced?’
‘Casper still likes to keep a close eye on her. Trust me.’
Harry tasted the beer, torn between the urge to find out and knowing that it was prudent to keep his nose out. Of course, there was only one possible outcome.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Why else would he install his ex in a penthouse at the top of a building he owns? Nice arrangement, if you ask me. Saves on alimony and if he fancies a trip down memory lane, he has a spare key. If you follow my drift.’
Harry winced. ‘Casper May owns John Newton House?’
‘Didn’t you realise?’
No, Harry didn’t have the faintest idea. Casper doled out work to half the lawyers in Liverpool and Jim was among those who traded properties on his behalf. Jim didn’t know about the affair with Juliet, but he’d sensed that Harry didn’t care for Casper and never discussed what his client was up to. Harry’s idea of hell was reading leases or balance sheets and he left the business side of the practice to his partner. Suddenly he understood how they could afford the rent. Jim must have done a deal on his fees to secure the premises on favourable terms.
‘We signed an agreement with the developers.’ He reached back into the trivia warehouse of his memory. ‘Culture Capital Holdings, something like that?’
‘Spot on. Casper May is chairman.’
Harry took a swig of beer as an aid to digesting this news. Jesus, he’d cuckolded his own landlord. For all he knew, this was a breach of one of the covenants spelt out in the small print of the lease that he’d never bothered to read.
‘Bad day, mate? Why don’t you come over and join us? Barney will be wondering what’s happened to his dry martini.’
Victor gestured to one of the plush semi-circular booths at the back of the bar. The lighting was sepulchral, but Harry made out a tall, skinny figure in a dark suit, cradling a glass beneath a scene of manic book-burning inspired by Fahrenheit 451.
‘Don’t let me interrupt your evening.’
‘No problem, Barney will be made up to meet you.’
This seemed unlikely, judging by the tall man’s languid pose, one long leg hooked over the other, but Harry followed as Victor bustled over. In the background, Vangelis had given way to Richard Strauss. Also Sprach Zarathustra, definitely the only tone poem Harry had ever stored on his iPod. As he exchanged cagey smiles with the man in the booth, he caught a pungent whiff in the air. A strange and unpleasant smell, yet somehow familiar.
‘Didn’t I tell you that Harry Devlin had moved into John Newton House? Meet the man himself! Harry, this is Barney Eagleson.’
Barney didn’t stand up to shake hands. His grip was weak, his palm moist. Long dark hair flowed on to his shoulders and a nose stud glinted in the gloom. He wore a raffish black velvet jacket and had the hollow-eyed look of someone who’d just stepped out of a poem by Baudelaire.
‘Harry Devlin himself, eh? Victor tells me you’ve been mixed up in lots of murder cases.’
‘I’m a criminal lawyer. It’s part of the job.’
‘You’re supposed to be a bit of a detective yourself.’
‘That was a long time ago.’
‘You’ll have heard about the murder?’ Victor asked.
‘The body at Waterloo?’
‘They say a serial killer is at work. Is that right, Barney?’
Barney put down his glass and raised a finger to his lips.
‘Trouble is, Harry,’ Victor sighed, ‘this chap’s an oyster, the soul of discretion. He won’t say a word about what’s happening with the investigation, even though he does have the inside track.’
‘You work with the police?’
‘Not exactly.’ Barney’s nose stud twinkled.
Victor leered. ‘He’s a mobile embalmer.’
A wild vision sprang into Harry’s mind. Barney driving a van emblazoned with the slogan Stop Me and Bury One.
‘I prefer to call myself a freelance restorative artist,’ Barney said. ‘I’m not tied to any particular undertaker. I’d rather be self-employed. I like the freedom. The hours aren’t bad and weekend working doesn’t worry me. Sorting out the tax and pension side is a small price to pay. You’re in the service sector, Harry, you know what I’m talking about.’ He dug into his trouser pocket. ‘Take my business card. The website address is on there as well.’
‘Website?’
‘It’s all about marketing these days, isn’t it? Public relations. Have a look at my blog. I like to reach out beyond the embalming community. As a matter of fact, I’ve tidied up one or two of the corpses in cases you’ve been involved with.’
Harry didn’t want to talk about the past. He tucked the card into his wallet and took a swig of beer.
‘The body on the beach won’t have been embalmed yet.’
‘You’re right. Denise Onuoha, though, she was one of mine.’
One of mine. The words hung in the air.
‘Don’t bother trying to persuade him to let on what the murderer did to her,’ Victor said after a pause. ‘Waste of breath, he’s not telling.’
‘I have to keep mum,’ Barney said. ‘Once an embalmer gets a reputation for…a loose tongue, he’s finished.’
He gave Harry a cheeky wink, as though daring him to participate in a secret game. But Harry didn’t know the rules.
‘They were saying on the radio that a serial killer’s on the rampage.’ Victor’s small eyes shone with excitement. ‘I heard an interview with Professor Maeve Hopes, the profiler. She says the first crime is the key. That’s when the murderer makes most mistakes, before he’s honed his skills. Fascinating, huh?’
‘Victor is passionate about crime scene and forensic stuff,’ Barney murmured. ‘Can’t get enough of it, he’s a walking encyclopaedia. You name it – bite-mark analysis, decoding the pattern of scattered bloodstains, Victor is your man.’
As he exchanged a grin with the building manager, Harry again sensed that he’d been excluded from some private joke. He gulped down the rest of his pint. A fascination for forensics was fine for a bloke who resembled Dr Crippen, but Harry didn’t fancy an evening in the company of a murderer’s look-alike.
‘I’d best be going. Must prepare for court tomorrow.’
Victor wagged an admonitory finger. ‘You work too hard!’
‘Lovely to talk,’ Barney said. ‘I’m sure we’ll meet again.’
Harry shook hands again. No question, the man reeked of something strangely distinctive. He felt a frisson of repugnance.
‘Don’t worry, he’s not sizing you up for a cold slab,’ Victor said. ‘Barney often drops into John Newton House. In between bodies, so to speak.’
When Harry reached the pavement outside, he halted to take in a lungful of evening air. Victor Creevey’s words reminded him of that terrible morning all those years ago when he’d first encountered the smell that clung to Barney Eagleson.
In a chilly mortuary, gazing down at the waxed features of his dead wife.
The man stank of formaldehyde.
The light on the answering machine flashed as Harry walked into his flat. He wasn’t expecting a call. It was bound to be bad news. Those clients who weren’t in trouble with the police were having their lives shredded by divorce or being ground into dust by the mills of litigation. They’d have to wait.
The flat was in sore need of a spring clean. Harry was a hoarder, though he couldn’t explain even to himself why he was so reluctant to throw things away: books he’d not read for years, music seldom played, shirts too unfashionable even for him. He walked under the shower, sluicing away the stench of the morgue. His waist was thickening; it wasn’t imagination that his suit trousers felt tight. In days gone by, he’d knocked back the pints and scoffed the chip butties without a second thought. They never made any difference. But things had changed.
‘You’re getting old,’ he said to the misty bathroom mirror.
His reflection glowered back at him.
Not exactly Tom Cruise, he was forced to admit. He’d never been vain about his appearance. Too lazy to bother too much about it. Somehow he’d attracted Liz, and later Juliet May, and they were women who could pick and choose. In the end, they both chose to live with someone else.
Was Jim right, did he fancy Ceri Hussain? Irrelevant; he was out of her league. She’d taken a first at Cambridge, shone at both medicine and law, and written a learned treatise exploring obscure crannies of the Coroner’s Rules. Close to forty, she was as glamorous as she was successful, and she was very successful. She was rumoured to be in the running for appointment as the country’s chief coroner. When conducting an inquest, she was calm, sympathetic, patient, mistress of her own emotions while relatives of the bereaved succumbed to tears and rage. He’d learnt from their chat that they had a few things in common. Ceri might be keen on ballet, Battleship Potemkin and Bartok, none of which set Harry’s juices flowing, but she also confessed to a weakness for Dionne Warwick, Don’t Look Now, and Dashiell Hammett. For an hour in the bar at the Adelphi, she’d seemed at ease in his company, but he’d made no attempt to see her again, or even contrive a chance encounter that might lead to something.
‘Feel the fear and do it anyway?’ he asked himself.
His reflection cringed. Had it come to this, Harry Devlin quoting a management consultant? And what did management consultants know about fear, come to that?
He towelled himself dry and flung on a tee shirt and shorts. The flat looked out onto the Mersey and he opened the double window and spent ten minutes gazing at the river. It was the closest he ever came to therapy. He and Liz had flown inside the Grand Canyon and been serenaded in a gondola under the Rialto. But no question, this was his favourite view in the world. He loved to watch at sundown, when it seemed to him that the shades on the water differed subtly every time. Bathed in a peach-yellow haze, even the oil depot at Birkenhead on the opposite shore took on a mystical splendour. Not long ago the United Nations had categorised the Mersey as a dead zone, because of pollution rather than the homicide rate. But their statistics were thirty years out of date; maybe they should concentrate on securing world peace. These days salmon leapt in the Mersey, although Harry wasn’t sure he was ready to swim in it.
He wandered into the kitchen, but didn’t have the appetite for a proper meal. Grabbing a jumbo sized bag of hand-cooked sea salt and crushed black pepper crisps from the cupboard, he poured himself a glass of Coke. Healthy living could start tomorrow. Though if he was to meet his end in a few days’ time, really, what was the point?
As he snacked, he took another look at the Borth inquest file. Aled Borth had come to him for advice following his mother’s death. The late Nesta Borth, widow of a long-deceased bus driver, had been seventy-nine years old and suffering from enough ailments to provide a warning against the downsides of extended life expectancy. Yet her death at the Indian Summer Care Home in Crosby came out of the blue, according to Aled. He’d visited her the evening before her death and said she seemed as fit as a flea. A flea on extensive medication, but not at death’s door. Aled’s suspicion that Nesta had not died of natural causes was fuelled by the discovery in her bedside table of a codicil to her will executed a month before her passing. She’d left ten thousand pounds to Dr Malachy Needham, who owned the Home. Aled, her only child, was incandescent, especially as her little terraced house had been sold to fund the care fees. Once the legacy was paid, there would only be buttons left for him. But there was nothing unusual in people becoming embittered about inheritance. It was when the post-mortem revealed unexpectedly high doses of morphine in Nesta’s body, far in excess of therapeutic treatment levels, that Ceri Hussain insisted that the police started asking questions.
It didn’t look good for Needham. Yet it didn’t make much sense, either. He’d trained as a medic, and his wife was a nurse, but for years he’d focused on business ventures. Years ago he’d made a quick buck by retailing fake Beatles memorabilia, nowadays he had a finger in innumerable pies. He owned holiday homes in Tuscany and the Caribbean and drove a silver Rolls Royce, so he would scarcely risk life imprisonment for the sake of a measly ten thousand quid. Although hadn’t Dr Shipman, having successfully murdered countless patients, come to grief through forging a will which sought to cheat a daughter of her proper inheritance? Foolish, given that the daughter was a solicitor. Harry presumed Shipman must have wanted to be caught.
Needham had spent a small fortune proving his innocence, Harry reflected, as he sifted through the papers. He’d hired a shit-hot firm of London lawyers and their first move had been to threaten Aled with an injunction if he said anything defamatory about their highly respectable client. Their master-stroke was to instruct an expert in pharmacokinetics to examine the toxicological evidence. Professor Afridi from Edinburgh, a man with more qualifications than you could shake a stick at, had established that Nesta Borth’s fondness for gin – testified to by everyone other than Aled – had turned her liver into a sodden, malfunctioning mess. As a result, her body had been incapable of excreting the opiates at the usual rate. The damage to her metabolism produced misleading toxicological results. She had indeed been given the right morphine doses and Needham was in the clear.
If Harry hoped Aled Borth would be glad to learn that his mother hadn’t ended her days at the hands of a rapacious poisoner, he was soon disabused. As far as Borth was concerned, there were lies, damned lies, and expert medical evidence. Needham was guilty and that was that. When the Crown Prosecution Service sat on the file for month after month, he persuaded himself that the net was closing in on Needham. Once the CPS announced that no charges were to be preferred, he reacted with fury.
An inquest could now be held and Aled made clear to Harry that he intended to accuse Needham of murder in open court. Not a good idea, and this afternoon Harry had meant to talk some sense into him. A lawyer’s job was to tell clients truths that they preferred not to hear.
Maybe one of those clients was behind the prank with the death notice. Surely it wasn’t Borth?
He closed the file and flicked on the TV. There wasn’t much on. He couldn’t face yet another concert by rock stars with big cars and even bigger fortunes protesting about climate change and poverty, but the countless channels he zapped through with the remote offered nothing better. Showbiz Darts, Amazing Traffic Cop Videos, Footballers’ Wives Makeover Tips, Zoo Vet, Extreme Cosmetic Dentistry, a repeat of Celebrities without Shame…no, no, too demoralising. He wasn’t in the mood to watch Wayne Saxelby’s girlfriend frolicking in the wet tee shirt that had made her reputation, and frankly hoped he never would be. Time to chill out with soft soul music. Drop down on the sofa and see what the shuffle came up with.
James Ingram. ‘This is the Night’.
But he couldn’t settle. His eyes strayed to the answering machine. It sat uneasily on a wonky table that proved there was no such thing as simple home-assembly. Its monotonous blinking was a silent reproach.
With a sigh, he ambled across the carpet and pressed play.
A couple of clicks, followed by silence. Christ, don’t say he’d been called up by a heavy breather…no, what was that?
Even though he strained his ears, he’d missed it. He turned the volume to maximum and played the tape again.
A distant, throaty whisper. Gender indistinguishable.
‘Midsummer’s Eve.’