‘Better take him up.’
Stephen smiled apologetically at her as they passed and struggled up the stairs. Finally, they dumped their burden on the bedspread and left Katie in the room with him. At first she didn’t move. She just stood by the window looking at Fellowes in horror. Surely Sam knew how much she hated and feared drunks, how much they disgusted her. And Mr Fellowes had seemed such a nice sober man.
She couldn’t really picture her father clearly, for he had died along with her mother in a fire when Katie was only four, but he had certainly been a drunk, and she was sure that he was at the root of her feelings.
The only vague image she retained was of a big vulgar man who frightened her with his loud voice, his whiskers and his roughness.
Once, when they hadn’t known she was watching, she saw him hurting her mother in the bedroom, making her groan and squirm in a way that sent shivers up Katie’s spine. Of course, when she got older, she realized what they must have been doing, but the early memory was as firmly established and as deeply rooted as cancer. She also remembered once when her father fell down and she was afraid that he’d hurt himself. When she went to help him though, he knocked her over and cursed her. She was terrified that he would do the same thing to her as he had done to her mother, but she couldn’t remember any more about the incident, no matter how hard she tried.
The fire was a memory she had blocked out too, though strange tongue-like flames sometimes roared and crackled in her nightmares. According to her grandmother, Katie had been in the house at the time, but the firemen had arrived before the blaze reached her room. Katie had been saved by the grace of God, so her granny said, whereas her parents, the sinners, had been consumed by the flames of hell.
The fire had been caused by smoking in bed, and her grandmother had seemed especially satisfied by that, as if the irony somehow marked it as God’s special work, an answer to her prayers. It had all been God’s will, His justice, and Katie was obliged to spend her life in gratitude and devoted service.
Katie took a deep breath, rolled Fellowes over carefully and pulled back the sheets - they could be washed easily, but not the quilted spread. Then she unlaced his walking boots and put them on some newspaper by the bed. They weren’t muddy, but fragments of earth had lodged in the ribbed treads.
‘Cleanliness is next to godliness,’ her grandmother had drilled into her. And a lot easier to achieve, Katie might have added if she had dared. Apart from an unusually long list of its attributes - mostly ‘thou shalt nots’, which seemed to include everything most normal people enjoyed - godliness was an elusive quality as far as Katie was concerned. Lately, she had found herself thinking about it a lot, recalling her grandmother’s harsh words and ‘necessary’ punishments: her mouth washed out with soap for lying; a spell in the coal hole for ‘swaying wantonly’ to a fragment of music that had drifted in from next door’s radio. These had all been preceded by the words, ‘This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you.’
Fellowes stirred and snapped Katie out of her reverie. For a second, his grey eyes opened wide and he grasped her hand. She could feel the fear and confusion flow from his bony fingers through her wrist.
‘Moving,’ he mumbled, falling back into a drunken sleep again. ‘Moving…’
Spittle gathered at the edges of his lips and dribbled down his chin. Katie shuddered. Leaving him, she hurried back downstairs. There was still the evening meal to prepare, and the garden needed weeding.
THREE
Banks leaned over the edge of Rawley Force and watched Glendenning coming up in the winch. It was an amusing sight. The tall white-haired doctor sat erect, trying to retain as much dignity as he could. A cigarette dangled from the left corner of his mouth, as usual, and he clutched his brown bag tightly against his stomach.
Luckily there had been hardly any rain over the past two weeks, so the waterfall to the doctor’s right was reduced to a trickle. The staff at the Mountain Rescue post had been only too willing to help and had come out and set up the winch in no time. Now the police team were ready to come up slowly, one at a time, and Glendenning, as befitted his status, was first in line.
Puffing, as he struggled out of the harness, the doctor nodded curtly at Banks and straightened the crease in his suit trousers. Banks led him half a mile along the wooded valley to the scene, where Gristhorpe still sat alone.
‘Thanks for coming so quickly,’ the superintendent said to Glendenning, getting up and dusting off his seat. Everyone in Eastvale Regional Police Headquarters found it paid to be polite, even deferential, to the doctor. Although he was a crusty old bugger, he was one of the best pathologists in the country and they were lucky he had chosen Eastvale as his home.
Glendenning lit another cigarette from the stub of his old one and asked, ‘Where is it, then?’
Gristhorpe pointed towards the pile of branches. The doctor cursed under his breath as he tackled the stepping stones, and Gristhorpe turned to Banks and winked. ‘Everyone here, Alan?’
‘Looks like it.’
Next the young photographer, Peter Darby, came hurrying towards them, trying to head off Glendenning before the doctor could get to work. To Banks he always looked far too fresh-faced and innocent for his line of work, but he had never been known to bat an eyelid, no matter what they asked him to photograph.
After him came Sergeant Hatchley, red-faced after his short walk from Rawley Force along the hanging valley. The fair-haired sergeant was a big man, like Gristhorpe, and although he was twenty years younger, his muscle was turning quickly to fat. He resembled a rugby prop forward, a position he had indeed played on the local team until cigarettes and beer took their toll on his stamina.
Banks filled him in on the details while Gristhorpe busied himself with the scene- of-crime team.
Glendenning, kneeling by the corpse, kept shooing the others away like flies. At last, he packed his bag and struggled back over the beck, stretching out his arms for balance like a tightrope walker. With one hand he clung on to his brown bag, and in the other he held a test tube.
‘Bloody awkward place to go finding a corpse,’ he grumbled, as if the superintendent were personally responsible.
‘Aye, well,’ Gristhorpe replied, ‘we don’t get to pick and choose in our business. I don’t suppose you can tell us much till after the post-mortem?’
Glendenning screwed up his face against the smoke that rose from his cigarette. ‘Not much,’ he said.
‘Looks like a stab wound to me. Probably pierced the heart from under the ribcage.’
‘Then someone got very close to him indeed,’ Gristhorpe said. ‘It must have been someone he knew and trusted.’
Glendenning sniffed. ‘I’ll leave that kind of speculation to you boys, if you don’t mind. There are lacerations and blows to the face, too. Can’t say what did it at the moment, or when it was done. Been dead about ten days. Not more than twelve.’
‘How can you be certain?’ Banks asked, startled by the information.
‘I can’t be certain, laddie,’ Glendenning said, ‘that’s the problem. Between ten and twelve days doesn’t count as accurate with me. I might be able to be more precise after the PM, but no promises. Those chappies over there have got a bag to put him in. He’ll need to soak in a Lysol bath for a day or two.’
Glendenning smiled and held up his test tube. ‘Maggots,’ he said.
The three detectives looked at the white, slow-moving blobs and exchanged puzzled glances.
Glendenning sighed and spoke as he would to a group of backward children. ‘Simple really. Bluebottle larvae. The bluebottle lays its eggs in daylight, usually when the sun’s shining. If the weather’s warm, as it has been lately, they hatch on the first day. Then you get what’s called the “first instar” maggot. That wee beauty sheds its skin like a snake after eight to fourteen hours, and then the second instar, the one you use for fishing’ - and here he glanced at Gristhorpe, a keen angler - ‘that one eats like a pig for five or six days before going into its pupa case. Look at these, gentlemen.’ He held up the test tube again. ‘These, as you can see, are fat maggots. Lazy. Mature. And they’re not in their pupa cases yet. Therefore, they must have been laid nine or ten days ago. Add on a day or so for the bluebottles to find the body and lay, and you’ve got twelve days at the outside.’
It was the most eloquent and lengthy speech Banks had ever heard Glendenning deliver. There was obviously a potential teacher in the brusque chain-smoking Scot with the trail of ash like the Milky Way down his waistcoat.
The doctor smiled at his audience. ‘Simpson,’ he said.
‘Pardon?’ Banks asked.
‘Simpson. Keith Simpson. I studied under him. Our equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, only Simpson’s real.’
‘I see,’ said Banks, who had learned to tease after so long in Yorkshire. ‘A kind of real-life Quincy, you mean?’ He felt Gristhorpe nudge him in the ribs.
Glendenning scowled and a half-inch of ash fell off the end of his cigarette. ‘Quite,’ he said, and put the test tube in his bag. ‘I hope that glorified truss over there can get me back down safely.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Gristhorpe assured him. ‘It will. And thank you very much.’
‘Aye. Now I have first-hand knowledge of what it feels like to have my arse in a sling,’ Glendenning said as he walked away.
Banks laughed and turned back to watch the experts at work. The photographs had been taken, and the team were busy searching the ground around
