‘Are you confirming suicide?’ Isaac asked as he stood back from the body. No one in the house showed any emotion, although one of the CSIs had said that he liked the house, and how much it would be to buy a place like it, and there was no way he could do it on the measly pittance he received.
Isaac knew the man wasn't insensitive. It was how some dealt with the situation, others succumbing to a few too many drinks of a night, and one or two were known to vomit in the gutter at the end of their shift. Isaac wasn’t any of those, inured as he was to death. And hanging there, the body of Matilda Montgomery. He could see, in spite of the pained expression on her face and the cord around her neck, that she had been an attractive woman in life. Yet she had committed suicide. Colin Young was now known to be Barry Montgomery, her brother, proven by a photo of the two in the kitchen, Amelia in the background with a beaming smile.
‘You couldn’t be wrong about the suicide on this one?’ Isaac asked.
‘Pathology will check if she had been taking drugs, but I doubt they’ll find anything. The woman committed suicide, open and shut case,’ Windsor replied.
Isaac didn’t like open and shut cases, they invariably had a flaw somewhere, but he trusted Gordon Windsor. The woman, if she had not been seen out and about for several days, must have stayed in the house, and then decided to kill herself. Downstairs, the CSIs were working their way through the rooms, relaying to Windsor and Isaac that nothing was out of order. No one else had been in the house, at least for a week, and food had been taken from the refrigerator, cooked and eaten, the dishes washed up afterwards and neatly put away, handles at the front, labels on the jars of food pointing forward. A clear sign of a possible obsessive-compulsive disorder.
‘Did she kill her brother?’ Windsor asked. The two men were now downstairs and on the street.
‘It’s a possibility,’ Isaac said. ‘Inconsolable grief at what she had done, followed by days on her own, commiserating with herself, and then what we saw upstairs. How long before you remove the body?’
‘Later today. A messy hanging, the way the rope was around her neck. She would have suffered for a while.’
‘And regretted it?’
‘Who knows the state of her mind. Most suicides are either drugged or drunk, sometimes both. Not with her from what we can see. The beam’s only eleven feet off the ground, so she climbed up the step ladder, threw the rope around the beam, and the noose around her neck, and then stepped off. It’s almost as if she wasn’t sure whether to go through with it.’
‘The ladder was tipped over,’ Isaac said.
‘She could have panicked, thrust her foot out in despair, hoping to find the ladder, kicking it over.’
‘Not a nice way to go.’
‘At least that’s solved the murder of Colin Young. Confirmed as the brother?’
‘Their parents will be in Challis Street within a couple of hours.’
‘Fratricide. You don’t see it often.’
‘The act of killing a brother. Not a lot; in fact, I can’t remember another case. According to Matilda’s friend, the dead woman was close to her brother. But he’s still an unknown. We may have a name, but his movements are still unclear, and why was he with Christine Mason?’
‘He could have been serious about the woman, ashamed to admit that he felt love for her. An Oedipus complex, the Mason woman being the mother substitute. Mind you, they always get it wrong. If you read your Greek mythology, Oedipus didn’t lust after his mother. He never knew who she was, and when he found out, he gouged out his own eyes, not wanting to see the wickedness of the world and what he had done.’
***
Isaac knocked on the door of Amelia Bentham’s house and went in. In the living room, Wendy sat with Amelia. The situation appeared calm, and there were no tears.
‘This is Detective Chief Inspector Cook,’ Wendy said.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Amelia said, standing up to shake his hand. She was a fine-looking woman, he had to admit, reminded him in some ways of Jess. Why do I keep thinking of her, when I’m with Jenny? Isaac thought to himself.
‘A coffee?’ Amelia asked.
‘A juice, if you’ve got one.’
‘Fresh orange. I squeezed it myself this morning.’ Amelia got up from the sofa where she had been sitting and went into the kitchen. A minute later she returned with a jug and three glasses. Isaac poured the juice for them all, taking a gulp before speaking.
‘Matilda?’ Amelia asked.
‘I’m sorry to say it, but she committed suicide.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Not long, twelve to fourteen hours.’
‘Gordon Windsor?’ Wendy asked, preferring something stronger than orange juice, but not mentioning it to the woman who had a well-stocked drinks cabinet on one side of the room.
‘He doesn’t believe that alcohol or drugs are involved.’
‘Not Matilda. She could be a bit on the puritanical side sometimes. No drugs, weakens the resolve she would say. And alcohol made her come out in hives. At least that was what she said, although I’m not sure she believed it, just used it to avoid accepting drinks from drunken fools at the pub.’
‘She visited them?’
‘And clubbing. She liked to have a dance, a good laugh, and then be back at a reasonable hour.’
‘And you, Miss Bentham?’
‘I like to kick on sometimes.’
‘Men?’
‘There was one man that Matilda went out with a
