Brief Cases Box Set Read online

  Through the open window, it being such a fair day, she could hear the high-pitched yips of the dogs’ excitement, and the voices of the boys calling after their pets. Occasionally her husband’s voice boomed out with an instruction, but more often with laughter so, it seemed to her, that they were all having a jolly nice time, including herself in this thought.

  Harry Falconer had finished with his newspaper for the time being, and was having a pre-luncheon doze on the sofa, covered in three furry bodies, joining him in this unexpected opportunity to use his body heat, when the phone rang. He started awake and sat up immediately, scattering cats as he got to his feet. This had better be a cold call. And if it was work, it’d better be good, disturbing him on the first day off he’d had for a fortnight.

  ‘Falconer. What?’ he answered, peremptorily.

  ‘Harry, I’m so sorry to disturb you,’ said the voice of Bob Bryant from the station, ‘but there’s been a very nasty death in Upper Darley. I think you need to get out there. And Carmichael.’

  ‘What’s happened? And why can’t someone else handle it for a change?’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Superintendent Chivers, and he wants you out there.’

  ‘Sadistic bastard! Right! Where is it, and what happened?’

  ‘It’s at the chip shop on the Riverside Parade, in Upper Darley, and it’s a nasty one. I don’t even want to describe it. It turns my stomach.’

  ‘And yet you want me to go out and look at it?’

  ‘Sorry, Harry, but it is your job. Get yourself out there, and I’ll send Carmichael to join you.’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ sighed Falconer. It was half-past twelve, and he now wouldn’t have time for any lunch. And on his day off, too! Maybe he could snaffle a bag of chips when he got there.

  wo little dogs, now exhausted, were having a nap on Kerry’s lap when the phone rang in Jasmine Cottage, in Castle Farthing’s High Street. Sliding them carefully off her, she rose to answer the phone. ‘Hello, Bob,’ she greeted the sergeant. ‘Surely you’re not going to disturb Davey on his day off? He hasn’t had one for a couple of weeks, and he’s out on the green, now, playing football with the boys.’

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Carmichael. I wouldn’t have called if the super hadn’t insisted. Can you call him in, so that I can have a word?’ asked Bryant, apologetically.

  ‘Of course I can, and call me Kerry. Everyone else does. Hang on a moment,’ she said, and put the receiver down on the little table where the phone base lived.

  Opening the cottage door, she put her hands to her mouth, to create an improvised loud-hailer, and called, ‘Davey – phone. Urgent!’ and watched as he said a few words to the boys and sprinted back to the cottage, the boys trailing in his wake, evidently disappointed that their fun had been cut short on their day with Daddy Davey.

  ‘Carmichael here,’ said the sergeant, picking up the

  phone, wondering what could be so urgent on his day off.

  ‘Davey, it’s Bob from the station. There’s been a nasty death at the chip shop, on that parade of shops at Upper Darley. Do you know the one? Good! The super want you to meet Harry out there. You’ll find out the details when you arrive.’

  ‘But, what’s hap …’ Carmichael started to ask, but Bob Bryant had cut him off, without a shred of detail. He’d just have to get himself over there as quickly as he could, and find out what had happened when he got there.

  Falconer, living on the outskirts of Market Darley, was the first one to arrive on the scene, and found a crowd of would-be customers, now turned rubber-neckers, outside the plate glass window. Crime-scene tape had already been stretched across the front of the shop, and PC Merv Green was on duty at the door to keep sight-seers away, as far as was humanly possible. There was always an audience at the site of any public death. It was simple human nature, but not a nice side of it.

  Pushing his way through the people gawking for a look through the window, he held out his warrant card and pushed his way through to where PC Green stood guard. ‘Know what’s happened in there?’ he asked, before entering.

  ‘Very nasty one, sir,’ replied Green, his face in agreement with his name. ‘I’m not usually squeamish, but this is a very unpleasant one. I think you’d better go inside and see for yourself. I don’t want to think about it, let alone talk about it. Sorry, sir.’

  This was unlike Green, and Bob Bryant had been reluctant to give any details either. Falconer’s insides gave a little flip of apprehension as these two thoughts collided. These were both experienced policemen. Whatever could have given them such a fit of the heebie-jeebies? Wondering if Dr Christmas had already arrived, or was still on his way, he pushed open the glass door and went inside the chip shop, preparing for the worst.

  ‘Hello, Harry,’ said a familiar voice, and Falconer became aware of Dr Phillip Christmas and another man, standing at the back of the shop, well away from the fryers. ‘May I introduce you to Frank Carrington, the owner of this establishment?’

  Falconer approached and shook the man’s hand, taking the opportunity to introduce himself at the same time. ‘So, what have we got here?’ he asked, and was surprised when the owner just pointed at the counter of the shop. After staring at this for a few seconds, Mr Carrington finally spoke, his voice a hoarse whisper. ‘It’s behind there!’ he croaked. ‘At the chip fryer.’

  Christmas gave Falconer a look, and added, ‘I hope you haven’t already had your lunch, Harry. It’s gruesome!’

  ‘I haven’t, as a matter of fact,’ Falconer informed them, and then, finally reaching the other side of the counter, stopped dead, his mouth opening in surprise and horror, his eyes involuntarily closing to shut out what was in front of them.

  Turning back to look at the other two men present, he opened his eyes again, and said, ‘I think I might give lunch a miss today. Who the hell did this? It’s iniquitous! What a bloody awful way to die!’

  ‘Sorry, Harry. Wish I could have spared you this one,’ sympathised Christmas. ‘Maybe it’d be better if I told you what happened, rather than you poke around for yourself.’

  ‘I think that’s a very good idea. I don’t fancy going any nearer to ‘that’ than I have to, and the thought of ‘poking around’, makes me positively queasy,’ replied Falconer, joining them at the other end of the shop, well away from the fryers, where a couple of grotty tables and a few mismatched chairs were placed for anyone who wanted to dine-in.

  ‘Take a seat, first, Harry. In fact, let’s all sit down. It’s not a nice subject for discussion, and I think we’d be better off seated once I start going into details.’

  ‘Do I have to stay?’ asked Carrington. ‘After all, I found her, and I feel as sick as a dog.’

  ‘Make a note of your name and address, and leave it on the counter, and I’ll be in touch later,’ Falconer told him, then waited until he’d complied before turning back to Dr Christmas. ‘Come on, out with it. You know you’ve got to tell me sometime,’ he said, looking apprehensive. ‘Who? How? And when? And why, for God’s sake. That’s sick, and it took some doing. We’ll work out who is responsible, when we’ve got something more to go on.’

  Christmas drew a deep breath, and commenced his grisly tale. ‘“Who” is easy. The victim is a Mrs Sylvia Beeton, who had worked part-time here for years. I got her address from Mr Carrington, so you don’t need to worry about that.

  ‘‘When’ isn’t too difficult, either, as she was supposed to arrive at work to get everything started at about eleven-thirty this morning, and open up at noon. Mr Carrington arrived just after opening time, and found customers waiting outside, unable to get in – she’d have locked the door while she did her preparation, and then not unlocked it again until opening time.

  ‘That seems straightforward enough, so far,’ Falconer interrupted the doctor, in a vain effort to delay what he knew would follow next.

  ‘Oh, it is, but it’s the ‘how’ that’s the stomach-churner.’ Here it came then. Falconer steeled himself for the grisly deta
ils. ‘From what I could glean from an examination of the scene, when I arrived about fifteen minutes ago, someone dumped the large container of batter over her head, then pushed her head into the chip fryer, and held her down with the large chip scoop. As she was due to start pre-frying chips, the oil was up to temperature, and I’m afraid that’s not very good for the complexion.’

  ‘Oh, my good God!’ exclaimed Falconer, unable to quite comprehend what he had been told. ‘I’ll have to take a look, for the sake of procedure, but now I know what happened, I know I’m not going to like it one little bit.’

  Slowly, like a child who is afraid that someone might jump out at him, Falconer approached the other side of the counter, and moved towards the huge bulk of what, until nearly midday today, been Mrs Sylvia Beeton.

  ‘Can you give me a hand to turn her over?’ he called to Christmas. ‘How did you manage it? She’s a very big woman.’

  ‘I got Green to help me,’ explained the Doc, and followed Falconer behind the counter.

  ‘That would explain why he looked so bilious when I got here,’ replied Falconer, more as something to say to keep his mind off what he was about to see.

  The two of them manhandled the body, so that they could look at its face, and Falconer came out in a cold sweat. ‘Whoever it was, has literally fried her face, and in batter, too,’ he managed, in a rather high-pitched voice, letting go his hold on his half of the mighty Mrs Beeton.

  Christmas lowered his end too, and said, with a nervous little giggle, ‘She’s definitely been battered to death, then! And it looks like she was held down in there at the back of the neck, as I just said, with the chip scoop. I haven’t touched it, just left it for you to put into an evidence bag, in case it’s got fingerprints on it.’

  ‘Don’t joke about it, Philip. It only makes it worse. And I’ll just get that scoop bagged up now. Thanks for noticing that. God, what a ghastly way to end up!’

  ‘What a dreadful thing even to contemplate doing to another human being,’ commented the medical man, and they both fell silent, and stared off into nothingness, horrified by this seemingly random and unspeakable act.

  So deep were they in a brown study that they didn’t hear the door open, and before either of them could do anything about it, Carmichael sprung up like a jack-in-the-box beside them, full of enthusiasm, as usual, to see what was afoot; and, unfortunately, from this distance, he could do just that.

  As he began to heave, Falconer yelled, ‘Nooo!’ and rushed, over in the vain hope that he could stem the inevitable flow. ‘Footprints, man!’ he shouted. ‘Evidence!’

  Hearing the inspector’s voice, Carmichael swivelled his noxious spray a hundred and eighty degrees, and the last of his offering landed on the highly polished tops of Falconer’s immaculate shoes.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done, Sergeant! Muddied any forensic evidence on the floor. And just look at my shoes,’ he finished, reaching for a roll of kitchen paper that sat on the shelf behind the counter. ‘Why on earth didn’t you wait?’

  ‘Urgh!’ groaned Carmichael, took a step forward to assist Falconer and slipped, landing on his back on his contribution to ‘Dirty Floor Day.’

  ‘And now you’ve fallen in it! Get yourself into the little cloakroom out the back, and see what you can do about cleaning yourself up!’

  ‘You know I’ve got a dicky tummy, sir,’ Carmichael pleaded, then, thinking again of what he had just seen, and went for it again with enthusiasm. But there was no ammunition left for him to shoot, and he stood there, in a pool of his own breakfast, dry-heaving like a pump fresh out of water.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder why you joined the force!’ snapped his boss, wiping lumps of the vile substance from his shoes, making a little moue of distaste, and making sure that he was breathing only through his mouth.

  ‘Because I wanted to catch criminals, sir,’ answered the sergeant, gingerly making his way towards the indicated cloakroom, and removing his jacket as he went.

  ‘Well, that’s ruined any evidence of footprints, this side of the counter!’ said Falconer, a little later, looking daggers at his sergeant, who was perched on one of the old chairs at the back of the shop, his head between his knees. ‘Why couldn’t you have had a light breakfast for, once? Just look at the mess you’ve made of the crime scene!’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ replied the ghost of Carmichael’s voice. ‘I couldn’t help it. I’m surprised it didn’t have the same effect on you, too.’

  ‘Leave it, sergeant. I suppose I’ll have to clear this away as best as I can before the SOCO team arrives, and I’d rather hoped to warn you to stay the other side of the counter before you came round here, but you just appeared out of nowhere, and it was too late by then.’

  ‘What sort of evil person does that to someone?’ Carmichael managed, his thought processes slowly re-gathering, his rinsed-off jacket in a chip shop plastic carrier bag at his feet. ‘What sort of imagination could even think of doing something like that?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, Carmichael. Most people are all right, but a few of them, out there, are mad, bad, and dangerous to know, to coin a cliché. They’re either just pure evil, or off their heads.’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ sounded, from where Philip Christmas was seated at another table, talking quietly into a recording device to aid his post mortem some time later.

  Chapter Three

  Saturday 17th April – afternoon

  Neither Falconer nor Carmichael had been able to face any lunch, and when the SOCO team had arrived they left them to it and called into a coffee shop at the other end of the parade for a shot of caffeine.

  ‘Oh, God, sir! I’ve never seen anything like that in my life before,’ Carmichael almost breathed. ‘All that bubbling! And her eyes! Bugger!’ He suddenly went silent, and seemed to have a silent conversation with his innards, eventually adding, ‘I think that’s going to give me nightmares! Sorry about the language, sir.’

  ‘Don’t give it another thought, Carmichael. I think you’ve earned a bit of a swear after what you’ve witnessed this morning. Me, I think it was the batter that made it worse,’ Falconer opined, in a low voice, so as not to alert too many people already in the coffee shop that they were police. ‘And I agree with you. I think my sleep might be a bit disturbed for a few nights after this morning’s little adventure.’

  As Carmichael made a characteristic shrugging motion identical to the one he had made only a minute ago, Falconer looked at him in alarm, and hissed, ‘And don’t you dare be sick again. You can’t have anything left after that magnificent demonstration back there!’

  The sergeant sat as still as a statue for almost thirty seconds, his eyes closed, making a herculean effort to regain control of his internal muscles, then took a sip of coffee. ‘So, where do we start, sir?’ he asked. The spirit was willing, and the flesh recovering, at last.

  ‘We ought to start with the owner, see if she made any enemies out of the customers. And I believe there are tenants in the upstairs flat. It might be worth having a word with them. Then we’re going to have to have a look at where she lived: the usual stuff, although it was anything but a usual death, even for a murder.’

  ‘While you were in that cloakroom, I got the address of the owner, and of Mrs Beeton, the – er – deceased. I think we should pay a little visit to Mr Carrington and ask if he remembers anything from last night that might have led to what we found this morning. There might also be regulars that she had fallen out with. He said she didn’t mince her words, so that looks like our starting point, after the upstairs flat.’

  ‘Mmph, sir.’ Carmichael was still working on that internal control.

  As the occupiers of the first floor flat above the chip shop were both office workers, they were at home, and not surprised to see the police after all the fuss that had been taking place downstairs since just before midday.

  Before either of them could say anything, after the flat door had been opened, the young man who opened it asked, ‘It’s not about
last night, is it? The music and everything?’

  Falconer, not understanding what he was talking about merely echoed, ‘Music?’

  ‘We sometimes get a bit carried away on a Friday and Saturday night, and you can tell Mrs Beeton that we’re really sorry. We’ll think about other people in the future. We don’t want to lose this flat, as we’ve only been here six months, and it’s perfect for somewhere we can walk to work from.’

  ‘Mrs Beeton asked you to turn your music down last night?’ Falconer bluffed.

  ‘Yeah! She was furious, because she had a rush on, and she couldn’t hear the orders with us blaring out with the CD player. We’re really sorry, and we’ll apologise to her when we see her again. She was a bit of a dragon, though, which you’ll know, if you’ve met her.’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t had that pleasure, sir. May I take your name, and that of your flatmate?’

  ‘I’m Mark Manners, and my wife’s name is Melanie,’ he offered, and Falconer was surprised at the use of the term wife. The young man couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or two.

  ‘Well, Mr Manners, I’m afraid that Mrs Beeton was murdered a little before midday today, and I’m here to ask you whether you heard or saw anything about that time,’ (and to see if her coming up here constantly to get you to turn your music down was enough to enrage you sufficiently to fry her face, he thought, but didn’t vocalise).

  Manners took a step backwards in surprise, and called over his shoulder, ‘Mel, that chip shop woman has been murdered.’

  There was a scuffling noise from the interior of the flat, and a young woman joined them, wearing only a dressing gown and slippers, yesterday’s make-up a series of smears on her face, and her hair tousled and standing on end. ‘What, that old moaning minnie who came up here last night? I don’t believe it! Where did it happen? In the actual shop?’