The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (21 page)

Behind Hartmann an elderly, rather dishevelled man in a woolly hat and scarf sneezed very loudly over the buttered currant buns. "Please?" Hartmann's tone was desperate — or pathetic, depending on the listener, and it found Eisenmenger saddened but not moved.

He sighed. "I'm sorry."

Hartmann leaned back in his chair and perhaps it was the light in the cafe but he looked suddenly spectral. He shut his eyes as if he were now feeling faint and whispered, "Shit!"

It was only when he opened his eyes that Eisenmenger saw that he was again weeping.

Eisenmenger had the growing realization that he couldn't just walk away, that he had to give the poor bastard some way out. Feeling that he might at some point regret it, he said, "Look, Mark. Do you still have the original tissue blocks?" Hartmann nodded but didn't say anything. "Then all I can suggest is that you replace them in the block file, and write to the Coroner claiming that you've made a mistake. If you do that, I don't see why we can't proceed as if it never happened."

But this advice, though well meant, was not well received.

"But I can't! If I do that, Rosenthal will find out!"

Eisenmenger shrugged. "Not necessarily. Unless he's got contacts in the Coroner's Office, there's no reason why he should, is there?"

For a few moments Hartmann continued to look hellhound, but then, gradually, Eisenmenger saw his face change as dawning interest brought some faint hue into it.

Behind him another sneeze added a further layer of glazing to the comestibles.

*

Hartmann returned home late but he wasn't worried about that. If Annette were cross with him, the significance of her anger would be laughable when compared with what might soon come. He was drunk, past the stage of relaxed enjoyment, deeply mired in the slow, depressive phase, but still coordinated enough to get the key in the lock first time. In the dark of the entrance hall he took off his coat wondering where his wife was, knowing that the children would be in bed. Although there was no sound of talking he saw light coming from under the sitting-room doors some way up the hall, and it was to this that he made his way.

Annette and her father were sitting there. They were talking, weren't even looking at each other. It was like a badly created tableau in a department store window. The sense of unreality was heightened when, like synchronized automata, they both turned silently to stare at him.

For a second he stared back at them then, perhaps stung by the open hostility, something switched over his brain. Synaptic potentials realigned and Hartmann became unaccountably belligerent. "Father-in-law! What a pleasant surprise!"

He advanced into the room — into
his
room — and sat down next to Annette. He smiled at his wife and her father; a broad and engaging smile that stretched orbicularis oris into unaccustomed tension.

And still they said nothing.

"You haven't got a drink," he decided, gesturing towards the judge. "Here let me get you one." He began to get up. "Your usual, father-in-law?"

Annette said suddenly, "Where have you been, Mark?" Her question was made of something sprung with tension, it was sharp enough to penetrate the ethanolic sheen and make him pause in the act of rising. He glanced across at Brown-Sequard, catching a look of smugness that he didn't much like. Didn't like at all, actually.

"Drinking," he replied, deciding that he was fed up with his father-in-law looking at him in much the same way as his housemaster had used to look him just prior to administering some corporal punishment. "Why?"

He addressed the question to Annette but the answer came from the judiciary on his left. "You haven't been in the betting shop, have you?"

The use of the words
betting
shop
was a considerable shock but he handled it quite well, saying without hesitation, "No." He didn't try outrage, merely denial, and it was all the better for it.

Then it was Annette's turn. "Where did you get the money to pay off your gambling debts?"

Hartmann found the changed direction of attack difficult to follow. This time he paused before saying, "I do earn my own living, you know."

The sound that emerged from Mr Justice Brown-Sequard's nasal cavity was so much more in meaning and less in sound than a common snort. It conveyed enough contempt to drown his son-in-law. "Sixteen thousand pounds?"

Which Hartmann did find a little difficult to counter with much gusto. In fact he was reduced to a pathetic, "How do you … ?" Silence followed abruptly as he realized he had made a significant tactical error. Annette suddenly sighed as if she hadn't been able to believe it until that moment. "Oh, Mark."

There was a swiftly rising dread in his stomach. Did they know? Had Rosenthal sent the tape, despite his promises? He tried to use the fear as fuel for anger.

"Have you been snooping on me?" he demanded of Annette. "How dare you!"

But he might just as well have been using a penknife to kill a dinosaur.

"We dare," explained his wife, "because we have to. Because the family of a member of the judiciary has to be completely without flaw or suspicion of a flaw, and that includes his son-in-law."

"Are you saying I've done something wrong?"

It was her father who replied. "No. We're asking a question."

He had always felt afraid of their debating skills, of their abilities to trip up, to twist, to imply and infer. What was better? To deny, to lie or to refuse to answer? He didn't have long to decide and, inevitably he chose the wrong option. "I won a big bet." It sounded good to Hartmann. After all, they now knew that he gambled.

Brown-Sequard took this with a look of realization and comprehension.
I
see
! he seemed to be saying.
Of
course
! He smiled across Hartmann at his daughter who said nothing. Then he repeated, "A large bet."

The intonation was perfect. Disbelief and sadness, topped off with pity. Hartmann had been looking at the carpet, trying not to think too much about the depth of faeces beneath his paddling feet. "Yes … it was a treble." He kept his eyes on the judge this time. Unfortunately, it was still the wrong place to be looking.

"A treble?" asked Annette. "That must have been amazing!" He jerked his head round to see her smiling widely. "You can prove it, of course. Where the meeting was and when, the race, the winners. That kind of thing."

And that was the end of Hartmann's defence. He found himself looking from one to the other, his mouth open, his eyes slightly widened. It wasn't long before Annette got up, no longer looking at him and left the room. Hartmann watched her leave without moving. From his chair Brown-Sequard murmured, "Perhaps you should sit down, Mark."

It was as much the tone as the words that Hartmann responded to. He felt tired, tired of everything.

Brown-Sequard asked, "Where did you get it?"

Hartmann leaned back, his chin on his chest, his eyes closed. He couldn't answer, but knew he had to say something. "Why don't you just fuck off and leave me alone?"

*

"No!"

Eisenmenger had expected no less, although he was surprised by the sudden eruption of intense anger.

"Look, Helena, l understand your objection … "

"Then you won't persist in the suggestion."

Helena's flat was warm, but her whole demeanour had turned suddenly unseasonably cold, as inhospitable as the night outside.
If
you
are
a
monkey
made
of
brass
,
be
prepared
to
shed
them
now
. He had called on her without prior warning and had found her getting ready to go out. It had clearly been a less than optimal time to discuss any proposition, let alone this one. She was in her dressing gown when she let him in and he had then waited for twenty minutes while she made noises in the bathroom. Her eventual appearance had left him temporarily without words as he was forcibly reminded just how gorgeous he thought she was.

"How else do you suggest we proceed? I've no other contacts in the police, and neither have you now that Johnson's retired. Beverley Wharton is the logical person to go to."

"Not her. Not that bitch."

Beverley Wharton had been one of the investigating officers of the murders of Helena's mother and father. It was she, Helena believed, who had fabricated a case against her brother, leading to his suicide.

"Who else then?" He noted her hesitation.

"Get a private detective."

She looked, he thought, beautiful; like a debutante, almost. Her perfume was strong and soft, her short pale cream dress a delight to the eye. He would have liked to have known where she was going, and was desperate to know with whom.

"Who's going to pay?" he asked, he thought not unreasonably.

Which brought about another hesitation, into which he said, "You see, Helena?"

"No," she declared and it was not said in a way that suggested the possibility of future negotiation. She had adopted a stance of intransigence as if they were married and this were a well-rehearsed argument. As she stood in front of him, he had the impression that she was as much defending a physical position as a polemical one. She had folded her arms and was standing with her legs slightly apart, so that her hips were accentuated. The look of determination on her face only added to her beauty, he thought.

Flickers of sadness sparkled in his eyes, yet simultaneously he began to feel annoyance. After all, she was letting her feelings get in the way. "Look, Helena. Hartmann's admitted that he falsified the autopsy report, that she died from multiple tumours. The mode of death in itself was bizarre; nobody dies from that many cancers, and certainly not when they're young and apparently well just a week or two before. If you add to that the fact that somebody wanted it kept quiet, and that same somebody was willing to pay a huge sum of money, then you've got something that not only stinks, it's crawling with maggots."

"Nobody's denying that there's something odd going on. If you remember, John, that was why I approached you in the first place."

"Well done. There is. Trouble is, if we're going to get any further, we need to involve someone who knows what they're doing when it comes to finding out details. I can't think of anyone else other than Beverley Wharton."

"She's corrupt, she's devious and she's no friend of ours — either yours or mine — remember?"

He sighed. Yes, he did remember. The strange and horrible death of Nikki Exner had not covered Beverley Wharton in glory, thanks mainly to the two of them. "A private detective costs a lot of money — hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of pounds. Can Raymond Sweet afford that?"

She ignored the question. "Why do we have to get anyone else involved at all? Why can't we do it ourselves?"

Ye
gods
.

"There is only one lead. Hartmann was blackmailed by a man calling himself Alan Rosenthal, apparently from a pharmaceutical company called Wiskott-Aldrich. Find out who he is and why Wiskott-Aldrich are interested in Millicent Sweet, and we have a chance of discovering what's going on."

Without moving from her station but with a glance at the clock on the mantelshelf Helena said, "They're bound to be pseudonyms."

At
last
.

"Precisely. Which is why we can't do it ourselves, why we need a professional. And since we can't afford a private enquiry agency, we'll have to use what we can."

"No!" This time it was actually, amazingly, sibilant. She leaned forward. "That
prostitute
is going to have nothing to do with this. Do you understand?"

She moved at last, as if falling back, a strategic withdrawal after this parry. Stung, he found himself beginning to find her irritating; a peculiarly wonderful irritation that was streaked with recollections. "No, I don't, Helena. You're letting emotion … "

"What the hell do you know about my emotions?" she demanded, picking up a scarf from the back of a dining chair with a whipping motion. "What the hell do you know about emotions, full stop?"

He felt furious at such hypocrisy, but it was a strangely wonderful fury, as if he were enjoying the release. "Me? Me?" he demanded. He even found himself waving his arms around, something that, once he noticed, was instantly embarrassing. "You call me emotionless? That's a good one."

Helena had wrapped the scarf about her neck and she was in the act of picking up her coat when he said this. The effect was immediate. She jerked round to face him, the coat forgotten. She opened her beautifully reddened mouth to reply, her face showing sudden outrage, but before she could say anything, the doorbell rang.

Eisenmenger was interested to see that the sound had a curious effect upon her. It caused her to hesitate, swallow the ire, then hurry to the door, offering him only a single glare. It seemed clear that whoever was expected was significant.

"Helena! Are you ready? You look ravishing!"