The Silent Sleep of the Dying (Eisenmenger-Flemming Forensic Mysteries) (3 page)

"Have you got a GP we can contact?"

She didn't actually hear the question and so didn't answer. Instead she said suddenly, "She was terrified of dying."

The policewoman thought,
Aren't
we
all
? but said only, "Was she?"

"Cancer. She was terrified of dying from cancer."

"Oh, yes, so am I." If Susan were just saying things to stop thinking, her companion was just saying them because she had never started. There was a pause and then Susan said, "She was caught up in some sort of fire once. She only just escaped with her life."

And then she realized what she had just said. Into her head came the sight of Millicent's excoriated face, looking exactly as if it had been blasted with a blowtorch, melted, and then congealed into tuberose distortions. It would not shift. She began to cry. The policewoman put her arm around her shoulders as her head went down. Her whole body began to shake with her sobs that gradually changed into a hacking cough interspersed with sore wheezing.

"What happened to her?" she asked at last and it was a terrified, agony-filled plea to God. "Her face was … horrible."

"I don't know, love."

"I thought at first that she was burned, but what were those things on her face?"

They were nearly back at Susan's flat.

The policewoman hadn't seen the body and felt rather glad about it. "The post-mortem will tell us."

The driver stopped the car and turned to Susan. "There we are."

Susan was helped by the policewoman through the hall to her front door. "Do you want me to stay?"

Susan shook her head. She was feeling faint, as if her leg muscles were dissolving. She just wanted to go to bed.

"Is there anyone who can look after you?"

But again this was met with refusal. She just wanted to be left alone. As she was going out of the flat, though, Susan asked suddenly, "She wasn't murdered, was she?" Somehow the thought that another human being could have done that …

"Oh, no. We're perfectly satisfied it was natural causes." This confidence was surprising and somewhat inaccurate, but Susan wasn't to know that. Having closed the door, Susan noticed the day's post. Most of them looked like bills and the effort of bending to pick them up made her feel on the point of vomiting. She had to shut her eyes and lean against the doorframe, putting the post on the table to her right and at once forgetting about it. Then, almost blindly, she made her way back to her bed.

Thus it was that she missed the flashing of her answerphone telling her that someone had called whilst she was out.

*

Hartmann was home by seven. This was too early despite the fact that he had been travelling for ninety minutes, that he had crawled along miles of dual carriageway, that he had been cut up three times by Neanderthals with large and over-expensive cars, that he hated work and he hated driving, and that he was desperate to relieve himself.

Eight, nine, ten would have been too early.

"Mark? Is that you?"

The fatuous question floated down from the landing as he shut the front door.

No
.

He took off his coat and hung it in the hall wardrobe as Annette descended the stairs. She was wearing smart clothes and make-up. Even he could read the signs. Accordingly he was ready for her next question.

"You haven't forgotten, have you?"

"Of course not," he smiled. "Sorry I'm late. You know how it is. There was a ton of work, and then the traffic was bloody awful … "

"Don't swear, Mark." The rebuke came as she was looking at herself in the mirror, primping. It cut across his lies, an uncaring but vicious knife through his bluster. Then, "You'd better hurry up. Mum and Dad will be here soon."

He'd been wondering who was coming to sup with them, but the information didn't lighten his gloom. She wasn't his Mum and he most definitely was not his Dad and Hartmann, as they made plain whenever he was with them, was not their son. He said nothing and trudged upstairs while Annette exhorted him with a following, "Do get a move on, dear."

In their bedroom he undressed and then stood under the shower, slowly rubbing his expanding stomach with soap, his mind full of questions, chief amongst which was,
When
did
I
start
to
hate
her
?

The question of when he had stopped loving her was not relevant here, since he had now to admit he had never actually started. Infatuation had masqueraded as that purest of emotions, had fooled him into thinking that she was the one for him. Infatuation with her snub nose and with her money.

He could not stop the merest of involuntary shudders rippling the more superfluous rolls of flesh as he thought of her snub nose.

And, bastard that it was, infatuation had remained disguised just long enough to see him married and the father of a small daughter. Then, the process undoubtedly exacerbated by the arrival of a son and the subsequent tantrums, insomnia and constant smell of infant faeces, his feelings of affection for his wife gradually ebbed, drying to nothing. That would have been bad enough, but it had not stopped there. From the vacuum had germinated a rising level of dislike; dislike that had inevitably deepened, broadened and gradually darkened until he had to admit that he now hated her.

He turned off the water and stepped from the shower. He had forgotten to get out a towel and he had to walk across the vinyl flooring to get one, thus leaving wet footprints. He knew that if he failed to dry these Annette would be angry with him, perhaps even sufficiently aroused from enervation to initiate a row; he knew, too, that he wouldn't be bothering to dry them.

Did she hate him? The recurrent question was unanswerable. Certainly she no longer loved him, but it was hardly a question he could pose with ease. They rowed with increasing frequency and about matters of increasing pettiness, and in those rows she was becoming noticeably more vituperative, but they weren't yet at the point where such basic truths could be tested. Thus he was left with mere suspicion that his feelings were matched by hers, a suspicion that was worse than knowledge, that irritated and gnawed at him, that left him eroded and dissatisfied.

There were no clean socks, nor underwear. The cleaning lady was paid to do the ironing but not to put it away, and clearly Annette had not had the time again. Exasperated he found his dirty socks and pants and put them on. At least there were some clean shirts and slacks; his father-in-law always turned up in a jacket and tie but he was damned if he was going to be the victim of social coercion in his own home. Defiantly he left the neck of the shirt open and pulled on a lambswool sweater.

… And what if she did? What if she did hate him?

What if she left him or, more accurately, she made him leave her?

The consequences were …

He couldn't even form the thought. Its very existence made his mind cramp into a distortion; it stopped thought as effectively and completely as cyanide.

He began to comb his hair in lieu of further examination of his situation.

He might have fallen from love but marriage, he knew, was about a good deal more than a useless emotion. Certainly his marriage to Annette had become an insoluble complex of feelings, reliances and interdependencies …

No!

His arm whipped out and the comb was flung across the room, clattering against the wardrobe. A futile gesture for a futile life.

Who was he fooling? There were no interdependencies in their marriage, only dependency. He on Annette. Annette, the daughter of a High Court judge and a well-thought of young barrister in her own right; Annette who earned three times his salary even without the money from Grandpa's trust fund; Annette who owned most of their belongings and subsidized the rest of his life.

He stood still, listening to his breathing, trying to dispel the feeling of panic that arose when he thought of how much he needed her. His life would be destroyed if she chose to end matters, not just because of what she had given to him, but because of what she had not.

"Mark? I think they're here." The voice was faint for it was a large house. He heard the excited shouts of the children as their grandparents came to the door.

"Hooray," he whispered.

*

Siobhan was out at her creative writing class when Turner got home. The emptiness of his house was a relief to him; he didn't feel confident that he would hide his worry and he did not need the understandable inquisitiveness of a newly acquired wife.

His smile at the thought was rueful.

He moved from the wood-panelled hall into the sitting room where his cherished collection of malt whiskies was arrayed on the sideboard. He picked one, poured a large volume into a heavy, cut-glass tumbler and topped it up with water from a jug. Only after swallowing half of it did he sit down and let out a long, long sigh.

Millicent was dead.

But how? How had she died?

He had heard rumours during the day, rumours that she had been burned, possibly even murdered.

God, how he hoped they were true.

He took another long swallow, emptying the glass. At once he was up and repeating the prescription. What, he wondered, if it weren't true? What if it were what he dreaded?

On the table beside him was a wedding photo, still new enough to be more than a relic of history; Siobhan's beauty was still painful to him, still precious, his astonishment that she should have chosen him — running to fat and to seed with equal speed — still great.

His smile was far sadder than tears would have been.

He was recently enough married to find pain in the fact that he could not confide in her. He knew that he should have told her about Millie, knew also that he had never been going to. Millie had just been a fling, an infatuation, an episode in his past; Siobhan and he had never talked about previous lovers and that was what Millie was. It would only have made trouble to go into details, so that to Siobhan she was merely part of his team, no different to any of the others.

Now
she was different, though.

A sudden shaft of panic spasmed his gut.

This had to be coincidence!

He had been assured that they were clear. They were all in the clear.
No
spread
. That was what they had said. He had even seen the results of the tests, because he hadn't entirely trusted them, and they had been negative, just as they had said.

But again the fear recurred, voiced as a question —
What
if
Millicent's
death
were
related
to
the
accident
?

He had to find out the results of the post-mortem examination. It would be done tomorrow, he assumed. He knew Professor Bowman — godawful woman that she was — and he was confident that she would let him know. If it was as he feared, he would contact PEP and raise some hell.

In the meantime, he would repeat the tests himself. He was certainly in a perfect position to do this, and he had all the equipment he required. So why not? He finished the whisky again. Yes, that's what he would do. Find out what Millicent died from, repeat the tests on himself, then, depending on what he then knew, act accordingly.

If PEP had lied to him, they would be sorry. Very sorry indeed.

*

It was much later, while he was in the kitchen fetching another bottle of vintage port for his father-in-law, that Hartmann found the day's post. Annette had propped it up behind the toaster, to the left of the Aga, but it had become obscured by a tea towel.

The evening had been as excruciating as he had expected it to be. Superficial friendliness overlain with a thick, corrosive layer of disdain. Annette had married beneath her was the constantly reiterated subtext, both socially, financially and intellectually, and her parents, whilst fully understanding of their daughter's right to choose, were not about to stop reminding him of his inferiority on all levels. That on at least two of these three charges no jury, nor even a hanging judge like his father-in-law, would ever convict, was a concept he knew he could never bring them to accept. Annette was very bright but he felt it was unlikely that you could become a Senior Lecturer in Pathology if you had the intellectual ability of a pumpkin, and doctors might no longer have the standing of lesser gods but then he didn't exactly feel that the legal profession were seraphim made incarnate.

Yet the financial matter was something else, something on which even he himself would have to pronounce sentence. He earned a not unreasonable whack but it was far from megabucks and it was pitiful when compared with Annette's salary — and it was minuscule when her inherited wealth was factored in.

It wouldn't have been so bad but for the financial arrangements that he had to endure. Perhaps inevitably these were legally impregnable and detailed down to the commas; he and Annette had different incomes and they were immiscible, now and forever. Only in certain areas — all well defined and strictly circumscribed — was Annette's money allowed to be polluted by his; in all others they effectively lived separate lives. He was convinced that this arrangement had originated with her father, but her obvious compliance — at least willing if not enthusiastic — was another cause for disgruntlement.