The Vacant Casualty (17 page)

‘Okay, but I’d better fill this paperwork out first or I’ll be for it,’ he added, settling down to his desk and whistling away quietly to himself.

‘You sure I can’t help with anything?’

‘No, it’s just sixteen pages. I’ll be fine, thanks.’

‘Okay,’ Sam sighed, ‘I’ll make a cup of tea, then.’

‘Could I be terribly naughty and have a cup of ginseng?’ asked Bradley.

‘Lifestyle,
lifestyle
! You can have black coffee or nothing at all,’ said Sam, walking off.

He sidled into the kitchen to find a kettle, and then sat in a free chair and watched Detective Brautigan. Although it was the middle of the night the station seemed to be packed. It appeared
some big case was coming to a conclusion.

The superintendent was standing over Brautigan’s desk, his sleeves rolled up, sweat patches under the arms, and with a weary expression. The desk itself was perhaps even worse than it had
been yesterday. It was covered with piles of coffee- and ketchup-stained paperwork, photographs of mutilated corpses and cockroach-infested food cartons. In one corner was a mound of unexamined
evidence piled in a heap, on top of which was a handgun in a lazily sealed evidence bag and a box with mysterious ticking coming from inside it. There also appeared to be a comatose prostitute
handcuffed to one of the legs of the desk.

‘So, you finally did it,’ said the superintendent. ‘You cracked the O’Shaughnessy case. He confessed! I never thought you could do it, you tough old bastard.’

Brautigan nodded wearily and rubbed his knuckles, still red-raw from the interrogation. ‘The streets are going to be a safer place with that guy inside.’

‘They sure will. Listen, Brautigan, you should take it easy now. You’ve only got one week until retirement. Take some time off. Reconnect with your wife, who you’re separated
from owing to your drink problem and depression. Maybe make a call to little Jenny, your four-year-old daughter, who you haven’t seen in a long while.’

The superintendent sloped off, and Sam watched as Brautigan took a bottle of whisky from his bottom drawer, and went to top up his coffee with it, before changing his mind. Instead he found
another cup, slurped whisky into it nearly to the brim, then diluted it with a splash of coffee in the top, turning it dark, and drank half in one gulp. He loosened his tie, rubbed a hand over his
forehead and picked up the (recently replaced) phone.

‘Is that Jenny? It’s . . . it’s Daddy,’ said Brautigan, tears flowing freely over his enormous, rock-like face.

‘That’s right, Jenny, it’s me, your old dad,’ he said, his shoulders shaking with sobs that he managed to keep out of his voice.

‘I wanted you to know that I love you, my little girl, and to say . . . Daddy’s coming home. That’s right! And I’m going to bring you a big doll to play with. The biggest
doll in the whole wide world!’

‘Have I really got to listen to this?’ asked the prostitute, raising herself off the floor on one elbow.

‘Just a minute, Jenny,’ Brautigan said, pressing his hand over the mouthpiece with elaborate care. ‘SHUT THE HELL UP, YOU GODDAMN WORTHLESS PIECE OF CRAP, BEFORE I PUNCH YOUR
STUPID HEAD OFF!’ He unloosed his grip on the receiver and adopted the same saintly expression as before.

‘That’s right, Jenny, we’ll have ice cream. Lots of ice cream. Chocolate, your favourite flavour! Okay, bye now. I love you . . .’ He gently placed the receiver on its
cradle without making a sound and sat back in his chair, taking a long deep breath and letting it out in a great sigh of relief.

Then another cop walked by his desk and dropped a file in front of him.

‘Another prostitute murdered. The Full Moon Murderer strikes again. Guess O’Shaughnessy wasn’t our guy after all . . .’

Brautigan’s face crumpled.

Sam went over to check on Bradley and see if he was nearly finished.

‘Yes, almost done,’ said Bradley. ‘Let’s find somewhere to eat and talk over the case there. I can’t concentrate with all this racket going on.’

They went out into the street just in time to see a typewriter smash out of an upper window and fall, along with a shower of glass, into the car park. It landed on a mattress that had been
skilfully placed in exactly the right spot, and was scattered with other pieces of office furniture.

‘There’s an all-night cafe near the station,’ said Bradley. ‘At least I
hope
it’s all-night – it would be unbearably depressing to have to sit in KFC
at this time.’

‘S
O
,’
SAID
B
RADLEY
when they had sat down. ‘I want to consult your experience of how
these crimes work. You know more about this than me.’

‘Okay. Right, what do you want to know?’

‘What tips do you have about how an experienced detective would go about solving this, based on what we’ve seen?’

‘It’s not really a case in the classic mould, from what I’ve seen.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, ideally, for a really juicy one, it would be a locked-room mystery.’

‘I see – so the mystery is, who locked the door?’

‘No, of course not. It’s where a dead body is found behind a locked door, and the victim was clearly murdered. It’s the purest kind of mystery.’

Bradley looked confused. ‘I don’t understand why. Surely the murderer just did the murder and then locked the door after him?’

Now it was Sam’s turn to look confused. ‘No, wait . . . Oh, right. The door’s locked from the inside.’

‘From the
inside
? But that’s impossible!’

‘Exactly, Detective. That’s what makes it a profound mystery.’

‘So what would the solution be?’

‘From memory, it’s a wild monkey that killed the victim and escaped up the chimney.’

Bradley pulled a police radio from his pocket and pressed the broadcast switch. ‘DI Bradley to Sergeant Percival. Percival, you there?’

The receiver let out a short blast of static. ‘Pschht! Receiving, Guv.’

‘Er, it’s me, Percival. Can you check round the nearby zoos, please, and see if there have been any monkeys that have escaped recently?’

‘Psht. Yes, Inspector, no problem. Monkeys or all types of primate?’

‘Er, just monkeys for now, thanks, Spencer. Unless they have gorillas small enough to fit down a chimney.’

‘Pfffshhhhhhchtach! Down a chimney. Got that, Guv.’

‘What are you doing?’ asked Sam.

‘Following your advice,’ said Bradley. ‘Why?’

‘We haven’t even found a body yet! I was just outlining the perfect murder mystery. Cancel that call.’

Bradley nodded and raised the radio again. ‘Er, Bradley to Percival, are you receiving?’

‘Pfffschhtt. Yes, Guv.’

‘Cancel that last order. Stand down on the zoo search.’

‘Psht. Got it, Guv. Call off the monkeys.’

‘Over and out,’ he barked into the radio. ‘Sorry about that, Sam. It’s just I’ve got to solve this case, you know? I haven’t slept, I’ve been chased and
beaten up, I’m hungover and eating terrible food. I feel like crap but it’s exhilarating – I feel like a real cop, and God damn it I’m going to solve this case! How’s
your Zinger Tower Burger, by the way?’

‘It’s horrid. And I can’t believe I got coleslaw as a side. I should have gone for beans – such a beginner’s error. Now what I’m going to do is take you
through the basic scenarios as I understand them, okay?’

Bradley nodded eagerly.

‘Okay. So, there are a handful of conventional solutions to a dastardly murder such as which we may be ourselves investigating. If “such as which” is a phrase, and I’m
too tired to work out whether it is or not.’

‘Okay, great. Sock them to me,’ said Bradley.

‘Fine, so listen. Of all the solutions to murder mysteries, there are a number of famous solutions. Number one, the butler did it.’

Bradley was staring at him with such intensity he was practically goggling. He appeared to be making rapid mental calculations. Sam could readily understand that if he had spent his whole life
as a village policeman, under the strict control of his wife (and he could hardly imagine what such a woman would be like), this must be the height of excitement. Bradley was wild-eyed, almost
crazed-looking, like a teenager, thrilled and sleepless at their first festival.

For Sam’s own part, he felt as fresh as a week-old cowpat. There were severe aches all the way up his back and legs. He had firmly come down from whatever that pill had been and had a
hangover from the four pints and six whiskies he’d drunk earlier. Now he was dehydrated, tired, demoralized, scared, feeling queasy and short-tempered and meanwhile Bradley was making a
spectacle of them both into the bargain. As far as he could tell, he was in need of just about every kind of medical and spiritual encouragement that the world had to offer, and his mental
checklist of immediate needs ran something like this, in no particular order:

A crap.

A drink.

Three or four pints of water.

At least twelve hours of sleep in a comfortable bed.

Several thousand pounds.

As many strong painkillers as would likely not prove fatal.

A hot bath.

A massage.

A week in Spain.

A good novel.

Some
excellent
food.

He decided that a rest break was in order and, warning Bradley that he would be a few moments, retired to the disabled toilets of the KFC.

This might be the moment to reflect that none of us knows what others get up to in toilets once the doors are locked. We may suspect various unedifying and morally regrettable acts, but we never
can know. And for some people (Sam being one of these) the very act of clicking the lock into place turned the drab, square, white-tiled space into a temporary home, where for a few minutes he
might act exactly as he pleased without making concession to any idea of normality. Therefore, with the pain ringing all the way up and down his legs at every step like a pianist running the back
of his hand up and down the keyboard, Sam first removed his mud-soaked socks and shoes, then splashed his poor feet with water from the sink and dried them with paper towels.

‘If there’s one thing I know how to do,’ he muttered, ‘it’s take a rest break.’

He took a miniature of Jameson from an inside pocket, cracked it open and downed it in two swift glugs. Then he refilled it from the tap and swigged down three strong ibuprofen. It was the first
peace and quiet he had known since arriving in the allegedly peaceful countryside, and silence beckoned him to rest his head on the cistern for a moment, when he lost consciousness. He roused
himself what felt like a second later, with an unsettling doubt in the back of his mind that fifteen or forty-five minutes might easily have passed, and so he concluded his business as quickly as
he could, tipping out a long thick line of the white powder he had been sold the previous day, wondering for a minute if there was not substantially less than he remembered when he’d bought
it, then cast the doubt aside and hoovered it up in a quick, stinging snort.

Exiting the room a minute or so later (and briefly casting glances left and right to detect any suspicious looks coming from others), he asked for three large cups of tap water and one of orange
juice from the counter. He sat alongside Bradley, who didn’t seem even mildly perturbed by the wait (however long it had been), and was talking rapidly into his phone. The detective seemed
excited rather than scared, so Sam concluded he either wasn’t talking to his wife, or he was, and with his altered persona had already established some ground-breaking new protocols with
her.

Sam’s restoration was nearly complete, but still lacking its final ceremony, which he now enacted with as much solemnity and care as if he had been celebrating a sacrament. Setting the
four cups in front of him, he cracked an extra-strong Alka-Seltzer into the first cup of water, and poured a sachet of Dioralyte into the second. The third he gulped straight down and then sipped
the orange juice as he let the two potions settle. Then, once his arid system had absorbed the first cup’s worth of water (which took about ninety seconds), he demolished the hangover cure
and the diarrhoea treatment in short measure.

The powder was kicking in, too. There seemed a small chance that (back pain aside) in fifteen minutes’ time he might start to feel all right. Bradley was still muttering away on his phone,
and Sam felt no immediate need to interrupt him, so he glanced around, and after spotting a familiar face not two tables away, had to do a movie-style double-take.

‘Good Lord! Literally. It’s Lord Ickham.’

Without raising himself from his hunched position over a paper plate of rapidly disappearing spicy wings, Horace glanced up from a nearby table and looked urgently around the room with a hunted
expression, apparently unsure of what he had heard. Then his eyes fell on Sam, and his unease vanished at once.

‘Dear boy,’ he said, smiling as he wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘You remembered the old moniker. No longer accurate, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh dear. They haven’t stripped you of it already?’ Sam had a sudden worrying vision of a highly publicized drugs scandal on the benches of the House of Lords.

‘Good
heavens
, no! They don’t actually do that, do they? No, quite the reverse. Another promotion, as you would put it.’

‘Blimey, well done!’ Sam said. ‘What are you up to now?’

‘Earl of Cheltenham. Poor old Chummy Rawlinson, my cousin, was the last Earl. He passed away.’

‘Your
cousin
,’ said Sam, feeling this warranted more gravity than a great-uncle of 107. ‘I
am
sorry.’

‘Well, you needn’t be. I never met the man – he moved to Brooklyn after that Profumo thing blew up. When I say “poor old Chummy”, I mean just that – he was
very poor and very old, so I can’t see that we would have exactly got on like a house on fire. Which is, ironically, how he died – smoking in bed.’

‘A dreadful habit. I smoke in the bath, because that doesn’t seem quite as dangerous.’

‘I quite agree. Hey, by the way, are you okay for, er . . .’

‘Naughty salt?’ said Sam, breaking out what he had once heard was the posh phrase for cocaine, and then immediately realizing he was a suck-up of the worst kind. ‘You’re
very generous,’ he said, ‘but I just had some. Is this your usual sort of joint?’