With My Little Eye (14 page)

‘This is interesting,' said the DCI. ‘You've come up against one of the walls that we've been butting our heads against. Everything points to Stan Eastwick having died during that period but we have no clue as to what he was in the habit of doing. How did you know that they took ready-made supermarket meals?'

Tash, who refused to be caught flat-footed by the question, looked at him coldly. ‘I was not in the habit of dining with them, if that's what you're thinking. You can see their wheelie bin from our office windows and they are – were – often careless about putting the lid down. I noticed the cottage pie carton more than once.'

‘I see. Go on.'

‘That's all I had to say. Thinking back, it seemed as if Stan was always out of sight during that lull.'

‘And you can't think of anything else that he might have been doing?'

Tash raised an eyebrow and wrinkled her forehead while she thought around the question. ‘I can think of lots of things he might have been doing but they all seem very unlikely. At the meal, if he took it with us, or after it, he didn't seem to have smartened himself up by more than a wash and maybe changing his trousers if he'd got wet or muddy. He never shaved except first thing in the morning.'

The DCI switched his eyes to Douglas, who shook his head. ‘I've no idea what he might have been doing. And we didn't move him at all when we found him,' Douglas said. ‘Did anybody comment on whether he seemed to have been moved since he fell?'

DCI Laird frowned at the effort required in remembering. ‘There were no signs reported of anybody having moved him. The first officer to arrive was in no doubt that he was dead and his first concern was whether he had been robbed, so the man had the sense to look and see if he seemed to have been searched. He didn't see any such signs and he didn't let anyone else interfere with what was obviously a dead body, which suggests that you found him exactly where he collapsed.'

‘Then let's go and follow in his tracks.'

They traipsed across the small entrance hall and turned a corner. The DCI broke another seal and opened a door. They found themselves trying to squeeze into a cramped space which in the average house would have been expected to fill with mops and brushes and Dysons. There was a human outline on the floor in masking tape, becoming rather worn. ‘Did your men cart off a lot of mops and buckets?' Douglas asked.

The DCI shook his head. ‘The brothers seem to have built another cupboard round the corner for household tools, stealing a bit from the kitchen.'

‘I wonder why.' Douglas indicated a door on his right. ‘The boiler is behind there. We replaced it, of course. The back end of this space that we're standing in was the coal cellar but there's an oil tank now behind the hedge by the outside door.' Douglas hummed undecidedly for a moment. ‘It's very odd. Everything else in this flat is exactly as I meant it to be, but this is somehow different.'

‘Different? How?'

‘Damned if I know.' Douglas opened the inner door onto a cupboard in which a compact oil-fired boiler was muttering. ‘They're not using it as an airing cupboard either although I suppose the new boiler's too well insulated to be much use for that.'

‘I'll have to get the forensic science laddies back to see what they can find,' said the DCI. ‘Where do we go next?'

‘I hope you're going to be a bit more patient with the forensic team,' Douglas said. ‘If you hurry them, they'll miss what you want to know. Do you want me to tell you what to tell them to look for?'

The DCI backed out into the fresher air of the corridor, ‘Am I rushing too fast? If you have something to show me, show me now.' He paused and laughed at himself. ‘That sounds like a line from a song or the punch line of a rude story, I'm not sure which.'

‘It could be the punch line of a very interesting story,' Douglas said. ‘The old boiler was much bigger than this one. It wouldn't even have gone into this cubbyhole. For the record, the new boiler is against the bit of wall on my left. But I remember this space as going much further back so that the old boiler could connect to the chimney that runs up the middle of the staircase. This one has a balanced flue that goes out through the wall. There's a new wall across here and a new ceiling – with a plaster ventilator in it, you may care to note. I'm facing what looks like a blank wall with a digital time-clock mounted on a plywood panel but there's another time-clock half hidden behind the boiler. This space looks less than I'd envisaged it and the panel looks unnecessarily large. What's more, I haven't seen any of the digits change. I think it may …' There were scuffling sounds.

The DCI raised his voice. ‘Just a minute,' he said. ‘Don't move anything until I've had time to—'

He was too late. He was trying to squeeze past Tasha without treading on her toes or rubbing against her in too familiar a manner when Douglas backed out of the cubbyhole holding a plywood rectangle with a time-clock attached.

‘Give that to me,' the DCI snapped.

‘With pleasure.' Douglas handed over the plywood panel and stepped back into the minuscule chamber. ‘It hasn't been connected to anything, it was just hanging on hidden hooks. Here, I suspect, are most of the bits and pieces missing from the university.'

‘Let me see—'

Douglas was enjoying himself. It is not often given to a member of the public to teach a senior police officer his job and Douglas was making the most of the chance. ‘You'll see better if I turn them on.'

‘Don't—'

The real back wall of the space was about a metre further back and it was shelved. On the shelves stood several CCTV monitors and Douglas had already switched one of them on. As he put his hand on a second one, the first came alive. It showed part of an empty room.

Tash had ducked under his arm. ‘But that's my room. Or it was.'

The second monitor woke up. Another bedroom appeared, in full colour and sharp detail. It was a feminine room but not excessively so, papered in a modest paper of pale blue and mossy green. A lady was about to put on a cream coloured slip, preparatory to donning the dress that was laid out on the bed. Her figure looked mature but well kept and her underwear was slightly old fashioned but, though it had not been in the top bracket for extravagance, it was not unglamorous. There was machine-made lace and artificial silk. Her stockings showed as little more than shadows and a faint gloss.

‘Put it off,' said Tash urgently. ‘Put it
off
! That's my mum.'

Douglas later told Tash, ‘At least there isn't a camera in my bedroom, or if there is it's very well hidden and there's no monitor to connect to it.'

So at least their transports had not been watched by a voyeuristic gardener's brother.

T
here followed what was becoming the customary period of limbo following any major event in the Stanley Eastwick case. Unexplained, dimly seen figures carried out incomprehensible tasks. Occupants of Underwood House were rigidly excluded from the basement flat and its immediate environs, but nobody could or would stop Douglas from strolling about the house and using his eyes. He had no particular interest in criminology but he felt a responsibility for anything impinging on Underwood House and its denizens.

The DCI was no Sabbath-keeper. To him, it seemed that Sunday was a convenient day for catching people at home and without any excuses for evading him, such as the demands of their jobs. Or else he was determined to keep out of the way of his wife, who was now for the moment his superior officer. He summoned the residents to another round-table conference on another Sunday morning, but this was strictly adults only. This time he had brought his own shorthand writer. Tash's siblings had been despatched to give their grandmother the benefit of their company. The old lady, who would far rather have had her own fireside to herself for a good read of the Sunday papers, always felt obliged to make a show of being a typical granny, welcoming them with open arms, spoiling them rotten and then finding them tasks or entertainment that would keep them well out of her way for as long as was acceptable or even longer.

Douglas and Tash had made no secret of the discoveries in the basement flat, so discussion of the
cabinet de voyeur,
in tones either shocked or amused, had already been under way for several days. Discussion had been resumed but was interrupted when DCI Laird arrived and took his seat.

‘I always knew that there was something sly about those brothers,' Mrs Jamieson was saying. ‘If you looked at them suddenly you could catch them eyeing up a woman in a way that you mightn't like.'

‘I wouldn't even like my doctor to look at me like that,' said Mrs McLeish. There came unbidden to Douglas's mind the memory of a fellow student who complained that she had been the victim of a sexual assault. Her complaints had been loud but Douglas had been sure, although he could not have pointed out a single supporting word or glance, that her description to her fellows of the event had contained the tiniest trace of a suggestion that
men, poor things, can't restrain themselves when confronted with my sexual magnetism.

The DCI accepted a cup of coffee but without any obvious signs of gratitude. ‘And you didn't think of telling me this?' he said bitterly.

Mrs McLeish put her nose up. ‘I've never been one to spread malicious gossip,' she said.

‘I did pass on to you what our local publican told me,' Douglas said.

The DCI opened his mouth but closed it again. After a long pause he said, ‘I have just now had word that George Eastwick is on the Sex Offender Register. He was prosecuted as a peeping Tom several years ago. That pre-dated computerization and it was in a different police area, so the information only surfaced this week.'

‘But,' said Tash, ‘that doesn't seem like much of a motive for killing somebody, if that's what's being suggested.'

Professor Cullins remarked that many a murder had been committed over less. ‘The act of voyeurism might not have furnished enough motivation in itself but it could easily have led to a quarrel that ended in homicide.' He laced his fingers together and sat back.

Douglas, once he had got past being biased by the professor's orientation, had wondered how so humdrum a man had become so senior an academic, but now he could see him in the guise of lecturer. He had authority.

‘Voyeurism,' said the professor, ‘is outside my field but one cannot help picking up some of the minutiae of allied subjects. Voyeurism is serious and bloody common. It usually dates from a sexual trauma while a toddler, something such as happening on a parent naked or parents having sex, and it only becomes true voyeurism when the sufferer – because he does suffer whether he knows it or not – is unable to stop but lives a life dedicated to stolen glimpses. I suppose one can understand a state of mind in which what one might call the trimmings – the courtship, the foreplay, soft lights, sweet music, words of love, exquisite liberties, stolen glimpses, lingerie, permissive touching – add up to a shining experience and the sex act itself becomes, as it is, rather ridiculous.'

Douglas struggled to keep his mouth shut. The idea of being instructed about sex by a known homosexual was mad and yet his words were making sense.

The professor continued. ‘Now, imagine two brothers, brought up strictly, the elder bloody desperate with desire but frustrated by the inhibitions of the era. Then perhaps the elder commits a sex act on the younger. This is only hypothesis but it seems highly probable. What could be more likely than that the brothers should share, perhaps even infect each other with the alternative pleasure of the voyeur? They grow up sharing that substitute for real sex. To add to all the other tensions between them, the younger may be holding the threat of complaining to the police over his elder. Some recent German research suggests that jealousy over the target of rival peeping bloody Toms can become just as bitter as jealousy between physical lovers.'

Betty McLeish and Tash's mother, the two most likely targets of the voyeurism, were looking mortified. Douglas decided that it was high time that the discussion was given a new twist. ‘And, of course,' he said, ‘during the later stages of the work on this house, Stan Eastwick was here, there and everywhere, lending a skilled hand with those small jobs that fell outside the building contract. His brother was only helping him out from time to time.'

Hubert Campion was never an outspoken person, preferring to listen and nod and smile, but he found his voice. ‘Stan was the one who always seemed to be about the university buildings. He must have been responsible for the thefts, so at least he knew about them.'

‘But I still don't understand,' Tash said. ‘They can't have been putting cameras all round the place. Unless they were hidden in things, James Bond style.'

The professor smiled at her innocence. ‘My dear, you may have been watching too many old films. The modern digital video camera can be amazingly small. If you're not too fussy about fine detail there are the Skype webcams that they sell in supermarkets for around a fiver for the set. The lens part of one of those is about the size of the top of a pencil. You could hide it in a keyhole. In reality shows they hide them in buttons and billiard pockets and the fittings of handbags and briefcases and they produce remarkably sharp images. But in point of fact my lady colleagues in zoology, who you might expect to welcome such toys for the intimate study of insects and small animals, aren't too enamoured of them. One lady admitted to me that she liked to use one to tidy her back hair and that was all.'

Douglas had brought a set of the architect, Harris Benton's drawings with him. ‘The wiring could go down the former flue which is now disused.'

The DCI was uneasy at discussing the technicalities of murder with the witnesses but he was not going to cut off the flow of useful information. His eyes were always on whoever was speaking. ‘How would the carbon dioxide have been introduced?' he asked.