Death on the Levels Read online

  The main A38 Bristol Road was only a stone’s throw away and the early morning bank holiday traffic was already thundering by. The noise was not a problem in itself. After all, that was what life was all about, wasn’t it? The brash, frenetic life that George had missed out on during all those wasted years locked away in Larchfield. But it was a reminder that people were out and about now, and darkness no longer provided its cloak of invisibility.

  Sleep had not come easily the previous night – with every creak of the barn’s timbers, every rustle of a bird or a rat a cause for alarm – and it had been well into the early hours before exhaustion had won over. Now though, with daylight stealing into the barn, it was time to make a move before the stolen red car parked at the back of the building was spotted by a visiting farmhand or a police helicopter passing overhead. The murder of the shrink and the audacious escape of one of the hospital’s detained patients was bound to have been circulated to all police forces, so, headache or not, George knew that any further delay could be disastrous. Old Bill would almost certainly be looking for the car, so it would need to be dumped at the first opportunity, but for the present it was needed.

  Revisiting Talbot Court had been a big mistake, of course. That was obvious now. But seeing the place just one last time had been a compulsion – a desire to lay the ghosts to rest and finally bury the traumatic memories that had haunted every waking hour for all those long years of incarceration. Nevertheless, the visit had almost ended in disaster, with the two heavies turning up to collect whatever it was they had stashed in the old boiler room necessitating a quick dive for cover. But then there had been the police raid and that bitch of a copper materializing just at the wrong moment. It was difficult to comprehend how such a run of bad luck could happen to one person in one place in such a short time. What if the cop had managed to put two and two together about the dosser she had spooked and had sent the balloon up? Even now, half the Avon & Somerset force could be scouring the countryside for their quarry. Time to go …

  George quit the barn and stumbled to the stolen VW car. It started first time and within minutes he joined the traffic heading towards Bridgwater.

  *

  Kate was fully prepared for Roscoe to have another go at her about losing her rough sleeper when she turned up for work in the morning. The crusty DI had warned her when she had first joined the department that he was not a man to forgive or forget misdemeanours, and he had certainly stuck to that philosophy in the years that she had worked with him. So, she fully expected him to resurrect the whole thing the moment he clapped eyes on her. But instead, though he called her into his office before she had even reached her desk, he said nothing about the previous night’s operation. Instead, he simply reached across his own desk and slapped a sheet of crumpled paper in front of her.

  ‘Read that,’ he growled. ‘It’s a copy of a letter the Super got this morning – apparently delivered by hand and left under the windscreen wiper of one of our motors parked outside the nick last night. He routed it to the DCI afterwards. Seems our boss is shitting himself over it.’

  She grinned mischievously. ‘The Super and the DCI working on a bank holiday weekend, guv?’ she mocked. ‘Whatever next.’

  ‘Just read it, will you?’ he grated. ‘I can do without the funnies.’

  Mystified, she picked it up and speed-read the tightly packed, handwritten contents.

  Dear Superintendent,

  It is an unfortunate fact that I shall always associate sherry with death. As a child, I knew someone had died when I came home from school and detected the sweet, sickly smell of the stuff. It happened when each of my uncles died and finally my mother and father.

  I knew that my aunts would be in the house on those scary occasions too, just like the skeletal birds of prey they were. Each one perched on the edge of her chair, with that tiny, over-full glass of sherry in one claw-like hand – a mangy fox fur sneering at me round the collar of her black coat, and red, lipstick-smeared lips twisted into a grim, indulgent smile, ready to imprint their mark on my recoiling cheeks. Looking back now, I realize that at the time they and my uncles must have actually been quite young, but to an impressionable child, they all seemed so old and frightening. To make matters worse, the curtains were always drawn when someone died and I was forced to stay in the front room with them. Forced to sit on the prickly horse-hair sofa, frozen into a statue by the gimlet eyes of my formidable so-called father, and just inches from the open coffin containing the cadaver of the ‘dearly departed.’

  I used to look at the pale, frozen faces of my aunts and think how like corpses they already were. The only saving grace seemed to be that, over time, their number would decrease as, one by one, they themselves would occupy a sleek, black coffin standing on a gurney in their own front room, just as their husbands – my uncles – had ended up before them. It couldn’t have come sooner for me, yet the tragedy was it never did.

  The aunts actually made my life a living hell, never losing the opportunity to torment and punish me and encouraging my father to do the same, while my mother looked on, too weak and spineless to intervene.

  As a consequence, I used to dream about my aunts and the torments they had put me through. Lie there writhing in my own perspiration as they crowded around me with their red lips and fox furs – prodding me with their long, painted nails – and wake up screaming. I didn’t need horror comics as a child. I had my aunts.

  Even now, I still think about them all the time, loathing them just as much as I did then, and the scary thing is, they are still there. They probably don’t look the same – witches can always change their appearance, can’t they? But to me they are there just the same. In fact, aunts are everywhere now, aren’t they? In towns, cities, and even in the countryside, with their smeared red lips and pointed red nails, ready to inflict misery on every small child they encounter. As a result, I have finally taken the decision to euthanize some of them – firstly because of the part such loathsome harridans played in ruining my own life and secondly, to satisfy myself that hateful creatures like these are truly gone forever.

  Why am I telling you all this? Well, I thought it might help your criminal profiler to understand my reasoning once I get going. Simple really.

  Yours faithfully,

  George

  Kate raised a cynical eyebrow.

  ‘Obviously someone didn’t think much of his scary aunts, guv,’ she commented drily. ‘Any idea who “George” is?’

  Roscoe snorted. ‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t be asking you to read the bloody letter, would I?’ he retorted. ‘Thing is, what do we do about it?’

  She shrugged. ‘What can we do? Send a note out to everyone who’s an aunt? Could be a bit labour intensive.’

  He glowered at her. ‘Just bin the sarcasm, will you?’

  She reread the letter, more carefully this time. ‘Probably just a crank,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed, ‘that’s what I reckon, but both the Super and the DCI are worried in case it’s a psycho-type crank, so we can’t just bury it.’

  ‘Then what are you going to do?’

  Roscoe stuffed a strip of gum in his mouth and began chewing furiously, his dark eyes darting from side to side as he pondered the problem.

  ‘Dunno right this minute,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘We don’t want to publicize the damned thing and scare everyone half to death. And if we did go down that route, how far would we need to circulate it – just Highbridge, county-wide, or what?’

  She shrugged. ‘Since the note was delivered by hand, it’s more than likely our George is someone local, so that at least narrows down the area a bit.’

  He snorted again. ‘Oh, come on, Sherlock. Anyone can hand-deliver a letter anywhere. Don’t have to be actually living there, do they? Any other bright suggestions?’

  ‘Depending on the quality of the original, we could check it for dabs or do a saliva test on the gummed seal – see if anything comes up on the DNA database. Assuming
, of course, that our shit-scared Super hasn’t already done that before allowing it to be pawed by half the nick?’

  Roscoe stared at her; his mouth frozen in mid-chew with part of the white gum stuck to the underside of his Stalin moustache.

  ‘Tell me you’re not serious?’ he breathed, sucking the gum back out of sight and apparently choosing to overlook her insubordinate reference to his boss. ‘Can you imagine the response from SOCO if every crank letter we received was sent to them with that sort of request? We’d become the laughing stock of the force.’

  She sighed. ‘Just a suggestion, guv,’ she said. ‘You asked me for ideas.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed, ‘but not stupid ones.’

  ‘And what happens if our crank actually carries out his threat?’ she queried, a mischievous glint in her eyes as she deliberately wound him up. ‘My suggestion wouldn’t look so stupid then, would it?’

  He blew a bubble with his gum, ignoring the sudden look of disgust on her face.

  ‘It won’t come to that,’ he said.

  ‘So, we just wait for a murder to be committed first, do we?’ she persisted.

  ‘There’s not going to be a murder,’ he retorted. ‘As you yourself just implied, this is simply some nutter trying to make us jump, that’s all. It’s too vague to be legit.’

  ‘So, what are you going to say to the boss when he asks you what we are doing about it?’

  He thought for a second, then grinned balefully, making no effort to retrieve the copy letter.

  ‘That one of our best detectives is working on it,’ he replied, adding, ‘but don’t spend too long doing the business. Just go through the motions, eh?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Well, you seem to have all the ideas.’

  ‘But … but you know the sort of workload I’m dealing with at the moment?’

  He shrugged. ‘You know what they say in the job – if you can’t stand a joke, you shouldn’t have joined.’

  Before she could say anything else, he snapped his fingers. ‘Oh yeah, and another thing. We’ve got a new DS joining the department tomorrow – coming straight from the NCS – a bloke called Percival, Des Percival. About time too. We’ve been travelling light ever since that turd, Sharp, fouled up.’

  Kate stiffened, remembering all too well the corrupt, weasel-faced DS, who had almost totally compromised a police murder investigation, and she shivered as mention of his name brought back unpleasant memories of the psychopathic killer known as ‘Twister’ who had nearly succeeded in killing her.

  ‘Could be an asset to the department,’ Roscoe went on, failing to pick up on her reaction, ‘and I’ll be assigning Jamie Foster and a couple of others to his team.’

  ‘And who do I get to assist me on this inquiry?’ she demanded, though she had already guessed the answer from the triumphant gleam in his eyes.

  ‘Can’t you guess?’ he sneered. ‘Danny Ferris, plus that wanker of a husband of yours. That pair should work well together.’

  Her mouth tightened. His description of Hayden had really cut into her. She was well aware of his low opinion of the affable man she had married and it was unjust. Hayden was certainly no live wire, was even work-shy at times – as with the previous night’s feigned sickness – and he could be totally infuriating, but the ex-public schoolboy had a first-class brain and a number of previous cases had been solved due to his keen analytical mind.

  She did not bite this time, however. ‘And what about last night’s narcotics job?’ she said coldly. ‘Do I carry on with that as well?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not our problem anymore. Drug Squad will be taking it over from now on. We’ve done our bit.’

  She waved the letter. ‘And how am I supposed to get anywhere with a dead-end inquiry like this?’

  ‘That’s for you to work out, Sergeant,’ he said, ‘but you could always call on that fabled intuition you women are supposed to have.’

  *

  Elsie Norman loved flowers. In summer, there were blooms everywhere in her garden, cramming nearly every flowerbed with rampant colour. In her eighties now, and alone since the death of her husband so many years before, she got a great deal of pleasure out of tending her shrubs and perennials – just as Tom had done when he was alive – weeding the beds and cutting some of the plants back so that they shot up again in spring. She actually talked to them when they were growing and she firmly believed they ultimately produced better blooms as a result. ‘It’s the personal touch, dear,’ she often told her bosom pal, Agnes Hereford, when she popped over from Wells for afternoon tea. ‘They feel wanted and appreciated.’

  She could have told her visitor the same thing too when he walked up the garden path of her chalet bungalow at around mid-morning, while she was kneeling on her foam pad with her trowel. But she sensed that someone so smartly dressed as the person standing there wouldn’t be interested in her ideas about the benefits of talking to flowers, so she kept her silly thoughts to herself.

  The bespectacled caller in the dark overcoat and strange, trilby-type hat might have humoured her, though, for he seemed a nice enough person, greeting her with a pleasant smile. Only the eyes bothered her when he helped her to her feet. They were strange eyes – not smiling at all, but quite cold and expressionless, as if they belonged to someone else living inside him, someone who was hiding behind the smile, looking out at her covertly. The man seemed vaguely familiar too, though she couldn’t quite place him, and her poor eyesight didn’t help either.

  Most peculiar, and her instincts warned her not to let the stranger over her porch. The local police community support officer had told her enough times never to let anyone she didn’t know into her home. But this one was so persuasive and chatty that she just couldn’t be rude, and, as there was no attempt to sell her anything, where was the harm anyway? In fact, her visitor was apparently from the council, sent to check that her home was properly insulated before the onslaught of winter in a few months. What a nice, kind thought – especially on a bank holiday, when most people would be off work – and, during their little chat in her comfortable sitting room, he explained that the survey was completely free too, even offering to help her sister, Mabel, when she mentioned her to him and asking for her address.

  Making them both a nice cup of tea was the least she could do in the circumstances. After all, it had to be very tiring trudging round door-to-door for hours. Leaving her guest sitting there, making notes in his little book, she bustled off to the kitchen to put the kettle on and find some of her special homemade biscuits to go with her best Darjeeling.

  But though her new silver-coloured kettle reached its boiling point, then switched off automatically, the nice cup of tea was never forthcoming and the homemade biscuits remained untouched on the fancy rose-patterned plate.

  CHAPTER 4

  Kate found Hayden in the police canteen – after all, where else would he be? She glared at the lardy cake on his plate, as if she could melt it with her stare.

  ‘Hi, old girl,’ he beamed through a mouthful of something that was certainly not the lardy cake.

  ‘Don’t—’ she began, glancing quickly around her at the other tables, but he cut her off, raising one sticky hand in apology.

  ‘Call you that at work, I know,’ he finished for her with a wince. ‘I meant Sergeant.’

  ‘Don’t you think you are carrying enough weight, without adding to it with that crap?’ she went on, closing her eyes briefly in resignation as she noticed the stain on his creased green shirt.

  He frowned. ‘I say, that’s a bit strong, isn’t it?’

  ‘Guts okay now, are they?’ she continued, without answering him.

  He nodded, taking a mouthful of the lardy cake. ‘Just went,’ he said. ‘Funny, that.’

  ‘Very,’ she agreed sarcastically. ‘And they’d better stay like that, as you and I have another job. So, leave the bloody cake and upstairs with you to the office – like now!’

  He grabbed his jacket from the back
of the chair, gulped some coffee, and followed her to the door, taking bites out of his cake as he went.

  The main office was empty. Even Roscoe seemed to have gone out somewhere, which couldn’t have been better as far as Kate was concerned. Pulling up a chair for her husband, she dropped into her own behind her desk.

  ‘Read that,’ she snapped, adding hastily as he reached out for the letter, ‘after you have cleaned your bloody hands.’

  To her horror, he wiped them down his trousers.

  ‘Well?’ she said when he had finished reading.

  He shrugged, apparently oblivious to the crumbs around his mouth.

  ‘It appears someone has a hang-up about aunts,’ he replied.

  ‘I made the same obvious point to Roscoe when he lumbered me with the job of tracing this arsehole,’ she said drily.

  He tutted. ‘I wish you wouldn’t use vulgar words like that,’ he said. ‘It smacks of a lack of breeding.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ she retorted, well used to his aversion to bad language, ‘but do you glean anything else from the letter?’

  ‘The handwriting is very cramped,’ he commented, ‘almost child-like, as if the author is either unused to writing longhand or short-sighted.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  He studied the letter again and grunted. ‘I am a little intrigued by his description of his childhood.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, it seems very dated – referring to a period long before you or I were born. His mention of horse-hair sofas pricking his legs – indicating he must have been in short trousers then – drawn curtains at funerals and ladies wearing black coats and fox furs draped around their necks, drinking sherry, conjures up an image of a period my dear old father used to describe. In fact, it all suggests he’s talking about the late forties or fifties.’

  Kate thought for a second. ‘That would mean our crank, or whatever he is, must be elderly, probably in his seventies or even older.’ She breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Some dangerous psychopath that would be – a geriatric, overdosing on Phyllosan!’