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The little dog had started nipping valiantly at the man’s bare ankles as he’d tried to dance away from the gnashing canine teeth. And since he was barefoot, when he’d taken off on seeing Trudy’s approach, she’d been able to catch him easily. Needless to say, he hadn’t put up any struggle, much to her relief. (She’d not been quite sure which bit of his unprepossessing body to grab first. Some things just weren’t covered in police training.)
Now, as she typed furiously, her cheeks still burning, she wasn’t sure whether she should be admiring the exhibitionist’s stamina and fortitude in going naked in the middle of January, or cursing him for making her the butt of station jokes for the next month (at least) to come.
‘Can I have a cup of tea then, lovely lady?’ Charles Frobisher asked her politely. A single man, who lived with his mother on what he called ‘a private income’, he’d listed his occupation as ‘poet’.
‘No. Sit down and keep quiet,’ Trudy hissed, casting a quick look over at the DI’s door.
‘Don’t worry – he’s not interested in what the cat dragged in. He’s got the vulture in with him,’ PC Swinburne reassured her amiably.
Trudy blinked at him. ‘Who?’
‘Our beloved coroner, Dr Clement Ryder,’ the old PC told her. ‘You’re new, so you haven’t had a chance to come across him yet, but you will. We all have to run that particular gauntlet sooner or later. One day you’ll have to testify at one of his inquests and when you do, my girl, just you make sure you refer to your notes and don’t slip up. The old sod will have you, if you do.’
From the way he spoke, Trudy guessed the old constable was talking from bitter experience.
‘Oh,’ she said nervously. ‘He sounds a bit of a nightmare.’
Walter grunted. ‘He was one of those bigwig fancy heart surgeons up in London before he quit. And you know what they’re like,’ he added grimly. ‘Think they’re closely related to God Almighty, most of them. Having the power of life and death in their hands, and all that rot. Now he’s coroner, he thinks he’s bleeding Perry Mason and Dick Tracy all rolled into one. Trouble is, he’s well respected in this city – invited to dine at a lot of High Tables and all that. Like this with the mayor,’ he said, crossing his fingers in demonstration. ‘So we have to indulge the big-headed old coot. Even if he does like to stick his nose in where it isn’t wanted.’
Trudy blinked. ‘Sorry?’
Walter Swinburne sniffed angrily. ‘Thinks he can tell the police what’s what. That’s probably what he’s doing now, I shouldn’t wonder. Trying to tell the boss how he should be handling the McGillicuddy case or something. Not that that’s any business of his, mind, but you can’t tell him that. None of the other coroners give us half as much trouble as the old vulture does. The boss won’t like it,’ he predicted with savage satisfaction, pursing his lips. ‘Nope, the boss won’t like it all.’
As it turned out, the old constable was only half right. DI Jennings didn’t much like having Dr Ryder breathing down his neck, but the coroner wasn’t there to tell him how he should be running his latest murder investigation.
Instead, he seemed to have some sort of bee in his bonnet about an old case.
When the coroner had called in that morning, just expecting Jennings to drop everything and make time for him (which, of course, Jennings had, damn him!), the DI had sensed trouble ahead. After he’d listened to what Ryder actually wanted, he’d become even more displeased. Because the damned man only wanted him to reopen and investigate an old case, a death by misadventure, dating from nearly five years ago.
‘Like I’ve been trying to tell you, Dr Ryder,’ Jennings said now, his patience wearing thin, ‘I simply don’t have the authority to reopen a case just on your say-so, especially one that seems to have brought in a perfectly adequate verdict. And before you carry on…’ He held out a hand as if to physically ward him off. ‘…I don’t believe my immediate superiors would allow it, even if I were to ask them,’ he said shortly.
He paused as he heard a sudden laughing roar outside, and glanced through the internal window that screened him from the rest of the office, just in time to see the pretty new probationary WPC come in with a naked man.
He drew his breath in sharply. Bloody hell, she’d actually caught the flasher, he thought blankly. Then he scowled as he watched her steer a skinny old man, covered by her overcoat, to a chair. There was something distinctly seedy and vaguely nauseating about the scene, and he only hoped nothing untoward would come of it. It would only take one silly matron on some influential committee with the ear of City Hall to complain about how wrong it was to expect respectable young women to catch dirty-minded perverts to cause one hell of a big stink. She’d complain to her civil-servant husband, who had the ear of the Chief Constable, and before you knew it, his immediate superior would be hauling DI Harry Jennings over the coals for…
‘I only want someone to help me do a little discreet digging.’ The caustic and precise tones of the coroner brought his mind snapping back to the problem at hand.
‘I believe the Fleet-Wright case was seriously flawed. And given the connection to your latest murder victim, I can’t understand why you’re deliberately dragging your heels, man,’ Clement Ryder put in cannily.
Harry Jennings sat back down behind his deck with a sigh. ‘The fact that our murder victim, McGillicuddy, once knew someone who died in what you insist on calling mysterious circumstances hardly makes for much of a connection, Dr Ryder,’ he pointed out wearily.
Clement drew in a long, slow, patient breath, and the policeman felt his spirits sink ever further. Clearly the older man wasn’t going to give up on this, and the last thing he needed was Dr Clement bloody Ryder running loose on some sort of a crusade.
‘I’m not asking you to officially reopen the case yet. I’m not even asking you to assign a team to it,’ the coroner said magnanimously.
Harry Jennings smiled grimly. ‘Kind of you, I’m sure, sir,’ he muttered sardonically.
‘In fact, I’m perfectly willing to devote my own spare time to it,’ Clement said, hiding a satisfied smile as the DI’s eyes grew rounder and wider than those of an owl, and the younger man nearly rocketed out of his chair in alarm. ‘But naturally, I can’t do that,’ Clement carried on mildly before the DI had a chance to protest, ‘without some sort of official status or help from the city police.’
Jennings, who’d slumped back in his chair in relief, quickly shot up out of it again. ‘That’s impossible, man,’ he snapped, finally at the end of his tether. ‘My team are all busy with the McGillicuddy murder case. Surely you must realise that?’
As he spoke, he wandered back to the internal office window and looked through, relieved to see his team busily working. ‘And as you can imagine, my superiors would prefer we solve it sooner rather than later.’
‘I understand that, naturally. But surely you can spare me one person? Just a body in uniform is all I need to give me a bit of official status when I re-question some witnesses,’ Clement cajoled. ‘And who knows, it’s possible the Fleet-Wright case just might connect back to your McGillicuddy case. And think how stupid you’d look if that turned out be the case and you hadn’t followed up on it – especially since I’d even offered to do it for you! Just think of it as killing two birds with one stone, man. What have you got to lose?’
‘You have no authority to go around questioning anyone,’ Jennings snapped, pushed beyond endurance.
‘Exactly,’ Clement Ryder said smugly. ‘Which is why I need an actual police officer. Someone to work closely with me and follow my lead. Surely you have someone unimportant you can spare me?’
Instantly, as he said this, Harry Jennings thought of PC Swinburne. The old man was just putting in time until his retirement anyway. And by now, he was willing to do almost anything in order to get the old vulture off his back. But when he looked back into the outer office at his team, the first person he saw was WPC Trudy Loveday.
Who’d just caught the flasher.
And would need to be reassigned to some other case where she couldn’t come to any harm or get in his way.
And suddenly he began to smile.
‘You know, Dr Ryder,’ he said, turning back to smile through gritted teeth at the trouble-making coroner. ‘I think I have just the person for you…’
When Trudy returned from depositing her prisoner in the cells (Frobisher having been clothed by a kindly Salvation Army colonel who’d come in with some donated items), she was surprised to be called into the DI’s office. She could almost count on the fingers of one hand the number of times her superior had actually wanted to see her, and secretly suspected he wished he hadn’t been assigned any female staff at all. It was almost as if he didn’t know what to do with her, and so he usually left it to the Sergeant to assign her details.
And when she stepped inside his office, she was even more surprised to see that the DI’s visitor – a rather distinguished-looking man – hadn’t yet left. Dressed in a smart charcoal-grey suit, with an imperious thick sweep of silver hair, he regarded her from beneath bushy eyebrows with obvious curiosity. Although his grey eyes looked somewhat watery, the expression in them was razor-sharp as they observed her.
Under their influence, Trudy could feel her spine begin to stiffen, and she became instantly alert.
‘WPC Loveday, this is Dr Clement Ryder, one of the city’s coroners,’ Harry Jennings said dryly.
‘Sir,’ Trudy said. But whether to her superior officer, or to the man lounging in the chair watching her, nobody in the room could tell – including Trudy.
‘Dr Ryder has rather an interesting proposition that he wants to put to you,’ DI Jennings said, slightly mischievously. Because, of course, he knew it was actually up to him to give the police constable her orders and that she really had no say in the matter.
He just didn’t want to make it easy for the old vulture.
And as the coroner shot him a chastising look, Trudy, with Walter Swinburne’s words of warning about this man still echoing in her ears, said cautiously, ‘Oh?’
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mavis McGillicuddy stood at her sink, listlessly washing up the breakfast things. Marie had gone back to school. The poor mite now only had her grandmother to look after her, and Mavis felt the responsibility keenly.
She stared out of her kitchen window vaguely as she automatically began to dry the teacups. Her neighbours and friends had been wonderful, rallying round, but they couldn’t be with her every minute of the day. And the house now felt so empty and quiet and nothing felt normal.
Even the people passing by out on the street paused to look at her house now. As if expecting to see something… What? Interesting? Frightening? Mavis didn’t quite know. But at the least the reporters had stopped bothering her for the moment and she was being left in peace.
But no sooner had she thought this than Mavis noticed the woman at the bottom of the short garden path. She seemed to be walking up to the gate, as if trying to make up her mind to open it, but then she’d veer off, as if losing her nerve.
Slowly, Mavis McGillicuddy’s hands stilled on her tea towel. The woman was a stranger, she was sure. Nicely dressed, by the cut of her tailored coat and… yes, her nice leather gloves.
Although, since Jonathan’s death, she’d become used to casual ‘gawpers’, as she thought of them, this woman didn’t strike her at all as one of the usual, run-of-the-mill curiosity-seekers.
Almost curious now, Mavis watched the woman thoughtfully. And frowned. Did her appearance ring a faint bell?
She looked to be nearly two decades younger than herself, and was still attractive. And now, again, she had marched back to the gate with a determined step, her back ramrod-straight, as if steeling herself for something unpleasant. And this time, her elegantly gloved hand even got as far as reaching for the gate latch. But then, at the last minute, she turned away again. This time there was the slope of defeat in her shoulders as she turned and walked away.
And didn’t come back.
With a shrug, Mavis reached for another plate and slipped it into her washing-up bowl, not realising she’d washed and dried it once already.
‘So, have you got all that clear?’ DI Jennings asked Trudy, who was standing straight and alert in front of his desk.
The coroner, Dr Clement Ryder, had just left and her superior was watching her closely.
‘Yes, sir,’ Trudy said, feeling both excited and vaguely puzzled. ‘You want me to read the inquest file Dr Ryder has left, give you a summary, and then work closely with Dr Ryder as he pursues his inquiries. And at the end of each day I’m to give you a written report of our activities.’
DI Jennings nodded. The girl had a quick mind and good grasp of things, he’d give her that.
‘And I’m to report to you at once if I believe Dr Ryder has overstepped the mark in any way.’ Here, Trudy began to feel a shade uneasy, since she wasn’t quite sure what the DI had meant by this. What would her boss consider overstepping the mark to be, exactly? ‘And when we interview any witnesses, I must be the one to do the questioning.’ She parroted his instructions back at him.
‘Exactly. Dr Ryder is a civilian, despite his role as coroner, and has no authority to make an arrest, question witnesses outside of his court, or otherwise play the role of a police officer. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Trudy said smartly. What wasn’t clear to her – not by a long shot – was why the Inspector was indulging the old vulture in this way.
After having briefly met the man, she could see now why Walter Swinburne and the rest of the station thought of him as a vulture. It wasn’t just the fact that the man dealt with death in the course of his job – for others did that too. Nor was it his beak-like nose that tended to give him the appearance of an imperious bird of prey. It was those cold, watchful eyes that gave you the shivers.
Jennings now sighed heavily. ‘Dr Ryder is a very clever man, with powerful friends, Constable Loveday – always remember that. He also has an annoying habit of being right. So if he thinks there was something off about this old case…’ He indicated the buff folder that lay on his desk. ‘Then, like as not, there probably was. And since there’s a tenuous link to our murder victim, McGillicuddy…’ Here Trudy’s eyes widened in real interest. ‘…We need to check it out. Within reason.’
Now Trudy wanted to turn cartwheels across the floor. She’d never thought, as a humble probationary WPC, that she’d be allowed to get within a mile of a real murder case. And although it was clear the Inspector didn’t think there was anything in it, to be able to work on even the periphery of an ongoing case, even in such odd circumstances as these, was far more than she could ever have wished for.
She’d be a fool not to make the most of it. ‘I see, sir,’ she said eagerly. ‘When do I start?’
‘Tomorrow will be soon enough. I don’t want the old vul—er… Dr Clement to think we’ll jump to his tune whenever he snaps his fingers.’ Even if he just had! ‘So study the case.’ He picked up the file, glanced at the name on it. ‘It’s one Gisela Fleet-Wright, death by misadventure, I think. When you’re sure you have a good grasp of it, call on Dr Ryder first thing in the morning. He’s said he’ll be in his office. You’ll then help him investigate whatever it is that needs investigating.’
‘Yes, sir. And I’m to, er, follow his instructions?’ She wanted this point clarified.
‘Yes, but as I’ve already said, only within reason,’ he added cautiously. ‘Just jolly him along, and if you can actually get to the bottom of whatever it is that’s bothering him, and get him off our backs altogether, so much the better.’
Trudy nodded, trying to bite back a growing grin of excitement. Even if the old case wasn’t that interesting, it had to be better than catching bag-snatchers and flashers, surely?
‘Yes, sir. I’ll do my best, sir.’
DI Jennings waved her out of his office, his mind already on other things. It had turned out that there just might be a lead from the fire incident in Sir Marcus’s dim and distant past, after all, and he was keen to follow up on it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It didn’t take Trudy long to read quickly through the file and get a basic grasp of the Fleet-Wright case. But it took several long hours of sitting at her desk and taking painstaking notes before she was confident she knew the case inside and out.
Once she did, she had to admit to feeling a slight sense of disappointment. When DI Jennings had told her that the wily coroner had been unhappy with this particular verdict, she’d expected something a little more… well, spectacular. Instead, the case she’d just read, while very sad, hadn’t struck her as being at all out of the ordinary.
The facts seemed simple and straightforward enough – but, as far as she could tell, though tragic, they didn’t seem particularly suspicious. Worse still, the connection to their murder victim was fleeting at best.
In the summer of 1955, twenty-one-year-old Gisela Fleet-Wright, daughter of Beatrice and Reginald Fleet-Wright, had been found dead in her bedroom. It had been a lovely sunny day, and her mother, who had found her, had tried to revive her without success. She had then rung up the family doctor, the GP arriving at the house some ten minutes later. He’d conducted a brief examination and declared the poor girl dead.
He had then called in the police.
This was, perhaps, the first sign that all was not quite right, since it immediately told Trudy the doctor was concerned about the circumstances of the death, and hadn’t been any too keen to write out a death certificate.
But given that Gisela had been only twenty-one, and supposedly in reasonable health, that wasn’t all that surprising.
There were no signs of violence on the body and it transpired that, although Gisela had a history of depression and ‘mood swings’, she had no underlying heart problems or any other medical conditions that might account for her sudden and unexpected death.
Naturally, the police had asked for an autopsy. The family, Roman Catholics, hadn’t particularly liked this idea, but, of course, had been unable to prevent it. Again, to the lay mind, this might have seemed suspicious, but Trudy knew most families instinctively shied away from the idea of their loved ones ‘being cut about’ and that this objection by the Fleet-Wrights didn’t necessarily indicate they had something to hide.
The results of the autopsy showed Gisela had higher than normal levels of the various antidepressant medicines she had been prescribed in her bloodstream: enough to cause the heart failure listed as the cause of death.
And this is where, Trudy supposed, Dr Clement Ryder’s first interest in the case had been piqued.
Although he hadn’t yet been a coroner when the inquest was heard, he’d told DI Jennings that he’d sat through the entire proceedings, wanting to learn more about his newly chosen profession and get a feel for what the job entailed. He had thus paid very close attention to every aspect of the evidence being given, and of the witnesses’ testimony.
And he had obviously convinced the DI that there was – at the very least – a possibility that something might have been amiss with the coroner’s verdict, since they were now reviewing it.
But for the life of her, and no matter how often she reread the witness statements, she couldn’t see where the problem might lie.
As Trudy had learned at police training college, a coroner’s inquest is not a trial. A coroner investigates deaths that appear to be due to violence, have a sudden or unknown cause, occur while in legal custody, or are otherwise deemed unnatural. And even then, a coroner’s inquest is only there to establish who the deceased was, and how and when they died.
In the Fleet-Wright case, there was no confusion or uncertainty over the victim’s identity, or when or where the victim had died. What was more, the coroner’s jury had been told by the medical witnesses that death had been caused by the victim ingesting too many of her prescribed pills. So, on this matter at least, they had no trouble bringing in the cause of death – they merely had to agree with the pathologist’s findings. The trouble and confusion lay in deciding how the overdose had come about.
Here, Trudy paused to lean back in her chair and stretch her arms luxuriously over her head, to give her eyes a little rest from reading. Her mind, however, remained as busy as ever.
Clearly, she mused, there were only a few ways in which Gisela Fleet-Wright could have taken too many pills. First, she could have taken them on purpose – in which case any jury would find that the victim had taken her own life, perhaps while the balance of her mind was affected. This, Trudy knew, was a kind way of saying a suicide victim wasn’t really responsible for their actions, and was often brought in by kind-hearted juries to make things easier on those left behind. Especially when the family concerned was Roman Catholic.
Second, the overdose could have been accidental – in some way, the poor girl had taken more pills than she intended. In which case, accidental death or the verdict that had eventually been reached – death by misadventure – would have been the correct conclusion.
And lastly, and most unlikely by far – somehow, someone had forced her to take the pills, resulting in her death.
In other words, murder.
In the rare cases where no cause of death could be agreed upon, the coroner was able to record an open verdict. This was never popular, however, or satisfying, as it was an admission that the court simply didn’t know what had happened. But it left the case ‘open’ for further investigation at some point in the future.
Once again, she turned back to the file and reread the evidence for a third time, determined not to miss anything. In spite of everyone commiserating with her on her new assignment working with ‘the old vulture’, Trudy knew this could be her big chance to prove to the Sarge and DI Jennings that she could do more than the menial tasks nobody else wanted.
It was her chance to show she had brains as well as ambition, and she was determined not to blow it. So, despite her eyes feeling as dry as those of a member of the temperance society, she forced her attention back to the papers in front of her.
The police report, as well as the findings of the subsequent forensics report, made it clear there had been no signs of forced entry at the Fleet-Wrights’ house – a large, detached villa in north Oxford, surrounded by large gardens. On the day in question, both the victim’s mother, younger brother and two gardeners had been in and around the house at various times, and none had reported seeing any strangers. Neither had anyone heard the victim scream. The pathologist’s report also made it clear there had been no signs of bruising on the girl’s body, no skin scrapings under her fingernails to indicate she might have fought off and scratched an attacker, and no signs of any ‘interference’ with the body.
The first police officer at the scene, a PC who walked that beat and had been asked to attend the scene and report back, also stated that he’d found the victim lying peacefully and fully clothed on her bed, and that the bedclothes underneath her were barely rumpled. Her bedroom had likewise shown no signs of a struggle. Furthermore, since it was a fine, sunny day, her window was open, and if she had cried out, one of the gardeners working below would surely have heard her.
Clearly, then, murder had seemed extremely unlikely.
Next, suicide had to be considered. But here again, there was no evidence for this. The victim had left no note – which wasn’t totally unheard of – but it seemed to be the consensus of opinion that young women, on the whole, did tend to leave a note behind, if only to say sorry or to try and explain or justify their actions. Furthermore, her family and friends all testified that Gisela wasn’t the kind of girl who’d just give up on life, despite her bouts of depression. What’s more, she had showed no signs that she might be thinking of taking her own life.
