Poisoned Cherries

Chapter 14

David Capperauld lived in a main-door flat; that means that it opened directly on to the street. No lights were showing in the living-room window, or in the glass panel above the front door. It didn’t look promising, but it had been my daft idea and Alison was pumped up to do it.

The Playhouse was emptying its audience into the night when our taxi dropped us at the end of Union Street. I didn’t particularly want a large crowd to see me hammering on a door, so we slipped into Giuliano’s for a coffee, to give them time to disperse, and to allow me to lose some of that beer.

Eventually we judged it to be quiet enough for us to go back. Capperauld’s door was as solid and impressive as the rest of the building. He could be inside there and moving around and we wouldn’t hear him through it.

I made Alison stand to one side, so she couldn’t be seen though the spyglass, then I rang the bell. As we expected, there was no answer. There was a big black-painted knocker halfway up the door. I grabbed it and thumped it as hard as I could, then I did it again, and again, and again. If there had been anyone inside he wouldn’t have stood for that.

‘Nah,’ I told her. ‘Your boyfriend has definitely done a runner.’

Her face seemed to crumple; she was on the edge of tears. ‘But it’s not like him! David’s a decent guy. He wouldn’t run away and leave me to sort out the Torrent mess; he just wouldn’t.’ She looked at me with fear in her eyes; she was the mouse again. ‘Oz, do you think we should go in?’

I looked at her, then at the door, then back at her, as if she was daft. ‘I’m not kicking that fucking thing in. Do you see how thick it is?’

‘You don’t have to. I’ve got a key.’

‘Jesus!’ The night had turned sharp and cold; my breath came out as a cloud of steam. ‘Now you bloody tell me; after we’ve wakened half the street. Is this what you wanted to do all along, only you wanted someone with you?’

She sniffed. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Well bloody do it, then! Get in there, see if there are any clues to where the boy might have gone, leave him an angry note and let’s be done with it.’

Alison nodded, and fished a brass key from her bag. The lock was a complicated five-lever job, with dead-bolts built in for added security. When she turned the key it sounded like she was opening a cell. She pushed the door and stepped inside, with me at her heels, feeling more useless and awkward by the second.

‘David!’ she called out nervously. ‘David, are you here?’

The place was pitch black and deadly still. ‘No, he’s fucking not!’ I snapped at her; impatience is not one of my usual faults, but I had had enough for the night. ‘Switch on a light and take a look around.’

She reached over to the wall and felt for the switch; eventually she found it, and in an instant the hall was light. ‘Fucking hell,’ I heard myself exclaim.

The floor was tiled, not carpeted; from that, and the solidity of the plasterwork and doorframes, I guessed that the house had either been restored to its original condition, or had never altered in the two hundred or so years since it was built.

The thing that lay at our feet was definitely not an original fitting. He was face down; his right arm stretched out as if it was pointing to something, and his left was by his side. His toes were tucked in, sort of pointing at each other. He hadn’t been a very big bloke, but a bit more than half my size, as Alison had said.

She gave a sudden mewling sound that was half scream, half cry of fear, and seemed to stagger. Then she turned, as if to run. I caught her and held her. She looked down at him again, her eyes wide with fear. I was aware of a puddle forming on the floor.

‘David, yes?’ I asked her.

She couldn’t speak, she could only barely nod. I held on to her until I was sure she could stand, then let her go and went back to close the door.

Taking care not to kneel on any wet bits, I crouched down beside David Capperauld and went through the formality of feeling for a pulse in his neck. But he was stone cold to the touch, so I wasn’t going to find one.

Without moving him, I took a look at his face. It was almost purple, and he was staring wide-eyed to one side. I could see no signs of violence.

‘What’s happened?’ Alison whimpered.

‘I can’t say for sure, but he might have had a heart attack, or a cerebral haemorrhage.’

‘But he’s only twenty-nine.’

‘It happens.’

‘How long has he been. .’

‘Love, I only know a bit of first aid. It’ll take a pathologist to tell you that.’ I did notice, though, that we hadn’t smelled anything unusual when we’d stepped into the hall. Right at that moment, all I could smell was pee. So could Alison; she tottered off towards what I guessed was the bathroom.

I stood there looking down at Capperauld, looking for anything that might tell me what had happened to him, but seeing nothing. When Alison reappeared around ten minutes later, she was barefoot, and wearing a man’s dressing gown, knotted tightly around her waist. She was red-eyed, and she had scrubbed off her make-up. Apart from the hair she looked just as she had in the old days.

‘What do we do?’ she asked me, her voice still shaky.

I wanted to tell her that she would call the police and I would get the fuck out of there. I didn’t need any more publicity, and certainly not like this. I couldn’t do it, though. I didn’t answer her. Instead I took out my mobile and called directory enquiries. They gave me the number of the Gayfield Square police office.

There was no background noise when they answered; a quiet night, I guessed. It was time to liven it up. ‘I want to report a sudden death,’ I told the officer on the other end of the line. ‘We’ll need a doctor and an ambulance, in due course.’ I gave him the address and the name of the occupant, and told him that the man’s fiancee and I had just found him.

‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ the young constable asked.

I threw him the line from The Friends of Eddie Coyle. ‘If he isn’t, he never will be.’ The boy didn’t laugh. Why should he have? It wasn’t funny.