Kick Back

17

Next thing I knew, I was crouched down on the patio, my back pressed against the wall so hard I could feel the texture of the brickwork against my scalp. I didn't know how I'd got there. My torch was turned off, but the sight of the dangling corpse still filled my vision. I squeezed my eyes closed, but the image of the body hanging in mid-air was still vividly there. It sounds callous, but I felt outraged. I don't do bodies. I do industrial espionage, fraud and white-collar theft. The desire to curl up in a tight little ball was almost overwhelming. I knew I ought to get the hell out of there and call the police, but I couldn't get my limbs to move.

It looked like an open and shut case. The woman called Nell had arrived earlier in the afternoon; now there was a woman's corpse in the house, and her car was missing. What it meant to me was that Cheetham would be facing a murder charge rather than one of fraud. Either way, he wouldn't be practising as a solicitor again in a hurry. But Lomax, on the other hand, would almost certainly live to defraud another day. All he had to do was deny everything and blame it all on Cheetham.

I struggled to my feet. I wished Richard was with me. Not because he'd be any practical use, but because he'd be talking me out of what I was about to do. I knew it was crazy, knew I was taking the kind of stupid chance that Bill would seriously fall out with me over. But I'd come this far, and I couldn't stop now. If there was any proof of what had been going on, I wanted to have a good look at it before the police sequestrated it. As Richard has pointed out on several occasions, I subscribe to the irregular verb theory of language; I am a trained investigator, you have a healthy curiosity, she/he is a nosy-parker.

I took a deep breath and studied the kitchen window, carefully averting my eyes from the doorway leading into the hall. If I could get up to it, I thought I might be able to reach through the open window and slip open the catch on the side section, which would be big enough to let me climb in. Unfortunately, the sill wasn't wide enough to stand on, and there was no conveniently placed ladder. The only things that were remotely portable were the carefully arranged bricks of the circular barbecue. They weren't mortared together, merely assembled like a child's building bricks.

With a sigh, I started shifting the bricks to build a platform beneath the window. I was grateful for the latex gloves; without them, my hands would have been in shreds. It didn't take long to construct a makeshift set of steps that brought me high enough to slide my arm inside the unfastened window. My fingertips could barely brush the top of the window catch. I withdrew and opened the blade of my Swiss Army knife that looks as if its only purpose is to remove Boy Scouts from horses' hoofs. It has a sort of hooked bit on the end and almost certainly has some quaint name like 'cordwangler's grommet disengager'.

With the blade extended, I was able to flick the catch upwards. I pushed the window towards me, and it swung open. I stepped into the kitchen sink and closed both windows behind me. I searched the draining board for a cloth then carefully wiped the sill and the sink to remove any obvious traces of my entry. The last thing I wanted was to be lifted for murder. What I was really doing was putting off the moment when I'd have to confront Nell's dangling body. She must be suspended from the banister, I realized as I braced myself to go through the doorway.

I emerged into the hall, gritted my teeth and switched on my torch. The body was still twisting languorously in some faint draught. Steeling myself, I started at the floor and worked upwards. A brown court shoe like the one I'd seen emerging from the Golf a couple of hours ago lay on its side on the plain oatmeal Berber carpet, as if it had been idly kicked off. Its partner was on the left foot of the body. The ankles were lashed together with an incongruous Liberty silk scarf. The scarf was tied in a slip knot that had tightened to cut into the flesh above the ankle bones. She wore sheer dark-tan stockings. They looked like silk to me. I caught a glimpse of suspenders under the full, swirling skirt. I couldn't see the underwear. The smell made me glad of that. My eyes travelled upwards, over a silk tunic cinched in at the waist by a woven leather belt with gilt studs, like a stylized leather queen's. The shapely legs were bent at the knees, held in place by another scarf that was tied to the belt.

The wrists were tied together in front of the body with another scarf, clasped like an innocent Doris Day in a nineteen-fifties film. Again, a slip knot had been used. It looked like a bizarre sexual fantasy, the stuff of snuff movies. I tried not to look too closely at the ligature, but it was obvious that the woman had been hanged by a rope of silk scarves. I closed my eyes, swallowed hard and made myself look at the face.

It wasn't Nell.

Not by any stretch of the imagination was that swollen, engorged face the same one I'd seen in Buxton and later in Cheetham's office. From below, it was hard to say more than that, but the hair looked strangely asymmetrical. The one ear I could see was an ominous bluish purple, and the skin of the face was an odd colour. Horrified but oddly fascinated, I skirted the body to climb the stairs for a better vantage point. Five steps from the top of the flight, I was almost level with the staring eyes. Dots of blood peppered the whites of the eyes. I tried not to think of this as a human being, but simply as a piece of evidence. Close to, it was clear that the brown hair was a wig. What was also clear, in spite of the hideous distortion of the features and the heavy make-up, was the identity of the corpse. That was when I lost it.

I splashed cold water over my face, drawing my breath in sharply as it hit. I dried myself on toilet paper, then flushed it down the loo. Then I flushed the loo again, the sixth time since I'd lost my lunch. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean the forensic scientists aren't out to get you. I gave the toilet bowl a last wipe down, then flushed again, praying the U-bend was now free from any traces of my reaction to discovering Martin Cheetham hanging from a banister dressed in women's clothing.

I closed the toilet lid and sat down on it. It was only my second corpse ever, and the discovery seemed to be taking a bit of getting used to. The voice of wisdom and self-preservation was telling me to get out of there as fast as possible and wait till I was in another county before calling the police. The bloody-minded voice from the other side of my brain reminded me that I'd never get another chance like this to get to the bottom of whatever had brought matters to this pass. I couldn't believe Cheetham had killed himself because he thought I'd uncovered his dishonesty in the land sale. There had to be more.

I forced myself out of the bathroom and back on to the landing. 'It's not a person,' I kept saying out loud to myself, as if that could convince me. I stood on the landing, above the banister where Cheetham's body was suspended by the rope of silk scarves. From here, it didn't look quite so terrible, though at this angle I could see what had been obscured from below, that he had an erection. I forced myself to reach down and touch the skin of the face. There was no perceptible difference in temperature between my hand and the corpse. I didn't know enough about forensic medicine to understand the significance of that.

I turned my back on the body and started my search. The first room I entered was obviously the spare room. It was lit dimly by the glow of the street lamps. The room was clean and neat, but again, curiously old fashioned, like a room in my parents' house. The wardrobe was empty except for a white tuxedo, dress trousers and a couple of frilly evening shirts. The chest of drawers was empty except for towels in the bottom drawer. On the off-chance, I lifted an insipid watercolour of the Lake District away from the wall. I couldn't think of any reason for keeping it except to obscure a safe. No such luck.

The next bedroom appeared more promising. It overlooked the garden, so I took the risk of drawing the heavy, floor-length chintz drapes and switching on the light. Mirrored wardrobes the length of the far wall doubled the apparent size of the room. A king-size bed dominated the other wall. The plain green duvet cover looked rumpled, as if someone had been lying on it. On the floor by the bed, a magazine lay open. I crouched down and studied it, gingerly turning the pages. It was sadomasochistic pornography of the kind that makes me feel like joining Mary Whitehouse and the Moral Majority. The key pages came just before the one that lay open on the floor. They featured an illustrated story about a man who got his satisfaction from pretending to hang himself.

As I crouched there, feeling soiled just looking at the porn, by a strange contrast I noticed the bed linen still smelled fresh and clean. I looked carefully at the pillows, then moved round the bed to the undisturbed side, where I lifted the duvet: no stray hairs, no wrinkles in the sheet, no depression in the pillows. I may not have had much experience of suicides, but I couldn't see someone changing the bedding before they topped themselves. On a hunch, I walked across the room to the wicker linen basket. It contained two shirts, two pairs of socks, two pairs of boxer shorts and a bath towel. But no sheets, pillow cases or duvet cover. Curiouser and curiouser.

I started on the wardrobes. The first revealed half a dozen business suits and a couple of dozen shirts, all from Marks amp; Spencer. A shoe rack along the bottom held a mixture of formal and casual footwear. A tie rack was fixed to the inside of the door, revealing a taste in ties as exotic as an undertaker's. The next section contained leisure wear – polo shirts, rugby shirts, jeans, all carefully pressed and hung. The next unit disguised a tower of drawers. T-shirts, underwear, socks, sweaters, jogging pants, all neatly folded in piles.

The last two sections appeared to be a double wardrobe, and it was locked. The lock was different from the flimsy ones on the other doors and their keys didn't fit. I wondered where Cheetham's key ring was, and doubled back to the drawer in the bedside table. It held a wallet and a bunch of keys, but not the key to the wardrobe. Oh joy, oh rapture. There was nothing else for it. I'd have to try picking the lock, and be careful not to leave it looking like someone had had a go at it.

I took out the slender tools and gently began to probe the inside of the lock with a narrow, flexible strip of metal. Just the thought of picking the lock had my hands sweating inside the thin gloves. I started to poke about in what I hoped was a reasonable approximation of what my friend Dennis had taught me. After a few minutes that felt like hours, my probe met the kind of resistance that shows a bit of give. Praying the strip I was using was strong enough, I twisted it. There was a click, and the doors slowly opened out towards me.

I could see why Martin Cheetham didn't want any casual snoopers to open them. It was the last thing you'd expect to find in a conveyancing specialist's wardrobe. There were a dozen chic outfits on hangers, each covered with a transparent plastic sheath. They ranged from a cocktail dress with a froth of multicoloured tulle and sequins to an elegant business suit with pencil skirt. There was also a mac and a camel wraparound coat. On a rack on the door was an exotic collection of silk scarves ranging from Hermes to hippie-style Indian. A chest of drawers occupied the lower section of half the wardrobe. The top drawer was filled with an astonishing and luxurious collection of ladies' underwear in both silk and leather. Believe me, I mean 'ladies'. The second drawer contained an assortment of foam and silica gel prostheses, which I managed to sort into three categories; breasts, hips and buttocks. It also held more make-up than I've ever possessed, even as an experimenting teenager, and a selection of false nails.

The lower drawers were filled with a bizarre assortment of straps, clamps and unidentifiable bits of leather with buckles and studs. I didn't even want to start imagining how they all fitted into the strange world of Martin Cheetham's sexual life. There were also a couple of vibrators, one so large it made my eyes water just to look at it. There were, however, no more magazines like the one by the bed. I slammed the drawers shut and concentrated on the less threatening contents of the wardrobe. Along the bottom was a shelf of shoes and matching handbags. They alone must have cost the best part of a couple of grand.

I picked up the first handbag, a soft black Italian leather satchel that Alexis would have killed for. The stray thought brought me up with a jolt. Alexis! I'd completely forgotten our close encounter at the end of the road! She couldn't have anything to do with all this. I knew she couldn't, yet the little traitor voice in my head kept saying, 'You don't know that. She might just have tipped him over the edge.' I shook my head vigorously, like a dog emerging from a river, and carried on with my search.

The third bedroom, little more than a boxroom, had been fitted out as an office, with a battered old filing cabinet, a tatty wooden desk and a very basic PC, compatible with the one in his office so he could presumably bring stuff home. A quick search revealed where Lomax had got his documents from. Three of the four drawers in the filing cabinet were empty. The fourth held only a couple of box files filled with what appeared to be personal receipts, credit card bills and the sort of miscellaneous garbage that every householder accumulates. I riffled quickly through the pair of boxes, finding nothing of interest.

The desk had even less to offer. The drawers contained only paper, envelopes and the bizarre mixture of odds and ends that always inhabits at least one drawer in every work space. The interesting thing was what wasn't there. There wasn't a single floppy disc in the place, a serious omission given that the computer in Cheetham's home office had no hard disc drive. In other words, the computer itself had no permanent memory. Every time it was switched on, it was like a blank sheet of paper. If Lomax had cleared the discs out, I suspected it had been done without Cheetham's permission or co-operation, for if he'd been trying to get rid of incriminating material, there was no reason on earth why he'd also feel the need to dump the software programs that were necessary to make the computer work.

Musing on this, I finished my search of the office and moved downstairs, trying to avoid looking at the body. As I entered the living room, I checked my watch. I'd been in the house just under an hour. I really couldn't afford to hang around much longer. All it needed was for Nell or Lomax to come back and find me here.

As it happened, it didn't take long for me to complete my search, ending up in the kitchen, where, incidentally, neither the washing machine nor the tumble drier contained bedding. The most useful thing I'd found was a spare set of keys in the cutlery drawer. As I let myself out of the back door, I felt an enormous sense of anti-climax. The tension that had been holding me together suddenly dissipated and I felt weak at the knees. Somehow, I found the strength to replace the bricks in something approximating the right barbecue arrangement, then I sneaked back round the house to the street, checking there was no one in sight before returning to the van. I could only hope that when the neighbours heard about Cheetham's death, none of them would remember any details about the strange van parked a few doors away from his house.

I drove home at a law-abiding speed for once. It was the traffic that was my downfall. I had to pass the Corn Exchange on my way home, and as I drove up Cateaton Street, everything ground to a complete halt. The lights at the bottom of Shude Hill had died, and the resulting rush-hour chaos brought the city centre to a standstill. It seemed like a sign from the gods, so I pulled off the main drag on to Hanging Ditch and parked the van.

Five minutes later, I was inside Martin Cheetham's office.