The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries

THE 45 STEPS by Peter Crowther

Luddersedge’s Regal Hotel lived up to its grand name in only one way.

The building was forbidding rather than imposing, a towering grey edifice of soot-ingrained stone and stained, greasy windows that squatted alongside the traffic lights on the corner of Smithfield Road and Albert Street. The somewhat less-than-impressive facade looked more like an old mill building – examples of which could still be seen dotted around the Calder Valley landscape, all the way from Halifax to Burnley and points even further west – than like a supposedly luxurious establishment catering for visiting gentry. But then, it was highly unlikely that any gentry taking advantage of the Regal’s dubious hospitality would actually be visiting Luddersedge itself. Rather, such occasional tenants would more realistically be those whose misfortune was so dire that their mode of transportation between departure and arrival points had chosen Luddersedge to give up the vehicular ghost… and at a time to render impossible any solution other than booking into the Regal.

On the top of the five-storey building, amongst the aerials and the blackened windows, pigeons and starlings roosted noisily beside the quieter permanent residents, a troupe of bizarre gargoyles intermittently positioned amidst the stone balustrades and fashioned by Cecil Blenkinsop at the turn of the century. These monolithic decorations – whose artistic merit was questionable at the very least – were presented by Blenkinsop to the hotel in a rare demonstration of generosity.

However, the smart money around the older citizens of the town had it that the “gift” was actually a means to eradicate the excessive gambling debts run up by the gruff mill-owner’s son-cum-sculptor in the hotel’s extensive gambling casino, a huge two floor area in the belly of the hotel that had since been refashioned and refurbished after the Great War into a ballroom.

To say that hotels in Luddersedge were thin on the ground was an understatement of gargantuan proportions. Although there were countless guest houses, particularly along Honey dew Lane beside the notorious Bentley’s Tannery – whose ever-present noxious fumes seemed to be unnoticed by the guests – usually truck drivers, who stayed there as a mid-way point on the long haul from Glasgow to the South Coast, parking their rigs on the spare ground between Carholme Place and Car-holme Drive – the Regal was the only full-blown hotel, and the only building other than the old town hall to stretch above the slate roofs of Luddersedge and scratch a sky oblivious to, and entirely disinterested in, its or even the town’s existence.

The corridors of the Regal were lined with threadbare carpets, hemmed in by walls bearing a testimonial trinity of mildew, graffiti and spilled alcohol, and topped by ceilings whose anaglypta was peeling at the corners and whose streaky paint-covering had been long ago dimmed by cigarette smoke.

The rooms themselves boasted little in the way of the creature comforts offered by the Regal’s big-town contemporaries in Halifax and Burnley.

Only the Albert, Calder and Bickerdyke suites on the fourth floor featured tea – and coffee-making facilities, not to mention sufficient room to swing a cat… should such an activity be desired (though deplorable TV reception and the absence of satellite or cable-fed hotel movies imbued even the most unusual in-room entertainment with dizzily heightened credibility and attraction).

The truth, however, was that the Regal’s guests brought their own entertainment in the form of a partner whose intimate attentions they might enjoy amidst the carbolic soap-smelling bed linen rather than propped against the building walls surrounding the club district of the metropolis of Halifax or parked up in one of the pull-ins overlooking Todmorden, testing the suspension and upholstery of old cars whose MOTs had been just a little too readily granted by Pete Dickinson or Tony Manderson at Tony’s garage over on Eldershot Road.

Such activities were entirely safe inasmuch that, while the Regal’s facilities were often found lacking, the discretion of the staff was legendary… and with room rates being so modest, even with breakfast added on, an additional gratuity in the form of a folded fiver jammed into the hand of the appropriately named manager Sidney Poke or one of his team was a small price to pay for uninterrupted passion in the relative comfort and complete anonymity accorded by the Regal.

For most of the year, the Regal’s register – if such a thing were ever to be filled in, which it rarely was… at least accurately – boasted only couples by the name of Smith or Jones, and the catering staff had little to prepare in the form of sustenance other than the fabled Full English Breakfast, truly the most obscenely mountainous start-of-the-day plate of food outside of Dublin. Indeed, questions were frequently asked in bread shop or bus stop queues and around the beer-slopped pub tables at the Working Men’s Club as to exactly how the Regal kept going.

But there were far too many other things to occupy the attention and interest of Luddersedge’s townsfolk and, anyway, most of them recognized the important social part played by the Regal in the lives of their not-so-distant cousins living in the towns a few miles down the road in either direction… just as they recognized the equally important part played for themselves by similar establishments in those same towns. There were far too many scarf-bedecked Juliets and blue-collar Romeos – some young and some not so young – who had taken advantage of such no-questions-asked solitude… some long ago, when their flesh seemed more artistically arranged, and some only a day or two earlier, when they had supposedly been visiting relatives in far-off Leeds or Manchester or delivering a van-load of unpronounceable grommet-type things down to Birmingham or up to Newcastle: after all, it didn’t do to defecate on one’s own doorstep, and the status quo could only ever be maintained by not asking awkward questions.

Not that awkward questions were not asked about other situations in which the Regal played a key role, one of which came to pass on a Saturday night in early December on the occasion of the Conservative Club’s Christmas Party… and which involved the one hotel feature that was truly magnificent – the Gentlemen’s toilet situated in the basement beneath the ballroom.

To call such a sprawling display of elegance and creative indulgence a loo or a bog – or even a john or a head, to use the slang vernacular popular with the occasional Americans who visited the Calder Valley in the 1950s, the heyday of Luddersedge’s long-forgotten twinning with the mid west town of Forest Plains – was tantamount to heresy.

Listen to this:

A row of shoulder-height marble urinals – complete with side panels that effectively rendered invisible anyone of modest height who happened to be availing themselves of their facility – was completed by a series of carefully angled glass panel splashguards set in aluminium side grips and a standing area inlaid with a mosaic of tiny slate and Yorkshire stone squares and rectangles of a multitude of colours. It was an area worn smooth by generations of men temporarily intent on emptying bladders filled with an excess of John Smith’s, Old Peculiar and Black Sheep bitter ales served in the bars above.

Two wide steps down from the urinals, set back and mounted on ornate embellishments of curlicued brass fashioned to resemble a confusion of vines interlinked with snakes, a row of generously sized washbasins nested beneath individual facing panels split one half mirror and the other reinforced glass. The glass halves looked through onto an identical set of basins on the other side of the partition and behind them stood the WCs.

It was these wood-panelled floor-to-ceiling enclosed retreats – with their individual light switches, oak toilet seats and covers and matching tissue dispensers, and stained glass backings behind the pipe leading from the overhead cistern – that were, perhaps, the room’s crowning glory, being even more impressive than the worn leather sofas and wing-backed chairs situated on their own dais at the far end of the toilet, bookended by towering aspidistras and serviced by standing silver ashtrays and glass-topped tables bearing the latest issues of popular men’s magazines.

But while these extravagant rooms – albeit small rooms, designed for but one purpose – had rightly gained some considerable fame (particularly as the town was not noted for anything even approaching artistic or historical significance) they had also achieved a certain notoriety that was not always welcome.

Such notoriety came not from merely from the time, in the late 1940s, when an exceptionally inebriated Jack Walker (father of the unfortunate Stanley, who was to meet his tragic end at the hands of his wife when she administered a lethal dose of EXTERMINATE! into his bottle of beer) pitched forward rather unexpectedly – after failing to register the aforementioned double step leading to the urinals – and smashed his head into one of the glass-panelled splashguards. The accident resulted in the loss of Jack’s left eye which, Jack being reluctant to wear a patch covering the now vacant socket (“Makes me look like a bloody pirate,” Jack remarked to his friend Alan, down at the steel mill one morning soon after the incident), was replaced by a strangely coloured (and shaped, for that matter) orb that more resembled the marbles his then six-year-old son Stan delighted in firing across the living room carpet than an eye.

Nor did it come only from the legendary night when Pete Dickinson was ceremoniously divested of all of his clothes on his stag night and reduced to escaping the Regal, staggering drunkenly through Luddersedge’s cold spring streets, wearing only one of the toilet’s continuous hand towels (those being the days before automatic hand dryers, of course), a 50-foot ribbon of linen that gave the quickly sobering Dickinson the appearance of a cross between Julius Caesar and Boris Karloff’s mummy.

Rather, the toilet’s somewhat dubious reputation stemmed solely from the fact that, over the years, its lavish cubicles had seen a stream of Luddersedge’s finest and most virile young men venturing into their narrow enclosures with their latest female conquests for a little session of hi-jinks where, their minds (and, all too often, their prowess and sexual longevity) clouded by the effects of ale, a surfeit of testosterone, the threat of being discovered, they would perform loveless couplings to the muted strains of whatever music drifted down from the floor above.

The practice was known, in the less salubrious circles of Calder Valley drinking establishments, as “The Forty Five Steps Club”. The name referred, in a version of the similar “honorary” appellation afforded those who carried out the same act on an in-flight aeroplane (“The Mile High Club”), to the toilet’s distance below ground – three perilously steep banks of fifteen steps leading down from the ballroom’s west entrance.

And so it was that, at precisely 10 o’clock on the fateful night of the Conservative Club’s Christmas Party, it was to this bastion room of opulence and renown that Arthur Clark retired midway through a plate of turkey, new potatoes, broccoli and carrots (having already seen off several pints of John Smith’s, an entire bowl of dry roasted peanuts – Planters, Arthur’s favourite – and the Regal’s obligatory prawn cocktail first course) to evacuate both bladder and bowel. It was a clockwork thing with Arthur and, no matter where he was nor whom he was with, he would leave whatever was going on to void himself – on this occasion, all the better to concentrate his full attention and gastric juices on the promised (though some might say “threatened”) Christmas Pudding and rum sauce plus a couple of coffees, and a few glasses of Bells whisky. Arthur’s slightly weaving departure from the ballroom, its back end filled with a series of long dining tables leaving the area immediately in front of the stage free for the inevitable dancing that would follow coffee and liqueurs, was to be the last time that his fellow guests saw him alive.

“Edna. Edna!” Betty Thorndike was leaning across the table trying to get Edna Clark’s attention, while one of the Merkinson twins – Betty thought it was Hilda but she couldn’t be sure, they both looked so alike – returned to her seat and dropped her handbag onto the floor beside her. Hilda – if it was Hilda – had been to the toilet more than fifteen minutes ago, while everyone else was still eating, her having bolted her food down in record time, and had spent the time since her return talking to Agnes Olroyd, as though she didn’t want to come back and join them: they were a funny pair, the Merkinsons.

When Edna turned around, from listening – disinterestedly – to John and Mary Tullen’s conversation about conservatories with Barbara Ashley and her husband, whose name she could never remember (it was Kenneth), she was frowning.

“What?”

“He’s been a long time, hasn’t he?” she said across the table, nodding to the watch on her wrist. “Your Arthur.”

“He’s had a lot,” Edna said with a shrug. The disc jockey on the stage put on Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman”.

“Oh, I love this me,” Mary Tullen announced to the table, droopy-eyed, and promptly began trying to join in with the words, cigarette smoke drifting out of her partially open mouth. She took a long drink of wine and frowned. “Who is it again? Name’s on the tip of my tongue.”

Edna shook her head.

“What was it like?” the Merkinson twin who had been to the toilet said to the one who had not.

A shrug was the reply. “You’ve been a long time, Hilda,” she said, pushing her plate forward. Hilda noted that the food had been shuffled around on the plate but not much had been eaten.

“Been talking to Agnes Olroyd.”

“So I saw.”

“She was asking me about the robbery,” Hilda said.

“Robbery? I thought you said nothing had been taken.”

Hilda shrugged. “Robbery, break-in – it’s all the same thing.”

Hilda worked at the animal testing facility out on Aldershot Road where, two days earlier, she had come into work to discover someone had broken in during the night – animal rights protesters, her boss Ian Arbutt had told the police – and trashed the place.

Not wanting to talk about the break-in again – it having been a source of conversation everywhere in the town the past 36 hours, particularly in the Merkinson twins’ small two-up, two-down in Belmont Drive – Hilda’s sister said, “How’s her Eric?”

Hilda made a face. “His prostate’s not so good,” she said.

“Oh.” Harriet’s attention seemed more concentrated on Edna Clark.

As Mary elbowed her husband in the stomach, prising his attention away from a young woman returning to a nearby table with breasts that looked like they had been inflated, Betty Thorndike said to Edna, “D’you think he’s all right?”

John Tullen spun around, glaring at his wife. “What?”

“Who, my Arthur?” Edna said.

“D’you know who’s singing this song?” Mary asked her husband. “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

“I’m surprised you can sense anything with that tongue,” John said as he reached for his pint of Guinness. “You’ve near on pickled the bloody thing tonight. Whyn’t you slow down a bit?”

Edna said, “He’s fine. He always goes at this time. Regular as clockwork. Doesn’t matter where he is.” This last revelation was accompanied by a slight shake of her head that seemed to convey both amazement and despair.

“I know,” Mary Tullen agreed, still wondering who it was that was singing. “It’s common knowledge, your Arthur’s regularity.” She had trouble getting her mouth around the word “regularity”, splitting it into three single-syllabled words with the following “ity” barely covering a watery burp. “‘Scuse me,” Mary said.

“But he’s been a long time.” Betty nodded to Arthur’s unfinished meal. “And he hasn’t even finished his dinner.”

“He’ll finish it when he gets back,” Edna said with assurance.

Behind her, somebody said, “There’s no bloody paper down there.”

Hilda Merkinson knocked her glass over and a thin veil of lager spilled across the table and onto her sister’s lap. “Hilda! For goodness sake.”

“Damn it,” Hilda said.

Edna threw a spare serviette across the table and turned around. Billy Roberts was sliding into his seat on the next table.

Sitting across from Billy, Jack Hanlon burst into a loud laugh. “You didn’t use your hands again, did you, Billy? You’ll never sell any meat on Monday – smell’ll be there for days.”

Billy smiled broadly and held his hand out beneath his friend’s nose. Jack pulled back so quickly he nearly upturned his chair. He took a drink of Old Peculiar, swallowed and shook a B &H out of a pack lying on the table. “If you must know,” Billy said, lighting the cigarette and blowing a thick cloud up towards the ceiling, “I used my hanky.” He made a play of reaching into his pocket. “But I washed it out, see-” And he pretended to throw something across the table to his friend. This time, gravity took its toll and Jack went over backwards into the aisle.

As Jack got to his feet and righted his chair, Billy said, “I flushed it, didn’t I, daft bugger. But I was worried for a few minutes when I saw there wasn’t any paper – course, by that time, I’d done the deed. When I got out, I checked all the WCs and there isn’t a bit in any of them.” He blew out more smoke.

“Aren’t you going to tell somebody, Billy?” Helen Simpson asked, her eyes sparkling as they took in Billy Roberts’s quiffed hair.

“Can’t be arsed,” Billy said. “There’s some poor sod down there now – probably still down there: he’ll have something to say about it when he gets out,” he added as he did a quick glance at the entrance to see if he could see anybody returning who looked either a little sheepish or blazing with annoyance.

“That’ll be Arthur.” Edna looked over her shoulder at Betty. “I bet that’s my Arthur,” she said. She tapped Billy on the shoulder. “That’ll be my Arthur,” she said again.

“What’s that, Mrs Clark?” Billy said, turning. “What’s your Arthur gone and done now?”

“He went to the toilet ages ago.”

Harriet Merkinson shuffled around in her handbag, produced a thick bundle of Kleenex and she held them out. “Here, why don’t you take him these?”

Edna nodded. “Thanks, er-”

“Harriet,” said Harriet.

“Thanks Harry – good idea.” She passed the tissues back to Billy and gave a big smile. “Here, be an angel, Billy and go back down and push these under the door for me.”

“You haven’t been down to the gents… have you, Mrs Clark?” There was a snigger at the last part from Jack Hanlon. “You can’t get sod all under them doors.”

“Well, can’t you knock on his door or something?” She nodded to the table behind her. “He hasn’t even finished his meal.”

Hilda looked across at Arthur’s plate and noted that it didn’t look much different to her sister’s – the only difference was that one meal was finished with and the other wasn’t.

When he got back to the toilet, Billy saw one of the waiters was already going into each cubicle to fasten a new roll of tissue into the dispenser. “Bugger me, you’re already doing it,” he said to the young man, whose face coloured immediately. “Somebody tell you, did they? Was it Arthur Clark?”

The boy shook his head and the colour on his cheeks darkened. “It was some bloke, don’t know what he’s called,” the waiter said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Said he’d come down and couldn’t find a-” The boy paused, searching for the word.

“A trap?” Billy ventured.

The boy smiled. “Said he couldn’t find a trap with any paper.” He nodded to a closed door at the end of the line of cubicles. “He’s all right now, though.”

Outside the door to the toilet there was a sudden burst of high-pitched giggling. “There’s a bloody waiter in there!” a girl’s voice said. Billy chuckled. Presumably only the waiter’s presence was preventing the girl from coming into the gents with her partner and not the fact that the toilet area was filled with men, young and old, either standing at the urinals or washing at the basins. Alcohol was a wonderful thing and no denying.

The chuckling continued and was complemented by the sound of feet hurriedly ascending the 45 steps back to the ballroom. A man Billy didn’t know wafted through the doors unzipping his flies and grinning like a Cheshire cat.

Billy exchanged nods with the man and turned his attention back to the waiter. He was still smiling – until he saw that the door to the cubicle which had been occupied while he was down here was still firmly closed.

“Has somebody just gone in there? I mean, while you’ve been down here.”

The boy glanced at the closed door and shook his head. “Not while I’ve been down here.”

Billy walked across and tapped gently on the door. “Hello?”

There was no response.

“He’ll be sleeping it off, lad, whoever he is,” a stocky bald man confided to Billy as he held his hands under the automatic drier. “You’ll need to knock louder than that.”

Billy nodded slowly. He rapped the door three times and said, “Mister Clark – are you in there? I’ve got some tissues for you.”

No answer.

The bald man finished his hands off on the back of his trousers and moved across so that he was standing alongside Billy. Although he was short, a good six inches shorter than Billy and three or four beneath the lofty height of the young waiter, the bald man had a commanding air about him. The waiter shuffled to one side to give the man more room.

The bald man hit the door several times with a closed fist and shouted, “Come on, mate, time to get up. You’ll be needing a hammer and chisel if you stay in there much longer, never mind bloody toilet paper.”

Still no answer.

“He must be a bloody heavy sleeper,” Billy said. “Either that or he’s pissed as a newt.”

The bald man turned to the waiter. “Is there any way into these things? I mean, some way of getting in when they’re locked.”

“I don’t know,” the boy said.

“Well, can you find somebody who does know? And can you do it bloody sharpish?”

The boy turned around and ran to the door and disappeared, his clumping feet echoing up the steps to the ballroom.

The man lifted his hands and felt around the door. “Do you know this bloke, whoever he is?”

Billy shook his head and jammed the toilet tissue into his jacket pocket. “No. Well, I do… I know his name and that but I don’t really know him. His wife asked me to come down.”

The man nodded. “Why was that, then?” he said, turning around.

“Well, there was no paper in any of the toilets.”

“How did his wife know that?”

“She heard me telling them on my table. I’d just got back from… you know -”

“Having a crap. I know – get on with it, lad.”

Billy straightened his shoulders. He would usually square up to anyone who spoke to him like that – after all, he wasn’t a lad: he was almost 25 – but there was something about the bald man that made him shrink back from confrontation. “That trap was closed when I came down here and it was still closed when I went back up.”

The bald man reached into his inside pocket and removed a packet of Marlboro. As he pulled a cigarette out, he said to Billy, “Do you smoke?”

Billy nodded. “Yeah,” he said, lifting his hand towards the man’s cigarettes. The man closed the pack and returned it to his pocket. “Well, give it up,” he said as he flicked a lighter under the cigarette and drew in smoke. “It’ll stunt your growth. Did you hear anything while you were down here?”

Billy shrugged. “Like what?”

The man blew smoke out. “Groans, plops, farts, throwing up… the usual.”

“No. No, I didn’t.”

The man nodded. He hammered on the door again, louder this time. “What did you say his name was?”

“Arthur Clark.”

“Not the bloke who wrote 2001, I suppose? I loved that picture.”

“I don’t think so,” Billy said with a chuckle.

“No, me neither.” He hammered again. “Mister Clark… if you can hear me, open the door. It’s the police.”

Billy was watching the door but when he heard that he turned to the man. “Are you really the police? I mean, are you a… a copper?”

Before the man could answer, the waiter came back into the toilet. He was trailing behind a tall man with bushy eyebrows that met over his nose. His face, which was scowling, was a mask of excess, folds of skin lined with broken blood vessels. He said, “What’s going on?”

“Who are you?” the bald man asked.

“Sidney Poke. I’m the manager of the Regal.”

The bald man nodded. “Any way into these things when they’re locked on the inside?”

Sidney Poke said, “Who are you?”

The bald man jammed his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, pulled a credit card holder from his inside pocket and shuffled through the little plastic flaps. He found what he was looking for and held it out for inspection. “Detective Inspector Malcolm Broadhurst, Leeds CID,” he said.

“What’s the problem, Inspector?” Sidney Poke said, his manner suddenly less aggressive.

“Somebody’s in here and we can’t get them to open the door. Been here a while, this lad says,” Malcolm Broadhurst said, nodding at Billy Roberts.

“Who is it? Who’s in there?” Sidney Poke asked Billy.

“Never mind who he is,” the policeman said. “How do we bloody well get in to him?”

Sidney Poke shrugged. “I suppose we have to knock the door down.”

Malcolm Broadhurst nodded. “Why did I know you were going to say that? Right-” He threw his cigarette on the floor and ground it with his foot. “One of you go upstairs and call for an ambulance – just to be on the safe side.”

A blond-haired man said, “I’ll do it,” and disappeared at a run out of the toilet.

The policeman took hold of Billy’s left arm and squeezed the biceps. “What do you do for a living, lad?”

“I’m a butcher.”

“Just the job,” he said, and he stepped back out of the way. “Right, break that bloody door down – and, daft as it sounds, try not to go mad: he could be on the floor at the other side.”

As he squared up to the door, Billy said, “How the hell do I do that? Knock the door down but go steady, I mean.”

“Just do your best. Now, you others stand back and give him room.”

The door jamb splintered on the sixth try. It came away on the eighth, still fastened but only loosely.

“Brilliant job, lad,” Broadhurst said taking Billy’s arm. He pulled him back and stepped close to the door, squinting through the small gap that had appeared. “It’s still fastened, but only just.”

He stepped back and frowned. “No time to bugger about looking for something to prise it open. If the fella couldn’t hear all that din then he’s in a bad way.” He stepped back and nodded to Billy. “Break it down, lad.”

Billy pulled himself back onto his left foot and hit the door with all his strength. The lock snapped and they heard something – a screw, maybe, or part of the actual lock – clatter inside the cubicle. The door stopped against something on the floor.

Malcolm Broadhurst pushed Billy out of the way and, holding the door, squeezed his way into the cubicle. When he was inside, the policeman closed the door again.

They heard shuffling.

“Is he all right?” Sidney Poke asked. Billy thought it was a pretty stupid question.

For a few seconds there was no answer and then the policeman said, “He’s dead.” Then, after a few seconds more of shuffling sounds and sounds of exertion, he said, “Bloody hell fire.”

Billy said, “What is it?”

When the door opened again the policeman was rubbing his face, looking down at the floor.

Billy and Sidney Poke and the young waiter – whose name was Chris and for whom this was his first night working at the Regal – followed Malcolm Broadhurst’s stare.

Arthur Clark was now sitting up against the side wall of the cubicle, the toilet paper dispenser – containing almost a full roll of paper – just above and to the side of his left ear. He was fully clothed but his shirt had been ripped apart at the stomach. Worse than that, the man’s flesh looked to have been flayed… with thick red welts and deep gashes covering the skin, and the top of his light grey trousers seemed to have been dyed black around the waistband: but they knew the original colour had been a deep red.

Chris the waiter gagged and turned away, his hand clamped over his mouth as he made for the washbasins. He made it just in time. When he was through, he leaned his head on his hand to one side of the basin and, in a surprised voice, said, “Hey, that’s where they were.”

The boy crouched down and reached his hands to the deep metal basket on the floor between his basin and the one next to it. When he stood up he was holding an armful of toilet rolls, some full and still thick and some partly used.

“Bloody idiots,” said Sidney Poke. “Do anything for a laugh but they wouldn’t think it was so damned fun-”

“Get everyone out, Mister Poke,” the policeman said. His voice sounded tired. “Get everyone back upstairs. But not you, butcher boy,” he said, turning to Billy. “You can give me a hand getting him out of here.”

The toilet was completely empty when they finally struggled out with Arthur Clark and laid him on the floor beside the washbasins.

“He looks like he’s been got at by a wild animal,” Billy said. “And scared to death, by the look on his face.”

The policeman shook two Marlboros from his pack and handed one to Billy. “Give it up tomorrow,” he said as he held his lighter under Billy’s cigarette.

Billy drew in the smoke and watched the bald man crouch down by the body. He turned over Arthur Clark’s hands one by one and said, “He was the wild animal. He did it to himself. See-” He held one of the hands up for Billy to see. The nails were caked with blood and skin – they looked like the hands of a butcher.

“Why? What did he think he was doing, do you think?”

“Looks to me like he was trying to get into his own stomach.”

“Arthur?” a woman’s voice shouted from outside the toilet door.

Then a man’s voice said, “You can’t go in there, madam.”

“Arthur!” the woman’s voice screamed.

There was a crash outside the door that sounded unquestionably like someone falling over.

“Shit,” said Detective Inspector Malcolm Broadhurst.

The ambulance arrived with siren wailing but it left silently.

Malcolm Broadhurst sat with Edna Clark for a long time, initially with Betty Thorndike, Joan Cardew and Miriam Barrett by her side, offering consolation in the undoubtedly heartfelt but seemingly sycophantic way that people have when they feel There but for the grace of God. To the policeman from Leeds CID the trio was doing more harm than good and he sent them packing. “Like the bloody witches from ‘Hamlet’,” he said to Billy Roberts over at the bar, ordering a couple of stiff Jamesons from Sidney Poke, who had assumed bar duties for the duration.

The rest of the guests and all the staff had given their names to a couple of uniformed officers from Halifax and had gone home.

“Macbeth,” Sidney Poke said quietly.

Billy looked up from his Irish frowning. He would have been happier with a pint but the policeman had ordered. “What?”

“The three witches. It was ‘Macbeth’, not ‘Hamlet’.”

“Oh.”

“And what about Bill and Ben? That was a turn-up for the books.”

“Who’s Bill and Ben?”

“Oh, the Merkinsons. The two old women.”

“Oh, the one who collapsed.”

Billy nodded. “And her sister.”

“Was it Bill or was it Ben?” Broadhurst mumbled.

“Huh?”

The policeman shook his head. “Which one of them was it who collapsed?”

Billy shrugged. “You can never tell. They both always look the same – dress the same, talk the same… it’s really weird.”

The two “old” women, as Billy Roberts had called them, were 53 years old. Malcolm Broadhurst wouldn’t have been far out with his own estimate of 50-51. The same age, give or take a year – he always forgot his own age but he knew he’d had his fiftieth because of the stripper they’d bought for him down at the station – and he didn’t consider himself as old. But then again, maybe he was. “Twins, are they?” he said.

Billy nodded.

Broadhurst had noticed them, standing by while he was talking to Edna Clark, because they were identically dressed, right down to the two-string necklace of fake pearls hanging over the first half-inch of their maroon dresses. One of them was looking after the other, the one who had collapsed, feeding her sips of brandy brought over by Sidney Poke.

“Like a couple of weirdos,” Billy Roberts said, remembering the scene in vivid detail. “Funny though, her keeling over like that.”

Now it was the policeman’s turn to nod. “She the Hilda Merkinson who works at the animal rights centre? The one that was done in this week?”

Billy frowned. “Don’t know. But she’s the only Hilda Merkinson in Luddersedge.”

“Cheers!” said Malcolm Broadhurst. He lifted his glass and drained it, then set it back on the bar top. “How much do I owe you?” he said to the Regal’s manager.

Poke shook his head. “On the house. Think I’ll have one myself.”

It was one o’clock.

“What was it, d’you think?” Billy asked. He lit a B &H from the packet he’d retrieved from the table and offered it to the other two. Poke waved a hand and the policeman simply produced his Marlboros and took one out.

“We’ll know when the autopsy boys know,” Broadhurst said around a cloud of smoke. “His missus says he didn’t have a bad heart or anything, but it’s either that or something he ate.”

“I thought that,” Billy offered, and then wished he hadn’t when he caught the glare from the Regal’s manager.

“Or drunk,” Broadhurst said. “I’ve had his meal wrapped up for tests, along with the pint he was working his way through.”

“Fancy,” Billy said, more to himself than to the others, “getting up for a crap halfway through your meal.”

“His missus says he does it regular as clockwork,” Broadhurst said.

“That’s right,” Billy said. “Doesn’t matter where he is or who he’s with. Come ten o’clock he has to disappear to do the deed. It’s legendary around town – everybody knows.”

“Another?” Poke said, holding the bottle of Jamesons over the policeman’s glass.

Broadhurst frowned over the answer to that and other questions that were already forming in his mind.

It was almost two o’clock when Broadhurst made his way from the ballroom and along the corridor towards reception. At the steps leading down to the Gentlemen’s toilet he paused. The steps were well lit but only in stages, the main house lights of the hotel having been dimmed an hour earlier. Now only single bulbs, secured behind half shells equally spaced down the flights, lit the steps leaving a well of darkness at the bottom.

The darkness seemed inviting and off-putting, both at the same time.

The policeman shook a cigarette from his packet, lit it and breathed smoke around him. It felt good… felt normal somehow. For there was a lot about what had happened that was not normal.

Before he even realized he was moving, Broadhurst had reached the landing at the foot of the first flight, his hand on the rail and his eyes squinting into the gloom. He took the next two flights two steps at a time but when he reached the bottom, with the ornate doors leading into the toilet right in front of him, he stopped and listened.

What was he listening for, he wondered. Was he listening for the sounds of Arthur Clark, screaming in agony? For didn’t some folks say that no sound ever died but only grew faint, waiting to be heard once more by those with the most finely tuned sense of hearing? No, it was something more than that… something more than the late-night campfire thoughts of ghoulies and ghosties and things that went phrrrp! in the night.

He threw his cigarette stub to the floor and stepped on it hard, pushing open the doors and stepping inside.

The toilet was silent. There was no sound save for the distant chuckle of water moving through ancient pipes, turning over in radiators and cisterns, and dlup dlupping down drain holes.

He looked around.

Someone else had been in here, someone who knew more about Arthur’s tragic death than he did. A lot more. Broadhurst felt it – felt it in his water, he thought, cringing at the unintentional pun. The death was neither natural nor unintentional. But he couldn’t understand how it could be anything else.

He walked along the row of cubicles, their doors either fully open or ajar, and felt a sense of threat… as though someone was going to step out of them… perhaps someone recently dead come to exact his revenge… or someone who knew more about the death, come to prevent being caught. Broadhurst stepped away from the line of cubicles and stopped, staring at the open doors.

What was he thinking of? How could the death be anything other than natural? The cubicle walls went from floor to ceiling, the door the same… save for barely an inch of space top and bottom – certainly far less than would be required to get into the cubicle if the door were locked from the inside. And, of course, the same went for getting out again when the deed was done.

“What deed?” Broadhurst said softly. There was no answer, just a giggle of water over by the sofa at the far end of the room.

He leaned on one of the basins and continued to look around. He moved from the basin, reluctantly turning his back on the cubicles until he was reassured by their reflection in the mirror over the basin in front of him, and looked some more. What are you looking for, Kojak? a small voice whispered in the back of his head, using the name granted to him by those colleagues in Halifax CID who could remember the TV show. It’s an open and shit case, seems to me, it added with what might have been a wry chuckle.

“Funny!” Broadhurst snapped, and he looked along the basin-tops, down to the floor and then along beneath them. There was a basket beside each one.

Hey, that’s where they were.

The young waiter’s voice sounded clear as a bell in his head. Broadhurst could half see him, stooping down to lift an armful of toilet rolls.

Then Sidney Poke’s voice chimed in. Bloody idiots… Do anything for a laugh.

Broadhurst frowned.

The ghost of Billy’s voice said, That’s right, doesn’t matter where he is or who he’s with. Come ten o’clock he has to disappear to do the deed. It’s legendary around town – everybody knows.

Broadhurst turned around to face the cubicles

everybody knows

and walked slowly towards them, his back straightening as they came nearer. He started at one end and walked slowly, pushing open each door and staring at the empty tissue holder

Hey, that’s where they were

attached to the wall of each cubicle, right next to where an arm would be resting on a straining knee… where so many arms had rested on so many straining knees

It’s legendary around town

until he reached

everybody knows

a cubicle with toilet paper. The cubicle.

He stared down at the now empty floor and closed his eyes. He saw Arthur Clark writhing in agony, crying out for help… so much pain that he could not simply unlock the cubicle door and crawl for help.

Broadhurst removed his handkerchief from his pocket and, stepping into the cubicle, wrapped it around the toilet roll.

Seconds later he was going up the steps away from the Regal’s Gentlemen’s toilet, two steps at a time… and wishing he could move faster.

Sundays in Luddersedge are traditionally quiet affairs but the events of the previous evening at the Conservative Club’s Christmas Party had permeated the town the same way smoke from an overcooked meal fills a kitchen.

In the tiny houses that lined the old cobbled streets of the town, over cereals and toast and bacon butties, and around tables festooned with open newspapers – primarily copies of the News of the World, the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday Sport - voices were discussing Arthur Clark’s unexpected demise in hushed almost reverent tones.

Conversations such as this one:

“I’ll bet it was his heart,” Miriam Barrett said from her position at the gas stove in the small kitchen in 14 Montgomery Street.

Her husband, Leonard, grunted over the Mirror’s sports pages. “Edna said not,” he mumbled. “Said he hadn’t had no heart problems.”

Miriam was unconvinced. She turned the sausages over in the frying pan and shuffled the ones that looked sufficiently cooked across to the side with the bacon and a few pieces of tomato that looked like sizzling blood-clots. “All that business with his… toilet,” she said, imbuing the word with a strange Calder Valley mysticism that might be more at home whispered in the gris gris atmosphere of a New Orleans speakeasy. “Can’t have been right.”

Leonard said, “He was just regular, that’s all.”

“Yes, well, there’s regular and there’s regular,” Miriam pointed out sagely. “But having to go in the middle of your meal like that, just cos it’s ten o’clock, well, that’s not regular.”

Leonard frowned. He wondered just what it was if it wasn’t regular, but decided against pursuing the point.

But not everyone in Luddersedge was talking.

In his bedroom over his father’s butcher’s shop at the corner of Lemon Road and Coronation Drive, Billy Roberts opened his eyes and stared at the watery sun glowing behind his closed curtains. His mouth was a mixture of kettle fur and sandpaper and using it to speak was the very last thing on his mind. It was all he could do to groan, and even then the sound of it sounded strange to him, like it wasn’t coming from him at all but maybe drifting from beneath the bed where something crouched, something big and unpleasant, waiting to see his foot appear in front of it.

Billy turned to his side and breathed deeply into his cupped hand. Then he stuck his nose into the opening in his hand and sniffed. The smell was sour and vaguely alcoholic, almost perfumed. He slumped back onto the pillows. It was those bloody whiskies that did it. He should have stuck to the beer, the way he usually did. It didn’t do to go mixing drinks.

Billy had had a bad night, even after all the booze. He supposed there was nothing like messing around with a dead body – particularly one that had smelt the way Arthur Clark’s had done, Arthur having so recently dumped into his trousers – to sober a person up. It had taken Billy more than an hour to drop off after getting in – despite the fact that it was three in the morning – and even then his dreams had been peppered with Arthur’s face… and the man’s ravaged stomach.

Work had been underway in the ballroom of the less than palatial Regal Hotel for several hours when Billy Roberts was beginning to contemplate getting out of bed.

The wreckage was far worse than usual somehow, even though the festivities had been cut short by the tragic events in the gentlemen’s toilet. But at least most of the explosive streamers were still intact and there were fewer stains than usual on the cloths and the chairs. The most surprising thing was the number of personal possessions that had been left in the cloakroom, particularly considering the very careful population of the town. But then the unceremonious way the guests had been dispatched for home after been questioned made a lot of things understandable.

Chris Hackett had arrived after the clear-up had begun, clocking into the ancient machine mounted on the green tiled wall leading to the Regal’s back door at 7.13. He didn’t think anyone would object to the fact that he was almost a quarter of an hour late, not after last night.

He set to straight away, throwing his yellow and blue bubble jacket onto one of the chest freezers in the kitchen and emerging through the swing doors into the ballroom. It was a hive of activity.

Jeff Wilkinson was busy dismantling one of the trestle tables over near the stage. Several of the tables had already been folded up and were standing propped against the ornate pillar beside the steps leading up to the stage, and chairs were stacked in towering piles against the side wall.

In the centre of the floor, Mervyn Frith was adding to a huge mound of tablecloths lay jumbled up – the cloths were waiting for somebody to fold them, an unpleasant job given their size and the amount of spilled food that still clung to them.

Elsewhere, various young men and women were loading glasses and bottles and plates and cutlery onto rickety wooden trolleys, the sound of their labours dwarfed by the sound of similar items being loaded into the huge dishwashers in the kitchens.

Wondering where he should start, Chris Hackett saw a table that had been untouched, over by the far wall. He went across to it, moving around to the wall side to begin stacking the plates. Halfway along the wall he caught his foot on something and went sprawling onto the floor, knocking over two chairs on the way.

Somebody laughed and their was a faint burst of applause as Chris got to his feet and looked around for the culprit of his embarrassment.

It was a ladies’ handbag.

Malcolm Broadhurst sat smoking a cigarette. He had been up since before dawn, having snatched a couple of hours’ fitful nap lying fully clothed on the eiderdown.

He had watched the sun pull itself languidly over the rooftops of Luddersedge and had then spent the next 40, 45 minutes trying to get something resembling decent reception from his TV. In the end, faced with either the Tellytubbies or an Open University programme on quantum physics, he gave it up and sat waiting for the day outside to catch up with him. That and thinking about the previous evening.

The call came through at a little after ten o’clock.

A man’s voice said, “You up?”

“Yeah.”

“Been to bed?”

Broadhurst grunted. “Didn’t sleep, though.”

“Well, you were right not to,” the voice said. “We’ve been on this all night – well, all morning would be more accurate.”

“And?”

“We’ve not finished yet but we’ve got a pretty good idea.”

The voice with the pretty good idea belonged to Jim Garnett, the doctor in charge of forensic science at Halifax Infirmary and who doubled as the medical guru for Halifax CID. He chuckled. “It’s a goodie. You were right to be suspicious.”

The policeman shook another cigarette from his packet and settled himself against the bed headboard. “Go on.”

“Okay. Two hours ago, I’d’ve been calling you to tell you he’d had a heart attack.”

“And he didn’t.”

“Well, that’s not exactly true: he did have a cardiac arrest… but it wasn’t brought on by natural causes.” Garnett paused and Broadhurst could hear the doctor shifting papers around. “What made me a little more cautious than usual – apart from your telephone call last night… for which Yvonne sends her thanks, by the way – was the list of symptoms, all classical.”

Broadhurst didn’t speak but it was as though the doctor had read the question in his mind.

“There were too many. Profuse salivation-”

“Profuse – is that like, there was a lot of it?”

“You could say that,” came the reply. “The poor chap’s shirt was soaked and he’d bitten through the back left side of his tongue; he’d vomited, messed his pants – diarrhoea: most unpleasant – and there were numerous contusions to the head, arms and legs.”

“Suggesting what?”

“The contusions?” Garnett smacked his lips. “Dizziness, auditory and visual disturbances, blurred vision… that kind of thing – and not the kind of thing you want to experience when you’re stuck in a WC. It’s my bet he shambled about in there like a ping pong ball, bouncing off every wall. And, of course, the pain would have been nothing to what he was having from his stomach – that’s why he’d clawed at himself so much. By then, he’d be having seizures – hence the tongue – and he’d be faint.”

“Why didn’t he just come out, shout for help?”

“Disorientation would be my guess. And panic. He’d be in a terrible state at this point, Mal.”

Broadhurst waited. “And?”

“And then he’d die. I’ve seen cases before – cardiac arrests – with two or three of the same symptoms, but never so many together… and never so intense. This chap suffered hell in his final minutes.”

Garnett sighed before continuing. “So, we checked him out for all the usual bacteria – saliva, urine, stool samples… and there were plenty of those, right down to his ankles – and-”

“So he hadn’t even been to the toilet?”

“No, he had been. His large bowel was empty. This stuff came as the result of a sudden stimulation to the gut and that would release contents further up the bowel passage. Anyway, like I said, we checked everything but it was no go. Then I checked the meal – bland but harmless – and the beer… nothing there either.”

Garnett moved away from the phone to cough. “God, and now I think I’m coming down with a cold.”

“Take the rest of the day off.”

“Thanks!” He cleared his throat and went on. “So, in absolute desperation, we started checking him for needle marks… thought he might be using something and that was why he always went to the toilet so regularly. But there was nothing, skin completely unbroken. And then…”

“Ah, is this the good bit?”

“Yes, indeedy – and this is the good bit.”

Broadhurst could sense the doctor leaning further into the phone, preparing to deliver the coup de grace.

“Then we turned him over and we found the rash.”

“The rash? All that and a rash too?”

“On his backside, across his cheeks and up into the anus… nasty little bastard, blotches turning to pustules even five hours after he died. At first I thought maybe it was thrush but it was too extreme for that. So we took a swab and tested it.”

The pause was theatrical in its duration. “And… go on, Jim, for God’s sake,” Broadhurst snapped around a cloud of smoke.

“Nicotine poisoning.”

The policeman’s heart sank. For this he had allowed himself to get excited? “Nicotine poisoning?” he said in exasperation.

“Nicotine as in cigarettes?” He glanced down at the chaos of crumpled brown stubs in the ashtray next to him on the bed.

Garnett grunted proudly. “Nicotine as in around eight million cigarettes smoked in the space of one drag.”

“What?”

“That was what killed him – not the heart attack, though that delivered the final blow – nicotine… one of the most lethal poisons known to man.”

“And how did he get it… if it wasn’t in the drink or in the meal, and it wasn’t injected? And assuming he didn’t smoke eight million cigarettes while he was sitting contemplating.”

Garnett cleared his throat. “He got it in the arse, Mal… though God only knows how.”

Broadhurst glanced across at the solitary toilet roll sitting on his chest of drawers. “I know, too,” he said. “But the ‘why’… that’s the puzzler.”

“And the ‘who’?”

“Yeah, that too.”

Edna Clark sat at her kitchen table, her hands wrapped around a mug of steaming tea. Sitting across from her was Betty Thorn-dike.

When the knock came on the front door, Betty said, “You stay put, love – I’ll get it.”

Hilda Merkinson had been in every room in the house but her sister was nowhere to be found.

Worse still, she couldn’t find her handbag.

“Harry?” She had already shouted her sister’s name a dozen times but, in the absence of a more useful course of action, she shouted it again. The silence seemed to mock her.

Hilda knew why Harriet had gone out. She had gone out to clear her head, maybe to have a weep by herself. No problem. She would get over it. It might take a bit of time, but she would get over it – of that, Hilda was convinced.

They had lived together, Hilda and Harriet Merkinson, in the same house for all of their 53 years… just the two of them since their mother, Hannah, had died in 1992.

They had a routine, a routine that Hilda did not want to see altered in any way. It was a safe routine, a routine of eating together, cleaning together, watching the TV together, and occasionally slipping along to the Three Pennies public house over on Pennypot Drive for a couple of life-affirming medicinal glasses of Guinness stout. It was a routine of going to bed and kissing each other goodnight on the upstairs landing and of waking each morning and kissing each other hello, again in the same spot; a routine broken only by Harriet’s job in Jack Wilson’s General Store – a sop to his love of America – and Hilda’s work at the animal testing facility on Aldershot Road, where she’d been for almost seven years. The same length of time that Harriet had worked. Since their mother had slipped finally into a coma in a small side ward in Halifax General, her six-stone body reduced to wattled skin and brittle bone.

During that time, the routine had persevered.

It had been all and its disappearance was unthinkable.

Not that there hadn’t been times when things looked a little shaky… namely the times when Ian Arbutt had cornered Hilda in the small back room against the photocopier and sworn his affection – despite Ian’s wife, Judith, and his two children. But basically, Ian’s affection had been for Hilda’s body and Hilda had recognized this pretty quickly into the relationship – if you could call the clumsy gropes and speedy ejaculations performed by her boss on the back room carpet a relationship.

Hilda had had to think of how to put an end to it – thus maintaining her and Harriet’s beloved routine – while not having it affect her position at the testing centre.

The solution had been simple, if a little Machiavellian. She had sent an anonymous letter to Judith Arbutt saying she should keep a tighter rein on her husband. “I’m not mentioning any names,” the carefully worded – and written – letter had continued, “but there are some folks around town who think your Ian’s affections might be being misplaced.” Hilda had liked that last bit.

A very anxious and contrite Ian had suggested to Hilda, on the next occasion that they were both alone in the centre, that he felt he wasn’t being fair to her. “Trifling with her affections” is what Hilda imagined he was wanting to say but Ian’s pharmacological expertise did not extend to the poetic. “I hope you’re not leading up to suggesting I look for other work,” Hilda had said, feigning annoyance, brow furrowed, “because that would mean something along the lines of sexual harassment, wouldn’t it?”

The answer had been emphatic and positive. “A job for life”, is how he worded it. “You’re here for as long as you want to be here, Hilda,” he said. And he had been true to his word, at least Hilda could give him that.

No, Hilda would have nothing come between her and her sister. They were all either of them had and their separation was something she could not contemplate. She had thought that Harriet felt the same way.

And then came the fateful day, almost a week ago – was it really only a week? It seemed so much longer – that had threatened to change all that.

Every Thursday, without fail, Harriet always walked along to the fish and chip shop on the green – Thursday being Jack Wilson’s early closing day – and had the tea all ready for Hilda when she got in. But on this particular Thursday, following four days of solid rain, when Hilda – a little earlier than usual because Ian also had flooding and wanted to get off – had gone past the General Store, she had seen Harriet helping Jack with moving boxes around due to the leakage through the front windows. He had asked her to stay back and give him a hand, and Harriet couldn’t refuse… despite her other “commitments”.

“We’ll just have some sandwiches,” Harriet had shouted through the locked door of Jack’s shop, looking terribly flustered. “You just put your feet up and I’ll make them when I get in,” she added.

Hilda had nodded. Then she had gone home, put the kettle on and, at the usual time Harriet always left the house en route for the fish and chips, Hilda had embarked into the darkness on the very same journey. Imagine her surprise when, from behind the big oak tree on the green, a shadowy figure leapt out, grabbed her by the shoulders and planted a big kiss on her mouth.

It was Arthur Clark.

“Thought you weren’t coming,” Arthur had announced to a bewildered Hilda. “Been here bloody ages,” he had added. “Edna’ll be getting ideas – mind you,” Arthur had confided, “it won’t matter soon. Must dash.” Then he had given her another kiss and had scurried across the green bound for home, calling over his shoulder, “See you on Saturday anyway, at the Christmas do.”

Hilda had stood and watched the figure disappear into the darkness, and she was so flabbergasted that she almost forgot all about the fish and chips and went home empty-handed. But already she was thinking that that would not do. That would not do at all.

The “meeting” had given her advance knowledge of a potential threat to the beloved routine. And by the time she was leaving the fat-smelling warmth of the shop, Hilda had hatched a plan.

She knew all about poisons from Ian’s explanations, long drawn-out monologues that, despite their monotony, had registered in Hilda’s mind. Which was fortunate. She knew about nicotine, and about the way it was lethal and produced symptoms not unlike heart failure.

Getting a small supply would not be a problem. There were constant threats against the centre – notably from animal rights groups based out in the wilderness of Hebden Bridge and Todmorden – so a small break-in, during which most of the contents of the centre could be strewn around and trashed, was an easy thing to arrange… particularly after administering a small dose of sleeping tablets to her sister, who obligingly nodded off in front of the TV during “Inspector Morse” (Hilda didn’t mind missing it because it was a repeat).

Hilda scooted along Luddersedge’s late night streets, let herself in with her own key – thanking God that he had seen fit to make Ian make her a joint key-holder with him… undoubtedly a result of Ian’s keenness to make her feel important after his calling off their “affair” – did what she considered to be an appropriate amount of damage, and removed a small amount of nicotine from the glass jar in Ian’s office cabinet, to which, again, she had a key. She left the cabinet untouched by “the vandals” who had destroyed the office. Then, after resetting the alarm, she had smashed in the windows with a large stick and returned home.

It wasn’t until she was almost back at the house that she heard the siren. She had smiled then – it had been long enough for whoever had broken in to do all the damage and escape without challenge. The night air had smelled good then, good and alive with… not so much possibilities but with continuance. Back in the warmth, she had settled herself down in front of the TV and, after about half an hour, had dropped off herself. The icing on the cake had been the fact that it was Hilda’s sister who woke Hilda up. A wonderful alibi, even though none would be needed.

Two days later, on the night of the Conservative Club’s Christmas Party, Hilda had bolted her meal and – though she knew she was risking things – had gone to the toilet at ten minutes to ten (Arthur Clark’s toilet habits being legendary in Luddersedge). Once out of the ballroom, she had run down to the gentlemen’s toilet, removed the tissue rolls from all but one WC, and had treated the first few sheets of the remaining roll with the special bottle in her handbag. It was four minutes to ten when she had finished.

She had arrived back in the ballroom at 9:58 just in time to see Arthur get up from the table and set off for his date with his maker. She had not been able to go straight back and was grateful for Agnes Olroyd catching her to talk about the break-in – there was nothing that the people of Luddersedge liked more than a bit of intrigue – and about her Eric’s prostate (in the absence of intrigue, family ailments being the order of the day).

By the time she had finished talking with Agnes, Hilda’s composure was fully restored and she was able to rejoin the table.

And now Harriet was nowhere to be seen. But that could wait.

The main thing as far as Hilda was concerned was to find her bag.

And she had a good idea as to where it was.

Harriet’s revelations had hit Edna Clark harder even than her husband’s death less than twelve hours earlier.

In Edna’s kitchen, with the sun washing through the window that looked out onto the back garden and with steam gently wafting from the freshly boiled kettle, Edna sat at the table feeling she had suddenly lost far more than her life partner: now she had lost her life itself. Everything she had believed in had been quickly and surely trounced by the blubbering Harriet Merkinson when she burst through the front door, ran along the hall – pursued by a confused Betty Thorndike – and emerged in the kitchen, tears streaming down her face. And now Edna’s 27 years with Arthur lay before her in tatters… every conversation, every endearment whispered to her in the private darkness of their bedroom, every meal she had prepared (if not always lovingly – for how can one “lovingly” make egg, chips and beans three times a week for 27 years? – at least with profound affection) and every holiday snapshot they had taken in Dorset and Derbyshire (dressed in shorts, T-shirts and walking boots, their backpacks on the ground before them) and Cornwall (sitting on the beach amidst the inevitable clutter that always resulted from such seaside expeditions).

While Harriet continued sniffling and Betty simply stood leaning against the kitchen cabinets (installed by Arthur, Edna recalled, one laughter-filled weekend in the early 1980s), her eyes seemingly permanently raised in a mask of disbelief, Edna looked around at the once-familiar ephemera and bric-a-brac of a life that now seemed completely alien. The painting on the kitchen wall; the small collection of tea pots and milk jugs on the wide window sill; the stacked plates and cereal bowls stacked behind the glass door of the cupboard – all of them. It might just as well have been the priceless jewellery and artefacts unearthed in an ancient Egyptian tomb… so devoid now of meaning and familiarity and understanding. These were things from another life – another person’s life – and nothing to do with Edna Clark, newly bereaved widow of one Arthur Clark, late of this parish.

The story had been a familiar one. Even as Harriet Merkinson had been burbling it out – the clandestine meetings, the whispered affections, the promise of a new life once Arthur had built up the nerve to leave his wife – Edna felt that she had heard it all before… or read it in a book someplace, maybe even watched it on television. The Arthur revealed by Harriet was not the Arthur she remembered… save for one thing: his toilet habits. At least something was constant in her husband’s two lives.

And now, while Edna’s mind raced and backtracked and questioned and attempted – in the strange and endearing way of minds – to rationalize and make palatable the revelations, the “other” woman continued to burble a litany of regret and sorrow and pleas for absolution and forgiveness.

“I can’t forgive you,” Edna said at last, her words cutting through the thick atmosphere like a knife through cheese. “Never,” she added with grim finality. “I can understand, because I know these things do happen, but I can never forgive you. You haven’t taken only my husband’s memory, you’ve completely removed my entire life.” It was the most articulate statement Edna had ever made, and the most articulate she would ever make in what remained of her life. Of course, she would come to terms with what had happened, but she would never get over it.

“Edna, Edna, Edna, Ed-”

“Now get out,” Edna said, cutting Harriet’s ramble off midword. Her voice was quieter now, more composed… gentle even. There was no animosity, no aggression, no threats of retribution: just a tiredness and, the still silent Betty was amazed to see, a new-found strength that was almost majesterial. “I never want to speak with you again.”

Minutes later, Betty and Edna heard the distant click of the front door latch closing. It sounded for all the world like the closing of a tomb door or the first scattering of soil on a recently lowered coffin. Edna leaned forward and placed her face in her hands, and she began to sob, quietly and uncontrollably.

While Malcolm Broadhurst was greeting the two uniformed policemen on the steps of the Regal’s ornate front door, two things were happening… both of them personally involving the Merkinson twins.

For Harriet, the routine so cherished by her sister had been a chore. More than that, it had been the bane of her life.

Harriet had long wanted to get out of the repetitive drudgery of the existence she shared with Hilda, and Arthur Clark – dear, sweet Arthur, with his strange toilet habits – had been her ticket to salvation. Love was a new experience to Harriet: for that matter, she did not know – not truly, down in those regions of the heart and the soul where such things reside, safe from the prying eyes of light and Society – whether she really loved Arthur, for she had never experienced such feelings, even as a teenager and a young woman, when such experiences and experimentation are commonplace. But she did see in him the means whereby she could attain a new life, a life of relative importance… “Harriet and Arthur”, “Arthur and Harriet” – she couldn’t decide which she preferred but she preferred either to “the Merkinson twins” or “Hilda and Harriet”!

As she fished out the old clothesline from the kitchen cupboard, taking care to replace the various bottles and cartons of disinfectant and packets of soap powder, she felt a calmness come over her. Arthur’s death had effectively removed her last chance for salvation, and she had been destitute. But now, thanks to the clothesline, she saw a solution. It wasn’t the one she would have preferred but it was now the only one available. The only game in town. She could neither face life with Hilda nor life without the constant frisson of excitement she got prior to meeting Arthur… and she certainly could not face the comments and whispers around town when she walked down the high street or around the green. No, this way was best for all concerned. It was best for Edna – who might at least derive a little satisfaction when she heard – and it was best for Hilda, who would have to put up with her own share of her sister’s shame.

She climbed the stairs wearily and attached one end of the clothesline to the upstairs banister rail. Then, after ensuring that the line’s drop was sufficiently short to do the job, she fashioned a noose of sorts and slipped it over her head. With one final look around the landing she climbed over the rail and sat on the banister, staring down at the floor far below. As she jumped, in that fleeting but seemingly endless second or two before the line pulled taut without her feet ever touching the hall floor, she wondered where Hilda was… and what she would say when she came home.

“You’ve got something for forensics?”

Broadhurst nodded. “It’s inside. I didn’t want to be seen with it outside.”

They started to walk.

“I came up last Wednesday,” Malcolm Broadhurst explained to the two uniforms. “To check into the break-in down at the animal testing centre.”

“Oh, yeah?” one of the policemen observed. His name was James Proctor and he had perfected that same aggressive and questioning response to even the most innocent facts or snippets of information, seeming to require confirmation or substantiation to anything said to him.

“Yeah,” Broadhurst confirmed. They were now walking up the Regal’s steps and approaching the wide, oak-panelled revolving door. “Your Inspector Mishkin asked me up because there were a few things he wasn’t too happy about. I take it you two aren’t working on that case?”

“We didn’t know it was a case,” the second policeman said as they emerged from the revolving door into the hotel’s reception area. He said the word “case” with a heavy-handed touch of sarcasm. “Thought it was just a simple break-in.”

“Yes, well,” Broadhurst continued. “That’s the way it looked, and Inspector Mishkin and I decided to keep it that way until things made a little more sense.”

“And have they now?” the second policeman asked. His name was John Dearlove and he had recently transferred from Manchester when his wife got a job at the Halifax’s head office. Janet Dearlove had a degree in computer science and she was working on a new IT project for the bank. John didn’t know anything about IT but, while he appreciated the generous salary his wife had always managed to secure, his resentment at feeling like a “kept man” – as so many of his colleagues on the Manchester force had delighted in calling him – had blossomed first into a resentment of all women and latterly into a resentment of any kind of authority at all.

Broadhurst hit the bell on the reception desk.

“Look at it this way,” the policeman said, turning from the desk and looking the two uniforms in the eye. “Whoever broke in through the window managed to trash the place and then place all the broken glass on top of the wrecked office.” He nodded, smiling. “That’s a pretty good trick, don’t you think?”

“So-”

“So,” Broadhurst continued, watching the main staircase as a young man appeared and started down, “the ‘vandal’ clearly had access to the centre and wanted to cover up the fact that they had been there. Now that reason could be simply a matter of their wanting to fight the animal testing… kind of like a fifth columnist, or it could be another reason. I think we now have that reason… although the reason itself must have a reason – and that’s what I now bloody well intend to find out.”

“Yes, sir?” the young man said as he reached the bottom of the stairs and approached the three men at the desk. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“Is Mister Poke around?” Broadhurst asked. “I gave him something to look after for me.”

The man nodded and moved around the desk. “I’ll give him a call, sir,” he said.

As Harriet Merkinson was swinging gently from side to side in the hallway of the house she shared with her sister, Hilda Merkinson slipped quietly into the back door of the Regal.

“Hello, Miss Merkinson,” Sidney Poke said. His tone was quite reverential… a tone he would use when speaking with anyone who had been at the previous evening’s party, and particularly those who had been closely involved with the tragic death of Arthur Clark.

Hilda nodded. “I wondered,” she said, “if you had found anything this morning. When you were cleaning up, I mean.”

Sidney frowned attentively. “Have you-” The ring of his mobile phone interrupted him. “Excuse me just a minute,” he said, pulling his phone from his side pocket. He pressed a button and said, “Yes?”

Hilda looked around as Poke listened on the phone.

“Right,” he said. “I’ll get it and bring it through.” He waited another few seconds and then said, “Very well, I’ll meet them on the way.”

“Now,” Poke said as he returned the phone to his pocket. “Where we were? Ah yes… have you lost something?”

They started walking slowly through the ballroom which was now cleared.

Tables were folded and leaning against the far wall; chairs were stacked in towering piles in front of the stage; and an army of young men and woman were busy with vacuum cleaners, criss-crossing the floor, their attention fixed on the carpet.

“My handbag,” Hilda shouted above the drone of the cleaners. “I think I must have left it last night.” Poke nodded and looked around absently. “In all the excitement,” Hilda added, suddenly wondering if “excitement” were the correct word to use under the circumstances.

“Ah!” Sidney Poke motioned Hilda towards a small occasional table set up by the door leading out to the toilets. “The table contained a few jackets plus an assortment of bags.

“All those were left last night?” Hilda said in astonishment.

Poke gave an approximation of a laugh which sounded more like a snort. “No, these belong to the cleaners,” he said, “but your bag – if you did leave it, and if it has been found – is most likely here as anywhere.”

As they reached the table, Hilda saw her bag. Her heart rose – or surfaced… or whatever it was that hearts did that was the opposite to sinking – and she reached out for it, careful not to appear too anxious. “That’s it,” she said triumphantly.

She picked up the bag and unfastened the sneck. She removed her purse, noting with grim satisfaction that the small bottle was still there, nestled in the bottom amongst Kleenex tissues, lipstick, comb and all the other rudiments of a woman’s handbag, and flipped it open. “There,” she announced, proudly displaying her library card, “just to show it’s mine.”

Hilda replaced the card and dropped the purse back into the depths of the handbag. Fastening the sneck, she said, “Well, I’ll get off, then.”

Sidney Poke nodded. He took her arm and gently led her towards the main door that went on to the toilets and out to the reception area.

“How are you today? I mean, how are you feeling?”

Hilda made a face. “Oh,” she said, “you mean after-”

Poke nodded with the quietly attentive air of an undertaker.

“It was my sister. It was Harriet who collapsed. Not me.”

“Ah.” He pushed open the door and ushered her through ahead of him. “Well, I’ll leave you here, if that’s okay, Miss Merkinson.” Poke stopped at a desk in a small recess and shuffled in his pocket. He produced a set of keys and set about opening the desk’s deep drawer. “We’re running a little behind, what with… you know.”

Hilda nodded, watching Poke reach around into the drawer.

Somewhere far off, but coming closer, she could hear footsteps.

“Ah, here it is,” Poke grunted. “Must have pushed it further back than I thought.” His back to Hilda, Poke pulled out a small bundle and closed the drawer.

The footsteps were getting closer. Hilda tried to ignore the yawning staircase on her right, the fabled 45 steps that led down to the Gentlemen’s toilets. Deep in her mind, the footsteps belonged to Arthur Clark as he descended less than 12 hours earlier to empty his bowel and meet his end… except they seemed to be coming towards her rather than away from her. She shook her head and turned back to see the Hotel manager holding a toilet roll enclosed in a polythene bag.

“Right then,” Poke was saying, though his words sounded like rushing water in Hilda’s ears. Rushing water and footsteps, now getting very close… echoing… as though there were more than just Arthur coming back.

Poke moved the bag from one hand to the other as he returned the keys to his pocket.

Hilda frowned at the bag, looked at Poke, smiled awkwardly, and turned around to face the toilet steps, half expecting to see Arthur climbing up to see her… to ask her why she had done what she had done, and bringing other people with him, friends of his… friends who

wanted toilet paper.

wanted to talk to her and smooth her troubled brow with grave-cold hands. She turned sharply, took a couple of steps in the direction of the reception area and then stopped. There were figures approaching, figures making footstep-sounds. Her initial relief at discovering that the footsteps didn’t belong to her sister’s fancy man quickly evaporated when Malcolm Broad-hurst called out to her.

“Ah, one of the Misses Merkinson.” Broadhurst’s tone was cheery. There were two policemen with him. “Now, which one are you?”

Hilda started to speak and then, clutching her bag tightly, she spun around. Behind her, Sidney Poke was still standing by the doors leading into the ballroom, the toilet roll in his hand.

“Miss Merkinson?”

Hilda looked all around, clutching the bag even tighter, willing it to disappear… willing it to be a week earlier… willing there to have been no rain so that Jack Wilson’s General Store had not been flooded and Harriet had not had to stay and so Hilda had not gone for the fish and chips and so met Arthur who believed that she was her own sister… willing herself, back seven years ago, not to take the job at the animal testing centre… so many things. So many opportunities for her to have avoided this single instant.

But it was too late.

The footsteps were growing louder and slightly faster, moving towards her along the polished floor.

“Miss Merkinson?”

Then it all became clear.

She could escape through the toilets somehow. Escape and find Harriet and they could run off together, start a new routine… just the two of them.

She turned and almost leapt forward.

The piece of slanted ceiling that descended with the steps stayed straight for a second or two and then tilted.

Just as she was wondering why that was, Hilda hit her head on the side railing. She felt something warm on her cheek, spun around, and smashed her shin on one of the steps. For a second, amidst the confusion and the pain, she thought she could see a figure standing at the foot of the 45 steps, a figure patiently waiting for her to come down. She heard a crack.

Hilda slipped backwards and to the side somehow, hitting the back of her head on another step before turning over fully and ramming her face into one of the rail supports. More warmth…

And then blackness.

Another step broke her nose and her pelvis, another her third and fourth ribs – sending a splinter of bone into her left lung and scraping a sliver of tissue away from the second and third ventricles of her heart.

Two more steps fractured her skull, broke her left collarbone and smashed the base of her spine. The final step on the first flight sent another piece of rib through her heart.

She rolled onto the first landing and then proceeded down the second flight. And then onto the third.

It was Betty Thorndike who found Harriet.

She had called around on her way back from Edna Clark’s house, just to see if Harriet was all right. Of course, she wasn’t.

By Monday afternoon, it was all over bar the shouting. And as far as Malcolm Broadhurst was concerned, there would be little of that.

He had been to see Edna Clark on the Sunday afternoon, with both of the Merkinson sisters lying on metal trays in the cold and strangely smelling basement of Halifax General.

In the silent loneliness of Edna’s kitchen, the widow had told him everything that Harriet had told her. Broadhurst put the rest of it together himself.

He had spoken with his boss at Halifax CID and they had agreed between the two of them that there was little to be achieved by releasing all of the gory details. They decided that Hilda had been a keen promoter of animal rights, using her position at the centre to obtain vital information of the testing Ian Arbutt was carrying out – hence the break-in.

Harriet, meanwhile, had been unable to come to terms with her sister’s death and had hanged herself. Only a slight discrepancy in timing suggested that such might not be the case and nobody would hear about that discrepancy. Now the two of them were united again… in whatever routine they could arrange.

Edna Clark cried when the policeman explained what he had organised. It meant that her life had been partially restored. To all intents and purposes, she was still the grieving widow of a fine and upstanding member of the Luddersedge community. Betty Thorndike, who had not said anything to anyone about Harriet Merkinson’s revelations – and had had no intention of doing so – consoled Edna and assured her that everything was all right.

“He was a good man,” Edna whispered into her friend’s shoulder. “Deep down,” she added.

“I know he was, love,” Betty agreed. “They all are… deep down.”

Driving back to Halifax late afternoon on Monday, there was just one thing that niggled Malcolm Broadhurst. He could not understand why Ian Arbutt had seemed somehow relieved – albeit momentarily – when he was told of Hilda’s unfortunate accident.

But the policeman did not believe Arbutt was in any way involved in either the break-in or Arthur Clark’s murder. There was another story there, somewhere… as, of course, there always is.