Wildcard

FOUR

Manchester, England

Miss Warren looked at the luminous numerals on her bedside clock: it was 2.35 a.m. She tried once more to get to sleep by turning on her side and pressing one ear to the pillow while holding the bedcovers to her other but it was no use; the music was too loud. She didn’t know what it was (it was Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The River’) but it had been playing non-stop for the last two hours. She looked up at the ceiling and sighed, feeling more puzzled than annoyed because this was all most unusual; in fact, it had never happened before. It was just not the sort of thing one expected at the Palmer Court flats.

When the music started she had assumed that her upstairs neighbour, Ann Danby, must be having a party. That in itself would be unusual, but maybe it was a special occasion, a birthday, perhaps, or job promotion? But as time went on Miss Warren came to realise that there was no sound of people in the flat above, no clinking of glasses, no party chatter, no intermittent gales of laughter, just that loud, unremitting music.

Although younger than most of the other residents in the flats — somewhere in her mid-thirties, she would guess — Miss Danby had always seemed to fit in so perfectly at Palmer Court. She dressed well, had an executive job — although Miss Warren didn’t know exactly what — and was always polite and courteous when they met in the hall. More than that, she was usually the first to pay her resident’s fees for grass-cutting and lift maintenance and could always be relied upon to turn up at meetings of the residents’ association — which was more than could be said for some of the others.

Miss Warren decided that she couldn’t stand the noise any more: she would have to go upstairs and have a word. She got out of bed, put on her slippers and dressing gown, fastening the belt with a firm tug and a large bow. She stopped to glance at herself in the hall mirror and primped her hair before opening the front door and padding along the landing to the doors leading to the fire-escape stairs. She almost turned tail when she heard voices and concluded that perhaps there was a party after all and the guests were now leaving, but then she recognised a man’s voice, that of George Dale, Miss Danby’s neighbour.

Miss Warren climbed the stairs and pushed open the landing door. George and Lucy Dale turned round. They wore matching dressing gowns in navy with green piping.

‘Whatever’s going on?’ she asked.

‘She won’t answer the door,’ replied Lucy Dale. ‘George has been knocking for the past five minutes. The noise is driving us mad.’

‘It’s not like Miss Danby at all,’ said Miss Warren. ‘Can you see anything through the letterbox?’

George knelt down with some difficulty, holding his right knee and lowering himself gently. ‘Bedroom light’s on,’ he said. ‘God, I feel like a peeping Tom… No sign of movement, though. Miss Danby! Are you there?’

There was still no response after several tries.

‘She hasn’t been well, you know,’ said Lucy. ‘She told me she thought she had flu coming on when I spoke to her the other day.’

‘Do you think we should call the police?’ asked Miss Warren.

Lucy looked doubtful. ‘I don’t like the idea of that,’ she said. ‘Policemen clomping their big boots all over the place. Maybe she just took a sleeping pill and fell asleep with the music on.’

‘If she can sleep through that, she’s the only one!’ snapped her husband. ‘I agree with Miss Warren. I think we should call the police.’

‘Oh dear, I hope it won’t cause bad feelings,’ said Lucy. ‘One hears such dreadful things these days about neighbours falling out.’

‘We’re doing it with the best of intentions,’ Miss Warren reassured her. ‘We’re worried about her welfare.’

As agreed, Miss Warren called the police when she went back downstairs. She did so in a very apologetic way, as she did most things in life, and was told that a Panda car would shortly be on its way. She gave the operator details of her buzzer number so that she could admit the officers when they arrived and then sat by the window. Her heart sank when she saw the flashing blue light appear. Drama was the last thing she or any of the other residents of Palmer Court would welcome, but at least the police car wasn’t making that awful noise.

Miss Warren admitted the two constables and briefed them on what had been happening.

‘And you say there was no response at all?’ asked the elder, PC Lennon.

‘None, and Mr Dale tried several times.’

‘Right, then, Miss Warren, leave it to us.’

The two officers went upstairs, their personal radios crackling with the static created in the steel-framed fire escape.

‘Nice place,’ remarked PC Clark as they climbed.

‘You’d need a few bob to live here,’ replied Lennon. ‘Come back when you’re a chief super.’

They went through the same routine that George Dale had before deciding to force an entry. Lennon, the beefier of the two, crashed his shoulder into the door three times before the lock gave way and splintered wood fell to the ground around their feet. The door swung open and the sound level went up even more. The two policemen entered and heard Bruce Springsteen going mournfully ‘down to the river’. They made their way slowly through the hall but did not call out, knowing that they could not compete with Bruce.

Lennon signalled to Clark to kill the music and watched as the younger man tried to figure out the controls on the front of the expensive sound system. In the end, he lost patience and pulled the plug out of the wall. A respectable silence was restored to Palmer Court.

‘Miss Danby? Are you there?’ The two policemen walked through to the bedroom and found a woman on the bed. She was wearing a nightdress and lying on top of the covers with her eyes closed. Her pillow was stained with vomit and her nightdress soaked in sweat.

‘Miss Danby?’

They moved closer and saw an empty whisky bottle on the bedside table. An empty pill bottle lay on its side next to it.

‘Oh, love, was life really that bad?’ murmured Lennon as he felt for a pulse at the woman’s neck.

‘Is she dead, Tom?’

‘Yeah, poor lass. Just shows you, money can’t buy you happiness.’

Both men looked around at the expensive furnishings.

‘This is my first,’ said Clark, looking down at the body. ‘She looks just like she’s sleeping.’

‘She’s not been dead that long, she’s still warm. Wait until you see them pulled out the canal after a week or lying on the floor in summer for a month because they didn’t have anyone to check on them.’

At that moment the ‘corpse’ moved its head and Clark jumped back. ‘Jesus, she’s alive!’

‘Christ!’ exclaimed Lennon. ‘I couldn’t feel a pulse. Get an ambulance. Miss Danby! Miss Danby, can you hear me?’

The woman groaned quietly.

‘Come on now, waken up! D’you hear me, Miss Danby? Waken up!’

‘Men…’

‘What’s that? What about men?’

‘All men… are bastards.’

‘Come on now, Miss Danby, waken up. Don’t go to sleep again.’

Her head slumped back on to the pillow.

‘Shit! Maybe her airway’s blocked. It’s the sort of thing that happens when drunks throw up. Come on, son, give me a hand here.’

Lennon reached into her mouth to clear away any obstruction, while Clark held her on her side. ‘Come on, Miss Danby, cough it up, love, cough it up.’

Both men worked at trying to get her to breathe again but she fell back on the bed and was absolutely still.

‘Will I try mouth-to-mouth, Tom?’

‘Might as well make it a big night for “firsts”.’

Clark carried out textbook resuscitation until Lennon told him to stop. ‘It’s no good, son, she’s gone. You did your best but she wouldn’t have thanked you for it, anyway. She’s got what she wanted. Let’s get cleaned up before the cavalry arrive.’

At a little after 4.15 a.m. Ann Danby’s body was removed from Palmer Court. Miss Warren, still awake and standing at the window, watched the zipped-up plastic bag being loaded into the waiting ambulance in the courtyard. She swallowed as she saw the doors close and the vehicle move off. ‘Goodbye, Miss Danby,’ she whispered. ‘God bless.’

The body of Ann Danby was taken through silent, deserted streets to the local hospital, where she was formally pronounced dead on arrival by the houseman on duty. She was taken to the mortuary by the night porter on a covered trolley and transferred to a metal tray, which was slid into bay 3, row 4 of the mortuary fridge. The big toe on her left foot was labelled with her name and the date and time of her arrival.

There were no suspicious circumstances as far as the police were concerned: it seemed a clear case of suicide but, as with all sudden deaths, a post-mortem examination would be required before a death certificate could be issued; there could be no funeral without it. Establishing the exact cause of death would be the responsibility of a forensic pathologist. Arranging the funeral would be the responsibility of Ann Danby’s parents who at 4.30 in the morning did not yet know of their daughter’s death. The task of telling them fell to the two constables who had found her.

‘Another first,’ said Lennon as they turned into the Danbys’ street in a pleasant, tree-lined suburb. ‘Wakey wakey, your daughter’s dead. Jesus, what a game.’

Clark looked at him sideways. ‘I suppose you’ve done a lot of these,’ he said.

‘More than you’ve had hot dinners, my son. Your husband’s been involved in a car crash… Your wife’s been involved in an accident… Your son fell off his motor bike… We’ve found a body in the river and we think it may be…’

‘Will you tell them?’

‘Yeah. You can do it next time.’

‘Yes, who is it?’ asked a woman’s voice from behind the door of number 28.

‘Police. Could you open the door, please, madam?’

‘Do you have identification?’

Lennon pushed his warrant card through the letterbox and the door was opened. A small woman with white hair corralled in a hairnet stood there in her nightclothes. ‘It’s Johnny,’ she said. ‘He’s had an accident, hasn’t he? Oh my God, is he…?’

‘No, it’s not Johnny, madam. Do you think we could come inside? Is your husband awake?’

With both the Danbys sitting on the couch in the living room and the two constables facing them, the news of Ann’s death was broken to them. The fact that it was suicide seemed to come as an even bigger shock than her death.

‘I just can’t believe it,’ said Mr Danby. ‘Ann had everything to live for. She was doing so well in her job and up for promotion yet again. Why on earth would she do such a thing?’

‘When did you last see your daughter, sir?’

Mr Danby turned to his wife, who was sitting with head bowed and a handkerchief pressed to her face. ‘I suppose about two weeks ago. She came to lunch. She seemed absolutely fine. But you spoke to her on the phone the other night, didn’t you, Alison?’

She nodded mutely, then after a pause said, ‘She thought she was getting flu and might have to stay off work. She didn’t like doing that; she was always so conscientious.’

‘Your daughter wasn’t married?’

‘No, she was very much a career woman, Officer,’ said Mr Danby.

‘No boyfriends?’

‘What has that got to do with anything?’ snapped Mrs Danby.

Lennon held up his hands in apology and said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. I was just trying to establish if there was anyone who might have seen your daughter in the last two or three days, someone who could throw more light on why she felt driven to take her own life.’

‘No one.’

‘A close female friend, perhaps?’

A look of anger flitted across Mrs Danby’s face as she thought she saw an implicit suggestion in the question, but it faded and she responded with a curt shake of the head before covering her nose and mouth again with her handkerchief. Her shoulders started shaking with silent sobs.

Mr Danby cleared his throat twice before managing to whisper, ‘You’ll want me to identify her?’

‘Yes, please, sir, when you feel up to it.’

‘I’m not sure about the procedure in such cases…’

‘There will have to be a post mortem, sir. After that the body will be released to you. You can go ahead and make arrangements pending the issue of a death certificate.’

‘Thank you, Officer.’

‘I don’t want them defiling Ann,’ Mrs Danby blurted out. ‘Leave my baby alone!’ She broke into uncontrollable sobs, and her husband put his arm round her and tried to comfort her. ‘Make them leave her alone, Charles. I don’t want them… doing things to her.’

Both policemen moved uncomfortably in their chairs as her raw grief reached them. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Lennon. ‘It’s mandatory in such cases.’

Mr Danby nodded his understanding and suggested with his eyes that they should leave.

‘Christ, that was awful,’ said Clark as they drove off.

‘It couldn’t be anything else,’ replied Lennon.

‘What a night. What a bloody awful night.’

‘You’ll have worse.’

‘That poor woman. It was as if we just destroyed her life.’

‘We didn’t. We were just the messengers, disinterested parties in other people’s lives. We tiptoe in and then we tiptoe out again — and then we forget.’

‘Forget? How can you possi-’

‘You do because you’re not involved personally and there’s no alternative. Either you learn to forget or you get out of the job double quick. Understood?’

‘Understood.’

‘Come on, I’ll buy you a bacon roll.’

Ann Danby was third on forensic pathologist Peter Saxby’s list the following morning. ‘So what have we here?’ he asked in his usual imperious manner as the mortuary technician transferred the body from the fridge transporter trolley to the PM table. The head hit the metal table with a bang and Saxby snarled, ‘Must you be so bloody clumsy, man?’

The technician mumbled an apology and melted into the background.

Saxby read from the file he was holding. ‘Ann Danby, white Caucasian female, thirty-three, believed to have overdosed on malt whisky and barbiturates. No suspicious circumstances as far as our boys in blue are concerned. Not exactly Silent Witness material, is it? Unless, of course, we find a Malaysian kris up her arse and two kilos of heroin in her peritoneal cavity, eh?’

The technician smiled dutifully. He didn’t like Saxby. He found him crude and insensitive but tried to make excuses for his behaviour, as befitted a soldier of the Salvation Army, something Saxby was unaware of. He waited while the pathologist made an external appraisal of the body and spoke his findings into the microphone that hung above the table. When Saxby had finished, the technician realigned the instrument tray at the head of the table and stood by as the pathologist made the first incision, a long, sweeping cut from throat to groin.

‘Well, no heroin,’ muttered Saxby when he had opened up the body to expose the internal organs. ‘But a hell of a lot of blood. She’s been bleeding internally from…’ He paused while he made a closer examination. ‘Just about every-bloody-where. Christ, are you sure this is the right body?’

‘Her toe tag says “Ann Danby”, and she was the only woman in the fridge,’ replied the technician. ‘Looks about the right age, too.’

‘Yes, thank you for your forensic input,’ snapped Saxby.

The technician said nothing and kept his eyes fixed on the table.

‘Jesus, she was leaking like a sieve. This wasn’t caused by whisky or bloody sleeping pills. Let me see those admission notes again.’ Saxby snatched them, smearing them with bloody mucus from his gloves in the process. ‘No mention of illness. Shit, I don’t think I like this…’

‘What d’you think was wrong with her?’ asked the technician. Normally he wouldn’t have dared ask, but the apprehension in Saxby’s face gave him the impetus.

‘I don’t know,’ murmured Saxby. He seemed mesmerised by the insides of the corpse. ‘I’ve read about this but I’ve never actually come across it. I think she may well have been suffering from haemorrhagic fever.’

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

There was a long pause before Saxby said, ‘Suffice to say, the last thing on earth you would want to do to such a case is perform a PM on it.’

‘It’s dangerous, then?’

‘Bloody lethal,’ whispered Saxby, turning pale. ‘What have I done?’

‘Are you absolutely sure about this?’ asked the technician.

Saxby shook his head slowly and said, ‘No, but I can’t think of anything else it could be.’

‘So where do we go from here then?’ The technician was still calm, in spite of what he was hearing. He had his faith to thank for that. He knew God was on his side.

Saxby came out of his trance and started snapping out instructions. ‘We need a body bag. I’ll give you a hand getting her into it, then wash down the entire place in disinfectant. When you’ve finished, dump all your clothes in the steriliser bin and shower for at least ten minutes.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m going to talk to the police first and then Public Health.’

Saxby locked the door to stop anyone coming in, and went to the phone. ‘I need to talk to the officers who discovered Miss Ann Danby’s body last night… Even if they are off duty… Then wake them up… Yes, it is urgent.’ Saxby hung up and waited. Six minutes later the phone rang and he snatched it up. ‘Sorry to disturb you, Constable Lennon, but this is most important. Did anything last night give you reason to think that Miss Danby had been ill recently?’

Tom Lennon rubbed the sleep from his eyes with one hand while he got his thoughts into order. ‘Her mother said that she spoke to her a few days ago and she thought she was coming down with flu, and one of the neighbours said that she had been off work for a couple of days.’

‘Thank you, Officer,’ said Saxby, his tone suggesting that this was bad news. ‘Was there any mention of her having been abroad recently?’

‘None at all, but the subject didn’t really come up.’

‘Do you have a phone number for her mother?’

‘Give me a minute; it’s in my notebook.’

Saxby tapped the phone impatiently as he waited, then scribbled down the number on a wall pad. He dialled it immediately.

The technician sluiced down the PM table while he listened to Saxby being ‘nice’ to Ann Danby’s parents. At least he didn’t say what kind of doctor he was and what he had just been doing, but watching Saxby apologise profusely for his ‘intrusion on their grief’ and then offering his ‘heartfelt condolences’ was like watching a man commit an unnatural act.

‘Has Ann been abroad recently?… She hasn’t… You’re absolutely sure about that?… Yes, I see… Majorca in 1998.’

Saxby put down the phone and stood there looking thoughtful while the technician, mop in hand, pushed a tide of disinfectant across the floor ever nearer to his feet.

‘Progress?’ asked the technician.

‘Maybe I was a bit hasty in pushing the panic button,’ said Saxby. ‘She hasn’t been abroad for two years, and even then it was only bloody Majorca. I don’t think it can be what I thought it was. Bloody odd, though.’

‘So all this is unnecessary?’

‘Better safe than sorry.’

‘What about the samples you took?’

‘Send them to the lab in the usual way.’

‘And the shower?’

‘Won’t do you any harm.’