Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

“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 phrrp! 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 long ago by his colleagues in Halifax CID. 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 as she fried her bacon and sausages, 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.