Хилари Боннер - A Moment Of Madness

Suddenly he hated her. The bile rose from deep inside him. God, how he hated her. And how he just had to make her stop.

He took one hesitant step forward and then he lunged at her. Threw himself at her, his bulk overwhelming her, his arms flailing, striking out at her with all his might.

Yet he only wanted to make her stop. That was all. Just to stop...

‘They’ve found another body out at Maythorpe Manor,’ DS Cooper blurted out excitedly as he burst into Karen Meadows’ office. ‘We’ve just had a 999 call, boss.’

Karen Meadows looked up at him. She had been sitting at her desk, dealing with a mountain of unwelcome paperwork. Almost involuntarily she jumped to her feet.

‘Whose body, who is it?’ she enquired.

‘Angel Silver, almost certainly,’ replied Cooper. ‘It was her daily, Mrs Nott, who found her. The woman was half hysterical on the phone, apparently, but she kept saying that it was Mrs Silver. “Mrs Silver’s been murdered.”’

‘Christ,’ said Karen. ‘I just knew this one wasn’t going to go away. Did Mrs Nott say how she thought Angel had been killed?’

‘No, just that there was a lot of blood everywhere.’

Karen grabbed her shoulder bag from her desk and headed for the door. There was no point in asking Phil Cooper any more questions. She needed to get to the scene of the crime fast to see it all for herself.

‘C’mon Phil, let’s get out there,’ she said.

Angel Silver’s body lay spread-eagled on the kitchen floor. Her eyes and mouth were wide open. Her face was bloodied, particularly around her nose and mouth, yet her expression was far more one of surprise than of fear, or even of pain.

One of her arms was lying at an impossible angle, almost certainly broken. The fresh bruise on her forehead, which Kelly had noticed and been disturbed by when he made his late-night visit, looked even more prominent in death, and Angel’s grubby towelling dressing gown was heavily bloodstained.

Karen Meadows peered at the body, getting as close as she dare before the SOCOs arrived and sealed the crime scene. She could see no signs of a major wound.

‘Is that more blood behind her head, Phil?’ she asked DS Cooper.

The young detective sergeant leaned forward to study the black and cream tiled floor. There was a smattering of dark red spots on the shiny slabs.

‘I reckon so, boss,’ he said. ‘There’s blood in her hair too, I think.’

He pointed to a patch of Angel’s hair protruding from behind one of the dead woman’s ears. The DCI could see that it was also dark red and matted.

‘Yes,’ said Karen Meadows. ‘Quite a bash on the head she’s taken. How exactly? That’s the question.’

‘She could just have fallen and cracked her head on the worktop,’ said Cooper. He gestured towards the granite surfaces. ‘Hard as nails, this stuff, and the edges have got sharp corners too.’

DCI Meadows nodded. ‘Thing is, was she pushed?’ she asked almost rhetorically.

‘Look at her eyes,’ said Cooper. ‘Pupils dilated. She was high as a kite when she died, I reckon.’

‘They did teach you something at college, then, Phil?’

‘Oh yeah, boss. I’m an expert on drug abuse, got really good at it.’

The young policeman grinned. Karen grinned back. She liked Phil Cooper’s sense of humour. You needed things to be lightened sometimes in their job.

The SOCOs arrived swiftly, as did the region’s Home Office pathologist. Karen had had a good relationship with his predecessor. She wasn’t too sure of Audley Richards, a taciturn character as precise as his small neat moustache, who invariably didn’t give an inch. But there was no doubt that he was darned good at his job.

Richards almost immediately made one pronouncement, which was a result in itself from a man who seemed to regard any form of educated guesswork or speculation in pathology as a crime equal almost in severity to murder itself.

Peering close to the body he said, ‘I think all this blood might be deceptive. I think she might have had a nose bleed.’

Karen Meadows leaned closer. ‘Caused by what?’ she asked.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Detective Chief Inspector. I’m a pathologist not a clairvoyant.’

Karen decided to resort to flattery. ‘Oh, come on, Audley,’ she said. ‘You always know more than you want to let on. You’re a seriously clever bastard. That’s why we all love you.’

Richards turned to face her. ‘The former I’m well aware of, so therefore it is vital that I protect my reputation when faced with impossible questions before I even have a chance to examine the corpse properly,’ he said. ‘The latter I can only assume is your idea of a joke, Karen.’

The use of her Christian name, in spite of the admonishment issued in an apparently frosty tone, was, Karen knew, a good sign. And indeed, it did seem that the flattery had worked, because Richards continued to speak and, considering that he had so far made only the briefest of preliminary examinations, proceeded to be unusually helpful.

‘Look at the membranes between her nostrils,’ he said. ‘They’re quite severely damaged. You wouldn’t have had to give that nose much more than a tap to make it bleed. Coke, of course.’

‘Christ,’ said Karen, wondering suddenly why she and Phil Cooper hadn’t themselves already noticed how paper thin the skin and tissue division which separated Angel’s nostrils had become. ‘I’m sure she wasn’t like that when I last saw her.’

‘It can happen quite suddenly after years of abuse.’ Audley Richards looked thoughtful. ‘This is quite an extreme case, too.’

‘So the blood has no relevance to her death?’

‘Hard to say.’

For a man who was famously reluctant to provide information at the scene of crime, Richards was being extremely co-operative, almost avuncular by his standards. Karen knew all too well how much he preferred to wait until he had examined a subject in his laboratory before giving anything away.

‘It would seem most likely that she was attacked and that her attacker hit her in the face,’ he went on. ‘But there is some sign of bruising, which indicates that she didn’t die straight after the blow to her face. I really can’t say any more yet until the post mortem.’

‘Time of death?’ Karen enquired, adding quickly, in order not to antagonise the pathologist, ‘Only approximately, of course.’

Richards grunted. ‘Very approximately, some time around midnight, I would say.’

Karen nodded thoughtfully. So, just as she had already guessed, Angel had lain dead in her kitchen overnight until the arrival of her daily help, Mrs Nott, first thing that morning.

The DCI persisted in trying to extract as much information as possible from Audley Richards.

‘Could that blow to the back of the head have been enough to kill her, Audley?’ she asked, although pretty sure she wouldn’t get a straight answer until Richards was able to do the job properly. She was quite correct, too.

‘Hit the right spot and a tap can kill you, Karen,’ he said tiredly. ‘As you well know. So can three inches of water, half a peanut if you have that allergy, and an unexpected aneurysm without warning as you walk along the street. Doesn’t mean a thing, does it?’

He wouldn’t budge. The DCI would have to be patient, something she wasn’t all that hot on if the truth be known.

Meanwhile she went into standard operating mode for the senior investigating officer at a suspicious death, which, she had to remind herself, was all that she had at the moment — although she was somehow pretty damned sure it was going to turn into a murder case pretty sharpish. A team was dispatched to ask questions in the neighbourhood about any comings and goings the night before.