Barry Maitland - The Malcontenta

‘We have sixty-two guest rooms in the upper floor of the house and west wing, plus treatment and common rooms and kitchen and offices and so on in the ground floor and basement. There’s six staff rooms in the attic of the house, and there’s the four staff cottages — one for the Director, one for the family of one of the married staff, and one each shared by four male and four female staff.’ It came out in a rush and he stopped suddenly, breathing heavily.

‘So there are sixty-two patients here?’

‘Well, that’s the number of rooms. Some are double. The most we can accommodate is seventy-four, but at this time of year, I don’t know, there might be fifty or sixty.’

‘And how many staff?’

‘In the brochure we say it’s one to one.’ Parsons phrased it carefully.

‘What, seventy-four staff?’

‘Well … maybe if you count all the part-time cleaners and cooks and gardeners and the like…’

‘Come on. Realistically, how many staff have been in and out of this place in the last twenty-four hours?’

He shrugged, ‘I don’t know … Thirty? Forty? The Director or the Business Manager would be able to tell you.’

‘Yes, I’ll get to them. I just wanted an idea. And of those staff, what, about a dozen live in the grounds?’

Parsons counted in his head. ‘Yes, six in the attic and nine or ten in the houses, plus the Director and his wife.’

‘And what about you, where do you live?’

‘In the attic’

‘And Petrou?’

‘Yes, in the attic too.’

‘So when did you last see him alive?’

Parsons’ face clouded anxiously again. ‘I don’t know … I’ve been trying to remember. Last night — Sunday night — staff often go out. There’s always a recital or something for guests in the house after dinner. I had to spend all my free time over the weekend studying for this course I’m doing. I don’t remember seeing Alex last evening at all, not at dinner or anything. Before that … I don’t know … my mind’s a blur.’

‘Don’t worry, relax, it’ll come back to you. We’ll be asking everybody that question, so give it some thought. What was he like?’

‘Alex? Well … we weren’t close friends or anything. He hadn’t been here that long.’

‘About six months, the Director said. You’d been living next door to him for six months. Two single men. You were both single, weren’t you?’

Parsons flushed. ‘Yes, though I’m engaged. I tend to spend most of my spare time with Rose, except just lately when I’ve had all this studying. Of course, when he first arrived we chatted. But once he’d got settled … We didn’t have much in common, I suppose.’

‘Did he have friends on the staff? Was he sociable?’

‘Yes … he was quite … outgoing. Went out a lot. Several of the girls were interested in him. He was sort of … glamorous, you know, him being a Mediterranean type, and with his accent and that.’

‘He was foreign?’

‘Yes. He came from Greece.’

Through the glass doors Kathy noticed a movement of lime-green Day-Glo jackets down the path. She turned back to Parsons. ‘All right. We’ll leave it there for the moment. What you might do for me now is go to the house, tell Dr Beamish-Newell that I may not get to see him for another hour or so, and ask him if he could start organizing a list of everyone who was in the grounds over the past twenty-four hours, in categories — staff, guests, others. OK?’

‘Yes …’ Parsons hesitated. ‘Is this normal?’ he asked timidly. ‘I mean, all these procedures … for a suicide.’

‘Any sudden death has to be thoroughly investigated. Don’t worry, we’ll be out of your hair soon enough.’

They stepped out under the portico. Head down, shoulders stooped, Parsons set off across the grass towards the house. A light drizzle had set in, making the rhododendron leaves glisten behind the two men pulling the generator up the path. Beyond them a second pair burst through the trees. Kathy recognized the doctor, pointing the way to a lean, hawk-faced man and having difficulty keeping up with his long stride.

Kathy looked back to Stanhope House.

A hundred people, she thought, ninety-nine of them about to begin twittering about what happened to glamour boy.

Professor Pugh looked closely at her as he shook her hand. There were little laughter creases at the corners of his eyes, and in his voice she heard the lilt of his Welsh boyhood.

‘So you have something interesting for me, do you, Sergeant?’

‘I hope so,’ she replied, and led the way down to the lower chamber, where Dowling and the uniformed man were in a huddle around the body. Dowling looked shocked. She sent them upstairs to help get the lights fixed up and assist the SOCO team.

Until the floodlights finally burst into life, she held the torch for the pathologist, who peered at Petrou’s head and neck through a pair of horn-rimmed glasses without touching any part of him. In the full light, the right side of his face, partly obscured by his glistening black hair, seemed distorted or squashed. It was impossible now to recognize any of the ‘glamour’ the girls had once seen in him.

Pugh stepped aside, folded the glasses and tapped them against his teeth, thinking. ‘It’s warmer in here than I would have expected,’ he said, ‘for such a damp place.’

‘Apparently there’s some kind of background heater installed in the organ chamber behind the console there, to keep the organ working.’

‘Ah, the organ,’ he nodded. ‘Splendid. Well, now, has he been photographed?’

‘No, sir. The photographer’s due any minute.’

‘Better get that done first.’ He turned away and took his bag to a far corner of the room, where he pulled out some blue nylon overalls and a packet of surgical gloves.

The photographer arrived a moment later, manoeuvring his bag of equipment with difficulty down the spiral stairs. He nodded to the pathologist, who, after a politely deferential glance at Kathy, instructed him on the shots he wanted of the body. Kathy added her own requests, including the objects on the floor and general views of the room.

While they waited, Kathy was able to examine the other features of the place, now brightly illuminated by the temporary lights. The service door which Parsons had mentioned was visible now, on the side wall near the foot of the spiral stairs, its two bolts securely in place. The painting on the end wall was also clear and obviously in need of attention, with the canvas sagging in its frame. Otherwise the walls were bare, efflorescing with damp. On the floor below the other side wall a small panel of white marble had been set flush with the paving slabs. No inscription explained its presence.

‘Now,’ said Pugh when the photographer was done, ‘let’s have another look.’

He put on his glasses and gave the body a further close scrutiny, gently pulling the collar and hem of the tracksuit top away from the flesh, and then drawing the waistband of the pants down to look at the right thigh. He felt each of the limbs with his gloved hands and stepped back, nodding.

‘Rigor is generalized,’ he said, ‘so between ten and forty-eight hours, say.’ He turned to Kathy. ‘Do we know if anyone saw him yesterday?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Mmm. I wouldn’t like to risk losing this, you see.’ He was talking half to himself, or to an imaginary tutorial group of students.

‘Lose what, sir?’ Kathy asked.

He turned and gave her a little smile, eyes bright. ‘The pattern of compression of the muscles, you see? All down the right side as far as I can tell — the face, right shoulder, hip and so on. The flattening has been fixed by rigor mortis, which starts in the face and jaw, then the upper limbs, and finally the hips and legs. It disappears in the same order. I want to have a proper look at that pattern. Is that what you were concerned about, Anthony?’ He turned to the doctor.