Rafferty & Llewellyn Boxed Set Books 5-8

Chapter Two-3

AFTER CHECKING QUICKLY for any signs of life, Rafferty retreated to the doorway of Clive Barstaple’s office, from where, with nostrils clenched, he gazed round the room. The smell both in the small office and in the gent’s toilet, was appalling. Obviously, in the later stages, Barstaple hadn’t made it back to the lavatory; the dead man had not only soiled his trousers, he had vomited down his shirt as well as in the metal waste-bin in the corner of the room. Apart from the swimming bile, the bin was half-full of shredded paper on top of which rested an empty yoghurt carton. The yoghurt was hazelnut flavour, Rafferty noted. It was the only one he liked.

The desk phone was off the hook, the receiver dangling down the side of the desk by its plastic wire, and Rafferty guessed the dead man had tried vainly to summon help. Obviously, he had left it too late and, presuming Smales’s deductions to be correct, the convulsions and paralysis had overtaken him before he’d been able to do so. Rafferty could imagine that, in the earlier stages, the dead man had just assumed he had a particularly bad stomach upset and thought no more about it than to ensure he had a clear run to the lavatory. But then, as the symptoms had grown more violent he had probably been torn between lavatory and telephone.

Unfortunately for him, the need for dignity had triumphed over common sense until it was too late. Barstaple had died a horrible death, alone, frightened, covered in his own vomit and excrement. Poor bastard, thought Rafferty. Poor, poor bastard.

For the second time today, the odours of death overpowered him, and he stumbled from the office, down the stairs and out into the fresh evening air. For once he didn’t curse the weather. The cold raindrops refreshed him.

He was surprised to find that Llewellyn had followed him. Unlike his own, Llewellyn’s stomach seemed able to take the most appalling sights and smells in its stride. To cover his attack of collywobbles, Rafferty now remarked, ‘Seems like young Smales was right.’

Llewellyn nodded.

Though whether the culprit was rhododendrons or some other toxic substance, Rafferty wasn’t prepared to hazard a guess. ‘What a way to go. Somebody must have hated his guts to do that to him. Bloody awful death.’

Llewellyn nodded again. As if he sensed that Rafferty needed a few moments more to get himself together, he remarked quietly, ‘The ancients were fond of poison, you know. Used it for murder, suicide, even judicial execution.’

Sensing an imminent lecture, Rafferty merely remarked, ‘Is that so?’

‘Oh yes. For instance, the Athenian philosopher, Socrates, was condemned to die on charges of atheism and corrupting youth. He was ordered to drink hemlock.’

Rafferty raised his eyebrows. ‘And did he?’

Once more, Llewellyn nodded.

The information that one of Llewellyn’s much-quoted and know-all heroes had got up other noses than his own and had met a sticky end for his pains, restored Rafferty’s stomach quicker than an Alka Seltzer. His manner sprightlier, he now remarked, ‘And I thought your old Greeks and Romans were supposed to be such a civilized lot. God save us from civilized people, hey? Give me ignorant barbarians any day and a quick sword thrust in the vitals.’

Confident he now had his queasy stomach under control, Rafferty led the way back upstairs. This time, he was able to take in more than the immediately obvious. There was a large pin-board just outside the victim’s office. It was covered with notices, and he glanced at them; reminders to the staff of this or that new company policy; warnings of the penalties awaiting those who failed to grasp and implement the numerous changes swiftly; bans on smoking either inside or immediately outside the building, bans on eating outside the prescribed lunch periods, bans on making tea or coffee more frequently than lunchtime, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. The bans even extended to making more visits to the loos than the management deemed sufficient. The wording of all of them reminded Rafferty of Superintendent Bradley at his more pedantic. All were signed by the dead man. His earlier pity evaporating, Rafferty wondered sourly if Barstaple had issued himself a reprimand for his own recent over-use of the toilet facilities.

Barstaple’s office was streamlined and functional. Its sole decoration, on the solid wall behind the desk, was several framed posters of some grey mechanical gadget called the Aimhurst Widget.

Rafferty, aware he’d have offended against nearly every one of Barstaple’s dreary edicts, thought fondly of his own office, which in spite of Superintendent Bradley’s frequent exhortations about tidiness, still remained as cosily ramshackle as ever.

Overcoming his distaste, Rafferty transferred his attention back to the dead man. The cadaver was half in, half out of his chair, which had tumbled to the floor with its load.

Barstaple must have cracked his head as he fell, he thought, as he noted the skin on his forehead was broken. As it to confirm his conclusions, he now saw there was a smear of blood on the corner of the desk.

‘Find out the name of the key holder and get them over here please, Dafyd,’ he instructed. ‘But before you do that, get on the blower, and call Dally and the team out. When you’ve done that, have a word with the security guard on the desk. With a bit of luck, he’ll be an ex-copper and might have something useful to tell us. I’ll speak to the woman who found the body. Where has Smales put her?’

‘In the ground floor staff room with the rest of the cleaners,’ Llewellyn told him, before heading off to make his phone calls.

Slowly, trying to compose his mind for the coming interviews, Rafferty followed him down the steep stairs to the ground floor, and walked along to the staff room. Along with a collection of staff photographs, there was the same profusion of notices here as there had been in Barstaple’s office. They even contained the same diktats.

WPC Green and PC Smales were there, along with the three members of the contract cleaning firm. Smales was doing his best not to look smug and failing. His face, so boyishly smooth that Rafferty guessed he rarely needed to shave, was pink with excitement, and Rafferty smothered a sigh.

The cleaners, two women and a man, stared anxiously at him. Incongruously, the male cleaner still sported a pair of bright yellow rubber gloves.

Rafferty nodded to Smales, and after a quick, whispered, ‘Well done. It looks as if you were right,’ he added, in an attempt to curb some of Smales’s more obvious adrenalin surge, ‘I’ll want you to take notes, Constable.’ He spoke briefly to the contract cleaning staff, before asking, ‘Which one of you found the body?’

‘I did.’ A plump middle-aged woman in a faded blue nylon overall answered.

‘And you are?’

‘Mrs Collins. Ada Collins.’

Rafferty was relieved to see that she seemed a sensible, level-headed kind of woman. Even after the shock of finding the body, she appeared remarkably composed, and when Rafferty told her he’d like to speak to her first, she simply nodded, and followed him down the corridor to the reception area.

The building was on two floors. It wasn’t a large concern, and, as he now learned from a sotto-voce Smales, consisted of a reception area, conference room, four offices, and a staff room on the ground floor, and a large open-plan office and male and female lavatories on the first floor. The open-plan office also incorporated a kitchen halfway down its length, and the victim’s own glassed-in office just inside the door.

As Llewellyn returned from his telephoning and took the security guard to an empty office, Rafferty led Mrs Collins to the seating area on the far side of the reception. Smales sat importantly on the other side of her, notebook and pen much in evidence.

Although composed, Ada Collins had had an unpleasant experience and Rafferty spent the first few minutes gently drawing her out about herself, before he led her onto the discovery of Clive Barstaple’s grisly death. ‘What time did you find the body?’

‘It was about 6.30.’ She blew her nose firmly with a large, practical men’s handkerchief, before she stuffed it back in her overall pocket. ‘In the normal way of things I wouldn’t have been the one to find him at all. I don’t usually do this floor,’ she explained. ‘Only Dot – Mrs Flowers, the regular cleaner – had some family trouble last week. Her lad.’ She shook her head sympathetically. ‘From something she let slip one time, he’s obviously a bit of a handful. Drugs,’ she added darkly. ‘Poor Dot had to pay his fine last time. He’s in hospital up in Birmingham. Overdose, I shouldn’t wonder. Anyway, Dot said she was going up there, and wouldn’t be in to work on Monday.’

‘When did she ring you?’

‘Friday night.’ Mrs Collins paused, and clenched her work-thickened fingers together in her lap, before adding, ‘You never know what trouble’s waiting for you, do you? Thank God my lads are no bother.’

‘Did she say what hospital her son was in?’

Mrs Collins shook her head. ‘She didn’t say a lot at all. She’s never been a chatty woman at the best of times, and with getting such news it was hardly that, was it? And her on her own, too. I dare say the boy’s missed a firm hand.’

Rafferty nodded.

‘Anyway, as I said, she rang me and told me she didn’t expect to be in all this week. So I rang the boss, Mr Arnold, Ross Arnold – he owns Allways Cleaning Services where we both work – and he sent Mrs Chakraburty to cover. Only she’s not so good on her legs. She told me she had rickets when she was young, and can’t manage stairs very well. Usually she does one of the local supermarkets. So I said I’d do the first floor.’

‘I see.’ Rafferty paused. ‘I gather from my constable here, that Mr Barstaple—the dead man,’ he added as he saw her blank expression, ‘was collapsed over his desk when you found him?’

‘That’s right. I thought he was just feeling poorly and taking a nap, as he was slumped on the desk with his head on his arms. I didn’t notice the mess in the bin or on his clothes at first—my eyesight’s poor, you see, and my sense of smell was never what you could call good. I didn’t want to startle him when I turned on the hoover, so I gave him a shake to wake him. But as it turned out it was me who had the start. As I told your young officer.’ She nodded at Smales who blushed, and buried his head back to his notebook, ‘I just shook the poor man by the shoulder, and the next thing I knew, he’d tumbled to the floor, chair and all.’

She paused, took a deep breath, and carried on. ‘I hadn’t been able to see his face before. It gave me quite a turn, I can tell you.’ She pulled her handkerchief from her pocket again, and after blowing her nose, gripped the cotton square tightly. ‘Poor man, and him so young. Still,’ she added brightly, ‘gastric can be a terrible thing and there’s been a lot of it around lately. I suppose it strained his heart?’

Rafferty made no comment on this. ‘I gather you didn’t know him personally?’

Ada Collins shook her head. ‘No. The staff were usually gone by the time we got here. Sometimes, one or two would be working late, but I never saw this man before. Barstaple you said his name was?’

Rafferty nodded.

Her lips pursed at this, and her gaze narrowed thoughtfully. ‘I remember now; he was the one nobody liked. I’d once or twice overheard some of the staff talking about him,’ she explained. ‘Barstaple the Bastard’, they called him.’

Rafferty glanced at Smales who had been frantically scribbling to keep up. But as Mrs Collins said this, he looked up with shining eyes. His expression said it all. What did I tell you, sir? it said. Someone’s murdered him.

Rafferty’s gaze narrowed warningly and Smales dropped his own back to his notebook.

‘What did you do then?’

‘I let out such a yell that the others came running—even Mrs Chakraburty.’ Ada Collins gave a shaky laugh. ‘I found a mouse earlier this year—I can’t bear the creatures,’ she explained, ‘and I suppose they thought I’d found another one. Anyway, up they came, Mrs Chakraburty and Eric and Albert, the security guard. Albert shooed us all out and made us wait down here while he rang 999. I did try to tell him we ought to try to res...resusc...bring him back to life—but Albert just kept saying not to bother trying as he was way past our help.’

‘So you were the only one to go up to the first floor before the discovery of the body?’

Ada Collins stared at him, the unexpectedly clear periwinkle blue eyes looking out of place in the worn, middle-aged face. ‘What difference does that make?’ she finally asked. ‘He died of a heart attack—didn’t he?’

‘We’ll have to wait for the pathologist to determine cause of death, Mrs Collins. But, in the meantime, we have to check certain facts, like who was up on that first floor between the time the staff left - at 5.30?’ She nodded. ‘When he was presumably still alive—and the time you found him just after 6.30. Should this turn out to be an unnatural death we need to eliminate as many people as possible.’

Ada Collins took a few seconds to digest this. Then she paled and stammered, ‘You mean—you mean you think somebody murdered him?’

Rafferty made no answer to his. She didn’t seem to expect one. ‘Did anyone else but you go up to that floor?’ he repeated.

‘Only Eric. Eric Penn, one of the other cleaners. You met him downstairs. Anyway, he came up earlier to make the tea. We always start with a cup, and Eric always makes it. He’s a bit simple, but there’s no harm in him, and he’s a hard worker, which is why Mr Arnold agreed to keep him on when the previous owner sold the cleaning business.’

‘And Mr Penn didn’t notice anything amiss?’

She shrugged. ‘If he did, he said nothing to me. If he noticed him at all, he probably thought, like me, that he was asleep. Of course, the door was shut, so any smell...’ She came to an embarrassed halt.

Rafferty was surprised to learn that the door to Barstaple’s office had been closed. He’s assumed that, feeling so ill, the dead man would have wanted an unrestricted path to the toilet. If Barstaple had been poisoned, and if Smales’s gut instinct should prove to be correct and it was the toxic substance in the rhododendron plant that had done the job, it must have been administered long before the cleaners arrived. According to Smales’s book of toxicology, the toxic substance in the plant took around six hours to work.

‘By the way,’ Rafferty asked. ‘Can you let me have Mrs Flowers’ address? Just for the record.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know it, though I’ve an idea she lives near the station, but exactly where...’ She shrugged. ‘She won’t be there, anyway. She’ll still be up in Birmingham with her son.’

‘Never mind. I imagine your employer will know it.’

Mrs Collins looked about to say something, but then closed her lips firmly.

‘Was there something else?’

Ada Collins shook her head.

Rafferty drew the interview to a close. He didn’t want Ada Collins chatting to her colleagues, so as she left and Smales went to follow her, Rafferty called him back and told him softly, ‘Put her into an empty office, put Hanks on the door, and send Mrs Chakraburty along in five minutes. Oh, and send Sergeant Llewellyn in your place. He should be finished with the security guard by now.’

‘But sir—’ Smales started to protest at what he evidently regarded as the stealing of his thunder.

‘Not now, Smales. We’ve too much to do.’

Smales went off trailing a long sigh. Two minutes later Llewellyn appeared.

‘Get anything useful from the security guard?’ Rafferty asked.

Llewellyn shook his head. ‘It was just as Smales said. The supervisor of the contract cleaners found the body, screamed, and brought everyone else running. The security guard isn’t an ex-policeman, but he acted sensibly, secured the scene of death, and gathered everybody downstairs in the staff room while he phoned us.’

Rafferty nodded.

‘The key holder’s been informed. He’s the deputy manager, a Mr Gallagher. Said he’d be about half-an-hour, and Dr Dally and the scene of crime team are on their way.’

Rafferty nodded again and told Llewellyn about Barstaple’s nickname. But before Llewellyn could comment, there was a knock on the door, and Smales put his head round and announced Mrs Chakraburty.

Mrs Chakraburty was a small and slight Asian woman. Painfully shy, with poor English, she seemed scared out of her wits and Rafferty had to coax the answers from her. Even then, her accent was so strong he had trouble understanding her. He found he had to listen intently to understand her at all.

She merely confirmed what Mrs Collins and the security guard had told them. It was clear they were going to get no hints of staff gossip from Mrs Chakraburty. After checking they had her address, he told Llewellyn to escort her back downstairs, and to bring Eric Penn up.

Eric Penn was quite young, about twenty-five, and built like an ox. He seemed very restless, and shuffled constantly on his chair as if he couldn’t get comfortable. His eyes flickered continually between Rafferty and Llewellyn.

Rafferty couldn’t decide whether Eric was excited or terrified. Though the way he hugged his arms across his body would seem to indicate the latter. As he said Eric’s name, the man’s eyes settled on Rafferty with an unblinking stare that was quite unnerving. Rafferty hurried on with his questions.

Unfortunately, Eric Penn was not the sort of person it was possible to hurry. He needed as much encouragement as Mrs Chakraburty, and even then his answers were so garbled and uncertain that Llewellyn said afterwards that he had the feeling Eric was holding something back.

After he had confirmed what the others had said, Rafferty remarked encouragingly, ‘I understand that Mr Barstaple, the dead man, had a nickname?’

Eric grinned, and suddenly became much more voluble. ‘Bast’le the Bastard,’ he told them loudly. ‘Do you know what bastard means?’ he asked as though he was about to confide a secret. ‘I do. Shall I tell yers?’

Rafferty stared at him, appalled and saddened by his damaged humanity, and he said gently, ‘Thank you, Eric, but we know what it means.’

The faint light that had enlivened Eric’s dull features went out again. ‘Just thought I’d tell yer. Iffen you didn’t know.’ He paused, then burst out, ‘He was an’ all. A bastard. Called me an ‘effin’ moron once.’ His face puckered. ‘Tha’s not nice, is it? Not a nice thing to call me.’

‘No, Eric, it’s not. You didn’t like him then?’

Eric shook his head vehemently.

‘Did you often see him working here in the evenings?’ Ada Collins had told him she didn’t know the dead man, had never met him. Yet it was obvious from what Eric had told him that Barstaple must occasionally have encountered the cleaners.

Eric shook his head but didn’t add anything more. Rafferty had to press him before he discovered that, after that one occasion when Eric had been cleaning the stairs and had earned the cruel moron rebuke for not getting out of Barstaple’s path quickly enough, Eric had generally taken trouble to keep out of his way.

Rafferty tried once more to gain Eric’s confidence. With a smile, he remarked, ‘Mrs Collins says you’re a hard worker.’

This brought a broad grin to Eric’s face. Sadly, the grin made him look even more simple. ‘I am. I’m a good boy. Mum told me I’d have to work hard, and I do. I do work hard. Mrs Flowers told me I clean better than anyone else,’ he told Rafferty proudly. ‘And faster.’

Probably for poverty wages, Rafferty guessed. Still, his needs were probably few—not that that was an excuse for exploitation. Rafferty asked if he had seen Clive Barstaple this evening, and Eric nodded.

‘Asked him iffen he wanted a cup of tea. But he never answered, though I asked him three times. That was rude, wasn’t it?’

Rafferty nodded. Barstaple had undoubtedly been dead by then, but he didn’t mention this probability to Eric. ‘I’m surprised you offered to make him tea when he’d been so unkind to you. Why did you do that, Eric?’

Eric looked confused at this, and eventually he mumbled, ‘Mum learned me my manners.’

Llewellyn popped a question into the pause. ‘Didn’t you notice the smell, Eric? The office bin was full of vomit and he’d—’

‘Course I did. It ponged.’ Eric pulled a disgusted face. ‘Dirty. Should have used lavvy. I shut the door to keep the pong in.’

‘So it was open when you went up to make the tea shortly after you arrived this evening?’ Llewellyn asked.

Eric nodded.

That was one thing cleared up, anyway, thought Rafferty.

WPC Liz Green knocked and advised them that Dally and the SOCO team had arrived. Rafferty told Eric to go with Liz and wait with the others. He seemed reluctant to go. Barstaple’s death had apparently excited him, and it was clear that he shared Smales’s juvenile desire to be where the action was. Rafferty had to be quite firm with him to get him to do what he’d been told.

***