Her voice had risen as she spoke, topping her tirade on a high C. She paused and collected herself, then continued in a normal voice.
“Sometime I’ll make a comeback, and when I do…”
Jack and Baker just stared. Lola looked from Baker to Mary and then back to Jack again. She tapped her heel against the doorframe and lit another cigarette.
“So. You’re the police. I heard about Humpty. I was sorry, I thought he was a nice guy. A bit short for my taste, but there you have it.”
“When did you last see him?” asked Jack, trying to gather his senses.
She flicked the ash off her cigarette. “About this time last year. I saw Hump come lumbering out; he never could move very fast with those short little legs of his. He looked a bit agitated, and I asked if he was all right. He was a bit startled when he saw me and said everything was fine, then went downstairs. I went back indoors, but I could still hear the shower running. Humpty never came back, and I called the maintenance engineer the following week. He didn’t turn up, and it’s still running. My guess is that they’re trying to make the building unsafe so we all have to move out.”
She looked around the shabby corridor and pulled at a piece of curling wallpaper disdainfully. It tore off easily in her hand, and she crushed the fragment to little pieces.
She suddenly looked bored. “Can I go? If you want me, you know where to find me. I don’t go out a lot.”
Lola didn’t wait for a reply. She just looked at them all, smiled at Baker, went back inside her room and closed the door noiselessly behind her.
Jack sighed and put an ear to one of the glass panes of Humpty’s front door.
“We’ve just met British cinema history,” he commented.
“She was rather a cracker in her time, sir,” declared Baker.
“I think she still is.”
“Well,” announced Mary, “if I look that good in my fifties, I’ll be a happy girl.”
Jack raised a finger to his lips. “Quiet a second, guys.”
They all stood in silence for a moment.
“She’s right. The shower is still running.”
He stepped back and gestured to Baker to force the lock. They pushed the door open against a mound of junk mail that had collected in the hall and then went on to the second door that separated the hall from the rest of the apartment. Jack paused and looked at Mary and Baker, seeing his own feelings of foreboding reflected on their faces.
As Jack grasped the door handle, it came away in his hand, and the door itself fell away into a rotten, soggy heap. A wave of damp air blew over them all. The moisture in the air had exacted a terrible toll on the apartment. Everything they could see was in an advanced state of rot. The carpets and furnishings were thickly mildewed, and the paper had peeled off the walls and lay in heaps next to the moldy skirting. The books in the bookcase had rotted down to a dark mulch, and everything in the flat was covered with a thin layer of moisture. There was a heavy smell of damp, and Jack noticed that several varieties of fungi had started to grow on the walls and floors. He felt the floorboards collapse gently under his weight, the patterned carpet keeping him from falling through entirely. He trod gently into the bedroom and saw that the sheets had rotted off the bed and the contents of the wardrobe had fallen off their hangers into a soggy mass. As he called to Baker to turn off the shower, his eyes settled on a badly corroded cartridge that lay on the wet carpet. He looked closer and found another, then two more. He bent down and prodded one with a pen, but it had stuck fast to the carpet.
Jack heard the shower stop. There was a short pause, and then Baker spoke, his voice solemn and quavering slightly.
“Sir, I think you’d better come and have a look at this.”
The SOCO team was there in under an hour. They looked around curiously at the decayed room and walked carefully on a floor that now undulated where the floorboards had partially collapsed. One officer busied himself cutting out the squares of carpet that had the cartridges corroded to them, but the fingerprint boys were sent away almost immediately.
Shenstone scratched the back of his head when he saw the mess. “How long has the shower been going?”
“A year.”
It posed severe problems. The photographer was still busy as Mrs. Singh arrived, breathless after hurrying up the stairs. Jack was sorting through the heap of junk mail and private letters, most of which seemed to be either bank correspondence, invitations to functions or pleas for charitable donations. There were hundreds of love letters, too—obviously brief amours hastily cast aside. The oldest postmark dated back almost a year, which seemed to tie in with what Lola had told them.
“Jack, Jack,” said Mrs. Singh, shaking her head sadly, “what’s going on?”
Jack took her to the bathroom, finding her a safe passage over the rotten floorboards. “Body in the shower. Probably been dead about a year.”
“A year? Well, as I said, dead men do—”
But then she saw the body. A flash went off at that moment to punctuate the discovery.
“Not much for me to work on, is there?”
“Not really.”
The corpse wasn’t much of a corpse. Since the body had been in a shower for nearly a year, the flesh had been quite literally washed down the drain. All that remained of the victim was a yellowish skeleton, held together by hardier pieces of tendon and gristle. Wisps of hair were attached to a small area of scalp on the side of the head, and the left foot, which was the only part of the body outside the oversize shower basin, had putrefied and was now host to a large crop of fungus.
“The shower was on when you found him?” asked Mrs. Singh.
“Yes. Him?”
“Male skeleton. Mid-thirties at a guess, not far off six foot. But this is what interests me.”
She pointed at the small collection of lead bullets that lay scattered beneath the corpse. They had dropped from the body as the surrounding tissue rotted away but were too heavy to be moved by the water. Mrs. Singh pulled out a Magic Marker and noted the position of one, and had the photographer take several pictures before she picked it up with a pair of forceps and looked closely at it.
“Looks like a .32. Make any sense?”
“There are .32 cartridges scattered all over the carpet just behind you.”
“Any idea who he is?” she asked without looking up.
“We think his name is Tom Thomm, aged thirty-four and a missing person—found his wallet in a pair of rotted 501s. Do I need to ask how he died?”
Mrs. Singh knelt by the shower basin. Jack squatted next to her.
“Not really,” she continued. “One shot grazed his lowest rib just here but was not fatal; another bullet that shattered the ulna indicates that he had raised his arm in an attempt to protect himself. There is another slug lodged in the hip joint which probably caused him to fall over, and the last two were fired to finish him off. One lodged in the side of his skull and the other nicked his rib.”
“How do you know two shots were fired to finish him off?”
She smiled and with a flourish drew back the shower curtain. It had three bullet holes at abdomen height and then two much lower down.
Jack looked at the holes and got up, rubbed his chin and stood just outside the bathroom door facing the shower. The ejected shell cases had been found there, so it was a fair bet that this was where the shots had been fired from.
“So they fire from here three times, hear the person slump in the shower and shoot twice more?”
Mrs. Singh stood up. “I’d say that’s about the tune of it. Get Skinner to have a look. I’ll leave the corpse there until he’s done.” She stared down at the body. “Seems hard to believe that a shower could be run for a year. Didn’t anyone complain?”
“Next-door neighbor. Lola Vavoom—”
“The actress?”
“The same. She complained, but they ignored her. No one lives below. It’s a mess down there, too. The damp has got into everything.”
r /> Mrs. Singh was deep in thought, but not, as Jack found out, about the corpse.
“Lola Vavoom, eh?” she said excitedly. “I was about the only person who liked My Sister Used to Keep Geese, and my husband and I saw Fancy Free in Ludlow eight times. I must get her autograph.”
She hurried off, leaving them both staring at the shower curtain.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Jack.
“Mrs. Dumpty?”
“Bingo. First three shots at abdomen level. Humpty was about four foot six. If she thought he was in the shower, that’s where she would have aimed.”
“What did Mrs. Dumpty say in her suicide note?” mused Mary.
“‘I went to his home and prayed for God to forgive me as I pulled the trigger.’”
“Only when we came around to interview her,” continued Mary,
“she didn’t know we were investigating something that had happened that morning—she must have thought we’d just discovered the body.”
“It explains why Dumpty had been lying low,” added Jack. “He obviously didn’t want her to have a second go at him.”
He stared at the skeleton in the shower basin.
“I reckon he’d only just discovered Tom Thomm’s body when Lola saw him.”
“Why didn’t he report it?” asked Mary.
“Because,” said Jack simply, “he was up to no good—and up to no good big time. But it still doesn’t tell us where Humpty had been living this past year.”
“So…are we any closer to who killed Humpty?”
“We know they used a .44-caliber handgun, that it’s probable Winkie saw them do it and—” He thought for a moment. “And that’s about it.”
The rain had stopped by the time they stepped out of the building. The sky had darkened even though it was barely midafternoon, and cautious motorists had switched on their headlights, causing the wet road to glisten. The doorman, inspired by all the activity, had put his pillbox hat on at a jaunty angle and saluted as they walked past.
“Briggs called,” said Baker as he saw them to the Allegro.
“Let me guess. Press conference?”
“In one.”
30. Another Press Conference
CRIME BOSS JAILED
Notorious racketeer and underworld crime boss Giorgio Porgia was found guilty yesterday on 208 counts of “undertaking home improvements with menaces.” The court heard that Porgia and his gang would routinely use threats, violence and intimidation to sell unwanted home improvements to frightened residents. Loft conversions were carried out where no loft had been; double glazing was replaced up to seven times on the same property, and houses were unnecessarily rewired using string. Porgia was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison, having already pleaded guilty to token charges of wanton lack of taste, poor color harmony and badly aligned wallpapering. He was also banned for life from owning a conservatory.
—From The Toad, March 2, 1984
“…but what was actually said at that fateful tea party, it was impossible to ascertain,” continued Chymes while the pressroom stared at him, hanging on his every word, “until I devised a forensic technique which I call ‘cake-crumb scatter-pattern identification.’ This works on the principle that if someone eats cake while talking, the crumbs are ejected from the mouth at different rates according to the syllables of the words spoken. By analyzing the pattern of crumbs on the tablecloth, I was able to deduce that the conversation was not about the weather, as Mrs. Pitkins claimed, but the subject of the misdiagnosis of botulism poisoning, a line of questioning that we were able to bring to our suspect, who soon confessed everything in a tearful scene that made a fitting end to the whole painful inquiry.”
Friedland was greeted by the usual standing ovation, which he modestly dismissed with a wave of the hand. There were a few technical questions about his new technique, regarding varying weights of the component parts of the cake and how far you might project a chocolate sprinkle when pronouncing “psoriasis,” something Chymes deftly answered with complicated diagrams on an overhead projector as DS Flotsam gave out printed copies of all the details.
Jack, Briggs and Mary were watching from the door of the anteroom.
“What am I doing here?” asked Jack. “I’ve got nothing really substantial to add—I don’t really know if Winkie’s death was even connected.”
“It’s from the seventh floor, Jack.” Briggs said it without enthusiasm. Someone was leaning on him.
“What’s going on, sir?”
Briggs looked down and rubbed his forehead. “The Guild is very powerful, Jack. I’m sorry.”
Before Jack could even begin to think what he might mean, Chymes strode past them as he walked out of the pressroom. He went back on to take a curtain call but then came off again, glared at Jack with a confident smile and said, “You want the heat, Jack? Try the fire.”
And he joined Flotsam and Barnes on the other side of the anteroom, where they attended to him as a manager looks after a boxer who has just come out of the ring.
Usually Jack waited for the journalists to file out, as they generally made a lot of noise, and if Archibald or anyone else was polite enough to stay, he would at least be heard. But today was different. Today no one filed out. There was silence. For a moment Jack thought Chymes was about to go back on, but he had already started to discuss the possibility of solving the Slough Thuggee cult murders in time for the early-evening news the following day.
“Sir,” said Mary as she leaned around the door to peer at their expectant faces, “I think they’re waiting for you.”
“That’s not possible,” replied Jack, his heart missing a beat. He looked at Briggs, who wouldn’t catch his eye. He’d clearly been set up.
“Shit.”
“What?” asked Mary.
“I’m going to be boned out there.”
“You can refuse to go on.”
“If it’s not now, it will be later. No, let’s get it over with.”
He walked on to the symphonic clatter of camera motor drives.
“Good afternoon,” he began, feeling what he imagined was something akin to bowel-moving stage fright. “My name is Detective Inspector Jack Spratt, and I am head of the Nursery Crime Division here at Reading Central. On Monday morning at approximately one A.M., Humperdinck Jehoshaphat Aloysius Stuyvesant van Dumpty was murdered by a person or persons unknown as he sat upon a wall at his place of work. He died instantly. At present we are unable to state a motive.”
Josh Hatchett asked, “How was he killed?”
“He was shot.”
A murmur went through the collected newsmen. So far this wasn’t going too badly.
“Do you have any suspects?”
“We have a woman named Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Brooks. We will be issuing a photograph after the press conference. In a separate development, Mr. William Winkie, Humpty Dumpty’s next-door neighbor, was found murdered in Palmer Park this morning. We are not ruling out the possibility of a connection.”
“Is Mrs. Garibaldi-Dumpty’s suicide connected to Mr. Dumpty’s death?”
“It is a direct consequence of it, yes.”
Hector Sleaze had been staring at what looked like a hastily photocopied list of press cuttings.
“Detective, I wonder if you could confirm for me that you recently attempted to convict the three pigs of Mr. Wolff’s murder?”
Jack shuffled uneasily. Here it comes, he thought. “That is true, yes.”
A ripple of laughter went through the room, and Jack felt himself grow hot.
“And that this failed conviction cost the taxpayers a quarter of a million pounds?”
“I’m not aware of the precise figure.”
“Okay,” said Hector after a pause, “can you also confirm that you have the lowest conviction/investigation ratio of any department in Reading?”
“Without looking at the records, it would be difficult to say.”
“Then let me help you,” Sleaze mu
ttered, looking through his list. “Sheep rustling from Miss Bo-peep. Two arrests, no charges. Failure to properly take care of livestock by ‘Boy’ Blue. One arrest, no charges. Cruelly putting a cat in a well. Johnny Flynn arrested, no charges brought. Kidnapping of Hansel and Gretel with intent to commit cannibalism. One arrest, no charges. Criminal spreading panic of sky falling. One arrest, no charges. Bluebeard. Died awaiting trial. ‘Goosey’ Gander, freed on appeal. Mr. Punch, arrested for wife battery, throwing a baby downstairs and illegal possession of a crocodile. All charges dropped.”
Hector put down the list. “I could go on. Not a very good record, is it, Inspector?”
Jack stared at him. If the Prosecution Service had proceeded, he could have brought convictions on a lot more occasions. If there had been a will to have them convicted.
“The NCD is a department fraught with—”
“In fact,” continued Hector, “I can only find sixteen successful convictions in the twenty years you have been heading the Nursery Crime Division. One every fifteen months. Friedland Chymes convicts that many every five weeks.”
It was an unfair comparison, and Jack clenched his jaw. Friedland had been busy.
“The NCD, Mr. Sleaze, is a unique area of policing where an understanding of the problems of the characters involved often allows me to stop things before they get out of—”
“Inspector Spratt, are you competent to run Mr. Dumpty’s murder investigation or are you really trying to work beyond your capabilities?”
“There is no doubt,” said Jack slowly, “that this case falls strictly within the NCD’s jurisdiction.”
“Do you think Chymes might have been able to secure a conviction of the three pigs?”
He would, of course. Juries considered it an honor to work with Chymes. But Jack had paused in his answer, and it gave him away.
“I take that as a yes, Inspector. Do you think it would be prudent to hand over the investigation to Chymes so we might see some headway?”
“I am completely in control of the investigation,” replied Jack hurriedly, answering for answering’s sake and wanting to be out of that room as soon as possible. But they weren’t done. They had been well primed. The newspaper headlines were already written, Chymes had made sure of it—and it would sell papers. Lots of them. Jack glanced over to where Briggs was staring at him from the side door. Beyond him Jack could see Friedland Chymes wearing a look of ill-disguised delight. The last detective who had tried to usurp Chymes’s dominance of Reading Central and refused to relinquish a case had been a bright spark named Drood. He had been transferred to the unrelenting tedium of the Missing Persons Bureau.