Waterloo Sunset: A Lake District Mystery #4 (Lake District Mysteries) Read online

  ‘From what I hear, over the years your love life’s been a bit of a soap opera.’ She grinned. ‘You can’t blame your friends for wanting to tune into the next instalment.’

  ‘Actually, my love life is more like a long-forgotten sitcom with no repeats.’ A rueful shake of the head. ‘I read this article about a tiny sea creature, a bdelloid rotifer, it’s called. It hasn’t had sex for one hundred million years and I know how it feels.’

  She laughed. ‘And Ceri?’

  He took a breath. ‘Her husband had a history of depression.’

  ‘Probably because so many women found him sleazy.’

  ‘I heard he was on Prozac, but that didn’t help balance the books of his business. It wasn’t Ceri’s fault that despair overwhelmed him.’

  She hung her head. ‘Sorry, I’m a cow. You were telling me about your client?’

  ‘Aled Borth lives in Waterloo. He’s a cinema organist at the Alhambra. Never married. But he knew Lee Welch, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Perhaps they shared a packet of popcorn at the pictures?’

  ‘Lee doesn’t sound like a devotee of art-house cinema. So how did Aled get to know her?’

  ‘Might be worth checking. I’ll have a word.’ She leaned across the desk and patted his hand. ‘Thanks.’

  The door swung open and Jim bustled in. He wrapped a proprietorial arm around Carmel’s shoulder. Harry couldn’t remember a time when his partner looked happier.

  ‘Ready, sweetheart? Hope she’s not distracted you, Harry.’

  She pecked Jim on the cheek. ‘We’ve just been passing the time of day.’

  He grunted. ‘With you two, I scarcely dare think what that means.’

  ‘Just the usual, you know.’ A wicked grin. ‘Sex and scandal and sudden death.’

  ***

  On his way out of the office, he bumped into Gina Paget. The lift doors were open and she was shining the mirrored walls of the cab as though her life depended on it. Her back was towards him, but her reflection gazed at him. Her face was drenched with misery.

  ‘I know how Lee made her money,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Does the name Cultural Companions mean anything to you?’

  She swung round to face him. ‘Never heard of it.’

  She wasn’t a bad liar, but he’d seen better. Some of them were clients of long standing. ‘She was on their books as an escort girl.’

  Gina hung her head. ‘All right. So maybe she made a few quid that way.’

  ‘She told you about it?’

  ‘If you must know, she invited me out for a drink one night and tried to talk me into signing on with them myself. I wasn’t interested. Like I told you, we’d come back to Liverpool to get away from gangsters on the make. No point in jumping from the frying pan into the fire.’

  ‘You argued about it?’

  ‘Yes, I told her she was making a huge mistake. She said she didn’t have to do anything with the clients that she didn’t fancy, and how many girls made a fortune out of trudging round offices with a mop and bucket? That seemed to amuse her, she pissed herself laughing. I shouted at her, said she was cheapening herself. The barman told us to button our mouths. We were disturbing the fellers watching football on satellite TV.’

  ‘Was that the last time you saw her?’

  ‘No, we met up a couple of times afterwards. She said she was sorry for upsetting me, and promised that soon she’d give up escort work. I didn’t believe her. Lee was heading down the slippery slope and nothing I said could save her.’

  ‘I hope you’re not blaming yourself for her death?’

  ‘Who else should I blame?’

  ‘The man who killed her.’

  ‘But I don’t know him, we’ll never meet.’ Her face crumpled and she dabbed at the corners of her eyes with the duster. ‘You mean well, Harry, but you don’t understand. It’s so much easier to blame myself.’

  ***

  ‘In a hurry?’

  Barney Eagleson had his feet up on the reception desk and his hands behind his head. The whiff of formaldehyde still clung to him. His smile was coy, complacent, verging on conspiratorial. You might have believed that he, not Casper May, owned the building.

  Harry wasn’t in the mood for a cosy chat with a mobile embalmer, but he couldn’t help succumbing to curiosity.

  ‘Lou’s gone home?’

  ‘In-growing toenail, would you believe? He nicked off a couple of hours early to see his doctor. Victor’s not happy. I called in to see if he fancied a pint and he asked me to keep an eye on things. He’s a bit of a slave-driver, if you ask me.’

  His teeth were pointed, like tiny tombstones. Harry felt sure Barney was taking the piss. He had never noticed Victor’s obsession with the work ethic.

  ‘And where is Victor?’

  ‘In the back room, on the phone to the idiots who installed the CCTV.’ Barney chortled. ‘For all poor Victor can tell, John Newton House is swarming with masked intruders at this very moment.’

  ‘If any of them want to fill in a few legal aid forms while they’re here, point them towards my office.’ Harry hesitated. ‘The girl who was murdered, she had her tongue cut out, didn’t she?’

  Barney’s smile vanished. ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You hinted that…’

  ‘I’d had a few drinks,’ Barney interrupted. ‘I didn’t mean any harm.’

  On the plasma screen, two more Stepford Architects rhapsodised about the new Liverpool.

  ‘Helicopter views…wilful unorthodoxy…energy pathways…’

  ‘Can you tell me…?’

  Barney swung his feet off the desk. ‘Listen, Harry. This is police business. I’m on the edge of the case. You’re not even that close. Take my advice, don’t interfere, don’t even hint about what I said. Otherwise your own tongue might be cut out too.’

  ***

  Harry hit trouble the moment he set off for his meeting with Kay Cheung. The Strand was blocked by a procession of tractors, combine harvesters and assorted farm vehicles. A cabinet minister was visiting Liverpool and a pressure group called Farmers4Justice had organised a demonstration. They kept finding fresh ways to cause maximum inconvenience in their campaign. They were fighting against the way the government favoured the city at the expense of the countryside. At least in their opinion.

  Horns honked, tempers frayed, as the police tried to divert the protesters away from the main road so that the rush hour commuters could escape the city centre. Harry sat behind the steering wheel, listening to local radio for a traffic update. On the drive programme, a historian claimed to have found proof that Adolf Hitler stayed with his half-brother Alois in Liverpool during his teens. It didn’t seem to Harry to be something to boast about, and he switched on the CD player. Dusty Springfield just didn’t know what to do with herself, and he understood the feeling. He’d be late for his appointment, but there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t call Kay to let her know. He’d have to hope that she waited for him.

  When at last the gridlock eased, he put his foot down, but it was impossible to make up for lost time. Speke Boulevard was a maze of traffic cones and cars and vans were bumper-to-bumper. Further on was a lengthy tailback from the Silver Jubilee bridge. Harry took the last exit for Widnes. In his teens he’d dated a pretty girl from the town. She lived in Farnworth, where Paul Simon once sat at a railway station with a ticket for his destination and wrote ‘Homeward Bound’. Harry hummed the tune until he found himself in Waterloo Road, driving past the Waterloo Centre.

  Waterloo, Waterloo, everywhere…

  He eased his MG over the humps in the narrow terraced streets that twisted into a dead end. A wide stretch of the Mersey blocked the way. Up above, the approach to the river bridge squatted on fat grey concrete legs tattooed with purple graffiti about the sex lives of unknown teenagers. He parked in their shadow.

  During the journey, he’d speculated about what Kay wanted to tell him. She’d sounded more fearful t
han when Gunter was on trial for murder. Someone had snatched the comfort blanket of childish faith in her man, leaving her defenceless and bare.

  Twenty to seven. He locked the car and started to walk. A stiff breeze made him shiver. He wandered down to the river’s edge, and stared at the gleaming mud. A flock of gulls wailed as they flew by.

  No trace of Kay.

  Overhead, the traffic roared. A hundred thousand vehicles a day crossed the Mersey, but down below it was peaceful. A couple of kids kicked a football, old men walked their dogs. The London to Liverpool express set off from the station on the Runcorn side of the water and blasted through the wrought-iron spans of the railway bridge. But Kay herself was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘The Lady Vanishes,’ he muttered to himself, walking under the viaduct through a vast brick arch. A stretch of the river was fenced off by spiked iron bars and he peered through them like a convict. A boat chugged towards the docks. In the distance, the steel towers of an oil refinery glistened in the pale brightness of evening.

  He turned and headed for Victoria Promenade, past a pub and a sandstone church. Notices along the river bank urged him to Stay Safe, and warned that hidden things might trap him. Beware of deep water.

  Maybe she’d given him up and gone home, maybe her taxi too had been delayed as a result of the demonstration of bucolic wrath. He’d wait another half hour, he owed her that much. Before meeting Kay, he’d killed off spider plants and kalanchoes by the box-load, but she’d taught him moderation and consistency, that it was as fatal to over-water as to starve a plant. It baffled him that someone so gentle could bear to live with a brute like Tom Gunter, but what women saw in violent men he found impossible to understand. Take Juliet, for instance; what ties still bound her to Casper May? This was the twenty-first century, but some women seemed as shackled as the Africans who’d been bought and sold in the grounds of the Parish Church.

  His mobile sang the theme to Shaft and he whipped it out of his pocket.

  ‘Kay?’

  ‘What’s that? Harry, are you there?’

  Wayne Saxelby, for God’s sake. Panting as though he’d run a four-minute mile.

  ‘Sorry, Wayne, this isn’t a good time.’

  ‘Harry, nothing’s more important than this. I had to phone you.’

  He’d never heard Wayne sound like this. Exhausted and panic-stricken.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Jim…Jim Crusoe.’

  ‘What about him?’ Harry felt his stomach muscles tighten. Was that a siren he could hear on the phone?

  ‘He’s been attacked. Hit over the head.’

  Harry swore. ‘Is he hurt?’

  ‘The ambulance is here now. So are the police. I thought you ought to know.’

  Suddenly Harry was shouting. Never mind Kay, she’d have to take care of herself. Only one person mattered now.

  ‘Are you telling me he’s in a bad way?’

  ‘Yes.’ Wayne’s voice was muffled. Was he on the brink of weeping?

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘Harry…I think he’s going to die.’

  Chapter Nine

  Harry hated hospitals. Yes, he knew they were good places, where wonderful work was done, where some lives began and others were saved. But he hated the echo of footsteps as they slapped the tiles of those echoing, sterile corridors, hated the stench of antiseptic scouring his sinuses, hated most of all the fear wasting the faces of those who waited for a word from the doctor. Reason and logic had nothing to do with it. For him, hospitals were places of pain, places where everyone suffered and too many died.

  If only Wayne would stop pacing up and down, clicking his tongue every couple of minutes as he consulted his watch. Even when he sat down for a moment, he fidgeted like a child, crackling the pages of tonight’s Echo or leaflets explaining how to spot the signs of a heart attack or a stroke. But Harry and Carmel owed Wayne so much. If he hadn’t ventured into the basement of John Newton House to collect his car, chances were that Jim would already be dead and gone.

  ‘Carmel’s a long time,’ Wayne muttered.

  ‘She’ll be waiting for news.’

  The surgeon was operating on Jim in the Neurosurgical Unit. No word yet about his chances of pulling through. Harry had called Carmel as soon as Wayne had rung off, but on arriving at the hospital he’d only seen her for a couple of minutes before she rushed away to be with her man. Harry had never seen a woman’s appearance change so much in the space of a few short hours. Terror and despair had washed away the joie de vivre of the morning, leaving her as shrunken and gaunt as a patient in a wheelchair they’d passed outside the cancer ward.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ Wayne said, ‘that hospitals are like prisons? I mean, you just feel desperate to escape. Last time I was in one of these places, all I could think of was when I might get out. I felt like a lifer, ticking the days off, one by one. Do you know what I mean?’

  Harry nodded.

  ‘It’s no good.’ Wayne put his head in his hands. ‘I can’t help blaming myself. If only I’d turned up ten minutes earlier.’

  Harry ground his teeth. ‘Thank God you turned up at all. Was his body…hidden from sight? ’

  Wayne breathed heavily. He stared at the ceiling, making a visible effort to concentrate. ‘I saw him lying in one of the marked spaces for cars. Whether he’d been dumped there or managed to crawl, I can’t say for sure. A few spots of blood led from the main lift shaft, but I didn’t notice them when I first reached the basement. I was late for a meeting with a prospective client, my head was buzzing with business stuff. I ran straight to my car, and as I drove past the bays on the other side of the lifts, something caught my eye. Someone spread out on the ground in the shape of a star. I didn’t realise it was Jim, I thought some tramp had sneaked into the car park and then collapsed in a drunken stupor. I slammed on the brake and jumped out to see how he was. When I recognised Jim and saw that gaping wound in the back of his head…I mean, it obviously wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘Was he conscious?’

  ‘I knelt beside him and felt for a pulse. The faintest flicker. I spoke to him, begged him to hang on. All he could manage was a muffled groan.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything?’

  Wayne shook his head. He gnawed at his lower lip, trying to contain himself.

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘Did you see the weapon?’

  ‘Tell you the truth, I didn’t hunt for it. The first thing that went through my mind was: suppose whoever did this is still here? Frankly, I almost pissed myself.’

  Harry could imagine. He’d always thought of Wayne as deeply shallow, but it must have cost the man something to admit that.

  ‘I couldn’t hear a sound, just the clanking of a lift on the floors above. Nobody was in the basement, and nobody else came down. It’s always deserted. Only a handful of people park their cars under the building, since it’s not fully let.’

  ‘So you dialled 999?’

  ‘I stepped outside, to get a better signal. Poked my head round the door very warily, I can tell you, but I didn’t see anything suspicious. The path from John Newton House runs behind a wall to the Strand. Whoever hit Jim could have made a dash for it and never been seen. I rang for an ambulance first, then the police. After that I called you, then Victor. We’d spoken barely ten minutes before. I dropped by at the desk to let him know we had a flood in the bathroom…shit, this puts leaking taps into perspective.’

  ‘Victor was on duty?’

  Wayne puffed out his cheeks. ‘If that’s what you call chatting with his mate Barney.’

  ‘Barney was there too?’

  ‘As usual. Victor grumbled about Lou skiving off, and being left to do everything on his own. Though the workload doesn’t stop him racing through books about CSIs.’ A harsh laugh. ‘Well, he has his own crime scene to contend with now. Right under his bloody feet.’

  ‘Too much to hope that either Victor or Barney saw anything suspicious? No-one lurking around
the doors to the car park?’

  ‘Are you serious? The security’s a joke.’ Wayne flushed as he fought to keep emotion in check. ‘You’d think that whoever set it up actually wanted to give intruders the run of the building. When I think of the rents they charge…’

  ‘Victor joined you in the basement while you waited for the emergency services to arrive?’

  ‘He took some persuading. I suppose he was terrified that whoever bashed Jim over the head might still be around. We left Barney at reception to keep an eye on the ground floor. Victor thought he’d said goodnight to Jim a quarter of an hour before I came back for help. The bastard who attacked Jim couldn’t have been long gone before I arrived on the scene.’

  ‘He’d gone out through the side door?’

  ‘Or even the exit for cars. It’s not overlooked. If the cameras had been working, it would have been different. As it is, anyone could have marched in or out. The chances of being spotted are minimal and once you’re outside, you can head off in any direction.’

  ‘You assume it was a man who hit Jim?’

  Wayne stared. ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘If Jim was hit with a brick or a cosh or an iron bar, it wouldn’t need a lot of strength.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Someone hiding behind the lift shaft might have jumped out and hit Jim the moment he stepped out into the car park. Before he had chance to turn round.’

  ‘Or had time to identify his attacker.’

  Cogs whirred in Harry’s brain. ‘It would have been over in a matter of seconds…’

  ‘What’s up? You look as though…’

  ‘Nothing.’

  It was a lie. A question had slunk into his head, like an unwelcome guest at a funeral.

  What if the attacker meant to kill me?

  ***

  It made no sense, he told himself as Carmel thanked Wayne Saxelby and said goodnight, this had nothing to do with that puerile nonsense about Midsummer’s Eve. Nobody who wanted to harm him would skulk down in the car park of John Newton House. He’d never once ventured into the basement, let alone brought his car there. There was no point, when he lived a few minutes’ walk away.