Deathly Affair Read online

  When he regained consciousness his head was pounding. What he was suffering felt like a bad hangover, only far more painful. Gradually he realised he was lying on a hard floor in a poorly lit room. Without moving his head he swivelled his eyes slowly and saw that he was in a cellar of some kind, with a very low ceiling and no windows. A free-standing lamp cast long shadows across the dusty floor. Other than that, the room was bare. Not until he tried to call out did he recover consciousness sufficiently to realise that he had been gagged, and his hands had been tied together. Whoever had brought him here had not given any thought to keeping him comfortable. He had no idea how long he lay there feeling his joints stiffen, before he finally heard a door open and footsteps approaching. With an effort he turned his head and saw the lower half of a pair of legs wearing jeans and trainers. Looking at the shoes, he guessed he had been joined by a man. Unable to talk, Mark groaned as loudly as he could and blinked as tears slid from his eyes.

  He became aware of a figure crouching down beside him and shifting his gaze upwards saw the angular profile, dark eyes and fleshy lips of his neighbour. He could have cried with relief when fumbling fingers removed his gag. For a moment he was too overcome to thank his rescuer. While he struggled to control his emotions and express his gratitude, a voice murmured close to his ear.

  ‘Good. He’s still alive.’

  ‘Help me,’ Mark blurted out. ‘My hands are tied.’

  ‘We don’t want him dying on us yet,’ the voice continued, paying no attention to Mark’s words.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Mark asked, confused. ‘I’m tied up here. Can you release my hands please?’

  ‘He wants us to let him go. Does he think we are stupid?’

  Mark swivelled his eyes around but could see no one else in the room with them, and the man did not appear to be talking into a phone.

  ‘Who’s there? What do you want with me?’ he cried out.

  ‘He knows why he’s here. He’s played fast and loose for long enough. Now it’s his turn to suffer.’

  ‘Let me go at once!’ Mark shouted, his eyes wide with terror.

  Ignoring Mark’s outburst, the other man asked a question of his own. He spoke so calmly, it took a few seconds for Mark to take in what he was saying.

  ‘How long can a man last without food or water, do you suppose?’

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Mark said, his own voice rising in fear with the growing realisation that the man might not have come to rescue him after all. ‘Do you want money? Is that it?’

  For a moment the other man did not answer, then the silence was broken by a guttural laugh.

  ‘He’s offering us money,’ the man said in his odd singsong voice. ‘He thinks he can buy his way out of his predicament.’

  ‘Tell me what you want,’ Mark said, trying to keep his voice steady, as though this was a normal conversation. ‘If it’s not about money, what are you after?’

  ‘How long can a man last without food or water?’ the man repeated. He sat back on his heels. ‘I guess we’re about to find out, aren’t we? Assuming we can all be patient, that is.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Mark asked, even though he had already realised the other man was insane. Not only was he apparently talking to himself, but he seemed to be threatening to kill Mark. ‘You’re making a mistake. You can’t want to do this to me. I don’t even know you.’

  ‘But you know my wife, don’t you?’

  ‘What? What wife?’

  Mark felt sick. It was true, he had been sleeping with another man’s wife, but he had never seen her husband. Not having met him face to face before, there was a chance he might be able to persuade his captor that he had the wrong man. Although his voice was shaking with fear, he tried to sound indignant.

  ‘What are you talking about? I’ve never slept with another man’s wife. You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m not like that. I – I’m gay.’

  ‘He’s pretending he’s gay,’ the man sniggered. ‘Of course, he’s used to lying, isn’t he? His whole life is built on deceit. Well, he has to learn that he can’t get away with it. Not this time. Not with me.’

  ‘What do you want? Listen, you’re making a mistake. Tell you what. You let me go right now and we’ll say no more about it. I won’t say a word to anyone about this. We’ll put it down to a practical joke, just a bit of fun. How about that? I don’t even know who you are. You don’t live in my block of flats really, do you? I don’t know who you are or where you’re from and by tomorrow I won’t even remember what you look like. I’m hopeless with faces. I just don’t remember them.’

  It was terrifying, trying to persuade this lunatic to let him go, while his hands were tied together and his head was aching horribly. He thought he might throw up. But he kept babbling, until the other man snapped at him to stop talking.

  ‘What are you going to do with me?’ Mark asked. ‘You can’t really be going to kill me? You can’t do this.’

  ‘He’s not happy about it but he’s going to get what’s coming to him. No, not yet. He’s not ready yet.’

  ‘What do you mean, not ready? I don’t understand. What are you talking about? What’s going on?’

  ‘He’s too well fed for us.’

  Although the words did not make sense, they had a horrible ring of premeditation. What was more, Mark could not fail to notice that his captor was wearing black gloves and was making no attempt to conceal his face. It seemed that Mark’s incarceration had been planned in advance, and was going to end in his death. In a panic, he began to yell, but the other man slapped him, hard, across the face. Before Mark recovered enough to resume shouting for help the gag was pulled across his mouth again.

  ‘Now we wait,’ the man said. ‘Shall we come back tomorrow? Will he be ready to do what we want by then?’

  Mark nodded his head, as far as he could, to intimate he would do whatever his captor wanted. He was ready to comply right now. But his protestations of surrender came out as unintelligible moaning. He heard footsteps moving away, the floor vibrated with the movement, and then the door closed softly and he was on his own again.

  12

  It was a week since the body had been discovered. The police had got nowhere with finding the killer or even establishing the victim’s identity. He was known only as Bingo. In the absence of family or friends on their backs to complain about police inaction, the investigation was proceeding without any sense of urgency. In theory, it was desperately sad that a man had been murdered and no one cared, but without any outpouring of grief, the complexion of the case was altered. In some ways it felt more like an impersonal puzzle to be solved than a restoration of human justice. Subtle changes in her colleagues’ behaviour alerted Geraldine to their attitude towards the murdered man.

  ‘Bingo,’ Ariadne said. ‘It sounds like an old time music hall artist, or the name you might give to a dog. I mean, it’s an odd sort of name, isn’t it? I’ve never met anyone called Bingo. It could be a surname, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s probably a nickname,’ Geraldine replied. ‘We haven’t been able to find anyone called Bingo, first name or surname, who’s been reported missing. He’s like an inconvenient loose end,’ she added glumly.

  ‘Who is?’ Ariadne asked.

  Geraldine shrugged.

  ‘I thought we were getting somewhere,’ Ariadne said when Geraldine explained herself.

  It was true, they were making progress. Only that morning the forensic laboratory had confirmed that the threads found on Bingo’s neck matched a fabric used in the manufacture of garments made with a particular cotton. They were able to pinpoint the area of the globe where the material originated, and the factory where the dye was produced. They had even said where that particular batch of cotton had been dyed. The disappointing news was that it was a common colour used in the mass production of millions of garments, including a bran
d of tie that could have been purchased from any number of stores, or online. Thousands of such items were sold every week, and in any case the one used to strangle the victim might have been bought years ago so there was little point in trying to trace where it had been purchased. Even though the specific fabric and dye had been identified, discovering the likely nature of the murder weapon had not moved the investigation forward.

  ‘At least we now know the killer was male,’ a constable said.

  His comment provoked a barrage of dissent.

  ‘Women can get hold of ties,’ a female constable said.

  ‘Women wear ties,’ another officer added.

  The constable who had made the thoughtless comment looked at the floor.

  ‘Don’t make assumptions and don’t take anything for granted,’ Ian said.

  Geraldine wondered if Ian remembered how she had drummed those instructions into him when she had been his senior officer. The days when she had been a detective inspector and he had been her sergeant seemed a lifetime away. She smiled sadly at him but he either did not notice or else chose to ignore her glance of complicity. She understood. As an inspector, he had moved away from his former reliance on her guidance. Stifling her regret at the distance that had grown between them, she went to speak to the team who had been studying CCTV footage of the area around Coney Street.

  The constables were excited that they had spotted a hooded figure near the crime scene. They had done their best to follow it, but had lost their possible suspect in the streets leading away from the site. With a light drizzle falling on the evening the tramp had been killed, there were several hooded figures hurrying along the pavements and waiting at bus stops. It was impossible to be sure which of them had walked hurriedly along the street away from the crime scene at around the time the tramp had been strangled. Geraldine shivered as she watched one of the figures who was probably a perfectly innocent pedestrian, but who might have just killed someone.

  Armed with photographs of the dead man before and after he had been cleaned up, that evening Geraldine and Ariadne went to talk to anyone they could find sleeping rough in the warm weather.

  ‘You’d hardly think it was the same man, would you?’ Ariadne asked, gazing at the two images.

  With his face washed, and his hair combed neatly, the man known as Bingo looked very different to the grubby corpse that had been discovered lying on the pavement. It made the circumstances of his death somehow more poignant, a pointless death at the end of a wasted life.

  ‘He doesn’t look that old, does he, now he’s been cleaned up?’

  ‘Younger than us,’ Ariadne agreed. ‘What was he? Late thirties?’

  ‘Jonah said it was difficult to assess his age because he was so unhealthy before he died, but he thinks he was in his forties. He’d barely eaten for days and had been drinking a lot of cheap spirits.’ She sighed. ‘It’s so sad, isn’t it?’

  ‘What? That he was homeless or that he was killed?’ Ariadne asked.

  ‘Both. I wonder what reduced him to poverty.’

  ‘Oh well, there’s nothing we can do about that and thank goodness it’s not our job to try and sort out the homeless. What a depressing task that must be. Hopeless.’

  Geraldine was not sure whether Ariadne was feeling pessimistic about the task or the homeless people, but she did not pursue the matter. Leaving Ariadne talking to any rough sleepers she could find, Geraldine went along to the other resettlement shelter in York. The manager of the shelter came to meet her in person. After signing her in, he led her upstairs to his office which was small but well maintained like the rest of the building she had seen so far.

  ‘How can we help you?’ he asked. ‘I take it this is about the rough sleeper who was murdered?’

  ‘Yes. We’re trying to establish his identity. So far we only know him as Bingo.’

  ‘That’s right. We heard about it from the shelter at Fishergate.’

  ‘Did he have another name?’

  The responses were almost identical to those she had been given at the first shelter she had visited.

  The manager gave a helpless shrug. ‘He must have had other names, of course, but he didn’t tell us. We only knew him as Bingo.’ He gave a twisted smile. ‘It happens. Some of them never tell us their full names and when they do they often just make the names up. They don’t always give the same name because they forget what they’ve already told us. We don’t judge here. If they’re referred to come and stay then we need their details, but many of the rough sleepers are too accustomed to their lifestyle to want to change and only come here to use the crash pad in severe weather. We’re under no obligation to try and force them to stay, even if we had the resources to accommodate them all. We can only try to help those who genuinely want to learn to live independently. We offer all sorts of support, and workshops and training, but there’s not much we can do for those who are happy to stay on the streets. They can use the facilities here, like the showers, but that’s all some of them want. We can’t work miracles.’

  ‘Of course not. But the point is we’re trying to trace his identity. This man has been murdered and there may be someone somewhere who would like to know what’s happened to him, or who can maybe even help us to find out who did this.’

  The manager nodded. ‘I want to introduce you to some of our volunteer helpers here, as well as our paid staff, as they may have heard something.’

  Several of the people working there mentioned a resident called Tommy.

  ‘He’s in his room,’ the manager said. ‘I’ll pop up and fetch him. It sounds as though he knows Bingo.’

  He knew him, Geraldine thought.

  At first sight Tommy looked nothing like a stereotypical tramp, apart perhaps from his shuffling gait as he entered the office. His hair was neat, his face clean shaven and his shirt crisply ironed. Well spoken and articulate, he launched unbidden into an apologetic account of how he had been laid off by a bank in the latest crash. Paid off in shares that became worthless overnight, he went from a high-earning banker to a rough sleeper, abandoned by his wife, alone and homeless. Quitting the city, he had walked and hitched his way north to Scotland, and had ended up returning to York where he had been referred to the resettlement shelter. Geraldine did not enquire whether it was drink or drugs that made him jittery but he told her anyway, extending a trembling hand.

  ‘It’s the drink that makes me shake. I’m doing what I can to control it. They’ll throw me out if I don’t.’

  When Geraldine asked him about Bingo he nodded. ‘Yes, I know Bingo. We used to look out for each other, before I came here.’

  ‘I’m afraid Bingo’s dead.’

  Tommy did not show any emotion on hearing the news of his friend’s death. He merely raised one inquisitive eyebrow.

  ‘Bingo’s dead?’ He frowned, gazing at Geraldine speculatively. ‘I heard a rumour to that effect, but there are always rumours flying around.’

  ‘I’m afraid it was more than a rumour. Bingo is dead. I’m sorry to bring you the sad news.’

  Tommy shrugged and a flake of dandruff floated off his shoulder. Geraldine watched it for a second as it drifted aimlessly to the floor.

  ‘You’re sorry? Why? I wouldn’t waste your sympathy on guys like us. If you ask me, he’s well out of it.’

  ‘He was murdered.’

  ‘Shit.’ Tommy stood up and went and opened the office door. ‘Hey, you guys,’ he called out in a commanding voice to a couple of men walking past. ‘Did you know Bingo was murdered?’

  ‘I told you it’s not safe out there,’ one of the other residents replied.

  ‘Who’s going to protect us?’ an old man whined. ‘Any one of us could be next.’

  When it came to talking about the dead man, all Tommy admitted to knowing about him was his name, and he freely conceded that even that was probably no more than an u
ntraceable nickname. Geraldine had expected it to be easier to deal with a murder when there was no one living suffering as a consequence, but in some ways Bingo’s death was turning out to be even more distressing to investigate than the victims she was used to dealing with: a man had died and no one actually cared. Even Tommy, who claimed to have looked out for Bingo, was unmoved at the news of his violent death.

  ‘It’s a shame about Tommy,’ the manager said as Geraldine was leaving. ‘We’ve tried to encourage him to stop drinking but he just says, what for?’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ariadne asked as Geraldine arrived back at her desk. ‘You’re looking a bit down.’

  Geraldine did not reply that she was wondering who would care if anything happened to her.

  Instead, she smiled. ‘Sure. I’m fine.’

  ‘Those places are depressing, aren’t they?’

  Geraldine nodded, content to let Ariadne misinterpret her long face.

  13

  The plan was working out perfectly so far. Mark’s cries would probably have been inaudible regardless of where he was kept, since he was gagged and tied up. But to make absolutely sure, he had not been trapped in a shed at the end of a garden, or in a garage at the side of a house, where he might somehow have managed to attract attention by banging loudly on the door. Instead, he was imprisoned in the locked cellar of a locked house where no one could possibly hear him or come across him by accident.

  Even though he could not help gloating, he was not acting out of petty resentment. This was far more important than his own personal revenge. What he was doing was carrying out a just and reasonable execution. It was exactly what Mark deserved. In principle, he would agree, it was never a good idea to take the law into your own hands, but in this instance the law was impotent, leaving him with no other choice. With Mark gone, the world would be rid of a toxic presence; an evil rooted out and destroyed could only make the world a better place for everyone. He smiled, savouring Mark’s terror as the finishing touch to his triumph.