The Yeare's Midnight (33 page)

‘… For someone my age?’ He coughed and pain seared at him. His heart rate jumped to 82 b.p.m. Dexter shifted uncomfortably.

‘Shall I get a nurse?’ she asked.

‘No … no, I’m all right.’ Images rolled across his mind like clouds: the sea, the wind rattling against windows, Julia cowering away from him in terror, Paul Heyer trussed like a turkey. He forced his eyes open and saw Dexter as the clouds began to dissipate. ‘Dex … listen to me.’ He gulped phlegm from his throat and the effort made him wheeze. ‘I think you’re in danger I …’ He gasped for air at the edge of unconsciousness. ‘He’s not performing … not performing. That isn’t the point.’ His eyes closed.

A staff nurse walked up and checked Underwood’s machines. ‘He’s very tired,’ she told Dexter with a faint night-shift smile. ‘Don’t be long.’

‘I won’t,’ Dexter replied as the nurse walked away.

Underwood drifted back from a fragment of a dream about drowning. The drugs had made him extremely drowsy, as if his limbs were filled with water. He focused on Dexter’s sparkling green eyes as they fizzed over his face:
he
could
take
them
and
put
them
in
Julia’s
head
to
make
her
pretty
again.

‘You said he’s not performing, sir, I don’t understand what you mean.’ Her voice snapped him back: her accent was as abrasive as her personality. He summoned the strength to answer her:
the
will.

‘The audience … he’s not performing … he’s educating, using Stussman.’ He was nauseous now, the room was starting to spin gently away from him.
Got
to
concentrate.
‘You found him … he’ll come for you.’

‘Why didn’t he kill me when he had me, then? Why let me go?’

‘He wanted you to see the Drury woman … to understand
… to be improved by it … he killed the couple that found him … why not you – unless he wanted you for something else?’

‘I’ll be careful,’ Dexter assured him. She wasn’t convinced, besides she had green eyes, not blue. She had been told once that they were her best feature.

Only once.

‘What about that Heyer bloke that you went to see? You want me to rattle his cage some more?’ she asked.

A shadow flitted across Underwood’s face. ‘Waste of time. Leave him alone.’ His eyes flickered and closed. Dexter wondered if he would live. She hoped so.

Underwood was speaking again: much softer this time, as if he was muttering something in his sleep. His words ebbed away as unconsciousness overtook him. Dexter’s eyes moved instinctively towards the computer screen next to the bed: 65 b.p.m., 180 over 90. He was OK. Underwood breathed heavily in front of her. He was sleeping. Dexter watched him for a second and then left without looking back.

Dexter’s head ached inside and out as she drove back to New Bolden police station. The morning traffic was thick and the journey was an irritation. Was she in danger? She touched the laceration on the side of her head where the killer had struck her. If he had wanted to kill her he could have done so already. He could even have taken her with him, she mused. If only she could remember his face. He was tall certainly, slim, white. What else? She racked her brain for something. What else did they know? He was clever.

‘Fucking pathetic.’ Dexter slammed her hands against the steering column and cursed the limits of her own imagination. Four people dead and all she could manage was ‘clever’. The traffic began to clear ahead of her and she accelerated hard to vent her frustration. The thing that worried her most now was that she was in charge of the investigation – albeit temporarily. How would she feel if someone else was murdered now? Responsibility burned like the headlights of an onrushing truck.

She drove into the station car park and glided smoothly to a halt. Rain began to spatter on her windscreen. She thought of Elizabeth Drury. How had the killer found her? Dexter had located Drury from a two-year-old newspaper article. Surely the killer hadn’t waited two years to kill her. The thought troubled her as she climbed the stairs to the crime room. Both victims had been mentioned in newspaper articles. That was the only link between them, apart from their names. It had to mean something. Did the killer have access to some database like the one at County Police Headquarters in Huntingdon that could search thousands of old newspapers for specific names? They were expensive systems. Dexter knew some banks and law firms had them. Where else?

Harrison was waiting for her. He looked tired. ‘We’re getting Inspector Tarrant from AMIP tomorrow. They’re bringing him back from holiday.’ Dexter gently closed the door to Underwood’s office and walked through to the Incident Room. ‘What’s up with Underwood?’ Harrison continued. ‘Will he be all right?’

‘Don’t know. He doesn’t look too clever.’ Dexter paused in front of the pictures of Harrington and Drury on the board.
Educating
us.
Why
is
he
educating
us?

‘Word is,’ Harrison whispered in Dexter’s ear, ‘he went cuckoo last night. Roughed up his wife and beat up her boyfriend.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Dexter snorted. ‘He’s had a heart attack.’

‘I’m just saying.’ Harrison guided her into a quiet corner of the room. ‘We heard a rumour out of Norwich CID. Jensen knows a DC there.’

‘I’ll bet she does,’ Dexter replied acidly.

‘He told her that our man Underwood was arrested, picked up from some arse-end-of-nowhere cottage and taken to hospital. His wife gave a statement saying that Underwood had broken in, tied up her boyfriend, smacked him on the head and dumped him on top of some cliff.’

‘Bollocks!’

‘I’m being serious. Guess who the boyfriend is?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Paul Heyer,’ said Harrison with a note of triumph in his
voice. He knew he had her now. He was wiping her nose in the shit trail her precious boss had left behind him.

‘Heyer? The same bloke—’

‘The same bloke who Underwood supposedly got an anonymous tip-off about, right. The same bloke that me and him interviewed a couple of days ago about Lucy Harrington. Don’t you see? He made it all up, Dex. I’ve been up in the Chief Super’s office taking the flak. This Heyer bloke filed a complaint about Underwood this morning. Assuming he stays alive, Underwood’s up to his neck in the brown stuff.’

Dexter recoiled slightly in shock. She felt betrayed and angry. They had wasted time looking into Heyer: interviewing him, researching him and his company. Time that could have been better used elsewhere. Maybe Drury and the others would still be alive. Then she remembered Underwood, alone and heartbroken, wired to a machine. She banished the thought.

‘If what you’re saying’s true, he’s finished,’ she said quietly.

‘All hail, Inspector Dexter,’ Harrison said, with the ghost of a smile. ‘You shall be king hereafter.’

‘Piss off.’

She walked back to the noticeboard. ‘We’d better get cracking. What else have I missed this morning?’

‘Jensen has taken a PC and started visiting the names on that list of local housebreakers. She’s done two so far: one’s got a gold-plated alibi for both nights, the other’s in a wheelchair.’

‘Brilliant,’ she said bitterly. ‘I knew that list was a waste of time.’

‘Your doctor friend called for you this morning,’ Harrison continued.

‘Leach?’

‘No, the American woman. Stussman.’

‘Has he called her again?’

‘I don’t think so. She said she needed to speak with you.’

‘I’ll call her.’ Dexter reread the names of Elizabeth Drury and Lucy Harrington for the tenth time. ‘Get hold of that list Stussman did for us. We have to find out if anyone else with those names lives locally. We just concentrated on Elizabeth Drury before, now we need to follow up on the others.’

Harrison winced. That would take an age and Jensen was out. ‘OK. I’ll try and second some uniform grunts to help me out. It’s such a slow fucking process. Anything else?’

‘Get someone to look up local antique dealers on the Net. Cambridge especially. Leach reckons our man might have bought himself some Jack-the-Ripper doctor’s bag. It might be worth a look.’

‘I’ll do that,’ said Harrison. It sounded more interesting than trawling through the electoral register. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to the library.’

‘What for?’

‘Underwood thinks that the killer is trying to educate us. I want to have a look at some books on Donne. The answer’s in these poems somewhere. We can’t rely on Stussman all the time. We need to get smart.’

‘By the way, while you’re there –’ Harrison lifted a piece of paper from his desk ‘– you might want to check this out. Drury wrote a book.’

‘What about?’

‘Lard-arses. It’s called
The
Weight
of
Expectation.
Her secretary told me.’ He handed her the slip of paper.

New Bolden library was a ten-minute drive from the police station. The rain and volume of traffic doubled the journey time. Dexter fumed silently. Everything seemed to take an age. London had traffic problems but it also had benefits. New Bolden still seemed very small to her.

She decided to hold off calling Stussman until she had learned some more about Donne. Half of what the academic said had gone over her head and, in any case, Dexter hated being out-flanked in conversation. She would ambush Stussman with her knowledge when she called her back. Harrison’s comments
about Underwood had upset her. The inspector had certainly been behaving strangely and he had confided to Dexter that his wife was seeing someone else. However, Dexter couldn’t believe Underwood would manipulate his position to get at Heyer and then actually attack him. It didn’t ring true. Maybe Underwood
had
lost it.

The library was almost empty and was gratifyingly warm. Dexter exchanged some uncomfortable pleasantries with Dan, the librarian she had briefly dated. She politely refused dinner and then hurried, as directed, to the literature section. She found the poetry shelves and scoured the titles for Donne. Nothing. She remembered that there had been some texts on Donne when she had visited a couple of days previously. Annoyed, Dexter marched past the newspaper and magazine section and found Dan again.

‘Dan, sorry to be a pain, but all the books on Donne have gone.’

‘They can’t all have gone,’ he sniffed. ‘Some people don’t put them back. Students, mainly. We get a lot of students from Westlands College. Messy sods. I bet your Donne books are lying about in a workroom somewhere. I tell you what.’ He took her gently by the arm and led her towards the library computer system. She shifted slightly, uneasy that he had touched her. ‘Have a look on this. It’s our central database. If your books are here it will tell you. If they’re out, it will tell you when they should be back.’ Dexter winced slightly: Dan’s breath smelled of stale coffee and constipation.

He leaned over the glowing console and typed in a few instructions. The screen changed. He stood up. ‘There you go. That’s the search page. Just type in the author you’re looking for and you’re away.’

‘Thank you, Dan.’

‘No problemo!’ He grinned and headed back to his book stacks.

Dexter cringed. Nobody said things like ‘No problemo’ any more. And she had got off with the bloke: twice, in fact. What had she been thinking? She scratched her head thoughtfully and
sat down in front of the computer terminal. She used the cursor to click the name ‘Donne’ into the on-screen keyboard. Lines of information appeared:

The other books were listed below. She selected the first entry and pointed her cursor at the ‘Status’ key at the bottom left of the screen. The computer paused for a moment, then displayed its results:

It looked like Dan had been right. She repeated the process with each of the five entries and received the same response each time. According to the computer, all the Donne books were in the library.
Or
they’ve
been
nicked,
she thought. Dexter glanced around: the workrooms were all upstairs, adjoining the reference section. She walked up the central stairway and moved through the reference area towards the three workrooms. A man and a woman were working at opposite ends of one room: both looked up at her as she entered. She smiled apologetically and closed the door again. All the other rooms were empty and there were no books lying around in any of them. She swore beneath her breath and returned down the stairs to the computer terminal. Dexter wasn’t academically minded and the silent stillness of the building brought back uncomfortable memories of school and hot exam rooms. She undid the top button of her blouse and looked at the screen again.

This time she typed in ‘Donne’ as a search term rather than an author name and got twelve matches. She scrolled down the
list, writing down their class marks. Most looked like academic studies of Donne and all were apparently in stock. She was pleased: someone explaining poetry in simple English was much better than trying to figure out the gobbledegook for yourself. Dexter was about to leave the terminal to seek her list of titles on the shelves when she remembered Harrison’s passing comment about Drury’s book.

She unfolded the note of paper he had given her.
The
Weight
of
Expectation.
By
E
Drury.
Dexter cleared the search results from the computer and called up the now-familiar on-screen typewriter again. She selected ‘Author Search’ and carefully pointed her cursor arrow at ‘D’. She clicked her mouse. Then ‘R’. She clicked the mouse again. It was a slow system. Something flickered on the screen and she looked up at it.