Page 19 of Blow Down (The Plumber's Mate)
Then I stepped forward and literally fell over the body.
I scrambled onto my knees next to what was left of Amelia Fenchurch-Majors and had my little mini meltdown over whether she was still alive and how the hell I could keep her that way.
Great, Paretski. Way to contaminate the crime scene.
Course, it didn’t have to be a crime, did it? Maybe they had been a bit careless with the reptiles and left something poisonous behind that’d fancied a bite out of dear old Amelia for its dinner. Maybe she’d tripped and knocked her head on a tent peg. Maybe she’d just keeled over from all the excitement. I mean, it did happen, right? Even young people had heart attacks sometimes.
Trouble was, I clearly remembered how she’d looked earlier. I knew damn well she hadn’t been wearing a scarf—and in any case, my night vision was getting better all the time. I could see now that what was wrapped around Mrs. F-M.’s slender neck wasn’t something she’d ever have willingly put there. Whoever had done for her had used a length of bunting, so Mrs. F-M.’s attacker was either opportunistic or had a nice sense of irony. Or both.
I tried to get it loose, just in case there was still some hope, but no dice. The swollen ridges of her skin hugged it tight, and all I got for my pains was the certainty that if I didn’t stop I was gonna hurl, which would really make a mess of the crime scene.
Shit. She needed someone who had the first bloody clue what they were doing. I lurched to my feet and made for the exit, almost tripping over Mrs. F-M. again en route. Blobs of colour from the blinding sunshine danced over a sea of expectant faces when I poked my head outside. I blinked frantically. “Somebody get a doctor. Quick.”
Nobody moved.
“For fu—flip’s sake, get a doctor!” It was probably my voice breaking on the last word that convinced ’em it wasn’t all part of the act. After that, it all got taken out of my hands, thank God. St. John’s Ambulance, who’d been having a nice natter by the beer tent, were scrambled, and a team of green-shirted volunteers swarmed over to start doing CPR on Mrs. F-M. and hand out shock blankets to anyone who stood still long enough.
“Bloody hell, I can’t take you anywhere, can I?”
I’d never been more glad to hear Phil’s voice in my ear. Or to feel the warmth of his arm around my shoulders. “Yeah, I reckon Mrs. F-M. went all out for this demo, didn’t she?” I gave a shaky laugh, which shows you the state of my nerves right then as it really, really wasn’t funny.
They’d looped up the side of the tent to let the St. John’s lot in, and I’d got a good look at what I’d stumbled over. It wasn’t pretty. She wasn’t pretty, not anymore, which is more or less what you’d expect when someone’s been strangled—or do you call it garrotted when it’s not just bare hands? Not sure.
You never get used to it. Death, I mean. At least, I haven’t, and I sincerely hope I never bloody well will. It wasn’t just the way she looked, her face all swollen and dark. She’d have been well upset if she could see herself. It was the fact that this person, only minutes ago, was alive and doing stuff and talking to people, and now she wasn’t and never would be again, and how the hell was that even possible? It just didn’t seem right.
I mean, I hadn’t even liked the lady, but seeing her now—it was just wrong.
A tall, thin, grey-haired bloke I vaguely recognised as the one who’d been tinkering with the speakers earlier barged in, even pulling one of the green-shirts aside, which didn’t go down too well. “Amelia,” he kept saying in a tone I found myself thinking of as strangled and then really wished my subconscious hadn’t gone there.
There was a chorus of Please let us do our job, sir, from the St. John’s mob, but it was Vi Majors who eventually managed to haul him out of the way. “Daddy, you’ve got to leave them to it.”
Daddy? This was Alex Majors? I couldn’t help staring as he stood to one side, Vi’s arms around him like she was still having to physically hold him back. I reckoned she could do it and all, looking at her dad.
I dunno what I’d expected, really. Someone aggressively businesslike, probably. Granted, this wasn’t the best of circs to meet him under, but the word that sprang to mind when I looked at Alex was faded. With his flat grey hair and deeply hooded grey eyes, he looked way too old and tired to be married to Mrs. F-M. His light-grey summer-weight suit was obviously expensive, but it hung on him like he’d lost weight recently. And trust me, he didn’t have a lot of weight to spare. Blokes like Alex seem to have been invented to make spiders feel less conspicuously leggy. Course, maybe he’d taken up marathon running in his spare time. Or the new missus had been giving him a regular workout in the bedroom.
Didn’t look like that was going to be a problem from now on.
Alex’s eyes were glued to his wife’s body as the St. John’s lot kept on trying to bring her back to life, but there was no hope in his expression. Poor sod. Having married a woman around twenty years younger than he was, he couldn’t have expected to outlive her. Vi, on the other hand, looked furious. All I could think was that she was mad at her stepmum for upsetting her dad, which seemed a bit heartless, but there you go.
We all had to clear out when the emergency services turned up. The police were first in, closely followed by the real ambulance lot. They shepherded us over round the back of the tent, by the hedge, which meant I ended up not six feet from Vi and Alex. She shot me a poisonous glare but clearly decided looking after Daddy was more important than tearing me a new one right now.
Then we just had to wait until they were ready to deal with us.
Of course, me being the one to find the body meant I was the number-one attraction for the local plod.
We weren’t by the reptile tent any longer, thank God, so I didn’t have to try to wrestle my thoughts into some kind of order while the scene-of-crime bods did their stuff with the late Mrs. F-M. in the background. The police had commandeered the local tennis clubhouse, which was off to one end of the playing fields, for their on-site interviews, so we were sitting on plastic chairs around the table-football table in the main room. One side of it was all windows, looking onto the tennis courts, now cleared of players. The other walls were covered in notices, tournament tables, and motivational posters, including the one of that girl in the white frock scratching her bum.
“So you arranged with Mrs. Fenchurch-Majors beforehand that she’d hide something in the tent?” The lady copper was young, mixed-race, and aggressively keen. She’d given tennis girl’s poster a disapproving look, unless it was the one right next to it of Roger Federer with his shirt off she didn’t like. Personally, I’d have found that one well motivational if I’d been into tennis.
“Not in the tent, specifically. Just, she was supposed to hide something somewhere.” I swallowed. Not being totally daft, I had a fair idea how it must look to them. “Look, I hardly knew her. She just asked me to do a turn to entertain the crowd, and it was part of the show, her hiding something.”
“You had something of a disagreement with Mrs. Fenchurch-Majors earlier on today, didn’t you, sir?”
You know you’re in trouble when the plod insist on calling you sir in that steely tone of voice. “Well, yeah, but nothing I’d have strangled her over. It was just about that demo she had me doing. Been a bit of a communication failure, hadn’t there?”
“Tell me, Mr. Paretski, what would you consider sufficient grounds for murder?”
You get the drift.
