The Body Beautiful

by Raymond Flynn

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

Robert Graham is mugged when he's mistaken for a stalker instead of a law-abiding detective chief inspector. His loyal but over-enthusiastic dog inflicts an embarrassing wound on Graham's atacker. a peeping tom outsmarts the police force. and a fast-talking barmaid disappears just like her one-time husband, the paroled rapist. But it's someone quite different who dies. Shirley (alias Davinia) West had hoped to make her fortune as a beauty queen. Instead she makes the headlines when she's brutally murdered right under the noses of the police, who were supposedly trying to thwart the stalker, the peeping tom and the missing rapist at the time...

Release date: November 21, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

It was cold, it was dark, it was raining; flaming July. Never mind, the scattering of miserable wrinklies, the odd huddled anorak in a doorway, and the occasional family trudging back to an unwelcoming landlady after a night of semi-live entertainment at Eddathorpe Rocks! were none of my affair. Me, I was just an innocent dog-walker, a fugitive from the wet beach and the cutting North Sea breezes, an environmental coward hiding in the back streets.

Besides, I’d got troubles of my own to contend with, and all to do with sex. As a Detective Chief Inspector, I had a pregnant subordinate for a start. Nothing, I would hasten to add, to do with me. Ail perfectly legitimate, but Mrs Paula Spriggs née Baily, the Eddathorpe DI, was in the club. Once the ooohs and ahhs and the congratulations had died down, we were left with questions about maternity leave, and who, pending the big event, was going to take her place. Decisions, decisions: a certain amount of friction among the potential contenders probably lay ahead.

The other problems were routine, at least from a police point of view. Petty even, hardly worth the cost of powder and shot from the CID. Not so if you were the average female member of the public, or even the average Eddathorpe husband, of course.

Somewhere down there among the usual crop of petty burglars and car thieves we’d recently acquired a phantom flasher, and then, on the principle of success breeding success, he’d been joined by an extremely busy Peeping Tom. Not exactly serious crime, you might have thought, and funny in a way; to your cruder, hooting, thick-skinned, callous copper, that is.

The worst summer for years; wind, rain, piercing cold. Enough, according to George Caunt, the borough detective sergeant, to send the most ambitious of brass monkeys on a trip to the welder’s shop, and yet we had one idiot leaping out of dark alleys, and presenting his chopper to women amid cries of Taka looka that, me duck! while a second was sneaking around the backs of tunnel-back houses, tripping over dustbins, tangling with washing lines, shiking through windows and generally setting himself up as an all-round pest.

Personally, said George, he thought that the flasher’s victims would have needed a magnifying glass in weather like this. Not entirely sensitive to public opinion, isn’t George.

Beside me, Joe, my not-altogether-cuddly Lakeland terrier, trotted innocently along, exercising one of his newer skills as if the coupling of his name and activities with those of the late, unlamented Soviet dictator was totally undeserved. Freshly obedience-trained, walking sedately at heel, no lead. It was, as my cynical wife had said on more than one occasion recently, a triumph of hope over experience if ever there was one.

Personally, I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. The Wednesday evenings of late winter and early spring had found us trotting briskly around the local Memorial Hall. Come Joe, sit Joe, stay Joe! had been the order of the day, and gradually, very gradually, the junior terrorist had begun to emerge as a reasonably well-trained dog.

Ten two-hour sessions of obedience training, and the slightly fixed, glassy grin on the face of the woman in charge of the class on catching sight of an unregenerate Stalin had changed to the kind of welcome that the Christian offers to the sinner that repents. Or so I was beginning to think. About the genuineness of the repentance. More fool me.

There had, I have to admit, already been the occasional cases of backsliding along the way. C-a-t-s were something of a problem, and he still had this tendency to pause by the doorways of over-noisy pubs with the air of a bad-tempered section sergeant intending to rip up the landlord’s liquor licence, and kick his recalcitrant clients out into the street. Favours a quiet, well-behaved clientele does Joe, preferably with packets of prawn-flavoured poised generously in the non-drinkholding hand.

I passed Carey’s Supermarket; shopping from eight a.m. to eleven p.m. on Thursdays; crazy but true. They’d finally closed, the checkout girls had vanished, and through the locked glass double doors I could see a couple of middle-aged men in dustcoats sweeping up. Every now and again, a man in a suit reluctantly flourished a bunch of keys to release a dilatory member of staff, earning a standard, largely insincere murmur of, ‘Good Night!’

The pubs had already turned out; few street corner groups, no yawping, yelling, fighting or other misconduct tonight. No doubt about it, one shower of rain is worth more than an army of coppers on the streets.

Crossing the road beyond the Royal Standard, one of Eddathorpe’s older, rougher pubs, I turned right into a maze of side streets. A couple of hundred yards, another right turn, left briefly, another right and I’d eventually find myself back on the Esplanade, a mere fifty yards above home, a nightcap and bed.

Poet’s day tomorrow: early start, early finish, and it was this particular Detective Chief Inspector’s weekend off. Both Angie and the infant Laura would be pleased.

The last free weekend, as I recalled it, had been ruined by a call out to a major assault nearly twenty miles away in an Aylfleet pub. No real need for the call out; a case of the uniformed divisional commander bleating for a senior CID officer, just because he was there. Aylfleet as well as Eddathorpe was my responsibility CID-wise, and neither it, nor Superintendent Dorothea Spinks, the Boudicca of the east coast, were on my list of deep and abiding loves.

Time for a vague, unfocussed brood on the subject of one of the bulkier human clouds on my horizon, good old Thea and her over-assertive, self-protecting ways. Mind wandering, dog trotting happily, I drifted homewards at a steady pace. Coat collar up, head down against the drizzle, I was only vaguely aware of another figure moving in the same direction, silhouetted occasionally against the inadequate street lights, some twenty or thirty yards in front on the opposite side of the road.

Approaching the turning, I crossed again and entered a dimly-lit side street of late Victorian semi-detached houses with walls, steps and tiny front gardens. Few, if any, had gates. Some lunatic in the Ministry of Supply had made a clean sweep of gates and iron railings, allegedly to build Spitfires, some fifty-odd years before. A futile gesture, of course. The resultant bits and pieces had all been dumped, and the local strays had been peeing gratefully on the unfortunate householders’ nasturtiums ever since.

The street was empty apart from the inevitable double row of parked cars, two wheels on the pavement, and a single, suspicious cat which took one look at my companion prior to taking cover under a conveniently situated set of wheels.

Joe continued to trot along amiably, just as though the proverbial butter wouldn’t melt.

‘No, Joe. Heel!’ Practice makes perfect; I managed to inject, I hoped, the exact degree of authority combined with menace into my voice. Unbending as usual, he ignored me, doing his best to give the impression that thoughts of felicide had never entered his head. His tail, however, lost a fraction of its arrogant curl, and his ears definitely drooped.

Happy in the possession of a well-behaved dog, I completely failed to react to what happened next.

‘That’s the one!’ Female voice raised in anger, very close at hand.

‘Right then, see how the dirty bastard likes a dose of this!’ Male voice, and a bulky figure launched itself from behind a hedge and wall from a height advantage of three or four steps. Innocent pedestrian receives fist in face, followed immediately by an explosion of pain in the eyes. Shocked, I drew a breath, only to take a mind-numbing dose of liquid fire into my mouth and nasal passages. Impossible to breathe!

Muggers!

Blind, heaving, choking, I threw one ineffectual punch before I was slammed into the gutter beneath some massive, beery gorilla whose fingers promptly fastened around my throat. Somewhere on the edge of perception, fighting for air, I could hear a cacophony of what sounded like encouraging feminine squeals. The only thing I could think of: a latter-day version of Bonnie and Clyde.

A split second later, seventy-five pounds worth of dog obedience classes went up in smoke as my Lakeland, beside himself with rage, and keening like a runaway electric saw, launched himself into the fight, homing-in on the target the Border lads love best.

A second series of shrieks, this time of terminal pain, traumatised my left ear, and the fingers uncurled, while the weight across my upper chest and diaphragm was abruptly withdrawn.

‘Me Balls! Gerrimoff me frigging Balls, you bastard! Araughh! Araughhhhhhhh!’

Head exploding, with eyes, nose and throat subjected to the fires of hell, and with ninety-five percent of my remaining energies devoted to drawing one, just one more lung-serrating breath, I nevertheless got the message. In the midst of my own agony I refused to sympathise, but I perfectly understood.

For a hundred yards in any direction a sound more terrible than trumpets, more effective than an air-raid siren, rent the night. Sash windows grated; doors were flung open; voices were raised. Suburbia awake! Stalin had reverted to type.

The girl came in the middle of the afternoon, just after I’d woken up from my umpteenth serial snooze; there was nothing else to do. Twentyish by the look of her, blonde, pretty in an anorexic sort of way; skirt too short for her matchstick legs. Expressions of curiosity and delight mixed with envy transfixed the faces of the three elderly men in the six-bed hospital bay. Unashamedly, they settled down to listen: bugger the radio headsets, this was much more fun!

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Feeling better now?’

Better: an entirely relative term. I peered at her; only vaguely familiar, red cardigan, white blouse and black skirt. My eyes were still sore and she was fuzzy round the edges. Better than what?

‘Hello,’ I responded cheerlessly. ‘Who are you?’

‘Beryl. I’m not supposed to be here, I just sneaked in.’

‘That’s nice.’ The nutter’s league of uninvited hospital visitors. Just what I needed right now.

‘I came to see Bernie, really. He’s had to have four stitches, but he’s going to be … you know, all right.’

‘Bernie,’ I muttered. ‘The crazy bastard who attacked me, Bernard Cork?’

‘He means well.’

The brain began to function at last. ‘And you’re his ruddy girlfriend, right?’

‘No-o.’ Then, her voice becoming more assured as she went along, ‘No, he lives in the ground-floor flat, but he’s none too bright. Are you going to send him to prison?’

‘Rampton State Hospital, I should think. Anyway, there’s no point in talking to me, it’s being investigated by somebody else.’

She sounded tearful, ‘I just came to apologise, it was all my fault.’

‘I’ve already heard.’

I had: via a steady procession of visitors, some more compassionate than others. Angela, my wife, accompanied by two-year-old Laura had almost wanted to bring back the rope, while George, my detective sergeant, was inclined to be facetious about the whole thing. Detective Inspector Paula Spriggs, accompanied by her bump, was briskly professional as usual; she’d been hurtfully objective about Bernard Cork’s mistake. Something about the poor man trying to be a good citizen, or so she’d said.

Never mind, she’d cheered up the nurses no end; scandalous rumours, whispers about dutiful wives being followed by shameless mistresses started circulating, even before she’d left. Hence the current air of excitement among the other patients: randy Detective Chief Inspector scores again.

‘A faceful of pepper, and concussion. Damn near a fractured skull. Was that stuff yours?’ I lowered my voice; an overactive interest was being displayed in the two beds opposite, not to mention the only other occupied berth on my left-hand side.

She promptly lowered her own volume to a sibilant hiss, and sat down uninvited halfway down the bed.

‘The pepper? From Cary’s. I bought it early yesterday evening, on the way to work.’

The conversation stalled. A brooding silence: why should I go around encouraging a woman like this?

‘I’ve seen you before,’ she offered. ‘I work in the Standard, behind the bar.’

Totally fascinating, but hardly the point. I didn’t go in there often, I scarcely recognised her, and I certainly hadn’t offered that kind of offence. Maybe she just didn’t like coppers; maybe she thought she had the right.

‘OK,’ I said, finally making the necessary effort. ‘Why?’

‘I thought I was being stalked.’

‘Not by me, you weren’t.’

Widespread disappointment all around.

‘What did he say?’ A quavering voice addressing my neighbour from the opposite side of the room.

‘Dunno, squire. I wish he’d speak up.’

I pressed the bell, ‘Nurse!’

A click of heels and a Staff Nurse appeared.

‘Yes, Mr Graham?’ Hospital patients, like prisoners in cell blocks, do not make themselves popular by ringing the bell.

‘I need somewhere private, please; I want to get up.’

The staff nurse, mid-thirties, agreeably plump, glanced from me to the girl occupying the far side of my bed. She sniffed.

‘Police business,’ I said hotly. Liar that I am.

‘Mr Collins is coming at four.’ It sounded as if my request had just been refused.

‘Who’s Mr Collins?’

‘Our ophthalmic consultant.’ She made it sound as if I’d belittled an Archangel. Consultants, I gathered, were close to, if not the rightful occupants of, the heavenly throne.

‘Ten minutes,’ I bargained.

She glanced at the three elderly, expectant faces in the six-bed bay. She sniffed again.

‘All right.’ Anything to spoil their fun; all three faces fell.

She led Beryl out of the bay while I assumed a blue, well-washed towelling dressing gown over my hospital pyjamas, and made an uncertain grab for the felt slippers in the locker beside my bed. The application of the best part of a drum of pepper, followed by a sinus-wash and subsequent eye baths every couple of hours, hadn’t done all that much for my sense of humour, my balance, or my sight.

Three unsympathetic taxpayers watched me suffer. Serve me right. In my dual role as public servant and hospital entertainer, that nurse should certainly have kept me under restraint. Grunts, snorts and other sub-vocal expressions of disapproval thickened the air as they watched me depart.

Mr Collins or no Mr Collins, short of a full set of chains or a straitjacket, I was shortly going home, and bugger my companions. No, on second thoughts, bugger the entire NHS.

‘Go on,’ said the nurse, ‘you can use the office. Ten minutes, mind.’

Beryl perched herself on the edge of a plastic chair; I looked at the slightly more prestigious post behind the desk, but settled for the other visitor’s chair opposite. A man in a shabby robe and an old-fashioned pair of stripey pyjamas conducting an interview; a silly sight already, without my having a stab at playing Colonel Blimp.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘so you came to apologise; now you’ve apologised, what else?’

A hint of amusement lurked behind her eyes, ‘I came to see if you were all right. Honest.’

‘And?’

‘Not very friendly, are you?’

‘Friendly,’ I said coldly, ‘is something I do when I’m feeling fit and well.’

‘Not inclined to do a deal, huh?’

‘Deal? You were carrying an offensive weapon, and you apparently persuaded this Bernie character to use it on an innocent passer-by. Grievous Bodily Harm reduced to Actual Bodily Harm, perhaps. And that’s if they’re feeling generous down at the nick.’

‘A pinch or two of pepper,’ she said scornfully. ‘An offensive weapon? How do you make that out?’

‘Dangerous stuff,’ I replied feelingly. ‘If you and your pal Bernie had been a couple of muggers, d’you think you’d have a defence at crown court by saying that?’

There are times when I’m feeling really pompous, when, according to Angie, I’m inclined to go the whole hog. Besides, there are ways and means of dealing with offenders, and this wasn’t one of them. What about the Home Office Codes of Practice? Cautions, a police witness, tapes? I’d already dropped myself well and truly into the cart.

‘I was thinking more about a whatsit; a tit for tat.’

‘A quid pro quo?’ A minimal feeling of unease began to stir, somewhere deep in my gut. This might not be quite so cut and dried as I’d thought.

‘Yeah. After all, a girl gotta right to defend herself, huh?’

‘Sure,’ I said, sarcasm being the lowest form of wit, ‘against rampant dog walkers, for example?’

‘That’s the point, in’it? Dangerous dog: you leave us alone, we leave you alone. Fair enough?’

A slip of a girl, pulling pints in a seaside pub on the edge of the civilised world, and she ought to have been working as the UN Rep for Saddam Hussain.

‘The dog,’ I said, still on my high horse, ‘was defending his master.’

‘And Bernie thought he was defending me. Look, mate, I was in a panic, so I had me pepper container handy, OK? I’ve been followed home once or twice; so have the other girls. Bernie was on the doorstep, just going in. I told him about it, he took me pepper off me and Bob’s your uncle.’

‘And Fanny’s your aunt!’ It was out before I knew it; a talent for the totally inappropriate. Oh, well.

This time the hint of amusement broadened into an open grin. ‘Trust me to score on the only copper for miles. Never seems to be one around when—’

‘You want one,’ I finished. ‘Thanks.’

‘It was nothing personal,’ she assured me. ‘What about it, then?’

‘Tell me about these other girls being followed,’ I said evasively. ‘Are they all going around intending to maim people, too?’

She did, they were, and in the meantime, however eminent the threatened consultant, Robert Graham was definitely planning on going home.



Superintendent Edward Baring QPM, having unburdened himself, rested his elbows on his desk, joined the tips of his fingers together, and stared at the three of us with all the warmth of an old-fashioned hanging judge. Monday morning, nine-fifteen, sunlight streaming through the windows of his elaborately furnished office.

Eddathorpe, which once had an independent Borough police, had amalgamated with the county something like fifty years before. That hadn’t stopped Teddy from appropriating the office, the furnishings, and, said his enemies, the manner and sheer bloody-mindedness, of the long-departed chief constable. You could define his whole philosophy in one straightforward statement: over God knows how many square miles of farm and fen, he was the law.

Personally, I had come round to Paula’s way of thinking; to hell with justice, I was all for the quiet life. It wasn’t much of a scandal as police scandals went, but a genuine stuff-the-coppers embarrassment factor was present, nevertheless. Noble dog defends master against raving hooligan is one thing, detective chief inspector’s mutt savages have-a-go citizen who then gets prosecuted, was a bit like something else.

Paula, demob-happy, one-month-to-maternity-leave Paula, stirred; she didn’t like Teddy’s tone. ‘I don’t think anything of the sort, sir,’ she said firmly. ‘With respect.’

Teddy, crossed, was unable to detect anything remotely resembling the stuff. Nor, from the flat emphasis of her voice and the angle of her uptilted chin, could I. He opened his mouth to distribute another arctic blast, then, attention diverted by the blonde, summer-tented figure before him, he slowly closed his mouth. Chivalry was not, at least so far as the pretty and the pregnant were concerned, entirely dead.

‘Go on.’

‘It looks,’ murmured Paula, ‘as if this girl Beryl Matthews has been genuinely followed. So have a couple of her colleagues from the local pubs. They’ve been frightened to the extent of wanting to protect themselves.’

‘Exactly,’ Teddy sounded indignant. ‘They should have come to the police in the first place. Pepper in handbags, hah!’

‘They didn’t feel—’

‘That we cared?’

‘That we had the resources to help them very much; after all—’

‘They thought we’d got better things to do?’

She stopped and stared levelly at him across the desk. Tall, thin, almost emaciated, with a head which always looked too small for his body, and with his cold, slightly protuberant grey eyes, Teddy, despite his virtues, was not the most flexible of men. John Calvin, John Knox, Teddy; there were odd occasions when their opponents did well to watch out.

Paula, however, with her over-emphatic make-up, orange linen dress and wide, derisive grin was no soft touch. Not the type to thank anybody for the award of a second prize.

‘Look at it this way; this Bernie character tried to help a girl in trouble; what d’you think the press will make of it? Handicapped Hero Savaged: Police Take Good Samaritan to Court?’

That, both Derek and I decided, had torn it. We both knew how much Teddy hated the press. Cowardice in the face of the enemy: we both winced.

‘Handicapped?’

I looked at Paula with respect: he’d picked up on the buzz word instead. She’d offered him a way out.

‘Bernie Cork has learning difficulties,’ she said carelessly, ‘but he still manages to hold down a regular job.’ A nice additional touch that. Just the thing to appeal to the Evangelistic Right.

‘Ah.’

Long reflective pause.

‘From a personal point of view,’ I said, breaking the silence. ‘I’m quite prepared to forgive and forget.’

‘Especially,’ said Teddy nastily, surfacing from a nightmare in which handicapped heroes were interviewed by hoards of tabloid journalists on the steps of Eddathorpe Magistrates Court, ‘when you’re the one with the savage dog.’

‘Joe was being a hero, too.’ I protested, ‘according to his lights; but let’s be realistic, sir, the thought had occurred.’ Say it firmly, say it fast; a quick burst of the honesty-is-the-best-policy stuff.

‘I suppose,’ said T. . .