The Expert

Book 0: The Sixties Crime Series

by Bernard Knight

Genres: Traditional Mysteries; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Renowned pathologist John Hardy is thinking of leaving his job following the death of his wife ? but when a series of women are found murdered, leaving police baffled, it's up to Hardy to try and crack one last big case. The odds are against him ? a local nightclub owner is the key suspect, but fair means don?t seem to be enough to get a conviction, not when the other side has experts of their own?will Hardy manage to succeed? An insight into the latest scientific crime-fighting techniques available during 1970s investigations, The Expert was previously made into an acclaimed TV series and draws on the author?s extensive experience in pathology.

Release date: March 3, 2016

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 240

Sample

Chapter One

The shrill sound of the telephone ravaged the quietness of the empty study. Its double peal clawed harshly at the darkness for minute after long minute. Whoever was on the other end was hell-bent on getting an answer.

Outside the study, the hall was dark, except for a thin shaft of weak moonlight that poked its way through the landing window. The deep tick of a grandfather clock seemed disdainful of the raucous jangle from the other room.

Suddenly, a door opened upstairs and brighter light flooded the landing. Muttering under his breath, John Hardy pulled the cord of a red brocade dressing gown about him, as he padded down the stairs into the gloom below.

The familiarity of years guided him accurately to the study door. He pressed the light switch and hurried to the noisy phone that sat on his big mahogany desk.

‘Hello, Doctor Hardy here.’

He listened for a moment, then slid onto the desk, his slippered feet dangling just above the carpet.

‘Yes, I’m sorry about that. I’d forgotten to switch it through to the bedroom extension. Been away so long I’d lost the habit.’

He listened again, then looked sharply up at the electric clock above a bookcase.

‘I make it twelve minutes past midnight now. If I come up the main road as far as Five Ways, can you have a car waiting there to pilot me through those small roads? I don’t know them all that well, especially in the dark.’

The receiver croaked again into his ear and he nodded, as if the caller could see him.

‘That’s fine, then. I’ll be in a beige Range Rover. Say twenty minutes time. I’ve got to get some clothes on first.’

He dropped the telephone delicately into its cradle and sighed. Life went on just the same – and so, it seemed, did death.

Turning out the light, he went back up the stairs, listening with distaste to a distant rumble of thunder. ‘Duck boots and a mac,’ he murmured. He went back into his bedroom and cast a longing glance at the open book lying on his bedside table. Then his eyes strayed to the big double bed, only one side of which was rumpled.

A sudden unwelcome lump came into his throat, followed quickly by a feeling of near terror. He had realised that this was the first call since that awful one almost three months ago.

Hardy stared at the bed, almost hypnotised, illogical panic sweeping over him.

It passed as quickly as it had come and he took a deep breath and straightened up.

‘For God’s sake, don’t be so damned self-pitying,’ he said loudly.

He marched through into a small dressing room and peeled off his night things. Running a quick hand over his chin, he decided that his morning shave would have to last. Then he selected a check sports shirt and a thick jumper from a drawer under a wardrobe. Thick socks and a pair of old golfing trousers went on over his underpants and, in a few moments, he was ready for action. Another peal of thunder, nearer this time, sent him groping on top of a cupboard for a waterproof trilby that still had little tears in the crown from fishing flies.

He picked up his watch and wallet and padded down the stairs of the silent house. This time, he went through the kitchen to his laboratory, which had been closed up for ten weeks and smelt dusty and stale.

On a table near a window was his square, black doctor’s bag. He swung it off, hoping that Sandra, his last laboratory technician, had topped it up before she left for her new job in Liverpool.

Hardy went back into the kitchen and opened the door into the garden. He stepped out on to the gravel path and, looking up, saw that black clouds were rolling across the pale moon. Again a grumble of thunder came from the west. He had taken a fishing jacket from the hall on his way out and now he paused to struggle into it, as the first drops of rain started to tap tentatively on the garage roof.

The coat was of a thick olive-green nylon and again a flash of morbid recollection hit him, as he remembered that he had last worn it when Jo had been shot.

He ground his teeth at the vexation of discovering that John Hardy was not the impassive, coldly logical man he held himself to be. Stamping across the crunchy gravel to the garage, he deliberately put these thoughts from his mind, as he went in and groped for the light switch.

He put the bag into the back of the Rover, then picked a pair of wellington boots from the floor and dropped them in alongside the bag. They would be cold and possibly damp, but there was nothing he could do about it. From the description Carrol had given over the phone, he was going to need them, damp or not. Hardy lifted the roller door and switched off the light.

The car started at the first touch and he drove away, not bothering to close the door after him.

His headlights carved a swathe out of the night as he went towards the A41 trunk road that led from Warwick to Birmingham. The Rover was on loan from a dealer, so at least there were no painful memories attached to that. His white Alfa Romeo had been accidentally destroyed by fire when he was away, while having a routine service done in the dealer’s premises. Until the insurance company decided what was to happen about a replacement, he had been loaned this one by a highly apologetic manager.

Hardy set the car’s nose northwards, with about eight miles to the rendezvous with the police. It was not yet half past twelve, but the roads were very quiet. The threatening weather, now with flashes of lightning and frequent thunderclaps, was keeping all but the most determined people at home.

Then the rain came swishing down and Hardy groaned at the thought of the next couple of hours. After twenty-five years at the game he knew that most of the investigation at the scene would consist of waiting … waiting for the photographer, waiting for the lighting, waiting for the forensic lab, waiting for the undertaker. And looking at the weather now, maybe even waiting for frogmen, he thought cynically.

All that the CID chief had told him on the phone was that a girl’s body had been found in a disused quarry deep in a wood. The place was near some remote hamlet in the countryside, within the triangle formed by Warwick, Birmingham and Stratford-upon-Avon. He had no other details, but he knew Carrol of old and if Carrol said, ‘It’s a nasty one, Doc,’ then that was good enough. If it had been a younger and less senior detective, then Hardy might have wanted a few more details before turning out so promptly into a filthy night like this, but Carrol’s laconic description was a warranty of the seriousness of the case.

John Hardy wondered, as he peered down the bright tunnel of his headlights, just how many times he had driven off into the unknown like this. How many black nights and grey dawns had he seen, standing with a posse of big, grave men over some pathetic or horrifying scene of violent death? He sometimes wondered at times like these why on earth he had ever chosen forensic pathology – surely the most macabre, as well as the least popular career in medicine. He never seemed to be called to a murder at eleven o’clock on a sunny Tuesday morning. It was always – in his memory at least – between midnight and four in the morning, always cold, usually raining or snowing. It was always with a full day’s engagements ahead of him – that needed a dozen frantic telephone calls to rearrange. Either that or he was about to catch the ferry to a holiday on the continent or an aeroplane to some conference in America.

As he watched the big raindrops flying at him down the light beams, he suddenly realised that he was getting old and crabby. Thank God that he had some insight left, he thought, mentally shaking himself out of his introspective, self-indulgent mood. This was surely the most interesting job in the world. He was privileged to be doing it and wouldn’t think of changing it for any inducement on earth.

But it isn’t the same any more, he thought, his shoulders sagging again. Jo had gone.

He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t just that, but deep down, he knew it was true. The fire had gone out of his belly – or if it hadn’t gone, it was burning pretty low.

This first call after his return showed him that three months and a trip halfway round the world had made little difference to the acutely depressed person that he had been immediately after the death of his wife.

This night was going to be a test, he knew that.

Like the man who goes back into the water after almost drowning or the air pilot who flies again after his crash, this was to be the make-or-break case.

He sat upright again, quickly.

‘Balderdash! John Hardy, you damned sentimental, cringing worm! Snap out of it!’

After a pause, he added loudly, ‘And stop damn well talking to yourself!’

He felt better after this and settled down to concentrate on his driving. He knew the main road like the back of his hand and Five Ways was a road junction about a quarter of the way from Warwick to Birmingham. The west fork of the junction went down to Rowington and then to places like Shrewley and Lapworth, along the Grand Union Canal, but off these secondary roads were lanes and byways that were known only to locals and the police.

The Range Rover was unfamiliar after his old car, but he liked it well enough and, even in tonight’s bad conditions, he found it a pleasure to drive. The suburbs and villages slipped by in the October darkness. The roofs and pavements glistened in the wet and upstairs windows glowed redly as people went about their settling for the night.

He had passed Hatton and was now in the open stretch to Five Ways. The wipers beat like twin metronomes in front of his eyes and he compared the awful weather of the Midlands autumn with that of the Canary Islands and the Caribbean, where he had spent the last eight weeks, working hard to bury his horror in a languid round of shipboard socialising.

Had it worked? He didn’t really know himself. Perhaps it had done something, but maybe it was just the passage of two months that had rubbed off the sharp edges of his grief. Maybe he could have saved himself a thousand pounds and stayed in Warwick with the same result. Feeling himself slipping into the familiar cycle of self-pity and recrimination, he savagely concentrated on his driving. He was almost glad that he had caught up with a large truck that half-filled the road. It gave him something to do, trying to pass it on the wet and slippery road.

When he finally pulled past it on a straight stretch, he found Five Ways right ahead of him. He imagined the truck driver cursing ‘the silly buggers who overtake, then turn off!’ But he had no choice and switched his indicators for a left turn.

The police car was parked a few yards down the side road. It was a white Jaguar with a red fluorescent band around it and a blue flasher on the roof, which revolved to throw an eerie beam through the rain-filled air.

John Hardy pulled up right behind the Jaguar and flashed his headlights once to confirm who he was. The police driver stuck an arm out into the rain to give a ‘thumbs up’ sign and started to move away.

The Rover followed it for some miles down the side road, then turned left down an even smaller road for another mile. They were in raw agricultural country now, but patches of rough woodland began to appear wetly on either side of the lane. There seemed to be no more houses or cottages this way and Hardy saw only the gates of fields or gaping holes in hedges as his lights swept past.

The police car kept going, its bright red tail lights his only beacon in the pitch blackness. Then the right-hand flasher began winking its yellow message.

The sleek police vehicle turned slowly into what seemed to be a hole in the trees and Hardy saw that they were leaving the tarred road to go onto a gravel track. A few hundred yards in second gear and then he knew that they had arrived.

The Jaguar pulled up at the side of the lane, which here widened into a small clearing. There were other vehicles there, another white Jaguar, two Morris Eleven Hundreds and a Range Rover, all in police livery.

Beyond them were four more civilian cars, which Hardy guessed belonged to the senior detectives, photographers and maybe someone from the Home Office forensic laboratory.

Another car – a Mini – was parked opposite where he stopped and he saw a uniformed policeman stooping down to the driver’s window. As he got out, he could just see a label on the windscreen saying ‘Press’. Once again, he marvelled at the instinct that brought reporters to the scene of a crime, like a missile homing in by radar. If a body was found in the middle of the Gobi Desert, thought Hardy, he would not be surprised in the slightest if a spotty youth from the ‘Wolverhampton Observer’ popped up from behind the nearest boulder.

He took his case from the back and in the dim red light of the rear lamps, hopped on each foot to put on his gumboots. By now, shadowy figures were coming across from the other cars.

‘Morning, Doc. Nice to see you back with us.’

The leader of the group of police officers was the man who had telephoned, Detective Chief Superintendent Lewis Carrol – inevitably known to the Force as ‘Alice’, though he certainly lived in no Wonderland. He was a squat figure in the dark, his breadth making his six-foot frame look shorter. He was pyramid-shaped, expanding progressively as one’s eye went down from his small, bald head, past his shoulders to his broadening waist and massive legs and feet. Hardy had once seen him in swimming trunks and was reminded of a Japanese wrestler. But he was one hell of a good detective and was as tough as they come.

Behind him was Sam Partridge, Carrol’s superintendent and the second man at Headquarters CID. Two others were shadows in the dark and Hardy gave them all a general greeting.

‘Sorry to pull you out on a night like this, Doc,’ Alice went on. ‘But it’s easing off a bit now.’

True enough, the heavy rain had almost stopped for the moment, though the overhanging trees still sent down a barrage of drips on them.

‘We’re down the lane a bit. I’ll tell you as we go.’

Hardy walked alongside Carrol, the others followed behind. They passed a knot of uniformed policemen standing by the cars, one talking through the window into a radio. The steady ‘peep-peep’ of the UHF set and the distorted jumble of number codes that came from the speaker, were suddenly so familiar to Hardy – and somehow soothing. The things that one knows and understands can be like a life-raft suddenly grabbed in a shipwreck, he thought – then sternly rejected it as being selfish nonsense.

The senior detective was talking as they passed the cars and headed down the muddy lane.

‘It’s far too mucky to bring the cars down here. And we didn’t want to spoil any tracks more than we can help. Not that this damn rain is going to help – it’ll already have washed out any tyre prints.’

‘You said a girl, on the phone?’

‘About twenty, maybe twenty-two, I should think. Hasn’t been there long. Looks fresh to me, within the last day or two. Can’t see any marks on her, but we haven’t touched her yet, not until you have a look.’

Hardy plodded on, feeling his feet getting colder and damper in the disused rubber boots. They were walking on the dying autumn grass at the edge of the track, so as not to disturb any wheel marks that may have survived the rain.

‘When was she found?’

‘About nine o’clock. Sheer chance, really.’

Hardy stopped in the middle of the rough grass verge. ‘Nine o’clock. In the pitch dark?’

Carrol grinned in the dark, so wide that Hardy could see his false teeth flashing in his little, wrinkled face.

‘Yes, a farmer down the road lost one of his cows. Been looking for it since milking time. Still is, for all I know. Gate was left open and half a dozen of ’em wandered off. He found them all except one, doing his nut trying to round up the last one all evening. He came up through this little wood here, to see if it had fallen into . . .