Single to Infinity

By TONY NASH

DI John Hunter is not every day confronted with the corpse of a senior Government minister, nor that of an extra-terrestrial noble lord. This one seems to be both. John knows what problems the political implications will bring to the case. There are no marks on the body apart from the 'ALIEN' inscription on the forehead, and nothing to show how the death occurred. Both the dead man's phones are missing. Like all ministers, Sir Duncan received many death threats, and one of them reads, 'Death to all aliens'. At first sight it seems like a 'nutcase' killing.
John and his new wife, Jane, are sent for an interview with the Prime Minister, where it is made plain to them that they are to tread carefully - not one of John's usual attributes. With vindictive interference from Special Branch not helping matters the investigation is going nowhere fast. John begins to investigate the 'Church of Pure Humanity' with the help of friends. One of the declared intentions of the Church is 'Death to all aliens'. Jane is abducted to try to stop him investigating, but he believes he is on the right track at last and sets a trap for the killer, but he could not be more wrong...

• Language: English
• Publisher: TONY NASH
• Release date: Mar 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781631737503

TONY NASH

Tony Nash is the author of over thirty detective, historical and war novels. He began his career as a navigator in the Royal Air Force, later re-training at Bletchley Park to become an electronic spy, intercepting Russian and East German agent transmissions, during which time he studied many languages and achieved a BA Honours Degree from London University. Diverse occupations followed: Head of Modern Languages in a large comprehensive school, ocean yacht skipper, deep sea fisher, fly tyer, antique dealer, bespoke furniture maker, restorer and French polisher, professional deer stalker and creative writer.

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Single to Infinity

Tony Nash

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Tony Nash 2013

ISBN 978-1-63173-750-3

Other works by this author:

The DCI Tony Dyce thrillers:

Murder by Proxy

Murder on the Back Burner

Murder on the Chess Board

Murder on the High ‘C’

Murder on Tiptoes

The other two John Hunter thrillers:

Carve Up

The Most Unkindest Cut

The 2 Harry Page Thrillers:

Tripled Exposure

Unseemly Exposure

The Devil Deals Death – (A Black Magic Thriller)

The Makepeace Manifesto

The Last Laugh

Panic

A Handful Of Dust

A Handful Of Salt

The World’s Worst Joke Book

"---And that no man might buy or sell, save that he had the MARK, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."

(Bible: Revelations 13:17)

CHAPTER ONE – IF ONE LITTLE GREEN MAN SHOULD ACCIDENTALLY FALL

It never failed: the full moon always brought out the bloodlust and the weirdoes. It was our third suspicious death in as many days, and apart from the artwork on this one’s forehead there was nothing to get my renowned sixth sense working. If I’d known it was having an off day I’d have grabbed Jane’s hand and headed for the high timber - fast!

Monday was a suicide so messy that the first officers on the scene called it in as a murder; Tuesday took us to a tramp in a back alley off the Hanson Road, with the knife, bearing a beautifully clear set of fingerprints on the hilt, still sticking out of his back. Two minutes with the Automatic Fingerprint Identification Service, and a ten-minute drive in a squad car put that one firmly to bed; quod erat demonstrandum.

Today you could say we’d gone from the sublime to the gorblimey and stratospherically up-market.

The corpse was that of Sir Duncan Peel-Llindro, minister without portfolio and likely Premiership material if you believed the media pundits. No longer, maybe, although on second thoughts even in his present state he could still do a better job than some Prime Ministers we’d had. At least what should be the first principle of politics, like that of doctors, would still apply: first, do no evil. At that stage of the investigation I had no idea if he’d been that way inclined, but if he had his evil-doing days were well and truly over.

Jane, my wife and partner in the fight against crime, always liked to look on the bright side, ‘He looks quite peaceful in death, don’t you think?’

I felt like reminding her that when our team lost eight one at home her comment had been, ‘At least we got a goal.’ I was more one of the ‘half-empty’ brigade myself, since in my experience that was how things usually panned out, but I wasn’t about to contradict her.

Instead I told her, ‘More peaceful than the raging bull he loved to play in Commons debates. He was quite something in full flow, and definitely on the way up. I’ve watched him on the ‘box’ giving the Opposition hell, and even I was impressed.’

‘Perhaps one of them killed him.’

‘We should be so lucky.’

She might just have a point, I thought. Though it might not be another MP, whoever had killed him was no passing opportunist. To get that close to him it had to have been someone he knew and trusted. We needed to put his everyday life under the microscope, and with the way our politicians’ lives are guarded from the masses I knew that was not going to be a cakewalk. It would be ‘need-to-know’ all along the line, with stonewalling witnesses and official ‘no comments’. Hey-ho! A policeman’s lot---.

Alive he’d been a handsome man; maybe half a stone overweight, but he’d carried it well; dark brown hair, with a miniature tsunami wave about as natural as an inner-city speed bump, pronounced cheekbones, a strong jaw line and a nose that appeared to have been broken at some time. With the old, healed, half-moon scar on his forehead just below the hairline it told me he’d been a rugby player in his youth. His bushy eyebrows would be the attribute a cartoonist would have zoomed in on, and brought to mind old Dennis Healey – a man in the same line of business. His eyes were wide open and still seemed to show astonishment at his unexpected end. If, as Proverbs had it, they were the window of the soul, I wondered if a room somewhere close beyond had been filled in the minutes and seconds before death with love, requited or unrequited, or hate, and if so, for what? And what of the corridor beyond, and the other rooms leading off it? Had they been filled with lust, anger, desire, jealousy, and raw ambition, or furnished with ease and contentment? Had every one of them been splendid and spectacular in its glory, or were there those, shabby and shameful, and hidden from public gaze, where only he dared go in? If so, those were the rooms we had to find the keys to and enter. Whatever had gone before, the mansion of his soul, built brick by brick and carefully embellished and decorated over so many years, was now empty, stripped of all its accumulated furnishings, with nothing but a misspellt ‘SOLD’ sign to show for all his trouble. The owner had gone away and would not be returning.

The blue felt pen decoration on his forehead was obviously post-mortem, and in simple capital letters: ‘ALIEN’.

We had to wait until the Scene of Crime Officers, headed by Ken Bryson, had completed their tasks and bagged up all the little bits they would spend the next forty-eight hours inspecting, dissecting, accepting or rejecting, and we sat quietly holding hands, with me thinking for what must have been the millionth time how lucky I was that this young, highly intelligent, beautiful, future Commissioner of Police had chosen a tired old bugger like me for her life’s partner. It was still like an unbelievable dream.

The SOCOs’ van was parked in front of our Ford, and the morgue vehicle was behind us, with Janet Keller’s two dieners sitting patiently in the front, waiting to take the body back to the morgue.

The weather forecasters, with their ‘Dry throughout all daylight hours’, had got it wrong yet again – surprise, surprise! A sudden, unexpected downpour changed in seconds the kaleidoscopic shades of burning gold reflected off every surface, from the bright, glaring reflections off windows to the dull patina of the road surface into a soaking wet world of subdued greys and browns, the only relief the dripping green palmate leaves of the immature horse chestnut trees dotted along the wide pavement, their panicles of red-spotted white flowers gone; changed by the marvels of nature to the immature spiked seed capsules that would, in a few short weeks, produce the conkers so beloved of past generations of schoolboys and now left lying on the ground, wasted, thanks to the efforts of the do-gooders, preaching the dangers of childish games and banning them from school playing fields. Not all progress was progress.

The team waited inside the house until the shower finished. You couldn’t blame them: it had been heavy. Ken tiptoed over towards us through the puddles while the rest went to put their collection of samples and equipment in their van. I got out to greet him and he jerked his head towards the front door.

‘He’s all yours. Janet has just about finished.’

‘What can you tell us?’

‘We’ve taken both computers - the main one and the laptop - they’re password locked, and our tech boys and girls will have to get to work on them. There’s a pretty sophisticated safe, which we haven’t been able to open yet; Harry Clarke is off sick and they’re trying to locate another locksmith. There’s also a double-locked rifle cabinet large enough for six guns, bolted to the wall of one of the little annexes in the hall. That will have to be opened too and any weapons taken into custody. In another cupboard we found a gun cleaning kit for a twelve-gauge shotgun, and brushes for rifles with calibres of .22, .243 and .308. Other than that, I can’t tell you much until we’ve processed everything.’

‘Does he have a car?’

He flicked his head to the right. My eyes followed his and saw just in front of the SOCO van a black Jaguar XJ with this year’s plate. Nice for some people, I thought – it made my battered old Ford Mondeo look sick. The dead man hadn’t been short of the ‘readies’ - that was obvious.

‘Find anything in it?’

‘The usual in the glove compartment – car instruction book and insurance details - nothing of immediate interest. There’s a nice pair of Zeiss eight-by-thirty binoculars in the boot, along with a pair of size ten Le Chameau rubber boots and a car rug. We’ll be doing full forensics on it for the record. It looks clean, but if we find anything you might need I’ll let you know.’

The first twenty-four hours of any case are always the most crucial, and I wanted to get the investigation moving; I asked him, ‘When can you let us have his list of phone contacts?’

‘Mobile, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘One of the first things we look for, as you know, but there was no sign of one and we’ve gone through the place with a fine toothcomb, checking the pockets of all his suits and every drawer in the place. We’ll be doing a check on the landline, and you can probably have that list this afternoon. Give me a ring about three.’

‘Okay, thanks.’

Now that, I thought, was more than just strange. No one of his rank could operate efficiently unless they had instant access to the Internet and fellow ministers, political assistants, members of staff and relatives, and these days anyone without a mobile, particularly in his job, would be regarded as a dinosaur by his peers.

As we climbed the stairs Jane’s comment told me she was thinking along the same lines, ‘They don’t usually miss anything.’

I agreed, ‘They do not. Someone has taken that phone.’ It told us even before we saw the corpse that we would be looking at murder.

The bedroom was sparsely furnished with a king-size bed fully made up, its peach coloured covers turned down ready for an occupant that would now never make it. The walls were plain white emulsion and bare of artwork, the carpet light beige, with a small, multi-coloured Chinese rug by the bed. One complete wall was taken up by mirror-fronted sliding panels, with wardrobe space behind them. Ken’s people had left one door partly open, and we could see a rack of suits, hanging from the rail. I knew without checking that none of them would have come from Primark or British Home Stores. Apart from the chair, the only other furniture in the room was a large, leather-topped, mahogany partners’ desk where I would have expected to find a dressing table. I’d noticed another one that looked identical in the downstairs office as we passed it. I guessed Ken’s people had taken the computer from this one – there were slight indentations visible in the leather where the feet would have been. Sir Duncan obviously liked to work before going to bed, or first thing in the morning before getting dressed. I guessed in his line of work, like ours, your time is never really your own.

Janet Keller, our tall, willowy blonde forensic pathologist was bent over the body when we walked in, looking intently at something on the head. She pulled back to stand upright and speak to us.

‘Hello, you two. I wondered if you’d be the ones to get the job. I’ve finished the initial examination of the corpse, so you can do your thing.’

I asked her, ‘Anything stand out, Janet?’

‘Apart from that,’ She pointed to the writing on the forehead of the corpse, ‘only that his fly is unzipped.’

‘It’s not standing out then.’ I kicked myself mentally – why did I always have to use sexual innuendo when I was near her? Old habits died hard. I tried to gloss over it, ‘What killed him?’

‘At this moment I can only hazard a guess. When we have him undressed and on the autopsy table I’ll be able to tell you more. His pupils are not dilated, there are no petechiae in the eyes, nose or mouth, and there are no unusual smells, in fact, apart from the decoration, there is not a thing that looks suspicious. The only thing I can find that’s unusual is a tiny spot of blood in his left ear. It’s possible something went in there and into his brain. If so, it’s an unusual way of killing, but then you’ve come across your share of bizarre murder methods, haven’t you, John? Of course, he could just have died of a heart attack. Sexual excitement can do that, as you know.’ She looked brazenly into my eyes, telling me that after all I’d started it. I couldn’t help the blush that started around my neck level and heated up as it rose, knowing Jane was watching me, but unable to stop the memories---.

Janet and I had had a wonderful, no-strings-attached fling, at least as far as I was concerned, just after my divorce from Anita. She was one of those vocal women who had to let the whole world know when she was coming to a climax. Getting her there I always felt like the pilot who was upside down over the ocean, with sod-all on the ‘clock’ but the maker’s name in German - and still climbing! It took halfway to forever and the number of shrieked ‘Oh, Gods’ and ‘Oh, yeses’ would have put a minah bird high on speed to shame. We’d made the holidays of a lot of people a hell of a lot more interesting when we went away to places with thin walls. A few months into the affair she’d become broody and intense, and began talking babies and commitment – the biggest turnoff known to randy man. I got cold feet and ended it, fast. I liked her a whole lot and enjoyed her company and the incredible sex, but I was still raw from the divorce and no way wanted a new serious commitment. She always made it plain that she still carried a torch for me. Jane had guessed, though I’d never told her, and Janet liked to push the sexual innuendo when my wife was with me. There was no malice in it – just a bit of fun for her, but with Jane’s problem, which was also mine now, it had to hurt her deeply. I’d often thought I should tell Janet what the situation was, but held back in case she pushed it further, hoping to help me, and her, at the same time. It would have blown her mind, knowing my healthy sexual appetite, that our marriage had still not been consummated seven months after the wedding – a state of affairs unlikely to change. She wouldn’t be able to understand, either, that I was completely happy with the situation. Happy? Now whom was I kidding? Only me. To begin with, sure, but now?

Janet brushed back the lock of hair that had fallen over the forehead of the corpse, ‘The cryptic message tells us it was almost certainly murder. He didn’t do that to himself after he died.’

‘How do we know it was done after he died? It could have been part of some sort of weird sexual play-acting.’

‘True enough, though I doubt it.’

I doubted it too. ‘What about TOD?’

‘From the livor and rigor mortis I’d say around nine to ten o’clock last night. Kenneth Blake, his manservant, told the copper who responded to his call that his boss gave him the night off after he’d served dinner at quarter to eight. He went out drinking with some friends at quarter past and came back to the house in the early hours and went straight to bed. He found the body when he came in to wake his boss this morning.’

‘And found that it wasn’t as easy as normal.’

‘Dead right.’

‘He’s downstairs and we’re going to interview him when we’ve finished here.’

‘You’ll have your own theories, but my first guess would be that he had a woman here with him, and she somehow killed him and wrote the word on his forehead.’

Jane looked puzzled, ‘Why ‘Alien’? His corpse looks human enough.’ I had to agree – he didn’t have the look of someone who’d just come winging in from the outer reaches of space.

Janet laughed, ‘The spot of blood in his ear looks the right colour, but if he bleeds out green, I’ll confirm the appellation for you.’

I spoke my thoughts out loud, ‘Could this be a ‘nut case’ killing?’

Jane gave a snort of disbelief, ‘What, you mean someone actually believed he was a little green man in disguise? Come on now, John, get real.’

‘It’s possible.’

She sighed, ‘Yes, I suppose it is, and there are enough nut cases out there, as we know only too well.’

‘If it is that, it will have something to do with his job. I’ll need to find out what a minister without portfolio actually does. I believe he’s got the same rank as other ministers but without a particular department to oversee.’

Jane, whose formative years had been spent in a household dominated by the political system, was well up on the subject and told us, ‘You’ve just about got it right, John, but he does usually take responsibility for some aspects of another minister’s field, and I suppose it could just have something to do with space, or UFOs, or extra-terrestrials even.’

‘Sounds like a bit of a sinecure.’

‘Yes and no, I believe. My father was in that position for a time, and I seem to remember he worked harder then than ever before or since. I hardly saw him.’

Her mother had died in childbirth, and she’d told me enough to know that her childhood and teenage years must have been lonely, with only the staff and security men for company. It explained why she was not close with her father, although they kept in touch at birthdays and Christmas. I’d met him just once, and he had not impressed me as a man with feelings. His steel grey eyes had seemed to pierce my very soul and his permanently stern expression was made more impressive by his brushed back hair style with a deep parting, absolutely central, and so straight it could only have been achieved with the help of a laser beam. Compared with him, the Angel of Death seemed like a benevolent Father Christmas. Regarding childhood we’d both had our crosses to bear. When she asked I glossed over mine, for many good and valid reasons, though one day I guessed I’d have to tell her.

‘Why is he sitting on that chair in the middle of the carpet? He’s obviously moved it from behind the desk.’ It was a beautifully kept George III lyre-backed armchair with the classical bow to the front of the arms, which had held the man in and stopped him falling onto the carpet. I had a good eye for antiques, and it looked like an original Sheraton. From what I’d seen in the rest of the place I’d have put money on it.

‘It has to be supposition, but with