Raw Spirit

RAW SPIRIT

In our mind’s eye, we see our soul’s lament.

Pat Whitaker

Copyright © 2009 by Pat Whitaker

Cover design Pat & Robert Whitaker

All rights reserved.

Other Titles by Pat Whitaker

Antithesis

Bad Blood

Time Out

Mindset

Returning

Smashwords Edition 1.0, November 2009

Manchester, England.

Sunday, 3rd August, 2005.

3.05 am:

Doctor Sean Whyte lay staring at the ceiling in the darkness. It was after three in the morning, and in spite—or perhaps because—of the hectic day he had had yesterday, sleep would not come. But more likely it was the weather.

The night was oppressive. Unseasonably hot and dry and yet the air was charged, alive. Sean, a physicist, knew that the effect was the product of atmospheric static and meant a storm was on it’s way. The scientist in him also knew he had made it harder for himself. A man who habitually slept naked, Sean had realised he had come on this trip without any pyjamas and grabbed a cheap pair at the supermarket. Polyester, and now he was sleeping—or rather, not sleeping—on polyester sheets. He was probably carrying around enough static to fry an egg.

Lying there, he recalled that at the end of the first floor corridor where his room was situated, was a large, double-hung window that had been left open to allow a little air to circulate. If his memory served him correctly, it was marked as a fire escape, implying some sort of balcony outside. Maybe half an hour in the fresh, and hopefully cooler, air outside would help him get to sleep. He got up.

Minutes later he was back in his room. Pale faced and trembling he sat down on the edge of his bed, staring blankly at the wall opposite. He was still sitting there, unmoved, when the daylight started to appear and the Inn, the Three Legged Horse at Chunal, slowly started coming to life.

6.10 am:

The Duty Sergeant at the Manchester City Police Station in Bootle Street looked up at the clock. He was not a clock-watcher by nature but his shift finished at 6.00am and it was already ten past. As his replacement was supposed to arrive a quarter of an hour before shift’s end so that he could be brought up to speed, Sergeant Collins was not best pleased.

His less than charitable reverie was interrupted by the phone.

Manchester City Police Station. Can I help you?

Yes, it's Detective Inspector Stringer. I am calling from the reception desk at the Three Legged Horse outside Chunal. We have a suspicious death up here and I need a forensic team and an extra six uniforms as quick as possible.

Right Sir, they are on their way, so to speak.

He cut the call and switched to an internal line. Within minutes the required police were despatched and the members of the forensic team were headed independently to the scene. Sergeant Collins sat back with a frown.

Bloody typical, nothing but a couple of drunks all night and a bloody murder comes along just as I go off duty.

D.I. Stringer put down the phone and turned back to the landlord.

Thanks for that, I don’t seem to be able to get a signal on my mobile. Now we need to carefully and quietly get all the guests down into the lounge. They don’t need to panic, but I’d like it done as quickly as possible—I know it’s early. Once you have them settled it might be an idea if you got the staff to organise some breakfast. We'll try not to inconvenience your guests more than necessary, but until we have an idea as to what has happened, everyone is going to have to remain here.

The landlord, a tall, gaunt man in his early sixties, nodded solemnly, not surprisingly deeply disturbed by events. Paul continued,

This applies to your staff as well, of course, and if you could impress on every one of them that neither they, nor the guests, must disturb anything even if it has no apparent connection to the young woman who’s died.

Bates, the landlord, nodded and turned towards the kitchen and Paul Stringer headed back upstairs to the room where the body had been discovered. The officer, Henderson, who had accompanied him on the response to the 999 call, was standing outside the door.

Team on their way, Sir?

Should be less than half an hour, the uniforms a bit quicker. Until then I’m going to have a look around in here and I want you to go down to the lounge and keep an eye on the guests. You’ll get a lot of questions, just fob them off—but politely, they’ll be pretty stressed.

"Right, Sir, and nobody leaves?’

Nobody. If anybody gets stroppy, tell them I’ll be down to talk to them shortly, there’ll be at least one, there always is.

Henderson nodded and headed for the stair. Paul entered the room and carefully closed the door behind him.

High in the Dales, on the road between Chunal and Hayfield, the Three Legged Horse sat on it’s own in a small valley, a mere dip in the landscape really. It had probably been sighted there originally to shelter it from the excesses of the weather, but the result was both secluded and picturesque, although there were still views out over the Dales from the upper floors. Built in the early fifteenth century and largely unchanged ever since, the ironstone building was originally about a day’s travel from Manchester—as it then was—and was somewhat too large to be an inn yet not really in the character of a hotel.

Paul stood motionless in the victim's first-floor room and looked down at her body sprawled awkwardly face-down on the floor. She was young, late-twenties, and fairly tall. Not slim, rather what he would describe quite imprecisely as athletic—imprecise, as marathon runners and weight lifters are both athletes. Well built and fit, was more accurate.

As to how she died, he as yet had no idea, but she was lying in a pool of blood, and this would make natural causes or accident improbable. Turning her over would almost certainly reveal the cause of death, but that would have to wait until the forensic team arrived. So far he had only checked her neck for a pulse. Unnecessary, but a required procedure.

6.47 am:

Blaine Rawlinson was not a well man. He was not exactly ill, or not in any specific sense, but he was eighty-nine, diabetic, and in what is normally described as frail health. He lived alone in a small farm cottage at Brilley, on the Welsh border, as he had done for the last forty-three years. He had a man who came and cut the lawns and did anything required in the garden, such as it was. The next-door neighbour's wife cleaned one morning a week and of late brought him an evening meal. The district nurse also called with increasing regularity.

He took small walks with his dog, read, watched television, wrote the occasional letter and had done little else since he had moved here on the death of his wife forty-three years earlier. It was as if her death marked the end of his life also, and he had moved into the cottage simply to wait for the end.

But Blaine Rawlinson was a wealthy man. A very, very wealthy man. In his twenties he had inherited a sizeable fortune from an industrious uncle and then married an heiress. He now had both fortunes and cared not a jot. His modest life placed no strain on his resources and his wealth continued to grow remorselessly. Those responsible for administering his estate had tried to persuade him to make some provision against his eventual death—he had no family—but he just wasn’t interested. When the time came, he would die intestate.

The grief, the devastation he felt at the loss of his wife, the only woman he had ever known, had destroyed him. But at what point his fading grief had been replaced by simple inertia and an unbreakable routine was impossible to judge. Either way, for forty three years he had sat alone, waiting. The wait, it appeared, was soon to be over.

8.23 am:

The Canadian physicist, Sean Whyte, sat along with the other guests in the Lounge Bar of the Three Legged Horse, waiting to be interviewed by the police. They sat in silence. This suited Sean—he was deeply disturbed by the events of the night—but sat uncomfortably with many of those present. An air of barely suppressed excitement filled the room and one would normally anticipate a babble of breathless speculation, but the police had made clear that they wanted no discussion about the nights events until such time as they had interviewed everybody. Sergeant Henderson’s considerable and foreboding bulk standing near the door added weight to this request.

One by one the guests were called and taken to the Manager’s Office across the hall from the Lounge Bar and Sean, ever the scientist, noted that the Inspector was working from the top floor at the east end, to the west and down. This meant his interview would be next but one—or rather two, as the room next to him was occupied by a couple and it appeared the Inspector was interviewing couples separately.

Paul Stringer lifted his head from his notes and looked at the squat, middle aged woman before him. She was so agitated that she quite literally could not sit still. She was squirming in her chair and, although now in some sort of control, had been crying through most of the interview. He sighed inwardly. For this poor woman, the whole process was distressing beyond anything she was equipped to handle, yet Paul knew with absolute certainty that she had nothing at all to do with the murder. She had seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing and yet it was as if her own flesh and blood had died by her hand. Guilt. Guilt for simply being there. Guilt for being interviewed by the police. There was always one like her and he knew that no reasoned comment from him would change the way she felt.

Thank you, Mrs. Clarke, you have been most helpful. I don’t believe I shall have any further questions for you, although I shall have to ask you to remain, along with the other guests and the staff, for the meantime. If you would like to return to your husband in the lounge and get yourself a cup of tea I think you’ll soon feel better.

He rose and showed her to the door.

Who’s next? Constable? That scientist? Henderson nodded. Paul frowned, then added,

I think I need a few minutes to review things, tell him I need a comfort break and to relax. I’ll get to him shortly.

Right ho, Sir.

Paul sat back down and leant back, hands behind his head. So far he had nothing. Nobody had seen or heard anything. Everyone interviewed so far had done all the usual things on the previous evening—dinner, television, drinks in the Bar—and by eleven o’clock or soon thereafter they were all in their rooms. And that was a good four hours before the woman was killed. Of course, they may not have stayed there, any one of them may be lying, but that being a possibility didn’t really give him anything to work with.

All he had was the murder scene itself and so far the forensic examination hadn’t turned up much. But it was early days. The woman’s body, on the other hand, had proved somewhat more obliging. Identity was no problem, she carried all the normal paraphernalia that most people lug around, and already an officer was busy filling out her background and tracing her family.

Her reason for being here was also no mystery, she was a keen recreational walker and had come to the Hotel for a couple of days walking on the Dales, something she had discussed in detail with the Landlord when seeking his advice. Indeed, she had previously spent a little time here some three years earlier. She had socialised casually with some of the other guests over dinner or in the evening, but otherwise kept pretty much to herself. She hadn’t had any visitors.

The manner of her death, on the other hand, was unusual, even for a murder. She had been stabbed in the chest with a small garden hand fork. Had she been found in a garden, this would have implied a spontaneous act, but at three in the morning on the first floor of a hotel indicated something else. Even more disturbing was a comment by Doctor Greenwood, the forensic pathologist. His opinion that the weapon was a small garden fork, the kind often sold as a pair with a weeding trowel, was based on the pattern and shape of the three puncture wounds to the chest. It was speculative, and he would be able to shed more light on the matter after the autopsy, but assuming it to be correct, it posed a problem. The three, rather blunt prongs meant that the pressure from the single stab was distributed, in the same way a person can’t step on a nail but can safely lie on a bed of nails. Doctor Greenwood didn’t believe that the average person would be able to inflict a fatal blow with such a weapon unless the fork had been very deliberately sharpened.

This was no spur of the moment act of anger. This was a carefully planned and executed murder. Ironically, this gave Inspector Stringer some cause for optimism. A carefully planned crime implied