A Fatal Obsession Read online

  ‘Exactly. Dr Ryder is a civilian, despite his role as coroner, and has no authority to make an arrest, question witnesses outside of his court, or otherwise play the role of a police officer. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Trudy said smartly. What wasn’t clear to her – not by a long shot – was why the Inspector was indulging the old vulture in this way.

  After having briefly met the man, she could see now why Walter Swinburne and the rest of the station thought of him as a vulture. It wasn’t just the fact that the man dealt with death in the course of his job – for others did that too. Nor was it his beak-like nose that tended to give him the appearance of an imperious bird of prey. It was those cold, watchful eyes that gave you the shivers.

  Jennings now sighed heavily. ‘Dr Ryder is a very clever man, with powerful friends, Constable Loveday – always remember that. He also has an annoying habit of being right. So if he thinks there was something off about this old case…’ He indicated the buff folder that lay on his desk. ‘Then, like as not, there probably was. And since there’s a tenuous link to our murder victim, McGillicuddy…’ Here Trudy’s eyes widened in real interest. ‘…We need to check it out. Within reason.’

  Now Trudy wanted to turn cartwheels across the floor. She’d never thought, as a humble probationary WPC, that she’d be allowed to get within a mile of a real murder case. And although it was clear the Inspector didn’t think there was anything in it, to be able to work on even the periphery of an ongoing case, even in such odd circumstances as these, was far more than she could ever have wished for.

  She’d be a fool not to make the most of it. ‘I see, sir,’ she said eagerly. ‘When do I start?’

  ‘Tomorrow will be soon enough. I don’t want the old vul—er… Dr Clement to think we’ll jump to his tune whenever he snaps his fingers.’ Even if he just had! ‘So study the case.’ He picked up the file, glanced at the name on it. ‘It’s one Gisela Fleet-Wright, death by misadventure, I think. When you’re sure you have a good grasp of it, call on Dr Ryder first thing in the morning. He’s said he’ll be in his office. You’ll then help him investigate whatever it is that needs investigating.’

  ‘Yes, sir. And I’m to, er, follow his instructions?’ She wanted this point clarified.

  ‘Yes, but as I’ve already said, only within reason,’ he added cautiously. ‘Just jolly him along, and if you can actually get to the bottom of whatever it is that’s bothering him, and get him off our backs altogether, so much the better.’

  Trudy nodded, trying to bite back a growing grin of excitement. Even if the old case wasn’t that interesting, it had to be better than catching bag-snatchers and flashers, surely?

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll do my best, sir.’

  DI Jennings waved her out of his office, his mind already on other things. It had turned out that there just might be a lead from the fire incident in Sir Marcus’s dim and distant past, after all, and he was keen to follow up on it.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It didn’t take Trudy long to read quickly through the file and get a basic grasp of the Fleet-Wright case. But it took several long hours of sitting at her desk and taking painstaking notes before she was confident she knew the case inside and out.

  Once she did, she had to admit to feeling a slight sense of disappointment. When DI Jennings had told her that the wily coroner had been unhappy with this particular verdict, she’d expected something a little more… well, spectacular. Instead, the case she’d just read, while very sad, hadn’t struck her as being at all out of the ordinary.

  The facts seemed simple and straightforward enough – but, as far as she could tell, though tragic, they didn’t seem particularly suspicious. Worse still, the connection to their murder victim was fleeting at best.

  In the summer of 1955, twenty-one-year-old Gisela Fleet-Wright, daughter of Beatrice and Reginald Fleet-Wright, had been found dead in her bedroom. It had been a lovely sunny day, and her mother, who had found her, had tried to revive her without success. She had then rung up the family doctor, the GP arriving at the house some ten minutes later. He’d conducted a brief examination and declared the poor girl dead.

  He had then called in the police.

  This was, perhaps, the first sign that all was not quite right, since it immediately told Trudy the doctor was concerned about the circumstances of the death, and hadn’t been any too keen to write out a death certificate.

  But given that Gisela had been only twenty-one, and supposedly in reasonable health, that wasn’t all that surprising.

  There were no signs of violence on the body and it transpired that, although Gisela had a history of depression and ‘mood swings’, she had no underlying heart problems or any other medical conditions that might account for her sudden and unexpected death.

  Naturally, the police had asked for an autopsy. The family, Roman Catholics, hadn’t particularly liked this idea, but, of course, had been unable to prevent it. Again, to the lay mind, this might have seemed suspicious, but Trudy knew most families instinctively shied away from the idea of their loved ones ‘being cut about’ and that this objection by the Fleet-Wrights didn’t necessarily indicate they had something to hide.

  The results of the autopsy showed Gisela had higher than normal levels of the various antidepressant medicines she had been prescribed in her bloodstream: enough to cause the heart failure listed as the cause of death.

  And this is where, Trudy supposed, Dr Clement Ryder’s first interest in the case had been peaked.

  Although he hadn’t yet been a coroner when the inquest was heard, he’d told DI Jennings that he’d sat through the entire proceedings, wanting to learn more about his newly chosen profession and get a feel for what the job entailed. He had thus paid very close attention to every aspect of the evidence being given, and of the witnesses’ testimony.

  And he had obviously convinced the DI that there was – at the very least – a possibility that something might have been amiss with the coroner’s verdict, since they were now reviewing it.

  But for the life of her, and no matter how often she reread the witness statements, she couldn’t see where the problem might lie.

  As Trudy had learned at police training college, a coroner’s inquest is not a trial. A coroner investigates deaths that appear to be due to violence, have a sudden or unknown cause, occur while in legal custody, or are otherwise deemed unnatural. And even then, a coroner’s inquest is only there to establish who the deceased was, and how and when they died.

  In the Fleet-Wright case, there was no confusion or uncertainty over the victim’s identity, or when or where the victim had died. What was more, the coroner’s jury had been told by the medical witnesses that death had been caused by the victim ingesting too many of her prescribed pills. So, on this matter at least, they had no trouble bringing in the cause of death – they merely had to agree with the pathologist’s findings. The trouble and confusion lay in deciding how the overdose had come about.

  Here, Trudy paused to lean back in her chair and stretch her arms luxuriously over her head, to give her eyes a little rest from reading. Her mind, however, remained as busy as ever.

  Clearly, she mused, there were only a few ways in which Gisela Fleet-Wright could have taken too many pills. First, she could have taken them on purpose – in which case any jury would find that the victim had taken her own life, perhaps while the balance of her mind was affected. This, Trudy knew, was a kind way of saying a suicide victim wasn’t really responsible for their actions, and was often brought in by kind-hearted juries to make things easier on those left behind. Especially when the family concerned was Roman Catholic.

  Second, the overdose could have been accidental – in some way, the poor girl had taken more pills than she intended. In which case, accidental death or the verdict that had eventually been reached – death by misadventure – would have been the correct conclusion.

  And lastly, and most unlikely by far – somehow, someone had forced her to
take the pills, resulting in her death.

  In other words, murder.

  In the rare cases where no cause of death could be agreed upon, the coroner was able to record an open verdict. This was never popular, however, or satisfying, as it was an admission that the court simply didn’t know what had happened. But it left the case ‘open’ for further investigation at some point in the future.

  Once again, she turned back to the file and reread the evidence for a third time, determined not to miss anything. In spite of everyone commiserating with her on her new assignment working with ‘the old vulture’, Trudy knew this could be her big chance to prove to the Sarge and DI Jennings that she could do more than the menial tasks nobody else wanted.

  It was her chance to show she had brains as well as ambition, and she was determined not to blow it. So, despite her eyes feeling as dry as those of a member of the temperance society, she forced her attention back to the papers in front of her.

  The police report, as well as the findings of the subsequent forensics report, made it clear there had been no signs of forced entry at the Fleet-Wrights’ house – a large, detached villa in north Oxford, surrounded by large gardens. On the day in question, both the victim’s mother, younger brother and two gardeners had been in and around the house at various times, and none had reported seeing any strangers. Neither had anyone heard the victim scream. The pathologist’s report also made it clear there had been no signs of bruising on the girl’s body, no skin scrapings under her fingernails to indicate she might have fought off and scratched an attacker, and no signs of any ‘interference’ with the body.

  The first police officer at the scene, a PC who walked that beat and had been asked to attend the scene and report back, also stated that he’d found the victim lying peacefully and fully clothed on her bed, and that the bedclothes underneath her were barely rumpled. Her bedroom had likewise shown no signs of a struggle. Furthermore, since it was a fine, sunny day, her window was open, and if she had cried out, one of the gardeners working below would surely have heard her.

  Clearly, then, murder had seemed extremely unlikely.

  Next, suicide had to be considered. But here again, there was no evidence for this. The victim had left no note – which wasn’t totally unheard of – but it seemed to be the consensus of opinion that young women, on the whole, did tend to leave a note behind, if only to say sorry or to try and explain or justify their actions. Furthermore, her family and friends all testified that Gisela wasn’t the kind of girl who’d just give up on life, despite her bouts of depression. What’s more, she had showed no signs that she might be thinking of taking her own life.

  Naturally, Trudy had thought when she’d first read this, you’d expect them to say that. Nobody, after all, liked to think they might have missed the signs, and thus feel culpable for letting down a loved one.

  However, against that, Gisela had been treated for depression for years before her death, and several of her friends testified that she could be ‘difficult’, describing her as ‘being up one minute and down the next’. There had been some hints, too, that she could be ‘highly strung’ at times.

  It was also noted that the victim had recently broken up with her boyfriend of six months or so, one Mr Jonathan McGillicuddy. Although their courtship had been over for several months, many of her friends reported that it had affected her badly, leaving her ‘wild with anger’ or, alternatively, ‘weepy and distraught’.

  But all her friends agreed that Gisela herself had been adamant they would eventually get back together. It was also agreed among her friends that the breakup of her courtship with McGillicuddy, a young widower with a small child, had made her, if anything, angry rather than suicidal. One friend had even testified that Gisela was so determined to win him back that she was making plans for an engagement party.

  Which perhaps indicated the thinking of someone unstable enough to swallow a whole bunch of pills?

  But there had been nothing concrete for the jury to latch on to, and it wasn’t really surprising that they might have been reluctant to bring in a verdict of suicide on such skimpy and mostly hearsay evidence.

  Not that, in the event, this had proved to be a problem for them, because everything had changed with the mother’s testimony. Indeed, it had been Beatrice Fleet-Wright who had been instrumental in their bringing in the verdict they did – death by misadventure.

  Gisela, like a lot of people suffering with depression and a vague, unspecified, so-called ‘mental illness’, hated taking the drugs prescribed for her by doctor. Often she complained that they left her feeling tired or sluggish, and as if she was ‘watching the world through a pane of glass that had been smeared with grease’. Not surprisingly then, she often tried to get out of taking them, swearing she’d swallowed the prescribed dose when, in actuality, she hadn’t. And the fact that her family could tell when this was the case proved just how much she needed them to keep her depression and mood swings at bay.

  So her mother, and sometimes her father, had taken to standing over her and making sure she took them in the morning, at noon and in the early evening, as prescribed.

  Unfortunately, Beatrice Fleet-Wright (often described in the court transcripts as ‘weeping’ or ‘clearly distraught’) had once or twice caught her daughter being sick in the bathroom, and suspected she was deliberately making herself ill shortly after taking the pills in order to prevent them taking effect.

  This could lead to some confusion, she had testified – a number of times, she’d had to make sure her daughter took some more pills and then kept them down. And very often, she further testified, her daughter would take a short nap after taking the pills, as they made her drowsy, and, on waking, could be ‘somewhat confused’ and ‘wildly unpredictable’ for a short while, until she seemed to ‘balance herself out’. During these bouts, she could become forgetful, playful, morose or angry, depending on her state of mind at the time, and thus could forget she’d already taken the prescribed dose, leading her to take them again.

  As her evidence went on, it became clear that Beatrice Fleet-Wright was convinced the overdose had been accidental.

  She’d testified that, on the morning in question, her daughter, a third-year student at a local non-affiliated college, studying for a BA in English literature, had promised her she’d taken her pills, but that she, her mother, hadn’t believed her. She’d said that, when her daughter had promised her this, she’d shot a guilty look at the bathroom, causing Beatrice to suspect she’d brought them back up again.

  So she had given her daughter a second dose, just to be sure. This, of course, wouldn’t have been anything like enough to kill her, even if she’d been mistaken and Gisela had, in fact, taken the dose she’d said she had.

  When she’d left Gisela alone in her bedroom, her daughter had been taking a nap, sleeping peacefully, as was usual.

  But what, Beatrice had speculated, if Gisela had then woken up in a confused state and, not realising she’d already taken her pills, decided to take some more? Sometimes, on waking, she could be in a slightly tearful and contrite state, and would apologise to her mother, or father, or anyone else present, vowing she would ‘try to be good’ and take her pills. And, sometimes, she had seemed childishly keen to do so.

  What if that had happened this time?

  If Gisela hadn’t, in fact, regurgitated her first set of pills, she would have had two doses inside her, making her even more confused. If she’d then woken up in a ‘contrite’ state of mind, she might have taken yet a third dose. And, since it might have been close to lunchtime when she woke up, might she then have taken her ‘second’ dose of the day, which would in effect have been a fourth or fifth?

  At this point in her testimony, Mrs Fleet-Wright had become ‘inconsolable’ as she admitted she must be responsible for her daughter’s death, telling the court she blamed herself for not being right there, in her daughter’s bedroom, at the fatal moment. For even though she’d been due to attend a meet
ing that afternoon, discussing an up-coming charity event with her fellow WI members, she’d cancelled it at the last moment and had remained in the house, but doing odd little jobs of housekeeping throughout her home instead.

  The coroner had told her she mustn’t ‘speculate’ about what had happened and ‘stick only to the facts’, but nothing he said could convince the witness she wasn’t responsible for her daughter’s overdose.

  Distraught, and still blaming herself, Mrs Fleet-Wright had been led from the witness stand.

  After that, things had moved along fairly crisply, with both the jury and coroner in agreement. It was found that Gisela Fleet-Wright had died after accidentally taking too much of her medication, and a verdict of death by misadventure had been duly entered into the records.

  Now, nearly five years later, as Trudy tidied up her desk and got ready to call it a day, she felt her heart ache for that poor girl’s mother. To lose a daughter at all was surely tragic enough – but to have to live the rest of your life feeling and believing you were to blame (and who knew, perhaps she actually was?) must be awful.

  As she walked down St Ebbes, she paused to look in the brightly lit shop window of Coopers, one of her mother’s favourite stores, but found little in the window display to attract her attention.

  Just what was it about the Fleet-Wright case that had got Dr Clement Ryder so worked up? She was fairly sure, at least, that the fact of their murder victim knowing the dead girl could have no possible bearing on his murder all these years later. Clearly the old vulture was merely using the coincidence to get his own way in re-examining the dead girl’s case!

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The next morning found Sir Marcus Deering sitting in his study, in his usual chair, staring in numb disbelief at the envelope in his hand. His secretary, after delivering it, had backed out quickly as he barked at her to telephone the police at once.

  He sat for several frozen seconds, simply staring at the familiar, green-inked block capitals, then found his hand was shaking so much that he couldn’t actually physically manage to open it. His fingers felt like so many numb sausages. In the end he stopped trying and simply dropped the thing onto the top of his desk.