The body in the stairwel.., p.1
The Body in the Stairwell, page 1
The Body in the Stairwell
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Epilogue
Next in Series
Canelo Crime
About the Author
Also by Nick Louth
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
For Louise, as always
Chapter One
Jonathan Hale awoke with palpitations, covered in sweat, the bed damp. The digits of the clock showed 5.17 a.m. Gradually he eased himself out, trying not to awaken his wife. Fleeting fragments of a nightmare melted away, but his racing heart reminded him. He had been trying to escape. He didn’t need to be told what from. All he remembered, as on previous occasions, was the final image before he woke up. He was looking from several floors above down to the bottom of a circular stairwell. A man in a suit was lying face-down, soaked in blood, on a floor of black and white tiles.
He knew the man was him.
And he knew that he was dead.
He padded through to the en suite and carefully clicked the door closed behind him before switching on the light. Above his pyjamas the top of his chest and his neck were mottled red. Taking a face cloth he sponged himself down, chest, armpits, neck. He reached into his own reflection and pulled open the mirrored door of the bathroom cabinet. Dozens of packets of prescription drugs were crammed in there and without his contact lenses in he squinted to read the names.
There was a time, not so very long ago, that he had been fit, healthy and unafraid. His property law business had been prospering, and he had his choice of wealthy clients. Regular referrals from overseas. He’d run a half marathon for charity, played squash twice a week, cycled and swam. Now, everything was different. He stared at his florid face. The sweep of fair hair was still thick, thank goodness, with only the occasional quill of white showing through above his ears. The dark brown eyes were still clear. But on the lower half of his face, the original firm jawline had been replaced by a series of sagging fleshy pouches. Fifty-four years going on seventy. What he had been through had aged him, the fear and worry. Even now, safely home, anxiety gnawed at him. The tiny chance, the what if. Not only for him, but his family. What if? If it happened, what would he do?
Hale tiptoed down the wide, carpeted stairs to the tiled ground floor. He made his way past his home office into the panic room, installed just three months ago at huge cost. He flicked on the security screen, which showed the nine CCTV cameras dotted around the four acres of grounds. In the darkness, nothing appeared to be moving. He clicked the cameras to infrared. A small shape waddled along the back pastures above the brook. Their regular hedgehog, christened Spike by his daughter, was nuzzling the ground, on a hunt for slugs and snails. It made him smile, a moment of blessed relief before the fretting returned. He tapped on the keyboard and ran the analysis program. It searched files recorded for the last twelve hours looking for unexplained movements. Nothing. The system was smart enough to have learned to recognise and ignore members of the family, the au pair, dogs, cats and birds, anything whose profile had already been registered, anything it was told to ignore. It was looking for unknown humans. The only thing it had flagged up in the last week was a new window cleaner, who’d since been added to the profiles, and the distant vision of a contractor on a ladder fitting a burglar alarm to a neighbour’s house.
He left the panic room and padded into the kitchen, his bare feet chilled by the quarry tiles, and crouched down by Duffy’s bed. The aged spaniel was watching him with milky eyes, his tail wagging rhythmically.
‘How are you doing, boy?’
Duffy stretched and gradually stood up on his arthritic legs, yawning extravagantly. Hale tickled the dog’s ears, and watched as the animal limped gamely towards the side door. Hale disarmed the alarm and let him out. He then made some coffee and sat sipping it, watching Duffy exploring the side lawns as if he had never visited them before. He envied the dog for its peace of mind, and its determination to greet every new day with equal excitement. He’d lost that ability.
For Hale, each day dawned with foreboding. Money worries were real, of course, but he’d find a way to deal with them. It was the deeper fear, however irrational, that never quite went away. There was in reality nothing to worry about. That’s what Xolwa always said, and logically she was right. But since his little trip abroad he was no longer rational. Anxiety seeped into every solitary moment, the knowledge that even with the huge distance between him and his enemies, there was still a chance that they would track him down, even here in the discreet and leafy comfort of the Home Counties, even at this new secluded home. What they would do to him and his family before killing them all didn’t bear thinking about. But at least once every hour, he did think about it.
Chapter Two
Five thousand miles away
North Bluff State Correctional Facility occupies a shallow canyon between two reserves of Native American land in the heart of the Arizona desert. Summer temperatures exceed 110 degrees, and the canyon is reached by a single dirt road. The maximum security complex has a dozen low buildings around a giant windowless concrete dome which houses 2,200 violent felons on five circular floors. Each two-person cell has a barred front facing a huge central atrium, as if they were boxes at a theatre. A narrow glass watchtower, bristling with CCTV cameras, stands at the centre of the atrium. Correctional officers within can see directly into each cell. At the base of the atrium are three subterranean punishment pits.
In one of those pits, a felon contemplated his fate.
There was darkness, and there was a total absence of light. Richard Tyler literally couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. The only sound was a susurrus coming from the air purifier high above him, a ghostly moaning. It was unnerving, but blocking it out was hard. With nothing to see and little to hear you were already down two senses out of five. In darkness, touch was useful. In the first few hours of confinement he thoroughly explored the pit. He was at the bottom of a deep circular well, made of seamless concrete. He’d seen it briefly when they lowered him in on the harness. The narrow ledge on which he sat was just wide enough to sleep on. His feet rested on the concave bottom of the pit, which sloped gently to a drain at the lowest point. To circumnavigate the ledge was exactly twenty-three heel-to-toe paces, starting from his folded blanket and finishing when he found it again. In the first few hours he had sung to himself a handful of country ballads he could remember, then some nursery rhymes that his British-born mother had sung to him when he was a child: ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’; ‘Oranges and Lemons’; ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ and, most relevant to his current predicament, ‘Ding Dong Dell’. He sang all that he knew, varying pitch and volume, listening to the sibilant echo before the darkness swallowed his voice.
He thought about his mother, snatched away from him by fate, and his long, dark, nasty childhood, isolated by his father, kept locked indoors when he wanted to be outside like the other kids. For your own good, that’s what he was told. Always, for your own good. Well, now he was incarcerated all over again. Not just for his own good, but for the good of society. A childhood in isolation, no wonder he turned out this way, returning to the solitude. The scene of the crime, the core of his psychopathy.
That’s what she had told him. The penitentiary shrink. Tight white blouse, long legs, short skirt, curves. Had given him the itch.
He licked his lips.
It was warm in the pit, the temperature of blood. Like the blood he’d tasted after killing her. She had begged, which had added to the pleasure. The correctionals were on him in seconds, but he’d already snapped her spine and bitten deeply into her carotid artery. When they got to him, his face was covered in her blood. He’d taken many a pleasurable hour reliving those few seconds of power and freedom.
But in the pit those fleeting pleasures of recollection and imagination needed to be rationed. He quickly discovered you could desensitise a fantasy by overuse. Instead, he tried to gather together the wisps of memories of his trip with his mother across the Atlantic to London in the winter of 1979, when he was six. He recalled the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, all the soldiers in red with big black hats, and all the tiny little British cars, the narrow streets that always seemed damp, lined by poky-looking rowhouses. There was garbage everywhere, which his mother said was down to the unions. He also recalled the Tower of London and its
At least that wasn’t a problem in the pit.
But boredom was. Grinding and relentless. There were so few stimuli. Trying to find some, he’d explored his clothing: an already-familiar orange prison jumpsuit with his name and prisoner number embroidered in hard thread above the left breast pocket, one set of originally white underwear in artificial fibres, green rubber shower shoes. He also had six sheets of coarse toilet tissue. No book, because there was no light. No pencil, no paper. When he’d finished exploring his clothing, he explored his body in all the ways you might imagine, then a few you might not. First, he had checked all of his skin lesions, feeling for changes in shape, for desiccation, anything that might indicate melanoma. He had tasted his skin in different places, noting the variations in bodily hair, salinity, odour. By stretching, he was able to lick his own knees and armpits with his tongue, and taste how different they were.
The last sense to intensify was smell, the most neglected of humanity’s five. He could smell himself of course, and the powerful stink of his own waste where he’d squatted on the grating. There was the smell of his blanket, clearly used by many others, and a slightly perfumed taint on the unused toilet paper. He hunted in his mind, concentrating on analysing every odour. Even the concrete had an aroma, when he put his nose close to it. It was a little like vinegar.
Time stretched endlessly, until he was awakened from a sleep he hadn’t realised he was in. A grinding noise high above. A hatch was opened a good fifteen feet above him, and a searing beam of artificial light burst onto the floor, right over the drain hole. A hose was pointed in, and in the high-pressure jet all the bodily waste he had deposited on the grating was washed down into the drain. Echoing voices ordered him to strip off and stand over the grating. Dazzled by the light even through closed eyelids, he groped his way across the floor into the beam. The water was powerful, cool and welcome, a sensory delight, and he was just beginning to wash himself when it stopped. He stood back as instructed and a metal tray was lowered on a cable to him. On it was a pack of chow, and some more sheets of the coarse toilet paper. After he’d received it, the cable was withdrawn and the lid closed.
That daily two-minute ray of was the only clock in his life.
At the start he been able to number the days this way, but after the first month he lost count. There was nothing for him to think about, except to look forward to that two minutes of brightness. Once he had explored every aspect of the realm, his fingers found every shallow depression or scratch in the concrete, counted every stitch on the hem of the blanket, he began to retreat inside himself and to plan for the moment that he was determined would come. Escape. All he had to sustain him until then was hatred. In that respect at least he was well nourished. Every moment that passed, every lap of the pit, every crunch or press-up, made him more determined to seek vengeance. He was here in this hell because of one person. A slippery British lawyer who had broken under interrogation, made a plea bargain with the DOJ and ratted out all three of them. Department. Of. Justice. That’s no justice. Six months they gave him! And now he’s out. Living the high life somewhere. Wherever in the world he was, he’d track him down. If it took him a hundred lifetimes, a thousand, he’d do it. And then, the pleasure of a slow death.
He threw his head back and roared his fury, as he had done so many times.
‘Jonathan Hale, you cannot hide from me. I will destroy you.’
Chapter Three
Hale sat in his home office in his dressing gown and looked at the finances. They were depressing. On the face of it he was a wealthy man, with a prestige home in one of the most expensive and exclusive districts in Surrey. In truth, he had been forced to transfer most of his assets into his wife’s name. And even then they were mortgaged to the hilt, following the fine he’d had to pay. Now he had to find a five-figure loan repayment for The Cedars each month while earning less than a third of that from his property consultancy business. It couldn’t go on. How he missed the income he used to have. Easy money, taken for granted.
A decision became a little more pressing every day. It wouldn’t be an easy one to make. It might mean breaking a promise made not only to himself but to his family. But what was the alternative?
He padded back upstairs just after seven, to see his wife wrapped in a towel emerging from the en suite. Her flawless teak-coloured skin was still dappled with droplets of water on her shoulders and thighs, her cornrows still dark with moisture.
‘You got up early,’ Xolwa said, sitting on the bed and towelling down her thighs.
‘I was a bit restless.’
‘You had the sweats again, didn’t you? The sheets were damp.’ Her soft brown eyes held his. It wasn’t an accusation, it was expressed in a tone of concern. He said nothing. ‘Was it that nightmare again?’
‘Yeah, it was.’ He looked up to the ceiling. ‘But it’s also money.’
‘That letter from the mortgage people?’
‘Partly.’
He could see in her eyes that she knew what he’d been thinking about. ‘We can cut back, Jon. We don’t have to do anything desperate.’
‘We can’t cut back enough. I’m disbarred, I’m just not earning what I did before.’
‘I’ve stopped buying artwork, antiques. I stopped the moment you went away on your little trip.’
‘I know. Poor you, no new handbags.’
‘No golf for you.’ She smiled at their little game of pretend poverty.
He had cancelled all the club subscriptions months ago. That had been making a virtue out of a necessity. There was no point being a member of the golf or squash clubs when nobody wanted to be seen with him. He held both of her hands. ‘Xolwa, we’re in overdraft on five bank accounts. I’m constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul. We’ve got almost no equity left in the house.’ Hale considered the enormous running costs of The Cedars, the twenty-metre indoor pool, the cars, Azalea’s extortionate livery for her horse. And the school fees, my God, the school fees.
‘It’s still nowhere near enough.’
‘I can go back to work. I mean work work, not the shop.’ Xolwa worked three mornings a week at a very expensive local fashion shop but was hankering to return to modelling. With her tall, lean frame and high cheekbones she had been a fixture on the catwalk for a decade before they met, twenty years ago.
‘No, we have to be discreet,’ Hale said. ‘I don’t want your face out there for them to find.’
‘Jon, they’re in prison, a long, long way away.’ They had been through this many times.
‘These guys always have friends on the outside.’
‘But not here, not in Britain, not in Surrey.’
He shrugged and sighed.
‘You’re not being rational,’ she said. ‘We have an immediate problem, right now, and I could help fix it. I could do catalogue work, colour supplements, there’s loads of it out there. I don’t have to do TV. I’ve always used my maiden name.’
‘Well, radio would be okay,’ Hale said with a smile.
Xolwa grinned back at him, delighted that his mood had improved. ‘You can’t model on the radio.’
‘What about voice-overs?’
‘It’s not my shtick, you know that. I’d never be considered.’
‘It would be a waste of that wonderful face too,’ Hale said, and reached across to kiss her.
‘Maybe we should sell the house, start again,’ she whispered.
‘There’d be no proceeds if we’ve no equity. We’d just give it to the bank. Even with rising prices we would never be able to afford anything around here.’
‘We could move away, we would still have us, our little happy family, we could start again, go abroad. Get some quality back into our life.’
Hale sighed. ‘We can’t take Azalea out of St Cuthbert’s. She’s just got settled.’ Azalea’s piano and cello had come on in leaps and bounds in the four years she’d been enrolled, and she’d found some good friends in the orchestra. ‘Besides, you love this house, so does she. She is always in the pool with Zoe and little Lucy.’
