Detective Inspector Bill Davies of the York and North East Yorkshire Police knew that the body found bled to death in a tub with an empty bottle of whiskey on the floor next to it might look suspicious to some people. Including his colleague, Detective Inspector Ellen Flay.
“Time to think again about Jane Cutler, Bill?” she said.
“Cleaning lady said Joe’d not been himself for some time,” Davies said, shaking his head. “Said she wasn’t half-surprised when she found him.”
And you’ve not been yourself either, Flay thought. Snap out of it.
“But the similarities,” she said. “Jane and Joe, both with no neighbors close by. Sort you’d choose if you didn’t want to be noticed.”
Davies drew upon his shrinking reserves of patience.
“What killer ever wants to be noticed?” he said. “And you want similarities? Jane Cutler’s sister in Leeds said she’d been in a depressed state, said she was worried. Look here, Ellen: if you’d made up your mind to kill yourself, how would you do it?”
Flay shrugged.
“Shoot yourself, you leave a mess you might not want others to clean up,” she said.
“I can see Joe worrying about that. Thoughtful chap. Scoutmaster, in church every Sunday.”
Fancies the young lads, needs forgiveness, Flay thought, but she said “Hanging.”
She put her hand to her throat as Davies thought I should be stroking that instead of. . .
“What if you can’t find a place to give yourself a long drop?” she continued. “No upstairs here. A short drop, maybe you don’t die right off by snapping your neck. You strangle. Slow and painful.”
“But this way you get the water a cozy temperature, sip your favorite whiskey”—Davies nodded toward the Dewar’s—“let the blood run out slowly. . .”
“Side One of Revolver playing on the hi-fi in the next room. Bloody hell: ‘Eleanor Rigby.’”
“There you go, Ellen: perfect song to die to.”
“Give me the latest Stones album,” she said. “‘Under My Thumb.’”
Davies smiled.
“Can’t see you agreeing to be under any bloke’s thumb.”
“But wouldn’t mind him trying. Give me something to push against.”
Would take a hardy bloke to get you under his thumb, he thought, saying “Jane Cutler was a small woman, but to pack Joe Croft into the bath. . .”
“Would take—”
“Would take a big strong chap, you’re thinking. Not like me.”
Flay gave her colleague a sizing-up look.
“Wasn’t thinking ‘Not like you,’ Bill. But there are big strong chaps about.”
You were, he thought.
“Anyroad, Jane wasn’t playing music. That doesn’t help you build a pattern, Ellen.”
“Did Jane even own a hi-fi?”
“Well. . . ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is pretty,” he said irrelevantly.
“I don’t like pretty, I like rough,” Flay said, adding, “Can’t feel good to slash your wrists.”
“Slash?”
He gripped the rim of the tub, descending slowly because of his knees.
“‘Slash’ is a word meant to sell newspapers,” he snorted.
Flay knelt on the other side of the tub.
“How long you think those incisions are, Ellen?”
“Quarter-inch,” she said as she examined the dead man’s wrists.
“Shall we say slice rather than slash?”
Davies hauled himself up.
“Need to drop a couple of stone,” he said, breathing heavily.
Flay stood up.
“Seems you’ve thought deeply about all the ins and outs of killing yourself, Bill.”
Davies looked her in the eye.
“I mean, killing yourself in the way anybody would do it.”
Davies wondered if his colleague had really meant “in the way anybody would do it.” But looking hard at her would make her suspicious. He studied once again Joe Croft’s lifeless body.
Before Davies had raised his doubts about murder, Flay had already pondered the messiness of shooting and the fallibility of hanging. And she’d regretted saying “slash” even as the word left her mouth. She conceded the possibility that Joe Croft had wanted to end his life and had chosen a relatively pleasant way to do so.
The other possibility, though, given that Jane Cutler had recently died in the same way, only with Johnnie Walker next to the tub instead of Dewar’s, was that Jane hadn’t been a suicide after all, and now someone who’d done her as well as Joe Croft would kill again.
But among the myriad irritations that had lately overwhelmed D.I. Davies, according to Flay’s observations, the work of solving murders was prominent. She cautioned herself not to push the murder hypothesis too hard with him.
“Should chat with Paul Shepherd,” she said.
“He’s a crime reporter, Flay.”
Forget ‘Ellen,’ she thought. Already pushed too hard.
“Was,” she said. “Wrote a ‘Slice of Life’ about Joe. Might know something.”
Bollocks, he thought. But it’s a free country.
“Chat with Shepherd if you like, Flay. You like rough? He’s your type.”
“Doesn’t require size,” she laughed. “Look at Jagger.”
She paused. Then she laughed again.
“And look at all the blokes you’ve put behind bars,” she said as she rested her hand on his shoulder. “You can be rough in your own way.”
He stared at her hand. She pulled it away, thinking Fucking hell.
“Anyroad, Flay, chat with Shepherd, I’ll file the report. Straightforward, so it’ll go fast.”
Flay bit her tongue. By all accounts, Davies had been a fine Detective Inspector for many years before she’d joined the force, and she still liked him, or felt sorry for him. She didn’t want to take her concerns up the chain of command, but. . .
After retiring from big-city crime reporting and moving back to the North to live in the house where he’d grown up after first his father and then his mother had died, Paul Shepherd had bought the Ackby Clarion from the old couple who’d published it forever. He’d kept the little weekly newspaper the same except for adding a regular feature called “Slice of Life” under his own byline. In London, with the Express and later the Telegraph, Shepherd had reported on what he called “eruptions from the dark side of human nature,” especially homicides. But “Slice of Life” represented a different kind of reporting.
In two years of publishing the Clarion, Shepherd had profiled about a hundred Ackby residents, one in every issue. “Slice of Life” was for the unsensational stuff of daily life that he’d turned a blind eye to in London. His neighbor, Mrs. Sarah Abbott, whose Russian Blue cat, Smokey, Shepherd, was forever rescuing from her horse chestnut tree, had been his first subject. He’d nodded off in her parlor and spilled tea in his lap while she rambled on about Smokey and the other cats she’d owned. He hadn’t glamorized Mrs. Abbott or her cats, and his story was received warmly by the people of Ackby, as were subsequent “Slice of Life” pieces. Within a month after he wrote about her, the Clarion’s regular press run had doubled.
Most Ackby residents looked forward to Shepherd’s knock. In Bill Davies’ case, it came on the evening after the death of Joe Croft.
“Detective Inspector Flay put ideas in your head?” Davies said as he directed his gaze high above the chain meant to keep the visitor from pushing the door open.
At which task, the chain would have failed if Paul Shepherd had wished to do violence. He wasn’t a decade removed from his days as a recreational rugby prop that some people thought needn’t have been merely recreational.
“She say something about Joe Croft?” Davies added.
“Had a note that she stopped by the office today, but I was out. My misfortune. Haven’t spoken lately with the lovely D.I. Flay, though, I’m up for an intimate chat with her any time.”
Shepherd grinned.
“Laying heavy emphasis on ‘up’ and ‘intimate.’ Your sort of work has to wind a lass up. Oh, but to be there when she unwinds. . .”
“Flay didn’t talk to you, then why you here?” Davies growled.
He’d always tried to ignore Flay’s sex, most often unsuccessfully. He knew that thinking about it would do him no good. Maybe if I weren’t two inches shorter than her, he thought. Doesn’t require size! Bollocks. Bloody Mick Jagger would look down on me. In every way.
“Just wrote about Edmund Darrow, Detective Inspector, so it’s your turn.”
In fact, Shepherd had written most recently about Melissa Trabert; Edmund Darrow had been the week before that. He determined his subjects by working his way through the rolls of Ackby’s registered voters, moving, alternately, forward from the beginning of the alphabet and backward from the end.
“Don’t stay current with your masterpieces, Shepherd. Not curious about how the fine citizens of this town ice their bunions at night and why they prefer Newcastle Brown to Guinness, except when they don’t.”
“Only because you’ve got healthy feet and you’re not a pint man, Detective Inspector. This more your taste?”
Shepherd raised the bottle of Powers so that the porch light would illuminate all of its glory.
Davies whistled and said, “Always wanted to visit the John’s Lane distillery.”
“A man of serious ambitions. Let me in so I can hear about them.”
In his kitchen, pausing to savor the aromas of fruit and honey before taking his first sip, Davies had a word of caution for his guest.
“With all due respect to D.I. Flay, she’s trying too hard. Joe Croft’s a suicide.”
“The Clarion will report it thus, Detective Inspector.”
Davies showed his glass to Shepherd. They drank.
“It’s Bill,” Davies said, and Shepherd said, “Paul.”
“Paul,” Davies repeated. “So what serious ambitions did you want to hear about? Be warned that my ambitions are all things of the past.”
“We can begin with the past,” Shepherd grinned.
Davies laughed, and Shepherd said, “Your past good for a giggle?”
“Tickled my funny bone that you’re called Shepherd, but you smile like a wolf.”
“Every bloke’s got a bit of wolf in him, Bill. You think often of taking a bite out of D.I. Flay? Or chewing on this or that part of her? Chewing and gently spitting out, since one doesn’t really eat a woman.”
Davies stiffened.
“I understand,” Shepherd said quickly. “Mustn’t mix the personal and the professional. But the personal came before, Bill, so tell me about the first time you got your leg over.”
Davies set his glass down in the sink.
“You talk this way to old Mrs. Abbott, Shepherd?”
Shepherd had asked harder questions of harder men than Davies. He took the glass out of the sink and refilled it. He handed it to Davies.
“Got it,” he said. “Sex is off-limits. Only meant to relax you.”
“Wasn’t working,” Davies said before tossing back his drink. “But, this should do the trick.”
“Then talk about your move out here, away from York. That meant to relax you? D.I. Flay’s in the city, likes being in the thick of it. You satisfied here in what might be called the thin of it? Where’s your nearest neighbor?”
“Just a drop,” Davies said as Shepherd poured again. “I’m a lightweight.”
Shepherd poured more than a drop.
“Ex-wife’s in the city,” Davies said. “Won’t run into her here.”
“Bitter divorce, was it? Recent?”
“Recent enough. Had no clue it was coming. But had no clue he was coming, either. And in my bed. Every afternoon, apparently, while I was on the job.”
Shepherd poured for himself.
“You always ask folk if they’re satisfied?” Davies said. “And expect to get the truth? Isn’t saying you’re not like admitting something’s wrong with you?”
“What I expect is whatever does satisfy them. Could be the little pussy that knows how to climb a tree but can’t climb down, could be icing their bunions. Could be finding Guinness on the shelf when lately there’d been only Newcastle Brown.”
“So you want that. Not a yes or no.”
“You ask a bloke if he’s satisfied and he says no. . .”
Shepherd hesitated.
“Somebody says that and really means it,” he continued, “can’t even think to say it’s finding a bottle of Guinness, you wonder. . . you wonder what’s the point.”
“The point?”
“The sodding point,” Shepherd said, slapping the kitchen counter middling-hard. “I get tired of hearing from folk who are tired of themselves.”
Davies was silent for a moment.
“The satisfaction from a bottle of Guinness passes,” he said. “Or from a fine Irish whiskey. Somebody’s unhappy, has nowt but Guinness or whiskey to give him pleasure, you write that?”
“I write about what they do, not what they feel. Life consumed in slices around the perimeter. Seen from outside, the inner torment obscured. Mustn’t depress my readers.”
Not wishing to depress Shepherd’s readers, Davies talked about his life seen from the outside: his new home in Ackby, his work, how finding Joe Croft dead had been unpleasant. . . but less so than if he’d been murdered, after all.
Though he didn’t often read “Slice of Life,” he’d read the one about Joe that Flay had mentioned. No sadness in it, he recalled.
Shepherd finally said he had enough.
“Give me another minute,” Davies said. “But off the record.”
Shepherd put away his pencil.
“That bloke who has nowt but whiskey to give him pleasure. . . you’re looking at him.”
“Thought I might be,” Shepherd grinned. “Feels good to say so, doesn’t it?”
He dropped his big paw on Davies’ shoulder. Davies patted it.
“Stop in again, Bill?”
Davies pushed out a sigh.
“Tomorrow, Paul?”
“If that’s not wearing out my welcome. Bring back the Powers? Or shall I leave it?”
Davies was tempted. But he thought that perhaps he wasn’t ready to start down that path.
“Take it, but bring it back if you don’t mind. All I’ve got.”
Davies had stopped buying groceries. He hoped to lose weight by eating only when he was out. But he needed to soak up the whiskey. A dish of biscuits had sat for several days on the coffee table in front of the sofa facing the telly. It wasn’t true that he had only whiskey to give himself pleasure. He had Match of the Day.
The biscuits helped. He dragged himself up to his bedroom and the unperused copies of the Clarion, piled up for a rainy day on the nightstand. He found the “Slice of Life” about Jane Cutler from a few months back, less than a month before her suicide. No sadness there.
Davies stopped at the off-license in the morning. Terry was there as always. Davies wondered how he could stand it.
“Had a ‘Slice of Life’ done about you, Terry?”
“Mr. Shepherd discriminates against us the middle of the alphabet.”
“Martin,” Davies smiled. “Mr. Shepherd come in often?”
“Two or three times. Bought Powers yesterday. Not long ago bought Dewar’s.”
“Might have been another time?”
Terry put his hands on his hips.
“Months ago,” he sighed. “Think it was whiskey.”
Shepherd outdid himself that evening.
“Didn’t need to bring a full bottle,” Davies said. “Was plenty left in last night’s.”
“That was to gain entrée; this is to celebrate a new friendship.”
“Glasses,” Davies stammered.
“No glass for me. Not feeling tip-top tonight, so I’ll watch you.”
Davies wondered if he knew what he was doing.
In the morning, D.I. Flay’s elation was muted. Davies’ admission the previous afternoon that she’d been right about the deaths of Joe Croft and Jane Cutler had pleased her, of course. Yet she’d had a scare. Waiting for as long as she did in the spare bedroom so that she and the two strapping Constables hiding with her could catch Shepherd red-handed had meant that the huge bastard’s razor was nearly touching Davies’ wrist, poised to slice, as he slept in the tub.
As for Davies, it’s true he’d been reminded that he had not only whiskey and Match of the Day to give him pleasure, but catching killers, too. However, there remained three brute facts: the worst hangover of his life, knowledge of the inevitable passing of all of his satisfactions, and the thought that he might have been better off if the bastard had succeeded.
END
by 
Don Stoll
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Loved this one, Don. Really fine dialog.
Thank you, Roy!