fought my way back to the front door – locked – then around the side of the house. The damp fingers of an ancient leylandii pawed at me as I waded through knee-high weeds to a tall wooden gate. The hinges squealed as I shouldered it open.
The back garden was a riot of thistles, docken, and grass. It followed the slope of the hill, the top corner just catching the first rays of dawn. A small pond choked with reeds, a greenhouse with no glass left in it, and an outbuilding that needed a coat of paint and a new roof.
I took the path along the back of the building to the bedroom window. Dark. Probably had the curtains drawn. The kitchen door was locked like the front one, but …
Up on my tiptoes, fingers spidering along the top of the architrave. Bingo: a little ceramic puffin, the black and white paint flaking and brittle. A Yale key was wedged inside. I pulled it out and unlocked the kitchen door.
‘Henry? Henry, it’s Ash. Ash Henderson? You in? You awake? You sober?’ Nothing but silence from the dead house. ‘Henry? You still alive, or have you pickled yourself to death, you daft old bugger …?’
No answer.
The kitchen was disappearing under a layer of dust. Piles of newspapers and unopened letters covered a small breakfast bar, four stools tucked beneath the worktop.
‘Henry?’
Through into the hallway, breath streaming out in a thin grey fog. It was colder in here than outside.
‘Henry?’
The stairs led up to a small landing, but I went for the back bedroom instead. Knocked, waited, then eased the door open. Darkness. The smell of rancid garlic and stale booze underpinned something foul and rotting. ‘Henry?’
I felt for the light switch and flicked it on.
Henry was lying on the bed, flat on his back, dressed in a black suit, white shirt and black tie. Grey hair made a rumpled tonsure around a bald crown speckled with liver spots. His face was slack, like a sock-puppet without a hand, his features too big for that little head. A bottle of Bells lay beside one thin hand, only a third of it left.
A small plastic bottle of pills sat on the bedside cabinet.
The silly old git … He’d finally done it.
I stared at the ceiling for a minute, then settled down on the stool in front of the vanity unit.
So much for getting Henry’s help catching the Birthday Boy: looked as if Dr McDonald was on her own …
Which wasn’t exactly fair. The poor old sod deserved better than this, rotting away in a cold and lonely house, until the booze, an aneurism, or hypothermia finished the job.
Let’s be honest, the end probably came as a bit of a relief.
‘Henry, could you not have waited till—’
A dry squeak came from the corpse, followed by the smell of death. Or rotten eggs. Or a mouldering otter … Not dead, just farting.
‘Agh, not you too!’ What was it with psychologists?
I stuck a hand over my mouth, marched over to the curtains and threw them open, then did the same with the window, letting the cold air in and the smell of whatever was festering in Henry’s bum out.
‘Henry!’
‘Mmmmmph … Nrm slppn …’ Pale gums in a slack mouth.
‘Henry, you manky-arsed bugger: up! You’ve got visitors.’
He cracked an eye open and blinked at the ceiling. ‘Sodding hell …’ His voice sounded like a handful of walnuts being slowly crushed, the Aberdeen accent twisting the vowels out of shape. ‘Fit time is it?’
‘Nearly eight.’
‘Tuesday?’
‘Wednesday.’
‘Near enough.’ He looked as if he was trying to sit up, then flopped back on top of the duvet. ‘Am I dead?’
‘You smell like it.’
‘Oh … In that case, give us a hand?’
I hauled him out of bed, and propped him up against the wardrobe, trying not to breathe through my nose. ‘God almighty, when did you last have a bath?’
‘You look like a punch bag.’ A long, rattling cough. ‘Where did I leave my teeth?’
The little plastic bottle of pills rattled when I shook it. A printed label on the side: ‘FLUVOXAMINE 50MG. TWO PILLS TWICE A DAY TO BE TAKEN WITH FOOD. AVOID ALCOHOL.’
‘You shouldn’t be drinking with these.’
‘Ah, there they are.’ Henry picked a tumbler off the windowsill – a set of dentures were floating in what looked like old urine. He fished his teeth out and popped them in, then drank the rest of the liquid, and sighed. The unmistakable reek of whisky. ‘Ash, much though I’ve missed you like an amputated limb, I’m guessing you want something …’ His eyes narrowed. Then closed completely. His shoulders slumped. ‘Of course, I’m sorry. Rebecca’s birthday was Monday, wasn’t it? I meant to call, but …’
‘It’s OK.’
‘No, it’s not.’ He clicked his false teeth together a couple of times. ‘I used to be a psychologist, not an idiot.’ He snatched the bottle of Bells from the bed and slouched through to the kitchen. ‘Put the kettle on, I need to wrestle my prostate into a decent morning piss for a change …’
By the time he came back from the toilet, I had four mugs of coffee sitting on the dusty kitchen worktop, the big ring on the gas stove turned up full to take the chill out of the air.
Henry froze in the doorway, frowning at Dr McDonald. ‘Who’s this? I thought you …’ A sniff. ‘And what’s that bloody racket?’
The strains of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ came through the kitchen wall – Royce, whistling away to himself in the lounge. I didn’t have the heart to tell him to knock it off.
‘Dr Forrester, this is Dr McDonald, she has a tendency to babble and her hangover farts smell even worse than yours.’
Pink bloomed on her cheeks. ‘He’s not exactly … it’s … this isn’t really the first impression I wanted to make, I mean we’ve come all the way up here and now you think I’m some sort of drunkard, when really I was trying to dis-inhibit my normal thinking patterns so I could examine the case from the offender’s perspective.’
Henry raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, aren’t you … delightfully quirky.’ He settled onto one of the breakfast-bar stools. ‘What makes you think I’m hungover?’
I clunked a mug of black coffee down in front of him. ‘You’ve no milk.’
His hands shook as he picked it up and slurped. Then topped it off with Bells, the neck of the bottle clattering around the mug’s rim. ‘Before you say anything: it’s the Fluvoxamine – stops your body breaking down caffeine properly, gives you the tremors. And you’re not my mother. I’m seventy-two, I can drink what I want, when I want.’
Another slurp, then more whisky.
‘What happened to your windows?’
Henry peered over the rim of his mug. ‘Tell me, Dr McDonald, do you always binge drink when you’re working on a profile?’
She pulled out a stool and sat opposite him. ‘Actually, we call it “behavioural evidence analysis” now, everyone was watching all those television shows where the FBI come in and give a profile and it’s bang on and they catch the serial killer every time, and—’
‘Do you drink,