Later he had gone home and eaten a plate of fish and chips, which he had smothered liberally with tomato ketchup, then he had gone to the pub and had a beer or two. Only at the close of the day did he suddenly realize that as a policeman, accumulating the sort of experiences that come to most people only once a lifetime, he had calmly taken in his stride a trauma that would otherwise have shaken him badly. Now, years later, he found himself calmly taking the air and enjoying the evening when inside the house was a woman whose life had all but come to an end, who now sat in a state of numbed shock in a chair in the drawing room, attended by W.P.C. Willems, while in the dining room her husband’s life had completely come to an end. Bloodily.
Dr. Chan, the police surgeon, had pronounced death within fifteen seconds of kneeling beside the body and then systematically began to count the stab wounds.
“Fifteen in the front of the torso,” he said. “There may be others in the rear of the body, but I won’t move him, of course — it might interfere with the work of the pathologist.” Chan was a small Oriental — always, thought Donoghue, highly professional. He had then stood, saying, “I’d like to stay to observe the pathologist’s work, but I have a sudden death in Maryhill.”
Donoghue thanked him as the doctor left the house, the locus of the offense. In the dining room, two constables stood reverently in the corner and a scene-of-crimes officer began to make ready his camera. The smell of death was beginning to rise. It was always the same smell — not unlike dried leaves, but sweeter and mustier. From women, from men, from the young, from the old, from the poor or from, as in this case, the rich, it was always the same. It was at that point that Donoghue, knowing his presence was not immediately required, had gone outside to enjoy the evening, and to wait for the arrival of Dr. Reynolds.
He strolled to the bottom of the drive and noticed the occasional curtain move in one or another of the neighboring houses as the police activity attracted attention. But the people who lived in Maxwell Park were discreet and polite, not venturing from their homes. In the sprawling peripheral housing schemes, any similar activity on the part of the police would cause a crowd to gather, blatantly staring, hoping to catch a glimpse of the corpse or of the arrest or whatever, but not here where the stockbrokers lived. Here, although they would surrender to a little curiosity, people minded their own affairs.
Donoghue turned and walked back up the driveway to the side of the house and then round to the rear. The only sounds were his shoes crunching the gravel and the birds singing in the warm, placid Sunday-evening air. He felt quite at home in these surroundings and, with his tailored three-piece suit, gold hunter’s-chain looping across his waistcoat, and his pipe with its slightly curved stem, he would, to an onlooker, seem indeed to be quite at home. The garden at the rear of the house was landscaped. There were rockeries, shrubberies, and croquet hoops in the lawn.
A car door slamming shut penetrated the still evening and Donoghue returned to the side of the house and saw Dr. Reynolds striding purposefully up the drive. He walked toward the tall silver-haired pathologist. “Good evening, sir,” he said.
“Good evening, Inspector.” Reynolds nodded cheerfully. “What have you got for me?”
“One male, middle-aged, sir,” said Donoghue. “Dr. Chan has pronounced him dead. Apparently from stab wounds.”
“Apparently?”
“Well, that’s really your department, sir.” Donoghue invited Reynolds to enter the house in front of him. “But even a layman could say that the number of wounds involved wouldn’t have done his health the world of good.”
Reynolds stepped over the threshold into the hallway. Oak panels, imposing stairway. “What was the deceased’s profession, do you know?”
“He was a medical man, I believe, sir. An obstetrician.”
“Opposite side of the coin to me, eh? He brings them into the world, I find out what caused them to leave. Where’s the corpse?”
“First door on the right, sir.”
Reynolds opened the heavy oak door and Donoghue followed him into the room. A camera bulb flashed. Elliot Bothwell was dusting the room for latents. The two constables still stood in a corner awaiting instructions. The body lay as it had been found, between the dining table and the crockery cabinet.
“I see what you mean,” said Reynolds. He looked down at the corpse, his heavily bloodstained shirt, the blood-soaked carpet. The dead man’s right hand was tightly clenched into a fist, his left was badly lacerated. “Tried to grab the knife with his left hand, I’d say,” Reynolds remarked. He knelt and prized open the right fist. A button fell onto the carpet. “Mr. Bothwell!” Donoghue called.
“Sir?” Elliot Bothwell blinked behind his thick-lensed spectacles.
“Do you have a cellophane bag? Small size?”
Bothwell walked across the room and handed Donoghue a small self-sealing cellophane sachet. Donoghue picked up the button between thumb and forefinger and dropped it into the sachet. “See if you can lift any latents from it,” he said, handing the sachet to Bothwell, “then send it to the Forensic Science Lab at Pitt Street.”
Reynolds glanced at Donoghue. “Most probably torn from the attacker’s clothing, you think?”
“It would seem likely, sir.”
Reynolds began to take notes. “Do you have any idea when this incident happened?”
“All we can tell is between three and five P.M. today,” Donoghue said. “Being the times when the deceased’s wife left her husband enjoyably reading the Sunday papers and returned to find him as we see him now. She didn’t touch anything and managed to retain self-control long enough to phone three nines. We arrived to find her still holding the telephone in a state of deep shock. Dr. Chan prescribed a mild sedative. She’s sitting in the next room — quite conscious, but not talking at all.”
“Who can blame her?” Reynolds slipped a thermometer into the deceased man’s mouth and used a second thermometer to measure the temperature of the room. “They’ve probably been married for thirty years and were looking forward to enjoying each other’s company for a good number more. One minute you see a golden road stretching before you and the very next there’s nothing there but a brick wall.”
“We’d like to begin interviewing as soon as we can,” Donoghue said. “The trail’s getting colder by the second.”
“No indication of motive?” Reynolds took the thermometer from the dead man’s mouth and noted the temperature.
“It doesn’t appear to be robbery,” Donoghue said. “There’s no indication of forced entry — no evidence of anything being disturbed as we would expect to find in the case of a burglary.”
Reynolds stood. “A personal motive, then?”
“It would appear so. Which is why we’re doubly keen to talk to his wife. Somebody didn’t like him.”
Reynolds looked down at the corpse in the scarlet-stained shirt and turned to Donoghue. “That, Inspector, even for you, is something of an understatement. Well, I can’t do anything else here. I’ll have the body removed to the Royal Infirmary. I’ll phone my findings in as soon as I can.”
“He had no enemies at all,” said the woman, wrapping herself tighter in a black shawl — the only suitable garment, she had apologized, that she had in her wardrobe. In the twenty-four hours since she had discovered her husband’s mutilated corpse, she seemed, to a stunned and shocked Elka Willems, to have aged ten to fifteen years. Richard King, who took the statement, never having seen her before, assumed that she normally looked like this — grey hair, drawn face, sunken, distant eyes, hunched frame — but Elka could recall the woman she had seen before, a full face atop a proudly held body. “He had no enemies,” the widow said.