‘Excuse me,’ she called out. ‘You look lost. Can I help you?’
‘Possibly,’ I replied, walking to the end of her short garden path. ‘I’m trying to locate a house called Ailsa View and a man named Hodgson. I was told it was in this street, but I can’t see any sign of it.’
‘Not surprising,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty well hidden. If you go to the end of the street, there’s a house called Lindisfarne. It looks as if it has a double driveway, but in fact half of it leads to Ailsa View. It’s hidden behind it. Hodgson,’ she repeated. ‘That’s the chap’s name, is it? Funny, isn’t it, that you can live in a street as short as this one for twenty-five years, and still you don’t know all your neighbours. No wonder they call him the Hermit.’ She laughed. ‘Maybe he should change the name to “The Hermitage”. More appropriate than “Ailsa View”. You don’t get a glimpse of the Ailsa Craig from here.’
I thanked her and followed her direction. She was right; at first glance I’d taken the gravel driveway as leading into Lindisfarne. It was only when I was close to it that I saw the bifurcation and the curve beyond it.
I followed it, the stones crunching beneath my feet, until Hodgson’s place came into view, facing at ninety degrees to the one in front. It wasn’t much of a house, smaller than any other in the street; it had a garden, or rather a grassy area in front that didn’t come close to resembling a proper lawn. I wondered if the owner of Lindisfarne had cashed in on half of his plot, but the place looked as old as any of its neighbours and in a poorer state of repair. Whoever developed the land had jammed it into maximise profit, I decided.
Its name was on a small plaque, wall mounted, to the right of brown wooden double doors that looked in want of a coat of varnish, and above a white plastic bell stud. I pressed it, leaning hard for five or six seconds, then waited: in vain.
I tried the storm doors, but they were locked. I rattled the letter box, in case the bell wasn’t sounding indoors. I took out my mobile and called Hodgson’s number. From within I could hear it ring out seven times, then go silent as it switched to auto answer.
‘Bugger,’ I muttered.
There was a square bay window to the left of the entrance and a smaller single pane to the right. I peered in each, but they were screened by Venetian blinds, closed tightly enough to deny me any more than the narrowest glimpse of the rooms inside.
Sure as hell, I hadn’t driven all that way to turn around and go home without having a bloody good look around. I walked round to the back of the house, checking the window of each room as I went, but none of them offered any better view than the two in front, other than the kitchen, at the back.
I peered through the dirty glass. There was a milk carton on the work surface and a packet of biscuits, but nothing else in sight other than a few lazy flies.
Jock Hodgson’s garage was at the end of the driveway, in the rear left-hand corner of the plot. It had an up-and-over door that was locked, and another to the side that wasn’t.
I opened it and stepped inside.
I hadn’t seen a Ford Escort in years, not one from the late sixties with what they called the Coke bottle body style, but Jock Hodgson had one, F registration in the old number style. Unlike his house, it was immaculate. The body shell looked as new, and the paint was brilliant white, beneath a coating of dust. The bumpers were shiny without a speck of rust to be seen. I opened the driver’s door and leaned inside; even the blue imitation leather seats were pristine. The only thing about it that wasn’t original was a Samsung mobile phone lying in the footwell on the driver’s side. I knew for sure that if I raised the hood, I’d find that the cylinder head was polished. It was a collector’s car, an engineer’s car, a show car.
And the key was in the ignition. And the side door to the garage was unlocked.
I don’t know much about collectable cars; these days I buy mine new and trade them in before they’re old enough to need an MOT. But looking at that Escort, which was nearly as old as me, I guessed it had to be worth close on ten grand. Clearly, the man Hodgson loved that vehicle, yet anyone could have gone in there, raised the up-and-over from the inside and driven off with it.
That was the point when my instincts told me that something was very wrong. I knew I should have twigged it earlier, that something else should have rung my alarm bell, but I couldn’t pin it down. While I thought about it, I turned the key in the ignition . . . and all I heard was the clunk of a stone dead battery. I tried the lights; the dashboard panel barely flickered. I gripped the steering wheel and my hand became enmeshed in a spider’s web that I hadn’t noticed before.
And that’s when I realised what had been out of place: those flies in the kitchen. How many flies do you expect to find in a cold house in the first week in February?
There were three other keys on the ring that fed the ignition. I pulled it out and examined them. One was long and thin, and had to be for the up-and-over, another was a Yale, and I suspected that it matched the lock I’d noticed on the side door.
The third was for a mortice lock. I returned to the back door, looking into the kitchen again as I passed the window. There were quite a few of those damn flies, especially if I counted the dead ones that lay at the foot of the pane. I tried the key; it turned, I opened the door, stepped into the kitchen . . . and that was when the smell hit me.
The geeks who post on lurid online forums say the odour of decomposing human flesh is unique; they’re wrong. In my experience, the smell of death is more subtle than that. There’s an underlying, cloying sweetness to it, but it varies with the stage of decomposition and with the shape and bulk of the person before life became extinct. The one thing that is universally accepted is that it’s horrible and you don’t want to be breathing in the molecules that create it.
I’ve asked Sarah how she copes with it; all she says is ‘mental conditioning’, and yet the same woman has repeating deodorant sprays in every bathroom in our house.
I grabbed a towel that was hanging from a hook on a cupboard door, held it over my nose and mouth and went in search of the source. All I had to do was follow the flies; the closer I got the thicker they swarmed.
I found him in the living room. Jock Hodgson had been tied to a chair; his wrists and left ankle were secured by some form of restraint that I couldn’t see properly because they were so swollen. His face was black, and his head lolled on his left shoulder; his body was distended, and his clothes stretched, by gases. He looked ready to burst; I hoped he would contain himself, literally, until I was gone.
The swelling was most obvious in his feet, for he wore neither shoes nor socks. They had been removed and lay beside him. I could guess the reason.
I backed out of there. I didn’t want to contaminate the scene, nor did I want the scene to contaminate me, any more than it had already. In the garden I drew deep breath after deep breath, and blew my nose hard, on the handkerchief from my breast pocket, yet the stink of the dead Hodgson was still with me. My suit wasn’t going to the dry cleaner, that I knew; it was bound for the incinerator.
I took my phone from its pocket inside my jacket and thumbed through my directory until I reached ‘M’. A few months before I’d probably have stopped at ‘Martin’, but in the new situation there was no guarantee that my call would be accepted. Instead I carried on to ‘McGuire’.
‘Bob,’ my friend answered on the first ring. ‘What’s up? Have you decided you need to speak to McGarry?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got somebody else in mind, two people in fact. My assignment for Eden Higgins has just become very complicated and very smelly. You need to send a CSI team to Dunglas Avenue, in Wemyss Bay; that and the best matched CID pair you’ve got.’ I told him who they were.