A Mind Diseased Read online

  A MIND

  DISEASED

  Also by Catherine Moloney

  A Walking Shadow

  Blood Will Have Blood

  Night’s Black Agents

  A MIND

  DISEASED

  CATHERINE

  MOLONEY

  ROBERT HALE

  First published in 2019 by

  Robert Hale, an imprint of

  The Crowood Press Ltd,

  Ramsbury, Marlborough

  Wiltshire SN8 2HR

  www.crowood.com

  This e-book first published in 2019

  © Catherine Moloney 2019

  All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 71982 903 1

  The right of Catherine Moloney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1. A Voice from the Grave

  2. Through the Looking Glass

  3. Sleep No More

  4. Phantom Threads

  5. The Sleep of Reason

  6. A Cold Front

  7. Diminishing Returns

  8. Wheels Within Wheels

  9. Aftermath

  10. A Mystery

  11. Out of Joint

  12. Out of the Depths

  13. Countdown

  14. Finis

  Epilogue

  To the Highlanders,

  C, C and I

  PROLOGUE

  BLIMEY, THAT LAST STRETCH was a bugger. I’m getting too old for this.

  Ernie Roberts stood doubled over at the top of Bromgrove Rise on a raw Sunday afternoon in January, struggling to get his breath back. Finally, he straightened up and headed across to the bench whose lofty pre-eminence afforded panoramic views across Bromgrove Woods below.

  Gently, Ernie ran his fingers over the bench’s little bronze memorial plaque.

  In loving memory of Jean Roberts who loved this place.

  ‘Hello, luv,’ he wheezed. ‘I made it. Reckon I’ll be glad of that pint in the Shoulder of Mutton once I get back down.’

  Sitting down heavily, he looked about him.

  I’m the king of the world.

  Most Bromgrove folk found the Rise too bleak, with its undulating stretches of furze, gorse and heather criss-crossed by winding sandy paths. But Ernie never tired of watching the kaleidoscope play of the light across the shrubs and wild grasses, turning them into a mysterious ever-shifting sea so that he half expected to see Neptune or some other watery deity rise with a trident from their depths.

  Jean used to tease him for his poetical streak. ‘Fey, that’s what you are,’ she told him. But he knew she felt it too. Their own private kingdom, where they escaped into another world inaccessible to the soulless sing song tannoy of the Bestway Cash and Carry where Jean had worked on the tills or the endless refrain of rickety trolleys in the Newman Hospital which seemed to ring in his ears even after the day’s portering was done.

  He inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with the cold sharp air, wiping the week’s slate clean.

  Looking down towards the thickly clustering woods overhung by a blood-red sun, Ernie smiled as he watched Waffle scurrying in and out of spongy banks and rank thickets.

  Typical terrier. On the scent of God only knew what. Daft name for a dog really. But Jean had insisted …

  He must have lost himself for a bit. The light seemed to be growing wan, and wreaths of mist were rising from the ground like ghostly exhalations.

  Time to make a move. Somewhat stiff now, Ernie heaved himself to his feet.

  Again, he ran his fingers over the plaque in valediction before heading back down the gravel track which skirted the edge of the woods.

  ‘C’mon, Waffle,’ he called. ‘Home time.’

  Suddenly, the little terrier erupted from the underbrush barking, as Ernie later said, like something possessed.

  Alternately circling Ernie and darting backwards and forwards to the adjacent copse, Waffle clearly had something she wanted to show him.

  Oh God. A rotting carcass or some such. Guaranteed to put him right off his pint …

  Gingerly, he advanced into the copse. It felt oppressive after the crisp freedom of the hilltop.

  Too many stifling trees.

  In that instant, he very much wanted to be away from the gloom and the spiralling mist which seemed to stalk him like a footpad.

  ‘C’mon, girl,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Whatever it is, it can wait. We—’

  Whatever Ernie had meant to say remained unsaid, his heart beating twice as fast as normal.

  Waffle was dancing around what was recognizably a skeletonized human arm and hand sticking out of a clump of undergrowth.

  Afterwards, Ernie thought how absurd it was that he had tiptoed forwards as though this was some fairy story and he was afraid to waken the sleeper in the forest.

  This wasn’t like the forests of childhood, where playing and singing would echo through the trees and the dense foliage was touched with enchantment.

  This was a place where something unspeakably evil had happened.

  Murder.

  Most of the skeleton was there in the tangled scrub.

  With the detached, rational part of his mind, he wondered how long it had taken for the body to decompose to bones and whether animals had made off with the rest.

  Was it foxes? Or rats? Did they fight over the body? Did they tear it to shreds?

  How come nobody found it until now?

  Why him?

  Suddenly, the hairs rose on the back of Ernie’s neck, as though there was a shadowy figure watching the scene with him. Gloating.

  He spun round, checking every murky patch of foliage.

  No-one.

  Slowly, he turned back to the remains.

  Waffle was quiet now, spooked like him.

  A wave of crushing pity washed over Ernie.

  Wasn’t it enough to kill the poor soul, without dumping the corpse like this out in the open, exposed to the elements, at the mercy of scavengers?

  The ultimate indignity.

  Along with the pity, Ernie felt a surge of hatred so strong it nearly choked him.

  Jean’s memorial was defiled. Her magical kingdom polluted by something unspeakable.

  Bending down, with shaking hands he put the leash on a now subdued Waffle.

  Then he fumbled for his mobile.

  1

  A Voice from the Grave

  A MISTY MONDAY MORNING. Another bench. This time, the back of Bromgrove Police Station where DI Gilbert Markham sat enjoying a moment of tranquillity.

  It was always like this at the start of a case. The need to fill himself with total stillness before the mayhem of the investigation took over.

  Markham felt almost as though he wasn’t even breathing. Almost as though he’d become part of some municipal phantasmagoria rather than a city of bricks and mortar.

  There in front of him was the blackened Victorian pile of the Town Hall. Behind that rose the ancient terraces of St Chad’s cemetery on one side and Hollingrove Park with its gentle contours on the other.

  A view as familiar to him as his own face. A view he had contemplated thousands of times before.

  And yet now, by some mysterious alchemy, subtly different.

  The alchemy of murder.

  In the stillness, Markham felt he was absorbing everything around him with clinical detachment, with no conscious thought at all. Observation, but no observer. A vibrant, alert hyper-awareness.

  If he listened hard enough, he would hear voices pulsating through the landscape, pushing back the walls of time. The voices of those ‘dunged with rotten death’ who cried out to be avenged.

  With one long, last look, the DI got up and made his way round to the main entrance and the lift which would whisk him to CID.

  Early as it was, two familiar faces awaited him.

  DS George Noakes was sprawled across his work station wolfing down what looked like a McDonald’s double sausage and egg McMuffin, watched by DS Kate Burton of whose appalled expression he was happily oblivious.

  It was an amusing study in contrasts. The grizzled, frowsy veteran and the bright-as-a-button university graduate.

  Despite the DCI’s best efforts, Markham had stubbornly resisted all attempts to prise George Noakes from his side. He couldn’t do his job without the other’s unvarnished honesty, common sense and bloody-minded disregard for social conventions. It was as simple as that. Rarely as they shared personal confidences, the DI knew that no man’s metal rang as true as Noakes’s, and that they somehow understood each other at a level beyond words. Wherever their investigations took them, whatever treacherous shoals and quicksands they had to navigate, he knew the DS had his back, ‘though hell should bar the way’. ‘The bizarrest bromance,’ Markham’s teacher girlfriend Olivia Mullen was wont to chuckle, but she had a soft sp
ot for Noakes who reciprocated in kind, regarding his boss’s willowy red-haired partner with a reverential awe which was proof against any amount of disapproval from ‘the missus’ or ribbing by colleagues.

  Queasily, with intimations of nausea circling round her digestive system, Kate Burton observed her fellow DS gobble down the last greasy morsel of his McMuffin. A contented postprandial belch indicated that it had lived up (or should that be down?) to expectations.

  With a sardonic glance at Noakes, the DI headed for his glassed-in corner office with unrivalled views of the station car park. Snatching up her notebook, Burton was quick to follow while Noakes took one last slurp of his coffee and lobbed the plastic cup in the direction of his waste basket, not appearing unduly concerned when it missed.

  Markham gave the radiator in his freezing office a halfhearted thump, as if by that means he could galvanize the temperamental heating system into action. Then he sat down behind his desk, waving his two subordinates to chairs opposite.

  As ever, Noakes’s working ensemble seemed positively calculated to induce a migraine, the virulent mustard jacket and candy stripe shirt straining over baggy chinos the colour of shredded wheat. The dazzling effect of a Royal British Legion tie was significantly diminished by a large blob of ketchup smack in the middle, while the overall look was best described as dragged through a hedge backwards. Watching him chomping away at his coronary-in-a-carton, only breaking off for slugs of coffee, Markham had sent up a silent prayer of thanks that DCI Sidney’s quarters were two floors up so that he was unlikely ever to witness such Lucullan debauches. As it was, the DS’s continued presence in CID was a running sore to Sidney, or Slimy Sid as he was more popularly known. ‘He’ll drag you down, you mark my words,’ went the perennial refrain. ‘Looks like a slob, and as for interpersonal skills … the diversity people just throw up their hands in horror. The sooner we can put him out to grass, the better. I mean, Noakes, the face of modern policing! It’s a sick joke!’

  ‘Well, was it him, Guv? The doc?’ Noakes asked.

  Burton leaned forward, eager to hear the answer.

  ‘Yes, it was, Noakes. Doctor Jonathan Warr, consultant psychiatrist at the Newman Hospital. Missing for nearly a year. Until now, not a trace, nothing. The smart money was on him having experienced some kind of breakdown or amnesiac episode. And there had been rumours of marital strain and stress at work, not least because of an ongoing investigation by the General Medical Council and Care Quality Commission into allegations of patient abuse at the facility. All in all, more than enough to tip even a well-respected professional over the edge.’

  ‘But this breakdown business is only a theory, innit, Guv?’

  ‘Yes, only a theory. Another theory is that Doctor Warr disappeared to start a new life, though there were no leads to indicate whether he had tried to fake his own death or had experienced a protracted fugue state which led to him walking out. Anyway, whatever the truth of the matter, it’s definitely Doctor Warr,’ said Markham quietly. ‘Dental records confirm it. And there were some scraps of clothing.’

  ‘How come no-one found the body till now?’ Noakes was puzzled. ‘I mean, isn’t Bromley Woods where all the dog walkers and fitness freaks hang out?’

  ‘There would have been two feet or so of water when Doctor Warr was dumped there … probably around last March.’

  Doctor Warr. For Markham, the dead were never anonymous, and he was notoriously intolerant of any approach to gallows humour. Junior officers had learned the hard way to avoid any off-colour remarks around the austere DI whose gaze could freeze a subordinate at ten paces.

  ‘A watercourse, sir?’ Burton tried to visualize the topography. ‘So, that would have made decomposition happen faster? Does this mean he died at the same time as he disappeared? What about—’

  A snort from Noakes brought her up short. She blushed.

  DS Burton’s nut-brown pageboy hairdo gleamed like an advertisement for L’Oréal, while alert brown eyes watched everything from under her neat fringe with the air of an intelligent beagle. A well-cut charcoal trouser suit, immaculate white shirt and highly polished black ankle boots all proclaimed that this was a young officer going places, while her work station, streamlined within an inch of its life, could not have presented a greater contrast with that of her dishevelled neighbour.

  Although not exactly pretty, Kate Burton’s retroussé nose and neat features were not without a certain charm. Keenly intelligent and ambitious, there had been resistance from home when she joined the force so her police career had not been plain sailing, whatever Noakes said about fast-track graduates and silver spoons.

  Having worked together on an earlier case which led to Burton’s permanent promotion to CID (via an MA in Gender Studies at Bromgrove University), an uneasy truce had formed between her and Noakes. In some strange way, their widely differing personalities complemented each other, though the old war horse’s un-PC pronouncements were still capable of raising her hackles. Most of the time, however, she refused to rise to the bait.

  Deep inside, though unacknowledged by either of them, Burton knew she had another reason to be grateful to Noakes. Newly transferred to CID, she had nursed a hopeless infatuation for the DI. Hopeless, because he had eyes only for Olivia Mullen. She knew now that Noakes must have guessed the lie of the land but – for all he possessed the primitive cunning of a stone age pygmy – he had never held her up to ridicule; had even saved her from making a fool of herself over Markham.

  Well, she was older and wiser now. And engaged to a DS in Fraud, thank you very much.

  But even now, the sight of the DI’s dark head and saturnine good looks, coupled with the melancholy sensitivity which made him somehow unlike any policeman she had ever met, still made her heart miss a beat, so that she became as tongue-tied as any schoolgirl.

  She would have to watch herself, Burton thought grimly. Especially around Noakes.

  ‘Sorry, sir, I’m getting ahead of myself.’

  ‘That’s all right, Kate.’ Markham smiled at her go-getting enthusiasm. Then his face clouded. ‘It seems likely Doctor Warr died around the time that he disappeared. Animals and running water took away some of the bones, but most of the skeleton was intact.’

  A gruesome abyss opened in Burton’s mind, then she veered back to theories.

  ‘D’you think it’s connected with the patient abuse scandal at the Newman, sir?’

  Before the DI could answer, Noakes weighed in.

  ‘Oh, c’mon. It’s a loony bin, right? Any one of the crazies could’ve done it. Remember when we went there on the St Mary’s investigation, Guv … real Silence of the Lambs that was.’

  ‘I remember it all too well, Sergeant.’ Markham’s tone was trenchant. ‘And while we’re at it, do you think you could remember that the appropriate designation is special hospital as opposed to “loony bin”, and that the inmates are patients rather than “crazies”?’

  The DS grinned, not at all abashed by the reproof. ‘Righto, Guv.’

  Hide of an elephant, thought Burton, wondering for the umpteenth time about the nature of the bond between her uncouth shambling colleague and Markham. Subconsciously, she was jealous of the unspoken understanding she sensed between Noakes and their legendarily chilly boss. Whatever it was, she knew the DS was one of Markham’s non-negotiables.

  If she had been asked to describe her ideal man, Burton’s description would have answered point for point to Gilbert Markham, right down to the far-seeing grey eyes and chiselled refinement quite unlike that of anyone else on the force. Aloof from the petty practices, politics and palpable bids for favour which bedevilled CID, he was the ‘sea-green incorruptible’ of her ideals. And yet she knew he would never look in her direction. Not in that way …

  Burton’s mind wandered to Colin, her solid, dependable fiancé. Cupid’s dart struck when they worked together on a conspiracy investigation, and before long they were an item. Her parents – particularly her father, who had always been against her joining the police on the grounds that it was ‘no job for a woman’– thoroughly approved. If she were totally honest with herself, that was the reason why she’d agreed when Colin suggested they get engaged. That and the thrill of being part of a couple. She need no longer despair of always being the person left behind, seeking a connection, seeking love. She would no longer have to wear the armour she had built round herself as a lonely only child. Finally, she could say ‘We’ not ‘I’.