“Practising? Practising what? Trying to kill me?”
“No, of course not. Practising archery.”
There would once have been a time when this reply would have left me not only short of things to say but also short of breath to say them with. But no longer; I knew him too well. My father collected new hobbies like small boys collect pictures of first-division footballers, only he tired of them considerably more quickly. Over the last year he had taken up campanology, astronomy, carpentry, metalwork, juggling and karate; admittedly, the last he had been forced to give up after two days when he broke his fifth metacarpal trying to chop firewood with his bare hands, but all the rest had arrived with a rush of enthusiasm, stayed for a few weeks, then dwindled to indifference in the space of perhaps five days.
“You were aiming at the door to your garden,” I pointed out.
“Of course I was,” he said, his voice betraying doubt that I was using my brain about the matter. “That’s where I pinned the target.” He gestured behind us and we turned to see a large paper archery target peppered with holes – none in the bull – on the inside of the garden gate. “The pathway down the side of the garage makes a nice shooting gallery.”
“But you knew we were coming in that way.”
He frowned. “So? Oh, don’t worry,” he said airily. “I wouldn’t have fired the arrow if the door had been any more open than it was.”
I didn’t believe that for one moment but knew better than to argue the point, so tried another one. “As it was, the bloody thing went through the wood and nearly got me in the eye.”
“I know,” he said with real enthusiasm. “Very impressive, you’ll have to agree. And all with a home-made bow. Come over here and look at it.”
He toddled off and all Max and I could do was proffer each other a despairing smile and follow him. I have never been able to decide whether my father is a madman pretending sanity, or a sane man pretending madness. He was standing just in front of his homemade, oil-drum barbecue from which the distinct odour of burning meat was rising. He was cradling his bow with the kind of love that is normally only seen in mothers with their first-born. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
It was, I have to admit, a fairly impressive item; about five foot long and an inch in diameter at the middle, it was highly polished and had a handle made of a crepe bandage wound tightly round. Just below this there was some sort of thin bolt protruding forwards, on the end of which was welded a five-pound kitchen weight. Just above the handle was a slight notch on the left-hand edge.
“I made it myself.” My father said this in the tone of voice that dared you not to be impressed. Max complied with, “Wonderful craftsmanship, Dr Elliot. You’re clearly very talented.” I merely said, “Mmm…”
“I got this book on archery out of the library and I suddenly thought what a brilliant idea to make my own longbow.”
“Have you killed anyone yet?”
He took offence. “What do you mean by that?”
“You came close with me. If that arrow had hit a knothole in the wood, at this present moment I’d be doing a fairly lifelike imitation of King Harold on the field at Hastings.”
He turned to Max. “He does go on so, doesn’t he?”
At which point, with a faint “whoosh”, the whole barbecue went up in flames and, what with trying to save the food and stop the overhanging sycamore tree from burning down, the subject wasn’t raised again that evening. As we ate meat that varied from cremated to raw in the space of two mouthfuls, I remember vaguely wondering whether I should try to argue him out of his current obsession but, what with nearly being killed and then having to play at fire brigades all in one evening, I didn’t feel strong enough to ask.
At 7 o’clock on Thursday, 3 June, on a hot and sticky day, I parked my car in Fairlands Avenue, which stretched and curved away behind me, rather upmarket terraced houses staring at each other across the road. The reason I was there was not because of the day job as a general practitioner, but because I had newly become a Police Surgeon. I had not wanted the post but had been badgered into it by Brian, my practice colleague, who had been doing it for ten years and was now about to retire; he had been assisted in this coercion by my father – himself a Police Surgeon in his day – who painted a rosy-hued picture of the life, one that, inevitably, was as true to reality as my father’s recollections of his war exploits. It was not a pleasurable thing to do – although it did supplement my income quite nicely – and it had the amazing knack of doing maximum damage to my social life. I was becoming seriously afraid that Max would soon forget how beautiful I was.
I walked up to the top of the road where Fairlands Avenue met Thornton Road, which was where a lot of coppers were thronging. I had been doing the job long enough to be let in to what I discovered to be a clockmaker’s shop – proprietor Harvey Carlton, Esquire – without hindrance, where I found Inspector Masson. I wish I could say that he and I were buddies of the bosom kind, that we spent many a long night chatting cosily about our mutual hobbies, how we both quite liked ABBA (although all their songs tend to sound the same) and how we were delighted that Southampton had trounced Manchester United in the FA Cup final. In truth, though, I was slightly scared of him, and he was completely contemptuous of me; this was not the basis for a deep, lasting relationship.
There was an even greater concentration of constabulary blue behind him as he turned to face me. “Doctor,” he said, as he usually did, his tone suggesting that he had hoped for better.
“Inspector.”
“We normally wouldn’t have bothered you, but the pathologist’s been taken with diarrhoea and vomiting.”
Maybe he meant this well, but I had the impression he found my presence only slightly more welcome than an attack of either. “What’s happened?”
He turned and gestured me forward. I followed him through the uniforms that parted as we moved amongst them to reveal the body of a man dressed in brown overalls. He was on his back and his left eye was gone, replaced by a bloodied pulp. In falling, he had knocked over a whole shelf full of clocks, watches, barometers and weather stations, many of which appeared to have shattered, so that he was surrounded by an astonishingly intricate array of cogs, wheels, wood splinters, coils and spherules of mercury.
“Ouch.”
“Did that kill him?” asked Masson.
I rather hoped that it had, but I couldn’t say for sure immediately. “Can I move him?”
“SOCO have got all the photos they need for now,” he assured me, so I gently took the head in my hands and lifted it, feeling the scalp with the tips of my fingers. There was a soft boggy patch that would do for an exit wound. Then, having laid it back down, I quickly looked over the rest of the body, enlisting a constable to turn it so that I could look at the back; I tested the limbs for rigor mortis and gross bony injuries, checked for bruising around the neck and ligature marks around the wrists and ankles. Then, telling myself that a corpse has no dignity to lose, I undid his belt, pulled down his trousers and pants, and inserted a thermometer where not only the sun didn’t shine but there was no starlight either. I left it there for five minutes, pulled it out and examined it, noting the temperature before wiping it with a tissue and putting back in its holder. Without completely stripping the body, it was as good an examination as I could make.
“Well?” Masson’s tone suggested that he was fed up with watching me footle around pretending to know what I was doing.
“The body’s only lost two degrees and it’s still limp, so I’d estimate he’s been dead about three to four hours…”
If I thought I was doing well, Masson soon put me right. “I know when he died, Doctor. As he fell he broke at least eight clocks and all of them stopped at the same time – three-fifty-two.”