Sycamore Gap: A DCI Ryan Mystery(73)

“Other exits?” Ryan asked.

“None, sir. The garden to the rear is inaccessible except through the house itself, and is walled off from the neighbours.”

“At what time did you gain entry?”

“We received DS Phillips’ message approximately thirty minutes’ ago, at eight-fifteen. We acted upon it immediately, intending to bring the suspect into police custody. We knocked at the door and identified ourselves several times. Believing the suspect to be inside the house and ignoring us, we forewarned the suspect that we had the appropriate warrant to enter his property and DC Fowler retrieved the battering ram from the boot of the car to force entry if necessary.”

Ryan flicked a glance towards the front door, which remained intact, then back to the reporting constable.

“No, sir,” he answered the unspoken question. “There was no need to force the door. We tried the handle and found it was unlocked.”

“Then?”

“We conducted a search of the property and found it to be in some state of disarray, at least downstairs. There is one awkward issue, sir, which is that the suspect’s mother …” he consulted his notebook to find her name, “… a Mrs Geraldine Hart, appears to be asleep in one of the bedrooms upstairs. We tried to be quiet, so as not to wake her …” He trailed off, clearly unsure of himself.

Ryan and Phillips exchanged a look.

“We’ll be careful not to wake Sleeping Beauty,” Ryan couldn’t help the sarcasm. “Meantime, I want an All Ports Warning out on her blue-eyed boy. We’ve got the local lads watching out for a man who matches his description in the vicinity. Is that his car?” He eyed the blue Honda sitting on the driveway.

“That car’s the only one registered to his name,” Phillips chimed in.

“So he’s unlikely to have transport, unless he’s hired something. No pick-ups, no deliveries?”

“No sir, no visitors at all to the property during our surveillance.”

“So he’s likely on foot. See if you can get the traffic helicopter involved – we can cover a wider area that way. Make a start on tracing his mobile phone.”

“Shall I contact Gregson?”

Ryan should have been in regular contact with his Chief Superintendent.

“He can wait,” he said shortly, and then turned towards the house. They pulled on plastic shoe coverings, nitrile gloves and wished they had full body overalls to complete the ensemble.

As they stepped into the grand old house, there was a thick scent of lavender permeating the air, just as MacKenzie had described. It clung to the nostrils and brought to mind funeral parlours or nursing homes, depending upon one’s degree of optimism. The hallway was clean and tidy and, beyond it, they glimpsed the reception rooms and the kitchen. They bypassed those and made directly for the stairs because it seemed obvious to both men that, in order to have slept through that level of commotion, Geraldine Hart would have to be souped up on sleeping pills, or dead.

Upon closer inspection, it turned out that she was dead.

“Did they come in on the banana boat, or what?” Phillips shook his head in disbelief at the younger generation of detectives rising in the ranks. How they could have mistaken the state of Geraldine Hart’s body as being anything other than dead as a door knob, was beyond him.

“First thing on Monday, they’re on a refresher training course,” Ryan muttered.

The room stank. There was no other word for it. The heady mixture of food matter gone off and fruit-flavoured medication was nothing in comparison with the scent of raw sewage, which pervaded the airspace. Geraldine’s body had evacuated itself either before or after it died; that much was clear from the sticky brown mess on the bedclothes beneath where she lay.

The television was turned down low and the theme tune to some facile morning show invaded the room. Ryan wished he could have touched the volume control, to silence the jingle, but training held him steadfastly in his place by the door.

“Just when you think you’ve seen it all –”

“You realise you haven’t. Not by a long shot,” Ryan finished Phillips’ sentence.

“Don’t know how she could let herself get into that state,” Phillips said, but with a trace of pity rather than judgement. He was a fair man.

Ryan said nothing. He knew from his background checks into the lives of Colin Hart and his mother that she suffered from a number of illnesses, all of which were attributable to her being drastically overweight. Diabetes, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, to name a few. Apparently, she’d had a stroke a few years back. If she had been his own mother – hard to imagine, when he thought of Eve Finlay-Ryan – he might have found it hard to broach the taboo subject of her increasing weight gain. There was, most likely, a psychological basis to it all and he knew better than most how prickly a subject one’s own psychology could be.