Page 21 of Murder Most Haunted

Dr Mortimer was a man who liked to take charge.

He told them so himself. In Midge’s experience, people who had to tell you they were taking charge often weren’t.

His first action was to insist on checking for signs of life, which got very messy, very quickly.

Harold said, ‘I’m no expert but even I can see he’s dead as a dodo’ – which Midge couldn’t help agreeing with.

But Andrew, despite Gloria begging him to just get on with it, said that ‘Rendell isn’t bloody dead until I say he’s dead’, at which point Harold said that ‘He certainly doesn’t look very well, then’.

Then Noah piped up to ask whether ‘he’s supposed to smell that bad’, and Harold replied that it was the decomposition because he was absolutely, definitely dead.

Which was when Midge could see Dr Mortimer wishing they would all get out and she couldn’t help agreeing with him.

That’s the problem with taking charge. It involves other people.

‘Bloody hell,’ Harold kept saying. ‘What the bloody hell?’

Noah threw up again, like he did at the sheep.

‘It’s blood,’ he explained. ‘I’m hemophobic.’

‘Thought you were a bit more woke than that,’ muttered Harold. He caught Midge’s eye. ‘Sorry, gallows humour.’

There was a lot of blood. The open wound had mixed with the water, leaving a bath of red liquid which dripped over the sides, spilling on to the floor. Thankfully, Harold had switched the taps off.

‘What about our phones?’ asked Rona, suddenly.

At first, Midge assumed Rona wanted to alert the police, but just as she was about to remind her that Rendell had confiscated their phones, to Midge’s surprise, Rona continued, ‘My life is on that phone . . . a lot of very personal information. If that falls into the wrong hands . . .’ She paled.

‘There’s a dead body in front of you and all you’re worried about is where your bloody phone is?’ Noah shook his head in disbelief. ‘Surely you haven’t got any personal information left anyway, have you? From what you said, your boobs are pretty much public property.’

‘Well, there’s nothing to stop us searching his room afterwards, I suppose,’ suggested Midge, who was relieved to steer the topic away from Rona’s bosoms again.

‘Rona, please can you take Gloria back to her room,’ said the doctor, standing up and looking at his wife. ‘You’ll only distress yourself.’

Gloria moved away from the bath before being swept out into the corridor by Rona.

‘Why would he do this?’ asked Noah when they had gone.

Midge blinked. ‘Do what?’

‘Kill himself.’

‘What makes you think he killed himself?’ she asked. The steam, although almost gone from the room, was making her feel both lightheaded and hot.

‘Uh, the bloody great slash mark on his throat?’ said Harold.

Midge leaned closer to the body. There was a cut-throat razor on the edge of the bath, but it was far larger than the wound itself.

‘And the door was locked,’ said Harold. ‘From the inside.’ He was right: there was a small brass key on the tiles next to the splinters of wood, inside the bathroom.

‘What are you doing, woman?’ Dr Mortimer said, washing his hands in the sink. ‘Move away from the body.’

Midge walked over to the window, which was shut and also locked. ‘He didn’t strike me as suicidal.’ She took a moment to consider everything in the room, analysing the position and condition of each object, recording it to memory.

‘Well, he certainly didn’t strike me as happy.’ Harold shrugged. ‘Who can tell what’s going on in someone else’s mind?’

‘That’s true,’ muttered the doctor.

‘We can’t leave him here.’ Noah looked a queasy shade of green.

What we need to do is preserve the scene, thought Midge, but she was reluctant to say so. Fortunately for them all, the doctor was busy ‘taking charge’.

‘We need to preserve the body for the police,’ he said, echoing Midge’s thoughts.

‘Keep him in the bath?’ suggested Noah, his hand over his mouth. ‘We’ve no idea when we’ll be able to get help.’

‘He’ll be all shrivelled like a prune,’ commented Harold. Midge glanced down at the body as Noah tried to float a flannel over the corpse’s modesty. It occurred to her that it was only the second time in her life that she had seen a naked man, and on both occasions, it had been Rendell.

‘What do we do about the body, then?’ said the doctor. ‘If we had some ice, we could keep him cool.’

Midge considered this herself. The body would quickly start to decompose in the water, making later forensic examination more difficult. If there was one thing the rows of evidence in the property office had taught her, it was that preservation was critical.

Harold pointed out of the window. ‘We could . . . well, we could always use the snow?’

Midge glanced outside. It was unorthodox, but on the face of it, if they could cover him in snow it would mean keeping him intact to some extent.

‘We would have to ensure minimum disturbance while packing the snow on,’ said Dr Mortimer.

‘I don’t think any of us are keen to start fiddling with him,’ retorted Harold. ‘If that’s what you mean.’

‘Excuse me!’ interrupted Noah. ‘While you’re busy discussing how to create a human popsicle, is no one else at all worried that we are now clearly stuck in the house with a hostile paranormal?’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked the doctor impatiently.

‘It’s the ghost,’ said Noah, trying to gulp some air without opening his mouth. ‘It wants us to help it or . . . something . . .’ He was now gabbling to such an extent that Midge decided he was probably panicking, and that the best course of action would be to either slap him or ignore him.

‘Ghosts aren’t real,’ said Dr Mortimer, firmly. ‘But this body is, and for now, we should preserve it and then the room.’

Unfortunately, Rendell proved to be just as awkward in death as he had been in life, and covering him in snow and ice was far easier said than done.

The first problem was agreeing on who would try to remove the plug from underneath him, in order to allow the hot water to drain out.

Fortunately, rigor mortis and pooling hadn’t yet set in, which Dr Mortimer explained to Noah would have led to an unpleasant and messy rectal evacuation.

Nor had the body decomposed enough to require the police underwater diving team and their protective gear, which was ideal for scooping up all of the subsequent body mush.

Andrew said this was a really good thing, because all they had managed to find was a couple of pairs of marigolds and they weren’t much protection against the hundreds of unpleasant bacteria released from dead body goop.

He began listing some of these before a nudge from Harold alerted him to the fact that Noah had turned an unhealthy shade of green at the word ‘mush’.

Fortunately, Harold had managed to find several buckets downstairs, which they used to transport the snow from outside.

Midge and Harold had to do this by themselves, because the doctor had gone to check on Gloria at the first sign of manual lifting and Noah had to keep stopping to throw up and wash his hands.

‘It’s not normal, you know,’ said Harold to Midge as they stood beside the baths after their second round of snow bathing. ‘All that hand-washing.’

‘Not normal?!’ shouted Noah, his face turning red. ‘Fiddling with a dead body isn’t exactly normal, is it? But you two look like you’re on a day out in Brighton.’

It was true.

‘Had to get used to dead bodies in the army,’ said Harold. And to killing people, thought Midge.

‘This is so messed up,’ said Noah. ‘You do realize that, don’t you?’

‘How about you?’ Harold asked Midge, waving a hand down at Rendell, who now looked like a grotesque caricature of Frosty the Snowman. ‘You seem fairly relaxed about it all.’

‘Dead people don’t talk as much,’ said Midge.

When it came to fetching the last bucket of snow, Midge had to ask Noah to carry it back into the house by himself because of the sharp, relentless pain radiating from her knee due to the unaccustomed physical effort.

‘Well, if ever we want to go into the body disposal business, I think we make quite the team!’ panted Harold, kicking at a croquet hoop protruding through the lawn’s snow.

‘Rendell is not disposed of,’ frowned Midge. ‘He’s quite clearly still inside the bathing room. You can see him any time, should you so want to.’

‘Sorry,’ muttered Harold, his nose pink with the cold. ‘Probably inappropriate, anyway.’

The sky was grey with the threat of sleet.

In the distance, the vast moorland slopes encircling them made Midge feel like a cornered ant, futilely scuttling around.

On the top floor of the hall, Midge could see Gloria looking out of her bedroom, her silhouette framed by the window and giving the appearance of a hooded eye watching from the house’s I.

‘Poor sod,’ said Harold.

Midge’s fingers were numb with the cold and her toes, despite the police boots, were curled under in an effort to retain some heat. ‘Who?’ she asked. ‘Gloria or Rendell?’ It was true, Gloria’s state of mind had seemed fragile enough before being confronted with a dead body.

‘Some people never have any luck in life,’ Harold replied.

Which was a novel thought for Midge, who had never considered that a person’s chances of being murdered were influenced by luck alone.

All in all, surely Harold seemed far too calm for a man whose employer had just been found dead under suspicious circumstances.

She was hoping there would be a clue when they searched Rendell’s room as to why he was dead.

Indeed, as she contemplated the freshly dug snow holes now peppering the lawn, something started to stir deep inside Midge, something that had perhaps been awakening for a while.

Her slumbering investigative instincts were telling her that despite Noah’s protestations of ghostly foul play and Harold’s of suicide, this was indeed a murder.

She stared after Harold as he made his way back towards the door, a long-forgotten feeling of excitement and anticipation working its way through her.

As he disappeared inside, it occurred to her that every one of them was now a suspect, and that out of all the guests in the hall, other than Harold, she was the one with the strongest motive to kill their host.

Bending her head, deep in thought, Midge poked her cane into the snow on the croquet grass and drew two circles, before slowly joining them together with a line.