Butterfield's Hate

By S.D. Gripton and Sally Dillon-Snape

This is a Fourth crime investigation for Dave Lewis and Mariska Masekova. This time they are being hounded by Butterfield, a fat ex-cop, who blames Dave for getting him dismissed from the police force following the Darke Revenge investigation, and for killing his mother, who dropped to the floor dead in front of him. To help in his insane revenge plot, he garners six psychopathic teenagers to his side, he trains them to be acrobatic clowns, complete with make-up and colourful clothing, and they kill whole families for him, they kill anyone he points them at. And the final targets are Dave and Mariska, and those living in the house. With the help of some new equipment installed in the house, Dave, Mariska, Sophie, the Twins, and a fairly new resident, Linda Walk, try to head Butterfield and his clowns off, they try to save themselves from terrible, vengeful deaths.
Another superb exciting crime novel from S.D. Gripton, which will grab your attention from the beginning and hold it throughout

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.D. Gripton
• Release date: Mar 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301371211

S.D. Gripton

S.D. Gripton novels and real crime books are written by Dennis Snape, who is married to Sally who originate from North Wales and Manchester respectively and who met 18 years ago. I work very hard to make a reading experience a good one, with good plots and earthy language. I enjoy writing and hope readers enjoy what I have written. I thank everyone who has ever looked at at one of my books.

Book preview

Butterfield’s Hate

A Dave Lewis/Mariska Masekova

Crime Novel

Book Four

By

S.D. Gripton & Sally Dillon-Snape

Copyright © Sally Dillon-Snape & Dennis Snape (2023)

The moral right of the authors is hereby asserted in accordance with The Copyright Act 1988

All characters and events in this publication other than those of fact and historical significance available in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living and dead is purely coincidental

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher

The Cover is by Snape

This ebook is dedicated to Debby Charles who inspired me to write it and to Jodi Cone who found the errors. Thank you

Chapter 1

Four Weeks Ago

James Holland Butterfield was an ex-cop. He didn’t want to be an ex-cop and never expected to be one, not until the time arrived when he chose not to be one for himself. He served over twenty-five years as a Police Officer, rising to the rank of Sergeant, but was dismissed the force with a pension for no good reason five months ago. All he’d done was to give a good friend some information about something, it was innocent enough, police officers pass information to good friends all the time. How was he to know that the friend would turn out to be a serial killer? How was he supposed to know?

It wasn’t his fault.

But he knew whose fault it was.

It was David Lewis’s fault. He was the one who followed up with specious complaints, who built up the case against him, who eventually got him dismissed. He was also responsible for putting his wonderful mother into a death-like coma out of which she was yet to recover. And David Lewis had done these things for no reason.

For no reason other than hate.

David Lewis hated him and always had done.

Because David Lewis was an ex-cop too; he’d had a serious drink problem and had murdered a woman, shot her between the eyes, once again for no reason as far as Butterfield could discover. He’d gotten away with it too, was never charged, never dismissed; he’d spent four weeks in a home spinning his lies to psychiatrists and had never returned to the police force, being allowed to resign with honour.

Lewis hated Butterfield because Butterfield knew he was a murderer; knew he’d murdered the woman in cold blood; but no one believed Butterfield; people were far too busy making all kinds of excuses for Lewis, but Butterfield knew. David Lewis was a stone-cold killer.

Butterfield believed Lewis didn’t want to be ex-cop either, though he still thought of himself as one, working as a Private Detective for a red-haired Hungarian slut, the woman with the rolling hips. Oh yes, he’d seen her jogging in the park with the rest of the whores who lived in the house, the house owned by said Lewis, King of Pimps.

He’d seen them all together, running around, laughing like children, barely dressed; advertising themselves to anyone who wanted to buy them. His mother had warned him against such women and he’d had the sense to steer clear of them. He’d made his mother very proud. She’d never said so, but he felt it, had felt it throughout his life.

His poor virginal mother; who gave birth to him without sleeping with a filthy man, telling her son hundreds, if not thousands, of times that sex was the greatest sin of mankind, that he must never partake, never reduce a woman to the level of an animal no better than a dog. The mother he’d loved so much, becoming with child when, during her poverty years, she’d bathed in a bath of water that had also been used by a man who had masturbated. Mother always called him My Little Bath Child, right up until the day she fainted into her death-like coma, even though by then he was the size of a barn door, with a belly on him like a separate entity to the rest of his flabby frame. But to his mother he was always My Little Bath Child.

Five months ago, he’d slouched home from the City Police Station to inform her that he’d been dismissed following several biased and unfair hearings. He’d never done anything wrong, he insisted; nothing at all. He’d only been dismissed because of the hate felt for him by one man…

…David Lewis.

His mother heard him, listened to his words as she stood in front of him, dark eyes staring, her wig slipping slightly to one side of her head as she took her son’s words in, when she gasped a loud gasp and fainted; a faint from which she was yet to recover. But he still looked after her, he still cared for her, he’d lain next to her in bed for two weeks hoping she would regain consciousness but had not yet done it. After that time, his mother had begun to smell a little and she would have hated him for that, letting her smell, because she only ever smelled nice, after covering herself with perfumes; she would have hated him as much as David Lewis for not looking after her.

So, Butterfield had done the right thing.

He’d purchased a tall upright fridge, which the delivery men moaned about when he told them he wanted it upstairs in the spare bedroom, as they pretended to struggle with it up the stairs and push it to the exact place he wanted. He didn’t tip them because of all their moaning.

What’s that smell? one of the delivery men asked as he was leaving the house, but Butterfield ignored him.

The moment he had the fridge plugged in, although the handbook recommended a whole day before placing anything inside, he had removed all the shelves and placed a small chair inside for his mother to sit upon. He’d dressed her in her favourite long blue dress, smothered her with perfume and lifted her in and positioned her on the chair. There were some creaks from her bones but Butterfield put that down to her being old. She did fall forward a few times when he opened the door, but once he tied her to the chair, she was fine. She was happy there, and he knew all about people being frozen so that they could come back to life again when the time was right, and he thought that might happen, so he kept his mother up to date with what was happening in the world, what programmes were on the radio; mother hated television, she said it corrupted; and reading from a newspaper, reading everything except the sports pages; she hated sport, so many people dressed in so few clothes, it was a disgrace. Especially tennis; God she hated tennis; even on the radio.

And the hate she felt for so many things affected her only son. Whatever mother hated so did he; whoever mother hated so did he and after he came home that day and told her about being dismissed, when she went into her faint, he hated David Lewis enough for both of them.

Dismissed from his job; humiliated in front of his colleagues and friends, some of whom he was still in touch with, but only by telephone; no one ever visiting the house, mother not liking visitors, they were always after something, she said.

And he looked after her, without need of visitors.

During those years when he worked and was paid weekly, he handed all his money over to her; when he was paid monthly, he handed that over, too. She looked after them both, giving him back money to spend on food and at work, never going out herself, far too many people out there willing and able to hurt you, she said, so many wanting to corrupt her, so he shopped and she cooked and cleaned and covered herself in perfume just as Butterfield was spraying her with her favourites now, as she sat in the fridge waiting to be resurrected.

She’d actually left him a surprising amount of money in several joint bank accounts that Butterfield knew nothing about until he discovered details of them in her smalls’ drawer. He would never have gone into her smalls’ drawer under normal circumstances, but he felt the need to strew them around the bed he’d shared with her, to remind himself of the happy times.

He discovered joint bank accounts with enormous amounts of money in them, enormous amounts to Butterfield anyway. He did wonder where it had all come from, the thousands that were there, for she never worked, not to his knowledge and the accounts did go back some years. Along with the pension he received from the Police Force Pension Fund; a policeman had to be caught red-handed standing with a weapon in his hand, over a murder victim, to be dismissed and to lose his pension and even then there was fifty/fifty chance he would keep it; meant that Butterfield was quite well off.

Though he did wonder, more than once, where his mother earned such amounts of money.

He did not know, and she had never informed him; and it was good that she never had; that before she’d given birth to him, before she’d become the crackpot semi-religious overpowering figure in Butterfield’s life when he reached the age of eleven, she’d been a high-flying prostitute and porn star using the name Betty High. She even continued in the professions until her son was nine or ten, him being so slow witted that she guessed he would never remember her going missing at nights or for days on end, he wouldn’t remember being looked after by various other girls while she did the business, and he never did remember.

She gave up being a working girl temporarily when he reached the age of ten because he was falling so far behind other school pupils in his English and in his Mathematics, and she was considering returning to it when he reached eleven but by then she’d had an epiphany; a light flashed in her head that she thought was a religious experience, even though she had never stepped through the door of a church or a chapel in her life, and she never considered the fact that it could have been the result of all the drugs she was using at the time. So she retired with all her money invested and a son to look after her when he left school. Because he looked after her, she never found the need to go further than the back garden of her house during the rest of her life.

Butterfield would have been horrified to learn of his mother’s chosen way of earning a living during her younger years. In fact, his mother would have been as equally horrified had he ever discovered it, had he questioned her, so completely had she disconnected herself from her past. She would have thought he was talking about someone else.

As the weeks passed, Butterfield spoke to his mother every morning for one hour and every evening for one hour, but mostly he sat in the small lounge of her home, day and night without lights, listening to the radio.

He was sure, he was absolutely convinced, that his mother had said it was all right for him to hate David Lewis in the way he hated him; she said it was all right to crush David Lewis in the way he, himself, had been crushed; it was all right to hurt David Lewis in the way he’d been hurt. He heard his mother tell him to kill David Lewis but only after Lewis had been humiliated, just as he had. Kill David Lewis, but kill all those close to him first, mother had said; cause him great pain, break him, reduce him to a trembling wreck; let him see that happens to the people who must suffer because of his own actions. Make him feel worthless and unwanted was her advice.

Kill his women, kill the red-haired one last.

He knew it was the right thing to do.

Mother had told him so.

***

The Present

If Dave Lewis lived to be one hundred years old, he would never forget the day Mariska Masekova said she would move in with him. His heart leaped and pounded in his chest, his blood rushed around his body, he felt a little giddy and a little silly as his mouth fell open and he looked like a dork. She did say it in front of witnesses after all, so she must have meant it; she wasn’t embarrassed at saying it, so she must have considered it before saying it.

She was moving in with him.

Not that she wasn’t already moved in with him, of course; she’d lived in his house for years in one capacity or another; nanny to his daughter Melanie, deceased; housekeeper to his wife Julia, deceased; housekeeper to him, not yet deceased; and she now owned a Private Detective Agency with money loaned to her by Dave, some of which she had actually paid back. What she meant by moving in with him was moving into his bedroom, into his bed. It was no wonder his blood rushed, his heart pounded and his mouth fell open.

He had never dared dream of such a thing.

He was, after all, beyond the dreaded age of forty, while she was barely touching thirty. He had grey hair growing above his ears, something she often commented on, though he was tall and slim in a rangy way and good-looking in a kind of beaten-up fashion. She, on the other hand, was an absolute stunner, with her long red hair grown down to the middle of her shapely back, her long legs, her shapely figure, her perfect face and lips, something he’d wanted to kiss for years.

She did have, though, the temper and the temperament of her Irish/Hungarian heritage, but that was genetic and he forgave her for it; and if she ever heard him say such a thing, never mind think it, she would not be moving in with him. He was sure of that, so he tried not to think it.

He’d loved her for many a long year and she’d known it.

But the main reason he remembered the day she said she was moving in with him so well, was that the day after she said it, before she actually moved in with him, before she shared his bed, she threw him out of the house.

And that had been almost six months ago.

Not that she’d made him homeless, she wasn’t that cruel, at least not to him; no indeed, he was not made a vagabond carrying all his worldly goods on his back in a little knotted spotted bag on the end of a stick. She simply moved him out of the house and along the street a little, into The Park Hotel which, remarkably, stood opposite the park in which Dave and Mariska and the other females of the house jogged on a regular basis.

Those females comprised Mariska of course, with whom he would soon be moving in with, and Sophie Nelson, the first real customer the Detective Agency ever had, who appeared like a sewer-rat through the door to the office with no money, no ambition and no hope, who was looking for someone to find the killers of her daughter, Alicia. Dave and Mariska found them. There was Linda Walk, the newest tenant, who had been through some quite recent traumas; she had been held in an underground cage, her hair shaved off, she been tattooed and tortured, but she was still a serving police officer working in Major Crimes, a department of the City Police that Dave used to be the boss of; and then there were identical Twins, Victoria and Analaise Harcourt, whom Mariska had employed as housekeeper and secretary but who turned out to be university educated computer hackers of considerable talent with mysterious pasts.

Now the house was without a recognised housekeeper and the business was without a secretary as both girls worked full time for the Agency. Sophie worked for it too because she had qualified as a Private Detective, taking a very expensive course devised by Dave; never paying, of course; and excelling in it after being coached by him in the nuances of the law. They all had their own bedrooms and the house had a kitchen, a dining room and a lounge where they would gather regularly to gossip and talk, and it had two bathrooms. The Agency was in what used to be the basement of the house, where Mariska had lived for some years when she was the housekeeper, and was approached from the street by half-a-dozen steps, the red sign with her name on it creaking high above them, always threatening to crash to earth.

And the Agency was doing very well thank you very much; so well that Mariska had begun to pay Dave back more of the money he’d loaned her to set it up.

And he worked for her.

He was the Agency’s Senior Investigator though he rarely got paid anything for doing it.

It was a job he loved. It made him feel like the policeman who lived in his soul, but without the paperwork and the grief; without the politics of upsetting people who were always more senior, and the stepping on egg-shells when you did. Working for Mariska distanced him from working with cops who were violent or stupid or just stupidly violent; it distanced him from the lies and the arguments and the jostling for position; from the boasting and the bragging; and it distanced him from the terribly cruel crimes that had begun to drain his humanity.

Not that the Agency had not investigated terrible crimes and terrible people, it was just that they didn’t happen every day; they were not part of his daily routine. Alicia Nelson was one of those rare terrible crimes, for example, ten years old, daughter of Sophie, run down by a swift running car, deliberately murdered. He’d investigated that terrible crime, seen it through to the end. And there had been others along the way, but the Agency had come through, it had survived and it had thrived, though most of the clients nowadays were people seeking evidence against partners for a divorce.

And Dave didn’t do divorce.

That was Sophie’s job, sometimes Mariska’s, sometimes Victoria and Analaise’s if they wanted to do it, but never Dave’s. He was the Senior Investigator, he investigated serious things. Except there hadn’t been many of those over the last few months, during the time he’d been out of his house living at The Park Hotel. Not that he didn’t love the Hotel; he absolutely adored it.

It was owned and managed by Tom Hellenby and James Watson, who’d been together for thirty-five years after meeting at the Chichester Theatre Festival where Tom had been a dresser and James something to do with scenery. It had been love at first-sight, apparently, and some years later they bought a small Hotel somewhere on the other side of the City and purchased The Park Hotel just over three years ago. Dave was very friendly with both of them, and with their chef Mario Monetti, who they’d brought over from Italy when they’d stopped to eat at a tiny ristorante which stood, isolated, on a narrow dusty road, where they’d discovered the food to be delicious. Mario had his own partner, Noel, and they’d been together for almost two years.

Dave and his women, as he sometimes thought of them; he’d thought of them as his harem once, and said it out loud in front of witnesses, but it was the only time he’d ever said it; it would be the only time he’d ever think it, too, if he wanted to retain his testicles; dined at the Hotel at least once a week. The food was always delicious, the company superb, especially when Tom and Jim gave them their undivided attention, entertaining them royally, making them all feel special, everyone returning back to the house in happy spirits, arms linked in one long row, walking the short distance up the slight incline to the house.

Dave had been thrown out of his house because of necessary repairs, Mariska had said. Necessary to her and the other women, but not to Dave, who saw nothing wrong with the house. It had bathrooms, it had carpets, it had somewhere to eat, somewhere to cook, beds and bedrooms; what more was needed? Lots, obviously, as he’d been living in the Hotel for six months and he was not even allowed to see what was going happening go his house. When he reported to the office each morning, whatever time in the morning he decided to turn up, there were always builders’ vans and plumbers’ vans and a combination of general work vans parked on the street, with men and women dressed in overalls walking in and out. One day when he was passing his front door, an unmarked van was standing outside and it looked like something from the future; sleek with blacked out windows, fancy lights and no license plates, which Dave knew was illegal. As he stood there, three people, two men and a woman rushed out of the house, all of them dressed in dark jeans, dark T-shirts, dark peaked caps with no insignia and sunglasses and they ignored him so completely it was as if he were not even there. They leapt into the van and drove off. When Dave mentioned seeing them to those working in the office he was blanked, everyone looking up at him as if he’d imagined the whole thing. He never tried to peek, or rush in and see what was happening because he knew it was more than his life was worth. He’d been told to stay away until it was finished, so he stayed away. He was looking forward to the work being finished though, and Mariska moving in with him.

On the day it was supposed to be happening, he was sitting in some comfort in the foyer of the Park Hotel, reading the sports pages of newspapers; he never read the news news, it was all far too depressing for him; and in the city newspapers he’d featured far too often for his liking; and he was sipping on wonderful coffee. He was dressed in what had almost become his uniform, jeans, trainers and a clean sweatshirt; the laundry service at the Hotel being superb. His worn black leather jacket was lying over the back of an empty chair and if he went out, he would need it, as it was raining. The day was wet and miserable. He hadn’t felt the need to jog today, he was having a lazy morning; the trouble was he was having far too many lazy mornings of late. He wanted to go home, the work had gone on long enough, they could have rebuilt the house in the time he’d been gone. He would mention it to Mariska; he would say it was time for him to go home.

He’d chatted to Jim and Tom, learned scandal about guests they shouldn’t have been talking about; learned of their plans for the day; he never knew why they told him because, not only were they devoted to each other, they were devoted to their hotel and to their staff and to their guests. Every day when they told him what they were doing, it always involved a lot of hotel managing.

His phone chirped and he looked at it as if it had just fallen out of the sky. No one had phoned him for months, about six of them.

Hello.

Are you thinking of coming to work today, or are going to spend all your time drinking coffee and gossiping with those two old women?

I don’t think they would be happy with you calling them that.

I call them that all the time, they love me.

So do I.

There was a short pause while Mariska sighed noisily.

We have some clients here who need to speak to you; as you need to speak to them.

It’s raining.

I shall come down to the hotel and bring you to the office by the ear if needs be. I expect to see you in ten seconds.

She rang off.

Dave glanced at his watch. Ten seconds was pushing it, he thought, as he finished his coffee, stood, waved bye to Tom, who was standing behind reception, pulled on his jacket and raced up the road to the office. As he passed the house, the futuristic van was again parked outside and he glanced at it and determined to ask Mariska what it was, and who the weird looking characters he saw jumping into it were, and what they had to do with the house. He bounded into the office, shaking rain from his head like a dog that had just come out of a river.

Everyone turned to look at him, Mariska, Sophie, Victoria and Analaise, the Twins sitting at the redundant secretary’s desk, and the two middle-aged female strangers who were sitting at Mariska’s desk.

Dave smiled in what he hoped was a winning way but Mariska simply scowled.

You will have to forgive him, Mrs. Parsons, Mrs. Wilson, but this is our Senior Investigator, Mr. David Lewis. He used to be a very good policeman when he came to us… making it sound as if she had recruited him, …with a very good reputation; we were lucky to get him…

Yes, thank you, Miz Masekova, enough of the personal history, Dave said, pulling up a chair, nodding to Sophie and the Twins, mouthing ‘Coffee’ to Victoria, who smiled at him but didn’t stand or brew coffee. Her sister Analaise did, though. She placed the cup on a coaster in front of him while Mariska was still speaking.

As I was saying, she continued, giving Dave another dark look, he is extremely, even uniquely, qualified to deal with your problems and I wonder if you could just relate them again for his benefit.

Mariska had a pad filled with notes sitting on the large desk at which she sat, she had written everything down just as he’d instructed her, but she wanted the women to repeat their problem to him, personally.

What would it be? Dave thought. A lost cat, a son and a daughter from the two families eloping to marry against family wishes; the families not getting on, a feud between them, Romeo and Juliet again? He could have gone on guessing all day long, but when Mrs. Parson spoke she straightened his back, stopped him guessing and got his attention.

My son was murdered over six months ago, she said, turning in her chair to look at him. Shot in the eye outside a fish and chip shop; one shot. He was with a friend who said something funny to him but which the friend cannot remember. He is still off work with shock. The fish and chip shop was full of people; no one saw anything; no one heard anything and the police haven’t got a clue about who did it. They have had six months to investigate it and they have, so far, failed. I want you to find whoever it was who shot my son. I’ve followed your career; I know how tenacious you are. I want you.

Those bloody reports in city newspapers, the ones he was always trying to avoid; they sometimes led people to the Agency’s door with expectations beyond his abilities. They’d had other people who’d come looking for him to perform miracles and it had depressed him when he couldn’t find satisfactory solutions.

He looked at Mrs. Wilson.

And you are accompanying Mrs. Parsons to what end, Mrs. Wilson? he asked.

Mr. Lewis, I am not simply accompanying Wendy, I want to employ you too. My son was shot too. Two weeks after Michael who was Wendy’s son, was killed, my son Eric was also shot with one bullet, in the back of the head, when he was returning home following discussions with his fiancée over their wedding plans. He was probably the happiest he had ever been. The police haven’t caught his murderer either, but we have been informed that the same gun was used in both murders, the same calibre of bullet. And I have faith in you to find Eric’s killer, just as Wendy has in you finding the killer of her own son.

The women had all of Dave’s attention now.

Two murders, same gun, same calibre of bullet and, presumably, nothing since, otherwise Mariska would have mentioned it, and he might even have done a little investigating himself. He had been known to stick his nose into ongoing police investigations. Michael Parsons and Eric Wilson had been killed by the same person, he reasoned. He reached out and slid Mariska’s notepad across the desk towards him and glanced down at it.

Wendy, may I call you Wendy…

Please do; may I call you David?

"…call me Dave, Wendy, everyone calls me Dave. When people call me David, I know I’m in trouble.

Wendy Parsons smiled a weak smile.

It’s your Sunday name; David?

Yes, it is. I see from Miz Masekova’s notes that it was only 22:30 when your son was shot; that’s quite early in the night for a shooting.

He’d been for a few drinks with his friend Allan Westerlake; he’s the one who said something funny; because he remembers Michael turning his head to look at him, laughing when he was shot. Except Allan can’t remember what the joke was. Poor man, he’s suffering, unable to work, unable to stop thinking about it. The two of them had been friends for years, from kindergarten through the whole of their school lives, even working together for the same company, and they were just coming out of the fish and chip shop, both of them holding a bag of chips and the next thing, Michael is falling to the ground; Allan doesn’t know what’s happening, there is blood but he doesn’t know where it’s coming from. By the time he kneels down, by the time the owner and other people run out of the shop, Michael is dead. Someone called the medics and police, they came and investigated and discovered Michael had been shot, but nothing else, not a clue, not a motive, nothing. They could never even work out where the killer was standing when he took his shot, how he got away, nothing. The police say they have viewed hours of CCTV coverage from cameras in the area and found nothing.

And that says it all in the investigation of my son Eric, Eleanor Wilson added. "Exactly the same; no one heard anything, not the sound of a gun being fired, no bang, nothing. Once again, they have no idea where the gunman was standing when he fired the weapon; no shells have ever been recovered, they have found nothing on CCTV, not in either of the murders.’

Who led the investigation, which Police Department? Dave asked.

It was the Major Crimes Department who investigated; it was led by a Detective Inspector Peter Lindcroft.

Dave was a little nonplussed and Mariska knew it, as she reached across the desk and touched his hand, Dave giving her a thin smile and nodding his head.

I know D.I. Lindcroft quite well, Wendy, Eleanor, he said, and he is a very fine and efficient officer. I used to work with him before I came to work for Mariska, he is a friend of both of us; we are friends with most of the officers who work in Major Crimes. If Pete Lindcroft couldn’t find anything I’m not sure I will be able to.

He was a nice man, the Detective Inspector, but Eleanor and me… and she indicated Mrs. Wilson with a wave of her left hand, …we don’t want anyone nice any longer, we want you, we want you to find out who killed our sons and we want you to punish him, or her, or them.

Dave sat back in his chair and glanced again at Mariska. What were they asking him to do, he thought? Were they asking him to hunt down the killer, or killers, of their sons and to kill them himself? Was that what they were asking?"

David is not an assassin, Mrs. Parsons, Mrs. Wilson, Mariska said. He is an investigator, a legally licensed Private Investigator in the City, with a licence that covers the whole country, but he is not and I must stress this, he is not an assassin. He will discover who killed your sons; I can almost guarantee that…

She looked at Dave and he shrugged his shoulders and gave her an expression that said she was insane for making such a promise.

…but when he does find them, unless they attack him, he will be turning them over to law enforcement.

Well, Eleanor Wilson said; her tone mellifluous, let us hope that they do attack him so he can deal with them.

Dave could barely believe he was sitting in an office in the relatively early morning of a miserable wet city day discussing murdering murderers with a pair of well-educated, reasonably affluent, middle- aged mothers.

The world really was as crazy as he thought it was.

I wonder if I could speak to Miz Masekova for a moment, Wendy, Eleanor, he said as he stood and walked out of the office into the rain of the day. Mariska followed him, carrying a brolly with which she covered both of them.

First of all, he said as soon as she stepped out and closed the door behind her, never ever promise anyone I can solve a crime. People believe stuff like that, they’ll hold me to it, and be extremely angry and hurt when I fail.

I’m sorry; I got a little carried away.

You should be carried away, saying things like that. It’s very unprofessional.

Am I going to have to stand here all day while you berate me or is there a purpose to us standing in the rain?

They must understand I am not an assassin; that I don’t routinely go about the business of killing people.

I’ll make sure they understand, Mariska said.

And I will not be able to investigate these murders from the hotel; I will need to be back in the office or in my office in the dining room, or somewhere here so that I can communicate with people. I cannot stay at the hotel a day longer.

Today and tomorrow; two more nights, Mariska said. Then you can come home.

He looked at her suspiciously.

Two more nights? he asked. Are you sure you’re not just softening me up for harsher things to come?

Two more nights, she said. And I will come to the hotel on both of those nights and we will practise sleeping together.

She smiled her sweetest of smiles.

He had to lean on the wall of the office as his breath caught in his mouth, as his brain emptied of all rational thoughts and his legs turned to jelly.

What did you say? he whispered.

Do I have to say everything twice for you to believe me? I will come to you tonight and tomorrow night? I need to know what you’re like to sleep with after all. You may be the most rasping snorer in the land, you may twitch and scream out in your sleep, you may, God forbid, pull the duvet off me and roll yourself up in it.

He gazed at her, knowing that this conversation was totally inappropriate with two mothers inside the office, just the other side of the glass, looking for the killers of their sons, while she played sexual politics with him.

And if I do any of those things, will it preclude us from sleeping together?

Good gracious, no. I just want to know, that’s all.

He felt strength returning to his legs, he even felt strong enough