St. Patrick’s Day. Fiction.

On St. Patrick’s day, Monday, 17th March 2003, I got up late – around noon. This is the one day of the year I can always do without, because it was on this date, 10 years previously, that Imogen, my beautiful bride of just one month, was killed by a hit-and-run car thief. And, although I was then a CID police sergeant based at New Scotland Yard, I couldn’t do the one thing that would have helped me recover from her death - catch her killer.
These days I’m a forty-year-old embittered private detective scraping a living by prying into the lives of other people. And I drink lots of alcohol. Usually alone. Nobody likes to be around misery.
In Ken’s café, my local 24/7 greasy-spoon where I eat most of my meals, I was waiting for my all-day breakfast when a gentle female voice asked, ‘Are you Emmo?’
She looked young, a teenager. Black, small, slim and pretty, with long straight tar-coloured hair framing her open and defenceless face. Her enormous black-sapphire eyes radiated a deep hurt and her mouth quivered with emotion. Although she looked familiar, I knew we had never met. This girl was not forgettable.
In my usual unsociable way, I asked, ‘Who wants to know?’
‘I’m Patsy Plant.’
I stared. The name meant nothing to me.
‘Paula’s sister.’
I got it. No wonder she looked familiar. Paula was the waitress in this very café. A friendly young woman prone to make mistakes with the orders and to spill things. Nobody minded. Her smile was enough to melt the hardest of hearts. She got decent tips, not grumbles.
‘So?’
‘Paula’s dead.’
No longer unfriendly, I invited Patsy to sit down opposite me. ‘Do you want some food? Or a drink?’
‘No thanks, I’m full of tea and toast. I’ve been here for hours waiting for you. I understand that you and Paula were friends.’
‘In a superficial way, as a customer knows a waitress. What happened to her?’
‘The police say that in the early hours of this morning she jumped out of her 17th floor flat window, but that was not her way at all. She must have been thrown out.’
‘By whom?’
‘It could have been her sometimes live-in boy friend, Gary Clark, or somebody else. She knew lots of unsavoury people.’
‘Have you told the police of your suspicions?’
‘Yes. They say it was clearly suicide, but they’re wrong. If Paula wanted to kill herself, she would have taken pills. She liked pills. Uppers, downers, barbiturates. And she liked to smoke pot and she drank lots of alcopops. Besides, she was vain. She would have got herself dolled up and taken pills. Not jumped naked out of a window.’
I watched her eyes. Honest eyes. Not for a moment did she think that Paula had thrown herself out of the window. Of course, it didn’t mean that she was right, but she honestly thought she was.
Patsy was still talking. ‘She was twenty-three. I’m her nineteen years old baby sister who hates pills, drugs and booze. My only vice is freshly percolated coffee. That was the way she wanted me…clean. She did pills and stuff, not me.’
‘Were you close?’
‘Yes. She has always looked out for me. Even when her life was in a mess, she did her best to shield me from the sharks, and I loved her for it. I really did…’
Her voice trailed away as, quite suddenly, the tears began to flow. She had been holding herself together with nothing but true grit and now it was time for her to let go. She hunched over the table, crying hard and sobbing deep and loud. I let her, knowing it was for the best, and while I waited, I asked myself, Why has Saint Patrick, on his special day, brought me another death? Did he want me to help prevent this little black jewel of a girl becoming a wreck like me? Should I help? What if I messed up and made things worse? Did I have the guts? Did I have the skills? Did I want to get involved?
From deep within me came the answers. Yes, and don’t muck up this time. So I ate my meal and waited.
After thirty minutes, the black-sapphire eyes were still ringed with retained tears, and her smile was shaky, but Patsy had hold of herself.
‘What does Emmo stand for?’ she asked.
I fished out one of my home-made business cards and handed it over, explaining, ‘I can’t afford real ones, so I got a rubber stamp made.’
She read out loud, ‘Michael O’Reilly, Inquiry Agent. Michael O’Reilly – initials M.O. I see where ‘Emmo’ comes from.’ Suddenly the tears were back. ‘I was told that you were a detective. I need a detective not an inquiry agent.’
I hastened to placate her. ‘I’m not a policeman, but I am allowed to nose around. Ten years ago I was Detective Sergeant Michael O’Reilly of New Scotland Yard.’
‘Irish?’
‘London-born son of Belfast Catholics.’
I got a hopeful look and a big smile that reminded me of her sister. Suddenly I badly wanted to help this girl.
She replied, ‘I’m also a London-born Catholic. A daughter of Afro-Caribbean immigrant parents. For their sake, and mine, can you find out what happened?’
‘I can try.’
She fished in her red handbag and pulled out a roll of banknotes.
‘Don’t flash that around here,’ I admonished, ‘you’ll be mugged.’
The money quickly disappeared as she leaned forward to say, ‘I’m the clean sister. Hardworking and thrifty. Is five hundred pounds enough to hire you?’
I took a deep breath. God and Saint Patrick knew how much I needed money, but I didn’t want to take it. I had sort of decided that I would work for nothing but that wouldn’t have been good because I know me - I wouldn’t have taken it seriously enough. ‘Give me a hundred and your mobile phone number,’ I replied. ‘You can pay me more if you think what I find out is worth it.’

It took me ten long booze-free days to get to Inspector John Prentiss. We had crossed paths a sufficient number of times to know that we didn’t much like each other, but I thought him an honest and competent policeman. He had been the first detective on the death scene, so I had offered to buy him lunch in return for information on what he knew.
He read from his notebook. ‘Black skinned and naked, Paula Plant had silently come down out of the darkness. After bouncing off the protruding sloped roof of the main entrance, she fell into the road and under a bus. Before anyone could react, a heavy lorry had also run over the body. What was left was scooped up and taken to the mortuary. Then the area was hosed down until every trace of her had disappeared.’
‘Why did you decide on suicide?’
‘When we eventually sorted out what floor and window she came out of, we found the flat door locked with the chain bolt on. Keys inside. To gain entry, we had to get a locksmith and use bolt cutters.’ He stopped to fill his mouth with food, chew it, and swallow.
‘The window was wide open,’ he continued, ‘and on a chair beside the window was a pile of clothes. I checked to see if anyone was hiding in the flat. There wasn’t. We found a small amount of good quality cannabis and lots of pills. Forensics took them for analysis. In what was left of Paula, they found evidence of recent cannabis use and an ingestion of pills not long before she died.’
‘Did she leave a note?’
‘Sadly no. A note clears up doubts for friends and relatives.’
I changed tack. ‘Her sister thinks that she was murdered, maybe by the boyfriend.’
‘Patsy? Yeah, I talked to her. Pretty little girl. Dainty, fragile and vulnerable. I wanted to help so I checked out Gary Clark’s alibi. It wasn’t airtight, but he definitely was at an after-hours club. He could have gone to the flat and killed her, but we had no motive. Besides, there was the door chain. He couldn’t have fixed that.’
‘Patsy has given me a key to Paula’s flat. Will it be all right to take a look inside?’
‘If you’ve got her permission it is. It isn’t blocked off as a crime scene.’

The key that Patsy had given me opened up flat number 172. Paula hadn’t taken security very seriously. Just one yale-type lock and the remains of the cut door chain. The flat gave out a message of impermanence, as if Paula had lived there without ever wanting to make the place her own. No rugs on the imitation wood parquet floor, and what little furniture there was, was old flat-pack stuff. A few newspapers and magazines littered the furniture, but no books. A couple of compact discs lay on an old sideboard, and next to the CD’s was a dust-free rectangle suggesting that until recently there had been something to play them on. The TV set was an ancient black and white twelve-inch. Standing on top of it was an indoor aerial.
My search threw up no clues as to why Paula had taken off all her clothes, opened the window, climbed up onto the window ledge and silently dropped to her death. I opened the window and looked down. It was a frighteningly long way. I closed the window.
For a long time I stared at the pile of clothes on the chair, wondering why they didn’t look right. The refrigerator was stuffed full of food and milk. That wasn’t right either. My every instinct told me that Paula hadn’t willingly gone out of the window. I agreed with young Patsy. Suicide didn’t fit the scene.
My eyes again scanned the room and landed on the two bits of dangling door chain. Perhaps…? Worth a try.
I went to the kitchen where I had noticed a few hand-tools and chose a screwdriver. It didn’t take me long to unscrew the two bits of the security lock and slip them into my pocket.
In the nearest hardware shop I found a match. Same ‘made in China’ brand name, same size, same chain length, same screw-holes and screws. Returning to the flat I fixed the new security chain in place and went outside to the landing. Despite me having big Irish hands, with a loss of skin to my knuckles, I was able to slip the chain in place and out again. If I could do it, anybody could. I replaced the two pieces of original door chain, put the new one in my pocket and returned the screwdriver to the kitchen.
That night I had good news for Patsy. Without saying why, I told her that I had found out how someone could have murdered her sister. Her relief at my news was worth me keeping off the booze for all of those days, and to my surprise, I was almost over any need for alcohol.

When I want, I can still look and sound like a cop, which sometimes helps when I’m looking for someone. This time that someone was Gary Clark and I was outside his door listening to the loud rock music inside. Using my big right clenched fist, I hammered on the door loud enough to be heard over the music. Seconds later the music stopped and a male voice asked who was there.
‘Police. Open up.’ That was breaking the law, but I didn’t expect to be arrested for it.
‘What’s it about?’
‘I want to talk to Gary Clark about Paula Plant.’
‘Yeah. Give me a minute to dress.’
He was a white guy wearing a grubby blue tee shirt, tatty jeans, and trainers. Early thirties, tall and thin, with hollow cheeks and prominent eyebrows, he looked wasted and on his way to death. His one room with toilet and shower was a mess. Waved to a chair, I preferred to stand. He flopped onto the only easy chair and reached for his cigarettes.
‘So you want to know about Paula.’ A statement said without fear or feeling.
I nodded. ‘Tell me your side.’
‘I’ve been over this already. I was nowhere near her flat when it happened. The last I saw of her was five or six hours before she jumped. Sammy’s Place was busy so I was helping out behind the bar. She came in, had a couple of drinks, we talked, and she left.’
‘By herself?’
Dragging on his cigarette, he nodded.
‘And you went on working?’
‘Until we closed up at a little after three. Then I came here, picked up Sunny and we went to an all night party in Finchley. Got there about four.’
‘Sunny?’
‘My regular girl.’
‘When did you go to Paula’s flat?’
‘Who said I did?’
‘You picked up some stuff including that stereo unit.’
‘It was mine. And most of the CD’s. I only took what was mine before someone else started clearing the place out.’
‘How long were you living there?’
‘I wasn’t living there. I lived here, Paula lived there, and for about a year, I spent time with her.’
‘Who killed Paula?’
His eyes went big, and round, and they stared at me in total surprise.
‘Paula was murdered?’ he squeaked. ‘You ain’t just making a noise?’
‘No noise. Somebody killed Paula.’
‘Well, that’s a load off my mind. I thought she had killed herself on account of me dumping her. Paula was okay but too free with her favours – if you know what I mean. I could have caught something. Knowing she was murdered is a big weight off me I can tell you, but I can’t tell you who did it.’
I bent my right arm upward to my belly and clenched my big Irish hand into a fist before saying, ‘Is it okay for me to take that expensive music centre and the CD’s? They belong to Paula’s sister.’
Gary Clark was no hero. After one look at my fist, he shrugged and watched me pack the music stack, speakers and the CD’s into an empty carton which, I guessed, he had used to carry them from Paula’s. He was still sitting in the chair as I exited.
His alibi was thin. He could easily have gone to Paula’s and heaved her out of the window, but I didn’t think so. He had been too relaxed and careless with his words to be guilty.
I phoned Patsy and got her answering service, so I left a message saying I wanted to see her. Then I phoned Inspector Prentiss and asked him to quickly seal Paula’s flat as a possible crime scene. Protesting at first, he finally said yes provided that I agreed to pay for a slap-up meal and explain my reasons.
We met in that pseudo-French place in Soho. I began, ‘I’m working for Patsy Plant and I agree with her that Paula Plant was murdered. Secondly, keys. Gary Clark has one. I caught him in possession of Paula’s expensive stereo unit and a number of CD’s. I took ‘em off him to return to Patsy. My worry is how many other keys to Paula’s flat are out there. Best to have the flat sealed before the place is ransacked and of no use as a crime scene. Thirdly,’ I pulled the new security door chain out of my pocket. ‘I can prove that it is possible for a killer to leave the flat and secure the bolt from the outside. And now I come to the reason why I will pay for this meal. Did you have a police photographer take pictures of the body and the flat?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, I don’t want to see any pictures of the body but after we’ve finished here, I would like to have copies of the interior shots. And if I crack this case, you get the arrest. How’s that?’
Later that same evening I managed to get Patsy on her mobile and was invited round to her place in Wandsworth. Taking the carton, I hailed a taxi and alighted in front of a not-so-nice apartment block, to find, when I got into her flat, that Patsy, with minimum expenditure, had created a perfect home. The furniture and knick-nacks were obviously second-hand but everything had been carefully chosen. The place was clean, neat and invitingly homely. No television. Her little radio was tuned to an FM station playing classical music, and she had coffee made. I accepted a cup and was asked to sit in a most comfortable fireside chair to watch her unpack the carton.
‘I wasn’t sure if you would want it,’ I explained, ‘but better than Gary Clark having it. It’s an expensive item, he would only have sold it to get another fix.’
Patsy was pleased. ‘I could do with it, my radio is dying of old age.’ She looked at me like I was some kind of hero and continued, ‘My hundred pounds was well spent, you’ve already recovered goods worth more. Did Gary kill Paula?’
‘I think not. He’s a gutless chancer who walks away from trouble. I have already told the police of my suspicion that Paula didn’t commit suicide and I got them to seal her flat as a possible crime scene.’
I went on to tell her about the security lock. Then I showed her one of the pictures I’d got from Prentiss. The one with the clothes piled on a chair.
‘Look at the clothes,’ I pointed. ‘I noticed this when I was in Paula’s flat and I wanted the police photographs taken at the time to make sure that her things hadn’t been disturbed since her death.’
Whilst Patsy looked at me questioningly, I continued to explain my theory. ‘The cops supposed that as Paula got undressed before going out of the window, she dropped her clothes onto the chair. Or maybe she had taken her clothes off earlier. It doesn’t matter. What puzzled me was the order that they had been placed on the chair. Aren’t they in the wrong order? Knickers on the bottom, the bra is underneath the blouse, and the pantyhose is part under, and part over, the skirt.’ I looked at Patsy. ‘You’re a woman. Do you agree that the clothes lying on that chair are in the wrong order?’
Patsy’s eyes gleamed with excitement. ‘Of course!’ she exclaimed. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. Oh Emmo, I could kiss you!’
‘Slow down,’ I cautioned. ‘This isn’t proof of anything. Maybe she knocked the clothes onto the floor, or one of the cops went through them before the photograph was taken. All I can say is that it’s another question mark.’
Crestfallen, Patsy asked, ‘but you do still think it was murder?’
‘Oh yes, but you must be patient while I spend time doing some good old-fashioned police legwork. Maybe I’ll uncover some answers.’

Starting at the bottom, I steadily worked my way upward through the block where Paula had lived and found out quite a lot about her.
She had been much more than a waitress. She went out every night and she regularly took men back to her flat. She was friendly and chatty with neighbours. On Tuesday mornings she went to private voice training classes. Also on Tuesdays, she posed nude for an evening art class in the local college and afterwards went drinking with the male students. She was a regular in a couple of pubs and she enjoyed quiz-nights. I talked to anyone that might know something about her death, and I tracked her movements during the final hours. After her shift at Ken’s café, she had gone home to freshen up. Then she had gone out again to, knowbody knew, to reappear in Sammy’s Place where she spent about an hour and a half. From there she went to her local pub, but stayed only about thirty minutes. As far as anyone could remember, she left alone. One woman thought that maybe Paula had scored for a supply of pills.
Several weeks went by. I had other jobs to do, so I could only work on the Paula case during my spare time, managing to more or less eliminate everyone living in the building up to the 16th floor. Only four more floors to go. It had been hard work with little to show for it, making me even more determined to crack the case.
Late on Friday evening, the 30th of May, I was standing on the pavement opposite Paula’s block, staring up at her window whilst I mentally sifted everything through my brain in the hope that something…anything, would come to me.
At almost midnight, the streets were still busy. Plenty of traffic and pedestrians coming and going. A man staggered out of a taxi and went into the block. I watched, and noticed that the lift service-lights automatically switched on and off as the lift reached, then left, each floor. The lights showed that the man had gone up to the sixth floor. After a while, the lift light on the sixth floor went out and the light on the fifth floor went on, then off. The fourth floor light went on, then went off. The same with the third floor light, followed by the second floor, the first floor, and finally the ground floor, where the light stayed on. I counted. On each floor, the lift light stayed on for about thirty seconds.
Someone else used the lift. Ground floor light went out, first floor lit up then went out. The lift went up to the fifteenth floor. I kept my eyes on the fifteenth floor to see a light switch on in one of the flats. The lift returned to the ground floor. I continued to watch. For hours I idly watched that lift. It became a kind of game to successfully follow the movements of the people as they came and went about their private business.
Time passed. The streets quietened and the lift was still for longer and longer periods, but I didn’t move. Dawn was breaking by the time my brain had finished sifting, giving me a train of thought. My eyes travelled upwards one more time, all the way to the twenty-fourth floor, and I knew, I just knew, that I had the answer. I went to an all-night café for food and to think.

It was a Saturday so if I went early enough, but not too early, I had a good chance of finding everybody in without them wanting to stay in bed and ignore my knocking. Concentrating on just four flats, I was on the third when I rang the bell of flat number 232. The man who opened the door wore a pair of fashionably faded jeans, a designer shirt and leather moccasin-style slippers.
I said, ‘Mister Stride, I want to talk to you about Paula Plant.’ I knew his name from my habit of collecting tenant’s names from talkative neighbours.
As I watched, his face fell apart, telling me that Tommy Stride was the person I was looking for. I pushed the door fully open and moved forward whilst he automatically stepped back to make room for me. Closing the front door, I walked past him into the lounge. Standing with my back to the window, I said, ‘She went out of this window.’ A statement, not a question.
He had recovered sufficiently to spread his arms wide with his half-open hands facing the ceiling, and counter with, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
But he did know. His eyes and his body language told me that he knew.
I didn’t shout or threaten. In a conversationally un-aggressive tone I said, ‘For weeks I have been puzzled by all the things that nobody saw. Nobody noticed any strangers. Nobody saw anyone leave the building after Paula hit the ground directly in front of the main entrance. Surely someone among the gathering crowd would have seen the killer leave. Then, early this morning I had the answer. The reason nobody noticed a stranger, or saw the killer leave, was simply that he, or she, was not a stranger. They lived in the building. From that simple premise, I pieced together the rest of it.’
Tommy Stride stood still, mouth half-open, his face drained of colour, listening intently as I told him about the clothes on the chair.
‘Paula didn’t take them off and pile them up like that. Her killer dumped them on the chair to make it look as if she had undressed in her own flat. And it worked. The police took the obvious view that Paula, full of pills and dope, had committed suicide. But in reality, you pushed her out of this window. Didn’t you.’ An accusation not a question.
He collapsed into a chair and began to talk.
He was employed as a laboratory technician in a local hospital from where he brought home drugs for his own use. When Paula found out, Tommy was an immediate attraction. He had got used to her tapping lightly on his door in the middle of the night to drop a few pills and have no-ties sex.
‘Paula loved her sex,’ he said. ‘She needed it most nights.’
‘Did you use condoms?’
‘Yes, always. A fellow can’t be too careful.’
On that fateful night, Paula had turned up at a little after two in the morning, already high on alcohol and cannabis. He too was high, so it didn’t take more than a shared smoke and a couple of pills for them to be really flying. They had stripped and gone to bed. Later, after dozing for about an hour, Paula had awakened completely spaced out and hysterical. He had tried to settle her down, but she wasn’t having any. She was mumbling some unintelligible gibberish and staggering around the flat, seemingly searching for something, when she tripped and fell.
By the time his brain had registered that something was wrong and he should go to her, she was lying at a crazy angle suggesting that her neck was broken. He checked. There was no pulse to be found at her wrist, her throat or her temple. He tried the breath-on-a-mirror trick. She wasn’t breathing.
He was in full flow now, reliving the whole episode as best as he could remember it. saying, ‘All I could think of was that she was dead in my flat with both of us full of drugs and I was in trouble.’
‘What happened next?’
‘I was going to take her back to her own flat and started to dress her, but it was impossible. As I began to think straighter, I came to the conclusion that even if I got her dressed, I couldn’t risk meeting somebody on the landings or in the lift...’ he paused for breath.
‘So you put her out of the window,’ I finished his sentence.
‘Not then,’ he continued. ‘I left her here, on the floor, while I took the keys from her blouse pocket, gathered up her clothes and shoes and went to her flat. I unlocked the door and found the security chain was on, but I wasn’t surprised. I’d often seen Paula fasten it from the outside. I unhooked it, went into the flat, switched on the light and put her clothes on a chair and the shoes on the floor. I left her keys on the sideboard, and opened the window as wide as it would go. When I left, I replaced the security chain just as I’d seen Paula do it, and slammed the door. Then I hurried back here to my own flat.
‘Paula hadn’t moved. I again checked her pulse and breathing to confirm that she was dead, which she was, so I switched off my flat lights, opened this window, which is directly above hers, and maneuvered her naked body up until I could simply let it fall. I didn’t look down. I closed the window and sat here in the dark, hoping that what I had done would never be found out.’
As he unburdened his guilt, his relief was clear. He wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer, just a frightened little man.
I pulled out my mobile phone and dialed an unlisted number. As arranged, Detective Inspector John Prentiss answered. And because Tommy Stride had technically turned himself in and had given a full confession, he was sentenced to a lenient five years in prison.

So here we are, two years later. Patsy needing help was the catalyst that started me straightening myself out. And I have. No more booze, no more self-loathing, no more self-pity. Business has mushroomed upwards to bigger and better paid jobs, enabling me to get a mortgage on this very nice three-bedroomed house with my own office.
As I finish writing this on my new computer, I feel something press into my back as two small hands reach out and over my head to cover my eyes. A warm friendly voice says, ‘Dinner is ready.’
I swivel round. The hands leave my eyes and go round my neck. As soft classical music wafts in from the stereo unit, I use my big mitts to caress the black smooth skin of the swollen belly containing our first-born - a girl already known to us as Destiny.
Patsy, her love for me radiating out of her black sapphire eyes, kisses me. I think, Saint Patrick, if you are responsible for this, we thank you, from the bottom of both our hearts.