Chapter 1

1. Pilgrim way

Then grant us grace, Companion-God, to choose again the pilgrim way

Fred Kaan, “Now let us from this table rise”.

‘I can’t believe you talked me into this,’ Peter grumbled, turning round in his seat to speak to Jonah, who was in his hi-tech electric wheelchair, safely strapped into the back of their specially adapted car. ‘What makes you think that we’ll be able to solve a murder case that the local police can’t fathom?’

‘Bringing a fresh eye to a situation often helps,’ Jonah replied, smiling complacently. ‘And I could hardly refuse an appeal from Bernie’s favourite Aunt.’

‘You keep me out of this!’ Peter’s wife protested from the driver’s seat. ‘I agree with Peter. I’m sure that Merseyside Police are quite competent to deal with it. Aunty Dot just has unreasonable expectations. She doesn’t realise that these things always take time. Plus, she’s determined to prove everyone wrong about this young man she’s got fond of. You shouldn’t encourage her. I only went along with it all because I’d already been thinking I ought to pay the family another visit, and getting you to take any leave at all has been like trying to get blood out of a stone.’

‘But if this Jonathan that Aunty Dot’s talking about really is innocent,’ her daughter Lucy chimed in, from the seat opposite Jonah, ‘shouldn’t we be doing everything we can to prove it? I mean, it’s not fair, is it? If they never find out who did do it, he’ll have it hanging over him for the rest of his life.’

‘There you are, Peter! Lucy agrees with me,’ Jonah said triumphantly. ‘It’s our duty to help DCI Latham and her team to get to the bottom of things; and it’s not as if I haven’t gone through the proper channels. After Dot rang, I got on to Sandra Latham and she jumped at the idea that we might be willing to come up and give her the benefit of our experience.’

‘Only because she’s got this bizarre idea that you are some sort of superhero,’ Bernie retorted. ‘She still sees you in terms of those tabloid headlines when you first came back to work after you were shot: Police hero back in the saddle after near-fatal shooting, Inspirational cop returns to the frontline…’

‘Criminals beware! He’s back! And he’s on your trail!’ Lucy added with a giggle.

‘I suppose she thinks she’s getting Ironside to help her,’ Peter muttered.

‘I doubt it,’ Bernie said, laughing. ‘She’s too young to have much idea who Ironside was. You’re starting to show your age, Peter. Even I can only just remember when it was on the telly; and I never watched it. I was more of a Cagney and Lacey girl myself!’

‘You’re all talking nonsense,’ Jonah said, when the hilarity died down enough for him to be heard. ‘She simply recognised the benefits of having an independent mind to look at the evidence. And, of course, we did put her on the right track last year with that murder that you all got yourselves mixed up in.’

The summer before, Bernie had made a rare visit to her home city of Liverpool to introduce Lucy and Peter to her few remaining relatives. During their stay, they had witnessed the killing of a Roman Catholic priest aboard one of the iconic Mersey Ferries and Bernie, in particular, had been involved in identifying the perpetrator of the crime.[1] DCI Sandra Latham had been the Senior Investigating Officer and Jonah had struck up a friendship with her, based, as Bernie had rightly indicated, on her deep respect, verging on adulation, for the way in which he had refused to allow a disabling spinal injury to curtail a highly successful career in Thames Valley CID.

When Miss Dorothy Fazakerley had rung her niece, three days earlier, to say that there had been a suspicious death among the residents of the Care Home where she lived, Jonah’s immediate reaction had been to contact Sandra to get a police perspective on the incident. To his delight, it transpired that she was in charge of the investigation and she confided to him that Merseyside Police were making very little progress towards finding conclusive evidence to establish how, and by whom, a lethal dose of insulin had been administered to 79-year-old Mrs Olive Carter.

Thus it was that the whole family was making the journey from their home in Oxford to spend a week in Liverpool, visiting Bernie’s cousins – and her aunt, of course – and helping the police with their enquiries.

‘If you’re so against the idea, why didn’t you stay at home?’ Jonah demanded of Peter, ‘instead of just sitting there complaining all the time.’

‘What? And leave you lot alone together with a killer on the loose?’ Peter exclaimed. ‘Not bloody likely! You can’t any of you be trusted to take care of yourselves. You need me around to exercise a restraining hand and stop you barging into things without thinking and getting yourselves killed!’

He spoke jokingly to hide the real reason that he had insisted on joining the expedition: he was determined not to allow his wife and stepdaughter to shoulder the entire burden of caring for their friend in unfamiliar surroundings. The large house in Oxford, which they had shared with Jonah since the death of his wife three years previously, had been extensively modified to suit his needs. It also contained many labour-saving devices to assist them in various activities of daily living. A hotel, even one that boasted full accessibility, could not be expected to provide all the equipment that they were accustomed to having. Apparently simple tasks, such as giving Jonah a shower, were likely to involve heavy lifting, probably in awkward confined spaces, which would be much easier if Peter were there to help.

‘But it’s only what Mam and Jonah do all the time,’ Lucy pointed out, taking her stepfather’s words at face value and wondering why he should be concerned about a murder investigation in Liverpool, when he was sanguine about such things closer to home. ‘I mean, that’s their job, isn’t it – investigating murders?’

‘As part of a proper police team,’ Peter insisted, ‘with all the proper safeguards in place.’

‘Tiredness can kill. Take a break,’ Bernie read aloud from one of the roadside signs, hoping to distract them from a fruitless argument. She knew exactly why Peter had come, and shared his desire to avoid voicing his concerns in front of Jonah. ‘We must be coming up to Keele Services. We’ll stop there for a drink and to stretch our legs, and then we should be able to get to Liverpool in one more stage. Peter! You can drive on the last leg, while I navigate.’

They pulled in at the motorway service station and parked in a disabled bay close to the entrance of the building. Bernie and Peter got out, while Lucy leaned forward and started undoing the straps that held Jonah’s wheelchair in place. By the time she had finished, Bernie and Peter had the back of the car open and were engaged in attaching the ramp that would allow Jonah to descend. Soon all four of them were together on the tarmac, looking around to get their bearings.

‘Let’s get off the road,’ Peter suggested. ‘There are some tables and chairs just over there,’ he added, pointing towards a small paved area, cordoned off from the main concourse by green barriers.

Jonah expertly manoeuvred his electric wheelchair across the carpark and up a gently slope to the patio that Peter had indicated. The others followed.

‘I’ll get us some coffee,’ Bernie said. ‘Everyone having their usual?’

‘Yes please,’ Jonah answered, while Peter nodded his agreement.

‘I’ll come and help carry,’ Lucy volunteered.

They disappeared into the building, leaving Jonah and Peter sitting looking at one another. Jonah pressed a button on the arm of his chair, which made it recline slowly until he was lying on his back. Peter smiled approvingly, glad that Jonah had not needed reminding that the chief purpose of the break in their journey was to allow him to change his body position to avoid developing pressure sores or circulation problems as a result of being strapped into his wheelchair for too long.

Jonah manipulated the controls to make the surface upon which he was lying tilt, first to the right and then to the left, shifting his weight to relieve the pressure on his body. After a few minutes, he brought it back into a horizontal position and looked towards Peter.

‘Would you mind strapping me in so I can stand up? Now that I’ve got the new chair, I might as well make the most of it.’

Peter carefully fastened wide bands of fabric around Jonah’s legs and across his chest, just beneath his armpits, so that he was attached firmly to the chair, which now resembled a narrow bed or a hospital trolley

‘OK,’ he said, after double-checking that each strap was secure and that the wheelchair’s brakes were applied. ‘You’re good to go.’

Jonah pressed another of the controls on the keypad beneath his left hand and the surface on which he was lying began to pivot as a hydraulic cylinder extended, bringing him into an upright position while leaving the wheelchair chassis standing firmly on the ground. His purpose-built chair made a large contribution, along with the support of his three friends, to Jonah’s ability to carry on a normal life despite his extensive physical limitations. This vertical support mechanism was a new feature and Jonah enjoyed using it. As well as being beneficial to his physical well-being, it made him feel more normal to be standing up and viewing the world from his own natural height. Although he could not feel his feet, it gave him pleasure to know that they were now planted on the ground and supporting his weight, albeit still dependent on the straps to prevent his legs buckling.

He looked around and smiled to himself at the way that the crowds of people walking past them, on the way to the coffee shop, restaurant or toilets, were watching him while pretending not to. He caught the eye of a young man who grinned sheepishly and hurried on.

‘Look at that man!’ a young voice sounded behind him. ‘What’s he doing in that funny thing?’

Jonah turned his head and saw a woman pushing a baby in a buggy with a girl, whom Jonah estimated to be three or four, trotting along beside her, clutching a grey fur-fabric rabbit in her arms.

‘Hello,’ Jonah greeted them. ‘Do you like my chair?’

The little girl drew back against her mother and clutched her rabbit closer to her. The woman looked embarrassed.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sounding flustered. ‘I’ve told her not to stare at people, but …’

‘Don’t apologise,’ Jonah put in quickly, smiling down on her. ‘Children ought to take an interest in what’s going on around them. How else are they going to learn? I’m Jonah,’ he went on, ‘and this is Peter. We’re on our way to Liverpool. Do you have far to go?’

‘We’re going to stay with my mum in Clitheroe,’ the woman answered. ‘I’m Janice and this is Emily.’

‘I know Clitheroe. My late wife came from Horwich,’ Jonah told her. ‘We used to go over there sometimes when we were staying with her family. We used to take our two boys up Pendle Hill.’ He turned his head to address Emily. ‘That’s a nice rabbit you’ve got there. What his name?’

‘She’s called Woffles,’ Emily answered in a tone that suggested that the gender of her soft toy should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence.

‘I do beg her pardon,’ Jonah said hastily, favouring Emily with a lopsided grin. ‘Is she looking forward to your holiday?’

Emily nodded. Then she plucked up her courage to ask, ‘why are you in that thing?’

‘Because I can’t move my arms and legs anymore. This chair helps me to get about.’

‘It doesn’t look like a chair to me,’ Emily observed with a frown.

‘That’s because it’s a very special chair. Some very clever friends of mine designed it for me. It can be a chair or a bed or it can stand me up like this.’

‘What happened to you?’ Emily wanted to know.

‘Someone shot me in my neck and it broke most of the nerves in my spinal cord. That’s the thing that takes messages from my brain to my muscles to tell them what to do,’ Jonah started to explain. ‘It-’

‘We’d better be going,’ Janice interrupted, still embarrassed at her daughter’s interest in Jonah’s disability. ‘Come along Emily! Olivia needs her nappy changing.’ She started pushing the buggy towards the entrance to the services building. Emily looked Jonah up and down again before turning to follow her mother.

‘Goodbye, Emily!’ Jonah called after them. ‘It was nice talking to you.’

Bernie’s eyes lit up with pleasure at the sight of Jonah in his upright position when she and Lucy returned with the drinks. Like Peter, she worried that Jonah did not always take as much care over his own welfare as he could have done and she was pleased to see him making full use of the versatile new wheelchair’s advanced features, designed to keep him healthy. She put down the two paper cups of coffee, which she was carrying, on one of the tables and busied herself with inserting a long drinking straw into the lid of one of them. Jonah raised the right-hand arm-rest of his chair into a horizontal position so that the small table attached to it was ready to receive the cup. Bernie placed Jonah’s cup on it taking care to ensure that the straw was within his reach.

‘Tell me more about this Care Home where your Aunty Dot lives,’ Jonah urged her, as soon as they were all settled with their drinks. ‘What sort of place is it?’

‘Well, you’ve been there, haven’t you?’ Bernie reminded him. ‘So I don’t know what else I can tell you.’

‘I mean: what sort of people live there? How many of them are there? And how many staff? Do they get out much? Or are they all stuck in there all day?’

‘I don’t know,’ Bernie shrugged. ‘It’s quite small, I think. It’s privately owned and, I think, it’s independent – not part of a big chain, I mean. The residents are all elderly and need help with activities of daily living, but it doesn’t offer nursing care, so they can’t be really ill. They are a mixture of people like Aunty Dot, who have their fees paid by the local authority, and better-off ones who pay their own way. That’s been a bit of a bone of contention, I gather. The ones who pay for themselves get charged more, ostensibly because they have the better rooms, but everyone “knows” that it’s really just that the home can only survive financially if the paying residents are subsidising the others. I don’t know how true this is, but that’s the perception, according to Aunty Dot.’

‘And was Olive Carter, the victim, a local authority resident or paying her own fees?’ Jonah asked.

‘She was paying for herself. According to Aunty Dot, she owned a house in Mossley Hill, which meant that her assets were way over the limit for Local Authority assistance. She was going to have to sell it to raise the cash to continue paying the fees.’

‘Aaaah!’ Jonah nodded thoughtfully. ‘And Dot said that it was her family who pointed the finger at this Jonathan, because she’d left him something in her will. But they must have been set to inherit a lot more than he did, assuming that she left the house to them.’

‘Are you suggesting that they could have killed her?’ Peter asked.

‘I’m merely pointing out that they have a motive – two motives in fact: the straightforward financial one and possibly an emotional desire to prevent the family home being sold off. The way Bernie describes it, it sounds as if Olive’s death occurred at the crucial moment to prevent that happening. They – or some of them – may even have been living in it. Did Dot say anything about that?’

‘No.’ Bernie shrugged. ‘I didn’t ask.’

‘I’m sure Sandra Latham will have found out about all that,’ Peter said. ‘You’ll just have to wait and let her brief you properly.’

‘The Care Home management must suspect Jonathan,’ Bernie said thoughtfully. ‘When Aunty Dot rang last night, she said he’d been suspended from work. She didn’t know whether that meant the police had told them he was a suspect or-’

‘Sandra would have rung me if they’d got evidence of that,’ Jonah interrupted confidently. ‘It’ll just be to reassure the residents that they’re taking it seriously and aren’t going to allow them to be murdered in their beds.’

‘But that’s awful!’ Lucy exclaimed. ‘What if they never find out who did it? Will he lose his job?’

‘I’m afraid he probably will,’ Peter admitted. ‘They’ll say that his position would be untenable because the residents have lost confidence in him.’

‘Which is why it’s so important that we get to the bottom of what really happened!’ Jonah added triumphantly. ‘You see Peter? It’s our duty to help. If this Jonathan is guilty, he needs to be stopped from going off somewhere else and doing it again; and if he’s innocent then he shouldn’t have to suffer for it.’

‘The thing I’m most concerned about is making sure that Aunty Dot isn’t left living somewhere where there’s a serial killer on the loose,’ Bernie commented. ‘Don’t forget: the main reason for suspecting Jonathan was that another old dear, who had also left him a legacy, also died recently. If it is Jonathan who bumped them both off for their money, she’s probably safe because she doesn’t have a bean as far as I know, but if another member of staff is doing it, who knows?’

‘Dom says nobody thought anything was wrong when the first one died,’ Lucy said. ‘He got roped in to take Aunty Dot to the funeral, and everyone was saying how well she’d done getting to ninety-eight, especially when she’d had a heart condition for twenty years.’

Dominic Fazakerley was Bernie’s first cousin once removed – the youngest of her Cousin Joey’s three children. He and Lucy had become friends during their visit the previous year and regularly conversed via Facebook.

‘Did he know what it was exactly that this other woman had left to Jonathan?’ Jonah asked eagerly. This was the first that he knew that Lucy had access to inside information about the case. ‘And did she have any family who might have resented her leaving it to him?’

‘Just some ornaments off the shelves in her room, as far as Dom knew,’ Lucy answered. ‘He thinks it’s bonkers to think anyone’d kill for them. I don’t know about any family. Dom said Aunty Dot wanted to go to the funeral because she was afraid there wouldn’t be anyone much there, so maybe not.’

‘She told me that there was a daughter,’ Bernie said. ‘But Dot reckoned she was happy for Jonathan to have some of her mother’s stuff.’

‘But she would say that wouldn’t she?’ Jonah argued. ‘To your Aunty Dot and the other people at the Care Home, I mean; but she may have warned Olive’s family to keep an eye on Jonathan in case he worked his charms on her too. And the ornaments may have been valuable antiques, which it would have been worth Jonathan’s while killing for.’

‘Hardly worth bothering when the woman was ninety-eight,’ Peter pointed out. ‘He might as well have just waited for nature to take its course.’

‘And maybe he did,’ Jonah agreed. ‘Or maybe he discovered that the daughter was working on her to change her will and decided to cash in his investment right away.’

‘Or maybe he wasn’t thinking about it at all,’ Lucy said indignantly. ‘Aunty Dot says he’s just very nice and kind and helpful, and all the residents like giving him little presents. If her daughter wanted to have all her money after she died, why didn’t she look after her herself, instead of putting her in a Home?’

‘Maybe she couldn’t,’ Peter suggested. ‘If the mother’s ninety-eight, the daughter may well be well into her seventies and unwell herself.’

‘Stan and Sylvia are in their seventies and they could do it,’ Lucy argued. ‘I don’t understand why anyone would not look after their family themselves. It’s-’

‘Stan and Sylvia are remarkably fit for their age’ Bernie cut in, ‘and even so, Stan’s arthritis would prevent him from looking after someone who needed a lot of lifting. We can’t possibly know the circumstances, so you shouldn’t judge.’

‘The mother may have preferred to live in a Home,’ Peter added. ‘It may have made her feel more independent; or the daughter may have other caring responsibilities. We just don’t know, do we?’

‘I suppose so,’ Lucy agreed reluctantly, still convinced that she would not have allowed anything to get in the way of her becoming the main carer for her mother under such circumstances. She had been involved in caring for their friend Jonah ever since his disabling injury when she was only nine years old; consequently she saw the idea of putting a loved one into the hands of professionals as something unnatural and incomprehensible.

‘Mike says that insulin is a stupid thing to use to kill someone,’ Lucy said, seeing that her parents did not want her to continue pursuing her argument. ‘He says that it might well not have worked, because it depends so much on things like what she’d eaten before it was administered.’

Dr Mike Carson was a forensic pathologist and a longstanding friend of the family. Lucy, whose ambition was to follow in his footsteps, had discussed the case with him in some detail.

‘I expect it was a copy-cat killing,’ Peter opined. ‘There was a case a few years back, which hit the headlines. Several hospital patients were killed or injured by someone putting insulin in their saline drips.’

‘That’s right,’ Bernie agreed. ‘And it wasn’t so very far from Liverpool, so it may have been covered even more extensively up there. It was Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport. A nurse was accused and then acquitted, as far as I remember.’

‘No. She was never brought to trial,’ Jonah corrected her. He had been researching the incident, having already concluded that it could well have been the inspiration for Olive Carter’s killer. ‘The charges were dropped. They discovered that another similar death had occurred after the first nurse had been suspended from duty. It turned out to be a different nurse altogether. It was nearly three years before he was convicted. And Mike is right: twenty-two people were poisoned, but only seven of them died.’

‘Wow! I hope it doesn’t take three years to clear Jonathan,’ Lucy gasped.

‘And I hope nobody else gets poisoned while the police are investigating,’ Bernie added. ‘But, it may not be the same sort of thing at all. I mean, it may not be a serial killer. Surely, it could even be an unfortunate accident.’

[1] See Mystery over the Mersey © Judy Ford 2016, ISBN 978-1-911083-19-1, 978-1-911083-24-5 (e-book) and 978-1-911083-29-0 (Large Print)