The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 by David Carter (best finance books of all time .txt) 📕

And she laughed, and Radka in the glass laughed back.

‘I’ll bet you wish you were here right now, have you got over it yet?’ and Iskra frowned, just as she knew Radka would have frowned, and the image in the mirror frowned too, exactly as she had imagined.

Iskra bent down and picked up the green squirty lavatory cleaner and opened the pan.

A young man’s face stared back through his blue eyes.

Iskra jumped back a pace.

Her mouth fell open.

‘Jee-sus Christ!’ she said, clutching hard the plastic bottle of cleaner.

And then she realised it was a joke.

The girls were always playing silly jokes on one another, especially on the new girls, and this had to be another. Iskra had been half expecting it; and everyone knew that the English had a very strange sense of humour. For a moment they had her fooled. The head looked so real, so lifelike, ’cept it could not be alive, not down there, not without an attached body. Iskra grinned.

It was jammed down the pan so that the back of the head was resting on the water, so the face was staring straight up.

She retook the single pace back toward the pan.

The mouth in the head was open and there was something inside the mouth, something pink, not the tongue, something else. Iskra dropped the cleaner and pointed at the face. Her forefinger approached the lavatory, and closed in on the head.

She touched the displayed teeth.

Nice teeth. Real teeth. Human teeth.

She touched the eye.

Nice eye. Real eye. Human eye. It didn’t blink.

Her mouth fell open and she wanted to scream, but nothing came, no sound, just flavours of garlic and cayenne and paprika and overdone fatty beef.

And then something did come, highly flavoured vomit, a torrent of it, undigested breakfast, as it splashed down and covered the head’s blue eyes, filling the open mouth, burying whatever was inside, blanketing the face.

And when she had done, she did scream.

One long terrible exclamation from the very depths of her soul.

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

MARY WAS BUSY IN THE room next door. Couldn’t fail to hear the row through the wall.

It was clearly Iskra, and Mary McGrory from Dungannon, an older lady with a penchant for barley wines, had taken a shine to the young and pretty Bulgarian, taken her under her wing, and by the sound of that horrendous screech, she had either fallen... or had been attacked. Maybe there was still a creepy punter in there, and he had tried it on. It happened, though never to her.

She hustled into the corridor, shouting, ‘You all right, Iskra?’ as Iskra opened the door and pushed past Mary without looking her in the eye, and fled down the corridor, holding her mouth, shaking her head, wanting to scream again.

‘What is it, my child?’ asked Mary, as she gingerly crept into room number fifty, and into the bathroom that was still really smelly, and there she saw the Technicolor mish mash that greeted her eyes when she peered down the open bowl, and the outline beyond of a young man’s head.

‘Jesus Mary and Joseph!’ she muttered, and crossed herself, and turned about and set off down the corridor, after Iskra, shouting, ‘Mister Heale, Mister Heale, you’d better come and see this!’

Mister Heale was in reception, standing behind the counter, talking on the phone.

The dusky girl, who never said much, was sitting at the desk, busy on paperwork, every now and again glancing at her computer screen.

‘Mister Heale, you must come and see this!’ repeated Mary, sniffling into her handkerchief.

She didn’t look well, Mister Heale thought. Bout of summer flu coming on, maybe.

He was talking to some American computer company who wanted to block book sixty rooms, but they were haggling hard on the rate.

‘Mister Heale!’

He put his hands over the mouth piece and whispered, mouthing it widely as if she were deaf, ‘I am speaking to International Computers!’

‘Mister Heale, there is a man’s head in the lavvy!’

The dusky girl glanced up, same impassive expression.

She’d heard it all before.

There wasn’t much that could surprise her.

For once Mister Heale was lost for words. Then he said, ‘I am so sorry, Mrs Wendlesham, can I call you back in ten, there’s just something I need to check on right now,’ and he bobbed his head and said, ‘Rightho, I’ll call you back,’ and put the phone down.

Then he was out in the public area, pulling the door open to the corridor, muttering about how bloody busy he was, and he hoped she wasn’t wasting his time, and that it was all probably some stupid student rag stunt, just like last year, don’t you remember that, because it was approaching the end of term time again, rag week, that daft stunt when they dressed a whole pig in an evening suit, complete with a red silk bow tie, and placed it on the bed, sat straight up, pillows supporting its back and neck, a fat smoking cigar in its grinning mouth, and a glass of red wine somehow wedged into its front right trotter, and when Mister Heale had been called to the room, the students were outside in the car park. They’d removed the lace curtains, and were filming the event, and then they put the whole thing up on pooptube, or whatever that time wasting trite Internet site is called, and it had received over ten million hits in forty-eight hours, and the students had done very nicely out of it, thank you very much.

‘It’ll be a freakin’ hoax again,’ he said, ‘sure as eggs are eggs.’

‘Don’t think so, Mister Heale. Don’t think so, not this time.’

‘Was that why Iskra came running and crying through reception?’

Mary pulled a long face and nodded twice, and by then he was opening room fifty and going inside where he hurried into the bathroom and glanced down the open lavvy bowl, and poked through the vomit, poking the head in the eye, as if he half expected