Killing Time Read online

  ‘Because they’d quarrelled?’ Mackay speculated.

  ‘It might have been the way they usually did it,’ said Hollis. ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘On Tuesday,’ Slider went on, ‘Paloma got up and sat with Parnell while she got ready to go out. He was upset at first about the quarrel, but grew more cheerful as he began to talk about his plan to leave London and buy a boarding house in Ireland.’

  ‘That sentence would make more sense the other way round,’ said Norma.

  ‘Parnell left the house at eleven-thirty, and she and the taxi driver Fluss are the last people we know to have seen Paloma alive. He was due to go to work at seven p.m. but didn’t arrive, nor did he telephone to say he wasn’t going in. At half past eleven p.m. we have two separate witnesses to the sound of the door being kicked in, and some kind of further noise suggestive of something heavy being knocked over. At six-thirty on Wednesday morning Parnell arrived home to find the door kicked in and Paloma dead. Any comments?’

  There were shrugs all round. ‘That’s plain enough,’ Mackay said for them all. ‘Chummy kicks the door down and does him in. End of story.’

  ‘Except for the minor question of who chummy was,’ Norma added with delicate irony.

  ‘Forensic says that from the size of the footmark,’ Slider picked it up, ‘we’re looking for a very big man, probably over six foot, and powerfully built. The boot had a ridged sole of one of the usual man-made compositions, something like a Doc Marten—’

  ‘Oh, well, that narrows the field a bit,’ said Norma.

  ‘So if we find a suspect we may get a bit of help there,’ Slider concluded patiently.

  ‘Guv, I can’t believe no-one saw this geezer,’ Hart said. ‘I mean, with all them flats around – and half past eleven people are coming back from the pub. And what about the block opposite? If you heard a door being kicked in, wouldn’t you go out on the balcony and have a look?’

  ‘No,’ said Anderson. ‘Ninety-nine out of a hundred, the last thing they’d do is go out and look.’

  ‘What about natural curiosity?’ Norma said.

  ‘What about self-preservation?’ Anderson said. ‘The immediate neighbours made sure they stayed inside where it was safe.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s different,’ Hart said. ‘Across the other block it’d be safe enough to go out and have a butcher’s. I know I would.’

  ‘The estate’s not that dangerous,’ Norma said. ‘People exaggerate.’

  ‘The door was kicked in with one blow,’ Slider reminded her. ‘There may not have been that much to hear.’ Hart shrugged, half convinced. ‘By all means, interview everyone again. I’m always ready to give instincts a run.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ McLaren said, and waited for the chorus of whistles and groans to die down. ‘If this bloke went along there to kick the door in and take Paloma out, why didn’t he do it in the middle of the night, when there was no-one around? Why choose half past eleven when there could be any number of witnesses?’

  Slider looked at Hart. ‘What’s your thinking on that?’

  ‘S’obvious,’ she said. ‘Middle of the night he would’ve stood out like a sore thumb. Half past eleven, pub letting-out time, he passes in the crowd, and if someone sees him kick the door in they probably just think he’s forgot his key. Anyone hears a loud bang, they don’t pay no attention, just think it’s a drunken fight or something and forget it. So when someone asks did you hear anything, they say no, and mean it.’

  Slider said, ‘So the killer was a professional, to your thinking?’

  Hart looked confused. ‘Well—’

  ‘Yes? Let’s have it.’

  ‘Well, guv, the choice of timing and kicking the door open looks professional. And the killing – the first whack across the bridge of the nose killed him instantly, that looks professional. But then he goes on to paste buggery out of the dead man’s skull for no reason – that don’t look professional. And when he stops to pick up the table and put the fag ends back in the ashtray – that looks plain daft.’

  ‘Maybe he wanted to leave everything looking normal,’ McLaren said.

  ‘Oh, normal – with a dead body on the floor,’ Hart said witheringly.

  ‘He pulled the front door closed behind him,’ McLaren defended himself.

  ‘That was to delay discovery,’ Anderson said. ‘A front door hanging open in the middle of the night would arouse suspicion.’

  ‘I can’t see what the problem is,’ Norma said impatiently. ‘You’ve got someone with the foresight to choose the time of day for his murder and the expertise to know how to deal a killing blow. But then he gets carried away with excitement at what he’s done and launches—’

  She’s going to say it, thought Slider.

  ‘—a frenzied attack on the body. When he finally gets his breath back, he’s not really thinking straight any more, if at all. Instinct takes over. He tidies up the table that got knocked over – maybe he had a houseproud mum – and closes the front door after him. I don’t see why,’ she concluded, ‘you should expect a villain to be consistent – especially in an irrational situation.’

  ‘You’re talking about this bloke being professional,’ McLaren objected, ‘but you don’t know he chose half eleven to be clever. Maybe he was dead stupid and never even thought about it. Maybe he had a beef with Paloma, and that just happened to be the time he lost his rag. Rushed round there, kicked the door in, and belted fuck out of him – just happened to get the first killing blow in where it landed, pure chance. That’s much more likely.’

  ‘And tidied up after himself?’ Slider said. McLaren offered no thoughts on that. ‘Let’s move on, shall we? What about this drugs connection? Parnell says that Paloma was buying cocaine for his lover. Billy Yates says he saw Paloma talking to a man in the club who might have been a dealer.’

  Hollis said genially, ‘My uncle Fred might stick his wooden leg up his arse and do toffee apple impressions. Might doesn’t feed the whippet.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Slider agreed. ‘However, I have to say that I don’t believe Parnell would have mentioned coke at all unless there was something in it. She and I have had a few run-ins in the past on that subject. Now it may be she’s not telling me the truth, or at least not all of the truth – in fact, I’m sure of that – but I think we can be sure there’s some truth in it. It’s possible Paloma was supplying her, and she brought in the lover as a smoke-screen. But on the other hand, she did say he was being paid well for it and putting the money away towards this B and B scheme she mentioned. I’m inclined to believe her. I don’t think she’s got the imagination to make that up.’

  ‘It doesn’t make the man in the club the dealer,’ Norma said.

  ‘No. But again, Billy Yates needn’t have mentioned him. He certainly wasn’t trying to be helpful to me, so presumably he was worried by this man and was hoping I’d act as pest control officer and rid the club of him. And if Billy Yates was worried by the man, there’s something about him we ought to know. I wouldn’t trust Yates as far as I could spit him, but I trust his instincts of self-preservation.’

  ‘Guv,’ Anderson said, ‘how about this? Paloma said on Sunday he reckoned he could get the last of the money he needed for the Ireland scheme, right? He goes to see his lover on Monday and arranges to get another supply of coke for him. His lover gives him the cash. He goes into the club Monday night and buys the stuff as usual. Tuesday he knows Parnell’s not going to be home, so he arranges to sell the stuff to some local distributor, probably for more than he paid for it. He’s waiting in at home for the bloke to call, but word’s got round that there’s stuff in the flat, and before the right man can get there, someone else breaks in, grabs the snow and whacks Paloma. End of story.’

  ‘There was no sign of anyone searching for anything,’ Mackay said.

  ‘If he was expecting to sell it, he probably had it sitting there on the table.’

  ‘Why didn’t he ring in to say he wasn’t going to work? Ri
ng in sick, or something?’ Hart asked.

  ‘He didn’t care any more. He was leaving anyway, once he’d got this dosh,’ said Anderson. ‘Next day when Parnell comes home he’s going to say to her, pack your bags, darlin’, we’re off.’

  ‘Very beguiling,’ Slider said. ‘But where does the poison-pen campaign fit into this?’

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t,’ Anderson said, wholesale. ‘Maybe that was nothing to do with it. Given who he was and what he did, there’s every chance there were people who didn’t like him and wanted to scare him.’

  Hart spoke up. ‘Actually, boss, when you come to think of it – you never saw one of the letters. And he never told Parnell about it, either, which you’d think he would. Maybe it never happened. Maybe he made it up.’

  Slider looked at her. ‘Why would he go to all the trouble of coming in to see me to tell me about it? He was certainly afraid of something.’

  ‘I’d be afraid if I was going to pull off some dodgy stuff with a coke dealer,’ Hart said. ‘He came hoping you’d give him protection, put a copper on the door just for long enough for him to get away. Only he couldn’t tell you the real reason.’

  ‘We’re really getting into Hans Andersen country now,’ Slider said impatiently. ‘We’ve got to get more facts. We need to find the man he spoke to at the club, and any other contacts he had there. If the man Yates spotted wasn’t a dealer, who was he; and who was the dealer? Paloma had been working at the club for almost a year. He must have talked to other club employees. Who did he know and what did he tell them? Any ideas how we can get the information?’

  ‘Billy Yates’s staff won’t talk to us,’ Mackay said. ‘It’s more than their jobs are worth.’

  ‘For jobs read lives,’ Anderson concurred.

  Hart snorted. ‘You don’t mean that big ponce Garry, walking about pretending he’s got a holster under his arm?’

  ‘Billy Yates has armed protectors, everyone knows that. They’re not pretending,’ Mackay said.

  ‘Yeah, and they’re going to go round shooting anyone that asks questions?’ Hart said derisively. ‘Do me a lemon! How long is Yates going to stay in business if he leaves a trail of corpses wherever he goes? If his boys carry shooters, it’s to scare people. They’re not gonna use ’em. Soon as they use ’em, Yates has got cops crawling all over his place, which is very good for business, I don’t think.’

  ‘That’s the sort of attitude that can get you killed,’ Norma said sternly.

  ‘This ain’t East LA,’ Hart responded. She turned to Slider. ‘I reckon I could get that Garry to talk to me, boss. He was fancying me rotten when we was there. If I come on to him a bit—’

  Slider shook his head. ‘I can’t let you put yourself in that sort of position. If you lead him on and then try to back out, he might very well force you, or beat you up.’

  ‘But, guv—’ Hart protested.

  ‘I think you underestimate the danger. He knows you’re a copper, don’t forget. He’d be glad to humiliate you. And if he got carried away, he might even kill you. Yates may be intelligent enough to know you can’t go round offing people, but that’s no guarantee Garry is.’ Slider looked round at the others. ‘Not Yates’s staff, I don’t think. But what about the other entertainers? They won’t have the same loyalty, and I doubt whether they’ll have the same fears. Yates wouldn’t waste his energy on them. Find out who they are, and get to them, privately, away from the club.

  ‘Get on to all the known users and dealers in the area and try to get a handle on it from that end. Find out if anyone did know about Paloma having coke on him at any time. And speak to everyone on the block, and anyone who was visiting that evening, and find out if anyone saw the door being kicked in. It’s probably worth asking in the local pubs as well.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ he concluded, ‘the killer doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Someone knows him. Keep your ears to the ground. Ask around all your usual snouts. He came home in a state, probably with blood on him, and if he didn’t tell his nearest and dearest why, they probably guessed anyway. You all know that ninety-nine out of a hundred crimes are solved through informers. Get out there and get at ’em.’

  As the troops were dispersing, Hart waylaid him with a determined gleam in her eye. ‘Guv, about that Garry—’ she began.

  Slider’s heart sank, but he turned back to give her the benefit of the doubt. ‘What about him?’

  ‘I know I’m right about him. I’m sure I could get information out of him. He’s just pretending to be the hard man. Honest, I know the type.’

  ‘Well I’m not sure, so we’ll just leave it, shall we?’ Slider said.

  ‘But you said you were always willing to go with instinct.’

  ‘A woman’s instinct, is that it?’

  ‘No, guv, a copper’s instinct,’ she returned smartly.

  She was so young and so confident she made him feel tired. ‘How old are you?’

  She stuck her lip out. ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it, sir.’

  ‘Of course you don’t. One of the nice things about being young is that you think you’re immortal. When you’ve seen a few colleagues go down, you know different. You’re not in this job to get your head blown off, Hart.’

  ‘I don’t reckon to, sir, but—’

  ‘Experience tells when it’s worth taking the risk. For this, it’s not worth it. Trust me.’ He began to turn away again.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that to Mackay or Anderson,’ she said sullenly.

  His head began to throb. ‘They would know better than to ask,’ he said. ‘If you want to prove you’re the same as a man, stick a rolled-up sock down your knickers. I haven’t got time to visit anyone else in hospital.’

  ‘That’s what this is about, ain’t it, guv? You feel guilty about Sergeant Atherton and it’s making you over-protective to the rest of us. With respect, you ain’t got the right to lay that on us—’

  ‘Don’t give me that psycho-bollocks. This is not an episode of Cracker. And don’t ever use those words to me again.’

  ‘What words?’ she said, taken aback.

  ‘With respect,’ he said, and left her standing.

  ‘Am I intruding?’ Joanna said, and he looked up from his desk to realise she had been standing in the doorway for some time, and he had been half aware of her and trying not to be.

  ‘Oh, no, come in.’ Joanna walked over and leaned across the desk to kiss him. She had been rehearsing at the Albert Hall for the evening’s concert.

  ‘Why so distracted?’ she asked.

  ‘I was afraid it was Hart coming back for a rematch.’

  ‘Would you care to elucidate?’

  He told her. ‘I don’t know why I got riled, except that she’s so cocksure, and can’t take orders, and wants to go swaggering into the jaws of death like Indiana Jones when it doesn’t even begin to be necessary.’

  ‘She’s young,’ Joanna said.

  ‘I know. That’s the trouble. God, they think anyone over thirty has lost touch with reality. It’s part of my job to see they live to realise how wrong they are.’

  ‘All the same, she’s probably right – about you being over-protective. Would you have stopped Mackay or Anderson?’

  ‘They’re not female,’ he said. ‘It’s no good looking at me like that. She was proposing to attempt to seduce a flash, gun-toting club hardman, and, having got information out of him, back out of having sex with him at the last minute. But anything he wanted to do to her, she couldn’t stop him doing. It doesn’t matter how feisty she is, or how well-trained, he’s bigger and stronger than her, and that’s the bottom line.’

  ‘But isn’t her life hers to risk?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s mine. While she’s in the Job and in my firm, she’s my responsibility.’

  Joanna looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You came back to work too soon,’ she said. ‘No, don’t glare at me, I don’t mean your judgement is impaired, I just mean you look tired. And I bet you’ve got a he
adache.’

  He tried to smile. ‘Were you going to suggest having sex on the desk, then?’

  ‘After the rehearsal I’ve just been through? Lupton and Bruckner? My arm’s only hanging on by a thread. God, I hate the Albert Hall! You have to scrub twice as hard to make any impression. But I suppose making it hemispherical seemed like a good idea to her at the time.’

  ‘Queen Victoria?’

  ‘Mrs Hall. It was named in memory of her husband.’

  He gave her a ferocious scowl. ‘What do you want anyway, Marshall?’

  ‘I was just going to suggest a spot of lunch. Have you got time?’

  ‘I’ll make time,’ he said largely, feeling her different perspective on life like a blast of fresh air from a just-opened window. ‘I’ll take you to the canteen.’

  ‘Gosh, you know how to spoil a girl,’ she said.

  The Special was steak and onion cobbler. ‘Aptly named,’ Slider said. It was in fact stew, with things on top that looked like dumplings but were actually a sort of hard pastry, having all the attributes of cobblestones except flavour. Joanna had the fisherman’s pie. ‘What’s under the mashed potato?’ Slider asked.

  Joanna chewed thoughtfully for a moment and then looked down. ‘Something white,’ she said at last. ‘With little bits of something pink.’ She chewed again. ‘I am eating, aren’t I?’ she appealed for reassurance. ‘It’s so hard to tell without some sensory input, like taste or texture.’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘you can make it up with the pudding – they do a wicked jam roly-poly and custard. Atherton says it’s the best thing on the menu. You are going in to see him this afternoon, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course. I thought I’d smuggle Oedipus in to say hello. Are you going to be home tonight?’

  ‘Yes. I hope so. I think so.’

  ‘I won’t go for a drink, then, I’ll come straight home.’ She smiled at him suddenly. ‘Nice, this, isn’t it?’

  He looked startled. ‘Nice?’