Blood Lines Read online

  He was in his mid-to-late thirties, dark-haired, dark-eyed and moley; his lower face had the bluish shading that went with really black hair and white skin.

  ‘DS Mills, sir,’ he said helpfully when Slider failed to respond.

  ‘What does the DS stand for?’ Slider asked. ‘Dark Satanic?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant, sir,’ Mills corrected, deadpan.

  ‘Are you being funny, lad?’

  ‘No, sir. Would you like me to be?’

  Both men broke into a grin, and Slider got up to stretch out his hand. ‘Good to see you, Mills. How are you?’

  ‘I thought for a minute you didn’t remember me,’ Mills said gratefully. ‘It’s a long time since the old Charing Cross days.’

  ‘Ten years at least, I should think. So you made your stripes? Well done! And what are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve just transferred from Epsom.’

  Slider raised his eyebrows. ‘Nobody told me. I’ve been a sergeant short for three weeks. I thought I was never going to get a replacement.’

  Mills looked embarrassed. ‘Oh, no sir, I’m not for you. I’m joining Mr Carver’s firm tomorrow, but when I heard you were here I thought I’d drop in as I was passing and see if you remembered me.’

  Carver had been agitating for extra manpower for months, but he hadn’t actually lost anyone. If anyone ought to have got Mills, it was Slider; but Ron Carver was on the square. Slider swallowed his disappointment and his paranoia. The ways of the Met were passing strange but there was no future in pissing into the wind.

  ‘How are things in Epsom?’ he asked instead.

  Mills made a face. ‘Quiet. Except on Saturday nights. You know what these outers are like, sir.’

  ‘Ah well, you won’t get bored here.’

  ‘I’m from Shepherd’s Bush originally,’ Mills said. ‘I mean, I was born here.’

  ‘Were you? I suppose someone has to be.’

  ‘We lived in Oaklands Grove,’ Mills confided. ‘I’ve been walking about the last couple of days, though, and the place has changed a good bit. I passed where the Congo Church used to be, and it’s gone!’ He sounded quite indignant. ‘It’s a block of flats now. I used to go to scouts in the church hall there when I was a kid.’

  ‘Got any family here?’

  ‘My mum, she’s in sheltered in Hammersmith. And my auntie lives in Ormiston Grove.’

  ‘Sir Robert Mark would have a fit,’ Slider murmured. It had been that great man’s contention that detectives should not get to know their ground too well, or corruption would inevitably set in, struggle how one might. ‘Are you staying with her?’

  ‘No, sir. I’ve got a temporary place just round the corner, Stanlake Road. I’ll be looking for a flat a bit further out once I’ve got settled.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure you’ll be a great asset to Mr Carver, even if you do have to relearn the geography. I wish you were joining my firm. I’ve lost a DS, and the holiday season’s always a problem. Have you had your holidays?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Rhyl, sir.’

  Slider was unable to think of a single thing to say about Rhyl. Possibly no-one ever had. ‘You haven’t taken up DIY, have you?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘No sir,’ Mills said with faint surprise.

  Slider was relieved. ‘Better steer clear of DC Anderson, then,’ he advised. ‘He’s just built his own sun-lounge extension.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning, guv,’ said Mills grinning.

  The White Horse wasn’t much of a pub, but it was open all day and the nearest to the police station, so it received more patronage than its efforts to please deserved. Slider pushed open the door of the saloon bar and a friendly fug embraced his head, an all-senses combination of cigarette smoke, cherry-coloured nylon carpeting, the smell of institutional gravy and the pinging and gurgling of a fruit-machine. Along the bar in front of him was a row of broad dark-blue serge behinds topped with a variety of anoraks and leather jackets: B Relief must have been on overtime. He imagined he could hear the steady sound of sucking, as when a team of plough horses just turned out nudges up to the water-trough.

  One of them, alerted perhaps by the unnaturally fresh air that had wafted in with Slider, turned his head, and then smiled welcomingly. ‘Hullo, sir. I’m up – can I get you one?’ D’Arblay said. The others looked round as well, and their expressions were not wholly unwilling, but Slider felt shy of imposing himself upon them. They had been sucking in grateful silence, and if he joined them they’d have to make polite conversation.

  ‘Oh, thanks, you’re very kind, but I’m going to get something to eat,’ he excused himself.

  ‘You’re a brave man, sir,’ said Elkins, his moustache heavy with froth like a hawthorn bush in May. Before them on the bar were four opened packets of Pork Scratchings. Courage is all relative, Slider thought as he made his way to the food counter.

  Mein host was a tall, fat, cold-eyed man who resented the fact that the coppers from across the road didn’t like his pub, and got his own back by making them feel as unwanted as possible. Slider’s request for food pleased him because it gave him the chance to disappoint.

  ‘At this time of day? You must be joking. I can’t keep kitchen staff hanging about just on the off-chance.’

  ‘A sandwich, then,’ Slider said as firmly as he could on an empty stomach. The landlord’s face registered a brief struggle. He hated customers, and especially policemen, but their constant presence on his premises meant he had very little trouble from drunks or vandals. Besides, policemen spent well. His overall aim was to make them feel miserable without actually driving them away; compromise was sometimes necessary.

  ‘Only rolls,’ he said at last.

  ‘Two ham rolls, then,’ said Slider.

  ‘No ham. Only cheese.’

  ‘I see you studied at the Hobson school of catering,’ Slider said politely. ‘Two cheese rolls, then; and a large scotch. And a packet of crisps,’ he added, throwing caution to the winds. What the hell? You have to splurge sometimes.

  ‘What flavour?’ the landlord asked with the light of battle in his eye.

  ‘Vanilla,’ said Slider, staring him down; and after a moment he walked off, thwarted. The food, when it came, was as miserable as it could be rendered, the sort of rolls that were soft on the outside and hard on the inside instead of the other way round, scraped over with margarine instead of butter, with one thin square of processed cheese in each, whose four corners, poking outside the circumference, had gone hard and greasy from exposure. When Slider opened the rolls to inspect them, he found as a final insult a single wafer-thin circlet of tomato stuck to the marge in each, damp, anaemic and smelling of old knives.

  And the crisps weren’t. Slider ate and drank almost with a painful pleasure, a sense of supping life’s dregs, after which things could not possibly get worse. As if to prove the point, the landlord approached, and said with offensive indignation, ‘Phone call for you.’ Slider made his way round the bar to the public telephone at the other end, and could only think it must be Irene; if it was business or Joanna they’d have used his bleeper.

  It was Joanna. ‘You forgot your bleeper again, didn’t you?’

  ‘I left it on my desk,’ he discovered.

  ‘So I’ve been told. Luckily someone saw you go across the road, or I’d have had a long search. What on earth are you doing there?’

  ‘Making myself suffer. Nothing’s any fun without you, anyway. Where are you?’

  ‘At the Trevor,’ she said through a blast of background hilarity. ‘Can’t you tell?’

  He thought of the Trevor Arms, the nearest pub to Glyndebourne, the one the orchestra always patronised. He thought of a pint of Harvey’s – mahogany nectar – and the house ham, egg and chips – the greatest trio since Schubert.

  ‘What’s the weather like?’ he asked, hoping for relief.

  ‘Terrible,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It’s pissin
g down. I do feel sorry for the punters, all togged up and nowhere to go. If it doesn’t stop by the interval, they’ll all have to squeeze into the marquee for their picnics.’

  ‘What you might call loitering within tents,’ Slider said.

  ‘What? I missed that, there’s so much noise here. What’s it like there?’

  ‘Noisy.’

  ‘The weather, I mean.’

  ‘Oh – terrible. I don’t know, really. Not raining, I don’t think.’

  ‘Darling, what’s the matter?’ she asked anxiously.

  He searched for some succinct way to tell her, but the distance between them was too great, and the line wasn’t good enough for delicate expositions. ‘It’s Thursday,’ he said. ‘I’ve never really got the hang of Thursdays.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, wanting to get to the bottom of it, but feeling, like him, that the effort over the phone was too exhausting. ‘Well, only another one and a half horrible Dons, and then it’s lovely Traviata. You’ll like that – frilly dresses and damask drawing-rooms. You will come to the pre-dress, won’t you?’

  ‘If I’m off, of course I will.’ He thought of telling her about the singer whose house was broken into, but he couldn’t remember her name. While he was hesitating she went on.

  ‘I’ve got some good news.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The BBC’s going to do a television recording of the Don, and we’re being booked for it. Best of all, they’re not just taping a performance down here. It’s going to be a studio recording. That means nine sessions.’

  ‘That’s wonderful.’ He roused himself to enthuse: he knew what that meant to the finances. Then he frowned. ‘Nine three-hour sessions? But the opera’s only about three hours long, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s my detective, scenting the anomaly,’ she said, and he heard her smile. ‘The running time’s about two hours fifty – depends a bit who’s conducting. But you’re only allowed to record twenty minutes of finished product per session.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Union rules, silly. We’ve got to eat. All the same, by the time you’ve run through, polished up, done a few takes, and hung around for the engineers to decide if it’s good enough, you wouldn’t get more than twenty minutes taped anyway.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad for you,’ he said. Work had been a bit thin on the ground lately.

  ‘Be glad for yourself, too – the sessions are bound to be in London, maybe even at White City. We’ll be able to have lunch together.’

  She sounded so simply pleased at the idea that the words ‘I miss you’ were surprised out of him, with hardly a thought for the surroundings or the possibility of being overheard. ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, and he knew it was bad news. ‘We’ve got two calls tomorrow for Traviata, morning and afternoon, and the last Don is on Saturday. So I thought tomorrow evening I might go and see my parents and stay over. It’s my mother’s birthday on Saturday.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. Her parents lived in Eastbourne, which wasn’t very far from Glyndebourne.

  ‘Well, you see, I thought I could take them out for dinner tomorrow night, and then spend the day with her on Saturday, take her out for a drive somewhere maybe. I don’t see them very often, and as I’m down here anyway—’

  ‘It’s all right, you don’t have to ask my permission,’ he said. He tried to say it neutrally, but he was afraid it sounded petulant all the same.

  ‘You don’t mind, then?’ she asked doubtfully.

  The question peeved him, because even if he said he did mind, she wouldn’t change her plan. And why should she? It wasn’t as if they were married. She could do as she liked – and did. ‘It isn’t for me to mind or not mind. You’re a free agent,’ he said.

  There was a pause. It went on so long he thought she might change her mind, but at last she said, ‘Well, as long as you’ll be all right—’

  Disappointment was mingled with a feeling of guilt for trying to spoil her evening, with resentment for being put in a situation where it was possible to feel guilty, with exasperation for his own feebleness in being so tied to her apron strings. She mustn’t think he was going to be moping at home and waiting for her reproachfully. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, and unthinkingly added what had just jumped into his mind, ‘I’ve got to go and see Irene anyway.’ Stupid, stupid! In the context that sounded like sucks to you.

  But she only said, ‘Of course you have,’ and for the life of him he couldn’t tell how she’d taken it. Then she said, ‘Listen, I’ve got to go, there’s a queue for this phone.’

  ‘Have fun,’ he said.

  ‘And you.’ She hung up, and he felt like forty-seven kinds of idiot. This love business was fraught with potholes. He hadn’t even asked her if she was coming home on Saturday after the show. Surely she would? But if it was her mother’s birthday and he had made her feel uncomfortable, maybe she’d spend the night in Eastbourne again rather than risk a chilly welcome. It was undignified to be cast in the rôle of reproachful, stay-at-home spouse, and ironic after all the years he had been failing to turn up in Irene’s evenings. Boots and other legs didn’t half alter your perspective on things.

  He wandered back aimlessly to his end of the bar and tried to catch the landlord’s eye for another large Bells. But, he thought, anomaly-spotting again, why hadn’t she told him yesterday before she left that it was her mother’s birthday and that she might go and visit? Come to think of it, she hardly ever spoke of her parents at all. So why this sudden flush of dutifulness? As far as he knew, she had never marked their birthdays with a visit before, not while he had known her.

  Maybe she wasn’t going to Eastbourne at all. Maybe there was someone else down there – another man.

  At that point he actually made himself laugh. Someone else? She was playing in an orchestra of sixty musicians, the vast majority of them men; and male musicians were the most sexually irresponsible animals in the universe, next to policemen. It was the old unsocial hours syndrome, plus propinquity and being in a discrete group with its own esoteric language and experience. Just like policemen again. He reminded himself painfully how he had met her in the first place.

  The monster of jealousy boggled at him round the corners of his mind, and like all monsters it was ludicrous and frightening in equal proportions. He took a pull on himself. If she was down there, out of his sight and unaccountable, he was up here equally unaccountable to her. You had to trust someone if you loved them; and jealousy was most unattractive behaviour. But of course there was still the old dichotomy between the mind and the balls. Even while his intellect was explaining everything to him rationally, his hormones were prowling up and down with a baseball bat, looking for a fight.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Knife Work

  For once Slider beat Atherton to a call. In fact, he was so quick off the mark that when he reached the TV Centre at White City, there was only a single jam-sandwich parked in front of the main reception hall. Inside it was a forensic nightmare, with a milling crowd jostling around three tables set up along the left side, where they were apparently being checked in and badged, before moving slowly up the staircase at the far end. The main reception desk to the right was besieged only in a minor way by bored couriers, and as soon as Slider held up his ID a worried-looking young woman detached herself from a telephone conversation and hurried over to him.

  ‘Detective Inspector Slider, Shepherd’s Bush CID,’ he said. ‘There’s been an incident – a body found?’

  ‘Oh yes, it’s on the fourth floor, in one of the gents’ loos. I’ll get someone to show you up.’ She grew confidential. ‘It’s such a terrible thing – I mean, it isn’t a natural death.’ She pronounced the words in a voiceless whisper. ‘No-one knows quite what to do – you see, it’s a live programme, with an audience and everything. I do hope you can sort it all out. Do you think they’ll have to cancel the show?’ She raised hopeful eyes to his face.

  ‘I expect so,’ Slide
r said. ‘What programme is it?’

  ‘Questions of Our Time. Roger’s one of the panellists. Well, was.’

  ‘Roger who?’

  ‘Oh gosh, didn’t they tell you? Roger Greatrex. He’s the one they found. Well, I don’t know all the details, but apparently he’s killed himself in some ghastly way. Poor Fiona’s in a terrible state—’

  ‘Is this the audience?’ Slider cut her off, indicating the milling mob.

  ‘The last of them. The rest are in the exec canteen, or on their way up to it. It takes ages getting them all in. We thought, as we didn’t know what was to happen, that we’d better carry on as usual, rather than tell them to go home.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s right. Can someone show me upstairs now?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, yes, of course. Kate, can you come here a minute?’

  In a moment Slider was following a young woman who scurried like the White Rabbit up stairs, along a corridor, through some swing doors, up more stairs, along another corridor, without ever looking back to see if he was keeping up with her. At last she deposited him, completely disorientated, before a small worried knot of people standing before a closed door which bore the familiar straddling peg-man silhouette, the UN-approved International Idiot Icon for the gents’ loo. A uniformed constable – Baker – was guarding the door and some bloody footmarks in front of it. To Slider’s surprise, DS Mills was also there.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Slider said.

  ‘Oh, I just happened to be passing,’ Mills said vaguely. ‘I intercepted the call, and I thought I might be able to help.’