Blood Sinister Read online

  ‘Probably at work,’ Slider said. The front door let into a vestibule, which contained two further Yale-locked doors. They were built across what was obviously the original hall of the house, to judge by the black-and-white diamond floor tiles. One gave access to the stairs to the top flat; the other was standing open onto the rest of the hall and Phoebe Agnew’s flat. It had been the main part of the original family house, and had the advantage of the fine cornices and ceiling roses, elaborate architraves and panelled doors; but it had been converted long enough ago to have had the fireplaces ripped out and plastered over.

  There was a small kitchen at the front of the house, a tiny windowless bathroom next to it, and two other rooms. The smaller was furnished as an office, with a desk, filing cabinets, cupboards, bookshelves, personal computer and fax machine, and on every surface a mountain range of papers and files that made Slider’s fade into foothills.

  ‘Oh, what fun we’ll have sorting through that lot!’ Atherton enthused, clasping his hands.

  ‘We?’ Slider said cruelly.

  The other room, which stretched right across the back of the house, was furnished as a bedsitting room.

  ‘Odd decision,’ said Atherton. ‘Why not have the separate bedroom and the office in here?’

  ‘Maybe she liked to get away from work once in a while,’ Slider said.

  ‘I suppose it saves time on seduction techniques,’ Atherton said, always willing to learn something new. ‘Shorter step from sofa to bed. I wonder what she spent all her money on? It wasn’t home comforts, that’s for sure.’

  The furnishings were evidently old and didn’t look as if they’d ever been expensive. There was a large and shabby high-backed sofa covered with cushions and a fringed crimson plush throw, which looked like an old-fashioned chenille tablecloth. In front of it was a massive coffee table, of dark wood with a glass inset top, on the other side of which were two elderly and unmatching armchairs. One had a dented cushion, and a bottle of White Horse and a glass stood on the floor by its right foreleg. The other was a real museum piece with metal hoop arms and 1950s ‘contemp’ry’ patterned fabric. There was a folded blanket concealing something on its seat. Slider lifted the edge and saw that it was a heap of papers, correspondence and files, topped off with some clean but unironed laundry. The quickest way to tidy up, perhaps.

  Along one wall was a low ‘unit’ of imitation light oak veneer, early MFI by the look of it, on top of which stood a television and video, a hi-fi stack, a fruit bowl containing some rather wrinkled apples and two black bananas, a litre bottle of Courvoisier and a two-litre bottle of Gordon’s, part empty, some used coffee cups and glasses, and a derelict spider plant in a white plastic pot. The hi-fi was still switched on, and several CDs were lying about – Vivaldi, Mozart and Bach – while the open case of the CD presumably still in the machine was lying on the top of the stack: Schubert, Quintet in C.

  Along another wall were bookshelves with cupboards below, the shelves tightly packed, mostly with paperbacks, but with a fair sprinkling of hardback political biographies. ‘Review copies,’ Atherton said. ‘The great journalistic freebie.’ Slider looked at a title or two. Hattersley, Enoch Powell, Dennis Healey. But Woodrow Wyatt? Wasn’t he a builder?

  The window was large and looked over the small, sooty garden, to which there was no access from up here. It was the original sash with the lever-lock, which was, he noted, in the locked position. Of course, someone breaking in that way could have locked it before departing by the door.

  ‘But then, why should they?’ said Atherton. ‘The Yale on that door’s so old and loose a child could slip it. You’d have thought someone in her position would have been a bit more security-minded.’

  Slider shook his head. ‘Obviously she was unworldly.’

  ‘Other-worldly now, if you want to be precise.’

  The right-hand end of the room was furnished with a wardrobe, a tallboy, a low chest of drawers doubling as bedside table, and a double bed, pushed up into the back corner and covered with a black cotton counterpane. The wardrobe was decorated with a variety of old stickers: CND; Nuclear Power – No Thanks; Stop the Bloody Whaling; Troops Out of Vietnam; and, fondly familiar to Slider, the round, yellow Keep Music Live sticker. Instead of pictures there were posters stuck up on the magnolia-painted walls, amongst them a very old one of Che, a couple of vintage film posters, some political flyers and rally leaflets, and some cartoon originals which were probably pretty valuable. The room, though tidy, was scruffy and full of statements, like a student bedsit from the early 1970s. Given the age and status of the occupant, it seemed a deliberate two fingers raised at conventional, middle-class expectations.

  The body was on the bed.

  Freddie Cameron, the forensic pathologist, straightened and looked up as Slider approached. He was as dapper as a sea lion, a smallish, quick-moving man in a neat grey suit, with a dark waistcoat and, today, a very cheery tartan bow-tie – the sort only a very self-confident man or an expensive teddy bear could have got away with. It was the kind of bow-tie that had to be sported, rather than merely worn, and Cameron sported it, jaunty as a good deed in a naughty world.

  ‘Bill! Hello, old chum,’ he warbled. ‘Good way to end the week. How’s tricks?’

  ‘Trix? She’s fine, but I’ve told you not to mention her in front of the boy,’ Slider replied sternly.

  Freddie blinked. ‘Ha! I see they haven’t knocked the cheek out of you, anyway. You know who we’ve got here?’

  ‘I do indeed.’

  ‘There won’t be many tears shed for her in the Job, I suppose. Sad loss to journalism, all the same.’

  Slider raised his eyebrows. ‘I didn’t think you read the Grauniad.’

  ‘Indy man, me,’ Cameron admitted. ‘But she wrote for that occasionally, and the Staggers, which I read sometimes. Got to keep an open mind. I always liked her pieces, even when I didn’t agree with her.’

  ‘Someone didn’t agree with her,’ Slider said, and – there being no more excuse for ignoring it – for the first time looked directly at the corpse.

  What had been Phoebe Agnew was sprawled on her back, one leg slipping off the edge of the bed, toes touching the carpet. Her arms were flung back above her head, and her wrists were tied together and to the bedhead with a pair of tights. Her auburn hair, long and thick and loosely curling, was spread out around her like a sunburst, vivid against the black cloth, seeming to draw all the life and colour out of the room. It was amazing hair in any circumstance, but if, as Atherton had told him, she was around fifty, it was doubly so, because the colour looked entirely natural.

  She was wearing a large, loose, oatmeal-coloured knitted sweater and was naked from the waist down; a pair of grey wool trousers and scarlet bikini briefs lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. Slider flinched inwardly, and felt a stab of pity for the woman, so exposed in this helpless indignity. It was always the worst bit, the first moment of acknowledging the person whose life had been taken from them without their will. There she lay, mutely reproachful, beseeching justice. A body is just a body, of course, but still it wears the face of a person who lived, and was self-aware, and who didn’t want to die.

  The nakedness seemed worse because she was not young: there is an arrogance to the nakedness of youth which defies ridicule. In life she must have been good-looking, perhaps even beautiful, Slider thought, noting the classical nose, the wide mouth, the strong chin; but no-one looks their best after being strangled. The face was swollen and suffused, the open eyes horribly bloodshot; her lips were bluish, and there was blood on them, and in her left ear; and round her neck was the livid mark of the ligature. The ligature, however, had been removed.

  After all these years, the first sight of a corpse still raised Slider’s pulse and made him feel hot and prickly for a moment – almost like a kind of violent teenage embarrassment. He took a couple of deep breaths until it subsided.

  Atherton looked away, shoving his hands into his pockets. Tall an
d elegant, gracefully drooping, he looked as out of place in this room as a borzoi in a scrapyard. ‘Wonder why they took one ligature and left the other,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe the one round her neck was traceable in some way,’ Slider said. ‘Time of death, Freddie?’

  ‘Well, she’s cold and stiff, so that puts it between eight and thirty-six hours, according to the jolly old textbook. It’s not over-warm in here, and though she looks reasonably fit she’s no spring chicken, so I’d put it in the middle range, say twelve to twenty-four. Not less than twelve, anyway.’

  ‘So we’re looking at sometime yesterday, probably evening or afternoon,’ Slider said. ‘And I suppose the cause of death was strangulation?’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to commit myself until I’ve got her on the table. There are no other apparent injuries, but I’m not blessed with infra-red vision, and it’s getting dark as Newgate Knocker in here. These hypoxia cases are notoriously tricky, anyway. But she certainly has been strangled.’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to have been a struggle,’ Slider said. ‘No furniture overturned or anything.’

  ‘She may have been drugged, of course,’ Cameron said. ‘Which is why I reserve judgement on the cause of death. Have you seen enough? Well, let’s get the photos done, then, and we can get her out of here.’

  Slider left him to it and went to look at the kitchen. It must have been fitted in about 1982, with cheap units whose doors had slumped out of alignment, and daisy-patterned tiles, all in shades of brown: pure eighties chic. The cooker was old and flecked with encrusted spillings that hasty cleaning had missed. The fridge was also old, with leaking seals, and filled with a clutter of bowls containing leftovers: bits of food on plates, ends of cheese in crumpled wrappings, an expiring lettuce, and tomatoes that had gone wrinkly. A bottle of skimmed milk was past its sell-by date and there was a platoon of yoghurts, one of which had a crack down the side of its carton and was dribbling messily. The comparative tidiness of the bedsitting room was evidently only skin deep.

  The sink, with draining boards and a washing machine under it, had been fitted into the bay window. There was a plastic washing-up bowl in the sink. In it, and on the draining boards, was a collection of dirty utensils: plates and bowls, knives, forks and spoons, saucepans and various serving vessels. It looked as though there had been a dinner, featuring some kind of casserole, vegetables and potatoes followed by tiramisu. The last wasn’t hard to guess as the remaining half of it was still in its glass dish sitting on top of the grill hood of the gas stove. There were several empty bottles standing at the back of the work surface – three wine and one brandy – though there was no knowing how long they’d been there. They might not all appertain to the same meal.

  The meal surprised him a little. Knowing Phoebe Agnew’s politics, he would have bet on her being a vegetarian. And actually, given the state of the flat and the fridge, he would have expected her to be above cooking, just as she was apparently above home-making. The cookery books lying open amid the clutter of the work surface suggested a certain lack of practice in the art. Casserole Cookery, with the unconvincing, orange-toned food photographs of the seventies by way of illustration, was obviously old but had not, to judge from the lack of food splashes, been heavily used in its life. It was open at Italian-Style Chicken With Olives and had a fresh smear of tomato paste on one edge. The other book, New Italian Cooking, was brand new – so much so that the page had had to be weighted to stay open at Tiramisu.

  So she had entertained someone to a home-cooked meal yesterday and gone to some trouble about it: in his experience women never got out the cookery books for a man they were sure of. But was it the murderer she had cooked for? Or had she been dozing off the effects of the grub and booze when someone else called to cancel her ticket?

  ‘Guv, come and look at this,’ Atherton called.

  He was in the bathroom. Being windowless it had one of those fans that come on with the light. It was as ineffective as they usually are: the room had that sour smell of rancid water you get in towels that have been put away damp. It needed redecoration: the Crystal tiles staggered crazily over the uneven walls, the grouting on its last legs, and the paint on the woodwork was lumpy and peeling. There was a calcium crust around the taps, and the bath and basin were mottled white where the hard water had marked them, which looked particularly nasty since the suite was brown.

  ‘My whole life just flashed before me,’ Slider said. A brown bath had been the dernier cri when he first married.

  There was a washing line strung over the bath, on which hung more undies from a well-known high street store. Naturally she would shop at Marks and Engels, Slider thought. He counted six used towels – on the rail, over the edge of the bath, stretched over the radiator, and ‘hung up on the floor’, as his mother used to say.

  ‘And the plug hole’s clogged with soapy hair,’ he commented, looking, though not too closely, into the sink.

  ‘Never mind that, see here,’ Atherton said, and drew back for Slider to look into the lavatory bowl. The sad little rubber ‘o’ of a condom looked back at them.

  ‘She definitely had company,’ Atherton said.

  ‘We already knew that,’ said Slider. ‘Better fish it out.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Don’t whine. You’ve got gloves on.’

  ‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ Atherton grumbled. ‘I was fashioned for love, not labour.’ As he reached fastidiously into the bowl, he was reminded of an anecdote. ‘The plumber I use now and then told me about how this woman called him out one time because she wanted a new lav fitted. He asked her if she wanted a P-trap or an S-trap, and she went bright red with embarrassment and said, “Oh – well – it’s for both, really.”’

  ‘Get on with it,’ Slider said. Outside there was the sound of reinforcements arriving, and a voice he hadn’t expected. ‘Is that the Super? What the chuck’s he doing here?’

  ‘The voice of the turtle was heard in our land,’ said Atherton. He secured the floating evidence and followed Slider out.

  It seemed to have got even colder, and the sky was now featureless, low and grey, like the underside of a submarine. Detective Superintendent Fred ‘The Syrup’ Porson was on the doorstep, draped in a wonderful old Douglas Hurd coat of military green, voluminous and floor-length. What you might call army surplice, Slider thought. Behind Porson stood three of his DCs, presumably brought in the same car – the Department was short of wheels, as always.

  ‘Ah, Bill,’ Porson said. The cold air had given his skin a greyish tinge. With his big-nosed, granite face he looked remarkably like one of the Easter Island heads; the preposterous toupee was like a crop of vegetation growing on the top. ‘What’s the current situation, vis-à-vis deceased? Let’s have a stasis report.’

  Porson used language with the delicate touch of a man in boxing gloves playing the harpsichord. It was one of the endearing things about him – as long as you didn’t suffer from perfect literary pitch.

  ‘It looks as though it wasn’t suicide, sir,’ Slider said. He recapped briefly, while Porson tramped restlessly on the spot like a horse, using his hands thrust into his pockets to wrap the strange coat about him.

  ‘Hm. Yes. Well. I see,’ he said. He seemed in travail of a decision. ‘You are aware, of course,’ he said at last, ‘that this ’flu epidemic has precipitated a crisis situation, Area-wide, with regard to personnel? It’s a problem right across the broad, and as such, AMIP has asked if we’d be prepared to keep the case.’

  Slider raised his eyebrows. ‘It’ll be high profile, sir.’

  ‘The highest of the high, to coin a phrase,’ Porson agreed. A few tiny pinpoints of snow were drifting down, settling on the eponymous rug. It looked as though it was developing dandruff. Slider dragged his eyes away – Porson didn’t like the wig to be noticed. ‘The papers will be full of it,’ Porson went on. ‘Our every movement will be scrutinised with a tooth-comb. I’m well aware it’ll be no picnic, believe you me.
But the fly in the argument is’, he explained, ‘that AMIP’s even worse hit, absentee-wise, than we are. Half their manpower’s been decimated, plus they’ve got three other major investigations on the go as well. So the upshoot is, they’ve asked if we’ll do the premilinary work, at least to begin with.’

  Slider shrugged. Upshoot or offshot, his was not to reason why. ‘I hope the budget will stand it, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you worry about that.’ Porson seemed relieved at his docility. ‘I’ll sort all that out with AMIP. Well, now I’m here you’d better show me round, recapitate what you’ve got so far.’

  Slider obliged. Only as Porson was leaving did he think to ask, ‘By the way, sir, how did AMIP hear about it so soon?’

  Porson gave a grim smile. ‘They heard it from Commander Wetherspoon. Some reporter rang him at ten this morning, asking who was heading the investigation.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Slider.

  ‘So you see the problem.’

  He tramped off down the steps to the car, his coat brushing regally behind him. Atherton, at Slider’s shoulder, said, ‘Given who she was, I suppose there was never a cat in hell’s chance of keeping the press out of it.’

  ‘Not a toupee’s chance in a wind tunnel,’ Slider agreed.

  ‘That’s not an original toupee, you know, it’s an elaborate postiche,’ Atherton said. Another car pulling up further down the road caught his attention. Two men got out and headed towards them with an air of restraining themselves from running. ‘I hope the Super’s sending us some more uniform – the vultures are beginning to gather,’ he said.

  ‘If you stand around there you’ll get your picture taken,’ Slider warned. ‘Time to go and talk to the female that found the body, I think.’

  CHAPTER TWO