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  ‘Ah,’ he said, looking up with satisfaction as Slider appeared in the doorway, ‘the old firm, back at the usual stand.’

  ‘Hello, Freddie. How’s tricks?’

  ‘All serene, old boy. How’s Joanna? Are you a father yet?’

  ‘No, seven weeks to go yet. And she’s fine, or as fine as you can be in those circumstances.’ It seemed odd to Slider to be discussing cheerful life in this place of death, with Stonax still lying where he had fallen, still dead. ‘She says it’s like being a ventriloquist’s dummy, only you’ve got the whole ventriloquist inside, not just his hand.’

  ‘I’m still waiting to be invited to the wedding,’ Freddie said sternly. ‘I hope you’re not going to be adding to the statistics.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to get married,’ Slider said, wounded. ‘Arranging a wedding between a policeman and a musician is like trying to push a balloon into a milk bottle.’

  ‘Well, stop trying to arrange it and just do it,’ Freddie suggested helpfully. ‘You know who this is, don’t you?’

  ‘Ed Stonax, the TV bloke.’

  ‘Bingo. Strange how different a body looks when you’ve seen it on the telly in life.’

  ‘I was thinking the same thing. Anything to tell me? I assume it was the blow that killed him?’

  ‘It certainly looks that way. The bones of the skull are crushed here. It was a very violent blow, with something small but heavy, and rounded in profile, like a nice old-fashioned lead cosh. With a good right arm behind it, it could have been something small enough to conceal in a pocket.’

  ‘And given that it’s to the left temple, it looks like a right-handed blow?’

  ‘Unless the murderer’s a tennis ace,’ said Freddie. ‘Possible, but unlikely. Professionals don’t generally swipe their victims backhand.’

  ‘You think it’s professional, then?’

  ‘Either that, or a lucky guess.’ He stood up. ‘I’ve bagged the hands, but I don’t think they’ll yield anything. There’s no sign of a struggle or any defensive wounds. Eyes open. I think he was taken by surprise and felled before he even knew it was coming. The why of it, I leave to you.’

  ‘Time of death?’ Slider asked.

  Freddie glanced automatically at his watch. ‘I’d say it was four to six hours, so that would put it between five and seven this morning.’

  Slider’s eyebrows went up. ‘This morning? We were assuming it was last night. He’s fully dressed, as if he came home from work and it happened then.’

  ‘Well, these times are not precise as you very well know, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that long ago. He must have been on his way to work,’ said Freddie.

  ‘You’re just giving me problems,’ Slider said. ‘Burglars, as a race, are not early risers.’

  ‘There’s always the exception,’ said Freddie. He looked at Bob Bailey. ‘Right, if it’s OK with you, I’ll take him away.’

  ‘Yes, OK. We’ve got everything,’ said Bailey.

  Freddie’s assistants laid the bag down and with trained knack lifted the body easily, despite its size, across and on to it. Something moved on the carpet.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Slider.

  Bailey picked it up and held it out for Slider to see. It was a biro, an ordinary, amorphous, cheap biro, white with a black top and no cap, the sort that charities send you in begging envelopes in the hope that you’ll use it to write them a cheque. The body had been lying on it.

  ‘I’ll dust it for prints,’ Bailey said. ‘You never know.’

  ‘If there are any, they’ll only be Stonax’s,’ Slider said. ‘Although I wouldn’t have put him down as a cheap biro man. I’d have thought he’d have a gold Mont Blanc.’

  ‘Maybe it’s chummy’s?’ said Bailey.

  Maybe – and how lovely it would be, Slider thought, to get a clear and perfect lift of the murderer from it. But life was never than easy. ‘Send it off anyway, Bob,’ he said. ‘There may be something else on it that will help.’

  Porson, their Detective Superintendent, arrived as Slider was preparing to leave.

  ‘Chuffing Nora, it’s bloody madness out there,’ he complained, stamping into the vestibule, his vast ancient coat swirling about him like a cloak. As he came to rest, Slider noticed that one of his shirt collar points was curling upwards, there was a shiny grey stain of what looked like porridge on his tie, and a ghostly line of dried shaving-soap along his jaw. When his wife was alive she would never have allowed him to leave the house in a less than perfect state of hygiene. Slider wondered if he was having difficulty coping.

  ‘Bloody press are going bezique,’ Porson rumbled on. ‘Just because it’s one of their own. Always the same when a journo gets hit. You’d think the world revolved around ’em.’

  ‘He wasn’t a journo any more, sir,’ Slider pointed out.

  ‘What does that lot care? And he was telly, as well – that makes him a god. Telly and BBC. They’re going to be all over us like a cheap rash. I’ve had a word with that Forster woman at Hammersmith and she’s going to co-ordinate the TV coverage.’ Mo Forster was the new Press Officer for the area.

  ‘Does that mean one of us will have to go down to the publicity suite and do an interview?’ Slider asked, feeling depressed. Porson hated doing it as much as he did, but Porson had the rank to get out of it.

  Porson’s face didn’t soften – it was built like a bagful of spanners and softening wasn’t an option – but there was a sympathetic gleam in his eye as he answered. ‘No, laddie. Mr Palfreyman’s doing all the fronting. Too important to be left to the likes of us to mess up. In fact – ’ he almost smiled – ‘I’ve been given a pacific injuncture to pass on, that we’re to avoid talking to the press at all costs.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Slider said.

  Palfreyman, head of the Homicide Advice Team, had been busily empire-building ever since he came to Hammersmith, and the chance to be the face on the screen in a big case like this must have set him drooling.

  ‘Thank Him all you like,’ Porson said shortly, scowling. ‘But don’t forget that what Mr Palfreyman wants to be remembered for is solving the case. He doesn’t want to be up there looking like a prat, being questioned about a cock-up. So if anything goes wrong it’ll be my gonads in the cross-hairs. And when I say mine, I mean yours.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘Right. As long as you know.’ The massive eyebrows resumed normal position. ‘You know me, laddie. Threats are water off a duck’s bridge to me. But this case is going to have a searchlight on it all the way. What’s the story so far?’

  ‘There isn’t much yet. No forcible entry, no ransacking. Deceased killed with a single blow to the head, pockets emptied and watch removed. I think it’s meant to look like robbery from the person.’

  ‘Only it’s not?’

  ‘Of course, it could be. We haven’t had a chance yet to see if there’s anything else missing.’

  ‘But this bloke moved in high places, probably pissed off some arsey people, and it could be a hit?’

  ‘Yes, sir. There are things about it that don’t sit right with me.’

  Porson looked thoughtful. He knew Slider’s instincts by now and trusted him. ‘We’ll go with motiveless robbery for the time being. Keep anything else out of the news as long as we can. I’ll tell Mr Palfreyman. The last thing we want is a rabid pack of journos peculating about conspiracies.’

  Peculating was a good word for it, considering Porson’s view of the honesty of the press. ‘It’ll make life easier if we can keep it at that, sir,’ Slider said.

  ‘Oh, I think Mr Palfreyman will see it our way,’ said Porson. ‘Going back to the factory?’

  ‘If I can run the gauntlet out there.’

  ‘Just ignore them. Don’t say anything. That’s an order. And tell your firm not to speak to anyone. No comment all the way, if anyone asks.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Meanwhile, you’d better get digging, see what dirt you can turn up. Th
ere should be plenty. This Stonax bloke wasn’t exactly a parody of virtue.’

  It was Porson’s way, in his energetic passage through life, to take a wild swing at vocabulary, hit or miss, to get his meaning across. Like the famed chemist of old, he dispensed with accuracy.

  Two

  No Folk Without Mire

  Outside, Slider put his head down and scuttled for his car, blocking out the shouted questions, ignoring the eyes and open mouths massed around the barrier tape, keeping his head turned away from the rattlesnake clicking of cameras. As he reached his car and opened the door, something he saw across its roof caught his attention, but in such a subliminal way that when he looked properly, he could not see what it was. But it reminded him of the black Ford Focus again, and he made a mental note to get one of the firm to run the number plate he had taken down.

  He drove off, was let out of the roadblock, and turned on to King Street. A few minutes later his mobile rang.

  He flipped it open. ‘Slider,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you know it’s illegal to answer the phone while you’re driving?’ said a voice. A male voice, vaguely familiar, precise, accentless. The words were spoken not as a pleasantry but with – as far as one sentence could reveal this – a kind of menace.

  ‘Who is that?’ Slider said.

  ‘Oh, you know who it is. You haven’t forgotten me, surely, Inspector Plod? The last time we met I told you you’d regret meddling in my business.’

  He knew it now. ‘Bates,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Bates to you. Don’t forget you’re a public servant and I pay your wages.’

  Trevor Bates, alias The Needle. Wealthy businessman, property dealer, electronics expert, murderer of a prostitute called Susie Mabbot. He had stuck her full of acupuncture needles (his fetish), broken her neck and thrown her in the Thames. Slider suspected him of commissioning, if not actually committing with his own hands, other murders, and who knew what else besides? Slider had been in on the capture of The Needle, helping to trap him in his hotel room at a conference, for which Bates had vowed revenge. Slider had heeded it as little as the idle wind at the time; but Bates had not remained long in custody. He had never even gone to trial. While he was being moved to the maximum security remand facility at Woodhill, the security van was held up and he was sprung. He had been missing for over a month now, not seen or heard of by anyone in authority. Until now.

  ‘How did you get this number?’ Slider asked.

  Bates laughed. ‘Oh, come, Mr Plod. A man of my stature? I can find out anything I want to know. I know all about you. I know where you live.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Slider asked, striving to sound untroubled, though he was thinking of Joanna. He had been threatened before, many times, and he knew most threats were simply made to aggrandise the threatener. They were never carried out. But Bates was not quite in that class. He was intellectual, cold-blooded, and pathologically vain. He might just mean it.

  ‘You know what I want,’ Bates said. ‘To make you regret messing with me. And you will, I promise you.’

  ‘You’re talking like a bad movie,’ Slider said, taking furtive looks around him in his rear-view and wing mirrors. If the man knew he was answering while driving, he might be somewhere near, following him. There seemed to be a lot of background noise to the call but he couldn’t identify it as anything in particular. It could have been a call made from a car. Slider thought at once of the black Focus. He couldn’t see one anywhere, but it might have dropped back too far to spot. Or Bates might have changed to another car. He had been fabulously rich in more than one country, so it was possible that not all his assets had been seized, and he certainly had the know-how to mount secret-service type surveillance. ‘Every policeman in the country is looking for you,’ Slider said. ‘You’ll be back inside any time now.’

  ‘Don’t you know I have friends in high places? Very high places, Mr Plod. You’ll be wanting to try to trace this call, so I shall ring off now, but we’ll talk again soon. Or I may pop in and visit you. How would you like that?’

  He was gone before Slider could say anything more. He knows, of course, Slider thought, how long it takes to do a trace. All that kind of thing was nursery stuff to Bates – electronics was his field; he had provided listening services to the CIA in London. But wait a minute, if Bates knew he was talking to Slider’s mobile, he must know that calls to and from a mobile are all logged automatically, so why had he said that?

  Just to sow confusion and fear, he answered himself. Blast the man, popping up at a time like this, when he was going to have his hands full with Stonax. An unwelcome distraction, to say the least. And there was Joanna . . . He was glad she was not at home today – though of course she’d be coming back. Was the threat serious? He thought of Susie Mabbot and shuddered. No, The Needle wasn’t as mad as that, surely? It was out of all proportion to Slider’s puny role in capturing him. There had been a dozen people there, and the operation had been run by Chief Superintendent Ormerod of the Serious Organised Crime Liaison Group. Ormerod was Bates’s nemesis, surely? He was the one who ought to be being threatened. Unless it was simply Slider’s lowliness that offended him: all right to be pursued by top-ranking brass, but not to be toppled by a dog-eared inspector.

  He’d report it to Porson, of course, when he got in, and Porson would hand it further up the line. Probably Bates was the responsibility of the Serious Organised Crime mob now – SOCA – and Ormerod, who had moved on and up to be head of another group of initials under the same umbrella, would no doubt be itching to nail the sod who’d slipped his grasp.

  Anyway, it was not his problem. And he had his own work to do. He shoved the whole mess firmly to the back of his mind, with the final thought that his old instincts had – probably – been right. He had – probably – been being followed.

  Back at the factory, he met Atherton on the stairs. ‘Where’s the daughter?’ he asked briskly.

  ‘In the soft room,’ Atherton said. That was what he called the ‘interview suite’, refusing to use the official title because, he said, a suite had to have more than one room to it. The others frequently mocked Atherton’s pickiness, but often, as in this case, his verbal amendments stuck. Everyone now called it the soft room. It was, in fact, simply an interview room, but unlike the ones downstairs it was meant to be reassuring for witnesses in a delicate mental state. It had carpet, sofa and chairs, and pictures on the walls so bland they could have been used to dilute water. Also it didn’t smell of feet and imperfectly expunged vomit, which was a great plus all round.

  ‘Good. Has anyone had a go at her?’

  ‘Asher brought her in, and Swilley’s been holding her hand, but they only took the basic statement of how she found him.’

  ‘Right. We’ll go and do her now, then,’ Slider said. Atherton followed him after a tiny but noticeable pause. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Atherton said. There was an odd blankness in his expression, which he shook away instantly. As they turned on to the corridor he said in his normal, conversational tone, ‘Have you heard of a coup de foudre?’

  ‘New car?’ Slider said, not really listening. ‘Is that the next thing you’re after?’

  ‘Oh, no, I’ve already got it,’ Atherton said, opening the door to the soft room.

  Slider beckoned Swilley out, and they had a brief chat, sotto voce, in the corridor as she brought him up to date. Kathleen ‘Norma’ Swilley was tall, blonde and gorgeous in a curiously unmemorable way, like a Miss World contestant. She was also one of Slider’s best officers, and highly trained in unarmed combat. It was said she could kick the nuts off a fly at five paces, so sexist comments about her were not generally aired in her presence – though what was said behind her back would curl the hair of anyone but a policeman. Canteen culture was more than just a mould found on the sandwiches.

  Slider passed over to her the registration number of the Focus and asked her to get someone to check it.

  �
��And I was called on my mobile ten minutes ago. Can you find out who it was that called me and where they were?’

  ‘Yes, boss.’ She jotted down the number.

  ‘When Hart comes in, you and she can start sorting the statements. Get Fathom on it too, so he can learn from you. Oh, and let me know when Mr Porson gets back.’

  ‘Right, boss.’

  In the soft room, Emily Stonax was sitting on the sofa with WPC ‘For God’s Sake Stop Calling Me Jane’ Asher beside her. Asher stood and Miss Stonax looked up as Slider and Atherton came in. So far, Slider noted with relief, there seemed to be no tears. Emily Stonax was dry-eyed, though white with shock, but evidently doing her best to hold it together. She was twenty-eight, according to Swilley, though she looked younger – but then, he thought, most people did these days, probably because they dressed younger. Slider noted the suitcase, carry-on bag and duty-free carrier in the corner, with a donkey jacket dumped over them, and took in the dry, weary look of the recently flight-arrived.

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Slider,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry for your loss, Miss Stonax. I know it must be hard for you, but would you mind if I asked you a few questions?’

  She was sitting a little hunched, with her hands clasped between her knees, screwing a paper handkerchief about between her fingers: a slim but nicely made young woman in cargo pants and soft ankle boots, a white shirt – understandably a little crumpled – and a brown suede jerkin. Her only jewellery was a large, oval gold locket on a chain round her neck, which hung like a slightly flattened pullet’s egg in the V of her shirt neck. Her hair, as abundant, black and coarse as her father’s, was cut short and spiky, and stood out round her head, but pointing backwards like the quills of a hedgehog. It was, he saw, meant to look cute rather than challenging. No Goth, this: she had no make-up on and no piercings, her nails were short and unpolished, and there was about her face a look of intelligence, and of sense – not always the same thing. Her full mouth, brown eyes and thick eyelashes gave warmth to a face otherwise notable for character, with its straight nose, strongly marked brows and firm chin. She met Slider’s eyes directly, and he felt the attractiveness of her, even as he was admiring her determination not to give in to wailing and gnashing while there was something that had to be done.