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  ‘His wallet wasn’t there? What, did she steal it? Did she – or was it – was he robbed? Mugged?’ Realisation caught up with her, about what she didn’t yet know. ‘How did he die?’

  Now was the time to be very careful indeed. ‘There was a fire at a motel, Mrs Neal. It seems your husband had booked into a room there—’

  ‘Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God,’ She hardly seemed to know she was saying it. ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ Atherton thought she might go on repeating it for ever, but after a bit she stopped.

  When they finally left, Polish sat looking straight ahead through the windscreen.

  ‘Well, there you have it,’ Atherton said lightly. ‘Unfortunate that it fell to us. Usually we leave that sort of thing to the wooden tops.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I am one, remember.’ She frowned a little. ‘She didn’t want to talk to me. She hardly really knew I was there at all. It was you she wanted, for comfort.’

  ‘Yes.’ It was received opinion in the Job that a distressed woman, who’d been raped or attacked or bereaved or whatever, needed another woman to confide in, but in Slider’s experience women would always far sooner unburden themselves to a man – provided it was a kind, sympathetic man – and Atherton agreed with him. ‘I suppose it’s like girls never being able to discuss their periods with their mothers,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘Really? Was that your experience too?’

  ‘Bugger off. I suppose women don’t really trust each other, that’s what it comes down to.’

  Polish reached out and patted his knee, briefly and electrically. ‘Daft. Women don’t trust men, either. They just know how to manipulate ’em.’

  Dickson was back, to Slider’s profound relief. He might be an impossible bastard – anyone above the rank of inspector was, by definition – but as least he was a proper CID impossible bastard, with whom one could therefore do business.

  Slider looked at him almost with affection as he entered the Bells-and-Marlboro-scented bower. Dickson had done his probationary two years on the beat, transferred to CID as soon as he could, and spent the entire rest of his career in the Department. He was CID right through the entire vulcanised thickness of his being.

  Head, on the other hand, had been in the uniform branch all the way up, and had only recently made a sideways career move to speed his upward passage to the stars. He’d be going back into uniform as soon as a Commander’s post became vacant, probably hoping to forget the undisciplined nightmare of the Department as if it had never happened.

  Dickson’s vast bulk was penned, palpitating, in his swivel chair, his ash-strewn suit barely able to contain the stuff of him. His huge hands rested on the desk top as if they were so heavy he’d needed to put them down somewhere for a minute, and the nicotine stains on his fingers seemed to have spread lately, heading, like gangrene, for his heart.

  Yet to Slider’s keen eye, there was a change in the old bull. He appeared – could it be? – to have lost weight. The wide, bottled face seemed fractionally less wide, the veined red cheeks the merest shade paler. He looked like a man who had been ill – not very, but unexpectedly. And the boiled boot eyes were perhaps just slightly less impenetrable than usual.

  ‘Yes, Bill,’ he greeted Slider perfunctorily. ‘What’s the SP on this motel fire? You had a set-to over it with Detective Chief Superintendent Head, I understand.’

  ‘Hardly a set-to, sir,’ Slider began, but Dickson rode over him like twenty thousand head of cattle.

  ‘He doesn’t like you. Mark you, he doesn’t like any of us. But he seemed to get it into his head that you were lacking in respect. Dumb insolence – would that be the phrase?’

  ‘His phrase, sir?’

  Dickson didn’t answer what he didn’t care to. ‘Sit down. Tell me what you’ve got.’

  Slider told him.

  ‘Looks like accidental death. So what’s the problem with it?’

  ‘There are a number of things, sir. According to Neal’s wife, he was a noted cocksman – girl in every port. Is it likely, then, that he’d need to resort to ropes and wires to get his gratification?’

  ‘Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe she was lying. Or maybe he’d lied to her about his prowess.’

  ‘Yes sir. But I’d like to know, all the same. Then there’s the fact that he didn’t have his wallet and credit cards with him. We thought at first they’d been stolen, but when we brought the car in, we found his wallet with everything in it intact in the dashboard compartment.’

  ‘How did he pay for the motel room?’

  ‘Cash.’

  ‘Then he didn’t need his credit cards, did he?’

  ‘No, sir. But why leave them in the car? It’s not natural. And we didn’t find his car keys.’

  Dickson looked restless. ‘Well. Is that all?’

  ‘Not quite. There’s the fire. I was never happy about that. The dropped cigarette theory didn’t go with the hanging perversion motif, to my mind; and now forensic have come up with traces of candle-wax on the floor and on fragments of the fabric of the chair.’

  ‘Candle wax.’ Dickson eyes were flatter than a bootsole now. They were as flat as the half-used bottle of tonic you find in the back of the fridge when you come back from holiday. The only thing in the universe flatter was his voice. ‘That’s it, is it? Candle wax?’

  Slider kept his peace.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you, do I, how many things a man can do with a lighted candle? Besides immolating himself, that is. That cabin was a favoured resort of toms and turd-burglars and God knows what other slags. There are even those, it’s rumoured, who use candles in connection with the illegal insertion into their bodies of well-known recreational drugs.’

  ‘Sir—’

  ‘So what you’ve got, to set against all Mr Head’s well-reasoned logic, is surprise that the man was a pervert, surprise he left his wallet in his car, surprise that his car keys haven’t been found, and suspicion over the presence in what amounts to a trick-pad of some candle-wax?’

  All coppers are actors, convincing actors: they have to be, to survive. But they don’t always manage to convince each other – and of course they don’t always intend to. Slider surveyed the broad range of genial irony, withering scorn, and righteous anger he had been offered, and didn’t believe any of it.

  ‘It doesn’t feel right to me,’ he said, acting the part of baffled but stubborn probity. ‘I think there was someone else there.’

  ‘Well so do I,’ Dickson said, lighting another cigarette. ‘I trust your instincts. And I trust the feeling I get up here—’ He tapped himself just behind the ear, perilously, with the forefinger that was supporting the glowing fag – ‘when someone’s handing me a parcel of shit and passing it off as profiteroles. So you can look into it. I’ll tell the Coroner to give us an adjournment, and we’ll treat this as suspicious circumstances.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Slider.

  Dickson leaned forward slightly, and a look frighteningly close to human appeal came into his eyes. ‘But for fucksake, Bill, get me something soon. Head isn’t going to like this drain on the budget. He’s going to take a bit of persuading. And if the wheel comes off and I get dropped on from a great height, I don’t need to tell you who’ll be underneath me, do I?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Slider.

  Of all the threats he’d been at the sharp end of in twenty years in the Job, this last one was somehow the least convincing. Dickson, he thought, as he made his puzzled way back to his own office, seemed in danger of turning into a pussy-cat.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Stolen Tarts

  THE CANTEEN DID A GOOD fry-up: full house, all the business including fried bread, for which Slider had a lamentable passion. There was a separate room where the ‘governors’ could eat apart from the ‘troops’, but Slider sat with Joanna in a secluded corner of the main canteen. He disliked the whole idea of segregation. How would you ever hear the gossip if you dined apart? There was a separate governors’ lav, too, but
he did use that. It was the closest to his room, and it had proper soap.

  ‘So where do you go from here?’ Joanna asked, carefully stripping the rinds off her bacon.

  ‘We start the hard slog of old-fashioned police work. Find out where he was that evening, who he was with. Who were his friends? Did he have any enemies? Any secrets, any debts, any vices?’

  ‘I thought you knew about those.’

  ‘I’m more than ever convinced that was a set-up. Now I’ve spoken to his wife—’

  ‘God, that must have been hard! No wonder you look pale.’

  ‘Do I? She was upset, of course. But at least I could offer her the comfort that it wasn’t being left at that, that we were investigating the suspicious circumstances.’

  ‘Would that be a comfort? I wonder,’ Joanna mused. ‘But does anyone except you think it was supicious?’

  ‘Freddie Cameron’s come round to my way of thinking. He came back to me on the tissue sections of the wrists and ankles, and confirmed that they had been bound. He also confirmed what I noticed when I examined the body, that the insides of the wrists were more badly burned than the backs, which is the opposite to what you’d expect.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Think about it. If you tied your own wrists, for what ever reason, you’d have to tie them in front of you – yes? So that you could pull the knot tight with our teeth, or by gripping the end between your knees.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And if you tie them in front of you, it’s much more natural to tie them inside to inside.’

  Joanna’s face grew intent as she tried it for herself under the level of the table. ‘Yes,’ she agreed.

  ‘On the other hand, if you tie someone else’s hands behind them, it’s easier to tie them back to back, because that’s the way the elbows bend.’

  ‘Yes, I see. So if Neal’s hands were tied back to back, they were probably tied behind him, so someone else must have done it. There must have been someone else there.’

  ‘Exactly. Whoever it was probably took Neal’s car keys, too. Picked them up by mistake, perhaps – it’s easily done. Or maybe he intended to drive Neal’s car away, and then thought better of it.’

  She considered. ‘But his death still could have been an accident. I mean, whoever it was might have tied him up for fun, or at his own request, and then got in a panic and run away when he suddenly upped and died on him.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Slider said, ‘but not likely. If Neal really was a hanging fetishist, he wouldn’t have had anyone else there. It’s a thing they do strictly alone, and they’ll usually go to any lengths to hide what they are from the world.’

  ‘Couldn’t it have been ordinary old ten-a-penny bondage?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The style’s all wrong. I think he was murdered, and it was meant to look like accidental death through sexual asphyxiation.’

  ‘But then what about the fire? It doesn’t make sense for someone to murder this bloke, go to all the trouble to make him look like a particular kind of pervert, and then destroy their handiwork by setting fire to him. I mean, if they just wanted him dead, what’s wrong with simply whacking him on the head with the good old traditional Blunt Instrument?’

  Slider smiled. ‘Some murderers have no sense of our heritage. I don’t know about the fire. Maybe it was just an accident. Or maybe the murderer was trying to make absolutely sure – second and third lines of defence.’

  She sighed. ‘It’s ridiculously over-elaborate. Like something in a novel.’

  ‘Yes. Just like that. Nature imitating art.’

  ‘So what you’re looking for is a crime fiction aficionado. Or a television cop-show addict,’ she said. He didn’t respond, and she glanced up and saw from his face that he had gone away. It was something she’d had to get used to in the time she’d known him.

  She shrugged and turned her attention to the sausage she’d saved until last. Why was it, she wondered, that catering sausages were always so much nicer than the ones you had at home? Perhaps it was because they consisted entirely of fat and rusk, making them, in effect, a kind of tubular fried bread. She shared Slider’s unwholesome passion for fried bread.

  She reached for the tomato sauce. Foreigners, she thought, would never understand the British aversion to the horrid Continental practice of putting meat in sausages. It was one of the things that made them foreign, of course, poor things.

  The widow Neal had become quite expansive with Slider over a large, medicinal whisky on the brocade sofa in the pink-shaded living-room. There was a Barbara Cartland sort of opulence to the decor which he thought Irene would really have liked in their house if she’d had the social courage. And if he’d had the salary, of course: chandeliers, white fur rugs and reproduction mahogany Queen-Anne-chiffonier TV-and-video cabinets didn’t grow on trees.

  ‘It’s ironic that he should die in a fire like that, when he spent his entire life trying to prevent them,’ she said.

  Slider could tell from her voice that it hadn’t really come home to her yet that he was dead. Part of the time she was hearing herself speak; half expecting the appropriate emotions to arrive on their own, part of the package, as it were, of bereavement. The rest of the time, though she spoke in the past tense, the words were still being driven by her feelings towards the living man, whose echo and after-image would linger in her mind and her days long after she had accepted intellectually that he was not coming back.

  ‘A friend of his was killed in a fire once. That’s when he got that scar. That was before he met me, of course. But he did actually care about fire prevention – I mean, really care. He felt his job was important. It was about the only thing he did care about,’ she added bitterly. ‘But I suppose that’s why he did well at it.’

  ‘Did he?’

  She looked up quickly. ‘Oh yes. His firm thought the world of him. They used to say he could have sold a fridge to an eskimo. I suppose he was a good salesman in a way. I mean, he could always sell himself – to women, at least.’ The bitterness again. ‘But it wasn’t that, so much, more that he really believed in what he was selling. I think people can always tell, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Slider comfortably. ‘Did it pay well?’

  For answer she made a curious flat gesture around the room. ‘It brought all this. And his car, and his suits – he liked to dress.’ The heavy gold bangle on her wrist seemed to catch her attention. ‘I never wanted for anything. Jewellery, clothes. Anything money could buy. He was always generous.’

  Slider’s roving gaze gathered in the pink and white expensiveness of the room. It had a curiously static quality, as if it had been put together for an exhibition at the V and A: Home Decor Through the Ages. This was in the Post-Contemporary Harrow and Wealdstone section.

  ‘You never had any children?’ he hazarded.

  ‘I couldn’t.’ She took a gulp at her whisky to fortify the baring of All. ‘We’d have liked some, at first anyway, when we were still – when things were all right. Maybe if we’d had a kiddie … I’ve sometimes wondered whether that was why Dick ran after other women. A sort of compensation. Because he was disappointed in me.’

  ‘Have you any reason to think he was?’

  She didn’t answer at once. Her eyes were distant and there was a small smile on her lips. ‘It was so good at first. We fell in love at first sight – really,’ she added, as if Slider had protested at the platitude. ‘He’d had lots of girlfriends, but he’d never asked anyone to marry him, even though he was thirty-three when I met him. Everyone said we were an ideal couple.’ She sighed reminiscently. ‘He was so attentive. He had lovely manners. Women like that.’ She focused on him suddenly to deliver this useful piece of information, and Slider nodded gratefully. ‘He could make you feel special. Perhaps if I’d had a kiddie, it would all have …’

  She drifted away for a moment, and then sighed. ‘I don’t know. Maybe not. He was always, you know, very active’ She looked at Slider carefully to see
if he did, in fact, know. ‘That’s all right for a time, but you can have enough of it, when it’s every night. I don’t think women feel the same way about that sort of thing as men. I mean, they don’t sort of do it for its own sake, the way men do, and after a while, well—’

  She hesitated, and Slider helped her out. ‘His appetites grew too much for you?’

  She looked at him sharply. ‘Don’t get me wrong. He was all man, my husband, but there was nothing funny about him. Nothing kinky. He just liked to do it a lot, that’s all. And with his job, he had all the opportunities.’

  ‘How did you find out?’ Slider asked.

  She shrugged. ‘A woman always knows. Not necessarily who, but what.’

  It wasn’t the first time he’d heard that said, and he still begged leave to doubt it. But there seemed to be a special sealed compartment in women’s minds where they could keep bunkum – intuition, astrology, telepathy, precognition and suchlike – without its contaminating the rest of their common sense.

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘he wasn’t exactly careful to hide it. Oh, I don’t mean he paraded it, but he left things around. I could have found out everything if I’d wanted. And if I faced him with something, he usually admitted it. He didn’t,’ she added in a puzzled voice, ‘seem to have any bad conscience about it. As if it was – just part of the job.’

  Slider nodded. He knew coppers like that – several of them. And since Joanna, musicians too. Men whose jobs made them unaccountable… Was it something inherent in all men? Or was it an infection they caught from each other? Well, and now him, too. But it was different for him. He and Joanna were different – weren’t they?

  He pulled himself together. ‘I believe you told my colleague that you actually saw your husband with a young woman—’

  ‘Little tart!’ she said explosively.

  ‘Was that recently?’

  ‘Oh yes. Well, three, maybe four weeks ago. She was his latest.’

  ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘I know who she is.’ Her eyes narrowed in hatred. ‘Her name’s Lorraine or Debbie or one of those common names. She works in Dick’s office – one of the backups for the salesmen. Every new girl that joins, he has to try out – if she’s half-way decent-looking. Laughable, really, a man of his age chasing young girls like that. I said to him, you’re too old for this sort of thing. I said you’re going to die of a heart-attack one of these days—’