Blood Never Dies Read online

  There were no lights on in the house when he pulled up before it – glad, as always, that the front garden had been replaced with hardstanding, so the old days of cruising the neighbourhood looking for a parking space were over. Joanna’s Mazda was there facing outwards. She always backed in – said it made her nervous not to be able to make a quick getaway. There were ways in which she had retained the boyishness of her bachelor days, despite marriage and baby George. It was the orchestra, of course, that kept her that way: musicians egged each other on to behave like lads. It was like the Job in that respect. Coppers and musicians, they were all Peter Pans.

  The house was quiet, smelled of clean dust and old wood. There were worse things to smell of, he thought. They had a lot to do to it still, but money was tight and time was tighter. He stood in the hall listening to it breathe, then went in search of his wife. He found her sitting on the concrete patch – you couldn’t in all justice call it a patio, still less a terrace – just outside the French windows from the drawing room. She was quite still, staring down the dark garden at the last of the heat, swelling and redness just sinking below the trees at the end. The remaining member of the diagnostic quartet, the dolor, seemed present in the set of her shoulders.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he said quietly, not to startle her.

  She jerked anyway, coming back from a long way away, half-turned her head to him, then stood up to kiss him hello. ‘George was restless. Couldn’t get to sleep for the heat, poor lamb. I got him off eventually – he’s quiet now.’

  It struck him that the answer, like the embrace, was an evasion. Freeing herself from him she moved past him into the house. ‘Hard day? Shall I get you a drink? Beer? Gin and tonic?’

  ‘I’ll have a cold beer, thanks,’ he said, making to follow her.

  She heard the movement without seeing it and said, her back still to him, ‘No, no, you sit down and watch the sunset. I’ll bring it out to you.’

  She seemed gone rather a long time. He sat, pulled off his tie and undid his top button, and still had time to remove his shoes and socks before she came back. His feet wriggled gratefully in the open air like puppies shown affection at last. The concrete felt delightfully cold to his soles after a day shut inside. The air was just beginning to cool off and the night was pleasingly quiet with so many families away and the traffic at summer neaps.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said, appearing with a tray. ‘Supper’s cold, so we can take our time.’ She had brought a small bowl of cashew nuts as well, cold beer for him, a glass of wine for her. She put everything on the small table in front of him, and sat beside him – a seamless performance, except that she hadn’t once met his eyes since he got home.

  He took a long drink from his glass first, then put it down and said, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Matter?’ she said vaguely.

  ‘You seem out of sorts.’

  ‘I told you, I had trouble with George. It’s tiring when you can’t do anything for them. How was your day?’

  Oh well, he thought. If she doesn’t want to say . . . So he told her about the case.

  ‘And you think it’s murder?’ she said when he’d finished.

  ‘I’m sure of it. Just instinct, really.’

  ‘Instinct can be the reaction to a lot of little clues collected subliminally,’ she said.

  ‘Is that you comforting me?’ he said, amused.

  ‘Just telling you I trust your instinct more than Jim’s,’ she said with the first smile of the evening. ‘So what do you think happened?’

  ‘God, I don’t know! But it has a nasty look about it. Too tidy and organized. People aren’t generally that good at murder.’ He finished the beer. ‘Not that I’m advocating the frenzied attack, you understand. That’s nasty, too.’

  ‘But a bit more human?’ she suggested.

  He looked at her. ‘Animals just follow instinct. It’s only humans who perform calculated acts of vileness.’

  There was nothing to say to that, and he realized he had cut conversation off at the pass. And yet he could feel his twanging nerves begin to settle just at being here, and with her. He had a moment of intense sympathy for all the policemen (some in his own team) who couldn’t go home after a beast of a day and relax with the one they loved. The Job took a lot out of you, and if you couldn’t refill the tanks in your off time . . . Well, they all knew burnt-out cops.

  They sat on a while in silence, but he could feel her easing, too. He ate the last cashew and stood up. ‘Shall we have something to eat?’

  They sat opposite each other at the kitchen table and ate the chicken, bacon and avocado salad, and finished the wine she had opened, and though they talked, it was about humdrum, household things. He had hoped she would open up but she didn’t; and, loving her, he let her alone. She would tell him in her own time, he supposed; though he hated to think of her having a troubled mind. But probably she felt the same about him, and there was nothing she could do to help him with his.

  Freddie Cameron rang Slider in the morning, sounding fresh and restored. ‘The couple next door have taken the children out for the day with their own. Peace on earth, goodwill towards neighbours. So I came in early and got on with your post, and Martha’s taken the phone off the hook and she’s going to garden all day. So all’s well with the world.’

  ‘Hey nonny no?’ Slider suggested.

  ‘At least. And possibly even a derry derry down. Now your corpus, best beloved: a fine specimen altogether. Shocking waste! No sign of any drug abuse. No needle marks. Well nourished. Looks admirably healthy – all the internal organs in the pink. As it were.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘No, there were a couple of interesting features. Firstly, the tattoos.’

  ‘I didn’t see any tattoos.’

  ‘You wouldn’t from where you were standing, at the bathroom door. They were on the side away from you. Left thigh and left ankle. They’re rather interesting and nicely done. I’ve sent over photographs for you. The important point is that I think they’re fairly recent. Tattooing affects the body like second-degree burns, and healing follows certain stages. I think they were done within the past few months.’

  ‘Maybe he was a footballer,’ Slider said, thinking of David Beckham. ‘He’s got the highlights for it.’

  ‘Hasn’t got big enough thighs,’ Cameron replied smartly.

  ‘Anyway, what am I thinking? They make a fortune. He wouldn’t be living in a flat like that. Second point?’

  ‘Second point, when I opened the stomach I found food residue – pizza, to be specific – which he must have eaten within three hours of death – I would say between one and two hours.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Slider. ‘That gives us something to work on.’

  ‘Also some spiritous liquid – I would guess vodka,’ Cameron went on. ‘But no capsule cases. The pathological evidence that he had taken a narcotic was clear. You see the significance?’

  Slider did. ‘Because how did he take it, if not by capsule? He might empty the contents out of the capsules, but why would he bother if he was committing suicide? On the other hand—’

  ‘On the other hand,’ Cameron finished for him, ‘if it was murder, you can’t say to your intended victim, “Would you mind just knocking back these little red and black jobs, old horse?” You’d have to empty them into something on the sly.’

  Slider nodded, then realized Cameron couldn’t see him and said, ‘Yes. The thing that puzzles me, though, is that if it was a murder that was meant to look like suicide, why not cut the wrists? That would have looked more natural.’

  ‘Squeamishness?’ Freddie suggested. ‘Also messiness. The murderer doesn’t want to get blood all over himself. Slippery customers, wrists, especially when they’re wet and bloody. This left no mess to clear up. The killer cut a vein, not an artery, so there would be no spurting. Just nice, slow, tidy bleeding. I imagine the victim got into the bath under his own steam – as it were – and the murderer waited unti
l he dozed off to do the deed.’

  ‘Which means we’re looking for a murderer who can persuade a man to take a bath while they’re in the house.’

  ‘Taken with the pizza and the vodka, it does suggest a degree of intimacy,’ Freddie agreed. ‘The TV repair man doesn’t say, “I’ll run you a nice warm bath, dear.” Mine doesn’t, anyway,’ he added regretfully. ‘So, some food for thought?’

  ‘A four-course dinner,’ Slider said. ‘Thanks, Freddie.’

  In the first mail was a preliminary report from Bob Bailey to the effect that all the main surfaces in the flat had been wiped. The only fingermarks they had found that weren’t the victim’s were Botev’s – on the flat’s entrance door, the on-off button of the CD-player, and the bathroom door jamb.

  ‘Which bears out Botev’s story. And makes it almost definitely murder,’ Slider said to the troops.

  ‘Almost?’ Swilley queried.

  ‘It’s physically possible that the victim wiped things down himself, but why would he – especially as he left marks in other places – on the razor, the lid of the loo and the flush handle, for instance. I think for all practical purposes we can count that out and assume it was murder.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ Connolly said.

  ‘Yes, too many caveats spoil the broth,’ Atherton said. ‘So, what now?’

  ‘The pizza’s good, guv,’ said Hollis. ‘I mean, that’s almost bound to be local. Nobody buys a pizza a long way from home.’

  ‘It might have been delivered,’ Atherton said.

  ‘Either way,’ said Hollis. ‘You don’t want it cold.’

  ‘We’ve got an approximate time, too,’ Slider said. ‘If it wasn’t delivered, if he called in on his way home from somewhere, he may have had the murderer with him, and we might get a sight of them on someone’s security tapes. If it was delivered, the delivery person may have seen something.’

  ‘And in either case someone might have known him,’ said Swilley. ‘Guys living alone eat a lot of takeaway pizza.’

  ‘He must have eaten it out, at a restaurant,’ Atherton said. ‘You seem to be forgetting there was no empty pizza box in the flat.’

  ‘Black-sack man took it away with the rest of the stuff,’ Swilley said witheringly. She was tall, leggy and Baywatch gorgeous, and often faintly antagonistic to Atherton, whom she had viewed in times past, in his woman-hunting days, as a philandering, sexist pig. Even though he had calmed down, not to mention settled down, you generally could have chipped bits off the way she looked at him and dropped them in your gin and tonic. ‘The pizza, the vodka, the bath – it’s all part of a seduction scene. There was someone there with him.’

  ‘Well, we know that,’ Atherton said, withering back.

  ‘A woman, I mean,’ Swilley said.

  ‘Needn’t be a woman,’ Connolly put in. ‘He might a been light on his feet, for all we know.’

  ‘Either way, it probably means the pizza was delivered,’ Swilley said.

  ‘Job for somebody,’ Slider intervened. ‘Asking round all the local pizza places.’ Everyone looked at McLaren and then away again.

  ‘I’ll do it if you want,’ he said meekly.

  ‘I wouldn’t put temptation in your way,’ said Slider. ‘Mackay, it’s yours.’

  ‘What about these tattoos, boss?’ Connolly asked.

  She was examining the photos. The tattoos were rather fine work: on the victim’s left thigh a leaping tiger, very fierce and muscular, and on the left ankle a dragon winding round, the forked tail on the inside and the fire-breathing head on the outside. ‘Leaping tiger, hidden dragon,’ she said. ‘Sure this is a grand piece o’ work altogether. You’d be looking for a real artist.’

  ‘What do you know about tattoos?’ Slider asked, amused.

  ‘I haven’t got one meself,’ she said, ‘but me sister back home got this little bluebird on her shoulder. Only about the size of me thumbnail, but me Da went mental, said she might as well go out and rent herself a lamp post. But he’s a dinosaur, me Da. Everyone’s got ’em these days. It’s body art.’

  ‘It’s utter stupidity,’ Atherton countered.

  ‘Don’t sugar-coat it, Jim,’ Swilley murmured. ‘Say what you really mean.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Atherton went on, ‘you’re hopelessly out of date. All the big stars are getting them removed now. Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Charlie Sheen . . .’

  ‘Sure, how would you know?’ Connolly asked, trying not to be impressed.

  ‘I read the papers,’ he said. ‘Little trick you pick up as you go through life. Point is, if they were recent, it means he’d managed to get through the rest of his life so far without them, so why suddenly do it now, just when it’s going out of fashion?’

  ‘I’d bet it was a new girlfriend,’ said Connolly, ‘and she dared him to do it. Me friend back home dared her boyfriend get one on his lad. He got her name, Wendy.’

  ‘He had “Wendy” tattooed on his penis?’ Atherton asked with the greatest scepticism.

  ‘T’was fierce romantic,’ said Connolly. ‘’Course, it only said “Wendy” some of the time. When he got excited it said, “Welcome to Dublin, have a nice day.”’

  FOUR

  Unnatural Smoothness

  The source of all wisdom about tattoos at Shepherd’s Bush nick was PC Kevin Organ, whose unfortunate name was so far beyond satire he was probably the least teased man in the Job. In a youthful attempt to out-cool his disadvantage, he had had his arms so extensively tattooed they looked like two rolls of toile de jouy wallpaper, and he could never take advantage of short-sleeve order when it came in in the summer.

  He was rumoured to have other artistic gems too, in other, hidden places, but Slider preferred not to know about that. He was not as vocal on the subject as Atherton but in his mind tattoos were a social marker, like piercings, and they didn’t belong on policemen, who ought to fade into the background of their uniform to be really effective, not make fashion statements at any level.

  Fortunately, Organ’s organic furbishment was not Slider’s problem. Also fortunately, Organ was on duty that day, and at Slider’s summons came climbing up from the trolls’ dungeon behind the front shop where the woodentops lived, to the airy cloud-borne fastnesses of the CID room, to be consulted.

  There were, Organ told them, four tattoo parlours in the immediate area, plus a couple of mobiles, who advertised on the Internet and came and inked you in the comfort of your own home. The four with premises were Punktures, The Fill Inn, Inkerman’s, and Blues ’n’ Tattoos – it seemed that imaginative names were all part of the culture.

  The mobiles were Krazy Kris and Needlepix. ‘But you can forget them,’ Organ said as he examined the photographs of Robin Williams’s decorations. ‘These are nice inks – classy stuff. Krazy Kris, and Mona from Needlepix, couldn’t do anything as elaborate as this. Apart from anything else, you need a steady hand, and Mona drinks, and Kris, well, he’s getting on now. Must be nearly seventy. Whatever you asked him for, you’d end up with a snowstorm.’ He admired the photographs again, taking his time, pleased to be the centre of good attention for once. ‘I’d say they almost certainly came from Blues ’n’ Tattoos, in Hammersmith Road,’ he pronounced gravely. ‘If not them, then Inkerman’s, but I’d try Blues first. Honest John’s the bloke’s name, he’s the owner, and he’s a real artist.’

  ‘Is it a pukka emporium?’ Atherton asked. ‘Or is his sobriquet ironic?

  Organ didn’t get forty per cent of the words in that, but he followed the force of the enquiry. ‘Oh, he’s right as rain,’ he said. ‘Never been in any trouble. Pays his taxes and everything.’

  ‘Ah. His price is above rubies.’

  ‘Well, you got to pay for quality work,’ Organ said defensively, then frowned. ‘Who’s Ruby? She another mobile?’

  ‘Just for that,’ Slider said sternly to Atherton, ‘you can go and do the enquiry.’

  ‘Me? No! What do I know about tattoos?’

  ‘You
’ll know more when you’ve done it. The acquisition of knowledge is the cornerstone of civilization.’

  Organ stumped away back home to the nether regions, reflecting that it was true what he’d heard, they were all bonkers in CID. Totally tonto.

  Blues ’n’ Tattoos was half way along Hammersmith Road, in a small parade of shops which were a reminder of how nice Shepherd’s Bush must have looked when it was first built. The two-storey Victorian buildings were identical to the yellow-brick, slate-roofed terraced cottages in the adjacent roads, except that the ground floor had a shop window instead of the residential bay; so they blended in perfectly, and gave a gentler, more humane face to commerce. The entire parade was still made up of small businesses, too – the square footage was too small to attract chains. There was a newsagent, a café, a dry-cleaner (SPECIAL SUMMER OFFER ON DUVET’S, BLANKET’S, CURTAIN’S! it announced possessively), a pet shop, a baker’s of the sort that specializes in white loaves and the sort of cakes that look home-made without being in any way tempting, and next door to that, Blues ’n’ Tattoos.

  The man in the tattoo parlour looked just the way you’d expect someone called Honest John to look, if you lived in an ideal world that had never known the cold breath of irony. He was tallish, solid, middle-aged, with a pleasantly unremarkable face, kind eyes and thick, healthy hair beginning to go grey. The main room of his shop was plain but clean, with lino on the floor, chairs around the wall, and a rack of magazines. It could have been a dentist’s waiting room except that the posters featured not the horrors of tooth neglect but the several thousand designs you could choose to have permanently pounded into your pink and cringing flesh.

  There was a desk at the end opposite the door, and a doorway behind and to its right, leading, Atherton supposed, to the torture chamber beyond. It was curtained with those multicoloured plastic strips. Wouldn’t a decent, solid, soundproofed door have been better, he wondered, to deaden the cries of the afflicted?