Headlong Read online

  ‘You’re the Yvonne Manners de nos jours,’ he told Atherton. ‘I bet you never even sweat.’

  ‘In the first place,’ Atherton said, ‘I don’t sweat, I perspire. And in the second place, I don’t perspire. Emily’s free tonight. Fancy meeting up later for a meal? We could meet halfway in King Street. Have a curry at Potli.’

  ‘Can’t,’ Slider said. ‘Joanna’s at home with George tonight. Dad and Lydia are away.’

  ‘We’ll come to yours, then? Pick up a take-away on the way.’

  ‘All right. I’ll check with Joanna.’

  He rang her, and she said she’d got a casserole on the go, but it would keep until tomorrow. ‘It’s always better the second day. And I’d like the company.’

  ‘She says yes,’ he translated to Atherton.

  ‘Good. Will Yvonne be there?’

  ‘I thought you weren’t listening.’

  ‘I’m always listening. Who is she, anyway?’

  ‘A girl who never sweated.’

  Emily was a freelance journalist, and being in the words business was the most interested of all of them in Ed Wiseman. ‘I met him once,’ she remembered as they passed the containers of curry around. ‘Must be eight, ten years ago. At an awards dinner. Guest Halliday had just won the big crime novel award for the first Tortelli book, and there was a lot of griping by the native writers because it had gone to an American, and not to one of them. To add insult to injury, she didn’t even turn up to the dinner. He had to receive the prize on her behalf, as her agent. Made a very funny speech, though,’ she concluded. ‘Almost won round the antis.’

  ‘What was he like?’ Joanna asked.

  ‘Lean, athletic – always laughing.’

  ‘What was he – a dolphin?’ said Slider.

  ‘And sexy,’ Emily went on. ‘Oh boy, was he sexy! When he gave you one of those looks, you could feel your insides melt.’

  ‘Right here, beside you,’ Atherton complained mildly. ‘I can hear you.’

  ‘Before your time, my pet,’ Emily told him. ‘I don’t enquire into your distant past.’

  And not so distant, Slider thought, but he didn’t say it aloud. Joanna caught his eye and he knew she knew what he was thinking. Atherton was a serial romancer. Joanna had opined that Emily really ought to sew his trousers up before she let him out in the morning.

  ‘He flirted with me most professionally,’ Emily went on. ‘I enjoyed it.’

  ‘Apart from that,’ Atherton said, ‘what do you remember about him?’

  She frowned in thought. ‘Not from meeting him, but by reputation he was a roisterer in his heyday. Used to get thrown out of nightclubs, him and Lionel Tippet and somebody else. Who was it? I’ll remember in a minute.’ She drummed her fingers on the table to help memory along. ‘Murray Pauling, that was it! They were a gang. I think the three of them were at uni together. Called themselves—’

  ‘Let me guess: The Three Musketeers,’ Atherton interrupted witheringly.

  ‘Actually, no, smarty-pants. It was the something club.’ Her phone appeared in her hand like magic and she rattled away like machine-gun fire. ‘The Claret Club, that was it. Apparently like the Bollinger, but with more refinement.’

  ‘And who were the other two?’ Joanna asked, just beating Slider to it. ‘I mean, what did they do?’

  ‘They were all in the publishing world. Tippet was an editor – with Hodder, I think – and Pauling was with Mirador and then started up his own publishing house, New Avalon.’ She reached for the rice. ‘It’s a shame Ed Wiseman’s dead. The world needs charmers like him.’

  ‘He sounds like a bottom pincher,’ Atherton grumbled.

  ‘I wouldn’t know. But if he did, he’d do it with style. So, you just have to decide if it was accident or suicide, is that it? Anyone want some tarka dal?’

  ‘It’s cruel, eating otters,’ Slider said, passing it on. ‘Any views, suicide-wise? You’re the only one of us who ever met him.’

  ‘I didn’t know the man. He flirted with everyone, charmed everyone, was always full of life and fun. But that can be a cover-up for a deep loneliness.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Joyce,’ said Atherton. ‘Or he might have been exactly what he seemed, and just leaned out too far.’

  Emily grinned. ‘You’re jealous. I like it!’

  Later they retired to the drawing room to be comfortable, and when Slider went back to the kitchen to get more beers, Joanna followed him. ‘I’m worried about those two,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think he’s really jealous,’ he said, surprised. ‘It’s just play.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I think they’ve got a deeper problem. She wants a baby, and I don’t think he’s up for it.’

  Slider raised his hands defensively. ‘I can’t possibly get involved in that sort of discussion. I work with the man.’

  ‘I know. I don’t expect you to comment. Anyway, it’s the modern problem, isn’t it? Woman wants baby, man wants to stick with his old freewheeling life. Only the woman’s got a hormone deadline to meet.’

  She sounded so low about it, he put down the bottles and put his arms round her. ‘Do you think about it often – the miscarriage?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about me,’ she said, giving him a squeeze, ‘but thanks for worrying. This Wiseman business – it’s not going to mean long hours, I hope?’

  ‘No, it should all be cleared up tomorrow.’

  ‘Because remember you’ve got George this weekend. I’m working.’

  ‘I remember.’

  He didn’t have a good night, and gave up on it at six, leaving Joanna sleeping to go downstairs and make a cup of tea and put on the radio. Not music – the news programme. He could tune out voices, but music could too easily become an earworm. Wiseman’s name caught him back from his thoughts.

  ‘Ed Wiseman, the well-known literary agent, was found dead at his West London home yesterday in what appears to be a tragic accident. Over a long career, Wiseman represented many famous authors, including John Grisewood, Martin Pusey and Guest Halliday.’

  And then it was on to the sport. Lily Saddler had done a good job of restricting interest, Slider thought. Without his inconvenient doubts, it could all be closed down today with the minimum of disruption.

  Joanna came into the kitchen, yawning, her hair in spikes. George followed her, frowning in concentration over a Transformer robot, trying to get it to turn into a sports car.

  ‘Breakfast?’ he asked her. ‘Scrambled eggs, bacon, toast?’

  ‘Are you offering or asking?’

  ‘I’ll make it.’

  ‘How nice. All of the above, then, please. I’ll make the tea. Come on, Boy, let me put you in your chair.’

  George was too preoccupied to object. ‘He keeps being a robot,’ he complained as Joanna heaved him into his booster seat. Now he was running around everywhere, he was getting to be a chunky child, not fat, but a solidity of bone and muscle. ‘He won’t be a car.’

  ‘Let me see,’ said Joanna, reaching.

  George pulled his hands and the toy away. ‘Daddy do it.’

  ‘Of course, because Daddy’s a man and understands mechanical things,’ Joanna said, going to put the kettle back on. ‘And they tell you gender bias is learned, not innate.’

  ‘That sounds unusually sharp, from you,’ said Slider.

  ‘I’m tired. We’ll have to get separate beds if you’re going to practise for the marathon all night,’ she said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Thrashing legs at all hours. No more curry and beer before bedtime for you, my lad.’

  ‘Sorry. It wasn’t that. I had something on my mind.’

  ‘I know you can’t help it, but I have sessions. I have to be on top of my game.’

  ‘Oddly, so do I,’ he said, and then wished he hadn’t. It sounded sour, and effectively stopped conversation. They never quarrelled, but there was something almost approaching an atmosphere in the kitchen, and that was the last thing he needed.

/>   Swilley was reporting to him on a case she’d been working, a ‘carer’ stealing from the houses she visited, when LaSalle came in with a mid-morning cup of tea for Slider and said, ‘Is there anything else you want me to do on the Wiseman business, guv?’

  ‘He was quite a big wheel, wasn’t he?’ Swilley said. ‘I saw him on Have I Got News For You a while back. He was good. Accident, was it? Had he been drinking?’

  Slider stared at her for a moment, thoughts working. Then he said, ‘Can I run something by you? Both of you,’ he added, as LaSalle made to leave.

  ‘Sure, boss,’ said Swilley. ‘Is something bothering you?’

  ‘Yes, and I don’t know if it’s really something, or I’m getting it out of proportion. Before she left some time after six o’clock, Wiseman told Amy Hollinshead that he was staying at home all evening, reading manuscripts. There was a manuscript on his desk, half-read, with scribbled notes on it. The reading lamp was on, and there was a glass of brandy on the desk beside the manuscript. The window behind the desk was pushed right up. One of those tall, old-fashioned sash windows. The position of the body is consistent with his having fallen out of it to his death.’

  ‘So that looks all right,’ Swilley prompted helpfully.

  ‘Possibilities: one, he’d got up for a break and a stretch, looked out of the window to see how the building next door was getting on, leaned out too far, and overbalanced.’

  ‘Right,’ said Swilley.

  ‘Two, he heard something, some sound from outside, went to the window to look out, leaned too far and overbalanced.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And there is possibility three, which is that he was overcome with despairing thoughts, got up and went to the window, and looking down into the abyss, gave in to them and threw himself out.’

  LaSalle looked worried. ‘Are we thinking it was suicide now, then?’

  Swilley saw this was not the point. She flapped her fingers at LaSalle to still him, and said, ‘Yes, boss, with you so far. What’s the problem?’

  Slider twiddled his pen between his fingers, frowning at it. ‘His desk chair was pushed right in under the desk. If you get up for a break, or to look out of the window because you’ve heard something, you don’t push the chair back in, do you? You leave it out because you’re coming back.’

  Swilley was thinking. ‘He didn’t need to push the chair in to get to the window, did he?’

  ‘No, the desk was well towards the middle of the room. There was plenty of space to pass behind, even with the chair right out. It wouldn’t be in the way at all.’ Slider showed her the layout on his tablet.

  ‘It might have been a reflex action, maybe?’

  Slider looked up at her. She wasn’t arguing with him, just being thorough. ‘Most people getting up from a desk shove themselves backwards as they stand, pushing the chair away behind them. And unless there’s a particular reason to, do they really then go round behind the chair and push it back in before getting on with what they got up to do?’

  LaSalle said helpfully, ‘But what if he’d decided to kill himself? If it was sudden overwhelming despair? He could have been sitting there for hours, not working, just brooding over his problems, then finally he jumps up and just does it.’

  ‘It still seems an odd thing to do, to push your chair back in.’

  Swilley nodded. ‘It’s a matter of “what’s wrong with this picture”, isn’t it? But it would be hard to make it the basis of a case.’

  ‘I know. And there’s something else,’ Slider said. ‘His glasses were found with him in the basement diggings. But according to Hollinshead, he only wore them for reading. I can’t see in any of those three scenarios how he would look out of the window with them on. You can’t look at distances through reading glasses. He’d take them off automatically as he stood up. They should have been lying on the desk with the manuscript.’

  ‘Maybe he took them off, but was still holding them in his hand,’ LaSalle offered.

  ‘Even then, he’d need both hands to push the window up. He’d surely have put them down somewhere.’ He watched LaSalle rehearse the action in mime. You pushed a sash window up with your palms. Glasses held in the hand would get in the way.

  ‘So what’s your thinking, boss?’ Swilley asked.

  He sighed unhappily. ‘I’m thinking that someone wanted us to think that he was working on that manuscript, got up for a stretch, leaned too far out of the window and fell. The brandy was a little stage dressing – to suggest that perhaps he’d had too much to drink, which helped him lose his balance.’

  ‘You think it was staged?’ Swilley said.

  ‘By somebody quite good, but not good enough.’

  ‘And that means you think …?’ said LaSalle.

  ‘That he didn’t fall,’ said Slider, ‘he was pushed.’

  Porson poked his head round the door. ‘I’ve just had Mr Carpenter on the blower again. Have you signed off on that Wiseman thing yet, and if not, why not?’

  ‘I haven’t heard from Freddie Cameron yet,’ Slider said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Porson, withdrew, then snapped his head back through like a tortoise spotting a wild strawberry. ‘What?’ he positively barked.

  ‘Sir?’ said Slider warily.

  ‘I know that face of yours. What are you cooking up?’

  Slider hesitated, but answered. ‘I have doubts about its being an accident.’

  Porson put both hands up in a warding-off gesture. ‘Oh no. Oh no, no, no. Do not do this to me.’ But he waited, receptively, until Slider explained his two niggles. His eyes narrowed, but he did not immediately bellow. He was, above all else, a policeman. After a silence, he said, ‘You can’t go in front of a jury with just “he pushed his chair in” as evidence.’

  ‘I know,’ said Slider. ‘But that’s not to say there isn’t more to find. If I’m allowed to look.’

  Porson shifted his feet like a nervous horse. ‘I don’t know … We can’t be wasting our time. Limited resources … On the other hand, he’s high profile … If it turned out there was funny business and we missed it …’

  Slider waited. He didn’t particularly want to be thrown in the deep end of a poisoned chalice without a snorkel, but he knew, because he knew himself, that it would always nag at the back of his mind. The chair and the glasses didn’t make sense, and in a torrid world he needed things to make sense.

  Porson finally met his eyes with something like melancholy. ‘Can’t sign off till you hear what Cameron says. That gives me a few more hours to think about it. But these celebrity cases can be tricky. It can cut both ways, as the Chinaman said when he gave his father a two-edged knife. It’ll probably be better all round to call it an accident.’

  Better for who? Better for them, perhaps. Not for Wiseman. But he was past caring, wasn’t he? What’s dead can’t come to life, I think. It was just the little matter of Truth, Justice and the Metropolitan way. Cheesy as that sounded, it did not behove coppers, however exalted their rank, to stop taking it into consideration.

  And Porson knew it. He sighed. ‘Let me know when you’ve heard from Cameron,’ he said, and stomped away.

  Slider came back from a meeting to his office to find Freddie Cameron bending over his desk, scribbling on his jotting-pad. ‘What an unexpected pleasure,’ Slider said. ‘A man in a decent suit.’

  Cameron straightened up, still immaculate after a day of carving corpses. Another Yvonne. It must be something to do with breeding – Freddie was cut glass from accent to shiny shoes. ‘I was just writing you a note,’ Cameron said. ‘I happened to be passing on my way home, so I thought I’d pop in and tell you the news in person.’

  ‘How civilised,’ Slider said. ‘I’d ring for sherry, but this is a luxury-free zone.’

  ‘So I see,’ said Cameron. ‘You can’t even offer a visitor a chair.’

  ‘I don’t have visitors. But I do have a very fine windowsill.’

  ‘I’ll stand, thanks. It’s Wiseman. That’s a cop
y of my findings—’ he nodded towards the manila envelope he’d put on the desk – ‘but in essence, it was the blows to the head that killed him. At least two forceful blows to the left side of the head with a heavy, blunt instrument, resulting in comminuted fractures of the os sphenoidale and the os zygomaticum and causing, inter alia, a catastrophic cerebral haemorrhage under the parietal bone. It was the bleed wot dun it,’ he translated at the end. Even his cockney was exquisite.

  Slider was trying to picture it. ‘So,’ he said slowly, ‘he hit his head on the way down? On those protruding scaffolding poles, maybe?’

  ‘I think not,’ said Freddie, giving him an unnervingly kind look. ‘The other injuries, broken neck, collarbone, humerus and so on, which were consistent with falling from a height onto a variety of unforgiving surfaces, were all post-mortem. Considerably post-mortem.’

  Slider looked unhappy. ‘He hit his head on the way down and then lay dying?’

  ‘You’re not listening. I said they were post-mortem. In my professional opinion, he was dead when he went out of the window. The blows to the head killed him almost instantly. The trophies he collected from the fall were neither here nor there. I’d say he was dead at least an hour before them.’

  Slider stared. ‘So it wasn’t accident. Or suicide.’

  ‘Unless he’d worked out a way to whack himself on the head while suspended in mid-air, no, I don’t think it was suicide. And if the original blow was an accident, someone went to considerable trouble to cover it up.’

  ‘Damn,’ said Slider. ‘I knew there was something wrong with it.’

  ‘Then I’ve proved you right,’ Cameron pointed out.

  ‘I didn’t want to be right. I’d always sooner be happy than right.’

  Freddie smiled the serene smile of the man who delivers the bad news and then goes off to dine, secure in the knowledge that it’s no longer his problem. ‘Bad luck, old chap. Anything more I can do?’

  ‘Tell me he had a fatal disease, so it was a mercy killing.’

  ‘Nope. He was fit and healthy, very good musculature for a man his age. No sign of drug use. Stomach empty apart from a little wine—’