Dead End Read online

  ‘But he couldn’t spend every moment of every day working?’

  ‘Indeed he could,’ Keaton said. ‘You have no idea the amount of preparation that has to go into giving a concert. Studying the music, reading, learning the score, communing with his spirit, preparing himself to give of himself so that the great work of a man long dead might come to life again. Even the time he was forced to spend giving interviews, having his photograph taken, making speeches, attending banquets – all that sort of thing – he deeply begrudged.’ He looked at Slider sternly. ‘It’s not just a matter of standing up and wiggling a stick, you know. That’s the trouble with the world today – everything is slipshod, everything is geared to what will just do. It’s not “how good can I make it”, it’s “how little can I get away with” – even amongst professional musicians. There’s no dedication to excellence any more.’

  He was getting annoyed. Slider hastened to placate him. ‘I know he must have been a dedicated man. But surely he must sometimes have had to relax and – recharge the batteries, so to speak.’

  Keaton shrugged. ‘To stay quietly here at home was enough. A simple meal, civilised conversation, a walk in the garden – they were his pleasures. He didn’t hanker after the noise and racket of the modern world.’

  Slider swallowed that with his tea. ‘The garden is magnificent,’ he said.

  ‘Sir Stefan loved it. It was my pleasure to create a beautiful place for him to rest in.’

  ‘Are you the gardener? I’m impressed.’

  Keaton gave a modest smile. ‘Gardening has always been my great love, and my relaxation. Sir Stefan generously gave me a free hand.’

  ‘He couldn’t have regretted it. It’s beautiful,’ Slider said, and Keaton warmed in the obvious sincerity.

  ‘I have help,’ he confessed. ‘A man comes in to mow the lawn and do the heavy work. But what you see is my creation. I still plant and prune and propagate. And I do a little research work now and then, just to keep my mind active. Stefan built me a large greenhouse and shed down at the bottom. I’m trying to develop a new iris.’ His mouth trembled. ‘If it was accepted, I was going to name it after him. Oh dear!’

  ‘I’m astonished you’ve had time to keep the garden looking so lovely, as well as looking after Sir Stefan.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t go everywhere with him. To concerts, yes, but not always to rehearsals and recording sessions. So I have a little time for my other tasks. I do the cooking; you know, when we’re at home, take care of his clothes, keep his personal correspondence – not that there’s much of that. It’s enough to keep me busy.’ He had slipped back into the present tense. Adjustment was not going to come easily to him, Slider thought with compassion.

  ‘Did you always go with him on tour?’

  ‘Always. He couldn’t have done without me for more than a few hours. And it was doubly important that someone who understood his delicate state of health was on hand.’

  On the spur of the moment Slider decided to slip one in. ‘What is the Ootsy Tootsy Club?’ he asked casually.

  Keaton’s eyes snapped to attention. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘It’s in Hong Kong. You went to Hong Kong recently, didn’t you?’

  ‘Last October. A triumphant tour – but exhausting. The heat and humidity never suited him.’

  ‘And the Ootsy Tootsy Club?’

  ‘I don’t know any such club,’ Keaton said coldly. ‘Why should you think I do? It sounds ridiculous. What has it to do with anything?’

  Slider said soothingly, ‘It’s impossible in these cases to tell what might be helpful. We often have to ask what seem like pointless questions.’

  ‘Have to? Why do you have to?’ Keaton said irritably.

  ‘We have to find out who killed him. You want us to catch the man who did it, don’t you?’

  ‘Will it bring Stefan back to life?’ Keaton said petulantly. ‘Then no, I don’t care about it. Leave him to his conscience and to God.’

  ‘I’m afraid we’re not allowed to do that,’ Slider said gently. He stood up. ‘I won’t trouble you any more now, Mr Keaton, but I may have to come back another time. I hope you won’t mind.’

  Keaton shrugged. ‘I shall be here. There’s nowhere else to go now, anyway.’

  On the way to the door Slider said, ‘Oh, by the way, I imagine that Sir Stefan must have been a very wealthy man?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Keaton without emphasis. ‘His agent dealt with the financial side of things. I suggest you talk to her about it.’

  ‘Thank you, I will. But I wondered if you knew how his property was left. Had he made a Will?’

  ‘Oh yes, some time ago. There was nothing complicated about it. This house and most of the contents come to me. Everything else goes to his daughter.’

  ‘Bah, humbug!’ Atherton said, perching himself precariously on the edge of his overflowing desk.

  ‘Thank you, Ebenezer. Would you care to be more specific?’

  ‘Radek, a selfless, dedicated genius? Bah, humbug!’

  ‘Oh, that. You members of the younger generation are distressingly cynical. I’ve often thought it.’

  ‘Anyone’d be cynical after what I’ve been hearing about Radek from various members of the orchestra. Whose version is right, I wonder, the dresser’s or the musicians’?’

  Slider shrugged. ‘As in all things, the truth probably lies somewhere between the two.’

  ‘Perhaps, but what about Radek’s naughty habits? Do you think Keaton didn’t know about them, or didn’t want to know? Or was Des Riley making it all up?’

  ‘He saw red when I mentioned the club in Hong Kong,’ Slider said. ‘I think he didn’t want to know, because it interfered with his vision of holiness.’

  ‘You didn’t think it was all a bit too good to be true, Buster’s hero-worship?’ Atherton suggested.

  ‘Oh no. I think he’s genuine. But it’s possible he needed to believe Radek was a saint, to make himself feel more important. Otherwise he was just a glorified domestic servant. I mean, dedicating your life to someone is a bit pointless if that person isn’t something out of the ordinary.’

  ‘I dunno,’ Atherton said, ‘women do it all the time. And look how I’ve dedicated myself to you.’

  ‘Yes, but then I am out of the ordinary.’

  ‘True, oh King. So, how do you fancy the son-in-law for villain?’

  ‘He’s a solicitor,’ Slider mentioned.

  ‘Case proved, then,’ Atherton said simply.

  ‘Seriously!’

  ‘Seriously, the daughter does stand to inherit a fairish fortune – though owing to that wicked Married Woman’s Property Act, it remains hers to dispose of.’

  ‘The good old money motive,’ said Slider. ‘I always feel more comfortable when we get down to the cui bono. But the daughter’s got the same motive as her husband, and a less legal mind.’

  ‘Maybe it was the daughter then. Under a hat a slightly built young man could be a woman, and a gunning down in public does smack rather of female hysteria.’

  ‘I don’t know how you’ve lived to your ripe age, saying non-pc things like that. I wonder how much of a motive the money was, though,’ Slider mused. ‘We must find out what he was worth and exactly how he left it.’

  ‘It makes you glad you’ve got nothing to leave,’ Atherton said.

  ‘I suppose so.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Just time for a quick bite before the post mortem.’

  ‘Crown and Sceptre? It’s on the way, more or less.’

  ‘Okay. I don’t know though,’ Slider added, humpty-dumptylike, as they started down the stairs, ‘it would be nice to know you could go on being useful after you were dead.’

  ‘We all do that.’

  ‘We do?’ Slider asked incautiously.

  ‘Organic fertilizer. Nothing is wasted,’ Atherton smirked. ‘And think of all those maggots. Fishermen would pay good money for ’em.’

  ‘Police humour is so childish,’ Slider sighed
reprovingly.

  ‘At least it’s gentle humour,’ Atherton said, and it took Slider a moment or two to catch up with that one.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Late Ex Man

  It was strange going to a post mortem and not seeing Freddie Cameron. He and Slider had known each other for years, and had worked together on many a case. In the natural course of things, since there were less than seven hundred murders a year altogether, there were few forensic pathologists with homicide experience, and since everyone wanted an expert, the same ones tended to be called in every time. It was bad luck, really, Freddie being away just at this moment. Forensic pathologists shouldn’t have holidays. Slider hoped this new man knew his onions.

  Things were already under way when Slider and Atherton arrived: the photographer had finished, the body had been undressed, and Mackay, as exhibits officer, was bagging the clothes. The body was now lying face-down on the slab, and the new man, James, was hovering over it. He was in his thirties, tall and powerful, with a rather pale and slightly alien face whose strangeness Slider eventually tracked down to the large pale-green eyes, which were slightly too shallow and too far apart to look as if he had originated on this planet. His brown hair was very long and straight, and he wore it in a pony-tail down his back tied with a leather thong. He also wore earrings, tiny gold star-shaped studs, and had a faint Birmingham accent, which may or may not have accounted for the other strangenesses. He was as different in looks from Freddie Cameron as could be, right down to the denims he wore under his lab coat and rubber apron; but true to his species, he was sucking a peppermint when Slider and Atherton walked in. All corpses smell: it’s only a matter of how much.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Are you the Investigating Officer? I don’t think we’ve met before.’

  Slider introduced himself and Atherton. ‘Freddie usually does my posts.’

  ‘Oh, the ineffable Freddie! Great bloke. Where is he, then?’

  ‘On holiday. Antigua, I think.’

  ‘Blimey, he must be doing all right. A long weekend in Selly Oak is all I can run to.’

  Slider smiled. ‘This could be a turning point in your career, carving a big celeb.’

  ‘Yeah, I do nice work. I’ll give him a pretty scar.’ He turned briskly to his assistant. ‘Okay, let’s have him over.’

  With the trained strength of hill rescuers, they flipped the body over onto its back, and suddenly the likeness of Sir Stefan Radek was before Slider’s eyes, the familiarity of the hawk-nosed face, but an unfamiliar colour, and unmistakably dead. Only the white hair, flying and silky, looked alive – as indeed, in a way it still was. The flesh looked not like flesh, but like some extremely realistic plastic; the old-man’s body, blue-white and hairless, shamefully naked, exposed in this final humiliation, was not him, exactly, but like him, as, say, a Spitting Image puppet is meant to be. Gaunt, grotesque, veined of arm and yellow of foot, it waited for the knife and the ritual disembowelment.

  James surveyed it thoughtfully. ‘Funny, I saw him conduct only last year, in Birmingham. Took my mum and dad. He looked like a sort of god up there, waving his arms about.’

  ‘Sic transit,’ said Atherton.

  ‘And then some,’ James returned reverently. ‘And talking of transit, come and have a look at this. I’ve read about ’em, but I hadn’t actually seen one before. Look, it’s your exit wound. See that?’

  While not necessarily wanting to have it personalised, Slider had a particular interest in the exit wound. ‘I didn’t think there was one.’ He bent closer. There seemed to be a scratch-like abrasion, v-shaped in form, in the flesh padding the waist on the right side. ‘Is that it? It’s just a couple of scratches.’

  ‘Ah,’ said James, as though it were a personal triumph, ‘but look at this.’ He took up a probe and, inserting it into the apex, gently retracted a triangular flap of skin. ‘There’s your exit wound, see? As I said, I’ve read about this in the manual, but this is the first time I’ve actually handled one. It happens when the bullet’s lost so much velocity, it only just has the force to sort of plop out through the skin; and the skin, being naturally elastic, springs back together and hides the hole. It must have been fired at extreme range.’

  ‘I think it was,’ Slider said. ‘It must have been about sixty feet. So what happened to the bullet? We thought it was still inside.’

  ‘It was in his underpants. We found it when we stripped him. Here,’ and he reached over to the side table and picked up a plastic bag, in which the nasty little object reposed. ‘You’ll want to send that off to ballistics. Chris Priest’s your man. Tell him Laddo sends his best. We’ve often worked on the same shooting. We were both at Nottingham in our palmy days.’

  ‘Laddo?’ Slider queried out of a fog of thought.

  James made a face. ‘My mother had me christened Ladislaw. What would you have done? A cruel thing to do to a helpless little babe in arms, I always thought. And talking of arms, did you notice the left hand? Nice little example of cadaveric spasm.’

  ‘Oh yes, he was clutching the neck of his sweater, wasn’t he?’ Slider remembered.

  ‘Yeah. It was the real thing all right. Had quite a job to disentangle him.’

  ‘Isn’t cadaveric spasm a sign of great emotion or fear at the time of death?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘Or violent activity,’ James answered. ‘You often find it in drownings for instance, where the victim’s struggling to survive – bits of weed clutched in the fingers and so on. Or in assaults, of course – scraps of torn clothing. Nothing to help you here, though, I’m afraid. No nice shred of shirt with a handy name-tag sewn in to guide you to the villain.’

  ‘I’m never that lucky,’ Slider said.

  ‘Well, let’s get started. I’ll have the exit wound out first,’ James said, cutting himself a neat square. ‘I’m making a collection of entry and exit wounds – got nearly fifty now. It won’t tell us a lot we don’t know already in this case, of course, but if you can tell me exactly how far away the killer was standing, and how high off the ground the victim was, I can give you an estimate of his height.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Slider said. ‘Every little helps.’

  The pathologist worked in silence for a while. With a few long, powerful strokes of the scalpel he opened up the corpse as easily as Slider opened his morning mail, and examined the evidence of the bullet’s path. ‘Well now,’ he said at last, ‘you see why God gave us all love-handles. This little sucker passed through the meat of the waist without touching any vital organs. Mind you, at the speed it was travelling, if it had hit any obstruction it probably would have stopped right there, but as it was, it just slipped out the other side. Hardly did any damage at all. If he’d been a young man, he’d be sitting up in his hospital bed by now yelling for Lucozade.’

  ‘So what killed him?’ Atherton asked. ‘Shock?’

  ‘One way or another, yes, I expect so. We’ll see.’

  ‘I understand he had a heart condition,’ Slider said.

  ‘That’d help, of course,’ James said. ‘Though he looks a fit old boy. Not bad musculature for his age. It must be a healthy way of life, waving your arms around in public.’

  ‘It is,’ Atherton said. ‘Look at Monteux: at the age of ninety-two his contract with the LSO expired, and he wouldn’t accept a renewal for anything less than fifteen years. Conductors are famous for living to ripe old ages.’

  ‘If they don’t get gunned down,’ said Laddo, with a grin. ‘I should look for a hostile critic if I were you.’ He cut out the heart, took it to the sink and sliced into it, washing out the chambers and examining them. ‘Well, it all looks normal to me. No sign of any heart disease.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Slider said. ‘I was definitely told he had a weak heart.’

  ‘Quite sure. Some normal wear and deterioration, due to age, but otherwise it looks in very good shape, considering.’

  ‘So what killed him?’

  ‘Tell you in a minute, when I�
��ve finished. Let’s get the old loaf out, shall we?’

  The removal of the brain was the part Atherton liked least, and he always kept a trivial question or remark ready so that he could turn away and engage the nearest person in conversation to drown the buzzing of the bone saw. Slider, though, watched impassively. Once the first cuts had been made the corpse lost all resemblance to a human being in his eyes; but then he’d been brought up on a farm.

  Some time later James straightened up, flexed his fingers in a satisfied way, and said, ‘That’s it then. Syncope, caused by shock.’

  ‘QED,’ said Atherton.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Queer’e died, isn’t it?’

  James’s face cleared. ‘Oh, there’s nothing mysterious about it, especially given his age. He was – what – seventy-something?’

  ‘Seventy-two,’ Slider said.

  ‘Well, there you are, then. At his age shock is not to be sniffed at. The physical insult together with the psychological trauma of being shot were quite enough to cause the old CNS to shut down, and Bob’s your uncle. It’s still down to the gunshot, even if the bullet didn’t hit anything vital.’

  ‘It’s still murder then,’ Atherton said. ‘That’s a relief. I didn’t want to be wasting my talents on a mere assault.’

  On the way out Slider paused by Mackay. ‘Anything in his pockets?’

  ‘A handkerchief, a pencil stub and some loose change.’ He displayed the plastic bags. ‘Nothing interesting, guv.’

  ‘I thought at least he’d have the decency to be harbouring a signed blackmail demand,’ Atherton complained as they stepped out into the blessed fresh traffic fumes, ‘or a cassette recording of a death threat. Oh well.’

  ‘Life is never easy.’

  ‘You speak as one who knows. Will you drive or shall I?’

  ‘Such exquisite grammar,’ Slider marvelled. ‘You drive, dear. I want to think.’