Killing Time Read online

  ‘Blimey, not again,’ Atherton said. Slider told him about it. Atherton did not know Busty Parnell, and was faintly amused at Slider’s seedy Soho and showbiz connections. What a Bohemian past his boss had had! He had heard of Hanging Out in the Jungle, of course – everyone had – and of Jeremy Haviland’s suicide; but to Atherton it was Theatre History, it was like talking to someone who had actually met Flo Ziegfeld.

  ‘Well, you’ve got enough there to be going on with,’ he said. ‘Seedy connections, mysterious lover, poison pen letters. You won’t be bored for a week or two.’ His voice cracked, and he licked his lips.

  Slider looked at him carefully for a moment. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. Why?’

  ‘Hey, it’s me. What’s the matter?’

  Atherton hesitated, and then, with a hollow sense of helplessness he admitted, ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘You’re entitled,’ Slider said.

  Atherton shook his head slightly. After a while he went on. ‘I’ve never been scared before. Not like this. When a bloke pulls a knife on you—’

  Slider nodded. ‘The adrenalin kicks in. Afterwards you think, “Shit, he might have killed me.“’

  ‘Afterwards. Not before. That’s the difference.’ He turned his head a little on the pillow, looking towards the shadows. ‘It only happened to other coppers. Now it’s us.’ He licked his lips again. ‘Aren’t you scared?’

  It was what Slider had been trying not to think about. But he owed Atherton that, at least. He looked it in the face and said, ‘Yes. Shit-scared. I don’t want to end up a notch on some stupid scumbag’s belt.’

  ‘So – what, then? Why go on?’

  ‘The odds are on our side.’

  Atherton closed his eyes.

  Slider thought. Yes, the odds were on their side. But the odds were shortening all the time; and anyway, that wasn’t it. So what, then? He couldn’t do anything else, wasn’t trained for anything else. But that wasn’t it either. It was what had made him take the job in the first place, that made him stay with it. An inability to do nothing. There were those who, seeing two kids smashing up a telephone kiosk, hurried past, and those who had to protest. His body might have its own views, but his soul sickened at the stupidity and waste of crime, and if he didn’t do something, his bit, to stop it … It wasn’t exactly that he couldn’t stop caring. That was perfectly possible, something he was on the edge of every day. It was that he couldn’t stop caring whether he cared or not. That was the very, very bottom line.

  He opened his mouth to share this revelation with Atherton, but Atherton was asleep again.

  Freddie Cameron’s bow tie of the day was claret with pale blue diagonal stripes, a bright spot in a dark world. Thunder clouds had come up, and an unnatural, yellowish twilight outside made the strip-lighted pathology rooms seem unnecessarily glaring. Slider introduced Hollis, and Freddie shook his hand.

  ‘Permanent fixture?’

  ‘I hope so.’ Hollis looked around. ‘Nice set-up you’ve got here. Last time I went to a post there was water running down the walls and the corpse was the warmest thing in the room.’

  ‘High Victorian?’

  ‘Low farce,’ Hollis corrected, and Cameron smiled.

  ‘I know what you mean. Well, there’s still a good few of those dear old mortuaries around. You wait till you’ve attended an exhumation in one. That’s when your faith is really tested.’

  Slider looked around, missing the usual crowd that hung around post mortems. ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘Holiday season,’ Freddie explained.

  ‘Surely not?’ Slider said. ‘They can’t all be away at once.’

  ‘Tell you the truth, old boy, pathology isn’t the draw it used to be. And no-one specialises in forensic pathology any more. When my generation’s gone, I don’t know who’s going to cut up your corpses for you. You know we’ve lost our only forensic odontologist, don’t you?’ Slider had heard that the Tooth Fairy, as he was called, had gone to Dublin, where, thanks to the EC, the livin’ was easy. ‘I tell the students, being a pathologist is a grand life. Easy hours, no stress – and dead men don’t sue. Bodies may pong a bit, but it beats being called out in the middle of the night to deliver someone’s baby. But they don’t listen. To tell the truth, I think they see too many simulated messy corpses on the telly to sustain the thrill. The romance has gone out of it.’

  ‘What you’ve got,’ Slider said wisely, ‘is Weltschmerz.’

  ‘I thought that was a kind of German sausage. How is Atherton, by the way?’

  ‘I hope that’s a non-sequitur. He’s coming along slowly, but it’ll be a long job. The wound has to heal from the inside outwards, so it has to be kept open.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Freddie wisely. ‘That must be a trial. Keeps it always before him, so to speak. How’s his morale?’

  ‘Shaky. But he’s still very weak.’

  ‘Is he allowed visitors? I might pop in and see him, if you think it’d cheer him up. Is this radiant female looking for you?’

  Slider turned. ‘Oh, yes, she’s my new DC, a temporary loaner, though if I’m nice to her she might persuade them to let her stay.’

  ‘You should have let her off this post, then,’ said Freddie the chivalrous. He could never shake himself of the old habit of regarding women as delicate and lovely creatures to be protected and pampered, despite the fact that one of his daughters was a country vet and the other rode a Triumph Bonneville to work. ‘Shall we begin?’

  The body was stripped, and lay pale and faintly shiny on the PM table, like something made of high-quality plastic, an illusion aided by the teen-doll perfection of his figure. In life Jay Paloma had been lean and flat-bellied, and, apart from the nest of pinkish-blond curls at the root of the penis, entirely hairless. Even the legs were smooth – presumably the result of hours of agony with hot wax. Because of the leanness, the genitals looked unusually large by contrast, a curious effect Slider had noticed before. He wondered the Government didn’t stress that point in its efforts to get the nation to lose weight. It would have had more effect than the health argument.

  Freddie spoke into the microphone. ‘The body is that of a male, apparent age thirty-five to forty years old, well-nourished, of medium build. Height—’ He and his assistant measured. ‘Height is five feet nine inches. Put that into Napoleons, will you, Carol?’ he added for the typist. All metric measures were Napoleons to him, just as all foreign currencies were washers. He stubbornly refused to be embraced by Europe.

  ‘No sign of drug usage, no needle marks or tracks. Apart from the injuries to the head and face, which I will come to later, no apparent wounds, abrasions, or bruises. No surgical scars. Estimated time of death – now where did I put my notes? Ah yes. When I first examined the body at the scene of the crime, at – ah – 7.15 a.m. on Wednesday, it was cold to the touch and rigor mortis was present in the upper limbs, the trunk and the lower limbs as far as the ankles, but there was still some flexibility in the toes. There was post mortem staining present in the dependent parts of the body. The ambient temperature was 17.2°C and the body temperature 33°C. That was a liver stab, by the way. I avoided rectal testing because of the nature of the deceased’s inclinations. The body temperature at 9.30 a.m. was 32.5°C. I estimate that the time of death was between fifteen and eighteen hours before my first examination at 7.15, that is between 1.15 and 4.15 p.m. on Tuesday.’

  Slider caught Hart’s eye. ‘Hang on a minute, Freddie,’ he said. ‘Are you sure about that time of death?’

  Freddie looked up enquiringly over his half-moons. ‘You know better than that, old boy. Anything over four hours can never be certain. The variations and exceptions are endless. It’s my opinion, but I wouldn’t stake half-a-crown on it if you know better.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got witnesses—’

  ‘A witness takes precedence over the jolly old Three Signs, you know that. What time do you want, then?’

  ‘Eleven-thirty on Tuesd
ay evening. Not an eyewitness, but two separate witnesses to the door being kicked in and the sound of furniture overturned.’

  ‘Eleven-thirty? That gives me not quite eight hours. Well, I’d have thought it was a bit short, but anything’s possible. Now I look at him, he’s thinner than I first took him for. Nicely built, but not an ounce of fat on him, so he could have cooled and stiffened very quickly, especially lying through the night in an unheated room. And of course,’ he added with a bland look at Slider, ‘he’s shaved off all his body hair, so he’s got no fur coat for insulation.’

  ‘Shaved?’

  ‘Or waxed. The things some people will do for love! Let’s have him over, John.’

  The examination continued. ‘Hypostasis well developed on the trunk and lower limbs. Ah, you see here the evidence that our chap was a practised sodomite: hairless and smooth as a baby’s cheek. Depilatory cream followed by Oil of Ulay, I suspect. Epithelium cornified, smooth and less elastic than normal, and there’s a lack of sphincteric tone. No sign of venereal disease, or proctitis. Practised but careful. Ah, but here, do you see this? Some peri-anal bruising, and a couple of tiny haematomata. Our friend’s had a bit of rough sex quite recently. Not immediately pre-mortem, though. Not part of the homicidal attack – twelve to twenty-fours hours before that, I’d say.’

  ‘He went to see his lover the day before, apparently,’ Slider said.

  ‘Did he? You’re not worried about this, then? Can we move on?’

  ‘We haven’t identified the lover yet. It could be important.’

  ‘In that case I’ll take swabs.’

  Freddie came at last to the head injuries, and as he approached them he began to whistle quietly through his teeth, a defence mechanism which caused his typist considerable pain during transcription. ‘Injuries to the head are consistent with having been caused by repeated severe blows from a hard object. The wounds are considerably overlaid and it is impossible to say with any certainty what the weapon might have been. The blows were inflicted with great force, sufficient to crush the skull.’

  ‘In fact,’ Slider said, ‘it was our old friend, the frenzied attack.’

  ‘Quite.’ Cameron whistled on. ‘Let’s have him over again.’

  ‘Ah, now, this is better. There appears to have been a single blow to the face, across the bridge of the nose, again with enormous force. The clean-cut edge to the wound here – d’you see, Bill? – suggests it might have been something with a straight edge or a square section. A metal bar, for instance, rather than a baseball bat or a knobkerrie.’

  Slider made a note.

  ‘The blow to the face was the first and fatal one, delivered with sufficient force to drive splinters of bone into the brain. Death would have been instantaneous. The rest of the blows to the skull were carried out post mortem.’ Cameron paused. ‘What’s up, Bill? With all the blood down the front of the shirt and none down the back, you must have come to that conclusion yourself.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Slider, ‘but it doesn’t make it easier. If you sneak up on someone, it’s usual to do it from behind.’

  ‘Bit of a breach of protocol,’ Freddie agreed.

  ‘And there was no sign of a struggle, and no defence injuries—’

  ‘True,’ said Freddie. ‘The fatal blow was undefended.’

  ‘But if someone had kicked the door in, why didn’t he see them coming? Unless he was drunk. Or drugged.’

  ‘If he was unconscious through drink or drugs,’ Freddie said, ‘it could explain the rapid fall in body temperature and quick onset of rigor. Did he drug?’

  ‘Not according to his flat mate, but she wouldn’t necessarily know everything. Or even necessarily tell the truth.’

  ‘Well, the blood tests may show something. D’you want the stomach contents analysed as well?’

  ‘Yes, it may help.’

  ‘I’ll secure the whole thing and send it off, then.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Pom Deterrent

  The ground-floor-level manifestation of the Pomona Club was a stuccoed wall painted with a mural of a tropical jungle prominently featuring a grinning snake and an apple. Entrance was via a side-alley, and the door sported a state-of-the art neon sign of an apple which flicked back and forth between being whole and having a large, deckle-edged bite out of it. Below the apple little red dots chased themselves round the border of a space which read alternately Pomona and Cabaret.

  Despite the apple theme, Slider happened to know, because an amused O’Flaherty had told him, that the club had been named for entirely different reasons. Billy Yates, the owner, had had a long rivalry with a fellow businessman, Brian Hooper, who being from Sydney himself had referred to Yates’s enterprise as ‘that club with the Pom owner’. The name stuck, and Yates, ever a pragmatist, made the best of a bad job and renamed it the Pomona to make it look as though he had thought of it first. Despite his many business interests, Yates seemed to have a particular attachment to the Pomona, spending more time there than might seem warranted.

  The neon sign was off now, of course, revealing the secret of its pseudokinesics in an unseemly display of unlit tubes and bulbs. The door below gave access to a steep flight of stairs: the club itself lived in the basement. Hart wrinkled her nose as she descended behind Slider. ‘Mouldy place. How’d they ever get a licence?’

  ‘God knows,’ Slider said.

  ‘I should’ve thought it would never pass a fire certificate.’

  ‘Contributions in the right boxes,’ Slider suggested. ‘Friends in the right places.’

  ‘On the square, you mean?’

  ‘You might think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.’

  The club wore an insistent and insincere glamour, an air of having had just enough spent on it to make it appear to a casual or drunken glance to have had a great deal spent on it. It was gloomy now, lit only by the bar lights, and the reflection from the back-curtain to the dance stage, which was made of vertical shimmery stuff like giant Lametta. It smelled of cigarette smoke, spilled alcohol, disinfectant, cellar-mould, and a faint, spicy whiff of something that was either joss-sticks or a certain popular recreational tobacco substitute.

  ‘What a dump,’ Hart murmured, keeping so close behind Slider he could feel the heat of her body. Nervous, he thought; or perhaps she didn’t have very good night vision.

  They had not been unobserved. A door revealed itself over beyond the bar as an oblong of light, and a dark figure came through and quickly stepped aside so as not to be outlined. ‘Can I help you?’ a man’s voice asked unwelcomingly.

  ‘I’m looking for Mr Yates,’ Slider said. There was a click, and fluorescent lights in the ceiling came on, pinning Slider and Hart like bugs on a table.

  ‘If you’re tryin’ to ge’ a job for your daugh’er,’ the voice said with grim humour and a splendid array of West London glottal stops, ‘forge’ i’. She ain’t got the tits for it.’

  The voice belonged to a tall, very fit-looking young black man – the glossy, dessert-chocolate black of Africa – dressed in a suit of the same cheap-smartness as the club decor, and with his right hand tucked casually in under the left coat of his jacket. The hard eyes had already summed up Slider and Hart as not being dangerous, so the gesture was purely theatrical, meant to impress.

  ‘Detective Inspector Slider, Detective Constable Hart. Mr Yates is in the back, is he?’

  Now the right hand moved with the invisible-lightning speed of a lizard out from under the coat and down into a pocket. The alert pose became casual. A wide and perfectly false smile decorated the features. ‘Oh, yeah, he’ll be glad to see you. Always glad to see you lot, is Mr Yates. Come on through.’

  So, Billy Yates keeps an armed guard at his side, Slider thought as he crossed the room. Now what has he got to be afraid of, I wonder?

  The man led the way through into a narrow corridor. He knocked on a door, opened it and said, ‘Mr Yates, it’s the fuzz. Coupla detectives.’ He stretched his arm to usher them in
, favouring Hart with a salacious look. ‘F’you want an audition, darlin’, I don’t mind waivin’ the tits if you don’t. Geddit?’ he added with a grin of delight at his own wit.

  Hart looked witheringly as she passed him. ‘Jerk,’ she said.

  ‘Shut up, Garry, and get out,’ a colder, older voice from inside commanded. Slider followed Hart into the tiny room, and the door was closed behind them. Billy Yates sat behind a cheap metal office desk piled high with papers. There were two cheap office chairs and a bank of filing cabinets on this side of the desk, and that was all. The room was so tiny there was only just room between the cabinets and the desk for the chairs. To open a filing cabinet drawer you would have had to lift a chair out of the way.

  Yates was a big man who had once been muscular and was going slightly to seed. Still, he was big enough and strong enough to have taken care of himself, especially as, Slider calculated, in any situation he was likely to get the first blow in, and the first blow from him would be the only one in the fight. His face was big-featured, tanned with an expensive, overseas tan which Slider guessed he would sport all year round, and would have been good-looking if it had had a pleasant expression. But there was no smile in the mouth, no humanity in the eyes. It was a cartoon face, just lines drawn round a space, without animation, a representation of a human rather than the real thing. His hair was carefully coiffeured, his cufflinks large and gold, his aftershave filled the small room, but though his suit looked expensive, Slider’s eye, tutored over the years by Atherton, saw that it was merely new, and would not last the pace. Cheap-smart again, just a better class of cheap-smart than his henchman’s. Was Yates a man who was satisfied with what would pass muster, rather than the real thing, or did he dress down for the venue? If rumour was even half right, he had a wad the size of Centre Point, so he must be spending it on something.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked. He waved a hand towards the chairs. Slider sat. Now on a level with him, Yates’s face waited for him without expression, his grey eyes stationary as oysters.