Dead End Read online

  ‘Do you think Radek would have carried out his threat?’ Atherton asked.

  Joanna looked at him. ‘Nice point. I think he just might have – he was megalomaniac enough. And besides, he’d never want for work. He could command any fees he liked, and any orchestra in the world would fight to have him. So the management had no leverage. Couldn’t take the chance.’

  ‘What’s happened to Bob now?’ Atherton asked.

  Sue shrugged. ‘He’s freelancing when he can get work, but it’s hard for trumpeters. You don’t need many of them per orchestra, and there’s hardly any solo work. I’ve seen him once or twice. He’s very depressed.’

  ‘So he has a real grudge against Radek?’ Atherton said.

  The two women gave the impression of suddenly sitting bolt upright. ‘Oh hang on,’ Sue protested, ‘you can’t think Bob would murder the old bastard because of that?’

  ‘I’m not thinking it, I’m canvassing possibilities,’ Atherton said blandly.

  ‘It’s not a possibility. If I’d thought you’d suspect him, I’d never have told you about it,’ Sue said angrily.

  Joanna was watching her with faint amusement, having gone down this path herself long before. ‘I should have known these questions weren’t all random,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter, Sue. They’d find out anyway. Better he hears it from someone who can give them a balanced picture.’

  ‘All the same—’

  ‘And if Bob had murdered Radek, you wouldn’t want him to get away with it, would you?’

  ‘Yes, but Bob—’

  ‘I know. The idea’s ludicrous. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  ‘You might as well suspect me,’ Sue said, looking defiantly at Atherton. ‘After all, I had a row with Radek just the day before he was killed.’

  ‘I have taken that into account,’ Atherton said smoothly. Sue went scarlet, and Joanna stepped in.

  ‘What he means is he doesn’t think that would be enough motive for you to actually want to kill Radek,’ she said firmly. ‘Isn’t that right, Jim?’

  ‘Oh, I think I can eliminate you,’ Atherton said generously. ‘After all, you wouldn’t have had time to hire the killer.’

  Sue stared for a moment, and then burst into laughter.

  ‘You rotten sod. I’m keeping score now. You’ll pay for that.’

  ‘I do hope so,’ Atherton said warmly. ‘You must let me cook for you some time. Joanna will tell you I’m a noted cook.’

  ‘That sounds good to me,’ Sue said. ‘What about tonight, after the session?’

  ‘Brilliant idea! If I can get off early enough, I could do you a boeuf en croûte. It’s what I call casing the joint.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Sue groaned in protest. ‘What am I getting myself into?’

  Joanna looked from her face to his and back, and suddenly felt rather left out of things.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  How Green was my Volvo

  Slider finally ran Radek’s daughter to earth in Hampstead, in a house she was redecorating. Her little van, painted ecology green with a nice curly Fenella in crimson lettering edged with black on the side, was parked on the paved hardstanding (what had once been the front garden) behind a Volvo estate and a dark blue Jaguar XJ which made Slider whimper. He’d always wanted one. He parked his own shabby Vauxhall across the front, blocking them all in, since there wasn’t anywhere else to put it: the streets here were only about one car wide. The tall, narrow, eighteenth-century house would have made him whimper too, if it had been anywhere else, but Hampstead was one of those places, like Greenwich Village, you either adored or didn’t.

  The door was opened to him by a maid, and that was something you couldn’t often say nowadays. She was foreign, of course – something east of Clacton, he surmised – and, smiling as if she hadn’t understood a word he said, she invited him to wait in the hall with a gesture as graceful as part of a temple dance, and disappeared upstairs. The house was very quiet: all he could hear was the measured sound of a long-case clock ticking somewhere out of sight, and once a creak of a floorboard from upstairs. It gave him the feeling that he had sometimes had as a child, when he had been ill in bed on a schoolday: that everyone in the whole world had gone away somewhere, to another planet, perhaps, leaving him absolutely alone.

  To distract himself he examined the letters on the hall table and discovered that the house belonged to a Famous Writer (of the Booker as opposed to the Airport type), so famous even he had heard of her. A quick poke about in the mental files suggested that she was married to an almost equally famous Historian who was now Arts Editor of one of the serious newspapers. That accounted for the money, at least. What they could want with redecorating he couldn’t imagine – everything looked immaculate – unless it was somehow deductible.

  At last the maid came downstairs again, and with another uncomprehending smile and lovely gesture said, ‘Please,’ and led him upstairs. She showed him into a beautiful double drawing-room, where Mrs Coleraine and the Famous Writer were standing at the window examining fabric samples. The writer was tall and rangey with big teeth and big hair and a large, jolly voice which left her eyes untouched by humour or humanity. Slider had been abused, insulted and even spat at by many a potential interviewee, but it was a long time since he had been made to feel that he ought to have gone round by the tradesman’s entrance.

  ‘Ah yes, Inspector,’ she said witheringly, like a heart surgeon looking down at the nit nurse, ‘come in. You want to see Mrs Coleraine, I understand. I can’t imagine why you couldn’t have waited until this evening when she’s at home, but I dare say you have your reasons. Something tremendously urgent, I suppose?’

  Slider declined to be drawn, and merely gave her a humble smile. She turned to her companion.

  ‘Fay, my dear, I suppose I had better leave you to it, but I shall only be upstairs in my bedroom.’ In case I attack her, Slider thought. ‘I am beginning to incline towards the green. The raw silk is so lovely I can’t resist it. Can we think along those lines? What I’m looking for is a sort of underwater feeling. We can talk about textures later.’ When this horrid little man has gone, said her glance, and she bestowed a gigantic smile on Mrs Coleraine, large enough to last her till she came back, and went out of the room.

  Fay Coleraine turned to Slider. She was a tall woman, but being much more lightly made than the Famous Writer had appeared small in her company. She had a sweet, worn face in which he could find no likeness to Radek except for the height of the cheekbones and the heaviness of the eyelids; on her they looked beautiful rather than menacing. Her hair was strawberry blonde, short and set in the sweeping waves that women of a certain age always seem to adopt, revealing her ear-lobes in which small pearls were set. She was wearing black slacks and a black silk blouse, with a black and white scarf in the neckline which was twisted in and under a string of very good pearls. Slider couldn’t tell if it were a uniform for her work, a concession to mourning, or merely a random choice of clothes, but she looked smart, attractive and expensive.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you at your work,’ he said, and she smiled a kind smile that made him want to take her out to tea and tell her not to worry about anything.

  ‘Don’t mind Maggie. She doesn’t mean to trample. Was it something urgent?’

  ‘Not urgent, in that sense, but trails do get cold, and the sooner we ask our questions the better. I did call your house, but they told me you were working today.’

  She almost shrugged. ‘I thought it better to keep busy. There didn’t seem any reason to stay at home; and Maggie’s hard to pin down.’

  ‘I won’t keep you long,’ Slider said, and she gestured towards a brocaded chaise longue.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, take whatever time you need. Shall we sit down? Though I’m not sure what help I can be. I simply can’t imagine who would do such a dreadful thing. I’ve racked my brains, but I can’t think of anyone who hated my father that badly. You’re sure it wasn’t just one of those random thing
s, like the Hungerford massacre?’

  ‘We don’t think so. It doesn’t look like it. The symptoms are wrong.’

  She sighed. ‘Well, you must know, of course.’

  ‘I’m very sorry. It must have been a terrible shock for you.’

  She sat forward a little, folding her hands together and trapping them between her knees in a rather girlish gesture. ‘It was, of course, but I must be absolutely frank with you and say that I didn’t like my father very much. I don’t think anyone did, except Buster. But then I don’t think my father wanted to be liked. Worshipped was good enough for him.’

  ‘Your mother must have liked him,’ he suggested.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. Swept off her feet by him, more like.’ She looked at him from under her eyelids. ‘He wasn’t a nice man, you know. He was mean and spiteful. He liked tormenting people and playing them off against each other. He used to do it with Mummy and me, and with Mummy and Dodo—’

  ‘Dodo?’

  ‘That was Mrs Keaton – Doreen Keaton. I called her Dodo. She was our cook-housekeeper when I was little.’

  ‘You were – what – three years old when the Keatons came to work for your parents?’

  She nodded. ‘We’d just moved into the Holland Park house. It’s the first home I remember – we were in a flat before, in Kensington. My grandfather died and left everything to Mummy, including the house. She was the only child, and my grandparents were only-children too, so I was very short of relatives. And then Mummy died when I was only nine.’

  ‘That’s very sad. I’m so sorry.’

  She looked at him as if to see whether he really was, and then nodded, accepting his interest. ‘I loved her so much, and that’s when I really started to hate my father. Because he drove her to it, you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t know. What did she die of?’

  ‘It was an overdose of sleeping pills. Well, of course, she wouldn’t have had any sleeping pills if my father hadn’t been such a beast to her. They brought it in as an accident at the inquest, but I believe – I still believe – it was suicide. And Dodo did as well.’

  ‘Did she say so to you?’

  ‘Not in so many words, but she told me that it wasn’t an accident. And on her deathbed she said to me that “things were not as they seemed”. Those were her words.’

  ‘Did she look after you when your mother died?’

  ‘Yes, she was very good to me. I don’t know how I would have coped if she hadn’t been there. But she died less than a year after Mummy. It wasn’t really surprising, she was such a pale, wispy sort of creature, always full of aches and pains – though she never complained. She just soldiered on, cooking and cleaning and looking after me. Do you know, I have no memory of her laughing? Smiling, yes, but not laughing. Isn’t that sad?’

  ‘What did she die of?’

  ‘Gastroenteritis. It just got worse and worse over a couple of days, and then they took her into hospital, but it was too late. Nowadays I suppose they would have been able to save her. It amazes me to think how far medical science has advanced in just thirty years.’

  ‘You must have missed her very much. Who looked after you then?’

  ‘Oh, well, after that my father wanted to get rid of me, of course – I would have got in the way of his career – so he sent me off to boarding school. Do you really want to hear all this? It hasn’t anything to do with this awful business,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘It helps if I have the whole picture. Sometimes something can have a completely different meaning if you can put it in context.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure. Where was I?’

  ‘You went to boarding school. Who looked after you in the holidays – or did you spend them at school too?’

  ‘Oh no, I came home in the holidays. Buster looked after me. He didn’t trot round after my father quite as much in those days.’

  ‘Did you like him?’

  ‘Buster? Oh yes, he was all right. He was very kind to me, really. I always remember he used to make me Shrewsbury biscuits, because I’d once said I liked them. I’d got them mixed up with Garibaldis, and every school hols he’d have a batch of them ready for me when I got home, so I had to eat them, even though I didn’t like them much, rather than hurt his feelings.’

  She smiled, and Slider smiled back. ‘Your father didn’t marry again?’

  ‘No. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he’d have married the first time if Mummy hadn’t had money. He didn’t really want any competition, you know.’

  ‘With whom?’

  ‘With anyone. If he was married people would always say, “Oh, and how is your wife?” Divided attention, you see.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘He had Buster to take care of him, and Buster was better than a wife. He didn’t have to remember Buster’s birthday or buy him flowers.’

  ‘He does seem very devoted.’

  ‘Oh, he is. Poor old thing. He’ll be so lost without Daddy.’ It was the first time, Slider noticed, that she had said ‘Daddy’ instead of ‘my father’. ‘He’s like a faithful old dog. A bit creepy almost, I sometimes used to think, the way he dedicated himself to him. But now they’ve grown old together they’re a bit more on equal terms. They fight like cat and dog, you know. It’s quite funny sometimes, as long as you’re out of range. They sling plates at each other like a married couple.’

  Slider inched in a delicate question. ‘The relationship between them – was it ever – was Buster more than—?’

  She cut him off, looking genuinely shocked, and even a little annoyed. ‘Good God no! Oh, I know nowadays it’s the first thing anyone thinks, and it does make me cross. There was nothing like that between them. My father may have been a swine, but he was perfectly normal.’

  ‘I was really asking more from Buster’s side.’

  ‘He was married too, you seem to forget. Of course he was normal.’

  ‘It doesn’t always follow.’

  She looked at him, and then sniffed. ‘I suppose not. But I assure you Buster wasn’t – isn’t – like that. He thinks my father’s a genius, that’s all.’

  ‘And was he?’

  She noticed the change of tense. ‘I keep forgetting. He was always such a larger-than-life figure, it’s hard to remember he’s gone. Well, I don’t know – a genius? Yes, I suppose he was. If I hadn’t been his daughter I probably would have worshipped him too. I do love music, you know. But by the time I was old enough to leave home, I’d had enough of the world of music, if you follow.’ Slider nodded. ‘That’s why I married Alec.’ She smiled. ‘Alec’s a musical ignoramus. He wouldn’t know Schubert from Schoenberg. It was so refreshing! And it drove my father mad, of course. He absolutely forbade me to marry, so I waited until I was twenty-one and then thumbed my nose at him. He never really forgave me.’

  He couldn’t tell how she felt about that. He asked, ‘What were relations like between you and your father? Recently, I mean.’

  ‘He didn’t really care about me, not as a person. But I was his child, you know, so he wanted me to do well so that he could bathe in reflected glory. He was very into all that. Buster said a clever thing once – that my father never discarded, he only added to his hand. If he’d ever talent-spotted anyone or helped them in their career, they were his for life, and he expected them to go on being grateful and referring to his influence in all future interviews. He didn’t much care for my business – he thought it was frivolous – but when I did well at it and made lots of money and became famous in my own small way, he liked to claim the credit.’

  ‘How did he do that?’

  ‘He brought me up to have good taste, of course, and taught me to stand on my own two feet and be tough, which made me a good businesswoman. And his fame rubbed off on me, so that people used me because they wanted to say their house was done over by Sir Stefan Radek’s daughter.’ She smiled tautly. ‘All nonsense, of course, but I stopped arguing with him. If it m
ade him happy.’

  ‘Did you see much of him?’

  ‘No, not really. I suppose it averaged out at about once a month. Family occasions, and the odd invitation if he felt we would do him credit. I didn’t pop in. For one thing he was hardly ever at home – although he had slowed down a bit in the last year or two. Buster’s influence, I think. And for another, we always ended up quarrelling, and it wore me out.’

  ‘What did you quarrel about?’

  She hesitated just perceptibly. ‘Alec, usually. He thought he wasn’t good enough for me. He always wanted me to admit I’d made a mistake and that he’d been right, that I should have listened to Daddy’s advice, that sort of thing. I know I oughtn’t to have risen to it, but my father had ways of getting to you. He had a vicious tongue.’

  ‘How did your husband get on with him?’

  ‘He didn’t mind him so much. Well, he hadn’t had to put up with him all his life, had he? He didn’t like my father criticising the way we brought Marcus up – that’s our son – but he was better at holding his tongue than I was.’

  ‘You have only the one child?’

  ‘Yes. We’d have liked more, but—’ She shrugged. ‘We’re very short of family altogether. It’s like a chronic condition. Alec always wanted a large family, but all he has is me and Marcus, and a godson he’s rather fond of. I suppose that’s why he’s tended to spoil Marcus. He gives in to him much too easily. He’s so soft with him he would never even let me punish him, and of course a child soon learns he can play one parent off against the other.’ She stopped, and stared thoughtfully at the carpet, pursuing a private thought.

  After a moment Slider said, ‘When was the last time you saw your father? Can you remember?’

  ‘Oh yes. It was three weeks ago, on my birthday. We went there for dinner. I did speak to him on the phone last week about the concert – it’s a pet cause of mine, the St Augustine’s Restoration Fund. I was rather surprised he agreed to do it. To be frank, I think Buster persuaded him in the hope that it would bring us closer together. He always cherished the hope that we’d be reconciled into one big happy family.’