One Under

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Well, maybe he saw this house, fell in love with it, and thought it would be perfect if only it had a sheila-trap on the roof. Did you find anything?’

  ‘Only Rizla papers, condoms and a key.’ He showed it.

  ‘Well, the desk and filing cabinet here aren’t locked. Maybe it’s from his work office.’

  Mrs S reappeared at the door, and Slider turned to her. ‘Do you know what this drawing is?’

  She glanced at it. ‘I don’t know. I never ask about his work. Tea is made.’

  In the kitchen, over tea, they showed her photographs of Kaylee and Shannon, and even Tyler Vance, but she said she didn’t recognize them, and did not know their names. She said again, as if it was important, that her son had never brought any woman to the house. ‘These too young for him,’ she said, with a dismissive gesture at the photographs. ‘He would not be interested anyway in young girls like that.’ She peered more closely. ‘They don’t look like good girls,’ she added, and gave Slider an angry look. ‘Why you think he would mix with girls like that?’

  Slider soothed her feathers, and asked about his social life, but as to who his friends might be, or where he went in the evenings for his socialising, she could not say. But she did confirm that he had gone out on Saturday night – not to a party, but to the opera. ‘Katya Kabanova, at Covent Garden. He loves opera, my Yorkos. He goes often.’

  ‘I can’t see him taking Kaylee Adams to a Janáček opera,’ Atherton said as they walked back to the car.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Slider, deep in thought.

  ‘What?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ Slider said slowly, ‘that she ought to have been less forthcoming?’

  ‘The bereaved often want to talk about the beloved,’ Atherton offered.

  ‘That’s true. But she didn’t really, did she? She didn’t volunteer anything, share her memories of him, get out the photograph album. She just answered our questions – and why did she? As far as she knows, he committed suicide. Why wasn’t she more curious about why we were there at all?’

  ‘I don’t know, guv,’ Atherton said patiently. ‘Why do you think?’

  ‘Because she knows he was up to something. Maybe she doesn’t know what, but she knows it was bad and doesn’t want to hear about it. She wants to remember her good son the way he was to her. So she answers up and tries to get us out of her hair with as little trouble as possible.’

  ‘The bad things he was up to could be no worse than just drugs and girls,’ Atherton said.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ said Slider.

  EIGHT

  The Wife of Bach

  ‘There was a ticket bought with a credit card in the name of George Peloponnos,’ Swilley reported the result of her enquiry of the Royal Opera House, ‘and the seat was occupied, but we don’t know who by.’

  ‘Security cameras?’ Porson asked. He was perched on the end of her desk and holding a mug of tea, which was standing on a saucer, whose purpose was solely for the transportation of two custard creams and a Bourbon. Slider looked at them enviously. He hadn’t had any lunch.

  ‘They have them, of course,’ said Swilley, ‘but they don’t keep the tapes longer than seventy-two hours, unless there’s an incident.’ This was quite common. Some commercial concerns only kept them forty-eight hours. ‘We could interview the people who were on duty that night, show them his photograph, see if they remember him.’

  But that was laborious. ‘And if he was at the opera,’ McLaren said, ‘he wasn’t at this party, so he’s not our man anyway.’ He had a Cornish pasty cooling on a plate on his desk, but didn’t like to eat it in front of Mr Porson, who had recently been extremely sharp about greasy fingermarks on a document.

  ‘Just because Kaylee said she was going to a party, doesn’t mean she went,’ Mackay pointed out.

  ‘By the same token, telling his mother he was going to the opera doesn’t mean Georgie was the one in the seat,’ Atherton added.

  ‘When was the ticket purchased?’ Slider asked.

  ‘On Friday, five forty-five. By phone with a credit card.’

  ‘Bit of a last-minute purchase,’ Slider said.

  ‘It was an expensive seat, too,’ Swilley said. ‘Orchestra stalls – the best.’

  ‘Probably all that was left by then,’ said Slider. ‘Just the one?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So it could have been bought as an alibi,’ Atherton said.

  ‘But alibi for what?’ Porson barked restlessly.

  ‘If he bought the ticket before inviting Kaylee to the party, does that mean he was planning to kill her?’ Mackay wondered.

  ‘We don’t know that he did invite her to the party,’ Slider said. ‘Only that he phoned her that morning. And,’ he added, against the looks of resistance from his crew, ‘if she was being picked up in a car at the end of the street, we have to take into consideration that Mrs Peloponnos says her son didn’t own a car and couldn’t drive.’

  ‘Anyone can say they can’t drive,’ McLaren grumbled sotto voce.

  ‘So all you’ve got to connect him with Adams,’ said Porson, ‘is the two phone calls on the day. And nothing to connect him or Adams with the Vance case.’ Slider recognized this for a rhetorical question and said nothing. ‘You’ve got the square root of sod all, pardon my French. They’ll have my testimonials on a plate if I go upstairs with that.’

  ‘I’d really like to bring in his computer,’ Slider said.

  ‘Can’t do that,’ said Porson, chomping his last custard cream and spraying crumbs. ‘Not without more to go on.’ He fielded their protesting looks. ‘Oh, it’s a mystery, all right. What it’s not is a case.’

  ‘So – we pull it?’ Slider said. Over the years he had learned, like a good dog, to read his master’s body language and recognize his tones of voice, so he knew the answer would not be a flat ‘yes’.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Porson said. ‘Something stinks, and it’s not just one dead sprat. You can stay on it, as long as you get your other work done at the same time. But you’ll have to be quick, get me something solid. What are you following up?’

  ‘Fathom’s out now, looking for a camera that might have caught Kaylee being picked up on Saturday night. We’re waiting for Peloponnos’s phone records. I want to look into this trust he was working for and have a sniff around his office. We’re monitoring Shannon’s phone – a sixteen-year-old can’t go for long without using it. And Hart and Connolly are out looking for other girls in Kaylee’s and Tyler’s circles who might have something to tell.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Porson said, wounded.

  ‘And, of course, something might be forthcoming from Harefield about the motor,’ Slider added unhappily.

  ‘Forthcoming? You’ll need the second coming to get you out of this. Well—’ he stood up, apparently done with punishing them – ‘do what you can.’ He swilled back the last of his tea, stood up and gave them a final, sharp look to share between them. ‘It’s all cisterns go on this one, because by the end of the week you’ve got to show up, or shut up.’

  Connolly was back late. She had gone to social services first. The case worker supervisor said that Tyler was flagged up by the care home because of her nocturnal absences; but she had presented well on interviewing – quiet, polite, not aggressive. ‘We look out for signs of self-harming and anorexia,’ she said. ‘They’re usually the big signs that something serious is wrong. But Tyler came across as a confident girl, not likely to be bullied. And not depressed. She wouldn’t tell us where she went when she broke out at night – just said she wanted a bit of fun. We supposed she had a boyfriend. Well, you can’t really stop them by that age. Frankly, there are so many girls really on the edge that we can’t follow up on the less critical cases.’

  And then Connolly had gone to the care home. ‘Jesus Mary an’ Joseph, you’d want to see that place,’ she said. ‘Rough as a badger’s arse. But the superintendent let me talk to the girls. The older ones are hard as a bun
ch o’ crack whores, and the younger ones are just pathetic. The one lot givin’ me the dog’s abuse for bein’ the filth, the other lot streelin’ round in a fog o’ depression, and between them never an answer to a straight question. More stone-wallin’ than the Yorkshire Dales.’

  ‘So you got nothing?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Well, there was one girl seemed a bit more on the ball than the others. Said she reckoned Tyler was doing a line with an older feller, used to get out Saturday nights and come back in the early hours. Well, we knew that anyway. But,’ she added, ‘she said Tyler used to hang around with another girl, called Jessica Bale, only she’s left now. So I asked the superintendent. This Jessica was older than Tyler, and they chuck ’em out when they get to sixteen. She gave me the address of this hostel they send them to. So I went there.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She wasn’t there. She’d moved on. Apparently they generally do. They didn’t know where she’d gone. But wait’ll I tell ya,’ she went on quickly. ‘I showed the warden Kaylee’s an’ Shannon’s pix, and she didn’t recognize Kaylee, but she reckoned she’d seen Shannon before, thought she was a friend of this Jessica’s. So it occurred to me that if we can find Jessica, she might know where Shannon is. She might even be stayin’ with her.’

  ‘If you can find her,’ Slider said. ‘She might be anywhere.’

  ‘Yeah, but these girls rarely move far away,’ Connolly said. ‘They stick around the streets they know. And I got a photo of her. If we put it out on circulation, there’s a good chance one of our guys’ll spot her.’

  ‘Well, it’s a long shot,’ Slider said, ‘but we haven’t got any short ones. Go for it.’

  Hart came back even later. The school said Kaylee had been in trouble for getting into fights, stealing, and damaging school property, until about a year ago when she had quietened down. After that her misbehaviour was mainly absenteeism. She had brought forged notes from her mother, and frequently used the excuse that her mother was ill and needed caring for, or that she had had to take her to A&E after a fall or domestic mishap. Her absences were usually on a Friday or Monday, which had triggered the suspicion that she was truanting to extend the weekend.

  Social services were still monitoring the family because of the mother’s drug habit, but they were more worried about Julienne than Kaylee, who had seemed to be ‘coping’.

  ‘And o’ course I couldn’t talk to the kids because they’re underage,’ she concluded. ‘I could ’ave anuvver go at Julienne wiv her mum present. She might know a bit more about where big sis went at night.’

  ‘I can’t authorize that at the moment,’ Slider said, ‘given that it isn’t even officially a case. Write up your notes and go on home. We’ll hope for better luck tomorrow.’

  Peloponnos’s doctor, Bhatia, worked out of a surgery on Brook Green, and Slider caught him before he finished for the day. He was a lean and handsome GP of the modern sort, well-dressed, friendly, and energetic. His room was neat and tidy, with a framed photograph of a smiling wife and two children on the side of his desk. He put Slider in mind of a successful young executive – which he supposed, with the current fund-holding NHS arrangements, he was.

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve been treating Mr Peloponnos and his mother for four years,’ he said. There was no trace of the Punjab in his accent. Slider had looked him up, and he had been in England since he was two and had studied medicine at Barts. ‘Ever since I took over the list from Dr Camden when he retired. They’ve been with this surgery about eight years, I believe.’ He accessed the computer record with a rapid jabber of fingers. ‘Yes, they came over from Ladbroke Grove, Dr Odessa. What did you want to know?’

  Slider mentioned the drugs he had found in the medicine cabinet. ‘Was that a usual prescription for him? Had he been on them long?’

  ‘No,’ said Bhatia. ‘In fact, he hasn’t come on our radar much over the years. It was his mother I saw more of – just the usual pains of age. Mr Peloponnos was pretty healthy. There was a scare a few years ago when he came in thinking he had bowel cancer, but I sent him for tests and there was nothing there. A touch of constipation – plus hypochondria. I expect he’d read something in the Sunday supps. I’d class him as a rather nervous, imaginative person. Of course, we always take anything like that seriously, but he was as clean as a whistle inside.’

  Which Slider found an odd simile, in the circumstances. He shied away from the mental image and said, ‘So what gave rise to these sleeping pills?’

  ‘Well, he came in on January the 15th, complaining of insomnia. He seemed nervous and depressed, and he looked as though he hadn’t slept. I asked him if there was any reason for it, and he said he had a lot on at work, and it was preying on his mind at night and stopping him sleeping. So I gave him a benzodiazepine compound. A couple of weeks later he came back wanting something he could take in the daytime that wouldn’t make him sleepy. I prescribed a fluoxetine.’

  ‘That’s the Prozac, is it?’

  ‘That’s right.’ He smiled. ‘The so-called “Happy Pills”.’

  ‘Was he still taking the sleeping pills?’

  ‘Yes. He said they were working. He came back for a repeat prescription—’ he scrolled again – ‘at the beginning of March. I didn’t see him that time – one of my colleagues did. And he’s had repeats of the Prozac, taking him up-to-date.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Let me see – on March the 18th.’

  ‘And how was he then?’

  Bhatia consulted his notes, then sat back, crossed his legs, steepled his fingers, and frowned in thought. ‘Nervous and depressed,’ he said. ‘Not to a non-functioning level, but he was definitely not in his normal state of mind, as far as I remembered it. He seemed to be brooding about something and – yes, I remember someone dropped something in the corridor outside, made rather a crash, and he jumped. Nerves on edge.’

  ‘But he never told you what he was worried about?’

  ‘Only that he was busy at work, as I said.’ Bhatia seemed to take it as a criticism. ‘We have ten minutes per patient, and that’s maximum. We don’t have time any more for the chat.’

  Slider took that as a hint, and rose. ‘It’s good of you to give me your time.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Bhatia, rising too and offering his hand. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with? Well, do give me a ring if there is.’

  Slider had reached the door when he heard Bhatia draw a preparatory breath, and he turned back to see him gestating of a confidence. He smiled receptively.

  ‘There is just one thing,’ Bhatia said. He gave a troubled smile and a little shrug. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter now, in the circumstances. But I have a suspicion that he might have been using cocaine.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Oh, one knows the signs, you know. It’s comparatively common these days, especially with your high-powered executives. I saw him a couple of times last year with minor ailments and thought that might be the case. It obviously wasn’t giving him problems, so I didn’t raise it with him – it doesn’t do to lose their trust. But you know, cocaine can cause depression. And cocaine users often smoke cannabis as well, and the combination can lead to the sort of anxious, fearful unhappiness that can drive a person to suicide.’

  ‘Did you consider that when you prescribed him sedatives?’ Slider asked.

  Bhatia bristled. ‘As I’ve said, he was high-functioning. And we don’t have time to go into all the nooks and crannies. We have to examine, prescribe and get on to the next patient. It’s inevitable that sometimes people will slip through the cracks. I’m sorry Mr Peloponnos did away with himself. But he didn’t kill himself with the pills, did he?’

  ‘No,’ said Slider. ‘He didn’t.’

  Joanna had had sessions all day, and was home when he got back. He went up and changed and looked in at his son, peacefully sleeping under his Pooh ’n’ Piglet duvet, and went back down to share a kitchen supper with his bel
oved. It was macaroni cheese.

  ‘You made this,’ he discovered with pleasure. ‘When did you have the time?’

  ‘While your dad did George’s bath and story,’ she said. Slider’s father lived with his new wife in the attached granny flat. In fact, it was his investment – from selling the farm cottage, where Slider had been born, to a developer – that had allowed them to buy the present house. ‘How did you know I made it?’

  ‘Bits of crisp pancetta. Dad never puts bacon in his. And, if I’m not mistaken, a bay leaf in the cheese sauce.’

  Joanna was impressed. ‘That’s amazing, Monsieur Escoffier. You must have the delicate palate of a gourmet.’

  ‘No, I have a bay leaf,’ Slider said fishing it up. ‘You forgot to take it out.’

  ‘And your dad would never do that. But may I remind you, he can’t play the violin.’

  ‘It wasn’t a criticism. How was your day?’

  ‘Not too bad. A bit tedious this afternoon – too many stops. The engineers kept getting extraneous noises so we had to retake.’

  ‘At least you got a rest.’

  ‘And it’s a good time to pass round jokes,’ Joanna said. ‘Jason told me a good one.’ Jason was her desk partner. ‘How many second violins does it take to change a lightbulb?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘None – they can’t get up that high.’

  Slider laughed dutifully. He understood musician jokes now, but he supposed you had to be a musician really to find them funny.

  They had just finished the macaroni cheese when the phone rang. Joanna jumped up to answer it, and it was evidently one of her sisters, because she went into one of those long meandering conversations that men find baffling. How can women find so much to say on the telephone? And to someone they’ve spoken to recently – perhaps even the day before? Joanna liked to move about while on the phone, and cleared the table as she spoke, then wandered out into the hall. When she reached the bit of the conversation where her contribution was mostly, ‘Yes. Mm-hm. Oh yes. Really? Mmm,’ Slider got up and made coffee.