One Under

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  There was no comfort for him at home, not yet.

  He phoned Mrs Havelock Symonds. It rang a long time, and he thought she must be out, but she answered at last. ‘Oh, I was going to call you,’ she said. ‘I’ve been standing by the bedroom window, watching. Behind the curtain, so I can’t be seen,’ she added, as though he’d asked.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing. All quiet,’ she said. ‘There are no lights on the roof terrace, no music, no movement up there. It’s too early for guests to arrive, but there’s been no coming and going at all – in fact, there’s only one light on in the whole house, so I think we can be sure there’ll be no party tonight, because they would have been setting up by now. I don’t know if it’s your doing, but I’m most grateful for a quiet Saturday evening for once,’ she concluded. She sounded almost wistful. The parties, and objecting to them, must have given her an interest in life.

  When he had rung off, he sat in thought a while longer, then fetched his coat and headed down and out to the car. It was folly. It might be his equivalent of Peloponnos putting his head in front of a train. But it seemed to be something he had to do.

  Abbotsbury Walk was deadly quiet, the houses dark. Mrs Havelock Symonds’s curtains were thick and heavy enough to keep her light in, and only a faint gleam, through the fanlight over the front door suggested her presence. At the end of the road were the tall, forbidding walls, the gates, and Holland Lodge, quiet and dark, except for a glow of light-behind-curtains on the first floor. The SUV was parked at an angle on the gravel. A security light popped on and caught him as he approached the gate, and the call button on the panel lit up. The light decided him. He had half been thinking of staring at the house and going away again, but the spotlight had been turned on him, and he felt obliged to perform.

  He pressed the button. It made no sound, and he stood feeling foolish, wondering if it had worked. But after a while one side of the gate swung silently open. He stepped through and it began to shut again at once, almost catching him. He trudged across the gravel, feeling absurdly exposed in the open space, as though he were in a film and someone was going to shoot him down. He reached the handsome, square house – ‘very Kensingtony’: he recalled those words from somewhere, some society lady’s verdict on Osborne House, if he remembered rightly. In the porch was another panel, another button, and this time there was almost immediately a buzz of a door release, and he pushed his way in.

  The hall was dim, lit by a light coming down the stairs from above; handsome stairs, broad, polished wood, starting straight ahead and folding round the height of the hall. He got an impression of a few pieces of fine antique furniture, a large flower arrangement, a smell of polish; but then Marler appeared, coming down the stairs, and his attention was painfully riveted.

  Marler was in smart trousers and loafers and a cashmere sweater with the sleeves pushed up to the elbow, very casual and at his ease. His charming smile was on display. ‘Well, well, you again,’ he said as he reached the turn of the stairs. He came no further. ‘Come on up. Have a drink. I’m on my own tonight, so company’s welcome.’

  Was there a message in that for him, Slider wondered as he mounted towards him. Marler stuck out a hand. ‘Slider, isn’t it? What do they call you? Bill, is it?’

  Slider didn’t want to shake hands with him, but in his inferior position on the stairs he felt vulnerable. He touched hands as briefly as possible, and said, ‘Detective Chief Inspector Bill Slider, sir.’

  Marler beamed – was there a touch of malice in it? ‘Oh, please, not “sir”. Call me Gideon – a burden of a name, by mine own. I hope this isn’t an official visit? Never mind, whether it is or not, come on up to the drawing room and have a noggin.’

  Noggin? Slider wondered. Who said that any more? He followed, faintly bemused, up the stairs, across the landing, and in through the tall, beautiful door to a tall, beautiful drawing room, dressed in keeping with the house and its age, but made human by a real log fire in the grate. A room in whose mouth butter wouldn’t melt. A room you could entertain ambassadors in. He thought of the bedrooms above, and the roof terrace, and what happened there. If this room found out, it might die of shame.

  Marler glanced at the fire. ‘I know it’s not really cold outside, but I don’t care for central heating, and these big rooms can be chilly at night. And besides, it’s for comfort. Grab a pew – take that one, over there – and I’ll get you a drink. What’s your poison?’

  Pew? Poison? It was like a theatrical performance, Slider thought: Marler was the hale fellow, well met in about 1955. What did he know? What had he been told? Had someone from Hammersmith rung him – or had word gone via a more involved path up to the AC and back? Or had there never been going to be a party tonight? In which case, why was he alone here? Surely a man like him, in his position, didn’t have evenings alone at home? Slider felt unease, adding to his existing nervous tension, churning an acid storm in his stomach. Poison? He didn’t mean it literally, did he?

  Marler was hovering by a table on which stood a massive silver tray bearing bottles, glasses, a vast ice bucket. His smile was unwavering, his eyes genially crinkled. ‘Whisky? Gin? Vodka? I’ve got most things. You are allowed to drink, aren’t you? Or are you on duty?’

  ‘Whisky, please,’ Slider said. ‘No ice.’

  ‘Wise man. Care for a single malt?’

  Slider could not allow himself to be beguiled. ‘Anything’s fine,’ he said, though in any other circumstance it would have hurt him to say it. He took the chair Marler had indicated – one of those huge, square, buttoned-leather ‘club’ chairs, facing another just like it, the two flanking the fire and the composition completed by a matching chesterfield. He perched on the edge of the seat; Marler handed him a cut-class tumbler heavy enough to club seals with, and took his own drink to the chair opposite, in which he sat well back, ostentatiously at ease.

  ‘So, what can I help you with tonight, Bill?’ he said. The ‘Bill’ seemed to come in inverted commas, and there was again, Slider thought, that gleam of malice in the smiling eyes.

  ‘I want to talk to you about various things,’ Slider said. ‘The parties. Cobra, Cheetah and all the rest of it. The girls, the drugs. Tyler Vance. Kaylee Adams.’

  ‘Is that all?’ he asked, almost merrily.

  ‘That’ll do for a start.’

  Suddenly, shockingly, the geniality was gone. Slider saw what he looked like without the PR façade. His face seemed thin and hard, his eyes pouched. He was less handsome; he even looked less young. Slider remembered the magician’s use of the word ‘glamour’ – a spell which caused the subject to see something not as it was, but as the practitioner wanted them to see it. Now he saw Marler without his glamour.

  ‘I know about you,’ Marler said, his voice clipped and without warmth. ‘You’re the loony one, always throwing yourself at lost causes. Only got your promotion to keep you quiet – and long after everyone else shot up the ladder. And you’ll never go any further. Some people think you’re a nutcase. Others think you’re just trouble. Why should I talk to you?’

  There was no good reason. ‘To satisfy my curiosity,’ Slider said.

  Marler’s smile was feral. ‘You are a nutcase. Drink your whisky – or do you think I’ve poisoned it?’

  ‘You wouldn’t do that,’ Slider said, but he didn’t drink. He needed to keep his head clear.

  ‘So,’ said Marler, ‘what do you want to know? Nothing I say to you is evidence, you do understand that?’

  ‘I know,’ Slider said.

  ‘You’re alone. If you tried to repeat anything I said, I’d deny it. And I don’t need to remind you who they’d believe, do I?’

  ‘You have the ear and the protection of Assistant Commissioner Millichip,’ Slider said.

  Marler looked slightly surprised at having him named. But he recovered himself. ‘Well, if you know that …’ He waved a hand. ‘Knock yourself out. What do you want to talk about?’

  ‘The death of K
aylee Adams,’ Slider said.

  ‘That was an accident,’ said Marler.

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Slider. ‘But I don’t think it was meant to happen the way it did. What were you intending to do with her?’

  He didn’t think Marler would answer, but he said quite easily, ‘She was going to be the victim of a hit-and-run. Get her drunk, bundle her in the car, out to the sticks somewhere where bad driving is traditional. Only someone had a different idea.’

  ‘Someone, meaning Cheetah,’ Slider said.

  Marler looked sour. ‘He wanted to have the little slut first. He was angry with her. Her nosiness was threatening the whole set-up. And besides, she’d always shrunk away from him, and that annoyed him. So he took her downstairs first.’

  ‘You remained on the terrace,’ Slider said, remembering he’d had his phone in his hand, ‘waiting for him to tell you he’d finished. To tell him if the coast was clear.’

  ‘He was supposed to take her down the back stairs to the car. Instead he brought her up to me, wanting to know how much she knew, saying we ought to get it out of her before we dealt with her. We argued. He lost his temper.’ He shrugged.

  ‘And threw her over the parapet.’

  ‘You could never prove that,’ Marler said. ‘Officially, she was the victim of a hit-and-run. It looked just fine the way it was – until you started poking about. I really ought to be very cross with you.’ He wagged a finger jokingly, then took a swig of his whisky. Slider saw that he was enjoying himself: he felt absolutely safe, and wanted to boast about it. There would be no one else in his life he could brag to about his cleverness. Slider was his perfect audience – informed, and helpless.

  ‘Tyler,’ Slider began.

  Marler waved a hand. ‘That was natural causes.’

  ‘If you can call an excess of cocaine natural,’ Slider said.

  He shrugged. ‘Cheetah wanted her disposed of. There’d been some rough sex. And of course, she was underage, so we couldn’t exactly call an ambulance, now could we? Not that it would have helped. She was dead as a herring.’

  ‘She had a congenital heart defect. Her mother had it too,’ Slider said.

  ‘Yes, we heard about that afterwards, when she got washed up. That was just bad luck. The river police tell me most of ’em get taken right out to sea, or unrecognisably eaten.’

  ‘Bad luck, you call it?’ Slider said.

  Marler eyed him, took another swig. ‘Oh, are you going to get all self-righteous on me now?’

  ‘About organising a sex ring for abusing little girls? Yes, I think I might.’

  ‘Abusing!’ Marler exploded. ‘Get real, will you? No one forces these girls to come to the parties. They love it! The little sluts are gagging for it. They get exactly what they want: drink, drugs, sex and a bit of pocket money at the end of it. Hell, we don’t even really need to give them money. We’ve never had any trouble recruiting. Once they know what they’re getting, we have to beat them off with sticks! There are no victims here, Bill, get that through your thick head. These little whores would spread their legs for anyone. If it wasn’t us, in nice clean beds, they’d be doing it up against the wall with a pimply youth from school.’

  ‘I’m glad to have all that made clear,’ Slider said. He had to put down his glass to hide the fact that his hand was shaking. ‘I was afraid there might be something admirable about you, however small.’

  Marler grinned. ‘You can’t touch me. Not emotionally or in the law. And, by the way, I know you aren’t wearing a wire, because everyone who passes through the porch is scanned by the latest equipment. We’re not amateurs, you know. The girls are all screened, they have to leave their phones and devices in the cloakroom, switched off, we never used proper names inside the house. There are a lot of people with reputations to lose, and we take care of them.’

  ‘Like Cobra? Did you take care of him?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he seemed genuinely puzzled.

  ‘After I’d talked to him, he rang you, and you sent someone round to kill him, in case he blurted it all out.’

  Marler tried laughter, but it was brittle. ‘You’ve been reading too much gangster fiction! We’re not the Mafia, you know.’ Underneath, Slider saw he had been taken aback. He didn’t know – it hadn’t occurred to him that it might not have been suicide. He recovered himself, and managed to sound confident at least while saying, ‘That was nothing to do with me. Cobra killed himself. You must have scared him badly. He did ring me, and I told him there was nothing to worry about, but it seems I wasn’t reassuring enough. He gave himself an overdose rather than risk exposure.’

  ‘And Otter,’ said Slider.

  ‘What about Otter?’ Marler said impatiently. He got up and refilled his glass.

  Slider sensed he was tiring of the game, and thought he’d better get the rest of his answers quickly. ‘You knew Kaylee had decided to drop out, but you couldn’t trust her to keep quiet,’ he said. ‘You used Otter to get her to come to one last party, because you knew she trusted him. And you told him not to come, because you’d seen symptoms of a friendship between them, so you didn’t want him around in case he intervened.’

  ‘I told him to get out for a change, enjoy himself. Apparently, he took me literally and went to the opera.’

  ‘I expect he thought it was an order, coming from you.’

  ‘You flatter me! Well, I hope he enjoyed it, anyway.’

  ‘I don’t think he did. He must have been wondering what was going on. What I don’t understand is why he killed himself.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t think that was me, then? You’re willing to believe that was a suicide?’

  ‘But he wasn’t suicidal on the Sunday. Or, apparently, on the Monday morning. It was only after David Easter spoke to him outside the tube station. What did Easter say to him?’

  ‘You work it out,’ Marler said, drinking again.

  ‘He told him Kaylee was dead,’ Slider said slowly. ‘He said, you did well, getting her to the party, and now we’ve got rid of her. Told him if it ever came out, he was implicated, he was as guilty as the rest, so he’d better keep his mouth shut. And the guilt of it, and the realisation of what he’d got into, was too much for him.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ said Marler.

  ‘You fixed him so that his hands were red. You didn’t trust him to keep quiet. Why?’ Slider said.

  Marler shrugged. ‘He wasn’t really one of us. I only brought him in because he was useful. I needed him to get my planning permission through, but he was nosy about some of my, let’s say, more specialized alterations. Then I found out he was hot for little girls, and I had him. After that, he was my creature. I got him into the trust, so he could do some specialized work for me there. Rewarded him with the girls, while making it impossible for him to split on us. But I was worried about his apparent fondness for Kaylee. So I had to make doubly sure of him.’

  ‘You were right to be suspicious. He was keeping a log of your guests. Their names and the dates they attended your parties. It looks as though he was planning to shop you at some point.’

  Marler had scowled at the mention of the list, but the scowl cleared and he said, ‘Well, he’s out of it now, anyway. Dead men don’t grass. And I think I’ve given you enough of my time. Much as I hate to end our lovely evening, I’m going to ask you to go, now.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll see you out.’

  Slider stood too. ‘You don’t have one scrap of remorse? Kaylee Adams was only fifteen. She had her whole life before her.’

  ‘Life? You call that life? You know what sort of girl she was – you must do. Probably the best thing that ever happened to her was falling off the roof. Imagine what she’d have been like at thirty – a drug-raddled old bag. We saved her from that.’

  He sounded almost self-righteous. That was the nearest Slider got to hitting him.

  He made Slider walk down the stairs in front of him. Slider felt the hair rise on the back of his neck, half expecting the sud
den shove that would send him flying to a broken neck. But all he got from behind was the voice, genial again, in complete control of the world.

  ‘By the way, if you think I’m not going to report your visit to your commander, you’re living in a fool’s paradise. You really are finished, you know that? We didn’t go into this without making sure our rear was protected. There are a lot of important people involved, and I don’t just mean at the parties. You’d have done well to think about that before you went blundering in with your size twelves.’

  Slider reached level ground with gratitude, and walked towards the door without looking back.

  ‘You should have weighed it up first. The most powerful people in society on the one hand, versus a completely replaceable slut.’ A snort of laughter. ‘And a dead slut at that!’

  Slider found the door latch, opened it, let himself out into the cool evening. A little prickle of rain touched his face. His stomach felt scoured, and there was a hot pressure behind his eyes, as if he might cry. But his mind scurried like a mouse on a wheel. An alternative strategy? We might get him yet, he thought.

  Across the gravel, his crunching footsteps seemed to say, ‘Al Capone. Al Capone.’

  TWENTY

  It Was Al All the Time

  Slider and Joanna sat up into the small hours at the kitchen table, talking, over relays of tea. She didn’t reproach him. She might have said all manner of things along the lines of ‘what were you thinking?’ But they had always granted each other autonomy.

  Anyway, he could do that bit himself. ‘Why did I do it? I’m not that person,’ he said. ‘I’m not the “maverick cop”, for God’s sake. I’d have to be a sad loner with a drink problem – and this would have to be New York, or LA. You can’t make that work when you live in Chiswick with your wife and child and your dad in a granny flat.’

  ‘I can see how you had to,’ Joanna said. ‘What you’ve told me – it’s beyond appalling. How can people be so utterly inhuman? We live in a sick age.’ Her eyes were shadowed – she’d done a hard evening’s work and he shouldn’t be keeping her up like this, upsetting her. He reached across the table and closed his hand over hers. She gave him a wan smile and said, ‘You’re the only bright thing in this story. You and your belief that most people are like you, not like them.’