Death Watch (The Bill Slider Novels)

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘There are just a couple of things I’d like to ask you, ma’am, if you wouldn’t mind,’ he said, following her into the plump pink sitting-room. She sat ungracefully on the brocade sofa and looked at him patiently out of her suffering. Like Jacqui Turner, she felt no more need to be attractive. The world was now simply a place full of people who weren’t Dick.

  ‘Firstly, if you’d have a look at this photo – is that the woman you saw getting out of your husband’s car?’

  She took the picture flinchingly, and then looked puzzled. ‘No, that’s not her. Who is it?’

  ‘You’ve never seen this person before?’

  ‘No, not that I remember.’ Slider took the photo back. ‘Who is she?’ she asked again.

  ‘Someone we hoped to eliminate from our enquiries,’ he said, and went on quickly, ‘Does the word mouthwash mean anything to you? Did it have a special meaning for your husband, for instance? Perhaps a story, an experience, an old joke connected with it?’

  ‘Mouthwash?’ She looked bewildered. ‘No, not that I know of. I mean, other than what you wash your mouth out with, I’ve never heard of it.’

  ‘Have you ever heard him use the word in an unusual connection? Or seen it written down anywhere?’

  ‘No, never. What’s this all about?’

  He avoided that one, too. ‘Mrs Neal, has your husband seemed in his usual spirits lately?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘Did he seem as though he had anything particular on his mind?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, but again without great conviction. ‘Not more than usual. He always thought a lot about his job. He was very conscientious.’

  ‘On Sunday,’ Slider pursued, ‘I think you said he was at home all day?’

  ‘Yes, until about seven, when he left for Bradford. At least, he was supposed to be going to Bradford.’

  ‘And that was his usual practice when he was going away on a trip? To leave the night before?’

  ‘Yes, if it was any distance, so he could be fresh for his first appointment in the morning.’

  ‘Did he do anything at all unusual on the Sunday? Anything he didn’t usually do?’

  ‘No.’ She looked bewildered again. ‘He read the papers, had his lunch, made a few phone calls, packed his case. Nothing at all, really. And then he went.’ Her mouth quivered.

  ‘Do you know who he telephoned?’

  ‘No. He always made his phone calls from his study. You can’t hear anything with the door shut.’

  ‘How did you know he made calls, then?’

  ‘Because the phone in the hall goes ping when you pick up either of the extensions, or put them down. And when you dial out, it kind of tinkles.’

  Slider nodded. ‘How many calls did he make?’

  ‘Two or three. I wasn’t really counting.’

  ‘And he didn’t tell you who he was ringing?’

  ‘No. I didn’t ask. I never interfered in his business.’

  ‘You assumed they were business calls?’ She shrugged. ‘Did anyone ring him?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Wait, yes, the phone did ring once, in the morning. I was in the kitchen doing the potatoes. Dick answered it, and then went into his study to take it, so it must have been for him.’

  ‘And he didn’t tell you who that was, either?’

  ‘No.’ She looked miserable. ‘If it had been a friend, anyone we both knew, he’d have told me, so it must have been business, mustn’t it?’

  How easy she had made it for him, Slider thought. Was that indifference, weakness, pride, or self-defence, he wondered? Or perhaps it was all part of the conflict: Neal tried to make her curious about his movements, and she refused to be curious. We all have ways of punishing each other, if only we work at it.

  ‘So he was his usual cheerful self all day, was he?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. Well—’ She paused a moment. ‘I wouldn’t say he was exactly cheerful. But he wasn’t the opposite either. He was just ordinary.’

  ‘Thoughtful?’ Slider suggested.

  ‘Yes, perhaps. I suppose so. He spent quite a long time in his study after lunch, so I expect he was going over his papers and things for the trip. He had one or two of his biggest clients in Bradford and Leeds, so he’d want to be sure he was properly prepared. He had to give technical advice, you see, which people relied on. His job was important — it wasn’t just a matter of selling things.’

  ‘And when he left, at seven o’clock, did he say or do anything unusual?’

  Her eyes filled with tears, and she shook her head. ‘He just – he kissed my cheek and – and said “Cheerio darling,” just as if – as if—’

  She wasn’t going to get any more out at present, he could see. He nodded sympathetically. ‘Yes, I understand. Thank you.’ He waited while she dabbed her eyes and blew her nose, and then stood up. ‘I’d like to have a word with Sergeant Atherton now, if I may?’

  ‘Yes. He’s in the study’ She stood up too, and sniffed bravely. ‘I’ show you.’

  ‘Oh no, that’s all right, please don’t bother. Along here is it?’

  ’Yes, round the corner, and it’s the last door on the right. It used to be the back part of the old garage, but Dick had it made into a study when we had the new double garage built.’

  ‘Have you tidied it at all since Sunday?’

  ‘I haven’t been in it. I never went in his study. A man has to have somewhere to be private.’

  Bloody Nora, Slider thought – quite mildly, considering.

  The study was hardly more than a cubbyhole, about eight feet by eight, with a desk under the window, a filing cabinet beside the door, and shelves round the other two walls. Atherton more or less filled what space remained with his long legs and large, elegantly-shod feet. He seemed to have the entire contents of desk and filing cabinet spread out on every available surface.

  ‘Hullo, Guv. I thought I heard your voice.’

  ‘Jacqui Turner is not the red-headed tart,’ Slider told him. ‘I just tried Mrs Neal with a photograph and she says she’s never seen her before.’

  He related the substance of his interview with Miss Turner. Atherton whistled soundlessly.

  ‘Be sure your sins will find you out. I begin to feel almost sorry for Tricky Dicky. It must have been a hell of a shock when his Brighton bird turned up out of context. Cornered in his own place of work, forced into promising marriage – and I wonder how many others there were? Nature, as they say, doesn’t work in isolated examples.’

  ‘Have you found anything?’

  ‘I’m working on it. I think friend Neal may have been in financial trouble as well.’

  ‘As well?’

  ‘As well as woman trouble, I mean. There’s a clutch of unpaid bills here, and a mortgage arrears notice. He’s been running the total up on his credit cards, and his bank account’s gone into overdraft. It seems to be of recent origin. Up until about six months ago, he seems to have been pretty sensible about money – bills all paid on time, regular transfers out of his current account into a savings account. Then suddenly all the money disappears. The last quarterly statement I’ve found is over two months old, so he must be due a new one at any moment.’

  Slider nodded. ‘We’ll get hold of it.’

  ‘I think his cancelled cheques might stand looking at, as well. He’s been parting with considerable amounts of folding, to judge by all the cash withdrawals, but that’s not where it’s all gone by a long chalk.’

  ‘Blackmail?’

  ‘It’s possible, isn’t it? But his income’s dropped as well. His salary’s paid direct to the bank, and the totals have been going down for the last six months. It can’t be his basic, so it must be his commission. It looks as though he hasn’t been selling much.’

  ‘We can check that with his firm,’ Slider said.

  ‘Jacqui Turner said she was worried he’d been skiving off, not keeping his appointments,’ Atherton said. ‘He may have had some
thing very serious on his mind that was putting him off his stroke. Or maybe it was the whole syndrome of drink and women building up to critical point.’

  ‘Right. We’ll look into every aspect of his financial setup. Of course, if he was being blackmailed, it gives us a suspect at last, which is something we’ve been woefully short of so far.’

  Atherton looked round the tiny room and sighed. ‘We won’t be short of something to pass the time, that’s for sure. This bloke was a squirrel. I don’t think he could have thrown anything away in years.’

  ‘I’ll have a word with Mrs Neal, and you can bundle it all up and take it back to the factory. Get the others to help you go through it.’

  ‘It’s funny, though, that Mrs Neal didn’t seem to know about the money situation,’ Atherton mused.

  ‘I imagine Neal dealt with all that side of things. It isn’t uncommon for women of her generation to rely entirely on their husband for everything to do with finance. He’d give her the housekeeping money, and she’d ask no questions. She said she never wanted for anything and that he was generous with presents and so on. I dare say it suited them both that way.’

  Atherton sighed. ‘She made it easy for him. I’ll tell you another thing, Guv – he wasn’t a secretive man. I’ve found a couple of phone bills here, and he had itemised calls.’

  ‘I suppose he’d claim some of them on expenses,’ Slider said.

  ‘Maybe so, but I’ve seen Jacqui Turner’s number on the list a few times. Not only did he call her from here, with the risk of his wife picking up the extension, but he kept the bill where she could find it, with the chance she might decide to check up on who the numbers belonged to.’

  Slider looked into the tangle sadly. ‘Maybe he wanted her to find out. Maybe he hoped to provoke her into divorcing him. That would have been one way out of his troubles, if Jacqui Turner was pressing him to marry her.’

  ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire,’ Atherton said. ‘And likewise, better the devil you know.’

  ‘How true,’ said Slider. He held out his hand. ‘Give me the list of numbers. I’ll have them checked out. And get BT to give us the rest of the numbers, up to date – I’d like to know who he called on Sunday. I’d like to know who called him, too,’ he added, ‘but that’s another matter.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Haddocks’ Eyes

  ‘THAT’S WHAT I LIKE TO see,’ Atherton said, strolling into the CID room with an armful of paper bags. Every head was bent, every desk covered in bits of Neal’s accumulation of paper. ‘The whole Department hunting for haddocks’ eyes.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Anderson, looking up from the stack of cancelled cheques before him.

  ‘For our beloved leader to work into waistcoat buttons,’ Atherton explained, dumping the bags in the nearest out tray and sorting through them. ‘What else do any of us do in the silent night? Except for Phil the Pill, of course, who reads his PACE handbook and polishes up his tongue. Where is he, anyway?’

  ‘Bog,’ said Norma economically.

  ‘And you, Norma, you police siren: you who comb visions from your hair upon the midnight rocks of illusion.’ He bent over her seductively. ‘Was yours the corned beef and pickle or the liver sausage and tomato?’

  She pulled the bag from his hand and pushed him away in the same movement. ‘What were you eating last night? Your breath is straightening my perm.’

  He straightened. ‘Don’t get the hump. Here’s your lunchpack, Notre Dame.’ She snorted derisively without looking up. He peered into another bag. ‘Whose was the roast beef? Oh, that’s mine.’

  ‘That greasy-looking bag must be my hot sausage roll,’ said Anderson.

  ‘Don’t talk about Norma like that,’ Atherton reproved, moving out of range. ‘And two cheese salad rolls for Polish – now she wouldn’t push me away. She’s a woman with taste.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Mackay said, ‘I’ve never tasted her.’

  ‘Tasted who?’ Hunt asked, coming back into the room.

  ‘Can’t think of her name, but she’s been on the tip of my tongue a few times,’ Mackay answered.

  ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ Atherton said. ‘Where is my lovely Polish plonk, anyway? I’ve got something I want to give her.’

  ‘You’re not the only one,’ Anderson said with a secret smile. ‘She went in to see the Guv’nor, and hasn’t been heard of since.’

  ‘Stop panting,’ Atherton said, ‘(a) he wouldn’t, and (b) she wouldn’t. Maybe I ought to rescue her, though. He has a mind above food. She might starve entirely away.’

  On cue, the door opened and Slider came in with Polish behind him. Atherton gazed avidly at her spiky head and neat little ears. She made him want to sink his teeth into her neck and keep nibbling until he got to her toes; but then he hadn’t had his lunch yet.

  ‘Ah, good, you’re back,’ Slider said, gathering Atherton with his gaze. ‘I think we ought to have a chat, lay out what we’ve got so far. There are some—’ He took in the sandwich bags. ‘You can go on with your lunches while we talk.’

  Polish beat Atherton to it. ‘Can I get you something, sir? It won’t take a minute.’

  ‘I’ll catch up later.’ He carefully cleared the end of a desk and perched on it. ‘Okay, let’s have a look at what we know about Neal.’

  ‘He was Jack the Lad,’ Norma offered. ‘Well known around that part of the ground. Tony and I got a number of nods to his mugshot – pubs mainly, and betting shops.’

  Anderson nodded. ‘Fond of the gee-gees.’

  ‘Lucky?’ Slider asked.

  Anderson grinned. ‘Who is? He was free with his money, though. And popular. People seemed to like him.’

  ‘Well they would, wouldn’t they?’ Norma said, faintly indignant. ‘Fleas are bound to love their dog.’ She looked at Slider. ‘He was known as a womaniser, too.’

  ‘Prostitutes?’

  ‘More of a ladies’ man. He was good-looking, as we know. Nice manners, free spending, that sort of thing.’

  Mackay spoke. ‘I had a word with some of the local tarts, sir, but they didn’t bite. I don’t think he had the notion of paying for it. Well, he never had to, did he?’

  ‘Why that area, in particular?’ Slider asked, in Socratic mode.

  ‘He worked for Betcon in Glenthorne Road at one time,’ Beevers said. ‘Security guard. That was before he married, of course, and he was living the merry bachelor life, drinking, clubs and so on.’ There was the faintest of envy apparent in Beevers voice, the regret of a man with a new baby in the house and a wife still off-limits. ‘I spoke to a Doug Gifford who worked with him at Betcon, and he said Neal was quite a wild character – he called him a, quote, mad bastard, unquote. And a hard drinker a – though a lot of security guards are, of course. Neal had a flat in Dalling Road, and Gifford said he was always taking women back there.’

  ‘So there was nothing strange about his being in that area,’ Slider said. ‘It was home ground.’

  ‘And he preferred it to his new beat,’ Atherton said. ‘We know he told his wife he went to the golf club every Saturday, to have lunch with friends and play a few rounds in the afternoon. Except of course that the Secretary says he’s only been there half a dozen times in the past year, and hasn’t been out on the greens since last summer.’

  Atherton remembered what Beevers had said when he came back from taking statements at the golf club: ‘You should have seen the smiles when I asked how often he’d been in. One of the members at the bar told me Neal’s what they call a “periodic member” – only turns up when his tart’s got her period. Gawd, it’s made easy for some blokes, isn’t it? His wife never even used to phone up and check on him.’

  But Atherton didn’t convey it to Slider in quite those words, having regard for his guv’nor’s own new foray into adultery. ‘Neal used the golf club as his excuse to get away, sometimes to see Jacqui Turner – and perhaps other women we don’t know about yet – and sometimes to go back to his happy hunting ground
for a spree.’

  Slider nodded thoughtfully. ‘So the redhead at Gorgeous George’s may just be—’

  ‘A red herring?’ Atherton offered.

  ‘There may be nothing fishy about her at all,’ Slider said. ‘He might simply have met her on one of his jaunts, quite coincidentally.’

  ‘But then what was she doing there?’ Norma asked.

  ‘What she said, perhaps,’ Slider suggested. ‘It isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that she was a student, or in town temporarily to do some research, met Neal by chance and simply joined him for a good time.’

  ‘Then why did she leave so suddenly?’ Norma pursued.

  Just before Neal was killed,’ Beevers pointed out. ‘We don’t know she’s even involved.’

  ‘At the moment she seems to be a bit of a dead end, until we can find her and talk to her. No luck tracing her from her name?’

  ‘No sir,’ said Norma. ‘She’s not in our records.’

  ‘All right, keep trying. But leaving her aside for the moment, let’s look at Neal’s latest situation. He’d got himself into money-trouble. Bills unpaid, big overdraft, running up credit everywhere.’

  ‘I spoke to his bank manager,’ Atherton said, ‘and it seems about a month ago he made enquiries about a second mortgage on his house. The bank seemed to find that quite amusing. They said that since he’d already run up an unauthorised overdraft about equal to a second mortgage, they’d sit this one out thank you very much.’

  ‘So he was looking for extra money – why?’ Slider said.

  ‘Gambling debts?’ Anderson suggested. ‘He’d been losing fairly heavily on the ponies.’

  ‘And his income had fallen,’ Atherton said. ‘These things can be cumulative.’

  Slider smiled. ‘It was a semi-rhetorical question,’ he said. ‘Jablowski’s come up with something.’

  ‘I think Neal was up to something in Brighton,’ Polish said. ‘I was checking through the phone numbers on his itemised bills, and I found a lot of numbers with the Brighton code. Well, we knew he went down there regularly on business, and a lot of the numbers were businesses and hotels. But he also made a lot of long calls – fifteen, twenty minutes sometimes – to a number which turned out to be registered to a C. Young, with an address in Carlton Hill.’