Death Watch (The Bill Slider Novels)

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Nice,’ Atherton said appreciatively. ‘That’s the old part of town – Regency houses.’

  ‘Expensive?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Depends. If you bought a whole house it would be. But a lot of it is run down, and the houses are cut up into flats and bedsitters.’

  ‘I did some checking via the electoral register,’ Polish went on, ‘and C. Young turns out to be a Miss Catriona Young – and it is a flat in a house, by the way, Jim.’

  ‘So, Neal had yet another little bit of heaven,’ Atherton said. ‘Well we didn’t think he lived a monk’s life.’

  ‘Ah, but you missed the exciting bit,’ Norma said with a grin. ‘While you were out and Polish was chasing up numbers, Tony found a whole lot of cancelled cheques made out to C. Young—’

  ‘For quite large amounts,’ Anderson concluded. ‘And at almost regular weekly intervals.’

  ‘You might have waited till I got back,’ Atherton complained.

  ‘So it could be blackmail,’ Norma began.

  ‘It sounds more like maintenance,’ Atherton finished.

  She shrugged. ‘Much the same thing when the bloke’s a married man.’

  Atherton looked disbelieving. ‘Have you seen Mrs Neal?’

  ‘All right,’ Slider intervened, ‘we’ve obviously got to follow up the Brighton business. Anything else occur to anyone?’

  ‘Well, Guv,’ Mackay said, and Slider turned to him encouragingly. ‘It seems to me the only real villain remotely in the frame is Gorgeous George – even if he’s got no actual form, he goes about with some very naughty boys. What if he was into Neal for something? We’ve got Neal sighted in Gorgeous’s drum very near the scene and the time.’

  Slider considered. ‘It would be nice and tidy that way, I agree, but if Gorgeous George wanted to give Neal a smacking he’d just do it one dark night up an alley. I can’t see him working out this devious plan.’

  ‘Everyone says he has got a very funny sense of humour,’ Mackay said hopefully.

  ‘And he likes women,’ Hunt said. ‘He can get them to do anything for him. He could have set this redhead up as bait.’

  ‘But why would he go to such lengths to compromise himself by using his own premises? That’s not the way he’s kept his record clean all these years.’

  Mackay folded his fingers together precisely. ‘No, Guv. But we don’t know what Gorgeous is on the fringes of. I mean, what we do know about his business ventures can only be the tip of the iceberg. And by the looks of it, Neal was down some very big numbers. Suppose we give Gorgeous a tug—?’

  ‘We’d need something more than supposition,’ said Slider. ‘We’ve binned people up on a wing and a prayer before now, but a prayer alone is not enough. No harm in keeping your eyes and ears open in that direction, though. Anyone else got any ideas?’

  ‘Yes, Guv,’ said Beevers smartly. ‘It occurs to me that we know Neal was a club man in his bachelor days, and once a club man, always a club man in my experience. We know he didn’t use the golf club – and in any case, it doesn’t look as though that was his scene. So I think we ought to be looking around his old ground to find out what club he was using.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll leave that one to you,’ Slider said, and Beevers smiled with gratification – or at least, his moustache changed shape. You couldn’t see his mouth underneath it. ‘In the mean time, we still don’t know who the old friend was he went to see on Saturday.’

  ‘Unfortunately, The Wellington’s always busy on a Saturday lunchtime,’ Atherton said. ‘One of the barmen thinks he saw Neal sitting talking to a man, but that’s as far as it goes. The other bar staff don’t remember him at all.’

  ‘Very Little Else said he was sitting in the window seat,’ Norma said, ‘Which means he’d have been facing the bar. If the person he was talking to was sitting opposite him, the barman could only have seen the back of his head anyway. A face you might notice, if it happened to fit into a gap in the crowd, but would you really notice the back of an anonymous head?’

  It was a fair point. ‘Probably not,’ said Slider. ‘Still, there’s no harm in keeping on asking. You might find a customer who was sitting near Neal and his friend.’

  ‘Couldn’t it have been Gorgeous George he met?’ Mackay suggested.

  ‘Couldn’t it have been the mystery redhead?’ Polish countered. ‘If we assume that he spent the afternoon with her, maybe he had lunch with her too.’

  ‘Else said he came out of the pub alone,’ Atherton pointed out.

  ‘He might not want to be seen with her in public,’ said Polish. ‘She might have followed him – or gone on ahead.’

  ‘If Very Little Else can be relied on at all,’ Beevers said sourly. ‘She’s as mad as a bandage, everybody knows that.’

  ‘The fact is, we just don’t know who he was with,’ said Slider. ‘If we start from the assumption that he wasn’t entirely lying when he told Jacqui Turner he was meeting an old friend, we’ll have to begin by eliminating all of his old friends we can lay hands on.’

  ‘Male and female?’ Atherton said. ‘That could take the rest of our lives.’

  ‘To move on to Sunday,’ Slider said quellingly, ‘he was at home all day – no mysteries there, except that he received a phone call, which we may or may not ever learn about; and he made several phone calls out—’

  ‘I’m still waiting to hear from BT, sir,’ Polish said. ‘They’re going to send me the up-to-date list of his itemised calls. Though of course if they were short, local calls, they won’t appear anyway.’

  Slider nodded. ‘We can only hope. To continue – Neal packed his suitcase and left home at around seven that evening, saying he was going to Bradford where he had appointments the next day.’

  ‘Did he, in fact, have appointments in Bradford?’ Norma asked.

  ‘Oh yes, they were genuine enough,’ Slider said. ‘Whether he meant to keep them or not we don’t know, of course. If leaving the night before was a cover-up for some other activity, he could still have got to Bradford in time by leaving early the next morning. Or he may have intended to phone in sick the next day, or to have given some other excuse – say the car had broken down or something. At all events, there are five hours unaccounted for. He left home at seven, and turned up at the motel just before midnight, and we don’t know where he was in between.’

  ‘We know he spent some of the time drinking,’ Atherton said, ‘and since he had beer in his stomach, it’s likely he was in a pub somewhere.’

  ‘We must keep checking that,’ Slider said. ‘Every pub – and club—’ with a glance at Beevers, ‘in the vicinity. Someone must have seen him.’

  There was a brief silence as they all contemplated the task, and the massive invisibility of the average person in the average pub.

  ‘And then there was the brandy,’ Slider went on. ‘The motel clerk, Pascoe, told us Neal had been drinking, but wasn’t drunk when he arrived. Cameron tells us that from the quantity of brandy in his stomach, he must have been as drunk as a wheelbarrow. So we can assume he drank it after he arrived at the motel.’

  ‘Jacqui Turner said Neal didn’t usually drink brandy—’ said Atherton.

  ‘Which his wife confirms,’ said Slider. ‘He was properly a whisky man.’

  ‘So does that mean the brandy was forced on him?’ Anderson asked.

  Slider shook his head. ‘I doubt it. When a man drinks alone, or at home, or in a public house, he chooses his preference. But if he’s in a private place with someone else, and the other person provides the drink, if he’s a drinking man he’ll just drink what’s there. And we know that Neal was a drinking man.’

  ‘It’s another indication that there was someone else with him at the motel,’ said Atherton. ‘Whom, for the sake of argument, we might as well call the murderer.’

  ‘But don’t we have to assume it was a woman?’ Polish said. ‘I mean, surely a man wouldn’t go to a motel room with another man, unless he was bent?’

  ‘Maybe h
e was bent,’ said Anderson. ‘Or maybe they wanted to watch a blue movie—’

  ‘No video in those rooms,’ said Norma.

  ‘They might have gone to talk business,’ Slider said. ‘Or laugh about old times. Or just go on drinking – the pubs were shut, after all. Pascoe says Neal was merry, so we have to assume that he wasn’t there under duress. He invited whoever it was into his motel room, so presumably it was someone he knew — either an old friend, or someone he struck up an acquaintance with during the evening. And there’d be no difficulty for the murderer in getting his dear old buddy Dick Neal to invite him back to his motel room to knock off a bottle of the good stuff together.’

  ‘There’s a hell of a lot we don’t know,’ Atherton complained, ‘when you think Neal wasn’t really a secretive man. Still, it’s early days yet.’

  Slider thought of Dickson’s warning. It wasn’t even definitely down as a murder yet. ‘Early days may be all we have on this one,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to get some results, and soon.’

  Dickson had levered himself out of his chair, and was standing by the window. It was more than usually difficult to see out of. Someone – his wife, perhaps – had once given him a tradescantia for his windowsill. It had flourished to begin with, resting its long tendrils against the window and growing towards the ceiling; but then it had been allowed to die of drought in the searing glasshouse heat, leaving the brown husks of its leaves stuck to the panes, where they blended with the natural dirt to make an impenetrable fog between Dickson and the outside world.

  He glanced over his shoulder briefly as Slider appeared. ‘Ah, Bill, come in.’ He turned his head back to the window. He had his hands jammed in his trouser pockets, making his hips look wider than ever, and was jingling his change in a Latin American rhythm. That, plus the fact that he couldn’t possibly have seen anything out of the window unless he had X-ray vision, gave Slider the impression that he was pretending insouciance.

  ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’ he said quietly. Vertical, Dickson seemed to fill the tiny room even more thoroughly than when penned in his chair. Slider thought they would only need to add a fairly small policewoman to put up a respectable challenge to the students-in-a-phone-box record.

  Dickson played his trouser maracas. ‘How’s your case proceeding?’

  ‘With all the smoothness of a bull rhinoceros being eased through a Chinese laundry press’ would have been the honest answer. Slider rejected it, however, in favour of ‘We’ve got some promising lines of investigation to follow up, sir.’

  Dickson turned and surveyed him long and hard. He almost seemed to be debating whether to continue. The uncertainty was more surprising than worrying to Slider, whose conscience was clean: he met the gaze patiently, and with faint enquiry.

  At last Dickson sighed, extricated his hands with some difficulty, put them on his desk, and leaned on them. ‘You’re a good man, Bill,’ he said, frighteningly. ‘I wish you’d taken that promotion.’

  ‘You know why I didn’t,’ Slider said.

  ‘I do. And, off the record, I don’t blame you. But it’s not regulation behaviour. Makes you look like a subversive. A bloody pinko conchie collaborator leftie long-hair agent provocateur, to coin some phrases. Not sound’

  ‘Oh.’ There didn’t seem to be much more to say to that.

  ‘Not to be promoted isn’t a sin. To refuse to be promoted – that’s different.’ He sat down, with an air of giving up an unequal struggle. ‘There’s a new spirit abroad, Bill. I don’t have to tell you that. Accelerated promotion – need I say more?’

  It was a scheme by which graduates could move more quickly up the ranks – aimed, quite laudably, at attracting able, educated men into the service, but always controversial, and deeply resented by the old-style coppers who believed everyone should learn the trade by serving before the mast. Slider, as befitted a man born under the blight of Libra, was in two minds about it. The service needed thinking men; but nothing could replace the experience gained on the streets.

  ‘Someone doesn’t like you, Bill. And on a completely different subject, I’ve had Detective Chief Superintendent Head on the blower.’

  ‘I see, sir.’

  ‘He wants to know why we’re still treating the Neal case as murder. Says Neal was in bad financial trouble, multiple woman trouble, maybe being blackmailed, and was a known drinker. To his mind that adds up to misadventure or suicide – he’s not particular within a point or two. We haven’t got a suspect of any sort, or even the smell of a motive, and the only witness we’ve got is an old bag lady who’s as mad as a tricycle.’

  Slider gazed deep into the poached and impenetrable eyes. Multiple woman trouble? Blackmail? But they had only found that out today, and formal report hadn’t yet been made to Mr Head. ‘How does he know all the detail, sir?’

  ‘He wants it crashed, Bill,’ said Dickson imperviously. Slider said nothing, holding his gaze steadily. ‘Not everybody on your firm is as unambitious as you,’ Dickson yielded at last. ‘And holding onto the ankles of the man who’s about to be shot from the cannon may be the best way of getting to the top of the tent, if you take my drift.’

  Hunt, thought Slider. It’s got to be. Bloody Phil Hunt. Never trust a man who wears cutaway leather driving gloves in his car, he told himself bitterly. He must have found some excuse to call Head, and then allowed himself to be pumped.

  ‘What are you going to do, sir?’ Slider asked.

  Dickson moved restlessly. ‘Ordinarily I’d tell anyone who tried to interfere with my team to get stuffed,’ he said. ‘But – and this is confidential—’

  Slider nodded. More and more terrifying.

  ‘You’ve heard of the expression Required to Resign?’

  Christ, not the old bull as well, Slider thought. A world without Dickson was hard to imagine.

  ‘Sir?’

  Dickson made a sound of contempt. ‘Some people should read their history. “The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders.” You know who said that?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘Nor do I. All the same, these are tender times. Not the moment for heroics. This is when you sit it out, and await developments. Take a day at a time. So I want something on this Neal case, Bill, and I want it today. A suspect, a motive, a good witness, a decent amount of circumstantial – anything, so long as it’s convincing. The ball’s in the air, and I want no dropped catches, you comprendy?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘And for fucksake sort out your firm. This is not a John Le Carré novel.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘That’s all.’

  Slider turned to go, but felt the restlessness behind him, even though Dickson didn’t move so much as a finger. With his hand on the doorknob he looked back at the ash-strewn, firebreathing mountain behind the desk. There was a great deal he’d have liked to say, about loyalty for one thing, and his own hatred of power-politics, and the importance of the Job as against all considerations of career and status.

  He sensed that there were things Dickson wanted to communicate; but even in his present approachable mood, he was not a person to whom you volunteered things on a personal theme. And if the skids really were under him, anything that even smacked of sympathy would surely bring about a violent eruption.

  So Slider didn’t say anything; but Dickson met his eyes, and for a moment his seemed almost human. He drummed his thick fingers on his desk top.

  ‘Bill?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You should think again about accepting that promotion.’ Slider opened his mouth to protest, and Dickson cut him off with a lift of the hand. ‘I know what you feel about it, but it’s only another half-step from DC I to Superintendent.’

  Slider said patiently, ‘I don’t think I want to be a superintendent either, sir.’

  Dickson smiled mirthlessly. ‘Then you’re more stupid than you look. The higher you are in this game, the harder it is to make you fall. If they’d been after you as long as they’ve been afte
r me, believe me you’d be walking Fido round some bloody factory perimeter by now, with the Daily Mail in one pocket and a packet of cheese sandwiches in the other.’

  ‘Warning, sir? Is someone after me?’

  ‘You’re the type that some people will always want to take a pop at. Christ, you must know that by now. Take the bloody promotion.’

  ‘I’ll think about it, sir,’ Slider said, holding his gaze stubbornly, and it was Dickson who finally looked away.

  ‘Go on, bugger off,’ Dickson said, waving a dismissing hand; but he smiled as he said it.

  CHAPTER 7

  Brighton Belle

  ‘I TOLD YOU I’D SEE you today,’ Slider said as they headed South.

  ‘An afternoon at the seaside,’ Joanna said admiringly. ‘I don’t know how you manage it.’

  ‘And not just any seaside, but your actual Brighton,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Yes,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I’m not too sure about the connotations, but I accept the invitation. And what shall I do while you work?’

  ‘You could lie on the beach, have a swim—’

  ‘At this time of year?’

  ‘I could leave you with the local CID – I know how much you like policemen.’

  ‘Well, I do as it happens. They’re very like musicians.’

  ‘I pass over the slur. Or you could wander round The Lanes—’

  ‘Oh yes! You know what a mug I am for antique shops. Who is it you’re going to see?’

  ‘Another of Neal’s secret harem, so it appears.’

  ‘The man had stamina,’ Joanna said, impressed. ‘I wonder when he found time to work.’

  ‘And afterwards, we can go for a meal somewhere. Would you like to go somewhere in Brighton? Or stop at a pub on the way home?’