Death Watch (The Bill Slider Novels)

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

‘Yes, but what’s this got to do with you?’ Slider asked when she paused for breath. ‘I suppose she wants to put us down for tickets—’

  ‘No, no, you don’t understand!’ Irene said rapturously. ‘Marilyn Cripps has asked me to help! She’s asked me to make some of the costumes. She says they’ve got to be really professional – looking, and that’s why she thought of me.’

  ‘She wants you to make costumes for a school play, and you’re pleased about it?’

  ‘It’s not a school play,’ she said indignantly. ‘It’s a Gala, and it’s at Eton College. Don’t you understand? It means I’ll be invited to the reception as well, and I’ll get to meet the Duchess of Kent!’

  ‘Or Princess Alexandra – whichever it is,’ Slider said, and then wished he hadn’t.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased for me,’ she said, hurt.

  ‘I am,’ he said hastily. ‘I’m delighted. It’s wonderful.’

  It gave him a pain like indigestion to think what a dismal thing had the power to thrill her. Marilyn Cripps was one of the world’s greatest organisers, a gigantic woman like a rogue elephant – not physically large, but unstoppable. Not the least of her talents was being able to pick the very people who would do the hardest work for the least reward, and think themselves privileged to be asked. Irene had been involved in making costumes for Kate’s school’s play once, and he knew how much time and effort was involved – tedious, neck – aching work bent over the dining – room table in poor light night after night. But for something at Eton College, Irene would work until her fingers came off and her eyes stopped out, and the Cripps woman knew it.

  ‘Will I be expected to turn up for this do?’ he asked tentatively. He knew how ballsachingly ghastly it would be. He had nothing against putting on a monkey suit for the Duchess of Kent (or Princess Alexandra) but he was afraid only having his jaws surgically wired would prevent him from saying something unforgiveably fruity to Mrs Cripps.

  ‘Oh no,’ Irene said promptly, and with faint and pardonable triumph. ‘They can’t have too many people to the supper, especially with a member of the royal family there. It will just be the guests of honour and the main organisers with their husbands or wives, and the rest of the helpers will be asked on their own. But you probably wouldn’t have been able to come anyway, would you, so it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ He made an effort on her behalf. ‘Well, I really am pleased for you, darling. I hope you’ll be—’ He nearly said very happy. ‘I hope you’ll enjoy it very much.’

  ‘It’s going to take up all my time for the next few weeks,’ she said happily, ‘so don’t expect me to be around to cook your meals whenever you come home. And there’ll be meetings and fittings and things at Marilyn’s house or up at the College,’ – how gladly that word tripped off her tongue – ‘maybe several times a week. We’ll have to have a babysitter when I’m out: it’s not fair on Matthew to leave him in charge so often. I hope we can afford it.’

  He heard the faint irony in the question, and responded with an irony of his own. ‘When it comes to your happiness, of course we can afford it.’

  Irene didn’t notice. She was busy looking forward to the rosy future which had suddenly replaced the dreary grey vista of heretofore. ‘To think of her asking me! She must think more of me than I realised. When it’s over, perhaps I’ll invite her and some of the others over to our house for something. A bridge evening with supper would be nice. I’ve got a book somewhere with some marvellous recipes for finger – food! Our lounge is so small, though, I’d have to move the suite out to the—’

  ‘I’ve got to go now, darling,’ he said hastily. ‘The other phone’s ringing—’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said vaguely, and actually put the phone down on him in sheer absence of mind. He could almost see the young bridal look her face would be wearing as she planned the social life she had always dreamed of. Bridge, garden parties, cocktail parties … the Crippses usually made up a party for Ascot, too … and they went to Glyndebourne several times most summers …

  He hoped Irene wasn’t going to be let down too hard when her usefulness was over. For the moment, however, much as he hated Mrs Cripps for exploiting Irene, he had to admit she had made her happier than he had been able to in years.

  And, of course, he was guiltily glad that with Irene fully preoccupied outside the home, it would be easier for him to see Joanna for the next few weeks.

  ‘Who on earth would want to murder a fireman?’ Joanna said. ‘I mean, of all people in the world, you’d think they’d be the last to have enemies.’

  Slider smiled into the darkness. They were in bed, Joanna was in his arms, with her face on his chest and the top of her head tucked under his chin, and he was so blissfully comfortable he almost couldn’t be bothered to correct her wild delusions.

  ‘You know that there’s a saying in the Job, whenever a probationary PC complains about the attitude of the public: if you wanted to be popular, you should have joined the fire brigade.’

  ‘Quite right. I mean, what they do is so absolutely heroic and unselfish, isn’t it? They risk their lives for other people’s good, and you can’t even suspect them of ulterior motives, like policemen or soldiers who might just possibly be doing it for the power.’

  ‘You have got it bad, haven’t you? But Neal wasn’t a fireman, he was a fire alarm salesman. He hadn’t been a fireman for sixteen years.’

  ‘Sixteen years. A big part of his life. And his life was real to him, not just a set of statistics, a list of facts on an index card,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘He ate and slept and thought and felt; the most important person in the world to himself. The epicentre of a whole universe of experience.’

  Slider grunted agreement.

  ‘It’s easy to forget him in all the excitement, isn’t it? That was something that worried me when you were investigating Anne – Marie’s murder, that I’d become interested in the problem of it, without remembering there was a person attached.’

  He grunted again. It was amazing, when you thought how knobbly and uncompromising the human body was compared with, say, a cat’s, how Joanna’s contours fitted against his so easily and perfectly.

  ‘But I suppose you’d have to do that, wouldn’t you, out of self – defence? You couldn’t really allow yourself to care personally about every victim?’

  And then again, when you thought how different her contours were from his – yet you couldn’t have got a cigarette paper between them at the moment, always supposing you were abandoned enough to want to try.

  ‘Have you got any real picture of Neal in your mind? I mean, is he a person to you?’ Joanna pursued. ‘You were saying the other day that you felt sorry for him, but it sounded as though it was partly a joke.’

  Slider roused himself. She was in one of her interrogative moods, and there was only one way to silence her. The romantic touch – charm, flattery, seduction – make her purr, make her feel like a queen. Time for the sophisticated approach.

  ‘C’mere, woman,’ he said.

  Ten minutes later she murmured in a much more relaxed voice, ‘I love being in bed with you.’

  ‘Pity the nights are so short,’ he said. ‘It’ll be an early start for me tomorrow. But at least we can have breakfast together. And the A40 traffic can get along without me for once.’

  ‘You’d better go on sleeping here while I’m away,’ she said. ‘Get Irene into the habit.’

  ‘What d’you mean, while you’re away?’

  ‘You haven’t forgotten I’m going to Germany for four days?’

  He’d forgotten.

  ‘Mini – tour,’ she reminded him. ‘What we call the Cholera Special. Three towns in four days – Cologne, Düsseldorf and Frankfurt.’

  ‘I didn’t know that was yet, I thought it was weeks away,’ he said. ‘Hell’s bells!’

  ‘And damnation,’ she added. ‘Berlioz, La Damnation de Faust. If it wasn’t a tour, it’d be a pleasure: music so beautiful it�
��s an erotic experience just playing it, and a luscious tenor singing in French – in French! I could listen all day.’

  ‘Never mind all that. You’re going away! Why did it have to be now, just when I can be with you?’

  He went cold as soon as the words were out of his mouth, but, prince of a woman, she didn’t point out the obvious this time, as she might have. ‘Think about me,’ she said, ‘stuck in boring old Germany without you. I hate these short – haul tours – they’re exhausting, too much travelling for too little playing. And it’s yummy music, but with the world’s most hated conductor. If we do well, it’s in spite of him, not because of him.’

  ‘How can he be that bad? He’s world famous,’ Slider argued. ‘Surely no – one would hire him a second time if he were incompetent?’

  ‘How little you know!’ He felt her writhe a little with frustration. ‘He’s a box – office draw. The public don’t know any better. They want a show, and since all they see is his back, there’s got to be some spectacular swooping about, or they’d think he wasn’t doing anything. The really good conductors, from our point of view, are nothing to look at, so they hardly ever get famous.’ She sighed. ‘It’s hard not to hate the public sometimes. You have to keep reminding yourself that they’re who we’re doing it all for.’

  He smiled unwillingly. ‘That’s exactly how we feel.’

  ‘I know.’ She pressed herself against him. ‘I told you, musicians and coppers are very alike,’ she said.

  His hand lingered on the curve of her buttock, and her breasts were nudging his chest like two friendly angora rabbits. ‘I can think of lots of differences,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me about them,’ she invited.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Strangling in a String

  WHEN DICKSON BREEZED INTO THE department meeting, Slider stiffened with surprise: his suit was innocent of ash, and he smelled of aftershave. True, it was only Brut or Old Mice, one of those that very old aunts or very young children give you for Christmas because they can’t think of anything else to get, and you put the bottle in the back of the medicine cabinet because you’re too fond of them actually to throw it away. Still, it was definitely aftershave and not whisky; and his nostril hair was freshly trimmed.

  ‘Morning!’ He flashed his Shanks Armitage smile around the bemused troops, and unbuttoned his jacket. Some of his body took the chance to make a dash for it, and got as far as his shirt buttons before being stopped. ‘Right, Bill, carry on. Let’s hear what you’ve got.’

  ‘As you know, we’ve been trying to trace the men who were on the same watch as Neal when the Shaftesbury Avenue station was closed in 1974,’ Slider said. ‘We knew it wasn’t going to be easy after a gap of sixteen years, and especially since the men were pretty well scattered to begin with. We started by checking with the Neal paperwork, his itemised calls list, and with Mrs Neal. That was our first surprise: Mrs Neal had no idea her husband had ever been a fireman.’

  Dickson stirred a little. ‘Wait a minute – that burn on the back of Neal’s hand. Didn’t she say he got that when a friend of his died in a fire?’

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ Atherton answered. It had been in the report of his first interview with Mrs Neal. What a memory the old man had! ‘Apparently, that’s literally all he told her. “A friend of mine was killed in a fire once.” ’

  ‘He never talked about the past, and she never asked about it,’ Slider said. ‘Not a woman of great curiosity.’

  ‘I suppose it suited him that way,’ Dickson grunted. ‘Suited ’em both, probably. Go on.’

  ‘With no help from the Neal end, we thought we’d have to do it the hard way, from the Shaftesbury Avenue end, move by move. But one of the names on the list was unusual – Benjamin Hulfa – and there was only one Hulfa in the London Telephone Directory. We took a shot at it, and it turned out to be Ben Hulfa’s widow.’

  ‘Widow?’ Dickson glanced behind him for a desk, parked his rump on the edge of it, and folded his arms across his chest, like an old – fashioned housewife by a garden fence.

  ‘Swilley went round to interview her,’ Slider said, and cued Norma with a glance.

  ‘Hulfa died last year, sir. He was an insurance investigator, but he’d been off work for almost ten weeks with depression, taking various drugs prescribed by his doctor. Mrs Hulfa was a BT telephonist, doing shift work. She came home one night after the late shift and found all three services outside her house. There’d been a fire, and her husband was dead.’

  ‘Killed in the fire?’

  ‘Apparently not, sir. He’d taken a mixture of sleepers and brandy, sitting on the sofa in the living room. He was a heavy smoker, and it was assumed that he’d dropped a lighted cigarette as he grew drowsy, and set light to the upholstery. A passer – by saw the curtains on fire and called the fire brigade. Hulfa was already dead when they got to him, but from respiratory collapse from the drugs rather than smoke inhalation. There was some talk of suicide, but it was eventually brought in as accidental death.’

  ‘Well?’ Dickson asked, reading her tone of voice. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Only that the post mortem found there was no carbon at all in the lungs or in the nostrils,’ Norma said. ‘It seemed to me, sir, that if he dropped the cigarette as he grew drowsy, you’d expect him to have breathed in at least some of the smoke before he died. Death from respiratory collapse isn’t instantaneous.’

  Dickson gave no encouragement to supposition. ‘You don’t know how rapid the collapse was, or how slow the fire was to start.’

  ‘No sir,’ Norma said, meaning the opposite.

  Slider took the ball back. ‘At all events, that made three dead out of the eight we were interested in. I thought it was worth running the rest of the names through the Cumberland House computer, to see if there were death certificates for any more of them. The results, now they’ve finally come through, are very interesting.’ He gestured behind him towards the whiteboard. ‘Of the eight men of Red Watch, six are dead: five of them violently, and only one from natural causes.’

  ‘Seventy-five per cent,’ said Dickson. ‘In sixteen years? It’s on the high side of average. Well, let’s have it. Take us through’em, Bill.’

  ‘In date order of their deaths: first, James Elton Sears of Castlebar Road, Ealing, full – time fireman, died November 1985, age thirty – one. He had his head stoved in by a person or persons unknown as he walked home from the pub one night. No robbery from the person. No witnesses. No arrest was ever made.

  ‘David Arthur Webb from Harefield, double glazing salesman, murdered April 1987, aged thirty-six. We know about him, of course. Again, not even a suspect.

  ‘Gary Handsworth, of Aldersbrook Road, Wanstead, chimney sweep, died in August 1988, aged thirty-three. He apparently crashed his car into a tree when he was the worse for drink, and the car caught fire. He had head injuries and a broken neck, either of which could have caused his death. There were no witnesses. It was brought in as accidental death.

  ‘Benjamin Hulfa, of St George’s Avenue, Tufnell Park, insurance investigator, died January 1990, aged forty-four, of an overdose. Accidental death, or was it suicide?

  ‘Then we come to our own Richard Neal from Pinner, security systems salesman, died March 1991, aged fifty, in mysterious circumstances.

  ‘The sixth member of Red Watch to die was Barry John Lister of Dorking, Surrey, retired builder, aged sixty-six. It turns out that he was “Mouthwash”, as Swilley guessed, and she near as dammit got to speak to him. She finally managed to track him down – he’d moved around a lot – only to discover that he died on Thursday last, of a heart attack.’

  ‘A real heart attack?’ Dickson asked.

  ‘It looks that way. He died at home, with his wife present, in his own sitting room, watching The Bill on television.’

  Dickson nodded. ‘That’d do it.’

  ‘He had a known heart condition, and his own doctor gave the certificate without any hesitation, s
o it looks all right. That only leaves two survivors from 1974: John Francis Simpson, age thirty-six, self-employed builder and decorator, with an address in St Albans, and Paul Godwin, age forty-one, who’s still a fireman, and lives in Newcastle.’

  ‘It certainly looks like a pattern,’ Dickson conceded, ‘and it’s not one out of Woman’s Weekly.’

  Slider rubbed his hair up the wrong way in frowning thought. ‘Leaving aside Lister, there’s a little over a year separating each of the deaths. All could possibly have been murders, and Webb’s certainly was. All but Sears, the earliest death, involve a fire. Two of the bodies, Neal and Handsworth, were badly burned, but none of the deaths was caused by fire. The two earliest deaths, Sears and Handsworth, involved head injuries. The later three, Webb, Hulfa and Neal, died of suffocation, though the method by which it was induced was different in each case. The same three also had a background of personal problems – money troubles, depression.’ He rubbed his hair back the other way. ‘I’m not sure where that gets us.’

  ‘Strange, isn’t it,’ Atherton mused, ‘that only two of them stayed in the fire service after Shaftesbury Avenue closed?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Slider said. ‘Nobody stays a fireman for ever.’

  ‘It does seem like rather a large drop-out rate, though.’

  Dickson seemed to find this line unhelpful. ‘What about Lister?’ he said. ‘He’s the odd man out, isn’t he? What do you make of him?’

  ‘It looks as though he may have been onto something. Mrs Hulfa told us that Lister was in fact known as “Mouthwash” when he was in Red Watch. Jacqui Turner said that when she asked Neal who he was going to see on the Saturday, he said “Mouthwash”, though she didn’t realise it was a name, of course. I think we can assume that Lister was the mystery man Neal met in The Wellington.’

  ‘Well that’s one burning question answered, at least,’ Dickson said ironically.

  ‘Neal told Jacqui Turner he hadn’t seen the old friend for years, so the meeting wasn’t a matter of course. And Catriona Young said that Neal told her he had met an old friend on the Saturday who had warned him that someone was out to kill him. So it looks as though Lister may have decided for himself that all these deaths were more than coincidence. Presumably he presented Neal with at least some of the same information about his old colleagues that we have here. Exactly what he told Neal – whether he knew more than we do – of course we don’t know. And we don’t know how Neal took it, whether he believed it or not. He doesn’t seem to have said anything to Mrs Neal – but then he doesn’t ever seem to have talked to her much.’