Death Watch (The Bill Slider Novels)

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Your husband knew that you and Dick had been – fond of each other?’

  ‘Gil knew everything,’ she said firmly, and looked at him, and then away again in a curious access of embarrassment. Now what, he wondered, did that relate to? ‘The three of us were always close, from the first day we all met. It was a very equal relationship. No-one was left out. All for one and one for all, as Gil used to say.’

  Slider flinched away from Dumas-yet-again and tried a banana shot. ‘Why did you marry him instead of Dick?’ he asked, as though she had already admitted there was something odd about it.

  She had taken out another photograph, and stared at it unseeingly as she answered. ‘Because I knew he would make a more suitable husband than Dick.’ She drew a faint, shaky sigh, and then looked across at Slider. ‘There, that’s said. Not much of a reason, is it? But it seemed a good one at the time. Gil was a steady, reliable man, the sort who’d make a good husband and a good father, who’d save, and get on, and provide for one. I was sick of being a poor student by then,’ she went on in a muted burst of passion. ‘Scrimping and scraping and making do, never having anything nice to wear, or going out anywhere. I couldn’t bear that kind of life. Gil was kind and generous, and he cared for me as a husband should. Dick was a spendthrift. Oh, he was good fun to be with, but you’d never have known from one day to the next whether the bailiffs would be knocking at your door.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ said Slider.

  She looked up. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes. But did Dick?’

  ‘You’d hardly expect him to, would you,’ she said. ‘Especially as—’

  ‘Yes?’

  She obviously changed her mind. ‘When I was twenty-five the Trust ended and I came into Dad’s money,’ she said, and it made enough sense to have been a sequitur, but Slider felt certain it was not what she had been going to say. ‘It wasn’t a huge fortune, but it was enough to be comfortable on. So I could have married anyone, you see – even Dick. But by then it was too late. In the mean time, there was Eleanor.’

  She handed him the photographer she had been holding. There in the middle was Marsha Forrester, looking like Millicent Martin by now, only prettier, in an A-line coat that showed her knees and little hat perched above her curved hair, holding a baby whose dress and shawl trailed almost to its mother’s knees. On one side of her stood Neal in a suit, button-down collar and narrow tie, his hair brushed straight back but still unruly: handsome, debonair, faintly raffish,

  On the other side was a taller man, broad-shouldered, fair, with straight, light hair, already thinning, and a pleasant, kind, unemphatic sort of face. The kind of man any child would want as a father. The men were wearing identical proud smiles and carnation buttonholes; Marsha looked faintly apprehensive, as if she was afraid she was going to drop the baby. Behind them was a large-stoned wall and the corner of a church window; and the sun was shining down on them still, dropping short shadows on the grass at their feet.

  ‘My hostage to fortune,’ Mrs Forrester said. ‘After that, I couldn’t have left Gil, even if I’d inherited fifty fortunes.’

  ‘She’s your only child?’

  ‘Yes. I think Gil would have liked more, but it just never happened. So she was extra special to him. She was Daddy’s Little Angel.’

  There seemed to be a faint irony in the last words. Had she been jealous of the child’s adoration of her father? Or was she apologising for the pukey nature of the words?

  Still, it must have been nice for Forrester to feel he had beaten his rival at something. Slider was not entirely convinced by this Three Musketeers baloney: it would be a very strange man who would welcome his wife’s ex-lover into the fold without even a hidden reservation. Slider stared at the photo. Whoever had taken it was less than expert: he had not centred the group properly, with the result that Dick and Marsha held the middle of the frame, and Gil Forrester was almost off the edge of the picture. It made him look, poor man, like a hanger-on at his own daughter’s christening.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  O’Mafia

  THE SHERRY GLASSES HAD BEEN refilled. Mrs Forrester was talking freely now. It was an effect Slider had seen before, a sort of self-perpetuating hypnosis. By talking to him she had produced the atmosphere in which she felt it was safe for her to talk, and the longer she went on, the safer she would feel. All he had to do was not to alarm her, or break the mood.

  The box of photographs had been put away. Those she had shown him had been more variations on the same theme: the three of them being happy together in fields, at fairgrounds, on beaches, before notable buildings, always in the sunshine, domestic or foreign. Marsha, Dick and Gil, where before it had been Marsha and Dick; and later Marsha, Dick, Gil and Eleanor.

  A remarkably pretty, dark-haired little girl grew up through the pictures: pick-a-back on Gil, perched on Dick’s shoulder, swinging between the two with a hand held by each; seven years old sitting between them on a wall with her short legs dangling and a smile with gaps in it; nine years old astride a pony with two unnecessary guiding hands on the bridle; eleven years old and solemn with new self-consciousness at the top of the Eiffel Tower.

  Slider was glad when there were no more photographs. They made him feel desperately sad. Which was perhaps just as well, when they came to discuss the subject of Gil’s death.

  ‘Why did you go round to the station afterwards?’ he asked. ‘Did you really feel the others were to blame?’

  ‘In the philosophical sense, they were,’ she said. ‘That was where Gil’s one-for-all-and-all-for-one really applied. But if you mean, did I think there was any negligence on anyone’s part – no. I certainly don’t now. Whether I really did then I can’t honestly remember. It’s a long time ago, and I was in a state of shock. I wasn’t really responsible for my actions.’

  ‘Do you remember anything of what you felt at the time?’

  She thought about it. ‘Anger mostly, I think. I was angry with Gil for being so stupid, so careless, as to get himself killed. Is that shocking?’

  ‘Understandable,’ he said.

  ‘I was always that way with Ellie, too. If she hurt herself, fell down and cut her knee or whatever, my first reaction was furious anger with her. But it was only because I cared about her. I couldn’t bear her to be hurt, to feel pain or fear, and that’s just the way it came out in me. Can you understand that?’

  He nodded. Her focus sharpened.

  ‘Are you married?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Children?’

  ‘A boy and a girl,’ he said. She needed something back from him, reaction to having given so much out. He had seen that before, too.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘They are, too. I hope they realise that.’

  He smiled by way of answer, and said, ‘How did Eleanor cope with her father’s death?’

  ‘Very well, really. She was very upset at first, of course, but she recovered much more quickly than I expected. She had a week off school after the funeral, and I would have been happy to keep her at home longer – in fact, I did think of taking her away for a holiday somewhere. But she said she wanted to go back to school, so I let her. She was starring in the school play, and said she didn’t want to miss the rehearsals. I suppose she needed something to keep her occupied,’ she added, answering her own unasked question. ‘She was probably right. I know I felt better once I went back to work. Stopped me thinking all the time.’

  ‘You changed your job about that time, didn’t you?’

  ‘I wanted to get away. Everything reminded me of Gil and what had happened. I wanted a complete change. So I applied for a new post, and when it came through, I sold the house and we moved here. Eleanor changed schools at the same time, and I think that did her good, though she wouldn’t admit it at the time. She said she hated the new school, but she did very well there.’

  ‘Which school was it?’

  ‘Burlington Danes, in Wood Lane.’
>
  ‘Ah yes.’

  ‘She got four A levels – chemistry, physics, biology and maths,’ she said proudly. ‘Three “A”s and a “B”, and in those days grades still meant something.’

  ‘Bright girl.’

  ‘She always was. Gil would have been proud of her. She was always a daddy’s girl, but after he died, and we moved here – well, it seemed to bring us closer together. She used to drive in with me every day – I’d drop her off at the corner of Du Cane Road – and that time together in the morning we talked more than at any other time in our lives. There’s something about being in a car.’

  ‘Yes. It gets the mind working, doesn’t it?’ Slider said. ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t remember. Everything. My work, her progress at school, things in general. It was very precious,’ she added sadly.

  ‘Did you keep in touch with any of the others on Red Watch after you moved?’

  ‘Only poor Cookie – that was Jim Sears. Well, he kept in touch with me rather than vice versa. I think he felt particularly bad about what happened. He used to haunt the place at first, trying to make amends. Actually he was very useful, putting up shelves and things. It was nice for me to have a man about the place while I was settling in. But after a while I got tired of finding him under my feet, and hinted him away, and he gradually stopped coming. And of course that tedious Barry Lister phoned me up every now and then. He’s the sort who’s always last to leave a party, never knows when it’s time to go.’

  ‘None of the others?’

  She shook her head indifferently. They scattered to the four winds when the station closed.’

  ‘But Dick Neal was only just round the corner from you, wasn’t he? Living and working in Hammersmith.’

  It came perilously close to being the question that would stop her talking. ‘What are you suggesting?’ she asked coldly. ‘That I moved here because of him? Because you’re very wide of the mark, I assure you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to suggest anything in particular,’ he said soothingly. ‘I just wondered whether your closeness survived the tragedy. I mean, once you were over your period of mourning, you’d be free to marry again, wouldn’t you?’

  The formality of his wording seemed to please her. ‘Yes, and of course that occurred to him,’ she said with a faint smile.

  ‘Not to you?’

  ‘I’d had my chance to marry him when he was younger and nicer. I’d turned him down then. There was no reason why I should change my mind.’

  ‘But he did ask you?’

  ‘Many times, very emphatically. Starting when Gil was barely cold in his grave, I might add.’ An unfortunate choice of words, Slider thought. ‘You see, you had it the wrong way round — it was Dick who followed me here, not vice versa. He bore a terrible burden of guilt for Gil’s death – not that anyone else blamed him, but he blamed himself – and I think he thought the only way he could make up for it was to take care of me and Eleanor.’

  ‘But you didn’t want that.’

  She evaded the question. ‘It would have been a difficult time to remarry. Ellie was at an awkward age, and she wouldn’t have welcomed any step-father, least of all Dick. For about a year he kept asking, and I kept saying no, and then he tried to make me jealous by going out with other women. And when that didn’t work, he married one of them, and simply dropped out of my life. I never saw or heard of him again, and from what I gathered from Barry’s tedious little bulletins, neither did anyone else.’

  ‘Don’t you think that was odd?’

  ‘Not particularly. Gil was his great friend. He never much cared for any of the others.’

  ‘But you had been his friend far longer. Isn’t it odd that he dropped you, too? And so completely?’

  ‘He took Gil’s death very hard. Of the three of us, I think it affected him far the worst. He was a broken man afterwards. That’s another reason I couldn’t have married him.’

  A slight hardness had crept into her voice, which Slider stored for later analysis. Poor old Dick had been found wanting again, had he? By then, of course, Mrs Forrester would have been a successful consultant, and probably pretty well-off into the bargain, while Dick Neal was merely an ex-fireman who had taken a job as a security guard. Yes, it would have been something of a mis-match from her point of view. Miscegenation on a grand scale. Had she tired of her faithful swain at last, and hinted him away too?

  ‘So once Dick married, you had no contact with any of his former colleagues, except for the phone calls from Barry Lister?’

  ‘And poor Cookie, of course – but that wasn’t for my sweet sake. Eleanor was his object.’ She grew grim. ‘I wasn’t too keen on the idea of becoming his mother-in-law, I can tell you.’

  ‘Jim Sears was courting your daughter?’

  She smiled. ‘You have a lovely old-fashioned vocabulary, Inspector. Mourning and courting. I imagine you’ll expect your future son-in-law to call you “sir” when he first comes visiting.’

  ‘Of course,’ Slider smiled back. ‘But when did Jim Sears “first come visiting”? He must have been quite a bit older than your daughter?’

  ‘Seven years. Not such a great difference, I suppose, but he’d already had a failed marriage. He wasn’t what I wanted for my only daughter. I had no idea, actually, that she looked on him as anything but an honorary uncle. He used to come round and fix things for me, as I said, when we first moved here, but I discouraged him gently and that all stopped after a month or two. Then we didn’t hear anything more from him for years.’

  Slider nodded. ‘So how did he come back on the scene?’

  ‘Well, Eleanor went and did VSO after her A Levels. Four years on a kibbutz in Israel.’ From the tone of her voice, it might have been four years in Holloway. ‘A terrible waste of all that education. And then when she came back, she said she wanted to join the fire brigade and follow in her father’s footsteps. I was furious – it was like Dick all over again. With her brains and looks she could have done anything she liked. But in the end I just had to let her get on with it. I hoped she’d find out eventually that it wasn’t for her. But then the first person she met when she joined her station had to go and be Cookie.’

  ‘He was at Ealing station, wasn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right. How did you know?’

  ‘His address was in Ealing, so I assumed he worked at the nearest station. Was your daughter still living here?’

  ‘No.’ Very brief – terse, in fact. He waited in silence, and she expanded with apparent reluctance. ‘We’d had a terrible row over this fire brigade business, and she’d gone off and got herself a flat. Oh, we made it up after a while, and I suppose it was time for her to have a place of her own anyway. She got a little flat in Northfields and joined the Ealing station – and there was Cookie. Before I’d drawn my breath, almost, they were going out together, and talking about getting married.’

  ‘You didn’t approve of that, I take it?’

  ‘It wasn’t for me to approve or disapprove. She was twenty-three years old, she could make up her own mind,’ she said stiffly.

  ‘Twenty-three is very young,’ Slider said. ‘A lot of mistakes are made at that age.’

  She yielded to the inner pressure. ‘I tried to tell her she was throwing her life away, but she wouldn’t listen! He had no prospects, no education, and he’d had one failed marriage already. The next thing you know she’d have been one of those downtrodden housewives hanging around the doctor’s waiting-room with half a dozen snivelling brats in tow.’ She heard her voice rising and checked it with an obvious effort. ‘But she’d made up her mind, and I didn’t want to alienate her any further. So I said nothing more.’ She sighed. ‘And how glad I was in the end that I hadn’t. She needed all my support, poor child, when he was killed in that dreadful way.’

  ‘Yes, I read about it. He was mugged, wasn’t he?’

  ‘On his way home from the pub. I didn’t want them to marry, but I wouldn’t have wished that on
him.’

  Praised with faint damns. ‘Your daughter wasn’t actually with him that night, was she?’

  ‘No, thank God! It was bad enough as it was.’

  ‘Yes, it must have been enough to make her want to change her job.’

  ‘I hoped she would, but all she did was to change stations. She moved to Hammersmith, and there she is still. I hoped, too, that she might come back and live at home again, but she said it wouldn’t work. Perhaps she was right. She has her own place in Riverside Gardens, and we see each other now and then. Not often enough for my liking, but she has her own life, and I have mine.’

  ‘But you’re on friendly terms again?’

  ‘Oh yes. We keep in touch.’ That answer seemed to leave something to be desired in the matter of frankness. It sounded as thought there was some resentment between them still. Mrs Forrester probably wouldn’t be able to help letting her daughter know she was a disappointment to her; which the daughter would probably know well enough anyway, from comparing her own career with that of her high-powered, successful mother.

  ‘I understand you telephoned Mr Lister to tell him about Dick Neal’s death? How did you come to hear about it? Wasn’t it usually he who phoned you?’

  ‘I read about it in the Hammersmith Gazette,’ she said promptly. ‘I phoned Barry to see if he had any more information, but he hadn’t heard about it at all. Obviously his grapevine wasn’t working in Dick’s case. But then Dick had cut himself off from everyone since he got married.’

  ‘You didn’t have any contact with Dick at all in all those years?’

  ‘I’ve said so.’

  ‘What about Jim Sears’ funeral? Didn’t you go to that?’

  ‘No. I don’t care for funerals. But Dick didn’t go either. Why should he? They’d worked together ten years before, that’s all. Do you keep in touch with all your ex-colleagues?’

  ‘No, of course not. But in this case – he’d been so fond of Eleanor; he watched her grow up. He must have been like an uncle to her. And Sears was her fiancé. You’d think he’d want to be there.’