Death Watch (The Bill Slider Novels)

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  He found his children sitting side by side on the sofa watching a game-show hosted – he noted almost with disbelief-by Bruce Forsyth, and eating Hula Hoops. Their hands moved dreamily back and forth from packet to mouth, and their jaws champed slowly and in perfect rhythm with each other upon the shaped pieces of expanded potato starch. They reminded him of a couple of sea anemones on the Great Barrier Reef, stirred only by the eternal tides of the Pacific Ocean.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Where’s Mummy?’

  It was a while before his words sank the necessary fathoms to reach them in their sunless submarine caverns.

  ‘In the dining-room,’ Matthew managed to articulate at last, without breaking his feeding rhythm. ‘Doing, you know—’ There was a long pause before the last word floated up and burst on the surface. ‘Costumes.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Slider said with unperceived irony.

  Alfred the Sacred River ran past them unheeded, and Bruce Forsyth, measureless to man and miraculously not looking a day older than he was, conducted the audience in the response to his old, familiar catchphrase. Nice! the audience bellowed. At any moment, Slider thought weakly, the Television Toppers would snake on with their single giant horizontal leg, and he would know his mind had finally gone. He beat a hasty retreat to the dining-room.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said at the door. ‘How’s it going?’

  Irene was bent over her sewing-machine, which was set up on the dining-table. All around were heaps of material, boxes of buttons and trimmings, magazine cuttings, library books on costume, and lists of instructions from Marilyn Cripps – he recognised the layout and dot-matrix printing of her rinky-dinky little PC. That would be the next thing Irene would want, he thought. He would have to restrain himself when she asked from making a joke along the lines of her having had a PC years ago, when they first married, and not using it then.

  She looked up at the sound of his voice, and he saw with surprise that she looked flushed and eager, suddenly much younger and almost pretty in her preoccupation.

  ‘Oh, don’t bother me now,’ she said happily, ‘I’ve got far too much to do.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to bother you,’ he said.

  ‘Well I can’t think about cooking at a time like this. You’ll have to fend for yourself. The children have had theirs. There’s some cold meat in the fridge. Or there’s an individual pizza in the freezer you can put in the microwave. I can’t stop in the middle of this lot.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get myself something,’ he said. Next time he married Irene, he was going to make sure they lived next door to a fish-and-chip shop. ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘The costumes for the Gala,’ she said with a disproportionately huge indignation that he recognised from Kate – or did Kate get it from Irene? ‘I should have thought you’d remember that at least, even if you don’t care about anything I do.’

  ‘I know it’s the costumes for the Gala,’ he said patiently. ‘I meant which particular one are you working on at the moment?’

  She had the grace to blush. ‘It’s going to be a sort of crinoline affair, Charles Dickens type thing. It’s a scene from Bleak House, I think.’

  ‘Didn’t they do that on the telly a while ago?’ he offered intelligently. Taking An Interest, Mum used to call it. She’d been so good at it – asking the right questions of dull relatives and casual acquaintances so that they could expand on the one subject they were expert in.

  A vagrant memory strayed across his brain of Mum engaging Irene’s father in best-parlour conversation about his job as a pensions clerk. God, what a thing to give head-room to! He hadn’t thought of Mr Carter in years.

  Mum’s trick had worked with Irene though: she looked pleased. ‘Yes, that’s right, with Diana Rigg as Lady Whatsername,’ she said. ‘Of course it’s a lot of work, with all those flounces and tucks, and puffed sleeves, and all the lace will have to be sewn on by hand if it’s going to sit right. Just this one dress is going to take me days,’ she added with deep content.

  Slider felt a sadness under his ribs like mild indigestion. She asked so little of life, and even that little had been denied her until now. And now that she had it, it aroused a deep and unwelcome pity in him.

  ‘Of course,’ she went on proudly, ‘Marilyn said I needn’t take so much trouble, because the costumes would only be seen from a distance, but I said to her, it’s no trouble to me to do a thing right. It would actually be harder work for me to skimp it, I said. I’m funny like that. If I do a thing at all, it’s got to be perfect.’

  This was a remarkable new view of her character that he had never heard expounded before. He didn’t know how to respond to it, but that was all right, because she didn’t want him to respond, only listen and admire.

  ‘And in any case, I said to her, there’s no knowing whether the Royal Party will want to come backstage afterwards, and have some of the cast presented in their costumes, and then, well, you wouldn’t want anything to’ve been skimped, would you? I said. I mean, I’d be mortified if a member of the Royal Family was to see my work close up and find it wanting. But she said to me, Irene, if you do it, I know it’ll be perfect.’

  ‘Quite, right,’ Slider said, seeing a tempting pause laid before him. ‘You’re a fine needlewoman, everyone knows that.’

  She smiled, and her cheeks were pink. She practically had dimples, he noted. ‘Well it’s true, I am,’ she said, as though someone had argued. ‘Everyone always used to say how nicely I turned the children out, when I used to make their little dresses and shorts and things.’

  Did they? Slider wondered, searching through this unfamiliar terrain for some landmark he recognised. Who was everyone? As far as he knew, she had never had any social contact with other mothers, and he couldn’t think of anyone else who would ever have commented on the children’s clothing. It occurred to him that his wife was engaged in rewriting her life to suit her new acquaintances. Why did it make him want to cut his throat and get life over with?

  ‘Well, I’m very glad you’re being appreciated at last,’ he said. She was in such a good mood, it was probably a good time to break the news that he would be not be home tomorrow. ‘By the way, I’m afraid I’ve got to work tomorrow,’ he began apologetically, but she had already gone back to her whirring, and he was addressing the top of her head.

  ‘Oh, I haven’t time to worry about that,’ she said airily. ‘I’ve got to go over to Marilyn’s for a meeting at lunchtime, and I expect it will last all afternoon. She’s doing a buffet for all of us, and she said we can bring the children if we like. They’ve got a huge garden, so all the children can play together while we get on with things. I’m so pleased,’ she burbled, ‘that Matthew will have a chance to get to know little Edward Cripps. He’s such a nice boy, and just the sort of friend I’ve always wanted for Matthew. I never did like that Simon he’s always hanging about with.’

  Edward Cripps went to Eton, Slider reflected, while Simon had adenoids, red hair, and a mother who went to work. No contest, Simon. Bad luck, son. He backed out delicately, like a cat that’s just spotted the travelling-basket being got out of the cupboard, and Irene didn’t even notice him go. It was a good thing that getting to Eton was not just a matter of money, he thought as he headed for the kitchen and the delights of frozen pizza, or that’d be the next thing he would discover he had failed her in.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Best Eaten Cold

  HAVING DISCOVERED BY AN EARLY call that she was on her day off, Slider went the next morning to visit Eleanor Forrester in her flat in Riverside Gardens. It was a late Victorian block in handsome red brick and white stone of what used to be called service flats. Such blocks were usually called Something Mansions; the flats were dark and stately inside, and cost, in his experience, a tidy rent.

  Riverside Gardens, for a wonder, actually was alongside the river, just by Hammersmith Bridge, and Miss Forrester had a top flat with a wonderful view across the Thames to the school playing fields whi
ch, by some unexpectedly intelligent planning, had preserved the waterfront from development. She couldn’t afford this on a firewoman’s wages, he thought as he followed her into the sitting-room. Presumably she had inherited something from her grandparents.

  In contrast with the bright, river-reflected light outside the room was extra dark, and he had difficulty for a moment in making it out. When his eyes adjusted, he saw that the walls were papered with a Victorian-style wallpaper of a darkish fawn patterned with small brown flowers. The picture-rail, dado, skirting board, door and window-frames were all painted dark brown, and there was a small fireplace with a dark wooden surround.

  The carpet had an old-fashioned pattern in chocolate, coffee and cream shades, there were three buttoned leather club chairs, and under the window a gate-legged table flanked by two Windsor chairs. Add to that that the table and the mantelpiece were covered with ginger plush cloths with bobble fringes, and the whole effect was charming, very much in keeping with the style of the building, and terribly depressing. How could she bear to live here? It would be like living on a theatre set.

  She had been watching him looking. ‘Do you like it?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ve taken a lot of trouble to get it right,’ he said. ‘I was wondering where you got the wallpaper. It looks original.’

  ‘It almost is,’ she said. ‘It was underneath when I scraped off the top layers. It was damaged, though, by the scraping, so I sent a sample to a firm that specialises in reproduction papers – the National Trust use them all the time – and they made it up for me.’

  Clever how they reproduced the dinginess, he thought. Or did she order that specially? ‘It must have been terribly expensive,’ he said.

  ‘It was,’ she said indifferently, and then, as if she had divined the reason for his curiosity, ‘Grandad left me quite a lot of money, and I’ve nothing else to spend it on. Everything’s original, except the wallpaper.’

  He turned now from the room to examine her. She was taller than her mother, almost as tall as him – which was no great feat, of course – and had a great deal of her mother’s prettiness. The hair was short and dark brown and rather clumsily cut, as thought she’d had a go at it herself, with a fringe that had grown too long and was almost touching her eyes. She gave the impression of looking out from under it warily, like a cat under a hedge.

  Her face was innocent of makeup, and perhaps for that reason looked rather pale. It also made him think of Joanna – again, no difficult feat – and predisposed him to like her. She was wearing a baggy maroon cotton sweatshirt and black Turkish cotton trousers, and her feet were bare. She had long toes, and he noticed that the fourth toe of her right foot was slightly crooked – the joint stuck up a little above the level of the rest, rather like somebody with a teacup crooking their little finger.

  ‘What can I get you?’ she asked. ‘Some tea? Do you like mint tea? I was just going to make some for myself.’

  ‘I’ve never tried it,’ he said cautiously, and she took that for acceptance.

  ‘All right. I won’t be a second – the kettle’s already boiled.’

  Outside on the grey-brown river a pair of lighters went past, going down on the slack, and a red double-decker bus cruised majestically across the bridge above them. On the far bank, the plane trees were showing tender new leaf of improbable green, with dabs of yellow beneath them where some public-spirited person had planted daffodils. London’s unchanging beauties, he thought. If the double glazing weren’t so effective, he was sure he’d hear sparrows chipping away in the guttering just above the window.

  Better to look out than to look in, he thought. Why did this room make him feel so sad? Was it simply what he knew about the young woman who lived here? Or the very fact that she did live here, like this, all alone, rebel without a cause? Gil ‘Larry’ Forrester’s daughter; Jim ‘Cookie’ Sears’ fiancée. Both gone and left her.

  ‘Here we are.’

  She came back in so quietly on her bare feet that he flinched at her sudden voice, and turned feeling foolish. She put the tray down on the plush-covered table under the window. ‘Shall we sit here? Then you can watch the river. I saw you were fascinated.’

  ‘Where Alph the Sacred River ran,’ he heard himself say.

  ‘Through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea,’ she finished for him. ‘Were you made to recite poetry when you were little, too?’

  ‘Only at school,’ Slider said, sitting down across the table from her. ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus and so on.’

  ‘Daddy made me, at home. He said it was good for the diction and the delivery. I’m glad now that he did, but I hated it at the time, because of course I never understood a word I was saying. Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves,’ she pronounced suddenly.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Milton. Samson Agonistes. Wonderful stuff for proclaiming, very gloomy and profound. The sun to me is dark, and silent as the moon, when she deserts the night, hid in her vacant something cave . . . To live a life half dead, a living death! It rolls around the tongue, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Very jolly,’ Slider said.

  She smiled. ‘Have some tea.’ she poured it into the two pretty, fluted cups, and it was greenish-brown and rank-looking and smelled like hot river-water. ‘Mother said you’d been to see her. She telephoned yesterday after you’d left.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Slider neutrally. Had some kind of warning been conveyed? The eyes opposite were watching him very carefully from under the thatch.

  ‘I don’t quite know what help you think I can be. I know less about it even than Mother. You haven’t tried your tea.’

  Slider picked up the cup and brought it towards his lips. The smell was brackish and uninviting, and he found himself reluctant to touch it. It made him think, not for the first time, how social custom would make it pretty easy to poison someone, if they’d been brought up properly. He put the cup down untasted. ‘Too hot still,’ he said.

  She didn’t try her own, only watched him, a faint smile on her lips that didn’t touch her eyes. ‘Well then, what did you want to know?’

  ‘I’m making enquiries in connection with the death of Richard Neal.’ He didn’t want her to force him into being formal and allowing her to shelter behind that. He smiled and said casually, ‘What did you call him when you were a little girl?’

  ‘Uncle Dickie,’ she responded automatically, and then an unexpected blush stained her cheeks, and as quickly receded, like the blush of rage that passes through an octopus when you lift its rock away.

  Slider followed up quickly, before she could have time to get back under the stone. ‘He was always around the house, wasn’t he? Did he use to listen to you reciting, too?’

  ‘No, that was just between Daddy and me,’ she said. ‘I never did it in front of anyone else. Daddy used to say it was silly, and I’d never get to be an actress that way, but to me it was a special thing, just for him.’

  ‘Did you want to be an actress?’

  ‘Not really. It’s just a thing you say when you’re little, like wanting to be a film star.’

  ‘Or wanting to be a fireman, like your father?’ A swift series of associations came to him, and he continued smoothly, ‘Of course, at Hammersmith station you can combine the two, can’t you?’

  ‘I could, if they’d put on a proper play, instead of The Sound of Music’

  ‘Oh, aren’t you going to be in it?’ he sounded disappointed.

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘That’s a pity. I’m sure you have a lot of talent.’

  ‘I got rave reviews as Lady Hamilton in Dearest Emma last year,’ she said quickly. Her mouth curved down. ‘Then they spoiled it by following it with Privates on Parade’

  Slider had seen the film version. He thought it must be rather a good play. Now was not the time to say so, though. Instead he said, ‘What sort of things did you do with Uncle Dickie, if it wasn’t reciting?’

  She looked at him. ‘You don’t
have to call him that. I stopped doing it years ago.’

  He tried frankness. ‘Sorry. It’s very difficult to know what to call people you don’t know, when you talk about them to someone who does.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said unhelpfully.

  ‘What do you call him now?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said stonily. ‘I don’t call him anything.’

  Oh boy! ‘All right, how would you refer to him if you spoke about him now?’

  She couldn’t get out of that one. ‘Dick, I suppose. Look, do we have to talk about him?’

  ‘That’s what I’m here for. What would you like us to talk about? The World Cup? The University Boat Race?’

  She opened her mouth and shut it again, surprised by his rudeness. Then she said in a quieter voice, ‘I’m sorry. I suppose you have to do your job. It’s just that—’

  ‘Yes? Just what?’

  ‘It’s just that I don’t like to think about it. He’s dead, and nothing that happened can be altered. I just want to forget now.’

  ‘Forget what?’

  She looked away for a moment, and then back, gathering herself. ‘You know, don’t you, that he and my mother were lovers?’

  ‘Before she married your father.’

  She looked at him levelly. ‘And afterwards.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I don’t think, I know,’ she said patiently.

  ‘But you were only a child at the time. You were too young to fully understand the relationship between three adult—’

  ‘Children aren’t deaf and blind, you know. They know a lot more about what’s going on than people give them credit for.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know that—’

  ‘You don’t know what Mother was like then. She was very beautiful for one thing.’