Dead End

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Oh don’t be such a stiff,’ she was saying sternly. ‘You know exactly what I’m talking about. Your idea of safe sex is not telling the girl where you live.’

  ‘Wearing a condom is avoiding the issue,’ Atherton said, at his most maddening.

  ‘It’s not a joking matter, Jim, not any more. These days you—’

  They both saw Slider at the same moment, and Norma sprang off the edge of his desk where she had been warming a neglected circulation file with her delectable and (Slider could only assume) peachlike bottom. She brushed her skirt down, turning to face him with a slight and extremely fetching blush; Atherton declined to be caught wrong-footed, and continued to decorate the radiator with a catlike smile, his weight on his hands and his legs crossed at the ankle, like a third-year student at a tutorial.

  ‘Am I interrupting?’ Slider enquired pleasantly. ‘Don’t stop on my account. I know my office is a public place within the meaning of the Act.’

  ‘The ballistics report has come in, sir,’ Norma said. She held out the sheaf of paper, trying to look like a civil servant and failing.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, taking it and passing round his desk to sit down. ‘I assume you’ve read it.’

  ‘Yes, sir. The bullet was a .38, and it was fired from a Webley and Scott Mark IV revolver. Priest thinks given the range it was likely it was the model with the five-inch barrel.’

  Chris Priest was the top firearms guru at the Home Office lab at Huntingdon. One glance at the striations on a spent bullet, and he could tell you the gunmaker’s sock size. Nothing, unfortunately, about the gun owner.

  ‘A .38 Webley?’

  ‘It was a popular handgun for British officers during the Second World War,’ Norma said, ‘which would make it bad luck for us, because if it was a World War Two trophy it won’t have been registered.’

  ‘Why should you assume that?’ Atherton said. He was looking faintly annoyed, perhaps at Swilley’s display of expert knowledge in a subject in which he had no interest – or perhaps it was a residue from their interrupted conversation.

  ‘Because, brain, all weapons issued during the Second World War are Government property and cannot lawfully be retained. Don’t you know your firearms law?’

  ‘All right, but it doesn’t have to be a World War Two gun, does it?’ Atherton objected. ‘Presumably they’ve been used at other times.’

  ‘Priest thinks the gun was pretty old; and besides,’ she turned to Slider again, ‘the actual bullet turns out to be quite interesting. It’s marked DC 43, which stands for Dominion Cartridge 1943. It was a brand made in Canada and shipped over towards the end of the war. Apparently we couldn’t make enough over here to keep up with demand.’

  ‘Nice and specific,’ Slider said, ‘but unfortunately not much use to us unless we have a suspect.’

  ‘I quite fancy the agent’s boyfriend,’ Atherton said. ‘Stephen or Steve Murray. I’ve done a bit of work on him. He’s a stage-hand at the Royal Opera House – sweat and singlet type – more brawn than brain. Apparently Kate Apwey likes a bit of rough trade.’ He glanced at Norma but she refused to be provoked. ‘I ran a make on him, and he’s got a little bit of form: possession, a couple of cautions for drunk and disorderly – pub fights – and, here’s the juicy one, a suspended for assault and ABH. Bloke on the management team of one of the big orchestras – Murray thought Kate was having an affair with him; waited for him outside the Festival Hall, caught him coming out of the artists’ entrance and broke two of his ribs.’

  ‘It’s too much to hope that Murray’s known for carrying weapons?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Much too much,’ Atherton said. ‘But he jumped this bloke in full daylight with people walking past, and then ran away – which is the same sort of MO as Radek’s murderer – and also he had good reason to suppose Radek was humping Apwey – which is the same motive as the assault.’

  Norma looked unimpressed. ‘You think sex is at the bottom of everything.’

  ‘Unfortunate turn of phrase, Norm.’

  ‘But look,’ she went on, ignoring him, ‘the person who shot Radek was small, not a hulking great scenery-humper.’

  ‘Ah, that’s the beauty of it. I said Murray was brawny, not a hulk. He’s more your small, wiry type. Kate Apwey reckons he’s five-nine, but you can take an inch off for adoration. And he wasn’t at work on Wednesday afternoon. He phoned in sick.’ He looked appealingly at Slider.

  ‘It sounds promising. You’d better check up on the alibi, and go round and have a look at his drum. Does he live with Apwey?’

  ‘Surprisingly, not yet. She shares a flat with two other professional girls – sorry, Norma, women – and he has a flat in Covent Garden, handy for work. I don’t get the impression he earns much.’

  Slider nodded. ‘That would tend to put him in a dilemma. On the one hand jealousy of his girlfriend’s relationship with Radek, and on the other hand, knowing she needed both the job and the tips for them to be able to get a place together.’

  ‘Jealousy, deep frustration, ambivalence of mind – boom!’ said Atherton happily.

  ‘On the other hand,’ Slider said, ‘we mustn’t lose sight of the other possibles. It won’t hurt to take a look at this sacked musician, what was his name? Preston, Bob Preston. At least find out where he was so we can eliminate him. And then there are the Coleraines.’

  ‘Not Mrs, guv,’ Swilley said. ‘Polish checked her alibi and it’s tight. She was at her shop until two o’clock, and then she drove to Peter Jones’s to buy fabrics. They know her there, and the manageress of the department says she served her before she went off for her tea at three, and she was about fifteen to twenty minutes buying stuff. There’s no way she could have been at Shepherd’s Bush shooting Radek at two thirty-five and got to Sloane Square by two forty-five.’

  ‘Good,’ said Slider. ‘I didn’t really think it was her. Her husband, now, he’s another matter. He struck me as nervous and evasive, and his alibi is unprovable. He says he was at home alone all afternoon.’

  ‘Wait a minute, guv,’ Norma said. ‘He can’t have been at home all afternoon, because we tried to phone Mrs Coleraine there and got no answer. That must have been about four-ish. We eventually caught her at the shop, after she got back from Peter Jones. That’s when we told her about Radek being shot.’

  ‘Coleraine says he got home at a quarter to two. Let’s find out everything we can about him. Maybe his business was in trouble. Maybe his son’s in trouble. He knew his wife would inherit Radek’s estate, and a good dutiful wife wouldn’t fail to share the loot with him.’

  ‘It was quite a loot, too,’ Atherton said. ‘I checked with the solicitor that Parker, Pool and Law put me on to. Radek was worth about three million pounds.’

  There was a brief silence. ‘Just for waving your arms about,’ Norma said wistfully.

  ‘Now that’s what I call a motive,’ Slider said. ‘I’m glad I didn’t know how much before I talked to Mrs Coleraine.’

  Slider put his head into the CID room, looking for Atherton, and Beevers looked up from his desk.

  ‘Sir, over here,’ he called.

  ‘No, sir over here,’ Slider corrected.

  Beevers looked at him with grave Nonconformist reproof. ‘Have you got a minute, guv? Only it’s something a bit odd.’

  Slider went meekly and looked over Beevers’ shoulder at some printed lists. ‘What’s this, stolen property?’

  ‘It’s something that came in this morning, that I was working on before. You know that load of stolen antiques and stuff we found in that big house in Paddenswick Road?’

  ‘We took Lenny Picket up for it.’ Slider shook his head. ‘I can never get over that name – Picket the Fence. What other line of work could he possibly have taken up?’

  Beevers thought about it. ‘I suppose he could have been a landscape gardener.’

  Slider was thrown into confusion. Was the Pillar of the Chapel making a joke? Normally Beevers disapproved of humour, belie
ving that lightness of mind was an infallible indicator of lightness of morals – and with the example of Atherton before them, who could argue with him? ‘What about it, anyway?’ Slider said hastily.

  ‘Well, guv, there were some paintings in the haul, so we sent a description round all the dealers to see if they could place them. This letter came in this morning from Christie’s. I was going to pass it on to one of the TDs when the name caught my eye. Look—’ He squared the letter before Slider. ‘They identify the three paintings as stuff they sold to Alec Coleraine only five months ago, paid for with a bank draft drawn on his personal account. Important paintings, too.’

  Slider read, and let out a soundless whistle. ‘You’re not kidding.’ A Turner, a minor Constable and an Italian painter Slider hadn’t heard of – religious and Italian, sixteenth-century. The three together had been bought for a total of one million, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. ‘And Coleraine wasn’t kidding when he said he was doing all right. One and a quarter million on piccies? I wonder if Lenny knew what he was getting into. Pictures like that are a bit out of his league.’

  Beevers scratched his woolly head thoughtfully. ‘The funny thing is, guv, Coleraine never reported ’em missing. You know McLaren used to be at Kensington, where Coleraine’s gaff is? Well, he got a mate of his over there to look up the records. There was a break-in at the house on the fifth of June, three weeks after he bought the paintings. It looked like a professional job – burglar alarm bypassed and a window taken right out, nice as pie, not kid’s stuff. This mate of McLaren’s faxed us the report, and there’s a list of stolen gear – small antiques, silver and some figurines – but no mention of these paintings. But,’ he added the word weightily as he drew another sheet forward and turned it for Slider’s scrutiny, tapping with his forefinger, ‘if you look here, on this list of the gear we got from Lenny’s, this occasional table sounds very like the one Coleraine says he lost; and these figurines, here, they’ve got to be the same, haven’t they?’

  Slider read. ‘They sound like it,’ he admitted.

  ‘Staffordshire glazed figures, 1840s, Victoria and Albert, Admiral Nelson, Sir Robert Peel, George Washington, they’re all on the list. George Hudson – who was he, anyway?’

  ‘The Railway King. Pioneering railway builder. Didn’t you want to drive a steam train when you were a kid?’

  ‘I’m not old enough,’ Beevers said with unconscious cruelty. ‘Anyway, guv, here we’ve got gear from Coleraine’s break-in turning up at Lenny’s, plus paintings we know Coleraine bought, but he never reports ’em stolen.’ He shook his head with dark reproof. ‘It’s a bit queer.’

  After consulting with the duty sergeant, Paxman, whose specialist subject on Mastermind could have been Drinking Habits of Shepherd’s Bush Lowlife, 1960 to 1990, Slider ran Lenny Picket to earth in The George in Hammersmith Broadway, a vast Edwardian pub of mahogany panels and acid-embossed glass screens, in whose womblike darkness the few daytime drinkers sat at a respectful distance from each other and politely never looked up when anyone came in or went out. As if out of a sense of artistic coherence, everything about Lenny was as narrow as his name – narrow face, narrow shoulders, narrow chest. He smoked very thin roll-ups and during the brief period they stayed alight narrowed his eyes against the rising smoke. He was a squirrel of a man, small, neat, quick and adaptable; a player of many rôles, who at the drop of a hat could switch speech modes from Parkhurst to Park Lane.

  He was reading up the forthcoming antique sales in the Telegraph, and folded the paper hastily when Slider arrived alongside his table.

  ‘Oh, Mr Slider, you gave me a start,’ he said. He had a curiously husky voice which made him sound a bit like Lauren Bacall. Perhaps that was why Slider had always liked him.

  ‘Hullo, Lenny. I wanted to have a word with you. Mind if I sit down?’

  ‘Can I stop you?’ Lenny shrugged. ‘I’m on bail, my life isn’t my own any more.’

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘Might as well take one off you. Gold watch – make it a double – no ice.’

  When Slider returned with the drinks he settled down on the other side of the table, and Lenny abandoned the dismal remains of his last roll-up, brought out a packet of Rizla and a tin of Old Horrible, and started anew. ‘What’s the beef, then?’

  ‘It’s about that last haul we nicked you for.’

  ‘Come on now, Mr Slider, I put me hand up for that like a good boy,’ he protested. ‘End of story. Finito.’

  ‘All right, Len, it’s not grief for you. I just want some information,’ Slider reassured him. ‘About those three oil paintings.’

  Lenny looked gloomy. ‘I wishter God I’d never touched ’em. I don’t know what came over me. I’ve been in this business all my life, and rule number one is never touch nothing there’s only one of. I mean, what the ’ell was I going to do with ’em? A nice bit of furniture, a nice garden stachoo, who’s to say where it came from? But an oil painting, and a ruddy Gainsborough into the bargain—’

  ‘It was a Constable, actually.’

  ‘Don’t say that word, please,’ Lenny shuddered delicately. ‘I’ll never forget when that PC D’Arblay came bursting in. The irony was not lost on me, I promise you.’

  ‘Does it never bother you that what you’re doing is completely immoral?’ Slider asked in wonder. ‘You seem such a nice bloke otherwise.’

  ‘Come on now, Mr Slider, be fair. I’m a businessman,’ he said in wounded tones. ‘I pay an honest price for what I buy, and sell it again at an honest profit. I’ve got thousands of satisfied customers who’d give me a testimony. I don’t ask where the stuff comes from or where it goes to, but then who does? It’s not my fault if other people break the law, is it?’

  ‘A fascinating rationale,’ Slider said. ‘I like you, Lenny. It’s such a pity you’re bent.’

  ‘Bent? Listen,’ he leaned forward earnestly, ‘I had a young bloke in my place a couple of weeks ago, posh accent, posh clothes, all the education money could buy: he comes in to look at some lead allegorical figures for his garden, argues about the price, finally writes me a cheque – and has it away with my fountain pen. Now that’s bent. Young people today! They got no standards.’

  Slider smiled. ‘Well, I’m not interested in statues. It’s those oil paintings I want to know about. I want to know where they came from. D’you want to give me a name, Len, and save me a lot of trouble?’

  Lenny lifted a hand. ‘Now then, now then, you know me better than that. I may not be lily-white in your eyes, but I don’t grass up a business associate. Where’d I be if I got meself a reputation? I’d be finished. No-one’d ever do business with me again if they knew I was going to put Plod on their tail.’

  ‘And you know me well enough to know I wouldn’t ask you unless it was important,’ Slider said. ‘I suppose I didn’t really expect you to tell me, though I could make a fair guess – within three names.’ He looked deep into Lenny’s eyes, or as deep as you can look into the slit in a pillar box, but Lenny faced him out unmoved. ‘Look,’ Slider went on, ‘at this stage you don’t have to tell me who you got the pictures from, I just want to know where they were stolen from. The address, that’s all.’

  ‘What d’you mean, at this stage?’ Lenny asked suspiciously.

  ‘It may or it may not prove important. If it doesn’t, you won’t hear any more about it, my word on it. If it is important, I’ll try to keep you out of it and establish the information from another direction.’

  ‘Try?’ Lenny sounded peevish. ‘And I’ll be inside trying not to get my boat altered during association period.’

  ‘It’s a murder case I’m investigating,’ Slider said impatiently. ‘Don’t mess me about, Lenny. I’m asking you nicely now, and ten to one you’ll hear nothing more about it. But we can do it the hard way if you like, and you can have all the publicity you want.’

  ‘That’s blackmail. I’m surprised at you, Mr Slider. I always thought you was a decent bloke.’ He sh
ook his head over the unreliability of humankind. ‘Look, I tell you straight, I don’t know where the pictures came from. That’s not something I ever ask. I can go back to my supplier and ask him, but whether he’ll tell me or not—’ He shook his head again.

  ‘He’ll tell you. You’ll make him. You’ll find a way, Lenny. I have confidence in you.’

  ‘It might take me a bit of time.’

  Slider smiled. For such a kind-faced man he could look surprisingly menacing when he wanted to, Lenny thought.

  ‘Oh, you’ll have the information by Monday, I’m sure of it. An anonymous phone call is all I want. Just an address. Got me?’

  ‘Got you,’ Lenny sighed. He pushed his roll-up into the corner of his mouth and fumbled in his pocket for his lighter. ‘Tell me, does anybody ever make the mistake of thinking you’re soft?’

  ‘Only my wife,’ Slider said sadly.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Humming and Erring

  On the whole Atherton liked what had happened to Covent Garden. Some of the shops might be a bit poncey, and it seemed to be impossible to cross the piazza without having to avoid someone in black tights and a striped jumper miming his way round a sheet of glass; but at least the place was vital now. Empty upstairs rooms were being turned into flats and bedsitters, the reversal of the usual trend in Central London, and it had the comfortingly Manhattan feeling of a place where people lived, shopped, ate and sat out on sunny evenings on their doorsteps and window-sills watching the world go by.

  It had always been rich in restaurants, and he decided to fortify himself with lunch before seeking out Kate Apwey’s lover. In a state of pleasant anticipation he strolled into what had been his favourite tatty tratt, a place of check tablecloths and heartwarming Italian vulgarity, only to find it had changed hands since his last visit. Atherton knew he was in trouble when he saw sun-dried tomatoes and balsamic vinegar on the menu: life at the Casa Angelo had suddenly got serious. Gone were the tight-trousered boys with priapic pepper mills, the vast mamma in black wedged behind the till, the clusters of strawed Chianti bottles hanging about in corners like evil funghi, the loop tape of Volare and O Sole Mio. Now there was rubber music played almost but not quite sub-aurally, the tablecloths were white and the light fittings chrome, and the pictures on the walls were numbingly abstract. Gone were the familiar comforts of avocado vinaigrette, spag bol and pollo sorpreso, the mountain of profiteroles on the sweet trolley overshadowing an untouched bowl of oranges in somethingorother. Now the food made sparse patterns on the oversize plates; olive oil seemed to get drizzled over most things, and the owner actually came out in a grey silk suit and supervised the drizzling. Atherton ate and left a sadder but not much wider man; nobody, in his opinion, ought ever to come out of an Italian restaurant still able to do up all their buttons.