‘Anyone slipping out wouldn’t be able to tell before he opened the door that Tate wasn’t watching,’ Anderson said. ‘The door panel’s hammered glass, you can’t see through it. So it would be quite a chance if someone managed to get out unseen.’
‘In any case,’ Atherton said, ‘we’re only interested in the time between half past one and, say, two o’clock. If Marcus didn’t leave by about two, he couldn’t have got back to Shepherd’s Bush in time to do the murder.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t Marcus that Tate saw go in,’ McLaren said hopefully.
‘We showed Tate the mugshot, and he said he thought that was him,’ Anderson said. ‘It’s as close as you’ll get.’
‘Never mind, I still think it’s worth taking a look at Marcus’s flat,’ Slider said. ‘It isn’t what you’d call a water-tight alibi, and there’s definitely a connection there somewhere. At the very least, instinct tells me that Marcus knows more about it than he’s said.’
The house in Caroline Place had once been a handsome thing, but was showing the symptoms of being divided up into too many flats. The steps and rendering were cracked, the door and windows needed painting, and the heterogeny of curtains at the different windows gave it a shabby air. Still, it was central, close to a tube, and would probably be bringing in about a hundred pounds a body per week to the landlord.
The landlord came scuttling out from the basement like a crab out of its rock crevice as Slider and Atherton reached the foot of the steps up to the front door. He was stout and short, so that he looked almost spherical, a round head stuck onto a round body without benefit of a neck in between, like something a child had made out of Plasticine. He was dressed in a white shirt open at the throat and with the sleeves rolled up, black trousers and a black waistcoat with a gold chain across the extreme point of his circumference, which for some reason made Slider think of undertakers. His face was pudgily white, his head almost hairless, and yet he managed to give the impression of being exotically swarthy, perhaps because his eyes had the dark melancholy of an ancient race. He stuck his arms out, pumping his elbows and waving his thick fingers to help him up the steps out of his hole, puffing and calling, ‘Yes, yes, I’m coming, vait, don’t be so impatient!’
Slider stopped and looked at him with mild enquiry. He stood before them, looking them over with quick, suspicious eyes. ‘Yes, yes, vot do you vont? I am Mr Rose, this is my house. Vot are you, police? Not customs, no, policemen, I think. Plain clothes. Vy you calling at my house?’
‘We came to see one of your tenants, Mr Rose,’ Slider said, somewhat amused at the quick identification. It spoke long experience.
‘On a Sunday?’ he protested, spreading his hands. ‘It must be serious. Vich one you vont? I don’t vont no trouble here. I keep a quiet house, I am honest landlord, trying to make honest living. Don’t come here making trouble at my house.’
‘No trouble, Mr Rose,’ Slider said soothingly. ‘We just want a little chat with Mr Coleraine. What number flat is he?’
The thick face sharpened, a quick intake of breath hissed between the teeth. ‘Ah, so, number four. I knew it! Ven I see policemen coming, I knew it must be number four.’ He gave the impression of leaning closer, though he could hardly have got closer than he already was. ‘A bad boy that! I vood have got rid of him, but he pays, he pays, always on time, no trouble, and I am a businessman.’ A shrug. ‘I cannot turn away good money. But now he has someone sharing vid him, and this is forbidden. I say to him, Mr Coleraine, you know I let this rooms to you and you only, no others, no lodgers, and he denies. I cannot catch him, but I know there is another up there. If I can catch him, I get rid of him, I promise you. He’s a bad boy. In a minute, he goes. Like this.’ He made the gesture of snapping his fingers, but it was like trying to snap two grilled pork sausages.
‘How do you know there’s someone sharing with him?’ Slider asked with interest.
Mr Rose shrugged again, and tapped his nose. ‘This tells me. I let rooms all my life, and my mother before me. I know. I cannot catch him, but I know.’ He slid his eyes sideways and up, glancing significantly at Slider’s face and away again. ‘I think he gives him key. This is forbidden, absolutely forbidden. I vont him out of my house.’
He folded his arms round his chest, a smouldering bonfire of ancient grudges, and watched broodingly as Slider and Atherton mounted the steps. The front door was on the latch, and Slider pushed it open. A communal hall, smelling of floor polish; institutional green lino, a large speckled mirror on the wall beside the door, a battered side table below it on which reposed a collection of leaflets which presumably had been pushed through the letter-box and picked up by some resident public spirited enough not to walk over them but too indifferent to dispose of them. Beyond the mirror was the door to the ground-floor flat with a plastic number 1 screwed to it; stairs leading up straight ahead; on the first floor doors numbered 2 and 3. Narrower stairs, and on the second floor a door numbered 4 and a very narrow, precipitous flight going on up to the attic.
Atherton laid his ear to the door and after a moment nodded to Slider. ‘Music,’ he murmured. ‘Shall I knock?’
The door was opened after a few moments, just enough to reveal Marcus Coleraine in jeans, a purple singlet, bare feet and hayrick hair, blocking the view into the flat. At the sight of Atherton his face shut down. ‘What do you want?’
‘First of all, Mr Coleraine, we’d like to come in,’ Atherton answered.
‘What for?’
‘We’d like to talk to you, son,’ Slider said gently. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Slider of Shepherd’s Bush Police Station. Sergeant Atherton you know, of course. Your father’s at the station at this very moment making a statement, and from what he’s told us, we think there are some things you might be able to clear up for us.’
Marcus still didn’t move, looking from face to face with an air of trying to calculate the incalculable. Finally Slider said, ‘Can we come in? Or is there some reason you don’t want us to see behind you?’
A moment’s more resistance, and Marcus stepped back and opened the door. ‘Come in if you must,’ he said. Inside there was a sound of music playing very quietly – Dvoák, the New World Symphony – and an agreeable smell of bath soap. The short passage had two doors opposite each other, both open – one on the kitchen and the other on the sitting-room – and then bent round a right-angle up ahead, presumably to the bedroom and bathroom. All the walls were painted cream, the woodwork white, there was oatmeal Berber underfoot, and everything seemed clean and fairly new.
Marcus had backed up as far as the sitting-room door, but was not inviting them any further in. The assumption that they might be prepared to stand in the hall and talk annoyed Slider. What was the point in this time-wasting, unless it was simply meant to annoy for annoyance’s sake?
‘We’d like to look around, if you don’t mind,’ he said evenly.
‘Have you got a warrant?’ Marcus asked. Atherton gave Slider a look. Would they never learn?
‘No,’ said Slider patiently. ‘I can get one if I have to. Is there some reason you don’t want me to look around? Is there something you have to hide?’
Marcus hesitated. ‘What are you looking for?’ he asked, trying for a reasonable tone of voice. ‘Maybe I can save you trouble.’
Slider held his eyes. ‘For one thing, we’re looking for your grandfather’s revolver.’ Marcus’s eyes flinched slightly, and Slider felt a surge of triumph. The boy took an instinctive half-step backwards, and Atherton, adjusting his position accordingly, was able for the first time to see into the sitting-room.
‘Guv?’ he said, touching Slider’s arm. Slider followed the direction of Atherton’s nod. On a table just inside the sitting-room door was the telephone, and beside it a brown, broad-brimmed trilby-type hat. From where he stood, Marcus could not see what they were looking at, but there was alarm as well as enquiry in his eyes.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked quietly.
�
�What’s the matter? You’re in a world of grief, son, that’s what’s the matter,’ Slider said gently. ‘Why don’t you tell me all about it, and get it off your chest? You know we’ll find out in the end.’
‘Yes, I suppose you will,’ Marcus said rather blankly, his mind evidently working. And then suddenly, shockingly, he grinned. ‘Oh well, it couldn’t last for ever. I did my best, that’s all.’
‘Your best?’
‘It wasn’t me killed Grandpa,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree there. But I’m not going to get into trouble over it. I didn’t mind helping as long as it didn’t come back on me, but if Dad’s fingered me, the simp, I’m getting out from under.’ He turned his head and shouted towards the back of the flat. ‘Lev? Lev! Come here, will you? It’s all right, come on out!’ Nothing happened, and Marcus turned back to Atherton and Slider. ‘He’s hiding in the bedroom, the dumb bastard. Doesn’t realise the game’s up. Go in and sit down and I’ll fetch him.’
But at that moment someone appeared at the turn of the passage, a small, slight young man, smaller than Marcus, with a narrow, pale, thin-skinned face, fine hair the colour of corn-silk, and over-large blue eyes set in delicate orbits of mauve shadow. His mouth was curious, wide and almost without a top lip, except for a small pink mark in the centre where there ought to have been a peak. His lower lip was soft and childlike and drooping, and when he saw the two men it began to tremble. He flung Marcus a look of mingled reproach and fear, to which Marcus merely shrugged with robust indifference.
‘It’s the police. Sorry, Lev old mate, it can’t be helped.’ He turned to Slider, completing the introduction in a parody of formality which he was obviously enjoying. ‘Gentlemen, may I introduce Lev Polowski, who shot my grandfather?’
Transparent, unsullied tears slipped over Lev’s lower eyelashes. ‘I didn’t mean to. Honest I didn’t mean to,’ he said in a husky voice.
Marcus grinned the wider, and slipped an arm round his shoulders. ‘It’s all right, don’t worry, they don’t hang you any more,’ he said, and Lev broke into shuddering sobs.
Slider stepped in. He caught Atherton’s eye and jerked his head towards the kitchen. ‘Mr Coleraine, I wonder if you’d be so kind as to make some tea?’
He made a moue. ‘Oh God, do I have to? I’m not a skivvy, you know.’
‘And while you’re in the kitchen, I’d like you to tell Sergeant Atherton your side of the story. Meanwhile, Mr Polowski, we’ll go in here where it’s quiet and you can tell me all about it.’
Lev Polowski sat on the sofa, his hands between his knees, his bony shoulders hunched up around his ears. He looked so fragile and innocent it was hard to think of him as a grown man.
‘Stefan did everything for me. I owe him everything,’ he said. He had a slight, attractive accent, but his English was excellent. ‘I was a student at the Academy in Warsaw. I had a scholarship, which paid my fees, but things were very hard at home with me not earning and my brothers and sisters growing up. My father died, you see, when I was twelve, and Mamma found it harder and harder to make ends meet, and it was getting to look as though I must give up music and try to get a job. My father was a musician, and Mamma wanted me to be one too, but there are so few openings for a trumpet player, so little solo work, and a hundred good players after every orchestral place. And then – Stefan came.’
A rapt look crossed his face, and his hands clasped each other harder. They were large and strong compared with the rest of him, capable-looking, a man’s hands grafted on to a boy’s narrow wrists.
‘You met him in Warsaw?’ Slider asked.
He nodded. ‘He came to conduct a public concert with the Philharmonic, and the next day to give a master class at the Academy. Everyone was so excited, for he is a great national hero to us – the poor Polish boy who fled into exile and became the greatest musician of our age. And also, we all knew he sponsored talented young musicians. Everyone hoped he had come to talent-spot, but how to catch his eye? He was going to walk about, look into classes, and so, and so; but also we were to give a concert for him in the lunch hour, we the senior orchestra. Everyone was practising as though their lives depended on it, and I—’ He shrugged. ‘I went over and over my part to make it perfect for him, but I had nothing to hope for. I was not a violinist, not even an oboist or clarinettist to attract his notice, to be taken up and polished as a soloist. We all thought that if it would be anyone, it would be Marta he noticed, our star pianist, who was going to play the Sans-Saens concerto for him, and we were glad, because Marta was so very, very good, and a lovely person too, worthy of being given her chance. No-one would have begrudged the luck to Marta.’
He lifted his head and his eyes were wide and distant. ‘I did not dream – no-one dreamed – that he would notice me. It is a nice trumpet part in the Sans-Saens, very prominent, and pretty, echoing the piano and completing the tune. And I was good that day, I knew I was good, and I was glad to have made something fine for the great man. But afterwards, when we were walking from the platform, our Director of Music came to me and said, “Sir Stefan would like to speak to you.”’ He was reliving now what Slider could see had been the best moment of his life. His husky voice caressed the words like a lover. ‘I was taken to the Director’s office, and sent in alone. There was Stefan – so tall, so noble, his white hair, his fierce eyes, like a great eagle – and he was looking at me so piercingly, as if he could see into my soul. “You sent for me, maestro,” I said. And he held out his hand to me, he took my hand in his—’ His hands rehearsed the moment quite unconsciously in front of him. ‘And he said, “You played today like an angel. Great trumpet players are very rare. I wish to help you become a soloist. Will you leave Poland and come with me?”’
He stopped. ‘And you went with him?’ Slider prompted after a while, and Lev sighed and looked at him as though he were waking from a deep sleep.
‘Yes, of course,’ he said with an effort. ‘Since then he has done everything for me. He brought me to England, paid for me to have the best teachers, arranged my solo debut, took me with him on tours to play with him with some of the greatest orchestras in the world. And he gave Mamma money, too. He is a great, great man.’
‘You must have been grateful to him.’
‘Of course. Of course.’
‘You admired him. It would not be too strong a word to say you loved him,’ suggested Slider.
The boy’s gaze grew troubled. ‘Yes,’ he said, his voice barely audible. ‘I loved him.’
‘And he loved you? He wanted you to show your love in a physical way, perhaps?’
Lev nodded, and then his eyes filled with tears again and he dropped his head, hiding them. ‘I was—’ He began and stopped, drew a shuddering breath, began again. ‘I didn’t want Mamma to know. She wouldn’t understand. But I was not ashamed. I was proud to be his lover. Only—’ He stopped again.
‘How long did this go on? When did it begin?’ Slider asked.
‘Two years. It began almost as soon as I came to England. I was happy – I had my music, I had my career, I had Stefan. But then it seemed that I saw less of him. He changed towards me. He was still kind, but distant. He said I could stand on my own feet now, and I could, in a way, but I thought – I was afraid—’
‘That he had someone else?’ Slider suggested.
He nodded again, chewing his lower lip. After a moment he said, ‘I tried to tell myself I could not expect – he was so much greater than me – I was nothing compared to him. I should not judge him. But when I remembered the things he’d said to me about love, I could not bear it. And then Marcus told me – he told me – that Stefan was – that he was having an affair with a woman. I thought he was lying at first, but when I faced Stefan with it, he admitted it. He said – terrible things to me.’ He shook his head to shake away the memory.
‘How did you meet Marcus?’ Slider asked.
‘At Stefan’s house, of course. Stefan wanted us to be friends. I was pleased th
at he did. I thought he wanted it because I was important to him. But I think he hoped Marcus would distract me, keep me from finding out about the others.’ He gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘He never guessed Marcus would be the one to tell me.’
‘How did he come to tell you?’
‘It was on Tuesday – last Tuesday. We’d been out together, Marcus and I, just messing around and he asked me to go with him to visit his mother at her shop. I think he wanted to ask her for some money. I didn’t want to go, because I was shy of her. Stefan had said she mustn’t know about him and me, because she wouldn’t approve, and I was afraid she might guess. But Marcus persuaded me. We went to her shop, and she was very nice, friendly to me, but I felt awkward. She told me about the concert Stefan was giving at the church for the charity she was interested in, and asked me if I would be going to it, and I said maybe. But really it was the first time I’d heard about it, and I wondered why Stefan hadn’t said anything to me. And afterwards, when Marcus and I left, I said to him that I thought I would go along to the final rehearsal, because I hadn’t seen Stefan for such a long time, he’d been so busy, and it would be a chance to catch up with him. Marcus said it would be a bad idea to go, and I asked him why, and that was when – when – he told me that Stefan was having an affair with a woman, his agent, and that she’d be there.’
‘Kate Apwey,’ said Slider.
‘Yes, that’s her.’ He lifted his flamey eyes to Slider’s face. ‘I hate her name! I hate her! She could be with him all the time, any time! But how could he do it?’
‘So what did you do when Marcus told you? You said you went to confront him with it?’
‘Not straight away. I was too upset. I told Marcus I wanted to be on my own for a bit, and I left him and went for a walk.’
‘Where?’
‘On Hampstead Heath. That’s where we were. His mother’s shop is in Hampstead, you see. I walked about, thinking and thinking, and then in the end I decided I had to go and face Stefan, and ask him if it was true. I thought Marcus might be mistaken. Or that he might – be making mischief.’ He bit his lip. ‘Marcus likes to tease, you see. He likes making trouble. He doesn’t mean any harm, really, it’s just – it amuses him.’
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