Shadow Play

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Ooh, that’s cold, Slider thought. Playing second fiddle to washing.

  ‘When’s Eli going to be home?’ she went on before he could speak. ‘You got nothing on him, you can’t keep him.’

  ‘We’re not keeping him now,’ Slider said smoothly. ‘He’s voluntarily helping us with our enquiries.’

  ‘Right! If it’s voluntary, he can voluntary come home. He don’t know nothing about this geezer, and neither do I. I’ve warned you. If I don’t see him back here by dinner time, I’m putting in a complaint. So you’re told!’

  Outside, Atherton said, ‘Phew! I feel like the victim of reverse police brutality. Was she feigning anger to distract our attention, or was it real?’

  ‘There was nothing feigned about that. But I still think she knew deceased.’

  ‘That stuff about Gene Hackman didn’t work for you? I was convinced.’

  ‘Ooh, irony? You could put someone’s eye out with that. But all the same, I agree with her, I don’t think he did the killing. She may think he’s an idiot, but surely not idiot enough to leave the body there?’

  ‘Elaborate double bluff?’

  ‘Not that much of a Moriarty, either,’ said Slider.

  Sampson’s statement had been short and sour. He’d said only what he said before, that he’d come in at seven and found deceased there, and that he’d never seen him before in his life. Hart had questioned him about his customers, on the off chance that one of them was involved, but he was sure they couldn’t be. They were all good blokes, he said, though when it came to details about them, he was vague in the extreme. He had no surnames, knew them only as Dave, Mikey, Phil and so on, and had no addresses for any of them.

  ‘He could tell me the make and model of their cars and what was wrong with them down to the last wing nut,’ said Hart, ‘but the owners were “just some bloke”.’

  ‘How did he know them, then?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Word of mouth,’ Hart said. ‘Tom, Dick and Harry recommend him, and Jim, Jack and Paddy just drive in, leave their motors, and he fixes ’em.’

  ‘He must have phone numbers, or how does he tell them when the car’s ready?’ Atherton said, sitting on the cold radiator and contemplating his shoes. He’d had to wash them when he got back to get the mud off, and dry them with the hand dryer in the gents. He was hoping there wouldn’t be a watermark.

  ‘He jots the number down on a piece of paper when they leave the car,’ said Hart, ‘but he doesn’t keep ’em. He’s not what you’d call devoted to the office work. When I asked about receipts, he looked at me as if I’d started talking Swedish. I gather it’s a cash business, in so far as it’s a business at all.’

  ‘He’s got a land line at the yard,’ LaSalle said helpfully. ‘We could get the records.’

  ‘Do we want to?’ Hart said with a weary look. ‘Trawling through his customers’d take ages, and do we really think he’s got something to do with the corpse, boss? He dun’t seem the type to me.’

  ‘We have to account for the body somehow,’ said Slider. ‘Someone put it there – so why there?’

  ‘It’s got to be someone who knew the yard existed,’ Atherton said. ‘You can’t tell from the road.’

  ‘Well, that’d be a bugger, having a corpse dumped on you, just cos someone knows you’ve got a yard,’ Hart said.

  ‘What are friends for?’ said Atherton.

  ‘Normally if you’ve got a body to get rid of,’ said Slider, ‘you bury it in the woods or throw it down a remote quarry.’

  ‘Shepherd’s Bush is notably short of both,’ Atherton observed.

  ‘If they was in a car,’ Hart pointed out, ‘they could’ve driven off and found one.’

  ‘So perhaps time was short,’ said Slider. ‘The good thing about Jacket’s Yard is that it’s not overlooked. If they knew that, maybe it was enough, just to get the body away from wherever the killing happened.’

  ‘Or maybe they panicked,’ Atherton said.

  Slider shook his head. ‘It doesn’t look panicky, exactly. They took the trouble to empty his pockets. It looks more like time-saving. But until we know who deceased is, we can’t tell if he’s connected to Sampson or his customers in any way.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any point in sifting through his contacts,’ said Atherton. ‘I don’t believe he would have called it in if he’d had anything to do with it. He’d have loaded the body up and driven it away somewhere.’

  ‘I’ve already said that,’ said Slider.

  ‘Well, I’m agreeing with you.’

  ‘But in my case it was reasoned deduction. With you it’s just laziness,’ said Slider.

  Doc Cameron had sent over the fingerprints, and LaSalle went off to run them. Slider was getting on with some other stuff when Loessop, who had been running Sampson through records, came in. He was swarthy and piratical, a look he cultivated for street-cred purposes with the Captain Jack Sparrow locks and plaited beard, earning him the nickname of Funky. Slider noted he was also wearing a dangly earring, a silver skull. His women detectives knew he did not allow danglers, but it obviously hadn’t filtered through to Funky. He mentioned it mildly, and Loessop hastily removed it.

  ‘Sorry, sir. It’s just part of the image.’

  ‘If some low life on the street grabs you by it, it’ll be part of a visit to A&E,’ said Slider. ‘What’ve you got on Sampson?’

  ‘He’s got no criminal record,’ said Loessop.

  ‘That’s a surprise. I’d have thought there’d be a little something. Receiving stolen goods. Driving without insurance. Looking iffy in a public place.’

  ‘Well, he’s either been virtuous, careful, or lucky,’ Loessop said. ‘I’d bet lucky: he’s been drawing long-term disability benefit for nearly ten years.’

  ‘He looked spry enough to me.’

  ‘Yeah, guv. He doesn’t look like a bloke with chronic back pain and crippling sciatica, does he?’

  ‘I suppose he’s got a note from some doctor or other?’

  ‘It’s Dr Bajwa in St Mark’s Road. He’s come on the radar before, for giving out medical certificates for cash.’

  ‘There’s a lot of it about,’ said Slider.

  ‘And another thing, guv – I checked with the Inland Revenue, and Sampson’s not troubled them since he went on the sicker. No declared income. He’s what you might call part of the cash economy.’

  ‘That explains why he doesn’t have to hustle to make a living,’ said Slider. ‘A nice benefits cushion, and mends cars for cash as a sideline.’

  ‘And no paperwork to catch him out. Doesn’t get us any nearer the mystery corpse, though,’ Loessop concluded, tugging fretfully at his beard plaits.

  ‘What it does,’ Slider comforted him, ‘is give us a handle if we should need to put the bite on friend Sampson at some stage. Benefits fraud and tax evasion are enough to lock him up and lean on him.’

  Loessop brightened. ‘D’you want me to have a go, guv?’

  ‘We’ve got nothing to ask him yet,’ said Slider. ‘You can let him go. I think his wife wants a word with him.’

  LaSalle came back with the news that deceased’s fingerprints had not found a match. With no one to canvass and no lines to follow up until they had an identity, there wasn’t anything more they could do for now. ‘We can’t even ask Mispers without a name,’ said LaSalle discontentedly.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve got plenty of other work to get on with,’ Slider said. ‘As I have.’

  LaSalle took the hint and went away, and Slider tried to clear his mind of annoyingly misplaced bodies and concentrate on police community relations initiatives. He was about to go home when Freddie Cameron telephoned.

  ‘You sound tired,’ Slider said.

  ‘It’s been a long day,’ said Cameron. ‘And the mud’s gone right through my nice grey bags. Both knees.’

  ‘You should know better than to wear nice clothes to work.’

  ‘I spend my entire life at work, when else am I going to wea
r nice clothes? If I’m reduced to wearing tough corduroys and big boots every day like some urban James Herriot, I might as well retire, because life won’t be worth living.’

  ‘Dilettante!’ Slider jeered. ‘What about my corpse?’

  ‘I’ve only done the visual so far,’ Freddie said. ‘The full necropsy will have to wait until tomorrow. But I can say that death was almost certainly caused by a massive blow to the cervical spine, with a heavy blunt instrument with a rounded profile. A blow of considerable force.’

  ‘Ah, typical suicide,’ said Slider. ‘He accidentally brutally hit himself on the back of the neck with a baseball bat.’

  ‘Ho ho,’ said Cameron. ‘It rather rules out accident as well as suicide. You couldn’t fall on something with that much force without leaving other injuries. And there were no other visible injuries or bruising.’

  ‘So it wasn’t part of a beating?’

  ‘No, just the one blow. I suspect he didn’t see it coming, since there were no defence injuries. For the rest, deceased was probably in his mid-to-late fifties, but fit for his age – good musculature and a low body fat percentage. He was well-nourished, clean, circumcised, no evidence of homosexual activity or drug use. There was one old scar around the ribs that looked like a knife wound, but that must be going back twenty years or so. The hands were well-kept but there was some old scarring of the knuckles, together with some thickening, typical of someone who’s used his fists for fighting. No wedding ring, though that doesn’t mean he wasn’t married, of course. No jewellery other than that nice watch.’

  ‘So he was a naughty boy in his youth, come upon something more lucrative and less physical to do in later life. How long was he dead before they dumped him, can you tell?’

  ‘It was probably quite soon after death. The hypostasis is consistent with the position in which the body was found,’ said Cameron. ‘It doesn’t become fixed until around six hours, but there are usually some traces – earlobes and fingernails, for instance – if the body’s moved after it sets in.’

  ‘I suppose he didn’t have his name and national insurance number tattooed on his arm?’

  ‘Interesting you should say that,’ Freddie began.

  ‘You’re kidding me!’

  ‘Yes, of course I am. However, we did find one thing. We thought the pockets were completely empty, but in the inside breast pocket of the jacket we found a lottery ticket. I’ll send it over. It was flat against the lining under the buttonhole, so you couldn’t feel it just by putting your hand in. We missed it at the site. We only found it when we had the clothes off the body and turned every pocket out, which presumably the murderer didn’t have the luxury of doing.’

  ‘A lottery ticket,’ Slider said. ‘Recent?’

  ‘Saturday’s,’ said Freddie. ‘Something?’

  ‘Could be. We still don’t know who he is.’

  ‘No one’s rung in asking for him, then?’

  ‘It’s early days for that. And the fingerprints came up blank.’

  ‘Interesting. I’d have thought the fighting might have got him into trouble. Well, I’ll circulate the dental profile. And I’ll send off a DNA sample. You can decide if you want it processed. We’ll go over the clothing for any fibres or other deposits, but that’ll have to wait until tomorrow as well. I’m going home now.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Slider.

  ‘Have you got plans for this evening?’

  ‘No, I’m all alone tonight. Joanna didn’t have any work for a couple of days, so she’s gone to visit her parents, and taken George with her.’

  ‘You’re welcome to come and feed with us,’ said Freddie – a generous offer given how tired he was.

  ‘Thanks all the same,’ said Slider, ‘but I’m quite looking forward to pretending to be a bachelor again. I shall have a curry on my knees in front of the telly.’

  ‘Sounds like heaven,’ said Freddie politely.

  Slider smiled to himself. He couldn’t imagine Freddie ever eating other than at a table, and with a knife and fork. ‘It is to me,’ he said.

  ‘And the whole bed to yourself,’ Freddie added. ‘Martha’s miniature dachshund gets on the bed between us, and I wake up to find myself clinging to the very edge and Merry sprawled out in the middle. It’s amazing how much room a small dog can take when he puts his mind to it.’

  ‘Shut him out of the room,’ Slider suggested.

  ‘Then he howls outside the door,’ Freddie sighed.

  Slider chuckled. ‘It’s not like you to give in to emotional blackmail. If you’d brought your children up that way …’

  ‘They didn’t have such piercing voices,’ said Cameron.

  Slider didn’t sleep well, despite having the whole bed to himself. Perhaps it was the curry, or the gloomy Australian film he’d watched, featuring dead teenage girls and corrupt policemen in a grim outback settlement. Perhaps it was having the whole bed to himself. He kept surfacing, about every half hour; jerking awake as though he’d heard something. Then he went through that tiresome process of calculating, ‘if I can go to sleep now, I’ll still get four hours’; then three, then two. At six he gave up and went downstairs, made some tea, and had bacon frying when the phone rang.

  ‘Did I wake you?’ Joanna asked.

  ‘No, I was up. I had a bad night.’

  ‘So did I. Kept waking up thinking it was morning, and finding I’d only been asleep half an hour.’

  ‘Same here. Can it be that you miss having me beside you?’ he asked.

  ‘Always. Are you making yourself a proper breakfast?’

  ‘Yes, Mama. Are you having a nice time? How is everyone?’

  ‘They’re all fine. Dad is spoiling George – bought him a chocolate ice cream as big as his head yesterday, so of course he was sick. George, not Dad. Mum keeps asking when he’s going to have a little brother or sister. She says it isn’t good for children to be “onlies”.’

  ‘She has met me, hasn’t she?’

  ‘You’re the exception that proves the rule.’ She paused. ‘What does that even mean?’

  ‘“Proves” as in “tests”,’ said Slider.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, with an air of discovery. ‘You are a fount of knowledge.’

  ‘We did it in school.’

  In the background a person said something he couldn’t make out, and she said, ‘I have to go. Someone’s just spilled a whole glass of water over someone.’

  ‘I hope both someones are my son,’ Slider said.

  Slider’s immediate boss, Detective Superintendent Porson, was back after a week off. It didn’t seem to have sweetened him. He seemed to regard the body at Jacket’s Yard as having been deliberately planted to annoy him. In fairness, they did have a lot on, and this sort of body boded a lot of work. Nobody liked boding first thing in the morning.

  ‘What did they want to dump him there for?’ he demanded, fretfully leafing through the paperwork that had arrived on his desk in his absence. ‘What’s wrong with the countryside? Plenty of it around, isn’t there? What did they have to come cluttering up our ground for?’ Slider took those as rhetorical questions. ‘And you’ve got no ID? Nothing at all?’

  ‘Nothing from the fingerprints. We’ve had no enquiries after anyone matching his description, and it’s too early for Mispers. We’ll circulate his photograph to the other boroughs, and the usual places – hospitals, taxi firms. If nothing turns up, we may have to go to public appeal.’

  ‘We’re a long way off that,’ Porson said hastily. ‘He can stay in the cooler until someone misses him or you get a name. No use knocking yourself out.’

  ‘We could process the DNA—’ Slider began.

  Porson scowled. ‘We could not! There’s enough wailing and gnashing of feet upstairs ’cause we’re over our budget. I’m not lashing out for some low-life that nobody’s missing.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Slider said. The nice clothes, watch and manicure suggested he was quite a high-living low-life, but the principle was the same.r />
  ‘Don’t go borrowing trouble,’ Porson advised. ‘It’s not as if you’re short of something to do. Murder’s a priority, of course, but you’ll have to do this one on the cheap, until there’s a reason not to.’

  Slider looked up as McLaren came into his room. ‘You’ve got something on your mouth,’ he said sharply. ‘Is that chocolate?’

  McLaren’s hand stole guiltily to his upper lip, even as he said, ‘No, guv. I’m growing a moustache.’

  ‘Really?’ said Slider.

  McLaren smirked. ‘It’s a surprise for Natalie.’

  Slider contemplated the statement. ‘I don’t think you’re going to be able to keep it a secret,’ he concluded.

  ‘She’s had the surprise,’ McLaren explained. ‘The surprise was me doing it. She says every man should have a moustache. She thinks they’re macho.’

  It was the reason, of course, that so many policemen sported facial hair.

  McLaren seemed to have fallen into a reverie. His new girlfriend had that effect on him. Slider broke his dream. ‘Did you want something?’

  ‘Oh – yes, guv! This come in the bag from Doc Cameron.’

  It was the lottery ticket from the corpse’s pocket. Slider followed McLaren to the door of the CID room, caught Swilley’s eye, and when she came over, handed her the ticket and said, ‘See if you can find out where this was sold. If it’s a local shop, there’s a possibility the vendor might recognise the mugshot.’

  THREE

  Arose By Some Other Name

  The National Lotteries Board reported that the ticket in deceased’s pocket had been purchased from a newsagents called Randal’s in Hammersmith Road. Swilley punched up the details of the shop. There had been a Randal’s on that spot for sixty years, but it was now owned and run by an A. Patel and a B. Patel.

  ‘The chances of them knowing anything are slight to nil, Norm,’ Hart complained. ‘You’ll have a wasted journey.’

  ‘At least it gets me out of the house,’ Swilley said, slinging on her coat.

  ‘Bring us back a pasty,’ McLaren called. Swilley glared at him. ‘Go on, Norma. I’ll give you the money when you come back.’