Body Line dibs-13

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘And you were wondering who’s going to pay for the funeral, I suppose,’ she suggested tartly.

  ‘Oh, I dare say there’ll be enough in his estate to cover that. He seems to have been living in comfort.’

  This seemed to interest her. ‘You’ve found money?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that – just that his style of living suggests he was comfortably-off.’

  She looked down at her hands and then up again. ‘I thought perhaps he had got into financial trouble and committed suicide.’

  ‘It wasn’t suicide,’ Slider said.

  She surveyed his face keenly. ‘You’re sure of that? David wasn’t a very – resolute person. Liable to look for the easy way out when things – set him back. Not a striver against misfortune.’

  Why was she keen to sell them on suicide, Slider wondered. ‘He didn’t kill himself,’ he said.

  ‘Sometimes these things can be made to look like an accident,’ she said, and then hurried on, as though she had come to a decision. ‘You needn’t worry about the funeral. I’ll make all the arrangements, if that helps. I don’t suppose there’s anyone else who—’

  ‘Cares for him?’ he suggested gently.

  ‘I don’t care for him,’ she said. ‘I did once, but that was a long time ago. However, there is such a thing as common decency.’

  She hadn’t looked at Atherton since they’d sat down. She had forgotten him. And he could see she was ready to talk to Slider. He wondered again how Slider did it. Animal magic – pheromones – mesmerism? Something.

  ‘He was an attractive man,’ Slider suggested.

  ‘You don’t know how attractive.’ She stopped abruptly as something occurred to her. ‘You haven’t said yet how he died. Was it a car crash?’

  Slider held her eyes. They were not blue, as he had first thought, but greenish-grey. Unusual, but not very – what was the word? – sympathique, in the French sense. Better suited to expressing froideur than warmth. ‘I’m sorry to tell you that he was murdered.’

  For the first time she lost her composure. Colour drained from her face, and she looked suddenly older. Her lips rehearsed some words she didn’t speak. At last she got a grip. ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘He was shot in the back of the head,’ Slider said.

  The words were as brutal as the shot itself.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said, staring at him as if he had slapped her. She put both her hands to her mouth. But evidently her mind was still working. After a moment she said from behind them, ‘Was it over some woman?’

  ‘That’s what we have to find out,’ Slider said, ‘and it means going into his background, which is why I hoped you would be able to help us. The more we know about him, the better chance we have of finding who did this.’

  ‘There’ll be a woman at the bottom of it,’ she said, and now there was a hint of bitterness in her tone. ‘There always was. That’s what killed our marriage – women. He couldn’t resist them. And they couldn’t resist him. To some extent he wasn’t to blame. They threw themselves at him. He was so handsome, so charming. He had a way of making you feel you were the only person in the world who mattered. And of course it was sincere – at the time. It took me years to understand that. He wasn’t pretending. It was just that he made every woman feel like that.’

  ‘It must have been a useful thing for a doctor.’

  She didn’t take it amiss. ‘Yes. The ultimate bedside manner. He ought to have been a psychiatrist. Or even a dentist. Women would have flocked to him.’

  ‘What was his field?’

  She seemed slightly put out by the question. ‘Urology,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Not glamorous,’ Slider sympathized. But lucrative – and more male patients than female, he reflected. She should have been glad about that. ‘Was he ambitious?’ he asked. ‘I suppose he must have been to get as far as he did. He came from quite humble beginnings, didn’t he?’

  She studied him a moment, as if to weigh the implications of his question, and then, oddly, glanced at Atherton. He took the cue. ‘On his birth certificate, it said his father was an insurance clerk.’

  She nodded, as if that explained it. ‘He grew up in a terraced workman’s cottage. Two up, two down. He used to make jokes about D.H. Lawrence, but it wasn’t quite that bad. Greasely’s quite a pretty, country place. And his parents were respectable working people, very keen for him to get on. He went to the grammar school, and got a grant to go to university. Which is where I met him.’

  Slider had not pictured her a student; and he became aware that he had noticed subliminally that there was not a single book on display in the immaculate sitting-room. On the shelves in the chimney alcove there were only ornaments. ‘Which one?’ he asked.

  ‘Edinburgh. He wanted to go to London but couldn’t get in. I chose Edinburgh to get as far away from home as possible. So we were both rather lost sheep.’

  ‘What did you study?’ Atherton asked, mainly to keep her going, but also out of curiosity. He couldn’t see her as a scholar, either.

  ‘Philosophy,’ she said, surprising them both. English – the easy option – was what they would have betted. ‘Daddy said it was a waste of time, because it couldn’t lead to a career. And Mummy didn’t want me to have a career anyway, so she didn’t want me to go to university at all. Least of all Edinburgh. She was afraid I’d meet someone unsuitable there. Which I did, in her sense. So they were both right.’

  ‘And you were attracted to David right away?’ Slider asked.

  ‘I admired him for the way he’d got over his disadvantages and moved himself into a different world. Without being resentful. There were other working-class students, of course, but they tended to be – what’s that word they use nowadays?’

  ‘Chippy?’ Atherton suggested.

  ‘Oh yes. There were a lot of chippy people around back then. But David wasn’t the least like that. He loved the fact that I came from a privileged home. He made me feel it was something to be proud of. So we – clung together, I suppose. And then – well, he was tremendously attractive. Thick, black hair, blue eyes, wonderfully athletic. And that charm of his . . .’

  ‘You fell in love,’ Slider suggested. She assented by a slight nod. ‘But you didn’t get married for quite some time.’

  She sharpened. ‘You seem to know an awful lot about me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Slider said. ‘We found the marriage certificate, you see, so we know the date.’

  She sighed. ‘There was a lot of opposition at home. Mummy was horrified because he wasn’t “one of us”. Daddy insisted David must prove himself before we could get married. They hoped I’d meet someone else if they made me wait.’ Her mouth hardened as she said it. ‘For five years they threw eligible men of the “right” sort at me, made me go to every dance and party, tried to pretend David was just one of the field. It wasn’t until he was a senior houseman, and Bernard Webber got him a registrar slot, that they gave in.’

  Interesting, Slider thought. She would have been of age on leaving university, and could have married him then, but it did not seem to have occurred to her to do it without permission. Or was it a matter of money? It wasn’t in his remit to ask, though he’d have liked to.

  ‘We got married,’ she went on, ‘and he proved them wrong – as far as career and income went. Mummy always looked down her nose at him rather, but Daddy respected him for what he achieved. I always kept the women thing away from them, until the end. But they wouldn’t have cared about that, anyway, as long as there wasn’t a scandal. They would have told me not to make a fuss. And I didn’t, for a long time. But in the end, it just wore me down.’ She met Slider’s eyes. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. The constant, constant—’ Her eyes glittered with unshed tears. ‘The lies. The excuses. The “conferences”. The “medical emergencies”. The tawdriness of it all! The way those girls behaved – no restraint. No self-respect. Notes left in his pockets. Telephone calls – the ones where they hang up when I a
nswer and the ones where they pretend to be calling from work. The ones who sat in their cars outside the house hoping to catch a glimpse of him. The ones who were friendly to me at functions to show there was nothing going on and the ones who glared furiously at me across the room. The ones who showed up at the house in tears. The ones who thought he would marry them. They didn’t understand the first thing about him. He would never have left me. And I’d have put up with it, if it was just an occasional thing, if it was kept out of sight. But it just – never – stopped.’

  She looked around her helplessly, and Atherton, divining her problem, jumped up and brought the box of tissues to her from the coffee table. She looked at him properly for the first time as she took one and said, ‘Thanks.’ He thought she might have been quite attractive if she ever smiled.

  ‘It must have been very hard for you,’ Slider said when she had dried her eyes and discreetly blown her nose.

  ‘It was. I did care for him, you see, and in a way he couldn’t help it. He was just made that way. He loved sex, and he couldn’t resist when it was offered. And of course a doctor gets offered lots of it. He was a very uncomplicated person, really. But I just couldn’t go on. He cried when he moved out. I hated that. We sold the house – we had a lovely place in Chipperfield – and the London flat, and divided the money, and I bought this house.’

  ‘Did he pay you maintenance?’

  ‘No. I told you, we shared the capital. I didn’t want anything else from him. I wanted to cut him out of my life, and that’s what I did. Made my own life, concentrated on my own career.’

  ‘Which is?’ Slider asked.

  ‘I co-own an employment agency – Sturgess and Beale, in Chiswick. We specialize in placing disabled people.’

  It was a bit of a conversation-stopper. ‘That must be very – rewarding,’ Slider managed.

  ‘It is,’ she said, back in control and blanking them out again. ‘Since then, as I say, I have had nothing to do with David, beyond the occasional phone call. I can’t even recall when the last one was. Last year some time. So I don’t know what he’s been getting up to.’

  ‘Do you know where he’s been working recently?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I have no idea how he supports himself. He could be a taxi driver for all I know.’

  ‘Has he ever suggested to you that he had money worries?’

  ‘No. I imagine he does all right, since he’s still living in that house in Shepherd’s Bush. I know that cost quite a bit when he bought it. But he wouldn’t ask me for money anyway. He’d get short shrift if he did! When I think of what he made me give up . . . I loved our life – the parties, the holidays – living in the country – our lovely house. And it’s come to this.’ She looked around her bitterly. ‘A semi-detached in Ealing. That’s all I have to show for all those years.’

  What was so bad about that? Slider thought. It was a pretty nice house. He made a non-committal noise.

  She looked at him. ‘And now he’s dead. Shot. He shamed me, but I wouldn’t have wanted it to come to that. You’ll find there’s a woman at the bottom of it. Some jealous woman or some angry husband. I suppose he’s gone out in a blaze of glory, in a way. I don’t know if that isn’t an ending he’d have approved of.’

  They were interrupted at that moment by the sound of a key in the front door, and her faced snapped back instantly into hauteur, salted with a hint of annoyance. She rose to her feet, forcing Slider, who’d been brought up that way, to stand as well. A man came in from the hall: a lean, well-built man – though a couple of inches shorter than her – in his forties, with a deeply weather-tanned face, unruly dark hair and bright-blue eyes. He was wearing a donkey-jacket over a navy guernsey, heavy cord trousers and mud-stained work boots.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I didn’t know you had visitors.’ His accent, while not as cut-glass as Amanda’s, was quite pure – a surprise, given his clothing, and hands which had seen manual labour in the recent past. He saw Atherton looking at them and put them behind his back.

  ‘These gentlemen are just leaving,’ Amanda said. There was a pink spot – of annoyance or embarrassment, or both – in her cheek. Slider stood his ground sturdily and smiled enquiringly until she was forced to say, ‘Robin Frith, an old friend of mine. These gentlemen are police officers. It seems David’s had an accident.’

  She gave him a glare that would have turned Medusa to stone, and a flick of the head which made him say, ‘Well, I won’t interrupt,’ and absent himself hastily.

  Slider could hear him going upstairs; and Amanda’s body language was urging them towards the door.

  ‘I mustn’t keep you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I’m not able to tell you anything useful.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve been very helpful, thank you,’ Slider said, but more to give her something to think about than because it was true.

  ‘Odd,’ Atherton said when they had left. ‘Don’t you think it was odd?’

  ‘What, specifically? She’s an unusual woman.’

  ‘Her attitude to David Rogers, for a start.’

  ‘In particular?’ said Slider.

  ‘Well, she’s driven by his womanizing into divorcing him, but she doesn’t make him pay alimony. It shows an unhealthy lack of desire for vengeance.’

  ‘Unless she’s trying to make it seem that she has no desire for vengeance. Or for his money.’

  ‘You think she could be guilty?’

  ‘Anyone could be guilty. I’m sure she’s not telling us everything.’

  ‘What she said did seem inconsistent,’ Atherton agreed. ‘She complains about her lifestyle but didn’t want his money. She’s confident he’d tell her if he got married, but says she doesn’t know where he’s been working. I think that there was more contact between them than she’s letting on.’

  ‘Probably. But why hide it?’ Slider said.

  ‘Because she’s guilty?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Slider mused. ‘She obviously still had feelings for him. A mixture of sentiment and bitterness. And she really seemed shocked by his death.’

  ‘Could be shock that we’d come to her so soon. And you admit the bitterness.’

  ‘Hmm. But they’ve been divorced for ten years. Wouldn’t she need a more recent motive to want to do away with him?’

  ‘She seemed to be deliberately distancing herself from him and his money,’ Atherton said. ‘But wouldn’t it be interesting if it turned out he’d left everything to her? That would answer a lot of questions. “He shamed me but I’ve had the last laugh.” Revenge eaten cold and so on.’

  ‘I wonder what she is living on? This agency of hers? I suppose we’ll have to check if it’s pukka.’

  ‘It would be a brilliant front if it wasn’t,’ Atherton said. ‘So utterly worthy you’d feel like a complete shit asking questions. And she obviously didn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘But equally, if she’s a genuine philanthropist she wouldn’t want to talk about it. That would be blowing her own trumpet.’

  ‘You always have to see both sides, don’t you? Well, and what about old Mellors coming in? Did she blush! Old friend, indeed – and he went straight upstairs. She’s shacking up with him.’

  ‘Quite possibly.’

  ‘It looks as if she has a bit of a thing for horny-handed sons of the soil. OK –’ he forestalled Slider – ‘Rogers was a doctor, but he started out with coal dust in his hair.’

  ‘Greasely, not Greaseborough,’ Slider said, for the second time of what he was afraid would be many. ‘Different sort of place entirely.’

  ‘Still, she seems to like sinning below her station.’

  ‘Did you catch the smell from Frith when he came in?’ Slider pondered.

  ‘We don’t all have a hooter like yours. What was it?’

  ‘Horses.’

  Atherton didn’t know what to make of that bit of information. They had reached the car. The gritty wind, rollicking unchecked across Ealing Common, slapped a greasy sandwich paper
against the side window, just missing his sleeve. He peeled it off with flinching fingertips. The homeward-bound traffic was pouring across the junction into Hanger Lane and backing up, like water pouring into a jar. Dusk had come, and it wasn’t any warmer, and he still didn’t have an overcoat on. He shivered, and his mind turned naturally to crackling fires, old oak beams, naff crimson carpets and the sultry gleam of horse-brasses.

  ‘Fancy a pint?’ he asked.

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ Slider said, unlocking the door.

  FOUR

  They Tuck You up, Your Mum and Dad

  As Slider was trying to get his key into the lock, the door opened, and his father smiled a welcome at him.

  ‘Joanna not home yet?’ he divined.

  ‘She’s on her way,’ Dad said. She had been doing a concert in Norwich, a repeat of the one in Harrogate. ‘She rang from her mobile – said they were stopping in The Red House for a pint.’

  Slider nodded. He understood how they had to ‘come down’ from a performance; and also that in a freelance world it was the clubbable people who got the jobs, all other things being equal.

  ‘She’ll only have the one,’ his father went on. Slider was amused that he should defend her. Or was he reassuring him? In the early days he had worried all the time when she was out on her own in her car. Not that she wasn’t a good driver – she was excellent – but she carried so much of his love with her it made him vulnerable. And he was a policeman – he knew what road accidents looked like.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  Dad looked past him at Atherton. ‘Hello, Jim. You another orphan? Emily’s away, isn’t she?’

  ‘Covering the Irish elections.’

  ‘I was always the same when Bill’s mother was at the WI. Home’s not home without the woman. Well, come in, don’t stand on the doorstep. You both look cold. I thought this morning Bill should have taken a coat. And I see you’re no better, Jim. Can’t trust March sunshine, you know. I lit the fire.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘Have you eaten?’