Death Watch

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Atherton found the house, an end-of-terrace in Jubilee Road, its small front garden concreted over to make a hard standing, and an overweight Cyprian cat sitting on the windowsill of the front bay. Atherton parked, and stepped out into the afternoon street. The spring air was sharp with the smell of car exhaust and dog shit, the traffic on the Western Avenue crooned in the background, and overhead a jumbo jet headed for Heathrow, with another already in sight, two minutes behind. This, then, was Perivale. He started towards the front door, and the Cyprian cat gave him an affronted look, leapt off the windowsill and fled under the privet with a flash of striped trousers.

  The window frames were painted mauve and the door was glossy dark purple. The walls were clad in imitation York stone, and the door bell chimed three and a half bars of There’s No Place Like Home. This place has everything, Atherton thought, except a brass knocker in the shape of a Cornish piskie. After a short pause Mrs Collins opened the door. She brightened when she saw him. She was plump in an inviting sort of way, her body coaxed into a clinging mauve jersey dress and her feet into ambitiously high heels. She had a rather lumpy, soaked face, too much makeup, short hennaed curls, and gold hoop earrings which caught the light as she reached up automatically to touch her hair.

  ‘Hullo, love,’ she said in a friendly manner. She had large teeth, which pushed her lips from underneath into fashionable fullness. ‘If it’s double glazing, I’m afraid you’re out of luck – we’ve already got it on order. We’re having the whole house done.’

  I knew it, Atherton thought. He was delighted, however, at this ready identification of him as a salesman. He must congratulate his tailor. ‘Mrs Collins? Mrs “Pet” Collins?’

  She dimpled. ‘Silly name, isn’t it? My mother named me after Petula Clark. She was quite a star when I was a born.’

  Ungenerous to Miss Clark, Atherton thought. He flashed his brief and her smile wavered and sank to be replaced by wariness.

  ‘I understand you and your husband were friends of Richard Neal?’ he said pleasantly. ‘May I come in for a moment? I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

  She was unexpectedly quick on the uptake. ‘What d’you mean, “were”? What’s happened? Has there been an accident?’ She fell back a step as if he’d hit her, and her mouth fell open shapelessly. ‘Omigod, he’s dead, isn’t he? Dave’s killed him! I knew it, I knew it would happen! Oh Jesus, I warned him!’

  And before Atherton could speak, she flung back her head and howled like a bereaved she-wolf.

  *

  It was a long time before he could calm her down enough to talk to him, and then she didn’t make much sense. At the table in the kitchen (mauve paintwork and textured vinyl wallpaper with a closely-repeated pattern of violets) she sobbed until her false eyelashes soaked off, while Atherton made her a cup of tea and tried to sort fact from the fiction in her overwrought outpourings.

  It seemed that Dick Neal and Dave Collins were closer friends than Mrs Neal supposed. Collins was older than Neal, something of a father-figure to him; he had been in some way instrumental in getting Neal the Omniflamme job, or at least had pointed him in that direction. Atherton gathered Collins thought Neal had reason to be grateful to him, and perhaps didn’t show it enough. Mrs C was equivocal on the point.

  Pet was Collins’s second wife. The first Mrs Collins emerged briefly from the tirade as ‘that bitch’, whose occupancy of the former marital home in Harrow, along with the two children of the marriage, had led to her successor’s having to make do with ‘this rat-box’ instead of the semi she desired and properly deserved.

  Atherton gathered Pet’s disappointment with Collins sprang from his failure to provide for her both financially and sexually, and that she had fallen pretty heavily for Neal when she first met him – though that was not quite the way she presented it. In her version Neal had made all the running, and her beleaguered virtue had succumbed reluctantly to strenuous pleading one day on the marital sofa when he had called round to see Dave and Dave was not in.

  Perhaps Mrs Neal’s outrage at the suggestion that anything had been going on between Dick and Pet was not entirely misplaced. Reading between the lines, Atherton guessed that Neal had slipped Mrs Collins a spare length once in the heat of the moment, and afterwards, horrified at his own weakness and perfidy, had tried to convince her that it was a one-off aberration. Pet had then thrown a mega-wobbly, had gone round to his house to give him a sample of the kind of scene she was prepared to make if he pulled the plug on her, and had forced him to go on servicing her by threatening to tell her husband all about it.

  As her makeup was rubbed and washed off by her grief, Atherton could see that it had been concealing a fading but extensive bruise on the side of her face. That bumpy look of hers was probably the long-term effect of being knocked about. It looked as though the amiable Dave Collins might not be averse to the odd smack in the puss when his lovely mate got on his tits.

  The division between men who hit women, and men who didn’t, was absolute, but if Neal was Collins’s friend, he must surely have known what Collins was capable of. Atherton wondered a little, in that case, that he could have believed Mrs C would spill the beans. Surely it would have been worse for her than for him if she had? On the other hand, all the evidence was that Neal was dedicated to the quiet life and the avoidance of strife, even to the point of giving his private parts the sort of punishment few men dared even to dream about.

  It was clear, however, that the affair certainly did not end back in October. Neal had been banging his purple partner as lately as a week ago; and the letter Norma had found had indeed been sent last month, to keep old Dick up to the mark after a failure to deliver.

  It was also clear that despite Mrs Collins’s fear that her husband would find out and beat Neal up, she’d had no intention of giving up the relationship. Was that the measure of her grave stupidity, or her passionate devotion to Neal’s active member? Or had she just believed that her luck would hold up for ever?

  The answering-machine was flashing when they got back to Joanna’s flat.

  ‘Bet it’s for you,’ she said resignedly, and it was: a request to ring Atherton at the station. ‘I’ll go and make some coffee,’ Joanna said. ‘Or would you like another drink?’

  ‘Let’s make a pact about drinking,’ Slider said, dialling.

  ‘Okay’

  ‘Let’s never stop.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, departing.

  Atherton answered. ‘Ah, you’re back. Any luck?’

  ‘Yes and no. What are you still doing there?’

  ‘Stacking up some overtime. Polish has gone home, and I’ve got no-one to play with. There’ve been some developments here. Since you’re at Joanna’s, why don’t I come straight around, and we can have a mutual debriefing session.’

  ‘I’ll have to check with Joanna … Jo? Atherton wants to come over and take your knickers off.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ she called back from the kitchen.

  Half an hour later they were sitting around the fire with thick cheese sandwiches and glasses of malt whisky. Joanna was kneeling in the hearth holding a sheet of newspaper over the fireplace to hurry up the flames.

  Atherton sat on the shabby old chesterfield and pondered the surrealist shape of the sandwich on his plate. ‘You’re the only person in the world I know apart from me who doesn’t have sliced bread,’ he said to Joanna.

  ‘I was in a hurry,’ she protested. ‘You can’t cut bread straight if you rush it.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t complaining. I’m all for novelty. And I must say it’s a novel experience to be eating anything without Oedipus patting my hand to see what it is–’

  ‘He’s the paw you have always with you,’ Joanna said.

  ‘ – or trying to draw attention to himself by tiptoeing through the china on the mantelpiece with that wilful smile on his face, like a cross between Olga Korbut and a Visigoth.’

  ‘But you know perfectly well he can walk the whole way alo
ng without knocking anything off,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen him do it.’

  ‘Yes, but only if he wants to. He knows I know what he can do. It’s a subtle form of blackmail.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why you call him Oedipus?’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Because he wrecks.’

  ‘Talking of blackmail,’ Atherton said firmly, turning to the patient Slider, ‘how about casting this Catriona Young in the role of suspect?’

  ‘She wasn’t blackmailing Neal. The money was his idea – his way of keeping a hold on her and the baby,’ said Slider.

  ‘So she says,’ Atherton pointed out. ‘But we’ve only got her word for it. And no jury would ever believe it. Far more likely that she wanted him to marry her, and he refused.’

  ‘I see, all women long to be married, is that it?’ Joanna enquired ironically over her shoulder. ‘God, you men are so arrogant!’

  ‘Even if she was blackmailing him,’ Slider intervened, ‘that doesn’t give her a reason to kill him. Rather the opposite.’

  ‘If what she says was true,’ Joanna said, folding up the paper now that the fire was leaping, ‘that she wanted the baby without the man, and he was trying to muscle in on the arrangement, she might well hate him.’ She moved over and sat down at Slider’s feet, leaning an elbow on his knee to aid thought. ‘A man like that would have been a real threat to her tranquillity – and the more so since he had a perfectly legitimate reason to come visiting. She’d probably feel she oughtn’t to cut the child off from its father.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ Atherton said, picking up the thread happily. ‘He wasn’t in her class. He was her bit of rough, and that was very nice thank you, but she didn’t want him hanging around the campus embarrassing her in front of her friends. Or lurking about the house with a chip on his shoulder every time she wanted to do something a bit more mentally challenging than going down the pub for a pint.’

  ‘It wasn’t a problem that was going to go away,’ Joanna said. ‘It could only get worse, as long as Neal lived.’

  ‘So she just took him out,’ Atherton concluded. ‘God, you women are so ruthless!’

  ‘Stop clowning,’ said Joanna. ‘We’re only talking about logical possibilities. The question is, is she that ruthless? She frightened you, didn’t she, Bill?’

  ‘Did she?’ Atherton asked with interest.

  ‘She struck me as a powerful and determined woman,’ Slider said doubtfully. ‘There was something about her that made me nervous.’

  ‘But then you like your women old-fashioned,’ Atherton said. ‘More to the point, has she got an alibi?’

  ‘She was at home alone all Sunday afternoon and evening. No witnesses.’

  ‘She also has a small baby,’ Joanna pointed out. ‘What would she do with that when she went out a-murdering?’

  ‘She could put it to sleep on the back seat of the car,’ Atherton said easily.

  ‘Suppose it woke up?’

  ‘She could have given it something to make it sleep.’

  ‘Oh come on!’ Joanna protested. ‘Drugging the baby while she murdered its father?’

  Atherton smiled at her. ‘These are only logical possibilities we’re talking about. But she is tempting as the suspect in one particular way – she’s a woman.’

  ‘So are Mrs Neal and Jacqui Turner.’

  ‘Yes, but Catriona Young is intelligent – would you say even ingenious, Bill? – and reads a lot of detective fiction,’ said Atherton. ‘I’ve always fancied a woman for the murderer. The cover-up was so absurdly elaborate and cruel. No man would ever think up something like that.’

  ‘Quote Kipling now,’ Joanna warned, ‘and you’re a dead man.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Slider, passing, ‘but what about this story that he phoned her on Saturday afternoon and told her that someone wanted to kill him?’

  Atherton shrugged. ‘There you are, you see – ridiculously melodramatic! Trying to set up a false trail. A mysterious warning, an unknown assailant, a deep secret in his past. All you need is the country-house weekend and the sealed room, and you’ve got the whole Cluedo set.’

  ‘The bit about having lunch with an old friend ties in with what Jacqui Turner said,’ Slider pointed out.

  ‘There’s no reason why that shouldn’t have been true. Or why she shouldn’t have known about it. She may have just decided to use it to make her own story more convincing.’

  ‘So where did he phone her from? He wasn’t at home on Saturday afternoon, and there’s no telephone in Gor-geous’s small flat.’

  ‘From the pub, before he left, perhaps,’ Atherton said.

  Joanna put in, ‘But you’ve only got the bag lady’s word for it that he went to that flat. He could have been anywhere really, couldn’t he?’

  ‘Ah, well, now we come to this afternoon’s developments,’ Atherton said. ‘We got the rest of the itemised calls in from BT. Unfortunately, none of the Sunday ones show up. They only list anything over ten units, and you get a lot of time for ten units on a Sunday, even long distance. He could have made any number of shortish calls, and we’d be none the wiser. But he did make one operator-assisted call on Sunday, at 11.17, which of course is listed. And the number belongs to the public call-box outside Gorgeous George’s car lot.’

  ‘Helen Woodman,’ said Slider happily.

  ‘Who?’ said Joanna.

  ‘The red-headed tart. That was the name she gave Gorgeous George.’

  ‘Exactly. Gorgeous George said she suddenly changed her mind about staying and handed him back the key, on Sunday morning at about half past eleven. Suppose Neal was calling her – at a prearranged time, I suppose – to agree a meet? The tart, having set him up for the murderer, has done her bit, and legs it to establish her alibi elsewhere—’

  ‘I thought you said you fancied a woman for the murderer,’ Joanna objected.

  ‘So I did,’ Atherton said benignly. ‘Well, why shouldn’t Woodman have been a friend of Catriona Young? These man-haters like to stick together, don’t they? They were probably lesbians—’

  ‘Why couldn’t they be one and the same?’ Joanna provoked back. ‘How many tall, strong, red-haired women do you want in your story?’

  ‘It’s a nice idea,’ Atherton said, ‘but the baby’s a bit of a handicap there. And what about her job? She couldn’t be absent from that for three weeks, could she?’

  ‘Gorgeous George said she wasn’t there all the time. And university lecturers have lots of time when they’re not actually teaching. Some of them only do a few tutorials a week, and the rest of the time they could be absolutely anywhere.’

  ‘This is all just fairy stories,’ Slider said, bringing them firmly down to earth. ‘We haven’t got a scrap of evidence against anyone.’

  ‘True,’ Atherton allowed. ‘But at least Catriona Young has a possible motive and no apparent alibi. We could at least have a look at her, couldn’t we? Map her movements for the last three weeks, find out if she leaves the baby with anyone, if anyone phoned her on Sunday, and so on.’

  ‘Yes, all right. I’ll send Polish down there to exercise her tact.’

  ‘Oh no, not Polish! I’m still working on her. How am I ever going to get her into bed if you keep sending her out of Town?’

  ‘Polish or no-one,’ Slider said firmly. ‘Make your mind up.’

  ‘Oh all right. Catriona Young isn’t a suspect, if you insist,’ said Atherton. ‘I’ve got something better for you, anyway. How would you like a man-eating woman with a violent and potentially jealous husband?’

  ‘Depends how attractive she is,’ Slider said judiciously.

  ‘She has a passion for mauve and purple – possibly to match her bruises – and appalling punctuation,’ said Atherton, and told them about the Collins complication.

  At the end of it, Slider said, ‘Now I really am sorry for Tricky Dicky. Good God, the man was in every sort of trouble!’

  ‘Right! He had Jacqui Turner taking a job at his off
ice and expecting him to marry her; Catriona Young with his firstborn son, refusing to marry him; his long-suffering wife forgiving him every time he came home; and the purple python with a stranglehold on his pod, threatenint to tell his best friend all about it if he didn’t perform like a man. If only he’d humped for charity,’ Atherton said, ‘he could’ve made Bob Geldof look like Attila the Hun.’

  ‘He does, a bit,’ said Joanna.

  ‘It’s no wonder his commission had dwindled to nothing,’ Slider concluded. ‘The poor man could hardly have had time to go to work.’

  ‘Oh, that’s typical,’ Joanna said. ‘Pity the man, of course. What about all the women he was deceiving?’

  ‘The only woman he was deceiving was Turner – the others knew about him.’

  ‘And he wasn’t really deceiving her,’ Atherton put in. ‘She was deceiving herself. She knew he was married, after all.’

  There was a short, appalled silence as each of them hoped neither of the others would make the connection; and Atherton hurried on, ‘And you’ve missed out one: presumably he was having to fit in the red-headed tart as well. He must have longed for death at times – it was the only way he’d get any sleep.’

  Joanna struggled only for a moment, and then laughed. ‘You are an ‘orrible bastard, Jim Atherton!’

  ‘I aim to please. But look here, Guv, this is much more promising, isn’t it?’

  ‘I thought you wanted a woman for the murderer?’ Joanna interrupted.

  ‘That was just a joke. I can’t really see a woman killing poor old Neal, especially in such a revolting way. Screw the poor bugger to death, yes, but setting him up like that in that motel room – that was the work of a nasty twisted mind, and I’d be loath to think any woman could be so beastly.’

  Joanna leaned across and patted him. ‘You’re a nice old-fashioned thing underneath, aren’t you? And quite ashamed of your snips and snails and puppy-dog tails, like all men. You all carry such a load of guilt about with you, it’s heartbreaking.’

  ‘In the case of Neal, he had plenty to feel guilty about,’ Atherton said, sidestepping the analysis. ‘Especially with Petula Collins, his friend’s wife – maybe his best friend’s wife. I think we ought to look into it, don’t you, Guv? I mean, dear old sexual jealousy is a nice, comprehensive motive; and Mrs C says that Collins and Neal used to drink together at the Shamrock Club in Fulham Palace Road, which is not a hundred miles from the motel.’