Death Watch

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I was just thinking, if you want sober analysis of the human condition, you should always ask a professional barman.’

  ‘You said it, boy,’ said Doyle.

  *

  When Detective Chief Superintendent Richard ‘God’ Head turned up at the department meeting, they all knew they were in trouble. He walked in ahead of Dickson, tall, Grecianly fair, immaculately suited, with a high enough gloss on the toecaps of his shoes to have dazzled an oncoming motorist. He strode with measured tread the length of the room, parting the throng ahead of him like Moses on a particularly good day, and Dickson surged after, massive, stony-faced and ash-strewn: a perambulating Pennine Chain smoker.

  At the far end Head turned to face them, unbuttoning his jacket with an air of being about to get down to it really seriously, chaps. Slider noted gladly that their Adonis-like leader had a slight but satisfyingly incongruous paunch.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘now we’ve got a lot to get through and not much time, so let’s get on with it. I’m not here, I’m just a fly on the wall, so I shall leave it to Detective Superintendent Dickson to conduct this meeting in his usual way. Just ignore me, everybody. George?’

  Slider winced at Head’s bonhomous smile. No-one called Dickson ‘George’ and lived. Wisps of steam drifted out of the old mountain’s ears, and the floor seemed to shift slightly underfoot.

  He began. ‘In the matter of the death and presumed murder of Richard Neal—’

  ‘Yes, now are we still presuming it’s murder?’ Head trampled in. ‘It seems to me that we’ve no evidence whatsoever that it wasn’t just an accident. Or suicide.’

  ‘There are a number of small points that are inconsistent, sir,’ Dickson said with furious patience. ‘The post mortem report suggests the hands were tied behind the back, which would be—’

  ‘May have been,’ Head interrupted. ‘Only may have been.’

  ‘And the wreckage of the room has been searched, but deceased’s car keys have not been found—’

  ‘He could have dropped them somewhere on the way to the motel. Come on, George, you’ll have to do better than that. Look, Neal was in dire financial straits, he had women chasing him right left and centre, his job was going down the toilet, the whole thing was going to blow up in his face at any minute. Isn’t it much more likely that he’d simply reached the end of his tether?’

  Someone, probably Anderson, snorted audibly at the choice of metaphor.

  ‘If he went to the motel to hang himself, sir, why did he seem so cheerful to the desk clerk? And what about the wire around the genitals?’

  ‘You can’t expect a suicide to act rationally,’ Head said blithely. ‘And there’s no knowing what sort of perversions he was used to practising. The fire team found pieces of leather straps and the remains of strop magazines in the room, which suggests he’d gone there for his own strange purposes. After all,’ he flashed a titillating smile about the room, ‘what else does a man go to a motel for? It ain’t to get a good night’s sleep, boys.’

  Only Hunt laughed, and finding himself alone in his adoration, stopped abruptly.

  ‘Now you’ve been on this over a week, and you haven’t got the sniff of a suspect,’ Head went on, ‘whereas you’ve all the evidence you need for suicide. Unless you can show me some good reason not to, I’m going to close it down. We can’t keep this sort of show running on public money for ever, you know.’

  Dickson rolled flaming eyes towards Slider. ‘Bill – let’s hear what you got this morning.’

  Slider laid out the business of the quarrel in the Shamrock Club, together with the complication of Mrs Collins’s sexual appetite. ‘We haven’t been able to interview Collins yet, to find out what happened afterwards. We’ve spoken to Mrs Collins, but she doesn’t know what time her husband got in that night, because she took a sleeping pill, and slept right through until half past nine the next morning, when she woke alone in the house.’

  ‘Why haven’t you interviewed Collins?’ Head asked restively.

  ‘He’s somewhere west of Exeter at the moment, sir. We’re still trying to find him. He’s a commercial traveller.’

  Head’s head went up, and he sighted on Slider down his nose. ‘It doesn’t sound as if you’ve got anything to go on there. Your witness says the quarrel was about money, not about the wife.’

  ‘Sir, we—’

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ Head said. He turned to Dickson. ‘My mind’s made up. Unless anything better comes in today, I’m crashing this one, George. I’m sure you’ve got far more useful things for your men to be doing. Our clear-up rate isn’t so good it can’t stand improvement. So now if we can move on to other things—’

  He swept the troops with his eye. ‘There’ve been quite a few complaints from members of the public that break-in reports are not being followed up quickly enough. Now I’m sure you all realise that this is the very area where the public has most opportunity to get a good look at us and how we work …’

  Slider avoided looking at Dickson, as one might look away from a nasty road accident. The fly on the wall, he thought ferociously, had a hell of a lot to say for itself.

  Atherton arrived chez Château Rat in the middle of what was obviously a row. There was a car on the hard standing – a Ford Orion in the colour known to the trade as Gan Green, with a sticker in the back window which said If you can read this you re TOO BLOODY CLOSE – which told him that the master was home even before he got near enough to the purple door to hear the raised voices inside. The door chimes cut the quarrel short, and a moment later the door was opened abruptly by a furious scowl.

  ‘David Collins?’ Atherton said pleasantly, flashing his brief. The scowl disappeared, leaving behind it only a wary expression on the very tired face of a man in his mid-fifties. He was a five-niner with enough body to have gone round a six-footer comfortably, and Atherton guessed from the meat across his shoulders that he had once gone in for weight training – a grave mistake when the greatest weight you were ever going to handle in real life was a pint pot. A pint of cold water weighs a pound-and-a-quarter, a junior school memory chanted from the back of his mind. Plus the weight of the glass, and it added up to a lot of muscle going rapidly to seed.

  There was also the sneaky, soft, middle and lower spread of the long-distance car-driver, and the fullness of jowl of the beer drinker and travelling eater. A man away from the disciplines of home had no reason not to eat chips which was anywhere near as strong as his reasons for doing so.

  That apart, Collins was not a bad-looking man, with strong features, a good mouth, and curly grey hair. Atherton guessed that until recently he had looked much less than his age. Now, however, he looked exhausted, and there was something about his eyes and the lines around his mouth that suggested recent shock or pain.

  ‘That’s me,’ he said, in a voice without inflexion. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’d like to speak to you for a few minutes, sir, if that’s all right?’

  The hand gripping the door forbiddingly high up tightened a little, but Collins did not move to allow him in. ‘What about?’ he said in the same flat voice. Behind him in the passage Mrs Collins appeared with a handkerchief to her face, saw Atherton, and ducked back whence she had come. Collins must have seen the reflection of it in Atherton’s eyes, for a look of faint annoyance flickered through his face, and he said, ‘Was it you came round here yesterday, bothering my wife?’

  ‘Yes. But it was really you I wanted to see,’ Atherton said blandly. ‘Could I come in, do you think? Unless you really want to talk to me on the doorstep?’

  For a moment a number of possibilities seemed to be being debated inside Dave Collins’s grey head, not all of which would have entailed Atherton’s getting to draw his pension one day. Atherton felt the slight quickening of his pulses, caught that faint prickly whiff of adrenalin on the air, which always reminded him of the first time as a child he had seen the lion-tamer’s act at t
he circus. You knew, really, that the lions wouldn’t eat the tamer; and yet there was always the distant, intriguing possibility …

  ‘Come in,’ said Collins at last, stepping backwards. He retreated a few steps up the passage and opened the door to the room at the front of the house, standing just beyond it so that there was no alternative route for Atherton. ‘In here.’ It was the sitting-room, and had the same stiffness and cold smell of unuse it would have had in Victorian times. Atherton entered obediently, and Collins turned his head over his shoulder to yell simply, ‘Pet! Make some tea!’ Then he shut the door behind him, closing himself and Atherton in the cage together.

  ‘Well?’ Collins said unhelpfully.

  ‘I want to talk to you about your friend Dick Neal, Mr Collins,’ said Atherton. ‘I suppose you must have heard about his death by now?’

  Collins took the time to gesture Atherton to sit, and sat down himself on the chair opposite. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Pet told me. Died in a hotel fire, didn’t he?’

  ‘Mr Collins, you may have been one of the last people to see Dick Neal alive. It would be very helpful if you’d tell me exactly what happened on Sunday evening.’ Collins made a non-committal shrugging movement, and Atherton went on, ‘I understand you met in the Shamrock Club. Was that by arrangement?’

  An extra degree of weariness seemed to enter Collins’s face. ‘You’ve been down there asking questions, have you?’ he said. ‘Well then, you know all about it, don’t you?’

  ‘I know you and Mr Neal had a quarrel—’

  ‘Oh God!’ It was an appeal both weary and angry. Collins laid his hands on his knees and leaned forward, searching Atherton’s face. ‘You’re not going to try and make something out of that, are you? Look, I’ll tell you the absolute truth, and I hope to God you believe me, because you don’t look stupid. Dick and me were pals. I was probably his oldest friend – maybe his only real friend, because he didn’t have the knack of keeping them, I’ll tell you that for nothing! And yes, we did have a bit of a barney down the club, but it wasn’t serious. We often used to argue. It didn’t mean anything.’

  ‘Yes, someone else has said that,’ Atherton said soothingly. A brief but enormous relief flickered through Collins’s face, which Atherton noted with interest. Just tell me exactly what happened on Sunday.’

  ‘All right.’ He seemed to have decided to take the plunge. His words became more fluent, and the deadness went out of his voice as he talked. ‘Dick was supposed to meet me Sunday night at The Wellington to give me back some money he owed me—’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Hundred quid. He borrowed if off me nearly three weeks before, but every time I asked for it back he made some excuse. Well, a century may not be a lot to you, but it was to me, and Dick knew it. That’s what I mean by not keeping his friends. He wasn’t a bad bloke, just careless. He earned twice or three times what I did, and he didn’t have a bitch of an ex-wife and two kids sucking his blood, but he kept me waiting for that cash week after week.’

  ‘So you arranged this meeting with him – how?’

  ‘I telephoned him at his office Friday morning, asked him when I was going to see the money. Then it was more excuses – he couldn’t meet me Friday because of work, he couldn’t meet me Saturday because he was seeing some old friend he hadn’t seen for yonks, he couldn’t meet me Sunday because he was going away up north. Handing out all the usual old toffee. I wasn’t having it. I told him he had to meet me Sunday night, latest, because I had to have the money for Monday for a particular reason.’

  ‘Your wife’s birthday,’ Atherton suggested.

  Collins looked surprised, and then a spot of colour flamed in his cheeks. ‘Right. You know all about it, I see. Yes, I wanted to buy my wife a present. Anything wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Atherton said soothingly, wondering at the reaction. ‘Please go on.’

  Collins looked at him suspiciously for a moment, and then continued. ‘Well, I arranged to meet him in The Wellington at half past seven, but he never showed. I rang his house, but his wife answered, so I put the phone down. I knew he’d gone, because if he was in he never let her touch the phone. So then I started looking for him. I knew the places he drank. And when I finally ran him down in the Shamrock, having a whale of a time with some tart on his arm, it turns out he’d forgotten all about our arrangement.’

  His face darkened with anger at the memory. ‘Not so much as an apology. “Come and have a drink, join the party,” he says. “Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” he says. So I said, not on my hundred quid you don’t, or you’ll die tonight, never mind tomorrow.’

  He heard himself, stopped short, and then eyed Atherton defiantly.

  ‘All right, I said that, but it’s just a figure of speech. I didn’t mean anything by it. When I heard what happened to him – 1 could have bitten my tongue out. But I’m telling you, because I suppose some other bugger will if I don’t.’

  ‘It’s all right. Go on,’ Atherton said. ‘Just tell me what happened, in your own words.’

  Collins stared a moment, then shrugged. ‘Then he says he hasn’t got it, just like that. So that’s how it started. We had a row, and I called him some things I’d been thinking up over the past three weeks. To see him sitting there with his arm round that tart, spending money on her like water, while Charlie Muggins here sat around in The Wellington waiting for him, nursing a pint because that’s all I had the cash for! And then when he said he couldn’t pay me back—!’

  ‘You could have killed him,’ Atherton finished for him.

  Collins drooped. ‘Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘All right, I’ve got a temper, I don’t deny it, but I wouldn’t hurt a fly. And Dick Neal was my friend. He was a selfish, thoughtless bastard, but he was still my friend. I’d never have laid a finger on him.’

  Atherton nodded non-committally. ‘What happened afterwards? You were told to leave the bar, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, we were chucked out. But it was all over by then anyway. We’d been shouting at each other, and then we suddenly realised what idiots we were making of ourselves, and started to calm down. By the time we got up into the street, we were more or less back to normal. So I said, why not come back to my place for a drink or two—’

  ‘What time would that be?’

  ‘I don’t know, about ten, half past ten. I didn’t look at my watch.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, Dick said okay, and he’d go and fetch Helen – this bird. I’d forgotten about her – she pissed off to the loo when we started the shouting match – so I said something like, “Oh, can’t you get rid of her?” I wanted a quiet drink, you see, just the two of us. But he put on this silly smile and said no he couldn’t get rid of her, and said some other stupid stuff, and to cap—’

  ‘What stupid stuff? What did he say exactly?’

  Collins seemed to be embarrassed by it. ‘He said, well, he said “I’ll never leave her as long as I live”. And this was some piece of skirt he’d only picked up five minutes ago! Then he calmly proposed bringing her back to my place. Said she’d be company for Pet. Well, I just lost my temper with him then. I wasn’t having him talk about my wife like that. I – I called him a few names, and stormed off. And that’s the last I saw of him.’

  ‘You’re sure you didn’t take a swing at him as well?’

  ‘I told you, I wouldn’t hurt a fly. It was just that he made me mad, talking about Pet like that when—’

  ‘When what?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Collins said sullenly.

  ‘But you took a swing at your wife when you got home that evening, didn’t you? She had the remains of a pretty nice black eye when I called yesterday. Isn’t the reason you got mad at Neal that you knew he was having an affair with your wife?’

  Collins came to his feet so quickly that Atherton was rapidly revising his previous assessment from weight training to boxing, when the door opened and Pet Collins came in with a tray of teacu
ps. Perfect timing, he thought with relief – or had she been listening at the door? She looked apprehensively from one to the other, and the cups chattered in the saucers as she stood in the doorway. She had renewed her makeup while the kettle was boiling, but her eyes were red and swollen, as was the end of her nose.

  Atherton got up, too, and took the tray from her. ‘Thank you, Mrs Collins,’ he said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Do you want biscuits?’ she asked, trying for a normal tone of voice and getting it half right.

  ‘Not for me, thanks,’ Atherton said, blandly social.

  ‘All right, Pet, wait in the kitchen,’ Collins said sharply with a jerk of his head, and she went with automatic obedience. Atherton kept hold of the tea tray, on the principle that no man could hit a chap thus encumbered, and after a moment Collins sat down again, and slumped back in his chair wearily. ‘Bloody tea and biscuits,’ he said. ‘Like a bloody church social.’

  Atherton put down the tray on the coffee table and sat too, took a cup, and sipped, watching Collins carefully. After deep thought, he seemed to rouse himself. He looked tired and strained, with the pallor of someone who has been forced to stay awake for much too long on the trot.

  ‘If you know about Dick and Pet, you probably know all you need to know about what sort of a man he was,’ he said. ‘We were mates; I’d have done anything for him, and he knew it, but still he couldn’t resist the chance to bang my wife. I think sometimes he had a bit missing up here.’ He tapped his temple significantly. ‘He was mad for women. Couldn’t keep away from them. It was like a disease with him. If it moved, he’d have it. He didn’t seem to care about the risk, or who got hurt.’

  ‘Did he know you knew?’

  Collins shook his head with weary disgust. ‘There was no point. It wouldn’t have stopped him. It would just have meant I’d’ve had to have a scene with him, and I didn’t want that. Anyway, I don’t doubt it was as much Pet as him, in this case. She’s – well, I won’t go into that. But Dick – since I first met him, he seemed to have this thing about women. It was almost like he couldn’t help himself. And it didn’t even seem to make him happy.’