Orchestrated Death

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Atherton said quickly, answering the thought behind the words. ‘She doesn’t seem to have been touched at all. But the doc’s in there now.’

  ‘Oh well, let’s have a look,’ Slider said wearily.

  Apart from the foul taste in his mouth and the ferment in his bowels, he had a small but gripping pain in the socket behind his right eye, and he longed inexpressibly for untroubled sleep. Atherton on the other hand, who had shared his debauch and presumably been up before him, looked not only fresh and healthy, but happy, with the intent and eager expression of a sheepdog on its way up into the hills. Slider could only trust that age and marriage would catch up with him, too, one day.

  He found the flat gloomy and depressing in the unnatural glare from the spotlight on the roof opposite – installed to deter vandals, he supposed. ‘The electricity’s off, of course,’ Atherton said, producing his torch. Boy scout, thought Slider savagely. In the room itself DC Hunt was holding another torch, illuminating the scene for the police surgeon, Freddie Cameron, who nodded a greeting and silently gave Slider place beside the victim.

  She was lying on her left side with her back to the wall, her legs drawn up, her left arm folded with its hand under her head. Her dark hair, cut in a long pageboy bob, fell over her face and neck. Slider could see why Cosgrove thought she wasn’t a resident. She was what pathologists describe as ‘well-nourished’: her flesh was sleek and unblemished, her hair and skin had the indefinable sheen of affluence that comes from a well-balanced protein-based diet. She also had an expensive tan, which left a white bikini-mark over her hips.

  Slider picked up her right hand. It was icy cold, but still flexible: a strong, long-fingered, but curiously ugly hand, the fingernails cut so short that the flesh of the fingertips bulged a little round them. The cuticles were well-kept and there were no marks or scratches. He put the hand down and drew the hair back from the face. She looked about twenty-five – perhaps younger, for her cheek still had the full and blooming curve of extreme youth. Small straight nose, full mouth, with a short upper lip which showed the white edge of her teeth. Strongly marked dark brows, and below them a semicircle of black eyelashes brushing the curve of her cheekbone. Her eyes were closed reposefully. Death, though untimely, had come to her quietly, like sleep.

  He lifted her shoulder carefully to raise her a little against the hideously papered wall. Her small, unripe breasts were no paler than her shoulders – wherever she had sunbathed last year, it had been topless. Her body had the slender tautness of unuse; below her flat golden belly, the stripe of white flesh looked like velvet. He had a sudden vision of her, strutting along a foreign beach under an expensive sun, carelessly self-conscious as a young foal, all her life before her, and pleasure still something that did not surprise her. An enormous, unwanted pity shook him; the dark raspberry nipples seemed to reproach him like eyes, and he let her subside into her former position, and abruptly walked away to let Cameron take his place.

  He walked around the rest of the flat. There were three bedrooms, living-room, kitchen, bathroom and WC. The whole place was stripped bare, and had been swept clean. No litter of tramps and children, hardly even any dust. He remembered the grittiness of the stairs outside and sighed. There would be nothing here for them, no footprints, no fingerprints, no material evidence. What had become of her clothes and handbag? He felt already a sense of unpleasant anxiety about this business. It was too well organised, too professional. And the wallpaper in each room was more depressing than the last.

  Atherton appeared at the door, startling him. ‘Dr Cameron wants you, guv.’

  Freddie Cameron looked up as Slider came in. ‘No sign of a struggle. No visible wounds. No apparent marks or bruises.’

  ‘A fine upstanding body of negatives,’ Slider said. ‘What does that leave? Heart? Drugs?’

  ‘Give me a chance,’ Cameron grumbled. ‘I can’t see anything in this bloody awful light. I can’t find a puncture, but it’s probably narcotics – look at the pupils.’ He let the eyelids roll back, and picked up the arms one by one, peering at the soft crook of the elbow. ‘No sign of usage or abusage. Of course you can see from the general condition that she wasn’t an addict. Could have taken something by mouth, I suppose, but where’s the container?’

  ‘Where are her clothes, for the matter of that,’ said Slider. ‘Unless she walked up here in the nude, I think we can rule out suicide. Someone was obviously here.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Cameron said drily. ‘I can’t help you much, Bill, until I can examine her by a good light. My guess is an overdose, probably by mouth, though I may find a puncture wound. No marks on her anywhere at all, except for the cuts, and they were inflicted post mortem.’

  ‘Cuts?’

  ‘On the foot.’ Cameron gestured. Slider hunkered down and stared. He had not noticed before, but the softly curled palm of her foot had been marked with two deep cuts, roughly in the shape of a T. They had not bled, only oozed a little, and the blood had set darkly. Left foot only – the right was unmarked. The pads of the small toes rimmed the foot like fat pink pearls. Slider began to feel very bad indeed.

  ‘Time of death?’ he managed to say.

  ‘Eight hours, very roughly. Rigor’s just starting. I’ll have a better idea when it starts to pass off.’

  ‘About ten last night, then?’ Slider stared at the body with deep perplexity. Her glossy skin was so out of place against the background of that disgusting wallpaper. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said aloud.

  Cameron put his hand on Slider’s shoulder comfortingly. ‘There is no sign of forcible sexual penetration,’ he said.

  Slider managed to smile. ‘Anyone else would simply have said rape.’

  ‘Language, my dear Bill, is a tool – not a blunt instrument. Anyway, I’ll be able to confirm it after the post. She’ll be as stiff as a board by this afternoon. Let me see – I can do it Friday afternoon, about four-ish, if it’s passed off by then. I’ll let you know, in case you want to come. Nice-looking kid. I wonder who she is? Someone must be missing her. Ah, here’s the photographer. Oh, it’s you, Sid. No lights. I hope you’ve got yours with you, dear boy, because it’s as dark as a mole’s entry in here.’

  Sid got to work, complaining uniformly about the conditions as a bee buzzes about its work. Cameron turned the body over so that he could get some mugshots, and as the brown hair slid away from the face, Slider leaned forward with sudden interest.

  ‘Hullo, what’s that mark on her neck?’

  It was large and roughly round, about the size of a half-crown, an area of darkened and roughened skin about halfway down the left side of the neck; ugly against the otherwise flawless whiteness.

  ‘It looks like a bloody great lovebite,’ Sid said boisterously. ‘I wouldn’t mind giving her one meself.’ He had captured for police posterity some gruesome objects in his time, including a suicide-by-hanging so long undiscovered that only its clothes were holding it together. Decomposing corpses held no horrors for him, but Slider was interested to note that something about this one’s nude composure had unnerved the photographer too, making him overcompensate.

  ‘Is it a bruise? Or a burn – a chloroform burn or something like that?’

  ‘Oh no, it isn’t a new mark,’ Cameron said. ‘It’s more like a callus – see the pigmentation, where something’s rubbed there – and some abnormal hair growth, too, look, here. Whatever it is, it’s chronic’

  ‘Chronic? I’d call it bloody ugly,’ Sid said.

  ‘I mean it’s been there a long time,’ Cameron explained kindly. ‘Can you get a good shot of it? Good. All right, then, Bill – seen all you want? Let’s get her out of here, then. I’m bloody cold.’

  A short while later, having seen the body lifted onto a stretcher, covered and removed, Cameron paused on his way out to say to Slider, ‘I suppose you’ll want to have the prints and dental records toot sweet! Not that her teeth’ll tell you much – a near perfect set. Fluoride has a lot to
answer for.’

  ‘Thanks Freddie,’ Slider said absently. Someone must be missing her Parents, flatmates, boyfriend – certainly, surely, a boyfriend? He stared at the bare and dirty room: Why here, for heaven’s sake?

  ‘The fingerprint boys are here, guv,’ Atherton said in his ear, jerking him back from the darkness.

  ‘Right. Start Hunt and Hope on taking statements,’ Slider said. ‘Not that anyone will have seen anything, of course – not here.’

  The long grind begins, he thought. Questions and statements, hundreds of statements, and nearly all of them would boil down to the Three Wise Monkeys, or another fine regiment of negatives.

  In detective novels, he thought sadly, there was always someone who, having just checked his watch against the Greenwich Time Signal, glanced out of the window and saw the car with the memorable numberplate being driven off by a tall one-legged red-headed man with a black eyepatch and a zigzag scar down the left cheek. I could tell ’e wasn’t a gentleman, Hinspector, ’cause ’e was wearing brown boots.

  ‘Might be a good idea to get Cosgrove onto taking statements,’ Atherton was saying. ‘At least he speaks the lingo.’

  CHAPTER 2

  All Quiet on the Western Avenue

  A grey sky, which Slider had thought was simply pre-dawn greyness, settled in for the day, and resolved itself into a steady, cold and sordid rain.

  ‘All life is at its lowest ebb in January,’ Atherton said. ‘Except, of course, in Tierra del Fuego, where they’re miserable all year round. Cheese salad or ham salad?’ He held up a roll in each hand and wiggled them a little, like a conjurer demonstrating his bona fides.

  Slider looked at them doubtfully. ‘Is that the ham I can see hanging out of the side?’

  Atherton tilted the roll to inspect it, and the pink extrusion flapped dismally, like a ragged white vest which had accidentally been washed in company with a red teeshirt. ‘Well, yes,’ he admitted. ‘All right, then,’ he conceded, ‘cheese salad or rubber salad?’

  ‘Cheese salad.’

  ‘I was afraid you’d say that. I never thought you were the sort to pull rank, guv,’ Atherton grumbled, passing it across. ‘Funny how the act of making sandwiches brings out the Calvinist in us. If you enjoy it, it must be sinful.’ He looked for a moment at the bent head and sad face of his superior. ‘I could make you feel good about the rolls,’ he offered gently. ‘I could tell you about the pork pies.’

  The corner of Slider’s mouth twitched in response, but only briefly. Atherton let him be, and went on with his lunch and his newspaper. They had made a para in the lunchtime Standard:

  The body of a naked woman has been discovered in an empty flat on the White City Estate in West London. The police are investigating.

  Short and nutty, he thought. He was going to pass it over to Slider, and then decided against disturbing his brown study. He knew Slider well, and knew Irene as well as he imagined anyone would ever want to, and guessed that she had been giving him a hard time last night. Irene, he thought, was an excellent deterrent to his getting married.

  Atherton led a happy bachelor life in a dear little terraced artisan’s cottage in what Yuppies nowadays called West Hampstead – the same kind of logic as referring to Battersea as South Chelsea. It had two rooms up and two down, with the kitchen extended into the tiny, high-walled garden, and the whole thing had been modernised and upmarketised to the point where its original owners entering it through a time warp would have apologised hastily and backed out tugging their forelocks.

  Here he lived with a ruggedly handsome black ex-tomcat called, unimaginatively, Oedipus; and used the lack of space as an excuse not to get seriously involved with any of his succession of girlfriends. He fell in love frequently, but never for very long, which he realised was a reprehensible trait in him. But the conquest was all – once he had them, he lost interest.

  Apart from Oedipus, the person in life he loved best was probably Slider. It was certainly the most important and permanent relationship he’d had in adult life, and in some ways it was like a marriage. They spent a lot of time in each other’s company, were forced to get on together and work together for a common end. Atherton knew himself to be a bit of a misfit in the force – a whizz kid without the whizz. He thought of himself as a career man, a go-getter, keen on advancement, but he knew his intellectual curiosity was against him. He was too well read, too interested in the truth for its own sake, too little inclined to tailor his efforts to the results that were either possible or required. He would never be groomed for stardom – he left unlicked those things which he ought to have licked, and there was no grace in him.

  In that respect he resembled Slider, but for different reasons. Slider was dogged, thorough, painstaking, because it was in his nature to be: he was no intellectual gazelle. But Atherton not only admired Slider as a good policeman and a good man, he also liked him, was even fond of him; and he felt that Slider, who was reserved and didn’t make friends easily, depended on him, both on his judgement and his affection. It was a good relationship, and it worked well, and if it weren’t for Irene, he thought they would have been even closer.

  Irene disliked Atherton for taking up her husband’s time which she felt ought to be spent with her. He thought she probably suspected him vaguely of leading Bill astray and keeping him out late deliberately on wild debauches. God knew he would have done given the chance! The fact that Slider could have married someone like Irene was a fundamental mark against him which Atherton sometimes had difficulty in dismissing. It also meant that their relationship was restricted mainly to work, which might or might not have been a good thing.

  Slider looked up, feeling Atherton’s eyes on him. Slider was a smallish man, with a mild, fair face, blue eyes, and thick, soft, rather untidy brown hair. Jane Austen – of whom amongst others Atherton was a devotee – might have said Slider had a sweetness of expression. Atherton thought that was because his face was a clear window on his character, which was one of the things Atherton liked about him. In a dark and tangled world, it was good to know one person who was exactly what he seemed to be: a decent, kindly, honest, hard-working man, perhaps a little overconscientious. Slider’s faint, worried frown was the outward sign of his inner desire to compensate personally for all the shortcomings of the world. Atherton felt sometimes protective towards him, sometimes irritable: he felt that a man who was so little surprised at the wickedness of others ought surely to be less puzzled by it.

  ‘What’s up, guv?’ he asked. ‘You look hounded.’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about the girl. Seeing her in my mind’s eye.’

  ‘You’ve seen corpses before. At least this one wasn’t mangled.’

  ‘It’s the incongruity,’ Slider said reluctantly, knowing that he didn’t really know what it was that was bothering him. ‘A girl like her, in a place like that. Why would anyone want to murder her there of all places?’

  ‘We don’t know it was murder,’ Atherton said.

  ‘She could hardly have walked up there stark naked and let herself in without someone seeing her,’ Slider pointed out. Atherton gestured with his head towards the pile of statements Slider had been sifting through.

  ‘She walked up there at some point without being seen. Unless all those residents are lying. Which is entirely possible. Most people seem to lie to us automatically. Like shouting at foreigners.’

  Slider sighed and pushed the pile with his hands. ‘I don’t see how any of them could have had anything to do with it. Unless it was robbery from the person – and who takes all the clothes, right down to the underwear?’

  ‘A second-hand clothes dealer?’

  Slider ignored him. ‘Anyway, the whole thing’s too thorough. Everything that might have identified her removed. The whole place swept clean, the door knobs wiped. The only prints in the whole place are the kid’s on the front-door knob. Someone went to a lot of trouble.’

  Atherton grunted. ‘There are no signs of a struggle, and no so
unds of one according to the neighbours. Couldn’t it have been an accident? Maybe she went there with a boyfriend for a bit of sex-and-drugs naughtiness, and something went wrong. Boom – she’s dead! Boyfriend’s left with a very difficult corpse to explain. So he strips her, cleans the place up, takes her clothes and handbag, and bunks.’

  ‘And cuts her foot?’

  ‘She might have done that any time – stepped on the broken glass from the front door for instance.’

  ‘In the shape of the letter T? Anyway, they were postmortem cuts.’

  ‘Oh – yeah, I’d forgotten. Well, she might have been killed somewhere else, and taken up there naked in a black plastic sack.’

  ‘Well, she might,’ Slider said, but only because he was essentially fair-minded.

  Atherton grinned. ‘Thanks. She’s not very big, you know. A well-built man could have carried her. Everyone indoors watching telly – he could just pick his moment to walk up the stairs. Dump her, walk down again.’

  ‘He’d have to arrive in a car of some sort.’

  ‘Who looks at cars?’ Atherton shrugged. ‘In a place like that – ideal, really, for your average murderer. In an ordinary street, people know each other’s cars, they look out of the window, they know what their neighbours look like at least. But with a common yard, people are coming and going all the time. It’s a thoroughfare. And all the living-room windows are at the back, remember. It would be easy not to be noticed.’

  Slider shook his head. ‘I know all that. I just don’t see why anyone would go to all that trouble. No, it’s got a bad smell to it, this one. A setup. She was enticed there by the killer, murdered, and then all traces were removed to prevent her from being identified.’

  ‘But why cut her foot?’

  ‘That’s the part I hate most of all,’ Slider grimaced.

  ‘ “I don’t know nothin’ I hate so much as a cut toe,” ’ Atherton said absently.

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Quotation. Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath’