There were plenty of people in the department, he thought as he wielded the hairdryer, who would be happy to clamber a step higher up the ladder by treading on the head of anyone else, however much they liked them, who seemed not to have his entire mind on his job. And Slider, as Atherton was aware, had been passed over for promotion before because of department politics. All in all, it behoved Atherton to get his head down and produce something to show up at the next meeting, because so far they seemed to have got precisely nowhere.
He dressed, checked quickly under the bed – Oedipus had departed, leaving only a forlorn scrap of grey fur – and went off to St Thomas’s to try to intercept Helen Morris as she came off duty.
Slider was woken by Kate spilling tea onto his chest as she climbed onto the bed balancing a mug.
‘Time to get up, Daddy,’ she said, her bubblegum-sweet breath stertorous with the effort of retaining at least some of the tea within the mug. Slider elbowed himself sufficiently upright to field it before she scalded him again.
‘Thank you, sweetheart,’ he said dopily, and tried for the sake of her feelings to sip. It had been one hell of a session last night. He felt as though he had only just gone to sleep. He felt as though he had been beaten all over, and he had a smoke-headache and a dire feeling of oppression in his sinuses. He abandoned the attempt at creative parenthood, put the mug on the bedside table and flopped back onto the pillows with a groan.
‘You mustn’t go back to sleep, Daddy – you’ve got to get up,’ Kate said severely. She eyed him curiously like a bird eyeing a wormhole. ‘Were you drunk last night?’
‘Of course not,’ Slider mumbled. ‘Why d’you say that?’
‘Mummy thought you were.’
He opened one eye. ‘She didn’t say that,’ he said with some assurance. Kate shrugged her birdlike shoulders.
‘She didn’t say so, but I bet that’s what she thought anyway. She’s cross about something, and she said you were very late coming home, and when Chantal’s Dad comes home late he’s usually drunk.’
‘You think too much,’ Slider said. ‘Anyway, I was working, not drinking. You know, don’t you, that I have to work funny hours sometimes?’ She shrugged, unconvinced, and opened her mouth to deliver more opinions. Desperate to deflect her, Slider said unguardedly, ‘What are you going to do today?’
The already opened mouth dropped still further in amazement at his stupidity. ‘But it’s the school fair today,’ she said with huge and patient emphasis, like a nurse in a home for the senile. ‘I’m going to be on a stall I’m going to be a Mister Man. Mummy’s made me a costume and everything]’
‘Oh, is that today?’ Slider said feebly.
Kate sighed heavily, blowing a strand of sticky, light-brown hair across her face. ‘Of course it’s today. You know it is,’ she said inexorably.
‘I thought it was next week,’ Slider said with a growing sense of doom.
‘Well it isn’t.’ She eyes him suspiciously. ‘You are coming, aren’t you?’
‘Darling, I can’t. I’ve got to go to work.’
Violent despair contorted her features. ‘But Daddy, you promised!’ she wailed.
‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I can’t help it. I’ve got an important case on at the moment, and I just have to go in to work. It’s a murder case – you know what that is, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do. I’m not stupid,’ she said crossly. ‘But you don’t really have to go, do you? Not all day?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Is that why Mummy’s cross?’
‘I don’t think she knows yet,’ Slider said weakly. ‘Get off the bed, darling, I have to go to the bathroom.’
‘I bet she doesn’t know,’ Kate said with relish, bounced off the bed and hared off downstairs, a delighted harbinger of doom. Blast the child, Slider thought as he plodded what felt like uphill to the bathroom. He urinated, stood for a pleasurable moment or two scratching himself, and then started to run a bath. The running water made so much noise he didn’t hear Irene behind him until she spoke.
‘Is it true?’
‘Is what true?’ he temporised.
‘Kate says you’ve got to work today.’ Her voice was icy, and he turned to see how bad it was. It was bad. Her lips were thin and white, which made her look five years older than her true age. It was an unlovely expression, he thought, on any woman. He felt around in his mind for a moment for guilt, and could find nothing new there, only the familiar old sorts with which he was almost comfortable. Joanna was there, but as a loosely woven, shining net of pleasure, and the glow coming off the thoughts of her seemed to be protecting him from feeling anything bad about it.
‘I’m afraid so,’ he said, and drew breath to add some extenuating detail, but she was in first.
‘I’m surprised you bothered to come home at all,’ she said bitterly. ‘It hardly seems worth it. Why don’t you move in with Atherton? At least you won’t disturb him coming in all hours of the night – especially if it’s him you’re sitting up drinking with.’
Slider allowed himself a touch of impatience. ‘Oh come on! I wasn’t drinking last night, as you know perfectly well. I was working. I told you the old lady, the only witness in this blasted case, was found dead. You know how much work that means. And,’ he added, managing to work up a bit of momentum. ‘I think it’s a bit much for you to go telling Kate I came in drunk.’
He thought the false accusation would sidetrack her, but she only said with deep irony, ‘And now I suppose you’ve got to go in again?’
‘Yes, I’ve got to,’ he returned her words defiantly.
‘And you couldn’t possibly have told me earlier, of course?’
‘No, of course I couldn’t. I didn’t know earlier, did I?’
‘You realise that it’s Kate’s fair today. Of course, she’s only been looking forward to it for weeks.’
‘Well, I can’t see that that -’
‘And that Matthew’s playing in the match today. His first chance in the school team. Which you said you were so proud of.’
‘Oh God, is that today as well? I’d forgotten -’
‘Yes, you’re good at forgetting things like that, aren’t you? Things to do with your home and family. Unimportant things – like the fact that you were supposed to take Kate and me to the fair and then take Matthew on to the match. You forgot that you were supposed to be here for a change.’
‘Well I can’t help it, can I?’ he defended himself automatically. ‘What do you want me to do, tell Division I’m busy?’
Irene never answered inconvenient questions. ‘One day,’ she said bitterly. ‘Just one day. Is that so much to ask? Of course I wouldn’t expect you to do anything for me, but I would have thought you could spare a few hours for your children, when they’ve been looking forward to it so much. But you’re much too busy. I should have expected it.’
‘It’s my job, for God’s sake!’ he cried, goaded.
‘Your job,’ she said in tones of withering scorn.
‘It’s an important case -’
‘So you say. But I’ll bet you one thing – it won’t get you anywhere. It won’t get you promoted. And shall I tell you why? Because you run around like their little dog, working all the hours God sends, at their beck and call, and they don’t respect you for it, oh no! They’re going to keep you down because you’re too useful for them to promote you!’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Irene, do you think I’d do it if it wasn’t necessary? Do you think I like going to work on a Saturday?’
Suddenly things changed. Her face, taut with anger, seemed to loosen. She was no longer playing a part in her own personal soap opera: she looked at him for once as though she really saw him; she looked at him with a sadness of disillusion which hurt him unbearably.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think you do. I think you prefer working at any time to being with us.’
It was too close to the truth. He stared at her helplessly, wanting to reach o
ut his hands to her, but it was too long since they had touched habitually for the gesture to be possible without intolerable exposure. If he reached out and she rejected him, it would hurt both of them too much. The distance they had established between them was the optimum for being able to continue living together, and this was not the moment to change the parameters.
‘Oh Irene,’ was all he managed to say from the depths of his pity.
‘Don’t,’ she said abruptly, and went away.
Slider sat down on the rim of the bath and stared at his hands, and longed suddenly and fiercely for Joanna, for someone not filled to the brim with obscure and irremediable hurt. He remembered Atherton once saying that the best thing you could give to someone you loved was the ability to please you. He didn’t know where Atherton got it from, but it was true. He loved Joanna not least because he could so easily give her pleasure; but he was not so naive that he didn’t know that might easily be true of the beginning of any affair.
Sighing, he rose and got on with his shaving and bathing and dressing, thinking about the Irene problem and the Joanna not-problem in uncoordinated bursts, while the back of his mind leafed endlessly through the documents of the case. His mind was like Snow White’s apple, one half sweet, one half poisoned.
‘Miss Morris?’
‘You must be Sergeant Atherton. They rang me from downstairs to say you wanted to see me.’
Helen Morris was plump and pretty with friendly dark eyes and neat, short brown hair. She had the deliciously scrubbed-clean look of all nurses, and dark shadows under her eyes which could be the result of night-duty, Atherton supposed. On the other hand, he had already made enquiries downstairs before he came up to this floor, which put him at an advantage over the weary nurse.
‘I’m sorry to make your working day longer, but I wanted to talk to you alone,’ he said, giving her a disarming, non-alarming smile.
She didn’t respond. ‘I don’t like doing things behind Simon’s back,’ she said.
Atherton smiled ever more genially. ‘It’s purely a matter of routine – independent confirmation, that’s all.’
She put her head up a little. ‘I’ve complete confidence in Simon. He had nothing whatever to do with – with what happened to Anne-Marie.’
‘Well that’s all right then, isn’t it?’ Atherton said blandly, turning as if to walk with her along the corridor.
Finding she seemed to have agreed to it, she shrugged and went along. ‘I must have a cup of coffee,’ she stipulated.
‘Fine. We can talk in the canteen.’
They walked along the wakening corridors and into the canteen, which was filled with the hollow, swimming-bath sounds of a half-empty public place early in the morning. There was a pleasant smell of frying bacon, and the bad-breath smell of instant coffee. A number of nurses were breakfasting, but there were plenty of empty tables to enable them to sit out of earshot of anyone else. Atherton bought two coffees, and sat down opposite her across the smeared melamine.
‘I suppose you know why I’m here,’ he began, working on the principle of letting people put their own feet in it first.
She shrugged, stirring her coffee with an appearance of calm indifference. He admired her nerve; though he supposed that after a night in the operating theatre, anything that happened out here might seem tame. On the other hand, she had a full and sexy mouth which just now was set in lines of discontent, and the attitude of her body as she leaned on one elbow seemed expressive not only of tiredness but also unhappiness.
‘How well did you know Anne-Marie Austen?’ he began.
‘Hardly at all. I saw her backstage a few times, and once or twice she was in a group of us that went for a drink after a concert – that sort of thing. I knew her to speak to, that’s all.’
‘She wasn’t a particular friend of your boyfriend’s?’
She had lifted her cup two-handed to her lips, and now made a small face of distaste and put the cup down without drinking. Now was that the coffee, or his question?
‘I knew about her and Simon in Italy, if that’s what you’re getting at.’
‘Someone told you?’
‘These things have a way of getting about in an orchestra.’
‘Did you mind about it?’
She looked at him with a flash of anger. ‘Of course I minded. What do you think? But there was nothing I could do about it, was there?’ He kept his silence, and after a moment she went on, ‘You may as well know – she wasn’t the first.’ She smiled unconvincingly. ‘Musicians are like that. It’s the stress of the job. They do things on tour that they wouldn’t do at home, and it would be stupid to make a big thing about it. As long as it ended at the airport, that’s what I always said – and it did.’
‘Always?’
‘Simon and I have been together a long time, and I know him pretty well. With all his faults, he’s always been fair to me. He would never have carried on with her after the tour. That was all on her side.’
She met Atherton’s eyes as she said these noble lines, as people do who are bent on convincing you of something they don’t really believe. She keeps up a good shop-front, he thought, but she’s too intelligent not to know what he is.
‘So Anne-Marie wasn’t willing to let things go?’
Her lips hardened. ‘Because they’d been to bed together, I suppose she – fell in love with him, or something. She started chasing him, and Simon felt sorry for her, and I suppose she took it for encouragement.’
‘How do you mean, chasing him?’
She took it for a criticism, and looked at him defiantly. ‘It wasn’t just my imagination, you know – ask anyone. She was pretty blatant about it. She hung around him, kept asking him out for drinks, even phoned the flat a couple of times.’
‘It upset you,’ he suggested.
She shrugged. ‘I just pretended nothing was happening. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.’
‘You didn’t like her much, I gather?’
‘I despise women like that. They’ve got to have a man -any man. They don’t care who. It’s pathetic’
‘But I would have thought a girl as pretty as her wouldn’t have any trouble finding a boyfriend,’ he said as though thoughtfully.
She looked a little disconcerted. ‘People didn’t like her. Men didn’t like her. Look, I know you think I was jealous -’
‘Not at all,’ Atherton murmured.
‘But it wasn’t that. I had nothing to be jealous of. I just thought she was – weak.’
Atherton absorbed all this, and tried a new tack. ‘Tell me about that day – the Monday.’
‘The day she died?’ She frowned in thought. ‘Well, I’d been on duty Sunday night. I got home on Monday morning about half past eight. Simon was in bed. I got in with him and we went to sleep. He got up about half past twelve and made some lunch – scrambled eggs, if you want to be particular -and brought them in, and then he got dressed and went off to work.’
‘At what time?’
‘Well, he had a session at half past two, so it would be about half past one, I suppose. I didn’t particularly notice, but he’d leave about an hour to get there.’
‘And you were on duty again that night?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did you next see Mr Thompson?’
‘Well, it would be the next morning, when I got home.’
‘So you didn’t see him between the time he left home on Monday – about half past one in the afternoon – and Tuesday morning at – what? – half past eight?’
‘I’ve said so.’ He said nothing, and she went on as if compelled. ‘We were both working. I was here all night, and Simon was working until half past nine.’
‘And then he went home?’
‘He had a drink, and went home.’
‘That’s what he told you?’ She was looking at him warily now. ‘But you see, I happen to know that he came here to the hospital when he left the TVC that Monday evening. And why would he come here, if not
to see you?’
She whitened so rapidly that he was afraid she might actually faint, and for a long moment she said nothing, though her dark eyes were intelligent, thinking through things at great speed, not focused on him. At last she said faintly, ‘He wasn’t here. He didn’t -’
‘You didn’t see him? You didn’t, by any chance, arrange to meet him and hand over a certain package?’
‘No!’ she protested, though it came out as hardly more than a whisper. She was evidently badly shaken, but Atherton knew that there would not have been time for Thompson to come here to the hospital, collect the drug, and still be back in time to murder Anne-Marie by the established time. If he were the murderer, his purpose in coming here must surely have been to establish his alibi, and Helen Morris ought therefore to be claiming to have seen him, not the reverse. It looked as though, if he did it, she was not in on it.
Her mind had been speeding along on a different track, however. She said, ‘Look, I can guess what you’re thinking, but there’s no way in the world I could have got hold of any drugs. It’s checked and double-checked every night. If anything was missing, it would be discovered at once. And Simon couldn’t have got hold of anything, either. They’re incredibly security-minded at this hospital.’
‘Yes, I know. That’s how I know he came here on that Monday night. And you’re quite sure he didn’t come here to see you?’
She hesitated, and Atherton watched with interest the struggle between her loyalty to Thompson, which wanted to bail him out of possible trouble, and her intelligence, which told her that if she changed her story now, it would look suspicious. In the end she said, ‘I didn’t see him. But he might have come to see me, and not been able to find me.’
Clever, thought Atherton.
‘Look,’ she went on with a touch of irritation. ‘I’m very tired. Can I go home now? You know where to find me if you want to ask me any more questions. I’m not going to leave the country.’
Orchestrated Death Page 13
