‘You searched for it, of course?’
‘Of course. It never turned up, though.’ There was a breath of a pause, and then Cate continued blandly. ‘In any case, I told Ronnie to get the lock changed just to be on the safe side, and he did. I kept meaning to collect the spare key from him, but I haven’t got round to it yet.’
Cate was making a monkey of him. Slider controlled his temper and continued to play Plod, while his mind felt about for a reason why Cate should want to bait him. ‘So Ronnie is still the only person with a key to the shop?’
‘Front door key, yes. I have a key to the back door, but it’s always kept bolted on the inside, so I couldn’t use it if I wanted to.’
And Slaughter said that the back door was bolted when he came in on the day after the murder. And there was no sign of forcible entry. They were back on safe ground. It had to have been Slaughter after all.
Soon afterwards, Slider was rising to go. Cate extended his hand and shook Slider’s firmly: virile, confident, friendly, said that grip.
‘It’s been nice meeting you, Bill. I hope we can get together again some time. I like having the chance to talk shop occasionally. You must come over to my place one day. Are you married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, come to dinner some time, bring the wife.’
‘Thanks. I’d like that.’
‘Right! Good! I’ll be in touch, then. And tell old Ian to go easy on you, like I did on him when I was his boss! A good man is hard to find, you know.’
According to Joanna, Slider thought on his way out, a hard man is good to find, though he wondered in this case. He was not going to hold his breath waiting for a dinner engagement to materialise; and if Colin Cate, with all his police contacts and committees, needed a lowly and newly acquainted inspector with whom to talk shop, then his arse was an apricot. All the end bit, like all the beginning bit, was insincere, but equally it was not intended to deceive. It served the same social function as eyebrow-raising and bottom-flashing amongst baboons: it established social hierarchy.
That didn’t mean to say there was anything wrong with the middle bit, though Slider was at a loss to understand why he had been dragged all this way to go through it, when any DC at any time would have done as well, for all the information Cate was able to add. He supposed demanding Slider’s presence so far from home had been Cate’s way of flashing his bottom at Barrington: I may have left the Job, but I’m still your superior, laddie, and don’t you forget it.
Another little chat with Ronnie was in order, to establish the whereabouts of the second key, and then home.
Not home for much longer, he reminded himself, and felt a sudden surge of nervousness. He still had that hurdle to clear, and it wasn’t going to be in one gazelle-like bound, that was for sure.
The effect on Ronnie Slaughter of Cate’s name was unexpected. Slider had expected him to look embarrassed or shamefaced at having his self-inflating pose debunked, but instead he seemed terrified. He appeared to crouch lower in his chair, like a motorway verge mouse swept over by a kestrel’s shadow, and he fixed frightened eyes on Slider in desperate appeal.
‘Oh Gawd, oh Gawd,’ he whimpered. You didn’t tell him? Oh Gawd, he’ll kill me!’
‘I had to tell him, Ronnie,’ Slider said reasonably. ‘It’s his shop. He came asking why we’d shut it without asking him. He’s got a right to know.’
‘He’ll kill me! He said there’s not got to be no trouble. He said it’s got to be a clean shop, no drunks or rowdies, no fights or anything. I promised him. That’s why I got the job. He was real good to me, giving me that job. It’s die best job I ever had – a real nice shop, respectable and everything. I was that grateful. I’d never do nothing to upset him, and he said if ever the Bill was called in, I was for it.’ He rocked in his chair a little and moaned. ‘You shouldn’t of told him! What did he say? Was he mad?’
‘Ronnie, you’re in much bigger trouble than worrying about your job with Mr Cate,’ Slider said bemusedly, but even the mention of the name made Slaughter wince.
With difficulty he kept Ronnie’s attention and asked him about the other key – ‘It’s in a box in the suitcase under my bed. I told you nobody but me had a key’ – and about the bolt on the back door – ‘It was bolted, I tell you. I would never forget that. Mr Cate would kill me if I forgot it.’
‘Never mind what Mr Cate would think, are you quite sure it was bolted?’ Slider pressed him.
Slaughter nodded, his mind clearly on more serious problems. ‘You didn’t tell him about – about me – you know – about me being gay?’
‘He knew about that anyway. He told me, in fact’
Slaughter began to cry. ‘Oh Gawd, he’ll kill me,’ he whimpered.
Slider was at a loss to know how to put things into perspective for this pathetic creature. To be worrying about his boss’s disapproval when he was facing life imprisonment for murder suggested a view of life so far askew that it wasn’t surprising he had killed and cut up Peter Leman on so small a provocation and with so little apparent compunction.
It was an evening on which Slider desperately needed to see Joanna, in order to have himself reconnected via her with the real world. The day had left a bad taste in his mouth, and he badly needed the sweet and sensual pleasure of her company to soothe his troubled mind and weary body and restore him for the fray tomorrow. But Joanna was what she pleased to call ‘up-country’, doing a concert in Leeds which was a repeat of one of the tour programmes. She had nobly refrained from pointing out that if he had done his duty and sorted out his personal life by now, she would have come home, albeit very late, to him; but he pointed it out to himself as he drove home along the A40 towards Ruislip. Due west, it was, into the sunset, and a very gaudy one this evening: purple bars across raging crimson and gold on the horizon, and above that streaks of Walt Disney powder pink and baby blue. It made him feel as though he was in the last scene of a movie. He could almost hear the soaring strings and the celestial choir in the background.
Wind the film back a bit. The first opportunity, he had promised her. Would there be an opportunity tonight? Oh fearful thought! Why couldn’t he skip that bit? He saw himself in a still taken from the movie, facing Irene and telling her about Joanna, telling her he was leaving her. In the still he couldn’t see his own face, but he could see hers. How could he do that to her? Well, that had always been the question, hadn’t it? And it was unanswerable.
He had stills of the children, too. He saw them not in their usual rôles of either defying him, ignoring him, or berating him for failing to reach their high standards of parental expenditure. Here they appeared in vulnerable mode: Kate coming to him weeping because Goldie the Guinea pig had died, Matthew’s brow buckled with the weight of anguished responsibility because he had been picked to play for the middle-school eleven and was afraid his batting wasn’t good enough.
And what would he say to them? Daddy’s leaving you, children. Daddy still loves you very much, but he won’t be living here with you and Mummy any more. He’ll still come and see you, of course, on Sundays (if he’s not on duty) to take you for an outing that’s supposed to make up for the fact that he isn’t there every day, and for birthday treats and at Christmas. Slider knew how it was done. The police force was a high-divorce industry – he had seen it all before.
How would he bear it when they cried? How would he bear it if they didn’t? He was hardly ever at home anyway, hadn’t taken them out anywhere in months (years?) Maybe they wouldn’t care that he was going. He imagined Matthew taking Kate aside: ‘A boy at school’s father went away, and now every time he visits, he brings him brilliant presents! This boy’s got a fifteen-speed bike and a Nintendo Gameboy and his own video … ‘ Ah!
There was the alternative, of course: to say goodbye to Joanna, and to serve out his sentence as the disappointing husband and barely tolerated father; without love, without comfort, without appreciation, without conversation – and worse, knowing t
hat Joanna was without those things too, only at the other end of a telephone, within reach, out of reach. Foolishness and waste, the two of them unhappy when they could be happy. Irene and the children would soon get over him, they didn’t care that much for him, never had …
But he had made promises, taken on responsibilities. How could he go back on them?
But he could fulfil them in other ways – better ways, surely, if he was personally content? He had a responsibility to himself, too. What sort of husband-and-father would he make if he felt miserable, deprived and trapped?
Or was that just a weak justification for doing what he knew was wrong? But was it wrong, or was it the best thing for all of them in the long run?
And he had gone through all this before, every argument, every word, a hundred times, maybe a thousand, since he first met Joanna and went over the side – as the police saying was – in an unexpected splash which astonished him and everyone who knew him, left his brains waterlogged and his moral rectitude going down for the third time. It was not as if he had done anything like that before. He had not been a philanderer. He had never even been tempted before. Surely that made a difference? It was not that he had wanted to leave Irene and had latched onto the first available woman. It was Joanna, no-one else. He had to have her, or everything else was poindess. And to have her he must leave Irene.
Oh, round the wheel again! He could see his own tail up ahead of him, its fluffy tip ever retreating, beckoning him on. The first opportunity. Would there be an opportunity tonight…?
She was not in when he got home, but the children were there. Kate was sitting on the floor about eight inches away from the television screen watching The Young Doctors. She was addicted to soaps, and absorbed the emotions of the characters, however banal or incomprehensible, like a vicarious black hole. The video recorder was permanently set to tape them all, and she watched them over and over again unless she was stopped.
Matthew and his adenoidal friend Sibod were playing a game which involved much running up and down stairs, slamming doors, and bellowing at each other from opposite ends of the universe. Since the house, built in the worst period of the ‘70s, was only made of cardboard and Sellotape, it trembled like a frightened dik-dik at every adolescent footfall.
Slider fielded Matthew as he thundered past. ‘Are you lot all on your own?’
‘Bernice has just gone,’ Matthew said, already slithering away. He had a child’s ability to remove his bones from a grip, leaving the restrainer with nothing but a handful of clothing. ‘Mummy was supposed to be back by now, and Bernice couldn’t stay any longer.’
‘Have you eaten?’
‘We had Turkey Bites,’ Matthew replied diminuendo as he retreated upstairs.
‘Turkey bites?’ Slider said, baffled. Was that food?
‘And oven chips. Out of the freezer.’ He was almost in his room now. ‘Bernice did them in the microwave,’ he offered, as if it were the clue to the labyrinth, and the door slammed, shutting off any further possibility of communication. Slider, stranded in the hall on his ebbing wave of parental enquiry, looked through the sitting-room door at Kate, but decided against disturbing her. With her head almost in the set, she was far, far away in a sunnier land, pursuing one of girlhood’s most durable dreams in a nurse’s uniform.
He went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, and stood leaning against the work surface, his mind for once leaving him alone. The kettle sang companionably, like a cat purring. He would have liked a cat, but Irene always said there was no point when he was barely ever at home, and in any case they were dirty and unhygienic. In vain he pointed out that at least you didn’t have to clean up after them like Kate’s rabbits and Guinea pig – they did it themselves. But Kate’s beasts were kept caged and did it in one place, Irene countered. And in any case, she – Irene – would be the one who’d end up having to look after the thing (which was undeniable) and if she’d wanted a cat she’d have got one for herself long ago. So that was that.
Just as the kettle boiled, there was the sound of a key in the front door, and Irene’s voice called, ‘Bill? Are you back?’
‘In the kitchen,’ he shouted. She appeared in the doorway, taking off her coat. ‘I didn’t hear your car. You must have had the exhaust fixed.’
‘It’s in the garage. I’m getting it done tomorrow. Marilyn just dropped me off.’
‘Oh,’ said Slider cautiously. ‘I didn’t know you were seeing her today.’ His wife had a bright-eyed and bushy look to her which boded no good. What was it going to be this time? A roof garden? An en-suite bathroom? A two-week bridge-playing holiday in a heritage hotel in Wiltshire?
‘We’ve just been shopping in Watford. She wanted me to help her choose some curtain material for their dining-room.’
And make the curtains, Slider thought, if he knew anything about it. The she-Cripps, though wealthy beyond repair, was not averse from letting Irene save her money through the labour of her nimble fingers. Perhaps she believed that exploitation was the sincerest form of flattery.
‘Are the children all right? Did they have their tea?’
‘Bernice brought them back and gave them Turkey Bites, whatever they are. Out of the freezer.’
‘It’s pieces of turkey breast in breadcrumbs,’ Irene said seriously. She dropped her coat over the back of a chair – a most uncharacteristic gesture – and sat down eater-cornered to him. ‘We had them last week, don’t you remember? With salad. On Tuesday.’
He didn’t remember. Food at home was an exercise in nourishment without tears rather than an occasion to cherish in recollection. ‘Oh, those,’ he said vaguely.
‘The children like them,’ Irene said defensively, ‘and they’re quick.’ She clasped her thin hands together on the table-top. They were always beautifully kept, with perfect, unchipped nail varnish on the neat oval nails. Joanna’s nails had to be cut very short for playing the fiddle, and would have looked wrong painted. He couldn’t imagine Irene’s hand clasped round a pint glass or throwing a dart. She was everything that was ladylike, neat and feminine. Why didn’t he love her? He transferred his gaze from her hands to her face, and found it urgent with hopeful anticipation.
‘Bill,’ she said, ‘you aren’t doing anything tomorrow night, are you?’
‘Why, what’s tomorrow night?’ He said it non-committally, though his heart was sinking. It would be harder to pull the usual piles-of-work excuse if he had already had to agree to whatever it was she wanted him to do with her. And anyway, he didn’t like letting her down at the last minute, especially since he had so often in their lives had to do it legitimately.
‘It’s a concert,’ she said, serenely unaware of what she was doing to his heart rate. ‘The Royal Charity Gala at the Festival Hall – the Duke and Duchess of Kent will be there, and all sorts of celebrities, and there’s a sort of reception afterwards to meet them and some of the orchestra. Marilyn’s got four tickets – well, David has, really. His firm is one of the sponsors. They’re apparently ever so hard to get hold of, the tickets I mean, so I was really flattered when she asked us. Of course I told her I’d have to check with you. I know you’ve got a case on at the moment, but you did say it was going well and you’ve charged a man, and that usually means you’re a bit less pressed. But Marilyn said she’d like me to come even if you’re working, and they’ll just keep the other ticket in case you can make it at the last minute or anything.’
Slider marked time in desperation. ‘It’s rather short notice, isn’t it?’
‘I expect she’s only just got the tickets,’ Irene said trustingly. Only just been let down by the first people she invited, Slider corrected inwardly.
‘How much does she want for them? If it’s a gala, it’ll be expensive.’
‘She doesn’t want paying for them,’ Irene said, shocked. ‘She’s invited us as her guests, hers and David’s. It’s a great compliment. Why do you always think the worst of people?’
‘I suppose it is kind of
her,’ Slider said reluctantly, desperately searching for an excuse. ‘I don’t know that I’d be very good company, though. You know how tired I get when—’
Irene jumped in, bubbling with excitement and happiness. ‘I know, but you like classical music, much more than I do, really, at least you know more about it, and you wouldn’t have to talk, would you, just sit and listen. It would be relaxing for you. And, oh Bill, it’s so nice that she’s asked us to something like this, when everyone must be longing to go, if they could only get the tickets! I’d have been glad enough to go on my own, but if you can come it will make it just perfect – you know how awkward I feel when everyone else has a partner and I don’t. And we haven’t been out together for such ages! I’ve only got to ask Bernice to come and sit in with the children, and I can take your dinner suit into that two-hour cleaners in the High Street tomorrow morning, so that’ll be all right.’
‘Dinner suit?’ Slider said dazedly.
‘It is a Gala,’ she reminded him. ‘Of course it’s black tie! And Marilyn said long dresses,’ she added happily. ‘It’s so nice to have the chance to dress up once in a while, and you look so distinguished in a dinner jacket, it really suits you. People don’t wear evening dress often enough nowadays. Everything’s so casual, it’s a shame. I’ve hardly worn my long dress and I’ve had it five years. I expect Marilyn’s got a dozen of them, she and David go out so much. I just hope it will be warm enough tomorrow night not to wear a coat. I do think a coat looks so silly over an evening dress, unless it’s a fur coat of course, but that’s different. A fur stole would be nice. Marilyn’s got the most beautiful fox cape – David bought it for her for their first wedding anniversary, she told me. I suppose I could wear a shawl if it’s chilly, that would be better than a coat, anyway. I wonder if that one I got in Spain would be all right, or would it look common?’
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