Star Fall

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘So all in all, Lavender can live pretty cheaply.’

  ‘As long as he’s Egerton’s lapdog,’ Swilley agreed, with a dissatisfied look. That made it less likely that he would kill him, and he was their best suspect. ‘He does draw a regular salary, but it’s small. Year before last it was twenty-five thousand. Last year it was twenty.’ She met Slider’s eyes. ‘Enough for a simple life, but practically pocket change in those circles.’

  Well, he probably didn’t need more than pocket change, in his life of service, Slider thought. All the same … ‘I think I’d better go and have another word with him,’ he said.

  ‘Now?’ said Swilley. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘No, I’ll take Atherton. You’re better occupied here,’ he said, and saw a quick look of relief cross her face.

  ‘There’s still a lot to sort out,’ she said. ‘I’d like to crossmatch individual sales and purchases for the shop, see what sort of a profit they made on that stuff. And how long they were having to keep them before they could shift them.’

  ‘Sounds like an accountant’s nightmare,’ Slider said.

  ‘And a taxman’s dream,’ she said, heading back to her toils.

  Atherton was humming softly as Slider drove. Something operatic, he thought, and from the jigginess of the tune he deduced his colleague was in cheerful mood. After a bit, the humming got on his nerves so he fished for conversation instead. ‘Good evening last night?’

  ‘Is that a bizarrely inappropriate salutation, or are you inquiring after my social life?’ Atherton responded.

  ‘Forget it,’ Slider said. ‘It was just chit-chat.’

  ‘I had a very good evening, thank you.’

  ‘Jane Kellock?’ Slider hazarded.

  ‘Actually, no – though it was a solicitor.’

  ‘Don’t tell me – not the Egerton one?’

  ‘Dear little Eva. As different from the statuesque Jane as can be.’

  ‘What if Jane finds out?’

  Atherton made an amused sound. ‘You’re not getting the picture. Jane and I have fun. That’s what’s so good about it. We enjoy each other instead of making demands. No expectations, no guilt.’ He locked his hands behind his head with a feline smile. ‘The world is so full of a number of things,’ he said, ‘and a good proportion of them are agreeable females. Why ration yourself? As long as everyone knows the rules of the game.’

  ‘That sounds like an awful lot of justification,’ Slider said.

  ‘We’re not the same, you and I. I’ve finally learned it the hard way. We don’t want the same things.’

  Slider ventured one step on to unstable ground. ‘I thought you were happy with Emily.’

  He saw Atherton’s expression of pain out of the side of his eye.

  ‘There always comes a point,’ Atherton said, ‘when they’re not satisfied with things as they are, however good they may be. It’s inbuilt in women – they need to feel a relationship is “going somewhere”. And when they start looking broody, I start eyeing the exits. They feel that if it’s not developing, it’s dying. Whereas I am dedicated to the status quo. I don’t want to “go somewhere”, I want to stay right where I am.’

  ‘That’s very shallow,’ Slider said pleasantly.

  ‘Thank you,’ Atherton said with a smirk. ‘Now Jane, the magnificent Amazon, is just my sort of woman. Career first, with as much bonking as can be fitted into the schedule, and domesticity so far down the order you couldn’t get odds on it.’

  ‘I’m glad it’s working out for you,’ Slider said. ‘But I must say, I wouldn’t be in your trousers for a ton of fivers.’

  ‘Autres gens, autres moeurs,’ said Atherton.

  John Lavender looked dreadful. He had gone downhill fast. Slider had called ahead, to check he was in and that he would open the door when the bell rang. The big man seemed somehow diminished. Hunching at the shoulders didn’t help, and his face was noticeably thinner, but mostly it was that the appearance of solid granite had abandoned him, leaving him shrunken from the status of mountain to a pile of scree. He was haggard, his hair awry, and though he was wearing the trousers of a suit, his shirt was open at the neck and he was tieless. Slider guessed this was a wild departure from the norm, occasioned by desperation. If ever there was a man who dressed properly everywhere, he thought it would be John Lavender. The proverbial dinner-jacket-on-a-desert-island Englishman. Three-piece suit even at breakfast. The man probably didn’t even own a pair of casual trousers.

  He led them into the sitting room, which had a window on to the street. Lavender went straight to it, in what looked like a habitual movement, and tweaked the curtain aside an inch to look out. There were no press camped out there today. In the absence of any crumbs from the Department, they were concentrating their efforts on Egerton’s house.

  ‘Have they been bothering you?’ Slider asked.

  Lavender let the curtain drop. ‘I haven’t been outside, not since I came back here after – after I spoke with you.’

  ‘How are you managing for food?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘I’m not interested in food,’ he said. He wandered back, sat down opposite them, but sitting forward in the armchair, hands on his knees, as though he might soon get up again. That great impermeable stillness was gone.

  The room was small and rather dim, with brownish wallpaper that might have been fifty years old or the latest retro fad. The furniture was either antique or just old, none of it particularly handsome. The Turkish carpet was definitely old, threadbare in places, the pattern merged into murk. The pictures on the walls were, even to Slider’s untrained eye, pretty dismal, like the rejects from a shop at the junkier end of antiquery. There were the ashes of a long-dead fire in the grate, and a film of dust on every surface. Mrs Bean had said Lavender was even fussier than Egerton, but it didn’t seem to stretch to his home environment. Unless, of course, he didn’t regard this flat as home. Or was one of those people that Slider had always found rather creepy, who were smart in public and careless, even negligent, where no-one else could see it. The dingy underwear brigade.

  ‘How are you coping?’ Slider asked, to get him warmed up.

  He blinked, drew a breath and let it out, seemed to be thinking what to say. ‘I keep—’ he began, and stopped.

  ‘Yes?’ Slider encouraged.

  ‘I keep remembering. How he looked.’

  ‘You’re upset,’ Slider said neutrally.

  There was a little flash of anger. ‘Of course I’m upset. My friend – my friend – has been horribly murdered. How would you feel?’

  Good, Slider thought. As long as he could still be provoked … ‘You spent a great deal of your time together,’ he suggested.

  ‘Of course we did. We went to sales together, saw customers together, I went to most of his recordings—’

  ‘And you socialized together,’ Atherton put in.

  He seemed to object to the word. ‘Socialized? Yes, we spent much of our leisure time together.’

  ‘I wonder you bothered to keep a separate place here,’ Atherton said.

  Lavender looked at him with dislike. ‘We didn’t live in each other’s pockets. We had our separate lives. But we were good friends. And now he’s—’ He looked down at his hands, frowning.

  Slider picked it up. ‘You say you went to his recordings. I believe he was quite dependent on you, on your expertise. Without you, he wouldn’t have been able to make much of a showing on those television programmes.’

  Now he looked up – a touch warily? ‘Who says so?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Atherton said. ‘You were the real brains of the partnership. Mr Egerton was just the showman. It must have been hard for you, living in his shadow. Never getting the credit you deserved. Hearing him praised for his tremendous expertise when it was really your expertise, and he was simply coasting on it.’

  There seemed to be some struggle going on under the rocky face. The big hands clenched into fists. But when he spoke, it was int
ensely, but calmly. ‘You shouldn’t listen to gossip. Television is full of it. As for being “just a showman” – you have no idea how much talent that takes. Rowland was wonderful, not just on camera, but with people. He charmed them, put them at their ease. Few people can do that – certainly not as well as he did. He earned his fame. I was just the background technician – like the camera men, if you will, or the producers. Necessary, and quite as much valued in our way. And, no, I wasn’t jealous, if that’s what you’re trying to imply. I was proud to be his associate.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Slider said. ‘I believe your association was quite lucrative for you, as well.’

  Lavender looked pained, as though he had said something indelicate. ‘He supported the business with his external earnings. That was the arrangement from the beginning.’

  ‘The business hasn’t been going very well lately, I understand.’

  ‘It’s the same everywhere. People don’t buy antiques in a depression. We’re all suffering.’ He gave Slider a clear look. ‘Rowland has been putting even more in lately. It was he who was keeping us afloat.’ He took a breath, and added in a low voice, as though it was hard to say, ‘So I had no incentive to kill him – quite the opposite.’

  Slider gave him a reassuring smile. ‘I never suggested you did.’

  ‘But that’s what all this is about,’ Lavender said resentfully. ‘You didn’t come here to enquire after my health. You’re regarding me as a suspect.’

  ‘I’m sorry if you think so,’ Slider said. ‘A follow-up interview like this is perfectly normal, quite routine. Often people remember different things on different occasions.’

  ‘So I presume you are no closer to determining who did kill him?’

  ‘There is very little to go on,’ said Slider. ‘Apart from the missing objects. The painting and the Fabergé box.’

  ‘Why didn’t you mention that you bought the painting yourself as a present for Mr Egerton?’ Atherton put in.

  Lavender straightened a little in the chair. ‘Why on earth should I?’

  ‘It would just seem a natural thing to say when the subject came up.’

  ‘It didn’t occur to me,’ Lavender said crossly. ‘Who told you I bought it?’

  ‘Miss Hedley-Somerton.’

  He gave a faint shrug. ‘I buy most things in the business.’

  ‘Did you often buy things for Mr Egerton?’ Atherton asked. ‘As presents, I mean.’

  He hesitated. ‘He wasn’t an easy man to buy for. The proverbial “man who has everything”.’

  ‘And the Fabergé box? What do you know about that?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about it. Somebody gave it to him as a present. He didn’t say who. It was just there one day, when I went round, on the console table.’ He looked away, as though tiring of the subject.

  Slider tried another tack. ‘What do you think of Dale Sholto?’

  ‘I don’t think of her at all,’ Lavender said.

  ‘You don’t like her?’

  ‘That’s not what I said. I hardly know her. I’ve met her with Rowland a few times. They weren’t close.’

  ‘But you had Christmas with them, the Sholtos.’

  A flicker crossed his face, which Slider took as annoyance. ‘Rowland and I went over there on Christmas Day, for lunch. A duty visit.’

  ‘Mr Egerton’s will leaves everything bar the business to Mrs Sholto,’ Slider tried, watching him for any reaction.

  ‘I know,’ he said, his face immovable again.

  ‘He told you?’

  ‘Who else would he leave it to? She’s his daughter, his only family.’

  ‘Do you have any other family?’

  ‘No,’ he said, and offered nothing more.

  ‘So, I have to ask you again, have you any idea of who might want to harm Mr Egerton? Anyone who had reason to kill him?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Why do you even ask? It was the burglar who did it, surely? Whoever stole the Fabergé box and the painting. Who else could it be? He must have walked in on them, and they killed him. Isn’t that the way these things go nowadays? One reads about it all the time.’

  Slider said nothing, watching him.

  ‘Nobody hated him – put that out of your head. It must have been the burglar.’

  ‘But there’s no sign of a break-in,’ Slider said, and waited. At this point, the guilty man hastens to offer explanations of how it could be done; but Lavender only looked at him, blank on the surface and exhausted underneath, like an animal run to its limits and turned at bay – not afraid, just finished.

  He caught Atherton’s eye, and they exchanged a mental shrug. Soon afterwards they made their adieux. In the tiny space at the top of the stairs, which did service as the hall, there was a row of coat hooks on the wall. Atherton nudged Slider and jerked his eyes towards them. A couple of overcoats were hanging, and a neatly-furled umbrella. And an elderly, dark trilby hat.

  Outside, Slider said, ‘Yes, I saw. But it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. In that class and age group they’re fairly common, and Blenheim Terrace is the sort of place where people of his age and class live.’

  ‘That sounds like an awful lot of justification,’ Atherton said. They walked back to the car.

  ‘Just stating a fact,’ said Slider.

  ‘Still, we’ve got a sighting of a man in a hat going in and a man in a hat coming out,’ said Atherton. ‘That’s also a fact.’

  ‘But Lavender didn’t come out,’ said Slider. ‘And the times weren’t right for him. And one of the hats was walking, whereas we know Lavender came in his car. So it would suggest at least two hats.’

  ‘People never get times right,’ Atherton said.

  ‘If Lavender really arrived at two twenty-five, none of the sightings was him.’

  ‘But he could be lying.’

  ‘Oh, quite. People lie in season and out. But why? What has he got to hide?’

  ‘I’m sure there’s something.’

  ‘So am I. But I don’t think he killed him. There’s no reason for it.’

  ‘Lovers quarrel.’

  ‘They weren’t—’

  ‘Metaphorically speaking. It’s odd about the box.’

  ‘Specifically?’

  ‘Well,’ said Atherton, ‘if he acquired it while doing the show, you’d think Lavender would have known about it. But he said he saw it first at Egerton’s house. Which means that Egerton was very careful to keep it out of his sight on the day he got it.’

  ‘Easy enough to do – it would have fitted into a jacket pocket. A bit bulky, perhaps, but possible. Or – we don’t know he didn’t have some sort of bag with him.’

  ‘But why would Egerton want to keep its origins so secret?’ Atherton pursued.

  ‘If it was a present from someone he was having an affair with,’ Slider suggested.

  Atherton snorted. ‘The sort of toad Egerton was would relish everyone knowing about his conquest.’

  ‘You don’t really know what sort of a toad he was.’

  ‘Everyone says he was a noted cocksman. Why the sudden reticence?’

  ‘I don’t know. The other possibility is—’

  ‘That Lavender’s lying and he did know where the box came from. And probably, then, where it’s gone to. But why?’

  ‘If we knew that, we’d know a lot. If the box has a significance and wasn’t just stolen at random.’

  Atherton shook his head. ‘Maybe the person who gave it to him took it back. And I keep coming back to it: if not Lavender, who?’

  ‘That,’ said Slider patiently, ‘is what we have to find out.’

  ‘Touché,’ said Atherton. They got in the car and drove off in thoughtful silence.

  Connolly was tapping away at her keyboard and looked up as they came in. ‘Boss,’ she called.

  ‘That’s me,’ said Slider.

  ‘I’ve got something a bit interesting.’

  ‘Only a bit?’

  ‘Well, it’s showing promise.
It could be interesting when it grows up and leaves school.’

  He went over to her desk.

  ‘See, I was looking for recent sightings of your man, like you asked, and the most recent that’s nothing to do with his TV shows is this, at the funeral of Julia Rabbet.’

  ‘That was TV-show-related,’ Atherton objected, joining them.

  ‘Up to a point,’ she said patiently. ‘Thing is, the funeral was supposed to be private, family only. And I checked with Gavin Ehlie, and he said that was right, they were all told ever so politely it was off limits, no flowers, donations to some charity. He said nobody from the show went, even though she was Miss Popular with everybody. They all went for a drink one night instead to send her on her way.’

  ‘But Egerton went to the funeral anyway?’ Slider said. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘A photographer caught him,’ Connolly said, pleased with herself. ‘It’s on the Internet. Look.’ There were several shots of well-heeled, black clad folk coming down the steps of a church and gathering in solemnly-chatting groups in front. She scrolled through. ‘Here. This one. See him in the background, creeping out after everyone’s left, God love him? It’s the height of hilarity! The big media star trying not to get noticed.’

  Yes, in the photo concerned most people were in chatting groups in front of the steps, and just appearing in the church doorway, looking unexpectedly furtive, was the unmistakable figure of Rowland Egerton in a dark overcoat, just in the process of raising a hat to his head, perhaps to disguise his trademark hair.

  ‘He’d to take the hat off inside, o’ course,’ Connolly said. ‘He musta found a dark corner to sit in.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t he want to be seen?’ Atherton said. ‘When the whole of his life otherwise seems to have been dedicated to the opposite?’

  ‘Because he wasn’t invited,’ Connolly said. ‘Private. Family only. Sure, he’s so desperate, the big eejit, he’ll even crash a family funeral for publicity.’