Star Fall

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘I can’t get my head round those two,’ Porson grunted, scratching his bumpy poll. ‘What a weird relationship. Are you convinced Lavender didn’t do it?’

  ‘I’m halfway there,’ Slider said. ‘Egerton’s death was going to leave him at a big financial disadvantage, so he had no money motive for killing him. He could still have done it in sudden anger, but there was no spatter on his clothes. And his story holds together in its own terms.’

  ‘Nutty terms,’ said Porson disapprovingly. ‘He had a key, you can’t get over that.’

  ‘No, sir. That’s against him. But it’ll be hard to prove either way.’

  ‘It’s the worst,’ Porson said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘He’s given us the route he took from Waitrose to the house. We’re going to try to find him on camera somewhere, to confirm the timings. Look for more witnesses, of course.’

  ‘And search his flat while we’ve got him, see if he’s got that box thingy stashed away.’

  ‘Yes, sir. That would solve a lot of headaches,’ Slider said.

  ‘And if Lavender didn’t do it, you’d better start trying to find out who did. What else have you got? There was that one forty man.’

  ‘He’s the one thirty-five man now. We’ve got someone in a hat coming out of the tube station, just after half past, that we think could be him. We’ll have to try and trace his journey back, see where he came from and if we can get a squint at his face on any of the TfL cameras.’

  ‘And probably find he’s nothing to do with it and went into a different house altogether,’ Porson sighed. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Very little,’ Slider acknowledged. ‘Egerton wasn’t a very popular man among people who knew him, but no-one seems to have hated him enough to kill him.’

  ‘Except that if it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, he could just have said something very bloody annoying and – wham.’

  That was true, Slider thought. But it was neither help nor comfort to him.

  ‘Go home,’ Porson said with sudden sympathy. ‘We’ll keep Lavender overnight, search his gaff, have another crack at him in the morning. If he’s decided to stop lying, he might have something interesting to tell us about the victim’s other relationships. But all that’ll keep. I’m going home myself in a minute. Sufficient unto the day is the wassname.’

  ‘That’s very true, sir,’ Slider said, without the least irony.

  He drove home over a crunchy new layer of snow that had fallen since the roads cleared of home-time traffic. The skies were clear, and it was freezing hard, but he was too tired when he got home to bother with dragging out the tarpaulin to cover the car. He’d just have to deal in the morning with whatever fell overnight, like most people did.

  Joanna had gone to bed, but she got up and came downstairs when she heard him come in.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked.

  ‘Starving,’ he discovered. ‘But you don’t need to hang around here getting cold. Go back to bed – I can manage.’

  It was cold – obviously, the heating had gone off for the night some time ago. She went before him into the kitchen and turned on the little heater by the table, and headed straight for the gas stove. ‘Omelette all right?’

  ‘Wonderful. Thanks.’

  ‘I’m going to make myself some cocoa,’ she said. ‘Would you like some, or would you rather have tea?’

  ‘Cocoa?’ he queried.

  ‘Just suddenly had a yen for it. Must be the combination of snow outside and midnight feasts.’

  ‘Cocoa sounds good to me.’ He sat down at the table, watching her track back and forth, hearing the comforting sounds – the pop of gas, the crack of eggs, the glug of milk, the clink of stirring spoons and forks – which meant someone was taking loving care of him. His thoughts brushed the edge of Lavender and recoiled from the dry, fruitless loneliness of his love, or whatever his attachment was, for Egerton. It’s good to be me, he thought fervently – and then remembered the miscarriage, and fell back into his uneasy, questioning sadness for Joanna and what she must be feeling. Being happy made him feel guilty; forgetting, for long periods of the day when he was busy, made him feel guiltier.

  ‘So, how was your day?’ he asked.

  He knew even from the back that she was smiling. ‘What a dutiful question,’ she said. ‘It’s a terrible give-away, you know.’

  ‘Give-away of what?’ he asked warily.

  ‘It’s what the man says when he comes home from work and realizes he hasn’t given his wife a thought the whole day, and wonders if she knows that.’

  He didn’t know what to say. ‘I just asked,’ he said feebly.

  She turned her head. ‘I wasn’t being nasty. I should jolly well hope you do forget all about me when you’re working. I forget about you when I’m playing, and it doesn’t mean I don’t love you.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Love you?’

  ‘Still?’

  ‘Would I cook omelettes in the middle of the night for someone I didn’t love?’

  ‘A Victorian sense of duty might make you do it.’

  ‘True,’ she said, turning the omelette out on to a plate and bringing it across to him, along with bread and butter. ‘But in this case, it’s love.’

  She went back for the cocoa and sat down with him.

  ‘Eat,’ she said. He ate. She sipped cocoa and watched him. ‘It’s very satisfying, anyway,’ she said after a while. ‘Feeding the animals. Basic human instinct. Look at zoos.’

  ‘And pigeons in Trafalgar Square,’ he added, mopping the loose bit in the middle with the bread.

  ‘And George.’

  ‘How is George?’

  ‘We’re just coming into hurricane season. The Terrible Twos. He had an attack of fury today, didn’t know what to do with it, or himself. I wanted him to get ready to go to the shops, and he wanted to finish his playing. He hadn’t the vocabulary to tell me why it was important. So he lay down on the floor and raged.’

  ‘You mustn’t let him wear you out,’ Slider said, looking at her with concern, trying to see if the depredations showed.

  ‘Bill, it’s seven weeks now. I’m all right. Back to normal.’

  ‘I know the doctor signed you off—’ he began.

  ‘You’ve got to stop trying to wrap me in cotton wool,’ she said, and there was a tautness under the words.

  ‘I’m not. I don’t.’

  ‘You do.’ The smile was gone now. ‘You don’t dare touch me. You hardly look at me. When you do, you look at me as if I might go off, like a defective grenade.’

  ‘I’m naturally worried about you,’ he said. ‘It was a terrible thing you went through.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But you’re making it worse. It’s bad enough I lost the baby, but if I lose you, too—’

  ‘You haven’t lost me,’ he exclaimed, shocked she should think so. ‘You won’t. Never.’

  ‘You won’t even hold me in bed,’ she said, from a world of sadness. ‘I can feel you lying there rigid, trying not to touch me. It makes me feel as if I’m no use any more.’

  He was dumbfounded. ‘I didn’t want to put pressure on you. Your body … I mean, obviously making love was out. I didn’t want you to think I was trying to hurry you into anything before you were ready.’

  ‘But you could have held me. We could have cuddled. We always did that a lot, and I miss it. I miss you.’

  He stared at her, stricken that she could have thought he didn’t want that too. ‘If I cuddle you in bed,’ he said in a low voice of embarrassment, ‘I’ll get an erection. I can’t help it. It’s automatic. And you’ll think—’

  Then she smiled. It was one of her old smiles, from Before, and it made him go hot all the way down to his toes, like a draught of cocoa. ‘I can cope with that. I promise I won’t regard it as bullying. I might even see it as a compliment.’

  ‘Oh, Jo! I’m sorry.’

  ‘So am I. I’ve not been much company for you these past week
s. And I’m not very good at explaining my feelings. Mostly because I’m not used to having them. I’m like George, really – don’t know what all this emotion is, or what to do with it.’

  ‘You lost a baby—’ he began.

  ‘It’s hormonal,’ she said, stopping him. ‘Not really me at all. I just want to get back to normal now. Can we do that?’

  He still looked doubtful, his mind full of sub-vocal warnings and old wives’ tales. The mysteries of womankind – the terrible ways in which they could suffer and die that men couldn’t know about. And however much she wanted not to lose him, you could double that at least for him, losing her.

  ‘We can certainly try,’ he said.

  They finished their cocoa and went up to bed, where he took her very carefully into his arms, hoping he was too tired to get an erection. It didn’t help when she murmured, ‘Stop stiffening.’ Then he realized she just meant he was tense. He tried consciously to relax, and in the middle of the process sleep ambushed him, and he fell out of the world like a stone down a well.

  THIRTEEN

  Fairy Moans

  The papers on Tuesday were full of Lavender’s arrest, and TV teams had doorstepped the Hedley-Somertons, resulting in a clip from the photogenic and distressed Georgia saying he was the kindest man and she knew he was innocent, which was played over and over on all the channels. In the absence of anything concrete from the police, the papers were repeating everything they had on Egerton and speculating in guarded terms as to what Lavender’s relationship with him had been.

  ‘Which is a pity, if we are on the brink of letting him go,’ said Atherton. ‘The hounds of hell on felon’s traces. They won’t let him go now.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have lied to us,’ Slider said.

  The search of the flat had not turned up the malachite box, or any bloodstained clothing, or anything else of interest as far as the case went. The shop, though closed, was now a focus of attention, not only for the press but for a constant stream of sensation tourists, probably hoping that it would reopen and allow them to buy something – anything – that could be a souvenir of the famous TV star or the weirdo who killed him. The local police had put their most imperturbable uniform on the door, who was pretending to be one of those soldiers on palace guard who weren’t allowed to move their faces.

  Lavender looked exhausted in the morning, said he had not been able to sleep, and was evidently starting a cold, which made him look even more unappetizing: grey, pouchy and ever so old. He had no objection to being questioned again and answered everything without hesitation, but dully, like a man whose battery is almost spent. He had nothing new to tell, however, beyond what they had gleaned from other people. He knew nothing about the specifics of Egerton’s recent love-life, or of anything he might have been involved in outside what was generally and publicly known. Despite the amount of time they had spent together, they had kept the rest of their lives separate. Egerton was adored by his fans and generally not much liked by his colleagues, but there were no long-standing feuds or hatreds that he knew about. He knew of no reason anyone should have wanted to kill him.

  There were several phone calls from Georgia Hedley-Somerton that morning, asking if she could see him, or at least speak to him, offering her own solicitor to act for him, and finally, on being told he was being released on police bail, offering him a billet in her own house. ‘He can’t go back to the flat,’ she asserted, ‘and he hasn’t any family.’

  Atherton, who took the call, said, ‘Haven’t you got a lot of press hanging around your house?’

  ‘Yes, that’s true, but it’s a big house, and they can’t get round the back. He could be private there. And my husband’s pretty good at handling reporters. He’d be better off here than on his own.’

  ‘I can but relay the offer,’ Atherton said, thinking Lavender would be unlikely to accept. But in fact he did, looking surprised and grateful, or as much so as was possible for a man with a face like the Eiger’s.

  ‘Just as well to have him where we can find him,’ Atherton said to Slider. ‘She can let us know if he looks like bolting again.’

  ‘He won’t,’ Slider said. Where, after all, was there for him to go, now?

  Now that he had the route, McLaren found Lavender’s car on a bus camera turning into Blythe Road, which put him two minutes from Egerton’s house at eight minutes past two. That meant, if he had told the truth, that he had sat in the car brooding for ten or fifteen minutes, and spent fifteen minutes in the house being shocked, wrapping up the painting and working out his story. It probably had been him that the witness saw coming out of the house at about twenty past and going to the boot of the car. Beyond that, they were not in a position to prove or disprove Lavender’s movements. It was all most unsatisfactory.

  ‘Shall I carry on looking?’ McLaren asked.

  ‘No, I’d sooner you started on TfL’s tapes and try to trace back One Thirty-Five Man. That’s more important. I’m not sure Lavender’s peregrinations are going to tell us much more.’

  ‘His what, guv?’ McLaren frowned. ‘That’s some kind o’ big bird, isn’t it?’

  ‘Skip it,’ said Slider.

  McLaren went back to his desk and hunched over another endless series of grainy images. It was painstaking and tedious work, examining TfL’s tube station footage, looking for the man in the trilby and hoping against hope that he hadn’t taken it off during the journey.

  ‘Anyone who thinks policing is glamorous’d only want to take a look at old Maurice to put sense on them,’ remarked Connolly, who had brought him tea. ‘Sure it’s the dog’s job. Someone’s going down to Mike’s for banjos, boss. Will they get you anything? Rasher, sausage, cheese’n’ham?’

  Before he could answer, Swilley came to the door. ‘I’ve got something, boss,’ she said.

  It was Melling’s afternoon for doing public valuations at Christie’s. Slider and Atherton arrived to find him – in the absence of any paying customers – being terribly amusing before a rapt audience of a young man and a young woman who from their exquisite thinness and intimidatingly expensive grooming could only be Christie’s employees. They melted away at the sight of the warrant cards, leaving Melling, retro-chic in a double-breasted suit and co-respondent shoes, to his fate.

  He became markedly less sprightly in a room on his own with the detectives, but still did his best to keep up the party spirit. ‘You again!’ he cried gaily. ‘Have you developed a taste for my company?’

  ‘We just wanted to ask you some follow-up questions,’ Slider said with suitable gravity.

  ‘I saw in the papers that you’ve arrested poor old John Lavender for the murder,’ Melling went on quickly. ‘I must say I was surprised – or perhaps not? No, now I think of it, I can see him as First Murderer. I always thought he was deliciously creepy, lurking silently in the background in that sinister way – the Mrs Danvers of the antiques trade. What put you on his trail?’

  Slider ignored all this. ‘I’d like you to cast your mind back to last Friday, when I interviewed you at your home.’

  ‘How can I forget it? You turned down a perfectly delectable lunch that I’d gone to considerable trouble to put together. And champagne!’

  ‘You told me then that on Thursday you had spent most of the day at an auction at the Guildhall in Northampton.’

  ‘Did I?’ he said lightly. ‘Then I suppose I had.’

  ‘Would it surprise you to know there was no auction at the Guildhall on Thursday? In fact, there was no auction anywhere in Northampton.’

  Melling looked taken aback, but he kept his end up. ‘Well, silly me! I must have got confused. I expect it was a different day, the auction. It’s so easy to muddle dates, isn’t it?’

  ‘What did you do yesterday, sir?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Yesterday?’ Now he was startled. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Answer the question, please.’

  ‘Well, if you must know, I went to see my publisher in the
morning, then had lunch with an actor friend in St Martin’s Lane—’

  Slider interrupted. ‘So you don’t generally have difficulty in remembering what you were doing twenty-four hours earlier. But somehow, last Friday, you were confused about what you were doing on Thursday.’

  Melling grew sulky. ‘All right, you’ve made your point. You don’t have to be so humourless about it. Goodness! Anyway, how was I supposed to know you’d go and check up?’

  ‘We check everything,’ Slider said. ‘Where were you on Thursday?’

  ‘If you want to know, I was at home all day, alone. There. You see? No corroboration – is that what you people call it? I thought I’d have you on my back if I said that, so …’ He shrugged.

  ‘So you lied to the police. That’s a very serious matter,’ Atherton said.

  ‘Oh, the Brothers Grimm from Grimthorpe or what?’ Melling cried with desperate gaiety. ‘A teeny harmless embroidery, nothing more. What are you going to do – arrest me for being a stay-at-home?’

  Slider ignored the question. ‘You had a history of bad feeling with Mr Egerton, isn’t that true?’

  ‘I teased him a bit, that’s all. It wasn’t serious.’

  ‘You were very angry about the snuffbox,’ Atherton said. ‘That wasn’t just teasing. You were outraged by his behaviour, as you had every right to be.’

  Melling looked uneasy at being sympathized with. ‘Well,’ he said cautiously, ‘perhaps I was a bit cross with him, but it all blows away, you know. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘And on the following show, you had another row with him,’ Slider said. ‘That’s the last show before he was killed, just to be clear.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘A row about a certain cameraman,’ Atherton said. ‘You’d been flirting with him, and Egerton came sticking his nose in. You told him in no uncertain terms to mind his own business.’

  Melling was gobsmacked. ‘I – what?’ he managed.

  ‘The whole thing was witnessed,’ Slider said smoothly. ‘Someone standing close by, unseen by either of you, heard it all.’