‘I don’t think she planned to kill him,’ Slider said.
Swilley agreed. ‘If she was that upset over him seeing Lucy Gallo she’d have acted sooner. Not waited a month to whack him.’
‘Unless she’d been brooding, and it all came to a head,’ said Lœssop, leaning against the door jamb.
‘But if she’d gone over there deliberately to kill him, she wouldn’t have taken the cash with her,’ Swilley pointed out. ‘She stopped at the cashpoint after leaving home and took the money out, and we found it under his pillow, so it must have been meant for him. She must have gone over there for sex, and the killing was an act of impulse. Something was said, they quarrelled, and she hit him.’
‘All right as far as it goes,’ said Atherton, arms folded, magisterial, ‘but the mystery is, why seven hundred?’
McLaren appeared at Lœssop’s shoulder eating a hot sausage roll (his breakfast ran to two courses), and Lœssop stepped aside nimbly to avoid the dandruff shower of pastry flakes. ‘Maybe it was five hundred for him, and the other two was for her, her walking-about money,’ McLaren suggested.
‘But the whole seven ended up under his pillow,’ said Atherton.
‘She changed her mind. She came over all generous. He performed better than expected. Or maybe he just needed exactly seven hundred more for his grand plan. Why is it important?’
‘Anything mysterious is important,’ Atherton said. ‘If we can’t explain it, a jury won’t buy it.’
‘If you’re talking about mysteries,’ Swilley said, ‘why wouldn’t an intelligent woman like her arrange a better alibi for herself?’
‘She thought she had one,’ said Atherton. ‘She works from nine to midnight every evening and mustn’t be disturbed. No phone calls, no tender enquiries from hubby, no cups of tea. Noli me tangere. The perfect cover.’
‘You lost me with the tangerines,’ said Swilley.
He carried on regardless. ‘Obviously, she never expected any connection to be made between her and Lingoss’s death. Why should it be? She couldn’t know about the camera in K D Electronics’ window. As long as she kept saying she was at home all evening, no one could prove any different. Or so she thought.’
‘But she’s still sticking to it now, when we know she was out,’ Swilley said. ‘Why doesn’t she make something up to cover herself?’
‘She’s frozen,’ Atherton said. ‘Gone tharn. Can’t think. All she can do is cling to her story and hope for the best.’
‘So her protestations of innocence are all lies?’ Slider asked him.
Atherton gave him a curious look. ‘Point a, we know they are. And point b – what do you think she does for a living? She tells lies professionally – writes about things that never happened to people who never existed.’
‘So the line between truth and fiction necessarily becomes blurred?’ Slider asked.
‘I didn’t say that. Only that she must be good at making things up, and doing it with a straight face.’
‘That’s my point,’ Swilley said doggedly. ‘Why doesn’t she make something up now?’
‘It wouldn’t look good to change her story, would it?’ said Atherton.
‘It’d look better than having no answer to the whole car and cash question,’ Lœssop pointed out.
‘Moving on,’ Atherton said. ‘Second mystery – why did she take his mobile phone away?’
‘Because she knew her call to him would be logged,’ said Swilley. ‘She was trying to leave no evidence.’
‘But why didn’t she destroy it straight away? Or at least turn it off?’
McLaren sucked the last crumbs off his fingers. ‘I still reckon she picked it up by accident. Natalie’s always doing that at home. We’ve got the same model, she just picks up whichever one she sees. And Steenkamp and Lingoss’s phones are the same model. She was on her way out the door, saw it lying there, picked it up without even knowing she’d done it.’
‘Even though she still had her own phone in her handbag or pocket or whatever?’ Swilley objected.
‘Automatic reaction,’ said McLaren.
‘But then what would she have done with it?’ Atherton said. ‘People do behave automatically with their phones, I agree. She’d have put it wherever she usually put it. Not in her pocket – she’d have found the other one there straight away.’
‘In her handbag?’ Lœssop suggested.
‘All right. But when she felt for it later, to ring Greyling, wouldn’t she have found she had two?’
‘Women’s handbags are strange, trans-dimensional spaces,’ said Slider. ‘Things put in them defy the laws of nature.’
‘That’s true,’ said Swilley. ‘Doesn’t matter where you put your keys, they’re always right down at the bottom where you can’t reach them.’
‘So there are two phones in her bag and it’s a matter of chance which one she fishes out when she wants to make that call?’ said Atherton.
‘Seems likely to me,’ said Swilley. ‘That’s why I never put my phone in my bag. And I always put it on the seat next to me when I drive.’
‘All right,’ said Atherton. ‘But I still maintain it’s more likely she took it for a reason.’
Slider moved it on again. ‘Why did she ring Leon Greyling? It could hardly be a pocket-dial when he wasn’t in her contacts list.’
‘Nobody’s ever said Lingoss was the only geezer she was doing,’ said McLaren. ‘If she was into young blokes, why stick at one?’
‘You’re making an unusual amount of sense this morning, Maurice,’ said Swilley.
He shrugged off the insult and stumped away, back to the eternal verities of his cameras. McLaren might be annoying in many ways, Slider thought, but he had a work ethic that would shame a bee.
‘But she says she didn’t know Greyling,’ Slider said, going back to the argument. ‘And it seems she had never rung him before.’
‘Well, she must have,’ said Atherton. ‘Maybe he had another number. Or she had another mobile for her secret trysts.’
‘You’re reaching too far,’ said Slider. ‘And we’ve got enough phones flying around for now, thank you. I admit there are mysteries, but for the moment we have to concentrate on firming up our evidence, then we can have another crack at our famous authoress and see if we can get her to break.’
‘On a point of order,’ Atherton said, levering his elegant length upright, ‘the word “author” refers to the relationship between an artefact and its originator, and cannot therefore be gender specific.’
‘You what?’ Swilley said impatiently.
‘It’s analogous with the word “maker”. You don’t talk about a “makeress”, do you?’
‘There’s a word that springs to my mind,’ said Swilley coldly, ‘very like “maker”, only it starts with a “w” and it’s got an “n” in it.’
‘You know where to hit a chap, don’t you? Right in the philology.’
‘Phil who?’ said Swilley vaguely. ‘You mean Gascoyne?’
‘Go away and find evidence,’ Slider dismissed them all.
He surfaced some time later from re-reading everything from the beginning, feeling stiff of body and stuffy of head. He stood up, and his knees made a noise like a goat chewing on aluminium foil. He thought of all those Lingosses and Gallos tirelessly treading and lifting and pulling and pressing, tending their bodies as though they were exotic plants, searching for perfection. Were they in some way closer to God, or was it just an extreme form of vanity? He had some respect for Gilda Steenkamp, who was older than him and probably rose both seamlessly and silently from a chair. Policemen were supposed to maintain a certain level of fitness, but the reading-heavy life of a detective chief inspector did not conduce to lissomness. Cautiously he tried a few stretches, then swung his arms about to relieve the tension in his neck and shoulders.
Of course, someone chose that moment to come into his office. It was Hart.
‘Doing karate, boss?’ she asked with interest.
‘Is
that what it looked like?’ Slider said hopefully.
‘Nah. More like you’d just walked into a spider’s web.’
‘Is there something you wanted, detective sergeant?’ he asked sternly.
‘Yeah,’ she said, grinning. ‘I got something good for you.’
She had been co-ordinating the two mobile phone logs, Steenkamp’s and Lingoss’s, and presented him with a single sheet on which were two columns of times.
‘Lucky they were both on the same server, so the same phone masts registered them. And there we are. Both start from zone three at the same moment, pass into zone two, both stationary for the same time, then Steenkamp’s goes back to zone one and Lingoss’s goes off. Beautiful, innit?’
‘Very satisfying,’ he said sadly. The noose was closing round that elegant neck. ‘Now, if we could just find the phone itself …’
‘It’s gotta be this Greyling geezer, hasn’t it?’ Hart said. ‘He’s the loose marble in the toybox. She rung him and he lives in zone two.’
‘So do a lot of other people,’ Slider reminded her. ‘We need to find out exactly where the car went. She says she didn’t know Greyling …’
‘But maybe Gallo did. He lives in zone two. Maybe he gave her Greyling’s number.’
‘But for what purpose?’ Slider said. ‘You’re suggesting the killing was planned? But if she did it, what did she need either Gallo or Greyling for?’
‘I dunno,’ Hart said. ‘Haven’t thought that bit out yet.’
He made it up to the canteen this time, and was thoughtfully ingesting liver, bacon, mash and cabbage when Atherton appeared, and predictably wrinkled his nose.
‘Liver is brain food,’ Slider informed him. ‘Rich in choline, vitamin A and zinc.’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘You looked.’
‘The look was to accompany the news that Norma’s back from Steenkamp’s flat, and they didn’t find anything.’
‘I wasn’t hopeful,’ said Slider. ‘It is over a week since the event, plenty of time to get rid of anything incriminating.’
‘And she’s intelligent enough – and rich enough – to throw away stained clothing rather than trying to wash it,’ said Atherton. ‘The search does seem to have calmed Seagram down, though. Norma says he’d got very quiet and thoughtful before they left. Apparently, he buttonholed her while Steenkamp was in confab with her brief, and asked if she really thought his wife had anything to do with it.’
Slider’s eyebrows shot up. ‘He said that?’
‘Quite humble and anxious, Norma says. It didn’t last long – she gave him a professional answer, and he bounced straight back into how dare you suspect my saintly wife mode. But it’s interesting that we seem to have sowed a seed of doubt.’
‘Interesting,’ Slider repeated thoughtfully.
‘Of course,’ Atherton went on, ‘if she did her writing on a computer like normal people, it would have been time-logged and we’d have been able to prove she wasn’t working that evening. But she says she was writing by hand that night. Tiresome of her. What with that and the self-isolation, you’d almost think she’d planned years ago to murder someone.’
Slider looked up sharply. ‘What did you say?’
‘I thought liver was brain food. Or did you not hear?’
‘I heard. And I was thinking.’
‘Do tell.’
‘Not yet. The thought isn’t fully formed.’
‘And you never show your work until it’s finished? You have a lot in common with a novelist, you know.’
‘But I wouldn’t have to make it up.’ He stood up, abandoning lunch. ‘I wonder how McLaren’s getting on.’
McLaren was looking tired but triumphant, like a woman who had just given birth. Fathom, at his shoulder, provided the rumpled and sweaty bit – but actually he always looked like that. It was after six, and the borrowed uniforms had packed up, rubbing their eyes, and gone home. McLaren had been collating the results of the team’s labours, and presented them in the CID room with full and impressive detail. Slider would have let him have his moment, aware of what a soul-sapping job tracing a car from camera to camera was, but Porson had sidled in at the back, as inconspicuous as Stonehenge, and was soon starting to fidget. He’d had his patience tested once. It turned out negative.
In essence, through a variety of cameras, they had managed to piece together the red Mazda’s journey from Russell Close. ‘Course, it was easier knowing what time we were looking for,’ McLaren acknowledged. ‘And what motor we were dealing with.’ After leaving Russell Close at nine fifty-nine and turning into Holland Road, it must have swung round the one-way system of Addison Crescent and Addison Road, because it appeared on the camera at the traffic lights where Addison Road met Kensington High Street. Two cameras marked its progress along the High Street, but it had taken a lot of trawling before they found that a bus camera in an eastbound number nine had caught it turning into Adam and Eve Mews.
‘After that, we lost it for a bit,’ McLaren said regretfully. ‘You’d think there’d be a lot of cameras, place like that, but there’s only two, and they’re both pointing down at their own front doors. The mews isn’t a cul-de-sac – you can get out onto Allen Street. So we had a big area to check. But we didn’t get a ping on it anywhere, until a westbound number twenty-seven bus catches it trying to turn right out of the mews at ten thirty-seven, and an eastbound number forty-nine at the same time shows it turning left into Campden Hill Road. On its way home.’
Porson broke the digestive silence. ‘So it’s missing for half an hour.’
McLaren looked apologetic. ‘It goes into Adam and Eve Mews, sir, and it comes out of there. It’s fair to assume that’s where it was for the half hour.’
‘Assuming’s not proving,’ Porson grunted.
‘It’s very suggestive. She rang Greyling, and went to see him,’ said Atherton.
‘A man who she’d never contacted before,’ Slider said, troubled.
LaSalle spoke up. ‘Gallo lives two minutes away in Marloes Road. And he drinks in Allen Street. There’s got to be a connection.’
‘Maybe,’ said Slider. ‘Or maybe it’s just geography. Everything’s happening within a small area, but not everybody in that area knows everybody else.’
Porson gave him a look so old-fashioned it had mutton chop whiskers. ‘Maybe’s not good enough! Can’t arrest a celebrity on maybe. That Friedman type’s going to scrupulize everything with a magnifying glass. Slightest crack in our case and he’ll be through it. It’s got to be watertight as a duck’s back.’
‘I know, sir,’ said Slider. ‘We’ve still got work to do.’
Jack Gallo’s flat was the top floor of a typical three-storeys-plus-basement mid-Victorian terraced house, which had been converted the cheap way, by sticking up plasterboard partitions wherever needed, without regard to aesthetics. LaSalle was not architecture-sensitive like the boss, and like many Londoners judged the desirability of a dwelling solely on its proximity to a Tube station. But even he thought Gallo’s pad was a bit dismal. Mostly, this was because Gallo was so big and the place was so small. Effectively it was one decent-sized room that had been divided up into three inadequate ones – a bed-sitting room, a sliver of bathroom and a galley kitchen – linked by a narrow passage from the front door. The fact that it was on the top floor so the ceilings were low didn’t help. LaSalle had to force himself not to stoop. He was impressed that Gallo walked so freely in the upright position, given that he had only about an inch clearance. And he did have to bob under the doorways.
He accepted LaSalle’s visit resignedly and led him without question through to the tiny living room. There was a sofa bed, which was still in the out position and took up most of the room. There was a small table, occupied by a computer screen and keyboard, in one corner, and in the other a jumble of CD and DVD equipment and speakers, topped with a portable TV. It was a typical guy room, LaSalle thought: the bedding was dark grey with a dull red stripe a
nd was strewn with clothes, there was no carpet on the wood-effect floor or curtains at the window, no possessions or aids to comfort anywhere. In passing he had noticed a mountain bike in the bathroom – the only place to put it, but you’d have to move it into the passage to use the loo. Small as it was, this flat would still carry a hefty rental because of its Kensington address. Gallo owned a successful gym and ought to have been making a decent amount – most people, once they were established, moved further out for more room. Perhaps, LaSalle supposed, he had lived here since before his success, and cared too little about his living arrangements to bother to move.
LaSalle was still sure Gallo was the man they should be concentrating on. Despite the compelling Mazda-and-mobile evidence against Steenkamp, he felt in his gut that Gallo was at the bottom of it; Gallo with his missing alibi, his undeclared meeting with Wilson on Murder Night, his geographical proximity to all the action. And he was the one with the steaming-hot motive. LaSalle knew these Italian families and their fierce loyalties, and particularly the protectiveness of brothers towards sisters, especially younger sisters. It made a lot more sense to him that Gallo should have killed Lingoss for dissing his sister than that a mature and sophisticated woman like Steenkamp should be driven by jealousy to kill her toy boy, when she must have known he would stray eventually and would have to be replaced.
So instead of going home, he had sought out Gallo. There were two upright chairs at the table, and Gallo pulled them out, waved LaSalle to one and took the other himself. Their knees were almost touching, but there was nowhere else to sit, apart from the bed. LaSalle supposed that when it was folded up into a sofa, you could sit and watch TV from it, but for a man living alone, the temptation to leave it out, when you were only going to want it again that night, would be nigh-on irresistible. He didn’t suppose Gallo spent much time here anyway.
Cruel as the Grave Page 20
