‘Yes, sir. But he was very insistent she wouldn’t have left the dog. Said she was pure dotey about it.’
‘Not much of a dog lover if she keeps a big dog in an upstairs flat,’ Porson complained.
‘It’s actually the garden flat, sir,’ Connolly said, uncertain if she should be correcting the Big Cheese.
‘Still leaves it alone all day when she’s at work,’ Porson pointed out triumphantly.
‘Maybe she’d asked someone to take care of it, and they forgot,’ said Slider, making peace. But Connolly could see he had taken the point. There was a slight thoughtful frown between his brows.
Porson’s had drawn together like sheep huddling from the rain. ‘Waste of bloody time. The dog that barked in the night? Or didn’t bark, or whatever it was.’
But Connolly, encouraged by the fact that Slider evidently trusted her instincts, made bold to say, ‘I just got the feeling there was something in it, sir. This Mr Fitton – there was something about him. I’m not sure what it was, but . . .’
‘Wait a minute,’ Porson said, suddenly interested. ‘Fitton, you say? Not Ronnie Fitton?’
Connolly glanced at her pad. ‘Fitton, Ronald. That’s right, sir.’
‘Come with me,’ said Porson.
When the record was brought up on the computer screen, Connolly recognized the face of her interviewee, despite the accretion of years. In fact, he’d had all the same lines when the mugshot was taken, they’d just got deeper; and his hair, though longer and bushier then, had been grey already. The intense eyes were the same. He’d been quite a looker, in the lean, craggy, Harrison Ford sort of mould.
‘Fitton, Ronald Dean,’ Porson said. ‘Recognize him now?’
‘I think it’s the same man, sir,’ said Connolly.
But Porson was talking to Slider.
‘I don’t know that I do,’ he said.
‘Maybe it was before your time. He was quite a cause celeb at the time. Got sacks o’ love letters from daft women.’ Porson shook his head in wonder. ‘One bit o’ fame and they’re all over you like a certifiable disease, never mind what you’ve done.’
‘What did he do, sir?’ Connolly asked.
‘Murdered his wife,’ Porson said. He looked at her, as if to judge her reaction. Connolly got the idea he was enjoying himself, and remained sturdily unmoved. ‘Caught her in bed doing the horizontal tango with the bloke next door and whacked her on the head. She died in hospital a couple of hours later. Funny thing, he never touched the bloke. Just threw his clothes out the window and told him to hop it. Bloke ran out in the road starkers and nearly got run over; white van swerved to avoid him and went into a lamp post.’
‘I remember the case now,’ Slider said. ‘It was before my time, but I remember reading about it.’
‘Couldn’t miss it, with details like that.’ He rubbed his hands with relish. ‘White van man turned out to have a load of stolen plant in the back, so they got him at the same time. Then Fitton’s ripped the leg off a chair to hit her with. You wouldn’t’ve thought it to look at him – stringy sort of bloke. The tabloids were burbling about madmen having the strength of ten.’
‘But he went down, didn’t he?’
‘Oh yes. Funny, though, he could’ve got off with a lighter sentence – he was respectable, got no previous, never been in trouble, he only hit her the once, and there was provocation. And like I said he never touched the bloke. Only, he wouldn’t express any remorse. Said she had it coming and he’d do it again in the same circs. Said adulterous women deserved to die. That didn’t go down well with the women jurors. And prosecuting counsel was Georgie Higgins – remember him?’
‘Wrath of God Higgins? Yes, he was quite a character.’
‘Anyway, he thundered on about taking justice into your own hands and judgement is mine sez the lord and let him who is without doo-dah stow the first throne and so on. That all went down a treat with the beak, who happened to be old Freeling, who was so High Church God called him sir. Freeling gives Fitton one last chance to say he’s sorry, and Fitton not only refuses but comes out with he’s an atheist, so Freeling goes purple and jugs him as hard as he can. You could see he was itching to slip on the black cap, if only they hadn’t gone and abolished hanging.’
‘So he got life?’
‘Yes, and then he buggered up his parole by getting into a fight with another prisoner and putting him in the san.’ He stroked his nose reflectively.
Now Connolly had placed that monk-like spareness and tidiness: not a soldier or sailor but a long-sentence con. ‘Nice class of a character you had me visiting,’ she muttered.
‘Well, apart from that he was a model prisoner. And there was provocation,’ Porson said. ‘The other con had it in for him, apparently, and he had form for starting barneys. So,’ he reflected, ‘Fitton’s back on our ground, is he? And a young lady he’s interested in’s gone missing.’
Oh, right, Connolly thought. Now she’s a missing person. That’s what happened when bosses came in on their days off. What Mr Porson needed was a hobby. She glanced at Slider and saw the same thought in his face.
‘Too early to say that, sir,’ Slider said mildly.
‘It’s the early bird that gathers the moss,’ Porson retorted. ‘If it goes bad, the press’ll be all over us for not jumping to it right away. You know what they’re like. They love a damson in distress.’
Slider barely blinked. He was used to Porson’s hit-or-miss use of language, and the old boy was sharp as a tack and a good boss. A bit of Bush in the boss was worth bearing for the sake of the strand in hand.
‘But we’ve got no reason to think she is missing,’ he said. He anticipated Porson’s next words: ‘And Ronnie Fitton would hardly call us in and draw attention to himself if he had done something to her.’
‘Hmph,’ Porson said.
‘It’s not even twenty-four hours yet. And nobody close to her has reported her missing.’
‘As you say,’ Porson said, and took himself off as if tiring of the subject; but he turned at the end of the corridor to say, ‘I just hope it doesn’t come back and bite you in the arse.’
Connolly caught Slider’s momentary stricken look, and when Porson had gone said indignantly, ‘The meaner! That was below the belt, guv.’
But Slider did not let his firm criticize senior officers – not in front of him, anyway. ‘Haven’t you got a report to write up? And if you’re short of something to do, I’ve got some photocopying.’
Slider was not on the following day. He was celebrating a Sunday off by sitting on the sofa, nominally reading the papers and watching little George while Joanna practised in the kitchen, but in reality conducting frequent essential checks on the inside of his eyelids, when the telephone rang.
It was Atherton, obscenely breezy. ‘Your supposed missing person just got missinger.’
‘That’s not even a word,’ Slider rebuked him with dignity. ‘And what are you telling me for?’
‘I thought you’d like to know. The boyfriend just reported she’s gone walkabout. We haven’t told him Fitton already reported it, just in case.’
‘In case what?’
‘Well, Mr Porson thinks Fitton did it.’
‘That doesn’t mean he didn’t.’
‘What a volte face! Yesterday you wouldn’t admit there was an it for him to have done. Connolly said you had to bite your cheeks at the suggestion.’
‘In any case, the boyfriend must know by now that Fitton spoke to us, because Fitton has the dog and he’d have had to go to him to get it back.’
‘That’s a point. He didn’t mention the dog. All right, you go back to sleep. I’ll handle everything. And if I need help, I can always pop upstairs and ask Mr Porson.’
Slider sat up. ‘Bloody Nora, what’s he doing there?’
‘There’s no way to answer that without laying myself open to disciplinary action.’
‘And what do you mean, he didn’t mention the dog?’
‘Do
you want me to read you the interview transcript?’ Atherton enquired sweetly.
‘No, no. You win. I’ll come in,’ Slider said, sighing like a whale with relationship problems. ‘Connolly felt there was something to it. That girl’s developing good instincts.’
‘But you did the right thing,’ said Atherton. ‘Couldn’t go on Fitton’s say-so. And we still don’t know she’s missing, for the matter of that – only that she’s not at home. She may just have done a runner, and from the look of the boyfriend, who would blame her?’
‘If you’re trying to comfort me you must think things are bad.’
‘Not yet, they’re not,’ Atherton said significantly.
Joanna was used to such interruptions but she was human. She only said, ‘It’s a pity I’ve already put the beef in,’ but combined with the scent of it on the air, it was enough to break a man’s heart.
‘You and Dad will enjoy it, anyway,’ he said. His father shared the house with them, a very nice arrangement for babysitting, and for relieving him of anxiety about the old man living alone. ‘I probably won’t be gone very long.’
‘Why have you got to go in, anyway? Just for a missing person?’
‘There’s an ex-murderer involved.’
‘Ex, or axe?’
‘Ex as in former.’
‘Can you be a former murderer? Surely what’s done is done.’
‘You quibble like Atherton. Anyway, Mr Porson’s gone all unnecessary over it, so I want to make sure everything’s in place, just in case it turns out to be anything.’
‘You’d sooner do it yourself than inherit someone else’s mess,’ she summarized.
‘Wouldn’t you?’
She kissed him. ‘Go, with my blessing. Cold roast beef’s almost better than hot, anyway.’
He kissed her back. ‘You’re a very wonderful woman,’ he said.
‘I said “almost”,’ she reminded him.
Slider was not a tall man, and Scott Hibbert was, and since he didn’t like being loomed over, he freely admitted that he started off with a prejudice against the man. Hibbert was both tall and big, but going a little bit to softness around the jaw and middle. He was not bad looking, in an obvious, fleshy sort of way, except that his mouth was too small, which Slider thought made him look weak and a bit petulant. He was wearing jeans and an expensive leather jacket, and shoes, not trainers (one plus point), which were well polished (two plus points); but the jeans had been ironed with a crease (minus a point). His carefully-cut hair was dressed with a little fan of spikes at the front like Keanu Reeves, and his chin was designer-stubbled (minus too many points to count).
Having privately indulged his prejudices for a satisfying few seconds, Slider dismissed them firmly, and prepared to interview Hibbert with a completely receptive mind.
‘So, Mr Hibbert, tell me when you last saw Miss Hunter.’
‘I already told the other guy everything,’ he complained.
Guy. Another minus – no, no, no. Concentrate. ‘I’m sorry, but I really would like you to tell me again, in your own words,’ said Slider.
Hibbert looked uneasy, and kept crossing and recrossing his legs, and though he was not sweating, his skin looked damp. He licked his lips. ‘Look, shouldn’t you be doing something?’ he asked querulously. ‘Like, I mean, looking for her or something?’
‘I assure you the other officer will already have put things in train for a general alert. I need to hear your story so that we can refine the search. You last saw her when?’
‘Like I said, Friday morning, before we went off to work,’ he said, frowning. ‘We usually walk to the tube together, but I was taking my car in because I was going down to the West Country later, so I offered to drop her off at the station. But she said no, she’d rather walk.’ His left leg was jiggling all on its own, and he sniffed and wiped the end of his nose on the back of his hand. Slider found these unstudied gestures reassuring. Stillness and composure in witnesses were what worried him. ‘She was a bit pissed off with me, if you want the truth,’ Hibbert added in a blurty sort of way. ‘I was going away for the weekend and she was narked about it.’
‘Because?’
‘I was going to this wedding in the West Country – my mate Dave – we were at school together – and she didn’t want me to go.’
‘Why not? Wasn’t she invited?’
‘Oh, she was invited and everything. Of course she was. Except there was this stag thing on the Friday night that was men only. She didn’t want to go to the hen night because she didn’t really know Julie, that Dave’s marrying, and anyway she’d already got this thing arranged for Friday night with some of her girl friends. I said, so come down on Saturday, then, but she wouldn’t. She said she hates weddings anyway, and she never really liked Dave. Well, she can’t stand him if you want to know the truth. I mean, they’ve only met a couple of times and it ended in a stand-up row both times, and she said she never wanted to see him again. I suppose he’s a bit blokeish for her, but he’s a laugh, and he’s my best mate. There’s some of her friends I don’t like. Well, that’s all right – she has her friends and I have mine, why not? We don’t have to do everything together. And I couldn’t let old Dave down, not on his wedding day, could I?’
Slider guessed he was hearing the essence of the row that had been. Hibbert was justifying himself to him. He nodded neutrally.
‘When I first told her about it, she said it was all right, I should go on my own and she didn’t mind,’ he went on. ‘But Friday morning she was really narky about it, kept saying things about me and Dave getting drunk together. Well, what’s a stag night for? And everybody gets drunk at weddings. I said you won’t have to see us, so what’s the problem? And she said wild horses wouldn’t drag her there. We had a bit of a barney and she storms off to the bathroom. So then I cool down a bit and when she comes out I say d’you wanna lift to the station, babes, and she gives me a look and says no, she’ll walk. And she did.’
‘She works at the Natural History Museum? And where do you work?’
‘Hatter and Ruck – you know, the estate agents? – in Knightsbridge.’
Posh, Slider thought. ‘So you could have dropped her off at work, instead of just offering a lift to the station? You’d go right past it.’
He looked uneasy, and shifted to another buttock. ‘I wasn’t going in to the office first thing, I was going to look at a house in Hendon. I don’t normally take the car in when I’m just in the office because parking’s a nightmare up there.’
‘And that was the last time you saw her?’
He nodded, looked stricken at the reminder, and found yet another buttock to shift to. How many did he have in there?
‘Or spoke to her?’
‘No, I rang her Friday evening, while she was out with her mates. I rang her up to make peace, if you want to know, but she was all right again by then. She’d got over and it and just said have a good time and everything and I’ll see you Sunday. She’s like that – she never stays mad for long.’
‘And that was the last time you spoke to her?’
He nodded.
‘Did you go home after work on Friday?’
‘No, I went straight down to the West Country.’
He kept saying the West Country. Slider thought that odd. ‘Where, exactly?’
‘Salisbury,’ he said. ‘Dave lives in Salisbury.’
‘And what time did you eventually get home?’
‘I was supposed to come back Sunday night – there was a lot of us from the same school and we were going to get together Sunday lunchtime – but I was missing Mel, so I called it off. Well, we’d been talking and drinking all Saturday afternoon and evening, so I reckoned we’d said everything anyway. I didn’t sleep very well Saturday night so I got up really early Sunday morning and left. I was back home, what, about ten? She wasn’t there, and I knew right away something was up.’
‘How?’ Slider asked.
Hibbert stared in perplexity at the questi
on.
‘How did you know something was wrong?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. Now he was still, thinking about it: buttocks at rest at last; even the lone break-dancing knee had stopped and held its breath. He scowled with the effort of analysis, and Slider got the impression he was not very bright; and yet, of course, it is easy enough to fake being dumber than you are. It’s the opposite that’s impossible.
‘I dunno,’ he said at last. ‘It just felt wrong, as if no one had been there.’ He thought some more. ‘Oh, for one thing, the answer-machine wasn’t on. If she’d gone out, she’d have put it on. And she’d have left me a note to say where she was going. She always leaves a note.’
‘Even if she was still mad at you?’
‘But she wasn’t any more. When I spoke to her Friday night she was all right again.’
‘Anything else?’ Slider prompted. Hibbert looked puzzled by the question, having apparently gone off on another train of thought. ‘Anything else you noticed that made you think something was wrong?’ He was going after the dog, absence of, but what he got was quite unexpected.
Hibbert’s face cleared. He looked as though he’d just got the last answer in the jackpot pub quiz. ‘Her handbag was there.’
‘Her handbag?’ Slider said, trying not to sound like Edith Evans.
‘Yeah, her handbag,’ he said excitedly. ‘With her purse and phone and everything in it. But not her door keys.’
‘Excuse me,’ Slider said. ‘I have to make a phone call.’
TWO
Deep-Pan, Crisp and Even
Joanna was resigned. ‘I’m not surprised,’ she said. ‘I know once they get hold of you, they won’t let you go. That place is a black hole.’
Even over the phone, he thought he could smell the roast beef and Yorkshire. ‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘The case just turned into a case. The girl’s handbag is in the flat.’
‘Her handbag, singular? Tell me any woman of that age who only has one.’
‘The handbag she was using, I mean. With her gubbins in it. So it’s looking more like foul play, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh dear. Well, keep the chin up. There may be an explanation you haven’t thought of, and she’ll come wandering in looking surprised.’
Kill My Darling Page 2
