Body Line

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Well, well. The naughty lad,’ Slider said. ‘Freddie was right. He said there was a scandal around Rogers.’

  ‘I looked up the newspapers from the time, and it did get in, though there weren’t that much, only in the tabloids, and they were big on innuendo and headlines and not much text,’ Hollis said. ‘Which is always the clue they’ve not got much. And it died down pretty quick – I suppose when the woman dropped out.’

  But as Freddie had said, when it was one of your own, you noticed.

  ‘Was he struck off?’

  ‘I haven’t found that out yet. You know what the General Medical Council are like. I’m trying to get on to someone but they’re not ringing me back.’

  ‘Keep trying.’

  ‘Aye, guv. But you know, it could have been a false accusation. Happens all the time. Woman wants to make money, it’s the easiest way.’

  Slider nodded. It happened to policemen, too. And rather than have to fight it through the courts, with all the disastrous publicity, establishments tended to prefer to settle.

  ‘Or she might have made a genuine mistake,’ Slider said. ‘If she was groggy or drifting in and out of consciousness—’

  ‘Doesn’t look as if the practice put up much of a fight,’ Hollis said, ‘so I reckon there was something in it. Anyway, I’ll keep on at the GMC and try and get to bottom of it. So t’ speak.’

  ‘Thank you, I’ll do the jokes,’ Slider said. He frowned. ‘June 1998? And the Rogerses were divorced in September 1999. I wonder if this was the proverbial last straw?’

  ‘Amanda Sturgess never said anything about it, did she?’

  ‘No,’ said Slider. ‘She did say he had shamed her, but only that he’d had a lot of women. Nothing about his being accused and arrested. I wonder whether that was just natural modesty—’

  ‘Or she didn’t want you to know she had a bloody good reason to hate him,’ Hollis said, finishing the sentence.

  ‘But it’s always the same objection,’ Slider concluded with dissatisfaction. ‘Why would she wait all this time if it was revenge she wanted?’

  Hollis shrugged. ‘Maybe you need to ask her. Oh, and another thing, guv – it says in the papers Rogers was a plastic surgeon. But we’ve got him down as urology.’

  ‘That’s what Amanda Sturgess told us,’ said Slider. What with that, the unadmitted telephone calls, and Frith’s lie about his whereabouts on Monday, the Sturgess équipe was definitely due for another visit, Slider thought.

  The Sturgess and Beale agency was an office above a travel shop on the Chiswick High Road, more or less opposite the common – a good, central position that would probably command a steepish rent. ‘Although possibly the landlord may give it a favourable rate because it’s a charity,’ Slider said, as Atherton scanned the roadside for somewhere to park.

  ‘Bless your Pollyanna heart,’ Atherton said. ‘Landlords don’t think like that. They’d have to hand back the badge if they did something kind.’ He saw a space and drew up parallel to the car in front of it. ‘But there’s no reason the agency shouldn’t have wealthy donors. Oh, get off my tail, you halfwit!’ he bellowed into the rear view mirror. ‘Can’t you see I’m parking?’ He jerked a hand out of the window and furiously beckoned past the car that was jammed up behind him. It was a souped-up black Mazda 3 Sport with a driver who looked about fifteen and had his windows wound down so that the whole world could share his CD choice. ‘Get you next time,’ Atherton said. ‘And if I listened to music like that, I wouldn’t want anyone else to know about it.’

  They walked back to the travel shop. The door for the upstairs lay between it and the next shop: a genuine old Victorian door that matched the age of the building, handsomely painted in fresh red gloss, with a big brass dead-knob in the centre. There was a brass nameplate on the return of the wall: Sturgess and Beale Agency, Employment Solutions for the Differently Abled.

  ‘Classy,’ said Atherton.

  Below that was another plate saying: Disabled access and lift to the rear, or please ring for assistance. Below again was the bell, a large brass mounting around a white porcelain button with PRESS enamelled in the centre in black. ‘All right for the press; where do the rest of us ring?’ Atherton complained.

  ‘I think we’ll just go up,’ Slider said. The door was on the latch and pushed open. Inside was a narrow hallway with green marble-effect lino tiles and a steep staircase going up; the passage went past them right through to a glazed back door and the lift. The walls were painted cream and pale green and there were sunken halogen lights in the ceiling. All very fresh and attractive. They climbed to the first floor, where the lift came out on the landing, and walls had been moved to make manoeuvring room for a wheelchair. The doorways were extra wide, and there were polished wooden handrails everywhere. ‘I bet the lino tiles are non-slip, too,’ Atherton said. ‘They’ve thought of everything.’

  ‘I should hope so,’ said Slider.

  Through the first open door, they passed into an office, light and airy, well lit, with plenty of floor space. There were three desks, one bearing a printer and copier and stacks of forms and leaflets. The other two had computers and telephones and the usual office accoutrements. Behind one sat a slight young woman, very fair and pale, who appeared to be suffering from a heavy cold – her eyes and the end of her nose were red and swollen – clattering away full-speed on the keyboard. At the other was a woman in her fifties, rather shapeless-looking, with a mass of greying frizzy hair spreading out and past her shoulders, oversized tortoiseshell glasses slipping to the end of her nose, and an expression of tense concentration on her face as she picked two-fingered at the keys. Through a further wide and open door was a glimpse of a second office, the one which had the windows on to the street. The desk was out of sight to the left, but a youngish man in a wheelchair could be seen, his attention on the occupant of the desk. Slider could distinguish the cut-glass tones of Amanda Sturgess coming from within.

  ‘Can I help you?’ said the shapeless woman.

  ‘Detective Inspector Slider and Detective Sergeant Atherton,’ Slider said. ‘To see Amanda Sturgess.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the woman, looking alarmed. She stood up jerkily, knocking over a pot of pencils and biros on the desk. ‘I’m afraid she’s not available.’ A pencil rolled off the table and she stooped awkwardly to retrieve it. She was about five foot four and extremely fat, and was wearing a waistless print dress which reached her ankles, like a floral tent. She pushed her large glasses up her nose and they slid straight back down, as arrogantly as the Queen Mary down the slipway. ‘Can I help at all? I’m Nora Beale. Ms Sturgess’s partner.’ She came round the end of the desk and took a step towards them, and dithered, as if wondering whether to offer to shake hands or not. The outer edge of her hip knocked a small pile of papers to the ground. ‘Oh!’ she said again, and made to retrieve them, but Atherton got in first, stooping like a hawk, gathering them in one pass of his long fingers and presenting them to her. She almost snatched them from him, looking at him in confused annoyance. ‘They’re confidential,’ she objected, and pushed her glasses up again. ‘Were you enquiring about employing a differently abled person? I have a leaflet covering the legal requirements, if you aren’t sure about them.’

  Unseen within the inner room, a hand closed the door.

  Slider raised his hand slightly, to prevent the woman attempting to get across the room to the leaflet table, which he thought in her state of nervousness would leave a trail of havoc. The young woman had ceased typing and was watching the scene. ‘No, thank you. I need to speak to Mrs Sturgess about a personal matter.’

  ‘It’s Ms Sturgess,’ Beale corrected, with more force than anything she had said so far. ‘And I’m afraid it’s quite impossible to speak to her. She has someone with her. One of our clients.’

  ‘Yes, so I saw,’ Slider said. ‘I’m afraid it is rather urgent, however. Would you please tell her we are here?’

  ‘I can’t disturb her when she’s with
a client,’ she objected, outraged. ‘Our clients are very vulnerable, and must be given every consideration. You’ll have to come back some other time. It’s best to make an appointment, you know. Ms Sturgess is always very busy.’ Her face was mottling, though whether with fear or anger, Slider couldn’t tell. Her devotion to Amanda Sturgess was obvious, but from the little he had seen, it was not so obvious why Amanda would keep her about the place.

  ‘I quite understand,’ he said soothingly, ‘but I must ask you to interrupt her and tell her we are here. We’ll wait while she winds up the interview.’

  Ms Beale made various disapproving, tutting noises, but she blundered back round her desk and rang through to the other office, turning away and covering her mouth while she muttered her message. When she had put the phone down again she went back to her hunt-and-peck typing without a word to the two intruders, though judging from the amount of backspacing she was doing, she was too upset to be making a good job of it. It was the younger woman who said, ‘Would you like to sit down?’ and gestured towards some chairs on her side of the room. Slider smiled at her and politely declined. He was not going to be passively seated and let them think the waiting was all right.

  It was eight minutes before the inner door opened and the man in the wheelchair appeared, with Amanda Sturgess behind him. She ignored the visitors with glacial completeness as she escorted him out, talking to him the while, all the way to the lift. Only on her return did she give Slider a cold glance and say, ‘You may come in,’ and then stalked past them into her sanctum.

  They followed her in and closed the door, and she faced them, standing, across her desk and got the first punch in. ‘If you wish to speak to me in future you must make an appointment. I do not appreciate your turning up here unannounced, embarrassing me, annoying my staff and upsetting the clients. You must understand that our clients are extremely vulnerable people, and I cannot have disturbing influences putting them at risk.’

  Slider took it straight back to her. ‘And you must understand that I do not appreciate being lied to. It makes me feel very disturbed, and when I get disturbed I tend to come and disturb others.’

  She was shocked by his use of her own words. Her eyes widened and she reddened angrily. ‘How dare you be facetious?’ she cried. ‘Don’t you grasp the importance of our work here? We are a charity! We deal with disabled people!’

  ‘It’s not your business I’m interested in, it’s you personally. And you need to grasp that I am investigating a murder, and that hindering an investigation is an imprisonable offence.’

  Atherton thought his boss was going in a bit hard, but it seemed he had the measure of her. She shut her mouth with a snap and sat down abruptly, and when she spoke again a moment later her tone was different, quieter.

  ‘But I’m not. I wouldn’t. Obviously I want to help you if I can, in any way possible, but I don’t see what I can do. I don’t know anything about it. You can’t really suppose that I do.’ She looked at him with furious appeal.

  ‘What I may or may not suppose is beside the point,’ Slider said. ‘I deal in facts, and the fact is that you have lied to me, and I don’t like it. Lies make me restless. I have to know what’s behind them.’

  ‘I didn’t lie to you,’ she said indignantly, but there was a consciousness in her eyes, and a wariness. Atherton noted it with interest. She was wondering which lies had been uncovered, he thought – which argued that there had been several of them.

  ‘There are lies of commission, and lies of omission,’ Slider said. ‘Perhaps a purist might ease their conscience over the latter, but there’s no excuse for the former. You told me that you hadn’t spoken to your former husband for months, and that you only spoke to him about once a year anyway. But we know that you have spoken to him frequently in the last few weeks. And that you had a long telephone conversation with him only a week before his death.’

  And suddenly she was quite calm again. She straightened her shoulders, laid her hands before her on the desk, and said, as if it were a normal interview and she was in control of it, ‘The telephone conversations had nothing to do with your investigation, and my not telling you of them has not hampered you in any way. Really, these are very trivial matters to come trampling in here threatening me about. I have a mind to make an official complaint about your behaviour, Inspector Slider. You may not be aware that the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire is a very great personal friend of mine.’

  ‘I’m afraid he does not have any authority over me,’ Slider gave her back calmly. If she was threatening him, she must have something to hide, which only spurred him on. ‘The Metropolitan Police report directly to the Home Secretary.’

  She smiled unpleasantly. ‘Please don’t suppose that I have never met him, either. Is that it?’

  ‘You told us your husband’s specialty was urology, but in fact he was in plastic surgery.’

  That caused her a little flicker, but she came back smoothly. ‘He began in urology, but he changed to plastics when an opportunity came up. Again, it had nothing to do with your investigation. And what are these so-called sins of omission? Equally trivial, I have no doubt.’

  This was not the way round Slider wanted to do the interview, but he had not managed to shake her sufficiently. ‘You didn’t tell us that your husband had been arrested for indecent assault.’

  ‘My ex-husband. No, why should I? It was a long time ago. It’s none of my business now, and none of yours either.’

  ‘I’d like to know something about it.’

  ‘Look it up in the papers. I’m sure it’s all there. It is not something I wish to talk about.’

  ‘Was that why you got divorced?’

  ‘Really, I will not answer questions about my private life. It was more than ten years ago. It has nothing to do with anything in the present, and I refuse to satisfy your prurient and idle curiosity. You should be concentrating on finding out who killed David, not harassing responsible citizens and interfering with their work. If that is all you have to say I must ask you to leave. I am too busy for this nonsense.’

  Slider studied her for a moment and she held his look unflinchingly. Quietly, he tried, ‘You didn’t tell us that you had put a large amount of money into Hillbrow Equestrian Centre.’

  Now that was interesting. That one, which ought to have received only a puzzled ‘what’s that got to do with anything?’, actually made her blink. You could see her trying to think her way through it. Finally she said, ‘My financial relationship with Hillbrow is none of your business.’ It was the finance that bothered her. Not passion, but money? There was definitely something to be found out, and he meant to find it.

  ‘Where was Mr Frith on Monday morning?’ he asked.

  She was still puzzled, he could see, but she had taken comfort from this new direction. ‘You had better ask him,’ she said.

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  ‘I am not disposed to tell you,’ she said grandly.

  ‘Do you want to be arrested?’ he asked with assumed incredulity.

  ‘I know very well that you will not do any such thing.’

  ‘Are you quite sure of that?’

  They locked eyes across the desk, and it was Amanda who flinched. She looked away, towards the window. ‘He went to work as usual.’

  ‘At what time?’

  ‘He generally leaves at six or six fifteen.’

  ‘What time did he leave on Monday?’

  ‘I think it was – six fifteen. Yes, a quarter past six.’

  ‘Does he drive to work?’

  ‘Yes, of course. How else could he get there?’

  ‘What sort of car does he drive?’

  ‘A four-by-four. A Shogun.’

  ‘Does he have any other car?’

  ‘No. Why would he need two?’

  ‘But you have a car.’

  ‘Of course. We are not joined at the hip,’ she snapped, seeming annoyed by the idea that she might not need a car if he had one. ‘I have a BMW 7
50Li.’

  Atherton was too well trained to stir at that, but Slider felt his gladness. ‘But in fact, Mr Frith did not go to work as usual on Monday. He told his staff he was working from home and going straight from there to an appointment at eleven. But the appointment was also fictitious.’

  Now that did move her. She did not speak, only stared at Slider blankly, with some furious thinking evidently going on behind the marble frontage.

  ‘Would you like to reconsider your statement to me?’ Slider offered.

  Her voice was faint and strained. ‘Yes – I – made a mistake. Monday – yes – that was different. He was working from home. Some paperwork. He was still there when I left for work myself at a quarter past eight.’ She rallied, composed herself, and said coldly, ‘It is easy enough to mistake one day for another. My work here is important and occupies my mind to the exclusion of trivial domestic detail.’

  Nice save, Slider thought. But not good enough. He switched direction in the hope of unbalancing her again. ‘What did you and David Rogers talk about during that last conversation?’

  It took her a second to answer. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said, and he could see it was a lie.

  ‘It was a long call. Nearly twenty minutes. I’m sure you must remember it.’

  ‘I remember the call,’ she said with faint irritability. ‘I don’t remember what was said. Just general chit-chat. Nothing important.’

  ‘So you were on friendly terms with him,’ Slider said. ‘One doesn’t chit-chat for twenty minutes on unimportant subjects except with people one is close to.’

  She looked at him, trying to work out the implications of the statement, and did not answer.

  ‘But you told me you were not close, that you had no idea what he was doing, that you had little contact with him.’

  She shifted in her seat. ‘I don’t know what he does, and I don’t want to know. And I don’t normally have much contact with him. Just lately he has rung me a couple of times. I can’t tell you why. Perhaps he was bored. Or lonely. He was a weak man, the sort who can never be satisfied with his own company. Always had to be doing something, going somewhere, meeting someone.’ She seemed to be growing annoyed at the memory. ‘He was weak and unreliable and irresolute, and he made my life hell –’ she did not exactly pause, but the rest of the sentence came out in a very different tone, as if she had heard herself and corrected it – ‘but we were married for a long time, so I suppose there was still a fondness there for him. I’m sorry he’s dead. And particularly that he was killed in that shocking way.’