‘How often?’
‘Oh, not often. It’d be once a month or less – except this last few weeks. Then it was a couple of times a week.’
‘You didn’t ever hear anything that was said?’ Slider asked without hope.
She shook her head. ‘They weren’t long calls, and you could tell they made her mad, because she’d slam the phone down, and once I went in with some typing straight after and she had a face like thunder for a second before she hid it. I thought maybe he was trying to soften her up for him and me moving in together. But maybe—’ She looked at them with pitiful and failing hope. ‘I suppose it probably wasn’t that? I suppose it was this trouble he was in?’ Slider didn’t answer. ‘But why would he talk to her about it and not me about it? I thought he loved me.’
‘That was a sickening spectacle,’ Atherton commented when they were alone again, heading back for the car.
‘I like liver sausage,’ Slider said. ‘And no one asked you to watch me eat it.’
‘No, I was talking about that apparently normally intelligent woman deluding herself that a once or twice a week no-strings-attached bonk equates to true love and a happy-ever-after settlement. She didn’t even know where the man worked or what he did, for crying out loud! She’d never met any of his friends, never been to his house, and when he said he wanted their relationship kept secret she went along with it. What a complete and utter pap-brained loser!’
‘Don’t sugar-coat it,’ Slider advised. ‘Say what you really mean.’
Atherton enumerated on his long fingers. ‘So we know Amanda was talking to Rogers. That whatever it was was making her angry. That he had been worried about something lately. And then there’s this Suffolk business.’
‘Does it occur to you that Suffolk might just have been his excuse not to stay the night?’
‘Did it occur to you? What an unkind thought.’
‘On the other hand, if it was an excuse, why Suffolk? It seems a bizarre choice. He could have made it somewhere much further away, to be on the safe side. Or at least more exotic, to impress her. Catching a plane to Brussels, say – got to be at the airport at the crack, got to go home and pack a bag.’
‘And what about all this apocalyptic stuff? Big decision to make and everything could change?’
‘It sounds to me as if he was planning to dump her.’
‘Yes, that’s what I thought, too. Some rough beast of a big excuse was slouching towards Acton to be born.’
‘On the other hand, he did end up dead,’ Slider said, ‘so there could have been something going on. I’m inclined to think Suffolk might be genuine, just because it sounds so dopey as an excuse.’
‘But what was he going there for?’ Atherton asked. ‘On evidence so far, it was probably only another woman.’
As they came in from the yard, Nicholls popped his head out from the front shop. ‘Oh, Bill’
‘Nutty’ Nicholls, the handsome Scot with the lustrous accent from the far north-west, was one of the uniformed sergeants. He had a much-loved wife and a large family of daughters, which gave him a certain vibe that had every female he encountered wanting to nestle against his heart and tell him things. He also had a fine voice and was a leading light of the Hammersmith Police Players. His singing range was so wide that, in their latest production for charity, he had just been chosen to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, because he could sing it better than any of the female members. That he accepted the part was a sign of his confidence in himself. Not every man was so comfortable in his sexuality he could wear a pinafore dress and a long-blonde-plaits wig when there was any chance of colleagues seeing him. The Players only did four performances and the whole run was already a sell-out. O’Flaherty, another sergeant and Slider’s old friend, had assured him that he’d heard Nutty sing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ in rehearsal and ‘it had me heart scalded, so it did’.
They paused, and Atherton said, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’
Nutty was un-phased. ‘Mock away. My back’s broad.’
‘But I hear you have a tiny waist.’
‘What is it, Nutty?’ Slider intervened.
‘At last, a sensible man. I will talk to you,’ said Nicholls. ‘There’s someone waiting to see you.’
‘To do with the Rogers case?’
‘Name of Frith, if that means anything to you. I put him in Interview One. I gave him tea and biscuits, but he looked at me like Bambi’s mother, so I think you should see him before he finishes the Hobnobs, or he might leap away into the forest.’
‘Is that your next production?’ Atherton asked with feigned interest.
‘We’re saving a part for you,’ Nutty assured him seriously. ‘You would do very well as Thumper. It is typecasting, really.’
Frith was on his feet when they went into the room, like someone just making up his mind to leave. Slider could smell the sweat through the aftershave – the new sweat of fear, must be, since it was not particularly warm out today, and the interview room, whose radiator hadn’t worked in weeks, was positively cool.
He looked sharply at Slider and Atherton, and said, ‘You’re the people who came to the house, to tell Amanda.’ It was not clear whether he thought that was a good or a bad thing.
‘Detective Inspector Slider and Detective Sergeant Atherton,’ Slider reintroduced them. ‘Won’t you sit down, Mr Frith. You wanted to speak to me?’
He sat, but only on the edge of the chair, as if retaining the right to leave at any moment. His eyes tracked from one of them to the other, and they were so large, and with such long lashes, that had they been dark instead of blue, Slider might have thought Nutty’s comparison valid. But Frith was a big man, bigger up close, and particularly in this confined space, than he had seemed out in the high-ceilinged hall of Amanda’s house: not especially tall, but muscular, and his face was lean and firm, and his shoulders were big, and his hands looked powerful. No, on second thoughts, there was nothing cervine about him. If he was nervous, it would not lead him to panic. He had twice won Badminton, and Slider knew enough about riding to know controlling half a ton of horse at speed over the toughest course in the world was not an option for the weak-minded or panicky.
Frith opened the campaign by attack. ‘You’ve been asking questions about me,’ he said. ‘And I’m guessing that the woman who’s been quizzing my staff and buying them drinks is one of yours. Sarratt is a small village, and in villages word gets round pretty quickly. So before you completely ruin my reputation and my business, I want to know what you mean by it.’
Slider drove the ball straight back down the wicket. ‘In the course of a murder investigation, many people are asked many questions. Why should it bother you?’
‘You asked my groom where I was on the morning David Rogers was murdered. That’s not just any question. That’s asking for an alibi, and that must mean you suspect me of something.’
‘Innocent people don’t need alibis,’ he said blandly.
‘Exactly,’ said Frith with some triumph.
‘Innocent people also don’t tell lies to the police.’ Which was not true, of course: people lied to the police all the time, about everything, for no apparent reason, or for reasons so inadequate as to make them seem like perfect imbeciles. But as Frith seemed to want to do a bit of verbal fencing, Slider obliged him, and was gratified to see him redden – whether with anger or shame he didn’t know, but at least it was discomfort.
‘I haven’t lied to you,’ Frith said, his voice hard. ‘In fact, as far as I am aware I haven’t been asked any questions, so how could I?’
‘You haven’t lied to me,’ Slider agreed amiably, ‘but you have lied about your whereabouts on Monday morning. You told your staff you were going to Archers, the feed merchant, but you weren’t there. Which means you were missing all of Monday morning, a time we are naturally interested in. So if your presence here means you have decided to come clean—’
‘Come clean?’ Frith said
indignantly. ‘I’ve got nothing to come clean about! Now look, I don’t like your tone—’
Slider cut through the bluster. ‘There’s a simple way to resolve this. Just tell me where you were on Monday morning, and there’s an end to it.’
Frith maintained an angry silence, but he was not meeting Slider’s eyes any more. He seemed to be thinking, calculating. Wondering what he could get away with, Atherton thought.
‘Look,’ he said at last – the language of capitulation.
‘I’m looking,’ Slider said when the pause grew to long.
‘All right,’ said Frith, raising his eyes again. ‘I’ll tell you where I was – not that it’s any of your damn business, but I can see this won’t go away otherwise. But I want your word that this doesn’t go any further. That – well, you won’t tell anyone.’
‘Anyone?’
‘Amanda. That you won’t tell Amanda.’ His eyes shifted again. ‘You see, I was with someone. Well, a woman.’
Oh, not that one, Atherton thought wearily. Had he already primed whoever-it-was to back him up, or was he just hoping?
Interesting, Slider thought: it didn’t seem that Amanda had spoken to him yet about their visit this morning. That was a lucky thing. He might be able to get something out of Frith before they compared stories.
‘You’re seeing another woman?’ he said. ‘Who is it?’
Frith was looking both angry and embarrassed now. ‘It’s someone I’ve been seeing for a while. Well, Amanda and I aren’t married. Her decision. She says once bitten twice shy. It’s a bit insulting really – I mean, I’m not David. But I don’t want to go into that. The fact of the matter is that she likes to keep her independence. She has her own job, her own friends. She always says we’re not joined at the hip just because we live together. We’re two separate people. So there’s no earthly reason why I shouldn’t see someone else. The trouble is,’ he concluded with a short sigh, looking down at his big, strong hands, ‘I know she wouldn’t see it that way. We’ve known each other for a long time, and I know her pretty well. If she found out there was another woman she’d go completely bananas. So I’m asking you – very strongly – not to tell her.’
‘You’re having an affair?’ Slider said, hoping to goad him.
‘It’s not an affair,’ Frith said indignantly. ‘I keep telling you, Amanda and I aren’t married. I asked her for the first time when we were both seventeen, and I’ve asked her God knows how many times since. But she went off and married that oaf David. And look where that got her. I could have made her happy, but she decided she wanted that – that obvious bastard. I know he’s dead and all that, but it doesn’t change what he was. And when they separated, it was her came looking for me. I said then I’d marry her when she got divorced and she ummed and ahhed about it, but once the divorce came through she said she didn’t want to risk it again. This whole arrangement is her idea. She wants to keep her options open, just like she did when we were kids, always looking over her shoulder in case something better came along. I’ve actually heard her introduce me as her lodger. I’m just the stopgap. But she likes to keep a firm hold on her possessions, which means that she’s free to look around, but I’m not.’
A lot of anger there, Slider thought with interest. Yet he stayed with her. Was it perhaps that the anger towards her he couldn’t act on had found a displacement activity in anger towards Rogers? Amanda treated him pretty shabbily, if what he was saying was true, and he was obviously hurt and jealous that she had chosen Rogers instead of him. Perhaps at some level he believed that if Rogers was really completely out of the way, i.e. dead, she might finally commit to him? But that would mean a Frith solo murder, not a Frith-effected, Amanda-designed murder. Which did not explain Amanda’s lies and evasions. Or his, Slider’s, conviction that she knew something about it.
‘So let’s get this straight,’ he said. ‘On Monday morning you left home at – what time?’
‘The usual time. I always leave around six. Horses wake up early, and morning stables are the hardest work of the day. There’s always a lot to do.’
‘Around six? Can you be more specific?’
‘Well, not really. I wasn’t watching the clock. But the radio was on in the bedroom when I went in to say goodbye to Amanda – she dozes to it in bed – and they were still doing the news, so it was probably just a few minutes after six.’
‘And you went – where?’
‘Straight to Sue’s house in Ruislip. It wasn’t worth going to the stables first, because she was coming in from Dubai at six fifty-five that morning. She’s a cabin attendant with BA. Well, I got to her place about a quarter to seven and she arrived about eight.’
Atherton pushed pad and pencil across to him. ‘Write down her name, address and telephone number,’ he said.
Frith looked alarmed. ‘You can’t just go and ask her! My God!’
‘You mean she won’t confirm your alibi?’ Atherton said.
‘No, I mean she’s married.’
‘So it is an affair,’ said Slider.
‘Well, if you want to be technical about it,’ Frith said sulkily. ‘It’s hard enough for us as it is, what with her schedule and her husband’s. He’s an exhibition contractor, so he’s away a lot. And we can’t go to my place because I don’t really have a place. I sold my house to buy the stables, and though there’s a flat there I have to let the staff use it and live in Amanda’s house because property’s so expensive out there. So when Sue’s coming back she rings me and if Terry’s going to be away we meet at her house, and if he’s not we go to this hotel. Well, it’s not ideal, but she won’t leave Terry, and in any case I can’t leave Amanda – she’s got so much money tied up in my stables, she’d make me sell up if all this came out, and then I’d be ruined.’ He shook his head as if his life had suddenly passed before his eyes in all its glorious panoply. ‘It’s a mess,’ he muttered.
No argument there, Slider thought. ‘So what it comes down to,’ he summed up, ‘is that your alibi is that you were meeting someone, but you won’t tell us who or where.’
‘I know it sounds stupid,’ he began.
‘At least,’ said Atherton.
Slider pushed his chair back. ‘If you’re adamant you won’t tell us—’
Frith looked apprehensive, but he stuck to it. ‘I can’t.’
‘Then there’s nothing more to say. But I urge you to think carefully about it. Until we can eliminate you from our enquiries you remain a suspect.’
‘But I didn’t do anything!’ Frith protested.
‘You can just help me on one thing.’ Frith looked receptive. ‘You’d known David Rogers for quite some time. What was his connection with Suffolk?’
‘Suffolk?’ said Frith.
‘Yes – it seems he went there regularly. Did he work at a hospital there?’
‘Not that I know of,’ Frith said. ‘But I hadn’t kept up with him, so I don’t really know what he did. Except—’ Something seemed to occur to him. ‘Maybe that was where he kept his boat?’
Slider remembered the photograph in Rogers’s bedroom. ‘He had a boat?’
‘He’d taken up sport fishing in recent years. Bought a boat. Amanda said he was quite a bore about it.’ He shrugged. ‘No worse than golf bores, I suppose. These big consultants all have their rich-man’s hobbies,’ he concluded sourly.
‘You were a bit easy on him,’ Atherton complained to Slider as they trod up the stairs together. ‘The blighter’s taken Amanda’s money and protection, yet he’s banging a trolley dolly behind her back. I almost feel sorry for the Sturgess-type. But you didn’t force him on his alibi. Which in any case isn’t really an alibi,’ he continued, ‘because he says he was alone in his car from just after six until a quarter to seven, and alone in the dolly’s house from a quarter to seven until eight. Virtually two hours unaccounted for. Enough time to drive to Shepherd’s Bush, shoot David Rogers in the head, and drive back to Ruislip.’
‘The killer didn’t d
rive back to Ruislip. He drove to Stanmore.’
‘Oh, yes. I’d forgotten.’ He thought a bit. ‘But that’s still enough time, out to Stanmore, back to Ruislip, two hours. Easy. And even if it were an alibi, we can’t check it unless he gives us the name and address.’
‘Can’t we?’ Slider said serenely. ‘How many flights from Dubai do BA have that arrived at six fifty-five on Monday morning? And how many of the cabin crew on that flight are called Sue and live in Ruislip? We get her details from BA and check with her. And if she doesn’t exist, we’ll nick him for obstruction.’
‘You’re devious,’ Atherton said admiringly.
‘Maybe I am, and maybe I’m not,’ said Slider.
NINE
Who Dares Whinge
When they walked into the CID room, Emily was there, sitting on Norma’s desk, chatting. Atherton sloped up to her and they greeted each other with studied nonchalance.
‘’Lo.’
‘Wotcher.’
‘’Right?’
‘Uh. You?’
‘Young love!’ Norma said sourly. ‘Can you go and mate on someone else’s desk?’
‘You’re not the same since you had that baby,’ Atherton complained, and added in his Michael Caine voice, ‘You gone all milkified, girl.’ He turned to Emily. ‘When did you get in?’
‘Couple of hours ago. I came to take you out to lunch,’ Emily said. ‘Or have you eaten already?’
‘We had a sandwich, but that was hours ago. A witness lunch. They never satisfy, somehow. You always want another an hour later.’
‘Witness or sandwich?’
‘Both.’
‘No second lunches,’ Slider decreed. ‘We’ve got work to do.’ He cleared a space on the edge of Atherton’s desk, perched and said, ‘Report time. Gather round.’
The troops gave him their attention. McLaren gave as much as he could spare from giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a cheese and pickle sandwich. It looked as though the sandwich wasn’t going to make it.
Slider went over the Frith interview and his possible, though partial, alibi. ‘The good thing is that Amanda Sturgess has been provoked into giving a false alibi. She says Frith was home until she left at a quarter past eight, while he says he left at six. The bad thing is that even if the air hostess checks out, it still gives him time to have gone to Stanmore and get back to Ruislip.’
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