Hard Going

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Mansard looked a little abashed at his own softness. ‘Well, he was an old boy – didn’t look all that well, if you ask me – so I waited to see him safe inside. I reckoned he was meeting someone, and once he was inside they’d take care of him. And that’s the last I saw of him.’

  Slider pondered. ‘You say he didn’t look well?’

  ‘He was very thin, and not what I’d call a good colour. But he was pretty old,’ he added with a shrug.

  ‘What was his mood like? Could you tell if he was happy, sad, worried – anything?’

  ‘I didn’t see that much of him to say, really. He was very polite, and gents like that don’t show their feelings much. Maybe he was a bit serious, like he’d got something on his mind,’ he added doubtfully. ‘I’m not sure I could swear to it.’

  ‘Well, thank you,’ Slider said. ‘You’ve been very helpful. I only wish you’d come in sooner.’

  ‘Didn’t know, did I?’ Mansard said, standing up. ‘Gloria’ll confirm the times and the address, if you need it. I asked her about him ’fore I come in, but he never rang again that day to get picked up, so he must have picked up a cab on the street to come home.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Slider. ‘I’ll have a word with her, just to double check, but I’m sure you have all the details right.’

  ‘I’m really sorry somebody done the old boy in,’ Mansard said in valediction. ‘He was a real gent.’

  ‘So I believe,’ said Slider, brow creased in thought.

  ‘So that lets Mrs Kroll out,’ said Hollis, leaning against the whiteboard. ‘She was telling the truth. Bygod went out quarter to twelve. She’s left the house at half past two, and she’s covered after that.’

  ‘Unless he came back before she left,’ Swilley said.

  ‘Not likely,’ said Connolly. ‘Go all that way to lunch and back by half two? What class of a lunch would that be?’

  ‘A cancelled one, perhaps,’ Slider said. ‘If the person he was meeting didn’t turn up, he might have waited half an hour and then come home. But we can easily find that out. It does look rather as though Mrs Kroll is in the clear. But we know Bygod did come home at some point, and we know he was probably dead by seven because he didn’t answer the door and there were no lights on when Plumptre called. Which leaves a couple of hours when Mr Kroll could have come back to the house. So he’s not out of it yet.’

  ‘McLaren and Mackay are still trying to track his movements,’ Hollis said.

  ‘I’ll get on to the restaurant,’ Swilley said. ‘I wonder who Bygod was meeting? There was nothing in his diary.’

  ‘Try and get a description from the restaurant,’ Slider said.

  Soho again. He wondered briefly about Diana Chambers. She had said she and Bygod usually met at restaurants in town, and her play was rehearsing in Archer Street, also in Soho. Had she met him on Tuesday and not told Slider about it? Or Head – presumably he was attending the rehearsals as well. He could have followed her, seen who she was meeting, gone after Bygod later at home. Or they could both be in it, for the money … He so much didn’t want Chambers to be mixed up in the death that he half had to suspect her to compensate for his bias.

  With plenty of new material to think about he had forgotten about Wetherspoon. Heading unwarily for the washroom, he walked right into him in the corridor.

  ‘Ah, Slider,’ said the great man. Wetherspoon was a tall and curiously bulky man with a square, chalky-pink face and wiry grey hair like a superior kind of pan scourer. He carried his head high like a horse the better to look down on people from under his eyelids. He looked at Slider now with the expression of a man who has just found old egg yolk between the tines of his fork.

  ‘And where are you off to?’ he asked with a kind of grim jollity. Slider didn’t think it was a question he should answer. Wetherspoon examined him from above. ‘Not getting on very well with this case, are you?’

  ‘I think we’re making progress, sir,’ Slider said.

  ‘Do you? You think that, do you? And what is this miraculous progress? Mr Porson doesn’t seem to know about it.’

  ‘We’re following up several lines of enquiry,’ Slider said doggedly. ‘Tracing various people’s movements. It all takes time.’ He felt like a fool for saying it, because it was like saying rain was wet, but if Wetherspoon chose to play this sort of power game there was nothing he could do about it.

  ‘Well, time is of the essence, isn’t it?’ Wetherspoon enquired rhetorically. ‘Once a business like this gets away from you, you’re playing catch-up. You need to stay ahead of the game.’

  And there’ll be more readings from the Book of Clichés at the same time next week, Slider announced inside his head.

  ‘There’s going to be a lot of interest in this case,’ Wetherspoon went on, ‘once the connection is made with the Roxwell business.’ Oh, you’ve discovered who Bygod was, have you? Slider thought. ‘I can see the press making a big splash with it. I can’t have us appearing to be caught on the hop, looking as if we don’t know who we’re dealing with. I’m going to pre-empt the press, let them know we’re on the ball.’

  ‘You’re going public?’ Slider exclaimed in alarm.

  Wetherspoon’s lips curved in a superbly contemptuous smile. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t be called upon to face the cameras. I’m afraid the days of the amateur are over. I’ll do it myself from the publicity suite at Hammersmith, a full media briefing, press and TV.’

  God, you love all that stuff, don’t you? Slider thought.

  ‘It’s just a pity,’ Wetherspoon said with a sigh, ‘there isn’t a grieving widow or next of kin. Those tearful close-ups, trembling lips and so on, are the best thing for making witnesses come forward. But we’ll manage somehow.’

  ‘Sir, I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ Slider said.

  ‘Oh, really? And why is that?’

  Slider was thinking about Diana Chambers. Once the press were interested in Bygod, how long before they got hold of her name? It was so easy to leak, and generally so untraceable. Journalists hung around incognito in pubs listening, or rang weak characters in the Job with offers they couldn’t refuse. The only way to stop it was not to start it.

  But of course he couldn’t say that to Wetherspoon. He reached almost at random for a reason. ‘We haven’t traced the next of kin yet, sir. It wouldn’t be right for them to find out that way.’

  Wetherspoon frowned. ‘Perhaps it’s just the way to make them come forward,’ he said, but less certainly. People sued for post-traumatic stress at the drop of a hat these days.

  ‘A few more days, sir.’ Slider pressed his foot on the doubt pedal. ‘Once we’ve located the next of kin …’

  ‘Ha-hm!’ Wetherspoon cleared his throat non-committally, and struck off in another direction. ‘Crondace – what have you done about Crondace?’ he barked, changing the subject.

  ‘We’re trying to trace him at this end, sir, and Tower Hamlets are working from the other end. It’s difficult, though. He didn’t have a car, so the ANPR is no use. We’re having to do it the hard way.’

  ‘Aha!’ Wetherspoon said triumphantly. ‘That’s exactly the sort of scenario where going public can help. And I’m liking Crondace for it, I’m liking him very much. That court case, the miscarriage of justice burning in his gut, the long search, the violent revenge at the end of it. It all makes sense.’

  What it all made was a story Wetherspoon could imagine himself telling to the assembled media, hushed and hanging on his every word. And at the golf club afterwards. And whatever other places the demigods of the Job hung out and displayed their baboon bottoms to each other – my case is flashier than yours. He wanted Slider to get Crondace for him, that was it.

  Slider saw a chink of light in the tunnel. ‘I think it would be counter-productive to go public on Crondace just yet, sir. We need to keep him off his guard, not send him underground. We’re watching the wife and we think she may lead us to him, if she’s not tipped off. She’s got a solid alibi so she thi
nks we’re not interested in her any more.’

  Uncertainty flitted across Wetherspoon’s face for a moment. Then he gathered the mantle of greatness about himself and said, ‘Very well, a few more days. But I’ll be watching events very closely as they develop, and if you haven’t brought in Crondace in the next day or two we shall have to think again.’ He strode away without waiting for Slider to answer, and a few steps further on, at the end of the corridor, he turned and pointed a finger. ‘I’m watching you, Slider. Remember that.’

  Slider waited until he had disappeared through the swing doors to stick his tongue out. Childish, he knew, but a small satisfaction – the only one he was ever likely to get, lowly troll that he was in the hall of the Mountain King.

  FIFTEEN

  Sic Monday

  Porson was in Slider’s office when Swilley came in to say that the La Florida confirmed there had been a booking in the name of Bygod and that it had been taken up. Receipts confirmed that lunch for two had been consumed and paid for, and the till slip was timed at two twenty-two.

  ‘So unless he had a time machine,’ she concluded, ‘he couldn’t have got home before Mrs Kroll left. She’s covered, boss.’

  Porson sighed. ‘That’s a bugger. Oh well, can’t be helped. Lucky we’ve got other kites to fry. Old man Kroll’s still good for it, isn’t he?’

  ‘We’re checking pubs and betting shops at the moment, sir,’ Slider confirmed.

  ‘We’ll have to let her go, of course,’ Porson said, and then brightened. ‘That might make him cough – she’ll be on the outside where he can’t protect her.’

  ‘But if he confesses he definitely won’t be getting out,’ Slider pointed out. ‘You’re not suggesting we offer protection for her if he comes clean?’

  Porson considered it for a golden moment, then rejected it regretfully. ‘Can’t do that. But he probably won’t think it through. If he had any brains he wouldn’t be in the pickle he’s in. Just suggest that honesty’s his best policy, dangle something vague – hint hint, softly softly, you get me? Nothing actionable.’

  ‘Right, sir,’ Slider said.

  Porson cocked an eye at him, noting his unhappy expression, and fathomed the reason effortlessly. ‘You can’t worry about Mrs Kroll,’ he decreed. ‘We’re not responsible for her problems with the Changs.’

  ‘I know that, sir.’

  ‘If Kroll did it, she’s probably in on it.’

  ‘I know that too, sir.’

  Porson softened, not for Mrs Kroll’s sake but for Slider’s. ‘You can have a word with Ealing,’ he said. ‘Let ’em know she’s coming out. They must want the Changs caught as much as she does. They can use her as bait. Set a thief to catch a mackerel, eh?’

  ‘I’ll talk to them, sir,’ Swilley offered. ‘I know DS Barraclough quite well.’

  For an electric moment both men considered what ‘quite well’ might mean, then Porson blinked and said, ‘Good girl. Well, press on.’ He headed for the door. ‘And we’ve still got Crondace – blood in his gaff, and he’s had it away on his toes,’ he added. ‘He’s got to turn up sooner or later.’

  ‘Trouble is,’ Swilley added when he had gone, ‘Crondace had plenty of time to leave the country before we ever started looking for him.’

  Slider nodded, but said, ‘I don’t think he’ll have gone far. He’s not the type. What would he do abroad? Anyway, there’s not much we can do about him, until Tower Hamlets gives us a lead. I’d better go and see to the Krolls.’

  Mrs Kroll was extremely vocal about being let go. ‘Oh, so, you believe me now, do you? Very nice! Thank you very much! After locking me up like a common criminal. I’ll have you for that, you lot – don’t think you’re going to get away with it. You first, Mr Bleedin’ Inspector Slimy, or whatever you call yourself. I’m suing you for wrongful arrest. You’ll be finished once I’m done with you, I’ll see to that! And what about my husband? You letting him go as well? You’d better be. I warn you, I’m not taking this lying down.’

  And so on.

  ‘I liked her better when she was under arrest,’ said ‘Nutty’ Nicholls, the uniformed sergeant on custody. ‘She was a helluvalot quieter.’

  ‘I wish her husband was as talkative,’ Slider complained.

  ‘The strong, silent type,’ said Nicholls. ‘You never quite know with them. Sometimes they’re hiding something and sometimes they’re just stubborn.’

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ said Slider. ‘Keeping quiet in this case is stupid if he’s innocent …’

  ‘… but if villains weren’t stupid they’d never be caught.’ Nicholls cocked a sympathetic eye. ‘Maybe letting her out will give him a jolt.’

  ‘That’s what Mr Porson said.’

  ‘Give that man a coconut,’ said Nicholls. ‘You going to do him now?’

  ‘Might as well,’ said Slider. ‘Strike while the iron’s flat, and all that. Just pop in first, Nutty, and tell him his wife’s out, will you. I’ll give him five minutes to process the idea and then have a go.’

  Slider had a cup of tea while he was waiting, which PC Detton brought him, along with a complimentary couple of custard creams that made him feel like visiting royalty. He was only halfway down the cup when Nicholls came back and said with a chuckle, ‘It’s working so far. He’s tearing his hair. I got more words out of him than the rest of his stay put together, though seven eighths of them were profane. Five more minutes and he’ll be chatty enough to – hullo! Here’s one of your hounds.’

  He broke off as McLaren came in from outside, shaking himself like a dog. It was still raining steadily, and he’d managed to get pretty wet on the dash from the car – his hair and the shoulders of his jacket were distinctly damp. He looked up, saw Slider, and news leapt to his eye. ‘Guv!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Result?’ Slider suggested.

  ‘Yeah,’ said McLaren in a decrescendo of disappointment. ‘We got him accounted for pretty much the whole afternoon. Between the Eagle and Child and the Red Lion, and in and out of Paddy Power and Coral’s, there’s not more than ten–fifteen minutes to play with. Not enough fr’im to’ve got to Shepherd’s Bush and back, even with his van, let alone on public transport.’ He stood still, looking at Slider as if hoping he might produce some way to keep Kroll in the frame – a little-known West London wormhole, or an anomaly in the space-time continuum. Then he shrugged and pulled out his notebook. ‘It’s all here – the times and everything.’

  Gascoyne came in behind him. ‘Kroll’s out of it, sir,’ he said, spotting Slider. Unlike McLaren he seemed pleased – perhaps just because he had done a good job. He was not as personally involved in Kroll’s suspectability as McLaren was.

  ‘So I hear,’ Slider said. ‘All right. Go and write it up. You’ve done a good job.’

  They departed, and Nicholls said, not without sympathy, ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.’

  ‘Trouble is,’ Slider said, ‘in my experience, once one pile of bricks falls over, the others tumble too.’ What next? he wondered. ‘We’d better get on with releasing Kroll number two.’

  He was in his office still ploughing through Kroll paperwork when Atherton strolled in and said, ‘Head.’

  Slider looked up. ‘Not “guv”? Or “boss”?’

  ‘As in Alistair. He’s covered,’ Atherton went on. ‘On Tuesday he lunched at the Ivy with an arts minister, spent the afternoon in his office, got changed there and went to a fund-raising dinner where he was visible up on the platform until after eleven, at which point he went on to a club with a director of the Royal Opera House and the CEO of an engineering company. A good time was had by all – with the possible exception of a posse of young ladies who may only have had a lucrative time – until nearly three in the morning.’

  ‘And then?’

  Atherton shrugged. ‘Presumably he went home. But unless Doc Cameron’s very wrong about the time of death—’

  ‘It’s possible, but not probable,’ Slider said. ‘At
least, not by that sort of margin.’

  ‘I could try and track the rest of his movements,’ Atherton said. ‘Whatever taxi he got home, and whether his wife remembers him coming in, and so forth, but as it stands …’

  ‘No, as you say, he’s covered. Without some evidence against him we can’t justify looking at him any further. It was just a wild hope.’

  ‘I’m not sure which way you were hoping,’ Atherton said. ‘With Alistair Head being obviously unworthy of the goddess Diana – who, by the way, was at rehearsal all day and apparently dined at a friend’s house with a fellow cast member and his wife. And again, unless you want the alibi checked and her traced after dinner—?’

  ‘No,’ said Slider, deep in thought. He roused himself. ‘They’re not going anywhere. If anything did come up to implicate them … But at the moment, we’ve got nothing.’

  ‘So it seems,’ said Atherton. ‘No Head/Chambers, and no Krolls.’

  ‘Which leaves Crondace,’ said Slider. Two piles of bricks down.

  ‘Or person or persons unknown,’ said Atherton.

  Slider closed his eyes. ‘By which you mean starting again from scratch. No, let’s hope Crondace comes up and sets Mr Wetherspoon’s heart a-fluttering.’

  ‘He’s not always wrong, you know,’ Atherton comforted him. ‘Let the gods smile on their own for once.’

  It was that sort of Monday, when the gods had a hangover and were out to make everyone suffer for it. Slider had gone up to the canteen and was mechanically disposing of shepherd’s pie and peas and reading his own notes of the case so far when Gascoyne came in and stood by the door scanning for him. Slider felt like crouching down and hiding, but it could conceivably be good news, couldn’t it? He caught Gascoyne’s eye and the lad hurried over.

  ‘It’s a message from Tower Hamlets, sir.’ Not long out of uniform, he hadn’t got sufficiently used to ‘guv’ for it to come out naturally. ‘DI Athill wants you to call him back. Said to say they’ve found Crondace.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘He didn’t say, sir. I thought I’d better come up and tell you straight away, though.’