Dear Departed

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  While Slider was contemplating this slender possibility, Atherton came in, back from the scene. ‘No clothes or knives as yet,’ he reported. ‘There were eight cigarette ends in that part of the shrubbery, but most of them are obviously not fresh.’

  ‘He might have staked out the area beforehand,’ Slider said. ‘Keep them all until we see what else we get, before having them DNA tested.’ There was always the budget to consider.

  Atherton resumed. ‘Mackay and McLaren are on their way back with the first stack of statements to go through, and the photographs have arrived. Hollis is putting them up on the whiteboard with the stuff we got from Ealing.’ He looked at Slider’s desk. ‘Is that her Walkman?’

  Slider smiled slightly. ‘It would hardly be mine, now, would it? I’m a dinosaur, didn’t you know?’

  Atherton blinked, but let it pass. ‘What was she listening to?’ he asked.

  ‘She wasn’t listening to anything, if you remember. It was turned off and the headset was unplugged.’

  ‘It probably came unplugged in the struggle,’ Norma said.

  ‘Yes, but it does seem odd to me—’ Slider began, but Atherton interrupted him. He had picked up the evidence bag containing the CD.

  ‘Ah, now, look at this! This isn’t a commercial CD – it’s a demo disc. This could be something. It might give us a lead on who she is.’

  ‘How come?’ Swilley asked.

  Atherton was always glad of an opportunity to impress her. Since he had got his new haircut, he had shown a renewed interest in Swilley, even though she was now married to the man she had lived with for years. Atherton, who was not one to let logic spoil a good prejudice, insisted that the husband didn’t exist – despite the fact that Slider had been at the wedding. He said nobody would really marry a man named Tony Allnutt. And anyway, even if he did exist, Norma would surely be regretting her folly by now, and be ready for Atherton’s sophistication and non-joke surname.

  ‘When a band makes a demo CD,’ he said, ‘they don’t go on sale, they’re distributed to the A and R people at record companies and to promoters and festival organisers and so on, which would cut down the field anyway. But this is even better. You see, the label’s not printed, it’s hand-written, and there’s nothing on it but the band’s name, the studio name and the recording date. That suggests that it’s a master, or a band copy – something only a very few people would have. It would mean that our victim was closely connected with the band, or just possibly the recording team.’

  ‘What’s the date on it?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Monday,’ said Atherton. ‘That makes it even more likely that she was with the band. It’s probably a first impression, given to them to approve before the final mixing. After mixing it would be a couple of weeks for the copies for distribution to be ready. This may be the master, or one of as few as half a dozen prints.’

  ‘Well, that’s good news,’ Slider said. To have got a handle on the ID this early was a bonus. ‘I thought we were going to have to house-to-house the whole of west London.’

  ‘What band is it?’ Swilley asked, trying to see over Atherton‘s shoulder.

  ‘Baroque Solid,’ Atherton said, passing it over to her.

  She wrinkled her nose at the name. ‘Never heard of them.’

  But Slider looked enlightened. ‘I’ve heard Joanna talk about them. I think they were mentioned in the paper last week, weren’t they?’

  ‘Only in the arts section,’ Atherton said. ‘They’re new and hot and they do fusion music – classical meets jazz. I saw them doing a foyer performance at the National Theatre – Satie and Stockhausen and a bit of Bartók. I thought they were pretty good, but it’s an unusual taste, and without the right breaks that sort of thing can die the death. But they did a Purcell Room concert last week and got good reviews, so it looks as though they might be taking off.’

  ‘Fusion music? It sounds dire,’ Swilley said.

  ‘It takes a bit of listening to. I expect you like Abba and Fleetwood Mac,’ Atherton said kindly.

  ‘Anyway, it’s a stupid name,’ she retaliated. ‘If they mess up, everyone’ll be calling them Baroque Bottom.’

  Atherton’s eyes gleamed. ‘Now, I’ve always thought you had a—’

  Slider intervened hastily. ‘How do we get in contact with these people?’

  ‘There’s bound to be a website address for the band. Let’s have a look.’

  They went through into the CID room, where the computer sat in a corner, its screen-saver trekking through an endless brick maze, turning left and right at the dead ends with the strangely fluid jerk of a goldfish. Slider brought up the search engine and tapped in the band’s name, but as soon as the site began to load Atherton was breathing down his neck in his eagerness. ‘She’s probably one of the musicians,’ he said. ‘I seem to remember there was a pretty female amongst them.’

  She wasn’t, though, and Slider was faintly and ridiculously relieved, as though it would have been a threat to Joanna if she had been. There were photographs of the eight members of Baroque Solid on the website, and though they were all in the right age group and four of them were female, none of the four sufficiently resembled the victim even to be worth wondering about.

  ‘So what now?’ Slider asked. Atherton was much more au fait with the music world than he was, in spite of Joanna.

  ‘Go and see them. The victim must be closely involved with the band. There’s the snail-mail address at the bottom. It’s only just down the road in Barons Court.’

  ‘Don’t beg. You’ve got the job,’ Slider said, handing him the disc.

  ‘Everyone hates a volunteer,’ Swilley said coolly, as Atherton bounded away.

  Joanna came in to the office just before six, bringing two jam doughnuts in a bag from the good baker in Shepherd’s Bush Road.

  ‘Peace offering,’ she said.

  ‘Peace offering for what?’

  ‘I think I was less than gracious this morning.’

  ‘You were disappointed,’ he excused her.

  ‘So were you.’

  ‘I’m used to it by now.’

  ‘Well, I’d better get used to it too, if I’m going to be a policeman’s wife. With the emphasis on “if”.’

  ‘Oh, Jo, I’m sorr—’

  ‘Joke,’ she assured him. ‘Officers’ wives for the use of. And talking of officers’ wives, where’s Jim?’

  ‘Did you have doughnuts for him, too?’ Slider asked innocently.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ she said grimly. ‘I was talking to Sue today.’

  ‘It’s not his fault she changed her mind about marrying him,’ Slider said.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Sue Caversham, Joanna’s friend and colleague, had been Atherton’s girlfriend, putting up with a great deal from him while he adjusted to the alien idea of monogamy. It was hard for a lifelong hound to give up the chase. On the very evening Slider discovered that Joanna was pregnant and proposed to her, Atherton was proposing to Sue. Slider couldn’t have been more surprised – or thought he couldn’t, until a month later Sue changed her mind. She had said she couldn’t marry Atherton after all, a row ensued, and they had broken up.

  ‘She was naturally doubtful about the leopard’s changing his spots,’ Joanna went on. All she needed was a bit of reassurance, and everything would have been all right. But what does he do? Bawls her out and then rushes off and starts dating other women like an amphetamine James Bond.’

  The door between Slider’s room and the CID room was open, as usual, and he felt this was not the place for this discussion. He turned her gracefully by saying, ‘It looks as though the victim might have had something to do with that band you were talking about the other week, Baroque Solid.’

  She allowed herself to be turned. ‘Oh, no, don’t say one of them’s been killed! They’re so talented.’

  Would that make it worse? Slider wondered. From the outside, perhaps – talent being a rarity. But from the inside – everyone’s life is precious to them.
He said, ‘No, she wasn’t one of the musicians. We had a look at the website and there were photos of them. But she must have been close to them in some way.’ A thought crossed his mind. Classical music was a small world and everybody tended to know everybody else. ‘Would you be willing to have a look at the mugshot, to see if perhaps you know her? It would save a lot of time if you could give us a name.’

  ‘You don’t know who she is?’ Joanna said, and then, mind working rapidly, she got it. ‘Of course, she was out jogging and didn’t have a handbag or anything with her. All right, I’ll have a look.’ She put out her hand, but then a thought came to her and she faltered. ‘It’s not – she’s not—?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not disfigured or anything.’

  ‘Only dead,’ Joanna finished wryly. She took the photo, looked carefully, and passed it back. ‘No, I don’t know her. Poor girl, she’s so young and pretty. What a monstrous thing to do.’

  Monstrous, Slider thought. Yes, that was a good word for it.

  ‘Well,’ Joanna said, ‘I’d better not disturb you any longer. I suppose you’ll be late tonight?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Slider. ‘They’re doing the post mortem at seven and I want to go to that.’

  ‘The fun you have!’

  He came round the desk to kiss her goodbye and escort her out. ‘Did you have a proper lunch?’

  ‘Yes, Mother. I had a very nice tomatoey pasta and a salad in Pizza Express, in between estate agents. I bet you didn’t have anything.’

  ‘I’ve got two doughnuts now,’ Slider said.

  She eyed him with sympathy. ‘I’m going to go home and make a casserole that won’t spoil for long, slow cooking. So whatever time you get home—’

  ‘I’ll try not to be too late.’

  * * *

  The murder made the BBC’s Six o’Clock News, though there was so much else going on it only got a short mention. Slider and Hollis went along to Ron Carver’s room to watch – Carver, fortunately, having gone home. There had always been rivalry between Slider’s firm and Carver’s, though Slider did all he could to discourage it. But DI Carver had been born with a grudge and was never happy unless he was nurturing some fancied slight to himself. The fact was that he always had the best of everything, more men, more overtime allowance, more consideration. Even a television. The overlords having decided that the department ought to have a TV set, it was put in Carver’s room as a matter of course; and when Slider asked for one as well he was told that there was no sense in having two – one for everybody was quite sufficient. Of course, Carver was a mason, everybody knew that. Atherton said that was just paranoia on Slider’s part, but as Slider said, you’d be paranoid if everyone was plotting against you.

  The murder came in fourth, behind the oil crisis, the Middle East peace talks, and the prime minister’s visit to Washington.

  ‘A young woman was stabbed to death in a park in west London this morning, in what appears to be another attack by the so-called Park Killer,’ said the studio announcer.

  There followed a quick resumé of the previous cases, with background footage of the other two parks involved, and then a brief moving camera shot of the Paddenswick scene from earlier in the day: the blue and white tape, the policemen on guard duty, and a shot of a SOCO on hands and knees examining the bark at the edge of the shrubbery. Then it jumped straight into the next item, about a riot in an asylum seekers’ camp in Australia’s Northern Territory.

  ‘Short and not sweet,’ Slider said.

  ‘They’ll probably do a bit more on the local news,’ said Hollis, and they settled in to wait.

  The local news had it as lead item.

  ‘Nothing like a murder on your own patch,’ said Hollis. ‘Local boy makes good sort o’ thing. Or local girl makes corpse.’

  The bulletin had almost identical film to the main news, but obviously taken from a minutely different camera angle. ‘Good use of the licence fee money,’ said Slider. ‘Send two complete teams from different offices in the same building.’

  ‘Everyone knows local telly’s a job creation scheme,’ Hollis said. ‘I mean, look at the presenter bird. Who else’d employ her?’

  London News also billed it as the Park Killer Strikes Again and précis’d the two previous outings, but they varied the approach with some of their beloved on-the-scene vox pops. There were short clips of local residents saying it was shocking, and you didn’t feel safe on your own streets any more. Then one young woman said she would never walk through Paddenswick Park again, and another said she always walked through the park and saw no reason to change now.

  Finally the reporter, who looked about fifteen, faced camera and, with lavish hand gestures, said, ‘Police are asking anyone who may have seen anything unusual to come forward. They are pertickerly asking anyone who was in the park between seven forty-five a.m. and eight fifteen a.m. this morning to come forward and identify themselves so that they can be eliminated from enquiries.’ And then it was back to the studio.

  ‘Did you ask for that?’ said Hollis, his pale green eyes bulging alarmingly.

  ‘Not me,’ Slider said. ‘Someone did, though.’ He did not need to say more. The press liaison unit was at headquarters at Hammersmith, close to the source of godhead. It took its orders straight from the fount, and it would not occur to anyone to let the blokes at the sharp end know what was decided.

  ‘We’ll have to man the phones tonight,’ Hollis observed.

  ‘And I’ve got a post to go to,’ said Slider.

  ‘I’ll get on it, guv,’ Hollis said kindly. ‘We probably won’t need more than a couple. I don’t expect there’ll be many calls tonight anyway.’

  ‘You mean, because the Beeb didn’t feature it prominently?’

  Hollis looked pitying at his ignorance. ‘No, guv. Because there’s a footy match on tonight. World Cup. England v. East Moldavia. Nobody’s going to miss the one tie we might win.’

  The address for Baroque Solid was Gunterstone Road, a ground-floor flat in one of those big three-storeys-plus-basement terrace houses that abound all over Hammersmith and North Kensington. A new sticker had been put above the bell saying, ‘Baroque Solid – Music Fusion’. This was the strapline from the website, too, and Atherton thought it neat and punchy. It was not until his third visit at half past seven that he got a reply to his ring.

  The door was opened by a young woman in jeans, black T-shirt and a loose chambray shirt worn open.

  ‘Is this the office for Baroque Solid?’ he asked, glimpsing behind her what was obviously a residential and not a business space.

  ‘Well, yes, it is,’ she said, as though there were a good deal of doubt about it. He showed his warrant card, and she relaxed a little – a novel reaction in Atherton’s experience. Most people tensed up when they realised their visitor was Lily Law. She said, ‘You see, it’s where I and Joni and Tab live, but it’s also the band’s headquarters. At the moment, anyway. Until we get really, really famous.’ And she laughed to avert the hubris. ‘Would you like to come in?’

  She led him into the big front room on the left of the entrance passage. At the far end with the bay window, there were bare floorboards, a semi-circle of hard chairs and music stands set on some kind of specialised rubber mat, and against the wall an impressive bank of sound equipment. At this, the door end, there was an office desk, a filing cabinet, a computer on a stand, and a table covered with papers.

  ‘This is the beating heart of the operation,’ she said, with an ironic wave of the hand. ‘We’re really just getting started. But we had our first proper concert last week, on the South Bank.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Atherton said. ‘In the Purcell Room.’

  ‘Oh, were you there?’ she asked, with about equal parts of surprise and pleasure.

  ‘No, but I read the reviews. And I’ve heard you before, in a foyer performance.’

  ‘Are you into music?’

  It was an expression he loathed, but it was sweetened a littl
e for coming from her lips. When she had opened the door to him, he had thought her quite plain, with her straight brown hair and unmade-up face. But now at closer quarters and inspection, he was finding her unnervingly attractive. The hair, for instance – brushed straight back and cut about shoulder length – was a silky waterfall, and the word ‘brown’ didn’t begin to cover the fabulous complexity of natural tints in it, from shining chestnut to amber and toffee, shot through with gleams of ink and pure set-on-fire copper. Her eyes were large and expressive and hazel, and makeup, he thought, would only have diminished their luminosity. Her mouth was wide and generous, and when she smiled she showed teeth so beautiful he wanted to kiss them. To find someone’s teeth erotic must mean he was in a bad way; but so ’twas. He couldn’t take his eyes from her.

  ‘I love music,’ he answered her belatedly. ‘But I’m afraid that’s not why I’m here.’

  ‘Oh dear, I hope we’re not in trouble,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘Atherton. Detective Sergeant Atherton, Shepherd’s Bush.’ And then, to his own surprise, he added, ‘Jim,’ and held out his hand.

  She took it. Hers was warm and dry and strong. A hand of ability. He wondered if she was a violinist. ‘I’m Marion,’ she said. ‘Marion Davies.’

  It was an oddly old-fashioned name, Marion. He wondered if she had older parents. But its plainness appealed to him. It suddenly seemed the essence of femininity.

  ‘I play second fiddle,’ she went on.

  The words ‘second fiddle’ immediately brought Sue to his mind; one of those instant and uncontrollable associations. She lurked in his mind all the time anyway, though he kept his mental eyes firmly turned away from her.

  ‘You haven’t got a mark,’ he said to Marion Davies, looking at her neck.

  From the background of his thoughts of Sue, he had spoken too intimately. She blushed, and her skin was so delicate and clear he could actually see the blood racing up the corpuscles like BMW drivers up the M1. ‘I’ve been lucky. But I’ve always used a pad,’ she said.

  He pulled himself together, and said, ‘The reason I’m here is that we have come by one of your demo discs in unusual circumstances, and I wondered if you could give me an idea of who was likely to have had one.’ He handed over the disc in its bag, and she took it, looking a little bewildered.