Dear Departed

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘The mother says the victim had no contact with him, and she doesn’t know where he is. So we can go on air with the photo. They’ve sent us over a studio portrait the mother came up with, better quality than what we’ve got, so we’ll go with that.’

  Slider looked at his watch. ‘It’s too late to get it on the Six o’Clock News.’

  ‘Time you entered the twenty-first century,’ Porson admonished. ‘Hemel sent the photo electronically to the Beeb at the same time as us, and they’re going on with that, and a plain studio statement. “Police have named the victim” blah-de-blah. But they want a live body for the ten o’clock, so you’ve got to go and record something.’

  Slider’s heart sank. ‘Me, sir?’ He hated being on screen.

  ‘The camera loves you, Slider,’ Porson said, straight-faced. ‘They’ll be filming it in the publicity suite. Get yourself over to Hammersmith quick as you like. You know what to say?’

  ‘We’re still sticking with the Park Killer?’

  ‘We’ll leave it run a bit longer,’ Porson said. ‘Don’t say it was him, just that first impressions point that way, you know the score. Noncommittal. The publicity woman, Amanda Odell, will run through it with you. Ask for witnesses to come forward. And for anyone who was in the park to get himself crossed off the list.’

  ‘Especially Bicycle Man and Running Man,’ Slider said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What about manning the phones tonight?’

  ‘I’ll see to that. You get yourself to Hammersmith. Go. They’re waiting for you.’

  Get thee to a mummery, thought Slider, trudging away.

  * * *

  ‘You’re early,’ Joanna said, when he let himself in.

  ‘It’s nearly nine o’clock,’ Slider said. ‘You call that early?’

  ‘I wasn’t really expecting you until later.’

  ‘Does that mean there’s nothing to eat?’

  ‘We can go out if you like,’ she said, and then, seeing from his face how well that went down, ‘or I could pop out and get some fish and chips.’

  ‘Now you’re talking,’ he said, brightening. ‘But what about you – haven’t you eaten?’

  ‘Only a snack. I could find space for fish and chips,’ she said. ‘Anyway, we’re celebrating.’

  ‘We are?’

  ‘I’ve got some good news. Really good news. I had a phone call today.’

  ‘Huh, that’s nothing. I get those every day.’

  ‘Stop clowning, this is important. I’ve been booked for some sessions.’

  ‘Oh. Good for you. What sessions?’

  ‘It’s the soundtrack for the new James Bond film. Nine sessions, at Watford, tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday.’

  ‘Tomorrow? That’s short notice.’

  ‘Well, obviously I wasn’t the first choice,’ she said. ‘I’m subbing for some poor sap who’s fallen ill and who’s going to miss out on all the goodies. She’ll be kicking herself, because film sessions pay top dollar, and it doesn’t end there. They’re going to make a CD of the music later, which will be more sessions; and Ronnie said there’s some talk of taking it on the road as a concert promotion.’

  ‘Ronnie?’

  ‘Ronnie Barrett, the fixer. The soundtrack and the CD will all be on the one contract, so it’ll be the same people for both, but he likes me so he says he’ll try and get me the concerts as well.’ She beamed. ‘Lots of lovely work and lots of lovely money. Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘Of course I am. Delighted for you. But – three lots of three sessions? On consecutive days? Isn’t that too much for you, in—’

  ‘“In my delicate condition”? My dear Inspector, you can’t say things like that any more,’ she laughed. He saw that it was not so much the money she was so happy about as the work.She had missed being in the loop, missed the company, the music and the sense of importance it gave her, the shape it gave to her life. How would she cope when the baby came? And if, after her maternity absence, she couldn’t get any more work at all, what then?

  ‘Borrowing trouble are your two middle names,’ as his mother would have said. Deal with that when and if it arose.

  ‘I just want you to take care of yourself,’ he said at last.

  She stepped closer and put her arms round his waist. ‘I will. I’ll be sitting down all the time, remember.’ She kissed him. ‘I promise I’ll eat proper meals and rest in the breaks. And I won’t even have to drive. Pete Thomas lives in Hammersmith and he’s going to pick me up, and we’ll share petrol money.’

  ‘Okay.’ He felt the hardness of her belly pressing against him. ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘I love you, too.’ She kissed him again. ‘I’ll go and get the fish and chips now, shall I, while you change?’

  ‘All right. We can eat them in front of the telly and you can criticise my performance.’

  ‘You’re on the telly again? My dear, this house is just full of artistes!’

  The day dawned sunny, but the sunshine and the blue sky both had a watery, unstable look. Slider shoved his mac into the car, returned to kiss Joanna again – she was practising, from a book of ‘studies’ that looked like black hairy caterpillars crawling up and down the staves – and set off for Hemel Hempstead. Before he was within striking distance, loose, wet grey clouds came up, and sharp rain began to hit the windscreeen.

  Stella Smart’s address was Owl Cottage, The Dene, and it was just outside the town – he had got directions from the Hemel police. He imagined a country lane and a cob cottage with a crooked roof and small, deep windows burdened with creeper. And Stella Smart he thought would either be artistic-Bohemian with pre-Raphaelite dresses, gypsy hair and clashing bangles, or celebrity-glamorous with lots of makeup and gold costume jewellery.

  He stopped in Hemel on his way to buy one of her books in Smith’s. He picked up Long Summer Days, which seemed to be the most recent paperback – there were lots of copies of it, anyway – and pulled into a lay-by to thumb through it. It seemed to be about a nice vicar’s wife of the jam-making, sensible-shoe kind, who thought her husband was being unfaithful to her. There was a lot of villagey stuff about WI meetings and cricket clubs, and a lot of drinking went on – people seemed to be always propping up the bar in the village pub, or downing G-and-Ts in each other’s kitchens. He was about to throw it aside and drive on when the word ‘nipple’ caught his eye and he found himself in the middle of a torrid love scene between Mrs Vicar and a young man, an artist and newcomer to the village. So, he thought, what would you call that, then? An Aga-bonker? A surplice-ripper? The Bohemian image of Stella Smart now seemed the more appropriate.

  It was a surprise all ways up, therefore, when The Dene turned out to be a road on a dinky new estate of little Lego houses of yellow brick, with pink-tiled roofs that looked mysteriously as if they were made of Plasticine. To an eye used to London’s Victorian stock, they looked impossibly small, as if they had been built to house the garden gnomes that decorated so many of the front gardens. Owl Cottage was a corner house, just as new, boxy and Legoland as the rest, and the door was opened to him by a small, neat woman in a plain dark blue linen suit over a white blouse, with tidy hair and makeup, who might have been just off to work in a solicitor’s or estate agent’s office.

  ‘Mrs Smart?’ he asked, though he knew it was her from the blind look of grief that had settled into her face. Perhaps he ought to have said Miss Smart, if it was her writing name. He wasn’t sure of the etiquette. If she hadn’t remarried she was probably Mrs Cornfeld. ‘I’m Inspector Slider.’ He proffered his brief, but she didn’t look at it.

  ‘They said you were coming,’ she said; and then, with an air of pulling herself together, ‘You’d better come in. You’re getting wet.’

  She backed off to let him into the hall – necessary because it was only as wide as the door and hardly any longer. She held out her hand for his mac. He struggled out of it, elbows bumping the walls, and she hung it on top of the others on the coat pegs. �
��Come in,’ she said, and led him through a glass-panelled door which gave directly onto a through-lounge-cum-dining room ending in French windows onto the garden. The room was not, to begin with, spacious in this gnome-sized house; but the cramped effect was heightened by the fact that all the furniture in it had been made for a different class of house altogether. Old, fine and lovingly polished, it crowded the narrow space: a huge bookcase to the right, giving the impression of having to duck its head under the low ceiling, a lovely chiffonier on the left, a large brocade chesterfield and two Queen Anne armchairs beyond, lamps and wine tables forced in somehow, and in the dining room section a mahogany table with William IV chairs and a wonderful high Edwardian sideboard, which between them meant holding your breath and sidling if you wanted to get past to the garden. There were paintings on the wall, a mixture of watercolours and small oils, and on the surfaces delicate pieces of porcelain and two lovely clocks. Presumably some necessity had brought Stella Smart to this inappropriate setting.

  ‘You’d like some coffee,’ she said, and it was hardly a question, so he didn’t answer it. ‘Do sit down.’

  She waved him to the chesterfield and went out through a door between the two sections of the room, which presumably led to the kitchen and stairs. The smell of fresh coffee sneaked in before the door closed again, relieving him of the fear that he might have to drink instant. Evidently she had everything ready for him, for before his look-round had had a chance to do more than note the similar-looking row of hardbacks in the bookcase, which were presumably her own, and no photographs anywhere (a family trait?) she came back in with a tray. She was keeping up standards: delicately embroidered tray-cloth, bone china decorated with tiny forget-me-nots, coffee in a china jug to match, and a plate of what looked like home-made shortcake.

  She took an armchair catty-corner to him and put the tray down on the small table between them. ‘How do you take it?’

  ‘Black, please. No sugar.’

  She poured, passed, handed him the shortcake, and he waited in silence while she did these things. She was marking her territory, giving herself the upper hand by these small rituals, which was as it should be. He studied her as she poured her own coffee. She was in her fifties, he thought, and well preserved rather than young for her age. Her hair was fair-going-grey; she was small and slight – thin, almost – with a bony nose and sharp chin. He could not see much resemblance in her to Chattie. He would not have called her pretty or even handsome, though there was something in the direct look of her brown eyes when she lifted them at last that was attractive. They were pinkish now, and the lids still swollen from crying, but at other times he thought she would have been able to do things with them that would have fetched most men.

  She sat back now with her cup and sipped, looking at him steadily, not initiating anything. He gave it time, trying his coffee – very good – and the biscuit.

  ‘Good shortcake,’ he commented. ‘Did you make it yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  He waited, but she offered nothing more. He set down his cup and said, ‘I am very sorry for your loss.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘And I’m sorry to have to bother you at a time like this, but I would like to talk to you about your daughter.’

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  He had not expected that. ‘Because I need to know as much about her as possible,’ he said.

  ‘But if she was murdered by the Park Killer,’ said Stella Smart, ‘he would have picked her simply because she was there, not for any other reason. How can knowing about her help you find him?’ The eyes were like policeman’s eyes, he saw now: they not only looked, but saw. He had never met an author before. He supposed that noticing and deducing would be part of a writer’s trade too. An interesting new thought to come back to.

  ‘You’re very quick,’ he said. ‘I had better tell you at once that we don’t think she was one of the Park Killer’s victims.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There were discrepancies in the method. I don’t want to go into that with you. But we think the murderer was trying to make it look like the Park Killer’s work.’

  ‘I saw the news last night. It gave the impression—’

  ‘Yes. We thought it might help us to let the murderer think we were fooled. But I believe she was killed by someone who knew her.’

  She examined his face. ‘You must have ruled me out, if you’re telling me this.’

  He had, in the first few moments. ‘I can see what she meant to you.’

  Now she moved her eyes away, breaking contact. She could observe other people, but could not have her own feelings observed. ‘She was everything to me. She was all I had.’

  ‘What about …?’ He glanced towards the bookcase.

  ‘My work?’ she said, with a sour twist of her mouth. ‘Yes, I used to think it mattered a great deal. But that was while I still had Chattie. Now I can see it’s just a handful of dust.’

  ‘Tell me about her,’ he invited.

  Her eyes became remote as she looked into the past. She sipped at her coffee. He saw as she put the cup back in the saucer that there was a slight tremor in her hands, and now he looked more closely, there were broken veins in the cheeks and on the nose that the careful makeup only just didn’t conceal. He wondered if she was a drinker.

  She said, ‘She was a happy baby, with a wonderful chuckle. She walked and talked very early, and then she was running about and chattering all day long. That was when we nicknamed her Chattie. Everyone loved her. And she was clever, too, and musical. Did well at school, won a scholarship at eleven, sang in all the school choirs, took up the cello. After school she went to the Royal College, and I thought she’d be a musician, but she didn’t feel she had sufficient talent, though I thought she was wrong about that. Anyway, when she finished college she got a job instead. She worked for Regina Stein, the big music agency, for two years, and for a record company for another year, and then she decided to set up on her own.’

  ‘Solutions,’ Slider suggested.

  Stella Smart’s mouth turned down a little. ‘Yes, that’s what she called it. I said she should have called it Dogsbodies.’

  ‘You didn’t approve?’

  ‘It wasn’t a matter of not approving. I thought she was wasting her talents and that she would never make a living out of it.’

  ‘Did you quarrel about it?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We never quarrelled. You couldn’t quarrel with Chattie. She was too good-tempered.’

  ‘How did the idea of Solutions come to her?’

  ‘Oh, it was something she came across in America, and she liked the idea of the variety it would give her. She never wanted to do a routine nine-to-five job. She helped a couple of musician friends to set up websites, and taught herself about that side of the business that way. She thought she’d have all sorts of clients, but with her background a lot of them have turned out to be musicians and, of course, they never seem to have any money. She has a struggle to get them to pay. And much of what she does is menial office work. It’s been four years, and she’s still only scratching a living. All that intelligence and energy and talent, and she’s doing people’s filing and writing their letters.’

  She sounded angry and frustrated. Definitely a casus belli here, Slider thought.

  ‘How has she managed for money, these four years?’ Slider asked. ‘Did she have any other job, or source of income?’

  ‘How could she?’ she said sharply. ‘It took up all her time.’

  ‘Was there family money?’

  ‘No,’ Stella Smart snapped. Apart from some furniture and things left to me by my mother, I have only what I earn from my books, and that, believe me, is no fortune. You see,’ with a gesture of the hand, ‘what I am reduced to.’

  ‘Did you help her out with money?’

  ‘She wanted to do it all herself, with no help from anybody.’

  ‘What about her father?’

&nbs
p; ‘Chattie has nothing to do with her father. She feels the same way about him as I do. She hasn’t seen him for years.’

  ‘It’s just that she seemed to live quite a lavish lifestyle,’ Slider said delicately. ‘Lots of restaurants and theatres, nice holidays and so on.’

  She looked at him with a faint, triumphant smile. ‘A woman can always enjoy those things without having money, if she knows how to attract men. Chattie never lacked for male company.’

  ‘Did you ever visit her house?’ he asked.

  ‘She lived in some ghastly slum in Hammersmith – all she could afford. She never invited me there and I never wanted to go. We met in Town, or she came here.’

  Slider wondered now whether the mother had really known anything about her daughter’s life. Chattie might have had lots of dates, but she spent her own money as well; and the house was no slum. Either the mother was dissembling for some reason, or Chattie had kept secrets from her. He tried another tack. ‘She was your only child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought there was a sister, or step-sister?’

  The face became stony. ‘Half-sister. Jassy is not my child, and I have nothing to do with her.’ Slider kept looking at her expectantly, and after a pause she sighed and said, ‘I had better tell you the story, or you won’t leave it alone. I met Chattie’s father at some ghastly party or other. We had an affair. He divorced his first wife for me. Later he met Jassy’s mother and had an affair with her, and left me for her. So I suppose you could say I was served right.’ Slider wouldn’t have dared. ‘There was a child from the first wife, too, another daughter, Ruth. So there are three half-sisters; but none of them grew up together.’

  ‘Presumably Chattie had some contact with them?’

  ‘None, as far as I know, with Ruth. She’s a lot older, a different generation. They had nothing in common. And Chattie never liked Jassy. She disapproved of her.’

  ‘But from what I’ve heard, Jassy lived with her for a while.’

  ‘Chattie’s too soft a touch. She never says no to anyone. Jassy leeched off her. The girl is a slut with no morals – just like her mother. Mother and daughter, they’re like those ghastly underwater things with suckers that simply attach themselves and live by draining the victim’s blood. I’ve never been beholden to anyone, and I’m proud of Chattie for making her own way and owing nothing to anyone.’