Dear Departed

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  But it was above the neck that she was truly remarkable. Her hair was coke-black and cut in haphazard spikes. She looked like a cartoon character who has touched a live wire, except that the spikes were not symmetrical. Her face was very white, her eyeshadow and lipstick a very dark near-black red, her eyes a mass of thick, black mascara. She had four rings around the rim of one ear and three round the other and black shiny studs in the lobes, a stud in her nose and one between her lower lip and her chin, two rings in one eyebrow and a row of studs in the other.

  She had done everything she could to make herself look disagreeable; but someone else – presumably the absent Darren – had still done more. Her eyes were red with crying and her mascara had smeared clownishly below them. Under the white foundation her face had a bumpy look with which Slider, like other policemen, was sadly all too familiar. She had a large bruise on her right cheekbone, a cut on the left side of her mouth, which was swollen, and a bruise on her left cheekbone, which had spread round the eye. Three blows, he thought, with sad expertise. A right-handed assailant: hit the left side first, then a backhander to the right (the cut was probably caused by a ring), then the left again. It was the carelessly callous assault of accustomedness. And yet still she expected him back and opened the door to him.

  ‘Did Darren do this to you?’ Slider asked, injecting fatherly tenderness into his voice.

  ‘None of your bloody business,’ she muttered.

  ‘You don’t have to take that, you know, Jassy. No-one’s got the right to hit you.’

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked irritably, but with a shade of weariness, as if she’d heard it all before.

  ‘Just to talk to you.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say. Not to Fascist lackeys like you.’ She glanced at Hart. ‘What’re you doing this job for? You’re the worst sort, sucking up to the enemy. Haven’t you got any loyalty?’

  ‘Just sit down, Jassy,’ Slider said firmly, ‘and let’s get this over with.’

  ‘Who d’you think you’re talking to? You can’t order me about in my own home. Get out of here and leave me alone. I’m not talking.’

  ‘I’m trying to make this friendly,’ Slider said, ‘but I’m not going to waste my time. Either you talk to us here, or I’ll arrest you and you can talk at the station. It’s up to you.’

  ‘Arrest me?’ she said, with a fair attempt at lip-curling contempt. ‘What for?’

  Hart took it up. ‘We got some very nice lifts off that bag o’ charlie hidden in Chattie’s house. We gonna find out they’re yours soon as we print you.’ Jassy’s face registered dismay for a telling moment. ‘You know how it goes, girl. Own up and you get some credit. Make us work for it and you don’ get nuffin’. Plus, this is your chance to tell your side o’ the story. What’s it gonna be?’

  Slider thought she was overdoing it a little, but it played like vaudeville with Jassy, in her, presumably, overwrought state.

  ‘Bastard,’ she said, but it didn’t seem to be directed towards either of them. She sat down heavily on the sofa, and tears began to well up in her eyes. She tried to sniff them back, and said, in an unsteady voice, ‘You got any fags? He cleaned me out, the bastard.’

  Silently, Hart produced a pack and handed one over, and Jassy reached across to the coffee table for a box of matches. While she was lighting it, Slider took a quick and covert glance round at the room. It was sparsely furnished, but in a way that suggested this was a style choice rather than lack of money. The stereo system racked along one wall would have cost thousands, and there was a large, new plasma-screen TV on an expensive corner unit. The floor was stripped and polished – which must make life miserable for the people underneath, he thought, given the kind and volume of the music Jassy seemed to prefer – and the black leather sofa and chairs were top of the range, and still smelt new. Whatever Jassy was doing here in Brixton, it wasn’t slumming – unless of the cultural sort. Though her language was not elegant, her accent was out of its place.

  ‘So where’s Darren?’ Slider asked at last.

  She shrugged, without looking at him.

  ‘He hit you, and then he took off?’ Another shrug. ‘What did he hit you for?’ No answer. ‘Was it about the cocaine in Chattie’s house?’

  She fidgeted a bit, but didn’t answer. One arm was folded across her waist, the elbow of the other resting on it so that her hand was by her face, handy for concealing it, and for smoking and nail-biting which she did alternately. She stared away from them, out of the window, which, being at the back of the house, had no view of the lovely tree, only the no-escape fire escape and the backs of other buildings.

  Slider tried again. ‘Did you know that your sister Chattie was dead?’ he said, hoping that either way it might shock a response out of her.

  It worked, though it was not the reaction he had expected. She looked at him balefully for an instant. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, what d’you think this is all about?’ There was a breath of a pause, and then resentment burst the banks. ‘It’s all her fault, stupid cow! She always had everything she wanted, always, and I never had anything!’ And then she cried – not tears of grief and mourning, but what, in Slider’s experience, were always the most sincere and heartfelt of all, the tears of self-pity.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Snow White and the Severn Dork

  There was a residual reluctance to overcome, but Hart worked on Jassy with sympathy and sisterly solidarity. ‘Look at your face. I wu’nt take that from no-one, girl. He ain’t got the right to knock you aroun’.’

  ‘We had a row,’ Jassy confessed, wiping tears and kohl from under her eyes with a Kleenex.

  ‘About the bag o’ white at yo’ sister’s house, was it?’ Jassy did not answer this. Hart leaned forward a little and said earnestly, ‘Listen, grassing up a mate’s one fing, I know that, but this is different. This is serious. You don’t want to do time for that bastard, do you? After what he did? He ain’t wurf it, girl. I mean, that’s yo’ fingerprints on the bag, ennit, an’ we know you was there. We got a witness.’

  ‘That cow of a cleaner, Maureen or whatever her name is,’ Jassy said viciously. ‘Always poking her nose in. Who does she think she is?’

  Hart tossed Slider a quick look, and he took up the thread. ‘Jassy, I want you to understand this is something much more serious and important than the bag of cocaine. Now, if you help us by telling us everything you know, you won’t get into trouble for that. But if you won’t help us, then we’ll have no option but to arrest you. That was a very large quantity of snow in that bag. It’s not just possession. We’re talking jail here.’

  She stared at his stern face, and then at Hart’s sympathetic one, and sighed. ‘I never wanted to do it in the first place,’ she said. ‘I mean, that’s Darren’s business. I didn’t want to know.’

  Happy to live off the proceeds, though, weren’t you? Slider could see the thought in Hart’s eyes, but fortunately Jassy didn’t.

  ‘So he made you hide the bag in Chattie’s house? Why was that?’

  ‘ I don’t know.’

  Slider looked at Hart. ‘I don’t think this qualifies as cooperation. I think we’d better continue this down at the station.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Hart. ‘You can’t be nice to some people.’

  Jassy stirred indignantly. ‘Look, I don’t know. He just said to take it there and put it in the cupboard behind the tins of tomatoes. I thought he needed a safe place to stash it, that’s all. I know some of your lot have had their eye on him. Maybe he had a tip-off or something that he was going to get turned over.’

  ‘He didn’t give a reason and you didn’t ask for one? You just hid a bloody great bag o’ white in your sister’s house, no questions asked?’

  She gave a sulky shrug. ‘Why should I care about her? She’s never done anything for me.’

  ‘But Darren obviously knew his way about her kitchen all right, if he knew what was in that cupboard,’ said Slider. ‘How well did he know your sister
?’

  ‘Look, if you’re suggesting there was something going on between them—’

  ‘I didn’t suggest anything, but it’s interesting that you jump to that conclusion,’ said Slider, with an air of intellectual enquiry.

  Hart lowered the tone judiciously. ‘Was he bonking her, love?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘So it was a business relationship?’

  ‘I don’t know, and I don’t care,’ Jassy said. ‘I hid the charlie for him, that’s all. Then Wednesday night he tells me to go and get it. But when I get to the house there’s a copper on the door.’

  Atherton got that done just in time, Slider thought.

  ‘So I came home and told Darren and he was furious. He just went off at me, as if it was my fault. I told him it was nothing to do with me, but he said the coke must have been found and I couldn’t have hidden it properly, and he shouted at me and then he hit me and then he took off and I haven’t seen him since.’ She drew a breath, and added, ‘I don’t care if I never see him again, either, the bastard. It wasn’t my fault. I put it where he told me to. He’d got no right to hit me.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ Hart said warmly. Jassy turned minutely towards her and away from Slider, responding, he saw, to female sympathy. Hart was good, he thought. ‘So where was Dow Wensday morning, Jass? Did he go out early?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t here. I went to see my mum Tuesday night and stayed over. But he wasn’t here either. He went up to Manchester to see some mates on Tuesday. That’s why I went to see Mum. He didn’t get home until about eight o’clock Wednesday night, and then he told me to go over to Chattie’s and get the coke.’

  ‘How come he’s got mates in Manchester?’ Hart asked.

  ‘He went to college there. Not for long – they chucked him out for selling weed.’ She smiled slightly as she said it – a proud smile for the rebel without a cause.

  ‘D’you think that’s where he’s gone now?’

  ‘I don’t know. It might be.’

  ‘You haven’t tried to find him? Rung round your friends?’

  ‘Why should I, after what he did? I never want to see him again. I hope he rots in hell, the bastard.’

  ‘Can you give us the name and address of these mates?’

  She came down off her high horse, belatedly alarmed. ‘What d’you want that for?’

  ‘We’d like a word with him about that charlie – and we can do him for assault on you at the same time, if you like,’ said Hart.

  But Jassy looked uneasy. ‘He’s got some funny mates up there, hard men. I don’t want to get mixed up with it. I mean, they’d be pissed off if they thought I’d put the coppers on their tail. They could be serious trouble.’

  ‘We won’t tell them it was you told us,’ Hart said. ‘There’s lots of ways we could’ve found it out.’ Jassy still looked uncertain, and Hart allowed a little toughness to creep into her voice. ‘In return for a bit of leeway on your prints being on that bag of coke.’

  ‘I’ve told you about that. It wasn’t mine.’

  ‘Yeah, but he’s put you right in it. You don’t wanna go down, just protectin’ him. Do yo’self a favour. You don’t owe him nuffin’. Give us a name, girlfrien’. No-one won’t know you said anyfing. ’At’s a promise.’

  Jassy sighed, and said, ‘I know one of ’em’s Dave O’Brien.I don’t know his address but his phone number’s around somewhere. Will that do?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s good, girl,’ Hart said. ‘You get that for us, an’ that’s a lot o’ Brownie points for you.’

  Jassy got up and said, ‘If you find Darren, make sure he falls down a flight of stairs or something.’ She found the number on a pad by the telephone and handed it to Hart with an air of having finished all transactions.

  But Slider said, ‘So when did you find out your sister was dead?’

  She turned to him, wariness creeping into her expression and posture. ‘Eh?’

  ‘When you went to her house on Wednesday night and saw the policeman on duty, you didn’t know then she was dead?’

  ‘Well, of course I didn’t. I thought it was to do with the coke. That’s why I had the fight with Darren.’ She said it with the exaggerated exasperation of the age.

  ‘So when did you find out?’

  Jassy sat down. ‘If you must know, my mum phoned me up about it last night. She saw it on the telly, on the news.’

  ‘Don’t you watch the news on television?’

  ‘No, why should I? It’s a load of rubbish. Capitalist indoctrination. All those TV companies are tools of the establishment.’

  ‘That’s a big TV set you’ve got,’ Hart remarked.

  ‘It’s Darren’s. He watches the sport on it.’ It was said with a roll of the eyes.

  ‘You don’t seem very sorry that she’s dead.’

  Resentment flared. ‘Why should I be? She was only my half-sister. Anyway, she wouldn’t care if it was me. She always thought she was a cut above everyone else. Her mum is a stuck-up bitch. She called my mum all the names under the sun for stealing my dad from her, but she’d done just the same, so who was she to give herself airs? The first time I went to her house for tea when I was a kid, she went on and on about table manners and had I washed my hands and was I allowed to eat like that at home. I wasn’t good enough for her. I mean, I was just a little kid! You don’t take it out on a little kid like that, do you? And Chattie was just like her – thought she was oh-so-posh, looked down on me and my friends, all holier-than-thou every time I wanted to do a line of charlie or a couple of tabs of E or whatever. The fuss she made when I smoked a bit of weed in her precious house! You’d have thought I’d been spraying anthrax around. I said to her, everybody does it, and she said, I don’t, and I said, well, that doesn’t surprise me because you’re just bloody perfect, everybody knows that. Her and her stupid little piddling business, and all that crap about doing it on her own and not taking anything from anybody! That was aimed at me, that charming little remark. All very well for someone who’s always had everything they wanted, all very fine and nice. She made me sick, she was so bloody pious, sitting in her ivory tower and telling me I had no right to draw social security, as if it was a crime. I said to her, I know my rights, and she made some smart-mouth remark about not knowing my duty. Duty! Yeah, duty to the forces of global capitalism, I said. Never mind the third-world poor, grind them in the dust, as long as you’ve got your share! She was such a hypocrite. I mean, she only had that house in the first place because our dad gave her the money for it. So much for not taking anything from anybody.’

  ‘Is your dad well off?’

  She shrugged again. ‘All I know is, he’s never given me anything.’

  ‘Are he and your mum still together?’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking!’ she said, with a toss of her head. ‘He scarpered the moment I turned up. Cleared off and left Mum to it. I was just glad he’d done the same to Chattie and her snobby mum. Her and her stupid books! My mum got one out of the library once. She said it was rubbish.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve really got some issues wiv your sister,’ Hart said sympathetically.

  ‘She always had everything,’ Jassy cried, with a fresh burst of self-pity. ‘She’s pretty, she’s brainy, and everybody always takes her side, because she sucks up to them. Everything she does turns out right, she always had tons of boyfriends, and now she’s got that house and she hangs around with celebs in that potty job of hers, and her life’s just bloody perfect! All I’ve got is this crummy place, and Darren. And now,’ she reached the peak and tumbled over, ‘Darren’s hit me and gone off and I don’t know where he is or when he’s coming back!’

  She began to cry again, and Hart handed her another Kleenex and met Slider’s eye over her bent head. The resentment was fresh and hot and there was plenty of material here for motive. And the absent Darren, Hart’s look said as clearly as words, was more than a bit tasty.

  Baroque Solid were not
playing together on Friday evening. Marion and Trish had outside work, playing at Milton Keynes, and the others were about their normal social rounds – or normal-ish, considering the shock they had all sustained. Atherton eventually tracked Jasper Stalybrass down in a pub in Islington, which was filled with well-scrubbed, well-dressed young people spending large amounts of money on designer beers (the men), which they drank out of the bottle, and bizarre cocktails (the women) that came laden with fruity bits and twisty glass straws. Stalybrass was tall and handsome and was evidently being the life and soul of the group of laughing people he was in company with. It was a delicate manoeuvre to cut him out from his adoring fans.

  Atherton’s experience, backed up by what he had learned from Joanna and Sue, was that horn-players were often men with enormous charm and cold, cold hearts, so he started off with a mild prejudice against him, especially as he had found him telling jokes and laughing heartily. But once he had him alone in a quiet corner, he fell victim himself to the charm, especially as it was allied to a sharp mind, a straightforward delivery, and an obviously genuine shock and sadness about Chattie.

  ‘God, it’s hard to believe,’ he said. ‘I keep forgetting for a time, and then remembering all over again. It was a hell of a blow, I can tell you. I mean, everybody liked Chattie. Who in the world would want to kill her?’ He put his hand up to scratch his eyebrow in an almost boyish gesture of hiding his tears. He cleared his throat, and then said, ‘But I was forgetting – it was this Park Killer, wasn’t it? So that means he picked her at random. God, what a terrible, awful chance. You never think it could happen to anyone you know, do you?’

  ‘I imagine the whole band is very upset,’ Atherton said neutrally.

  ‘Upset? That doesn’t come near it. We were back at the studio today to do the final mix on our CD, but we all just sat around and talked about Chattie. We hadn’t got the heart to get on with it. Mike Ardeel – the studio boss? – he was really cut up. He said in the circumstances he’d give us another session and wouldn’t charge us for the wasted one, and usually he’s red hot on money – has to be, in a small operation – so that shows you. But really, none of us could think about doing it right then. It would have been too weird. The last time most of us saw her was in that studio on Monday. The girls were all in tears. I nearly was myself.’