Dear Departed
Page 32
‘But at least the acne cure won’t be suppressed. He’ll be glad about that.’
‘I hope it won’t.’ He sighed. ‘So many lives ruined. Things done that can’t be undone.’
‘Now, don’t start that again,’ she said. ‘You always get depressed at the end of a case. Think positive: you avenged Chattie.’
‘But that doesn’t bring her back,’ said Slider. And I only ever saw her dead. I wish I’d known her. I think she was a genuinely good and kind person.’
‘Unless she really did have an affair with this Cockerell person,’ she teased him gently.
‘Of course she didn’t. It would have been a deplorable lapse of taste on her part. Cockerell admitted that he fancied her, and tried to get off with her, but she talked him out of it, and they just had a few lunches together and some long heart-to-hearts and became friends.’
‘Well, of course, he would say that,’ said Atherton, leaning over to put a full pint in front of each of them.
‘It was the truth,’ Slider said indignantly. ‘Why would she want to bonk that slippery cheese?’
‘He was the big cheese,’ said Atherton.
‘No. Sorry. I just don’t buy it. Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams. Chattie was a princess.’
His arm was round Joanna and he gave her a squeeze as he said it. She smiled, and then yawned, and said, ‘Last pint, then I must get home to bed. I can’t take these late nights any more.’
‘You musicians have got no stamina,’ Atherton said. ‘We intend to make the night hideous with our carousings – don’t we?’ he added to Hart, who had moved round to join them.
‘Yeah, what he said,’ she agreed, leaning on him. ‘So, all over bar the shouting, eh, guv?’
‘Yes, thank God,’ Slider said. He lifted his pint to his lips, and inside his head, made a silent valediction to Chattie, whom he had never known, but was close to loving.
Swilley called over heads, ‘Boss, there’s a phone call for you. Urgent.’
‘Flaming Nora,’ Slider said, ‘are they even going to pursue me to the pub?’ He struggled up from the velvet embrace of the banquette, edged out from behind the loaded table, and went over to the bar.
The landlord put the phone down in front of him. ‘I’ve put it through to here,’ he explained. ‘They said it was urgent.’
‘Thanks, Andy.’ Slider wearily picked up the receiver, expecting trouble. It was not a premonition, just that most urgent phone calls were trouble, of one sort or another.
It was Porson. Ah, glad I caught you there, Slider. Just had a bell from Chief Superintendent Ormerod. He thought you ought to know. Put you on your guard, at least.’
‘What is it, sir?’
‘It’s about Bates, Trevor Bates, that last case of yours. Bit of a shambles, red faces all round. Seems they were moving him to the maximum-security remand facility at Woodhill when the van was held up. He must have managed to communicate with some of his people on the outside. That’s what comes of treating ’em soft, all those phone calls and private sessions with dodgy briefs.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Slider said. ‘You mean the Needle’s escaped?’
‘Yes, laddie,’ Porson said, with deep regret. ‘He’s escaped. Clean as a whistle. They haven’t got a clue where he is now, and given that he wasn’t best pleased with you, Ormerod thought you ought to be alerted, in case he came after you. Unlikely, maybe, but even so …’
‘Bloody Nora,’ Slider said, with deep feeling and, in fairness, some justification.