Blood Lines

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Lures him into the gents – with the offer of sweeties, perhaps?’

  ‘Greatrex probably went of his own accord. After all, it wasn’t essential to Palliser’s plan to kill him in that particular place, was it? Whoever killed him,’ he added, seeing Slider about to object, ‘it’s hardly likely to have been the chosen spot.’

  ‘Fair enough. But then we’re back to the problem of the bloodstained clothes, or lack of,’ Slider said, sighing. ‘Did you try Mrs P with the knife?’

  ‘Yes – no go.’

  ‘Still, it’s better than Norma’s theory,’ he said, ‘and worth following up. Since the motive for the murder wasn’t robbery from the person, it must have been someone who knew him, and Palliser seems to be the one who knew him best. We’ll have to get him to volunteer some fingerprints. Somers too. Even if only for the purpose of elimination.’

  ‘As long as you can keep Mr Honeyman sweet. He still wants it to be suicide.’

  ‘Ah, on that subject – I had a telephone call from Freddie. Good news from our point of view – he’s found subcutaneous bruising on the chin and jaw, including one very fine fingermark on the right side just below the ear.’ He watched Atherton visualising it. ‘So that gives us the murderer coming up behind him, grabbing him with the left hand under the chin—’

  ‘To force his head back,’ Atherton supplied, ‘and pull the neck taut.’

  ‘Right. Freddie says he thinks it was inflicted immediately prior to death, which accounts for it not spreading to the upper layers.’

  ‘Well, Mr Honeyman can hardly argue with that. Congratulations, guv.’ Atherton looked at his watch. ‘I’d better go. I’ve got a hot date.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Atherton grinned. ‘Sue isn’t playing in Traviata, remember.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘Where are you eating tonight? Why don’t you come round later, have some supper?’

  ‘I’ve got to go and see Irene.’

  ‘Will she be feeding you?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ Slider shuddered at the thought.

  ‘Well, then, come round. Look, you don’t have to commit yourself. I don’t suppose you know how long you’ll be. Just come round if you want to. I’ll be cooking something that doesn’t spoil, just in case.’

  Slider was tired and his mind was full of little jumping bits of information, like a dog with fleas, which was not the best state to be in for an interview with his future ex-wife. Not only that, but he had to go and see her in the house of the man she had ambled off with, which made him feel awkward and see red. The place was large and overstuffed and dull, like Ernie Newman himself, and it had a funny smell about it, which he couldn’t pin down, but which reminded him depressingly of visiting aunties when he was a child – in particular Aunty Celia, who was ferocious about children being seen but not heard, and who always made him kiss her, instead of contenting herself, like other relatives, with kissing him. The texture and taste of her Coty face powder was all woven into the nightmare which began when Dad rang her doorbell. Ernie Newman’s house had the same door chimes as Aunty Celia’s.

  The children had been allowed to stay up to see him, but he was so late that they had been scrubbed and pyjama’d and were waiting for him in brand new dressing-gowns and slippers which they wore with the air of lamb chops wearing paper frills. Matthew in particular was pale with shock, and after staring at Slider with his lower lip under his teeth for an agonising moment flung himself into Slider’s arms to whisper passionately, ‘Oh Dad, can’t we go home? He bought us these slippers, and he calls them house shoes.’

  Slider’s heart lurched with sympathy. In such small things does true horror reside. When he was Matthew’s age, there had been a teacher at school who had filled him with crawling dread because she pronounced the name Susan as Syusan. There was no arguing with that kind of aversion. The person concerned might be the paradigm of every kindly virtue – it was still garlic flowers and stake-through-the-heart time.

  Kate was not stricken, but even her bounce was less ballistic. ‘They don’t do Nature Study in my new school,’ she complained, ‘they do Eartha Wareness. And Melanie took the gerbils home, even though it was my turn. It’s not fair.’

  ‘Didn’t you say anything to the teacher?’ Slider asked.

  Kate’s tiny chest swelled with indignation. ‘I couldn’t. Because Mummy said I couldn’t have my turn. Because he gets assama.’

  Irene caught Slider’s eyes and looked flustered. ‘Don’t call Uncle Ernie him, it’s rude,’ she rebuked her daughter.

  ‘He’s not my uncle,’ Kate returned smartly, and forestalled further rebuke by grabbing Slider’s hand. ‘Come and see my room, Daddy. I’ve got four new horses in my c’lection, and I’m going to have a shelf over my bed to put them all.’

  Matthew reddened and glared at her. ‘Shut up,’ he hissed. ‘Dad doesn’t want to see your bedroom.’

  ‘Shut up yourself,’ she retorted, clearly getting out of hand. ‘Daddy, don’t you think I’m old enough to wear a bra? Stephanie at school’s got one, and Melanie’s getting one next week.’

  ‘You’ll have to ask your mother. How are you getting on at school?’ Slider asked Matthew hastily. ‘Settling in?’

  His son regarded him with troubled eyes. ‘All right,’ he said guardedly. ‘I wish I didn’t have to go on the bus, though. If I had a bike I could cycle there. It’s only six miles.’

  ‘Not on that main road, Matthew,’ Irene said, plainly treading a path that had been trod before. ‘I’ve told you.’ She appealed to Slider. ‘He’d have to go part of the way on the A412. You know how the cars zip along there. It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the bus?’ Slider asked, trying not to get sucked in.

  Matthew blushed again and chewed his lip before admitting, ‘The others get at me.’

  ‘What for?’

  Even more reluctantly, Matthew said, ‘They say the police are the fascist lackeys of state repression.’

  Slider was impressed. ‘They use longer words than the boys you used to mix with. There’s something to be said for private education after all.’

  ‘Don’t joke, Dad,’ Matthew said. ‘Can’t we—’ He flicked a glance at his mother, which proved he had been going to say, can’t we go home, and changed it to, ‘Can’t I go back to my old school?’

  ‘No you can’t, Matthew,’ Irene said angrily, ‘and I wish you’d stop asking that.’

  I wish I could help you, Slider thought sadly, but I can’t. Sometimes you just have to bear things. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said instead, uselessly. ‘Everything seems strange at the moment. Just give it time.’ And Matthew looked at him in silent reproach, just as he would have done in the same situation.

  After such soul-searing, it was quite a relief to be left alone with Irene, even if it was in Ernie Newman’s best parlour. The three-piece suite was covered in white and gold brocade, the shagpile carpet was off-white, and the occasional tables had green onyx tops with gold rims. He looked to see what Irene had been doing before he arrived, and saw on the table nearest the dented cushions Irene’s reading glasses lying on top of a book called The Acol Method and After and next to it a shorthand pad on which notes had been made in Irene’s small and careful hand.

  ‘What’s the Acol method?’ he asked, and refrained from adding a joke about birth control, which would have gone too near too many sensitivities.

  ‘It’s bridge,’ she said, almost irritably. She knew what he thought about the game. ‘As you know very well. I’m brushing up on my bidding.’

  ‘Is he giving you a hard time?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Everyone gets frustrated sometimes when their partner misses a signal. In fact, Marilyn says husbands and wives shouldn’t partner each other – but she’s only joking, of course,’ she added hastily, perhaps fearing Slider might say something about her not being Ernie Newman’s wife.

  He felt an enormous sympathy for her welling
up, and said instead, ‘How’s your mother? Did she have her operation?’

  She looked at him with relief and gratitude. ‘No, they think she might not have to now. She’s much better since they’ve put her on the new pills.’

  ‘Good,’ Slider said, nodding encouragingly.

  ‘She asks after you,’ Irene offered him, kindness for kindness.

  ‘Well, give her my love next time you speak to her. If you think it’s appropriate.’

  ‘Of course. She’ll be pleased I’ve seen you.’ And now she was looking at him almost wistfully. ‘I’m glad to see you, too,’ she said in a small voice.

  He met her eyes for an agonising moment, and saw in them the same look of bewilderment as in the children’s. She was out of her place too; for two pins, Slider thought, she would ask him if they couldn’t all go home again. And it was a tempting scenario, that was the damnable thing. It was always easier to settle for the familiar, however disappointing, than to get through the pain of change in the hope of something better. That weight of inertia was marriage’s best friend. The words hung unspoken on the air – couldn’t we forget everything that’s happened in the past year and go back – sink back into our cosy frowst – it wasn’t so very bad, was it?

  Slider stiffened his sinews. Having got this far, he thought – and that reminded him that he ought to help things along a little, in case, apart from anything else, the ratepayer returned. Seeing his wife in Ernie’s house was bad enough, but with Ernie present it would have been intolerable. There was a peculiar – given the circumstances – seed of possessive fury somewhere in him which he did not want to confront. He hardened his heart against her loneliness. She looked so little against Ernie’s overstuffed furniture. ‘So, you wanted to talk to me about the divorce?’

  She chewed her lower lip, for a moment looking absurdly like Matthew, another thing he didn’t want to think about. ‘I wish I didn’t have to, but things have to be sorted out. The thing is, I have to ask you if you’re going to contest it. You see, we could arrange everything between us and then instruct a solicitor just to do the paperwork, and that way it could all be done as friendly as possible. I think what none of us want is for things to get nasty – I mean, especially with the children and everything, it would be so awful for them if we quarrelled.’

  ‘Quarrelled?’ He was almost amused at the inappropriateness of her nursery language.

  ‘Over – well – money and things. I mean, you’ve been so good about all this – I just can’t tell you how grateful I am that you’ve taken it so well – and I feel so guilty as well, all I want is for it all to be as easy as possible for everyone concerned.’

  He had to put her at her ease. Her guilt reminded him too pointedly of his own. ‘That’s what I want too,’ he said soothingly. ‘And of course I won’t contest it, as long as we can come to an agreement that satisfies us both.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t ask you for anything for myself,’ she promised hastily. ‘I mean, I want to be fair. And you can see the children whenever you want. There’s absolutely no trouble about that. Ernie agrees with me. It’s just a question of settling about maintenance for the children.’

  ‘I’m sure we can come to an agreement without anyone getting angry,’ he said. ‘After all, there are always faults on both sides,’ he said. ‘A marriage doesn’t break up through just one person’s fault.’

  She allowed her shoulders to drop in an exaggerated gesture of relief which was designed to conceal her very real relief that he was not out to seek vengeance. ‘You always were a fair person, Bill. It’s one of the things about you,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it used to annoy me, that you always saw both sides of every argument, but now—’

  She was looking at him more meltingly every minute, and the hedgehog of guilt on which he was sitting was growing longer and longer spikes. He didn’t want to meet her eyes, for fear of what he might be tempted to blurt out. She was the mother of his children, he had woken up beside her every morning for fourteen years, and even now he could have gone into the strange bedroom she was at present inhabiting and known exactly where she had put every item of her clothing. It was a huge dry bath-bun of knowledge to be swallowed down in one gulp.

  ‘I’ve got a murder case on at the moment,’ he said.

  ‘You look as if you’re not getting enough to eat,’ she said.

  As fine and evasive a pair of non sequiturs as you were likely to meet in a twelvemonth, Slider thought. He wondered what Joanna was doing at that very instant.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sleepless on the Settle

  Fiona Parsons lived in Chiswick, in that strange tangle of little streets between Chiswick High Road and the river, where Georgian country villas, Victorian workmen’s cottages, and Edwardian clerks’ semis jostle for proximity to the fabled real-estate values of the Strand on the Green. Miss Parsons lived on the top floor of a two-storey Victorian house which had been almost converted by the owner, who lived downstairs. The almost-conversion had made two separate dwellings within the house without separating them, which meant that when Norma rang the doorbell, the owner – a tall, vague, gangling, bushy-haired, media intellectual inevitably called John – opened the door onto the vista and smell of new buttermilk emulsion, and when asked for Miss Parsons called up the bare and polished staircase like a husband, ‘Fee, darling, it’s for you!’

  Fiona Parsons’ voice floated back unintelligibly from somewhere above, upon which John smiled in a daffy, well-meaning way and said, ‘She’s upstairs. You’d better go on up.’ Norma thought she had better, too, but had only got as far as the first step when John caught up with his thought processes sufficiently to say, ‘Isn’t that an awful, awful thing about poor Roger! Did you know him? Oh, I just couldn’t believe it when she told me. Poor, poor Fiona. And she was actually there, poor thing! I can’t believe anyone would do such a terrible thing. Such a sweet man!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Norma comprehensively, escaping up the stairs.

  ‘She hasn’t been to work since,’ he called after her. ‘It’s totally wrecked her life.’

  Upstairs the conversion had been carried out in the unengagingly dotty manner of the amateur, which meant that while the paint-clogged plaster of the elaborate vine-swag cornices had been painstakingly scraped, cleaned and restored to its full, crisp glory, there were bare wires hanging from the ceiling and the electric sockets were lying on the floor waiting to be chased into the walls; the handsome panelled doors had been stripped to the wood, but their hardware had not been replaced, so that presumably they could not be closed; all the floors had been filled, sanded and varnished, but the kitchen door was leaning against the wall out in the hallway and the hall window was broken.

  While Norma was taking a quick peek in at the rooms, Fiona Parsons appeared from the bathroom handsomely wrapped in a fluffy dressing-gown and with her hair turbaned in a towel. She looked, Norma thought irritably, sensational, despite – or perhaps because of – the dark shadows under her eyes. She was the kind of woman who, rising from her bath, always looked like Aphrodite instead of a turbot like the rest of humanity; who naked and smeared with whipped cream would look like a sex goddess rather than just a mucky herbert.

  Her mouth took on a downward curve when she saw Norma. ‘Oh—!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was told to come up.’

  ‘It’s John – he’s hopeless! My doorbell’s never worked. D’you know, I’ve been here nearly a year and I’ve still only got a single ring to cook on. The trouble is he won’t get anyone in. He insists on doing everything himself, in between writing his stupid scripts. I wish I’d never agreed to come here. I mean, the house will be lovely when it’s finished, and he charges me hardly any rent, but I’d sometimes sooner pay the rent and have a bit of privacy. D’you want some coffee?’

  ‘Will it be any trouble?’

  ‘Oh no, I’ve got an electric kettle. I was going to make some for myself.’ She turned towards the kitchen, and Norma followed. ‘I don’t do mu
ch cooking, I have to say. I take most of my meals out. I’d like to be able to entertain sometimes – or rather—’ She stopped in confusion, and busied herself with her back to Norma making coffee with much clattering.

  ‘Your landlord seems to have known Roger Greatrex,’ Norma said.

  ‘John?’ she said with unnecessary insouciance. ‘Well, everyone knew him, didn’t they. John was a producer at the Beeb before he started freelance scriptwriting.’

  ‘I think it was a rather more personal knowledge than that,’ Norma said kindly. ‘He’s been here, hasn’t he?’

  Fiona turned with nervous eyes, and her voice came out rather high. ‘Why d’you say that?’

  It was so pathetic it was touching. ‘You’ve got his picture on your bedside table.’

  The eyes filled alarmingly with tears. ‘Oh God – oh God—!’

  In the end, Norma made the coffee, and by the time she carried in the two mugs to the sitting-room, Fiona Parsons had regained control, and was sitting on the sofa with her legs curled under her, a small alp of wet tissues beside her, ready to talk.

  ‘How did you guess? I thought I was being so discreet.’

  ‘I didn’t really, I just thought it might be the case. It was you who asked for him to be on the show; and you went down to meet him in person.’

  ‘But I did that with most of the guests. Phil and I shared the duty between us.’

  ‘Not that night. You only met him, none of the others. And he was early. According to what I’ve heard, that was very unusual.’

  She sighed. ‘Yes. I did persuade Martin we ought to have Roger on the show – not that he needed much persuading, Roger’s always good value – but Martin wanted to approach the question more from the government side. And he objected that we’d only had Roger a few weeks ago – although it was actually eight weeks, but it was still quite soon – so I pointed out that Roger and Sandal had both been in the news recently, and that we ought to have both of them. I said we could hardly have an arts-funding debate without them and in the end he agreed, and so that was that.’