Blood Lines

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Somers said scornfully.

  ‘All right, then,’ Atherton said, ‘tell me instead why you went through Roger Greatrex’s pockets – once he was dead, that is.’ Somers stared, as if trying to gauge how much he knew. Atherton smiled unlovingly. ‘It might save time all round if I tell you that we’ve found your fingerprints on Roger’s wallet, so it would be a waste of breath to deny it. Fingerprints in his blood, I should add. Now I’m sure you weren’t after his money, so what did you take out of there?’

  ‘Nothing. I didn’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Somers gabbled.

  ‘Whatever it was you took out of his wallet, I think it was something you knew was there. You didn’t go through his other pockets, after all. And whatever it was, if it was important enough for you to take it from his dead body, it was probably what you killed him for.’

  Somers groaned and leaned forward, clutching his stomach, his face so white that Atherton moved his feet back sharply.

  ‘Come on, Mr Somers, much better get it off your chest,’ he said, though it wasn’t his chest that looked the likeliest candidate at the moment. ‘Tell me everything, clear your conscience. You know we’ll find out in the end. Why did you kill him? By all accounts he was a bit of a bastard anyway, no great loss to humanity. Why did you do it?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Somers moaned. ‘I didn’t kill him. I wish to God I had, but I didn’t.’

  ‘What had he done?’ Atherton coaxed. But Somers shook his head, still hugging himself and rocking. ‘You’d better tell me. You’re only making it worse for yourself.’

  The door opened at that moment, and Mandy looked in. ‘Mum says—’ She broke off, staring at her brother in concern, and then at Atherton. ‘What’s going on? What’ve you done to him? Did you hit him?’

  Atherton stood up, exasperated. He’d get nothing out of him now. ‘I’m afraid your brother doesn’t feel very well. I think I’d better go. I’ll call again some other time and talk to you, Mr Somers,’ he added, ‘unless you change your mind and want to talk to me. You know where to reach me if you do.’

  Mandy saw him to the door in a half-resentful silence. As Atherton stepped out into the open air, she said, ‘I don’t know what all this is about, but Phil hasn’t done anything. He wouldn’t. He’d never do anything that might upset Mum.’

  ‘Say goodbye to your mother for me, will you? And thank you,’ said Atherton.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Wife of Acton’s Tale

  ‘Hello! What are you doing here?’

  ‘There’s a nice greeting. Aren’t you glad to see me?’

  ‘I didn’t say I wasn’t.’

  ‘That’s all right then,’ Joanna said. ‘I got bored on my own, that’s all. I thought I’d come and see if you were going to have lunch. How did it go this morning?’

  Slider told her. ‘What a sad story,’ she said. ‘Do you think he really believes it’s his kid?’

  ‘I’m sure he does, at least on one level,’ Slider said. ‘But people can easily believe several conflicting things at the same time – though you can’t say that in court. In court you’ve got to present a nice, simple world where everything’s black or white and people behave consistently. Fortunately,’ he backed out from the cave of gloom opening before him, ‘juries are amazingly sensible on the whole. They generally get it right, whatever antics counsel get up to. It’s the one great argument for the jury system.’

  ‘And do you think Sandal Palliser is your man?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Slider frowned. ‘I hoped when I got on the trail of the telephone call that I’d be able to put him out of the frame, but I can’t, entirely. He still had time to do it, and a better motive you couldn’t want. Real, world-class resentment—’

  He was interrupted by Atherton’s arrival. ‘I’ve just been comprehensively tortured by the smell of the Traditional English Sunday Lunch. Anybody ready for a bite?’

  ‘We can get a sandwich upstairs if you like,’ Slider suggested, more to Joanna than his partner. ‘How did you get on with Somers? Get anything?’

  ‘Nada. But he’s definitely on the run now – gasping at the surface like a holed fish. I think he’ll break soon. And there was an atmosphere of tension in the house. I think the mother knows something, or suspects something, at least. She mentioned Greatrex in uncomplimentary terms and then frightened herself and ran away. But what a household,’ he added happily, and described it to them. ‘In other circumstances it would give you renewed faith in society – a whole family living together and keeping up the traditions.’

  Slider told him about his morning, and Atherton brightened. ‘Maybe Palliser’s our man after all. I’d sooner it was him than Somers. Somehow I can’t see Somers cutting Greatrex’s throat in that determined way. He’d have hacked about and made a mess of it.’

  ‘Those quiet ones can be the most determined when they screw themselves to the sticking point,’ Slider said.

  ‘He couldn’t screw himself to the wall. No, it’s Palliser for me,’ Atherton said cheerfully. ‘Mystic Meg has spoken. I see a tall man with a warped mind – oh no, that’s the mirror.’

  Slider wasn’t listening. ‘But what did Somers go into Greatrex’s pocket for?’ he said with a dissatisfied frown. ‘I wish you’d found that out. All we can do in a case like this is—’

  ‘Clear as we go,’ Atherton finished in chorus with him, and grinned at Joanna.

  ‘Do I really say that a lot?’ Slider asked.

  ‘It’s just a phrase you’re going through,’ Atherton said soothingly. ‘What about that sandwich?’

  But the phone rang from the front shop. ‘Excuse me, sir, there’s someone here who wants to talk to whoever’s in charge of the Greatrex case. Says she’s got some information, won’t give it to anyone but the top man.’

  Slider relayed this to Atherton. ‘Don’t tell me we’ve got a witness at last?’

  ‘We can but pray,’ said Atherton.

  Joanna stood up. ‘I’ll go and leave you to it. Where are we eating tonight?’

  ‘You notice she doesn’t ask when,’ Atherton said. ‘You’ve got her trained.’

  ‘I’ll give you a ring before I leave,’ Slider promised, and she stepped aside and let him pass, seeing his mind had already gone ahead of him, and she was forgotten.

  * * *

  As they passed through the charge room Nicholls, who had just come on and was still in his anorak, making tea, put out a hand to stop him.

  ‘Oh, Bill, just a minute. That guy we were talking about – it’s just come to me, where I knew him from.’

  ‘Philip Somers?’

  ‘That’s right. Though strictly speaking, it wasn’t him I remembered, it was his sister.’

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ Atherton said with a grin. ‘I was round his house this morning, and they come in six-packs.’

  ‘Is that a fact? Well, her name’ll come to me in a minute. Anyway, the Somers business – it was about eight, nine years ago – you can check it out with the Thames Valley records. It was while I was at Maidenhead. Oh yes, Madeleine! That was her name. Madeleine Somers. She was about seventeen, bright, pretty girl.’

  ‘I asked Somers about his family, and he didn’t mention a sister Madeleine,’ Atherton said.

  ‘I imagine not,’ Nicholls said. ‘Sister Madeleine was going out with Roger Greatrex.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘S’right,’ Nicholls nodded. ‘I don’t know all the details of the affair, but one night Greatrex was driving her back from a hotel in Bray where they’d been making the beast with two backs, and they were involved in an RTA. He wasn’t hurt, just cuts and bruises, but she went into the windscreen, suffered head injuries, and died a couple of hours later in hospital.’

  ‘The photograph!’ Atherton said. ‘I should have realised the significance: there was one photograph on its own on a table with flowers. Pretty girl of about seventeen.’r />
  ‘The memorial corner,’ Nicholls nodded. ‘Nice old-fashioned custom. They do it in my part of the world.’

  ‘The mother’s Irish,’ said Atherton.

  ‘But what about Philip Somers?’ Slider said impatiently. ‘What was your contact with him?’

  ‘I remember him from the inquest,’ Nicholls said. ‘I had to give evidence, seeing I was on traffic patrol at the time and I was one of the first on the scene. Anyway, your man Somers maintained Greatrex was to blame for the accident, made quite a scene in the coroner’s court. Said he’d been drinking – well, he undoubtedly had been, but we breathalysed him on the spot and he was below the limit, and there was a lot of black ice about that night, so nothing came of it. It went down as accidental death and that was that.’

  ‘Was it, indeed?’ Slider mused.

  ‘So it seemed. But it occurs to me that people are much less forgiving these days than they used to be. There’s no such thing as an accident any more. We’re all encouraged to think someone must be to blame.’

  ‘And some of us don’t need much encouraging,’ Atherton said. ‘There’s the motive, hot and strong! And we know Somers still resented Greatrex, because he tried to keep him off the programme.’

  Nicholls watched the two of them with intelligent interest. ‘Well, make of it what you will. It’ll be in the records, as I said, though there wasn’t a big splash in the papers as you’d expect. I think Greatrex must have had friends in high journalistic places, and used his influence to play it down.’

  ‘Did the rest of the family share Somers’s view?’

  ‘I dunno, Bill. I only saw the mother in court, and she kept quiet. It was Somers who did the shouting. I think they’d been particularly close, as I remember.’

  ‘Well, thanks, Nutty. That’s a great help,’ Slider said.

  ‘N’t’all. By the way, you did know there’s a customer in the shop for you?’

  ‘That’s where I was going. Better not keep her waiting any longer.’

  The customer was a stout, motherly woman in a cheap coat and even cheaper perfume, whose fantastically wrinkled face was explained by the equally fantastic nicotine stains on her fingers and the yellow streak across the front of her grey hair. She was sitting with a suffering expression under one of the No Smoking signs, and stood up as Slider approached.

  ‘You the boss?’ Slider introduced himself and Atherton. ‘Gor blimey, you don’t half make it hard for us smokers these days. I’m gasping for a fag. Can we go somewhere I can get one on, ’fore I passes out? You a smoker, dear?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. But there’s an interview room over here we can use. You’ve got something to tell me, I understand.’

  ‘About that murder at the BBC,’ she said. ‘Well, I did see something, dunno if it’s important.’ She slid her eyes about. ‘Don’t want to make a song and dance about it, dear. Walls have ears, y’know.’

  Slider nodded wisely and led the way to the small interview room. The woman fumbled in her bulging handbag, lit up, and sucked on the burning stick with an almost sexual ecstasy. ‘Aaah, that’s better!’ she sighed like a genial dragon, smoke billowing from her nose and mouth and, Atherton fantasised, her ears too. ‘Gor, I thought I’d had it, waiting all that time without so much as a puff. I dunno what the times are coming to, when a respectable woman can’t even light up in her own local p’lice station.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s all to do with the insurance company,’ Slider lied gently, ‘Mrs—?’

  ‘Dorothy Edna Reynolds, 19D Mandela House, South Acton,’ she supplied smartly. ‘But that’s between you, me, him, and the furnicher, all right? I didn’t like the look of that bloke, and I don’t want him coming round my house, supposing he is the one.’

  Slider’s soul thrilled to her words. An orchestra entirely composed of strings struck up somewhere. ‘You saw somebody you think was connected with the murder?’

  ‘Blimey, yes, what d’you think I come here for?’ She sucked again, wriggled herself comfortable, and began. ‘Thursday night, right? I come on six o’clock – six till eight, I do.’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘Cleaning. Just the offices and the lavs. Corridors is done by a contract firm during the night. Don’t ask me what happens to the stoojos. Anyway,’ she gathered her audience’s attention in a thoroughly professional way, ‘’bout quarter past seven time, going on har past, I finish floor five and come down the stairs with me box to do four.’

  ‘What staircase?’

  She looked approval at the question. ‘Well, it was number five, wannit?’ she answered rhetorically. ‘That’s the one right next door to where it all happened, which is what made me think. Not at the time, see, because I didn’t know nothing about it at the time, but after.’

  ‘Quite,’ Slider said encouragingly.

  ‘All right, so I come out the swing doors on four, and there’s this bloke just come out the gents next door and stood in front of the lift.’

  ‘Did you actually see him come out of the gents?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘Well,’ she looked bothered and fortified herself with another suck of smoke, ‘I been thinking about that, and I can’t honestly say if I axshully seen him come out, but I know in me mind that’s where he come from.’ Her brow furrowed, sending fault lines of wrinkles racing in all directions. She seemed genuinely puzzled by her own inability to be sure on the point.

  Slider said, ‘Maybe you saw the door just closing. Those doors with the hydraulic hinge on the back do close very slowly.’

  He expected her to leap at the explanation, but she didn’t, only went on puzzling and puffing. ‘I dunno,’ she said at last. ‘I dunno why I know, but if you’d asked me right then where he come from, I’d’ve said the gents, certain as I live.’

  ‘All right,’ Slider said, ‘never mind that now. What did the man do?’

  ‘Well, he stopped at the lift and pressed the button.’

  ‘Up or down?’ Atherton put in.

  She shook her head. ‘I dunno. I think, down, but I can’t be sure. I mean, it was on’y just a second I looked at him as I come out through the swing doors, because I turned the other way, see, to start with the offices down that end—’

  ‘You turned right out of the swing doors?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. But I looked at him and he looked at me, and that’s what sort of burned on me memory, otherwise I wun’t have thought twice about it. Because he looked at me, right into me eyes, and he looked—’ she paused again, rummaging through her memory or her vocabulary, or both, for the right description.

  ‘Afraid? Anxious? Startled?’ Atherton offered when the pause lengthened. She made a distracted movement of her hand and Slider stilled Atherton with a glance. This was a good witness. She knew what she knew.

  At last she shook her head. ‘I can’t describe it. But it wasn’t a nordin’ry look. That’s what took me attention, see?’

  ‘So he rang for the lift, and looked at you, and then you turned and went away – and that’s the last time you saw him?’ She nodded. ‘Can you describe him to me?’

  She fixed her eyes on the wall, the better to rifle her memory. ‘He was medium height,’ she said at last. Atherton converted a snort into a slight cough, and she glanced at him. ‘Not so tall as you, and not so short as you,’ she said indignantly. ‘What would you call that, if it’s not medium?’

  ‘Thin? Fat?’ Slider prompted.

  ‘He was what I’d call a big man,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Not fat, really, but, like, well-fed. Meaty. He looked strong. And he was really dark, with one o’ them blue chins, and black hair and dark eyes. Sinister, I’d call ’em. And a beauty spot on his cheek, here.’ She pressed the inner curve of her cheek just beside and below the corner of her left nostril.

  Slider could feel Atherton seething with disbelief beside him as this Boy’s Own description reeled out, but he knew a good witness when he met one. ‘Age?’ he asked.

  ‘’Bout fortyish. Give or take.’
She grinned lasciviously at Slider. ‘’Bout your age. My fav’rite.’

  ‘How was he dressed?’

  ‘Oh, just in a suit an’ tie. But he was carrying a bag, one o’ them nylon bags, what d’you call ’em, flight bags, is it? Like with a shoulder strap, only he was holding it by the handles. Blue, it was, just plain blue.’

  ‘Did it look full? Did he carry it as if it was heavy?’

  She seemed distracted by the question. ‘I dunno. He was just holding it, down by his side. I didn’t notice it, except it was there.’

  Slider could feel that Atherton was longing to ask questions, but was too good a subordinate to ignore the silencing look he had been given. ‘Did you see anyone else in the corridor at the time?’ Slider asked.

  ‘No, there was no-one around. I never see anyone going either way. I went straight down to the office at the end of the corridor and went in and started cleaning, and I never see anyone at all until about a half-hour later when I got nearly up to stairway six and found the whole place roped off and a copper standing there like he was stopping the traffic. So I says what’s going on, and he says never you mind, there’s nothing to see, and you can’t come this way, so I says, it don’t matter to me, I can go the other way, and I do, and that’s that, because it was my time to knock off anyway. Six till eight I do.’

  ‘Can you pin down the time any closer for me, the time you saw the man by the lift?’

  ‘Well,’ she said regretfully, ‘I didn’t look at me watch right after, but it’s got to’ve been between quarter and twenty past, ’cause it was coming up to quarter past when I finished the gents next to stairway six on five, and I’d only just walked along to stairway five and down two flights.’

  ‘Why didn’t you use stairway six?’ Atherton asked, unable to restrain himself any longer. ‘Why walk back?’

  ‘Because stairway six and seven was full of the aujence for Questions of Our Time going up to the canteen,’ she said with just a hint of triumph. ‘I wasn’t up to pushing me way through that little lot.’