Blood Lines

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘There’s plenty of time, isn’t there? And she has plenty of children.’

  Somers shook his head. ‘It affected us all. You don’t understand. Maddy was the life of the family. She was the bright one, the funny one, always on the go. She was the one who made us do things. She was the one who made Mum and Dad buy this house when the council put it up for sale. She introduced Patrick to his wife. Without her—’ He lapsed into a trembling silence.

  ‘How did she meet Greatrex?’

  ‘She was a voluntary steward at the Festival Hall, and he was always there, of course, being a music critic. He just saw her and decided he had to have her.’

  ‘She was pretty,’ Atherton commented.

  ‘She was beautiful!’ Somers cried. ‘He had to have her, to spoil her. Whatever was fresh and good and clean he had to spoil. He seduced her and ruined her, taking her to cheap hotels—’

  ‘That one in Bray wasn’t exactly cheap,’ Atherton said mildly.

  Somers glared at him. ‘Are you condoning what he did?’

  ‘Well, you know, she was over age – what he did was no crime. She could presumably choose for herself, and most people don’t regard having a sexual relationship with someone as disgraceful any more.’

  ‘Most people! What do you know about most people? Maddy would never have gone to bed with him if he hadn’t forced her – telling her lies, making her promises. I begged her to give him up, but she wouldn’t. She said he meant to marry her. Marry her! He was degrading her! She was getting worse and worse, doing things she’d never have dreamed of doing before. But I could still have got her back, if only I’d had the chance. Now she’s dead, and lost to us for ever. He did that.’

  Crackers, Atherton thought. He’s as mad as a fish in a privet hedge. ‘You wished he was dead,’ he suggested lightly.

  ‘Yes,’ Somers said fiercely. ‘But I didn’t kill him.’

  ‘All right, tell me about it.’

  ‘When I found him there like that, I thought he’d killed himself. First of all I was glad. Then I was angry that he’d escaped so easily, without ever realising what he’d done to us. I’d wanted him to feel remorse, and now he never would. I was furious. I took him by the shoulders and shook him, I was so angry. That’s how I got blood on me. And I kicked the knife across the floor, sort of in temper.’ Atherton nodded encouragingly. ‘And then – then I realised that it might look bad that I’d got blood on me. I’d been out looking for him, and here I was alone with him, and it might look as though—’ He stopped, staring at his fearful memories. ‘I – I suppose that’s how I got it on my face. I must have put my hands up to it, like this.’

  He cupped his face in his hands, and his long fingers reached into the hair at the edges of his ears.

  ‘So I lay him down again, to try to make him look natural. I would have fetched the knife back, but I had blood on my shoes, and I knew I’d make a mark if I went to pick it up. I thought if I raised the alarm, I could explain the blood on me by saying I’d examined him to see if he was dead. Anyway, I reckoned no-one would think I had any reason to kill him. And then I remembered—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Atherton. ‘You remembered what he kept in his pocket.’

  Somers nodded slowly, seeming relieved that Atherton knew about it. Atherton waited, hoping for enlightenment. At last he was forced to ask, ‘How did you know it was there?’

  ‘He’d showed it to me once. Years afterwards, when he was on a programme I was working on. He recognised me, and came up to talk to me, showed it to me, said that it proved he’d really loved her. I wanted to kill him then,’ he said, trembling. ‘I wanted to. It wasn’t only Maddy, you see. There were others. They were all there, all the girls he’d seduced.’

  Oh, I doubt it, Atherton thought – unless his boasts had far outstripped reality.

  ‘I couldn’t leave her there – part of his harem,’ Somers said bitterly. ‘Degraded into just one of his conquests. So I took it.’

  ‘And where is it now?’ Atherton asked, still flying by the seat of his pants.

  Somers put a slow and reluctant hand into his trouser pocket. ‘I thought you’d ask to see it,’ he said unhappily, drawing out and handing over what looked like a leather wallet. Atherton took it and opened it. Inside transparent pockets on both sides were photographs. Photographs! Why didn’t he think of that? ‘That’s Maddy,’ Somers said, pointing.

  ‘Yes, I recognise her,’ Atherton said. The smiling face of Madeleine Somers gazed back through the plastic from the far side of death.

  ‘Will I be able to have it back?’ Somers asked in a small, defeated voice.

  ‘Yes, of course, when we’ve completed our investigation,’ Atherton said.

  ‘I couldn’t leave her there,’ Somers said again. ‘There’s no knowing who those others were. And besides—’

  ‘If the picture had been found, people might have thought you killed him,’ Atherton said. ‘Quite. But why did you put the card in his pocket?’

  ‘Card?’

  ‘The religious card. The tract – a Bible quotation.’

  Somers shook his head, puzzled. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You didn’t put anything into his pocket?’

  ‘No. I took out this wallet, that’s all. I got the wrong one first – his money wallet. He had – you-know-what’s – in it,’ he added in disgust. ‘I put that back and took this one. I’d have taken Maddy’s picture out and left the rest, but I was getting nervous, I thought someone might come in and find me. So I took the whole thing and went outside to raise the alarm. Luckily Dorothy was coming along the passage.’

  ‘And you stood guard to stop anyone else going in until the police arrived. Why did you do that?’

  ‘Well, that’s what you do. I’ve seen it on the television. You’re not supposed to disturb anything.’

  ‘But you already had disturbed things. Wouldn’t it have been better from your point of view if a few other people had done it too?’

  ‘But I hadn’t done anything wrong. I thought he’d committed suicide. I wanted to make sure the police would see that.’ He looked at Atherton pleadingly. ‘Don’t you think he did? It could be suicide, couldn’t it? I mean, now you don’t think I killed him.’ Atherton didn’t immediately answer and Somers plunged on in alarm. ‘You don’t think I did, do you? You do believe me, what I’ve told you? It’s the truth, I promise you. He was dead when I found him, and all I did was take the photos.’

  ‘Yes, I believe you,’ Atherton said, and only he knew how disappointed he was to be saying that. ‘But you’ve given us a lot of trouble by not being honest with us from the beginning. You’ve wasted a lot of our time, and my guv’nor’s not going to be pleased about that.’ Somers looked suitably cowed, and Atherton went on, ‘I shall have to ask you to come down to the station and make another statement. And this time, please don’t leave anything out.’

  ‘Will it have to come out – about Roger and Maddy?’ Somers asked pathetically. ‘We kept it from the younger ones at the time. Kevin and Mandy and Katy don’t know – what Maddy did. They think she was working with Roger the night she was killed.’

  Like fun they do, Atherton thought. This man was a dreamer. ‘I don’t see why it should,’ he said aloud. ‘Provided you’ve now told us everything, I don’t see why the matter of the photograph need be raised again.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Somers said. ‘Mum’ll be so glad. The shame of it nearly killed her at the time.’

  Atherton would have thought rather that the grief nearly killed her; or the shame of having a son as spaced out as Silly Philly might do it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Deliver us from Ealing

  ‘Well, I’m not going to blow any sunshine up your skirts,’ Slider concluded. ‘We’ve now got a very long haul ahead of us, but you can comfort yourselves that this is what police work is really all about.’

  With a sad smile in response to the irony, the troops dispersed. Slider cal
led McLaren over. ‘How have you got on with that discrepancy over the names on the lists? Davis or whatever it was?’

  ‘Well, guv, the address Davis gave doesn’t exist – Bishop’s Road, SW11, which is Battersea of course. There isn’t a Bishop’s Road in Battersea. There’s a Bishop’s Park Road in Fulham and one in Mitcham, but he doesn’t live in either of them. There’s a Bishop’s Terrace in SE11, but he doesn’t live there. And there’s four other Bishop’s Roads in various places, five Bishop’s Avenues, four Bishop’s Closes, one Bishop’s Court, and one Bishop Road without the “s”. I haven’t got round to checking them yet.’ He looked up from his list. ‘Doesn’t the word “Bishop” start to look funny when you stare at it a long time?’

  ‘What about the other name, the one that was on the ticket list?’

  ‘Oh, that address is all right – Oakley Square, that’s round the back of Mornington Crescent. Flats and bedsits, a lot of students and singles. But we knew that address must be all right anyway, because that’s where they posted the ticket to.’

  ‘And have you checked to see if Davis lives there?’

  ‘Not yet. I was doing the other one first.’

  ‘Well get onto it now,’ Slider said, restraining himself nobly. ‘Find out what the score is, whether he went to the BBC that night and if not, who did. And have you checked the no-shows?’

  ‘All but one, and he’s apparently abroad. His firm says that’s pukka. The others seem genuine enough, but only one of them still had the ticket – the rest threw them away.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to be important.’ He turned to Norma. ‘We need to get Mrs Reynolds in to identify the bag. Liaise with Atherton, see if you can get her here at the same time as Somers comes in to do his statement, and let them pass each other, just to see if she recognises him. I don’t think it was him, now, but he was always our best chance. No harm in running him past her.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘And then take Mrs Reynolds along to do a photofit.’

  ‘Are you going public?’ she asked with interest.

  ‘That’s up to Mr Honeyman, not me, thank God. He’s having a press conference this afternoon, by the way, so he’ll want as many things cleared up as possible before then. Let’s snap to it.’

  The later edition of the paper had a report of the Laurence Jepp incident. Slider was surprised to read that Jepp had not been beaten to death, as he had been imagining, but had had his throat cut. Any mention of throat-cutting immediately caught Slider’s attention these days – like seeing your own name on a page, it was the thing that jumped out at you. It was not usually the preferred method for a surprised burglar, in his experience, and not a particularly common method of homicide overall. It was a long shot, but could there possibly be any connection between the Jepp case and the Greatrex murder? Greatrex was a music critic, after all, and he had reported on the Don Giovanni in which Jepp had been performing.

  It was worth checking up on, at any rate, he thought. For want of a nail, and all that sort of thing. Probably there was nothing in it, but—

  McLaren looked round the door. ‘I think I got a result, guv,’ he said.

  ‘Davis?’

  ‘Yeah. The one with the “e”.’

  ‘Come in.’

  McLaren sidled in with his notebook in one hand and the stump of a Mars bar in the other. ‘Well, guv—’

  ‘Leave the chocolate outside, please. Last time you got it on my telephone, God knows how.’

  McLaren looked at his left hand in surprise, as if he hadn’t known the confectionery was there. ‘I forgot I was eating that,’ he said, and shoved it whole into his mouth. Slider averted his gaze. McLaren screwed up the paper and lobbed it accurately into the bin. ‘Well, guv,’ he resumed, bubbling a little, ‘I got hold of this Davies guy. It turns out he’s got an interesting story.’

  Slider gestured McLaren to sit down. ‘Did he go to the show on Thursday?’

  ‘He went to White City, but he never went into the building. While he was queuing up outside with the rest of ’em, this bloke comes up to him and asks if he’s there on his own. Davies says yes, and this bloke spins him a story, says he and his wife always come to these things together, only this time this bloke thinks he’s working so his wife gets a ticket to come on her own, then at the last minute it turns out he’s not working but by then there’s no tickets left. So he says to Davies he really wants to go to this thing with his wife, and asks if Davies will sell him his ticket. Well, you don’t pay for these tickets in the first place, and Davies isn’t that struck on the show, really – he only goes ’cause he hopes to meet somebody—’

  ‘Somebody?’

  ‘He’s a bit of a sad-act, this Davies guy. Unemployed, no money, no bird – no friends either. So he goes to a lot of these free shows at the BBC. It’s a way of passing the time, which he’s got a lot of, and he reckons it’s his best chance of meeting birds, though they’d have to be desperate to fancy a legover with a pathetic nerk like him. Still, you get a lot of left-wing birds at the political ones like Questions of Our Time and they might see it as social work. The BBC’s like a free dating agency to him.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So anyway, he asks this geezer how much and the geezer says a score, and Davies reckons for twenty quid he can go to the pub for the night and pick up a tart there, so he says okay and hands it over and the bloke gives him a twenty note, nice as pie. He’s just walking off when the bloke asks him his name – says he’ll need to know it at the door for the security check, which is true, which Davies knows it is – and Davies tells him Jim Davies, and off he goes.’ McLaren leaned back in the chair with satisfaction. ‘Geezer must have misheard the Jim for John; and not knowing the spelling went for the simplest version.’

  ‘The man didn’t tell Davies his name, I suppose? No, we couldn’t be that lucky.’ Slider thought a moment. ‘Did Davies believe his story?’

  McLaren shrugged. ‘He didn’t say he didn’t. He told it to me as if it made sense to him.’

  ‘Did he see the man’s wife?’

  ‘He says he didn’t notice him at all until the bloke spoke to him. And when he’d got his score in his hand he shoved off fast, case the bloke changed his mind. Saw a bus coming and ran across the road and jumped on, and never looked back.’

  ‘Did you ask him for a description of the man?’

  ‘Yeah. He wasn’t very helpful. He says he never really noticed. I s’pose he’s standing there miles away and it’s all over before he’s on the ball. Probably more interested in the twenty than the bloke.’

  ‘Well, what did he give you?’

  ‘Middle age, middle height, clean-shaven, short hair but not bald. Brown or dark – not fair. Thinks the bloke may have worn glasses.’

  ‘Clothes?’

  McLaren shrugged again. ‘A suit, he thinks, or possibly an overcoat. Not jeans, anyway.’ He anticipated the next question. ‘He doesn’t remember if he was carrying a bag.’

  Slider sighed. Davies had taken in merely an impression of a conventional grown-up rather than a shaggy youth. He could probably have told you the number on the bank note, though.

  ‘All right, get him in, get a statement.’

  ‘I’ve arranged that, guv. He’s coming in today some time. D’you think it’s the murderer?’

  ‘It could be. Whoever it was was pretty determined to get in. I wonder why he picked on Davies, though?’

  ‘He was right at the back of the queue, and on his own,’ McLaren said. ‘And he sounds like a dozy git. Maybe he looks like he sounds. At least he probably looked as if he needed the money.’

  ‘Fair enough. Well, see if you can get a better description out of him – maybe a photofit. Then we can compare it with Mrs Reynolds’s efforts.’

  ‘Rightyoh.’ McLaren stood up. ‘D’you think it’s anything?’

  ‘Anything could be anything. There could be any number of reasons why he wanted to go to this show, but—’ He let it h
ang.

  ‘Yeah,’ said McLaren sympathetically. ‘You gotta clear as you go.’

  Slider determined never to say that again. He had always despised bosses who fell into tricks of speech and catchphrases. Mental laziness. That was one of the things he relied on Atherton for – to keep his mind perpetually on the hop.

  DS Phil Hunt had been one of Slider’s team, until he had got his stripes and gone to Ealing. He’d always been a bit of a pill. His one great passion in life was his customised red Escort XR3 on which he hung, screwed or stuck every new gadget that came out, like a crazed automotive Cophetua. No trouble was too great where his car was concerned. Slider vividly recollected a week during which his sole topic of conversation was a set of imported tyres he had ordered from a specialist dealer on the North Circular – how they brought the good pneus from Brent to Hayes, as Atherton had wearily put it.

  The good thing about Hunt was that he did not realise what a dickhead he was, and had such an unshakeable sense of his own superiority that he never held grudges and was gracious to everyone. So when Slider rang to say he was in the area and asked if Hunt would like to slip out for a drink, he saw nothing suspicious in it, and met his former boss ten minutes later in one of the pubs in Madeley Road.

  It was not difficult to get him to talk about the Laurence Jepp case. ‘Ground-floor flat, conversion,’ he said in his familiar, episodic style. ‘One of those old Victorian piles down the side of the Common. Sash windows, no locks, of course – just the original catches. Child’s play. Straightforward burglary, it looked like. Probably the bloke panicked when Jepp woke up and hit the alarm.’

  ‘Anything missing?’

  ‘Nothing obvious, but it’s hard to say, with Jepp being dead, and living alone. He had a lot of nice stuff, if you like that sort of thing – antiques and pictures – but not what you’d expect a break-in for, not unless it was a proper daylight, front-door job with a van.’