‘He was my bagman on several cases. I had complete faith in him.’
‘I’ve pulled his record, and that’s clean,’ Honeyman said regretfully. ‘And Colin Washbrook over at Epsom speaks highly of him. But that’s his duty life. His private life is less satisfactory. He isn’t married, you know. I don’t like the idea of policemen who aren’t married. And he’s a loner. I prefer a policeman to be the sociable type. That way we all check up on each other.’ He looked up. ‘He had blood on his clothes, you say?’
‘He said Somers had clutched hold of him, and the blood came off on him. That’s a reasonable explanation. And Baker confirms that Somers was hysterical and that Mills had a job calming him.’
‘He might have grabbed hold of Somers deliberately to hide bloodstains he had got earlier.’
‘But Mrs Reynolds doesn’t say the man at the lift had blood on his clothes, only a little on his cuff.’
‘Even that would be enough for him to want to hide. He wasn’t to know that the woman had noticed, if they only saw each other for a second – or that she would come forward.’ Honeyman’s fingers drummed absently on the newspaper on his desk. ‘The fingerprint on the religious tract card doesn’t match, you say?’
‘Bob Lamont says they are very similar, but there are certain distinct features which differ in Mills’s.’
‘Well, fingerprinting’s not an exact science. You can always argue it either way. It’s negative evidence at best. And that print could have got onto the card at any time, as we always knew. The most damning thing is the fact that he was there in the first place. It’s going to be hard to get round that.’
Slider was silent. He knew that was true. It was the bit, on the whole, he didn’t like; yet putting himself in Mills’s shoes, he wondered if natural curiosity might not have made him act the same. Walking your new ground trying to get a feel of things, trying to assemble the knowledge on which your future success, possibly even life, would depend … Well, it was arguable, at the outside.
‘You’ve checked with the mobile team – what were their names?’
‘Baker and Morley, sir. They say Mills just appeared soon after they got to the scene of the murder.’
‘Ah. And what about reception?’
‘Mills says he didn’t go to the desk, he just followed the uniformed lads. No-one tried to stop him because the reception area was crowded with people – the audience going up to the show.’
Honeyman looked seriously at him. ‘This could be crucial. If you can find anyone who saw him arriving, and pin down the time, we might have a defence.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Slider said patiently. ‘We’re on it.’ The team was already re-contacting all the people who might have been in the reception area at the time to ask, rather hopelessly, if they had noticed the uniforms arriving and the dark-haired man following. It was not necessary to tell them how urgent the matter was; Mills might be new, but he was one of their own, and, loner or not, he was instantly likeable.
‘For the time being, I have no alternative but to suspend Mills,’ Honeyman said, and to his credit he sounded regretful; Slider hoped on Mills’s behalf and not his own. ‘On your recommendation I shan’t take any further action yet, but of course Mills must be very, very careful and very circumspect. I’ve told Carver, and he thinks that as Mills has been working on your case, you should be the one to tell him.’
Oh joy, Slider thought. Thank you, Ron.
‘One other thing, Slider – nothing’s been said yet to the Complaints Investigation Bureau. I want to give you a chance to justify your faith in Mills. But I have to warn you, if he is named in the press, or if you fail to progress within the next two days, I shall have no alternative. And once Mills has been turned over to the CIB, it will be out of my hands.’
‘I understand, sir,’ Slider said. Forty-eight hours to get old Dark Satanic out of the brown and viscous. And to rescue dainty Eric Honeyman’s career from an ignominious end. On the whole, he thought, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Close to Home
‘You never got married, then?’ Slider asked, sitting at one side of the table in the tiny kitchen while Mills sat at the other. Through the open door they could hear the soft sounds of Atherton searching the bedroom. Mills had a tiny flat on the top floor of a house on the bend of Stanlake Road, where it bumped into the edge of the New Park and swung away again. From the little window behind the sink you could see through the trees a bit of the park and the BBC building on the other side of it. It was much too close to the nick for a policeman to settle in permanently, but it had often been let for short periods to newcomers while they looked for a place – having the advantage that it was almost impossible to be late for work while living there. As Atherton said, you could almost smell the canteen from the door.
‘Never,’ Mills answered Slider’s question, with a quirk of his lips at the word, as though it amused him in some way. He took a sip from his mug of coffee. Slider’s sat untouched before him. He didn’t like instant coffee anyway, and this was edging towards record-breaking awfulness. It was the colour of ditch water and smelt like a stale face-flannel, and those were only its good points. Odd that ‘a coffee’ had always been the accepted precursor to – and even euphemism for – a sexual encounter. But then, like sexual encounters, instant coffee was usually disappointing and often left a funny taste in your mouth.
‘What happened to that nice girl you were seeing when we were both at Charing Cross? Dark-haired girl. What was her name?’
‘Ruth.’
‘That’s the one. Scottish, wasn’t she? She was a nice girl.’
‘She married a nice man,’ Mills said. ‘With a nice job, nine to five and a company car and no hassle.’
‘Ah. I’m sorry.’
‘So was I.’ Mills looked at him with a gleam of humour. ‘There have been others. I’m not queer.’
‘I didn’t think you were.’
‘For the record, then. But the longer you’re on your own, the harder it is to get it together with someone. You know the problems – the only people who understand are policewomen, and if you date a plonk from your own ground, it’s like having it off in a goldfish bowl. No romance could survive that.’ He shrugged. ‘So I keep it outside and I keep it casual. Or it keeps itself casual. Women don’t like taking second place to the Job.’
‘Are you seeing someone at the moment?’
‘There was someone in Epsom.’
‘The girl you left behind?’ Slider suggested.
Mills didn’t smile. ‘She was married. He was a sales director for an ice cream company. He didn’t know. She didn’t want him to. It suited her that way. Having her Arctic Roll and eating it.’
‘And you? Did it suit you?’
He shrugged. ‘She wasn’t the one great love of my life.’
‘So who was?’ He didn’t answer. ‘Ruth?’
‘I suppose – if it was anyone. But if I’d married her we’d probably be divorced by now. Statistics. Are you divorced, sir?’
‘Not yet,’ Slider said. He wasn’t going to let Mills turn the point. ‘So tell me about your family.’
‘My Dad’s dead – ten, eleven years ago. He was a lot older than Mum. Mum’s getting a bit—’ He rocked his hand. ‘Well, she’s pushing seventy. It’s not Alzheimer’s, apparently – something to be grateful for. But she doesn’t always remember things. Gets confused.’
‘She’s in a home, you said?’
‘Not a home. Sheltered accommodation. St Melitus’s in Brook Green.’
‘And you go and visit her?’
‘That was mainly why I got myself transferred here, so I could get to see her more often. When I was in Epsom I couldn’t just “drop in”. It was too far. And when they get old like that, you don’t know how long you’ll have them. After Dad died – well, when it’s too late, then you realise how often you missed the chance to visit them because you were tired or couldn’t be bothered or whatever.’<
br />
Slider thought of his own father, and thought away again. ‘Any other family?’
‘Only Auntie Betty. When I was a kid there were some ancient uncles and aunts on my Dad’s side that we saw occasionally, but they’re all dead now, and I never kept up with the cousins. My mum just had the one sister. Like I said, she lives in Ormiston Grove.’
‘And you visit her too.’
‘I always called on her when I came to see Mum. But she was a bit cross about me transferring to Shepherd’s Bush. Told me she didn’t want me hanging around bothering her.’ He smiled to show it was a joke. ‘She was always very fond of me. I loved going round her house when I was a kid. She used to take me out places, tried to widen my horizons. She took me to Covent Garden, the museums, the zoo – to the Oval to watch Surrey—’
‘You had an aunt who liked cricket?’ Slider said in envious tones.
‘She was a very unusual aunt – an education in herself. She really made me what I am. She and Mum never really got on, but I will say Mum never tried to stop me seeing her. I think she disapproved because Auntie Betty had a career instead of getting married and having children, like a proper woman. But it was nice for me. It meant I got all the attention and all the presents. It was Auntie Betty bought me my first bike.’
‘That’s quite a present from an aunt,’ Slider said.
‘It caused a bit of a fuss at home,’ Mills said with a rueful grin. ‘Mum and Dad didn’t have a lot of money, they couldn’t afford to buy me stuff. I remember some pretty sharp comments about that bike. I think Dad had half a mind to send it back, but it would’ve broken my heart. I’d wanted one for years. I suppose it was a bit tactless of Auntie, but she had a good job in the Civil Service and no-one else to spend the money on, and she was very fond of me.’
‘She wasn’t married?’
‘Married to her career.’
‘Like you.’
Mills shrugged. ‘I’ll be a bachelor like my father – that’s what I used to say. It used to drive Mum mad.’
‘Did you know anything about your natural parents?’
‘No,’ Mills said firmly but indifferently. ‘I never asked.’
‘Weren’t you curious?’
‘Why should I be? I was happy as I was. My mum and dad were good to me, and as far as I was concerned they were my parents.’
‘You must have heard something about the circumstances, though, over the years. How you came to be born.’
‘I gathered my natural mother was unmarried and the bloke didn’t want to know, that’s all. The usual story. Of course in those days it was a serious thing, getting pregnant. A girl couldn’t just keep the kid and live on the State like she can now. I mean, she needn’t have been a bad lot. But she was nothing to do with me. How could she be? I was taken away from her at birth and adopted when I was a couple of weeks old. My parents didn’t talk about it, and like I said, I didn’t ask.’
‘You grew up around here, you said?’
‘You could hardly get a more local boy than me. Went to Ellerslie Road primary and Christopher Wren secondary. Supported QPR. Went dancing at the Hammersmith Palais. Got drunk for the first time at the General Smuts and fumbled my first girl in Wormholt Park.’
‘Impressive credentials,’ Slider smiled. ‘And what made you become a policeman?’
‘I suppose that was down to Auntie Betty in a way. Mum and Dad wanted me to go in for something like banking or accountancy, something respectable and secure in a suit. But Auntie used to talk about public service. She really believed that being a civil servant was doing something for your country, bless her. And she used to say, “You can’t just live your life as if you were the only person on the planet.” She was quite scathing on the subject of doing a job just to earn money. I think that was another reason she and Dad didn’t get on. He must have thought she was criticising him all the time. I don’t think she was – I think she was just tactless. But everything she said and did must have looked as if she was saying the way Mum and Dad lived wasn’t good enough.’
‘Weren’t you afraid joining the police would look like siding with her against them?’
‘I never thought about it. Once the idea of the police took root in my brain, it was all I wanted. And anyway, there was never any open hostility between Auntie and Mum and Dad. It was just little things that, looking back, I can see now must have annoyed them. But they were always polite. And I don’t think in the end they minded me being a policeman. Mum nearly died of pride at the passing-out parade – any time she saw me in uniform, really; and Dad was always trying to get me to come and talk to his Sunday school class.’
‘Were they churchgoers, your parents?’
‘Oh yes. In the Pillars Of class – though of course it wasn’t so unusual in those days. If you were respectable people you went to church, and that was that. But they were quite religious. I was adopted through the Church. I suppose they might have been grateful on that account as well – it was quite hard even in those days for a couple with such a big age difference to adopt. Dad was twenty years older than Mum.’
Slider nodded. ‘Was your aunt religious, too?’
Mills made an amused face. ‘I don’t know. I was never allowed to visit her on Sundays. But I rather doubt it. She was always a bit of a rebel, my Auntie.’
‘Nothing,’ said Atherton. ‘Normality encapsulated. You couldn’t get anything less Dark and Satanic. The only iffy thing in the house was a large collection of Barbra Streisand records; but I suppose it is possible for a Barbra Streisand fan to be a good man,’ he added doubtfully.
‘I once knew a thoroughly decent person who quite liked Barry Manilow,’ Slider admitted.
‘You just never can tell,’ Atherton said wisely. ‘So what about Mills?’
‘I don’t know,’ Slider said. ‘I don’t believe he’s a murderer, but you don’t necessarily have to be a murderer to kill someone, do you? The question is, if it was him, why Roger Greatrex? There’s got to be some connection. I can’t believe Greatrex was dispatched completely at random, and if it wasn’t robbery from the person, it was because of something he did, or was.’
‘Or even everything he did and was,’ Atherton said.
‘Yes, perhaps,’ Slider said absently.
‘Well, what do we do now?’ Atherton asked after a moment. ‘Keep looking for some connection between Mills and Greatrex? Or accept that the old bird was confused?’
‘We haven’t got a lot of options. We’ll have to do a full investigation into Mills, because if we don’t the CIB will. That means someone will have to go to Epsom and try to find out who his friends were, what he did in his spare time, whether he had any cases that bear on the situation. And we’ll have to try to trace his movements on Thursday night and since he’s been back in the Bush.’
‘This aunt might throw some light, I suppose?’
‘We can only hope so. And meanwhile, we continue to act on the assumption that it wasn’t him Mrs Reynolds saw by the lift. We keep asking questions, look for witnesses, show people the photofit and see if they recognise it, try and trace the bag—’
‘Ha ha.’
‘And the coat.’
‘And the knife?’
Slider frowned. ‘Mills said he was in the Scouts as a lad. And the knife is the sort of old-fashioned clasp-knife that Scouts used in those days. But it could have been anyone’s, and come from anywhere. I think the most likely thing is that Mrs Reynolds saw someone by the lift who was superficially like Mills; she’d seen Mills at the TVC without realising it, and compounded them in her mind when she saw him again at the station.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ Atherton said. ‘And we’ve still got the spare Mr Davis to follow up. No need to despair yet.’
‘How do you follow up someone you know doesn’t exist?’ Slider said rhetorically.
Miss Elizabeth Giles, Mills’s Auntie Betty, turned out to be a tall, vigorous, chain-smoking lady in her sixties, whose intelligent dark eyes made her
face look younger than her white hair suggested. Though thick and bushy, it was cut very short.
‘Unseemly, I know,’ she said, having made an apology for her ‘skinhead crop’ the opening gambit in their conversation, ‘but I’ve let it grow out since I retired – I used to dye it, you see, sad effort to look younger than my years – and with the ends dark and the roots growing out white, I looked such a sight, like a skewbald pony. So I keep having them cut off. The last of it’s gone, now, as you see, so I can start to resume the dignity due to my vast age. Except that I rather like the freedom.’ She shook her head about. ‘Like Jo, you know, in Little Women? No, delete that. Silly thing to say. What would a chap like you be doing reading Little Women? Even if you have a daughter, I’m sure the PC brigade will have banned books like that from sale.’
She occupied the ground floor of a tall terraced house in Ormiston Grove which showed, by its paper bell-signs, to have other occupants upstairs and in the semi-basement. ‘I bought it years ago for an investment, in case I ever got married and had a lot of children, but what sort of man would marry a woman who owned a house large enough to have ten children in?’ she said cheerfully. ‘Don’t attempt to answer that. In case you wonder, I’ve had plenty of offers of marriage over the years, but never from anyone I’d have dreamed of accepting. I suppose my trouble is I could never respect any man who’d want to be married to a woman like me. So here I am, all alone, except for the students in the basement and the bats in the belfry. I like to keep some young people about me, keeps me on my toes.’
‘Bats in the belfry?’ Slider managed to slip a question in.
‘Oh, God love them, they’re not really bats, of course, but one can’t resist, can one? Le mot juste and all that. CICs they call them now, bless them – Care in the Community. I’ve got two upstairs, and you couldn’t want better lodgers. Besides, it makes the tax position so much more favourable. God knows I’ve paid enough in all these years – not that I begrudge it. You have to do your bit, don’t you? No man is an island. Would you like tea? Excuse the mess, I’m not one of nature’s Little Housewives, and now I’m at home all the time, I seem to make ten times the mess. But it’s all clean dirt, as my mother used to say. Do you mind dogs? Do you mind if I let mine out? I shut them in the scullery when I came to the door because they’re off out into the street if they get the slightest chance. Can you switch the kettle on while I let them out? It is full.’
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