He was about to go home when Norma put her head round the door and said, ‘Mr Honeyman wants you, boss.’
‘What’s he still doing here?’ Slider said wearily.
‘It looked like the Maori Haka,’ she said. ‘Have you seen the paper?’
‘Oh, don’t tell me!’
‘They’ve named Mills.’
‘How the hell did that get out?’ Slider cursed. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better go and face it.’
Honeyman was very upset. ‘This couldn’t have come from your witness,’ he said accusingly, rapping the paper with an admonitory finger. ‘Someone in your team has leaked.’
Slider took the paper in silence and read.
The police officer in the Roger Greatrex murder case, who has been suspended over alleged irregularities of conduct, has been named as Detective Sergeant Steven Mills, 38. Mills, recently transferred to Shepherd’s Bush, lives locally and has no previous disciplinary record. The Police declined to comment on the specific reasons for Mills’s suspension.
Then it went on to rehash the details of the Greatrex murder. There was nothing else about Mills. But there was a picture – rather a bad one, but recognisable if you knew him.
‘They don’t really know anything,’ Slider said, handing the paper back.
‘It won’t be long,’ Honeyman grumbled. ‘God knows how they got hold of the photograph, but now they have, some neighbour will recognise him and then they’ll find out where he lives and it will be all over the six o’clock news. I’m very, very unhappy about this, Slider. I looked to you to keep your team in order. This is very unprofessional conduct, quite unacceptable.’
‘It could have come from anywhere, sir,’ Slider began, but Honeyman interrupted.
‘The point is, it came from somewhere,’ he said, silencing Slider with admiration. ‘This alters the situation. I shall have to inform Mr Wetherspoon. I imagine he will take it out of my hands.’
‘Sir,’ Slider said urgently, but Honeyman held up his hand.
‘I know, I know. I will do my best to get you some time, but I can’t promise anything. Have you made any progress?’
Slider looked frustrated. ‘Only negatively, sir.’ For an instant something flickered in his mind at the sound of the word, but he had no time to lay hold of it then. ‘There’s nothing to indicate any connection between Mills and Greatrex,’ he went on. ‘But—’
‘It’s not enough,’ Honeyman said with vast regret. ‘Well, as I said, I’ll try and buy you some time. But my advice to you is to try to come up with something a bit more positive, and as soon as possible.’
Now what the Sun Hill does he think I’ve been trying to do? Slider asked himself glumly as he trod away.
Joanna knew that look, too. ‘Are you on to something?’ she asked as he leaned against the kitchen door, watching her with unseeing eyes.
‘Mmm,’ he said vaguely.
‘A line on the case?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing makes any sense yet. I think I’m about to understand what I’m thinking, but I’m so far out to the side I can’t see the play. What are you cooking?’
‘Minestrone soup. Thick enough to trot a mouse on. It’s nearly ready. Do you want any bread with it?’
‘Umm,’ he said unhelpfully.
‘Was that a yes?’ Joanna asked, but he had wandered away. She sighed, and then thought of Irene, and restrained herself. This is what it must have been like to be married to him all those years, and in Irene’s case she didn’t even have the comfort of knowing herself deeply loved and fancied rotten by him. The bread was a bit stale so she decided to toast it, and then thought it would be nice to make it garlic bread, so she took her time peeling and crushing two cloves of garlic and mixing them with salt and butter to spread on the warm toast. But for all Bill noticed she might as well have given him the table mats to dip in his soup.
Between mouthfuls she looked at the blank face opposite her and felt her brief peeve dissolve to be replaced by a rather wistful affection. The difficulty always was that you loved a person as they were, and you couldn’t get rid of the annoying factors without changing who they were. Bill’s job got in the way, but separate him from his job and what you had left was not Bill. She supposed he must feel the same way about her job – or would if he was given to introspection. He had been pretty annoyed and upset that she had not been around over the weekend, though she doubted if he would have got right to the bottom of his own feelings. Apart from anything else, he hadn’t had time to think about much but the case.
She wasn’t at all surprised when after the meal he said apologetically, ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I think I’ve got to go out again.’
She protested only because she felt he expected it, and might think she was indifferent if she didn’t. ‘It’s my only evening at home this week. Does it have to be now?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, helplessly. ‘I’m up against the clock, and there’s one of my own men in trouble as well.’
‘Yes, I know – Mills. Do you think he did it?’
‘It isn’t my business to think anything. I’m supposed to collect evidence, whichever way it goes.’
‘Yes, but do you think he did it?’ she insisted, knowing him.
‘I’m hoping to prove he didn’t,’ he admitted. ‘You remember that attempted burglary of Christa Jimenez that I mentioned to you?’
‘You think that’s part of it?’
‘It did occur to me to wonder, in the light of Laurence Jepp being murdered, whether there was a connection, whether it really was a burglary.’
‘Because they were both in Giovanni? You think there’s a curse on the production?’
‘I haven’t got as far as that. I just wondered if it was intended as an attack rather than a burglary; if so, it might have been by the same man. So I’ve asked Mills for a blood sample, and I’ve persuaded Ron Carver to let me compare it with the blood on the knife that Jimenez attacked her intruder with – because it’s his case, of course. I’m waiting to hear from Tufty. Of course, it’s negative evidence at best. There’s no certainty that incident was any part of it. And there’s still the identification to be got over.’ He lapsed again into his thoughts.
She studied his face. ‘Is that what you’ve been thinking about since you came home?’
‘Not entirely,’ he said. ‘There’s something else I’ve got by the tail, but even if I’m right, I don’t see where it gets me. But you’ve got to do the next thing. It’s the only way forward. The next step. Maybe I’ll see more clearly when I’ve taken it.’
‘Go,’ she said. ‘With my blessing.’
A slightly lightened look was her reward. ‘Really?’
‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. You’re no use to me anyway, in this mood.’ She saw the doubt, and reached across to pat his hand kindly. ‘I mean it. Really. Go on, I ought to practise anyway, and I’ll never do it if you’re here looking provocatively sexy all evening.’
He even managed a grin. ‘Thanks.’
She came with him to the door, and kissed him so that the bit of his mother in him worried about what the neighbours might think.
‘Anyone might be looking.’
‘Poor things,’ she said, and did it again, but this time he reached behind her and switched off the hall light. He didn’t like feeling exposed in the spotlight like that – but then, unlike her, his life had been threatened more than once. Looking over your shoulder got to be second nature.
There were lights on in Miss Giles’s flat and faint music, but no answer when he rang the doorbell. He thought of trying the top bell, but then remembering who she had said was living there, decided to try the basement instead. There was a noise of pop music inside, and after a while the door opened and a young girl with a towel wrapped round her head looked out.
‘Oh, have you been ringing long? I had my head under the tap,’ she said, looking at him with such an open and trusting expression that he thought of his daughter, Kate,
and a fatherly sternness came over him. He could have been anyone, and there she was in a dressing-gown and completely defenceless.
‘I’m a police officer,’ he said quickly, though she evidently had no apprehension about him. He showed his brief, but she barely looked at it. ‘You ought always to check when someone shows you an ID like that,’ he admonished her, but she only grinned at him.
‘Oh, I had a look at you through the glass before I opened the door. I could see you were all right,’ she said.
‘You can’t tell from appearance,’ he objected.
‘I can,’ she said simply. ‘What’s the matter, is there something wrong?’
‘I hope not,’ he said. ‘I’ve been ringing Miss Giles’s doorbell and there’s no answer.’
‘Oh, that’s all right, she never answers the door at night.’
‘Unlike you.’
‘I might miss out on something,’ she pointed out with unconscious cruelty. ‘Did you want me to get her for you?’
‘Can you?’
‘There’s an inside door to her flat. She always hears if I knock on that. Come in.’
He followed her, but said, ‘You shouldn’t let me in when you haven’t checked my ID.’
‘Why are you so worried about me?’ she asked gaily over her shoulder.
‘I’ve got a daughter myself. These are dangerous times.’
‘You’re sweet,’ she said, looking back at him for an instant. He gave it up. Maybe he shouldn’t try to spoil that wonderful confidence of youth. Statistics were on her side; it was just the caution that was built in to the job.
The house had originally been all one, of course, and the stairs down from the first floor had not been removed when it was made into three. The young tenant used them as display shelves, but there was passage through the middle to the door at the top. Slider stood at the bottom while the young woman rapped briskly, held a brief conversation through it, and then crouched down to field the schnauzers as the door was opened.
‘It’s all right, come up,’ she said.
Miss Giles looked very different from when he had first seen her. She was dressed in an ancient red felt dressing-gown with a striped cord tied tightly about her waist, which probably didn’t help, but she looked old, and very much less vigorous. Her face without make-up looked pale and lined, her lips without lipstick thin and blue. Even her silky white hair looked limp, and her freckled hands shook a little as she lit a cigarette from the stump of the previous one and put the pack back in the pocket.
‘I don’t answer the door at night,’ she said. ‘You hear such terrible things.’
‘Very wise,’ he said. She led him, as before, into the kitchen, where a one-bar electric fire was set up near the table, on which stood a bottle of Famous Grouse, a tumbler, and an ashtray already overflowing with stubs. He looked quickly round to see what she had been doing when disturbed, but there was no book, paper, letter. Perhaps she had just been listening to the music and turned it off when she heard the knock on the door. Or perhaps she had been sitting and thinking.
She sat down on the side of the table nearest the fire. ‘D’you want a drink?’ she asked, unscrewing the cap from the bottle.
‘No, thanks, not just now.’
‘Well I’m having one. Let me know if you change your mind. One advantage to retirement is that it doesn’t matter what you look like the next morning.’ She looked up and met his eyes; hers seemed apprehensive. ‘Oh yes, I’ve had a few already. And I mean to have a few more.’
‘Is there something on your mind?’
‘Is there something on yours?’ she countered. ‘It must be something urgent to warrant a visit at night. Or do they pay you overtime?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘So what do you want? I’ve told you everything I know.’
He smiled. ‘It would take a great deal longer than one short visit to learn everything you know.’
‘You flatter me,’ she said. ‘But I’ve worked in many parts of the world in my time, and I wouldn’t have lasted long unless I knew how to keep my counsel.’
‘Every life has secrets,’ he said. ‘They’re harder to keep at the beginning than at the end, though. They have a sort of energy when they’re first born, and they wriggle and wriggle to get out. But once that’s exhausted, they tend to give up and lie quietly. If you can keep a secret for the critical period, you can keep it for ever.’
‘Very poetic,’ she said.
‘Unless it becomes important for some reason to let it out.’
‘And what possible reason could there be?’
‘Oh, if someone was in danger of some sort, for instance.’
She shook her head, puffing busily. ‘I can’t see it, myself. A secret kept absolutely and for ever couldn’t hurt anyone. A secret no-one knows effectively doesn’t exist.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. One of the dogs came up and sniffed his leg, and then stood up with its front paws up on his knee, and he caressed its ears absently. ‘It’s probably the half-known things that are more dangerous,’ he went on. ‘They’re certainly an irritant. They nag at your mind until you can’t rest. Things you can’t quite understand. Things that don’t quite add up.’
She looked at him unhelpfully. Whatever he guessed at, it would be less than she knew, and he still didn’t know where what he guessed at might get him.
‘For instance,’ he said, ‘I made a phone call this afternoon to a very helpful friend of mine at St Catherine’s House, who never minds looking things up for me. She told me that Margaret Rose Giles married Arthur Mills in September 1955.’
Miss Giles shrugged. ‘I could have told you that, if you’d asked. It isn’t a secret.’
‘I didn’t want to bother you,’ Slider said. ‘But the thing is, you see, that Steve Mills’s date of birth in his records is May 1957, and he told me that he was adopted when he was just a couple of weeks old. That means your sister had been married less than two years when she adopted him.’
‘What of it?’ Miss Giles said with massive indifference.
‘Well, it struck me, you see, that it was rather early days to decide you’re never going to be able to have a child naturally and that the only course is adoption. Most couples wait five, six – even ten years before giving up hope.’
‘You’re forgetting Arthur’s age. He didn’t have ten years to wait,’ she said, and Slider smiled inwardly. Once they start giving explanations, you’ve got them on the run. ‘Maybe he’d had tests.’
‘In 1957? It wasn’t that easy on the National Health, and I gather there wasn’t much money in the case. No, I think if you’d gone to a doctor in 1957 and said you hadn’t become pregnant after less than two years of marriage, he’d have just told you to go away and try again.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Miss Giles. ‘I’ve never been married, so I don’t know.’
‘It struck me as odd,’ Slider continued, ‘both that they should leap to that conclusion so early, and that they should have settled for adoption so quickly. Even after a couple despairs of pregnancy, it’s usually a long time before they’ve talked enough about adoption to decide on it.’
‘Well, it doesn’t strike me as odd, but everyone to their own,’ she said briskly. ‘I don’t see what it’s got to do with me, anyway. They didn’t confide their thought processes to me, however fascinating you may find the subject.’
‘I’ll come to that,’ Slider said. ‘I thought, you see, that if they didn’t decide to adopt when they did because they’d exhausted all hope and all other channels, maybe the timing depended on the baby being available just at that moment. And if that was the case, then perhaps it was because they wanted to adopt not just any baby, but that particular one. That it was special to them in some way.’
She said nothing, but she kept on looking at him, in the manner of one who must know the worst.
‘You were very fond of Steve when he was a boy,’ Slider said gently. ‘Unusually fond, perhaps, given that you a
nd your sister didn’t get on.’
‘The boy wasn’t to blame for that. And besides, he was very lovable.’
‘Yes, I imagine so. But you loved the boy so much you even bought a house one street away to be near him—’
‘That wasn’t why—’
‘Please. Bear with me. I’m just describing my thought processes. You bought this house, one street away, and the boy came to visit you, and you took him out places, interested yourself in his education, in the broader sense, encouraged him to make something of himself. And all this for the adopted child of a sister you didn’t get on with married to a man you despised. And what was odder still, even though the sister and her husband disapproved of you, they let you take a hand in the upbringing of their son.’
She was silent.
‘I also noticed that while you referred to your own father as “Father”, you referred to Arthur as Steve’s “dad”. You even corrected me when I used the word “father” in respect of Arthur. And you’re a woman, I’ve noticed, who uses words with skill.’
‘You notice a lot,’ she said acerbically.
‘I noticed quite a few things you said. For instance, when you spoke of adopted children being able to trace their natural parents these days, you said, “Fortunately, most of them don’t bother.” That “fortunately” struck me as odd – as if it had personal relevance for you.’ She didn’t respond to that. ‘And although you are not a churchgoer and seem rather contemptuous of your sister and brother-in-law’s religion, you seemed to know an awful lot about the minister who arranged the adoption. Well,’ he sat back from the table and put his hands down on it with a completing gesture, ‘I thought everything over, and eventually I came to the conclusion that when you said Steve was the nearest thing you ever had to a son, you were having a little private joke at my expense.’ He looked up from his hands. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? Steve is your son. He was your baby. Your knowledge of Minister Green and his mother-and-baby home came from first-hand experience.’
Blood Lines Page 21
