Blood Lines

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

A bitter expression crossed Palliser’s face. ‘Oh, that! I wish to God – you’d never have come here asking questions, but for that.’

  ‘Yes I would, for the same reason I’m here now. What did Roger Greatrex do that made someone want him dead?’ He asked it seriously, and saw that Palliser was thinking about it seriously. He sipped his tea. Slider sipped his, incautiously, and got a mouthful of tea leaves, which he nobly swallowed rather than make a fuss and disturb the other man.

  ‘What he did most of was writing and fucking,’ Palliser said at last. ‘I can’t see anything in that to drive anyone crazy. Caroline was the person with most to object to about the fucking, and I’m sure she didn’t do it. As to the writing – well, that brings it back to me, doesn’t it? We had a well-publicised difference of opinion over his critical acuity.’

  ‘I have it on good authority that that was manufactured for publicity purposes, to advance the careers of both of you.’

  ‘I don’t know whose authority you think carries weight,’ Palliser said scornfully, ‘but I can tell you it was a genuine disagreement. It wasn’t manufactured – although, of course, we argued intellectually and not personally, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘But you actually quarrelled in public, at Glyndebourne, over the Don Giovanni, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, but that didn’t mean anything. I get heated over my opinions – so does Roger – but that’s an intellectual exercise. An opinion isn’t worth holding unless you’re vehement about it. It doesn’t mean I’d kill anyone for disagreeing with me. Only an intellectual pygmy would do that. Or a religious fanatic.’

  A stillness fell in Slider’s mind, a sensation like a great lump of white silence in the middle of his head, into which after a moment small, crystal-clear words were spoken very quietly. A religious fanatic. The Don Giovanni row: Greatrex had praised the production, had identified himself closely with it as his idea of a fine example of opera production. There had been a lot of talk in the papers about the production being blasphemous. And Greatrex had been murdered. Farfetched?

  But Palliser had condemned the blasphemous aspect of it in print – and Palliser had not been harmed.

  Laurence Jepp and Christa Jimenez – but then, why those two singers and not any of the others? Or, if other victims were intended, why those first? Because they appeared in the blasphemous scene? But Lassiter, the man who sang the Don himself, had not been attacked. Mere geography, perhaps, because the other two lived not too far apart? Or accessibility – maybe Frederick Lassiter was abroad, or had family or minions around him all the time, or had a terrific security system. The other two had lived alone, and in old houses with easy windows. Would a religious fanatic worry about such things? Well, why not? Maybe he had to. If he was working up to slaughter everyone connected with the blasphemy, maybe he would start with the easy ones. In which case—

  ‘You’ve thought of something,’ Palliser said. Slider realised he had been looking at him curiously for some time.

  ‘Yes,’ said Slider with an effort. ‘It was something you said, reminded me of something.’ A religious fanatic. It didn’t do to underestimate the power of religion – especially these days, when there was so little of any other sort of power. But there was Mrs Reynolds to be got over, and her description of the man at the lift. Damn it, he’d got to get Mills out of the frame – or, reluctantly, into it. Because everyone was capable of some murder, and Mills was an unmarried man living alone, and Slider couldn’t really swear on his soul that this was not Mills’s. He had been brought up by deeply religious people, though he showed no symptoms of it himself. And all three attacks – if they were connected – had happened since Mills came to Shepherd’s Bush. ‘Tell me,’ he said, reaching into his pocket, ‘have you ever seen this man before?’

  He handed over a copy of the photofit, and Palliser looked at it, turning it first for better light, and then taking a pair of half-glasses out of his pocket. ‘Yes, I have,’ he said. ‘Now, let me think, where do I know him from?’

  He stared for some time, and Slider waited, wondering whether he hoped more than he feared, or vice versa. At last Palliser flipped the paper with the backs of his fingers. ‘Well, of course! Why didn’t I place him at once, considering we were only just talking about it? It was down at Glyndebourne, when Roger and I were having our famous disagreement in the foyer. Of course we gathered quite a crowd – and I won’t say,’ he added with a faint smile, ‘that we weren’t conscious of it, and that it would make good publicity. But he was saying his usual fatuous things about modernity and innovation and exciting new interpretation, and I must admit I got a bit heated, especially considering the exciting new interpretation he was so thrilled about had run to that completely gratuitous defiling of the altar, for which there’s no textual authority, and which of course had only been put in to shock a few reviews out of people who might otherwise ignore the production, and to tempt the sillier element of the population to buy tickets out of mere prurience—’

  ‘It worked,’ Slider remarked.

  ‘It always does,’ Palliser snorted. ‘Mainly thanks to reviewers like Roger who are so ready to be thrilled by the meretricious – but however,’ he recalled himself to the task in hand, ‘this man was at the front of the crowd and listening to every word. I noticed him because he really looked as though he was listening to the argument, as opposed to merely gawping with open mouth at the sight of two celebrities sparring, like the rest of the dinner-suited dross that infests opera audiences these days. Of course, Roger’s reviews were addressed to just those people, which is why he made so much money. You can count the real music lovers in the average audience on the fingers of one foot.’

  He ought to get together with Joanna, Slider thought. ‘Are you quite sure this is the same man?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Palliser, quite surely. ‘He tried to accost me afterwards, I suppose to carry on the argument, but I avoided him. It’s a thing one gets quite good at.’ Then, looking again at the picture, ‘There is something different. Maybe he had his hair differently. But certainly this looks like the man I saw. I particularly remember this mole on his cheek.’

  ‘Have you seen him anywhere else?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Not that I remember. When I noticed him at Glyndebourne, it wasn’t as someone I had ever seen before, and I’m not aware of having seen him anywhere since.’

  ‘Well, thank you. You’ve been a great help,’ Slider said. There was no reason Mills shouldn’t have been to Glyndebourne. His “aunt” had said she tried to interest him in opera and Mills himself had said she took him to Covent Garden. When he said it, Slider had registered it as the jolly place full of shops and jugglers it had now become, but of course in earlier days the name was synonymous with the Royal Opera House – and still was in some circles. Silly him. And if Mills had been at Glyndebourne that night, why shouldn’t he have listened with more than average intelligence to the critics’ row? Slider didn’t know whether it helped the case or hindered it. He only knew that he had to get away somewhere and think, because the idea that had been struggling to be born an hour ago was still struggling. Something he had seen or heard somewhere had impinged itself on the pattern in his mind as out of place, and he needed peace and quiet to ferret it out.

  ‘You’re going?’ Palliser said as Slider stood up, and he sounded quite disappointed. Perhaps he’d hoped Slider would cook his dinner for him as well as make his tea.

  ‘I’m sorry, I have to,’ Slider said. ‘I’ve still got a lot of work to get through tonight.’

  ‘I was going to offer you a spot of supper,’ Palliser said. ‘I – I’m not used to being in the house alone.’

  He sounded so pathetic, compared with his former arrogant self, that Slider felt sorry for him. ‘Why don’t you phone her up? She’s probably lonely too – especially if she’s in a hotel. They’re dismal places to be alone in.’

  ‘Do you think I should?’

  ‘I think you can hardly ever make s
omething worse by talking about it,’ Slider said, and Palliser nodded at these words of wisdom.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  And Slider thought of Phyllis Palliser, and reckoned that, sad as her life had been, it would be better to be sad at home in her own kitchen than in a cheap Kensington hotel; and that, being a sensible woman, she’d probably realise it for herself soon enough.

  He drove back to the factory, for no other reason than that he wanted to be alone to think, and walked in from the yard to a warm reception.

  ‘There you are! Christ, Billy, you got to start carryin’ your little tinkler wit’ you,’ O’Flaherty cried expansively. ‘Everyone’s goin’ mad tryin’ to find you, and worryin’ the bejasus out of your woman, phonin’ there when she thought all the time you were here.’

  ‘I left it on my desk,’ Slider discovered again. ‘Psychological. I hate that thing. What’s happened, anyway?’

  ‘A very nasty murder,’ O’Flaherty said, and for once he was quite serious. Slider felt a chill in the middle of his back, because Fergus hardly ever spoke in that tone of voice. ‘You were round the house o’ Mills’s anty earlier on, weren’t you?’

  ‘About an hour and a half back.’

  ‘Yes, the girls downstairs said it was you. Ah sure God, it’s a bad business.’

  ‘You don’t mean it’s her?’

  ‘Hacked to death. A frenzied attack.’

  ‘For Chris’ sake, Fergus—!’

  ‘The girls saw a man goin’ in. Described him, said he’d visited there before.’ He shook his head, partly in wonder and partly in pity at Slider’s frantic look. ‘Don’t take it to heart, Billy.’

  ‘Where else am I to take it?’ Slider said wildly.

  The girls – the pretty one he had met before and her plain friend who had come in from a late library session shortly before the incident – had heard the thumps from upstairs, and a bit later the dogs howling and barking like mad.

  ‘When they didn’t stop, we thought something must have happened to her,’ said Valerie, the prettier one, her eyes red with weeping. ‘We thought she must have fallen over and hurt herself, so we went and knocked on the inside door, and shouted really loud. She always answered when we shouted at the door. But there was no answer.’

  ‘We couldn’t open it because we hadn’t got a key,’ said Sue, the plainer one, briskly. She was dry-eyed but very pale, determined to do the right thing and not let the side down. ‘So I climbed up from the area to the back garden. There’s some wooden steps down from her back door, and if you lean right over you can just about see into the kitchen. I could hear the dogs locked in the scullery, barking like mad. I could hear them scratching the door. And I could see—’ She swallowed. ‘I could see a chair was knocked over from the kitchen table, and what looked like a bundle of clothes on the floor. Except I knew Miss Giles’s dressing-gown. So I told Val to call the police.’

  Slider turned to Valerie. ‘You say she had a visitor, after I left?’

  ‘I didn’t see him,’ she hiccupped. ‘It was Sue.’

  ‘When I was just coming in,’ Sue said. ‘I was standing at our door getting my key out and I saw him pass the railings, coming from the Uxbridge Road direction.’

  ‘Wearing?’

  She frowned in thought. ‘Trousers – not jeans – dark-coloured. An anorak, I think – dark blue maybe.’

  ‘Shoes? His feet must have been more or less at eye-level.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘Trainers?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think it was shoes. But I’m not honestly sure. He just walked past. Oh – I think he was carrying a bag.’

  ‘A carrier bag? Briefcase? Suitcase?’

  ‘No, just a bag – like a sports bag or an airline bag, something that size.’

  Slider nodded. The modus operandi. It was deliberate, then – can’t walk back through the streets covered in blood. And where was the bag now? ‘Did you see him go in?’

  ‘No, I just saw him pass, but I heard his feet on the steps before I went in.’

  ‘Didn’t you say she never let anyone in at night?’ Slider asked Valerie.

  ‘That’s right. She never even answered the door after about six o’clock,’ Valerie said.

  ‘So,’ to Sue, ‘why didn’t you warn him he was wasting his time?’

  ‘It was none of my business,’ she said indignantly. ‘I’m not her guardian. Anyway, she must have let him in, mustn’t she?’

  ‘Did you hear her doorbell?’

  ‘No,’ Sue said. ‘Val didn’t either. But we might not have noticed, if he only rang once. Or he might have had a key?’

  ‘You’d seen him visit her before? But you said you only caught a glimpse.’

  ‘Enough to recognise his face. Yes, I’ve seen him come to the house before, though I don’t know that he was visiting her – he could have been for the upstairs people, it’s the same door, though a different bell. I had an idea, actually, that he was a social worker.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘I don’t know really.’ She seemed genuinely puzzled at her own perception. ‘I suppose maybe – there was just something about him. I honestly don’t know.’

  ‘But he did visit her last week, one afternoon,’ Val said, ‘because I saw her at the door with him. I thought he might be a relative of some sort,’ she added with an apologetic glance at Sue.

  ‘Why a relative?’ Slider asked.

  ‘The way she was talking to him. And I can’t think who else would visit her, anyway. She never had friends round. She didn’t entertain.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Sue agreed. ‘She said to me once she lived too much like a pig to want anyone to see her house.’

  ‘Do you remember which afternoon it was last week?’

  Valerie screwed up her face with effort. ‘It might have been Wednesday. Or Tuesday? No, I’m not sure. I think it was the middle of the week. Not Friday, anyway, because I wasn’t in Friday afternoon.’

  ‘So it could have been Thursday?’ She assented. With a sense of inner weariness, Slider drew out the photofit print and offered it to the girls. ‘Is that the man?’

  ‘Yes, that’s him,’ Valerie said eagerly. ‘I’m sure it is.’

  Sue didn’t answer at once. She looked at the picture very carefully, and said at last, hesitantly, ‘I think so. It’s so hard to tell from a picture, isn’t it, unless you actually know someone very well. I mean, pictures never really look like people.’

  ‘Oh Sue,’ Valerie said reproachfully.

  ‘Well, I can’t help it,’ Sue said irritably. ‘I can’t swear it’s the same man, all I can say is he does look quite like this.’

  ‘You’re right to be cautious,’ Slider said. ‘Identity is a tricky thing.’

  Sue looked at him eagerly. ‘I always think it’s an interesting word – identity.’ She obviously had a theory and was glad of the chance to expound it. ‘I mean, we use it carelessly, but what it means is saying something is identical with something else, saying it is exactly the same thing, and therefore unique. And I can’t say a picture is identical with a human being. I can’t say that someone I’ve only just seen is exactly the same person as someone else I’ve seen, not unless I know them personally.’

  ‘Oh, you always quibble,’ Valerie objected. ‘How you can talk about words when poor Miss Giles is lying up there—’ and she burst into tears.

  ‘That’s no answer,’ Sue said unkindly. Slider agreed, though it was not for him to say so.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ Mills said, with the calmness of desperation. ‘How can you even think it? I loved her. She was like a mother to me. For God’s sake—’

  Slider remained impassive. It was hard to get out of his mind what he had seen in that now-familiar kitchen. Miss Giles had been lying on her back, half under the kitchen table, her eyes open. Her throat had been cut, severing the carotid artery, which had probably been the fatal blow, but she had been sta
bbed in the upper torso another seven times. From the blood distribution it looked as though she had been standing near the stove, facing the wall – perhaps putting the kettle on – when the first blow had been struck; had then been whirled around, struck in the back, which had made her fall forwards, knocking over the chair and hitting her head on the edge of the table; and then rolled over or been turned over to receive the other wounds from the front. One blow had been so forceful it had gone right through her torso and nicked the lino underneath. It was indeed, in the words beloved of police reports, a frenzied attack: as if the throat-cutting had been calmly planned, the rest of the blows the result of a rage of hatred.

  A terrible wave of sickness and despair had overwhelmed him as he looked at the pathetic bundle of old clothes which only a few hours ago had been a vigorous and intelligent woman. The appalling waste – the stupid vandalism which could destroy in seconds a personality which had taken more than sixty years to create, a unique and fascinating personality that could never be restored – made him angry. And he felt a personal loss, as for a friend, for in the short time he had learned a lot about her; he felt she had given him more of herself than she had given to anyone for a long time. When someone gives you something of themself like that, you become guardian of it, and responsible. He was responsible. He ought to have foreseen this. He had seen that she was worried, even afraid, and he had virtually assured her that Mills was not the man, instead of putting her on her guard against him.

  But he would not have thought it of Mills. He would not have thought it. He had been badly wrong, and Miss Giles had paid the price of his arrogance, which had led him to do what he was always warning against. He should have paid attention to the evidence, not tried to explain it away. Mills had put up a convincing show of bewilderment when he was brought in, so convincing that Slider was toying with the idea that he had shut the murder out of his mind completely, and genuinely had no recollection of it. He had to force himself to be calm, and to ask the questions in the sort of matter-of-fact tone that eases out information that might otherwise be held on to.