Fell Purpose
( Detective Inspector Bill Slider - 12 )
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
The brand-new Bill Slider Mystery - Bank Holiday Monday, and beautiful Zellah Wilding straight-A student, prefect, future Head Girl lies deadnear the famous Wormwood Scrubs prison in London. What was this good Christian girl doing out there, dressed to kill, when she was supposed to be at a sleep-over with schoolfriends? A secret boyfriend from a run-down estate and a recently-released rapist look tasty; or could the nearby fairground or prison have something to do with it?
Recent Titles by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles from Severn House
THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER
A CORNISH AFFAIR
DANGEROUS LOVE
DIVIDED LOVE
EVEN CHANCE
HARTE’S DESIRE
THE HORSEMASTERS
JULIA
LAST RUN
THE LONGEST DANCE
NOBODY’S FOOL
ON WINGS OF LOVE
PLAY FOR LOVE
A RAINBOW SUMMER
REAL LIFE ( Short Stories )
The Bill Slider Mysteries
GAME OVER
FELL PURPOSE
Copyright © 2009 by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.
All rights reserved.
For Terry Wale – the Voice of Slider – with love
ONE
Tinkling Symbol
Atherton was singing as he drove.
‘If I give my heart to you, I’ll have none and you’ll have two—’
‘What are you so happy about?’ Slider asked.
Atherton did his martyred wife impression. ‘Just my way of getting through the day.’
‘You can’t kid me. You’re smiling so much you look as if you slept with a hanger in your mouth. It’s that good with Emily, is it?’ It was good to see his colleague bitten at last, after a lifetime heading the Hounds’ Hall of Fame.
‘Ah, it’s true what they say about women,’ Atherton said blithely, laying the car like paint round the corner into Wood Lane.
‘What?’
‘It’s an irregular plural. Anyway, if anyone should be happy, it’s you. New wife, new baby—’
‘Interrupted Bank Holiday,’ Slider concluded.
‘Yes. Bummer,’ Atherton agreed, finally relinquishing his smile. They had both had the Bank Holiday off. He and Emily had planned to go for a long walk along the Thames Footpath from Richmond to Kew, and have lunch at the wine bar on Kew Green. It had been no part of his plan to pick up his boss at the station and drive out to view a corpse.
Slider had arranged to take his children by his first wife, Kate and Matthew, plus Joanna and the baby, to see his father, who lived out in the sticks in Essex. It was the sort of arrangement that was difficult to make in the first place, with so many schedules to co-ordinate, and was correspondingly harder to have to give up – Atherton at least now had Emily on tap. And his father was getting frail, and he didn’t see enough of him at the best of times. Joanna was carrying on with the plan without him, driving all the children down herself, but Slider resented missing out.
‘We have got to find somewhere to live,’ he concluded. Joanna’s one-bedroom flat had been tight enough for the two of them, but now with the baby it was bucking for impossible. ‘It makes everything so damn difficult when I can’t have the children to stay.’
‘Well, it’s a good time to pick up a bargain,’ Atherton said, picking up speed past Television Centre. ‘House prices plummeting and all that.’
‘We can’t even afford a bargain on my pay,’ Slider said. ‘We’d have to think twice if they were giving them away.’
Atherton glanced sideways at his boss. ‘Emily and I will come over and babysit for you some time, if you and Joanna want to go out.’
‘Thanks,’ said Slider, appreciating the sentiment behind the offer. You needed all the kindness you could get when facing a murder investigation – and all the cheerfulness you could muster on the way to the scene. Underneath the normality of their chat was the tension of not knowing exactly what they would find at the other end, except that it would be horrible.
Wormwood Scrubs was a vast green space, roughly rectangular, almost a mile long by half a mile wide. It was bounded on one long side by the embankment of the main-line railway out of Paddington to all points west. Along the other long side sat the backs of a school, a hospital and the eponymous HM Prison, which all fronted on Du Cane Road. At the western end, where they were now heading, the green was called Old Oak Common, a relic of local history. The prison had been built in a tract of open farmland and common land that stretched all the way from Notting Hill to the tiny village of East Acton. Then the brick tide of London had lapped up and around and past it. Now the Scrubs was the last bit of open ground left, and some of the country’s most dangerous criminals were banged up within a stone’s throw of little ex-council houses with net curtains and gnomes in their gardens. It was an odd arrangement.
Atherton pulled up behind the other cars in Braybrook Street, which had houses along one side and was open to the common on the other. Slider got out to take in the scene. Already the blue-and-white tape was up, sealing off a large section of the green. The Bank Holiday was fine and warm, for a wonder, though the sunshine was hazy, so it was ideal weather for the locals to be out, early though it was. The uniformed presence was keeping them well back on the other side of the road, where they chattered excitedly about this bit of fame that had come to their neighbourhood. One or two of the older ones still remembered 1966 when, in this same place, robbers had shot and killed three detectives in cold blood and broad daylight. They were predicting that this current murder wouldn’t be a patch on that one – but then nothing these days could match up to the old times. The younger ones, Xboxed to a state of advanced numbness where death and mayhem were concerned, were only hanging around for lack of anything better to do.
The press were there, talking aloofly to each other and smoking like kippers, and so far there was just a lone TV camera team – Slider guessed they were from the local news programme. He wondered how long it would take them to catch up with the street’s history. He could see the headlines now – Murder Spot Claims Another Victim.
But the action this time was evidently right over at the embankment, where the white-clad forensic support team was already in the process of erecting canvas screens to shield the site from view. Avoiding all eyes, Slider started off, with Atherton at his side, across the grass. He found himself walking over a patch of churned ground, pitted with stud-marks – baked in after a week without rain. This end of the Scrubs was marked out for football pitches, where amateur teams played at the weekends – the football season started in August these days, and he was crossing a goalmouth. He registered automatically the large brick building over to his right, which housed changing rooms, showers and lavatories for the teams, and paused to note its relative position. Was it securely locked, or could someone have lurked in there? Then he turned to take in the rest of the surroundings.
The high, blank wall of the prison was the most obvious feature, with the white-topped turrets of its towers just peeping above. The hospital also had a wall, not so high but just as blank. Beyond that was the stout link fencing of the school playing fields. At the eastern end of the Scrubs, almost a mile away, on the other short side of the rectangle, was another school, and beside it a patch of ground which the council let out from time to time to travelling shows and temporary exhibitions. On Bank Holidays there was always either a circus or a fair, and this time it was the latter: the familiar shapes of helter-skelter and big wheel stuck up from the surrounding circular tent-tops of the other rides and attractions. Public access to the fairground was from
the far side, from Scrubs Lane. On this side of it was a dense but orderly collection of parked lorries and the living caravans of the staff. The hazy sunshine glinted off a windscreen or two, as if the fair were winking at him. Wouldn’t you like to know!
‘Too far away for anyone to have seen anything,’ Atherton said, noting the direction of his gaze.
‘We’ll still have to ask questions,’ Slider said.
‘That’ll make us popular,’ Atherton said. Fairground people resented, to put it mildly, any suggestion that they were more criminally bent than the rest of the population.
The fair was an added complication that Slider could have done without. ‘The press are bound to leap on it,’ he said. His frowning gaze returned to the prison’s blank façade, where there were no windows to wink. ‘Too much scope for speculation altogether.’
Atherton caught his drift, as he so often did. ‘But if anyone had got over the wall it would be known about. Meanwhile, there are hundreds and thousands of houses all around us that no one’s been watching.’
‘Ah, but you don’t think in clichés.’
The railway embankment ran the whole length of the Scrubs. It was tall and steep, and had once sported a dense shrubbery mixed with tree cover, but in recent years the track company had cut it back for safety purposes, and acid rain or some other modern blight had thinned the remainder naturally, so now only the lower part of the slope still had bushes growing patchily over it.
Reaching the site, Slider and Atherton passed two of the forensic team, who had just discovered that the screen they were erecting had somehow got torn since the last time it was used.
‘Why does this keep happening to us?’ one of them complained.
‘Awning has broken,’ Atherton explained. ‘Like the first awning.’
‘It’s not an awning,’ the man replied squashingly. ‘Don’t forget to sign the access log. And keep to the boards!’
‘Tell your grandmother.’
One of Slider’s own team, WDC Hart, met them, smart in a charcoal trouser suit and cherry-red shirt, her hair scraped up into a knob on top. She looked upset. They all tried to hide their feelings, but when you worked with someone for a while you got to know the symptoms. Slider gave her a steadying look.
‘It’s a girl,’ she said.
‘Yes, we were told,’ said Slider.
‘She’s just a kid, guv. Seventeen-eighteen tops.’ The emotion escaped her in a burst of anger. ‘Who does that? Bastards!’
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Slider said. ‘Any identification?’
‘No, guv. No pockets on what she’s wearing, and we ain’t found ’er ’andbag yet.’
He went to have a look. The victim was lying on her back between the bushes on the lower slope of the embankment, her arms out to the sides, one leg slightly bent. It was a relaxed-looking pose, as if she had just flung herself down to rest in the heat of the day. She had thick corn-blonde hair, shoulder-length, and he noted the night’s dew was on it.
She was slim and very young, as Hart had said, but with an enviable figure, with no puppy chubbiness around jaw or waist, and fine skin: not a spot in sight. She was wearing a mauve cropped top with spaghetti straps, and a black skirt, so short it was a mere nod to decency, which fitted round her hips, leaving her navel exposed. The navel sat curled and cute like a winkle-shell – but the winkle-shell of a particularly fashion-conscious winkle – embedded in the smooth honey-coloured mound of her belly. It was appallingly sexual. Why did girls want to dress like that, he wondered, with a background ache of alarm. His own daughter, Kate, bright and pretty as she was, was just getting to the age when she wanted to go out with her friends, all of them looking like hookers – and cheap hookers at that. They might as well have had placards on their backs saying: ‘Available for casual sex. No respect required.’
The victim’s legs were bare, and one strappy high-heeled shoe was on, while the other lay nearby, its straps broken. The heel had snapped off and was a little further away towards the road.
Hart indicated it with a gesture and said, ‘You can see it, guv, can’t you? She’s running away from ’im and ’er heel catches, down she goes, and he’s on ’er.’
‘You assume she was running away,’ Atherton said. ‘Haven’t you ever been to the movies? What about playful chasing and light-hearted gambolling?’
‘Gambling? What are you talkin’ about?’
‘There’s no reason to think she was running at all,’ Slider said impatiently. ‘She could just as easily have been walking, or even standing still—’
‘Yeah, standing still and struggling,’ Hart said.
‘The ground’s too hard for footmarks,’ Slider said, but without regret. Footmarks were time-consuming, and hardly ever helpful.
He looked last of all at the face. As Hart had said, she had been pretty, as far as one could tell – perhaps extremely pretty. Now the face was congested; the open eyes spotted with petechiae; the tip of the tongue protruding between the lips, a smear of blood on the chin. Around her neck was a pair of flesh-coloured tights. They were not knotted, just crossed over, but were kept in place by the ridge of swollen flesh on either side. There was also, he noticed, bending closer, a thin red line around the bottom of her neck: a fine cut, as if a wire had been tightened there.
‘Strangled with ’er own tights,’ Hart said bitterly.
Slider leaned forward. ‘You see what she’s wearing,’ he said, lifting the hem of the skirt back a little.
‘A thong,’ said Hart. ‘I ’ate those things. They’re dead un’ygienic. Give you thrush, and it’s a bugger to get rid of.’
‘The thong has ended but the malady lingers on?’ Atherton suggested.
‘Sometimes you’re really funny, Jim,’ Hart told him. ‘And then there’s now.’
‘The point I’m trying to make,’ Slider said patiently, ‘is that I wonder if she was raped. Would a rapist put the thing back on afterwards?’
‘Would he take it off in the first place?’ Atherton said.
‘But what about the tights, guv?’ Hart said. ‘I fink maybe I was wrong before.’
Slider got the point. ‘She obviously wasn’t wearing them. She had her shoes on bare feet.’ He was trying not to notice that the feet were cared-for and pretty and the toenails were neatly painted with clear varnish. The fingernails, cut short and following the contour of the fingertips, were unpainted.
‘So someone brought his own murder weapon with him?’ Atherton said. ‘That’s not so nice. That looks like someone with form.’
Slider sighed inwardly at the thought of a serial killer, but he said, ‘It gives us a line of enquiry, anyway. We’ll look at the offenders’ list and see who’s out and about. I can’t think of anyone obvious.’
‘At least it might misdirect the press,’ Atherton said. ‘What with the Scrubs being right next door, they’re bound to make the obvious misconnection. Finding out who’s in there that fits the bill might keep them happily absorbed while we get on with the job.’
‘We’ve got to identify her first,’ Slider said, straightening up.
‘Look at Mispers?’ Hart suggested.
‘If we can’t find the handbag,’ Slider said. ‘And there’s all these local people to canvass. If only we could take a mugshot, one of them might know who she is, but we can’t show them what she looks like now.’
‘Murderers are so inconsiderate,’ Atherton agreed.
Porson, their superintendent, arrived, wearing his summer tegument, an ancient beige mac: a wondrous thing of flaps and capes and buckles, concealed poacher’s pockets, and buttoned straps of unknown purpose. It was so vast and long it looked as if it was taking him for a walk rather than vice versa. His massive and strangely bumpy bald head shone in the muted sunlight, a beacon of hope and a symbol of courage in adversity. He had abandoned his wig when his adored wife died, but was still known by his old sobriquet of ‘The Syrup’.
He disappeared behind the screens, had a
look, and came back to speak to Slider.
‘I don’t like it,’ he said, shaking his head at the general iniquity of things. ‘She’s only a kid. What, sixteen? Seventeen? It’s nasty.’
Slider had no argument with that.
‘The tabloids are going to be all over this one,’ Porson went on gloomily, pursing his lips and pursuing something round his teeth with his tongue. ‘Young girl, rape and murder. Whose tights are they? Not hers.’ The old man was quick, Slider thought. ‘Looks like some cyclepath on the loose. They’ll love that.’ He snorted. ‘No one ever lost money misunderestimating the press.’
In his headlong and tempestuous battle with crime, and with life in general, Porson’s way was to fling whatever words came first to hand in the general direction of meaning, and hope some of them stuck. It drove the language-sensitive Atherton mad; Slider, who was fond of the old man, found it almost endearing.
Porson snapped his head round and fixed Slider with a gimlet eye. ‘Got anything yet?’
‘We don’t even know who she is,’ Slider admitted.
‘Someone’ll miss her, nice girl like that. She’s not a prozzie.’
Slider agreed. Despite the clothes, she looked like someone’s daughter. Her skin and hair were well cared-for and well nourished, and her navel wasn’t pierced.
‘I’m going to go all out to get you resources for this one,’ Porson said, ‘even if it does jeropodise the budget. It’s going to be hell’s own job, though, getting the uniforms back, what with the Carnival.’ The Notting Hill Carnival, held every August Bank Holiday, sucked police out of the system like a black hole. ‘What a weekend to choose!’
‘I wonder if it was an informed choice,’ Slider said, thinking of those tights.
Porson shuddered. ‘If the villains are going to start getting smart, we’re out of a job.’ He glanced round and said, ‘I’m going to go now, before someone tries to interview me. Keep me up to scratch on this. I’ll get on with pulling in some extra men. Ask me for anything you want.’
Fell Purpose dibs-12 Page 1
