‘I’m sure you are,’ Slider said. Sorry for yourself, he added inside his head.
They got enough of everything done by the end of the day to go for a celebratory drink in the British Queen. Emily joined them, and Joanna came, bringing the baby, so they sat out in the garden. It was a warm evening, the threatening storm having passed over without breaking. The landlord brought out a platter of sandwiches, pork pies and scotch eggs, the low sun flickered through the trees, there was a blackbird singing nearby. It was all very pleasant. George got passed around from hand to hand and had the time of his life. Everyone wanted to pet him, and he held court like a confirmed bon viveur, half a ham sandwich in one hand and somebody’s biro in the other, munching and conducting by turns.
Slider leaned tiredly against Joanna on the only bench with a back, and let the others talk. Atherton and Hart led the way in telling the story to her and Emily, though Atherton generously called on Connolly to add a sentence or two.
She had the last word of the story. ‘The tights were his wife’s, of course. She kept a spare pair in the car because she laddered so many at work. When Zellah jumped out to do a legger, she must’ve hit the storage bin yoke with her knee – it fell open and the tights fell out. He was so mad at her by then he picked them up and – well, enda story. We found the wrapper from the tights under the driver’s seat. Shoved it there when he got out the car, and didn’t shift it afterwards, the eejit. Don’t know if he was too stupid, too upset – or maybe just a stone mentaller who thought he could get away with anything.’
Hart blew crumbs, waving her sandwich urgently. ‘That third thing.’
‘I think he was in such a blind panic he was on automatic,’ Hollis said. ‘Otherwise he’d have taken the tights away with him, or tried to hide the body. He just killed her and ran away.’
‘And put the whole thing out of his mind,’ Connolly finished, ‘and hoped it’d go away.’
Atherton said. ‘He’d just offered to pay for Zellah to have an abortion, but his only money was his wife’s. A prince among men.’
Slider reached for his pint. It was time for the toasts. ‘To all of us,’ he proposed. ‘Good work, everybody. We did it!’
Atherton proposed the next one. ‘To the criminal – without whom police work would be merely theory.’
Then Connolly said, ‘To the boss – sir – Mr Slider.’
‘The guv!’ the others roared, and drank with gusto.
‘Oh shucks,’ Slider said.
‘They love you, you fool,’ Joanna said.
‘Shups,’ said George, who had arrived back with him at that moment, passed over from Hart.
‘He’s a bit damp,’ Hart explained, half apologetically.
‘Like the guv’s eyes,’ said Joanna, laughing. ‘Let’s have another round. I’m up.’ And to the polite protests, ‘It must be my turn by now.’
Connolly turned to Hart when she’d gone. ‘D’y’know what I’m going to tellya? That one,’ she jerked her head in Joanna’s direction, ‘is one smart ban.’
In bed that night, Joanna said, ‘You’ve hardly spoken about her. Is she bothering you so much?’
‘Who?’
‘Don’t be a mug. Zellah, of course.’
‘Yes, she bothers me. I keep thinking about her, so lonely, her parents fighting over her like two dogs over a juicy bone. She was desperate for love, trying to fit in with the other girls, trying to be what Mike Carmichael wanted, then finding what she thought was her soul mate in Alex Markov. She told Frieda he really understood her.’
‘Poor kid.’
‘Yes, she was just a kid, in spite of everything. And then that last day, pregnant, alone, desperately afraid, not knowing what to do or who to turn to. I can’t help thinking she knew all along Markov was going to let her down. She couldn’t have known he was going to kill her, though.’
‘Do you think she really loved Markov?’
‘Of course it was a fantasy. But yes, she loved him. That was what it was all about.’ He thought of that poem. The thrush, sobbing in darkness. How lonely, how utterly alone she had felt herself. She had thought Markov was her sunlit freedom. Poor little sap. ‘She gave him what he wanted – sex – in exchange for what she wanted – warmth. Just to be touched, held. Not to be alone.’
‘Well, she wouldn’t be the first woman to do that. In fact, I’d think it’s probably how most relationships go. Sex in exchange for a cuddle.’
‘That’s a comforting thought.’
‘Strange how she repeated her mother’s past. Fell for a married man and got pregnant. Subconscious copying, I suppose. But what a hellish life she must have had, with a father like that.’
‘He did his best for her, according to his own lights. It’s all anyone can do.’
‘What will happen now?’ she asked after a moment. ‘Will Markov go down?’
‘Yes, the tights will do for him as surely as they did for Zellah. If only he’d used his hands, he might have claimed it was a momentary lapse. But the tights made it premeditated; malice aforethought. His fell purpose.’
‘He’ll get life?’
‘Which means twenty years. Out in fourteen. Still young enough for a new life. Even to start a family. It’s the Wildings who get the real life sentence.’
‘What will Mr Wilding do now, I wonder?’
‘I don’t know. We’ve taken the possibility of revenge away from him. I’ve managed to convince him it wasn’t Carmichael. And he can’t get at Markov, because we’ve got him banged up. All he had left to keep him going was the determination to kill the person responsible.’
‘Then I suppose he’ll kill himself,’ Joanna said.
‘That’s not my problem,’ Slider said after a moment.
‘Then stop sounding as if it is. You won, you fool. What do you think that drink at the pub was all about?’
‘You can’t ever win in a situation like this,’ he said. ‘That poor child. She was just a little girl.’
Joanna folded him close to her. She knew he was close to crying. ‘You avenge them, the wronged dead. They’re lucky, the ones who have you. Don’t you know that? They can lie quiet. You’ve done what she needed. She won’t walk tonight.’
After a bit he sighed, and she felt him relax. Time to come back to earth. ‘You forgot to phone your father again,’ she said.
‘Oh hell,’ he muttered. ‘Remind me to phone him tomorrow, without fail.’
‘I understand congratulations are in order?’ Mr Slider said.
‘How did you know that?’ Slider said, sitting out in Joanna’s pocket handkerchief of a garden with his Sunday morning coffee, while George sat on the grass nearby, considering what to eat – grass, stick, stone, worm? It was all so tempting . . .
‘Joanna told me yesterday. She rang to say you’d broken the case and probably wouldn’t have a chance to ring me.’
‘I’m sorry. You know how much there is to do.’
‘I know. It didn’t matter, anyway, son. I’ve gone ahead and done it.’
‘Done what?’
‘Sold the cottage. Well, you said you didn’t mind.’
‘It was your decision,’ Slider said, but he feared that his father, old and commercially innocent, might have been rooked. He wished he had waited until Slider could help him. ‘I hope you got a decent price for it,’ he said anxiously.
‘Don’t worry. Your old dad’s not so green as he’s grass-looking. Listen, Bill, there’s something I want to ask you. But I want you to promise to say no if you feel that way. There’ll be no hard feelings. You just be honest with me.’
‘Dad—’
‘No, let me say my piece. I bin practising,’ he said with a smile in his voice. ‘I know you and Joanna are looking to move, and I was wondering whether we couldn’t throw in together, and get a place a bit bigger, with room for me. A granny-flat or whatever they call it. I don’t need much – just a bed-sitting room with a gas ring, and a bathroom.’
‘Oh, Dad, it would b
e lovely, but—’
‘I wouldn’t be underfoot, don’t you think that. You wouldn’t even see me unless you asked to. But I’d like to be closer, now I’m getting on a bit. And, see, I could stop in for the gas man, that sort of thing. And I could babysit for you any time, if you wanted to go out. I’d be on hand, like. And what I thought was, if I give you the money right off, I only got to live another seven years, and you wouldn’t be hit with those old death-duties when I do pop off.’
‘Dad, it would be wonderful,’ Slider said, desperate to stop him, ‘but we could never afford a place big enough. We can’t find anything we can afford even for us.’
‘I’d be putting in my money, you know.’
‘I know, but what you could get for the cottage just wouldn’t be enough in London.’
Mr Slider chuckled. ‘Oh, I got a fair bit for it. A tidy bit. I sold it to a developer, you see.’
‘A developer?’
‘That’s right, son. It seems the government’s told the County Council they’ve got to build six thousand more houses in Essex, and the only way they can do that is on greenfield sites. Well, my bit of land’s handy to the main road, and there’s the lane all the way up to the cottage, with the sewage and water and electric already laid on. And it’s not conservation land or prime farmland. So it’s ideal.’
Slider felt breathless. ‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ he managed to say.
‘I told you, I’m not so green as you think. Once they approached me and made an offer, I said I’d think about it, and I went and did a bit of homework. Talked to the planning officer at the council, had a look at some other plans, spoke to a solicitor. The developers offered me two hundred and fifty thousand for the cottage.’
‘Two hundred and fifty?’ Slider was pleasantly surprised. It was a lot for that little place, and it was all clear profit – no mortgage to pay off. Despite himself, his brain went instantly into calculation mode. A quarter of a million was far too little for anywhere round here, of course, but it was a handsome deposit in anyone’s language, and say he and Jo could get a hefty mortgage, and they looked further out – a lot further out . . .
Mr Slider said, chuckling again, ‘Ah, but that’s just for the cottage. Near on four acres I got there. They could put sixteen executive homes on that, or twenty-four luxury dwellings. I took advice and asked ’em for one and a quarter million, and we settled in the end on one-point-oh-five. What that oh-five was about, don’t ask me! But it makes one-point-three altogether. That’ll be enough to get somewhere with a little annexe for me, won’t it? If you want me, that is.’
Slider found his voice at last. ‘For the chance of a live-in babysitter? Are you kidding?’
‘And don’t forget house-sitting,’ Mr Slider said calmly. ‘I read an article about it in the paper. If you have someone living in your house when you go on holiday, you can get a reduction on your insurance. Now that’s most important, son.’
Helplessly, and perhaps even with a touch of hysteria, Slider began to laugh.
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