Fell Purpose

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Slider had tea and sandwiches sent in to Wilding, and despatched one of his uniforms, armed with Wilding’s car keys, to fetch in his car, which he said was in Wulfstan Street. Not that it would be any help to the investigation, for even if they found traces of Zellah in it, why wouldn’t they? But you never knew.

  Wilding drank two cups of tea, but didn’t touch the sandwiches. When Slider went in with Atherton to question him, he saw this, and asked if Wilding would like something different to eat.

  ‘I want nothing,’ he said stonily. ‘My life is over. I have no wish to preserve it.’

  ‘I understand,’ Slider began.

  ‘Spare me your empty pieties. You don’t understand.’

  It was a little flash of spirit, and Slider was glad of it. There was still something there to work with, a spark that cared a tiny bit about something, whatever it was.

  ‘What were you doing at Old Oak Common?’ he asked.

  ‘Why should I tell you?’

  ‘Is there some reason I shouldn’t know?’ Slider countered conversationally.

  Wilding stared heavily at nothing. ‘I wanted to see . . . the place where she died. I couldn’t get close to it. I was waiting for those men to go away.’

  ‘They’ll be there for some time yet,’ Slider told him.

  ‘I can wait,’ Wilding said with massive indifference.

  ‘There’s nothing to see there. Why do you want to?’ No answer. ‘If you had come to me, I could probably have arranged for you to go in.’

  ‘With you there, and the constables, and all the paraphernalia of your futile investigation? No, thank you. I will wait until you have gone away and left it as it was before, when she was alive. I want to stand there, where she was.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘I will kill myself.’

  No, Slider thought; despite those words he was not quite at the last gate. He still wanted to ‘tell’ – that human urge that was of such value to policemen like him. But to tell what?

  ‘Why do you call the investigation futile?’ he asked. ‘Do you think we won’t find out who did it? We always do.’

  ‘I don’t care if you do. What difference does it make? It won’t bring her back.’ Tears began to seep out of his eyes, and he pulled out a handkerchief and pressed it against them. ‘Don’t imagine that it’s anything you can say that makes me weep. I can’t stop, that’s all. It’s a nervous reaction.’

  The handkerchief was filthy, and Slider pushed a box of tissues across to him. He ignored it. ‘What do you want from me?’ he asked after a moment, when the tears seem to be stopped. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to know the truth,’ Slider said.

  Wilding looked at him bitterly. ‘Oh yes, you have the luxury of intellectual curiosity. And the vanity. You haven’t lost everything that gave meaning to your life. What does the truth matter to me? I don’t care about it. My daughter is dead.’

  ‘Then why did you tell lies and sign your name to them? Your daughter was dead then. It seems you cared then about concealing the truth.’

  A consciousness stirred in his eyes. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘In your statement about your whereabouts that evening, you said you were at home the whole time. But you weren’t. You went out in your car shortly after Zellah left. You followed her, didn’t you?’

  The tears began to leak again. He pressed them back, Canute-like, with the filthy handkerchief.

  ‘You knew where she was going,’ Slider tried. ‘Why follow her? Or did you, perhaps, think that she wasn’t going to Sophy’s house? Did you think there was some deception going on?’ Wilding still didn’t answer, but now he reached for a tissue and blew his nose, and then took another to blot at his eyes. He had done it in what seemed an automatic gesture, but Slider saw it as a sign of lowered resistance, and pressed a little more. ‘I’m surprised you should suspect your lovely daughter of hiding something from you. Or did you have some reason to think her friends were conspiring to do her harm?’

  That provoked him. ‘Zellah would never have done anything like that if it hadn’t been for those others corrupting her,’ he cried in a little flash of defensive spirit.

  ‘Done anything like what?’ Slider asked.

  Wilding didn’t answer that, but he talked. ‘I tried to keep her safe. I tried to keep her away from bad influences. That was all I ever wanted, to keep her as she was – so beautiful, so perfect. Was that wrong?’ He laid his big, hard hands on the table in a gesture of finality. Even after only three days away from his bench, the little nicks and scratches were healing, the recent scars fading. Life could be very cruel, in its thoughtless regeneration. ‘But everything was against me. The whole of modern society is a disease. What can one man do against it?’

  ‘Her friends, Sophy and Chloë . . .’ Slider began.

  The fire lit in him. ‘Those girls! She wanted them as Zellah’s friends – my wife. Her own mother was complicit in corrupting her. Friends? What kind of mother would want her child to mix with creatures like that? Trollops with empty minds. Hussies with no interest in anything, beyond sex and celebrities and clothes.’ He rocked back and forth in an anguish of mourning. ‘But that’s what her mother wanted. She wanted my daughter, with all her wonderful intelligence and talent, to be . . . a model.’

  His tone of disgust and outrage and grief said this was the worst fate a girl could encounter. Worse than death? Well, perhaps. Perhaps.

  ‘And what did you want for her?’ Slider asked quietly, hoping to slip his questions in isotonically so Wilding would hardly notice.

  ‘To be something that mattered. To be herself. To use all her abilities, not just her looks. Not to waste herself. But all the time I was fighting against the world. The foul, trivial, dirty, corrupting world.’ Slider felt Atherton’s ears prick, though he was not looking at him. ‘It was the world that took my Zellah from me,’ Wilding cried. ‘I tried to save her, but in the end . . .’

  He didn’t finish the sentence, which was a pity, because the conclusion of it might have been ‘the only way I could save her was to kill her’ or words to that effect. The tears were seeping out again and Wilding took another tissue. Atherton stirred just very slightly, so that Slider knew he thought Wilding was hiding in there and ought to be winkled out. But Slider didn’t think so. There was a momentum now. He just had to keep it going.

  ‘What made you decide that particular day that something was going to happen?’ he asked, without emphasis. ‘Was it the fact that she was staying over?’

  ‘I was always against that,’ Wilding answered without pause. ‘I could understand Zellah wanting to – the other girls often did it, and she was too innocent to see the danger they represented. But her mother wanted it, too. There’s no excuse for her. Good God, she prides herself on being worldly!’ he said bitterly. ‘They both asked, over and over. Zellah sounded so wistful. Pam – well, I knew she wouldn’t let up. In the end . . . But I shouldn’t have given in. I shall always blame myself for that.’

  ‘What were you afraid was going to happen?’

  ‘I had no specific apprehension. I just knew it would not be good for her to spend time unsupervised with those creatures. But then . . .’ He paused so long that Slider was on the brink of prompting him when he went on, very low, his head bent, so it was hard even in the silent room to hear him. ‘It was the deceit that was so hard to bear. I was used to it from Pam. I expected it from her. But not Zellah. Not . . . my little girl.’

  Slider took a chance. ‘You found her mobile phone,’ he suggested.

  ‘Almost as soon as she’d left the house,’ he said. ‘I went up to her room. It was lying on her bed. I was worried about her being out without it. I thought I could catch her up in the car and give it to her.’

  Slider shook his head. ‘That wasn’t the way it was,’ he said, gently but firmly. ‘If that was your intention, you would have gone openly and told your wife about it. But you left secretly without her knowin
g. You decided to follow Zellah and see what she was up to. Why was that? What aroused your suspicion?’

  It was a rule they were taught early on in the CID, never to ask a question you don’t already know the answer to. Sometimes you couldn’t help it, but in the present case it was a useful tool. Wilding didn’t answer, and Slider was able to say, ‘You used the last-number recall to see who she’d been speaking to, and found she had called the young man you had forbidden her to see.’

  Wilding raised his head and his voice was anguished, a cry of pain. ‘She deceived me! She must have been deceiving me for months with that – that piece of trash! I had to know! You must see that! I had to know how far things had gone, how far he had corrupted her! You must see I had to!’

  ‘I do see,’ Slider said. ‘If she felt she had to hide it from you, you were afraid it might be very bad.’

  ‘She was so innocent, she wouldn’t know – she wouldn’t see it coming. I didn’t want her to be shocked. I wanted to step in before that happened, before he exposed her to things she wouldn’t understand. So I drove to the Cooper-Hutchinsons’ house and waited there until she arrived. I saw her go in. For a moment I was relieved. And then I thought, what if that was a ruse? What if they were conniving at her ruin? So I waited. And sure enough, she came out again, alone. Dressed like . . . dressed like . . .’ Tears flowed so freely Slider wondered where all the moisture could be coming from, in a man who had been dehydrated. ‘They weren’t her clothes. Those girls – her friends – had dressed her like a prostitute.’

  Slider took a bunch of tissues from the box and pushed them into his hands, but he couldn’t afford to let the momentum drop. ‘Why didn’t you stop her then?’ he asked, though he knew it would hurt. But hurt, in this case, might be a useful weapon.

  ‘I had to know!’ he cried out in pain. ‘I had to know the worst. If I’d stopped her then, she might have lied to me. I couldn’t bear my child to lie to my face. If it was bad, I had to know so I could face her with it.’

  Interesting, Slider thought – the same rule of interrogation he had just been thinking about. Know the answer before you ask the question.

  ‘So you followed her to the pub.’

  Wilding didn’t seem to wonder how Slider knew. He said, ‘I thought she was meeting him inside. I was going to go in and confront her, but there wasn’t a parking space, and I was afraid if I drove off to find one, she might come out and I’d miss her. And while I was still debating what to do, she did come out. She was obviously waiting for someone. And in a moment he drove up on his motorbike. Before I could get out and stop her, she got on and drove off with him. I followed, but he could weave in and out of the traffic. I couldn’t catch him up, and I lost him at the lights.’ He blew his nose again. The tears had stopped, perhaps from exhaustion of the reservoir.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I drove about looking for them. It was hopeless.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go to his flat?’

  ‘I had no idea where he lived. I thought he lived with his mother in Reading, but I didn’t know the address. I didn’t think he would be taking her there. I thought, in fact, he was taking her to the Carnival. She wanted to go, but I’d forbidden it. It was too dangerous for a young girl. But it was the sort of thing I assumed he’d like.’

  ‘So did you go there?’

  ‘I tried to. But of course you can’t get near it in a car. It’s all cordoned off. I looked for a parking space and the nearest I could get was in Barlby Road. I parked there and tried walking down Ladbroke Grove, but the streets were packed. So many people – all that noise – it was bedlam. How could I find her in that crowd? It was hopeless. I was jostled and deafened – I thought I was going to be robbed – but I kept going. I was sure she was there somewhere, and I had to find her – save her . . .’ He stopped, staring dully at his hands.

  ‘Was it just by chance that you found them again?’ Slider asked after a moment.

  ‘What?’ Wilding said. He raised his head at the question. Was that wariness?

  ‘You were parked in Barlby Road. Your way home was back down North Pole Road. Opposite the end of North Pole Road was the fair. You thought they might have gone there – something Zellah would like, but that wouldn’t be so dangerous. She’d accepted your edict that she mustn’t go to the Carnival, but the fair was safe enough, and nearly as much fun. Did you spot them going in, or did you go in and find them inside?’

  ‘I didn’t see her,’ he said. He looked bewildered. ‘I didn’t think about the fair. After being jostled in the crowds for a while I couldn’t stand it any more and I went back to my car. But I couldn’t go home without her. I just drove about the streets. It was stupid – pointless. I suppose in the back of my mind I hoped I might just spot her by chance. I didn’t know what else to do. I knew she was in danger, but I couldn’t get to her.’ His hands clenched. ‘Do you know what that’s like? To be so helpless . . . If I could have found them, I’d have saved her.’

  ‘But by the time you did find her, it was too late to save her,’ Slider said. ‘So there was only one thing left to do.’

  ‘I tell you, I never found her,’ he said. ‘In the end I went home without her. I’ll never forgive myself. Not to be there when she needed me . . .’

  ‘What made you look around Old Oak Common? You were driving around the streets. Was it just chance you saw her there?’

  ‘I never thought to go there. Why should I?’

  ‘You saw her standing by the side of the road. You stopped the car. She ran and jumped in. Then you asked her what she’d been up to. There was a terrible row. Believe me, I understand. It’s the worst thing for a father to go through, the realization that he hasn’t been able to keep his daughter safe. She defied you and jumped out of the car. In anguish, you followed. You were too late to save her body, but you could still save her soul.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Wilding’s eyes were wide, his face a gape of horror.

  Slider hardened his voice. ‘But you’d known all along it was going to come to that, hadn’t you? From the moment you knew she was deceiving you to see that man. You knew it was too late. Which was why you’d gone prepared. You knew what you would have to do, and when the moment came—’

  ‘You’re saying . . .’ Wilding’s voice was hoarse. ‘You mean . . . you think I killed her?’ He started to rise from his seat, and it was horribly primordial, like a rock being forced up by tectonic pressures. ‘No! You can’t say that! You can’t say that! My Zellah! My own precious love! Take it back! You take it back!’

  He lunged across the table, reaching for Slider’s throat – an interesting reaction, Slider thought, even as his adrenalin was taking charge, bypassing his brain and saving his bacon. Throttling was evidently Wilding’s preferred option for choking off unpleasant speeches and the unpleasant thoughts behind them. So what had Zellah said in the car that had finally convinced her father there was no other option? Because mad as he must have been at the beginning of the trail – and he would have had to be furious to the point of madness to take the tights with him – there had obviously been time between that and the final act for other feelings and thoughts to assert themselves. The sight of Zellah, still dressed like a prostitute, and standing beside the road like one, could have been enough to restore the default fury, but he didn’t kill her right there and then, in the car. There had been speech, and Zellah had got out, apparently weeping. Slider had a fair idea what the speech must have been about – the thing that must have been on Zellah’s mind all that last day, and for who knew how many days before.

  It was a few minutes before order was restored, and Wilding was seated again, trembling visibly, staring at nothing again, but this time in what looked more like shock than despair. Shock at having been found out? Or was he one of those murderers who managed to distance themselves from their crime, so that it was a shock suddenly to be made to register it again?

  ‘Mr Wilding, let’s have it over with,’ Slider resum
ed, quite kindly. ‘You strangled Zellah with a pair of tights you’d brought from home for the purpose. You did it for the best possible motives – to save her from what you saw as a life of degradation, sin and vice, which would have endangered her immortal soul.’

  ‘You don’t believe that? You don’t really believe that?’ Wilding said, screwing up his face in what looked like pain. ‘That I would kill what I loved the most?’

  ‘To save what you loved most. The world was taking her away from you, corrupting her, ruining her. This way, you could keep her for ever, as she was – yours, and yours alone.’ Wilding only shook his head, slowly back and forth in a goaded manner, as if trying to avoid blows coming at him in slow motion. ‘Perhaps you didn’t really think in the end you could do it. But she told you something, as you sat in the car. She told you something that made it clear you were at the last resort.’

  ‘She told me something.’ Was it a question, or was he just repeating the words? Slider couldn’t tell.

  ‘She told you about the baby.’ He watched closely for reaction. ‘She told you she was pregnant.’

  It came – the reaction – after a measurable pause; and the flesh of the big, exhausted face cringed as from a blow. He stared, and then he screwed up his eyes, and put his fists to his cheeks, and his lower lip dropped and trembled. ‘No,’ he said, as one pleading with a torturer. ‘No. Please, no. You’re making it up. She wasn’t. Please!’

  ‘Zellah was two months pregnant,’ Slider said.

  After a long moment, the next words – with steel under them – were, ‘Who did it? Who did that to her? Was it that Carmichael boy? I will kill him! I swear I will kill him!’

  And with sadness, Slider decided that he hadn’t known about the pregnancy, and he was rather sorry to have been the one to let that particular cat out of the bag.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Atherton said as they went back upstairs, ‘he’s still the best suspect. He didn’t have to know she was pregnant for the rest to work.’ He counted the points off. ‘He admits he knew she’d been seeing Carmichael. He admits suspecting her of being on the slippery slope to damnation. He admits he followed her. He lied to us about it and can’t give any good reason why.’