‘Yes, please, if I may.’ They clothed up in the hall, and Care led him through towards the back. The house was just as Slider would have expected from the outside, spacious and well-pro-portioned, furnished and decorated with the sort of neutral ‘good taste’ you pay an interior decorator to have for you. The ‘antique’ furniture was too new and too well kept to be anything other than reproduction, though from the top end, and expensive. There were large formal arrangements of flowers here and there that Slider guessed were also brought in by a firm. It felt more like an exclusive hotel than a home – he couldn’t imagine anyone kicking off their shoes or laughing in a place like this. He almost felt sorry for David Regal.
The kitchen was huge, and so modern it hurt – every gadget known to man, lighting so concealed you’d need a map to find it, glassy black marble tops, and enough stainless steel to keep Sheffield going for a year. It was spotless, and looked as though no one had ever cooked in it. Judging by modern trends that could well be true: Slider had noted that, as a rule, the posher the kitchen, the less it was used.
The downstairs loo was off to one side of it, past a small lobby with a door to the utility room. ‘Loo’, in any case, was far too humble a term to apply to the spacious marble palace that contained WC, bidet, basin, vanity unit, mirrors, sofa, orchids, matching towels and a haunting fragrance of frangipani.
It was a place you would hesitate to sully even by washing your hands, so it was an outrage to all senses that it also contained a dead man, sprawled on his back on the floor. He was dressed in fine woollen slacks and a silk shirt with the top button undone, no tie, leather loafers with tassels. Slider guessed him to be about five foot nine or ten, no more, and probably in his late fifties; well preserved, and with a good figure. He had the sort of tan you had to go abroad for, silver hair beautifully cut, and his features were small and neat, almost boyish. The likeness to Richard Gere lay only in the colouring and general impression of handsomeness.
His eyes and mouth were a little open; his outflung left wrist had been deeply cut, and there was a pool of blood on the floor under it and his arm, staining the beautiful shirt under the shoulder and armpit where it had spread back. Near his right hand was a bloody kitchen knife, very sharp-looking.
Cameron, another Tyvek-clad ghost, looked up and said, ‘There you are! Jonny said you were coming. You know Jonny Care, do you? Your Islington counterpart and much beloved in his community.’ Care smirked shyly at this accolade. ‘I must say, as downstairs loos go this is a pleasure to work in. I was expecting to have to do gymnastics to work around the body. So, Bill, what do you think of this? Another bug for your collection, maybe?’
‘How can you be so cheerful on a Saturday?’ Slider countered.
‘All days are as one to the pure of heart. He’s been dead about twelve hours.’
‘Which makes it some time yesterday evening,’ said Slider. The wife was well covered, then.
‘First reaction?’ Freddie asked facetiously.
Slider stared, taking in the scene and the corpse. ‘You said it looked like suicide,’ he said to Care.
Care met his eyes. ‘Perhaps I should have said it looks as though it’s meant to look like suicide.’
Slider returned the look. ‘There’s not enough blood.’
‘Bingo,’ said Freddie. ‘He didn’t bleed out. To judge from his pupils, he’s taken rather a large dose of some narcotic or other. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we were to find it was the drug that killed him. The cutting isn’t post-mortem of course, or there’d be no blood to speak of. But I’d guess his heart gave out under the strain of the overdose before he’d managed to exsanguinate. And of course once the heart stopped, the bleeding would stop.’
Slider said, ‘In Corley’s case, it was phenobarbital.’
‘Could be the same. We won’t be able to tell until we’ve had a tox screen,’ said Freddie.
Slider looked at Care. ‘Phenobarbital administered in alcohol most probably. It dissolves readily and leaves no taste.’
‘There’s an empty glass in the sitting room,’ said Care. ‘Smells like vodka.’
‘What else?’ Freddie asked almost jovially. He was enjoying himself, like a prof egging on two bright pupils.
Slider looked carefully around and then worked his way backwards from the bathroom across the kitchen, with Care following. Beyond the kitchen was the sitting room, an informal area with a sofa, armchairs and coffee table, a built-in wall unit containing books, sound equipment and television, and a wood-burning stove screened, at this time of year, with another large flower arrangement. One side of the sofa bore a man-sized indentation in the cushions. On the table in front of it was a cut-glass tumbler with dregs of clear liquid in it, an untidily-folded newspaper, and the TV remote. The glow of a red light on the television itself showed it was on standby.
‘No note?’ Slider asked.
‘We haven’t found one yet,’ said Care. He almost seemed to be enjoying himself, too.
‘He sat here, drinking his vodka and tonic. Do you know what was on television?’
‘It’s on BBC One. There was the news at ten. After that, an action film. Before it, a programme about soldiers in Afghanistan,’ said Care. ‘I looked it up.’
Slider smiled inwardly. Good for you, he thought. ‘So he might have been half-watching while he read the paper. He finishes his drink, throws the paper down, walks into the bathroom, and cuts his wrist with the knife he’s collected from the kitchen on his way.’
‘There is one missing from the knife rack. Matching handles,’ said Care.
‘Not forgetting to turn off the TV first,’ Cameron called. ‘Is it me, or is that deeply unconvincing?’
Slider went back over the ground. ‘He was dragged. You can see the marks of his heels, here on the carpet, where the pile lies differently. And in the kitchen, here, and here where they had to swing round for the doorway.’ They were faint, the scuffs, just dullnesses in the polish of the kitchen floor’s surface. Slider straightened up and tilted his head. ‘The light would have been different – artificial, not daylight – and at a different angle. They probably couldn’t have seen the marks then.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Care.
‘They gave him the drugged vodka, and when he fell unconscious, dragged him into the bathroom, tidied up his clothes, and cut his wrist to make it look like suicide.’
‘Then washed up the glass and poured another vodka and tonic into it for the show,’ said Care.
‘But the glass would then have had no fingermarks on it,’ said Slider.
‘They emptied it again and took it into the bathroom, wrapping his right hand round it for verisimilitude before replacing it on the table.’
Slider agreed with all that.
‘But what I don’t understand is, why bother?’ Care went on. ‘Why not cut his wrist right here where he sat on the sofa?’
‘Instinct, perhaps. Or maybe they thought it looked more natural in the loo. Perhaps Regal was a clean and tidy sort of person who wouldn’t have liked to stain the carpets and upholstery, even in death,’ Slider said.
‘In your Corley murder, deceased was actually in the bath, wasn’t he?’ Care commented.
‘Yes,’ said Slider. ‘But presumably the murderer was not on intimate enough terms with Regal to persuade him to take a bath.’ He pondered a little, pursuing a fugitive thought.
Care interrupted his brown study. ‘I’m going to have another word with the wife. My super will probably kill me for offering, but would you like to come?’
Slider came back with a start. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, very much. Thank you.’
Sylvia Scott, or Sylvia Regal, was in a different sitting room, which had French windows on to a terrace. There were chandeliers, brocade upholstery and Chinese carpets, an Adam fireplace, repro Georgian side tables with bronzes of horses and dogs on them, oil paintings in heavy gold frames on the walls. This was the formal drawing room and it felt chilly
and unused, though it was still hot outside.
Mrs Regal was in her late thirties or early forties, but looked younger, her face remarkably line-free, as though she had never had a care in her life. There seemed something faintly familiar about her that Slider could not put his finger on. She had bronze-gold hair in a jaw-length bob, so well cut that it moved all-of-a-piece, like an elastic bell, and if she was not beautiful she was so well presented and made up you would never notice. She was wearing grey slacks and a white blouse, patent shoes, a heavy gold choker and gold earrings, all very smart and restrained apart from a massive diamond engagement ring against her wedding ring. Despite her long drive and the subsequent horrors, she seemed both fresh and composed, her make-up unsmudged, no hair out of place.
She was sitting on a slippery-looking brocade sofa and there was a brandy glass on the onyx coffee table in front of her. A woman detective stood stolidly behind and to one side of her. It was the one who had brought Slider coffee in Care’s office – what had he called her? Sara, that was it. She smiled a deferential greeting at Slider as he came in.
The woman looked up at Slider too, with a quick frown, quickly smoothed away. You didn’t stay line-free by engaging facial expressions willy-nilly. It was to Care she addressed herself. ‘How long is this going to go on?’
‘Is what, ma’am?’
‘How long must I sit here? I’ve had a long journey. I would like to go to my room, change out of these clothes, have a shower. In any case, I have a meeting this afternoon at the RSC and a fitting this evening that I must attend, or my whole schedule will be thrown out.’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ Care said, ‘but there are always procedures attendant upon a death which have to be observed.’
She stared at him as if trying to read his thoughts. ‘Look, you might as well know right away, David’s and my marriage was a matter of form only. It suited us both better to stay married than to divorce, but he went his way and I went mine, and it’s more years than I can remember since either of us cared what the other did. We were as good as strangers. So I don’t see any point in playing the hypocrite and pretending to feel deep grief, when I don’t. I’m sorry he’s dead, and I’m sorry he felt so badly about something he wanted to take his own life. But that’s all.’
‘Why do you think he might have wanted to kill himself?’ Care slipped the question in.
She looked exasperated. ‘I don’t know. Haven’t I just told you, we went our own ways? I’ve no idea what he was getting up to recently.’
Was she telling the literal truth, Slider wondered, or was she trying to distance herself from anything they had found out about Regal?
‘When you came home this morning, you would naturally go straight to your bedroom, wouldn’t you?’ Care asked neutrally.
‘Yes, as I should like to do now,’ she said with irritation.
‘Then how did you come to find him before showering and changing?’
That made her pause an instant. But she recovered quickly. ‘I knew he was at home because his car was there, so I just popped along to say, “Hello, I’m back.” I didn’t say we weren’t friends. I saw the glass and the newspaper, went into the kitchen, and saw him through the open door.’
Slider could feel Care not saying something at that point. There was something about that statement that was wrong.
‘Was he in money trouble?’ Care continued.
‘Good heavens, no! David’s very well off.’
‘Romantic entanglements?’
She paused, considering, and sighed. ‘I suppose you’ll probe and probe until you find out. David liked boys. Not little boys,’ she added hastily. ‘I mean young men. And his affaires, as I suppose one must call them, have always tended to be rather emotional. I believe that’s usually the case with that sort of liaison. But I don’t know if he was seeing anyone lately.’
‘How long had he been – interested in young men?’
‘Always. He was always like that.’
‘Then why did you marry him?’
She drew a short, exasperated sort of breath, as if she didn’t like being questioned about her private life. But she continued very fluidly, almost as if she had thought it out, or had had to explain the same thing before. ‘I didn’t know to begin with, of course. I met him when I was stage managing a play he was backing. I was very young, he was very handsome, and charming, very much a grown-up. All the other men I knew were so callow beside David. He took me out to restaurants and clubs. It was all so sophisticated. I fell for him, and when he asked me to marry him, I couldn’t believe my luck. But the other thing was always there. Looking back, I could see the hints, but at the time I was too young and innocent to realize. But he was good to me, very generous. He set me up in business. Gradually the other thing – the boy thing – took over more and more, and the feelings I’d had for him died. One day I came home and he had a young man with him – in our bed. There was a terrific row. I said I was leaving him. He begged me not to. In the end, we worked it out to suit us both. We bought this house where we could have separate suites. He promised to be more discreet, and in return he helped and supported my career. It’s been a happy arrangement, and I have no regrets. I’m only sorry he was so disturbed underneath that he had to take his own life. If only he’d spoken to me about it, perhaps I could have talked him out of it. I shall always blame myself for not realizing.’ She sighed.
Slider glanced at Care, aware that he had a good rapport with him, for someone he’d only just met. Care met his eye for a fraction of a second, and they almost exchanged thoughts.
Certainly Care said just what Slider would have. ‘There’s no need to feel guilty,’ he said to Mrs Regal. ‘You see, he didn’t take his own life.’
She jerked her head up, like a deer in the forest hearing a rifle being cocked. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that we don’t believe your husband killed himself. He was murdered.’
For a moment she could not speak. Perhaps it was the normal reaction of any normal person faced with the ‘m’ word. Or perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps there was something else there. Slider saw now that under her appearance of calm there was a strained blankness, an air of listening to sounds beyond human reach. One of her hands was trembling very faintly, and she placed the other over it. It could have been the effect of natural shock at the death of her husband. Or – was her alibi really as perfect as it sounded?
She recovered herself. ‘Nonsense! What are you saying? You’ve no reason to think that, none at all. I don’t believe it for a minute. Who on earth would want to kill David?’
‘That’s what we hope you can help us with,’ Care said smoothly. ‘I believe you know more about it than you are letting on.’
‘But I tell you I don’t know anything about his life,’ she cried. ‘How many more times? And I wasn’t even here. I was hundreds of miles away in York. I wasn’t here!’
‘Then Detective Superintendent Keyes turned up and threw me out,’ Slider said, at the end of his exposition. ‘Poor old Care’s in for a wigging. Mr Porson said he couldn’t talk Keyes round, no matter how hard he flirted. Showed his legs and everything. Keyes said he’d liaise with us over anything they discover that’s pertinent to our investigation, but he won’t let us actually be there.’
‘That’s a bummer,’ Atherton said.
‘Well, yes and no. It’s not our case, and that’s as long as it’s broad. We’ve got enough on our hands as it is.’
‘Yes, but it’s got to be part of the same sequence, don’t you think?’
‘I do think,’ said Slider. ‘For a start, there was no sign of a break-in. Either Regal let the murderer in, or they knew the keypad code and had a door key. Either way, I think we can assume it was someone he knew, because again, there was no sign of a struggle.’
‘And he knew whoever it was well enough to accept a drink from them.’
‘And there’s another thing,’ Slider said. ‘Care walked me to the door on my ignomini
ous exit, specifically to tell me that all the security cameras – the gate, front door and inside the house – had been turned off, and the tapes in the recorders were new and unused.’
‘Why not just wipe them?’ Atherton wondered.
‘Wiping takes time. Quicker just to replace them and take the old ones away,’ said Slider.
‘But that doesn’t fit so well with trying to pretend it was suicide,’ Atherton said.
‘Not if you’re suspicious to start with. But there’s no way of knowing how long the cameras had been off, and you can’t prove Regal didn’t do it himself – realized the tapes were full at some point and replaced them, and forgot to turn the cameras on again. There was one thing Mrs Regal said, though, that might trip her up. She said she knew when she got home that Regal was in, because his car was there. But his car was in the garage, and she parked hers outside, so how would she know? She couldn’t have seen it without opening the garage door, and why would she do that and then not put her car in as well?’
‘But from what you say, the wife was the one person who couldn’t have done it.’
‘True. But it doesn’t mean she didn’t know about it,’ said Slider, rubbing his hand backwards through his hair.
‘A paid assassin?’ Atherton said, with a pained air.
‘Or just someone she’s in league with.’ He stood up. ‘We’d better get the rest of them up to speed. And give McLaren another set of security cameras to add into the mix. If there are any near to the Regal house.’
Atherton snorted. ‘Any security cameras in Highgate? Are there any legs in the Folies Bergère?’
‘I really wouldn’t know,’ said Slider with dignity.
‘So if David Regal isn’t the big cheese, who is?’ Mackay asked in resentful tones.
‘Whoever it is,’ Atherton said, ‘the murders are getting more panicky. Guthrie was good – could have been an accident, can’t prove otherwise. Corley was good – they’d have got away with it if they’d realized he was left-handed. But then Flynn was just a slash-and-grab.’
Blood Never Dies Page 26
