Death Watch (13 page)
Dickson played his trouser maracas. ‘How’s your case proceeding?’
‘With all the smoothness of a bull rhinoceros being eased through a Chinese laundry press’ would have been the honest answer. Slider rejected it, however, in favour of ‘We’ve got some promising lines of investigation to follow up, sir.’
Dickson turned and surveyed him long and hard. He almost seemed to be debating whether to continue. The uncertainty was more surprising than worrying to Slider, whose conscience was clean: he met the gaze patiently, and with faint enquiry.
At last Dickson sighed, extricated his hands with some difficulty, put them on his desk, and leaned on them. ‘You’re a good man, Bill,’ he said, frighteningly. ‘I wish you’d taken that promotion.’
‘You know why I didn’t,’ Slider said.
‘I
do. And, off the record, I don’t blame you. But it’s not regulation behaviour. Makes you look like a subversive. A bloody pinko conchie collaborator leftie long-hair agent provocateur, to coin some phrases.
Not sound’
‘Oh.’ There didn’t seem to be much more to say to that.
‘Not to be promoted isn’t a sin. To refuse to be promoted – that’s different.’ He sat down, with an air of giving up an unequal struggle. ‘There’s a new spirit abroad, Bill. I don’t have to tell you that.
Accelerated promotion
– need I say more?’
It was a scheme by which graduates could move more quickly up the ranks – aimed, quite laudably, at attracting able, educated men into the service, but always controversial, and deeply resented by the old-style coppers who believed everyone should learn the trade by serving before the mast. Slider, as befitted a man born under the blight of Libra, was in two minds about it. The service needed thinking men; but nothing could replace the experience gained on the streets.
‘Someone doesn’t like you, Bill. And on a completely different subject, I’ve had Detective Chief Superintendent Head on the blower.’
‘I see, sir.’
‘He wants to know why we’re still treating the Neal case as murder. Says Neal was in bad financial trouble, multiple woman trouble, maybe being blackmailed, and was a known drinker. To his mind that adds up to misadventure or suicide – he’s not particular within a point or two. We haven’t got a suspect of any sort, or even the smell of a motive, and the only witness we’ve got is an old bag lady who’s as mad as a tricycle.’
Slider gazed deep into the poached and impenetrable eyes. Multiple woman trouble? Blackmail? But they had only found that out today, and formal report hadn’t yet been made to Mr Head. ‘How does he know all the detail, sir?’
‘He wants it crashed, Bill,’ said Dickson imperviously. Slider said nothing, holding his gaze steadily. ‘Not everybody on your firm is as unambitious as you,’ Dickson
yielded at last. ‘And holding onto the ankles of the man who’s about to be shot from the cannon may be the best way of getting to the top of the tent, if you take my drift.’
Hunt, thought Slider. It’s got to be. Bloody Phil Hunt. Never trust a man who wears cutaway leather driving gloves in his car, he told himself bitterly. He must have found some excuse to call Head, and then allowed himself to be pumped.
‘What are you going to do, sir?’ Slider asked.
Dickson moved restlessly. ‘Ordinarily I’d tell anyone who tried to interfere with my team to get stuffed,’ he said. ‘But – and this is confidential—’
Slider nodded. More and more terrifying.
‘You’ve heard of the expression Required to Resign?’
Christ, not the old bull as well, Slider thought. A world without Dickson was hard to imagine.
‘Sir?’
Dickson made a sound of contempt. ‘Some people should read their history. “The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders.” You know who said that?’
‘No sir.’
‘Nor do I. All the same, these are tender times. Not the moment for heroics. This is when you sit it out, and await developments. Take a day at a time. So I want something on this Neal case, Bill, and I want it today. A suspect, a motive, a good witness, a decent amount of circumstantial – anything, so long as it’s convincing. The ball’s in the air, and I want no dropped catches, you comprendy?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘And for fucksake sort out your firm. This is not a John Le Carré novel.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘That’s all.’
Slider turned to go, but felt the restlessness behind him, even though Dickson didn’t move so much as a finger. With his hand on the doorknob he looked back at the ash-strewn, firebreathing mountain behind the desk. There was a great deal he’d have liked to say, about loyalty for one thing, and his own hatred of power-politics, and
the importance of the Job as against all considerations of career and status.
He sensed that there were things Dickson wanted to communicate; but even in his present approachable mood, he was not a person to whom you volunteered things on a personal theme. And if the skids really were under him, anything that even smacked of sympathy would surely bring about a violent eruption.
So Slider didn’t say anything; but Dickson met his eyes, and for a moment his seemed almost human. He drummed his thick fingers on his desk top.
‘Bill?’
‘Sir?’
‘You should think again about accepting that promotion.’ Slider opened his mouth to protest, and Dickson cut him off with a lift of the hand. ‘I know what you feel about it, but it’s only another half-step from DC I to Superintendent.’
Slider said patiently, ‘I don’t think I want to be a superintendent either, sir.’
Dickson smiled mirthlessly. ‘Then you’re more stupid than you look. The higher you are in this game, the harder it is to make you fall. If they’d been after you as long as they’ve been after me, believe me you’d be walking Fido round some bloody factory perimeter by now, with the
Daily Mail
in one pocket and a packet of cheese sandwiches in the other.’
‘Warning, sir? Is someone after me?’
‘You’re the type that some people will always want to take a pop at. Christ, you must know that by now. Take the bloody promotion.’
‘I’ll think about it, sir,’ Slider said, holding his gaze stubbornly, and it was Dickson who finally looked away.
‘Go on, bugger off,’ Dickson said, waving a dismissing hand; but he smiled as he said it.
‘I TOLD YOU I’D SEE you today,’ Slider said as they headed South.
‘An afternoon at the seaside,’ Joanna said admiringly. ‘I don’t know how you manage it.’
‘And not just any seaside, but your actual Brighton,’ he pointed out.
‘Yes,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I’m not too sure about the connotations, but I accept the invitation. And what shall I do while you work?’
‘You could lie on the beach, have a swim—’
‘At this time of year?’
‘I could leave you with the local CID – I know how much you like policemen.’
‘Well, I do as it happens. They’re very like musicians.’
‘I pass over the slur. Or you could wander round The Lanes—’
‘Oh yes! You know what a mug I am for antique shops. Who is it you’re going to see?’
‘Another of Neal’s secret harem, so it appears.’
‘The man had stamina,’ Joanna said, impressed. ‘I wonder when he found time to work.’
‘And afterwards, we can go for a meal somewhere. Would you like to go somewhere in Brighton? Or stop at a pub on the way home?’
‘What’s the local beer? Oh, Harveys, isn’t it? Pub then. I haven’t had a decent pint all week.’
‘Spoken like a true policeman.’
From what you’ve told me, there aren’t too many of us left.’
Slider smiled in self-mockery. ‘All policemen have always said that. It’s the old “nostalgia isn’t what it used to be” syndrome.’
‘But?’
‘But nothing.’ She looked at him. ‘Oh well,’ he yielded, ‘I’ve been having a chat with Dickson. There’s an element that’s out to get him.’
‘Get rid of him?’
Slider shrugged. ‘They’d try, but I doubt it would come to that. More likely a sideways move, into something non-operational – records or the training school or whatever. Slow death, for someone like him.’
‘But why do they want him out?’ Joanna asked. ‘I thought he was a good copper. You seem to think so, anyway.’
‘He is. I do. But he doesn’t fit in with the new image. He’s untidy. He does things his own way. He doesn’t automatically respect those in authority over him. He doesn’t mind his tongue.’
‘Yes, but what will they get him out
for?
I mean, what can they accuse him of?’
‘Drink’s always a good one. You know that it’s a disciplinary offence for a member of the Department ever to be drunk, on or off duty?’
‘No, I didn’t know. But you’ve told me before Dickson’s never the worse for it.’
‘True. They’d find it hard to prove he was actually drunk. But given the amount he drinks, he’d be hard put to it to prove he wasn’t. Or there’s poor results. Lack of discipline below him. Saying the wrong things to the media. There’s always a way, if they’re determined and you haven’t got the right connections.’
She thought about it. ‘Does that mean you’re in danger, too?’
He didn’t answer directly. ‘I hate politics,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t think they’ll get the better of Dickson, but the fact that they’re even trying makes me sick.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of that going on in the music world, too – the whizz-kids straight out of music college, trying to get rid of the older players. They think technique is all there is to music, and experience counts for nothing. And they think they’ve a God-given right to have a job – someone else’s if necessary.’
He glanced sideways at her, smiling. ‘Listen to us,’ he said. ‘ “Youngsters today—!” Of course old fogeys like us’d be bound to think that experience is more important than ability.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t always see the other side. It’s disconcerting,’ she complained. She laid a hand on his knee. ‘And in any case, I’ve always said it’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it.’
‘I’ll try and bear that in mind,’ he said.
Miss Catriona Young turned out to have the basement flat, but she had done her best not to live down to it. There were stark white walls and polished wood floors, the sort of Swedish-style bare blonde furniture that was never meant to be sat on, and a great deal of brass pierced-work which went with the smell of joss-sticks in the air and the beaded cushions lined up along the sofa, defying relaxation.
Miss Young was one of those tall, white-fleshed young women who favour long skirts and flat sandals, perhaps in an attempt not to look any taller. Her blouse was of the sort of fine Indian cotton you never have to iron, and over it she wore a short sleeveless jacket – which Slider would have called, rather shamefacedly, a bolero – made of embroidered black velvet with those tiny round mirrors sewn into the cloth. Her tough, gingery-fawn hair crinkled in parallel waves and hung down behind to her waist, held back by two brown hairslides, one over each ear. She had sandy eyelashes and fine freckles, and her face was full of character. Slider didn’t know what effect she had had on Neal, but she scared the hell out of him.
She also had a baby, of the surprised-looking sort, large
and pale, which was sitting on the floor in the middle of the sitting-room, playing with its toes, which were unusually long and looked slightly crooked, though he couldn’t quite see why. As he watched the baby raised a foot effortlessly to its mouth and sucked on it, staring at Slider with detached interest, like an early luncher at a Parisian street café watching the world go by.
‘I’ve only just got in,’ said Miss Young briskly. ‘Can you wait while I put him down? There’s some juice in the fridge if you like. I haven’t got anything stronger.’
She whipped the baby off the floor, and it soared upwards with the equanimity of one who, having had such a mother from birth, could find nothing much else disconcerting. Left alone, Slider wandered over to the bookshelves, on the principle that you could learn a lot very quickly about a person from the books they kept by them.
The shelves were low down, near the floor, and ran for an impressive distance along one wall. Bending double, he looked at the titles. A lot of foreign novels – Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Gide – and what looked like a full set of Dickens, along with George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the novels of Charlotte Brontë that weren’t
Jane Eyre.
Punishing reading, he thought: the mental equivalent at the end of a long day of’ Get on the floor and give me fifty’.
There were also a large number of non-fiction titles, about economics, statistics, basic law, and computers. Slider wondered why it was that books about computers were always made the wrong shape and size for bookshelves – contempt for the printed word, perhaps? Then came a green forest of the tall, slim spines of the Virago imprint, then Fay Weldon and Mary Wesley, and then serried ranks of detective fiction: P.D.James, Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell – the posh ones – along with Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and the Penguin reissues of the classic ‘thirties collection in those distinctive green-and-white jackets.
And finally, on the bottom shelf, tucked away in the corner and almost hidden by the fold of the drawn-back
curtains, fifteen volumes of the Pan van Thai collections of horror stories, so well-read that their spines were creased almost white. Slider straightened up, feeling nervous. Who in the world keeps their books in alphabetical order? The bookshelf, so they say, was the window on the soul. Perhaps he shouldn’t have come here alone.
‘Sorry to have kept you waiting,’ she said, making him jump. She had come back in on silent, sandalled feet, and stood in the middle of the room looking at him.
‘I was just looking at your books,’ he said, startled into foolishness, and then, feeling he couldn’t leave it at that, ‘You’re fond of detective stories.’
‘Yes. I find them relaxing – my equivalent of watching television. I’m sure they aren’t anything like real life, however,’ she added out of politeness to his calling. ‘Please sit down. Can I get you some juice?’
For some reason, ‘juice’ without any qualifier always struck him as vaguely indecent. ‘No thank you,’ Slider said. He lowered himself gingerly into a wood and canvas construction which looked like the illustration in an old scouting manual of some kind of extempore bathing equipment. The canvas part was of a shade between grey and beige so featureless as to defy even depression. What exotic name would today’s interior decorators give to that shade, he wondered? Spring Bandage, perhaps: or Hint of Webbing. Professional tip: for a really stylish effect, try picking out cornice, picture-rail and skirting-board in contrasting Truss Pink.
