Death Watch (19 page)

For a moment a number of possibilities seemed to be being debated inside Dave Collins’s grey head, not all of which would have entailed Atherton’s getting to draw his pension one day. Atherton felt the slight quickening of his pulses, caught that faint prickly whiff of adrenalin on the
air, which always reminded him of the first time as a child he had seen the lion-tamer’s act at the circus. You
knew,
really, that the lions wouldn’t eat the tamer; and yet there was always the distant, intriguing possibility …

‘Come in,’ said Collins at last, stepping backwards. He retreated a few steps up the passage and opened the door to the room at the front of the house, standing just beyond it so that there was no alternative route for Atherton. ‘In here.’ It was the sitting-room, and had the same stiffness and cold smell of unuse it would have had in Victorian times. Atherton entered obediently, and Collins turned his head over his shoulder to yell simply, ‘Pet! Make some tea!’ Then he shut the door behind him, closing himself and Atherton in the cage together.

‘Well?’ Collins said unhelpfully.

‘I want to talk to you about your friend Dick Neal, Mr Collins,’ said Atherton. ‘I suppose you must have heard about his death by now?’

Collins took the time to gesture Atherton to sit, and sat down himself on the chair opposite. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Pet told me. Died in a hotel fire, didn’t he?’

‘Mr Collins, you may have been one of the last people to see Dick Neal alive. It would be very helpful if you’d tell me exactly what happened on Sunday evening.’ Collins made a non-committal shrugging movement, and Atherton went on, ‘I understand you met in the Shamrock Club. Was that by arrangement?’

An extra degree of weariness seemed to enter Collins’s face. ‘You’ve been down there asking questions, have you?’ he said. ‘Well then, you know all about it, don’t you?’

‘I know you and Mr Neal had a quarrel—’

‘Oh God!’ It was an appeal both weary and angry. Collins laid his hands on his knees and leaned forward, searching Atherton’s face. ‘You’re not going to try and make something out of that, are you? Look, I’ll tell you the absolute truth, and I hope to God you believe me, because you don’t look stupid. Dick and me were pals. I was probably his oldest friend – maybe his only real friend, because he didn’t have the knack of keeping them, I’ll tell
you that for nothing! And yes, we did have a bit of a barney down the club, but it wasn’t serious. We often used to argue. It didn’t mean anything.’

‘Yes, someone else has said that,’ Atherton said soothingly. A brief but enormous relief flickered through Collins’s face, which Atherton noted with interest. Just tell me exactly what happened on Sunday.’

‘All right.’ He seemed to have decided to take the plunge. His words became more fluent, and the deadness went out of his voice as he talked. ‘Dick was supposed to meet me Sunday night at The Wellington to give me back some money he owed me—’

‘How much?’

‘Hundred quid. He borrowed if off me nearly three weeks before, but every time I asked for it back he made some excuse. Well, a century may not be a lot to you, but it was to me, and Dick knew it. That’s what I mean by not keeping his friends. He wasn’t a bad bloke, just careless. He earned twice or three times what I did,
and
he didn’t have a bitch of an ex-wife and two kids sucking his blood, but he kept me waiting for that cash week after week.’

‘So you arranged this meeting with him – how?’

‘I telephoned him at his office Friday morning, asked him when I was going to see the money. Then it was more excuses – he couldn’t meet me Friday because of work, he couldn’t meet me Saturday because he was seeing some old friend he hadn’t seen for yonks, he couldn’t meet me Sunday because he was going away up north. Handing out all the usual old toffee. I wasn’t having it. I told him he had to meet me Sunday night, latest, because I had to have the money for Monday for a particular reason.’

‘Your wife’s birthday,’ Atherton suggested.

Collins looked surprised, and then a spot of colour flamed in his cheeks. ‘Right. You know all about it, I see. Yes, I wanted to buy my wife a present. Anything wrong with that?’

‘Nothing at all,’ Atherton said soothingly, wondering at the reaction. ‘Please go on.’

Collins looked at him suspiciously for a moment, and
then continued. ‘Well, I arranged to meet him in The Wellington at half past seven, but he never showed. I rang his house, but his wife answered, so I put the phone down. I knew he’d gone, because if he was in he never let her touch the phone. So then I started looking for him. I knew the places he drank. And when I finally ran him down in the Shamrock, having a whale of a time with some tart on his arm, it turns out he’d forgotten all about our arrangement.’

His face darkened with anger at the memory. ‘Not so much as an apology. “Come and have a drink, join the party,” he says. “Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” he says. So I said, not on my hundred quid you don’t, or you’ll die tonight, never mind tomorrow.’

He heard himself, stopped short, and then eyed Atherton defiantly.

‘All right, I said that, but it’s just a figure of speech. I didn’t mean anything by it. When I heard what happened to him – 1 could have bitten my tongue out. But I’m telling you, because I suppose some other bugger will if I don’t.’

‘It’s all right. Go on,’ Atherton said. ‘Just tell me what happened, in your own words.’

Collins stared a moment, then shrugged. ‘Then he says he hasn’t got it, just like that. So that’s how it started. We had a row, and I called him some things I’d been thinking up over the past three weeks. To see him sitting there with his arm round that tart, spending money on her like water, while Charlie Muggins here sat around in The Wellington waiting for him, nursing a pint because that’s all I had the cash for! And then when he said he couldn’t pay me back—!’

‘You could have killed him,’ Atherton finished for him.

Collins drooped. ‘Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘All right, I’ve got a temper, I don’t deny it, but I wouldn’t hurt a fly. And Dick Neal was my friend. He was a selfish, thoughtless bastard, but he was still my friend. I’d never have laid a finger on him.’

Atherton nodded non-committally. ‘What happened afterwards? You were told to leave the bar, weren’t you?’

‘Yeah, we were chucked out. But it was all over by then anyway. We’d been shouting at each other, and then we suddenly realised what idiots we were making of ourselves, and started to calm down. By the time we got up into the street, we were more or less back to normal. So I said, why not come back to my place for a drink or two—’

‘What time would that be?’

‘I don’t know, about ten, half past ten. I didn’t look at my watch.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, Dick said okay, and he’d go and fetch Helen – this bird. I’d forgotten about her – she pissed off to the loo when we started the shouting match – so I said something like, “Oh, can’t you get rid of her?” I wanted a quiet drink, you see, just the two of us. But he put on this silly smile and said no he couldn’t get rid of her, and said some other stupid stuff, and to cap—’

‘What stupid stuff? What did he say exactly?’

Collins seemed to be embarrassed by it. ‘He said, well, he said “I’ll never leave her as long as I live”. And this was some piece of skirt he’d only picked up five minutes ago! Then he calmly proposed bringing her back to my place. Said she’d be company for Pet. Well, I just lost my temper with him then. I wasn’t having him talk about my wife like that. I – I called him a few names, and stormed off. And that’s the last I saw of him.’

‘You’re sure you didn’t take a swing at him as well?’

‘I told you, I wouldn’t hurt a fly. It was just that he made me mad, talking about Pet like that when—’

‘When what?’

‘Nothing,’ Collins said sullenly.

‘But you took a swing at your wife when you got home that evening, didn’t you? She had the remains of a pretty nice black eye when I called yesterday. Isn’t the reason you got mad at Neal that you knew he was having an affair with your wife?’

Collins came to his feet so quickly that Atherton was rapidly revising his previous assessment from weight training to boxing, when the door opened and Pet Collins
came in with a tray of teacups. Perfect timing, he thought with relief – or had she been listening at the door? She looked apprehensively from one to the other, and the cups chattered in the saucers as she stood in the doorway. She had renewed her makeup while the kettle was boiling, but her eyes were red and swollen, as was the end of her nose.

Atherton got up, too, and took the tray from her. ‘Thank you, Mrs Collins,’ he said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘Do you want biscuits?’ she asked, trying for a normal tone of voice and getting it half right.

‘Not for me, thanks,’ Atherton said, blandly social.

‘All right, Pet, wait in the kitchen,’ Collins said sharply with a jerk of his head, and she went with automatic obedience. Atherton kept hold of the tea tray, on the principle that no man could hit a chap thus encumbered, and after a moment Collins sat down again, and slumped back in his chair wearily. ‘Bloody tea and biscuits,’ he said. ‘Like a bloody church social.’

Atherton put down the tray on the coffee table and sat too, took a cup, and sipped, watching Collins carefully. After deep thought, he seemed to rouse himself. He looked tired and strained, with the pallor of someone who has been forced to stay awake for much too long on the trot.

‘If you know about Dick and Pet, you probably know all you need to know about what sort of a man he was,’ he said. ‘We were mates; I’d have done anything for him, and he knew it, but still he couldn’t resist the chance to bang my wife. I think sometimes he had a bit missing up here.’ He tapped his temple significantly. ‘He was mad for women. Couldn’t keep away from them. It was like a disease with him. If it moved, he’d have it. He didn’t seem to care about the risk, or who got hurt.’

‘Did he know you knew?’

Collins shook his head with weary disgust. ‘There was no point. It wouldn’t have stopped him. It would just have meant I’d’ve had to have a scene with him, and I didn’t want that. Anyway, I don’t doubt it was as much Pet as him, in this case. She’s – well, I won’t go into that. But Dick
– since I first met him, he seemed to have this thing about women. It was almost like he couldn’t help himself. And it didn’t even seem to make him happy.’

Atherton remembered what Catriona Young had said to Slider, about Dick Neal’s possible secret past. ‘Was there some tragedy in his past life that might have made him that way?’

Collins brooded. ‘What, like some woman did the dirt on him, you mean? It’s an idea. I don’t know. He never spoke about his private life. I met him – what – sixteen years ago, just after he married Betty, and we worked together in the same firm for eight years. But he never talked about his past or his childhood or anything like that.’ He mused. ‘He was a funny man in some ways. Secretive. He didn’t like inviting anyone back to his house, either. In all the years I’ve known him I’ve only been there three or four times, and that was only like to pick him up to go on somewhere else. You’d almost think he was ashamed of something. I felt sorry for Betty, poor cow. He practically kept her in purdah.’

Atherton felt they had gone down an unhelpful cul-de-sac. He sipped some more tea and said, ‘Can we go back to Sunday night? I’d like you to tell me what you did when you left Neal.’

Collins sighed, and then seemed to want to get it over with. ‘I walked around a bit, in a temper, and then I decided I needed to get drunk. So I started on a bit of a club-crawl.’

‘Really? I thought you didn’t have any money? You say you could only afford one pint in The Wellington.’

‘Dick gave me some. When we were out in the street, and we’d calmed down a bit, he said he didn’t have the hundred, but he could let me have a score to be going on with. So I took it.’

‘I see. And where did you go?’

He looked awkward. ‘I don’t really remember. I wandered around a bit. I was pretty pissed by the time I got home.’

‘What time did you get home?’

‘About midnight, I suppose. Pet will tell you.’

Atherton smiled lethally. ‘She told me yesterday she didn’t know when you came in. She took a sleeping pill, and when she woke in the morning you’d been and gone, taking your bag with you.’

Collins reddened. ‘She was lying. She was awake all right.’

‘Why would she lie?’

‘I don’t know.’ He looked uneasy, as well he might. ‘Maybe because she was pissed off with me for not buying her a present for her stupid birthday, the silly cow. I don’t know. You know women. They’ll say anything.’

‘You had a quarrel with her about money when you got in, didn’t you? Is that when you hit her?’

‘I didn’t hit her,’ he said, his anger breaking suddenly. ‘She must have fallen over or walked into something. She always was clumsy.’

‘But you did have a quarrel?’

‘She went on at me for blowing the twenty Dick gave me. I told her I’d spend it how I liked, seeing it was my money, and – oh Christ, you know how these things go!’

Not from first hand, thank God, Atherton thought. Another excellent reason not to get married. ‘Did you quarrel about her and Dick?’

‘I’ve told you, I never told her I knew about that. What was the point?’

‘That was very forgiving of you.’

‘If it had been anyone except Dick—’ He shut his mouth and stared broodingly at the floor. Atherton felt an unwelcome twinge of sympathy. Probably he hadn’t mentioned it because he was afraid of having his inadequacy thrown back in his face. What a hell of a life the man had been leading. All the same …

‘All right, so you had a quarrel, and then what?’

‘I went to bed. And the next morning I packed my bag and went to Exeter. On business. I’ve been in the west country all week.’ He watched Atherton’s face warily. ‘You can check it all with Pet. And with my firm, and my customers.’

‘You had business down there the whole week?’

He hesitated. ‘No, only Tuesday and Wednesday. But I was pissed off with everything here. I didn’t want to come back right away.’