Necrocrip (25 page)

‘Yes, I know who you are. I’m glad you’ve called me. We’ve got a lot to talk about. Do you want to give me your number in case we get cut off?’

‘I’m not that daft,’ he said. ‘I told Suzanne – and I suppose she told you – that I’m in hiding.’

‘Yes, so she said.’

‘Well I’m not about to tell you my number then, am I? Talk sense.’

‘So why did you call me?’

‘I saw it in the newspaper this morning that Ronnie had topped himself. Is that true?’

‘It’s true that he’s dead,’ Slider said.

‘What, you mean it wasn’t suicide?’ Leman’s comprehension was suspiciously quick. Slider didn’t immediately answer him, and the voice rose in manifest fear. ‘For Chrissake tell me! Was he murdered?’

‘It’s possible,’ Slider said. ‘His throat was cut. We don’t know if it was suicide or murder.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Leman muttered. ‘Oh Jesus. Listen, I’ve got to tell you – I suppose you think I did it, but I didn’t. I’ve been here all the time, ever since Wednesday—’

‘Where’s here?’

‘Don’t make me laugh. Listen! I didn’t kill Ronnie. My orders were to pick him up at the chip shop, take him for a drink and go home with him, that’s all.’

‘Why did you have to do that?’

‘The bloke I work for doesn’t give you reasons, and you don’t ask. You just do what you’re told.’

Sounds like Barrington, Slider thought wryly. ‘And who is he?’

‘I’m not telling you his name. D’you think I’m daft? I shouldn’t even be phoning you, but I had to find out about Ronnie. I didn’t kill him, you know. I quite liked him in a way, old Ronnie, even if he was thick. He was all right. I never knew they were going to top him, poor old bastard. If I had—’

‘You wouldn’t have had anything to do with it?’ Slider hazarded.

Leman muttered something profane. ‘My boss – I’ve worked for him for a long time. There’s never been anything like this before.’

‘The night you went for a drink with Ronnie, there was a murder committed at the chip shop. What was your connection with that?’

‘Look, I didn’t phone you to answer your questions. I just did what I was told.’

‘But you knew about it, didn’t you? Why were you told to go into hiding?’

‘
I
don’t know! I never knew there were going to be bodies everywhere. That’s not my scene.’

‘So tell me who you were working for.’

‘I can’t. It’s not safe. I shouldn’t even be talking to you, only Suzanne told you about me, silly bitch. I told her not to tell anyone, but she had to go and open her big mouth.’

‘You can’t trust women,’ Slider said sympathetically.

‘You’re dead right. I wish I’d never – the thing is, you’ve got to keep away from Suzanne. My boss – he doesn’t know I’ve got a girlfriend. If he knew – well, he wouldn’t be too pleased. I wasn’t supposed to get mixed up with anyone while this was going on. So just keep away from her, all right?’

‘Do you think she’s in danger?’ Leman didn’t answer. ‘If you think she’s in danger you must tell us. We can protect her.’ There was an unidentifiable sound at the other end, and then the dialling tone.’

‘He’s rung off,’ Mackay said.

Atherton looked at Slider. ‘What was that last thing – that noise?’

Slider met his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’

‘It was a sort of glugging noise,’ Atherton said. ‘Like someone gargling.’

They waited. A minute later Beevers appeared waving a piece of paper like a short, hairy Anthony Eden. ‘Got it, Guv!’ he said in triumphant tones. ‘It’s an address in Hanwell.’

‘Let’s go!’ snapped Slider, jumping to his feet, snatching the paper from Beevers and thrusting it at Atherton. To Beevers, ‘You and Mackay, organise some uniform backup, fast as you can. Then get to Suzanne Edrich and stay with her.’

IT WAS A NARROW, DIRTY
, crowded road of Victorian terraced cottages, built before the motor-car was invented, choked with parked cars. The house itself was shabby and neglected, with filthy lace curtains at the windows, paint peeling off the door, rotting window frames, rubbish sacks propped against the mangy remains of a privet hedge. It was two storeys high, but built to such a small budget that the upstairs windows were almost within reach. In such houses Victorian working men had raised families of thirteen, and thought themselves blessed.

The front door was pushed to, but not latched. Atherton prodded it open cautiously with the end of a pencil, and they went in to an uncarpeted hall with the staircase straight ahead; cheap patterned wallpaper and brown paint. The two downstairs rooms were empty and unfurnished, but in the scullery at the back was a stained porcelain sink, encrusted gas stove, and a small table bearing dirty crockery and the evidence of take-away meals. It smelled of damp and old fried food.

‘Upstairs,’ said Slider. Upstairs was a bathroom, cleaner than the rest and smelling of soap, the bath still dropleted from recent use, a damp towel hanging up and a frill of dried lather on the bar of pink Camay. The front bedroom was empty. The back bedroom contained a single bed, a
cheap wardrobe, a small chest of drawers, an armchair, a stack of paperback books, a telephone, and Peter Leman. He was lying across the bed, his legs dangling over the far side, his hands flung back, his throat cut from ear to ear. Like Anne Boleyn, he had only had a little neck, and it had been cut right through to the bone. His eyes stared at the ceiling, wide and brown, dully shining like those of a stuffed deer in a country house trophy room.

‘Too late,’ said Slider expressionlessly.

In the small, stuffy room the halitus of fresh blood was sickening. It had soaked his white shirt and the bedclothes he lay on. There were even splashes on the wall where the last pumpings of his heart had flung it from the severed arteries. His flung-back left hand was minus all four fingers, which seemed to have been removed at the knuckle with a very sharp knife. In the centre of the palm of his right hand was a round, red mark like a small bruise.

On the floor beside the bed was a plastic mac, also bloody, and a pair of rubber gloves. The missing fingers they found just under the bed, where they had rolled, or been flung.

‘He had his back to the door. He was sitting looking out at the garden while he telephoned,’ said Atherton after a moment. ‘What a mug. And chummy crept in from behind, well protected against the splashing—’ Slider heard his dry throat click as he swallowed. ‘But why cut off the fingers? Unless he tried to grab the knife as it came round in front of him?’

The noise they had heard over the telephone, Slider thought, was the gurgle of Leman having his throat cut. If only he had telephoned sooner. Well, they could take the bug off Suzanne’s telephone now. That would ease the budget and please Mr Barrington. Except that they got further from a solution every day – further into the soup.

‘And then there were three,’ he said aloud. ‘You’d better go down and radio in from the car.’

Later, very late, in a dim corner of the moodily-lit Anglabangla Indian Restaurant – which had lately tried to shove its image upmarket by adding karahi to the menu and
landed its less sophisticated customers in the burns unit of Charing Cross hospital – Slider ordered Chicken Bhuna and Atherton the suspiciously-named Meat Vindaloo. They were both so hungry by then that they were quite likely to eat it when it came.

‘There’s something going on,’ Slider said, turning his lager glass round and round on the spot.

Atherton ate another papadum, much as a starving horse eats its bedding. ‘That much is obvious. But what?’

‘Everything seems to operate in a vacuum. Nothing leads to anything else – and yet it must all be connected, or why has any of it happened?’

‘Cheryl Makepeace found a finger in her chips. Ronnie Slaughter called us in. We found the rest of the body,’ Atherton mused. ‘Was he carried along by inevitability, or was he so thick he thought he could get away with it? Or was he, conversely, completely innocent?’

‘Or only comparatively completely innocent,’ Slider added. ‘He accepted the suggestion that the body was Peter Leman without too much strain on the credulity.’

‘Even while protesting that he didn’t kill him. Yes. And he was certainly with Leman that night. In this whole messy case, that’s the one thing we know for certain. But why?’

‘You heard Leman say he was told to make friends with Slaughter that night and go home with him. And he said he’d been in hiding ever since. I think we were meant to think that Slaughter had killed Leman. I think Slaughter was set up to take the fall.’

‘Someone would have been taking a lot of chances,’ Atherton said doubtfully.

‘Why? It convinced us, after all. It was only Suzanne blowing the gaff that spoiled it. And there again, it can’t be coincidence that someone has shut both of their mouths – Slaughter’s and Leman’s. Someone has something serious to hide.’

Atherton looked restless. ‘Ronnie could still have committed suicide, you know. Out of remorse or fear over the original murder – we don’t know he didn’t commit that. Or simply because everything was getting on top of him. He wasn’t the brightest person in the world, but he was sensitive.
Maybe he really couldn’t take any more. Maybe the suicide note was quite genuine.’

‘But then how do you explain the second note?’ Slider frowned. ‘The one Cate gave me, which looks like the same handwriting as the suicide note, subject to confirmation from the experts. Cate said he
saw
Ronnie write it, which is impossible.’

Atherton shrugged. ‘Reluctant though I am to credit anyone above the rank of inspector with any sense, Mr Barrington could be right about that. We’ve only got Mandy’s word that Ronnie was illiterate, and she could be lying, or mistaken. Or Ronnie could have lied to her, just pretended to be illiterate, for some reason—’

‘What reason?’ Slider said incredulously.

‘Cry for attention, maybe. An excuse to go to her room and sit with her, thigh to thigh, heads bent together over the same piece of paper. A poor, lonely guy – an ugly poor lonely guy – who has no friends and can’t afford a tart and simply wants a little human warmth and sympathy. So he pretends he can’t fill in his Community Charge form and takes it to the tarts to do for him.’

‘Except that they seemed quite willing to talk to him without excuses,’ Slider said. ‘And there was the fact that we found no reading or writing materials in his room at all. And do you really think that Ronnie was bright enough to act a part like that?’

‘He was acting a part all his life, wasn’t he, pretending not to be a ginger.’ Atherton dipped a fragment of papadum into the raita. ‘And look at the alternative. Did Colin Cate – an ex-copper, rich, smart, influential, sitter on committees and adviser to Parliamentary review bodies – did this man really troll up to Ronnie’s bedsit, slaughter him with his own hands, and fake that suicide note? And then when you came asking for a corroborative piece of handwriting, pop upstairs and write you another? Honestly, Bill, it just doesn’t seem likely to me. A man like that, assuming he wanted a bit of dirty biz done – and I don’t rule out the possibility of almost any human bean being crooked, with the exception of you and me – but a man like that would surely have paid someone else to do it.’

‘Maybe,’ Slider said. He took a draught of lager. ‘Maybe,’ he added, more doubtfully. ‘But the more partners you have in crime the more likely you are to be caught. The safest way is to do it yourself – as any copper or ex-copper knows.’

‘Well then,’ Atherton added relentlessly, ‘there’s the fact that the first time you met Cate, he said that Ronnie had written to him to apply for the job. Why would he lie about that, at that point?’

‘He could have been telling the truth then and lying later. Someone might have written that application for Ronnie.’

‘Besides, he’s got an alibi for the night in question.’

‘Only a guilty man needs an alibi.’

Atherton grinned. ‘You have got it bad.’

‘All right, what’s your theory?’ Slider asked, nettled.

‘You told me never to theorise ahead of my data,’ Atherton said piously.

‘No I didn’t, that was Sherlock Holmes. Just give me an explanation to keep me out of Colney Hatch for a few more hours, will you.’

‘I think I’ll wait until we find out more about Michael Lam. He’s my favourite for the dismembered corpse stakes.’

‘Talking of dismembered corpse steaks,’ Slider said, as the waiter came just at that moment with their food, and planked it down in front of them on two plates. No poncing about with heating apparatus at the Anglabangla. Atherton inserted a fork into his brown mess and discovered that Meat was really the only description for it. However, when he looked closely at it nothing looked back, and he reasoned that the heat of the vindaloo sauce would kill whatever it was, if it wasn’t already dead.

He had his own vision of the kitchens of the Anglabangla: six large buckets keeping warm, three of amorphous lumps labelled Chicken, Meat and Prawn, and three of curry sauce, labelled Hot, Medium and Mild. Whatever you ordered required only two swift movements of the ladle onto the plate. The rest of the twenty minutes between ordering and being served was sheer artistic embellishment on the part of the staff.

Slider transferred a forkful of medium hot lumps from his plate to his mouth and swallowed absently.

‘Well, I don’t care who the corpse is,’ he said finally. ‘I think Ronnie was murdered, and the three deaths are connected. And I think Cate has got to be in it somewhere.’

‘The King of the Chip Shops. You see him as a sort of Eminence Grease, do you?’

‘I don’t know if someone’s pulling his strings, or if he’s the puppetmaster. I’d be sorry to think an ex-copper could be involved in anything as stupid as multiple murder, but I do think Ronnie was illiterate, and Cate lied about it to make us believe in the suicide. And Leman was killed because he was in a position to finger somebody. But who, and what the hell it’s all about, I can’t imagine. It must be something big to be worth all those bodies.’

They ate in silence for a while. Then Slider sighed.