Necrocrip (6 page)

On the mantelpiece was a cheap quartz carriage clock and a framed photograph of Slaughter himself, much younger, with his arm round an elderly woman, with a bungalow in the background. His dear old Mum, without a doubt, Slider thought. The mirror above the mantelpiece was perfectly plain, but around the walls were four framed, home-made pictures of ladies in crinoline dresses, fashioned out of silver-paper sweet wrappers. Slider shook his head in disbelief. He remembered the craze for making them, but it was too long ago for Slaughter to have experienced it. The Dear Old Mum must have given them to him.

Otherwise, Slaughter’s possessions were meagre, and all stored away neatly. There was nothing of interest except for the suitcase under the bed, which contained a stack of homosexual porn magazines, a red-spotted neckerchief, and a heavy leather belt so encrusted with metal studs it would have dragged any trousers it was attached to down to the knees with its sheer weight.

‘No collection of scalps,’ Atherton said sadly. ‘I was looking forward to seeing them pinned up around the walls like a stag’s revenge.’

‘No evidence of morbid obsessions at all,’ Slider concurred.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Atherton said, looking in a drawer. ‘It
is all far too tidy. He even folds his socks – now that’s morbid.’

‘There’s something odd about this room all the same,’ Slider said absently, letting his mind slip out of gear as he stared around.

‘How odd do you want it? What kind of a man irons his underpants?’

Slider got it at last. ‘There’s no reading matter of any kind. No books, newspapers, magazines—’

‘Except those under the bed.’

‘Well presumably they’re valued more for the illustrations than the text’

‘No
TV Times,’
Atherton acknowledged. ‘How does he know what’s on?’

‘No diary, letters, bills – nothing.’ Slider shook his head. ‘It’s perfectly possible to live a life without paperwork, of course, but it’s surely unusual?’

‘Nothing in writing. Caution, do you suppose?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s odd.’ Slider looked in the wardrobe. The clothes were neatly disposed and looked clean, with the exception of the two pairs of trainers which were, in deference to normal usage, grimy. ‘All this will have to be bagged and tested, but it doesn’t look as if any of them belonged to the victim.’

‘No sign that anyone’s been involved in an evening’s amateur butchery, either,’ Atherton began.

Slider put a warning hand on his arm. A slow footfall was coming up the stairs. They turned towards the open door. A middle-aged woman with permed and dyed black hair rose laboriously into view. She was wearing a green nylon overall with a yellow duster bulging out of one pocket, carpet slippers, and enamelled earrings in the shape of four-leaved clovers. She had a fag clamped in the corner of her mouth and one eye was screwed up against the ascending smoke. She also carried a pair of blue jeans over her arm.

She wheezed as she climbed, concentrating on the stairs, and didn’t notice them until she was almost on top of them. Then she started violently, let out a faint shriek, and clutched the jeans to her chest, teetering on the brink of the slippery stairs.

‘It’s all right,’ Slider said hastily, taking a step forward. Any further movement of alarm could prove fatal.

‘Who are you?’ she spluttered through the cigarette in her lips. ‘Dear Baby Jesus, you frightened me nearly to death, jumpin’ out on me like that!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Slider. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’ They showed their briefs, and she looked suspiciously from one to the other.

‘What are you doing in Ronnie’s room? How did you get in?’

‘With the key,’ Slider said, displaying it. ‘I take it you’re the housekeeper, Mrs—?’

‘Sullivan. Mrs Kathleen Sullivan and I’ve been housekeeper here for ten years, as anyone will tell you,’ she said emphatically, as though it were a character reference. ‘Ronnie Slaughter’s a nice boy, hard working and quiet. Don’t tell me he’s in trouble because I won’t believe you.’

‘We hope not. That’s what we’re trying to find out.’ He looked at the jeans over her arm. ‘Are those his?’

‘That’s right. He must have washed them in the bathroom and left them to dry. I was bringing them up for him. I’ve already done his room – not that there’s anything much to do, ever, for he’s the cleanest, neatest creature I ever saw, which is not natural in a man, let me tell you! I’ve been married to two of them, so I know what I’m talking about. Why the good Lord made men messy I don’t know, but that’s the way of it.’

‘Does he usually do his washing in the bathroom?’

‘He does not! I wouldn’t encourage it. He takes his little bit of a wash down to the launderette of a Sunday morning as a rule.’ She held the jeans up judicially before her. ‘It is queer,’ she acknowledged. ‘I suppose he must have spilt something on them. He seems to have got it out, anyway, whatever it was.’

Behind him, Atherton played a little fanfare on a trumpet. No, he didn’t really, that was just Slider’s imagination. He held out his hand.

‘May I?’ he said politely.

TUFNELL ARCENEAUX OF THE METROPOLITAN
Police Forensic Science Laboratory was a raw-boned giant of a man, half Scots, half French and half Swiss-German, as he said of himself. He had fair skin, pale blue eyes, and masses of thick, fuzzy blond hair which sprouted so vigorously from his visible orifices that his inevitable nickname of Tufty Arsehole was less speculative than it might otherwise have been. He had a booming voice, an enormous appetite for work, a new young wife, and eight children at the last count.

‘Bill!’ he cried in greeting. ‘How are you, my old dear? How are the essential juices?’

Slider held the receiver a little further from his ear. ‘Flowing, thanks Tufty. What’ve you got for me?’

‘I thought you’d like a preliminary report to be going on with.’

‘All contributions gratefully received.’

‘In the soup, eh?’ the earpiece howled. ‘Well, the blood in the shop is human all right. So you’re not looking for a mad pork-butcher after all.’

‘Good.’

‘We’ve typed it against the sample from the body, and we’ve got a pretty good match. About ninety per cent. Good enough for the Crown Prosecution Service, anyway. We’ll do the genetic thingummy on the tissue from the cutting machine, but you know how long that takes. One little old man with a bunsen burner in the lab of a girls’ secondary mod in Leicestershire. Be a week, I should
think. Still, I think you can reasonably assume that the body was cut up in the back room of the shop.’

‘That’s a relief. In all the best crime novels the corpse is never the corpse—’

‘And the suspect is never the suspect. Quite.’

‘Talking of the suspect, have you looked at the jeans?’

‘Yes, and we found a bloodstain on the front left side and at the top of the left leg. Human blood.’

‘I knew there must be something!’

‘The old copper’s instinct, eh? Well, we managed to get enough out of the inside of the seam to group it EAPBA, which is the same as the corpse.’

‘Halleluja!’

‘The bad news,’ Tufty roared sympathetically, ‘is that it’s also the same as one in four of the population at large. And, I’m afraid, his voice surged with regret, ‘it’s also the same as the suspect, as per samples, intimate, freely donated, innocence for the establishing of.’

‘Can’t you type it any more closely?’

‘Sorry, old mate. The sample just isn’t good enough. It was a bit washed out. But never mind,’ he subsided to a mere fortissimo, ‘something else will turn up. Always does. How are you getting on with the new man, by the way? Barrington?’

‘I don’t know yet. I’ve hardly come into contact with him –except for his memos. He seems to be suffering from AIDS.’

‘What?’

‘Accumulative Inter-office Document Syndrome.’

‘You’re going to hate him,’ Tufty promised in a confidential roar. ‘He’s dry, old dear, dry – no essential juices at all. You couldn’t get an intimate sample out of him with a hundred foot bore. In fact, hundred foot bore just about sums him up.’

‘How do you know him?’

‘I meet him at dinners all over the place. He’s one of Nature’s club men. A great Joiner. Belongs to just about everything – golf, cricket, rifles. All the backslappers too: Buffaloes, Rotary, Order of the Honourable Chipmunks –you name it.’

‘I’d sooner not,’ said Slider mildly.

‘Mind you,’ Tufty bellowed reasonably, ‘I’ve nothing against that kind of thing in theory. If a man wants to spend his weekends in the Function Room of the Runnymede Sheraton, lifting his trouser leg and swearing eternal loyalty to the Grand High Ferret of the Chasuble, that’s his business. But when it gets in the way of his profession, that’s another matter.’

‘So Barrington’s a Mason, is he?’

‘I never said a thing, old love. All that panic about Masons is pure paranoia anyway! I don’t believe for a minute that they sacrifice newborn babies and drink the blood in bizarre secret rituals. But a man can’t be too careful who his friends are. Need I say more?’

‘Well, yes, actually, you do,’ Slider said, mystified; but it was no use.

‘Said too much already! Anyway, I’ll send you the full report on the shop as soon as I can find a typist who can spell “immediate”. Cheerio, old mate! We must have a drink sometime.’

Atherton put his head round the door. ‘I’m off, Guv, unless you need me for anything else.’

‘No overtime for you?’

‘Not tonight. I’m cooking dinner for Polish. Three-mushroom terrine, noisettes of lamb with walnuts and gooseberries, and dark and white chocolate mousse.’

‘That should do it,’ Slider agreed. ‘For a dinner like that you could have me on the sofa.’

‘When does Joanna come back?’ Atherton followed the thought rather than the words.

‘Tomorrow. It’s been a long two weeks.’

‘Longer for her, I should think, doing the whole of North America in a fortnight.’

‘Be in early tomorrow.’

‘I will. Goodnight.’ The head withdrew.

‘Make notes!’ Slider called after it.

*

When he got home, the place was deserted. In some ways it was how he liked it best, though even at its best it never really felt like home. In the spotless kitchen he found a note pinned against the refrigerator door by a magnetic strawberry:
Cold meat and salad in the fridge. Please ring Mr Styles about the bath tap if you’re not going to do it.
Whatever happened to welcome home darling? he wondered. He opened the fridge and looked in. The salad was laid out on a plate with clingfilm over it: lettuce, green pepper, cucumber, tomato and cold lamb. He’d never liked cold lamb. He shut the fridge and wandered into the living-room.

Irene had been moving the furniture round again. He hated to come home and find things changed, but Joanna said it was a secondary sex characteristic, all men were like that. Something to do with the primitive territorial instinct: you couldn’t properly scent-mark things if they moved around from day to day.

He smiled at the memory of her telling him that (in The Bell and Crown at Strand-on-the-Green, it had been, ploughman’s and a pint of Fullers, watching and wondering at the cormorants diving for fish in the Thames: the last time he had seen her before she went away) and approached Irene’s latest proud acquisition. Her desire to have a conservatory had, of course, arisen from the fact that Marilyn Cripps had one – though hers was Victorian and original to the house. The installation had cost more than Slider had been eager to spend, but he had been unable to think of a convincing reason to refuse it, especially given the elephant of guilt he could always see out of the corner of his eye whenever he was with his wife.

So there it was, gleaming white pvc, octagonal, double-glazed, with black-and-white-tile effect Cushionfloor, and Sanderson print curtains all round – ‘So we can entertain in here at night,’ Irene had explained when he baulked at the extra cost. The material seemed unnaturally expensive to him, though to be fair Irene had made the curtains up herself and done a beautiful job of it, thermal lining, contrasting piping, pelmets, tie-backs and all. But that was only the beginning: next there had to be special conservatory furniture – a bamboo sofa and chairs with cushions to
match the curtains, and a glass-topped coffee table just for starters. More would undoubtedly follow – she had already hinted at an indoor fountain.

‘You want it nice now we’ve got it, don’t you?’ she had said in wounded tones when Slider protested mildly about the outlay. He thought it had looked nice completely empty, and Matthew had confided in a rare moment of masculine sympathy that it would be perfect for a three-quarter-size snooker table he had seen advertised in a Superman comic his friend Simon had lent him. But Kate, who was growing up horribly fast, had been on her mother’s side, and was already promising to make vol-au-vent cases, which she had just learned at school, for the inaugural cocktail party.

Slider went through it and out into the garden: an oblong of grass with a path up one side and a rather drab collection of shrubs round the other two; a paved patio with two half-barrel tubs planted with red geraniums, blue lobelia and white alyssum. He felt another pang of guilt. The garden had always been his responsibility, and he liked gardening, but he had found less and less time to do anything about it, and of late years Irene had taken over the function. As a result, anything that was complicated or involved a lot of work had been quietly eliminated. It looked like her garden now, not his – and whose fault was that?

Standing brooding like a heron, he remembered the garden of his childhood home, the rows and rows of vegetables looking so ugly in the rain (why did he always remember the vegetable garden in the rain?) and the ranks of shaggy chrysanthemums, the fruit trees and the pale rambling rose down the bottom by the potting shed, the hollyhocks which had been his mother’s favourites and which were always blighted with some disease or other, chocolate-spot or rust or whatever it was called.

Now that
was
a garden! It smelled like a garden, too, of earth and rot and manure; full of birds and slugs and earwigs; the dank potting-shed a haven of mouldy sacks, cobwebs and woodlice. This present garden had no smell, no wildlife, no natural chaos. It was just an oblong of tidiness, bland and sterile. He stared at it with a sense of
loss. He didn’t belong. He had been away too long, so that even when he was here the place rejected him. Where were they all, anyway? They no longer even bothered to tell him where they were going, though Irene must have been expecting him back or she wouldn’t have laid out the salad.