Blood Sinister (31 page)

‘He went into the bathroom to shower, and he threw the used condom into the waste-paper basket in there,’ she recited tonelessly. ‘I saw him do it before he shut the door. He never put them down the lavatory. He said it blocked it up. The basket has a bin-liner in it. When he’d washed and changed he went downstairs without a word, and I lay there in bed, looking at that bin. I could just see it, inside the bathroom door.’

‘So you went and got the condom out again.’

She nodded slowly. ‘It came to me all at once, the whole plan. I thought I’d kill her and then put his semen in her so that there was no way he could deny he’d been with her. I had a little plastic syringe I’d got from the vet years ago for giving the cat his medicine. I used that to get the semen out. I put a pair of tights in my pocket, and took the key and walked round there.’

‘Go on. What time did you get there?’

‘About half past eight, I suppose. I don’t know exactly. I went
to the door first and listened, and heard the voices inside. So I knew he was still there. I went and stood across the road where I could see the house and waited. It was then I started to calm down. I realised I couldn’t do it. You can think of killing someone, you can want to, but when you actually face them alive – you can’t really, can you? I wanted her dead, but I’m not that ruthless. So I was going to give it up and go home, when the door opened and I saw him come out.’

‘Saw who come out?’ Slider asked quickly.

‘Josh, of course.’ Her voice hardened. ‘Seeing him come out started it all up again. I imagined them in there together, talking, laughing, making love. I wondered how many other times he must have gone to her without telling me. I could just see them, laughing about me and how easy I was to fool. I
hated
him then.’ She stopped abruptly.

‘So what did you do?’ Slider prompted.

‘I waited a long time to make sure he’d really gone, then I went across and let myself in quietly. Crept into the sitting room. And there she was, sitting in the chair, dead. It was so horrible! I can’t tell you.’

She stopped for a bit, trembling, leaking tears, while she wound herself up for the rest. Slider waited, patient as nemesis, the awful sympathy that invites confession.

‘I realised, you see, that I’d been living with a murderer. I’ve been living with him ever since. Can you imagine what that’s been like? Every day, wondering whether he’d come home and do the same thing to me. I kept seeing her in my mind’s eye – her face all swollen, that mark round her neck … If he did that to her, what might he do to me? When I heard you coming just now, I thought it was him, come to get me.’

‘I see,’ Slider said.

‘That’s why in the end I went through with the rest of the plan. I thought if I just left her like that he’d never be caught. I knew he was clever. He’d get out of it somehow.’

‘You could have told us what you knew,’ Swilley said.

Noni had forgotten she was there. She looked at her blankly and then said, ‘How could I? He’d have found out and killed me. And what if you hadn’t believed me? It would be just my word against his. So I did the rest of it, to make sure he got caught. It was horrible, horrible – I can’t tell you! And
now you’ve let him go! Why did you arrest him and then let him go?’

‘Go on with your story,’ Slider said. ‘What happened next?’

She hunched her shoulders, pressing her clenched fists against her breastbone in a defensive pose. ‘I thought I should die. In that room with her, looking like that. He must have done it with his tie, I suppose. And she was still warm.’ She closed her eyes and swallowed, and her throat clicked. ‘He’d done it only minutes before. She’d been alive only minutes before, and now she was dead. I’d never seen a dead body before. I think it made me a little bit mad. Otherwise I couldn’t have—’ She shuddered.

‘Tell me,’ said Slider.

‘I dragged her over to the bed. She was so heavy, I had a terrible job getting her up onto it. That must be when I hurt my back. Then I took her clothes off – just the bottom ones. Tied her arms to the bed rail. And put – put the semen in her with the syringe.’ She met Swilley’s gaze. ‘I had to make sure he was caught – and it didn’t matter to her any more. And I threw the condom into the loo. No-one but me would know he didn’t do that. I almost flushed it away – reflex reaction – before I stopped myself. Stupid.’ She shook her head.

Slider’s mind was reeling. ‘That’s when you left the fingermark,’ he said. All the brain-ache this woman had given them! ‘But don’t you realise, if he had done it using a condom, there wouldn’t be any semen in her?’

She looked blank. ‘No,’ she said faintly. ‘I never even thought of that. Stupid of me.’

‘I suppose you didn’t do badly for a first attempt,’ said a grim Swilley. ‘Did you wipe your finger-marks off everything else before you left?’

‘I didn’t touch anything else. I was very careful. I pulled my sleeve over my hand to open the door on the way out.’

Slider pulled himself together. ‘Is this the truth you’ve told me now?’

‘The truth,’ she said, out of the blackness where she watched the endless reel of her own private X film: the appalling thing she had found; horror and guilt at what she had been prepared to do; horror and fear at discovering her husband had done it; the week she had spent living with it, with him, and wondering what was going to happen next.

‘Do you wear contact lenses, Mrs Prentiss?’ Slider asked.

She lifted her eyes to him, faintly surprised. ‘No. I have glasses for driving, but I don’t wear them otherwise.’

‘You’re short-sighted, then?’

‘Only a little.’

‘You were watching the house from across the road, and it was dark, and the street lamps aren’t very bright in Eltham Road. You saw a man come out of the house that you thought was your husband, but it wasn’t. No, I mean it. By the time you reached the house your husband was some distance away, in someone else’s house. We have witnesses.’

‘It was him. I saw him.’

‘No. Your husband didn’t kill Phoebe Agnew. He has an alibi. The person you saw come out of the flat was only someone who looked like him,’ said Slider with awful pity.

She was silent a long moment as it sank in. ‘Oh, dear God, what have I done?’

‘What you’ve done’, Slider said, ‘is to interfere with the scene of a crime and seriously impede our investigation, while attempting to incriminate your husband for something he didn’t do. Perverting the course of justice is a grave criminal offence for which the maximum penalty is ten years’ imprisonment.’

Mrs Prentiss stared as another layer of desperate realisation was uncovered in her mind. ‘I was so sure it was him,’ she whispered. And then, ‘What happens now?’

‘You’ll have to come with us to the station and make a complete statement. After that we’ll decide whether charges will be laid against you,’ Slider said. Swilley glanced at him, noting his distracted tone of voice. He was going through the motions here, but his mind was already galloping off, trying to work out the next step. If it wasn’t Prentiss and it wasn’t Mrs Prentiss, who the hell was it? They weren’t just back at square one, they hadn’t even got the board out of the toy cupboard yet.

‘Damn and blast,’ said the Syrup, quite mildly, all things considered. ‘That’s what comes of working weekends.’

‘Swilley’s taking her statement now,’ Slider said. ‘As far as charging her’s concerned, I think she’s pretty near the edge already—’

‘Yes, well, that’s not your decision to make,’ Porson said sharply. ‘Perverting the course is a very serious matter indeed, and not something to exercise leniency over. Besides, we’ve already got the Home Secretary in a right two-and-eight about Josh Prentiss and Giles Freeman. And this is a government that likes to be seen as above repute. Caesar’s wife and all that. They don’t want any more scandal.’

‘I doubt whether charging Prentiss’s wife with trying to stick him with the murder will absolutely kill all scandal stone dead, sir.’

‘Don’t be satirical, Slider. In your position, you can’t afford it. We’re a week into the investigation and what have we got to show for it? You’ve gone at Prentiss like a bull at a china gate, and now we’re left with egg all over the carpet and a hostile press praying for our blood! We’ve got off lightly so far, but the Sundays have had all week to sharpen their pens, and they’ll have the knives out for us all right. So you’d better have some plan of action up your sleeve, or there’s going to be some pretty derisory comments made higher up the echelon, I can tell you.’

Slider tried not to shrug. What else could he have done but follow up the obvious leads? But bosses had to yell at you: they had bigger bosses upon their backs to bite ’em. ‘Well, we know that there was someone else there on the Thursday,’ he began, ‘because of the finger-marks—’

‘Oh, thank you very much!’ Porson barked. ‘An insightive comment, given that we know she didn’t strangle herself! Is that what I gave up my afternoon’s golf for?’

Porson played golf? Slider stared at him absently, wondering whether he wore a cap, and how he kept the rug on on windy days. Porson, fortunately, did not note the direction of the stare, only that it was blank. ‘Yes, well, you look as if you could do with a bit of time off yourself,’ he said more kindly. ‘You’re played out, laddie. When you’ve finished with Mrs Prentiss, you’d better go home. Give the old grey matter a rest. Have a shit, a shave and a shower and come up with some new lines to follow up.’ His eyes followed Slider to the door, and he added, ‘We can still hope for something on Wordley. I’d really enjoy nailing that sod.’

‘I’ll see what I can do, sir,’ Slider promised.

Joanna had a rehearsal and concert at Milton Keynes on the Sunday, which was almost just as well, since he had some heavy-duty thinking to do. He was a long way down when the phone rang, and it took him a while to surface and get out to the hall to answer it.

‘Bill? Chrise me, laddie, I thought you weren’t going to answer. Asleep over the Sundays, were you?’

‘Oh, hello, Nutty.’ It was Nicholls, the uniform sergeant on duty. ‘No, I was thinking, that’s all. Took me a while to realise the phone was ringing. What’s up?’

‘We just had a phone call from Piers Prentiss. He had a bit of information for you. Didn’t sound like much, but he seemed nervous as hell, so I thought I’d mebbe pass it on straight away.’

‘You never know what might be important,’ Slider said. ‘What did he have for me?’

‘He said he’d just remembered it – though I suspect he’d been a wee while working out whether or not to pass it on. But he said that while he was on the phone to your murder victim on the evil day itself – is this making sense?’

‘Yes, go on.’

‘Okay. While he was on the phone to her, he heard something in the background – in her flat, d’ye see? It was a pager going off.’

‘Is that it?’ Slider said after a pause.

‘That’s it, chum. Any use?’

‘I don’t know. You say he sounded nervous?’

‘Aye, ahuh. Wettin’ himself.’

‘Well, then, evidently he thought it was important, though I can’t quite see why for the moment. Unless he recognised the particular bleep.’

‘Or he heard something else he hasn’t coughed up yet,’ Nicholls suggested.

‘Yes. I’ll give him a ring and ask. Well, thanks, Nutty. All serene down there?’

‘Quiet as a church.’

Slider rang off, went to look up Piers Prentiss’s number, and dialled. There was no answer. Slider was a little surprised – he’d have expected an answering machine. He rang Nicholls, and asked him to get Piers to ring him direct on his mobile, should he be in contact again.

As soon as he put the phone down, it rang again. This time it was Irene.

‘Oh, God, I’m sorry. I was supposed to arrange something with you and the kids for the weekend,’ he remembered.

‘It’s all right,’ she said resignedly. ‘I didn’t tell them it might be on because I guessed it wouldn’t be.’

‘I’m really sorry. It’s this case—’

‘It’s always a case.
You’re
a case, Bill Slider! I sometimes think the Job is all there is to you. Take it away and you just wouldn’t be there at all.’

It was too close to home, this comment. He thought of Joanna going to Amsterdam without him. ‘I think you’re right. Maybe I should give it up.’

She wasn’t used to him agreeing with her. Even now she didn’t want to hurt him. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean it. You’re a good copper, and it’s important work.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said glumly. ‘The Job’s not like it used to be. And I start wondering whether there isn’t more to life than this. I’ve always given you and the kids a raw deal. You’ve always come second to it.’

‘No,’ she said, defending him against himself. ‘Maybe it wasn’t always a bed of roses, but your job put food on the table, that’s what matters.’

He smiled to himself. ‘You’re a very traditional woman,
aren’t you? There are things a husband does and things a wife does.’

‘Well, I happen to think men and women were made that way, that’s all, and these hard career women cause more trouble than they know. If they stayed home and cooked for their men and their children, the world might be a better place. There might not be so much crime to keep you working weekends.’