Blood Sinister (35 page)

‘Yes, they—’ Her eyes widened. ‘There, now, you were right, I have remembered something that was different. The kitchen door was closed – the one between the kitchen and the rest of the house. That was always left open, but this morning when I went in it was closed.’ She looked apologetic. ‘I noticed it and didn’t notice it, if you know what I mean. I mean, until you know something’s important, you sort of dismiss it from your mind, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I know exactly what you mean,’ Slider said. ‘One last
thing, that photograph that went missing, the previous time we came to see Piers – did it ever turn up?’

Her eyes widened. ‘No, it didn’t, and that was odd, because he thought I’d moved it, but I certainly hadn’t. I thought maybe it had fallen down behind something, but I looked when I was cleaning and didn’t find it. So where it went is a mystery.’

When they had left her, Atherton said, ‘What was that about the photograph? Was it important?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Slider said. ‘I’m just punting. Anything could be anything.’

‘You don’t know what’s important until you know what’s important,’ Atherton agreed. ‘So what do you think happened?’

‘I suppose the murderer called on him last night and persuaded him to go over to the shop for some reason. Knocked him down, strangled him, and then went back to the house for something, using the keys from his pocket to let himself in and lock everything up after him. And shoved the dogs in the kitchen and shut the door while he looked for whatever it was.’

‘Or maybe’, Atherton said, ‘he met Piers at the house, and shut the kitchen door before they went to the shop together. That way he could come back in the front without disturbing them.’

‘It’s possible,’ Slider said, ‘though he’d run more risk of being seen going in that way.’

‘But I wonder why he left the shop lights on?’

‘Oversight, probably. Or maybe he’d been careful not to touch anything, and didn’t want to leave prints on the light switches. He could have let himself out with the key without having to touch the door, you see.’

‘But then if he went to the house to rummage round he’d have had to have gloves, wouldn’t he?’

‘Well, we don’t know that he
did
rummage round,’ Slider said. ‘He might have taken the keys just to let himself out and lock the shop, and the kitchen door being closed was just a fluke and not related to anything. Which way’s the incident room, do you suppose?’

‘I’d bet that way. Want to thank Mr Heaveysides?’

‘That, and to see if they’ll let us have a rummage of our own through Piers’s papers. Though I doubt whether it will
reveal anything. I wish I knew what was going on,’ he said sadly. ‘This maniac has killed two people now, and it would be nice to know if anyone else is in the firing line before he gets to them.’

There was the familiar blue-and-white barrier tape boxing off the cottage and antiques shop and the road and pavement in front of them, and a small crowd of the usual sort – shapeless women in C&A macs and headscarves, slovenly unemployed youths in trainers and scrub-headed ten-year-old truants astride mountain bikes of fabulous expense.

As Slider and Atherton were admitted through the barrier and walked towards the front door, Slider was surprised to hear his name called with some urgency.

‘Mr Slider! Over here!’

It was Peter Medmenham, gripping the tape and staring at him with the urgency of a pointer. He looked out of place against the grimy background in his neat charcoal grey overcoat and yellow wool muffler. His shiny little feet were set in the gutter of the mud-streaked road, and a coating of fine mist droplets made his blue-white hair look dingy grey.

Slider went over to him. ‘How did you get here?’

‘The police telephoned Josh, and he called me right away, to let me know,’ he said. ‘I had to come.’ He hadn’t put on any make-up, and the cold had brought out the network of fine thread veins, red over the blue of his cheeks. He looked pinched and old. ‘I should have been with him,’ he said starkly. ‘He phoned me yesterday. He’s hardly seen anything of his new friend. I think he was lonely. But I wouldn’t go. Pride, you see. And now he’s—’

‘I’m sorry,’ Slider said, and he really, really was.

Medmenham shook the sympathy away. ‘My own fault. They’re saying it was a break-in. Is that right?’ His eyes appealed, but for what, Slider didn’t know. There was no comfort he could give this man one way or the other.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

Medmenham swallowed, reaching for words. ‘I wonder – if you can ask for me. I can’t get anyone to listen. His things – photographs, for instance. Just something of his to keep. If I could go in, just for a moment—?’

‘I’m afraid that’s not possible. But all his things will be released to his brother eventually. Why don’t you ask him? I’m sure he’d let you have something.’

Medmenham shook his head again, as if Slider had said something hopelessly naive. ‘It’s awful to be kept out like this. Like a stranger. I should have been with him. It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been there.’

‘I must go,’ Slider said. He turned away, and Medmenham’s voice, lifted a little, followed him like a sibylline pronouncement on the damp air.

‘He’d have left him soon, you know, the new one. Dropped him. It wouldn’t have lasted.’

Slider glanced back from the door, and he was standing there at the barrier, as still as only an actor or a soldier can; small and upright, staring into the distance, the bright dab of pure colour at his throat marking him out from the surrounding browns, greys and sludges. He was as unlike as possible the rest of the crowd, the real natives of this place and this event. Some of them were looking at him, with curiosity and faint hostility, like sparrows just about to start pecking an escaped budgerigar.

It was fortunate that Slider was still at the house when the call came through from Shepherd’s Bush that a Mr Henry Banks wanted to meet him in a pub in Sudbury, because it was only about twenty-five miles from there, straight through on the A131. If he had started off back to London he’d have been going in the opposite direction.

There was Atherton to deal with, but one of the local boys offered to drop him at the railway station, and the trains from Chelmsford were frequent and fast. Atherton gave him a curious look as he left: it wasn’t often that Slider did anything Atherton didn’t know about. But Slider said it was a meeting with a snout of his – which was almost the truth – and a man’s snout was sacrosanct, so he couldn’t very well ask any more.

It was a slow drive, with the afternoon pootling traffic clogging
up the roads: elderly Cambridges and Metros driven by old men in hats who could only just see over the wheel; cheap hatchbacks with rusty bumpers and the back door secured with string, driven by red-faced men who looked as if they might well have a pig or a crate of chickens in the passenger seat. They all drove at forty-five miles an hour in the exact centre of the lane and never looked in their rear-view mirrors, so it was impossible to pass them.

There was that melancholy feeling of all comfort ending that you only get towards dusk in the countryside in winter. The sky was pinkish along the horizon, the bare trees looked chilly, and here and there a lone rook flapped slowly home, straight as the crow flies. Loneliness breathed up from the brown furrows and the scattered, crouched houses. The oncoming dark seemed a menace to flee. You felt you had to get indoors as quickly as possible.

He thought of his own childhood home, the dank cottage with its garden full of cabbages and brussels sprouts and the drain in the kitchen that smelled of tea leaves. Suddenly he was ten again, and coming home across the fields, his feet weighted with mud and his cold legs aching so he could hardly get along, and the night mist beginning to be exhaled from the black water in the field drains. But indoors, if he could only get there, would be lights, and the furry, comfortable warmth of paraffin heaters, and Mum in the kitchen, where a mum always ought to be, getting tea. Women and food: how they locked on to your heart, taking it so young that if you had ever been properly loved and nurtured, you could never quite untangle them again. And did you ever, ever get over losing your mum? It seemed absurd after so long, and at his age, to be seized with such a yearning to go home; but she was gone, beyond reach, and a grown man wasn’t allowed to feel like this.

The bricks and street lights of Sudbury came as a relief. It had been a pretty town, though like everywhere else now it had its rash of ugly little new houses creeping out over the outlying fields like psoriasis. It was years since he had been here, but he remembered his way about all right, as a pub man does, navigating from inn sign to inn sign. The Rose and Crown was one of those tiny beamed cottages, long and low with diamond-pane windows, sunk slightly below the pavement level,
that look as if they’ve shrunk together with age, like little old women. He pushed open the oak door – probably five hundred years old, and how many unthinking hands had pushed it open in that time? – and stepped into the parlour. It had a red carpet and red velvet banquettes and beams everywhere, a game machine flashing its lights in a corner like someone humming to himself, and at one end a glorious log fire, just getting into its stride. There were two customers sitting on stools at the bar. One was talking to the landlord, who was obviously an old friend; the other was at the far end, near the fire, reading a newspaper.

‘Afternoon,’ said the landlord pleasantly. ‘What can I get you?’ His friend looked round as well, and half smiled; the reader didn’t look up from his paper.

‘Afternoon. A pint of Adnams, please,’ Slider said, and drifted, as though of no purpose, down the bar, to station himself between the other two customers, but closer to the newspaper man.

The pint came. The landlord made a remark or two about the weather, looking at Slider keenly with copper’s eyes, as though assessing where he came from and what he was doing here, and then politely left him and went back to his friend. Slider turned his back on them casually to look at the fire, leaning his right elbow on the bar. The man with the paper looked up. The paper, Slider could see now, was a sporting one; the man was small, thin, and deeply lined in the face, with an all-weather complexion and hands like wooden clubs.

Slider met his eyes and raised his eyebrows. The man nodded slightly. After a suitable pause, Slider said, ‘Might have a bit of snow before the weekend, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘C’n do with it,’ he said, in a voice faint and hoarse with a lifetime of fags. ‘Warm winter don’t kill the bugs.’ He had a Norfolk accent.

‘At least there haven’t been too many sporting fixtures cancelled, though.’

‘There’s always an upside and a downside.’ The little man up-ended his pint and Slider took his cue.

‘Get you another?’

‘Don’t mind if I do. Ta very much.’

When the landlord had refilled the glass and the little man had offered and lit a cigarette, they were licensed to talk without
drawing suspicion; though Slider had the uncomfortable feeling that the landlord had no illusions about why the stranger in the well-worn suit had suddenly turned up at his pub.

There was nothing in the least porcine about Piggy Banks – it was evidently just one of those inevitable nicknames, like Chalky White and Lofty Short. ‘You was wanting to know about Furlong Stud, then?’ he asked in due course. Another couple of customers had come in, and the landlord was further off. On his way down the bar he had also turned on the background music, a courtesy Slider could normally have done without, but useful now. Had he done it deliberately?

‘Yes,’ said Slider. He made a polite gesture towards his wallet pocket. ‘I expect you’ll have expenses to cover.’

Piggy slid his eyes away modestly. ‘Half a cent’ry’ll cover it,’ he said. ‘Tidy’s a mate of an old mate of mine who wants to do him a favour. Slip it me after so that lot don’t see.’ With a jerk of his head towards the rest of the population.

‘I don’t think there’s much the guv’nor doesn’t see,’ Slider said, feeling he ought to warn Banks that his cover might not be impenetrable.

‘He used to be one of your lot. Cozzer from down London. He’s all right. I know him and he knows me. Anyway, Furlong. It’s a scam, o’ course.’ He looked to see if Slider knew that.

‘I thought it must be. Do you know how?’

‘Ever heard of a horse called Hypericum?’

Slider shook his head. ‘I’m not a racing man.’

Banks didn’t seem to mind that. ‘Smashing colt. Got everything – blood, bone, and a heart as big as a house. Unbeaten as a two-year-old, won the Queen Anne Stakes at Ascot and the Prix Morny at three, and the Canadian International. He was a real engine. Second in the Guineas and would’ve had the Derby, but they over-raced him and he broke down. After that he was never really sound. When he was fit, he could beat anything, but he’d go all right for a while and then break down again.’

He took a drag on his fag and had a long, sustaining cough. ‘Anyway,’ he began again, breathlessly, ‘this codger Bill Carrington used to be Hypericum’s trainer. He loved that horse. When they decided to sell it, he couldn’t bear to see it go where it might not be well treated, so he bought it himself and left to set up his own place.’

‘Where did he get the money?’