Body Line (3 page)

‘You keep calling him the good doctor,’ Atherton said. ‘From the look of Doris here he’s more the original Dirty Doctor.’

Both had champagne glasses in their free hands, and the edge of a table covered in plates of fiddly food could be seen to one side. The background was a terrace at night, with a string of fancy lamps overhead, and the dots of light in the darkness behind them could have been any major city in the world, seen from a penthouse terrace. Corporate party of some kind, Slider was willing to bet, from their cheesy grins and the canapés.

Bailey removed them from the frames and handed them over, and as Slider was turning to go, said, ‘Oh! I nearly forgot! You’re going to love me for this.’ With a rabbit-and-hat air, he brought out from his pocket an evidence bag containing a mobile phone, and held it out to Slider with a grin. ‘Also in his jacket, in the dressing-room. I know how you love following up numbers.’

‘Terrific,’ Slider said. ‘Just what I wanted. If I weren’t wearing a mask I’d kiss you.’

‘I’m not that easy,’ said Bailey.

Slider left Atherton on site, and took Connolly with him to the hospital, a sort of consolation prize for having denied her the corpse. Besides, it was always as well to have a female on hand when interviewing a female. He scuttled in hunched mode through the icy wind to the car, and Connolly, who had been strolling in her warm tweed Withnail coat, had to run to keep up with him, a panther pursuing a crab.

‘What’s the girl’s name – do we know?’ he asked her as they turned out of Hofland Crescent into Masbro Road, realizing belatedly that he had never heard it mentioned.

‘Katrina Old. The ambulance paras asked her, and that’s what the owl ones remember – though they were in flitters, so they may have got it wrong.’

In the car, Connolly picked up the photo of the man with the girl. ‘That dress leaves everything to be desired. So this is your man Rogers?’ She studied the face. A bit Pierce Brosnan, if you squinted: forties, handsome, perma-tanned, going a bit soft; pleased with himself; expensive haircut just too young for him – unlike the female on his arm, who was a lot too young for him. ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘hasn’t
he
the face you’d never tire of slapping?’

Slider smiled to himself, turning into Blythe Road. He liked the way Connolly talked. ‘Little Katrina doesn’t think so,’ he said, nodding at the photograph.

‘Plastic Mary here? Is that her, so?’

‘Dunno. I’m assuming.’

Connolly studied the exposed cleavage again. ‘Convent girl, obviously,’ she murmured.

The rush-hour traffic had done its thing and he got through to Charing Cross hospital fairly easily. The stained concrete building, built in the worst of the brutalist style of the seventies, was depressing. The Victorians, he reflected, at least realized that illness is ugly enough anyway, and added curlicues and turrets and fancy brickwork to their hospitals for distraction.

They found the witness in a private room being watched over by PC Lawrence, a slight girl with transparent skin and the kind of thin fair hair that always slips out of its moorings. She looked to Slider altogether too frail to be a copper, but you couldn’t say that kind of thing now. At least Connolly, though not tall, had a muscular look about her and a sharp determination in her face. She and Lawrence had been friends in uniform. ‘Howya, Jillie,’ she greeted her.

‘’Lo, Reets,’ Lawrence replied laconically, lounging in her chair; then, seeing Slider, stood up sharply and said, ‘Sir,’ while a disastrously visible blush coursed through her see-through face. How had she ever got through Hendon, Slider wondered despairingly.

The witness’s name was in fact Catriona Aude; she was twenty-seven and lived in a shared flat in Putney. And she was not the blonde in the photograph. It showed a coarsening of the fibres, Slider thought, to display one woman’s photograph in your bedroom when you were furgling another. Or as Connolly put it indignantly, ‘He’d sicken you!’

‘Miss Aude,’ said Slider, ‘I am Detective Inspector Slider of Shepherd’s Bush police, and this is Detective Constable Connolly. Are you feeling up to answering a few questions?’

As Lawrence could have warned them – and in fact she did mention it afterwards – the difficulty was to stop her talking. They had given her a painkiller and something to calm her down, and for some physiological reason the combination had made her loquacious.

‘Oh no, I’m fine, I mean, I wasn’t really hurt, just a few bruises and I twisted my ankle when I landed but that’s all right now and my hands are a bit sore from the railings, the paint’s kind of flaky and sharp and I had to hang on for ages, I thought I was going to fall but I sort of froze, y’know? and then I couldn’t let go and my arms were nearly coming out of their sockets, I can’t tell you how much it hurt, I thought he was going to kill me, I thought I was going to die.’ Suddenly she set her fingers to her face and dragged it downwards into a Greek mask of tragedy, and behind them moaned, ‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. He’s dead, isn’t he?’

When not pulling her eyes down in imitation of a bloodhound, she was an attractive young woman, with brown eyes and long, thick brown hair with purple highlights, and the kind of spectacular frontal development that seemed to mark a definite taste on the part of the deceased doctor. She had a suspiciously even tan, and the remains of last night’s eye make-up had been spread around by sleep and perhaps the sweat of fear, but not, it seemed, by tears.

‘I can’t cry,’ she confided. ‘I want to cry, I really want to cry, but I can’t. I dunno why.’

‘It’ll be the pills they gave you,’ Connolly said comfortingly, and the young woman turned to her so readily that Slider took a back seat and let Connolly get on with it.

‘Really?’

‘Don’t worry, you’ll cry all right when they wear off. But it’s good you can’t cry now, because we need you to be calm, so’s you can tell us everything that happened. Every little thing you can remember. Are you up for that, Catriona?’

‘Cat. Everyone calls me Cat.’

‘Cat, so. Are you able for it? Because it’s very, very important you tell us everything while it’s fresh in your mind.’

Cat nodded helpfully. ‘I know. So you can catch him. I’ve seen the cop shows on the telly. But what if he comes back for me?’

‘The murderer? Do you know him?’

‘No. I mean I never saw him, not his face. But what if he finds out who I am and comes for me?’

‘Don’t worry a thing, we’ll mind you,’ Connolly said with huge, warm assurance. Even Slider felt himself relaxing. This girl was
good
. ‘Just start at the beginning and tell us all about you and Dr Rogers.’

‘David.’

‘Sure, David.’

‘I love that name, David, don’t you? It’s so upper. David Rogers. And it really suits him. He’s a real gentleman, d’you know what I mean? Like, lovely manners, opening doors and all that sort of thing.’

‘A real gent,’ Connolly said, thinking of
noblesse oblige
and the openly-displayed photo of the blonde. I bet he’s so posh he farts Paco Rabanne, she thought. Slider handed her the photo of the man by the boat, and gave her a nudging look. Right. Better get it over at the start. ‘Before we start, would you just have a look at this photo and tell me if it’s David, so we know we’re talking about the same person?’

Cat took it, looked, and her face screwed up as if a gnat had flown up her nose, though she remained dry thanks to the chemicals in her blood. But she started moaning, ‘David. Oh David. David. Oh God. Oh David,’ and it looked as though it would be a while before she was finished with the mantra. Slider settled in to wait it out, and quelled Connolly’s impatient movement with a look. You didn’t get to see the badger unless you were prepared to put in the time outside the hole.

TWO

Witless for the Prosecution

C
at Aude met David Rogers at Jiffies Club in Notting Hill.

‘You go there often?’ asked Connolly.

‘I work there.’

‘You’re a stripper?’

Cat was offended. ‘I’m a
dancer
. It’s a different thing altogether.’

‘A pole dancer?’

‘I suppose you think that’s easy. Well, it’s not. You have to be ballet-trained to do it properly. Anyway, I’m a featured artist, I’ll have you know. I have my own spot, and my own music and everything.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Connolly humbly.

Slider gave her a tiny nod of approval. This early on it was right to placate the girl. But he knew and Connolly knew – and presumably Cat Aude knew, featured dancer or not – that Jiffies was an expensive strip club where well-to-do men could go and look at titties without spoiling their reputation either for respectability or cool. There was a dress code (for the customers), the drinks were wildly expensive, and women were not allowed in free. It was all very reassuring. But it was the knockers they went for, not the ballet.

‘I’m Ceecee St Clair,’ the stripper went on. ‘That’s my professional name. I do two sets twice a week. It’s not my main job. I work for a publisher days, but you can’t afford rent in London on what they pay you, so I do Jiffies extra. The pay’s all right and you get nice tips as well. I could do more than two nights if I wanted but I don’t want to overexpose myself.’ Connolly managed to suppress a snort at that point. ‘I’m going to be an actress, you see,’ Ceecee St Clair concluded. ‘That’s why I use a professional name, to save my real name for acting. I’m going to be a serious actress, stage first and then go into movies when I’ve learnt my craft. You see, all my life I’ve dreamed—’

Slider didn’t want to get lost in the byways of the Judy Garland Story, and interrupted gently. ‘So how did you meet David Rogers?’

She didn’t seem to mind being redirected. ‘It was a couple of months ago. Between my sets I’m supposed to put on a nice dress and go out and talk to any customers who’re on their own. Put them at ease, sort of. Make sure they buy drinks. There’s no funny business,’ she added sharply, ‘so don’t you think it. The management are very strict about that.’

‘Of course,’ said Slider graciously, as though the thought had never crossed his mind.

‘Well, I’d seen David in there a few times,’ she went on, mollified. ‘He brought other men in – clients of his, I suppose. Lots of blokes did that. Usually it was foreigners they brought – Arabs and Chinese mostly. Entertaining them to get their business – drinks, nice meal, and a visit to a club. Anyway, this night, David came in alone. He was at a table on his own and he sort of caught my eye and nodded to me so I went over. He bought a bottle of champagne straight off – nothing mean about him – and we sat chatting, and I thought he was really nice, charming, you know, and well spoken. And lovely manners. When I had to go he stood up when I left the table. I mean, you can’t buy manners like that. And he was a fantastic listener.’

He’d need to be, Slider thought, but he didn’t say it.

‘I always wanted to go out with a doctor,’ Cat concluded.

‘He told you he was a doctor?’ Janey Mackers, Connolly thought, could this bloke be any more obvious?

‘First thing,’ she said proudly. ‘Said he was a doctor, but not NHS. Private medicine, that’s what he said. A consultant.’

‘What in?’ Slider asked.

‘Excuse me?’

‘What branch of medicine was he a consultant in?’

‘I told you,’ she said. ‘Private medicine.’ Slider let it go. ‘So when I had to go back for my second set he asked if I would join him for supper when I got off, and it went on from there. He took me to another club for supper – like I said, nice manners, he knew I wouldn’t want to eat where I worked. And everything was the best – champagne, whatever I wanted off the menu, tipped the doorman, taxis everywhere. And it was cash for everything. I like that in a man – no fiddling about with credit cards. Always paid in cash, David.’ A moist sigh.

‘And after the supper?’ Connolly prompted.

‘We went back to his place. Beautiful house – I could see he must be rolling in it. Full of lovely antiques and stuff. Nice clothes, all designer labels. The next day he said he’d like to see me again and I said yes.’

‘Was he married?’ Connolly asked.

‘Excuse me! What do you take me for? Of course he wasn’t married.’

‘He told you that, did he?’

Cat fixed her with a flat stare. ‘There’s no woman’s stuff in that house – not in the bedroom or the bathroom. There was no woman living there, I could see that right away.’

Fair point, Slider thought. She had more intelligence than he had credited her with. ‘We need to know, you see,’ he said to take the sting out of it, ‘who his next of kin was. Did he mention any relatives?’

‘We didn’t talk about that sort of thing. Well, to be honest, we didn’t do that much talking.’

‘So you’ve been seeing him for a couple of months?’ Connolly picked up after a beat.

‘Yes,’ she said; but then some impulse of honesty made her add, ‘Well, twice a week. On my Jiffies nights. He comes in for my last set and we go out for a meal and then back to his place.’ She seemed to think this sounded inadequate, and added defiantly, ‘But we were going to see more of each other. We were going to go away for a weekend to really get to know each other – that’s what he said – only we hadn’t fixed on the date yet.’ Her face crumpled. ‘Now I suppose it’ll never happen.’