Death Watch (29 page)

‘You changed your job about that time, didn’t you?’

‘I wanted to get away. Everything reminded me of Gil and what had happened. I wanted a complete change. So I applied for a new post, and when it came through, I sold the house and we moved here. Eleanor changed schools at the same time, and I think that did her good, though she wouldn’t admit it at the time. She said she hated the new school, but she did very well there.’

‘Which school was it?’

‘Burlington Danes, in Wood Lane.’

‘Ah yes.’

‘She got four A levels – chemistry, physics, biology and maths,’ she said proudly. ‘Three “A”s and a “B”, and in those days grades still meant something.’

‘Bright girl.’

‘She always was. Gil would have been proud of her. She was always a daddy’s girl, but after he died, and we moved here – well, it seemed to bring us closer together. She used to drive in with me every day – I’d drop her off at the corner of Du Cane Road – and that time together in the morning we talked more than at any other time in our lives. There’s something about being in a car.’

‘Yes. It gets the mind working, doesn’t it?’ Slider said. ‘What did you talk about?’

‘Oh, I don’t remember. Everything. My work, her progress at school, things in general. It was very precious,’ she added sadly.

‘Did you keep in touch with any of the others on Red Watch after you moved?’

‘Only poor Cookie – that was Jim Sears. Well, he kept in touch with me rather than vice versa. I think he felt particularly bad about what happened. He used to haunt the place at first, trying to make amends. Actually he was very useful, putting up shelves and things. It was nice for me to have a man about the place while I was settling in. But after a while I got tired of finding him under my feet,
and hinted him away, and he gradually stopped coming. And of course that tedious Barry Lister phoned me up every now and then. He’s the sort who’s always last to leave a party, never knows when it’s time to go.’

‘None of the others?’

She shook her head indifferently. They scattered to the four winds when the station closed.’

‘But Dick Neal was only just round the corner from you, wasn’t he? Living and working in Hammersmith.’

It came perilously close to being the question that would stop her talking. ‘What are you suggesting?’ she asked coldly. ‘That I moved here because of him? Because you’re very wide of the mark, I assure you.’

‘I didn’t mean to suggest anything in particular,’ he said soothingly. ‘I just wondered whether your closeness survived the tragedy. I mean, once you were over your period of mourning, you’d be free to marry again, wouldn’t you?’

The formality of his wording seemed to please her. ‘Yes, and of course that occurred to him,’ she said with a faint smile.

‘Not to you?’

‘I’d had my chance to marry him when he was younger and nicer. I’d turned him down then. There was no reason why I should change my mind.’

‘But he did ask you?’

‘Many times, very emphatically. Starting when Gil was barely cold in his grave, I might add.’ An unfortunate choice of words, Slider thought. ‘You see, you had it the wrong way round — it was Dick who followed me here, not vice versa. He bore a terrible burden of guilt for Gil’s death – not that anyone else blamed him, but he blamed himself – and I think he thought the only way he could make up for it was to take care of me and Eleanor.’

‘But you didn’t want that.’

She evaded the question. ‘It would have been a difficult time to remarry. Ellie was at an awkward age, and she wouldn’t have welcomed any step-father, least of all Dick. For about a year he kept asking, and I kept saying no, and
then he tried to make me jealous by going out with other women. And when that didn’t work, he married one of them, and simply dropped out of my life. I never saw or heard of him again, and from what I gathered from Barry’s tedious little bulletins, neither did anyone else.’

‘Don’t you think that was odd?’

‘Not particularly. Gil was his great friend. He never much cared for any of the others.’

‘But you had been his friend far longer. Isn’t it odd that he dropped you, too? And so completely?’

‘He took Gil’s death very hard. Of the three of us, I think it affected him far the worst. He was a broken man afterwards. That’s another reason I couldn’t have married him.’

A slight hardness had crept into her voice, which Slider stored for later analysis. Poor old Dick had been found wanting again, had he? By then, of course, Mrs Forrester would have been a successful consultant, and probably pretty well-off into the bargain, while Dick Neal was merely an ex-fireman who had taken a job as a security guard. Yes, it would have been something of a mis-match from her point of view. Miscegenation on a grand scale. Had she tired of her faithful swain at last, and hinted him away too?

‘So once Dick married, you had no contact with any of his former colleagues, except for the phone calls from Barry Lister?’

‘And poor Cookie, of course – but that wasn’t for my sweet sake. Eleanor was his object.’ She grew grim. ‘I wasn’t too keen on the idea of becoming his mother-in-law, I can tell you.’

‘Jim Sears was courting your daughter?’

She smiled. ‘You have a lovely old-fashioned vocabulary, Inspector.
Mourning
and
courting.
I imagine you’ll expect your future son-in-law to call you “sir” when he first comes visiting.’

‘Of course,’ Slider smiled back. ‘But when did Jim Sears “first come visiting”? He must have been quite a bit older than your daughter?’

‘Seven years. Not such a great difference, I suppose, but he’d already had a failed marriage. He wasn’t what I wanted for my only daughter. I had no idea, actually, that she looked on him as anything but an honorary uncle. He used to come round and fix things for me, as I said, when we first moved here, but I discouraged him gently and that all stopped after a month or two. Then we didn’t hear anything more from him for years.’

Slider nodded. ‘So how did he come back on the scene?’

‘Well, Eleanor went and did VSO after her A Levels. Four years on a kibbutz in Israel.’ From the tone of her voice, it might have been four years in Holloway. ‘A terrible waste of all that education. And then when she came back, she said she wanted to join the fire brigade and follow in her father’s footsteps. I was furious – it was like Dick all over again. With her brains and looks she could have done anything she liked. But in the end I just had to let her get on with it. I hoped she’d find out eventually that it wasn’t for her. But then the first person she met when she joined her station had to go and be Cookie.’

‘He was at Ealing station, wasn’t he?’

‘That’s right. How did you know?’

‘His address was in Ealing, so I assumed he worked at the nearest station. Was your daughter still living here?’

‘No.’ Very brief – terse, in fact. He waited in silence, and she expanded with apparent reluctance. ‘We’d had a terrible row over this fire brigade business, and she’d gone off and got herself a flat. Oh, we made it up after a while, and I suppose it was time for her to have a place of her own anyway. She got a little flat in Northfields and joined the Ealing station – and there was Cookie. Before I’d drawn my breath, almost, they were going out together, and talking about getting married.’

‘You didn’t approve of that, I take it?’

‘It wasn’t for me to approve or disapprove. She was twenty-three years old, she could make up her own mind,’ she said stiffly.

‘Twenty-three is very young,’ Slider said. ‘A lot of mistakes are made at that age.’

She yielded to the inner pressure. ‘I tried to tell her she was throwing her life away, but she wouldn’t listen! He had no prospects, no education, and he’d had one failed marriage already. The next thing you know she’d have been one of those downtrodden housewives hanging around the doctor’s waiting-room with half a dozen snivelling brats in tow.’ She heard her voice rising and checked it with an obvious effort. ‘But she’d made up her mind, and I didn’t want to alienate her any further. So I said nothing more.’ She sighed. ‘And how glad I was in the end that I hadn’t. She needed all my support, poor child, when he was killed in that dreadful way.’

‘Yes, I read about it. He was mugged, wasn’t he?’

‘On his way home from the pub. I didn’t want them to marry, but I wouldn’t have wished that on him.’

Praised with faint damns. ‘Your daughter wasn’t actually with him that night, was she?’

‘No, thank God! It was bad enough as it was.’

‘Yes, it must have been enough to make her want to change her job.’

‘I hoped she would, but all she did was to change stations. She moved to Hammersmith, and there she is still. I hoped, too, that she might come back and live at home again, but she said it wouldn’t work. Perhaps she was right. She has her own place in Riverside Gardens, and we see each other now and then. Not often enough for my liking, but she has her own life, and I have mine.’

‘But you’re on friendly terms again?’

‘Oh yes. We keep in touch.’ That answer seemed to leave something to be desired in the matter of frankness. It sounded as thought there was some resentment between them still. Mrs Forrester probably wouldn’t be able to help letting her daughter know she was a disappointment to her; which the daughter would probably know well enough anyway, from comparing her own career with that of her high-powered, successful mother.

‘I understand you telephoned Mr Lister to tell him about Dick Neal’s death? How did you come to hear about it? Wasn’t it usually he who phoned you?’

‘I read about it in the
Hammersmith Gazette,’
she said promptly. ‘I phoned Barry to see if he had any more information, but he hadn’t heard about it at all. Obviously his grapevine wasn’t working in Dick’s case. But then Dick had cut himself off from everyone since he got married.’

‘You didn’t have any contact with Dick at all in all those years?’

‘I’ve said so.’

‘What about Jim Sears’ funeral? Didn’t you go to that?’

‘No. I don’t care for funerals. But Dick didn’t go either. Why should he? They’d worked together ten years before, that’s all. Do you keep in touch with all your ex-colleagues?’

‘No, of course not. But in this case – he’d been so fond of Eleanor; he watched her grow up. He must have been like an uncle to her. And Sears was her fiancé. You’d think he’d want to be there.’

‘I don’t suppose he knew about it. Dick hadn’t seen Eleanor since she was twelve years old,’ she said harshly. ‘He’d never so much as sent her a birthday card since then. I doubt whether he’d have recognised her if he passed her in the street.’

‘Did Barry Lister tell you about any of your husband’s other colleagues dying?’

‘No. Why should he? I think you overestimate his contact with me – and my interest in the matter. I got a Christmas card every year from Barry and the occasional phone call, but I assure you all the contact between us was entirely at his instigation and for his benefit. He was a retired man with nothing to do, and missing his job. My days as a fireman’s wife are far, far behind me – and I assure you I don’t miss them at all.’

‘What about Dick? Do you miss him?’

She looked at him for a long moment. ‘Is that a shot in the dark, or a shrewd guess? No, I don’t miss him — but I miss what we were together. I never regretted marrying Gil instead of him. He’d have made a hopeless husband, and my life would have been grim. But—’ She hesitated. ‘I think a woman always feels a special fondness for her first
love, especially when he’s also her first lover. We were young and happy together. When I read about his death, I felt-a great loss.’

The loss of innocence, Slider thought. In every life there was a moment when the gates of the garden shut behind you, and you realised that from now on, the pleasure you had always taken for granted would have to be worked for. Joanna had put it once – a quotation from somewhere, he thought, but he didn’t know where – ‘Before, one thing wrong and the day was spoilt; afterwards, one thing right and the day is made.’

That was the message in the snapshots, of course. In the photographic past, every day was sunny, every face was smiling. She should have married Neal in the very beginning, before they got thrown out of Eden. But the road to Hell is paved with missed chances, and no good deed ever goes unpunished. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, he concluded with a sigh.

‘Interesting,’ said Atherton. ‘Very, very interesting. And what did you make of her overall?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Slider said, staring into his tea. The canteen had started using those teabags on strings, which meant that you always had it lying in the saucer, a disgusting little corpus delicti spoiling your pleasure and making the bottom of the cup drippy. ‘I thought she was a very sad woman, with an empty life. She loved Dick Neal but decided he wasn’t good enough for her, and made them both unhappy.’

‘But if he wasn’t good enough for her because he was only a fireman, why on earth did she marry Forrester?’

‘That’s what I can’t understand. The only thing I can think of is that she did it to spite him – married his best friend to make him jealous and serve him right.’

‘Serve him right for what?’

Slider shrugged. ‘For letting her down, perhaps. She went to University and made something of herself, while he dropped out – at least in her terms – and made himself
ineligible. She was still quite young, remember – only about twenty-one when she married – and passion can be as irrational as that, particularly when it’s intense.’

‘Do you think they were lovers while she was married?’

‘I’ve no idea. But it hardly matters, does it? Whether they actually did it physically or not, they were still lovers in every other sense. You could see it in the photographs – the belonging between them. Forrester must have been one hell of a patient man.’

‘So if all the passion was still alive, why didn’t she marry him when Forrester was dead?’

‘I suppose the same problem still existed – he wasn’t good enough for her. She was even further above him by then. Her career was advancing, and she had private income from her father’s will.’ Slider frowned. ‘I can imagine a scenario where he proposed, and she said, “Yes, all right, as long as you make something of yourself. I’m not marrying a security guard.”’