Game Over (14 page)

‘Dave, it wasn’t a genuine offer,’ Slider reminded him. ‘This man doesn’t really have a friend who imports Rolexes. It was the victim’s watch and it was taken off his dead wrist to help incriminate you.’

‘Oh. Yeah.’ Borthwick slumped, looking sullen.

‘When did you find it?’ Atherton asked.

‘I dunno,’ Borthwick said sulkily. ‘This morning, when I went out to see what all the fuss was about. When you lot arrived.’

‘It wasn’t there last night when you got back from the pub?’

‘I dunno. I don’t go in and out that way unless I’m on me bike. I got a door into the yard I use, and I walked to the pub.’ He seemed suddenly to tire. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ he asked, almost indifferently. All the excitement had taken it out of him.

‘We’re going to keep you here for a while, while you help us with our inquiries. And if you are completely co-operative, there will probably be no charges against you. What they’ll think of you at Valancy House I can’t tell.’

‘Wasn’t my fault,’ he said. ‘I never done nothing.’

Slider waved that aside. ‘Tell me what this man looked like.’

Borthwick made an effort, rubbing his hand back and forth across his beard to aid memory. ‘He was tall – about six foot. Buff – like he worked out a lot. Wore a nice leather jacket – expensive. Nice clothes. He looked the business all right.’

‘Name? Age?’

‘He said his name was Patrick Steel. I dunno his age. Not old. Not young. Mid-thirties, maybe. I’m not good at ages. Dark hair, real poof’s-parlour cut like yours,’ he nodded at Atherton, ‘not a five quid back an’ sides job like yours.’ This to Slider. ‘You could see he was well-off. But he was a hard man, not some soft office job wanker. You wouldn’t want to cross him.’

‘What about the other man, the man who did the repair?’

‘I never seen him. This Steel, he comes to the door, gives me the money, says he’ll get his man in, what’s waiting in the van, and he kinda like waits for me to go. So I go in me flat and shut the door, because you don’t piss off a bloke like him, know’t I mean?’

‘All right, I’m going to ask you to look at some photographs later, see if you can spot Patrick Steel, and maybe ask you to help create a photofit. Meanwhile you can give me the telephone number.’

‘I got the number here.’ He handed over a dirty scrap of paper.

‘Is that his writing?’

‘No, he like told me it an’ I wrote it down.’

A careful villain, Slider thought. He stood up. ‘That’s all for now. We’ll probably talk again later. Do you want anything? Cup of tea?’

‘Two sugars,’ Borthwick said eagerly. ‘And can I have summink to eat? I ain’t had nothing since last night.’

Outside, Slider said to the constable, ‘Get him some tea, two sugars, and a couple of rounds of bacon sarnies. Make him feel loved.’

‘Be the first time in his life,’ Atherton said as they walked upstairs together. ‘Are you sure you want to bother? Subtlety’s wasted on him.’

‘Oxygen’s wasted on him,’ Slider said.

‘What a dipstick,’ Atherton said. ‘If they gave Air Miles for stupidity, he’d be the first man on Mars. Are you going to run that number?’

‘Have to go through the motions,’ Slider said, ‘but Fort Knox to a Frisbee it’ll be at the bottom of a sewer by now. And he won’t find a photograph. Whoever did the fronting, he won’t have a record, Patrick Steel won’t be his name, and he won’t have worked for Ring 4. I wonder how he fixed the doors to fail again.’

‘Something on a timer that blew the fuse,’ Atherton said. ‘Shouldn’t be hard to rig. Want to get someone in to look at it?’

‘Yes, we’d better do that. It might have a signature method about it, like a bomb-maker’s. But I’m not sure it’s going to be that easy. This is starting to look horribly professional. I think we’re going to have to trawl Stonax’s life to find out why someone wanted to go to so much trouble to kill him.’

They climbed a few steps in silence and then Slider looked at Atherton, and Atherton anticipated his thought. ‘You’re glad now I took the trouble to befriend his daughter, aren’t you?’

‘Oh, is that what you call it nowadays – befriending?’

‘I’m not sure how much help she’ll be, given that she lives in New York, and it seems that he kept a lot of secrets from her,’ Atherton said, ‘but I know she’ll want to help, and she’ll do everything she can.’

‘Yes,’ said Slider. ‘And we’ll need all the help we can get, going through his papers. Maybe I’d better ask Porson’s permission to bring her in on the case. Now we know it isn’t Borthwick, he’ll see the point.’

‘I wish you hadn’t mentioned bacon sandwiches,’ Atherton complained as they reached the corridor. ‘It’s made me hungry.’

‘We’ll send someone for tea and sticky buns,’ Slider said, turning into the office.

McLaren was there, at his desk, and Atherton said, ‘Oy, Maurice, you know all about the ponies: heard of a horse called Pretty Polly?’

McLaren looked up. ‘You don’t half pick ’em. It was in the two thirty at Newbury yesterday. Came in so late it had to tiptoe into the stables. How much d’you lose?’

‘Not me, another bloke. Put a monkey on it.’

‘Barmy,’ McLaren shook his head sadly.

Slider was heading on to his office. Atherton said to McLaren, ‘You’re not hungry, are you?’

‘Kidding? I could eat a nun’s arse through a convent gate.’

‘Excellent. Then while you’re in the canteen, can you get something for the guv’nor and me? One tea, one coffee, and two sticky buns. Pay you when you get back.’

McLaren grumbled, but he got up. Never let it be said he shirked a trip to the canteen, even for a friend.

Eight

Outrageous Fortune

S
willey traced Candida Scott-Chatton to her home this time, and found a very different person from the poised, controlling woman of the previous day. It was as if the reality of Stonax’s death has suddenly sunk in. She didn’t quite look unkempt – probably she could have emerged from an earthquake with no hair out of place – but there was something ragged in her expression and demeanour, and when she moved it was both sluggish and curiously jerky, as though she had taken some drug and it hadn’t quite worked off.

An elderly, uniformed maid had let Swilley in, and she was shown into a drawing-room which was like the office all over again, only more so – high ceilings, antiques, oil paintings, bronzes; that expensive silence only the houses of the very wealthy seem to have, the stillness of air that no unruly passions would ever stir; the absence of smell, except for a breath of clean carpets and the faintest ghost of potpourri.

When Scott-Chatton entered she was preceded by two elegant whippets, one black with a white mark on its breast, the other brindle-grey. They looked at Swilley from a distance, twitching their tucked-down tails ingratiatingly but not venturing close. Swilley noted that they were both wearing diamond collars. It struck her as not what she would have expected from Scott-Chatton – too vulgarly ostentatious. It also looked, to her admittedly inexpert eye, as if they were real diamonds.

‘Eos and Aurora,’ Scott-Chatton said, as if Swilley had asked. ‘Do you like dogs?’

‘I can take ’em or leave ’em,’ Swilley said.

Scott-Chatton did not ask her to sit, nor sat herself, but remained standing where she had halted, a little way into the room, looking at Swilley with eyes that were no longer chips of ice, rubbing her fingers very slowly as if they were cold, or aching. Swilley had seen old people do that, and it was not a gesture she would have associated with this woman. ‘I have a few questions I want to put to you, if that’s all right.’

Scott-Chatton searched her face. ‘It wasn’t robbery, was it?’

‘We don’t know yet, but it may have had something to do with Mr Stonax’s life, so we need to find out as much about him as possible. I’m afraid we’re a bit confused about what
your
relationship was with him. His daughter seems to think you and he were still going out together, which is what you suggested to me, but someone else says you dropped him when he got the sack from the DTI.’

‘I can guess who that was,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t take everything Shawna says literally. She has a grudge against me.’

‘Oh?’ said Swilley receptively.

‘She came in to work one day quite unsuitably dressed and I asked her to go home and change. Naturally she took that as a mortal insult, and she’s been waging a war of attrition on me ever since.’

‘Why don’t you sack her, then?’

Scott-Chatton only raised her eyebrows. ‘You can’t dismiss a person these days except for stealing. Surely you know that?’

‘She says Mr Stonax tried to persuade you to keep seeing him and you refused. She overheard him saying he wanted to talk to you and you saying it wouldn’t make any difference.’ A blush of anger coloured Scott-Chatton’s face and Swilley reckoned she might yet find a way of sacking young Shawna, employment laws or no employment laws. ‘Also the gossip papers say you’re going out with Mr Freddie Bell of the Three Bells gaming company.’

Now Scott-Chatton sat. She did it gracefully, but there was a look of involuntariness about it. The dogs came close to her, shivering in that disconcerting way whippets have.

‘I’ll tell you everything,’ she said, ‘because I can see otherwise you will take away all the wrong impressions. But I don’t think it will help you, because I don’t understand any of it myself.’

Swilley seated herself, uninvited, in the chair opposite, and got out her notebook. ‘Go on.’

‘I want you to know that I loved Ed,’ she began, looking at her hands. ‘He was a wonderful man – a truly
good
man. He was tireless in his pursuit of truth. He was honourable in his profession. And more than that, he was so warm – he lit up a room when he came into it. I was still married when I first met him, though Hugo and I had already separated. When my divorce came through, Ed and I were going to marry, but then his ex-wife died, and he said for decency’s sake we ought to wait a few months. I honoured him for that. How many men would have so much delicacy?’ She looked up as she said this, as if she wanted an answer.

Swilley was interested in the choice of the word delicacy, and wondered what, really, it meant. She declined to answer, saying merely, ‘Go on.’

Scott-Chatton made a little, unhappy movement of her shoulders. ‘I wish to God, now, he had not been so sensitive. At least we would have been married. We would have had that. As it was, that awful trouble came along.’

‘The three-in-a-bed high jinks?’

She flinched at the words. ‘Please, don’t say it like that. And don’t think for a moment there was anything in it. I
know
he was innocent.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because he told me.’ She met Swilley’s eyes. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. He would never lie to me. And he wasn’t the sort of man who would ever do something like that, anyway. The whole thing was a fraud, to blackmail him into leaving the department.’

‘If you knew he was innocent, why did you dump him?’

‘I
didn’t
,’ she cried, with sufficient anguish to make the little dogs stare up at her in what looked like shock. Voices were never raised in these hallowed spaces. ‘I would have stood by him publicly, but Ed persuaded me to
seem
to part company with him, for the sake of our various causes. I was very much against it, but he said I had to think of the greater good. The scandal was quite dreadful at the time, and he said it would rub off on to me, and on to the Trust and the other various charities that we had both worked so hard for. Donors would have pulled out. The press would have revived it every time the Trust was mentioned. He said I would be throwing away all we had worked for. We argued about it very much – that must be what Shawna overheard, and she got it quite the wrong way around, you see. But I knew there was truth in what he said and I allowed myself to be persuaded. But I wish – you don’t know
how
I wish – I had resisted him.’

Swilley wasn’t interested in her remorse. ‘If the thing was a fraud, why didn’t he make a fuss? Challenge it? Take it to court?’

‘They had the photographs. Oh,
I
knew they were faked,
he
knew they were faked – well, of course
he
did,’ she corrected herself with a little shake of the head. ‘But there they were, and at the first hint of resistance on his part they went to the papers. You know the rest. They were splashed everywhere, and once the genie is out of the bottle you can’t put it back. It’s no use protesting your innocence, because no-one will believe you. As it was, if he had gone quietly when they showed the photographs to him privately, it would have saved two other people from disgrace – Sid Andrew and that poor girl. I’ve forgotten her name, now. Isn’t that dreadful? But they were both ruined. And if he’d challenged them publicly, who knows what would have happened next?’ She looked up and met Swilley’s sceptical gaze, and said with a touch of heat, ‘Ed said they would target me next, or his daughter. Probably both of us. He said it was better for him to say nothing and go. Photographs are easy to fake – my God, they proved that all right! – and other documents too. Imagine what they could have done to his daughter’s life. I’d have been willing to risk it, for myself, but Ed wanted me to distance myself from him as soon as possible, and so – and so that’s what I did.’