Kill My Darling (3 page)

‘If you're trying to comfort me you must think things are bad.'

‘Not
yet
, they're not,' Atherton said significantly.

Joanna was used to such interruptions but she was human. She only said, ‘It's a pity I've already put the beef in,' but combined with the scent of it on the air, it was enough to break a man's heart.

‘You and Dad will enjoy it, anyway,' he said. His father shared the house with them, a very nice arrangement for babysitting, and for relieving him of anxiety about the old man living alone. ‘I probably won't be gone very long.'

‘Why have you got to go in, anyway? Just for a missing person?'

‘There's an ex-murderer involved.'

‘Ex, or axe?'

‘Ex as in former.'

‘Can you
be
a former murderer? Surely what's done is done.'

‘You quibble like Atherton. Anyway, Mr Porson's gone all unnecessary over it, so I want to make sure everything's in place, just in case it turns out to be anything.'

‘You'd sooner do it yourself than inherit someone else's mess,' she summarized.

‘Wouldn't you?'

She kissed him. ‘Go, with my blessing. Cold roast beef's almost better than hot, anyway.'

He kissed her back. ‘You're a very wonderful woman,' he said.

‘I said “almost”,' she reminded him.

Slider was not a tall man, and Scott Hibbert was, and since he didn't like being loomed over, he freely admitted that he started off with a prejudice against the man. Hibbert was both tall and big, but going a little bit to softness around the jaw and middle. He was not bad looking, in an obvious, fleshy sort of way, except that his mouth was too small, which Slider thought made him look weak and a bit petulant. He was wearing jeans and an expensive leather jacket, and shoes, not trainers (one plus point), which were well polished (two plus points); but the jeans had been ironed with a crease (minus a point). His carefully-cut hair was dressed with a little fan of spikes at the front like Keanu Reeves, and his chin was designer-stubbled (minus too many points to count).

Having privately indulged his prejudices for a satisfying few seconds, Slider dismissed them firmly, and prepared to interview Hibbert with a completely receptive mind.

‘So, Mr Hibbert, tell me when you last saw Miss Hunter.'

‘I already told the other guy everything,' he complained.

Guy. Another minus – no, no, no. Concentrate
. ‘I'm sorry, but I really would like you to tell me again, in your own words,' said Slider.

Hibbert looked uneasy, and kept crossing and recrossing his legs, and though he was not sweating, his skin looked damp. He licked his lips. ‘Look, shouldn't you be
doing
something?' he asked querulously. ‘Like, I mean,
looking
for her or something?'

‘I assure you the other officer will already have put things in train for a general alert. I need to hear your story so that we can refine the search. You last saw her when?'

‘Like I said, Friday morning, before we went off to work,' he said, frowning. ‘We usually walk to the tube together, but I was taking my car in because I was going down to the West Country later, so I offered to drop her off at the station. But she said no, she'd rather walk.' His left leg was jiggling all on its own, and he sniffed and wiped the end of his nose on the back of his hand. Slider found these unstudied gestures reassuring. Stillness and composure in witnesses were what worried him. ‘She was a bit pissed off with me, if you want the truth,' Hibbert added in a blurty sort of way. ‘I was going away for the weekend and she was narked about it.'

‘Because?'

‘I was going to this wedding in the West Country – my mate Dave – we were at school together – and she didn't want me to go.'

‘Why not? Wasn't she invited?'

‘Oh, she was invited and everything. Of course she was. Except there was this stag thing on the Friday night that was men only. She didn't want to go to the hen night because she didn't really know Julie, that Dave's marrying, and anyway she'd already got this thing arranged for Friday night with some of her girl friends. I said, so come down on Saturday, then, but she wouldn't. She said she hates weddings anyway, and she never really liked Dave. Well, she can't stand him if you want to know the truth. I mean, they've only met a couple of times and it ended in a stand-up row both times, and she said she never wanted to see him again. I suppose he's a bit blokeish for her, but he's a laugh, and he's my best mate. There's some of her friends I don't like. Well, that's all right – she has her friends and I have mine, why not? We don't have to do everything together. And I couldn't let old Dave down, not on his wedding day, could I?'

Slider guessed he was hearing the essence of the row that had been. Hibbert was justifying himself to him. He nodded neutrally.

‘When I first told her about it, she said it was all right, I should go on my own and she didn't mind,' he went on. ‘But Friday morning she was really narky about it, kept saying things about me and Dave getting drunk together. Well, what's a stag night for? And everybody gets drunk at weddings. I said
you
won't have to see us, so what's the problem? And she said wild horses wouldn't drag her there. We had a bit of a barney and she storms off to the bathroom. So then I cool down a bit and when she comes out I say d'you wanna lift to the station, babes, and she gives me a look and says no, she'll walk. And she did.'

‘She works at the Natural History Museum? And where do you work?'

‘Hatter and Ruck – you know, the estate agents? – in Knightsbridge.'

Posh, Slider thought. ‘So you could have dropped her off at work, instead of just offering a lift to the station? You'd go right past it.'

He looked uneasy, and shifted to another buttock. ‘I wasn't going in to the office first thing, I was going to look at a house in Hendon. I don't normally take the car in when I'm just in the office because parking's a nightmare up there.'

‘And that was the last time you saw her?'

He nodded, looked stricken at the reminder, and found yet another buttock to shift to. How many did he have in there?

‘Or spoke to her?'

‘No, I rang her Friday evening, while she was out with her mates. I rang her up to make peace, if you want to know, but she was all right again by then. She'd got over and it and just said have a good time and everything and I'll see you Sunday. She's like that – she never stays mad for long.'

‘And that was the last time you spoke to her?'

He nodded.

‘Did you go home after work on Friday?'

‘No, I went straight down to the West Country.'

He kept saying the West Country. Slider thought that odd. ‘Where, exactly?'

‘Salisbury,' he said. ‘Dave lives in Salisbury.'

‘And what time did you eventually get home?'

‘I was supposed to come back Sunday night – there was a lot of us from the same school and we were going to get together Sunday lunchtime – but I was missing Mel, so I called it off. Well, we'd been talking and drinking all Saturday afternoon and evening, so I reckoned we'd said everything anyway. I didn't sleep very well Saturday night so I got up really early Sunday morning and left. I was back home, what, about ten? She wasn't there, and I knew right away something was up.'

‘How?' Slider asked.

Hibbert stared in perplexity at the question.

‘How did you know something was wrong?'

‘I don't know,' he said. Now he was still, thinking about it: buttocks at rest at last; even the lone break-dancing knee had stopped and held its breath. He scowled with the effort of analysis, and Slider got the impression he was not very bright; and yet, of course, it is easy enough to fake being dumber than you are. It's the opposite that's impossible.

‘I dunno,' he said at last. ‘It just felt wrong, as if no one had been there.' He thought some more. ‘Oh, for one thing, the answer-machine wasn't on. If she'd gone out, she'd have put it on. And she'd have left me a note to say where she was going. She always leaves a note.'

‘Even if she was still mad at you?'

‘But she wasn't any more. When I spoke to her Friday night she was all right again.'

‘Anything else?' Slider prompted. Hibbert looked puzzled by the question, having apparently gone off on another train of thought. ‘Anything else you noticed that made you think something was wrong?' He was going after the dog, absence of, but what he got was quite unexpected.

Hibbert's face cleared. He looked as though he'd just got the last answer in the jackpot pub quiz. ‘Her handbag was there.'

‘Her handbag?' Slider said, trying not to sound like Edith Evans.

‘Yeah, her handbag,' he said excitedly. ‘With her purse and phone and everything in it. But not her door keys.'

‘Excuse me,' Slider said. ‘I have to make a phone call.'

TWO

Deep-Pan, Crisp and Even

J
oanna was resigned. ‘I'm not surprised,' she said. ‘I know once they get hold of you, they won't let you go. That place is a black hole.'

Even over the phone, he thought he could smell the roast beef and Yorkshire. ‘It's not that,' he said. ‘The case just turned into a case. The girl's handbag is in the flat.'

‘Her
handbag
, singular? Tell me any woman of that age who only has one.'

‘The handbag she was using, I mean. With her gubbins in it. So it's looking more like foul play, I'm afraid.'

‘Oh dear. Well, keep the chin up. There may be an explanation you haven't thought of, and she'll come wandering in looking surprised.'

‘I'll settle for that. See you later.'

Atherton drew up just short of the house and craned his head to look. ‘No press. Thank God. Amazing no one's spilled the beans yet. Now, where's that key?' He felt in his pocket for the key ring Slider had received from Scott Hibbert.

He was hampered by the seat belt and Connolly only watched him struggle for a millisecond before saying, ‘Undo the belt, you looper. And don't bother, because I have me own.' She dangled it before his eyes. ‘I got it off Mr Fitton before I left.'

‘How did you manage that?'

‘He volunteered. Gave it me and said, “I won't be needing this any more.”'

‘Did he, indeed?'

‘Ah, cool the head, it doesn't mean anything. Sure, he'd know we'd check on him as soon as I got back, and find his record, and then we'd want the key offa him anyhow.'

‘Yes, but saying he wouldn't need the key any more suggests he knows she's dead.'

‘Well
I
know it, so why not?'

‘You don't know any such thing. It's still odds-on she'll walk back in any minute. They usually do. And don't forget she took her keys with her. Why would she do that if she wasn't coming back?'

‘Don't
you
forget she left her mobile. She'd grab that before her keys, every time.'

Atherton yawned ostentatiously. ‘Well, if there is anything in it, we've got the prime suspect under wraps back at the factory, so relax.'

‘Scott Hibbert? He didn't do it. He's just a big gom.'

‘I take it “gom” is not an expression of approval.'

‘Why do you
talk
like that?' Connolly cried in frustration.

Atherton smiled, satisfied now he had goaded her. ‘Why don't you like him?'

‘What's to like? He's like a big transport-caff fry-up. Everything right there on the plate, and none of it very appetizing. I like a bit of subtlety.'

Atherton slapped his chest. ‘Right there,' he addressed the invisible audience. ‘She stepped right into my heart, folks. Subtlety,
c'est moi
.'

Connolly gave him a look so cold it could have hosted the Ice Capades. ‘What are we looking for up there?'

He became sensible. ‘Firstly, anything that suggests she was doing a runner – empty spaces in the wardrobe and so on. Secondly, signs of a struggle, anything that might have been used as a weapon, signs of blood. Also signs of hasty cleaning up. Someone who's just killed someone is usually in too much of a panic to clean properly, which is lucky for us. And always, of course, anything that strikes you as anomalous.'

‘As a what now?'

‘Odd. Out of place. Wrong. Peculiar.'

‘Why didn't you say so in the first place?'

Atherton, having done this so often in Slider's company, used his nose first, as Slider would have, and noticed that the flat had a cold smell about it, as if no one had been there for a while. It occupied a big area in square-footage, but the conversion was an old one, and clumsily done, so the space was not well used. On either side of a large, wasted entrance hall there was a sitting room and a bedroom, both with bay windows on to the front, with a slice cut off at the back to make a bathroom and kitchen, side by side. It all needed modernizing; and a cleverer architect (or indeed, given when it was done, any architect at all) could have made a much nicer flat out of it. If recombined with the basement (as Fitton had said Hibbert had been plotting) it would make a very glamorous maisonette, with a big kitchen/breakfast-room downstairs, and living room, two beds and modern bathroom upstairs. With the big rooms, high ceilings, mouldings and so on, it would fetch a stone fortune in up-and-coming Shepherd's Bush; so it wouldn't be wonderful if Hibbert, who was in the business after all, had spotted the potential.

Leaving aside the property-developing crying-shame it represented, Atherton noted that the furniture was modern but cheap, and that the place was ordinarily tidy. In the bedroom, the bed had been made, in that the duvet had been pulled up, but it hadn't been straightened or smoothed. There was a built-in wardrobe with sliding doors and a free-standing one so stuffed with clothes the doors wouldn't close at all. An exercise bike in the corner had clothes heaped over its saddle, and there were more clothes dumped on a wicker armchair – it would be fun trying to work out what she had been wearing, should the need arise. But there were no used plates or mugs or dirty clothes strewn around, and the floor was clear and the carpet clean. The sitting room was tidier, with only a newspaper, a novel (Laurie Graham,
At Sea
, face down and opened at page 64) and an emery board lying around to show occupation. And the handbag, large and tan leather, which was on the sofa, at the end nearest the door.