Killing Time (12 page)

‘Well, I’d better be getting back,’ he said. ‘If you think of anything that might help me find out who this friend of Maurice’s was, give me a ring, will you? Or if you remember the dealer’s name, or anything else that might be helpful—’

‘When can I go home?’ she asked abruptly.

‘You want to?’

She shrugged. ‘All my stuff is there. And where else would I go? There’s only my sister’s, and I can’t stay there. Trevor wouldn’t stand for it, even if she had room. And there’s no-one else. Maurice was all I had in the world apart from her.’

And Benny the Brief, Slider thought, but he didn’t say it aloud. Benny’s feet must be a deterrent indeed if even an ex-hooker couldn’t stand them. ‘I think you ought to be able to go home tomorrow. I’ll check when our blokes will be finished there, and let you know.’

* * *

‘All right, people, let’s concentrate,’ Slider said. ‘Mr Honeyman would like this cleared up before he leaves—’

‘I bet he would,’ Mackay said.

‘We could have a go at his dandruff, clear that up for him as well,’ McLaren murmured resentfully.

‘So let’s give him the best goodbye present a Super ever had,’ Slider went on, ‘and get it sorted. I’ll go through first of all what we know about Jay Paloma’s movements. Yes, thank you, McLaren. Right: he was a performer at the Pomona Club, where there was
a frackarse’ –
he gave it the Department pronunciation – ‘on Saturday night, an attack by animal rights campaigners. Paloma was involved, not injured but may well have been upset by it. It was kept out of the papers, except for a par in Monday’s
Standard,
which mentioned the club by name but not Paloma, nor the more interesting details of the incident. On Monday afternoon Paloma called at the station to see me, to tell me he was suffering from a poison pen campaign, which started six months ago with heavy-breather phone calls and escalated three months ago to threatening letters. It had escalated still further that morning – that’s to say Monday – with a photograph of a badly mauled corpse.’

‘Guv, the animal libbers,’ Norma said, ‘I suppose they were genuine? It wasn’t part of the intimidation?’

Hollis, who was office manager, had the information. ‘One of them checked out as a paid-up member, but only recently joined. The others seemed to be his mates, and they were all protest virgins. No previous campaign history, and no criminal record.’

‘These types usually have enough form to seat a banquet,’ Norma said. ‘Maybe they were not all they seemed.’

‘They didn’t seem very much,’ Hollis pointed out. ‘It wasn’t a very bright stunt, and it wasn’t ratified by any of the baa-lamb brigades. Going by the interview transcripts, I think they were just a bunch of dickheads acting off their own bats.’

Norma nodded to that, so Slider continued. ‘On Monday afternoon Paloma went to visit his regular lover, about whom we know nothing at present except that he is some kind of VIP who wanted to keep the relationship secret. They had a quarrel, according to Parnell. They also had somewhat rough sex, resulting in peri-anal bruising, according to the pathologist’s report.’

‘Because they’d quarrelled?’ Mackay speculated.

‘It might have been the way they usually did it,’ said Hollis. ‘We don’t know.’

‘On Tuesday,’ Slider went on, ‘Paloma got up and sat with Parnell while she got ready to go out. He was upset at first about the quarrel, but grew more cheerful as he began to talk about his plan to leave London and buy a boarding house in Ireland.’

‘That sentence would make more sense the other way round,’ said Norma.

‘Parnell left the house at eleven-thirty, and she and the taxi driver Fluss are the last people we know to have seen Paloma alive. He was due to go to work at seven p.m. but didn’t arrive, nor did he telephone to say he wasn’t going in. At half past eleven p.m. we have two separate witnesses to the sound of the door being kicked in, and some kind of further noise suggestive of something heavy being knocked over. At six-thirty on Wednesday morning Parnell arrived home to find the door kicked in and Paloma dead. Any comments?’

There were shrugs all round. ‘That’s plain enough,’ Mackay said for them all. ‘Chummy kicks the door down and does him in. End of story.’

‘Except for the minor question of who chummy was,’ Norma added with delicate irony.

‘Forensic says that from the size of the footmark,’ Slider picked it up, ‘we’re looking for a very big man, probably over six foot, and powerfully built. The boot had a ridged sole of one of the usual man-made compositions, something like a Doc Marten—’

‘Oh, well, that narrows the field a bit,’ said Norma.

‘So if we find a suspect we may get a bit of help there,’ Slider concluded patiently.

‘Guv, I can’t believe no-one saw this geezer,’ Hart said. ‘I mean, with all them flats around – and half past eleven people are coming back from the pub. And what about the block opposite? If you heard a door being kicked in, wouldn’t you go out on the balcony and have a look?’

‘No,’ said Anderson. ‘Ninety-nine out of a hundred, the last thing they’d do is go out and look.’

‘What about natural curiosity?’ Norma said.

‘What about self-preservation?’ Anderson said. ‘The immediate neighbours made sure they stayed inside where it was safe.’

‘Yeah, but that’s different,’ Hart said. ‘Across the other block it’d be safe enough to go out and have a butcher’s. I know I would.’

‘The estate’s not that dangerous,’ Norma said. ‘People exaggerate.’

‘The door was kicked in with one blow,’ Slider reminded her. ‘There may not have been that much to hear.’ Hart shrugged, half convinced. ‘By all means, interview everyone again. I’m always ready to give instincts a run.’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ McLaren said, and waited for the chorus of whistles and groans to die down. ‘If this bloke went along there to kick the door in and take Paloma out, why didn’t he do it in the middle of the night, when there was no-one around? Why choose half past eleven when there could be any number of witnesses?’

Slider looked at Hart. ‘What’s your thinking on that?’

‘S’obvious,’ she said. ‘Middle of the night he would’ve stood out like a sore thumb. Half past eleven, pub letting-out time, he passes in the crowd, and if someone sees him kick the door in they probably just think he’s forgot his key. Anyone hears a loud bang, they don’t pay no attention, just think it’s a drunken fight or something and forget it. So when someone asks did you hear anything, they say no, and mean it.’

Slider said, ‘So the killer was a professional, to your thinking?’

Hart looked confused. ‘Well—’

‘Yes? Let’s have it.’

‘Well, guv, the choice of timing and kicking the door open looks professional. And the killing – the first whack across the bridge of the nose killed him instantly, that looks professional. But then he goes on to paste buggery out of the dead man’s skull for no reason – that don’t look professional. And when he stops to pick up the table and put the fag ends back in the ashtray – that looks plain daft.’

‘Maybe he wanted to leave everything looking normal,’ McLaren said.

‘Oh, normal – with a dead body on the floor,’ Hart said witheringly.

‘He pulled the front door closed behind him,’ McLaren defended himself.

‘That was to delay discovery,’ Anderson said. ‘A front door hanging open in the middle of the night would arouse suspicion.’

‘I can’t see what the problem is,’ Norma said impatiently. ‘You’ve got someone with the foresight to choose the time of day for his murder and the expertise to know how to deal a killing blow. But then he gets carried away with excitement at what he’s done and launches—’

She’s going to say it, thought Slider.

‘—a frenzied attack on the body. When he finally gets his breath back, he’s not really thinking straight any more, if at all. Instinct takes over. He tidies up the table that got knocked over – maybe he had a houseproud mum – and closes the front door after him. I don’t see why,’ she concluded, ‘you should expect a villain to be consistent – especially in an irrational situation.’

‘You’re talking about this bloke being professional,’ McLaren objected, ‘but you don’t know he chose half eleven to be clever. Maybe he was dead stupid and never even thought about it. Maybe he had a beef with Paloma, and that just happened to be the time he lost his rag. Rushed round there, kicked the door in, and belted fuck out of him – just happened to get the first killing blow in where it landed, pure chance. That’s much more likely.’

‘And tidied up after himself?’ Slider said. McLaren offered no thoughts on that. ‘Let’s move on, shall we? What about this drugs connection? Parnell says that Paloma was buying cocaine for his lover. Billy Yates says he saw Paloma talking to a man in the club who might have been a dealer.’

Hollis said genially, ‘My uncle Fred might stick his wooden leg up his arse and do toffee apple impressions. Might doesn’t feed the whippet.’

‘Quite so,’ Slider agreed. ‘However, I have to say that I don’t believe Parnell would have mentioned coke at all unless there was something in it. She and I have had a few run-ins in the past on that subject. Now it may be she’s not telling me the truth, or at least not all of the truth – in fact, I’m sure of that – but I think we can be sure there’s some truth in it. It’s possible Paloma was supplying her, and she brought in the lover as a smoke-screen.
But on the other hand, she did say he was being paid well for it and putting the money away towards this B and B scheme she mentioned. I’m inclined to believe her. I don’t think she’s got the imagination to make that up.’

‘It doesn’t make the man in the club the dealer,’ Norma said.

‘No. But again, Billy Yates needn’t have mentioned him. He certainly wasn’t trying to be helpful to me, so presumably he was worried by this man and was hoping I’d act as pest control officer and rid the club of him. And if Billy Yates was worried by the man, there’s something about him we ought to know. I wouldn’t trust Yates as far as I could spit him, but I trust his instincts of self-preservation.’

‘Guv,’ Anderson said, ‘how about this? Paloma said on Sunday he reckoned he could get the last of the money he needed for the Ireland scheme, right? He goes to see his lover on Monday and arranges to get another supply of coke for him. His lover gives him the cash. He goes into the club Monday night and buys the stuff as usual. Tuesday he knows Parnell’s not going to be home, so he arranges to sell the stuff to some local distributor, probably for more than he paid for it. He’s waiting in at home for the bloke to call, but word’s got round that there’s stuff in the flat, and before the right man can get there, someone else breaks in, grabs the snow and whacks Paloma. End of story.’

‘There was no sign of anyone searching for anything,’ Mackay said.

‘If he was expecting to sell it, he probably had it sitting there on the table.’

‘Why didn’t he ring in to say he wasn’t going to work? Ring in sick, or something?’ Hart asked.

‘He didn’t care any more. He was leaving anyway, once he’d got this dosh,’ said Anderson. ‘Next day when Parnell comes home he’s going to say to her, pack your bags, darlin’, we’re off.’

‘Very beguiling,’ Slider said. ‘But where does the poison-pen campaign fit into this?’

‘Maybe it doesn’t,’ Anderson said, wholesale. ‘Maybe that was nothing to do with it. Given who he was and what he did, there’s every chance there were people who didn’t like him and wanted to scare him.’

Hart spoke up. ‘Actually, boss, when you come to think of it –
you never saw one of the letters. And he never told Parnell about it, either, which you’d think he would. Maybe it never happened. Maybe he made it up.’

Slider looked at her. ‘Why would he go to all the trouble of coming in to see me to tell me about it? He was certainly afraid of something.’

‘I’d be afraid if I was going to pull off some dodgy stuff with a coke dealer,’ Hart said. ‘He came hoping you’d give him protection, put a copper on the door just for long enough for him to get away. Only he couldn’t tell you the real reason.’

‘We’re really getting into Hans Andersen country now,’ Slider said impatiently. ‘We’ve got to get more facts. We need to find the man he spoke to at the club, and any other contacts he had there. If the man Yates spotted wasn’t a dealer, who was he; and who was the dealer? Paloma had been working at the club for almost a year. He must have talked to other club employees. Who did he know and what did he tell them? Any ideas how we can get the information?’

‘Billy Yates’s staff won’t talk to us,’ Mackay said. ‘It’s more than their jobs are worth.’

‘For jobs read lives,’ Anderson concurred.

Hart snorted. ‘You don’t mean that big ponce Garry, walking about pretending he’s got a holster under his arm?’

‘Billy Yates has armed protectors, everyone knows that. They’re not pretending,’ Mackay said.

‘Yeah, and they’re going to go round shooting anyone that asks questions?’ Hart said derisively. ‘Do me a lemon! How long is Yates going to stay in business if he leaves a trail of corpses wherever he goes? If his boys carry shooters, it’s to scare people. They’re not gonna use ’em. Soon as they use ’em, Yates has got cops crawling all over his place, which is very good for business, I don’t think.’

‘That’s the sort of attitude that can get you killed,’ Norma said sternly.

‘This ain’t East LA,’ Hart responded. She turned to Slider. ‘I reckon I could get that Garry to talk to me, boss. He was fancying me rotten when we was there. If I come on to him a bit—’

Slider shook his head. ‘I can’t let you put yourself in that sort of position. If you lead him on and then try to back out, he might very well force you, or beat you up.’

‘But, guv—’ Hart protested.

‘I think you underestimate the danger. He knows you’re a copper, don’t forget. He’d be glad to humiliate you. And if he got carried away, he might even kill you. Yates may be intelligent enough to know you can’t go round offing people, but that’s no guarantee Garry is.’ Slider looked round at the others. ‘Not Yates’s staff, I don’t think. But what about the other entertainers? They won’t have the same loyalty, and I doubt whether they’ll have the same fears. Yates wouldn’t waste his energy on them. Find out who they are, and get to them, privately, away from the club.