Killing Time (34 page)

‘You don’t know it’s a man,’ he said, to sidetrack her. ‘It could be my wife taking vengeance.’

‘Then she’d attack me, wouldn’t she, not you?’ Hart said with a cheeky grin.

He was glad to have distracted her, but he didn’t want her continuing in this delusion. ‘You take too much upon yourself,’ Slider said grimly. ‘Walk with me to my car, and then I’ll drive you to yours, just in case. And from now on, we both avoid dark alleys. Will you stop flapping, WDC Hart! If he’d wanted to take on two of us, he wouldn’t have run off when you came on the scene, would he?’

‘All the same,’ Joanna said, easing arnica into the spot, ‘she had a point.’

‘Atherton reckons she’s got several,’ Slider said. ‘Ouch.’

‘That’ll teach you not to be facetious. What in the name of Jupiter did he hit you with?’

‘It felt like a smallish building,’ Slider said. ‘But I wasn’t knocked out, just groggy. And nothing’s broken. It’s just a bruise. I don’t want to spend any more time hanging around a hospital if I can help it. I’ve got things to do.’

Joanna came round the front of him and sat down, knees touching his knees, face inches from his. She looked pale and tired and worried, and he suddenly had a very glad and lifting awareness of how much he loved her, which was reassuring in this world of uncertainties. ‘Suppose he tries it again, whoever he is?’

‘Well, being in hospital wouldn’t help me, would it? I proved how easy it is to sneak in.’

‘I was voicing a different worry that time,’ she said. ‘I’d moved on from (a) you might have delayed concussion to (b) there’s a murderer prancing about trying to invalidate your ticket.’ Her eyes were anxious. ‘I don’t want to lose you, Bill.’

She laid a hand on his knee and he placed his over it. This would be a good time, he thought, to give her something else to worry about. A nice go of stomach ache to take her mind off toothache. ‘Irene knows about us,’ he said.

It worked. ‘What? You don’t mean you told her?’

‘It sort of came out.’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, let’s get this straight. When you say you told her about us, what exactly did you tell her?’
Her eyes widened so far her eyebrows made her scalp shift backwards. ‘You told her everything?’ He nodded mutely. ‘Oh, bloody Nora, now what have you done?’

‘Bloody Nora?’ he said, amused. ‘You sound like a policeman.’

‘Laugh while you can,’ she said grimly. ‘Let me guess how pleased she was to find out the true state of affairs, if you’ll pardon the pun.’

‘She told me to get a lawyer,’ Slider admitted. ‘Her parting words before she slammed the phone down.’

Joanna jumped to her feet and paced about. ‘Phone! It was her on the phone, putting it down when I answered! Of course, why didn’t I guess?’

‘How do women do that?’ he marvelled. ‘Yes, she was the phantom phone caller. She’d been trying to get hold of me – to discuss our getting together again, I imagine – and when she kept getting a woman’s voice, she rang me at the office.’

‘I don’t know why you’re being so flippant about it,’ Joanna said crossly.

‘It’s less antisocial than crying,’ he said, ‘which is what I feel like doing.’

She sat down again abruptly. ‘I’m sorry. I know you care about her – about them. But really, Bill, why on earth did you – I mean, what good did you think it could do her to know?’

‘I just couldn’t bear to hear her blaming herself for everything. Anyway, she’d have had to know sooner or later. It would have come out.’

‘I don’t see why.’

‘Because whatever you think now, you and she are bound to meet from time to time in the future, and things slip out. You can’t keep a guilty secret for ever. And the later she found out, the worse it would be.’

‘After the divorce would have been good. I’d have settled for that.’

‘I hate lying to her. I hate lying about you. I’m sorry, I didn’t set out deliberately to tell her, but it just came out, and I can’t help feeling it’s for the best.’

‘As if your life wasn’t complicated enough already,’ Joanna sighed. She leaned forward and kissed his forehead. ‘You really are a clot, Bill Slider. She’s going to have your balls for jewellery
now, you know that? She’ll divorce you for adultery, and it’ll all be adversarial instead of amicable. She’ll have the house off you, and every penny she can screw out of you, and refuse you access to the children on the grounds that you’re an unsuitable influence.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I just thought I’d mention it.’

‘Anyway, she won’t. How can she, when she’s gone off with another man?’

‘But now she can say you drove her to it.’

‘Oh, it doesn’t work that way nowadays. The courts know what’s what. It’ll all be settled half and half in the end – these things always are.’

‘But you’ll have to fight for your half now, instead of being given it.’

He lost patience. ‘What do you want from me?’ he snapped. ‘It’s done now. Don’t go on and on about it.’

She looked at him whitely. ‘I’m just pointing out—’

‘Perhaps you’d prefer me to go back to her? That would save you a lot of trouble.’

‘Of course, your divorce is none of my business,’ she said neutrally. ‘You must settle it your own way.’ And she went out of the room.

Slider sat and cursed, softly but fluently, and hit his knees with his fists a few times. Then he got up and went after her. She was in the kitchen standing over the kettle, waiting for it to boil.

‘You haven’t switched it on,’ he observed. She pushed the switch in without answering. He put his arms round her from behind and kissed the back of her neck. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She turned inside his arms and looked into his face carefully – to see if he meant it, perhaps – and then sighed and leaned into the embrace.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I’m upset and worried. I shouldn’t snap at you.’

She rested her head against his cheek. ‘I worry about you. I wish we could just get away from all this.’

‘I know the divorce is your concern too—’

‘Oh, bugger the divorce. The divorce is a pleasant itch compared with having a maniac on the loose trying to kill you.’

‘He won’t try again,’ Slider said soothingly. ‘He’ll have scared himself too badly by nearly getting caught.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Really,’ he said. He felt her relax. ‘Boy, I’m getting good at this lying, aren’t I?’

She began to laugh. ‘Oh, you bastard.’

He set her back from him and kissed her, and said, ‘I’ll be all right. I’m a survivor. It’s Atherton you ought to worry about. He thinks he’s lost his nerve. He’s too sensitive to be a policeman, really. I think you should do everything in your power to boost his morale and get his pecker up.’

‘Not until his stitches are out,’ she said. ‘Ah, but then! I want you to remember it was you who suggested it.’

He slept late the next morning, and went on dozing when Joanna got up, waking properly only when she came in with a breakfast tray. He dragged himself up. ‘Let me pee first.’ When he came back she had pulled the curtains, letting in the sunshine, and was sitting cross-legged in bed. He got in, and she settled the tray between them. Oedipus appeared from nowhere and jumped up on the bed, sat precisely with his tail round his feet, and closed his eyes against temptation. His purr gave him away, though. Slider felt like purring too. Scrambled eggs with Parma ham, toast, fresh peaches cut into easinosh slices, a jug of juice. He sniffed it. ‘Squeezed?’

‘For a treat. There’s a grapefruit in there too.’

‘Everything I like best. What’s the celebration?’

‘Oh, this and that,’ she said. ‘How’s your neck stroke head?’

‘It’s been worse.’

They ate without talking much, and then she put the tray aside and they made long, slow love; the best for ages, which made him realise how much of their lives together was snatched between his duties and hers. Co-ordinating two schedules of unsocial hours took determination and dedication – but it was worth it. Afterwards they lay entwined and, eventually, talked.

‘Shouldn’t you be going to work or something?’ she asked.

‘I was just going to say that. What have you got on today?’

‘Concert tonight in Newbury, but there’s only a seating rehearsal. It’s the repeat of the one we did in Leeds.’

‘So what time d’you have to be there? Five?’

‘Five-thirty. So I’ve got all day. I had thought of cleaning this place up a bit and doing some shopping. The joys of domesticity. You can help me if you like.’

‘I’m on to you. You just want to keep an eye on me.’

‘Do you blame me?’

‘As soon as this case is out of the way,’ he promised, ‘I’ll take the rest of my sick-leave and we’ll go away somewhere. If you can get the time off.’

‘Watch me. But what about the case? Did anything happen yesterday?’

So he told her what he’d told Atherton and Hart already. Going through it again was never a bad idea.

‘So you know all about who didn’t do it,’ she said when he had finished.

‘That’s right. We’ve run out of false trails at last. Now we’ve just got to find who did.’

‘It must be someone he knew, because he let him in.’

‘People let in people they don’t know,’ Slider said. ‘Meter readers, insurance salesmen.’

‘You don’t sit and drink whisky with the meter reader,’ she said. ‘Well, I do, but I’m unusual.’

‘True. But then you do it in the nude. Paloma was fully dressed. I think it’s fairly safe to conclude that he knew the visitor.’

‘Could it have been his lover? Grisham? Come to try for a reconciliation? He pleads, Paloma resists, they argue, Grisham loses control and bashes him.’

‘With?’

‘Whatever,’ she said evasively. ‘Something he found lying to hand.’

‘Whatever the weapon was, it was taken away, and Busty didn’t say anything was missing.’

‘She might not notice. Well, something he brought with him, then. A walking-stick.’

‘Very gentlemanly, but not heavy enough. But anyway, we know it wasn’t Grisham. He had an alibi. He was telephoning Paloma from his office in Westminster at half past one.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she said indignantly.

‘I didn’t want to short-circuit you. I thought you might say something useful.’

‘Everything I say is useful. So what about this weapon?’

‘Whoever did the job, it had to be something small enough to be concealable when he left the flat, and heavy enough to be that small. Probably metallic. Possibly with a square edge.’

‘Like a spanner?’ she suggested.

‘Yes, a heavy spanner would do it.’

‘So you’re looking for a man who owns a spanner. That narrows it down.’

‘Ah, but he might have bought it specially.’

‘True. So you’ve got to use your brains.’

‘Don’t say that as if it was a disaster.’

‘Why not try a different approach,’ she said, propping herself up on one elbow. With her short bronze hair tousled, she looked like a show chrysanthemum past its best. ‘It seems to me you haven’t considered the poison pen letters.’

‘Not recently. But of course we thought we had the right man in Jonah, so the letters seemed incidental – if they existed. He didn’t bring any in to show me, remember.’

‘But I can’t see why he would make them up. Assume they did exist – isn’t it likely that whoever sent them was also the murderer? That it was an escalating campaign which went to its logical conclusion.’

‘It’s a possibility.’ Slider sat up. ‘The escalation is certainly there. Six months ago, according to Paloma, it started with phone calls; three months later the letters started, and increased in menace week by week. Of course, these things don’t usually end in murder, but it’s not unheard of. But who hated him with that sort of concentrated hatred?’

‘Didn’t he give you any hint as to who he thought it was?’

‘He said he didn’t know. I got the impression he had his suspicion, but he wouldn’t say anything. At the time, I thought he suspected Grisham.’

‘But why would Grisham—?’

‘Oh, because of the Pomona Club – refusing to stop working there. But that was before I talked to Grisham. The man really loved Paloma; and I just don’t see him as the kind to work in that underhand way. When he really lost it he acted very directly – rushing into the Pink Parrot waving fistfuls of quids. A poison pen is a different kind of character – slow, brooding, insidious and mean.’

She shivered. ‘And now he’s after you.’

‘Well he won’t get me. But what intrigues me is why did the campaign go so suddenly from the letters to murder? I’d have expected some build-up of physical attacks before the final one – broken windows, vandalism, arson attacks, that sort of thing. To make him suffer as much as possible before killing him.’

‘Presumably he did something that speeded it up,’ Joanna said. ‘What happened in the days just before the murder? Could it have been something to do with that animal rights business?’

‘I don’t see what,’ he said, frowning. ‘That was a pukka AL job, though unauthorised, and none of them had any connection with Paloma – we checked. And the only person who was likely to mind about the publicity was Grisham, and we’ve investigated that. All the same,’ he went on, putting his legs over the side of the bed, ‘I think you’re right. Something he did in the days before his death – over the weekend, perhaps – sparked it off. We’ve got to work out what.’

‘You’re getting up?’

‘Mm. I have to go in,’ he said absently, heading for the bathroom.

She saw he was off on his other plane. ‘I wish I hadn’t started you thinking. I thought we were going to go shopping together,’ she said.

‘Oh yes, let’s have lunch,’ he said vaguely over his shoulder.

‘No, that was the Eighties,’ she called after him; but he didn’t hear her.

As he entered the CID room, Norma, without looking up from her desk, began to sing very softly an old CID melody.

They called the bastard Stephen
,

They called the bastard Stephen
.

The rest of the team joined in with increasing volume.

They called the bastard Stephen
,

’CAUSE THAT WAS THE NAME OF THE INK!