Killing Time (6 page)

Hart, at Slider’s side, turned her head away quickly, swallowing with a clicking sound.

‘Feeling sick?’ Slider asked. She made an affirmative sound. ‘Is this your first time?’

‘No, sir, I’ve felt sick before.’

He gave her points for trying. ‘First murder?’

‘Not the first, but the messiest,’ she said.

‘You never get used to it,’ he told her from the depth of his own present misery. ‘You just have to learn to keep your stomach detached from your eyes. Now, using your eyes, what do you think happened here?’

She looked around, grateful to have her attention taken from the corpse. ‘He doesn’t seem to have put up much of a fight. None of the furniture’s out of place, apart from the one chair.’ There was another armchair, placed opposite the first, both of them facing the television on a slant, and between the two, but set back so that only the end of it was within reach, was a coffee table on which stood a whisky bottle – White Horse, almost
empty – and an empty glass, an ashtray with five cigarette ends in it, and an untidy pile of papers and magazines. Back against the wall was an elderly sofa of the armless couch type, covered with what was nowadays known as a ‘throw’ in a vaguely Polynesian pattern of mutually hostile colours – not so much a throw as a throw-up, Slider thought. Against the wall nearest the door was a large and ugly sideboard in pale highly-varnished oak with bulbous legs, dating, judging by its style, from the nineteen-fifties. On it was a collection of framed photographs, mostly black and white, of Busty and Jay in their separate high moments: Jay with Jeremy Haviland in a dinner suit; Busty with a celebrity so blurred it could have been David Nixon or Richard Nixon for all Slider knew; Busty in a lineup of Windmill girls; Jay in an Arran sweater against a wild sea from a knitwear catalogue – and so on. Some of the frames were as old as the photos. Slider touched one gently and its wonky foot slithered on the highly polished surface and collapsed.

‘If anyone had bumped against that, the pictures would have fallen over,’ Hart said.

‘So?’ Slider encouraged.

‘So no fight. The villain must have took him by surprise. Crept up on him and whacked him from behind.’

‘But the villain kicked the door in. Wouldn’t you think he’d have heard that?’

‘He might’ve been asleep. People do drift off in front of the telly.’

Slider grunted non-committally. ‘Does anything strike you as odd about that ashtray?’ he asked her. She looked, bent close to peer, and shook her head. ‘There are five dog ends in it,’ he said, ‘but no ash. How did he manage that?’

‘He didn’t. Look here,’ Hollis said. Between the coffee table and the couch there were traces of cigarette ash on the carpet, and an area where it had apparently been rubbed in, with a hand or a foot. ‘And there’s whisky been spilled here too,’ he added, sniffing. It was a damp patch which smelled strongly. ‘Chummy’s had the table over.’

‘Hang about, what’s that?’ Hart said. It was another glass, on the floor beside the other armchair, but standing upright, as though it had been placed there by someone sitting in the chair. ‘Maybe the whisky come from this glass.’

‘But you can see table’s been knocked over,’ Hollis said impatiently. ‘Look at the impressions in the carpet where it stood before. It wasn’t put back in exactly the same spot.’

Hart said, ‘The table could have been knocked over any time. It didn’t have to be the murderer.’

‘True,’ Slider said. ‘But it strikes me that everything is very neat and tidy here. Clean, dusted and polished. Would such a houseproud person knock the table over and then just rub the ash into the carpet? Wouldn’t he clean it up properly?’

‘All right,’ Hart conceded, ‘but if it was the murderer done it, why would he pick everything up again, put the dimps back in the ashtray and all that?’

‘No offers,’ Hollis said with a shrug.

‘Well,’ Slider went on at last, ‘there’s a few things to think about, anyway. Bag up the whisky bottle and the glasses. And we’ll take the ashtray and contents as well.’

Certainly, Slider thought, further pondering the room, Jay Paloma was killed there, in that spot, and probably in that chair. Apart from no signs of a struggle, there were no bloodmarks anywhere else. No reeling about locked in mortal combat à la Reichenbach Falls. There was blood on the chair, and on the carpet around it, some smears on the end of the coffee table, and a few specks on the TV screen. But why had Paloma sat there and let himself be killed? Asleep, maybe – but wouldn’t the kicking in have stirred him, wouldn’t he at least have been struggling to his feet?

The worse possibility was trying to suggest itself to him. If Paloma had been pursued to the edge of breaking by a campaign of poison pen letters, it might have bred in him such a conviction of hopelessness that he had simply given up. Believing there was no escape, he had just been killing time here, waiting for the inevitable moment when he would hear the executioner’s approaching footsteps. To such a mentality, the crash of the door being kicked in would be almost welcome, signalling an end to the hideous anticipation.

He didn’t want to think like that. His global-mammy circuits couldn’t take it. Perhaps Paloma had been drunk, and dead to the world. That might do it. Or doped. Leave that, have a wonder about motive, for light relief. It was pretty obviously not robbery. Slider wished the murderer had even made a pretence
of ransacking the place. Whoever had killed Jay Paloma had gone straight in and come straight out again – apart from the brief pause to put the coffee table straight. They knew what they wanted all right, and it wasn’t loose change or a video recorder.

Busty was waiting for him in one of the interview rooms, WPC Asher in attendance, a cup of tea steaming on the table in front of her. She was dressed in a smart coat with an imitation lucca-lamb collar, which was hanging open over a pink twin-set and a regulation barmaid’s black straight skirt. The eponymous udders were discreetly corseted now, but still peaks of splendour; in the first fine braless rapture of their acquaintance, the sight of Busty stepping out down Wardour Street had always set Slider to thinking about Barnes Wallis.

She was not a bad-looking woman still, even in the harsh strip-lighting of an interview room. Asher had escorted her to the ladies where she had had a wash to remove her ruined makeup, and without it she looked surprisingly young, despite her recent bout of hysterical weeping. She was calm now, but looked up at Slider with swollen, brimming eyes and pale and shaking cheeks.

‘Busty, I’m so sorry,’ he said. She nodded, keeping her lips closed. ‘I have to ask you some questions. You understand?’

She nodded again, and then unlocked enough to say, ‘You do your job. I want you to get the bastard that did this to my poor—’ She lost it a moment. ‘I want you to get the bastard, and then I want you to let me have five minutes alone with him.’

‘You’ve no idea, I suppose, who it might be? Who hated him that much?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He was a good, kind soul. He never hurt anyone in his life. He looked after me, Mr Slider. He was like my big brother. It was him got me the barmaid job, because he didn’t like me stripping and such at my age. I haven’t turned a trick since we started sharing again, d’you know that? He said to me, Val, he said, you’ll never have to do that again as long as I live.
That’s
the sort of person he was. Always thinking of others.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Slider said again. He was going to be sorrier when he had to tell her about the poison pen letters, but that was for
later. ‘Tell me what you know. You’d been away for the night, you said?’

Busty had been visiting her sister who lived in Harlesden. She had set off at about half past eleven on Tuesday morning, taking an overnight bag with her, intending to return at about the same time the next day. ‘It was my day off. I wasn’t due on again at the pub until this evening. And my sister’s not been too clever lately – you know, women’s stuff,’ she explained delicately, ‘so I went over to give her a bit of a break, let her have a day in bed and an evening out.’

‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’

‘Why should you?’ Busty shrugged. ‘We were close when we were kids, but then we weren’t all that much for a long time. Actually, I think when I first knew you was when we weren’t talking. Well, Mum and Dad didn’t approve of my way of life, and Shirley sided with them. It’s only since Dad died that we’ve sort of started liking each other again. She married a real bastard, so I suppose it made her realise there wasn’t much to choose between us.’

‘Come again?’

She gave him a wan smile. ‘Between her and me. Doing it for one man you don’t like isn’t much different from doing it for several men you don’t like.’

‘I see. So, you came back from your sister’s early. What happened to change your plan?’

‘The bastard came back. Her Trevor. He’s a lorry-driver. He wasn’t due back till this afternoon, but he fiddled his tacho and cut his breaks to get through early, and there he was. Lucky I’m a light sleeper, I heard him parking his lorry outside, so it give me a chance to get out of bed, grab me stuff and lock meself in the bathroom while I got dressed. Only if Trevor had come upstairs and found me asleep in his bed—’ She shrugged eloquently.

‘In his bed?’

‘Shirley’s not got a spare room. I was sleeping in with her.’

‘What time was that, when he got home?’

‘It must’ve been about six-ish, a bit before. Anyway, by the time I get downstairs, Shirl’s got the tea on the go, and Trevor’s mellowed out enough to let me phone for me taxi, otherwise
I’d’ve been stuck. I mean, you try finding a phone box that works in Harlesden.’

‘And you got home about half past six?’ Slider said, checking his notes. The shout was timed at six thirty-five.

‘I s’pose so. About then,’ she said, the animation draining from her face. ‘I didn’t realise at first. The door looked as if it was shut. It was only when I went to put my key in the lock that I felt it move, and then I realised it was only pushed to. I went in, and—’ She stopped, shutting her mouth hard.

‘Yes,’ Slider said helpfully. ‘I’m sorry, but I have to take you through it. Did you expect Jay to be home?’

‘Well, yes – at least, he hadn’t said he wouldn’t. Normally he’d be asleep at that time, with working late and everything. Well, he doesn’t get back from the club till around four, so he never usually got up till half-twelve-ish. The only reason he wouldn’t be home would be if he went somewhere with someone, straight from the club – like, a pick-up, you know. But he hadn’t been doing that lately. He’d hardly been out at all, not socially, and he hadn’t had any casuals in months.’

‘So you thought he was at home and asleep? Did you call out to him?’

‘No. I’m always quiet if I’m up early, not to wake him.’

‘So what did you do next?’

‘Well, I heard the telly was on, so I went in to the front room to see. And there he was.’

‘You didn’t touch anything or move anything?’

‘No. I didn’t really go in the room. I could see straight away, from the door, that he was – that he must be—’ She shook her head. ‘I just went straight and dialled 999.’

‘From your telephone? Which is where?’

‘In the hall. Opposite the front door. And then I just stayed by the telephone until the police come. I didn’t want to go back in there. I was in a state of shock. I didn’t even cry. It wasn’t until they came and started talking to me that I broke down.’ She took out a handkerchief and blew briskly.

Slider waited for her. ‘Would you like some more tea?’ Busty made a sound of assent through her hanky, and he looked at Asher, who nodded and slipped out. ‘Did he often watch television when he got back from the club?’

‘Well, no,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘I’ve never actually knew
him to do that. But I suppose if he was upset or something and couldn’t sleep he might have.’

‘And the whisky? Was it his habit to have a nightcap before he went to bed?’

‘I wouldn’t say habit,’ she said carefully, ‘but he has done on occasions. Whisky is his drink, but he doesn’t have it any special time. I’ve known him pop down the pub lunchtime and have one, or at home in the afternoon, if there’s a good film on. He liked all them old black and white ones, especially if they were about the war. Richard Attenborough and that. Or with his supper, before he went to work. He’d have a pie or a bit of cheese or something, and a Scotch with that.’

‘When you last saw him – when was that, exactly?’

‘When I left for my sister’s yesterday. He got up to see me off. He came out in his dressing-gown and made us a cup of coffee and sat with me and drank it while I did my makeup.’

‘And how did he seem? Was he in his normal spirits?’

‘Yes.’ She hesitated. ‘Well, he’s not been all that bright recently. A bit quiet and off it.’

‘Did he give you any reason?’

‘He was worried about something.’ She hesitated again. ‘I think it had to do with his friend.’

‘What friend is that?’

‘His gentleman friend,’ she said rather primly.

‘Name?’

‘He never told me. He always just called him his friend. All I know is, he was very rich. Someone important and famous – that’s why Maurice was extra discreet.’

‘Maurice?’

‘That’s his real name, Jay’s – Maurice McElhinney. Didn’t you know? Well, I suppose it’s only me that calls him that now. His parents were Irish – from Dublin. I think they were quite well off and that. Anyway, they wanted him to be a lawyer or a doctor or something, and they were really disappointed when all he wanted to do was be a dancer. He persuaded them to let him go to stage school, but when it came out that he was bent as well – well, all he could do was leave home and come to London. I mean, in those days it was hard enough being One Of Them over here, let alone in bleeding Dublin with Catholic parents and everything. And he’s never went back. I don’t think
he’s ever even written to them. He said to me only last week, I was all the family he had.’ She began to cry again. Slider left her alone until Asher came in with the tea, and then he gave her handkerchiefs and jollied her along until she was back in control.

‘So tell me what you know about this friend of his,’ Slider resumed. ‘Have you any idea who it was? Any clues at all – where he lived or what he did for a living or anything like that?’