Orchestrated Death
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
was born and educated in Shepherd’s Bush, and had a variety of jobs in the commercial world, starting as a junior cashier
at Woolworth’s and working her way down to Pensions Officer at the BBC. She won the Young Writers’ Award in 1973, and became
a full-time writer in 1978. She is the author of over sixty successful novels to date, including thirty volumes of the
Morland Dynasty
series.
Visit the author’s website at
www.cynthiaharrodeagles.com
The Bill Slider Mysteries
ORCHESTRATED DEATH
DEATH WATCH
NECROCHIP
DEAD END
BLOOD LINES
KILLING TIME
SHALLOW GRAVE
BLOOD SINISTER
GONE TOMORROW
DEAR DEPARTED
GAME OVER
FELL PURPOSE
BODY LINE
The Dynasty Series
THE FOUNDING
THE DARK ROSE
THE PRINCELING
THE OAK APPLE
THE BLACK PEARL
THE LONG SHADOW
THE CHEVALIER
THE MAIDEN
THE FLOOD-TIDE
THE TANGLED THREAD
THE EMPEROR
THE VICTORY
THE REGENCY
THE CAMPAIGNERS
THE RECKONING
THE DEVIL’S HORSE
THE POISON TREE
THE ABYSS
THE HIDDEN SHORE
THE WINTER JOURNEY
THE OUTCAST
THE MIRAGE
THE CAUSE
THE HOMECOMING
THE QUESTION
THE DREAM KINGDOM
THE RESTLESS SEA
THE WHITE ROAD
THE BURNING ROSES
THE MEASURE OF DAYS
THE FOREIGN FIELD
THE FALLEN KINGS
THE DANCING YEARS
To Terry Wale, the voice of Bill Slider
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-74813-318-5
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
CHAPTER 1: Absence of Brown Boots
CHAPTER 2: All Quiet on the Western Avenue
CHAPTER 4: Digging for Buttered Rolls
CHAPTER 5: Utterly Barbicanned
CHAPTER 7: The Last Furnished Flat in the World
CHAPTER 8: Where There’s a Will There’s a Relative
CHAPTER 10: Through the Dark Glassily
CHAPTER 11: Miss World and Montezuma
CHAPTER 13: A Woman of No Substance
CHAPTER 14: Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy they First Make Rich
CHAPTER 15: A Runt is as Good as a Feast
CHAPTER 16: Bogus is as Bogus Does
CHAPTER 17: The Stray Dog Syndrome
Absence of Brown Boots
Slider woke with that particular sense of doom generated by Rogan Josh and Mixed Vegetable Bhaji eaten too late at night,
followed by a row with Irene. She had been asleep when he crept in, but as he slid into bed beside her, she had woken and
laid into him with that capacity of hers for passing straight from sleep into altercation which he could only admire.
He and Atherton, his sergeant, had been working late. They had been out on loan to the Notting Hill Drug Squad to help stake
out a house where some kind of major deal was supposed to be going down. He had called Irene to say that he wouldn’t be back
in time to take her to the dinner party she had been looking forward to, and then spent the evening sitting in Atherton’s
powder-blue Sierra in Pembridge Road, watching a dark and silent house. Nothing happened, and when the Notting Hill CID man
eventually strolled over to put his head through their window and tell them they might as well push off, they were both starving.
Atherton was a tall, bony, fair-skinned, high-shouldered young man, who wore his toffee-coloured hair in the style made famous
by David McCallum in
The Man From UNCLE
in the days when Atherton was still too young to stay up and watch it. He looked at his watch cheerfully and said there was
just time for a pint at The Dog and Scrotum before Hilda put the towels up.
It wasn’t really called The Dog and Scrotum, of course. It was The Dog and Sportsman in Wood Lane, one of those
gigantic arterial road pubs built in the fifties, all dingy tiled corridors and ginger-varnished doors, short on comfort,
echoing like a swimming-pool, smelling of Jeyes and old smoke and piss and sour beer. The inn sign showed a man in tweeds
and a trilby cradling a gun in his arm, while a black labrador jumped up at him – presumably in an excess of high spirits,
but Atherton insisted it was depicted in the act of sinking its teeth into its master’s hairy Harris crutch.
It was a sodawful pub really, Slider reflected, as he did every time they went there. He didn’t like drinking on his patch,
but since he lived in Ruislip and Atherton lived in the Hampstead-overspill bit of Kilburn, it was the only pub reasonably
on both their ways. Atherton, whom nothing ever depressed, said that Hilda, the ancient barmaid, had hidden depths, and the
beer was all right. There was at least a kind of reassuring anonymity about it. Anyone willing to be a regular of such a dismal
place must be introspective to the point of coma.
So they had two pints while Atherton chatted up Hilda. Ever since he had bought the Sierra, Atherton had been weaving a fiction
that he was a software rep, but Slider was sure that Hilda, who looked as though the inside of a magistrates’ court would
hold no surprises for her, knew perfectly well that they were coppers. Rozzers, she might even call them; or Busies? No, that
was a bit too Dickensian: Hilda couldn’t be more than about sixty-eight or seventy. She had the black, empty eyes of an old
snake, and her hands trembled all the time except, miraculously, when she pulled a pint. It was hard to tell whether she knew
everything that went on, or nothing. Certainly she looked as though she had never believed in Father Christmas or George Dixon.
After the beer, they decided to go for a curry; or rather, since the only place still open at that time of night would be
an Indian restaurant, they decided which curry-house to patronise – the horrendously named Anglabangla, or The New Delhi,
which smelled relentlessly of damp basements. And then home, to the row with Irene, and indigestion. Both were so much a part
of any evening that began with working late, that nowadays when he ate in an Indian restaurant it was with an anticipatory
sense of unease.
After a bit of preliminary squaring up. Irene pitched into the usual tirade, all too familiar to Slider for him to need to
listen or reply. When she got to the bit about What Did He Think It Was Like To Sit By The Phone Hour After Hour Wondering
Whether He Was Alive Or Dead? Slider unwisely muttered that he had often wondered the same thing himself, which didn’t help
at all. Irene had in any case little sense of humour, and none at all where the sorrows of being a policeman’s wife were concerned.
Slider had ceased to argue, even to himself, that she had known what she was letting herself in for when she married him.
People, he had discovered, married each other for reasons which ranged from the insufficient to the ludicrous, and no-one
ever paid any attention to warnings of that sort. He himself had married Irene knowing what she was like, and despite a very
serious warning from his friend-and-mentor O’Flaherty, the desk sergeant at Shepherd’s Bush.
‘For God’s sake, Billy darlin’,’ the outsize son of Erin had said anxiously, thrusting forward his veined face to emphasise
the point, ‘you can’t marry a woman with no sense-a-humour.’
But he had gone and done it all the same, though in retrospect he could see that even then there had been things about her
that irritated him. Now he lay in bed beside her and listened to her breathing, and when he turned his head carefully to look
at her, he felt the rise inside him of the vast pity which had replaced love and desire.
Tout comprendre c’est tout embêter
Atherton said once, and translated it roughly as ‘Once you know everything it’s boring’. Slider pitied Irene because he understood
her, and it was that fatal ability of his to see both sides of every question which most irritated her, and made even their
quarrels inconclusive.
He could sense the puzzlement under her anger, because she wanted to be a good wife and love him, but how could she respect
anyone so ineffectual? Other people’s husbands Got On, got promoted and earned more money. Slider believed his work was important
and that he did it well, but Irene could not value an achievement so static, and sometimes he had to struggle not to absorb
her values. If once he
began to judge himself by her criteria, it would be All Up With Slider.
His intestines seethed and groaned like an old steam clamp as the curry and beer resolved themselves into acid and wind. He
longed to ease his position, but knew that any shift of weight on his part would disturb Irene. The Slumber-well Dreamland
Deluxe was sprung like a young trampoline, and overreaction was as much in its nature as in a Cadillac’s suspension.
He thought of the evening he had spent, apparently resultless as was so much of his police work. Then he thought of the one
he might have spent, of disguised food and tinkly talk at the Harpers’, who always had matching candles and napkins on their
dinner-table, but served Le Piat d’Or with everything.
The Harpers had good taste, according to Irene. You could tell they had good taste, because everything in their house resembled
the advertising pages of the Sundry Trends Colour Supplement. Well, it was comforting to know you were right, he supposed;
to be sure of your friends’ approval of your stripped pine, your Sanderson soft furnishings, your oatmeal Berber, your Pampas
bathroom suite, your numbered limited-edition prints of bare trees on a skyline in Norfolk, the varnished cork tiles on your
kitchen floor, and the excitingly chunky stonewear from Peter Jones. And when you lived on an estate in Ruislip where they
still thought plastic onions hanging in the kitchen were a pretty cute idea, it must all seem a world of sophistication apart.
Slider had a sudden, familiar spasm of hating it all; and especially this horrible Ranch-style Executive Home, with its picture
windows and no chimneys, its open-plan front garden in which all the dogs of the neighbourhood could crap at will, with its
carefully designed rocky outcrop containing two poncey little dwarf conifers and three clumps of heather; this utterly undesirable
residence on a new and sought-after estate, at the still centre of the fat and neutered universe of the lower middle classes.
Here struggle and passion had been ousted by Terence Conran, and the old, dark and insanitary religions had been replaced
by the single lustral rite of washing the car. A Homage to Catatonia. This was it, mate,
authentic, guaranteed, nice-work-if-you-can-get-it style. This was Eden.
The spasm passed. It was silly really, because he was one of the self-appointed guardians of Catatonia; and because, in the
end, he had to prefer vacuity to vice. He had seen enough of the other side, of the appalling waste and sheer stupidity of
crime, to know that the most thoughtless and smug of his neighbours was still marginally better worth protecting than the
greedy and self-pitying thugs who preyed on him. You’re a bastion, bhoy, he told himself in O’Flaherty’s voice. A right little
bastion.
The phone rang.
Slider plunged and caught it before its second shriek, and Irene moaned and stirred but didn’t wake. She had been hankering
after a Trimphone, using as an excuse the theory that it would disturb her less when it rang at unseasonable hours. There
were so many Trimphones down their street now that the starlings had started imitating them, and Slider had made one of his
rare firm stands. He didn’t mind being woken up in the middle of the night, but he was damned if he’d be warbled at in his
own home.
‘Hullo Bill. Sorry to wake you up, mate.’ It was Nicholls, the sergeant on night duty.
‘You didn’t actually. I was already awake. What’s up?’
‘I’ve got a corpus for you.’ Nicholls’ residual Scottish accent made his consonants so deliberate it always sounded like corpus.
‘It’s at Barry House, New Zealand Road, on the White City Estate.’
Slider glanced across at the clock. It was a quarter past five. ‘Just been found?’
