Dear Departed (14 page)

‘Thanks, Freddie.’

Slider rang off, and turned to Atherton.

‘She drank it?’ Atherton said.

‘Apparently.’

‘In a bottle marked “Poison”, I suppose. Very Alice in Wonderland.’

‘Someone might have spiked her water-bottle.’

‘But that would mean access to her house that morning. I can’t believe she’d fill her water-bottle up in advance, the day before. What did you get from the mater?’

‘Not much, except a ferment of emotions revolving round the daughter and the divorce, which was obviously acrimonious. And that there was no family money or private income. But,’ he added, with slight reluctance, because he could see this moving in a direction he didn’t like, ‘she evidently thought Chattie was living hand-to-mouth on the shaky proceeds of her business. She’d never seen the house, for a start. They always met elsewhere. She thought it was a slum and Chattie was ashamed of it.’

‘Sounds as if our Chattie had something to hide from Mummy,’ Atherton said. ‘I wonder what?’

Slider said, to distract him, ‘And there’s another half-sister somewhere. Stella Smart was the second wife of three. But apparently there wasn’t any contact between them. I suppose we’ll have to talk to her, but it’s not priority.’

‘Always nice to have more things to check up on,’ Atherton said. ‘In the meantime, there was quite a response from last night’s appeal. About a dozen people who were in the park and want to be crossed off. One or two possible sightings that are worth following up. And a man who says he saw Chattie on Tuesday evening in the Anchor – that’s the pub at the end of her road.’

‘Good! Get on to that one.’

‘I was going to do it myself,’ Atherton said, with a slight question mark.

‘Yes, go. What else?’

‘Oddly, a lot of people phoned up just to say they knew her and liked her. I’ve never known anything like that before. It was a bit Jill Dando-ish.’

‘So – what then? There’s an undertone in your voice.’

‘I suppose I’m just being perverse, but when everyone says a person is an angel, I can’t help wondering if there’s a con going on. And given that she had a lifestyle above her station, and concealed it from her mum, I’m wondering more than ever what she was up to.’

‘You’re thinking drugs,’ Slider said flatly.

‘Well, they always do jump to mind,’ Atherton said, not watching his feet. ‘Or, given the prevalence of the man-motif, high-priced prostitution.’

‘We’ve no reason to think either of those things,’ Slider snapped. ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions, shall we?’

Atherton raised his eyebrows. ‘Sorry. Have I stepped on a corn?’

Slider drew a deep breath. The image of her, softly limp like a dead hare, and her rough-cut gold hair, so like Joanna’s, called to him for pity and vengeance. He said, managing a fair imitation of lightness, ‘It’s your mental health I’m worried about. This job makes you too cynical if you’re not careful.’

‘I shall try to nurture a rosy outlook,’ Atherton said, but he
gave Slider an odd look as he left. Or Slider thought he did. Maybe it was just his paranoia again.

Joanna phoned. ‘Just breaking for lunch.’

‘It’s not that time already, is it?’

‘Half past twelve, ol’ guv of mine.’

‘Flaming Nora, where does the time go? How was the session?’

‘Oh, brill. Lots of old friends. It’s basically a scratch Royal London Philharmonia, like the one we used to cobble together for concerts in Croydon in the dear distant days of double booking.’

‘Good. So you’ve someone to lunch with?’

‘Lots of someones. God, it’s good to be back!’ The words burst out of her, and he understood the depth of the feelings she had been hiding from him. She needed her work, as he needed his.

‘What’s the music like?’

‘Oh, you know. You’ve seen the films. Bang, crash, wallop, car chase, speedboat chase – dum-diddle-um-dum, dum-dum-dum. Lots of dots for us. It’s hard work, but it’s great being with real professionals. All these guys could do it standing on their heads – or, at least, they let you think they could. That’s showmanship. What do you think of Charlie?’

He had to be quick on his feet for that one. ‘Charles Slider? It sounds like a senior officer in the Salvation Army.’

‘That’s odd – you know, it does,’ she said wonderingly. ‘But I didn’t say Charles, I said Charlie.’

‘You can’t christen a child Charlie. You have to start with Charles – and we said nothing with an
s
in it.’

‘Sebastian,’ she said. ‘Septimus. It’s like something out of Monty Python – six seditious Sadducees from Caesarea.’

‘Keep thinking, Butch,’ he advised. ‘That’s what you’re good at.’

‘Gotta go. The guys are waiting.’

‘See they keep waiting,’ he warned, and she was gone.

As he replaced the handset, McLaren came in with a cup of tea for him – or, rather, half a cup of tea and half a saucer of tea. ‘Sorry, guv, I slopped a bit,’ he said. Slider hastily cleared a space for him to set it down.

‘How’s it going?’ Slider asked. It was rare to find McLaren with his mouth empty and it seemed a shame to waste the opportunity.

‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘We’re getting through ’em. Funny lot of calls we’ve had, from people saying they liked her. Like if they said what a nice person she was, we’d let her off being dead.’

‘Character references,’ Slider said, charmed not so much by the flight of fancy, but that McLaren had had it. ‘Atherton told me.’

‘We’ve had two people say they saw her jogging, both sound all right. But no help on the murder. She was just jogging round the track, the circular one, with a few other people.’

‘With them?’

‘Not with them, as such. Just, there were a few going round.’

‘Nobody saw her near the shrubbery?’

‘Not yet. But,’ McLaren went on, ‘it’s looking good for my idea, the copycat murder.’ His head took on a defiant tilt as he said it. ‘We’ve had another four reports about Running Man. A lot of people saw him legging it out of the park, and three of them reckon he was clutching a mobile phone in his germans. And given that the vic’s is missing, I reckon that makes him tasty.’

‘Don’t call her the vic. This is not America,’ said Slider, fighting another losing battle.

‘All right,’ McLaren said equably. ‘So whajjer reckon, guv? Shall I follow it up? We know he went off up Askew Road. We could start canvassing up there, see who else saw him, spread the search area, see if he dumped anything.’

Slider considered. He had to be flexible enough to consider that McLaren might be right, even though he was McLaren. ‘I need you here for the moment. See how it goes today. If it’s still looking good later we may put out a specific appeal on him tonight. Have you got a good description?’

‘Yeah, as to height and clothes and probable age. We haven’t got a witness who saw his face close up – yet.’ He gave Slider a hopeful look, like a dog in the presence of chocolate.

‘All right, well, keep on the follow-up for now, but you can ask specifically about him. And you can recontact anyone who was in the park at the right time. If you find anyone who saw his face, get ’em in and try for a photofit. But – McLaren!’ He
called him back as he swung happily away. ‘Don’t push. Don’t put ideas into people’s heads.’

McLaren looked wounded. ‘Guv!’ he protested. ‘It’s me!’

‘That’s why I said it.’

PC Yvonne Collins stuck her head round Slider’s door. ‘Sir, there’s a man in Lycra shorts downstairs for you.’

‘Funny, I didn’t order one of those,’ Slider said.

She sniggered. It was a point up to her that she had a sense of humour; and she wasn’t a bad-looking young woman, but there was the hardness in her face that women police always developed, which made Slider wonder why Atherton had gone after her – unless it was purely instinctive, like a dog chasing rabbits.

‘It’s the bloke you appealed for on the telly, sir, the bloke on the bike.’

‘Oh, right. I’ll come down.’

Her duty done, she allowed herself a personal question. ‘Is Jim Atherton around, sir?’

It sounded rather wistful. Slider felt he ought to warn her off, but what could he say? Anyway, he didn’t want to get caught in the fall-out from Atherton’s trouser department.

‘No, he’s out interviewing a witness.’

‘Oh,’ she said, and seemed not to know what to do with the information. Well, she wasn’t his problem, he thought gratefully, as he brushed past her and went off down the corridor, leaving her standing there like a spare dinner at a conference banquet. Which, sadly, was pretty much what she was, he reflected.

‘I’m Phil Yerbury,’ said Bicycle Man. He was dressed in the skin-tight Lycra shorts and matching vest, and was carrying his helmet, one of the sporty ones with the point to the back and a lightning flash design on the side. He was tall and fair, but tanned, so that his body hair showed up white against his brown skin. A tuft of it poked out shyly from each armpit like a chinchilla rabbit scenting the air. He was very lean and his legs were admirably muscled, the tendons behind the knee standing out sharply like freshly chiselled relief, the calf muscles seeming to squirm impatiently under the tight skin, as if they would go off on their own and get cycling again if their owner stood there talking for much longer.

A wave of heat and a smell of sweat came off him, but it was fresh sweat and not absolutely unpleasant. His face was lean and firm and missed being handsome by so little that you might not notice it in all that healthy tannedness.

‘I think I may be the person you were appealing for on the telly last night,’ he said, ‘but if I am, I don’t know why. I haven’t done anything.’ And in what looked like a nervous movement he pulled the water-bottle from its holster on his belt, and slugged back a good gulp.

‘You did the right thing by coming in,’ Slider said, putting warmth into his voice. ‘Would you like to sit down?’

‘I hope this isn’t going to take long,’ he said. ‘I’m working, and I don’t want to get behind schedule.’

‘Can’t you call it your lunch-hour?’

‘I don’t take a lunch-break,’ he said with barely suppressed scorn. ‘I’m self-employed. There’s terrific competition in the bicycle-courier world, you know. You can’t afford to slack.’

He still hadn’t sat down, so Slider perched on the edge of the table. ‘It shouldn’t take long,’ he said. ‘Were you in Paddenswick Park on Wednesday morning at around eight o’clock?’

‘Yes. Well, I cut through it, because the traffic was slow on Paddenswick Road. But I don’t know anything about this woman who was murdered. I’ve never met her or even heard of her in my life.’ The eyes were wide and nervous.

‘Witnesses say you rode very fast out of the park into King Street, so fast you almost knocked a woman over, and dashed into the traffic without looking, almost causing an accident.’

Relief and annoyance chased each other across his face. ‘Is that what it’s about? I didn’t nearly knock her over, I didn’t touch her. I’m an excellent cyclist. I know exactly how narrow a gap I can get through. She only had to stand still. And of course I didn’t join the traffic without looking. I wouldn’t last a day in this job if I did things like that. There was no near accident. I knew exactly what I was doing.’

His professional pride had been touched, Slider saw, and it was so important to him that he had forgotten there was a murder in the background. This, he thought, was not their man – unless he was a fabulously good actor.

‘Why were you in such a hurry?’ he asked.

‘I was working. I told you, there’s huge competition—’

‘At that time of day?’

Yerbury looked scornful. ‘I start at seven. It’s the busiest time, seven thirty to eight thirty. Modern business doesn’t slouch in at half past nine any more, not if it wants to survive. It’s a competitive world out there.’

‘I see. Well, Mr Yerbury, if you’d like to write down your name, address and telephone number for me—’

‘But what do you want them for? You can’t think I had anything to do with it. You can’t think I’m the Park Killer?’

‘Actually,’ Slider said, ‘I’ve just been thinking that being a bicycle courier would be a wonderful way for the Park Killer to get about and cover his tracks.’

Yerbury’s eyes bulged in horror. ‘But I—’ His mouth remained open, but no further words got out.

‘Just sit down here and write your name and address,’ Slider said kindly. ‘It’s routine, that’s all. We have to check everything and everyone, you must see that. And write where you were immediately before and immediately after your ride through the park. I presume you were in transit from one firm to another. If they can vouch for you, I don’t expect we’ll need to bother you again.’

He sat, and took up the biro laid waiting for him, and applied himself to the pad. His hand shook at first, but writing calmed him down. ‘I was delivering to a printing firm in King Street,’ he said. ‘I don’t know their phone number offhand, but you can get it from Directory Enquiries.’

‘You have a bag of some sort on your bicycle, I suppose?’

‘Not a bag, a box. A plastic carrier – like a cooler box, only with a locking lid,’ he said, not pausing in his writing. So much for the witness’s accuracy. It was amazing how much people got wrong. Or perhaps what was amazing was how much the layman expected them to get right. If juries only knew.

Yerbury finished writing and looked up at Slider. Am I done now?’

‘Yes, you’re done. Unless there’s anything you can tell me that might help with the investigation. A young woman was brutally stabbed to death in the park just about the time you rode through. Did you see anything, anyone, unusual?’

‘I was riding fast,’ he said, but apologetically now. ‘I mean,
I pass people in a flash. Obviously I didn’t see anyone killing anybody. Whereabouts in the park did it happen?’

‘In the shrubbery.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t be able to see in there.’

‘You rode past it,’ Slider said, not making it a question or a challenge.

His eyes went past Slider’s as he thought back. ‘There were a couple of people on the path by the shrubbery, standing talking. I had to dodge round them. I don’t suppose that was anything?’

‘Anything might be anything. What were they like?’