Dear Departed (16 page)

‘And not just a single wrap, either,’ Hart said happily. ‘It’s not even a party-sized bag. There must be something like a hundred grams in there, enough to sell to a lot of friends for a nice profit.’ She almost chortled. ‘Little Princess Perfect turns out to be a naughty girl after all.’

‘I did feel all along she was too good to be true,’ Atherton said. ‘But the boss won’t be pleased. He’s taken a shine to her.’
He turned to Viv Preston. ‘Can you take a photograph of its position?’

‘I already have,’ she said. ‘You can take it out now.’

He gloved up, and carefully withdrew the package. ‘Of course,’ he said, holding it up by one corner and estimating the weight, ‘we don’t know until we test it. Might be bicarb for all we know.’

‘Yeah,’ said Hart ripely. And my arse is an apricot. Anyone want to bet it ain’t charlie?’ No-one did.

It was cocaine. They had field kits at the station for all the common drugs: a presumptive test and a confession could save a lot of time and money in possession cases.

‘Well,’ said Atherton, lounging against the door jamb of the CID room, ‘it certainly helps to explain how she could afford the high life, and the house.’

Looking round the room, Slider saw how cheered everyone was by this find, which seemed likely to explain so much. He, on the other hand, felt his heart sink, and realised that he had become attached already to the pretty, clear-skinned girl called Chattie, the smiling, always cheerful girl, who was nice to old men and paper-sellers. Perhaps she wasn’t Princess
Perfect, as Hart had dubbed her, but an awful lot of people had liked her. He didn’t want her to be a coke-head and a drug-dealer.

Atherton must have divined his thoughts, because he said, ‘A lot of people don’t regard cocaine as a dangerous drug, and don’t think it ought to be illegal. To them, snorting it or even selling it wouldn’t seem like a crime.’

‘Yeah, celebs do it all the time,’ Hart said, belatedly catching on. ‘They talk about it openly, and they don’t even get, whacher-callit,
déclassés.’

But she’d be
déclassée
with me, Slider thought. ‘What about fingerprints?’

‘There were a couple of nice ones on the plastic bag,’ Atherton said. ‘They’re comparing them now with the victim’s tenprint. Luckily people don’t generally bother to glove up when they’re handling their own little baggie of joy.’

‘Boss,’ said Hart, ‘I’ve just thought: what if the killer was her supplier? That would make sense of why she went into the bushes with him. Say she was scoring a bit o’ charlie to sell to her friends, she wouldn’t want to do that in full view of the joggers and jigglers.’

‘Yes,’ said Slider, but uneasily. He could see the images, of the man in the hooded top talking to Chattie by the shrubbery, of the man in the hooded top running away ‘like the wind’ from the park; and in between he could construct a scenario of the two of them in the shrubbery talking, a quarrel – over money, perhaps; the flash of a knife, the urgent flight. What didn’t sing to him was the notion of a drug-dealer calculatedly sedating his victim before stabbing her. ‘If it was a real stabbing,’
he said, ‘it would play like panto. As it is – why would he drug her and then go in for a bit of light wounding?’

Swilley said, ‘That’s right. I can’t see a drug-dealer being squeamish about putting the knife in.’

‘With all due respect to Dr Cameron,’ Atherton said, ‘we don’t know that she did die of a drug overdose. Not till the tox report comes back.’

Swilley looked at him pityingly. ‘That’s when you know you’ve got to get out more – when you start trying to make the evidence fit your theory.’

‘It’s not evidence, only the doc’s opinion,’ Atherton said.

‘Freddie Cameron’s opinion
is
evidence,’ Slider said.

‘Leaving aside the method of killing,’ Hollis put in, ‘her line of business would be ideal for dealing coke. She moved around a lot, met lots of musoes and showbiz types.’

‘Yeah, she was giving ’em all sorts of services – why not that? And maybe a bit of the other an’ all,’ McLaren said, with relish.

Slider controlled himself. ‘Well, let’s remember that this is all conjecture. We’ve no evidence yet that she did anything untoward. What else have we got?’

‘Still haven’t found her mobile, guv,’ Hart said. ‘We found her handbag in her bedroom, but it wasn’t in there, and we pretty well covered the house. I reckon she must have had it with her and the killer took it.’

‘Which would fit with the drug-dealer idea,’ Mackay said. ‘If she was murdered for personal reasons, why would the killer have it away with her phone?’

‘Well, we know it’s switched off,’ Slider said. ‘We can put the provider company on alert and as soon as it’s switched on again we can get a fix on it. So, we’re actively looking for Running Man?’

‘Yes, guv,’ McLaren said. Asking everyone about him. Is there gonna be another TV appeal tonight?’

‘On the local news only,’ Slider said. ‘The main news has lost interest. Too much else going on with the Middle East crisis and the cabinet split. And yes, I will make sure that they ask about Running Man. But let’s remember we don’t know that he has anything to do with it, or even that he is the same man who was seen talking to her.’

This caveat went down with the assembled troops like a barbed-wire sandwich.

‘So let’s consider the possibility that it was a murder for personal reasons,’ he went on. He looked at Atherton. ‘What about the man who saw her in the pub on Tuesday evening?’

Atherton told the tale. ‘The description he gave fits Toby Harkness, who was one of the members of the band Baroque Solid, so I thought that would be a good place to start.’

‘How come you didn’t latch onto it before, Jim? You’ve been spending enough time with the band,’ said Hart.

‘Maybe if you’d had your mind on the job when you were on the job,’ Swilley began dangerously.

Slider intervened. ‘All right, Toby Harkness. Maybe there was some sort of history between them.’

‘Or maybe she was just selling him charlie,’ Hart said. ‘It don’t sound romantic. Ruffling a bloke’s hair in public is a quick way to lose his interest. They hate that – don’t they, Jim? Buggers up fifty quid’s wurf of blow-drying.’

‘But,’ Hollis said, being the voice of sanity, ‘I thought her date for Tuesday night was with a JS?’

‘True,’ Atherton said, ‘and so I thought—’

‘Wasn’t one of the band called Jasper something?’ McLaren asked. ‘I remember thinking what a poncey name it was, just what you’d expect for a Beethoven freak.’

‘That’s right,’ Hart said. ‘There was a Jasper. What was his other name? I can’t remember.’

‘It was Stalybrass,’ said Atherton. ‘I thought I’d go and see him, and Toby.’

Hollis looked considering. ‘If she was seeing both of them at the same time, that might cause jealousy—’

‘And a motive for murder,’ Hart finished for him. ‘If they knew about each other.’

‘Oddly enough,’ Atherton said, ‘that had occurred to me.’

‘Well, you’re the obvious man for the job,’ Slider said, ‘since you’re so well in with the band. But can you see them separately without the other knowing? Don’t they all live together?’

‘No, Mark Falconer, the cellist, shares a flat with the clarinet, Chaz Barnes. But Jasper Stalybrass and Toby Harkness each have their own flats,’ Atherton said.

‘It woulda been hairy dating both of ’em if they’d lived together,’ Hart observed. ‘I’d a given the vic plus ten for balls.’

‘I can tell you’ve never studied anatomy,’ Atherton said kindly.

McLaren had been looking impatient, and now burst in with, ‘All this love and jealousy guff makes me tired. We’ve got a bloody great bag of charlie out of her gaff, and she was a high spender. What more do you want?’

Slider could have told him, but at that moment the telephone in his room rang and he left them to it while he went and answered it. When he returned the discerning might have
noticed a quiet smile of satisfaction on his face, but the discerning weren’t looking.

‘That was Viv Preston,’ he said. ‘She’s run the fingerprints from the cocaine bag against the victim’s tenprint. They don’t match. Nothing like.’

‘Oh, pants,’ Hart said. ‘Another good theory bites the dust.’

‘No, hang on,’ Mackay said. ‘Just because there’s someone else’s prints on the bag, doesn’t mean it wasn’t still hers. I mean, what was the stuff doing there anyway? Look, maybe it was one of her boyfriends left it there for her – didn’t that cleaner say she had a lot of people in and out? She had to get the stuff from somewhere. Someone might have dropped it there for her to pick up. Just because her prints weren’t on it doesn’t mean they weren’t going to be, see what I mean?’

‘Or maybe she was just careful,’ McLaren said. ‘Smart bird like her, she might always have used gloves.’

‘So who was she meeting in the shrubbery, then, in your theory?’ Slider asked.

‘Someone she was selling to,’ McLaren suggested shamelessly.

‘Nice try,’ Slider said. The mention of the cleaner had triggered something in his mind. ‘But I think I’ve got a better theory. Mrs Hammick said she saw Chattie’s sister Jassy in the house on Monday, coming up from the kitchen and looking furtive and guilty. She also said that Jassy mixed with a rough lot.’

‘Yeah,’ said Hart, ‘I’ve seen the mess she made of her bedroom. Drugs do fit better with the stud-queen image than with Princess Perfect,’ she admitted.

‘I think perhaps it’s time we had a talk with Jassy,’ Slider said.

‘Me for that,’ Hart said. ‘Remember, her boyfriend’s black. She’s more likely to trust me than one of you white boys. Where’s she live, boss?’

‘Clapham, I think. Ferndale Road,’ Slider said, from memory. ‘The number will be in the address book.’

Hart raised her eyebrows. ‘Then you’d definitely better send me. Ferndale Road’s not Clapham, it’s Brixton.’

‘There’s a lot of fuss about Brixton,’ Atherton said. ‘It’s just Shepherd’s Bush having it large.’

‘They’d be on you like a flock of piranhas,’ Hart discouraged him. ‘There’s another thing, guv,’ she went on. ‘Jassy’s boyfriend’s black and Running Man was black.’

‘There’s more than one black person in Shepherd’s Bush,’ Slider mentioned.

‘Yeah, but if she wasn’t dragged into the shrubbery by force, which we know she wasn’t, it had to be someone she knew, di’nt it? This way, you’ve got the personal motive and the drugs motive together in one person.’

Slider sighed. ‘Since I can’t seem to stop you jumping to conclusions, I suppose I’d better go with you and keep a hand on the rein. What?’ he answered her look. ‘You didn’t think I was going to let you go there alone, did you?’

‘I’m a big girl,’ Hart complained.

‘That’s why I’m going with you,’ said Slider.

Atherton was right, there was a lot of fuss over nothing made about Brixton. Though there was a greater preponderance of black faces, white people still lived there perfectly peacefully and went about unmolested. Nobody even glanced sideways at Slider as he walked with Hart from the throbbing heart of Brixton down Ferndale Road. As with most communities, the vast majority of people of all shades just wanted to get on with their lives without bothering or being bothered by their neighbours, and the small element that did want to cause trouble was as disliked by the majority as anything else that made their environment unpleasant.

Still, there was a certain healthy tension in Slider’s muscles, because they had looked up Jassy’s boyfriend before they left. Darren Barnes – as it had turned out to be – was well known to the police, having been pulled in numerous times for possession, possession with intent, social-security fraud, once for affray (that was a brawl outside a pub) and once for malicious wounding. He was not one of the big racketeers, just a smalltime distributor of recreational substances, and Mick Dangerfield at Brixton nick had told Slider that he seemed to try to avoid trouble on the whole, and lived a reasonably comfortable lifestyle on the proceeds of his dealing and multiple claims on the state’s purse, plus, probably, other minor scams they hadn’t caught up with yet. But, Dangerfield had warned, he was also known to
go tooled up, and apart from the malicious wounding charge was thought to have used a blade on other occasions when the victim had not been willing to tell his side of the story to the police. Barnes was also inclined to be political, which made him more trouble than it was worth to take all the way, and accounted for his numerous warnings rather than charges. He had gone to court after the malicious wounding, but the judge had decided there was probably equal fault on both sides and had given him a suspended. The other time he had made an appearance before the beak was for the social-security fraud, where the sentence was generally community service. Barnes had been sent to help out at a youth club for black youngsters in Clapham which, Dangerfield said wryly, had proved right up his particular boulevard as it enabled him to extend his customer base clear into the next borough.

So, thought Slider, the drugs and the knife were all present and correct, which was one up – two up – to McLaren; and while it was comforting to think that Darren usually tried to avoid trouble, there was always danger when you cornered a fox in its own lair. And if Darren Barnes had been both Running Man and Talking-to-Chattie Man, there might be enough at stake to make him reckless.

There was a beautiful London plane growing outside the house, which was the only nice thing about it. The house itself was tall and run down, and obviously divided into flats or rooms. The front door stood open, and the steps up to it were cracked and chipped and had lost their handrail. Inside the door was a passage floored with worn and dirty brown linoleum, the walls painted brown up to dado-level and cream above. The usual litter of electricity bills addressed to long-departed tenants, handbills and junk mail lay on the floor beside and behind the door. From somewhere above the relentless beat of rap music shook the air, which was cold inside the dark hall and smelt of feet, sweat, junk food and the rich undertone of ganja.

‘Just like home,’ Hart said, straight-faced, noticing Slider’s nostrils twitch. ‘So, which flat is it?’