Necrocrip (16 page)

‘Oh har har,’ Beevers said getting up. ‘I’m going to the toilet.’

‘It’s funny how he always tells us,’ Norma said just before Beevers was out of earshot. ‘He regresses further every day. I’m sure he’s an anal retentive.’

‘Just as well,’ Atherton responded automatically.

The door slammed. Norma got up and came across to sit on Atherton’s desk. Her long, Californian beach-beauty legs disappeared beguilingly under her skirt just about at the level of Atherton’s intellect, and it was a sign of his state of mind that he hardly gave them a glance.

‘Seriously, though,’ she said.

He looked up. ‘Seriously, said he with a mocking smile. This is my mocking smile.’

‘You can tell me. And I wish you would – I like you, but I’m also fond of Polly. She’s a sort of protegee of mine, you know? And if you’re going to make her unhappy—’

‘No, no, quite the reverse. You don’t need to worry about her.’ He met Norma’s eyes unwillingly. ‘It’s not debauchery that’s giving me bags under my eyes, it’s frustration. The fact is, I’ve always believed in the rule that if you can keep a woman talking until two in the morning, she’s yours. It’s never failed before, but—’ He shrugged.

‘It failed last night?’

‘Polish is a Catholic. She says she won’t sleep with anyone before marriage. She says she likes me very much, but she means to go to her marriage bed a virgin. Can you believe that?’

‘Yes, I believe it. Why not? D’you think every woman in the world has got to fall flat on her back just because you look her way?’

‘You didn’t,’ Atherton pointed out in an effort to change the subject.

‘You never made a play for me. Not a serious one. Not,’ she added sternly, ‘that it would have made any difference if you had. I’d never go out with someone in the Department, and I’m surprised that you do. I’ve never understood why you’ve made such a dead set at Polly.’

‘I like her,’ he said.

‘Can’t you like her without trying to get her into bed? Why do you have to knock off every woman you meet?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s a challenge. One must do something.’

‘That’s a disgusting thing to say!’

‘Oh, come on, Norma – the women I chase are just as eager for it as I am.’

‘So Where’s the challenge?’ Norma countered with spirit. Atherton looked down at his hands, thoughtfully rubbing the back of one with the forefinger of the other. ‘You don’t really mean any of that cobblers, anyway,’ she said, looking at his bent head. ‘You’re quite a nice bloke really. I don’t know why you pretend to be a bastard. It doesn’t suit you.’

‘Ah well, when the woman you love loves someone else, what can you do?’ he said lightly. She regarded him thoughtfully, a doubt forming in her mind and a question on her lips. He looked up. ‘Won’t you chuck your Tony and give me a chance, lovely Norma?’ he pleaded winsomely, laying a hand on her thigh.

‘Oh bugger off,’ she said explosively, leaping out from under his touch. She went back to her own desk to the accompaniment of his laughter, but as she reapplied herself to her work, she wondered all the same.

Slider arrived to find his office furniture under sheets and two men in Matisse-dotted overalls up ladders.

‘It’s the painters, Guv,’ McLaren told him helpfully as he was passing. He held a polystyrene cup in one hand and a greasy paper bag in the other.

‘Thank you,’ said Slider. ‘I was wondering. And what’s that?’

‘Just a hot sausage roll,’ McLaren said defensively, edging the bag back out of his line of vision.

‘You know Mr Barrington has forbidden eating in the CID room,’ Slider said sternly.

‘That’s all right, Guv. I hadn’t forgotten. I’m going to eat it in the lav.’

He was sidling off, when Slider remembered. ‘By the way, what happened about Mrs Stevens? Was she able to add anything more?’

McLaren’s face fell. ‘She wouldn’t ID the man she saw from Slaughter’s photo. In fact, she still insists he had a camel coat and fair hair – she says she saw it glitter in the lamplight. I suggested maybe it was a bald head shining, but she says she knows the difference between a glitter and a shine. She won’t be budged on it. But the good news is
I’ve got her to agree it was Wednesday morning, not Thursday—’

‘Got her to agree? So she’ll change her mind back again just as easily?’

‘No sir,’ he said in wounded tones. ‘I didn’t push her. She remembers that when she went to make herself a cup of tea straight afterwards she was nearly out of milk. She gets three pints a week, delivered on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So it couldn’t have been Thursday, or she’d’ve had half a bottle left.’

‘That’s the good news, is it?’

‘There’s more. She thinks he
was
carrying something, a bag of some sort, but she’s not sure what.’

‘Thinks he was. Not sure. And he had fair hair. And a camel coat.’ Slider sighed. ‘Whoever he was, he wasn’t Slaughter.’

‘No, but it’s a start though, isn’t it Guv? I mean, we’ve got something to follow up now.’

‘Absolutely. Well, go follow it. And – McLaren?’

‘Yes Guv?’

‘For God’s sake do your top button up. And get rid of that bag before somebody sees it.’

‘Okay,’ McLaren said easily, and legged it down the corridor. Slider turned back to contemplate his office, and found Atherton approaching from the other direction.

‘We’ve checked on the key, and it is there, as Slaughter said,’ he greeted his superior. Pausing he looked in through the door. ‘Oh, I see the painters have arrived.’

‘Is that what it is?’ Slider said gratefully. ‘Oy – you up the ladder!’

The painter turned at the waist. ‘What’s up, mate?’

‘How long are you going to be?’

‘Couple of hours or so. Be done by lunchtime,’ the man said cheerily.

‘Wonderful! And what am I supposed to do until then?’ Slider asked rhetorically.

‘How should I bloody know?’ the man up the ladder said agreeably, and turned back to his work.

‘No need to get emulsional about it,’ Atherton said. He eyed his boss with sympathy. ‘Looks like a clear signal from
on high to get out on the street, doesn’t it, Guv?’

‘On high? From God, you mean?’

‘One step down. Titian here is acting on Mr Barrington’s orders, after all. Which reminds me of the limerick:

While Titian was mixing rose madder,

His model reclined on a ladder.

Her position, to Titian,

Suggested coition,

So he nipped up the ladder, and had ‘er.’

Slider grinned unwillingly. ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’

Atherton opened his eyes wide. ‘Me, sir? No sir. But you can’t work in your office, now can you?’

Slider grunted. ‘There is one urgent interview I need to do, which would be better done in person than on the telephone.’

‘Well, then.’

‘Can I rely on your discretion?’

‘It’s the better part of my valour,’ he assured him gravely.

Joanna answered the door warm, sleepy and in her dressing-gown. In less than a minute she was wide awake and Slider was in her dressing-gown.

‘What is all this?’ she queried indistinctly, running a hand up and down the front of his trousers.

‘Don’t you really know?’ he asked in amazement through a mouthful of her neck. ‘You must let me show you.’

‘Oh I must,’ she agreed. They sidled like dressed crabs down the passage to her bedroom, where her rumpled bed was still warm. Without breaking step they undressed him and clambered into the nest.

‘Umm!’ Joanna said some minutes later. ‘I should go away more often.’

‘Wrong,’ Slider said, pulling her head close and burying his face in her hair. ‘You smell like a hill.’

‘A what?’

‘Bracken and warm earth.’

‘Gee, thanks!’

‘That’s the best sort of hill. I’m very partial to them. I like to lie on my back in the bracken and stare at the sky.’

‘How poetic,’ she said. She pressed her nose into the underside of his chin, all she could reasonably reach in that position. ‘Whereas you smell like the most expensive sort of coloured pencils. I won some as a school prize, once, in my junior school. Lakeland, they were called. Six beautiful coloured pencils in a tin box.’ She kissed him. ‘I loved those pencils.’

He kissed her back. ‘I loved my hill, too.’

‘How’s the case going?’

‘As smoothly as a pig on stilts.’

‘That well? I thought you’d got your man, my dear mountie.’

‘Oh, we’ve got him, but it’s hard work putting together the sort of evidence we’re going to need. We can’t find anyone who saw him at the scene of the crime, and that makes me nervous. All we’ve got is a woman who thinks she saw a red or blue or brown car parked in front of the shop, and another woman who saw a man coming out of the alley at the back of the shop who couldn’t possibly be the suspect, but who might be almost anyone else in the known universe.’

‘So do you think you’ve maybe got the wrong man?’ she asked sympathetically.

‘I don’t know. By his own admission, no-one else could have done it. Yet he still says he didn’t do it. I just don’t know.’

‘I see.’ She ran her hands up and down his back. ‘So what are you doing here, Inspector? Shouldn’t you have your ear to the grindstone and your nose to the wheel? What would your new boss say if he saw what you were doing?’

‘He’s having my office painted at the moment, so I can’t use it.’

‘What, now? In the middle of an investigation?’

‘To be fair, he may have looked at the duty roster and seen that I’m on lates today.’

‘Ah, I wondered how you could spare the time. I should have known you’d never play hookey just to see me.’

‘There’s a distinct note of regret in your voice as you say that,’ he said sternly.

‘All the same, painting your office at a time like this—!’

‘Yes. He has a firm grasp of the trivial. Whereas I—’ He felt new stirrings, to his own faint amazement. ‘I have a firm grasp of you.’

‘So you do. I don’t know how you keep it up,’ she said with admiration.

‘Polyfilla,’ he said.

A further pleasant interlude later, he sat up and sighed. ‘I hate to eat and run, but I had better get back.’

‘Was that all you came for?’ she asked sternly, shoving a hand through her rumpled hair. She looked like a bronze chrysanthemum in a high wind.

‘Well, no, not entirely. There was something I had to tell you. I’m afraid there’s a bit of a problem with the concert.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ she sighed. ‘You’re going to have to work.’

He told her, and watched with a sinking feeling as the expression drained out of her face.

‘No,’ she said at last.

‘No what?’ he asked nervously.

‘I won’t have it. You’re not coming to
my
concert with your wife. It isn’t fair.’

He could hardly blame her, and she had always been patient and understanding before, but he wished she had not chosen this moment to become immovable.

‘Tell her,’ she said. ‘Just tell her.’

‘I can’t. Not now. Not over this. She’s so excited and pleased about it. I can’t take that away from her. I can’t let her down.’

She turned on him angrily. ‘You don’t seem to mind letting me down!’

‘I do, of course I do,’ he said helplessly, uncomforted by the knowledge that thousands of men must have trodden this path before him. ‘But you know about her and she doesn’t know about you, so—’

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’

‘Do you think I want to hurt you?’ he countered.

‘I don’t know,’ she said stonily. ‘I don’t know what you want any more.’

She got up and pulled on her dressing-gown, turning her back on him. He groped around in the muddy pool for words. All he found was grit.

‘I want what you want. But you’ve got to let me do it my own way.’ She didn’t answer. ‘You wouldn’t want me if I didn’t care about Irene, would you?’ She shrugged unhelpfully. ‘I will sort things out, I promise you. As soon as I can.’

‘You’ve said that before.’

‘I mean it. I was all prepared to talk to her last night, but she jumped in first with this stuff about the concert, and I just couldn’t be so cruel as to spoil it for her. If you’d seen her face, all lit up with excitement – oh Jo, we’ll have the rest of our lives together! Don’t begrudge her this one poor little thing.’

‘It’s all so pathetic and futile,’ she muttered angrily.

‘To us, not to her.’

She turned. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You’re so good at seeing both sides of every question, so here’s the compromise – and it’s my only offer, so you’d better not try and haggle.’

‘Compromise?’ he said, hoping to God the relief didn’t show in his voice.

‘You can tell her you’ve got to work, and that you’ll come later if you can. And then you can sit backstage with me. I’m not in the concerto, so we’ll be together then, and in the interval. And she’ll have her concert. You said she said she’d sooner go without you than not at all.’

‘You mean I don’t appear at all? What about the reception afterwards?’

‘We’ll both miss it. We’ll go for a drink instead.’ She watched his struggling face. ‘Take it or leave it. It’s my best offer.’

‘I’ll take it,’ he sighed; and tried to comfort himself with the thought that Irene’s pleasure in the evening didn’t really depend on him. Maybe he could persuade her to get the Crippses to invite someone else for her escort. ‘I hate
this situation,’ he said at last.

‘It’s your situation,’ Joanna said, for once unmoved by his plight.

There was a large envelope for him at the desk when he got back to the station.

‘University College Hospital.’ O’Flaherty handed it over, looking at the return address. ‘I hope you haven’t been having secret tests, darlin’?’

Slider grinned. ‘No panic. It’s just the Tooth Fairy’s report.’

‘Who’s that, Ben Whittaker?’

‘Yes. Do you know him?’

‘Me? I’m a poor ignorant lad from the land of the bogs and the Little People. How would I know a man with letters after his name? I’ve just heard of him, that’s all.’

‘He’s a nice bloke. I saw a lot of him at the time of the Spanish Club fire, when we had thirty-seven barbecued bodies to identify. At the end of each day we used to go and get pissed together in a little pub in Foley Street, just to take our minds off.’