Necrocrip (17 page)

‘In dem sort a circumstances men become friends,’ Fergus said gravely. ‘Like Nutty and me in the trenches. When you go t’roo hell together, it forges a bond.’

‘In your case the bond must have been a forged one. You were never in the trenches.’

O’Flaherty looked dignified. ‘All right, we went t’roo Police College at Hendon together.’

‘That’s close enough.’

Slider headed instinctively for his office, but swerved away as the smell of paint met him half way up the corridor and went to the CID room instead to peruse the report. Ten minutes later he was telephoning Cameron.

‘The fish bar corpse, Freddie—?’

‘Yes, old boy? It’s fresh in my mind.’

‘If nowhere else. I’ve had the orthodontal report. Have you ever heard of mongoloid pits?’

‘Ancient Siberian funerary rites? Mass graves in Tibet?’

‘No, seriously.’

‘Seriously? Of course I have. They’re grooves you get on the back of the incisors of people of Asian origin. Are you telling me our corpse had ’em?’

‘According to Whittaker.’

‘He should know. Well well! That’s an interesting thing.’

‘But Freddie, wouldn’t you have noticed if the corpse was Asian?’

‘Oh certainly. But you see, these mongoloid pits are a genetic thing – passed down in the blood. You wouldn’t have to be a full-blooded Tibetan to have ’em – only that you’d have to have some oriental blood in you somewhere. And I suppose our victim could have had a dash – no reason why not. Slight build, sallow skin, scanty body hair. We haven’t got the face, eyes or hair, which might have told us a bit more. The eyes particularly.’

‘He doesn’t look particularly Chinese from his photograph,’ Slider said.

‘He doesn’t have to. He only had to have some Asian forebears somewhere in his history, and there’s nothing impossible about that as far as my findings are concerned – if that’s what you wanted to know. Did Whittaker say anything else?’

‘The teeth were in excellent condition, only three fillings, no crowns or prostheses. He agrees with you about the victim’s age. He says there were traces of blood in the capillaries, which is usually a sign of violent death. Oh, and he says that he doesn’t think the fillings were done in this country.’

‘Doesn’t he? Why, are they made of some exotic alloy?’

‘No, he says the amalgam they use is the same in all affluent countries these days. It’s more the method of filling – a matter of style. He thinks they were done in Japan or Hong Kong, most probably Hong Kong.’

‘It’s wonderful the advances they’re making in the forensic branches these days,’ Freddie said admiringly. ‘Now all you’ve got to do is find the dentist.’

‘Well, we know from Leman’s passport that he visited Hong Kong several times. He must have had his dental work done while he was there.’

‘Sensible man,’ Freddie said. ‘I was in Hong Kong once – had
a suit made. Quickest work you ever saw. If the dentists there are anything like the tailors, they probably do fillings while you wait.’

In accordance with his agreement with Joanna, Slider telephoned Irene during the afternoon to tell her that there were new developments and that he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get to the concert on time.

‘I don’t want to spoil your evening. Why don’t you see if Marilyn can get someone else to go with you?’

‘No, no, she doesn’t want anyone else, and nor do I Don’t worry, Bill, we all knew this might happen.’

He didn’t want her to be reasonable and sympathetic. It made him feel a rat. ‘I’m sorry—’ he began, but she jumped in.

‘Your job has to come first. Really, don’t worry about it. Just come when you can. Look, I’ll get Marilyn to leave your ticket at the box-office, and you can come later, whenever you finally get finished.’

‘I won’t be in dinner jacket.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’m sure lots of people won’t be. Your work suit’s all right. But do come, Bill, even if you only get there for the second half, or for the reception afterwards. Promise you will come.’

‘If at all possible,’ he said unwillingly. ‘If I’m finished in time.’ And she seemed to be satisfied with that.

So here he was, much later, sitting in the dimly-lit artists’ bar backstage at the Festival Hall, fulfilling his promise to Irene only in that he was in the building – giving her no pleasure by it. He was denied the pleasure of watching Joanna play, wearing her best long black and looking so grave and important and talented up on the platform (he had learned by now not to call it the stage) and exercising her inexplicable, dazzling skills. He was even denied the pleasure the music might have given him, since although it was relayed into the artists’ bar, it was always turned down very low so as not to disturb the musicians’ conversations or poker games.

And he doubted whether he was going to give Joanna
any pleasure by his presence either. When the overture was finished and the musicians not needed in the concerto came offstage, she appeared and joined him on the banquette in his dim corner, accepted the drink he had got in for her, and sipped it in silence. For once in their lives they had nothing to say to each other.

In the end he told her about the day’s developments.

‘So what will you do now? Circulate the dental description to all the dentists in Hong Kong?’ Joanna asked.

‘Not immediately. It would be rather slow and expensive, and it may not be necessary. I’m going to wait until we get the result of the genetic fingerprinting from the handkerchief. If that gives us a positive match, we won’t need the teeth.’

‘But on the face of it, the tooth business sounds like more evidence of identification,’ Joanna said. ‘Teeth cannot lie. And there can’t be all that many people who go regularly to Hong Kong.’

‘It would be a long coincidence,’ he agreed. ‘Unfortunately, Suzanne Edrich wasn’t able to help us one way or the other. She doesn’t know anything about Leman’s background or family, and he never said anything to her about having Asian forebears.’

‘You still don’t know who his next of kin is?’

‘We’re circulating his description and photograph, but no-one’s come forward to claim him yet. But he was obviously a secretive man. He didn’t mean anyone to pin him down.’

‘That’s men all over. They’re afraid of being tied down.’

She said it flippantly, but Slider glanced at her partly averted profile and sighed, going to the root of it. ‘I’m sorry. This isn’t my idea of a good night out either.’

She turned to look at him, and seemed in long debate with herself as to whether to pursue the subject. In the end she said, ‘This can’t go on, Bill. It’s ridiculous and undignified and hurtful. No-one benefits.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know it’s not fair on you. And I will sort things out—’

‘You keep saying that,’ she said quietly. ‘Why is it so hard?’

‘Should it be easy to hurt people?’

‘You hurt me. Why not Irene?’

Now she had got him into the position of justifying something he didn’t want to justify, arguing a case that was impossible to argue. ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone,’ he said helplessly. ‘And it isn’t just Irene. You don’t know what it’s like to have children—’

‘No. How can I?’ she said, staring into her empty glass.

‘I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.’

‘None of it’s fair. Life isn’t fair.’ She took a resolute breath. ‘I want to marry you, Bill. If that isn’t what you want, then say so, and let’s stop making ourselves and everybody else unhappy.’

‘It is what I want.’

‘Then—’ She shrugged and let it hang.

‘I’ll speak to her tomorrow,’ he said firmly.

‘Why not tonight?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘No, it’s better in daylight. Nothing is ever really resolved by emotional conversations late at night.’

‘Well, as long as—’ She broke off as a thunder of feet heralded a posse of musicians skidding into the room and throwing themselves at the bar. Joanna half rose in instinctive reaction. ‘That’s the first half over,’ she said. ‘I’d better get in the queue if you want another drink.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Slider said, standing up. ‘Same again for you?’

By the time he reached the end of the queue it had already reached the door. The first comers were plainly getting in huge rounds for all their friends: it was going to be a long wait. Slider leaned against the wall, looking across the room at the woman he loved, the only woman he had ever loved.
You hurt me. Why not Irene? He
had not tried to explain it to her because he doubted if he could make it sound sensible, but the reason he always protected Irene rather than her was not only because of the status quo, but because he didn’t really, most of the time, see Joanna as separate from him. And just as he had been taught as a child to offer the chocolate cake to the guest and take the plain bun himself, so he would always feel driven to give Irene more consideration because she was the outsider, and take the gristly bit for the himself-and-joanna entity.

It was only at moments like this, when he deliberately detached himself to look, that he saw Joanna as a discrete entity, capable of suffering in ways quite different from his own. And it—

‘Bill, you made it after all! I’m so glad!’

His heart contracted so violently with fright that it actually hurt him. His head whipped round, painfully wrenching a vertebra in his neck, and he found himself staring at Marilyn Cripps, standing inches away from him, very much
en fête
in grey tulle and sequins and with what looked horribly like real diamonds round her neck and at her ears. Behind her the dark-jowled David Cripps in a dinner suit looked like a Mafia boss gone soft; and beside him Irene was wearing her one long dress and an ecstatic smile. She had too much blue eyeshadow on, and more on the left eyelid than the right, and he ached to whip her away behind a screen and wipe it off before anyone noticed. He didn’t want her shown up in front of the she-Cripps, whose maquillage might have been painted on by Michelangelo on a particularly good day.

‘Darling,’ Irene said, oblivious to her lopsidedness, ‘have you only just got here?’

‘Good thought to meet us backstage! Did you pick up your ticket, old man?’ David Cripps asked. ‘We left it downstairs but they said they’d be closing quite soon. Doesn’t matter if you didn’t,’ he went on, taking Slider’s stunned silence for a negative. ‘They never check the tickets going back in for the second half anyway.’

Slider’s tongue seemed to have turned to sand and trickled down into the bottom of his neck. He couldn’t get so much as a croak out.

‘Well, I think we’d all like a drink, wouldn’t we?’ Cripps went on, craning his neck to assess the length of the bar queue; but at that moment the leader of the orchestra, Warren Stacker, came up to them with an official smile stitched to his lips and his arms out in a gathering-up gesture.

‘Ladies, gentlemen, I’m afraid you must have taken a wrong turning,’ he said with a sort of PR cheeriness barely masking exasperation, like the doorman at the Ritz
turning away a party of German students in shorts and backpacks. ‘The Corporate Sponsor’s Bar is at the other end of the corridor. Let me show you. This bar is for the artists only.’

‘Is that right? I’m a new boy, I’m afraid. Haven’t done this before,’ David Cripps said heartily. ‘Have we made a
faux pas?
Mustn’t disturb the geniuses at rest, must we, ha ha!’

They were being shuffled inexorably away, through the gathering press of musicians trying to get in, by Stacker’s outstretched, sheepdog arms. Slider, who had not made a single voluntary sound or movement since the first Cripps hail, flung a desperate glance back towards Joanna as his feet, in the interests of remaining directly under his body which was being shoved along willy-nilly, scuffed forwards. He could just see her through a gap in the crowd, a single glimpse of her white, set face above the black evening dress telling him that she had seen it all, before he was shoved out of the bar and into the corridor.

Cripps was still burbling merrily about being in the wrong place and ha-haing and rubbing his hands.

‘Not at all, not at all,’ Stacker said pleasantly. ‘A lot of people make the same mistake. It is confusing backstage. We really ought to put larger signs up. This way – straight ahead.’ He met Slider’s eye curiously. Of course he knew all about Slider and Joanna, and was having no trouble in putting two and two together; especially as Irene, as soon as space allowed, slipped her hand through Slider’s arm and beamed at him with an unmistakably proprietorial smile.

‘You were waiting in the wrong place, darling,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Slider agreed desperately. And it ought to have been his safeguard, he thought. If the others had gone to the Sponsor’s Bar as they should have, this wouldn’t have happened. He bet, savagely, that it was the she-Cripps who had brought them all blundering into the wrong place and ruined everything. Of all the futile, stupid, rotten luck! What an awful bloody farce! And what would Joanna be thinking now?

THE REST OF THE CONCERT
passed in a uncomprehending blur. He heard nothing of the music, only stared until his eyes watered at the small black and white blob that was Joanna on the platform, willing her to hear his thoughts. Afterwards there was no escape. Irene took his arm again, and the Crippses led the way with confident step to one of the hospitality rooms where a bar was laid on and uniformed staff handed round trays of cocktail snippets to the assembled corporate, and frequently corpulent, guests.

Here Cripps was in his element. He plunged into business talk with his colleagues while Marilyn graciously presented Irene to the colleagues’ wives and Slider tagged along like a subnormal child, always two exchanges behind the conversation. The agony was soon to be intensified, as a door at the rear of the room opened and members of the orchestra began to drift in. Slider knew how much they hated being dragooned into these sponsors’ receptions, and when he saw Joanna amongst them, he knew it meant trouble.

She didn’t look at him, heading like her colleagues first for the bar, and then allowing herself to be fastened on by one of the organisers. As the crowds thickened and the noise level rose, he lost sight of her. Marilyn Cripps was introducing him to people now, evidently having decided his profession and rank could be turned into a social asset
after all. Warren Stacker drifted by and was seized and lionised – ‘We’re in the right place now, aren’t we, ha ha!’ – but he was too experienced at the game to be held against his will. With another curious glance at Slider, he scraped them off onto the principal clarinet and escaped. Two minutes later the principal clarinet attempted to emulate his leader’s example and unloaded them rather more clumsily onto Joanna.