Necrocrip (18 page)

‘And do you play the clarinet as well?’ Marilyn asked loudly and clearly, as though she thought Joanna might be deaf or foreign.

‘No,’ Joanna answered. Her voice sounded tiny next to Marilyn’s, as though she were a Lilliputian talking to Gulliver’s wife. ‘I play the violin.’

‘Oh, my husband once had to investigate a case about a violinist,’ Irene burst in, placing her hand once more with proprietorial pride on Slider’s arm. ‘He’s a detective inspector in the CID.’

Joanna’s eyes shifted for the first time to Slider. Her face was as expressionless as a chair. ‘Really? That must be an interesting job.’

Slider felt as though he were sitting by an open fire in a castle – one side of him burning hot, the other side icy.

‘The poor girl was murdered, the violinist, I mean,’ Irene burbled on. ‘Perhaps you remember the case? It was a couple of years ago now, but it was in the papers at the time.’

The agony of having Joanna look at him as if she didn’t know him was ousted abruptly from Slider’s mind by the more urgent pain of trying to remember whether Irene was likely to have heard Joanna’s name in connection with the case. As the dead violinist’s best friend, she might possibly have been mentioned at some point. Joanna must be in an even worse fix, not knowing what Irene might or might not know about the murder of Anne-Marie Austen. At the moment she was looking politely blank, but at any moment someone was going to remember that it was this very orchestra which had been at the heart of the case.

‘Actually,’ Irene said, turning back to Slider, ‘I think this was the orchestra she played for, wasn’t it, darling?’

Slider opened his mouth without the slightest knowledge of what he would hear himself say, but Marilyn Cripps, redeeming herself for ever in Slider’s books, interrupted.

‘I don’t think we want to discuss such a morbid subject, do we?’ She didn’t care for conversations she hadn’t initiated. Tell me, isn’t the orchestra going abroad soon, on a tour? It must be so nice for you to be able to travel all over the world.’

‘Excuse me,’ Slider muttered desperately to Irene. ‘Must find a loo.’ It was all he could think of to get away. He just couldn’t stand here between Irene and Joanna like this. It was giving him vertigo.

He didn’t find a loo. He didn’t look for one. He just stood outside in the empty corridor and held his head in his hands and tried to think what to do, and while he was standing there he saw Joanna come out of a door further down and walk away towards the stairs. She had her fiddle case in her hand and her coat over her arm: leaving, then. He went after her at a half run, and caught her just on the other side of the swing doors.

‘Joanna!’

She turned, backing a step at the same time as though to stop him touching her. The gesture was not lost on him.

‘Where are you going?’ he said, the first thing that came into his head.

‘I’m going home,’ she said, as if it were none of his business. Her face was like wax.

‘Jo, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t anything I could do. You saw what happened.’

She looked at him searchingly for a moment as though she were going to speak, and then turned away again in silence.

He caught her arm. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

She sighed, and detached her arm, and then said patiently, as though explaining something to an unpromising child, ‘If you really believe there wasn’t anything you could do, then there’s nothing to say.’

‘But – what do you want me to do?’ he asked in frustration.

‘Whatever you were going to do.’

‘What do you mean?’ She was actually walking away and plainly didn’t mean to answer him. He went after her and caught her again. ‘What do you
mean
?

‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I’m going home.’

There seemed hope for him in the words, he didn’t know why. ‘I’ll phone you tomorrow,’ he said, releasing her arm. She started forward again like a wind-up toy.

‘No, don’t,’ she said.

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t phone me,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to phone me.’

And then she was gone.

He went slowly back to the reception. Nothing had changed, no-one but Irene had even noticed his departure.

‘Did you find it?’ she whispered as he rejoined her.

‘What?’

She was too polite to mention water closets in public, even in a whisper. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked in a different voice.

‘Yes. I suppose so. Why?’

‘You look funny.’

‘I’m tired, that’s all.’

‘Have you got your car here?’ she asked.

The question put him on his guard. Was it a trap? How did the car fit in with his cover story? ‘Yes,’ he said after only a moment’s hesitation. ‘Why?’

She squeezed his arm and smiled at him in a way that in any other woman he would have thought was meant to be seductive.

‘If you’ve got your car, we don’t need to wait for Marilyn and David. We can go home when we like.’

‘I thought there was supposed to be a meal afterwards, a restaurant or something?’

‘We don’t have to go to that. There are other people
going now, they won’t miss us. I can tell Marilyn you’re tired, and we can go straight home.’

She
was
being seductive. Slider shuddered, and she squeezed him again in response. ‘As soon as I can catch her attention,’ she murmured encouragingly, ‘I’ll make our excuses.’

Atherton lounged against the window, beyond which the day was white and blank, sunless and windless, neither hot nor cold, as though all weather had been cancelled out of respect for some national catastrophe. Slider felt that ozony sensation of internal hollowness which comes in the aftermath of a great shock, the sense that various functioning bits were missing and that his head had somehow come adrift from his body. He also felt slightly sick, but that might have been because of the residual smell of paint.

At the end of the recital, Atherton made a soundless whistle. ‘Christ, what a mess,’ he said. His face was screwed up with sympathy. ‘I just don’t know what to say.’

Slider hadn’t even told him the last and maybe worst bit, about making love to Irene last night. Or having sex, whatever was the proper name for what he had done. When it came to it, he hadn’t known how to reject her advances, so unexpectedly confident were they, and his body had let him down by apparently not being able to discriminate between the proper object of desire and the lawful.

It was the first time he had done it with Irene since he met Joanna, and he felt terrible afterwards for a whole range of reasons, not least among them that Irene had been glowingly happy this morning: it was many years since the kitchen had been so smiled in before eleven a.m. And he had no idea whether she was still taking the Pill. He rather doubted it, given that they had not done it for so long, but she hadn’t suggested any precautions on his part, even supposing he could have obliged if she had. Supposing she fell pregnant? Now there was a man-sized worry to get his teeth into!

Even to Atherton, the closest thing he had to a friend,
he couldn’t tell that bit.

‘I rang her as soon as I got out of the house this morning,’ he said instead, ‘but she wouldn’t talk to me.’

‘What, did she slam the phone down?’

‘She said she was sorry but it was all over between us, and that she didn’t want to see me again. She said if I couldn’t see how farcical the situation had become she was sorry for me.’

‘Ouch!’ said Atherton, wincing.

‘I tried to argue, but she said she didn’t want to talk to me any more, and put the phone down. When I rang again a bit later her machine was on. I think she must have gone to work by now.’

‘It sounds bad. What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never been in a situation like this before. Do you think she means it?’

Atherton looked at him, and shook his head. ‘How can I know that?’

‘You’ve known so many more women than I have,’ Slider said desperately. He’d take any reassurance just at the moment; any rag that would stop the bleeding. ‘What should I do? How can I explain to her?’

Atherton thought. ‘It’s hard to be persuasive on the telephone. You could write her a note, perhaps. Send it with some flowers.’

‘Flowers?’ Slider frowned. ‘That’s a bit naff, isn’t it?’

‘Women are naff,’ Atherton said. ‘When it comes to their emotions, they’re like children – they have no taste.’ Slider looked disbelieving, and Atherton shrugged. ‘Well, you asked me. I speak as I find, as the man with the geiger-counter on the beach said.’

‘Should I go round there, perhaps?’ Slider mused. ‘Is that what she’d expect? Or does she really want me to stay away?’

Atherton came to his feet. ‘Don’t you think it would be an idea to sort things out with Irene first?’

Slider looked startled. ‘What – before I know how things stand with Joanna?’

‘If you really mean to leave home and move in with her—’

‘But then supposing I did that and Joanna didn’t want me?’

Atherton did not reply, only shrugged again – a gesture which said a great many things Slider didn’t want to hear.

‘I’ll ring again this afternoon,’ he said at last. ‘And if I don’t get her, I’ll try going round there this evening.’

It was a long time to wait to hear his fate. ‘What you need now,’ Atherton said, kindly, on his way out, ‘is something to occupy your mind.’

It came soon enough, in a telephone call from Tufty.

‘Bill!’ he boomed. ‘I’ve got the report on the material from that handkerchief you sent in! The genetic lab boys really pulled their fingers out on this one. It was semen, as I think you know. Unfortunately—’

‘Oh no. Don’t say it!’

‘I’m afraid the sample wasn’t terribly good,’ Tufty bellowed sadly, ‘but they managed to get a partial profile. The thing is, it doesn’t match up with the victim.’

‘You mean they couldn’t get a good enough match to swear to identity?’

‘No, no, quite the reverse! Well, to be fair, almost the reverse. What they’ve got is nothing like the profile of the chip shop body. The sample wasn’t good enough for them to be able to swear an identity
with
anybody, but they can tell you quite categorically that the material in the handkerchief didn’t come from the victim.’

‘Damn! Slider said in frustration. ‘What was Leman doing with a handkerchief full of someone else’s semen in his bed?’

‘I hate to think,’ Tufty shouted cheerfully. ‘Never been that way inclined myself.’

‘And I thought all our troubles would be over when we got that result,’ Slider said. ‘Oh well, back to the drawing board, I suppose.’

Every clue seemed to run away into the sand. Now it was going to have to be the dental report, and a long wait while it circulated the thousands of dentists in Hong Kong; and he was so disillusioned by now, he wasn’t even sure that
would produce a result. The presence in Leman’s flat of another man did add weight to the theory that he was bisexual, but it introduced an unwelcome extra element of doubt: an unknown lover who might have had cause for jealousy, reason to commit murder. The defence – if this colander of a case ever came to court – were going to love that.

He took out a copy of Slaughter’s statement and read it again, though he knew it almost by heart now, hoping it might yield some new idea to him. But there was so little material there. Slaughter had a simple story, and weak though it was, he stuck to it manfully. Leman had come to the shop, suggested going for a drink with him, went home with him. They danced and flirted. They quarrelled. They made it up. He walked Leman to his car, walked around the streets for a while and then went home. He had never seen Leman outside of the shop before. He did not kill him. He had no idea how the body came to be in the black sacks. No-one else had access to the shop.

As a defence, it had the strength of lunacy. As for the case against Slaughter, he had motive, means, opportunity, and no alibi, and he himself swore no-one else could have done it. All Slider didn’t have was a confession, or any solid proof. It was all theory – and there was so much he didn’t know about the victim, too. Peter Leman had been up to something, that was for sure – probably smuggling, and even more probably drug-smuggling. Of course, that didn’t make any difference now he was dead, but Slider wished he knew all the same. Not knowing maddened him.

He was still staring at the wall deep in thought when the phone rang again.

‘Mr Slider?’ It was Suzanne Edrich, in a state of considerable excitement. ‘Mr Slider, I’ve just had a phone call from Peter!’

‘Peter?’

‘My Peter! Peter Leman! He isn’t dead after all!’ She made a sound between a laugh and a sob. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? I can’t believe I really thought it was him who was murdered! I should have known he was still alive. I’m
sure I did really, deep down. Oh, I’m so happy!’

Her voice clotted and she sobbed again into the receiver.

‘Where are you?’ Slider asked.

‘I’m at work,’ she managed to say through the strange noises she was making into the receiver. ‘He phoned me here. He wouldn’t ring me at home, because of my parents.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘He wouldn’t say. It has to be a secret, he says. Oh, but he’s alive, that’s all that matters!’

Not by a long chalk, Slider corrected inwardly. ‘All right, Miss Edrich, I’m going to come and see you right away. Stay where you are, don’t talk to anyone else, and if Peter rings you again, try to find out where he is, or get his number – or failing that, try to keep him talking until I come. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and added some more incoherent phrases of joy before ringing off. Slider slammed the phone down and was on his feet yelling for Atherton before it had stopped jangling. In the best detective stories, he remembered saying to Tufty, the suspect is never the suspect and the corpse is never the corpse. The thing was coming to pieces in his hands. If Peter Leman was alive, what price their case now?

Suzanne Edrich had let go and had a jolly good cry, and had enjoyed it so much that she threatened at any moment to spill over again. Slider had to question her very carefully to keep her juices confined, or they’d have got nothing out of her but salt water.