Necrocrip (26 page)

‘There’s so much to be done – and Barrington’s not going to like it. Cate’s last Chinese tenant, Lee Chang, worked at the NATO base. I suppose that accounts for the foreign car Mandy saw giving him a lift home.’

‘The dark blue overcoat could be an airman’s greatcoat,’ Atherton offered helpfully. ‘And American cars have numberplates printed in red.’

‘But what’s the connection?’ Slider worried.

‘Just what Cate said, maybe,’ Atherton shrugged. ‘Didn’t you tell me that he holds an advisory brief on security for the base?’

‘He liaises between the military and the local police security teams, as I understand it. One of his many consultative positions. He’s on every committee known to man.’

‘There you are, then. Why shouldn’t he know someone at the base who asks him to find a chap somewhere to stay?’

‘Oh, I know,’ Slider said. ‘I know it holds together. But I just have the feeling that it shouldn’t have to.’

‘I know what it is,’ Atherton said wisely, soaking his rice into the brown and steamy. ‘You don’t like Cate because Mr Barrington is so hot for him. And you don’t like Barrington because he didn’t like Dickson.’

‘Yes, and there’s another thing – why is Barrington so against our late lamented boss?’

‘Because Barrington is ex-army parade bull and Dickson
was an egg-on-the-tie man, and the one sort never understands the other.’

Slider was silent, unaccepting. Atherton sighed inwardly and let it be. They ate. When the waiter came with more lager which they hadn’t ordered, Atherton said, ‘And there’s the other thing, of course.’

Slider came back from a long way away. ‘What thing?’

‘The other reason you feel low. Joanna.’

‘Oh.’

‘Have you spoken to her again?’

Shake of the head. ‘It wouldn’t be fair. It would make it harder for her.’

‘It might make it easier for you.’

‘I can’t take advantage like that.’ He put his fork down wearily. ‘I worry about her, though. At least I have my work to occupy me.’

‘She has hers,’ Atherton pointed out.

‘It isn’t the same. It doesn’t use up the same bit of her brain.’

‘She’ll survive,’ Atherton said.

‘I know’

‘And so will you.’

‘I know’

‘Doesn’t help, does it?’ Atherton said sympathetically. He eyed Slider through the artful catering gloom. ‘You look worn out. Why don’t you go home and snatch a few hours’ sleep?’

‘I think I will,’ Slider said. ‘As long as whoever they are can hold off from killing anyone else for a few hours.’ He looked at Atherton tentatively. He would not normally have tried to talk about Atherton’s private life with him, but men who have been through a meal at the Anglabangla together feel a kind of brotherhood. ‘How are things with you and Jablowski?’

‘Oh, there’s nothing doing there,’ Atherton said lightly. ‘She told me yesterday she’s met someone else. Bloke called Resnik, from the Holloway CID.’

‘Yes, I know him,’ Slider said. ‘Midlander. Big, gloomy man with bushy hair.’

‘If you say so. I’ve never met him. He’s a DI, apparently –
step up for her from me. She met him at the Polish Club, and he’s a Catholic, so they speak each other’s language.’

‘You’re upset about it,’ Slider perceived.

‘Hurt pride, that’s all,’ Atherton said. ‘I’m a shallow, superficial kind of bloke, not the sort to have really important feelings.’

Irene was surprised, seemed almost fluttered, to see him.

‘I didn’t think you’d be back. After Sergeant O’Flaherty phoned about the second murder, I thought it would be another all-nighter.’

‘The troops are doing the routine work,’ he said dully. ‘I need to think things out a bit.’

Yes, of course,’ she said.

‘Kids in bed?’

‘Yes.’ She hesitated. ‘Do you want something to eat?’

‘No thanks. I had a curry with Atherton.’

‘I thought I could smell it on you,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘Why don’t you have a bath? It might relax you. You look done in.’

‘I think I will,’ he said. A wave of sadness passed through his intestines like wind at the thought that he would never share a bath with Joanna again. Never sit with her while she bathed, mixing black velvet and feeding her cheese and onion crisps. He felt lonely and defeated. For the first time he doubted his ability to solve a case which seemed so complicated and contradictory; and worse, he wondered if there were any point in it. Tomorrow there would be another, and he would still be without Joanna. Was there any point in anything at all? Perhaps he could run away, drop out?

But Irene and the children would still have been let down, and Joanna would still be shut off from him, and the likes of Peter Leman would still be sprawled across their own beds stinking of butchery, with parts of their bodies exposed to view which God had never meant to be seen. There was no escape. You just had to get on with things. Ain’t nothin’ but weery loads, honey.

He realised that Irene was still watching him, as if she expected him to say something else. Oh, God forbid, was it
time for one of her searching conversations about the State of their Marriage? He didn’t think he could bear that now. He had braced himself to go through with it, but he didn’t want to have to talk about it as well.

He looked at her cautiously; sidelong, but more closely. She looked different: less varnished-sleek; pinker, almost fluffy. What had she been up to? Oh yes, he remembered, today had been the day of the picnic on Box Hill. Could it be that she had enjoyed something that did not involve shopping? He made himself enquire after it.

‘Did you have a nice time today, by the way?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said eagerly, and then the eagerness seemed to run out. ‘Yes, very nice,’ she repeated woodenly.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t come with you,’ he said, in case it was that.

‘It’s all right. Ernie was wonderful. He thought up all sorts of games – the children loved it.’ Why did she sound as if that didn’t please her? ‘He brought food, too. I told him he didn’t need to, that I’d do it all. But he brought things from that kosher deli in Northwood – you know the one. Smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels, and some savoury dumpling things, and some special sort of cake.’

‘That was nice of him,’ Slider said.

‘Yes,’ she said. No smile with it. She looked more as if he had offered her mortal hurt. ‘Matthew really liked it – better than my dull sandwiches. Ernie’s car is much more roomy than mine anyway,’ she added, as though that were an explanation.

‘Yes, well it would be,’ Slider said. He wanted to get away now, afraid of what other comparisons might be coming up. Ernie doesn’t have to work ridiculous hours, Ernie earns twice as much as you, Ernie knows all the high-ups and belongs to two golf clubs and three bridge circles. Piss on you, Ernie, he thought defiantly, you couldn’t tell Perpendicular from Decorated without a guide book, so there. To get away he yawned hugely and falsely, and half way through it turned into a real yawn, tangled up his reflexes and nearly choked him.

Irene took the hint. ‘Go and have your bath. Put some Radox in it.’

‘I will,’ Slider said. ‘Are you going to bed now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Don’t stay awake for me.’ He hadn’t yet broached the subject of the spare bedroom. He might have to fall asleep on the sofa again. ‘I have a lot of thinking to do. I might be some time.’

She nodded and went away upstairs without a word. Slider didn’t know where the new Irene had come from, but she was certainly much easier to live with than the old one.

Dickson’s house was a perfectly ordinary 1930s North Harrow semi in a perfectly ordinary tree-lined suburban road. The only difference was that it had not been visibly altered or modernised. It had its original ‘sunburst’ front gate and its original door and windows, and the same little tarpaper-roofed, wooden-doored garage with which the original developers had sought to outdo their rivals in enticing people to move out to Metroland.

Dolly Dickson was at work in the front garden when Slider arrived. She straightened up at the click of the gate-latch. She was wearing a smock and a shapeless skirt, a battered straw hat and gardening gloves. She looked as timeless as the house.

‘Begonias,’ she said. ‘They were Bob’s passion, but I’ve never liked them. Fleshy, unnatural-looking things. I try to keep them up for his sake, but they seem to be dying.’ She smiled deprecatingly. ‘I wonder if I’m subconsciously doing the wrong things so as to kill them? I do hope not.’

He had forgotten her voice, soft, pleasantly modulated; posh accent. He remembered absorbing somewhere – he didn’t remember where – that she had come from a large, impoverished but definitely ‘county’ family. For a copper, Dickson had married well above him.

‘I don’t know about begonias,’ he said. ‘I don’t much like them either.’

‘I found myself stroking one the other day and talking to it. Bob was so attached to them. Time for coffee, I think,’ Mrs Dickson said, stripping off her gardening gloves. Her hands were brown and freckled like her face, but the skin of
them was loose where the skin on her face was tight and shiny. She looked as though she were wearing a second pair of gloves under the first. Slider wondered if she had lost a lot of weight recently.

She caught him looking, and distracted his attention. ‘What’s in that intriguing box you’re holding?’ she asked with a nod in its direction.

‘A cake,’ Slider said. The shop girl had tied it with that thin raffia ribbon and made a loop for his finger, and he held it rather shamefacedly, like a ten-pints-a-night man caught wearing an apron. ‘I didn’t know what else to bring you,’ he apologised.

‘It’s very acceptable,’ Dolly said, with the effortless graciousness of the lifelong committee woman. ‘Coffee is so dull without something to eat. Let’s go in.’

They went in through the front door. The house seemed empty and silent, smelling of lavender wax and carpets, with a suggestion of sunlight in some other room, and a ticking clock somewhere not quite heard. It reminded him of the few occasions when he had come home from school early: a house entered at an unaccustomed time gave him that feeling of strangeness, as if he had interrupted it on the verge of some unimagined metamorphosis.

Inside the house was as
virgo intacta
as outside – no knock-throughs, extensions, removed fireplaces, replacement doors. It was expensively furnished, but with the taste of twenty-five years ago. Everything was of good quality, designed to last, and gave the impression that it had been bought after solemn consideration, placed just so, and never moved again. Not for Dolly Dickson the frenzied bouts of furniture moving and the restless urges for new wallpaper or structural alterations which consumed Irene. Hers was a spirit at peace with its Cintique.

She led him through into the kitchen, which was full of sunshine. Everything was spotless and neat as if it had just that day been installed, though the original range, now unused, still stood in the original fireplace, and the cream and green wall tiles were of a sort not made since the war. The back door was open, and beyond it the garden was so orderly it looked like a painted cyclorama. Slider gazed at
the neat lawn and crowded flower beds so as not to have to look at the single mug and plate on the wooden drying rack by the sink, which he supposed represented Dolly’s solitary breakfast. Loneliness was such a huge thing, and lurked in such tiny symbols, it made him feel dizzy.

‘The garden looks wonderful,’ he said.

‘I’m trying to keep it that way.’ She put her gloves down and took the kettle to the tap. ‘Of course it was Bob’s passion – he spent every minute of his spare time out there.’ She smiled out at it, as though it might smile back. ‘For myself, I’d have liked something a bit less formal, more flowing. But it was always his garden rather than mine.’

‘It looks like a lot of work,’ Slider said.

‘It is. I’m probably only experiencing the tip of the iceberg as yet. But I feel I ought to keep it the way he liked it.’ She brought the kettle back and plugged it in. ‘I suppose I might have to get someone in to do the lawns and hedges. But for the moment it’s good for me to have something to do, to keep my mind off things.’

‘We all miss him,’ Slider said.

She looked at him consideringly for a moment. Yes, I believe you do. Bob was always very fond of you, you know. I wish we had had the chance to get to know each other more, but the Job doesn’t seem to be like that. So few occasions to mix socially. And Bob was such a shy man. He found human contact such a struggle, poor lamb!’ She arranged jug, filter and cups, and spooned coffee from a Lyons tin into the filter. ‘It’s the way he was brought up, of course. When I was a girl at home, there were people in and out all the time, tennis parties, weekend guests. But I had three elder sisters and two brothers.’ She looked at him. ‘Were you an only child?’

‘Yes.’

‘So was Bob. I sometimes think perhaps only lonely people become policemen. What do you think?’

It was obviously a question not meant to be answered, so he didn’t. The kettle boiled and she made the coffee. ‘Now what about this splendid cake of yours?’ she said. ‘Should we put it on a plate, do you think?’

Slider allowed himself to be domesticated, waiting until
they were sitting at the kitchen table with cups and plates and pastry forks and napkins disposed about them before he approached his question. Even then, it was she who primed him.

There was something in particular you wanted to ask me,’ she said, cutting the cake.

Yes, there was, if it doesn’t upset you too much to talk about it.’

‘If it’s about Bob, I shall talk about it gladly. I seize any excuse to mention his name. People don’t like to, you know, when you’ve been bereaved. Almost as if it’s bad luck.’ She placed a slice of cake on Slider’s plate and eyed it critically. ‘Is it from the Polish bakery by the station?’

‘Yes,’ Slider said. He thought of Jablowski taking up with DI Resnik; and then of Ernie Newman plying his children with kosher delicacies and Polish cheesecake. Free-association, sign that his mind was tired. Practically free fall.

‘I thought it looked nice. Shop cake is so often disappointing, isn’t it? So what is your question?’