Necrocrip (37 page)

‘And the very first murder – Michael Lam – that was Cate?’

‘I think he struck the blow. He was tall and powerful, while Chang was small and slight. Probably Chang distracted the victim’s attention while Cate came up behind him.’

‘And then he cut him up.’ She made a face. ‘He must really have been mad.’

‘Once the body’s dead, it’s no different really from cutting up any carcase, like a butcher.’

‘You don’t believe that,’ she said.

‘How did you guess?’

‘So what did he do with the bits that were missing – the hands and hair and whatever?’ she asked.

‘Cate bred Dobermanns for a hobby,’ Slider said, looking into the amber depths of his beer. ‘He had a copper in a little hut where he cooked the dogs’ pudding – that’s a mixture of meat and meal. He even had a machine for grinding up bones for bonemeal.’

Joanna made a sound which might have been acknowledgement.

‘The copper was heated from below by a small furnace, of course. He burned the clothes in there. Forensic cleaned the whole thing out and examined everything minutely, and they found some buttons which we reckoned were from Lam’s clothing. They didn’t find any human remains at all, though. Well, there’d been a lot of pudding cooked since then.’

‘Oh Bill,’ she said. ‘Thank God somebody shot him.’

‘I’m not allowed to agree. But it was a tidy solution. Even if we’d investigated him thoroughly, we might not have been able to assemble a good enough case against him. And if we had got him sent down, he’d probably only have done ten or twelve years. Still,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘I’d have liked the opportunity to question him. There are things we still don’t know, and I like to know everything.’

There was a silence, at the end of which he looked up at
her, and found her looking at him with an intense and searching look.

‘Oh Jo,’ he said helplessly, ‘I do miss you so much.’

‘Me too.’

‘I mean, I miss just being with you and talking to you. It’s so – everything’s so uncomfortable without you.’

‘I know’

‘Couldn’t we just – I mean, it doesn’t have to be—’

‘Don’t say it,’ she pleaded.

But he had to. ‘Couldn’t we just meet sometimes as friends? Do we have to cut ourselves off from each other so completely?’

‘We aren’t just friends. We never have been. That’s the whole point.’

‘But it seems so stupid that I can’t even talk to you.’

‘Would that satisfy you? Just to be able to talk to me?’

He read the warning in her unsmiling expression. ‘No, not satisfy, of course not. But it would be better than nothing, wouldn’t it?’

‘Do you really feel that?’ she asked, looking at him as though she didn’t know him. ‘How can you feel that?’

He dropped his hands on his knees, defeated. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to think or what to do any more. It’s like being lost in Hampton Court maze, and the man on the ladder’s gone home to tea.’

She almost smiled. ‘Oh Bill!’

He looked at her. ‘You don’t know it all yet.’

‘Well, tell me then. What else don’t I know?’

‘Yesterday, I had an interview with Barrington. At his request. About the Cate business.’

Barrington had not seemed at ease. He didn’t quite fidget, but he gave the impression of wanting to.

‘You did a lot of work on this case,’ he said at last. It didn’t sound like the beginning of a commendation, nor was it. ‘I have the feeling that you went into it for the wrong reasons. You wanted to prove something. Your loyalty to your old boss – well, we don’t need to go into that. Loyalty is a virtue, but misplaced loyalty is a weakness.’

He seemed to see belatedly where this last track would lead him, and stopped. Slider wondered whether he had been hauled over coals, and how many and how hot. When a big man goes overboard, the splash swamps a lot of smaller fry. It was important to be far enough away from the point of entry – or small enough to bob on the surface until the waves die down.

‘It seems to me, Slider, that we have a problem,’ he said, and he smiled. It was an uncomfortable smile to be on either side of. Slider would sooner have had a door between himself and it. ‘I’m staying on here,’ Barrington went on – a revelation, though perhaps he didn’t mean it to be, that there had been some doubt on the subject. ‘I like the view from my window. I like the view from my desk. I don’t want it spoiled by having to look at your face every day.’

‘Sir?’ Slider said rigidly, a man gratuitously insulted. He wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

‘I don’t think we can work together, not after all this. I think you might say we have a personality clash. You’re not my kind of copper, Slider, I have to tell you that. And seeing you every day might remind me of the ways in which you have disappointed me since I started here.’

Slider said nothing. He had the absurd head’s-study desire to laugh again. Is it going to be whops, sir? Or do I get off with lines this time? It was a purely hysterical reaction, he knew. He might be looking the end of his career in the face at this moment. It was not a laughing matter. But crikey, he wished he’d thought to put an exercise book down his shorts before he came in here.

Barrington, getting no reaction from his victim, looked down at the folder on his desk before him, and he turned a page or two in a nervous way. Slider deliberately didn’t look at it. He concentrated on the portrait of the Queen. One couldn’t laugh at the Queen, now could one?

‘It’s on your record that you turned down promotion to DCI once before, giving as a reason that you preferred to stay in a less administrative rank. Well, I’m happy to tell you that you are going to be given a chance to reconsider that decision.’

‘Sir?’ All desire to laugh at an end. This was serious. This was real life intruding.

‘There is a vacancy at Pinner. You can be transferred there by the end of the month. It’s quite nice and handy for your home, isn’t it? That is right, you live in Ruislip?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Just down the road, you see. Won’t that be nice?’ Slider said nothing. ‘I can’t force you to accept it,’ Barrington went on, ‘but I am very strongly recommending that you do. I don’t think you’d enjoy life here with me very much. I am a very resentful sort of person. I harbour grudges.’

‘Sir.’

‘You’ll find the extra money very useful, too, I’m sure.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Retirement looms closer every day for all of us.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘So you’ll think about it?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Don’t take too long about it,’ Barrington said, and then, apparently irritated by Slider’s lack of reaction, dismissed him curtly. ‘That’s all.’

Slider left, risus intactus. A hollow victory.

Joanna didn’t react to the story either. She sat looking at him with thoughtful, troubled eyes. She thinks I’m going to use it to blackmail her, Slider thought with a flash of insight. He wanted to cry out in protest at the very thought. He wanted to scoop her up in front of his saddle and gallop off with her very fast and very far.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said, when it was clear that she wouldn’t speak.

‘I can’t advise you,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to ask you to.’

‘It’s a promotion,’ she said, with an air of being scrupulously fair about it.

‘Yes. And the extra money is always useful. But the days can be so long at those outer stations. I like to be busy. I like it at Shepherd’s Bush.’

She looked down and then up again. ‘Irene would like
having you closer to home, I expect.’

Desperation broke through. ‘Oh Jo, is there no hope for us?’

That roused her. ‘It’s your decision! It always was! Don’t ask me those questions and look at me with those sad-dog eyes!’ She made a getting-up movement. ‘I’ve got to get back. I mustn’t be late.’

‘Wait, please; just a minute more.’ She subsided. He reached across the space between them and took her hand, and she let him, though suspiciously. ‘I love you so much. Please tell me – do you still want me?’

‘Of course I do, you stupid sod,’ she said desperately. ‘But only if I have all of you. I’m not going to share, not any more.’

He shook that away. ‘No, I know. I didn’t mean that. But if I do – if I did sort things out with Irene – would you take me back?’

‘Yes.
But you’ve got to do it first.’

‘I know. I know. I wouldn’t try to cheat you. You don’t think that, do you?’

‘I really have got to go,’ she said, standing up. He stood up too – perforce, since he had hold of her hand. She looked at him painfully. ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I miss you. All those things. Don’t think it’s easy for me, being away from you. I only get through it at all by boring the pants off Jim, bless him, talking about you. But I won’t share you. Don’t get my hopes up if you don’t think you can do it.’

‘I don’t think I can not do it,’ he said. ‘Life is too short.’

She looked at him intently a moment more, and then pulled her hand away. ‘Thanks for lunch,’ she said, and left him, pushing her way through the throng in a manner that left him in no doubt he wasn’t meant to follow her.

He drove home feeling hopeful, feeling hopeless. The thing to do, he thought, was to stop treating Irene like a passive object in his life and talk to her, really talk to her about the whole thing. She had accepted his move into the spare room with surprising docility – had heard his
rehearsed speech about pressure of work and late nights and disturbing her without a murmur. Perhaps he would find, if he talked to her, that she wouldn’t really mind it as much as he had supposed she would.

And the children – well, researchers always found the answers they wanted. He was absent so much; and when he was at home they stayed in their own rooms or went out to friends’ houses. They never wanted to talk to him or play with him or anything. It surely couldn’t make much difference to them if he moved out? It wasn’t as if it was an unusual thing any more. Lots of their schoolfriends must have parents who had divorced.

Divorced.
It was a cold and knobbly word, uncomfortable whichever way you grasped it. And after all, once he had broached the subject he couldn’t take it back, unsay it if it turned out that Irene couldn’t bear the idea.

But it made no sense to go on as they were, the three of them. And for no particular reason he could fathom he suddenly thought about Atherton. He hadn’t told Slider that he had been visiting Joanna. These little missions of mercy – how many of them had there been? Was he so very fond of her, then? More than fond? Oh, don’t be silly. They had never been attracted to each other that way. They just shared the same kind of sense of humour and had read the same books, that’s all.

It started to rain again, cold, steady rain out of a sky as grey and blank as a tarpaulin. Miserable June weather. The wipers smeared the dirty spray-water back and forth, obscuring and then revealing the view, like a mind changing itself monotonously between two possible courses of action. Thank God he was nearly home.

He turned into his road, and there was the familiar, loathed, ranch-style executive chicken-coop he lived in, wedged in between all the other coops just like it. There was a strange car on the hardstanding in front of the garage, which irritated Slider twofold, firstly because he had to park out in the road, which made it a longer, wetter dash to the front door, and secondly because he didn’t like coming home and finding visitors there. He liked to know about visitors in advance so he could prepare his mind for them.

Then as he got out of the car into the rain he realised that it was bloody Ernie’s car, and that was close to being the last straw. Ernie was a pompous bore, and he’d never understood what Irene saw in him. She actually seemed to like his company. He ran across the grass to the front door and let himself in, shaking himself like a dog on the front doormat. He heard Irene call from the sitting-room.

‘Bill? Is that you?’

‘Yes,’ he called back. Silly question. Who else would it be? Still, he was in the business now of placating Irene. He smoothed his damp hair down and went to the sitting-room door prepared to be polite if it killed him. Ernie was sitting bland and complacent in the armchair opposite the door like a semi-animated pudding. Irene was standing in the middle of the room looking irresolute and flustered – probably thought he was going to be rude to Ernie. Well, he’d show her. ‘Hullo,’ Slider said to her equably. And then, ‘Hullo Ernie. How nice to see you.’

Ernie gave a sort of equivocal smirk, but Irene, for some reason, looked upset at his words.

‘I’m glad you’re back early,’ she said, not looking it a bit. ‘I’ve got something I want to talk to you about. Well, we have, really.’

‘We?’ Slider asked, puzzled.

‘Ernie and I,’ she said.

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 978-0-7481-3320-8

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 1993 by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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