Blood Never Dies (26 page)

She shook her head. ‘I really don’t know. It’s silly, but after all this time I really know very little about him. I know he has his own company in London, and I think he lives in London too, but that’s about all. The cheques arrive on time, he pays me in advance, and any extras that are needed he never makes any bones about, so he’s a good client, and good clients you don’t alienate by asking questions if they don’t want to answer them.’

‘What about the other businessmen he brought here? What can you tell me about them?’

‘Oh, a mixed sort of bunch. Some of them didn’t really look like my idea of a businessman. A lot of them were foreigners, and I suppose he was showing them a good time to grease the wheels.’

‘What sort of foreigners?’

‘I can’t be sure – I was never introduced to them. A lot of them I’d say were probably East Europeans or Middle Easterns. At least they knew how to ride, even if they were a bit too dashing in the saddle for my liking.’

Slider got the image: Kazakhs galloping across the Steppes, Arabs galloping across the deserts, Bulgarians – what did they gallop across? David Regal greasing the wheels of business – but what business? And what else did he share, besides his horses?

‘So you last saw Colin on Wednesday last week,’ he resumed. ‘And have you heard from David since? Has he brought anyone else here?’

‘No to both questions. I didn’t think anything about it, because David doesn’t come on a regular basis, and sometimes there’ll be a gap of a few weeks. But if poor Colin has – well, that would explain it. I thought he’d come this weekend just past, since he’d seemed so keen on Colin, but he didn’t. Was that . . .? When did it happen?’

‘Last Sunday night,’ Slider said.

‘Oh dear. Oh, it’s so dreadful. I hope they hadn’t had a row or something like that. And what about his family? They’ll be devastated. He was so nice. Well, I expect David will be able to tell you who to get in contact with. How odd that he didn’t have any identification with him. Did you say—?’

At this slightly perilous moment they were interrupted by the sound of wheels and a diesel engine, and they both looked out of the window, sealed shut with genuinely antique dust and cobweb, to see a van with a trailer bouncing slowly over the imperfections of the yard. ‘Oh damn, it’s the smith,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to go. You finish your tea – you won’t be in the way here.’

‘I’ll have to go too,’ he said. ‘By the way, if David should ring you before I’ve seen him, don’t tell him anything, will you? Don’t even say I’ve been here.’

‘Not if you don’t want me to.’ She gave him an odd look, and he could read the question hovering on her lips:
do you suspect him of something
? But either pressure of time or natural discretion suppressed it. ‘Oh, I was going to give you his phone number,’ she said instead. She went to the door to wave to the smith, then came back to open a large and mud-smeared ledger, from which she copied down a telephone number on to a Post-it. ‘You’ll think it foolish, but I don’t even have his address. But if I leave a message on his answerphone, he always rings back, so it hasn’t been a problem.’

Slider glanced at the number. It was a land line.

‘Don’t worry, we can get the address from the number.’

‘Yes, I suppose
you
can,’ she said.

‘T
his case just gets nuttier all the time,’ said Atherton, back from the Wynnstay flat. ‘What’s Corley doing going horse-riding with David Regal?’

‘David Regal?’ Swilley said. ‘Of Regal Forsdyke? The solicitors that’re the legal representatives of Ransom – which belongs to the same group as Apsis, which owns the Hot Box. Boss, couldn’t David Regal be the big boss that Villiers said was getting very friendly with Corley?’

‘It’s a bit of a leap, but it’s certainly possible,’ said Slider.

‘So was Corley gay all the time?’ McLaren asked in wounded tones. ‘No one’s ever said that before.’

‘He had an affair with Kara,’ Hollis said. ‘That’s definite. ‘So he wasn’t gay then – or not exclusively.’

‘But if he
was
gay, maybe the murderer’s a man after all,’ said McLaren. ‘Black-sack man.’

‘What about the woman’s print on the vodka bottle?’ Swilley objected.

‘That could’ve got there any time,’ McLaren answered.

‘If he weren’t gay but pretending to David Regal he were, he’d get found out,’ Hollis said. ‘Maybe that’d be enough to make Regal murder him.’

Slider said, ‘If it turns out to have been personal after all, Mr Wetherspoon will murder
me
. Obviously we’ve got to get after this Regal type, but we’ve got to tread carefully.’

‘Sir,’ said Gascoyne, ‘I don’t think it was Regal that was with Corley on the night he was murdered.’

They all looked at him. ‘Have you got something?’ Slider asked.

‘You tracked down the pizza? Good lad,’ said Hollis.

Gascoyne looked pleased. ‘It wasn’t a pizza restaurant, it was an Italian restaurant. Called Giardino, in Elgin Crescent. I was just working my way through them one by one – there’s a hell of a lot of Italian restaurants in Notting Hill, you know. It’s like looking for a curry house in Brick Lane.’

‘Thick as leaves in Vallombrosa,’ Slider murmured.

Gascoyne cocked him a look, and seeing no more was forthcoming, went on. ‘Well, at first it was all, no, no, just like the other places. But I made everyone look at the photo, and there was this one waiter that kind of clocked it. He said no, like the others, but he gave me a look, and sort of flicked his eyes towards the back, so I went round and waited, and after a bit he comes out the kitchen door.’

He wasn’t Italian, though he looked the part – slim and olive-skinned with dark curly hair. In fact he was Portuguese, but he’d been in the catering trade since he left school, and coming to London for the better money, he’d learned enough of most languages to be anything the punters wanted.

‘I see this man,’ he said eagerly, having another look at the photo. ‘He was in here Sunday night, with a lady. But the manager, Pietro, he says to say nothing, because he was in disguise, this man. We get a lot of famous people in here,’ he added proudly. ‘Film stars, politicos, all sorts. They don’t come in if we talk about them, so Pietro says always, never show you know who they are.’

‘And did you know who he was?’ Gascoyne asked.

‘Me? No, I not know him, but Pietro say he was pop singer in old days.’

‘Ben Jackson?’ Gascoyne suggested.

‘Yes, that was name Pietro say, but I no heard of him. Anyway, he was with lady, came in late, ten o’clock, have meal, then he pay cash, leave good tip, and they go.’

‘What time did they leave?’

‘Maybe midnight, little bit before? I hold the door for them when they leave. They were nearly the last, we got the last ones out about quarter past twelve.’

‘Can you describe the lady to me?’

‘Is hard to say,’ he said. ‘Whenever I come to table, she looking down, or search for something in her bag. I not really see her face much, not close up, just from passing by. I think she good looking, maybe a bit older than him. Had red hair, short like—’ He made a curved gesture with both hands from the top of his head to his chin. ‘Tight black top, black trousers, very sexy lady. They having good talks and getting romantic, I think. They holding hands across the table at the end.’

‘You said you held the door for them. Did you see where they went when they left the restaurant?’

‘No, they cross the road, maybe going to car, I don’t know. But,’ he added eagerly, ‘as he go past me, I hear him say to her, “Which club we going to?” But I no hear her answer. She gone in front, not turn her head, I don’t know if she hear him, anyway.’

‘So you see, sir,’ Gascoyne finished his story, ‘he was having a romantic meeting with a woman at around midnight, so it’s likely it was her he took back to his flat, isn’t it?’

‘I always thought that bath thing was more like a woman’s seduction,’ Atherton said.

‘It was too early to let him take her home,’ Slider mused. ‘People might still be around at that time of night. Hence the club. But which one?’

‘This is like the Flynn murder,’ Atherton said. ‘Repeating her effects. Maybe she took Flynn to a club as well.’

‘The Forty-Niners is near the Giardino restaurant,’ Hollis said. ‘Maybe she took him there.’

‘And that was Tommy Flynn’s club,’ McLaren added.

‘But we’ve already canvassed the Forty-Niners,’ Mackay said. ‘Couldn’t get anyone to recognize Corley.’

‘Better ask them again,’ Slider said. ‘Any any other clubs in the area as well. Meanwhile, we’ve got to think what to do about David Regal.’

‘Boss,’ said Swilley, ‘the phone number you got for him from the horse woman goes to the same address as his office, but when I tried it, there’s an answering machine on. And the number listed for the office is different. Doesn’t that seem a bit suspicious?’

‘You didn’t leave a message, did you?’ Slider asked.

‘No, boss,’ Swilley said, managing to convey in two short words that that question should never have been asked.

‘Good. The Regal side needs thinking about before we move. Leaving it aside for the moment, I’d like to know why Corley said he’d got a dancing job, and whether there was any connection with Guthrie. Talk to Guthrie’s sister, try and find out more about his dancing career: where he trained, was it genuine, did he really dance in those shows, how did he get the jobs – anything that might connect him to anything to do with Corley, the clubs, Apsis, and so on.’

‘I get the idea, boss,’ Swilley said, still a little wounded. ‘You can leave it to me.’

‘And I think I had better have a chat with an old friend of mine, who knows more about the clubs and drugs scene than I do.’

The phone had rung and Hollis had answered it. Now he said, ‘Guv, there’s a lady to see you.’ Slider looked up, and Hollis made a sympathetic face. ‘It’s Corley’s mum.’

She was so obviously and extremely posh that someone from the shop had conducted her straight upstairs to the small interview room, rather than leave her in the cloisters of sin downstairs, where anyone might come in – and frequently did – and where the background smell of disinfectant only served to remind you of the smell of sick it was deployed to cover.

She stood as Slider came in, looked at him seriously and offered her hand. She was tall and slim, beautiful in a well-preserved way, exuding a faint waft of subtle perfume as she moved; her clothes simple but so expensive they put her way outside Slider’s realms of experience. Her shoes were a poem, her hands beautifully kept, her thick, sandy-fair hair exquisitely cut, her pearls at neck and ear so good he wanted to bite them. Apart from her tallness, it did not look as though either of her children much resembled her – certainly not in colouring, with her fair hair and fine hazel eyes. He supposed they took after her husband. He remembered Mrs Shepstone saying that Ben had been her pet, and he felt a quickening of sympathy.

He shook her cool hand briefly, introducing himself, and said, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. Won’t you sit down? Can I offer you tea or coffee?’

‘Nothing, thank you,’ she said, sitting. ‘You are the officer in charge of – I suppose I must call it the case?’

Her voice was as exquisite and upper class as the rest of her. One did not any more meet many people like this – there were, to begin with, few of them, and they tended to lead a life so much apart that the circles never intersected. What had she made of Ben’s strange career? But he reminded himself that she was a writer, and must therefore have experienced, at least in mind, many different kinds of life.

‘My daughter says you do not believe it was suicide. I’m not sure if that makes it worse or not.’

‘Neither option can be easy for you,’ Slider said. ‘You must be devastated.’

‘It’s hard to take it in,’ she said. ‘I still expected Ben to be there at the gate when I came through at Heathrow. He always made a point of meeting us when we came home.’ She gave a faint smile. ‘I think he just liked airports. My husband will be coming back tomorrow – he had business he could not abandon. But I suppose there’s nothing we can do anyway. It makes one feel so helpless. Still, I had to come. Perhaps you could tell me what one does about funeral arrangements. I have no experience of what happens in a case of – murder.’

She hesitated slightly on the word. She was afraid of making it real by saying it out loud. But it was already too late for that. He spoke to her calmly and quietly about the procedures, and saw her brace herself on the practicality. At the end of it she said, ‘If there is any way in which I can help – any questions I can answer for you . . . But I expect Jennifer has already told you everything.’

‘It’s never possible to know everything,’ he said. ‘That’s the problem. But there is something I wanted to ask, and it would save bothering Mrs Shepstone again.’

‘Please,’ she said, almost eagerly. ‘Anything.’

‘Did Ben have any training in dance? I know he studied music, and he was a member of Footlights which showed he had acting ability, but was there ever any formal stage training?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He studied piano, clarinet and classical guitar at school. He never went to stage school, or a dance school. Why do you ask?’

‘When he left the last job we know about – as a barman in the Hot Box club – he told them that he had a better job, as a dancer.’

‘A dancer? Where?’ she asked with surprise.

‘That’s what we’re wondering.’

She shook her head. ‘He learned a few dance moves when he was in Breaking Wave, for their videos, but that was all. He must have been joking.’

Or laying a trail, Slider thought.

‘But I don’t understand – what do you mean, the last job, as a barman? Ben was a journalist, for
Musical World
.’

Slider looked at her carefully. ‘I think I had better tell you what we know so far.’

‘I wish you would,’ she said.

She listened in silence to his exposition, but her face became more bewildered by the sentence. When he had finished she said, ‘False names? Dyed hair? Night clubs and pornographic films? I can hardly believe all this. It’s – it’s farcical! Are you quite sure it’s Ben you’re talking about?’ Before he could answer she waved the question away with a hand, and closed her eyes in a pained way. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t believe I said that. Of course you’re sure. But what on
earth
was he doing?’