Blood Never Dies (27 page)

‘I rather hoped you might have an idea about that.’

She shook her head, but lapsed into a silence so obviously intensely thoughtful that he waited it out, and when at last she looked up, he said quietly, ‘What is it? Please tell me.’

She drew a breath, gathering her thoughts. ‘I don’t
know
, of course – it’s the purest guesswork – but what it
looks
like is –’ another pause, perhaps searching for the right word – ‘knight-errantry.’

‘Knight-errantry?’

‘It would have been very like him. He was a very gallant person, underneath the careless exterior, and very protective of those he loved.’

‘You are thinking of Annie Casari?’ She nodded. ‘What did you think of her?’

‘I thought her a sad, weak, lost soul – out of her place and out of her depth. I was unhappy about Ben’s relationship with her, because it was very bad for him, without, as far as I could see, offering any real hope for her. Horrible as it is, I have to admit a small part of me was relieved when she died – though desperately sad for her and her family, of course – because it set Ben free.’

‘But I thought he was no longer going out with her?’

‘He wasn’t, officially. But that didn’t mean he didn’t still care for her.’

‘Your daughter said he was over her.’

She gave a small nod. ‘Yes, I can understand Jennifer saying that. She probably convinced herself that it was so. She was always inclined to underestimate the strength of Ben’s feelings for Annie, because she didn’t want it to be true.’ She sighed. ‘Poor Jennifer. She has always believed I favoured Ben.’

Slider said, ‘She told me he was your favourite.’

‘It’s very hard, when one of your children is brilliant and the other is not, to make them both feel you are treating them alike. Ben didn’t think I favoured him, and I made every effort not to, even sometimes being harsher with him that I would otherwise have been, so that Jennifer would not feel hard done by. But some things seem to be beyond reaching. Jennifer felt herself inferior to Ben and so assumed everyone would treat her as second-class. The miracle is that it didn’t make her hate her brother. She loved him and tried to protect him, always, from childhood upwards. And one of the things she wanted to protect him against was Annie, because she could see, as we all could, that Annie was not good for Ben. Of course, she would never have thought anyone was good enough for Ben. But Ben loved Annie, and there was nothing to be done about that.’

‘So at the time of Annie’s death, you think he was still in love with her?’

‘I know he was. He wrote to me, several impassioned letters. They were very hard for me to read.’

‘You were not at home – in England, I mean – when Annie died?’

‘No. We had come for our spring holiday early, but we left England a week before it happened.’ She looked at him carefully. ‘You are thinking that I ought to have come back to comfort Ben. But he specifically asked me not to, in his letters. He said there was nothing I could do, and that it would only fret him to have me change my plans on his account. And he was quite right, on both counts. But what occurs to me now is that he may have had another reason.’

‘The knight-errantry?’ Slider said.

‘Yes. If he was embarking on some kind of campaign to – I don’t know – save other young women in Annie’s situation – going undercover, perhaps, to get close to them and the men who exploited them – it would have hindered him to have concerned relatives enquiring tenderly where he was going every minute.’

‘I can see that,’ Slider said. ‘So you think perhaps he was involved in – shall we call it – investigative journalism? Concerning the drugs scene?’

It had been Porson’s idea quite early on – one had to give the old boy credit. He was an oddity, but not a fool.

‘It seems to me to make sense of what you’ve told me. And it would be in keeping with his character. His grandfather used to say he was born asking questions; and he was always careful of those weaker than him. At least,’ she said, with a quick frown, ‘I hope it was that, and not just revenge. Though perhaps the two are not unconnected.’

‘Revenge against whom?’

‘The suppliers of drugs. Those who make fortunes out of it, out of the weakness of people like Annie. He did –’ she looked uncomfortable – ‘write to me in that vein, immediately after Annie’s death. But his later letters were more full of love than hatred, so I didn’t take it seriously. What do
you
think he was doing?’

The question was sudden and abrupt and took him unprepared.

‘I don’t know. I think he may have been trying to bring something to light, but what his state of mind was, I can’t judge. And I’m no closer to knowing who killed him.’

She winced at the word, but said, ‘It must surely be someone from that world, the drugs supplier he was trying to uncover.’

‘So one would assume. But unfortunately he hasn’t left us anything to go on. If he made any notes about what he had discovered or what he suspected, we haven’t found them. There’s a missing laptop – stolen, we believe, by the killer – and if there was a backup – a disc or a memory stick or something of that sort – we haven’t discovered it yet.’

She frowned. ‘If he was taking all these measures to disguise himself, he must have thought what he was doing was dangerous. So if he took a copy of his notes, he would have hidden it – don’t you think? Deposited it in a safe place?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and waited for her to complete the sequence, as he knew she would, being an intelligent woman.

‘But he would have told someone he trusted where it was. “If anything happens to me, open this letter” – that sort of thing?’

‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘So who would he trust?’

‘Me. His father. Jennifer. I’d have thought, any of the three of us. Danny, his agent, perhaps. Some old friends. I don’t know who his new friends were. But whoever it was, they haven’t come forward?’ She reached the end of the reasoning.

‘No,’ Slider said. ‘Which leaves us trying to follow in his footsteps.’

‘And always a step behind,’ she added quietly. Slider’s only comfort was that she didn’t say it as an accusation.

Hollis was waiting for him when he got back to his office. ‘Guv, we’ve had a call about Flynn on Wensdy night. This bloke saw all the guff and the picture in the paper, and rang in to say Tommy Flynn was in Missie’s in Earl’s Court Road with a female.’

‘Missie’s?’

‘It’s newish, guv – cocktails, cult films, pool, live music, DJs an’ dancing – got a good reputation so far, no trouble, and very popular wi’ the kids. Opens five in the afternoon till two a.m., Wensdy to Sat’dy. Bloke who phoned in’s a bouncer, name o’ Derek Ademola, saw Tommy come in the club around midnight with a woman, saw ’em leave again maybe about half one.’

‘He’s sure it’s the same man?’ Slider asked.

‘Yes, guv. Soon as he saw the picture in the paper and realized it was the same guy, he asked one of the barmen that’s a friend of his, and this barman says he remembers him too. Had a lot of double vodkas, and danced with the woman very smoochy.’

‘What about the woman? Do they know her? Can they describe her?’

‘Barman says he never got a look at her close up. It was Flynn’at come up to the bar and bought the drinks. Says when they were dancing he noticed she had a nice body, wearin’ a tight black dress, but that’s all. Ademola says she had black hair, kind of square cut like a Chinese girl’s, but he never really saw her face because as they went past him she was fishing in her handbag for something, and coming out he only saw their backs. I’m getting ’em both in, just in case, see if they can put anything together between ’em, but it don’t look hopeful.’

‘How was Flynn, did they say? What was his mood?’

‘Ademola says he was in a right happy mood, grinning like a monkey, dead pleased with himself. Had his arm round the woman, and coming out he looks back and gives Ademola a big wink, like, “I’m gonna get it tonight”. That’s why he remembers him so well.’

‘Well, he got it all right, poor fish,’ Slider said.

‘At least he died happy, guv,’ said Hollis. His marriage was on the rocks, so perhaps he could be forgiven.

Swilley appeared at his door. ‘Boss?’

‘Come in. Sit down – you look tired.’

‘No, I’m all right, thanks. Been sitting all day.’ She was wearing high-waisted camel-coloured slacks that made her look even taller and slimmer than she was, and a cream blouse, and with her thick blonde hair she was a symphony in coordination. If it wasn’t for her rather blank, doll-like features, she’d have been distractingly good-looking. In fact, most of her male colleagues had been distracted at one time or another – to no purpose: she was unattainable, and had a range of searing looks in her armoury that could have taken paint off ships. Slider she had always treated like a father, and he had often wondered whether to take that as a compliment or not.

‘I’ve had a chat with Joyce Finnucane – Guthrie’s sister?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘Well, the whole dancing thing is genuine all right. He went to the Arkady Stage School in Tottenham Court Road. Took a lot of stick for it – you know, Billy Elliot style – but there was one teacher there that thought he had talent and took him under her wing. And it was apparently her that got Guthrie his first break, with a touring company doing
Starlight Express
. He was with the same company for quite a while, but then apparently this same teacher got him into
Les Miserables
. I’ve rung the theatre company and checked, and they say he was in the chorus for just over two years, but he left of his own accord, and quite suddenly. Guthrie’s sister says he left
Les Mis
for the Asset Strippers job, but I’ve rung the Asset Stripper’s management team, and the date he started with them means there was a gap of about six months between the two jobs. And when I asked them how he came to get the job, because there’s always a lot of stage-struck kids hanging around who’d love to be a gofer for their favourite band, they said it was someone at UniDigital – that’s the Asset Strippers’ record company – who asked them to take him on.’

‘Who, at the record company?’

‘His name’s Ed Wilson, and he’s Product Manager, which doesn’t sound like much, but apparently he’s responsible for marketing and promotion strategies for a number of acts. He has to coordinate all the press and promo around record releases and live events, and run the acts’ media campaigns, so he’s quite important enough to get them to take on a new gofer if he wants it. But why he’d want it I don’t know. Why Guthrie’d want it, come to that. It doesn’t pay very well, but I suppose it’s a lot less work than hoofing for your living.’ She looked at Slider, eyebrows raised. ‘Want me to find this Wilson and ask him?’

‘Yes,’ said Slider, after a moment’s thought. ‘It’s an odd sort of intervention, and it doesn’t sound as though Wilson and Guthrie were cut from the same cloth, so how did they know each other?’

‘Might have been childhood buddies,’ Swilley said. ‘Life can change a lot from when you’re eleven. I know mine did.’

It was a tantalizing opening, but sadly Slider simply didn’t have time. There was too much to do. He waved her gently away, and got his head down, trying to complete various bits of paperwork before he had to leave to keep the appointment he’d made to see his old friend from Central days, John Lillicrap.

T
he Asset Strippers were on the road and Swilley learnt that Ed Wilson was with them, but fortunately they hadn’t gone very far. Saturday would see them in the NEC arena in Birmingham in a line-up of top names, but they were doing a Friday night gig at a stadium on the way, where they would top the bill and give the good burghers of Luton a sniff of the high life, and incidentally conjure an income of half a million quid or so out of their vocal cords and pelvises.

Swilley arrived in the middle of the ‘get in’, to an organized chaos that brought to mind a kicked ants’ nest. Vast artics were being unloaded of lights and staging, and tough-looking road crew were sweating it amid the clanging of spanners, the whining of fork-lifts, thumps and crashes and spine-tingling curses. There was so much writhing black cable underfoot it looked like a scene from an Indiana Jones movie. There were vans unloading crates of beer and Australian champagne, pies and Pepsi, flowers and fruit, racks of costumes, sound boxes and drum kits. Catering caravans pumped out the smell of chips and sausages to add to the fizz of oil and diesel and sweat on the air – shut your eyes and add sawdust and you could be smelling a fairground. Smart PAs and fixers, technicians, publicists, caterers, cleaners, management legs, make-up girls, wardrobe mistresses and gofers darted everywhere like mayflies; arena staff and health ’n’ safety officers clutching clipboards wandered among them looking worried. Nearly everyone had either a radio or a mobile to his ear.

And then there was the security contingent: huge, bald men with gold chains and rings on their knuckles like pile drivers, and tattooed, shaven-headed women in big boots. Swilley was tough, and she had the law on her side, but still she reckoned the only reason she got past them was that the limos containing the Asset Strippers and the other acts had not yet arrived. And also she only wanted to see Ed Wilson, the git from the record company – nobody important. She was passed into the care of a small, thin gofer who had been surgically grafted to his radio, and hurried behind him through the ferment to an indoor Portakabin where a sharp-suited, over-cologned middle-aged man, with a permatan and thinning hair carefully eked out to hide the fact, was talking to someone who was so obviously a reporter from the local paper that Swilley felt sorry for her.

Wilson, learning who Swilley was in a breathless gush from the gofer, smiled very whitely and said, ‘I’ll be with you in just one second,’ and finished rather abruptly with the reporter, who looked almost relieved to be let go – and probably not just because of the aftershave. If she could blend in with the frenetic activity outside she might get a glimpse of the Asset Strippers themselves before security spotted and ejected her.