Blood Never Dies (32 page)

‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

She smiled at him. ‘With your colouring, I can see you marauding in a long-ship. I’m sorry I have to dash away. But I’ll ask about your – what was his name again?’

‘Robin Williams.’

‘That’s right. I’ll ask everyone, and let you know what they say, either way.’

She escorted him to the front hall and shook his hand again, looking up into his face with a warm and quizzical expression. ‘I’ve so enjoyed talking to you,’ she said, with a little hesitation. ‘You’re not at all what I would have expected in a policeman.’

‘I was just thinking the same about you,’ Atherton said, and the moment extended itself perilously until again she broke contact and he was able to extricate himself. She stood where she was, with a dancer’s poised stillness, until he was out of the door, and he felt her eyes like heat on the back of his neck until he finally turned out of sight. It was like leaving a warm fireside for a cold world. He crossed the road and leaned against a wall for a while to get his strength back. After a bit another young man with a shoe bag slung casually over his shoulder came out of the seniors’ door and sloped off towards the tube station. He imagined her teaching this highly-hormoned and fit young athlete one-to-one.
Lucky bugger
, he thought, though he was not entirely clear whether he meant her or him.

‘Y
ou missed all the excitement,’ McLaren said as Atherton came in through the door. He was hunched over his desk still labouring through the task of collecting and cross-referencing hundreds of car registration numbers. It was thankless work, but the new model McLaren didn’t seem to think he deserved any better, which was rather sad.

‘What excitement?’ Atherton said. ‘Where’s the guv?’

‘Gone,’ said McLaren cryptically, before Atherton could find a blunt instrument with which to swat him, Hollis came in through the other door.

‘So much for Regal being the big boss,’ he said perkily, seeing Atherton.

‘What? Why?’

‘He’s dead. The guv’s gone to ’ave a look.’

It was DI John – or Jonny – Care who had come through from Islington asking to speak to Slider.

‘Your Sergeant Hollis put in an enquiry about David Regal yesterday,’ he opened.

‘That’s right,’ Slider said. ‘It’s part of that enquiry I came to you about before.’

‘What, the Guthrie case?’

‘Yes. We found a connection between Guthrie and Regal.’

‘I see,’ said Care, suddenly sounding interested. ‘But as I remember, you only wanted to know about Guthrie because he was connected to another case of yours.’

‘The murder of a young man called Ben Corley. Corley had a connection to both Guthrie and Regal.’

‘Have you interviewed Regal?’

‘Not yet. We’re still getting our ducks in a row. Your super wasn’t keen on our upsetting Mr Regal unless we were sure of our ground.’

‘Yes, that sounds like our super,’ he said, with a hint of sympathy. ‘Well, I’m sorry to say you’ve missed your chance. David Regal was found dead this morning.’

‘Found dead? Where? Who by?’

‘At home. His wife was away for the night. She got back this morning and found him dead on the floor in the downstairs loo. It looks as though he committed suicide.’

Slider left Mr Porson to apply to the Islington Super, one Bob Keyes, for retrospective planning permission for him to attend the scene of the crime. Jonny Care, as behoved the copper at the coalface, was amenable and friendly to his opposite number from Shepherd’s Bush, especially when it turned out the forensic surgeon in attendance was Freddie Cameron, who claimed Slider with warmth and eagerness as an old friend.

The house was a 1930s cod-Georgian villa of the sort that abounded around Hampstead and Highgate, of red brick, with eight-paned windows complete with fake green shutters and unnecessarily tall chimneys. It had a gravelled yard in front and a manicured garden behind, the whole surrounded by a high wall, and the yard was shut off by nine-foot wrought-iron security gates with a keypad, camera and intercom with the house. The gates were open now, though guarded by blue-and-white tape and two policemen, and inside the yard, among the official vehicles, Slider could see a silver Mercedes S class. The constable allowed him under the tape, while the press pressed forward out of sheer instinct, like greyhounds in the slips, and asked each other who he was.

Care met him in front of the door. ‘Just to get you up to speed,’ he said as they walked in, ‘Mrs Regal went to an opening night of a play she did the costumes for. Did you know she’s a theatre costume designer?’

‘Yes, under the name of Sylvia Scott.’

‘That’s right. You have done your homework.’

Slider was afraid he thought his toes were being trodden on. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever heard of her,’ he confessed chummily.

Care shrugged and smiled. ‘Me neither. But I gather it’s a bit of an arcane world. Anyway, she went to this opening night in York – it’s a pre-season try-out, I think that’s what they call it, of an
Antony and Cleopatra
production that’s coming to London in the autumn. And there was a party afterwards so she stayed the night at the Royal York Hotel, and drove down this morning.’

‘A pretty good alibi, then?’

He looked at him oddly. ‘She apparently went up on stage with the producer to take a bow at the end of the show. And she was interviewed at the party afterwards by the Yorkshire Post.’

‘I’m not trying to be smart,’ Slider said humbly. ‘It’s just that on my last case we had a man who claimed to have been at a wedding, and we almost didn’t check it out.’

Care nodded. ‘You can’t be too careful. But the Yorkshire Post online’s already got a photo of her up on the stage with the producer and cast, and the hotel confirms they brought her car up from the garage this morning, so barring the supernatural I think she’s covered.’

‘You have done your homework,’ Slider offered him his words back.

He quirked his lips by way of a smile in response. ‘With this sort of resident it’s important to make sure you’ve covered the bases. Regal’s a golfer: he’s in very big with the commander. Was, I mean. Anyway, she got here about eleven and found him dead and cold. Do you want to come in and see?’

‘Yes, please, if I may.’ They clothed up in the hall, and Care led him through towards the back. The house was just as Slider would have expected from the outside, spacious and well-pro-portioned, furnished and decorated with the sort of neutral ‘good taste’ you pay an interior decorator to have for you. The ‘antique’ furniture was too new and too well kept to be anything other than reproduction, though from the top end, and expensive. There were large formal arrangements of flowers here and there that Slider guessed were also brought in by a firm. It felt more like an exclusive hotel than a home – he couldn’t imagine anyone kicking off their shoes or laughing in a place like this. He almost felt sorry for David Regal.

The kitchen was huge, and so modern it hurt – every gadget known to man, lighting so concealed you’d need a map to find it, glassy black marble tops, and enough stainless steel to keep Sheffield going for a year. It was spotless, and looked as though no one had ever cooked in it. Judging by modern trends that could well be true: Slider had noted that, as a rule, the posher the kitchen, the less it was used.

The downstairs loo was off to one side of it, past a small lobby with a door to the utility room. ‘Loo’, in any case, was far too humble a term to apply to the spacious marble palace that contained WC, bidet, basin, vanity unit, mirrors, sofa, orchids, matching towels and a haunting fragrance of frangipani.

It was a place you would hesitate to sully even by washing your hands, so it was an outrage to all senses that it also contained a dead man, sprawled on his back on the floor. He was dressed in fine woollen slacks and a silk shirt with the top button undone, no tie, leather loafers with tassels. Slider guessed him to be about five foot nine or ten, no more, and probably in his late fifties; well preserved, and with a good figure. He had the sort of tan you had to go abroad for, silver hair beautifully cut, and his features were small and neat, almost boyish. The likeness to Richard Gere lay only in the colouring and general impression of handsomeness.

His eyes and mouth were a little open; his outflung left wrist had been deeply cut, and there was a pool of blood on the floor under it and his arm, staining the beautiful shirt under the shoulder and armpit where it had spread back. Near his right hand was a bloody kitchen knife, very sharp-looking.

Cameron, another Tyvek-clad ghost, looked up and said, ‘There you are! Jonny said you were coming. You know Jonny Care, do you? Your Islington counterpart and much beloved in his community.’ Care smirked shyly at this accolade. ‘I must say, as downstairs loos go this is a pleasure to work in. I was expecting to have to do gymnastics to work around the body. So, Bill, what do you think of this? Another bug for your collection, maybe?’

‘How can you be so cheerful on a Saturday?’ Slider countered.

‘All days are as one to the pure of heart. He’s been dead about twelve hours.’

‘Which makes it some time yesterday evening,’ said Slider. The wife was well covered, then.

‘First reaction?’ Freddie asked facetiously.

Slider stared, taking in the scene and the corpse. ‘You said it looked like suicide,’ he said to Care.

Care met his eyes. ‘Perhaps I should have said it looks as though it’s
meant
to look like suicide.’

Slider returned the look. ‘There’s not enough blood.’

‘Bingo,’ said Freddie. ‘He didn’t bleed out. To judge from his pupils, he’s taken rather a large dose of some narcotic or other. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we were to find it was the drug that killed him. The cutting isn’t post-mortem of course, or there’d be no blood to speak of. But I’d guess his heart gave out under the strain of the overdose before he’d managed to exsanguinate. And of course once the heart stopped, the bleeding would stop.’

Slider said, ‘In Corley’s case, it was phenobarbital.’

‘Could be the same. We won’t be able to tell until we’ve had a tox screen,’ said Freddie.

Slider looked at Care. ‘Phenobarbital administered in alcohol most probably. It dissolves readily and leaves no taste.’

‘There’s an empty glass in the sitting room,’ said Care. ‘Smells like vodka.’

‘What else?’ Freddie asked almost jovially. He was enjoying himself, like a prof egging on two bright pupils.

Slider looked carefully around and then worked his way backwards from the bathroom across the kitchen, with Care following. Beyond the kitchen was the sitting room, an informal area with a sofa, armchairs and coffee table, a built-in wall unit containing books, sound equipment and television, and a wood-burning stove screened, at this time of year, with another large flower arrangement. One side of the sofa bore a man-sized indentation in the cushions. On the table in front of it was a cut-glass tumbler with dregs of clear liquid in it, an untidily-folded newspaper, and the TV remote. The glow of a red light on the television itself showed it was on standby.

‘No note?’ Slider asked.

‘We haven’t found one yet,’ said Care. He almost seemed to be enjoying himself, too.

‘He sat here, drinking his vodka and tonic. Do you know what was on television?’

‘It’s on BBC One. There was the news at ten. After that, an action film. Before it, a programme about soldiers in Afghanistan,’ said Care. ‘I looked it up.’

Slider smiled inwardly. Good for you, he thought. ‘So he might have been half-watching while he read the paper. He finishes his drink, throws the paper down, walks into the bathroom, and cuts his wrist with the knife he’s collected from the kitchen on his way.’

‘There
is
one missing from the knife rack. Matching handles,’ said Care.

‘Not forgetting to turn off the TV first,’ Cameron called. ‘Is it me, or is that deeply unconvincing?’

Slider went back over the ground. ‘He was dragged. You can see the marks of his heels, here on the carpet, where the pile lies differently. And in the kitchen, here, and here where they had to swing round for the doorway.’ They were faint, the scuffs, just dullnesses in the polish of the kitchen floor’s surface. Slider straightened up and tilted his head. ‘The light would have been different – artificial, not daylight – and at a different angle. They probably couldn’t have seen the marks then.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Care.

‘They gave him the drugged vodka, and when he fell unconscious, dragged him into the bathroom, tidied up his clothes, and cut his wrist to make it look like suicide.’

‘Then washed up the glass and poured another vodka and tonic into it for the show,’ said Care.

‘But the glass would then have had no fingermarks on it,’ said Slider.

‘They emptied it again and took it into the bathroom, wrapping his right hand round it for verisimilitude before replacing it on the table.’

Slider agreed with all that.

‘But what I don’t understand is, why bother?’ Care went on. ‘Why not cut his wrist right here where he sat on the sofa?’

‘Instinct, perhaps. Or maybe they thought it looked more natural in the loo. Perhaps Regal was a clean and tidy sort of person who wouldn’t have liked to stain the carpets and upholstery, even in death,’ Slider said.

‘In your Corley murder, deceased was actually
in
the bath, wasn’t he?’ Care commented.

‘Yes,’ said Slider. ‘But presumably the murderer was not on intimate enough terms with Regal to persuade him to take a bath.’ He pondered a little, pursuing a fugitive thought.

Care interrupted his brown study. ‘I’m going to have another word with the wife. My super will probably kill me for offering, but would you like to come?’

Slider came back with a start. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, very much. Thank you.’

Sylvia Scott, or Sylvia Regal, was in a different sitting room, which had French windows on to a terrace. There were chandeliers, brocade upholstery and Chinese carpets, an Adam fireplace, repro Georgian side tables with bronzes of horses and dogs on them, oil paintings in heavy gold frames on the walls. This was the formal drawing room and it felt chilly and unused, though it was still hot outside.