Blood Never Dies (33 page)

Mrs Regal was in her late thirties or early forties, but looked younger, her face remarkably line-free, as though she had never had a care in her life. There seemed something faintly familiar about her that Slider could not put his finger on. She had bronze-gold hair in a jaw-length bob, so well cut that it moved all-of-a-piece, like an elastic bell, and if she was not beautiful she was so well presented and made up you would never notice. She was wearing grey slacks and a white blouse, patent shoes, a heavy gold choker and gold earrings, all very smart and restrained apart from a massive diamond engagement ring against her wedding ring. Despite her long drive and the subsequent horrors, she seemed both fresh and composed, her make-up unsmudged, no hair out of place.

She was sitting on a slippery-looking brocade sofa and there was a brandy glass on the onyx coffee table in front of her. A woman detective stood stolidly behind and to one side of her. It was the one who had brought Slider coffee in Care’s office – what had he called her? Sara, that was it. She smiled a deferential greeting at Slider as he came in.

The woman looked up at Slider too, with a quick frown, quickly smoothed away. You didn’t stay line-free by engaging facial expressions willy-nilly. It was to Care she addressed herself. ‘How long is this going to go on?’

‘Is what, ma’am?’

‘How long must I sit here? I’ve had a long journey. I would like to go to my room, change out of these clothes, have a shower. In any case, I have a meeting this afternoon at the RSC and a fitting this evening that I must attend, or my whole schedule will be thrown out.’

‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ Care said, ‘but there are always procedures attendant upon a death which have to be observed.’

She stared at him as if trying to read his thoughts. ‘Look, you might as well know right away, David’s and my marriage was a matter of form only. It suited us both better to stay married than to divorce, but he went his way and I went mine, and it’s more years than I can remember since either of us cared what the other did. We were as good as strangers. So I don’t see any point in playing the hypocrite and pretending to feel deep grief, when I don’t. I’m sorry he’s dead, and I’m sorry he felt so badly about something he wanted to take his own life. But that’s all.’

‘Why do you think he might have wanted to kill himself?’ Care slipped the question in.

She looked exasperated. ‘I don’t
know
. Haven’t I just told you, we went our own ways? I’ve no idea what he was getting up to recently.’

Was she telling the literal truth, Slider wondered, or was she trying to distance herself from anything they had found out about Regal?

‘When you came home this morning, you would naturally go straight to your bedroom, wouldn’t you?’ Care asked neutrally.

‘Yes, as I should like to do now,’ she said with irritation.

‘Then how did you come to find him before showering and changing?’

That made her pause an instant. But she recovered quickly. ‘I knew he was at home because his car was there, so I just popped along to say, “Hello, I’m back.” I didn’t say we weren’t friends. I saw the glass and the newspaper, went into the kitchen, and saw him through the open door.’

Slider could feel Care not saying something at that point. There was something about that statement that was wrong.

‘Was he in money trouble?’ Care continued.

‘Good heavens, no! David’s very well off.’

‘Romantic entanglements?’

She paused, considering, and sighed. ‘I suppose you’ll probe and probe until you find out. David liked boys. Not little boys,’ she added hastily. ‘I mean young men. And his affaires, as I suppose one must call them, have always tended to be rather emotional. I believe that’s usually the case with that sort of liaison. But I don’t know if he was seeing anyone lately.’

‘How long had he been – interested in young men?’

‘Always. He was always like that.’

‘Then why did you marry him?’

She drew a short, exasperated sort of breath, as if she didn’t like being questioned about her private life. But she continued very fluidly, almost as if she had thought it out, or had had to explain the same thing before. ‘I didn’t know to begin with, of course. I met him when I was stage managing a play he was backing. I was very young, he was very handsome, and charming, very much a grown-up. All the other men I knew were so callow beside David. He took me out to restaurants and clubs. It was all so sophisticated. I fell for him, and when he asked me to marry him, I couldn’t believe my luck. But the other thing was always there. Looking back, I could see the hints, but at the time I was too young and innocent to realize. But he was good to me, very generous. He set me up in business. Gradually the other thing – the boy thing – took over more and more, and the feelings I’d had for him died. One day I came home and he had a young man with him – in our bed. There was a terrific row. I said I was leaving him. He begged me not to. In the end, we worked it out to suit us both. We bought this house where we could have separate suites. He promised to be more discreet, and in return he helped and supported my career. It’s been a happy arrangement, and I have no regrets. I’m only sorry he was so disturbed underneath that he had to take his own life. If only he’d spoken to me about it, perhaps I could have talked him out of it. I shall always blame myself for not realizing.’ She sighed.

Slider glanced at Care, aware that he had a good rapport with him, for someone he’d only just met. Care met his eye for a fraction of a second, and they almost exchanged thoughts.

Certainly Care said just what Slider would have. ‘There’s no need to feel guilty,’ he said to Mrs Regal. ‘You see, he didn’t take his own life.’

She jerked her head up, like a deer in the forest hearing a rifle being cocked. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that we don’t believe your husband killed himself. He was murdered.’

For a moment she could not speak. Perhaps it was the normal reaction of any normal person faced with the ‘m’ word. Or perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps there was something else there. Slider saw now that under her appearance of calm there was a strained blankness, an air of listening to sounds beyond human reach. One of her hands was trembling very faintly, and she placed the other over it. It could have been the effect of natural shock at the death of her husband. Or – was her alibi really as perfect as it sounded?

She recovered herself. ‘Nonsense! What are you saying? You’ve no reason to think that, none at all. I don’t believe it for a minute. Who on earth would want to kill David?’

‘That’s what we hope you can help us with,’ Care said smoothly. ‘I believe you know more about it than you are letting on.’

‘But I tell you I don’t know anything about his life,’ she cried. ‘How many more times? And I wasn’t even here. I was hundreds of miles away in York.
I wasn’t here
!’

‘Then Detective Superintendent Keyes turned up and threw me out,’ Slider said, at the end of his exposition. ‘Poor old Care’s in for a wigging. Mr Porson said he couldn’t talk Keyes round, no matter how hard he flirted. Showed his legs and everything. Keyes said he’d liaise with us over anything they discover that’s pertinent to our investigation, but he won’t let us actually be there.’

‘That’s a bummer,’ Atherton said.

‘Well, yes and no. It’s not our case, and that’s as long as it’s broad. We’ve got enough on our hands as it is.’

‘Yes, but it’s got to be part of the same sequence, don’t you think?’

‘I do think,’ said Slider. ‘For a start, there was no sign of a break-in. Either Regal let the murderer in, or they knew the keypad code and had a door key. Either way, I think we can assume it was someone he knew, because again, there was no sign of a struggle.’

‘And he knew whoever it was well enough to accept a drink from them.’

‘And there’s another thing,’ Slider said. ‘Care walked me to the door on my ignominious exit, specifically to tell me that all the security cameras – the gate, front door and inside the house – had been turned off, and the tapes in the recorders were new and unused.’

‘Why not just wipe them?’ Atherton wondered.

‘Wiping takes time. Quicker just to replace them and take the old ones away,’ said Slider.

‘But that doesn’t fit so well with trying to pretend it was suicide,’ Atherton said.

‘Not if you’re suspicious to start with. But there’s no way of knowing how long the cameras had been off, and you can’t prove Regal didn’t do it himself – realized the tapes were full at some point and replaced them, and forgot to turn the cameras on again. There was one thing Mrs Regal said, though, that might trip her up. She said she knew when she got home that Regal was in, because his car was there. But his car was in the garage, and she parked hers outside, so how would she know? She couldn’t have seen it without opening the garage door, and why would she do that and then not put her car in as well?’

‘But from what you say, the wife was the one person who couldn’t have done it.’

‘True. But it doesn’t mean she didn’t know about it,’ said Slider, rubbing his hand backwards through his hair.

‘A paid assassin?’ Atherton said, with a pained air.

‘Or just someone she’s in league with.’ He stood up. ‘We’d better get the rest of them up to speed. And give McLaren another set of security cameras to add into the mix. If there are any near to the Regal house.’

Atherton snorted. ‘Any security cameras in Highgate? Are there any legs in the Folies Bergère?’

‘I really wouldn’t know,’ said Slider with dignity.

‘So if David Regal isn’t the big cheese, who is?’ Mackay asked in resentful tones.

‘Whoever it is,’ Atherton said, ‘the murders are getting more panicky. Guthrie was good – could have been an accident, can’t prove otherwise. Corley was good – they’d have got away with it if they’d realized he was left-handed. But then Flynn was just a slash-and-grab.’

‘Regal wasn’t bad,’ Fathom said. ‘Could’ve been all right.’

‘Except for the drag marks,’ Mackay added. ‘They should have checked for those.’

‘But
why
were they all killed?’ Gascoyne asked. He hadn’t had to come in, but he’d turned up anyway, keen to keep up with events – or to show his suitability for joining the firm, Atherton thought.

‘Anyone who’s a threat to the organization has to be eliminated,’ he answered.

‘Guthrie because he drew attention to himself in that fight with Corley,’ Swilley suggested.

‘We don’t know that there wasn’t another reason,’ Slider said. ‘He was mixed up with David Regal somehow, and perhaps that was becoming a problem.’

‘Then Corley because he’d been asking too many questions,’ Atherton went on.

‘Yes, but what actually triggered it with Corley? He’d been asking questions for a while,’ Gascoyne objected.

Atherton shrugged. ‘I don’t know the answer to that one. Then Flynn because we’d been talking to him.’

‘Ah, sure, God, don’t say that,’ said Connolly. ‘I’ve a bad conscience anyway about the little twerp. Maybe he’d still be alive . . .’

‘You did your duty,’ Slider told her firmly. ‘It’s the murderer who’s guilty, not you.’

‘And then David Regal because we’d started asking questions about him,’ Atherton concluded.

‘But how did they find that out?’ asked Gascoyne. ‘We asked the Islington police – you can’t think they’re in on it.’

‘I went to his office,’ said Atherton. ‘But surely his own secretary, or whoever she was, wouldn’t rat him out? Then there was Ed Wilson. And Mrs Kennedy.’

‘I’d be willing to bet Ed Wilson wasn’t in on anything,’ Swilley said.

‘And I feel the same about Mrs Kennedy,’ Slider said. ‘But you never know who they might have dropped an innocent word to. At all events, someone at the top got to know we were interested in David Regal. I wonder if he hadn’t been identified before as a weak link, though. This young-man thing might have been getting out of hand. As long as we thought he was the man at the top, we assumed he had the power to do as he liked. But what if he was only a figurehead?’

‘The legal representative of the branch companies,’ Swilley said. ‘He doesn’t necessarily have to do anything or have any skills, but I should think the one thing the Marylebone Group would ask of him is
not
to draw attention to himself.’

‘And one way or another, attention has been drawn,’ said Slider.

‘But it doesn’t leave us any nearer to answering my question,’ Mackay complained. ‘Who
is
the big cheese?’

Mr Porson summoned Slider to his room. ‘I’ve got some news. The Birmingham police had a little looksy at Ransom’s production works for us.’

‘That was quick, sir,’ Slider said in surprise.

‘Very obliging of ’em,’ Porson agreed. ‘Sent a unit straight round. But it’s quiet at the moment, everyone on holiday, including the villains. Anyway, this industrial estate’s a bit of a flagstaff development for Solihull – award-winning design, prestigious urban-regeneration scheme, bags o’ civic pride – so they want to make sure no one casts any nasturtiums. Everything’s above board and bony fido about the estate – you couldn’t have a more kosher address – and Ransom’s place looks all right from the outside. No reason anyone would ever have asked any questions.’ He paused for effect, and Slider obliged with the prompt.

‘But when they
did
ask questions, sir?’

‘Different story,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Inside there’s a small DVD processing unit and printer, two blokes reading magazines and smoking, and a storeroom with half a dozen copies each of fifty or so films. All with the Ransom House name on the spine. File copies. Chummy and his pal look shifty as hell when plod bursts in, try to pretend it’s a slack period. Reckon they’re run off their feet normally, thousands of copies packed up and sent off every week. But our friends in blue say the dust was thick, and the neighbours have never seen a van of any size leaving the place. No activity at all, they say, bar Mutt and Jeff turning up for work with their round o’ cheese-and-pickle and the
Daily Mail
under their arm. And
that’s
not every day.’

‘But Ransom claim to be selling fifteen million quid’s worth a year,’ said Slider.