Blood Never Dies (37 page)

‘Well,’ Slider said, ‘it was panicking that trapped her. If she’d kept her head after killing Corley, we probably wouldn’t have been able to bring it back to her. And her attack on you –’ to Atherton – ‘was very ill-advised. She
knew
you were a policeman.’

‘She believed in her power over men. After all, she’d proved it often enough,’ Atherton said. ‘And killing gets easier the more often you do it. You see it with serial killers. It’s almost like greed – you want one more and one more and—’

‘Don’t,’ said Emily.

‘Oh, now here’s an interesting little titbit,’ Atherton added to her. ‘It was Sylvia’s insistence that when Mary killed David Regal, she had to do it somewhere it wouldn’t make a mess.’

‘You’re kidding me,’ Emily said suspiciously.

‘Seriously. After all, it was her house and she had to go on living there. I just love the thought of Mary dragging the unconscious Regal into the downstairs loo, puffing and straining, and cursing her sister under her breath for being so house-proud.’

‘That’s not nice,’ Emily said sternly.

‘You’re taking all the fun out of it.’

‘Steady, children,’ Slider admonished.

‘Everybody’s nerves’ll be a bit on edge after a case like this,’ Mr Slider said peaceably. ‘Supper must be just about ready. I’ll go and have a look, and maybe you ladies’ll lay the table?’

Left alone, Slider and Atherton looked at each other and Atherton shrugged. ‘We’ll be talking about this one for a long time,’ he said.

‘Probably,’ Slider said. He felt exhausted. There was almost more work in the aftermath of a case than when investigating it: everything had to be got together for the CPS file, every t crossed and i dotted, top brass briefed, explained to and placated. And there was the drugs angle in this one as well. He was glad he had Porson to stand between him and the abyss when the pip hit the spam about why they hadn’t handed it over sooner.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t other deaths we don’t know about yet,’ he said. ‘I somehow can’t believe that she started her killing career with Guthrie – it was too well carried out. And I have my suspicions of Barrow. We ought to start looking back through unsolved cases and sudden deaths where the same elements were involved.’

‘You’re a devil for work,’ Atherton said, stretching himself languidly. ‘Anyone would think you were on commission.’

‘We should go and see if Dad needs help,’ Slider said, standing up.

‘He won’t,’ said Atherton. He had had to learn to leave people alone when they were cooking in their own house. Cooking had always been his release from the tensions of the Job, and he had never been able to stand by idly and watch someone else do it. But now he had Emily.

Oh, wait, to be truthful his release had been cooking and sex. But, again, now he had Emily.

‘One thing that does intrigue me,’ he said, following Slider out. ‘When Corley finally got to meet Mary Lynn, which was pumping the other harder, her or him?’

‘We’ll never know,’ said Slider.

‘Wish I’d been a fly on the wall, though,’ said Atherton.

Securing a large haul of cocaine and getting a definite line on the Marylebone Group put the SOs and the big brass in such good humour they were able to overlook the fact that they ought to have been brought in on it sooner. In fact, in breaking up the drugs ring in a purple cloud of publicity and self-congratulation, they managed to forget that Slider and his firm had been involved in it in any way, which suited Slider down to the ground. The CPS had decided they were going to proceed against Mary Lynette Scott for the murders of Benedict Jackson Corley and David Edward Regal, and at some point in the proceedings, the press were bound to pick up the connection and toss it all over the papers; but sufficient unto the day, Slider thought.

So when the last file went off, all there was left was to have the firm’s usual post-case drinkie-do at the Boscombe Arms. They made it a double celebration, with the news that Gascoyne had been accepted into the CID and would be joining Slider’s firm. Gascoyne shuffled and blushed as they congratulated him, and then, just as Connolly was thinking
God love him altogether, the wee dote
, he proved his mettle by telling the story about the desert unit and the camel in such delicately obscene language that it was clear he had found his spiritual home.

It was a memorable celebration, and not just because of the magnitude of the case. McLaren turned up alone, although at the last couple of firm’s drinks he had insisted on bringing his new woman, Jackie. No one asked him about her, because they didn’t want to encourage him another time. Nobody had really liked her, and they didn’t like the way she had dispirited McLaren – though Swilley, for one, said Jackie would always have her gratitude for getting rid of Maurice’s nostril hair. ‘You’d sometimes think he was keeping a couple of hamsters up there.’

Slider thought McLaren was looking somehow different when he arrived through the door, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Then the food was brought out, and McLaren dived straight for the pork pies. They weren’t the little cocktail ones, they were the intermediate size about two inches across, and knives and plates had been provided, but McLaren cut straight to the chase and put one into his mouth whole.

Slider waited until he had finished chewing so as not to risk choking him, and then said, ‘I thought Jackie didn’t approve of your eating pastry.’

McLaren swallowed noisily and licked the glorious, greasy crumbs off his lips. ‘We broke up,’ he said.

There was a stunned silence.

‘Why?’ Slider asked at last, on behalf of all of them.

‘Ah – I got fed up. All that dieting and grooming. I’m not a bleeding racehorse.’ He looked around the staring faces, and then added, compelled by honesty, ‘Anyway, she’s met this new bloke. It was her broke up with me, really.’ He sniffed. ‘I dunno what she sees in him,’ he added. ‘He’s a right scruff-bag.’

There was a tactful silence, until Atherton intoned, in quotation marks, ‘My work here is done.’

McLaren’s eyes were on the snack plate. ‘Anyone want that scotch egg?’

‘Work away,’ Connolly said kindly. ‘Your need is greater than ours.’

Just as Slider got home, George woke, crying, and Joanna, in the middle of kissing him, broke off to say, ‘I think he’s teething.’

‘I’ll go,’ Slider offered, but she had already turned away.

‘No, I’ll do it. You make us both a drink. I want to talk to you.’

‘Oh-oh,’ he said. ‘That sounds ominous.’

‘God, why do men always say that?’ she said with mock exasperation, and ran lightly up the stairs.

She was gone rather a long time, and he carried his drink through to the small sitting room they used as a study, where the computer was set up. He had been thinking about it, for some reason, all day – perhaps just because they had been putting the case to bed. When Joanna came down and came searching for him, she found him looking at a pop video on YouTube, of all things.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, leaning on his shoulder and kissing his ear. ‘He’s gone off to sleep again.’

‘Good. It’s Kara, otherwise Annie Casari, Ben Corley’s girlfriend. I wanted to see her for myself.’

They watched for a moment in silence. The girl seemed very thin, with sticklike white arms. She clutched the big black mike to her face and bucked her hips and made the other current stampy moves. She was wearing a short sequinny flared skirt of many colours, and various tops in messy-looking layers, and her thin white legs ended in what looked like hiking socks and big laced boots. Her hair was a rat’s nest, but that seemed to be deliberate, and her face was made up witchy white with black smudgy eyes. She had a pleasant sort of voice, small and husky but true, and she sang about lost love: ‘I waited till the break of day. I knew that you had gone away. I don’t know why, what made you go.’

She seemed rather frail and vulnerable but not otherwise remarkable. He had heard other voices as good, and many more better. She didn’t, in his admittedly uninformed opinion, have anything much about her that would have propelled her to the stars. But Corley had loved her enough to go on a crusade to avenge her, and gone to his death in the process. This skinny girl, who couldn’t keep off drugs, had set all this in motion; it had led to the death not only of Corley but of Tommy Flynn and David Regal too, whom she had probably never even heard of.

He thought of Corley’s mother and sister, of Danny Ballantine, of the portrait in the hall of the family flat, of the young man full of promise. Was it worth it? Corley wouldn’t have thought in those terms. Maybe he couldn’t have done any differently. Sometimes Slider thought that people’s lives were laid down for them, and they could only follow the trail, with the end implicit in the beginning. But it was a weary thought, born of his tiredness.

‘Enough?’ Joanna enquired.

‘Enough,’ he said, and clicked it off.

‘She seems quite an ordinary girl,’ Joanna said; and he let that be her epitaph.

They went back to the sitting room. Autumn was coming and it was almost chilly enough to want the heating on, with damp August darkness outside.
Fin de siècle
. He put on an extra lamp for comfort and sat down on the sofa. ‘What did you want to talk about?’

She walked up and down a bit, like a cat not sure where to settle, and then sat in the armchair catty-corner to him, perched rather forward, nursing her glass in both hands on her lap. She hadn’t drunk much of it, he noticed.

‘I’ve been a bit grouchy lately,’ she said abruptly.

‘Have you? I didn’t notice,’ he said gallantly.

She gave a wry smile. ‘You did. And I’m sorry. But I had something on my mind.’

‘The LSO job,’ he said. ‘I know. And you decided not to go for it in the end.’ She hadn’t discussed it with him, but he knew she hadn’t been to the audition, so she must have made up her mind.

‘Are you glad?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, neither glad nor sorry. It was your decision to make. I could see points on both sides, but as long as you feel you’ve made the right decision . . .’

‘I hope I have. I’m sure I have, really,’ she said. ‘But it wasn’t exactly – it wasn’t straightforward.’

‘No, I know. Your career versus home. It would have been a lot more work. You’d have been away a lot.’

‘In the end, I felt I’d have to give up too much if I took it. There’s one bit of it you don’t know, you see.’ She was looking at him intensely, and he tried to brace himself. ‘I’m pregnant again,’ she said.

He had not expected that, and it left him without words.

‘How?’ he said eventually, as men do.

‘Oh Bill! These things happen.’ She was still watching him for his reaction, but he couldn’t think yet what it was. She said, ‘I couldn’t have taken the job and had another baby. And I know we’re not exactly flush with cash. Thanks to your dad we don’t have a mortgage, but everything’s so expensive, and the house needs a lot doing to it, and George doesn’t come cheap. We could have done with the extra money if I’d taken the job. But to do that I’d have had to – to get rid of the baby.’ He was shocked, and he knew it showed. She gave a wry sort of smile. ‘And when it came to it, I found I couldn’t do it.’

He came up out of his seat and crossed to her, and had to kneel down to be on the same level. ‘I should think not!’ he cried. ‘How could you even consider it?’

‘I had to consider everything. And you said all along it was my decision.’

‘Yes, but I didn’t know all the facts.’

‘We can’t afford another baby, that’s a fact. It’s hard enough with two wages. What happens when I have to stop work?’

He surveyed her face carefully. ‘Don’t you want it?’

Tears came into her eyes. ‘Of course I want it, you idiot,’ she said, trying not to cry. ‘And pay no attention to the waterworks. It’s just hormones.’

‘If you want it, that’s all there is to say. We’ll manage. We
will
,’ he added to her uncertain look.

‘Do
you
want it?’ she asked.

‘Oh, God, Jo, of course I do. I love you. I love George. I’d have ten children if I could, if you were willing.’

She gave a watery smile. ‘Not ten, I’m not up to that. But two’s a nice number, don’t you think?’ she said hopefully.

He took her glass and put it aside, and folded her hands in his. ‘Two, three, or any number, our children, yours and mine, they’re precious, and they’re wanted.’

‘You’re a nice man, Bill Slider,’ she said, and kissed him.

‘You should have told me,’ he said. ‘You should have let me help you decide.’

‘You had enough on your plate,’ she said. ‘And I knew what you’d say, anyway.’

‘Which is?’

‘Exactly what you did say.’

‘It’s pitiful to be so easily read,’ he complained. ‘I always wanted to be a man of mystery.’

‘No you didn’t,’ she said with some certainty. ‘So it’s all right then? Really? About the baby?’

‘Better than all right,’ he said. ‘It’s – magnificent.’

‘Nappies and broken nights and no money and all?’

He stuck out his chest boastfully. ‘Bring it on,’ he said. ‘I can take it. Bring it all on. And any dragons you want slaying. That’s what men are for.’ He flung out a hand in a magnificent gesture, and knocked her glass flying. ‘I don’t know my own strength,’ he apologized.

She was laughing. ‘How do you think I got pregnant in the first place?’