Blood Never Dies (5 page)

Porson met his eyes. Going public when all you had was a mugshot of a corpse was not nice. ‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that,’ he said shortly.

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, get on with it. I don’t like the sound of this, and I hope it turns out to be a suicide after all, or some simple mistake, or something. Maybe he was ampidistrous? But I suppose you’ve got to go through the motions, do it by the numbers. Let me know if anything comes up. Otherwise, I’m not here.’

Porson waved him away and bent his bloodshot eyes on the heap of ‘reading matter’ that every meeting these days seemed to generate, in the way that lily beetle grubs generated those slimy lumps of – well, if you were a gardener, you knew. And since his dear wife had died, Porson had had to take over her garden. Disrespectful to let it all die, he had thought, but he wasn’t sure he had the aptitude and he was preparing himself for disasters and guilt. Meanwhile . . . He opened the first file with a sigh like a gale through a pine forest.

R
onnie Brown was tracked down at work at Heathrow, where he did minor maintenance, mostly replacing lights and unblocking lavatories. He was a poor, meagre sort of person, faded and cowed by life. The only exciting thing that had ever happened to him was his wife throwing him out, which was why he longed to talk about it, to everyone he met, even to a policeman investigating a suspicious death. Kept to the point, he could offer no information about the man upstairs, having never spoken to him, though he had seen him once, getting out of a taxi outside the house as Ronnie Brown was walking towards it on his way home one evening from Hammersmith tube station. He hadn’t heard anything upstairs on Sunday night. He confessed to being a heavy sleeper. He’d been woken by the sound of Botev rowing with Lauren on the landing outside, and had then become aware of the music coming from the flat above. It hadn’t been going when he went to sleep, about half ten, quarter to eleven. He hadn’t heard loud music up there any other time. Upstairs was usually a very quiet tenant.

Nicky and Graham were more voluble – or at least, Nicky was. Graham, lying on the sofa with a rug over his legs, despite the summer heat, was clearly undergoing some extreme treatment, for he was grey and skeletal and had a cotton scarf tied round his head, pirate-style, to conceal his hair loss. Both were determinedly cheerful, however, and expressed deep concern over the fate of the man upstairs.

‘Robin Williams? Isn’t it terrible, we never even knew his name,’ Nicky said. ‘Poor soul, horrible to think of him killing himself all alone up there.’

But Graham looked at Swilley, who was doing the interview, and said, ‘I don’t think he did kill himself, otherwise this very glamorous lady detective wouldn’t be here, looking so stern. You think it was something else, don’t you?’

‘We don’t know,’ Swilley said shortly. ‘We’re trying to find out something about him, because there’s nothing in the flat, and we don’t know who his next of kin was.’

‘Well, it’s no use looking at us,’ Nicky cried gaily. ‘We did try to make friends when he first arrived – we always do, don’t we, Gray? – but he wasn’t having any. Very grim and
ne me touchez pas
. I thought he was just a bit of a
phobe
, you know? But Gray thought he was nursing a tragedy, didn’t you, Gray? Takes one to know one, all that sort of thing.’

‘Tragedy?’ Swilley queried.

‘Why else would he be here?
We
wouldn’t, if we could afford anything better,’ Nicky said. ‘But the things you can’t get on the NHS are expensive, and—’

‘No need to tell everyone our private biz,’ Graham interrupted him firmly. He looked at Swilley. ‘I thought he had that look about him – you get to recognize it. As if he’d been bereaved. A kind of tightness round the eyes, and a blankness underneath – like the lights are on, but nobody’s home.’

‘We’d gone up there with a bottle of wine to welcome him to the house,’ Nicky took up the story. ‘He was perfectly polite, but he made it plain he didn’t want anything to do with us. Said thanks, but he had a lot of work to do, maybe another time, blah blah blah. Classic brush-off.’

‘Obviously there wasn’t going to be another time, so we shrugged and left it,’ Graham finished.

‘Have you ever seen anyone calling on him, any visitors?’ Swilley asked.

‘No, and I’ll tell you something else,’ Nicky said, ‘he never has any mail. It comes through the letterbox downstairs and whoever gets there first puts it on the shelf just inside. Which is usually me, because we have the most so I pop down early and sort through it. And nothing for Mr Top Floor – that’s why I didn’t even know his name. No mail, no friends, no visitors – poor boy! I wish we could have befriended him.’

Graham was looking thoughtful. ‘Last night,’ he said.

Nicky stopped and stared at him. ‘What? What about last night?’

‘You were asleep, you wouldn’t have heard. I don’t sleep very well,’ he added to Swilley. ‘I often lie awake most of the night. Anyway, someone came up the stairs. Couldn’t have been Lauren, because she was at work, and Ronnie was already home by then – it must have been after midnight. And it couldn’t have been Malik or Rafi because the footsteps went on upwards. Besides, they don’t bother to walk quietly or talk in whispers. Clatter and bang with them, no matter what hour they come in! So it must have been this – what was his name? – Robin Williams, with someone.’

‘You heard him talking to someone?’ Swilley asked.

‘I heard the footsteps coming upstairs, and then a man’s voice – I don’t know what he said – and then someone said “Shh!” and the footsteps went on up the next flight and there was some whispering.’

‘You never told me all this!’ Nicky cried like one bereaved.

‘Didn’t know it mattered, did I?’ Graham said. ‘I don’t bother to report every time I hear someone in the house move.’

Nicky clapped his hand to his cheek and said, ‘That must have been the murderer with him! You heard a murderer!’

‘Going “Shh!”? How exciting,’ said Graham with deep irony.

‘Well, but was it?’ Nicky appealed to Swilley. ‘Did the murderer walk right past our door?’

‘They’d have had to, to get up there, wouldn’t they?’ Graham said with exasperated patience.

Swilley caught a hint of appeal in his eyes and said, ‘We don’t know it was murder. It looks like suicide. All we want is to find out something about the man so we can find his next of kin.’

‘Well, I’m afraid we’ve failed you,’ Graham said sadly. ‘We knew nothing about him. And that means we’ve failed him, too.’

‘But we
tried
, Gray,’ Nicky said urgently, taking hold of his hand and pressing it. ‘You can’t say we didn’t
try
.’

‘Maybe not hard enough,’ said Graham.

Malik and Rafi turned out to be students at a very bogus-sounding language school in Clerkenwell – and given that Clerkenwell was at the opposite end of the city, Slider would have bet neither of them had ever been anywhere near the address on the letterhead. Judging by the state of their room, cleanliness did not rank anywhere near godliness with them; nor did the number of their heads match the number of mattresses and heaps of cushions and blankets marking out sleeping places on the floor. And judging by the smell in the room and their extreme nervousness, they were in the habit of wiling away the time with recreational tobacco.

But they seemed to know nothing about the upstairs tenants, and given how much trouble they were already in without getting mixed up in murder, Slider was inclined to believe them. They claimed to have been at a party on Sunday night until the early hours. They had not noticed the music upstairs when they came in, but loud music was probably not something they would take notice of anyway. It was annoying, but he would have to check their alibi before he shrugged them off, which was a waste of manpower and time. He looked forward to passing the whole mess of their dubiously legal presence on to the specialist squad and wishing them well of it.

Most of Slider’s firm were back and writing up their reports when Detective Sergeant Atherton, Slider’s bagman and friend, strolled in. He had been to an awareness top-up seminar, and returned ready for some plain talking, short words, and if possible an entire absence of concepts.

Atherton never managed to look quite like a policeman, with his fastidiousness and his beautiful clothes and the fact that he spent more on a haircut than any of the others spent on a shirt. When he had been in uniform there had been something almost surreal about the sight of him in
that
tunic and
that
helmet. He had looked like a very handsome actor playing a policeman in a comedy sketch. He had been so obviously out of place that many of his colleagues simply assumed he must be gay, despite his multiple sexual conquests, because they couldn’t account for him any other way.

One of the early reasons for Atherton’s devotion to Slider had been that Slider had never, from the first meeting, looked at him askance. Slider had his countryman father’s view that God had made all creatures different for His own purposes. A horse was not a cat and a cat was not a dog, and only a fool would want them to be. Slider had taken Atherton for what he was and worked him that way. And Atherton, who was not any kind of a fool, had not taken long to work out that, in his own way, Slider was just as much of a misfit in the Job: it was just that he didn’t
look
different.

The first thing Atherton saw as he reached the CID room door was DC McLaren, working his keyboard with one hand and mournfully eating cottage cheese with the other. His new girlfriend was running him ragged: putting him on a diet, making him have his hair ‘styled’ instead of cut, making him buy new clothes. She had even given him a manicure, and khazi gossip had it she was threatening him with a facial. McLaren, newly lean, fragrant and polished, and bewildered by a variety of unfamiliar sensations and unsatisfied hungers, bore with it all because after years of living alone in divorced slobbery, he was hopelessly, grotesquely in
lurve
. But to his colleagues he seemed a shadow of his former self. Atherton almost felt a twinge of sympathy.

He looked up as Atherton came in. ‘What was it like, then? Was it good?’

‘The usual. Policing of the Future. It seems we’ve been doing it all wrong so far,’ Atherton said with delicate irony.

‘Not that,’ McLaren said. ‘I meant – there’s a DS I know at Kensington went last week. He said they had these amazing kind of cakes at the coffee break.’

Atherton toyed for a moment with telling him there had been boxes of mixed Krispy Kremes, but decided in the end it was cruelty to animals. ‘There was nothing like that. Just plain biscuits.’

‘Oh,’ said McLaren, losing interest.

‘So what’s been happening while I’ve been away?’ Atherton asked, looking round at the general busyness. ‘Something come in?’

‘Suspicious death,’ McLaren answered. ‘Looked like a suicide, Renker radioed for Hollis, but now the guv reckons it’s a murder.’

‘I leave you alone for two minutes and look what happens,’ Atherton said, and headed for Slider’s office.

‘Robin Williams! It’s a joke, isn’t it?’ Atherton was perched on Slider’s windowsill. He had a feline ability to look good in positions that would have been awkward for anyone else.

‘Not necessarily,’ Slider said. ‘It’s a common enough name. Fathom’s putting it through records.’

‘Hmm. But I’m thinking that there would have been no need to remove anything that showed his ID if he’d already given his real name to the landlord.’

‘Point.’

‘
If
that’s what happened. Maybe he didn’t have any ID in the flat to begin with.’

‘Why wouldn’t he?’

‘Lots of reasons. Maybe he wasn’t really living there – it was just a base for something, and he had his real home somewhere else.’

‘I’ve thought of that,’ Slider said. ‘But that raises as many questions as it answers.’

‘Oh, more,’ Atherton assured him easily. ‘Far more.’

‘Fat comfort you are,’ said Slider.

‘I’m not here to comfort. I’m here to keep you all on the intellectual straight and narrow. You seem to have got steamed up about very little. Why shouldn’t it be suicide? Just because there were left-hand fingermarks on the razor? Maybe he was ambidextrous.’

‘That’s what Mr Porson said.’

‘Listen to that man. Or he may have switched the razor from his right to his left hand to get at an awkward bit.’

‘Yes, but you don’t, do you? You just turn your head or stretch.’

‘
You
don’t, but someone else might. Look, the way I see it, here’s a man down on his luck, lost his job probably, forced to go and live in a cheap furnished let.’

‘Which he paints and carpet-cleans before he moves in.’

‘Why not? He’s still got a bit of self-respect at that point. And a tin of magnolia and a bottle of detergent doesn’t cost much. But after a couple of months of hopelessly hunting for work, he’s so depressed, can’t see any future for himself, so he gets in the bath and ends it all.’

‘No papers, no wallet, no phone, no credit card,’ Slider pointed out.

‘Papers – got rid of them all when he lost his previous home. You say he looked middle-class-ish? Suppose he’d had a good job, nice home, big mortgage, living it large, then with the downturn he gets sacked, suddenly it all crumbles to dust. He runs up debt, can’t pay the mortgage, home gets repossessed, has to sell all his worldly goods. Burns all the bank statements, letters, bills and what have-you. Ends up on the street with just what he can carry in a suitcase.’

‘Graham upstairs said he looked as though he’d had a tragedy,’ Slider admitted.

‘There you are. As to no wallet, credit card, mobile etc – I refer you to my previous answer.’

‘He had a nice watch.’

‘A man has to tell the time.’

‘But why didn’t he sell it and buy a cheap one? And Ronnie Brown said he saw him come home in a taxi one day. Can’t have been all that broke.’

‘Maybe he’d been pounding the streets looking for a job all day and was so fed up and footsore he thought, soddit, I’m taking a taxi, to hell with the cost.’