Dead End (12 page)

The maid was waiting outside the drawing-room door to show him out, proving it had not been a random interruption. He followed her downstairs and she opened the door for him and held it, making a graceful gesture with the other, an exquisite temple-maiden’s version of the good old A & C.

‘Lovely technique,’ he said, bowing to her as he passed.

She smiled a smile of complete incomprehension. ‘Please,’ she said.

Slider pulled up on the hardstanding outside his house and let himself in, shoving the front door against an interesting-looking heap. It turned out, however, to consist of two local freebie newspapers, an envelope for postal film-developing, a coupon for a free half-bottle of wine with any two adult meals ordered at the Ruislip Harvester (’for a limited period only, not to be used in conjunction with any other promotional offer’ – did that mean that after the limited period it could be used in conjunction with another promotional offer? You simply couldn’t trust people’s punctuation these days) and the spectacular offer of a free watch and inclusion in the
Reader’s Digest
prize draw. Open now! You may already have won £100,000! You never know your luck! I bloody do, Slider thought, gathering the ex-rainforest together and heading for the kitchen. As they say in the Job, I’m so unlucky I could fall in a barrel of tits and come out sucking my thumb.

The house smelled strange, a marginally sub-pleasant odour which he could not pin down, somewhere between margarine and Shake’n’Vac, with a hint of cold plimsolls thrown in. There was a chill echo about it, too: it was strange to come home and find the television not on – as if, like a fifth member of the family, it had left him too. The house was still fully furnished – Irene had taken nothing except her and the children’s personal belongings, and the new wicker conservatory furniture she loved so much – but that only made it worse. Chairs and carpets without personal clutter gave it the feeling of an institution; a
sort of kindly brutality designed to wipe out your inconvenient personality traits. Strange how the word ‘home’ could have two such opposite connotations.

He had only come to change his clothes and have an urgent reunion with his deodorant stick. He dumped the papers on the kitchen table and debated making a quick cup of tea, but the inhospitality of the kitchen daunted him. The dishcloth draped over the tap had dried into a hoop, and the last footmark he had made on the lino-tiled floor (Monday, putting the dustbin out – it hadn’t rained since) reproached him mutely where it had dried. Sherlock of the Homes could have deduced a thing or two about him from that: this man is five-foot-eight, weighs ten stone, wears rubber soles, and his wife is away.

It had never really been
his
home, he reflected; but, oddly, was much less so now that Irene and the children were gone. He hadn’t spent much time here in the weeks since it happened. He stayed long at work, ate out, and once or twice had managed to sleep out, too. He hated waking up in the morning to find himself curled up on ‘his’ side of the otherwise empty bed. It made him feel like a prat, but even when he deliberately started off in the middle he migrated in his sleep out of obedience to habit.

O’Flaherty, uniformed sergeant at Shepherd’s Bush and one of Slider’s oldest friends, knew his circumstances and had several times invited Slider back to supper. His wife was a noted cook of the steak-and-kidney pie, Irish stew and jammy pud school; aided by the Guinness intake, it accounted for O’Flaherty’s shape and his nickname of Flatulent Fergus. But they both made Slider welcome, and after one particularly indulgent evening, Fergus had pressed him to stay the night.

‘I don’t like to think of you sittin’ around like an undescended testicle in that empty house o’ yours. We got loads a room, now the kids are gone. You can have Brendan’s room – less clutter than in the girls’.’ And when Slider had argued politely, ‘Ah sure God, would you sit down and have another drink? It won’t take Margery a minute to put some sheets on.’

So Slider had stayed the night in a sagging single bed, which had a hollow in the middle you could have parked a Mini in (the effect of years of having been used as a trampoline, as the father in him rather than the detective recognised) in a tiny room with Superman wallpaper and Muppet bedlinen. It
was a night of crowded dreams peopled with caped crusaders and woolly monsters, amongst whom he searched in vain for someone without ever knowing who it was. He woke late and unrefreshed, and had felt both ashamed and comforted when he found that Margery had washed and ironed his shirt for him while he slept. She refused to be thanked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to do. The kindness of strangers got him where he was most vulnerable. He felt like Blanche.

Drifting back from the memories to the present, Slider suddenly wanted to be out of here. The place was like a corpse waiting for the post mortem to begin. He went upstairs, had a quick shower, and changed his work suit for cords and a sweater, and then went into the familiar annoying routine of trying to find a pair of socks that matched and didn’t have holes in them. What did they make socks out of nowadays, anyway? In a fit of fury he pulled the drawer out and up-ended it on the bed. As he rummaged he heard Joanna in his memory saying, ‘You only want a housekeeper. Someone to wash your socks.’ She was right in a way, but it was not really the sock-washing, it was more a case of needing something solid somewhere in a life that was otherwise fraught with peril and uncertainty. When the house was sold he would really have to accept that his marriage was over, and that there was nowhere he belonged and no-one who wanted him. It was not a prospect he relished.

There were enough coppers who lived bachelor lives, and got by very well in their own individual ways. Atherton for one. He lived in the part of Kilburn so extensively done up it dared to call itself West Hampstead, in a Victorian terraced cottage which he shared with a former tomcat called Oedipus. Atherton was an archetypal bachelor, Slider thought: being otherwise alone in the world, he dedicated his leisure and disposable income to putting his body into nice things and nice things into his body. Bathing, dressing, eating, drinking and mating – not necessarily in that order of preference – were his pleasures, and he took them very seriously. Slider remembered that Joanna had once said Atherton was in danger of becoming a caricature of himself. Precise, almost dilettantish in his enjoyments, he had already probably gone past the point where he was likely to be able to make the transition from bachelorhood into marriage, even if he wanted to. That he wanted to was moot: his reputation was
envied amongst the younger coppers. Awap – Anything With A Pulse – they called him behind his back.

It was a pity, given Atherton’s freedom from domestic cares, that he wasn’t a career man, Slider thought, rolling over-ventilated socks together and throwing them back in the drawer, whence they would return to haunt him one day. Dickson had once told Atherton that as a policeman he suffered from the disadvantage of too much education – an insult rated very differently by insulter and insultee. Too much of a smartarse, was the general opinion. But Slider believed it was more a spiritual malaise that held Atherton back: an inability to take things seriously, which itself was a function of the chronic outsiderism they all suffered from. Grown like callus to protect the tender places of the soul, it performed a useful function in keeping them sane while dealing with the world’s worst madness; but excessive growth could deform. There were lame coppers in plenty; Slider was sometimes afraid his friend was becoming one of them.

Or, to put it another way, if all coppers were odd, those who lived alone were easily the oddest. And he, Slider, was going to join them. He saw himself in years to come living in a small place of his own (it would have to be small, after Irene had had her share of the dead albatross) with his own few, well-liked things around him. Pottering about in his off-duty hours. Cooking for himself. Gardening maybe. Taking up his architectural drawing again, perhaps. Growing more idiosyncratically himself year by year, as people do who have no-one to rub the nobbly bits smooth against. He could see himself ten years on, greyer and more leathery, spreading a little in shapeless sweaters and half-moon glasses, full of annoying little habits of speech and gesture. But probably in the end not discontented – not absolutely.

That was the worst part. He didn’t want it that way. He had not been built with that in mind. He abandoned the sock quest, feeling useless and helpless, mourning the awful waste of the situation. How had it come to this? All those years of dull faithfulness, for Irene’s sake, for the children’s sake, and now they’d all fled like wet nestlings under Ernie’s protective wing. It was as though the gods were playing some elaborate practical joke on him. His life was falling apart. He wandered
out into the passage and looked down at the stairs – narrow, low-ceilinged, joining the top to the bottom of a house built out of margarine boxes and spit. Everything had been designed in a spirit of meanness, with no consideration but to push back a little further the limits of human tolerance. He had only bought it for Irene’s sake, and now she was gone, and he was left with the house. Ha ha, good one, Life.

He walked two steps and pushed open the door of Matthew’s room. The furniture was all there, but the room was stripped of his personality, except for the paler patches on the walls where he had taken down his posters of state-of-the-art jet fighters. He must have done it in some haste, because on one wall there was a drawing-pin left in, holding a small triangle of dark shiny paper. Absently, Slider removed it and sat down on the bed with it in his hand.

He had no-one to blame but himself, he thought – as though that made anything better. He had married Irene, knowing what she was like. He had remained a policeman, knowing what it did to home lives. He had followed his career while his children grew distant from him and his wife grew first bored and then resentful. And if she had run off with another man, well, hadn’t he been unfaithful to her first, even if she didn’t know about it? And hadn’t he neglected her until – what an indictment! – even Ernie Newman looked attractive? What kind of a rôle model would Ernie provide for his teenage son, he wondered? Better than his own father, probably: Ernie would always be there, boring, pedantic, costive, but indisputably
there,
and Matthew would forget the Dad who had taught him to bowl overarm and take a fish off a hook without damaging it. And Kate—

He had forgotten he was holding the drawing-pin, and fiddling with it, he accidentally drove it into his thumb. He looked down in surprise and hurt. The dark triangle of paper came from Matthew’s absolutely favourite poster, the moodily lit, seriously brill picture of a Stealth jet: he’d be really upset that he’d torn it getting it off the wall.

Suddenly, and with shocking vividness, Slider remembered a moment from his own childhood. It was not long after his grandmother, Dad’s mother, had died. He was standing in the kitchen of their dank little cottage: winter and summer it always smelled of water, standing or running, mossy or soapy. In the
dresser drawer he’d found the picture Gran had given him at Christmas, printed on card in soft, Walt Disney colours: Jesus the Good Shepherd, in a blue robe, with a crook, surrounded by sheep, children, and a brown-and-white collie. He’d loved it when she gave it to him, had thought it lost, and found it again: a moment of joy. But then he remembered she was dead, and suddenly the picture seemed unimportant, stupid, hatefully trivial. In a violent gesture, instantly regretted, he had torn it in two and flung it on the floor. Then Dad came in. He didn’t immediately say anything, just picked up the two pieces and held them against each other, looking at them in a silence that made Slider suddenly terrified that he might be going to cry. But Dads never cry. At last he said, ‘Never mind, son. We can put it together again with sticky-tape. It won’t show from the front.’ And suddenly the boy Slider had found himself weeping, his face pressed to Dad’s rough, hairy, horse-smelling jacket, his arms round Dad’s stringy waist; weeping as though he’d never stop, because then he knew for the first time, really knew, that nothing could make life the way it had been again.

It had been the beginning of the loneliness of growing up. In every life there comes a moment when the individual realises for the first time how separate and untouchable they are, alone in sin and alone in sadness; after that a wholeness is gone, and pleasures, though they may be many, can never be taken for granted. In his mind’s eye he could see Matthew taking down his posters, and, in spite of all his care, tearing the corner off his favourite one. Sitting alone on his son’s bed, Slider felt his loss as though it were his own. He would have cried, except that Dads don’t.

It’s a human habit which persists in the face of any amount of disappointed experience to imagine, on first hearing a person’s name, what they are going to look like. Slider saw Alec Coleraine as a tall, lean, thick-blond-haired sort of name; distinguishedly handsome, perhaps going just a little romantically grey at the temples – silver threads among the gold, tra-la. One thing he wasn’t expecting, and it turned out to be the one thing you simply couldn’t help noticing on meeting him, was that Alec Coleraine was short. Slider was not a tall man, but as Coleraine advanced hospitably across the carpet of his office to greet him, Slider overtopped him by a good two inches.

‘Inspector Slider? How do you do?’

‘I’m grateful to you for seeing me at short notice,’ Slider said, shaking hands. The hand was small, too: he was built in proportion. ‘I hope I haven’t kept you here inconveniently.’

‘No, no, I had plenty to do. I don’t usually leave the office until sixish, anyway. Besides, my convenience is hardly important in a matter as grave as this, is it?’