Fell Purpose (17 page)

‘Burning leaves? In August?’

‘Well, whatever gardeners burn in August. By the way,’ he short-circuited himself as he remembered, ‘what would he be growing in his vegetable patch that looked like coriander?’

Slider thought for a moment, and then said, ‘Parsnips, you philistine. So if he burned the handbag, why didn’t he get rid of the mobile at the same time?’

‘You can’t burn a mobile. Maybe he was going to take it out and dump it down a drain somewhere, but then he thought it would be better for us to have it.’

‘Why?’

Atherton looked triumphant. ‘Because if she was regularly telephoning a gentleman of the male persuasion, it would make
him
a suspect.’

‘Oh, you’re clever,’ Slider said bitterly. ‘You’ve got it all worked out.’

Atherton looked wounded. ‘Why do you want it
not
to be Wilding?’

‘Because he’s her
father
,’ Slider said. He was silent a moment, and then said, ‘You’re right, I’m not being objective. And there is one thing.’

‘Tell me, tell me.’

‘He was imagining her fleeing the murderer in terror and not being able to phone daddy, so I said there were lots of doors she could have knocked on. And he said, “What, at that time of night? Everyone would have been fast asleep.” We’ve never released a time of death. We don’t even really know it. It could have been any time after about ten p.m.’

‘He could have just assumed it was in the dead of night,’ Atherton said.

‘Now you’re being perverse. It was you who wanted him.’

‘Just playing your part.’

‘Well, don’t. You were right that we have to consider every possibility. We ought to look into Wilding. If he did know, or even suspect, that she was getting away from him, he might feel strongly enough. He was certainly passionate about her. And it is odd, at least, that she left her mobile behind. We’ll have a completely objective goosey at him, ask the neighbours what they thought of him, check what he was doing that night. It won’t be easy without making him think he’s being accused of something, and if he’s innocent, that’s the last thing I want.’

‘Salt in the wounds?’

‘More like boiling lead.’

‘Nobody said this was an easy job,’ Atherton commiserated. ‘First thing is to send someone for the mobile, I suppose.’

Slider was pondering. ‘I think I’ll go myself,’ he said. ‘I haven’t met the man – I’d like to get a look at him, and at the shed. And I’d like to have a look at her room.’

‘What do you hope to find there?’ Atherton asked.

‘Some clue as to who she was.’

‘Angel or devil?’

‘She won’t have been either. Nobody is. But I can’t see her clearly, and I want to. I think,’ he concluded sadly, ‘that I would have liked her if I’d known her.’

‘You always say that about everyone,’ Atherton said. ‘You’re just an empathizer.’

Hollis knew Ronnie Oates was living at home because his mother opened the door at once when he rang, and said, ‘Left your key behind?’ before she saw who it was. Then her face sagged like a disappointed child’s. ‘Who’re you? I don’t know you.’

‘Yes you do, love,’ he said kindly. ‘Sergeant Hollis from Shepherd’s Bush. You know me from when Ronnie had his last little bit of trouble.’

‘Well, he ain’t done nothing this time,’ she said, but yielded anyway to Hollis’s body language and let him in.

It was a ground-floor council-owned maisonette in a tiny terraced house in East Acton, in a turning off the A40, where the traffic thundered past night and day like the migration of the mastodons. Hollis was fortunate in not being cursed, like Slider, with a sensitive nose, or like Atherton with a refinement of taste, but even he quailed a little before the Oates establishment. It was filthy, and it stank.

The front door opened directly into the single living room, whose far end, under the window on to the garden, was the kitchen. In this end there was a sofa, two armchairs and a television set, but all the furniture was hidden under a silt of clothes, fast-food packaging, sweet wrappers, food residue, and saucers containing dabs of left-over cat food. The kitchen end festered under a silt of dishes and rancid food. The window to the garden was open and a succession of cats hopped in and out. The place smelled of urine, cats, and the sweetish, eye-burning odour of dirty bodies, which was also Mrs Oates’s
parfum du jour
.

She was a shortish woman, wide rather than fat, with dirty grey hair held back from her face by a child’s pink plastic hair-slides. She had a startling number of missing teeth, but when you saw the condition of those remaining, this seemed rather a cause for celebration than otherwise. She was dressed in a wrap-over floral cleaning overall, so amply stained it looked as if she had spent the day butchering piglets, and below the hem her tights hung in festoons on legs that disappeared into battered carpet slippers. She wore the slippers everywhere, inside the house and out in the street, and besides being stained each had a hole in the top where her big toe had poked through, on account of her never cutting her toenails, which were long and sharp enough to geld the piglets with.

‘So your Ronnie’s staying with you, then,’ Hollis said.

‘No, he ain’t. I dunno where he is,’ she said automatically. A look of cunning entered her face. ‘He’s in jail. My Ronnie’s in jail.’

‘Don’t be daft, ma. You know he came out in May. And I know he’s staying here because you’ve got the sofa bed out. Who’s sleeping on that if it’s not Ronnie?’

She looked for a costive moment at the sofa – thought did not come easily to her. The sofa was pulled out into a bed, taking up most of the space in the tiny room, and ‘made’ with a muddle of blankets and dirty sheets. Finally she said with an air of triumph, ‘I am. I’m sleeping on it.’

She looked pleased with herself for precisely the few seconds that elapsed before Hollis said, ‘Because Ronnie’s got your bed, right? He’s not in, is he, ma? Mind if I have a look?’

A door to the right led to the rest of the maisonette: a tiny hall, too small to swing a cat without killing it, with two doors, one leading to the tiny windowless bathroom – the smell in there was indescribable, and the bath was full of several years’ worth of old newspapers – and the bedroom, dominated by a double bed and an upturned plastic beer crate which served as a bedside table. Hollis only glanced into each to be sure Ronnie wasn’t there before returning to the living room.

‘So where was your Ronnie on Sunday, then, ma? This Sunday just gone.’

‘Out. He was out,’ she said quickly. ‘He weren’t here.’

‘Oh, so you can’t vouch for him, then?’ Hollis said innocently. ‘Can’t give him an alibi?’

She looked dumbfounded, but recovered to say, ‘No, that’s right, he was here all day. I ’member now. He never went out at all. He was watching telly all day, and – and – I give him fish and chips for his tea.’

Hollis was impressed with this piece of invention from a woman who was so dense that light bent round her. He needed to disarm her and get her to talk. He wished he could sit down, but he was afraid for his sanity. Instead he moved a little way from her and leaned against the wall, folding his arms, and said benignly, ‘Come on, ma, you can tell me. If he’s in trouble again, I can help you. You don’t want this to get out of hand, do you?’

She stared at him anxiously. ‘He’s a good boy, really,’ she said. ‘He never meant to hurt nobody. It was them girls that led him on. They was bad girls. Especially that last one, that Wanda. She was the one got him into trouble that last time. He’d never have thought of a thing like that. It was her what told him to do it. My Ronnie’s a good boy. It wasn’t true what they said about him in the papers.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t,’ he said soothingly.

‘I kept ’em all,’ she said proudly, short-circuiting herself. ‘Every one what had his name in. Pages and pages there was about him. Pictures, too.’ Her eyes clouded. ‘The pictures wasn’t good of him, though. Not one good one in the ’ole lot. Wouldn’t you think newspapers could take a better picture ’n that?’

‘It’s a shame,’ Hollis said. ‘So he went out Sunday lunchtime, did he?’ It was just a guess, but it primed her all right.

‘Went down the pub for his lunch,’ she agreed, ‘but he come back after and we watched telly, and then he went off out again.’

‘Went to the fair, did he?’

‘I dunno. I dunno where he went.’

‘I heard he likes fairs.’

‘Yeah, he does. Likes the lights and the noise and all that. Waste o’ money, I call ’em. But Ronnie likes ’em. I spec he did go to the fair. Never come in till late, any ’ow, that I do know.’ In her confusion, she seemed now to think it was a good thing for him to have been out, the longer the better.

‘What time did he come home, then?’

‘I ain’t got a clock,’ she said simply. Then, ‘I was in bed.’

‘Right,’ Hollis said. From memory, she stayed up watching the television until all hours, so this wasn’t much help, except that it suggested it was well after midnight. Mind you, the old bat was so wonky she wasn’t to be trusted on anything, and it could just as well have been Monday night he was out, or a fortnight-last-Whitsun. You could never use her in court. Still, she might be right on this occasion. And if Ronnie was out Sunday night, it led to a promising area of speculation, especially as a strange-looking man had been seen wandering around the area.

He was working out his next question when there was the sound of a key in the lock and the hair stood up on the back of his neck. Ronnie had been too dopey to be dangerous the last time Hollis had seen him, but that was before he had done a stretch as a sex-offender among the high-powered criminals in Wormwood Scrubs. There was no knowing what he might have learned in there.

The door opened and he slouched in, flinging a newspaper down on the nearest surface before he registered that there was a strange man in the room with his mother. His jaw dropped, and he stared, trying to work it out.

‘Hello, Ronnie, remember me? I just dropped in to have a little chat,’ Hollis said as unalarmingly as possible.

Ronnie Oates, the Acton Strangler, was undersized and thin – though he had put on a bit more flesh with good prison feeding – and his head looked slightly too big for him. He had large, pale-blue eyes etched about with a mass of fine lines, while the rest of his face was quite smooth, which gave him the curiously old-young look which was the hint to the wary that he was of limited mental acuity. In fact, his record gave his age as thirty-four. His hair was straight, limp, and fair, but thinning on the top. His hands, like his head, seemed over-large, and hung rather uselessly at the end of his arms. He was wearing the jacket of a dark-blue suit with trousers of buff cotton, a blue T-shirt and plastic sandals. Just a glance at his clothes would tell you he wasn’t dealing from the full deck; but in fact, since he combined the IQ of a glass of water with strong sexual urges and – according to the various female victims he’d exposed himself to over the years – a johnson the size of a Lyon’s family Swiss roll, he was not quite as harmless as he looked.

‘Sergeant Hollis, Shepherd’s Bush,’ Hollis helped him out, smiling comfortably. ‘Just popped in to see how you’re getting on.’

You could almost hear the gears grinding inside Ronnie’s skull; faint wisps of blue smoke from the burning oil drifted from his ears. ‘I never done nothing,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t me this time.’

‘Not you this time?’ Hollis said encouragingly.

‘It weren’t my fault. She wanted me to do it.’

‘Who did?’

‘That Wanda. She wouldn’t leave me alone. Kept asking me and asking me. She
made
me do it, Mum,’ he flung at his mother, who was watching the exchanges with her mouth partly open, like someone at a ping-pong tournament.

‘You gave her money to let you do it, Ronnie,’ Hollis reminded him.

‘She asked me for it. She asked me for money.’

Wanda Lempowski had been a prostitute, so Hollis didn’t doubt that. ‘But you shouldn’t have strangled her,’ he pointed out.

‘She said I could. She liked it. I asked her and she
said
I could squeeze her neck.’

‘Not as hard as that, though.’

‘I never meant to. She said she wanted it, then she started screaming, so I pressed a bit harder to stop her, and then she hit me. She hit me
hard
. It really hurt,’ he complained.

‘She was scared, that’s all,’ Hollis said soothingly.

‘Anyway,’ Oates said sulkily, ‘my mum said I wasn’t to do that no more.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Oates, ‘and he won’t. He promised. You won’t, will you, Ronnie? I told him he wasn’t to get it out no more, never again.’

‘That’s right, Ronnie,’ Hollis said. ‘Not unless you’re on your own in the bathroom.’

He stuck his lip out. ‘It don’t hurt ’em just showing it to ’em.’

‘But the probation man said you’re not to, Ron, never no more,’ Mrs Oates said anxiously.

‘All
right
, mum,’ he said irritably, and turned to Hollis. ‘Anyway, I never hurt
her
.’