Fell Purpose (33 page)

Slider shook his head. ‘That wasn’t the way it was,’ he said, gently but firmly. ‘If that was your intention, you would have gone openly and told your wife about it. But you left secretly without her knowing. You decided to follow Zellah and see what she was up to. Why was that? What aroused your suspicion?’

It was a rule they were taught early on in the CID, never to ask a question you don’t already know the answer to. Sometimes you couldn’t help it, but in the present case it was a useful tool. Wilding didn’t answer, and Slider was able to say, ‘You used the last-number recall to see who she’d been speaking to, and found she had called the young man you had forbidden her to see.’

Wilding raised his head and his voice was anguished, a cry of pain. ‘She deceived me! She must have been deceiving me for months with that – that piece of trash! I had to know! You must see that! I had to know how far things had gone, how far he had corrupted her! You must see I had to!’

‘I do see,’ Slider said. ‘If she felt she had to hide it from you, you were afraid it might be very bad.’

‘She was so innocent, she wouldn’t know – she wouldn’t see it coming. I didn’t want her to be shocked. I wanted to step in before that happened, before he exposed her to things she wouldn’t understand. So I drove to the Cooper-Hutchinsons’ house and waited there until she arrived. I saw her go in. For a moment I was relieved. And then I thought, what if that was a ruse? What if they were conniving at her ruin? So I waited. And sure enough, she came out again, alone. Dressed like . . . dressed like . . .’ Tears flowed so freely Slider wondered where all the moisture could be coming from, in a man who had been dehydrated. ‘They weren’t her clothes. Those girls – her
friends
– had dressed her like a
prostitute
.’

Slider took a bunch of tissues from the box and pushed them into his hands, but he couldn’t afford to let the momentum drop. ‘Why didn’t you stop her then?’ he asked, though he knew it would hurt. But hurt, in this case, might be a useful weapon.

‘I had to
know
!’ he cried out in pain. ‘I had to know the worst. If I’d stopped her then, she might have lied to me. I couldn’t bear my child to lie to my face. If it was bad, I had to know so I could face her with it.’

Interesting, Slider thought – the same rule of interrogation he had just been thinking about. Know the answer before you ask the question.

‘So you followed her to the pub.’

Wilding didn’t seem to wonder how Slider knew. He said, ‘I thought she was meeting him inside. I was going to go in and confront her, but there wasn’t a parking space, and I was afraid if I drove off to find one, she might come out and I’d miss her. And while I was still debating what to do, she
did
come out. She was obviously waiting for someone. And in a moment he drove up on his motorbike. Before I could get out and stop her, she got on and drove off with him. I followed, but he could weave in and out of the traffic. I couldn’t catch him up, and I lost him at the lights.’ He blew his nose again. The tears had stopped, perhaps from exhaustion of the reservoir.

‘What did you do?’

‘I drove about looking for them. It was hopeless.’

‘Why didn’t you go to his flat?’

‘I had no idea where he lived. I thought he lived with his mother in Reading, but I didn’t know the address. I didn’t think he would be taking her there. I thought, in fact, he was taking her to the Carnival. She wanted to go, but I’d forbidden it. It was too dangerous for a young girl. But it was the sort of thing I assumed
he’d
like.’

‘So did you go there?’

‘I tried to. But of course you can’t get near it in a car. It’s all cordoned off. I looked for a parking space and the nearest I could get was in Barlby Road. I parked there and tried walking down Ladbroke Grove, but the streets were packed. So many people – all that noise – it was bedlam. How could I find her in that crowd? It was hopeless. I was jostled and deafened – I thought I was going to be robbed – but I kept going. I was sure she was there somewhere, and I had to find her – save her . . .’ He stopped, staring dully at his hands.

‘Was it just by chance that you found them again?’ Slider asked after a moment.

‘What?’ Wilding said. He raised his head at the question. Was that wariness?

‘You were parked in Barlby Road. Your way home was back down North Pole Road. Opposite the end of North Pole Road was the fair. You thought they might have gone there – something Zellah would like, but that wouldn’t be so dangerous. She’d accepted your edict that she mustn’t go to the Carnival, but the fair was safe enough, and nearly as much fun. Did you spot them going in, or did you go in and find them inside?’

‘I didn’t see her,’ he said. He looked bewildered. ‘I didn’t think about the fair. After being jostled in the crowds for a while I couldn’t stand it any more and I went back to my car. But I couldn’t go home without her. I just drove about the streets. It was stupid – pointless. I suppose in the back of my mind I hoped I might just spot her by chance. I didn’t know what else to do. I knew she was in danger, but I couldn’t get to her.’ His hands clenched. ‘Do you know what that’s like? To be so helpless . . . If I could have found them, I’d have saved her.’

‘But by the time you did find her, it was too late to save her,’ Slider said. ‘So there was only one thing left to do.’

‘I tell you, I never found her,’ he said. ‘In the end I went home without her. I’ll never forgive myself. Not to be there when she needed me . . .’

‘What made you look around Old Oak Common? You were driving around the streets. Was it just chance you saw her there?’

‘I never thought to go there. Why should I?’

‘You saw her standing by the side of the road. You stopped the car. She ran and jumped in. Then you asked her what she’d been up to. There was a terrible row. Believe me, I understand. It’s the worst thing for a father to go through, the realization that he hasn’t been able to keep his daughter safe. She defied you and jumped out of the car. In anguish, you followed. You were too late to save her body, but you could still save her soul.’

‘What are you saying?’ Wilding’s eyes were wide, his face a gape of horror.

Slider hardened his voice. ‘But you’d known all along it was going to come to that, hadn’t you? From the moment you knew she was deceiving you to see that man. You knew it was too late. Which was why you’d gone prepared. You knew what you would have to do, and when the moment came—’

‘You’re saying . . .’ Wilding’s voice was hoarse. ‘You mean . . . you think
I killed her
?’ He started to rise from his seat, and it was horribly primordial, like a rock being forced up by tectonic pressures. ‘
No!
You can’t say that! You can’t say that! My Zellah! My own precious love! Take it back! You
take it back
!’

He lunged across the table, reaching for Slider’s throat – an interesting reaction, Slider thought, even as his adrenalin was taking charge, bypassing his brain and saving his bacon. Throttling was evidently Wilding’s preferred option for choking off unpleasant speeches and the unpleasant thoughts behind them. So what had Zellah said in the car that had finally convinced her father there was no other option? Because mad as he must have been at the beginning of the trail – and he would have had to be furious to the point of madness to take the tights with him – there had obviously been time between that and the final act for other feelings and thoughts to assert themselves. The sight of Zellah, still dressed like a prostitute, and standing beside the road like one, could have been enough to restore the default fury, but he didn’t kill her right there and then, in the car. There had been speech, and Zellah had got out, apparently weeping. Slider had a fair idea what the speech must have been about – the thing that must have been on Zellah’s mind all that last day, and for who knew how many days before.

It was a few minutes before order was restored, and Wilding was seated again, trembling visibly, staring at nothing again, but this time in what looked more like shock than despair. Shock at having been found out? Or was he one of those murderers who managed to distance themselves from their crime, so that it was a shock suddenly to be made to register it again?

‘Mr Wilding, let’s have it over with,’ Slider resumed, quite kindly. ‘You strangled Zellah with a pair of tights you’d brought from home for the purpose. You did it for the best possible motives – to save her from what you saw as a life of degradation, sin and vice, which would have endangered her immortal soul.’

‘You don’t believe that? You don’t really believe that?’ Wilding said, screwing up his face in what looked like pain. ‘That I would kill what I loved the most?’

‘To
save
what you loved most. The world was taking her away from you, corrupting her, ruining her. This way, you could keep her for ever, as she was – yours, and yours alone.’ Wilding only shook his head, slowly back and forth in a goaded manner, as if trying to avoid blows coming at him in slow motion. ‘Perhaps you didn’t really think in the end you could do it. But she told you something, as you sat in the car. She told you something that made it clear you were at the last resort.’

‘She told me something.’ Was it a question, or was he just repeating the words? Slider couldn’t tell.

‘She told you about the baby.’ He watched closely for reaction. ‘She told you she was pregnant.’

It came – the reaction – after a measurable pause; and the flesh of the big, exhausted face cringed as from a blow. He stared, and then he screwed up his eyes, and put his fists to his cheeks, and his lower lip dropped and trembled. ‘No,’ he said, as one pleading with a torturer. ‘No. Please, no. You’re making it up. She wasn’t.
Please!
’

‘Zellah was two months pregnant,’ Slider said.

After a long moment, the next words – with steel under them – were, ‘Who did it? Who did that to her? Was it that Carmichael boy? I will kill him! I swear I will kill him!’

And with sadness, Slider decided that he hadn’t known about the pregnancy, and he was rather sorry to have been the one to let that particular cat out of the bag.

‘Nevertheless,’ Atherton said as they went back upstairs, ‘he’s still the best suspect. He didn’t have to know she was pregnant for the rest to work.’ He counted the points off. ‘He admits he knew she’d been seeing Carmichael. He admits suspecting her of being on the slippery slope to damnation. He admits he followed her. He lied to us about it and can’t give any good reason why.’

‘He was ashamed. Following Zellah was not open, honest behaviour: it was a lapse from his own standards. And he’d done it behind his wife’s back.’

‘
Exactly
,’ Atherton said, as though that were a triumph. ‘And he still hasn’t told his wife. Why? Because she’d suspect what we suspect – that it was him what done her in.’

‘Would she?’ Slider objected mildly.

‘Wouldn’t she?’ Atherton countered. ‘Plus, he was out all night, he can’t account for his whereabouts at any point, and he admits he was looking for Zellah. Then he does a runner. And where do we finally find him? Hanging around the scene of his crime – as murderers are commonly known not to be able to resist doing – and talking about suicide. Guilty men in his position usually want to kill themselves afterwards, because they can’t live with the knowledge of what they’ve done.’

‘I know,’ Slider said.

Atherton looked at him sidelong. ‘I can’t tell whether you really think he didn’t do it, or you’re just playing devil’s advocate as usual.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t know which?’

‘Both.’ Slider paused at the top of the stairs and sighed. ‘If he did it, he may well have hidden the knowledge from himself, and we may never get it out.’

‘We can enjoy trying.’

‘Enjoy?’

‘He called her his own precious love. That’s creepy.’

Slider sighed again, thinking of Kate. He might not have used those words out loud, but there were times when he had felt like that about her. Atherton, who had no daughter, didn’t understand. It wasn’t a sexual thing or even a possessive thing: it was that a father had a particular vulnerability where his daughter was concerned, a love that sometimes made him go weak at the knees. And a particular set of worries about her, which, for obvious reasons, you didn’t have about a son.

‘We need more evidence,’ he said briskly. ‘We’ve nothing concrete to link him to the scene of the crime. We need a witness who can identify him, or remembers the reg number of his car. Or a scrap of DNA from the tights.’

‘We’ve got his car,’ Atherton said, ‘and a good reason now to go over it. If we could find a bit of soil on the floor that matches the murder scene—’

‘And if it isn’t the same as the soil in his garden or elsewhere in East Acton,’ Slider said. ‘And if we can be sure he didn’t walk on the grass that day when Connolly found him there.’

‘Always with the negativity!’ Atherton sighed, growing more buoyant as he always did with resistance. ‘Kindly don’t take the bloom off the peach.’

‘That’s what you call a peach?’ Slider said derisively, and peeled off from him as they hit the corridor. ‘I have to go and see Mr Porson.’