Killing Time (13 page)

‘Get on to all the known users and dealers in the area and try to get a handle on it from that end. Find out if anyone did know about Paloma having coke on him at any time. And speak to everyone on the block, and anyone who was visiting that evening, and find out if anyone saw the door being kicked in. It’s probably worth asking in the local pubs as well.

‘Meanwhile,’ he concluded, ‘the killer doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Someone knows him. Keep your ears to the ground. Ask around all your usual snouts. He came home in a state, probably with blood on him, and if he didn’t tell his nearest and dearest why, they probably guessed anyway. You all know that ninety-nine out of a hundred crimes are solved through informers. Get out there and get at ’em.’

As the troops were dispersing, Hart waylaid him with a determined gleam in her eye. ‘Guv, about that Garry—’ she began.

Slider’s heart sank, but he turned back to give her the benefit of the doubt. ‘What about him?’

‘I know I’m right about him. I’m sure I could get information out of him. He’s just pretending to be the hard man. Honest, I know the type.’

‘Well I’m
not
sure, so we’ll just leave it, shall we?’ Slider said.

‘But you said you were always willing to go with instinct.’

‘A woman’s instinct, is that it?’

‘No, guv, a copper’s instinct,’ she returned smartly.

She was so young and so confident she made him feel tired. ‘How old are you?’

She stuck her lip out. ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it, sir.’

‘Of course you don’t. One of the nice things about being young is that you think you’re immortal. When you’ve seen a few colleagues go down, you know different. You’re not in this job to get your head blown off, Hart.’

‘I don’t reckon to, sir, but—’

‘Experience tells when it’s worth taking the risk. For this, it’s not worth it. Trust me.’ He began to turn away again.

‘You wouldn’t say that to Mackay or Anderson,’ she said sullenly.

His head began to throb. ‘They would know better than to ask,’ he said. ‘If you want to prove you’re the same as a man, stick a rolled-up sock down your knickers. I haven’t got time to visit anyone else in hospital.’

‘That’s what this is about, ain’t it, guv? You feel guilty about Sergeant Atherton and it’s making you over-protective to the rest of us. With respect, you ain’t got the right to lay that on us—’

‘Don’t give me that psycho-bollocks. This is not an episode of
Cracker.
And don’t ever use those words to me again.’

‘What words?’ she said, taken aback.

‘With respect,’ he said, and left her standing.

‘Am I intruding?’ Joanna said, and he looked up from his desk to realise she had been standing in the doorway for some time, and he had been half aware of her and trying not to be.

‘Oh, no, come in.’ Joanna walked over and leaned across the desk to kiss him. She had been rehearsing at the Albert Hall for the evening’s concert.

‘Why so distracted?’ she asked.

‘I was afraid it was Hart coming back for a rematch.’

‘Would you care to elucidate?’

He told her. ‘I don’t know why I got riled, except that she’s so cocksure, and can’t take orders, and wants to go swaggering into the jaws of death like Indiana Jones when it doesn’t even begin to be necessary.’

‘She’s young,’ Joanna said.

‘I know. That’s the trouble. God, they think anyone over thirty has lost touch with reality. It’s part of my job to see they live to realise how wrong they are.’

‘All the same, she’s probably right – about you being over-protective.
Would
you have stopped Mackay or Anderson?’

‘They’re not female,’ he said. ‘It’s no good looking at me like that. She was proposing to attempt to seduce a flash, gun-toting club hardman, and, having got information out of him, back out of having sex with him at the last minute. But anything he wanted to do to her, she couldn’t stop him doing. It doesn’t matter how feisty she is, or how well-trained, he’s bigger and stronger than her, and that’s the bottom line.’

‘But isn’t her life hers to risk?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s mine. While she’s in the Job and in my firm, she’s my responsibility.’

Joanna looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You came back to work too soon,’ she said. ‘No, don’t glare at me, I don’t mean your judgement is impaired, I just mean you look tired. And I bet you’ve got a headache.’

He tried to smile. ‘Were you going to suggest having sex on the desk, then?’

‘After the rehearsal I’ve just been through? Lupton and Bruckner? My arm’s only hanging on by a thread. God, I hate the Albert Hall! You have to scrub twice as hard to make any impression. But I suppose making it hemispherical seemed like a good idea to her at the time.’

‘Queen Victoria?’

‘Mrs Hall. It was named in memory of her husband.’

He gave her a ferocious scowl. ‘What do you want anyway, Marshall?’

‘I was just going to suggest a spot of lunch. Have you got time?’

‘I’ll make time,’ he said largely, feeling her different perspective on life like a blast of fresh air from a just-opened window. ‘I’ll take you to the canteen.’

‘Gosh, you know how to spoil a girl,’ she said.

The Special was steak and onion cobbler. ‘Aptly named,’ Slider said. It was in fact stew, with things on top that looked like dumplings but were actually a sort of hard pastry, having all the attributes of cobblestones except flavour. Joanna had the fisherman’s pie. ‘What’s under the mashed potato?’ Slider asked.

Joanna chewed thoughtfully for a moment and then looked down. ‘Something white,’ she said at last. ‘With little bits of something pink.’ She chewed again. ‘I am eating, aren’t I?’
she appealed for reassurance. ‘It’s so hard to tell without some sensory input, like taste or texture.’

‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘you can make it up with the pudding – they do a wicked jam roly-poly and custard. Atherton says it’s the best thing on the menu. You are going in to see him this afternoon, aren’t you?’

‘Of course. I thought I’d smuggle Oedipus in to say hello. Are you going to be home tonight?’

‘Yes. I hope so. I think so.’

‘I won’t go for a drink, then, I’ll come straight home.’ She smiled at him suddenly. ‘Nice, this, isn’t it?’

He looked startled. ‘Nice?’

‘I mean, being able to plan to come home to each other, no tricky arrangements and subterfuges.’

‘Oh, that.’ He thought suddenly of Irene, like a low ache of misery, mooning about in Ernie Newman’s overstuffed lounge and pining for her own kitchen. ‘When this case is over I’m going to have to do something about that house,’ he said. ‘Change agents or lower the price or something.’ It was enough apropos as a comment for Joanna to accept it at face value; but Slider was thinking that if the house were sold, Irene would know there was no going back. But if she was really unhappy with Newman? And if that relationship broke down, what about the children? They’d have to have somewhere to go, they couldn’t live in a hotel. Maybe he ought to keep the house on as insurance for them? No, that was ridiculous, he couldn’t leave the empty house there for ever just in case Irene changed her mind about Ernie. If she could stand him enough to run away with him in the first place—

Joanna’s hand rested on his from across the table. ‘Don’t start worrying about that as well. You haven’t got room. One thing at a time.’

He looked up, his focus clearing to take in her face, not Irene’s, hers, Joanna’s. A face so ordinary it was like looking in the mirror, you hardly even distinguished the features; but so important, standing for everything in the last few years that was good in his life, it was like looking at, oh, an authentic photograph of God or something. Skin and lines and hair, eyes and teeth and nose: what was it that made one set of them so different, that nothing in your life afterwards could be taken out of their context ever again?

‘Are you sleeping with anyone tonight?’ he asked as casually as he could.

‘What, after the show? I hadn’t booked anyone.’

‘How about sex and a sandwich with me, then?’

‘All right. My place, ten-thirty, on the sofa, bring your own coleslaw.’

A furious clearing of the throat whipped Slider’s attention to the young PC standing at his elbow with a large brown envelope in his hand and a sappy grin slithering self-consciously about his chops. ‘This came in for you, sir. Sergeant Nicholls thought you’d like it straight away.’

‘Thank you, Ferris.’

Joanna watched him open it, smiling privately that a man of his age could still be self-conscious about being caught holding hands with his lady-love. And he’d probably use a word like lady-love, too, at least to himself.

Inside the envelope was the forensic report on the whisky glasses and bottle.

‘Ah, now this is interesting,’ Slider said. ‘You know that we found two glasses, one on the table and one down beside the other chair?’ Joanna nodded. ‘The glass on the table has Paloma’s fingermarks and lipmarks all over it.’

‘Lipmarks?’

‘Oh yes, they’re quite distinctive too.’

‘I must remember not to kiss my victims from now on.’

‘Not with wet lipstick, anyway. The glass on the floor also has Paloma’s fingermarks on it, but they’re overlaid by various smudges and marks consistent with its having been held by a hand wearing a leather glove. And it has lip marks on the rim which do not match Paloma’s.’

‘So he had a visitor,’ Joanna said.

‘A visitor who didn’t take off his gloves.’

‘Unusual,’ she conceded. ‘Unless he had hives. I suppose the phantom tippler must have been the murderer, then?’

‘It’s a working supposition. Which suggests that Paloma must have known him,’ Slider said. ‘But that doesn’t square with his having to kick the door in. It’s not the usual way of announcing yourself socially. And why would you offer a drink to someone who’d just done that?’

‘Well, look,’ Joanna said, ‘maybe Paloma used both glasses
at different times. He might have been sitting in the other chair earlier, put the glass down, then later wanted another drink and went and fetched a clean glass. Why not? I’ve done that myself. And if he was a fastidious sort of chap, the old, greasy glass might not have appealed. And then the murderer fancied a nip after he’d bumped him off, so he just used one of the glasses he found handy.’

‘But the glass didn’t have Paloma’s lip marks on it,’ Slider said. ‘It had only one set of lip prints, on one side of the glass, and the rest of the rim was clean.’

‘Maybe the murderer wiped the rim before he drank,’ Joanna said. ‘A lot of people would, quite instinctively, if they were drinking out of someone else’s glass.’

‘Hmm,’ said Slider. ‘But there’s something else here,’ he tapped the report. ‘The whisky bottle has fingermarks on it too. Two sets. One possibly Paloma’s, though they’re not clear enough to identify with absolute certainty. The other set is over the top of them: a whole palm and five lovely digits, clear as day. Someone grabbed the bottle firmly in a manner consistent with either pouring or glugging from it – someone with an unusually large hand.’

‘Didn’t you say the footmark on the door was unusually large too?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then presumably they are a set. The glugger was the murderer.’

‘Presumably.’

‘So all you’ve got to do is find him,’ Joanna concluded happily, ‘and you’ve got your proof there all ready and waiting.’

Slider turned a page. ‘Our mystery guest also left his fingermarks on the light switch. Several times.’

‘It was night time,’ Joanna pointed out.

‘Yes, but the light was off in the morning. I suppose he must have turned it off as he left. And again on the front door. That was when he pulled it to, I suppose.’ He turned back and read it all again. ‘It’s puzzling. Why did he drink out of the glass
and
the bottle? And why did he take his gloves off to pick up the bottle?’

‘You want me to solve the whole case for you? He took a drink out of the glass because his nerves were shaken after
killing Whatsisname, but that wasn’t enough, he needed a good long glug, so he went for the bottle. But he couldn’t get the fiddly cap off with his gloves on, so without thinking he took them off.
Voilà!’

Slider smiled. ‘You after a job or something?’

‘Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?’

‘Oh yes. There’s simply no accounting for the stupidity of the average murderer – thank God, otherwise how would we ever catch ’em?’

He had just got back to his desk when Hart reappeared in his doorway. ‘Guv?’ He looked up. ‘Sorry.’ She gave him a wobbly grin. ‘I dunno what come over me. Must be them testosterone pills I been taking. No, straight up,’ she went on as he began to smile, ‘I gotta shave twice a day now. And what you said about rolled-up socks? Don’t need ’em. I can write me name in the snow just like anybody else.’

So he told her about the forensic report, as a reward. Hart was jubilant. ‘Brilliant! If he’s got form, we’ve got him.’

‘Let’s hope.’

‘In any case, how hard can he be to find, over six foot, massive germans and plates the size of Wandsworth? You see that kicking someone’s door in, you don’t forget it in a hurry.’

‘Off you go then,’ he said indulgently, ‘and jog some memories.’ He stood up. ‘I’ve got to see a man about a taxi.’

‘How’s that?’

‘It just came to me. Busty Parnell said that Paloma went everywhere by taxi too. So he probably went to meet his lover in a cab, and if I can find the right driver, he can give me the address.’

‘Brilliant, boss.’

‘That’s why I get the big money.’

The headquarters of Monty’s Radio Metrocabs was, like every other taxi garage, cramped, chaotic and filthy. It consisted of two railway arches and the tiny cobbled yard in front of them. Under the arches was the repair and servicing workshop for the cabs, and the front right-hand corner was screened off with two walls of wood and glass to make a tiny office for Monty, into which he squeezed himself with his battered desk, his filing cabinets, and an old tin tray balanced on top of a kitchen stool on which the electric kettle and the coffee making equipment stood in a pool of sad spillings and half-melted sugar. There was no ceiling to his corner, and a single lightbulb dangled down, suspended on fathoms of fraying wire from the curved bricks invisible in the darkness far above. In the worst depths of winter a paraffin heater added its stink to that of Monty’s cigars and the pervading odour of petrol, but did little to mitigate the cavernous chill. Every surface was tacky with oil, and overhead Metropolitan Line trains passed at regular intervals in a brain-bouncing, tooth-loosening thunder. It was not an office that welcomed visitors, and that was how Monty liked it. He liked his drivers out driving and making him money, not hanging around the depot complaining.