Killing Time (36 page)

‘The gloves’d get messed up.’

‘And you can’t get blood-stains out of leather. You can wash a spanner, though, as long as you haven’t got a wife at home to ask you awkward questions.’

Hart sat thinking it through. ‘D’you really think he’d do that, just for the sake of old mother Parnell?’

‘She’s not that old,’ Slider protested. Actually, she must be
about the same age as him. ‘Anyway, he was obsessed by her. And jealousy is a strange thing.’

‘It was a frenzied attack,’ Hart said. ‘If the first blow killed him, there was no need to bash his head in like that. It didn’t make sense when we thought it was a pro job, but if it was jealousy – well.’

‘That’s what I thought. And given the way Paloma’s head was battered, I think he could be dangerous. If he has moved from threatening letters to actually killing Paloma, the next step could be that he decides he can’t keep Busty to himself any other way than by killing her – and then probably himself.’

‘Yeah,’ said Hart thoughtfully. ‘I seen that sort a thing before.’

‘We’ve got to get him banged up before he hurts someone else. But so far it’s all guesswork. That’s why we’ve got to have a look at his room and see if we can find something a bit more solid.’

‘Like blood-stained gloves?’

‘Or the makings of the poison pen letters – a pot of glue, some mutilated newspapers.’

‘We should be so lucky!’

‘And I’ve asked Norma to check his mobile phone account for the numbers he’s called. We might be able to correlate something from that. Ah, this is it.’

It was a stunted, two-storey house, one of a terrace built between the wars, and set below street level – there must have been a hillside there – so that you went down a flight of steps set into a bank to gain access. One flight to each pair, whose doors stood side by side, set back in arched porchways. Slider rang the bell, while Hart stood two steps up keeping a look out for homicidal black cabs, and eyeing the road as if it might bite her.

The landlady was a woman shrunk with age, with white wispy hair, National Health glasses, a thick nose, pendulous lip, and folds of heavy skin hanging loose about her face and neck like elephant’s trousers. She wore a green nylon overall of the sort that Woolworth’s assistants used to wear in the old days – for all Slider knew it might have been one, nicked in her heyday – and those tartan slippers with a fawn fold-back collar and a fawn bobble that boys used to buy for their fathers for Christmas back in 1962. She rolled a ferocious eye up at Slider and snapped, ‘Yes?’ in exactly the tone of voice in which she might have said, ‘Bugger off!’

Slider got as far as introducing himself and showing his brief when she interrupted. ‘Is
she
with you?’ she said with a glare in Hart’s direction. ‘Tell her to get off the steps. I washed them this morning.’

Slider cut to the chase. ‘I understand you have a Mr Fluss staying with you.’

‘I’ve a lodger of that name,’ she corrected aggressively, as though he had impugned her chastity. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘I’d like to see his room, please, Mrs—?’

‘Bugger off!’ she snapped. Slider blinked. ‘And it’s Miss. Miss Bogorov.’

‘Ah,’ said Slider. ‘Well, could you show us his room, please?’

She looked at him a moment longer, and then turned and went into the house without a word. One thing to be said about eastern Europe, Slider thought, it taught people not to argue with policemen. He beckoned to Hart and followed her in. The entrance passage was dark, and so narrow it might have been designed for a different race – which, in a way, it had, the working classes in the twenties and thirties being generally smaller and slighter than today’s chunky breed. The smell of dust came up from the carpet as he trod; and mingled with a composite house-smell of dog, tea, cooked rice, metal polish and incense. The stairs were straight ahead, as narrow as the hall, with a dogleg passage going past them to the rear of the house. At the foot of the stairs, on the wall, was a rather beautiful icon with a beaten silver surround, of a melancholy saint with his eyes rolled up and his head so far over on one side he looked like a Guy Fawkes effigy without enough straw in the neck. The missing straw seemed to be leaking out through his body in hedgehog spikes.

Miss Bogorov, one foot on the stairs, glanced back and saw what he was looking at. ‘Saint Sebastian. My mother brought it over.’ Her voice for a moment became liquid. ‘That’s all I’ve got left of her things. Everything else got sold.’

‘Over?’ Hart murmured behind him, but he silenced her with a gesture. Now was not the time, and he was a Dutchman if he didn’t recognise a deep vein of Russian melancholy just waiting to be mined, preferably across a table over endless tea. He left Saint Sebastian with a glance. Living with him, he reflected, was enough to make anyone scratchy.

‘How many lodgers do you have?’ he asked as Miss Bogorov climbed before him.

‘Just the two. There’s three rooms upstairs, but Mr Johnson has one for a sitting-room.’ She turned her head all the way back and fixed him with a terrible eye. ‘I live downstairs,’ she said, to make sure he knew there was nothing louche about the arrangements. It occurred to Slider that here after all was Benny the Brief’s soulmate, if he did but recognise it. He could marry her and move downstairs and they could swap Crying Shames to their hearts’ delight.

Miss Bogorov reached the top, turned right and stood with her
hand on the doorknob. The upper hall was dark and depressing, with a polished wood floor and a strip of patterned carpet down the middle. The walls were painted brown up to the dado and grubby cream above, and the doors were varnished dark brown with brown mottled Bakelite doorknobs. It couldn’t have been redecorated, Slider thought, since it was built.

‘Nearly six months he’s been with me, Mr Fluss, and no trouble at all,’ she said, looking from Slider to Hart and back as if searching for a clue. ‘A very nice gentleman, respectable and quiet. With very proper views. Otherwise I shouldn’t have taken him in. And Mr Johnson’s been with me eight years. This is a respectable house. Trouble enough we had when I was a girl, and all through the war. I don’t want any more trouble now. Remember that. This is my house. If you’ve got to do anything, do it quietly and don’t make a mess.’

Then she turned the doorknob and pushed the door open, and stood back for them to go in, folding her arms across her chest and sinking her chin, in the manner of oppressed peasants the world and time over, when the commissars come to steal their pigs and slit open their grain sacks.

Slider nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said pointedly. She sighed and went away down the stairs.

Slider surveyed the room. A single bed with a candlewick bedspread under the window. Cheap beige wall-to-wall carpet with a rug of nineteen-fifties vileness covering it in the middle – black with a pattern of red, yellow and green lightning jags. Very contemp’ry, he thought. A wash basin and mirror in the corner. A window so small and inadequate it seemed to be letting in darkness rather than light. An oversized wardrobe and chest of drawers using up the space. A pink basket chair on spindly legs jammed between the chest of drawers and the sink. A table and kitchen chair jammed between the wardrobe and the door. A low bookcase jammed between the foot of the bed and the wall.

The chest of drawers was five feet high, and a good four feet long, and drawers all the way. ‘You start on that,’ Slider said. The table was very small, its surface about two feet six by eighteen inches, and covered with marble – presumably it had been a washstand of some kind – and on it stood an Anglepoise lamp whose springs had gone, which was held in position by
an ingenious arrangement of strings fastened to a hook on the picture-rail above. This, perhaps, was where the work had been done. Slider switched on the light and bent to examine the surface closely, hoping for a trace of glue or a stuck scrap of newspaper. But Miss Bogorov was too good a housekeeper, and the surface was perfectly clean. He went over to the sink. Here, perhaps, a bloody spanner was washed – too long ago, now, for any traces to remain in the waste-pipe. A Duralex glass held a toothbrush with a brown and shaggy head and a tube of toothpaste with a messy cap. He ducked his head this way and that to see if there was a lip print. There were marks enough on its surface. They would take it, anyway. He straightened up. What was that smell, a cold, old smell, almost metallic, which hung about the room?

‘Guv?’ said Hart at that moment. ‘Have a goosey at this.’

He joined her at the chest – o would that t’were! – and looked into the top right-hand drawer which she had opened. Inside – amongst a useful litter of things like string, playing-cards, boxes of matches, Elastoplast, Sellotape, rolled crêpe bandages, the recharge lead from an electric razor, sundry loose 3-amp fuses, and a very old souvenir corn-dolly with Southwold painted across it which was losing its hair everywhere – sitting there mutely pleading for clemency was a bottle of Copydex, the sort that has a little brush attached inside the lid, and a pair of cutting-out scissors. Stacked neatly towards the back of the drawer was a couple of hundred white self-seal envelopes – ‘the long sort’ as Jay Paloma had put it.

‘Of course, it don’t prove anything,’ Hart said in the sort of voice that expects to be contradicted.

‘If only that dickhead Paloma had brought in an envelope,’ Slider mourned, ‘we could have done a match. Bag ’em up, anyway – oh, and the tooth glass. One way or another we’ve got to get something hard.’

‘How were the envelopes addressed, again?’ Hart asked.

‘Printed labels. I suppose he had them done at a Prontaprint somewhere. Now if we could find which one—!’

‘He’d have thrown any left away,’ she said. ‘Incriminating.’

Slider looked round. ‘Keep looking for the gloves. I’ll have a look at the books.’

The bookcase was so positioned that you had to crane round
the wardrobe to see the books at the end of the shelf. Very eclectic selection, he thought, using an Atherton word. Was eclectic right? Or was it eccentric? Or did they mean the same thing perhaps? Legal books, medico-legal books, a worrying collection of Arrow True Crime books,
Great Court Cases of History, F.E. – a Memoir
, Richard Gordon’s
The Medical Witness
, Henry Cecil and John Mortimer,
The Layman’s Guide to English Law
, a pocket Latin dictionary and four London A-Zs in various stages of decrepitude. Wedged in at one end of the top shelf and protruding slightly was a Basildon Bond writing pad. ‘We’ll have this as well,’ he said, pulling it out with an effort. It brought with it a large format paperback which hit the floor with a thud before Slider could catch it. He picked it up.
A Practical Guide to Forensic Examination
. He put his thumb to the back and scrolled through it. Sets of black and white photographs, of clinical equipment, of weapons, close-ups of wounds, part-dissected bodies, and some whole-body shots of multiple mutilations. A brief sampling of the text proved it was a serious book aimed at the professional – a starter volume for the newly-appointed police surgeon, perhaps – which accounted for the unexpurgated photographs. Photographs? A thought struck him, and he examined the sets of photographs more closely. Plates seventeen and eighteen were missing, neatly razored out flush with the fold. He turned to the front.
List of Illustrations
. He looked up number seventeen:
The Waddington Case – Frontal View of the Injuries
. And number eighteen was the same case, the injuries to the head. A close-up presumably. What had Paloma said about the photograph that had been sent to him? A dead body, all beaten up, with its throat cut.

‘I think we’ve got him,’ Slider said, straightening up. ‘This can’t just be a coincidence. We’ve got him, Hart. Come and have a look.’

What
was
that smell? He heard a wooden creak and turned to look, just in time to see Benny the Brief in the doorway launch himself forward with his arm raised. Hart beat Slider’s reactions off the mark by twenty years, hurling herself in hard and low like a rugby forward, hitting Benny amidships and carrying him by her impetus backwards to hit the door jamb. He rolled round it and fell out into the passage with her on top of him, hitting wildly but largely ineffectually (thank God!) at her back with whatever
he was holding. Slider threw himself at them, grabbing Benny’s business arm and slamming it to the floor with all his weight. The spanner – for it was he – jumped from Benny’s hand and hit the floor, skidding along it with an interesting scuffing sound like an ice-skater on a rink.

‘Get his other hand,’ he panted to Hart, trying to get his knee over the leg nearest him and hold it down. Benny was bucking like a teenage horse, but completely in silence. Slider supposed he had had the spare breath knocked out of him. Between them they managed to get him subdued and rolled over on his face, and Slider sat on him while Hart got his handcuffs out of his pocket and snapped them on. Once he was cuffed, Benny fell silent and still, so still that Slider thought for one rippling moment he might have snuffed it. But when he was dragged up to sitting position, he proved to be alive enough to bare his tiny hampsteads and spit at them. His aim, fortunately, proved faulty, though Slider wondered what Miss Bogorov would think of spittle on her carpet. It seemed ungrateful after she’d taken him in and ignored him so nicely.

‘All right, I’ll watch him, you phone for the cavalry,’ Slider said to Hart, and keeping a wary eye on Fluss he chanted the coppers’ hymn of triumph at him. ‘You do not have to say anything, but your defence may be prejudiced if you do not mention while being questioned something you later rely on in court …’ It didn’t quite have the swing of the old one, or the punch of the more informal ‘You’re fuckin’ nicked, mate,’ but it sliced the same way.

And at last he realised what the smell in the room was, the cold metallic ghost of the smell he was now getting hot and fresh in waves, the smell which, when he was sprawled on the hospital corridor floor, his nose had translated as escaping gas. It was Benny’s feet, clad for sneaking-up purposes in a pair of tropical-swamp trainers. He could easily have qualified as the only man in history to get his money back from the Odoreater company. As Busty had said – and Slider could see now why she hadn’t wanted to marry him – they didn’t half pen and ink.