One Under

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  It was ready just as she said goodbye. ‘Perfect timing,’ she told him, taking her cup from him and heading for the sitting room. She put on a disc, turned down low – she didn’t approve of using music as background wallpaper, but made exceptions for him if she thought he’d had a hard day – and patted the sofa beside her. ‘Come and tell me about it,’ she said.

  He sat. ‘That’s nice – what is it? Bach?’

  ‘Well spotted. Darling Rosty playing the “Cello Suite number one in G Major”. Many have followed, but there’s only one Rostropovich.’

  He listened for a bit in silence, thinking that if more people had wives to come home to who made them supper and played them the cello suites, there would be less unhappiness in the world. Peloponnos might not have committed suicide if he’d had Joanna, macaroni cheese and Bach.

  ‘You look tired,’ Joanna said after a bit. ‘What’s happening with your case?’

  He roused himself. ‘If it were a case, we could pursue it properly,’ he complained. ‘So far all we’ve got is Freddie Cameron’s opinion that it wasn’t an RTA.’

  ‘But isn’t Freddie always right?’

  ‘I think so. But if it came to court, the prosecution would be able to disagree. And we haven’t really got anything else.’ He told her about the day’s developments.

  ‘So your thinking is that he killed her, then committed suicide out of remorse. Or fear, perhaps – fear of being caught, going to prison, shaming his dear old mother?’

  ‘That seems the most likely. And buying the opera ticket looks like an attempt to establish an alibi. But there are odd things about it. How did he get Kaylee’s body out to Harefield when he didn’t have a car and couldn’t drive?’

  ‘Maybe he just said he couldn’t drive,’ Joanna offered.

  ‘There’s no record of his ever having had a licence. Then there’s the question of why and how he suddenly got hold of Kaylee’s number. They didn’t ring each other before that day.’

  ‘Maybe she had another mobile.’

  ‘It’s not impossible, but I think it’s unlikely. A girl from that background. And why would she?’

  ‘Because she was mixed up in something criminal. Like in The Wire – throw-away pay-as-you-goes?’

  ‘That was fiction, and it was really big league stuff, anyway. Kaylee was just a fairly dopy ordinary teenager.’

  Joanna examined his features. ‘So what do you think is behind it?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said glumly. ‘And I can’t investigate properly because we haven’t established there even was a crime. It’s like losing your glasses – you can’t look for them till you’ve found them.’

  ‘If Peloponnos didn’t know Kaylee,’ Joanna said, thinking it out, ‘then maybe someone else gave him her number just for that occasion. He wanted a date to take to the party.’

  ‘If he went to the party. And if he did, why did he buy an expensive ticket to the opera?’

  ‘He bought that the day before. Maybe he didn’t know about the party then, and when he did hear about it, decided he preferred it. Especially if it meant taking Kaylee.’

  ‘You haven’t seen her. She was no great catch.’

  ‘Or he had a really shy friend who hadn’t got the nerve to ask her himself, so he did it for him.’

  ‘He was forty-eight,’ Slider pointed out.

  ‘Even forty-eight-year-olds can be shy. In fact, rejection can be worse when you get to that age. Not that you’d know, Mr Confidence.’

  ‘I’ll have you know I’m very shy and sensitive.’

  ‘You asked me out the minute you saw me. And whisked me off to bed.’

  ‘As I remember, you did the whisking. Anyway,’ he said, taking the cup from her hand and putting it down, ‘it’s different when it’s True Love.’

  ‘Oh, is that what it is?’ she murmured, kissing him back.

  Was it his curse that at this very tender moment, the memory of their dead baby popped into his mind? He didn’t want their intimate life to be conducted hesitantly, and in the shadow of the miscarriage, but somehow lately he seemed to have lost his nerve. He had enough courage with regard to his own safety, but he was terribly afraid on her behalf. He didn’t want to do or say anything that would increase her pain.

  And hard on the heels of the Lost Child came the Hanged Man, aka Hollis. But whereas the Tarot card could mean awakening or renewal, Hollis only meant sadness and guilt, the passion-killer to beat all.

  She drew back and looked at him. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  He didn’t want to put it into words, because that would give it substance; and he wasn’t sure he could, anyway.

  But she knew him very well. ‘I’m all right now,’ she said. ‘Have been for months. But if you’re still worried, we can just cuddle. Cuddling’s good.’

  ‘It is,’ he said, shadows fleeing, dispelled by her smile. She was so very good at cuddling, that in all probability nature would take its course quite effortlessly. As, of course, she very well knew. ‘Oh wise young judge,’ he said.

  ‘Hang on,’ she objected. ‘Isn’t the next bit “How much more elder art thou than thy looks”?’

  ‘But that’s a compliment,’ Slider said, and started kissing her again.

  The bright sunshine of the day before had gone, and clouds carpeted Thursday’s sky with the translucent white of Tupperware. From time to time it darkened to grey and a thin drizzle fell. But at least the wind had dropped.

  Fathom, a big meaty lad, who gelled his hair into Keanu Reeves spikes, perhaps in an attempt to appear more interesting, came jauntily into Slider’s office, preceded by the smell of his aftershave. It was apparently called Fella. Atherton said that was short for Ox-Feller.

  ‘I struck lucky with the motor, guv,’ he announced.

  ‘I hope Lucky wasn’t a dog,’ Slider returned.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Never mind.’ Slider waved it away. ‘Tell me what you’ve got.’

  ‘It was a bit of a trawl,’ Fathom said, back on safe ground, ‘because a lot of shops on Shepherd’s Bush Road have cameras, but mostly they don’t keep the tapes long enough. But there’s a bank across the road and they had an incident last month and it’s made ’em nervous so they’re keeping stuff a week now. Wanna see?’

  Slider followed him back to his desk.

  ‘Course, it’s night time, under street lamps, so the definition’s not good, but you can see the girl waiting at the kerb at the end of the side road.’

  ‘It could be Kaylee,’ said Slider.

  Fathom enlarged the image but it became too grainy to identify the features absolutely. However, the clothes looked right – the leather jacket, short skirt and strappy high-heeled sandals. And the hair looked right – though most teenagers these days wore the hair long and straggly like that. Slider noted she had a small handbag on a long strap over her shoulder and was smoking a cigarette.

  ‘I reckon it has to be her, guv,’ said Fathom, ‘given the place and the time. And here comes the motor.’

  A black SUV drew up alongside her. When it moved on, Kaylee was no longer at the kerbside. Fathom enlarged the image again, but the windows were blacked out and it was not possible to see who was driving.

  ‘Well, that’s a help,’ Slider said. ‘At least we know she was picked up in a car at the time she said. But there must be a lot of black SUVs in London.’

  McLaren, still breakfast grazing – in the closing stages with a chocolate fudge pop tart – wandered over, attracted by any words that had to do with cars. ‘Show us it again, Jezza,’ he commanded. Slider made room for him – one always gives way before the expert. ‘That’s not just any SUV,’ he pronounced. ‘That’s a Mercedes GL550.’ He could recognize any vehicle, as a mother can tell her newborn baby from all the others in the nursery. ‘Top of the range. All the bells and whistles. Cost you upstairs of sixty k. Bastard of a fuel consumption, but if you got that sort of money to spend on your wheels, who cares?’

  ‘
So there won’t be too many of them around?’ Slider asked, with hope.

  ‘Well,’ McLaren said doubtfully, ‘they’re popular in the Diplomatic. And the rich Arabs buy them for their wives. Same with the Russian oligarchs. But,’ he added comfortingly, ‘it’s not like looking for a Corsa, or a Ford Asbo. Didn’t you get the index, Jez?’

  ‘I was coming to that,’ Fathom said defensively. ‘There was a TfL bus camera. The angle’s not right, but I got a partial.’ He cued up the shot, where the car was coming round the corner from Shepherd’s Bush Green, and for a moment the camera caught it in three-quarter profile.

  ‘You can see it’s a Merc all right,’ McLaren said, pointing to the badge on the radiator for Slider’s sake.

  ‘But you can’t read the index,’ Fathom said regretfully. ‘I’ve tried everything. You can see it begins with A, then it looks like F, or it might be E. But that’s all.’

  ‘Is that what you call a partial. One letter? You don’t even know what year it is.’

  ‘It’s better than nothing,’ said Fathom.

  ‘All right,’ Slider stepped in. ‘You’d better get a list of all of that model, with tinted windows, sold in this country, and start running them down.’

  NINE

  Coffee and Donors

  Swilley came to the door. ‘Peloponnos’s mobile record,’ she said. Then: ‘It’s a tricky name,’ she complained. ‘Can’t we refer to him as George, boss?’

  ‘George is my son’s name.’

  ‘I think you’ll be able to tell when I’m talking about your son.’

  ‘All right, if it helps. Anything interesting?’

  ‘Yes, boss. There’s the call to Kaylee’s mobile all right, and right after it, he calls another number. Very short call, only fifteen seconds, but the number goes to Gideon Marler.’

  ‘The MP?’ said Slider.

  ‘MP for Kensington North, and chair of the Parliamentary Select Committee on police matters,’ Swilley elaborated. ‘It’s a sub-committee of the Home Office Select Committee, so he’s got some pretty high-up connections.’

  ‘So I imagine,’ said Slider.

  It was a position of influence. The chairman of a select committee had the power to demand attendance of anyone and put them under scrutiny. Even luminaries of the Association of Chief Police Officers had to respect him.

  ‘I wonder how George knew him?’ Swilley mused.

  ‘Peloponnos worked for the local council. No reason he shouldn’t know a local MP.’

  ‘But the timing, boss – it’s interesting, don’t you think?’

  ‘I do think. We should have a word with Mr Marler.’

  ‘He’s got a constituency office in Notting Hill, and I found out from his secretary that he’s there this morning, doing a surgery. Shall I go?’

  Slider thought. ‘No, I think I’ll go myself,’ he said. With someone so important and well-connected, it was as well to let them think they were getting the full organ grinder and not the monkey.

  Atherton had also gone to Notting Hill, to the office of the North Kensington Regeneration Trust, which was in a converted Regency house on the Campden Hill side of the main street.

  He had looked up the trust on the internet beforehand and found that it was an NGO and a registered charity. It had been set up in partnership with the local authority with a starting grant of £50,000, but was now a self-sustaining and not-for-profit organisation, handling millions every year. The mission statement said it was ‘working alongside the public and voluntary sectors to improve the environmental well-being’ of a run-down part of the borough.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Atherton asked Virginia (‘Call me Ginnie’) Lamy, Peloponnos’s smart middle-aged PA.

  ‘The trust was started by ordinary people from the neighbourhood, who wanted to see real change and improvement. Now we promote arts and culture, host events, and provide space and development opportunities to individuals, businesses and charities, using our resources to realize the full potential of the community.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’ Atherton asked.

  She frowned. ‘Are you being deliberately obtuse?’

  ‘No,’ he said with his most disarming smile. ‘I’d just like to have it in simpler terms. I’ve never managed to get on top of office-speak.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, slightly shortly. ‘We have fundraisers, help worthwhile organisations find premises, advise on community projects. We give out a certain number of grants to artists and so on. And we buy land and develop it for the benefit of the local community.’

  ‘You do the development yourselves?’

  ‘Sometimes. More often we facilitate the work of developers who share our aims.’

  ‘I see. So having a former chief planning officer on the staff must be a great help,’ said Atherton.

  ‘George is wonderful,’ she said warmly; then her expression drooped. ‘I mean, he was wonderful. I can’t believe he’s gone.’

  ‘Were you with him when he worked for the borough?’

  ‘No, I was recruited as his PA when he came here. We started at the same time.’

  ‘And he was the CEO here, was he?’

  ‘No, Chief Development Director. Betty Geeson is the CEO.’

  ‘But as Chief Development Director, I expect he had a lot of responsibility.’

  ‘Gosh, yes, massive,’ she said. ‘Really, he was the final authority on whether anything went ahead. Betty’s more day-to-day management. Her background’s in charity and government lobbying. George was the real technical expert.’

  ‘Had you noticed lately that all this responsibility was getting him down?’

  She coloured. ‘No, not at all. What are you saying? He was superb at his job.’

  ‘I’m sure he was. But didn’t you think he was rather worried lately? A little out of sorts, as though something was preying on his mind?’

  ‘You’re just saying that because he committed suicide. But I promise you, if anyone here had had any idea that he was likely to … well, we’d have done anything to help him, anything at all.’

  Atherton spread his hands. ‘I assure you, I meant no criticism. I’m just trying to establish whether he seemed any different recently.’

  ‘No,’ she said. And then her eyes dropped. ‘Well,’ she began.

  ‘Yes?’ Atherton encouraged.

  ‘He had been a bit – preoccupied. Sometimes you’d speak to him three or four times before he’d answer. Sometimes he didn’t pick up his phone, and you’d come in and he’d be standing staring out of the window, not hearing it.’

  ‘Was it more a worried preoccupation, do you think, or a sad one?’

  She considered. ‘Worried, I think.’

  ‘And how long had it been going on?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. A while. Several weeks – maybe a couple of months. But I don’t want you to think he wasn’t doing his work. He was. But he was …’ A long pause. ‘Brooding, I suppose is the word. Absent, maybe.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘But I suppose it was his own death he was thinking about. It’s still hard to believe he would do that – throw himself in front of a train. He must have been really so unhappy. And we didn’t know.’

  Atherton gave her a beat of sympathy, then said, ‘I’d like to have a look at his office, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I don’t mind – but why? Are you trying to find out why he killed himself? Is that usual?’

  She was too sharp for him to pretend it was. ‘We think he may have known someone who was mixed up in something we’re investigating. Nothing to be alarmed about, though.’

  She looked worried. ‘I think I ought to ask Betty if it’s all right. Trouble is, she’s in an important meeting in Westminster at the moment and I can’t reach her.’

  ‘There’s no need to bother her,’ Atherton said soothingly. ‘I won’t take anything away. I just want to look around, in case I spot anything that could help us.’

  ‘Who is this other person? What’s the thing he
was mixed up in? Maybe I can help.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything about it at the moment. But you can help by showing me his office.’

  She seemed puzzled; but reassured, perhaps, by her conviction of her former boss’s innocence, she led him to the door and opened it for him, and then hovered in the doorway, watching. It was quite a handsomely-appointed office: nice paint job, good quality carpet, solid wood desk. A couple of leather easy chairs flanked the fireplace under whose Adam surround a gas coal-effect fire had been installed. There was a glazed mahogany bookcase with cupboard under, and a trolley in the corner bearing bottles of drinks and Waterford glasses.

  ‘Did he entertain a lot of visitors here?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. Developers, charity heads, councillors, politicians, advisers of all sorts. Donors, too. He was very good with the donors.’

  ‘People give you money to regenerate the neighbourhood?’

  She gave him a stiff look. ‘It’s an important project. A worthy cause.’ His steady gaze got through the defence. ‘And it’s very good publicity for them. And we’re a registered charity so it can be written off against tax.’

  ‘Ah. So a lot of wealthy and important people come through these doors.’

  ‘Yes, they do. I told you, it’s a major project.’

  The telephone outside on her desk rang, and she went away to answer it. Atherton took the opportunity to try the computer, which, like office computers everywhere, had been left on. Its folders seemed to be labelled with addresses and the names of projects, as one might expect. There was one labelled ‘Letters’, one ‘Planning applications’. He noticed one called ‘Cope’, but when he tried to call that one up, it was password protected.

  He listened and heard her voice, still on the phone. He looked quickly in the desk drawers, but saw nothing out of the usual. The bottom one was locked. He tried the key from Peloponnos’s bathroom, and it worked. Inside there was a metal cash box, locked, and under it a single pink wallet file. He picked up the file. It contained a handwritten sheet, a list of names, some with dates beside them. He recognized some of them – the names of people of influence and importance. On the spur of the moment, he laid it flat on the desk and took a photograph of it with his mobile. Hearing what sounded like winding-up conversation from outside, he returned the paper to the file, put the file back and closed and locked the drawer.