Death Watch (The Bill Slider Novels)

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘What’s the local beer? Oh, Harveys, isn’t it? Pub then. I haven’t had a decent pint all week.’

  ‘Spoken like a true policeman.’

  From what you’ve told me, there aren’t too many of us left.’

  Slider smiled in self-mockery. ‘All policemen have always said that. It’s the old “nostalgia isn’t what it used to be” syndrome.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But nothing.’ She looked at him. ‘Oh well,’ he yielded, ‘I’ve been having a chat with Dickson. There’s an element that’s out to get him.’

  ‘Get rid of him?’

  Slider shrugged. ‘They’d try, but I doubt it would come to that. More likely a sideways move, into something non-operational – records or the training school or whatever. Slow death, for someone like him.’

  ‘But why do they want him out?’ Joanna asked. ‘I thought he was a good copper. You seem to think so, anyway.’

  ‘He is. I do. But he doesn’t fit in with the new image. He’s untidy. He does things his own way. He doesn’t automatically respect those in authority over him. He doesn’t mind his tongue.’

  ‘Yes, but what will they get him out for? I mean, what can they accuse him of?’

  ‘Drink’s always a good one. You know that it’s a disciplinary offence for a member of the Department ever to be drunk, on or off duty?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know. But you’ve told me before Dickson’s never the worse for it.’

  ‘True. They’d find it hard to prove he was actually drunk. But given the amount he drinks, he’d be hard put to it to prove he wasn’t. Or there’s poor results. Lack of discipline below him. Saying the wrong things to the media. There’s always a way, if they’re determined and you haven’t got the right connections.’

  She thought about it. ‘Does that mean you’re in danger, too?’

  He didn’t answer directly. ‘I hate politics,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t think they’ll get the better of Dickson, but the fact that they’re even trying makes me sick.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot of that going on in the music world, too – the whizz-kids straight out of music college, trying to get rid of the older players. They think technique is all there is to music, and experience counts for nothing. And they think they’ve a God-given right to have a job – someone else’s if necessary.’

  He glanced sideways at her, smiling. ‘Listen to us,’ he said. ‘ “Youngsters today—!” Of course old fogeys like us’d be bound to think that experience is more important than ability.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t always see the other side. It’s disconcerting,’ she complained. She laid a hand on his knee. ‘And in any case, I’ve always said it’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it.’

  ‘I’ll try and bear that in mind,’ he said.

  Miss Catriona Young turned out to have the basement flat, but she had done her best not to live down to it. There were stark white walls and polished wood floors, the sort of Swedish-style bare blonde furniture that was never meant to be sat on, and a great deal of brass pierced-work which went with the smell of joss-sticks in the air and the beaded cushions lined up along the sofa, defying relaxation.

  Miss Young was one of those tall, white-fleshed young women who favour long skirts and flat sandals, perhaps in an attempt not to look any taller. Her blouse was of the sort of fine Indian cotton you never have to iron, and over it she wore a short sleeveless jacket – which Slider would have called, rather shamefacedly, a bolero – made of embroidered black velvet with those tiny round mirrors sewn into the cloth. Her tough, gingery-fawn hair crinkled in parallel waves and hung down behind to her waist, held back by two brown hairslides, one over each ear. She had sandy eyelashes and fine freckles, and her face was full of character. Slider didn’t know what effect she had had on Neal, but she scared the hell out of him.

  She also had a baby, of the surprised-looking sort, large and pale, which was sitting on the floor in the middle of the sitting-room, playing with its toes, which were unusually long and looked slightly crooked, though he couldn’t quite see why. As he watched the baby raised a foot effortlessly to its mouth and sucked on it, staring at Slider with detached interest, like an early luncher at a Parisian street café watching the world go by.

  ‘I’ve only just got in,’ said Miss Young briskly. ‘Can you wait while I put him down? There’s some juice in the fridge if you like. I haven’t got anything stronger.’

  She whipped the baby off the floor, and it soared upwards with the equanimity of one who, having had such a mother from birth, could find nothing much else disconcerting. Left alone, Slider wandered over to the bookshelves, on the principle that you could learn a lot very quickly about a person from the books they kept by them.

  The shelves were low down, near the floor, and ran for an impressive distance along one wall. Bending double, he looked at the titles. A lot of foreign novels – Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Gide – and what looked like a full set of Dickens, along with George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the novels of Charlotte Brontë that weren’t Jane Eyre. Punishing reading, he thought: the mental equivalent at the end of a long day of’ Get on the floor and give me fifty’.

  There were also a large number of non-fiction titles, about economics, statistics, basic law, and computers. Slider wondered why it was that books about computers were always made the wrong shape and size for bookshelves – contempt for the printed word, perhaps? Then came a green forest of the tall, slim spines of the Virago imprint, then Fay Weldon and Mary Wesley, and then serried ranks of detective fiction: P.D.James, Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell – the posh ones – along with Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and the Penguin reissues of the classic ‘thirties collection in those distinctive green-and-white jackets.

  And finally, on the bottom shelf, tucked away in the corner and almost hidden by the fold of the drawn-back curtains, fifteen volumes of the Pan van Thai collections of horror stories, so well-read that their spines were creased almost white. Slider straightened up, feeling nervous. Who in the world keeps their books in alphabetical order? The bookshelf, so they say, was the window on the soul. Perhaps he shouldn’t have come here alone.

  ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting,’ she said, making him jump. She had come back in on silent, sandalled feet, and stood in the middle of the room looking at him.

  ‘I was just looking at your books,’ he said, startled into foolishness, and then, feeling he couldn’t leave it at that, ‘You’re fond of detective stories.’

  ‘Yes. I find them relaxing – my equivalent of watching television. I’m sure they aren’t anything like real life, however,’ she added out of politeness to his calling. ‘Please sit down. Can I get you some juice?’

  For some reason, ‘juice’ without any qualifier always struck him as vaguely indecent. ‘No thank you,’ Slider said. He lowered himself gingerly into a wood and canvas construction which looked like the illustration in an old scouting manual of some kind of extempore bathing equipment. The canvas part was of a shade between grey and beige so featureless as to defy even depression. What exotic name would today’s interior decorators give to that shade, he wondered? Spring Bandage, perhaps: or Hint of Webbing. Professional tip: for a really stylish effect, try picking out cornice, picture-rail and skirting-board in contrasting Truss Pink.

  Miss Young sat down opposite him, folding her hands together in her lap. There was nothing reassuring in the pose: her hands seemed all knuckles, and she kept her feet together and drawn back, as if ready to leap into action at any moment. She was as alert and potentially dangerous as a spider with one foot on the web, testing for vibrations.

  ‘So what did you want to talk to me about?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s about Richard Neal,’ Slider began. Her face seemed to go very still – a determined lack of reaction? he wondered. ‘I understand you know him.’

  He could almost hear the whirring and clicking as she calculated the optimum reply. Then she said,
‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you known him for long?’

  ‘About three years.’

  ‘In what capacity?’

  She hesitated, and then said, as if it were not necessarily an answer to the question, ‘I met him at university when I was doing a post-graduate course.’

  ‘Sussex University?’

  ‘Yes. That’s where I work now. I lecture in Political Economy.’

  ‘And Mr Neal went to Sussex University?’

  She seemed to find the question disingenuous. ‘He wasn’t a student, which I’m sure you must know. Look, what do you want to know for?’

  She was too intelligent to be fed a line. He looked at her steadily. ‘I will tell you that in a moment, but I’d like to ask you a few basic questions first, if you wouldn’t mind. How did you come to meet Mr Neal?’

  ‘He was advising the university on new fire safety systems. I bumped into him on campus a few times, and we got friendly – it’s as simple as that.’

  ‘But you have been rather more than friends, haven’t you?’

  She almost smiled. ‘The way you people put things! Well, on the assumption that you aren’t just being prurient, yes, Dick and I are lovers, if that’s what you want to know. I’ve no reason to hide it.’

  ‘You did know he was married?’

  She turned her head away slightly. ‘That’s his business, not mine. I never enquire into his life when he’s not with me.’

  A cosy arrangement, thought Slider. This man seemed to have been surrounded by complacent women, none of whom wanted to give him trouble. How lucky could a man be?

  ‘It seems,’ he continued carefully, ‘that Mr Neal has been in the habit of paying you sums of money on a regular basis.’

  ‘Oh, is that what this is all about?’ She looked at him sharply, and snorted. ‘Good God, do you think I’ve been blackmailing him? You’re very wide of the mark. Do I look like a blackmailer?’

  ‘Not at all.’ She looked as though she would be capable of anything she set her mind to, in fact, but he could hardly say that.

  ‘I didn’t ask him for money – it was his idea. If you ask him, he’ll tell you. He sends it because he wants to. And it’s for Jonathon, not me.’

  ‘Jonathon?’

  She gestured with her head towards the bedroom. ‘Jonathon is our son – Dick’s and mine.’

  Thicker and thicker, Slider thought. The wife who couldn’t, the London mistress who’d like to, and the Brighton mistress who had. And this one was one hell of a tough cookie. She’d give Neal trouble all right, though it would probably not be of the expected sort.

  She had been reading Slider’s face the while, and now said with a firmness he would not have liked to have to refuse, ‘You’d better tell me what all this is about. Why are you asking questions about Dick and me?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news for you,’ he said in the time-honoured formula, and paused for a moment for the implication to sink in. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mr Neal was killed last Monday.’

  She drew a short breath, and her eyes searched his face busily. ‘What do you mean, killed? You mean murdered?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘How?’ she said urgently. ‘How did they do it?’

  ‘He was suffocated with a plastic bag.’

  ‘Oh good God!’ It was a genuine cry of pity, sprung out of her by an unwelcome instant of clear imagination. He felt obliged to try to ease it for her.

  ‘He was very drunk at the time. I don’t think he would really have known what was going on, if that helps at all.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said seriously. ‘I don’t know if it does.’ She shivered, a curious reaction, but one he’d seen before. ‘I’ve never had to think about something like this before. I can’t take it in. He’s dead? Dick’s dead?’

  Slider nodded. ‘It takes a while to sink in, I know.’

  ‘Yes. Of course, you must have had to tell hundreds of people things like that,’ she said. That was the academic intelligence still at work, he thought, still running around the farmyard, unaware that its head was off. ‘How do they react? Do they cry and scream? I don’t know what I should be doing.’

  ‘It takes different people different ways,’ he said. ‘But most people are quiet at first, with the shock.’

  ‘The shock, yes,’ she said. ‘Oh God, poor Dick!’ He actually saw the next thought impinge on her. ‘And what about Jonathon? Now he hasn’t a father.’ Her eyes were suddenly wet. Interesting, he thought, that she would cry for the child’s loss, which the child could not feel, rather than her own. ‘But who would do such a thing? Do you know who did it?’

  ‘No, not yet. That’s why I’ve come to see you – to find out as much as possible about Mr Neal’s life, in the hope that it will throw some light on the business.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Well, I’ll help you if I can. But I don’t really know anything about it.’ She looked and sounded dazed now.

  ‘There’s no knowing what may help,’ Slider said coaxingly. ‘Tell me, if you will, about your relationship with Mr Neal.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Start at the beginning,’ he said. ‘Tell me as you would tell a friend, about you and Dick.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, staring at the wall over his shoulder. ‘Me and Dick. Well, it was one of those cases of instant attraction. We just fell for each other the moment we met. The first two weeks were like a passionate honeymoon – he was staying down in Brighton to do the campus consultancy, and after the second day he left his hotel room and moved into my digs. I wasn’t here, then – I had rooms in a house on Falmer Road. Almost every instant he wasn’t working we were together, and a lot of the time we were in bed. It was a very physical attraction between us,’ she added, looking at him to see if he was shocked by her frankness.

  He nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I cared for him too, of course. I wouldn’t have had Jonathon otherwise. We were always good friends.’

  ‘But?’

  She looked at him.

  ‘It sounded as if you were going to add a “but”,’ Slider said.

  She lifted her shoulders. ‘He was—’ she hesitated. ‘I don’t know quite how to put it. At first, we both just wanted what we had. He came to Brighton pretty regularly on business, and when he did, he stayed here, and we had a wonderful time together. But as time went on, he started to want more out of the relationship. Something more continuous, more—’ she hesitated again. ‘Intrusive.’

  It seemed a curious choice of word. ‘Did he want to marry you?’ Slider asked.

  She didn’t seem to like it plain and simple. ‘I suppose so. I suppose that’s what you’d call it. He wanted to be with me all the time, but I had my own life. I’d finished my post-grad course and started teaching, and I had different interests from him, different friends and so on, and Dick didn’t fit in with that. I loved seeing him when he was here, but—’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Do you?’ she said sharply.

  Slider nodded, but didn’t elaborate. Dick Neal the great cocksman, the hard-drinking, swashbuckling rep, served a need for her, but he was not the sort of man a woman like her could think of marrying. He probably didn’t go down too well with her academic friends, and may have made his resentment of her intellectual life plain. Slider could imagine only too well her taking Neal to a university drinks-and-shop-talk party, and Neal, feeling left out and imagining everyone was sneering at him, getting drunk and being outrageous to get his own back. It took a strong man to cope with a woman who was his intellectual superior.

  ‘I think he loved me more than I loved him. And then there was his wife.’ She looked at him with the faint defiance of the recent religious convert, someone about to impart something they knew was claptrap, but that they badly wanted to believe in. ‘I wasn’t about to take him away from her. Women are a sisterhood. We have to stick together, not betray each other by playing the game the men’s wa
y.’

  ‘Hadn’t you already done that?’ Slider asked mildly.

  ‘Of course not. The bit of him I had, she wouldn’t have got anyway. But what she had – marriage, him coming home to her, the certainty – that’s what she wanted, and I wouldn’t take it from her.’

  Well, there was a certain amount of truth in that, Slider thought, albeit reluctantly, for she pronounced it with the readiness of dogma, which of course always got up the recipient’s nose. ‘And what about the baby? Whose idea was that?’

  She shrugged. ‘Both, really. Dick actually mentioned it first, but I’d already been thinking I’d like a child. With my job it was perfectly easy to fit it in, with the long vacation and everything, and it suited me that Dick was tied up with someone else. And on his side – well, his wife couldn’t have children, so unless he divorced her, this was his only solution. Of course, I had to get him to understand that I wouldn’t give up my independence. Our relationship was to stay the same, with or without a child.’

  ‘Did he accept that?’

  ‘Not at first. And even after he agreed, he still went back on it, first when he knew I was definitely pregnant, and then again when Jonathon was born. He wanted to move in with us, and be a proper father, as he put it, but I wouldn’t have that. We had a bargain, and he had to stick to it. I was perfectly willing to acknowledge him as the father, and to allow him to visit whenever he wanted, but I wasn’t going to be taken over, or to give him legal rights over Jonathon.’

  My God, thought Slider, the biter bit. After being will o’ the wisp to God knew how many women, Neal suddenly found one who wouldn’t let him tie himself down when he actually wanted to.

  ‘I think that’s why he started to send the money,’ she continued. To feel that he had some kind of hold on us. He couldn’t understand, you see, that the simple fact of his physical relationship to Jonathon should be enough. Jonathon has half his genes, but he kept whingeing because his name wasn’t on the birth certificate, and I wouldn’t let him come and live with me.’

  ‘Did you quarrel about it?’