‘Sometimes. He had a quick temper.’
‘Was he violent? Did he threaten you?’
‘God, no! Well, only over the phone, when he was drunk. He drank too much – but I suppose you know that. And then he’d get maudlin and sentimental. I hated that most of all. Stupid, drunken, weepy phone calls at one and two in the morning, waking me up, disturbing the baby—’ She made a sound of disgust, and then her face froze, as she remembered. ‘And now he’s dead,’ she said blankly. ‘Oh my God, I didn’t believe him. I thought it was just another of his tricks, to get my sympathy.’ She shut up abruptly, thinking hard.
‘What was one of his tricks?’ Slider asked.
The blank look continued, the sort of internally-preoccupied look of someone at a dinner party who has got a raspberry pip stuck between their teeth and is trying to work it loose with their tongue without anyone’s noticing.
‘Miss Young, what didn’t you believe?’
She focused on him. ‘He phoned me on Saturday. It was about three in the afternoon – closing time, you see – so I assumed he was drunk. He sounded peculiar—’
‘In what way, peculiar?’
‘Well, I don’t know. As if he was drunk, I suppose. Laughing in an idiotic way, when there wasn’t anything to laugh at, saying stupid things.’
‘What things?’
‘Well, he started off saying that someone was trying to kill him.’
Slider’s attention sharpened. ‘Yes?’
‘He said it, and then laughed as if he didn’t mean it, or didn’t want me to think he meant it. I told him not to be stupid, assuming—’ she looked at him appealingly.
That he was drunk, yes. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?’
She took it as a criticism. ‘He’d said stupid things before when he was drunk. Threatening suicide, for instance.’
‘Yes, I understand. Did he say who it was that wanted to kill him?’
She shook her head. ‘He said he’d been having lunch with an old friend, and he’d said someone was out to kill him, that’s all. And then he started to get maudlin, whining that I wouldn’t care if he was dead, and Jonathon would never know his face, and – well, you can imagine.’
‘Yes,’ Slider said absently. ‘Did he say who the friend was, that he lunched with?’ Shake of the head. ‘Not a name? Or where he knew him from? Nothing about him at all? Or why anyone would want to kill him?’
‘No,’ she said. She raised her eyes to him guiltily. ‘I wish I’d asked him now. If I’d known there was anything in it, I’d have got it all out of him. But I was annoyed, and I thought he was being stupid, and – how was I to know?’
Guilt, regret, wish-I’d-been-nicer-to-him – it was a bugger, especially when mixed with the irritation one naturally felt towards a person who loved you more than you loved them.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Slider said. ‘But if you have any idea at all about who might have had a grudge against him, I’d be grateful to hear it. You probably knew him better than anyone, and you seem to me to be an observant and intelligent person.’ No harm in a bit of flannel. ‘Did he have any enemies? Was he involved in anything, or with anyone, that might lead him into danger?’
‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘but thinking about it, there was something about him. I’d noticed it before. A sort of – melancholy. As if he’d gone through something at some time in his life which had made him—’ She hesitated. ‘How can I put it? Desperate?’ She frowned, thinking. ‘You know the American soldiers who came back from Vietnam, who’d seen such terrible things they couldn’t adjust to normal life? A bit like that. I think something really bad had happened to him, so that afterwards he could never really come to grips with life.’
‘He seemed to want to come to grips with you and Jonathon.’
‘With Jonathon, maybe. I think perhaps he hoped the baby would make things all right for him again. But I’ve often thought that the way he drank, and gambled, and ran after women – it wasn’t just me, you know, by any means – was a sign of a deep unhappiness in him.’
‘It often is,’ Slider agreed cautiously. ‘But what has that to do with this threat on his life?’
‘Well, I don’t know, of course,’ she said with faint irritation. ‘But if he had some secret bad thing in his past life, they may be connected. In fact,’ she added with a burst of academic logic, ‘I should think they’d pretty well have to be, wouldn’t they? I mean, ordinary people don’t get murdered in mysterious circumstances, do they?’
‘How do you know the circumstances were mysterious?’ he asked, secretly amused.
She eyed him acutely. ‘I may read a lot of detective novels, but I do know that in real life the vast majority of murders are carried out by the victim’s nearest and dearest, usually the husband or wife. Isn’t that so?’
‘Yes,’ he said, broadly.
‘And if it was Betty Neal that killed him, you’d know.’ She shook her head suddenly. ‘Listen to me talking! I just can’t take it in, you know, that it’s Dick we’re talking about. Ordinary people don’t get murdered, not people one knows. It can’t be true. He’ll ring me up in a minute to tell me he’s coming down tomorrow and can I meet him for lunch.’
A few questions later, Slider stood to go. ‘If you think of anything, anything at all, however trivial it seems,’ he began, giving her his card.
‘Yes, I’ll call you,’ she finished for him.
‘Especially if you have any idea who the friend he met on Saturday might be.’
‘I’ll try to think. But I’m sure he didn’t say who it was.’
Slider eyed her curiously. ‘Do you think he believed it – the threat?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Looking back, yes, I think he did. That nervous laughter – I thought it was drink, but now—’ She shook her head.
‘Was that the last time you spoke to him?’
‘No, he phoned me on Sunday, to tell me he was sending me a cheque for Jonathon.’
‘How did he sound?’
‘Oh, just ordinary. A bit tired, perhaps. Not upset. We chatted a bit, but it wasn’t a long call. He sounded rather preoccupied.’
‘Did the cheque arrive?’
‘Yes, on Tuesday. It was larger than usual.’ She sighed. ‘I paid it in on my way to work. I suppose it won’t go through, though. They’ll have frozen his bank account, won’t they?’
‘Yes,’ said Slider, ‘I expect so.’ They moved towards the door. ‘Is there someone you can telephone, a friend or relative who can come and be with you? You probably shouldn’t be alone.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ she said almost absently. ‘I’ve lots of friends. It’s nice of you to worry, though,’ she added with faint surprise. The caring face of the Met, he thought. Well, we are wonderful, of course – and compared with the toughs of Sussex Constabulary, we’re furry white bunny rabbits.
‘By the way,’ he said, remembering at the last moment, ‘does the word mouthwash mean anything to you?’
‘You mean, other than—? No. Why?’
‘You never heard Mr Neal use it?’
‘No. Nothing like that.’
‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter,’ Slider said.
The sunlit world outside beckoned him. He’d always hated basements. Catriona Young stood framed by the darkness within, overgrown and pale and fleshy like the grass you find when you lift the groundsheet after a fortnight’s camping holiday. He thought of the large, pale baby, and wondered what sort of life it would have, growing up there, and with her for a mother. But then life was always a lottery, whatever you started with. The world’s a wheel o’ fortune, as O’Flaherty often said.
*
Joanna was leaning on the railings, staring at the sea. The sun was almost horizontal, and her eyes were screwed up against the dazzle.
‘Hullo! How was the Brighton Belle?’
‘Surprising.’
‘How?’
Slider picked one thing from the many. ‘She has a baby.’
‘Crikey,’ said Joanna after some silence. She turned her back on the sea, hitched herself up onto the top rail, tucked her feet behind the lower one for stability, and gave him her whole attention.
He placed his hands one either side of her and longed to bury himself in her up to his ears. She was so warm and furry and comfortable, like a favourite stuffed toy. She looked as though she’d never been near a basement in her life. He just wanted to grab handfuls of her and shove them in every available pocket in case of famine later.
Instead he told her about Catriona Young, and she listened with that childlike capacity of hers to concentrate absolutely on the thing before her.
‘She sounds utterly creepy. I begin to feel almost sorry for Tricky Dicky,’ she said at the end.
‘Only begin to? He seems to me to have been a sad, pathetic creature.’
‘Yes, but pathetic creatures so often cost other people dear.’
‘I think in the case of Catriona Young, she was using him more than he was using her. She wanted a baby without the complications of marriage, and poor old Dick Neal was the sucker she picked on.’
‘What’s she called Catriona for anyway?’ Joanna said with a belated burst of indignation. ‘Is she Scottish, or Irish?’
‘She didn’t seem to be.’
‘Well then! Stupid woman.’
‘It probably wasn’t her choice,’ he said, spreading reason on her slice of rough wholemeal irrationality.
‘I can see you didn’t like her. Are you lining her up for suspect?’
‘My not liking her doesn’t make her a murderer. She’s a lecturer in economics—’
‘Same thing, then,’ Joanna nodded reasonably. She jumped down from the rail and shoved a hand through his arm. ‘Let’s walk, I’m getting cold. What makes her a suspect?’
‘Nothing really. I don’t know. Only that some of her reactions didn’t quite ring true. I don’t think she was quite surprised enough that he was dead, for one thing.’
Joanna pressed his arm. ‘If she’s intelligent, as you say she is, she’d probably guessed before you told her.’
‘Yes. And I suppose it must be difficult to behave naturally if you believe someone’s analysing your every gesture.’
‘Like Basil Fawlty and the psychiatrists. Do you think she was right that Neal had a dire secret in his past?’
‘If he did, his wife doesn’t seem to know about it.’
‘Perhaps it was before he met her.’
‘They were married fifteen years. That’s going back a hell of along way.’
‘Pasts often do,’ she pointed out.
‘Still, wouldn’t he have told her about it? The wife of his bosom?’
‘Mrs Neal doesn’t sound as if she ever was the wife of his bosom – of his convenience, more like. Besides, if he was donning the motley to hide a broken heart, he wouldn’t tell anyone, least of all the person closest to him. And the sort of loud talking, loud laughing, hard drinking, one-of-the-boys types are usually covering up a deep chasm inside. Don’t you think it sounds as if there was something rather desperate about the way he savaged the pleasures of life?’
‘That’s pretty well what Catriona Young said,’ Slider said.
‘I expect we read the same sauce bottles. Have you finished here now?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Then let’s get the car and head off, and find a country pub. We’ll have a lovely pint of Harveys, and something nice and simple and English to eat, and then we’ll go home and make wild passionate love on the hearthrug. How does that sound?’
‘How did you get to be such an abandoned hussy?’ he asked sternly.
‘I practised. Nothing important was ever achieved without practice.’
‘Is being abandoned important?’
‘It’ll save your life,’ she advised him seriously.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rather Grimm
YOU CERTAINLY GOT TO TRAVEL in this job, Atherton thought as he cruised along the A40 interstate freeway back towards Hanger Lane. Yesterday, Park Royal – today, Perivale! A convertible Porsche which hadn’t noticed that the motorway had run out shot past him doing about a hundred and twenty. It had a notice in the rear window which said My other car is also a Porsche. Atherton had a brief spasm of longing for a uniform and a flashing blue light. Strange how motoring brought out the beast in everyone.
Perivale. What a magical name. The Vale of the Peris. He imagined Persian houris drifting gracefully through a smiling green valley in the heart of the English countryside. Then he looked at the arterial road hinterland around him and thought, perhaps not. There were other words beginning with those four letters. Perineum, for instance; peristalsis. Yes, that was getting closer. And perilous. Perhaps that was the closest, at least as far as Richard Neal had been concerned. Why couldn’t the horrible little man have conducted his amours in Paris or Picardy? To be dingy in a dingy place was unfair on those who came after you.
It was Norma who had found it, as she toiled through another drawerful of Nealorabilia. ‘Jim? Come and have a look at this.’
A billydoo, it was, from someone signing herself ‘pet’ on mauve paper with a little decoration of violets in the top right-hand corner. Looking over Norma’s shoulder, Atherton read it aloud.
‘Dearest Dickie, I waited until after ten, but you never showed up. I hope your all right – sic.’
‘Quite,’ said Norma.
‘Oh, that too,’ said Atherton, ‘I suppose something happening to stop you coming, well these things happen, as long as you still feel the same about me. I still feel the same about you. If you want to see me again, give me a ring at home but if Dave answers just say wrong number or something. Don’t get chatting because it makes me jealous when he can talk to you and I can’t. But not Monday, that’s when I go to the hairdressers, must keep myself looking beautiful for you, ha ha! Yours ever, Pet. Yeuch!’
‘Friend Neal sure knew how to pick ’em.’
‘Presumably she had other compensatory qualities,’ Atherton said. ‘But why did he keep this dangerous missive? It could hardly have been sentiment.’
Norma produced the envelope and turned it over. Written at an angle across the back was a telephone and extension number and B. Wiseman, 2.30 Monday 12th.
‘I’ve tried the number, and it’s a department of the civil service in Holborn,’ said Norma. ‘Wiseman is the establishments officer. The glamorous Pet sent this to Neal at work – see the address? – and presumably he took a phone call around the same time and wrote down the appointment on the first thing that came to hand.’
‘Yes, that sounds suitably haphazard,’ said Atherton. ‘The man was suicidally careless.’
‘I thought you might want to follow it up,’ Norma said. ‘If Pet of the Purple Prose was a current complication, she might know something about his movements and/or his friends.’
‘It could be recent. There was a Monday the twelfth last month,’ Atherton noted. ‘Unfortunately, the lady didn’t write her address at the top of the page, not even on the outside of the envelope in the Post Office Approved manner.’
Norma gave him a withering look. ‘Don’t be a stiff. If he knew Dave well enough for her to worry he might get chatting, he probably knew them as a couple, and if he did, there’s at least a sporting chance that Mrs N knew them as well.’
‘True, oh queen. I’ll give it a whack.’
Mrs Neal’s reaction was unexpectedly violent. ‘That slut! I don’t want to talk about her! Trying to turn me against my own husband. And trying to make trouble between Dick and Dave.’
‘How did she do that?’
‘She forced herself on him like a common – well, the word’s too good for her! He was always a soft-hearted man, too soft. He didn’t like hurting anyone’s feelings, and she knew it. She made it very difficult for him, too, with him and Dave being friends. But there was nothing in it as far as Dick was concerned – I knew that. She was just a troublemaker. I could se
e it at a glance.’
‘You met her, did you?’ Atherton asked when he could get a word in.
‘She came round to the house,’ Mrs Neal admitted, half angry, half sulky. ‘Painted hag, all in mauve, cheap jewellery, and hair out of a bottle if I know anything about it. She came banging on the door one evening, shouting and sobbing – had the neighbours at their windows right up and down the street. Threatening to kill herself. Dick had to go out there and quieten her down, or we’d have had the police round. He put her in his car and drove her home, and that was the end of that.’
‘Your husband had been having an affair with her?’
‘He had not!’ she said indignantly. ‘That was just what she said, trying to get attention. I could guess how it happened. She was attracted to him – most women were – and threw herself at him, and when he turned her down, she got mad and tried to get her own back by making trouble for him. I told her I knew my husband a little better than to think he’d do something like that. I thought she was mentally unbalanced actually. I told Dick he ought to warn Dave about her, but he didn’t want to upset him, because he said Dave thought the world of her. Anyway, he seemed to have put her off all right, because we never heard another thing out of her.’
‘So Dave was a friend of your husband’s? Did they see a lot of each other?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. They used to meet for drinks and things, and they played golf together up at the club sometimes.’ Oh? thought Atherton. ‘They worked together years ago, in insurance. Dave’s a rep at Newbury’s now.’
‘You’ve never mentioned him before,’ Atherton said patiently. ‘When we asked you about your husband’s friends—’
‘He had so many,’ she said impatiently. ‘Mostly they were just like Dave – people he’d worked with, and met for drinks now and then. I can’t remember them all. I told you, everyone liked him.’ Her voice wavered, and recovered. ‘I don’t think he saw much of Dave after that woman made her little scene. He didn’t mention him at home. I suppose he’d have felt embarrassed about it.’
‘And when was it, exactly, that Mrs Collins came round to your house?’
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