Dead End

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  About the Author

  Cynthia Harrod-Eagles was born and educated in Shepherd’s Bush, and had a variety of jobs in the commercial world, starting as a junior cashier at Woolworth’s and working her way down to Pensions Officer at the BBC. She won the Young Writers’ Award in 1973, and became a full-time writer in 1978. She is the author of over sixty successful novels to date, including thirty volumes of the Morland Dynasty series.

  Visit the author’s website at www.cynthiaharrodeagles.com

  Also by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  The Bill Slider Mysteries

  ORCHESTRATED DEATH

  DEATH WATCH

  NECROCHIP

  DEAD END

  BLOOD LINES

  KILLING TIME

  SHALLOW GRAVE

  BLOOD SINISTER

  GONE TOMORROW

  DEAR DEPARTED

  GAME OVER

  FELL PURPOSE

  BODY LINE

  The Dynasty Series

  THE FOUNDING

  THE DARK ROSE

  THE PRINCELING

  THE OAK APPLE

  THE BLACK PEARL

  THE LONG SHADOW

  THE CHEVALIER

  THE MAIDEN

  THE FLOOD-TIDE

  THE TANGLED THREAD

  THE EMPEROR

  THE VICTORY

  THE REGENCY

  THE CAMPAIGNERS

  THE RECKONING

  THE DEVIL’S HORSE

  THE POISON TREE

  THE ABYSS

  THE HIDDEN SHORE

  THE WINTER JOURNEY

  THE OUTCAST

  THE MIRAGE

  THE CAUSE

  THE HOMECOMING

  THE QUESTION

  THE DREAM KINGDOM

  THE RESTLESS SEA

  THE WHITE ROAD

  THE BURNING ROSES

  THE MEASURE OF DAYS

  THE FOREIGN FIELD

  THE FALLEN KINGS

  THE DANCING YEARS

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-751-53721-5

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  ALSO BY CYNTHIA HARROD-EAGLES

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Days of Woes and Rises

  When Detective Superintendent ‘Mad Ivan’ Barrington of Shepherd’s Bush nick told you he would make your life a misery unless you accepted a transfer out of his station, you defied him at your peril. As the fount of all paperwork he was in a position to pour out upon you an unending stream of department fertilizer.

  Today, for instance, Detective Inspector Bill Slider had been trapped at his desk all morning with a dizzyingly uninteresting report on the connection between stress and absenteeism, which Barrington had given him to précis on a most-urgent basis. As a result, Slider went up so late to lunch that he got the last portion of the ‘home-made’ lasagne, which had set like crusted rubber in the corner of the oven dish. It was cool, but he dared not ask for it to be heated up again for fear of what it might do to his teeth. Still, the alternative was shepherd’s pie, and he’d tried that once.

  ‘Chips with it, love?’

  ‘Yes please.’ What other comfort was there in life for a man whose wife and lover had both left him? He sighed, and the canteen helper looked at him tenderly. He had the kind of ruffled, sad-puppy looks that made women want to cosset him.

  ‘I’ll give you extra chips, ’cause you had the last bit and it’s a bit small.’ She shovelled the chips on cosily. ‘Gravy, dear?’ she asked, already pouring, and then passed his plate over with her thumb planted firmly in the brown bit; but by the time he got to a table the thumbprint had filled in so you could hardly tell. He didn’t like gravy on chips – or on lasagne actually – but she had given him extra of that, too, out of compassion. Why did all the wrong people find him irresistible? And he still hadn’t finished the report. Mournfully he folded it open beside his plate, speared the driest chip he could see, and continued reading.

  Research suggests that disorders with psychosomatic components – headache, indigestion, constipation, diarrhoea, high blood pressure and ulcers – are more frequent among police officers than among citizens generally. What an attractive bunch they sounded, to be sure. He skipped down. What constitutes stress? the report asked him in a coy subheading. He was pretty sure it was going to tell him so he didn’t answer, and in a minute it did, with an angst league-table two pages long. Being Taken Hostage by Terrorists came in at number one, followed by Confronting a Person with a Gun. No surprises there. Ah, here was a little light relief, though: Being Caught Making a Mistake was apparently more stressful than Seeing Mutilated Bodies or Having to Deal with a Messy Car Accident. Still, anyone regularly eating in a police canteen got used to dealing with messy accidents.

  He pushed the report aside. Was this a fair punishment on a man for refusing to go away and play somewhere else? It wasn’t even his fault that he had got so terminally up Barrington’s nose. While investigating the chip-shop murder back in May, he had uncovered unsavoury facts about Barrington’s former boss who was also, unfortunately for Slider, Barrington’s lifelong hero. A man can forgive many things, but not being robbed of his dreams. There was nothing Barrington could do in the disciplinary way, since Slider had only been doing his job, so he had suggested, with all the menace at his command, that Slider should accept a promotion to Chief Inspector and move to Pinner station. Slider had known that he was asking for it when he refused, but that didn’t mean he had to like it when he got it.

  Of course, the promotion and transfer to Pinner would have meant a pay rise, and money was always an object; but he had never wanted to be a DCI anyway, and he didn’t fancy going to an outer station, where life moved at a more leisurely pace. Why, at Pinner they regularly won the Metropolitan Police Beautiful Window-Box competition: they probably had time to read reports like this every day. He liked inner stations like Shepherd’s Bush, where you were kept busy. A man needed a stable home-life to be able to cope with the opportunities for introspection left by a slower pace at work, and these days his home-life was about as stable as Michael Jackson’s face.

  He abandoned the report, sawed a section off the lasagne, and pulled out of his pocket a handbill given to him that morning by his bagman, Detective Sergeant Jim Atherton. It was a flyer for a concert that evening to be given in a local church, St Augustine’s, Addison Gardens. A Mahler symphony with a seriously famous conductor, Sir Stefan Radek. Slider was not, like Atherton, a great classical music buff, though he liked some of the famous pieces – Tchaikovsky and Beethoven and The Planets, that sort of thing. The only bit of Mahler he’d ever heard he’d thought s
ounded like an MGM film-track, which was all right in a cinema but not what you’d want to sit through a whole concert of. But the real point here, the reason Atherton had told him about it at all, was that the Royal London Philharmonic – the orchestra which was doing the concert – was the one in which Joanna was a violinist.

  Joanna, his lost love. Two and half years ago he had met her while he was on a case, and had – in the police jargon – gone overboard, with a resounding splash. He had been married then for nearly fourteen years and had never even considered being unfaithful before, believing that promises once made should not be broken and wives once chosen should not be forsaken. But he seemed not to be able to help himself, and for two years he had wrestled with guilt and responsibility, desperate to marry Joanna but unable to find a way to tell Irene, his wife, that he wanted to leave her. The worst of all possible worlds for all of them. At last, after a particularly humiliating evening, Joanna had broken it off with him, and had since steadfastly refused to re-attach it.

  The really hideous irony was that it was just after Joanna had chucked him that Barrington had suggested, with more than a hint of broken arms about it, that Slider should move to Pinner, which was just down the road from Ruislip and the marital home – ‘So nice and handy for you,’ Barrington had said menacingly; and Slider for the sake of peace and pension enhancement was on the brink of accepting it as a wise career move, when Irene had announced she was leaving him. He must have had a really horrible conjunction of his ruling planets for these blows all to have fallen together. And it was a sad fact that in his whole life he had only ever been involved with two women, and they had both dropped him in short succession. He’d been left so comprehensively he felt like the slice of cucumber in the garnish on a pub sandwich.

  And now Joanna, the lost and longed-for, was playing in a concert just down the road.

  ‘It would be a chance to see her,’ Atherton had said beguilingly when he gave Slider the leaflet. ‘A chance to talk to her.’

  ‘But she doesn’t want to talk to me,’ Slider had replied. ‘She said so.’

  ‘You don’t have to take her word for it. Anyway, Radek conducting Mahler is not to be missed. You know he’s the world authority on Mahler?’

  ‘What’s he conducting in a church in Shepherd’s Bush for, then?’ Slider objected.

  ‘I think it’s for the restoration fund. He lives just down the road, in Holland Park Avenue. It’s a beautiful church,’ Atherton added coaxingly.

  ‘Is it?’ Slider said unhelpfully.

  ‘And they’re rehearsing there this afternoon. Two-thirty to five-thirty.’

  Sitting over his cooling lasagne, Slider contemplated the scenario Atherton had been urging on him. The shift ended at four, and unless something came up Slider would be free then. He could stroll down to the church, quite casually, take a look in, wait until they finished rehearsing and then bump into Joanna accidentally on her way out. ‘Oh, hello. Fancy a drink? They’re just open.’ But what if she refused? She had told him she didn’t want to see him again, and inviting public humiliation was no way to run a life.

  No, he thought, sighing. Better not. He had a lot to do, anyway. There were two more survey reports on his desk for when he’d finished this one, and the car crime statistics to update. He gazed with digestive despair at the lasagne, which had withdrawn reproachfully, like a snubbed woman, under a cloak of hardening gravy. In any case, the jumbo dogknob ’n’ beans he had consumed in the canteen for breakfast still lay sad and indigestible in a pool of grease somewhere under his ribs, and he didn’t think he ought to add to his problems at this stage. He pushed his chair back and headed for the door, and almost ran into Mackay.

  ‘Oh, there you are, guv.’ Mackay’s face was alight with pleasure: something wonderful must have happened. ‘There’s been a shooting in that big church in Addison Gardens, Saint Whatsisname’s – one dead. It just came in from the emergency services. Some celeb’s got taken out. Right on our ground, too! Luck, eh?’

  Slider went cold with fright. ‘Anyone else hurt?’ he heard himself ask.

  ‘All we’ve got is that there was a single shot fired, one body, and chummy got away.’

  ‘All right. I’m on my way. Where’s Atherton?’

  ‘He’s already gone, guv,’ Mackay called after his disappearing back.

  Atherton was waiting for him out in the yard. Svelte, elegant, creaseless of suit, wearer of silk socks and an aftershave you could only smell when you got close up, outwardly Atherton was nothing like a detective. He and Slider had worked together for a long time now, and Atherton was the nearest thing Slider had to a friend. He was an able man who dissipated his abilities and was far too dedicated to enjoying himself to get on in his career. If he hadn’t been so intellectually lazy, he could have been Commissioner by now. If he hadn’t been incurably honest, he could have been a top politician.

  ‘We’ll go in my car, shall we?’ he said. ‘It’s hell to park up there.’

  ‘Oh, you heard about it, then.’

  ‘I heard.’ He gave Slider a quick look and said nothing more until he had edged the car out into the stream of traffic. It wasn’t too bad at this time of day – not much of a challenge to a man who loved driving. Not that you could do much real driving in a Ford anyway. He’d really like an Aston Martin, but apart from the price there was the parking problem. In London there was no point in driving anything you would mind getting nicked.

  Slider had not spoken, and Atherton glanced sideways at him and had little difficulty in guessing his thoughts. There was not much he didn’t know about his guv’nor’s home-life, and what he knew he’d never celebrated. That Slider had been married to the wrong woman for sixteen years was bad enough: Irene had no sense of humour and thought that food was something you had to have to stay alive, a combination in Atherton’s eyes so unfortunate as to be bizarre. Add to that the fact that the marital home was on an estate in Ruislip, and Atherton had thought things could not get worse for his boss; but getting worse is what things notoriously specialise in. The situation at the moment was, in technical language, a right bugger.

  ‘How are things in the green belt these days?’ he asked sympathetically.

  Slider didn’t look at him. ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.’

  ‘It was rotten luck,’ Atherton said. ‘Ironies of fate, and all that.’

  Ironies indeed, Slider thought, running on a now-familiar track. He wouldn’t have minded so much if Irene had run off with an Italian waiter or a hunky young milkman, but she had left him for her bridge partner, who was the most boring man who had ever lived. Ernie Newman had the dynamic personality of a man slipping in and out of coma: he had once been a member of Northwood Golf Club but had found the place too swinging for him.

  But Irene liked him: he was retired on an enormous company pension and he moved amidst the Volvo set she so admired.

  ‘He’s always there. He can spend time with me,’ Irene had said; as succinct a commentary on the loneliness of a copper’s wife as Slider had ever heard. And when he had protested about Ernie’s dullness: ‘I’ve had enough of excitement,’ she had said. ‘I want a man who thinks I’m exciting.’ Even in their courting days Slider had never thought Irene exciting. She had always been neat, proper, unimaginative and conventional; but he had to admit that next to Ernie she was Catherine the Great.

  She had taken the two children and left Slider in occupation of the house, the ranch-style, modern executive albatross which he had always hated with the pungency of a man who loved architecture forced to live with picture windows and an open-plan staircase. He had only bought it because it was the kind of thing she liked, and she, after all, would have to spend more time in it than him. That was irony for you!

  Ernie Newman, a widower, had a five-bedroom detached house in Chalfont, so there was plenty of room for Irene and the children. She had always wanted to live somewhere like Chalfont. And Ernie was going to pay for Matthew and Kate to go to priva
te school, which was something Irene had long hankered after. Ernie had never had any children of his own – Mavis couldn’t, apparently – so he was looking forward to being a father-by-proxy, Irene said. All Slider’s masculine instincts had got up on their hind legs at that point, but the concealed knowledge of his own guilt had made it impossible for him to attack. Irene had never found out about Joanna.

  And Joanna wouldn’t have him back, despite the fact that he was now free. Irony number two. He had more irony than a man with a steel plate in his head. The events of this summer had left him utterly at a loss. What on earth was he supposed to do with the rest of his life? Even work was not enough to fill the void. His sanguine temperament had previously found satisfaction even in the routine plod which made up so much of the job; but burglaries, TDAs, possession and the rest of the malarky had no power now to rouse him from his puzzled misery. He knew as a Christian he ought not to rejoice in murder, but there was nothing like a big case for ‘taking you out of yourself’, as his mother used to say.

  ‘So how did you know they would be rehearsing this afternoon?’ he asked as they rounded the end of Shepherd’s Bush Green.

  ‘Joanna told me, of course.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Slider resisted the urge to ask where and why Atherton had been talking to Joanna. He had no rights over either of them, and certainly had no right to feel bugged that, having given him the chuck, she continued the friendship with Atherton which only existed because she had been Slider’s lover. He turned his mind resolutely away from his own problems.

  ‘I suppose it is Sir Stefan Radek who’s been shot? Mackay just said “some big celeb”.’

  ‘That’s all I heard too. There isn’t a soloist, so presumably it’s Radek,’ Atherton said.

  Radek was one of the few serious musicians who had crossed over into general, man-in-the-street fame. He’d even been on tv, Slider remembered. He’d had that series last year, Classics for Idiots or whatever it was called, explaining the difference between a concerto and a double-bass with the help of computer graphics and a popular comedian to make it all user-friendly. And now somebody had shot him. That’d teach him to go slumming. All Slider knew about Radek came from a cheery little spoonerism Joanna had told him one night after a concert. ‘What’s the difference between Radek and Radox? Radox bucks up the feet.’ He remembered, too, after another concert when she had been seething about the conductor’s iniquities (not Radek, though, someone else), she’d said that if he were found murdered that night there’d be eighty-odd suspects in the orchestra alone. ‘Half of us would put our hands up out of sheer gratitude.’ She’d been joking, of course; but it made you think. Somebody evidently thought the only good conductor was a dead one, and was prepared to do something about it as well.