Dead End

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Atherton thought it was a nice change to investigate amongst people whose houses didn’t smell of urine,’ he finished, ‘but I’ve found it depressing to see how badly all these people have behaved, people who ought to know better. Casual sin and casual lawbreaking – drugs, embezzlement, greed, adultery, murder – looting their way through life and dropping the litter behind them like tourists. Not one person’s shown any compassion or had one thought to anyone else. It was just me, me, me.’

  ‘All sin is selfishness. And selfishness is the root of all sin,’ she said.

  He gave her a tired smile. ‘Oh, and by the way, Atherton told me to remind you you were wrong – about the murderer not being a musician.’

  ‘He’d better not bank on collecting. Maybe Polowski didn’t do it,’ she said. ‘Maybe it was Marcus all along, and he was only covering for him.’

  ‘No, no, it was Lev Polowski who pulled the trigger all right.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘No, that’s my line. You sounded as if you wanted to say “but”. Is there something funny about it?’

  ‘How well you know me.’ He sighed. ‘There’s lots that’s funny about it. I know we’ve got the right man and he’s confessed of his own free will, but I just don’t feel right with this case. There’s something unsatisfying about it – like watching a film where the hero and heroine meet in a restaurant, and they keep loading the forks, but you never see the food go down. Nobody’s actually chewing and swallowing.’

  ‘All right.’ She swivelled round to sit cross-legged facing him. ‘Go through it with me, then, item by item. What doesn’t feel right?’

  ‘Well, to begin with, there’s the question of why Buster didn’t recognise Lev.’

  ‘He was a long way away, and it was dark,’ Joanna said. ‘Remember we were sitting under the lights – you can’t see out into darkness. And Buster had no reason even to look that way until after the shot was fired.’

  ‘Oh, I know. I didn’t mean that. But the description of the murderer included his small size, the duffel coat and the hat. Now wouldn’t you have thought that would ring a bell?’

  ‘Why should he know anything about Polowski’s wardrobe?’

  ‘He’d called on him just the day before. And duffel coats aren’t that common any more.’

  ‘Maybe he wouldn’t know that. But probably he wouldn’t even think of it. With the shock of the shooting itself, and then he’s been devastated with grief ever since – he’s hardly in a state to ponder sartorial niceties.’

  ‘You sounded just like Atherton then. All right, I accept that – but then why didn’t he tell me that Lev had called at the house on Tuesday? He mentioned Marcus and Alec Coleraine, and when I said was there anyone else, anyone at all of any description, he said no.’

  ‘Forgot, maybe. People do.’

  ‘Forgot? Marcus had, in his own words, “wound Radek up”. They were about to go out and already late, and there’s another interruption, and an emotional scene, and Keaton doesn’t remember it, even when prompted?’

  ‘Well then, why do you think he didn’t mention it?’ she asked Socratically.

  ‘I don’t know. I wish I did.’ He sipped his wine thoughtfully, and she took the opportunity to go out to the kitchen and check on the oven. When she came back, he said, ‘Polowski says Radek looked ill when he got up on the platform. Did you think so? Did you notice anything in particular?’

  She frowned. ‘Well, I told you he was sweating a lot, but he always did. Maybe it was more than usual. He wiped his face with his handkerchief before he began. I don’t know. It all happened so quickly, and I wasn’t really looking at him to notice him. He wasn’t a man to gaze at.’

  ‘Lev gazed at him. He said his behaviour was different from usual.’

  ‘So what are you trying to suggest – that he knew he was going to be shot? But that wouldn’t alter the fact that he was shot, would it? I mean, that is a fact, isn’t it? You took a bullet out of him?’

  ‘Not me personally. Jenkins the pathologist did, though. I wish it had been Freddie.’

  ‘Why, don’t you trust this new one?’

  ‘He hasn’t got so much experience. Maybe he missed something.’

  ‘But I thought he had more firearms experience. Wasn’t that his specialist area?’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Well, then. I don’t understand what the problem is.’

  ‘Nor do I really,’ he said ruefully. ‘Maybe I’m hungry.’

  ‘There’s always that,’ she agreed. ‘Combined with the fact that your life has been turned upside down recently, and you’ve been working long hours and probably not sleeping much.’

  ‘And I haven’t even told the worst yet. Mad Ivan wants to be friends with me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He asked me if we could start again with a clean slate, and then he invited me to dinner.’

  She smiled slowly. ‘And you chose me! Well, I need never doubt again.’

  He reached out a hand for her. There was some extremely urgent unfinished business rushing about his bloodstream. ‘We don’t have to eat now, do we?’

  ‘Yes, we definitely do. Try to be a little sophisticated. Anticipation is half the dish – didn’t Sophocles say that?’

  ‘I doubt it. He was Greek, wasn’t he?’

  Atherton lay on his back feeling – feeling – well, feeling like he’d never felt before, actually. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  Sue turned onto her elbow and looked at him over her plump shoulder like a partridge hiding behind a pink rock. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘There’ll be plenty of other times.’

  ‘It’s never happened to me before,’ he said with a voice driven by humiliation.

  ‘It has to me,’ she said. He glanced at her, unwilling to meet her eyes in case it was embarrassing.

  ‘Has it?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s not a contest, you know.’ She wriggled herself into a more comfortable position. ‘The difficulty is knowing what to say. After all, if I say it doesn’t matter it sounds as if I’m not disappointed, and if I say I’m disappointed, it sounds as if I’m blaming you. It’s a bit like time travel, really. The danger is not that you might come face to face with yourself, but what on earth you’d find to talk about with someone who knows all your best lines.’

  He grinned unwillingly. ‘You really are a complete nut.’

  ‘I know,’ she said complacently. ‘Did I dream it, or was there some of that pudding left?’

  He sat up doubtfully. ‘You want it now?’

  She sat up too, the sheet miraculously continuing to cover her breasts just as if she was in a movie. ‘Why not? It’s the second most indecent thing I can think of to do at the moment. Can I have it in here, out of the serving bowl?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. He felt quite relieved. At least he knew he could cook. It was a mystery really, why he’d failed; and it wasn’t because he hadn’t really fancied Sue – after all, they’d been bouncing the springs every spare moment since they met.

  He opened the bedroom door and Oedipus shot in and jumped up onto the bed, giving him an affronted look over his shoulder. He stalked up to Sue with his tail straight up like a broomstick and began rubbing himself against her, purring like a geiger counter. She laughed and looked up at Atherton. ‘That’ll learn you!’

  ‘Nothing of the sort,’ Atherton said. ‘He’s just showing his good taste.’ Their eyes met and he felt better. He really, really liked her. More than anyone else he’d met in years.

  He began to turn away to go to the kitchen and she said casually, as if quite at random, ‘Did you ever sleep with Joanna?’

  He stopped very still. His back was to her so she couldn’t see his face, and the pause seemed to go on for a very long time.

  ‘No,’ he said at last.

  ‘Well, that’s okay then,’ she said lightly. He forced himself to turn and look at her, to find out the worst, but she was smiling an
all-embracing smile of perfect understanding. He felt comforted and comfortable, as if he’d been to confession and had all his sins cancelled.

  ‘Bring two spoons,’ she said.

  Slider woke with a violent jerk. His head had fallen right back onto the arm of the chesterfield, and his neck hurt. He sat up, bewildered, met Joanna’s eyes, and found the memory of a recent gigantic snore sculling about his brain. It must have been the noise of it that woke him.

  ‘You fell asleep,’ she said kindly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said thickly. ‘Bad manners.’

  ‘It’s all right. You’re tired and full of good things, and it’s warm in here.’ She eyed him curiously. ‘Were you having a dream? You were twitching and muttering.’

  His absent brain cells started to ooze back into their usual crevices. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was – yes, I remember now! I was playing in your orchestra. We were doing a concert.’

  ‘What were you playing?’ she asked, amused.

  ‘The trumpet.’

  ‘You can’t play the trumpet.’

  ‘I can’t play anything, but it was all right in the dream. I knew I could play it all right. That wasn’t the problem. There I was sitting at the back with the others and—’ He frowned. ‘Oh yes, I remember, the problem was that I had the wrong music in front of me. Any minute the conductor was going to start waving his hands and I’d have to play, and I knew my bit wouldn’t fit in with everybody else’s.’

  ‘That’s what you were muttering, I think – “It won’t fit, it won’t fit.”’ She looked at him patiently, seeing by his frown that he was far away in thought. His hair was ruffled, his eyes bloodshot, the muscles of his face slack with tiredness. A fine stubble was just beginning to show at this distance from this morning’s shave, and she could see that if he grew a beard now quite a bit of it would be grey. She had one of those infrequent moments of seeing him whole and separate, something complete and absolutely outside herself, as if he were rimmed with light; and she loved him so hugely she could only sigh, as one sighs sometimes with pain. That was why he’d gone on pursuing her in spite of her best efforts, she thought: because, being logical and clear-sighted, he saw that being apart wouldn’t stop them feeling like that about each other, so there was no point to it. She was going to have to accept love with all its inconveniences, and she had a moment of panic, because she’d got used to living on her own and liked her independence, and the safety that came along with it. But on the other hand, there was a sort of reprehensibly girly excitement about the thought of setting up home together and doing the things ordinary people did, like choosing wallpaper and buying carpets and deciding where to go for their summer holidays. Doing things with Bill. Alice in Magazineland. Suddenly she felt like crying.

  He came back from his long journey. ‘Jo, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to go,’ he said. He looked at her with such tentative apprehension, as though he thought it might be rolling-pin time again, that any indignation she might have felt expired in a puddle of amusement.

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘I’ve got to go back to the station. I need to have all the papers to hand.’

  ‘It’s the case, is it? Is there something wrong?’

  ‘It doesn’t fit,’ he said. ‘There’s something that doesn’t fit. I’ve just got to go over it again and—’ He was away with his thoughts again. Joanna got up and went silently to fetch his coat. She thrust it into his arms and turned him towards the door.

  ‘Go,’ she said. ‘And drive carefully.’

  ‘I’m sorry to mess up your evening,’ he began, trying to look over his shoulder at her.

  ‘Your evening too. It’s all right, I understand.’

  ‘I’ll make it up to you.’

  ‘I know you will. Just promise me one thing? Phone me later – when you can, when you’ve something to tell me.’ She reached past him to open the door, and he turned in the confined space and kissed her.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. And went.

  Seven o’clock in the morning is usually a quiet time in a police station. The CID office is unmanned, night shift ending at six and early shift not coming on until eight. Slider lifted his head from the sea of papers and looked towards the windows, seeing the early sky pale and sunless, hearing the morning traffic getting into its stride along Uxbridge Road. He picked up the telephone and dialled.

  ‘Freddie! I’m sorry to bother you so early. Oh good. Did you have a nice holiday? Well, it’s something that happened while you were away. Oh, you heard about that? No, I don’t know that there’s anything wrong, exactly, but I wondered if you’d have a look at the PM report for me. I don’t want to say until you’ve looked at it – I want your unbiased opinion. If I fax it to you now, could you look at it right away and ring me back? Yes, I know, but I do think it’s important. All right. Thanks a lot. I’ll go and do it right now. Thanks, Freddie. Bye.’

  It was almost eight o’clock when Cameron called back. ‘You were a long time,’ Slider said.

  ‘My dear old boy, you didn’t expect me to sit and read your blasted report in my skivvies, did you? I had to bath and shave and dress, and then I read it while I had my breakfast.’

  ‘Breakfast,’ Slider said in a mixture of exasperation and longing. The spag bol of sacred memory was now a long way in the past.

  ‘Certainly breakfast. Martha promised me kedgeree this morning. Only a certified madman passes up on Martha’s kedgeree.’ Even his voice was replete, Slider thought bitterly. ‘Anyway, I’m here now. What’s the problem with this PM?’

  ‘Do you think the conclusion is all right. The cause of death?’

  ‘I didn’t examine the body, old chum. But it looks all right to me. Laddo James knows what he’s doing. I don’t know much about him personally, but his reputation is certainly sound.’

  ‘But the bullet – it was hardly more than a flesh wound. It was at extreme range and it damaged no organs. Could it really have caused his death?’

  ‘Let’s be accurate: it was the shock that caused his death, and there’s nothing surprising about that. He was an old man. Shock is a very individual thing. You can never be sure how it will affect people.’

  ‘But Radek was very fit, and there was nothing wrong with his heart. Look, Freddie, you’re a bit of a music buff. You know how healthy conductors usually are.’

  ‘Yes, I know. They do tend to live for ever. I grant that on the surface it may seem surprising that such an unimportant wound should have led to his death, but as I said, shock acts very idiosyncratically.’

  ‘All right,’ Slider said, changing foot, ‘but then there’s something else. The cadaveric spasm. His left hand was clutching the neck of his jumper, his right hand was clenched on nothing.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Just visualise it, will you, Freddie? He’s standing there in front of the orchestra waiting to begin, with his baton in his right hand, his left hand poised in the air. There’s a loud bang and he’s struck in the lower back by a bullet, and in the emotion of the terrible shock he clutches at his sweater so violently that the spasm remains after death, but he drops his stick.’

  There was a silence at the other end. ‘Yes, I see what you mean. It is odd.’

  ‘He must have dropped the stick before the death spasm. If it was the shot caused the spasm, why did he drop it?’

  ‘I don’t know, chum. Is this leading where I think it’s leading?’

  ‘Is it possible,’ Slider said, ‘that it wasn’t the bullet that killed him?’

  ‘I keep telling you, what killed him was the syncope.’

  ‘All right, is it possible that something else caused the syncope? Could James have missed something?’

  ‘It’s possible, old boy, anything’s possible. But are you suggesting the shooting was a belt-and-braces job, or just an accidental concurrence? For someone to have shot him at that precise moment would be a bit of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Coincidences are coincide
ntal. That’s the thing about them. Anyway, the man who fired the shot says it was the surprise of seeing Radek fall that made him pull the trigger.’

  ‘Sounds a bit thin to me.’

  ‘But it’s medically possible?’

  ‘It’s possible. So what are you thinking?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, only that I can’t make it come out straight as it is. There’s the cadaveric spasm. There’s the fact that the gunman – and I admit he’s not the most reliable witness – says Radek fell before he pulled the trigger. And there’s the way he fell, too – he crumpled forward quite gently, didn’t even knock over the music stand. If you’d been hit in the back by a bullet, wouldn’t you arch backwards? Wouldn’t you automatically clutch at it?’

  ‘One would have thought so, yes. But I’ve never tried it, so I can’t swear to it.’

  ‘What else could have caused the syncope, Freddie?’

  ‘Well, some other kind of shock or insult. Something that attacked the central nervous system. A virus or a bacterial invasion could do it. Or some kind of toxin. Did he drug?’

  ‘Apparently, but not to excess. I don’t think it’s likely he took anything of that sort beforehand, though. It wasn’t his way – he took stuff afterwards to wind down. But he might have taken something medicinal. He was a bit of a hypochondriac.’

  ‘Accidental poisoning, then. Were there any symptoms?’

  ‘No,’ Slider said uncertainly. ‘Not really. We’ve one witness says he looked unwell, another says he was sweating a lot, but nothing concrete. But even if they were symptoms, he was apparently all right up to about five minutes beforehand.’

  ‘It could be a quick-acting toxin, with or without the added insult of the bullet – given his age, even though he was fit, the combination might bring on a syncope before any strong symptoms developed.’

  ‘But if he was poisoned,’ Slider said, ‘wouldn’t it leave post mortem signs?’

  ‘Not necessarily to the naked eye. But all poisons are detectable in one way or another.’