Game Over

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Right, boss, that reg number you gave me belonged to a Renault Clio that was scrapped last month. Registered owner was a Brian Delaney, address in Rodney Road, Lambeth, got it for his eighteenth birthday and totalled it on the Old Kent Road the day after. I spoke to his dad. He sounded genuine. Want me to chase up where the wreck went?’

  Slider shook his head. ‘It’s easy enough for someone to get the information and use the reg number without involving the wrecking yard. The important thing is that the number doesn’t match the car, which means there was something going on.’

  She didn’t know why he was asking about the car, of course, and looked at him receptively. When he didn’t immediately go on, she said, ‘I also checked on black Focuses stolen in the last three months. There were six in the Met area, and one, stolen from an address in Isleworth, had tinted windows. But it didn’t have any damage on the rear quarter. D’you want the details?’ She gestured to the papers in her hand.

  He shook his head again, but it was in thought rather than negation. He said, ‘You’d better let the stolen cars unit know that it might be operating under that reg number. And put out an all-units – if it’s spotted anywhere, they can bring it in. But I don’t think it’s going to be that easy. He may well have more numbers. Have you got the mobile phone dump yet?’

  ‘They’ve not come back on it yet. I’ll chase them up,’ Norma said. ‘Can I know what it is, boss?’

  ‘I’ll tell everyone,’ Slider said. ‘Give me ten minutes and I’ll be out for a rundown on what we’ve got so far.’

  When he was alone, he took another mouthful of sandwich and dialled Joanna’s number. ‘Hello, Inspector,’ she answered him before he spoke. She had number recognition, of course.

  The sound of her voice gave him a frisson, as always, and he reflected how lucky he was to have found his soulmate against all the odds. He had been married fairly joylessly to Irene for fourteen years but, being the sort of person he was, he hadn’t been looking for anyone else. A promise was a promise in his book, and he had meant to stick by her and do his best to be a good husband. It wasn’t her fault they had grown apart. But then he had met Joanna and everything became instantly different. It had plunged him into a tornado of troubles, doubts and self-loathing as he tried to square his sense of duty towards Irene and the children with the visceral conviction that his life lay with Joanna. Well, they had been through some difficult places on the rocky road to divorce, Irene’s remarriage, and the present blissful state of Joanna’s expecting their first child, but in all the turbulence the one thing that had never wavered was his conviction that he and Joanna were meant to be together and would get through it somehow.

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked, hearing sounds of conversation in the background.

  ‘The Spotted Dog,’ she said. ‘I’ve taken Mum and Dad out for a pub lunch. Madly gay, isn’t it? I love the way they’ve branched out since Dad retired. Eating out was completely unthought of when I was a kid.’

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re still agitating about the wedding,’ she said. ‘I keep telling them that it’s a matter of finding the time to do it, but they narrow their eyes and look sceptical. They think you’re trying to wriggle out of your responsibilities.’

  ‘If only they knew, I’m desperately trying to wriggle in,’ Slider said sadly.

  ‘I know. I tell them that. They’ll understand one day,’ she said. ‘They want us to call the baby Derek after Dad’s father.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘I thought that would prove a nice counter-irritant,’ she chuckled.

  ‘What if it’s a girl?’ he asked flinchingly. Did he have a vague memory that the paternal grandmother had been named Gladys?

  ‘Rebecca,’ said Joanna.

  ‘Oh. How come?’

  ‘Heroine in a book Mum’s reading. She thought it was a pretty name. They can’t understand why we don’t want to know which sex it is, given that we can.’

  ‘Very modern of them. Look, I can’t really chat, I haven’t got long.’

  ‘I know, you must be busy.’ The shout had come in before she left. ‘Is it awful?’

  ‘I’ll tell you about it when I see you. But, listen, something else has come up.’ And he told her briefly about Trevor Bates ringing him.

  When he had finished she said, ‘Is it serious? I mean, is he really likely to do anything?’ Slider hesitated before answering, only so as to assemble his words carefully, but she misunderstood and said, ‘Please don’t just tell me not to worry. I want to know the truth. We’re in this together, you know – all three of us.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to hide anything from you,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s just that I really don’t know how serious it is. He wants to frighten me, that’s plain enough. Whether he’d go any further I simply don’t know. But I don’t want you to worry, and I do want you to be careful.’

  ‘Careful how?’ she said. She sounded a bit bleak. It was not a nice thing to have dumped on you – and she had the baby to worry about as well. The world had become hostile and comfortless, and who was to help them now?

  ‘When you come back today, come to the station first, and we’ll go home together.’

  ‘Oh. It’s that bad, is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, frustrated. ‘I wish I did.’

  She heard the strain in his voice and hastened to take up the slack. ‘All right, I’ll see you later. Don’t worry about me – you’ve got enough to be going on with.’

  Out in the main office, DS Hollis was back and was marking up the whiteboard. He was a laconical Mancunian with a scrawny moustache and pale green eyes like bottled gooseberries, but despite his odd appearance – or perhaps because of it – he had a wonderful way of getting witnesses to trust him and tell him All. He was always office manager by default, because he didn’t mind doing it and everyone else did, but Slider sometimes thought it was a bit of a waste of his talents.

  Swilley and Atherton had their heads together in a serious and sotto-voce conversation, and from their glances upwards when he came in he guessed they were talking about him. But he was so glad to see them getting on together after the tensions in the past that he didn’t mind being the cause. Hart had brought in the first heap of statements and Mackay, the office swot, was stolidly working his way through them; while McLaren, the face that lunched on a thousand chips, was stolidly working his way through a Ginsters Mexican Chicken Wrap, which he was eating cold straight from the packet, the shiny sauce smearing his mouth like gloss lipstick.

  ‘Right,’ Slider said. ‘Ed Stonax.’ They all looked up. ‘First of all I have to tell you that there is a complete embargo on speaking to the press. That means any form of news media, and it means all of you. They’re going to be all over you—’

  ‘They’ve been ringing up already, guv,’ Hart said.

  ‘I’m not surprised. But you do not give them anything, repeat anything.’ He looked round the room and noted Fathom’s expression of insouciance along with his slight pinkness of complexion.

  Fathom, meeting the boss’s eyes reluctantly, said, ‘What are we supposed to say if they ask us stuff?’

  ‘You say no comment. Can you repeat that? Two words, no comment. Say it.’

  Fathom, realising he meant it, muttered sheepishly, ‘No comment.’

  ‘Good. Now, anything to report?’

  Hart said, ‘I had a long chat with the next door neighbours, guv. Mr and Mrs Arbuthnot.’

  ‘Yes, I saw that.’

  ‘They never heard nothing.’

  ‘That’s a surprise,’ said Swilley.

  ‘Ooh, irony! You could put someone’s eye out with that,’ said Atherton.

  ‘They have their wireless on a lot,’ said Hart said imperturbably. ‘That’s what they call it, love ’em. But they did say that when they didn’t have it on, they could hear him typing through the walls.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be normal? He was a journalist,’ Ho
llis said.

  ‘Yeah, but he’s been doing an awful lot of it lately. They always could hear him when he was working, because his desk is against the party wall, but they said for about the last week or ten days he was always at it. Whenever they turned off the radio they could hear him, and in the night, too. Like a death-watch beetle, Mr A said – whatever that is.’

  ‘A parasitical beetle that chews wood and destroys churches and makes a clicking noise,’ Atherton said. ‘How can you not know that?’

  Hart shrugged. ‘Education’s failed me.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘Can we get on?’ Swilley said in a pained voice.

  Hart resumed. ‘Well, they didn’t have anything else to tell me except that they liked him and reckoned he was dead straight and dead public spirited. They said he was a real help with the tenants’ meetings, jollying people along and getting round the awkward customers and that. They wanted him to take over as chairman only he said he didn’t have the time. So he seems to have been a stand-up bloke.’

  ‘Nice to know,’ said Slider, ‘but it would have been nicer if they’d heard something.’

  ‘No-one we’ve interviewed so far heard anything,’ Fathom said.

  ‘But, guv, the front door’s broken,’ Hart said. ‘That could be something?’

  ‘Yes, I heard. In what way broken?’

  ‘It’s one of them where you buzz people in, but the buzzer wasn’t working and the door wouldn’t latch. Anyone could have just pushed the door open. It was supposed to have been mended yesterday, but the Arbuthnots said it was broken again today.’

  ‘Who was supposed to have repaired it?’ Slider asked.

  ‘There’s a sort of handyman, caretaker kind of person. He lives in the basement. Name of—’ she inspected her notes ‘—Borthwick, David Keith. He’s supposed to do repairs, or get people in if he can’t do them himself. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet.’

  Slider nodded. ‘That’s something to follow up, anyway. What about the lift? That was out of order as well. Did the Arbuthnots say anything about it?’

  ‘No, guv,’ said Hart, ‘but I didn’t ask. I didn’t notice any sign. I just used the stairs anyway. Lifts give me the creeps.’

  ‘Something else to check on with the caretaker. Anything else?’

  There was a general shaking of heads. ‘But we haven’t spoken to all the residents yet,’ Atherton said. ‘There was no answer from numbers five and nine.’

  ‘Right, follow up on them – Mackay, Fathom. Uniform’s still doing the street canvass. Interview the caretaker, Hart. See what you can get out of him. Someone has to go and see Candida Scott-Chatton. Swilley, you can do that. I have to take the daughter back to the flat this afternoon to see if anything’s missing. Hollis, records.’

  ‘Yeah, guv. Local slags, anyone doing householders, same MO, all that stuff.’

  ‘That should keep you busy. All right,’ Slider concluded. ‘Before we scatter, I have something else to tell you, not connected with the case.’ And he told them about Trevor Bates. There was some growled comment. No-one had been pleased when Bates had escaped. They had all put hard work into the case.

  ‘It will be handed over to SOCA, I imagine, though Mr Porson has promised to keep me informed,’ Slider concluded.

  ‘But, guv,’ McLaren objected, ‘we can’t just sit on our arses and do nothing.’

  ‘We’ve got a very important murder case on our hands,’ Slider reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, but Bates was our collar, by rights. And you’re our guv’nor.’ He looked round and saw agreement in every face.

  ‘We can’t get officially involved. However,’ he added to stem the protest, ‘there’s no reason we shouldn’t do what we can unofficially. At the very least I’d like everyone to keep his or her eyes open for any sightings of this man. I’d be grateful to have my back watched.’

  ‘We’ll do that all right,’ Hollis said, ‘but can’t we try and nail the sod? This was his old ground, and if he’s come back here, it gives us a chance, doesn’t it? We know the place as well as he does, and if anyone’s going to catch him, it ought to be us, not SOCA.’

  Slider was pleased, but didn’t allow it to show. ‘We can’t let the Stonax case fail because we’ve got our minds elsewhere.’

  Atherton spoke up. ‘We’ve all got enough brain cells to work both at once. Well, all of us except Maurice.’

  ‘Don’t be such a snot,’ Swilley rebuked him automatically.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ said McLaren. ‘I never know what he’s talking about anyway.’

  Slider ignored the exchange. ‘You could all get into trouble for working on it unofficially.’

  ‘We’re all grown-ups here,’ Atherton said. ‘We can stand a few rapped knuckles.’

  Everyone nodded.

  ‘All right,’ Slider said, warmed by the response. He was not facing Bates alone after all. The posse was riding for the gulch hard on his heels. ‘Thank you for that. We’ll do what we can. But listen – this has to be kept among ourselves. No-one outside our firm must know. And I’m afraid we have to keep Mr Porson out of the loop, for his own sake. Hollis, you’ll office manage the Stonax case; Atherton, you’ll be c-in-c on Bates. Everyone, report anything you get on Bates either to Atherton or me direct.’

  ‘Had we better have a code name?’ Mackay asked. ‘In case anyone overhears us talking about him?’

  ‘Yeah, let’s call him The Needle,’ McLaren suggested.

  ‘Duh!’ said Hart. ‘That’s his nickname anyway, dumbo. Everyone knows it.’

  ‘Maurice, you have to stop pushing the Q-tip when you feel resistance,’ Atherton advised kindly.

  ‘Let’s call him Roberts,’ Mackay intervened. ‘After Roberts radios, because he’s an electronics whiz.’

  ‘This is not Bletchley Park,’ Slider said. ‘Forget code names. Just don’t let anyone overhear you talking about him.’

  Swilley had missed the last few exchanges because her phone had rung. She was writing rapid notes as she listened. When she replaced the receiver, she said, ‘Boss, that was the mobile dump. The call you got from Bates was made from a mobile. It was a pay as you go, and the location was King Street, Hammersmith.’

  ‘So he was following me,’ Slider said. ‘Who’s it registered to?’

  Swilley made a face. ‘Paid for by cash. That’s the trouble with those things.’

  ‘Still, we’ve got the number, and we can trace the signal, can’t we?’ Fathom said.

  ‘If he turns it on. It’s off at the moment,’ said Swilley.

  ‘But SOCA will do the same thing, won’t they?’ Atherton said. ‘The mobile trace unit will report to them. How do we get them to give us the information without SOCA knowing?’

  Swilley looked at Slider. ‘There’s this guy at the unit – Mick Hutton – he’s a sort of friend of mine.’ She almost blushed. An ex-lover, everyone thought. ‘From way back,’ she added as though she’d heard the thought.

  ‘Would he do it for you without telling anyone?’

  ‘Yeah, he’d do that for me, if I asked him.’

  Slider thought for a moment. Maybe nothing would come of it anyway, but he’d feel better about trusting the Bates inquiry to his own people than waiting for a lofty SO department to get itself moving. If his own firm did nail Bates and there were questions about how they found him – so be it. He’d face that when and if it happened.

  ‘Do it,’ he said.

  A couple of phone calls located Candida Scott-Chatton at her office, the headquarters of the Countryside Protection Trust in Queen’s Gate Place – handily round the corner from her house, Swilley thought. She spoke to the woman’s secretary, who said her name was Shawna Weedon, and who told her that Scott-Chatton knew about Stonax’s death. ‘It’s on all the newscasts. It’s terrible. He was such a nice man. He used to come in a lot and he was always so friendly and polite. I really liked him.’

  ‘I’ll come round straight away and talk t
o her,’ Swilley said.

  The office was on the ground floor of one of those splendid white-stuccoed Kensington houses, so the inside spaces were lofty and grand, with plenty of what was known to viewers of house makeover programmes as ‘original feachers’. There were two rooms, and the rear one was labelled Reception and Enquiries. It had the massive marble fireplace with an oil painting over it of a man with a funny hat and a red coat holding a horse, and was furnished with dark blue carpet, a visitor’s sofa, and a coffee table on which were spread various appropriate magazines, such as Country Life, The Lady, Horse and Hound, and the Trust’s own glossy quarterly, cutely entitled Countryside Matters.

  It also contained the desk of the secretary. Shawna Weedon greeted Swilley with a sort of self-conscious fluttering, and at once buzzed the intercom to her boss, invited Swilley to take a seat, and then got on ostentatiously with typing something on to the computer. Swilley stood, to make the point that her time was valuable, but she was not kept waiting more than a couple of minutes before the communicating door to the front room was opened and Candida Scott-Chatton invited her in with a, ‘Do come through, won’t you?’ as though it were a social visit.

  The front room was even more splendid and spacious than the waiting-room, with a more elaborate fireplace, a lot more paintings on the walls, antique furniture, and a blue and white Chinese carpet over the same dark-blue wall-to-wall as the other room. There was a highly polished antique partners’ desk on which the computer looked the only out-of-place thing in the room, and there were huge flower arrangements in probably priceless vases, on a side table, on the hearth in front of the fireplace, and on a torchère stand in a corner. It was, Swilley thought with loathing, like something out of a National Trust stately home. She liked everything modern and minimalist; and besides, she had an old-fashioned chippiness about people with double-barrelled names.

  Candida Scott-Chatton was tall, blonde and classically beautiful, exquisitely dressed in what Swilley would have liked to bet was a Chanel or Prada suit – something expensive and exclusive, anyway – with pearls at neck and ears. No hair of her smooth bob was out of place, and her make-up was so perfect that it gave her a kind of expressionless immobility, as if, having got herself to this state of perfection, she didn’t want to do anything else with her face for fear of spoiling it.