Slider filed the name gratefully – it didn’t appear on any maps. ‘Who told you that?’ he asked.
‘Some drivers who were in earlier,’ she said.
‘Our Tiff gets to hear everything,’ Young Barry observed. ‘She gives ’em a smile and they tell her all their secrets.’
‘No Sid today?’ Slider asked.
‘Dad’s stopping upstairs,’ said Young Barry.
‘Not ill, I hope?’
‘Nah, just his bronichals,’ said Mrs Sid.
‘So what’ll it be, gents?’ Tiffany asked.
‘Breakfast for me,’ said Slider.
‘Double soss, bacon, egg and beans? Fried slice with it?’
‘Please.’
‘Same for you, is it?’ She examined Atherton, noted his faint shudder, and added, ‘We ha’n’t got any tofu, darlin’.’
Slider smiled. ‘She’s got you down all right.’
She took pity on him. ‘How about a nice bowl of muesli?’ she offered. ‘Home made. I make it up meself. All organic.’ Atherton accepted gratefully.
They went and sat down. Across the other side, two lorry drivers were lingering over their tea and newspapers, and in a corner an old man was slowly consuming an all-day, eating the baked beans one by one to make it last. The morning rush was well over.
Tiffany brought their food, and two cups of tea that went with it, and said in a low voice, ‘Is that right then, a dead body’s turned up in Jacket’s Yard?’
How did these things get out? Slider wondered despairingly. But it would be in the papers soon, anyway. And if they didn’t find out who the corpse was, they’d have to appeal to the public. ‘That’s right.’
‘It’s not Eli, is it?’ she asked anxiously.
‘No, he’s all right,’ Slider said. ‘You know him, then?’
‘Oh yes. He comes in here sometimes, for his breakfast, or just a cuppa.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘He don’t talk much, but he seems decent enough. I’m glad it’s not him. You don’t like it to be someone you know. He was in for his breakfast Sunday, Eli. I don’t think his wife’s very kind to him. But you ought to talk to Grandad. He knows all about Jacket’s Yard and everybody round here. Why don’t you go up when you’ve finished your breakfast?’
‘He’s not too ill to see us?’
‘Nah, he’s fine,’ Tiffany said. ‘He’d sooner be down here, truth be told, but Barry said his coughing wasn’t nice for the customers. He’ll be glad to see someone – it drives him mad, not working. You go on up when you’ve finished. You can take his tea up, save me a trip.’
The flat above the shop, which had once been home to Sid and his family, was now part pied-a-terre and part store room. No one lived there now, but there was a small kitchen and a bed, if anyone needed an overnight doss, and the sitting room was still furnished, acting as a rest area for whoever was on duty downstairs.
Sid was on the sofa watching the racing, and the air was blue with cigarette smoke. He started up in alarm when Slider and Atherton came in, then relaxed when he saw who it was. ‘Thought you was Young Barry,’ he said with a shamefaced grin. ‘He’s always on at me about smoking.’
‘Brought your tea,’ said Slider. ‘Mind if I open the window a bit?’
‘Help yourself,’ said Sid. He turned down the television and sat down again. He was in grey flannel trousers, held up by braces over a collarless shirt, and carpet slippers, but his tweed cap was firmly in place. Slider had never seen him without it. He wondered if he slept in it.
Sid had a good cough, wiped his lips, and said, ‘It ain’t the fags, anyway, it’s the brown kiters. Damp weather brings it on. Bit o’ trouble down Jacket’s Yard, so I heard. S’at what you’ve come about?’
‘I thought you’d be good for a bit of background,’ said Slider.
Sid looked pleased. ‘Always glad to oblige. Sit down, sit down.’ He waved his hand magnificently. ‘They give you tea downstairs?’
‘We had breakfast,’ said Slider. ‘Why’s it called Jacket’s Yard, anyway?’
‘Well, that’s what we always called it,’ said Sid. ‘Everyone round here. Used to be a rag-and-bone yard, see, back before the war, and right up into the Sixties. Old man Jacket, he was the big boss, used to have twenty carts and ponies, maybe more, went all over this area, Shepherd’s Bush, White City, Ladbroke Grove. Everyone knew ’em. That’s what Steptoe and Son was based on, didn’t you know that?’
‘Hard to believe there was ever horse-drawn traffic round here,’ Atherton said, as lorries rumbled endlessly by, darkening the windows like a migration of mastodons.
Sid nodded, lighting another cigarette. ‘Oh, it was big business, rag and bone – though it was more scrap metal towards the end,’ he added fairly. ‘Made a fortune, too, old man Jacket, with his ponies and carts. Blew it all on the racing, though. Funny, that – made it on the ponies and lost it on the ponies.’ He laughed happily at his own wit, which brought on another coughing fit.
‘Tell me about Eli,’ Slider said, when the noise subsided.
‘Oh, everybody knows Eli,’ said Sid. ‘He’s always there, Sundays and Christmas included, fiddling about with his motors. I reckon he just goes to get away from his wife. Mother don’t like it when I say that, but she’s a right harridan, his missus. So is he dead, then, Eli?’
‘No, he was the one who found the body.’
Sid looked vaguely glad. ‘He’s a gyppo, you know – Eli? Proper Romany – old Romany family, the Sampsons. There was quite a few of ’em round here before the war. Give up the road and settled down. His wife, she was a Lee before she married. Another Romany family. Eli took over Jacket’s Yard, ooh, must be, what, twenty-five, twenty-six year ago. Before that, it was a bloke called Gerry Philips, he had a car repair shop there, and Eli used to work for him, on and off. Done other stuff, seasonal. Fruit picking. Flogging stuff round the streets. Worked at the fair, and the circus when they came to the Scrubs – there was Sampsons them days at Billy Smart’s, relatives of his. Then when Gerry retired, he offered the place to Eli. Helped him out with the rent till he got going. Like a son to him, Eli was. Course, the business has gone downhill since then.’
‘Why is that?’ Slider asked. ‘Is he not good at it?’
‘Oh, he’s good with cars, is Eli. None better. But cars’ve changed, it’s all computers now, you can’t mend them with a spanner. And he’s no good at business. This place has changed, Wood Lane, with all this development round here, nobody knows he’s there any more, and he won’t shift himself to advertise, or get himself known, or put in new equipment. So all he gets is the old bangers, and word-of-mouth. Won’t even put up a sign on the main road. Says he’s happy as he is.’ Sid shrugged, to signify that people were as people were, and there was nothing you could do about it.
‘Does he make a living?’ Slider asked.
‘That I can’t tell you. I can’t see how he can do, the way he goes about it.’
‘So – is there something else? Something on the side? A bit shady, maybe?’
Another shrug. ‘I wouldn’t say he’s up to anything crooked. Not that I know of.’
‘But it wouldn’t surprise you?’ Atherton put in.
‘I wouldn’t say he’s never been a naughty boy,’ said Sid, circumspectly, ‘but it wouldn’t be anything big. He’s too lazy. If something fell in his lap, maybe. If it was just a case of no questions asked, maybe he’d just roll with it.’
‘Knock-off watches, you mean? Duty free cigarettes?’ Atherton suggested.
‘I don’t know anything about that. I’m just saying.’ He blew smoke upwards, and looked at them with faded but steady blue eyes. ‘But you’re looking at a dead body. Eli’d never have nothing to do with a thing like that. That’s big stuff. How’d this bloke die, anyway? Lorry driver come in here this morning, says they reckon it’s a gangland boss, some turf war or something.’
Slider supposed someone had told someone else the victim was smartly
dressed in toff style, and it had snowballed from there. ‘We don’t know anything about the victim,’ he said, ‘and that’s the truth. So, Eli owns the property, does he?’
‘Nah, he just rents it,’ said Sid.
‘Only it must be worth a bit.’
Sid chuckled. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Used to be owned by a property comp’ny, I’ll think of the name in a minute. Begun with a T. They bought it off Gerry Philips, reckoned to develop it. Target, that was it. But they couldn’t, see, on account of the access. That road that goes in there, the first bit of it’s a bridge over the railway tunnel, and it’s not strong enough to take heavy traffic. London Transport owns that bit, and they’re not willing to rebuild it, given they never use it. So o’course you couldn’t get lorries in. Site was a white elephant.’ He chuckled again, pleased with the deserved misfortune of the naïve. ‘So they was glad to rent it out for whatever they could get.’
‘So Target still owns it?’
‘Nah, they sold it about two year ago. To another developer. That big company, what’s it called, that’s been buying up plots all over the place to put up luxury flats. Another lot of idiots, never did their homework. So they’re stuck with it now. What’s their name again? Some posh name, like a big house somewhere.’
‘Grosvenor?’ Slider suggested.
‘No, not that one. Something like Buckingham Palace. I’ll get it in a minute.’ He screwed up his face. ‘Blenheim, that’s it. Blenheim Property Development. So they’re renting it to old Eli on a short lease, hoping God’ll come down and reinforce that bridge for ’em so’s they can stick up a mansion block and make their fortune. Good luck to ’em!’
‘So Eli is shady, but not very shady,’ Atherton said as they emerged again into the day. There was a thin patch in the clouds through which the sun was trying to slide. It was blurred and whiteish behind the grey, like a half-sucked acid drop. ‘That, by the way, was surprisingly good muesli.’
‘Told you so,’ said Slider.
‘The muesli in our canteen looks like something a pigeon regurgitated to feed its young.’ He went round to the driver’s side of the car. ‘I wonder if our Eli is just enough connected to the demi-monde for someone to know about his yard and fancy it for a dumping ground.’
‘Possible. And if it implicates Eli and has us chasing about investigating him, so much the better?’
‘I hadn’t thought that far, but it’s a good line.’
Slider got in at the passenger side. ‘The bugger of it is, we’ll have to look into Eli anyway, just as a matter of—’
‘Routine,’ Atherton supplied.
‘Common sense,’ Slider finished.
TWO
That’ll Do, Pig
With the corpse taken off to the forensic suite at the Charing Cross, Sampson taken back to the station to ‘help with enquiries’ – in the delicately non-committal parlance of the early stages of an investigation – and the SOC team laboriously examining tyre prints and searching the yard for weapons, Slider decided they might as well call on Mrs Sampson before heading back. Sampson had given his address as a housing association flat in North Pole Road. ‘That’s only two minutes away.’
The flat occupied the upper floor of a two-storeyed edifice in the centre of a terrace. It had three bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom and sitting room, which sounded extensive, but it was in fact a miniature place, built before the war for a smaller race of natives with more modest ambitions. The largest room was only ten feet by twelve, and in the kitchen and bathroom two people couldn’t have passed each other without risking intimate contact.
Someone had already rung Mrs Sampson with the news – how things got about! – so she was not surprised to see them. Not pleased, either. The police, it was evident, were not at the very top of her list of welcome visitors, and only Slider’s most gimlet stare kept the opprobrious epithets that were hovering on her lips from taking to the air.
But when he made it clear he was not prepared to talk on the doorstep, she reluctantly let them in and admitted them to her sitting room. Though it was tiny, it was crammed with furniture and ornaments, and everything was shiningly clean and obsessively neat. It put Slider in mind of the inside of an old-school caravan or narrowboat. There were lace doilies under everything, antimacassars everywhere, plastic flowers in every vase. Bits of china and brass occupied every surface, and every inch of wall was covered in framed photographs, some of them hand-edged with lace, and cheap prints of sentimental pictures: faithful dogs, kittens playing with wool, whimsical children, whitewashed cottages infested with rambling roses and monstrous hollyhocks.
Mrs Sampson was short and stocky with a face like toothache. Where her husband was sullen, she bristled with suppressed fury. Her body seemed to strain outwards against her clothes as though ready to burst with it. She was an entire womanful of anger – possibly two.
‘That old fool! I’ll give him what for when I get hold of him, the useless article!’ she raged. ‘What’s he got himself into this time?’
‘I don’t know that he’s done anything,’ Slider said mildly. ‘Perhaps you can tell me.’
‘Are you trying to be funny?’ she snapped.
‘Not at all. You asked what he’d got into this time. What has he got into before?’
She was momentarily floored, but soon recovered. ‘What you saying? What you tryna pin on him? He’s a hard-working man, tryna make a living, no thanks to the likes of you – and young Skippy, here!’ She had saved a glare for Atherton. ‘Still wet behind the ears. Bumfluff still on his face. What you staring at, sonny? Try getting your hands dirty for a change, same as working people, if you pigs’d leave us alone for five minutes, coming round here accusing honest folk of I-don’t-know-what …’
She’d been forgetting to breathe in and now as her face went from scarlet towards black she had to pause at last to gasp, which gave Slider a chance to get a word in. He was treasuring her assessment of Atherton – especially ‘Skippy’ and ‘bumfluff’ – to be enjoyed more fully later. For now he had to get her to calm down.
‘At the moment, your husband is just helping us with our enquiries. But we are investigating a serious matter, so I recommend that you try to help us too. Tell me, do you know this man?’ He passed over the deceased’s image on his tablet.
She glanced, blenched a little, and tried to give it back. ‘Is this the dead bloke?’
‘Who is he?’
‘I don’t know. Never seen him before in my life.’
‘Look again. You didn’t look for long enough to be sure.’
‘I looked long enough! You take me for a fool? Coming in here, making me look at dead people! I tell you I don’t know him! What’s he got to do with my Eli?’
Slider still hadn’t taken the tablet back, and she couldn’t resist taking another peep. He watched her face. He was sure there was something there. ‘You do know him, don’t you?’
‘No, I don’t!’ she declared. Her eyes met his and slid away. ‘He just looks a bit like somebody famous, that’s all. Like some film actor or something. That Gene Hackman,’ she said on an inspiration. ‘That’s who it was. I thought at first he looked a bit like him.’
She thrust the tablet at him determinedly, and he took it, and threw Atherton a glance to take over.
As Slider was now Bad Cop, Atherton tried buttering her up along the ‘nice place you’ve got here’ lines.
‘I do my best,’ she said rigidly, unwilling to bend far. ‘Best I can do with a man forever messing things up, coming home all grease and dirt, fingermarks everywhere, everything in the wrong place, clothes hung up on the floor. Why the good Lord created men in the first place I’ll never understand. I’m glad to see the back of him when he goes off to his daft old yard, I can tell you, so’s I can get on with my work.’
Atherton slipped into the crack she’d opened. ‘He must be doing all right, though, all those long hours he puts in.’
‘Long hours? He’s never home. Might as we
ll be a widow, married to that object.’
‘But I’ve heard he’s very good with cars. They say he can fix anything.’
She snorted. ‘Fat lot of good it does him! Or me! I’m not a fiver better off at the end of the week, for all his messing. All those so-called friends of his that never pay him – “Oh, I’ll give it you next week”.’ She put on a whining voice. ‘Only next week never comes, does it? He’s an idiot when it comes to business. Only a fool would have signed that lease.’ She stopped abruptly, and looked suspiciously from Atherton to Slider. ‘What you taken him down the station for? You don’t think he had anything to do with this? He couldn’t kill anyone if he tried. Soft as muck, he is. He’d mess it up, anyway – probably shoot himself by mistake.’
‘What makes you think this man was shot?’ Slider asked.
She gave him a cunning look. ‘Oh no you don’t. You don’t catch me like that. I don’t know anything about it, and nor does Eli, and if I don’t see him back here double-quick, I’m going to make a complaint. We’re honest citizens. You can’t go harassing us. I know my rights.’ She folded her arms and her lips with a triumphant look.
‘What was that about the lease?’ Atherton asked smoothly, with an air of innocent interest. ‘You mean the lease with Blenheim? I thought he had it on good terms.’
She mottled with fury. ‘Good terms? Good terms?’ It burst from her. ‘One year rolling with a six month notice? I told him, I said what security you got now? They can have you out any time they like. If I’d been there – but no, he goes and signs it without asking me, the stupid lummox. Just because some slick-talking bastard comes round his yard – and what do they want it for, answer me that! Those big companies don’t go buying up land if there’s no profit in it – profit to them, not profit to someone who’s worked on it for thirty year!’ Again she stopped to breathe. ‘I think you better go, now,’ was her next effort. ‘I got washing to take out, and dinner to get started.’
Shadow Play Page 2