Shadow Play

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  She interrupted him hastily. ‘I must get back, we’ve got a lot on. Thank you again, very much. I shan’t disturb you any longer.’

  FIFTEEN

  The Road Goes Ever On And On

  The catch-up meeting was held over lunch in the CID room. Everyone had sandwiches at their desk. Hart had gone down to Mike’s for hers, and brought Slider back a cheese roll – simply cheese, butter, not spread, no pickle. McLaren had a giant Cornish pasty which, as the microwave was on the blink, he was eating cold from the cellophane. Atherton was eating something salady out of a tupperware tub with a fork – not even a plastic fork but a real one brought from home. And Mr Porson, who had joined them, had taken over Gascoyne’s desk and had unwrapped the greaseproof from an obviously home-made corned-beef-on-sliced-white. All human life is here, Slider thought. You could write a treatise about how the lunchtime sarnie is a window on the soul.

  Hart had made her report.

  ‘So Holdsworth got the place listed so as to get it cheap,’ LaSalle observed, ‘then got stiffed by his old pals, and got left with a white elephant.’

  ‘You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh,’ Hart agreed.

  ‘So he comes up with the Davy Lane project,’ said Atherton. ‘Can’t get an ordinary residential development approved, but with some public interest element—’

  Swilley jumped in. ‘That’s what James Hadleigh said. If it’s something that fits in with the government’s strategic plan, they can override the local planning veto.’

  ‘So Myra Silverman tries to persuade her old pal Kevin Rathkeale,’ Atherton took it back, ‘with the added benefit that not only will it get the planning permission forced through, but it will involve a large slice of public money.’

  ‘And she gets involved, why?’ Loessop asked.

  ‘Ten million? You kidding?’ Hart said.

  ‘But how does she get anything out of it?’

  ‘It’s the old cui bono,’ said Atherton. ‘Husband Jack will get the building contract.’

  ‘How did those two get together?’ Porson interjected. ‘Holdsworth and Silverman? Did they know each other before, or did Holdsworth pick him out of the Yellow Pages?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Slider admitted. Trust the old boy to shove in a stonker! ‘Silverman was to be the builder on the original Davy Lane development, the residential-only, but why Holdsworth chose him …’

  Porson merely nodded, the point made. Slider made a mental note to find out.

  ‘So,’ Atherton resumed, ‘there’s all this lovely government dosh up for grabs. Holdsworth gets to develop his white elephant and make a fat profit—’

  ‘Yeah, and we can guess he’s short of cash.’ It was Hart who interrupted this time. ‘He’s got a kid that’s in trouble and costing him an arm and a leg.’

  ‘And his business is doing nothing. Target’s just a shell,’ Swilley added. ‘And Farraday’s just a holding company. So where’s his income?’

  ‘What about Silverman?’ Loessop asked. ‘Is his business in trouble?’

  ‘He said he was doing all right,’ Slider said, ‘but then he would do, wouldn’t he? It didn’t seem busy when I was there.’

  ‘Look into that as well,’ Porson said.

  Swilley nodded. ‘Yes sir. And I’ve had a thought about Myra Silverman. It’s a good enough reason for getting involved, that her husband’d get the building contract. But if the rumours are true, she made a lot of money personally out of KidZone. And someone else said she has a lot of directorships, and they can add up to a pretty good income. Well, if this youth outreach centre did get built, they’d need a director for it, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Can’t see her getting it, after KidZone,’ said LaSalle.

  ‘Unless old pal gingernuts puts in the word,’ Hart said. ‘He’s the one with the moolah. He could make it a condition of the project that she gets the directorship.’

  ‘What’d that pay, anyway?’ McLaren asked.

  ‘A high profile, government-approved job like that could easily fetch eighty or ninety thousand,’ Atherton said.

  McLaren swallowed a lump of pastry and potato. ‘Kidding me!’ he managed to splutter.

  ‘Some charities pay their executives a lot more than that,’ said Atherton. ‘Two hundred and fifty thousand, some of the big ones – basically for having your name on the stationery.’

  ‘I’m in the wrong job,’ Loessop mourned.

  ‘We all are,’ Hart agreed.

  ‘So, it must have been a disappointment, then, when Rathkeale said no,’ McLaren said. Everyone looked at him. ‘Big disappointment,’ he went on. ‘All them people needing the money, all depending on Kevin Rathkeale to come through. There’s three people’d be well pissed off.’

  ‘Steady on, Maurice,’ Atherton said. ‘You had an idea only a few days ago. Mustn’t overdo.’

  ‘Never mind all that,’ Porson snapped, making Atherton jump – he’d forgotten he was there. ‘You got your motif for blackmail right there.’

  ‘Rathkeale had the final say-so. I been wondering all along what Davy Lane had to do with it,’ Hart said.

  ‘It gives us a reason for the blackmail,’ Slider said, ‘and if Kimmelman was working for Holdsworth—’

  ‘Although he denies it,’ said Atherton.

  ‘—it explains why he did the actual graft.’

  ‘Not something Holdsworth would get his hands dirty with,’ said Swilley disdainfully. She didn’t like Holdsworth. She kept thinking of the sad little woman at the upstairs window.

  ‘As you wouldn’t,’ Slider said, ‘But it doesn’t give us a reason for Kimmelman’s death.’

  There was a silence, and then Loessop said hesitantly, ‘Because he knows where the bodies are buried?’

  Porson slid the last bit of sandwich into his mouth and hitched himself off the desk. ‘Well, you got plenty to get on with,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ Slider walked to the door with him. ‘Any more on that motor that tried to run you down?’

  Slider told him about the concealed index. ‘But it’s the same make and model as the car that picked up the rent boys from the club.’

  ‘So it could be something to do with the case? Oh, well, that’s a comfort.’

  ‘Yes, my heart is bursting with gratitude,’ Slider said.

  Porson gave him a look so old-fashioned it would have suited a reactionary dinosaur. ‘I mean,’ he said witheringly, ‘you don’t want any distractions until you’ve brought this one home.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Slider. He knew what he meant. It was good that it might not be an extra random element out to kill him. Anybody trying to kill you was enough to be going on with.

  Atherton said, ‘Do you really think this Davy Lane project had enough juice in it to make killing Kimmelman worthwhile?’ He was standing, because Hart had come in first and was sitting where he usually sat on the windowsill. ‘To say nothing of trying to kill you. Which, by the way, is stupid, because it wouldn’t stop the investigation.’

  ‘Might slow it down,’ Hart said. She was twirling an end of hair round and round her finger in thought.

  ‘Trying to run me down doesn’t look like the action of a thoughtful person,’ Slider said. ‘More a blind lashing out.’

  ‘Someone had to think out a plan to find out where you were,’ Atherton said.

  ‘Here, boss, I just thought – maybe Myra Silverman was “Mrs Hastings”. Posh voice, Jezza said, and I’ve seen her on the news, she’s dead posh.’

  Slider was on the Humpty Dumpty plan, still answering the question before last. ‘Ten million, or a share of ten million, would be enough of a driver for most people, especially if they really needed the money. As to attacking me, the imperative only gets sharper when you add in murder. If Holdsworth is responsible for that, and he thinks we’re getting close, he may see all that lovely money taking wing, and the prospect of jail taking shape, and get himself into a blind panic.’

  ‘But is Myra Silverman close enough to
Holdsworth to get involved in that way?’ Atherton said.

  ‘If they are all in on the Davy Lane scheme, I suppose he could ask her to make the call without telling her what he was going to do with the information. But it’s all speculation. We need evidence,’ Slider concluded restlessly.

  Swilley came in. ‘I’ve looked into Abbott Construction, boss. They’ve had a lot of work, but their profits are way down. Can’t say why, but there’s a lot of things to go wrong on a building project. Cost overruns, bad weather, clients not paying up. And you can just be unlucky. I wish I could have a look at the Silvermans’ personal finances – I’d like to bet they’ve taken out big loans to keep things afloat.’

  ‘Wish we could just order the banks to give us a dekko at any account we wanted,’ Hart grumbled. ‘Makes you wonder what side they’re on, sometimes.’

  ‘Liberty and democracy, perhaps,’ Atherton suggested, with the sharpness of someone whose customary seat had been usurped.

  Everyone assembled again for McLaren’s exposition. Studying vehicle camera tapes was, to the normal person, brain-bleedingly boring. It helped to have the ability to blank out the other parts of your brain; or, as Swilley unkindly remarked, to have no activity in them to begin with. McLaren was largely impervious to insult, partly because he was used to it, but recently because his new relationship with Natalie had sunk him into a bucolic stupor of content, and the barbs of sarcasm went so far over his head you could have bounced mobile phone signals off them.

  He did like an audience, though. He preened his moustache, which had gone beyond Burt Reynolds into full walrus mode. It was so rampant now, it looked as though he could strain nourishment out of the air with it. There were baleen whales that had less to filter with. The growth rate had been astonishing. It must be, Swilley said, why he had to keep eating all the time, otherwise, like a pregnant woman, he’d end up consuming his own bones and teeth to sustain it.

  First of all, he explained, he’d fed the index they’d got from the motor that picked up the boys at Ivanka’s into the ANPR, and established that there had been no registered movement since the Sunday night into Monday morning when Kimmelman had been killed.

  ‘But o’ course, if it was the same motor that went after the guv, we know they obscured the number plate, so it wouldn’t register a ping anyway.’

  But on the Sunday night it had been out and about at a time when by any account Kimmelman was already dead.

  ‘It was a company car,’ Atherton pointed out. ‘We don’t know he had exclusive use of it.’

  ‘Obviously he didn’t,’ Swilley said impatiently.

  ‘Well, not after he was dead, but even before—’

  ‘Get on with it, Maurice. Never mind those two,’ Hart urged.

  He gave the three of them a patient look, and resumed. For their purposes, the only ANPR camera in the area that mattered was on the west side of the Green, and covered the junction with Uxbridge Road. ‘On the Sunday, we got the motor in question going north up Wood Lane at 11.47 pm, and returning the same way at 11.58 pm, so—’

  ‘North up Wood Lane?’ Swilley said. ‘So it could have been going to Jacket’s Yard. With the body.’

  ‘That’s cold, using the bloke’s own motor to get rid of his corpse,’ said LaSalle.

  ‘What d’you want them to do, hire a hearse and a bloke in a top hat to walk in front?’

  ‘Eleven minutes,’ Atherton interrupted her. ‘Say three minutes each way to the yard and back, that leaves five minutes to roll the body out of the car and make sure it looks all right.’

  ‘If that’s where it was going,’ Loessop said cautiously.

  Slider intervened. ‘I’m sure you’ve got more to tell us than that,’ he suggested to McLaren. ‘Please carry on.’

  ‘Yes, guv,’ he said gratefully. ‘I’ve looked at a lot of cameras, and you won’t want to hear all the details, but the main traffic camera I found that covers the front of Ruskin House, looking straight north up Shepherd’s Bush Road, it’s too far back to recognise people coming out of the house. But o’course as cars come closer to it, you can read the number plate, so you can track them backwards.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Slider.

  ‘So it looks like Kimmelman kept the motor in question—’

  ‘Can you stop calling it that?’ Atherton said, pained.

  ‘Yeah, just call it the Beamer,’ LaSalle suggested.

  ‘OK,’ McLaren said, unrattled. He stroked his gnat-strainer and resumed. ‘It looks like Kimmelman keeps the Beamer down Westwick Gardens, because you can see a man who could be him come out the front of Ruskin and walk down Westwick, then you see the Beamer come out of Westwick and turn south towards the camera, and then you can clock the index, all right? And I got other cameras picking up the m–the Beamer at other locations. So I can map the journey, OK?’

  ‘Yeah, we know how you do it, Maurice. Get on with it,’ said Hart.

  ‘So Friday night he’s come back from doing the blackmail tape on the boat. He’s took the boys back to Soho first, then he’s come home straight along the A40, and you see him park up and walk in the front of Ruskin at 1.36, that’d be Saturday morning. Next movement is Saturday evening, 6.25 pm, he comes out the flats, goes down Westwick, the Beamer comes out and heads south down Shepherd’s Bush Road. Now, there’s a school on the corner of Shepherd’s Bush Road and the south side of Brook Green, that’s got a camera covering the road. The Beamer turns left down Brook Green and then right into Luxemburg Gardens.’

  ‘Oh-ho. The plot thickens,’ said Atherton.

  ‘Like Maurice’s ’tache,’ said Hart. ‘Where’s he go, Mo?’

  ‘I got no camera in Luxemburg Gardens itself,’ McLaren said, ‘but there’s only four ways he can go from there, and with any of ’em, he’s got to exit either onto Hammersmith Road or back onto Brook Green. It’s like a triangle with just a few roads crossing it. I’ve got all those possible exits covered. You don’t wanna know how—’

  ‘We don’t,’ said Atherton, and this time without irony. He could imagine the work involved, and was simply glad someone else was willing to do it.

  ‘And he never comes out anywhere else. And he don’t come out of Luxemburg Gardens again until he comes back past the school and goes home. Which is 9.33 pm. Which is as good as to say—’

  ‘He was somewhere in that small triangle of streets all that time,’ said Atherton.

  ‘And Holdsworth’s house is in Luxemburg Place, off Luxemburg Gardens,’ Slider said, ‘so it’s working hypothesis that that’s where he was.’ It was not cast iron, but it was good enough for most reasonable people. ‘What next?’

  ‘Sunday afternoon. He comes out at a quarter to five and drives to Luxemburg Gardens again. Then nothing more until the trip up Wood Lane and back.’

  ‘You got that off the ANPR,’ Slider said, ‘but have you got any other camera coverage?’

  ‘Yes, guv. The Beamer comes from Luxemburg Gardens. After it crosses into Wood Lane, I got the camera at White City station confirming it passes there both ways. Then it comes back the same way to Luxemburg Gardens.’

  ‘That’s very suggestive,’ Slider said. ‘Any other movements?’

  ‘It comes back to Ruskin House,’ McLaren said, with small, allowable triumph. ‘Does a u-ey and parks right outside on the double yellow. It’s ten to one in the morning, so there’s not much traffic about. Bloke gets out and walks up to the house, lets himself in. It’s too far off to ID him,’ he said apologetically, anticipating the question, ‘but I’ve kind of got used to the shape of Kimmelman by now, if you see what I mean, watching him come and go, and this is a taller, thinner bloke to my mind. So he goes in, and he comes out again 2.42, with two big bags in his hands, look like black bin liners, and he gets in the Beamer and drives back to Luxemburg Gardens. And the Beamer doesn’t come out again, not as far as I’ve looked, which is up to the Tuesday. I could go on further, but it’s a lot of work. S’up t’you, guv. I got all this put together
in an evidential tape, plus the originals copied and preserved. Sorry it took so long, but—’

  ‘It’s a great effort,’ Slider said. ‘Well done.’

  There was a silence as everyone digested the information.

  Finally, Swilley spoke. ‘So it looks as though Kimmelman went to see Holdsworth on Sunday afternoon and never came back.’

  ‘We know he was killed some time on Sunday and dumped after six thirty on Sunday night, so that all fits,’ said Slider.

  ‘And Mrs Greenwood heard someone in the flat after midnight,’ said Swilley. ‘Holdsworth’s got to be the man.’

  ‘It’s good circumstantial evidence,’ Slider said. ‘But it’s not rock solid. And juries do like a motive.’

  ‘It’s a pity we had to waste so much time on Rathkeale,’ LaSalle grumbled. ‘We might have been watching Holdsworth and catching him at something.’

  ‘If Kimmelman was killed at his house, maybe there’s still some evidence around,’ Loessop said hopefully.

  ‘It was a dry killing – no blood,’ Hart said.

  ‘We’d never get a warrant, anyway,’ Atherton said. ‘Not on McLaren’s tapes alone.’

  ‘So what now, boss?’ Hart asked.

  Slider looked at his watch. ‘I think we go home, and we all rack our brains as to what more we can do. Holdsworth isn’t going anywhere.’

  ‘As long as he doesn’t have another go at you. Want me to drive you home?’ Hart said. ‘I can sleep on the floor outside your bedroom door, keep you safe. I know karate.’

  There had been a time when he might have thought she was at least half serious, when – according to Atherton – she’d had a little crush on him. Now her grin told him there was nothing there but high spirits.

  It was good to see how, even with the case dragging on, morale remained high, and they all remained quite bucked – several initial letters of the alphabet short of where the top brass traditionally liked to keep their underlings.

  Working on the assumption that the subconscious is better at thinking things out than the conscious, Slider put the case into the back of his mind when he got out of the car. He’d had long enough for fruitless pondering on the journey, since it had taken longer than usual.