‘Hmm. Beevers was right, then, about the club syndrome. But this isn’t a nice, comprehensible murder, don’t forget,’ said Slider. ‘Neal wasn’t shot, or knifed, or bludgeoned to death in the heat of an argument. And why would a jealous husband do the roping and wiring? That doesn’t fit in.’
Atherton would not be cheated of his prey. ‘No, it makes sense. Look, Mrs C hinted that Collins was a bit short-staffed in the men’s department. She also apparently nagged him about not providing her with the wordly goods, nagged him until he walloped her in fact – she had the remains of a black eye when I spoke to her. Then there’s his mate, Dick Neal, who not only lived in a gorgeous detached bungalow in Pinner, and whose wife is dripping in baubles and bangles, but who is known as the leading pork purveyor of the western world. When Collins discovers that said friend has had it in for him, as the saying goes, his rage might well be mighty. And what better revenge, having murdered said conjugal bandit, than to set him up for posterity as the lowliest and most pathetic sort of sexual inadequate?’
He drew breath, rubbing the back of his left hand with the fingers of his right as he viewed his own story with growing enthusiasm. ‘In fact, it’s the only answer that does make sense. If it wasn’t some form of exquisite revenge, then what was all that sexual strangulation set-up for? Because as a scent-thrower, it was a wash-out.’
Slider contemplated the scenario. ‘Then who was the red-headed tart?’
Atherton shrugged generously. ‘Just another bird he was jumping.’
‘And the man he met on Saturday? Who said someone wanted to kill him?’
‘Just another drinking-mate. We know he was well-known on that ground. Why should the Saturday meet be anything to do with anything? And it’s only Miss Young of the Agatha Christie fixation who says he was given a death-threat. Mrs Neal says he was perfectly normal on Sunday—’
‘I don’t think she’s a very noticing person. Or she may be deliberately un-noticing.’
Atherton waved a hand. ‘In any case, we know he had a phone call on Sunday, which he took in his study so that his wife shouldn’t overhear. Say that was Collins: “You’ve been screwing my wife. Do you want me to come over there and make a scene in front of Betty, or will you meet me and have it out man to man?” Neal says, okay, I’ll see you later in the Shamrock, or wherever, hoping to talk his way out of it and still drive up north to make his appointments the next day. They meet, have a few drinks, Collins lets Neal think he’s charmed him out of his righteous anger. They get pretty spiffed together, like old buddies. Then Time is called. Collins says, “Shame to spoil a good evening. I’ve got a bottle of good stuff in the car. What say we go somewhere and polish it off, and talk about old times.” But where can they go? Not to Collins’s house, with the wife-in-contention waiting up, probably wearing suspenders and black stockings and those knickers designed for three-legged ladies. Not to Neal’s house – Mrs N would want to know why he hadn’t gone to Bradford. And in any case, Neal is too bagged to drive all the way up there tonight. So they head for the motel, where Neal can sleep it off afterwards – or so he thinks. “You go in and book the room, old man,” says Collins, “while I get the stuff out of the car.” And that way, Pascoe only gets to see Neal.’
‘And what about Neal’s car?’ Slider asked, fascinated.
‘They leave it where it’s parked, because he’s too drunk to drive, and go in Collins’s. Collins drops Neal at the door, and parks somewhere out in the street. Afterwards, he takes Neal’s keys and goes back to bring Neal’s car a bit nearer to the scene. It might look a bit odd if it was found miles away. He parks it in Rylett Road, and chucks the keys away down a drain somewhere on his way home.’
‘I have to hand it to you,’ Slider said when Atherton stopped. ‘When it comes to weaving fiction, you’re up there with the greats. Eat your heart out, Hans Andersen.’
‘It all holds together,’ Atherton said indignantly.
‘It does,’ Slider said. ‘It’s beautiful – but we haven’t investigated Collins yet. We’ve only got to discover that on the night in question he was guest speaker at the annual dinner of the Ancient Order of Buffaloes, and your coach is a pumpkin.’
‘His wife said he went out for a drink on Sunday night, she doesn’t know where,’ Atherton said triumphantly. ‘She doesn’t know what time he came back. And on Monday he went away on a business trip and she hasn’t seen him since. She was pretty narked about it, because it was her birthday on Monday, and he didn’t give her a present. Doesn’t that sound as though he had something on his mind?’
‘Men are always forgetting birthdays,’ Joanna pointed out. ‘It’s a secondary sex-characteristic’
‘And we still don’t know where he was on Sunday night,’ Slider said patiently. ‘He might have fifty witnesses to say he was in The Dog and Duck or The Froth and Elbow.’
‘All right,’ Atherton said with sweet reasonableness, ‘if we discover he’s got an alibi for the time, well and good. All I’m saying is that it’s worth looking into.’
‘It wasn’t all you said, by a long chalk,’ Slider said. ‘But you can have a look at Collins. It’s the best lead we’ve had yet.’
‘It makes more sense to me than suspecting any of the women,’ Joanna said.
Slider reached out and pulled a lump of her hair through his fingers. ‘Of course it does. And it has the virtue that it will engage Head’s attention, maybe long enough for us to find out what really did happen.’
She glanced at him, disappointed. ‘You don’t like the Collins theory?’
‘It’s not a theory, until we have some facts. And even as a potential theory, it has its drawbacks.’ He sighed. ‘I wish I had Head’s capacity for self-deception, then I’d be able to believe Neal committed suicide, and all would be well. If it weren’t for that one piece of wire …’ He stroked Joanna’s head absently. ‘He certainly had enough reason to want to get out. His life was in a sodawful mess.’
Joanna kept very still, trying to listen through his hands to what he was thinking. He was a man with a conscience, and she was hoping hard he wouldn’t start to draw conclusions about his own situation from what he had discovered about Neal’s. She didn’t want to be given up, for however noble a reason. For his sake as well as hers, she would have to make sure that in the constant battle between his animal instincts for pleasure and self-preservation, and his better self, his better self didn’t get enough of an upper hand to make them all suffer.
CHAPTER NINE
The Snake is Living Yet
THE SHAMROCK CLUB BY DAYLIGHT was a dismal place, with a false and improbable air, like any piece of theatre scenery viewed from the wrong side. There was a depressing smell of cheap carpet about it, old cigarette smoke, stale beer, and dead illusions.
It was a simple enough proposition: a wide, shallow basement room, with a bar running along the long side, opposite the stairs down from the street. There were toilets off to one side, next to the fire exit, and tables and chairs cramming all the rest of the available space, leaving only a pathway, one waiter wide, tracking from the bar past every table and back to the bar, in a sort of ergonomically-efficient one-way system. It was impossible to go even to the bog without passing the bar both ways.
There was no stage, nor even a sound system, for this was a serious club, dedicated to drinking and talking, without any frivolous notions of entertainment. It was a man’s club. There was no rule that said you couldn’t bring a woman in, but it would be a strange woman who’d want to come with you a second time. There was a ladies’ loo next to the gents, but it didn’t have ladies on the door – a subtle discouragement that would be enough for any but the most brazen female.
Behind the bar was the usual long mirror, reflecting the backs of the usual optics and the bottles stacked along the glass shelves. There was an unusually large collection of different whiskies, including twenty-three Irish, some of which weren’t known by name to any revenue collector on earth. There was also a
surprisingly wide range of cigarettes and cigars on sale, and – sop to the younger generation and frowned upon by the older regulars, by whom women had never been regarded as a source of pleasure – a display rack of condoms, tucked away at the end beside the rows of personal pewter beer-mugs.
Along the pelmet above the mirror was a string of coloured lights, sole gesture to festivity. The bulbs were green and red and blue, but so coated in nicotine from thousand upon thousand cigarettes that the colours were virtually indistinguishable from each other. And stuck to the ceiling over the door of the gents was a brown and ghostly piece of Sellotape, with a fragment of silver lametta still adhering to it, where the experimental Christmas decorations of 1985 had been taken down, never, owing to general apathy to the notion, to be restored.
Such daylight as there was came down from above through the glass pavement bricks, and down the stairs from the street door, which had been left propped open while cleaning and delivering went on. The former task was being performed by a tiny old lady in a green nylon overall, who was being towed back and forth across the stub-and-spillage-coloured carpet by an outsize industrial-strength Hoover. The chairs had been set up onto the tables with their legs in the air, but still it was taking all her concentration to avoid hitting anything, and she didn’t even notice Atherton cross her path on his way in.
A man’s spirits ought to have plunged at the first step into this dismal boozerama, but Atherton, whom nothing ever depressed, was wearing his David Attenborough look, which meant that even the most loathsome invertebrate he might come across down here would have the loveliness of discovery for him. To think people actually chose to come down here, he told himself in anthropological wonder – and in their leisure hours!
‘Help you, guv’nor?’ A figure had popped up from behind the bar, a tall, muscular Irishman with a bright complexion, gingery, fluffy hair, and ears standing so nearly at right angles to his head that for a moment Atherton thought they were a joke pair.
He recovered himself quickly. ‘Shepherd’s Bush CID. Detective Sergeant Atherton.’ He presented his card. The barman took and scrutinised it, as hardly anyone ever did. He looked at Atherton intently as he handed it back.
‘Doesn’t look much like you,’ he commiserated. ‘Shepherd’s Bush, eh? D’you know Sergeant O’Flaherty?’
‘Yes, I know him.’
‘He used to come here a lot. Said we had the best pint east of Dingle.’
‘Pint?’
‘The Guinness,’ he elucidated simply. ‘Haven’t seen him for a while. Tell him hello from me when you see him. Say Joey Doyle says there’s one in the tap for him, any time.’
‘I’ll see he gets the message.’ Atherton took out the photograph of Neal. ‘Have a look at this, will you? I believe you know this man.’
Doyle flung the teatowel in his hand over his shoulder and took the photograph. ‘Ah sure, yes, Dickie Neal,’ he said at once. ‘Is that right he was killed in the fire on Monday?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Atherton said.
He nodded. ‘They’ve all been talking about it. Poor feller. What did you want to know about him?’
‘He was a regular here, was he?’
‘He’d been coming in for years, but not on regular nights. It was just now and then.’
‘When did you see him last?’
‘Sunday night, it would be.’ Atherton felt an inward glow. At last they were on the trail! Doyle grinned suddenly. ‘Caused a bit of a stir, didn’t he, coming in with a woman – the like of which had to be seen to be believed! Well, Dickie was always one for the ladies, but this one was a real cracker – and young enough to be his daughter, the owl beggar!’
‘What did she look like?’ Atherton asked.
‘Tall girl, about twenty-five, gorgeous. Long red hair and long white legs a man could get himself tangled up in.’
There was a touch of poetry about Doyle, Atherton noted. ‘And was he?’
Tangled?’ Doyle asked intelligently. ‘He was, that’s for sure.’
‘Not her?’
‘Well, he was a lot older than her. He was a nice man, but—’ An eloquent shrug. ‘I don’t say she was playing hard to get, but she wasn’t giving it away, either. Dickie was all over her. Like the divorced man that only gets to take his little daughter out once a month. She was just sitting tight, waiting to see if there was an ice-cream in it for her.’
A graphic picture. They could do with more substance, though. ‘Do you remember what time they came in?’
Doyle thought. ‘Not to swear to the minute. Between eight and half past, I should think. It was still early, anyway. They came and sat at the bar to begin with, but when it started to get crowded later on they went off to bag a table before they all got taken.’
‘Were you serving at the bar all evening?’
‘Till about nine, then Alice came on. Then I went on the tables.’
‘Did you notice what time Neal left, and who was with him?’
Doyle looked at Atherton thoughtfully. ‘Is it the row you want to know about, with Dave Collins? There was nothing much to it – just a bit of a barney between friends. When Alice told them to take it outside it was pretty well all over anyway. I don’t believe it would ever have come to blows, if that’s what you’re wondering. Not them two.’
Atherton practically quivered with triumph. ‘They were friends, you say?’
‘What, Dave and Dickie? Since dot. Sure they used to argue all the time, but it never meant anything.’
‘But wasn’t Collins a violent man?’
‘Violent? Not that I know of. He had a temper, but it was more shouting and roaring, kind of style. He and Dickie were always at it. And Dickie would never have risen to it, only he wanted to show up well in front of the girl. Normally he just let Dave get on with it.’
‘Did you hear anything of what the quarrel was about?’
Doyle raised his eyebrows. ‘Everyone in the whole club heard what it was about. That’s why Alice put a stop to it, in the end – people were listening instead of drinking.’
‘About women, was it?’ Atherton asked casually.
‘Money,’ said Doyle, little knowing that with that one word he had shattered a man’s dreams. ‘Dickie owed Dave some money, and he’d promised to pay him back that weekend, only it seems he’d lost quite a bit at Newbury, and couldn’t cough up. It wouldn’t have mattered, only it was Dave’s missus’s birthday the Monday, and he wanted to buy her something special, so he needed the cash. So he got mad. Well, Dickie didn’t like being embarrassed in front of the girl -– she got up the moment it started and went off to the loo and stayed there – so he got mad back. They went at it hammer and tongs for a bit, until they realised the whole bar was listening to every word, and then they started to look a bit embarrassed. Then Alice tells them to take it outside. They went out all right – glad to hide their faces, I should think – but they weren’t gone more than a minute or two. Then Dickie come back in and fetched the girl, and that’s the last I saw of him.’
‘Neal came back in on his own?’
‘Yes. He just came back down and fetched her away. She’d come back from hiding by then, d’ye see.’
‘So you didn’t see Collins again?’
He shook his head. ‘He hasn’t been in since.’
‘And what time did all this happen?’
‘It’d be half-tennish, something like that.’
A bit early for their purposes, Atherton thought. Still, men with a pint or two on them could stand on the street talking nonsense for an hour together, in his experience.
‘You say Collins wanted the money to buy his wife a present,’ he asked.
‘So he said. Thought the world of her. And he was always strapped for cash, where Dickie generally sported considerable amounts. So it was a bit ironic, really, Dickie saying he couldn’t pay.’
Atherton thought for a moment. ‘Had you seen the girl before, the girl Dick Neal was with?’
Doyle t
hought a moment before answering. ‘I’m not sure, now. He never brought her in here before, but I had the feeling when they came in that I’d seen her somewhere, only I couldn’t put me finger on it. No, I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
‘If you should happen to remember, you will let me know? We’d like to have a word with her, but we haven’t been able to find out so far who she is.’
‘Sure, if anything occurs to me,’ Doyle said. He looked at Atherton keenly. ‘Is there something funny about the fire? It was an accident, wasn’t it?’
‘Has anybody been suggesting it wasn’t?’
‘No, only that it was pretty ironic, given that Dickie was a fire alarm salesman. There’ve been some woeful jokes going up and down the bar, I can tell you. Along the lines of “Come home to a living fire”.’ He shook his head. ‘Some people have a narful sense of humour.’
‘But Neal was liked, wasn’t he?’
Doyle hesitated a telling second. ‘He was liked well enough. He was one of the lads, told a lot of jokes, you know the way his sort are. He was free with his money, always bought his round and more.’
‘But?’
Doyle wrinkled his nose. ‘I dunno. I never got the feeling he was anyone’s best buddy, d’you know what I mean? It was all front and no back – if he’d’ve been in trouble, they’d’ve looked the other way, and vice versa. Well, most people don’t care, do they, as long as someone else buys the drinks? And then, he was always with a different woman. There’s a lot of fellers, particularly the married ones, don’t trust a man who gets on with women like that.’
‘He died because he never knew these simple little rules and few,’ Atherton observed.
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