Death Watch

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Did Barry Lister tell you about any of your husband’s other colleagues dying?’

  ‘No. Why should he? I think you overestimate his contact with me – and my interest in the matter. I got a Christmas card every year from Barry and the occasional phone call, but I assure you all the contact between us was entirely at his instigation and for his benefit. He was a retired man with nothing to do, and missing his job. My days as a fireman’s wife are far, far behind me – and I assure you I don’t miss them at all.’

  ‘What about Dick? Do you miss him?’

  She looked at him for a long moment. ‘Is that a shot in the dark, or a shrewd guess? No, I don’t miss him — but I miss what we were together. I never regretted marrying Gil instead of him. He’d have made a hopeless husband, and my life would have been grim. But—’ She hesitated. ‘I think a woman always feels a special fondness for her first love, especially when he’s also her first lover. We were young and happy together. When I read about his death, I felt-a great loss.’

  The loss of innocence, Slider thought. In every life there was a moment when the gates of the garden shut behind you, and you realised that from now on, the pleasure you had always taken for granted would have to be worked for. Joanna had put it once – a quotation from somewhere, he thought, but he didn’t know where – ‘Before, one thing wrong and the day was spoilt; afterwards, one thing right and the day is made.’

  That was the message in the snapshots, of course. In the photographic past, every day was sunny, every face was smiling. She should have married Neal in the very beginning, before they got thrown out of Eden. But the road to Hell is paved with missed chances, and no good deed ever goes unpunished. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, he concluded with a sigh.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Atherton. ‘Very, very interesting. And what did you make of her overall?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Slider said, staring into his tea. The canteen had started using those teabags on strings, which meant that you always had it lying in the saucer, a disgusting little corpus delicti spoiling your pleasure and making the bottom of the cup drippy. ‘I thought she was a very sad woman, with an empty life. She loved Dick Neal but decided he wasn’t good enough for her, and made them both unhappy.’

  ‘But if he wasn’t good enough for her because he was only a fireman, why on earth did she marry Forrester?’

  ‘That’s what I can’t understand. The only thing I can think of is that she did it to spite him – married his best friend to make him jealous and serve him right.’

  ‘Serve him right for what?’

  Slider shrugged. ‘For letting her down, perhaps. She went to University and made something of herself, while he dropped out – at least in her terms – and made himself ineligible. She was still quite young, remember – only about twenty-one when she married – and passion can be as irrational as that, particularly when it’s intense.’

  ‘Do you think they were lovers while she was married?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. But it hardly matters, does it? Whether they actually did it physically or not, they were still lovers in every other sense. You could see it in the photographs – the belonging between them. Forrester must have been one hell of a patient man.’

  ‘So if all the passion was still alive, why didn’t she marry him when Forrester was dead?’

  ‘I suppose the same problem still existed – he wasn’t good enough for her. She was even further above him by then. Her career was advancing, and she had private income from her father’s will.’ Slider frowned. ‘I can imagine a scenario where he proposed, and she said, “Yes, all right, as long as you make something of yourself. I’m not marrying a security guard.”’

  Atherton joined in enthusiastically. ‘His pride would rear its head. He’d say, “I like me as I am. You’ll have to like it or lump it.”’

  ‘She calls him lazy and lacking in ambition—’

  ‘He calls her a frightful snob – they quarrel – tears all round and stormings out with slammed doors.’

  Slider sighed. ‘Hurt feelings can be the very devil. Probably they’d both want to make it up, but wouldn’t know how to start.’

  ‘Why did she change jobs?’

  ‘She lied about that, at any rate,’ Slider said. ‘She said Neal followed her to Hammersmith, but we know from the dates that’s not true. He started with Betcon two months after Shaftesbury Avenue closed, and gave his address then as Dalling Road. She didn’t move to Hammersmith until four months later.’

  ‘So she followed him?’

  ‘Maybe. It may even have been a coincidence. But it’s also possible that she genuinely remembers it the other way round.’

  ‘Hurt pride again.’ Atherton drained his cup. ‘At all events, it doesn’t detract from her motive. She’s furious that he doesn’t care enough about her to fulfil her conditions of marriage. Instead of improving himself to be worthy of marrying her, he prefers to remain a bum, and even marries an inferior woman just to spite her. If that’s what he did,’ he added, ‘they were a lovely couple all right, and deserved each other.’

  ‘Thwarted passion,’ Slider said. ‘It’s dangerous. But that only gives her a motive for killing Neal, not all the others.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. She didn’t want her darling daughter to marry a nasty fireman, and since the daughter was stubborn, the only answer was to put him out. And the others—’

  ‘Just a bad habit?’ Slider enquired ironically.

  ‘Give me a chance, I’m thinking. No, it makes sense all right, when you think what she’d been through, the conflict at every turn, the emotional suffering. It all built up over the years into an obsession. Neal let her down by becoming a fireman. Her husband let her down getting himself killed by being a fireman, and thus making a mockery of her sacrifices. Her daughter betrays her brilliant intellect by becoming one and wanting to marry one. Mrs F hates them all, more and more as her empty life unrolls before her. Most of all she hates her own particular ones, her husband’s “mates” whose society Dick preferred to hers – the final insult – and who let her husband die. She wants them all dead.’

  ‘So long after the event?’

  ‘It had been building up. But Sears had only just come back on the scene, wanting to marry her daughter. That’s obviously what triggered it off. The stimulus acute enough to make her kill. She killed him, and after that the rest would be easy. She started on an elaborate plan to off them all, leaving, as Norma put it, the best till last.’

  ‘The murders get more and more elaborate as they go on,’ Slider mused. ‘Starting with a simple bash on the head, and ending with Neal’s ridiculously elaborate set-up.’

  ‘And there’s the sexual jealousy motif we needed to make sense of that particular scenario. She not only killed him, she emasculated him.’

  ‘If they were a series at all.’

  Atherton sighed. ‘You are caution personified.’

  ‘Just trying to second-guess our lord and master. And of course we still have to prove it.’

  ‘Her alibi’s only for Sunday evening. She could still have been at the motel killing Neal at two in the morning. What we’ve got to do is find out where she was when Webb and Sears were killed, but that won’t be easy, after all this time. Another cup of tea?’ Atherton stood up, and Slider pushed his chair back too.

  ‘No thanks. I’m going to go home. I need to think a bit, get all this straight in my head.’

  Of course, Atherton thought, Joanna was away. Well, he would just tidy up a few things, and then see if he could persuade Polish to let him take her out for a meal. There was that marvellous Jewish family restaurant in Finchley Road, where they did a chicken soup with dumplings you could spend a week trapped in a lift with and not tire of its company. Polish needed feeding up – at least, that was his excuse. And afterwards, back to his artesian cottage for coffee and cognac and sexy Russian music.

  Tonight could be a memorable evening, he thought. And he’d do his best not to think of h
is guv’nor driving back to the grey wilderness of Ruislip and Irene’s bony arms – the fruits of hasty marriage. Slider was a walking object lesson to Atherton. He only wished he didn’t like him so much, so that he could appreciate the fact with unmixed feelings.

  On his way out, Slider came upon O’Flaherty, overflowing the chargeroom door and talking to Nicholls, who was custody skipper.

  ‘Ah, Billy!’ The Man o’ the Bogs turned and caught him. Last night’s Guinness hung around him like a miasma, sublimating out of his pores, perfuming even his serge-induced sweat. ‘I’ve got a curious little piece of information for yez. I was just telling Nutty about it.’

  Slider paused unwillingly. With all the new information his head was perilously full and close to slopping over already. ‘Is it about the case?’

  ‘Trust me,’ Fergus invited. ‘Would I waste your time?’

  Slider caught Nicholls’ eye across the wide, upholstered shoulder, and Nutty shrugged non-committally. ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘I went down the Shamrock Club last night, to see if I could sell some tickets,’ Fergus began in a once-upon-a-time manner, ‘and guess who I saw in there?’

  ‘Hedy Lamarr? Richard Nixon? The Dalai Lama?’

  ‘None other than our owl friend, Gorgeous George Verwoerd. Now I thought to meself, that’s a strange place to find a geezer like him, with not a drop of Irish blood in him—’

  ‘I thought everyone had a drop of Irish blood,’ Nutty put in. ‘How did your people miss him out?’

  Fergus ignored him. ‘So I asked Joey Doyle, an’ he said that Gorgeous was well known in there. And, what’s more, he’s seen him there several times talking to Richard Neal.’

  ‘Gorgeous told me he didn’t know Neal,’ said Slider.

  O’Flaherty nodded. ‘Wait’ll I tell ya, now. Joey was fairly poppin’ with it all, which was why I reckon he sent that message of love to me—’

  ‘If he had something to say, he could have said it to me,’ Slider said. ‘Or any member of the Department, for that matter.’

  ‘Ah, now, don’t be hard on me, Billy. I knew he wouldn’t a come across for you. Joey an’ me go way back. I knew his ma back in the owl country, and I did him a bit of a favour when he was younger. He’d had his germans in the till of the bar where he was working – oh, he wasn’t a bad lad: he’d got in a spot of bother, and he was going to put it back, only he got found out before he had the chance. Well, I knew the guv’nor and I got him to take the money and drop the charges, for his ma’s sake. Anyway, the long and the shart of it is that Joey’s always got his eye out to do me one back.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ Slider sighed. ‘I don’t know why we bother coming in to work. We should let you lot handle the detective work.’

  ‘It’s a tempting offer, Bill,’ Nicholls mused seriously.

  ‘Would yez stop interruptin’,’ Fergus said to him sternly. ‘Go and clank your keys somewhere. Listen, Billy, you remember the Neary boys?’

  ‘The O’Mafia? Who could forget them? The nearest Shepherd’s Bush ever got to Chicago. They made our lives hideous while it lasted. Don’t tell me they’re back?’

  ‘Micky and Hughie are still inside, praise be t’God and HMP, and Johnner and Brendan went back to Dublin, as you know. But the youngest, Colum, came outa the Scrubs about six months ago.’

  ‘He must have been keeping low – I haven’t heard anything about him,’ said Slider.

  ‘Well he has. Sure, I only heard yesterday what Joey Doyle told me. You remember Colly Neary only got twelve months, because he didn’t seem to be so involved as his big brothers?’

  ‘Yes, I remember. I was never convinced by that fresh-faced look of his.’

  ‘You were right,’ said Nicholls.

  ‘Well, but you know how it is in Irish families,’ Fergus said apologetically. ‘Colly’s the baby, and Micky and Hughie always swore he was only on th’ fringes of it. But Joey Doyle says that since Colly got out, he’s been fronting for his brothers inside, making to build the whole empire up again for when they get out – protection, lotteries, money-lending, the whole shebang.’

  ‘Oh good! Life was getting so samey,’ said Slider.

  ‘Just wait. You haven’t heard the best bit yet,’ Nicholls warned.

  ‘Now we know Gorgeous George was involved with the Neary boys last time, though we could never prove it,’ Fergus ploughed on. ‘Add to that, he’s now in pretty heavy with Colly Neary, and it starts to look very interesting that friend Neal was chattin’ away with your man nineteen to the dozen – and that Joey Doyle saw him on one occasion stowing a serious amount o’ wedge, which he reckoned Gorgeous had just slipped him. Now then!’

  Slider stared, working it through. ‘Doyle thinks Neal was working for the Neary boys, with Gorgeous George as contact man?’ he said disbelievingly.

  ‘No chance,’ Nicholls said promptly. ‘The Nearys may be all sorts of bastard, but they’re not suicidally stupid. They’d never work with a rank amateur.’

  ‘I never said they would,’ O’Flaherty said, goaded. Joey reckoned Neal’d been borrowing not wisely but too well. Twouldn’t be from Gorgeous – he wouldn’t lend a drowning man a sip o’ water – so he must only a been the go-between. Now if the O’Mafia was into Neal for the change, and he’d not come up with it—’

  ‘His finances had been getting more and more desperate,’ Slider said. ‘If he’d borrowed from the Nearys, and he got to the point where they believed he couldn’t pay, or wouldn’t pay—’

  ‘They’d have no choice but to take him out,’ Nicholls finished.

  Slider frowned. ‘But in that particular way? You know how he was left, don’t you?’

  O’Flaherty shrugged. ‘That might justa been a joke. If it was Gorgeous George did the contract, now, he’s a very funny feller.’

  ‘It’s a lot of ifs,’ Slider said doubtfully.

  ‘All right, but listen – wasn’t your man Webb, the Harefield Barn victim, deep in debt? And didn’t the Neary boys own a pub in Newyear’s Green — not half a mile across the fields to the barn where Webb was murdered?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Slider said. He looked at Fergus wearily. ‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’d just added to the confusion, and given us another thousand things to check up on.’

  ‘He’s a one-man job creation scheme,’ Nicholls said.

  ‘If you buy two tickets to Wetherspoon’s Spectacular, I’ll forget I ever told you any of that,’ Fergus offered. ‘Nutty’s in it,’ he added temptingly. ‘He’s playin’ the Mother Superior.’

  ‘My Climb Every Mountain is going to bring the house down,’ Nutty said.

  ‘Probably literally,’ Fergus added.

  Slider shuddered. ‘No thanks. Not even for a quiet life will I sit through D Relief dressed as nuns singing How do you solve a problem like Maria? in two-and-half part harmony.’

  ‘You’re a miserable bastard, so y’are,’ O’Flaherty said, heaving himself off the door jamb. ‘And after I give up me precious time to come and tell y’all this. Well, I must get back to me desk.’ He eyed Slider compassionately. ‘It’d give you a leg-up with God Head, at least. He loves gangs and hideouts and dawn raids and th’like. Reminds him of his uniform days. He was never so happy as when bustin’ down a door with his size elevens.’

  ‘I know. I just don’t want it to turn out to be Gorgeous George, that’s all. I can’t help liking him.’

  ‘You’ve a hell of a funny taste, boy,’ Fergus observed, as Slider took his departure.

  So now he had two hares running, Slider thought as he drove home, and running in different directions at that. But there was no doubt gangland would seem more tempting to Head than the world of thwarted passion.

  It would have to be looked into. If Gorgeous George had indeed given money to Neal, then Neal had been in big trouble. The fact of the Nearys’ pub being near the Harefield Barn might turn out to be sheer coincidence; but if the two murders were connected, which seemed ov
erwhelmingly likely, and Gorgeous was in the vicinity both times, Nearys or not it was going to be hard to keep him out of the frame.

  Then there was Marsha Forrester. He had a bad feeling about her: a strong, passionate, intelligent woman – well able intellectually to plan the murders and emotionally to want to commit them. Her being a pathologist meant she’d be able to cope with them physically, and live with the memories. And her contact with Barry Lister meant she’d be able to keep tabs on her victims until their turn came round. It also made sense of the fact that he hadn’t been killed – she’d have needed him for information.

  She was perfect for the frame, but it would be hard work proving it. And he wished he hadn’t seen all those photographs. The emptiness of her life, and the strong force that had driven her through the centre of it, and created her own loneliness, affected him deeply. He had to remind himself of Dick Neal’s ruined life, his hunger that couldn’t be filled, and his beastly, pitiful death, not to have too much sympathy with her.

  His thoughts churned as the Western Avenue rolled by. A red GTV went past him, and his mind twitched towards it automatically, as a sleeping dog will thump its tail if you call its name. They were all Joanna-cars to him now. God, he missed her! Why couldn’t he be going back to her, instead of to Ruislip? No-one there wanted him. He was extraneous, just a nuisance, like the men who came back after the war and found the woman and children had got on very well without them. Would they miss him if he went? What was he doing, sustaining the unnecessary edifice of his marriage? The sooner he made the break, the better for everyone. Get the agony over with.

  If only Joanna hadn’t gone away, he might have done it now, tonight. He was in the right frame of mind for it. But he couldn’t do it if he couldn’t go to her afterwards. The thought strayed past that he could do it anyway and then go and stay at Atherton’s, or even a hotel for the night; that it would actually be better, philosophically speaking, to do it when Joanna was away. He let the thought go, rejecting it untested. If only she hadn’t gone away, and he wasn’t in the middle of a serious case …