Orchestrated Death
Page 1
About the Author
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles was born and educated in Shepherd’s Bush, and had a variety of jobs in the commercial world, starting as a junior cashier at Woolworth’s and working her way down to Pensions Officer at the BBC. She won the Young Writers’ Award in 1973, and became a full-time writer in 1978. She is the author of over sixty successful novels to date, including thirty volumes of the Morland Dynasty series.
Visit the author’s website at www.cynthiaharrodeagles.com
Also by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
The Bill Slider Mysteries
ORCHESTRATED DEATH
DEATH WATCH
NECROCHIP
DEAD END
BLOOD LINES
KILLING TIME
SHALLOW GRAVE
BLOOD SINISTER
GONE TOMORROW
DEAR DEPARTED
GAME OVER
FELL PURPOSE
BODY LINE
The Dynasty Series
THE FOUNDING
THE DARK ROSE
THE PRINCELING
THE OAK APPLE
THE BLACK PEARL
THE LONG SHADOW
THE CHEVALIER
THE MAIDEN
THE FLOOD-TIDE
THE TANGLED THREAD
THE EMPEROR
THE VICTORY
THE REGENCY
THE CAMPAIGNERS
THE RECKONING
THE DEVIL’S HORSE
THE POISON TREE
THE ABYSS
THE HIDDEN SHORE
THE WINTER JOURNEY
THE OUTCAST
THE MIRAGE
THE CAUSE
THE HOMECOMING
THE QUESTION
THE DREAM KINGDOM
THE RESTLESS SEA
THE WHITE ROAD
THE BURNING ROSES
THE MEASURE OF DAYS
THE FOREIGN FIELD
THE FALLEN KINGS
THE DANCING YEARS
To Terry Wale, the voice of Bill Slider
COPYRIGHT
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-74813-318-5
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.hachette.co.uk
Contents
About the Author
Also by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
Copyright
CHAPTER 1: Absence of Brown Boots
CHAPTER 2: All Quiet on the Western Avenue
CHAPTER 3: Drowsy Syrups
CHAPTER 4: Digging for Buttered Rolls
CHAPTER 5: Utterly Barbicanned
CHAPTER 6: Moth and Behemoth
CHAPTER 7: The Last Furnished Flat in the World
CHAPTER 8: Where There’s a Will There’s a Relative
CHAPTER 9: Other Fish?
CHAPTER 10: Through the Dark Glassily
CHAPTER 11: Miss World and Montezuma
CHAPTER 12: Guilt Edged
CHAPTER 13: A Woman of No Substance
CHAPTER 14: Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy they First Make Rich
CHAPTER 15: A Runt is as Good as a Feast
CHAPTER 16: Bogus is as Bogus Does
CHAPTER 17: The Stray Dog Syndrome
CHAPTER 1
Absence of Brown Boots
Slider woke with that particular sense of doom generated by Rogan Josh and Mixed Vegetable Bhaji eaten too late at night, followed by a row with Irene. She had been asleep when he crept in, but as he slid into bed beside her, she had woken and laid into him with that capacity of hers for passing straight from sleep into altercation which he could only admire.
He and Atherton, his sergeant, had been working late. They had been out on loan to the Notting Hill Drug Squad to help stake out a house where some kind of major deal was supposed to be going down. He had called Irene to say that he wouldn’t be back in time to take her to the dinner party she had been looking forward to, and then spent the evening sitting in Atherton’s powder-blue Sierra in Pembridge Road, watching a dark and silent house. Nothing happened, and when the Notting Hill CID man eventually strolled over to put his head through their window and tell them they might as well push off, they were both starving.
Atherton was a tall, bony, fair-skinned, high-shouldered young man, who wore his toffee-coloured hair in the style made famous by David McCallum in The Man From UNCLE in the days when Atherton was still too young to stay up and watch it. He looked at his watch cheerfully and said there was just time for a pint at The Dog and Scrotum before Hilda put the towels up.
It wasn’t really called The Dog and Scrotum, of course. It was The Dog and Sportsman in Wood Lane, one of those gigantic arterial road pubs built in the fifties, all dingy tiled corridors and ginger-varnished doors, short on comfort, echoing like a swimming-pool, smelling of Jeyes and old smoke and piss and sour beer. The inn sign showed a man in tweeds and a trilby cradling a gun in his arm, while a black labrador jumped up at him – presumably in an excess of high spirits, but Atherton insisted it was depicted in the act of sinking its teeth into its master’s hairy Harris crutch.
It was a sodawful pub really, Slider reflected, as he did every time they went there. He didn’t like drinking on his patch, but since he lived in Ruislip and Atherton lived in the Hampstead-overspill bit of Kilburn, it was the only pub reasonably on both their ways. Atherton, whom nothing ever depressed, said that Hilda, the ancient barmaid, had hidden depths, and the beer was all right. There was at least a kind of reassuring anonymity about it. Anyone willing to be a regular of such a dismal place must be introspective to the point of coma.
So they had two pints while Atherton chatted up Hilda. Ever since he had bought the Sierra, Atherton had been weaving a fiction that he was a software rep, but Slider was sure that Hilda, who looked as though the inside of a magistrates’ court would hold no surprises for her, knew perfectly well that they were coppers. Rozzers, she might even call them; or Busies? No, that was a bit too Dickensian: Hilda couldn’t be more than about sixty-eight or seventy. She had the black, empty eyes of an old snake, and her hands trembled all the time except, miraculously, when she pulled a pint. It was hard to tell whether she knew everything that went on, or nothing. Certainly she looked as though she had never believed in Father Christmas or George Dixon.
After the beer, they decided to go for a curry; or rather, since the only place still open at that time of night would be an Indian restaurant, they decided which curry-house to patronise – the horrendously named Anglabangla, or The New Delhi, which smelled relentlessly of damp basements. And then home, to the row with Irene, and indigestion. Both were so much a part of any evening that began with working late, that nowadays when he ate in an Indian restaurant it was with an anticipatory sense of unease.
After a bit of preliminary squaring up. Irene pitched into the usual tirade, all too familiar to Slider for him to need to listen or reply. When she got to the bit about What Did He Think It Was Like To Sit By The Phone Hour After Hour Wondering Whether He Was Alive Or Dead? Slider unwisely muttered that he had often wondered the same thing himself, which didn’t help at all. Irene had in any case little sense of humour, and none at all where the sorrows of being a policeman’s wife were concerned.
S
lider had ceased to argue, even to himself, that she had known what she was letting herself in for when she married him. People, he had discovered, married each other for reasons which ranged from the insufficient to the ludicrous, and no-one ever paid any attention to warnings of that sort. He himself had married Irene knowing what she was like, and despite a very serious warning from his friend-and-mentor O’Flaherty, the desk sergeant at Shepherd’s Bush.
‘For God’s sake, Billy darlin’,’ the outsize son of Erin had said anxiously, thrusting forward his veined face to emphasise the point, ‘you can’t marry a woman with no sense-a-humour.’
But he had gone and done it all the same, though in retrospect he could see that even then there had been things about her that irritated him. Now he lay in bed beside her and listened to her breathing, and when he turned his head carefully to look at her, he felt the rise inside him of the vast pity which had replaced love and desire. Tout comprendre c’est tout embêter Atherton said once, and translated it roughly as ‘Once you know everything it’s boring’. Slider pitied Irene because he understood her, and it was that fatal ability of his to see both sides of every question which most irritated her, and made even their quarrels inconclusive.
He could sense the puzzlement under her anger, because she wanted to be a good wife and love him, but how could she respect anyone so ineffectual? Other people’s husbands Got On, got promoted and earned more money. Slider believed his work was important and that he did it well, but Irene could not value an achievement so static, and sometimes he had to struggle not to absorb her values. If once he began to judge himself by her criteria, it would be All Up With Slider.
His intestines seethed and groaned like an old steam clamp as the curry and beer resolved themselves into acid and wind. He longed to ease his position, but knew that any shift of weight on his part would disturb Irene. The Slumber-well Dreamland Deluxe was sprung like a young trampoline, and overreaction was as much in its nature as in a Cadillac’s suspension.
He thought of the evening he had spent, apparently resultless as was so much of his police work. Then he thought of the one he might have spent, of disguised food and tinkly talk at the Harpers’, who always had matching candles and napkins on their dinner-table, but served Le Piat d’Or with everything.
The Harpers had good taste, according to Irene. You could tell they had good taste, because everything in their house resembled the advertising pages of the Sundry Trends Colour Supplement. Well, it was comforting to know you were right, he supposed; to be sure of your friends’ approval of your stripped pine, your Sanderson soft furnishings, your oatmeal Berber, your Pampas bathroom suite, your numbered limited-edition prints of bare trees on a skyline in Norfolk, the varnished cork tiles on your kitchen floor, and the excitingly chunky stonewear from Peter Jones. And when you lived on an estate in Ruislip where they still thought plastic onions hanging in the kitchen were a pretty cute idea, it must all seem a world of sophistication apart.
Slider had a sudden, familiar spasm of hating it all; and especially this horrible Ranch-style Executive Home, with its picture windows and no chimneys, its open-plan front garden in which all the dogs of the neighbourhood could crap at will, with its carefully designed rocky outcrop containing two poncey little dwarf conifers and three clumps of heather; this utterly undesirable residence on a new and sought-after estate, at the still centre of the fat and neutered universe of the lower middle classes. Here struggle and passion had been ousted by Terence Conran, and the old, dark and insanitary religions had been replaced by the single lustral rite of washing the car. A Homage to Catatonia. This was it, mate, authentic, guaranteed, nice-work-if-you-can-get-it style. This was Eden.
The spasm passed. It was silly really, because he was one of the self-appointed guardians of Catatonia; and because, in the end, he had to prefer vacuity to vice. He had seen enough of the other side, of the appalling waste and sheer stupidity of crime, to know that the most thoughtless and smug of his neighbours was still marginally better worth protecting than the greedy and self-pitying thugs who preyed on him. You’re a bastion, bhoy, he told himself in O’Flaherty’s voice. A right little bastion.
The phone rang.
Slider plunged and caught it before its second shriek, and Irene moaned and stirred but didn’t wake. She had been hankering after a Trimphone, using as an excuse the theory that it would disturb her less when it rang at unseasonable hours. There were so many Trimphones down their street now that the starlings had started imitating them, and Slider had made one of his rare firm stands. He didn’t mind being woken up in the middle of the night, but he was damned if he’d be warbled at in his own home.
‘Hullo Bill. Sorry to wake you up, mate.’ It was Nicholls, the sergeant on night duty.
‘You didn’t actually. I was already awake. What’s up?’
‘I’ve got a corpus for you.’ Nicholls’ residual Scottish accent made his consonants so deliberate it always sounded like corpus. ‘It’s at Barry House, New Zealand Road, on the White City Estate.’
Slider glanced across at the clock. It was a quarter past five. ‘Just been found?’
‘It came in on a 999 call – anonymous tip-off, but it took a while to get on to it, because it was a kid who phoned, and naturally they thought it was a hoax. But Uniform’s there now, and Atherton’s on his way. Nice start to your day.’
‘Could be worse,’ Slider said automatically, and then seeing Irene beginning to wake, realised that if he didn’t get on his way quickly before she woke properly, it most certainly would be.
* * *
The White City Estate was built on the site of the Commonwealth Exhibition, for whose sake not only a gigantic athletics stadium, but a whole new underground station had been built. The vast area of low-rise flats was bordered on one side by the Western Avenue, the embryo motorway of the A40. On another side lay the stadium itself, and the BBC’s Television Centre, which kept its back firmly turned on the flats and faced Wood Lane instead. On the other two sides were the teeming back streets of Shepherd’s Bush and Acton. In the Thirties, the estate had been a showpiece, but it had become rather dirty and depressing. Now they were even pulling down the stadium, where dogs had been racing every Thursday and Saturday night since Time began.
Slider had had business on the estate on many an occasion, usually just the daily grind of car theft and housebreaking; though sometimes an escaped inmate of the nearby Wormwood Scrubs prison would brighten up everyone’s day by going to earth in the rabbit warren of flats. It was a good place to hide: Slider always got lost. The local council had once put up boards displaying maps with an alphabetical index of the blocks, but they had been eagerly defaced by the waiting local kids as soon as they were erected. Slider was of the opinion that either you were born there, or you never learnt your way about.
In memory of the original exhibition, the roads were named after outposts of the Empire – Australia Road, India Way and so on – and the blocks of flats after its heroes – Lawrence, Rhodes, Nightingale. They all looked the same to Slider, as he drove in a dazed way about the identical streets. Barry House, New Zealand Road. Who the hell was Barry anyway?
At last he caught sight of the familiar shapes of panda and jam sandwich, parked in a yard framed by two small blocks, five storeys high, three flats to a floor, each a mirror image of the other. Many of the flats were boarded up, and the yard was half blocked by building equipment, but the balconies were lined with leaning, chattering, thrilled onlookers, and despite the early hour the yard was thronged with small black children.
A tall, heavy, bearded constable was holding the bottom of the stairway, chatting genially with the front members of the crowd as he kept them effortlessly at bay. It was Andy Cosgrove who, under the new regime of community policing, had this labyrinth as his beat, and apparently not only knew but also liked it.
‘It’s on the top floor I’m afraid, sir,’ he told Slider as he parted the bodies for him, ‘and no lift. This is one of the o
lder blocks. As you can see, they’re just starting to modernise it.’
Slider cocked an eye upwards. ‘Know who it is?’
‘No sir. I don’t think it’s a local, though. Sergeant Atherton’s up there already, and the surgeon’s just arrived.’
Slider grimaced. ‘I’m always last at the party.’
‘Penalties of living in the country, sir,’ Cosgrove said, and Slider couldn’t tell if he were joking or not.
He started up the stairs. They were built to last, of solid granite, with cast-iron banisters and glazed tiles on the walls, all calculated to reject any trace of those passing up them. Ah, they don’t make ’em like that any more. On the top-floor landing, almost breathless, he found Atherton, obscenely cheerful.
‘One more flight,’ he said encouragingly. Slider glared at him and tramped, grey building rubble gritting under his soles. The stairs divided the flats two to one side and one to the other. ‘It’s the middle flat. They’re all empty on this floor.’ A uniformed constable, Willans, stood guard at the door. ‘It’s been empty about six weeks, apparently. Cosgrove says there’s been some trouble with tramps sleeping in there, and kids breaking in for a smoke, the usual things. Here’s how they got in.’
The glass panel of the front door had been boarded over. Atherton demonstrated the loosened nails in one corner, wiggled his fingers under to show how the knob of the Yale lock could be reached.
‘No broken glass?’ Slider frowned.
‘Someone’s cleaned up the whole place,’ Atherton admitted sadly. ‘Swept it clean as a whistle.’
‘Who found the body?’
‘Some kid phoned emergency around three this morning. Nicholls thought it was a hoax – the kid was very young, and wouldn’t give his name – but he passed it on to the night patrol anyway, only the panda took its time getting here. She was found about a quarter to five.’
‘She?’ Funny how you always expect it to be male.
‘Female, middle-twenties. Naked,’ Atherton said economically.
Slider felt a familiar sinking of heart. ‘Oh no.’