‘Blimey, the lab really pulled its finger out on that one, didn’t it? What did they find?’
‘Nothing out of the ordinary, except that on the front passenger seat there were traces of a white powder –’
‘A white powder!’
‘Behave yourself. A white powder which on analysis proved to be pyrethrum and –’ he consulted the report – ‘piperonyl butoxide.’
‘Come again?’
‘It’s an insecticide with pretty general application. Kills fleas, lice, bedbugs, earwigs, woodlice and so on. Freely available from any garden shop, or Woolworth’s – you might find it in any household. Poisonous if you ate enough of it, and can irritate the eyes and nasal tissues if you throw it about or inhale it.’
‘It irritates my brain tissues,’ Atherton said crossly. ‘What’s the use of that? She could have bought a tin of it at any time, for any purpose, and spilt some on the seat. Where does that get us?’
‘Nowhere. Except that we didn’t find a tin of anything like that in her flat. But the other thing was more interesting – also found on the passenger seat, but down the crack between the seat and the back.’ He handed over a small square of paper which had originally been folded into four, but had since been crushed and creased and dirtied by its sojourn down the seat cushion. Opening it out Atherton saw that it was a sheet from a note-block, the sort of small pad you keep by the telephone. On it, written at a steep angle, as it might be by someone gripping the telephone receiver between chin and shoulder to leave both hands free, was the word Salomon, and a telephone number.
There was an instant of painful blankness, and then Atherton exclaimed, ‘Saloman! Saloman of Vincey’s!’
‘You know who he is?’
‘Vincey’s of Bond Street, the antiquarian’s. Saloman’s their expert on violin bows. Andrew Watson, the bloke at Sotheby’s, mentioned him when he was looking at the Stradivarius. Is this Anne-Marie’s writing, do we know? I suppose we can find out. Did she consult him? It’s a lead, anyway, and we’ve precious few of those.’
Slider smiled at his excitement. ‘Leads have a habit of fizzling out on closer inspection. I’ll leave this one to you – you’re getting to be the violin expert around here. By the way, someone ought to drop in at The Dog and Scrotum and have a chat with Hilda and the regulars. I know they all said they didn’t see Anne-Marie that night, but that was the official line. A comfy, private chat ought to get the truth out of them, one way or the other. I suppose,’ he added uncon-vincingly, ‘as it’s more or less on my way home –’
‘Bollards,’ Atherton said sweetly. ‘You know very well you don’t go home that way any more. I’ll do it, guv – you shove off to love’s young dream.’
‘That’s awfully good of you, old chap,’ Slider said gravely. ‘I thought you didn’t approve.’
‘If you see enough of her, you might get bored. Anyway, you know Hilda fancies me. She’s more likely to come across for me than for you. It’s my fresh young face and youthful charm – she can’t resist ’em.’
Slider shuddered. ‘What about the gatekeepers at the TVC?’
‘Beevers did ’em. One of them thinks he remembers that she didn’t get into the car, just went up to it and then ran back as if she’d forgotten something.’
‘A note under the windscreen wiper, perhaps, telling her to meet the murderer at the pub?’
‘Not if the murderer was Thompson.’
‘You know what I think about that,’ Slider said.
‘Maybe she just fancied somewhere different for a change. You can make too much of something, you know.’
Slider met his eyes, and a great number of warnings passed in both directions, which neither was likely to take heed of.
CHAPTER 11
Miss World and Montezuma
‘Hey,’ said Joanna, sitting up and looking down at him in the leaping firelight.
‘Hmm?’ One side of his body was too hot, the other icy from the draught under the sitting-room door; the floor was hard under his shoulder blades, the rug itchy under his buttocks. All the same, he would have preferred not to have to move for several more hours. Sleep had been in short supply lately.
‘You sleep on your own penny,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to be amusing me.’
‘I just did,’ he murmured without opening his eyes. He felt the roughness of her hair and a brief pressure on his penis as she bent to kiss it.
‘Sex is all very well, but I want you to talk to me as well.’
He groaned and rolled onto his side, and propped his head minimally with hand and elbow. ‘What?’ he said.
‘You look so sweet and ruffled,’ she grinned at him. ‘Innocent.’
‘You look like a dangerous wild animal,’ he said. ‘Most people look vulnerable when they take their clothes off, but you’re just the opposite. You look as though you might eat me.’
‘I will if you like,’ she offered equably.
‘A drink first. All very well for you women – it takes it out of us men.’
‘You women! Spoken from the depths of your vast experience, I suppose!’
‘You don’t have to have a baby to be a gynaecologist,’ he said with dignity.
She rose fluidly to her feet. ‘Can you drink gin and tonic?’
‘Does a monkey eat nuts?’
Left alone, he sat up and turned his other side to the fire. He looked around him and wondered at the sense of peace and comfort that this room gave him. He had never, to his memory, sat on the floor in his own house, though he used to in the early days of his marriage when he and Irene had had their little flat. But at home he couldn’t in any case have sat on the floor by the fire, since there was neither fireplace nor chimney. This room was neither smart nor elegant, nor even particularly clean, but it was a place where you could do nothing in perfect peace, a room that demanded nothing of you, imposed nothing on you.
A clinking sound heralded Joanna with a large glass in each hand. Ice cubes floated and bumped like miniature icebergs, lemon moons hung suspended, beaded with silver bubbles, and the liquid gleamed with the delicate blue sheen of a bloody large gin. The aromatic scent of it wafted sweetly to his nostrils.
‘Lovely,’ he said inadequately. She folded down beside him, and held her glass at eye level.
‘Aesthetically pleasing,’ she acknowledged.
‘You’re such an animal. It’s all pleasure with you – pleasure and comfort.’
‘Any fool can be uncomfortable.’
‘But what about duty and responsibility?’
She turned her head to rub an itch on her nose against her shoulder, something he couldn’t imagine Irene ever doing.
‘Those too. One fits them in, you know. But one’s first duty is to oneself.’
‘All right for you. You don’t have a wife and children.’
‘Oh, these wives and children!’ He looked irritated, and she went on, ‘Well, if you can’t make yourself happy, you aren’t likely to have much success with anyone else, are you? What use would I be to you if I were unhappy?’
‘If everyone thought like you –’ he began, but she gave convention short shrift.
‘Everyone doesn’t. The whole point is that the philosophy of irresponsibility is only safe in the hands of the morally trustworthy. So drink your nice drink and don’t worry about it. It takes a great deal of practice to become a dedicated hedonist.’
‘In other words, you don’t want to discuss it.’
‘Uh-huh,’ she concurred, leaning forward, her glass held clear of their bodies, to kiss him. She slid her tongue into his mouth and he was amazed to feel his instant reaction. Blimey, lad, he addressed his organ inwardly, you’re pretty lively for your age. Doing yourself proud, aren’t you? He reached behind him blindly for somewhere safe to put his glass so as to free his hands, and the phone started to ring.
Joanna removed her tongue from his mouth. ‘“Time watches from the shadow. And coughs when you would kiss”.’
�
�Shall I get it? It’s probably for me.’
But she was already up. ‘I should have put the answering machine on.’
It was O’Flaherty, starting his week of nights, and fresh from his day off with an assumed and expansive outrage. ‘It’s gettin’ to be a bloody trial trackin’ you down, Billy me darlin’. I even rang The Dog an’ Bloody Scorpion, till Little Boy Blue said I’d find you in Flagrante Dilecto, and I said to him, I said, that’s a pub I never even heard of –’
‘I hate to interrupt your Ignorant Man from the Bogs routine, but did you want anything in particular? It’s cold away from the fire.’
‘I think I got something for you,’ O’Flaherty said, dropping abruptly out of role. ‘Listen, there’s this young feller asking for you. He says he’s got something important to tell you, and it’s got to be you because he’s shit-scared of Atherton. Says Atherton’s got it in for him. Wants to see you alone.’
‘How d’you rate him?’
‘I think he’s the goods. Name of Thompson.’
‘Christ.’
‘Are you deaf, I said Thompson,’ O’Flaherty said witheringly.
‘Is he there now?’
‘No, he wouldn’t come to the station in case we locked him up. All this was on the dog an’ bone. I got him holdin’ fire in The Crown and Sceptic, but only God knows how long he’ll stay put. Apart from bein’ in mortal terror, he’ll be as pissed as a bloody fart unless you get out there soon. Where are you now?’
‘Turnham Green. I can be there in ten minutes. Listen, Pat, will you do me a favour? Will you ring a certain person and say what’s happened and that I don’t know how long I’ll be.’
‘Ah, Jaysus, Billy –’
‘Come on, Pat. Don’t start that again.’
‘Okay, okay, I’ll do it. Now you’d better get for Chrissakes over to dat pub before yer man changes his mind.’
‘All right, I’ll speak to you later.’
He put the phone down and turned to find Joanna not looking at him. ‘A certain person, forsooth,’ she said, but quite mildly.
‘Simon Thompson wants to see me, alone. Says he’s got information for me. I’ve got to go and see him before he changes his mind.’ She nodded acquiescence, turning her face away, sipping her drink and looking into the fire. All sorts of bits of him wanted badly to cleave unto her just then, but he reached for his clothes automatically, however unwillingly. ‘I’m sorry.’
She shrugged.
‘I’ll ring you later, if it’s not too late,’ he said humbly.
She turned, contrite. ‘Ring anyway, even if it is too late. I’ll be awake.’
He dressed and kissed her goodbye before he left, but his mind had already left ahead of him.
The pub seemed full for a weekday. Slider stood just inside the door looking around so as to give Thompson a chance to accost him first. Neither, of course, knew what the other looked like, but he pretty soon picked out Thompson from Atherton’s description – ‘Miss World in trousers’ – and from the way he was crouched over an untouched half pint with the preoccupied, inward-looking posture of an animal in pain. The eyes came round to the door, hesitated, went away, and returned to meet Slider’s hopefully. Slider nodded slightly and went across and Thompson made room for him on the banquette. As soon as he was near enough, Slider could smell the other man’s fear. This was no hoax.
‘Mr Thomspon?’
Thompson nodded, still hunched wretchedly. ‘You’re Inspector Slider?’
‘How did you know about me?’
‘Sue Bernstein said you were in charge of the investigation. She said you seemed like a decent bloke. And she said you’re going with Joanna Marshall, is that right?’
Slider coughed slightly, taken aback by the directness of the question.
‘Well, I thought you were probably all right. Better than that Sergeant Atherton, anyway. He’s got it in for me.’ His voice rose a little in panic. ‘He thinks I killed Anne-Marie. He’s out to prove it, whatever it takes.’ He seemed to flinch at the sound of his own words, and crouched lower, looking around him as if he expected Atherton to leap up triumphantly from under the table brandishing a tape recorder.
‘I’m sure he doesn’t think anything of the kind,’ Slider said soothingly. ‘We have to ask questions in order to get at the facts, that’s all.’
Thompson looked at him hopefully, a film of sweat on his upper lip, his eyes fawning. ‘You seem like a reasonable bloke. You don’t think I killed her, do you?’
‘Well, as a matter of fact I don’t,’ Slider said, ‘but that’s neither here nor there, is it?’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘Well, if you really didn’t do it, you’ve got nothing to worry about, have you?’
‘It’s all very well for you,’ Thompson said bitterly, ‘but if you were in my position you wouldn’t be so cheerful. I had nothing to do with it. You must believe me. I was as horrified as anyone when I heard.’
‘Perhaps a bit more horrified?’ Slider suggested. ‘Well, after all, you had had a relationship with her. You must have been closer to her than anyone else –’
‘No-one was close to that girl,’ he interrupted with force. ‘She was weird and – look, I’m sorry she’s dead, but I can’t help it. She was mixed up in something and it caught up with her in the end. It was her own fault, that’s how I see it.’
‘What was she mixed up in?’ Slider asked evenly, his heart jumping.
Thompson took the plunge. ‘I don’t know the details, but I’m pretty sure she was mixed up in some kind of smuggling racket. I got the idea she was beginning to want out, but she’d got in too deep. On the plane coming back from Italy she seemed pretty scared, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was about.’
‘Ah yes, Italy. Tell me about that. You and she were going around together, weren’t you?’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘It was just for the tour – that was understood. We’d done it before. We swapped rooms with some other people so that we could sleep together, and everything was all right until the last day, in Florence. We’d been out in the morning, poking around the junk shops in one of those alleys behind the main square – you know.’ Slider, who had never been to Florence, nodded. ‘Then I said how about getting some lunch and she suddenly said no, she had to go and see somebody. Just sprang it on me like that – never mentioned anything about it before. Well, when you’re spending a tour together, you sort of expect to know what the other person’s doing, don’t you?’
Again Slider nodded.
‘So naturally I asked her who she had to see all of a sudden, and she wouldn’t tell me. Got quite nasty about it. Eventually she said if I really wanted to know she was going to see her cousin Mario, but it was none of my business, and I never gave her a moment’s privacy and – things like that. Suddenly we were quarrelling and I didn’t know how I got into it.’
‘You think she deliberately engineered the quarrel – so as to get away from you?’
Thompson nodded eagerly. ‘Yes, that’s it. And she was different, too – jumpy and nervous, looking over her shoulder as if she thought someone might be watching her. Anyway, we argued a bit, and she stormed off, and I – well, I sort of followed her. I didn’t really mean to. I was just walking in the same direction at first, because that was the way I wanted to go, and then because I was angry I sort of got the idea that I’d follow her and see where she went and then later I’d face her with this cousin Mario nonsense …’ His voice trailed off.
‘You were jealous, perhaps?’ Slider suggested. Thompson shrugged. ‘Did she see you following her?’
‘I don’t think so. I had a job to keep up with her, mind you, because she went a hell of a long way, right off the tourist track, and after a while I got scared of losing her, because I’d never have found my way back. I had no idea where I was.’
‘Did she seem to know where she was going?’
‘Oh yes. She never hesitated. And she took lots of little alleys and back street
s and so on. I’d never have remembered the way – it was too complicated.’
Cautious, thought Slider. How the hell did she miss an incompetent bloodhound like Thompson? ‘Where did you eventually end up?’
‘In an ordinary street, with houses and a few shops on either side. Not a tourist street. Not smart. And then she turned into a doorway.’
‘A shop?’
‘I didn’t see. I was a bit behind her, and when she went in I didn’t like to go too close in case she came out again suddenly, and spotted me. So I stood in a doorway further down the street and waited. I kept thinking, suppose there’s a back way? Suppose she goes out the back way, I’m really fin trouble.’
‘You didn’t notice the name of the street, I suppose,’ Slider said without hope.
Thompson looked eager and said, ‘Yes, I did. The doorway I was standing in was right opposite the street sign, so I was sort of staring at it for ages. I remembered it because it was so inappropriate – Paradise Alley, only in Italian, you know.’
Blimey, Slider thought, a fact. Someone actually remembers something.
‘Go on.’
‘Well, she was in there I don’t know how long, but it seemed a long time to me, maybe ten minutes, and when she came out she was carrying a bag.’
‘What sort of bag? How big?’
‘I think you call them carpet bags. You know, like a big sports bag, but soft – canvas I think – and with handles on the top. About this big.’ He offered his hands about thirty inches apart.
‘Was it heavy?’ Thompson looked puzzled. ‘How did she walk with it? Did she walk as if it was heavy?’
‘Oh,’ he said, enlightened. ‘No, not really. She just walked normally. Well, I ducked back into the doorway until she’d gone past and then followed her again until we got near the main square and I recognised where I was, and I turned off to the side. But she must have turned off down the next street, because a minute later when I came into the square I bumped into her. She didn’t look too pleased to see me, but I put it down to we’d just had a quarrel. So I asked her what was in the bag. Well, it was a natural question, wasn’t it?’
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