The man made an involuntary movement with his eyes towards the door – presumably the door to the storeroom. It was no more than a flicker, quickly controlled, but Slider’s scalp was prickling with the briny tension which filled the air. He could almost hear the clicking and whirring.
‘I told you, we don’t do it any more. Not enough call for it. It was too expensive.’
‘Well, could you tell me where you got it from?’
‘Italy,’ he said impatiently. ‘Is there anything else you want?’ The question verged on the belligerent, and was obviously meant to be interpreted as Why don’t you piss off?
‘Oh, no, thanks, that was all,’ Slider said, almost Uriah Heeping now, and departed. The grocer slammed the door behind him, and there was a distinctive little click which was the plastic sign hanging from the back of the door being turned to show ‘Closed’. Slider went in search of Norma with a sweet singing of success in his ears.
He met her at the appointed rendezvous round the corner, where she was engaged in cat-licking her face clean with the corner of a handkerchief and a pocket mirror. Her hair was ruffled, and her collar slightly askew.
‘Anything?’ he asked her, eyeing her condition. ‘I hope you didn’t take any risks.’
‘There’s an alleyway that runs right along the back to service the back yards. They all had high walls, but to an ex-PT teacher like me –’ She shrugged. ‘Piece of piss.’
‘You were never a PT teacher,’ Slider reminded her severely. ‘Did you see anything?’
‘The door was locked and the window was barred – pretty filthy too – but I hitched myself up and managed to have a look through it. It’s just an ordinary storeroom, full of boxes and so on. But on one shelf there are about twenty tins like the one in Anne-Marie’s flat.’
Slider sighed with pure pleasure. They’ve made a mistake. At last they’ve made a mistake – only a small one, but my God!’
‘How did you get on?’
‘He practically threw me out. Told me they didn’t sell olive oil any more – no demand for it. My God, we must really have rattled him!’ He stopped and sniffed. ‘What have you been treading in?’
‘I hate to think.’ Norma said, making use of the kerb’s edge. ‘That yard was the resort of uncleanly creatures. Do you really think we’re onto something?’
‘I’m sure of it. A shop like that would never deny selling something they had in stock. Come on, my lovely girl, I’m going to buy you a drink. There must be a pub somewhere near here.’
‘Anywhere, so long as there’s a Ladies where I can clean myself up.’
‘Thompson was right,’ Atherton said triumphantly as Slider came in. ‘She was smuggling!’
Slider simpered. ‘Whatever happened to “Good morning, darling, did you sleep well?“’
‘I’ve spent all night going through these daybooks and Anne-Marie’s bank statements, and there are some remarkable correlations,’ Atherton went on.
‘You’re not as much fun as you used to be,’ Slider complained. ‘What daybooks?’
‘Saloman of Vincey’s. It’s an interesting exercise. The turnover of that little shop is astonishing when you’ve been there and seen how empty it is.’
‘In Bond Street you need an astonishing turnover,’ Slider pointed out.
‘All right, but look at these figures. Saloman admits to buying one fiddle from Anne-Marie, correct name and address, in October 1987. Now look at the bank statement.’ Slider leaned over his shoulder and followed the line of the long forefinger. ‘He pays her three hundred thousand pounds – which, by the way, my friend at Sotheby’s thinks was on the high side for those days – and she makes a deposit of four thousand five hundred. In March ’88 he admits to paying her a hundred thousand for two bows, and she makes a deposit in her account of fifteen hundred.’ He looked up at Slider. ‘I don’t have to tell you, do I, that each of those deposits represents exactly one and a half per cent of the purchase price?’
‘No, dear. But what happened to the rest of the money?’
‘Yes, that’s the question. The way I see it, Cousin Mario gives her the goods, she smuggles them in, sells them to Saloman, banks her cut, and sends the rest of the money to –someone.’
‘Someone?’ Slider said sternly.
Atherton ruffled his hair out of order. ‘I haven’t worked that bit out yet,’ he admitted.
Slider ruffled the hair back again. ‘Only teasing.’
‘But look, we can take this further. There are only two occasions when Anne-Marie’s name appears in the daybook, but every time she made a large deposit in her account, there’s a corresponding sale around the same date at Vincey’s. Sometimes the amounts don’t match exactly, but she may have kept some cash back for immediate expenses –that’s no problem. The other names used on those occasions are never the same twice. I don’t know whether it would be worth checking them out.’
‘I suppose they used her real name twice to make sure she was implicated and therefore couldn’t rat on them,’ Slider mused. ‘That’s quite feasible. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t have had a good fiddle and a couple of bows to sell, but more than that would look suspicious. But we know she didn’t go on tour as often as once a month.’
Atherton shrugged. ‘She needn’t necessarily go with an orchestra. As long as she only took out one fiddle and came back with one, she was safe enough. And we do know that she was always taking time off from her Orchestra, ostensibly to play for outside concerns.’
‘True – and we also know that she didn’t play for the Birmingham Orchestra as she said she did.’
‘What puzzles me is how they got her own fiddle back to her each time.’
Slider shrugged. They may simply have imported it legally, through the normal channels. All they’d have to do would be to pay the duty and VAT, which would be peanuts compared with the value of the fiddle she brought in.’
‘But what was the scam, guv? I mean, the fiddles were sold openly at Saloman of Vincey’s, and you’d have thought that if there was anything wrong with that setup, it would have been discovered long ago. I mean they knew all about it at Sothebys.’
‘We’ll have to check up on them, and the olive-oil company, and the shop in Tutman Street. But my hunch is that they’ll all come out squeaky clean. They’d have to be, to be any use as a laundry service.’
Atherton’s eyebrows went up. ‘The Italian Connection. So you really think it was The Family after all?’
‘I’d bet on it. An elaborate scheme to launder dirty money and pass it back to Italy where it could be used openly and legitimately. Of course, Anne-Marie’s part must only have been a tiny one, one little wheel in a huge machine. And when she started to go wrong, she was simply eliminated.’
‘Yes, but by whom? We don’t seem to be any closer to knowing who actually killed her.’
‘When we know how, we’ll know who,’ Slider said, but without conviction. ‘But I’m afraid that aspect may turn out to be the least important of the whole business. I think I’d better go and talk to Dickson. Let me have a copy of those notes about the money, will you?’
When he came back in with the copy, Atherton lounged gracefully against the wall beside Slider’s desk in the only patch of sunshine in the room. ‘It looks as if you were right all along, guv,’ he said. ‘I was barking up the wrong tree with that Thompson business. But I wonder if we’ll ever be able to prove it wasn’t all legit.’
‘I doubt it,’ Slider said without looking up. ‘That’s the whole point of laundering.’
‘But if a thing is a lie, it ought to be possible to nail it.’
‘In an ideal world.’
‘We might manage to squeeze them a bit on probability. Look, I did some more working out. We can tell from Anne-Marie’s bank statement that she must have been passing around two million pounds to that shop in Tutman Street, and how did they account for that? If olive oil costs, say, thirty pounds a tin –’
‘What?’
‘Oh yes.’ Atherton was pleased at having surprised him. ‘Extra virgin oil is very expensive. In Sainsbury’s it’s about two quid for a little tiny bottle. Now at thirty pounds a tin, they’d have had to record sales of around sixty-seven thousand tins a year to account for the money. And that would be about a hundred and eighty tins of it per day. Can you believe a little shop like that would sell all that much olive oil?’
‘Probability isn’t proof. And you can bet they’ve worked out their accounting problems. They needn’t have passed all the sales through one shop or one class of goods. And we don’t even know that that’s where she took the money.’
‘No, but she must have gone there for something.’
‘And even if you did manage to nail that little shop, you’d only be snipping one tiny blood vessel in the system. You don’t imagine that two million pounds was the summit of their ambitions, do you?’
‘To quote you on that one, we do what we can, and it has to do. Your trouble is you take everything too seriously. If you can scoop up one little turd, the world is a sweeter place.’
‘Thank you, Old Moore,’ Slider said, not without bitterness.
She had drawn the heavy, port-coloured curtains against the dreary evening, and lit the fire, and it glinted off things half-hidden in corners and increased the Aladdin’s Cave effect of the red Turkish carpet and the cushion-stuffed chairs and sofa.
‘You’re very late. Was it trouble?’
‘I came by a roundabout route, and spent some time driving about watching my rear-view mirror.’
‘I hope that’s just paranoia.’
‘Reasonable precautions, now they’ve seen my face.’ He took her in his arms and kissed her. It seemed to have been a very long time since he had last done that.
After a while she rubbed a fond hand along his groin and remarked, ‘At least you always carry a blunt instrument around with you.’
‘Not always. Only when I’m with you.’
‘You say such lovely things to a girl.’ She tilted her head up at him, smiling a long, curved smile. ‘Do you want to eat now, or afterwards? Speak now, because things will start to burn soon.’
He laughed. ‘You’re so basic. It’s lovely.’
‘It’s healthy. Well?’
‘Turn the gas off,’ he said.
Much later they sat by the fire and ate steak with avocado salad followed by Gorgonzola with a bottle of Rully. Joanna was splendidly, unconcernedly naked – ‘Saves on napkins,’ she said – while Slider wore only his underpants, because her carpet was so prickly.
‘You’ve changed so much,’ she marvelled, ‘in such a short time. That first night I met you, you were so reserved. You’d never have done something like this.’
‘You’ve changed me,’ he said, stroking her shoulder. ‘And you aren’t white at all. More butter-coloured.’
‘Salted or unsalted?’
‘Pure Jersey.’
‘It’s only the fire light,’ she said, turning her head to kiss his hand, and he smiled and shook his head. All his senses seemed sharpened, all sensations heightened. The taste of the food and wine, the blissful heat from the fire on his skin, the shapes of light made by the flames, the small bright sounds of the fire and the ticking clock and the tap of cutlery on plate -everything seemed intensified, more itself, as if he had been transported into a world of paradigms. As perhaps he had, being in love.
They talked of nothing in particular, and gradually Slider fell silent, leaving the chatter to Joanna. She touched on a few subjects, and when they got to the cheese stage she asked him how the case was coming along.
‘We’re waiting for reports to come in on the shop and Vincey’s. But I don’t suppose they’ll tell us much. If Anne-Marie was mixed up with a big, powerful organisation, it isn’t likely we’ll be able to pin her murder on them. They’ll have covered their tracks.’
‘Is that what bothers you?’
‘What bothers me most is that if I’m right, my superiors will regard her as an unimportant side issue. People seem to have come to mean a great deal less than money nowadays.’
‘Oh Bill!’ She smiled, leaning forward to touch his knee. ‘That’s nothing new. Really, it’s just the opposite – that only nowadays have people begun to feel that it’s wrong for money to mean more than people. Think of the Victorian times. Think of Roman times. Think of any time in the past.’
He did not look convinced, so she changed the subject and told him about her day and the terrible conductor they were suffering from. She related a few musical anecdotes to him, and saw him trying to be amused and failing, and fell silent. Then, seeing he had allowed her to fail him, he felt guilty, and tried to make it up to both of them by making love to her again.
For the first time in his life he couldn’t do it. Long after she had accepted the inevitable he went on trying, until at last she said gently, ‘It’s no use bullying yourself. If it won’t, it won’t.’
He rolled over onto one elbow and stared at her. This, then, was the other side of that heightening of awareness –that everything hurt too much.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said helplessly.
‘You shouldn’t have tried. It’s only made you sad.’
‘I didn’t want – I wanted us not to be separate.’
‘Your feeling like that separates us. For heaven’s sake, if you want to be sad in my company, go ahead and feel sad. You don’t have to amuse me. You don’t have to be on your best behaviour.’
He put out a hand and pulled a lock of her muddled hair. ‘I know.’
‘No. I don’t think you do. Coming here to me is like – oh, I don’t know – like going out to tea when you were a child. Best suit, party manners, a break from real life and bread and-jam. I’m not real to you at all.’
He was surprised. ‘You are! You’re the most real thing in my life.’
‘Then you should feel that you can be natural with me. Be gloomy, if that’s how you feel.’
‘But that wouldn’t be fair on you.’
She jerked away from him and sat up. ‘Oh, fair on me! What’s fair on me? What do you think you’re doing? When you happen to be here, and you’re in a good mood, is that what you think is fair?’
‘I don’t understand,’ he said helplessly.
‘I can see that. It’s because you don’t put yourself to the trouble of thinking. Where will you be sleeping tonight, just answer me that?’
‘At home, of course,’ he said unhappily.
‘Of course!’
‘But you know that. What else can I do?’
‘Nothing. Nothing. Forget it. Just don’t talk about fairness.’ She stood up with an abrupt movement of exasperation or hurt, he wasn’t sure which, and stood with her back to him leaning on her folded arms on the mantelpiece.
‘Joanna, I don’t understand. I though you wanted me to be here. I don’t want to hurt you. If it hurts you, me being here, I won’t come,’ he tried.
‘Oh, for God’s sake! Thank you for the extensive choice.’
He didn’t know what else to say, and after a moment she said, ‘I think you’d better go. We’re only picking at each other.’
But not like this, he thought. He couldn’t bear to leave her like this. He hesitated for a long time, and then went and put his hands on her shoulders and turned her. Her eyes were dry and bright and she looked at him searchingly, perhaps to see how much he understood, which was very little.
‘When I was a child,’ she said suddenly, ‘My mother always wound the clock in the sitting-room on a Sunday afternoon, about five o’clock. It was a very evocative sound. And there was a drain in the kitchen under the sink that smelled of very old green soap. And the bricks the house was made of, when the sun warmed them, they smelled like caramel. But no-one will ever say that sort of thing about any house of mine. I build my nest, you see, but nothing grows in it.’
Still he didn’t understand, but wisely avoiding words, he kissed her on the forehead and the eyes and th
e lips, and after a while she responded, and they lay down on the hearth rug again and made love, this time without any trouble.
‘You think this will make everything all right again,’ she muttered at one point, and he did understand, dimly.
‘I love you,’ he responded. ‘I love you.’ He said it again and again, and never used her name because she was not separate from him then, she was part of his substance. Afterwards he lay heavy, like something waterlogged, in her arms, unable to make the terrible effort of moving.
‘I’d better go,’ he said at last.
‘Hardly worth it. You might as well stay here. Move in, and save yourself the journey.’
‘I can’t,’ he said automatically. Did she mean it or was she joking? He dreaded a revival of the argument.
But she only said, ‘I know.’
‘You don’t sound convinced.’
‘What do you want, a written guarantee?’ she said, but without rancour. ‘Go on, you dope. Get thee to thy clonery.’
‘Here’s the report on that company, Olio d’Italia.’ Dickson said, gesturing Slider to a seat. The fragrance of whisky hung on the air all around him like aftershave. ‘There was a certain amount of reluctance on the part of our Italian friends to press the enquiry, which in itself tended to confirm what you thought, Bill. There’s mud at the bottom of every pool, and some of it’s best left unstirred. Still, for what it’s worth, they’ve sent us this profile, and it’s pretty much what you’d expect.’
‘Oh,’ said Slider. Sometimes it wasn’t nice to be proved right.
‘Olio d’Italia, head office in Calle le Paradiso, however you pronounce that. Run by one Gino Manetti –’
‘Cousin Mario,’ Slider said. Dickson looked a question and didn’t wait for the answer.
‘The company itself is a subsidiary of Prodiutto Italiano imaginative names these people choose – which is a massive international concern dealing with all sorts of Italian produce – oil, pasta, tomatoes, olives, cheeses, grapes, dried fruit -you name it. The big boy at the head of the parent company is also, surprise surprise, called Manetti – Arturo Manetti. He lives in an enormous villa up in the hills above Florence. Fantastic place, so I’m told, servants, guard dogs, electric fence, armed bodyguards, the lot. Arturo is Gino’s uncle, and others of his relations run other subsidiaries. Of course, the reason the Italian security didn’t want to run the enquiries too hard is that Arturo is the local Capo.’
Orchestrated Death Page 24