Orchestrated Death

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Mr Slider! Down here, quick! Come on, guv, quick as you like!’

  The voice was hoarse with urgency, and he obeyed, running down the steps and then down the precipitous, dish-shaped flight into the area. Ronnie Brenner stood half concealed by his door, which he held just enough ajar for Slider to get through.

  ‘’Urry up, guv, please. It ain’t safe,’ he whispered, and Slider went past him into the flat, his senses alert. Brenner took a frightened and comprehensive look around outside, and then closed the door and chained it clumsily.

  ‘Frough here,’ he said, inching past Slider in the narrow, dark, malodorous passage and leading the way to the back of the house. ‘We can’t be seen in here – nothink don’t overlook it.’

  The room was a surprise to Slider. It was a living-cum-kitchen-cum-dining room, square, and well-lit from a window with a Venetian blind over it. One corner was equipped as a kitchen, and the rest was furnished with a square dining-table with barley-sugar legs, a shabby and almost shapeless sofa, two sagging armchairs covered in scratched and scarred leather, and bookshelves along one wall. Though shabby, it was spotlessly clean, and smelled, unlike the passage, not of damp and rotting plaster, but pleasantly of leather and neat’s-foot oil.

  There were photographs of horses everywhere, framed and hanging on the wall, pinned along the edges of the bookshelves, propped up on the table and the kitchen cabinet, cut out of newspapers and magazines and sellotaped to the fridge door and above the draining-board. At a quick glance Slider could see that all the books on the shelves were to do with horses and racing, ranging from serious turf and stud books to a row of Dick Francis novels in well-thumbed paperback. There was nothing surprising about the room except its existence here, in the basement of a slum house in Shepherd’s Bush. Had it been transported, as it stood, to the flat above the stables of a respected stud-groom, Slider would have found it entirely in character.

  Turning to face his host, Slider remembered him now, and remembered him as harmless. He was small, undersized, weakly-looking except for the whippy strength of his arms and hands, and the hard lines in his face which told of a lifetime’s bitter and losing struggle with weight. He might once have been a handsome man, before the effects of deliberate starvation, exposure to the weather, and a diet of gin and cigarettes designed to stunt him, had browned and wrinkled and monkeyfied him. Under the brown he was at this moment very white, his features drawn and pinched with fear. Ronnie Brenner was plainly a very frightened man.

  Slider addressed him kindly. ‘Now then, Ronnie – who’s been putting the frighteners on you?’

  ‘Christ, Mr Slider, nobody don’t need to say nothink. I seen what they do, haven’t I? Was you followed, guv?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I came a very roundabout way. Is it as bad as that?’

  ‘I wanted to tell you, guv, honest,’ he said, fidgeting anxiously with the things on the table. ‘I hung about the station for a bit hoping I’d see you, till I see that big Mick sergeant clocking me, then I come away a bit hasty. Him and me have had a brush now and then, see. I fought about phoning you, but I never done it. I never fought you’d come here.’

  ‘Well I did, and here I am. What did you want to tell me?’

  ‘I ain’t done nothing, and that’s the truth, guv, so help me. You got to believe me. This bloke phoned me up, see, out of the blue -’

  ‘Which bloke?’

  ‘I don’t know. He never give me no name. He says, I know you, Ronnie, and I’ve got a little job for you, what’U pay you nicely.’

  ‘He used your name like that?’

  ‘Yessir. Straight out, Ronnie, he calls me.’

  ‘Did you recognise his voice?’

  ‘No sir. Not to say who he was, but it’s a kind of voice I’ve heard before. What I mean is, it was posh. Posher than yours. Not a Silver-Ring voice, see, but real posh, like the county nobs in the owners’ enclosure.’

  ‘Old? Young?’

  ‘Not young. Middle-aged. An’ he was ringing me from a coin box, and it must have been long distance because I kept hearing him put money in, every two bleeding seconds nearly. So anyway, he asks me to do this job for him. He says he wants me to find him an empty flat on the White City estate, make it so’s he can get in, clean it out, and watch it for a couple of days to see who goes in and out of the block, what times an’ that.’

  ‘Did he say why he wanted you to do those things?’

  ‘He says he wants to have a private meeting, and he wants him and his colleagues to be able to get there and go away again without no-one seeing them. Well, it don’t sound too bad, so I done it. Well, there’s nothink against the law, is there?’

  ‘Breaking and entering is against the law.’

  ‘Yeah, but it was an empty flat, kids break in all the time. He couldn’t steal nothink, could he? Just have a meeting there – well, I didn’t know what the meeting was about and he never told me, but I said to him, I said, I ain’t got no previous, I said, and that’s the way I want it to stay. I don’t want to get mixed up in nothink heavy, I said, and he said that’s why I picked you, Ronnie, he said. I wouldn’t want to have to do with no-one what had a record.’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘Yessir. And he said he’d pay me well and he did, no funny business. Two hundred and fifty a day, he paid me, in five and tens in a jiffy bag frough the letter box.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you kept any of the bags?’

  ‘No, I frew ’em away.’

  ‘You didn’t notice the postmark?’

  Brenner’s face took on a gleam of hope. ‘It was Birmingham. I spose that was where he was phoning from, long-distance.’

  ‘And how was he to get the information from you?’

  ‘He phoned me up every day at a certain time and I told him and he paid me. I done it five days, and I can tell you I was glad to get the money. I had a lot of bad luck recently, Mr Slider, and I had some heavy debts.’

  ‘I believe you. Go on.’

  ‘Well, I done it five days, like I said, and then he says all right, that’s enough, and I never heard from him again. But then the next week I saw in the papers about the body being found in the flat, and, Christ, I can tell you, I nearly shat myself. I mean, I ain’t never ‘ad nothink to do with nothink like that! You know me, guv, I’m not in that class – wouldn’t hurt a flea, and that’s the truth. I didn’t know what to do. I just stopped at home and kept the door locked. And then the bloke phoned me up again.’

  ‘The same man?’

  ‘Yessir. He didn’t sound so smoove this time though. He sounded as if he was shitting himself an’ all.’

  ‘And what day was this?’

  ‘The same day. It was in the papers the noon edition about the body being found, and he bells me the afternoon. I said to him straight off I didn’t want nothink to do with him and his bloody money, and he said it wasn’t no good me talking like that because I was right in it up to the nostrils.’

  ‘Implicated.’

  ‘That’s it, guv, implicated He said I’d got to do what he said or it’d be the worse for me, and he said I hadn’t got to get in a panic because what I had to do was easy.’

  ‘What did you have to do?’

  ‘He says I’ve got to go back to the flats to look for the young lady’s handbag.’ Slider jumped, and Brenner nodded. ‘That’s right. He said it might be in all that building stuff lying about, ‘cause he fought she might of thrown it out of the car or over the balcony, and if anyone found it we was all for the ‘igh jump. Well, I didn’t want to go back there, I can tell you, wiv the place crawling wiv plod – no offence, guv – but he says to me, talk bloody sense, he says, I could go round there like I was just sightseeing, but he’d stick out like a sore bloody fumb. Anyway, the long and the short of it is I went round there and I never found nothing. I told him when he belled me, and he said to go back and look again, but I’d had enough, so I hooked it.’

  ‘Where?’

  Brenner looked a
pologetic. ‘Isle of Wight. I fought I’d better get where he couldn’t find me, and spend the money. But when it came to it, I couldn’t spend it. I ain’t never ‘ad nothink to do with stuff like that, and it scared the shit out of me, guv, I can tell you. So Monday I come back and tried to get in touch with you, waited at the station to see you come out -’

  ‘Why me, Ronnie? I’m flattered and all that, but

  ‘Well, I knew Mr Raisbrook was in the cot, and I couldn’t talk to none of them kids, all mouf and trousers. They ain’t real. They don’t know nothink what doesn’t come out of a book. But I knew you was straight.’ It was a simple and heartfelt tribute.

  ‘Anyway, that night I see you going into The Crown, so I hung about outside in the alley, but you come out with another bloke, so I nipped off.’

  ‘There was someone else there that night, too,’ Slider said. ‘You know that the man I was with was murdered the next day?’

  ‘Was that ‘im? Bloody ’ell, Mr Slider, what’s going on? Is it drugs, or what?’

  ‘Worse than that.’

  ‘Something big?’

  ‘Very big, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I wish I’d never touched the bleedin’ job,’ Ronnie said bitterly, ‘but it looked all right at the time. My bloke – is he going to be after me now?’

  Slider paused a moment. ‘I don’t know. It depends on how quickly news travels. You see, we’ve officially dropped the case, and once they know that, they’ll probably pull him out. That means we’ll never get the chance to get at him, unless there’s anything else you can tell me about him.’

  Brenner was a shade whiter even than before. ‘Honest, guv, if I knew anything I’d tell you. I ain’t holding back.’

  ‘You said he seemed to know you –?’

  ‘A lot of people know me, racing people. That don’t mean nothing. His voice did sound a bit familiar, but all the racecourse toffs talk like that.’

  ‘Well if you think of anything, anything at all –’

  ‘I know. You don’t need to tell me.’

  ‘By the way, Ronnie, apart from that time outside The Crown, have you been following me, or watching me?’

  ‘No,’ he said promptly; and then his jaw sagged as he gathered the implication. ‘Gawd ’elp us, he’s been following you! He’ll know you come here!’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Slider said as reassuringly as he could. ‘I’ve been very careful. And as I said, once they know we’ve dropped it, they won’t take any more risks. As long as you keep out of sight for the next few hours, you should be all right. Is there another way out of here?’

  ‘If you climb out the winder, you can get across the garden, frough the fence, across the next garden and over the wall into the alley. I come in that way sometimes. There’s a packing case this sider the wall, to give you a leg-up.’

  ‘All right, I’ll go out that way, just in case anyone’s watching the front. But I don’t think they’ll bother you after tonight.’

  ‘I hope they know that,’ Brenner said woefully.

  All the same, Slider parked a distance from Joanna’s house and walked the rest, listening with his scalp. He had plenty to think about as he walked, and not much of it added up. Who the hell was the murderer? If he was someone who knew Ronnie Brenner, it was a natural assumption that he must be one of the racing fraternity, but then what was his connection with Anne-Marie? Or was he merely a hired hitman? But there were aspects of the case that made Slider feel restless with that as a conclusion; and he had also the infuriating feeling that there was something on the tip of his brain that he could not quite get to grips with – something he had seen out of the corner of his eye, or something someone had said in passing. If only he could remember what it was, he felt, all the unrelated threads would suddenly weave themselves together into a web strong enough to net the rabbit.

  Joanna let him in. ‘I haven’t got long, you know. I’ll have to leave in about an hour.’

  He replied only with a preoccupied grunt. She took a close look at his face, and then ushered him without further comment in to the living-room, shoved him into an armchair and brought him a drink. Then she knelt at his feet and rested her arms on his knees and waited for him. Finally he drank a little, stroked her hair absently, and finally looked at her.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re closing the case.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Apparently they’re convinced of the Family connection, and that makes it too big to handle locally. It’s going up to the Yard, and they’re making it official that Thompson killed Anne-Marie and then committed suicide.’

  ‘To make the villains relax?’

  ‘Partly. And partly because nobody really wants to know who murdered Anne-Marie. She was one of theirs, and they “tidied her up”, and who cares?’

  ‘Doesn’t Atherton care?’

  ‘Not really. He always said I took this case too personally, and I suppose I did. Atherton’s a cool well-balanced personality, and the job is just the job to him.’ He knew that wasn’t entirely the truth, but it was near enough for the moment. ‘But apart from my personal feelings, I hate to leave a job unfinished. There are so many loose threads –’

  He lapsed into thought, and she sat quietly drinking her drink and watching him. Even through his preoccupation he felt her presence, just the being near and warming him. After a while he came back and said, ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t much fun for you.’

  ‘Fun,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘We only met in the first place, you know, because Anne-Marie was murdered. Sometimes I can’t take it in, and when I do, I feel terribly guilty about being so happy with you. She had such an awful life, when you think about it, and for so much loneliness to end like that is dreadful. There wasn’t even anyone at her funeral. It’s almost –’

  Slider sat bolt upright, stopping Joanna in mid-sentence. His expression was so strange that for a moment she thought he was choking or having a heart attack. He grabbed her hand and gripped it so tightly that it hurt her, but he was unaware of it. Suddenly things were slotting into place so fast that he could hardly keep up with them.

  ‘The funeral! At the funeral! I knew at the time someone had said something important, but I couldn’t work out what it was, and it’s been at the back of my mind ever since. Listen, you told me once that Anne-Marie had said to you that she wasn’t allowed to have a pet when she was a child.’

  ‘That’s right – her aunt was too houseproud, and didn’t want the mess, though I think Anne-Marie thought she forbade it simply out of spite, because of course she has dogs of her own.’

  His eyes were very bright, but they were not focused on her. ‘There were two things. I have it now. Somebody said –I think you said – that Stourton was nearer to Birmingham than to London. And the bogus vet said that he had known Anne-Marie all her life, and had often taken care of her pony and her puppy.’

  ‘Yes he did. I remember it now. Why would he say that?’

  ‘He made a mistake,’ Slider said in a small, deadly voice.

  ‘But what did –’

  He gripped her hand even tighter. ‘Don’t speak!’ He was frantic to take hold of the thread of his thoughts as the words tumbled through his brain. They put her down like an old dog. Someone who knew Ronnie Brenner. Piperonyl butoxide. Real posh, like the county nobs. A tall man with a nice voice. Known her since she was a child. A hat like Lord Oaksey wears –

  Joanna eased her hand out of his grip and flexed it painfully. ‘What is it?’ she said very softly.

  ‘We made a mistake at the very beginning. Freddie Cameron made a mistake. He said that only a hospital anaesthetist would have access to Pentathol. But it was he who said they put her down like an old dog. Said it to me as a joke, and I forgot it.’

  She was listening, following.

  ‘Vets have to be their own anaesthetists, don’t you see? They don’t just diagnose, like GPs, they do surgery as well. Pentathol and a surgeon’s scalpel. And piperon
yl butoxide kills fleas and lice as well as bedbugs and woodlice.’

  ‘Flea powder!’ she exclaimed. ‘If a vet had traces of it on his clothes, and then sat down in the passenger seat of Anne-Marie’s car –’

  ‘He knew her from her childhood – that part was true, at least. He must have known how lonely and alienated she was. He may even have had long talks with her for all we know, got to know the way her mind worked, what her dreams were. It was he who recruited her.’ Dickson’s voice said in his head, ‘It was that or the Foreign Office’, and he shook it away as an irrelevance. ‘Then she became dangerous and had to be put out of the way.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think, because of the Stradivarius. I have a kind of feeling that playing it at that concert in Florence wasn’t part of her orders. I think she took the opportunity of your being taken ill to play it for her own pleasure, and then, having played it, found she couldn’t bear to part with it. She kept it instead of passing it on through the system. Then of course she was in trouble. She had to try to get hold of money, went to her solicitor to find out if there was anything coming to her, and discovered she was worth a fortune if only she could get married.’

  ‘That’s why she suddenly started pursuing poor old Simon!’

  ‘He was her only hope. She had to move fast, she hadn’t time to start from scratch, and the only other man she knew well was already married.’

  ‘Martin Cutts.’

  ‘He was probably more of a friend to her, for all his faults,’ Slider said with distaste. ‘When she found it was no use, she turned to him for comfort. She was beginning to get very frightened. She said to him, “I’m so afraid”.’

  ‘Yes, you told me,’ Joanna said quietly.

  ‘She was right to be. Already the order had gone out. The vet – Hildyard – knew Ronnie Brenner. Ronnie hangs out at Banbury racecourse, and that isn’t far from Stourton. If we check, I think we’ll find Hildyard was a regular there. We may even find he’s the official racecourse vet. Ronnie has no previous – they’d never use anyone with a criminal record -but he looks shady enough, the type who’d do a job for cash without asking questions. Ronnie said his contact had a posh voice. And Mrs Gostyn mentioned his voice, too.’