‘You have some kind of machine, I suppose?’
‘Yeah, a peeler and a cutter. I’ll show you’ He half rose, eager to display his expertise, but Slider checked him gently.
‘Yes, later. Just a few more questions. So you cut up a new lot of chips this morning, did you? How do you suppose that finger got into them?’
‘I dunno,’ he said, shaking his head in perplexity. ‘It couldn’t have been in the new lot. How could it? I haven’t lost a finger.’ That seemed indisputable, but he spread his hands out on the table before him, as though for reassurance. ‘It has happened,’ he conceded, ‘with the old style of cutters. They was dangerous. There was a bloke over in Acton a couple o’ years ago with one of them old sort lost two fingers. But with the new rotaries—’ He shrugged, displaying his firmly attached digits again.
‘That’s what you’ve got?’
‘Yeah. An’ they’ve got safety cut-offs.’
Slider shuddered at the choice of words. ‘Who else works here?’
‘No-one. There’s only me, except at weekends for the busy time, then there’s the part-timers, school kids mostly. But they only help serve out front. I’m the one that does all the preparation.’
‘So the chips you cooked this morning were peeled and cut up this morning by you?’ Slider asked.
Slaughter’s frown dissolved suddenly. ‘Wait a minute I’ve just remembered! I had half a bucket of chips left over from last night. They was what I put in first thing when I opened this morning. It must have been in them.’ He seemed happy to have solved the mystery.
‘And who prepared yesterday’s chips? You?’
‘Yes. I keep telling you, there is only me,’ he said almost crossly.
So they were no further forward. It was a mystery, Slider thought, and not a particularly interesting one, either. Someone must have planted the thing as a joke. ‘Let’s just take it slowly from the beginning,’ he said patiently. ‘When you arrived this morning, did you come in by the front door or the back door?’
‘Through the shop. I let meself in through the shop like I always do.’
‘And did everything seem normal? Was there any sign of disturbance?’
‘No, it all looked all right. We’ve had break-ins before, mostly after the fruit machine. Nicked the ‘ole bloody machine once, took it out the bloody front door right in the street in broad daylight – well, under the street lamps. No-one saw nothing, o’ course,’ he added bitterly. ‘They never do.’
How true, thought Slider. ‘But this morning everything was all right? And what did you do next?’
‘Went through into the back room to start work.’
‘Did everything seem normal there?’
‘I never noticed anything different.’
‘The back door was shut?’
‘Yeah. I opened it to let some air in. It gets stuffy in there ‘cause I had to brick the window in, ‘cause kids kept breaking in through it.’
‘What sort of lock have you got on the back door?’
‘A Yale lock, and two bolts, top and bottom.’ He seemed to experience some qualms about this, as though realising it was not much of a high-tech response to the modern crime wave. ‘It’s kids mostly,’ he added apologetically. ‘Little bastards.’
‘And was the door locked and bolted when you arrived this morning?’
Slaughter hesitated, and then said, ‘Yeah, it was bolted.’
‘You’re quite sure?’
‘I always bolt it last thing before I go home. I wouldn’t forget that.’
‘All right, Mr Slaughter. What did you do next?’
‘Just what I always do. Get stuff ready.’
‘What stuff is that?’
‘Well, I wash out the batter buckets and mix up the new lot, cut up the fish, peel the spuds and cut the chips.’ The words recalled him to the present mystery. He shook his head dolefully. ‘I dunno how that thing got in there. I cut them chips up yesterday morning. It didn’t half give me a shock when I saw it. Bumped my head on the table.’ He touched the lump gingerly.
‘And were you here alone all day yesterday?’
‘Yeah. I only have helpers on Friday night and Sat’day.’ He looked up suddenly as an idea occurred to him. ‘Maybe that kid put it in herself, for a joke,’ he said hopefully.
But before this possibility could be explored to its conclusion, which admittedly would have taken all of a microsecond, they were interrupted. Atherton appeared in the doorway between the front and the back shop, looking distinctly pale. ‘Guv?’
Slider got up and went to him. Atherton glanced significantly at Slaughter, and then jerked his head towards the back room.
‘Something nasty in the woodshed,’ he murmured.
Across the tiny back room the back door stood open, but Slider caught the smell well before he reached it. The sun had risen high enough to clear the surrounding buildings and shine into the tiny yard, which contained an outside lavatory and a number of bulgingly-full black plastic sacks, neatly stacked round the perimeter, their necks tied with string. The sickly stink of rotting fish was terrible, mitigated only now and then by the chemical odour rolling over the fence from the dry-cleaner’s next door. Cleaning fluid would not normally have been high on Slider’s list of Things to Smell Today, but it was still considerably ahead of rotting fish – if that’s what it was.
Breathing shallowly Slider turned, and found that Slaughter had wandered after them and was standing in his back shop, staring in a puzzled way at his equipment as if it might speak and obligingly solve the puzzle.
‘Mr Slaughter – does it always smell as bad as this out here?’ Slider asked.
Slaughter started a little, plainly having been far away with his thoughts. ‘Well,’ he said apologetically, ‘it does get a bit – you know – whiffy, especially in the warm weather. It’s the fish trimmings and that. But the dustmen only come twice a week. I tie the sacks up – well you have to with the cats and everything – but the smell still gets out. You get sort of used to it after a while.’
‘You get used to this?’ Atherton said disbelievingly.
Slaughter took another step or two to the door and sniffed cautiously. ‘Maybe it is a bit worse than usual,’ he admitted. ‘I dunno. I don’t think I’ve got all that much sense of smell, really. Working with fish all the time – and the frying smell gets in your clothes—’
‘These bags, sir,’ Slider said. He gestured to one at random. ‘That one there, for instance. What’s in that?’
‘Rubbish and that. You know, just the usual. Potato peelings, fish trimmings, left-overs and stuff. Just rubbish.’
‘Is that how you tied it up yourself?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Slaughter cautiously. A certain reluctance was coming into his expression, perhaps as the magnitude of the smell came home to him at last.
‘Would you mind opening it, sir?’
He plainly would mind, but equally plainly didn’t feel he could refuse. He untied the string and parted the neck of the sack, pulling his head back out of the way as the smell rose up. On the top were some broken, soggy chips and several portions of battered fish.
‘Red herrings, I suppose?’ Atherton enquired.
‘Left-overs,’ Slaughter corrected him, with some relief.
‘The piece of cod which passeth understanding,’ said Atherton. ‘But what’s underneath, I wonder?’
He looked round him, picked up a yard broom, turned it up the other way, and used the end of the handle to push aside the top layer of rubbish. Underneath the left-overs was a left foot.
‘Bloody ‘ell,’ Slaughter said softly, transfixed with horror.
‘I thought it’d been too quiet lately,’ Slider murmured.
‘The game’s afoot, Guv,’ said Atherton.
‘I was afraid you were going to say that,’ said Slider.
Slaughter burst surprisingly into tears.
‘I think we’re going to need help here,’ Atherton said under cover o
f the noise. He licked his lips, and Slider could see that his nostrils were flared with some emotion, distaste or excitement – either would have been appropriate.
‘We certainly will. I’m not looking through a sackful of dead fish for evidence,’ Slider agreed.
‘And that’s just one sack. There are enough of them out here to hold the whole body, assuming it’s in pieces.’
‘Right,’ said Slider. ‘Take Slaughter inside to the front shop and stay with him. I’ll call in. And be gentle with him. If there is a body out here, he must know about it.’
‘Okay,’ Atherton said. The colour was returning to his face, and with it the blood to his head. ‘If there is a body out here,’ he gave the words back with minor relish, ‘we’ve got ourselves a murder.’
‘You don’t have to sound so pleased about it.’
‘It’s better than endless burglaries and domestics.’
‘Yes,’ Slider assented minimally. His own pulse had quickened at this first, far-off sound of the hunt, but he never liked the part of him which felt excited at the beginning of a murder enquiry. It was someone’s life, after all. ‘Well, get on with it.’
The circus – forensic, fingerprinting, photography – had been and gone, and now Slider stood alone in the back shop looking round it contemplatively. It was small, drab, and even with the door open, stuffy. The floor was tiled in a chequerboard pattern of black and red, scuffed and pitted with age. The walls – what you could see of them –were tiled with large white ceramic tiles of the sort which first gave rise to the expression ‘bog standard’. The back door was a massive thing of plain, impanelled wood, painted black, and with a splintered notch three inches above the lock where it had been forced on a previous occasion, according to Slaughter. The window, as Slaughter had said, had been blocked in rather crudely and was still awaiting any kind of finish to its raw bricks and mortar.
Two walls were lined with open shelves on which were stacked bags of powdered batter mix, boxes of Frymax cooking fat, jars of pickled eggs and pickled gherkins, cartons of crisps and outers of soft drinks. Along the third wall were ranged a large fridge which was mostly full of individual meat pies and drink cans; a huge chest freezer which contained nothing more sinister than packets of frozen fish, chicken portions and sausages; and a pallet stacked with paper sacks of potatoes.
Along the fourth wall, nearest the door, was a large sink with a stainless steel drainer to one side and a steel-topped work table to the other, above which, on the wall, was a rack containing an impressive array of butcher’s knives. Under the work table there was a small drain set into the floor, and a brief glance around confirmed that the floor was sloped to drain into it, presumably so that the whole thing could be hosed down for ease of cleaning. Next to the work table stood the peeling machine, a large metal drum on a stand, which looked like a cross between an old-fashioned ship’s binnacle and a What-The-Butier-Saw machine. Next to that was the chip-cutter. Slider tentatively felt one of its blades, and withdrew his hand hastily.
He stepped again to the back door and looked out. The yard had high wooden fences all round and one gate, secured by a padlock, leading to the alley. The alley had a high brick wall on one side, behind which were the back yards of the shops in the adjacent side-street, and on the other side the gardens of the houses down the opposite side-street. The back windows of those houses were out of sight because of a large sycamore growing in the nearest garden. The only windows which might have a view of the yard were upstairs in the dry-cleaners next door, and he had already ascertained that the Patels used the upper floor only for storage – they lived in a semi-detached house in Perivale. So anyone might have come and gone through the alley-way with a good chance of not being seen.
The pathologist, Freddie Cameron, came looking for him. ‘I’m off now, Bill. I’ll let you have a preliminary report as soon as possible.’
‘What’s the hurry?’
‘The smell, old boy.’ Cameron shuddered delicately. ‘It’s the sort of stink you can’t get out of your nostrils for days.’
‘That’s something, coming from you,’ Slider said.
‘Not a Linger Longer Aroma,’ Cameron amplified, in retreat.
Slider smiled inwardly, wondering how many people would remember that particular advertisement, and nearly missed his chance. ‘Oy! Can’t you tell me something before you go? Anything, even if it’s only I love you.’
Cameron turned back reluctantly. ‘About the body?’
‘Certainly about the body. It is animal, vegetable or mineral? Can you eat it?’
‘Preliminary shufti suggests there’s just enough bits for one male Caucasian, rather small and slightly built, youngish. But it’s in a lot of pieces, so I’ll have to have time to lay them out before I can tell you any more about it.’
‘Have you got a head? If I can get a photograph right away—’
‘We’ve got a head, but I’m afraid a photograph won’t do you any good. It’s been rather heavily altered. The face has been obliterated.’
‘Obliterated?’
‘Removed,’ Cameron said uncompromisingly. ‘I suppose the bits may be in the sacks somewhere, but whether we’ll be able to make anything of them—’
‘Someone didn’t want him recognised, then.’
‘Right. And we haven’t found the hands, except for the one finger. Oh, and there’s no hair, either. The entire scalp has been removed. We may find that, of course, but—’
He let the sentence hang for Slider, who would just as soon not have had it. Scalped? It sounded unpleasantly obsessive. Were they going to have to look for a homicidal Wild West fan?
‘I suppose the body’s badly decomposed?’
‘No, I’d say it was quite fresh. Probably not more than twelve hours old. I think you’re probably looking for a murder committed during the dark hours last night.’
‘Then it was the fish making the stink?’
‘Just the fish,’ Cameron agreed. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? If friend Atherton hadn’t been so fastidious, it might all have been carted away by the dustman and no-one any the wiser.’
He turned to go again. A murder during the dark hours, Slider pondered. ‘Freddie, all this cutting up – wouldn’t it have taken a hell of a long time?’
‘Not necessarily. There was that case last year, don’t you remember, of the serial killer who dismembered his victims. The first took him thirteen hours, the second he managed in just two and a half. It all depends on knowing your way round a carcase. With a skilled hand and good sharp knives – and I’d say this was a skilled hand. There’s no haggling. The body’s been disjointed very neatly.’
‘What about the cause of death?’
‘Impossible to say yet. I’ll keep you posted.’
‘Okay. Thanks,’ Slider said absently. A skilled hand and sharp knives – the back room with its steel table and floor drain. And yet Slaughter had seemed genuinely puzzled by the finger. Well, yes, perhaps he was – puzzled by how he came to miss it. A lot of pieces, Cameron said – not surprising one went astray, perhaps. Fell unseen into the chip tub. And Slaughter opened up the shop again just as usual the next morning. He must be a cool hand – God, he had to stop using that word! But then what could he do but open up? Anything else would have been suspicious. And when the schoolgirl began shrieking, what else could he do but call the police?
Step by step, landing himself in the soup. Or, as Atherton would undoubtedly say, the chowder.
CHAPTER 3
Definitely Queer
POLLY JABLOWSKI, THE POLISH PLONK, was in Slider’s office putting a folder on his desk. Slider stopped dead just inside the door, feeling a nameless sense of unease, almost dread. Something was not as it should be. It was like one of those dreams where something enormously familiar, like the house where one was born, suddenly takes on an air of inexplicable menace.
Atherton, just behind him, stopped perforce, and stared hungrily over his shoulder at Jablowski’s little spiky head and
nude neck. The air crackled with impure thoughts; Slider’s ear grew hot.
‘Sir?’ Polish said, straightening up. Seeing Slider’s expression she said defensively, ‘I was just delivering this folder—’
‘Something’s wrong,’ he said. ‘This is my office, isn’t it?’
She grinned. ‘The windows have been cleaned, that’s all. By order of Mr Barrington.’
‘Blimey, he moves fast,’ Atherton murmured. ‘And when we’ve just got ourselves a nice murder, too.’
Slider shook his head, bemused. ‘It was such a shock.’
‘The CID room windows are clean, too,’ Polish mentioned.
‘There goes our centre-spread in next month’s Toilet and Garden,’ Atherton said sadly. ‘That man has no respect for tradition.’
Slider crossed to his desk to look at the folder. It was new, crisp, and had a fresh white label on the cover with the circulation list for checking off. The list was very long. There was also a memo fixed to the cover by a paper-clip.
‘From Mr Barrington, sir,’ Polish said apologetically.
‘So I see,’ said Slider. As of this date, circulation files will be read and passed on within 24 hours of receipt, unless there are exceptional circumstances which prevent this. Such exceptional circumstances must be advised in writing to IVNB.
‘Apparently we’re all to see all circulation files from now on,’ she explained. ‘Mr Barrington says we should be conversant with every new directive, whether it affects us directly or not. So the files have to go round more quickly, so that everyone gets a chance to read them.’
‘I see,’ Slider said with admirable restraint.
‘And the painters are coming in next week,’ she added, perhaps by way of providing a counter-irritant.
‘Oh good!’
‘There’s a colour-chart on its way to you. Mr Carver’s got it at the moment’
‘Splendid!’
‘Shall I get a cup of tea, sir?’ she enquired tenderly, like a nurse in casualty department.
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