Necrocrip

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘What other bloke?’ Atherton asked with diminishing patience.

  ‘The dead bloke. The one in the sacks. I killed him.’

  ‘All right – who is he, then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Slaughter muttered.

  ‘You don’t know. So how can you say you killed him if you don’t even know who he is?’ Atherton said kindly. ‘Come on, now Ronnie, let’s have you out of there.’

  He grew hysterical. ‘I killed him, I tell you! I did it! Gimme a statement, I’ll sign it! Anything you like, only don’t make me go out there again!’ And he burst into noisy tears.

  It was some time before they got him quietened down again, mopped him up, and detached him from his seat. Nicholls talked to him kindly, and at last he seemed resigned, and was even vaguely comforted by the prospect of a car ride right to his own front door.

  ‘What will I do now?’ he asked quietly as he shuffled docilely towards the back yard where the cars were parked, accompanied by Atherton to see him off the premises and the PC who had been detailed to drive him home. ‘Will I go back to the shop?’

  ‘Not for the moment. You can’t open the shop yet, I’m afraid. Not until we’re sure we’ve got all the information we need out of it.’

  ‘Like, clues, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘So I just stay at home, right? And, like, wait?’

  ‘Yes, I should do that,’ Atherton said. He had been threatened by released arrestees before now, but never asked for advice. ‘We’ll let you know when you can open the shop again.’

  Slaughter shook his head. ‘No, Mr Cate will do that,’ he said. ‘Mr Cate will decide. He’ll tell me what to do. I’ll just go home and wait, then.’

  CHAPTER 11

  Breakfast and Villainies

  WHAT WITH ONE THING AND another, it was late before Slider got home, his mind aching with the events of the day, and raw with the fresh sting of his last, unhappy interview with Joanna. When she had opened the door to him, he had thought that she would refuse to talk. But after looking at him for a long moment, she sighed and said, ‘All right, come in. I suppose it all has to be said once.’

  He followed her in, and she led him into the sitting-room, where they had eaten and drunk and made love and talked so many times, done everything except as now to have a formal conversation, sitting too far apart to touch each other. He felt at a disadvantage like that. His mind, in any case, was still partly occupied by the case, and a large part of the rest of it was simply consumed with longing to take hold of her and sink his face into her neck. To sit here unlicensed to touch her, and have her look at him with that unsmiling, frozen face, made him want to throw back his head and howl like a dog.

  ‘Jo, why?’ he said at last. ‘Nothing’s changed.’

  ‘Yes it has,’ she said.

  ‘Not for me.’ She seemed unwilling – or perhaps unable – to amplify. ‘What, then?’ he urged at last.

  ‘I hadn’t seen her before. She wasn’t real.’

  ‘She was just as real to me. I love you, I want to live with you. That hasn’t changed. I’m ready to do it. Don’t stop now, just when everything’s on the brink of being all right.’

  She looked at him clearly. ‘Not tonight, now – it’s too late. Not tomorrow – you’ll be working late. Not at the weekend – the children will be around.’

  His own words delivered back to him were like smacks in the face.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘I’m not being unkind. I just want you to see it as it is, the truth. I know you weren’t just making excuses. If you had been, everything would be quite different.’

  ‘They weren’t excuses, they were reasons.’

  ‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘That’s the point. And the reason you haven’t been able to do it all this time is that you know it’s wrong. You made promises, you took on responsibilities, and you can’t just shrug them off. And I,’ she finished sadly, ‘should never have asked you to.’

  ‘I have a responsibility to you, too,’ he pointed out.

  She shook her head. ‘Not the same. Not really.’

  ‘It’s real to me.’

  ‘Well,’ she said. She began to speak, changed her mind, lifted her hands from her lap and tucked them under her arms, a defensive gesture, hugging to comfort herself. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s why it has to be me who decides. And I’ve decided I can’t ask you to do something that’s so hard for you, something that you believe is wrong.’

  ‘You’re not asking me. I am capable of making my own decisions about my own life.’

  ‘You decided last night.’

  ‘I didn’t. I couldn’t help that.’

  She sighed. ‘If it’s that hard for you to do, maybe you shouldn’t do it. If you could have come to me gladly – but not like this. Not—’ She seemed to search for words, and then said again flatly, ‘Not like this.’

  He could not move her. In the end she asked him to go, and seeing what it cost her to ask, he got up obediently. But at the door he found himself overwhelmed with disbelief. This couldn’t be all. He turned again and said, ‘You’ll change your mind.’ Half statement, half question. Half plea.

  ‘No.’ She met his eyes, and almost managed to smile. ‘But thank you for not suggesting that we just go on as we are. That takes real greatness. You are a great man, Bill.’

  He felt as though he had a tennis ball stuck in his throat. ‘I love you,’ he managed to say despite it.

  ‘I love you, too,’ she said. She stepped back, like someone who had just cast off a boat, and he thought it was so that he should not try to kiss her. There was nothing to do but go. ‘Good luck,’ she said when he was half way down the path. He would have liked to say something but the tennis ball prevented, so he lifted his hand in a futile sort of gesture and concentrated on not stumbling or walking into the gatepost in the fog which enveloped him.

  By the time he got home, everyone was in bed, and he thanked God for the small mercy, because he didn’t think he could bear to speak to anyone. He couldn’t go to bed – he’d never sleep. Besides, he didn’t want to get in beside Irene. He didn’t want to sleep beside her ever again. He couldn’t think why it hadn’t bothered him before. He would move into the spare bedroom, sleep alone from now on. Why hadn’t he done it before? It would be a modicum, the smallest modicum possible, of honesty. Irene wouldn’t mind. Barring the aberration last night (was it really only last night?) his company in bed had meant nothing to her for years, and she often complained that he woke her up with his comings and goings and late phone calls. He would use work as the excuse, so as to save her face – and for the children’s sake.

  He should have moved into the spare room long ago. For tonight, the sofa would do. He wasn’t going to start morrissing about with sheets now. The sofa – or couch, as Irene called it, as though it were some exotic divan upon which an odalisque might quite easily be found reclining – and the whisky bottle. If ever a man needed a small glass of Lethe, it was him, and now. God, what a life! The case going to pieces all around him, Barrington telling him off like an inky schoolboy, and Joanna – no, he’d better not think about Joanna or he’d start weeping, and he had the perilous feeling that if he started he’d never stop.

  The case, think about the case. Leman must be the clue, the link. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed that there was some sort of conspiracy going on, and that Slaughter was being used. The innocent, or perhaps only partly innocent, catspaw. The alternative was that Slaughter had gone to the shop after leaving Leman and had met the victim there – by chance or be pre-arrangement – and had murdered him for his own reasons, and that Leman’s presence earlier in the evening in question was pure coincidence.

  Well, the essence of a coincidence was that it was coincidental, and therefore theory number two was just as likely as theory number one. But it was in any policeman’s nature to be suspicious of coincidences, and if Slaughter had commi
tted the murder, why did he say he didn’t know who the victim was when he was so gaily confessing to anything and everything?

  Why had Leman taken the chip-shop job when he plainly had plenty of money from other directions? Why had he not told the Abbotts that he was minding the Acton flat for a friend? Why had he taken on the pub job so suddenly? Why had he left it early to go to the chip shop? All those things could have been deliberate ploys to make it look as though he was missing, to support the illusion that Ronnie had murdered him – and if that were the case, Leman must know something about the real victim, the real murder. That was theory number one.

  Well, from the procedural point of view it didn’t really matter. They still had to find Leman, whether to prove he was involved or he wasn’t.

  And they still had to identify the victim, damn it! Perhaps he was Chinese. There was the Hung Fat Restaurant almost next door. Of course everyone there had been questioned as a matter of routine, and had said they knew nothing, but it was always hard to get trustworthy statements out of people who didn’t speak English, or pretended not to. They would all have to be interviewed again.

  Hadn’t there been another mention of Chinese men somewhere in the case? It escaped him for the moment, but the motif had come up before somewhere—

  He was flung out of his train of thought by the telephone bell. He leapt across the room to grab it before it woke Irene. It was Paxman, who was station sergeant on night duty.

  ‘A call this late must be an emergency,’ Slider said. ‘What’s up, Arthur?’

  ‘That joker you released this afternoon?’ Paxman said.

  ‘Slaughter?’

  ‘That’s right. Just had a call from his place of abode. Looks as though the silly bugger’s topped himself.’

  ‘God, that was quick work,’ Slider heard himself say.

  ‘Found in his room with his throat cut,’ Paxman amplified.

  ‘Who’s on night duty in the Department? Mackay, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, he’s gone, and the area car. And Atherton’s on his way.’

  ‘Right, thanks. I’m leaving now,’ Slider said.

  ‘Why these silly buggers can’t wait until daylight I don’t know,’ Paxman said genially.

  ‘If they waited until daylight they probably wouldn’t do it,’ Slider pointed out. He put the phone down and went out into the hall to pick up his car keys.

  ‘Bill?’ Irene was half way down the stairs, still tying the belt of her dressing-gown. Her sleep-ruffled hair made her look softer and younger than her daytime sleekness.

  ‘I’ve got to go out again. Emergency call,’ he said.

  ‘Bill, I need to talk to you,’ she said, still coming down.

  He felt a strange mixture of irritation and panic – a cross between wanting to snap, ‘Not now, woman!’ and put his arms up in front of his face in the form of a cross.

  ‘It’ll have to wait,’ he managed to say with an approximation of normality. ‘We’ve got another corpse on our hands, I’m afraid. I don’t know what time I’ll be back. You know how it is.’ And he grabbed his keys and legged it like one John Smith. Even as he backed the car out into the road, he could see Irene standing at the door watching him go, softly implacable as Nemesis. She would be there when he got back. That was marriage for you.

  *

  The house was lit up as though for a party, the front door open, cars drawn up outside, pretty flashing blue lights … there ought to have been a small bunch of balloons tied to the railings, Slider thought as he spotted Atherton’s immaculate four-year-old Sierra double-parked by it. On the bathroom landing a strange man was being voluble and indignant to Mackay, and at the next landing Mandy was in her nextdoor neighbour’s room, seated on the bed between WPC Coffey and a cross-looking dark girl in a negligee, weeping violently.

  Slider toiled on up, and found Atherton on the upper floor with the local doctor who had been called in to pronounce life extinct. Not that there was any doubt about it. Slaughter was lying in a huddle in the far corner of his room under the wash-basin with his throat cut from ear to ear. There was blood in the basin, smears of it down the outside of the white porcelain, and pools of it on the floor. Lying in the basin was a large, sharp, black-handled kitchen knife, plentifully bloodied. Slaughter himself was in pyjamas, black nylon with a pattern of small, random red and white squares. His feet were bare. Slider looked at them, and then away again. There was something so pathetic, so horribly, vulnerably human about feet – knobbled and calloused and marked by a lifetime of unsung service.

  Dr Wasim was departing. ‘I’ve taken the temperature. Life extinct about an hour and a half, I should say. Immediate cause of death suffocation from the severed windpipe. No other exterior signs of violence.’ He gave a small, taut smile. ‘I’ll leave the rest for Dr Cameron. Would you like me to look at that unfortunate young woman downstairs before I go?’

  While Atherton saw him off, Slider picked his way delicately over to the body. The story was written there, easy to read. He had stood over the sink to cut his throat, presumably out of consideration for others, hoping not to make a mess. Having made the cut, he had dropped the knife and collapsed, smearing the outside of the basin with his bloody hands, and sunk to the floor.

  ‘It was Mandy who found him,’ Atherton explained, coming back. ‘She was downstairs in her room – immediately underneath, if you remember – entertaining a gentleman friend. As soon as he left she went over to the sink to make herself a cup of coffee, and a drop of blood fell on her. She looked up and saw it dripping through the ceiling. You see how it is, Guv—’

  He saw how it was. Below the sink the floor was covered with a square of lino. Through this the various water and waste pipes were let through holes, and through holes cut in the floorboards below.

  ‘The cold water pipe goes straight through into Mandy’s room. She said she can see the light through it when her room’s dark and the light’s on up here. So the blood—’

  The blood, finding its own level, had trickled down and through the corresponding hole in Mandy’s ceiling – just two significant drops before it thickened too much to drip.

  ‘Who’s the bloke downstairs? Is that her customer?’

  ‘No, he’d already gone. That’s the man who was in with the other girl, Maureen. They rushed out when Mandy started screaming to see what the hullabaloo was about. He’s most indignant now because he feels he was being public spirited in staying with the girls until the police arrived, and now we’re demanding his name and address, which he isn’t keen to give.’

  ‘What about the knife?’

  ‘It’s fairly old and used, and there are two others matching but in different sizes in the cutlery drawer.’

  Slider grunted, bending over the body and carefully lifting the head. The cut ran from high up under the left ear to the base of the right side of the neck – the typical direction of a right-handed suicide – and had severed all the great vessels in one clean sweep – not typical of the average suicide. Slaughter’s eyes were open, and had the grey and clouded look of a stale fish on a slab. Slider laid him down gently and stood back, looking around.

  ‘It’s not usual for a slitter to make it first go,’ Atherton remarked. ‘And that is a very deep and clean cut. No haggling.’

  No haggling. Like the dismembered corpse where it all began. ‘Yes; but he was used to handling knives,’ Slider said. ‘And there’s no sign of disturbance or struggle.’ The room was as monastically neat as before, except that the bedclothes were thrown back, and there was a dent in the middle of the pillow. ‘He was in bed,’ Slider said aloud, his eyes moving from bed to sink and back.

  ‘Yes. Doesn’t that seem odd to you? I mean, to get undressed and go to bed, and then get up to commit suicide?’

  Slider shook his head. ‘Not impossible. Got undressed and went to bed as a matter of routine, then lay there unable to sleep, thinking, going over and over things in his mind until it just got too much for him. Flung the bedclothe
s back and got up—’

  ‘Scribbled a suicide note,’ Atherton put in, gesturing towards the mantelpiece.

  Yes, there it was, propped up beside the photograph of Mum. It was a smudgy fly-leaflet advertising a local disco – LADIES! You may enter ‘FREE’ after nine o’clock on Friday’s and Saturday’s – and the note was written on its unprinted back.

  I got mad and killed him it said in pencil, the clumsy, cramped handwriting of the unaccustomed. I can’t stand it any more. God forgive me.

  Slider looked round again, more carefully. Ah, there was the pencil on the floor, just under the table, as if it had rolled off the mantelpiece and fallen. It was one of those tiny, thin jobs with the plastic stud on top, that lives down the spine of a diary. The size of the lead corresponded with the thickness of the writing. That was all right.

  ‘Have to test that for fingerprints, and the note. And the knife, of course,’ Slider said. But there was something odd about it. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something…

  ‘They’re on their way,’ Atherton said. ‘Photography, fingerprints, forensic, the whole circus. But it looks all right on the surface of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Slider.

  Atherton looked at him more closely. ‘Are you all right, Guv?’

  Slider pulled himself up. ‘Just tired,’ he said. ‘I thought I wouldn’t sleep so I had a large glass of whisky before I got the call.’

  ‘I wish I’d thought of that,’ Atherton said.

  ‘We’d better go down and have a word with Mandy and – what’s the other one’s name again?’

  ‘Maureen O’Rourke. Not from Oiled Oiland, though – she’s got a Shepherd’s Bush twang you could cut with a knife.’

  Slider glanced again at the pyjama’d huddle under the sink, the straggling back hair and the mute, reproachful feet, gnarled and discoloured like old potatoes.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t used those particular words,’ he said.

  It was morning when they finally emerged from the station, gritty-eyed and weary. The streets were full of people on their way to work and delivery vans double parked in front of shops just to annoy. Slider felt hollow of frame and stuffed of head, but he had gone through tiredness and out the other side. He knew from experience that he could go on like this now all day if he had to. It was the thought of going back to Ruislip that daunted him, and reminded him, with a sinking sensation, of the present state of play in his personal life.