Star Fall

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  The phone rang on Saturday as Slider was having breakfast. Joanna had been too long a policeman’s wife even to look up as he went to answer it.

  It was O’Flaherty, the sergeant on morning relief in the shop – a vast man of large appetites, whose inherent frenzy had been tamed by his wife’s magnificent cooking until he had become almost a father figure among the uniforms. He was, to Slider, a living example of the importance of feeding the beast.

  ‘Ah, there y’are, Billy, darlin’.’

  ‘Where would you expect me to be at this time of day?’

  ‘Out sleuthin’ o’ course. I’ve news for ye. Henley police have been on to say that the Sholtos are back home, and did you want them to do the Knock?’

  It was what they called the visit to inform a relative of a death.

  Slider thought rapidly. He swallowed toast. ‘No, thanks, Fergus,’ he said. ‘I’d like to do it myself.’ First expressions could be valuable.

  ‘Are you still on your breakfast, you lazy article?’ Fergus wondered. ‘I can smell the eggs from here. No reliefs, no weekends. Sure, you CID boyos have the easy life.’

  ‘Ah, but you see our brains are working all the time.’

  Fergus snorted, but not unsympathetically. ‘I hope ye hadn’t a grand family day planned.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Matthew and Kate are coming for the weekend,’ he said. They were his children from his first marriage. ‘I’ll have to organize something else for them.’

  ‘I doubt they’ll be surprised that Daddy has to work,’ Fergus said. ‘Right y’are, darlin’, I’ll let Henley know.’

  Dad said he and Lydia were more than happy to stand in. ‘I’ll come up and talk to Joanna about it in a bit,’ he said when Slider rang him. ‘We’re still in our didies.’

  ‘It’s not the weather for anything outdoors,’ Slider worried.

  ‘We’ll find something, don’t you fret. Go on, off with you. Put us out of your mind.’

  He half managed. He rang Connolly – she was nearer than Swilley, and he wanted a woman along with him – then took a tender farewell of his sad-eyed wife. She smiled as she sent him on his way, and returned his kiss, but he was aware of the absence in her. A part of her was always absent, these days. The miscarriage was, for her, a bereavement, and mourning took time. But missing her left a hollowness in him that a good egg breakfast couldn’t fill.

  He and Connolly met up at a lay-by on the A40. She parked down the nearest side road and hopped nimbly in beside him, pulling off her lappet hat with one hand and buckling up with the other. She had the eager air of going on an outing.

  ‘Swear to God, it’s cold enough to freeze a dog to a tree out there,’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Very graphic,’ said Slider, pulling out into the traffic. It was light at this hour on a Saturday. The weekenders all lemminged out on Friday night. ‘Hope I didn’t catch you in the middle of anyone,’ he said lightly. Connolly’s private life was a mystery, which made her an object of seething curiosity to every man in the department. Like Swilley before her, she would not date anyone in the Job, claiming that they were all headers with their brains in their mickeys; but she was attractive in a sharp, policewomanly way so it didn’t stop them trying.

  ‘Ah no,’ she said. ‘I was just painting the cat and brushing me nails.’

  She was a good companion, able to sit quietly without chattering, which Slider appreciated at this time of day. After the Polish War Memorial, the speed limit came off and the road widened invitingly towards the motorway. He put his foot down. Connolly’s lips parted as though she were drinking the wind of their passage, and for a moment he wished he had a summer day and a convertible for her.

  Instead he said, ‘Look at that sky.’ It was grey and curdled like scum in a washing-up bowl. ‘It’s going to snow.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said cheerily.

  ‘You think this is a nice day out, don’t you?’ he said, glancing at her curiously.

  ‘Anything that gets me away from our flat is grand by me,’ she said.

  ‘Not nice?’ he hazarded.

  ‘It’d be gank enough without three girls sharing, but you’d want to see the state of it after a Friday night in. It’d give you mares. I’m well out of it.’

  ‘Perhaps they’ll tidy up while you’re gone,’ he suggested, and she snorted derisively in reply.

  ‘Still, on the plus side, there’s always someone around, so you don’t have to go out for the mighty craic of a weekend. Saves a stack o’ jingle.’

  Craic? Slider’s mind vaguely offered him a range of ceiling and other plaster-related domestic disasters, but it was mostly occupied with getting past a knot of ditherers and a lorry with a flapping canvas, so he didn’t pursue it.

  He drove on in silence, westwards towards the darkening clouds, distantly pleased that at least he knew one more fact about his companion – that she shared a flat. Though, given London property prices, he might have guessed that.

  Henley approached. After much rain, the fields all around lay under wide pools of water, reflecting the sky in the stillness before the on-creeping weather. He could see skims of ice on them here and there, and on one shallow lakelet, which had obviously frozen solid, some disconsolate ducks were waddling and skidding, out of their element. The bare trees stood still, awaiting whatever was coming to them; rooks flapped about nervously, loose and erratic as cinder-paper, sensing the change. The countryside in winter was not a place for cissies.

  But the Sholtos lived on an estate just outside the town, a place of tight brick, tarmac, concrete, and human control, which gave the impression that there was no such thing as weather – indeed, hardly any such thing as outdoors. As long as the electricity didn’t fail, you had everything you needed within your four walls. Outdoors was something you drove through in your car to get to another indoors.

  There was no movement anywhere. In commuter-land they didn’t need to get up and about early on a Saturday. The houses were modern and detached, each with an unfenced oblong of front lawn innocent of garden design. The Sholtos’ house was number twenty-one. On the hardstanding before the garage stood a dark-blue BMW and the inevitable Range Rover, both exquisitely clean.

  ‘Yeah,’ Connolly said disparagingly, with a glance about the recreated urban environment. ‘You really need a four by four, living in a place like this. Eejits.’

  ‘You’re a car fascist,’ Slider said. ‘Why shouldn’t they have what they like?’

  ‘First time they back over their own kid in the driveway …’ she muttered warningly.

  They got out. She had left her hat in the car. Slider looked with concern at her near-naked head. ‘You ought to grow your hair a bit longer in the winter,’ he said. ‘Give you a bit of protection.’

  ‘I could say the same thing to you, sir.’ She grinned at him, then composed her face into solemnity for the task at hand.

  The door was opened by a very tall woman, fully dressed in beige slacks and a cream cashmere jumper. She had short brown hair, waved and carefully arranged, and a plain face, lightly made-up. She looked worn, but that might have been the effects of travel – Henley said they had arrived back in the early hours of that morning. Or was it bereavement?

  What Slider noticed most of all was the look of lightless patience in her face, as though she had long ago accepted that the brightly coloured, more pleasant things in life were not meant for her. It made him sad, and he didn’t want any more sadness in his life.

  ‘Mrs Sholto?’ he said, showing his brief. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Slider from Shepherd’s Bush, and this is Detective Constable Connolly.’

  ‘If you’ve come to tell me about the murder, I already know,’ she said.

  Slider looked the question.

  ‘We picked up the newspaper at the airport. I suppose you know we’ve just flown in this morning?’

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you so early,’ Slider said.

  ‘It’s all right. We didn’t go to bed. Didn�
��t seem worth it. Do you want to come in?’

  ‘If you don’t mind. I’d like to talk to you.’

  She nodded indifferently, stood back for them, closed the door behind them. The house seemed utterly still. There was no sound at all, and no discernible smell, as though it was brand new out of its wrapping. The floors were polished wood, the walls white, the spaces well-lit. They were ushered into a large sitting-room with a beige rug and a taupe-coloured three piece suite, and windows on to a featureless garden of lawn and bare shrubs. Slider had never seen a room so utterly devoid of personality. He could feel the will to live being sucked out of him into its vacuum.

  ‘Please sit down,’ said Mrs Sholto in her neutral voice.

  Slider sat on the spotless sofa. Connolly and Mrs Sholto took the chairs. There was nothing on the coffee table. Nothing at all.

  He had been in rooms of clashing carpets, cabbage-rose wallpaper and orange-and-purple upholstery; rooms cluttered with hideous china ornaments, weighted with horse-brass collections, manic with Toby jugs, and one with a model train layout all the way round the walls at dado level with little swing bridges to allow you to open the doors. There had been rooms that smelt of dog, rooms that smelt of chips, rooms that smelt of cigarettes, and rooms where you didn’t let yourself wonder what the smell was, and tried not to have to sit down. They had all been places where people lived, redolent with their characters, good and bad. This room defeated him. It was like a terribly tasteful tomb. He longed for a bag of knitting on a chair, a cat tiptoeing in, tail erect, a browning apple core forgotten on the mantelpiece – anything to show warm-blooded creatures lived here. You couldn’t imagine anyone actually choosing this place; just as you couldn’t imagine anyone actually choosing Mrs Sholto. How could you do anything so positive as to choose such an absence of a person?

  ‘Is your husband in?’ he asked.

  ‘No, Jeremy had to go in to work. He’s with an investment bank. Things pile up. But he insists we’re out of communication while we’re away. Otherwise it’s no holiday at all.’

  Slider nodded. ‘I see. Well, as you say you already know about your father’s death, may I first of all offer my condolences for your loss.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Phil and I weren’t close.’

  ‘Phil?’ Slider queried.

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘He left us when I was five years old. You can’t expect me to call him “Dad” at this stage of my life.’

  ‘No,’ said Slider, ‘I was wondering why you call him “Phil”.’

  ‘Because that’s his name. Phil Harris.’ She surveyed them both. ‘You didn’t know that? You didn’t really think he was called “Rowland Egerton”, did you? That was something he made up because he thought it would appeal to his upper class clients. The Pont Street set, my mother used to call them. He so longed to be one of them. It was rather pathetic, in a way, how hard he tried. But of course he never was. They’d invite him to their houses, but he could never really be accepted.’ She spoke without heat, without resentment, just narrating, as she might read aloud from a book that didn’t really interest her.

  It was good, Slider thought, that at least she seemed inclined to talk. ‘I’d like to ask you a bit about him, if I may,’ he said, with a friendly, encouraging smile.

  It slipped off her impermeable facade and lay withered on the carpet. ‘Why would you want to do that? It can’t make any difference now, surely.’

  ‘We don’t know who did this,’ Slider said. ‘The more we know about him, the more chance we’ll have of working it out.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’ she asked indifferently.

  He was going to have to prime her. He tried, ‘How did he meet your mother?’ That was always a good one.

  ‘It was at university,’ she said.

  ‘They were at university together?’

  ‘No, he was at Nottingham, doing history of textiles. She was doing a BDS at UCH.’

  He untangled the initials. ‘She was a dentist?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Sholto. ‘She came over here to study because the course was shorter than in the States. And because there was still something of “swinging London” about it back then. She thought it would be more fun.’

  ‘She was American?’

  She nodded.

  ‘So how did they meet?’

  ‘Phil had a school friend who was at UCL. He gave a big party one Christmas and Phil came down for it. The friend’s girlfriend had invited her brother Bob, and he brought my mother along as his date. There was nothing serious going on between them – they were just doing the same course, they were friends. During the evening Bob got off with someone else and Mom got off with Phil.’ She paused a moment, reflectively. ‘Apparently, he was very handsome. Mom always said girls couldn’t resist him. Charming, too. He had all the chat-up lines.’

  ‘So they got together?’

  ‘Not right away. He had to go back to Nottingham. But he wrote to her – they kept in touch. He finished his degree the next summer and came down to London to get a job. Mom still had two years to go, but I think she liked having a boyfriend with money in his pocket, especially one who seemed to know how to have fun, so she hooked up with him. I gathered it was a bit on and off for the two years. But when she graduated, he proposed, and she accepted, and that was that.’

  ‘What sort of work was he doing?’

  ‘Interior design. He’d wanted to work in textiles restoration for one of the museums, or maybe the National Trust or one of the royal palaces, but his qualifications weren’t good enough. Also those jobs tend to go to people with connections – the old school-tie – and Phil didn’t have any. He was just a nobody from Nottingham. He got himself a job with Marino & Page in King’s Road instead. At least that way he had an income, and he met the right people. And when Mom graduated and started working, he set up on his own and tried freelancing.’

  ‘That must have been tough,’ Slider suggested.

  She gave him a blank look. ‘It was. And it didn’t help matters when I came along. In the end, Phil decided we were holding him back, and he skipped.’

  ‘That must have been hard for you,’ Slider said.

  She shook her head. ‘It’s a long time ago, now. I don’t remember minding too much. Mom and I were all right. She built up a private practice and made a good income. I think she’d realized Phil wasn’t the real deal, and that she was better off without him. He wasn’t faithful to her, you know,’ she added, looking into the distance, as if the subject was distasteful to her, but the revelation necessary. ‘He could never resist any woman. Mom said it was like a sickness with him. She didn’t really blame him – he was so good-looking, women threw themselves at him – but after a while that sort of thing gets tiresome. So she was relieved more than anything when he split. They remained on friendly terms. He always remembered my birthday and Christmas presents, and I saw him once in a while. I can’t say we were ever close, but I bore him no ill-will. He gave me away at my wedding.’

  She stopped, her eyes distant, remembering, perhaps. Slider studied her old-young face. He had worked out that she must be around thirty-three, but she could have been ten or fifteen years older. Her calm dissection of her parents’ marriage was almost chilling. It must be hard anyway to be very tall when you were a woman, but then to be plain on top of that, and have your father abandon you so young. But to have no spleen – not even any passion – about the hand life had dealt you … He glanced round the characterless room and saw how she fitted in to it. Had she early become too afraid to have emotions, because of what they might cost? She had put off youth untasted for the safety of middle age.

  ‘Did your mother remarry?’ he asked.

  ‘No. She wasn’t really interested in that sort of thing. Her career was everything. And she was only forty-seven when she died.’ Her eyes came back to him. ‘Pancreatic cancer,’ she said briskly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Slider said.

  ‘At least it was
quick,’ said Dale Sholto. ‘She was gone literally in days.’

  ‘Did your father have any other relatives?’

  ‘No. He was an only child. Mom had a sister – Aunt Jean. She lives in Rhode Island. All the grandparents are dead now. And now he’s gone too. So there’s just me.’ The words were heartbreaking, but she said them without emphasis. ‘Jeremy and I never had any children,’ she added.

  Stop, I may cry, Slider thought desperately. He struck off on a new path. ‘How much do you know about John Lavender?’ he asked.

  ‘He and Phil have known each other for years. They’re business partners. He’s an antique dealer, he has a shop in South Kensington. I think they met at an antiques fair or something like that. Phil was pretty well set up in his interior design business by then, and one of the things he had to do from time to time was to source antique furniture or objets d’art for his clients.’ She seemed to think some explanation was necessary. ‘He only took on the really wealthy ones, preferably English nobility, if he could get them. That was why he assumed the name. Thought they’d trust him more if he sounded like one of them. Though he wasn’t averse to an oil sheikh, as long as he had good taste. He didn’t like the recent influx of Russian oligarchs. He says all they want is bling.’ The modern word sounded odd on her lips – but of course was Egerton’s word, merely reported.

  ‘So he and Mr Lavender got together – how?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Oh, at first it was just John helping him source things on a casual basis. Then bit by bit he started using John’s shop to meet clients and show them his ideas – and John’s ideas.’ She met Slider’s eyes. ‘You see, Phil really didn’t know anything about antiques. He had an eye for colour and fabric, and he was good with people. John was the real expert. So after a bit they went into partnership with the shop, and ran the interior design as a sideline. It was through the shop that Phil got asked to do the television programme – one of John’s regular customers was an investor in the television company, and recommended him. And of course everything took off from then.’

  ‘How did he manage on TV if he didn’t know anything about antiques?’ Slider asked.