‘I’m going to Cumae,’ he said.
Gascoyne had a telephone call from Pat Bexley. ‘You know, Amanda Knight’s aunt? You came to visit me last week?’
‘Yes, of course I remember. How can I help you?’
‘Well, I wondered whether you’d managed to find Maggie, my sister Margaret. I mean, with all your resources—’
‘Yes, we did trace her. My boss went to see her and had a talk with her.’
‘Broke the news to her?’
‘Yes, of course.’ He couldn’t discuss the interview with anyone else, and tried to distract her. ‘What can I help you with today?’
‘Well, I wondered if you could give me her address and phone number. Or phone number at any rate. I’d like to get in touch with her. It must be a terrible time for her right now. After all these years – and I know she must have suspected Amanda was dead, but that’s not the same as knowing, is it? She must need someone to support her, and family’s family when all’s said and done.’
‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t be allowed to give you that information—’ Gascoyne began, but she jumped back in.
‘And there’ll be a funeral won’t there? I mean at some point. She’ll need help with that. She shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.’
‘I can’t give you her contact details,’ Gascoyne said firmly, to stem the tide, ‘but what I can do is give your contact details to her, and tell her that you want to be in touch with her. How would that be?’
‘Oh! Right – well, that’d be better than nothing,’ Mrs Bexley said, with hope in her voice.
‘I’ll just run it past my boss to make sure it doesn’t breach any protocols,’ said Gascoyne.
‘Thank you. And do you know when the funeral will be?’
‘I haven’t any information about that at present. I don’t think the body has been released yet.’
‘Oh. Well, give Maggie my details and tell her to get in touch. Tell her I really want to hear from her.’
‘I will.’
‘And tell her, I know we parted brass rags, and there was bad blood between us, but that was a long time ago. It’s all water under the bridge, and I’ve got no hard feelings. Forgive and forget, I say, especially when you’re up against it. Blood is thicker than water, after all, and I want to be there for her in her hour of need. Family ought to stick together at times like this, and Amanda was my niece. And she’s my sister, no matter what. Tell, her, will you?’
‘I’ll tell her,’ Gascoyne said, writing it all down.
After he had rung off, Slider passed his desk on his way out and, looking over his shoulder, said, ‘Practising for the Annual Cliché Competition?’
Gascoyne explained. ‘Shall I pass it on to Mrs Knight?’
‘Yes, all right. I expect she’ll welcome the chance to bury the hatchet. What’s this about the funeral?’
‘I said I didn’t think the body had been released yet.’
‘We don’t really need it for anything now. Look it up, will you?’
Gascoyne found the file on-line, and said, ‘Oh, here it is, sir – we haven’t had the DNA test back yet. The doc didn’t fast-track it, so I expect it’s caught up in the queue somewhere.’
‘All right, well goose them up a bit, will you? We ought not to keep that poor woman waiting longer than we have to.’
‘Will do, sir.’
Despite the rise in temperature outside, Connie Bindman’s basement was horribly cold. She had added two woollen scarves to her usual polar gear, one round her neck and one tied over her head. ‘I keep asking them to fix the heating,’ she said to Slider, ‘but it’s always the same answer. “Budget,” they say. “You’ll have to wait your turn,” they say. I tell them paper needs to be kept dry, but they don’t care. I think they’d be happy if the archive would just go away, and me with it. I swear to you, I wouldn’t be surprised if I tried to go home one evening, and found the door at the top of the stairs boarded up and the building scheduled for demolition.’
‘If I ever hear it’s going to be, I promise I’ll come and check that you got out,’ said Slider.
She beamed. ‘You’re a good man, Bill Slider. One of the gentry. What can I do for you, darling? I had one of your girls down here last week, looking for a misper. Are you still on that?’
He nodded. ‘It’s developed ramifications. One of which is that the missing girl was allegedly best friends with a girl called Melissa Vickery.’
‘Oho!’ said Connie. ‘As in Detective Superintendent Edgar Vickery?’
‘I don’t know. That’s why I came to pick your brains.’
She had an access of caution. ‘What do you mean by “allegedly”?’
‘Con, this case is twenty-five years old. Everything’s alleged. People who were children then are middle-aged now, people who were young are old. And people who were grown-up are dead.’
Connie winced visibly. ‘Don’t be so dramatic, darling. Twenty-five years is nothing in the scheme of things.’
‘In the scheme of me it’s a lot of water under a lot of bridges. And I want a result on this very badly.’
She gave him a shrewd look. ‘Don’t tell me it’s a rehabilitation thing? You shouldn’t pay too much attention to those children upstairs. They throw their little toys out of the pram, but you and I, dear boy, we’ve seen it all before. We’ve survived it. In a few years there’ll be different children with different toys. But the Job is always the Job.’
‘I’m not sure it is any more,’ he said dolefully. ‘They keep changing things. In the end, there’s nothing left that you recognize.’
‘I can see you’re in defeatist mood. That’s not like you. Don’t tell me they’ve finally knocked the cheek out of you? Not Bill Slider, the Met’s answer to James Dean?’
He had to grin. ‘You do me good, Con! Everyone should have a course of Connie Bindman prescribed every so often—’
‘Like a purgative?’ she interrupted wryly. ‘Thank you so much, my cherub. But you really don’t want to start venting bodily secretions down in this morgue, I can tell you. Have you any idea how many flights of stairs separate us from a WC at this moment? It’s a good job I have iron control over everything, including my bladder. But all things have their season, so shall we get on with some work? What do you want to know?’
‘Vickery. Kellington and Vickery,’ he added, for good measure.
Connie produced two folding chairs – rejects from one of the conference room make-overs upstairs – and set them up, and they sat facing each other, close, knee to knee, in an unconscious bid to preserve body heat.
‘Kellington was Vickery’s boy,’ she pronounced.
‘You mean …?’ Slider asked, with a raised eyebrow.
She looked annoyed. ‘No! Don’t be obvious, Bill Slider. You’re better than that.’
‘I was surprised, that’s all. I’ve met Kellington.’
‘Appearance proves nothing,’ she said briskly. ‘But you’re right. It wasn’t that. Kellington worshipped him, that’s all. He was a big, slow, dumb giant – as stupid as it’s possible to be in the Met and still get on – so, not dangerously stupid, just …’
‘Lacking in imagination?’
‘Yes. Good.’
‘That’s what Mitchell Baxter said.’
‘He’s a good boy, Mitchell,’ said Connie. The ‘boy’ was close to retirement, but Slider let it go. ‘Yes, lacking imagination. Whereas Vickery was brilliant. Quick. Inventive. Bags of imagination. I used to think of them rather like those two chaps in Of Mice And Men, what where they called – George and Lennie?’
‘Good lord!’
Her brows snapped down. ‘Not literally, fool! Just the relationship. Kellington did Vickery’s bidding, Vickery protected Kellington. Kellington thought Vickery was the cat’s pyjamas, Vickery explained things that were above Kellington’s brain-grade.’
‘This is good. More!’
‘Vickery was one of those wiry, restless, fizzing people, who tend to go of
f at the wrong time if they’re not given enough to do. An unstable firework. Impulsive.’
‘Crooked?’
‘No, I wouldn’t say that. Perhaps a bit too brilliant for his own good. It made him impatient with people who didn’t see things the way he saw them.’ She stopped, brooding over memories.
Slider thought about that, concluding that crooked was as crooked did. An impatient, brilliant person might cut corners to get the hard-of-thinking to the destination that he could make in a single bound. If the destination was a good one, he might justify corner-cutting very happily to himself. Hadn’t they all done things like that from time to time? Hadn’t he gone to interview Gideon Marler against direct orders from his borough commander?
‘Where is he now?’ Slider asked.
She came back. ‘Who? Oh, Vickery? I can’t tell you. He left the Job a long time ago.’
‘Left, how?’
‘Just resigned. Had enough, I suppose. Burned out, maybe – your brilliant ones often do. You should watch your pet Jim Atherton that way.’
‘Atherton’s all right,’ Slider replied, meaning that he had had his breakdown, years back, after being knifed on the Job. Done it, come back, got the T-shirt.
But she gave a wry smile and said, ‘Yes, I know – he’s got you. Equally, though, you’ve got him. It doesn’t do to get too reliant on one person.’
‘We’re not talking about me,’ Slider said hastily. ‘When did Vickery leave?’
‘October 1990,’ she said without hesitation.
‘How the heck—?’
‘I looked it up, simpleton! I knew you’d be back. That file didn’t have nearly enough in it, so I knew you’d want to pick the Bindman brains. Vickery handed in his notice, and left at the end of October 1990. Kellington went on to retirement – but you said you’d seen him, so you’ll know that?’
‘Yes,’ said Slider. ‘Did Vickery have any family? Wife, children?’
‘He was never married while he was in the Job. Afterwards, I couldn’t tell you. He was a noted cocksman, in trouble for it from time to time, when he didn’t keep it zipped when he ought to have. Witnesses confused. Evidence compromised and so on.’ Slider nodded understanding. ‘As to children – I never heard he had any. Probably he didn’t, either.’
It was a joke, and Slider smiled. ‘What about other family?’ he asked casually, his mind on tiptoe. ‘Brothers? Sisters?’
But she wasn’t fooled. She gave him a wise old grin and said, ‘If the girl’s name was Melissa Vickery, we’re not looking for a sister, are we? Or the surname would be different. Did Edgar Vickery have a niece called Melissa? I couldn’t tell you.’
Slider’s disappointment was sharp.
But she continued. ‘He did have a brother, however. Who could well have been married and have had children.’
‘Name?’
‘I don’t know his name. But what I heard was that this brother was brilliant as well, and our Edgar was intensely proud of him. Some high-flier in the scientific community. A generation further on and he’d probably have been one of these IT wizards. The Vickerys had brains, that was Edgar’s boast.’ She looked at Slider thoughtfully. ‘Kellington might know. He and Vickery worked together a lot. He probably talked about his brother to him. Almost certainly, I’d have thought.’
But if there was anything funny about the case, Kellington was probably involved, and he didn’t want to go to him now, before he had his ducks in a row. Little niggles were working away in his mind, but he didn’t really know what he suspected, or of whom. All he knew was that, like Atherton, he was made uneasy by coincidences.
‘And,’ Connie went on, still studying him, ‘if there’s something funny about Vickery in relation to his brother or this case, Kellington might not tell you. He might prefer to be a good dog. These rather stupid people can be loyal beyond all reason.’
‘You could be right,’ said Slider. He mused. ‘Were they a local family?’ he asked. ‘One of my new boys, LaSalle, says Vickery is a local name.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Connie. ‘Born and bred. Came from Godolphin or Coningham – one of those roads. LaSalle’s local, too – I suppose you knew that. Not his name, of course. His grandmother married a French refugee during the war. Scandalous! She was a Pierce before that. That’s a Shepherd’s Bush name, too.’
He had to laugh. ‘You really do know everything, don’t you?’
‘Except how to get those bastards upstairs to fix the heating,’ Connie said sourly.
SEVENTEEN
O Tempora O Maurice
Joanna was depping in the West End again, and Slider had a happy couple of hours being a father. Dad had already fed George by the time he got home, but he played with his son on the floor with his Lego junior construction kit, then gave him his bath, tucked him up in bed and read to him. His favourite bedtime book at the moment was Goodnight Moon, which was so soporific Slider had difficulty in staying awake long enough to see George off.
George would be three next month, Slider thought as he went downstairs to prepare his own supper, and was due for some more grown-up brain-fare. He didn’t hold out much hope, however. Bedtime rituals were exactly that – change them at your peril. When he himself had been very small, he always had to stroke the dog goodnight before he went to bed, which had driven his mother crazy because it meant she had had to wash his hands again. The dog loved to roll in cowshit, and she was convinced he would suck his thumb during the night and give himself dysentery. Goodnight Dog. Hello A&E.
Over supper, the thoughts he had sent out for a walk while he enjoyed himself with George came back to plague him. He tried to ignore them, but they sent his appetite packing. The washing machine had come on on the timer, and made an unholy racket – Wagner’s Rinse Cycle, as Joanna was wont to call it – so he gave up on food and went into the drawing room. He tried to read, but the words wouldn’t grip, so he watched a bit of Mad Men on the boxed set Dad and Lydia had given him last Christmas. Thanks to the vagaries of work, he was still only halfway through it. It was quite good as a distraction because he could never remember who anyone was or how they related to anyone else, which had his forensic skills running around until they were tired.
And when Joanna came home, he had the gin already in the glass, waiting for the tonic, knowing that she would be both tired and ‘up’ and would need winding down before bed.
‘How was it?’ he asked, bringing her the glass on the sofa.
‘Ah, lovely! Thanks. I’ve been thinking about this all the way home. The show? Oh, much the same. Flippin’ chaos held in check by the brilliance of the musicians. The MD was off tonight, so we had the AMD, who’s a keyboardist in real life, which is fine by us, but it put the lead soprano in a temper, because she’s having it off with the MD and she’s convinced he’s seeing someone else whenever he’s out of her sight. So she was obviously determined to make his life a misery by ignoring him – the AMD, I mean.’
‘Why doesn’t she just make the MD’s life a misery?’ Slider asked.
‘Because she depends on him for work. She’s not really that good, you see. But as long as he’s bonking her, he has to come up with the jobs.’
Slider smiled. ‘You’re kidding me. It doesn’t really work like that, does it?’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Have I taught you nothing? The MD is all powerful. He dispenses patronage. He can accept or reject a dep, for instance, on the basis of whether he likes them or not. Or whether they’ve sucked up to him enough on other occasions.’
‘But this soprano – she must be able to sing the part?’
‘Up to a point. What she has is decibels. She’s got a voice like a power drill boring through sheet metal. She fills the theatre, all right. You can hear her in the back rows. Whether you’d want to hear her is another matter. But she’s the darling of Classic FM, she’s got recording contracts, and she can snub a poor humble AMD-keyboardist with impunity. Hey, have I told you the old joke? Why is being a lead soprano like st
aying in a cheap lodging house?’
‘I don’t know,’ Slider said obediently.
‘Because you can come in when you like and you don’t have to worry about the key.’
‘Ho-ho,’ he said. She had finished her drink. ‘Another?’
‘No, thanks, I’d never sleep. How was work? You look frazzled.’
There was no fooling her. ‘Hart found Shannon Bailey.’
‘And?’
‘She says she doesn’t remember any more what she saw, if anything at all. She was on vodka and cocaine and everything’s a blur.’
‘I see. Well, that’s possible, isn’t it? Even likely.’ She studied him. ‘And she was all you had, wasn’t she?’
‘She was the only witness to Kaylee’s death. Except that, without her testimony, there’s no knowing if that’s how Kaylee died. Or if she was even there. They’ve got a top forensic expert to say that her injuries were consistent with being hit by a car where she was found. So the whole roof thing is now officially just a junkie’s drug-fuelled fantasy.’
‘Officially? But you still think—’
‘No. That’s the problem. I now worry that I pushed her into it. Junkies are very suggestible. Young girls are suggestible. I got the answer I wanted.’
She looked troubled. ‘What about the parties? The underage sex?’
‘None of the other girls will testify. There may have been parties, they may have gone to them, but there’s no evidence any of them had sex with anyone.’
‘Oh, come on – why else would they be there?’
He shook his head at her. ‘That’s just innuendo. Give a dog a bad name and hang him. They could have been having Bible reading classes in there for all we know. A fine group of worthies trying to improve the lot of poor girls and set them on the strait and narrow. The Gladstones de nos jours.’
‘Do you believe that?’ Joanna asked, a touch raucously.
‘Doesn’t matter what I believe. In fact, I shouldn’t believe. Facts, evidence, a proper case, that’s what I have to have, or I’m not doing my job. I’m afraid,’ he said slowly, coming to the hard part, squeezing it out, because she was his confessional and he needed her to understand, even when it hurt to tell her, ‘that I wasn’t doing my job. I was running a vendetta, because I was angry about Kaylee – her life, her death, and the fact that no one cared about either. I turned myself from a policeman into a vigilante.’
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