Gone Tomorrow

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  A post-mortem is not a pleasant thing to witness, and it was good to have something else to focus on at particular moments. Slider found the lyricism of Miss Whitty’s moving torso very soothing. It was plain to Slider that she was quite well aware of the effect she was having. He liked a woman to enjoy her own prowess – why not? – but he couldn’t help thinking that it was not the best thing for a newly revitalised Atherton to be exposed to. One of them ought to have his mind on the job.

  ‘Well, what can I tell you?’ Freddie Cameron said at last, with a certain sympathy in his eye.

  ‘Some good news,’ Slider said.

  ‘If I had any of that, I’d open a shop,’ Cameron said. ‘Deceased died from a single stab wound from a double-edged, narrow blade, about five inches long, maybe longer – there’s always a certain amount of compression – which penetrated the heart. There’s no sign of any chronic disease or any other contributory cause.’

  ‘And there wouldn’t have needed to be?’

  ‘Oh, no. That wound is quite sufficient. Death would have been instantaneous.’

  ‘There’s no reason to think he was poisoned or drugged, is there?’

  ‘Nothing in the pathology. The stomach contents are well digested. It looks as if he hadn’t eaten for several hours, though I fancy he had a pint not too long before death. Do you want them analysed?’

  ‘Not at the moment. There’s the budget to think about, and we might have to have the DNA analysed. Any way of telling whether he was killed where we found him or moved after death?’

  ‘Not really. The hypostasis is consistent with the way he was found, but as you know it can be two or three hours before it settles, and even if the body is moved after it appears, it may well slip down to the new position anyway.’

  ‘And the time of death?’

  ‘Well, old dear,’ Freddie said cheerfully, ‘I can give you an educated guess. Based on the temperature, I’d say anything up to eight hours before I first saw him.’

  ‘That means some time after midnight,’ Slider said. ‘I could have told you that.’

  ‘But it could have been earlier,’ Freddie went on, ever more cheerfully. ‘He was a muscular chap, and it wasn’t a cold night; and if he’d been kept bundled up or in a sheltered position – indoors, or in the boot of a car, for instance – he wouldn’t have cooled so quickly.’

  ‘I can’t think,’ Slider said with dignity, ‘why they call it forensic science.’

  Ah, if only I were a fictional character,’ Freddie said, ‘I could take one squint and tell you he died at exactly twenty to three on Tuesday-was-a-week.’

  ‘If he were a fictional character,’ Slider capped him, ‘his watch would have stopped at the moment of death and I wouldn’t have had to ask you.’

  Freddie took pity on him. ‘Absolutely best guess, between four and eight hours. But don’t quote me. And if you finally discover he was done at eleven pm or five am, don’t come crying foul to me.’

  ‘King Death hath ass’s ears,’ Slider said.

  ‘Sounds like one of those tongue twisters. “The Leith poleeth dismisses us.” Not easy to say with a mint in your mouth.’

  ‘Well, guys and gals, the bad news is that the fingerprints have come up with no match. Our deceased friend has no previous.’

  There was a murmur. Atherton, sitting on a desk contemplating his shoes, said, ‘I must say that does surprise me. He looked like a villain.’

  ‘Maybe he was a successful villain,’ said DC Swilley. Her given name was Kathleen, but for phonetic reasons, as well as her ability to look after herself, she had always been known as Norma. For as long as Slider had known her she had been engaged to a man called Tony whom no-one had ever met. Swilley had always been reticent about him to the point of mystery; some – generally those who had tried to make her and failed – had even said he did not exist. Then a couple of months ago she had electrified the department by actually getting married. Tony’s surname turned out to be Allnutt, and it had not taken much agonising for Swilley to decide to keep her maiden name while she was in the job. Life was hard enough, even for a tall, Baywatch blonde like her, without adding unnecessary problems.

  Atherton for some reason had been very upset about Swilley getting married. He had told Slider he couldn’t bear to think of any man defiling her. Slider had pointed out that Mr Allnutt had of a certainty been defiling her for years, but Atherton claimed illogically that she was different since the wedding: less unattainably godlike, somehow diminished. Annoyingly, Slider knew what he meant. There was a strange ordinariness to Mrs Allnutt, a glow of domestic contentment, which was like polished pewter to her previous burnished silver. He didn’t, however, go as far as Atherton and blame her for it.

  So when Swilley said, ‘Maybe he was a successful villain,’ Atherton immediately contradicted her.

  ‘There’s no such thing.’

  ‘Don’t be such a dick,’ Swilley said impatiently. ‘Of course there is.’

  ‘Criminals are basically stupid. They always give themselves away in the end. We’d have had him through our hands.’

  ‘Yes, and if we’d had to let him go for lack of evidence or whatever, he wouldn’t have a record and the prints would’ve been destroyed,’ Swilley pointed out.

  ‘Well, if that’s what you call successful—’

  ‘Children, can you wait until playtime if you want to quarrel,’ Slider said. ‘Now, I must say I was rather counting on a record to identify him. What we’re left with is a blood sample which we could have checked against the DNA database, but that’s expensive and—?’ He looked round like a friendly lecturer.

  ‘If he’s got no fingerprint record, there’ll be no DNA record,’ Mackay filled in obligingly.

  ‘Give that man a coconut. If all else fails we may have to fall back on his dental profile—’

  ‘God forbid,’ Atherton said. ‘He was pre-fluoride. The bastard had teeth like Madeira cake.’

  ‘It can take months to get a match on dental,’ Mackay said.

  ‘Exactly. So before we tread that despairing route, there are other things to do.’

  ‘Mispers,’ McLaren suggested.

  ‘It’s probably a bit early for that, but check it anyway. And meanwhile, we do it the hard way. Knock on doors, show his face and the tattoo, until we find someone who recognises him.’ There was a composite moan. ‘Start with the flats and houses nearest the two park gates and work outwards. You know and I know that it’s twelve to seven he wasn’t from outer space or the Outer Hebrides. He’ll have been a local, and chances are he’s used the park before for whatever he was using it for.’

  ‘What if he was dumped there dead?’ Anderson said.

  ‘Well, that’s probably even better from our point of view. It’s impossible to move a large dead body around without somebody noticing something. But it’s my belief he went to the park alive and was killed on the spot – for the same reason, that it would be a ludicrously difficult place to dump him without being seen.’

  ‘Guv,’ said McLaren, ‘he was stabbed, had all his ID lifted, but his money left, and no attempt made to conceal the body. That looks like a punishment thing, dunnit? Or a gang thing. He was involved in something and they caught up with him, sorted him, and left him there as an example.’

  ‘That’s one theory.’

  ‘I just can’t see why they didn’t take the wonga,’ McLaren urged. ‘Who’s gonna leave well over a K in folding when it’s sitting up and begging to be took?’

  Mackay agreed. ‘We’ve got Doc Cameron’s evidence that his pockets were gone through, so it can’t just be they missed it. But if it was a punishment thing, why not take it anyway?’

  ‘To make it scarier,’ Atherton said.

  ‘What?’ Swilley challenged derisively.

  He shrugged. ‘A villain who’s not interested in money? It scares the shit out of me.’

  ‘All right, let’s get on with it,’ Slider intervened. ‘While we’ve got all the uniform
help with the doorstepping, I’d like you people to try for a short cut. That’s pubs, clubs, cafés, anywhere you can think of on our ground that the lowlife gather – remembering that he might only have been a fringe player. Don’t forget your snouts – they’re probably the likeliest to know him. Swilley, get the pictures off to the other boroughs. Most likely he’s local but he might have strayed at some time or other: it’s not as if we’ve got border control. McLaren, check Mispers. Atherton, have a go at our own dear Criminal Intelligence System to see if there are any matches on single stab wounds to the heart or anything connected with the park. And,’ he added through the scrape and rustle of troops rising, ‘let’s not forget the obvious. Show the pictures to our own. Who’s on downstairs?’

  ‘Paxman,’ someone said.

  ‘Oh, well, he knows everyone who’s ever lived. I think I’ll pop down and have a word with him myself.’

  Sergeant Paxman was a great solid bull of a man, his curly poll growing a little grizzled now, like an elderly Hereford. He had a bull’s massive stillness too, a complete lack of fidget, which spread out around him in waves. It made him invaluable when they brought in belligerent drunks or drug addicts with the screaming abdabs: in a room full of thrashing arms and legs he was a kinetic black hole.

  His relationship with Slider had sometimes been uneasy. Paxman was a devout Methodist and disliked any form of moral laxity, particularly in policemen, who he felt ought to set an example to society at large. PCs on his relief tended to find themselves getting married to the people they were living with almost without their own volition. His current favourite in the Department was Norma, whom he favoured, when she passed him, with his rare smile.

  Slider had once been one of Paxman’s okays, but he had fallen from grace when his marriage to Irene broke up and he went to live with Joanna, who had been a witness in one of his cases. Paxman would never say anything, of course, but his disapproval of hanky-panky spread around him in the same palpable ripples as his stillness. However, Irene had remarried, and Joanna had gone abroad. She was a professional violinist and had been offered a lucrative and prestigious position in an orchestra based in Amsterdam. With work so scarce at home, she had felt she had to take it. Slider missed her with a horrible hollow sucking emptiness; but at least now that he was living alone, hankiless and without a shadow of panky, he thought he had detected a breath of rehabilitation with Paxman.

  Paxman stared at the photographs for a long time, stationary as a ton of paper. Slider waited, feeling the dust of aeons sifting down on him, soft and implacable. Then at last the sergeant lifted his head and said, ‘No. I don’t know him. Not been through my hands. But you said he’d been in a barney?’

  ‘Apparently. He was sporting some knuckle bruises.’

  ‘Hm. Well, there was a bit of a frackarse last night down at the Phoenix.’

  ‘Really?’ This was the pub in South Africa Road, a little way along from the park gates. ‘Who went down there?’

  ‘Oh, we weren’t called,’ Paxman said. ‘It wasn’t anything major. Just a bit of a barney. Two blokes throwing punches. Over before it started sort o’ thing. Dunno if it’s anything to do with your bloke.’

  Slider wondered, if the police weren’t called, how Paxman knew about it; but the question would probably only be answered with a shrug, so he didn’t ask it. Sometimes he thought even Paxman didn’t know how he knew things. Osmosis, probably.

  ‘Well, thanks, Arthur,’ he said. ‘It might well be something. I’ll point one of my lads at it.’

  ‘Right,’ said Paxman. He laid an enormous hand over the photos. ‘I’ll keep these, show ’em around. You never know.’

  You never did, Slider agreed. ‘And pass them on when the relief changes? Thanks.’

  In the event, Slider went down to the Phoenix himself. He wanted another look at the immediate surroundings. The White City was a large estate of five-storey blocks of council flats, built in the thirties. It had originally been created to be a complete community, with its own shops, park, playground and public house, the General Smuts. However in the sixties there had been a small expansion on its south-eastern border, where the new park had been opened; and there an infant school, another row of shops and a second pub had been added.

  Created in that unloved period of architecture, the Phoenix was everything a pub didn’t ought to be, a featureless pale-brick box with picture windows. It inspired no affection or loyalty as a local, and almost from the beginning the rougher types had been tempted there. Now most of the picture windows had been bricked up to avoid temptation, and the interior was as dark as an American bar – so dark the security cameras Slider noted at the angles of the ceiling must have worked on infrared. The prevailing design motif was the avoidance of anything that could be picked up and thrown. The bar stools and tables were bolted to the floor and the only other seating was the banquettes round the walls, covered in red leatherette gaping open to its foam filling in numerous wounds. The brewery that owned it had recently yielded to this fashion trend and restocked with plastic beer glasses. It was that sort of pub.

  On this sunny day, however, it was peaceful. The door was standing open to let some light into the interior, and the three customers it could boast were sitting up at the bar over their pints not bothering anyone. The landlord was a moody-looking bald man with a glass eye. He looked about fifty, but was mega fit for it, with a weightlifter’s vast shoulders and nipped-in waist, which he emphasised by wearing a clinging black teeshirt and jeans with a heavy leather belt cinched tight in between. The fact that he was only five foot six somehow made him seem more, rather than less, dangerous, as a terrier is more unnerving than a Great Dane.

  His name, according to the licence notice over the door, was Colin Collins – which Slider reckoned was enough to jaundice a man from earliest childhood – but he was always known as Sonny. Slider assumed it was spelt with an ‘o’: a ‘u’ would have been too needlessly cynical. He had old, faded tattoos on his forearms and left biceps; and at some, presumably drunken, point in his merry life he had had a dotted line tattooed right round the base of his neck. In the gloom of the far reaches of the bar his black-clad torso was almost invisible, and his pale throat and gleaming ivory head floated eerily above the dotted line as if someone had already obeyed the implicit instruction to cut along it.

  Slider introduced himself and passed the photographs over the bar. Collins looked down at them with his good eye, while the glass one continued to stare furiously at Slider. It must be something that came in handy when dealing with the obstreperous, Slider thought, and was briefly beguiled by the memory of a story Tufty Arceneaux, the forensic haematologist, had told him about his time in Africa. It was about an up-country estate boss Tufty had frequently drunk with, who had a glass eye. When he couldn’t be in two places at once the bloke used to take the eye out and leave it to supervise, the natives believing that he could thus see what was going on in absentia. Once a man had been brought to him for discipline, but he had been called away urgently in the middle of the interview, so he had left his glass eye on the desk and told the man to stay put. In dealing with the emergency he had forgotten to go back, and the miscreant had sat in the office facing the eye for four days. His relatives had taken turns bringing him food and water.

  Sonny Collins didn’t take four days about it, but it seemed to Slider an uncomfortably long time to wait under the basilisk gaze. ‘I understand there was a bit of a barney outside last night,’ he prompted. ‘Two men throwing punches. I wondered if this was one of the men.’

  ‘Might be,’ Sonny vouchsafed at last.

  ‘Can you tell me about it,’ Slider asked patiently.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the fight.’

  Sonny shrugged, and his massive muscles manoeuvred about under his skin like Volkswagen Beetles trying to pass in an alley. ‘Not much to tell. Two blokes started arguing.’ He closed his mouth tightly after each sentence like someone switching off unnecessar
y lights to save electricity. ‘One’s throwing his lip. Effing and blinding. Told ’em to take it outside.’

  ‘And they went.’

  ‘In my pub,’ Sonny Collins said, suddenly expansive, ‘when I say take it outside, outside it goes.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Slider said, trying a bit of flattery. It melted Collins in the same way a one-bar electric fire melts a block of granite. Both eyes were as yielding as marbles as they stared at Slider. ‘What time was this?’ he asked, humbled.

  ‘About closing time.’

  ‘And what happened outside?’

  ‘Didn’t see it. Heard about it. Not much of a fight. Couple o’ punches thrown. Then it all goes quiet.’

  ‘And who were the two men? You think this was one of them? What’s his name?’

  Sonny Collins stared as if Slider were being irrational. ‘I don’t know,’ he said impatiently. ‘He’s not a regular.’

  Slider picked up an inference Collins perhaps didn’t intend him to. ‘But the other man is a regular,’ he said, not making it too much of a question. ‘What’s his name?’

  Collins seemed to weigh the pros and cons of co-operation. At last he said, ‘Eddie.’

  ‘Eddie what?’

  The impatience again. ‘You don’t ask surnames,’ he said. ‘Pub like this, you don’t ask names at all. Heard him called Eddie, that’s all. Lives local. Comes in two, three times a week. That’s it. That’s all I can tell you.’

  ‘And this other bloke,’ Slider said, gesturing to the photograph, ‘had you seen him before?’

  Collins shrugged. ‘May have. He looks a bit familiar. That’s all I can tell you.’

  ‘Can you describe this Eddie?’

  ‘Tall, dark hair. Fancies himself. Always talking about how many women he’s had.’ Collins grew impatient. ‘Is that it? Only I can’t stand chatting to you all day. I got customers to serve.’

  None of the other three people in the pub had moved a muscle since Slider had entered. They hunched over their half-empty glasses like three Mystic Megs staring into their crystal balls. Slider thought Collins knew more than he was telling, but he knew he wouldn’t get any more out of him now, and if he pushed him it would spoil the chances of getting more next time. With naturally irritable people like him, going against their grain could be counter-productive.