Gone Tomorrow

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Not on our ground,’ Slider said quickly.

  ‘We may get out on a technicality with that one, but three is four too many as it is. They won’t leave it with us much longer.’

  ‘How long have we got, sir?’ Slider asked.

  ‘The Murder Review Team will be here on Monday, or Tuesday at the latest. If we’ve got nowhere, they’ll bring someone in from outside. Well, I wish them joy of it, that’s all. A case like this is a bugger. When you lift the corner of the carpet, you never know what you’ll find looking back at you. Do what you can in the time available, Slider, and I’ll authorise any overtime you want for your team. If you can get a result, well and good.’

  Slider could not hold out the slightest hope that they’d get anywhere by Tuesday morning, so he remained silent. Porson was staring at nothing again, deep in a reverie. Suddenly he came back and said, ‘If they take it away I’ll have a few days off. Go down and visit my daughter.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a daughter, sir,’ Slider said – foolishly, since he hadn’t known anything about Porson’s life.

  ‘Lives down in Devon. Married, two boys. She’s an artist. Paints views for the tourist trade – but good stuff, mind!’ he added sharply as if Slider had sniggered. ‘None of your tat! She’s a real painter. I used to make a joke about it. I used to say to her, “Moira, I may be a superintendent but you’re a right Constable.”’

  Porson making a joke? Slider thought in astonishment. And then, Moira? He tried to smile.

  Porson went on. ‘I’ll stay with them for a few days and we can all come up together for the funeral on Friday.’

  ‘If anyone deserves a few days off it’s you, sir,’ Slider said in a kind of desperation. All this personal revelation was terrifying. He was afraid any minute Porson would ask him to come too.

  ‘So don’t beat yourself up, Slider, that’s what I’m saying,’ Porson concluded in a wholly normal voice. ‘If it doesn’t come off, let someone else worry about it.’

  This was worse than anything, Slider thought. If the old man gave in to the Palfreymans of this world without a struggle, it really would be the end. If the great granite Porson was defeated there was no hope for any of them: the world would crack in two like a saucer and fall into the void.

  ‘But it’s our ground, sir,’ he said, trying to infuse some urgency into the old man.

  ‘Is it?’ Porson said. ‘I wonder sometimes. I wonder if it’s not theirs.’ Theirs? Palfreyman’s and Wetherspoon’s, did he mean? ‘Your Lenny Baxters’ and your Sonny Collinses’,’ Porson elucidated. ‘Whoever said the meek shall inherit the earth was talking out the back of his head.’

  This didn’t seem to be the moment to tell him that it was the Lord. Slider kept schtumm.

  All the same, someone had to do something, and when he got back to his office he rang his old friend Pauline Smithers. She was now with the National Crime Squad, and he found her still in her office at the West London headquarters.

  ‘Hullo,’ she answered him. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘That’s a very hurtful conclusion to jump to,’ Slider said. ‘I phoned to say congratulations.’

  He had known Pauline Smithers his whole career, ever since he was a probationer in uniform and she had had the stern glamour of five years of seniority over him. There had been a time when something might have started between them, but he had held back through diffidence, and in the end he had married Irene and she had married her career. The gap between them had widened exponentially since that point. He was a detective inspector working seventeen-hour days at a local nick. She was a detective chief superintendent and second in command of a team that had been investigating Internet paedophile rings and had just made a spectacular and widely publicised bust, with a hundred arrests and several lorryloads of porn confiscated.

  ‘I saw you on the telly,’ he said. ‘You looked very good, Pauly. The grapevine says you’re destined for great things.’

  ‘Well, that’s what we all thought, but it was splashed in the papers for one day and then forgotten, like everything else. Fifteen minutes of fame, you know? Now we’ve got to slog it through the courts. A hundred arrests but how many will we get down? Still, it was nice while it lasted.’

  ‘Now don’t you let me down,’ Slider complained. ‘None of that defeatist talk. You’re always bullish and positive. I phoned you for a bit of backbone stiffening, and here you are, c’est-la-vie-ing me.’

  ‘Hah! I knew it! You did want something.’

  ‘Well, only a bit. I really did phone to congratulate you, and I should have done it sooner only—’

  ‘You had stuff to do. I know. So what’s your problem this time, chum? I don’t know but what having a go at yours wouldn’t be a nice temporary relief from my own. I’m sick of paedophiles.’

  ‘I bet you are.’

  ‘Sometimes I find myself trembling with rage and wanting to go down to the cells and simply beat them to death. Not good for the soul, that. We’ve got to keep our objectivity. Like surgeons. We’re the last rational people in the whole legal system.’

  Slider sighed happily. ‘Ah, that’s the stuff! Come on, more! Pump it in – I can feel it doing me good already.’

  She laughed. ‘What do you want, you bastard? I’ve got stuff to do myself before I can get home to my cot.’

  So he told her. Just saying it all out loud helped him to slot the pieces into place. She listened, putting a question now and then, and he imagined her at her desk with the lamp making a puddle of light over her hands, taking notes in her quick, small script. He felt an enormous surge of affection for her, a familiar and comprehensible person in a wild and woolly world.

  At the end she said, ‘Well, I see why you want this Bates person to turn out to be the Needle, but you really haven’t got anything to go on, have you?’

  ‘No, I know. That’s where I need you.’

  ‘Oh, is that where?’

  Slider missed that one. ‘These high-powered people are difficult to get information on. His house is like Fort Knox and I’ve exhausted the normal routes. But if he’s providing some kind of goods or services to the American cultural legation, someone official must know about him.’

  ‘Don’t you think that makes it unlikely that he’s a criminal?’ she asked him kindly.

  ‘What better cover could there be?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but why would he bother?’

  ‘Some people just can’t get enough. Look, if he turns out to be pure as the driven, so be it. At least it stops me wasting my time – and I’ve got little enough of that to waste.’

  ‘All right, I’ll see what I can do. But I don’t know why you can’t just let it go, Bill. After all, there’s plenty more criminals where that one came from.’

  ‘Why do you bother catching a hundred paedophiles when there’s a hundred thousand more out there? Crime’s a Medusa head. Every snake you cut off, another ten spring up. But what’s the alternative? You can’t let them do it right under your nose without so much as a challenge.’

  ‘All right, I said I’d do it,’ Pauline interrupted him.

  ‘Thanks. Right away?’

  ‘By yesterday, if that’s soon enough for you.’

  ‘Thanks, Pauly.’

  ‘Is your mobile number still the same? All right then, I’ll call you as soon as I know anything. Don’t call me, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay. How’s what’s-her-name – your friend?’

  ‘Joanna? Absent.’

  ‘Ah. I smell a story. Well, you can buy me lunch or something and tell me all about it.’

  When he had rung off from Pauline, he phoned home to get his answering machine messages – two from Joanna, the second saying she was just going in to play and she’d try again after the concert. He hadn’t realised it was so late. He was hungry, too, he discovered. He quite fancied a ruby. Hadn’t had one of those for ages. He’d stop on the way home at the Angla Bangla for a nice chicken tikka with saffron r
ice and a big greasy naan: a thinking man had to keep his energies up.

  That decided, he felt more cheerful and embarked on his last task – ringing round his team to get them in tomorrow. Two days. A lot could happen in two days. Even a result wasn’t out of the question.

  Hollis’s quest for people who had known Sonny Collins had led at last to one of those raw new estates built beside the M1 to take the overspill from Northampton. Here he was received on Sunday morning by one Stanley Rice who lived with his wife in retirement at number 5, Meadowview. Despite its name, it looked out at the front only on the houses opposite, across the narrow road and the open-plan front gardens, and at the back on the high wooden fencing that divided the estate from the motorway.

  Hollis had driven to Meadowview through Orchard Way and The Glebe, passing such side turnings as Haystacks, Willow Close and Primrose Dene. When he got out of his car and the roar of the traffic hit him, he almost staggered. It thundered past just beyond the flimsy barrier with a noise like a waterfall driving hydro-electric turbines; it battered the air in a way that surely was literally unendurable. It must be like living in the exhaust pit of a rocket launcher. He half expected his nose and ears to start bleeding.

  But it was amazing how quickly he got used to it once he was inside the house where, though constant, it was not at killing pitch. It was a mean little house, with low ceilings and tiny rooms, as if built for a smaller race of hominids than your actual homo erectus. Hollis came from Manchester, and was reminded of things he had learnt in history lessons about the cramped and gimcrack housing that was run up for factory workers in the nineteenth century. How the wheel turned!

  Mr and Mrs Rice had brought with them to their new castle their old furniture, which had been designed with normal-sized houses in mind. With the sofa in place along the only piece of wall long enough to accommodate it, and a footstool in front for Mrs Rice, who suffered from swollen ankles, there was only just room for a person to pass between it and the log-effect electric fire. An armchair placed at either side of the fire made it an obstacle course to get from the door to the far window, under which a gateleg table and two dining chairs filled all the remaining space from wall to wall. There was another window at the front of the room, looking onto the road, and beneath it stood a bookcase and a cupboard with two drawers underneath, which impeded the opening of the door from the tiny entrance hall to the ‘living room’.

  Every step they took, Hollis reflected, must involve sidling past something or squeezing through some gap. It was depressing. Still, they seemed an immensely cheerful couple and even, to his astonishment, said that this house was much nicer than their old one.

  ‘We’ve got the hatch through to the kitchen here, for one thing,’ Mr Rice explained, ‘so I can talk to Mother while she’s in there cooking or whatever, and she can see the television through it, so she doesn’t miss things. She likes the soaps, you see, and if they come on when she’s washing up or doing the potatoes … Mustard on the soaps, she is. Aren’t you, love?’

  Hollis had missed the television. It was behind one of the armchairs, between it and the wall. They would have to push the chair back up against the dining table to be able to see it.

  On top of the television was a rather nice model ship, made of wood and ivory.

  ‘I can see you were a naval man,’ Hollis said, to get things rolling. ‘That model, the painting and everything.’ Over the fireplace was a large, cheaply framed reproduction of a three-master in full sail over a rollicking blue sea; while on the narrow, low mantelpiece, the top of the bookcase and the cupboard was a whole collection of ships in bottles, of various sizes and degrees of accomplishment.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mr Rice said, pleased. ‘I like my bits and bobs about me. Collect ’em, when I can find ’em. And I’ve got a lot more stuff upstairs, in the spare bedroom. I make model battleships from kits – the modern ones, you know, not like her.’ He gestured towards the three-master. ‘Mother laughs at me about my “kid’s hobby”, but I find it satisfying. She has her knitting, and I have my models, right? Where’s the difference?’

  ‘Oh, go on, Stan!’ Mrs Rice protested. ‘The gentleman doesn’t want to know about your silly ships. Would you like a cup of tea, Mr – er? Or coffee?’

  ‘Thanks, that’d be very nice,’ said Hollis. ‘Coffee, please, if it’s no trouble.’

  She bustled off and he heard her presently in the tiny kitchen just through the cardboard wall, making kettle-and-cup noises. It was hardly necessary to have a hatch, Hollis reflected. You could have put your hand straight through the wall without half trying. But he supposed if Mr Rice had been a sailor he’d be used to confined spaces and living on top of other people. As to Mrs Rice, women of her generation adapted themselves, in his experience, to absolutely anything.

  At Mr Rice’s invitation he sat himself in one of the armchairs and chatted inconsequentially until Mrs Rice came back in with a wooden tray on which reposed two cups and saucers of instant coffee made with milk, a sugar bowl, and a plate of mixed biscuits. The china all matched and was decorated with pink and silver roses, and there was a spotless embroidered linen tray cloth underneath. There was something about people like this that made Hollis almost want to cry. He thanked Mrs Rice warmly and admired the china, and she looked pleased, and took herself off with a puzzle book and a Biro to sit at the dining table and give them privacy, or as much of it as was possible at a distance of three feet.

  ‘So, Mr Rice, you knew Colin Collins? Or Sonny Collins, as he was known.’

  ‘Not when I knew him,’ Mr Rice said. ‘Not Sonny. Never heard him called that. Crafty Collins, we called him. We all had nicknames, o’ course. Mine was Speedy. Not that I was fast, or anything – though I was a lot spryer in those days than I am now – but my initials were S.P.D., you see. Stanley Philip David. S.P.D. – Speedy Rice, you see?’

  Hollis got it. ‘So why was he called Crafty Collins?’

  ‘’Cause he was crafty,’ Mr Rice said promptly, opening pale blue eyes wide. ‘I mean, crafty as in handy with his hands, yes, that was one thing. He was what we called an artificer. He could make anything out of anything. But he was crafty the other way, too. On shipboard, even on a shore base, you live on top of each other, you know, Mr Hollis. And that means you have to get on, you have to trust one another. And if somebody’s not honest, it messes up everybody’s life. No, he wasn’t popular, wasn’t Crafty Collins. We knew he’d come to grief sooner or later, and there was no tears shed when he did.’

  ‘Oh, Stan!’ Mrs Rice protested, proving she was not as far out of earshot as she was pretending.

  Speedy seemed to understand her objection. ‘Well, I know it’s a terrible thing to lose an eye. But it has to be said he had it coming, if not from one source, then another. A terrible contentious man, he was. Always getting into fights. He’d argue about anything. You couldn’t say it was raining without he’d pick you up and say it wasn’t. He just wanted to fight. Needed it, sort of. There are men like that – I’ve known a few of them.’

  He looked enquiringly at Hollis, who nodded and said, ‘Yes, I know what you mean.’

  ‘Thought you did. After all, the police is a service, just the same as the navy. And men are men all over. And there are some that’ve just got to be getting their fists out and proving it, even when nobody’s said “boo” to them.’

  ‘So how long did you serve with Crafty Collins?’

  ‘Well, let me see. We were two years on the base before he got in his bit of trouble and got discharged, and then it must have been another three years or so he was still there, but as a civilian. Then it was about six months after he left before I was posted back to England, home and beauty. O’ course, we weren’t friends, you understand. I mean, I was a good bit older than him, and I was a petty officer, while he was just a rating. And apart from that, you didn’t make friends with Collins. He wasn’t a friendly man. Not,’ he added thoughtfully, and pausing to sip his coffee, ‘that he didn’t have a soft
spot somewhere. I maintain everyone’s got one. And Collins had this bird. We weren’t supposed to have pets,’ he went on, dismissing Hollis’s immediate vision of a girlfriend, ‘but on a shore base things are a bit different and blind eyes are turned now and then, if you know what I mean. Anyway, Collins had this little bird in a cage. A finch, I think it was. He bought it off a Chinee –they’re big on these little cage birds, the Chinese. Walk through a Chinese section of Hong Kong and you’ll see a cage hanging up on every balcony with some canary or whatnot whistling its little heart out.’

  ‘Cruel, I call it,’ Mrs Rice put in.

  ‘She’s not keen on birds, Mother,’ Mr Rice explained for her. ‘Give her the creeps.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘I like ’em well enough in the garden, but keeping ’em in cages is not natural. They just sit there hunched up all day and night, like they’re in mourning.’

  ‘Fanciful,’ Mr Rice explained her to Hollis.

  ‘No I am not,’ Mrs Rice defended herself. ‘Even when they sing, it’s not happy singing. Makes me shiver.’

  ‘I knew a man once had this parrot,’ said Mr Rice. ‘Or, well, it was a cockateel, to be absolutely accurate—’

  Hollis felt they were on a banana skin to unfettered reminiscence, and coughed slightly. About Mr Collins?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Rice, quite unembarrassed. ‘I was saying he had this finch or whatever it was – a little grey bird with a red cap, very smart. Looked like an MP. And, I will say, it whistled a treat. Well, you wouldn’t think Crafty would care that much about it. He was built like a bag of boulders, and full of boiling oil, if you know what I mean, and this little bird was only about three inches from head to tail. But he looked after it like a mother. Used to go down the market to get it fresh lettuce and fruit and stuff. He loved that bird, which goes to prove what I’ve always said, that there’s a soft spot in everyone, if you know where to find it.’

  ‘What happened to the bird?’ Hollis asked in spite of himself.

  ‘Oh, it died. They don’t live long, them sort, even in the wild.’