Gone Tomorrow

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Is Collins homosexual?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘Certainly not overtly,’ Slider said. ‘He and Bates shared girls. Let’s call it more a fascination – which Bates apparently held for other people, too. Collins was fiercely protective of him, and probably very strongly influenced by him—’

  ‘As those of less nimble minds often are by clever people who take time and trouble with them,’ Atherton concluded. ‘Well, it makes sense.’

  ‘Fiercely protective and fiercely loyal,’ Slider went on. ‘They came back to England when Hong Kong started to get too hot. Collins had – and this is all assumption now – quite a bit of money to bring with him. But he took a job, while Bates went on to found a business empire on renovating property.’

  He looked at Hollis, who took it up. ‘My idea was that maybe Collins gave the money to Bates to get him started.’

  ‘Out of devotion?’ Swilley asked with some disbelief. ‘I wish I had friends like that.’

  ‘Maybe. Or because he was under his influence, or because Bates was the businessman and could make something of it where Collins couldn’t. We don’t know that Bates didn’t share the proceeds with Collins.’

  ‘And we don’t know that he did. Why would Collins go on managing pubs if he had money coming in from Bates?’

  ‘Well,’ Hollis said apologetically, ‘maybe he liked it. I can’t think why anyone would want to own a pub but lots of folk do, because they like the life.’

  ‘Let’s not get too poetical,’ Atherton said. ‘We know that Collins ran two small-time crooks for his boss, and we can assume it was more than two. Maybe the pub was just very good cover.’

  ‘Then why not buy one?’ Mackay asked. ‘Why risk interference from the brewery?’

  ‘I can think of two reasons,’ Hollis said. ‘In the first place, running your own pub is a lot more work than managing one. If it was only a cover, you wouldn’t want it to take up too much of your time. And for a second thing, it’d be much easier to move on if you had to. Changing jobs is easier than selling a pub and buying another one.’

  ‘All right, let’s get on,’ Slider said. ‘We turn now to Susie Mabbot, a tom who ran a high-price house in Notting Hill, catering for rich businessmen. Somehow or other Trevor Bates finds her, or is recommended to her. He has strange sexual tastes which he wants to exercise in strict secrecy.’

  ‘Exercise or exorcise?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘He pays her well, she keeps his identity secret – if she knew it at all.’

  ‘I can’t see why he’d ever tell her who he was. Presumably he paid her in cash,’ said Mackay.

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ said Slider. ‘She calls him Mr Lee. He visits her, in company with two bodyguards, about once a month.’

  ‘Boss, d’you think that’s significant?’ Swilley asked.

  ‘What, the once a month bit? It’s possible. Strange mental urges can run in cycles. I’m not up on all the latest research, but—’

  ‘You don’t believe that bollocks about going mad at the full moon?’ Mackay protested.

  ‘Linking it to the phase of the moon may well be self-suggestion,’ Slider said, ‘but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. However, that’s not for us to debate at present. Bates is visiting Susie Mabbot. He mentions he’s recruiting – or she brings the subject up, we don’t know which – and it results in Everet Boston being taken on by Bates.’

  ‘Boston said he got the job through a friend,’ Anderson observed.

  Slider nodded. ‘Boston and Mabbot were old friends from back home. Boston had another friend, Lenny Baxter, whom he met playing snooker. He introduced Baxter to his cousin Mary, and the four of them – he, Mabbot, Baxter and Mary, who called herself Teena Brown – became friends and went out together. This friendship was broken when three months ago Mr Lee, alias Trevor Bates, murdered Susie Mabbot and dumped her in the river.’

  ‘And if we can arrest him for anything at all,’ Swilley said, heartfelt, ‘we can cross-match his DNA and get him for that.’

  Slider nodded. ‘So now we come to Lenny Baxter.’

  ‘Our number one corpse,’ said Atherton. ‘The first but not the last.’

  ‘Baxter was an unreliable type. He was a prolific villain but a rotten gambler with a taste for the ponies. He was working as a runner for Herbie Weedon’s loan firm, but he was short of money, and about a year ago Everet, perhaps with his cousin’s welfare in mind, got him taken on by the big boss, whom he only knew as the Needle. But Baxter still kept on his other job with Herbie Weedon. Baxter had gambling debts, and was blacklisted by legal bookies. Getting a job running for an illegal bookmaker must have been like letting Billy Bunter loose in a cake shop. He started placing his own bets as well as the customers’, and, when they went down, crossing money collected for Herbie to cover them.’

  ‘And getting himself in a right old two-and-eight,’ McLaren concluded.

  ‘Eventually,’ Slider went on, ‘and here we are in the realm of supposition again, the Needle decided he was too much of a risk and that he should be eliminated. He was conducting business of his own on the side, which included selling drugs in the park. One evening the fiat went forth—’

  ‘I can’t see a rich bloke like Bates driving one of them,’ McLaren objected. ‘He’d have something a bit posher.’

  ‘I see him as more a Beamer type,’ Mackay agreed.

  ‘Don’t encourage him,’ Swilley said witheringly.

  ‘Now here a piece of blind chance intervenes,’ said Slider. ‘Baxter’s going about his normal business when he’s waylaid by Eddie Cranston, who’s got a beef with him about one of his sidelines – preying on females that Eddie feels are his own legitimate feeding ground. Eddie tries to get into a fight with him, but Lenny knows his boss doesn’t like attention drawn to any of his outposts, and makes a getaway. Later he meets with two heavies in a conversation in the street, and later still he’s murdered very efficiently in the park, presumably by the two heavies seen walking away from the park down the street at two in the morning, carrying something which I feel we have reason to suspect is the missing lock and chain.’

  ‘Which later turns up round the throat of Herbie Weedon, who was about to tell me something interesting,’ Atherton said. ‘How did he know, though?’

  ‘We don’t know what he knew, but I suspect it was something he gleaned from Lenny Baxter, who doesn’t seem to have been the world’s most reliable crook. Probably Baxter told him something and he put two and two together out of his vast experience. And the Needle, in the course of clearing up Lenny Baxter’s mess, had Boston put a bug in his office and soon found out he was talking to the police in the form of Mr Atherton.’ Wolf whistles. ‘So Herbie was killed.’

  ‘Which put the wind up Everet Boston and made him run for it,’ said McLaren.

  ‘Later again,’ Slider said, ‘Boston seems on the brink of telling us something, and is murdered.’

  ‘And chucked in the canal,’ Hollis mentioned. ‘Like Mabbot was chucked in the river.’

  ‘A watery motif,’ said Atherton. ‘I wonder if he got into the habit of throwing people in the harbour in Hong Kong?’

  ‘And when,’ Slider continued, ‘it looks as though we are going to lean heavily on Collins, he takes his own life.’

  ‘Why?’ Swilley mused. ‘Was he afraid he’d break down and start talking? It doesn’t seem likely. He was as tough as old boots.’

  ‘I think maybe it all just got too much for him,’ Slider said. ‘Running one bit of the crime network for his great idol – perhaps stashing away some of the proceeds for his old age – presumably enjoying the odd night out, or in, with Bates, like in the old days – was one thing. But the body count was mounting. Mabbot, Baxter, Weedon, Boston – what next? Maybe he thought Bates was out of control. Disillusion,’ he said, looking round his team, ‘is a powerful emotion. It can lead to anger or despair. And if in the middle of that he got the idea that Bates didn’t trust him any more and was may
be putting him on the list for removal – well, he’d have nothing left to live for.’

  ‘He jumped rather than waited to be pushed?’ Atherton said. ‘Hm. I suppose it’s possible.’

  ‘And there the trail ends,’ said Slider.

  ‘But what have we really got against this guy?’ Swilley asked. ‘He may have killed Mabbot with his own hands but he won’t have personally offed the other three. It will have been his minders. And Collins killed himself.’

  ‘It’s the old gangland conundrum,’ Atherton agreed. ‘The bloke with the motive has clean hands and the bloke who actually does it has no connection with the victim.’

  Hollis enumerated, holding up his fingers. ‘We know he knew Collins in Hong Kong. We know from Ev Boston that the boss was called the Needle. We know from Rice that Bates was fascinated by needles. We know Mabbot’s lover and killer was called the Needle. We know one of her killer’s bodyguards was Thomas Mark. We know Thomas Mark is Trevor Bates’s driver.’

  The chain, Slider thought, forged link by link, connecting all the scattered pieces of lives. ‘And then there’s the whole business of the jackets,’ he said aloud.

  ‘Yes, Bates and Mark deny knowing Baxter, but Mark is wearing a jacket identical to one of the four Baxter bought from Tom Garfield. Bates says he bought it and gave it to Mark but can’t prove it.’

  ‘And we can’t prove he didn’t,’ Atherton pointed out. ‘We can’t really prove anything. It’s all suggestion. We still don’t know who killed Lenny Baxter, even if we think we know who ordered it done.’

  ‘My guess would be that the actual deed was done by Mark and that butler type we saw in his house,’ Slider said. ‘However well Bates pays and however much he’s feared, he’s not going to give jobs like that to just anyone. It would have to be done by those closest to him that he trusts the most. And they looked like professionals. So we show their pictures to Elly Fraser and see if she can ID them as the men she saw leaving the park.’

  ‘And if she can’t?’

  ‘There’s still Susie Mabbot,’ Hollis said. ‘If we can get him for that on the DNA, it makes the others look more credible. Then they might start rowing for the shore, him and his minders, and shopping each other in the hope of a comfier cell.’

  This idea seemed to go down well. There was a murmur of conversation, out of which Swilley spoke up.

  ‘There’s still one thing that bothers me.’

  ‘Only one?’ said Atherton.

  She ignored him. ‘If the minders were going to kill Lenny in the park at two in the morning, they must have arranged to meet him there at that time. So why was he there two hours earlier, at midnight? We know the chain was off the gate then, so he must have been in there.’

  ‘We don’t know the chain was off the gate,’ Atherton said. ‘A very dodgy witness says it was.’

  ‘He might have been doing a spot of business,’ Mackay said. ‘Why not?’

  ‘It wasn’t his regular night.’

  ‘He wasn’t much of a regular guy,’ Hollis pointed out.

  ‘But two hours? Hanging around in the park for two hours? And there are no reports of a stream of customers going in and out of the gate.’

  ‘When were there ever?’

  ‘Anyway,’ Swilley said, ‘I can’t believe there’d be that much trade for him on a Monday night, when he wasn’t known to be there selling. Maybe for an hour after the pubs closed, but not through to two in the morning.’

  ‘Well, maybe he wasn’t there,’ McLaren said. ‘Maybe he did a bit of biz, then went home and came back at two.’

  ‘Leaving the gate unlocked all that time?’

  McLaren shrugged. ‘Why not?’ Swilley couldn’t answer that.

  ‘There is one other loose end,’ Slider said. ‘Baxter’s girlfriend being missing.’

  ‘She’s probably in the river too,’ Atherton said.

  ‘Some comfort you are,’ said Swilley.

  ‘Well, if he’s been getting rid of anyone who could finger him, he’d hardly leave her out, would he? She was just as much a threat as Everet and Baxter.’

  ‘She probably wasn’t anything to do with it at all,’ Mackay said. ‘She’s just scarpered, and who wouldn’t?’

  ‘All right,’ Slider said. ‘Things to do. We want full statements from Rice about Collins and Bates, and from Neville Coulsden about Mabbot, his daughter, Boston and Baxter. Get Tom Garfield formally to identify Baxter’s jacket as one of his. Get Elly Fraser to look at Mark’s picture, see if she can identify him.’

  ‘Guv, won’t we have to give the Mabbot stuff to Notting Hill? It’s their case.’

  ‘First I want to get everything lined up to see if Mr Porson thinks it’s enough to get Bates in to answer questions. If he does, we can get the name of his butler bloke and a mugshot to show Sassy Palmer, see if he was the other minder that came in with Mark.’

  ‘If Bates is as bonkers as he sounds,’ said Swilley, ‘we could probably get him to crack by telling him everything we know about him and Collins.’

  ‘It did cross my mind,’ Slider said.

  * * *

  Slider was having a very late cheese and pickle sandwich at his desk and working on assembling the paperwork when the phone rang.

  ‘Oh, Mr Slider? It’s Andy Barrett – from the Boscombe Arms?’

  Slider wrenched his head back into the present. ‘Oh, yes. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, it’s like this.’ He sounded a bit furtive. ‘There’s someone here wants to say something to you, but he’s scared of coming into the police station. I wondered if you could pop down and have a word with him?’

  ‘Can’t you put him on the phone?’

  ‘It’s a bit awkward. You’ll see why when you come.’

  ‘All right, I’ll send someone down.’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll talk to anyone else,’ Barrett said anxiously. ‘Couldn’t you come yourself? It’s about this Lenny Baxter business,’ he added, with the air of speaking without moving his lips.

  ‘All right, I’ll try and make time later today,’ Slider said unwillingly.

  ‘Oh dear. The thing is, can you come now?’

  ‘Why now?’

  ‘Well, we’re closed now, so it’s quiet. You’d have a bit of privacy. And – well, it’s the wife, you see.’ He came to the real reason with a little rush. ‘She doesn’t like me to get mixed up in anything, and she’s out at the moment, so she wouldn’t have to know if you came now. Only I know she’d say to leave well alone if she was here, but I don’t think that’s right, not when it’s a case of murder, you know?’

  Slider sighed. ‘I’ll be there in about ten minutes,’ he said, abandoning the sandwich. It was stale anyway – yesterday’s left-overs, from the taste of it. Not much of a Sunday lunch. Oh, it was a glamorous life in the CID!

  The Boscombe had a small snug behind the main bar, and Andy Barrett, having let him in from the street, ushered him in there.

  ‘All right, Bernie, here he is,’ Barrett said with a large-lipped, talking-to-idiots emphasis. Passing through the door, Slider saw why. Sitting side by side on the banquette facing the door were Blind Bernie and Mad Sam. ‘They’ve been here since opening,’ Barrett added, as though they couldn’t hear him. ‘I thought there was something on his mind. When it came to closing I didn’t realise they were still in here till I’d shut the outside doors. Then he said he had to talk to you.’

  ‘What’s all this “he” and “him” malarky?’ Blind Bernie said suddenly and angrily. ‘I’m not deaf, you know. Nor daft, neither. Is that you, Mr Slider?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. You’ve got something to tell me, Bernie?’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ he said definitely. He turned his face towards the sound of Slider’s voice, and then back to where Andy Barrett had last spoken. ‘It’s for Mr Slider’s ears only. I don’t want anyone else listening. You clear off and give us a bit of peace, you hear?’

  ‘Now look here,’ Barrett said, annoyed. ‘You c
an’t talk to me like that in my own pub! I let you stay here on sufferance—’

  Slider touched his arm to stop him. Mad Sam, who had been staring about him with his usual vacant expression of goodwill, was growing upset.

  ‘Sufferance, my eye!’ Bernie cried. ‘Go on, clear off! This is police business.’

  ‘All right,’ Barrett said, more to Slider than to Bernie. ‘I’ll leave you alone. But don’t take long. If you aren’t out of here by the time the wife gets back we’ll all be in the soup.’

  Blind Bernie turned his head this way and that, listening. ‘Is he gone?’ he asked.

  Slider sat down opposite them. ‘Yes, he’s gone. It’s just me here now.’

  ‘Is he gone, Sammy?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘Where’s my glass? I meant to get him to fill it up again before he went,’ Bernie grumbled.

  ‘Drinking out of hours?’ Slider said.

  ‘Don’t count if I don’t pay,’ Bernie said promptly. ‘I know the law. Ah well, too late now, I suppose.’

  During this exchange Slider had been examining the strange pair before him. Bernie was in his sixties, but looked older: a gaunt and grizzled man, sparse white hair mostly concealed under a greasy brown trilby that was never off his head, indoors or out; white whiskers like a horse’s; gnarled and blue-veined hands knotted round the end of his old-fashioned white cane, the wooden sort with the crook handle. He always wore the same clothes: a dirty mackintosh that had once been tan, over a grey suit, with a collarless shirt under the jacket and a button-necked vest under the shirt. In the winter he interpolated a pullover and cardigan between the shirt and jacket, and all the layers peeped out from under one another in a stepped décolletage. Blind Bernie, the human onion. Slider didn’t know why he was blind, whether it was congenital or the result of an illness or accident. There was no sign of it on his face. His eyes were rather small and round and pale blue, and the lack of focus gave him a vacant look, just like his son’s. Otherwise they appeared normal, except that the pupils were rather too large and dark which, for some reason Slider could not fathom, gave him the faint look of a budgerigar.