‘I mean, being able to plan to come home to each other, no tricky arrangements and subterfuges.’
‘Oh, that.’ He thought suddenly of Irene, like a low ache of misery, mooning about in Ernie Newman’s overstuffed lounge and pining for her own kitchen. ‘When this case is over I’m going to have to do something about that house,’ he said. ‘Change agents or lower the price or something.’ It was enough apropos as a comment for Joanna to accept it at face value; but Slider was thinking that if the house were sold, Irene would know there was no going back. But if she was really unhappy with Newman? And if that relationship broke down, what about the children? They’d have to have somewhere to go, they couldn’t live in a hotel. Maybe he ought to keep the house on as insurance for them? No, that was ridiculous, he couldn’t leave the empty house there for ever just in case Irene changed her mind about Ernie. If she could stand him enough to run away with him in the first place—
Joanna’s hand rested on his from across the table. ‘Don’t start worrying about that as well. You haven’t got room. One thing at a time.’
He looked up, his focus clearing to take in her face, not Irene’s, hers, Joanna’s. A face so ordinary it was like looking in the mirror, you hardly even distinguished the features; but so important, standing for everything in the last few years that was good in his life, it was like looking at, oh, an authentic photograph of God or something. Skin and lines and hair, eyes and teeth and nose: what was it that made one set of them so different, that nothing in your life afterwards could be taken out of their context ever again?
‘Are you sleeping with anyone tonight?’ he asked as casually as he could.
‘What, after the show? I hadn’t booked anyone.’
‘How about sex and a sandwich with me, then?’
‘All right. My place, ten-thirty, on the sofa, bring your own coleslaw.’
A furious clearing of the throat whipped Slider’s attention to the young PC standing at his elbow with a large brown envelope in his hand and a sappy grin slithering self-consciously about his chops. ‘This came in for you, sir. Sergeant Nicholls thought you’d like it straight away.’
‘Thank you, Ferris.’
Joanna watched him open it, smiling privately that a man of his age could still be self-conscious about being caught holding hands with his lady-love. And he’d probably use a word like lady-love, too, at least to himself.
Inside the envelope was the forensic report on the whisky glasses and bottle.
‘Ah, now this is interesting,’ Slider said. ‘You know that we found two glasses, one on the table and one down beside the other chair?’ Joanna nodded. ‘The glass on the table has Paloma’s fingermarks and lipmarks all over it.’
‘Lipmarks?’
‘Oh yes, they’re quite distinctive too.’
‘I must remember not to kiss my victims from now on.’
‘Not with wet lipstick, anyway. The glass on the floor also has Paloma’s fingermarks on it, but they’re overlaid by various smudges and marks consistent with its having been held by a hand wearing a leather glove. And it has lip marks on the rim which do not match Paloma’s.’
‘So he had a visitor,’ Joanna said.
‘A visitor who didn’t take off his gloves.’
‘Unusual,’ she conceded. ‘Unless he had hives. I suppose the phantom tippler must have been the murderer, then?’
‘It’s a working supposition. Which suggests that Paloma must have known him,’ Slider said. ‘But that doesn’t square with his having to kick the door in. It’s not the usual way of announcing yourself socially. And why would you offer a drink to someone who’d just done that?’
‘Well, look,’ Joanna said, ‘maybe Paloma used both glasses at different times. He might have been sitting in the other chair earlier, put the glass down, then later wanted another drink and went and fetched a clean glass. Why not? I’ve done that myself. And if he was a fastidious sort of chap, the old, greasy glass might not have appealed. And then the murderer fancied a nip after he’d bumped him off, so he just used one of the glasses he found handy.’
‘But the glass didn’t have Paloma’s lip marks on it,’ Slider said. ‘It had only one set of lip prints, on one side of the glass, and the rest of the rim was clean.’
‘Maybe the murderer wiped the rim before he drank,’ Joanna said. ‘A lot of people would, quite instinctively, if they were drinking out of someone else’s glass.’
‘Hmm,’ said Slider. ‘But there’s something else here,’ he tapped the report. ‘The whisky bottle has fingermarks on it too. Two sets. One possibly Paloma’s, though they’re not clear enough to identify with absolute certainty. The other set is over the top of them: a whole palm and five lovely digits, clear as day. Someone grabbed the bottle firmly in a manner consistent with either pouring or glugging from it – someone with an unusually large hand.’
‘Didn’t you say the footmark on the door was unusually large too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then presumably they are a set. The glugger was the murderer.’
‘Presumably.’
‘So all you’ve got to do is find him,’ Joanna concluded happily, ‘and you’ve got your proof there all ready and waiting.’
Slider turned a page. ‘Our mystery guest also left his fingermarks on the light switch. Several times.’
‘It was night time,’ Joanna pointed out.
‘Yes, but the light was off in the morning. I suppose he must have turned it off as he left. And again on the front door. That was when he pulled it to, I suppose.’ He turned back and read it all again. ‘It’s puzzling. Why did he drink out of the glass and the bottle? And why did he take his gloves off to pick up the bottle?’
‘You want me to solve the whole case for you? He took a drink out of the glass because his nerves were shaken after killing Whatsisname, but that wasn’t enough, he needed a good long glug, so he went for the bottle. But he couldn’t get the fiddly cap off with his gloves on, so without thinking he took them off. Voilà!’
Slider smiled. ‘You after a job or something?’
‘Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes. There’s simply no accounting for the stupidity of the average murderer – thank God, otherwise how would we ever catch ’em?’
He had just got back to his desk when Hart reappeared in his doorway. ‘Guv?’ He looked up. ‘Sorry.’ She gave him a wobbly grin. ‘I dunno what come over me. Must be them testosterone pills I been taking. No, straight up,’ she went on as he began to smile, ‘I gotta shave twice a day now. And what you said about rolled-up socks? Don’t need ’em. I can write me name in the snow just like anybody else.’
So he told her about the forensic report, as a reward. Hart was jubilant. ‘Brilliant! If he’s got form, we’ve got him.’
‘Let’s hope.’
‘In any case, how hard can he be to find, over six foot, massive germans and plates the size of Wandsworth? You see that kicking someone’s door in, you don’t forget it in a hurry.’
‘Off you go then,’ he said indulgently, ‘and jog some memories.’ He stood up. ‘I’ve got to see a man about a taxi.’
‘How’s that?’
‘It just came to me. Busty Parnell said that Paloma went everywhere by taxi too. So he probably went to meet his lover in a cab, and if I can find the right driver, he can give me the address.’
‘Brilliant, boss.’
‘That’s why I get the big money.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Shades of Brown
The headquarters of Monty’s Radio Metrocabs was, like every other taxi garage, cramped, chaotic and filthy. It consisted of two railway arches and the tiny cobbled yard in front of them. Under the arches was the repair and servicing workshop for the cabs, and the front right-hand corner was screened off with two walls of wood and glass to make a tiny office for Monty, into which he squeezed himself with his battered desk, his filing cabinets, and an old tin tray balanced on top of a kitchen st
ool on which the electric kettle and the coffee making equipment stood in a pool of sad spillings and half-melted sugar. There was no ceiling to his corner, and a single lightbulb dangled down, suspended on fathoms of fraying wire from the curved bricks invisible in the darkness far above. In the worst depths of winter a paraffin heater added its stink to that of Monty’s cigars and the pervading odour of petrol, but did little to mitigate the cavernous chill. Every surface was tacky with oil, and overhead Metropolitan Line trains passed at regular intervals in a brain-bouncing, tooth-loosening thunder. It was not an office that welcomed visitors, and that was how Monty liked it. He liked his drivers out driving and making him money, not hanging around the depot complaining.
Across the other side of the yard in a new, brightly-lit and tropically heated portakabin, the radio side of the operation was worked by Monty’s wife Rita and his mistress Gloria in a comfortable atmosphere of tea, bourbon biscuits, knitting, family photographs and refained gentility. They called the cabbies ‘dear’ and ‘my pet’ and asked tenderly after their wives’ ailments, but ruled them with a rod of iron. They would not tolerate the word ‘can’t’, and fined them for bad language on a sliding scale from a simple damn upwards. ‘That’s twenty pence in the Swear Box, my darling,’ they would say primly when some benighted cabbie trying to find an invisible fare at a mythical address let loose with a bloody over the air; and such was the force of their personalities that the next time the transgressor was in the yard, he would go into the cabin and pay his dues. The box was emptied every week after the lucrative Saturday Night Swear, and the proceeds went towards taking disabled children on an annual adventure holiday.
‘Isn’t that doing evil that good may come?’ Slider once asked Rita, and she primmed her lips and said, ‘I don’t suppose the kiddies mind, dear.’
Slider was always amazed by Monty’s ménage à trois: he couldn’t understand why he bothered. The two women were so alike that people often thought they were sisters. They were the same age, height and build, with the same solid, well-corseted figure and the expensively dull clothes of prosperous middle age. Both wore their hair permed and sprayed to the same style by the weekly attentions of the same hairdresser – Rita’s was tinted mauve and Gloria’s platinum. Both wore their glasses round their necks on a chain – Gloria’s made of pearls and Rita’s of little gold beads. Gloria’s smile had more teeth in it – she had captured Monty by her vivacity, and was now stuck with it, Slider deduced – but otherwise there was nothing to choose between them. Perhaps that was why Monty hadn’t.
The two women were the best of friends, and between radio messages chatted seamlessly in the manner of those who know each other’s thoughts. They treated Monty with the same arch and half-affectionate exasperation as they treated the cabbies, corrected his manners, deplored his smoking, doctored his ills and chose his clothes. Slider couldn’t imagine what Monty got out of it.
Slider tacked past the cabin, hoping to escape notice, though he saw through the brightly lit window that Rita turned her head, her jaws never ceasing to move as she talked to the public, the cabbies and Gloria, switching from one to the other as effortlessly as American TV programmes switch to adverts. Under the right-hand arch a black cab was up on the lift and one of the mechanics, Nick the Greek, waved a friendly spanner at Slider from the inspection pit as he crossed to Monty’s office.
Monty removed a cold cigar from his teeth and struggled courteously to his feet. He was a short, wide man with a thick, collapsing face, despairing hair, sad brown eyes behind heavy glasses, and a full lower lip permanently deformed by having to accommodate huge Havana cigars. They were expensive, and the ladies tutted, so he hardly ever smoked them, just lit them and let them go out. That way they lasted.
He seemed glad to see Slider. ‘Well, well, well! And what can I do for you today, young sir?’
‘Hello, Monty. How’s business?’
His face buckled with instant gloom. ‘Well bad,’ he said confusingly. ‘When is business anything but bad? Heads above, just – that’s the best we can hope for. It’s a wonder I can sleep at night.’
‘Come off it, you old fraud,’ Slider said. ‘I see you driving about in a new Bentley.’
‘It’s not new, it’s two years old,’ Monty protested. ‘I only got it to give my bank manager confidence, stop him foreclosing on me. I tell you, Mr Slider, I’m brassic. What with the cost of cabs, insurance through the roof, rates up fifty per cent this year, new Health and Safety rules coming off by the yard every week – it’s as much as I can do to turn a penny. And Mrs Green is not a well woman, you know.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. She looks bonny enough,’ Slider said, glancing towards the cabin.
‘My mother,’ Monty elucidated. ‘She can’t manage the stairs, you see, which means either putting in a stair lift, or making her a bedroom downstairs. Either way, it’s all expense. And the mortgage enough to make you faint.’ He sighed. ‘I wouldn’t wish this life on a dog, I promise you.’
So Monty lived with his mother as well as his wife and mistress, did he? Perhaps the one phenomenon accounted for the other. ‘You know,’ Slider said, ‘five minutes talking to you does me the power of good. Makes the world outside seem so bright. You should work for the Samaritans.’
‘You try getting cabbies to pay up at the end of the week, you’ll soon know all about working for charity,’ Monty said, and busied himself relighting his cigar. Honour satisfied, he went on more cheerfully, ‘Anyway, what can I do for you? I suppose you’re on this business of PC Cosgrove? Rotten bloody shame that was, pardon my French. Is there any improvement?’
‘He’s still in a coma, but stable, they say.’
Monty shook his head. ‘Rotten business. He’s such a nice geezer, too. He was round here, you know, just a few days before it happened.’
‘Was he? What about?’
‘Just chewing the fat. He used to pop in from time to time – have a bunny with Rita and Gloria, cuppa tea, time of day, that sort of thing. It was on his way home. How’s his wife taking it? I feel sorry for her, another nipper on the way, can’t be easy.’
‘She’s bearing up, I believe. But I’m not on that case – that’s Mr Carver’s. I’m here about something else – a murder last Tuesday. I want your help.’
‘Right you are,’ Monty said, looking intelligent. ‘Anything I can do. Always happy to assist the boys in blue.’
‘I want to trace the cabbie who picked up a fare from the White City on Monday, late morning.’ He gave Jay Paloma’s address and description. ‘He went up to Town somewhere – I want to know where. It could be one of yours. This bloke went everywhere by cab – nervous type – so it’s probable he telephoned for a cab and he may well have used your firm.’
‘We can soon look that up,’ Monty said.
‘If not I’d like you to put the word about for me.’
‘Fair enough. You’re sure it was a black cab?’
‘Yes, he didn’t trust minicabs.’
‘Pity he’s dead, then. Can’t afford to lose people like that -there aren’t enough of ’em. Got a picture?’
‘I’m getting them done now. They’ll be round this afternoon.’
‘Right. Let’s go and look at the book of words.’
They went out into the yard together. ‘Oh, by the way,’ Slider said, ‘I’m interested in one of your drivers, Benny by name.’
‘Benny the Brief or Benny Bovril?’
‘Benny the Brief. Is he all right? Reliable?’
‘He’s all right,’ Monty said. ‘He can be a bit of a pain in the neck – too much of this—’ He imitated a yacking mouth with his fingers. ‘But he’s all right. Funny old sort – bit of a reader. Knows a stack about the law. The other drivers take the piss out of him, pardon my French, but they all go to him when they want to know something. Walking encyclopaedia. Is he in trouble?’
‘No, no. I just wanted to know if I can believe what he tells me.’
‘Oh, he�
�s honest as the day, old Benny. Had a tough break a few months back – his old lady died. The Big C. Went just like that. Been married a coon’s age, as well. He took it really hard – sold the house and everything in it, went to live in lodgings, said he couldn’t bear to have her stuff around him, reminding him all the time. Worked every hour God sent. I said to him, “Benny,” I said, “you’ll crack up. Take a rest,” I said. But no, he wanted to work. Kept his mind off, he said. He’s eased off now, though – not been doing much at all, hardly turned in two tanners last week. Just as well, I suppose, or he’d come to grief, and I’d be sorry to lose him. Funny old bugger, but he’s all right.’
They reached the cabin, and Monty climbed the steps and opened the door onto the Yardley scented, pot-plant-benighted bower. ‘It’s like the hanging gardens of Babel,’ Monty muttered over his shoulder for Slider’s benefit. The women’s voices and the squawk of the radio were like birds’ cries: Slider had a momentary vision of Rita and Gloria as brightly-coloured parrots swinging about the tropical branches. But they were nothing if not businesslike. When Monty explained Slider’s quest, they consulted the day-book for him without ever ceasing to answer the phone and speak their mysterious incantations to the invisible spirits of the cabbies. But there was no record of a call to that address or anything near it, or for the name of Paloma or McElhinney.
Still, Slider was hopeful as he left the yard. Jay had been as bright and distinctive as his avian namesake, and if Monty circulated the query, someone ought to remember him.
Hart tagged on to Slider as he went past. ‘Guv, I got a message for you, but I don’t know if it’s genuine or not. It sounds like someone’s pulling our plonker.’
‘What is it?’
‘Well, this bloke said his name was Tidy Barnet. I mean, that’s gotta be a joke, ennit?’
‘He’s a snout of mine,’ Slider said. Barnet was his real surname. He had had an older brother whose nickname was Scruffy, so Tidy’s sobriquet was inevitable. ‘What did he want?’
‘He just said to say,’ Hart looked down at her pad to check it, ‘Tidy Barnet says tell Mr Slider to ask Maroon. Does that make sense?’
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