‘It crossed my mind,’ Slider said, ‘but why wouldn’t he have mentioned it to me?’
‘Maybe because he didn’t put it on the clock, and didn’t want to get into trouble. Is it important? That wasn’t the day the chap got killed, was it?’
‘No, it wasn’t. Probably it isn’t important.’ He thought a moment. Gloria was low man on Monty’s totem pole, and had to toe the party line when Rita was around. This was a golden chance to get her views un-iced. ‘What do you make of Benny Fluss?’
‘He’s all right,’ she said indifferently.
‘D’you like him?’ She made a face. ‘Tell me what he’s like.’
‘He’s a boring old fart,’ she said, surprising the hell out of Slider, who almost looked round for the Swear Box. She saw his surprise and blushed a little. ‘Well he is,’ she said defensively. ‘Jaw, jaw, jaw. And never admits he doesn’t know something. Makes it up as he goes along, and if you catch him out he bullshits and makes out he said something different. Can’t be in the wrong, you know the sort; and patronising? Rita and me might be moron slaves.’
‘I gather you don’t like him,’ Slider said mildly.
‘Oh, he doesn’t bother me, really. Don’t see enough of him to get worked up. Monty thinks he’s a hoot, plays him along, you know, to get him to talk. But there’s a side to him I don’t like.’ She lowered her enormous, lavvy-brush lashes and looked at Slider sidelong. ‘He was in trouble once, did you know?’
‘Police?’
‘It didn’t come to that, but it ought to’ve, in my view. You see, Benny had a half-flat in those days – about ten years ago, this was.’
Slider nodded. Half-flat was the arrangement where two drivers shared the same cab, one driving days and one driving nights.
‘Anyway,’ Gloria went on, ‘he found out that the other driver was seeing Gwen – Benny’s wife, Gwen – while Benny had the cab. There was a terrible to-do. Benny went round to Sam’s – Sam was the other driver, Sam Kelly – and beat him up. Did a real job on him. Terrible it was. Well, I know Sam was in the wrong, but Rita and me thought Benny went too far, and the police should’ve been told. But Sam wouldn’t make any complaint against Benny, so I suppose he thought it was coming to him, but as soon as he was out of hospital he moved right away and we’ve never seen him since. But after that I could never really laugh about Benny like Monty does. I mean, it’s in him somewhere, isn’t it? And who’d have thought he could be that jealous about Gwen? I know they’d been married a long time, but I never got the impression he cared tuppence for her, seeing them together. It’s a funny thing, jealousy, isn’t it?’ she finished on an academic note.
‘It certainly is,’ Slider said, substituting it at the last moment for how would you know?
He sat in his car and made the necessary calls. There were several of them, and by the time he got to the corner of Wood Lane, Hart was waiting for him.
‘I’m spose to give you this,’ she said, waving the warrant as she climbed in. ‘What’s cooking?’
‘Benny the Brief,’ he said.
‘The tame cabbie?’ she said with evident surprise.
‘I’ve been thinking about time scales,’ Slider said. ‘Six months ago, his wife died. At the same time the silent phone calls start. Three months ago he asked Busty Parnell to marry him and she turned him down. From that point Jay Paloma starts getting threatening letters.’
‘You think he sent them? What for?’
‘Jealousy,’ Slider said. ‘The oldest, blackest, meanest emotion. He’s been looking on Busty as his own property for years, but while he was married it never occurred to him to do anything about it. After all, he was comfortable as he was. But once he’s a widower he starts to think he could have her all to himself, marry her and take her home for keeps. He’s so confident of the outcome he sells the marital home so that they can get a new place together. He hasn’t even asked her yet, but he’s sure she’ll jump at the chance of changing her unsatisfactory life for security and Benny’s fascinating company. Only when the moment finally comes, she refuses him. She prefers to live with a painted popinjay who earns his living doing unspeakable things in a basement club.’
‘Bit of a bummer,’ Hart agreed.
‘He can’t hate her for it, of course: his hatred is aimed at Jay, his rival for Busty’s affections.’
‘So he starts sending poison pen letters, you reckon? I s’pose it makes sense.’
‘I don’t know whether he hoped to scare Paloma into leaving Busty,’ Slider said, ‘or if it was just venting his feelings. Bit of both, maybe.’
‘The letters was posted from different places all over London, wun’t they?’ Hart remembered. ‘A cabbie’d have no trouble sorting that side of it.’
‘Yes, and living in lodgings rather than in a shared home he’d have the privacy to make them up.’
‘So if it was him, what d’you think triggered the murder?’
‘Jay Paloma was going to take Busty away from him. Jay had been saving money for them to buy a place together in Ireland – his dream plan. It might have remained a dream, except that he had reached a crisis in his life. He’d hated having to buy drugs for his lover, but now the supply was cut off he was probably worried about what would happen to Grisham. He must also have worried for his own skin – could he trust the supplier not to bust him? There was the paint-throwing incident at the Pomona which upset him; and the poison pen letters were getting him down. His quarrel with Grisham was probably the last straw. He was now so fed up with his situation that he decided their savings were enough for him and Busty to get out and put the plan into action. And Busty was happy enough to go along with it.’
‘Yeah,’ said Hart, staring forward. ‘We saw Paloma going was reason enough to make Grisham mad, but we never fought about Parnell and Benny Fluss. Good one, guv.’
‘I should have got onto it before,’ Slider said. ‘I should have picked up on the discrepancy in the statements. You see, Busty told me that on that last day, Jay was chatting cheerfully to her and Benny about his plan, but Benny said Jay didn’t speak to him at all, and that he was low and depressed. I think Jay had probably told him they were definitely going when Benny drove him to Hammersmith the day before, and that was when Benny decided to do it. So he didn’t mention that journey to me – in fact, he said he never drove Paloma – because in his own mind it was connected with his guilt. And he projected his negative emotions onto Jay the next day, and remembered him as being low and depressed.’
‘Well, you would be, wouldn’t you, if you was gonna get done that day?’
‘Quite. Of course, all this is conjecture. But Paloma let the murderer in and sat and chatted with him, which meant he must have known him well; and Busty said he hadn’t any friends, and never saw people at home. Also, Benny was the one person who knew Paloma would be at home alone. He drove Busty to her sister’s, and he knew she would ring him to be collected from there when she wanted to come home, so there was no danger she’d walk in on them.’
Hart nodded. ‘What about the weapon?’
‘Joanna suggested this morning that it could be a heavy spanner. Something Benny would have to hand in his cab. Also we know the murderer wore leather gloves; and when I first met Benny he was wearing a pair of brand new ones.’
‘The gloves’d get messed up.’
‘And you can’t get blood-stains out of leather. You can wash a spanner, though, as long as you haven’t got a wife at home to ask you awkward questions.’
Hart sat thinking it through. ‘D’you really think he’d do that, just for the sake of old mother Parnell?’
‘She’s not that old,’ Slider protested. Actually, she must be about the same age as him. ‘Anyway, he was obsessed by her. And jealousy is a strange thing.’
‘It was a frenzied attack,’ Hart said. ‘If the first blow killed him, there was no need to bash his head in like that. It didn’t make sense when we thought it was a pro job, but if it was jealousy – well.’
‘That’s what I thought. And given the way Paloma’s head was battered, I think he could be dangerous. If he has moved from threatening letters to actually killing Paloma, the next step could be that he decides he can’t keep Busty to himself any other way than by killing her – and then probably himself.’
‘Yeah,’ said Hart thoughtfully. ‘I seen that sort a thing before.’
‘We’ve got to get him banged up before he hurts someone else. But so far it’s all guesswork. That’s why we’ve got to have a look at his room and see if we can find something a bit more solid.’
‘Like blood-stained gloves?’
‘Or the makings of the poison pen letters – a pot of glue, some mutilated newspapers.’
‘We should be so lucky!’
‘And I’ve asked Norma to check his mobile phone account for the numbers he’s called. We might be able to correlate something from that. Ah, this is it.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hell Toupée
It was a stunted, two-storey house, one of a terrace built between the wars, and set below street level – there must have been a hillside there – so that you went down a flight of steps set into a bank to gain access. One flight to each pair, whose doors stood side by side, set back in arched porchways. Slider rang the bell, while Hart stood two steps up keeping a look out for homicidal black cabs, and eyeing the road as if it might bite her.
The landlady was a woman shrunk with age, with white wispy hair, National Health glasses, a thick nose, pendulous lip, and folds of heavy skin hanging loose about her face and neck like elephant’s trousers. She wore a green nylon overall of the sort that Woolworth’s assistants used to wear in the old days – for all Slider knew it might have been one, nicked in her heyday – and those tartan slippers with a fawn fold-back collar and a fawn bobble that boys used to buy for their fathers for Christmas back in 1962. She rolled a ferocious eye up at Slider and snapped, ‘Yes?’ in exactly the tone of voice in which she might have said, ‘Bugger off!’
Slider got as far as introducing himself and showing his brief when she interrupted. ‘Is she with you?’ she said with a glare in Hart’s direction. ‘Tell her to get off the steps. I washed them this morning.’
Slider cut to the chase. ‘I understand you have a Mr Fluss staying with you.’
‘I’ve a lodger of that name,’ she corrected aggressively, as though he had impugned her chastity. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘I’d like to see his room, please, Mrs—?’
‘Bugger off!’ she snapped. Slider blinked. ‘And it’s Miss. Miss Bogorov.’
‘Ah,’ said Slider. ‘Well, could you show us his room, please?’
She looked at him a moment longer, and then turned and went into the house without a word. One thing to be said about eastern Europe, Slider thought, it taught people not to argue with policemen. He beckoned to Hart and followed her in. The entrance passage was dark, and so narrow it might have been designed for a different race – which, in a way, it had, the working classes in the twenties and thirties being generally smaller and slighter than today’s chunky breed. The smell of dust came up from the carpet as he trod; and mingled with a composite house-smell of dog, tea, cooked rice, metal polish and incense. The stairs were straight ahead, as narrow as the hall, with a dogleg passage going past them to the rear of the house. At the foot of the stairs, on the wall, was a rather beautiful icon with a beaten silver surround, of a melancholy saint with his eyes rolled up and his head so far over on one side he looked like a Guy Fawkes effigy without enough straw in the neck. The missing straw seemed to be leaking out through his body in hedgehog spikes.
Miss Bogorov, one foot on the stairs, glanced back and saw what he was looking at. ‘Saint Sebastian. My mother brought it over.’ Her voice for a moment became liquid. ‘That’s all I’ve got left of her things. Everything else got sold.’
‘Over?’ Hart murmured behind him, but he silenced her with a gesture. Now was not the time, and he was a Dutchman if he didn’t recognise a deep vein of Russian melancholy just waiting to be mined, preferably across a table over endless tea. He left Saint Sebastian with a glance. Living with him, he reflected, was enough to make anyone scratchy.
‘How many lodgers do you have?’ he asked as Miss Bogorov climbed before him.
‘Just the two. There’s three rooms upstairs, but Mr Johnson has one for a sitting-room.’ She turned her head all the way back and fixed him with a terrible eye. ‘I live downstairs,’ she said, to make sure he knew there was nothing louche about the arrangements. It occurred to Slider that here after all was Benny the Brief’s soulmate, if he did but recognise it. He could marry her and move downstairs and they could swap Crying Shames to their hearts’ delight.
Miss Bogorov reached the top, turned right and stood with her hand on the doorknob. The upper hall was dark and depressing, with a polished wood floor and a strip of patterned carpet down the middle. The walls were painted brown up to the dado and grubby cream above, and the doors were varnished dark brown with brown mottled Bakelite doorknobs. It couldn’t have been redecorated, Slider thought, since it was built.
‘Nearly six months he’s been with me, Mr Fluss, and no trouble at all,’ she said, looking from Slider to Hart and back as if searching for a clue. ‘A very nice gentleman, respectable and quiet. With very proper views. Otherwise I shouldn’t have taken him in. And Mr Johnson’s been with me eight years. This is a respectable house. Trouble enough we had when I was a girl, and all through the war. I don’t want any more trouble now. Remember that. This is my house. If you’ve got to do anything, do it quietly and don’t make a mess.’
Then she turned the doorknob and pushed the door open, and stood back for them to go in, folding her arms across her chest and sinking her chin, in the manner of oppressed peasants the world and time over, when the commissars come to steal their pigs and slit open their grain sacks.
Slider nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said pointedly. She sighed and went away down the stairs.
Slider surveyed the room. A single bed with a candlewick bedspread under the window. Cheap beige wall-to-wall carpet with a rug of nineteen-fifties vileness covering it in the middle – black with a pattern of red, yellow and green lightning jags. Very contemp’ry, he thought. A wash basin and mirror in the corner. A window so small and inadequate it seemed to be letting in darkness rather than light. An oversized wardrobe and chest of drawers using up the space. A pink basket chair on spindly legs jammed between the chest of drawers and the sink. A table and kitchen chair jammed between the wardrobe and the door. A low bookcase jammed between the foot of the bed and the wall.
The chest of drawers was five feet high, and a good four feet long, and drawers all the way. ‘You start on that,’ Slider said. The table was very small, its surface about two feet six by eighteen inches, and covered with marble – presumably it had been a washstand of some kind – and on it stood an Anglepoise lamp whose springs had gone, which was held in position by an ingenious arrangement of strings fastened to a hook on the picture-rail above. This, perhaps, was where the work had been done. Slider switched on the light and bent to examine the surface closely, hoping for a trace of glue or a stuck scrap of newspaper. But Miss Bogorov was too good a housekeeper, and the surface was perfectly clean. He went over to the sink. Here, perhaps, a bloody spanner was washed – too long ago, now, for any traces to remain in the waste-pipe. A Duralex glass held a toothbrush with a brown and shaggy head and a tube of toothpaste with a messy cap. He ducked his head this way and that to see if there was a lip print. There were marks enough on its surface. They would take it, anyway. He straightened up. What was that smell, a cold, old smell, almost metallic, which hung about the room?
‘Guv?’ said Hart at that moment. ‘Have a goosey at this.’
He joined her at the chest – o would that t’were! – and looked into the top right-hand drawer which she had opened. Inside – amongst a useful litter of things like string, playing-cards, boxes
of matches, Elastoplast, Sellotape, rolled crêpe bandages, the recharge lead from an electric razor, sundry loose 3-amp fuses, and a very old souvenir corn-dolly with Southwold painted across it which was losing its hair everywhere – sitting there mutely pleading for clemency was a bottle of Copydex, the sort that has a little brush attached inside the lid, and a pair of cutting-out scissors. Stacked neatly towards the back of the drawer was a couple of hundred white self-seal envelopes – ‘the long sort’ as Jay Paloma had put it.
‘Of course, it don’t prove anything,’ Hart said in the sort of voice that expects to be contradicted.
‘If only that dickhead Paloma had brought in an envelope,’ Slider mourned, ‘we could have done a match. Bag ’em up, anyway – oh, and the tooth glass. One way or another we’ve got to get something hard.’
‘How were the envelopes addressed, again?’ Hart asked.
‘Printed labels. I suppose he had them done at a Prontaprint somewhere. Now if we could find which one—!’
‘He’d have thrown any left away,’ she said. ‘Incriminating.’
Slider looked round. ‘Keep looking for the gloves. I’ll have a look at the books.’
The bookcase was so positioned that you had to crane round the wardrobe to see the books at the end of the shelf. Very eclectic selection, he thought, using an Atherton word. Was eclectic right? Or was it eccentric? Or did they mean the same thing perhaps? Legal books, medico-legal books, a worrying collection of Arrow True Crime books, Great Court Cases of History, F.E. – a Memoir, Richard Gordon’s The Medical Witness, Henry Cecil and John Mortimer, The Layman’s Guide to English Law, a pocket Latin dictionary and four London A-Zs in various stages of decrepitude. Wedged in at one end of the top shelf and protruding slightly was a Basildon Bond writing pad. ‘We’ll have this as well,’ he said, pulling it out with an effort. It brought with it a large format paperback which hit the floor with a thud before Slider could catch it. He picked it up. A Practical Guide to Forensic Examination. He put his thumb to the back and scrolled through it. Sets of black and white photographs, of clinical equipment, of weapons, close-ups of wounds, part-dissected bodies, and some whole-body shots of multiple mutilations. A brief sampling of the text proved it was a serious book aimed at the professional – a starter volume for the newly-appointed police surgeon, perhaps – which accounted for the unexpurgated photographs. Photographs? A thought struck him, and he examined the sets of photographs more closely. Plates seventeen and eighteen were missing, neatly razored out flush with the fold. He turned to the front. List of Illustrations. He looked up number seventeen: The Waddington Case – Frontal View of the Injuries. And number eighteen was the same case, the injuries to the head. A close-up presumably. What had Paloma said about the photograph that had been sent to him? A dead body, all beaten up, with its throat cut.
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