Kill My Darling

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘I’ll settle for that. See you later.’

  Atherton drew up just short of the house and craned his head to look. ‘No press. Thank God. Amazing no one’s spilled the beans yet. Now, where’s that key?’ He felt in his pocket for the key ring Slider had received from Scott Hibbert.

  He was hampered by the seat belt and Connolly only watched him struggle for a millisecond before saying, ‘Undo the belt, you looper. And don’t bother, because I have me own.’ She dangled it before his eyes. ‘I got it off Mr Fitton before I left.’

  ‘How did you manage that?’

  ‘He volunteered. Gave it me and said, “I won’t be needing this any more.”’

  ‘Did he, indeed?’

  ‘Ah, cool the head, it doesn’t mean anything. Sure, he’d know we’d check on him as soon as I got back, and find his record, and then we’d want the key offa him anyhow.’

  ‘Yes, but saying he wouldn’t need the key any more suggests he knows she’s dead.’

  ‘Well I know it, so why not?’

  ‘You don’t know any such thing. It’s still odds-on she’ll walk back in any minute. They usually do. And don’t forget she took her keys with her. Why would she do that if she wasn’t coming back?’

  ‘Don’t you forget she left her mobile. She’d grab that before her keys, every time.’

  Atherton yawned ostentatiously. ‘Well, if there is anything in it, we’ve got the prime suspect under wraps back at the factory, so relax.’

  ‘Scott Hibbert? He didn’t do it. He’s just a big gom.’

  ‘I take it “gom” is not an expression of approval.’

  ‘Why do you talk like that?’ Connolly cried in frustration.

  Atherton smiled, satisfied now he had goaded her. ‘Why don’t you like him?’

  ‘What’s to like? He’s like a big transport-caff fry-up. Everything right there on the plate, and none of it very appetizing. I like a bit of subtlety.’

  Atherton slapped his chest. ‘Right there,’ he addressed the invisible audience. ‘She stepped right into my heart, folks. Subtlety, c’est moi.’

  Connolly gave him a look so cold it could have hosted the Ice Capades. ‘What are we looking for up there?’

  He became sensible. ‘Firstly, anything that suggests she was doing a runner – empty spaces in the wardrobe and so on. Secondly, signs of a struggle, anything that might have been used as a weapon, signs of blood. Also signs of hasty cleaning up. Someone who’s just killed someone is usually in too much of a panic to clean properly, which is lucky for us. And always, of course, anything that strikes you as anomalous.’

  ‘As a what now?’

  ‘Odd. Out of place. Wrong. Peculiar.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’

  Atherton, having done this so often in Slider’s company, used his nose first, as Slider would have, and noticed that the flat had a cold smell about it, as if no one had been there for a while. It occupied a big area in square-footage, but the conversion was an old one, and clumsily done, so the space was not well used. On either side of a large, wasted entrance hall there was a sitting room and a bedroom, both with bay windows on to the front, with a slice cut off at the back to make a bathroom and kitchen, side by side. It all needed modernizing; and a cleverer architect (or indeed, given when it was done, any architect at all) could have made a much nicer flat out of it. If recombined with the basement (as Fitton had said Hibbert had been plotting) it would make a very glamorous maisonette, with a big kitchen/breakfast-room downstairs, and living room, two beds and modern bathroom upstairs. With the big rooms, high ceilings, mouldings and so on, it would fetch a stone fortune in up-and-coming Shepherd’s Bush; so it wouldn’t be wonderful if Hibbert, who was in the business after all, had spotted the potential.

  Leaving aside the property-developing crying-shame it represented, Atherton noted that the furniture was modern but cheap, and that the place was ordinarily tidy. In the bedroom, the bed had been made, in that the duvet had been pulled up, but it hadn’t been straightened or smoothed. There was a built-in wardrobe with sliding doors and a free-standing one so stuffed with clothes the doors wouldn’t close at all. An exercise bike in the corner had clothes heaped over its saddle, and there were more clothes dumped on a wicker armchair – it would be fun trying to work out what she had been wearing, should the need arise. But there were no used plates or mugs or dirty clothes strewn around, and the floor was clear and the carpet clean. The sitting room was tidier, with only a newspaper, a novel (Laurie Graham, At Sea, face down and opened at page 64) and an emery board lying around to show occupation. And the handbag, large and tan leather, which was on the sofa, at the end nearest the door.

  Connolly gestured to the remote, lying on the coffee table next to the emery board. ‘She coulda been sitting here, doing her nails and watching the TV. See, the TV’s not been turned off at the switch – it’s on standby.’

  ‘Ninety per cent of people habitually turn off the TV with the remote,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t mean she was interrupted.’

  In the bathroom he observed that the inside of the shower and the bath were dry, as were both bath towels, stretched out on a double towel-rail, and the bath mat, hanging over the side of the bath. But there were drops of water still in the basin, and the hand towel was crumpled and damp inside the creases.

  ‘Which accords with no one having showered in here since Friday,’ he said. ‘Sonny Boy says he came home at ten this morning. So he didn’t shower, but did at least wash his hands. Probably after he went to the loo. There are droplets round the loo bowl as well.’

  ‘To much information,’ Connolly said, making a face.

  ‘Water droplets, from the flush. Don’t be sensitive. Got that torch?’ he asked.

  The bathroom was fully tiled, and there was tile-patterned acrylic flooring, but both were old, chipped here and there, the grouting discoloured and breaking. Atherton went over everything with the torch, looking sidelong to catch any smearing or marks, shone the torch down the plug holes and under the rim of the toilet (‘Rather you than me,’ Connolly said) and then did the same in the kitchen – equally old and shabby, but clean and tidy, with the last lot of washing-up (cereal bowls and mugs and a small plate – Friday’s breakfast?) clean and very dry in the dish rack.

  ‘A big fat nothing,’ Connolly concluded, sounding slightly disappointed.

  ‘If she was abducted, she went without a struggle,’ Atherton said, ‘and if she was killed here, it was very quick and clean. Or Hibbert’s a better housekeeper than he looks. Or –’ he gave Connolly a look – ‘she walked out of her own accord and will shortly come prancing back through the door demanding to know what we’re doing here.’

  Connolly studied him. ‘You don’t think that any more. You’re starting to think there’s something in it.’

  ‘Not really. Except for the mobile. You’ve got me worried about the mobile.’

  ‘Hah!’

  ‘Only a bit,’ he equivocated. ‘If she was just popping down the offy for a packet of fags she might not grab it along with her keys.’

  ‘But then she’d have taken her purse.’

  ‘Not if she took a tenner out of it.’

  ‘But then she’d have come back.’

  He shrugged. ‘I just think, on balance, given her age and sex, she’d have been more likely to have taken her mobile, and that that constitutes an anomaly. Unfortunately, the only one. If we’d found signs of a struggle or clean-up we could have got a forensic team in, but as it stands there’s no evidence to justify it. But we’d better take the handbag back with us. Might be all sorts of goodies in it, besides the phone. Run and get an evidence bag, will you?’

  On her way back from the car, when she got to the foot of the steps, Fitton appeared suddenly round the side of the house, where his own front door was, and stood looking at her.

  ‘You came back, then,’ he said. ‘Decided there was something in it after all.’

  ‘Well,’ sh
e said, wondering what it was right to say to him.

  He examined her expression in a way that made her shiver. He was too noticing. ‘You know about me,’ he said flatly, his mouth making a downturn that was more sad than sour.

  ‘How—?’

  ‘I can tell from the way you’re looking at me. Like I’m a mad dog that might bite.’

  ‘No,’ she protested. ‘It’s not like—’

  ‘Didn’t take long,’ he said. ‘Knew it wouldn’t.’ He poked his forehead with a finger and thumb. ‘Branded for life.’

  ‘It’s just standard procedure,’ she said helplessly, not understanding why she wanted to protect his feelings. ‘Our Super recognized your name. But it doesn’t mean—’

  ‘Just remember I called it in,’ he said. ‘Benefit of the doubt. All right?’

  ‘It’s all in writing,’ she said. The dog, Marty, padded round from the side of the house – Fitton must have left the door open – and came up behind him, shoving its head up peremptorily under his hand. He caressed it automatically, and the tail swung.

  ‘You’ve still got her dog, so,’ Connolly said, and cursed herself for the stupid remark.

  He jerked his head towards the upstairs flat. ‘He never asked about him. Dipstick probably doesn’t even remember he exists. I’ll keep him till somebody takes him away.’ He started to turn away, the dog sticking close to his side, then looked back to say, ‘Benefit of the doubt. Remember.’

  ‘I’ll remember the dog likes you,’ she said to his retreating back. What an eejitty thing to say. God, she was a thick! She scurried up the steps before she did anything else to embarrass herself.

  Swilley was going to see the parents. She had often drawn the short straw in these cases because (a) she was a woman and (b) she was regarded as unflappable. It was better for bad news to be delivered by someone with an air of calm. But since having a child of her own she had liked this task less and less.

  Joining the Job at a time when women had to prove themselves not just as good as men, but the same as men, she had early grown a shell against taunts, insults, slights, come-ons and filthy jokes. She had been helped by being tall, blonde, athletic, and beautiful in a sort of wide-mouthed, small-nosed, Baywatch way, which rendered most of her tormentors tongue-tied if she actually faced them one-to-one. She was also blessed with an iron head and concrete stomach, which meant she could match them pint for pint and curry for curry; and she was deceptively strong, was a blue-belt in judo, had twenty-twenty vision, and was a crack shot.

  Joining Slider’s firm had been wonderful for her, because he thought she was a good detective and treated her as one, and at least had the decency to appear not to notice her gender. After one early, disastrous mistake she had made it an iron rule not to go out or get involved with any of her colleagues. After a time they had stopped trying and written her off as frigid and probably a lesbian, which she had borne patiently; and eventually had accepted her as one of them, an honorary bloke. Her nickname, Norma, was a tribute to her machismo, and she had worn it with pride. It had been hard won.

  So for years she had maintained an icy virginity at work and a wonderfully patient, amazingly understanding secret boyfriend at home; but eventually Tony had grown restless. He disapproved of her refusal to go for promotion. Well, the money would have been nice, but she did not want to have to go through that whole process of training a new lot of resentful males to accept her for herself. The very prospect exhausted her. Also, patient though he was, Tony was still all man, and he didn’t like the fact that she kept him secret, as if she was ashamed of him. Not ashamed of him, she told him, but of them. But in the end she had to give him something, and the price of being allowed to go on being her was first marriage, and then the baby.

  She was very happy being married, and Tony had reverted to being patient, adaptable, and helpful to a saintly degree when her job prevented her doing wifely and motherly things; and she adored little Ashley and wondered how they had ever lived without her. But she paid with whole new layers of sensitivity towards lovers, married people, parents, the bereaved; and new layers of fear that the things she saw happening daily to the anonymous victims of crime might happen to her own small family. She had become vulnerable; she had lost her ice. She hoped she had not also lost her edge.

  But she approached the present task with resignation. There were lots of things in the Job you didn’t necessarily relish – smelly houses, vomiting drunks, decomposing corpses, road accidents – but you did them just the same.

  Melanie Hunter’s parents weren’t called Hunter – she had them down as Wiseman, Ian and Rachel, so either the mum had remarried, or Melanie had changed her name for some reason. They lived in a nice part of Ealing, typical suburbia, Edwardian semis on a street edged with those trees that went into pink blossom like screwed up tissue paper in spring. Of course, they were bare now, the freezing weather having held everything back. Most of the houses had turned their gardens into hardstanding for cars, but where they still had front gardens, they were neatly kept, with clipped privet hedges, and hard-pruned sticks that would be roses later, and oblongs and squares of bare, weeded earth that would be flower beds, showing only the blunt green noses of bulbs.

  The faint, watery sun had broken through, and even though it did nothing to mitigate the biting cold, it gave an air of festivity to the street. As it was Sunday, there were cars parked before most of the houses, kids were trundling about on bikes and scooters, and one brave or barmy man was washing his motor with a hose with a foaming sponge attachment. All very Mrs Norman Normal – as were all lives until the meteor of chance hit them, the hurtling rock from the sky crashed at random through their roof.

  In the front garden of the Wisemans’ house, there was a girl of about eleven or twelve, in a cropped top and skinny jeans that exposed her belly button (why the hell wasn’t she freezing? Kids these days! Swilley thought), picking the sugar-pink varnish from her nails with all the destructive boredom of Sunday afternoon. She eyed Swilley with intense interest, scanning her from her pull-on woolly hat down through her camel wool wrap-around coat to her long boots.

  ‘Hello,’ Swilley said. ‘Are your mum and dad Mr and Mrs Wiseman?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Are they in?’

  ‘Mum is,’ the girl said, and then, in a burst of confidence: ‘She won’t buy anything. She never buys anything at the door.’

  ‘That’s all right, cos I’m not selling. Can I have a word with her? It’s important.’

  The girl twisted her head over her shoulder without removing her eyes from Swilley’s face and yelled through the half-open front door, ‘Mu-u-um! There’s a lady wants you.’

  Oh, ever so much a lady, Swilley thought.

  ‘Are you a social worker?’ the girl asked abruptly. ‘She’s not my real mum, she’s my stepmum. I like your colour lipstick. What’s it called? Do you like vodka?’

  A woman appeared behind her, saving Swilley from answering. She was middle aged and ordinary, dressed in slacks, a cotton jumper and an unattractive big, thick, chunky cardigan. She had her glasses in one hand and a biro in the other, and a look between wariness and embryo annoyance on a face that held the remains of prettiness behind the soft plumpness of middle-aged marriage. ‘Yes?’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Wiseman? I wonder if I could come in and have a word with you,’ Swilley said, and showed her warrant card. The woman looked immediately put out and flustered, but the child’s eyes opened so wide Swilley was afraid she’d see her brain.

  ‘You’re the cops,’ she breathed. ‘Are you going to arrest Mum?’

  ‘Bethany!’ the woman rebuked automatically, but her worried eyes were searching Swilley’s face. ‘Is it Ian? Is it an accident?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. It may be nothing at all. Can I come in?’ Swilley said. The man two doors down had ceased wiping his car’s roof and was staring with his mouth ajar and the hose soaking his feet, ha ha.

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, come on through.�
�

  Bethany slipped in before Mrs Wiseman shut the door firmly behind Swilley. ‘Come in the lounge,’ she said. Swilley followed her, and as she turned with a question in her face, made a quick sideways gesture of the eyes towards the child, which fortunately the woman was compos mentis enough to catch and interpret. ‘Bethany, go out in the back garden and play,’ she said, sharply enough to be obeyed.

  ‘Play?’ the girl complained. ‘What am I, a kid? I don’t play.’

  ‘And shut the back door after you. Don’t let all the heat out.’

  The girl extracted herself by unwilling inches, leaving Swilley alone with her mother in a knocked-through lounge decorated and furnished in exactly the sort of middle-income, suburban taste Swilley would have expected.

  ‘Would you like to sit down?’ Mrs Wiseman said automatically.

  Swilley saw she had been doing some sort of paperwork on the coffee table in front of the sofa, and took an armchair.

  Mrs Wiseman sat in the chair opposite, looked enquiringly at Swilley, and then suddenly something seemed to come over her. She swayed, gripped the arm of the chair, and said almost in a whisper, ‘Oh my God, it’s Melanie, isn’t it? Something’s happened to Melanie!’

  She stared at Swilley, white with some awful foreknowledge, and Swilley thought perhaps it was there, latent, in every mother’s mind, an instinct born at the moment of conception: the fear that one day some stranger would come and tell you your child had been taken from you. She felt horribly impressed, and a little queasy.

  ‘It’s probably nothing to worry about,’ Swilley said, though Mrs Wiseman’s certainty had communicated itself to her, now. ‘It’s just that Melanie’s not at home, and her boyfriend doesn’t know where she is. Have you heard from her lately?’

  ‘I spoke to her – Friday,’ Mrs Wiseman said. ‘She rang me from work. She rings me two or three times a week, just for a chat.’

  ‘You’re close, then?’ said Swilley.

  ‘Always have been,’ she said, but with some reservation in her voice Swilley didn’t understand.