Kill My Darling

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘I know it.’ It used to be called the Hung Fat. Perhaps they finally realized the name was not working for the English clientele.

  ‘It’s a family business – well, they always are, aren’t they? Mum and Dad, couple o’ young cousins in the back, and the eldest son on the till. Well, I shows ’em the photo, and they all say no, no, never seen, the way they always do. But I see the young lad clock her, so I hang about outside till mum and dad goes in the back, then I goes back in for a crafty word with him.’

  ‘Does he speak English?’

  ‘Oh yeah. He was born here. His mum and dad was, too. It’s just the cousins that are over from the old country. But they all pretend not to speak English. Stops ’em being bothered.’

  Slider knew this was a perennial problem with the Chinese community – the linguistic equivalent of the Great Wall. He had come across it in his Central days, when investigating anything in the Chinatown section of Soho had been a specialist job with its own unit. Mostly they just gave you the Look that said no understand, but if pressed they would burst into floods of hysterical-sounding Chinese, with hand gestures and deep scowls, to drive you away. But out here, away from the centre, they lived a quietly separate life and caused no trouble, so leaving them alone worked well both ways.

  ‘So, did you get anything out of him?’

  ‘Yeah, once I got him on his own he said he’d seen her face in the papers and recognized her. Course, he wouldn’t come forward, but now I was asking – she come in that night, Friday, and bought a takeaway.’

  ‘Did she, indeed!’

  ‘Yeah, and they cook everything fresh, so it took eight, ten minutes – they had telephone orders to do before hers. She sat down in the corner to wait, and he said she stared at the telly for a bit, then she got out a pen and paper. He said she seemed to be working out sums, something like that – said it looked like numbers, not words. Anyway, then her order comes out. Sweet an’ sour pork balls, spicy chicken with bean sprouts, and crispy fried noodles. She pays, and then goes off. That’s between twenty and twenty-five past ten, he says. Which makes it right for her getting home around half past.’

  ‘Which means she didn’t go anywhere else or meet anyone else,’ Slider concluded. Well, that was one thing cleared up. ‘Did anyone come in while she was there?’

  ‘Yeah, a couple of people come in for their telephone orders, but Lee says they never spoke to her. Didn’t even look at her. Just come up to the counter, took their orders and left. But we can check that for ourselves, guv, because they got a CCTV camera. When he said she’d been in I said we’ve have to have the tape, and he said his mum and dad would never allow it. So I had to lean on him a bit. He went in the back and I could hear this almighty row going on – all scribble-talk, y’know? – but in the end he comes back with the tape.’

  ‘Good,’ said Slider. ‘Even if she didn’t speak to anyone, it’s possible someone noticed her and followed her home.’ Though that had always been a possibility, with or without a Chinese takeaway. But that scenario presented its own problems, because either she would have had to invite them into her flat to get murdered there, or have got into a car with them – theirs or hers – to be driven away and murdered somewhere else. And why would she do that? Being snatched between her car and the flat didn’t work because she parked right outside Fitton’s window and he would have heard the struggle; and there were no signs on the body of her having been restrained.

  ‘Well, let’s go and look at it,’ he said. He followed McLaren to the tape room and watched over his shoulder as he ploughed through fast-forward until the right time cue came up and he pressed play. There was nothing much to it. The camera was above the television, so it showed anyone coming in the door three-quarter view, anyone at the counter side-on, and anyone on the chairs full face. But since everyone at some point had to look at the screen – the human who could be in the same room as a television and not look at it once had not been bred yet – there was at least one full-face of everyone.

  Slider saw Melanie Hunter walk into the otherwise empty shop and up to the counter. She gave Lee the order – she didn’t seem, interestingly, to study the menu on the wall behind him, but gave the order at once as if she had decided before she came in. She smiled at him, and he smiled back and said something – presumably something on the lines of ‘it’ll be ten minutes’. Then she went and sat on the plastic chair in the corner, at the end of the row of four, and gazed idly into the camera for some time.

  It was a chance for Slider to study her face. People don’t look at their best staring blankly at the idiot box, but he could see that she was pretty, and she looked tired. It was poignant for him, because unlike the people she had known, whom they had been interviewing, this was the first time he had seen her alive, so from now on it would be his only living memory of her. He looked at her, knowing that the sand was running rapidly out of her glass, that she was living the last minutes of her life without knowing it. To her it was just the end of another day. He saw her rub an itch on the end of her nose, push her hair back from her forehead: unconscious, natural movements that would always be part of his knowledge of her now. His life was so intimately bound with hers, for this intense period, he felt anguished and guilty that he could not tell the girl in the grainy greyscale picture what he knew, and save her. Don’t go home tonight! But if it didn’t get her tonight, would death come for her anyway, tomorrow, or next week? How determined was her murderer that she should die? And why? That above all.

  She seemed to think of something. She pulled her handbag over on to her lap and rummaged in it, came up with a pen and a piece of paper – it looked like a till receipt – and began writing on the back. That Lee was a smart fellow, he thought: it did look like numbers rather than words. But it was not possible to read it. She jotted, totted, and thought; and meanwhile other customers came in, walked across to the counter, looked at the television, received their orders and went out. None seemed to notice the girl in the corner – certainly no one looked at her directly or addressed her.

  Finally Lee came out with a stiff paper carrier bag and said something and she looked up. She balled the paper she had been writing on in her hand. Slider became tense. What happened to that paper? He watched it, rather than her, as she put away the pen and got out her purse, went to the counter, paid, received change, put away her purse and took up the handles of the carrier. At that point she seemed to become aware of the paper in her hand, and dropped it with the utmost casualness into the carrier. Slider let his breath out.

  ‘Wonder what was on that bit of paper,’ McLaren said, breaking the silence, and proving himself more of a detective than was often apparent.

  ‘Whatever it was, it’s with the rest of the rubbish now,’ Slider said. ‘Wherever that is.’

  Melanie said goodnight, with a smile, to Lee, walked to the shop door, opened it and turned right, disappearing out of camera range.

  ‘Can’t see her motor,’ McLaren said, ‘but she parked outside the ATM, which is that way.’ And a moment later, ‘There. That’s her.’ He ran the tape back and watched again, slowing it as a small car, which could have been a Polo, and could have been green, went past in the road outside, just visible to the camera. ‘You can’t see the driver, but I bet that’s her.’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter,’ Slider said. ‘We know she went home and she must have gone straight there because of the time.’ The time cue in the corner was showing 22.25. She had driven away to her appointment with death, and there was nothing he could do to change it.

  As they walked back to the main office, McLaren said, ‘Guv, I been thinking.’

  ‘I tried that once,’ Slider said. ‘Didn’t take to it.’

  ‘About that takeaway,’ McLaren went on. His only defence against Slider’s more inexplicable remarks was to ignore them. ‘That’s a meal for one. Not enough there for two.’

  ‘I take your word for it,’ Slider said, and meant it. McLaren was the oracle when it cam
e to junk food. He had never met a ready meal he didn’t like. Or, at least, that had been the case up until whatever epiphany had recently struck him.

  ‘Well, then, what happened to it?’ McLaren asked.

  ‘You’re right. We know she didn’t eat it,’ Slider said, ‘because we have the forensic report on her stomach contents. If she’d eaten it so soon before she was killed, it would still have been in the stomach and recognizable.’

  ‘Anyway, she’d just had a big dinner,’ McLaren said.

  ‘And she couldn’t have bought it in a fit of-absent-mindedness, since she had ten minutes to sit and think while it was being cooked. So, we have to conclude . . .?’

  ‘That she bought it for someone else,’ McLaren said. ‘But who?’

  ‘And then there’s the money. I can’t remember offhand but I’m pretty sure there wasn’t two hundred pounds in her purse.’

  ‘No, guv,’ McLaren said. ‘Forty pounds and some change. And she didn’t spend a hundred and sixty on a takeaway.’

  In the office, Hollis was still at work and Atherton and Swilley were back. They gathered round and Slider explained about the tape and Melanie’s takeaway purchase.

  ‘Not for herself, obviously. But who do you buy a takeaway for?’ Atherton said. ‘Someone you know. Someone you live with.’

  ‘Hibbert was away,’ said Hollis.

  ‘Or was he?’ Atherton countered. ‘With Melanie dead, we’ve only his word for it. We certainly know where he wasn’t. Suppose when he rang her at the pub that night he told her he’d seen the error of his ways and was on his way home?’

  ‘And asked her to get him a takeaway?’ Norma said scornfully. ‘When he was on his way to murder her?’

  ‘You don’t know what the habit was between them,’ he reasoned. ‘She didn’t know she was for the chop. Maybe it was customary after his nights at the pub. Maybe she asked him, “Shall I get you a Chinese as usual?” and he said yes rather than arouse her suspicions.’

  ‘The person she lived with is the most likely person she’d buy a takeaway for,’ Hollis allowed. ‘But what happened to the containers?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said McLaren. ‘Connolly was in there Saturday, and she looked round and in the bin in the kitchen, and there was nothing like that there. And they weren’t in the dustbins, either.’

  The contents of the household dustbins were secured on Monday – that was SOP – and since collection day was Tuesday, anything thrown in there over the weekend would still have been there.

  ‘He could have taken them out and disposed of them,’ Atherton said. ‘He had plenty of time. They could be in any bin between here and Salisbury.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Slider said. ‘But why would he bother?’

  ‘To hide the fact that he was there,’ said Atherton. ‘If we’d found the debris, we’d have got DNA out of the saliva traces and identified him as being at home when he was supposed to be at the wedding.’

  ‘But would he think of that? This is the man whose alibi was cracked at the first question,’ Slider said.

  ‘You just don’t know what he might think of. Or maybe he killed her first, then took it with him and ate it in the car,’ Atherton said impatiently.

  ‘It’d have been well cold,’ McLaren said scornfully. ‘He had to get rid of the body first.’

  ‘You know who else she could have bought it for,’ Swilley said. ‘That she was friendly with. Who had time to get rid of the rubbish. And I bet he eats a lot of takeaways. And there’s the money, too. If it wasn’t in her purse, where was it?’

  ‘Most likely Hibbert took it,’ said Atherton.

  ‘No,’ said Slider. ‘She means Ronnie Fitton.’

  TEN

  The Son Also Rises

  Slider was holding down the fort at home that evening, as Joanna had a recording session, and for a wonder Dad had a date as well. Since selling up his home and coming to live with them, he had been available night and day, and Slider had often told him that he ought to go out more, get some interests of his own. It was said as a sop to Slider’s conscience, not for his father’s benefit, since he knew, deep down, that what his father liked best was being at home and looking after George; but it seemed that at last Mr Slider had heeded him and gone and joined a club. A Scrabble club, of all things.

  ‘I didn’t even know you played Scrabble,’ Slider had said.

  ‘Everybody plays Scrabble,’ Dad had said. ‘T’isn’t difficult. Anyway, it’s company. Gets me out o’ the house.’

  Slider had started worrying on a whole new level. ‘Those dedicated Scrabble players can be peculiar people. Fiercely competitive. They know words all made up of Qs and Ks, and they’re scornful of anyone who doesn’t.’

  Mr Slider had been untroubled ‘It’s not like that in this club. All amateurs – just nice people wanting a quiet game. You wanted me to go out,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I want you to be happy, though.’

  ‘Your trouble is you never have enough to worry about. You’re an addict. Even when you got plenty, you keep looking for more. Anyway, if I don’t like it I can always leave, can’t I? I got to go once, because I told someone I’d give it a try.’

  ‘Oh? You’ve made a new friend?’ Slider didn’t know why he was surprised. It’s just he never visualized his father outside the home, talking to anybody.

  There was a gleam in Mr Slider’s eye, as if he read this thought quite plainly. ‘Not deaf and dumb, am I? I see people in the street, talk to them in the supermarket. Quite a friendly old place, this. Anyway, you needn’t worry about me. I had half an hour with the dictionary while my boy was taking his nap, and I’m all primed up.’ He patted his forehead, as if it were a willing horse. ‘Quassia, quern, quincunx. Kukri, kowtow, kumis. Want to test me on the Js and Zs?’

  It was odd, though, to see his father off and close the door, leaving himself in a silent house, empty except for George, asleep upstairs. He went up and had a look at him, just for the pleasure, then came down, feeling at a loss, and realizing how comfortable his life had been of recent months – always a fire lit and a meal ready when he came home, and sympathetic company to tell his day’s experiences to. Ah well. He drifted into the kitchen, where his father had left him half a shepherd’s pie in the oven, warming on a low light. There were vegetables, cut and ready to cook, but even as he looked at them he knew they were doomed to lie there undisturbed, and that when the moment came he would eat the shepherd’s pie straight from the dish with a spoon. He was not a man who had been designed ever to live alone.

  He thought he’d have a small malt whisky before eating, took time over choosing, and carried his Scapa into the sitting room. He intended to spend the evening doing some heavy reading and some even heavier thinking. He had the uneasy feeling he had missed something, or forgotten something – that someone had told him something important that he had put aside in his head and now couldn’t lay his hand on. It was not unusual when he was involved in a complex case – probably just part of the way his mind worked – but it was uncomfortable all the same.

  He decided to look at the paper first, while he drank his whisky, to see if leaving it alone would make the missing thing pop up of its own accord. That sometimes happened. He took a sip, put down his glass, took up the paper, read the first paragraph of the first story, and passed out, sandbagged by sheer exhaustion.

  He woke an unknown time later with a stiff neck and a thumping heart as George’s cry pierced the fog. He was on his feet and moving before he’d even opened his eyes, so he knew, as he hurried upstairs towards the sobbing, that it was the first cry he had heard. George was on his feet, clutching the side of his cot, his face contorted with grief and swimming with those great, fat, somehow extra glistening tears babies could produce as though their tear ducts were primed with glycerine. His hands went out with the familiar snatching gesture as soon as Slider appeared, and he swooped the boy up to his shoulder, felt the wet cheek against his neck, and the hands gripping his clothes with t
he ferocity of the bad dream that had wakened him. He was going through a phase of being woken by nightmares that he hadn’t the vocabulary to explain, which was distressing to everyone.

  ‘Was it a bad dream?’ he asked, holding the tight little body close.

  Nod.

  ‘Never mind, it’s all gone now.’

  The hands clutched harder.

  ‘What was it about, do you remember?’

  Shake.

  ‘Do you want to come downstairs with me for a bit?’

  Nod.

  So he carried him downstairs to the lighted room, where the fire had sunk, but was still giving warmth. He sat on the sofa and held George in his lap, and George stuck his thumb in his mouth and stared at the fire glow.

  After a bit he unplugged and said, ‘Story, Daddy.’

  Slider embarked on the story of the ugly duckling from memory, adding in extra characters and action to pad it out, to give George time to get sleepy again. When the boy finally dozed off, Slider stayed put, to make sure he was really down before moving him again. He sat with the lovely weight in his lap, staring at the fire and not thinking of anything in particular.

  And that was how Mr Slider found them, both asleep, when he got back from his Scrabble evening. The smell of the forgotten shepherd’s pie was strong on the air. Good job I put it on low, he thought, with a fond and exasperated shake of the head.

  Despite not having done any industrial-strength thinking, it was probably a good thing he’d had that extra sleep, Slider reasoned the next morning, when he went in to work feeling rested and firing on all cylinders. He stopped off to talk to Paxman, the duty sergeant downstairs, who told him that the operation had gone off smoothly, and Ronnie Fitton was safely banged up in the cells awaiting his fate.

  ‘Did he give any trouble?’

  ‘No trouble at all,’ said Paxman, a large, heavy-built man, with stationary eyes and tightly curly hair that gave him a faint resemblance to a Hereford bull. ‘Fact he seemed to be expecting it. Resigned. He got a couple of hours’ kip once we’d processed him, and he’s had a good breakfast, so he’s ready for you any time.’