Body Line

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘I’ll bet that was a hundred-pound haircut,’ Atherton mourned. ‘What a waste!’ They all had their different ways of coping.

  Freddie Cameron, kneeling beside the body, looked up. ‘I take it you’re not interested in time of death?’

  ‘Unless it’s not compatible with all the high-jinks at six thirty,’ said Slider.

  ‘Six thirty’s all right, from the warmth of the body and the condition of the blood. So, what can I tell you? He was shot in the back of the head, as you see. A single shot at close range, probably no more than eight inches away – you see the gas-rebound splitting, and the localized scorching. He was upright at the time, as you’ll see from the blood and tissue distribution. The bullet will be somewhere over there, probably embedded in the wall.’

  ‘He’s not far from the front door,’ Slider observed. ‘He could have let the person in, and then they shot him as he led the way into the sitting-room.’

  ‘That’s your province, not mine,’ Freddie said. ‘Sounds depressingly professional.’

  ‘Could be a vengeful lover or husband,’ Slider said, keeping an open mind. ‘If it was someone he knew well enough to let in . . .’

  ‘Well, either way, I’d say it was a 9mm or .38 pistol wot dunnit,’ Freddie said. ‘The 9mm is the most commonly used handgun this side of the Atlantic, and consequently the most numerous and easiest to get hold of.’

  ‘There’s lotsa blood,’ Atherton observed.

  ‘He was lotsa hurt,’ Freddie said. ‘A high velocity bullet causing complete ejection of the brain will have destroyed most of his face. I hope identification isn’t going to be a problem?’

  ‘We’re assuming he’s the householder,’ Slider said. ‘A Doctor David Rogers.’

  ‘Don’t think I know him,’ Freddie said. ‘I’ll take the fingerprints for you, anyway, just in case. There probably won’t be much chance of comparing dental records. I’m ready to turn him over now – where’s the photographer?’

  Slider had no wish to see this part. ‘I’ll have a quick look round, get the lie of the place, see if there’s a photograph of the good doctor,’ he said. ‘Call me if there’s anything significant.’

  The sitting-room was expensively-furnished, with no sign of any interference. There were modern paintings on the wall, a large flat-screen television, DVD and sound equipment, silver candlesticks and an antique clock on the mantel, all untouched. Not a standard burglary, then. Slider noted a leather-topped kneehole desk in one fireplace alcove – it had the air of a decorative feature, but it could be the place to look for personal papers, perhaps. The fingerprints team were busy dusting everything and another forensic pair were on their knees marking all the blood and tissue spatters, so Slider did not go in. He could see all he wanted from here, for now. What struck him most was that the antique furniture looked like repro. The buttoned leather sofa and armchairs were modern, too. Everything was new-looking, immaculate, and curiously lifeless, like the lounge section of an expensive hotel suite. It only wanted an oversized flower arrangement and a leather-bound room-service menu. There was no personal clutter lying around, either. It was a room in which it was impossible to imagine anyone doing anything other than having a large whisky and watching the television for ten minutes before going to bed. Well, perhaps that was all the doctor had done. Didn’t they all work impossible hours, these consultants? He was assuming he was a consultant, to afford a house like this.

  Bob Bailey, the Crime Scene Manager, conducted them upstairs and showed them the master bedroom, again furnished in modern luxury style with a deep-pile carpet and concealed lighting. The super-king-sized bed had the covers thrown back, and there were dark-blue silk pyjamas carelessly dropped on the floor at one side. The French windows on to the balcony stood open, the wind blowing the voile curtains about like an advert for Fry’s Turkish Delight. On the balcony were two lollipop bay trees in silver-painted pots, one at either end. Apart from the bed there was an empire chaise longue and two matching chairs in striped silk, and two Louis XV bow fronted chests of drawers – all repro. And an unnecessary number of mirrors.

  ‘Cheerfully vulgar,’ Atherton remarked. ‘It’s what our Aussie cousins would call a sheila-trap.’

  Bob Bailey gestured to the two doors, one either side of the bed, and said, ‘Bathroom through there and dressing-room through there. I’d rather you didn’t go in. We’re still fingerprinting. There’s nothing much to see except that the drawers in the dressing-room are all pulled out, same as in here.’

  All the drawers in the bedside cabinets and the chests were open – an expert opens the bottom one first and leaves it open to save time – but there was no evidence of rifling, nothing thrown out on the floor.

  ‘Looks as though whoever it was was looking for something specific,’ Slider said.

  ‘We’ve got a nice foot imprint or two,’ Bailey said, gesturing to the marked places on the floor. ‘Benefit of a thick carpet like this. Bigger than the victim’s, so let’s assume they’re chummy’s.’

  ‘Anything in the bathroom? Bathroom cabinet?’

  ‘Door closed and no sign of disturbance,’ said Bailey. ‘We’ll collect the contents and send them to you, in case they’re significant, but it doesn’t look as though drugs were the object. Otherwise – damp towels, wet shower-tray, damp toothbrush. All the normal signs of getting ready in the morning.’

  The other room on this floor was set up as a study, with a desk bearing a computer. The drawers of the desk were also standing open, but again, there was no sign of rifling. And on the top floor were two more bedrooms and a bathroom, minimally furnished and untouched.

  ‘Don’t think he even went up there,’ said Bailey. ‘No footmarks at all on the stairs – just hoover tracks. Looks as if no one’s been up there since the cleaner last called.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Slider. ‘They were looking for something they were sure couldn’t be upstairs.’

  ‘Or downstairs,’ Bailey said. ‘The desk drawers in the sitting-room were closed.’

  ‘Maybe they were disturbed before they had to chance to look further,’ Atherton said. ‘Who’s to say they knew what rooms were up there?’

  ‘Well, thanks, Bob,’ Slider said. ‘Let me know when we can come back for a closer look. What I really want most urgently is a photograph of the good doctor, since we’re not likely to get a mugshot.’

  ‘No difficulty there,’ Bailey said. He gestured towards one of the chests, where there was an assembly of photographs in matching silver frames. ‘Most of them are of the same man so I’m guessing it’s him.’

  ‘I guess too. The sort of person to have matching silver frames would be bound to keep lots of pictures of himself around,’ Atherton said. ‘I bet he had a monogrammed wallet as well.’

  Bailey grinned. ‘How did you know? In his jacket, hanging on the dumb valet in the dressing-room. I’ll let you have it as soon as we’re done fingerprinting, but there’s money and credit cards in it – doesn’t look as though it’s been disturbed.’

  ‘A very selective intruder,’ Slider said.

  Bailey brought him some of the photographs, and he chose one of a man wearing nothing but swimming trunks standing in the sunshine on a dock somewhere, smiling directly at the camera, with a motor yacht moored up just behind him. He was very tanned, with a hairless chest, and not in bad shape, reasonably muscled arms, just a little sly bulging to either side above the elastic of the trunks. Slider chose it because he was full-face and clear. He picked another of the same man with a woman. In this one he was in white dinner jacket. The woman was in a clinging white evening dress with more décolletage than was strictly proper, unless she was hoping the good doctor was about to give her a thorough physical. From the way she was hanging on to his arm and gazing at him, perhaps she was.

  ‘You keep calling him the good doctor,’ Atherton said. ‘From the look of Doris here he’s more the original Dirty Doctor.’

  Both had champagne glasses in their free hands
, and the edge of a table covered in plates of fiddly food could be seen to one side. The background was a terrace at night, with a string of fancy lamps overhead, and the dots of light in the darkness behind them could have been any major city in the world, seen from a penthouse terrace. Corporate party of some kind, Slider was willing to bet, from their cheesy grins and the canapés.

  Bailey removed them from the frames and handed them over, and as Slider was turning to go, said, ‘Oh! I nearly forgot! You’re going to love me for this.’ With a rabbit-and-hat air, he brought out from his pocket an evidence bag containing a mobile phone, and held it out to Slider with a grin. ‘Also in his jacket, in the dressing-room. I know how you love following up numbers.’

  ‘Terrific,’ Slider said. ‘Just what I wanted. If I weren’t wearing a mask I’d kiss you.’

  ‘I’m not that easy,’ said Bailey.

  Slider left Atherton on site, and took Connolly with him to the hospital, a sort of consolation prize for having denied her the corpse. Besides, it was always as well to have a female on hand when interviewing a female. He scuttled in hunched mode through the icy wind to the car, and Connolly, who had been strolling in her warm tweed Withnail coat, had to run to keep up with him, a panther pursuing a crab.

  ‘What’s the girl’s name – do we know?’ he asked her as they turned out of Hofland Crescent into Masbro Road, realizing belatedly that he had never heard it mentioned.

  ‘Katrina Old. The ambulance paras asked her, and that’s what the owl ones remember – though they were in flitters, so they may have got it wrong.’

  In the car, Connolly picked up the photo of the man with the girl. ‘That dress leaves everything to be desired. So this is your man Rogers?’ She studied the face. A bit Pierce Brosnan, if you squinted: forties, handsome, perma-tanned, going a bit soft; pleased with himself; expensive haircut just too young for him – unlike the female on his arm, who was a lot too young for him. ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘hasn’t he the face you’d never tire of slapping?’

  Slider smiled to himself, turning into Blythe Road. He liked the way Connolly talked. ‘Little Katrina doesn’t think so,’ he said, nodding at the photograph.

  ‘Plastic Mary here? Is that her, so?’

  ‘Dunno. I’m assuming.’

  Connolly studied the exposed cleavage again. ‘Convent girl, obviously,’ she murmured.

  The rush-hour traffic had done its thing and he got through to Charing Cross hospital fairly easily. The stained concrete building, built in the worst of the brutalist style of the seventies, was depressing. The Victorians, he reflected, at least realized that illness is ugly enough anyway, and added curlicues and turrets and fancy brickwork to their hospitals for distraction.

  They found the witness in a private room being watched over by PC Lawrence, a slight girl with transparent skin and the kind of thin fair hair that always slips out of its moorings. She looked to Slider altogether too frail to be a copper, but you couldn’t say that kind of thing now. At least Connolly, though not tall, had a muscular look about her and a sharp determination in her face. She and Lawrence had been friends in uniform. ‘Howya, Jillie,’ she greeted her.

  ‘’Lo, Reets,’ Lawrence replied laconically, lounging in her chair; then, seeing Slider, stood up sharply and said, ‘Sir,’ while a disastrously visible blush coursed through her see-through face. How had she ever got through Hendon, Slider wondered despairingly.

  The witness’s name was in fact Catriona Aude; she was twenty-seven and lived in a shared flat in Putney. And she was not the blonde in the photograph. It showed a coarsening of the fibres, Slider thought, to display one woman’s photograph in your bedroom when you were furgling another. Or as Connolly put it indignantly, ‘He’d sicken you!’

  ‘Miss Aude,’ said Slider, ‘I am Detective Inspector Slider of Shepherd’s Bush police, and this is Detective Constable Connolly. Are you feeling up to answering a few questions?’

  As Lawrence could have warned them – and in fact she did mention it afterwards – the difficulty was to stop her talking. They had given her a painkiller and something to calm her down, and for some physiological reason the combination had made her loquacious.

  ‘Oh no, I’m fine, I mean, I wasn’t really hurt, just a few bruises and I twisted my ankle when I landed but that’s all right now and my hands are a bit sore from the railings, the paint’s kind of flaky and sharp and I had to hang on for ages, I thought I was going to fall but I sort of froze, y’know? and then I couldn’t let go and my arms were nearly coming out of their sockets, I can’t tell you how much it hurt, I thought he was going to kill me, I thought I was going to die.’ Suddenly she set her fingers to her face and dragged it downwards into a Greek mask of tragedy, and behind them moaned, ‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  When not pulling her eyes down in imitation of a bloodhound, she was an attractive young woman, with brown eyes and long, thick brown hair with purple highlights, and the kind of spectacular frontal development that seemed to mark a definite taste on the part of the deceased doctor. She had a suspiciously even tan, and the remains of last night’s eye make-up had been spread around by sleep and perhaps the sweat of fear, but not, it seemed, by tears.

  ‘I can’t cry,’ she confided. ‘I want to cry, I really want to cry, but I can’t. I dunno why.’

  ‘It’ll be the pills they gave you,’ Connolly said comfortingly, and the young woman turned to her so readily that Slider took a back seat and let Connolly get on with it.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll cry all right when they wear off. But it’s good you can’t cry now, because we need you to be calm, so’s you can tell us everything that happened. Every little thing you can remember. Are you up for that, Catriona?’

  ‘Cat. Everyone calls me Cat.’

  ‘Cat, so. Are you able for it? Because it’s very, very important you tell us everything while it’s fresh in your mind.’

  Cat nodded helpfully. ‘I know. So you can catch him. I’ve seen the cop shows on the telly. But what if he comes back for me?’

  ‘The murderer? Do you know him?’

  ‘No. I mean I never saw him, not his face. But what if he finds out who I am and comes for me?’

  ‘Don’t worry a thing, we’ll mind you,’ Connolly said with huge, warm assurance. Even Slider felt himself relaxing. This girl was good. ‘Just start at the beginning and tell us all about you and Dr Rogers.’

  ‘David.’

  ‘Sure, David.’

  ‘I love that name, David, don’t you? It’s so upper. David Rogers. And it really suits him. He’s a real gentleman, d’you know what I mean? Like, lovely manners, opening doors and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘A real gent,’ Connolly said, thinking of noblesse oblige and the openly-displayed photo of the blonde. I bet he’s so posh he farts Paco Rabanne, she thought. Slider handed her the photo of the man by the boat, and gave her a nudging look. Right. Better get it over at the start. ‘Before we start, would you just have a look at this photo and tell me if it’s David, so we know we’re talking about the same person?’

  Cat took it, looked, and her face screwed up as if a gnat had flown up her nose, though she remained dry thanks to the chemicals in her blood. But she started moaning, ‘David. Oh David. David. Oh God. Oh David,’ and it looked as though it would be a while before she was finished with the mantra. Slider settled in to wait it out, and quelled Connolly’s impatient movement with a look. You didn’t get to see the badger unless you were prepared to put in the time outside the hole.

  TWO

  Witless for the Prosecution

  Cat Aude met David Rogers at Jiffies Club in Notting Hill.

  ‘You go there often?’ asked Connolly.

  ‘I work there.’

  ‘You’re a stripper?’

  Cat was offended. ‘I’m a dancer. It’s a different thing altogether.’

  ‘A pole dancer?’

  ‘I suppose you th
ink that’s easy. Well, it’s not. You have to be ballet-trained to do it properly. Anyway, I’m a featured artist, I’ll have you know. I have my own spot, and my own music and everything.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Connolly humbly.

  Slider gave her a tiny nod of approval. This early on it was right to placate the girl. But he knew and Connolly knew – and presumably Cat Aude knew, featured dancer or not – that Jiffies was an expensive strip club where well-to-do men could go and look at titties without spoiling their reputation either for respectability or cool. There was a dress code (for the customers), the drinks were wildly expensive, and women were not allowed in free. It was all very reassuring. But it was the knockers they went for, not the ballet.

  ‘I’m Ceecee St Clair,’ the stripper went on. ‘That’s my professional name. I do two sets twice a week. It’s not my main job. I work for a publisher days, but you can’t afford rent in London on what they pay you, so I do Jiffies extra. The pay’s all right and you get nice tips as well. I could do more than two nights if I wanted but I don’t want to overexpose myself.’ Connolly managed to suppress a snort at that point. ‘I’m going to be an actress, you see,’ Ceecee St Clair concluded. ‘That’s why I use a professional name, to save my real name for acting. I’m going to be a serious actress, stage first and then go into movies when I’ve learnt my craft. You see, all my life I’ve dreamed—’

  Slider didn’t want to get lost in the byways of the Judy Garland Story, and interrupted gently. ‘So how did you meet David Rogers?’

  She didn’t seem to mind being redirected. ‘It was a couple of months ago. Between my sets I’m supposed to put on a nice dress and go out and talk to any customers who’re on their own. Put them at ease, sort of. Make sure they buy drinks. There’s no funny business,’ she added sharply, ‘so don’t you think it. The management are very strict about that.’