Hard Going

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Yes, what about the social thing, Swilley wondered. ‘Did he eat here often?’ she asked.

  ‘Often for lunch, at least once a week, sometimes more. Not so often for dinner. But I think he ate out a lot. Like I said, he liked food.’

  ‘Did he come here alone? Or did he bring friends?’

  ‘Most often alone. Sometimes with friends. Men around his own age – English men. I think they talked business. But they seemed to know each other well – they laugh and joke a little too.’

  ‘So, always men,’ Swilley suggested. ‘Never women.’

  He did not seem to find that a pointed question. ‘Maybe he took women somewhere else,’ he hazarded. ‘But last week he brought a lady. I was pleased. She was not young, but beautiful, and—’ He waved a hand, searching for the word. ‘Glamorous. Like film star, maybe, but not so much. Beautiful for a woman of her age, the way sometimes French women are, do you know?’

  ‘When was that, exactly?’

  He thought. ‘Thursday? Yes, I think Thursday. Lunchtime.’

  ‘Do you know her name?’

  He shook his head regretfully. ‘He didn’t introduce.’

  ‘What did they talk about?’

  ‘I don’t hear, but I think maybe business – serious mostly. But I saw him hold her hand once across the table, and she smiled at him. I think they were fond of each other.’

  ‘Was that the last time you saw him?’

  ‘No, he came in to lunch on Saturday. Alone. That was just like usual.’

  Swilley lost interest. Serhati seemed like a dead end. She wound up the interview with questions about the previous afternoon. He was not much help. The restaurant closed between three and seven and he and his wife and all his staff had gone home as they usually did between sessions. He hadn’t noticed anyone going to Mr Bygod’s door during the hours he was here, but then he wouldn’t notice when he was working. People passed by all the time, and he couldn’t see Bygod’s door unless he stood right by the window, which he never did.

  ‘If you think of anything that might help us, please get in touch,’ Swilley said, giving him a card, and he hurried to open the door for her. As she passed him, going out, he touched her arm, briefly and shyly.

  ‘How did they do it? I mean, was it – bad?’ She froze him off with a look, and he said instead, humbly, ‘I’m sorry. I only pray he didn’t suffer.’

  And, surprisingly for her, she took pity on him and said, ‘I think it was quick.’

  The cleaner’s name was Angela Kroll, and she called herself Mr Bygod’s housekeeper. She had had blood on her clothes, so they had been taken away and she had been given coveralls and slippers to wear until her husband could collect her and bring a new set. ‘But they’ve put her in the soft room and given her coffee,’ Atherton reported when they got back to the station.

  In Atherton’s view the soft room, which is what he called the interview suite where they took witnesses rather than suspects – people they didn’t want to intimidate – wasn’t any great shakes, but it was better than the bare rooms behind the front shop. It had carpet and upholstery and smelled of air freshener rather than feet and vomit.

  ‘Kroll is the German word for someone with curly hair,’ Atherton went on chattily as they trod up the stairs. ‘So what we have here is a curly-haired angel. You can’t get any purer than that.’

  ‘Try not to let it prejudice you against her.’

  Atherton smiled sinuously. ‘How well you know me.’ He looked keen, like a pointer in the presence of the guns. Slider could almost read his mind. Wouldn’t it be nice if the suspiciously named angel had done it? They’d find a motive, prove that the pattern of blood on her clothes could only have come from wielding the weapon, and – bingo! All done and dusted in time for tea.

  And of course, sometimes it happened that way. And often you got a confession to boot. People who had done someone to death in a moment of wildness, even where they had tried to cover up afterwards, were curiously eager to talk about it. And who was more willing to hear than your friendly plain-clothes police officer?

  Angela Kroll had nothing particularly angelic about her appearance, though glamour was not enhanced by the coveralls and a face scrubbed of make-up. She seemed to be in her late forties, a stringy, whippy sort of woman with large knuckly hands, a pale, indoors face, poor teeth, and no-coloured hair, straight and dragged back tight to her skull into a ponytail. It was hard to tell if she was upset about her employer’s death. Her eyes were jittery and her expression was guarded, but even the most innocent of civilians could get a little nutty in the presence of the police. Who didn’t have secrets in their lives? It was one of the ways you could spot the professional criminal under questioning: they were too much at ease.

  Slider started her off with the easy stuff to get her loosened up – name, address, marital status. She lived in Acton Vale with her husband, had three grown children, one still at home. Her husband was a builder. Kroll – no, it was a Polish name. She had a flat, North London accent and tended towards the terse and monosyllabic, but whether that was habitual, or nerves, Slider couldn’t tell.

  ‘How long have you worked for Mr Bygod?’ he asked.

  ‘Ten years,’ she said with a shrug that meant ‘more or less’.

  ‘And you’re his – housekeeper, you said?’

  ‘I clean, do his laundry, cook sometimes.’

  ‘You go in every day?’

  ‘Not weekends. Eight thirty till two, Monday to Friday.’

  ‘Is he married?’

  ‘Ex wife. Before my time.’ She seemed to read something into the question and bristled slightly. ‘I’m his housekeeper, that’s all. I know nothing about his private life.’

  ‘You seem to keep the house beautifully clean,’ Slider said soothingly.

  She shrugged again. ‘There’s not really enough work, but I stretch it out. He likes me to be there.’

  ‘To answer the door for him,’ Slider suggested.

  ‘When he’s out. If he’s in, he does it. With the entryphone. If it’s the postman or something, he sometimes asks me to go down.’

  ‘He didn’t like the stairs?’

  ‘He never went down to answer the door. He buzzed people up. Or not. Depending.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On whether he wanted to see them,’ she said witheringly.

  ‘Did he go out much?’

  ‘Sometimes. I don’t know what he did in the evening. I wasn’t there.’

  ‘But he had visitors while you were there.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ she objected.

  ‘You said he buzzed people up.’ He spread his hands. ‘I’m not trying to catch you out, Mrs Kroll. I’m just trying to establish a pattern of who might have come to the house.’

  ‘Yes, he had visitors. If you could call them that,’ she said with palpable disapproval.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘People came to him all the time for advice and help. Parasites.’ She sniffed. ‘Sucking the blood out of him.’

  ‘Did he give them money?’

  ‘No!’ she said scornfully. ‘Or not that I knew, anyway. But there’s such a thing as wearing a person to death. Everyone in trouble, everyone wanting something. Always at him. Never a bit of peace.’

  ‘You were fond of him,’ Slider suggested.

  ‘I worked for him,’ she said. ‘Fond doesn’t come into it. What do you want from me?’ She gave him a burning look.

  ‘You said they were wearing him to death?’

  She met his eyes for a fraction of a second then looked away, as if she regretted having given so much. ‘Figure of speech.’

  ‘Did you know any of them?’

  ‘I never saw them, except in passing.’

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘Every sort. Old, young, rich, poor. Looked like right low-life, some of ’em. Wouldn’t be surprised if some of ’em hadn’t been inside – done time. I kept out of the way. I didn’t want
to get sucked in.’ She sniffed again. ‘He didn’t seem to mind.’ She looked about, grabbed a tissue from the box on the table, and blew her nose thoroughly.

  Slider caught Atherton’s eye over her shoulder. All these people tramping in and out, and some of them low-life, if Mrs Kroll was to be believed, was going to make a real cat’s-tangle to unravel.

  ‘You say he was divorced. Did he have any female friends?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know anything about his private life.’ She hesitated.

  ‘Yes?’ Slider encouraged. ‘You thought of something.’

  ‘Sometimes a woman phoned for him, didn’t sound like one of the parasites. Posh voice, sort of low and sexy.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘She’d just say, “Tell him Nina rang.”’

  ‘So you answered the phone for him?’

  ‘When he was out,’ she said indignantly. ‘I told him to get an answer-machine, but he didn’t like stuff like that. Old-fashioned, he was.’

  ‘There was no computer in the house,’ Slider mentioned.

  ‘He didn’t want one, said all he needed was his typewriter. I said what about the Internet, but he said there were books for information, and people should talk face to face or on the phone. He said talking to machines would destroy society.’

  Slider remembered something Atherton had once quoted him, originally said by Albert Einstein: ‘I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will have a generation of idiots.’ You only had to see a group of youngsters out for the night, all texting away instead of talking to each other, to suspect old Al had a point.

  ‘If you ask me he was dotty,’ Mrs Kroll went on. She started to heat up. ‘Got no TV either. Who doesn’t have a telly? Got this old radio he carried round to listen to the test match and the news. God knows what he did in the evenings.’

  Slider wondered too. Reading, or gadding about? ‘Was he a well man, would you say?’

  ‘Seemed all right. He never complained.’

  ‘He could get about all right? Or was he frail?’

  ‘Frail?’ she said derisively. ‘He wasn’t that old.’

  He saw Atherton make a gesture, and asked, ‘Was he hard of hearing?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Look, he may have been getting on, and he may have been weird about computers and such, but there was nothing wrong with him as far as I know.’ She stirred restively. ‘Is my old man here yet? I want to go home. I can’t sit about here all day talking to you. I’ve got stuff to do, you know.’

  ‘They’ll ring up to us when your husband arrives,’ Slider said soothingly. ‘Just tell me what your usual routine was. You arrived at eight every morning?’ He said the wrong time deliberately so she would have to correct him. It would get her going.

  ‘Half past,’ she said promptly. ‘I’d clear up the kitchen from his breakfast, and the night before if he’d cooked for himself. He went out to eat a lot, but he liked cooking as well.’

  ‘So you’d know from the dirty dishes if he’d had people in.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said sulkily.

  ‘Go on. You cleaned the house?’

  ‘Hoovered, dusted, polished. Made the bed. Bathroom. Put his laundry in the machine and ironed the dry stuff. Cooked him lunch sometimes if he wasn’t going out. Left at two sharp. That was it. Like I said, there wasn’t that much work – you don’t really need to clean a house every day – but he wanted me to be there.’

  ‘Even when he wasn’t there? When he went out?’

  ‘That was when I got the chance to clean his study properly. When he was in, he always sat in there. I cleaned round him, but it’s not the same, and if I was Hoovering and the phone rang I’d have to stop. Which it did, a lot.’

  ‘And if visitors came?’

  ‘I’d leave the room. Keep out of the way.’

  ‘That must have been annoying for you,’ Slider said kindly, ‘when you wanted to get on.’

  She shrugged. ‘Every job’s got its drawbacks.’

  ‘He was a wealthy man, I suppose?’ he slipped in casually.

  But she looked wary. ‘I never asked.’

  ‘Did he keep any valuables around the house?’

  ‘What you asking that for?’ she said sharply. The burn was back. ‘Mr Bygod trusted me, he left me alone in the house many’s the time. I was with him ten years.’

  Slider laid calm over the troubled water. ‘I’m just thinking that if word had got round that there were valuables in the house – and you said some of the visitors were “low-lifes”, maybe ex-cons …’

  ‘Oh,’ she said warily, unsure whether to believe him. ‘Well, he didn’t have anything like that as far as I know. Just his knick-knacks, his books, his crappy old pictures and such. Who’d steal them?’

  ‘Did he have a safe?’

  ‘Only that little one in the study.’

  ‘I noticed the key was in it.’

  ‘He never locked it. He said it was just to keep documents safe if there was a fire. There was no money in it or anything.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  She looked affronted again. ‘He told me. Anyway, he had it open most of the time when I’ve been in there, and I could see. Just papers, that’s all.’

  The phone rang. Atherton answered it, and nodded to Slider over her shoulder.

  ‘Your husband’s arrived,’ Slider said.

  She scowled. ‘And he’ll be in a temper, getting called from work.’ Something occurred to her. ‘And I suppose I’ve got to tell him I’ve lost my job as well.’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Slider said.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she muttered below her breath. ‘As if I didn’t have enough to put up with.’ Aloud, she said, ‘Can I go now, then?’

  ‘Just a few more questions. This morning, when you went in – you have a key, I suppose?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said.

  ‘You went upstairs, and into—?’

  ‘The kitchen first. I go in there, take my coat off, put the kettle on, before I go and see him.’

  ‘Did you call out to him?’

  ‘Top of the stairs. “It’s only me,” I said, though who else it’d be I don’t know.’

  ‘Were you surprised he didn’t answer you?’

  ‘Not really. I thought he was reading or something.’

  ‘What did you see in the kitchen?’

  ‘Nothing. It was all tidy.’

  ‘No dirty dishes.’

  ‘He went out for lunch, Tuesday. Went off about half eleven, wasn’t back before I left.’

  ‘No supper dishes? So he didn’t eat in, in the evening?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘And no breakfast things.’

  ‘Well, there wouldn’t be, would there? He was dead.’

  ‘Didn’t it surprise you? There were usually breakfast things for you to wash up.’

  The weary look again. ‘I didn’t think about it. One less thing for me to do, that’s all. I just went along to his study to see if he wanted anything and—’ She stopped, her face tight and hard, which might have been the attempt to control emotion. But what emotion?

  ‘Was the study door open or closed?’

  ‘Open. It always was, unless he was having a meeting in there and wanted to be private.’

  ‘So you saw him from the door.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Why did you go over to him?’

  She bridled. ‘To see if he was dead, what d’you think? He might’ve still been alive, then I’d’ve called the ambulance. I shook his shoulder and called him, tried to lift his head up, but it was no good.’

  ‘Don’t you know you aren’t supposed to move anything at a crime scene?’

  ‘I said, he might’ve been alive!’ she said angrily. ‘God Almighty!’ She stood up. ‘Can I go now? Or are you accusing me of something?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Slider said, standing up too. Her face was red, and she was bristling. He nodded to Atherton, who wen
t to open the door. As she reached it, he said, ‘By the way, do you wear rubber gloves while you’re cleaning?’

  She only turned at the neck, and the single eye he could see glittered. ‘What you asking that for?’

  ‘Answer the question, please.’

  ‘For doing the bathroom, and washing up,’ she said, as if trying to work out what he wanted.

  ‘Not otherwise?’

  ‘Why you asking?’

  ‘We’ll need to eliminate your fingerprints from among any we find in the house,’ he said smoothly. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, with a faintly baffled look. Outside, Lawrence, one of the uniformed policewomen, was just arriving to escort her out. Slider called Atherton back quickly. ‘Have a look at the husband,’ he murmured. ‘And get a background search started on him. And the rest of the family.’

  Atherton nodded and went away.

  Mrs Kroll had something to hide, Slider was sure of it, but it was a wearisome fact that civilians habitually tried to hide things that were nothing to do with the case they were being questioned about. If her husband or son were dodgy in some way, that could account for her wariness.

  Or she might know more about Bygod’s death than she was going to let on without official encouragement.

  But she had not shed a tear for him, despite the ten years.

  THREE

  Huddled Masses

  ‘We’ve got a para in the Standard,’ Norma said, sitting on a desk swinging her lovely legs. One of the uniforms at the back of the room followed the movement with his eyes like a pendulum. ‘Local hero murdered. The man who helped everyone, blah blah. “Mr Bygod was well-known locally for giving help and advice to all who needed it.”’

  ‘Right little boy scout, wasn’t he?’ McLaren said, unpeeling the end of a Mars Bar. ‘That’s what you get for helping people.’