Blood Sinister

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Obviously. She thinks he did it, throws herself into the breach.’

  ‘Does a wife leap to the conclusion that her husband’s a murderer just like that?’ Slider queried. ‘And if so, why would she defend him?’

  ‘Fear,’ Swilley said. ‘She might be next.’

  ‘Did she strike you as fearful?’

  ‘Maybe. She didn’t seem at ease, anyway.’

  Slider moved on. ‘How are you getting on with checking Prentiss’s movements after he left the flat?’ he asked Hollis.

  ‘Not well,’ Hollis said. ‘I can’t get near Giles Freeman. He’s got more wrapping round him than an After Eight. The best I’ve managed is his press officer – and he’s cagey as hell. Can’t say, no comment, have to check on that. Everyone’s going to “get back to me” and no-one ever gets.’

  ‘Keep trying,’ Slider said. ‘Freeman’s got to come across, if he doesn’t want a slap for obstruction.’

  ‘Can you slap a Secretary of State?’ Atherton asked doubtfully, eyeing his mild-looking boss in his ready-made suit. In the power-dressing league he packed all the force of a digital watch battery.

  ‘I can slap anyone,’ he said heroically. ‘But this whole Prentiss business is a mess. The trouble is, we know he was there and he admits he was there, but there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have been there. It doesn’t make him the murderer, all his lies notwithstanding.’

  ‘We’ve got the finger-mark on the whisky glass and the semen,’ Hollis said.

  ‘He’s covered himself for the finger-mark,’ Slider pointed out. ‘If the semen comes back his we might have a different picture. But in the meantime, I think we’ll have to at least entertain the notion that Prentiss didn’t kill her. Give it tea and biscuits, if not a bed for the night. So what else have we got?’

  ‘I’d go for Wordley,’ McLaren said. ‘Okay, maybe she done him a good turn, but he’s got form as long as your arm.’

  ‘He’s got no form on sex crime,’ Mackay demurred.

  ‘There’s always a first time,’ McLaren said. ‘If you ask me he’s an evil psychotic bastard who’d kill anyone without a second thought, just for looking at him sideways.’

  Swilley shook her head. ‘You’re a prat, Maurice. Would an evil psychotic bastard who raped and strangled a woman who’d done him a good turn bother to use a condom, and then throw it tidily down the lav?’

  ‘And not check it had been flushed away properly?’ Atherton added.

  ‘Why not?’ McLaren defended his brainchild. ‘Barmy is barmy. You can’t account for nutters.’

  ‘By all means look into him,’ Slider said generously. ‘Find out where he was and how he felt about Agnew.’

  ‘Maybe he despised her, and hated being done good to,’ Atherton said. ‘I know I would. But would she have cooked him a nice supper?’

  ‘We don’t know the diner was the killer,’ Swilley said, and sighed. ‘In fact, if Prentiss is telling the truth about seeing her alive at eight, he couldn’t have been.’

  ‘Unless the supper was eaten after Prentiss left,’ said Atherton. ‘People do eat later in the evening in some strata of society,’ he informed her kindly. She stuck her tongue out at him.

  ‘Or Prentiss et it,’ said McLaren. ‘Or there was another visitor we don’t know about.’

  ‘The meal is a blasted nuisance,’ Hollis said.

  ‘And probably not even important,’ Atherton concluded. ‘Can chicken be a red herring?’

  ‘Thank you, we won’t go down that byway,’ Slider said hastily. ‘What else?’

  ‘Boss, I’m still not happy about Peter Medmenham,’ Swilley said. ‘There’s something not right about his story. I think there’s something he’s not telling us.’

  ‘There’s probably a lot he’s not telling us. What the average citizen doesn’t tell us would make the Internet sag. But follow him up,’ Slider said. ‘Until we get confirmation on Prentiss one way or the other, there’s no need to stop at him. In fact, it seems to me the only way forward is to find out exactly what was going on, that day at the flat and in Agnew’s life in general. Let’s get some street witness, find out if anyone was seen entering or leaving. Talk to her work colleagues – find out what she was involved in recently. Go through her papers, see if anything shows up missing. And, of course, check the pedigree of everything we’ve been told so far. Test every statement, follow every lead—’

  ‘You sound like a chorus from The Sound of Music,’ Atherton complained. ‘It’s still Prentiss for me.’

  ‘Even if it is,’ Slider said, ‘I’d like at least to know why he did it.’

  Slider came out of the washroom and bumped into Norma.

  ‘Oh – I was just looking for you, boss.’

  ‘Haven’t you gone home?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ she said gravely. She turned and fell in with him as he walked back towards the office. ‘I’ve managed to get hold of Medmenham’s dear old white-haired mum, and guess what?’

  ‘He didn’t go down there on Thursday night?’

  ‘In one! And she hasn’t been ill – fit as a fiddle, she said. Sounded quite indignant about it. Must have made a mistake, she said. Never had a day’s illness in my life, young woman, all that sort of thing. And she wasn’t expecting him, either. He turned up about eleven on Friday morning and said he wanted to take her out to lunch. So she drove them both into Chelmsford and they had lunch in a restaurant and she saw him off on the train.’

  ‘That’s a long way for him to go just for one meal,’ Slider said.

  ‘She said, “He’s such a good son, always thinking of little treats for me.” Said it before I even asked.’

  ‘Ah! So she thought it was odd, too.’

  ‘I’d guess she did. Also, I checked with the Ham and Ful and Martin, the editor, said the notion of having a day off doesn’t apply to Medmenham because although he’s a regular he’s a freelance, so he can choose his own hours.’

  ‘What would we do without bad liars?’ Slider smiled. ‘So what, I wonder, was he up to on Thursday night? Easiest way to find out is to ask him, I suppose.’

  Norma looked serious. ‘If he killed Agnew, sir, he’s a dangerous man.’

  ‘Is that you worrying about me, WDC Swilley?’

  ‘Somebody’s got to, and Jim’s gone home.’

  ‘I’m not sure I like that juxtaposition,’ Slider said. He walked with her through the CID room, passing her desk on the way to his office. There was a thick file on it. ‘What’s this?’

  She blushed. ‘Oh, I was passing the time between phone calls looking at menus. I still haven’t sorted the caterers out.’

  The file, he saw, was neatly labelled ‘Wedding’ in Swilley’s firm black capitals; and reading no unwillingness in her posture, he opened it and found it full of orderly paperwork, everything from correspondence with the organist over the choice of music to comparative quotations for marquees.

  ‘You’re going about it like a military campaign,’ he said. For some reason he found that unbearably touching.

  ‘I don’t know any other way,’ she said, and for a moment her voice was uncertain, and her look as she met Slider’s was horribly vulnerable. ‘Tony laughs at me, but – you have to be organised about things, don’t you?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said, feeling like Steve Martin. ‘It’s going to be the end of an era, you know, you getting married.’ Expect earthquakes, comets, two-headed calves, he thought; the very globe would gape in wonder – but it didn’t seem quite polite to say so. ‘So, is it all coming together all right?’

  ‘I wish!’ She regained her old ferocity. ‘I hate caterers! They start off telling you you can have anything you want, but they’ve got three standard menus, and you’re going to end up with one of them. Whatever you say, there’s a problem with it, or it’s not advisable and, blow me, there’s the standard menu back under your nose. It’s like Alice Through The Looking Glass. As fast as you walk out the door, you find yourself walking back in through
it.’

  ‘So that’s why food at weddings always tastes the same,’ Slider marvelled. ‘Those caterer’s prawns, exactly like newborn baby mice. The rubber chicken.’

  ‘I said no chicken,’ Norma gnashed. ‘I said duck. I swear we agreed on duck. And when the confirmation arrived, it was down as chicken. What do you do?’

  ‘Keep fighting,’ Slider said. ‘It’s your wedding, not theirs. But shouldn’t your parents be doing all this?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, at my age? Anyway, my parents are dead.’

  ‘What about Tony’s?’ She made a face. ‘Don’t you like them?’

  ‘Oh, they’re very nice. All his family are terribly nice – but—’

  ‘Dull?’

  ‘Dull?’ It burst from her. ‘They’re like dead people without the rouge! Boss, d’you think – d’you think I’m doing the right thing?’

  Slider spread his hands. ‘How can I answer that? Look, you love Tony, don’t you? Well, that’s the only important thing. Weddings are something you do for the sake of other people. Weddings are hell, but it doesn’t mean the marriage isn’t right.’

  She opened her eyes wide. ‘Gosh, that sounded so brill! Did you just think of it?’

  ‘It was pretty good, wasn’t it?’ Slider said modestly. ‘Just hang in there, Norma. We’re all behind you.’

  ‘Some of you are more help than others,’ Norma said, closing the file with a sigh. ‘I asked Jim if he’d help me choose the wines, seeing he’s such a wine buff. He said I’d need a Mâcon with the chicken. I was writing it down, when he said, “Yeah, I’ve watched you, you’re a messy eater.”’

  ‘Atherton’s a pain in the khyber sometimes,’ Slider agreed. He patted her shoulder and headed for his office, but she called him back.

  ‘Boss?’ He turned, to encounter the unfamiliar vulnerable Norma again, lurking in those usually marble eyes. ‘I don’t suppose – I mean – are you doing anything on the sixth?’

  He turned fully, surprised. ‘Are you inviting me to your wedding? I thought you didn’t want any of us there?’

  ‘I don’t want the others. They laugh at me.’

  ‘They don’t.’

  ‘All right, not laugh, exactly, but—’ She frowned, searching for the words. ‘They don’t think of me as a real person at all. I’m just old Norma Stits – like a cartoon character.’

  Slider knew, uncomfortably, how far this was true. ‘They’re a bit scared of you, that’s all’

  ‘I didn’t ask them to be scared of me,’ she said fiercely. ‘Why can’t they just accept me? I accept them, I don’t judge them by their revolting bodies and nasty habits. But to them I’m a freak. Well, I won’t have them at my wedding, sneering and sniggering.’ Slider couldn’t think of anything to say, and in his silence her ferocity drained away. She became diffident. ‘Anyway, I know it’s short notice and everything, but I wondered if you’d – if you’d give me away?’

  He was so surprised he didn’t answer at once, and she hurried on, blushing painfully.

  ‘I mean, say no if you think it’s a cheek to ask, but my Dad’s dead and the nearest thing I’ve got is a cousin I’ve never liked, who’s got dandruff and BO and terrible teeth. I don’t want him. Tony’s Dad’s offered, but that doesn’t seem right to me. It ought to be someone of mine. And you – well – you’re practically like family. In a sort of way. I mean …’

  He had to say something to check this painful embarrassment. ‘I always knew there was some reason you never made a pass at me,’ he said, smiling slowly. ‘I assumed it was respect for my rank, but now I see it’s because you thought of me as a different generation.’ Now she smiled too, shyly. ‘I’d be honoured to do it. Thank you for asking me.’

  ‘Thank you, boss,’ she said, and, hugely daring, darted a kiss at his cheek.

  ‘And now you’d better go home,’ he said, mock-sternly, because someone had to get them out of this before they both burst into tears.

  ‘Right, boss.’ She sat abruptly at her desk and bent her head, shuffling her papers together in a terminal sort of way.

  Slider marched himself off into his office.

  Mâcon, indeed!

  CHAPTER SIX

  Things can only get bitter

  Peter Medmenham opened the door to Slider and said without a great deal of surprise, ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  ‘You know why I’m here?’ Slider said sternly.

  ‘Yes. My mother rang me.’ He managed to scrape up a bit of indignation. ‘You had no right to call her without my permission.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, of course we did,’ Slider said, and Medmenham’s balloon collapsed. ‘And we wouldn’t have had to bother her if you hadn’t lied to us in the first place.’

  Now he only looked miserable. ‘You’d better come in,’ he sighed, and stepped back.

  Medmenham’s flat was a very different affair from either of the other two. A great deal of money and thought had obviously gone into it. The narrow passageway beyond the front door ought, Slider knew from other houses like this, to have been dark and damp-smelling. In fact it was brightly lit from sunken halogen lamps in the ceiling and smelled faintly of pot-pourri. The walls were white, and the single piece of furniture in view was a delicate mahogany side table of breathtaking simplicity and elegance – Georgian, Slider thought – on which stood a narrow glass vase containing a single scarlet gerbera, spiky and stunning against the white wall.

  Medmenham led the way past two closed doors – bedroom and bathroom, presumably – to the room at the back. This was the living room, with the kitchen beyond in a new glass-roofed extension, divided from the sitting-room, American style, only by a counter. The kitchen was blisteringly modern, all pale ash and chrome, with a wicker-fronted drawer stack, a lot of expensive stainless-steel equipment on overhead racks, and a huge stone jar filled with dried rushes on the floor by the door.

  Everything was tidy and put away, except that on the counter stood a large Gordon’s bottle and a heavy-bottomed cut-crystal glass, and a small chopping-board with half a lemon and a short knife lying on it.

  The sitting-room was decorated in the sort of spare, minimalist style that depended on a very high quality of workmanship to make it succeed. Again the walls were white, and sported a series of black-and-white eighteenth-century political cartoons in huge white mounts and thin gold frames. The polished floorboards were covered in the centre with a large square carpet, very thick and blackberry purple. There was an enormous sofa covered in coarse white material, with lavender-coloured scatter cushions, and a heavy glass coffee table on which stood a single purple orchid in another tall skinny glass. The only other chair was an expensive-looking leather recliner which faced the state-of-the-art television set in the corner. Behind the TV was a cabinet which seemed to have been specially designed to house four video recorders – for his job as reviewer, Slider supposed. Evidently he didn’t watch Channel 5 – but then, who did?

  ‘You’ve really put some work into your flat, haven’t you?’ Slider said in admiring tones.

  Medmenham seemed pleased. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘You obviously have very good taste,’ Slider said. ‘But I wonder you should do so much when you don’t own it. I mean, I suppose you must have had to pay for all the building work yourself?’

  ‘Goodness, you don’t think Sborksi would ever put his hand in his pocket? I know,’ he said, looking round, ‘it’s probably a bit foolish of me, but the rent is so low, and I’m comfortable here, and my surroundings are so important to me. Things grate, don’t you find, if they’re not just so? And I never intended to move again, so what did it matter?’

  ‘You never intended – does that mean you intend now?’

  Medmenham waved him graciously to the sofa, and stood facing him, clasping his hands together as though he were going to recite. ‘I don’t know. All this business – poor Phoebe – it’s so unsettling. I wonder if I’ll be able to bear it here now, thinking of her being – you know – up t
here.’ He rolled his eyes at the ceiling. ‘And, of course, not having her there to talk to will make such a difference. We always planned to grow old together.’

  The lighting in the room came from artfully placed lamps and was designed to be flattering, but even so Slider could see the age and weariness that had come to the plump face. Medmenham had bags under his eyes that even a BA stewardess would have rejected as cabin luggage.

  ‘You were very fond of her?’ Slider suggested.

  ‘I thought I’d made that clear,’ said Medmenham.

  ‘I thought you’d made a lot of things clear, until it turned out you’d been lying,’ Slider said sternly.

  He made a fluttery movement of his hands. ‘Oh, Lord, don’t make a big thing of it! I’m not up to it. I can’t tell you what a state I’ve been in these last few days! Look, would you like a snort? Frankly, I’m not going to get through the next half hour without a drinkette. Gin and ton?’

  Slider accepted, and having handed him a gin and tonic very nearly large enough to wash in, Medmenham took his own replenished glass and retired to the leather recliner, where he tucked one foot under him girlishly, took a good mouthful, swallowed, and shuddered.

  ‘That’s better! Not’, he added firmly, ‘that I want you to think I’m a boozer. Normally it’s moderation in all things, but things aren’t normal, are they? And frankly, dear, it’s ruinous to the complexion. Oh, I know, don’t look! I must look shocking. I’ve been weeping like a waterfall, and no sleep; but I just haven’t had the heart to put any slap on. I’ve said to Phoebe many a time, you and I just can’t go on drinking at our age the way we used to – well, you know what journalists are like, first cousin to a bottomless pit as far as alcohol’s concerned; but when you’re young you burn it off, don’t you? And just lately darling Feeb’s been hitting the White Horse a bit hard. I mean, I said, you’re not Lester Piggott, darling! But the past few weeks it’s been sip, sip, sip like a dowager. So depressing! Not that she can’t hold it. Always a perfect gentleman. But you can’t punish yourself like that and get away with it for ever.’