Blood Sinister

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Could you see that from down here?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Well, sir,’ the old man said, leaning forward and hitching again at his trousers in his eagerness – they were practically up to his knees now – ‘I can’t see the road, that’s true, because of the angle and the cars, but I can see the door of the ’ouse opposite, on account of it’s up the steps. And I see her go up to the door and go in. Try for yourself,’ he added on a happy thought.

  Slider went to the window. The area wall straight ahead hid the road but, yes, he could see two thirds of Phoebe Agnew’s front door. Probably the old man, given his lack of height, would only see half of it, but it would be enough to see the head and shoulders of a person going in.

  ‘Can you say more exactly what time that was?’

  ‘Well, sir, no,’ Mr Singer said regretfully. ‘Not exactly. But near as I can say it would a’ bin between ten to and five to. It wasn’t long afore the wireless give the time at nine o’clock, and I ’as to turn over.’

  ‘You didn’t see the woman come out?’

  ‘No, sir. I left the winder, see, when I turned over for the news hour, and then I never went back. But she never come out afore nine.’

  Slider nodded. ‘Well, that’s very helpful, Mr Singer, thank you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Glad to ’elp.’

  ‘Now, can you describe the woman to me?’

  He shook his head sadly. ‘I couldn’t see her face – too far away, and she ’ad ’er back to me most o’ the time. But I’d say she was young. Slim. Short ’air—’

  ‘Light or dark?’

  ‘Dark,’ he said certainly. ‘She ’ad trowsis on, but not them jeans, dark ones. And proper shoes, not them trainers. She looked like a lady,’ he added. ‘Y’know what I mean? Not one o’ these modern girls, all bits an’ pieces, hair like a rat’s nest an’ no manners.’

  Slider nodded. ‘I think I know what you mean.’

  ‘An’ she stood still as a soldier. I’ll never forget that.’

  ‘One last thing, Mr Singer – do you live here alone?’

  ‘Yes, I do, sir, since the wife went. Passed on nearly ten year ago. I manage all right but—’ He looked round as if suddenly struck by his surroundings, and gave a little, deprecating smile. ‘I dunno what she’d think o’ the way I keep the place. But it’s not in a man’s nacher to be tidy, is it, sir? That’s what I reckon. Wimmin are nachrally tidy. Looking after us, an’ tidyin’ up, it’s in their make-up. That’s why they’re no good at inventin’ things. There wouldn’t be no jet engines nor motor cars nor anythink if it was left to them, ’cos they only see what’s in front of their eyes, an’ as soon as a man makes a mess, they wanna tidy it up. But you can’t make somethink without makin’ a mess, now can you? It ain’t reasonable. That’s why you never get no wimmin inventors.’

  ‘You could be right,’ Slider said. He made a firm gesture of leaving. The melancholy chill was creeping into his bones.

  ‘Well, that’s what I think, anyway,’ Mr Singer said. He saw Slider to the door. ‘I ’ope you get him, sir.’

  ‘I hope so too. You’ve been a great help, thank you,’ Slider said.

  As he climbed the steps, up out of the Stygian cave and into the sunlit uplands of normal street level, he was followed by a heartfelt and slightly wistful, ‘Thank you sir, very much.’

  He moved away down the street a little, aware that he would be watched as long as he was in sight. He noticed that, as in many streets of this vintage, the street lights were staggered on alternate sides of the road. There was one almost right outside the Agnew house, which meant that across the road, outside Mr Singer’s, there was none. Someone standing at the top of Mr Singer’s steps would have been in comparative darkness, watching a door in comparative light.

  Maria Colehern’s flat had an intercom at the street door. When she answered, he asked for Josh Prentiss. ‘Is he staying with you, by any chance?’

  ‘If you’re the press,’ she answered snappily, ‘you can go away. I’m giving no more statements.’

  ‘It’s not the press, it’s the police. I’m Detective Inspector Slider, and I want a quick word with Josh Prentiss. Is he with you? I know he’s not at home or in his office.’

  There was a long pause, as if consultation was going on, and then her voice came back. ‘All right, come up.’ The release buzzed violently.

  The building was of luxury flats, built in the thirties and now extremely expensive. Either Maria Colehern’s job was more important than he had realised, or she was independently wealthy. As he stood outside her glossy door in the cream-painted hall on the thick green carpet, the door to the next flat silently opened four inches and a face inspected him through the gap. When he turned his head towards it, the door closed two of the inches, but the inspection went on. This, presumably, was the neighbour who vouched for Prentiss’s arrival.

  Maria Colehern opened her door and looked quickly past him, down the corridor. ‘Oh, you are alone,’ she said. ‘I thought it might be a trick.’

  She was extremely attractive: slim, with a sharp-featured, high-cheekboned face, and very glossy dark hair in a bouncy bob held off her face with an Alice band. She was wearing a short mulberry skirt over navy opaque tights, and a skin-tight black Lycra top under an enormous mauve mohair sweater with the sleeves turned up. Her legs were superb, her hands long and beautifully manicured, her make-up subtle and perfect. She looked both very feminine and very capable. She also looked very cross.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ Slider said in his mildest manner, with a smile that would have disarmed an ICBM. ‘It won’t take long.’

  ‘We’ve been badgered to death,’ she said shortly, and then, turning towards her invisible neighbour, said loudly, ‘All right, Mrs Romescu, thank you, there’s nothing to see.’ The neighbour’s door snapped to. ‘Come in,’ she said to Slider.

  Inside it was amazingly spacious, with a huge hall and glimpses through open doors of large airy rooms furnished with antiques. The air was warm and dry, and smelled of furniture polish, cedar, Miss Colehern’s perfume (Este´e Lauder, he thought) and, at a level almost below detection, that ghost-memory of chicken soup with barley that haunts all pre-war service flats, as though the shades of a hundred Jewish Mammas live in the air-conditioning vents, sighing over modern eating habits.

  Maria Colehern led the way into a drawing-room with a parquet floor partly covered with a thick pink and cream Chinese rug and what looked like French Empire furniture. Slider itched to examine the fabulous bronze group on the marble mantelpiece and the watercolours on the walls, but Miss Colehern had turned in the middle of the carpet to face him with the air of one who was not going to ask him to sit down.

  ‘What is it you want?’ she asked. ‘I’m not sure if he’ll speak to you – or even if he should, without a solicitor. I’m sorry to sound inhospitable, but our lives have been turned upside down, and I really don’t think—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s not more trouble. I just want a piece of information.’

  Her lovely lips parted for more objections when Prentiss came in behind Slider. ‘Josh, I was just saying I think you ought to have Philip here if—’

  ‘It’s all right, I’ll talk to him,’ Prentiss said. ‘It’s the quickest way to get rid of him.’

  Slider turned. It was a very different Josh Prentiss from the bedchamber ace he had first met: this one had crashed and burned and his propeller was six feet into the tarmac. He was unkempt, deeply haggard, and smelled of last night’s drink, which he must have taken in plenty.

  Prentiss must have read his own appearance in Slider’s eyes because a bitter look came over his face. ‘I didn’t think you’d have the nerve to turn up again,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you done enough? You’ve already destroyed my life – what more do you want? My political career’s over, my firm’s had orders cancelled, my wife’s thrown me out, my chances of the Oscar are now zilch, and last night a Hollywood producer turned down a d
esign he was crazy about a week ago. I’ve become untouchable, and it’s all your fault.’

  ‘Your wife’s thrown you out?’ Slider said, picking the bit that interested him.

  ‘She thinks I’m a murderer,’ he sneered. ‘I wonder how she got that impression?’

  ‘Did she actually say so – that she thinks you killed Phoebe Agnew?’

  ‘Well, let me see. She looks at me with horror, shrinks away and screams “Don’t touch me”, and says she can’t live under the same roof with me any more. What do you think that means?’ Despite his ironic delivery, Slider could see the genuine distress underneath.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s been an upsetting experience for everyone. But there are one or two things I need to confirm with you.’ He went on quickly before any more objections could be voiced. ‘You told me that Phoebe Agnew seemed to be worried about something that last day. Are you sure she didn’t tell you anything about what was on her mind?’

  ‘What’s this, a new line you’re pursuing? You’ve really convinced yourself I didn’t do it?’

  ‘I don’t think you did it,’ Slider said patiently. ‘And if you’d been completely frank and honest with me from the beginning, I probably never would have. Now please, will you answer the question?’

  ‘No, she didn’t tell me. She said she wished she could but she couldn’t.’

  ‘I wonder why she couldn’t tell you? Was there any area of her life she had previously kept secret from you? Do you remember coming up against a barrier like that at any point in your past friendship?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We talked about everything – or at least, I thought we did. She wasn’t a reticent person. She had no taboos.’

  ‘Have you any idea what she was working on recently? We’ve had a hint that she had a big project, something important and possibly dangerous.’

  He frowned. ‘Apart from her regular stuff for the papers, you mean? No, the only thing I knew was that she’d been working on a book.’

  ‘A novel?’

  ‘Of course not. A biography. I don’t know whose, but it would be someone political, no doubt. But she’d been writing that for – oh, six months at least. I don’t think you could call that important, except to her, and I don’t see how it could be dangerous.’

  ‘No,’ Slider agreed. ‘I know she was never married, but did she ever have a—’ Slider fished around for the right words. ‘Was there a “one great love of her life”, do you know? A major romantic entanglement?’

  ‘No,’ Prentiss said. ‘Not that I ever heard about. She was the most unsentimental person I ever met. She liked love affairs – the sex part – but they never seemed to touch her emotionally. I never knew her to be “in love” in that way. Certainly she never mentioned anyone. Why do you ask?’

  ‘It’s the meal, you see,’ Slider said. ‘She cooked a two-course meal for someone, and you said it was ludicrous to suppose she would have cooked it for you. So who did she do it for?’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone she’d cook for,’ he said blankly. ‘She’d take a bullet for you if you were her friend, but she hated cooking.’

  ‘Do you have a key to her flat?’

  Slider slipped the question in and Prentiss seemed about to answer automatically and in the negative, when he thought of something and paused.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said reluctantly, ‘I have got one.’ He was actually blushing, and Maria Colehern looked at him in concern. ‘But I didn’t use it that day.’

  ‘Josh, I really think you ought to call Philip,’ Miss Colehern began urgently.

  Slider shook his head at her. ‘It’s all right. I really don’t think he did it. But I can see’, he went on, to Prentiss, ‘that it might have looked incriminating if you’d mentioned it before.’

  ‘I wasn’t hiding the fact,’ Prentiss protested. ‘I’d just forgotten about it. Phoebe gave it to me ages ago, when she was going abroad for a couple of weeks and I thought I might like to use her flat while she was away.’ His eyes pleaded, and Slider understood that he had wanted to take a woman there, which was not a thing to mention in front of Maria. ‘But I’d completely forgotten I had it. And I didn’t use it that day.’

  ‘Where is the key now?’

  ‘At home, I suppose,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a key rack in the kitchen behind the door with all the spare keys on it, and I hung it on there. I haven’t touched it since.’

  ‘Did your wife know whose key it was?’

  ‘I don’t know. She may have. It might have come up in conversation, or Phoebe might have mentioned it. I really don’t know. It wouldn’t matter, anyway. We have neighbours’ keys and friends’ keys and the children’s. It would have been quite natural to have Phoebe’s.’

  ‘Your wife used to be an actress, I know, but was she ever a dancer?’ he asked next.

  Prentiss seemed puzzled by the new direction. ‘She did ballet as a child, but that’s all. She was never a professional dancer, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘So, this old injury to her back – where did that come from?’

  ‘Old injury—’ he frowned, and then his face cleared. ‘Oh, you mean this present trouble she’s got? It’s just a pulled muscle, that’s all. She slipped coming down the stairs and twisted it saving herself.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Friday morning,’ Prentiss said.

  ‘Did you see it happen?’

  ‘No, it was while I was at work. Why?’

  ‘So when you went to work on Friday morning she was quite all right? No backache?’

  ‘No. Well,’ he added, ‘she was still in bed when I left for work, but when I got home on Friday evening she was hobbling around in agony and she told me then that she’d done it that morning. Why are you asking? What’s this about?’

  Slider shook his head, pushing the question away. ‘There is one last thing I want to ask you, and then I’ll take myself out of your hair.’ He looked up and found Maria Colehern’s eyes on him, intent and troubled. She was an intelligent girl, and she seemed to be running somewhat ahead of her seedy old mate with his booze-sodden synapses. Slider realised that he needed to get her out of the way. What Prentiss chose to tell her afterwards would be his affair. ‘I’d like to ask you this one question in private, if you don’t mind,’ he said to Prentiss. ‘If Miss Colehern would be so kind as to excuse us?’

  She didn’t like it, but since Prentiss didn’t object, she could only brand him with a searingly significant look, and leave the room. When they were alone, Slider said to Prentiss, ‘I have to ask you this again, and I want you to be completely honest with me. I can’t impress on you how important it is that you tell me the truth. Did you have sex with Phoebe Agnew that Thursday?’

  Prentiss looked annoyed. ‘No! How often do I have to say it?’

  ‘We found your semen in her.’

  ‘It wasn’t my semen. You made a mistake. I didn’t have sex with her.’

  ‘And that’s the truth? Please, it’s important.’

  ‘She and I didn’t have that sort of relationship. I only ever did it with her once, way back when we were students, at a post-finals party. One of those spur-of-the-moment things on a heap of coats in someone’s bedroom. I told her the next day how sorry I was, and that I’d never have done it if I hadn’t been extremely drunk – though she was no more sober herself. Anyway, that was thirty years ago, and we never did it again. I doubt whether she would even have remembered it – it’s certainly not something I ever think about. And that’s the truth. It was always Noni and me. How can I convince you?’ ‘I’m convinced. Thank you,’ said Slider unhappily.

  Norma was waiting for him outside the station, looking elegant in trousers and heeled boots and one of those loose, wrap-around overcoats that only tall women with good figures can wear. She climbed in beside him, her cold cheeks pink, bringing a whiff of Eau de Givenchy with her, and said, ‘Hi! Where are we going?’

  ‘To see Mrs Prentiss,’ Slider said. ‘Thanks for com
ing in.’

  ‘Pleasure. I’m only fretting myself to death over the wedding at home. Only a week to go.’ She hunched her shoulders. ‘So what does Mrs P know?’

  ‘More than she’s telling us, that’s for sure. I don’t understand it all yet.’ He remembered a line from a book – he couldn’t now remember which one – in which the author described a character as ‘standing as still as only a soldier or an actor can’. Slider knew that stillness. It had reminded Albert Singer of a soldier, but, ‘She was an actress,’ he said aloud. ‘It’s important to remember that.’

  ‘It is?’ said Norma.

  Slider didn’t hear her. He had doubted Peter Medmenham at first, thinking that you never knew when an actor stopped acting. And Medmenham thought Noni Prentiss a sound actress. ‘If I’m right, Mrs Prentiss has been playing a very long game indeed,’ he said.

  Norma caught the tone of his voice. ‘You don’t think she did it?’

  ‘It’s the same old question of who do you believe? She said Josh phoned and told her that Phoebe was dead, but he appeared not to know about it until we interviewed him. We believed her, so we thought he was lying. Then there was her remark about “the way the body was left”. If he didn’t divulge that little detail to her, how did she know it? And there’s the question of her bad back.’

  ‘The old dancing injury?’

  ‘Except that she’s never been a dancer – and Josh says she had no old injury. She told him she hurt it slipping down the stairs on Friday. But it occurred to me that most people who hurt their backs do it trying to lift something heavy.’

  Swilley was there. ‘Oh. But if she hurt it on Friday—?’

  ‘She was still in bed when he went to work on Friday morning. So it could have been already hurting – he wouldn’t know.’

  ‘And there’s the female finger-mark inside the flat,’ she remembered. ‘If she says she’s never been there, and it proves to be hers …’