Dear Departed

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘True,’ said Slider. ‘All right, you can do an evening visit as well. You’d better have some help.’ McLaren perked up no end at that, sat up straight and tried to look reliable. ‘See if one of the uniforms is willing. Plain clothes, of course.’ He thought. ‘Not Renker: he’d still look like a copper if he was stark naked. Willans has got his hands full. See if D’Arblay’s up for it. He’s a nice, confiding lad. People open up for him.’

  ‘Right-oh, guv.’

  Swilley spoke up. ‘There’s the tube station, boss. The killer might have made his getaway that way. We ought to have someone on there at the same time of the morning. And maybe some leaflets to hand out.’

  ‘Good thought. You can arrange that,’ said Slider. All right, anything to follow up in the statements so far?’ There were negatives all round. ‘Anything come in on the telephone last night?’

  ‘Just the usual attention-seekers and Daft Dorises,’ Hollis said. ‘Apparently there were strange lights in the sky over the park Tuesday night.’

  ‘There are strange lights in the sky over the park every night,’ Slider said. ‘It’s on the flight path to Heathrow.’

  Wingate Road, where the victim had lived, was just off the main road, but surprisingly was a little haven of quiet. It was a short street with a pub at one end, a nice, small, old-fashioned-looking hostelry called the Anchor. It was obvious from the state of the pub and the houses that the street had been gentrified. Everything was in a condition of cherished middle-class repair, and the parked cars were rust-free and mostly under three years old.

  The terraced houses dated from the 1850s, earlier than adjacent streets: two storeys plus semi-basement, square stuccoed fronts, the pitch of the roof hidden by a ruled-off parapet, the age given away only by the lovely proportion of the tall sash windows, each divided into nine small panes. At some point all the residents had been seized by a common urge to paint their stucco in a dusty pastel shade. The effect was delightful, like a tube of Refreshers.

  ‘That’s it,’ Atherton said, indicating a house of pale hyacinth blue. ‘Gloriosky! There’s a parking space. I wonder if one of these is her car?’

  ‘Didn’t you ask what’s-her-name – Marion Davies? You were there long enough.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have known, anyway,’ Atherton said. ‘Women never cease to amaze me. When you think of the hours they spend rabbiting to each other about shopping and hairdressers, and they don’t even know what sort of car each other drives.’

  Slider parked the car, pulled two pairs of gloves from the box in the dash compartment, and got out.

  ‘Did you bring the key?’ Atherton demanded.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ Slider said patiently.

  Inside the house, the long hall was cool and dim, a pleasure after the heat of the day, and it smelt beautifully clean, with an undertone of furniture polish. The staircase rose up straight ahead, the handrail a shining snake of wood, smoothed and rubbed to a rich patina by a hundred and fifty years of hands. Though the house looked small from the street, it went back a long way, and the ceilings were lofty, eleven or twelve feet high, Slider thought. It was a wonderful house, built with the fine proportions and attention to detail that were characteristic of the age: the skirtings, the panelled doors and brass door-furniture, the decorated cornices and ceiling roses, the handsome fireplaces.

  ‘Looks as if she made a decent living from this company of hers,’ Atherton said.

  ‘Or maybe she just had good taste,’ Slider said. There was nothing expensive about the furnishings, but the simplicity with which everything was arranged made it look good. The floors had been stripped and polished, and there were a few rugs here and there for comfort; modern furniture, plain walls and curtains, and no clutter.

  There were two rooms on this floor. At the front, with the bay window, was the drawing room. The sofa and two armchairs were in coarse off-white material, grouped round a heavy glass coffee-table. Against the walls were hi-fi equipment, television and video, and a range of bookshelves. There were no pictures on the walls, just two four-foot-by-two framed posters. One was a movie poster for Casablanca. ‘That must be worth a bit,’ Atherton remarked. The other advertised a Festival Hall concert by the London Symphony Orchestra, with a date from the 1950s. Boult and Curzon, Slider noticed. Frivolity was limited to a number of large plants in big floor pots, their leaves glossily polished. The room was so big it was a little too bare for Slider’s taste, but there was no denying it was stylish.

  The rear room was slightly smaller, square and fitted out as an office, with the usual equipment. Here, too, everything was neat, tidy, clean and dusted. There was a big engagements diary and a red address book on the desk, which Slider noted for removal; and a small pile of unopened mail. Postmarks suggested it was yesterday’s. Presumably, then, it had arrived before she had gone out for her morning jog. She had picked it up and put it in here to be looked at when she got back. But she never got back.

  ‘Everything in here will have to be gone through,’ Slider said, with a wave that included the filing cabinets and the contents of the in- and out-trays. ‘We need to know what sort of business she was doing, and with whom.’

  This floor of the house was slightly above ground level, and stairs at the back of the hall led down to the semi-basement, with a landing halfway down with a lavatory and a door to the garden. The basement had been knocked into one long, large room with the original stone-flagged floor, fitted out as kitchen and eating area.

  ‘Nice-looking kitchen,’ Atherton said. ‘All that slate and black granite must have cost a bob or two. She didn’t stint herself.’

  They went back up to the hall, intending to take a quick look round upstairs before getting down to a proper search, but as they were walking towards the front door, a shadow appeared behind its glass and the bell rang.

  ‘Now what?’ Atherton said.

  Slider was ahead of him so he was the one to open the door. There, grinning engagingly, stood a very pretty young black woman in a bottle green trouser suit, with her hair plaited in windrows and tipped with green beads.

  ‘’Allo, guv,’ she chirped. ‘I was told to report to you.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Brother, Can You Spare Me a Paradigm?

  Slider stared like a man who’d just been hit on the head with a large fish. ‘Hart?’ he said.

  ‘Hollis fought you might need help. S’prised to see me?’

  ‘Surprised doesn’t begin to cover it,’ Slider said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re the extra body Mr Porson wangled?’

  DC Tony Hart nodded. Slider stepped back to let her in. Behind him, he heard Atherton say, ‘Extra body’s the mot juste.’

  ‘I ain’t ’alf glad to be ’ere, I can tell you,’ Hart went on. ‘I’m sick of being the token black, token woman on all these special squads. I mean, it’s all bollocks, innit? I told Mr Wevverspoon I wanted to get back operational, but he said I was too valuable to waste on police work.’ She opened her eyes wide. ‘I mean, straight, guv, can you believe it?’

  ‘I believe six worse things than that every day before breakfast,’ Slider said.

  ‘I’ve been on this Diversity Advice Follow-up Team for three months now, wiv this bunch o’ total tossers who’ve never been on the street in their lives. The acronym says it all. Honestly, not one of ’em noticed what it was.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad to have you with us, Hart,’ Slider said, skipping over that bit. Of all the firms in all the cop shops in all the Met, he thought, she had to walk into his. The last time she had worked with them, she had had a torrid fling with Atherton. Joanna, however, had opined that Hart had actually only chased Atherton because she really fancied him, Slider – a deeply unsettling thought. Whichever way round it was, complications like those he didn’t need, especially given Atherton’s currently over-stimulated state. Hart was too juicy by half to expose him to.

  Hart turned her attention to Atherton now, and said lightly, ‘Wotcher, Jim. I like the barnet. Cool
or what?’

  ‘Best not to encourage him,’ Slider said kindly. ‘He’s on the loose again.’

  ‘I can take care’v meself,’ Hart said.

  ‘Has Hollis filled you in on the story so far?’

  ‘Sort of. The vic was drugged and stabbed in the park, to make it look like the Park Killer struck again.’

  ‘Don’t call her the vic. She’s not a theatre.’

  ‘All right,’ Hart said agreeably. ‘So what we doin’?’

  ‘Looking round the house. What we need immediately is a photograph of the victim we can use with the public, and any information about next of kin. There’ll be a full team in later to do the serious search. Of course you needn’t ignore anything interesting or unusual if it jumps up and bites you. You’d better come upstairs with me and have a look at the bedrooms. Atherton, you can start going through the office.’

  Upstairs, on the next floor, there were two bedrooms and a large bathroom, which, given the age of the house, must have originally been another bedroom. The floors were stripped and varnished all through, and echoed to their footsteps.

  ‘Bit chilly,’ Hart remarked. ‘I like a nice bit o’ Wilton meself.’

  Slider thought it would be unwelcoming in winter, though at the moment it was pleasantly cool. The bathroom was done in a retro style, with a free-standing claw-footed bath, high-level cistern and old-fashioned pedestal basin. An odd place to make a stand for heritage. Of all rooms, surely the bathroom was the one in which you most wanted clinical modernity.

  Of the bedrooms, the one at the back was the smaller. It was unfurnished, and being used for storage. There were several removers’ cartons, still sealed up, presumably never having been unpacked since she moved in. There were also a number of ordinary cardboard boxes containing a variety of odds and ends – clothes, shoes, board games and jigsaw puzzles, sports equipment, ornaments, crockery, and one full of dolls and soft toys.

  ‘It’s like she brought everyfing wiv her when she left home,’ Hart said. ‘Look, there’s pairs o’ bally shoes in here, must be all of ’em goin’ back to when she was five. An’ about a thousand china horses. This is the sort o’ stuff you leave cluttering up your mum and dad’s house until they get mad and chuck it out.’

  Yes, Slider thought, she was right. It was a good insight. ‘Hell of a lot of sorting through to do,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I dunno, guv,’ Hart said comfortingly. ‘If she’s never unpacked it, it prob’ly never had anything to do with her present life. I wonder why she brought it wiv her, though.’

  ‘Maybe her parents divorced and the family house was sold,’ Slider suggested.

  Hart grinned. ‘Yeah, but most of us would still make our mums take all this crap to her new house. There’s people all over the country’ve got their cupboards stuffed full of their grown-up kids’ junk, while their kids swank about bein’ all minimalist in warehouse conversions wiv no storage.’

  The larger, front room was evidently her bedroom. A king-size bed, neatly made; an extensive range of built-in wardrobes; an oak chest, probably Jacobean, under the window; a beautiful secretaire, probably Regency.

  Hart had a look in the wardrobes. ‘Well nice,’ she said, in emphatic understatement. ‘Some top gear in here. Gucci and Karen Millen. Manolo shoes, even. Oh, and look at this pink suede skirt! Viv Westwood. I’m drooling, boss.’

  ‘Just don’t get DNA on the goods,’ Slider warned. ‘She did keep everything tidy, didn’t she?’

  ‘It’s like one of them adverts for fitted bedrooms,’ Hart said. ‘Or that makeover programme – you know – where they turn out your messiest room and make you chuck stuff away. It looks about like this when they let the people back in. I’ve always thought they should do a revisit a week later. Nobody keeps their clothes like this. What was she, an alien from another planet?’

  Slider headed for the secretaire. ‘This is for us. This’ll be where she kept her personal papers.’

  ‘An’ there’s a photo,’ Hart said. It was framed and standing on top of the secretaire, next to a small vase containing a single rose, whose petals were beginning to fall.

  Slider picked up the photo and turned it to the light. The girl in the picture was smiling with radiant happiness, her face sharing the space inside the frame with that of a very nice bay horse.

  Hart came close and looked too. ‘Pretty. Nice face.’

  ‘The girl’s not bad, either.’

  Hart slung a sideways glance at him. ‘Bally an’ horses. She was someone’s little princess, wasn’t she? Will it do?’

  ‘We could screen out the horse,’ Slider said, ‘but she was in her late twenties, and she only looks about seventeen or eighteen in this.’ He looked round. ‘Strange that this is the only photo. Most people have scads of them.’

  ‘The only one on display,’ Hart corrected.

  The top part of the secretaire held lots of documents and letters. ‘We’ll have to take all this stuff back to the office and go through it,’ Slider said.

  In the drawer, along with various unremarkable odds and ends, was a number of Boots’ developer’s envelopes full of photographs. Slider and Hart looked through them, spread some out on the bed. There were holiday pictures and snaps of parties, outings, picnics, weddings and christenings. Young, good-looking faces were everywhere, laughing, mugging, drinking, having a good time. There was nothing that looked like a family shot – all the principals were young. Chattie herself appeared in very few of them – she must have been the one holding the camera – but when she did appear she seemed generally to have a champagne glass in her hand and her arm draped round a young man, and she was always laughing. Those fine, well-kept teeth shone out, the eyes disappeared into slits of hilarity, and everyone seemed to be looking at her, crowding round her as if she were the life of the group.

  ‘Definitely a princess,’ Hart observed, and it did not seem an entirely complimentary judgement.

  Slider, though, was fascinated by her face. ‘I’d like to have known her.’

  ‘You’d nevera kept up, guv. She liked to ’ave it large, by the look of her,’ Hart said. ‘Any of these any good for us?’

  ‘We’ll take them back and have a look. She seems to be laughing too much in most of them,’ Slider said, with a hint of sadness. ‘Let’s look upstairs.’

  There was another staircase, much plainer and narrower, going up into the roof space, into what must originally have been the servant’s bedroom. Given that one of the main bedrooms was being used for storage, Slider would have expected more boxes up there, but it was furnished with a divan, fitted dressing table and wardrobe and a tiny shower-room-and-loo carved out of a corner. It was also, in contrast to the rest of the house, perilously untidy, with clothes and shoes and bags spread over every surface, used mugs and plates on the floor, apple cores in the fireplace. A vast array of makeup and face and body unguents in clogged and dribbling bottles choked the dressing table, smeared tissues lying where they had been thrown at the wastepaper basket and missed. Where any bare surface showed it was thick with dust, and there was a stale smell in the room, which was being baked to well-risen perfection by the heat under the roof.

  ‘Oh, I love what she’s done up here,’ said Hart. ‘Very postmodern.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Slider. ‘A complete personality change when you come up these stairs.’

  ‘This is the attic she had in her picture,’ Hart said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Oscar Wilde. I knew there was something wrong wiv a person who kept her wardrobe that tidy. This is where her evil alter-ego had its ’orrible outlet.’

  ‘Or,’ Slider said, throwing cold water, ‘she had a lodger.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Hart. ‘There is that possibility.’

  But apart from clothes and shoes and toiletries, there were no personal effects or documents in the drawers and cupboards. ‘Not a permanent lodger, then,’ Slider concluded.

  ‘Maybe a friend who lived out of town and nee
ded a place to crash during the week,’ Hart suggested.

  They descended again. Hearing their footsteps Atherton came out into the hall and said, ‘I’ve found a safe.’

  Hart assumed a breathless excitement. ‘Hidden be’ind an ancestral portrait?’

  Atherton gave her a quelling look. ‘One of us doing that sort of thing is enough. No, it’s sunk into the floor under the desk well. There’s a ring in the floorboards that lifts up a square section and the door to the safe is underneath.’

  Slider went and looked. ‘Nice. Just hidden enough—’

  ‘But not too tasty,’ Hart concluded. ‘’Ow we gonna get in?’

  ‘Manufacturer,’ Slider said, and regarded her expression. ‘Did you think we were going to blow it open with plastique? You really have got out of touch with reality.’

  ‘I’m desperate for excitement,’ she admitted. ‘I feel as if I’ve been in a meeting for two years.’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ Atherton said patiently, ‘I’ve found one or two things. Her passport – nothing much there, a few trips to the States, well spaced, probably holidays. Of course, European trips don’t get stamped now, more’s the pity.’

  ‘We found holiday snaps upstairs,’ said Hart. ‘She liked to par-tay.’

  ‘And I’ve found her bank statements. She had two accounts, one with a local NatWest for the business. Her personal account – this is the interesting bit – is with Coutts.’

  ‘Coutts?’ Hart said. ‘That’s the nobby bank, in’t it? The Queen’s got one of them.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Atherton said. ‘But you don’t have to be a nob. Anyone can have a Coutts account – anyone with assets of a quarter of a million.’

  Hart’s eyes widened satisfactorily. ‘Is that straight?’

  ‘So what are you suggesting?’ Slider asked.

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting anything. I was just making observations,’ Atherton said.

  ‘No, you weren’t,’ said Slider.

  ‘All right, then. I’m suggesting she must have had some other form of income than this business of hers, because the amounts going in and out of that account wouldn’t buy her one of Coutts’s paperclips.’