Blood Lines

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘Possible but unlikely, sir. The pathologist says death would have been instantaneous.’

  ‘Ah, the pathologist. Expert witness and all that. Well, personally, I wouldn’t hang a dog on scientific evidence. I think we need more than that, don’t you?’

  ‘There’s the religious text card, which sounds rather like a threat.’

  ‘No reason to think it wasn’t his.’

  ‘And the bloodmarks on the inside of the pocket—’

  ‘Well, deceased could have made those too – fumbling for something in the confusion of the moment.’

  ‘—and on the underpants.’

  ‘Oh dear, I don’t like what you’re suggesting. You think the body has been interfered with?’

  ‘It certainly does seem so to me, sir.’

  ‘Still, even if someone else did go through the pockets and – et cetera – it doesn’t rule out suicide.’

  ‘He was remarkably cheerful that evening, apparently.’

  ‘Ah well, they often are, you know. And in any case, a mood can change in a moment.’

  ‘But appearances are more on the side of homicide than suicide. There are too many anomalies for me to be happy with writing it down.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Honeyman said again, and lapsed into silence like an overstretched personal computer. Slider waited. At last the screen flickered again. ‘It’s a tricky one. I don’t know that we would be justified in setting a full-scale investigation in train on the strength of your not feeling happy about it.’

  He made it sound like PMT, Slider thought. ‘Well, sir, it’s still a suspicious death. There has to be some sort of investigation.’

  Honeyman looked at him sharply. ‘I’m quite well aware of that, thank you.’ It was like being savaged by a goldfish. ‘But I can’t let you monopolise all this manpower indefinitely. There’s a crime wave out there on the streets, you know, and I am responsible to the public for the way we use our resources.’

  ‘There are an awful lot of people to interview, sir,’ Slider said. ‘It’s important that we find some witnesses before memories cloud.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes, yes,’ Honeyman said testily, ‘but it’s ten to one that it was suicide, and the press will be following every detail of this one, and the BBC. We can’t afford to look foolish, and be accused of throwing money about recklessly.’

  ‘If it turns out later that it wasn’t suicide, we’ll look even worse,’ Slider pointed out. Honeyman gave him a goaded look. ‘Greatrex must have been somewhere in the building during those ten minutes, sir, and somebody must have seen him. There were hundreds of people wandering about. And he was a striking-looking man.’

  ‘Oh, very well,’ Honeyman said disagreeably. ‘I’ll let you have the extra men for a week, but if you haven’t come up with something by then, I shall have to cut you down to just your own squad. I’m perfectly certain in my own mind,’ he added pathetically, ‘that it was suicide, so do make it your first priority to look for a note. There’s bound to be one somewhere – he wouldn’t have missed the chance to tell his public all about his state of mind. These media-types are notoriously self-obsessed, they like nothing better than to talk about themselves. And,’ he added severely, ‘they blow their own little problems up out of all proportion. Can’t see the wood for the trees. I can’t waste my budget on that sort of thing. I’m answerable to the Commissioner, you know.’

  Talk about pots and kettles, Slider thought glumly, trudging dutifully out.

  ‘Things always look better in daylight,’ Atherton said, sitting on his desk and contemplating the shine on his shoes. ‘There was something almost surreal about the TVC. I began to think I was in something by Stendhal.’

  The CID room was crowded with the extra personnel so begrudged by Honeyman. Mills, on loan with other members of Carver’s team, was clipping his nails into the wastepaper basket. ‘What about the post mortem, then, eh? Is that right, they found bloody fingermarks on his old man?’

  ‘Why do you men always have to bring everything down to the lowest level?’ Norma said, busy writing.

  ‘I could explain it to you, if you’d like to meet me after,’ Mills offered.

  ‘Oi! There’s a queue, you know,’ Atherton said. ‘Get thee behind me.’

  ‘In your dreams,’ Norma said, going on calmly writing. ‘Anyway, what about that nice woman you were going out with, Jim? I thought you might be going to settle down at last.’

  ‘I do settle down,’ Atherton protested. ‘Just not in the same place every time.’

  McLaren, who was reading the Sun and eating a bacon roll, called across, ‘Eh, Atherton, have you ever had two women at the same time?’

  ‘At the same time as what?’ Atherton enquired.

  Unfortunately, McLaren didn’t know a rhetorical question when he heard one and answered, which made Norma look up at last, severely. ‘You disgust me, Maurice,’ she said.

  ‘Oh he has,’ Atherton agreed. ‘Certainly with everyone here.’

  Mills finished snipping, put down the bin and dusted off his hands. ‘Does the guv’nor really think it’s murder?’ he asked Atherton. ‘I can’t see it myself.’

  ‘He has a feeling about it,’ Atherton said. He remembered the Radek case, when it all looked sewn up, except that Slider felt something was wrong about it. ‘When he’s got one of those, it’s best to go along with it.’

  ‘If the guv’nor says it’s Christmas, we all sing carols,’ said Hewson, another of Carver’s team.

  ‘He’s not like that,’ said Norma, beating Mills to it.

  ‘They’re all like that,’ Cook, Hewson’s partner, contradicted. ‘It’s just some show it sooner than others. You’ll find out.’

  ‘I’ve been with him for six years,’ Norma said firmly. ‘He’s the least dogmatic man I’ve ever worked with.’

  ‘It’s there underneath all the same,’ Hewson said, unconcernedly, looking over McLaren’s shoulder at the page three tits. ‘Stands to reason. A guv’nor’s a guv’nor, spelt gee-oh-dee. You can’t get away from it.’

  ‘I’ve met a lot of people in my life,’ Norma said icily. ‘You two are not amongst them.’

  Cook looked annoyed. ‘Don’t give me that. Are you telling me—’

  ‘Brass at twelve o’clock,’ Mills warned as Slider appeared in the doorway, and a sudden silence fell.

  Slider looked round curiously, caught Atherton’s minute shrug, and strode front and centre. ‘Right, the Greatrex case. Suspicious death. Let’s have some views. I know you’re for suicide,’ he added to Mills, ‘in which you have the great and good on your side. Mr Honeyman sees no reason to suppose it’s anything else. But if it was suicide, someone at least interfered with the body. Either it was Philip Somers, and he’s not admitting it; or someone was there before him, and is keeping quiet about it.’

  ‘To me, it’s murder,’ Norma said. ‘There was definitely something funny going on. I had all sorts of hints from Dorothy Hammond—’

  ‘Oh, women are always gossiping, trying to stir up trouble,’ Mackay said easily.

  Norma sailed straight over him, ‘—about a row between Fiona Parsons and Philip Somers over whether Greatrex should even be on the show or not; and then about a row between Greatrex and Palliser. And Palliser left the greenroom just after Greatrex, on a flimsy excuse.’

  ‘My money’s on Somers,’ Atherton said. ‘If you’re covered in blood, what better way to explain it than to be the one to discover the corpse?’

  ‘I can’t see it,’ Mills said. ‘You’d have to be pretty cool to think of that, and carry it off, and the last thing he was when I arrived was cool. He was nearly hysterical.’

  ‘He struck me as such a wet ponce, he’d never have the balls to cut someone’s throat,’ Mackay said.

  ‘He’s still got to be favourite,’ Anderson put in. ‘He’s the only one with blood on him. And he was out of sight for the crucial ten minutes, by his own admission looking for Greatrex.’

  ‘But Dorothy Hammond
said he didn’t want Greatrex on the show at all,’ Norma said.

  ‘Because he hated him, maybe.’

  ‘But if he wanted the chance to kill him, he’d have argued to have him on, not the other way,’ Norma said.

  ‘If it was planned ahead,’ Anderson said. ‘Maybe he just hated him so much it came over him on an impulse, and he was left trying to cover up the best way he knew.’

  ‘That sounds very nice,’ Slider said, ‘except for the knife. If it was impulse, why did he bring the knife with him?’

  ‘We’ve got to try to tie the knife in with someone,’ Mackay said.

  ‘Oh, did you think of that all by yourself?’ Atherton murmured.

  ‘It could have been Somers, it could have been Palliser, it could have been Fiona Parsons for that matter,’ McLaren said. ‘It could have been anybody at all – if it was anybody.’

  ‘McLaren’s right,’ Slider said into the stunned silence. ‘The difficulty is that we don’t know where Greatrex went or what he did in the missing fifteen or twenty minutes. We’ve got a situation where an unknown number of people are wandering around a large building, and nobody knows where anybody is at any given moment. Nobody’s accountable, nobody can be pinned down to exact times. Our particular problem is that until we can find some witnesses, we can’t prove it was murder and not suicide, and we can’t get the manpower to do the sort of investigation we need to find witnesses until we can show that it was murder.’

  ‘Catch twenty-two,’ Mackay said triumphantly.

  ‘So we’re going to have to start at the other end,’ Slider said, ‘with motive. We’ve got to find out all about this man Greatrex, who loved him and who hated him, who wanted him dead – and if it turns out that he hated himself most of all, well, so be it.’ He gazed round them at his blandest. ‘I’m not dogmatic.’

  Norma and Atherton exchanged a look. Was it possible he had heard?

  ‘And in the meantime, we’ve got to talk to everyone who was in the building at the time, and that includes all the members of the audience of the show – telephone work there for everyone with bad feet or a poor excuse. And I want two teams to comb the immediate area around the exits from the building for anything that might have been dumped, because if it wasn’t Somers, somebody must have had some bloodstained clothing to account for. Start outside and work your way back in. Mills, as you were in at the beginning, I’m going to make you office manager. Right, there’s a lot to organise, so let’s get busy.’

  The room broke into a buzz of talk and movement, amongst which one voice came out clearly saying, ‘Overtime all round, then.’ That was Honeyman’s concern, of course; but Slider had a moment of doubt as he looked at the pleased faces following the remark. For when all was said and done, the fact that the body had been interfered with did not mean it wasn’t suicide, and if that’s what it turned out to be, Honeyman was not going to be happy with Slider. Slider liked to keep Det Sups happy – that was the route to a long and untroubled life.

  Slider had long wanted to see the inside of one of those houses in Pelham Place, and Roger Greatrex turned out to have lived in one of them.

  ‘Ah, I know where he got the liquorice,’ Atherton said in sudden enlightenment as they approached the wedge of South Kensington Station along Harrington Road. ‘There’s an old-fashioned sweet shop just outside the station, by the Thurloe Street exit. They do sherbet lemons and acid drops and toasted teacakes and all that sort of tackle.’

  ‘I’m so glad we’ve cleared up that point,’ Slider said. ‘What’s the wife’s name?’

  ‘Caroline, formerly – and I ask you to believe this – a Miss Fiennes-Marjoribanks, daughter of Viscount Chirnside.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘Dunno. Somebody has, though, to live in Pelham Place. I suppose a media honey like Greatrex must have been pulling down big biccies, but I’d be surprised if it was enough for a house like that. Be sure to wipe your boots before entering. And curtsey while you’re thinking. It saves time.’

  The house – white, elegant, shapely – smiled in the sunshine across its railings and semi-basement with a century and a half of assured beauty. Slider sighed with satisfaction. The terrace led the eye away kindly and then bent to the supple curve of Pelham Crescent, in all the loveliness of perfect proportion. Ah, they didn’t write ’em like that any more. ‘Didn’t they use one of these for the outside of the house in Upstairs Downstairs?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Before my time,’ Atherton said cruelly. They trod up the steps, and he ostentatiously wiped his hand down his trousers before pulling the bell. Caroline Greatrex received them in the drawing-room, which was chilly with the spaciousness and quiet of real wealth. Atherton, disposing himself elegantly on a brocaded settle, took a quick inventory of the age and value of the appurtenances. It reminded him of that line from the Goon Show – the curtains were drawn, but the furniture was real. Though in this case, it was the widow who was drawn – and pale, even through her perfectly applied make-up. Her hair, ash-blonde over natural ash, was arranged as carefully as if she had been to the salon that morning, in the rather bouffant page-boy bob that a certain section of Society favours, drawn back in a curve to show the ears, decorated with large pearl studs. Three rows of pearls around the neck, and if they weren’t real, Atherton thought, he was a monkey’s uncle. A black roll-neck sweater showed off the pearls; below that she wore a grey-and-white-fleck tweed skirt and black court shoes. All very plain and suitable; and no other jewellery except a rather ugly collection of rings on the wedding finger: a broad gold band, a three-stone diamond engagement hoop, a diamond-studded eternity ring, and a keeper of thin gold with clasped hands filled all the space between knuckle and first joint. She had ugly hands, Atherton thought, stubby and pale with fleshy joints, and the sort of nails that shouldn’t be drawn attention to, and were painted bright scarlet.

  ‘May I offer you sherry?’ she asked. ‘Or are you not allowed? I never know whether that’s pure fiction or not.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Slider said. He liked to give them something to do if they were likely to be ill at ease, and she ought to be, though she was outwardly completely composed. The English upper classes in adversity, Slider thought: there’s no-one like ’em. As a farmer’s son in a wealthy county he had had more experience of them than Atherton, for all the latter’s urbanity. Town gentry are not like the old county families.

  When she had brought their glasses and sat down opposite them, Atherton could see what Slider had already noted, that her composure was only outward, and liked her better for it. Death should never be a matter of no moment, he felt. She turned her sherry glass round slowly in her fingers, and at rest her mouth trembled. She looked much older than the corpse of Roger Greatrex had done – sixty, perhaps, to his fifty – but then death smoothes away lines while bereavement adds them.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to trouble you at such a time,’ Slider said, ‘and I’m very grateful to you for seeing me.’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ she said bleakly. ‘You have to do your job, I understand that.’

  ‘I have to ask you first if you know of any reason why your husband might have wanted to do away with himself? Was he depressed? Unhappy? Worried about anything?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ she said firmly. ‘I can’t believe that he would do such a thing. He was at the height of his career, he had no financial worries. In fact just lately he has been particularly cheerful.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  She looked chilly. ‘I have no idea. He did not discuss it with me.’

  She paused reflectively. Her eyes wanted to take a look at Atherton, but Slider held her glance and said, ‘I can assure you that anything you tell me will be held in confidence if it possibly can be.’ Atherton noted with faint surprise that his boss’s usually regionless voice had taken on a very slight country softness – hardly an accent, more a cadence. But something in Mrs Greatrex seemed to respond to it. Atherton saw her begin to relax, as a nervous dog does w
ith assured handling, and could only admire. He could not have done that, he knew.

  ‘I think I should tell you, then, that my husband and I have for a long time gone our separate ways. Our marriage is more a formality than a union of any intimacy. We have separate suites upstairs, we each follow our own activities – though we keep up appearances for the sake of the family, and there are still occasions when we appear as a couple. Appeared, I should say.’

  ‘You were on friendly terms?’

  ‘Oh yes, it was not a rancorous arrangement. But I didn’t care for some of Roger’s media friends, and he was utterly bored by mine.’

  ‘Did he have any enemies?’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘He was a critic, and not generally a benign one. I should say he had many enemies – but I can’t believe anyone would kill over a bad review. That is what you’re asking me? Did anyone hate Roger enough to kill him?’

  ‘Did anyone?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can only say, not that I know of. But I can’t say what would be enough, can I?’

  Slider let the question slip past his ear. ‘Did he have any relatives?’

  ‘His parents are both dead now. He has a sister, Ruth. They were always very fond of each other, but she’s married and lives in America. They write to each other once or twice a year, but we haven’t seen her since – oh – it must be four years, if not five.’

  ‘What about your family? Did he get on with them?’

  Her mouth made a wry movement. ‘Oh yes, we all got on with each other. He didn’t like them and they didn’t like him, but on family occasions we would all turn up and be polite. That’s what happens in civilised society. I shudder to think how much time we all waste being polite to people we don’t much care for.’

  ‘Why didn’t they like him?’

  ‘Not good enough.’ She sipped her sherry, scanning Slider’s face for comprehension. ‘My parents thought I made a disappointing marriage. Roger wasn’t one of us. But they tried to make the best of it. The trouble was that Roger resented being made the best of. He wanted to be judged on his own merits. I’m afraid Daddy’s generation wasn’t very good at that.’