Blood Lines

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘There wasn’t anything to tell. I can’t control who gets booked to play at the same dates as me.’ She met his eyes steadily. ‘You’ve got to trust me, Bill. We’re going nowhere if you don’t trust me.’

  He knew that was true, but he had been stinging for days. ‘It isn’t a matter of trust. I do trust you – but I can’t help feeling jealous.’

  ‘You’ve got to help it. Do I spend all day fretting over what you might be up to? Do I worry about the gorgeous women you might be meeting every day who are just cra-a-azy over policemen, in or out of uniform, and who’d do anything for a little squint at your truncheon?’

  ‘What about Irene?’ he said.

  ‘That’s different,’ she said after a moment. ‘She’s not out of your life.’

  He stood up and stepped towards her, but something in her face stopped him touching her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this bloke?’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell,’ she said wearily. ‘He turned up, that’s all.’

  ‘But you went for a drink with him. He was there in the Trevor when you phoned me.’ This was a guess, but an easy one.

  ‘Everybody goes to the Trevor,’ she said. His heart sank at this confirmation. He’d rather hoped the bloke went somewhere else.

  ‘What’s his name?’ he asked, almost against his will.

  ‘You don’t want to know his name,’ she said, and her eyes were suddenly humorous.

  He resisted her. ‘I do. What’s his name?’

  ‘Andrew,’ she said.

  She was right. He didn’t want to know it. He felt a bit sick. He began to turn away, and now she moved, grabbed his hand, pulled him back.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ she said. She lifted his hand, kissed it, put it to her head. ‘Not even in here.’

  By its own will his hand cupped round the side of her skull, fingers in her short, rough hair.

  ‘I love you,’ she said. She was always generous, always made the first move. He drew her against him, held her head against his cheek. It was like coming home, the touch of her body. It was something he couldn’t do without. He sighed. ‘Into each life a little rain must fall,’ she said. ‘It’s hell, isn’t it – jealousy?’

  ‘Now I know how Irene used to feel,’ he said. He was aware immediately he said it that he should not have introduced another name at that particular moment, but he couldn’t take it back once it was out, so instead he said, ‘I love you, too.’

  ‘Let’s go to bed, then,’ she said, and it seemed to him like an excellent idea.

  There was nothing like an emotional scene before bedtime for making you wake up early. Slider woke feeling unrested to the sound of the dawn chorus. Joanna’s bed, in any case, had been old when he met her, and was beginning to sport the scars of vigorous usage. There was a spring which caught him just under one hip. They ought to buy a new one, but he didn’t know how to approach the subject, given that they had never actually discussed their future together, and he had never officially moved in to her flat. It had been merely diffidence on his part – or so he had thought until last night. Now he realised that however much they loved each other, they were both nervous about making so serious a commitment as to mention aloud what Palliser had called the M-word. In these post-feminist, modern times, it had become the love that dared not speak its name. Suppose he asked her and she refused? It was one thing to live with her like this, unmarried and undeclared, face not merely saved but never even staked; but to live with her unmarried after they had spoken of a permanent attachment would not do. He would always wonder what her reservations were, whether he had failed to measure up in some way, or whether she was holding back in the hope that someone better might come along. Besides, there were his children to think of, and the example he set them. Sooner or later, if he and Joanna stayed together, they would have to meet her, and he didn’t want them thinking of her as ‘Daddy’s girlfriend’, with all the tacky connotations of the phrase.

  If they stayed together? What was he thinking? There could not be a question about it – could there? He pushed himself up on one elbow to look down at her, still sleeping and curled on her side with her hands under her cheek Shirley Temple-style. She looked so complete, as people sleeping often do, that he felt shut out from her. After all, she had managed without him all these years – without anyone. She had her own career, money, establishment, interests and friends: what could she need him for? He thought back to their first weeks together, and the time he had taken her to visit his father. She had said that a woman on her own for long enough became a sort of stray dog – a man might play with it in the park, but would never think of taking it home. And he saw that it was true. That completeness of hers might not be something she liked or enjoyed, might not be what she wanted, but it existed none the less. He had no idea what either of them could do about it.

  To avoid thinking about these imponderables, he thought about the case, and immediately experienced a rush of blood to the head that had him out of bed. He went into the sitting-room to use the phone there so as not to wake her.

  The leather of the chesterfield was chilly to his bare behind. He rested his elbows on his knees and looked down with detached curiosity at his own feet, legs and dangly bits. God’s supreme joke; His way of cutting Man down to size. There was nothing laughable about the back end of a horse or even a dog, but the human male’s wedding tackle was essentially ridiculous.

  Fergus answered. ‘What are you doing up so early?’

  ‘Contemplating my navel,’ Slider said. ‘The feminists are right, y’know. If God was a man, He’d never have put the balls on the outside.’

  ‘Izzat what you woke me up for, to tell me that?’

  ‘I thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘You’re tryin’ to think on an empty stomach, that’s what’s wrong wit you. A plate o’ bacon an’ eggs’ll get your brain functioning right,’ O’Flaherty said wisely. ‘What do you want, anyway?’

  ‘Is anyone from my team in?’

  ‘I got Mackay standing beside me this very minute. Will he do?’

  ‘Perfectly,’ said Slider. When Mackay came on he said, ‘I’ve got a job for you. I want you to go to the TVC for me. Go to the lift right next to the loo where Greatrex was killed. Inside it there must be an inspection hatch in the ceiling – get up there and see if there’s anything hidden on the roof of the lift.’

  ‘Now, guv?’

  ‘Yes, now. You’ll need someone with you to give you a boost.’

  ‘Am I looking for anything in particular?’

  ‘Well, I hope you may find a bag there containing bloodstained clothing. That would be my favourite result.’

  Mackay was enlightened at last. ‘Oh! Right! Nice one, guv. Why didn’t we think of that before?’

  We? Slider thought. ‘Get on with it,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in in about twenty minutes.’

  When he returned to the bedroom, Joanna was awake and watching the door.

  ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ he said.

  ‘This phone pings when you pick the other one up,’ she said. ‘Who were you calling?’

  Was there something cautious about the question? ‘Just the factory,’ he said. ‘I had an idea about where the bag might be hidden. I don’t expect anything will come of it, but a man can dream.’

  ‘Are you going in now?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He sat down on the bed beside her and stroked the hair back from her brow. Touching her head brought a rush of feelings through him, as though he had plugged in to something. ‘About last night—’

  She rolled onto her back to free her arms to reach up to him. ‘Let’s forget it. We wouldn’t quarrel like that if we didn’t love each other.’

  He bent and kissed her. ‘Could we find some other way of showing it in future, do you think?’

  Her hand ran up and down his flank. ‘You don’t want to fight? What sort of a man are you, anyway?’

  If he showered and dressed like lightning afterwards, he
thought, there was just time to show her.

  Half the force seemed to be gathered around a single desk in the CID room when Slider arrived, and it parted in a Red Sea of smiling faces before him to lead him to a rather dusty blue nylon flight bag sitting on Atherton’s desk.

  ‘Just where you said it’d be, guv,’ Mackay gloated.

  So his instinct about Mrs Reynolds had been right after all.

  ‘I had inside information,’ Slider said modestly. He didn’t yet quite understand his own thought processes, but something was going on in the back of his mind. ‘Let’s have a look at it.’

  Or more importantly, in it. The outside yielded nothing but a quantity of dust and an oil stain which probably came from the lift cable, but inside the bag was a pair of bloody surgical gloves and an elderly mackintosh with blood-soaked sleeves, bloody smears down both front coats, and an almost round bloodstain further down where, Slider surmised, the wearer had gone down on one knee.

  ‘Oh Tufty,’ Slider murmured, ‘you lucky, lucky lad.’

  The one person not pleased with the discovery of the bag was Mr Honeyman, whose doll face did not quite manage to express disapproval, but whose unchuffedness was evinced by the silence with which he received the news, a long silence during which he searched his mind for a budget-friendly reason for the bag to be found where it was. He had managed to believe that the bruising to the chin was not convincing evidence of foul play, coming up with the alternative – in both senses – theory that Greatrex might have bruised himself shaving, but this was harder going. He did not go so far as to suggest Greatrex might somehow have managed to conceal the bag in the lift after cutting his own throat but before collapsing, but he did say, ‘You will check that the blood group is the same as that of Greatrex, won’t you?’ – as though it might be that of a clumsy, DIY-loving lift maintenance engineer with a strict wife.

  ‘Of course, sir,’ Slider said patiently – so patiently that Honeyman was recalled reluctantly to reality.

  ‘Well, I suppose this changes things quite considerably,’ he said. ‘I suppose I must tell Mr Wetherspoon that we have a murder investigation on our hands.’

  Slider had no mercy. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You realise what this means, don’t you?’ Honeyman said irritably. ‘If the murderer wore protective clothing, it could be anyone, anyone at all. There were hundreds of people in that building.’

  Yes, there were, Slider thought as he walked back to his room; but whoever murdered Roger Greatrex must have planned it beforehand, to have brought the gloves with him, and must therefore have had a grudge against him. So it could not have been just anyone amongst the hundreds. The prime suspects were still the same three people who had had good reason to want to kill him; or someone else with a beef they hadn’t unearthed yet.

  But why didn’t the murderer carry the bag away out of the building and dump it somewhere far from the scene? Because he couldn’t leave the building just yet? Because he had to go back and join a group of people – like those in the greenroom, for instance – who would notice his absence?

  And where had the bag been before – or rather, where had the mack been? Those nylon bags hadn’t much bulk to them – it could have been stuffed into an overcoat pocket, for instance – but the mack couldn’t have been concealed. It must either have been worn or carried over the arm – unless it was already in the building somewhere. Damn! There were going to have to be a lot of questions asked about that mack.

  And why had the murderer hidden the bag in the lift? It was a good hiding place, provided you could get it up there in the first place. You’d need to be athletic to jump up, hold onto the ledge round the top of the lift, and hang there by one hand while you used the other to push the inspection hatch aside and swing the bag up into place. Athletic and tall. Well, all three of their suspects were tallish, and even Sandal Palliser was skinny and strong-looking.

  The big drawback to the lift was that even if you happened to find it empty in the first place, you were just as likely as not to be interrupted by someone getting in or out, whereupon you might find it hard to explain why you were dangling about from the ceiling like an ape on whacky baccy. The lift couldn’t have been essential to the plan, must surely have been a spur-of-the-moment thing. Perhaps being surprised by Mrs Reynolds, he had decided it was safer to hide the bag than go on carrying it about.

  But Mrs Reynolds’ description of the man at the lift didn’t match any of the best suspects. If he wasn’t the murderer, how did the bag get onto the lift roof? And if he was the murderer, then it wasn’t Palliser, Somers or Parsons.

  No, Slider sighed, he’d have to face the fact that they had been barking up the wrong street and pursuing red herrings down blind alleys all this time. His whole pack had been cur-dog hunting, and the fox must be two valleys away by now.

  Still, clear as you go, that was the thing. A piece of the bloodsoaked raincoat material must be sent off to Tufty, Mrs Reynolds must be called in to identify the bag, and the forensic team must be dispatched to see if there was any trace of anything useful left in the lift. And the ground team would have to go back in and start asking everyone whether they’d seen anyone answering the description entering or leaving the lift, or entering the building wearing or carrying the mack.

  The only good thing was that now he would not have to fight Honeyman for the manpower.

  Atherton seemed as little pleased as Honeyman when he arrived and heard the news about the bag.

  ‘It could still be Somers,’ he said doggedly. ‘He had every opportunity to plan the murder, bring the bag in at any time beforehand, and hide it again afterwards. He was only next door, and he’s the only one who can say exactly when and how the body was discovered.’

  ‘And why would he go to the trouble of putting on protective clothing and hiding it, and then go and dabble in the blood?’ Slider said patiently.

  ‘Well, we know he went into Greatrex’s pocket for something. Suppose he did the murder in the protective gear, stowed it away, and then remembered whatever it was in the pocket. He had to go back for it, and then, seeing he’d got blood on him after all, he had to make the best of it by being the one who found the body. That would account for the state he’s been in ever since – his perfect plan went astray, and now he’s terrified he’s going to get caught.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘And he was the one who had longest to brood over his wrongs and plan the thing. All those years of resentment, and then a couple of weeks of knowing Greatrex was going to be on the show and available to him.’

  ‘But he doesn’t answer the description of the man by the lift,’ Slider managed to get in at last.

  ‘We don’t know he was anything to do with it. There could be a thousand reasons he had blood on his cuff.’

  ‘He was carrying the bag,’ Slider pointed out.

  Atherton fought a noble rearguard action. ‘It might not be the same bag. They’re as common as blackberries. Or maybe Mrs Thing was mistaken. Or maybe she’s confused the man she saw with somebody else.’

  ‘You know you’re beaten. Why don’t you just admit defeat gracefully?’

  ‘Show me the man who laughs at defeat and I’ll show you a chiropodist with a warped sense of humour.’

  ‘That’s no answer.’

  ‘Can I at least ask Somers about the mack?’ Atherton pleaded.

  ‘Of course you can, dear,’ Slider said soothingly. ‘In any case, you’ve got to clear up what he went into the pocket for. When you tell him he’s out of the frame for the murder he’ll probably come across. But the mack—’ he shook his head. ‘That’s not a young man’s mack. It’s old, but it was once very expensive and very conservative. It’s a stuffy mack. It’s a wealthy, middle-aged, establishment sort of a mack.’

  ‘It could have been bought second-hand,’ Atherton pointed out.

  ‘So it could, of course.’

  ‘Or borrowed.’

  ‘Quite. It’s going to be no help at all.�
�

  Mrs Somers opened the door to Atherton and drew a quick little breath. Her eyes searched his face for information, and, liking her, he said at once to relieve her, ‘I know about Greatrex and your daughter.’

  Her expression hardened, but there was still fear in her eyes. ‘Phil didn’t kill him. He deserved to die, but Phil would never do a thing like that.’

  ‘I know,’ Atherton said gently. ‘Can I talk to him? There are some details he hasn’t told us that are getting in the way of finding out who really did do it.’

  She hesitated only a moment, and then stood aside to let him in. ‘He’s having a lie in. He’s not been well since this happened, so I told him to stop in bed. I’ll go and get him up.’

  ‘No need, I can talk to him in his room.’

  She bristled. ‘You can not! You’ll sit down in the front room, and when I’ve called Philly, I’ll make you a cup o’ coffee. D’you take sugar?’

  Philip Somers appeared at last in trousers, shirt and bedroom slippers, pale, unshaven, seedy about the eyes, and definitely apprehensive. His fingernails, Atherton noticed with distaste, were bitten to the nub.

  ‘Mum says you want to talk to me,’ he said, though from the sulky tone Atherton reckoned it was rather Mum says I’ve got to talk to you.

  Atherton, who had been standing by the window, took a step and picked up the photograph from the corner table. ‘Is this Madeleine?’

  ‘Put that down,’ Somers said sharply. Atherton took his time about complying.

  ‘She was very pretty,’ he said. ‘Why did you hold Greatrex responsible? The inquest said it was an accident.’

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ Somers said sickly.

  ‘I know,’ Atherton said, and saw relief register so strongly on Somers’s face that he wondered for an instant whether his own beloved theory was right after all. Somers sat down with involuntary abruptness. ‘So tell me,’ Atherton said again, ‘why did you hold Greatrex to blame for your sister’s death?’

  ‘He was to blame, even if it was an accident,’ Somers said fiercely. ‘She was there because of him, she was in the car in that place at that time because of him. If he hadn’t seduced her, she wouldn’t have died. She’d be alive now, properly married, to a decent bloke, probably with children of her own. Mum would be a grandmother, like she always wanted. Now – maybe she’ll never be.’