He wasn’t sure what reaction he had expected from her – stubborn silence or even furious denial, perhaps – but he had not expected her to cry. It was painful and horrible for both of them, and there was nothing he could do to comfort her. He knew well enough that to touch her or offer her sympathy would compound his crime. After a moment of struggle she put her hands over her face and cried without grace, with the clumsiness of the unaccustomed, and with the tearing anguish of a lifetime of constraint and concealment. The dogs ran to her, looking up and wagging their tails curiously at the noise, and then began to grow distressed in their turn, running round her and trying to jump up. They finally settled for sitting at her feet crying in sympathy, occasionally pawing at her unresponsive leg.
‘You can have no idea,’ she said. Red-eyed, blotchy, and old, so old, she sat hunched at the table, smoking slowly. ‘None of you men has any idea. Well, I can’t blame you – I didn’t have any idea either. I thought you could just have it and walk away. A baby you’d never seen – how could it mean anything to you? But it isn’t like that. It’s a part of you, you see. Oh, not your flesh, you can part with that. People don’t hanker to know what happened to their amputated leg or whatever. But a part of who you are. And there’s a bit of you that can’t let go. However sensible and pragmatic you think you are. You can’t – let – go.’
She smoked again, and he was silent. Now that she was talking, he must let her take her time.
‘They took the babies away at birth. That was supposed to be the best thing for the mother. Kinder – the clean break. I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘It seemed sensible to me at the time – beforehand. Maybe it is best for some people. A few months in the home, then into hospital, whisk the thing away like an appendix – that is a joke, you know, of a sort – and six weeks later you’re back to normal and ready to take up your life again. That’s the theory. But it wasn’t that simple. Those girls in the home—’ She was silent, looking at memory. ‘They were so pathetic. All they wanted was to be able to keep their babies, but it wasn’t allowed. Society didn’t allow. You can’t imagine how impossible it was then.’ She looked at him for an instant. ‘Nowadays nobody thinks twice about it. People even do it intentionally, when they don’t have to, people who have the choice. “Starlet’s love-child” and all that sort of thing. And if you haven’t any money, the State pays. But not then. You simply couldn’t. It was impossible, and those girls knew it. But oh, how they cried! The matron said it was just their condition – hormones all shaken up – but it wasn’t. God damn it, she didn’t hear them at night! They cried from their souls upwards. It was a river, an unstaunchable flood of tears. Have you ever heard a cow calling for its calf? They cried like animals for their stolen children, those poor, ignorant girls! But they were trapped. Even if society had let them, Green and his Church wouldn’t. That’s why they took the babies at birth, you see, to give us no chance to change our minds. The Church had put down good money for those babies. Those babies were capital.’
‘You mean they took money for arranging the adoptions?’ Slider asked.
‘Good God, no,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Green wasn’t interested in money. His vanity was purely religious. It was souls he wanted. He placed the babies with good, churchgoing couples, in return for which the couples kept on being churchgoing, and brought up the kid to be, too. It was God’s work – evangelism in its most practical form. Give me a child at an impressionable age – and so on.’ She sucked on her cigarette and then snorted with unamused laughter. ‘He used to preach to us, too. Not content with the babies, he wanted our souls as well. A lot of the girls were swayed – that was hormones. You feel quite sexy at a certain stage of pregnancy, and your mind is rather loose in the haft as well, easily unbalanced. And he was quite a man. They yearned for him, and thought it was religion. Poor saps!’
‘What about the father of your child?’
‘What about him? He doesn’t come into it. He’s dead now, long since. That’s one mercy.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘How d’you think?’ she said, and then relented. ‘He was my boss. Married, of course. I was just starting out on my career. I fell for his status and he fell for my earnestness. I have to say he behaved decently according to his lights. He was horrified when I told him I was pregnant – it would have been the end of him in those days, if it had got out – but he tried to do the decent thing. He arranged for me to have a sabbatical, and gave me money to keep me going. He was so glad when I said I was going to have it adopted. I think ideally he’d have liked me to have an abortion, but of course it cost the earth to have it done properly in Switzerland, and even he wouldn’t have expected me to take the risk of an illegal in England. So Joshua Green’s salvation plan for fallen women filled the bill perfectly.’
‘How did your sister come into it?’
‘Oh, she introduced me to Green, of course. It was her I turned to first of all, even before I told the father. She’d been like a mother to me, after all, so I naturally thought she could sort me out. But Arthur was horrified. His first worry was what would the neighbours think and what would the Sunday school think. He’d have thrown me out into the snow if he could, but Maggie talked him round. I think she must have suspected by then that he wasn’t going to be able to give her a baby, and she wanted one so badly. And at least mine would share her genes – not that she thought in those terms, but the idea was there. And it was common cant that a woman who adopted often got pregnant soon afterwards, so she had nothing to lose. I don’t know how she persuaded Arthur, but I think religion came into it. I was a fallen woman and past redemption, but the child could be rescued from sin and brought up by Arthur in the paths of righteousness, and wouldn’t that be a good thing to do? Worth a gold star, ten points towards his halo at least.’
‘And the minister, Green, arranged all the legal side, did he?’
‘Yes. He wasn’t too keen on the arrangement, really – didn’t like the idea that an unmarried mother would know where her baby had gone. There was supposed to be an absolute cut-off and no contact ever after. He only agreed to it – and Arthur only agreed to it – on the condition that I kept out of the way while I was pregnant, and went right away afterwards and didn’t come near Maggie and Arthur ever again.’ She shrugged. ‘I was happy enough with the arrangement. I wanted my career, I thought babies were revolting, I wanted to be a free-wheeling, hard-headed power-woman in a suit, get to the top of the Civil Service, and have no ties, and retire with a small gong and a large pension.’
‘But it didn’t work out that way.’
‘Not entirely. I went away to begin with. I went back to work, kept my mouth shut and my head down and started to climb the ladder. But there was always the question mark. And Green was right in one way. Knowing where they were made it difficult not to go and take a look at them. So finally I gave in to the voices and bought this house and—’ She shrugged again.
‘I imagine Maggie and Arthur weren’t too happy about it.’
‘You imagine right. But there I was, like a mountain, and it was easier to work round me than try and remove me. I promised I would never tell Steve, or even hint at it, and I kept my word. Maggie knew I would, and I suppose she persuaded Arthur. Besides, I was the only one in the family who was ever going to have money, and he’d have thought by rights it ought to come to Stevie. But it galled him, I think, that he had the expense of keeping the child while I had the fun of taking him to the zoo. Like a weekend father.’ She looked at him quickly. ‘It isn’t all roses being a weekend father.’
Slider nodded. Had she guessed? Statistically, it was a fair bet.
‘But I’d made my bed, and I wasn’t going to whine about it. And nobody has ever guessed until today, until you – damn you.’ But she said it without heat.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
She searched his face. ‘You mean, does Steve guess? No, I don’t think so. Have you reason to think so?’
; ‘No. Not really. I just thought—’ He studied her. ‘There is a resemblance, when you look for it.’
‘But people don’t,’ she said. ‘People never do. Those gothic romances where the heroine looks at a family portrait and realises it’s her mother – it just would never happen in real life. Steve – Steve looks like his father. But even if he’d ever come face to face with his father, I doubt if he’d have noticed.’
Slider sat silent. Much more made sense now, question marks had been exploded and swept away. But it didn’t get him any further on. He hadn’t known where he was going with his doubts, and he still couldn’t see daylight ahead. All he had done was to upset this woman and rip a secret out of her that she had taken a lifetime to bury under the foundations.
As if she heard his thought, she said, ‘You were right about secrets losing their energy. If I was going to blurt it out to Steve, it would have been when he was about eight years old. I loved him so much then, and he was so fond of me, I used to think sometimes I’d done the wrong thing, that I should have kept him and tried to bring him up myself. But it would have been hell for all of us. The way it turned out was the best for him, and for me in every way but one.’ She paused a moment, staring at the middle air. ‘But after that, there was never any danger I’d tell, or let anything slip.’ She changed her focus. ‘You guessed because you were looking for something. Or maybe – maybe because you’re unusually perceptive.’ She sounded puzzled by the notion.
‘I don’t think I am,’ he said. ‘If I were I’d know what the hell was going on in this case, and I don’t. I’m trying to clear your – your nephew, and the only way I can think of to do it is to solve the case, find who really did it. But I don’t even know where to look.’
‘Find out who did what?’ she asked. ‘What is he supposed to have done?’
‘He’s been identified by a witness.’ He looked at her thoughtfully, wondering if the gravity of the situation would make her more or less forthcoming. ‘It’s a case of murder. A man carrying a bag which turned out to contain clothes stained with the victim’s blood was seen and described by a witness, and she’s picked out Mills as being the man.’
She was silent, but her face was drawn, her eyes seemed to have gone back in her head. After a moment she said, ‘I saw – in the paper it said – it was a murder case. But I didn’t know he was suspected. Oh my God.’ He half wished he hadn’t told her now. She seemed not just distressed, but terrified. After a moment she said, ‘You don’t think – do you?’
‘No. No, on the whole I don’t.’
‘But how can you have any doubt? He just isn’t capable of murder!’
‘I always maintain you can’t say that about anyone. Anyone is capable of murder, if the circumstances are right. But I don’t happen to think that Steve is capable of this particular murder.’
She said nothing more, though her eyes scanned his face urgently as if she was trying to glean more information from him without having to ask the questions. Or as if she was wondering if she ought to tell him something. He wasn’t sure which. There was something on her mind, that was a fact. Did she suspect Mills of something, or know something about him she wasn’t telling? Possibly, even probably on both counts. But she did not divulge it, though it looked as though it was making her sick – by the time he left her, she was looking as crook as rookwood, so much that he felt constrained to ask if he ought to call someone for her, or ask the girls downstairs to come and sit with her a while. That suggestion at least aroused her to scorn, but it was on the surface, and didn’t touch the undercurrent of preoccupation. He went away feeling vaguely anxious for her and vaguely hopeful for himself, for whatever was preying on her mind, he felt it could not prey there long, and that if he came back the next day she would surely let it out. She liked him, and if she was going to tell anyone, it would be him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Death at Auntie’s
Slider drove slowly and on automatic, running his mental fingers idly through the mass of facts, searching for inspiration. Something somewhere needed to connect up, was wanting quite urgently to connect up. When you were stuck, you looked for patterns and you looked for anomalies. Roger Greatrex – media star, chronic womaniser, neglecter of his wife and child, accidental killer of Madeleine Somers – was dead. Someone had reason enough to kill him; specifically, to cut his throat. There was something about that, something calculated, perhaps, or professional. It was not the enraged bash on the head with the nearest implement to hand. Someone had brought the knife to him. A swift and silent death, that – but you had to be determined. You had to be single-minded. Not every person could cut a throat like that.
Assuming it wasn’t Mills, for the moment – what about Sandal Palliser? Slider thought he had the intelligence to plan it, and the determination to do it, and would be unlikely to be squeamish – but that left the question of the clothes in the bag. Yes, Palliser might well think of the lift roof as a good hiding-place, and he of all suspects would have had to hide them on the premises, since he had to get back to the greenroom. But surely if Mrs Reynolds had seen a striking-looking man like him, even supposing she did not recognise him as the television star, she would have remembered him, and not confused him with Dark Satanic.
On a sudden impulse he did a series of left turns to reverse direction and drove towards Kensington. There were lights on in the house in Addison Road, but there was also a sense of emptiness, and it was so long before there was any response to his ringing that Slider thought he was not going to be answered. But at last the door was opened, by Palliser himself. He looked gaunt and grey and wild-haired, and somehow insubstantial, like a scarecrow with the stuffing removed. Slider had the impression that if he joggled the wrong bit, Palliser would collapse in an empty heap at his feet.
A look of dislike came over Palliser’s face as he saw Slider. ‘You again! Can’t you leave me alone? Haven’t you done enough damage?’
‘What have I done?’ Slider asked.
‘My wife has left me,’ Palliser said – blurted, rather. ‘Phyllis has walked out on me, after thirty-two years. I mean, now, after all this time! It’s unbelievable.’
Seeing how shocked Palliser was, Slider inserted himself into the house and closed the door behind him, and Palliser allowed the movement, obeyed the body language instruction and led the way into the kitchen. It was warm from the Aga, and as chaotic as ever, but lacking the smell of food which had given it its homeliness and purpose. Palliser sat down at the table and leaned on his folded arms in an attitude of helpless despair.
‘She went yesterday, after church,’ he said dazedly. ‘She just came home, packed a bag, and went. Didn’t even take her hat off.’
‘Where did she go?’ Slider asked. He hefted the kettle, judged there to be enough water in it, and pushed it onto the hot ring. Tea was in order, he thought. Always tea in a house of bereavement.
‘I asked her that. I said where can you go on a Sunday, and she said there were plenty of hotels around, and they all had rooms on Sunday nights. I said, that’s crazy, and she just shrugged. I said stay, talk about it, but she said she wanted to go, it had taken her two days to make up her mind and she wasn’t going to unmake it again. She phoned later to say where she was, but I couldn’t persuade her to come back.’
‘But do you know why?’
‘It’s this business over Roger.’ Palliser looked up resentfully. ‘Murder is so commonplace to you, you never think how it affects ordinary people. She’d known Roger almost as long as she knew me. It’s hard enough coping with someone dying naturally, but when someone’s murdered, especially in that brutal way—’
‘Is that what she said? That that was why she was going?’
‘Yes. No. Not exactly. She said it had made her think a lot about things. She said – she’s suspected about Jamie for a long time, but then when you and that other one came here asking questions and obviously thinking I’d killed Roger, it confirmed it in her mind. All those questio
ns made her think – about everything, her and me and Caroline and—’ He rubbed his face with his hands as though trying to rub normality back into his life. ‘She said she’d just decided she’d had enough. After all these years. I mean, she was always happy enough. I gave her everything. She knew I’d never leave her.’
Slider made the tea. ‘She’ll come back,’ he said comfortingly.
‘You think so?’ Palliser was eager for comfort, whatever the source.
‘She probably needs a bit of time alone to think things out, that’s all. She’ll get her mind settled, and then she’ll come back.’
‘It’s been unsettling for her. For all of us.’
‘That’s right. Your patterns have been disrupted – hers most of all, because she doesn’t have a career, like you, to take her out of herself.’ He brought the tea to the table, milked two cups, and poured. Even as he did it he realised he’d forgotten the tea-strainer, and cursed inwardly as the dark rush of leaves sprang into the first cup. Oh well. Important not to break the flow now, of tea or talk. He took the leafy cup himself and pushed the other towards Palliser. Making the tea had made him unthreatening. Palliser took it unprotesting, and looked at Slider without hostility.
‘I didn’t kill him, you know.’
‘Didn’t you?’
‘I wanted to – that night most of all. But often. For what he did to us. But I didn’t kill him. It isn’t in me to kill another human being.’
‘It’s in all of us,’ Slider said for the second time in one evening. ‘That particular murder just wasn’t your murder. But whose was it?’
‘Don’t you know yet?’
Slider shook his head. ‘I was hoping talking to you might help me get there. You were the person who knew Roger best – better than his wife, probably. You were almost the last person to see him alive – probably the last to have a quarrel with him.’
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