‘But we’re not telling ’em any more than her name and that we’re treating it as murder. Don’t want them getting prurient about it. Her parents have got enough to be coping with, without the sex angle.’
‘It will leak out that she was strangled. The dog-walker who found her will tell.’
‘It’ll get out in time, it always does, but that’s not our providence. You can’t make an omelette without breaking step. So what are you up to? Got any lines?’
Slider told him where they were on Carmichael.
‘Looks like the evidence is stacking up on him all right,’ Porson said. ‘I’ll get on to Woodley Green, ask them nicely to keep an eye out for him, especially at his mum’s house. You’ve got people out in Notting Hill?’
‘Yes, sir, looking for a flat above a tarot shop.’
‘Be a few of those,’ Porson said, echoing Atherton. ‘Can’t chuck a brick round that way without hitting some of that dippy mystic stuff.’
‘We’ll find it, sir.’
‘And what then?’
‘If he’s there, we’ll arrest him for questioning. We’ve got enough to nab him, given that he ran away.’
‘And if he isn’t there?’ Porson moved restlessly back and forth, unwinding a paper clip and then bending the resultant length of metal back and forth in his big, chalky fingers until it snapped. ‘Can’t search his gaff without a warrant, and it’ll be hell’s own job getting one without more evidence than that. If it was on our own ground that’d be one thing, but you know what our brothers in Notting Hill are like. Don’t like people raining on their shed without all the eyes crossed and the tees dotted.’ He selected another paper clip and resumed the exercise. ‘He’s got to come home sooner or later,’ he concluded. ‘If he’s not there, put someone on obbo and nab him as soon as they see him.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And meanwhile,’ Porson went on, ‘what about Ronnie Oates? Now there’s a little toerag you can get your teeth into.’
‘I’m sending Hollis out to see his mum. He’ll get it out of her where Ronnie is. And we’ve got a sighting of someone who fits his description hanging around the Scrubs that evening.’
‘Good. Excellent. I’d like to get him put away properly. They didn’t jug him half hard enough last time, and if it was him . . .’ The paper clip snapped audibly. ‘That pretty girl, not even seventeen . . .’ His eyes lifted to Slider’s. ‘Sometimes I hate this job.’
‘At least we get to do something about it,’ Slider said, offering his own comfort, ‘even if it isn’t enough.’
The steel re-entered Porson’s soul. ‘Is that you sympathizing with me?’ he barked.
‘No, sir. Just passing a comment,’ Slider said hastily.
‘When I want pity, I’ll ask for it. And it’ll be a warm day in Hull before that happens, I can tell you.’
‘I know that, sir.’
‘Well, get on with it, then. No use to anyone standing round like a spare plate at a wedding. Get weaving.’
Slider was hardly back in his office when the phone rang.
‘Is that Inspector Slider? It’s Derek Wilding here, Zellah’s – Zellah’s father. I understand you’re the person to talk to.’
‘I am the investigating officer. I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr Wilding. Is there something I can help you with?’
‘I hope perhaps I can help you. The other officer – I think his name was Atherton?’
‘Detective Sergeant Atherton, that’s right.’
‘Well, he asked about Zellah’s mobile phone, asked me for the number and make of it. Said it could be traced from the signal.’
‘That’s right. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to trace it because it seems to have been turned off.’
‘Yes, Mr Atherton said it could only be traced if it was turned on,’ said Wilding. ‘The thing is, I’ve just found it.’
‘You’ve found the mobile?’
‘Yes, it was here in her room. In the drawer of her bedside cabinet. I was just – I was in her room. Looking at things.’ He swallowed audibly, and resumed, his tone pleading. ‘Her things are there. It’s all I have left. It still . . . smells of her.’ His voice broke altogether, and Slider fought with his own pity to remain steady and grounded.
‘I understand, Mr Wilding. Please don’t feel you need to explain. Now, this mobile – you’re sure it’s hers?’
‘Of course I am. I bought it for her.’
‘I’m just surprised she didn’t take it with her.’
‘She must have forgotten it.’ His voice wobbled again as he said, ‘It’s terrible that she didn’t have it with her that night. I can’t help thinking—’ He cleared his throat and regained control. ‘What if she wanted to call me, and she couldn’t? What if she was frightened? What if I could have saved her?’
‘You mustn’t think like that,’ Slider said. ‘There were lots of houses within a few yards of where she was. She could have knocked on any door for help.’
‘At that time of night? Everyone would have been fast asleep.’
‘But there was no report of any disturbance or shouting or anything like that. I think it happened very quickly, and she wouldn’t have had time to telephone you, even if she’d had her mobile with her.’ It was a perilous way to try to console a father: there wasn’t much comfort in it whichever way you sliced it. He didn’t want Wilding to think too deeply about what he had just said, and went on, ‘I’d like you to put the mobile into a bag – an ordinary freezer bag will be fine – and we’ll collect it. And don’t handle if, if you’ll be so kind. Pick it up by the end of the aerial stalk and drop it into the bag.’
‘You’re thinking of fingerprints? But – what fingerprints can there be on it, if she didn’t have it with her?’
‘It’s a very long shot, of course, but it may have been someone she knew and they may have touched it at some point recently. We have to go through the routines.’
‘I see,’ he said dully. ‘Of course, I touched it when I took it out of the drawer.’
‘I understand. I’ll send someone round to fetch it, and we’ll be able to get a record of her calls, at any rate. We’ll know who she was in the habit of calling.’
‘Very well,’ he said, resignedly. ‘I expect it will just be her school friends. And this number here. It won’t tell you anything.’
‘We’re doing all we can,’ Slider said kindly, answering the thought behind the words.
Atherton took the news with more interest than Slider had shown. ‘Wait, wait, this could be something,’ he said. ‘What girl ever goes out without her mobile? They’re surgically wedded to them. The only way to stop a teenager texting her pals is to prise the phone from her cold, dead fingers.’
Slider winced. ‘A happy turn of phrase. I agree with you in general, but even a teenage girl can be absent-minded on occasion. She just forgot it, that’s all.’
‘That’s what I’m saying, she wouldn’t have. Never in a thousand years. She’d have put it into her handbag as automatically as her door keys.’
‘Well on this occasion she didn’t. Why are you getting so excited?’
‘Suppose the murderer brought it away from the scene with him?’
‘You want Wilding to be the murderer?’
‘I don’t want him to be. But it usually is the victim’s nearest and dearest, and he was hugely controlling of her. Maybe he followed her, discovered what she was up to, sex-and-smut wise, had a violent row and strangled her.’
‘With tights he just happened to have brought with him.’
‘He may have found out beforehand that she wasn’t the little angel he had always believed in, and went out to execute her, to save her soul from worse to come. There would have been plenty of tights in the house, his wife’s and his daughter’s. Look,’ he said to Slider’s rejecting expression, ‘we know he’s a religious nut—’
‘He’s a churchgoer,’ Slider said indignantly. ‘Why has everyone with a religious belief got to be
a nutcase?’
‘Well, they don’t have to be. But he’s too good to be true – all that charity work and helping out at the school and being on committees and going to church. Yet he wasn’t above stealing that piece of land behind his garden – because that’s what it comes down to. And he knocked off his secretary, which involved immorality and deceit. Old Wilding’s not as squeaky clean as he likes to seem.’
‘It’s others who praise him,’ Slider pointed out. ‘He never said he was a saint.’
Atherton waved that away. ‘And look at the way he treated Zellah – wouldn’t let her go anywhere or do anything for fear of her purity being sullied. Brooding away out in his shed about disgusting youths putting their hands on his lily-white treasure. You’ve got to admit it’s a compelling scenario. I mean, the shed alone condemns him. Men who spend all their leisure hours alone in a shed at the bottom of the garden have got to be up to no good.’ He was only partly joking. ‘And if he hasn’t got a stack of hygiene magazines in there, then what is he doing?’
‘Woodwork,’ said Slider. As he said it, he remembered with a horrible chill another shed in another garden, which had belonged to a religious nut. The smell of new pine and old sweat pierced his memory. It was always smells that brought back the past the most vividly. He had been tied up by a man with a knife who was going to kill him; and instead it was Atherton who had been stabbed, near fatally. He met his subordinate’s eyes and knew he was thinking of the same thing. He said, ‘Even allowing your analysis for the moment, what are you supposing happened?’
‘Don’t you think it’s suspicious that it’s only after I tell him the phone can be traced that it turns up? He hadn’t thought of it before – it was certainly news to him at the time that you can trace a mobile with pinpoint accuracy from a signal. So he dashes home and switches it off before we can start looking, and then decides the safest thing is to tell you he’s found it in an unexceptional place.’
‘But why is it there at all?’
‘After he killed her, he took her handbag away with him. To conceal her identity, probably,’ he said in anticipation of Slider’s next question, ‘to give himself time to work out his story. He disposed of it somewhere – or maybe hid it in his wardrobe.’
‘Or his shed?’
‘Yes, better. Wifey might find it in his wardrobe, but I’ll bet he locks the old wooden hacienda when he’s not using it. Then he was alerted that the phone would lead us straight to him. He’s probably destroyed the handbag by now – might be interesting to ask the neighbours if he was burning leaves on Tuesday afternoon.’
‘Burning leaves? In August?’
‘Well, whatever gardeners burn in August. By the way,’ he short-circuited himself as he remembered, ‘what would he be growing in his vegetable patch that looked like coriander?’
Slider thought for a moment, and then said, ‘Parsnips, you philistine. So if he burned the handbag, why didn’t he get rid of the mobile at the same time?’
‘You can’t burn a mobile. Maybe he was going to take it out and dump it down a drain somewhere, but then he thought it would be better for us to have it.’
‘Why?’
Atherton looked triumphant. ‘Because if she was regularly telephoning a gentleman of the male persuasion, it would make him a suspect.’
‘Oh, you’re clever,’ Slider said bitterly. ‘You’ve got it all worked out.’
Atherton looked wounded. ‘Why do you want it not to be Wilding?’
‘Because he’s her father,’ Slider said. He was silent a moment, and then said, ‘You’re right, I’m not being objective. And there is one thing.’
‘Tell me, tell me.’
‘He was imagining her fleeing the murderer in terror and not being able to phone daddy, so I said there were lots of doors she could have knocked on. And he said, “What, at that time of night? Everyone would have been fast asleep.” We’ve never released a time of death. We don’t even really know it. It could have been any time after about ten p.m.’
‘He could have just assumed it was in the dead of night,’ Atherton said.
‘Now you’re being perverse. It was you who wanted him.’
‘Just playing your part.’
‘Well, don’t. You were right that we have to consider every possibility. We ought to look into Wilding. If he did know, or even suspect, that she was getting away from him, he might feel strongly enough. He was certainly passionate about her. And it is odd, at least, that she left her mobile behind. We’ll have a completely objective goosey at him, ask the neighbours what they thought of him, check what he was doing that night. It won’t be easy without making him think he’s being accused of something, and if he’s innocent, that’s the last thing I want.’
‘Salt in the wounds?’
‘More like boiling lead.’
‘Nobody said this was an easy job,’ Atherton commiserated. ‘First thing is to send someone for the mobile, I suppose.’
Slider was pondering. ‘I think I’ll go myself,’ he said. ‘I haven’t met the man – I’d like to get a look at him, and at the shed. And I’d like to have a look at her room.’
‘What do you hope to find there?’ Atherton asked.
‘Some clue as to who she was.’
‘Angel or devil?’
‘She won’t have been either. Nobody is. But I can’t see her clearly, and I want to. I think,’ he concluded sadly, ‘that I would have liked her if I’d known her.’
‘You always say that about everyone,’ Atherton said. ‘You’re just an empathizer.’
Hollis knew Ronnie Oates was living at home because his mother opened the door at once when he rang, and said, ‘Left your key behind?’ before she saw who it was. Then her face sagged like a disappointed child’s. ‘Who’re you? I don’t know you.’
‘Yes you do, love,’ he said kindly. ‘Sergeant Hollis from Shepherd’s Bush. You know me from when Ronnie had his last little bit of trouble.’
‘Well, he ain’t done nothing this time,’ she said, but yielded anyway to Hollis’s body language and let him in.
It was a ground-floor council-owned maisonette in a tiny terraced house in East Acton, in a turning off the A40, where the traffic thundered past night and day like the migration of the mastodons. Hollis was fortunate in not being cursed, like Slider, with a sensitive nose, or like Atherton with a refinement of taste, but even he quailed a little before the Oates establishment. It was filthy, and it stank.
The front door opened directly into the single living room, whose far end, under the window on to the garden, was the kitchen. In this end there was a sofa, two armchairs and a television set, but all the furniture was hidden under a silt of clothes, fast-food packaging, sweet wrappers, food residue, and saucers containing dabs of left-over cat food. The kitchen end festered under a silt of dishes and rancid food. The window to the garden was open and a succession of cats hopped in and out. The place smelled of urine, cats, and the sweetish, eye-burning odour of dirty bodies, which was also Mrs Oates’s parfum du jour.
She was a shortish woman, wide rather than fat, with dirty grey hair held back from her face by a child’s pink plastic hair-slides. She had a startling number of missing teeth, but when you saw the condition of those remaining, this seemed rather a cause for celebration than otherwise. She was dressed in a wrap-over floral cleaning overall, so amply stained it looked as if she had spent the day butchering piglets, and below the hem her tights hung in festoons on legs that disappeared into battered carpet slippers. She wore the slippers everywhere, inside the house and out in the street, and besides being stained each had a hole in the top where her big toe had poked through, on account of her never cutting her toenails, which were long and sharp enough to geld the piglets with.
‘So your Ronnie’s staying with you, then,’ Hollis said.
‘No, he ain’t. I dunno where he is,’ she said automatically. A look of cunning entered her face. ‘He’s in jail. My Ronnie’s in jail.’
�
�Don’t be daft, ma. You know he came out in May. And I know he’s staying here because you’ve got the sofa bed out. Who’s sleeping on that if it’s not Ronnie?’
She looked for a costive moment at the sofa – thought did not come easily to her. The sofa was pulled out into a bed, taking up most of the space in the tiny room, and ‘made’ with a muddle of blankets and dirty sheets. Finally she said with an air of triumph, ‘I am. I’m sleeping on it.’
She looked pleased with herself for precisely the few seconds that elapsed before Hollis said, ‘Because Ronnie’s got your bed, right? He’s not in, is he, ma? Mind if I have a look?’
A door to the right led to the rest of the maisonette: a tiny hall, too small to swing a cat without killing it, with two doors, one leading to the tiny windowless bathroom – the smell in there was indescribable, and the bath was full of several years’ worth of old newspapers – and the bedroom, dominated by a double bed and an upturned plastic beer crate which served as a bedside table. Hollis only glanced into each to be sure Ronnie wasn’t there before returning to the living room.
‘So where was your Ronnie on Sunday, then, ma? This Sunday just gone.’
‘Out. He was out,’ she said quickly. ‘He weren’t here.’
‘Oh, so you can’t vouch for him, then?’ Hollis said innocently. ‘Can’t give him an alibi?’
She looked dumbfounded, but recovered to say, ‘No, that’s right, he was here all day. I ’member now. He never went out at all. He was watching telly all day, and – and – I give him fish and chips for his tea.’
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