‘I expect that’s unusual.’
‘More so every year. One feels so for the Wildings, because they encouraged her just as they should, and that’s even more rare. Mr Wilding,’ the smile flashed out briefly, like a lighthouse beam passing, ‘is quite one of our treasures. He’s on the Board of Governors; he involves himself in all our projects, always willing to help in the most practical way. I believe he does a great deal of charity work outside as well, and sits on various committees – residents’ association, parish council, Neighbourhood Watch and so on. He’s a pillar of society.’ She used the phrase as if it were placed in inverted commas: a cliché, you were to understand, but one that could not be bettered. ‘And a most conscientious communicant. We expect all our parents to attend service regularly, but one can’t command the spirit in which they do it. But Mr Wilding is a true Christian in the best sense. And he recognised Zellah’s abilities and was most anxious that she should study serious subjects and do well at them. Most of our girls,’ she said with a sad shake of the head, ‘want to go into media studies, fashion, journalism, the soft options, and their parents encourage them. They want them to make easy money and good marriages, nothing more, as if the height of their ambition is to see their daughters emulate Victoria Beckham. Thirty years on from so-called Liberation, and women’s minds are still not valued in the least! I sometimes think it’s impossible to educate adolescent girls at all. And then someone like Zellah comes along and restores one’s faith in the species.’
It seemed a lot to be resting on one girl’s shoulders, Slider thought. ‘So you would say she was a serious-minded girl. Was she a . . . a good girl, for want of a better phrase?’
‘I understand you. And yes, she was a good girl. That was why we made her a prefect. But she wasn’t, shall we say, dour and humourless. She had great charm and vivacity. And her intellect was very well rounded. We wish our girls to be balanced, and Zellah’s science subjects had their counterpoint in the arts. She took part in many of the after-school activities. She was a member of the choir, the drama society – she took a leading part in our play at the end of the spring term. Her father helped make the scenery, by the way. I believe she did ballet, though of course that was outside the school. And she had quite a talent for art. Quite a talent. Our art master, Mr Markov, thought the world of her.’
‘So, it sounds as if she was the ideal pupil.’
‘The ideal student,’ she corrected. They didn’t say ‘pupil’ any more, either. ‘She will be a great loss to the school. And of course to her poor parents.’
Slider nodded, thinking. After a pause, he said abruptly, ‘Did you like her?’
There was a small hesitation. Then she said, ‘I never allow myself to become emotionally attached to any of my girls. You will see the necessity. Affection is not in my remit, and indeed would be too likely to affect my impartiality were I to permit it to develop. And Zellah was in many ways a very private person, hard to get to know. But she was a credit to the school, and the manner of her death has come as a great shock. A great shock.’
Was that a long way round of saying that she didn’t like her? Was there something a little intimidating in all that perfection? Or perhaps that Finch-Dutton simply had not known her well enough to like or dislike. A head teacher these days was probably fairly remote from the pupils, stuck in an office with reams of paperwork and government returns to fill in. Or, another possibility, Miss Finch-Dutton – he was sure it was Miss – didn’t really know what liking a girl felt like.
But there did seem to be quite a discrepancy, he thought when he had seen her out, between the jewel of St Margaret’s crown and delight of Mr Wilding’s eye, and the girl Sophy Cooper-Hutchinson described as her mate. It was a large crack for the real Zellah to get lost down, and Slider, who would never now meet her, felt an aching need to know what she had been like.
Meanwhile, there was Ronnie Oates, the Acton Strangler. He got up to go and see Porson. Leaning on a pervy little sex-offender was the kind of policing an old-fashioned copper like Porson would feel comfortable with, and Slider liked his bosses to be happy.
Chloë Paulson had evidently modelled herself on Sophy Cooper-Hutchinson to a large extent. Though her hair was mouse-fair, it was cut short and teased into moderate spikes on top of her head, and she wore purple lipstick and nail varnish, though the black around her eyes was much more subtle. Perhaps the fact that her parents were not in South America, and that her mother was actually at home, had moderated her fashion statement somewhat.
The Paulsons lived in a large Edwardian semi in Stamford Brook, the quality of whose paint-job alone declared them to be wealthy and sophisticated. Mrs Paulson was in her well-preserved fifties, slim and very smart, dressed and made up as if she was going to an important meeting, though it was evident she was just hanging about at home. But within seconds of Slider and Connolly arriving she had managed to get them into her kitchen and apprise them of the fact that it had been newly refitted at the cost of £80,000. It looked it. Slider could almost feel Connolly quivering with desire beside him. Strange how women felt about kitchens; and it seemed to him, the less they actually cooked the more desperately they wanted a vast culinary temple full of the most cutting-edge gadgets. He had seen Connolly eating, and while she was nowhere near being a female McLaren, he was convinced nobody who willingly chose to ingest a chutney-chilli-cheeseburger from Mike’s stand at the end of Shepherd’s Bush Market could be interested in the art of haute cuisine. Yet here she was, practically drooling over the six-burner Aga-style gas-stove, the double stainless-steel sinks with jet hose attachment and pre-chilled drinking-water tap, and the island unit’s integral butcher’s block with the range of cook’s knives sunk into slots along the back, including everything from an aubergine peeler to a marrow-bone splitter.
A glance at Mrs Paulson’s nails suggested she didn’t do a lot of hands-on cooking either, but the two women were as one in regarding this vast hymn to the domestic art as the peak of their desire. It stretched right across the back of the house and was extended outwards under a glass roof, so it measured about twenty feet by sixteen. He thought of Joanna cooking for them in her dark little six-by-six cubbyhole, with a sink, stove and about two feet of work surface her only comforts, and felt uneasily that he had let her down in some essential duty of manhood.
Mrs Paulson also managed to mention that her husband was an investment banker and that she had been a high-powered financial analyst until child-bearing took her out of the loop, but that she now did ‘important charity work’, whatever that might be. The need to impress even such lowly specimens as police officers suggested a level of loneliness and frustration that made him sad. But it did leave her open to the suggestion that she talk to Connolly in the kitchen while she made coffee for them all, while Slider interviewed Chloë alone (although in sight, beyond the triple sliding glass doors out on the patio). Slider wanted a franker talk with Chloë than he was likely to get with her mother listening.
Chloë was a bouncy girl, too energetic to be fat, but with roundnesses where Sophy and Zellah – perhaps because of their ballet classes – had none. She was wearing a stretchy halter top which stopped just under the breasts, and shorts that hugged her around the hips. Everything in between was bare, and as brown as if she had been basted and roasted – which he supposed after all was what sunbathing was. His daughter Kate would have called her ‘a chub’, a dismissive adjective she applied to everyone in the world apart from herself and a couple of approved skinny chums. Chloë’s little round belly looked like the nicely egg-glazed top of an apple dumpling, and the ring in her navel might have been put there on purpose to lift it by. She had a round face, plumply pretty and even less suited to the Goth make-up than Sophy’s, especially as her default expression seemed to be one of wide-eyed surprise.
She seemed thrilled by the attention of a real police detective, and was eager to talk to Slider, especially when he said he hoped she would be frank.
‘O
h, I don’t mind telling you anything,’ she said. ‘Try me.’
She confirmed the times and substance of what Sophy had told him about the weekend, adding her own gloss. She agreed Zellah had refused to say who she was going out with, but added that she had said ‘he was a man, not a boy’. Chloë had asked her if he went to St Martin’s, the neighbouring boys’ school whose playing fields they shared, but that Zellah had said she was way beyond St Martin’s boys.
‘Sophy said she was nervous about the date. Is that how you saw it?’ Slider asked.
‘I wouldn’t say nervous exactly,’ Chloë said. ‘More, like, jumpy. But excited as well. Once when Sophy was out of the room I said to her, “Come on, Zellah, we’re mates. Tell me who it is.” Because Sophy can be a bit, like, pushy, you know? And I thought she might tell me when she wouldn’t tell her. But she just looked at me, kind of, like, sparkly, and said she might have something important to tell me next time I saw her. But after that Sophy came back in and she clammed up and wouldn’t talk about it at all.’
‘Did you conclude from that that it was someone you knew?’ Slider asked.
‘There’s no one we know that any of us would get excited about,’ she said simply. ‘Sophy thought she was just trying to make herself important, making out she’d got a better boyfriend than us.’
‘So you don’t think it was Mike Carmichael?’ he slipped in.
She merely looked surprised. ‘That was ages ago. She wasn’t still seeing him. Sophy razzed her about him so she gave him up. I mean, he didn’t have a car. Sophy says you can’t go out with a bloke without a car.’
Sophy seemed responsible for most of Chloë’s ideas, Slider thought. ‘What’s the importance of a car?’ he asked.
‘For copping off,’ she said, as if he ought to have known that.
‘Copping off, as in—?’
She blushed a little. ‘Well, you know, snogging and that.’
Slider was beguiled that expressions of his youth like ‘snogging’ – along with ‘cool’ – had come back into vogue.
‘Where else can you do it?’ she went on. ‘My mum and dad would never let me have a boy up in my bedroom. Sophy’s the lucky one. Her mum and dad are really cool. They go away a lot, and even when they’re at home they let her do whatever she wants. They’re great.’
‘Is that what constitutes great parents? Letting her do what she wants?’
He got the stare. ‘Well . . . They give her shedloads of money, too. She’s always got all the latest stuff and, like, loads of clothes and everything. It’s cool.’
He was realizing his fundamental failures as a father. ‘What about Zellah’s parents? Were they cool?’
He got the stare and the head jerk this time. ‘Duh! That’s what the whole weekend was about. They’re awful. They never let her go anywhere. And they’ve got, like, no money. Zellah had, like, hardly any pocket money, and no new clothes.’
‘Did you ever meet them – her parents?’
‘Not really meet them. We didn’t get invited round her house. But I’d seen them, at parents’ day and sports day and prize giving, things like that. Her dad wasn’t so bad – sort of hunky, in a way – only way strict. I was scared of him. But her mum was fat!’ She added the last in tones of breathless horror as the worst thing that could be said of any human being.
‘If her dad was so strict, how come he didn’t check up on Zellah the whole weekend?’ Slider asked.
‘He used to,’ she said. ‘It was, like, so-o embarrassing. Zellah, like, trained him out of it. Her mum was all right, she wanted Zellah to have fun – it was her picked the name Zellah. How cool is that? I wish I had a great name, instead of crummy old “Chloë”. Everyone’s called that. There are three Chloës in our year at school. What was I saying?’
‘About her parents checking up on her.’
‘Oh, right. Well, her dad used to phone up all the time, until when she turned sixteen she told him if he didn’t leave it off she’d leave home. She said you can by law when you’re sixteen and your parents can’t make you come back, and he was so scared he agreed not to call her when she was out, as long as he knew where she was going. Well, she could tell him anything after that, as long as it was something he’d approve of, like that dorky Southbank Fair.’
‘So he believed her when she said she’d leave home?’
‘You don’t know Zellah. She’d have done it all right. She didn’t care. She was really cool. She was the first one of us to go all the way with a bloke.’
‘Was that with Mike Carmichael?’
Her eyes slid away from his. She put her hands between her thighs and squeezed them together, rocking forward and back in her chair. ‘I shouldn’t’ve said.’
‘Come on, Chloë. I thought we were going to be frank.’
She looked at him. ‘This doesn’t get back to her mum and dad?’
‘Zellah’s dead,’ he reminded her.
‘Oh, yeah. I’d forgotten.’ She seemed remarkably unaffected by it. ‘Well, I s’pose it doesn’t matter then. Yeah, she went all the way with Mike.’
‘How did that work, if he didn’t have a car?’
‘He’s got his own place. But she said she’d have done it anywhere with him. She was nuts about him. And the way she talked about it, she was really hot for, you know, sex. It was funny really, her being like that and her mum and dad being all proper and churchy. She told Sophy once the only reason she stayed with them was she wanted to finish school and she didn’t have any money so she had to.’
‘In that case, why did her father believe she really would leave?’
Chloë looked blank. ‘I dunno,’ she said at last. ‘I suppose she just kind of made him believe it.’
‘Through force of personality, you mean?’
‘Yeah, like that,’ Chloë said
‘So you and Zellah and Sophy go around together a lot?’
‘Yeah, we’re, like, mates. We’re tight. We’ve had, like, this gang since the fourth year. There used to be another girl as well, Frieda, Frieda Mossman, but she got all stupid when we started going out with boys, so we dropped her.’
‘You mean she didn’t approve?’
Eye-roll and jerk. ‘Couldn’t pull one herself, so she was jealous. Said she was saving it for marriage. Sophy said “nobody’s going to marry you, girl, so you might as well spend it while you can”, and she got all upset and, like, stormed off.’
‘That was pretty cruel, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, Sophy doesn’t care what she says. She’s great. Frieda shouldn’t have been so sensitive. But she was a bit fat and she has this frizzy hair.’
Slider couldn’t decide if this was justification for the nastiness, or the reason for being over-sensitive. He was fascinated, though appalled, at this glimpse below the gleaming surface of these girls. In the kitchen he saw Connolly deep in conversation with Mrs Paulson, with Mrs Paulson doing the chin-work, but he could also see the coffee was ready and only needed pouring, so he had to get on.
‘Tell me about your brother,’ he said.
‘Which one?’
‘The one who lives in Notting Hill.’
‘What, Oliver? He’s cool.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a foreign analyst for a firm of brokers. City stuff, you know. He earns shedloads of money. I mean, him and his mates are all making out like bandits! He shares this great flat in Lansdowne Crescent with these three other guys – you should see it! It’s gorgeous. And he wears these beautiful suits. Boss, Armani. Totally great threads. He had this girlfriend Tara who was actually an earl’s daughter. They’ve broken it off now, though. Sophy says Tara’s a dorky name, anyway. She says it’s, like, a name you give a pony. But Oliver never had trouble pulling girls anyway. He’s gorgeous looking, and he has, like, this great sense of humour.’
‘So how does he know Mike Carmichael? It seems an unlikely sort of friendship, given Mike’s background.’
The round face was innocent of
guile. ‘Oh, I don’t think he knows him that well. He just lives in the neighbourhood. I think they met at a party of a mate of his.’
‘And how did Zellah meet him?’
‘Round Oliver’s. Zellah and Sophy used to go up Oliver’s on Saturdays after ballet class and I’d meet them there. I don’t do ballet. This one Saturday Oliver was taking us all to lunch. He does that sometimes. He’s great. And Mike was there, so he came with us. Mike’s all right,’ she added, free of charge. ‘Sophy doesn’t like him, but she’s a snob. Mike’s a laugh. I could see right off Zellah liked him. Sophy said that’s because of Zellah’s chav blood. It takes one to know one, she said. But I reckon she fancied him herself, Sophy did, only you could see it was Zellah he was into. It, like, pissed her off, Sophy, so she never had a good word to say for Mike after that. But I don’t think she would have gone out with him if he had asked her,’ she concluded, ‘so I don’t know what she had to get snarky about.’
‘Do you know Mike’s address?’
‘No, but I know he’s got this flat in Ladbroke Grove, over this cool shop that sells, like, tarot cards and joss sticks and mystic books and stuff. I’d love to have a flat over a shop. It’s so cool.’ She returned from her dream to ask, ‘Why d’you want to know about Mike? Zellah’s not seen him in months.’
‘Oh, we have to talk to everyone who knew her. You never know what you might find out.’
She observed him with interest. ‘You don’t think he killed her, do you?’
‘I don’t think anything yet. I have to gather the facts first. Why, do you?’
‘Me? I don’t even know the bloke. Well, hardly. It would be, like, cool, though, knowing a murderer.’
Slider ended the interview and excused himself. He could take, like, no more.
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