‘They told me you were here, guv,’ he said to Slider, but his eyes moved on to Porson. ‘Ronnie Oates has confessed.’
Porson looked as if he’d been thrown a lifeline. ‘That’s more like it. Confession is as confession does. I don’t like it when they don’t cough. What sort of state’s he in?’
‘He’s fine, sir,’ Hollis said. ‘Quite cheerful. Thinks himself no end of a buck, if you want my opinion.’
‘Good. We don’t want the defence claiming we beat it out of him.’
‘No, sir. He’s all right. Better than me.’
Porson looked at his watch. ‘Has he had anything to eat?’
‘Not since breakfast, sir, though he’s had several cups of tea.’
‘All right. This is what we’ll do. Read him his rights, get him a solicitor, and make sure he gets a good lunch before the brief arrives. Whatever he likes best. Keep him in a good mood. Then get him to do it again on tape with the solicitor present. That way there’s no argument.’ He pulled out his handkerchief and mopped his brow and round his neck. Behind him the window was open, but not a breath of air came through, and the sky was blankly grey. ‘Meanwhile, follow everything up, get everything corrobolated, leave no grindstone unturned. If we’re going to stand Ronnie Oates up against the bleeding hearts brigade, we need a cast-iron case, no loose nuts.’ He put his handkerchief away. ‘Too damned hot today. Wouldn’t be surprised if it rained later. Oates is in the coolest place – can’t accuse us of cruelty. Well,’ he concluded in a bark, ‘what are you standing there for? Get on with it!’
Slider turned away. He wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a storm later, and not only meteorologically. This case was like a typical British summer, he thought. Three hot days and a thunderstorm – with a period of unease in between.
‘I’m going to leave Oates to you,’ he said to Hollis as they walked down the corridor. ‘Can you manage that and office manager?’
‘Yes, guv,’ Hollis said, with a question naked in his face.
‘I’m going to interview our friend Carmichael,’ Slider said. ‘As the Old Man says, we don’t want any loose ends.’
‘Curiosity,’ said Hollis gravely, ‘got the early cat the cream.’
THIRTEEN
Another Day, Another Dealer
Running was Carmichael’s undoing. DI Phil Warzynski at Notting Hill accepted it, when Slider phoned him, as proof of villainy, and with his good word in support the duty muppet coughed up a warrant to search the flat. Hart and McLaren came back with cheering news. They had found things of interest.
‘It weren’t a bad pad,’ Hart commented. ‘Clean, done up nice. I dunno if he spends much time there, though. There wasn’t many clothes, no telly, just a sound system and some CDs. No food to speak of in the fridge, just the empties of a six-pack and a Chinese takeaway in the bin. He must have gone out last night and took it back in with him.’ She rolled her eyes slightly to show what she thought of the other team allowing him past. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t picture him sitting around there of an evening. It was more like a drop-in.’
‘Expensive drop-in,’ McLaren said. ‘Anywhere decent round there costs a bomb.’
‘But we reckon he was making well enough to afford it,’ Hart went on. ‘I knew we’d find something as soon as he started talking about “planting” stuff. They always say that, the dipsticks. And right away we found a whole lot of little squares of white paper in one cupboard, and a couple of packets of white powder in another.’ She grinned. ‘He’d put ’em in two tins marked rice and flour. I reckon he’s got a sense of humour.’
‘But they weren’t rice and flour?’ Slider prompted gently.
‘Kensington an’ Chelsea,’ Hart said.
‘Calvin Klein,’ McLaren put in, not wanting to be left out of the hip-talk stakes.
K&C, or CK, was ketamine and cocaine, the latest drug of choice for young people wanting to get off their faces. Ket, the veterinary tranquiliser, was cheaper than charlie, and while the high didn’t last as long, there was no paranoid come-down as with cocaine. It was more like being hilarious drunk for a couple of hours, leaving you with nothing worse than a mild hangover. At the lower end of the social scale, the users were abandoning coke for financial reasons along with high-price cocktail bars and nightclubs, and taking ket with friends at home, which was a lot less trouble for everyone (including the police). The better-off kids were mixing the two, hence the ‘Royal Borough’ nickname for the combination.
‘So, our little chum is at the cutting edge of juvenile stupidity, is he?’ Slider said. ‘How much did you find?’
‘About fifty grams of charlie and twenty-five of K,’ Hart said. ‘Plus, like I said, the papers for making the wraps.’
‘So we could make dealing stick all right?’
‘Yes, guv, and there was something else,’ McLaren added eagerly. ‘In the bathroom there was a hairbrush on the shelf in front of the mirror, and there were some long blonde hairs in it, along with the black.’
‘We brought ’em back in an evidence bag, guv, in case you want to do a DNA test,’ Hart concluded. ‘O’ course, he might have had some other blonde bird up there, but . . .’
‘Quite,’ said Slider. This was good. It gave him more to work with in putting pressure on Carmichael, and if enough pressure were exerted it would probably not be necessary to send the hair to be expensively analysed. ‘All right, get it written up and the samples booked. I’m off to see a man about a drug.’
Michael Carmichael was looking both furious and sulky, which Slider thought a promising combination. Both states of mind were the enemy of rational thought, and without rational thought there could be no cunning.
‘I’m not talking to you!’ he shouted as soon as Slider came in.
Slider had brought Mackay with him, in case of trouble, and nodded to him to stand inconspicuously in the corner, while Detton, the duty constable, went to stand outside the door. He wanted the conversation, if it took place at all, to seem like a one-to-one.
It didn’t start well. Carmichael fixed angry eyes on Slider and snarled, ‘I’m not telling you anything. I want a lawyer.’
Slider looked fatherly concern. ‘Oh, don’t say that! I was hoping to have a friendly chat, just between the two of us.’
‘I know my rights,’ Carmichael said, and thumped the table to emphasise his determination. ‘I’m not saying anything without a lawyer. You get me one, or that’s it.’
‘Well, I’m sure you do know your rights,’ Slider said, ‘but the thing is this: we’ve found a lot of drugs in your flat. If you insist on a lawyer, we’ll have to charge you with dealing, and that means prison.’
‘You planted ’em there. You’d never make it stick.’
‘Yes, we would. Don’t be silly.’
He knew it, too. He changed tack. ‘It’s just a bit for my own use. You don’t go down for that. You’d have to let me go with a slap on the wrist.’
‘Don’t let’s waste time. You know the quantities you had up there, far more than for your own use – plus the papers all ready for making the wraps. It’s a clear charge of dealing, for which it’s a couple of years inside.’ He paused long enough to let it sink in. Carmichael’s face was dark with anger and frustration, and for a moment he seemed to struggle for escape, moving his head this way and that, rocking the chair back on its hind legs and letting it drop with a crash. Finally he let loose with a flood of foul language, beating his fists on the table. Slider watched him unmoved until the storm abated, and then said, ‘Calm down and listen. Listen!’ Carmichael shut his mouth and looked at Slider, trembling slightly, nostrils flaring. ‘As it happens,’ Slider went on, ‘I’m not minded to follow up the drugs thing – if you co-operate.’
‘Co-operate?’ Carmichael said at last, with deep suspicion. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s not the drugs I want to talk to you about, so if you calm down and talk to me sensibly without babbling about your rights and wanting a lawye
r, I can forget we found anything in your flat.’
‘What do you want to talk about?’ he said, but Slider could see he knew the answer to that.
‘Zellah Wilding.’
‘Oh, shit. You’re going to try to pin that on me now, are you? Just ’cos I come from Woodley South. Stick a label on someone and hang him. You fascist bastard! You and the Nazis would’ve got along great.’
‘I’m not trying to pin anything on you. I’m trying to find out the truth. I want to hear your side of the story. But if you want to go the other way, I can charge you for dealing and pass you over to someone else to do the questioning.’ Carmichael watched him with narrowed eyes. ‘We’ve got plenty against you already,’ Slider said. ‘Maybe you’ve got a good explanation for everything. I’d like to hear. But if you don’t want to tell me about it, we can just as easily assemble the evidence without your input.’
‘Frame me, you mean. Fit me up.’
Slider enumerated on his fingers. ‘We found Zellah’s hair in your flat. You claimed you hadn’t seen her in months but we’ve got eyewitnesses who saw you with her on the night she was murdered. And they saw you quarrelling with her.’ He laid the hand on the table and shrugged, looking away indifferently. ‘Your call, son. If you’re innocent, talk to me, tell me what really happened. Otherwise let’s book you and get it over with. But don’t waste my time.’
There was a breathless pause – breathless for Slider, anyway – before Carmichael said sulkily, ‘All right, I’ll talk.’
‘You’ll waive seeing a lawyer at this time?’
‘And the drugs thing goes away?’
‘On that understanding.’
‘All right.’ He rocked his chair back on to its hind legs again, and stuffed his hands into his pockets – no easy feat, given their tightness. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Tell me about meeting Zellah that night.’
‘It was her idea,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten about her. I hadn’t seen her in months – that’s the truth.’
‘How many months? When did you last see her before that night?’
‘It must’ve been . . . May, probably. It was, like, Easter when I took her home that time on my bike and her dad give me the bollocking. I’d have dropped her then – I mean, she was a nice enough bird, but who needs that kind of aggro? – but she was all over me. It was all her, you know,’ he insisted in an aggrieved tone. ‘She made the running. So we went out a few more weeks, and then she dropped me.’
‘Dropped you how? Said she didn’t want to see you any more?’
‘No, she just didn’t ring me. I never rang her, in case her dad was around. He wasn’t above answering her phone if it rang when he was there, so she told me never to ring her. And when she stopped ringing me, I thought it was over. I didn’t care,’ he added, to make it clear. ‘I had other fish to fry. I don’t go short of birds, I promise you.’
‘I’m sure you don’t. So tell me about the date on Sunday.’
‘Well, she rang me up out of the blue, Sunday morning, and said let’s get together that night. I said I was busy. Well, I wasn’t going to let her think I was at her beck and call. I said I could see her some other time, but she said that night or nothing, so in the end I thought, what the hell. I mean, she was a right little raver in bed, and I’d got nothing better to do. So I said OK. She said would I pick her up and we arranged a place.’
‘The Black Lion in Chiswick,’ Slider mentioned, just to keep the pressure on. Carmichael stared at him. ‘They have a CCTV camera trained on the car park,’ Slider assured him. ‘We have the tape.’
Carmichael felt the need to express some feelings about the fascist state and Big Brother surveillance before he could go on. In the end, Slider prompted him. ‘You picked her up, and took her back to your flat?’
‘Yeah,’ Carmichael agreed, though his mind was evidently still on his political grievances. ‘Free country? Don’t make me laugh.’
‘To your flat,’ Slider prompted. ‘And did what?’
‘Had a drink. Put some sounds on. Talked a bit. I had a smoke. She was sort of wandering about. Restless.’
‘Nervous?’
He shrugged. ‘I dunno. Maybe. She was in a funny mood all right. I thought she wanted to get it on – I mean, I thought that was why she phoned me in the first place. We had a bit of a cuddle, but when I started kissing her she pulled away. Then she said she wanted to go to the fair. I thought she was playing hard to get and we’d do it later, so I didn’t care. Girls like to play games like that. But she was hot stuff in bed. You wouldn’t think to look at her, but she was all over me when we went out together. Tore the clothes off me, practically.’
‘Did she love you? Was she in love with you?’
The question seemed to surprise him, as if love didn’t normally come into his calculations. ‘She was mad for me,’ he said at last doubtfully, making a distinction. ‘Couldn’t get enough.’
Slider left that line for the moment. ‘How do you know Oliver Paulson?’ he asked. Carmichael looked surprised and uneasy. ‘Who?’
‘Chloë’s brother. You met Zellah through him. Chloë, Zellah and Sophy were at his flat one day and the five of you went out to lunch. Surely you can’t have forgotten him?’
‘Well, why shouldn’t I know him?’ Carmichael tried, unconvincingly.
‘A bit out of your normal circle, isn’t he? An ex-public-schoolboy City dealer with a million-pound flat in Notting Hill.’
‘And I’m a kid from a sink estate, yeah, I get it,’ he said bitterly.
‘You’ve obviously bettered yourself,’ Slider said. ‘You’ve got a nice pad in Ladbroke Grove, an expensive Harley, nice clothes, posh friends. What’s your secret?’ Carmichael only glowered. ‘I told you I wasn’t interested in the drugs thing, so let’s just get it out of the way, shall we? You knew Oliver Paulson because you were supplying him with drugs.’
A pause, and then, with a kind of sigh of release, Carmichael said, ‘He contacted me through a bloke in a pub I know. I got him charlie, and then CK when they went over to that. A lot of ’em changed over because they said it interfered with work less, when they’re doing it three–four times a week, like most of these City whizzes, instead of just weekends. I don’t care,’ he shrugged. ‘I charge ’em the same for Calvin Klein, and it costs me less. They could get ket cheaper on the street, but they don’t want to get their hands dirty, and they know they can trust me. So then Olly put me on to some other friends of his and I’ve made a good thing out of it. I do parties and everything. Some of ’em contact me before they even ring the caterers. It’s meant I could give up the risky end of the business, and good riddance. I never liked hanging about on the Woodley South, standing on corners with all those scag dealers and crack heads, and the stupid bloody gangstas with their knives and attitude. I hate that bloody place!’ he cried with sudden vehemence. ‘I wouldn’t ever go back there, ever, if it weren’t for my mum.’ He turned his gaze to Slider, and for a moment a younger Mike Carmichael looked out from his eyes, a scared and uncertain boy who had been left to fend for himself, in a fast-moving and dangerous world, by the inexplicable withdrawal of his mother. ‘I’ve tried to get her out, but she won’t leave. And I’ve tried to get her off the shit, but she won’t even try. The only thing I can do for her is make sure she doesn’t get in with any of the really dangerous dealers, or get hold of shit that’s cut with something that’ll kill her. That’s why I get her the stuff – because she’d go somewhere else if I didn’t, and end up dead, or worse. I give her money and try and make her eat and take care of herself. What else can I do? I mean, what am I supposed to do? You tell me!’
Slider resisted the call to sympathy and the urge to ask himself what he would have done in the same circumstances. His habit of empathizing was both one of the strengths of his character and one of its weaknesses, and he knew it. Instead he asked, ‘Did Zellah take drugs?’
‘No, she wasn’t interested. She thought it was stupid t
o mess with your brain like that. Mind you, she had a brain, not like those friends of hers. I don’t think they even knew how clever she was. She tried to hide it from them, but it came out all over the place – to me, at least. I noticed. She was, like, brilliant. She could have been a rocket scientist if she wanted. But she was one messed-up kid. Didn’t know what she wanted. Except sex. She liked that.’
Slider thought of the drawings, of the bleak poem, of what Markov had said of her. ‘Do you think she had doubts about her sexuality?’ he asked.
‘Doubts?’ Carmichael stared. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘A lot of young people go through a phase of wondering about their . . . orientation.’ He hated using the word, but he couldn’t think how else to phrase it. ‘Sometimes they try to hide it from themselves by going too far in the other direction.’
‘You mean, did she pretend to like sex because she was secretly a lezzer?’ he said brutally, and then laughed. ‘No chance! That girl was a natural in bed. Who told you that crap?’
‘I was just speculating aloud,’ Slider said. ‘Trying to understand her.’ On an impulse, he said, ‘Do you know Alex Markov?’
To his surprise, Carmichael said at once, ‘Yeah, he’s one of Oliver’s mates. I met him at Olly’s. I sell him stuff, too. They call him the Magic Marker, because he’s an artist and he used to be into psychedelics, speed, mushrooms and that, when he was at college.’ Slider smiled inwardly at this derivation of his sobriquet. Magic Markov indeed! ‘Olly bought a painting off him once.’
‘Have you been to his house?’
‘No. I take him the gear at Olly’s or we meet in a pub. He’s married and I don’t think his wife knows he does drugs. She’s a top nurse on shifts, so they don’t see much of each other. I don’t think they’re getting on, to tell you the truth. Olly says it’s a good lesson in why you should never get married.’ Carmichael seemed to be enjoying himself now, was becoming almost garrulous, as if he had forgotten why they were having this conversation. ‘Why do you want to know about him?’
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