‘What makes you think that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. But if he wasn’t, why did it all have to be such a secret?’
‘Because her parents wouldn’t have liked her to have a boyfriend?’
‘Oh, I don’t mean secret from them. Obviously it had to be a secret from them,’ she said, shaking her head at his stupidity. ‘But why keep it a secret from me? She didn’t keep Mike a secret from me. Or from Sophy and Chloë. But I don’t think they even knew she had a new boyfriend.’
‘I don’t think they did either,’ Slider said encouragingly. ‘I think you knew Zellah much better than they did.’
‘I was her only real friend,’ she said bleakly, ‘but still she didn’t trust me enough to tell me about him. I wish I knew why. Nothing’s ever so bad if you can understand.’
‘Can you think of anything, anything at all, that she told you about the new boyfriend? Anything that might help us find him.’
Now her gaze sharpened behind the glasses. ‘Why do you want to find him? Do you think he was the one that . . . that killed her?’
‘I don’t know,’ Slider said, glad to be able to fall back on that. ‘But obviously we want to talk to anyone who knew her well, particularly in the last two or three months.’
‘Well, I can’t think of anything she said, apart from what I’ve told you. Mostly she just said how wonderful he was. And how he understood her. She said that a lot.’ She nodded at Slider emphatically. ‘She really thought he was her soul-mate. She didn’t like her parents much. They were always fighting over her. I’ve seen them with her, at parents’ day, and it was true. Everyone says how proud they were of her, but I don’t think they actually really saw her, as a person. They just wanted to own her. For reflected glory. You know,’ she added seriously, ‘I don’t think it could have been the new man that killed her. I mean, she loved him. And I suppose he must have loved her. So why would he?’
For all her intellectual maturity, she was still untried where emotions were concerned. She couldn’t conceive why love might lead to death.
Atherton was still there when Slider got back to the station, sitting on his windowsill.
‘I thought I told you to go home.’
‘With my boss going solo, risking his all out in the wilderness? No way,’ said Atherton. ‘You might have needed rescuing, and who else was going to go out with the barrel of brandy round his neck? Besides, you’ll want to hear this. Connolly?’
Connolly came in from the CID room with a piece of paper in her hand. ‘I got the gen on the car, sir,’ she said. ‘Two-year-old Toyota Corolla, colour sapphire black.’ She looked up from the paper. ‘That’s—’
‘I know what that is, thank you, Constable,’ he said. ‘I had a lecture earlier today from a career TDA artist.’
‘Registered keeper is a Miss Stephanie Barstowe, address 6 Shirland House, Bravington Road, Kensal Town. Bought new on finance from Kensal Motors, Harrow Road – payments all up to date so far. You asked about tickets – there’s half a dozen outstanding, all around London. No other violations. Insurance is with Liverpool Victoria, fully comp, fifty-pound windscreen excess, self and named driver covered. And,’ she looked up here, with an expression of triumph, ‘the named driver is Alexander Markov of the same address.’
Slider sat down behind his desk. ‘Go on.’
‘I got talking to another nurse in the same unit, and they are married, but she uses her maiden name. I suppose that’s because of her career – she’s manager of the intensive-care unit, so she’s a bit of a player. Also, I asked did Stephanie drive the car to work. Apparently she drives in when the weather’s bad, otherwise she cycles.’
‘The weather was fine on Sunday,’ Atherton said.
‘And I did a bit of checking with the management about her shifts. The parking tickets are all at times Stephanie was working. So someone else was driving the car at those times.’
‘You said the car under the railway bridge was a Toyota Corolla,’ Atherton said to Slider. ‘But I’m not sure where you’re going with this, or what made you connect the two. There must be hundreds of Corollas in the area.’
‘Just as there are Focuses,’ Slider replied, ‘but you were happy for it to be Wilding’s.’
‘Well, obviously, because it belongs to someone connected with the victim,’ he said, and stopped abruptly.
‘Sir,’ Connolly said, frowning as she tried to catch up, ‘I thought Markov said Zellah was a lezzer. It said in your notes—’
‘Classic misdirection,’ Slider said.
‘Hey, I said that,’ Atherton protested.
‘About a completely different subject. Markov threw out the suggestion about Zellah in the hope that I wouldn’t make a connection between him, Zellah and sex. He didn’t say she was a lesbian. He said he wondered if she had doubts about her sexuality, as many young girls do. He also told me that he didn’t own a car. And then he said it was hardly worth it in London. And he said his wife cycled to work. Every one of those statements is true. But he didn’t say he never drove a car, though that was the impression he hoped to leave.’
‘Misdirection,’ Connolly said. ‘I see. So you think . . .?’
Slider turned to Atherton. ‘Emily said Carmichael’s account of the last meeting with Zellah was so dumb it could almost be true.’
‘The thing about having two dates?’ he remembered.
‘It was school holidays. She couldn’t use the after-school activity excuse. The sleepover with Sophy and Chloë was her one chance to get in touch with the father of the baby,’ Slider went on. ‘She must have been desperate and terrified by then. Imagine if you were her, having to tell that father you were pregnant.’
‘Yes,’ Atherton said. ‘That would frighten a triple DSO.’
‘She couldn’t ring Markov from home. I don’t know if she tried to ring him from Sophy’s house. Maybe she did, and he wasn’t in, or his wife answered. I suspect she felt she had to see him face to face to tell him – it’s not something you can do over the phone.’
‘So where did Carmichael come into it?’ Atherton asked. ‘Was she really just using him for transport?’
‘I think she thought of him as a friend – someone she could talk to. She must have felt lonely, isolated with her problem.’
‘You got that right,’ Connolly said. ‘Couldn’t talk to her parents. And nobody would confide something like that to Sophy Cooper-Hutchinson.’
‘And I’ve learned enough about Frieda Mossman today to know she wouldn’t have confided in her, either,’ Slider said. ‘Not about that. At least Mike wouldn’t be shocked or disapproving. Probably she hoped to be able to talk to him. But he quickly showed he was just interested in sex,’ he said sadly. ‘So all that was left was to get in touch with Markov. Now, the scenario I’m working on is that she phoned Markov from Mike’s flat – he says she made a phone call. She told him she must see him. They agreed a time and a place – the fairground, ten o’clock. She had time to kill, so she got Mike to take her to the fair, and tried to have a good time.’
‘The condemned man eating a hearty meal?’ Atherton said.
‘Something like that.’ He thought of her going on the rides and screaming, hugging Mike’s arm to her, being a normal girlfriend for the last time in her life. He couldn’t blame her for using Carmichael. Hadn’t he used her? ‘But then she told Mike she was meeting someone else, and naturally enough he didn’t like that and they quarrelled.’
‘But,’ said Atherton, ‘the fat lady said the quarrel was later, near midnight.’
‘I’ve looked at the write-ups. She said there was a quarrel. The rifle-range man’s description matches Carmichael all right, but the fat lady said a tall man – Carmichael is not notably tall – older than Zellah – Carmichael doesn’t look particularly older than her – and she said he had brown hair, where Carmichael is notably dark. When Emily said that thing about the dumb excuse being true, I started to wonder if Zellah didn’t meet two men after all,
and have two quarrels: one at ten, and a second, serious one at twelve.’
‘Yes,’ said Atherton, staring at nothing, ‘it works. She fights with Markov. She runs off across the Scrubs weeping, thinking her world is at an end. But after a while and some walking, she wonders if there isn’t still hope. She sees the Snogging Couple and asks to use their phone, rings Markov again, he comes to meet her.’
‘Meet, you see, not fetch,’ said Slider.
‘They have another row, she jumps out of the car, he chases her and kills her.’
They were silent.
‘But, sir,’ said Connolly, ‘if she told him she was up the pole the first time they met, why would he come to see her a second time? Why did they quarrel again? And why did that quarrel lead him to kill her?’
‘And why,’ Atherton said, ‘did he take a pair of tights with him when he went to meet her the second time?’
‘That,’ said Slider, ‘is something I think we’ll have to ask him.’
‘But first we need the phone records,’ Atherton said. ‘If it wasn’t Markov she phoned, the whole theory is a crock.’
‘We can’t expect to get them tonight. I think we should all go home and get a good night’s sleep.’
Atherton cocked his head. ‘Dollars to doughnuts you won’t sleep tonight.’
‘That’s entirely my problem,’ Slider said with dignity.
Joanna, holding Slider in bed, could feel both his weariness and his tension. The intense sympathy he always felt with a murder victim, even when it was a low-life scumbag, was partly what made him a good detective, but it also wore him out. He would find it hard to get to sleep tonight. He was keeping quite still, so as not to disturb her, but it was not a restful stillness. She sought for something to take his mind off the case.
‘Your father rang again this evening,’ she said, quietly, so as not to wake the baby.
‘Hmm?’
‘He sounded wistful.’
Slider sighed. ‘I’ll ring him tomorrow. I’ll make time. I’ve got him on my conscience.’
‘You haven’t got room on your conscience for anything else. I looked at more flats today.’
‘Oh?’
‘Nothing we could afford. You wouldn’t believe what a broom-cupboard costs these days. The only thing in our range was a lock-up garage. But it had no plumbing.’
‘What about . . .?’
‘I looked at rentals, too,’ she anticipated. ‘The rents are as much as a mortgage would be. The only reason I can afford this place is that I’ve been here so long the rent’s protected.’
‘I’ve let you down.’
‘Don’t start that. I’m not your dependant. But I just can’t think of a way out. We can’t increase our incomes, and we’ve nothing to sell. Unless . . .’
‘Unless what?’
‘Well, I did think perhaps we could sell George and lease him back. You get a big tax advantage with lease-back.’
‘I’m glad you’ve still got your sensa yumour,’ he said. ‘You’ll need it, living with me. We can’t even get a council flat, since I was foolish enough to marry you. They only give them to unmarried mothers.’
‘I was just wondering about your dad, though. If he’s selling his place, perhaps we could pool our resources and live together.’
‘You wouldn’t mind?’ Slider was amazed and touched.
‘I love your dad.’
‘But it’s different having him to live with us.’
‘Well, it’d be the other way round, really, since the money would be his.’
He kissed her brow tenderly. ‘Thank you for the thought. I’m glad you like the old man that much. But you don’t know that he’d want to live with us.’
‘I think he would. He was hinting that he’d like to move closer to us.’
‘Closer and with aren’t the same thing. But anyway, that cottage can’t be worth much – not enough to buy somewhere in London, let alone something big enough for the four of us.’
‘Oh well,’ she said comfortably, ‘we’ll just have to stay put. At least we’ve got a roof over our heads. People in past times lived in small spaces and shared rooms.’
‘People in past times had surgery without anaesthetic.’
‘Not the same thing. I think we’ve just got too nice. We’re all going to have to trim our nails if the recession gets bad.’
‘Hmm.’
She could feel he had relaxed, and the ‘hmm’ was much more contented than the first one. They were silent a moment, and then she thought of something that infallibly relaxed him and put him to sleep afterwards. She laid her lips against his ear, and whispered, ‘How would you feel about a close encounter of the marital kind?’
‘Hmm,’ he murmured into her neck. And one second later she felt the infinitesimal thud as he fell off the cliff of consciousness and into the void of sleep. It was that quick when you were as tired as he was. Smiling in the darkness, she held him until he was deep enough under for her to release herself without waking him, then turned over into her own sleep position.
TWENTY
You Must Remember This; A Kiss is Still a Coordinated Interpersonal Labial Spasm
Tufnell ‘Tufty’ Arceneaux, who described himself as ‘The Bodily Fluids Man’ with more than a coincidental accuracy, rang Slider as soon as he was at his desk in the morning. ‘Bill, old chum!’ he roared (everything about Tufty was larger than life). ‘How’s the world treating you? How’s the wife? How’s the nipper?’
‘He’s great fun,’ Slider said. ‘He’s just started crawling.’
‘That’ll be useful training for later life! Especially if he wants to get on in the police force.’
‘We’re not allowed to call it that. It’s the police service now.’
‘Makes you sound like a lot of bloody tennis players.’
‘How’s Diana? Is she enjoying the job?’ Tufty’s wife had recently gone back to work in an advertising agency.
‘Loves it. A prank a minute. They’ve just taken on a new product, Galaxy-type chocolate bar called Destiny. She put up a whole folder, artwork and everything, with the slogan “It’s the Destiny that shapes our ends”. Did it with a straight face,’ he concluded admiringly.
‘They’ll sack her if she’s not careful.’
‘Oh, no, they love her. All the others are under twenty-five. She’s the only one who can spell. Anyway, I’ve pulled every digit out of every orifice, done the impossible, and got all your analyses done.’
‘All of them? That’s amazing,’ Slider said. ‘I thought I’d have to wait until Monday at least.’
‘What are you talking about? I’ve had them since Tuesday.’
‘I know you had the first ones on Tuesday, but Freddie only sent the foetal tissue on Thursday.’
‘I can do it in thirty-six hours when I have to. Come to think of it, I’ve done it for thirty-six hours when I’ve had to, but that’s another story.’
‘Well, I’m very grateful.’
‘Special service for my old and bestest chum. Fact is, when the foetal tissue came in, I thought there’s no point in the one lot without t’other, so I got on with it without waiting for you to fast-track. Now, if that doesn’t warrant an invite to dinner with you and your charming mate, I don’t know what does.’
‘Absolutely as soon as I’ve got this case sorted out, we’ll do it,’ Slider said, thinking doubtfully of how easy it would be to fit Tufty’s large frame and its even more enormous appetite into Joanna’s small sitting room, where the only table was.
‘Excellent, old chum-bum. Nosh-date, potential, duly noted in the almanac. Now, regarding your samples – the foetal tissue does not match the profile you gave me from the records – Michael Carmichael? God, what a name!’
‘Carmichael is not the father?’
‘Not in those trousers. Have you got anyone else you want me to check it against?’
‘Not yet, but I hope to very soon.’
‘Ah, a hot suspect in the offing, eh?
’
‘What about DNA from the tights and the chain?’
‘Couldn’t get anything from the tights, just a few of the victim’s own skin cells. But there was a trace of blood and a few cells on the chain. I managed to work it up, and we have a match between that and the foetal DNA. Whoever cut his hand on the chain was also the baby’s progenitor. I’d say father but it doesn’t seem a very fatherly act to kill the mother, now does it?’
‘Not when I was a boy scout. Thanks, Tufty. That’s a great help.’
‘Let me know when you’ve got something to match it against, and I’ll put it through on the express till. Five items or less. You’ve got room in your basket. Well, back to the grindstone. Dyb dyb, old horse.’
‘Dob dob,’ Slider responded absently, his mind already on the next thing.
Porson was late in, having gone to Hammersmith first, straight from home, and he was still inhaling his first mug of coffee when Slider arrived at his door.
‘Good news, sir,’ he said.
‘I’m up for that,’ Porson said.
Slider told him about the DNA typing, and went on, ‘And we’ve just had the phone records back, for Carmichael’s home phone and Tyler Burton’s mobile. The number Zellah called from each was the same. It was Alex Markov’s.’
Porson put down his mug so sharply a slurp of coffee sprang over the rim. ‘Bloody hell, that’s a relief,’ he said, giving himself away completely.
‘That’s how I felt, sir,’ Slider admitted. A theory’s all very well, but one is as good as another until you get something solid to back it up. ‘And we’ve got a good possibility the car under the bridge was his. Same make and colour, anyway, though it’s a pity we haven’t got a reg number.’
‘Plus he lied to you about not having a car,’ Porson added, dragging a handkerchief from his pocket and mopping the spilled coffee with it. His wife was dead and he did his own laundry now, Slider reflected. ‘Right, how do you want to proceed?’
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