Table of Contents
Recent Titles by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles from Severn House
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One: Bloody Sundae
Chapter Two: Good Morning Vat Man
Chapter Three: Tattoo Parlous
Chapter Four: Unnatural Smoothness
Chapter Five: Barrow, In Fairness
Chapter Six: Unlimited Company
Chapter Seven: Porter Coeli
Chapter Eight: Girls Allowed
Chapter Nine: Pop Tart
Chapter Ten: A Little Night Music
Chapter Eleven: Hansel and Regrettal
Chapter Twelve: The Swiller’s Feeling for Snow
Chapter Thirteen: The Land of Lost Content
Chapter Fourteen: Dancing in the Dark
Chapter Fifteen: The Get in
Chapter Sixteen: Warm Precincts, Cheerful Day
Chapter Seventeen: Care in the Community
Chapter Eighteen: Fresh Hoods and Bastards New
Chapter Nineteen: Llama Sutra
Recent Titles by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles from Severn House
THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER
A CORNISH AFFAIR
COUNTRY PLOT
DANGEROUS LOVE
DIVIDED LOVE
EVEN CHANCE
HARTE’S DESIRE
THE HORSEMASTERS
JULIA
LAST RUN
THE LONGEST DANCE
NOBODY’S FOOL
ON WINGS OF LOVE
PLAY FOR LOVE
A RAINBOW SUMMER
REAL LIFE (Short Stories)
The Bill Slider Mysteries
GAME OVER
FELL PURPOSE
BODY LINE
KILL MY DARLING
BLOOD NEVER DIES
BLOOD NEVER DIES
A Bill Slider Mystery
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First published in Great Britain and the USA 2012 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
This eBook edition first published in 2012 by Severn Digital an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2012 by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.
The right of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia.
Blood never dies.
1. Slider, Bill (Fictitious character)–Fiction.
2. Police–England–London–Fiction. 3. Detective and
mystery stories.
I. Title
823.9'2-dc23
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-322-8 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8211-0 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-455-4 (trade paper)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
For Edwin – thanks for keeping faith
Blood, though it sleeps a time, yet never dies;
The gods on murd’rers fix revengeful eyes.
George Chapman: The Widow’s Tears
ONE
Bloody Sundae
Exsanguination was the word Slider found wandering around his mind. The skin of the body in the bath was so pale it was almost translucent. It didn’t look real. A wax effigy marinading in low-grade tomato soup. Whack a tank round it, he thought, and you’d got yourself a Damien Hirst.
It was stifling up here in the attic flat, with the sun beating down on the roof only inches above his head, like trying to breathe through a blanket. For once August was doing what it was supposed to, and it was baking hot; though the sky was veiled in high, thin grey, so it was heat rather than light that was bouncing off the pavements outside. Probably this old house had no insulation at all between the ceiling and the slates, on which you could have fried an egg had you been so wanton as to try. A pigeon’s egg, maybe. He could hear them pattering about on the flat roof of the dormer and offering each other lifelong devotion. In here, the rusty, dirty smell of blood was sickening. He’d far rather think about pigeons; but it was his job, and, breathing shallowly through his mouth, he dragged his mind back to the matter in hand.
The dead man seemed to be in his late twenties or early thirties, and tall, nearly six feet to judge by the way he’d had to bend his knees up to fit in the bath. His features were pleasingly regular: nobody looks their best dead, but exsanguination had left the victim with a sculpted, alabaster appearance, like the bust of a Greek god. His hair was thick, brown with rather obvious blonde highlights, and fashionably, if not expensively, styled. He was lean, and his skin was smooth and healthy. The words ‘fit’ and ‘buff’, in the way his teenage daughter would use them, wandered into his mind and then out again.
A suicide is a detective sergeant’s business. The uniformed officer, PC Renker, who had attended the ‘unexpected death’ shout, had taken one look and radioed back to the factory for a DS; but Hollis, whose turn it was, had not liked what he had seen. He had been there only a few minutes before calling it in as suspicious, and Slider, who had been sitting down at his desk all day, trying to light the fire of his brain with paperwork, had been almost glad to respond.
‘It don’t look right to me, guv,’ said Hollis, the Mancunian lamp-post, ‘but I can’t quite put me finger on it.’
Physical beauty is a matter of millimetres either way. Move a nose a fraction sideways, add a whisper more curve to a mouth or chin, and perfection is made or marred. But scrawny frog-eyed Hollis, with his despairing hair and feather-duster moustache, was in a different class altogether. He made Peter Lorre look like a model from a knitwear catalogue. And yet he had a tremendous, mysterious charm which made members of the public trust him. He was a damn good policeman, which was all that counted with Slider – though not, of course, with the media-obsessed top bods in the Job, who would never promote Colin Hollis to any position that might get him on camera.
‘Soon as I got here,’ Hollis said, scratching the undernourished tundra of his pate, ‘I thought, it dun’t look like a suicide to me. Eric felt the same, soon as he walked in.’ Eric Renker was in the next room, talking to – or rather, being talked at by – the landlord. ‘It’s too – tidy,’ Hollis concluded, with the awareness in his voice that tidy wasn’t really the word he wanted.
The flat was tidy, and that in itself was a surprise. ‘Flat’ was an overgenerous description: it was really just a single attic room at the top of a tall Victorian terraced house of the sort that abounded between the Uxbridge Road and Goldhawk Road. They had each once housed a single family, but they were so perfectly calculated for splitting up into sublets, the architect in Slider wondered if the Victorians hadn’t really had a time machine after all, an
d had seen how things would turn out.
This room under the roof had been elevated from bedsit to flat by partitioning off a slice to make the tiny bathroom. In the main room was a sofa bed, a single wardrobe and chest of drawers, a small kitchen table with two chairs, and along one wall a kitchen counter containing a sink and gas hob, with a refrigerator underneath and a microwave on top, and a geyser on the wall for hot water. On the end of the counter was a small portable television facing the sofa, and on the table a large portable radio/CD player of the sort that used to be known as a Brixton Briefcase.
The whole house was a typical developer’s job of magnolia walls and industrial beige carpet, plasterboard partitions and awkward corners, cheap ugly doors and the sort of furniture made of wood-effect veneer over chipboard that would age disastrously quickly. As he trod up the stairs, Slider had noted the marks on the walls and the stains on the carpets, and had imagined with a shudder what he would find at the top.
But in the attic flat the carpet had evidently been cleaned of all but a few intractable stains, and the walls repainted so recently there was still a faint smell of emulsion on the air. And most of all, it was tidy, every surface clear and clean. A single man, living alone in this sort of bottom-end rental, with inadequate cupboard space and no supervision, would normally have turned it into an assault course of discarded clothes and unwashed crockery, papers and possessions, and the dominant smell should have been of feet, sweat and a hint of spoiling food.
And then there was the bathroom, also tidy and clean. There was a bath (because of the slope of the roof there wasn’t the height for a shower), a WC, and a washbasin with a small mirrored wall cupboard above it. Everything was so tight that a splashy bather would have constantly wet the toilet roll. On the other hand, the loo with the lid down made a useful place to stand your drink while you were in the bath. Bending his head sideways and squinting, Slider could see from a faint ring-mark that that was exactly what someone had done in the recent past.
He stared again at the body: there was something about it that suggested prosperity above the level of its surroundings. Something about the healthy skin and hair, the good teeth just revealed by the drop of the jaw, the buffness in general, made him think that however down on his luck the deceased must have been to come and live here, it must have happened recently. Someone like him ought to have had friends or relations who surely could have given him a spare room until he got back on his feet.
If it was suicide, perhaps he had embraced degradation as part of his self-loathing? But then, the flat was so clean and tidy, and the victim himself was clean, shaved and shampooed, which did not speak of terminal despair. No, he could see why Hollis had called it in. It was odd.
And the oddest thing of all was the wound that had let out the life: a single cut through the left external jugular, after which his essence had simply drained away into the bath. The left forearm rested across the abdomen, the right arm was hanging down outside the bath, and on the floor below the hand was a Stanley knife with blood on the blade. He appeared to have died quietly, without struggle: there had been no splashing. The tiny bathroom was still immaculate. It was the most efficient suicide Slider had seen.
He heard Hollis behind him; his breath tickled the back of Slider’s neck as he looked over his shoulder at the corpse, willing it to give up its secrets. ‘There’s summat wrong with it,’ he said. ‘I dunno – what do you think, guv?’
‘It’s an unusual method, that’s true,’ Slider said, ever cautious. ‘Men don’t generally cut.’
Women slashed their wrists – often as a cry for help, not intending to die – or took pills. Men threw themselves out of windows, hanged themselves, or put a hose from the exhaust through the car window, but they didn’t usually cut.
‘And who cuts like that?’ Hollis said. ‘How did he find the right spot wi’out a mirror?’
‘He could have looked it up, I suppose,’ Slider said. ‘Or maybe he had medical expertise. He could have been a doctor.’ There were many ways for a doctor to disgrace himself, which might lead a man to suicide. But then doctors could get pills, couldn’t they? Wouldn’t that be an easier way out?
‘He ent got doctor’s hair,’ Hollis said. That was true. The cut was too assertive, the blonde highlights too theatrical. ‘But there’s summat else. I can’t put me finger on it.’
‘I know,’ Slider said. ‘As you say, the whole thing’s too tidy.’ If you were driven so far into despair you decided to end your life, would you really tidy up the flat so completely? What man wouldn’t need a drink before he did the deed? But in the other room there was not even a used glass in view. There were no clothes lying about—
‘There are no clothes lying about,’ Slider said aloud in a eureka tone. ‘Whatever he was wearing before he got into the bath, he put them away.’
Hollis snapped his fingers. ‘That’s what it was,’ he said. ‘I knew there were summat. You might want to die in a nice warm bath, but put y’ clothes away all tidy first?’
‘It’s perfectly possible,’ Slider said. Tidy habits were learned early, and early habits tended to stick. ‘But it’s not likely. I agree with you. It doesn’t look like suicide to me. I’m going to call in the circus.’
Big, Nordic-blonde Eric Renker, who could have starred on a poster for Strength Through Joy, was out on the landing at the head of the stairs, still listening to the landlord. Both of them turned eagerly to Slider as he came back from the bathroom, Renker hoping for relief and the landlord recognizing a more important audience for his troubles.
Renker introduced him. ‘This is Mr Milan Botev, guv. He owns the building.’
Botev was short and swarthy, his head emerging from his shoulders without the bother of a neck: a large, round head with thick, bushy black hair. He had the kind of heavy beard-growth that would necessitate shaving several times a day, and as his face was a contour map of old acne scars, there were little dark outcrops down in the ravines that the razor couldn’t reach. His shoulders were bulked with muscle, and Slider would have bet they were as furry as a bear’s, too; and his hands were like planks. But his feet were small and rubbery, and as he moved on the spot in his annoyance, Slider thought he would probably be swift and silent when it was called for. You wouldn’t hear him coming, until he got you.
‘It was him found the body,’ Renker continued.
‘How did you happen to do that?’ Slider asked.
Botev scowled – though that may have been habitual – and clenched his fists as he spoke. His voice was harsh and his accent was thick. ‘I have telephone call from tenant – she live in flat below this one. She complain that music is too loud – very loud – going on and on. She say she bang on the door and no one comes. So I must come and do something. Ha! I say, nothing to do with me. What am I, your father? But she insist, make fuss, and I must come. So I come, and what do I find? Pah! Bad, bad! I do not like bad things happen in my houses.’
He glared up at Slider as though it were all his fault. Slider guessed that it had been all Renker’s fault for the past fifteen minutes and was sorry for him.
‘So what did you do when you got here?’ Slider asked.
‘I hear the music, yes, very loud. Like party, only no sound of people. So I also knock, knock, and when no one come, I go in and turn it off.’
‘How did you get in?’
‘I have keys,’ Botev said, as though that was obvious. He held up and shook a bunch of Yales, each with a different coloured plastic half-moon over the top, and stretched out the luggage label attached to the large ring so that Slider could read the address written on it. ‘This keys this house. I have other house also. Keys all my places.’
‘What time did you enter the flat?’
‘I already tell him –’ the spherical property mogul gestured towards towering Renker with what was almost but not quite contempt – ‘it was a little after half past nine. I do not know exactly.’
‘Go on. What did you see?’
‘Did you go in to the bathroom?’
‘No need. I see from the door he is extremely dead.’
Extremely – yet, that was the right adjective. ‘Was the bathroom exactly as it is now? Did you touch anything or remove anything?’
Botev grew angry again. ‘Nothing, nothing! Do you think I am idiot? Do you think I do not know nothing must be touched at crime scene?’
‘Suicide is not a crime,’ Slider said mildly, wanting his reaction. Though it had not looked quite like a suicide to him or Hollis, it could still be one; and if not, it was obviously supposed to look like one.
But Botev said, ‘Sure it is. Kill yourself big crime to God, to church. Bad, very bad sin. Make God very angry.’ He shook his massive head in stern condemnation. ‘And besides, it make it hard for me to let flat again, when people know. Give me much trouble, maybe, cost me money.’
Thus morality met commerce with a screech of tyres.
The tenant who had made the complaint was in her own flat below, being interviewed by Rita Connolly, the Dublin DC. Lauren Green had the bright eyes and pale, dry skin of someone who has been up all night, but the events upstairs had banished any trace of sleepiness.
‘Well, I work nights,’ she explained, sitting on her bed so that Connolly could have the single chair, a Victorian-style plush-covered boudoir chair from which she first had to remove a heap of clothes and stuffed toys. The room was smaller than the attic room above, and had a shower-room instead of a bathroom, so compact it could almost have fitted into a wardrobe, and more or less did; and the kitchen consisted of a sink and double gas ring, disguised by a bamboo folding screen. But unlike its upstairs rival it was filled to suffocation point with the owner’s possessions, clothes, ornaments, magazines, and a multitude of cuddly toys. Every inch of wall was covered in pictures, cut out of magazines and home framed, the frames decorated with seashells, sequins, little cut-out hearts and flowers, beads, feathers. Silk scarves were draped from corner to corner of the ceiling in rainbow stripes, the central lampshade was crimson silk with long fringes and sported a plume of feathers the Prince of Wales must have been missing, and there were so many ferns and trailing plants suspended in front of the window, the room lurked in adumbrous obscurity like a cave at the bottom of the sea.
Blood Never Dies Page 1