Blood Sinister (2 page)

‘Ah, it’s a new investment ploy,’ Atherton said, unhitching his behind from the desk. ‘I’m thinking of buying a part share in a racehorse. I saw this ad in the paper and sent off for the details. I’m going to put my savings into it.’

‘Have you been standing around under the power lines without your lead hat again?’ Slider said mildly.

‘Well, there’s no point in leaving cash in deposit accounts, with interest rates at rock bottom,’ Atherton said. ‘And anyway, it’s not a gamble, it’s a scientific investment. Serious businessmen put big money into it. This Furlong Stud is a proper company: they’ve been putting together consortia for years. It’s all in the information pack. It’s no more risky than the stock market, really.’

‘What’s the name of the poor wreck of a horse they’re trying to flog you?’ Slider enquired.

‘The one I’m looking at is called Two Left Feet,’ Atherton announced, and when Slider groaned he said, ‘No, it’s a really cute name, don’t you see? All horses have two left feet.’

‘Mug punter,’ said McLaren pityingly, turning a page. ‘It’s sad, really. Bet on the name, every time. Here,’ he recalled suddenly, looking up, ‘talk about names, did you see that story in the paper a bit since, about those two Irish owners who tried to register a colt, and Tattersalls wouldn’t allow it? They wanted to call it Norfolk and Chance.’

‘I’m worried about you,’ Slider said, as Atherton followed him into his office. ‘You didn’t used to be irrational.’

‘How do you know?’ Atherton said cheerfully. ‘Anyway, I need a bit of excitement in my life. I used to get it chasing women, but now I’m settled down in cosy domesticity, I have to look elsewhere for that thrill of danger.’

‘I wish I thought you were joking,’ Slider said, going round his desk. He shoved fretfully at the piles of files that burdened it. They bred during the night, he was sure of it. ‘What’s this steaming pile of Tottenham?’

‘Case files. Ongoing. Mr Carver’s firm passed them over, Mr Porson’s orders. They’re down four men again, with the ’flu.’

‘Carver’s firm are always catching things,’ Slider complained. ‘What do they do, sleep together?’

‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,’ Atherton said. ‘It’s worse than it looks, anyway. Most of it’s to do with that suspected fags-and-booze smuggling ring.’

‘Take ’em away,’ Slider decreed. ‘I’m too frail for gang warfare at this stage of the week.’

WDC Swilley, who had answered the phone out in the office, came to the door now, her posture suddenly galvanised, which, since Swilley was built like a young lad’s secret dream, was hardly fair on the two within. ‘We’ve got a murder, boss!’ she announced happily.

‘Gordon Bennett, what next?’ Slider said. ‘It shouldn’t be allowed on a Friday.’

‘Phoebe Agnew!’ Atherton enthused as he drove, with an air of doing it one-handed, through the end of the rush-hour traffic. How come so many people went to work so late? ‘I mean, I know she’s a bit of a thorn in the copper’s side—’

‘In spades,’ Slider agreed.

‘Yeah, but what a journalist! Took the Palgabria Prize in 1990, and winner of the John Perkins Award for ’97 and ’98 – the only person ever to win it two years running, incidentally. And she really can write, guv. Awesomely chilling prose.’

‘Well, don’t get so excited. You’re not going to have a conversation with her,’ Slider pointed out.

Atherton’s face fell a fraction. ‘No, you’re right. What a wicked waste!’

As they turned off the main road they found their way blocked by a dustcart. It had a selection of grubby teddy bears and
dolls tied to the radiator grille. Why did scaffies do that, Slider wondered. With their arms outstretched and their hopeless eyes staring ahead, they looked depressingly like a human shield.

Atherton backed fluidly, turned, and roared down another side street. ‘Anyway, AMIP’s bound to take the case from us,’ he said.

The Area Major Incident Pool took all the serious or high-profile crimes and, these days, virtually all murders, unless they were straightforward domestics. Judson, the present head of 6 AMIP, was an empire-builder. He was that most hated of creatures, the career uniform man who had transferred to CID purely in pursuit of promotion.

‘Judson’s welcome to it,’ Slider said. ‘He’ll probably enjoy being crawled over by the press.’

‘You are in a doldrum,’ Atherton said, turning into Eltham Road, which was parked right up both sides, like everywhere else in London these days.

‘You can’t have a single doldrum,’ said Slider. ‘They always hunt in packs. This is it. You’ll have to double park.’

‘It’s the reason I became a policeman,’ said Atherton.

The house was one of a terrace, built in the late nineteenth century, of two storeys, plus the semi-basement – which Londoners call ‘the area’ – over which a flight of wide, shallow steps led up to the front door. Eltham Road was in one of the borderline areas between the old, working-class Shepherd’s Bush and the new yuppiedom, and a few years ago Slider would have said it might go either way. But rising incomes and outward pressure from the centre of London were making his familiar ground more and more desirable in real-estate terms, and there was no doubt in his mind now that the ‘unimproved’ properties in this street soon wouldn’t recognise themselves. Anyone who had bought here ten years ago would be sitting on a handsome profit.

The house in question was divided into three flats, and it was the middle one which had been occupied by Phoebe Agnew, a freelance journalist whose name was enough to make any policeman shudder. An ex-
Guardian
hack with impeccable left-wing credentials, she had made a name for herself for investigating corruption, and had concentrated in recent years on the establishment and the legal system, exposing bad apples,
and sniffing out miscarriages of justice with the zeal of perfect hindsight.

Slider was all for rooting out bent coppers; that was in everyone’s interest. His biggest beef with Agnew was that she had been instrumental in the release of the Portland Two, attacking the evidence that had got a pair of exceedingly nasty child-murderers put away. Well, the law was the law, and you had to play by the rules: he accepted that. Still, it galled coppers who remembered the case to hear Heaton and Donaldson described as ‘innocent’, just because some harried DC at the time had got his paperwork in a muddle. And who was the better for it? The Two had been quietly doing their porridge, and would have been up for parole in a couple of years. Getting them out on a technicality had simply banged another nail into the coffin of public confidence. According to eager
Guardian
polls, half the population now believed the police went round picking up innocent people at random for the sheer joy of fitting them up.

Well, now Phoebe Agnew was dead. The biter bit, perhaps – and theirs to identify the guilty dentition.

At the front door PC Renker was keeping guard and the SOC record. With his helmet on and his big blond moustache, he looked like exotic grass growing under a cloche.

‘Doc Cameron’s inside, sir,’ he reported, ‘and the photographer, and forensic’s on the way. Asher’s upstairs with the female that found the body – lives in the top flat. Bottom tenant’s a Peter Medmenham, but he’s not in, apparently.’

‘Probably at work,’ Slider said. The front door let into a vestibule, which contained two further Yale-locked doors. They were built across what was obviously the original hall of the house, to judge by the black-and-white diamond floor tiles. One gave access to the stairs to the top flat; the other was standing open onto the rest of the hall and Phoebe Agnew’s flat. It had been the main part of the original family house, and had the advantage of the fine cornices and ceiling roses, elaborate architraves and panelled doors; but it had been converted long enough ago to have had the fireplaces ripped out and plastered over.

There was a small kitchen at the front of the house, a tiny windowless bathroom next to it, and two other rooms. The
smaller was furnished as an office, with a desk, filing cabinets, cupboards, bookshelves, personal computer and fax machine, and on every surface a mountain range of papers and files that made Slider’s fade into foothills.

‘Oh, what fun we’ll have sorting through that lot!’ Atherton enthused, clasping his hands.

‘We?’ Slider said cruelly.

The other room, which stretched right across the back of the house, was furnished as a bedsitting room.

‘Odd decision,’ said Atherton. ‘Why not have the separate bedroom and the office in here?’

‘Maybe she liked to get away from work once in a while,’ Slider said.

‘I suppose it saves time on seduction techniques,’ Atherton said, always willing to learn something new. ‘Shorter step from sofa to bed. I wonder what she spent all her money on? It wasn’t home comforts, that’s for sure.’

The furnishings were evidently old and didn’t look as if they’d ever been expensive. There was a large and shabby high-backed sofa covered with cushions and a fringed crimson plush throw, which looked like an old-fashioned chenille tablecloth. In front of it was a massive coffee table, of dark wood with a glass inset top, on the other side of which were two elderly and unmatching armchairs. One had a dented cushion, and a bottle of White Horse and a glass stood on the floor by its right foreleg. The other was a real museum piece with metal hoop arms and 1950s ‘contemp’ry’ patterned fabric. There was a folded blanket concealing something on its seat. Slider lifted the edge and saw that it was a heap of papers, correspondence and files, topped off with some clean but unironed laundry. The quickest way to tidy up, perhaps.

Along one wall was a low ‘unit’ of imitation light oak veneer, early MFI by the look of it, on top of which stood a television and video, a hi-fi stack, a fruit bowl containing some rather wrinkled apples and two black bananas, a litre bottle of Courvoisier and a two-litre bottle of Gordon’s, part empty, some used coffee cups and glasses, and a derelict spider plant in a white plastic pot. The hi-fi was still switched on, and several CDs were lying about – Vivaldi, Mozart and Bach – while the open case of the
CD presumably still in the machine was lying on the top of the stack: Schubert, Quintet in C.

Along another wall were bookshelves with cupboards below, the shelves tightly packed, mostly with paperbacks, but with a fair sprinkling of hardback political biographies. ‘Review copies,’ Atherton said. ‘The great journalistic freebie.’ Slider looked at a title or two. Hattersley, Enoch Powell, Dennis Healey. But Woodrow Wyatt? Wasn’t he a builder?

The window was large and looked over the small, sooty garden, to which there was no access from up here. It was the original sash with the lever-lock, which was, he noted, in the locked position. Of course, someone breaking in that way could have locked it before departing by the door.

‘But then, why should they?’ said Atherton. ‘The Yale on that door’s so old and loose a child could slip it. You’d have thought someone in her position would have been a bit more security-minded.’

Slider shook his head. ‘Obviously she was unworldly.’

‘Other-worldly now, if you want to be precise.’

The right-hand end of the room was furnished with a wardrobe, a tallboy, a low chest of drawers doubling as bedside table, and a double bed, pushed up into the back corner and covered with a black cotton counterpane. The wardrobe was decorated with a variety of old stickers: CND; Nuclear Power – No Thanks; Stop the Bloody Whaling; Troops Out of Vietnam; and, fondly familiar to Slider, the round, yellow Keep Music Live sticker. Instead of pictures there were posters stuck up on the magnolia-painted walls, amongst them a very old one of Che, a couple of vintage film posters, some political flyers and rally leaflets, and some cartoon originals which were probably pretty valuable. The room, though tidy, was scruffy and full of statements, like a student bedsit from the early 1970s. Given the age and status of the occupant, it seemed a deliberate two fingers raised at conventional, middle-class expectations.

The body was on the bed.

Freddie Cameron, the forensic pathologist, straightened and looked up as Slider approached. He was as dapper as a sea lion, a smallish, quick-moving man in a neat grey suit, with a dark waistcoat and, today, a very cheery tartan bow-tie – the sort only a very self-confident man or an expensive teddy bear
could have got away with. It was the kind of bow-tie that had to be sported, rather than merely worn, and Cameron sported it, jaunty as a good deed in a naughty world.

‘Bill! Hello, old chum,’ he warbled. ‘Good way to end the week. How’s tricks?’

‘Trix? She’s fine, but I’ve told you not to mention her in front of the boy,’ Slider replied sternly.

Freddie blinked. ‘Ha! I see they haven’t knocked the cheek out of you, anyway. You know who we’ve got here?’

‘I do indeed.’

‘There won’t be many tears shed for her in the Job, I suppose. Sad loss to journalism, all the same.’

Slider raised his eyebrows. ‘I didn’t think you read the
Grauniad
.’

‘
Indy
man, me,’ Cameron admitted. ‘But she wrote for that occasionally, and the
Staggers
, which I read sometimes. Got to keep an open mind. I always liked her pieces, even when I didn’t agree with her.’

‘
Someone
didn’t agree with her,’ Slider said, and – there being no more excuse for ignoring it – for the first time looked directly at the corpse.

What had been Phoebe Agnew was sprawled on her back, one leg slipping off the edge of the bed, toes touching the carpet. Her arms were flung back above her head, and her wrists were tied together and to the bedhead with a pair of tights. Her auburn hair, long and thick and loosely curling, was spread out around her like a sunburst, vivid against the black cloth, seeming to draw all the life and colour out of the room. It was amazing hair in any circumstance, but if, as Atherton had told him, she was around fifty, it was doubly so, because the colour looked entirely natural.