Blood Sinister (3 page)

She was wearing a large, loose, oatmeal-coloured knitted sweater and was naked from the waist down; a pair of grey wool trousers and scarlet bikini briefs lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. Slider flinched inwardly, and felt a stab of pity for the woman, so exposed in this helpless indignity. It was always the worst bit, the first moment of acknowledging the person whose life had been taken from them without their will. There she lay, mutely reproachful, beseeching justice. A body is just a body, of course, but still it wears the face
of a person who lived, and was self-aware, and who didn’t want to die.

The nakedness seemed worse because she was not young: there is an arrogance to the nakedness of youth which defies ridicule. In life she must have been good-looking, perhaps even beautiful, Slider thought, noting the classical nose, the wide mouth, the strong chin; but no-one looks their best after being strangled. The face was swollen and suffused, the open eyes horribly bloodshot; her lips were bluish, and there was blood on them, and in her left ear; and round her neck was the livid mark of the ligature. The ligature, however, had been removed.

After all these years, the first sight of a corpse still raised Slider’s pulse and made him feel hot and prickly for a moment – almost like a kind of violent teenage embarrassment. He took a couple of deep breaths until it subsided.

Atherton looked away, shoving his hands into his pockets. Tall and elegant, gracefully drooping, he looked as out of place in this room as a borzoi in a scrapyard. ‘Wonder why they took one ligature and left the other,’ he said.

‘Maybe the one round her neck was traceable in some way,’ Slider said. ‘Time of death, Freddie?’

‘Well, she’s cold and stiff, so that puts it between eight and thirty-six hours, according to the jolly old textbook. It’s not over-warm in here, and though she looks reasonably fit she’s no spring chicken, so I’d put it in the middle range, say twelve to twenty-four. Not less than twelve, anyway.’

‘So we’re looking at sometime yesterday, probably evening or afternoon,’ Slider said. ‘And I suppose the cause of death was strangulation?’

‘I wouldn’t like to commit myself until I’ve got her on the table. There are no other apparent injuries, but I’m not blessed with infra-red vision, and it’s getting dark as Newgate Knocker in here. These hypoxia cases are notoriously tricky, anyway. But she certainly has been strangled.’

‘There doesn’t seem to have been a struggle,’ Slider said. ‘No furniture overturned or anything.’

‘She may have been drugged, of course,’ Cameron said. ‘Which is why I reserve judgement on the cause of death. Have you seen enough? Well, let’s get the photos done, then, and we can get her out of here.’

Slider left him to it and went to look at the kitchen. It must have been fitted in about 1982, with cheap units whose doors had slumped out of alignment, and daisy-patterned tiles, all in shades of brown: pure eighties chic. The cooker was old and flecked with encrusted spillings that hasty cleaning had missed. The fridge was also old, with leaking seals, and filled with a clutter of bowls containing leftovers: bits of food on plates, ends of cheese in crumpled wrappings, an expiring lettuce, and tomatoes that had gone wrinkly. A bottle of skimmed milk was past its sell-by date and there was a platoon of yoghurts, one of which had a crack down the side of its carton and was dribbling messily. The comparative tidiness of the bedsitting room was evidently only skin deep.

The sink, with draining boards and a washing machine under it, had been fitted into the bay window. There was a plastic washing-up bowl in the sink. In it, and on the draining boards, was a collection of dirty utensils: plates and bowls, knives, forks and spoons, saucepans and various serving vessels. It looked as though there had been a dinner, featuring some kind of casserole, vegetables and potatoes followed by tiramisu. The last wasn’t hard to guess as the remaining half of it was still in its glass dish sitting on top of the grill hood of the gas stove. There were several empty bottles standing at the back of the work surface – three wine and one brandy – though there was no knowing how long they’d been there. They might not all appertain to the same meal.

The meal surprised him a little. Knowing Phoebe Agnew’s politics, he would have bet on her being a vegetarian. And actually, given the state of the flat and the fridge, he would have expected her to be above cooking, just as she was apparently above home-making. The cookery books lying open amid the clutter of the work surface suggested a certain lack of practice in the art.
Casserole Cookery
, with the unconvincing, orange-toned food photographs of the seventies by way of illustration, was obviously old but had not, to judge from the lack of food splashes, been heavily used in its life. It was open at Italian-Style Chicken With Olives and had a fresh smear of tomato paste on one edge. The other book,
New Italian Cooking
, was brand new – so much so that the page had had to be weighted to stay open at Tiramisu.

So she had entertained someone to a home-cooked meal yesterday and gone to some trouble about it: in his experience women never got out the cookery books for a man they were sure of. But was it the murderer she had cooked for? Or had she been dozing off the effects of the grub and booze when someone else called to cancel her ticket?

‘Guv, come and look at this,’ Atherton called.

He was in the bathroom. Being windowless it had one of those fans that come on with the light. It was as ineffective as they usually are: the room had that sour smell of rancid water you get in towels that have been put away damp. It needed redecoration: the Crystal tiles staggered crazily over the uneven walls, the grouting on its last legs, and the paint on the woodwork was lumpy and peeling. There was a calcium crust around the taps, and the bath and basin were mottled white where the hard water had marked them, which looked particularly nasty since the suite was brown.

‘My whole life just flashed before me,’ Slider said. A brown bath had been the
dernier cri
when he first married.

There was a washing line strung over the bath, on which hung more undies from a well-known high street store. Naturally she would shop at Marks and Engels, Slider thought. He counted six used towels – on the rail, over the edge of the bath, stretched over the radiator, and ‘hung up on the floor’, as his mother used to say.

‘And the plug hole’s clogged with soapy hair,’ he commented, looking, though not too closely, into the sink.

‘Never mind that, see here,’ Atherton said, and drew back for Slider to look into the lavatory bowl. The sad little rubber ‘o’ of a condom looked back at them.

‘She definitely had company,’ Atherton said.

‘We already knew that,’ said Slider. ‘Better fish it out.’

‘
Me?
’

‘Don’t whine. You’ve got gloves on.’

‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ Atherton grumbled. ‘I was fashioned for love, not labour.’ As he reached fastidiously into the bowl, he was reminded of an anecdote. ‘The plumber I use now and then told me about how this woman called him out one time because she wanted a new lav fitted. He asked her if she wanted a P-trap or an S-trap, and she went bright
red with embarrassment and said, “Oh – well – it’s for both, really.”’

‘Get on with it,’ Slider said. Outside there was the sound of reinforcements arriving, and a voice he hadn’t expected. ‘Is that the Super? What the chuck’s he doing here?’

‘The voice of the turtle was heard in our land,’ said Atherton. He secured the floating evidence and followed Slider out.

It seemed to have got even colder, and the sky was now featureless, low and grey, like the underside of a submarine. Detective Superintendent Fred ‘The Syrup’ Porson was on the doorstep, draped in a wonderful old Douglas Hurd coat of military green, voluminous and floor-length. What you might call army surplice, Slider thought. Behind Porson stood three of his DCs, presumably brought in the same car – the Department was short of wheels, as always.

‘Ah, Bill,’ Porson said. The cold air had given his skin a greyish tinge. With his big-nosed, granite face he looked remarkably like one of the Easter Island heads; the preposterous toupee was like a crop of vegetation growing on the top. ‘What’s the current situation,
vis-à-vis
deceased? Let’s have a stasis report.’

Porson used language with the delicate touch of a man in boxing gloves playing the harpsichord. It was one of the endearing things about him – as long as you didn’t suffer from perfect literary pitch.

‘It looks as though it wasn’t suicide, sir,’ Slider said. He recapped briefly, while Porson tramped restlessly on the spot like a horse, using his hands thrust into his pockets to wrap the strange coat about him.

‘Hm. Yes. Well. I see,’ he said. He seemed in travail of a decision. ‘You are aware, of course,’ he said at last, ‘that this ’flu epidemic has precipitated a crisis situation, Area-wide, with regard to personnel? It’s a problem right across the broad, and as such, AMIP has asked if we’d be prepared to keep the case.’

Slider raised his eyebrows. ‘It’ll be high profile, sir.’

‘The highest of the high, to coin a phrase,’ Porson agreed. A few tiny pinpoints of snow were drifting down, settling on the eponymous rug. It looked as though it was developing dandruff. Slider dragged his eyes away – Porson didn’t like the wig to be noticed. ‘The papers will be full of it,’ Porson went on. ‘Our every movement will be scrutinised with a tooth-comb. I’m well aware
it’ll be no picnic, believe you me. But the fly in the argument
is
’, he explained, ‘that AMIP’s even worse hit, absentee-wise, than we are. Half their manpower’s been decimated,
plus
they’ve got three other major investigations on the go as well. So the upshoot is, they’ve asked if we’ll do the premilinary work, at least to begin with.’

Slider shrugged. Upshoot or offshot, his was not to reason why. ‘I hope the budget will stand it, sir,’ he said.

‘Don’t you worry about that.’ Porson seemed relieved at his docility. ‘I’ll sort all that out with AMIP. Well, now I’m here you’d better show me round, recapitate what you’ve got so far.’

Slider obliged. Only as Porson was leaving did he think to ask, ‘By the way, sir, how did AMIP hear about it so soon?’

Porson gave a grim smile. ‘They heard it from Commander Wetherspoon. Some reporter rang him at ten this morning, asking who was heading the investigation.’

‘Good God,’ said Slider.

‘So you see the problem.’

He tramped off down the steps to the car, his coat brushing regally behind him. Atherton, at Slider’s shoulder, said, ‘Given who she was, I suppose there was never a cat in hell’s chance of keeping the press out of it.’

‘Not a toupee’s chance in a wind tunnel,’ Slider agreed.

‘That’s not an original toupee, you know, it’s an elaborate postiche,’ Atherton said. Another car pulling up further down the road caught his attention. Two men got out and headed towards them with an air of restraining themselves from running. ‘I hope the Super’s sending us some more uniform – the vultures are beginning to gather,’ he said.

‘If you stand around there you’ll get your picture taken,’ Slider warned. ‘Time to go and talk to the female that found the body, I think.’

In contrast to Phoebe Agnew’s unreconstructed seventies pit, the upstairs flat had been through the sort of make-over that wouldn’t have disgraced a
Changing Rooms
designer. Its tiny fragment of hall was made almost unbearably elegant by a bamboo plant stand bearing a vase of artificial roses, a large mirror in an elaborate gold plastic frame and, dangling from the ceiling, a Chinese lantern with tassels.

The Chinese theme continued up the stairs with red and gold wallpaper, vaguely willow-patterned. The carpet was crimson, and at the top was a small landing and a glimpse through an open door of a dark and sultry boudoir, with red flock wallpaper and velvet curtains, a double bed covered in a purple and gold brocade counterpane, a velvet chair stuffed with tasselled silk cushions, pierced-work incense burners, and a surprising number of mirrors, including a full-length cheval standing at the foot of the bed.

The sitting room, by contrast, was furnished in cheap, bright Ikea pine and jolly primary colours, chiefly yellow and lime. There was a window-seat occupied by a row of stuffed toys; the mantelpiece and various tables bore a collection of china animals, mostly pigs, frogs and mice; and on the walls were pictures of winsome puppies and kittens and other adorable fluffy baby animals in agonisingly lovable poses. There were enough moist eyes in that room, Slider reckoned, to have supplied an entire sultan’s banquet.

‘The occupant of this flat’, Atherton concluded, ‘is either seriously schizophrenic, or a working girl.’

‘Oh dear, how will we ever tell which?’ Slider wondered.

The occupant was sitting on the sofa before a gas fire, sniffling
into a Kleenex. WPC Asher stood at hand with the box, and made an enigmatic face over her head as the two appeared in the doorway.

‘Miss Jekyll, I presume?’ Slider enquired.

She looked up. ‘Eh?’

‘What’s your name, love?’

‘Candi,’ she said. ‘With an “i”. Candi Du Cane.’

‘Real name?’

She looked a trifle sulky. ‘Lorraine, if you must know. Lorraine Peabody.’