Body Line (14 page)

‘I ain’t reported nothing. Where are you from? You ain’t locals.’

‘Reckon you
have
had a theft,’ McLaren insisted. Fathom was wandering away a few steps, looking around, which was giving Embry trouble keeping his eyes on the two of them at once. ‘Matter of a number plate. Comes back to a wrote-off Astra you got here.’

‘My business is legit, ’undred per cent,’ Embry said. ‘Had your lot crawling all over the place at the start, making sure of that. And tell your mate not to go wandering off. These ain’t the only two dogs I got.’

‘Well, if the number plate weren’t stolen, you sold it,’ McLaren said. ‘And that means you been a naughty boy.’

Embry’s stance shifted very slightly. ‘I got scads a people coming in here looking for spares. I sell ’em legitimate. Bound to be the odd nut and bolt took on the side. Can’t watch every bastard all the time.’

‘That’s why you got all these cameras, ain’t it, mate?’ McLaren said, gesturing round to the four CCTV cameras mounted on poles in the four corners of the yard.

‘They don’t work. Just for show – try an’ scare some of the thieving fuckers off.’ He looked aggrieved. ‘And a fat lot o’ use you lot are. Had an OHC off a Porsche nicked last week. You know what that’s worth? Fuck knows how he got it out without me seeing. Know who it was but I can’t prove it. No point telling you lot. You don’t do anything when I do report a theft. Useless bunch o’ tossers, ain’t you?’

‘Oh, now, you’ve hurt my feelings,’ McLaren said. ‘I come here to do you a favour. Might not feel like being so kind now.’

‘Favour! That’ll be the day.’

‘This Astra. We’d like to have a look at it.’ He held out a copy of the scrappage form.

Embry’s granite face did not flicker. ‘Have to look it up. Can’t remember every wreck in the place.’

They followed him into the office, where McLaren noted another security camera, up near the ceiling in the corner, covering the door and the wooden counter. The red monitor light on its base came on as they walked in, indicating it was either motion-or heat-sensitive. As Embry had his back to them, going to a filing cabinet, McLaren nudged Fathom and drew his attention to it.

Embry drew out a folder, opened it on the counter, and ran a finger down a column, comparing with the piece of paper. His finger stopped and he looked up.

‘Gone,’ he said. ‘Went in the crusher Monday.’

‘How convenient,’ McLaren said. ‘And what about the plates?’

Embry scowled. ‘They’d a been on it. Crush the ’ole lot together.’

‘Then how do you account for ’em being clocked on a BMW in Shepherd’s Bush Monday morning?’

‘How the fuck should I know?’

‘We know you sold them plates.’

‘I don’t sell number plates,’ Embry said, calling their bluff.

‘Rented ’em, same thing. Either way, they come out of here and come back in here, ended in the crusher. Car was tracked all the way. So you can make it easy on yourself or you can make it hard.’

Embry said nothing, but he looked at McLaren a touch more receptively. The Dobermann had stopped snarling, and was sitting down, looking warily from face to face. Now it sneezed, rubbed its nose on its wrist, and sighed.

McLaren got out the print taken from the A410 roundabout camera. ‘Seen this man before?’ he asked.

Embry took the print and, while his face had probably never been one designed for showing emotions, and life had only made it less so, McLaren was sure that awareness flicked through it for a split second. Embry recognized the man all right – McLaren was sure of it.

‘Don’t know him,’ Embry said, pushing the print back at him. ‘What’s he done, anyway?’

‘Murder.’

The tight face flinched, and he must have tensed, because the dog was up again and snarling. Embry jerked the chain to shut it up. ‘Bastard,’ he said, but it was not apparent whether he was referring to the dog or not. ‘I don’t know him,’ he said again, ‘but he might have been here. Might have nicked them plates. Like I said, I can’t watch everyone all the time.’

‘But the plates were on the car when you crushed it, so he must’ve brought ’em back. Tidy sort of thief, that.’

‘Look, whadder you
want
?’ Embry said irritably.

‘A look at your CCTV tapes’ll do for a start.’

‘I told you, they don’t work.’

‘This one does, though,’ McLaren said, pointing upwards. ‘Wouldn’t leave yourself without a bit of backup, not a cautious bloke like you. And chummy here’ll be on it. We need a better picture of him. Give us the tapes, and we may forget about you selling number plates illegal. Or we can shut you down and take ’em anyway. Up to you.’

‘You got nothing on me,’ Embry said scornfully. ‘Stuff gets stolen. Not my fault.’

McLaren leaned forward slightly, fixing Embry with his eyes. ‘You don’t wanner get us interested in you, mate. There’s worse things than number plates to have coming back on you. If we start taking you apart you never know what we’ll find. Be a sensible boy and give us the tapes so we go away happy.’

Hollis came in to Slider’s office with the air of excitement detectives get when they’ve had a breakthrough. His gooseberry eyes were bulging, and he brushed at his terrible moustache with the back of his forefinger as though preparing it for the cameras. Not than anything short of the ultimate sanction would do anything to make that pathetic soup-strainer look any better. Hollis was a nice bloke, Slider often reflected, but he simply had no talent at growing hair.

‘Got him, guv,’ he said. ‘He’s in the records all right.’

‘Rogers?’

‘The Dirty Doctor,’ Hollis said, accepting Atherton’s sobriquet for him. ‘Fingerprints came up positive. It was a while back, though – June 1998. Long story short, he was accused of sexually assaulting a female patient while she was under sedation. Happened at a fancy Harley Street place him and two other doctors were sharing. Had his hand up her skirt. But it never went to court. She settled for compensation and withdrew the charge.’

‘Well, well. The naughty lad,’ Slider said. ‘Freddie was right. He said there was a scandal around Rogers.’

‘I looked up the newspapers from the time, and it did get in, though there weren’t that much, only in the tabloids, and they were big on innuendo and headlines and not much text,’ Hollis said. ‘Which is always the clue they’ve not got much. And it died down pretty quick – I suppose when the woman dropped out.’

But as Freddie had said, when it was one of your own, you noticed.

‘Was he struck off?’

‘I haven’t found that out yet. You know what the General Medical Council are like. I’m trying to get on to someone but they’re not ringing me back.’

‘Keep trying.’

‘Aye, guv. But you know, it could have been a false accusation. Happens all the time. Woman wants to make money, it’s the easiest way.’

Slider nodded. It happened to policemen, too. And rather than have to fight it through the courts, with all the disastrous publicity, establishments tended to prefer to settle.

‘Or she might have made a genuine mistake,’ Slider said. ‘If she was groggy or drifting in and out of consciousness—’

‘Doesn’t look as if the practice put up much of a fight,’ Hollis said, ‘so I reckon there was something in it. Anyway, I’ll keep on at the GMC and try and get to bottom of it. So t’ speak.’

‘Thank you, I’ll do the jokes,’ Slider said. He frowned. ‘June 1998? And the Rogerses were divorced in September 1999. I wonder if this was the proverbial last straw?’

‘Amanda Sturgess never said anything about it, did she?’

‘No,’ said Slider. ‘She did say he had shamed her, but only that he’d had a lot of women. Nothing about his being accused and arrested. I wonder whether that was just natural modesty—’

‘Or she didn’t want you to know she had a bloody good reason to hate him,’ Hollis said, finishing the sentence.

‘But it’s always the same objection,’ Slider concluded with dissatisfaction. ‘Why would she wait all this time if it was revenge she wanted?’

Hollis shrugged. ‘Maybe you need to ask her. Oh, and another thing, guv – it says in the papers Rogers was a plastic surgeon. But we’ve got him down as urology.’

‘That’s what Amanda Sturgess told us,’ said Slider. What with that, the unadmitted telephone calls, and Frith’s lie about his whereabouts on Monday, the Sturgess
équipe
was definitely due for another visit, Slider thought.

The Sturgess and Beale agency was an office above a travel shop on the Chiswick High Road, more or less opposite the common – a good, central position that would probably command a steepish rent. ‘Although possibly the landlord may give it a favourable rate because it’s a charity,’ Slider said, as Atherton scanned the roadside for somewhere to park.

‘Bless your Pollyanna heart,’ Atherton said. ‘Landlords don’t think like that. They’d have to hand back the badge if they did something kind.’ He saw a space and drew up parallel to the car in front of it. ‘But there’s no reason the agency shouldn’t have wealthy donors. Oh, get off my tail, you halfwit!’ he bellowed into the rear view mirror. ‘Can’t you see I’m parking?’ He jerked a hand out of the window and furiously beckoned past the car that was jammed up behind him. It was a souped-up black Mazda 3 Sport with a driver who looked about fifteen and had his windows wound down so that the whole world could share his CD choice. ‘Get you next time,’ Atherton said. ‘And if I listened to music like that, I wouldn’t want anyone else to know about it.’

They walked back to the travel shop. The door for the upstairs lay between it and the next shop: a genuine old Victorian door that matched the age of the building, handsomely painted in fresh red gloss, with a big brass dead-knob in the centre. There was a brass nameplate on the return of the wall:
Sturgess and Beale Agency, Employment Solutions for the Differently Abled
.

‘Classy,’ said Atherton.

Below that was another plate saying:
Disabled access and lift to the rear, or please ring for assistance.
Below again was the bell, a large brass mounting around a white porcelain button with PRESS enamelled in the centre in black. ‘All right for the press; where do the rest of us ring?’ Atherton complained.

‘I think we’ll just go up,’ Slider said. The door was on the latch and pushed open. Inside was a narrow hallway with green marble-effect lino tiles and a steep staircase going up; the passage went past them right through to a glazed back door and the lift. The walls were painted cream and pale green and there were sunken halogen lights in the ceiling. All very fresh and attractive. They climbed to the first floor, where the lift came out on the landing, and walls had been moved to make manoeuvring room for a wheelchair. The doorways were extra wide, and there were polished wooden handrails everywhere. ‘I bet the lino tiles are non-slip, too,’ Atherton said. ‘They’ve thought of everything.’

‘I should hope so,’ said Slider.

Through the first open door, they passed into an office, light and airy, well lit, with plenty of floor space. There were three desks, one bearing a printer and copier and stacks of forms and leaflets. The other two had computers and telephones and the usual office accoutrements. Behind one sat a slight young woman, very fair and pale, who appeared to be suffering from a heavy cold – her eyes and the end of her nose were red and swollen – clattering away full-speed on the keyboard. At the other was a woman in her fifties, rather shapeless-looking, with a mass of greying frizzy hair spreading out and past her shoulders, oversized tortoiseshell glasses slipping to the end of her nose, and an expression of tense concentration on her face as she picked two-fingered at the keys. Through a further wide and open door was a glimpse of a second office, the one which had the windows on to the street. The desk was out of sight to the left, but a youngish man in a wheelchair could be seen, his attention on the occupant of the desk. Slider could distinguish the cut-glass tones of Amanda Sturgess coming from within.

‘Can I help you?’ said the shapeless woman.

‘Detective Inspector Slider and Detective Sergeant Atherton,’ Slider said. ‘To see Amanda Sturgess.’

‘Oh,’ said the woman, looking alarmed. She stood up jerkily, knocking over a pot of pencils and biros on the desk. ‘I’m afraid she’s not available.’ A pencil rolled off the table and she stooped awkwardly to retrieve it. She was about five foot four and extremely fat, and was wearing a waistless print dress which reached her ankles, like a floral tent. She pushed her large glasses up her nose and they slid straight back down, as arrogantly as the Queen Mary down the slipway. ‘Can I help at all? I’m Nora Beale. Ms Sturgess’s partner.’ She came round the end of the desk and took a step towards them, and dithered, as if wondering whether to offer to shake hands or not. The outer edge of her hip knocked a small pile of papers to the ground. ‘Oh!’ she said again, and made to retrieve them, but Atherton got in first, stooping like a hawk, gathering them in one pass of his long fingers and presenting them to her. She almost snatched them from him, looking at him in confused annoyance. ‘They’re confidential,’ she objected, and pushed her glasses up again. ‘Were you enquiring about employing a differently abled person? I have a leaflet covering the legal requirements, if you aren’t sure about them.’