Body Line (15 page)

Unseen within the inner room, a hand closed the door.

Slider raised his hand slightly, to prevent the woman attempting to get across the room to the leaflet table, which he thought in her state of nervousness would leave a trail of havoc. The young woman had ceased typing and was watching the scene. ‘No, thank you. I need to speak to Mrs Sturgess about a personal matter.’

‘It’s
Ms
Sturgess,’ Beale corrected, with more force than anything she had said so far. ‘And I’m afraid it’s quite impossible to speak to her. She has someone with her. One of our clients.’

‘Yes, so I saw,’ Slider said. ‘I’m afraid it is rather urgent, however. Would you please tell her we are here?’

‘I can’t disturb her when she’s with a
client
,’ she objected, outraged. ‘Our clients are very vulnerable, and must be given every consideration. You’ll have to come back some other time. It’s best to make an appointment, you know. Ms Sturgess is always
very busy
.’ Her face was mottling, though whether with fear or anger, Slider couldn’t tell. Her devotion to Amanda Sturgess was obvious, but from the little he had seen, it was not so obvious why Amanda would keep her about the place.

‘I quite understand,’ he said soothingly, ‘but I must ask you to interrupt her and tell her we are here. We’ll wait while she winds up the interview.’

Ms Beale made various disapproving, tutting noises, but she blundered back round her desk and rang through to the other office, turning away and covering her mouth while she muttered her message. When she had put the phone down again she went back to her hunt-and-peck typing without a word to the two intruders, though judging from the amount of backspacing she was doing, she was too upset to be making a good job of it. It was the younger woman who said, ‘Would you like to sit down?’ and gestured towards some chairs on her side of the room. Slider smiled at her and politely declined. He was not going to be passively seated and let them think the waiting was all right.

It was eight minutes before the inner door opened and the man in the wheelchair appeared, with Amanda Sturgess behind him. She ignored the visitors with glacial completeness as she escorted him out, talking to him the while, all the way to the lift. Only on her return did she give Slider a cold glance and say, ‘You may come in,’ and then stalked past them into her sanctum.

They followed her in and closed the door, and she faced them, standing, across her desk and got the first punch in. ‘If you wish to speak to me in future you
must
make an appointment. I do
not
appreciate your turning up here unannounced, embarrassing me, annoying my staff and upsetting the clients. You must understand that our clients are extremely vulnerable people, and I cannot have disturbing influences putting them at risk.’

Slider took it straight back to her. ‘And you must understand that I do not appreciate being lied to. It makes me feel very disturbed, and when I get disturbed I tend to come and disturb others.’

She was shocked by his use of her own words. Her eyes widened and she reddened angrily. ‘How
dare
you be facetious?’ she cried. ‘Don’t you grasp the importance of our work here? We are a
charity
! We deal with
disabled people
!’

‘It’s not your business I’m interested in, it’s you personally. And you need to grasp that I am investigating a murder, and that hindering an investigation is an imprisonable offence.’

Atherton thought his boss was going in a bit hard, but it seemed he had the measure of her. She shut her mouth with a snap and sat down abruptly, and when she spoke again a moment later her tone was different, quieter.

‘But I’m
not
. I
wouldn’t
. Obviously I want to help you if I can, in any way possible, but I don’t see what I can do. I don’t know anything about it. You can’t really suppose that I do.’ She looked at him with furious appeal.

‘What I may or may not suppose is beside the point,’ Slider said. ‘I deal in facts, and the fact is that you have lied to me, and I don’t like it. Lies make me restless. I have to know what’s behind them.’

‘I
didn’t
lie to you,’ she said indignantly, but there was a consciousness in her eyes, and a wariness. Atherton noted it with interest. She was wondering which lies had been uncovered, he thought – which argued that there had been several of them.

‘There are lies of commission, and lies of
o
mission,’ Slider said. ‘Perhaps a purist might ease their conscience over the latter, but there’s no excuse for the former. You told me that you hadn’t spoken to your former husband for months, and that you only spoke to him about once a year anyway. But we know that you have spoken to him frequently in the last few weeks. And that you had a long telephone conversation with him only a week before his death.’

And suddenly she was quite calm again. She straightened her shoulders, laid her hands before her on the desk, and said, as if it were a normal interview and she was in control of it, ‘The telephone conversations had nothing to do with your investigation, and my not telling you of them has not hampered you in any way. Really, these are very trivial matters to come trampling in here threatening me about. I have a mind to make an official complaint about your behaviour, Inspector Slider. You may not be aware that the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire is a very great personal friend of mine.’

‘I’m afraid he does not have any authority over me,’ Slider gave her back calmly. If she was threatening him, she must have something to hide, which only spurred him on. ‘The Metropolitan Police report directly to the Home Secretary.’

She smiled unpleasantly. ‘Please don’t suppose that I have never met
him
, either. Is that it?’

‘You told us your husband’s specialty was urology, but in fact he was in plastic surgery.’

That caused her a little flicker, but she came back smoothly. ‘He
began
in urology, but he changed to plastics when an opportunity came up. Again, it had nothing to do with your investigation. And what are these so-called sins of omission? Equally trivial, I have no doubt.’

This was not the way round Slider wanted to do the interview, but he had not managed to shake her sufficiently. ‘You didn’t tell us that your husband had been arrested for indecent assault.’

‘My ex-husband. No, why should I? It was a long time ago. It’s none of my business now, and none of yours either.’

‘I’d like to know something about it.’

‘Look it up in the papers. I’m sure it’s all there. It is not something I wish to talk about.’

‘Was that why you got divorced?’

‘Really, I
will
not answer questions about my private life. It was more than ten years ago. It has nothing to do with anything in the present, and I refuse to satisfy your prurient and idle curiosity. You should be concentrating on finding out who killed David, not harassing responsible citizens and interfering with their work. If that is all you have to say I must ask you to leave. I am too busy for this nonsense.’

Slider studied her for a moment and she held his look unflinchingly. Quietly, he tried, ‘You didn’t tell us that you had put a large amount of money into Hillbrow Equestrian Centre.’

Now that was interesting. That one, which ought to have received only a puzzled ‘what’s that got to do with anything?’, actually made her blink. You could see her trying to think her way through it. Finally she said, ‘My financial relationship with Hillbrow is none of your business.’ It was the finance that bothered her. Not passion, but money? There was definitely something to be found out, and he meant to find it.

‘Where was Mr Frith on Monday morning?’ he asked.

She was still puzzled, he could see, but she had taken comfort from this new direction. ‘You had better ask him,’ she said.

‘I’m asking you.’

‘I am not disposed to tell you,’ she said grandly.

‘Do you
want
to be arrested?’ he asked with assumed incredulity.

‘I know very well that you will not do any such thing.’

‘Are you quite sure of that?’

They locked eyes across the desk, and it was Amanda who flinched. She looked away, towards the window. ‘He went to work as usual.’

‘At what time?’

‘He generally leaves at six or six fifteen.’

‘What time did he leave on Monday?’

‘I think it was – six fifteen. Yes, a quarter past six.’

‘Does he drive to work?’

‘Yes, of course. How else could he get there?’

‘What sort of car does he drive?’

‘A four-by-four. A Shogun.’

‘Does he have any other car?’

‘No. Why would he need two?’

‘But you have a car.’

‘Of course. We are not joined at the hip,’ she snapped, seeming annoyed by the idea that she might not need a car if he had one. ‘I have a BMW 750Li.’

Atherton was too well trained to stir at that, but Slider felt his gladness. ‘But in fact, Mr Frith did
not
go to work as usual on Monday. He told his staff he was working from home and going straight from there to an appointment at eleven. But the appointment was also fictitious.’

Now that
did
move her. She did not speak, only stared at Slider blankly, with some furious thinking evidently going on behind the marble frontage.

‘Would you like to reconsider your statement to me?’ Slider offered.

Her voice was faint and strained. ‘Yes – I – made a mistake. Monday – yes – that was different. He was working from home. Some paperwork. He was still there when I left for work myself at a quarter past eight.’ She rallied, composed herself, and said coldly, ‘It is easy enough to mistake one day for another. My work here is important and occupies my mind to the exclusion of trivial domestic detail.’

Nice save, Slider thought. But not good enough. He switched direction in the hope of unbalancing her again. ‘What did you and David Rogers talk about during that last conversation?’

It took her a second to answer. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said, and he could see it was a lie.

‘It was a long call. Nearly twenty minutes. I’m sure you must remember it.’

‘I remember the
call
,’ she said with faint irritability. ‘I don’t remember what was said. Just general chit-chat. Nothing important.’

‘So you
were
on friendly terms with him,’ Slider said. ‘One doesn’t chit-chat for twenty minutes on unimportant subjects except with people one is close to.’

She looked at him, trying to work out the implications of the statement, and did not answer.

‘But you told me you were not close, that you had no idea what he was doing, that you had little contact with him.’

She shifted in her seat. ‘I
don’t
know what he does, and I don’t want to know. And I
don’t
normally have much contact with him. Just lately he has rung me a couple of times. I can’t tell you why. Perhaps he was bored. Or lonely. He was a weak man, the sort who can never be satisfied with his own company. Always had to be doing something, going somewhere, meeting someone.’ She seemed to be growing annoyed at the memory. ‘He was weak and unreliable and irresolute, and he made my life hell –’ she did not exactly pause, but the rest of the sentence came out in a very different tone, as if she had heard herself and corrected it – ‘but we were married for a long time, so I suppose there was still a fondness there for him. I’m sorry he’s dead. And particularly that he was killed in that shocking way.’

Outside, Atherton said, ‘Well, I don’t know that that gets us any further forward. Except that she has a BMW. And she gave Frith an alibi.’

‘Unfortunately. If she didn’t leave for work until eight fifteen he’s covered,’ Slider said. ‘Even on the normal schedule he couldn’t have left at six and been in Shepherd’s Bush at ten past.’

‘But if he was doing the job for her, we can’t take her word,’ said Atherton. ‘And as there were just the two of them at home it can’t be disproved. Bummer. When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies.’

‘Eh?’

‘Shakespeare.’

‘The bummer, or the last bit?’

‘Both. That business about the phone calls—’

‘Doesn’t hold water. That last phone call wasn’t just chit-chat. I’d like to get hold of her phone records, see if
she
rang
him
as well, during that period.
Something
was going on; and he ended up dead. If she didn’t arrange it, she knows more about it than she’s telling us.’

‘But getting it out of her will be the trick,’ said Atherton. They paused at the kerb. ‘What now?’