Body Line (6 page)

That she was not glad to be disturbed was immediately apparent.

‘Yes?’ she snapped, her face fixed in an expression of impenetrable
hauteur
.

‘Amanda Sturgess?’ Slider asked politely.

Her expression changed to one of suspicion and dislike. Her eyes flicked to Atherton, rapidly assessing his suit; and, strangely, this seemed to deepen her aversion. ‘If you’re from the Bible College, you’re wasting your time. My religion is
not
open to discussion.’

Slider winced. Oh, poor Atherton, he thought. The Hugo Boss wouldn’t be getting another outing any time soon. ‘We’re police officers, madam,’ he said, showing his brief, before she could slam the door. She inspected it without touching it; Atherton’s did not merit even a glance. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you but we’d like to speak with you. May we come in for a moment?’

Atherton noticed that, as well as using his most deferential tone, he had allowed a very slight hint of a country accent to creep in. He had used this before, to disarm ‘county’ types, but Atherton was never sure if it was deliberate or instinctive.

Perhaps Sarratt didn’t count as ‘county’. There was no thaw. ‘What about?’ she demanded.

‘I’d rather not talk about it on the doorstep, madam.’ Slider, gently persuasive.

‘Tell me what it’s about, or I shall close the door.’ Amanda Sturgess, magnificently unpersuaded.

‘It’s about your former husband, David Rogers.’

For a moment something flickered through her eyes that might have been alarm, but then there followed overt and sighing exasperation. Overdone? ‘What’s he been up to now?’ Interesting, Slider thought. He’d been up to things before? ‘As you point out,’ she went on, ‘he is my
ex
-husband. I know nothing about his present exploits. I can’t help you.’

‘We’re hoping you can help us with some background information,’ Slider said, and threw in another ‘madam’ for good measure. He had dropped the slight burr now, Atherton noted. Smart and workmanlike was the way to go with this dame. ‘We shan’t keep you long.’

He could do as good an unyielding as her any day, and did it now. Unwillingly, she let them in. The house had been refurbished to a high standard of what passed these days for luxury – that is, all the floors had been stripped and polished and left bare, the walls were painted white, the furniture was modern and minimal, and an extravagant number of walls had been knocked out, so that the downstairs into which they were led formed a vast L shape with the sitting-room, the short leg, leading through to a kitchen-diner that stretched across the whole back of the house, and had glass doors across most of the width. Slider guessed they would be both sliding and folding, so that in summer almost the entire back of the house could be opened on to the patio. If ever the weather was hot enough. For the rest of the year, it seemed to him, the set-up would be pointedly un-cosy. It struck him that the current fashion for vast open spaces inside houses was an import from a country with a very different climate. But of course, the Amanda Knox-Sturgesses of this world had never set great store by comfort.

Her heels clacked aggressively on the bare boards; Slider’s and Atherton’s police rubber soles were soundless behind her. No cat or dog came to greet them; the air smelled only of potpourri, not supper; there was no visible food preparation going on in the kitchen; and the sunless rooms were chilly. It was not Slider’s idea of a home; but he was a farm boy from the sticks, so what did he know?

She turned to face them at the point where the sitting-room turned into the dining end of the kitchen and, menacingly tall under the RSJ, said, ‘Very well. Please be brief. What has David done now?’

No please-sit-down, no cuppa. There was nothing for it: Slider said, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that he’s dead.’

He was watching her face, and it went stationary with shock; though again he felt there was a flicker of something – guilt or fear? – before she regained her icy mask. ‘I suppose he crashed his car. He always was a careless driver,’ she said as if indifferently, but she was not unaffected. Her eyes seemed blank, and her voice was by the tiniest degree not steady. She sat abruptly in the nearest armchair. Thus licensed, Slider and Atherton sat too.

‘One of the things we hoped you might be able to tell us,’ Slider said, sidestepping the car crash thing, ‘was, who is his next of kin? He seems to have been living alone. Did he remarry after your divorce?’

‘Neither of us remarried,’ she said, a little absently, surveying some inner landscape.

‘So you did keep in touch with him,’ Slider said. She looked up sharply. ‘If you knew he hadn’t remarried, you must have had some contact with him.’

‘We sent birthday and Christmas cards. And occasionally we spoke on the phone – about once a year. He would have told me if he was getting married. But that’s all. I haven’t seen him in years, and I know nothing about his present life.’

‘Are his parents alive?’ Slider asked, pursuing the next-of-kin line.

‘No. His father died in nineteen-eighty-eight and his mother in ninety-four. They were quite elderly when they had him.’

‘Brothers and sisters?’

‘He was an only child. And his parents were only children as well. He had a quite remarkable lack of relatives. It made his side of the church look very empty at our wedding.’

An extraneous comment! Slider was glad of this evidence of softening. ‘At Holy Cross?’ he suggested beguilingly.

‘You know Sarratt?’ she asked, but not warmly – almost suspiciously, as if she suspected he was sucking up to her.

Which he was, of course, though she wasn’t supposed to know it. ‘I know that part of the world. It’s a lovely church. And you and David didn’t have any children?’ Somehow he knew that: there was nothing maternal about her shape or her manner.

‘No,’ she said shortly, and in such a voice that it was impossible to pursue the subject.

‘Then it looks as though you are the nearest thing he had to next of kin,’ Slider concluded.

‘I am his
ex
-wife,’ she reminded him again, sharply. ‘I am not responsible for anything to do with him.’

‘Not legally, of course,’ Slider said, as though there was another kind of responsibility. She eyed him and opened her mouth to retort but he got in first – soothingly. ‘I was just wondering whether there was anyone else who needed to be told about his death.’

‘
And
you were wondering who’s going to pay for the funeral, I suppose,’ she suggested tartly.

‘Oh, I dare say there’ll be enough in his estate to cover that. He seems to have been living in comfort.’

This seemed to interest her. ‘You’ve found money?’

‘I didn’t mean that – just that his style of living suggests he was comfortably-off.’

She looked down at her hands and then up again. ‘I thought perhaps he had got into financial trouble and committed suicide.’

‘It wasn’t suicide,’ Slider said.

She surveyed his face keenly. ‘You’re sure of that? David wasn’t a very –
resolute
person. Liable to look for the easy way out when things – set him back. Not a striver against misfortune.’

Why was she keen to sell them on suicide, Slider wondered. ‘He didn’t kill himself,’ he said.

‘Sometimes these things can be made to look like an accident,’ she said, and then hurried on, as though she had come to a decision. ‘You needn’t worry about the funeral. I’ll make all the arrangements, if that helps. I don’t suppose there’s anyone else who—’

‘Cares for him?’ he suggested gently.

‘I don’t care for him,’ she said. ‘I did once, but that was a long time ago. However, there is such a thing as common decency.’

She hadn’t looked at Atherton since they’d sat down. She had forgotten him. And he could see she was ready to talk to Slider. He wondered again how Slider did it. Animal magic – pheromones – mesmerism? Something.

‘He was an attractive man,’ Slider suggested.

‘You don’t know how attractive.’ She stopped abruptly as something occurred to her. ‘You haven’t said yet how he died.
Was
it a car crash?’

Slider held her eyes. They were not blue, as he had first thought, but greenish-grey. Unusual, but not very – what was the word? –
sympathique
, in the French sense. Better suited to expressing
froideur
than warmth. ‘I’m sorry to tell you that he was murdered.’

For the first time she lost her composure. Colour drained from her face, and she looked suddenly older. Her lips rehearsed some words she didn’t speak. At last she got a grip. ‘How can you be sure?’

‘He was shot in the back of the head,’ Slider said.

The words were as brutal as the shot itself.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, staring at him as if he had slapped her. She put both her hands to her mouth. But evidently her mind was still working. After a moment she said from behind them, ‘Was it over some woman?’

‘That’s what we have to find out,’ Slider said, ‘and it means going into his background, which is why I hoped you would be able to help us. The more we know about him, the better chance we have of finding who did this.’

‘There’ll be a woman at the bottom of it,’ she said, and now there was a hint of bitterness in her tone. ‘There always was. That’s what killed our marriage – women. He couldn’t resist them. And they couldn’t resist him. To some extent he wasn’t to blame. They threw themselves at him. He was so handsome, so charming. He had a way of making you feel you were the only person in the world who mattered. And of course it was sincere – at the time. It took me years to understand that. He wasn’t pretending. It was just that he made every woman feel like that.’

‘It must have been a useful thing for a doctor.’

She didn’t take it amiss. ‘Yes. The ultimate bedside manner. He ought to have been a psychiatrist. Or even a dentist. Women would have flocked to him.’

‘What was his field?’

She seemed slightly put out by the question. ‘Urology,’ she said flatly.

‘Not glamorous,’ Slider sympathized. But lucrative – and more male patients than female, he reflected. She should have been glad about that. ‘Was he ambitious?’ he asked. ‘I suppose he must have been to get as far as he did. He came from quite humble beginnings, didn’t he?’

She studied him a moment, as if to weigh the implications of his question, and then, oddly, glanced at Atherton. He took the cue. ‘On his birth certificate, it said his father was an insurance clerk.’

She nodded, as if that explained it. ‘He grew up in a terraced workman’s cottage. Two up, two down. He used to make jokes about D.H. Lawrence, but it wasn’t quite that bad. Greasely’s quite a pretty, country place. And his parents were respectable working people, very keen for him to get on. He went to the grammar school, and got a grant to go to university. Which is where I met him.’

Slider had not pictured her a student; and he became aware that he had noticed subliminally that there was not a single book on display in the immaculate sitting-room. On the shelves in the chimney alcove there were only ornaments. ‘Which one?’ he asked.

‘Edinburgh. He wanted to go to London but couldn’t get in. I chose Edinburgh to get as far away from home as possible. So we were both rather lost sheep.’

‘What did you study?’ Atherton asked, mainly to keep her going, but also out of curiosity. He couldn’t see her as a scholar, either.

‘Philosophy,’ she said, surprising them both. English – the easy option – was what they would have betted. ‘Daddy said it was a waste of time, because it couldn’t lead to a career. And Mummy didn’t want me to have a career anyway, so she didn’t want me to go to university at all. Least of all Edinburgh. She was afraid I’d meet someone unsuitable there. Which I did, in her sense. So they were both right.’

‘And you were attracted to David right away?’ Slider asked.

‘I admired him for the way he’d got over his disadvantages and moved himself into a different world. Without being resentful. There were other working-class students, of course, but they tended to be – what’s that word they use nowadays?’

‘Chippy?’ Atherton suggested.

‘Oh yes. There were a lot of chippy people around back then. But David wasn’t the least like that. He loved the fact that I came from a privileged home. He made me feel it was something to be proud of. So we – clung together, I suppose. And then – well, he
was
tremendously attractive. Thick, black hair, blue eyes, wonderfully athletic. And that charm of his . . .’

‘You fell in love,’ Slider suggested. She assented by a slight nod. ‘But you didn’t get married for quite some time.’

She sharpened. ‘You seem to know an awful lot about me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Slider said. ‘We found the marriage certificate, you see, so we know the date.’

She sighed. ‘There was a lot of opposition at home. Mummy was horrified because he wasn’t “one of us”. Daddy insisted David must prove himself before we could get married. They hoped I’d meet someone else if they made me wait.’ Her mouth hardened as she said it. ‘For five years they threw eligible men of the “right” sort at me, made me go to every dance and party, tried to pretend David was just one of the field. It wasn’t until he was a senior houseman, and Bernard Webber got him a registrar slot, that they gave in.’