Dead End (2 page)

Slider went cold with fright. ‘Anyone else hurt?’ he heard himself ask.

‘All we’ve got is that there was a single shot fired, one body, and chummy got away.’

‘All right. I’m on my way. Where’s Atherton?’

‘He’s already gone, guv,’ Mackay called after his disappearing back.

Atherton was waiting for him out in the yard. Svelte, elegant, creaseless of suit, wearer of silk socks and an aftershave you could only smell when you got close up, outwardly Atherton was nothing like a detective. He and Slider had worked together for a long time now, and Atherton was the nearest thing Slider had to a friend. He was an able man who dissipated his abilities and was far too dedicated to enjoying himself to get on in his career. If he hadn’t been so intellectually lazy, he could have been Commissioner by now. If he hadn’t been incurably honest, he could have been a top politician.

‘We’ll go in my car, shall we?’ he said. ‘It’s hell to park up there.’

‘Oh, you heard about it, then.’

‘I heard.’ He gave Slider a quick look and said nothing more until he had edged the car out into the stream of traffic. It wasn’t too bad at this time of day – not much of a challenge to a man who loved driving. Not that you could do much real driving in a Ford anyway. He’d really like an Aston Martin, but apart from the price there was the parking problem. In London there was no point in driving anything you would mind getting nicked.

Slider had not spoken, and Atherton glanced sideways at him and had little difficulty in guessing his thoughts. There was not much he didn’t know about his guv’nor’s home-life, and what he knew he’d never celebrated. That Slider had been married to the wrong woman for sixteen years was bad enough: Irene had no sense of humour and thought that food was something
you had to have to stay alive, a combination in Atherton’s eyes so unfortunate as to be bizarre. Add to that the fact that the marital home was on an estate in Ruislip, and Atherton had thought things could not get worse for his boss; but getting worse is what things notoriously specialise in. The situation at the moment was, in technical language, a right bugger.

‘How are things in the green belt these days?’ he asked sympathetically.

Slider didn’t look at him. ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.’

‘It was rotten luck,’ Atherton said. ‘Ironies of fate, and all that.’

Ironies indeed, Slider thought, running on a now-familiar track. He wouldn’t have minded so much if Irene had run off with an Italian waiter or a hunky young milkman, but she had left him for her bridge partner, who was the most boring man who had ever lived. Ernie Newman had the dynamic personality of a man slipping in and out of coma: he had once been a member of Northwood Golf Club but had found the place too swinging for him.

But Irene liked him: he was retired on an enormous company pension and he moved amidst the Volvo set she so admired.

‘He’s always there. He can spend time with me,’ Irene had said; as succinct a commentary on the loneliness of a copper’s wife as Slider had ever heard. And when he had protested about Ernie’s dullness: ‘I’ve had enough of excitement,’ she had said. ‘I want a man who thinks
I’m
exciting.’ Even in their courting days Slider had never thought Irene exciting. She had always been neat, proper, unimaginative and conventional; but he had to admit that next to Ernie she was Catherine the Great.

She had taken the two children and left Slider in occupation of the house, the ranch-style, modern executive albatross which he had always hated with the pungency of a man who loved architecture forced to live with picture windows and an open-plan staircase. He had only bought it because it was the kind of thing she liked, and she, after all, would have to spend more time in it than him. That was irony for you!

Ernie Newman, a widower, had a five-bedroom detached house in Chalfont, so there was plenty of room for Irene and the children. She had always wanted to live somewhere like
Chalfont. And Ernie was going to pay for Matthew and Kate to go to private school, which was something Irene had long hankered after. Ernie had never had any children of his own – Mavis couldn’t, apparently – so he was looking forward to being a father-by-proxy, Irene said. All Slider’s masculine instincts had got up on their hind legs at that point, but the concealed knowledge of his own guilt had made it impossible for him to attack. Irene had never found out about Joanna.

And Joanna wouldn’t have him back, despite the fact that he was now free. Irony number two. He had more irony than a man with a steel plate in his head. The events of this summer had left him utterly at a loss. What on earth was he supposed to do with the rest of his life? Even work was not enough to fill the void. His sanguine temperament had previously found satisfaction even in the routine plod which made up so much of the job; but burglaries, TDAs, possession and the rest of the malarky had no power now to rouse him from his puzzled misery. He knew as a Christian he ought not to rejoice in murder, but there was nothing like a big case for ‘taking you out of yourself’, as his mother used to say.

‘So how did you know they would be rehearsing this afternoon?’ he asked as they rounded the end of Shepherd’s Bush Green.

‘Joanna told me, of course.’

‘Oh.’

Slider resisted the urge to ask where and why Atherton had been talking to Joanna. He had no rights over either of them, and certainly had no right to feel bugged that, having given him the chuck, she continued the friendship with Atherton which only existed because she had been Slider’s lover. He turned his mind resolutely away from his own problems.

‘I suppose it is Sir Stefan Radek who’s been shot? Mackay just said “some big celeb”.’

‘That’s all I heard too. There isn’t a soloist, so presumably it’s Radek,’ Atherton said.

Radek was one of the few serious musicians who had crossed over into general, man-in-the-street fame. He’d even been on tv, Slider remembered. He’d had that series last year,
Classics for Idiots
or whatever it was called, explaining the difference between a concerto and a double-bass with the help of computer
graphics and a popular comedian to make it all user-friendly. And now somebody had shot him. That’d teach him to go slumming. All Slider knew about Radek came from a cheery little spoonerism Joanna had told him one night after a concert. ‘What’s the difference between Radek and Radox? Radox bucks up the feet.’ He remembered, too, after another concert when she had been seething about the conductor’s iniquities (not Radek, though, someone else), she’d said that if he were found murdered that night there’d be eighty-odd suspects in the orchestra alone. ‘Half of us would put our hands up out of sheer gratitude.’ She’d been joking, of course; but it made you think. Somebody evidently thought the only good conductor was a dead one, and was prepared to do something about it as well.

St Augustine’s was an incongruously big church for the streets it found itself in, hinting at larger, wealthier, or at least more devout congregations in the past. It was nineteenth-century Byzantine, built of soot-smudged pale-red brick with white stone coping, like a dish of slightly burned brawn piped with mashed potato. Inside it was a miniature Westminster Cathedral, cavernous and echoing, with lofty arches lost in shadow, pierced-work lamps, gilded wall and ceiling paintings, windows stained in deep, jewel shades of red and blue and green, and dark-eyed, beardless El Greco saints with narrow hands and melancholy mouths staring from every corner. There were high, wrought-iron gates across the choir, and the orchestra had been set up in the space below them on a low platform. Chairs and music stands and the timps were all that was to be seen. The players themselves had been ushered away somewhere – presumably to whatever place had been set aside for them as dressing-rooms. Slider hoped, anyway, that they had not all disappeared. Like tea, statements were best taken freshly brewed.

He and Atherton walked down the central aisle towards the scene, which was lit by overhead spots so that it stood out from the cave of comparative darkness around, like a gruesome reverse Nativity. The body was sprawled face down on the small podium between the lectern, on which the score lay open, and the long-legged conductor’s chair. He had fallen quite neatly without knocking either over, which suggested to Slider that the bullet had not struck him with great force: he had crumpled
rather than reeled or been flung off his feet. And in the place of ox and ass there were two people keeping guard over the body: one Slider recognised as the orchestra’s fixer, Tony Whittam; the other was a dapper, plumpish, bald man who was kneeling on the floor at the head of the corpse and weeping. Every now and then he wiped the tears from his face unselfconsciously with a large handkerchief held in his left hand; in his right he held the conductor’s baton by the point, so that the bulbous end rested on the floor. It looked like the ceremonial reversing of a sword.

As soon as he saw Slider, Tony Whittam stepped towards him with a cry of relief. ‘Am I glad to see a friendly face! Are you the official presence?’

‘Yes,’ said Slider. ‘This is on my ground.’

‘Well, that’s a piece of luck,’ Whittam said. His usually genial face was drawn into uncharacteristic lines of shock and anxiety. He was a well-fed, dapper man of fifty-two going on thirty-five, in a light biscuit suit and a tie that would have tried the credibility of a twenty-year old. The orchestra’s personnel-manager-cumagony-aunt was much given to gold jewellery, sported a deeply suspect suntan and an artificially white smile, and altogether had the air of being likely to break out into a flower in the buttonhole at the slightest provocation. He looked like a spiv, but was in fact superb at his job, efficient as a machine and genuinely warm-hearted. Many a time Slider had seen him in the middle of a crowd of musicians, all clutching their diaries, all hoping to get off one date or on another; and he had always managed to spare Slider a glance and a friendly nod while coping patiently with the conflicting demands of, say, Mahler Five and the personal lives of a hundred-odd freelance and therefore temperamental artistes. Perhaps it was unkind mentally to have cast him as an ass.

‘Who’s this bloke?’ Slider asked in an undertone with a gesture of the head towards the ox.

‘It’s Radek’s dresser. He’s a bit upset.’

Understatement of the year. ‘Dresser?’

‘That’s what he calls himself. Sort of like his valet, personal servant, whatever. Been with him years. Everyone knows him.’ He was, Slider realised, justifying the man’s presence.

‘Name?’

‘Keaton. Arthur Keaton, but everyone calls him Buster.’

‘Okay. And where’s everybody else?’

‘Down in the crypt – that’s where the dressing-rooms are, and a sort of band room for coffee and warming-up. I thought it best to keep everyone together until someone came,’ he said anxiously. ‘Des is with ’em, keeping ’em quiet.’ That was Des Riley, orchestral attendant, who set up the platform and loaded and unloaded the instruments – a dark, ripely handsome man dedicated to body-building and fornication. Since orchestral attendants were traditionally known as ‘humpers’, these would seem to be the two essential qualifications.

‘You did just right,’ Slider said reassuringly. ‘Is everybody all right?’

‘Oh yes – I mean they’re shocked, as you’d expect, but nobody’s hurt.’ He nodded significantly, to convey to Slider that by everybody he understood him to mean Joanna.

‘Who else was here apart from the musicians?’

‘Well, there was Bill Fordham’s wife and kid – first horn – they’d come to watch; and Martin Cutts’s latest bird, of course; and the verger, he was mucking about back there with some keys,’ he gestured with his head towards the back of the church. ‘And Georgina, my assistant, but she was through in the vestry making a phone call. They’re all down there in the band room. Radek’s agent was here earlier, but she’d gone before it happened. And Spaz – he’d already left as well. He’s taken the van away – there’s nowhere to park it here.’ That was Des Riley’s assistant, Garry Sparrow, usually known as Gaz the Spaz, a witticism none too subtle for him.

‘All right. You’ve done very well,’ Slider said, and crouched to take a look at the body. Radek had been lean and upright, one of those wiry old men who go on for ever and never look much different once they’ve passed fifty. Slider, musical tyro though he was, recognised him, as he supposed about seventy-five per cent of people would, whether they were music-lovers or not, now that he’d been on the telly. For Radek was not only hugely famous, but physically distinctive. He was very tall, gaunt, and had a great beak of a nose and bushy white eyebrows over heavy-lidded eyes, so that he looked like a half-pissed bird of prey. His shock of over-long white hair was brushed straight back like a lion’s mane, but once he got going, it flew about as if it had a life of its own. It was his hallmark; and his photograph – invariably moodily-lit and against a dark
background – loured, snarled and brooded famously on a million record-covers, white mane and white hands spiked against the blackness, the archetypal image of the super-maestro.

Today he was dressed in civvies of course – fawn slacks, with a black roll-neck sweater tucked into them, leather moccasins and, my God, pale yellow socks.

‘He doesn’t look as impressive as he does in white tie and tails,’ Slider murmured to Atherton.

‘Nobody looks their best dead,’ Atherton reminded him.

There was no doubt he was dead, at any rate, Slider thought. Radek’s face was pale grey, with a touch of blue about nose and lips, and the skin looked unpleasantly moist, like sweating cheese. His eyes were open and fixed, staring as no eyes ever stared in life, and his lips were drawn back from old-man’s long yellow teeth as though he were baring them in defiance. There was a bitter smell of sweat about him, a whiff of aftershave, and underneath that a faint, unclean smell, which Slider associated with mortality. Radek was lying more or less in the recovery position, one leg slightly drawn up, and both his hands were clenched – the right lying beside his head, the other, caught under him, seemingly locked onto the cloth of his roll-neck.