Death Watch (10 page)

So Joanna had affected him, with her undisguised face
and frank enjoyment of him. He had grabbed at her with the last of his survival instinct. She was an unexpected and undeserved last chance to live his own life, the way he wanted to live it.

Ah, but that still left Irene, didn’t it? And the children; and the house with its mortgage and maintenance; and then there was insurance, pension top-up, bank loan repayments … When the euphoria of being whacked unexpectedly on the head by True Love at the age of fortysomething subsided slightly, there remained the whole ill-fitting but extremely tightly-knitted garment of his married life to unpick, and he just didn’t know where to start.

How did other men do it? When he thought simply about the practical difficulties of moving himself and his belongings out, to say nothing of the cost of it all, he wondered that anyone in the history of matrimony had ever left anyone else. The disruption, the exhausting scenes, the tears, the silent reproaches – he could imagine it all, and all too easily.

And then there was love to consider: his for Irene – uncomfortable and unwelcome as it was, it still existed. You can’t look after and worry about and placate and care for someone for all those years and not become attached to them. And hers for him – and oh God, that was harder still to bear. Because for all her disappointment and her contempt for his ineffectuality, she did love him, and he knew with a sort of tearing sensation of self-hatred that he was her whole world. Love like that, however little you asked for it in the first place, was hard to betray.

He thought about Mrs Neal, forgiving her erring husband, waiting for him to come back; being there, like the dog with its nose pressed to the door, always waiting. He didn’t want to do that to Irene; she had not deserved it. And he didn’t want her to be in the position of being able to do it to him. She’d forgive him to death.

All the same, he wanted Joanna, needed the wholeness of life with her, and for that he had to leave Irene. He didn’t baulk at the logic. It was simply the doing of it which
so far had defeated him. There were those who were constitutionally unable to kick puppies. Ah, but supposing you were given the choice between kicking the puppy, and your own death? You’d do it then, wouldn’t you?

Except, of course, that for survival reasons, the human animal was rigged not to be able to believe in its own death. Perhaps, he thought wistfully, he just wasn’t desperate enough yet.

Jacqui Turner opened the door wearing practically nothing but an anxious expression.

Slider showed his brief. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you so early, but I wanted to catch you before you left for work.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said vaguely. ‘I wasn’t going in anyway. I’ve been having the week off.’ She looked dazed, and her eyes were puffy — either through crying, or lack of sleep, or both, Slider thought.

He followed her into the hall. She had a ground-floor flat in what had been a handsome, three-storey Victorian family house, almost overlooking Ealing Common. The conversion had plainly been done in the worst period of the seventies. A series of despicable doors and cardboard partition walls gave access at last to two thirds of a large and splendid room, with a marble fireplace and French windows into the garden. The ceiling mouldings running round three of the walls collided with the fourth, a false wall which partitioned off the remainder of the room. Through the open doorway Slider glimpsed curtained gloom and a tumbled bed.

‘I hope I didn’t wake you up,’ he said contritely. A valiant effort kept his eyes away from the hem of her shortie nightie.

‘No, it’s all right,’ she said, turning to face him, which was worse. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee or something? Or tea? I was just going to make some.’

‘No, thanks all the same. It’s just a brief visit. I won’t keep you a moment.’

She seemed suddenly to realise he was a man as well as a
detective inspector. ‘I’ll go and put something on, then,’ she muttered, and disappeared through the door in the carton wall.

Slider looked around the room. It was determinedly untidy, considering how large it was and how little there was in it in the way of furniture. Clothes were strewn everywhere, magazines and crumpled tissues, and there was much evidence of eating and drinking. Miss Turner seemed to have been exorcising her grief in the time-honoured fashion with chocolate biscuits, tinned rice pudding, milky drinks, Kit-Kats, whisky, crisps, satsumas, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Coca Cola, popcorn and pickled gherkins. A closely – written five – year diary lay open on the sofa, along with a scattering of letters: from Neal, presumably, and evidence if so of his carelessness.

On the mantelpiece amongst the miscellanea were two framed photographs. One was of Neal, rather blurred as if it had been blown up from a slightly unsuccessful snapshot, with the river and trees in the background – probably at Strand on the Green, Slider thought. The expression on his face was surprised and not entirely pleased. Early in the relationship, probably: she had snatched the picture in order to have some permanent record of him, the one thing at that stage he wouldn’t want.

The other photo was of Neal with his arm round Miss Turner’s waist on the front at Brighton, with a resigned and faintly embarrassed smile. It was plainly taken by a seaside photographer, who was probably glad of the work, since the empty parking spaces and the deserted state of the street behind them showed it was out of season.

And there were two videos in hire-shop covers lying on top of the television. He drifted over to look at the titles.
The Way We Were
and
Brief Encounter.
It was all so very, very sad, he thought.

Miss Turner came back in, wearing a very unglamorous towelling bathrobe, her hair still tangled and her face uncared for. She had obviously taken a sabbatical for the moment from the search for everlasting love.

‘Do sit down,’ she said wearily. ‘I suppose you want to ask me some more questions.’ She glanced at the sofa, and her face trembled. ‘I’ll clear those away,’ she said abruptly, crouching down and trying to shuffle the letters together.

‘No, it’s all right, don’t bother,’ Slider said. ‘There’s no need—’

She looked up and he met her eyes unwillingly. He didn’t want to have to look in at this door, too.

‘It’s all I’ve got of him,’ she said. ‘Just a few letters, and only one of them’s a proper one, the others are just notes.’ She gulped and made the final, humiliating confession. ‘To do with work, actually. There’s one that says – that says—’ Tears filled and spilled over from her eyes with amazing facility. She thrust the piece of paper at Slider and groped in the towelling pocket for a handkerchief.

Jacquie,
the note said – had he not known, then, how she preferred to spell herself, or was it a protest on his part? –
can you look me out the Valdena correspondence please, asap. DN.

Yes, he got the picture. Slider waited in silence while she mopped up the latest overspill, and then as she gathered the rest of the papers together, gently laid the precious note on the top. She took the whole pile up and held them against her chest. It was a universal, unthinking gesture, essentially female, he thought. Give a man a burden, and he’ll first look about for something to make a barrow out of, but a woman just picks it up and trudges.

She looked at him again and read his sympathy. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it?’ she said, but without self-consciousness at last. ‘When I think of all the hours we spent together, what we did together, and I’ve got nothing to show for it. Just a few bits of paper. I told your friend, the other one, that he wanted to marry me, but I knew deep down he didn’t really. I was just fooling myself. He’d never have left her. It was just a bit of fun for him. He only said that, about marrying me, because I made him. Just to keep me quiet.’

Slider’s mind jumped before he could stop it to Joanna. What would she have to remember him by, if he were to
die tomorrow? He’d never had occasion to write to her – their communications were all by telephone. She was not interested in photography, and the only presents he had ever brought to her were consumable – bottles of wine, cheese and pâté from the deli at Turnham Green, occasionally flowers if he had happened to pass a seller on his way round. If he were to be snatched away suddenly, he’d have left no trace behind in her home or her life.

But the cases were not comparable, he told himself savagely. He yanked his mind back determinedly, wanting to be out of here. The place stank of grief and deceived womanhood, and they were the last things he needed to be exposed to at the moment.

‘There’s really no need for you to disturb yourself,’ he said desperately. ‘I just wanted to ask you if you could let me have a recent photograph of yourself.’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she said, and then surprise caught up with her. ‘What do you want it for?’

‘It’s just to eliminate you from certain lines of enquiry,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing to worry about. I’ll let you have it back in a day or two.’

‘Yes, all right,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I can find you one.’ She drifted back into the bedroom, and some moments later came back with an eight-by-twelve studio print, which she proffered tentatively. ‘This was taken last year, but I don’t think I’ve changed much.’

It was a black and white glossy of Miss Turner in a smart suit with attenuated skirt against a background of a tree in spring blossom and two municipal tubs of daffodils. On the back was an ink stamp
Brighton Evening Argus
with a telephone number and the copyright negative number.

Slider looked the question.

‘It was in the paper, on the women’s page – spring fashions. You know, what women in Brighton are wearing, sort of thing. I liked it, so I bought some copies. You can do that,’ she assured him gravely.

He nodded.

‘I used to live there,’ she added. ‘That’s where I met Dick, in fact.’

‘Oh? I thought you met him at work.’

‘No, I took the job at Omniflamme so we could be near each other. He happened to mention that the girl before, Lorraine, was leaving, so I phoned up the Accounts Director and asked for the job. He was so impressed by my initiative he gave me an interview, and, well, I got it. I was already doing the same sort of work, you see, for DSS – Dolphin Security Systems. I met Dick when I was on the DSS stand at SafeCon – you know, the trade fair. They hold it in Brighton every year.’

‘Did he know you were applying for the job at Omniflamme?’

‘No, I kept it a secret till I got it, to surprise him.’

‘I’ll bet it surprised him, Slider thought. What was the old adage about never fouling your own nest? And she’d be a far tighter curb on his roving than a well-trained wife who never asked questions. How, he wondered, had Neal been proposing to sort out that little tangle in his life?

‘Was he pleased about it?’

‘Of course he was,’ she said quickly, ‘only we had to keep our relationship secret until he’d got everything sorted out with his wife and we could be officially engaged.’ She caught herself up. ‘There I go again, you see. But that’s what he pretended, and I let myself believe him. I suppose now,’ she added hopelessly, ‘I ought to go back to Brighton. There’s nothing to keep me here any more.’

‘When you saw him on Friday evening,’ Slider asked, ‘how did he seem? Was he just as usual, or did he seem worried or preoccupied at all? Was he cheerful?’

‘He was always cheerful,’ she said, and she seemed to sag a little at the recollection. ‘That was one of the things people loved about him. Of course, he’d had a lot on his mind recently, but he never let it get him down. Only on Friday he was a little bit – well—’ She hesitated.

‘Yes?’ Slider encouraged. ‘Anything you can tell us, anything at all, might help us to find out what happened to him.’

‘Well,’ she said again, reluctantly, ‘we did have a bit of a row in Crispin’s, about – well, when we were going to get married.
I was impatient, you see. I wanted him to get on with it, get things sorted out.’ She gulped. ‘So we had a bit of a tiff. But we made it up when we got back here. He never carried things on, you know – not sulky, like some men, wanting to punish you for stepping out of line.’ Slider nodded encouragingly. ‘He’d been being so nice to me, and then when he told me he couldn’t see me on Saturday, I felt sort of – well, I didn’t feel I should—’ She paused again.

‘Did you perhaps feel that you couldn’t be angry over that, because of the quarrel you’d had earlier?’

‘Yes,’ she said eagerly, turning her face to him. ‘That was just what it was. I felt bad about nagging him about his wife, and so when he said that, about Saturday, I thought, well, just keep quiet, Jacqui. Enough’s enough.’

He could never know for certain, of course, but Slider would not have been surprised if Neal had deliberately stage-managed the earlier quarrel. A man in his position must learn unusual social skills to survive.

‘Are you sure he didn’t tell you anything about the person he was going to visit, except that it was an old friend? He didn’t mention where he knew him from, for instance – school, work, golf club, whatever?’

She shook her head slowly. ‘No. No, nothing at all. He was being secretive, laughing to himself, you know. Sort of teasing me. Except—’ She stopped abruptly, looking thoughtful.

‘Yes?’ he encouraged.

‘Well, it sounds silly, but – when I asked him who he was going to meet, I thought he said
mouthwash.’

‘Mouthwash?’

‘I said it was silly,’ she backpedalled.

‘No, no, please. Nothing is too small to mention. Tell me exactly what you said and what he said.’

‘I said something like, “Who do you have to see tomorrow that’s so important?” and he said, “Mouthwash”. Well, that’s what it sounded like. And I said, “What did you say?” thinking he was, like, swearing at me, you know?’

‘You thought it was like saying “Rubbish” or “Nonsense”?’

‘Yes, like that! So I said “What did you say to me?” And he said, “It’s no-one you know. Just an old friend I haven’t seen for years.” And wouldn’t tell me anything more about it.’

Mrs Neal opened the door to Slider, dressed in black, sensible shoes and no makeup. Her face was old with misery, and Slider was forced to conclude that there must have been something essentially lovable about Neal, for two women to mourn him so sincerely.