Death Watch (12 page)

Mackay spoke. ‘I had a word with some of the local tarts, sir, but they didn’t bite. I don’t think he had the notion of paying for it. Well, he never had to, did he?’

‘Why that area, in particular?’ Slider asked, in Socratic mode.

‘He worked for Betcon in Glenthorne Road at one time,’ Beevers said. ‘Security guard. That was before he married, of course, and he was living the merry bachelor life, drinking, clubs and so on.’ There was the faintest of envy apparent in Beevers voice, the regret of a man with a new baby in the house and a wife still off-limits. ‘I spoke to a Doug Gifford who worked with him at Betcon, and he said Neal was quite a wild character – he called him a, quote, mad bastard, unquote. And a hard drinker a – though a lot of security guards are, of course. Neal had a flat in Dalling Road, and Gifford said he was always taking women back there.’

‘So there was nothing strange about his being in that area,’ Slider said. ‘It was home ground.’

‘And he preferred it to his new beat,’ Atherton said. ‘We know he told his wife he went to the golf club every Saturday, to have lunch with friends and play a few rounds in the afternoon. Except of course that the Secretary says he’s only been there half a dozen times in the past year, and hasn’t been out on the greens since last summer.’

Atherton remembered what Beevers had said when he came back from taking statements at the golf club: ‘You should have seen the smiles when I asked how often he’d been in. One of the members at the bar told me Neal’s what they call a “periodic member” – only turns up when his tart’s got her period. Gawd, it’s made easy for some blokes, isn’t it? His wife never even used to phone up and check on him.’

But Atherton didn’t convey it to Slider in quite those words, having regard for his guv’nor’s own new foray into adultery. ‘Neal used the golf club as his excuse to get away, sometimes to see Jacqui Turner – and perhaps other women we don’t know about yet – and sometimes to go back to his happy hunting ground for a spree.’

Slider nodded thoughtfully. ‘So the redhead at Gorgeous George’s may just be—’

‘A red herring?’ Atherton offered.

‘There may be nothing fishy about her at all,’ Slider said. ‘He might simply have met her on one of his jaunts, quite coincidentally.’

‘But then what was
she
doing there?’ Norma asked.

‘What she said, perhaps,’ Slider suggested. ‘It isn’t beyond the realms of possibility that she was a student, or in town temporarily to do some research, met Neal by chance and simply joined him for a good time.’

‘Then why did she leave so suddenly?’ Norma pursued.

Just
before
Neal was killed,’ Beevers pointed out. ‘We don’t know she’s even involved.’

‘At the moment she seems to be a bit of a dead end, until we can find her and talk to her. No luck tracing her from her name?’

‘No sir,’ said Norma. ‘She’s not in our records.’

‘All right, keep trying. But leaving her aside for the moment, let’s look at Neal’s latest situation. He’d got himself into money-trouble. Bills unpaid, big overdraft, running up credit everywhere.’

‘I spoke to his bank manager,’ Atherton said, ‘and it seems about a month ago he made enquiries about a second mortgage on his house. The bank seemed to find that quite amusing. They said that since he’d already run up an unauthorised overdraft about equal to a second mortgage, they’d sit this one out thank you very much.’

‘So he was looking for extra money – why?’ Slider said.

‘Gambling debts?’ Anderson suggested. ‘He’d been losing fairly heavily on the ponies.’

‘And his income had fallen,’ Atherton said. ‘These things can be cumulative.’

Slider smiled. ‘It was a semi-rhetorical question,’ he said. ‘Jablowski’s come up with something.’

‘I think Neal was up to something in Brighton,’ Polish said. ‘I was checking through the phone numbers on his itemised bills, and I found a lot of numbers with the Brighton code. Well, we knew he went down there regularly on business, and a lot of the numbers were businesses and hotels. But he also made a lot of long calls – fifteen, twenty minutes sometimes – to a number which turned out to be registered to a C. Young, with an address in Carlton Hill.’

‘Nice,’ Atherton said appreciatively. ‘That’s the old part of town – Regency houses.’

‘Expensive?’ Slider asked.

‘Depends. If you bought a whole house it would be. But a lot of it is run down, and the houses are cut up into flats and bedsitters.’

‘I did some checking via the electoral register,’ Polish went on, ‘and C. Young turns out to be a Miss Catriona Young – and it is a flat in a house, by the way, Jim.’

‘So, Neal had yet another little bit of heaven,’ Atherton said. ‘Well we didn’t think he lived a monk’s life.’

‘Ah, but you missed the exciting bit,’ Norma said with a grin. ‘While you were out and Polish was chasing up numbers, Tony found a whole lot of cancelled cheques made out to C. Young—’

‘For quite large amounts,’ Anderson concluded. ‘And at almost regular weekly intervals.’

‘You might have waited till I got back,’ Atherton complained.

‘So it could be blackmail,’ Norma began.

‘It sounds more like maintenance,’ Atherton finished.

She shrugged. ‘Much the same thing when the bloke’s a married man.’

Atherton looked disbelieving. ‘Have you seen Mrs Neal?’

‘All right,’ Slider intervened, ‘we’ve obviously got to follow up the Brighton business. Anything else occur to anyone?’

‘Well, Guv,’ Mackay said, and Slider turned to him encouragingly. ‘It seems to me the only real villain remotely in the frame is Gorgeous George – even if he’s got no actual form, he goes about with some very naughty boys. What if he was into Neal for something? We’ve got Neal sighted in Gorgeous’s drum very near the scene and the time.’

Slider considered. ‘It would be nice and tidy that way, I agree, but if Gorgeous George wanted to give Neal a smacking he’d just do it one dark night up an alley. I can’t see him working out this devious plan.’

‘Everyone says he has got a very funny sense of humour,’ Mackay said hopefully.

‘And he likes women,’ Hunt said. ‘He can get them to do anything for him. He could have set this redhead up as bait.’

‘But why would he go to such lengths to compromise himself by using his own premises? That’s not the way he’s kept his record clean all these years.’

Mackay folded his fingers together precisely. ‘No, Guv. But we don’t know what Gorgeous is on the fringes of. I mean, what we do know about his business ventures can only be the tip of the iceberg. And by the looks of it, Neal was down some very big numbers. Suppose we give Gorgeous a tug—?’

‘We’d need something more than supposition,’ said Slider. ‘We’ve binned people up on a wing and a prayer before now, but a prayer alone is not enough. No harm in keeping your eyes and ears open in that direction, though. Anyone else got any ideas?’

‘Yes, Guv,’ said Beevers smartly. ‘It occurs to me that we know Neal was a club man in his bachelor days, and once a club man, always a club man in my experience. We know he didn’t use the golf club – and in any case, it doesn’t look as though that was his scene. So I think we ought to be looking around his old ground to find out what club he
was
using.’

‘Okay. I’ll leave that one to you,’ Slider said, and Beevers smiled with gratification – or at least, his moustache
changed shape. You couldn’t see his mouth underneath it. ‘In the mean time, we still don’t know who the old friend was he went to see on Saturday.’

‘Unfortunately, The Wellington’s always busy on a Saturday lunchtime,’ Atherton said. ‘One of the barmen thinks he saw Neal sitting talking to a man, but that’s as far as it goes. The other bar staff don’t remember him at all.’

‘Very Little Else said he was sitting in the window seat,’ Norma said, ‘Which means he’d have been facing the bar. If the person he was talking to was sitting opposite him, the barman could only have seen the back of his head anyway. A face you might notice, if it happened to fit into a gap in the crowd, but would you really notice the back of an anonymous head?’

It was a fair point. ‘Probably not,’ said Slider. ‘Still, there’s no harm in keeping on asking. You might find a customer who was sitting near Neal and his friend.’

‘Couldn’t it have been Gorgeous George he met?’ Mackay suggested.

‘Couldn’t it have been the mystery redhead?’ Polish countered. ‘If we assume that he spent the afternoon with her, maybe he had lunch with her too.’

‘Else said he came out of the pub alone,’ Atherton pointed out.

‘He might not want to be seen with her in public,’ said Polish. ‘She might have followed him – or gone on ahead.’

‘If Very Little Else can be relied on at all,’ Beevers said sourly. ‘She’s as mad as a bandage, everybody knows that.’

‘The fact is, we just don’t know who he was with,’ said Slider. ‘If we start from the assumption that he wasn’t entirely lying when he told Jacqui Turner he was meeting an old friend, we’ll have to begin by eliminating all of his old friends we can lay hands on.’

‘Male and female?’ Atherton said. ‘That could take the rest of our lives.’

‘To move on to Sunday,’ Slider said quellingly, ‘he was at home all day – no mysteries there, except that he received a phone call, which we may or may not ever learn about; and he made several phone calls out—’

‘I’m still waiting to hear from BT, sir,’ Polish said. ‘They’re going to send me the up-to-date list of his itemised calls. Though of course if they were short, local calls, they won’t appear anyway.’

Slider nodded. ‘We can only hope. To continue – Neal packed his suitcase and left home at around seven that evening, saying he was going to Bradford where he had appointments the next day.’

‘Did he, in fact, have appointments in Bradford?’ Norma asked.

‘Oh yes, they were genuine enough,’ Slider said. ‘Whether he meant to keep them or not we don’t know, of course. If leaving the night before was a cover-up for some other activity, he could still have got to Bradford in time by leaving early the next morning. Or he may have intended to phone in sick the next day, or to have given some other excuse – say the car had broken down or something. At all events, there are five hours unaccounted for. He left home at seven, and turned up at the motel just before midnight, and we don’t know where he was in between.’

‘We know he spent some of the time drinking,’ Atherton said, ‘and since he had beer in his stomach, it’s likely he was in a pub somewhere.’

‘We must keep checking that,’ Slider said. ‘Every pub – and club—’ with a glance at Beevers, ‘in the vicinity. Someone must have seen him.’

There was a brief silence as they all contemplated the task, and the massive invisibility of the average person in the average pub.

‘And then there was the brandy,’ Slider went on. ‘The motel clerk, Pascoe, told us Neal had been drinking, but wasn’t drunk when he arrived. Cameron tells us that from the quantity of brandy in his stomach, he must have been as drunk as a wheelbarrow. So we can assume he drank it after he arrived at the motel.’

‘Jacqui Turner said Neal didn’t usually drink brandy—’ said Atherton.

‘Which his wife confirms,’ said Slider. ‘He was properly a whisky man.’

‘So does that mean the brandy was forced on him?’ Anderson asked.

Slider shook his head. ‘I doubt it. When a man drinks alone, or at home, or in a public house, he chooses his preference. But if he’s in a private place with someone else, and the other person provides the drink, if he’s a drinking man he’ll just drink what’s there. And we know that Neal was a drinking man.’

‘It’s another indication that there was someone else with him at the motel,’ said Atherton. ‘Whom, for the sake of argument, we might as well call the murderer.’

‘But don’t we have to assume it was a woman?’ Polish said. ‘I mean, surely a man wouldn’t go to a motel room with another man, unless he was bent?’

‘Maybe he was bent,’ said Anderson. ‘Or maybe they wanted to watch a blue movie—’

‘No video in those rooms,’ said Norma.

‘They might have gone to talk business,’ Slider said. ‘Or laugh about old times. Or just go on drinking – the pubs were shut, after all. Pascoe says Neal was merry, so we have to assume that he wasn’t there under duress. He invited whoever it was into his motel room, so presumably it was someone he knew — either an old friend, or someone he struck up an acquaintance with during the evening. And there’d be no difficulty for the murderer in getting his dear old buddy Dick Neal to invite him back to his motel room to knock off a bottle of the good stuff together.’

‘There’s a hell of a lot we don’t know,’ Atherton complained, ‘when you think Neal wasn’t really a secretive man. Still, it’s early days yet.’

Slider thought of Dickson’s warning. It wasn’t even definitely down as a murder yet. ‘Early days may be all we have on this one,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to get some results, and soon.’

Dickson had levered himself out of his chair, and was standing by the window. It was more than usually difficult to see out of. Someone – his wife, perhaps – had once
given him a tradescantia for his windowsill. It had flourished to begin with, resting its long tendrils against the window and growing towards the ceiling; but then it had been allowed to die of drought in the searing glasshouse heat, leaving the brown husks of its leaves stuck to the panes, where they blended with the natural dirt to make an impenetrable fog between Dickson and the outside world.

He glanced over his shoulder briefly as Slider appeared. ‘Ah, Bill, come in.’ He turned his head back to the window. He had his hands jammed in his trouser pockets, making his hips look wider than ever, and was jingling his change in a Latin American rhythm. That, plus the fact that he couldn’t possibly have seen anything out of the window unless he had X-ray vision, gave Slider the impression that he was pretending insouciance.

‘You wanted to see me, sir?’ he said quietly. Vertical, Dickson seemed to fill the tiny room even more thoroughly than when penned in his chair. Slider thought they would only need to add a fairly small policewoman to put up a respectable challenge to the students-in-a-phone-box record.