Death Watch (14 page)

Miss Young sat down opposite him, folding her hands together in her lap. There was nothing reassuring in the pose: her hands seemed all knuckles, and she kept her feet together and drawn back, as if ready to leap into action at any moment. She was as alert and potentially dangerous as a spider with one foot on the web, testing for vibrations.

‘So what did you want to talk to me about?’ she asked.

‘It’s about Richard Neal,’ Slider began. Her face seemed to go very still – a determined lack of reaction? he wondered. ‘I understand you know him.’

He could almost hear the whirring and clicking as she calculated the optimum reply. Then she said, ‘Yes.’

‘Have you known him for long?’

‘About three years.’

‘In what capacity?’

She hesitated, and then said, as if it were not necessarily an answer to the question, ‘I met him at university when I was doing a post-graduate course.’

‘Sussex University?’

‘Yes. That’s where I work now. I lecture in Political Economy.’

‘And Mr Neal went to Sussex University?’

She seemed to find the question disingenuous. ‘He wasn’t a student, which I’m sure you must know. Look, what do you want to know for?’

She was too intelligent to be fed a line. He looked at her steadily. ‘I will tell you that in a moment, but I’d like to ask you a few basic questions first, if you wouldn’t mind. How did you come to meet Mr Neal?’

‘He was advising the university on new fire safety systems. I bumped into him on campus a few times, and we got friendly – it’s as simple as that.’

‘But you have been rather more than friends, haven’t you?’

She almost smiled. ‘The way you people put things! Well, on the assumption that you aren’t just being prurient, yes, Dick and I are lovers, if that’s what you want to know. I’ve no reason to hide it.’

‘You did know he was married?’

She turned her head away slightly. ‘That’s his business, not mine. I never enquire into his life when he’s not with me.’

A cosy arrangement, thought Slider. This man seemed to have been surrounded by complacent women, none of whom wanted to give him trouble. How lucky could a man be?

‘It seems,’ he continued carefully, ‘that Mr Neal has been in the habit of paying you sums of money on a regular basis.’

‘Oh, is that what this is all about?’ She looked at him sharply, and snorted. ‘Good God, do you think I’ve been blackmailing him? You’re very wide of the mark. Do I look like a blackmailer?’

‘Not at all.’ She looked as though she would be capable of anything she set her mind to, in fact, but he could hardly say that.

‘I didn’t ask him for money – it was his idea. If you ask him, he’ll tell you. He sends it because he wants to. And it’s for Jonathon, not me.’

‘Jonathon?’

She gestured with her head towards the bedroom. ‘Jonathon is our son – Dick’s and mine.’

Thicker and thicker, Slider thought. The wife who couldn’t, the London mistress who’d like to, and the Brighton mistress who had. And this one was one hell of a tough cookie. She’d give Neal trouble all right, though it would probably not be of the expected sort.

She had been reading Slider’s face the while, and now said with a firmness he would not have liked to have to refuse, ‘You’d better tell me what all this is about. Why are you asking questions about Dick and me?’

‘I’m afraid I have some bad news for you,’ he said in the time-honoured formula, and paused for a moment for the implication to sink in. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mr Neal was killed last Monday.’

She drew a short breath, and her eyes searched his face busily. ‘What do you mean, killed? You mean murdered?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘How?’ she said urgently. ‘How did they do it?’

‘He was suffocated with a plastic bag.’

‘Oh good God!’ It was a genuine cry of pity, sprung out of her by an unwelcome instant of clear imagination. He felt obliged to try to ease it for her.

‘He was very drunk at the time. I don’t think he would really have known what was going on, if that helps at all.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said seriously. ‘I don’t know if it does.’ She shivered, a curious reaction, but one he’d seen before. ‘I’ve never had to think about something like this before. I
can’t take it in. He’s dead? Dick’s dead?’

Slider nodded. ‘It takes a while to sink in, I know.’

‘Yes. Of course, you must have had to tell hundreds of people things like that,’ she said. That was the academic intelligence still at work, he thought, still running around the farmyard, unaware that its head was off. ‘How do they react? Do they cry and scream? I don’t know what I should be doing.’

‘It takes different people different ways,’ he said. ‘But most people are quiet at first, with the shock.’

‘The shock, yes,’ she said. ‘Oh God, poor Dick!’ He actually saw the next thought impinge on her. ‘And what about Jonathon? Now he hasn’t a father.’ Her eyes were suddenly wet. Interesting, he thought, that she would cry for the child’s loss, which the child could not feel, rather than her own. ‘But who would do such a thing? Do you know who did it?’

‘No, not yet. That’s why I’ve come to see you – to find out as much as possible about Mr Neal’s life, in the hope that it will throw some light on the business.’

‘Yes, of course. Well, I’ll help you if I can. But I don’t really know anything about it.’ She looked and sounded dazed now.

‘There’s no knowing what may help,’ Slider said coaxingly. ‘Tell me, if you will, about your relationship with Mr Neal.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Start at the beginning,’ he said. ‘Tell me as you would tell a friend, about you and Dick.’

‘Yes,’ she said, staring at the wall over his shoulder. ‘Me and Dick. Well, it was one of those cases of instant attraction. We just fell for each other the moment we met. The first two weeks were like a passionate honeymoon – he was staying down in Brighton to do the campus consultancy, and after the second day he left his hotel room and moved into my digs. I wasn’t here, then – I had rooms in a house on Falmer Road. Almost every instant he wasn’t working we were together, and a lot of the time we were in bed. It was a very physical attraction between us,’
she added, looking at him to see if he was shocked by her frankness.

He nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘I cared for him too, of course. I wouldn’t have had Jonathon otherwise. We were always good friends.’

‘But?’

She looked at him.

‘It sounded as if you were going to add a “but”,’ Slider said.

She lifted her shoulders. ‘He was—’ she hesitated. ‘I don’t know quite how to put it. At first, we both just wanted what we had. He came to Brighton pretty regularly on business, and when he did, he stayed here, and we had a wonderful time together. But as time went on, he started to want more out of the relationship. Something more continuous, more—’ she hesitated again. ‘Intrusive.’

It seemed a curious choice of word. ‘Did he want to marry you?’ Slider asked.

She didn’t seem to like it plain and simple. ‘I suppose so. I suppose that’s what you’d call it. He wanted to be with me all the time, but I had my own life. I’d finished my post-grad course and started teaching, and I had different interests from him, different friends and so on, and Dick didn’t fit in with that. I loved seeing him when he was here, but—’

‘I understand.’

‘Do you?’ she said sharply.

Slider nodded, but didn’t elaborate. Dick Neal the great cocksman, the hard-drinking, swashbuckling rep, served a need for her, but he was not the sort of man a woman like her could think of marrying. He probably didn’t go down too well with her academic friends, and may have made his resentment of her intellectual life plain. Slider could imagine only too well her taking Neal to a university drinks-and-shop-talk party, and Neal, feeling left out and imagining everyone was sneering at him, getting drunk and being outrageous to get his own back. It took a strong man to cope with a woman who was his intellectual superior.

‘I think he loved me more than I loved him. And then
there was his wife.’ She looked at him with the faint defiance of the recent religious convert, someone about to impart something they knew was claptrap, but that they badly wanted to believe in. ‘I wasn’t about to take him away from her. Women are a sisterhood. We have to stick together, not betray each other by playing the game the men’s way.’

‘Hadn’t you already done that?’ Slider asked mildly.

‘Of course not. The bit of him I had, she wouldn’t have got anyway. But what she had – marriage, him coming home to her, the certainty – that’s what she wanted, and I wouldn’t take it from her.’

Well, there was a certain amount of truth in that, Slider thought, albeit reluctantly, for she pronounced it with the readiness of dogma, which of course always got up the recipient’s nose. ‘And what about the baby? Whose idea was that?’

She shrugged. ‘Both, really. Dick actually mentioned it first, but I’d already been thinking I’d like a child. With my job it was perfectly easy to fit it in, with the long vacation and everything, and it suited me that Dick was tied up with someone else. And on his side – well, his wife couldn’t have children, so unless he divorced her, this was his only solution. Of course, I had to get him to understand that I wouldn’t give up my independence. Our relationship was to stay the same, with or without a child.’

‘Did he accept that?’

‘Not at first. And even after he agreed, he still went back on it, first when he knew I was definitely pregnant, and then again when Jonathon was born. He wanted to move in with us, and be a proper father, as he put it, but I wouldn’t have that. We had a bargain, and he had to stick to it. I was perfectly willing to acknowledge him as the father, and to allow him to visit whenever he wanted, but I wasn’t going to be taken over, or to give him legal rights over Jonathon.’

My God, thought Slider, the biter bit. After being will o’ the wisp to God knew how many women, Neal suddenly found one who wouldn’t let him tie himself down when he actually wanted to.

‘I think that’s why he started to send the money,’ she continued.
To feel that he had some kind of hold on us. He couldn’t understand, you see, that the simple fact of his physical relationship to Jonathon should be enough. Jonathon has half his genes, but he kept whingeing because his name wasn’t on the birth certificate, and I wouldn’t let him come and live with me.’

‘Did you quarrel about it?’

‘Sometimes. He had a quick temper.’

‘Was he violent? Did he threaten you?’

‘God, no! Well, only over the phone, when he was drunk. He drank too much – but I suppose you know that. And then he’d get maudlin and sentimental. I hated that most of all. Stupid, drunken, weepy phone calls at one and two in the morning, waking me up, disturbing the baby—’ She made a sound of disgust, and then her face froze, as she remembered. ‘And now he’s dead,’ she said blankly. ‘Oh my God, I didn’t believe him. I thought it was just another of his tricks, to get my sympathy.’ She shut up abruptly, thinking hard.

‘What
was one of his tricks?’ Slider asked.

The blank look continued, the sort of internally-preoccupied look of someone at a dinner party who has got a raspberry pip stuck between their teeth and is trying to work it loose with their tongue without anyone’s noticing.

‘Miss Young, what didn’t you believe?’

She focused on him. ‘He phoned me on Saturday. It was about three in the afternoon – closing time, you see – so I assumed he was drunk. He sounded peculiar—’

‘In what way, peculiar?’

‘Well, I don’t know. As if he was drunk, I suppose. Laughing in an idiotic way, when there wasn’t anything to laugh at, saying stupid things.’

‘What things?’

‘Well, he started off saying that someone was trying to kill him.’

Slider’s attention sharpened. ‘Yes?’

‘He said it, and then laughed as if he didn’t mean it, or didn’t want me to think he meant it. I told him not to be stupid, assuming—’ she looked at him appealingly.

That he was drunk, yes. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?’

She took it as a criticism. ‘He’d said stupid things before when he was drunk. Threatening suicide, for instance.’

‘Yes, I understand. Did he say who it was that wanted to kill him?’

She shook her head. ‘He said he’d been having lunch with an old friend, and
he’d
said someone was out to kill him, that’s all. And then he started to get maudlin, whining that I wouldn’t care if he was dead, and Jonathon would never know his face, and – well, you can imagine.’

‘Yes,’ Slider said absently. ‘Did he say who the friend was, that he lunched with?’ Shake of the head. ‘Not a name? Or where he knew him from? Nothing about him at all? Or why anyone would want to kill him?’

‘No,’ she said. She raised her eyes to him guiltily. ‘I wish I’d asked him now. If I’d known there was anything in it, I’d have got it all out of him. But I was annoyed, and I thought he was being stupid, and – how was I to know?’

Guilt, regret, wish-I’d-been-nicer-to-him – it was a bugger, especially when mixed with the irritation one naturally felt towards a person who loved you more than you loved them.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Slider said. ‘But if you have any idea at all about who might have had a grudge against him, I’d be grateful to hear it. You probably knew him better than anyone, and you seem to me to be an observant and intelligent person.’ No harm in a bit of flannel. ‘Did he have any enemies? Was he involved in anything, or with anyone, that might lead him into danger?’

‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘but thinking about it, there was something about him. I’d noticed it before. A sort of – melancholy. As if he’d gone through something at some time in his life which had made him—’ She hesitated. ‘How can I put it? Desperate?’ She frowned, thinking. ‘You know the American soldiers who came back from Vietnam, who’d seen such terrible things they couldn’t adjust to normal life? A bit like that. I think something really bad had happened to him, so that afterwards he could never really come to grips with life.’

‘He seemed to want to come to grips with you and Jonathon.’

‘With Jonathon, maybe. I think perhaps he hoped the baby would make things all right for him again. But I’ve often thought that the way he drank, and gambled, and ran after women – it wasn’t just me, you know, by any means – was a sign of a deep unhappiness in him.’