Death Watch (27 page)

‘Not yet. I’m still hoping to meet Mr Right,’ Norma said unblushingly. ‘So had your husband kept in touch with Mrs Forrester since the station closed?’

‘Well, he was the union representative at the time of the accident, so of course he had to see that Marsha was all right. There was the death benefit from the widows and orphans fund, and the pension and everything. But I think he felt sorry for her anyway, so he kept a sort of eye on her for the first few months. He didn’t have all that much to do with her once he left the service – just a Christmas card every year, and a phone call now and then.’

‘Did he keep in touch with any of the others?’

‘No, not that I knew of. I dare say Marsha might have told him the news now and then when he phoned, but you’d have to ask her that.’

‘Did you think it was strange that the men didn’t keep in touch with each other afterwards? I mean, they were a very tightly-knit unit, weren’t they?’

‘What, all one happy family, you mean? You don’t want to believe all you hear about that. You know what men are like when they get together. It was like that with the National Service – all boys together, horseplay and getting drunk every night and singing, but once they were demobbed, off they went to their homes and never gave each other a second thought.’

‘But it seems that Richard Neal didn’t even tell his wife he had ever been a fireman. He never spoke about it at all, to anyone. Don’t you think that was strange?’

‘He was strange,’ Mrs Lister said emphatically. ‘The way he ran after women, I think there was something wrong with him. It’s a pity you can’t have men like that doctored. He even made a pass at me once, you know, at the Christmas dance.’

Now that
is
strange, Norma thought, but with a noble effort managed not to say it.

Joanna phoned to say goodbye.

‘I wish you weren’t going,’ Slider said plaintively.

‘I wish you were coming with me,’ she returned.

‘Still, I expect you’ll have a lovely time,’ he said, trying to be gracious about it. ‘They’ll probably give you wonderful parties and receptions and things, and you won’t miss me at all.’

‘Stop fishing. Besides, you know receptions are always ghastly.’

‘I know you always say they are, but maybe German ones will be different.’

‘They won’t. They’re all the same: a glass of cheap white wine, and an hour being ballsachingly nice to the sponsors, which is awful, and their wives, which is worse.’

‘Why worse?’

‘Oh – I find it depressing that we’ve got to the last decade of the twentieth century and still define women according to the man they’re attached to. And worse still, that women allow it.’ She chuckled suddenly. ‘It reminds me – did I ever tell you about Gary Potts?’

‘That’s a made-up name if ever I heard one. Who’s Gary Potts?’

‘He used to be our principal trumpet. He’s left now, gone to Australia, and the world’s a duller place without him, I can tell you! He was a real gorblimey Cockney, about five feet tall and four feet wide, utterly shameless, with a wicked sense of humour – and the best trumpet player in the known universe to boot. I loved him.’

‘I thought you loved Atherton.’

‘Oh yes, I forgot.’

‘What brought this Potts to mind, anyway?’

‘Well, we had to go to one of these receptions one evening at the Festival Hall – the Waterloo Room, or some such nirvana. The usual speed is for the orchestra to hang around the bar looking sheepish, eating all the free canapés and totally ignoring the punters, which is not the purpose at all. So on this occasion the orchestra manager came and rousted us all out and made us go off and do the pretty. He grabbed hold of Gary and pointed him in the direction of this fabulous-looking old dame with a blue rinse and a fur coat and said, “She looks as if she’s rolling in it. Go and be nice to her.”

‘So old Gary goes up to her, and, typical style, gives her a huge grin and says, “Allo darlin’, oo are you?” The old girl looks a bit surprised, but she dimples gamely and says “Oh, I’m not anyone important, really, but my husband’s in oil.” And Gary stares at her with his mouth well open and says, “What is ‘e then, a fuckin’ sardine?” ’ Joanna sighed happily at the memory. ‘God, I miss him! Dem were de days, Joxer, dem were de days.’

‘A pathologist?’

‘Yes Guv, at University College Hospital in 1974,’ said Norma. ‘She and her husband had been living in Hampstead Garden Suburb—’

‘Nice.’

‘Yes, and handy for both their jobs. But about six months after he died, she moved to a similar post in Hammersmith Hospital, and she and the child moved to a house in Brook Green.’

‘Interesting,’ Slider said. ‘Neal had been living in Golders Green—’

‘About half a mile from Hampstead Garden Suburb—’

‘And when the Shaftesbury Avenue station closed, he moved to Hammersmith, got a job at Betcon and a flat in Dalling Road—’

‘About half a mile from Brook Green,’ Norma concluded. ‘Coincidence?’

‘I hope we shall find out,’ said Slider.

‘But a pathologist, Guv – could be very helpful if you wanted to kill a whole string of people.’ She started to tick off the points on her fingers. ‘In the first place, you’d be cold-blooded enough about bodies. In the second place, you’d know enough about post mortem effects to rig your murders to look like accidents or suicides—’

‘You’d also know that the ligature mark of electrical flex on Webb’s neck would prove that he’d been murdered,’ Slider pointed out.

‘But the murderer obviously expected the body to be burned in the fire,’ Norma said.

‘Even so, she couldn’t have been sure the ligature mark would be sufficiently burned as to be unrecognisable. And changing the flex for rope was an unnecessary act, if the idea was to fake suicide. Webb could just as easily have strangled himself with flex as hanged himself with rope, and a pathologist would know that.’

‘Maybe she got careless. But you must admit she’s got a very good motive,’ Norma hurried on. ‘Classic revenge. Her mind turned by the terrible tragedy, she blames the whole watch for his death, and sets about murdering them one by one—’

‘Very MGM. I can see Bette Davis in the part,’ Slider agreed. ‘All the same, if you’re thinking she moved to Hammersmith to keep tabs on Neal, the more easily to rub him out, tell me why didn’t she get to him for another sixteen years?’

‘Saving the best till last, perhaps. If she considered him the most guilty—’

‘But he wasn’t the last. There was Barry Lister — and two left alive.’

‘But the two left alive weren’t on duty on the night of the fire,’ Norma said triumphantly, ‘and poor old Mouth-wash’d had a heart condition for years. She may well have thought she wouldn’t need to do him at all, that nature would do it for her. As was the case in the end. We don’t know that he wouldn’t have been next on the list, if he hadn’t popped his clogs of his own accord.’

‘She may have moved to Hammersmith simply to be near Neal, her former best buddy and putative lover,’ Slider pointed out. ‘Nothing more suspicious than that.’

‘Yes sir,’ Norma said, giving him a sample of her West Coast smile, which had been known to disarm the most thick-skinned villain and reduce him to stammering self-consciousness. ‘But on the other hand—’

‘Yes,’ Slider said. ‘The hysterical outburst at the fire station helps the thing along. All the same, why wait eleven years to begin the murders? That rather takes the edge off the idea of the white-hot fury of revenge.’

‘But revenge is a dish best eaten cold.’

‘Who said that?’

‘I did.’

‘Ah,’ Slider said. ‘Well, I’d better go and see Mrs Forrester, find out what sort of a cook she is.’

The house Marsha Forrester lived in, three floors and a semi-basement, had been built for one moderately wealthy family, and now, through the turning of the wheel, was divided into four flats for only slightly less wealthy people. Mrs Forrester had the drawing-room floor: high ceilings, mouldings, and a handsome fireplace. She had a collection of early English landscape watercolours that Slider would almost have contemplated crime for, and a seven-foot grand piano which seemed to have been designed for the sole purpose of displaying the Chinese bowl full of pot-pourri which admired its own reflection in the polished surface of the lid.

‘I knew I shouldn’t have tried to have a day off,’ she said, returning from answering the telephone, which had rung just as she was showing Slider in. ‘So much for my
dolce far niente’

‘Sorry,’ said Slider.

‘Never mind, you can’t help it. A glass of sherry?’

Sherry was a drink he’d never seen the point of. The sweet, he’d found, tasted like cough syrup, and the dry like old tin cans; but on the other hand, the bottle she was
hovering over didn’t have either of the words
Harveys
or
British
on it, so he thought he might be in for a new experience.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

She brought the glass over to him, and then sat down on the chesterfield with her own, tucking one leg up under her. She was half a dozen years or so older than him, Slider thought, but looked very, very good for it. She was wearing jeans and a chambray shirt, and her short grey-sandy hair, cut in what used to be called a page-boy bob, was shoved back out of the way behind a cloth-covered Alice band. Clothes and style would not have looked out of place on an eighteen-year-old, but Marsha Forrester could carry it off. She must, he assumed, be wearing makeup, but it was applied so as to look as though she was not wearing any, and about her there hung a faint and evocative fragrance which he tracked down through memory at last as Balmain’s
Vent Vert.
If she went to all this trouble on her day off, he thought, what would she have looked like
en fête?

He sipped the sherry cautiously. It was almost colourless, and tasted of grapes, with a slight hint of burnt sugar. He looked up and found her watching his surprise, and smiled, and said ‘Delicious.’

She smiled too. ‘Good. So, then, what’s all this about? I suppose it’s to do with poor Dick Neal, is it?’

‘Why should you think that?’

‘So cautious, Inspector? Well, I can’t think of any other reason you’d be coming to visit me. Was there something untoward about his death? Am I suspected of something?’ Despite her light and teasing tone, there was a watchful look about her, Slider thought. Before he could answer she went on, ‘You’d better tell me straight away, when is the alibi required for?’

‘If you know about his death, you ought to know that,’ he said, equally lightly.

‘Yes, but I’ve a terrible memory. I know it was some time at the weekend, but I can’t remember if it was Saturday or Sunday. Oh well, no matter, I’ll tell you what I was doing
both days. On the Saturday morning I was at the hospital. I had lunch with an old friend, did some shopping in the afternoon, came back here for a bath, and then went out to the opera with a gentleman, and supper afterwards at Bertorelli’s. On the Sunday I got up late, and left about twelve to go down to the country. Some publishing people who have a place in Gloucestershire. I’m hoping for great things from them – a little book I’ve written that I’d like to see in print.’

She sipped her sherry and made a face. They turned out to be rather hard work, or she did, at least. He was sweet, but very nouveau, and they had the most ghastly friends in who simply talked about ski-ing
all the time.
They turned out to be vegetarians, so the food was grisly, too, but he had a grown-up son by his first wife, who, thank God, had a sense of humour or I might have left embarrassingly early. As it was, I drove back at a respectably late hour, and went straight to bed with a book.’

She looked across at him with a faintly challenging smile. ‘Does that let me off the hook? Aren’t you going to take it down? I should hate to have to say it all again.’

‘I haven’t come to take a statement from you,’ he smiled. ‘At the moment I just want to find out some background information.’

‘About me?’ she asked. Was there the faintest edge to her voice?

‘About Richard Neal. We’ve had a difficult time getting any sort of picture of him. He seems to have been a very secretive man.’

‘If it’s pictures of him you want,’ she said, getting up.

‘I didn’t mean that literally,’ Slider said.

‘I know you didn’t,’ she answered, crossing the room to the bureau. ‘But if you want the story about Dick and me – which I assume is what you’ve come for — you’re going to have to let me tell it in my own way. With illustrations.’

She brought back a cardboard box – it had ‘Basildon Bond’ on the lid in curly script, and the corners were battered with age – and sat down with it on her knee. She
lifted the lid, and began to sort through the photographs inside.

‘This is one of the earliest pictures I’ve got of Dick and me,’ she said.

He took it. It was an old black-and-white print, taken, he would guess from the style, in the late fifties or early sixties. A country lane – pale road, rough grass verge, tall hedge and dark trees beyond in full summer leaf; a young man and a young woman standing astride their stationary bicycles, hands on the handlebars, smiling for the camera. The front wheel of his bike had swung in to touch the front wheel of hers, like carriage horses touching noses.

‘He was eighteen and I was seventeen,’ said Mrs Forrester. ‘Weren’t we beautiful?’

They were both wearing shorts and shirts with the sleeves rolled up, ankle socks and lace-up shoes. Neal had thick curly hair, cut very short at the sides – was it that which made his ears seem to stand out, or did everyone have sticking-out ears in those days? With his straight nose and engaging grin, he looked like every girl’s dream boyfriend. He even had good-looking knees, Slider noted.

Marsha Forrester – or whatever her name had been then – looked ravishingly pretty, even in black and white. Her hair was in much the same style as it was now, except she had a fringe then, and it was held back with hair-slides instead of a band. She was smiling too. They looked like clean-limbed, happy young people – advertising archetypes – and the sun was shining down on them, as it always did in that far-off, innocent land.