Fell Purpose (24 page)

He looked even more wounded. ‘No, sir. Why should it? They’re the victim’s parents, not suspects.’

Atherton turned away.

‘Sir,’ Organ called after him. ‘Do I still have to stay on the door, now they’re gone? No one’s said anything.’

‘I think you might be on duty here a while longer, Constable,’ Atherton said.

TWELVE

What a Difference a Dray Makes

S
lider would have liked to round things off by talking to Oliver Paulson – whose flat was only a hop, skip and jump from Bravington Road – but of course Paulson would be at work in the City, and would have to be an evening call. Instead, he decided to look in on his obbo team.

At present on duty outside Carmichael’s flat were Hart and McLaren, and as Slider came along he was pleased to see that they blended in with the background nicely. He only knew them because he knew them. McLaren was leaning against the wall between the two shops opposite, eating a drippy meatball sub, and given that everyone on London’s streets under the age of fifty seemed to be eating all the time these days, it made him inconspicuous. Hart had abandoned her smart work suits for a cropped top and a pair of hot pants, and if men walking past were looking at her it was not because they thought she might be a cop. She was wearing an iPod and earphones, an inspired piece of costume because it gave her an excuse to jiggle about a bit and disguised the fact that she was staying in the same place.

Slider didn’t want to go up to her and blow her cover, but he saw her spot him, so he went into the tobacconist’s next to the tarot shop under Carmichael’s flat, and bought a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches. When he came out, he found Hart there, having sloped inconspicuously across.

She saw the cigarettes in his hand, as he had intended, and said, ‘Got a fag, mister? Go on, give us one. Be a sport.’

‘You’re too young to smoke,’ he said, and took his time unwrapping the pack to give her time to make her report to him.

It didn’t take long, however. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing in and nothing out. I wonder if he’s on to us?’

‘Surely not. You blend in so well,’ Slider said.

‘Not
us
,’ Hart said with superb self-confidence. ‘That pillock Fathom we took over from. Just one look at his shoes’d tell you.’

And then suddenly she wasn’t there. There was a little whisk of air, and she was running like a hare down the KPR. Across the road McLaren had also sprung into action, hurling the remains of the sub into a waste bin as he passed – it was
that
serious, then. Slider went after them, only then seeing their quarry, who must have come out of the flat door while Slider was concentrating on the cigarette pack. Evidently he had seen Hart clock him and, with admirable perspicacity, put two and two together and taken off.

Hart was fleet and nimble, but Carmichael was young and fit and a good runner, and she was only keeping up with him, until he started across the road towards Westbourne Grove, presumably hoping to cut through to the Portobello Road and lose them among the stalls. At that moment a flat-bed fruit and veg truck pulled out of the turning, heading him off and losing him most of his lead. He turned right instead, down Stanley Gardens. Slider, who was some way behind, turned down the parallel Ladbroke Gardens and then left into Stanley Crescent, hoping to cut off a corner. He saw Carmichael emerge from Stanley Gardens into the crescent. Carmichael spotted him and hesitated a fatal second, wondering which way to run, and by the time he turned left, away from Slider, Hart was on him.

She brought him down to the pavement with a satisfying smack, using the whole weight of her body. Carmichael was no taller than her, but he had a man’s weight and muscles against a woman’s, and by the time Slider reached them, his breath dragging at his lungs, Carmichael was in danger of getting away again. Movies always made subduing a struggling man look easy, but in real life Slider had seen one drunken sixty-year-old woman require the services of four burly policemen to hold her down. But with Hart lying full length on top of him, Carmichael was hampered for breath after his run, enough for Slider, and McLaren when he arrived seconds later, to grab an arm each and pin him to the ground.

‘Get off me!’ he gasped. ‘I haven’t done nothing!’

‘Stop struggling,’ Slider panted, hanging on. McLaren had got the handcuffs out and was trying to get one end on the other wrist. ‘You’ll just hurt yourself. Give it up.’

‘Lemme go! I ain’t
done
nothing!’

‘Then what did you run for? Keep still, you idiot. We’ve got you now.’

But not until the cuffs were on did he stop thrashing, and even then Slider suspected it was lack of air rather than lack of ambition. ‘Get
off
me! I can’t breathe!’ he was moaning.

Hart eased herself off, taking hold of the handcuff chain for precaution as she rose. Slider and McLaren took an arm each and heaved the lad to his feet. He was about five-foot-seven, lean, good-looking, in his early twenties, though he looked younger because of his slight build. Despite the warm day he was wearing his black leather jacket over jeans and boots. His longish dark hair was all over the place, and he had a red mark down one side of his face where it had been pressed to the pavement, which slightly detracted from his air of sophistication – and no one looks their best in handcuffs. But Slider could guess that in good times he had the air to attract the girls and make the boys envy him.

He glowered at Slider. ‘I haven’t done nothing! Take these things
off
me!’

‘You’ve run away from me twice, son,’ Slider said. ‘That’s enough for me.’

‘You’d run away if people were always after you. You cops never leave me alone.’

Hart gave his chain a yank. ‘Stop dealing drugs and we’ll leave you alone.’

‘I don’t deal drugs,’ he said. ‘Just ’cos I was in trouble once. You never give anyone a chance. Anyone from the estate, you’re down on. You’re all the same, you—’

‘Oh, stop whining,’ she said. ‘You’re nabbed. Take it like a man.’

Slider almost snorted, but the approach seemed to work with Carmichael. He sagged a little and looked sulky. ‘So what’re you arresting me for?’

‘We’ll think of something. I’m sure when we have a little look in your flat we’ll find something interesting,’ Hart said.

‘Plant it, more like,’ he muttered sullenly.

Hart winked at Slider. ‘There y’are, guv. Out’v his own mouth. He wouldn’t’ve said that unless there
was
something up there to find. I knew he didn’t run for nothing.’

‘Why don’t you bastards leave me alone?’ Carmichael almost wailed. ‘Why don’t you go after the big players?’

‘Because we want to talk to you about Zellah Wilding,’ Slider said.

‘Who?’ Carmichael said.

‘Your girlfriend,’ Hart said. ‘You must remember her.’

‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ Carmichael said. ‘We broke up.’

‘It was off, and then it was on again,’ Hart said.

‘I tell you I haven’t seen her in months.’

‘Well, in that case,’ Slider said, ‘we’ll arrest you for lying to us. We’ve got a dozen witnesses that you were with her on Sunday night.’

‘Oh shit,’ said Michael Carmichael.

‘That’s what you’re in, all right,’ said McLaren.

‘You didn’t half go, guv,’ Hart said to Slider as McLaren was putting Carmichael into the squad car they had summoned. ‘I was well impressed.’

‘Do you really think I’ll respond to blatant flattery like that?’ he said severely.

‘What sort of blatant flattery
will
you respond to, then?’ she asked cheekily.

He ignored that. ‘You, on the other hand, brought him down with a tackle that could qualify you to play for England.’

‘Thanks, guv. I’ll take all the flattery I can get; any sort.’

‘I don’t understand how he got
into
the flat, however, when it was being watched twenty-four hours a day.’

Hart met his eye. They both knew the answer. He had been missed going in. But Hart nobly didn’t even say, ‘It wasn’t us.’

‘You and McLaren can give the flat a good going over,’ Slider said.

‘Righty-o. I bet we find enough in there to put the pressure on him. But I can’t see why he wouldn’t tell us the trufe anyway – about Zellah, I mean. Once he knows we don’t think he killed her. We don’t think he killed her, do we?’ she added on a faintly puzzled note. ‘I mean, it was Ronnie Oates done her?’

‘It looks that way.’

‘So we only want him for corroboration?’

‘So it seems.’

She cocked her head at him enquiringly. ‘Guv, I can’t help feeling you’ve got reservations about this case.’

‘I can’t help feeling there’s something I’ve missed,’ Slider confessed

‘That’s just normal paranoia,’ Hart said comfortingly. ‘Everyone on the planet gets that. Don’t worry, some ’orrible snag will come up and blow the case to bits and you’ll have to put it back togevver against the clock with the big brass breathing down your neck, and everything will seem nice and normal again.’

‘Thanks, I feel better now,’ said Slider. ‘I’m going back to the factory.’

His room looked like a public place within the meaning of the act. There were so many people in it he couldn’t get through the door, and when enough of them spotted him and melted away to give him access, he found Joanna in there, with young George Slider sitting on the edge of his father’s desk holding court. With a rusk in one hand and a pencil in the other, he was waving his arms swoopingly at his fans, like Solti conducting Debussy, except that Solti, though equally bald, had never smiled so seraphically at an orchestra.

Joanna looked guilty. ‘Sorry. Is this a completely inappropriate time? I just picked him up from the baby-minder after rehearsal. I was on my way home when I thought that, as you’ll be late again this evening, you’d like to see him awake for once, so I popped in. But I can pop out again just as quickly.’

George had spotted his father now and was beaming in delight, showing his new top incisors, which he was growing to match the two at the bottom. ‘Mumurummum,’ he said.

‘I didn’t realize it was that late,’ Slider said.

‘It isn’t. We finished early. I think the conductor had somewhere more exciting to go.’

Slider picked up the baby, who signalled his approval by pushing the damp end of the rusk into his father’s ear and saying, ‘Blum mum num.’

‘I’m glad you came,’ Slider said. ‘But I can’t spare you long. We’ve just brought someone in and he’ll need questioning.’

‘I know, don’t worry. I should go home, anyway. There’s a mountain of ironing I’ve been putting off. I can get some of it done while he’s having his nap.’

‘I wish I could take you out to lunch,’ Slider said wistfully, ‘but . . .’

‘We’ll catch up when all this is over. I just wanted my boy to know he still has a father.’ She smiled as she said it to show she was not complaining.

‘I slept with him last night. What more does he want?’ He grinned at his son, who tried to grab his nose, so the pencil in his hand came dangerously close to Slider’s eye. He removed it gently. ‘I’m glad you brought him.’ It helped to keep a person grounded. He made that noise with his lips that all babies find irresistibly funny, and George responded by demonstrating his award-winning chuckle. ‘If we could bottle that, we could sell it for a fortune,’ Slider remarked, making him do it again.

‘By the way – I meant to ask you – did you speak to your father?’

‘Yes. He rang me here yesterday morning.’ Good Lord, was it only yesterday? ‘He’s talking about selling the house.’

‘Yes, he said something about it when I was over there on Monday.’ She hesitated. ‘Reading between the lines, I think he’d like to move nearer to us.’

Slider sighed. ‘I wish he could, but London prices being what they are . . .’

‘I know.’

‘I worry about him.’

‘I know. But he can look after himself. He’s a big boy. And talking of big boys . . .’ Through the windows on to the CID room, she had seen that Atherton had come purposefully in and was heading towards the communicating door. ‘Let me have him. I’ll get out of your hair.’ She took the baby back, shouldered her bag, and pecked her husband on the cheek in passing. ‘I’ll leave something out for you to heat up, in case you’re hungry when you get home.’

‘Have a good concert. Drive carefully,’ Slider said.

She departed through the door to the corridor, George watching his father over her shoulder with a slightly disconcerted air, and reaching out for him in farewell with the damp rusk. ‘Bloo,’ he said.

Atherton came in at the other door, unaware that his big entrance had been upstaged by one of the world’s great exits, and said, ‘Wilding’s flitted. That’s one for my side!’

‘It’s not exactly flitting, is it?’ Slider said, perched on Atherton’s desk for a change. ‘They were under siege from the media, angry and distressed. When I saw him on Wednesday he complained they were prisoners in their own home. They’d probably just had enough.’