Kill My Darling (37 page)

‘I didn't mean to hurt her,' he said in a faded voice of horror. ‘I would never hurt my little girl. I knelt beside her, slipped my hand under her head, felt the blood. I called her name, and I thought she looked at me, but then she was limp and her eyes weren't looking anywhere. Just staring. But I never meant to hurt her, I swear to you. If I could have died instead . . .'

‘But you didn't,' Slider said.

EIGHTEEN

The Devil Wears Primark

‘
T
hat's a terrible story,' Joanna said. ‘That's the worst thing I've heard. The poor man.'

Slider had rung her on her mobile to say he didn't know what time he'd be home, and she had diverted after the concert and come to the station to hear about it first hand. She was sitting on his desk now, still in her long black, a breath of fresh air from the outside world – the real world, if you wanted to look at it that way, in which people lived their lives without ever murdering or being murdered.

Sitting as he was in his normal chair behind the desk, he was looking up at her. He admired her almost painfully. She had just been engaged in something of extraordinary, unimaginable skill – playing the violin before an audience of thousands, recreating great music from tiny, random-looking dots on a page – something so beyond his comprehension that it stood in his mind like a conjuring trick in a child's: genuine magic. She was a hummingbird, a kingfisher – airborne, delicate, a jewel of brightness and a quicksilver of movement. He was a humble duck, patiently drudging about in the weed.

She was also his wife, which was a pretty damn fine thing, whichever way you looked at it.

‘But,' she said, ‘if it was an accident, why didn't he just go straight to the police?'

Atherton, sitting on the cold radiator as usual, answered. ‘Because of this whole identity swap thing. He was afraid it would all come out and he was terrified of going to prison. So he carried her into the woods and laid her half under a bush. He had to make it look as though she'd been concealed, but he wanted her to be found, so he chose a place not far off the path. Then he went home and waited.'

‘It must have been hell,' Joanna observed.

‘Yes,' said Atherton, ‘particularly when she
wasn't
found. Saturday went past and Sunday went past, and all the usual visitors and dog walkers kept going in there and nothing happened. He didn't want to be caught, but he couldn't bear to leave her lying out there any longer. I mean, not just the agonizing suspense, but what with foxes and stoats and such—'

‘Don't.' Joanna winced.

‘So on Monday morning he finally broke, and “found” her himself. He was in a terrible state when we interviewed him, but then, finding a dead body is not a nice thing for the ordinary punter, so we didn't think anything of it. And then, when we didn't come back for him . . .'

‘I suppose he was on tenterhooks, wondering if, and whether, and when,' Joanna said thoughtfully. ‘A whole week of it.'

‘Yes, I think he was just glad in the end, when we did come for him, that it was all over.'

‘Hardly that,' Slider said. They looked at him. ‘Not all over by any means.'

‘Well, no, there's all the mess to clear up,' Atherton admitted. ‘And
what
a mess he's made of everything! His daughter's dead. His wife's marriage is bigamous.'

‘That's easily remedied, surely? Divorce and remarriage would fix that,' Joanna suggested.

‘It was still knowing bigamy on her part, which is a crime. Not to mention the insurance fraud. She could do time. And the marriage is ruined anyway. Ian's not going to want her back. And his life will never be the same, either. He'll have to change his job – if he can get another one after being a suspect. Though it's hard to feel sympathy for him, given the Stephanie incident. There's the child, Bethany – she's bound to find out everything sooner or later, and it's not a pretty story. What will that do to her? And then there's Toby.'

‘Who's Toby? Joanna asked.

‘Hunter's dog. It was the one thing he asked as we arrested him – what's going to happen to Toby?'

‘Well, what does?'

‘A local dog charity took him. We have an arrangement with them for such eventualities. They'll keep him for a bit, and if Hunter ends up going inside they'll rehome him. That was the one thing he talked about in the car on the way here. He said, “Toby'll be dead by the time I get out.” We could have given him – the dog – to Mrs Wiseman-stroke-Hunter – Marty could do with a brother – but with the chance she'll be going away at Her Majesty's pleasure as well, we couldn't risk it.'

Joanna contemplated for a bit. ‘You're right. It is a mess. What must he be feeling?'

‘At the moment, he just wants to die,' Atherton said. ‘He's killed his darling and there's nothing left for him. He'll have to be put on suicide watch, which is a great nuisance to everybody. Then, of course, there's William McGuire to consider. We'll have to try and track down his relatives, if any, and tell them. We haven't yet checked with MisPer whether he was ever reported missing. If he was, that'll make it easier.' He rolled his eyes. ‘Just the paperwork of undeading Hunter and redeading McGuire is a nightmare.'

‘And then there's the case to prepare,' Slider said. Joanna noticed that he had been curiously silent all through this. Usually the relief of getting to the end of a case made him talkative. But he was sitting with his head bent in a dejected attitude, twirling a pencil round and round in his fingers.

‘But if it was an accident, not murder, what case is there?' she asked.

‘Failure to notify a death. Interference with a human corpse. Concealing a crime. Impeding a police investigation. Plus the original identity swap fraud, and complicity in insurance fraud,' Atherton enumerated.

‘If it was an accident,' Slider said. They both looked at him. ‘We have no evidence about the death. No evidence either for him or against him. No evidence at all.'

‘But – he confessed,' Joanna said.

‘Confessions can be retracted. We get false confessions all the time. He can go back to saying he only found the body, that it had nothing to do with him. Claim he was upset and didn't know what he was saying.'

‘But there's Toby's hair on her clothes,' Atherton objected.

‘A good counsel will get over that, given he and Toby found the body.'

‘The wound could be matched to the roof edge of his car.'

‘It's a common make and model. Without any traces of her blood on it . . . And he was a minicab driver. One thing he knows how to do is wash a car. There were no witnesses. We've got nothing but the coincidence of her being his daughter.'

‘But she was
there
– only yards from his home!' Joanna protested. ‘Doesn't that mean something?'

He shook his head. ‘He used to take her to the Lido when she was a kid. Who's to say she wasn't just having a nostalgia trip and got killed by a nutter walking in the woods? We can't prove he knew she was there. She didn't tell anyone he had come back into her life, and we don't know that they were ever seen together. The CPS would never go on a confession alone, particularly one like that, made under emotional strain, if it was retracted. No, if he thinks better of it, there's nothing we can do.'

‘Well, perhaps losing his beloved daughter is punishment enough,' Joanna said, and then caught up with something he'd said. ‘What do you mean, “if it was an accident”?'

‘He said her foot skidded in the mud,' said Slider. ‘But the ground had been frozen hard for weeks. There was no mud. I noticed myself when we arrived on the scene, because I was thinking about possible footmarks.'

‘Maybe she skidded on something else,' Joanna said reasonably.

‘Maybe,' Slider said. ‘But someone falling backwards against a car like that – you wouldn't expect the blow to be hard enough to kill. But if, being drunk and furious
and
afraid, he dashed her backwards with all his considerable strength – he was a manual worker, so he was pretty sinewy . . .'

‘But it would still be an accident,' Joanna said.

‘The law wouldn't see it that way,' Slider said. ‘Intent to hurt someone, if it ends in killing them – especially with the deliberate cover-up afterwards. He tied her scarf round her neck to make it look as if she'd been strangled. He must have been afraid his hands would have left a mark. That's quite calculated, you know. Not the action of a man in a blind panic. It would weight the evidence against him. If . . .'

‘If?' she asked.

‘If the CPS decided to go with it.' He gave a shrug, ‘Not my problem, fortunately. Those of far higher counsel than me will go through it all and decide what to charge him with and why. And there's plenty to play with, so they'll get him for something. And as you say, maybe losing her will be punishment enough.' He thought of Ronnie Fitton and his crime and punishment speech. It was never enough, was it, for those who cared?

‘Surely your opinion will be taken into account,' Joanna said, concerned for him now, rather than the unknown and now unknowable Melanie.

‘Me? I don't have an opinion. I'm just the meek ass between two burdens. More than two, it generally feels like.'

‘Issachar was a strong ass, not a meek one,' Atherton said, to lighten the mood. ‘I don't usually get to correct you on the Bible, but if you're going to quote . . .'

‘All asses are meek,' Slider said.

‘Ah, well, there I have to disagree with you,' Atherton said. ‘What about McLaren?'

‘Oh, poor McLaren,' Joanna protested. ‘You're always picking on him.'

A twitch of a smile moved Slider's mouth. ‘One thing I will say about him: he may be weird, but at least you know he probably won't reproduce.'

Some time later, after Joanna had gone home to relieve his father, Connolly brought him a cup of tea. There was so much to do that several of the team had been invited to come in and do some overtime, and she was one of those who had accepted.

She found Slider surrounded by young skyscrapers of documents, but staring at the studio photograph of Melanie Hunter. He didn't look up as she placed the tea gently on his desk, but he said, ‘Now it's just The Melanie Hunter Murder – a shorthand reference in books and papers, coupled in the minds of those who remember at all with this picture.'

She sought for something to say. ‘But you got a result, boss. That's something.'

‘Not to her,' he said. He put the picture down with an air of squaring his shoulders. ‘Thanks for the tea.' She gave a little
you're welcome
gesture, and as she didn't immediately turn away, he said, ‘You're glad it didn't turn out to be Fitton, aren't you? I think you had a soft spot for him.'

‘Not exactly soft. Just not desperate hard. I think he cared about Melanie.'

‘Not to the extent of finding out what was going on in her life,' Slider said, thinking of that
Not my business
. ‘I don't think anyone cared that much about her, poor girl.'

‘Marty did,' said Connolly, and then wished she hadn't, because far from giving him any comfort, she'd clearly just given him someone else to worry about.

Eventually they had the firm's traditional celebration drink at the Boscombe Arms. So far, Hunter had not retracted his confession, and the mess of possible charges was under consideration. Slider's worry was that the CPS would end up thinking it was not worth the money it would cost to take it to trial, especially as the story was such a good one it would probably get the jury's sympathy. But Porson had said they would have to move on the ‘tampering with a body' side of it, at least,
pour decourager les autres
. ‘Can't have people faking murders to cover up accidents,' he had said, with no apparent sense of irony. And Paxman, meeting Slider in the canteen one day, brooding over mulligatawny soup, had said that if they went on the tampering bit, it would make no sense without the rest. ‘He'll be jugged, good and hard, don't you worry,' he had concluded with unusual sympathy.

It was good that they had found out a little bit about William McGuire. According to MisPers, an elderly aunt from Colwyn Bay had reported him missing, but two months after the train crash, and only because he had missed sending her a birthday card, which he always did, and had not responded to a letter she had sent asking why. He had no other relatives. Nothing much was done about it at the time. As Hunter had said, when someone like McGuire goes missing, no one is very surprised. The old aunt, now 87 and in a home, but still with all her marbles, was contacted and told that he had died in the Greenford rail crash, and it was reported to Slider that she had been glad to know at last what had happened to him, having long made up her mind to it that he was dead.

The superintendent of the home sent Slider a photograph which the old lady had asked to have ‘put in his grave with him'. It was of McGuire, in palmier days, standing with his elder brother Robert, whom he had hero-worshipped. Robert was in uniform – he had been an NCO in the Welsh Guards, one of forty killed in the Falklands. Their parents had died when they were in their teens and Robert had always looked out for William. William had wanted to follow Robert into the army, but wasn't bright enough – he could barely read and write. ‘He was a little bit simple, poor lamb,' the Colwyn Bay auntie was reported as saying, ‘but always ever such a good boy.'

Quite how you put a photograph ‘in a grave' Slider wasn't sure; finding the grave at all would be an extra, time-consuming task he could well do without. He was glad, at least, that what with all the other wrongs done him, McGuire had not been murdered. And for the sake of closing files in his mind, he was glad to discover what he had been doing on the train that day – the auntie had said he was on night duty at the annexe, so he would have been on his way home. He wasn't just fulfilling his meeting with destiny.