Killing Time (32 page)

‘Did you tell him anything?’

‘And drop Maurice in it? What d’you think I am? Of course I didn’t. Well, anyway, Andy stayed a bit and had a bit of a chat and then he went, and that’s the last time I saw him.’

‘Had he ever called on you before?’

‘What, at the flat? No. No, he hadn’t. Come to think of it, I suppose that must of meant it was important. But I didn’t make anything of it, really. I mean, I know what you coppers are like. Always lonely, always wanting a chat.’ And she smiled fondly at Slider, remembering.

Slider cleared his throat. He had enough woman trouble already. ‘Can you remember exactly when that was – the day he visited you? You said it wasn’t long before he was attacked.’

‘That’s right. It was the week before. On the Thursday or Friday, I think. Let me see.’ She furrowed her brow willingly but evidently without much hope.

‘You said it was while Maurice was out,’ Slider prompted. ‘Where had he gone, do you remember that?’

‘Oh, to see his friend, of course. Wait a minute, yes, I’ve got it now. It was the Friday afternoon. And poor Andy got done over on the Saturday night. Well, there! With all the trouble over Maurice I never thought, but it was just the day before. It makes you think, don’t it?’

‘Why didn’t you mention this to me before?’ Slider said.

‘You never asked,’ she said with a touch of indignation. ‘Anyway, it’s got nothing to do with Maurice, has it?’

‘No,’ Slider sighed. ‘No, I don’t suppose it has.’

‘Anyway, what did you want to ask me?’ Busty said. ‘Only I can’t leave George holding the baby.’

‘Oh, that was it. About Andy Cosgrove. It was just a loose end I wanted tying up.’

‘And has it helped?’ she asked, eyeing him keenly.

No, Slider thought, it hasn’t. ‘
You’ve
helped,’ he said. ‘Thanks, Busty. When all this is over, I’ll take you out and buy you a curry. Like the old days.’

‘Only this ain’t the old days any more,’ she said sadly. ‘In the old days everybody was shocked if a copper got hurt. Now it don’t even make the front page. We didn’t know when we was lucky.’

Ain’t it the truth, Slider thought. On an impulse he laid his hand briefly over hers as it rested on the bar, and leaned forward to peck her on the cheek. ‘See you, Busty.’

Outside, on the way to his car, he passed Benny’s black cab. Or he assumed it was Benny’s – he wouldn’t expect there to be two Monty’s Metrocabs parked down the side of the pub. It was interesting that he hadn’t noticed it on his way in. It was like Lenny the Lion said – you didn’t see black cabs unless you were positively looking for them. They were street furniture, and the brain edited them out.

He got in his car and just sat, wondering what to do next. He toyed briefly with the idea of going home, but knew he couldn’t bear to. When he needed to think he had to be out; home had too many other connotations to be conducive. If he went home he’d have to tell Joanna about Irene and the phone call, and he didn’t want to think about that yet; couldn’t afford the brain-space, with so much else that needed to be sorted out. So there seemed nothing for it but to go and see Atherton. It was late, and even with flexible visiting hours the nursing staff might be unwilling to let him by. But he knew a back way in, and if challenged he could always flash his brief and claim official business. Which it was, in a way. Cot-case or not, Atherton was still his partner.

He parked down the narrow service road behind the hospital, and when he got out and turned to lock the door, he got that prickling feeling again of being watched. It was just the loneliness of the road, he told himself, and the multiplicity of shadowy places. The backs of hospitals were always unlovely: all downpipes and dirty windows of frosted glass, and always a single mysterious plume of steam rising from somewhere into the yellow sodium-lit sky. He thought briefly of the waste ground, and de Glanville, and de Glanville’s extensive caution. Well, he was after big players, and big players did sometimes get carried away. But they wouldn’t be interested in Slider. His head was aching a bit, and he wondered if thinking you were being followed was a sign of brain damage. Perhaps he had come back to work too early. If he hadn’t come back, this whole Paloma mess would have landed on someone else’s desk and he wouldn’t have Busty Parnell on his conscience. He should have taken more sick-leave. He yearned to be lying on a beach somewhere instead of here, slogging it out with this grubby mystery; but now he had taken hold of it, he couldn’t put it down. Unless his head actually fell off, he would have to see it through.

His unofficial way in was across the back yard and past the dustbins. There was a metal fire door, one of those push-bar-to-open jobs, which was slightly warped and would only shut properly if you yanked it hard, which porters in a hurry often did not bother to do. If you just let it go to close by its own weight, it simply rested shut without the lock catching. So it was now. Slider worked his fingers under the rim and pulled it open. It gave onto a stone-floored corridor with dark-green glazed tiled walls lit by a single sulky bulb in the high ceiling.
To the right a much scarred metal door gave access to the incinerator room, where they burned the infected waste and the bits of people that people didn’t want any more. Slider hurried past it with a superstitious shudder. At the far end was a pair of black rubber swing doors, and he pushed through these into a corridor of the brightly-lit hospital proper, with its white noise of air conditioning and its smell of you-don’t-really-want-to-know-what-this-is-covering-up. Here was the goods lift and a series of store rooms, and a little further along a granite staircase with metal hand rails, alongside a branch corridor which led to the mortuary and the old post-mortem room. He had been there more times than he needed to remember, in the company of Freddie Cameron, which was how he knew this back way in. He clattered up the stairs, meeting no-one and reflecting how easy it was to bypass security in a hospital. But of course hospitals had not been built with security in mind. Who would ever have thought there would be a need?

Coming at Atherton’s room from the wrong end, as it were, he didn’t even encounter a nurse. He could see by the glass panel in the door that the light was on, and looking through he saw Atherton sitting up in bed; and in a chair beside the bed, chatting to him, was Hart.

He went in. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked as Hart looked round.

‘Just visiting,’ she said. ‘Why not?’

‘It’s late,’ Slider said. ‘How did you get past the nurses?’

‘One of ’em’s a friend of mine,’ Hart said simply.

‘Good evening. Yes, thank you, much better, thank you for asking,’ Atherton said to the wall.

‘I was going to ask if you minded being disturbed so late,’ Slider said, ‘but I got thrown off track. You’re
looking
better.’

‘You look terrible,’ Atherton reciprocated. ‘Are you having headaches?’

‘Does Salman Rushdie have life insurance?’

‘Has something happened, guv?’ Hart asked, searching his face. ‘Some new information?’

‘Why should you think that?’

She grinned. ‘Deduced it, din’ I? You ain’t bin home, and it’s ages since I left you at the factory.’

‘Pull up a chair,’ Atherton said, ‘and tell all. I need mental
stimulation. Now I’m not drugged all day long, I’m bored to death.’

So Slider brought Atherton up to speed, and told them both about his interview with de Glanville and the truth about where Jay Paloma had got the cocaine.

‘It’s ironic,’ Slider concluded. ‘At one end of the chain there was Grisham being blackmailed into getting the dope from Paloma, and at the other end Paloma being blackmailed into getting it for Grisham.

‘It’s pafetic when you fink of it,’ Hart said. ‘When you remember, guv, how that Grisham was going on about true love and finding his soulmate, and all the time poor old Paloma was spying on him and putting his money aside so he could get enough saved up to leave him.’

‘But it does look as though the drugs can be ruled out as a motive,’ Atherton said. ‘Obviously he wasn’t whacked for bilking a dealer or anything. He wasn’t really a threat to anyone.’

‘It might still have been someone who knew he had the stuff and just wanted to nick it,’ Hart said.

Slider shook his head. ‘That won’t work. There was no sign of the flat being searched; no sign even of anyone going through the victim’s pockets. If some local low-life or addict did it just to get a single packet, they wouldn’t have left without even looking for what they came for.’

‘I suppose not,’ Hart conceded unwillingly.

‘Then what does that leave you with? Yates?’ Atherton said. ‘He’s into some serious naughties somewhere. And he definitely sent Jonah Lafota round. Though we still don’t know what he wanted Paloma done for.’

‘I
do,’ Hart said.

Slider looked at her narrowly. ‘Have you been hanging around that club again?’

‘No, boss,’ she said in wounded tones. ‘I din’t need to. I got my snout wound round my little finger now.’

‘You’re a bleeding contortionist, that’s what you are,’ Atherton said admiringly.

‘I ain’t been wasting my time,’ she said with a sidelong look at Slider. ‘My snout got it all off that ficko Garry. Apparently Yates knew Paloma had been scoring white in the club and he didn’t like it, ’cause the dealer wasn’t one of his. Well, we know
now it was one of ours. Anyway, Yates don’t want any outside dealing on his patch, and he don’t want any trouble spoiling the spotless reputation of his fine establishment. So when Grisham comes in and makes the fuss, Yates sees a way of putting the frighteners on Paloma, and if anything comes back at him, he lays it off on Grisham, because there’s witnesses that the daft bugger give Jonah money to do it. Jonah don’t like it, of course, because it’s his spuds on the barbecue, but he’s got to do as he’s told. If Yates says it’s Christmas they all sing carols.’

‘Is that the way it was?’

‘Yeah, and when we come in asking questions, Yates comes over all helpful and puts us onto the dealer to keep us off his back. Probably hoped we might scare him off the patch, as well.’

‘Well, that ties up an end. But I rather think Yates is ruled out for the murder,’ Slider said regretfully. ‘I can’t see him sending two men to do the same job. And if he’d had Paloma killed in the afternoon, he wouldn’t have sent Jonah round in the evening.’

‘Are you definitely accepting Jonah’s story, then?’ Atherton asked. ‘That Paloma was already dead when he got there?’

‘It agrees too well,’ Slider said. ‘Look.’ He counted the points out on his left hand. ‘For a start, Freddie Cameron originally put the death much earlier – between one fifteen and four fifteen. He accepted the later time because we had witnesses to the breaking down of the door, and an eyewitness outweighs the science of rigor. But that was his first opinion.’ He extended the forefinger to join the thumb. ‘Then there’s the old man who lives underneath.’

‘Sounds like the title of a children’s story written by the Prince of Wales,’ Atherton commented.

Slider ignored him. ‘His evidence is very detailed. The visitor, the heavy fall, the trampling and banging as the body was repeatedly struck – it all agrees.’

‘He could be making it up to get attention,’ Hart said. ‘Old man, living alone, no family—’

‘We’ve all seen
Twelve Angry Men,’
Atherton told her.

‘That’s always a possibility,’ Slider conceded, ‘but he did point out the exact spot where the body fell, without ever having seen inside the flat. And his background and his explanation make it plausible that he was listening, and that he could distinguish what he heard. Hollis believes him, and Hollis is no monkey.
The old man also says that Paloma didn’t do his practice at the usual time that evening; and we’ve got Grisham’s word that he telephoned several times in the afternoon and got no reply.’

‘Paloma could have guessed it was Grisham ringing and just not answered,’ Atherton said.

‘Of course. But add it to the rest of the evidence, and it starts to tell. Point – where have I got up to? Three?’

‘Four, if you count Grisham,’ Hart said.

‘Four, then. There’s the forensic evidence about the stomach contents. Scrambled eggs on toast eaten less than an hour before death. That ties in with the crockery left in the sink, and it could have been eaten any time. But Busty expected him to get himself breakfast after she left, and she says he always washed up immediately. So look at the timings: she leaves him in his dressing-gown at half past eleven. He takes an hour-plus to get shaved, washed and dressed – half past twelve, twenty to one. He cooks himself some breakfast and eats it. Puts the dirties in the sink to wash. Then he goes into the front room to put the television on—’

‘He ain’t done the washing up,’ Hart objected.

‘I have to guess here, but maybe he just popped in to check the time of the film. It was one he didn’t want to miss, and they start at a different time every day. He and Busty didn’t have a newspaper or a
TV Times
, but they did have Teletext. It’s possible he just went in to check the time, meaning to go straight back to do the washing up before settling down. But at that very moment, the visitor arrives.’

‘It makes sense,’ Atherton conceded.

‘They sit and talk, Paloma gets them both a drink, then at twenty past the visitor jumps up and whacks him.’

‘But—’

‘Bear with me,’ Slider said, lifting his hand. ‘See how this works out. Paloma’s dead. So the washing up doesn’t get done. The bath towels don’t get folded and hung up as usual. He doesn’t do his practice. He doesn’t answer the phone. He doesn’t go in to work. The television’s on and tuned to Channel 4 for the afternoon film – a black and white wartime job of which he was very fond. Busty says if he’d been watching that night he’d have had it on ITV for sure. The curtains are open – if he’d been watching at night he’d have drawn them.’

‘It’s all circumstantial,’ Atherton said.

‘Yes, but it adds up. Nothing jars yet. All right, come eleven-thirty Jonah Lafota turns up to scare the bejaysus out of Paloma. He’s drunk and furious about the whole thing. He kicks the door in and storms into the front room, where the telly’s on. By the light of the screen he can’t see much. So he turns on the light, leaving his fingermarks on the light switch. He sees Paloma lying on the floor. He walks over, sees the mess someone’s made of the man he’s been sent to scare, and realises the creamola he’s in. He grabs a drink, knocking over the table, panics, picks everything up and puts it straight and leaves, remembering – for he’s intelligent, our boy – to put the light off again as he goes, and pull the front door to so that it won’t be seen until he’s well away.’