Killing Time (4 page)

‘Improving slowly. It’ll be a long job.’

‘And you, sir? You took a bit of a bashing an’ all, didn’t you?’

Dotty charm was all very well, but Slider was still the boss. ‘If I think I’m going to faint, I’ll let you know,’ he said, and wheeled her into the CID room. He raised his voice over McLaren’s whistle and Mackay’s ‘Babe alert!’ and said, ‘Listen, everybody! This is DC Hart come to join us temporarily.’ He went quickly through the names and then passed her over to Anderson’s care before retreating to the haven of his own room. Why Anderson, he wondered mildly as he walked back. Because he was safe? Less sexist than Mackay and less sticky than McLaren? The least likely to tease the girl on her quota-bility quotient? No, on analysis, it was because he hoped Anderson would try and show her his latest photos. Slider had no doubt she would sort him out.

He could have sworn when he got back to his desk, the pile had grown. What Atherton would have called bullshit on an Augean scale. He missed Atherton. How was he going to find a
mot juste
for every situation without him? By lunchtime, after a busy morning’s shovelling, the heap was larger, word having gone round that he was back. And as if that wasn’t enough, Irene
had telephoned. She had been mightily peeved that no-one had told her he was in hospital until he wasn’t any more, and was still harping on about it.

‘After all these years, you’d have thought
someone
would have let me know.’

‘I suppose they didn’t know how things stood between us,’ Slider temporised. Lumps of headache were falling off the inside of his skull like rotting plaster.

‘One of the sergeants at least might have thought to tell me,’ she grumbled. ‘I mean, I’ve known them for years. And I
know
Sergeant O’Flaherty has got my new telephone number, because I made a point of giving it to him just in case.’

‘In case of what?’

She sidestepped that one. ‘If I’d only known, I’d have visited you in hospital. It’s not right. I mean, I am your—’ She stopped herself, and her voice fell an octave or two. ‘I can’t bear to think of you being hurt,’ she said, ‘and lying there in a hospital bed all alone.’

They didn’t usually allow sharing beds in hospitals, he thought; but he didn’t say it. He felt rather tender about Irene. And of course Atherton would normally have coped with a tactful briefing of his future-ex-spouse, but Atherton too was out of commission. ‘Well,’ he said soothingly, ‘it doesn’t matter now.’

But it did matter to Irene, and nothing would satisfy her but to see him, so he arranged to meet her for lunch at the Crown and Sceptre. He telephoned the flat to tell Joanna he wouldn’t be about – she sometimes dropped in to lunch with him if she was in the area – but the answering machine was on the blink and he wasn’t sure the message had taken. So he told Nicholls as well, in case she phoned while he was out.

He was at the Crown before Irene, and stood at the bar opposite the door where she’d see him as soon as she came in. She wasn’t really a pub person, having been brought up genteel, and still felt awkward about entering them alone. She arrived punctually, looking both familiar and strange. Familiar because – well, he had been married to her for most of his adult life. Strange because she was wearing a new suit in a style not normally her own, camel-coloured with chocolate accessories and the sort of costume jewellery that you see in
the windows of high street beauty salons: twirly over-bright gold and enormous fake pearls, set round with tiny things that weren’t diamonds; patently false and patently very expensive. To Slider the existence of such stuff had always been a mystery on a par with ceramic fruit. Obviously someone must buy it, but
why?

Her resentment seemed to have dissipated. She smiled uncertainly.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello. Go and sit down over there, and I’ll bring the menu. What d’you want to drink?’

She was no fun in a pub – she always had orange juice. But today she said, almost naturally, ‘Oh, a gin and tonic, please.’ Gin and tonic, eh? Imbibing at lunchtime? This could spell bad news. He got her drink and took it with his pint over to the banquette where she sat deportmentally, knees and ankles together, hands folded over her handbag in her lap. She was ill at ease and trying womanfully to carry it off. He felt a tug of sympathy for her.

She looked up and smiled uncertainly as he put down her drink on the low table in front of her. ‘Thanks. You don’t look as bad as I expected. I thought you’d be really traumatised after what that terrible man did to you. Thank God they got him.’

Traumatised? That was a new word. New vocab, new drink, new outfit. She was not entirely – and he noted it with an odd small pang – his Irene any more, not the same woman he had been married to for so long, the woman who’d read the
Sunday Times Magazine
adverts with wistful envy. She was wearing a different scent as well, heavy and gardenia-ish, where she’d always preferred the light and flowery before. What was that one the children used to buy her?
Je Reviens,
that was it. Kate used to call it Jerry Vines. ‘You look nice,’ he said, sitting down beside her. ‘New suit?’

She looked down at herself, as though she needed to check what she had on. ‘Yes,’ she said distractedly. ‘Marilyn made me buy it. I’m not sure it’s me, really, but she said I ought to—’

Ought to move up a class, Slider suspected. Marilyn Cripps, her new Best Friend, seemed determined to do a pygmalion on her. It was the she-Cripps who had introduced Irene to Ernie Newman, the man with whom she had run away from the marital semi in Ruislip to a five-bedroom detached house in
Chalfont. The Crippses lived in Dorney and had a son at Eton. Say no more.

‘You look very nice,’ he said firmly.

‘I didn’t come here to talk about clothes,’ she replied, just a little reproachfully. He waited, and she went on at last, ‘It’s getting more dangerous, isn’t it? I mean, it seems no time since you were in hospital with those burns after that dreadful Austin case. And this time you were nearly killed. And Atherton—’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I suppose he is going to be all right, isn’t he?’

‘I hope so.’

She bit her lip. ‘I worry about you all the time, you know. Madmen with knives, drug addicts, guns. I thought I could stop when I – when we split up. But it doesn’t seem to make any difference. I still worry.’

‘You shouldn’t.’ He tried to say it kindly, not snubbingly – though it would probably be kinder in the long run to snub. He began to see where this might be leading. ‘You’ve got Ernie to think about now.’

She looked at him doubtfully, wondering if he was being ironic. It was hard not to be, about Ernie. ‘I don’t need to worry about him,’ she said.

He didn’t know how to take that. After a silence he said, ‘How are the kids?’

‘All right. Matthew was really upset when he knew you were hurt. He saw it in the paper – one of the boys at school showed him before I had a chance to talk to him about it. He was more worried than me, even. He thought you were going to die.’

That hurt. ‘He watches too much television.’ He said it lightly, but he meant it. ‘Too many cop shows.’

‘It’s hard to stop him.’ She sighed. ‘He’s got a television in his bedroom now. Ernie bought it for him.’

‘You shouldn’t have let him. You know I don’t approve of kids having their own TVs.’

‘I know. I don’t either, really. It means I can’t stop him watching unsuitable programmes – violent ones, that give him bad dreams. But Ernie wanted to buy it for him, and Matthew wanted it, and what could I do? I was stuck in the middle.’

Slider saw the scenario quite clearly: Ernie wanted to bribe Matthew to like him – and was probably also quite keen to get
the children to stay in their own rooms and not clutter up his lounge; and Matthew was being opportunist after the manner of children throughout the realms of time and space. And Irene – Irene wanted to please everyone. Well, that was a new Irene, too. She must be feeling very unsure of herself if she was not insisting on having her own way. He felt a huge and unwelcome surge of pity for her, and thrust it away. ‘I’ll have a word with him, if you like.’

‘Ernie?’ she said in alarm.

‘No, Matthew.’

She looked at him hesitantly, opened and closed her mouth, and then took the plunge. ‘He wants to go home. Matthew, I mean. He doesn’t take to Ernie. And he doesn’t like the house. It’s all so strange to him. He keeps asking me, why can’t you and Dad get together again?’ She swallowed. ‘He says, you haven’t sold the house yet, why can’t we just all go home?’ Slider could find nothing to say, and into his unready silence Irene said in a small voice, ‘I’ve wondered the same thing myself, sometimes.’

Slider didn’t want to hear this. It was too inexpressibly painful. He saw quite clearly that she felt lost, out of her place, living in Ernie’s home, which was not her own, according to his style and manners, which were not what she was used to. The familiar sight of Slider rekindled whatever affection she had once had for him, and blotted out the memory of his inadequacies as a husband, the years of unhappiness she had suffered as a copper’s neglected wife. With the slightest encouragement she would ask if they couldn’t ‘try again’; and standing on the brink of that question, he realised with a new clarity that he didn’t want to go back. Definitely. Even if he and Joanna didn’t make it, his marriage to Irene was definitely over.

But Irene didn’t know about Joanna, of course, and this was not the time to tell her, so he changed the subject with a desperate lunge. ‘How’s Kate?’ he asked, as if there had been no implied question in her last words.

She reassembled herself with an effort, and said brightly, ‘Oh, you know Kate. She’s agitating for piano lessons now, because her new friend at school, Flora, has them.’

‘Fancy naming a child after margarine, poor kid,’ Slider said to amuse her.

She wasn’t. ‘It was one of the names we considered for Kate, if you remember.’

Actually, it was she who had considered. He’d expected another boy, for some reason, and had got as far as Michael and no further. When the baby turned out to be a girl, he went blank. Irene had kindly suggested Michaela and he’d roared with laughter and she’d got into a huff, and he’d placated her by saying she should choose, she was better with names than him, and she’d produced a list with Kate at the top, which he’d grasped enthusiastically for fear of what might be lurking further down.

‘I always wish I’d learnt the piano,’ he said, to distract her. ‘It’d be nice for her to learn. I seem to remember seeing a piano in Ernie’s lounge, so there’d be no problem about an instrument, would there?’

‘But you know what would happen,’ Irene said crossly. ‘She’d be all enthusiasm for a week, then she’d slack off, and I’d be the one who’d have to make her practise, and it would be nothing but row, row, row. It was the same with those gerbils. I always ended up cleaning them out – and then you talked about getting a cat or a dog!’

‘I only—’

‘You got the children all excited about it, without thinking that it would be me who ended up with the responsibility, because you just wouldn’t be there when there was a row about it. And then it was down to me to tell them they couldn’t have one. I always ended up with the dirty jobs.’

Ah, this was better, this was more like it. Slider almost smiled at her, seeing the steel return to her face, so much easier to bear than wistfulness; but also oddly poignant, because it meant she was
his
Irene again, the disapproving Irene he knew and – well, almost – loved. Best to keep her annoyed, he thought. ‘You don’t have to clean out a piano,’ he said. ‘I can’t see what harm there’d be in—’

The door opened, and Joanna came in. Perhaps it was because he was in the middle of a familiar-feeling argument with Irene; perhaps it was simply long habit – fourteen years of faithful marriage and two of bowel-churning deception. Perhaps it was Fate sending down a googly. At all events, he panicked.

‘Ah, there you are,’ Joanna said, heading straight for him. ‘They said I’d find you here.’

Nicholls, you die for this, he thought, stuttering to his feet. ‘Oh, hello, Joanna. Er, this is Irene. Irene, this is Joanna, a friend of Jim Atherton’s.’

Joanna’s smile solidified, and he saw her nostrils flare. Irene said, ‘How do you do?’ nicely, and Joanna repeated her words and even her intonation, while her mind plainly worked furiously behind her mask. Slider’s head felt as concrete as her expression; he couldn’t think, he couldn’t cope. He looked from Joanna, in white jeans, a Greek cotton tunic and sandals, her rough hair held off her face with a pair of sunglasses, to Irene, neat and polished in a suit with matching accessories and a proprietorial smile, and wanted to be anywhere but here, the further away the better.

It was Joanna who spoke at last – it seemed like several suspicious hours later, but it must have been almost instantly, because Irene was still looking social and pleasant. ‘Yes, they told me you’d be here and that you could tell me the latest on Jim. How is he?’

‘Pretty much the same. I saw him yesterday. They say he’s improving slowly.’

‘Is he allowed visitors yet?’

‘I’m not sure. He’s asleep most of the time, but if you telephoned the hospital I’m sure they’d let you know. Have you got the number?’

He thought he was doing pretty well but she shot him a look of fierce impatience and said, ‘Yes, of course. Well, I won’t interrupt your lunch any longer. I was just passing. Goodbye,’ to Irene, and with a whip-flick glance at Slider, ‘it was nice neeting you.’

When she was gone, Irene said, ‘Is that Atherton’s latest girlfriend? She doesn’t seem his usual type – not glamorous enough. And she’s a bit old for him, isn’t she?’ She chattered on for a bit, until she realised he was too quiet, and said, ‘Are you all right? You look a bit pale.’

‘A bit of a headache, that’s all,’ he said.

She was all concern. ‘Do you want to go? Shall we forget lunch? You must be careful, after a crack on the head like that. Look, shall I get you a taxi to take you home? Where are you staying at the moment, anyway?’

That was one question to head her away from. He pulled himself together. ‘No, no, I’m fine. Let’s have a look at the menu. They do quite good grub here. No, really, I’m all right. I wouldn’t drag you all this way and not give you lunch.’