Necrocrip (14 page)

Cate was a tall man beginning to go soft in the middle, but his clothes were too expensive for that to matter. He was subtly resplendent in a light grey Austin Reed suit, an Aquascrotum shirt of broad blue and white stripes, and a dark blue silk tie with a tiny, discreet logo on it – so tiny that its decorative value was nil, so its function must have been to make the onlooker who did not know what it represented feel equally small. His plain onyx and gold cufflinks were large in exactly the same way that the tie-logo wasn’t, his watch was a Rolex Oyster, and on the bar next to his drink was a hefty portable telephone and a bunch of keys with a BMW tag. Since the two other men he was standing with had been turned out by the same firm, by the time Slider reached them he felt like a crumpled tourist on a long-haul
flight who had wandered accidentally into club-class while looking for the lav.

‘Ah, yes, you must be Bill Slider!’ Cate hailed him cheerily. Slider agreed, sadly, that he must be. ‘What’ll you have?’ Slider protested mildly about being on duty, but Cate overrode him with the sort of outsize bonhomie men use when they are trying to convince an inferior that they look on him as an equal. ‘Bollocks, you must have something! What’ll it be? Whisky, brandy, anything you like. Christ, you don’t have to put on a show for me – I used to be a copper myself, y’know. Don’t worry, I won’t tell your boss on you!’

Slider thanked him and asked for a gin and tonic, which gave him the opportunity, while Cate was dealing with the order – ‘Same again for you blokes, I suppose? All right, you drunken bastards! Christ knows how you ever manage to run a business,’ and so on – to study him. Cate was one of those men who gave the impression of being handsome, though when you examined his face carefully there wasn’t a good feature in it: the nose was too narrow and too small, the mouth too soft, the chin too large and long, the cheekbones too wide. He had carefully-styled, silver-white hair which looked as though it had been specially selected by a top-price designer to go with his Playa de las Americas tan. Cate must have been late fifties at least, but the effect of the contrast was to make him look much younger.

It was only when you studied him closely that you could see the slackness of the face muscles, the tell-tale tiny pouches over the cheekbones, the tiredness of the skin – and there would be few enough people who would ever do that. The hearty palliness was there to keep at bay as much as to put at ease, and the eyes that were screwed up in constant smiles were grey and keen behind the concealing lids. Slider had known policemen like him, and they were often the most successful ones; businessmen too, though the style had so many imitators in commercial life that the real goods like Cate could hide up in a herd of prats and go unnoticed for as long as it was to his advantage.

Having secured the drinks, Cate ushered Slider away from his friends. ‘Excuse us, lads – a bit of business to discuss. I’ll catch you later. Oh yes I will – it’s your round, you tight-fisted
sod! No, seriously, I’ll only be about half an hour, all right? Cheers, then.’

He led the way across the room to one of those round bar tables which are too low and too small to be of any use other than to catch you in the knees every time you shift position and make you spill your drink. Cate settled himself, and rested his right hand on the table top beside his drink. It was very brown, and Slider noticed he was wearing a ring on the third finger in the shape of a skull: heavy gold, beautifully wrought, expensive and ugly – a strange thing, he thought, to go with the aforesaid suit, shirt and tie. If it had been silver instead of gold, and much more crude, it might have been a biker’s ring. But maybe it was meant simply to surprise – and to warn the business contact that this was not just a rich man, but a tough bastard too.

Cate surveyed Slider’s face and slipped into serious man-to-man mode.

‘All right, tell me about it. The lad Ronnie’s got himself into trouble, has he?’

Slider told him briefly the history of the case. ‘He told us that it was his shop, and there seemed no particular reason to doubt him. If anything, it would have been in his interest to make us think there
was
someone else to suspect’

The eyes crinkled merrily. ‘You’re not suspecting me, I hope?’

‘No sir,’ Slider said solidly. ‘I’m just explaining why we didn’t doubt he was the owner of the shop.’

Serious mode again. ‘It’s all right, Bill – I may call you Bill?’

Slider toyed with ‘No,’ even as his lips were sneaking in with a cowardly ‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, Bill, I understand perfectly, of course. I was a bit annoyed at first, I don’t mind telling you, that nobody had bothered to let me know. But I know how many things there are to check up on at the beginning of a case. I shan’t say any more about it. And I’ll make it all right with your Guv’nor.’

He paused for Slider’s murmur of gratitude.

‘I’m pretty shocked that one of my shops should have been involved in that way, but the public being what they are, it may turn out to bring them in rather than put them off.
People can be rotten ghouls. Good for business, you know what I mean? Time will tell. And who is it that Ronnie murdered? One of his boyfriends, I suppose?’

‘You knew he was homosexual?’

Cate raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh come on!’

‘He seems to hope he can hide it from the world,’ Slider said neutrally.

‘I knew he was an iron as soon as I saw him, but it didn’t bother me. It’s not illegal, and I’ve got no prejudices. What mattered to me was that he knew how to run a fish and chip shop.’

‘How did you come to employ him in the first place?’ Slider asked.

‘He answered an advertisement I put in the local rag for a manager. I could tell he wasn’t very bright, but he’d been in the trade since he was fourteen, so there wasn’t much he didn’t know about it. He’s turned out to be a good worker, anyway. He never took time off – except occasionally shutting up early if it was quiet – and he never tried to rob me. I shall be sorry to lose him.’

‘I’m afraid you’ll be losing more than just him. The man he murdered was also one of your employees.’

‘Oh?’ The grey eyes became serious. ‘Who?’

‘The man who helped out in the fish bar at weekends –Peter Leman. Did you know him?’

Was there the tiniest of hesitations? No, it must be just inferiority-induced paranoia.

‘I didn’t know him, as such –I left it to Ronnie to sort out his own helpers – but I think I saw him in the shop once or twice. He seemed like a nice lad. You’re not telling me that he and Ronnie—?’ He paused suggestively, eyebrows raised.

‘It seems so. Certainly the night Leman was killed he met Slaughter and went home with him. They quarrelled about something—’

‘Well, that doesn’t surprise me! If ever there was a case of beauty and the beast. Still, it sounds as if you’ve got it all wrapped up. That’s quick work. I’m sure Ian will be pleased with you. It looks good in the figures to get it cleared up so fast’

‘Ian?’

‘Barrington. DS Barrington,’ Cate explained. ‘He’s an old mate of mine. Didn’t you know his name was Ian?’

‘No sir. Only his initials.’

‘He’s a good man,’ Cate said seriously. ‘Sound. He can be a bit of a martinet, I know, but he’s a good copper. He gets the job done, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?’

Slider took this as a hint, and eased his notebook out of his pocket. ‘I hope you won’t mind if I ask you a few routine questions, just to clear up one or two points?’

Cate crinkled a smile. ‘Not at all. Nice to see you being thorough. What d’you want to know?’

‘How often do you visit the Fish Bar?’

‘That particular one, not very often. Twice a month maybe, at most. Ronnie’s a good manager – or he was, I should say. I just used to pop in when I was passing on the odd occasion to see that everything was all right. I never give my businesses warning that I’m coming – keeps ‘em on their toes.’

‘Do you remember when you were there last?’

He frowned in thought. ‘Hard to remember. Three weeks ago, maybe. About that, anyway.’

‘You have a key to the shop, of course? Where do you keep it?’

Cate lifted his hands and laid them on the table on either side of his glass. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. I did have one, but I lost it – oh, must be two months ago. I was having my office at home redecorated, so I had to clear everything out of it. All the keys were on hooks on a peg-board on the wall by my desk, so of course it had to come down. I put it with the rest of the office gear in a spare bedroom, but when I came to put everything back afterwards, that particular key was missing.’

Slider felt a sinking sensation. If there were a missing key sculling about the universe, it put paid to half the case.

‘Could it have been stolen, do you suppose?’

‘Well, I suppose it could have. The decorators were in and out of the house and one of them could have gone upstairs when no-one was looking. But I’ve known ‘em for years, and I trust ‘em. I don’t think they’d steal anything – if I did, I wouldn’t employ ‘em. And besides, it’s hard to see why
anyone would take that one key and no other No, I think it must have just fallen off in the spare room and got lost.’

‘You searched for it, of course?’

‘Of course. It never turned up, though.’ There was a breath of a pause, and then Cate continued blandly. ‘In any case, I told Ronnie to get the lock changed just to be on the safe side, and he did. I kept meaning to collect the spare key from him, but I haven’t got round to it yet.’

Cate was making a monkey of him. Slider controlled his temper and continued to play Plod, while his mind felt about for a reason why Cate should want to bait him. ‘So Ronnie is still the only person with a key to the shop?’

‘Front door key, yes. I have a key to the back door, but it’s always kept bolted on the inside, so I couldn’t use it if I wanted to.’

And Slaughter said that the back door was bolted when he came in on the day after the murder. And there was no sign of forcible entry. They were back on safe ground. It had to have been Slaughter after all.

Soon afterwards, Slider was rising to go. Cate extended his hand and shook Slider’s firmly: virile, confident, friendly, said that grip.

‘It’s been nice meeting you, Bill. I hope we can get together again some time. I like having the chance to talk shop occasionally. You must come over to my place one day. Are you married?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, come to dinner some time, bring the wife.’

‘Thanks. I’d like that.’

‘Right! Good! I’ll be in touch, then. And tell old Ian to go easy on you, like I did on him when I was his boss! A good man is hard to find, you know.’

According to Joanna, Slider thought on his way out, a hard man is good to find, though he wondered in this case. He was not going to hold his breath waiting for a dinner engagement to materialise; and if Colin Cate, with all his police contacts and committees, needed a lowly and newly acquainted inspector with whom to talk shop, then his arse was an apricot. All the end bit, like all the beginning bit, was insincere, but equally it was not intended to deceive. It
served the same social function as eyebrow-raising and bottom-flashing amongst baboons: it established social hierarchy.

That didn’t mean to say there was anything wrong with the middle bit, though Slider was at a loss to understand why he had been dragged all this way to go through it, when any DC at any time would have done as well, for all the information Cate was able to add. He supposed demanding Slider’s presence so far from home had been Cate’s way of flashing his bottom at Barrington: I may have left the Job, but I’m still your superior, laddie, and don’t you forget it.

Another little chat with Ronnie was in order, to establish the whereabouts of the second key, and then home.

Not home for much longer, he reminded himself, and felt a sudden surge of nervousness. He still had that hurdle to clear, and it wasn’t going to be in one gazelle-like bound, that was for sure.

The effect on Ronnie Slaughter of Cate’s name was unexpected. Slider had expected him to look embarrassed or shamefaced at having his self-inflating pose debunked, but instead he seemed terrified. He appeared to crouch lower in his chair, like a motorway verge mouse swept over by a kestrel’s shadow, and he fixed frightened eyes on Slider in desperate appeal.

‘Oh Gawd, oh Gawd,’ he whimpered. You didn’t tell him? Oh Gawd, he’ll kill me!’

‘I had to tell him, Ronnie,’ Slider said reasonably. ‘It’s his shop. He came asking why we’d shut it without asking him. He’s got a right to know.’

‘He’ll kill me! He said there’s not got to be no trouble. He said it’s got to be a clean shop, no drunks or rowdies, no fights or anything. I promised him. That’s why I got the job. He was real good to me, giving me that job. It’s die best job I ever had – a real nice shop, respectable and everything. I was that grateful. I’d never do nothing to upset him, and he said if ever the Bill was called in, I was for it.’ He rocked in his chair a little and moaned. ‘You shouldn’t of told him! What did he say? Was he mad?’

‘Ronnie, you’re in much bigger trouble than worrying about your job with Mr Cate,’ Slider said bemusedly, but even the mention of the name made Slaughter wince.

With difficulty he kept Ronnie’s attention and asked him about the other key – ‘It’s in a box in the suitcase under my bed. I told you nobody but me had a key’ – and about the bolt on the back door – ‘It was bolted, I tell you. I would never forget that. Mr Cate would kill me if I forgot it.’

‘Never mind what Mr Cate would think, are you quite sure it was bolted?’ Slider pressed him.

Slaughter nodded, his mind clearly on more serious problems. ‘You didn’t tell him about – about me – you know – about me being gay?’

‘He knew about that anyway.
He
told
me,
in fact’

Slaughter began to cry. ‘Oh Gawd, he’ll kill me,’ he whimpered.

Slider was at a loss to know how to put things into perspective for this pathetic creature. To be worrying about his boss’s disapproval when he was facing life imprisonment for murder suggested a view of life so far askew that it wasn’t surprising he had killed and cut up Peter Leman on so small a provocation and with so little apparent compunction.