Orchestrated Death (12 page)

Joanna, looking sideways at him, saw only a faint smile. ‘What are you thinking about, dear Inspector?’

Happiness bubbled over into laughter. ‘You really can’t go on calling me Inspector!’

‘Well, what then? Ridiculous though it seems, I don’t know your first name.’

‘It was on my identity card.’

‘I didn’t notice it at the time.’

‘George William Slider. But I’ve always been called Bill,
because my father’s a George as well.’ Saying his own name aloud made him feel ridiculously shy, as though he were sixteen
and on his first date.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. -’Now I know, I can see it suits you. Do you like to be called Bill?’

‘Well, hardly anyone does these days. There’s still a lot of surname-calling in the force. The quasi-military setup, you see.
I suppose it makes it seem a bit like public school. I always called Atherton by his surname, for instance. I simply can’t
think of him as Jim, though the younger ones do.’

‘Did you go to public school?’

He laughed at the thought. ‘Good Lord, no! Timberlog Lane Secondary Modern, that was me.’

‘What a pretty name,’ she teased. ‘Where’s Timberlog Lane?’

‘In Essex, Upper Hawksey. It was a brand new school in those days, one of those Prides of the Fifties, knocked up to cope
with the post-war bulge.’

‘Where’s Upper Hawksey?’

‘Near Colchester. It used to be just a little village, and then they built a housing estate onto it – hence the school – and
now it’s practically an urban overspill. You know the sort of thing.’

‘Yes, I know – there’s the village green and the old blacksmith’s forge, carefully preserved, and backed up against it streets
and streets of modern open-plan houses with a Volvo parked in front of each.’

‘Sort of. And further back there’s an older council estate -that was there when I was a child.’

‘The rot had set in even then?’

‘Mmm. It’s funny – we lived in the old village, so we thought ourselves a cut above the estate people, the newcomers. But
they thought themselves above us, because we had no bathrooms and only outside privies. But my father had nearly an acre of
garden, and grew all our own vegetables. And he kept rabbits. And a donkey.’

‘A donkey?’

‘For the manure.’

‘Ah. Messy, but practical. So you’re a real country boy, then?’

‘Original hayseed. Dad used to take me out into the woods and fields and sit me down somewhere and say, “Now, lad, keep your
mouth shut and your eyes open, and you’ll learn what there is to be learnt”. I’ve always thought that was a very good training
for a detective.’

‘So you always meant to be a detective?’

‘I suppose so. Once I’d got past the engine-driver stage. Reading all those Sherlock Holmes and Sexton Blake stories must
have turned my brain.’

She smiled. ‘I bet they’re proud of you. Do they still live in Upper Whatsit, your parents?’

‘Hawksey. Dad does – in the same cottage, still with the outside lavvy. Mum’s – Mum died.’ He still hated to say she was dead.
The verb seemed somehow less destructive. ‘What about your parents?’

‘They’re both alive. They live in Eastbourne.’

‘Is that where you come from?’

‘No, they retired there. I was brought up in London -Willesden, in fact. You see I’ve never strayed very far.’

‘And are they proud of you?’

‘I suppose so,’ she shrugged, and then caught his eye and smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t mean they don’t care about me or anything like
that, but there were an awful lot of us – I was seventh of ten. I don’t think you can care so intensely about each when you’ve
got so many. And I left home so long ago I don’t think of myself in relation to them any more. I expect they’re glad I earn
an honest crust and haven’t ended up in Holloway or Shepherds’ Market, but beyond that -’ She let the sentence go. ‘Are you
an only child?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, there you are then. Do you still visit your father?’

‘Sometimes. Not so much now. There never seems to be time, and he never got on with -’ He checked himself, and she glanced
at him.

‘With your wife? Well, I suppose you’ll have to mention her sometime. What’s her name?’

‘Irene,’ he said reluctantly. He didn’t want to talk about her to Joanna. On the other hand, when he said no more the silence
seemed to grow ominous and unnatural, and at last he said in a sort of desperation, ‘Mum liked her very much. She
was always glad we got married. But Dad couldn’t get on with her, and after Mum died it got to be a bit of a strain going
down there with Irene, and it looked rather pointed to go without her.’

‘I suppose it is rather a long way,’ Joanna said neutrally.

Another silence fell. Slider drove on, and the whole ugly, familiar, unnecessary edifice of in-law trouble crowded into his
mind; cluttering the view, like those wartime prefabs that somehow never got taken down. Mum had been so proud when he’d married
Irene. She saw it as a step-up – for her only son to marry a girl from the Estate, a girl who came from a house with a bathroom.
Irene was ‘superior’. She came from a ‘superior’ family, people who had a car and a television and went abroad for their holidays.
Irene’s mother didn’t go to work, and had a washing-machine. Irene’s father worked in an office, not with his hands.

Mum’s perceptions and her ambitions were equally uncomplicated. Her Bill had got a good education and a good job, and now
he was marrying a superior girl, and might one day own his own house. He thought with a familiar spasm of hatred of Catatonia,
and how Mum would have loved it. Well, they said men always married women like their mothers.

Dad, on the other hand, had somehow managed to avoid the standardisation of state education. He could read and write and his
general knowledge was extensive, but his approach to life had not been moulded. He lived close to the earth, and on his own
terms, clear-sighted and sharp-witted as wild animals were. Stubborn, too, like his donkey. He had said Irene wouldn’t do,
and he had stuck by that. To be fair, he had never really given her a chance, or made allowances for her youth and inexperience.
What had been nervousness on her side, Dad saw as ‘being stuck up’. Slider, seeing both sides, as was his wont, had been unable
to reconcile them.

But they had gone on putting up with each other as people will, rather than risk open breach. Slider remembered with muted
horror those Sunday visits. Oh the High Tea, complete with tinned salmon and salad and a fruit cake and trifle with hundreds-and-thousands
on the top! The polite, monotonous conversation; the photograph album and the
walk round the garden and the glass of sweet sherry ‘for the road’. It was a pattern which might have endured to this day,
had Mum not died and ended the necessity for dissembling.

‘What did he do, your father?’ Joanna asked suddenly. ‘Are you from a long line of policemen?’

‘God, no, I’m the first. Dad was a farm-worker.’ Even after all these years he still said it with a touch of defiant pride,
legacy of the days when Irene, ashamed, would tell people her father-in-law was a farmer, or sometimes an estate-manager.
‘The cottage we lived in was a tied cottage, but by the time Dad retired things had changed, and the new generation of estate
workers wouldn’t have wanted to live there, so they let him stay on. He’ll die there, and then I suppose they’ll gut it and
modernise it and put in central heating, and let it to some account executive as a weekend cottage.’

He knew he sounded bitter, and tried to lighten his tone. ‘You wouldn’t recognise the farm Dad worked on now. When I was a
kid, it used to have a bit of everything – a few dairy cows, some pigs, a bit of arable, chickens and ducks and geese wandering
about everywhere. Now it’s all down to fruit. Acres and acres of little stunted fruit trees, all in straight rows. They grubbed
up all the hedges and filled in all the ditches and planted thousands of those dwarf trees, in regiments, right up to the
road. It’s like a desert.’

How could fruit trees be like a desert? his logic challenged him as he lapsed into silence. But they gave the impression of
desolation, all the same. Joanna laid a hand on his knee for an instant and said as if to comfort him, ‘Things are changing
now. They’re beginning to realise their mistake and replant the hedgerows -’

‘But it’s too late for the hedgerows I knew,’ he said. He turned his head for an instant to look at her. Her eyes, which he
had thought were plain brown, he now saw were richly tapestried in gold and tawny and russet, glowing in the sunlight. ‘That’s
the terrible thing about my job,’ he added. ‘By its very nature, almost everything I do is done too late.’

‘If it makes you so unhappy, why do you do it?’ she asked, as people had asked before, as he had asked himself.

‘Because it would be worse if I didn’t,’ he said.

* * *

Simon Thompson lived in a flat in the Newington Green Road, where people lived who couldn’t yet quite afford Islington. It
was above a butcher’s shop and must, Atherton thought, be one of the last furnished flats in the world. He walked up the dark
and dirty stairs to the first floor and stopped before the gimcrack, cardboard door with the sticky-paper label. The stairs
went on upward, more sordidly than ever, and a smell of nappies and burnt fat slid down them towards him.

Thompson opened the door violently at the first knock as though he had been crouched behind it listening to the footfalls.
On the phone he had sounded nervous, protesting and consenting almost simultaneously. Presumably he was well aware that he
was the person, after Joanna Marshall, who would be presumed to have been closest to Anne-Marie Austen.

‘Sergeant Atherton.’ He stated rather than asked. ‘Come in. I don’t know why you want to speak to me. I don’t know anything
about it.’

‘Don’t you, sir?’ Atherton said peacefully, following Thompson into a flat so perilously untidy that it would have taken a
properties-buyer a month at least to recreate it for a television serial.

‘In here,’ Thompson said, and they entered what was evidently the sitting-room. There was a massive and ancient sofa, around
which the flat had probably been built in the first place, and a set of mutually intolerant chairs and tables. A hi-fi system
occupied one wall, incongruously new and expensive, and at least answering the question as to what Thompson spent his income
on. It seemed to have everything, including a compact-disc player, and was ranked with a huge collection of records, tapes
and discs, and a pair of speakers like black refrigerators.

Everything else in the room was swamped with a making tide of clothes, newspapers, sheet music, empty bottles, dirty crockery,
books, correspondence, empty record sleeves, apple cores, crumpled towels, and overflowing ashtrays. The windows were swathed
in net so dirty it was at first glance
invisible. Curtains lay folded, and evidently laundered, on the windowsill waiting to be rehung, but even from where he stood
Atherton could see the thick film of dust on them.

‘I hardly knew her, you know,’ Thompson said defensively as soon as they were inside. He turned to face Atherton. He was a
small and slender young man of ripe and theatrical good looks. His hair was dark and glossy and a little too carefully styled,
his skin expensively tanned, his eyes large and blue with long curly lashes. His features were delicately pretty, his mouth
full and petulant, his teeth white as only capping or cosmetic toothpaste could make them. He wore a ring on each hand and
a heavy gold bracelet on his right wrist. His left wrist was weighed down with the sort of watch usually called a chronometer,
which was designed to do everything except make toast, and would operate under water to a depth of three nautical miles.

He was the sort of man who would infallibly appeal to a certain kind of woman, who would equally infallibly be exploited by
him. ‘Spoilt’, Atherton’s mother would have put it more simply. A mummy’s boy: all his life women had made a pet of him, and
would continue to do so. Probably had elder sisters who’d liked dressing him up when he was a toddler and taking him out to
show off to friends. He was also, Atherton noted, extremely nervous. His hands, held before him defensively, were never still,
and there was a film of moisture on his deeply indented upper lip. His eyes flickered to Atherton’s and away again, like those
of a man who knows that the corpse under the sofa is imperfectly concealed, and fears that a foot may be sticking out at one
end.

‘May I sit down?’ Atherton said, digging himself out a space at the end of the sofa and sitting in it quickly before the tide
of junk could flow back in. ‘It’s purely a matter of routine, sir, nothing to worry about. We have to talk to everyone who
might be able to help us.’

‘But I hardly knew her,’ Thompson said again, perching himself on the arm of the chair opposite, with the air of being ready
to run.

Atherton smiled. ‘No-one seems to have known her well, from what we’re told, but you must have known her better
than the rest. After all, you did have an affair with her, didn’t you?’

He licked his lips. ‘Someone told you that, did they?’ He leaned forward confidentially. ‘Look here, I’ve got nothing to hide.
I went to bed with her a couple of times, that’s all. It happens all the time on tour. It doesn’t mean anything. Anyone will
tell you that.’

‘Will they, sir?’ Atherton was writing notes, and Thompson took the bait like a lamb. Lamb-bait?

‘Yes, of course. It wasn’t serious. She and I had a bit of fun, just while we were on tour. So did lots of people. It ends
when we get back on the plane to come home. That’s the way it’s played. But then when we got home she started to pretend it
had been serious, and saying I’d promised to marry her.’

‘And had you?’

‘Of course not,’ he cried in frustration. ‘I never said anything like that. And she kept hanging around me and it was really
embarrassing. Then when I told her to get lost, she said she’d make me sorry, and tried to make trouble with my girlfriend
-’

‘Oh, you have a girlfriend, then, have you sir?’