Orchestrated Death (2 page)

‘It came in on a 999 call – anonymous tip-off, but it took a while to get on to it, because it was a kid who phoned, and naturally
they thought it was a hoax. But Uniform’s there now, and Atherton’s on his way. Nice start to your day.’

‘Could be worse,’ Slider said automatically, and then seeing Irene beginning to wake, realised that if he didn’t get on his
way quickly before she woke properly, it most certainly would be.

* * *

The White City Estate was built on the site of the Commonwealth Exhibition, for whose sake not only a gigantic athletics stadium,
but a whole new underground station had been built. The vast area of low-rise flats was bordered on one side by the Western
Avenue, the embryo motorway of the A40. On another side lay the stadium itself, and the BBC’s Television Centre, which kept
its back firmly turned on the flats and faced Wood Lane instead. On the other two sides were the teeming back streets of Shepherd’s
Bush and Acton. In the Thirties, the estate had been a showpiece, but it had become rather dirty and depressing. Now they
were even pulling down the stadium, where dogs had been racing every Thursday and Saturday night since Time began.

Slider had had business on the estate on many an occasion, usually just the daily grind of car theft and housebreaking; though
sometimes an escaped inmate of the nearby Wormwood Scrubs prison would brighten up everyone’s day by going to earth in the
rabbit warren of flats. It was a good place to hide: Slider always got lost. The local council had once put up boards displaying
maps with an alphabetical index of the blocks, but they had been eagerly defaced by the waiting local kids as soon as they
were erected. Slider was of the opinion that either you were born there, or you never learnt your way about.

In memory of the original exhibition, the roads were named after outposts of the Empire – Australia Road, India Way and so
on – and the blocks of flats after its heroes – Lawrence, Rhodes, Nightingale. They all looked the same to Slider, as he drove
in a dazed way about the identical streets. Barry House, New Zealand Road. Who the hell was Barry anyway?

At last he caught sight of the familiar shapes of panda and jam sandwich, parked in a yard framed by two small blocks, five
storeys high, three flats to a floor, each a mirror image of the other. Many of the flats were boarded up, and the yard was
half blocked by building equipment, but the balconies were lined with leaning, chattering, thrilled onlookers, and despite
the early hour the yard was thronged with small black children.

A tall, heavy, bearded constable was holding the bottom
of the stairway, chatting genially with the front members of the crowd as he kept them effortlessly at bay. It was Andy Cosgrove
who, under the new regime of community policing, had this labyrinth as his beat, and apparently not only knew but also liked
it.

‘It’s on the top floor I’m afraid, sir,’ he told Slider as he parted the bodies for him, ‘and no lift. This is one of the
older blocks. As you can see, they’re just starting to modernise it.’

Slider cocked an eye upwards. ‘Know who it is?’

‘No sir. I don’t think it’s a local, though. Sergeant Atherton’s up there already, and the surgeon’s just arrived.’

Slider grimaced. ‘I’m always last at the party.’

‘Penalties of living in the country, sir,’ Cosgrove said, and Slider couldn’t tell if he were joking or not.

He started up the stairs. They were built to last, of solid granite, with cast-iron banisters and glazed tiles on the walls,
all calculated to reject any trace of those passing up them. Ah, they don’t make ’em like that any more. On the top-floor
landing, almost breathless, he found Atherton, obscenely cheerful.

‘One more flight,’ he said encouragingly. Slider glared at him and tramped, grey building rubble gritting under his soles.
The stairs divided the flats two to one side and one to the other. ‘It’s the middle flat. They’re all empty on this floor.’
A uniformed constable, Willans, stood guard at the door. ‘It’s been empty about six weeks, apparently. Cosgrove says there’s
been some trouble with tramps sleeping in there, and kids breaking in for a smoke, the usual things. Here’s how they got in.’

The glass panel of the front door had been boarded over. Atherton demonstrated the loosened nails in one corner, wiggled his
fingers under to show how the knob of the Yale lock could be reached.

‘No broken glass?’ Slider frowned.

‘Someone’s cleaned up the whole place,’ Atherton admitted sadly. ‘Swept it clean as a whistle.’

‘Who found the body?’

‘Some kid phoned emergency around three this morning. Nicholls thought it was a hoax – the kid was very young, and
wouldn’t give his name – but he passed it on to the night patrol anyway, only the panda took its time getting here. She was
found about a quarter to five.’

‘She?’ Funny how you always expect it to be male.

‘Female, middle-twenties. Naked,’ Atherton said economically.

Slider felt a familiar sinking of heart. ‘Oh no.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Atherton said quickly, answering the thought behind the words. ‘She doesn’t seem to have been touched
at all. But the doc’s in there now.’

‘Oh well, let’s have a look,’ Slider said wearily.

Apart from the foul taste in his mouth and the ferment in his bowels, he had a small but gripping pain in the socket behind
his right eye, and he longed inexpressibly for untroubled sleep. Atherton on the other hand, who had shared his debauch and
presumably been up before him, looked not only fresh and healthy, but happy, with the intent and eager expression of a sheepdog
on its way up into the hills. Slider could only trust that age and marriage would catch up with him, too, one day.

He found the flat gloomy and depressing in the unnatural glare from the spotlight on the roof opposite – installed to deter
vandals, he supposed. ‘The electricity’s off, of course,’ Atherton said, producing his torch. Boy scout, thought Slider savagely.
In the room itself DC Hunt was holding another torch, illuminating the scene for the police surgeon, Freddie Cameron, who
nodded a greeting and silently gave Slider place beside the victim.

She was lying on her left side with her back to the wall, her legs drawn up, her left arm folded with its hand under her head.
Her dark hair, cut in a long pageboy bob, fell over her face and neck. Slider could see why Cosgrove thought she wasn’t a
resident. She was what pathologists describe as ‘well-nourished’: her flesh was sleek and unblemished, her hair and skin had
the indefinable sheen of affluence that comes from a well-balanced protein-based diet. She also had an expensive tan, which
left a white bikini-mark over her hips.

Slider picked up her right hand. It was icy cold, but still flexible: a strong, long-fingered, but curiously ugly hand, the
fingernails cut so short that the flesh of the fingertips bulged a little round them. The cuticles were well-kept and there
were no marks or scratches. He put the hand down and drew the hair back from the face. She looked about twenty-five – perhaps
younger, for her cheek still had the full and blooming curve of extreme youth. Small straight nose, full mouth, with a short
upper lip which showed the white edge of her teeth. Strongly marked dark brows, and below them a semicircle of black eyelashes
brushing the curve of her cheekbone. Her eyes were closed reposefully. Death, though untimely, had come to her quietly, like
sleep.

He lifted her shoulder carefully to raise her a little against the hideously papered wall. Her small, unripe breasts were
no paler than her shoulders – wherever she had sunbathed last year, it had been topless. Her body had the slender tautness
of unuse; below her flat golden belly, the stripe of white flesh looked like velvet. He had a sudden vision of her, strutting
along a foreign beach under an expensive sun, carelessly self-conscious as a young foal, all her life before her, and pleasure
still something that did not surprise her. An enormous, unwanted pity shook him; the dark raspberry nipples seemed to reproach
him like eyes, and he let her subside into her former position, and abruptly walked away to let Cameron take his place.

He walked around the rest of the flat. There were three bedrooms, living-room, kitchen, bathroom and WC. The whole place was
stripped bare, and had been swept clean. No litter of tramps and children, hardly even any dust. He remembered the grittiness
of the stairs outside and sighed. There would be nothing here for them, no footprints, no fingerprints, no material evidence.
What had become of her clothes and handbag? He felt already a sense of unpleasant anxiety about this business. It was too
well organised, too professional. And the wallpaper in each room was more depressing than the last.

Atherton appeared at the door, startling him. ‘Dr Cameron wants you, guv.’

Freddie Cameron looked up as Slider came in. ‘No sign of a struggle. No visible wounds. No apparent marks or bruises.’

‘A fine upstanding body of negatives,’ Slider said. ‘What does that leave? Heart? Drugs?’

‘Give me a chance,’ Cameron grumbled. ‘I can’t see anything in this bloody awful light. I can’t find a puncture, but it’s
probably narcotics – look at the pupils.’ He let the eyelids roll back, and picked up the arms one by one, peering at the
soft crook of the elbow. ‘No sign of usage or abusage. Of course you can see from the general condition that she wasn’t an
addict. Could have taken something by mouth, I suppose, but where’s the container?’

‘Where are her clothes, for the matter of that,’ said Slider. ‘Unless she walked up here in the nude, I think we can rule
out suicide.
Someone
was obviously here.’

‘Obviously,’ Cameron said drily. ‘I can’t help you much, Bill, until I can examine her by a good light. My guess is an overdose,
probably by mouth, though I may find a puncture wound. No marks on her anywhere at all, except for the cuts, and they were
inflicted post mortem.’

‘Cuts?’

‘On the foot.’ Cameron gestured. Slider hunkered down and stared. He had not noticed before, but the softly curled palm of
her foot had been marked with two deep cuts, roughly in the shape of a T. They had not bled, only oozed a little, and the
blood had set darkly. Left foot only – the right was unmarked. The pads of the small toes rimmed the foot like fat pink pearls.
Slider began to feel very bad indeed.

‘Time of death?’ he managed to say.

‘Eight hours, very roughly. Rigor’s just starting. I’ll have a better idea when it starts to pass off.’

‘About ten last night, then?’ Slider stared at the body with deep perplexity. Her glossy skin was so out of place against
the background of that disgusting wallpaper. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said aloud.

Cameron put his hand on Slider’s shoulder comfortingly. ‘There is no sign of forcible sexual penetration,’ he said.

Slider managed to smile. ‘Anyone else would simply have said rape.’

‘Language, my dear Bill, is a tool – not a blunt instrument. Anyway, I’ll be able to confirm it after the post. She’ll be
as stiff as a board by this afternoon. Let me see – I can do it
Friday afternoon, about four-ish, if it’s passed off by then. I’ll let you know, in case you want to come. Nice-looking kid.
I wonder who she is? Someone must be missing her. Ah, here’s the photographer. Oh, it’s you, Sid. No lights. I hope you’ve
got yours with you, dear boy, because it’s as dark as a mole’s entry in here.’

Sid got to work, complaining uniformly about the conditions as a bee buzzes about its work. Cameron turned the body over so
that he could get some mugshots, and as the brown hair slid away from the face, Slider leaned forward with sudden interest.

‘Hullo, what’s that mark on her neck?’

It was large and roughly round, about the size of a half-crown, an area of darkened and roughened skin about halfway down
the left side of the neck; ugly against the otherwise flawless whiteness.

‘It looks like a bloody great lovebite,’ Sid said boisterously. ‘I wouldn’t mind giving her one meself.’ He had captured for
police posterity some gruesome objects in his time, including a suicide-by-hanging so long undiscovered that only its clothes
were holding it together. Decomposing corpses held no horrors for him, but Slider was interested to note that something about
this one’s nude composure had unnerved the photographer too, making him overcompensate.

‘Is it a bruise? Or a burn – a chloroform burn or something like that?’

‘Oh no, it isn’t a new mark,’ Cameron said. ‘It’s more like a callus – see the pigmentation, where something’s rubbed there
– and some abnormal hair growth, too, look, here. Whatever it is, it’s chronic’

‘Chronic? I’d call it bloody ugly,’ Sid said.

‘I mean it’s been there a long time,’ Cameron explained kindly. ‘Can you get a good shot of it? Good. All right, then, Bill
– seen all you want? Let’s get her out of here, then. I’m bloody cold.’

A short while later, having seen the body lifted onto a stretcher, covered and removed, Cameron paused on his way out to say
to Slider, ‘I suppose you’ll want to have the prints and dental records
toot sweet!
Not that her teeth’ll tell you much – a near perfect set. Fluoride has a lot to answer for.’

‘Thanks Freddie,’ Slider said absently.
Someone must be missing her
Parents, flatmates, boyfriend – certainly, surely, a boyfriend? He stared at the bare and dirty room:
Why here, for heaven’s sake?

‘The fingerprint boys are here, guv,’ Atherton said in his ear, jerking him back from the darkness.

‘Right. Start Hunt and Hope on taking statements,’ Slider said. ‘Not that anyone will have seen anything, of course – not
here.’

The long grind begins, he thought. Questions and statements, hundreds of statements, and nearly all of them would boil down
to the Three Wise Monkeys, or another fine regiment of negatives.

In detective novels, he thought sadly, there was always someone who, having just checked his watch against the Greenwich Time
Signal, glanced out of the window and saw the car with the memorable numberplate being driven off by a tall one-legged red-headed
man with a black eyepatch and a zigzag scar down the left cheek. I
could tell ’e wasn’t a gentleman, Hinspector, ’cause ’e was wearing brown boots.