Orchestrated Death (27 page)

She looked at him with the resignation of a woman who sees that she will never be as important to her husband as his work,
and for whom to stop minding is the worst of the possible alternatives. Slider saw the resistance go out of her
and was grateful, though he didn’t know why it had happened.

He said, ‘This is a photograph of the girl who was murdered, Anne-Marie Austen. The case I’m investigating. You can easily
check that, if you don’t believe me.’

She turned away. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I believe you.’ She pretended to be looking in a drawer, to keep her back to him, and her
next words sounded curiously muffled. ‘I shouldn’t have looked in your wallet. I’m sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does. I shouldn’t have done it.’

He thought she was crying. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Come to bed.’

But when she turned she was dry-eyed, only looked very tired. She got into bed beside him and lay down, not touching him,
and then turned on her side, facing away from him, her sleep position. Slider put his book down and hesitated, looking down
at her. So it was all right again. The danger was over. He had gone up the side turning and the posse had thundered past.
It would be all right for a long time now because she would feel guilty about having wrongly accused him.

He wished that he could have made love to her then: it might have comforted them both, and given at least a semblance of resolution
to what was otherwise unfinished business between them. But it had been too long since they last did it for habit to achieve
the gesture, and he could not do it from the heart of any feelings for her. He switched out the light and lay down. Since
there was Joanna, he thought in the dark, he could not do that.

The department meeting was held in the CID room, the other offices being too small to hold everyone simultaneously. The others
were all there when Slider went in. WDC Swilley, who hated her real name of Kathleen so much that she actually preferred being
called Norma, was sitting on one of the battered desks swinging her long, beautiful legs for the benefit of her colleagues.
She was a tall, strong, athletic girl, with the golden skin, large white teeth, streaky-blonde hair, and curiously unmemorable
features of a California Beach Beauty. Slider often had the feeling that he was the only member of the department she hadn’t
seduced, which he felt lent him a certain superiority over the others. Obviously she regarded him as a real person, while
the others were only sex objects to her.

She smiled at him now and said, ‘Here he comes, crumpled and in a hurry, the perfect example of the Married Middle-Management
Man.’

‘You missed out some. What about Menopausal?’ said Beevers, sitting where he could get the best view of the famous Legs, which
often haunted his dreams. He was an almost circular young man, with thick, densely curly light-brown hair, and a rampant and
disarming moustache. He was married to a tiny, round brown mouse of a woman called Mary. He adored her, but her serviceable
legs only twinkled, never swung.

‘How about Manic?’ Atherton added.

‘Not today,’ Slider said, loosening his tie with an automatic
gesture. Today I am a monument of calm. A man who has done his homework can’t be shaken. Time you youngsters learned that
– flair is no substitute for hard work.’

He looked around them as they groaned automatically. There was DC Anderson, just back from holiday and probably bulging with
photographs he wanted to show around. He was keen on what he called ‘artistic shots’, which nearly all turned out to be various
stages of a sunset reflected on sea and wet sand. The other DCs, wooden-headed, obsessive Hunt and quiet, introverted Mackay,
were sitting solemnly side by side on hard chairs, bracketed by the sprawling charm of Swilley and Atherton, and counterpoised
by stumpy Beevers, who had a bit missing from his brain and so could never be made to feel shame or embarrassment.

These, he thought, far more than the three in Ruislip, were his family; only if it were a family, he was probably the mother,
while the Superintendent was the authoritarian father. They were one short at the moment, for the DCI, Colin Raisbrook, had
suffered a mild heart attack and was on extended sick-leave. It was not yet clear whether he would be returning to the department.
If they gave him early retirement, as Slider had, long realised with an inward sigh, Irene would be expecting him to be promoted
to DCI in Raisbrook’s place; and if he was not, his life would be made extremely unpleasant.

‘It’s a filthy day,’ Norma said unemphatically, staring out of the window at the cold and steady rain, ‘and due to get worse.
Any moment now Dickson will come breezing through that door like an advertisement for cosmetic toothpaste, and I shall want
to murder him all over again.’

‘Hullo Super!’ Anderson chirruped, and Hunt obediently chanted the ritual reply.

‘Hullo Gorgeous!’

‘If he calls me WDC Snockers once more, I shall murder him,’ Swilley went on undeterred. ‘I hate a man in authority who tries
to be funny and then expects you to laugh.’

‘I don’t think he does,’ Atherton said. ‘I think he exists purely for his own gratification.’

This was too far above the head of Hunt, who brought the tone down to his own level by saying, ‘But if you murdered
him, Norm, what would you do with the body?’

‘Sell it to the canteen,’ Mackay suggested. ‘Always roast pork on Wednesdays.’

‘I thought they got that from Hammersmith Hospital,’ Anderson joined in. ‘Wasn’t it Wednesday we had that pileup at Speake’s
Corner, the Cortina and the artic? Brought the Cortina driver out in pieces?’

‘You lot don’t get any better. All this fourth-form humour makes me tired,’ Atherton said witheringly.

‘You’re always tired,’ Swilley remarked with a sad shake of the head, and Anderson hooted.

‘How would you know that, Norma? Let us in on your secret.’

They were interrupted, not before time in Slider’s opinion, by the entry of Detective Superintendent Dickson. Dickson was
large and broad and weighty, a prize bull of a man – no-one would ever have thought of calling him fat – whose brisk movements,
added to the sheer size of him, gave him an unstoppable impetus, like a runaway lorry. He had a wide, ruddy, genial Yorkshire
face, held in place by a spreading and bottled nose that spoke of a terrifying blood pressure. He had scanty, sandy hair,
and a smile whose front uppers looked too numerous and regular to be his own.

He had survived years of being called Dickson of Shepherd’s Bush Green by pretending that he had thought of it first, and
had developed, like a compensatory limp, a passion for nicknames of his own. In a service fairly evenly divided between hard
men pretending to be soft and soft men pretending to be hard, Dickson was in a category of one: a hard man pretending to be
a soft man pretending to be hard. He drank whisky almost as continuously as he breathed, was never seen the worse for it,
and one day would be found dead at his desk. Slider could never decide whether he would be glad or sorry at that moment.

‘Good morning lads. Good morning Norma,’ he breezed, favouring her with the full Royal Doulton. She glowered back. ‘Sit down
everybody. We’ve got a lot to get through this morning.’

It was some time before they had cleared away all the other matters and got to the murder of Anne-Marie Austen.
Slider brought them up to date on what they had got so far, and then Dickson gathered their attention.

‘I don’t mind telling you that the powers that be are not too happy about this case – two more deaths, and nothing concrete
to go on. Now either they’re very good, or we’re very bad, and either way we’re going to lose it if we don’t get something
on the go. As far as the Thompson death goes, “N” District want to know if we think it’s part of the same transaction and
I take it that we do? All right. They’ll do the legwork their end, and liaise with Atherton. Now, what have we got to follow
up?’

‘The Birmingham end ought to be looked into,’ Atherton said with an eye to the main chance. ‘We know she was making regular
trips there, and there’s the question of the flat she rented which she oughtn’t to have been able to afford. I could –’

‘Right,’ Dickson interrupted. ‘Bill, you cover that. Take someone with you. Atherton, you’re the musical genius around here
– follow up this bloody violin. I don’t believe no-one’s seen the thing since 1940. And get onto this Saloman bloke and find
out all about him.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Atherton said, rolling his eyes at Slider.

‘Beevers, I want you to check out the girl’s aunt – your face isn’t known down there. There’s our money motive, strong and
nice. Find out who she knows, where she goes, where she was that night. Find out about her trips to London. It’s a small village,
so you shouldn’t have any trouble getting people to talk. Now, what else?’

‘I’m convinced it’s a large organisation behind it, sir,’ Slider said.

‘I know you are, and I have to admit it has that smell to me, but there’s nothing to prove it isn’t just a very ruthless individual.’

‘The cuts on her foot, sir – did anything turn up about those?’ Dickson didn’t immediately answer, and Slider went on, watching
him carefully, ‘With the Italian connection, I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t some connection with the Family? Those
cuts did make it look like a ritual killing.’

There was a short and palpable silence. Dickson’s face went
blank, his eyes uncommunicative. There’s nothing I can tell you about that,’ he said evenly. ‘Nobody’s got anything to say
about the letter T.’

‘Why shouldn’t it be the murderer’s initial?’ Atherton said smoothly.

‘Why indeed,’ Dickson agreed, with an air of humouring him.

‘Suggestion, sir,’ Slider said quickly. Dickson’s face became a wary blank again. ‘Whether it’s an organisation behind it
or an individual, my guess would be that the Thompson death was meant to tie up the loose ends: murder, followed by remorse
and suicide. I wonder if there might be some mileage in letting them think we bought it? If the villain or villains thought
the heat was off –’

‘What about Mrs Gostyn?’ Atherton interposed.

‘Accident. It might even have been one,’ Slider said.

‘We’d have to get the press to cooperate,’ Dickson said, ‘but it might just turn something up. I’m in favour. All right, I’ll
see to it.’

Slider nodded his thanks, but felt curiously unsatisfied. There was something about the way Dickson agreed that made him feel
it had been decided beforehand by someone else. Something was going on. Cautiously, he slid a toe into the water. ‘What about
the Italian end, sir? This Cousin Mario? Can we get any cooperation on him or the house in Paradise Alley?’

Dickson’s face grew redder with anger. ‘I think you’ve got quite enough to be going on with already, finding out where she
was killed, where the drug came from, what they did with her clothes, just for starters. And who’s this bloke O’Flaherty says
has been hanging around the station? Has he got anything to do with it?’

‘I don’t know –’ Slider began, and Dickson roared like a bull.

‘You don’t know bloody much, and that’s a fact. I’m telling you, all of you, that there are certain people who are not at
all happy about the way this case is going, so let’s get to it, and get something concrete down.’ He rose to his feet like
the Andes, glowered around them for an instant, and then transformed his features grotesquely into a fatherly grin.
‘And be careful, all right? You’re not in this job to get your bloody heads blown off.’

He power-surged out of the room, leaving Slider feeling more than ever convinced that something was going on that they were
not allowed to know about. Dickson had manufactured his rage to prevent the questions being asked that he was not prepared
to answer. The others, however, were just shifting in their seats and muttering as if the headmaster had been in a nasty bate
and given the whole school a detention.

‘The mushroom syndrome,’ Beevers said as if he had just thought of it. ‘Keep us in the dark and shovel shit over us.’

‘Very original, Alec,’ Norma said kindly.

He turned his hairy lips upward and smiled graciously at her. ‘There’s one theory that no-one’s thought of, though.’

‘Except you, I suppose?’

‘Right! Thompson was murdered by a left-handed surgeon, wasn’t he? And John Brown, the Orchestra personnel manager, is a raving
bender and living with this bloke Trevor Byers, who just happens to be a surgeon at St Mary’s. Suppose Austen was blackmailing
them, and they got fed up with it and killed her. And Thompson somehow found out about it, and so they did him as well?’

He gazed around his audience triumphantly. Norma clasped her hands to her breast and whispered, ‘Brilliant!’

Beevers accepted the tribute. ‘This Mafia bullshit!’ he went on kindly. ‘Now the girl may or may not have smuggled a Stradivarius
into the country, but there’s no evidence she didn’t just do it for herself, or that she ever did it more than once. And,
with all due respect to you, guv, it’s too clumsy to have been the work of a professional. This is a typical amateur setup,
to me.’

‘Brains and originality,’ Norma remarked. ‘You can’t do without ’em.’

‘Beevers can,’ Atherton said.

‘We had better leave no stone unturned, I suppose,’ Slider said. ‘But for God’s sake be careful. Don’t go blundering about
and getting complaints laid against us.’

‘Leave it to me, guv,’ Beevers said, pleased. ‘Softly softly.’ He rose and headed for the door. ‘Well, I’ll love you and leave
you. I’m going to –’

‘Grin like a dog and run about the city,’ Atherton suggested.

Beevers paused. ‘Come again?’

‘That’s a quotation from Psalm 59,’ Atherton told him.

Beevers gave him a superior smile. ‘We’re Chapel,’ he said unassailably.

Slider was surprised to have Norma assigned to him for the trip to Birmingham, until she revealed that she knew Birmingham
quite well, having lived there for many years. Since he could not take Joanna, both for professional reasons and because she
was working, Slider was glad to have Swilley with him. He found her company restful, and he also considered her to be the
best policeman in ‘F’ district, and nicer to look at than an
A to
Z.