Orchestrated Death (3 page)

‘Might be a good idea to get Cosgrove onto taking statements,’ Atherton was saying. ‘At least he speaks the lingo.’

A grey sky, which Slider had thought was simply pre-dawn greyness, settled in for the day, and resolved itself into a steady,
cold and sordid rain.

‘All life is at its lowest ebb in January,’ Atherton said. ‘Except, of course, in Tierra del Fuego, where they’re miserable
all year round. Cheese salad or ham salad?’ He held up a roll in each hand and wiggled them a little, like a conjurer demonstrating
his bona fides.

Slider looked at them doubtfully. ‘Is that the ham I can see hanging out of the side?’

Atherton tilted the roll to inspect it, and the pink extrusion flapped dismally, like a ragged white vest which had accidentally
been washed in company with a red teeshirt. ‘Well, yes,’ he admitted. ‘All right, then,’ he conceded, ‘cheese salad or rubber
salad?’

‘Cheese salad.’

‘I was afraid you’d say that. I never thought you were the sort to pull rank, guv,’ Atherton grumbled, passing it across.
‘Funny how the act of making sandwiches brings out the Calvinist in us. If you enjoy it, it must be sinful.’ He looked for
a moment at the bent head and sad face of his superior. ‘I could make you feel good about the rolls,’ he offered gently. ‘I
could tell you about the pork pies.’

The corner of Slider’s mouth twitched in response, but only briefly. Atherton let him be, and went on with his lunch
and his newspaper. They had made a para in the lunchtime
Standard:

The body of a naked woman has been discovered in an empty flat on the White City Estate in West London. The police are investigating.

Short and nutty, he thought. He was going to pass it over to Slider, and then decided against disturbing his brown study.
He knew Slider well, and knew Irene as well as he imagined anyone would ever want to, and guessed that she had been giving
him a hard time last night. Irene, he thought, was an excellent deterrent to his getting married.

Atherton led a happy bachelor life in a dear little terraced artisan’s cottage in what Yuppies nowadays called West Hampstead
– the same kind of logic as referring to Battersea as South Chelsea. It had two rooms up and two down, with the kitchen extended
into the tiny, high-walled garden, and the whole thing had been modernised and upmarketised to the point where its original
owners entering it through a time warp would have apologised hastily and backed out tugging their forelocks.

Here he lived with a ruggedly handsome black ex-tomcat called, unimaginatively, Oedipus; and used the lack of space as an
excuse not to get seriously involved with any of his succession of girlfriends. He fell in love frequently, but never for
very long, which he realised was a reprehensible trait in him. But the conquest was all – once he had them, he lost interest.

Apart from Oedipus, the person in life he loved best was probably Slider. It was certainly the most important and permanent
relationship he’d had in adult life, and in some ways it was like a marriage. They spent a lot of time in each other’s company,
were forced to get on together and work together for a common end. Atherton knew himself to be a bit of a misfit in the force
– a whizz kid without the whizz. He thought of himself as a career man, a go-getter, keen on advancement, but he knew his
intellectual curiosity was against him. He was too well read, too interested in the truth for its own sake, too little inclined
to tailor his efforts to the
results that were either possible or required. He would never be groomed for stardom – he left unlicked those things which
he ought to have licked, and there was no grace in him.

In that respect he resembled Slider, but for different reasons. Slider was dogged, thorough, painstaking, because it was in
his nature to be: he was no intellectual gazelle. But Atherton not only admired Slider as a good policeman and a good man,
he also liked him, was even fond of him; and he felt that Slider, who was reserved and didn’t make friends easily, depended
on him, both on his judgement and his affection. It was a good relationship, and it worked well, and if it weren’t for Irene,
he thought they would have been even closer.

Irene disliked Atherton for taking up her husband’s time which she felt ought to be spent with her. He thought she probably
suspected him vaguely of leading Bill astray and keeping him out late deliberately on wild debauches. God knew he would have
done given the chance! The fact that Slider could have married someone like Irene was a fundamental mark against him which
Atherton sometimes had difficulty in dismissing. It also meant that their relationship was restricted mainly to work, which
might or might not have been a good thing.

Slider looked up, feeling Atherton’s eyes on him. Slider was a smallish man, with a mild, fair face, blue eyes, and thick,
soft, rather untidy brown hair. Jane Austen – of whom amongst others Atherton was a devotee – might have said Slider had a
sweetness of expression. Atherton thought that was because his face was a clear window on his character, which was one of
the things Atherton liked about him. In a dark and tangled world, it was good to know one person who was exactly what he seemed
to be: a decent, kindly, honest, hard-working man, perhaps a little overconscientious. Slider’s faint, worried frown was the
outward sign of his inner desire to compensate personally for all the shortcomings of the world. Atherton felt sometimes protective
towards him, sometimes irritable: he felt that a man who was so little surprised at the wickedness of others ought surely
to be less puzzled by it.

‘What’s up, guv?’ he asked. ‘You look hounded.’

‘I can’t stop thinking about the girl. Seeing her in my mind’s eye.’

‘You’ve seen corpses before. At least this one wasn’t mangled.’

‘It’s the incongruity,’ Slider said reluctantly, knowing that he didn’t really know what it was that was bothering him. ‘A
girl like her, in a place like that. Why would anyone want to murder her
there
of all places?’

‘We don’t know it was murder,’ Atherton said.

‘She could hardly have walked up there stark naked and let herself in without someone seeing her,’ Slider pointed out. Atherton
gestured with his head towards the pile of statements Slider had been sifting through.

‘She walked up there at some point without being seen. Unless all those residents are lying. Which is entirely possible. Most
people seem to lie to us automatically. Like shouting at foreigners.’

Slider sighed and pushed the pile with his hands. ‘I don’t see how any of them could have had anything to do with it. Unless
it was robbery from the person – and who takes all the clothes, right down to the underwear?’

‘A second-hand clothes dealer?’

Slider ignored him. ‘Anyway, the whole thing’s too thorough. Everything that might have identified her removed. The whole
place swept clean, the door knobs wiped. The only prints in the whole place are the kid’s on the front-door knob. Someone
went to a lot of trouble.’

Atherton grunted. ‘There are no signs of a struggle, and no sounds of one according to the neighbours. Couldn’t it have been
an accident? Maybe she went there with a boyfriend for a bit of sex-and-drugs naughtiness, and something went wrong. Boom
– she’s dead! Boyfriend’s left with a very difficult corpse to explain. So he strips her, cleans the place up, takes her clothes
and handbag, and bunks.’

‘And cuts her foot?’

‘She might have done that any time – stepped on the broken glass from the front door for instance.’

‘In the shape of the letter T? Anyway, they were postmortem cuts.’

‘Oh – yeah, I’d forgotten. Well, she might have been killed
somewhere else, and taken up there naked in a black plastic sack.’

‘Well, she might,’ Slider said, but only because he was essentially fair-minded.

Atherton grinned. ‘Thanks. She’s not very big, you know. A well-built man could have carried her. Everyone indoors watching
telly – he could just pick his moment to walk up the stairs. Dump her, walk down again.’

‘He’d have to arrive in a car of some sort.’

‘Who looks at cars?’ Atherton shrugged. ‘In a place like that – ideal, really, for your average murderer. In an ordinary street,
people know each other’s cars, they look out of the window, they know what their neighbours look like at least. But with a
common yard, people are coming and going all the time. It’s a thoroughfare. And all the living-room windows are at the back,
remember. It would be easy not to be noticed.’

Slider shook his head. ‘I know all that. I just don’t see why anyone would go to all that trouble. No, it’s got a bad smell
to it, this one. A setup. She was enticed there by the killer, murdered, and then all traces were removed to prevent her from
being identified.’

‘But why cut her foot?’

‘That’s the part I hate most of all,’ Slider grimaced.

‘ “I don’t know nothin’ I hate so much as a cut toe,” ’ Atherton said absently.

‘Uh?’

‘Quotation. Steinbeck.
The Grapes of Wrath’

The duty officer stuck his head round the door, registered Slider, and said, ‘Records just phoned, sir. I’ve been ringing
your phone – didn’t know you were in here. It’s negative on those fingerprints, sir. No previous.’

‘I didn’t think there would be,’ Slider said, his gloom intensifying a millimetre.

The disembodied face softened: everybody liked Slider.

‘I’m just going to make some tea, sir. Would you like a cup?’

Nicholls came into Slider’s room in the afternoon holding a
large brown envelope. Slider looked up in surprise.

‘You’re early, aren’t you? Or has my watch stopped?’

‘Doing Fergus a favour. He’s tortured with the toothache,’ Nicholls said. He and O’Flaherty were old friends, having gone
through police college together. He called O’Flaherty ‘Flatulent Fergus’, and O’Flaherty called him ‘Nutty Nicholls’. They
sometimes dropped into a well-polished routine about having been in the trenches together. Nicholls was a ripely handsome
Highlander with a surprising range of musical talents. At a police concert in aid of charity he had once brought the house
down by singing ‘The Queen of the Night’ aria from
The Magic Flute
in a true and powerful soprano, hitting the cruel F in alt fair and square on the button. Not so much the school of Bel Canto,
he had claimed afterwards, as the school of Can Belto.

‘So much tortured,’ Nicholls went on, rolling his Rs impressively, ‘that he forgot to give you these. I found them lying on
his desk. I expect you’ve been waiting for them.’

He held out the envelope and Slider took and opened it.

‘Yes, I was wondering where they’d got to,’ he said, drawing out the sheaf of photographs and spreading them on his desk.
Nicholls leaned on his fists and whistled soundlessly.

‘Is that your corpus? A bit of a stunner, isn’t she? You’d best not let the wife see any of these, or bang goes your overtime
for the next ten years.’ He pushed the top ones back with a forefinger. ‘Poor wee lassie,’ he said. ‘No luck ID-ing her yet?’

‘We’ve got nothing to go on,’ Slider said. ‘Not so much as a signet ring, or an appendix scar. Nothing but this mark on her
neck, and I don’t know that that’s going to get us anywhere.’

Nicholls picked up one of the close-ups of the neck, and grinned at Slider. ‘Oh Mrs Stein – or may I call you Phyllis?’

‘You know something?’

Nicholls tapped the photograph with a forefinger. ‘You and Freddie Cameron I can understand, but I’m a wee bit surprised young
Atherton hasn’t picked up on this.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t see it at the flat. And we’ve been waiting for the photographs,’ Slider said patiently.

‘Tell me, Bill, did you notice anything about her fingers?’

‘Nothing in particular. Except that she had very short fingernails. I suppose she bit them.’

‘Ah-huh. Nothing of the sort, man. She was a fiddle-player. A vi-o-linist. This is the mark they get from gripping the violin
between the neck and the shoulder.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Well, I couldn’t swear it wasnae a viola,’ Nicholls said gravely. ‘And the fingernails have to be short, you see, for pressing
down on the strings.’

Slider thought. ‘They were short on both hands.’

‘I expect she’d want them symmetrical,’ Nicholls said kindly. ‘Well, this gives you a way of tracing her, anyway. Narrows
the field. It’s a closed kind of world – everyone knows everyone.’

‘I suppose I’d start with the musicians’ union,’ Slider hazarded. Like most people, he had no idea how the musical world was
arranged internally. He’d never been to a live symphony concert, though he had a few classical records, and could tell Beethoven
from Bach. Just.

‘I doubt that’d be much use to you,’ Nicholls said. ‘Not without the name. They don’t have photographs in their central records.
No, if I were you, I’d ask around the orchestras.’

‘We don’t know that she was a member of an orchestra.’

‘No, but if she played the fiddle, it’s likely she was on the classical side of the business rather than the pop. And if she
wasn’t a member of an orchestra, she’d still likely be known to someone. As I said, it’s a closed world.’

‘Well, it’s a lead, anyway,’ Slider said, getting up with renewed energy and shuffling the photographs together. ‘Thanks,
Nutty.’

Nicholls grinned. ‘N’t’all. Get yon Atherton onto it, I should. I heard a rumour he was havin’ social intercourse with a flute-player
at last year’s Proms. That’s why I was surprised he didn’t recognise the mark.’

‘If it was a mark on the navel, he’d have spotted it straight off,’ Slider said.

* * *

It was a mistake to try to go home at half past five, as anyone more in the habit of doing so than Slider would have known.
The A40 – the Western Avenue – was jammed solid with Rovers and BMWs heading out for Gerrard’s Crawse. Slider was locked in
his car for an hour with a disc jockey called Chas or Mike or Dave – they always seemed to have names like the bark of a dog
– who burbled on about a major tailback on the A40 due to roadworks at Perivale. So he was further hindered in his desire
to forget his work for a while by finding himself stationary for a long period on the section of the road which ran beside
the White City Estate.