Orchestrated Death (30 page)

‘Yes, I know. But we have to go through the motions.’

Late in the afternoon, Norma got a bite. She met with Slider out of sight round the corner, and said breathlessly. ‘The owner
of that paper shop recognised the mugshot. He said she often used to go to the grocer’s shop further down on the other side,
and his wife says they sell a special kind of olive oil that’s imported in barrels, and you bring your own tin and they fill
it up from the tap. They used to see Anne-Marie go past quite often with a tin.’

Slider was silent, his brow drawn with thought.

‘I thought you’d be turning cartwheels.’ Norma said reproachfully.

‘I never know whether to cheer or sob whenever that damned olive oil comes into the picture,’ he sighed. ‘Come on then, let’s
go and see.’

The grocery shop was one of those tiny food stores turned into a supermarket by dint of adding a double-sided display
down the centre and a cash register by the door. There was nothing unusual about it at first sight: there was the stack of
battered wire baskets; the moth-eaten vegetables and brown-spotted apples in cardboard boxes; the freezer cabinet long overdue
for defrosting piled high with Lean Cuisine, French-bread pizza and frozen chilli con carne; the cold cabinet sporting sticky,
dribbling yoghurt tubs and packets of rubber ham; the chipped lino tiles on the floor and the film of dust over the less popular
lines of tins and bottles.

Slider went in alone and wandered along the aisles, pretending to search for something. When he turned the end of the row
and looked back towards the cash desk he saw something that alerted his instincts, something that was unusual about this shop.
The owner had appeared from somewhere and was standing by the till watching him, and he was not an Asian. He was white and
middle-aged, and among the enduring stereotypes of Slider’s childhood he would have been put down unerringly as good old Mr
Baldergammon who runs the village shop. He was stoutish, pinkish, baldish, and respectable-looking, in a neat brown overall-coat.
Had this been a television sitcom he would have been wearing a spotless white grocer’s apron, and his eyes would have twinkled
benevolently from behind gold-rimmed half-glasses.

Slider moved towards him, his senses alert, and the man said, ‘Can I help you, sir?’

He fell a long way short of his stereotype. Unaided by props, his eyes did not twinkle, but glared with muted hostility. He
did not smile benevolently, and despite his words, he did not seem at all to want to help Slider, unless it was to help him
out of the shop, and pronto.

‘I’m looking for olive oil,’ Slider said, meeting the eyes at the last moment. The grocer’s remained stony.

‘You passed it. Top shelf, right-hand side, down the end,’ he said curtly.

Slider smiled an amiable smile and cocked an eyebrow at a quizzical angle, expressions he did well and convincingly. ‘Oh,
well, actually, I’m looking for a special sort. A friend of mine cooked me an Italian meal and she says the olive oil you
use makes all the difference. So naturally I asked her
what sort she uses and she said it was called Virgin Green. Silly name, isn’t it?’

‘All we’ve got is what’s on the shelf,’ the grocer said coldly.

Slider smiled a little more ingratiatingly. ‘But she told me you sell it here, only not in tins, in a barrel, like draught
beer, so I thought as I was passing I’d call in and see if I could get some.’

‘We don’t sell it any more,’ he said curtly.

‘Oh, but I’m sure it wasn’t very long ago she last got some from you. Are you sure you haven’t got any, out the back, perhaps?’

The man made an involuntary movement with his eyes towards the door – presumably the door to the storeroom. It was no more
than a flicker, quickly controlled, but Slider’s scalp was prickling with the briny tension which filled the air. He could
almost hear the clicking and whirring.

‘I told you, we don’t do it any more. Not enough call for it. It was too expensive.’

‘Well, could you tell me where you got it from?’

‘Italy,’ he said impatiently. ‘Is there anything else you want?’ The question verged on the belligerent, and was obviously
meant to be interpreted as Why don’t you piss off?

‘Oh, no, thanks, that was all,’ Slider said, almost Uriah Heeping now, and departed. The grocer slammed the door behind him,
and there was a distinctive little click which was the plastic sign hanging from the back of the door being turned to show
‘Closed’. Slider went in search of Norma with a sweet singing of success in his ears.

He met her at the appointed rendezvous round the corner, where she was engaged in cat-licking her face clean with the corner
of a handkerchief and a pocket mirror. Her hair was ruffled, and her collar slightly askew.

‘Anything?’ he asked her, eyeing her condition. ‘I hope you didn’t take any risks.’

‘There’s an alleyway that runs right along the back to service the back yards. They all had high walls, but to an ex-PT teacher
like me –’ She shrugged. ‘Piece of piss.’

‘You were never a PT teacher,’ Slider reminded her severely. ‘Did you see anything?’

‘The door was locked and the window was barred – pretty filthy too – but I hitched myself up and managed to have a look through
it. It’s just an ordinary storeroom, full of boxes and so on. But on one shelf there are about twenty tins like the one in
Anne-Marie’s flat.’

Slider sighed with pure pleasure. They’ve made a mistake. At last they’ve made a mistake – only a small one, but my God!’

‘How did you get on?’

‘He practically threw me out. Told me they didn’t sell olive oil any more – no demand for it. My God, we must really have
rattled him!’ He stopped and sniffed. ‘What have you been treading in?’

‘I hate to think.’ Norma said, making use of the kerb’s edge. ‘That yard was the resort of uncleanly creatures. Do you really
think we’re onto something?’

‘I’m sure of it. A shop like that would never deny selling something they had in stock. Come on, my lovely girl, I’m going
to buy you a drink. There must be a pub somewhere near here.’

‘Anywhere, so long as there’s a Ladies where I can clean myself up.’

‘Thompson was right,’ Atherton said triumphantly as Slider came in. ‘She was smuggling!’

Slider simpered. ‘Whatever happened to “Good morning, darling, did you sleep well?“’

‘I’ve spent all night going through these daybooks and Anne-Marie’s bank statements, and there are some remarkable correlations,’
Atherton went on.

‘You’re not as much fun as you used to be,’ Slider complained. ‘What daybooks?’

‘Saloman of Vincey’s. It’s an interesting exercise. The turnover of that little shop is astonishing when you’ve been there
and seen how empty it is.’

‘In Bond Street you need an astonishing turnover,’ Slider pointed out.

‘All right, but look at these figures. Saloman admits to buying one fiddle from Anne-Marie, correct name and
address, in October 1987. Now look at the bank statement.’ Slider leaned over his shoulder and followed the line of the long
forefinger. ‘He pays her three hundred thousand pounds – which, by the way, my friend at Sotheby’s thinks was on the high
side for those days – and she makes a deposit of four thousand five hundred. In March ’88 he admits to paying her a hundred
thousand for two bows, and she makes a deposit in her account of fifteen hundred.’ He looked up at Slider. ‘I don’t have to
tell you, do I, that each of those deposits represents exactly one and a half per cent of the purchase price?’

‘No, dear. But what happened to the rest of the money?’

‘Yes, that’s the question. The way I see it, Cousin Mario gives her the goods, she smuggles them in, sells them to Saloman,
banks her cut, and sends the rest of the money to –someone.’

‘Someone?’ Slider said sternly.

Atherton ruffled his hair out of order. ‘I haven’t worked that bit out yet,’ he admitted.

Slider ruffled the hair back again. ‘Only teasing.’

‘But look, we can take this further. There are only two occasions when Anne-Marie’s name appears in the daybook, but every
time she made a large deposit in her account, there’s a corresponding sale around the same date at Vincey’s. Sometimes the
amounts don’t match exactly, but she may have kept some cash back for immediate expenses –that’s no problem. The other names
used on those occasions are never the same twice. I don’t know whether it would be worth checking them out.’

‘I suppose they used her real name twice to make sure she was implicated and therefore couldn’t rat on them,’ Slider mused.
‘That’s quite feasible. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t have had a good fiddle and a couple of bows to sell, but more
than that would look suspicious. But we know she didn’t go on tour as often as once a month.’

Atherton shrugged. ‘She needn’t necessarily go with an orchestra. As long as she only took out one fiddle and came back with
one, she was safe enough. And we do know that she was always taking time off from her Orchestra, ostensibly to play for outside
concerns.’

‘True – and we also know that she didn’t play for the
Birmingham Orchestra as she said she did.’

‘What puzzles me is how they got her own fiddle back to her each time.’

Slider shrugged. They may simply have imported it legally, through the normal channels. All they’d have to do would be to
pay the duty and VAT, which would be peanuts compared with the value of the fiddle she brought in.’

‘But what was the scam, guv? I mean, the fiddles were sold openly at Saloman of Vincey’s, and you’d have thought that if there
was anything wrong with that setup, it would have been discovered long ago. I mean they knew all about it at Sothebys.’

‘We’ll have to check up on them, and the olive-oil company, and the shop in Tutman Street. But my hunch is that they’ll all
come out squeaky clean. They’d have to be, to be any use as a laundry service.’

Atherton’s eyebrows went up. ‘The Italian Connection. So you really think it was The Family after all?’

‘I’d bet on it. An elaborate scheme to launder dirty money and pass it back to Italy where it could be used openly and legitimately.
Of course, Anne-Marie’s part must only have been a tiny one, one little wheel in a huge machine. And when she started to go
wrong, she was simply eliminated.’

‘Yes, but by whom? We don’t seem to be any closer to knowing who actually killed her.’

‘When we know how, we’ll know who,’ Slider said, but without conviction. ‘But I’m afraid that aspect may turn out to be the
least important of the whole business. I think I’d better go and talk to Dickson. Let me have a copy of those notes about
the money, will you?’

When he came back in with the copy, Atherton lounged gracefully against the wall beside Slider’s desk in the only patch of
sunshine in the room. ‘It looks as if you were right all along, guv,’ he said. ‘I was barking up the wrong tree with that
Thompson business. But I wonder if we’ll ever be able to prove it wasn’t all legit.’

‘I doubt it,’ Slider said without looking up. ‘That’s the whole point of laundering.’

‘But if a thing is a lie, it ought to be possible to nail it.’

‘In an ideal world.’

‘We might manage to squeeze them a bit on probability. Look, I did some more working out. We can tell from Anne-Marie’s bank
statement that she must have been passing around two million pounds to that shop in Tutman Street, and how did they account
for that? If olive oil costs, say, thirty pounds a tin –’

‘What?’

‘Oh yes.’ Atherton was pleased at having surprised him. ‘Extra virgin oil is very expensive. In Sainsbury’s it’s about two
quid for a little tiny bottle. Now at thirty pounds a tin, they’d have had to record sales of around sixty-seven thousand
tins a year to account for the money. And that would be about a hundred and eighty tins of it per day. Can you believe a little
shop like that would sell all that much olive oil?’

‘Probability isn’t proof. And you can bet they’ve worked out their accounting problems. They needn’t have passed all the sales
through one shop or one class of goods. And we don’t even know that that’s where she took the money.’

‘No, but she must have gone there for something.’

‘And even if you did manage to nail that little shop, you’d only be snipping one tiny blood vessel in the system. You don’t
imagine that two million pounds was the summit of their ambitions, do you?’

‘To quote you on that one, we do what we can, and it has to do. Your trouble is you take everything too seriously. If you
can scoop up one little turd, the world is a sweeter place.’

‘Thank you, Old Moore,’ Slider said, not without bitterness.

She had drawn the heavy, port-coloured curtains against the dreary evening, and lit the fire, and it glinted off things half-hidden
in corners and increased the Aladdin’s Cave effect of the red Turkish carpet and the cushion-stuffed chairs and sofa.

‘You’re very late. Was it trouble?’

‘I came by a roundabout route, and spent some time driving about watching my rear-view mirror.’

‘I hope that’s just paranoia.’

‘Reasonable precautions, now they’ve seen my face.’ He took her in his arms and kissed her. It seemed to have been a very
long time since he had last done that.

After a while she rubbed a fond hand along his groin and remarked, ‘At least you always carry a blunt instrument around with
you.’

‘Not always. Only when I’m with you.’

‘You say such lovely things to a girl.’ She tilted her head up at him, smiling a long, curved smile. ‘Do you want to eat now,
or afterwards? Speak now, because things will start to burn soon.’

He laughed. ‘You’re so basic. It’s lovely.’

‘It’s healthy. Well?’

‘Turn the gas off,’ he said.

Much later they sat by the fire and ate steak with avocado salad followed by Gorgonzola with a bottle of Rully. Joanna was
splendidly, unconcernedly naked – ‘Saves on napkins,’ she said – while Slider wore only his underpants, because her carpet
was so prickly.

‘You’ve changed so much,’ she marvelled, ‘in such a short time. That first night I met you, you were so reserved. You’d never
have done something like this.’