Orchestrated Death (4 page)

Sometime this afternoon Freddie Cameron would have done the post. Slider had been to one or two out of interest, in order
to know what happened, and he had not wished to attend this one. It was a particularly human horror, this minute and dispassionate
mutilation of a dead body. No other species practised it on its own kind. He felt inexplicably unnerved at the thought. For
some reason this particular young woman refused to take on the status of a corpse but remained a person in his mind, her white
body floating there like the memory of someone he had known. She was in the back of his head, like the horrors seen out of
the corner of the eye in childhood: like the man with no face behind the bedroom door after Mum had put the light out. He
knew he mustn’t look at it, or it would get him; and yet the half-admitted shape called the eye irresistibly.

He tried to concentrate on the radio programme. A listener had just called in, apparently – to judge by the background noise
– from some place a long way off that was suffering from a hailstorm, or possibly an earthquake. A distorted voice said, ‘Hullo
Dive, this is Eric from Hendon. I am a first-time caller. I jussliketsay, I lissnayour programme every day, iss reelly grite.’
Slider remembered being told that soundwaves never die, simply stream off into space for ever and ever. What would they make
of that, out on Alpha Centauri Beta?

He was going home early in the hope of scoring some Brownie points after the storms of the last few days. It struck him as
a dismal sort of reason for going home, and he thought enviously of Atherton heading back to his bijou little
cottage, a few delectable things to eat, and a stimulating evening with a new young woman to be conquered. Not that Slider
wanted stimulation or a new young woman – he was too tired these days for the thought of illicit sex to do other than appal
him; but peace and comfort would have been nice to look forward to.

But the house, which he hated, was Irene’s, decorated and furnished to her requirements, not his. Wasn’t it the same for all
married men? Probably. Probably. All the same, the three-piece suite seemed to have been designed for looking at, not sitting
on. All the furniture was like that: it rejected human advances like a chilly woman. It was like living in one of those display
houses at the Ideal Home Exhibition.

And Irene cooked like someone meting out punishment. No, that wasn’t strictly fair. The food was probably perfectly wholesome
and well-balanced nutritionally, but it never seemed to taste of anything. It was joyless food, imbued with the salt water
of tears. The subconscious knowledge that she hated cooking would have made him feel guilty about evincing any pleasure in
eating it, even if there had been any.

When they were first married, Slider had done a lot of the cooking in their little bedsit in Holland Park. He liked trying
out new dishes, and they had often laughed together over the results. He examined the memory doubtfully. It didn’t seem possible
that the Irene he was going home to was the same Irene who had sat cross-legged on the floor and eaten chilli con carne out
of a pot with a tablespoon. She didn’t like him to cook now – she thought it was unmanly. In fact, she didn’t like him going
into the kitchen at all. If he so much as made a cup of tea, she followed him round with a J cloth and a tight-lipped expression,
wiping up imaginary Spillings.

When he got home at last, it was all effort wasted, because Irene was not there. She had gone out to play bridge with the
Harpers and Ernie Newman, which, had he thought hard enough, he should have known, because she had told him last week about
it. Slider had said sooner her than him, and she’d asked why in a dangerous sort of way, and he’d said because Newman was
an intolerable, stuffed-shirted, patronising, constipated prick. Irene primmed her lips and said there was no need for him
to bring bowels into it, he wasn’t
talking to one of his low Met friends now, and if he spent less time with them and more with decent people he’d be able to
hold a civilised conversation once in a while.

Then they had had a row, which ended with Irene complaining that they never went anywhere together any more, and that was
more or less true, not only because of his job, but because they no longer liked doing the same kind of things. He liked eating
out, which she thought was just a waste of money. And she liked playing bridge, for God ’s sake!

Actually, he was pretty sure she didn’t like bridge, that she had only learned it as the entrée to the sort of society to
which she thought they ought to belong. The Commissioner and his wife played bridge. He didn’t say that to her of course,
when she badgered him to learn. He just said he didn’t like card games and she said he didn’t like anything, and he had found
that hard to refute just for the moment. His concerns seemed to have been whittled down to work, and slumping in front of
the telly for ten minutes before passing out. It was years since he had stayed awake all the way through a film. He was becoming
a boring old fart.

Of course, that wasn’t congenital. He had lots of interests really: good food and wine and vintage cars and gardening and
walking in the country and visiting old houses – architecture had always been a passion of his, and he used to sketch rather
well in a painstaking way – but there just didn’t seem to be room in his life any more. Not time, somehow, but room, as if
his wife and his children and his mortgage and his job swelled like wet rice year by year – bland, damp and weighty – and
squeezed everything else out of him.

No Brownie points tonight, then. No peace either – the living-room was occupied by the babysitter, who was watching a gameshow
on television. A ten-second glance at the screen suggested that the rules of the game comprised the contestants having to
guess which of the Christian names on the illuminated board was their own in order to win a microwave oven or a cut-glass
decanter and glasses. The applause following a right answer was as impassioned as an ovation for a Nobel-prize winner.

The babysitter was fifteen and, for some reason Slider had
never discovered, her name was Chantal. Slider regarded her as marginally less competent to deal with an emergency than a
goldfish, and this was not only because, short of actual self-mutilation, she had done everything possible to make herself
appear as ugly and degenerate as possible. Her clothes hung sadly on her in uneven layers of conflictingly ugly colours, her
shoes looked like surgical boots, and her hair was died coke-black, while the roots were growing out blonde: a mind-numbing
reversal of the normal order of things which made Slider feel as if he were seeing in negative.

To add to this, her eyelids were painted red and her fingernails black, she chewed constantly like a ruminant, and she wore
both earrings in the same ear, though Slider assumed that this was fashion and not absent-mindedness. She was actually quite
harmless, apart from her villainous appearance, and her parents were decent, pleasant people with a comfortable income.

She looked up at him now with the intensely unreliable expression of an Old English sheepdog.

‘Oh, hullo, Mr Slider. I wasn’t expecting you,’ she said, and a surprising hot blush ran up from under her collar. She fingered
her Phurnacite hair nervously. She was in fact desperately in love with him, though Slider hadn’t twigged it. He had replaced
Dennis Waterman in her heart the instant she discovered that Dennis Waterman was married to Rula Lenska. ‘Shall I turn this
off?’

‘No, it’s all right. I won’t disturb you. Where are the children?’

‘Matthew’s round his friend Simon’s, and Kate’s in her room reading.’ They eyed each other for a moment, trapped by politeness.
‘Shall I fix you a drink?’ Chantal asked suddenly. It was like a scene from
Dynasty.
Slider glanced around nervously for the television cameras.

‘Oh – er – no, thanks. You watch your programme. Don’t mind me. I’ve got things to do.’

He backed out into the hall and closed the door. Fix him a drink, indeed! He looked round, wondering what to do next. No comfort,
he thought. He really hadn’t anything to do. He was so unused to having time on his hands that he felt hobbled by it. He decided
to go upstairs and see Kate, who
hadn’t been awake when he left that morning, and whom he hardly ever saw at night because she usually went to bed before he
got home. The door of her room was closed, and through it he heard the muted tones of what must surely be the same radio programme.

‘Hullo Mike. This is Sharon from Tooting. I jussliketersay, I lissnayour programme all the time, iss reelly grite …’

Or perhaps there was only ever one, an endless loop of tape run by a computer from a basement somewhere behind Ludgate Circus.

He stopped on the dim landing, and suddenly the dead girl was there with him, ambushing him from the back of his mind: the
childlike fall of her hair and the curve of her cheek, the innocence of her nakedness. He put his fingers to his temples and
pressed and drew his breath long and hard. He felt on the brink of some unknown crisis; he felt suddenly out of control.

Kate must have heard something – she called out ‘Is that you Daddy?’ from inside her room. Slider let out his breath shudderingly,
drew another more normal. He reached for the door handle.

‘Hullo, my sweetheart,’ he said cheerfully, going in.

It was an old-fashioned morgue, cold and high-ceilinged, with marble floors that echoed hollowly when you walked across them,
and a sink in the corner with a tap that dripped. There was a strong smell of disinfectant and formalin, which did not quite
mask a different smell underneath – warmer, sweetish and dirty.

Cameron, fresh from the path unit at one of the newer hospitals, contrasted this chilly old tomb with the low-ceilinged, strip-lighted,
air-conditioned, rubber-tile-floored place he had just left. He felt a vague fondness, all the same, for the old morgues like
this which were fast disappearing. Not only had he done his training in such places, but the architecture reminded him cosily
of his primary school in Edinburgh. All the same, he decided to leave his waistcoat on.

His dapper form enveloped in protective apron and gloves, he bent forward over the pale cadaver on the herringbone-gullied
table, his breath just faintly visible on the cold air as, whistling, he made the first sweeping incision from the point of
the chin to the top of the pubic bone.

‘Right then, here we go,’ he said, reaching under the table with his foot for the pedal which turned on the audio recorder.
Out of sheer force of habit he reached up and tapped the microphone with a knuckle to see if it was working, and it clunked
hollowly. The assistant watched him phlegmatically. He had tested the machinery himself as a matter of course, as he always
did, as Cameron knew he
always did; but Cameron had no faith in machines. He had done his training in the days of handwritten notes, and even then
he had known fountain pens to go wrong.

Now, like a cheerful gardener pruning roses, Cameron snipped through the cartilages which joined the ribs, freed them from
the breastbone, separated the breastbone from the collarbones, and then with the economical force of long practice, opened
out the two sides of the chest like cabinet doors. Inside, neatly disposed in their ordained order, were the internal organs,
displayed like an anatomical drawing in a medical textbook before his enquiring eyes.

Slider was not present. Cameron had phoned him earlier to say that he would not be posting the girl until six-thirty, in case
he wanted to come, but Slider had refused. Cameron thought his old friend sounded distinctly odd. He hoped old Bill wasn’t
going to crack up. Many a good man had gone that way: Cameron had seen it in the army as well as in the force, time and time
again, and it was always the quiet, conscientious ones you had to watch. When a man had worry at work and worry at home –
well, pressure started to build up. And poor old Bill’s Madam was not exactly the Pal of the Period.

The words
male menopause
floated through his mind and he dismissed them irritably. He disliked jargon, particularly inaccurate jargon. When a man
of forty-odd started fancying young girls, it was either because things were not right at home, or he was trying to prove
something to himself – in either case, it was nothing to do with hormones. Not that Bill was chasing skirts, of course – he
simply wasn’t that sort – but it came to the same thing. He was jumpy, distinctly jumpy.

‘I’d like to come, Freddie, but I’ve got a heap of reports I’ve been putting off,’ Slider had said. ‘It’s quiet now, and I
daren’t put them off again.’ Now this was transparently an excuse. Cameron knew how much there was to do when a division handled
a murder case – the Incident Room to be set up, thousands of statements to go over – no need to go dragging in reports. Then
Slider had given a nervous laugh and added unnecessarily, ‘You know what paperwork is.’ When a close friend starts talking
to you like an idiot,
Cameron considered, you knew there was something seriously on his mind.

Still whistling, and wielding his large knife with a flourish, more the jolly family butcher now than the cheerful gardener,
he removed the internal organs in turn, weighed, sliced and examined them, and took sections for analysis, which the assistant
sealed in sterile jars and labelled while Cameron watched sternly. He had a natural horror of unlabelled specimens. When the
body was completely eviscerated, he made a lateral cut across the scalp from ear to ear, freed the tissues from the bone,
and drew the front half of the scalp down over the face like a mask, and the rear half down over the neck like a coalman’s
flap. Then with an electric bone-saw he cut through the cranium and lifted the top off the skull, much as he had taken the
top off his boiled egg that morning, and with very little more effort. With a little more cutting and snipping, he was able
to slide his hands in under the brain and lift it out whole. He laid it on the slab and sliced it like a rather pallid country
loaf.