Orchestrated Death (6 page)

‘You only just caught me. I was just going out for something to eat,’ said Atherton.

‘I’ve had mine. And I’ve found out who the girl is.’

‘I deduced both those facts – you smell of garlic and you’re looking smug.’

‘I also know why she was where she was: she was working at the TVC that evening.’

‘Lunch can wait. Tell me all,’ Atherton said. He sat down on the edge of a desk, raising a cloud of dust into the streams
of sunlight that were fighting their way through the grime on the windows of the CID room, which no-one had ever washed in
the history of Time. Everyone else was out, the telephones dozed, and the room had that unnatural midday hush.

Slider told him what he had learned that morning. ‘It’s possible that whoever killed her knew that the Orchestra wouldn’t
be working again for ten days, and that therefore she wouldn’t be missed. Stripping the body, too – they’d have expected it
to delay us for weeks. After all, if it hadn’t been for Nicholls identifying that mark on her neck –’

‘Unlike Nicholls, I didn’t have the benefit of seeing it. And unlike you, by the way.’

‘All right, sonny – how would you like to go back to tracing stolen videos?’

It was a familiar joking exchange of sass and threat, but suddenly there was a harsher note in it that surprised both of them,
and they eyed each other with some embarrassment. Atherton opened his mouth to say something placatory, but Slider forestalled
him. ‘You’d better go and get your lunch, hadn’t you? Who’s minding the shop, anyway?’

‘Fletcher. He’s in the bog.’

Slider shrugged and went away to his own room, angry with himself, and a little puzzled. Everyone needed help in this job
– why was he suddenly so defensive?

Freddie Cameron phoned.

‘I’ve got the forensic reports from Lambeth, Bill. I’ve just sent off a full copy of the post-mortem report to you, but I
thought you’d like to know straight away, as it’s your case.’

‘Yes, thanks, Freddie. What was it?’

‘As I thought – an overdose of barbiturate.’

‘Self-administered?’

‘I think it very unlikely. The puncture was in the back of the right hand, damned awkward place to do it to yourself. The
veins slide about if you don’t pull the skin taut. Anyway, I found the puncture as soon as I got her into a good light, and
it was the only one, so there’s no doubt about that. But there was some very slight subcutaneous bruising of the left upper
arm and right wrist. I’d say she was handled by an expert – someone who knew how to subdue with the minimum force, and without
damaging the goods. Professional.’

‘Left upper arm and right wrist?’

‘Yes. It seems to me that if she was sitting down, for instance, someone could pass their arm right round her body from behind
and grip the wrist to hold it still while administering the injection with the other hand.’

‘Or there might have been two of them. She’d probably struggle. No other marks? No ligatures?’

‘Nothing. But they wouldn’t have to hold her for long. She’d have been unconscious within seconds, and dead within minutes.’

‘What was it, then?’

‘Pentathol.’

‘Pentathol?’

‘Short-acting anaesthetic. It’s what they give you in the anteroom of an operating theatre to put you under, before they give
you the gas.’

‘Yes, I know that. But it seems an odd choice.’

‘It produces deep anaesthesia very quickly. Of course, it also wears off very quickly – except that this poor child was given
enough to fell a horse. Wasteful chaps, murderers.’

‘And you’re sure that’s what it was? No other drugs?’

‘Of course I’m sure. As I said, this stuff normally wears off very quickly, but if you administer enough of it, it paralyses
the victim’s respiratory system. They stop breathing, and death follows without a struggle.’

‘Presumably only a doctor would have access to it?’

‘Yes, but even then, not every doctor. It would have to be an anaesthetist at a hospital, or someone with access to hospital
theatre drugs. An ordinary GP who wrote out a prescription for it wouldn’t get it. Not what I’d call the murderer’s usual
choice. It’s eminently detectable, and so difficult to come by that I should have thought the source would be easily traceable.
Now if it were me, I’d have –’

‘I think they wanted it to be detected,’ Slider said abruptly.

‘What’s that?’

‘Well, look – there was no attempt to hide the body, or to make it look like suicide. They must have known she’d be found
before long. And then there were the cuts on her foot.’

‘Ah yes, the cuts. Inflicted after death, of course.’

‘Yes.’

‘With a very sharp blade. They were deep, but quite clean – no haggling. A strong hand and something like an old-fashioned
cutthroat razor, but with a shorter blade.’

‘A scalpel, perhaps,’ Slider said quietly.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. Exactly like that.’ There was a silence, filled only with the hollow, subaural thrumming of an open line.
‘Bill, I’m not liking this. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘It looks,’ Slider said slowly, ‘like an execution.’

‘Pour encourager les autres,’
Cameron said in his appalling Scottish French. ‘The letter T – Traitor? Or Talker perhaps? But put pentathol, scalpel and
a strong, steady hand together, and it comes out Surgeon. That’s what I don’t like.’

‘I don’t like any part of it,’ Slider said. An execution? What could she have been into, that young girl with her unused body?

‘Well, you should have your copy of the report this afternoon, with any luck. When’s the inquest?’

‘As soon as possible. At least we don’t have any distraught parents clamouring for release of her body.’

‘You’ve not ID’d her then?’

‘Yes, but we’ve no next of kin yet, and no-one’s asked after her. No-one at all.’

He must have sounded a little how he felt, for Cameron said kindly, ‘She wouldn’t have felt a thing, you know. It would have
been very quick and easy, like a mercy killing. They just put her to sleep, like an old dog.’

Anne-Marie Austen had lived in a shabby, three-storeyed Edwardian house off the Chiswick High Road. There were three bells
on the front door, with paper labels: Gostyn, Barclay and Austen. A prolonged ringing at the lowest bell eventually produced
Mrs Gostyn, the erstwhile owner of the house, who now lived as a protected tenant in the ground-floor accommodation with use
of garden.

She was very old, and had presumably once been fat, for her thick, white, ginger-freckled skin was now much too big for her
and hung around her sadly like borrowed clothes. She gripped Atherton’s forearm with surprising strength to keep him still
while she told him her tale of the glories from which she had fallen; passing on, when he showed signs of restlessness, to
the iniquities of the Barclays on the first floor, who left their baby with a child minder so that they could both go out
to work, and who hoovered at all hours of the evening which interfered with Mrs Gostyn’s television, and who made the whole
ceiling shake with their washing machine, she gave him her word, so it was a wonder the house didn’t come down around her
ears.

Miss Austen? Yes, Miss Austen lived on the top floor. She played the violin in an orchestra, which was very nice in its way,
but there was the coming and going at all hours, and then practising, practising, up and down scales until you thought you’d
go mad. It wasn’t even as if it was a nice tune you could tap your feet to. You mightn’t think it to look at
her, but Mrs Gostyn had been a great dancer in her time, when Mr Gostyn was alive.

Atherton recoiled slightly from the arch look, and tried to withdraw his arm, but though the flesh of her hand slid about,
the bones inside still gripped him fiercely. He murmured as little encouragingly as he could.

‘Oh yes, a great dancer. Max Jaffa, Victor Sylvester – we used to roll the carpet back, you know, whenever there was anything
like that on the wireless. Of course,’ with a moist sigh, ‘we had the whole house then. Lodgers were not thought of. But you
can’t get servants these days, dear, not even if you could afford them, and I can’t climb those stairs any more.’

‘Did Miss Austen have many visitors?’ Slider asked quickly, before she could tack off again.

‘Well, no, not so many. She was away a lot, of course, for her work – sometimes for days at a time, but even when she was
home she didn’t seem to be much of a one for entertaining. There’s her friend – a young lady – the one she worked with, who
came sometimes –’

‘Boyfriends?’ Atherton asked.

Mrs Gostyn sniffed. ‘There have been men going up there, once or twice. It’s not my business to ask questions. But when a
young woman lives alone in a flat like that, she’s bound to get into trouble sooner or later. Far be it from me to speak ill
of the dead, but –’

Atherton felt Slider’s surprise. There had been no official identification given out, no photograph in the press.

‘How did you know she was dead, Mrs Gostyn?’

The old woman looked merely surprised. ‘The other policeman told me, of course. The one who came before.’

‘Before?’

‘Tuesday afternoon. Or was it Wednesday? Inspector Petrie he said his name was. A very nice man. I offered him a cup of tea,
but he couldn’t stop.’

‘He came in a police car?’

‘Oh no, an ordinary car, like yours. Not a panda car or anything.’

‘Did he show you his identification?’ Slider tried.

Of course he did,’ she said indignantly. ‘Otherwise I
wouldn’t have given him the key.’

Atherton made a sound like a moan, and she glanced at him disapprovingly. Slider went on, ‘Did he say why he wanted the key?’

‘To collect Miss Austen’s things. He took them away with him in a bag. I offered him a cup of tea but he said he hadn’t time.
Thank you very much for asking, though, he said. A very nice, polite man, he was.’

‘Shit fire,’ Atherton muttered, and Slider quelled him with a glance.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know this Inspector Petrie,’ he said patiently. ‘Did he happen to mention to you, Mrs Gostyn, where he
came from? Which police station? Or did you see it on his identity card?’

‘No, dear, I couldn’t see it properly because of not having my reading glasses on, but he very kindly read it out to me, his
name, I mean – Inspector Petrie, CID, it said. Such a nice voice – what I’d call a cultured voice, like Alvar Liddell. Unusual
these days. Are you telling me there’s something wrong with him?’

Atherton intercepted a glance from Slider and headed back to the car radio.

‘I’m afraid there may have been some little confusion,’ Slider said gently. ‘I don’t think I know Inspector Petrie. Could
you describe him to me?’

‘He was a tall man,’ she said after some thought. ‘Very nicely spoken.’

‘Clean-shaven?’

She thought again. ‘I think he was wearing a hat. Yes, of course, because he lifted it to me – a trilby. I remember thinking
you don’t see many men wearing hats these days. I always think a person looks unfinished without a hat on, out of doors.’

Slider changed direction. ‘He arrived yesterday – at what time?’

‘About two o’clock, I should think it was.’

‘And you gave him the key to Miss Austen’s flat? Did you go upstairs with him?’

‘I did not. It’s not my business to be doing that sort of thing, and so I’ve told Mrs Barclay many a time when she
wanted delivery men letting in. I only keep the keys for the meter man and emergencies, that’s what I’ve told her, besides
going up and down those stairs, which is too much for me now, with my leg. Not that I’d give anyone the key, dear, but I’ve
known the meter man for fifteen years, and if you can’t trust the police, who can you trust?’

‘Who indeed,’ Slider agreed. ‘And did you see him come down again?’

‘I came out when I heard him on the stairs. He was very quick, only five or ten minutes. He had one of those black plastic
sacks, which he said he’d got Miss Austen’s things in. “To give to her next of kin, Mrs Gostyn,” he said, and I asked him
if he’d like a cup of tea, because it’s not a nice job to have to do, is it, even for strangers, but he said no, he had to
go. He said he had everything he needed and touched his hat to me. Such a nice man.’

‘Has anyone else been up there since? Have you been up there?’

‘I have not,’ she said firmly. ‘And besides, Inspector Petrie has the key, so I couldn’t get in if I wanted to.’

Atherton came back, and spoke to Slider aside through wooden lips. ‘Petrie my arse.’

‘I’ll go up,’ Slider said quietly. ‘See if you can get a description out of her. Don’t bully her, or she’ll clam up. And a
description of the car.’

‘You wouldn’t like the registration number, I suppose?’ Atherton enquired ironically, and turned without relish to his task
while Slider went upstairs to lock the stable door.

Mrs Gostyn proved extremely helpful. From her Atherton learnt that the bogus inspector was a tall, short, fat, thin man; a
fair, dark-haired red-headed bald man in a hat, clean-shaven with a beard and moustache, wore glasses, didn’t wear glasses,
and had a nice speaking voice – she was quite sure about that much. The car he drove was a car, had four wheels, and was painted
a colour, but she didn’t know which one.

Atherton sighed and turned a page. On the day of the murder, he learnt, Miss Austen had driven off in her little car at about
nine-thirty in the morning and hadn’t returned, unless it was while Mrs Gostyn was at the chiropodist
between two and four in the afternoon. But her car wasn’t there when Mrs Gostyn returned, and she hadn’t heard her come in
that night.

Atherton put his notebook away again. ‘Thank you very much for your help. If you remember anything else, anything at all,
you’ll let us know, won’t you?’

‘Anything about what?’ Mrs Gostyn asked with apparently genuine puzzlement.

‘About Miss Austen or Inspector Petrie – anything that happened on that day. I’ll give you this card, look – it has a telephone
number where you can reach us, all right?’