Gone Tomorrow (23 page)

‘Nah, I don’t think she was a tom. I think maybe she was a relative. Cousin or something. From the way they talked to each other. That’s all I know. Any good?’

‘Thanks, George. That is a help.’ He slipped a note across to George’s ready fingers under cover of the drying-cloth he was holding. As an afterthought he said, ‘You don’t know anything about this man Ev was working for?’

‘Nah. Sorry. I know you got the word out. Whoever he is, he keeps himself private. All I’ve heard is it’s big business.’

‘Yes, well, I guessed that. If you do hear anything—’

George gave a curt nod and sidled away. He was not one of Slider’s regular informants, but Slider had known him a long time and did not underestimate him, for which George was in a quiet way grateful. This was not the first piece of information George had given him.

Slider called Swilley in. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’

‘Now or tomorrow?’

‘Oh Nora, is that the time? Well, it’s going to take a while. You’d better start in the morning.’

‘Okay. D’you want to tell me about it?’

‘It’s a bit of a long shot anyway,’ Slider sighed, and told her about Everet Boston’s putative relationship with the missing Tina. ‘I want you to go through the records. Start with the
toms register, but don’t restrict yourself to that if nothing comes up. Try the name Boston. Of course, cousins don’t always have the same surname, but it’s a chance. And if that doesn’t work, just look for any possible connection with Everet. Tina’s probably not her real name, which adds to the fun for you. Get onto Everet’s old school, get them to look up what his address was when he was there, see if that yields anything. A lot of these Harlesden families live close together. I know it’s a tenuous brief, but that’s why I want you to do it. Use your intelligence.’

‘Thanks,’ said Swilley; and then, ‘It’s that bad, is it?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Slider said. ‘We’re bound to get a handle on them sooner or later. I’d just prefer it was sooner.’

‘You think this Tina’s in danger?’

Slider met her eyes. ‘Everet thinks she is. And he knows them better than we do.’

Passing the door of Porson’s office, Slider saw to his surprise that Porson was there, standing by his desk, reading.

‘Sir,’ he said.

Porson turned. He looked worn out. ‘Just looked in,’ he said hoarsely, cleared his throat and tried again. ‘Make sure everything’s all right. I’ve been on the dog to Mr Palfreyman, so he’s filled me in
vis-à-vis
the status quo. But you don’t always hear everything when it’s coming down from above rather than up from below.’

And with Palfreyman it had a long way to fall, Slider thought. Porson met his eyes and there was a sudden sympathy between them.

‘I expect you’ve come in for a bit of the brown shower,’ Porson said. ‘That’s usually my job, to intersect it. Act as a sort of umbrella for the pony. Otherwise you lot’d be buried up to your navels and never get anything done.’

‘We do appreciate it, sir,’ Slider said. Porson looked bleak, and he added, ‘It’s a lonely job.’

That was going too far. Porson’s face tightened and he said briskly, ‘So what leads are you following as of this instance?’

Slider gave him a précis. ‘It seems at the moment that Everet Boston is our one hope, and he’s disappeared. We’re watching his house but I can’t see him going back there in his present
state. What we have got is his mobile number. It’s switched off at the moment—’

‘He is being careful,’ Porson remarked.

‘Yes, sir. But he has said he’ll phone Billy Cheeseman again and he may phone me. What I’d like is a warrant for the mobile service provider so that if he does use his mobile again they’ll pinpoint where he is, and we can pick him up.’

Porson considered a moment, and then said, ‘Well, it’s a long shot, but this is a bastard of a case. I’ll authorise it. Get it typed up and I’ll sign it.’

‘I’ve got it here,’ Slider said. ‘I was going to send it over to Hammersmith, but—’

‘Glad I’m useful for something,’ Porson barked. He fumbled at his pocket for a pen, then went behind his desk to get one out of a drawer. As he bent over to sign, his rug slipped forward, and he pushed it back with a careless hand. Was it possible to lose weight on your actual skull? Porson straightened up and Slider moved his eyes hastily.

Porson passed over the warrant. He fixed Slider with a steely gaze. ‘We haven’t got long on this one. It’s going to turn into a political problem if we don’t break through and they’ll have to bring in an SCG from another borough.’

‘I’ve half expected it before now, sir.’

‘All right, it’s no shame to us. Normally they’d have had it off us from the start. We’ve only been left holding the bathtub this long because of the manpower situation. But they’ll bring in people who don’t know the ground, and I’d as soon not have ’em treading mud over my carpet. Mud or worse. Capisky?’

Slider nodded. ‘I’ll do my best, sir.’

‘I know, laddie, I know. You always do. I’m not just breathing down your parade to annoy you. You’ve got my full support. Any warrants you want, as much overtime as it takes. Whatever you need.’

Slider thanked him. ‘Does that mean you’re back, sir?’

The old granite face seemed to harden a fraction more. ‘No, laddie, I’m not back. I just popped in, like I said. I’ve got to get back to the hospital.’

Hospital? Slider started to say, ‘I hope—’ and then realised there was no way to finish that sentence.
I hope it’s nothing serious?
But he wouldn’t be away from work if it weren’t.

Porson seemed to appreciate the reticence. He nodded. ‘If you need anything, call me on my mobile. And you can send someone over with anything that wants signing. Come to me, not Mr P.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And keep leaning on every bit of lowlife in the borough. This lot may be well organised, but somewhere out there there’s a weak link, and I want us to put our foot through it before they do.’

Joanna opened the door of Atherton’s house to him, with a cross-eyed teenage Siamese clinging to her scalp.

‘Gosh, you’re late,’ she said.

‘Doesn’t that hurt?’ Slider asked.

‘Like hell,’ she assured him mildly. ‘I can’t detach it until you’re inside.’

‘Sorry. Shall I do the honours?’

‘Yes please –
gently
!’

He lifted it, freed the curved claws from the chunks of hair, and placed it on his own shoulder.

‘He jumped on me from the top of the kitchen door as I came through,’ Joanna said.

‘Which one is it?’

‘Vash,’ she said. ‘But it makes no conceivable difference. They’re both bonkers.’

Sredni Vashtar teetered on Slider’s shoulder, purring like an engine; then, as his brother’s voice was upraised plaintively in the kitchen, scuttered straight down Slider’s front and disappeared in two flouncing leaps towards the smell of food. Slider took the cat-free window of opportunity to kiss Joanna.

‘Mm, you taste nice,’ he said at half-time.

‘It’s Jim’s sherry.’

‘No, it’s you,’ he assured her, and sank back in.

‘God, you two!’ Sue said, coming in from the kitchen. ‘You’re like horny teenagers.’

Slider straightened up. ‘We haven’t seen each other in a while.’

‘I haven’t seen my gran for years,’ Sue said, ‘but all she gets is a peck on the beak and a box of Quality Street. Have a bruschetti.’

‘Thanks. Isn’t that plural?’

‘You want waitress service
and
a Linguaphone course?’

‘I’ll get you a drink,’ Joanna said indistinctly, having stuffed the smallest slice whole into her mouth. She went into the kitchen, leaving Slider alone with Sue. She fixed him with a penetrating blue gaze. Tinted contact lenses, Slider thought absently as doom fell on him.

‘He wasn’t working overtime last week, was he?’

‘What do you mean?’ Slider said. That was feeble. He’d never been good at this confrontation thing.

‘Wednesday and Thursday. Oh, it’s all right,’ she said, waving away any possible answer he might have been going to give –which from where he was standing was not likely to have arrived until next week some time. ‘I won’t ask you to perjure yourself. I know the symptoms. That’s where you men always get it wrong. You think we’re stupid.’

‘I don’t think you’re stupid,’ Slider said, which could have meant very nearly anything, so wasn’t the height of tact.

‘I just thought,’ she went on, ‘that we’d got all that nonsense over with.’

Slider felt a looming trap. ‘Look,’ he began, and she flapped a hand to stop him.

‘For God’s sake don’t say anything that starts with “look”. Sentences like that lead anywhere and they’re always fatal.’

‘Sorry.’

‘No, I’m sorry,’ she said, and Slider saw she was. Sorry and angry and also afraid.

‘He really cares about you,’ Slider said awkwardly. Doing the old bosom-baring on your own behalf was bad enough, but having to talk girly about a male friend was as easy as eating a sand sandwich.

‘I can’t keep going through this time after time.’

‘Talk to him,’ Slider said.

‘Talk to him who?’ Joanna asked, coming back in with a tumbler of gin-and-tonic. It was a beauty – long and cool, blue with gin, clinking with ice, and with a floating demi-lune of lemon beaded delicately silver on the upper side. Slider wanted to dive in and stay under till the coast was clear.

But Sue rescued him. ‘Jim,’ she said easily. ‘About the case.’

Which showed, Slider thought, that a lady could be a gentleman as well as a bosom friend.

*   *   *

At the table, over a starter of baked goat’s cheese and rocket, Atherton said, ‘I don’t think we’re ever going to solve this one. No witnesses, no info. We haven’t even got a weapon.’

‘What about the old man who was strangled with the chain?’ Joanna asked.

‘Herbie Weedon? Same story. No-one saw anyone go up. The hardware shop was closed at the time but the deli was still open, but they said they never took any notice of people going in and out of the door to Golden Loans. And why should they?’ Atherton finished in frustration. ‘People just don’t look at each other any more. Everyone wanders round in their own little bubble as if no-one else on the planet exists.’

‘But how could the killer know Herbie was going to talk to you?’ Joanna asked.

‘Maybe his phone was bugged,’ Atherton said with a faint shrug. ‘He said it wasn’t safe to talk on the phone.’

‘Is it really that easy to bug someone’s phone?’ Sue objected. ‘Outside of a James Bond film, I mean.’

‘Oh, it isn’t difficult, if you’ve got the know-how. The gear exists, and it’s very sophisticated and very compact these days. It doesn’t even have to be inside the actual phone. They’ve got radio bugs that are so powerful they can pick up what’s said on both sides of a telephone conversation from anywhere in the room.’

‘Wouldn’t you have found the bugging device if there was one?’

‘Not if whoever killed him remembered to remove it,’ Atherton said. ‘And I suspect they might have.’

‘But then,’ said Joanna, ‘you’re talking about a very sophisticated killer. And if the same person who killed Herbie Weedon killed Lenny Baxter—’

‘Which we assume is the case because of the lock and chain,’ Atherton said.

‘—then that means Baxter wasn’t killed by one of his drugs customers or his betting customers—’

‘Or any other of the assorted lowlife, like Eddie Cranston, that we think he associated with,’ Slider concluded.

‘But the killer himself needn’t have been sophisticated,’ Sue said, reaching for the bottle and pouring more Chablis. ‘If it
was a gang thing, he could be just a crude tool given orders by a sophisticated boss.’

‘Not too crude,’ Atherton said.

‘Everet Boston is smart enough,’ Slider said. ‘And so is Sonny Collins. The trouble is we just don’t have any evidence to point to anyone.’

‘Or even a motive?’ Sue suggested.

‘Murders, very generally, are done for one of two reasons,’ Slider said. ‘Money, or passion.’

‘But in this case, the money was left in the victim’s pocket,’ Sue said.

‘Well, there’s money as in wads of folding, and money as in don’t jeopardise my business,’ Slider said. ‘Robbery from the person isn’t the only option. What we need is a witness. Some helpful passer-by with a description we can act on. Or, failing that, we could do with laying our hands on someone who knows something from the inside. Like Lenny’s girlfriend.’

‘Or Everet Boston,’ Atherton said, standing up and beginning to clear plates. ‘It’s a pity you didn’t keep hold of him when you had him.’

‘Yes, Mr Atherton. Sorry, Mr Atherton,’ Slider said.

Sue followed Atherton out of the room with her eyes. ‘Do you let him talk to you like that?’ she said in mock amazement. ‘He’s only the cook.’

‘You just can’t get the staff these days,’ Slider apologised.

In the car on the way home, Joanna asked out of the blue, ‘Is Jim up to his old tricks again?’

‘I don’t know,’ Slider said. She looked a protest. ‘Really, I don’t know.’

‘Sue seems to think he is.’

‘Is that what she said?’

‘Not directly. It’s just the impression I got.’

‘From what?’

‘Stop being a detective for a minute. What is wrong with him?’

‘If he is up to something – which I don’t know that he is –he probably wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with him, or it. They’re not married.’

She gave him a hostile glance. ‘That’s beside the point. Either he wants a relationship or he doesn’t. He’s got to make up his mind.’

‘Why? I’m not defending the position, just asking.’

‘In a spirit of pure enquiry? All right, because he expects her to have made up her mind. He wants what she’s got to offer him, but he doesn’t want to give her anything back.’

‘I don’t know that that’s true,’ Slider said. ‘It’s just—’ He couldn’t phrase it, and fell silent.

At last she prompted. ‘It’s just what? He doesn’t even really try very hard not to get found out. That’s insulting.’

‘No, it isn’t. It’s the one hopeful thing, that he
wants
her to find out.’

‘So she’ll punish him? But she’s not his mum. He’d better shape up soon or that’ll be that. Can’t you talk to him?’