Sighing, he rose and got on with his shaving and bathing and dressing, thinking about the Irene problem and the Joanna not-problem
in uncoordinated bursts, while the back of his mind leafed endlessly through the documents of the case. His mind was like
Snow White’s apple, one half sweet, one half poisoned.
‘Miss Morris?’
‘You must be Sergeant Atherton. They rang me from downstairs to say you wanted to see me.’
Helen Morris was plump and pretty with friendly dark eyes and neat, short brown hair. She had the deliciously scrubbed-clean
look of all nurses, and dark shadows under her eyes which could be the result of night-duty, Atherton supposed. On the other
hand, he had already made enquiries downstairs before he came up to this floor, which put him at an advantage over the weary
nurse.
‘I’m sorry to make your working day longer, but I wanted
to talk to you alone,’ he said, giving her a disarming, non-alarming smile.
She didn’t respond. ‘I don’t like doing things behind Simon’s back,’ she said.
Atherton smiled ever more genially. ‘It’s purely a matter of routine – independent confirmation, that’s all.’
She put her head up a little. ‘I’ve complete confidence in Simon. He had nothing whatever to do with – with what happened
to Anne-Marie.’
‘Well that’s all right then, isn’t it?’ Atherton said blandly, turning as if to walk with her along the corridor.
Finding she seemed to have agreed to it, she shrugged and went along. ‘I must have a cup of coffee,’ she stipulated.
‘Fine. We can talk in the canteen.’
They walked along the wakening corridors and into the canteen, which was filled with the hollow, swimming-bath sounds of a
half-empty public place early in the morning. There was a pleasant smell of frying bacon, and the bad-breath smell of instant
coffee. A number of nurses were breakfasting, but there were plenty of empty tables to enable them to sit out of earshot of
anyone else. Atherton bought two coffees, and sat down opposite her across the smeared melamine.
‘I suppose you know why I’m here,’ he began, working on the principle of letting people put their own feet in it first.
She shrugged, stirring her coffee with an appearance of calm indifference. He admired her nerve; though he supposed that after
a night in the operating theatre, anything that happened out here might seem tame. On the other hand, she had a full and sexy
mouth which just now was set in lines of discontent, and the attitude of her body as she leaned on one elbow seemed expressive
not only of tiredness but also unhappiness.
‘How well did you know Anne-Marie Austen?’ he began.
‘Hardly at all. I saw her backstage a few times, and once or twice she was in a group of us that went for a drink after a
concert – that sort of thing. I knew her to speak to, that’s all.’
‘She wasn’t a particular friend of your boyfriend’s?’
She had lifted her cup two-handed to her lips, and now made a small face of distaste and put the cup down without
drinking. Now was that the coffee, or his question?
‘I knew about her and Simon in Italy, if that’s what you’re getting at.’
‘Someone told you?’
‘These things have a way of getting about in an orchestra.’
‘Did you mind about it?’
She looked at him with a flash of anger. ‘Of course I
minded
. What do you think? But there was nothing I could do about it, was there?’ He kept his silence, and after a moment she went
on, ‘You may as well know – she wasn’t the first.’ She smiled unconvincingly. ‘Musicians are like that. It’s the stress of
the job. They do things on tour that they wouldn’t do at home, and it would be stupid to make a big thing about it. As long
as it ended at the airport, that’s what I always said – and it did.’
‘Always?’
‘Simon and I have been together a long time, and I know him pretty well. With all his faults, he’s always been fair to me.
He would never have carried on with her after the tour. That was all on
her
side.’
She met Atherton’s eyes as she said these noble lines, as people do who are bent on convincing you of something they don’t
really believe. She keeps up a good shop-front, he thought, but she’s too intelligent not to know what he is.
‘So Anne-Marie wasn’t willing to let things go?’
Her lips hardened. ‘Because they’d been to bed together, I suppose she – fell in love with him, or something. She started chasing
him, and Simon felt sorry for her, and I suppose she took it for encouragement.’
‘How do you mean, chasing him?’
She took it for a criticism, and looked at him defiantly. ‘It wasn’t just my imagination, you know – ask anyone. She was pretty
blatant about it. She hung around him, kept asking him out for drinks, even phoned the flat a couple of times.’
‘It upset you,’ he suggested.
She shrugged. ‘I just pretended nothing was happening. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.’
‘You didn’t like her much, I gather?’
‘I despise women like that. They’ve got to have a man -any man. They don’t care who. It’s pathetic’
‘But I would have thought a girl as pretty as her wouldn’t have any trouble finding a boyfriend,’ he said as though thoughtfully.
She looked a little disconcerted. ‘People didn’t like her.
Men
didn’t like her. Look, I know you think I was jealous -’
‘Not at all,’ Atherton murmured.
‘But it wasn’t that. I had nothing to be jealous of. I just thought she was – weak.’
Atherton absorbed all this, and tried a new tack. ‘Tell me about that day – the Monday.’
‘The day she died?’ She frowned in thought. ‘Well, I’d been on duty Sunday night. I got home on Monday morning about half
past eight. Simon was in bed. I got in with him and we went to sleep. He got up about half past twelve and made some lunch
– scrambled eggs, if you want to be particular -and brought them in, and then he got dressed and went off to work.’
‘At what time?’
‘Well, he had a session at half past two, so it would be about half past one, I suppose. I didn’t particularly notice, but
he’d leave about an hour to get there.’
‘And you were on duty again that night?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did you next see Mr Thompson?’
‘Well, it would be the next morning, when I got home.’
‘So you didn’t see him between the time he left home on Monday – about half past one in the afternoon – and Tuesday morning
at – what? – half past eight?’
‘I’ve said so.’ He said nothing, and she went on as if compelled. ‘We were both working. I was here all night, and Simon was
working until half past nine.’
‘And then he went home?’
‘He had a drink, and went home.’
‘That’s what he told you?’ She was looking at him warily now. ‘But you see, I happen to know that he came here to the hospital
when he left the TVC that Monday evening. And why would he come here, if not to see you?’
She whitened so rapidly that he was afraid she might actually faint, and for a long moment she said nothing, though her dark
eyes were intelligent, thinking through
things at great speed, not focused on him. At last she said faintly, ‘He wasn’t here. He didn’t -’
‘You didn’t see him? You didn’t, by any chance, arrange to meet him and hand over a certain package?’
‘No!’ she protested, though it came out as hardly more than a whisper. She was evidently badly shaken, but Atherton knew that
there would not have been time for Thompson to come here to the hospital, collect the drug, and still be back in time to murder
Anne-Marie by the established time. If he were the murderer, his purpose in coming here must surely have been to establish
his alibi, and Helen Morris ought therefore to be claiming to have seen him, not the reverse. It looked as though, if he did
it, she was not in on it.
Her mind had been speeding along on a different track, however. She said, ‘Look, I can guess what you’re thinking, but there’s
no way in the world I could have got hold of any drugs. It’s checked and double-checked every night. If anything was missing,
it would be discovered at once. And Simon couldn’t have got hold of anything, either. They’re incredibly security-minded at
this hospital.’
‘Yes, I know. That’s how I know he came here on that Monday night. And you’re quite sure he didn’t come here to see you?’
She hesitated, and Atherton watched with interest the struggle between her loyalty to Thompson, which wanted to bail him out
of possible trouble, and her intelligence, which told her that if she changed her story now, it would look suspicious. In
the end she said, ‘I didn’t see him. But he might have come to see me, and not been able to find me.’
Clever, thought Atherton.
‘Look,’ she went on with a touch of irritation. ‘I’m very tired. Can I go home now? You know where to find me if you want
to ask me any more questions. I’m not going to leave the country.’
Atherton rose and smiled graciously at the irony. He was not displeased with the interview. Someone intelligent and determined
– and she was both – could overcome the problem of falsifying the drugs record; and he had established to his own satisfaction
that she was not as sure of Thompson as she claimed to be. She knew he was a shit; she
was also nervous and worried. She had by no means told Atherton everything. Perhaps she knew where Thompson had been that
evening. Or perhaps she didn’t know, and wondered.
Out in the clear air of the morning, Slider found himself ravenously hungry. He had declined breakfast at home in the company
of his grieving son, his self-righteous daughter and his tight-lipped wife. Consequently he had a little time in hand; enough
to drive to a coffee-stall he knew in Hammersmith Grove where they made bacon sandwiches with thick, white crusty bread of
the sort he remembered from his childhood, before everyone went wholemeal. The other early workers made room for him in companionable
silence, and they all sipped their dark-brown tea out of thick white mugs like shaving-pots and blinked at nothing through
the comforting steam.
Restored, he drove to Joanna’s house. She opened the door as he was parking the car and stood watching him until he came up
the path. Discovering her again was a series of delightful shocks which registered all over his body. She had on a pair of
soft and faded grey cord trousers, tucked into ankle-boots, and a buttercup yellow vyella shirt which seemed to glow in the
colourlessness of a winter morning. She looked wonderful, but best of all, so approachable, so accessible. He put his arms
round her and she turned her face up to him, smiling, and she seemed both familiar and dear. He caught the scent of her skin,
and it seemed so surprising and exciting that he already knew the smell of her so well, that it gave him an erection.
‘Hullo,’ she said. ‘How did you sleep?’
‘Like the dead. And you?’ It didn’t matter what they said. He felt suddenly safe and optimistic.
They went into the house and she shut the door behind them with a practised flick of one foot. In his arms again, she pressed
against him and felt his condition. ‘Have we time?’ she asked simply.
His stomach tightened. He was not yet used to such directness. ‘What time is he coming?’
She cocked his watch towards her. Twenty minutes.’
‘Then we’ve time,’ he said, taking her face in his hands and kissing her. With one hand on the wall to guide her, she backed
with him down the passage to the bedroom.
Martin Cutts turned out to be about forty-five, a small, almost delicate man with the very black hair and very white skin
of the Far North, and the carefully upright gait of the back-sufferer. He had an alert face and an engaging smile, and was
as jewel-bright as a bluetit – in a sapphire suede jacket over a canary-yellow roll-neck sweater. Slider was regarding with
some suspicion and even contempt a man of that age who would dress so brightly, until it occurred to him depressingly that
he was merely jealous of a man who he suspected might once have been Joanna’s lover, and then he laid himself out to be affable.
Joanna had arranged the interview for Slider at her house, since there were things Cutts would not be able to say at home
in front of his wife, as Slider, newly sensitive on that score, had appreciated. Joanna now left them tactfully alone and
went and had her bath, and the thought of her naked and soapy in the steam beckoned distractingly from the corner of Slider’s
mind.
He cleared his throat determinedly and said, ‘It was good of you to give me your time like this.’
‘Not at all,’ Cutts said, seating himself carefully on the arm of the chesterfield. ‘It was good of you to let me answer your
questions here rather than at home.’ He crinkled his eyes in what Slider realised with a start was a conspiratorial grin.
It brought home to him all over again his new status as a Man of the World, a Man with a Bit on the Side, and he wasn’t sure
he liked it.
‘Perhaps you’d tell me how you got to know Miss Austen,’ he asked, poising his pen above his pad in the manner which laid
obligation on the interviewee to give one something to write down.
Cutts was not unwilling. ‘Well of course I knew her in Birmingham,’ he began, and Slider hid his surprise and nodded safely
instead.
‘You were in the same orchestra?’
‘For a short time. She joined just before I left to come to London.’
‘Did you have an affair with her while you were both in Birmingham?’
Martin Cutts did not seem at all put out by the question. He answered as if it were as natural a thing as having his hair
cut. ‘I went to bed with her, yes, but it wasn’t really what you’d call an affair. I had to be more careful up there, of course,
because I was between wives.’
Slider was puzzled. ‘I don’t follow.’
‘I’d just divorced my first wife, and hadn’t yet married my second,’ he explained obligingly.
‘Yes, but why did that mean you had to be more careful? Surely -’
‘Well, obviously,’ Cutts said as if it were, indeed, obvious, ‘if you’re not married and you go about with a single girl,
she’s bound to take you more seriously and try to pin you down. If you’ve got a current wife, you’re safe. She knows she can’t
have you. That’s the beauty of it.’