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Gone Tomorrow
A Bill Slider Mystery
By Cynthia Harrod-Eagles St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2001 Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8856-2
CHAPTER 1
Too Much Like Aardvark
By the time Detective Inspector Bill Slider got to the scene, the rest of the circus was already there: the area had been closed off with what always struck him as inappropriately festive blue-and-white tape, the screens were erected, and uniform had got the crowd under control and space cleared for official cars.
Detective Sergeant Hollis held his car door open for him.
'You're very kind,' said Slider, climbing out.
'I used to get hit if I wasn't,' Hollis said. He was a scanty-haired beanpole of a Mancunian with a laconical delivery.
'Atherton not in yet?' DS Atherton, Slider's bagman, was due back from holiday that morning.
'Not when I left.'
Slider nodded towards the screens. 'Who is it?'
'Dunno, guv. He's not saying much. Large bloke, no ID. I don't recognise him.'
'Who found him?'
'Parkie. He doesn't know him either.'
Hammersmith Park was a long, narrow piece of land which lay between the White City estate and Shepherd's Bush. It had a gate at either end. One was in South Africa Road – home to the stadium of Queen's Park Rangers football team, known locally, for their horizontally striped shirts, as ve 'oops (or, if they had been having a successful run, superoops). The other gate was in Frithville Gardens, a cul-de-sac turning off the main Uxbridge Road which also led to the back door of the BBC Television Centre. Between the two lay the moderately landscaped green space of lawns and trees, with a sinuous path from gate to gate which was used as a cut-through for estate dwellers to and from the Bush.
Slider had been called to the South Africa Road gate. Just inside it, to the left, was a children's playground, whose amenity had been much reduced over the years in the retreat before vandalism. There was a paddling pool with no water, a sandpit with no sand, two rocking horses which, in the interests of safety, had been bolted to the ground and no longer rocked, and two sets of swings, one for babies and one for children.
Between the playground and the road was a small two-storey building which had once been an office and residence for a park keeper. It was now unused and all its orifices had been sealed up with breeze-block – the only way these days to keep out vandals, who had the tenacity of termites and would set fire to their own left legs in pursuit of a thrill. The only purpose of the building now, Slider noted a little glumly, seemed to be to conceal activity in the playground from anyone passing by in the street.
The body was on one of the children's swings. Slider passed through the screens to take a look. The swings were of a simple, municipally sturdy design, suspended from a framework made of scaffolding poles by chains thick and heavy enough to have towed a ship. The seats were made from short, thick chunks of wood that might have been chopped from railway sleepers, and the one was bolted to the other with sufficient determination to have resisted mindless destruction.
Deceased was seated, slumped forward, head and arms hanging, legs bent back and feet resting pigeon-toed on the ground. He had been a large, muscular man, otherwise he would probably have slipped off; as it was, he was kept in place by his own weight pressing against the chains, the bulge of the deltoids to one side and the pectorals to the other making a sort of channel for each chain to lie in snugly.
Hollis ranged up silently beside Slider.
'When was he found?' Slider asked.
'Park keeper came to open up at half seven. The gates are open between seven-thirty in the morning and dusk,' he added, anticipating Slider's question. 'Dusk is a bit of a movable feast, o' course. Sunset's around nine o'clock, give or take, this time o' year. But in practice the parkie shuts up when he feels like it, or when he remembers.'
Slider grunted, staring at the body. It was a fit-looking man, probably in his thirties, dressed in an expensive leather blouson-type jacket and a thin black roll-neck tucked into tight blue jeans, Italian leather casuals and a gold chain round his neck.
'The Milk Tray man's uniform,' Slider commented.
'He looks like an up-market bouncer,' Hollis agreed.
The hair was light brown and cut very short, the face was Torremolinos tanned, and he had a gold earring in the top of his left ear, small and quite discreet, the sort that said okay, I'm cool, but I'm also tough.
It was strangely hard to tell with corpses, when the face was without expression and the eyes closed, but this man probably would have been quite good-looking in life, of the sort a certain kind of woman fell for. Only his hands let him down: they were ugly, with badly bitten nails and deep nicotine stains. He wore a heavy gold signet ring, unengraved, on the middle finger of the right hand – the place fighters wore it, where it would do most damage.
Hollis reached out with a Biro and delicately lifted aside one side of the jacket to show Slider the stab wound below the left breast. 'Single blow, right where he lived. The only one as far as I can see, without moving him.'
'Not much staining,' Slider said. There was a stiff little patch around the wound, but nothing had gushed or dripped. 'Probably killed him instantly. If the heart had gone on pumping for any length of time there'd've been a lot more blood.'
'That's what I thought. Professional?' Hollis suggested.
Slider did not commit himself. 'No sign of the weapon?'
'Not so far.'
'And no ID?'
'Nothing in the jacket or the back trouser pocket. I've not gone in the front trouser pockets, o' course, but they feel empty.'
'Those jeans are so tight there can't be room down there for much more than his giblets,' Slider observed.
'Anyroad, all I found was money and fags.'
'Oh well, there might be something more when we can strip him off. Doctor been yet?'
'No, guv. Held up in traffic.'
Slider stepped back out to look around. What had brought this man here to his death? A meeting? Or perhaps he had been killed elsewhere and left here on the swing as a nasty kind of joke? At all events, it was a fairly private place, hidden from the road by the bulk of the defunct building. The park was overlooked only from the right-hand side by the upper floors of the flats in Batman Close, and then only in winter. At this time of year the foliage on the well-grown trees baffled any view of the ground. Yes, provided a person could get into the park in the first place without attracting attention, the spot was well chosen.
Beyond the park railings a small murmuring crowd had now collected, the usual mix of the idle, the elderly, and truanting kids. Slider scanned them automatically, but he didn't recognise anyone except Blind Bernie and Mad Sam, a well-known couple round the Bush. Mad Sam was Blind Bernie's son, and was not mad, only mentally retarded, a round-faced, smiling child of forty. He was Bernie's guide, and Bernie looked after him. They each kept the other out of A Home, the thing both dreaded with Victorian horror. Slider could see Sam's lips moving as he told Bernie what he could see, and Bernie's as he translated what Sam told him. Now he came to think of it, they lived in Frithville Gardens, so they naturally would be interested in something that happened in what was virtually their front garden.
Along the roof of the disused keeper's house a row of seagulls sat, shuffling their wings in the small breeze and turning their heads back and forth to see if all the unusual activity portended food. Once, they had come up into the estate from the Thames only in bad weather, to shelter, but now they seemed to live here all the time. Probably the large area of high buildings reminded them of cliffs; and there was plenty of rubbish for them to pick over. They had forgotten the sea; but on a quiet day their raucous squabbling cries brought it near in Slider's mind.
It was quiet here today, with the road temporarily closed to traffic. Somewhere out of sight a car horn broke the gentle background wash of distant city sounds, a composite murmur like the 'white noise' of silence; a crow cawed in one of the park trees, a fork-lift truck whined briefly behind the wall of the TVC, and far above a jumbo growled its way to Heathrow, flashing back the sun as it crawled between clouds.
All around, for miles and miles in every direction, in streets and shops and houses, real life was going on, oblivious; but here a dead man sat, the full stop at the end of his own sentence, with a little still pocket of attention focused fiercely and minutely on him. Why him? And why here? Slider felt the questions attaching themselves to him like shackles, chaining him to this scene, to a well-known process of effort, worry and responsibility.
He had a moment's revulsion for it all, for the blank stupidity of death, and longed to be anywhere but here, and to have any job but this. And then the doctor and the meat wagon arrived simultaneously, one of the uniforms asked him about press access, the police photographer came to him for instructions, and one of his own DCs, Mackay, turned up with the firm's Polaroid. Extraneous feelings fled as the job in hand claimed him, with a familiarity, at least, that was comfortable.
* * *
Detective Superintendent Fred 'The Syrup' Porson looked exhausted. He'd had this nasty 'summer flu' that was going around – seemed to have been having it for months – and his face looked grey and chipped. The rosy tint to his pouched eyes and abraded beak was the only touch of colour in the granite façade.
The HAT car (Homicide Advice Team) had been and gone, assessing the murder.
'We're keeping it,' Porson told Slider.
'The playground murder?'
'What did you think I meant?' Porson snapped irritably. 'Queen Victoria's birthday? And you don't know it's a murder yet.'
'Single stab wound to the heart and no weapon on the scene,' Slider mentioned.
'When you've been in the Job as long as I have, you'll take nothing for guaranteed,' Porson said darkly.
Slider almost had been, but he let it pass. The old boy was irritable with suffering.
'Anyway, it's ours,' Porson repeated.
'The SCG doesn't want it?' Slider asked.
The SCG was the Serious Crime Group, which had replaced the old Area Major Incident Pool, or AMIP. No doubt the change had brought joy to some desk-bound pillock's heart, and SCG was one letter shorter than AMIP which must be a great saving on ink; but since the personnel in the one were the exact same as had been in t'other, Slider couldn't see the point. It was hard for a bloke at the fuzzy end to get excited about a new acronym, especially one that did not trip off the tongue.
'SCG's got its plate taken up with the Fulham multiple,' Porson answered. 'Plus the Brooke Green terrorist bomb factory – to say nothing of being short-handed, and having four blokes on the sicker.'
Slider met The Syrup's eyes and refrained from reminding him that they too were short-handed. What with chronic under-recruitment, secondment to the National Crime Squad – not to mention to the SCG itself – plus absence on Roll-out Programmes and the usual attrition of epidemic colds, IBS and back problems – the ongoing response of over-stretched men to a stressful job – there could hardly be a unit of any sort in the Met that was up to strength. But Porson knew all that as well as he did. The SCG were supposed to take the major crimes, which these days generally meant all murders apart from straightforward domestics, but the fact of the matter was that Peter Judson, the head fromage of their own particular SCG, was a cherry-picking bastard who had obviously logged this case as entailing more graft than glory and tossed it back whence it came.
'After all,' Porson went on, trying to put a gloss on it, 'when push comes to shovel, it's a testament to your firm's record of success that they want to bung it onto us.'
'Yes, sir,' Slider said neutrally.
'You ought to've got a commendation last time, laddie, over that Agnew business. It was pure political bullshine that shot our fox before we could bring it home to roost. So here's your chance to do yourself a bit of bon. Brace up, knuckle down, and I'll make sure you get your dues this time, even if I have to stir up puddles till the cows come home.'
The allegories along Porson's Nile were more than usually deformed this morning, Slider thought, which was generally a sign of emotion or more than usual stress in the old boy. But he knew what he meant. He meant that Slider should put his nose to the wheel and his shoulder to the grindstone, a posture which inevitably left his arse in the right position to be hung out to dry if necessary; and Slider had a feeling, from the preliminary look of the thing, that this one was going to be a long, hard slog.
* * *
When he got back to the office, Atherton was there, looking bronzed, fit, rested and generally full of marrowbone jelly. Slider felt a quiet relief at the sight of him. Atherton had been through some tough times recently, including a near nervous breakdown, and there had been moments when Slider had feared to lose him altogether. He'd had other bagmen in a long career, but none that he would have also called his friend.
Atherton did not immediately look up, being engaged with the Guardian crossword. DC McLaren was hanging over his shoulder, a drippy bacon sandwich suspended perilously on the way to his mouth.
'I can't read your writing,' McLaren complained. 'What's that?'
'Aardvark.'
'With two a's?' McLaren objected.
'It's a name it made up for itself when it heard Noah was boarding the ark in alphabetical order,' Atherton explained kindly. 'The zebras were exceptionally pissed off, I can tell you. That's why they turned up in their pyjamas – as a kind of protest.'
'Now I know you're back,' Slider said. Atherton looked up, and McLaren straightened just in time for the melted butter to drip onto his front – which was used to it – instead of Atherton's back. Atherton was a classy dresser, and it would have been an act of vandalism akin to gobbing on the Mona Lisa.
'No need to ask if you had a good time,' Slider said. 'You're looking disgustingly pleased with yourself.'
'Why not?' Atherton agreed. 'A fortnight of sunshine and unfeasibly energetic sexual activity. And now a nice meaty corpse to get our teeth into.'
'Some people have strange tastes. How did you know, anyway?'
'Bad news has wings. Maurice was talking to Paul Beynon from the SCG while you were upstairs.'
'I knew him at Kensington,' McLaren said. 'He rung to give me the gen.' His time at Kensington was his Golden Age, source of all legend. Amazingly, it seemed he had been popular there. At all events, they were always ringing him up for a bunny, and vice versa.
'So it seems I just got back in time,' Atherton said.
'Yeah, from what you said, another day'd've killed you,' McLaren said lubriciously.
'How's Sue?' Slider asked.
Atherton smiled. 'You'll never know.'
McLaren pricked up his ears. 'Oh, is that who you were with? That short bird I saw you with that time? Blimey, you still going with her?'
His surprise was understandable, if tactless, for Atherton had always demanded supermodel looks as basic minimum, and Sue – a colleague of Joanna's – was neither willowy nor drop-dead gorgeous. She had something, however, that melted Atherton's collar studs. But he didn't rise to McLaren. He merely looked sidelong and said, 'You know the old saying, Maurice: better to have loved a short girl than never to have loved a tall.'
'Right, shall we get on with it?' Slider interposed. The rest of his team, bar Hollis and Mackay who were still at the scene, had come in behind him. 'With no identification on the corpse, we've got more work even than usual ahead of us. In fact, I expected to find you all hard at it already,' he complained.
'We have been. Hive of activity, guv,' McLaren said smartly. 'Just waiting for you to get back to see how you wanted it set up.'
'Never mind that Tottenham. When did I ever want it set up any differently? Here's the Polaroids from the scene. And I shall want a sketch map of the immediate area up on the wall. Get on with it, Leonardo.'
McLaren stuffed the last of the sandwich in his mouth. 'Right, guv,' he said indistinctly. 'Get you a cuppa first?'
'From the canteen? Yes, all right, might as well. It'll be a long day.'
'Get me one too, Maurice,' Anderson said.
'Slice cake with it?'
Anderson boggled. 'You what? Turn you stone blind.'
McLaren shrugged and hurried off.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gone Tomorrow by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. Copyright © 2001 Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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