Dead End (14 page)

* * *

In the outer office the secretary was rattling away on a word-processor. She looked up and smiled hesitantly at Slider, and he paused by her desk.

‘Mrs Goodwin, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Helena.’ She was a striking-looking woman in her mid-thirties, with large brown eyes and high cheekbones, dark, fine hair escaping from an Edwardian cottage-loaf, the legal secretary’s uniform garb of blue-and-white striped shirt and navy skirt. She looked as though she hadn’t been getting much sleep lately: she was pale and there were dark shadows under her eyes, and the smile on her rather lovely mouth was troubled.

‘You’ve been with Mr Coleraine for some time now, haven’t you?’

‘Four years, and two with Mr Antrobus before that. I don’t know if you’d call that a long time.’

Slider nodded encouragingly. ‘It’s an upsetting business, this.’ She watched him carefully, committing herself to nothing. ‘A murder in the family,’ he expanded, ‘even if the victim wasn’t particularly popular.’

‘I didn’t really know Sir Stefan,’ she said. ‘Only as an ordinary member of the public. He never came to this office.’

‘Do you like classical music?’

‘Some,’ she said circumspectly.

‘You’ve been to concerts when he’s been conducting, I suppose?’

For some reason the question bothered her. A faint pinkness appeared. ‘One or two. I – I don’t really go out much. I have a little boy. Babysitters aren’t always easy to find.’

‘What does your husband do?’

‘I’m divorced,’ she said abruptly, the pink deepening. She stood up. ‘May I show you out? I have rather a lot of work to catch up on.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to put you behind,’ he said with his most engaging smile, and she softened a little.

‘No, it’s all right, really,’ she said, coming round the desk and crossing to the door. He waited until her hand was on the doorknob.

‘Can you tell me what time Mr Coleraine left on Wednesday?’

The hand remained steady, but she said, ‘I should have thought you could have asked him that.’

‘What an evasive answer,’ he said lightly. ‘Is there something I ought to know about Wednesday?’

She turned and looked at him steadily. ‘No, nothing at all. He left at twelve-thirty.’ He waited in silence, looking pleasantly expectant, until she felt obliged to add more. ‘He had a luncheon appointment for twelve forty-five, but he came out of his office at half past and said that he wasn’t feeling well and was going home, and asked me to cancel it for him.’

‘That was rather short notice, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, but it wasn’t a client, it was a colleague, Peter Gethers. His office is only round the corner in King Street, and they were going to a local restaurant, so I was able to catch him before he left. Mr Coleraine looked very unwell. I wasn’t surprised he had to go home.’

She was defending him. Loyalty – or something to cover up?

‘Did anything happen that morning to upset him? Anything out of the ordinary?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Did he have any visitors?’

‘Not that morning.’

‘Phone calls.’

‘Of course. Lots of them.’

‘What was the last one you put through? Do you remember?’

‘It was Marcus, his son,’ she said with faint reluctance. ‘He telephoned at about a quarter to twelve. Then Mr Coleraine buzzed me and asked me to hold all calls for half an hour. And at half past twelve he came out from his office and said he was going home.’

‘Do you think those things had anything to do with each other?’ Slider asked pleasantly, as though it were a matter of no importance.

She was not wooed. ‘I don’t know. How could I know that? You must ask Mr Coleraine.’

‘Of course. I just thought he might have said something to you about it.’

‘Well he didn’t. Is there anything else now? Because I really do have a lot of work to catch up.’

‘Nothing else at present. Thank you very much, Mrs Goodwin. You’ve been a great help.’

She opened the door for him, looking faintly puzzled about
what she could have said that was so helpful. There was never any harm in leaving people slightly off balance.

Slider walked in to his office and found Atherton lounging like a tame Viking against the cold radiator talking to WDC Kathleen Swilley – always called Norma for her sins which, since she led a social life of well-guarded privacy, had to be largely imagined by her colleagues, and were. She was blonde and bronzed and mighty like the heroine of a Halls of Valhalla SF mag, and she exuded a degree of sexual vitality you could light a campfire with if you only had a magnifying glass handy – the sort of woman who her colleagues told each other, with varying degrees of wistfulness, must be a lesbian.

‘Oh don’t be such a stiff,’ she was saying sternly. ‘You know exactly what I’m talking about. Your idea of safe sex is not telling the girl where you live.’

‘Wearing a condom is avoiding the issue,’ Atherton said, at his most maddening.

‘It’s not a joking matter, Jim, not any more. These days you—’

They both saw Slider at the same moment, and Norma sprang off the edge of his desk where she had been warming a neglected circulation file with her delectable and (Slider could only assume) peachlike bottom. She brushed her skirt down, turning to face him with a slight and extremely fetching blush; Atherton declined to be caught wrong-footed, and continued to decorate the radiator with a catlike smile, his weight on his hands and his legs crossed at the ankle, like a third-year student at a tutorial.

‘Am I interrupting?’ Slider enquired pleasantly. ‘Don’t stop on my account. I know my office is a public place within the meaning of the Act.’

‘The ballistics report has come in, sir,’ Norma said. She held out the sheaf of paper, trying to look like a civil servant and failing.

‘Tell me,’ he said, taking it and passing round his desk to sit down. ‘I assume you’ve read it.’

‘Yes, sir. The bullet was a .38, and it was fired from a Webley and Scott Mark IV revolver. Priest thinks given the range it was likely it was the model with the five-inch barrel.’

Chris Priest was the top firearms guru at the Home Office lab at Huntingdon. One glance at the striations on a spent bullet, and he could tell you the gunmaker’s sock size. Nothing, unfortunately, about the gun owner.

‘A .38 Webley?’

‘It was a popular handgun for British officers during the Second World War,’ Norma said, ‘which would make it bad luck for us, because if it was a World War Two trophy it won’t have been registered.’

‘Why should you assume that?’ Atherton said. He was looking faintly annoyed, perhaps at Swilley’s display of expert knowledge in a subject in which he had no interest – or perhaps it was a residue from their interrupted conversation.

‘Because, brain, all weapons issued during the Second World War are Government property and cannot lawfully be retained. Don’t you know your firearms law?’

‘All right, but it doesn’t have to be a World War Two gun, does it?’ Atherton objected. ‘Presumably they’ve been used at other times.’

‘Priest thinks the gun was pretty old; and besides,’ she turned to Slider again, ‘the actual bullet turns out to be quite interesting. It’s marked DC 43, which stands for Dominion Cartridge 1943. It was a brand made in Canada and shipped over towards the end of the war. Apparently we couldn’t make enough over here to keep up with demand.’

‘Nice and specific,’ Slider said, ‘but unfortunately not much use to us unless we have a suspect.’

‘I quite fancy the agent’s boyfriend,’ Atherton said. ‘Stephen or Steve Murray. I’ve done a bit of work on him. He’s a stage-hand at the Royal Opera House – sweat and singlet type – more brawn than brain. Apparently Kate Apwey likes a bit of rough trade.’ He glanced at Norma but she refused to be provoked. ‘I ran a make on him, and he’s got a little bit of form: possession, a couple of cautions for drunk and disorderly – pub fights – and, here’s the juicy one, a suspended for assault and ABH. Bloke on the management team of one of the big orchestras – Murray thought Kate was having an affair with him; waited for him outside the Festival Hall, caught him coming out of the artists’ entrance and broke two of his ribs.’

‘It’s too much to hope that Murray’s known for carrying weapons?’ Slider asked.

‘Much too much,’ Atherton said. ‘But he jumped this bloke in full daylight with people walking past, and then ran away – which is the same sort of MO as Radek’s murderer – and also he had good reason to suppose Radek was humping Apwey – which is the same motive as the assault.’

Norma looked unimpressed. ‘You think sex is at the bottom of everything.’

‘Unfortunate turn of phrase, Norm.’

‘But look,’ she went on, ignoring him, ‘the person who shot Radek was small, not a hulking great scenery-humper.’

‘Ah, that’s the beauty of it. I said Murray was brawny, not a hulk. He’s more your small, wiry type. Kate Apwey reckons he’s five-nine, but you can take an inch off for adoration.
And
he wasn’t at work on Wednesday afternoon. He phoned in sick.’ He looked appealingly at Slider.

‘It sounds promising. You’d better check up on the alibi, and go round and have a look at his drum. Does he live with Apwey?’

‘Surprisingly, not yet. She shares a flat with two other professional girls – sorry, Norma, women – and he has a flat in Covent Garden, handy for work. I don’t get the impression he earns much.’

Slider nodded. ‘That would tend to put him in a dilemma. On the one hand jealousy of his girlfriend’s relationship with Radek, and on the other hand, knowing she needed both the job and the tips for them to be able to get a place together.’

‘Jealousy, deep frustration, ambivalence of mind – boom!’ said Atherton happily.

‘On the other hand,’ Slider said, ‘we mustn’t lose sight of the other possibles. It won’t hurt to take a look at this sacked musician, what was his name? Preston, Bob Preston. At least find out where he was so we can eliminate him. And then there are the Coleraines.’

‘Not Mrs, guv,’ Swilley said. ‘Polish checked her alibi and it’s tight. She was at her shop until two o’clock, and then she drove to Peter Jones’s to buy fabrics. They know her there, and the manageress of the department says she served her before she went off for her tea at three, and she was about fifteen to
twenty minutes buying stuff. There’s no way she could have been at Shepherd’s Bush shooting Radek at two thirty-five and got to Sloane Square by two forty-five.’

‘Good,’ said Slider. ‘I didn’t really think it was her. Her husband, now, he’s another matter. He struck me as nervous and evasive, and his alibi is unprovable. He says he was at home alone all afternoon.’

‘Wait a minute, guv,’ Norma said. ‘He can’t have been at home all afternoon, because we tried to phone Mrs Coleraine there and got no answer. That must have been about four-ish. We eventually caught her at the shop, after she got back from Peter Jones. That’s when we told her about Radek being shot.’

‘Coleraine says he got home at a quarter to two. Let’s find out everything we can about him. Maybe his business was in trouble. Maybe his son’s in trouble. He knew his wife would inherit Radek’s estate, and a good dutiful wife wouldn’t fail to share the loot with him.’

‘It was quite a loot, too,’ Atherton said. ‘I checked with the solicitor that Parker, Pool and Law put me on to. Radek was worth about three million pounds.’

There was a brief silence. ‘Just for waving your arms about,’ Norma said wistfully.

‘Now that’s what I call a motive,’ Slider said. ‘I’m glad I didn’t know how much before I talked to Mrs Coleraine.’

Slider put his head into the CID room, looking for Atherton, and Beevers looked up from his desk.

‘Sir, over here,’ he called.

‘No, sir over here,’ Slider corrected.

Beevers looked at him with grave Nonconformist reproof. ‘Have you got a minute, guv? Only it’s something a bit odd.’

Slider went meekly and looked over Beevers’ shoulder at some printed lists. ‘What’s this, stolen property?’

‘It’s something that came in this morning, that I was working on before. You know that load of stolen antiques and stuff we found in that big house in Paddenswick Road?’

‘We took Lenny Picket up for it.’ Slider shook his head. ‘I can never get over that name – Picket the Fence. What other line of work could he possibly have taken up?’

Beevers thought about it. ‘I suppose he could have been a landscape gardener.’

Slider was thrown into confusion. Was the Pillar of the Chapel making a joke? Normally Beevers disapproved of humour, believing that lightness of mind was an infallible indicator of lightness of morals – and with the example of Atherton before them, who could argue with him? ‘What about it, anyway?’ Slider said hastily.

‘Well, guv, there were some paintings in the haul, so we sent a description round all the dealers to see if they could place them. This letter came in this morning from Christie’s. I was going to pass it on to one of the TDs when the name caught my eye. Look—’ He squared the letter before Slider. ‘They identify the three paintings as stuff they sold to Alec Coleraine only five months ago, paid for with a bank draft drawn on his personal account. Important paintings, too.’