Dead End (19 page)

‘It was a bloke, and not my sort,’ Slider said, coming across for the piece of paper. On it, in Paxman’s bullish handwriting, was Coleraine’s address.

‘Is this to do with your murder?’ Nicholls asked, rolling his r’s superbly. ‘Is that not the son-in-law’s address?’

‘How did you know that?’ Slider asked in amusement. Not much got past Nicholls.

‘I was at the fax machine when McLaren got his burglary report through. Is the son-in-law in the frame, then?’

‘Like a Gainsborough,’ Slider answered, and thought of Lenny Picket. But not like a Constable. ‘Is Barrington in?’

Nutty shook his head. ‘Not back yet. That man is developing a dangerously high tolerance of lunch.’

‘Do you think it’s lunch? It strikes me he’s not firing on all cylinders these days.’

Nicholls cocked an eye at him. ‘You think he’s heading for a breakdown? I’ve been wondering myself. D’you know he was down here this morning looking through the waste-paper baskets?’

‘Did he find what he was looking for?’

‘He found a couple of paper clips in the charge room, and went straight into circuit overload. Paxman told me about it. Result is we’ve got a new ukase wet from the press.’ He gestured towards a memo lying in the in-basket. ‘To all departments: paper clips are not to be thrown away but must be kept and re-used. Department supervisors must make regular checks of the waste-paper baskets to see that this instruction is being followed.’

Slider shook his head sadly. ‘He’s just playing for popularity. Taking the easy course.’

‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ Nutty went on. ‘All that business over the chip-shop murders – Home Office, Foreign Office and everyone else asking him searching questions – and then you not taking your transfer. Every time he comes in to the office the sight of you rubs his face in it.’

‘You think it’s my fault, do you?’ Slider protested.

‘If you mean to sup with the devil, you need a long spoon,’ Nicholls said with Highland inscrutability. ‘You had troubles enough, but he’d four times as many. He’d yours times his.’

‘That’s what bosses are for.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Nutty tranquilly. ‘I’m just mentioning.’

The last thing in the world Slider wanted at the moment was to be induced to feel sorry for Mad Ivan Barrington: it came in even behind being trapped in a lift with a man who’d done his own conveyancing. He turned away, and then turned back to say, ‘Oh, and I have got an assignation, as it happens. I’m having tea with a lady.’

Nutty grinned. ‘You English!’

‘The trouble with revolvers is that the cartridge cases are carried away in the chamber, so until we find the gun we can’t be absolutely sure of a match,’ said Swilley.

‘This obsession with guns is just penis envy you know, Norma,’ Atherton pointed out.

‘Bollocks,’ she replied.

‘If you’ve got ’em, clang ’em,’ said Anderson.

‘You’re all morons,’ Norma said kindly.

She was perched on her desk resting her weight on her hands like a 1950s Coca-Cola girl. Normally this would have had Mackay dribbling at her feet, but in emulation of his old oppo, Hunt, he had recently bought a Golf GTI, and his lusts had all been diverted into motor-mechanical channels. Now all that passed through his mind was the extra pair of Bosch halogen superspots he’d set his heart on. ‘It’s a pretty fair bet we’re onto the right gun, though,’ he said. ‘The same sort of ammo, and not your everyday brand either. Radek’s shooter was kept loaded and in an unlocked drawer, where Coleraine knew where it was, and he was in the house and left alone for long enough to nick it.’

‘It’s a good start,’ Slider said, ‘but it’s not proof. Norma’s right, we’ve got to find that gun – and that means we’ve got to find where the killer went after the shooting. What’s the latest on that?’

‘We’ve got various reports to follow up,’ Beevers said, referring to his papers. ‘A woman saw a man in a duffel coat looking very nervous coming out of Queensway tube at about three o’clock. He turned left and went on up Queensway. She said he was youngish and medium height with light-coloured hair. But he didn’t have a hat on.’

‘All the better to recognise him without,’ Atherton said, ‘supposing it’s our man.’

‘Supposing,’ said Beevers. ‘Then there’s a man with a hat and light brown coat who came running out of Bond Street tube at about twenty past three, but the witness doesn’t know if it was a duffel coat or not. He ran across the road – almost getting himself knocked down, according to witness – and up James Street. And there was a fair-haired man acting suspiciously at White City outside the BBC centre—’

‘Isn’t there always?’ Slider said.

‘Probably Jimmy Saville,’ said Anderson.

‘—again at about three o’clock, but not wearing a coat or hat, though he was carrying a large carrier bag, so they could have been inside it. He was sweating and looked nervous. Hung
around for a bit and then jumped on a seventy-two bus heading north when it stopped at the crossing.’ He turned the pages back. ‘The Anti-terrorist Squad got that report as well. Those three are the most promising. There’s dozens of others, of course – men, women, hats, coats, parcels, and every tube station on the Underground.’

‘Well, keep at it,’ Slider said. ‘Something will come up. Let’s have videofits from those three to start with. And try them with a photograph of Coleraine, see if it tweaks any hairs.’

‘But guv,’ Anderson said, ‘if Coleraine did want to off the old man, surely he wouldn’t be so daft as to use Radek’s own gun, when it could be proved he knew about it and had the opportunity to nick it? And when he’s got a cartridge case from it stuck on his mantelpiece for all to see?’

‘He probably never thought twice about the cartridge case,’ Norma said. ‘It’d been there so long it was—’

‘Part of the furniture,’ Atherton supplied.

‘Well, it’s not that easy for your average law-abiding citizen to get hold of a gun,’ Slider said. ‘He’d have to make do with what was to hand – and it must have been tempting, lying there loaded and ready and available.’

‘Maybe he meant to put it back at some later stage,’ Norma suggested, ‘hoping no-one would make the connection. Not everybody knows that you can tell which gun a bullet’s been fired from.’

‘Let’s not forget the son in all this,’ Atherton said. ‘He knew the gun was there as well, and had just as much opportunity to steal it.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Norma objected. ‘You don’t know he was left alone.’

‘You don’t know he wasn’t.’

‘What’s his motive then?’ Mackay asked.

‘The same – money,’ said Atherton. ‘From the little I know about Marcus so far, he’s an immoral, selfish little tart who’d sell his granny for the gold in her teeth.’

‘You’ve been looking into his background, haven’t you?’ Slider intervened to impose a bit of structure on the talk. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Our Marcus is a naughty boy,’ Atherton obliged. ‘His prep school had him “could do better” – clever but lazy, not amenable
to discipline and inclined to think too well of himself. The head I spoke to came over rather puzzled and a little wary: liked the boy in spite of everything but was afraid I was going to tell him he’d gone to the bad.’

‘Prophetic,’ Slider nodded.

‘After prep school he went to Harrow by the skin of his teeth. They weren’t too keen to take him, but he’d got a scholarship; and besides, Coleraine’s mother was a Russell, and her family’s men have gone there for a hundred and fifty years or something.’

‘Coleraine’s godson, Henry Russell—?’ Slider remembered.

‘Is a second cousin, yes. He was at Harrow at the same time and presented an unhappy contrast with Marcus, which probably helped to reinforce the bad behaviour. Anyway, Marcus got sent down in the end for running an adolescent version of long firm fraud: offering to get hold of tickets for popular events – student balls and pop concerts and the like – taking the money up front and then not delivering the tickets. One of the boys complained to his father, and the balloon went up. Coleraine managed to hush it up by paying back all the boys out of his own money – Marcus had spent the lot, of course – so the school didn’t call in the police, but still insisted Marcus left. So he went to a crammer for two terms, got his A levels, just, and went to university.’

‘What did he study?’ Mackay asked.

‘Economics. I spoke to his tutor, who said that the father had wanted Marcus to read Law, but he didn’t have the grades – another source of friction. And from the first Marcus didn’t make any attempt to do the work and obey the rules. It was all gigs and girls and drunken parties – the tutor thought he’d got interested in recreational drugs too – and he was frequently in minor trouble. Nobody was surprised when he dropped out. Since then he’s set up to live in the flat in Bayswater and spend money – presumably his father’s, since he’s never done a day’s work in his life.’

‘Sounds like an absolute sweetie,’ Norma said sourly.

‘What’s his connection with Steve Murray?’ Anderson asked.

‘Met him at a Radek concert at the Festival Hall. Marcus was hanging around backstage hoping to tap his grandad for a few bucks; Murray was hanging round hoping Kate Apwey wouldn’t have to go off horizontal jogging with the old bugger. The two
lonely lads took to each other and became friends. Reading between the lines, Murray had a supplier and Marcus was free with his money, so they were obviously made for each other.’

‘Just a moment, are you saying that Marcus is an addict?’ Slider asked.

‘No, strictly a recreational user. You could almost like him better if he was – there’d be some excuse for him then. But he’s just a self-indulgent little parasite.’

‘I’m getting a sort of feeling here that you don’t like him,’ Slider said tentatively.

‘He disgusts me,’ Atherton said.

‘He may be a spoiled brat but it doesn’t make him a murderer. From what you’ve said his father keeps him supplied with money. Why should he take the risk of killing his grandfather when he can have anything he wants for the asking? Radek’s money goes to Fay, anyway, not to Marcus.’

‘Far more likely Coleraine’s feeling the pinch, if he’s funding his son’s delightful habits,’ Norma agreed.

‘It’d come to the same thing, wouldn’t it?’ McLaren said as best he could. He had just finished eating a packet of McVitie’s Chocolate Homewheat and was hooking squashy chocolatey bits from the corners of his gums with his little finger. ‘I mean, if his old man was up the swannee, and his old lady came in for the wonga, it’d come to him anyway. She’d wedge him up all right.’

‘English is such a beautiful language when spoken by an expert,’ Atherton said admiringly. ‘Why shouldn’t Marcus and Murray have dreamed up the whole scheme in an idle moment – of which, let’s face it, they have an unlimited supply – just for the fun of it? The idea of diverting the money from tight-fisted grandpa to soppily generous mamma would just be an added incentive.’

‘You take a large size in assumptions,’ Slider reproved. ‘What about Marcus’s movements that day?’

‘Ah, now, there’s the really interesting bit,’ Atherton said. ‘He says he was mooching about at home all morning, which rings true; left home at noon and went to see Murray, got there at half past one and stayed the rest of the evening. Murray confirms it all like a paid-up member. So for the crucial period they are each other’s alibi.’

‘How convenient,’ Slider said wearily.

‘Damnable, isn’t it? Covent Garden being what it is, there must have been hundreds of people around, any one of whom might have seen Marcus arrive. The problem will be finding them.’

‘But hang on,’ Anderson said, ‘how did Marcus know Murray would be there? Murray called in sick that morning. He should have been at work. Marcus would’ve known that, surely?’

‘Right. But if Murray wasn’t in, Marcus was going to pop into the Opera House and get his key to let himself in. Murray was a friendly soul, not above giving his mates the run of his gaff.’ Atherton shrugged. ‘As an alibi it’s like a string vest – it fits all right, but it’s full of holes.’

‘It’s a better alibi than Coleraine’s got,’ Norma pointed out.

‘Which is not saying a whole hell of a lot,’ Atherton retorted.

Slider cut through the witty badinage. ‘Now here’s something. Marcus left home at twelve and got to Murray’s at one-thirty – an hour and a half for a half-hour journey. Coleraine left the office at twelve-thirty and says he got home at a quarter to two – an hour and a quarter for a half-hour journey. Where’s the missing time? Suppose he met Marcus at twelve-thirty somewhere near the office?’

‘You said Marcus phoned him at a quarter to twelve and rang off at about twelve,’ Norma said. ‘They could have arranged to meet. It fits all right. But what’s it got to do with us?’

‘Do you think they were both in on the job, guv?’ Atherton said. ‘That they met to arrange the murder?’

He shook his head. ‘No, I can’t see that. But suppose Marcus were in some worse than usual financial crisis, and after meeting him and hearing about it Coleraine went home in despair and decided the only way out was to kill Radek?’

‘But he’d taken the gun the day before,’ Mackay pointed out.

‘There’s no reason he couldn’t have planned it earlier,’ Atherton said. ‘The meeting with Marcus might have been incidental.’