Dead End (6 page)

‘I understand, sir,’ said Slider. ‘May I talk to you about something else now? I did want to report on the Radek murder case.’

Barrington looked blank for a moment, like a man who’s been smacked on the side of the head unexpectedly by a golf-ball. Then he sat down abruptly at his desk. ‘I was wondering when you’d get round to that,’ he said sharply. ‘Well, carry on.’

Sighing inwardly, Slider carried on.

‘Forensic aren’t going to be able to help us on this one,’ he concluded. ‘There’s nothing at the scene to identify the killer amongst all the hundreds of footprints and fingerprints. We’ve interviewed everyone who was present, but all the accounts are pretty much the same and no-one has much to contribute. Only the verger was close enough even to get a glimpse of the face under the hat, and he didn’t see enough to know the man again. But we’ll assemble what description we can, and we’ve started the door-to-door. I think this is a case where posters may help, too – someone must have seen him in the street either before or afterwards. We could be ready to go on the television for this evening’s news, the local for preference, if you think it’s worth it with what little we’ve got.’

He paused enquiringly, but Barrington only stared at him briefly as though he hadn’t been listening, and then said, ‘Go on.’

Slider continued. ‘In case it was a random killing we’ve run a computer check, but nothing’s come up. Description and MO don’t tally with anyone on the streets at the moment – though that doesn’t rule out someone with no record, of course.’

Barrington grunted.

‘The post is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. We had a bit of trouble, Freddie Cameron being away on holiday, what with the general shortage of forensic pathologists. But at least it ought to be quite straightforward – there’s no mystery about the cause of death, after all. Anyway, there’s a man at Thomas’s,
name of James: he’s young but he’s got some gunshot wound experience—’

‘James? Yes. I know him.’ Slider made a politely enquiring noise. ‘I met him once or twice when I was up in Nottingham.’ The Nottingham forensic lab dealt with all the specialist firearms enquiries outside the Met area. ‘He’s a good man. I didn’t know he was at Thomas’s now.’

Slider nodded and continued. ‘Regarding the gun, sir, I’ve got two teams combing the area at the moment – front gardens, basements, rubbish bins and so on – but in view of the fact that chummy put the piece in his pocket, I’m not hopeful. In my experience either they throw it away immediately in a panic, or they hang on to it and dump it or stash it when they get home. And we don’t know where home may be, of course. But my gut feeling is that this murder will probably turn out to be a domestic, and it’s just a matter of finding out who wanted him dead. I think once we talk to the family we’ll latch onto something fairly quickly.’

Barrington stopped at that, and turned to look at Slider thoughtfully, pulling out his lower lip with his finger and thumb in the unattractive way of someone who doesn’t realise he’s doing it.

‘You see this as an old-fashioned police job, do you?’ he asked suddenly.

Slider was puzzled. ‘Sir?’

‘This case. Means, motive and opportunity. Dedicated plodding. Is that how you see it?’

Slider hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, and he didn’t like it. This was so unlike Barrington-talk he had an obscure sense of trouble approaching.

‘I wouldn’t say that exactly, sir,’ he said cautiously. ‘All I mean is that I don’t think it was a random killing. It might be as simple as money. From what I understand of the music world, conductors earn a lot of money. Radek must have been a very wealthy man.’

‘I’ve had a call, you see, from Bob Moston at 6 AMIP,’ Barrington said.

‘I see,’ said Slider non-committally. The Area Major Incident Pool handled the particularly complex or high-profile cases. It remained to be seen whether this would prove to be either, but a
glory-hungry AMIP boss or a responsibility-shy local boss might insist on passing the case upwards.

‘Radek was rather a media honey last year,’ Barrington went on, ‘though he’s not particularly in the news at the moment.’ He will be after today, Slider thought. ‘But you just never know with the press. There’s a romantic side to it – the single shot fired in a dark church – which might catch their imagination. On the other hand—’

He let it hang. On the other hand, Slider filled in for himself, it might be cast into the shade by a newly discovered Soap Star’s Secret Love-Nest Shock, or MP In Baby Alligator Abuse Scandal.

‘Is Mr Moston anxious to take the case, sir?’ Slider asked.

Barrington looked surprised. ‘Oh. No. On the contrary. Two of his SIOs are
hors de combat
at the moment.’ French yet, thought Slider. ‘And the other three are already involved in more than one case each. He’s asking whether we’re likely to be sending this case up to him, because he’d probably have to tackle it himself if we did. So I want your assessment. Can you handle it here?’

If you leave me alone, I can. Slider, the brave captain, tilted his clean-cut English chin at the stern and critical general. ‘I think so, sir. At the moment there’s no media pressure, and we’ve no reason yet to think it’s going to be a sticker. I’ve got a good team, and Atherton’s pretty
au fait
with the music scene.’ You’re not the only one who knows French, chum.

‘You – er – have a contact in the orchestra concerned, I believe?’ Barrington said with unexpected delicacy. ‘Is that likely to cause a problem?’

How the hell did he know that? ‘Quite the contrary, sir.’ He couldn’t really risk
au contraire,
not so soon. ‘It should be a useful source of information. Though I must point out that there’s no indication the orchestra was anything but an accidental witness.’

‘Very well. We’ll keep the case, then. And we’ll keep off the television for the time being. I think the likelihood of gain is outweighed by the disadvantage of the publicity.’ Barrington got up and began pacing again. ‘And I’ll handle the press on this one. I want you to have a free hand.’

Free to win fame or to fuck up. ‘Thank you, sir,’ Slider said.

Barrington paced, and Slider began to feel restless. He had better things to do than to wait on Mad Ivan’s thought processes.

‘Will that be all, sir?’ he prompted, Jeeves-like.

Barrington turned and stared thoughtfully at him. ‘Yes. Carry on. But don’t forget what I said. Discipline, and attention to detail. You can’t run a successful campaign without them.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Slider said dutifully, and removed himself. Definitely cracking up, he thought. And who was likely to get the rubble coming down on his head?

Radek’s house, now the house of sorrow, was one of those large, handsome, four-storeyed, nineteenth-century town-houses, white stone rendering over yellow London brick, porch with white pillars, steps up over a semi-basement. It was one of a terrace set back a little from Holland Park Avenue, with a private access road divided from the common pavement by iron railings, a shrubbery and a row of ancient plane trees seventy feet high. They soared with magnificent disproportion over the little cars and the little people down in the street, like members of an alien culture so advanced it did not even need to acknowledge the host infestation.

Inside the house was gracious and beautiful in a way that you simply had to be born to money to achieve. Slider appreciated, but knew he could never have emulated it, even if he won the pools. It was as many light years away from the Sunday supplement, Marilyn Cripps good-taste of Irene’s wistful dreams as
that
was from the Ruislip Moderne she was fleeing so hard, poor thing. And oddly enough, Buster Keaton fitted into it, and looked not nearly so odd amidst the quiet elegance as he had in the ordinary world. He was short, stout and shiningly bald, but his features held the remnants of what must once have been a remarkable beauty, and he moved among the glowing treasures with the ease of custom.

‘Yes, it is a lovely house,’ Keaton said, leading Slider into the first-floor drawing-room. ‘I have been very happy here. I count myself fortunate to have been able to share all this, as well as the life of a great genius.’ In himself he was immaculate, clean enough to have eaten off, and even indoors and at a time like this was dressed in grey flannels with a knife-edge crease, pale blue shirt, striped tie and navy blazer.

‘Was Sir Stefan a genius?’ Slider asked. Keaton looked at him sharply, and he smiled disarmingly. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about music.’

Keaton examined him for bona fides, and his hackles slowly lowered. ‘Yes. Yes, he was a genius. It’s a word that’s over-used and often misapplied, but in his case it was justified. He was a man of rare and extraordinary talent. Of course like most geniuses he was misunderstood by lesser people.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, they sometimes thought him rude and intolerant. I’ve heard the things people say – musicians – but they didn’t understand. He lived to serve Music: he didn’t have the time or energy to worry about their petty feelings.’ He settled himself on the end of a chaise-longue, sitting very upright, his back unsupported, and waved Slider to a chair. ‘Of course his dedication took its toll of him. Not that he counted the cost: he never spared himself. But it was killing him.’

‘Killing him?’

Keaton’s large pale eyes seemed to widen further. ‘His heart,’ he said. ‘He was not a well man. I’ve been trying for eighteen months to persuade him to do less, to go into semi-retirement, but he couldn’t live without his work. “If I go tomorrow,” he’d say to me, “I want to go with my stick in my hand.”’ Slider began to detect a very faint residual Yorkshire accent in the otherwise cultured tones. It seemed to grow with the increasing cosiness of the prose-style. ‘I warned him. I said, “You’re not as young as you used to be. Take it easy,” I said. “Does it matter if you do one concert a week instead of two or three?” Well, he did slow down a bit, but not as much as I wanted him to. And now—’ the eyes shone with tears, ‘and now he’s gone, even if it was the way he wanted.’ He had to pause a moment to regain control. ‘He could have gone at any time, I knew that,’ he went on, shaking his head slowly. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised.’

Slider was sitting forward, hands clasped between his knees, staring at the carpet while he listened. Now he looked up. ‘But it wasn’t his heart that killed him, Mr Keaton.’

For a moment Keaton looked quite blank, as though he’d been spoken to in a foreign language. Then he drew out a handkerchief and slowly and carefully wiped his eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was forgetting. You must forgive me. This has
been such a dreadful shock for me, I hardly know what I’m thinking.’

‘You’d been with Sir Stefan a long time,’ said Slider, to get him going again.

‘More than forty years,’ he answered with a touch of mournful pride. ‘It was June 1953 when my wife and I joined him. Of course he wasn’t
Sir
Stefan in those days, but he was already world-famous. We came as a couple. My wife was cook-housekeeper and I was chauffeur-handyman.’

‘Your wife?’

A gleam of something appeared in the depths of Keaton’s eyes at the interjection – perhaps annoyance or even amusement that Slider had obviously been writing him down as a lifelong bachelor.

‘My wife Doreen died in 1960.’ He spread his hands in a little deprecatory gesture. ‘I was not always as you see me now. In my youth I was thought quite handsome. Let me show you.’

He got up and went across the room to a bureau, opened a drawer, and took out a large photograph album. As he walked back, he turned the pages over and then turned it round and presented it to Slider open, holding it for him rather than entrusting it to his grasp. Alone on the page was an eleven-by-eight black-and-white print of a smiling young woman in the rolled-over hairstyle and high-shouldered print dress of the forties. Her arm was linked through that of a young man in a double-breasted suit, his thin light hair Brylcreemed down and his pale eyes almost disappearing by some trick of the light. They were standing on grass and amid shrubs, and in the background was part of a building, the sort of vast Victorian pile which usually turned out to be either a private school or a lunatic asylum – not, Slider thought, that there was always much difference. Yes, he had been good-looking. A little on the short side, perhaps, but women didn’t usually mind that too much.

‘What’s this place?’ he asked.

‘Fitzpayne School,’ Keaton replied. ‘Not my
alma mater,
I hasten to add. I taught there after the war.’

‘Classics?’ Slider suggested, following the Latin clue.

Again that faint gleam. ‘Biology. Botany was my subject, but I taught zoology as well. I shouldn’t have liked to be known as The Bot Master.’

Slider smiled dutifully at what was obviously a well-rehearsed joke. He could just see Keaton telling it daringly over the sherry at parents’ evenings, to indulgent and faintly shocked laughter.

‘What did you do during the war?’

‘I was at university. Cambridge. I did research there for the Ministry of Food as part of my degree – how to make two ears of wheat grow where one grew before, that sort of thing.’

It was said defensively, as though he had been accused of dodging the call-up. Slider decided to ease one sting with another. ‘You’re obviously an educated man. What made you give up teaching to become a chauffeur? Didn’t you find it rather a come-down to go into service?’

Keaton looked away for a moment, and Slider thought he might have gone too far; but after a moment he said, without apparent offence, ‘I didn’t enjoy teaching. I didn’t really like children, you see, especially little boys – their minds are so undisciplined. And then I decided I wanted to write. I suppose most of us feel we have a book in us somewhere, don’t we?’ Slider assented dishonestly. He had never had the least urge to write – real life, at least in his case, being a lot stranger than fiction.