Killing Time (19 page)

‘You don’t know Jonah,’ she said abruptly, and then folded her lips tight, as though she hadn’t meant to say as much.

Slider felt a certain sympathy with that. He spoke for the first time. ‘If Jonah’s inside, he can’t hurt you, can he? Help us put him away, and then you’ll be safe. It’s the only way you
can
be safe. If he walks out of this police station, he’s not going to be in the best of moods. Even if he thinks he’s got away with it, he’s going to be fed up with having spent all this time in here, and who d’you think he’s going to take it out on?’ Candy looked at him resentfully but said nothing. ‘Just tell me the truth, Candy. He wasn’t really with you all Tuesday evening, was he? He went out. Tell me what time he went out.’

Candy didn’t hesitate this time. ‘He was in all evening,’ she said. But to Slider’s ears it had a hint of wistfulness about it.

Billy Yates’s brief was a quick-talking, smiling, rotund man called David Stevens. He had small, twinkling brown eyes and thick glossy hair, and exuded such enormous vitality he was like something out of a Pedigree Chum advert. He also had suits to die for, and the sort of wildly expensive red BMW coupe that successful pimps liked to drive. As he represented all the worst criminals on the ground, Slider knew him very well. The trouble was, Slider liked him, which made it harder to resist him. He thought Stevens liked him, too, but Stevens had the lawyerly knack of being able to think one thing and do another.

‘How come you represent Yates as well as the scum of the neighbourhood?’ Slider asked. ‘Is there some connection I should know about?’

‘You’ll have to be careful what you say to me, or I might have to sue you for defamation of character,’ Stevens said cheerfully.

‘Definition of character, did you say?’

Stevens whistled soundlessly. ‘Ooh, Bill, that’s another hundred thousand. Mr Yates is a prominent local businessman of
impeccable probity, who does a great deal of good in the neighbourhood and gives generously to charity.’

‘Yes, of course, silly me, that’s what I meant to say,’ Slider said. ‘And what can his interest be in Mr Lafota, I wonder?’

‘Mr Yates takes an interest in all his employees.’

‘Mr Lafota is unemployed,’ Slider pointed out sweetly.

Stevens was unshaken. ‘You didn’t let me finish,’ he said smoothly. ‘The end of my sentence was – even when they have left his employ. Mr Lafota needed a solicitor – Mr Yates asked me if I would act for him. So here I am.’

‘I can’t say I wasn’t expecting you,’ Slider said resignedly. ‘Though I didn’t think you’d get here so quickly. Jonah hasn’t even had his phone call yet. So tell me, how did Mr Yates hear that Mr Lafota was helping us with our enquiries?’

‘There isn’t much Mr Yates doesn’t hear.’ Stevens gave Slider a canny look. ‘Now, Bill, don’t be obvious! You can’t bring in a seven-foot giant built like a brick shithouse unnoticed, y’know. Anyone could have told him that.’

‘I suppose so,’ Slider sighed. ‘You’re such a nice bloke, Dave, how can you square it with your conscience to spend your life trying to get creeps like him off the hook?’

‘Not that old chestnut!’ Stevens chortled. ‘You must be feeling tired, old chum!’

Slider eyed him resentfully. ‘Where did you get that tan? The Bahamas?’

‘In my own little old back garden, mowing the lawn. It
is
summer, in case you hadn’t noticed. And now I want Mr Lafota out. You’ve got sweet FA, and you know it, so you’ll have to let him go. Much better not to struggle against the inevitable, as the actress said to the High Court judge.’

‘Oh, gimme a break, Dave,’ Slider said with faint, uncharacteristic irritation. ‘We’re not playing Scrabble, you know.’

Stevens only looked merrier. ‘I know you want a result before Little Eric says bye-bye, but that’s your problem, not mine. You’ve got nothing on my client, and I want him sprung.’

‘I’ve got the fingerprints,’ Slider pointed out.

‘On a bottle of whisky, not on a murder weapon. Paloma bought his Scotch from the club, staff rate. Lafota’s been in the store room there. The prints could have got on the bottle
any time. You’ll have to do better than that, sweetheart. It’s not proof. It’s not even evidence.’

‘And the prints on the light switch, in the flat he claims he’s never visited.’

‘They’re very poor prints, less than fifty per cent agreement.’

‘It’s enough to hold him on, while we look for something better,’ Slider said.

Stevens shrugged. ‘Temporarily. The Muppets will let me have him. You know that.’

‘That gives me thirty-six hours. I’ll take what I can get.’

Hart looked in. ‘You still here, guv? I wondered when I saw the light on.’

‘I was just thinking of going,’ he said. He eyed her thoughtfully. ‘Come in a minute, will you?’ She came and stood before the desk, eyeing him perkily. Didn’t these youngsters ever get tired? ‘I don’t generally interfere with my people’s intelligence gathering, but then they know the rules I like to operate under. You’re new to the ground, and you’re new to me, and I have the feeling you also like life to have an element of excitement. This information you got on Jonah Lafota—’

She grinned. ‘S’all right, guv, it wasn’t Garry. Listen, just because I’m black, female, and I talk wiv a gorblimey accent, it don’t mean to say I’m stupid.’

‘I didn’t think you were stupid,’ Slider said mildly. ‘I thought you probably felt you had something to prove.’

She became serious for once. ‘You’re dead right. You’ve heard of accelerated promotion? I got the opposite. People like me don’t start from the starting line, we start from back in the pavilion.’ Then suddenly she grinned again. ‘And d’you know the worst fing of all? If I do get on, get promoted, even if I get commended, I’ll never know if it’s because I’m any good, or because some git’s trying to prove he’s not prejudiced. I can’t win.
He
can’t win. I hate positive discrimination. It’s a bastard. At least with the old sort you knew where you were. If it wasn’t happening to you, you knew everything was all right. Now they’ve invented the other stuff, you’ll never know. You’ll never, ever know.’

There was a short silence. ‘You don’t leave me with much to say,’ Slider said. ‘I was going to tell you there’s no discrimination
in my firm, but now if I tell you that, you won’t be able to believe me.’

‘Yeah,’ she said with sympathy. ‘It’s like this—’ She took hold of the skin of her cheek between finger and thumb. ‘Once you got it, you just have to learn to live wiv it. You look tired, guv. An’ I bet you ain’t had anything to eat all day.’

Slider tried to look stern. ‘You’re not my mother.’

‘That’ll be a relief to my dad.’

Slider stood up, hesitated, and then said, ‘D’you want to go and get something to eat? Now you’ve reminded me, I am hungry.’ Joanna was away for the night, a concert in Leeds. He didn’t want to go home to cold bread and cheese.

‘Yeah, great,’ Hart said easily.

‘Right then. Oh,’ he remembered, ‘I’ve just thought, I ought to go and look at my house first. My old house – I’m not living there. I have to drop in now and then to make sure it hasn’t been burnt down or taken over by squatters. It’ll take about half an hour.’

‘No problem,’ she said. ‘I’ll come with you, if you like, and we can get a bite after.’

‘Okay. There’s a decent curry house not far from there. I’d be glad of the company, make sure I don’t drop off at the wheel.’

He wouldn’t, he was aware, have said that to Atherton, would not have felt the need to offer a justification. Was that another form of prejudice? He supposed it was, in a way, because he wouldn’t have said it to McLaren, either – supposing he had ever been likely to invite McLaren’s company. Why couldn’t he treat Hart like a male colleague? He had never seen himself as a crusty old MCP – hadn’t he always said Norma was the best policeman in the department? And that wasn’t because she was a woman, but because she was the best. Ah, but then, had she been a man, would he have ever felt the need to say it? Bloody hell, this prejudice business was a minefield! No, be fair, he had only said that about Norma out loud when someone had attacked women in the police generally as being inferior in some way. And privately he thought about her no differently from his male troops: her physical difference was a trait attached to her like McLaren’s eating habits or Mackay’s football fanaticism or Atherton’s finickitiness.

He didn’t think he was prejudiced, not in any direction. He worried about Hart because she was a rookie and because she
was a wild card – he didn’t know what she might do. On the subject of which—

‘By the way, who was your informant, if it wasn’t Garry?’

‘It was another bloke I met down the club. He’s a regular, he knows everybody. S’all right, guv,’ she added as Slider looked at her in alarm, ‘nobody knew who I was. That’s one advantage of being black and female, you can dress up outrageous so no-one recognises you. I walked right past that Garry in the doorway and he never clocked me. Mind you, he is as fick as pig-dribble.’

‘And that’s supposed to reassure me?’ Slider wanted to forbid her to go there again, but in the wake of all this talk and thought about prejudice, he felt his hands were tied. After all, he wouldn’t have tried to stop Mackay. He wouldn’t even have tried to stop Norma.

There was a slight fog, just enough to catch in the lights: the new halogen street lamps with their down-directed beams looked like a double row of shower-heads. The gibbous moon was an extraordinary colour, a most unnatural-looking dark yellow. Lying on its back low in the sky, it looked like a half-sucked sherbet lemon.

‘Where do you live?’ he asked Hart. She had snuggled into the seat beside him, drawing her legs up and wrapping her arms round them. Her generation was so much more at ease with everyone than his had been. In her place at that age he’d have sat up straight and worried about pleasing.

‘Streatham. I share a house. But I’m stopping with me mum and dad while I’m at Shepherd’s Bush. They live in North Wembley.’

‘Is that where you were born?’

‘Near enough. Willesden.’

‘So you’re a northerner?’

‘Am I?’

‘North of the river. That accounts for why you seem so normal. Atherton has this theory that London north of the river and London south of the river are utterly alien to each other. He calls it Cispontine and Transpontine London.’ It didn’t mean anything to Hart. But then it hadn’t to Slider until Atherton explained.

‘You miss him, don’t you?’ she said.

‘It was another complication in my life I could have done without.’

‘What’s this house we’re going to?’ she asked. So he told her. He meant to give her the briefest outline of the house
situation, but her questioning was so adroit he found himself telling her more, about Irene now apparently having second thoughts and his worry about the children being brought up by Ernie Newman.

‘It’s not that I’ve anything against him, except that he’s a boring fart. It’s that they’re
my
children, my responsibility. If anything goes wrong, it’ll be my fault, but now there’s nothing I can do to control the situation. I hate responsibility without power. It’s – frustrating,’ he ended mildly, suddenly aware of how much he was giving away.

‘Yeah,’ she said, in a tell-me-about-it voice.

He glanced at her. ‘Have you got a boyfriend?’

‘Not at the moment,’ she said.

‘It’s hard for women in the Job – particularly in the Department. That’s one of the unfairnesses.’

‘S’right. And at least when you get married you can have a wife. If I get married, I’ve got to have a husband.’ She made a face.

‘Would you like to be married?’

‘Not now. I want a career now. I like the Job, I want to get on. But I’d like to have kids too. I wanna have my career now, then when I’m forty-five ease off a bit and do the other. A bloke could do that. I can’t. It’s like
this.’
She tweaked her face again. ‘So tell me about frustration,’ she finished. ‘The way I see it, we all got disabilities. It’s like we’re all cripples, one way or another. Blind people, people with no legs, they got to adapt. But when you got all your bits and pieces, you expect too much. We got to start thinking like cripples.’

‘Count your blessings,’ Slider said. ‘They used to tell us that when I was a kid. There was even a Sunday School hymn.’

‘If I was you, guv,’ she said gravely, ‘every morning when I got up I’d look in the mirror and thank Jesus I’m not McLaren.’

Slider laughed, and pulled off the A40 into the slip lane. ‘Soon be there now. It won’t take long. I’ve just got to make sure nothing disastrous has happened. Then we’ll go for a Ruby. I’m assuming you like curry?’

‘Do lemmings like cliffs?’ said Hart.

When they got to the house he’d have expected her to stay in the car, but she got out when he did, so he didn’t say anything. She followed him up to the front door. ‘Nice,’ she said.

He concealed his surprise. ‘You think so?’

‘My mum and dad’d love this.’

‘They can have it,’ he offered promptly.

‘They couldn’t afford it.’

‘Neither can I,’ he said, but he thought it just showed you, one man’s meat is another man’s McDonald’s. Everything looked all right, no obvious broken windows or signs of squatters. He unlocked and stepped inside. The air smelled dry and stale, like packet soup. At first when he had come back it had seemed like his home, though deserted. Now he had been away long enough for it to seem alien to him: the spaces no longer fitted the geography of his eye’s expectations. They say if you shut your eyes while walking you retain an image of where you’re going to tread for eight paces, after which your brain loses confidence and you have to look again. It took longer to get unused to your old home, but he could no longer have confidently negotiated it in the dark. Not that it was ever completely dark. The street lamps filled it at night with a ghastly pinkish-yellow glow.

He left Hart in the hall and went upstairs to make sure there was no water where water should not be, and that the windows were all still locked. It was such a waste for the house to be empty, he thought, even though he didn’t love it. And the mortgage hurt more now that he wasn’t getting any use from it. Maybe, he toyed, he and Joanna should move into it. He had forked over those greens before, though, and knew the caterpillars. Even if he could live with Joanna where he had lived with Irene – and anyone could do anything if they put their minds to it – Joanna would hate it. He didn’t suppose for a moment that she’d consent to it, so he had never even suggested it. He had put the house on the market and she had not demurred, so that was that.