Killing Time (24 page)

Atherton shouted with pleasure.

‘I never know whether to believe your stories,’ Slider complained.

Joanna smiled seraphically. ‘Everything I tell you is either true, or bloody well ought to be.’

Slider faced David Stevens in the corridor outside the tape room.

‘Look, Dave, you’ve got to get him to come across. It’s not doing him any good, this refusing to say anything.’

Stevens shrugged his bouncy shoulders. ‘I can only take my client’s instruction. If he doesn’t want to talk—’

‘Have you explained to him about the change in the law over the right to remain silent?’

‘Who d’you think you’re talking to here? Of course I have.’

Slider struck off points on his fingers. ‘We’ve got the footmark on the door, fingermarks inside the flat, an eyewitness who saw him kicking the door down. And now we’ve got Sir Nigel Grisham’s statement that he paid Lafota money to put the frighteners on Paloma. There’s no doubt we’ll get custody extended.’

‘I agree,’ said Stevens easily.

Slider blinked. ‘I’ve got enough to charge him.’

Stevens smiled. ‘So charge him.’ He was eyeing Slider closely. ‘Charge him,’ he said again.

‘I want him to tell me what happened!’ Slider burst out in frustration. ‘Grisham only asked him to frighten Paloma. Why did he kill him? Was it an accident? Why did he wait until the next evening? How did he know Paloma was at home? Keeping silent now is pointless – can’t you make him see that?’

Stevens grinned his predator’s grin. ‘Ah Bill, Bill, the great poker face! You’ve got doubts, haven’t you?’

‘Don’t get clever with me. I just told you that.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘If there’s anything he’s got to say in mitigation, he’s
weakening his position by not telling me now.
You
know that. Make
him
understand it.’

Stevens laid a hand on Slider’s shoulder. His shirt was crisp, his suit unwrinkled, his aftershave a poem; and his eyes twinkled with that whole-hearted enjoyment of life only solicitors can afford. ‘I will do my best, old son,’ he pledged. ‘Angels can’t do more.’

Jonah, seedy, rumpled and smelling of sweat, lit another cigarette and coughed through the first drag. His eyes were bloodshot from smoke and lack of sleep. He glared at Slider defiantly across the table.

‘I didn’t do it, right?’

‘You didn’t do what?’ Slider asked.

‘I didn’t kill Jay.’

‘Then who did?’

‘I dunno. How should I know?’ All I know, ’e was dead when I got there, right?’

‘That’s not very original. If I had a fiver for every time someone’s told me that—’

‘Itsa trufe!’ Now Jonah sounded frightened. His voice cracked a little. ‘I never done niffing to him. He was dead when I got there.’

‘All right, tell me about it,’ Slider said.

Jonah was no orator even when he wanted to speak. It was like pull-out toffee, getting his story, but assembled it amounted to this: he had driven from his flat to White City, timing it to arrive at about twenty past eleven when the pubs were turning out, so that he wouldn’t be noticed. He went up to Paloma’s flat, kicked the door in with one mighty blow of his right foot, went straight to the sitting-room, from which he could hear the sound of the television. Paloma was sprawled dead on the floor with his overturned chair.

‘How did you know he was dead?’

‘Aw, come on, man!’ was Jonah’s reply to that.

‘Did you go right up to him and look?’

‘Nah, I could see from the door he was dead all right.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Nuffing. I never done niffing. I just got out, right? It wasn’t no business of mine.’

‘Hmm. But you see, the people next door who heard you kick the door in also heard you knock over something heavy. They heard a thud, as if something heavy had hit the floor. Now what was that, I wonder, if it wasn’t Jay Paloma?’

‘I never touched him! I tell you I never touched niffing!’

‘Nothing at all?’

Jonah stared at him, eyes wide, his mouth open to repeat his panicky denial. But Stevens beside him stirred like the first faint dawn breeze ruffling the willows, and Jonah’s mouth remained open and silent as he tried to capture the thread which had been spun for him.

‘The bottle!’ he cried at last. He might as well have pronounced it
eureka
. ‘I was shakin’, man, an’ I needed a drink, so I grabbed the bottle. The whisky bottle on the table.’

‘So you did go into the room, then? Just now you told me you stayed by the door.’

‘Look, I just went to look at ’im, right? Like anyone would. I never touched ’im. And I was so shook up, like I said, I grabbed the bottle and took a drink, and when I turned round to put it back, I knocked the table over.’

‘You knocked the table over?’

‘Yeah.’ Lafota seemed to feel relief at having reached sure ground. He looked at Stevens for approval. ‘That’s what these people must of heard, right? An’ everyfing went on the floor. So I picked it up and put it back, and then I took off.’

‘Why did you pick everything up?’ Slider asked.

‘I dunno,’ Lafota said, floored by the question.

But in Slider’s mind the scenario played true. What could be simpler for a man-mountain in a normal-sized sitting-room than to knock the table over? He might have done it at any point while he was whacking Paloma; or it might actually have happened as he said, when, shaky from the killing, he had fortified himself with a drink. It had the sappy ring of truth about it, that bit. The killing he had planned and visualised, but the mess as the table went over, spilling magazines, whisky and the contents of the ashtray on the floor, was something unexpected, and it threw him. In his panic, wanting to leave things as he had found them, wanting to leave no trace of his having been there – other, of course, than the dead body – the big lug had tidied up after himself, put the table back, rubbed the ash into the carpet so that no-one would
notice it, entirely forgetting that he had left his dabs all over the whisky bottle. It was the sort of stupid thing a person would do, when they were not accustomed to thinking things out, and found themselves in an unexpected and frightening situation.

‘So why
did
you kill him?’ Slider asked at last, conversationally.

‘I never,’ Jonah said stubbornly. ‘I told you. He was already dead when I got there.’

‘All right, then what did you go to the flat for in the first place?’ No answer. ‘Why did you go to the flat and kick the door down?’ No answer. ‘Did you do it for the money?’

Jonah looked contemptuous. ‘You call that money? I wouldn’t spit on a beggar for that.’ Stevens stirred, and Jonah glanced at him anxiously, and then said, ‘I never killed him. He was dead when I got there.’

‘But then
why
did you go there?’

Now Jonah looked sullen. ‘I ain’t saying no more. I never killed ’im, that’s all. I ain’t done niffing.’ He turned resentfully to Stevens. ‘You get me out of here, right? They got niffing on me.’ And he folded his massive arms across his chest and ostentatiously closed his mouth.

Hollis was in Slider’s room, reading something he held in his hands. He looked up as Slider came in. ‘Any luck?’

‘I ain’t saying niffing,’ Slider said, going round his desk to sit down heavily. ‘Now he says he found Paloma already dead when he got there, was so upset he took a drink of whisky, and knocked the table over putting the bottle back.’

‘Really? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced,’ Hollis said brightly.

Slider gave him a look. ‘It means he’s talked his way out of the fingerprints.’

‘It looks like an open and shut case to me, guv,’ Hollis said comfortingly. ‘I wouldn’t worry. He’ll come clean in the end.’

‘With Stevens as his brief?’ Slider said. ‘What’s that you’ve got there, anyway?’

Hollis proffered it. ‘It’s the additional forensic report.’

Slider took it. The lab had typed the anal swab ready for cross-matching if requested. Well, that should keep Sir Nigel straight and true to his story. There was no trace of any
known recreational drug in the bloodstream, and the alcohol was low, 40mg per 100ml, so Paloma was neither drunk nor high at the time of death. And the stomach contents had been analysed as scrambled eggs and toast, eaten less than one hour before death.

‘Well, that’s consistent with the dirty dishes in the kitchen,’ Slider said, throwing the paper down on his desk. ‘No surprises there.’

‘The hearty man ate a condemned breakfast,’ Hollis said.

‘A late breakfast, anyway,’ Slider said. ‘What else have you got for me?’

‘Oh – this, sir.’ Hollis passed over the envelope with an abstracted air of having forgotten he was holding it. It was large, square and stiff, and Slider guessed what it was before he opened it.

‘Mr Honeyman’s farewell party,’ he said aloud. ‘The official brass one, complete with speeches and presentation.’

‘You’re invited, sir?’ Hollis said with a smirk. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Not so fast,’ Slider said. ‘I’ve got to take someone else from my firm.’ He passed the invitation back. ‘As the only sergeant still upright, that means you. If I’ve got to suffer, I don’t see why you should get away with it. I’m not a well man, you know.’

Hollis bulged at him. ‘Me, guv? They won’t want me. I’m a new boy, hardly know Mr Honeyman.’

‘Don’t grovel,’ Slider said coldly. ‘You’re It.’

‘But it says black tie! My dinner suit’s twenty years old. It’s got twelve-inch flares and eight-inch lapels. The Fred West Wedding Suit look. I don’t even know if I can still get into it.’

‘Hire one,’ Slider said brutally.

‘Guv, listen, take Swilley. Give yourself a bit o’ credit.’

‘I wouldn’t do that to Swilley,’ Slider said.

‘Hart, then.’ Hollis seemed struck by his own idea a moment after voicing it. ‘That’s it – take Hart. Not only will it give you street cred, having a bird on your arm, but think how much it’ll annoy the high-ups.’

Slider looked at him narrowly. ‘White man speak with forked tongue. But you’ve got a point.’

‘That’s right, guv.’ Hollis relaxed ostentatiously. ‘She doesn’t mind what she says to anyone, and she’s cracking-looking.
And being an ambitious female, she probably won’t mind going.’

‘All right, you’ve made your point,’ Slider said. ‘I shan’t forget, though, how you abandoned me in my hour of need.’

‘That seems fair,’ Hollis said happily, ‘I won’t forget it either.’ He got as far as the door and turned back. ‘Guv, I was just thinking – I suppose Lafota couldn’t possibly have been telling the truth?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Well, you remember at the post mortem, the pathologist-bloke started off thinking the death were much earlier? It was you saying late breakfast made me think – well, it
is
more like a breakfast meal, scrambled eggs, in’t it?’

Slider was silent. The wrong time of death? Two men on the scene? Could that be the answer to all the anomalies? There was something else, something that made Hollis’s suggestion chime harmoniously rather than jar. He looked back through his mental filing cabinet, and Hollis waited, watching him. What the hell was it? Something he had noticed without noticing, right at the very beginning. Something about the room in which Paloma was found.

‘You were at the scene before me,’ Slider said at last. ‘Were the curtains in the sitting-room open or closed when you arrived?’

‘Open,’ Hollis said without hesitation. ‘The sun was shining in.’

‘You didn’t open them?’

‘Not me.’

‘Who was first on the scene? It was Baker, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t have pulled the curtains back. He’d know better than that.’

‘Shall I check, guv?’

‘Yes, do that. If the curtains were open—’

‘Yes.’

‘It isn’t impossible that someone should sit and watch television at night with the curtains open, particularly in summer – with the long twilights people do sometimes forget to pull them. But—’

‘Yes, guv,’ Hollis said.

Slider met his eyes unwillingly. ‘If there’s anything in this, we’re back at square one, you realise that. We’ll have it all to
do again. We’ll have to go over every statement, re-examine the witnesses, re-interview all the neighbours with a new time of death in mind.’

‘No nice goodbye present for Mr Honeyman, then?’

‘Go and track down Baker. And if he says the curtains were open, you’d better assemble the troops to start looking at the statements.’

‘Right, guv.’

‘Oh – Hollis!’

‘Guv?’

‘That television programme that was on when we arrived at the scene. What channel would that be?’

‘That’s
The Big Breakfast
. Channel Four.’

‘Right. Thanks,’ said Slider.

Honeyman seemed ill at ease. ‘Ah, Slider,’ he said vaguely. He stared at and through him, frowning.

‘You sent for me, sir?’ Slider reminded him tactfully.

‘Yes. Yes.’ A pause. ‘Oh yes. You’ve had your invitation to my farewell party?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And who are you bringing?’

‘I thought Hart, sir, if that’s all right.’

‘Hart? Oh yes. Yes, good idea. Bring a little life into it. These do’s tend to be stuffy. A lot of men together, slapping backs and talking shop.’ He cleared his throat as though embarrassed. ‘You know of course that I’m not leaving?’

‘Not, sir?’

‘No. Well, not this week, anyway. I had hoped we could bring this Paloma case home by today, but as we haven’t – well, I couldn’t go in the middle of it. Especially given the sensitivity of the Grisham connection.’

‘I see, sir. So how long will you be staying on?’ If the case went into extra time, what then? Would they just slip little Eric in the non-active filing cabinet years hence and forget him?

‘I’ve asked for another fortnight,’ Honeyman said. ‘If there’s nothing substantial by then I shall have to hand it on to my successor, but I did want to give it a reasonable chance. I look to you – er, Bill – to send me out in the right style.’ He used
Slider’s name with all the ease of a Victorian virgin naming a private part.

‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ Slider said. ‘So – what about the party?’