Killing Time (7 page)

She shook her head. ‘Usually he talked about his friends a bit to me – not the intimate stuff, just that he’d been to see them and where they’d gone and what they’d done. But this one was different. All I gathered was, if it had got out about Maurice, it could have caused this man trouble.’

‘Was Jay – Maurice – in love with him?’

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ she said consideringly. ‘He was generous, this man – gave Maurice presents and money. It was because of that I was able to give up turning tricks – though that was a lot easier on the feet than barmaiding, I can tell you!’

‘How long had he known him?’

‘About a year.’

‘And relations were normally smooth between them?’

‘Oh, I think so – except I think the secrecy got on Maurice’s nerves a bit. But just recently – well, the last few weeks, I suppose – he hasn’t been his usual self. Always very cheerful, he was, and sort of – brisk. Always cleaning the house, singing to himself, nagging me about my appearance. Try this lipstick, Val; have your hair cut, Val; get yourself a new dress, Val. All good-natured, you know. He wanted me to make the most of myself. But lately there hasn’t been much of that. He’s been sort of quiet and – off it. And then yesterday morning, while he was sitting fiddling with my makeup, I said to him, “What’s up, Mo darling, you look as if you’ve got the blues,” and he said, “Oh,” he said, “my friend and I had a bit of a disagreement yesterday, that’s all.”’

‘He’d been to see him, then, on Monday?’

‘Monday lunchtime. He was spending the afternoon with him, but I’d gone to work before he got back. That’s why he got up, I suppose, to see me off.’ Her eyes filled. ‘To say goodbye. If only I’d known. If only we’d both known.’

‘Did he say what the quarrel was about?’

‘He didn’t say quarrel, he said disagreement. He didn’t say what about, but they had argued before, so I suppose it was about the same thing. I gather his friend has been objecting to Maurice working at the Pomona.’

That made sense to Slider. ‘Well, it isn’t exactly Rules, is it?’

‘Isn’t what, pardon?’

Slider waved that away. ‘Did you know that Jay had been receiving threatening letters?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ She scanned his face keenly, and then let out her breath in a slow hiss. ‘So that was it! I knew he’d been keeping something from me. No, I didn’t know that, but I knew there was something wrong. I thought at first it was one of those summer colds, you know, that sort of hang on and never come out properly. But no wonder, with that hanging over him, poor lamb! Why didn’t he tell me?’

‘He didn’t want to worry you.’

‘So you knew about it? He reported it to you, did he?’

‘He came to see me on Monday afternoon. Unfortunately, he hadn’t kept any of the letters, so there wasn’t much I could do. And I had the feeling he was hiding something. I thought he knew who was doing it, but wasn’t willing to tell me. I told him to come back if anything else happened.’

She looked at him, her eyes widening. ‘Do you think – this friend of Maurice’s – do you think he killed him?’

‘It’s possible, at any rate, that whoever sent him the poison pen letters may have killed him.’

‘You knew about the letters,’ she said. ‘You could have saved him.’

‘I don’t know how,’ Slider said abjectly. ‘Busty, I’m sorry, believe me. I feel terrible about it. But what could I have done? I had nothing to go on, and short of posting a bodyguard on him—’

But she turned her face away, grieved, and rocked herself. ‘If only he’d told me, I’d never have left him. I’d have stayed with him every minute.’ She wiped at her nose and eyes, but they went on leaking, like a slow bleed. She turned back to Slider. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it? He was always so careful – went everywhere by taxi, made me go everywhere by taxi, ’cause he said public transport wasn’t safe, especially late at night, and with the kind
of places we worked. And always a proper taxi, never a minicab, because he said you never knew who you’d get. There was that time, d’you remember, when I was working at the Nitey Nite Club, what was it, back in ’seventy-eight, when Sandra Hodson got abducted by a minicab driver? D’you remember her? She did that act with the python. Madame Ranee she called herself.’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘And she got driven out into the sticks and raped and dumped naked somewhere—’

‘Beaconsfield.’

‘That’s it. Miles out in the country. And poor Sange always hated fields and cows and that. Wouldn’t even walk through St James’s Park if she could help it. So ever since then I’ve never had anything but a proper black cab, and Maurice was the same. That careful, he was. And then they come and get him in his own home – sitting in his own front room, Mr Slider, watching his own telly. It’s not fair. It’s—’ She struggled for a word. ‘It’s like
cheating.’

‘Yes,’ said Slider. ‘I know.’

‘And I’ll tell you another thing,’ she said, flame-eyed with tears and outrage now. ‘Just Sunday, he was talking about chucking the whole thing up. He said he was fed up of it, the whole set-up, the club, show-business, working all night and sleeping in the day, being treated like dirt, being slobbered over by drunks. And he said to me Sunday, he said, “Val,” he said, “let’s chuck it up and get out of London while we’ve still got a bit of life in front of us.” Well, he’d got this plan, you see, for us to retire and get a place in the country, in Ireland, and do bed and breakfast for holiday-makers. He’d been saving up ages to buy a little place. It was his dream, but now he said, “Val, let’s really do it.”’ The animation faded. ‘He meant it an’ all. It’s not fair. He deserved a bit of luck, poor Maurice.’

He’d had his bit of luck, Slider reflected. It’s just that it wasn’t good.

Busty’s next-door neighbour was torn between the obligatory reluctance to ‘get involved’, and the temptation of being a star, for if she became a witness for the police, she might get herself on the telly. She havered and wavered, but finally the glamour of potential fame overcame her to the point of inviting Hart in for a cup of tea – a courtesy Hart would have dispensed with. The flat smelled of urine, babies and chip fat. Why didn’t humans have those useful nostrils that closed flat, Hart wondered. When her hostess left the room to put on the kettle, Hart sneaked her Amarige out of her handbag and dabbed a bit on her upper lip for protection.

Charmian, was the woman’s name, God only knew why. Charmian Hogg. She sat on the sofa opposite Hart, a pasty female, spots at the corners of her mouth and a crop of blackheads on her cheeks like an aerial view of black cattle grazing across a parched plain. Her hair was dirty, her teeshirt much stained, her short skirt straining into corrugated creases across her belly, her bare legs blotched red and mauve, her feet in broken-down slippers. She pulled a pack of cigarettes out from behind the sofa-cushion and lit one, and a dirty child of about three, in sagging, nappy-bulging shorts, wandered in and climbed up next to her, clutching her arm and staring at Hart as if she were Sigourney Weaver. In another room a baby cried monotonously. In a corner of this one, in a playpen, another child of about eighteen months picked listlessly at the tacky bits of trodden-in food on the carpet, and stared out through the bars with its mouth open.

‘Them next door,’ said Mrs Hogg, ‘I never had nothing to do with ’em. I told the Council, I don’t want the likes of them
living next door to me. Disgusting. Well, I don’t mind blacks,’ she said generously, for Hart’s sake, ‘but that lot—! And him! Filthy, I call it. I mean, I suppose some of ’em can’t help being that way, which you don’t mind when they’re nice, like that actor, what’s his name, he’s very funny, you know the one I mean, the big fat one. But to do it like him next door – just selling himself for money. Just like animals. Not but what he wasn’t polite, always looked smart, and said hello nice as you like when I met him on the stairs or anything. Offered to help me up the stairs with the pushchair once, but I wouldn’t let him anywhere near my Jason – would I, Jase?’ she addressed the odoriferous child beside her, which was now absently exploring its nose with a forefinger, never taking its eyes from Hart’s alien face. ‘You never know what you might catch off someone like that. Riddled with diseases they are – AIDS and that – and I wouldn’t have him touching none of my kids.’

Hart moved further towards the edge of the armchair she was sitting on, which she had a horrible suspicion was damp. ‘So you didn’t know ’em very well?’

‘I never even knew his name until you told me.’

‘What about your husband?’

‘He ain’t here. He’s got his own flat over Fulham. He don’t come here much now. He’s got this girlfriend. Right little slapper
she
is!’

‘All right, tell me what you heard last night,’ Hart said, anxious to get her to the point.

‘Last night?’

‘You said you heard something?’

‘Oh. Yeah. Well, there was a noise. Like someone was having a barney. It woke my Jade up, so I wasn’t best pleased, I can tell you.’

‘Woke your what?’

‘Jade. Over there.’ She indicated the child in the playpen. ‘My little girl.’

Blimey, thought Hart. ‘What time was that?’

‘Oh, middle of the night. I dunno exactly.’

‘After midnight?’

‘Well, maybe not. I didn’t notice.’

‘Were you in bed?’

‘No, I was in here, watching telly. I might of just dropped off, though,’ she admitted reluctantly.

‘What exactly did you hear?’

‘I heard this crash, like the door was being kicked in, and then a load of shoutin’ an’ crashin’ about, like someone was havin’ a real barney.’ She waxed enthusiastic. ‘All furnicher bein’ knocked over and glass broken and that. And then someone shouted, “I’m going to kill you, you dirty bastard.” And then there was a kind of thud, like a body falling over. And then it all went quiet.’ She shuddered. ‘’Orrible it was!’

In your dreams, Hart thought, making notes with an inward sigh. ‘What direction did these noises come from?’

‘Are you taking the piss?’ Mrs Hogg asked with a derisive look. ‘Them next door, o’ course. That’s what you was asking about, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, right. But you see, there’s no sign of anyone having a fight in there, no furniture turned over or broken glass. So I thought it might be some other barney you heard.’

Mrs Hogg grew sulky. ‘I know what I heard. You callin’ me a liar?’

‘I just want you to think carefully about what you really heard. It’s not going to help us if you exaggerate.’

‘I did hear the door bein’ kicked in,’ she said defiantly.
‘And
I heard some furnicher crashin’.’ A pause. ‘Maybe that was all,’ she added reluctantly.

‘What about the shouting?’

‘Well, maybe, maybe not. I can’t say for sure.’

‘And can you help me some more about the time?’

‘Like I say, I must of dropped off in front of the telly,’ she said, eyeing Hart as though she saw her chance of stardom dissolving.

‘And it was the noise that woke you up? Do you remember what was on the telly then?’

Further probing brought the admission that Mrs Hogg had been hitting the Cinzano earlier in the evening, which had caused her to drop off, and the noise next door had only partly woken her. She had dozed again, and it was only when Jade’s howling had started off baby Pearse that the combined racket had penetrated her cobwebs. By then all was quiet next door. It was then ten past midnight, so the door-kicking-in could have happened at any time before that.

The neighbours on the other side were harder to coax out, and less forthcoming, but probably more reliable. The elderly couple glared at Hart suspiciously round the chain on the door, and would only open it when she had got PC Baker to come and flash his uniform, and both sets of ID had been carefully scrutinised.

‘Can’t be too careful,’ the oldster grunted begrudgingly as he opened the door a little wider. He wore a very sporty home-knitted cardigan of grey wool with a white reindeer-motif border, whose pockets sagged hopelessly under the burden of handkerchiefs, tobacco tin and matches.

‘Only you see stuff on the telly all the time,’ the oldstress added over his shoulder. She was inclined to be apologetic, and would have asked them in, had her husband not blocked the way as robustly as his trembling frame could manage. Hart was quite happy to interview them on the doorstep. Over their diminutive shoulders she could smell the house aroma of liniment, cold roll-ups and dirty bodies, and had no wish to pitch her Amarige against this new Everest.

The old man said their name was Mr and Mrs Maplesyrup, but the old lady, whose teeth fitted better, corrected this to Maplesthorp as Hart wrote it down. They had heard the door being kicked in all right. It was just before half past eleven, because the film was just finishing, which was
Assassination
with Charles Bronson, very loud and lots of banging, guns and that, and Mr Maplesyrup had thought at first the noise was just part of the film, but Mrs Maplesyrup had said turn the sound down a minute, Charlie, I think it was next door. So he had done, because it was just the whajjercallums, the titles by then, and they’d listened, and they’d heard a sort of bang next door, or it might have been a thud, maybe, like something heavy being dropped or knocked over. And then nothing, just quiet, so Mr Fudgefrosting had turned the sound back up because there was that advert he liked, the supermarket one with the little boy and the shopping, he was a laugh that kid, and Mrs Hotjamsundae had gone to put the kettle on for their cuppa, which they always had before they went to bed. And while she was in the kitchen it was all quiet next door, and no-one had come along the communal balcony past her window. And this morning when she went out to go down for the paper she had
just looked next door, just a quick peek, and she’d seen that the door wasn’t closed properly and a big footmark on it and sort of splintery-looking at the edge where the Yale was, so she’d known they hadn’t imagined it after all.

‘I suppose you didn’t think of calling the police?’ Hart said. Mr Maplesthorp looked witheringly at her, and said they couldn’t go phoning the police every time they heard a thump or a raised voice, or they’d never be off the phone. And the police wouldn’t thank them neither, they never did nothing if you did phone them. Anyway, you didn’t stick your nose in on this estate, you left well alone as long as
you
were left alone. It wasn’t like it used to be in the old days, when you could leave your front door open all day and no bother, and neighbours were neighbours. They were only waiting to be rehoused, but they’d been on the waiting list five years now, so unless they won the lottery—