Authors: Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
Gone Tomorrow
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
was born and educated in Shepherd’s Bush, and had a variety of jobs in the commercial world, starting as a junior cashier at Woolworth’s and working her way down to Pensions Officer at the BBC. She won the Young Writers’ Award in 1973, and became a full-time writer in 1978. She is the author of over sixty successful novels to date, including thirty volumes of the
Morland Dynasty
series.
Visit the author’s website at
www.cynthiaharrodeagles.com
The Bill Slider Mysteries
ORCHESTRATED DEATH
DEATH WATCH
NECROCHIP
DEAD END
BLOOD LINES
KILLING TIME
SHALLOW GRAVE
BLOOD SINISTER
GONE TOMORROW
DEAR DEPARTED
GAME OVER
FELL PURPOSE
BODY LINE
The Dynasty Series
THE FOUNDING
THE DARK ROSE
THE PRINCELING
THE OAK APPLE
THE BLACK PEARL
THE LONG SHADOW
THE CHEVALIER
THE MAIDEN
THE FLOOD-TIDE
THE TANGLED THREAD
THE EMPEROR
THE VICTORY
THE REGENCY
THE CAMPAIGNERS
THE RECKONING
THE DEVIL’S HORSE
THE POISON TREE
THE ABYSS
THE HIDDEN SHORE
THE WINTER JOURNEY
THE OUTCAST
THE MIRAGE
THE CAUSE
THE HOMECOMING
THE QUESTION
THE DREAM KINGDOM
THE RESTLESS SEA
THE WHITE ROAD
THE BURNING ROSES
THE MEASURE OF DAYS
THE FOREIGN FIELD
THE FALLEN KINGS
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978 0 7481 3326 0
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
Contents
Author’s Note
Shepherd’s Bush and White City are real places, of course, but this
is
a work of fiction, so if certain liberties have been taken with the geography, please don’t write and complain. None of the characters is based on a real person; and though there is a police station at Shepherd’s Bush, my Shepherd’s Bush nick is a made-up one, as are the Phoenix and the Dog and Sportsman pubs; which have no relation to any hostelry living or dead.
Too Much Like Aardvark
By the time Detective Inspector Bill Slider got to the scene, the rest of the circus was already there: the area had been closed off with what always struck him as inappropriately festive blue-and-white tape, the screens were erected, and uniform had got the crowd under control and space cleared for official cars.
Detective Sergeant Hollis held his car door open for him.
‘You’re very kind,’ said Slider, climbing out.
‘I used to get hit if I wasn’t,’ Hollis said. He was a scanty-haired beanpole of a Mancunian with a laconical delivery.
‘Atherton not in yet?’ DS Atherton, Slider’s bagman, was due back from holiday that morning.
‘Not when I left.’
Slider nodded towards the screens. ‘Who is it?’
‘Dunno, guv. He’s not saying much. Large bloke, no ID. I don’t recognise him.’
‘Who found him?’
‘Parkie. He doesn’t know him either.’
Hammersmith Park was a long, narrow piece of land which lay between the White City estate and Shepherd’s Bush. It had a gate at either end. One was in South Africa Road – home to the stadium of Queen’s Park Rangers football team, known locally, for their horizontally striped shirts, as
ve ’oops
(or, if they had been having a successful run,
superoops).
The other gate was in Frithville Gardens, a cul-de-sac turning off the main Uxbridge Road which also led to the back door of the BBC Television Centre. Between the two lay the moderately landscaped green space of lawns and trees, with a sinuous path from gate to gate which was used as a cut-through for estate dwellers to and from the Bush.
Slider had been called to the South Africa Road gate. Just inside it, to the left, was a children’s playground, whose amenity had been much reduced over the years in the retreat before vandalism. There was a paddling pool with no water, a sandpit with no sand, two rocking horses which, in the interests of safety, had been bolted to the ground and no longer rocked, and two sets of swings, one for babies and one for children.
Between the playground and the road was a small two-storey building which had once been an office and residence for a park keeper. It was now unused and all its orifices had been sealed up with breeze-block – the only way these days to keep out vandals, who had the tenacity of termites and would set fire to their own left legs in pursuit of a thrill. The only purpose of the building now, Slider noted a little glumly, seemed to be to conceal activity in the playground from anyone passing by in the street.
The body was on one of the children’s swings. Slider passed through the screens to take a look. The swings were of a simple, municipally sturdy design, suspended from a framework made of scaffolding poles by chains thick and heavy enough to have towed a ship. The seats were made from short, thick chunks of wood that might have been chopped from railway sleepers, and the one was bolted to the other with sufficient determination to have resisted mindless destruction.
Deceased was seated, slumped forward, head and arms hanging, legs bent back and feet resting pigeon-toed on the ground. He had been a large, muscular man, otherwise he would probably have slipped off; as it was, he was kept in place by his own weight pressing against the chains, the bulge of the deltoids to one side and the pectorals to the other making a sort of channel for each chain to lie in snugly.
Hollis ranged up silently beside Slider.
‘When was he found?’ Slider asked.
‘Park keeper came to open up at half seven. The gates are open between seven-thirty in the morning and dusk,’ he added, anticipating Slider’s question. ‘Dusk is a bit of a movable feast, o’ course. Sunset’s around nine o’clock, give or take, this time o’
year. But in practice the parkie shuts up when he feels like it, or when he remembers.’
Slider grunted, staring at the body. It was a fit-looking man,
probably in his thirties, dressed in an expensive leather blouson-type jacket and a thin black roll-neck tucked into tight blue jeans, Italian leather casuals and a gold chain round his neck.
‘The Milk Tray man’s uniform,’ Slider commented.
‘He looks like an up-market bouncer,’ Hollis agreed.
The hair was light brown and cut very short, the face was Torremolinos tanned, and he had a gold earring in the top of his left ear, small and quite discreet, the sort that said
okay, I’m cool, but I’m also tough.
It was strangely hard to tell with corpses, when the face was without expression and the eyes closed, but this man probably would have been quite good-looking in life, of the sort a certain kind of woman fell for. Only his hands let him down: they were ugly, with badly bitten nails and deep nicotine stains. He wore a heavy gold signet ring, unengraved, on the middle finger of the right hand – the place fighters wore it, where it would do most damage.
Hollis reached out with a Biro and delicately lifted aside one side of the jacket to show Slider the stab wound below the left breast. ‘Single blow, right where he lived. The only one as far as I can see, without moving him.’
‘Not much staining,’ Slider said. There was a stiff little patch around the wound, but nothing had gushed or dripped. ‘Probably killed him instantly. If the heart had gone on pumping for any length of time there’d’ve been a lot more blood.’
‘That’s what I thought. Professional?’ Hollis suggested.
Slider did not commit himself. ‘No sign of the weapon?’
‘Not so far.’
‘And no ID?’
‘Nothing in the jacket or the back trouser pocket. I’ve not gone in the front trouser pockets, o’ course, but they feel empty.’
‘Those jeans are so tight there can’t be room down there for much more than his giblets,’ Slider observed.
‘Anyroad, all I found was money and fags.’
‘Oh well, there might be something more when we can strip him off. Doctor been yet?’
‘No, guv. Held up in traffic.’
Slider stepped back out to look around. What had brought this man here to his death? A meeting? Or perhaps he had been killed elsewhere and left here on the swing as a nasty kind of
joke? At all events, it was a fairly private place, hidden from the road by the bulk of the defunct building. The park was overlooked only from the right-hand side by the upper floors of the flats in Batman Close, and then only in winter. At this time of year the foliage on the well-grown trees baffled any view of the ground. Yes, provided a person could get into the park in the first place without attracting attention, the spot was well chosen.
Beyond the park railings a small murmuring crowd had now collected, the usual mix of the idle, the elderly, and truanting kids. Slider scanned them automatically, but he didn’t recognise anyone except Blind Bernie and Mad Sam, a well-known couple round the Bush. Mad Sam was Blind Bernie’s son, and was not mad, only mentally retarded, a round-faced, smiling child of forty. He was Bernie’s guide, and Bernie looked after him. They each kept the other out of A Home, the thing both dreaded with Victorian horror. Slider could see Sam’s lips moving as he told Bernie what he could see, and Bernie’s as he translated what Sam told him. Now he came to think of it, they lived in Frithville Gardens, so they naturally would be interested in something that happened in what was virtually their front garden.
Along the roof of the disused keeper’s house a row of seagulls sat, shuffling their wings in the small breeze and turning their heads back and forth to see if all the unusual activity portended food. Once, they had come up into the estate from the Thames only in bad weather, to shelter, but now they seemed to live here all the time. Probably the large area of high buildings reminded them of cliffs; and there was plenty of rubbish for them to pick over. They had forgotten the sea; but on a quiet day their raucous squabbling cries brought it near in Slider’s mind.
It was quiet here today, with the road temporarily closed to traffic. Somewhere out of sight a car horn broke the gentle background wash of distant city sounds, a composite murmur like the ‘white noise’ of silence; a crow cawed in one of the park trees, a fork-lift truck whined briefly behind the wall of the TVC, and far above a jumbo growled its way to Heathrow, flashing back the sun as it crawled between clouds.
All around, for miles and miles in every direction, in streets and shops and houses, real life was going on, oblivious; but
here a dead man sat, the full stop at the end of his own sentence, with a little still pocket of attention focused fiercely and minutely on him. Why him? And why here? Slider felt the questions attaching themselves to him like shackles, chaining him to this scene, to a well-known process of effort, worry and responsibility.