Gone Tomorrow (21 page)

‘I suppose I’ll have to go and see what he wants,’ Slider sighed, getting up.

‘He’s in Porson’s room,’ Atherton said. ‘Better run, lad. And stick a book down inside your trousers!’ he called after him. ‘The Head’s looking batey!’

Actually, Palfreyman was looking, as he always did, superficially genial. He was a tall man in his thirties, quite good-looking, and slim, except for his hips and upper legs, which seemed disproportionately thick. Slider had noticed many times that tall, slim men with fat thighs were often to be found in managerial positions, and that they were generally popular and successful with their peers and seniors, and ineffectual at their jobs. There must be a fat-thigh gene that marked you out for the top-of-the-range Mondeo, the executive swivel chair and the ‘Mr So-and-so’s in a meeting, can I take a message?’ Now he came to think of it, DCS Head had had fat thighs too. The difference was that Head delivered his life-complicating ‘initiatives’ with a snarl, while Palfreyman did it with a smile. Palfreyman wanted everyone to like him; but that was in any case a function of management style these days. He would vault to the stars just like his predecessor, but not having Head’s predilection for kicking down doors, would probably find his resting place in a ‘think-tank’ or policy unit. It was the third law of thermo-dynamics in the Job that bollock-brains always ended up where they could do the most harm.

‘Ah, DI Slider?’ he said as Slider appeared in the doorway. ‘Come in, close the door. Bill, isn’t it? May I call you Bill?’

Slider’s lips said yes, yes, yes, but his eyes said no, no no.

‘Sit down.’ Palfreyman gestured genially, and sat down himself behind Porson’s desk. ‘Just thought I’d pop in and have a little chat.’ He was as conciliatory as an old-fashioned ward sister with an enema in mind. ‘See how you’re getting on. In Detective Superintendent Porson’s absence. That causing any problems, at all?’

‘Is there any news from him, sir?’ Slider asked. ‘Do we know when he’s coming back?’

‘I’m afraid not. His wife’s rather poorly, apparently.’

‘Poorly?’
Slider couldn’t help himself. As if The Syrup would stay home just to mix the Lemsip and pass the tissues!

‘Not well,’ Palfreyman translated kindly, as if Slider perhaps did not know that ‘well’ and ‘poorly’ were antonyms. Actually, Slider would have bet a substantial chunk of his dinner money that Palfreyman wouldn’t know an antonym if it sat in his lap and peed on him.

‘In what way, not well?’ Slider asked stonily.

Palfreyman flushed a little. ‘I’m not at liberty to say,’ he said. ‘I didn’t come here to answer questions, but to ask them. This big case of yours – there’s been a rather serious development, I understand.’

It wasn’t a question, so Slider didn’t answer it. He knew it was foolish to provoke a demi-god, but he couldn’t help it. Palfreyman was so young, and so pointless.

‘There’s been another death, hasn’t there?’ Palfreyman went on.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It doesn’t look good, you know. Not good at all. Do you think they’re connected?’

‘I think the second victim was killed to stop him giving us information,’ Slider said.

‘I see. And does that point to any particular individual?’

‘I believe we may be dealing with a criminal organisation, and that the first death was a punishment killing.’

‘Ah, yes, I see. An organisation, eh? It’s a gang thing, then.’ He pondered a moment, tapping his fingers on the desk. ‘Perhaps you should look into the operations of all the criminal organisations in your area and see if there aren’t similarities of method.’

‘We have done that,’ Slider said patiently, and added in language Palfreyman would understand, ‘It’s an ongoing process, but to date it has not yielded any significant data.’

The DCS looked happier. Ah, clearly you are keeping on top of things. There has been some discussion – I’ve been talking to Peter Judson—’

‘Is the SCG taking the case over, sir?’ Slider asked quickly. ‘Because if so, I’d sooner they did so now, before I commit any more effort to it.’

‘I’m sure you’re doing your best,’ Palfreyman said. ‘But a second death – and connected to the case – it just doesn’t look good.’

‘Is the SCG taking the case?’ Slider insisted.

Palfreyman’s eyes slithered away. He disliked directness. Directness never built any empires. Well, actually, directness had built most of the empires in history, but that was in the bad old days, before interactive human resource management residential training seminars had been invented.

‘Mr Judson would like to, but the manpower situation is critical at the moment. He has so many men tied up in court, now the terrorist business has gone to the Old Bailey – well, you know how it goes. He just hasn’t a man to spare. But if your case is stuck and you can’t get any progress on it, we may have to think of bringing in some people from outside the borough. And I don’t think I need to tell you how Mr Wetherspoon would feel about that.’

The honour of the school is at stake, Slider. Ten to make and the last man in.

‘We have some lines to follow up, sir,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we can say the case is stuck at this point. It’s only been a week.’

‘But this gang – if it is a gang: there’s nothing in records to help?’

‘Either they’re very new, or they’re very good, and they seem to have a powerful hold on their people. But that’s the very reason I’d really like to get at them. I don’t like new kids on my block throwing their weight around.’

‘Very well,’ Palfreyman said. ‘You go ahead and do what you have to do. Get a quick result on this one, and a lot of people will be very pleased indeed.’ By which Slider divined he didn’t mean the good burghers of Shepherd’s Bush. ‘And of course if there’s any help I can give in Mr Porson’s absence, my door is always open.’

‘You’re staying here, sir?’ Slider said, surprised.

‘Oh – well – no. I was speaking metaphorically,’ Palfreyman said hastily. Olympians couldn’t breathe the air down here for very long. ‘But you can always telephone me. You’ve got my direct line number.’

Slider was on his way out when Palfreyman, having relied so far, as HR guidelines dictated, on the carrot, decided there was no harm in a wave of the stick. ‘I’ll need to see some concrete progress very soon, though. We’re under a lot of pressure over our clear-up figures, and you don’t need me to tell you that any murder is a high-profile case, whoever the victim.’

No, Slider thought as he headed downstairs, I don’t need you to tell me, so why do you? Obviously, because everyone knew that Slider had so little understanding of the seriousness of murder that he wouldn’t exert himself to clear up the case unless he was chivvied – and chivvied, moreover, by an expert who’d been on all the right courses and was a fully qualified chivvier.

He didn’t get all the way to his office. On the stairs he encountered WPC Asher who said, ‘Oh, sir, they’re looking for you in the front shop.’

‘No point in looking for me down there when I’m up here, is there?’ Slider said reasonably.

Asher’s rather hard blue eyes did not soften. She hadn’t much sense of humour. ‘No, sir, I mean Sergeant Paxman was looking for you. There’s a man come in with some information about your case, sir.’

‘Thank you,’ Slider said meekly, and went. The man waiting for him in the reception area could only be American. It wasn’t just the height and the air of having achieved a perfect diet, but above all the immaculateness. He was wearing a blue chambray shirt, open and with half rolled sleeves, over a white teeshirt so gleaming bright it would have had an oncoming motorist flashing his lights in annoyance. His blue jeans managed to look brand new and yet softly worn at the same time; his pale leather desert boots were unscuffed and unmarked and his socks – dead giveaway – were white. Everything was exquisitely clean and perfectly ironed. When the Last Trump sounded and all hearts were opened, the American nation was going to have to give up the secret of laundering to everyone else.

He seemed to be in his thirties, though it was getting harder to tell these days. He had the shining hair and supple tan skin of lifelong good nourishment, and the straight white teeth of expensive orthodontics. He was also wearing, for reasons Slider hoped to discover, a faintly hangdog look.

‘I understand you have some information for me, Mr—?’

‘Garfield. Tom Garfield. Yes, I have, but – could it be in private?’

‘Of course,’ Slider said. He led the way into one of the interview rooms.

Garfield looked about with a keen interest that seemed hardly warranted by his drab surroundings; and then explained it when he said, ‘This is all new for me. I haven’t been inside a British police station before. But it’s just like the TV programme. Do you watch
The Bill?’

‘I never seem to get home in time to watch the television,’ Slider said. He could have added that what you didn’t get on
The Bill
was the smell, but desisted on the grounds that in the present circumstances he was an ambassador for his country. He invited Garfield to sit down and asked, ‘What have you got for me?’

‘Well, it’s a little embarrassing.’ Garfield crossed one leg over the other and smiled nervously. ‘You see, I don’t know whether what I’ve got is important anyway, and I really don’t want to get myself into trouble ...?’ He added a tempting question mark to the pause so that Slider could leap in with an amnesty.

Slider regarded him solidly. ‘Do you know something about the murder of Lenny Baxter?’

‘Lord, no, not about the murder. But I did know Lenny. Only slightly. In a business sort of way.’

‘Your business with him was not of a legitimate type, I take it?’

The smile became ever more winning. ‘There’s an expression, “victimless crime”?’

‘Mr Garfield, if you know anything that may help us solve this terrible crime you have a duty to – tell me.’ He just managed to stop himself using the words ‘disclose it’. What was it about talking to well-brought-up Americans that made his vocabulary slip back fifty years?

‘And my own little – misdemeanour?’ Was Garfield likewise struggling against the word ‘peccadillo’?

‘I will turn a blind eye to anything I can. It’s not in my interests to make life difficult for witnesses.’ He had to get him started somehow. ‘Why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself?’

‘Oh. Well, okay. I work at the BBC – you know, at the TV Centre – as an assistant programme editor. I started out in journalism back home, working on a local paper.’

‘Where’s “back home”?’

‘The States. I thought you’d – oh, you mean where exactly. In Springfield, Massachusetts. My folks come from Vermont but
we moved there when I graduated from high school. I started out on the
Springfield Messenger,
and then I went over to broadcasting. I moved to Boston, to a radio station there, and then I met a guy from IRN. He was over from London on secondment and I got pretty friendly with him and his wife and, to cut a long story short, they got me in with a news agency –Visnews – in London, and from there I went to the BBC. End of long story,’ he added with a nervous laugh.

‘So if you work at the Television Centre you must know that we have had enquiries out for the best part of a week for information about Lenny Baxter.’

‘Yeah. I kind of—’ He shrugged. ‘Okay, I hoped someone else would come forward and I wouldn’t have to. And, like I said, I didn’t know if it was important anyway. I couldn’t see how it could be. But then my girlfriend kept on at me, and –well, here I am. You see, they’re saying you want to know about Lenny’s leather jacket, and it was me that sold it to him.’

He looked at Slider to see what effect this news had. Slider guessed that the leather jacket was not the source of Garfield’s embarrassment. In fact, he had a pretty fair idea what it was Garfield didn’t want to tell him. He confined himself to raising an eyebrow and saying, ‘Where did you get the jacket?’

‘From a guy back home. I went back to see my folks at Christmas and I spent a couple of days in Boston, checking out old friends. One of them had these jackets.’ He spread his hands ruefully. ‘Okay, maybe I should have asked more questions, but Sparky swore they weren’t hot and – well, I wanted to believe him.’

‘These jackets? How many did he have?’

‘A boxful. Maybe about twenty, I don’t know. He said they were a discontinued line, but they looked pretty good to me, and the price he wanted for them, I suppose I should have guessed he’d knocked them off. But I knew I could sell ’em over here and make a few bucks. So I took four. I’d have taken more,’ he added frankly, ‘only I couldn’t have got ’em in my baggage.’

‘Describe them to me.’

‘Oh, you know. You’ve seen one of them. Three were black leather and one was tan suede, and they all had this tartan lining, but not Scottish tartan, just shades of brown. And the label was Emporio Firenze. That’s a top smart label in Boston.
I should have cut the labels out, really, but I didn’t want to spoil the jackets.’

‘And you sold these jackets to Lenny Baxter?’

He looked embarrassed. ‘I thought if I offered them to people at work questions might be asked. Lenny was always selling stuff anyhow, and he said he’d take all four off my hands. I thought it’d be easier that way. I didn’t make a whole lot when you come right down to it, but I was kind of regretting I’d bought ’em by then. You’ve got to have the right kind of contacts if you want to go in for that kind of thing. I mean, it’s okay for guys like Sparky and Lenny, but when I offered one to a friend of mine he looked at me as if I was peddling human flesh or something.’ He gave Slider an engaging smile. ‘I sure have learned my lesson. From now on I buy in a shop or nowhere.’

Slider remained unengaged. ‘How did you come to know Lenny?’

This was the question Garfield didn’t want asked. A blush spread across his fresh, boyish cheeks. ‘Oh – I don’t know. I kind of saw him around, you know.’

‘Around? I can’t think Lenny Baxter moved in the same circles as you.’ Garfield didn’t speak. Slider decided to put him out of his agony. ‘Did you buy something from Lenny, was that it? You said he was always selling stuff. Did you buy something from him that you don’t want to tell me about? Maybe a little something to smoke, or a little something to sniff?’