Gone Tomorrow (30 page)

‘An invitation?’

‘It won’t be hard for them to guess we’re over-extended – it’s all over the papers every week – and here’s a way for us to clear up something, get the Brownie points and release some manpower.’

Porson’s frown was terrific, but he was following, however unwillingly. ‘That still leaves Lenny Baxter.’

‘Maybe they’re just hoping we’ll write that off, let it go by default. After all, we’ve got no evidence and nothing to link him with anyone.’

‘Except Everet Boston.’

‘Yes,’ said Slider.

‘What price his life now?’ Porson moved restlessly, the light from the window throwing his head into planes and his face into shocking hollows. How much weight had he lost, for Pete’s sake? ‘I’ve put out an all units on friend Boston, but if he keeps using his mobile like the plonker he is, I don’t stack any hope on us finding him before they do. But what kind of bloody people are they? This isn’t Chicago!’ He paced about a bit, thinking. ‘Where do we go from here, if it’s not a rhysterical question. We’ve got no concrete evidence on either the Baxter or the Weedon murders,’ he continued, ‘which is what you’d expect if they’re professional. No forensic, no witnesses. And Collins either was or wasn’t suicide, and there’ll be no evidence there either, you can bet your bottom boots. So unless we can pick up Everet Boston, we’ve got nothing to connect any of this with the gang or the boss – Needle, or whatever they call him. What a bloody shambles! So what are you working on?’

‘Trying to trace the Susan or Susie Mabbot we think may have been the friend of Boston and Baxter, in the hope that she may know where Baxter’s girlfriend Teena is.’

‘What good will that do if you do find this Teena?’ Porson snapped suspiciously.

‘She lived with him, so she may know who the two minders were who talked to him that night, and she may have seen who searched the house.’

Porson snorted. ‘May and might butter no parsons! I can’t see any future in wasting effort trying to find her. If she knew anything they’ll have done her as well. You said yourself she might have been lifted when they searched Baxter’s gaff. What else?’

‘We’re trying to find out more about Trevor Bates.’

‘But you don’t know he is the Needle. You’ve no reason even to think so, except for that bloody jacket.’

‘And the sophisticated electronics equipment and the radio and telephone masts on his house.’

‘Anyone could have those.’

‘Anyone could, but he
has
got them. I think he’s worth looking at.’

‘All right. But carefully. We don’t want a case against us. What else?’

Slider shrugged. ‘Keep slogging on, looking for witnesses.’

‘Right,’ Porson said gloomily, and turned to stare out of the window. ‘Someone saw something. Sometimes it takes months. Sometimes it takes years. Look at the Dando and the Russell murders. But we’re not rolling over. I’m not having some bastard smart alec villain treating my manor like his own private playground.’

Death, Slider thought, had suddenly become personal to Porson. ‘We’ll get him, sir,’ he said, which was as near as he could go to offering sympathy.

Porson turned. ‘See you bloody do!’ he barked, but there was understanding in his red-rimmed eyes.

The search of Collins’s house had revealed in the storeroom a vast stock of cigarettes, including Lenny’s own favoured brand Gitanes, for which there was no paperwork upstairs in the office, and which it was pounds to peanuts had been brought in illegally from the low-tax continent; ditto various cases of spirits. Evidently Sonny, either on his own behalf or for the Boss, had been used to augment his income by the sale of these private stocks without involving the brewery. Slider wondered if the smuggling was itself another of the gang’s operations. With cigarettes retailing at £4.50 a pack here and purchasable for £1.20 in Spain, there was plenty of leeway in between for a healthy profit to be made. Perhaps Sonny’s pub was a distribution centre? The brewery was not going to be happy about that.

The brewery had of course been told that Sonny was dead and that the Phoenix was closed while the investigation went on. It was agitating for more information and for a date when it could reopen with a new manager, and the phone calls were coming from progressively further up the hierarchy; to which Slider had responded at last by leaving orders for all such calls to be rerouted direct to Mr Palfreyman. Palfreyman got the big money, let him have the nuisance, Slider thought. He had enough to do without that.

The rest of the search had revealed a very Spartan lifestyle for Mrs Collins’s son Colin. The bed was hard and narrow, the floors uncarpeted, the kitchen sparsely stocked. Even the soap in the bathroom was Wright’s Coal Tar. Personal possessions were few, with the notable exceptions of an old and beautiful piece of scrimshaw work, and a ship in a bottle which Slider
thought might be late eighteenth-century or early nineteenth. But these two rather exquisite esoterica only seemed to sharpen the question of what Sonny spent his money on. There seemed little point in a criminal career if you didn’t enjoy yourself with your ill-gotten gains. Maybe he was stashing it away for a comfortable retirement? But the kind of spare living exemplified in the flat did not argue a disposition that craved comfort. Maybe it was just the power he had craved. That at least made sense. But why, then, had he so obligingly killed himself?

One gratifying thing emerged from the search, however. Sonny’s clothes were generally few and monotonous, leaning heavily towards the black trousers and teeshirts. Everything was spotlessly clean, beautifully ironed, and squared neatly away in true Bristol fashion. The man even ironed his underpants, Slider discovered, with a sense that it was more than he really needed to know. But hanging in the wardrobe (the first wardrobe he had ever seen in a private house where you could actually push things back and forth along the rail) was a black leather jacket with a rather distinctive tartan wool lining in caramel shades; a jacket new enough to make the wardrobe smell like the inside of a Rolls-Royce.

‘The fourth jacket!’ Slider had exclaimed happily when they discovered it; at which Atherton had warned him sternly not to jump to conclusions. But it was a perfect match with Lenny Baxter’s. It gave Slider great satisfaction to have this small part of the puzzle sorted.

‘But it doesn’t help,’ Atherton pointed out. All it proves is that Lenny knew Sonny, and we knew that already.’

‘I know,’ Slider said, ‘but when little things like that trip up the mighty, it makes it all seem worthwhile. Lenny Baxter has four leather jackets and sells one of them to Thomas Mark, driver to the great mogul Trevor Bates—’

‘Who we have no reason to suspect is the Needle,’ Atherton interpolated.

Slider waved that away. ‘—and thus provides a link without which no-one would ever have looked in Bates’s direction. It’s the mad bitch Chance at her most trivial. It’s beautiful.’

‘So you’re determined to believe it’s Bates?’ Atherton asked.

Slider tapped his chest. ‘I feel it. In here. He lied about the jacket, you see. That was his mistake.’

‘But you don’t
know
Mark got the jacket from Lenny,’ Atherton said, frustrated. ‘Bates could have bought it in Boston. After all, how did he know it was American if he didn’t buy it there himself?’

‘I suppose Lenny told Mark and he told Bates.’

Atherton shook his head. ‘You’re more obsessed with jackets than Spud-u-Like.’

Slider looked at him, amused. ‘You’re determined it isn’t Bates, aren’t you? What is it, his suits?’

‘I’ve no feelings about the man either way. I just don’t like to see you run ahead of your data. It’s not like you.’

‘What’s a man without a hunch?’ Slider said lightly.

‘Tall,’ said Atherton.

Freddie Cameron telephoned.

‘Working on a Saturday?’ Slider wondered.

‘So are you,’ Cameron pointed out. ‘Got to catch up with the workload somehow. Besides, we’ve got builders in, and it offends my delicate sensibilities to watch them spend all day drinking tea and listening to Kiss FM on my penny.’

‘What are you having done?’

‘We’re having the bathroom refitted, God help us. Of course the brunt of it falls on Martha, but what drives me mad is that they could have finished a week ago if they’d just got on with it. If it was me, I’d sooner work hard for a week and have a week off than slop around for a fortnight for the same money. But what do I know?’

‘Start taking your work home,’ Slider suggested. That’d have ’em out in no time.’

‘The speed one of them moves, I suspect he’s clinically dead anyway.’ Cameron said bitterly.

‘So what have you got for me?’

‘The Collins PM. The report’s in the post, but I thought you’d like to know that it was the pills that killed him.’

‘That’s something, I suppose.’

‘It was a short-acting barbiturate, secobarbital. He’d had a large dose – blood levels were 20mg. Death would have occurred within about half an hour, from respiratory collapse.’

Any idea where he might have got hold of it?’ Slider asked.

‘Well, as you know, old boy, barbiturates haven’t been prescribed
in this country for twenty years, or in any of the other civilised countries, but they’re more or less freely available in places like Mexico and China, so they leech in across the borders onto the illicit market. My personal preference for country of origin in this case would be China. I found remnants of the capsule cases in the stomach, and they were coloured a shade of blue that I’ve come across before with Chinese drugs. There’s a large Chinese population in every major city in the world, and half the cargo ships on the high seas are crewed by Chinese, so distribution’s no problem. That’s only an opinion, mind;
I can’t prove it.’

‘Your opinion’s usually good enough for me.’

‘By the way, I didn’t find any evidence of force – no bruises or chipped teeth – so it does look like suicide. And, unusually, there was no alcohol in the bloodstream. He did it stone-cold sober in the clear light of morning. Odd, that.’

‘It’s not just odd, it’s creepy,’ Slider said.

‘Greater love hath no man?’ suggested Freddie.

‘Yes, but love for what?’ said Slider.

The Chinese restaurant Karen Phillips chose for her rendezvous with Atherton was down one of the little side turnings off Holland Park Avenue. It had ground-floor and basement dining rooms, and the latter was low-ceilinged and divided into a multitude of secret little booths by bamboo screens and large palms in pots. The lighting was dim, from low-hanging bulbs shrouded in red paper lanterns, and monotonous Chinese music from a loop tape added to the authentically mysterious atmosphere of an opium den in a
Carry On
film.

Miss Phillips herself, a strikingly pretty young woman with thick, dark, curly hair and innocent brown eyes, was evidently deep into the character of conspirator. She had chosen a booth in the darkest corner and looked round constantly and nervously in a manner guaranteed to draw attention to herself, should anyone actually be watching them. Atherton found this rather endearing. Most of the women he knew were so briskly capable that her ineptitude at intrigue had the attraction of novelty.

‘I shouldn’t really be here, you see,’ she said in a low, thrilling voice. ‘I mean, not talking to you like this. Not that we’re not allowed to meet people, but there are things we’re not supposed to talk about.’

Atherton gestured towards the menu. ‘Shall we order lunch and get that out of the way?’

‘Well, I don’t really want anything to eat,’ she said, in faint surprise that he hadn’t twigged that.

‘Yes, but it would look rather more like a secret meeting if we didn’t have any food, wouldn’t it?’

‘Oh! Yes. You’re smart! I guess your training makes you think of things like that.’ She smiled self-deprecatingly. ‘I’d never make a detective, would I? Or a spy.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a distinct advantage to begin with.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Somehow one never suspects beautiful women of anything underhand.’

To his surprise she withdrew a little. ‘Now you’re making fun of me.’

He backpedalled. ‘Sorry. That sounded a bit patronising. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s this place going to my head.’

She giggled. ‘Yeah, it is kind of goofy, isn’t it? I keep expecting Inspector Clouseau to jump out and do a karate chop or something.’

The waitress came and hovered, and they ordered some food, more or less at random, and tea – Karen said she didn’t drink at lunchtime. While they were thus engaged some more people came in and took tables: a young man and woman; three giggly twenty-something females; an older woman with two younger ones, mother and daughters who’d been shopping. Another waiter appeared to attend to them. Everything looked like normal enough lunch trade to soothe Karen’s nerves, and they chatted easily about books and movies until the food arrived.

When they were alone again, she said, ‘So, what did you want to talk to me about?’

‘I think you know that,’ Atherton said. ‘Trevor Bates, of course.’

She looked round with an instinctive, guilty movement to see that no-one was listening. ‘I told you, I don’t know him.’

Atherton smiled. ‘Yes, you told me. But I know that isn’t true. And if you didn’t want to tell me the truth, why are you here?
Have a prawn ball.’

‘Look,’ she said, leaning forward a little, ‘I do want to tell
you, but I don’t want to get into trouble. Do you promise me no-one will know I’ve been talking to you?’

‘Scout’s honour,’ said Atherton.

She frowned. ‘I’m serious.’

‘So am I. This is a very serious matter. Two people have been murdered.’

Now her eyes widened. ‘Murdered?’ she gasped. ‘I didn’t know that. I thought it was about—’

‘About what?’

She shook her head. ‘That’s awful. You think he did it? Oh God, that’s awful! I kind of guessed he was a bad guy, but I never thought … Were they women?’ she asked suddenly. ‘The people he killed?’

‘We don’t know that he killed them. And, no, they weren’t women. But we have our reasons for suspecting he’s involved and we need to know everything we can find out about him. So, tell me, how do you know him?’