Gone Tomorrow (38 page)

‘If Bates is as bonkers as he sounds,’ said Swilley, ‘we could probably get him to crack by telling him everything we know about him and Collins.’

‘It did cross my mind,’ Slider said.

*   *   *

Slider was having a very late cheese and pickle sandwich at his desk and working on assembling the paperwork when the phone rang.

‘Oh, Mr Slider? It’s Andy Barrett – from the Boscombe Arms?’

Slider wrenched his head back into the present. ‘Oh, yes. What can I do for you?’

‘Well, it’s like this.’ He sounded a bit furtive. ‘There’s someone here wants to say something to you, but he’s scared of coming into the police station. I wondered if you could pop down and have a word with him?’

‘Can’t you put him on the phone?’

‘It’s a bit awkward. You’ll see why when you come.’

‘All right, I’ll send someone down.’

‘I don’t think he’ll talk to anyone else,’ Barrett said anxiously. ‘Couldn’t you come yourself? It’s about this Lenny Baxter business,’ he added, with the air of speaking without moving his lips.

‘All right, I’ll try and make time later today,’ Slider said unwillingly.

‘Oh dear. The thing is, can you come now?’

‘Why now?’

‘Well, we’re closed now, so it’s quiet. You’d have a bit of privacy. And – well, it’s the wife, you see.’ He came to the real reason with a little rush. ‘She doesn’t like me to get mixed up in anything, and she’s out at the moment, so she wouldn’t have to know if you came now. Only I know she’d say to leave well alone if she was here, but I don’t think that’s right, not when it’s a case of murder, you know?’

Slider sighed. ‘I’ll be there in about ten minutes,’ he said, abandoning the sandwich. It was stale anyway – yesterday’s left-overs, from the taste of it. Not much of a Sunday lunch. Oh, it was a glamorous life in the CID!

The Boscombe had a small snug behind the main bar, and Andy Barrett, having let him in from the street, ushered him in there.

‘All right, Bernie, here he is,’ Barrett said with a large-lipped, talking-to-idiots emphasis. Passing through the door, Slider saw why. Sitting side by side on the banquette facing the door were Blind Bernie and Mad Sam. ‘They’ve been here since opening,’
Barrett added, as though they couldn’t hear him. ‘I thought there
was something on his mind. When it came to closing I didn’t realise they were still in here till I’d shut the outside doors. Then he said he had to talk to you.’

‘What’s all this “he” and “him” malarky?’ Blind Bernie said suddenly and angrily. ‘I’m not deaf, you know. Nor daft, neither. Is that you, Mr Slider?’

‘Yes, it’s me. You’ve got something to tell me, Bernie?’

‘Yes, I have,’ he said definitely. He turned his face towards the sound of Slider’s voice, and then back to where Andy Barrett had last spoken. ‘It’s for Mr Slider’s ears only. I don’t want anyone else listening. You clear off and give us a bit of peace, you hear?’

‘Now look here,’ Barrett said, annoyed. ‘You can’t talk to me like that in my own pub! I let you stay here on sufferance—’

Slider touched his arm to stop him. Mad Sam, who had been staring about him with his usual vacant expression of goodwill, was growing upset.

‘Sufferance, my eye!’ Bernie cried. ‘Go on, clear off! This is police business.’

‘All right,’ Barrett said, more to Slider than to Bernie. ‘I’ll leave you alone. But don’t take long. If you aren’t out of here by the time the wife gets back we’ll all be in the soup.’

Blind Bernie turned his head this way and that, listening. ‘Is he gone?’ he asked.

Slider sat down opposite them. ‘Yes, he’s gone. It’s just me here now.’

‘Is he gone, Sammy?’

‘Yes, Dad.’

‘Where’s my glass? I meant to get him to fill it up again before he went,’ Bernie grumbled.

‘Drinking out of hours?’ Slider said.

‘Don’t count if I don’t pay,’ Bernie said promptly. ‘I know the law. Ah well, too late now, I suppose.’

During this exchange Slider had been examining the strange pair before him. Bernie was in his sixties, but looked older: a gaunt and grizzled man, sparse white hair mostly concealed under a greasy brown trilby that was never off his head, indoors or out; white whiskers like a horse’s; gnarled and blue-veined hands knotted round the end of his old-fashioned white cane, the wooden sort with the crook handle. He always wore
the same clothes: a dirty mackintosh that had once been tan, over a grey suit, with a collarless shirt under the jacket and a button-necked vest under the shirt. In the winter he interpolated a pullover and cardigan between the shirt and jacket, and all the layers peeped out from under one another in a stepped
décolletage.
Blind Bernie, the human onion. Slider didn’t know why he was blind, whether it was congenital or the result of an illness or accident. There was no sign of it on his face. His eyes were rather small and round and pale blue, and the lack of focus gave him a vacant look, just like his son’s. Otherwise they appeared normal, except that the pupils were rather too large and dark which, for some reason Slider could not fathom, gave him the faint look of a budgerigar.

Mad Sam must now be nearly forty, though he looked younger until you studied his face closely. He was hardly taller than his father, but round where Bernie was gaunt; a chubby fellow with a rolling gait and the unlined cherubic face of a choirboy. His hair was thin now, though still dark, and his eyes were blue and round, his expression amiable and harmless. He dribbled slightly from time to time, when his mind, distracted by the necessity to think about something hard, was forced to let go of his jaw to compensate. He always wore the same greenish old tweed overcoat, buttoned up and with a yellow muffler filling in the neckline, winter and summer alike. Slider had no idea what he wore underneath it and was not eager to make the discovery. The two lived together and managed somehow, had done so since Sam’s mother died thirty years ago. They spent most of their lives walking about the streets, Bernie’s hand on Sam’s shoulder: Sam leading, Bernie directing; Sam describing, Bernie explaining.

They lived, as Slider had known but dismissed from his thoughts, in Frithville Gardens – about halfway up, on the right –
in the ground-floor maisonette of a two-storey terrace house conversion.

‘I’ll buy you a pint afterwards,’ Slider said to Bernie now. ‘And something for Sam,’ he added, smiling at the lad (it was impossible not to think of him as a lad, despite the deeply grooved fine creases round his eyes).

‘No beer for him,’ Bernie said sharply. ‘He’s not to have alcohol.
It’s not good for boys.’ He had never lost his slight northern accent, and from talking almost exclusively to his dad, Sam had it too.

‘I don’t like beer,’ Sam said easily, in his rather childish voice. ‘I don’t want beer, Dad.’

‘You’d better not,’ said Bernie. ‘Orangeade’s good enough for him, Mr Slider, when he’s done telling you what he saw.’

‘If it’s something important, I can do better than orangeade,’ Slider said. ‘How about a Coca-Cola?’

Sam’s eyes lit up. ‘I like that, I do. Can I have Coca-Cola, Dad?’

‘It’s too good for you,’ Bernie grumbled automatically, ‘but if Mr Slider wants to waste his money …’

‘So what’s all this about?’ said Slider. ‘Something to do with that nasty business in the park, is it?’

‘Nasty,’ said Sam.

‘He saw something,’ Bernie said. ‘That night, the night it happened. Someone coming out of the park.’

‘Why didn’t you come to me with this before?’ Slider asked.

Bernie spread his hands. ‘I didn’t want to get mixed up in it,’ he said defensively. ‘Don’t hold it against me, Mr Slider. You know what people are like. They want to put me and him in a home. Any chance they’d get to say I was a bad father, they’d use it to put us in a home. If I was to get mixed up with the police … Always after us, the social people, ever since Betty died.’

Sam was looking at him in alarm. ‘Dad, Dad!’

‘Take him away, they would, and then what’d happen to me? Him in the asylum and me in an old folks’ home, and we’d never see each other again.’

‘Don’t let ’em, Dad,’ Sam said. ‘Don’t let ’em take me away.’ He began to rock a little.

Slider intervened hastily. ‘They won’t take you away. Don’t you worry, Sammy. They wouldn’t punish you for doing your duty, coming forward and helping the police. That’s the right thing to do. That’s good.’

‘Oh, you don’t know,’ Bernie moaned. Any excuse, that’s what they want. They’d blame me for taking the lad to a pub. Bad influence, that’s what they’d say I was.’

‘Well, they won’t say that because they won’t know,’ Slider
said firmly. ‘I shan’t tell ’em. And they can’t touch you for taking Sam to a pub. He’s over eighteen. It’s perfectly legal.’

Sam looked at him across the table, blue eyes as round as an owl’s. ‘I don’t want to leave me dad. I love me dad.’

‘You won’t have to, don’t worry. I’ll make it all right, Sam. Just tell me what it was you saw.’

He didn’t understand the question, and only stared, a drop of drool elongating at his mouth corner.

Bernie, recovering himself, took up the questioning. Slider saw him pinch the back of Sam’s hand sharply. ‘You ready to tell, Sammy? Like we talked about? That night we were down the Red Lion, and we got talking to Mrs Wheeler, and we walked home late?
That was the night of that trouble in the park,’ he added to Slider. ‘I may be blind, but the lad isn’t – and he’s not daft either, whatever people say. He doesn’t know much, but what he knows, he knows. He told me right there and then what he saw, but I was afraid of the fuss and bother, and the social people saying I couldn’t look after him.’

‘All right,’ Slider said soothingly, ‘just start at the beginning. You were coming home from the pub. What time would that be?’

‘It’d be half eleven easy ’fore we left the Red Lion,’ Bernie answered. ‘Mrs Wheeler’d tell you, and Sid Field, the barman. And then twenty minutes or so to walk home. Near on midnight it must have been. We was just coming up to our front gate when Sammy says, “There’s a lady,” he says. “Coming out of the park.”’

Sam’s face suddenly illuminated, as though someone had just switched him on. He bounced a little in his seat with pleasure at understanding something. ‘That’s right, that’s right!’ he said excitedly. ‘A lady, I saw a lady. She came out of the park.’

‘Was the gate open or closed, Sam?’ Slider asked, not from a need to know but to focus him on the memory.

‘Closed, it was closed. She closed it behind her. I saw her. She didn’t see me, though. She was too upset. She just ran by. She didn’t look at us.’

‘How do you know she was upset?’

‘She was hurrying along and all like hunched up. And she was crying,’ Sam said. ‘I was sorry for her. She was a pretty lady.’

‘Can you describe her to me?’ Slider said. ‘What did she look like?’

‘She was pretty,’ Sam said. ‘And she smelt nice.’

‘What was she wearing?’

‘She had a dress on, a nice blue one, like Oxford and Cambridge.’

‘Light blue,’ Bernie translated. ‘The boat race. We’re Cambridge, but he always calls it Oxford and Cambridge. He thinks it’s the same thing.’

‘What else, Sammy?’

‘She was a black lady,’ Sam said helpfully.

‘If you saw her again, would you recognise her?’

Sam nodded his head. ‘I would. I would know her. I would.’ Then his mouth turned down. ‘Because of the nasty thing.’

‘What nasty thing was that?’

Sam looked at his father. ‘I don’t have to say, do I, Dad? I don’t like saying it.’

‘Aye, you must,’ Bernie said. ‘Like I told you, you’ve got to say it to Mr Slider, and you’ve not got to get upset, or they’ll come and take us away and put us in a home. Now get on and tell what the lady did.’

Sam’s lip trembled, and his eyes were moist. He rocked again, gently. ‘She had something in her hand, something nasty. I saw when she went past. It was all covered in blood. It was nasty.’

‘Was it a knife?’ Slider asked. Sam nodded, near to tears. All right, Sammy, go on.’

‘Go on, son,’ Bernie encouraged. ‘Tell what she did.’

‘She threw it away,’ Sam said. ‘In the house with the weeds, down the area. She went across the road and threw it in there. And then she ran all the way down the street and turned the corner that way.’ He made a gesture of turning right.

‘I understand,’ Slider said. ‘Is that all?’

Sam nodded.

‘That’s all,’ Bernie said. ‘But when we heard about the murder, I couldn’t decide whether to say anything or not. You won’t let them hold it against me, will you, Mr Slider? I know I’m old, but we manage all right. We look after each other. If they split us up, I don’t know what would become of the boy.’

‘I won’t let it make any trouble for you,’ Slider said, with more conviction than he felt. It wasn’t that anything they had
done or not done was reason for institutionalising either of them; but Bernie knew with the instinct of self-preservation that in their situation you did not draw attention to yourself. Journalists might get hold of the story and decide to splash it for ‘human interest’; or simply being in court might direct official eyes in their direction. And then questions would be asked, and appalling things done to them for their own good. A social worker would only have to smell them to know they ought to be put in a home; and God knew what the inside of the maisonette was like.

‘That man was killed,’ Sam said suddenly and confidingly. ‘I know, I heard it. I saw our street and our park on the telly. That man was killed with a knife, a sharp knife, a pointy knife, and there was all blood and he fell down dead. Bang!’ It was sudden and loud and made Slider jump, which in turn made Sam flinch. He was getting too excited.

‘Never mind about that,’ Bernie said sharply. ‘You sit still and be quiet or I’ll give you what-for.’ And to Slider, ‘I don’t like him watching telly. It’s not good for the lad, but they have it on sometimes when we’re down the pub. He saw you on the telly, Mr Slider—’

‘I saw you on the telly, Mr Slider,’ Sam nodded.

‘He’s not daft, whatever people say. He wanted to tell you about the lady and the knife—’

‘It was a sharp knife, all covered in blood! It was nasty!’