Gone Tomorrow (4 page)

‘Well, if that’s what you call successful—’

‘Children, can you wait until playtime if you want to quarrel,’ Slider said. ‘Now, I must say I was rather counting on a record to identify him. What we’re left with is a blood sample which we could have checked against the DNA database, but that’s expensive and—?’ He looked round like a friendly lecturer.

‘If he’s got no fingerprint record, there’ll be no DNA record,’ Mackay filled in obligingly.

‘Give that man a coconut. If all else fails we may have to fall back on his dental profile—’

‘God forbid,’ Atherton said. ‘He was pre-fluoride. The bastard had teeth like Madeira cake.’

‘It can take months to get a match on dental,’ Mackay said.

‘Exactly. So before we tread that despairing route, there are other things to do.’

‘Mispers,’ McLaren suggested.

‘It’s probably a bit early for that, but check it anyway. And meanwhile, we do it the hard way. Knock on doors, show his face and the tattoo, until we find someone who recognises him.’ There was a composite moan. ‘Start with the flats and houses nearest the two park gates and work outwards. You know and I know that it’s twelve to seven he wasn’t from outer space or the Outer Hebrides. He’ll have been a local, and chances are he’s used the park before for whatever he was using it for.’

‘What if he was dumped there dead?’ Anderson said.

‘Well, that’s probably even better from our point of view. It’s impossible to move a large dead body around without somebody noticing something. But it’s my belief he went to the park
alive and was killed on the spot – for the same reason, that it would be a ludicrously difficult place to dump him without being seen.’

‘Guv,’ said McLaren, ‘he was stabbed, had all his ID lifted, but his money left, and no attempt made to conceal the body. That looks like a punishment thing, dunnit? Or a gang thing. He was involved in something and they caught up with him, sorted him, and left him there as an example.’

‘That’s one theory.’

‘I just can’t see why they didn’t take the wonga,’ McLaren urged. ‘Who’s gonna leave well over a K in folding when it’s sitting up and begging to be took?’

Mackay agreed. ‘We’ve got Doc Cameron’s evidence that his pockets were gone through, so it can’t just be they missed it. But if it was a punishment thing, why not take it anyway?’

‘To make it scarier,’ Atherton said.

‘What?’ Swilley challenged derisively.

He shrugged. ‘A villain who’s not interested in money? It scares the shit out of me.’

‘All right, let’s get on with it,’ Slider intervened. ‘While we’ve got all the uniform help with the doorstepping, I’d like you people to try for a short cut. That’s pubs, clubs, cafés, anywhere you can think of on our ground that the lowlife gather – remembering that he might only have been a fringe player. Don’t forget your snouts – they’re probably the likeliest to know him. Swilley, get the pictures off to the other boroughs. Most likely he’s local but he might have strayed at some time or other: it’s not as if we’ve got border control. McLaren, check Mispers. Atherton, have a go at our own dear Criminal Intelligence System to see if there are any matches on single stab wounds to the heart or anything connected with the park. And,’ he added through the scrape and rustle of troops rising, ‘let’s not forget the obvious. Show the pictures to our own. Who’s on downstairs?’

‘Paxman,’ someone said.

‘Oh, well, he knows everyone who’s ever lived. I think I’ll pop down and have a word with him myself.’

Sergeant Paxman was a great solid bull of a man, his curly poll growing a little grizzled now, like an elderly Hereford. He had a bull’s massive stillness too, a complete lack of fidget, which
spread out around him in waves. It made him invaluable when they brought in belligerent drunks or drug addicts with the screaming abdabs: in a room full of thrashing arms and legs he was a kinetic black hole.

His relationship with Slider had sometimes been uneasy. Paxman was a devout Methodist and disliked any form of moral laxity, particularly in policemen, who he felt ought to set an example to society at large. PCs on his relief tended to find themselves getting married to the people they were living with almost without their own volition. His current favourite in the Department was Norma, whom he favoured, when she passed him, with his rare smile.

Slider had once been one of Paxman’s okays, but he had fallen from grace when his marriage to Irene broke up and he went to live with Joanna, who had been a witness in one of his cases. Paxman would never say anything, of course, but his disapproval of hanky-panky spread around him in the same palpable ripples as his stillness. However, Irene had remarried, and Joanna had gone abroad. She was a professional violinist and had been offered a lucrative and prestigious position in an orchestra based in Amsterdam. With work so scarce at home, she had felt she had to take it. Slider missed her with a horrible hollow sucking emptiness; but at least now that he was living alone, hankiless and without a shadow of panky, he thought he had detected a breath of rehabilitation with Paxman.

Paxman stared at the photographs for a long time, stationary as a ton of paper. Slider waited, feeling the dust of aeons sifting down on him, soft and implacable. Then at last the sergeant lifted his head and said, ‘No. I don’t know him. Not been through my hands. But you said he’d been in a barney?’

‘Apparently. He was sporting some knuckle bruises.’

‘Hm. Well, there was a bit of a frackarse last night down at the Phoenix.’

‘Really?’ This was the pub in South Africa Road, a little way along from the park gates. ‘Who went down there?’

‘Oh, we weren’t called,’ Paxman said. ‘It wasn’t anything major. Just a bit of a barney. Two blokes throwing punches. Over before it started sort o’ thing. Dunno if it’s anything to do with your bloke.’

Slider wondered, if the police weren’t called, how Paxman
knew about it; but the question would probably only be answered with a shrug, so he didn’t ask it. Sometimes he thought even Paxman didn’t know how he knew things. Osmosis, probably.

‘Well, thanks, Arthur,’ he said. ‘It might well be something. I’ll point one of my lads at it.’

‘Right,’ said Paxman. He laid an enormous hand over the photos. ‘I’ll keep these, show ’em around. You never know.’

You never did, Slider agreed. ‘And pass them on when the relief changes? Thanks.’

In the event, Slider went down to the Phoenix himself. He wanted another look at the immediate surroundings. The White City was a large estate of five-storey blocks of council flats, built in the thirties. It had originally been created to be a complete community, with its own shops, park, playground and public house, the General Smuts. However in the sixties there had been a small expansion on its south-eastern border, where the new park had been opened; and there an infant school, another row of shops and a second pub had been added.

Created in that unloved period of architecture, the Phoenix was everything a pub didn’t ought to be, a featureless pale-brick box with picture windows. It inspired no affection or loyalty as a local, and almost from the beginning the rougher types had been tempted there. Now most of the picture windows had been bricked up to avoid temptation, and the interior was as dark as an American bar – so dark the security cameras Slider noted at the angles of the ceiling must have worked on infrared. The prevailing design motif was the avoidance of anything that could be picked up and thrown. The bar stools and tables were bolted to the floor and the only other seating was the banquettes round the walls, covered in red leatherette gaping open to its foam filling in numerous wounds. The brewery that owned it had recently yielded to this fashion trend and restocked with plastic beer glasses. It was that sort of pub.

On this sunny day, however, it was peaceful. The door was standing open to let some light into the interior, and the three customers it could boast were sitting up at the bar over their pints not bothering anyone. The landlord was a moody-looking bald man with a glass eye. He looked about fifty, but was mega fit for it, with a weightlifter’s vast shoulders and nipped-in waist,
which he emphasised by wearing a clinging black teeshirt and jeans with a heavy leather belt cinched tight in between. The fact that he was only five foot six somehow made him seem more, rather than less, dangerous, as a terrier is more unnerving than a Great Dane.

His name, according to the licence notice over the door, was Colin Collins – which Slider reckoned was enough to jaundice a man from earliest childhood – but he was always known as Sonny. Slider assumed it was spelt with an ‘o’: a ‘u’ would have been too needlessly cynical. He had old, faded tattoos on his forearms and left biceps; and at some, presumably drunken, point in his merry life he had had a dotted line tattooed right round the base of his neck. In the gloom of the far reaches of the bar his black-clad torso was almost invisible, and his pale throat and gleaming ivory head floated eerily above the dotted line as if someone had already obeyed the implicit instruction to cut along it.

Slider introduced himself and passed the photographs over the bar. Collins looked down at them with his good eye, while the glass one continued to stare furiously at Slider. It must be something that came in handy when dealing with the obstreperous, Slider thought, and was briefly beguiled by the memory of a story Tufty Arceneaux, the forensic haematologist, had told him about his time in Africa. It was about an up-country estate boss Tufty had frequently drunk with, who had a glass eye. When he couldn’t be in two places at once the bloke used to take the eye out and leave it to supervise, the natives believing that he could thus see what was going on
in absentia.
Once a man had been brought to him for discipline, but he had been called away urgently in the middle of the interview, so he had left his glass eye on the desk and told the man to stay put. In dealing with the emergency he had forgotten to go back, and the miscreant had sat in the office facing the eye for four days. His relatives had taken turns bringing him food and water.

Sonny Collins didn’t take four days about it, but it seemed to Slider an uncomfortably long time to wait under the basilisk gaze. ‘I understand there was a bit of a barney outside last night,’ he prompted. ‘Two men throwing punches. I wondered if this was one of the men.’

‘Might be,’ Sonny vouchsafed at last.

‘Can you tell me about it,’ Slider asked patiently.

‘About what?’

‘About the fight.’

Sonny shrugged, and his massive muscles manoeuvred about under his skin like Volkswagen Beetles trying to pass in an alley. ‘Not much to tell. Two blokes started arguing.’ He closed his mouth tightly after each sentence like someone switching off unnecessary lights to save electricity. ‘One’s throwing his lip. Effing and blinding. Told ’em to take it outside.’

‘And they went.’

‘In my pub,’ Sonny Collins said, suddenly expansive, ‘when I say take it outside, outside it goes.’

‘I believe you,’ Slider said, trying a bit of flattery. It melted Collins in the same way a one-bar electric fire melts a block of granite. Both eyes were as yielding as marbles as they stared at Slider. ‘What time was this?’ he asked, humbled.

‘About closing time.’

‘And what happened outside?’

‘Didn’t see it. Heard about it. Not much of a fight. Couple o’ punches thrown. Then it all goes quiet.’

‘And who were the two men? You think this was one of them? What’s his name?’

Sonny Collins stared as if Slider were being irrational. ‘
I
don’t know,’ he said impatiently. ‘He’s not a regular.’

Slider picked up an inference Collins perhaps didn’t intend him to. ‘But the other man
is
a regular,’ he said, not making it too much of a question. ‘What’s his name?’

Collins seemed to weigh the pros and cons of co-operation. At last he said, ‘Eddie.’

‘Eddie what?’

The impatience again. ‘You don’t ask surnames,’ he said. ‘Pub like this, you don’t ask names at all. Heard him called Eddie, that’s all. Lives local. Comes in two, three times a week. That’s it. That’s all I can tell you.’

‘And this other bloke,’ Slider said, gesturing to the photograph, ‘had you seen him before?’

Collins shrugged. ‘May have. He looks a bit familiar. That’s all I can tell you.’

‘Can you describe this Eddie?’

‘Tall, dark hair. Fancies himself. Always talking about how many women he’s had.’ Collins grew impatient. ‘Is that it? Only I can’t stand chatting to you all day. I got customers to serve.’

None of the other three people in the pub had moved a muscle since Slider had entered. They hunched over their half-empty glasses like three Mystic Megs staring into their crystal balls. Slider thought Collins knew more than he was telling, but he knew he wouldn’t get any more out of him now, and if he pushed him it would spoil the chances of getting more next time. With naturally irritable people like him, going against their grain could be counter-productive.

‘You should have let me go,’ Atherton said.

‘He wouldn’t have told you even as much as he told me,’ Slider said.

‘Why not?’ asked Atherton, ready to be offended.

‘Because you’re tall and he’s short. That’s psychology,’ Slider added kindly. ‘So we’ve got our man having a fist fight outside the pub some time after eleven, and being stabbed in the park a few dozen yards away at any time between then and seven-thirty the next morning.’

‘The obvious inference is that they took the quarrel, whatever it was, into the park, and it turned to murder.’

‘Hmm. But I always like to resist the obvious,’ Slider said. ‘And it wasn’t the South Africa gate that was unlocked, it was the Frithville gate.’

‘That could be nothing to do with it. You said yourself Ken Whalley might just have forgotten to lock up.’

‘Yes, and that’s more likely than that someone cut through the lock and chain and then carried them away,’ Slider said.

‘I wish you wouldn’t always argue both sides at once,’ Atherton complained. ‘Still, the simplest solution is that Eddie and deceased had a row, deceased maybe got scared and legged it, nipped over the gate into the park, Eddie followed, caught him up in the playground, and stabbed him.’