Star Fall

ONE

Hairline Pilot

Slider went back to the bedroom to say goodbye to Joanna. He murmured, ‘I’m off, now,’ but she didn’t stir, so he didn’t kiss her, in case it woke her. It was early, and she hadn’t been sleeping very well lately. Actually, he had an idea she was only pretending to be asleep, but either way … He listened a moment to her quiet breathing, then left.

Outside, the icy air romped into his lungs like something with claws. After a mild, wet Christmas and New Year the wind had gone round and was now hurtling with malicious glee straight from Siberia. Too cold to snow, he thought. It was still dark, the pre-dawn black and glittering as obsidian. No-one about, the houses shut tight, the cars sleeping nose to tail along both kerbs. When he started the engine it sounded offensively loud. He imagined cross stirrings in warm beds with still an hour to go before the alarm.

He was going in early to try to get a jump on the paperwork. He could get through a lot with no-one around and no telephones ringing. He turned on to the Chiswick High Road, the only moving car in sight, drove in the sickly lamplight past the shuttered shops and empty pavements. The traffic lights, all green, were round alien eyes watching him. The naked trees bent to the wind; a sheet of newspaper like an albino fruit-bat flapped across the road and wrapped itself round a lamp post.

He was aware of a low-level sense of dread. Getting up in the dark always made him uneasy. It was no coincidence that all the old religions had feast days in the dead of the year, involving lights and fires. The primitive part of the brain was still Stone Age, huddled in its bone cave, afraid the sun would not come back. Oh, let me not die in the black of night.

Other traffic was beginning to appear by the time he reached Shepherd’s Bush; early birds were waiting at bus stops, huddled in the wind, or hurrying towards the tube. Mike’s coffee stall, at the end of the market, showed yellow light, a haven of steam and comfort in the hollow dark. A couple of taxi drivers were shifting from foot to foot in the mean wind, hands clasped round mugs as thick as sanitary ware. Slider stopped at the kerb alongside and bought himself a takeaway styrofoam cup of tea and a bacon roll.

He parked in the station yard and went straight in and up the stairs without seeing anybody. The smell of the bacon neutralized the reek of rubber flooring and disinfectant. The only sound was a faint buzz from a mildly defective strip-light. No phones. There would be no-one up here but him – the Department was not manned at this hour.

He stepped into his own office, and for an instant before he put on the light he looked through the far door to the main office beyond, lit by the street lamps outside. For a while, Hollis, one of his sergeants, had been practically living there after his wife had thrown him out, sleeping in a chair and washing and shaving in the gents. Slider had turned a blind eye to this unauthorized occupancy. It had been comforting, somehow, to have Hollis there to greet him at whatever hour he came in, like the family dog. Recently, Hollis had found himself lodgings of some kind, and the CID room was empty, a place of shapes and shadows.

He clicked down the light switch, banishing ghosts, and padded towards the Matterhorn of papers waiting for him on his desk.

Connolly was the first one in. The light went on next door, and she crossed his line of vision, came back to his door, then went away again without speaking. A good chap, that Connolly: knew he did not want to be disturbed. He heard the pattering, clacking sound of her keyboard. Hollis was next. He heard his greeting and Connolly’s low reply. The sounds of occupancy gradually accumulated, phones began to ring, daylight arrived grey and apologetic outside the window, but no-one broke into his concentration. He was deep down, occupied – safe.

Atherton, his other sergeant, and also his friend and bagman, arrived in the early afternoon, having been on a half-day awareness seminar about cyber-crime. Slider, who was just surfacing, heard him before he saw him. He was singing the Toreador song from Carmen:

Toreador, please don’t spit on the floor.

Use the cuspidor –

Whaddaya think it’s for?

Tall, elegant, beautifully suited, he lounged in to Slider’s room like a refugee from a more gracious age. Slider stretched, crackingly, and registered that he was hungry. He hadn’t stopped for lunch, and the bacon roll was a distant memory. ‘How was the seminar?’ he asked.

Atherton considered, searching for the right word. ‘Technical,’ he said at last. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Oh, thank you. What am I, your granny?’

‘They liked me,’ Atherton said with a faux-modest smirk. ‘In fact, I got the impression the unit boss wants to poach me.’

‘I don’t know about poaching. Many people would like to boil you,’ Slider mentioned. ‘In oil.’

‘You woke up from your nap cranky. Don’t worry, I’m not tempted.’

‘Afraid of the competition?’

‘I couldn’t hack the uniform,’ Atherton said, with a shudder. ‘Facial hair, cargo pants, and a T-shirt that makes a statement.’ He sat down on the window sill, crossing his feet at the ankle, folding his arms, ready for a chat. ‘I met your friend Pauline’s new boyfriend, by the way. Bernard Eason.’

Slider and Pauline Smithers had started out at Hendon together, but she was now a Chief Superintendent in a specialist unit in SCD1. They had teetered on the edge of romance for many years before he had married someone else and she had shot up the career ladder. They met for a drink now and then, and there was still a warmth between them.

‘What’s he like?’ Slider couldn’t help asking.

Atherton thought. ‘A bit like you.’

‘Stop that!’ Slider said sternly.

‘Not to look at. I don’t know … just something about him. I liked him. So what’s going down in Groove Town?’ He bent a slat of the Venetian blind and peered out. ‘It’s quiet out there,’ he intoned. ‘Too quiet.’

‘Bite your tongue,’ Slider said.

On cue, his phone rang. It was Nicholls, the relief sergeant downstairs, his north-west-coast Scottish accent soft as a sea breeze.

‘There’s a call coming in, Bill. A homicide. I thought you’d want a head start. I know how you’ve been longing for a corpus.’

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Slider said to Atherton when he put the phone down and immediately it rang again.

The long post-Christmas lull was over.

There was something indefinably unkempt about Hollis. He was tall, skinny, with thinning fuzzy hair and a scrawny moustache that seemed to grow in random tufts, like a lawn mowed with blunt blades. Today his eyes looked red and his face pouchy, as though he hadn’t been getting much sleep. Slider wondered if he was drinking too much – a common hazard, particularly in coppers with domestic troubles.

Hollis immediately offered to be office manager, which was a relief all round. It was not generally a favoured job, staying in the office, recording and keeping track of all the information that came in. People joined the CID for the freedom of the open road, not for the clerical duties.

‘Thank you. Right then,’ said Slider, looking round his assembled troops.

Before he had got further than announcing the shout, Porson, their superintendent, bustled in. In the low winter light his worn face looked grey and craggy, eroded by the cares of leadership. ‘Got a bit more griff for you, ’fore you head off,’ he said without preamble. ‘It appears deceased is some sort of telly personality, name of Rowland Egerton. Anybody know him?’

‘He’s one of the experts on Antiques Galore!’ said Atherton.

Porson gave him a ‘trust you to know that’ sort of look. ‘Never watch it,’ he said quellingly.

Atherton couldn’t take a hint. ‘He’s also the presenter on Going, Going, Gone.’

‘Whatever that may be,’ Porson growled.

‘I know,’ said Mackay helpfully. ‘My missus likes that. These two dealers get given a monkey each to buy antiques, then they auction ’em to see who makes the most profit.’

‘When I want your input I’ll ask for it,’ Porson withered him. ‘Point is, telly is telly, even if it is daytime pap for old ladies.’

Mackay looked hurt.

‘The press are going to be all over this like a nasty rash. I’ll do my best to keep ’em off your back, but you’ll all have to be on your best behaviour. Absolutely no leaking, is that understood?’ He looked round the troops. ‘I don’t want any juicy titbits getting out. Nobody says dickie to anyone – not your mum, your best girl, and especially not the friendly bloke down the pub who wants to buy you a pint.’

‘We don’t leak,’ Swilley objected.

‘You want to talk to Mr Carver’s firm about that,’ McLaren muttered resentfully. ‘They leak like a French toilet.’

‘What’s that?’ Porson barked, his eyebrows crashing together like fighting rams.

‘I said we don’t leak, sir.’

Porson maintained the glare for long enough to drown the defiance, then said, ‘See you keep it that way. All right, what are you standing around for? The early bird gathers no moss. Get on with it.’

He stumped out. In his impatience, it was his way to fling words at meaning and see what stuck. The results made the intellectual Atherton wince; but Porson was a good boss, and on their side, so Slider was always willing to cut him some slack.

Blenheim Terrace was a row of early Victorian houses, in yellow London stock brick, now weathered to a tasteful grey, with white stone copings. Two storeys and a semi-basement with railings. A black and white tiled path led to the front door, and a steep flight of steps went down into what Londoners called ‘the area’. Slider noted that the door down there, which once would have been the servants’ entrance, had been bricked in. The area contained a number of antique-looking plant pots and urns, bare at this time of year except for a few browning ferns.

Built in the 1840s, they still had the Georgian proportions inside and, where they had not been horribly modernized, handsome fireplaces, panelled doors, cornices and ceiling roses. What they didn’t have was anywhere to park. Luckily, it was daytime so a lot of the residents were out at work, leaving their kerbside spaces empty. Uniform had taped off the whole road and roused the neighbours who were in to move their cars to the next street, making room for the working vehicles. It had the benefit of keeping the ranks of the press at a distance, bunched up at either end of the street like a dangerous accumulation of water behind an inadequate dam. Though, with the long-ranges lenses they had these days, distance was hardly an object.

‘Maybe it’ll be a suicide and confound them all,’ Atherton said, digging his hands deep into his pockets.

‘Not likely,’ said Bob Bailey, the crime scene manager, arriving beside them. ‘Not easy to stab yourself in the neck. You know who it is, don’t you?’

‘Rowland Egerton, darling of daytime TV,’ Atherton supplied.

‘Right,’ said Bailey. ‘My wife reckons him. Him and his poncey suits and his long hair! Its funny how females go for the type.’

‘Yes, you’d think they’d prefer a hairy chested caveman like you,’ Atherton said with deep sympathy.

Bailey sniffed. ‘Got up on the wrong side of the web this morning, did we?’

‘Who found him?’ Slider intervened.

‘His partner, John Lavender. He phoned it in at two thirty this afternoon. He’s downstairs in the kitchen if you want to speak to him first.’

‘Is Doc Cameron here?’ Slider asked.

‘On his way. I’ll let you know when he arrives.’

‘I’ll just have a quick goosey, then I’ll see Mr Lavender.’

Beyond the front door, the white walls of the rather narrow hall were hung on both sides with photographs in thin black frames. Some were glossy stills of Egerton himself: his lean, aristocratic face, hawk-nosed, was familiar to Slider, as was the trademark swept-back mane of silver hair. It contrasted so well with the tan of his skin and the bright blue of his eyes, making him look younger than his official fifty-eight years. Others looked like press or publicity shots of him with various celebrities – TV personalities, film actors, MPs: he seemed to know everyone, or at least, a sour bit of Slider added, he knew how to get himself photographed with them.

‘You recognize him now, don’t you?’ Atherton said. ‘Is it all coming back to you?’

‘I’m afraid of it all coming up on me,’ said Slider. ‘What sort of a man lines his walls with his own face?’

‘An intolerable peacock,’ said Atherton.

Slider sighed. ‘But I suppose if you’re on telly, you have to be a bit of a peacock to succeed.’

‘You’ll rick your neck if you keep trying to see both sides,’ Atherton warned.

They stopped at the first door. ‘Drawing room,’ said Bailey. ‘Dining room at the back, small study on the other side. Two bedrooms, bathroom and shower room upstairs. Kitchen in the basement.’

He stepped aside to allow Slider to look in. It was a beautiful room, mouldings all present, fine marble fireplace, antique furniture, Persian carpet on the floor, the walls crammed with paintings, and various ceramics and curios flocking on every surface. ‘That’ll be fun to fingerprint,’ he observed. There was no sign of disorder, nothing knocked over or broken.

The drawing room and dining room were separated by folding doors, at present folded open, and against the wall just in front of them was a gilt and marble console table on which stood a large ormolu clock flanked by vases. The body was crumpled on the floor in front of it.

Egerton was fully dressed in a smart navy three-piece suit and a rather flamboyant tie: muddled dabs of purple, pink, indigo and sea green. There was a pool of blood under the head, and the hair flowed through it, dabbled like a dead rabbit’s ears. The carpet was rucked under the body, as though he had struggled or writhed. The wound was in the front of the neck and seemed to be the only one. The eyes were half open, the mouth wide, and there was a little froth on the lips.

Egerton’s right hand seemed to be clutching at his collar; his left rested against his stomach, and Slider saw a heavy gold and emerald signet ring on the third finger and what seemed to be an expensive watch peeping out from the crisp band of the cuff.

‘No apparent robbery from the person,’ Bailey said. ‘Doors and windows were secure. And the place hasn’t been turned over. If anything was stolen, they knew where it was. Theft to order, maybe.’

‘Or he just got in the way,’ said Atherton.

‘It’ll be hard to tell if anything’s missing, with all this crap around.’ Bailey waved a dismissive hand at someone’s lifetime collection of desirable objects.

‘Right,’ said Slider. ‘Let’s go and see the partner.’

As was common with this style of house, the warren of basement rooms had been ripped out and replaced with one large one, which in this case had been extended into the garden, with sliding glass doors on to a paved patio. The street end was fitted as a kitchen, the garden end as a dining area, with an enormous oak table and chairs. The walls were white, the flooring dark slate. The kitchen fittings were modern and expensive, with a huge American fridge and sexy concealed lighting. In the dining area there were framed prints – Slider assumed they were prints – of modernist paintings on the walls. He wasn’t sure if they were fauvist or surrealist (he must ask Atherton), but the colours were bright and the images clear-cut. He rather liked them: they looked good amid all the black and white.

The one discordant note, being watched over by PC Dave Bright, was the man sitting at the end of the dining table, sniffing and wiping his nose with a Kleenex. A little heap of them, crumpled and bloodied, lay in front of him.

‘Nosebleed,’ he explained, looking up as Slider and Atherton appeared from the bottom of the staircase. ‘It’s emotional.’ He examined the tissue in his hand. ‘I think it’s stopping.’

‘Mr Lavender?’ said Slider.

He was a big, bulky man in a charcoal suit which, even to Slider’s inexpert eye, had not the sharpness of Egerton’s: it looked like the sort of ‘good suit’ that a certain kind of man bought to last twenty years. He sat rigidly upright, but there were signs of disorder about him: his conservatively striped tie had been loosened at the knot; his black (too black?) hair was tousled, which was not a good look, since it was both thin and crinkly and must have been carefully eked over the balding top which had now become visible. His face was like something clumsily carved out of granite, greyish, asymmetrical, with deep creases down the sides of the large nose and at the mouth corners; and the bags under his eyes were so big you could have called them steamer trunks. Without the perma-tan and the styling of the man upstairs he looked ten years older.

With a last dab and inspection he stood up. It was like a building moving. He was taller than Slider, with heavy shoulders and chest and a look of having once been fit: a rugby forward gone to seed. If he had played rugby, it would account for the bumpy immobility of his face. His aftershave was expensive – Slider thought it was one that Atherton wore sometimes. It seemed rather dainty for such an architectural man.

Lavender offered his hand in an automatic gesture. It looked damp and unappetizing, and Slider never liked touching members of the public. He feigned not to see it, and nodded instead, saying, ‘Mr Lavender? Detective Inspector Slider – and this is Detective Sergeant Atherton. Please sit down, sir. I’d like to ask you a few questions. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Coffee,’ Lavender said. He was halfway down and started to rise again. ‘But I only drink freshly-brewed.’ He looked towards the machine on the countertop, shiny and dangerous-looking with its spouts and knobs, like something NASA had designed for taking samples on the moon.

‘I can do it, sir,’ Bright intervened. ‘I got one like this at home.’ Lavender stared in disbelief at this statement, but Bright was unmoved. ‘Do you like it strong?’

Lavender nodded doubtfully, and though he sat again his eyes kept wandering to the big policeman, looking curiously out of place as he manipulated grounds and machine with calm efficiency.

‘Now, Mr Lavender,’ Slider said, sitting catty-corner to him and capturing his gaze. ‘Please tell me what happened this afternoon. Take your time. Every detail could be important.’

‘I got here at twenty-five past two,’ Lavender said.

‘You seem sure of that time,’ Slider remarked.

‘I looked at the clock when I came down here,’ he said, nodding towards the clock on the wall between two of the prints.

‘So you came straight down here?’

‘Yes. I let myself in, I called out, It’s only me! but he didn’t answer. He doesn’t always, if he’s busy with something. He can get very deeply involved with whatever he’s doing. I’d been to Waitrose –’ he nodded towards the large green jute Waitrose bag on the countertop – ‘so I brought the shopping down here first. I was going to unpack it but then I thought I’d see if he wanted a cup of tea, so I went upstairs again and called to him. I looked into the drawing room, and there he was.’ He pressed the Kleenex to his nose and inspected it, and seemed surprised it came away clean. ‘It was a shock, finding him like that.’

‘It must have been,’ Slider said kindly.

‘We’ve been friends for over twenty years.’ He raised faded eyes to Slider’s. ‘I suppose it was a burglary, and he came in at the wrong moment.’ There was evidently some emotion going on inside, but the granite face wasn’t designed for expressing it. It was like watching an Easter Island head do long division.

The smell of coffee was easing out into the air; the machine was gurgling like a happy infant. A background of normality to abnormal emotions which, thank God, most people never had to experience. ‘What did you do?’ Slider asked.

‘I telephoned for the police,’ Lavender said. His voice was gravelly, with a cultured accent, but little inflected, as if it had to match his face.

‘There’s blood on your clothes,’ Slider pointed out. ‘On the knees. And your cuff, there. How did that happen?’

‘I knelt down beside him to check if he was still alive. I felt for a pulse. But I was sure he was dead. He hadn’t moved at all. And I couldn’t see him breathing. And as soon as I touched him, I knew. He felt dead.’

‘What do you mean by that? Was he cold?’

‘No, not that – just, somehow, dead. I can’t say exactly.’ He stared reflectively at his hands. ‘So I rang the police.’

‘And then?’

‘I came down here and waited. I didn’t want to stay in the room with him.’

‘So from entering the house, you came downstairs to put the shopping down, went up to the drawing room, and came back to the kitchen again. Did you go anywhere else?’

He looked a little blank, as if he didn’t see the point of the question. Then he said, ‘Just to the lavatory.’ He nodded towards the door in the corner. Now Slider saw why they had bricked up the servants’ entrance: they had made the little entrance lobby into a downstairs cloakroom.

‘And when was that? At what point?’

‘After I rang the police. I had to wash my hands.’

‘Was there blood on them?’

‘I don’t think so. But I’d touched a dead body. I had to wash them.’

Slider nodded. Squeamish, he thought. It wasn’t a pretty trait in a man. ‘Did you touch anything else, or move anything?’

‘I don’t think so.’ He seemed to be recovering a little. He reached up and smoothed his hair in what was probably an automatic gesture, guiding the locks to their place, restoring the comb-over. It did little to foster the appearance of youthfulness, but what people saw in the mirror was never what other people saw. Most men were touchy about hair-loss, and it might be especially delicate for a person who hung around with a celebrity.

‘So what made you think it was a burglary?’ Slider asked.

He looked blank. ‘What else could it be?’

‘Was there any sign of a break-in? Any disorder in the room? Drawers opened, furniture turned over? Did you tidy up before the police came?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Everything was just as you see it. I suppose he interrupted them before they got started.’

‘Did you notice that anything was missing?’

Something came back to him. ‘Yes, I noticed straight away that the malachite box was missing. It always stood on the console table in front of the clock, and it wasn’t there. That was why I assumed it was a burglary.’

‘Anything else?’

His eyes became stationary. ‘I didn’t notice anything else. But,’ he added quickly, ‘I didn’t go and look, of course. My mind was on other things.’

Slider nodded. ‘When you arrived, was the front door closed?’

‘Yes. I opened it with my key.’

‘And the doors here,’ Slider said, gesturing to the glass doors to the patio. ‘Open or closed?’

‘Closed. And locked – the policemen checked.’

‘Does anyone else have a key?’

‘Only Molly – the cleaner. Molly Bean. She comes in twice a week.’

‘So who lives here – is it just the two of you?’

‘Well, I don’t live here all the time. We have a shop in the Fulham Road, and I have a flat above it. But I have a bedroom here and keep some of my things here. I suppose you could say I divide my time between the two places. But the house belongs to him.’

There was something in the way he said the last sentence that caught Slider’s attention. He filed it away to be analysed later.

Bright placed a cup of coffee in front of Lavender and he drank from it thirstily, then glanced uncertainly up at Bright, as though wondering what the correct protocol was. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Very nice.’

Bright retreated. Slider was deep in thought, so Atherton, to keep it moving, said, ‘We’ll need to know who