Gone Tomorrow (2 page)

He had a moment’s revulsion for it all, for the blank stupidity of death, and longed to be anywhere but here, and to have any job but this. And then the doctor and the meat wagon arrived simultaneously, one of the uniforms asked him about press access, the police photographer came to him for instructions, and one of his own DCs, Mackay, turned up with the firm’s Polaroid. Extraneous feelings fled as the job in hand claimed him, with a familiarity, at least, that was comfortable.

Detective Superintendent Fred ‘The Syrup’ Porson looked exhausted. He’d had this nasty ‘summer flu’ that was going around – seemed to have been having it for months – and his face looked grey and chipped. The rosy tint to his pouched eyes and abraded beak was the only touch of colour in the granite façade.

The HAT car (Homicide Advice Team) had been and gone, assessing the murder.

‘We’re keeping it,’ Porson told Slider.

‘The playground murder?’

‘What did you think I meant?’ Porson snapped irritably. ‘Queen Victoria’s birthday? And you don’t know it’s a murder

yet.’

‘Single stab wound to the heart and no weapon on the scene,’ Slider mentioned.

‘When you’ve been in the Job as long as I have, you’ll take nothing for guaranteed,’ Porson said darkly.

Slider almost had been, but he let it pass. The old boy was irritable with suffering.

‘Anyway, it’s ours,’ Porson repeated.

‘The SCG doesn’t want it?’ Slider asked.

The SCG was the Serious Crime Group, which had replaced the old Area Major Incident Pool, or AMIP. No doubt the change had brought joy to some desk-bound pillock’s heart, and SCG was one letter shorter than AMIP which must be a great saving
on ink; but since the personnel in the one were the exact same as had been in t’other, Slider couldn’t see the point. It was hard for a bloke at the fuzzy end to get excited about a new acronym, especially one that did not trip off the tongue.

‘SCG’s got its plate taken up with the Fulham multiple,’ Porson answered. ‘Plus the Brooke Green terrorist bomb factory –
to say nothing of being short-handed,
and
having four blokes on the sicker.’

Slider met The Syrup’s eyes and refrained from reminding him that they too were short-handed. What with chronic underrecruitment, secondment to the National Crime Squad – not to mention to the SCG itself – plus absence on Roll-out Programmes and the usual attrition of epidemic colds, IBS and back problems – the ongoing response of over-stretched men to a stressful job – there could hardly be a unit of any sort in the Met that was up to strength. But Porson knew all that as well as he did. The SCG were supposed to take the major crimes, which these days generally meant all murders apart from straightforward domestics, but the fact of the matter was that Peter Judson, the head fromage of their own particular SCG, was a cherry-picking bastard who had obviously logged this case as entailing more graft than glory and tossed it back whence it came.

‘After all,’ Porson went on, trying to put a gloss on it, ‘when push comes to shovel, it’s a testament to your firm’s record of success that they want to bung it onto us.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Slider said neutrally.

‘You ought to’ve got a commendation last time, laddie, over that Agnew business. It was pure political bullshine that shot our fox before we could bring it home to roost. So here’s your chance to do yourself a bit of bon. Brace up, knuckle down, and I’ll make sure you get your dues this time, even if I have to stir up puddles till the cows come home.’

The allegories along Porson’s Nile were more than usually deformed this morning, Slider thought, which was generally a sign of emotion or more than usual stress in the old boy. But he knew what he meant. He meant that Slider should put his nose to the wheel and his shoulder to the grindstone, a posture which inevitably left his arse in the right position to be hung out to dry if necessary; and Slider had a feeling, from the
preliminary look of the thing, that this one was going to be a long, hard slog.

When he got back to the office, Atherton was there, looking bronzed, fit, rested and generally full of marrowbone jelly. Slider felt a quiet relief at the sight of him. Atherton had been through some tough times recently, including a near nervous breakdown, and there had been moments when Slider had feared to lose him altogether. He’d had other bagmen in a long career, but none that he would have also called his friend.

Atherton did not immediately look up, being engaged with the
Guardian
crossword. DC McLaren was hanging over his shoulder, a drippy bacon sandwich suspended perilously on the way to his mouth.

‘I can’t read your writing,’ McLaren complained. ‘What’s that?’

‘Aardvark.’

‘With two a’s?’ McLaren objected.

‘It’s a name it made up for itself when it heard Noah was boarding the ark in alphabetical order,’ Atherton explained kindly. ‘The zebras were exceptionally pissed off, I can tell you. That’s why they turned up in their pyjamas – as a kind of protest.’

‘Now I know you’re back,’ Slider said. Atherton looked up, and McLaren straightened just in time for the melted butter to drip onto his front – which was used to it – instead of Atherton’s back. Atherton was a classy dresser, and it would have been an act of vandalism akin to gobbing on the Mona Lisa.

‘No need to ask if you had a good time,’ Slider said. ‘You’re looking disgustingly pleased with yourself.’

‘Why not?’ Atherton agreed. A fortnight of sunshine and unfeasibly energetic sexual activity. And now a nice meaty corpse to get our teeth into.’

‘Some people have strange tastes. How did you know, anyway?’

‘Bad news has wings. Maurice was talking to Paul Beynon from the SCG while you were upstairs.’

‘I knew him at Kensington,’ McLaren said. ‘He rung to give me the gen.’ His time at Kensington was his Golden Age, source of all legend. Amazingly, it seemed he had been popular there. At all events, they were always ringing him up for a bunny, and vice versa.

‘So it seems I just got back in time,’ Atherton said.

‘Yeah, from what you said, another day’d’ve killed you,’ McLaren said lubriciously.

‘How’s Sue?’ Slider asked.

Atherton smiled. ‘You’ll never know.’

McLaren pricked up his ears. ‘Oh, is that who you were with? That short bird I saw you with that time? Blimey, you still going with her?’

His surprise was understandable, if tactless, for Atherton had always demanded supermodel looks as basic minimum, and Sue – a colleague of Joanna’s – was neither willowy nor drop-dead gorgeous. She had something, however, that melted Atherton’s collar studs. But he didn’t rise to McLaren. He merely looked sidelong and said, ‘You know the old saying, Maurice: better to have loved a short girl than never to have loved a tall.’

‘Right, shall we get on with it?’ Slider interposed. The rest of his team, bar Hollis and Mackay who were still at the scene, had come in behind him. ‘With no identification on the corpse, we’ve got more work even than usual ahead of us. In fact, I expected to find you all hard at it already,’ he complained.

‘We have been. Hive of activity, guv,’ McLaren said smartly. ‘Just waiting for you to get back to see how you wanted it set up.’

‘Never mind that Tottenham. When did I ever want it set up any differently? Here’s the Polaroids from the scene. And I shall want a sketch map of the immediate area up on the wall. Get on with it, Leonardo.’

McLaren stuffed the last of the sandwich in his mouth. ‘Right, guv,’ he said indistinctly. ‘Get you a cuppa first?’

‘From the canteen? Yes, all right, might as well. It’ll be a long day.’

‘Get me one too, Maurice,’ Anderson said.

‘Slice cake with it?’

Anderson boggled. ‘You what? Turn you stone blind.’

McLaren shrugged and hurried off.

Atherton shoved the newspaper into his drawer and unfurled his elegant height to the vertical. ‘He probably thought you meant DiCaprio,’ he observed to Slider.

The park keeper, Ken Whalley, was in the interview room, his hands wrapped round a mug of tea as if warming them on a
cold winter’s day. He had a surprisingly pale face for an outdoor worker, pudgy and nondescript, with strangely formless features, as if he had been fashioned by an eager child out of pastry but not yet cooked. Two minutes after turning your back on him it would be impossible to remember what he looked like. Perhaps to give himself some distinction he had grown his fuzzy brown hair down to his collar where it nestled weakly, having let go the top of his head as an unequal struggle.

He looked desperately upset, which perhaps was not surprising. However un-mangled this particular corpse was, it was one more than most people ever saw in a lifetime, and finding it must have been unsettling.

Slider, sitting opposite, made himself as unthreatening as possible. ‘So, tell me about this morning. What time did you arrive at the park?’

Whalley looked up over the rim of the mug like a victim. He had those drooping lower lids, like a bloodhound, that showed the red, which made him look more than ever pathetic. ‘I’ve already told the other bloke all about it,’ he complained. ‘Back at the park. I told the copper first, and then I had to tell that plain-clothes bloke an’ all.’

‘I know, it’s a pain the way you’ll have to keep repeating the story,’ Slider sympathised, ‘but I’m afraid that’s the way it goes. This is a murder investigation, you know.’ Whalley flinched at the ‘M’ word and offered no more protest. ‘What time did you arrive?’

Whalley sighed and yielded. ‘Just before a’pass seven. I’m supposed to open up at a’pass.’

‘At the South Africa Road end?’ A nod. And what time did you leave home?’

He seemed to find this question surprising. At last he said, as if Slider ought to have known, ‘But I only live across the road. I got a flat in Davis House. Goes with the job.’

‘I see. All right, when you got there, were the gates open or shut?’

‘Shut. They was shut,’ he said quickly.

‘And locked? How do you lock them?’

‘With a chain and padlock.’

‘And were the chain and padlock still in place, and locked?’

‘Yeah, course they were,’ Whalley said defensively.

‘And what about the Frithville Gardens end?’

‘I never went down there. Once I saw that bloke in the playground I just rang you lot, and then I never went nowhere else.’
He looked nervously from Slider to Atherton and back. ‘Look, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I never locked up properly last night.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Well I did. I done everything right, same as always. It’s not my bleedin’ fault ’e got done!’

‘All right, calm down. Nobody’s accusing you of anything,’ Atherton said. ‘We just need to get it all straight, that’s all. Once we’ve got your statement written down we probably won’t need to bother you again.’

Whalley seemed reassured by this. All right,’ he said at last, putting the mug down and wiping his lips on the back of his sleeve. ‘What j’wanna know?’

‘Tell me about locking up last night,’ Slider said. ‘What time it was, and exactly what you did.’

‘Well, it was about a’pass nine. I’m s’pose to lock up at dusk, which is generally about arf hour after sunset, but it’s up to me. I generally lock up earlier in winter, ’cause there’s not so many people about. It’s a cut-through, but there’s no lights in the park, so we can’t leave it open after dark. Course, people still want to take the short cut, and they used to bunk over the gate, so we had them new gates put on down the Frithville end, with all the pointy stuff on top.’

Slider had seen them: irregular metal extrusions, vaguely flame-shaped, topped the high gates, looking as if they were meant for decoration but in fact a fairly good deterrent. Of course, a really determined person could climb over anything, but the flames prevented ‘bunking’ – hitching oneself up onto one’s stomach and then swinging the legs over – which would deter the casual cutter-through.

Whalley went on, ‘But in summer it stays light longer and it depends what I’m doing what time I shut up. But anyway, I went over a’pass nine with the chains and padlocks. What I do, I shut the South Africa gate but I don’t lock it, then I walk through telling everyone it’s closing. Then I lock the Frithville gate, and walk back, make sure everyone’s out, then lock the South Africa gates.’

‘And that’s what you did last night?’

There were beads of sweat on Whalley’s upper lip. ‘That’s what I’m telling you, inni? I did everything just like normal and then I went home.’

‘Have you ever seen deceased before?’

‘No, I never seen him before in me life,’ Whalley said emphatically. ‘I don’t know who he is, and that’s the truth.’ He wiped his lips again.

‘Did you see him in the park anywhere before you locked up?’

‘What, j’fink I wouldn’t a noticed a bleedin’ dead body?’ Whalley said indignantly.

‘No, I meant did you see him alive? Was he hanging around, perhaps?’

‘I dunno. No, I never.’

‘Was there anyone in the park who took your notice? Anyone unusual or suspicious-looking?’

Whalley drew up his shoulders and spread his hands defensively. ‘Look, I don’t go checking up on people,’ he whined. ‘It’s not my job. I just go through telling ’em it’s closing. Everyone was out before I locked up, that’s all I know. You can’t put it on me. F’ cryin’ out loud!’

‘It’s just,’ Slider said gently, ‘that you said you didn’t go down to the Frithville gate this morning, but when one of our constables went down there, there was no padlock and chain. The gates were shut, but they weren’t locked.’

Whalley stared a long time, his lips moving as if rehearsing his answer. Then at last he licked them and said, ‘Someone must’ve took ’em.’ Slider waited in silence. Whalley looked suddenly relieved. ‘Yeah, someone must’ve cut through ’em. You could cut that chain all right with heavy bolt-cutters.’

Walking away from the interview room, Atherton eyed his boss’s thoughtful frown and said, ‘Well?’

‘Well?’ Slider countered. ‘How did you like Mr Whalley?’

‘Thick as a whale sandwich, and more chicken than the Colonel. What did you think of him?’

‘I don’t like it when they start supplying answers to questions they’ve no business answering,’ Slider said.