Body Line

EIGHT

Beauty in a Mist of Tears

Atherton’s reply was lost because behind Slider’s head he had seen the red door open again, and the pale young woman come out. He nudged his boss and Slider turned to see her pause, look round, spot them, hesitate, and come towards them.

‘Hello. Did you want to speak to us?’ Slider said kindly.

‘It was my lunch break anyway, but I thought I might catch you,’ she said, with a frowning, uneasy peep upwards at them – she was small as well as thin, almost a childlike figure. ‘I don’t know if I should – if it’s important . . .’

‘Anything you can tell us could be important,’ Slider said. ‘Is it about your boss?’

‘Sort of. Well, it’s David. I’ve been seeing him.’

Slider suddenly realized the signs of a heavy cold were in fact signs of weeping. ‘Then I definitely think you should talk to us,’ he said.

She glanced upwards at the window of the office. ‘Not here,’ she said. ‘Amanda might look out and see us. Can we – I mean, it is my lunchtime . . .’

‘Of course. Where would you like to go?’ Slider said.

‘There’s a place along there – Eddie’s – they do sandwiches and things,’ she said.

Eddie’s proved to be a wholly unreconstructed sandwich bar, with a few chrome-and-formica tables in the back of the sort that come screwed to the floor and all-in-one with their chairs. But the coffee smelled good, and the sandwiches were made to order from basic ingredients of the old-fashioned sort: ham, cheese, corned beef, liver sausage, lettuce, tomato, cucumber etc. And the coleslaw was made of cabbage.

‘This is not the place I was talking about,’ Atherton whispered as they went in.

‘Oddly enough, I guessed that,’ Slider murmured back.

The young woman, whose name was Angela Fraser, only picked listlessly at her food, and seemed likely at any moment to start leaking at the eyes again. Slider addressed his sandwich – he’d gone for the liver sausage, mostly to annoy Atherton, who thought it was the Devil’s Truncheon – and got her started.

‘So you knew David Rogers?’ he offered.

She nodded. ‘We’d been going out for a while.’

‘Going out as in . . .?’

She cast her eyes down, and colour came into her cheeks for the first time. ‘We were lovers,’ she managed at last. It was a curiously modest phraseology, for a female who looked to be in her early thirties. ‘We saw each other every week, on a Monday or Tuesday, and sometimes Saturdays. Unless there was some work reason why he couldn’t. Which there often was,’ she admitted, sighing.

‘What was his work?’ Slider slipped in.

She looked surprised. ‘He was a doctor,’ she said in an explaining-the-bleedin’-obvious tone. ‘A consultant,’ she bettered it.

‘At a hospital?’

‘I suppose so. He never talked about his work,’ she said. ‘He told me he was a consultant, that was all. Well, I sort of knew that anyway, because Amanda had said so. But he never said anything else about it.’

‘So you don’t know what field he was in?’ Atherton asked. She shook her head. ‘Or what hospital?’

‘No. I told you, we didn’t discuss it. We had other things to talk about.’ She smiled faintly. ‘He was great company. And he was interested in things I was interested in, too. I mean, we talked about films and clothes and decorating and food and everything. Not just football and cars, like most of the men I’ve dated. He’d always notice my hair and make-up and things. He didn’t think it was weak to know about stuff like that.’

‘He was a metrosexual,’ Atherton suggested.

She nodded, her eyes filling. ‘He was great. He bought me a Dolce and Gabbana handbag. I can’t tell you what it cost.’

‘It’s nice when a man is generous,’ Slider said warmly. ‘I suppose he was well off?’

‘I suppose he must have been.’ She looked dreamy, remembering. ‘It was always the best, wherever we went – best seats, best restaurants, taxis everywhere, champagne. He always had loads of cash on him. He paid for everything cash – even the handbag.’ Her expression sharpened suddenly. ‘You’re not thinking I went out with him for his money?’

‘Of course not,’ Slider said soothingly.

‘Because it wasn’t that at all,’ she informed him sternly. ‘He was a lovely man, sensitive and kind. He was a great listener. He always wanted to know what was on my mind, not just rushing me into bed like other men. That’s what I loved him for.’

It was a good ploy, Atherton thought. If you can listen to a woman with an appearance of interest, no matter what bollocks she’s talking, for long enough, she’s yours. The old Dirty Doctor had doubtless developed his skills over a long period.

‘So how long had you been going out?’ he asked.

‘Fourteen months,’ she said, with a hint of pride. ‘We’d started talking about taking our relationship to the next level.’

‘I thought you were already lovers,’ Atherton queried.

She frowned. ‘I don’t mean that. I mean moving in together. I’ve got this flat in South Acton, and he had this house in Shepherd’s Bush. I never saw it – we always used my place. He said he’d never liked his house and only bought it because he had to have somewhere to lay his head, and it was a good investment. But he kept saying he wanted to see more of me, though with his work commitments he couldn’t manage more than twice a week, sometimes not even that, so I said maybe we should look at both selling and getting a place together, and that’s where we were at when – when . . .’ Definite filling of the eyes. Slider pulled a couple of paper napkins out of the dispenser on the table and pressed them into her hands. ‘I can’t believe he’s gone,’ she cried into her hands. ‘I’ll never see him again. And we were – we were – so in love!’

Slider exchanged a glance with Atherton while she was busy and read his cynical amusement. No doubt this poor deluded female had been due for the big drop, having brought up with Rogers the unmentionable subject of commitment, but the pain was no less real for her. Twice a week – at her flat – for Angela; twice a week – after stripping, and at his place – for Cat. How many others? How easy women made it these days, when sex was simply expected at the end of a date – particularly when they had hit the thirty barrier and were afraid of being left mateless. Hard-to-get meant you had to sit through dinner. But there was nothing wrong with Angela Fraser: she was pretty, personable, articulate. She must often ask herself, why wasn’t she married? A handsome, generous doctor willing to pretend to be interested in her must have seemed like a Godsend. No wonder she thought she was in love with him – and told herself he was, with her.

She emerged from her muffling, accepted another couple of napkins, blew her nose, and said abruptly, ‘When will the funeral be? I want to go.’

‘I don’t know,’ Slider said. ‘We can’t release the body while the investigation is going on.’ It wasn’t strictly true, but at the moment they hadn’t anyone to release it to; and, anyway, who knew whether Miss Fraser would end up being invited? He understood it would be important to her, seeing herself effectively as the widow, but the reality might be very different and he didn’t want to get into that.

Fortunately she was bracing herself up. ‘I’m sorry about crying,’ she said. ‘I must look a sight.’

‘Not at all,’ Slider said gallantly. ‘Just a little pink.’

‘I’ve been crying a lot at home,’ she confessed. ‘I have to try to hide it at work. Amanda would be furious if she knew I’d been seeing David. But I want to help you. Whoever did this terrible thing, they must be caught and made to suffer. Do you have any idea who it was?’

‘I was hoping you might be able to give us some sort of insight into that,’ Slider said earnestly. ‘You obviously knew him very well. Did he have any enemies?’

‘What, apart from Amanda?’ Angela said with a scornful look. ‘She hated him.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Because of the divorce,’ she said dismissively. ‘She just didn’t understand him, that’s what. He wouldn’t have looked elsewhere if she’d been more sympathetic. I just can’t imagine them married – she was so wrong for him. He was so gentle and sensitive. She’s hard, and all she cares about is business.’

‘I thought she cared about her clients,’ Slider said. ‘I mean, she’s doing very worthwhile work with the agency, isn’t she?’

‘Oh, that’s what she’d tell you,’ Angela snorted. ‘She loves everyone to think she’s this saintly Mother Theresa sort of figure, but all she does it for is the applause. She’s as hard as nails really, and the way she talks to them sometimes – telling them to stop feeling sorry for themselves, and that they can do more than they think, and they should get out and get a job and stop making a thing about their disabilities. Well, if people knew, she wouldn’t get invited to all these conferences, and dinners, and opening facilities and everything. Anyway, it’s me and Nora do all the work, really. She’s always out “networking”, as she calls it.’

‘Do you know Robin Frith?’ Slider asked, before she exploded with wrath.

‘What, her fancy man? Yes, and how come it was all right for her to shack up with him, but not all right for poor David to find comfort in another woman’s arms after the hell she put him through?’

‘So you’ve met him – Robin Frith?’ Atherton tried to get her back on track.

‘Not met, exactly. I’ve seen him once or twice. He looks a bit of a hunk, actually – I can’t think how she caught him. But I don’t really know him. I think he’s got his own business,’ she concluded vaguely, ‘but I don’t know what it is. Amanda doesn’t talk about him. Well, she doesn’t really talk about personal stuff much. She doesn’t encourage what she calls gossip in the office.’

‘Why do you think she would have minded you going out with David?’ Atherton asked.

‘Oh, because the first time I met him, he’d come into the office to see Amanda about something and she had a client with her, and he sat by my desk and started chatting to me, and we were getting on really well when she finished and came out and – well, you should have seen the look. She practically dragged him into her room, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but you could tell from the tone she was tearing him off a strip. And when he came out he looked furious, but he sort of swallowed it down and he winked at me as he left. Then she called me in and bollocked me for talking to him, and said that I was not to use the workplace as a dating agency and she didn’t pay me to flirt with men on her time and that if I wanted to make myself sexually available to aging Lotharios I should go and stand on a street corner in Soho, and she’d be happy to release me without notice if that was the summit of my ambition.’ She looked from Atherton to Slider and back. ‘She really said that.’

You had to admire her vocabulary, Slider thought. And if David had ‘dropped in’ at the office, it proved there was more contact between them than Amanda admitted. ‘So she didn’t want you to get to know David,’ he mused. ‘I wonder why.’

‘Jealousy,’ Angela said promptly. ‘Didn’t want anyone else to give him the happiness she couldn’t. But she couldn’t keep us apart. When I went out at lunchtime a bit later to get a sandwich he was waiting for me in his car. Took me to Strand-on-the-Green for lunch, and it took off from there. We agreed never to let Amanda know, because he said it would make her furious and I was afraid she’d sack me if she knew. Because I could make him happy, and she’d failed. We’ve been together ever since. If only he hadn’t been so busy, we could have seen more of each other. We could have been married by now.’

Atherton couldn’t bear another helping of pink blancmange. ‘What about David’s friends?’ he asked. ‘Did you meet any of them?’

‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘We were too wrapped up in each other ever to want anyone else. Our dates were too precious to water them down with other people.’

‘So you don’t know if he had any enemies? Any difficulties at work? Was anyone threatening him? Did he have money worries?’

‘No, nothing like that. I mean, he never talked about work, but he’d have said if he was in trouble. I mean, we told each other everything. And he had plenty of money. I’ve told you that.’ Suddenly she frowned. ‘Except – I’ve just remembered. He was a bit preoccupied lately.’

‘Preoccupied?’ Slider queried.

‘A bit absent, sort of. Thinking about stuff. I’d suddenly realize he wasn’t listening properly, and he’d sort of “come to” and apologize.’

‘You didn’t ask him what he was thinking about?’

‘Well, yes, but he’d just say, “Oh, nothing, sorry,” and change the subject.’

‘How long had this “thinking” been going on?’

‘About two or three weeks, I suppose. Maybe longer.’

‘Can you pinpoint anything that might have started it?’

‘Not really,’ she said slowly, working back in her mind. ‘Except – well, he used to go to this place in Suffolk.’

‘What place?’

‘He didn’t say. You see, if we went out on a Tuesday, we’d go back to my place, but he hardly ever stayed the night because he said he had to get up really early, like crack of dawn, on Wednesdays to go to Suffolk. I just thought it was another hospital he worked at. Anyway, this Tuesday night – Tuesday before last – when he got out of bed, he came back to kiss me and said he wished he didn’t have to go. I said, well don’t, then, and he said he wished he never had to do that damned journey again, and for a minute he looked really—’ She sought the right word. ‘Really bleak. I thought he just meant that he wished we were living together, but I’m thinking now maybe he was talking about this Suffolk job. Because when he left he said he wasn’t sure about next week because things might be changing in his life. He said, “There’s a big decision to be made, and it could change everything.” Well, I thought he was talking about him and me. But maybe he meant this job. Anyway, the next week we met the same as usual, but it was from then, now I think about it, that he was in this funny mood.’ She looked at them anxiously. ‘He was definitely worrying about something. Do you think he knew what was going to happen? Was someone threatening him?’ Her eyes filled again. ‘I can’t bear to think he had that hanging over him, and didn’t tell me. He was too much of a gentleman to put something like that on me. Always wanted to protect me. But I could have taken it. I might have helped him.’

Slider handed over more napkins and said, ‘Are you sure he never said anything about where he went in Suffolk? Or why he went? The name of the hospital. Did he mention a town? Or tell you about his journey? You know – “there were roadworks on the A45”, or “the traffic was terrible through Saffron Walden”. Anything like that?’

‘No. He didn’t talk about driving or traffic or dull stuff like that.’

Definitely a man in a million, Slider thought. Where two or three men are gathered together, there shall routes be discussed. How could any red-blooded male drive regularly to Suffolk and never so much as mention the Army and Navy roundabout, necessity of avoiding, the Thetford bypass, difference made by, or the little-known short cut that shaved ten minutes off the Royston to Bury leg?

He changed tack. ‘You said you met him at the office. Did he often call in?’

‘No, I think I’ve only seen him there three or four times since we opened. I suppose she scared him off. But he rang her up sometimes. Nora answered the phone and put the calls through to Amanda, and I’d hear her say, “It’s David Rogers for you.”’

‘How often?’

‘Oh, not often. It’d be once a month or less – except this last few weeks. Then it was a couple of times a week.’

‘You didn’t ever hear anything that was said?’ Slider asked without hope.

She shook her head. ‘They weren’t long calls, and you could tell they made her mad, because she’d slam the phone down, and once I went in with some typing straight after and she had a face like thunder for a second before she hid it. I thought maybe he was trying to soften her up for him and me moving in together. But maybe—’ She looked at them with pitiful and failing hope. ‘I suppose it probably wasn’t that? I suppose it was this trouble he was in?’ Slider didn’t answer. ‘But why would he talk to her about it and not me about it? I thought he loved me.’

‘That was a sickening spectacle,’ Atherton commented when they were alone again, heading back for the car.

‘I like liver sausage,’ Slider said. ‘And no one asked you to watch me eat it.’

‘No, I was talking about that apparently normally intelligent woman deluding herself that a once or twice a week no-strings-attached bonk equates to true love and a happy-ever-after settlement. She didn’t even know where the man worked or what he did, for crying out loud! She’d never met any of his friends, never been to his house, and when he said he wanted their relationship kept secret she went along with it. What a complete and utter pap-brained loser!’

‘Don’t sugar-coat it,’ Slider advised. ‘Say what you really mean.’

Atherton enumerated on his long fingers. ‘So we know Amanda was talking to Rogers. That whatever it was was making her angry. That he had been worried about something lately. And then there’s this Suffolk business.’

‘Does it occur to you that Suffolk might just have been his excuse not to stay the night?’

‘Did it occur to you? What an unkind thought.’

‘On the other hand, if it was an excuse, why Suffolk? It seems a bizarre choice. He could have made it somewhere much further away, to be on the safe side. Or at least more exotic, to impress her. Catching a plane to Brussels, say – got to be at the airport at the crack, got to go home and pack a bag.’

‘And what about all this apocalyptic stuff? Big decision to make and everything could change?’

‘It sounds to me as if he was planning to dump her.’

‘Yes, that’s what I thought, too. Some rough beast of a big excuse was slouching towards Acton to be born.’

‘On the other hand, he did end up dead,’ Slider said, ‘so there could have been something going on. I’m inclined to think Suffolk might be genuine, just because it sounds so dopey as an excuse.’

‘But what was he going there for?’ Atherton asked. ‘On evidence so far, it was probably only another woman.’

As they came in from the yard, Nicholls popped his head out from the front shop. ‘Oh, Bill’

‘Nutty’ Nicholls, the handsome Scot with the lustrous accent from the far north-west, was one of the uniformed sergeants. He had a much-loved wife and a large family of daughters, which gave him a certain vibe that had every female he encountered wanting to nestle against his heart and tell him things. He also had a fine voice and was a leading light of the Hammersmith Police Players. His singing range was so wide that, in their latest production for charity, he had just been chosen to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, because he could sing it better than any of the female members. That he accepted the part was a sign of his confidence in himself. Not every man was so comfortable in his sexuality he could wear a pinafore dress and a long-blonde-plaits wig when there was any chance of colleagues seeing him. The Players only did four performances and the whole run was already a sell-out. O’Flaherty, another sergeant and Slider’s old friend, had assured him that he’d heard Nutty sing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ in rehearsal and ‘it had me heart scalded, so it did’.

They paused, and Atherton said, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’

Nutty was un-phased. ‘Mock away. My back’s broad.’

‘But I hear you have a tiny waist.’

‘What is it, Nutty?’ Slider intervened.

‘At last, a sensible man. I will talk to you,’ said Nicholls. ‘There’s someone waiting to see you.’

‘To do with the Rogers case?’

‘Name of Frith, if that means anything to you. I put him in Interview One. I gave him tea and biscuits, but he looked at me like Bambi’s mother, so I think you should see him before he finishes the Hobnobs, or he might leap away into the forest.’

‘Is that your next production?’ Atherton asked with feigned interest.

‘We’re saving a part for you,’ Nutty assured him seriously. ‘You would do very well as Thumper. It is typecasting, really.’

Frith was on his feet when they went into the room, like someone just making up his mind to leave. Slider could smell the sweat through the aftershave – the new sweat of fear, must be, since it was not particularly warm out today, and the interview room, whose radiator hadn’t worked in weeks, was positively cool.

He looked sharply at Slider and Atherton, and said, ‘You’re the people who came to the house, to tell Amanda.’ It was not clear whether he thought that was a good or a bad thing.

‘Detective Inspector Slider and Detective Sergeant Atherton,’ Slider reintroduced them. ‘Won’t you sit down, Mr Frith. You wanted to speak to me?’

He sat, but only on the edge of the chair, as if retaining the right to leave at any moment. His eyes tracked from one of them to the other, and they were so large, and with such long lashes, that had they been dark instead of blue, Slider might have thought Nutty’s comparison valid. But Frith was a big man, bigger up close, and particularly in this confined space, than he had seemed out in the high-ceilinged hall of Amanda’s house: not especially tall, but muscular, and his face was lean and firm, and his shoulders were big, and his hands looked powerful. No, on second thoughts, there was nothing cervine about him. If he was nervous, it would not lead him to panic. He had twice won Badminton, and Slider knew enough about riding to know controlling half a ton of horse at speed over the toughest course in the world was not an option for the weak-minded or panicky.

Frith opened the campaign by attack. ‘You’ve been asking questions about me,’ he said. ‘And I’m guessing that the woman who’s been quizzing my staff and buying them drinks is one of yours. Sarratt is a small village, and in villages word gets round pretty quickly. So before you completely ruin my reputation and my business, I want to know what you mean by it.’

Slider drove the ball straight back down the wicket. ‘In the course of a murder investigation, many people are asked many questions. Why should it bother you?’

‘You asked my groom where I was on the morning David Rogers was murdered. That’s not just any question. That’s asking for an alibi, and that must mean you suspect me of something.’

‘Innocent people don’t need alibis,’ he said blandly.

‘Exactly,’ said Frith with some triumph.

‘Innocent people also don’t tell lies to the police.’ Which was not true, of course: people lied to the police all the time, about everything, for no apparent reason, or for reasons so inadequate as to make them seem like perfect imbeciles. But as Frith seemed to want to do a bit of verbal fencing, Slider obliged him, and was gratified to see him redden – whether with anger or shame he didn’t know, but at least it was discomfort.

‘I haven’t lied to you,’ Frith said, his voice hard. ‘In fact, as far as I am aware I haven’t been asked any questions, so how could I?’

‘You haven’t lied to me,’ Slider agreed amiably, ‘but you have lied about your whereabouts on Monday morning. You told your staff you were going to Archers, the feed merchant, but you weren’t there. Which means you were missing all of Monday morning, a time we are naturally interested in. So if your presence here means you have decided to come clean—’

‘Come clean?’ Frith said indignantly. ‘I’ve got nothing to come clean about! Now look, I don’t like your tone—’

Slider cut through the bluster. ‘There’s a simple way to resolve this. Just tell me where you were on Monday morning, and there’s an end to it.’

Frith maintained an angry silence, but he was not meeting Slider’s eyes any more. He seemed to be thinking, calculating. Wondering what he could get away with, Atherton thought.

‘Look,’ he said at last – the language of capitulation.

‘I’m looking,’ Slider said when the pause grew to long.

‘All right,’ said Frith, raising his eyes again. ‘I’ll tell you where I was – not that it’s any of your damn business, but I can see this won’t go away otherwise. But I want your word that this doesn’t go any further. That – well, you won’t tell anyone.’

‘Anyone?’

‘Amanda. That you won’t tell Amanda.’ His eyes shifted again. ‘You see, I was with someone. Well, a woman.’

Oh, not that one, Atherton thought wearily. Had he already primed whoever-it-was to back him up, or was he just hoping?

Interesting, Slider thought: it didn’t seem that Amanda had spoken to him yet about their visit this morning. That was a lucky thing. He might be able to get something out of Frith before they compared stories.

‘You’re seeing another woman?’ he said. ‘Who is it?’

Frith was looking both angry and embarrassed now. ‘It’s someone I’ve been seeing for a while. Well, Amanda and I aren’t married. Her decision. She says once bitten twice shy. It’s a bit insulting really – I mean, I’m not David. But I don’t want to go into that. The fact of the matter is that she likes to keep her independence. She has her own job, her own friends. She always says we’re not joined at the hip just because we live together. We’re two separate people. So there’s no earthly reason why I shouldn’t see someone else. The trouble is,’ he concluded with a short sigh, looking down at his big, strong hands, ‘I know she wouldn’t see it that way. We’ve known each other for a long time, and I know her pretty well. If she found out there was another woman she’d go completely bananas. So I’m asking you – very strongly – not to tell her.’

‘You’re having an affair?’ Slider said, hoping to goad him.

‘It’s not an affair,’ Frith said indignantly. ‘I keep telling you, Amanda and I aren’t married. I asked her for the first time when we were both seventeen, and I’ve asked her God knows how many times since. But she went off and married that oaf David. And look where that got her. I could have made her happy, but she decided she wanted that – that obvious bastard. I know he’s dead and all that, but it doesn’t change what he was. And when they separated, it was her came looking for me. I said then I’d marry her when she got divorced and she ummed and ahhed about it, but once the divorce came through she said she didn’t want to risk it again. This whole arrangement is her idea. She wants to keep her options open, just like she did when we were kids, always looking over her shoulder in case something better came along. I’ve actually heard her introduce me as her lodger. I’m just the stopgap. But she likes to keep a firm hold on her possessions, which means that she’s free to look around, but I’m not.’

A lot of anger there, Slider thought with interest. Yet he stayed with her. Was it perhaps that the anger towards her he couldn’t act on had found a displacement activity in anger towards Rogers? Amanda treated him pretty shabbily, if what he was saying was true, and he was obviously hurt and jealous that she had chosen Rogers instead of him. Perhaps at some level he believed that if Rogers was really completely out of the way, i.e. dead, she might finally commit to him? But that would mean a Frith solo murder, not a Frith-effected, Amanda-designed murder. Which did not explain Amanda’s lies and evasions. Or his, Slider’s, conviction that she knew something about it.

‘So let’s get this straight,’ he said. ‘On Monday morning you left home at – what time?’

‘The usual time. I always leave around six. Horses wake up early, and morning stables are the hardest work of the day. There’s always a lot to do.’

‘Around six? Can you be more specific?’

‘Well, not really. I wasn’t watching the clock. But the radio was on in the bedroom when I went in to say goodbye to Amanda – she dozes to it in bed – and they were still doing the news, so it was probably just a few minutes after six.’

‘And you went – where?’

‘Straight to Sue’s house in Ruislip. It wasn’t worth going to the stables first, because she was coming in from Dubai at six fifty-five that morning. She’s a cabin attendant with BA. Well, I got to her place about a quarter to seven and she arrived about eight.’

Atherton pushed pad and pencil across to him. ‘Write down her name, address and telephone number,’ he said.

Frith looked alarmed. ‘You can’t just go and ask her! My God!’

‘You mean she won’t confirm your alibi?’ Atherton said.

‘No, I mean she’s married.’

‘So it is an affair,’ said Slider.

‘Well, if you want to be technical about it,’ Frith said sulkily. ‘It’s hard enough for us as it is, what with her schedule and her husband’s. He’s an exhibition contractor, so he’s away a lot. And we can’t go to my place because I don’t really have a place. I sold my house to buy the stables, and though there’s a flat there I have to let the staff use it and live in Amanda’s house because property’s so expensive out there. So when Sue’s coming back she rings me and if Terry’s going to be away we meet at her house, and if he’s not we go to this hotel. Well, it’s not ideal, but she won’t leave Terry, and in any case I can’t leave Amanda – she’s got so much money tied up in my stables, she’d make me sell up if all this came out, and then I’d be ruined.’ He shook his head as if his life had suddenly passed before his eyes in all its glorious panoply. ‘It’s a mess,’ he muttered.

No argument there, Slider thought. ‘So what it comes down to,’ he summed up, ‘is that your alibi is that you were meeting someone, but you won’t tell us who or where.’

‘I know it sounds stupid,’ he began.

‘At least,’ said Atherton.

Slider pushed his chair back. ‘If you’re adamant you won’t tell us—’

Frith looked apprehensive, but he stuck to it. ‘I can’t.’

‘Then there’s nothing more to say. But I urge you to think carefully about it. Until we can eliminate you from our enquiries you remain a suspect.’

‘But I didn’t do anything!’ Frith protested.

‘You can just help me on one thing.’ Frith looked receptive. ‘You’d known David Rogers for quite some time. What was his connection with Suffolk?’

‘Suffolk?’ said Frith.

‘Yes – it seems he went there regularly. Did he work at a hospital there?’

‘Not that I know of,’ Frith said. ‘But I hadn’t kept up with him, so I don’t really know what he did. Except—’ Something seemed to occur to him. ‘Maybe that was where he kept his boat?’

Slider remembered the photograph in Rogers’s bedroom. ‘He had a boat?’

‘He’d taken up sport fishing in recent years. Bought a boat. Amanda said he was quite a bore about it.’ He shrugged. ‘No worse than golf bores, I suppose. These big consultants all have their rich-man’s hobbies,’ he concluded sourly.

‘You were a bit easy on him,’ Atherton complained to Slider as they trod up the stairs together. ‘The blighter’s taken Amanda’s money and protection, yet he’s banging a trolley dolly behind her back. I almost feel sorry for the Sturgess-type. But you didn’t force him on his alibi. Which in any case isn’t really an alibi,’ he continued, ‘because he says he was alone in his car from just after six until a quarter to seven, and alone in the dolly’s house from a quarter to seven until eight. Virtually two hours unaccounted for. Enough time to drive to Shepherd’s Bush, shoot David Rogers in the head, and drive back to Ruislip.’

‘The killer didn’t drive back to Ruislip. He drove to Stanmore.’

‘Oh, yes. I’d forgotten.’ He thought a bit. ‘But that’s still enough time, out to Stanmore, back to Ruislip, two hours. Easy. And even if it were an alibi, we can’t check it unless he gives us the name and address.’

‘Can’t we?’ Slider said serenely. ‘How many flights from Dubai do BA have that arrived at six fifty-five on Monday morning? And how many of the cabin crew on that flight are called Sue and live in Ruislip? We get her details from BA and check with her. And if she doesn’t exist, we’ll nick him for obstruction.’

‘You’re devious,’ Atherton said admiringly.

‘Maybe I am, and maybe I’m not,’ said Slider.