Body Line

ONE

The Wrath of Grapes

‘You look terrible,’ Slider said as Atherton slid into the car.

‘I feel terrible. I’d have to be dead three weeks to feel better than this,’ Atherton said. His voice gave him away – he sounded as if he’d been smoking forty a day for a week. ‘You, on the other hand . . .’ he added resentfully.

‘You shouldn’t mix your drinks,’ Slider said mildly.

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t sit in a jazz club and sip wine. It isn’t hip.’

‘If you were any more hip you wouldn’t be able to see over your pelvis.’

With Emily away in Ireland covering the elections, and Joanna doing a concert in Harrogate, Slider and Atherton had had an all-too-rare-lately boys’ night out. They had gone to Ronnie Scott’s for a Charlie Parker evening: Gilad Atzmon on sax, with a septet backing. Later on some of the Central boys coming off duty had arrived and the session had turned into a long one, moving from Ronnie’s to the flat of one of them nearby.

‘It was a good evening, though,’ Slider said.

Atherton agreed. ‘I can’t remember when I last heard live jazz.’

‘When I worked Central, I often used to slip into Ronnie’s at the end of a shift. Heard all the greats back then – met quite a few of them, too. The atmosphere’s not the same, though, now they’ve banned smoking.’

‘True. Without the fog you can actually see the performers across the room.’

‘Yes, but . . .’ Slider let it hang.

‘I know,’ said Atherton. ‘It’s weird. I hated smoky pubs and bars, but without smoke . . . It’s like waking up with someone you picked up when you were really, really drunk.’

‘It’s a long time since I did that,’ said Slider.

‘At least you went home to a bed and a missus. The kits had been shut in on their own all day, so when I got home they wanted a vigorous workout. They were wall-of-deathing round the house until dawn. Once every circuit they’d land heavily on my stomach and bawl, “Get up and play!”’

Atherton had inherited two Siamese, Shredni Vashtar and Tiglath Pileser, from his previous relationship. They had originally been intended to cement it – ha ha. Fortunately, Emily loved cats; and even more fortunately she was a freelance journalist and worked from home a lot. The kits liked company.

‘Well, you smell nice, anyway,’ Slider said, catching a breath of Atherton’s expensively subtle aftershave. ‘Maybe too nice for police work. A blast of Old Corpsebuster can make a big difference to that all-important first impression.’

‘Oh, blimey, it’s not a stinker is it?’ Atherton said. They were on their way to a murder shout.

‘I don’t know anything about it, only the address. Three Hofland Crescent.’

‘Where’s that? It doesn’t ring a bell.’

‘Back of Sinclair Road. I know where it is, but I don’t think I’ve ever been there.’

‘So it could be anything. Could be something that’s been down a cellar for a week,’ Atherton said. ‘And I haven’t had any breakfast yet.’

‘Maybe just as well.’

Shepherd’s Bush was not beautiful, but it had something to be said for it on a bright, breezy March morning. Clouds were running like tumbleweed across a sky of intense, saturated, heraldic azure. The tall, bare planes on the Green swayed solemnly like folkies singing Kumbayah. All around, the residents – young, old and middling – were sleeping, getting up, planning their day, thinking about work, school, sex, shopping, footie. Some were perhaps dying. One was dead in what the police called suspicious circumstances, and that, fortunately, was unusual. Homicide, even in the most crowded capital in Europe, was not the great eraser.

The Monday morning traffic was squeezing down the side of the Green to the West Cross roundabout, and piling lemming-like beyond it into Holland Park Avenue. The right turn lane at the roundabout was clear except for a pair of ditherers. ‘Tourists!’ Slider said, gave them a couple of bloops and swung round into Holland Road. A moment later Atherton roused himself from his torpor to say, ‘Here’s Sinclair Road. So where’s this crescent?’

It was misnamed – not a crescent at all, but a little snip of a straight road leading off Masbro Road at an angle. They had to leave the car in the only space left in Masbro Road and walk the rest. It was bitterly cold, despite the sunshine. The icy wind was coming down direct from the north, which accounted for the searing clarity of the sky, but it meant there was nothing between the Arctic floes and Slider’s skin except some wholly inadequate clothing.

Seduced by the sun, Atherton hadn’t worn an overcoat either. He shivered beside Slider like a fastidious cat. PCs Renker and Gostyn, on duty at the barrier closing off the crescent, were bundled into multiple layers, and stood massively impervious to the wind-chill factor – as weather forecasters so blithely called it these days. They smirked a little as they moved the barrier to let them through. Beyond it, there were unit cars and the forensic waggon blocking the road, and other uniforms keeping the curious residents and the press back from the blue-and-white tape which made a clear space in front of the house.

The sight of the house made Slider forget the cold for a moment. While the other side of the street consisted of a perfectly standard row of 1840s artisan cottages, their destination was one of a terrace of four Regency villas, harmonious in proportion, exquisite in detail, white-stuccoed, with the original fanlighted doors, and a little wrought-iron balcony at each first-floor window. ‘It’s a gem,’ he said, pausing in admiration.

‘Unexpected,’ said Atherton, who had had to start noticing architecture since he had been working with Slider.

‘They’re earlier than anything else around here,’ Slider said. ‘They must have been here first – when Shepherd’s Bush was still a country village. They’d have had a view over the fields in those days.’

‘Must be worth a fortune. I had a look at a cottage like one of those,’ Atherton said, jerking his hand over his shoulder, ‘for Emily and me, but they were going for nearly seven hundred thou, and they’re just two-up, two-down.’

‘I think we can surmise that our victim is a man of means,’ Slider concluded.

‘Well, thank God for that. Maybe we won’t need the industrial strength cologne after all.’

Detective Constable Kathleen ‘Norma’ Swilley, returned at last from maternity leave, was co-ordinating the troops on the scene. She had arrived back just in time to replace Hart, who had passed her sergeant’s exam and secured a posting to Fulham – a good promotion, though she went with many a wistful backward look. ‘You’re fam’ly,’ she had informed Slider’s firm tearfully at the leaving do, and had insisted on kissing every member of it full on the mouth – even McLaren, which was quite a feat. She’d had to compete with a vegetable samosa. McLaren never saw the point in wasting his lips on anything other than eating, which was perhaps why he hadn’t had a date since the Thatcher administration.

Swilley – whose sobriquet, bestowed for her considerable machismo as a policeman, seemed rather inappropriate now she was a mother – was sensibly wearing a trouser suit over a roll-neck sweater, and a big, thick overcoat: cream wool, wrap-around and belted, Diana Rigg style. She looked warm and delicious. Well, Slider thought she looked warm, and Atherton, slightly wistfully, thought she looked delicious. Swilley had been his one notable failure in his pre-Emily career as a hound.

Connolly, the newest member of Slider’s team, was talking to the next-door neighbours at Number 5, a well-dressed elderly couple, so tiny and immaculate they could have earned spare cash standing around on wedding cakes. They huddled in their doorway as though sheltering from a storm.

‘Deceased’s name is David Rogers, guv,’ Swilley reported. ‘He’s a doctor, according to the neighbours. That’s Mr and Mrs Firman.’ She gestured discreetly towards the elderly couple. ‘Lives alone – divorced or maybe single, they’re not sure – but has girlfriends round. Neighbours in Number 1 and 7 are young couples, but they’re out at work. No one at home in Number 7, and all there is in Number 1 is the nanny. Fathom’s in there having a go at her, but I don’t think he’ll get much change out of her. She doesn’t speak much English.’

‘Who’s inside?’ said Slider.

‘Forensics and the photographers. Doc Cameron’s not arrived yet. The local doctor pronounced, then had it away on his toes. He looked nearly green. Probably never seen a gunshot wound before.’

‘They are reassuringly rare,’ Slider said.

‘Well, it wasn’t pretty,’ said Swilley, who had seen her share of nasty sights. ‘Shot in the head.’

‘Suicide?’ Atherton queried. If so, they could get out of this icy wind double quick and back to the nice warm station.

‘Not unless he was a contortionist. Also—’

Connolly joined them at that moment and said, ‘Are we going in, so?’

Slider eyed her. ‘What’s this “we”?’

‘I’ve never seen a gunshot wound. Wouldn’t it be grand experience for me?’ she said innocently. ‘I’ve got everything we’re going to get outta the owl ones. Not that they know much. Didn’t hear the shot – deaf as Uncle’s donkey. They didn’t know there was anything going on at all until the girl dropped in.’

‘The girl?’

‘The girl outta Rogers’s house.’

‘There was a witness?’Atherton said. ‘Nice of you to mention it.’

‘I was just about to,’ Swilley said, ‘when I was interrupted.’

‘Where is she?’ Slider asked.

‘At the hospital,’ Connolly answered. ‘She jumped out the window or fell offa the balcony – they don’t know which. Landed in that bush outside their front window.’ It was a large, clipped bay, which had been flame shaped, but was now hit-by-a-heavy-body shaped. ‘She literally dropped in.’ Connolly grinned. ‘Frit the life outta them, banging on the window. She was in bits, sobbing with fright and babbling about your man being dead. So the owl ones took her in, made some tea—’

‘Ah, yes, tea. I’m glad they got their priorities right,’ Atherton said.

‘—and phoned for the peelers and the ambulance. Well, they didn’t have a key, and the girl was in a dressing gown so she hadn’t one either, so there wasn’t much else they could do. Anyway, the ambulance got here first and took her to Charing Cross.’

‘Was she conscious?’

‘Oh yeah. I don’t think she was bad hurt, from what they said. But she was in rag order from the shock, you know?’

‘We’ll have to interview her ASAP,’ Slider said. ‘She could be a suspect or an accomplice. You’d better ring the factory, get them to send someone to sit with her,’ he said to Atherton. ‘She shouldn’t be left alone. I might as well have a quick look at the scene now I’m here. There’s Freddie arriving, if I’m not much mistaken,’ he added, seeing a grey Jaguar XJ6 pull up beyond the barrier.

It was indeed Freddie Cameron, the forensic pathologist, well bundled-up in a camel cashmere overcoat and navy scarf, his face looking lean and brown from his ‘summer’ holiday in California. He never went away in June, July or August because that’s when his garden was at its best. He had an – to Slider – incomprehensible passion for dahlias.

‘You’d better go back to the Firmans,’ Slider said, breaking Connolly’s heart. ‘Since you’ve got a relationship with them. Get their statement down while it’s still fresh in their minds. Anything they saw or heard, however trivial. Everything the girl said. And find out everything they know about the victim – where does he work, what are his interests, who does he see, is he in financial or woman trouble?’

‘Righty-oh, sir,’ Connolly said glumly.

‘You’ll see all you’ll want to see in the photographs,’ Slider reassured her. ‘It won’t be pretty.’

‘I need to see it for myself, but,’ Connolly grumbled. ‘How’ll I learn?’

Slider turned away. ‘Freddie! Good holiday? You’re looking brown.’

‘My dear boy, this is rust! They’re having freak rainstorms over there. It was just like home.’

‘Not beach weather, then?’

‘I went whale watching, and Martha read seven books.’ Cameron paused a moment to consider the memory. ‘Not all at once, you understand. Sequentially.’

While Cameron went in, Slider had a word with PC Dave Bright, who had been the first officer on the scene, and was now keeping the log at the door. He was the citizen’s dream copper, big and burly, unflappably good-tempered, but with a core of steel that made villains think twice about lipping him.

‘Had to break the door in,’ he told Slider, with a gesture towards the splintered frame. ‘The neighbours didn’t have a spare key. Said they weren’t that friendly with the man.’

‘It hadn’t been tampered with already?’

‘No, sir. Looked perfectly all right. But it was only on the Yale – not deadlocked.’

‘So the killer didn’t break in,’ Slider said.

‘No, sir. I did a quick check before I called it in, and there was no sign of a break-in. All the doors and windows at the back were locked. Upstairs windows were locked except the French windows of the main bedroom, but that was where the young lady went out, apparently.’

‘All locked up, even though he was at home. A careful citizen.’

‘Yes, sir. So maybe he let chummy in, and chummy let himself out the same way.’

‘What time was this?’

‘Working it back, sir, it must have been about half past six or thereabouts. The 999 call came in at a quarter to seven, and I got here just after seven.’

‘On your own?’ Atherton said. ‘To a firearms shout?’

‘There wasn’t any mention of shooting,’ Bright said. ‘Whether it was the young lady or the old people who weren’t clear, I don’t know. All I was told was that there was a suspicion of foul play and no one had a key. As it was, the victim was there alone and anyone else was long gone. So it worked out all right,’ he said with a shrug.

‘Six thirty in the morning,’ Atherton said to Slider as they clothed up. ‘And on a weekday. Most people would be busy getting dressed or in the shower. Except for the high-flyers at numbers one and four, who’d have left for work at six.’

‘You’re supposing they’re high-flyers.’

‘Must be. Do you know what the mortgage payments would be on a house like this?’

‘It was a good time to choose,’ Slider said. ‘No one passing by to see anyone arriving or leaving.’

‘Even if anyone saw, they wouldn’t notice. Who notices someone coming out of a house, unless they’re acting suspiciously?’

‘Or covered in blood,’ Slider said. But he wasn’t hopeful. There wasn’t so much as a drip on the doorstep or the least smear on the door frame. Besides, shooting was not the murder method of choice for crimes of passion; which, together with the lack of a break-in, made it look like something more deliberate – and the deliberate didn’t dabble in their victim’s fluid emissions. Still, he checked himself, there was no sense in ruling things out beforehand. As he always told his firm, facts first, theories afterwards.

Deceased was in the doorway between the hall and the sitting-room on the right, lying face down, which was probably just as well because he had been shot in the back of the head. He looked to be about five ten, and was dressed in dark trousers, white shirt, shoes and socks.

‘So he wasn’t woken by someone ringing the bell,’ Slider said. ‘He was up and dressed already.’

‘Nice shoes,’ said Atherton. ‘Italian. See the feather stamped on the sole? That’s Amedeo Testoni. Knock you back twelve hundred a pair. I like a man who spends on his footwear.’

‘As against which he’s wearing a gold ring, and has diamond cufflinks,’ said Slider, who had a thing about men wearing jewellery. ‘I don’t think you could have been friends.’

Not much else could be told about the victim, except that what could be seen of his hair was thick and dark and shiny. There was a messy tangle of blood and shattered bone which marked the entry wound, blood pooling under the head, and an unspeakable porridge of brain, blood and tissue on the carpet ahead of him, in the direction the bullet had taken. Slider averted his eyes for a moment while he swallowed and took a settling deep breath.

‘I’ll bet that was a hundred-pound haircut,’ Atherton mourned. ‘What a waste!’ They all had their different ways of coping.

Freddie Cameron, kneeling beside the body, looked up. ‘I take it you’re not interested in time of death?’

‘Unless it’s not compatible with all the high-jinks at six thirty,’ said Slider.

‘Six thirty’s all right, from the warmth of the body and the condition of the blood. So, what can I tell you? He was shot in the back of the head, as you see. A single shot at close range, probably no more than eight inches away – you see the gas-rebound splitting, and the localized scorching. He was upright at the time, as you’ll see from the blood and tissue distribution. The bullet will be somewhere over there, probably embedded in the wall.’

‘He’s not far from the front door,’ Slider observed. ‘He could have let the person in, and then they shot him as he led the way into the sitting-room.’

‘That’s your province, not mine,’ Freddie said. ‘Sounds depressingly professional.’

‘Could be a vengeful lover or husband,’ Slider said, keeping an open mind. ‘If it was someone he knew well enough to let in . . .’

‘Well, either way, I’d say it was a 9mm or .38 pistol wot dunnit,’ Freddie said. ‘The 9mm is the most commonly used handgun this side of the Atlantic, and consequently the most numerous and easiest to get hold of.’

‘There’s lotsa blood,’ Atherton observed.

‘He was lotsa hurt,’ Freddie said. ‘A high velocity bullet causing complete ejection of the brain will have destroyed most of his face. I hope identification isn’t going to be a problem?’

‘We’re assuming he’s the householder,’ Slider said. ‘A Doctor David Rogers.’

‘Don’t think I know him,’ Freddie said. ‘I’ll take the fingerprints for you, anyway, just in case. There probably won’t be much chance of comparing dental records. I’m ready to turn him over now – where’s the photographer?’

Slider had no wish to see this part. ‘I’ll have a quick look round, get the lie of the place, see if there’s a photograph of the good doctor,’ he said. ‘Call me if there’s anything significant.’

The sitting-room was expensively-furnished, with no sign of any interference. There were modern paintings on the wall, a large flat-screen television, DVD and sound equipment, silver candlesticks and an antique clock on the mantel, all untouched. Not a standard burglary, then. Slider noted a leather-topped kneehole desk in one fireplace alcove – it had the air of a decorative feature, but it could be the place to look for personal papers, perhaps. The fingerprints team were busy dusting everything and another forensic pair were on their knees marking all the blood and tissue spatters, so Slider did not go in. He could see all he wanted from here, for now. What struck him most was that the antique furniture looked like repro. The buttoned leather sofa and armchairs were modern, too. Everything was new-looking, immaculate, and curiously lifeless, like the lounge section of an expensive hotel suite. It only wanted an oversized flower arrangement and a leather-bound room-service menu. There was no personal clutter lying around, either. It was a room in which it was impossible to imagine anyone doing anything other than having a large whisky and watching the television for ten minutes before going to bed. Well, perhaps that was all the doctor had done. Didn’t they all work impossible hours, these consultants? He was assuming he was a consultant, to afford a house like this.

Bob Bailey, the Crime Scene Manager, conducted them upstairs and showed them the master bedroom, again furnished in modern luxury style with a deep-pile carpet and concealed lighting. The super-king-sized bed had the covers thrown back, and there were dark-blue silk pyjamas carelessly dropped on the floor at one side. The French windows on to the balcony stood open, the wind blowing the voile curtains about like an advert for Fry’s Turkish Delight. On the balcony were two lollipop bay trees in silver-painted pots, one at either end. Apart from the bed there was an empire chaise longue and two matching chairs in striped silk, and two Louis XV bow fronted chests of drawers – all repro. And an unnecessary number of mirrors.

‘Cheerfully vulgar,’ Atherton remarked. ‘It’s what our Aussie cousins would call a sheila-trap.’

Bob Bailey gestured to the two doors, one either side of the bed, and said, ‘Bathroom through there and dressing-room through there. I’d rather you didn’t go in. We’re still fingerprinting. There’s nothing much to see except that the drawers in the dressing-room are all pulled out, same as in here.’

All the drawers in the bedside cabinets and the chests were open – an expert opens the bottom one first and leaves it open to save time – but there was no evidence of rifling, nothing thrown out on the floor.

‘Looks as though whoever it was was looking for something specific,’ Slider said.

‘We’ve got a nice foot imprint or two,’ Bailey said, gesturing to the marked places on the floor. ‘Benefit of a thick carpet like this. Bigger than the victim’s, so let’s assume they’re chummy’s.’

‘Anything in the bathroom? Bathroom cabinet?’

‘Door closed and no sign of disturbance,’ said Bailey. ‘We’ll collect the contents and send them to you, in case they’re significant, but it doesn’t look as though drugs were the object. Otherwise – damp towels, wet shower-tray, damp toothbrush. All the normal signs of getting ready in the morning.’

The other room on this floor was set up as a study, with a desk bearing a computer. The drawers of the desk were also standing open, but again, there was no sign of rifling. And on the top floor were two more bedrooms and a bathroom, minimally furnished and untouched.

‘Don’t think he even went up there,’ said Bailey. ‘No footmarks at all on the stairs – just hoover tracks. Looks as if no one’s been up there since the cleaner last called.’

‘Interesting,’ said Slider. ‘They were looking for something they were sure couldn’t be upstairs.’

‘Or downstairs,’ Bailey said. ‘The desk drawers in the sitting-room were closed.’

‘Maybe they were disturbed before they had to chance to look further,’ Atherton said. ‘Who’s to say they knew what rooms were up there?’

‘Well, thanks, Bob,’ Slider said. ‘Let me know when we can come back for a closer look. What I really want most urgently is a photograph of the good doctor, since we’re not likely to get a mugshot.’

‘No difficulty there,’ Bailey said. He gestured towards one of the chests, where there was an assembly of photographs in matching silver frames. ‘Most of them are of the same man so I’m guessing it’s him.’

‘I guess too. The sort of person to have matching silver frames would be bound to keep lots of pictures of himself around,’ Atherton said. ‘I bet he had a monogrammed wallet as well.’

Bailey grinned. ‘How did you know? In his jacket, hanging on the dumb valet in the dressing-room. I’ll let you have it as soon as we’re done fingerprinting, but there’s money and credit cards in it – doesn’t look as though it’s been disturbed.’

‘A very selective intruder,’ Slider said.

Bailey brought him some of the photographs, and he chose one of a man wearing nothing but swimming trunks standing in the sunshine on a dock somewhere, smiling directly at the camera, with a motor yacht moored up just behind him. He was very tanned, with a hairless chest, and not in bad shape, reasonably muscled arms, just a little sly bulging to either side above the elastic of the trunks. Slider chose it because he was full-face and clear. He picked another of the same man with a woman. In this one he was in white dinner jacket. The woman was in a clinging white evening dress with more décolletage than was strictly proper, unless she was hoping the good doctor was about to give her a thorough physical. From the way she was hanging on to his arm and gazing at him, perhaps she was.

‘You keep calling him the good doctor,’ Atherton said. ‘From the look of Doris here he’s more the original Dirty Doctor.’

Both had champagne glasses in their free hands, and the edge of a table covered in plates of fiddly food could be seen to one side. The background was a terrace at night, with a string of fancy lamps overhead, and the dots of light in the darkness behind them could have been any major city in the world, seen from a penthouse terrace. Corporate party of some kind, Slider was willing to bet, from their cheesy grins and the canapés.

Bailey removed them from the frames and handed them over, and as Slider was turning to go, said, ‘Oh! I nearly forgot! You’re going to love me for this.’ With a rabbit-and-hat air, he brought out from his pocket an evidence bag containing a mobile phone, and held it out to Slider with a grin. ‘Also in his jacket, in the dressing-room. I know how you love following up numbers.’

‘Terrific,’ Slider said. ‘Just what I wanted. If I weren’t wearing a mask I’d kiss you.’

‘I’m not that easy,’ said Bailey.

Slider left Atherton on site, and took Connolly with him to the hospital, a sort of consolation prize for having denied her the corpse. Besides, it was always as well to have a female on hand when interviewing a female. He scuttled in hunched mode through the icy wind to the car, and Connolly, who had been strolling in her warm tweed Withnail coat, had to run to keep up with him, a panther pursuing a crab.

‘What’s the girl’s name – do we know?’ he asked her as they turned out of Hofland Crescent into Masbro Road, realizing belatedly that he had never heard it mentioned.

‘Katrina Old. The ambulance paras asked her, and that’s what the owl ones remember – though they were in flitters, so they may have got it wrong.’

In the car, Connolly picked up the photo of the man with the girl. ‘That dress leaves everything to be desired. So this is your man Rogers?’ She studied the face. A bit Pierce Brosnan, if you squinted: forties, handsome, perma-tanned, going a bit soft; pleased with himself; expensive haircut just too young for him – unlike the female on his arm, who was a lot too young for him. ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘hasn’t he the face you’d never tire of slapping?’

Slider smiled to himself, turning into Blythe Road. He liked the way Connolly talked. ‘Little Katrina doesn’t think so,’ he said, nodding at the photograph.

‘Plastic Mary here? Is that her, so?’

‘Dunno. I’m assuming.’

Connolly studied the exposed cleavage again. ‘Convent girl, obviously,’ she murmured.

The rush-hour traffic had done its thing and he got through to Charing Cross hospital fairly easily. The stained concrete building, built in the worst of the brutalist style of the seventies, was depressing. The Victorians, he reflected, at least realized that illness is ugly enough anyway, and added curlicues and turrets and fancy brickwork to their hospitals for distraction.

They found the witness in a private room being watched over by PC Lawrence, a slight girl with transparent skin and the kind of thin fair hair that always slips out of its moorings. She looked to Slider altogether too frail to be a copper, but you couldn’t say that kind of thing now. At least Connolly, though not tall, had a muscular look about her and a sharp determination in her face. She and Lawrence had been friends in uniform. ‘Howya, Jillie,’ she greeted her.

‘’Lo, Reets,’ Lawrence replied laconically, lounging in her chair; then, seeing Slider, stood up sharply and said, ‘Sir,’ while a disastrously visible blush coursed through her see-through face. How had she ever got through Hendon, Slider wondered despairingly.

The witness’s name was in fact Catriona Aude; she was twenty-seven and lived in a shared flat in Putney. And she was not the blonde in the photograph. It showed a coarsening of the fibres, Slider thought, to display one woman’s photograph in your bedroom when you were furgling another. Or as Connolly put it indignantly, ‘He’d sicken you!’

‘Miss Aude,’ said Slider, ‘I am Detective Inspector Slider of Shepherd’s Bush police, and this is Detective Constable Connolly. Are you feeling up to answering a few questions?’

As Lawrence could have warned them – and in fact she did mention it afterwards – the difficulty was to stop her talking. They had given her a painkiller and something to calm her down, and for some physiological reason the combination had made her loquacious.

‘Oh no, I’m fine, I mean, I wasn’t really hurt, just a few bruises and I twisted my ankle when I landed but that’s all right now and my hands are a bit sore from the railings, the paint’s kind of flaky and sharp and I had to hang on for ages, I thought I was going to fall but I sort of froze, y’know? and then I couldn’t let go and my arms were nearly coming out of their sockets, I can’t tell you how much it hurt, I thought he was going to kill me, I thought I was going to die.’ Suddenly she set her fingers to her face and dragged it downwards into a Greek mask of tragedy, and behind them moaned, ‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. He’s dead, isn’t he?’

When not pulling her eyes down in imitation of a bloodhound, she was an attractive young woman, with brown eyes and long, thick brown hair with purple highlights, and the kind of spectacular frontal development that seemed to mark a definite taste on the part of the deceased doctor. She had a suspiciously even tan, and the remains of last night’s eye make-up had been spread around by sleep and perhaps the sweat of fear, but not, it seemed, by tears.

‘I can’t cry,’ she confided. ‘I want to cry, I really want to cry, but I can’t. I dunno why.’

‘It’ll be the pills they gave you,’ Connolly said comfortingly, and the young woman turned to her so readily that Slider took a back seat and let Connolly get on with it.

‘Really?’

‘Don’t worry, you’ll cry all right when they wear off. But it’s good you can’t cry now, because we need you to be calm, so’s you can tell us everything that happened. Every little thing you can remember. Are you up for that, Catriona?’

‘Cat. Everyone calls me Cat.’

‘Cat, so. Are you able for it? Because it’s very, very important you tell us everything while it’s fresh in your mind.’

Cat nodded helpfully. ‘I know. So you can catch him. I’ve seen the cop shows on the telly. But what if he comes back for me?’

‘The murderer? Do you know him?’

‘No. I mean I never saw him, not his face. But what if he finds out who I am and comes for me?’

‘Don’t worry a thing, we’ll mind you,’ Connolly said with huge, warm assurance. Even Slider felt himself relaxing. This girl was good. ‘Just start at the beginning and tell us all about you and Dr Rogers.’

‘David.’

‘Sure, David.’

‘I love that name, David, don’t you? It’s so upper. David Rogers. And it really suits him. He’s a real gentleman, d’you know what I mean? Like, lovely manners, opening doors and all that sort of thing.’

‘A real gent,’ Connolly said, thinking of noblesse oblige and the openly-displayed photo of the blonde. I bet he’s so posh he farts Paco Rabanne, she thought. Slider handed her the photo of the man by the boat, and gave her a nudging look. Right. Better get it over at the start. ‘Before we start, would you just have a look at this photo and tell me if it’s David, so we know we’re talking about the same person?’

Cat took it, looked, and her face screwed up as if a gnat had flown up her nose, though she remained dry thanks to the chemicals in her blood. But she started moaning, ‘David. Oh David. David. Oh God. Oh David,’ and it looked as though it would be a while before she was finished with the mantra. Slider settled in to wait it out, and quelled Connolly’s impatient movement with a look. You didn’t get to see the badger unless you were prepared to put in the time outside the hole.