Fell Purpose

NINE

From Bad to Verse

Slider went downstairs while they were processing Ronnie, and the sergeant on duty, O’Flaherty, stepped away to talk to him. He was a vast and beefy man whom copious pints of the Guinness and his wife’s traditional cooking maintained at a glossy peak of solidity, like a prize breeding bull. He, Slider and Nicholls had known each other a lifetime, and had seen each other through various vicissitudes – many involving top brass, pointless changes in working practices, and mad political directives descending from on high like the proverbial brown shower. O’Flaherty, whose nickname of Flatulent Fergus was both true and affectionate, had often said that coppers at the sharp end coped with crime in spite of, not with the help of, their seniors. Like Slider, he approved of Porson, who got them left alone to a remarkable degree.

‘Dis is a bad business, Billy,’ he said, unusually serious for him. ‘I always thought Ronnie was going to escalate one day, but I didn’t think it would be this soon. Mind you, I wasn’t in favour of him going down for that Wanda Lempowski thing. She was a nasty piece o’ the divil-in-a-skirt, and I don’t doubt she pushed him in the hope of getting more money out of him. In th’end she hurt him more than he hurt her. She’s twice his size, and she packs a punch like an army mule.’

‘That’s not really the point, is it?’ Slider said, a faint smile twitching his lips.

‘Ah, sure, I know that. But psychiatric was what he needed, not a spell inside learnin’ to be brutal.’

‘Well, he’ll get it this time,’ Slider said. ‘If he’s found guilty his brief will plead insanity and he’ll be locked up at Her Majesty’s pleasure. And that’ll be that.’

Fergus cocked an eye at him. ‘What’s up wit’ you? Don’t tell me you’re developing a liking for smelly little flashers who go on to murder?’

‘God, no! It’s just so depressing. And what’ll happen to his mother?’

‘Ah, don’t you worry about her. She’s too t’ick even to realize he’s gone. Are you going to interview him yourself?’

‘No, I think we should let him settle in first. Get him comfortable, get some good grub inside him.’

‘So he’ll sing like a contented canary?’

‘Right. One thing with Ronnie, you don’t have to worry that he’s using the time to think up answers. He couldn’t make up a story if he used both hands and a tool kit.’

‘Well, we’ll be a while processing him anyway, so by the time he’s had his supper he’ll be ready for bed. You can safely leave him till the morning. And I bet he’ll sleep better than you.’

‘I don’t doubt it. Thanks, Fergus.’

‘How’s your wee boy?’ O’Flaherty asked as he was turning away.

‘I wish I knew,’ Slider said.

Porson called him in as he passed his room. The television was on in the corner.

‘Look at this!’ he barked. ‘Have you seen this?’

Slider looked. It was the twenty-four-hour news channel. The sound was turned down, but the newscaster was mouthing to a background piece of film of the Oates house in East Acton with the squad car parked in front of it, its light revolving, and Ronnie coming out walking between two uniformed officers. The rolling ribbon at the bottom of the screen said: ‘Breaking news – police make arrest in Zellah Wilding case. Ronnie Oates, the Acton Strangler, taken into custody.’

‘How the hell did this get out?’ Porson demanded.

‘From the quality of the film, and the angle, I’d say it was a neighbour using a camera-phone leaning out of a window,’ Slider said. ‘I suppose there must have been neighbours who knew who Mrs Oates was, and knew Ronnie was back.’

‘Well, we can’t deny it now,’ Porson said. ‘And the vultures’ll have a field day with this. It’ll be all over the evening papers. “Acton Strangler strikes again.” I’ve had to ask for more uniform to guard that old bat as well. Why couldn’t you take him quietly? What’d you have to send a squad car for?’

‘Ronnie likes riding in them. He likes the lights. It was a way to get him in without a fuss.’

‘It was a way to alert the world and his wife that we were there!’ Porson stared at the screen in disgust for a long moment, and then straightened his shoulders. ‘Well, we might as well get all the queue-doughs we can out of getting a quick result. There’s no other pleasure catching a nasty little Herbert like him. He’s a sausage roll short of a picnic, that one, and the press are going to go to town on why he was wandering the streets in the first place.’

‘It wasn’t our fault he was let out,’ Slider pointed out.

‘Maybe not, but the public thinks we ought to be watching all these nonces all the time. It’ll be our fault he was let to kill again.’

‘He’s never killed before.’

‘Are you just going to stand there correcting me? Go and put a case together. He was seen in the area, he does it with tights, and you’ve got the handbag. What more do you need?’

The old man was unusually irritable, Slider thought as he escaped – but he took little pleasure in catching a brainless, hopeless, useless little git like Ronnie either.

He went the short way to his room through the CID room, entering in time to hear McLaren say to Connolly, ‘Here, Rita, here’s a good one – what do you call that useless piece of flesh at the end of a penis? Ronnie Oates.’

Connolly didn’t react. She was on the telephone, and looked up as Slider appeared and said, ‘He’s just come in. Sir, it’s Sergeant Atherton for you.’

‘I’ll take it in my room. McLaren, get me a cup of tea, will you?’

‘Anything with it? They got bread pudden up there today.’

Slider’s stomach groaned. It was a long time since the sausage sandwich. ‘All right, I’ll take a slab. Thanks.’ He looked at Connolly. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Going through the canvasses again, for anything that could be Oates, sir.’

‘Good. Find out who the Oateses’ neighbours are. They’ll have to be interviewed, in case they saw him go out or come in. One of them filmed him being arrested, so we can assume an interest.’

‘Right, sir.’

Atherton sounded elated. ‘Well, we found it, and it wasn’t easy. When Chloë Paulson said Ladbroke Grove, obviously she was talking generically about the area, not the road itself. There was one likely shop on Ladbroke Grove, right opposite the station, but the flat above it was untenanted. We asked the proprietor about other similar shops nearby, and she said there was one in Portobello Road, so we went down there. In fact there were three operating in the general area of retailing mystic crap to mugs, but it wasn’t any of them. Finally we found it on the KPR near the junction of Talbot Road. Man in the shop recognised the photo, and the second-floor tenant confirmed the bloke in the flat below was called Mike, and nodded to the photo as well. But there was no answer from his door – of course.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘Outside. I came out to ring you. We saw on the pub television that you’ve arrested Ronnie Oates.’

‘What were you doing in the pub?’

‘Relax. We went into the Castle to ask about more tarot-type shops, and they had the telly on.’

‘Is that all you went in for?’

‘And for Fathom to use the loo. You are suspicious. Anyway, the point is, do you still want to tug Mike Carmichael now you’ve got Oates? Lawrence said you’d found Zellah’s bag in his room, so it looks pretty conclusive.’

Slider had been thinking about this ever since Hollis rang in. ‘Yes, I think so. He was with her all the last evening and they had a row. We’ve got to construct as full a case as possible. And if Ronnie was at the fair, he might have seen him hanging around watching her. Also,’ he added, ‘he ran away, and he’s given us a lot of trouble to find him.’

‘We haven’t found him yet – only his drum.’

‘Exactly. I want to inconvenience him at the very least.’

‘Attaboy! Take him in, keep him hanging around, harass him and put the wind up him for dealing.’

‘You’ve got to catch him first. Start Fathom and Mackay on obbo. You can come back here and organise the rota.’

‘Are you off out again?’

‘In a while. I’m going to call on Mr Wilding.’

‘You’re still going to do that? Even though you’ve got Oates?’

‘I’m being thorough,’ Slider said.

‘I know you,’ Atherton said. ‘You just want to poke about in Zellah’s room.’

‘That’s being thorough.’

‘No, that’s being weird.’

‘Thank you. I’ll remember that come annual assessment time.’

Slider had forgotten about the media circus he had been warned was gathered around the Wildings’ door. It was probably much less than it had been – a lot of them would have beetled off to the Oateses’ when that news broke – but there were enough who would hang on like grim death in the hope of a ‘personal touch’ interview, a good photograph of a grief-stricken face at a window, or the now traditional tearful parents’ appeal to anyone who knew anything to come forward. It was part of the loathesome apparatus of a murder investigation, the way the media would demand, on behalf of ‘their’ public, that certain things would be done, and be done the way they had made sure was expected.

His arrival caused a stir among the waiting hounds. Cameras were raised, pencils flexed, questions shouted. He rarely now had to make statements to the press – it was usually done in the media suite in Hammersmith by a team trained for the job – but of course they all knew who he was. It was their business to.

‘Have you made a breakthrough?’

‘Any comments on the arrest?’

‘Is Ronnie your man?’

‘Have you come to tell the Wildings about it?’

He passed through them without comment and without meeting any eyes, and they didn’t make too much of a fuss, because he was known for being tight-lipped and they were resigned to getting nothing out of him. They crowded forward instead to see if they could get a good grief-shot when the door was opened. But the constable on the door – it was D’Arblay – rang the bell for him, the door was opened a crack, and he sidled through without seeing who was on the other side.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Wilding, without noticeable enthusiasm. ‘Can’t you do anything about them?’ he demanded at once, with a gesture towards the front gate.

‘We’re doing all we can,’ Slider said. ‘We’re keeping them to the pavement outside.’

‘We’re prisoners in our own house,’ Wilding said angrily. ‘We can’t go out. We can’t even look out of the window. There was a man on next-door’s roof yesterday, photographing the garden. I went out to dig some potatoes and I had to come back in again without them. He started shouting questions. Do you want us to starve to death? My wife can’t go out to buy food – we’re living on what’s in the freezer. Why can’t you make them go away?’

‘I’m afraid we don’t have the power to,’ Slider said. ‘It’s a free country and we have a free press. We can keep them off your premises, but the road outside is a public right of way.’

‘Free country! What freedom do we have? We’re supposed to be the victims here, but it’s us who are being punished, hounded by those brutes, locked up here day and night. The only freedom is for murderers, let out of prison so they can go on murdering other people’s children!’

So they had heard about Oates. He supposed they were bound to be watching television, confined to the house as they were.

‘This man, Oates,’ Wilding went on. ‘Why was he let out to kill again?’

‘He had never killed before,’ Slider said. ‘It was the press who called him the Acton Strangler. He was in prison for indecent assault, not murder.’

‘He still killed my little girl. Why did we abolish hanging? He ought to die for it. What are you going to do to him?’

‘It’s early days yet,’ Slider said. ‘We have a lot of ground to cover.’

‘But you know it was him?’ Wilding said insistently, glaring into Slider’s face. ‘You’ve got the right man? We want this over so we can go away. My wife’s distraught. I want to take her somewhere away from here, as soon as possible.’

‘I promise you we are doing everything we can to bring this to an end,’ Slider said. ‘I have to ask you just to stay put a bit longer and try and be patient. I know it’s hard for you.’

‘You know nothing – nothing at all. You can’t imagine what we’re going through,’ he said bitterly. ‘What have you come for, anyway?’

‘To collect Zellah’s mobile,’ he reminded him. ‘And I’d like to have a look at her room, if I may?’

‘What for?’ he said sharply and suspiciously.

‘It’s part of the routine I go through in every case. You never know what will be helpful.’

‘My daughter was killed at random by a sex-offender who didn’t even know her. What will her room tell you?’ Wilding said angrily.

Was he very keen to keep Slider out? Or just a grieving father? Hard to tell. Slider used all his calm, assertive energy. ‘If you please, sir,’ he said steadily.

Wilding tried to stare him down, but Slider was good at that game. After a moment the weary, red-rimmed eyes faltered and fell, and he turned away with a gesture almost of despair. ‘Oh, do as you please. Just don’t talk to me any more. I’ve had all the talk I can stand.’ And he went into the sitting room and shut the door hard behind him.

Slider went up the stairs and, with a fair knowledge of the layout of houses like this, found Zellah’s room first shot. The door was closed, and as he opened it his sensitive nostrils caught a faint breath of perfume. He remembered Wilding saying the room still smelled of her, and pity rocked his heart. Wilding thought he didn’t understand, but he did. He had a daughter of his own and, yes, he could imagine – only too well – what it must be like.

It was a plain little room. He compared it in his mind with Kate’s, cluttered now with consumer trophies that his ex-wife’s rich new husband had poured on both children in the hope of winning their love, or at least their acceptance. He thought of Sophy’s over-filled treasure trove, typical of the well-off middle-class child. He appreciated all over again how strict Wilding must have been with Zellah, to keep her in this state of mercantile innocence. No television or DVD player, no computer, no vast hamper of outgrown toys; just a wardrobe of plain, serviceable clothes, a little modest make-up on the dressing-table instead of the groaning board of unguents of any other sixteen-year-old. No eyelash curlers, curling tongs, hair straighteners, exercise machines – few possessions of any sort, in fact. What had this girl been? He felt frustrated. She had rebelled outside the house, he already knew that, but she had meekly bowed the neck within. How had Wilding dominated her so successfully? Had he abused her? And how far had she gone when she was out? Was her headmistress right or was Sophy? The parents or the friends?

He sat down on the bed, resting his arms on his knees, his hands dangling between them, and stared at the carpet in helpless thought. And after a moment he saw something white poking out from under the mattress – a small white triangle. Hastily he stood up. The bed was made in the usual way with an under sheet and duvet. Something had been pushed between the mattress and the divan, presumably to hide it. Carefully he lifted the mattress and drew it out.

It was a sketch pad. He turned the pages. There were a lot of horses to begin with, just figure studies, standing, walking, a rather unsuccessful one grazing – the length of the neck looked wrong – and then, as skill grew, trotting and cantering. At the end of this group a more finished page showed a horse cantering in open country with trees and hills in the background. Slider thought it was pretty good. Then there were some pages of still-life drawings – the usual groups of vases, flowers and fruit; a geranium in a flowerpot; a French loaf, cheese and a bottle of wine on a table with a gingham cloth. Competent but dull. Some ballet sketches reminiscent of Degas – copies perhaps? And finally some drawings of people in the nude. Life studies, wasn’t that what they called it? A woman, reclining, from the back; a girl seated on a table, knees together, hands supporting her weight on the table edge, head dropped forward; more of them, pages of them, some in pencil and some in charcoal. Slider was no expert but he thought them beautifully done, not just accurate in terms of proportion and anatomy, but with a line and grace and feeling to them that suggested an artistic talent, not merely a draughtsman’s skill.

He remembered the headmistress saying Zellah had real talent, and that the art master thought the world of her. No wonder she hid the book under her mattress, though. All that bare flesh? He would like to bet that Wilding didn’t know his daughter was drawing nudes at her art classes. Then his thoughts arrested him. That corner of white showing. Someone had been careless putting it back. Would Zellah, with everything to lose, have been careless? If Atherton’s theory was right, perhaps Wilding did know. Perhaps he had found the sketch pad and that was what had started him off on a quest to find out what his daughter really did when she was out of the house.

He was about to restore it to its home when he thought to check the rest of the book. There were a bunch of empty pages, and then, on the last one – on the back of the sheet so that it was face down to the cardboard back cover – was a poem. It was written in pencil in the round, unformed hand of the present-day teenager.

My self breaks its wings on the bars of my heart,

Sings, at the stirring of spring,

Like a frantic thrush, sobbing in darkness

Songs meant for the sun,

Whence it was ravished and has long forgotten.

It was the usual teenage stuff, he supposed. All teenagers who wrote poems wrote about how lonely and misunderstood they were. It was probably no better and no worse than any other adolescent offering. Not that it had been offered. It was hidden away at the back of the book, and the book was hidden under the mattress. Zellah had seen herself as a frantic thrush sobbing in a cage. Was it her father she saw as having imprisoned her? Or was it just her hormones making her restless? He wished he knew. He wished he had known her. The poem made him shiver, however good or bad it was, for she was dead, and it called to him from beyond the grave, from someone who had seen herself as imprisoned and helpless. Well, she was free now.

He replaced the book carefully, smoothed the bed where he had sat on it, and went downstairs. The Wildings were both in the sitting room – he could hear the television behind the closed door, and the rest of the downstairs was silent. He walked through the kitchen to the back door and looked out from the glass panel. Yes, there was the shed – and even from here he could see that it was locked with a large, stout padlock. To see inside he would have to ask Wilding for the key, and suddenly he had had enough. He had nothing on the man except Atherton’s idea, and the tradition that it was always the nearest and dearest who did it. To ask him for the key and search his shed would only be giving him more pain, which he probably did not merit.

He walked back towards the front door and was startled when the sitting-room door opened suddenly and Wilding was there, towering over him.

‘Seen all you want?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Slider.

‘You wanted this.’ He held out a freezer bag with a mobile phone inside it. Not a camera phone, just the basic ring-in-an-emergency sort. Even in choice of mobile he had been controlling.

‘Thanks,’ said Slider, feeling mean about his last thought. Probably the poor bloke couldn’t afford anything more. He had lost his business, after all.

‘Not that it will tell you anything,’ Wilding said, glaring at him. ‘It will have my fingerprints on it. And probably Zellah’s. But if you want to waste your time, obviously I can’t stop you. You’d do better to concentrate on that strangler you’ve caught, if you want my opinion. Don’t make a mistake and let him go again.’

He dropped the bag so that Slider had to catch it in mid-air, stalked back into the room and slammed the door. Slider’s sympathy dwindled a little. So anxious to put it on to Ronnie Oates? So quick to pre-empt the fact that his fingermarks were on the phone?

‘And it’s fingermarks, not fingerprints,’ he addressed the closed door conversationally. Frantic thrush sobbing in darkness. So unhappy? Not the nuts-to-you rebel Sophy described? There was something about the words that stuck, he thought, opening the front door to let himself out. She had a talent. And the nude drawings were beautiful.

Atherton, perched on Slider’s windowsill, his favourite pose for a bunny, still looked immaculate at the end of a long hot day, where Slider felt grubby and rumpled. He had crossed his ankles and was contemplating with satisfaction the fraction of silk sock that was revealed. ‘Interesting,’ he said, when Slider had finished. ‘I wish we hadn’t got Ronnie Oates, now. We can’t really run three suspects at once, and Oates is so much more likely.’

‘Likely?’ McLaren said, leaning against the door. ‘Try definite.’

‘We’re getting people ringing in with sightings,’ Connolly said, ‘now he’s been on the telly. I’m keeping a log and sorting out the most likely ones, but it looks as though he was at the fair, guv. Three people have said they saw him there.’

‘I expect people will have seen him everywhere from Glasgow Central to Piccadilly Circus,’ Slider said.

‘Yes, sir, and if it was only the one I’d have discounted it. But three separate witnesses? And,’ she added quickly to stop anyone thinking that was a real question, ‘the barman in the North Pole said he was in there drinking that evening, and the North Pole is only across the road from the fair.’

‘That’s a better identification,’ Atherton told her kindly. ‘Passing someone in the crowd is one thing, but facing someone sitting at a bar for a couple of hours . . .’

‘That’s what I was trying to say,’ Connolly said with a faint look of annoyance.

‘Don’t sweat it, love,’ Hart said. ‘He’s just trying to bring you up right. Part of his seduction technique – he thinks correcting people is erotic.’

‘I thought you understood by now that I’m no longer in the market,’ Atherton said loftily.

Hart grinned. ‘Yeah, it must be queer having to turn women down, eh, Jim?’ She winked at Connolly. ‘The nearest he ever got to saying “no” to a woman was, “not now, we’re landing”.’

‘Man was never meant to be monogamous,’ McLaren offered.

‘Or in your case,’ Hart turned on him, ‘even ogamous.’

‘Do they always go on like this, sir?’ Connolly appealed to Slider.

‘I let them let off steam now and then,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, let’s you and I have a sensible conversation. Did you get anywhere with the neighbours?’

She consulted her notebook. ‘It was the man at number six that took the film, sir, and sent it to the BBC. He’s retired, ill-health, so not much to do but watch his neighbours out of the window. He was a bit excited about Ronnie Oates coming back to his mum’s. Pretended to be angry about it,’ she said, lifting her eyes to Slider’s, ‘but you could see it was the best thing in his life for years. So when he saw the squad car he grabbed his camera phone and started filming.’

‘But on the night in question?’ Slider prompted her.

‘He saw Ronnie go out about lunchtime, come back in about three to half past, and go out again about eight. But he didn’t see him come back in. Said he went to bed about half-eleven.’

‘He wasn’t watching out the window all that time?’ said Hart.

‘No, but he said the walls of those houses are so thin you can hear someone coming in, especially if they slam the door, which Ronnie does, and he didn’t hear him come in. So if you allow for him dozing off, that means he probably didn’t come in before midnight.’

‘Getting the truth out of Ronnie won’t be easy,’ Atherton said.

‘That’s why I’ve left him to get comfortable and relax,’ Slider said. ‘The less he thinks, the more likely we are to get the truth. All right, we’ve got the watch set up on Carmichael’s flat, we’ve got Ronnie tucked up for the night. We’ll need a statement from the barman at the North Pole—’

‘Sir, I live out that way. I could do it on my way home,’ Connolly said.

‘All right, do so. Anything else?’

‘You thought about questioning the Wilding neighbours,’ Atherton said. ‘In support of my theory.’

‘It’s hardly a theory,’ Slider said. ‘More a wild stab in the dark.’

‘We’ve investigated a few of those,’ Atherton nodded.

‘Yeah, Sat’dy night down the Shepherd’s Bush Road,’ McLaren said. ‘Outside the Jesters Club. I hate bloody knives.’

‘And they’re always bloody,’ Atherton finished. ‘But to return to our moutons, which is to say Wilding – in the interests of being thorough, as someone we know and revere once said . . .’

Slider remembered, uneasily, the drawings, the poem, the corner of white sticking out from the mattress. You could only see it when you were sitting above it, as he had been. Whoever put it back that way would not have realized it was showing. Even so, would Zellah have been careless, when she was taking care to hide her secret life? She had drawn the cantering horse naked, too, he remembered, running free, without even a head collar. Had her father done more than clip her wings?

‘All right, you can question the neighbours. But for God’s sake be subtle about it. And don’t let the press see you. The last thing we want is to start public speculation about it.’

‘The press are having a field day with the Acton Strangler,’ Atherton said. ‘They won’t be looking for any other explanation.’

‘I dunno why we are,’ McLaren said. ‘Have you seen the Standard, guv? They’ve got an interview with a geezer ’at shared a cell with Ronnie in the Scrubs. Claims he was talking about getting his revenge on the establishment when he got out, and offing a posh girl.’ There was a chorus of protest. ‘All right,’ McLaren said, unabashed, ‘even if he didn’t use the word “establishment”, there’s no reason he couldn’t’ve said something like that. It’s just as likely as not. And there she is, dead. What more do you want?’

‘World peace,’ Atherton enumerated. ‘The perfect Yorkshire pudding—’

‘And lipstick that don’t come off on your glass,’ Hart concluded.