Fell Purpose

ONE

Tinkling Symbol

Atherton was singing as he drove.

‘If I give my heart to you, I’ll have none and you’ll have two—’

‘What are you so happy about?’ Slider asked.

Atherton did his martyred wife impression. ‘Just my way of getting through the day.’

‘You can’t kid me. You’re smiling so much you look as if you slept with a hanger in your mouth. It’s that good with Emily, is it?’ It was good to see his colleague bitten at last, after a lifetime heading the Hounds’ Hall of Fame.

‘Ah, it’s true what they say about women,’ Atherton said blithely, laying the car like paint round the corner into Wood Lane.

‘What?’

‘It’s an irregular plural. Anyway, if anyone should be happy, it’s you. New wife, new baby—’

‘Interrupted Bank Holiday,’ Slider concluded.

‘Yes. Bummer,’ Atherton agreed, finally relinquishing his smile. They had both had the Bank Holiday off. He and Emily had planned to go for a long walk along the Thames Footpath from Richmond to Kew, and have lunch at the wine bar on Kew Green. It had been no part of his plan to pick up his boss at the station and drive out to view a corpse.

Slider had arranged to take his children by his first wife, Kate and Matthew, plus Joanna and the baby, to see his father, who lived out in the sticks in Essex. It was the sort of arrangement that was difficult to make in the first place, with so many schedules to co-ordinate, and was correspondingly harder to have to give up – Atherton at least now had Emily on tap. And his father was getting frail, and he didn’t see enough of him at the best of times. Joanna was carrying on with the plan without him, driving all the children down herself, but Slider resented missing out.

‘We have got to find somewhere to live,’ he concluded. Joanna’s one-bedroom flat had been tight enough for the two of them, but now with the baby it was bucking for impossible. ‘It makes everything so damn difficult when I can’t have the children to stay.’

‘Well, it’s a good time to pick up a bargain,’ Atherton said, picking up speed past Television Centre. ‘House prices plummeting and all that.’

‘We can’t even afford a bargain on my pay,’ Slider said. ‘We’d have to think twice if they were giving them away.’

Atherton glanced sideways at his boss. ‘Emily and I will come over and babysit for you some time, if you and Joanna want to go out.’

‘Thanks,’ said Slider, appreciating the sentiment behind the offer. You needed all the kindness you could get when facing a murder investigation – and all the cheerfulness you could muster on the way to the scene. Underneath the normality of their chat was the tension of not knowing exactly what they would find at the other end, except that it would be horrible.

Wormwood Scrubs was a vast green space, roughly rectangular, almost a mile long by half a mile wide. It was bounded on one long side by the embankment of the main-line railway out of Paddington to all points west. Along the other long side sat the backs of a school, a hospital and the eponymous HM Prison, which all fronted on Du Cane Road. At the western end, where they were now heading, the green was called Old Oak Common, a relic of local history. The prison had been built in a tract of open farmland and common land that stretched all the way from Notting Hill to the tiny village of East Acton. Then the brick tide of London had lapped up and around and past it. Now the Scrubs was the last bit of open ground left, and some of the country’s most dangerous criminals were banged up within a stone’s throw of little ex-council houses with net curtains and gnomes in their gardens. It was an odd arrangement.

Atherton pulled up behind the other cars in Braybrook Street, which had houses along one side and was open to the common on the other. Slider got out to take in the scene. Already the blue-and-white tape was up, sealing off a large section of the green. The Bank Holiday was fine and warm, for a wonder, though the sunshine was hazy, so it was ideal weather for the locals to be out, early though it was. The uniformed presence was keeping them well back on the other side of the road, where they chattered excitedly about this bit of fame that had come to their neighbourhood. One or two of the older ones still remembered 1966 when, in this same place, robbers had shot and killed three detectives in cold blood and broad daylight. They were predicting that this current murder wouldn’t be a patch on that one – but then nothing these days could match up to the old times. The younger ones, Xboxed to a state of advanced numbness where death and mayhem were concerned, were only hanging around for lack of anything better to do.

The press were there, talking aloofly to each other and smoking like kippers, and so far there was just a lone TV camera team – Slider guessed they were from the local news programme. He wondered how long it would take them to catch up with the street’s history. He could see the headlines now – Murder Spot Claims Another Victim.

But the action this time was evidently right over at the embankment, where the white-clad forensic support team was already in the process of erecting canvas screens to shield the site from view. Avoiding all eyes, Slider started off, with Atherton at his side, across the grass. He found himself walking over a patch of churned ground, pitted with stud-marks – baked in after a week without rain. This end of the Scrubs was marked out for football pitches, where amateur teams played at the weekends – the football season started in August these days, and he was crossing a goalmouth. He registered automatically the large brick building over to his right, which housed changing rooms, showers and lavatories for the teams, and paused to note its relative position. Was it securely locked, or could someone have lurked in there? Then he turned to take in the rest of the surroundings.

The high, blank wall of the prison was the most obvious feature, with the white-topped turrets of its towers just peeping above. The hospital also had a wall, not so high but just as blank. Beyond that was the stout link fencing of the school playing fields. At the eastern end of the Scrubs, almost a mile away, on the other short side of the rectangle, was another school, and beside it a patch of ground which the council let out from time to time to travelling shows and temporary exhibitions. On Bank Holidays there was always either a circus or a fair, and this time it was the latter: the familiar shapes of helter-skelter and big wheel stuck up from the surrounding circular tent-tops of the other rides and attractions. Public access to the fairground was from the far side, from Scrubs Lane. On this side of it was a dense but orderly collection of parked lorries and the living caravans of the staff. The hazy sunshine glinted off a windscreen or two, as if the fair were winking at him. Wouldn’t you like to know!

‘Too far away for anyone to have seen anything,’ Atherton said, noting the direction of his gaze.

‘We’ll still have to ask questions,’ Slider said.

‘That’ll make us popular,’ Atherton said. Fairground people resented, to put it mildly, any suggestion that they were more criminally bent than the rest of the population.

The fair was an added complication that Slider could have done without. ‘The press are bound to leap on it,’ he said. His frowning gaze returned to the prison’s blank façade, where there were no windows to wink. ‘Too much scope for speculation altogether.’

Atherton caught his drift, as he so often did. ‘But if anyone had got over the wall it would be known about. Meanwhile, there are hundreds and thousands of houses all around us that no one’s been watching.’

‘Ah, but you don’t think in clichés.’

The railway embankment ran the whole length of the Scrubs. It was tall and steep, and had once sported a dense shrubbery mixed with tree cover, but in recent years the track company had cut it back for safety purposes, and acid rain or some other modern blight had thinned the remainder naturally, so now only the lower part of the slope still had bushes growing patchily over it.

Reaching the site, Slider and Atherton passed two of the forensic team, who had just discovered that the screen they were erecting had somehow got torn since the last time it was used.

‘Why does this keep happening to us?’ one of them complained.

‘Awning has broken,’ Atherton explained. ‘Like the first awning.’

‘It’s not an awning,’ the man replied squashingly. ‘Don’t forget to sign the access log. And keep to the boards!’

‘Tell your grandmother.’

One of Slider’s own team, WDC Hart, met them, smart in a charcoal trouser suit and cherry-red shirt, her hair scraped up into a knob on top. She looked upset. They all tried to hide their feelings, but when you worked with someone for a while you got to know the symptoms. Slider gave her a steadying look.

‘It’s a girl,’ she said.

‘Yes, we were told,’ said Slider.

‘She’s just a kid, guv. Seventeen-eighteen tops.’ The emotion escaped her in a burst of anger. ‘Who does that? Bastards!’

‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Slider said. ‘Any identification?’

‘No, guv. No pockets on what she’s wearing, and we ain’t found ’er ’andbag yet.’

He went to have a look. The victim was lying on her back between the bushes on the lower slope of the embankment, her arms out to the sides, one leg slightly bent. It was a relaxed-looking pose, as if she had just flung herself down to rest in the heat of the day. She had thick corn-blonde hair, shoulder-length, and he noted the night’s dew was on it.

She was slim and very young, as Hart had said, but with an enviable figure, with no puppy chubbiness around jaw or waist, and fine skin: not a spot in sight. She was wearing a mauve cropped top with spaghetti straps, and a black skirt, so short it was a mere nod to decency, which fitted round her hips, leaving her navel exposed. The navel sat curled and cute like a winkle-shell – but the winkle-shell of a particularly fashion-conscious winkle – embedded in the smooth honey-coloured mound of her belly. It was appallingly sexual. Why did girls want to dress like that, he wondered, with a background ache of alarm. His own daughter, Kate, bright and pretty as she was, was just getting to the age when she wanted to go out with her friends, all of them looking like hookers – and cheap hookers at that. They might as well have had placards on their backs saying: ‘Available for casual sex. No respect required.’

The victim’s legs were bare, and one strappy high-heeled shoe was on, while the other lay nearby, its straps broken. The heel had snapped off and was a little further away towards the road.

Hart indicated it with a gesture and said, ‘You can see it, guv, can’t you? She’s running away from ’im and ’er heel catches, down she goes, and he’s on ’er.’

‘You assume she was running away,’ Atherton said. ‘Haven’t you ever been to the movies? What about playful chasing and light-hearted gambolling?’

‘Gambling? What are you talkin’ about?’

‘There’s no reason to think she was running at all,’ Slider said impatiently. ‘She could just as easily have been walking, or even standing still—’

‘Yeah, standing still and struggling,’ Hart said.

‘The ground’s too hard for footmarks,’ Slider said, but without regret. Footmarks were time-consuming, and hardly ever helpful.

He looked last of all at the face. As Hart had said, she had been pretty, as far as one could tell – perhaps extremely pretty. Now the face was congested; the open eyes spotted with petechiae; the tip of the tongue protruding between the lips, a smear of blood on the chin. Around her neck was a pair of flesh-coloured tights. They were not knotted, just crossed over, but were kept in place by the ridge of swollen flesh on either side. There was also, he noticed, bending closer, a thin red line around the bottom of her neck: a fine cut, as if a wire had been tightened there.

‘Strangled with ’er own tights,’ Hart said bitterly.

Slider leaned forward. ‘You see what she’s wearing,’ he said, lifting the hem of the skirt back a little.

‘A thong,’ said Hart. ‘I ’ate those things. They’re dead un’ygienic. Give you thrush, and it’s a bugger to get rid of.’

‘The thong has ended but the malady lingers on?’ Atherton suggested.

‘Sometimes you’re really funny, Jim,’ Hart told him. ‘And then there’s now.’

‘The point I’m trying to make,’ Slider said patiently, ‘is that I wonder if she was raped. Would a rapist put the thing back on afterwards?’

‘Would he take it off in the first place?’ Atherton said.

‘But what about the tights, guv?’ Hart said. ‘I fink maybe I was wrong before.’

Slider got the point. ‘She obviously wasn’t wearing them. She had her shoes on bare feet.’ He was trying not to notice that the feet were cared-for and pretty and the toenails were neatly painted with clear varnish. The fingernails, cut short and following the contour of the fingertips, were unpainted.

‘So someone brought his own murder weapon with him?’ Atherton said. ‘That’s not so nice. That looks like someone with form.’

Slider sighed inwardly at the thought of a serial killer, but he said, ‘It gives us a line of enquiry, anyway. We’ll look at the offenders’ list and see who’s out and about. I can’t think of anyone obvious.’

‘At least it might misdirect the press,’ Atherton said. ‘What with the Scrubs being right next door, they’re bound to make the obvious misconnection. Finding out who’s in there that fits the bill might keep them happily absorbed while we get on with the job.’

‘We’ve got to identify her first,’ Slider said, straightening up.

‘Look at Mispers?’ Hart suggested.

‘If we can’t find the handbag,’ Slider said. ‘And there’s all these local people to canvass. If only we could take a mugshot, one of them might know who she is, but we can’t show them what she looks like now.’

‘Murderers are so inconsiderate,’ Atherton agreed.

Porson, their superintendent, arrived, wearing his summer tegument, an ancient beige mac: a wondrous thing of flaps and capes and buckles, concealed poacher’s pockets, and buttoned straps of unknown purpose. It was so vast and long it looked as if it was taking him for a walk rather than vice versa. His massive and strangely bumpy bald head shone in the muted sunlight, a beacon of hope and a symbol of courage in adversity. He had abandoned his wig when his adored wife died, but was still known by his old sobriquet of ‘The Syrup’.

He disappeared behind the screens, had a look, and came back to speak to Slider.

‘I don’t like it,’ he said, shaking his head at the general iniquity of things. ‘She’s only a kid. What, sixteen? Seventeen? It’s nasty.’

Slider had no argument with that.

‘The tabloids are going to be all over this one,’ Porson went on gloomily, pursing his lips and pursuing something round his teeth with his tongue. ‘Young girl, rape and murder. Whose tights are they? Not hers.’ The old man was quick, Slider thought. ‘Looks like some cyclepath on the loose. They’ll love that.’ He snorted. ‘No one ever lost money misunderestimating the press.’

In his headlong and tempestuous battle with crime, and with life in general, Porson’s way was to fling whatever words came first to hand in the general direction of meaning, and hope some of them stuck. It drove the language-sensitive Atherton mad; Slider, who was fond of the old man, found it almost endearing.

Porson snapped his head round and fixed Slider with a gimlet eye. ‘Got anything yet?’

‘We don’t even know who she is,’ Slider admitted.

‘Someone’ll miss her, nice girl like that. She’s not a prozzie.’

Slider agreed. Despite the clothes, she looked like someone’s daughter. Her skin and hair were well cared-for and well nourished, and her navel wasn’t pierced.

‘I’m going to go all out to get you resources for this one,’ Porson said, ‘even if it does jeropodise the budget. It’s going to be hell’s own job, though, getting the uniforms back, what with the Carnival.’ The Notting Hill Carnival, held every August Bank Holiday, sucked police out of the system like a black hole. ‘What a weekend to choose!’

‘I wonder if it was an informed choice,’ Slider said, thinking of those tights.

Porson shuddered. ‘If the villains are going to start getting smart, we’re out of a job.’ He glanced round and said, ‘I’m going to go now, before someone tries to interview me. Keep me up to scratch on this. I’ll get on with pulling in some extra men. Ask me for anything you want.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Slider watched him scuttle away, nimbly avoiding the TV cameras. Wise move, he thought. A closed mouth gathers no feet.

He was giving directions to the slowly increasing manpower – some to start the fingertip search, some to the canvassing of locals – when one of the uniformed extras, Gostyn, came up to him.

‘Just found this, sir.’ He held out something which Slider accepted into his plastic-gloved palm. It was an ornament about the size of a fifty-pence piece, an open circle with a Z inside it, all in diamonds on a silver-coloured metal. ‘It was just this side of the bushes, sir, lying in the grass. Think it could be hers?’

Slider remembered the thin red cut on the victim’s neck. ‘Could be. If it was on a chain round her neck—’

Gostyn got the point. ‘And he grabbed it while he was struggling with her and broke it,’ he finished for him eagerly.

Slider shook his head. ‘He must have grabbed it from behind. The chain cut her neck at the front.’

‘So he was chasing her, you reckon?’

‘Not necessarily. They might have been talking, then she suddenly got scared and turned to try to escape, and he grabbed her then. If she turned suddenly, that could have been when she broke the heel of her shoe and burst the straps.’

Atherton joined them. ‘What’s that? Oh, a letter Z. That’ll narrow the field.’

‘Could be an N, sir,’ Gostyn said, trying to be helpful.

‘No, look,’ said Slider, ‘here’s the ring the chain goes through. It hangs this way. It’s a Z all right.’

‘Zöe,’ Gostyn said. ‘Or . . .’ He racked his brains unsuccessfully.

‘Zuleika,’ Atherton supplied. ‘Zenobia. Zephany.’

‘Zebra,’ said Gostyn eagerly, and then blushed his confusion as Atherton’s eyebrow went up. ‘I was thinking of Debra,’ he muttered. Anyway, since when was Zephany a name?

‘Can I see?’ Atherton took it and tilted it back and forth. The stones caught the light and flung it back. ‘They look like real diamonds. Small, but not fake. Which means the setting’s probably white gold or platinum. Someone didn’t mind spending money on her. Pretty good going at her age.’

‘If it’s hers,’ Slider said. ‘Find the chain before you jump to conclusions.’

‘Yes, oh cautious one.’

‘Did you have something to tell me?’ Slider asked him.

‘Something important,’ Atherton confirmed. ‘The tea waggon’s arrived. Bacon sarnie?’

After a morning and most of the afternoon setting in train the involved and laborious routine of investigation, Slider was back at his desk ploughing through the paperwork when Freddie Cameron, the forensic pathologist, rang. His cut-glass tones, as neat and dapper as his habitual attire, were as stimulating as a yellow waistcoat. He and Slider went back a long way, and Slider had never known him to be other than cheerful, even in the face of the most insalubrious corpses.

‘Hello, Bill! How’s life?’

‘I’m waiting for the movie. How are you?’

‘Always merry and bright.’

‘Even coming in on a Bank Holiday?’

‘The traffic’s a pleasure. Absence thereof. And the phone doesn’t ring so much.’

Slider smiled. ‘I firmly believe if you were being transported to Hades you’d be making cheery small-talk with the Ferryman.’

‘Of course.’ Freddie put on his unconvincing cockney accent. ‘I ’ad that Orpheus in the back of my boat once . . .’

‘Orpheus? Didn’t we have him up for luting?’

‘My God, that’s terrible! Let’s change the subject. I’ve got your corpus. Sorry business – poor little beast. Thought I’d give you a preliminary report.’

‘Thanks. Was it what it looked like?’

‘From external examination it certainly looks as though death was due to strangulation, and the tights fit the pattern on the skin, so they probably are the weapon.’

‘Well, that’s a start.’ Anything straightforward was a relief.

‘I’m a bit choked up with work at the moment with half my staff on holiday, so unless there’s a particular reason to hurry, I’ll have to put off the post for a day or two. I can’t see anything out of the way, though. No sign of drugs, but I’ll do the usual tests when the time comes. No sign of forcible penetration, or indeed of recent sexual activity – no semen or lubricant traces. But our young lady was not a virgin. In fact I’d say she was probably quite experienced.’

‘God, they start early these days,’ Slider said. ‘She can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen.’

‘How old were you?’ Freddie asked drily.

‘I was a country boy,’ Slider said. ‘We didn’t have anything else to do. Any defence injuries?’

‘Nothing visible. There might be some subcutaneous bruising. No blood or tissue under the fingernails, unfortunately.’

‘Her nails were cut short,’ Slider mentioned.

‘Yes, and she had strong hands, too – I wonder if she played the piano? Probably the assailant took her by surprise, and instead of hitting or scratching him she tried to pull the ligature away. Pity. But we may find hairs or fibres somewhere. Nil desperandum.’

‘I love it when you talk Latin to me. Time of death?’

‘I haven’t done a liver stick yet, but I doubt if the temperature is going to tell us much we don’t know already. I’d estimate she’d been dead about twelve hours when I saw her this morning, which as you know is give or take the usual eight-hour margin.’

‘Helpful.’

‘But I understand she was found at about seven?’

‘Six forty-five. Woman walking her dog.’

‘So that cuts it down this end. And I noticed—’

‘The dew on her hair?’

‘Give that man a coconut. Now, I’ve done a quick bit of research and dew point would have been at about two o’ clock this morning, so given that the ground underneath her was dry—’

‘She must have been put there before then. Was she killed where we found her?’

‘The hypostasis was consistent with it, though as you know that’s only an indicator, not proof positive. But given the trampled grass and her broken shoe and the way the body was lying, I’d say it most likely happened there.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Slider said. ‘It’s hard to make a body look natural once you’ve moved it.’

‘Oh, it was a trick question, was it? I’m supposed to tell you things you didn’t know.’

‘How about her name? That would be a help.’

‘I’ll send over the fingerprints and dental record as soon as I’ve done them, but I dare say someone will claim her before you have to use them. Oh, by the way, I understand you found some sort of pendant or charm? Well, we found the chain, broken. It was underneath her when we turned her over. Possibly slipped down inside her clothing when it snapped, and slipped out at the bottom later on, when she was struggling. You saw the cut on her neck?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought you would have. It’s consistent with the chain. Must have exerted considerable force – I’m guessing it was a sharp jerk to restrain her rather than an attempt at strangulation.’

‘Considerable force? So it might have cut his hand too?’

‘Possibly. I’ll test it for tissue or blood, but don’t count on it.’

‘I never do.’

‘Buck up,’ Freddie said sympathetically. ‘At least it wasn’t a rape.’

‘No, just murder,’ said Slider. ‘So much more civilized.’

Slider let himself in, very late, to the narrow hall of the flat, and at once Joanna appeared, in her dressing-gown, finger to her lips.

‘Don’t wake the baby,’ she said, coming to kiss him.

‘How was he?’

‘Perfect. You have a perfect baby.’

‘How was the day?’

‘It went very well. A good time was had by all, I think.’

He followed her into the kitchen. ‘How was Dad?’

‘He seemed all right. He’s a bit slower about everything, but he’s pretty spry, considering, and there’s nothing wrong with his mind. He and Matthew were ages out in the garden, talking about the countryside and nature and so on.’

‘That’s what he used to do with me,’ Slider said, smiling faintly, remembering pre-dawn trips to watch for badgers.

‘And Kate was wonderful with the baby. She’s mad about him.’

‘If only we could have the children to stay, she could babysit him,’ Slider said.

‘I’ll go out house-hunting again tomorrow. I’ll widen the search area as well.’ She eyed him sympathetically. ‘You look exhausted. Was it awful?’

‘I’ve known worse. But she was so young.’ He told her the bare facts. ‘And we don’t even know who she is yet. Unknown person, killed by person unknown. I’ve had people trawling missing persons and runaways, and another lot looking through the rogues’ gallery. All without success so far.’ He yawned hugely, surprising himself. ‘Any phone calls?’

‘Just one message for me. They’ve changed the programme on Thursday to the bloody old Enigma. I hate that piece.’

‘But you love Elgar.’

‘That’s why I hate the Enigma. What a waste of talent! Variations aren’t music, they’re an exercise: how many different ways can I write this dopey tune? It’s like asking Shakespeare how many words he can make out of “Constantinople”. Like giving Sir Christopher Wren that puzzle with the three houses and the three utilities, and you have to link them all without crossing the lines!’

‘I love it when you get all vehement,’ Slider smiled, gathering her in to his chest.

‘You do realize what this means, don’t you?’ she said.

‘You’re going to have to practise?’

‘Some detective you are,’ she said. ‘Work it out: you, murder investigation. Me, concert Thursday. You were supposed to be home on Thursday night minding the baby.’

‘Oh Lord, yes. I can’t depend on getting back in time.’

‘I know. I’ve been phoning round all evening. Everyone’s away or busy.’

He pondered sleepily. Now he was winding down, Morpheus was catching up, stepping on his heels. With an effort he connected up various threads. ‘Atherton said this morning that he and Emily would sit for us some time if we wanted to go out.’

‘Nice of him. I’d like to go out with you some day, before I’m old and sere.’

‘But he’s going to be busy this week too. So maybe Emily would come over – or you could take George to her.’

‘Genius. The man’s a genius. Why didn’t I think of her? I’ll ring her tomorrow.’ She kissed him affectionately. ‘Look at you, you’re exhausted. Do you want anything to eat?’

He shook his head. ‘Too tired to swallow.’

‘Go on to bed, and I’ll rub your back for you.’ It soothed him when he was tense after a bad day. She let him have the bathroom first, and then popped in and brought the bergamot oil back with her. But he was already asleep, curled on his side with one fist under his chin.

He had surprisingly long eyelashes for a man, she thought, looking down at him. There was a bit of hair on the crown of his head that grew a different way from the rest, and it was hard to get it to lie down. The baby had just the same unruly tuft. She felt the enormous and surprising pang in the loins, that only a woman who has borne a son to the man she loves can feel.