Game Over

Copyright © 2008 by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.

For Peter Wright, as long promised.

One

Fame Shrewdly Gored

The habits learned in childhood tend to become ingrained, so that they operate on an involuntary level. With Detective Inspector Bill Slider, observation was second nature. His countryman father had taken him out to watch badgers’ setts at dusk, to wait for deer to come down to the stream at dawn, to know by a flattened patch of grass, a scrap of hair snagged on a hedge, a broken spider’s web, fallen feathers, or the crusty bits of a mouse left by a path-side, who had passed by, and when, and why. He noticed things often without immediately knowing he had done so.

So on his way to a call-out it was the second sighting of the black Ford Focus that impinged on him. Focuses were plentiful in West London and black had lately replaced silver as the most popular car colour, so there was nothing remarkable about it, except that it had tinted windows, and he was inherently suspicious of anyone trying to hide their face, and that there had been a black Focus parked just down the road from the back door of the police station the day before. It had had the same ding-and-scrape on the nearside rear quarter, but a different number plate. Slider’s interest prickled. The traffic halted him along the Goldhawk Road, just after the car had passed him, and he whipped out his notebook and jotted down its registration while he remembered it. He didn’t remember the number of the earlier car except that it had begun with LN, while this began with LR. It was probably nothing, of course, but he had noticed it, and the fact of noticing made him uneasy. If he was being followed, it was following of a professional order, to have bothered to change the plates. But anyone who had been in the Job as long as he had was bound to accumulate enemies, and he had had his share of high-profile cases.

The traffic was no better than crawling now, so he cut off to the right as soon as a gap opened and made his way through the back streets to his destination. Valancy House, Riverene Road was a handsome Edwardian block of flats: red-brick work, white stone trim, noble windows and an impressive door and entrance hall. It was an annoying address to Slider, replete with those names beloved of the Edwardians, which sounded almost but not quite like real words (its sister blocks were called Croftdene and Endsleigh), but it was not a cheap one. With the new rich of London moving ever westwards, these big, high-ceilinged flats were going for a million and upwards now – even in Riverene Road, a turning off King Street that pined under the shadow of the Great West Road flyover. The noise of it would be like a waterfall – a constant roaring driving out all else. But triple glazing took care of most of that, and it was still a tree-lined road that ran down to the river. The trees, he noted, were limes. In July the piercing sweetness of their blossom would overpower even the exhaust reek from the traffic above.

Riverene Road was closed now to traffic, and a uniformed constable, whose name Slider annoyingly couldn’t remember, moved the barrier and let him through. Before the building, a further barrier of blue and white tape kept the spectators away from the entrance. Word had got out, he thought, noting the number of press hounds. Someone in the building who couldn’t wait to be famous must have blabbed. The reporters shouted questions at him as he went up the shallow steps to the front door, but he did not distinguish what they were saying. He hated his enforced contacts with the news media, and blanked them out from his consciousness as much as possible.

Atherton, his bagman and friend, was waiting for him in the lobby: tall, elegant, fair-haired, incongruous in these surroundings, he lounged with his hands in his pockets like displaced minor royalty, or a refugee from Gatsby’s circle. He offered the important information first. ‘Mackay’s gone for coffee. There’s a Starbucks round the corner in King Street.’

‘There’s always a Starbucks round the corner,’ Slider complained. He rarely drank coffee, and tea from places like that was never any good. ‘Good job I had breakfast before the shout came in.’

‘That was early.’

‘Joanna’s gone down to see her parents. She wanted to get away before the traffic got bad, so we made an early start.’

The brown smell of old-fashioned polish in the hall went with the brown of the panelling and the dim brown light: penny-pinching low wattage bulbs did little to mitigate the loss of daylight to the flyover. There was a printed notice, hanging by a string loop on the lift door: OUT OF ORDER.

‘The security door’s not working either,’ Atherton said.

‘Oh?’ Slider queried.

‘Could be,’ Atherton answered elliptically. ‘But these old lifts work on prayer and chewing gum anyway.’

‘Thanks for that comforting thought.’ They trod up the stairs. ‘What’ve we got, anyway? I was just told a dead male, no name.’

‘We’ve identified him,’ Atherton said. ‘It’s the owner of the flat – Edward, otherwise Ed, Stonax. Lovely Viking sort of name, that: stone axe. It’s got a swish to it.’

Slider frowned. ‘I know the name. Why do I know the name?’

‘You’ve seen him on the telly,’ Atherton suggested. ‘He was a BBC correspondent.’ He paused on a landing, assumed the posture and the voice, and intoned to camera, ‘This is Ed Stonax. For the BBC. In Basra.’

‘Oh, is that what it was?’ Slider digested this, and then asked, ‘Wasn’t he in some kind of trouble a while back? Some kind of scandal?’

‘You’re improving,’ said Atherton. Crowded though life was, he could never understand a grown man who didn’t keep abreast of the news. Slider said he didn’t have time to read newspapers, and the television was all propaganda anyway, and relied on Atherton to keep him up to speed. But then, he had a woman to keep him warm at night. Atherton was currently without a female attachment, something unusual enough to keep him awake at night – whereas in the past it had been the female attachments, plural, which had – etcetera, etcetera.

‘Stonax left broadcasting a couple of years back and joined the civil service. Unusual to do it that way round – poacher turned gamekeeper kind of thing. Became one of the new army of “special advisers” at the Department of Trade and Industry. Had to walk the plank in December last year after a sex scandal. Headlines in all the tabloids, Minister’s Three-In-A-Bed High Jinks – that sort of thing. Stonax and Sid Andrew, the Trade and Industry Secretary, were caught sharing a nubile junior press officer from Andrew’s department after some drinky-do at Industry House. Stonax and the girl got sacked, Andrew got kicked upstairs.’

‘Oh,’ said Slider blankly.

‘How can you not remember that?’ Atherton said affectionately.

‘Three-in-a-bed high jinks tend to slip under my radar,’ Slider admitted. ‘Give me credit that I remembered he was in trouble.’

‘Well, he’s not in trouble any more,’ Atherton said.

They paused in the corridor outside the flat while Gallon, the PC on duty, put them in the book.

‘Who called it in?’ Slider asked him.

‘His daughter, sir, apparently. Emily Stonax. Asher took her back to the station.’

The neighbours on one side, an elderly couple, were standing outside their door being helpful to Tony Hart, one of Slider’s DCs, who was looking extremely cute this morning in a grey trouser suit, her hair subdued, for once, in a reverse plait. She flung him a welcoming grin, and the neighbours looked to see who she was looking at. Out of the corner of his eye he saw them yearn towards him, surmising he was the greater authority, wanting their moment of glory to go to the best audience. He stepped hastily inside.