Game Over

The flat was a scene of orderly forensic activity. The front door opened on to a vestibule with a large open archway into the drawing-room and Slider stood there and looked. On the far side of the room – as Bob Bailey, the local SOCO manager came across and explained – another door gave on to a branching passageway that led to the kitchen and dining-room one way and the three bedrooms and bathroom the other.

‘Three beds? The man must have been raking it in,’ Slider commented. ‘Is it all as tidy as this?’

‘Looks that way,’ said Bailey. ‘We haven’t done much yet. Didn’t get here much before you.’

‘Has the doctor been? Prawalha only lives round the corner, doesn’t he?’

‘He’s on holiday,’ said Bailey. ‘It’ll be Wasim from Ealing.’

‘He’ll be hours, then,’ said Atherton. ‘The traffic’s murder coming in that way.’

‘I know,’ said Slider, who had just done it himself.

‘It looks like robbery from the person, anyway,’ said Bailey helpfully. ‘Pockets emptied, and his watch is missing. You can see the mark where he wore it.’

The drawing-room was of the brown furniture and agreeable paintings order: tasteful, comfortable, unremarkable – and, Slider felt instinctively, a bachelor’s place. It had the air of a gentleman’s club, antiques and leather, dim old Turkish carpet, a couple of bronzes, a few bits of jade and ivory and ancient figurines that might have been Roman – objets that were evidently more valuable and interesting than decorative. There were no pot plants or scatter cushions, no half-read books or other signs of human occupation. It was the room of a person whose important life was led in a different place, either physical or mental, who needed of his dwelling only that it did not offend the senses. Women, however busy they were in their public lives, were never so indifferent to their domestic surroundings. They nested.

‘Was he married?’ he asked of no-one in particular.

It was Atherton who answered. He always seemed to know the background of any figure in the political arena. ‘Divorced, a good long time ago. And his wife was killed about a year back, if I remember rightly.’

‘Killed?’

‘Helicopter crash, trying to land at the multimillion pound mansion belonging to the new husband. She married Feyderman, the commodities millionaire – he was killed too.’

‘So Stonax lived here alone?’

‘Dunno,’ Atherton was forced to admit. ‘I can’t remember if he was connected with any other woman.’

‘You don’t know?’ Slider bated him. ‘You know so much about him I thought you were going to give me the brand of his underpants.’

‘I knew about the wife being killed because I knew about Feyderman. But if you’re really interested in his Ys—’

‘Thank you, I’ll pass. It doesn’t look as though there’s a female resident,’ Slider said.

‘Only one of the bedrooms seems to be occupied,’ Bailey supplied. ‘One’s made up like a spare room and the other’s a study.’

Slider nodded, and looked at last at the body. He had remembered Stonax in context now, a tall, lanky figure often to be seen wearing a flak jacket against a background of baked earth and battered cement houses in some Middle-Eastern hot spot. Or in a suit before the White House; a view so familiar it always looked two-dimensional, like a movie flat.

Though his accent had been neutrally English, he’d had the thick, unruly black hair and very white skin of a certain kind of Scot. He’d had brown eyes, it turned out: Slider couldn’t have said from seeing him on television. They were staring now, fixed and expressionless, like those of a very superior stuffed toy. Some people in death continue to look like real people, but Stonax, perhaps because he had been famous, looked like a model of himself, a waxwork. In the white expressionless face the lines of humour and character seemed oddly irrelevant, as though they had been marked in the wax with an orange stick after death. His skull had been smashed at the left temple by a tremendous blow, but because he was lying supine the blood had run backwards into his hair, leaving his face unsullied, but gluing the back of his head to the carpet.

He was fully dressed in business suit, shirt, tie, socks and shiny shoes, as if he’d just got back from work.

‘Robbery?’ Slider said thoughtfully.

They were joined in the doorway by Jerry Fathom, who had just arrived. He was a new DC sent to them to replace Tony Anderson – away on secondment so long he had been seconded right out of their world and up to the SO firmament. Fathom was young and keen, a tall, meaty lad with fidgety eyes and a rather petulant mouth. He was so new Slider hadn’t yet found out what he was good for. This was the first murder since he’d joined the firm, and as he stood at Slider’s shoulder, Slider could hear his breathing. He hoped he wasn’t going to throw up, or Slider would get it right down the ear.

But it seemed it was excitement rather than nausea that was making Fathom’s heart pound. ‘Looks straightforward to me,’ he said in the sort of voice that’s meant to impress someone. Slider could imagine him in a pub telling girls about his job. ‘Some crackhead doing the place over, looking for cash or something to flog. Householder comes home and surprises him. Bosh.’

‘Felonius interruptus?’ said Atherton.

‘Wallop,’ Fathom agreed importantly.

‘Very tidy crackhead,’ Atherton pointed out. ‘Nothing seems to have been disturbed.’

‘Well, maybe he’d only just started,’ Fathom offered generously.

Slider turned his head, though not his eyes, to the new boy. ‘Look at the door,’ he said. ‘No sign of forced entry.’

Fathom was not put off. ‘Chummy could’ve stolen the keys. Or the vic could’ve lost ’em.’

Slider winced at the abbreviation ‘vic’ which the younger officers all picked up from American cop shows. They so desperately longed to be cool, but it was hard without a gun at your hip.

‘Or maybe he picked the lock,’ Fathom concluded.

‘A very tidy crazed crackhead with unusual skills, then?’ Atherton suggested.

‘Well, it didn’t have to be a crackhead,’ Fathom conceded at last. ‘Could have been any sort of burglar. Do we know what’s missing?’

Atherton winced at the ‘we’. ‘There’s plenty of door-to-door to be getting on with. Every flat in the block will have to be canvassed, for starters. Hart will tell you where to go.’ Fathom removed himself reluctantly and by inches.

‘He’s right, of course,’ Slider said when he’d gone. ‘The lack of door-forcing doesn’t rule out burglary. There’s any number of possibilities. Chummy could have followed Stonax into the building and caught up with him before he’d closed the door. Or he could have rung the doorbell and pushed his way in.’

‘No sign of a struggle,’ Atherton said.

‘Quite. I think he was let in,’ said Slider.

‘You think Stonax knew him?’

‘Or had a reason to let him in – meter reader or something. But there’s more to it than that.’

‘How so?’

‘The way he’s lying, supine. He was struck from the front. If he’d let the man in it would be natural for him to be walking away and be struck from behind.’

‘Perhaps he was struck as soon as he opened the door,’ said Atherton, though the answer to that presented itself to him as soon as he said it.

‘But then he’d be lying closer to the door. No, he walked away, and then turned back. Why? And why was nothing taken but what was in his pockets? If it was straightforward robbery, why not take more?’

Atherton looked round the room and shrugged. ‘Your basic thief doesn’t want to be burdened with objay dee. And we don’t know yet that nothing else was taken.’

‘True,’ said Slider.

‘One thing,’ said Atherton, ‘the place is so tidy it ought to be easy to spot any gaps.’

‘Yes,’ said Slider. There was something about the economy of despatch that made him feel uneasily that it was a professional hit. It would have been extremely lucky for an opportunist amateur to have found the precise spot on the skull where a single blow would kill. And if it was professional, what was he after? A stolen-to-order painting or other artefact? Or was it something like bonds or valuable documents? ‘Do we know if he had a safe?’