‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘I’m not either. Are we OK, then?’
She didn’t immediately answer, but then said, quietly, and with a hint of the tears she was denying access to, ‘I think Dad would have approved of you.’
Slider drove home by a circuitous route, watching for motorbikes and black Focuses, and naturally enough there were plenty of both to keep him in a state of jitters. He was beginning to wind his way towards Turnham Green when he remembered that there wasn’t any food in the house. He thought of stopping at a supermarket, but the mental image of himself cooking in the empty flat was not convincing, so finally he stopped in Chiswick High Road, parked in a fortuitously empty space by the kerb, and walked down to the Chiswick Chippy and bought himself a rock and chips. There was a street bench on the pavement a little down from where he was parked, and he sat down there and opened his package and ate the fish and chips from the paper, while covertly watching the traffic and the passers-by.
He saw the black Focus go past twice. It wasn’t the same reg number that he had sent in before, but he was pretty sure it was the same car from the tinted glass and the way it slowed and idled a moment as it got to his part of the street. What innocent driver goes past the same spot twice at that time of night? He got out his mobile and rang through to the traffic division, gave the watchers the new number and urged them to send a patrol out right now. Then he slowed his consumption rate, lingering over each chip, and even eating the crumbs of batter in the bottom of the bag. They had used to call them ‘crackling’ when he was a kid. When the fish and chip van came round, if you hadn’t got enough money for chips you could get a pennorth of crackling to munch on.
He saw the unmarked patrol go by, but the Focus didn’t come past again. Had they seen him get his phone out and guessed why? He got up, dumped the vinegary paper into the nearest bin, and went to his car, and when the patrol came by again he signalled to them. They stopped beside him and wound down the window.
‘I think he’s taken fright,’ Slider said. ‘Maybe saw me phoning. But he might still be in the area.’
‘We’ll cruise around a bit, do a couple of passes by your house. Maybe we’ll spot him.’
Slider drove home, feeling weary and sick of the whole business. Was Emily’s theory right? If it was, it was the worst thing of all. He had given his life to the Job, and if the honesty and probity of those above him was going to come into question, then – well, it would be time for him to leave. He parked a way from his house, looked carefully for motorbikes before getting out, locked the car and crossed the road, walking on the opposite side, keeping to the shadow of the hedges and sending out his senses in all directions.
He saw nothing, heard nothing, until he got to the house. That morning when he locked the front door he had put a minute scrap of paper between the door and the jamb, at a point where the fit was too tight to allow it to fall unless the door was opened. The paper was no longer in place. As he fumbled out his key, he saw it in the corner of the porch, gleaming a warning at him. He let himself in carefully, listening, smelling, but the house was silent and seemed as usual. And yet, someone had been there. What had they done? Was it Bates, or one of his minions? Were they searching for something, or doing mischief? He remembered Bates’s area of greatest expertise: listening devices. Had he put in a mike somewhere? Or was that paranoia? What could Slider have to say that Bates could possibly find illuminating?
He closed the door behind him and, without putting on the light, walked slowly down the passage. The sitting-room was the first door, and it was just slightly ajar. He frowned. How had he left it? Not closed, that was for certain. They rarely closed that door. In fact, he rather thought it had been wide open that morning – wider than it was now, anyway. He eased out the side-arm baton that, feeling faintly foolish, he had slipped into his belt under his jacket before leaving the office. He didn’t feel foolish now. With the tip of it he pushed gently at the door, and felt a resistance. Was there something lying behind it? He got closer and pushed again, more firmly, and the door yielded. At the same moment there was a sensation of movement in the darkness above him, an indecipherable sound, a sharp pain in his head and shoulder, and then blackness.
Now someone was shaking his shoulder, a man’s voice saying, ‘Sir, are you all right? Sir?’
Slider groaned and opened his eyes and the light hurt. How was it light? Was it morning? No, it was electric light, he saw now, and he was lying on the floor in his own flat, in the doorway of the sitting-room, and his head and shoulder hurt abominably.
‘All right,’ he said, and the shoulder-shaking stopped. Slider squinted up. It was the traffic patrol man – what was his name? Willets, wasn’t it? – with his partner behind him, looking anxious. Slider struggled into a sitting position. ‘What happened?’ He remembered the blow in the darkness, and the details of Stonax’s death came back to him. ‘Was I coshed?’
‘Booby trap,’ said Willets. ‘We watched you go in as we went past, and then when we passed again and there were still no lights on, Wright said we ought to check if you were OK. You didn’t answer the door, and when I looked through the letter box I heard you groan, so we broke the glass panel in the door and let ourselves in.’
Now there’s broken glass to get fixed, the domestic part of Slider’s mind worried. ‘Booby trap?’ he said.
‘A bucket resting on the top of the door,’ said Willets. ‘A metal one.’ He gestured, and Slider turned his head, wincing, to see a large, heavy, old-fashioned galvanised bucket lying on the carpet. ‘Someone doesn’t like you, sir,’ Willets concluded, with questions sticking out all over his face.
Fortunately, Slider thought, he had not gone barging straight in, so the bucket had not hit him directly, but struck his head glancingly and the tip of his shoulder on its way down. The old schoolboy trick. Bates was making a fool of him. Had he meant to kill him? Well, probably not, but he wouldn’t have minded if he had.
‘Need to get forensics in. You didn’t touch anything?’
‘Only the door, and then you,’ said Willets. ‘I think you ought to go to the hospital, sir. There’s quite a bit of blood.’
Slider became aware, now, of a stickiness around his neck and collar.
‘Can’t leave the place,’ he said.
‘We’ll take care of it, sir,’ said Willets. ‘I’ve already phoned it in. Wright will take you to the hospital and I’ll wait here and preserve the scene. You really ought to get that looked at.’
A veterinary-sized painkiller and three stitches later, Slider was functioning again, needing a clean shirt more than anything. Mackay, who’d been doing night duty, was beside him in the cubicle, reporting that nothing else in the flat seemed to have been disturbed, that there were no fingermarks on the bucket, only glove smears, that the forensic team had finished and gone, and that a carpenter was even then boarding up the broken panel in the front door.
‘Do you want a bug sweep done, guv?’ he asked. Slider had mentioned his initial thought that Bates may have put in a listening device.
‘No, don’t bother. I think the booby trap was the reason for the break-in. I suppose my door locks were child’s play to him.’ He only thanked God that Joanna had not been there.
‘Well, I don’t think you ought to go back there,’ Mackay said anxiously. ‘Not tonight, anyway.’
‘I need clean clothes,’ Slider said, ‘and some shut-eye. And he’s not going to do anything else tonight, is he?’
‘Well, at least have a uniform on the door,’ Mackay urged. ‘Renker was there when I left. Let him stay on guard while you sleep.’
Slider agreed to that, rather than argue, which was becoming increasingly difficult as his brain kept trying to check out into the land of nod. He knew that his old friend O’Flaherty was the night relief sergeant at the station, and he wouldn’t mind leaving PC Renker on nursery duty. And it would be a brave villain who tried to get past big Eric Renker in a confined space.
Eleven
Fainting in Coils
‘Why didn’t you call me?’ Atherton demanded, the next morning.
‘I thought about it, but I didn’t want to disturb Emily with more tales of violence,’ Slider said. He felt as if he hadn’t slept for a week.
‘She’s going to find out anyway,’ Atherton pointed out.
‘Better to hear about it in daylight than in the middle of the night,’ Slider said from experience.
‘Well, you can’t stay there now, anyway. Who knows what he’ll do next? You’d better come and stay at my
