THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER
A CORNISH AFFAIR
DANGEROUS LOVE
DIVIDED LOVE
EVEN CHANCE
HARTE’S DESIRE
THE HORSEMASTERS
JULIA
LAST RUN
THE LONGEST DANCE
NOBODY’S FOOL
ON WINGS OF LOVE
PLAY FOR LOVE
A RAINBOW SUMMER
REAL LIFE (
GAME OVER
FELL PURPOSE
Copyright © 2009 by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.
All rights reserved.
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
‘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.
