Fell Purpose

dressed and made up as if she was going to an important meeting, though it was evident she was just hanging about at home. But within seconds of Slider and Connolly arriving she had managed to get them into her kitchen and apprise them of the fact that it had been newly refitted at the cost of ?80,000. It looked it. Slider could almost feel Connolly quivering with desire beside him. Strange how women felt about kitchens; and it seemed to him, the less they actually cooked the more desperately they wanted a vast culinary temple full of the most cutting-edge gadgets. He had seen Connolly eating, and while she was nowhere near being a female McLaren, he was convinced nobody who willingly chose to ingest a chutney-chilli-cheeseburger from Mike’s stand at the end of Shepherd’s Bush Market could be interested in the art of haute cuisine. Yet here she was, practically drooling over the six-burner Aga-style gas-stove, the double stainless-steel sinks with jet hose attachment and pre-chilled drinking-water tap, and the island unit’s integral butcher’s block with the range of cook’s knives sunk into slots along the back, including everything from an aubergine peeler to a marrow-bone splitter.

A glance at Mrs Paulson’s nails suggested she didn’t do a lot of hands-on cooking either, but the two women were as one in regarding this vast hymn to the domestic art as the peak of their desire. It stretched right across the back of the house and was extended outwards under a glass roof, so it measured about twenty feet by sixteen. He thought of Joanna cooking for them in her dark little six-by-six cubbyhole, with a sink, stove and about two feet of work surface her only comforts, and felt uneasily that he had let her down in some essential duty of manhood.

Mrs Paulson also managed to mention that her husband was an investment banker and that she had been a high-powered financial analyst until child-bearing took her out of the loop, but that she now did ‘important charity work’, whatever that might be. The need to impress even such lowly specimens as police officers suggested a level of loneliness and frustration that made him sad. But it did leave her open to the suggestion that she talk to Connolly in the kitchen while she made coffee for them all, while Slider interviewed Chloe alone (although in sight, beyond the triple sliding glass doors out on the patio). Slider wanted a franker talk with Chloe than he was likely to get with her mother listening.

Chloe was a bouncy girl, too energetic to be fat, but with roundnesses where Sophy and Zellah – perhaps because of their ballet classes – had none. She was wearing a stretchy halter top which stopped just under the breasts, and shorts that hugged her around the hips. Everything in between was bare, and as brown as if she had been basted and roasted – which he supposed after all was what sunbathing was. His daughter Kate would have called her ‘a chub’, a dismissive adjective she applied to everyone in the world apart from herself and a couple of approved skinny chums. Chloe’s little round belly looked like the nicely egg-glazed top of an apple dumpling, and the ring in her navel might have been put there on purpose to lift it by. She had a round face, plumply pretty and even less suited to the Goth make-up than Sophy’s, especially as her default expression seemed to be one of wide-eyed surprise.

She seemed thrilled by the attention of a real police detective, and was eager to talk to Slider, especially when he said he hoped she would be frank.

‘Oh, I don’t mind telling you anything,’ she said. ‘Try me.’

She confirmed the times and substance of what Sophy had told him about the weekend, adding her own gloss. She agreed Zellah had refused to say who she was going out with, but added that she had said ‘he was a man, not a boy’. Chloe had asked her if he went to St Martin’s, the neighbouring boys’ school whose playing fields they shared, but that Zellah had said she was way beyond St Martin’s boys.

‘Sophy said she was nervous about the date. Is that how you saw it?’ Slider asked.

‘I wouldn’t say nervous exactly,’ Chloe said. ‘More, like, jumpy. But excited as well. Once when Sophy was out of the room I said to her, “Come on, Zellah, we’re mates. Tell me who it is.” Because Sophy can be a bit, like, pushy, you know? And I thought she might tell me when she wouldn’t tell her. But she just looked at me, kind of, like, sparkly, and said she might have something important to tell me next time I saw her. But after that Sophy came back in and she clammed up and wouldn’t talk about it at all.’

‘Did you conclude from that that it was someone you knew?’ Slider asked.

‘There’s no one we know that any of us would get excited about,’ she said simply. ‘Sophy thought she was just trying to make herself important, making out she’d got a better boyfriend than us.’

‘So you don’t think it was Mike Carmichael?’ he slipped in.

She merely looked surprised. ‘That was ages ago. She wasn’t still seeing him. Sophy razzed her about him so she gave him up. I mean, he didn’t have a car. Sophy says you can’t go out with a bloke without a car.’

Sophy seemed responsible for most of Chloe’s ideas, Slider thought. ‘What’s the importance of a car?’ he asked.

‘For copping off,’ she said, as if he ought to have known that.

‘Copping off, as in—?’

She blushed a little. ‘Well, you know, snogging and that.’

Slider was beguiled that expressions of his youth like ‘snogging’ – along with ‘cool’ – had come back into vogue.

‘Where else can you do it?’ she went on. ‘My mum and dad would never let me have a boy up in my bedroom. Sophy’s the lucky one. Her mum and dad are really cool. They go away a lot, and even when they’re at home they let her do whatever she wants. They’re great.’

‘Is that what constitutes great parents? Letting her do what she wants?’

He got the stare. ‘Well . . . They give her shedloads of money, too. She’s always got all the latest stuff and, like, loads of clothes and everything. It’s cool.’

He was realizing his fundamental failures as a father. ‘What about Zellah’s parents? Were they cool?’

He got the stare and the head jerk this time. ‘Duh! That’s what the whole weekend was about. They’re awful. They never let her go anywhere. And they’ve got, like, no money. Zellah had, like, hardly any pocket money, and no new clothes.’

‘Did you ever meet them – her parents?’

‘Not really meet them. We didn’t get invited round her house. But I’d seen them, at parents’ day and sports day and prize giving, things like that. Her dad wasn’t so bad – sort of hunky, in a way – only way strict. I was scared of him. But her mum was fat!’ She added the last in tones of breathless horror as the worst thing that could be said of any human being.

‘If her dad was so strict, how come he didn’t check up on Zellah the whole weekend?’ Slider asked.

‘He used to,’ she said. ‘It was, like, so-o embarrassing. Zellah, like, trained him out of it. Her mum was all right, she wanted Zellah to have fun – it was her picked the name Zellah. How cool is that? I wish I had a great name, instead of crummy old “Chloe”. Everyone’s called that. There are three Chloes in our year at school. What was I saying?’

‘About her parents checking up on her.’

‘Oh, right. Well, her dad used to phone up all the time, until when she turned sixteen she told him if he didn’t leave it off she’d leave home. She said you can by law when you’re sixteen and your parents can’t make you come back, and he was so scared he agreed not to call her when she was out, as long as he knew where she was going. Well, she could tell him anything after that, as long as it was something he’d approve of, like that dorky Southbank Fair.’

‘So he believed her when she said she’d leave home?’

‘You don’t know Zellah. She’d have done it all right. She didn’t care. She was really cool. She was the first one of us to go all the way with a bloke.’

‘Was that with Mike Carmichael?’

Her eyes slid away from his. She put her hands between her thighs and squeezed them together, rocking forward and back in her chair. ‘I shouldn’t’ve said.’

‘Come on, Chloe. I thought we were going to be frank.’

She looked at him. ‘This doesn’t get back to her mum and dad?’

‘Zellah’s dead,’ he reminded her.

‘Oh, yeah. I’d forgotten.’ She seemed remarkably unaffected by it. ‘Well, I s’pose it doesn’t matter then. Yeah, she went all the way with Mike.’

‘How did that work, if he didn’t have a car?’

‘He’s got his own place. But she said she’d have done it anywhere with him. She was nuts about him. And the way she talked about it, she was really hot for, you know, sex. It was funny really, her being like that and her mum