Fell Purpose

minded on occasion. She just forgot it, that’s all.’

‘That’s what I’m saying, she wouldn’t have. Never in a thousand years. She’d have put it into her handbag as automatically as her door keys.’

‘Well on this occasion she didn’t. Why are you getting so excited?’

‘Suppose the murderer brought it away from the scene with him?’

‘You want Wilding to be the murderer?’

‘I don’t want him to be. But it usually is the victim’s nearest and dearest, and he was hugely controlling of her. Maybe he followed her, discovered what she was up to, sex-and-smut wise, had a violent row and strangled her.’

‘With tights he just happened to have brought with him.’

‘He may have found out beforehand that she wasn’t the little angel he had always believed in, and went out to execute her, to save her soul from worse to come. There would have been plenty of tights in the house, his wife’s and his daughter’s. Look,’ he said to Slider’s rejecting expression, ‘we know he’s a religious nut—’

‘He’s a churchgoer,’ Slider said indignantly. ‘Why has everyone with a religious belief got to be a nutcase?’

‘Well, they don’t have to be. But he’s too good to be true – all that charity work and helping out at the school and being on committees and going to church. Yet he wasn’t above stealing that piece of land behind his garden – because that’s what it comes down to. And he knocked off his secretary, which involved immorality and deceit. Old Wilding’s not as squeaky clean as he likes to seem.’

‘It’s others who praise him,’ Slider pointed out. ‘He never said he was a saint.’

Atherton waved that away. ‘And look at the way he treated Zellah – wouldn’t let her go anywhere or do anything for fear of her purity being sullied. Brooding away out in his shed about disgusting youths putting their hands on his lily-white treasure. You’ve got to admit it’s a compelling scenario. I mean, the shed alone condemns him. Men who spend all their leisure hours alone in a shed at the bottom of the garden have got to be up to no good.’ He was only partly joking. ‘And if he hasn’t got a stack of hygiene magazines in there, then what is he doing?’

‘Woodwork,’ said Slider. As he said it, he remembered with a horrible chill another shed in another garden, which had belonged to a religious nut. The smell of new pine and old sweat pierced his memory. It was always smells that brought back the past the most vividly. He had been tied up by a man with a knife who was going to kill him; and instead it was Atherton who had been stabbed, near fatally. He met his subordinate’s eyes and knew he was thinking of the same thing. He said, ‘Even allowing your analysis for the moment, what are you supposing happened?’

‘Don’t you think it’s suspicious that it’s only after I tell him the phone can be traced that it turns up? He hadn’t thought of it before – it was certainly news to him at the time that you can trace a mobile with pinpoint accuracy from a signal. So he dashes home and switches it off before we can start looking, and then decides the safest thing is to tell you he’s found it in an unexceptional place.’

‘But why is it there at all?’

‘After he killed her, he took her handbag away with him. To conceal her identity, probably,’ he said in anticipation of Slider’s next question, ‘to give himself time to work out his story. He disposed of it somewhere – or maybe hid it in his wardrobe.’

‘Or his shed?’

‘Yes, better. Wifey might find it in his wardrobe, but I’ll bet he locks the old wooden hacienda when he’s not using it. Then he was alerted that the phone would lead us straight to him. He’s probably destroyed the handbag by now – might be interesting to ask the neighbours if he was burning leaves on Tuesday afternoon.’

‘Burning leaves? In August?’

‘Well, whatever gardeners burn in August. By the way,’ he short-circuited himself as he remembered, ‘what would he be growing in his vegetable patch that looked like coriander?’

Slider thought for a moment, and then said, ‘Parsnips, you philistine. So if he burned the handbag, why didn’t he get rid of the mobile at the same time?’

‘You can’t burn a mobile. Maybe he was going to take it out and dump it down a drain somewhere, but then he thought it would be better for us to have it.’

‘Why?’

Atherton looked triumphant. ‘Because if she was regularly telephoning a gentleman of the male persuasion, it would make him a suspect.’

‘Oh, you’re clever,’ Slider said bitterly. ‘You’ve got it all worked out.’

Atherton looked wounded. ‘Why do you want it not to be Wilding?’

‘Because he’s her father,’ Slider said. He was silent a moment, and then said, ‘You’re right, I’m not being objective. And there is one thing.’

‘Tell me, tell me.’

‘He was imagining her fleeing the murderer in terror and not being able to phone daddy, so I said there were lots of doors she could have knocked on. And he said, “What, at that time of night? Everyone would have been fast asleep.” We’ve never released a time of death. We don’t even really know it. It could have been any time after about ten p.m.’

‘He could have just assumed it was in the dead of night,’ Atherton said.

‘Now you’re being perverse. It was you who wanted him.’

‘Just playing your part.’

‘Well, don’t. You were right that we have to consider every possibility. We ought to look into Wilding. If he did know, or even suspect, that she was getting away from him, he might feel strongly enough. He was certainly passionate about her. And it is odd, at least, that she left her mobile behind. We’ll have a completely objective goosey at him, ask the neighbours what they thought of him, check what he was doing that night. It won’t be easy without making him think he’s being accused of something, and if he’s innocent, that’s the last thing I want.’

‘Salt in the wounds?’

‘More like boiling lead.’

‘Nobody said this was an easy job,’ Atherton commiserated. ‘First thing is to send someone for the mobile, I suppose.’

Slider was pondering. ‘I think I’ll go myself,’ he said. ‘I haven’t met the man – I’d like to get a look at him, and at the shed. And I’d like to have a look at her room.’

‘What do you hope to find there?’ Atherton asked.

‘Some clue as to who she was.’

‘Angel or devil?’

‘She won’t have been either. Nobody is. But I can’t see her clearly, and I want to. I think,’ he concluded sadly, ‘that I would have liked her if I’d known her.’

‘You always say that about everyone,’ Atherton said. ‘You’re just an empathizer.’

Hollis knew Ronnie Oates was living at home because his mother opened the door at once when he rang, and said, ‘Left your key behind?’ before she saw who it was. Then her face sagged like a disappointed child’s. ‘Who’re you? I don’t know you.’

‘Yes you do, love,’ he said kindly. ‘Sergeant Hollis from Shepherd’s Bush. You know me from when Ronnie had his last little bit of trouble.’

‘Well, he ain’t done nothing this time,’ she said, but yielded anyway to Hollis’s body language and let him in.

It was a ground-floor council-owned maisonette in a tiny terraced house in East Acton, in a turning off the A40, where the traffic thundered past night and day like the migration of the mastodons. Hollis was fortunate in not being cursed, like Slider, with a sensitive nose, or like Atherton with a refinement of taste, but even he quailed a little before the Oates establishment. It was filthy, and it stank.

The front door opened directly into the single living room, whose far end, under the window on to the garden, was the kitchen. In this end there was a sofa, two armchairs and a television set, but all the furniture was hidden under a silt of clothes, fast-food packaging, sweet wrappers, food residue, and saucers containing dabs of left-over cat food. The kitchen end festered under a silt of dishes and rancid food. The window to the garden was open and a succession of cats hopped in and out. The place smelled of urine, cats, and the sweetish, eye-burning odour of dirty