Fell Purpose

him.’ She rolled her eyes slightly to show what she thought of the other team allowing him past. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t picture him sitting around there of an evening. It was more like a drop-in.’

‘Expensive drop-in,’ McLaren said. ‘Anywhere decent round there costs a bomb.’

‘But we reckon he was making well enough to afford it,’ Hart went on. ‘I knew we’d find something as soon as he started talking about “planting” stuff. They always say that, the dipsticks. And right away we found a whole lot of little squares of white paper in one cupboard, and a couple of packets of white powder in another.’ She grinned. ‘He’d put ’em in two tins marked rice and flour. I reckon he’s got a sense of humour.’

‘But they weren’t rice and flour?’ Slider prompted gently.

‘Kensington an’ Chelsea,’ Hart said.

‘Calvin Klein,’ McLaren put in, not wanting to be left out of the hip-talk stakes.

K&C, or CK, was ketamine and cocaine, the latest drug of choice for young people wanting to get off their faces. Ket, the veterinary tranquiliser, was cheaper than charlie, and while the high didn’t last as long, there was no paranoid come-down as with cocaine. It was more like being hilarious drunk for a couple of hours, leaving you with nothing worse than a mild hangover. At the lower end of the social scale, the users were abandoning coke for financial reasons along with high-price cocktail bars and nightclubs, and taking ket with friends at home, which was a lot less trouble for everyone (including the police). The better-off kids were mixing the two, hence the ‘Royal Borough’ nickname for the combination.

‘So, our little chum is at the cutting edge of juvenile stupidity, is he?’ Slider said. ‘How much did you find?’

‘About fifty grams of charlie and twenty-five of K,’ Hart said. ‘Plus, like I said, the papers for making the wraps.’

‘So we could make dealing stick all right?’

‘Yes, guv, and there was something else,’ McLaren added eagerly. ‘In the bathroom there was a hairbrush on the shelf in front of the mirror, and there were some long blonde hairs in it, along with the black.’

‘We brought ’em back in an evidence bag, guv, in case you want to do a DNA test,’ Hart concluded. ‘O’ course, he might have had some other blonde bird up there, but . . .’

‘Quite,’ said Slider. This was good. It gave him more to work with in putting pressure on Carmichael, and if enough pressure were exerted it would probably not be necessary to send the hair to be expensively analysed. ‘All right, get it written up and the samples booked. I’m off to see a man about a drug.’

Michael Carmichael was looking both furious and sulky, which Slider thought a promising combination. Both states of mind were the enemy of rational thought, and without rational thought there could be no cunning.

‘I’m not talking to you!’ he shouted as soon as Slider came in.

Slider had brought Mackay with him, in case of trouble, and nodded to him to stand inconspicuously in the corner, while Detton, the duty constable, went to stand outside the door. He wanted the conversation, if it took place at all, to seem like a one-to-one.

It didn’t start well. Carmichael fixed angry eyes on Slider and snarled, ‘I’m not telling you anything. I want a lawyer.’

Slider looked fatherly concern. ‘Oh, don’t say that! I was hoping to have a friendly chat, just between the two of us.’

‘I know my rights,’ Carmichael said, and thumped the table to emphasise his determination. ‘I’m not saying anything without a lawyer. You get me one, or that’s it.’

‘Well, I’m sure you do know your rights,’ Slider said, ‘but the thing is this: we’ve found a lot of drugs in your flat. If you insist on a lawyer, we’ll have to charge you with dealing, and that means prison.’

‘You planted ’em there. You’d never make it stick.’

‘Yes, we would. Don’t be silly.’

He knew it, too. He changed tack. ‘It’s just a bit for my own use. You don’t go down for that. You’d have to let me go with a slap on the wrist.’

‘Don’t let’s waste time. You know the quantities you had up there, far more than for your own use – plus the papers all ready for making the wraps. It’s a clear charge of dealing, for which it’s a couple of years inside.’ He paused long enough to let it sink in. Carmichael’s face was dark with anger and frustration, and for a moment he seemed to struggle for escape, moving his head this way and that, rocking the chair back on its hind legs and letting it drop with a crash. Finally he let loose with a flood of foul language, beating his fists on the table. Slider watched him unmoved until the storm abated, and then said, ‘Calm down and listen. Listen!’ Carmichael shut his mouth and looked at Slider, trembling slightly, nostrils flaring. ‘As it happens,’ Slider went on, ‘I’m not minded to follow up the drugs thing – if you co-operate.’

‘Co-operate?’ Carmichael said at last, with deep suspicion. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘It’s not the drugs I want to talk to you about, so if you calm down and talk to me sensibly without babbling about your rights and wanting a lawyer, I can forget we found anything in your flat.’

‘What do you want to talk about?’ he said, but Slider could see he knew the answer to that.

‘Zellah Wilding.’

‘Oh, shit. You’re going to try to pin that on me now, are you? Just ’cos I come from Woodley South. Stick a label on someone and hang him. You fascist bastard! You and the Nazis would’ve got along great.’

‘I’m not trying to pin anything on you. I’m trying to find out the truth. I want to hear your side of the story. But if you want to go the other way, I can charge you for dealing and pass you over to someone else to do the questioning.’ Carmichael watched him with narrowed eyes. ‘We’ve got plenty against you already,’ Slider said. ‘Maybe you’ve got a good explanation for everything. I’d like to hear. But if you don’t want to tell me about it, we can just as easily assemble the evidence without your input.’

‘Frame me, you mean. Fit me up.’

Slider enumerated on his fingers. ‘We found Zellah’s hair in your flat. You claimed you hadn’t seen her in months but we’ve got eyewitnesses who saw you with her on the night she was murdered. And they saw you quarrelling with her.’ He laid the hand on the table and shrugged, looking away indifferently. ‘Your call, son. If you’re innocent, talk to me, tell me what really happened. Otherwise let’s book you and get it over with. But don’t waste my time.’

There was a breathless pause – breathless for Slider, anyway – before Carmichael said sulkily, ‘All right, I’ll talk.’

‘You’ll waive seeing a lawyer at this time?’

‘And the drugs thing goes away?’

‘On that understanding.’

‘All right.’ He rocked his chair back on to its hind legs again, and stuffed his hands into his pockets – no easy feat, given their tightness. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Tell me about meeting Zellah that night.’

‘It was her idea,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten about her. I hadn’t seen her in months – that’s the truth.’

‘How many months? When did you last see her before that night?’

‘It must’ve been . . . May, probably. It was, like, Easter when I took her home that time on my bike and her dad give me the bollocking. I’d have dropped her then – I mean, she was a nice enough bird, but who needs that kind of aggro? – but she was all over me. It was all her, you know,’ he insisted in an aggrieved tone. ‘She made the running. So we went out a few more weeks, and then she dropped me.’

‘Dropped you how? Said she didn’t want to see you any more?’

‘No, she just didn’t ring me. I never rang her, in case her dad was around. He wasn’t above answering her phone if it rang when he was there, so she told me never to ring her. And when she stopped ringing me, I thought it was over. I didn’t care,’ he added, to make it clear. ‘I had other fish to fry. I don’t go short of birds, I promise you.’

‘I’m sure you don’t. So tell me about the date on Sunday.’

‘Well, she rang me up out of the blue, Sunday morning, and said let’s get together that night. I said I was busy. Well, I wasn’t going to let her think I was at her beck and call. I said I could see her some other time, but she said that night or nothing, so in the end I thought, what the hell. I mean, she was a right little raver in bed, and I’d got nothing better to do. So I said OK. She said would I pick her up and we arranged a place.’

‘The Black Lion in Chiswick,’ Slider mentioned, just to keep the pressure on. Carmichael stared at him. ‘They