Fell Purpose

the door. ‘This rich banker type, Oliver what’s-his-face.’

‘Oliver Paulson.’

‘If you say so. From what you’ve told me, he seems to have known all the protagonists, but you’ve never asked him a single question.’

‘Only because we haven’t got round to it. He works in the City so he’d have to be an evening interview.’

‘If he was a suspect you’d go right to his office and winkle him out.’

‘But why should he be a suspect?’

‘He’s a mega-rich banker,’ she said in a logic-for-the-simple tone. ‘Everyone hates those. Like estate agents in the old days. Maybe it was his baby.’

He patted her shoulder. ‘You just keep thinking, Butch. That’s what you’re good at.’

‘I could think you under the table any day.’

In the quiet of his office without the phone ringing, he got through the leftover paperwork in record time, and felt chipper enough to go down and see Carmichael, to see if he could catch him off balance.

Carmichael was not happy. ‘You can’t keep me here,’ he fumed. ‘You’ve got nothing on me. You got to let me go. I know my rights.’

‘There’s the little matter of the drugs we found in your place,’ Slider reminded him.

His face fell like a lift in a disaster movie. ‘You said you were forgetting them.’

‘I may still do. If you co-operate fully.’

‘I co-operated! You bastard!’ He let loose with a mouthful.

‘Hey! Enough of that,’ Slider said. ‘Watch your lip. My people have to check your alibi, such as it is, which all takes time.’

‘What d’y mean, “such as it is”? I’ve told you—’

‘Yes, you’ve told me, but you haven’t given me anything concrete to cover the hours during which Zellah was killed. And you didn’t tell me,’ he added sternly, ‘that she was pregnant.’

Carmichael’s face was a picture. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. Messages worked across his eyes, trying to connect up with something in his brain. At last he managed, ‘But she . . . Pregnant? She never . . . It’s nothing to do with me!’

‘Come on,’ Slider said encouragingly. ‘You can’t tell me she didn’t tell you that. Isn’t that the whole reason she suddenly wanted to see you?’

‘No!’ he said strenuously. ‘She never said a word! I swear! Anyway . . .’ More mental conflict. ‘She couldn’t have been. Not by me.’

‘Don’t make me give you the talk your father should have had with you. The one where a girl and a boy do certain things together in the privacy of his flat.’

‘But I mean . . . why wouldn’t she tell me, if she thought it was mine? Anyway, I hadn’t seen her for months. How far on was she?’

‘Look, son,’ Slider said, avoiding that one, ‘a simple DNA test is going to establish that it was your child. Now, if you really didn’t know she was pregnant, I can see it’s going to be pretty upsetting to think you killed the baby along with her—’

‘I didn’t kill her! Why won’t you believe me? And if it was mine . . .’ Something occurred to him. His eyes widened. ‘I bet that’s who she was going to see afterwards – some other bloke she’d been banging. Going the rounds to see who she could palm the kid off on.’

‘Is that what the row was about?’ Slider asked smoothly. ‘She told you she was pregnant and you told her she was on her own? No use coming to you? You wouldn’t even pay for an abortion?’

He shook his head, suddenly thoughtful. ‘She would never have done that,’ he said. ‘She was, like, very religious. She’d never have had an abortion.’

‘What, even though she was terrified of her father? If it was a choice between telling him, and getting rid of it . . .’

‘No. You didn’t know her. She would never have done that,’ he said, quiet now. ‘And she didn’t tell me. I swear. If she had, I would have . . .I’d have helped her. I’d . . . I’d like a kid. I mean, I wouldn’t have wanted one right now, for choice, but if that’s how it had to be . . . I’d have helped. If it was mine. I’d have looked after her.’

‘You have a softer side to you, I see,’ Slider said, poking him for the reaction.

His face grew bitter. ‘Yeah, that’s a big laugh to you lot, isn’t it? Comes from the Woodley South, so he’s no good. Mother’s a smack-head prostitute, no dad, brought up on the street. It’s a big laugh someone like me would want a clean life and a family. Split your sides, why don’t you?’

‘Don’t come all pious with me, son. Clean life? You sell drugs,’ Slider reminded him.

‘To rich kids, who are going to buy them anyway. If they didn’t get ’em from me, they’d get ’em from someone else. At least I don’t rob ’em, or cut the charlie with something worse. Anyway, it’s not like they’re street junkies robbing old ladies for a fix. It’s just what they do to relax in the evenings after work, instead of having a drink. What’s the difference from that and selling booze in a pub?’

‘Selling alcohol isn’t illegal.’

‘And that’s your answer, is it?’ he said bitterly.

Actually, it was, but it didn’t help his present campaign, so he sidestepped the argument. Instead he said, ‘It makes much more sense that she told you she was pregnant, you had a row about it, she walked off, and later you met up again, had another row, and in the heat of the moment you strangled her. Come on, isn’t that really what happened? I know you’ve got a temper. She went on and on and on about it, just wouldn’t stop yacking, and then she started crying – they always turn on the waterworks to get their own way, don’t they? You suspected anyway she was trying to shove the kid off on you when she’d been seeing someone else, and when she started to get hysterical and make a scene – well, anyone would snap. Isn’t that what happened? Come on, you can tell me. Get it off your chest.’

No line had ever so singularly not worked. Carmichael looked at him, utterly unmoved, still thinking things out. Then he said quietly, ‘I bet you it was her dad. If he found out – well, he’d kill her. Literally.’

Slider sighed. ‘And after that he’d kill you. It’s lucky for you that you’re in here where it’s safe.’

Carmichael turned his face away, stony with something that Slider was horribly afraid was sorrow of some kind. He really didn’t want to like Carmichael, even the slightest bit. On the other hand, he found himself fairly convinced that he hadn’t known Zellah was pregnant, though quite where that got him he wasn’t sure.

As he was passing through behind the shop on his way back upstairs, Nicholls popped his head out and said, ‘Oh, Bill, there you are. There’s a guy wants to see you about the Wilding case.’

‘Did he ask for me by name?’

‘Officer in charge. But I think he’s pukka. Looks like a cit.’

Slider sighed. ‘All right. Shove him in . . . what’s empty?’

‘This time o’ day? All of them. Have number two – no one’s thrown up in that since the weekend.’

‘Always grateful,’ Slider said.

He was not sure, when he first caught sight of the man, that Nicholls’ description was accurate. He looked more like a nutcase than a cit, though Slider had to confess that that was mostly because the man was wearing shorts, and he had a pathological suspicion of grown men who wore shorts in urban areas. He was tallish, scrawny, in his forties, with scanty hair and, as if to compensate, a large beard, above which an all-weather tan matched the brown of the sinewy legs exposed between shorts and sandals.

‘The name’s Eden,’ he said briskly, extending his hand towards Slider.

Slider never liked touching members of the public if he could help it, and used his own hand to gesture the man to a seat, avoiding the contact.

‘Detective Inspector Slider. What can I do for you, Mr Eden?’

‘They tell me you’re the person in charge of the case – the murder – that poor girl on Old Oak Common? I thought it was my duty to come forward, though I don’t know whether my information will be of any help or not.’

‘You have information about Zellah Wilding?’