Slider shook his head. ‘Even if, long shot, Amanda was behind the murder, we don’t know that she’d get Frith to do it, rather than a professional. She might keep him entirely in the dark.’
‘But given everything he owes her . . .’
‘It still isn’t enough to ask someone to do murder for you.’
‘Unless he hates Rogers as well.’
‘Even so, if he’s as soft as you’ve been making out—’
‘Oh, I don’t think he can be soft,’ Connolly said. ‘Maybe a pushover in the love stakes, but he’s won Badminton twice, and you don’t get to do that being a softie. And when Maureen was talking about how good he is with animals, she told how once they were walking home from school, the three of them, and a car going past them hit a pheasant. The poor beast was flapping around, and Robin – they were all about ten at the time – picked it up and broke its neck, just like that.’
‘Anyone would do the same,’ said Slider, who was a country boy himself.
‘I’m from Dublin,’ said Connolly. ‘I’d have taken it to the vet.’
SIX
Route of all Evil
Freddie Cameron rang last thing. ‘To let you know I’ve taken the fingerprints and I’m sending them over to you. Just in case there’s any doubt about the corpse being the corpse.’
‘We’re sure it is, but thanks anyway.’
‘A little surer never hurts,’ Freddie said. ‘There are no scars or interesting marks on the body, and I’m afraid there’s nothing of the face left. Hardly any of the teeth, either, just a couple of molars – not enough to match for dental work. Not sure really how you would make formal identification.’
‘From what we know about him so far, there may be several young ladies who could recognize one part of him.’
‘Hmm. Identification
Slider winced. ‘Unfortunate choice of word in the circumstances – “go down”.’
‘You’re obviously feeling frisky, old chum. Case going well?’
‘As smoothly as a hippo through a hand-operated mangle.’
‘Ah. Situation normal, then. I take it you’re not worried about tox screens and other such arcana?’
‘At the moment I’m working on the premise that it was the gunshot that killed him.’
‘It didn’t do him any good, that’s for sure. Well, let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.’
‘Doctor to doctor, you could tell me where he was working, if you wouldn’t mind. He’s not on any GP register. The witness said he worked at a hospital in Stansted but there’s no such place. And his salary seems to have come from something called Windhover, which we can’t identify so far. Ever heard of it?’
‘Windhover? Nope. Though there is something faintly familiar about the name David Rogers, which I haven’t been able to pin down in the old cerebellum.’
‘You think you’ve heard of him before?’
‘Could be. On the other hand, it’s a very ordinary name, isn’t it? There could be any number of David Rogerses. Or Roger Davises. Roger Davidson,’ he tried out, speculatively. ‘David Rogerson. Rabid Dodgerson. It could be anything, really. Or I could have dreamt it.’
‘Thanks, Freddie,’ Slider said warmly. ‘I knew I could count on you.’
Porson came to the meeting the next afternoon, carrying a mug of tea on top of which was balanced a plate bearing a Chelsea bun. The troops parted deferentially for him, but he eased his way to the back of the room and perched on a desk. ‘Carry on,’ he said. ‘I’m not here. I’m a fly on the wheel.’
Slider nodded to Hollis, who went through the basic facts of the case so far: the shout, Catriona Aude, the Firmans, the school’s CCTV, the gun’s provenance. Then Slider took over.
‘We’re assuming, for working purposes, that deceased was in fact David Rogers and that death was in fact caused by the single gunshot at close range to the back of the skull. There’s no reason at the moment to doubt either of these basics, so let’s not complicate an already difficult case. Swilley, what did you find out about Aude and her flatmates?’
‘Nothing suspicious, guv,’ Swilley said. ‘She shares a flat with two blokes and another female. She pays the least and gets the smallest room, and it’s a bit of a pit: clothes, make-up, sounds, magazines – never seen so much shite. She wouldn’t want a cleaner, she’d want a curator. But there’s nothing sinister in there. The flatmates seem decent, normal types. They’ve all got steady jobs, no big debts, no big spending habits. No obvious drug use. The four of them do the usual things – go to pubs, go clubbing, watch telly, have friends round. The two men have got semi-permanent girlfriends. The female and Aude were playing the field – looking for The One, according to the other female. I got plenty about that. Usual rant about how impossible it was to find a bloke who’ll commit these days.’
‘She was telling the wrong person,’ Atherton said. ‘Look how often you turned me down.’
Swilley ignored him. ‘It sounds as if Aude was the more desperate of the two. Always getting off with unsuitable blokes. One-night stands. Nothing lasting more than a couple of months at best. They were quite excited about Rogers. Pleased for her. He was a bit out of her usual class: money, nice manners, and the fact he wasn’t married was a real bonus. She told her flatmates he was a consultant at a hospital, but that was about all. They said he was generous with his money – took her to posh restaurants, gave her a couple of nice presents. Anyway,’ she concluded, ‘I can’t see she was in on it, guv. The impression was she was really stuck on him. Apparently she thought the relationship was going places, talking about something permanent down the line. Talk about the triumph of hope over experience.’
‘So you think she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?’ said Slider. ‘OK, we’ll put her to one side. The only other contact we’ve got at the moment is Rogers’s ex-wife.’ He ran through the interview with Amanda Sturgess and related Connolly’s story about the relationship between her and Frith. ‘Whether the barmaid Maureen is right or not, there is obviously more to it than Amanda told us. The divorce seems to have been acrimonious – on her part, at least. She didn’t mention anything about Frith or helping him to buy the stables, and while there’s no reason she should have, she did seem anxious for us not to speak to him when he came in. Who’s been looking into this agency of hers?’
‘Me, guv,’ said Mackay. ‘It’s pukka, all right. Does good work. Big employers these days have got to take on a certain number of disabled by law, but there’s nothing token about it. It’s got a good name with the disabled charities and lobby groups I contacted.’
‘Who’s the Beale of “Sturgess and Beale”?’ he asked.
‘She’s a Nora Beale, married, lives in Ealing, used to work for an ordinary employment agency, got a disabled son, decided a specialist agency was needed. Met Amanda at some social do when Amanda first moved there. Her and Amanda set up the agency together and they do all the work, bar one girl who does the clerical.’
‘Which makes our Mandy thoroughly worthy and out of the frame for First Murderer,’ Atherton said, but discontentedly.
‘We still don’t know what Rogers was doing for a living,’ said Slider. ‘What about this Windhover? Have you found out any more about it?’
Atherton answered. ‘It’s the Windhover Trust, in full, and it’s a part of something called the Geneva Medical Support and Research Foundation. The British arm, if you like. It has an address in SW1 but it’s only an accommodation address. Everything is forwarded from there to the parent organization in Geneva, and we haven’t been able to find out anything more about that, except that it’s supposed to be non-profit making. The website is outstandingly unhelpful, with little more than an address and a mission statement, and the authorities won’t play ball. You know what the Swiss are like. They didn’t stay out of the EU to answer questions to the likes of us. There is something called The Windhover Outreach, which does vaccinations in Africa, but whether that’s part of the same thing I haven’t been able to find out yet. And what they were paying David Rogers a hundred and eighty kay a year for is anyone’s guess.’
‘It’s not a huge amount,’ Slider said. ‘And yet he must have been giving them some value in return for it.’
