Body Line

mateless. Hard-to-get meant you had to sit through dinner. But there was nothing wrong with Angela Fraser: she was pretty, personable, articulate. She must often ask herself, why wasn’t she married? A handsome, generous doctor willing to pretend to be interested in her must have seemed like a Godsend. No wonder she thought she was in love with him – and told herself he was, with her.

She emerged from her muffling, accepted another couple of napkins, blew her nose, and said abruptly, ‘When will the funeral be? I want to go.’

‘I don’t know,’ Slider said. ‘We can’t release the body while the investigation is going on.’ It wasn’t strictly true, but at the moment they hadn’t anyone to release it to; and, anyway, who knew whether Miss Fraser would end up being invited? He understood it would be important to her, seeing herself effectively as the widow, but the reality might be very different and he didn’t want to get into that.

Fortunately she was bracing herself up. ‘I’m sorry about crying,’ she said. ‘I must look a sight.’

‘Not at all,’ Slider said gallantly. ‘Just a little pink.’

‘I’ve been crying a lot at home,’ she confessed. ‘I have to try to hide it at work. Amanda would be furious if she knew I’d been seeing David. But I want to help you. Whoever did this terrible thing, they must be caught and made to suffer. Do you have any idea who it was?’

‘I was hoping you might be able to give us some sort of insight into that,’ Slider said earnestly. ‘You obviously knew him very well. Did he have any enemies?’

‘What, apart from Amanda?’ Angela said with a scornful look. ‘She hated him.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Because of the divorce,’ she said dismissively. ‘She just didn’t understand him, that’s what. He wouldn’t have looked elsewhere if she’d been more sympathetic. I just can’t imagine them married – she was so wrong for him. He was so gentle and sensitive. She’s hard, and all she cares about is business.’

‘I thought she cared about her clients,’ Slider said. ‘I mean, she’s doing very worthwhile work with the agency, isn’t she?’

‘Oh, that’s what she’d tell you,’ Angela snorted. ‘She loves everyone to think she’s this saintly Mother Theresa sort of figure, but all she does it for is the applause. She’s as hard as nails really, and the way she talks to them sometimes – telling them to stop feeling sorry for themselves, and that they can do more than they think, and they should get out and get a job and stop making a thing about their disabilities. Well, if people knew, she wouldn’t get invited to all these conferences, and dinners, and opening facilities and everything. Anyway, it’s me and Nora do all the work, really. She’s always out “networking”, as she calls it.’

‘Do you know Robin Frith?’ Slider asked, before she exploded with wrath.

‘What, her fancy man? Yes, and how come it was all right for her to shack up with him, but not all right for poor David to find comfort in another woman’s arms after the hell she put him through?’

‘So you’ve met him – Robin Frith?’ Atherton tried to get her back on track.

‘Not met, exactly. I’ve seen him once or twice. He looks a bit of a hunk, actually – I can’t think how she caught him. But I don’t really know him. I think he’s got his own business,’ she concluded vaguely, ‘but I don’t know what it is. Amanda doesn’t talk about him. Well, she doesn’t really talk about personal stuff much. She doesn’t encourage what she calls gossip in the office.’

‘Why do you think she would have minded you going out with David?’ Atherton asked.

‘Oh, because the first time I met him, he’d come into the office to see Amanda about something and she had a client with her, and he sat by my desk and started chatting to me, and we were getting on really well when she finished and came out and – well, you should have seen the look. She practically dragged him into her room, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but you could tell from the tone she was tearing him off a strip. And when he came out he looked furious, but he sort of swallowed it down and he winked at me as he left. Then she called me in and bollocked me for talking to him, and said that I was not to use the workplace as a dating agency and she didn’t pay me to flirt with men on her time and that if I wanted to make myself sexually available to aging Lotharios I should go and stand on a street corner in Soho, and she’d be happy to release me without notice if that was the summit of my ambition.’ She looked from Atherton to Slider and back. ‘She really said that.’

You had to admire her vocabulary, Slider thought. And if David had ‘dropped in’ at the office, it proved there was more contact between them than Amanda admitted. ‘So she didn’t want you to get to know David,’ he mused. ‘I wonder why.’

‘Jealousy,’ Angela said promptly. ‘Didn’t want anyone else to give him the happiness she couldn’t. But she couldn’t keep us apart. When I went out at lunchtime a bit later to get a sandwich he was waiting for me in his car. Took me to Strand-on-the-Green for lunch, and it took off from there. We agreed never to let Amanda know, because he said it would make her furious and I was afraid she’d sack me if she knew. Because I could make him happy, and she’d failed. We’ve been together ever since. If only he hadn’t been so busy, we could have seen more of each other. We could have been married by now.’

Atherton couldn’t bear another helping of pink blancmange. ‘What about David’s friends?’ he asked. ‘Did you meet any of them?’

‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘We were too wrapped up in each other ever to want anyone else. Our dates were too precious to water them down with other people.’

‘So you don’t know if he had any enemies? Any difficulties at work? Was anyone threatening him? Did he have money worries?’

‘No, nothing like that. I mean, he never talked about work, but he’d have said if he was in trouble. I mean, we told each other everything. And he had plenty of money. I’ve told you that.’ Suddenly she frowned. ‘Except – I’ve just remembered. He was a bit preoccupied lately.’

‘Preoccupied?’ Slider queried.

‘A bit absent, sort of. Thinking about stuff. I’d suddenly realize he wasn’t listening properly, and he’d sort of “come to” and apologize.’

‘You didn’t ask him what he was thinking about?’

‘Well, yes, but he’d just say, “Oh, nothing, sorry,” and change the subject.’

‘How long had this “thinking” been going on?’

‘About two or three weeks, I suppose. Maybe longer.’

‘Can you pinpoint anything that might have started it?’

‘Not really,’ she said slowly, working back in her mind. ‘Except – well, he used to go to this place in Suffolk.’

‘What place?’

‘He didn’t say. You see, if we went out on a Tuesday, we’d go back to my place, but he hardly ever stayed the night because he said he had to get up really early, like crack of dawn, on Wednesdays to go to Suffolk. I just thought it was another hospital he worked at. Anyway, this Tuesday night – Tuesday before last – when he got out of bed, he came back to kiss me and said he wished he didn’t have to go. I said, well don’t, then, and he said he wished he never had to do that damned journey again, and for a minute he looked really—’ She sought the right word. ‘Really bleak. I thought he just meant that he wished we were living together, but I’m thinking now maybe he was talking about this Suffolk job. Because when he left he said he wasn’t sure about next week because things might be changing in his life. He said, “There’s a big decision to be made, and it could change everything.” Well, I thought he was talking about him and me. But maybe he meant this job. Anyway, the next week we met the same as usual, but it was from then, now I think about it, that he was in this funny mood.’ She looked at them anxiously. ‘He was definitely worrying about something. Do you think he knew what was going to happen? Was someone threatening him?’ Her eyes filled again. ‘I can’t bear to think he had that hanging over him, and didn’t tell me. He was too much of a gentleman to put something like that on me. Always wanted to protect me. But I could have taken it. I might have helped him.’

Slider handed over more napkins and said, ‘Are you sure he never said anything about where he went in Suffolk? Or why he went? The name of the hospital. Did he mention a town? Or tell you about his journey? You know – “there were roadworks on the A45”, or “the traffic was terrible through Saffron Walden”. Anything like that?’

‘No. He didn’t talk about driving or traffic or dull stuff like that.’

Definitely a man in a million, Slider thought. Where two or three men are gathered together, there shall routes be discussed. How could any red-blooded male drive regularly to Suffolk and never so much as mention the