Body Line

Army and Navy roundabout, necessity of avoiding, the Thetford bypass, difference made by, or the little-known short cut that shaved ten minutes off the Royston to Bury leg?

He changed tack. ‘You said you met him at the office. Did he often call in?’

‘No, I think I’ve only seen him there three or four times since we opened. I suppose she scared him off. But he rang her up sometimes. Nora answered the phone and put the calls through to Amanda, and I’d hear her say, “It’s David Rogers for you.”’

‘How often?’

‘Oh, not often. It’d be once a month or less – except this last few weeks. Then it was a couple of times a week.’

‘You didn’t ever hear anything that was said?’ Slider asked without hope.

She shook her head. ‘They weren’t long calls, and you could tell they made her mad, because she’d slam the phone down, and once I went in with some typing straight after and she had a face like thunder for a second before she hid it. I thought maybe he was trying to soften her up for him and me moving in together. But maybe—’ She looked at them with pitiful and failing hope. ‘I suppose it probably wasn’t that? I suppose it was this trouble he was in?’ Slider didn’t answer. ‘But why would he talk to her about it and not me about it? I thought he loved me.’

‘That was a sickening spectacle,’ Atherton commented when they were alone again, heading back for the car.

‘I like liver sausage,’ Slider said. ‘And no one asked you to watch me eat it.’

‘No, I was talking about that apparently normally intelligent woman deluding herself that a once or twice a week no-strings-attached bonk equates to true love and a happy-ever-after settlement. She didn’t even know where the man worked or what he did, for crying out loud! She’d never met any of his friends, never been to his house, and when he said he wanted their relationship kept secret she went along with it. What a complete and utter pap- brained loser!’

‘Don’t sugar-coat it,’ Slider advised. ‘Say what you really mean.’

Atherton enumerated on his long fingers. ‘So we know Amanda was talking to Rogers. That whatever it was was making her angry. That he had been worried about something lately. And then there’s this Suffolk business.’

‘Does it occur to you that Suffolk might just have been his excuse not to stay the night?’

‘Did it occur to you? What an unkind thought.’

‘On the other hand, if it was an excuse, why Suffolk? It seems a bizarre choice. He could have made it somewhere much further away, to be on the safe side. Or at least more exotic, to impress her. Catching a plane to Brussels, say – got to be at the airport at the crack, got to go home and pack a bag.’

‘And what about all this apocalyptic stuff? Big decision to make and everything could change?’

‘It sounds to me as if he was planning to dump her.’

‘Yes, that’s what I thought, too. Some rough beast of a big excuse was slouching towards Acton to be born.’

‘On the other hand, he did end up dead,’ Slider said, ‘so there could have been something going on. I’m inclined to think Suffolk might be genuine, just because it sounds so dopey as an excuse.’

‘But what was he going there for?’ Atherton asked. ‘On evidence so far, it was probably only another woman.’

As they came in from the yard, Nicholls popped his head out from the front shop. ‘Oh, Bill’

‘Nutty’ Nicholls, the handsome Scot with the lustrous accent from the far north-west, was one of the uniformed sergeants. He had a much-loved wife and a large family of daughters, which gave him a certain vibe that had every female he encountered wanting to nestle against his heart and tell him things. He also had a fine voice and was a leading light of the Hammersmith Police Players. His singing range was so wide that, in their latest production for charity, he had just been chosen to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, because he could sing it better than any of the female members. That he accepted the part was a sign of his confidence in himself. Not every man was so comfortable in his sexuality he could wear a pinafore dress and a long-blonde-plaits wig when there was any chance of colleagues seeing him. The Players only did four performances and the whole run was already a sell-out. O’Flaherty, another sergeant and Slider’s old friend, had assured him that he’d heard Nutty sing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ in rehearsal and ‘it had me heart scalded, so it did’.

They paused, and Atherton said, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’

Nutty was un-phased. ‘Mock away. My back’s broad.’

‘But I hear you have a tiny waist.’

‘What is it, Nutty?’ Slider intervened.

‘At last, a sensible man. I will talk to you,’ said Nicholls. ‘There’s someone waiting to see you.’

‘To do with the Rogers case?’

‘Name of Frith, if that means anything to you. I put him in Interview One. I gave him tea and biscuits, but he looked at me like Bambi’s mother, so I think you should see him before he finishes the Hobnobs, or he might leap away into the forest.’

‘Is that your next production?’ Atherton asked with feigned interest.

‘We’re saving a part for you,’ Nutty assured him seriously. ‘You would do very well as Thumper. It is typecasting, really.’

Frith was on his feet when they went into the room, like someone just making up his mind to leave. Slider could smell the sweat through the aftershave – the new sweat of fear, must be, since it was not particularly warm out today, and the interview room, whose radiator hadn’t worked in weeks, was positively cool.

He looked sharply at Slider and Atherton, and said, ‘You’re the people who came to the house, to tell Amanda.’ It was not clear whether he thought that was a good or a bad thing.

‘Detective Inspector Slider and Detective Sergeant Atherton,’ Slider reintroduced them. ‘Won’t you sit down, Mr Frith. You wanted to speak to me?’

He sat, but only on the edge of the chair, as if retaining the right to leave at any moment. His eyes tracked from one of them to the other, and they were so large, and with such long lashes, that had they been dark instead of blue, Slider might have thought Nutty’s comparison valid. But Frith was a big man, bigger up close, and particularly in this confined space, than he had seemed out in the high-ceilinged hall of Amanda’s house: not especially tall, but muscular, and his face was lean and firm, and his shoulders were big, and his hands looked powerful. No, on second thoughts, there was nothing cervine about him. If he was nervous, it would not lead him to panic. He had twice won Badminton, and Slider knew enough about riding to know controlling half a ton of horse at speed over the toughest course in the world was not an option for the weak-minded or panicky.

Frith opened the campaign by attack. ‘You’ve been asking questions about me,’ he said. ‘And I’m guessing that the woman who’s been quizzing my staff and buying them drinks is one of yours. Sarratt is a small village, and in villages word gets round pretty quickly. So before you completely ruin my reputation and my business, I want to know what you mean by it.’

Slider drove the ball straight back down the wicket. ‘In the course of a murder investigation, many people are asked many questions. Why should it bother you?’

‘You asked my groom where I was on the morning David Rogers was murdered. That’s not just any question. That’s asking for an alibi, and that must mean you suspect me of something.’

‘Innocent people don’t need alibis,’ he said blandly.

‘Exactly,’ said Frith with some triumph.

‘Innocent people also don’t tell lies to the police.’ Which was not true, of course: people lied to the police all the time, about everything, for no apparent reason, or for reasons so inadequate as to make them seem like perfect imbeciles. But as Frith seemed to want to do a bit of verbal fencing, Slider obliged him, and was gratified to see him redden – whether with anger or shame he didn’t know, but at least it was discomfort.

‘I haven’t lied to you,’ Frith said, his voice hard. ‘In fact, as far as I am aware I haven’t been asked any questions, so how could I?’

‘You haven’t lied to me,’ Slider agreed amiably, ‘but you have lied about your whereabouts on Monday morning. You told your staff you were going to Archers, the feed merchant, but you weren’t there. Which means you were missing all of Monday morning, a time we are naturally interested in. So if your presence here means you have decided to come clean—’

‘Come clean?’ Frith said indignantly. ‘I’ve got nothing to come clean about! Now look, I don’t like your tone