Body Line

—’

Slider cut through the bluster. ‘There’s a simple way to resolve this. Just tell me where you were on Monday morning, and there’s an end to it.’

Frith maintained an angry silence, but he was not meeting Slider’s eyes any more. He seemed to be thinking, calculating. Wondering what he could get away with, Atherton thought.

‘Look,’ he said at last – the language of capitulation.

‘I’m looking,’ Slider said when the pause grew to long.

‘All right,’ said Frith, raising his eyes again. ‘I’ll tell you where I was – not that it’s any of your damn business, but I can see this won’t go away otherwise. But I want your word that this doesn’t go any further. That – well, you won’t tell anyone.’

‘Anyone?’

‘Amanda. That you won’t tell Amanda.’ His eyes shifted again. ‘You see, I was with someone. Well, a woman.’

Oh, not that one, Atherton thought wearily. Had he already primed whoever-it-was to back him up, or was he just hoping?

Interesting, Slider thought: it didn’t seem that Amanda had spoken to him yet about their visit this morning. That was a lucky thing. He might be able to get something out of Frith before they compared stories.

‘You’re seeing another woman?’ he said. ‘Who is it?’

Frith was looking both angry and embarrassed now. ‘It’s someone I’ve been seeing for a while. Well, Amanda and I aren’t married. Her decision. She says once bitten twice shy. It’s a bit insulting really – I mean, I’m not David. But I don’t want to go into that. The fact of the matter is that she likes to keep her independence. She has her own job, her own friends. She always says we’re not joined at the hip just because we live together. We’re two separate people. So there’s no earthly reason why I shouldn’t see someone else. The trouble is,’ he concluded with a short sigh, looking down at his big, strong hands, ‘I know she wouldn’t see it that way. We’ve known each other for a long time, and I know her pretty well. If she found out there was another woman she’d go completely bananas. So I’m asking you – very strongly – not to tell her.’

‘You’re having an affair?’ Slider said, hoping to goad him.

‘It’s not an affair,’ Frith said indignantly. ‘I keep telling you, Amanda and I aren’t married. I asked her for the first time when we were both seventeen, and I’ve asked her God knows how many times since. But she went off and married that oaf David. And look where that got her. I could have made her happy, but she decided she wanted that – that obvious bastard. I know he’s dead and all that, but it doesn’t change what he was. And when they separated, it was her came looking for me. I said then I’d marry her when she got divorced and she ummed and ahhed about it, but once the divorce came through she said she didn’t want to risk it again. This whole arrangement is her idea. She wants to keep her options open, just like she did when we were kids, always looking over her shoulder in case something better came along. I’ve actually heard her introduce me as her lodger. I’m just the stopgap. But she likes to keep a firm hold on her possessions, which means that she’s free to look around, but I’m not.’

A lot of anger there, Slider thought with interest. Yet he stayed with her. Was it perhaps that the anger towards her he couldn’t act on had found a displacement activity in anger towards Rogers? Amanda treated him pretty shabbily, if what he was saying was true, and he was obviously hurt and jealous that she had chosen Rogers instead of him. Perhaps at some level he believed that if Rogers was really completely out of the way, i.e. dead, she might finally commit to him? But that would mean a Frith solo murder, not a Frith-effected, Amanda-designed murder. Which did not explain Amanda’s lies and evasions. Or his, Slider’s, conviction that she knew something about it.

‘So let’s get this straight,’ he said. ‘On Monday morning you left home at – what time?’

‘The usual time. I always leave around six. Horses wake up early, and morning stables are the hardest work of the day. There’s always a lot to do.’

‘Around six? Can you be more specific?’

‘Well, not really. I wasn’t watching the clock. But the radio was on in the bedroom when I went in to say goodbye to Amanda – she dozes to it in bed – and they were still doing the news, so it was probably just a few minutes after six.’

‘And you went – where?’

‘Straight to Sue’s house in Ruislip. It wasn’t worth going to the stables first, because she was coming in from Dubai at six fifty-five that morning. She’s a cabin attendant with BA. Well, I got to her place about a quarter to seven and she arrived about eight.’

Atherton pushed pad and pencil across to him. ‘Write down her name, address and telephone number,’ he said.

Frith looked alarmed. ‘You can’t just go and ask her! My God!’

‘You mean she won’t confirm your alibi?’ Atherton said.

‘No, I mean she’s married.’

‘So it is an affair,’ said Slider.

‘Well, if you want to be technical about it,’ Frith said sulkily. ‘It’s hard enough for us as it is, what with her schedule and her husband’s. He’s an exhibition contractor, so he’s away a lot. And we can’t go to my place because I don’t really have a place. I sold my house to buy the stables, and though there’s a flat there I have to let the staff use it and live in Amanda’s house because property’s so expensive out there. So when Sue’s coming back she rings me and if Terry’s going to be away we meet at her house, and if he’s not we go to this hotel. Well, it’s not ideal, but she won’t leave Terry, and in any case I can’t leave Amanda – she’s got so much money tied up in my stables, she’d make me sell up if all this came out, and then I’d be ruined.’ He shook his head as if his life had suddenly passed before his eyes in all its glorious panoply. ‘It’s a mess,’ he muttered.

No argument there, Slider thought. ‘So what it comes down to,’ he summed up, ‘is that your alibi is that you were meeting someone, but you won’t tell us who or where.’

‘I know it sounds stupid,’ he began.

‘At least,’ said Atherton.

Slider pushed his chair back. ‘If you’re adamant you won’t tell us—’

Frith looked apprehensive, but he stuck to it. ‘I can’t.’

‘Then there’s nothing more to say. But I urge you to think carefully about it. Until we can eliminate you from our enquiries you remain a suspect.’

‘But I didn’t do anything!’ Frith protested.

‘You can just help me on one thing.’ Frith looked receptive. ‘You’d known David Rogers for quite some time. What was his connection with Suffolk?’

‘Suffolk?’ said Frith.

‘Yes – it seems he went there regularly. Did he work at a hospital there?’

‘Not that I know of,’ Frith said. ‘But I hadn’t kept up with him, so I don’t really know what he did. Except—’ Something seemed to occur to him. ‘Maybe that was where he kept his boat?’

Slider remembered the photograph in Rogers’s bedroom. ‘He had a boat?’

‘He’d taken up sport fishing in recent years. Bought a boat. Amanda said he was quite a bore about it.’ He shrugged. ‘No worse than golf bores, I suppose. These big consultants all have their rich-man’s hobbies,’ he concluded sourly.

‘You were a bit easy on him,’ Atherton complained to Slider as they trod up the stairs together. ‘The blighter’s taken Amanda’s money and protection, yet he’s banging a trolley dolly behind her back. I almost feel sorry for the Sturgess-type. But you didn’t force him on his alibi. Which in any case isn’t really an alibi,’ he continued, ‘because he says he was alone in his car from just after six until a quarter to seven, and alone in the dolly’s house from a quarter to seven until eight. Virtually two hours unaccounted for. Enough time to drive to Shepherd’s Bush, shoot David Rogers in the head, and drive back to Ruislip.’

‘The killer didn’t drive back to Ruislip. He drove to Stanmore.’

‘Oh, yes. I’d forgotten.’ He thought a bit. ‘But that’s still enough time, out to Stanmore, back to Ruislip, two hours. Easy. And even if it were an alibi, we can’t check it unless he gives us the name and address.’

‘Can’t we?’ Slider said serenely. ‘How many flights from Dubai do BA have that arrived at six fifty-five on