Body Line

‘Good, very good,’ said Slider. ‘Now, when you saw him by the bedroom door, just the shape of him, how tall do you think he was?’

‘I dunno. I think he was tall. And, like, big. In the shoulders, I mean.’ She paused, thinking. ‘And when he was walking away down the road, he had a dark top on, like a bomber jacket. And dark hair.’

‘You’ve done very well,’ Slider said. ‘You’ve helped us a lot. And you were very brave.’

She accepted the praise this time without pleasure. She looked at him blankly out of a blank face. ‘It doesn’t make any difference,’ she said. ‘David’s dead. I never knew anyone get killed before. Especially not like that. I can’t get my head round it.’

‘You couldn’t have helped him,’ Slider said.

The pills must have been wearing off: tears began to gather in her eyes. ‘But who would do a thing like that? I mean, he’s a doctor. Who would kill a doctor?’

‘That’s what we mean to find out,’ Slider said.

‘I’m surprised at her resourcefulness,’ Slider said, when they were outside again in the chilly sunshine. ‘I imagine most people would have panicked and run into the bathroom and been trapped, but she managed to think her way through that, despite being afraid for her life.’

‘Fair play to her,’ Connolly said. ‘She was dumb enough about dating the doctor. Sex twice a week for the price of a meal! And phony promises to help her career. Holy God, she’d want to cop on to herself. Can you imagine her an actress?’

‘Stranger things have happened.’

‘Like?’

‘Who would have bet ballroom dancing would become top-billing TV?’

‘Oh, right. I’ll give you that one.’

‘But given that she’d only know him a few weeks, we can’t discount the possibility that she’s a plant—’

‘Yeah, from the neck up!’

‘—or an accomplice. That she knows more about the killing than she’s saying. She came across as genuine, but we’ll need to investigate her enough to cross her off. Since you liked her so much, I’ll put you on to that.’

‘Thanks, boss,’ Connolly said, with commendable restraint.

‘And we can’t discount that it was a crime of passion.’

‘It sounds more like a hit man.’

‘Disgruntled spouses and lovers have been known to hire them. And actually,’ he corrected himself, ‘we don’t know that it was a hit man.’

‘A gun with a silencer?’

‘But we only have Miss Aude’s word for the silencer.’

‘Wouldn’t the next-doors have heard if it wasn’t silenced?’

‘They’re solidly built, those houses. And you said the Firmans were deaf.’

‘Deaf-ish,’ she qualified, for the sake of the theory.

‘Besides, it’s astonishing,’ he concluded from the depth of a long experience, ‘what people don’t see and hear, even when it’s under their eyes and ears.’

Porson was surging restlessly about his office, like an electron searching for its nucleus. Given the amount of motion relative to the observer, you’d have expected him to generate a magnetic field.

‘So we’re looking for a tall bloke with dark hair, and that’s it? Talk about a needle in a woodpile! You’re looking for the weapon?’

‘Dustbins and front gardens. But I doubt we’ll find it. From the sound of it the killer was very calm and collected, so he’s not likely to have chucked the gun away in a panic.’

‘Probably a rental, anyway,’ Porson grunted. ‘I hate gun crime.’

‘I don’t think going after the man or the gun will yield anything,’ Slider said. ‘We know the victim knew the killer—’

‘We do?’ Porson said sharply.

‘Why else would he have let him in?’

‘Any number of reasons,’ Porson said, though he didn’t offer any. ‘I don’t like to see you jumping to collusions. All the same,’ he added after a beat, ‘you’re probably right. Which raises some interesting questions.’

Yes,’ said Slider. ‘It looks like a professional hit, but if he knew the killer, either he has some strange friends—’

‘Or some friendly enemies. What about this girl – the witness?’

‘I don’t think she was in on it. She seems genuinely shaken up, and her injuries are reassuringly slight. If she was involved, I’d have expected her to have been tied up, or roughed up, to establish her innocence. As it is, her story is quirky enough to sound genuine. And she seems really scared the killer will come back for her.’

‘But he didn’t know she was there,’ Porson objected.

‘I know. But he soon will. Even if she doesn’t talk—’

‘Which she will. They always do.’

‘—there’s the old couple, the Firmans. The press are going to be doorstepping them and we can’t gag them. I’ve persuaded the hospital to keep Aude in until tomorrow, so that gives us time to do a quick check on her background. After that . . .’

Porson nodded, thinking. ‘Try and persuade her to go away somewhere for a few days – parents, old aunty, whatever – and not tell anyone where she’s going. I don’t think she’s in that much danger. If she’d seen chummy’s face it’d be different, but if he’s professional he won’t risk offing a witness who only saw his boots. So, what’s your strategy visa vee the investigation?’

‘As you say, we can’t follow up the man or the weapon, so we’ve got to find out who wanted Rogers dead. That divides into the usual categories—’

‘Sex and money. My bet’s on money. It smells of money to me, and this –’ he tapped his considerable beak – ‘doesn’t often let me down. And he was getting through it all right. Clubs, champagne, big house, fancy suits.’

‘All the usual suspects,’ said Slider. ‘It’s never hard to find out where it goes. It’s where it comes from we don’t know.’

Porson actually paused in his astonishment. ‘He was a doctor,’ he said. ‘Blimey, even GPs trouser a hundred and fifty kay these days! Never mind specialists. There was an article in the Sunday paper about these society gynaechiatrists making two and three million a year.’

‘Well, no doubt we’ll find out when his papers come over,’ Slider said.

‘And who gets it now he’s snuffed it. Was he married?’

‘That seems to be a moot point.’

‘Well un-moot it then, quick as you like,’ Porson barked. ‘What are you hanging around here gossiping with me for?’

Atherton sauntered into Slider’s office whistling ‘I’ve got plenty of nuthin’.

‘If that’s your shorthand way of making a report,’ Slider began.

‘So far, nobody heard anything, nobody saw anything, and Rogers seems to have been a sweet old-fashioned type who did not have CCTV to back up his burglar alarm.’ He sat down in his usual spot on the windowsill. ‘My internal gypsy seer predicts we won’t find the shooter, so what now?’

‘We have to go round the back way. Up Motive Alley. As Mr Porson neatly summed it up, it comes down to sex or money.’

‘Which are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories.’

‘Sex seems the least likely. There doesn’t seem to have been a wife on site, and a disgruntled lover doesn’t usually hire a hit man.’

‘Unless the hit man was the disgruntled lover.’

‘Don’t get clever.’

‘Too late. And what about revenge? Best eaten cold, as we’re told. That fits in with a hit man. Furious wife brooding over her wrongs, slowly coming to the conclusion that the man’s a wart and the world would be better off without him? Especially if there’s an inheritance involved.’

‘There was no attempt to make it look like an accident or suicide,’ Slider pointed out. ‘Killing him to inherit his money wouldn’t work if the killing was traced back to the legatee.’

‘Big if. I’m just saying don’t rule out sex, especially as the Dirty Doctor seemed to