‘One of the things we hoped you might be able to tell us,’ Slider said, sidestepping the car crash thing, ‘was, who is his next of kin? He seems to have been living alone. Did he remarry after your divorce?’
‘Neither of us remarried,’ she said, a little absently, surveying some inner landscape.
‘So you did keep in touch with him,’ Slider said. She looked up sharply. ‘If you knew he hadn’t remarried, you must have had some contact with him.’
‘We sent birthday and Christmas cards. And occasionally we spoke on the phone – about once a year. He would have told me if he was getting married. But that’s all. I haven’t seen him in years, and I know nothing about his present life.’
‘Are his parents alive?’ Slider asked, pursuing the next-of-kin line.
‘No. His father died in nineteen-eighty-eight and his mother in ninety-four. They were quite elderly when they had him.’
‘Brothers and sisters?’
‘He was an only child. And his parents were only children as well. He had a quite remarkable lack of relatives. It made his side of the church look very empty at our wedding.’
An extraneous comment! Slider was glad of this evidence of softening. ‘At Holy Cross?’ he suggested beguilingly.
‘You know Sarratt?’ she asked, but not warmly – almost suspiciously, as if she suspected he was sucking up to her.
Which he was, of course, though she wasn’t supposed to know it. ‘I know that part of the world. It’s a lovely church. And you and David didn’t have any children?’ Somehow he knew that: there was nothing maternal about her shape or her manner.
‘No,’ she said shortly, and in such a voice that it was impossible to pursue the subject.
‘Then it looks as though you are the nearest thing he had to next of kin,’ Slider concluded.
‘I am his ex-wife,’ she reminded him again, sharply. ‘I am not responsible for anything to do with him.’
‘Not legally, of course,’ Slider said, as though there was another kind of responsibility. She eyed him and opened her mouth to retort but he got in first – soothingly. ‘I was just wondering whether there was anyone else who needed to be told about his death.’
‘And you were wondering who’s going to pay for the funeral, I suppose,’ she suggested tartly.
‘Oh, I dare say there’ll be enough in his estate to cover that. He seems to have been living in comfort.’
This seemed to interest her. ‘You’ve found money?’
‘I didn’t mean that – just that his style of living suggests he was comfortably-off.’
She looked down at her hands and then up again. ‘I thought perhaps he had got into financial trouble and committed suicide.’
‘It wasn’t suicide,’ Slider said.
She surveyed his face keenly. ‘You’re sure of that? David wasn’t a very – resolute person. Liable to look for the easy way out when things – set him back. Not a striver against misfortune.’
Why was she keen to sell them on suicide, Slider wondered. ‘He didn’t kill himself,’ he said.
‘Sometimes these things can be made to look like an accident,’ she said, and then hurried on, as though she had come to a decision. ‘You needn’t worry about the funeral. I’ll make all the arrangements, if that helps. I don’t suppose there’s anyone else who—’
‘Cares for him?’ he suggested gently.
‘I don’t care for him,’ she said. ‘I did once, but that was a long time ago. However, there is such a thing as common decency.’
She hadn’t looked at Atherton since they’d sat down. She had forgotten him. And he could see she was ready to talk to Slider. He wondered again how Slider did it. Animal magic – pheromones – mesmerism? Something.
‘He was an attractive man,’ Slider suggested.
‘You don’t know how attractive.’ She stopped abruptly as something occurred to her. ‘You haven’t said yet how he died. Was it a car crash?’
Slider held her eyes. They were not blue, as he had first thought, but greenish-grey. Unusual, but not very – what was the word? – sympathique, in the French sense. Better suited to expressing froideur than warmth. ‘I’m sorry to tell you that he was murdered.’
For the first time she lost her composure. Colour drained from her face, and she looked suddenly older. Her lips rehearsed some words she didn’t speak. At last she got a grip. ‘How can you be sure?’
‘He was shot in the back of the head,’ Slider said.
The words were as brutal as the shot itself.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, staring at him as if he had slapped her. She put both her hands to her mouth. But evidently her mind was still working. After a moment she said from behind them, ‘Was it over some woman?’
‘That’s what we have to find out,’ Slider said, ‘and it means going into his background, which is why I hoped you would be able to help us. The more we know about him, the better chance we have of finding who did this.’
‘There’ll be a woman at the bottom of it,’ she said, and now there was a hint of bitterness in her tone. ‘There always was. That’s what killed our marriage – women. He couldn’t resist them. And they couldn’t resist him. To some extent he wasn’t to blame. They threw themselves at him. He was so handsome, so charming. He had a way of making you feel you were the only person in the world who mattered. And of course it was sincere – at the time. It took me years to understand that. He wasn’t pretending. It was just that he made every woman feel like that.’
‘It must have been a useful thing for a doctor.’
She didn’t take it amiss. ‘Yes. The ultimate bedside manner. He ought to have been a psychiatrist. Or even a dentist. Women would have flocked to him.’
‘What was his field?’
She seemed slightly put out by the question. ‘Urology,’ she said flatly.
‘Not glamorous,’ Slider sympathized. But lucrative – and more male patients than female, he reflected. She should have been glad about that. ‘Was he ambitious?’ he asked. ‘I suppose he must have been to get as far as he did. He came from quite humble beginnings, didn’t he?’
She studied him a moment, as if to weigh the implications of his question, and then, oddly, glanced at Atherton. He took the cue. ‘On his birth certificate, it said his father was an insurance clerk.’
She nodded, as if that explained it. ‘He grew up in a terraced workman’s cottage. Two up, two down. He used to make jokes about D.H. Lawrence, but it wasn’t quite that bad. Greasely’s quite a pretty, country place. And his parents were respectable working people, very keen for him to get on. He went to the grammar school, and got a grant to go to university. Which is where I met him.’
Slider had not pictured her a student; and he became aware that he had noticed subliminally that there was not a single book on display in the immaculate sitting-room. On the shelves in the chimney alcove there were only ornaments. ‘Which one?’ he asked.
‘Edinburgh. He wanted to go to London but couldn’t get in. I chose Edinburgh to get as far away from home as possible. So we were both rather lost sheep.’
‘What did you study?’ Atherton asked, mainly to keep her going, but also out of curiosity. He couldn’t see her as a scholar, either.
‘Philosophy,’ she said, surprising them both. English – the easy option – was what they would have betted. ‘Daddy said it was a waste of time, because it couldn’t lead to a career. And Mummy didn’t want me to have a career anyway, so she didn’t want me to go to university at all. Least of all Edinburgh. She was afraid I’d meet someone unsuitable there. Which I did, in her sense. So they were both right.’