McLaren got out the print taken from the A410 roundabout camera. ‘Seen this man before?’ he asked.
Embry took the print and, while his face had probably never been one designed for showing emotions, and life had only made it less so, McLaren was sure that awareness flicked through it for a split second. Embry recognized the man all right – McLaren was sure of it.
‘Don’t know him,’ Embry said, pushing the print back at him. ‘What’s he done, anyway?’
‘Murder.’
The tight face flinched, and he must have tensed, because the dog was up again and snarling. Embry jerked the chain to shut it up. ‘Bastard,’ he said, but it was not apparent whether he was referring to the dog or not. ‘I don’t know him,’ he said again, ‘but he might have been here. Might have nicked them plates. Like I said, I can’t watch everyone all the time.’
‘But the plates were on the car when you crushed it, so he must’ve brought ’em back. Tidy sort of thief, that.’
‘Look, whadder you want?’ Embry said irritably.
‘A look at your CCTV tapes’ll do for a start.’
‘I told you, they don’t work.’
‘This one does, though,’ McLaren said, pointing upwards. ‘Wouldn’t leave yourself without a bit of backup, not a cautious bloke like you. And chummy here’ll be on it. We need a better picture of him. Give us the tapes, and we may forget about you selling number plates illegal. Or we can shut you down and take ’em anyway. Up to you.’
‘You got nothing on me,’ Embry said scornfully. ‘Stuff gets stolen. Not my fault.’
McLaren leaned forward slightly, fixing Embry with his eyes. ‘You don’t wanner get us interested in you, mate. There’s worse things than number plates to have coming back on you. If we start taking you apart you never know what we’ll find. Be a sensible boy and give us the tapes so we go away happy.’
Hollis came in to Slider’s office with the air of excitement detectives get when they’ve had a breakthrough. His gooseberry eyes were bulging, and he brushed at his terrible moustache with the back of his forefinger as though preparing it for the cameras. Not than anything short of the ultimate sanction would do anything to make that pathetic soup-strainer look any better. Hollis was a nice bloke, Slider often reflected, but he simply had no talent at growing hair.
‘Got him, guv,’ he said. ‘He’s in the records all right.’
‘Rogers?’
‘The Dirty Doctor,’ Hollis said, accepting Atherton’s sobriquet for him. ‘Fingerprints came up positive. It was a while back, though – June 1998. Long story short, he was accused of sexually assaulting a female patient while she was under sedation. Happened at a fancy Harley Street place him and two other doctors were sharing. Had his hand up her skirt. But it never went to court. She settled for compensation and withdrew the charge.’
‘Well, well. The naughty lad,’ Slider said. ‘Freddie was right. He said there was a scandal around Rogers.’
‘I looked up the newspapers from the time, and it did get in, though there weren’t that much, only in the tabloids, and they were big on innuendo and headlines and not much text,’ Hollis said. ‘Which is always the clue they’ve not got much. And it died down pretty quick – I suppose when the woman dropped out.’
But as Freddie had said, when it was one of your own, you noticed.
‘Was he struck off?’
‘I haven’t found that out yet. You know what the General Medical Council are like. I’m trying to get on to someone but they’re not ringing me back.’
‘Keep trying.’
‘Aye, guv. But you know, it could have been a false accusation. Happens all the time. Woman wants to make money, it’s the easiest way.’
Slider nodded. It happened to policemen, too. And rather than have to fight it through the courts, with all the disastrous publicity, establishments tended to prefer to settle.
‘Or she might have made a genuine mistake,’ Slider said. ‘If she was groggy or drifting in and out of consciousness—’
‘Doesn’t look as if the practice put up much of a fight,’ Hollis said, ‘so I reckon there was something in it. Anyway, I’ll keep on at the GMC and try and get to bottom of it. So t’ speak.’
‘Thank you, I’ll do the jokes,’ Slider said. He frowned. ‘June 1998? And the Rogerses were divorced in September 1999. I wonder if this was the proverbial last straw?’
‘Amanda Sturgess never said anything about it, did she?’
‘No,’ said Slider. ‘She did say he had shamed her, but only that he’d had a lot of women. Nothing about his being accused and arrested. I wonder whether that was just natural modesty—’
‘Or she didn’t want you to know she had a bloody good reason to hate him,’ Hollis said, finishing the sentence.
‘But it’s always the same objection,’ Slider concluded with dissatisfaction. ‘Why would she wait all this time if it was revenge she wanted?’
Hollis shrugged. ‘Maybe you need to ask her. Oh, and another thing, guv – it says in the papers Rogers was a plastic surgeon. But we’ve got him down as urology.’
‘That’s what Amanda Sturgess told us,’ said Slider. What with that, the unadmitted telephone calls, and Frith’s lie about his whereabouts on Monday, the Sturgess équipe was definitely due for another visit, Slider thought.
The Sturgess and Beale agency was an office above a travel shop on the Chiswick High Road, more or less opposite the common – a good, central position that would probably command a steepish rent. ‘Although possibly the landlord may give it a favourable rate because it’s a charity,’ Slider said, as Atherton scanned the roadside for somewhere to park.
‘Bless your Pollyanna heart,’ Atherton said. ‘Landlords don’t think like that. They’d have to hand back the badge if they did something kind.’ He saw a space and drew up parallel to the car in front of it. ‘But there’s no reason the agency shouldn’t have wealthy donors. Oh, get off my tail, you halfwit!’ he bellowed into the rear view mirror. ‘Can’t you see I’m parking?’ He jerked a hand out of the window and furiously beckoned past the car that was jammed up behind him. It was a souped-up black Mazda 3 Sport with a driver who looked about fifteen and had his windows wound down so that the whole world could share his CD choice. ‘Get you next time,’ Atherton said. ‘And if I listened to music like that, I wouldn’t want anyone else to know about it.’
They walked back to the travel shop. The door for the upstairs lay between it and the next shop: a genuine old Victorian door that matched the age of the building, handsomely painted in fresh red gloss, with a big brass dead-knob in the centre. There was a brass nameplate on the return of the walclass="underline" Sturgess and Beale Agency, Employment Solutions for the Differently Abled.
‘Classy,’ said Atherton.
Below that was another plate saying: Disabled access and lift to the rear, or please ring for assistance. Below again was the bell, a large brass mounting around a white porcelain button with PRESS enamelled in the centre in black. ‘All right for the press; where do the rest of us ring?’ Atherton complained.
‘I think we’ll just go up,’ Slider said. The door was on the latch and pushed open. Inside was a narrow hallway with green marble-effect lino tiles and a steep staircase going up; the passage went past them right through to a glazed back door and the lift. The walls were painted cream and pale green and there were sunken halogen lights in the ceiling. All very fresh and attractive. They climbed to the first floor, where the lift came out on the landing, and walls had been moved to make manoeuvring room for a wheelchair. The doorways were extra wide, and there were polished wooden handrails everywhere. ‘I bet the lino tiles are non-slip, too,’ Atherton said. ‘They’ve thought of everything.’