‘There isn’t much yet. No forcible entry, no ransacking. Deceased killed with a single blow to the head, pockets emptied and watch removed. I think it’s meant to look like robbery from the person.’
‘Only it’s not?’
‘Of course, it could be. We haven’t had a chance yet to see if there’s anything else missing.’
‘But this bloke moved in high places, probably pissed off some arsey people, and it could be a hit?’
‘Yes, sir. There are things about it that don’t sit right with me.’
Porson looked thoughtful. He knew Slider’s instincts by now and trusted him. ‘We’ll go with motiveless robbery for the time being. Keep anything else out of the news as long as we can. I’ll tell Mr Palfreyman. The last thing we want is a rabid pack of journos peculating about conspiracies.’
Peculating was a good word for it, considering Porson’s view of the honesty of the press. ‘It’ll make life easier if we can keep it at that, sir,’ Slider said.
‘Oh, I think Mr Palfreyman will see it our way,’ said Porson. ‘Going back to the factory?’
‘If I can run the gauntlet out there.’
‘Just ignore them. Don’t say anything. That’s an order. And tell your firm not to speak to anyone. No comment all the way, if anyone asks.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Meanwhile, you’d better get digging, see what dirt you can turn up. There should be plenty. This Stonax bloke wasn’t exactly a parody of virtue.’
It was Porson’s way, in his energetic passage through life, to take a wild swing at vocabulary, hit or miss, to get his meaning across. Like the famed chemist of old, he dispensed with accuracy.
Two
No Folk Without Mire
Outside, Slider put his head down and scuttled for his car, blocking out the shouted questions, ignoring the eyes and open mouths massed around the barrier tape, keeping his head turned away from the rattlesnake clicking of cameras. As he reached his car and opened the door, something he saw across its roof caught his attention, but in such a subliminal way that when he looked properly, he could not see what it was. But it reminded him of the black Ford Focus again, and he made a mental note to get one of the firm to run the number plate he had taken down.
He drove off, was let out of the roadblock, and turned on to King Street. A few minutes later his mobile rang.
He flipped it open. ‘Slider,’ he said.
‘Don’t you know it’s illegal to answer the phone while you’re driving?’ said a voice. A male voice, vaguely familiar, precise, accentless. The words were spoken not as a pleasantry but with – as far as one sentence could reveal this – a kind of menace.
‘Who is that?’ Slider said.
‘Oh, you know who it is. You haven’t forgotten me, surely, Inspector Plod? The last time we met I told you you’d regret meddling in my business.’
He knew it now. ‘Bates,’ he said.
‘Mr Bates to you. Don’t forget you’re a public servant and I pay your wages.’
Trevor Bates, alias The Needle. Wealthy businessman, property dealer, electronics expert, murderer of a prostitute called Susie Mabbot. He had stuck her full of acupuncture needles (his fetish), broken her neck and thrown her in the Thames. Slider suspected him of commissioning, if not actually committing with his own hands, other murders, and who knew what else besides? Slider had been in on the capture of The Needle, helping to trap him in his hotel room at a conference, for which Bates had vowed revenge. Slider had heeded it as little as the idle wind at the time; but Bates had not remained long in custody. He had never even gone to trial. While he was being moved to the maximum security remand facility at Woodhill, the security van was held up and he was sprung. He had been missing for over a month now, not seen or heard of by anyone in authority. Until now.
‘How did you get this number?’ Slider asked.
Bates laughed. ‘Oh, come, Mr Plod. A man of my stature? I can find out anything I want to know. I know all about you. I know where you live.’
‘What do you want?’ Slider asked, striving to sound untroubled, though he was thinking of Joanna. He had been threatened before, many times, and he knew most threats were simply made to aggrandise the threatener. They were never carried out. But Bates was not quite in that class. He was intellectual, cold-blooded, and pathologically vain. He might just mean it.
‘You know what I want,’ Bates said. ‘To make you regret messing with me. And you will, I promise you.’
‘You’re talking like a bad movie,’ Slider said, taking furtive looks around him in his rear-view and wing mirrors. If the man knew he was answering while driving, he might be somewhere near, following him. There seemed to be a lot of background noise to the call but he couldn’t identify it as anything in particular. It could have been a call made from a car. Slider thought at once of the black Focus. He couldn’t see one anywhere, but it might have dropped back too far to spot. Or Bates might have changed to another car. He had been fabulously rich in more than one country, so it was possible that not all his assets had been seized, and he certainly had the know-how to mount secret-service type surveillance. ‘Every policeman in the country is looking for you,’ Slider said. ‘You’ll be back inside any time now.’
‘Don’t you know I have friends in high places? Very high places, Mr Plod. You’ll be wanting to try to trace this call, so I shall ring off now, but we’ll talk again soon. Or I may pop in and visit you. How would you like that?’
He was gone before Slider could say anything more. He knows, of course, Slider thought, how long it takes to do a trace. All that kind of thing was nursery stuff to Bates – electronics was his field; he had provided listening services to the CIA in London. But wait a minute, if Bates knew he was talking to Slider’s mobile, he must know that calls to and from a mobile are all logged automatically, so why had he said that?
Just to sow confusion and fear, he answered himself. Blast the man, popping up at a time like this, when he was going to have his hands full with Stonax. An unwelcome distraction, to say the least. And there was Joanna . . . He was glad she was not at home today – though of course she’d be coming back. Was the threat serious? He thought of Susie Mabbot and shuddered. No, The Needle wasn’t as mad as that, surely? It was out of all proportion to Slider’s puny role in capturing him. There had been a dozen people there, and the operation had been run by Chief Superintendent Ormerod of the Serious Organised Crime Liaison Group. Ormerod was Bates’s nemesis, surely? He was the one who ought to be being threatened. Unless it was simply Slider’s lowliness that offended him: all right to be pursued by top-ranking brass, but not to be toppled by a dog-eared inspector.
He’d report it to Porson, of course, when he got in, and Porson would hand it further up the line. Probably Bates was the responsibility of the Serious Organised Crime mob now – SOCA – and Ormerod, who had moved on and up to be head of another group of initials under the same umbrella, would no doubt be itching to nail the sod who’d slipped his grasp.
Anyway, it was not his problem. And he had his own work to do. He shoved the whole mess firmly to the back of his mind, with the final thought that his old instincts had – probably – been right. He had – probably – been being followed.
Back at the factory, he met Atherton on the stairs. ‘Where’s the daughter?’ he asked briskly.
‘In the soft room,’ Atherton said. That was what he called the ‘interview suite’, refusing to use the official title because, he said, a suite had to have more than one room to it. The others frequently mocked Atherton’s pickiness, but often, as in this case, his verbal amendments stuck. Everyone now called it the soft room. It was, in fact, simply an interview room, but unlike the ones downstairs it was meant to be reassuring for witnesses in a delicate mental state. It had carpet, sofa and chairs, and pictures on the walls so bland they could have been used to dilute water. Also it didn’t smell of feet and imperfectly expunged vomit, which was a great plus all round.