Blood Never Dies (2 page)

‘I know,’ Slider said. ‘As you say, the whole thing’s too tidy.’ If you were driven so far into despair you decided to end your life, would you really tidy up the flat so completely? What man wouldn’t need a drink before he did the deed? But in the other room there was not even a used glass in view. There were no clothes lying about—

‘There are no clothes lying about,’ Slider said aloud in a eureka tone. ‘Whatever he was wearing before he got into the bath, he put them away.’

Hollis snapped his fingers. ‘That’s what it was,’ he said. ‘I knew there were summat. You might want to die in a nice warm bath, but put y’ clothes away all tidy first?’

‘It’s perfectly possible,’ Slider said. Tidy habits were learned early, and early habits tended to stick. ‘But it’s not likely. I agree with you. It doesn’t look like suicide to me. I’m going to call in the circus.’

Big, Nordic-blonde Eric Renker, who could have starred on a poster for Strength Through Joy, was out on the landing at the head of the stairs, still listening to the landlord. Both of them turned eagerly to Slider as he came back from the bathroom, Renker hoping for relief and the landlord recognizing a more important audience for his troubles.

Renker introduced him. ‘This is Mr Milan Botev, guv. He owns the building.’

Botev was short and swarthy, his head emerging from his shoulders without the bother of a neck: a large, round head with thick, bushy black hair. He had the kind of heavy beard-growth that would necessitate shaving several times a day, and as his face was a contour map of old acne scars, there were little dark outcrops down in the ravines that the razor couldn’t reach. His shoulders were bulked with muscle, and Slider would have bet they were as furry as a bear’s, too; and his hands were like planks. But his feet were small and rubbery, and as he moved on the spot in his annoyance, Slider thought he would probably be swift and silent when it was called for. You wouldn’t hear him coming, until he got you.

‘It was him found the body,’ Renker continued.

‘How did you happen to do that?’ Slider asked.

Botev scowled – though that may have been habitual – and clenched his fists as he spoke. His voice was harsh and his accent was thick. ‘I have telephone call from tenant – she live in flat below this one. She complain that music is too loud – very loud – going on and on. She say she bang on the door and no one comes. So I must come and do something. Ha! I say, nothing to do with me. What am I, your father? But she insist, make fuss, and I must come. So I come, and what do I find? Pah! Bad, bad! I do not like bad things happen in my houses.’

He glared up at Slider as though it were all his fault. Slider guessed that it had been all Renker’s fault for the past fifteen minutes and was sorry for him.

‘So what did you do when you got here?’ Slider asked.

‘I hear the music, yes, very loud. Like party, only no sound of people. So I also knock, knock, and when no one come, I go in and turn it off.’

‘How did you get in?’

‘I have keys,’ Botev said, as though
that
was obvious. He held up and shook a bunch of Yales, each with a different coloured plastic half-moon over the top, and stretched out the luggage label attached to the large ring so that Slider could read the address written on it. ‘This keys this house. I have other house also. Keys all my places.’

‘What time did you enter the flat?’

‘I already tell
him
–’ the spherical property mogul gestured towards towering Renker with what was almost but not quite contempt – ‘it was a little after half past nine. I do not know exactly.’

‘Go on. What did you see?’

‘I see at once the room empty, just like now. No one there. I went over, turn off music. He left it on, maybe, I think, and went out, forgetting. But one time I had tenant who die of heart attack in lavatory, so I think I must go see. I go to bathroom door and there he is, in bath. Bad, bad! So I use mobile and call nine-nine-nine.’

‘Did you go in to the bathroom?’

‘No need. I see from the door he is extremely dead.’

Extremely – yet, that was the right adjective. ‘Was the bathroom exactly as it is now? Did you touch anything or remove anything?’

Botev grew angry again. ‘Nothing, nothing! Do you think I am idiot? Do you think I do not know nothing must be touched at crime scene?’

‘Suicide is not a crime,’ Slider said mildly, wanting his reaction. Though it had not looked quite like a suicide to him or Hollis, it could still be one; and if not, it was obviously
supposed
to look like one.

But Botev said, ‘Sure it is. Kill yourself
big
crime to God, to church. Bad, very bad sin. Make God very angry.’ He shook his massive head in stern condemnation. ‘And besides, it make it hard for me to let flat again, when people know. Give me much trouble, maybe, cost me money.’

Thus morality met commerce with a screech of tyres.

The tenant who had made the complaint was in her own flat below, being interviewed by Rita Connolly, the Dublin DC. Lauren Green had the bright eyes and pale, dry skin of someone who has been up all night, but the events upstairs had banished any trace of sleepiness.

‘Well, I work nights,’ she explained, sitting on her bed so that Connolly could have the single chair, a Victorian-style plush-covered boudoir chair from which she first had to remove a heap of clothes and stuffed toys. The room was smaller than the attic room above, and had a shower-room instead of a bathroom, so compact it could almost have fitted into a wardrobe, and more or less did; and the kitchen consisted of a sink and double gas ring, disguised by a bamboo folding screen. But unlike its upstairs rival it was filled to suffocation point with the owner’s possessions, clothes, ornaments, magazines, and a multitude of cuddly toys. Every inch of wall was covered in pictures, cut out of magazines and home framed, the frames decorated with seashells, sequins, little cut-out hearts and flowers, beads, feathers. Silk scarves were draped from corner to corner of the ceiling in rainbow stripes, the central lampshade was crimson silk with long fringes and sported a plume of feathers the Prince of Wales must have been missing, and there were so many ferns and trailing plants suspended in front of the window, the room lurked in adumbrous obscurity like a cave at the bottom of the sea.

‘I like things nice,’ Ms Green had said in response to Connolly’s first recoiling stare. There was a burnt herbal smell, too, that made Connolly suspicious; but after a moment she decided on probabilities that it was joss sticks, not ganja. She would have betted that Lauren Green was a bath-with-scented-candles type, too, had she but possessed a bath.

‘What do you do, so?’ Connolly asked, opening her notebook. The morning light filtering through plants and coloured scarves made everything appear to move gently like seaweed. She would have to make notes by feel.

‘I work at Sarges in Poland Street – you know, in Soho?’

Lauren Green was youngish, in her twenties, Connolly guessed, and though plain in the face had a reasonable body. ‘Stripper?’ she enquired automatically.

‘I’m a waitress,’ Lauren replied, with faint affront. ‘Just because it’s in Soho . . . The pay’s better than round here.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean anything,’ Connolly said. ‘I just thought you’d a grand figure.’

She was instantly placated. ‘Oh. Well, dashing around serving keeps you fit.’

‘Tell me about this morning. What time’d you get home?’

‘Well, after we closed and cleared up, I stopped off for breakfast with one of the others – Jez, he’s bar staff as well – he’s gay, he’s my best mate. He’s a real laugh. We often have breakfast together. Well, I don’t like to cook here, because the smells get into everything, and I like things nice. So it must have been about half seven when I got home. And coming up the stairs I could hear the music. But in here it was the worst because it must have been right above me.’

‘Had you had that trouble before?’

‘No, never. Not with this bloke. The one before, Surash, he used to play loud music a lot, but not generally in the morning, and we were mates, so he was good about turning it down if I was trying to sleep. But this new one, well, I don’t really know him. But I’ve never heard a peep from him, only footsteps going across the floor sometimes, you can’t help that in a flat, and now and then a sort of murmur like it might be a telly, but not on loud. Nothing I couldn’t sleep through. I didn’t even know he had any music till this morning, and it was ridiculous, thump thump thump right through the ceiling. So I went up and knocked to ask him to turn it down, but there was no answer. I reckoned he couldn’t hear me through the noise, or he’d fallen asleep, God knows how. I knocked a lot, then I came back here and banged on the ceiling, but nothing. I was at my wits’ end, so I rang the landlord. Well, I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘Mr Botev?’ She nodded. ‘You rang him direct? Isn’t there a letting agent?’

‘Nah, he wouldn’t pay an agent. Sooner keep the money himself. Not that he likes being disturbed, he lets you know that all right, but he gives you his number when you first come, in case of trouble. Like I had water through my ceiling once when Surash left the bath running and went out. Well, he come and turned the taps off, but it was months before I could get him to fix the ceiling. I had this big bald patch and all brown round the edges. I was ringing him every day in the end, so he got a decorator in just to keep me quiet, I reckon. Anyway – what was I saying?’

Connolly could see she was becoming dazed with fatigue. ‘You rang him about the music upstairs.’

‘Oh, yeah. Well, he didn’t want to come – didn’t think it was an emergency. It was an emergency to me all right. I had to sleep. So I said if he didn’t come I’d call the police. That got him out. I heard him coming up the stairs and went to the door, and he give me a filthy look as he went past, and told me what he thought of me, but I can take that. Anyway, he lets himself in and I hear the music go off, so I goes in and shuts me door to get ready for bed. And that’s all I know till the police come and all this starts off. So he topped himself, did he?’

‘It looks that way,’ Connolly said. ‘You say you didn’t know him very well?’

‘Not at all, really. Though Mish downstairs said he was well fit. He’s only been here a few months. I think I’ve only seen him once, when he was coming in the same time as I got home. He held the door for me – the street door – and I followed him up the stairs, and I thought “nice bum”. He didn’t say anything to me, though. I didn’t even know his name.’

‘Apparently it was Robin Williams. Does that mean anything to you?’

‘No–o. Or – wait! Oh, no, I’m thinking of – there’s a film star called Robin Williams, in’t there?’

‘It isn’t him,’ Connolly said drily. ‘Did he ever have visitors, that you know of?’

‘No, but I work most evenings. I never heard anyone up there, or saw anyone. Like I said, I’ve only ever seen him the once.’

And she said it with regret. A well fit, single man living upstairs from you was a resource not to be wasted. Connolly felt she could follow Lauren’s thought processes perfectly, and was proved right when after a pause, she went on, ‘He was probably gay, though. The really buff ones always are.’

Freddie Cameron, the forensic pathologist, for whom the word dapper might have been coined, looked just a trifle less so than usual, though Slider could not immediately put his finger on the area of neglect. In deference to the weather, he was wearing a suit of biscuit-coloured linen, but not even a heatwave could make him neglect the jacket or fall short in the bow-tie area. But there was something slightly frazzled about him, all the same.

‘Everything all right, Freddie?’ Slider asked, cutting to the chase.

Cameron made a
moue
. ‘We’ve got the grandchildren,’ he said, in the sort of way a person might say they had termites. ‘They’ve just got old enough to be dumped on us while Stephen and Louisa go on holiday.’

‘Well – that’s nice, isn’t it?’ Slider said hesitantly.

Cameron rolled his eyes slightly. ‘Of course, we adore little Clemmie and Jasper. It’s not their fault they haven’t been brought up properly. I don’t understand it,’ he added plaintively. ‘We were always quite strict with our two – table manners, please and thank you, don’t interrupt, don’t touch without asking, that sort of thing. So why didn’t they pass it on to their own?’

‘Reaction,’ Slider said. ‘The pendulum will swing back one day.’

‘Not soon enough to save us,’ Freddie mourned. He smoothed back his hair, then felt for his bow tie, something Slider had never seen him do before. Hitherto Freddie had always
known
he was perfectly turned out, even on a Monday morning. ‘I must say I didn’t cover myself with glory this morning,’ he confessed. ‘In the middle of chaos in the kitchen, Martha had a fit of the nobles and said “You get off to work, I can manage.” And I’m ashamed to say I embraced my inner coward and made a run for the door.’

‘I once made a run for a rabbit,’ Slider reflected. ‘When the kids were small.’

‘You’ll get yours, buster,’ Cameron said, narrowing his eyes. ‘The time will come . . .’

‘Not too soon, I hope,’ Slider said. ‘Mine aren’t old enough to mate yet.’

‘Don’t bank on it. Anyway, who have we got here?’

‘The landlord says his name is Robin Williams.’

‘Ah,’ said Freddie. He put on his glasses and advanced to the bathside and studied the body. ‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? Unusual method.’

‘That’s what we thought. Which was partly why we thought it might be murder.’

‘On the other hand, it has its advantages, if you get it right. Rather a peaceful death.’

‘Yes, we noticed there was no splashing. Suggested he didn’t struggle, which was a point for suicide and against murder.’

‘Also it was a vein, not an artery, which takes time – time enough for him to fight back or struggle out of the bath if it was murder,’ Freddie said. He leaned over and felt the face. ‘Rigor just beginning here. Of course, he’s been lying in cold water, which will have delayed the onset.’

‘So when does that put it?’ Slider asked.