Blood Never Dies (3 page)

‘Oh, say, six to twelve hours, very roughly. Can’t be exact, as you know, but probably you’re looking at an evening bath rather than a morning one.’ He rolled back the eyelids. ‘Ah, now, you see – pupils much dilated. I think our friend here took some kind of narcotic before jumping in. That might explain the lack of struggle, if it were murder – send him to sleep and then dispatch him. Very efficient.’

‘Unfortunately, that also fits in with suicide,’ Slider said. ‘Suicides are notorious for the belt-and-braces approach. Will you be able to tell what he took, given that most of his blood is now mingled with twenty gallons of bath water?’

‘Oh, we’ll work something out,’ Cameron said airily. ‘Based on the total volume, calculations can be made. There may be traces in the tissue or residue in the stomach, depending on how quickly he died. The pathology will be clear, anyway. If it was a large dose, there would be oedema in the brain cells, the heart sac, congestion in the lungs. Leave it to the experts, old thing, and don’t worry your little head about it.’

‘Right. I’ll go away and worry about something else.’

The forensic team – what Slider’s firm called the circus – were in, like vengeful ghosts in white coveralls, masks, mob caps and slippers, and the photographer with both still and video cameras. Bob Bailey, the Crime Scene Manager, tutting over Botev’s unfettered presence before the shout, had already taken the fingerprints and a buccal swab from the indignant owner before he was hauled off to the station to make his statement. ‘God knows what he’s touched,’ Bailey grumbled.

The first thing they discovered was that the tidiness was not just skin deep. In the main room the wardrobe contained some jeans and chinos, a pair of leather trousers, a couple of jackets, the drawers a few T-shirts and underwear. There was some food in the fridge: cheese, bread, a vacuum pack of four apples, half a lemon, several cans of beer, some bottles of mineral water, a bottle of vodka, and some small cans of tonic. Otherwise, there were no signs of life at all. The cutlery and crockery had all been washed and put away. The kitchen surfaces were clean, and the bin under the sink was empty, with a clean bin-liner in it.

What was even more suspicious was that there were no personal papers anywhere, and nothing by which to identify the occupant: no wallet, no credit cards or driving licence, and no mobile phone. Yet there was a watch in one of the drawers in the small two-drawer cabinet at the end of the sofa that presumably served as bedside cabinet. It was quite a nice watch – not super-expensive, but a Tissot Chronograph probably worth about two-fifty, which suggested that the absence of the wallet was not simple robbery. It suggested,
au contraire
, that the murderer – if it was murder – had gone to some trouble to remove all traces of who the victim was; which further suggested that they would have taken care to leave no trace of themselves.

Bob Bailey, dancing on Slider’s heart, said cheerfully, ‘Maybe it was suicide after all. Just a very neat and tidy bloke.’

‘But why would he want to conceal his identity?’

‘To protect the people he’s leaving behind.’

‘Thanks. You’re a great help.’

‘I only said “maybe”.’

When one of Cameron’s assistants appeared just then to say the doc had the body out of the bath and would he like to come, Slider was glad of the distraction.

Lying on the plastic sheet, dripping raspberry syrup like a melting ice-cream treat, the pale body looked even more unnatural. In reality, the corpse was no more a human being than a plastic mannequin in an M&S window was. But unlike the mannequin it once had been. Death was so mysterious, Slider thought, not for the first time. The difference between a human being and a dead body was so profound, it always amazed him that the thing that made the difference, the vital spark, could disappear so instantaneously and completely. You’d think it would at least leave an afterglow of some sort that would fade gradually like the sunset from the sky. But it didn’t. Tick – alive; tock – dead. That was all there was to it. And no going back.

Robin Williams had been young, healthy, with all his life before him. Now he just didn’t exist any more. This object that was left was merely rubbish, something to be disposed of, no good for anything at all; but while it had held that animating spark it had been a thing of beauty, purpose and almost limitless potential. Slider looked at the fit and nicely-muscled frame over which Freddie Cameron was poised, and felt unhappily moved by the awful waste.

Did he kill himself, driven by some huge reversal in his life to come to this meagre flat and end it? And if so, why had he gone to such lengths to conceal his identity? Why should it matter to him after he was dead? But then young suicides, perversely, often did not really believe in their own deaths. They planned them like a piece of theatre with the inchoate idea in the back of the mind that they would be there to see the results, the effect it would have on people. Suicide was the ultimate narcissism. Those driven to it by fear or despair could be just as efficient, even ruthless in carrying out the execution, but it was seldom stylish, and rarely involved concealing their identity – they just didn’t care any longer.

But an accumulation of factors was telling him this was not suicide. And that was an even bigger waste. ‘You’ve got something for me?’ he asked hopefully. ‘I keep veering between suicide and murder like a compass needle in a magnet shop.’

Cameron looked up at Slider over the top of his half glasses. ‘As it happens, I think I
may
have. If you look at the musculature of his arms, you’ll see they’re slightly different from each other. It doesn’t show up on women much, or on bods who work out, but for ordinary folk like thee and me, who have to use brute force occasionally in the course of an average life, the dominant arm develops slightly larger muscles.’

‘Handedness,’ Slider said, in a light-bulb moment.

‘Just so. Of course, you used to be able to tell from the hand itself, in the dear dead days of writing with pens, but no one these days has a writer’s bump on the middle finger. But chappie here’s not very muscular – more your aesthetic type. And I can see he has slightly better biceps on his left arm than on his right. But the cut was to the left jugular, which would not be natural to a left-hander.’

‘But the way he was lying in the bath, with his left side to the wall, would make it a natural cut for a right-handed murderer leaning over him.’

‘Just so. If you can prove that he
was
left-handed, you’re away.’

Slider was already looking in the bathroom cabinet. He emerged triumphantly holding – but carefully with a gloved finger on the head and the tail – an electric razor, a black Phillips Phillishave. ‘Treasure trove,’ he said. ‘I was hoping for shaving tackle but an electric is even better. It’ll give a whole set of prints, thumb at the side of the head, forefinger in the middle at the back, and three fingers and a palm round the grip. If they’re left-hand prints rather than right-hand . . .’

‘You’ll have your proof,’ said Cameron.

Slider stuck his head out of the bathroom door and yelled for Bob Bailey and the portable fingerprinting kit.

T
he house had three storeys plus a semi-basement, and there were two flats to each of the middle floors. Botev had given the names of his other occupants, and Slider discovered why the address had seemed familiar when he was called out: he knew the basement tenants. Mish and Tash – for some reason their names always made him think of an Edwardian music hall conjurer’s act – were prostitutes and had come to police attention on a couple of occasions, though they were generally no trouble. Slider believed in getting working girls on the police side – they could be very useful sources of information – so he had a good relationship with Mish. Tash was a recent addition and he didn’t know her well.

He decided to interview them himself before returning to the station, and found them awake and agog – Michelle perhaps a little more gog than Natasha, but then she was the brighter of the two, and she knew Slider. Tash was still rather wary, and lurked behind her friend’s shoulder like something waiting to be tripped over.

Mish greeted him eagerly – not, he supposed, for his personal charms but for what he might tell them about what was going on – and got the coffee on.

‘I know you don’t like instant,’ she said kindly, ‘but I got some o’ them sashits of the real stuff. I’ll do them.’

They were both bed-haired and smudge-eyed, wearing large towelling bathrobes, one embroidered ‘Sheraton Heathrow’ and the other ‘Crowne Plaza Paris’.

‘It’s this businessman, one of my regulars,’ Tash explained sheepishly. ‘Stays in all the best places. He always brings us something, dun’t he, Mish?’

‘We haven’t had to buy shampoo or conditioner for years,’ Mish agreed.

‘That’s where we got the coffee,’ Tash said. ‘But he eats the chocklit mints,’ she added sadly.

‘So what’s going on upstairs?’ Mish asked. ‘We see Milan go in like a madman this morning, and Nicky from upstairs comes out and says he’s giving Lauren what-for on the stairs, and the next thing you lot start arriving. Then it’s the forensics, and someone said it was him on the top floor. Well, we couldn’t sleep now if we tried, could we Tash?’

‘I could, I’m dead on me feet,’ Tash said. ‘Has something happened to him, then, the top floor?’

It was a pretty sharp deduction, Slider had to give her.

‘It looks as though he’s committed suicide,’ Slider said.

Mish, bringing over his mug of coffee, looked at him sharply. ‘Only looks like?’ she said. ‘Sit down, make yourself comfy. So, what – you think it’s somethink else?’

‘I can’t say at the moment,’ Slider said.

The girls kept their home nice, or as nice as you could with a basement. There was a penetrating smell of damp, which was almost but not quite subdued by the stink of synthetic peaches from the wittily-named ‘room freshener’ plugged in to the wall. There were patches of plaster coming off in some corners and a stain the shape of Australia on the kitchen ceiling. Botev was not the sort of landlord to concern himself about such things. But everything was clean and tidy and with modern furniture from IKEA; it had a bright and homely look. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom and a good-sized kitchen, and since the bedrooms were their places of work, they did all their socializing round the kitchen table, which was where Slider now placed himself, with the girls either side of him, and a plate of biscuits in the middle.

‘What can you tell me about him?’

‘Well,’ said Mish, glancing at her friend, ‘not much. He’s not been here that long. What is it . . .?’

‘Coupla mumfs?’ Tash hazarded.

‘When was it? We see him move in, dint we, Tash?’

‘He come one afternoon. We was just going down the shops and we see him from the window.’

‘So we went out,’ Mish concluded. ‘We thought, “Hello,” we thought, “things are looking up.”’

‘He had on these really tight black jeans and this leather jacket . . .’

‘He was
well
fit,’ Mish confirmed. ‘Couldn’t think what he was coming to a dump like this for.’

‘How did you know he was moving in and not visiting?’

‘Well, Milan’d said he’d let the top floor. We knew it was empty ’cos ol’ Surash, what lived there before, he was a mate, and we knew he’d gone. Moved on to better things. Which is not difficult, let’s face it, after this place. Anyway, Milan was there to give the new bloke the key. We see him waiting on the steps. He come in a taxi, the new bloke. Didn’t have much with him—’

‘Just a suitcase,’ Tash put in. ‘And a sports bag—’

‘And this little telly.’

‘And a carrier with, like, food. And a laptop.’

‘He couldn’t carry ’em all. He asked the taxi driver to help, but
he
wouldn’t, a course.’ She made a sound of disgust.

‘Wouldn’t Mr Botev carry something for him?’ Slider asked, taking a custard cream. Anything to disguise the taste of the coffee.

‘Milan, help? He wouldn’t spit on you if you was on fire. No, he’d gone up ahead, so we went up to help. I said, “Hello, we’re Mish and Tash, we live in the basement. Can we carry something for you?” And he kinds of looks at us a bit startled, and he goes no, no, it’s all right. But I goes, “You can’t leave this stuff lying on the pavement, not if you don’t want it nicked,” so I grabs the telly and takes it up the steps.’

‘And he’s got the suitcase and the laptop so I grabs the carrier and the sports bag.’

‘But when we’re in through the front door into the hall, he gets all determined. He says thanks but he won’t trouble us to climb up all those stairs,’ Mish concluded, ‘and I could see he meant it. So I can see he’s not going to be the friendly type.’

‘I mean, we wasn’t exactly looking our best, was we, Michelle? We was only going down the shops.’

‘But he didn’t want anything to do with us, you could see that. Didn’t even tell us his name. So I thought, “Your loss mate,” and we leave it.’

Slider pondered this and the naff hairstyle versus the good skin and teeth, and came to no conclusion. ‘I wonder what he was doing here,’ he mused aloud.

Mish nodded. ‘You got us. We asked old Botev, but he just said he didn’t know. Didn’t care, more like. You can’t ever get an answer out of him. He wouldn’t tell you the time if you asked him.’

‘Did you see much of him after that?’

They looked at each other again. ‘No, I think we only saw him once or twice after that,’ Mish said, ‘and that wasn’t to speak to. He was going out one evening just as we were coming home, and we kind of crossed on the pavement. I said hello, but he kind of turned his head away and hurried off. You know,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘I can’t help feeling I’d seen him somewhere before, but I can’t put me finger on it.’

‘It was only because he was fit,’ Tash said.

‘No, it wasn’t that,’ Mish said more surely. ‘I just felt I’d seen his face somewhere. Maybe he was famous for something.’ She looked up. ‘I don’t even know his name,’ she said in a moment of realization.

‘Didn’t Mr Botev tell you?’