Gone Tomorrow (7 page)

Mason examined the label, and snorted. ‘Not Italian, of course! All the world wants Italian this, Italian that. Why? I can’t tell you. Italian food, Italian wine, yes, but when did you ever hear of an Italian tailor? Mean jackets, tight trousers, shoes too narrow –you want to look like a barrow boy? So choose Italian. You want to look like a gentleman …’ He left a space there for his most generous shrug.

‘If not Italian, what is it?’ Atherton asked patiently.

‘American,’ Mason said promptly. ‘The cut, the quality of the stitching. And the name I’ve heard of before.’ He examined the two tiny tags sewn into the seams near the bottom. ‘North-east America. These code numbers you get in New England, stock control. Not for export.’

‘So it was probably bought over there?’

‘Yes, but they sell such things also in PX stores. That’s export as far as we’re concerned, but to an American the PX is United States soil.’

‘I see. Well, thank you. I knew you’d be able to pin it down for me.’

‘Does it help?’ The bright eyes scanned his face keenly.

‘I don’t know that it does,’ Atherton said. Purely in the name of thoroughness he drew out the photographs and showed them to the tailor.

‘He’s dead, nuh?’ Mason said, looking closely at the mugshot. ‘It was him who wore the jacket? No, I don’t know him. And the tattoo – very few people with tattoos come to me. Or at least, not tattoos of that sort.’

‘Ah well, I didn’t think you would know him. Thanks anyway. At least I know he got the jacket from America.’

‘Or maybe an American gave it to him,’ Mason cautioned. ‘In payment for a debt, maybe. He doesn’t look the kind to get birthday presents. And now, from business to pleasure,’ he went on beguilingly, displaying the cloth again. A pair of trousers, what do you say?’

‘That’s business, surely?’

‘To make trousers for you is a pleasure,’ Mason said seriously. ‘I tell you no lie. A pure pleasure, Mr Atherton.’

*  *  *

‘Getting information on this case is like pulling teeth,’ Slider grumbled. ‘Now we know that Lenny lived with Tina, but not where, and no surnames for any of the blasted crew. And an American jacket. Where does that get us?’

‘Nowhere,’ Atherton acknowledged. ‘We don’t know that they were never imported. Or he could have gone on holiday to America and brought it back. People do, all the time.’

‘Or bought it in a pub from an American,’ Norma added. She was leaning against the door-jamb of Slider’s office, her arms folded across her chest like a housewife. Marriage had really changed her, Atherton thought. Any minute now she’d be getting a perm. ‘Or from someone who nicked it from an American –that’s more likely. So what now, boss?’

‘We try and find a tom called Tina,’ said Slider.

‘Needle in haystack time,’ Atherton commented.

‘If this were Ruislip it might be worth investigating a possible American connection, but there are no bases near here,’ Slider sighed.

‘What about the cultural legation or whatever it’s called in Holland Park?’ Swilley said. ‘That’s only just up the road.’

‘Culture?’ Atherton said. A bloke called Unlucky Lenny who lives with a tom?’

‘Maybe he provided a service of some kind. Even an embassy needs cleaners and dustbin men.’

‘That’s very profound, Norma.’

‘All right, you can look into it,’ Slider told Atherton. ‘I don’t suppose it’s anything, but it’s better to leave no stone unturned. Meanwhile, it’s on with the clubs, pubs and especially doorknockers. If Lenny lived on the estate, he must have been someone’s neighbour.’

‘Have you any idea how many flats there are on the estate?’ Norma said with horror.

‘I daresay in a couple of weeks you’ll be able to tell me exactly,’ said Slider.

Porson was sitting down – in itself an unusual thing. His usual torrent of restless energy seemed to have been staunched. He sat at his desk reading, looking grey and old. Even his wig seemed limp and spiritless. Normally Slider’s fascinated fear was that it would go flying off with one of the old boy’s rapid
changes of direction, but today it seemed to huddle close to the bony pate for comfort like a dog sensing disaster. Slider would have liked to ask if he was all right, but sympathy was not a thing you could show to The Syrup.

‘So,’ he said, looking up at last, planting a finger to mark where he had stopped reading. He had big, knuckly hands with an old man’s chalky, ridged nails, but they pinned down the paper firmly, just as, however random his vocabulary, his mind would pin down the facts of an investigation. ‘What have you got?’

‘More reports than a balloon-popping contest,’ Slider said, ‘but nothing to go on yet. We’ve got a first name, but no surname or address. An informant says deceased lived with a prostitute, but we’ve only got a first name for her as well, and of course there’s no knowing it was her real name anyway.’

Porson looked at him steadily from under eyebrows so bushy they always made him appear to be frowning. ‘You know we’re going to be under the microscope from the press with regard to this one? Our own back yard, and et cetera?’

‘We’re doing all we can, sir,’ Slider said.

‘I know, laddie,’ Porson said, unexpectedly kindly. ‘But I think we’d better go public all the same. Can’t do much investigating if you don’t even know who he was, can you?’

‘When, sir?’ Slider said, with a shrug in his voice. Going public was always a two-edged sword. It might bring in information, but it also warned people you might hope to take by surprise; and it spread knowledge of your weakness across the widest audience.

‘Too late today. I’ll talk to Mr Wetherspoon, get something in the morning papers, and arrange an item on the early evening news tomorrow. The local.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What d’you feel about doing it?’ Porson asked unexpectedly.

‘Doing it?’

‘The broadcast. I know we’ve got a press officer, but the journos always want to talk to a warm body. A real copper. Plays better in the one-and-nines.’

‘Me, sir?’ Slider looked his horror. ‘But you always do the broadcasts. I’m not – I’ve never liked cameras.’

Porson looked annoyed. ‘Do you think any of us do it for fun?’

‘I always thought you looked such a natural, sir.’

‘What, seeing myself plastered all over the screen like a blasted Spice Girl? I shake like an aspirin, every damn time! But needs must, laddie. Only this time, what with this cold and—’ He paused. ‘Other considerations – I’m not really up to it. You’ve got a nice, friendly face. You’ll look good on camera. You might find you like it – being the sinecure of all eyes.’

‘Atherton’s a handsome chap—’ Slider tried in a last-ditch defence.

‘No bon. You know it’s got to be a DI or better. No, you’re it, Slider.’

‘Is it an order, sir?’ Slider asked.

‘No, it’s not an order, it’s a request,’ Porson said, growing impatient. ‘But if you refuse a perfectly reasonable request from your senior officer, I’ll have to make it an order, won’t I?’

‘In that case, I’ll do it,’ Slider said glumly. As long as I know where I stand. I never craved the limelight, the fierce doo-dah that beats upon the thingummy, but if that’s the way the runes fall, it is a far, far better thing and so on. Joanna always said he ought to go on the box; and the children would be thrilled. They were of the generation that felt nothing was real until the TV validated it. But he had never wanted anything about himself to be public property. To him it was a violation. He didn’t even like to see his name in the telephone directory. And anonymity was not just a personal preference, it was one of the tools of his trade. He was the Alec Guinness of Shepherd’s Bush Nick.

‘Brace up, laddie,’ Porson said, reading his face. ‘Most people gape at the telly with their mouths open and their brains in neuter. You’ll slip in one side and out the other. It’s deceased they’ll be interested in, if at all.’

True, thought Slider, but not much comfort to the reluctant performer.

Atherton put his head round Slider’s door. Anything else before I go?’

Slider came back from a long distance. Are you off?’

‘It’s after seven.’

‘Is it? Blimey, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?’

‘Everyone else has gone. Why not have an early night? You look tired.’

Slider shrugged. ‘I don’t sleep well in that bed when Joanna’s
away. It needs a new mattress. It’s like the slopes of Mount Etna. Strange, though, somehow I never notice the lumps when she’s there.’

‘Sleep on the sofa,’ Atherton suggested. Slider got the impression he wasn’t taking his plight seriously.

‘What are you doing this evening?’ He didn’t like to ask, but if Atherton invited him back for a meal he wouldn’t say no.

But Atherton said breezily, ‘Oh, I’ve got plans. Well, if there’s nothing more, I’ll be off. Night!’

‘Goodnight,’ Slider said, concealing his disappointment as Atherton whisked away. He stared at the empty doorway a moment, and then turned to look out of the window. A warm, slightly hazy evening was spreading its buttery light over the streets, quiet in this time between commuting home and going out on the town. In the old days, he and Atherton would have gone for a pint in a pub with a garden, and maybe for a curry afterwards. Now women had come between them; which was fair enough when the women were all present and correct. But all that beckoned him now from his desk was an empty flat and, he was pretty sure, an empty fridge.

Oh, well, he thought, there are plenty of restaurants in Chiswick. He pictured them – a long and varied row, French, Italian, Chinese, Indian, Thai, Black Tie, new British, Old Greek, Middle Eastern – and wondered what he fancied, trying to whip up some enthusiasm for the notion of a meal out alone. Or he could take fish and chips home and eat in front of the telly like a sad divorcé. He so rarely watched it, he hadn’t the faintest idea what was on. And if he had known it wouldn’t have helped much. All television was a bit like a serial, he thought; or like science fiction, based on the assumptions of everything that had gone before. If you didn’t keep up with it, you couldn’t understand what they were on about, and lost interest.

And then the thing that had been bothering the back of his mind swam to the forefront. Atherton had said, ‘I’ve got plans.’
Not, ‘We’ve got plans.’ He wondered if it meant anything, or if it was only a slip of the tongue. He hoped the lad wasn’t up to something.

When he got outside, he thought better of the whole idea of going home. He left his car where it was and walked up Abdale
Road. The air was warm and still, and there was a smell to it, not entirely unpleasant, but a little used and smeary, like the smell of one’s own bedsheets after they’d been slept in. The houses in Abdale Road were terraced cottages, two storeys with the tiniest front gardens – you could have leaned across from the street and knocked on the window. They had been built for Victorian workmen but owing to the increasing desirability of Shepherd’s Bush they were being gentrified out of all recognition. You could tell the ones that were now in middle-class hands: they had freshly painted front doors, lots of pot plants, and no net curtains.

Round the corner in Loftus Road the houses were much bigger, three storeys plus a basement, with steps going up to the front door over a wide, well-lit ‘area’. By an odd reversal of fortunes these houses, which had been built for the servant-employing class, were now on the whole occupied by people lower down the social scale than were the tiny cottages in Abdale. They were mostly split up into flats and bedsitters, and were shabby and peeling. One or two, however, had been spotted for their potential by the newly affluent and were being done up regardless. Skips, scaffolding and contractors’ vans marked them out for work in progress.

There was one, towards the end of the road, in which the process was complete. Its sooty brick had been cleaned back to the original pleasing London yellow; new double-glazed sash windows, new paint, new roof slates, even new railings proclaimed its status as a beloved object. The time-nibbled edges of the steps up to the front door had been repaired so that they were as sharp as the day they were born, like a freshly unwrapped bar of chocolate; the area had been paved with expensive Italian tiles. Slider slowed his pace so that he could look appreciatively as he passed. It was a pleasure to see an old house properly taken care of, and it just showed what good houses these could be. The Victorians knew how to build all right. Someone had sunk a lot of dosh into this one, but they had got a fine and very large property out of it, which would probably have cost them three times as much in Fulham or Notting Hill.

Loftus Road was a cul-de-sac, but there was a cut-through into South Africa Road through the courtyards of Batman Close –one of the later additions coeval with the Phoenix. It was very
quiet everywhere. Hardly anyone was about. The door of the pub was open, and the subaural thump of its background music issued forth like a dragon’s heartbeat. In the small flight of shops the newsagent was still open and a couple of kids on bikes were hanging around the door, evidently the best use they felt they could make of the golden hours of childhood. Two men were in the launderette, reading newspapers at opposite ends of the bench before the row of machines; and there was a queue of three in the fish-and-chipper. The smell of frying, sharpened with vinegar, drifted out on the warm air. Slider’s stomach growled a warning. He hadn’t eaten since a meagre egg-and-cress sandwich Anderson had brought him in at lunchtime. He felt grubby from the day’s work, and his feet felt the pavement too keenly, as though his shoe soles had got radically thinner since this morning.

He was heading for Buller Close – all the blocks of flats were named after Heroes of the Empire, the estate having been built on the site of the old Commonwealth Exhibition. Who was Buller, he wondered as he trod the chewing-gum-pocked pavement, trawling his schoolboy history lessons. The name Redvers Buller sprang to mind, but it came with no information attached and pretty soon sprang out again.

The flat was on the first floor. There was a long pause after he had knocked on the door, and he turned his back to it and leaned on the balcony wall, staring down at the yard and wondering where all the children were. It was the great advantage of the estate that it was ideal for ‘playing out’ – enclosed yards, large greens, no through-traffic, and the blocks were low-rise enough for even a top-floor mum to shout down to her children and be heard. But the yards and greens were deserted. All indoors watching telly, he supposed sadly.