Dead End

Book 4: Bill Slider Mystery

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: Police Procedurals; Mystery

Synopsis

'An outstanding series' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

A Bill Slider Mystery

A call-out to a murder saves Detective Inspector Bill Slider from having to finish his canteen lunch, but it presents him with the problem of a dead conductor. In life Sir Stefan Radek was seriously famous and terminally unpleasant, but neither of these facts seems reason enough to gun him down.

But as Slider delves into the megastar's private life he finds there's no shortage of suspects, as everyone seems tastelessly glad that Radek is dead. Lies, lovers past and present, and a hotbed of squabbles and financial shenanigans complicate the already tangled case.

And with Slider's lost love, Joanna, a witness to the crime, his own life's jigsaw puzzle seems suddenly as complex as tracking down a most unlikely murderer...

Praise for the Bill Slider series:

'Slider and his creator are real discoveries'
Daily Mail

'Sharp, witty and well-plotted'
Times

'Harrod-Eagles and her detective hero form a class act. The style is fast, funny and furious - the plotting crisply devious'
Irish Times

Release date: September 1, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

When Detective Superintendent ‘Mad Ivan’ Barrington of Shepherd’s Bush nick told you he would make your life a misery unless
you accepted a transfer out of his station, you defied him at your peril. As the fount of all paperwork he was in a position
to pour out upon you an unending stream of department fertilizer.


Today, for instance, Detective Inspector Bill Slider had been trapped at his desk all morning with a dizzyingly uninteresting
report on the connection between stress and absenteeism, which Barrington had given him to précis on a most-urgent basis.
As a result, Slider went up so late to lunch that he got the last portion of the ‘home-made’ lasagne, which had set like crusted
rubber in the corner of the oven dish. It was cool, but he dared not ask for it to be heated up again for fear of what it
might do to his teeth. Still, the alternative was shepherd’s pie, and he’d tried that once.


‘Chips with it, love?’

‘Yes please.’ What other comfort was there in life for a man whose wife and lover had both left him? He sighed, and the canteen
helper looked at him tenderly. He had the kind of ruffled, sad-puppy looks that made women want to cosset him.


‘I’ll give you extra chips, ’cause you had the last bit and it’s a bit small.’ She shovelled the chips on cosily. ‘Gravy,
dear?’ she asked, already pouring, and then passed his plate over with her thumb planted firmly in the brown bit; but by the
time he got to a table the thumbprint had filled in so you could hardly tell. He didn’t like gravy on chips – or on lasagne
actually – but she had given him extra of that, too, out of compassion. Why did all the wrong people find him irresistible?
And he still hadn’t finished the report. Mournfully he folded it open beside his plate, speared the driest chip he could see, and continued reading.


Research suggests that disorders with psychosomatic components – headache, indigestion, constipation, diarrhoea, high blood
pressure and ulcers – are more frequent among police officers than among citizens generally. What an attractive bunch they sounded, to be sure. He skipped down. What constitutes stress? the report asked him in a coy subheading. He was pretty sure it was going to tell him so he didn’t answer, and in a minute
it did, with an angst league-table two pages long. Being Taken Hostage by Terrorists came in at number one, followed by Confronting a Person with a Gun. No surprises there. Ah, here was a little light relief, though: Being Caught Making a Mistake was apparently more stressful than Seeing Mutilated Bodies or Having to Deal with a Messy Car Accident. Still, anyone regularly eating in a police canteen got used to dealing with messy accidents.


He pushed the report aside. Was this a fair punishment on a man for refusing to go away and play somewhere else? It wasn’t
even his fault that he had got so terminally up Barrington’s nose. While investigating the chip-shop murder back in May, he
had uncovered unsavoury facts about Barrington’s former boss who was also, unfortunately for Slider, Barrington’s lifelong
hero. A man can forgive many things, but not being robbed of his dreams. There was nothing Barrington could do in the disciplinary
way, since Slider had only been doing his job, so he had suggested, with all the menace at his command, that Slider should
accept a promotion to Chief Inspector and move to Pinner station. Slider had known that he was asking for it when he refused,
but that didn’t mean he had to like it when he got it.


Of course, the promotion and transfer to Pinner would have meant a pay rise, and money was always an object; but he had never
wanted to be a DCI anyway, and he didn’t fancy going to an outer station, where life moved at a more leisurely pace. Why,
at Pinner they regularly won the Metropolitan Police Beautiful Window-Box competition: they probably had time to read reports
like this every day. He liked inner stations like Shepherd’s Bush, where you were kept busy. A man needed a stable home-life
to be able to cope with the opportunities for introspection left by a slower pace at work, and these days his home-life was about as stable as Michael Jackson’s face.


He abandoned the report, sawed a section off the lasagne, and pulled out of his pocket a handbill given to him that morning
by his bagman, Detective Sergeant Jim Atherton. It was a flyer for a concert that evening to be given in a local church, St
Augustine’s, Addison Gardens. A Mahler symphony with a seriously famous conductor, Sir Stefan Radek. Slider was not, like
Atherton, a great classical music buff, though he liked some of the famous pieces – Tchaikovsky and Beethoven and The Planets, that sort of thing. The only bit of Mahler he’d ever heard he’d thought sounded like an MGM film-track, which was all right
in a cinema but not what you’d want to sit through a whole concert of. But the real point here, the reason Atherton had told
him about it at all, was that the Royal London Philharmonic – the orchestra which was doing the concert – was the one in which
Joanna was a violinist.


Joanna, his lost love. Two and half years ago he had met her while he was on a case, and had – in the police jargon – gone
overboard, with a resounding splash. He had been married then for nearly fourteen years and had never even considered being
unfaithful before, believing that promises once made should not be broken and wives once chosen should not be forsaken. But
he seemed not to be able to help himself, and for two years he had wrestled with guilt and responsibility, desperate to marry
Joanna but unable to find a way to tell Irene, his wife, that he wanted to leave her. The worst of all possible worlds for
all of them. At last, after a particularly humiliating evening, Joanna had broken it off with him, and had since steadfastly
refused to re-attach it.


The really hideous irony was that it was just after Joanna had chucked him that Barrington had suggested, with more than a
hint of broken arms about it, that Slider should move to Pinner, which was just down the road from Ruislip and the marital
home – ‘So nice and handy for you,’ Barrington had said menacingly; and Slider for the sake of peace and pension enhancement
was on the brink of accepting it as a wise career move, when Irene had announced she was leaving him. He must have had a really
horrible conjunction of his ruling planets for these blows all to have fallen together. And it was a sad fact that in his
whole life he had only ever been involved with two women, and they had both dropped him in short succession. He’d been left so comprehensively he felt like the slice of cucumber in the garnish
on a pub sandwich.


And now Joanna, the lost and longed-for, was playing in a concert just down the road.

‘It would be a chance to see her,’ Atherton had said beguilingly when he gave Slider the leaflet. ‘A chance to talk to her.’

‘But she doesn’t want to talk to me,’ Slider had replied. ‘She said so.’

‘You don’t have to take her word for it. Anyway, Radek conducting Mahler is not to be missed. You know he’s the world authority
on Mahler?’


‘What’s he conducting in a church in Shepherd’s Bush for, then?’ Slider objected.

‘I think it’s for the restoration fund. He lives just down the road, in Holland Park Avenue. It’s a beautiful church,’ Atherton
added coaxingly.


‘Is it?’ Slider said unhelpfully.

‘And they’re rehearsing there this afternoon. Two-thirty to five-thirty.’

Sitting over his cooling lasagne, Slider contemplated the scenario Atherton had been urging on him. The shift ended at four,
and unless something came up Slider would be free then. He could stroll down to the church, quite casually, take a look in,
wait until they finished rehearsing and then bump into Joanna accidentally on her way out. ‘Oh, hello. Fancy a drink? They’re
just open.’ But what if she refused? She had told him she didn’t want to see him again, and inviting public humiliation was
no way to run a life.


No, he thought, sighing. Better not. He had a lot to do, anyway. There were two more survey reports on his desk for when he’d
finished this one, and the car crime statistics to update. He gazed with digestive despair at the lasagne, which had withdrawn
reproachfully, like a snubbed woman, under a cloak of hardening gravy. In any case, the jumbo dogknob ’n’ beans he had consumed
in the canteen for breakfast still lay sad and indigestible in a pool of grease somewhere under his ribs, and he didn’t think
he ought to add to his problems at this stage. He pushed his chair back and headed for the door, and almost ran into Mackay.


‘Oh, there you are, guv.’ Mackay’s face was alight with pleasure: something wonderful must have happened. ‘There’s been a
shooting in that big church in Addison Gardens, Saint Whatsisname’s – one dead. It just came in from the emergency services.
Some celeb’s got taken out. Right on our ground, too! Luck, eh?’


Slider went cold with fright. ‘Anyone else hurt?’ he heard himself ask.

‘All we’ve got is that there was a single shot fired, one body, and chummy got away.’

‘All right. I’m on my way. Where’s Atherton?’

‘He’s already gone, guv,’ Mackay called after his disappearing back.

Atherton was waiting for him out in the yard. Svelte, elegant, creaseless of suit, wearer of silk socks and an aftershave
you could only smell when you got close up, outwardly Atherton was nothing like a detective. He and Slider had worked together
for a long time now, and Atherton was the nearest thing Slider had to a friend. He was an able man who dissipated his abilities
and was far too dedicated to enjoying himself to get on in his career. If he hadn’t been so intellectually lazy, he could
have been Commissioner by now. If he hadn’t been incurably honest, he could have been a top politician.


‘We’ll go in my car, shall we?’ he said. ‘It’s hell to park up there.’

‘Oh, you heard about it, then.’

‘I heard.’ He gave Slider a quick look and said nothing more until he had edged the car out into the stream of traffic. It
wasn’t too bad at this time of day – not much of a challenge to a man who loved driving. Not that you could do much real driving
in a Ford anyway. He’d really like an Aston Martin, but apart from the price there was the parking problem. In London there
was no point in driving anything you would mind getting nicked.


Slider had not spoken, and Atherton glanced sideways at him and had little difficulty in guessing his thoughts. There was
not much he didn’t know about his guv’nor’s home-life, and what he knew he’d never celebrated. That Slider had been married
to the wrong woman for sixteen years was bad enough: Irene had no sense of humour and thought that food was something you had to have to stay alive, a combination in Atherton’s eyes so unfortunate as to be bizarre. Add to that the fact that
the marital home was on an estate in Ruislip, and Atherton had thought things could not get worse for his boss; but getting
worse is what things notoriously specialise in. The situation at the moment was, in technical language, a right bugger.


‘How are things in the green belt these days?’ he asked sympathetically.

Slider didn’t look at him. ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.’

‘It was rotten luck,’ Atherton said. ‘Ironies of fate, and all that.’

Ironies indeed, Slider thought, running on a now-familiar track. He wouldn’t have minded so much if Irene had run off with
an Italian waiter or a hunky young milkman, but she had left him for her bridge partner, who was the most boring man who had
ever lived. Ernie Newman had the dynamic personality of a man slipping in and out of coma: he had once been a member of Northwood
Golf Club but had found the place too swinging for him.


But Irene liked him: he was retired on an enormous company pension and he moved amidst the Volvo set she so admired.

‘He’s always there. He can spend time with me,’ Irene had said; as succinct a commentary on the loneliness of a copper’s wife
as Slider had ever heard. And when he had protested about Ernie’s dullness: ‘I’ve had enough of excitement,’ she had said.
‘I want a man who thinks I’m exciting.’ Even in their courting days Slider had never thought Irene exciting. She had always been neat, proper, unimaginative
and conventional; but he had to admit that next to Ernie she was Catherine the Great.


She had taken the two children and left Slider in occupation of the house, the ranch-style, modern executive albatross which
he had always hated with the pungency of a man who loved architecture forced to live with picture windows and an open-plan
staircase. He had only bought it because it was the kind of thing she liked, and she, after all, would have to spend more
time in it than him. That was irony for you!


Ernie Newman, a widower, had a five-bedroom detached house in Chalfont, so there was plenty of room for Irene and the children.
She had always wanted to live somewhere like Chalfont. And Ernie was going to pay for Matthew and Kate to go to private school, which was something Irene had long hankered
after. Ernie had never had any children of his own – Mavis couldn’t, apparently – so he was looking forward to being a father-by-proxy,
Irene said. All Slider’s masculine instincts had got up on their hind legs at that point, but the concealed knowledge of his
own guilt had made it impossible for him to attack. Irene had never found out about Joanna.


And Joanna wouldn’t have him back, despite the fact that he was now free. Irony number two. He had more irony than a man with
a steel plate in his head. The events of this summer had left him utterly at a loss. What on earth was he supposed to do with
the rest of his life? Even work was not enough to fill the void. His sanguine temperament had previously found satisfaction
even in the routine plod which made up so much of the job; but burglaries, TDAs, possession and the rest of the malarky had
no power now to rouse him from his puzzled misery. He knew as a Christian he ought not to rejoice in murder, but there was
nothing like a big case for ‘taking you out of yourself’, as his mother used to say.


‘So how did you know they would be rehearsing this afternoon?’ he asked as they rounded the end of Shepherd’s Bush Green.

‘Joanna told me, of course.’

‘Oh.’

Slider resisted the urge to ask where and why Atherton had been talking to Joanna. He had no rights over either of them, and
certainly had no right to feel bugged that, having given him the chuck, she continued the friendship with Atherton which only
existed because she had been Slider’s lover. He turned his mind resolutely away from his own problems.


‘I suppose it is Sir Stefan Radek who’s been shot? Mackay just said “some big celeb”.’

‘That’s all I heard too. There isn’t a soloist, so presumably it’s Radek,’ Atherton said.

Radek was one of the few serious musicians who had crossed over into general, man-in-the-street fame. He’d even been on tv,
Slider remembered. He’d had that series last year, Classics for Idiots or whatever it was called, explaining the difference between a concerto and a double-bass with the help of computer graphics and a popular comedian to make it all user-friendly. And now somebody had shot him. That’d teach him to go slumming.
All Slider knew about Radek came from a cheery little spoonerism Joanna had told him one night after a concert. ‘What’s the
difference between Radek and Radox? Radox bucks up the feet.’ He remembered, too, after another concert when she had been
seething about the conductor’s iniquities (not Radek, though, someone else), she’d said that if he were found murdered that
night there’d be eighty-odd suspects in the orchestra alone. ‘Half of us would put our hands up out of sheer gratitude.’ She’d
been joking, of course; but it made you think. Somebody evidently thought the only good conductor was a dead one, and was
prepared to do something about it as well.


St Augustine’s was an incongruously big church for the streets it found itself in, hinting at larger, wealthier, or at least
more devout congregations in the past. It was nineteenth-century Byzantine, built of soot-smudged pale-red brick with white
stone coping, like a dish of slightly burned brawn piped with mashed potato. Inside it was a miniature Westminster Cathedral,
cavernous and echoing, with lofty arches lost in shadow, pierced-work lamps, gilded wall and ceiling paintings, windows stained
in deep, jewel shades of red and blue and green, and dark-eyed, beardless El Greco saints with narrow hands and melancholy
mouths staring from every corner. There were high, wrought-iron gates across the choir, and the orchestra had been set up
in the space below them on a low platform. Chairs and music stands and the timps were all that was to be seen. The players
themselves had been ushered away somewhere – presumably to whatever place had been set aside for them as dressing-rooms. Slider
hoped, anyway, that they had not all disappeared. Like tea, statements were best taken freshly brewed.


He and Atherton walked down the central aisle towards the scene, which was lit by overhead spots so that it stood out from
the cave of comparative darkness around, like a gruesome reverse Nativity. The body was sprawled face down on the small podium
between the lectern, on which the score lay open, and the long-legged conductor’s chair. He had fallen quite neatly without
knocking either over, which suggested to Slider that the bullet had not struck him with great force: he had crumpled rather than reeled or been flung off his feet. And in the place of ox and ass there were two people keeping guard over the
body: one Slider recognised as the orchestra’s fixer, Tony Whittam; the other was a dapper, plumpish, bald man who was kneeling
on the floor at the head of the corpse and weeping. Every now and then he wiped the tears from his face unselfconsciously
with a large handkerchief held in his left hand; in his right he held the conductor’s baton by the point, so that the bulbous
end rested on the floor. It looked like the ceremonial reversing of a sword.


As soon as he saw Slider, Tony Whittam stepped towards him with a cry of relief. ‘Am I glad to see a friendly face! Are you
the official presence?’


‘Yes,’ said Slider. ‘This is on my ground.’

‘Well, that’s a piece of luck,’ Whittam said. His usually genial face was drawn into uncharacteristic lines of shock and anxiety.
He was a well-fed, dapper man of fifty-two going on thirty-five, in a light biscuit suit and a tie that would have tried the
credibility of a twenty-year old. The orchestra’s personnel-manager-cumagony-aunt was much given to gold jewellery, sported
a deeply suspect suntan and an artificially white smile, and altogether had the air of being likely to break out into a flower
in the buttonhole at the slightest provocation. He looked like a spiv, but was in fact superb at his job, efficient as a machine
and genuinely warm-hearted. Many a time Slider had seen him in the middle of a crowd of musicians, all clutching their diaries,
all hoping to get off one date or on another; and he had always managed to spare Slider a glance and a friendly nod while
coping patiently with the conflicting demands of, say, Mahler Five and the personal lives of a hundred-odd freelance and therefore
temperamental artistes. Perhaps it was unkind mentally to have cast him as an ass.


‘Who’s this bloke?’ Slider asked in an undertone with a gesture of the head towards the ox.

‘It’s Radek’s dresser. He’s a bit upset.’

Understatement of the year. ‘Dresser?’

‘That’s what he calls himself. Sort of like his valet, personal servant, whatever. Been with him years. Everyone knows him.’
He was, Slider realised, justifying the man’s presence.


‘Name?’

‘Keaton. Arthur Keaton, but everyone calls him Buster.’

‘Okay. And where’s everybody else?’

‘Down in the crypt – that’s where the dressing-rooms are, and a sort of band room for coffee and warming-up. I thought it
best to keep everyone together until someone came,’ he said anxiously. ‘Des is with ’em, keeping ’em quiet.’ That was Des
Riley, orchestral attendant, who set up the platform and loaded and unloaded the instruments – a dark, ripely handsome man
dedicated to body-building and fornication. Since orchestral attendants were traditionally known as ‘humpers’, these would
seem to be the two essential qualifications.


‘You did just right,’ Slider said reassuringly. ‘Is everybody all right?’

‘Oh yes – I mean they’re shocked, as you’d expect, but nobody’s hurt.’ He nodded significantly, to convey to Slider that by
everybody he understood him to mean Joanna.


‘Who else was here apart from the musicians?’

‘Well, there was Bill Fordham’s wife and kid – first horn – they’d come to watch; and Martin Cutts’s latest bird, of course;
and the verger, he was mucking about back there with some keys,’ he gestured with his head towards the back of the church.
‘And Georgina, my assistant, but she was through in the vestry making a phone call. They’re all down there in the band room.
Radek’s agent was here earlier, but she’d gone before it happened. And Spaz – he’d already left as well. He’s taken the van
away – there’s nowhere to park it here.’ That was Des Riley’s assistant, Garry Sparrow, usually known as Gaz the Spaz, a witticism
none too subtle for him.


‘All right. You’ve done very well,’ Slider said, and crouched to take a look at the body. Radek had been lean and upright,
one of those wiry old men who go on for ever and never look much different once they’ve passed fifty. Slider, musical tyro
though he was, recognised him, as he supposed about seventy-five per cent of people would, whether they were music-lovers
or not, now that he’d been on the telly. For Radek was not only hugely famous, but physically distinctive. He was very tall,
gaunt, and had a great beak of a nose and bushy white eyebrows over heavy-lidded eyes, so that he looked like a half-pissed
bird of prey. His shock of over-long white hair was brushed straight back like a lion’s mane, but once he got going, it flew
about as if it had a life of its own. It was his hallmark; and his photograph – invariably moodily-lit and against a dark
background – loured, snarled and brooded famously on a million record-covers, white mane and white hands spiked against the
blackness, the archetypal image of the super-maestro.


Today he was dressed in civvies, of course – fawn slacks, with a black roll-neck sweater tucked into them, leather moccasins
and, my God, pale yellow socks.


‘He doesn’t look as impressive as he does in white tie and tails,’ Slider murmured to Atherton.

‘Nobody looks their best dead,’ Atherton reminded him.

There was no doubt he was dead, at any rate, Slider thought. Radek’s face was pale grey, with a touch of blue about nose and
lips, and the skin looked unpleasantly moist, like sweating cheese. His eyes were open and fixed, staring as no eyes ever
stared in life, and his lips were drawn back from old-man’s long yellow teeth as though he were baring them in defiance. There
was a bitter smell of sweat about him, a whiff of aftershave, and underneath that a faint, unclean smell, which Slider associated
with mortality. Radek was lying more or less in the recovery pos. . .