Dear Departed

Book 10: Bill Slider Mystery

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: Police Procedurals

Synopsis

'An outstanding series' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

A Bill Slider Mystery

It looks as though Inspector Bill Slider has a serial killer on his hands: 'the Park Killer', as the media so innovatively label him, attacks his victims in London's public parks, and when Chattie Cornfield is murdered while out jogging, the pattern fits.

But as Slider and Atherton investigate, it is Chattie's life rather than the killer's that poses questions. There's a startling anomaly between her ritzy lifestyle and her modest income. There are friends who loved her, a sister who hated her, men who thought they knew her, and a mysterious package that poses more questions than it answers.

Who was the real Chattie? Where was she on the last day of her life? And was it love, hate or avarice that drove the hooded figure to kill her?

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: December 30, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 352

Sample

There is nothing quite like knocking on a strange door for getting a policeman’s adrenaline going. Slider stood in the hotel corridor, listening to the white noise of the air-conditioning and the interesting tattoo of his own heartbeat, and wondering if he was about to die.

His mouth was so dry he had to pause a moment and manufacture some spit. The kevlar vest under his shirt made him feel hot and awkward, and the tape holding the wire to his flesh was making him itch. He’d had to borrow a jacket from a larger colleague to conceal the fact that he was protected. He looked, and felt, overweight and stupid.

In front of him was an ordinary, typical hotel door, and behind the door was an extraordinary, untypical man, who, moreover, might well be armed, and had amply proved his willingness to kill. Robert Bates, alias The Needle, was being brought to book at last. He had been the subject of ongoing investigations by various CO departments of Scotland Yard, not to mention – because nobody ever did – MI5 and MI6.

Slider’s path had crossed with his during the investigation of a murder, which, it turned out most disappointingly, Bates didn’t do. However, Slider had turned up a number of things Bates did do, including the undoubted murder of a prostitute whom Bates had used, tortured, and then dispatched. Because of the involvement of higher authorities, Slider had been warned off Bates, but such disappointments were commonplace in a copper’s life. Sooner or later, he had reasoned, The Needle would get his come-uppance. Then two days ago he had been summoned to the office of the area supremo, Commander Wetherspoon.

‘Ah, Slider,’ Wetherspoon said, tilting his head back so that he could look down his nose at him, ‘someone here who wants to speak to you, Chief Superintendent Ormerod of the Serious Crime Group Liaison Team.’

Ormerod was a large and serious man, who towered over Slider and would have made two of him in bulk, and at least ten in conscious supremacy. He had a handsome, authoritative face, eyes like steel traps, and the smell of power came off him like an aura. This man was from the far, far end of policing, the place of hard deals done behind closed doors, of anonymous corridors, terse telephone calls, operations with code names and briefings with senior ministers where the senior ministers behaved quite meekly. It was as different from Slider’s place on the street as the Cabinet Room of Number 10 was from the checkout at Tesco’s. Slider felt faint just breathing Ormerod’s aftershave; and when Ormerod smiled, it was even more frightening than when he didn’t.

Ormerod smiled. ‘Ah, Inspector Slider. Bill, isn’t it? I’m glad to meet you. I won’t waste time. Trevor Bates. You did some smart work on that case. I’m sorry you had to take a back seat, but very large things were at stake.’

‘I understand, sir,’ Slider said, since something seemed to be required.

‘We’ve got to the point now where we’re ready to arrest him, and we want you to be the one to do it.’

‘Me, sir?’ Slider couldn’t help it, though it made him sound like Billy Bunter.

‘Thought you’d like to be in on it,’ Ormerod said. ‘Sort of thanks for all your hard work.’

‘Consolation prize,’ Wetherspoon put in, and Slider was glad to see him quelled with a single look from Ormerod. Anyone who could quell Wetherspoon was a Big Monkey indeed.

Also,’ Ormerod said, ‘we think you could be useful to us.’

Ormerod explained. Bates was a high-powered criminal, and as sharp and cunning as a lorry full of foxes. It would be impossible to arrest him in his home, which was better defended than Fort Knox, and pretty hard anywhere else if he saw them coming. Bates often went armed, and usually had armed bodyguards around him.

However, the day after tomorrow he was attending a business conference in a hotel in Birmingham, and staying overnight, and was unlikely to be armed in such a place, especially as they had taken pains to fall back from him over the past few weeks and let him relax. He would not be expecting trouble, and though he would have an ‘assistant’ with him, for which read bodyguard, he would probably not be taking very heavy precautions.

‘All the same, we can’t take him in any of the public rooms, in case his goon gets rattled and starts loosing off,’ Ormerod said. ‘So we have to arrest him in his room at the end of the day. But we don’t want to go kicking the door in and provoking a shoot-out. We need someone to distract him. That’s where you come in. He knows you, you’ve spoken to him before, and he’s not afraid of you.’

With the rind taken off, what Ormerod was saying was that Bates thought Slider was a pathetic dickhead whom he’d already outsmarted once. He would therefore be more likely to open the door to him. Bates was also tricky, smart and strong, and had an unhealthy liking for torture, knives and needles. And guns. The words ‘tethered’ and ‘goat’ had wandered through Slider’s mind, looking for something to link up with.

Which was why Slider now regarded that anonymous hotel door with trepidation. If Bates opened it at all, it might be simply to shoot him, and he didn’t want to die. His pulse rate notched up another level as he raised his hand and rapped hard on it. The team was all behind him, he reminded himself. They had watched Bates to his room, watched the ‘assistant’ to his adjoining one, and were waiting just out of sight, listening to everything that came over Slider’s wire, ready for his signal. He hoped the wire was still working. He hoped they weren’t being deafened by his heartbeat.

He knocked again. Bates’s voice – Slider recognised it, with a shiver – called out irritably from within. ‘Who is it?’

Slider gulped. ‘Detective Inspector Slider, sir, Shepherd’s Bush. Could I have a word, do you think?’

‘What?’ Bates said incredulously. ‘Slider, did you say?’ His voice came again from just behind the door, and Slider guessed he was being examined through the peephole. He held up his brief. ‘I know you,’ Bates said. ‘What are you doing here? What the hell do you want?’

‘I’d like to have a word with you, sir,’ Slider said stolidly, Mr Plod to the core. ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

There was a click and a rattle, and Slider’s stomach went over the edge of a cliff as the door was flung open and he waited for the hot flash and burn of a bullet or a knife in the guts. The kevlar was a comfort but it didn’t cover everything.

But he didn’t die. Bates stood there, lean, weirdly attractive, with his pale, translucent skin, clear grey eyes and backswept, shoulder-length fox red hair. He was still in his suit – three piece, exquisitely cut – but he had removed his tie and opened the top button of his shirt.

‘What the devil?’ he said, and looked Slider up and down with amused contempt. ‘You came asking me questions once before about some pathetic trivia or other. A leather jacket, wasn’t it?’

‘It’s a little bit more serious this time, sir, I’m sorry to say,’ Slider plodded. ‘Can I come in? I don’t think you want to discuss your private business in the corridor.’

‘I don’t intend to discuss my private business with you at all,’ he said. ‘What the devil are you doing here anyway? Do your superiors know you’ve come bothering me?’

‘I don’t need permission from anyone when I’m following up a case,’ Slider said, hoping he would take this to mean he was mavericking. Bates had not shut the door on him, apparently fascinated by the absurdity of this idiot policeman following him all the way to Birmingham. Ormerod had read him right: arrogance would be his downfall. Slider took the opportunity to walk past him into the room, noting with huge relief that there was no-one else in it. The goon was still in his adjoining room, the door of which was over to the left. One shout from Bates and he would come busting in, probably with a gun. Slider was not out of the woods yet.

‘I didn’t give you permission to come in,’ Bates said, sounding annoyed now.

‘This won’t take long, sir,’ Slider said. His voice shook slightly, but it probably didn’t matter. Bates would expect him to be nervous of a powerful man like him. ‘And it is rather important.’

‘More lost clothing? Or is it a lost dog this time?’ Bates sneered; but he walked away from the door, and it swung closed with a soft click. Slider cleared his throat, which was the signal. Nearly there now. Just a few seconds more. The team would be creeping towards the two doors, pass keys in hand.

Slider turned towards Bates, so that Bates had his back to the door. Triumph was beginning to sing in his veins along with the adrenaline, a heady mixture. He felt drunk and reckless with it, and knew it was a dangerous state of mind.

‘It’s a bit more interesting than that,’ he said, and the change of his tone brought alertness into the hard grey eyes. Slider saw the nostrils widen as though Bates were scenting like an animal for danger. ‘It’s to do with a certain prostitute called Susie Mabbot. I’m sure you remember her, even among your many conquests.’

‘I don’t know any prostitutes. How dare you suggest it?’ Bates said, advancing grimly. Slider backed a step to encourage him.

‘You used to know poor Susie, in the Biblical sense, anyway. Then one day you got carried away and killed her. Stuck her full of needles, had her, broke her neck, and chucked her in the Thames.’

‘You’re mad!’ Bates said. Outside the team slipped the pass card into the magnetic lock and it gave a faint but unmistakable clunk. Bates’s eyes flew wide as he realised the trap. He yelled, ‘Norman!’ and his small but rock hard fist shot out at Slider’s face.

Without the adrenaline he’d have been felled, but all those flight-or-fight impulses he had been resisting in the last five minutes came to his aid now. He jerked his head aside so fast that he ricked his neck and the fist shot past his head, grazing his left ear. In the same motion, Slider ducked in low and flung himself at Bates, grabbing him round the middle, and Bates, thrown off balance by the missed punch, was just unstable enough to stagger backwards and go down, hitting the floor with Slider on top of him as the rest of the team burst in through the two doors simultaneously.

From the next room there was thumping, crashing and shouting as the bodyguard put up a vigorous resistance. For a moment Bates writhed viciously, but then he suddenly seemed to see the futility, or perhaps the indignity of it, and became still. With his teeth bared, he hissed at Slider, ‘You’ll regret this. I’ll see you regret this, you pathetic moron. You don’t know what you’re meddling with. You’re in over your depth. You’re nobody!’

‘Well, at least I’m not a murderer,’ Slider said. He knew he ought not to provoke the man, but he couldn’t help it. That fist had taken skin off his ear, and his neck hurt.

‘You can’t prove a thing against me,’ Bates said, utterly assured.

‘Oh yes I can,’ Slider said blithely. ‘Poor old Susie got washed up. We found her.’

It was impossible for Bates to pale, but his eyes widened slightly. ‘You found her?’

‘Yup. Got the body, got the semen, got the DNA. You’re nicked, mate.’

A policeman’s life, he thought afterwards, holds few moments so beautiful as seeing an arrogant, vicious, self-satisfied criminal crumple in the face of what he knows is the inevitable. Slider got to his feet, and as Bates began to struggle up, he began his victory chant.

‘Trevor Bates, I arrest you for the murder of Susan Mabbot. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence …’

Bates wasn’t listening. He stared at Slider as though burning his image into his brain. ‘I’ll get you for this,’ he said.

‘… anything you later rely on in court,’ Slider finished. And suddenly he felt very tired, as all the adrenaline got bored with this part of the proceedings and went off somewhere else to look for a fight.

It is an immutable law, formulated by the eminent philosopher Professor Sod, that you will always wake up early on your day off. It was six a.m. when the alarm in Slider’s head went off. He woke in his customary violent fashion, with a grunt. He rarely managed a controlled re-entry: usually he hit consciousness like a man being thrown out of a moving car.

Joanna wasn’t there. He listened for a moment, then got up and padded into the kitchen. She was standing by the sink drinking water, staring out of the window into the small oblong of rough grass and blackberry brambles she called a garden. Since her pregnancy had begun to show, she had stopped wandering about in the nude. In an access of modesty she had taken to wearing a loose white muslin dress by way of a dressing-gown. As it was almost but not quite completely transparent, it was far more erotic than nakedness, but Slider hadn’t told her that. He just hoped that she didn’t answer the door in it when he wasn’t there. The postman didn’t look as though his heart would take it.

He slipped his arms round her from behind and rested his chin on her shoulder. ‘All right?’ he murmured.

‘Hmm,’ she confirmed.

‘Couldn’t sleep?’

‘Not since half past four. Why are you up, anyway? We were going to lie in and cuddle.’

‘Hard to do when you’re in the kitchen,’ he pointed out. ‘Shall we go back to bed?’

He felt her hesitate, and knew what was coming.

‘I’m hungry.’

‘You’re always hungry. It’s just your hormones.’

‘My hormones and I go everywhere together. Why don’t the three of us have breakfast? It’s such a beautiful morning, too good to waste lying in bed.’

He detached himself from her back. ‘I thought pregnant women were supposed to feel extra sexy,’ he complained.

‘You’ve got to fuel the engine,’ she said.

She fried bacon and tomatoes and made toast while he got a shave out of the way, and then they ate and talked.

‘Fried tomatoes are definitely a seventh-day thing,’ Slider said. Joanna had a theory that God had done all His very best creations on Sunday, when He was at leisure. A large amount of food seemed to get into her list: toasted cheese, raspberries, the smell of coffee.

‘It’s such a long time since we did this,’ she said happily. ‘I don’t even remember when you last had a day off.’

He had only known since May that Joanna was pregnant. She had given up her job with the orchestra in Amsterdam and was back home permanently, looking for work for the next few months. With the baby due in November, she could work until about the end of September – if she could get the dates. She’d had no luck so far. Still, it gave her a chance to look for a place for them to live. Her tiny flat had one bedroom, one sitting room, a small kitchen and a breathe-by-numbers bathroom – adequate for them but tight for them plus baby.

Being an old-fashioned kind of a bloke, he was determined they should get married before the baby was born. And before they got married they had to announce everything to their respective families, something which work had made impossible for him. But now, with the debriefing and writing up of the Bates case done at last, he had two days off. Tomorrow he and Joanna were going to spend the day with his father – his only relly – and today they were going down to Eastbourne to see her parents. Slider had never yet met them, and was nervous.

‘What if they don’t like me?’ he asked.

She was good at catching on. ‘They’ll like you. Why wouldn’t they?’

‘Debauching their daughter, for one. Getting you pregnant before marrying you.’

‘My sister Alison was born only six months after the Aged Ps married.’

‘Really?’

‘Mum mellowed one night when Sophie and I took her out for a drink for her birthday, and confessed. She was a bit shocked the next day when she remembered. She swore us to secrecy, so don’t say anything. Apparently the others don’t know.’

‘Except for Alison, presumably.’

‘I wouldn’t even be sure of that. She may not have put two and two together. She was always good at ignoring inconvenient facts.’

Slider reached for the marmalade. ‘Tell me them again. I haven’t got them straight.’

‘Doesn’t matter. You aren’t going to meet them all.’

‘You know me. I like to do my homework.’

‘All right. Alison’s the eldest, then the three boys, Peter, Tim and George.’

‘They’re in Australia?’

‘No, only Tim and George. They all emigrated together but Peter came back.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember now.’

‘Then Louisa and Bobby, then me, then the twins that died, then Sophie.’

‘What a crowd. It must have been nice, growing up with so many people around you.’

‘I’m sure you got a lot more attention,’ said Joanna.

‘But you don’t have much backup when you’re an only child. No insurance. When Mum died there was only me and Dad, and when he goes …’

She reached across and squeezed his hand. ‘You’ll still have a wife, an ex-wife and at least three children.’

He began to smile. ‘At least? What are you trying to tell me?’

She looked casual. ‘Oh, well, I just thought if you’re going to fork out all that money for a marriage licence, you might as well get your money’s worth.’

He inspected her expression and was thinking they might go back to bed after all, when the phone rang. Joanna met his eyes. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, looking a question and a doubt.

He felt a foreboding. ‘It couldn’t be. They wouldn’t. Not on my day off.’ But he knew they could and would. Detective inspectors had to be available for duty at all times, and since they didn’t get paid overtime it was easier on the budget to call them rather than someone who did.

He got up and trudged out to the narrow hall (Never get a pram in here, he thought distractedly) and picked up the phone. It was Nicholls, one of the uniformed sergeants at Shepherd’s Bush police station. ‘Are you up and dressed?’

‘This had better be important,’ Slider growled.

‘Sorry, Bill. I know it’s your day off and I hate to do it to you, but it’s a murder.‘

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

‘Came in on a 999 call. Female, stabbed to death in Paddenswick Park. Looks as though the Park Killer’s struck again.’

‘Why can’t Carver’s lot catch it?’

‘They’re knee deep in that drugs and prostitution ring. The boss says you’re it. I’m sorry, mate.’

‘Bloody Nora, can’t people leave off killing each other for two minutes together?’ Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Joanna had come out into the hall. At these words she turned away, and the cast of her shoulders was eloquent. All right, on my way.’

Joanna was in the bedroom. She looked up when he came in and forestalled his speech. ‘I gathered.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I know. Can’t be helped.’

He could tell by her terseness that she was upset, and he didn’t blame her. ‘You’ll explain to your parents?’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘Will you still go?’

‘No point. I’ll call it off,’ she said shortly, passing him in the doorway.

He rang Atherton – DS Jim Atherton, his bagman – and got him on his mobile at the scene.

‘You don’t need to hurry. Porson’s got everything under control.’

‘Hell’s bells. What’s he doing there?’

‘He was in the office when I arrived at a quarter to eight. I don’t think he’d been home.’

Porson, their Det Sup, had recently been widowed. Slider wondered whether he was finding home without his wife hard to cope with.

‘The shout came in about a quarter past eight,’ Atherton went on, ‘and he grabbed the team and shot over here. He’s already whistled up extra uniform to take statements, and the SOCO van’s on the way.’

‘So what does he need me for?’ Slider asked resentfully.

‘I expect it’s lurve,’ Atherton said. ‘Gotta go – he’s beckoning.’

So it was away with the cords and chambray shirt, hello workday suit and Teflon tie. Blast and damn, Slider thought. Any murder meant a period of intensive work and long hours, but a serial murderer could tie you down for months. If it was the Park Killer, there was no knowing when he’d get a day off again.

The traffic had built up by the time Slider left the house, and he had plenty of leisure to reflect as he crawled along Bath Road. The Park Killer had ‘struck’ – as the newspapers liked to put it – twice before, but not on Slider’s ground. The first time had been in Gunnersbury Park, the second only a month ago in Acton Park. On that – admittedly meagre – basis it looked as though he was moving eastwards, which left room for a couple more possible incidents in Shepherd’s Bush before he reached Holland Park and became Notting Hill’s problem. Slider wondered what could be done to hasten that happy day. The very thought of a serial killer made him miserable. The idea that any human being could be so utterly self-absorbed that he would kill someone at random simply as a means of self-advertisement was deeply depressing.

It was part, he thought, as he inched forward towards a traffic light that only stayed green for thirty seconds every five minutes, of the modern cult of celebrity. To get on the telly, to get in the papers, was the ultimate ambition for a wide swathe of the deeply stupid. And the newspapers didn’t help. This present bozo had killed two people, and already he had a media sobriquet. No wonder he had killed again so soon. He had a public to satisfy now. He was a performer.

To be a celebrity act, of course, you had to have a trademark, and the Park Killer’s bag was to kill in broad daylight in a public place full of passers-by – people walking dogs, people going to work, people jogging, roller-blading, bicycling. The newspapers had been full of wonder (which the killer probably read as admiration) as to how he had managed not to be seen. Paddenswick Park fitted this MO. It lay between Goldhawk Road to the north and King Street to the south, and was not only a cut-through but was well used by the local population for matutinal exercise and dog-emptying. Morning rush hour was the PK’s time of choice. If nothing else, Slider reflected, it slowed down the police trying to get to the scene.

By the time he reached the area, he had plumbed the depths. To add to the stupid senselessness of every murder, in this case there would be all the problems involved in liaising with the Ealing squad – how they would enjoy having to share with him the fact that they had got nowhere! – not to mention dealing with the inevitable media circus. It looked as though it would be a close-run thing whether he would get to marry Joanna or draw his pension first.

The park and a large section of Paddenswick Road, which ran down its east side, were cordoned off. Atherton was standing in the RV area behind the blue-and-white tape; he came over and moved it for Slider to drive through. Within the area were several marked police cars, Atherton’s and the department wheels and the large white van belonging to the scene-of-crime officers. Inside the park gates he could see that all the people who had been on the spot when the police arrived had been corralled, with a mixture of CID and uniform taking their basic details.

Though Slider kept a low media profile, some of the reporters recognised him and shouted out to him from where they were being kept at bay beyond the cordon. They only had one question, of course. ‘Is it the Park Killer?’ ‘Do you think it’s the Park Killer?’ A nod from him and they’d dash off, click together their Lego stock phrases, and every paper and bulletin would have the same headline: PARK KILLER STRIKES AGAIN. Slider ignored them.

‘What it is to be a star,’ said Atherton.

‘Me or him?’ Slider asked suspiciously.

‘Me, of course,’ said Atherton. He was elegantly suited, as always, and his straight fair hair, which he wore cut short these days, had just the subtlest hint of a fashionable spikiness about it, making him look even more dangerous to women. That sort of subtlety you had to pay upwards of forty quid for. Slider, who had used the same back-street barber for twenty years and now paid a princely nine quid a go, felt shabby and rumpled beside him. With his height and slimness Atherton sometimes looked more like a male model than a policeman. He was also, however, looking distinctly underslept about the eyes.

‘On the tiles again last night?’ Slider enquired. ‘Let me see, it was that new PC, wasn’t it? Collins?’

‘Yvonne. She’s new to the area and doesn’t know anybody,’ Atherton said, with dignity. ‘I was just making friends.’

‘A wild night of friend-making really takes it out of you,’ Slider said.

‘Crabby this morning,’ Atherton observed. ‘Bad luck about your day off. McLaren’s gone in search of coffee and bacon sarnies,’
he added coaxingly.

‘I had breakfast,’ Slider said. ‘I still don’t know what I’m doing here, if Porson’s in charge.’

‘Looks as though you’re about to find out,’ said Atherton, gesturing with his head.

Slider turned and caught Detective Superintendent Fred ‘The Syrup’ Porson’s eye on him across the little groups of coppers and witnesses. Porson was tall and bony and reared above the mass of humanity like a dolmen, his knobbly slap gleaming in the sun. It was still a shock to Slider to see old Syrup’s bald pate. He had earned his sobriquet through years of wearing a deeply unconvincing wig, but he had abandoned it the day his wife died. Slider was forced to the unlikely conclusion that it was Betty Porson (who had been quite an elegant little person) who had encouraged the sporting of the rug. The nickname had been in existence too long to die; now it had to be applied ironically.

Slider liked Porson. He was a good policeman and a loyal senior, and if he used language like a man in boxing gloves trying to thread a needle, well, it was a small price to pay not to be commanded by a twenty-something career kangaroo with a degree in Applied Pillockry.

The Syrup was signalling something with his eyebrows. Porson’s eyebrows were considerable growths. They could have declared UDI from the rest of his face and become a republic. Slider obeyed the summons.

‘Sorry about your day off,’ Porson said briefly. ‘I’ve got things initialated for you, but you’ll have to take over from here. I’ve got a Forward Strategy Planning Meeting at Hammersmith.’ His tone revealed what he thought of strategic planning meetings. These days, holding meetings seemed to be all the senior ranks did – hence, perhaps, old Syrup’s eagerness to sniff the gunpowder this morning. ‘Gallon was the first uniform on the spot – he’ll fill you in on the commensurate part. I’ve got people taking statements from everyone who was still here when we got here, and SOCO’s just gone in. All right?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Slider said. ‘But—’

Porson raised a large, knuckly hand in anticipation of Slider’s objection. ‘A word in your shell-like,’ he said, turning aside. Slider turned with him, and Porson resumed, in a lower voice: ‘Look here, this might be the Park Killer or it might not. It could be, from the look of appearances, but I want it either way. The SCG’s had to send most of its personal to help out the Anti-terrorist Squad, so Peter Judson’s down to two men and a performing dog, and they’re up to their navels.’ The Serious Crime Group had first refusal of all murders. ‘So it’ll probably be left with us, at least for the present time being. If we can clear this one, it’s going to do us a lot of bon. Definite flower in our caps.’

Slider wasn’t sure he wanted anything in his cap. ‘If it is a serial, there’s Ealing to consider,’ he said.

Porson looked triumphant. ‘That’s the beauty of it. They’ve not managed to get anywhere with it. We get the gen from them, and we clear it, see? Who’s a pretty boy then?’ Something of Slider’s inner scepticism must have showed, because Porson lowered his voice even more, and practically climbed into his ear. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’m . . .