Necrochip

Book 3: Bill Slider Mystery

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

'An outstanding series' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

A Bill Slider Mystery

There's a changing of the guard at Shepherd's Bush police station. But unfortunately for Bill Slider, incoming Detective Superintendent Barrington has something to prove and no desire to make friends with his subordinates.

Luckily - or rather, unluckily - Slider has work to be getting on with, and soon the discovery of a dismembered corpse plunges him into west London's seedy underworld.

But something's not sitting right. Why did Barrington have an axe to grind with the old Detective Superintendent? The more Slider learns, the less he likes it, and the less he can believe that his job is ever going to win him friends in high places ...


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

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

It had been quiet lately, a warm sunny spell after a cold wet spring surprising the General Public into good behaviour. If it went on, of course, the hot weather would generate its own particular rash of crime and they would all be run off their feet, but for the moment people were more interested in enjoying the sunshine than abusing their neighbours.

In the middle of the morning the atmosphere in the canteen at Shepherd’s Bush nick was so dense and bland you could have poured it over the apple pie and called it custard. Like trench soldiers during a prolonged pause in hostilities, the troops hung about drinking tea, playing cards, and swapping half-hearted complaints.

Detective Inspector Slider had had a cup of tea brought to him in his office only half an hour ago, but the contagion of lethargy found him joining his bagman, DS Atherton, for another. Some previous occupant of their corner table had managed to persuade the window open a crack, and a green, living sort of smell from the plane tree outside was pervading the normal canteen miasma of chips and sweat.

Slider dunked his teabag aimlessly up and down in the hot water, his mind idling out of gear. He didn’t really want the tea. These days there was a choice of teabags at the counter: Earl Grey, Orange Pekoe, Lapsang Souchong, or Breakfast Blend (catering-speak for Bog Standard). It was a move intended to quell the complaints about the change to teabags, which itself had been the response to complaints about the quality of the tea made the old way, which had always been either stewed or transparent. Since Atherton had bought this round, they had both got Earl Grey, which Slider didn’t care for. He didn’t like to say so, though, for fear of Atherton’s left eyebrow, which had a way of rising all on its own at any evidence of philistinism.

Atherton was so bored he had picked up a copy of The Job, the official Met newspaper whose explorative prose style brought out the David Attenborough in him. He turned a page now and found a report on an athletics meeting at Sudbury.

‘It says here, “After a slip in the 100 metres hurdles, PC Terry Smith remained lying prostate for some minutes.” That’s a gland way to spend the afternoon.’

Slider looked across at the front page. The picture was of two cute Alsatian puppies sitting in upturned police uniform caps, under the bold headline YAWN PATROL. He began to read the text. At the moment police work might be nothing more than a playful game of caps and robbers to tiny Dawn and Dynasty, but 12 months from now… He stopped reading hastily. On the back page was more sports news and an achingly unfunny cartoon. Slider remembered Joanna telling him what orchestral trumpet players said about their job: you spend half the time bored to death, and the other half scared to death. She was away on tour at the moment. He had managed to get thinking about her down to once every ten minutes.

Atherton turned a page. ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Here’s a para on Dickson. Obituary.’ He read it in silence. ‘Doesn’t say much,’ he said disapprovingly.

‘They never do,’ Slider said. Die in harness after thirty years of dedicated service, and you merit less room in the paper than tiny Dawn and Dynasty. Of course, to be honest, Dickson had never been that photogenic. And to be fair, they had been about to execute him when he forestalled them by having a heart attack. ‘Anything known about the new bloke?’ Slider asked to take his mind off Dickson, whom he missed and whose treatment he bitterly resented. ‘What’s his name – Boycott?’

‘Barrington,’ Atherton corrected. ‘Detective Superintendent I.V.N. Barrington.’

‘I knew it was some cricketer or other.’ Atherton, who had never heard of Barrington, looked blank. ‘I’ve never come across him. Have you heard anything?’

‘He’s from Kensington, apparently; before that I don’t know. Originally comes from oop north somewhere. Carrot country.’ He glanced round at the next table, where DC McLaren – recently transferred from Lambeth to replace Hunt – was reading the Sun while slowly consuming a microwave-heated Grunwick meat pie straight from the cellophane. Atherton repressed a shudder. ‘Hey, Maurice – you were at Kensington for a while, weren’t you? Did you come across this DS Barrington at all? What’s he like?’

McLaren looked up, removing his mouth from the pie. A lump of something brown and glutinous slipped out from the pastry crust and slopped onto the table. ‘Barrington? Yeah. He’s a great big bloke, face all over acne scars. Looks like a blemished lorry.’

‘Never mind that, what’s he like?’ Atherton interrupted.

‘What would you be like if you’d spent your teenage years looking like a pepperoni pizza? And he’s ex-army. Boxed for his unit; fair shot, too. Belongs to some snotty shooting club out Watford way. At Kensington we used to call him Mad Ivan.’

‘That’s encouraging.’

‘Cos of his initials – I.V.N.,’ he explained kindly. ‘Anyway, he comes from Yorkshire, and you know what it’s like out in the sticks – the top bods think they’re gods. I mean, Met guv’nors are human at least – more or less—’ It was plain that he hadn’t seen Slider in the corner. From where he was sitting, Atherton’s tall shape must have screened him.

‘Disciplinarian, is he?’ Atherton interrupted tactfully.

‘You might say,’ McLaren said with grim relish. ‘You lot’ll have to pull your socks up. He won’t let you get away with murder like old Dickson did. Especially you, Jim. No more lying about the office all day reading Time Out, then knocking off early for a trip to Harrods Food Hall.’

‘Do you really do that?’ Slider enquired mildly of Atherton. ‘I didn’t know.’

McLaren started, and reddened. ‘Sorry, Guv. I didn’t see you there.’

‘That’s all right. This is most enlightening. So Mr Barrington’s a spit and polish man, is he?’

‘Ex-army. Some said he was in the paras, but I dunno if that’s true. But he likes everything smart.’

‘Well, that suits me,’ Atherton said languidly, leaning back in his chair and stretching his elegant legs out under the table. ‘Maybe he can stop Mackay wearing nylon shirts.’

‘I doubt whether his definition of “smart” will coincide exactly with yours,’ Slider said. He pushed his now tepid tea away and stood up. ‘Ah, well, I suppose I’d better go and do some paperwork.’

* * *

As he walked back to his office, he reflected on the last days of DS Robert Scott Dickson, sometimes referred to – though never in his hearing – as ‘George’. He hadn’t quite died at his desk, as freshly-reprimanded DCs generation after generation had hopefully predicted, but it was a close thing. He’d been found there unconscious after the first heart attack, and it had taken four of them plus the ambulance crew to extricate him from his furniture and get him downstairs into the ambulance; for Dickson was a big man.

Slider had visited him in hospital the following day, and had found him strangely shrunken, lying immobile in the high white bed, patched in to the National Grid and running half a dozen VDU monitors. Small he looked amongst so much technology, and very clean and pale, as though he’d been shelled and his gnarled old obstreperous personality cleared tidily away by the nurses. Only his hands, resting on the fold of the sheet, had defied the process: the first and second fingers of each were stained orange almost to the knuckle, kippered by a lifetime’s nicotine, as though he’d smoked them two at a time. He looked for the first time like an old man, and Slider had been suddenly afraid for him, taken aback by this unexpected hint of mortality in someone he’d regarded as hardly human enough ever to die.

Dickson suffered a second attack the following day, a lesser one, but enough to finish him. But it had not really been that, Slider thought, which killed him. There had long been an element that wanted Dickson out, and that element had been baying more loudly recently, despite the good publicity the Department had gained over the clearing-up of what the tabloids had dubbed the Death Watch Murders. Even there, though presiding over a successful investigation, Dickson had not come across well in front of the news cameras: he was neither a lean, smart, keen-eyed achiever, nor the fatherly, dependable copper of public yearnings. Unpredictable of temper and permanently ash-strewn, like a mobile Mount Etna, he had scowled at the journalists’ questions and all but told them to mind their own bloody business. Standing at his elbow and wincing inwardly, Slider had imagined the local editor hastily changing the proposed jocularly approving headline of DICKSON OF SHEPHERD’S BUSH GREEN for an irate and rhetorical WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS?

In the end if top brass wanted you out, they’d always find a way, and Dickson’s faults being as many and manifest as his virtues, he didn’t make it hard for them. There had been a certain amount of fancy footwork on the part of the area chiefs, and some flirtatious meetings with members of Dickson’s team who were not-so-discreetly pumped for incriminating evidence against him. Slider, whom Atherton described affectionately as CSN – conspiratorially sub-normal – hadn’t understood at first what was going on. When his own turn came he met both veiled promises and veiled threats with puzzled blankness. Later Atherton and Joanna together explained it all to him, and when he wanted to go back in there and punch noses, they assured him he couldn’t knowingly have done better than he had unwittingly.

But it angered and depressed him all the same. ‘If I’d realised what they were getting at—! All those questions – d’you know, the bastards even tried to make out that the old man’s racially prejudiced? I didn’t twig it then, but I see now why they kept asking why we had no black DCs on our firm—’

‘You’re not allowed to say “black” any more. You have to say “epidermically challenged”.’

‘Shut up, Jim,’ Joanna said. ‘This is serious.’

‘I mean, Dickson of all people – he hardly even notices whether people are male or female, never mind what colour they are. And all that guff about his relationship with the press! As if any copper can keep those jackals happy, without feeding them his balls in a buttered roll.’

‘We’re all going to have to keep our heads down for a while,’ Atherton said, suddenly serious. ‘When the shit hits the fan, it’s better to be a live coward than a dead hero.’

‘I hate you when you talk like that,’ Joanna interrupted plaintively.

‘That’s from the Michael Douglas books of aphorisms,’ Atherton said in hurt tones.

‘You sound like some dickhead junior sales executive trying to impress the typists.’

‘But what about loyalty?’ Slider asked, still angry and ignoring the asides.

‘Depends,’ Atherton said, on the defensive. ‘Do you think Dickson would be loyal to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not if you’d done wrong.’

‘He hasn’t done wrong,’ Slider said, frustrated.

‘Then he’s got nothing to fear,’ Atherton said with maddening logic.

In the end, the Mighty Ones picked on drink; and Slider heard it first from Dickson himself.

It was at the end of a routine discussion in Dickson’s office. Slider, waiting to be dismissed, saw a change come over his boss. Dickson said suddenly, ‘I’ve been offered a posting to the computer centre. Letter here from Reggie Wetherspoon.’ He made a flat gesture towards his tottering in-tray. Wetherspoon was the Area Commander.

‘Sir?’

‘Come on, Bill, don’t give me that innocent look! You know what’s been going on. You had a cosy little cup of tea with Wetherspoon yourself last week, didn’t you?’ The irritation was feigned, Slider could see that. Dickson’s expression was watchful: a man counting his friends, perhaps? Or perhaps merely assessing his weapons. ‘I’ve been given the choice: sideways promotion, or a formal enquiry into my drinking habits in which I’ll be found unfit for duty and required to resign. I can make it easy for myself, Wetherspoon says, or I can do it the hard way. It’s up to me.’

‘You’ll fight them, sir,’ Slider said. It wasn’t really a question so much as a demand for reassurance. He had seen Dickson over the years in many moods and many modes, but this one was new. He seemed neither angry nor depressed nor even afraid; only very calm and rather distant, as though he had other things on his mind and was trying to be politely attentive to a friend’s child at the same time.

‘Bottle fatigue,’ Dickson said thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know. That would be a stain on the record, all right.’

‘They couldn’t make it stick,’ Slider said. ‘They’ve no evidence. Everyone here—’

‘—will be invited to an official enquiry. Statements will be required. Names taken for future reference, absences noted, apologies not accepted. If you’re not a friend you’re an enemy. Remember that.’

‘I’ll pick my own friends,’ Slider said angrily.

‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ Dickson said, quite kindly really. ‘They’ll take you down with me if you don’t co-operate. You’re a marked man already, don’t forget.’

‘I don’t care about that—’

‘You should care! Christ, this isn’t the bloody Boy Scouts! You’re here to do a job. I happen to think it’s an important job, and what good will it do anyone if you chuck your career away? No, listen to me! If they want a statement, give them a bloody statement. And if I do leave, take your promotion and get out. Go to another station as DCI and do the job you’ve been trained for.’ He forestalled another protest with an irritable gesture of one meaty hand. ‘If nothing else, you should be thinking about your pension now. You’re not bloody Peter Pan.’

‘Sir,’ Slider said stubbornly.

Dickson looked suddenly tired. ‘All right,’ he said, with a gesture of dismissal. ‘Suit yourself.’

Slider left him, not without apprehension. The old man would fight – must fight – could not and would not let Them get away with branding him a sot and a failure. Yet there was something detached about him, as though he had already let go; as though the effort of caring about things had become too great.

Slider lived through three days of strange, nervous limbo, waiting for the official notification that there was to be an enquiry, which would be the sign that Dickson had refused the posting to computers. But on the fourth day Dickson had collapsed at his desk, refusing either to be captured or shot, but launching himself instead Butch-Cassidy-style over the precipice where none could follow him.

Slider had sometimes wondered what he would feel in the event of Dickson’s departure for that Ground from which no man returns. He had supposed it might be sorrow, though the old man had not been one to court affection or even liking; he had expected a sense of loss. He had not been prepared for this anger and depression; but then he had not expected Dickson to be assassinated. The only small comfort was that Dickson had left the Job and the world with a stainless record after all. Dead hero. Slider reflected that it must have taken the most delicate of footwork for such a nonconformist man thus to avoid the falling fertiliser for thirty years.

At the end of the corridor Slider heard his telephone ringing, but before he reached his door it stopped. He shrugged and went over to his desk to see what had arrived since he had left it half an hour ago. The usual old rubbish. There were periods like this from time to time when nothing much seemed to happen, and his duties became almost completely supervisory and sedentary. He picked up a circulating file he had been putting off reading for days, and felt nothing but gratitude for the interruption of a knock on the door.

Jablowski put her head round. She always wore her hair short and spiky, but when she had just recently had it cut it looked almost painful. Her little pointed ears stood out from the stubble like leverets in a cornfield, exposed and vulnerable with the loss of their habitat.

‘Oh! You are there, sir.’

‘So it seems. Problem?’

‘I’ve just had Mr Barrington on the line, asking where you were. He said as soon as I found you to ask you to go and see him. He’s been ringing your phone.’

‘I’ve only just got back to my desk. Where was he ringing from?’

‘Here, sir. I mean, Mr Dickson’s office.’

‘Already? I thought he wasn’t due until Monday.’

Jablowski wrinkled her nose. ‘Dead men’s shoes. Maybe he’s trying to catch us out. Maurice McLaren was saying—’

‘I think we ought to try to start without prejudices,’ Slider checked her. ‘Give the man a fair chance.’

‘Yes Guv. If you say so,’ Jablowski said with profound disagreement.

It was unnerving to tap on Dickson’s door and hear a strange voice answer.

‘Come!’

Slider’s heart sank. He felt that someone too busy to get to the end of a sentence as short as ‘Come in’ would not prove to be a restful companion. He entered, and true to his principles searched around for a friendly and cheerful expression as he presented himself for inspection.

‘Slider, sir. You wanted to see me?’

Barrington was standing beside the desk, his back turned to the door, staring out of the window. His hands were down at his side, and the fingers of his right hand were drumming on the desk top. His bulk, coming between the window and the door, darkened the room, for he was both tall and heavily built. It was a solid, hard bulk – muscle, not fat – but he dressed well, so that he gave an impression of being at ease with his size. Slider thought of Atherton’s lounging grace which always made him seem apologetic about his height. Still, Atherton would approve of the suit at least. Even Slider, who was a sartorial ignoramus, could see the quality of it. And a quick glance at the shoes – Slider believed shoes were a useful indicator of character – revealed them to be heavy and expensive black Oxfords, polished to that deeply glassy shine that only soldiers ever really master. So far so bad, he thought.

When Barrington turned, it was impossible to look anywhere but at his face. It was a big face, big enough for that huge body, and made bigger by the thick wiry black hair which Slider could see would defy any barber’s efforts to make it lie down quietly. It was a big face which might have been strikingly handsome if nature had left it alone, but which in its ruin was simply spectacular. Slider blenched at the thought of what the ravages must have looked like which could have left such scars: Barrington’s naturally swarthy skin was gouged and pocked and runnelled like the surface of a space-wandering meteor.

And set in the ruin, under thick black brows, were intelligent hazel eyes, black-fringed; almost feral in their beauty. With an unwilling access of pity, Slider imagined those eyes as they must have looked out in adolescence from amidst the fresh eruptions; imagined him as a boy carrying his pustular, volcanic face before him into a world which turned from him in helpless distaste. Christ, Barrington, Slider thought, reverting in the depth of his pity to police jargon, ain’t life a bitch! He was ready to forgive him even for saying ‘Come!’

‘Ah yes, Slider,’ Barrington said coldly, surveying him minutely. His voice was big, too, resonant and full. It would carry – had carried, perhaps – across a windy northern parade ground. ‘We haven’t met before, I think. Bill, isn’t it?’ he asked, having apparently filed Slider’s essential features in some mental system of his own. ‘Relax. I’m not officially here yet. I thought we might just have a friendly chat, get to know each other.’

‘Sir,’ said Slider neutrally. The offer to relax was as enticing as a barbed-wire hammock.

Barrington’s mouth smiled, but nothing else in the pitted moonscape moved. ‘Well. So this is Shepherd’s Bush. Bob Dickson’s ground – which he made peculiarly his own.’

The last bit did not sound complimentary. ‘Did you know him, sir?’

‘Oh, yes.’ There was no telling whether it had been a pleasure or not. ‘We were at Notting Hill at the same time. Some years ago now.’

‘I didn’t know he’d been at Notting Hill,’ Slider said. He felt it was time to nail his colours to the mast. ‘His death was a great shock, sir. We’ll all miss him.’

‘He was a remarkable man,’ Barrington said enigmatically. The effort of being nice seemed to be proving a strain. The fingers drummed again. ‘Doesn’t anyone ever clean the windows here?’ he barked abruptly. ‘This one’s practically opaque.’

‘They haven’t been done since I’ve been here, sir,’ Slider said.

‘Then we’ll have them done. A lick of paint here and there wouldn’t come amiss, either; and a few pot-plants. I’m surprised the typists haven’t brought in pot-plants. The two usually go together.’

‘We’ve always been short of civilian staff here, sir,’ Slider said neutrally.

‘I want the place brightened up,’ Barrington rode over the objection. ‘Can’t expect people to behave smartly if their surroundings are dingy.’

He paused to let Slider agree or disagree, but Slider let the trap yawn unstepped-in. The bright eyes grew harder.

‘I was ringing your office for quite a while, trying to reach you. You weren’t at your desk.’

‘No, sir,’ Slider agreed, looking back steadily. Now was definitely the moment to get a few ground rules clear.

After a moment it was Barrington who looked away. ‘Things are pretty quiet at the moment,’ he said, moving round the desk and pulling out the chair as if he meant to sit down.

‘We’re always busy, sir. But there’s nothing special on at the moment.’

‘Good. Then it’s the right time to do some reorganising.’ He changed his mind about sitting down, and leaned on the chair back instead. Slider thought he was like an actor during a long speech, finding bits of stage business to occupy his body. ‘Organisation is the first essential – of people as well as the place. I want to find out what everybody’s good for.’

‘We’ve got a good team, sir,’ Slider said. ‘I’ve worked with them for some time now—’

Barrington made a small movement, like a cat in the grass spotting a bird landing nearby. ‘You refused your promotion to Chief Inspector, I understand. Why was that?’

‘I wanted to stay operational, sir.’ Slider had been prepared for that question, at least. ‘I’ve never been fond of desk work and meetings.’

‘None of us are,’ Barrington said firmly. ‘But it has to be done. Someone has to do it.’ To which Slider’s inward answers were – Not true, So what? and As long as it’s not me. ‘I expect everyone in my team to pull his full weight. No freeloaders. No weak links.’ There seemed to be nothing to say to that, so Slider said it. ‘We’ve got the chance for a new start here. Bob Dickson had his own ways of doing things, and sometimes they paid off. But his ways are not my ways. He’s gone now, and you’ve got me to answer to. I expect absolute loyalty. And I think you can tell the men that in return they will get absolute loyalty from me.’

‘I’ll tell them that, sir.’

Barrington studied the answer for a moment and seemed to find it short on fervour. ‘Some things are going to have to change around here,’ he went on. ‘Things have been let go. I’m not blaming anyone. It happens. But not when I’m in charge. I like to run a smart outfit. People are happier when they know what’s expected of them.’

‘Sir,’ Slider said. He was puzzled. The man was talking like a complete arse, and yet he got the feeling of real menace. It was as if the worn cliches were a crude code used by a being from a superior species who thought they were good enough for poor old dumb homo sapiens, Barrington’s higher thought processes were deemed to be too subtle for Slider to understand. And why had he not liked Dickson? Was it merely a spit and polish man’s irritation with the effective slob, or was there something else behind it? It must have been a fairly steep sort of annoyance for him to let it show like this.

Slider had evidently had his allotted time. Barrington came back round the desk and held out his hand. ‘Glad we’ve had this little chat.’

Slider’s hand was gripped, wrung and let go all in one movement, and Barrington was opening the door for him and ushering him out with the sheer force of his physical size. Norma, approaching along the corridor, stopped on seeing Slider, and then somehow stopped again from a stationary position on seeing Barrington. He smiled at her with his automatic, unmoving smile, his eyes photographing and filing her.

‘I don’t think we’ve met,’ he said. ‘Barrington.’

‘Swilley,’ she responded, mesmerised.

‘WDC Swilley—’ Slider began to explain, but Barrington cut him off.

‘Fine. I’ll get to know you all in due course,’ he said, and popped back through his trap door like the Demon King.

Norma turned open-mouthed to Slider, who shook his head and walked away along the corridor. He wouldn’t put it past Barrington to be standing just by the door to hear what they said about him.

When they had turned the corner and were safe she burst out in a low gasp, ‘Who is that extraordinary, sexy man?’

‘Sexy?’ Slider said, wounded. ‘With those acne scars?’

‘I can’t help it,’ she said in a baffled voice. ‘I know he oughtn’t to be, but, God! He made my knees go weak.’

‘He’s the new DS. Stepped into Dickson’s shoes. At Kensington they called him Mad Ivan.’

‘I bet they did! He’s breathtaking!’

‘You’re dribbling,’ Slider told her coldly. ‘What did you want, anyway?’

‘I was looking for you, Guv. A call’s just come in from Dave’s Fish Bar in Uxbridge Road – chip shop, corner of Adelaide Grove—’

‘Yes, I know it.’

‘A customer just bought a thirty pee portion of chips and found a finger in it.’

‘A finger of what?’ Slider asked absently.

‘A human finger.’

He wrinkled his nose. ‘Someone else can deal with it, surely? I’m not a public health inspector.’

Norma looked offended. ‘I thought you’d find it amusing, that’s all. There’s so little to do around here. Atherton’s gone,’ she added cunningly.

‘You’re quite right, of course. Anything’s better than going back and reading circulation files.’

‘You never know,’ she said encouragingly, following him down the corridor. ‘You might find the rest of the body attached to it.’

‘I’m never that lucky,’ he said.

Cheryl Makepeace, aged fifteen, had been on her way to school – Hammersmith County, at the far end of Bloemfontein Road. She’d been to the doctor . . .