‘Maybe they were disturbed before they had to chance to look further,’ Atherton said. ‘Who’s to say they knew what rooms were up there?’
‘Well, thanks, Bob,’ Slider said. ‘Let me know when we can come back for a closer look. What I really want most urgently is a photograph of the good doctor, since we’re not likely to get a mugshot.’
‘No difficulty there,’ Bailey said. He gestured towards one of the chests, where there was an assembly of photographs in matching silver frames. ‘Most of them are of the same man so I’m guessing it’s him.’
‘I guess too. The sort of person to have matching silver frames would be bound to keep lots of pictures of himself around,’ Atherton said. ‘I bet he had a monogrammed wallet as well.’
Bailey grinned. ‘How did you know? In his jacket, hanging on the dumb valet in the dressing-room. I’ll let you have it as soon as we’re done fingerprinting, but there’s money and credit cards in it – doesn’t look as though it’s been disturbed.’
‘A very selective intruder,’ Slider said.
Bailey brought him some of the photographs, and he chose one of a man wearing nothing but swimming trunks standing in the sunshine on a dock somewhere, smiling directly at the camera, with a motor yacht moored up just behind him. He was very tanned, with a hairless chest, and not in bad shape, reasonably muscled arms, just a little sly bulging to either side above the elastic of the trunks. Slider chose it because he was full-face and clear. He picked another of the same man with a woman. In this one he was in white dinner jacket. The woman was in a clinging white evening dress with more décolletage than was strictly proper, unless she was hoping the good doctor was about to give her a thorough physical. From the way she was hanging on to his arm and gazing at him, perhaps she was.
‘You keep calling him the good doctor,’ Atherton said. ‘From the look of Doris here he’s more the original Dirty Doctor.’
Both had champagne glasses in their free hands, and the edge of a table covered in plates of fiddly food could be seen to one side. The background was a terrace at night, with a string of fancy lamps overhead, and the dots of light in the darkness behind them could have been any major city in the world, seen from a penthouse terrace. Corporate party of some kind, Slider was willing to bet, from their cheesy grins and the canapés.
Bailey removed them from the frames and handed them over, and as Slider was turning to go, said, ‘Oh! I nearly forgot! You’re going to love me for this.’ With a rabbit-and-hat air, he brought out from his pocket an evidence bag containing a mobile phone, and held it out to Slider with a grin. ‘Also in his jacket, in the dressing-room. I know how you love following up numbers.’
‘Terrific,’ Slider said. ‘Just what I wanted. If I weren’t wearing a mask I’d kiss you.’
‘I’m not that easy,’ said Bailey.
Slider left Atherton on site, and took Connolly with him to the hospital, a sort of consolation prize for having denied her the corpse. Besides, it was always as well to have a female on hand when interviewing a female. He scuttled in hunched mode through the icy wind to the car, and Connolly, who had been strolling in her warm tweed Withnail coat, had to run to keep up with him, a panther pursuing a crab.
‘What’s the girl’s name – do we know?’ he asked her as they turned out of Hofland Crescent into Masbro Road, realizing belatedly that he had never heard it mentioned.
‘Katrina Old. The ambulance paras asked her, and that’s what the owl ones remember – though they were in flitters, so they may have got it wrong.’
In the car, Connolly picked up the photo of the man with the girl. ‘That dress leaves everything to be desired. So this is your man Rogers?’ She studied the face. A bit Pierce Brosnan, if you squinted: forties, handsome, perma-tanned, going a bit soft; pleased with himself; expensive haircut just too young for him – unlike the female on his arm, who was a lot too young for him. ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘hasn’t he the face you’d never tire of slapping?’
Slider smiled to himself, turning into Blythe Road. He liked the way Connolly talked. ‘Little Katrina doesn’t think so,’ he said, nodding at the photograph.
‘Plastic Mary here? Is that her, so?’
‘Dunno. I’m assuming.’
Connolly studied the exposed cleavage again. ‘Convent girl, obviously,’ she murmured.
The rush-hour traffic had done its thing and he got through to Charing Cross hospital fairly easily. The stained concrete building, built in the worst of the brutalist style of the seventies, was depressing. The Victorians, he reflected, at least realized that illness is ugly enough anyway, and added curlicues and turrets and fancy brickwork to their hospitals for distraction.
They found the witness in a private room being watched over by PC Lawrence, a slight girl with transparent skin and the kind of thin fair hair that always slips out of its moorings. She looked to Slider altogether too frail to be a copper, but you couldn’t say that kind of thing now. At least Connolly, though not tall, had a muscular look about her and a sharp determination in her face. She and Lawrence had been friends in uniform. ‘Howya, Jillie,’ she greeted her.
‘’Lo, Reets,’ Lawrence replied laconically, lounging in her chair; then, seeing Slider, stood up sharply and said, ‘Sir,’ while a disastrously visible blush coursed through her see-through face. How had she ever got through Hendon, Slider wondered despairingly.
The witness’s name was in fact Catriona Aude; she was twenty-seven and lived in a shared flat in Putney. And she was not the blonde in the photograph. It showed a coarsening of the fibres, Slider thought, to display one woman’s photograph in your bedroom when you were furgling another. Or as Connolly put it indignantly, ‘He’d sicken you!’
‘Miss Aude,’ said Slider, ‘I am Detective Inspector Slider of Shepherd’s Bush police, and this is Detective Constable Connolly. Are you feeling up to answering a few questions?’
As Lawrence could have warned them – and in fact she did mention it afterwards – the difficulty was to stop her talking. They had given her a painkiller and something to calm her down, and for some physiological reason the combination had made her loquacious.
‘Oh no, I’m fine, I mean, I wasn’t really hurt, just a few bruises and I twisted my ankle when I landed but that’s all right now and my hands are a bit sore from the railings, the paint’s kind of flaky and sharp and I had to hang on for ages, I thought I was going to fall but I sort of froze, y’know? and then I couldn’t let go and my arms were nearly coming out of their sockets, I can’t tell you how much it hurt, I thought he was going to kill me, I thought I was going to die.’ Suddenly she set her fingers to her face and dragged it downwards into a Greek mask of tragedy, and behind them moaned, ‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. He’s dead, isn’t he?’
When not pulling her eyes down in imitation of a bloodhound, she was an attractive young woman, with brown eyes and long, thick brown hair with purple highlights, and the kind of spectacular frontal development that seemed to mark a definite taste on the part of the deceased doctor. She had a suspiciously even tan, and the remains of last night’s eye make-up had been spread around by sleep and perhaps the sweat of fear, but not, it seemed, by tears.
‘I can’t cry,’ she confided. ‘I want to cry, I really want to cry, but I can’t. I dunno why.’
‘It’ll be the pills they gave you,’ Connolly said comfortingly, and the young woman turned to her so readily that Slider took a back seat and let Connolly get on with it.
‘Really?’
‘Don’t worry, you’ll cry all right when they wear off. But it’s good you can’t cry now, because we need you to be calm, so’s you can tell us everything that happened. Every little thing you can remember. Are you up for that, Catriona?’