‘I don’t know. Really, I have no idea. I suppose if anyone knows, it would most likely be her. But he went to such pains to keep her secret, maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to burden her with the knowledge.’
‘And “women always talk”,’ Slider mused.
Maricas gave a quick, unhappy smile. ‘So what’s to be done?’
‘You’ll have to leave it with me,’ Slider said. ‘Say nothing to anyone about this.’
‘I’ve kept his secret this far. You can trust me.’
‘I know I can,’ Slider said.
‘But what will you do?’ Maricas asked anxiously.
‘I don’t know yet. Once we have the murderer behind bars, I think Rogers’s wife will be safe.’
‘But how will you catch him?’
I haven’t the foggiest, Slider thought. But what he said was, ‘We are following up lines of investigation.’
FOURTEEN
Beauty in the Eye of the Beer Holder
‘You’d better go yourself,’ Porson said. ‘Normally I’d disignore this James Bond bollocks as so much fantasy, but given that the Aude female was offed as soon as she raised her head, we can’t afford to assume there’s no threat to the wife. Otherwise we ought to involve the local police, out of courtesy if nothing else. But the less people know about this the better. What about this Maricas?’
‘I think Rogers got lucky. I’d say he was a hundred per cent. It seems to me that Rogers picked him because he was the first solicitor he saw – the office is very eye-catching when you turn into that road—’
‘But what was he doing on that road in the first place when he lives in Shepherd’s Bush?’
‘It’s the first major turning off the main road when you’re coming from Stanmore,’ Slider said. ‘There’s got to be some connection with Stanmore, but if it isn’t the Cloisterwood, I don’t know what it was.’
‘Well, don’t raggle your brain about that now. The wife might know. She might know everything, in fact. What else have you got to follow up?’
‘Swilley’s going after the agency – trying to find out how it’s financed.’
‘You think that’s important? You still think Sturgess is involved?’
‘We haven’t got any other suspects. And the presence of a new wife makes her more interesting.’
‘The presence of a new will leaving everything to the new wife makes Sturgess less of a suspect,’ Porson pointed out.
‘If she knew about it. Rogers seems to have been at pains to keep it secret. And the old will left Sturgess everything.’
‘Point. Anything else?’
‘I want to have a look round Rogers’s house, see if I can find that safe.’
‘You’d better do that before you go and see the wife. Might be all sorts of things in there.’
‘Yes,’ said Slider. ‘I thought I’d go now, and go down to Southwold early tomorrow. Sunday’s a good day to catch people in.’
‘Good thought.’ Porson’s brows lowered themselves in thought over his eyes. It made Slider think of someone in a cave drawing the branches down to hide the entrance. His pronouncement eventually was, ‘Be careful. Rogers could have been a fantastacist, or he could have been involved with some foreign secret service, or industrial espionage, or smuggling. But whatever it was, they’ve shown themselves to be ruthless. Don’t dick about with your safety or the woman’s.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ Slider said.
But first, to the house in Hofland Crescent, where Slider and Atherton were met by their expert on safes and safe-cracking, Bill Adams, inevitably known as ‘Burglar Bill’. He was a big man with a big presence, shrewd eyes, and the hands of a surgeon, an analogy improved by the presence of a stethoscope poking out of the top of his kit bag.
‘But first we have to find it,’ Slider said, to curb his eagerness to get cracking. ‘It can’t be anywhere too obvious or Bob Bailey’s lot would have stumbled across it.’
‘Essence of a hidden safe,’ Adams said, ‘is that you don’t stumble across it. Though it’s amazing how often people choose the obvious places. There’s a sort of psychology that wants your friends to know you’re important enough to have one. It’s showing off.’
‘Well, our Dirty Doc was a whale on showing off,’ Atherton said. ‘Where do you recommend we start looking?’
‘Leave it to me,’ Adams said, with an air of rubbing his hands. ‘I like a challenge. Though it probably won’t be much of one.’
It was interesting to walk round behind him as he checked the usual places – peeping behind paintings, lifting rugs, examining cupboards. The dressing-room got him interested because there was a lock on the door – ‘Why would anyone want to lock up their suits?’ – but in the end he found it in the bathroom. The presence of a false wall was not in itself suspicious, he explained, because there were all sorts of pipes to be hidden, but this one was on the wrong side of the bathroom. The mirror over the basin was the sort that turned out to be a shallow cupboard containing medicines and spare razor blades; but the whole cupboard was further hinged and swung out from the wall, revealing the safe sunk into the space between the false wall and the brickwork.
‘Nice,’ Adams said. ‘Not seen that one before. And cute – your average burglar wouldn’t think of the bathroom.’
‘And private,’ Slider added. ‘If there was anyone else in the house – as there often was, Rogers being fond of female company – he could go in there and lock the door to access it without anyone wondering.’
‘Right enough,’ Adams said. ‘I hadn’t thought of that aspect.’
‘Now you’ve found it, can you open it?’
‘Oh yes,’ Adams said easily. ‘It isn’t a serious safe. Concealment was the real security. I’ll have it open for you in a brace of shakes.’ Shortly afterwards, a satisfying clunk having been heard from the door, Adams stepped back and said, ‘Be my guest.’
Slider hardly knew what he had expected to find in the safe, apart from a copy of the will. That, however, was not there: what was there was was money, cash, in fifties and twenties, bundled and held together some by rubber bands and some by paper sleeves.
‘Well,’ said Atherton appreciatively.
‘What’s your boy done – robbed a bank?’ Adams asked after a windless whistle.
‘I wish it were that simple,’ Slider said.
‘We did keep hearing that he paid cash for things,’ Atherton remembered. ‘So this was where he kept it. Got to be ill-gotten gains – you don’t keep your money in the house, unless you’re a barmy old lady with fourteen cats.’
‘Presumably he was paid in cash,’ said Slider, ‘for whatever it was he was doing. Or partly in cash.’ He removed the bundles, doing a rough count as he went. There was close on a hundred thousand in there.
‘Talk about your mad money,’ Atherton said. ‘So what now?’
‘We take it into safe keeping,’ Slider said. ‘Until we find out where it came from. If it isn’t dirty, the widow gets it. Look around for a bag, will you. There’s probably something in the dressing-room that will do.’ He turned to Adams. ‘Will you just check round the rest of the house, in case he had two safes? I’m going to have a walk round, in case there’s anything else of interest.’
Swilley was in his room when he got back, to report that she had made contact with Angela Fraser, who was ‘more than willing’ to help out.
‘She loves it that someone’s taking her seriously, poor cow,’ she said with scant sympathy. ‘She’s pretty sure she can get a look at the books on Monday. Amanda’s apparently not coming in, and she can do it when Nora goes to lunch and she’s alone in the office. I’ve told her to be careful, but I think she would have been anyway – she’s scared shitless of Amanda at the best of times.’