‘Then he shoulda called himself Bikemichael,’ Hart said. ‘He never had a car.’
‘Moving on,’ Slider said, ‘we also have a partial address. It ought to be easy enough to find the right place, now we know it’s over a tarot shop.’
Atherton gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘We are talking about Ladbroke Grove. Tarot and crystal shops are as plentiful as black beetles in a basement. It’ll have a Moroccan restaurant on one side, and a shop selling velvet scarves and clothes with little mirrors sewn into them on the other.’
‘I can’t see the point of tarot,’ Hart said. ‘Even if you know the future, you can’t change it.’
‘No, and it’s a strain to keep looking surprised. So, we are going after this Carmichael type, then?’
‘We’ve got him placed with the victim on the night in question, and a row between them,’ Slider said.
‘But you still don’t think he’s the murderer?’ Hart said, disappointed.
‘There are problems. The tights, for one thing. And the witness discrepancy about the time the quarrel happened.’
‘I don’t think that’s a problem. Both are correct. They just parted for a bit and then got back together for the second round,’ Atherton said.
‘We also have to take into account that Ronnie Oates has been seen back on the ground,’ Slider added.
‘What did Mr Porson say about that when you told him?’ Hart enquired. It was a rhetorical question, but Atherton answered anyway.
‘I’d take a modest bet he said, “That’s more like it.”’
‘Someone is going to have to go round to his mum’s house and see if he’s there,’ Slider said, ‘and if he isn’t, find out where he is. It needs the right handling if it’s going to get a result. His mum may not be firing on all cylinders, but she won’t want to drop her son in it. Hollis, I hate to take you away from your work, but I really think this is one for you. She’d trust you.’
‘Whatever you say, guv,’ Hollis said, looking pleased. He was tall, and so thin he had to run around in the shower to get wet. He had pale green eyes like over-cooked gooseberries, a truly terrible moustache, and a curiously strangled Mancunian accent, but somehow or other, people, particularly old people, trusted him and told him things they wouldn’t tell someone who looked more like a paid-up member of the human race. It made him an invaluable interviewer, and Slider often regretted that, by his own choice, he was always office manager, the member of the team who stayed in the CID room pulling everything together. But the fact was he was very good at that, too – and no one else liked doing it.
‘So, it’s off to Ladbroke Grove to look for Biker Boy, then,’ Atherton said, summing up, ‘and East Acton for Ronnie Oates. What else?’
‘There are all these canvasses to trawl through. Did anyone get anything interesting?’
They discussed the more hopeful sightings, though none was sufficiently definite, particularly in regard to time. Several people had mentioned a blue or black car parked under the railway bridge late at night. A couple of people had complained about a motorbike going round, making a noise, but that was a common occurrence and a common grouch. A girl had been seen walking on the Scrubs on her own, a ‘weird-looking’ man ditto, and there had been a couple snogging by the changing rooms – though that also was a frequent occurrence. It was, after all, the Sunday night before a Bank Holiday, so there were a lot of people about, and Londoners were trained not to look too hard at each other, for the sake of everyone’s privacy. The car, for instance: under the railway bridge away from the street lamps was a place where those who could do no better were accustomed to have sex in vehiculo, so in politeness nobody would have approached it too closely or looked directly at the occupants.
‘When we’ve got a possible scenario,’ Hollis said, ‘it’ll be easier to filter out what might support it and go back to them. We’re working in a vacuum at the moment. And we still haven’t found the handbag. Possibly the murderer took it with him, in which case it could be anywhere.’
‘Widen the search,’ Slider said. ‘If we find the handbag we might find her mobile phone, and that would tell us who she’d been talking to. We can’t trace it by the signal because it’s apparently switched off.’
‘Funny that, though, isn’t it, guv?’ Connolly said. ‘Why would she switch it off?’
‘Maybe the murderer did it, if he took the bag,’ Hart said.
‘Only if he was savvy enough to know it could be traced that way. And why would he want the bag anyway?’
‘I dunno. Souvenir?’ Hart said. ‘Or he was just plain daft.’
‘But if he was daft he wouldn’t know to switch the phone off.’
Slider interrupted this unfruitful speculation. ‘It’s odd the way Zellah’s headmistress and her parents thought she was an angel, while Sophy and Chloë saw her as a goer.’
‘Probably one side or the other was deluded,’ Atherton said.
‘Maybe she was somewhere between the two,’ Connolly said. ‘Neither angel nor divil. People like to exaggerate.’
‘Or maybe neither side really knew her,’ Slider said, ‘and she was something quite different from either. The other thing that’s said about her was that she was a private person. I’m getting the image of a girl who is whatever is expected of her, different things to different people. And yet,’ he checked himself, ‘she was willing to deceive her parents over the weekend with Sophy. I’d like to know whose idea that was, initially. Maybe she was a master manipulator.’
‘Well, it seems certain that she did have sex with Biker Boy,’ Atherton said, ‘so she was a goer to that extent.’
‘Maybe there were others,’ McLaren said. ‘What about this Oliver Paulson type?
‘Yes, I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew a bit more about Miss Zellah than is necessarily apparent,’ Atherton said. ‘Besides being a probable consumer of Biker Boy’s little wraps. I like snapping at the heels of rich kids who think their money entitles them to break the law. Who knows what we may find in his fabulous flat?’
‘While agreeing with you that it’s fun to taunt those better off than ourselves,’ Slider said, ‘it doesn’t necessarily get us any closer to an answer. I wish I had the slightest bit of evidence against Carmichael, other than that he knew Zellah and has a shady past.’
‘And a shady present – we know he’s a drug dealer,’ McLaren said.
‘We’ve been told he’s a drug dealer, which is not the same thing.’
‘That Harley he rides around,’ McLaren said, not without envy. ‘How does he afford that, if not from dealing?’
‘Even if he is dealing, it doesn’t make him a murderer,’ Slider said.
‘Well, at least he’s a bit closer to it than anyone else we know about,’ Atherton said cheerfully.
EIGHT
Whale Sandwich
‘We released the victim’s name this morning, so we’ve had to put someone on the house to keep the vultures off,’ Porson said.
It was always a delicate decision to make, when and how much to release to the press, and Slider was glad it did not fall to him to make it. On the one hand, there was the danger of clues being lost under the inevitable media stampede; on the other hand, it was the quickest way of reaching people at large, and people at large might know things that were useful and come forward with them. They never released the name until the family were told, and in this case it had meant they had had the first day to themselves; but now the feline had been defenestrated, every gawper and gutter hound in the region would be hammering round to Violet Street as fast as his cloven hooves could carry him.