‘Get off me!’ he gasped. ‘I haven’t done nothing!’
‘Stop struggling,’ Slider panted, hanging on. McLaren had got the handcuffs out and was trying to get one end on the other wrist. ‘You’ll just hurt yourself. Give it up.’
‘Lemme go! I ain’t done nothing!’
‘Then what did you run for? Keep still, you idiot. We’ve got you now.’
But not until the cuffs were on did he stop thrashing, and even then Slider suspected it was lack of air rather than lack of ambition. ‘Get off me! I can’t breathe!’ he was moaning.
Hart eased herself off, taking hold of the handcuff chain for precaution as she rose. Slider and McLaren took an arm each and heaved the lad to his feet. He was about five-foot-seven, lean, good-looking, in his early twenties, though he looked younger because of his slight build. Despite the warm day he was wearing his black leather jacket over jeans and boots. His longish dark hair was all over the place, and he had a red mark down one side of his face where it had been pressed to the pavement, which slightly detracted from his air of sophistication – and no one looks their best in handcuffs. But Slider could guess that in good times he had the air to attract the girls and make the boys envy him.
He glowered at Slider. ‘I haven’t done nothing! Take these things off me!’
‘You’ve run away from me twice, son,’ Slider said. ‘That’s enough for me.’
‘You’d run away if people were always after you. You cops never leave me alone.’
Hart gave his chain a yank. ‘Stop dealing drugs and we’ll leave you alone.’
‘I don’t deal drugs,’ he said. ‘Just ’cos I was in trouble once. You never give anyone a chance. Anyone from the estate, you’re down on. You’re all the same, you—’
‘Oh, stop whining,’ she said. ‘You’re nabbed. Take it like a man.’
Slider almost snorted, but the approach seemed to work with Carmichael. He sagged a little and looked sulky. ‘So what’re you arresting me for?’
‘We’ll think of something. I’m sure when we have a little look in your flat we’ll find something interesting,’ Hart said.
‘Plant it, more like,’ he muttered sullenly.
Hart winked at Slider. ‘There y’are, guv. Out’v his own mouth. He wouldn’t’ve said that unless there was something up there to find. I knew he didn’t run for nothing.’
‘Why don’t you bastards leave me alone?’ Carmichael almost wailed. ‘Why don’t you go after the big players?’
‘Because we want to talk to you about Zellah Wilding,’ Slider said.
‘Who?’ Carmichael said.
‘Your girlfriend,’ Hart said. ‘You must remember her.’
‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ Carmichael said. ‘We broke up.’
‘It was off, and then it was on again,’ Hart said.
‘I tell you I haven’t seen her in months.’
‘Well, in that case,’ Slider said, ‘we’ll arrest you for lying to us. We’ve got a dozen witnesses that you were with her on Sunday night.’
‘Oh shit,’ said Michael Carmichael.
‘That’s what you’re in, all right,’ said McLaren.
‘You didn’t half go, guv,’ Hart said to Slider as McLaren was putting Carmichael into the squad car they had summoned. ‘I was well impressed.’
‘Do you really think I’ll respond to blatant flattery like that?’ he said severely.
‘What sort of blatant flattery will you respond to, then?’ she asked cheekily.
He ignored that. ‘You, on the other hand, brought him down with a tackle that could qualify you to play for England.’
‘Thanks, guv. I’ll take all the flattery I can get; any sort.’
‘I don’t understand how he got into the flat, however, when it was being watched twenty-four hours a day.’
Hart met his eye. They both knew the answer. He had been missed going in. But Hart nobly didn’t even say, ‘It wasn’t us.’
‘You and McLaren can give the flat a good going over,’ Slider said.
‘Righty-o. I bet we find enough in there to put the pressure on him. But I can’t see why he wouldn’t tell us the trufe anyway – about Zellah, I mean. Once he knows we don’t think he killed her. We don’t think he killed her, do we?’ she added on a faintly puzzled note. ‘I mean, it was Ronnie Oates done her?’
‘It looks that way.’
‘So we only want him for corroboration?’
‘So it seems.’
She cocked her head at him enquiringly. ‘Guv, I can’t help feeling you’ve got reservations about this case.’
‘I can’t help feeling there’s something I’ve missed,’ Slider confessed
‘That’s just normal paranoia,’ Hart said comfortingly. ‘Everyone on the planet gets that. Don’t worry, some ’orrible snag will come up and blow the case to bits and you’ll have to put it back togevver against the clock with the big brass breathing down your neck, and everything will seem nice and normal again.’
‘Thanks, I feel better now,’ said Slider. ‘I’m going back to the factory.’
His room looked like a public place within the meaning of the act. There were so many people in it he couldn’t get through the door, and when enough of them spotted him and melted away to give him access, he found Joanna in there, with young George Slider sitting on the edge of his father’s desk holding court. With a rusk in one hand and a pencil in the other, he was waving his arms swoopingly at his fans, like Solti conducting Debussy, except that Solti, though equally bald, had never smiled so seraphically at an orchestra.
Joanna looked guilty. ‘Sorry. Is this a completely inappropriate time? I just picked him up from the baby-minder after rehearsal. I was on my way home when I thought that, as you’ll be late again this evening, you’d like to see him awake for once, so I popped in. But I can pop out again just as quickly.’
George had spotted his father now and was beaming in delight, showing his new top incisors, which he was growing to match the two at the bottom. ‘Mumurummum,’ he said.
‘I didn’t realize it was that late,’ Slider said.
‘It isn’t. We finished early. I think the conductor had somewhere more exciting to go.’
Slider picked up the baby, who signalled his approval by pushing the damp end of the rusk into his father’s ear and saying, ‘Blum mum num.’
‘I’m glad you came,’ Slider said. ‘But I can’t spare you long. We’ve just brought someone in and he’ll need questioning.’
‘I know, don’t worry. I should go home, anyway. There’s a mountain of ironing I’ve been putting off. I can get some of it done while he’s having his nap.’
‘I wish I could take you out to lunch,’ Slider said wistfully, ‘but . . .’
‘We’ll catch up when all this is over. I just wanted my boy to know he still has a father.’ She smiled as she said it to show she was not complaining.
‘I slept with him last night. What more does he want?’ He grinned at his son, who tried to grab his nose, so the pencil in his hand came dangerously close to Slider’s eye. He removed it gently. ‘I’m glad you brought him.’ It helped to keep a person grounded. He made that noise with his lips that all babies find irresistibly funny, and George responded by demonstrating his award-winning chuckle. ‘If we could bottle that, we could sell it for a fortune,’ Slider remarked, making him do it again.
‘By the way – I meant to ask you – did you speak to your father?’