‘Fish and chips, Marstons and toasted cheese.’
‘Sounds elegant to me.’
‘Not at that time of night.’
‘You always told me you could eat nails.’
‘That was then. This is now. I hate to mention it, but I’m not twenty-two any more.’
She slipped her body against his. ‘Now he tells me.’ They kissed. ‘Give me that spoon,’ she said when they untangled themselves. ‘You’re doing it all wrong. The food goes in through the mouth, not the nostrils.’
‘Now she tells me.’
‘Go and have your shower. I’ll make you breakfast with my other hand, show you how we women multi-task.’
He groaned. ‘Not breakfast. Please, never mention food to me again.’
‘Don’t be daft. I’ll make you some nice plain porridge, and you’ll feel better for it.’
She was right, of course. She always was. The porridge soaked up the molten asphalt in his stomach, and allowed him to take a couple of aspirin to clear his head; after which, though it was still early, he was ready to go in to the office and tackle the rest of the paperwork while it was still quiet, and before it drove him to despair.
‘I get to feel more and more like a faithless bureaucrat,’ he said, kissing her goodbye.
‘You know who’s a really sinister character that you haven’t investigated yet?’ Joanna said, following him to the door. ‘This rich banker type, Oliver what’s-his-face.’
‘Oliver Paulson.’
‘If you say so. From what you’ve told me, he seems to have known all the protagonists, but you’ve never asked him a single question.’
‘Only because we haven’t got round to it. He works in the City so he’d have to be an evening interview.’
‘If he was a suspect you’d go right to his office and winkle him out.’
‘But why should he be a suspect?’
‘He’s a mega-rich banker,’ she said in a logic-for-the-simple tone. ‘Everyone hates those. Like estate agents in the old days. Maybe it was his baby.’
He patted her shoulder. ‘You just keep thinking, Butch. That’s what you’re good at.’
‘I could think you under the table any day.’
In the quiet of his office without the phone ringing, he got through the leftover paperwork in record time, and felt chipper enough to go down and see Carmichael, to see if he could catch him off balance.
Carmichael was not happy. ‘You can’t keep me here,’ he fumed. ‘You’ve got nothing on me. You got to let me go. I know my rights.’
‘There’s the little matter of the drugs we found in your place,’ Slider reminded him.
His face fell like a lift in a disaster movie. ‘You said you were forgetting them.’
‘I may still do. If you co-operate fully.’
‘I co-operated! You bastard!’ He let loose with a mouthful.
‘Hey! Enough of that,’ Slider said. ‘Watch your lip. My people have to check your alibi, such as it is, which all takes time.’
‘What d’y mean, “such as it is”? I’ve told you—’
‘Yes, you’ve told me, but you haven’t given me anything concrete to cover the hours during which Zellah was killed. And you didn’t tell me,’ he added sternly, ‘that she was pregnant.’
Carmichael’s face was a picture. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. Messages worked across his eyes, trying to connect up with something in his brain. At last he managed, ‘But she . . . Pregnant? She never . . . It’s nothing to do with me!’
‘Come on,’ Slider said encouragingly. ‘You can’t tell me she didn’t tell you that. Isn’t that the whole reason she suddenly wanted to see you?’
‘No!’ he said strenuously. ‘She never said a word! I swear! Anyway . . .’ More mental conflict. ‘She couldn’t have been. Not by me.’
‘Don’t make me give you the talk your father should have had with you. The one where a girl and a boy do certain things together in the privacy of his flat.’
‘But I mean . . . why wouldn’t she tell me, if she thought it was mine? Anyway, I hadn’t seen her for months. How far on was she?’
‘Look, son,’ Slider said, avoiding that one, ‘a simple DNA test is going to establish that it was your child. Now, if you really didn’t know she was pregnant, I can see it’s going to be pretty upsetting to think you killed the baby along with her—’
‘I didn’t kill her! Why won’t you believe me? And if it was mine . . .’ Something occurred to him. His eyes widened. ‘I bet that’s who she was going to see afterwards – some other bloke she’d been banging. Going the rounds to see who she could palm the kid off on.’
‘Is that what the row was about?’ Slider asked smoothly. ‘She told you she was pregnant and you told her she was on her own? No use coming to you? You wouldn’t even pay for an abortion?’
He shook his head, suddenly thoughtful. ‘She would never have done that,’ he said. ‘She was, like, very religious. She’d never have had an abortion.’
‘What, even though she was terrified of her father? If it was a choice between telling him, and getting rid of it . . .’
‘No. You didn’t know her. She would never have done that,’ he said, quiet now. ‘And she didn’t tell me. I swear. If she had, I would have . . .I’d have helped her. I’d . . . I’d like a kid. I mean, I wouldn’t have wanted one right now, for choice, but if that’s how it had to be . . . I’d have helped. If it was mine. I’d have looked after her.’
‘You have a softer side to you, I see,’ Slider said, poking him for the reaction.
His face grew bitter. ‘Yeah, that’s a big laugh to you lot, isn’t it? Comes from the Woodley South, so he’s no good. Mother’s a smack-head prostitute, no dad, brought up on the street. It’s a big laugh someone like me would want a clean life and a family. Split your sides, why don’t you?’
‘Don’t come all pious with me, son. Clean life? You sell drugs,’ Slider reminded him.
‘To rich kids, who are going to buy them anyway. If they didn’t get ’em from me, they’d get ’em from someone else. At least I don’t rob ’em, or cut the charlie with something worse. Anyway, it’s not like they’re street junkies robbing old ladies for a fix. It’s just what they do to relax in the evenings after work, instead of having a drink. What’s the difference from that and selling booze in a pub?’
‘Selling alcohol isn’t illegal.’
‘And that’s your answer, is it?’ he said bitterly.
Actually, it was, but it didn’t help his present campaign, so he sidestepped the argument. Instead he said, ‘It makes much more sense that she told you she was pregnant, you had a row about it, she walked off, and later you met up again, had another row, and in the heat of the moment you strangled her. Come on, isn’t that really what happened? I know you’ve got a temper. She went on and on and on about it, just wouldn’t stop yacking, and then she started crying – they always turn on the waterworks to get their own way, don’t they? You suspected anyway she was trying to shove the kid off on you when she’d been seeing someone else, and when she started to get hysterical and make a scene – well, anyone would snap. Isn’t that what happened? Come on, you can tell me. Get it off your chest.’
No line had ever so singularly not worked. Carmichael looked at him, utterly unmoved, still thinking things out. Then he said quietly, ‘I bet you it was her dad. If he found out – well, he’d kill her. Literally.’
Slider sighed. ‘And after that he’d kill you. It’s lucky for you that you’re in here where it’s safe.’
Carmichael turned his face away, stony with something that Slider was horribly afraid was sorrow of some kind. He really didn’t want to like Carmichael, even the slightest bit. On the other hand, he found himself fairly convinced that he hadn’t known Zellah was pregnant, though quite where that got him he wasn’t sure.