He lunged across the table, reaching for Slider’s throat – an interesting reaction, Slider thought, even as his adrenalin was taking charge, bypassing his brain and saving his bacon. Throttling was evidently Wilding’s preferred option for choking off unpleasant speeches and the unpleasant thoughts behind them. So what had Zellah said in the car that had finally convinced her father there was no other option? Because mad as he must have been at the beginning of the trail – and he would have had to be furious to the point of madness to take the tights with him – there had obviously been time between that and the final act for other feelings and thoughts to assert themselves. The sight of Zellah, still dressed like a prostitute, and standing beside the road like one, could have been enough to restore the default fury, but he didn’t kill her right there and then, in the car. There had been speech, and Zellah had got out, apparently weeping. Slider had a fair idea what the speech must have been about – the thing that must have been on Zellah’s mind all that last day, and for who knew how many days before.
It was a few minutes before order was restored, and Wilding was seated again, trembling visibly, staring at nothing again, but this time in what looked more like shock than despair. Shock at having been found out? Or was he one of those murderers who managed to distance themselves from their crime, so that it was a shock suddenly to be made to register it again?
‘Mr Wilding, let’s have it over with,’ Slider resumed, quite kindly. ‘You strangled Zellah with a pair of tights you’d brought from home for the purpose. You did it for the best possible motives – to save her from what you saw as a life of degradation, sin and vice, which would have endangered her immortal soul.’
‘You don’t believe that? You don’t really believe that?’ Wilding said, screwing up his face in what looked like pain. ‘That I would kill what I loved the most?’
‘To save what you loved most. The world was taking her away from you, corrupting her, ruining her. This way, you could keep her for ever, as she was – yours, and yours alone.’ Wilding only shook his head, slowly back and forth in a goaded manner, as if trying to avoid blows coming at him in slow motion. ‘Perhaps you didn’t really think in the end you could do it. But she told you something, as you sat in the car. She told you something that made it clear you were at the last resort.’
‘She told me something.’ Was it a question, or was he just repeating the words? Slider couldn’t tell.
‘She told you about the baby.’ He watched closely for reaction. ‘She told you she was pregnant.’
It came – the reaction – after a measurable pause; and the flesh of the big, exhausted face cringed as from a blow. He stared, and then he screwed up his eyes, and put his fists to his cheeks, and his lower lip dropped and trembled. ‘No,’ he said, as one pleading with a torturer. ‘No. Please, no. You’re making it up. She wasn’t. Please!’
‘Zellah was two months pregnant,’ Slider said.
After a long moment, the next words – with steel under them – were, ‘Who did it? Who did that to her? Was it that Carmichael boy? I will kill him! I swear I will kill him!’
And with sadness, Slider decided that he hadn’t known about the pregnancy, and he was rather sorry to have been the one to let that particular cat out of the bag.
‘Nevertheless,’ Atherton said as they went back upstairs, ‘he’s still the best suspect. He didn’t have to know she was pregnant for the rest to work.’ He counted the points off. ‘He admits he knew she’d been seeing Carmichael. He admits suspecting her of being on the slippery slope to damnation. He admits he followed her. He lied to us about it and can’t give any good reason why.’
‘He was ashamed. Following Zellah was not open, honest behaviour: it was a lapse from his own standards. And he’d done it behind his wife’s back.’
‘Exactly,’ Atherton said, as though that were a triumph. ‘And he still hasn’t told his wife. Why? Because she’d suspect what we suspect – that it was him what done her in.’
‘Would she?’ Slider objected mildly.
‘Wouldn’t she?’ Atherton countered. ‘Plus, he was out all night, he can’t account for his whereabouts at any point, and he admits he was looking for Zellah. Then he does a runner. And where do we finally find him? Hanging around the scene of his crime – as murderers are commonly known not to be able to resist doing – and talking about suicide. Guilty men in his position usually want to kill themselves afterwards, because they can’t live with the knowledge of what they’ve done.’
‘I know,’ Slider said.
Atherton looked at him sidelong. ‘I can’t tell whether you really think he didn’t do it, or you’re just playing devil’s advocate as usual.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t know which?’
‘Both.’ Slider paused at the top of the stairs and sighed. ‘If he did it, he may well have hidden the knowledge from himself, and we may never get it out.’
‘We can enjoy trying.’
‘Enjoy?’
‘He called her his own precious love. That’s creepy.’
Slider sighed again, thinking of Kate. He might not have used those words out loud, but there were times when he had felt like that about her. Atherton, who had no daughter, didn’t understand. It wasn’t a sexual thing or even a possessive thing: it was that a father had a particular vulnerability where his daughter was concerned, a love that sometimes made him go weak at the knees. And a particular set of worries about her, which, for obvious reasons, you didn’t have about a son.
‘We need more evidence,’ he said briskly. ‘We’ve nothing concrete to link him to the scene of the crime. We need a witness who can identify him, or remembers the reg number of his car. Or a scrap of DNA from the tights.’
‘We’ve got his car,’ Atherton said, ‘and a good reason now to go over it. If we could find a bit of soil on the floor that matches the murder scene—’
‘And if it isn’t the same as the soil in his garden or elsewhere in East Acton,’ Slider said. ‘And if we can be sure he didn’t walk on the grass that day when Connolly found him there.’
‘Always with the negativity!’ Atherton sighed, growing more buoyant as he always did with resistance. ‘Kindly don’t take the bloom off the peach.’
‘That’s what you call a peach?’ Slider said derisively, and peeled off from him as they hit the corridor. ‘I have to go and see Mr Porson.’
SEVENTEEN
You Can’t Tell a Buck by its Clover
Porson was encouraging. ‘Rhodes wasn’t built in a day,’ he said. ‘Give yourself time. Keep on at him and he’ll crack eventually. They always do. In his position he wants to talk, you have to remember that. Meanwhile, find that evidence. Confession is one thing, but you can’t make huts without straw.’
Straw huts? Slider thought. Or straw hats? Or was the old man thinking in a subliminal way of the three little pigs, one of whom built his house of straw instead of bricks? Boy, you wouldn’t want to get lost in Porson’s mind without a miner’s lamp and a ball of string!
‘So what have you got to go on?’ Porson asked in conclusion.
Slider pulled himself together. ‘We’ve brought his car in. It’s a Ford Focus – dark blue, so that’s all right – and we’re going to look for soil or grass from the murder site. There’s an outside chance we might get something from the tights or the necklace chain. And we’re looking for more witnesses. If we can find someone who saw his car’s reg number at or near Old Oak Common . . .’