This chimed with something in Slider’s memory and he stared at the big, red painting for a moment until it clicked. Alex Markov had said almost the same thing. ‘How did you get that painting home on the tube?’ he asked. ‘It must have been awkward.’
Paulson turned round and looked at it. ‘Oh, I didn’t. Alex delivered it.’
‘Still must have been awkward on the tube.’
Paulson looked puzzled. ‘He brought it in his car.’
‘I thought he didn’t have one.’
‘I don’t know,’ Paulson said with a broad shrug. ‘He came in a car, that’s all I know. Maybe he borrowed one.’
‘Maybe that was it,’ Slider said. He stood up to take his leave. The alibi, given freely and unhesitatingly, as from the depths of a clear conscience, was eminently checkable, so Slider wasn’t going to check it. He hadn’t suspected Paulson of anything anyway. He had only hoped he might have been around to see something. But that was out.
At the door, Oliver Paulson became serious again, remembering what it was all about. ‘I can’t believe poor little Zellah got murdered,’ he said. ‘Why would anyone do that? I read in the paper you’d arrested a serial killer for it, but if it was a serial killer, why would you come round here asking me about Mike? You don’t think he had anything to do with it?’
‘Don’t you think he’s capable of it?’ Slider countered.
‘Well, he’s got a bit of a temper on him. I suppose he’s had to fight his way out a few times, coming from the Woodley South. But I always thought he was a decent bloke underneath. I mean, I wouldn’t have introduced him to my sister otherwise.’
Ah, that was it, Slider thought. He was feeling guilty for having brought Mike and Zellah together in the first place. Or maybe there had been things said at home, by the parents.
‘When it comes to unregulated passions, anyone can be capable of anything,’ Slider said neutrally.
‘I suppose so,’ Paulson said, still troubled. ‘But I wouldn’t have thought Mike would do something like that. Was that why you were asking about him?’
He evidently meant to have an answer. Slider said, ‘I’m asking about everyone in Zellah’s life. Trying to find out what she was really like.’
‘Good luck with that,’ Paulson said shortly. ‘She was a hard one to know, that one. An enigma.’
A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, Slider thought, going back to his car. Perhaps, as with Russia, the key lay in self-interest. He just had to find what, in Zellah’s case, that had been.
EIGHTEEN
How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Ring You Back
Slider idled back to the station, through the home-going traffic, allowing his thoughts to disconnect in the hope that a lot of small things that were bothering him would join forces and present him with a petition.
O’Flaherty was the duty sergeant. ‘Ah, Billy, me boy, dere y’are!’ he said largely. His ‘Simple Man o’ the Bogs’ act, begun years before as a defence mechanism, had become a mere mannerism now. ‘Someone waiting to see you.’
‘That’s what they’ll put on my tombstone,’ Slider said.
‘Well, now,’ Fergus said, leaning on the door frame as one settling in for a bunny, ‘in a very real an’ metaphysical sense that’d be true.’
‘This is not the moment to convert me to Catholicism. Can we have the unreal and non-metaphysical news first?’
‘Ye’re a disappointment to me, darlin’,’ Fergus said with a fat sigh. ‘I could ha’ given it to Atherton, but I thought y’d be grateful, and y’d see me right for it. I only need another five conversions now to get me sainthood.’
‘I’ll convert later,’ Slider said, ‘though why you should care whether I’m analogue or digital . . . Who’s waiting for me?’
O’Flaherty gestured into the shop, and Slider peered round the door, to see a brace of teenagers sitting on the bench, looking resigned.
‘I think it could be your Snogging Couple,’ Fergus said. ‘Now isn’t that worth something?’
Slider patted his pockets. ‘I’d give you a Hail Mary but I’ve left my wallet upstairs.’
‘I can make change for a Paternoster,’ Fergus said hopefully. ‘Ah, you CID types are all tight. Short arms and long pockets. Where d’yiz want Janet and John?’
‘Stick them in an interview room.’ Slider sighed. ‘I wish you had given them to Atherton. I’ve got a lot to think about.’
‘He’s out. Ah, go on, take ’em! Me instinct tells me they’ve somethin’ to say. And they did come in of their own free will.’
‘If it’s the Snogging Couple, they should have come in days ago,’ Slider grumbled. ‘Oh well, I’d better talk to them, I suppose. They won’t have anything to tell me, of course. Just want to be noticed.’
‘Don’t we all?’ Fergus said.
‘I thought as a Catholic you were always being noticed.’
‘Glad to see y’ haven’t lost y’ sense a humour, darlin’,’ Fergus said, and went off to fetch the witnesses.
The Snogging Couple – for so it turned out to be – were Chantelle Watts and Tyler Burton. She was a meaty, pallid girl with straight fair hair, spots on her chin, an outsize bust and a stud in her eyebrow. He was slim, remarkably unpierced in any dimension, and had the thick black hair and tan skin that suggested Italian heritage. He looked a lot younger than her, though that may have been the effect of his slightness against her bulk, and the world-weary air that she felt suitable to the present situation.
‘My mum said we oughta come in,’ Chantelle said, when the introductions and social niceties had been got over. ‘She said there might be a reward.’
‘I’m afraid that’s not likely to happen,’ Slider said. ‘But you are doing the right thing in coming forward. That should be reward enough, to know you are helping.’
This idea wandered about the ether looking for a home, but evidently found Chantelle’s environment inhospitable. After an extensive gape she said, ‘What, you mean there’s no money in it?’
‘No one has offered a reward for information – yet. But I tell you what, I’ll make a note of your names and everything you tell me, and if there’s a reward offered later, you’ll be in line for it.’
Tyler, who seemed to be marginally the sharper tack of the two, jumped in while she was still construing this, and said, ‘I don’t want me name in the papers. Me dad’d kill me if he knew I was round ’ere. He don’t like us talking to the fuzz.’
‘Why don’t you just tell me what you know,’ Slider said patiently, cursing Atherton’s absence, Fergus’s instincts, and the lack of tea in his bloodstream, ‘and we’ll see how it goes. You saw something on Sunday night, did you?’
It took a degree of coaxing and carefully designed questions to extract the story, though after the first few sentences they were not unwilling to talk. Being noticed by a policeman was better than not being noticed by anyone, which was their usual fate. It was just that they had no idea how to string two sentences together – indeed, stringing words together was almost beyond them. Their real linguistic skill lay at the phoneme level. Chantelle could have snorted and grunted for Britain.
The story, as Slider painstakingly reconstructed it, was that they had been ‘messing around’ together most of Sunday, having met at Chantelle’s house in the afternoon, watched a film on telly, eaten some frozen pizza (though not, Slider was relieved to hear, until after it had been microwaved by Chantelle’s mum) and then, when the film was over, had become bored enough to heave themselves out of the sofa and go out in search of some mates.
That, he managed to work out, was about six o’clock. They had gone to a friend’s house, hung about there for a bit, then they and the friend had ‘gone down The Fairway’, where there was a patch of open green in front of the houses where they and their peers generally ‘hung about’. They had loitered around there for some time, ‘having a laugh’, which meant, as Slider knew, gossiping, teasing and insulting each other, texting and phoning other friends on their mobiles, and playing electronic games on the same. There were about ten of them, ranging in age from Tyler, who was just fifteen, through Chantelle who was sixteen, to a youth called Dean Scraggs who was eighteen but ‘a bit daft’, and therefore not welcome with any of the older gangs.