Headlong, p.11
Headlong, page 11
McLaren gave him a ribald look. ‘No, I was going to get me mum to hold me hand.’
Fathom missed that one. ‘He looks well tasty,’ he said slowly. ‘You might need help. D’you want me to come with?’
‘I’m just going to ask him a few questions,’ McLaren said impatiently, ‘not go ten rounds with him.’
‘Yeah, but …’ said Fathom.
‘What?’
‘Well, some of the lads downstairs,’ Fathom said reluctantly, ‘they reckoned since you got together with Natalie – well, they reckon you might’ve lost your edge.’
McLaren rose so quickly, Fathom sprang back and almost lost his balance. ‘Me? Lost my edge? I got more edge than … than …’
‘A stellated dodecahedron,’ Atherton suggested, passing back the other way.
‘What’s that?’ Fathom asked suspiciously. Brainy ponces like Atherton, in his experience, were apt to make fun of you if you left them an opening.
Atherton hadn’t paused. ‘A very edgy thing,’ he threw over his shoulder.
‘Yeah, that’s me,’ said McLaren.
He grabbed an Airwave from the rack by the door, and left.
The place Langley lived in Fulham was the upstairs half of a tiny Victorian terraced cottage that had been divided by developers, probably with their breath held, into two self-contained flats. McLaren knew very well what it would be like inside, because he currently lived in the downstairs half of an identical house in Putney. The victim of two failed marriages, it was all he could afford.
As he waited for someone to vacate a parking space so that he could get in, he pondered a moment on that business about edge, and whether there could be anything in it. Now he’d got Natalie, he was happy, and that was a very strange sensation for him. Women, from his experience of two wives and multiple girlfriends, were sharp, uncomfortable things – alluring, but affording no rest, like a bed with broken springs. They watched you, judged you, criticised you, told you with that withering sarcasm how far short you fell of their ideal of manhood.
And they changed the rules all the time, so you never knew from day to day what was going to get you into trouble. You could say innocently, ‘You look nice in those trousers’, and they’d be on you, like a terrier grabbing a rat. ‘What d’you mean, in these trousers? What’s wrong with the ones I was wearing yesterday? You think my bum looks big, don’t you? Why don’t you just say it, you think my bum’s enormous. I suppose you want me to wear a dress. I know you, you want me in stockings and suspenders. I suppose that WPC tart you’re always drooling over wears suspenders. And a thong, the dirty trollop.’ And so on. They’d be all soft and lovey-dovey while they were trying to get you to marry them, and as soon as you got within tasting distance of that nice bit of cheese, crack! Down came the metal spring and broke your back.
But Natalie … Nat … Nat was different. She seemed actually to like him. Not some version of him she was going to try to change him into, but him – which he found pretty difficult to believe, because when he removed the necessary outer layer of machismo needed for the Job, he didn’t think he was much of a catch. He wasn’t handsome, young or rich, he couldn’t talk like Atherton, and he’d developed some pretty ropey bachelor habits over the years, like eating cereal out of the packet and drinking straight from the kitchen tap. And farting ad lib.
But Nat was round and warm, she drank beer and played darts, she laughed at his jokes, she liked his mates, she knew what the offside rule was, and she seemed extremely partial to his stringy bod. Too good to be true? He was aware that his colleagues didn’t think she was any oil painting, but she seemed beautiful to him – a woman without scorn in her eyes or acid in her tongue.
He was happy. Did that make him less of a force? An irritated motor horn behind him snapped him back to reality, and he slid into the now-vacant parking place. And at the same time, his mind snapped back into copper mode. Thoughts of home and women fell away as cleanly as a mould rapped with a mallet, and it was DC McLaren who got out of the car, and walked along towards the house, his mind subconsciously noticing and processing everything about his surroundings.
The little house, built for railway workers in the 1880s, had an unloved appearance now. What had been the front garden was covered with stained concrete, on which stood two wheelie bins and a squashed KFC box. The decorated tiles of the front path were cracked and several were missing, the front door was battered, the windows dirty, and the original brickwork of the façade, yellow London stock with soft red trim, had been covered long ago with lumpy Tyrolean and painted a gloomy shade of beige, like cheap coffee ice cream. Rented, McLaren concluded, and from a landlord who didn’t care.
There were two bells by the door, neither labelled, so he rang both, long and loud. The door opened, but it revealed a short, thin, elderly man with an oppressed expression who could not possibly be Langley. Behind him McLaren could see a tiny snippet of hall with a door, open, on the left to the downstairs flat, and a closed door straight ahead covering the stairs to the top flat.
‘Police,’ said McLaren. ‘I’m looking for Brian Langley.’
‘Upstairs. Top bell,’ said the man irritably.
‘Is he in?’
‘I don’t know,’ the man said as if it were an outrageous question. ‘If he’s not, he’s down the Dunstan. Practically lives there. Don’t ring my bell again.’ He shut the inner door with a slam, but McLaren’s copper’s sixth sense could feel him lurking behind it, waiting to see what developed.
McLaren rang again and, since he was already in the hall, pounded good and hard on the inner door. He felt Langley coming rather than heard him – the heavy footsteps on the stairs sent a vibration right through the floor. Then the door opened.
Christ, he was a big bugger, McLaren thought. Big and muscular as a bull, in a cocoa-brown jumper and mustard-coloured trousers. His hair was shaved close up the sides of his head, but on top it was cut back to aggressive upright bristles, which had a gingery tone. His hand, so meaty there were dimples on his knuckles, held the edge of the door, ready to slam it. The other drummed an irritable tune on the frame with a signet ring.
‘Brian Langley?’ McLaren asked, but not as if he had any doubt.
‘Who wants to know?’ Langley growled. Meaty was the only word you could apply to that face; so meaty, the eyes seemed sunk in and small, the nose an insignificant nub; the fleshy chin was so deeply cleft it looked like a pixie’s bum.
‘Police,’ McLaren said. ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions.’
Langley stared a moment, calculating. ‘I don’t have to talk to you.’
‘Yeah, you do, chap,’ said McLaren easily. ‘Otherwise I’ll think you got something to hide.’
More calculation. Langley said, without expression, ‘Upstairs.’
McLaren followed him up, or rather followed the enormous muscular bottom which was just about at eye level. Upstairs, the original two rooms (these places were built before the working classes had bathrooms) had been knocked through and then re-divided, so there was a small room at the back with a closed door, that McLaren guessed was the bathroom, and the rest of the space was now an open-plan bedsitter with a sink and an electric ring in the darkest corner by way of a kitchen.
The place was clean and tidy, but smelled of cigarettes, and underneath there was a thick, feral smell of feet and sweat that clogged the throat and made McLaren’s neck hairs stand up in sheer reaction. There was also a faint, savoury smell of hashish, which he mentally filed for future reference.
There was a desperately cheap beige carpet, and the walls would have been magnolia if you could see them; but they were covered with film posters from fantasy movies, and with bookshelves packed tight with books and DVDs. There was a single bed with a cheap Indian cotton bedspread, a gas fire with a chipped ceramic mantle probably dating from the 1930s, and the rest of the available room was taken up by a desk on which stood computer keyboard, two screens, and printer and speakers. Before it was an old office chair on wheels whose seat sloped at an unnatural angle, presumably from having had to swivel Langley’s bulk back and forth on a daily basis.
Atherton wasn’t far wrong, McLaren acknowledged; there was nothing for him to do up here but sit at his desk working on his books or watching DVDs on the computer screen. There wasn’t even anywhere else for him to sit. He’d have to eat his food and read his books at the desk, or sitting on the bed. It was not cosy. It was barely human. It was not a room to fill a visitor with confidence, and McLaren’s professional eye had immediately picked out, without ever looking at it directly, that Langley did indeed have a baseball bat, propped in the corner between the window and the gas fire. His neck hairs had another workout.
Langley was standing in the middle of the room, his hands down by his side flexing and unflexing with tension. McLaren halted, aware of the open stairs behind him – good for legging it, bad for getting thrown down.
‘Well?’ said Langley.
‘Ed Wiseman,’ McLaren said, equally gnomic.
Langley scowled with anger. ‘That bastard!’ he said. ‘Typical snobby, middle-class, bloody, arty-farty, privileged bastard!’
It was a lot of adjectives. McLaren was impressed. ‘What did he do to you?’ he asked.
‘All that crap about “the market not being right”.’ He put on a mincing tone to show the words were a quotation. ‘It’s his bloody job to sell books, isn’t it? Blokes like him make the market. No, I wasn’t good enough for him, was I? If I’d’ve been some ponce called Sebastian from the good old alma mater, it’d’ve been a different story!’
‘He turned down your book,’ McLaren suggested.
‘If you bloody know, why’re you bloody asking me?’ the bull bellowed.
‘You know he’s dead, don’t you?’ McLaren asked.
A stillness came over Langley. The hands clenched and unclenched still, but it was a wary bull. Thinking. ‘Saw it in the papers,’ he admitted at last. His feelings overcame him again, and he burst out with, ‘Good bloody riddance!’
McLaren distracted him. ‘Why did you say you’d been in the army?’
He looked surprised by the question. He had to think a minute. ‘I thought it’d make him take me seriously. That sort is all Eton-Oxford-and-the-Guards. It was true, anyway. Nearly. I wanted to join the army, when I was a kid. My old man wouldn’t let me. Then it was too late.’
‘What, you were too old?’ McLaren asked. As far as he knew, you could join right up to age thirty-two.
‘You got to go in young to make a career of it,’ said Langley, which seemed a slight evasion.
‘Your book – that’s not about soldiers, is it?’ McLaren said. Keep changing direction, keep them unbalanced.
‘No. Well – yes. In a way.’ His face was not built to show much in the way of emotion, but he did seem to perk up. ‘The Seers, the wise people of the planet Arimalia, they’re trying to protect the galaxy from the warlike hordes of the Vorga, and they’ve got to find the Amulet of Horg, which will protect them, before the Vorgassi get to it. So they call in the Mercenaries of the White Plains, because the Seers aren’t fighters, it’s against their creed. It’s a battle between good and evil, you see, and—’
That was enough of that, McLaren thought. Change direction again. ‘Where were you on Monday night?’
It didn’t trip an answer. The light faded, Langley’s face congested. ‘Why’re you asking me that?’ he said.
‘Just answer the question. Monday night, between – oh, say, six o’clock and midnight?’
‘I don’t have to tell you that,’ Langley said with growing indignation. ‘Where d’you get off, coming here asking me questions?’
‘What’s the problem, chap?’ McLaren said lightly. ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, there’s no reason not to answer. Where were you, anyway?’
‘Get out!’ Langley yelled.
‘No need to get antsy. Answer the question and I’ll go. Where were you Monday night and what were you doing?’
‘You fuck off! Mind your own fucking business!’
‘You mind your language. Got some special reason for not telling me? Like you were out and about doing something you shouldn’t?’ Langley’s face boiled but he didn’t answer. ‘Come on, chap, make this easy. Down the Dunstan were you? Lots of blokes there to give you an alibi? Or were you down Shepherd’s Bush maybe. Having a word with your friend Ed Wiseman?’
The massive fist coming McLaren’s way was fast, but he was quicker. He caught it in his left hand with a tremendous smacking noise and a jolt that went all the way up into his shoulder, but he used the counter-coup to whip out a blow with his right to the tip of the pixie’s bottom, not enough to hurt either of them, but enough to catch Langley off-balance. He reeled backwards, more in surprise than anything.
‘That’s assaulting a police officer,’ McLaren said. ‘You’re just stacking up trouble for yourself, chum. You wanta watch that temper of yours.’
Langley had steadied himself by the footboard of the bed, and now without looking he reached back and grabbed the baseball bat, pushing himself upright in the same movement.
McLaren didn’t wait to see where this was going. There were situations you were better off observing from a distance. He ran down the stairs, slamming the bottom door behind him, and keying the Airwave as he shot out into the street.
It was always easier to question a man at the station, on your own ground, where you knew the layout and he was at a disadvantage. Not that McLaren thought in those terms. He simply reflected with satisfaction that the bastard had dropped himself right in it now.
TEN
The Time of his Wife
Virginia Foulkes lived in one of those solid white-stuccoed houses in Regent’s Park Road, which could call itself Primrose Hill or Regent’s Park as the fancy took it. According to Atherton, a lot of luvvies lived in Primrose Hill, and since she was married to Oliver Knudsen, the film and TV producer, Slider supposed they would go with Primrose Hill, even though, with the windows open, they were close enough to hear the lions roar in London Zoo.
He always liked to know what level of entitlement he was dealing with, so he looked up similar properties on the Internet, and found they were selling for between six and seven million. Of course, the Foulkes/Knudsens might have owned the house for yonks, since before the Russian-inspired property boom; but it still suggested a certain affluence. Popular novelist, plus film director that even Slider, who rarely went to the pictures and never stayed for the titles, had heard of; he shouldn’t be surprised.
The area was very agreeable on a fine spring day, with a mist of green spreading over the trees in the park, municipal beds of tulips pinking up, blossom trees in gardens beginning to unfurl. A squirrel bopped across the road in front of his car and shot up the peeling trunk of a gigantic, graceful plane tree. A black cat was baking its fur on a windowsill as he pulled up, and gave him one slitty yellow glance, before going back to the important day’s work of sleepin’ in the sun.
He rang the bell, and the door was opened somewhat precipitately by a very tall, very large man, with a fighter’s body under a suit so bespoke and expensive it looked as though it could take messages, arrange conferences and run a personal organizer for its owner as well as command respect for him from all he met. It was the custom-built private Learjet of gentlemen’s wear. It fitted him like a … well, like a suit.
Above the collar was a very clean, big-featured face and a very large bald head. The eyes were sharp and imperious and the face looked angry, though Slider, who had encountered a lot of anger in his years as a copper, decided this was the artificial sort that was designed to subdue minions and deter them from arguing. The face’s owner was used to getting his own way.
Slider got his word in first. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Slider, to see Virginia Foulkes.’
The faint, grey brows contracted, the eyes glinted as they raked him down. ‘So, you’ve come to bother my wife with questions about that jackass?’ he snapped.
‘Sir?’ Slider said. You could never go far wrong with that.
‘Ed so-called bloody Wiseman! What a waste of space the man was! Well, come in, come in, if you must. I have a meeting to get to, otherwise I’d stay and make sure you don’t upset her.’
‘I won’t upset her,’ said Slider.
‘So I should bloody well hope!’ Knudsen barked. He turned and stalked into the house, and Slider followed, politely closing the door behind him. ‘Ginnie! Darling?’ Knudsen bellowed into the depths. ‘Your policeman is here! Come and take him off my hands!’ He turned back to glare at Slider while he waited, as though he suspected he might nick the silver if he turned his back.
And then Virginia Foulkes appeared, paused by Knudsen and said, ‘Go. Go. I’ll take it from here.’ She stretched up and kissed his cheek. ‘Do buzz off, darling, I’m quite capable of talking to the police without bursting into tears. Go, do your thing, win awards.’
He returned her peck somewhat sheepishly, gave Slider one last glare, and strode off further into the house, presumably heading for some back entrance, garage and car – or possibly helipad, who knew?
She came towards Slider smiling, and said, ‘Don’t mind Oliver. He’s rather a guard dog when it comes to me, with anyone he doesn’t know well.’
Slider took the hand that was offered, which was cool and dry and firm. ‘No need to apologise for loyalty,’ he said.
‘Oh, he’s loyal all right!’ she said with a laugh, but didn’t elaborate on the comment. ‘Come through into my study. It’s the pleasantest room in the house when the sun shines. Which is why I bagsed it, much to Oliver’s chagrin. But he has his studio now – down the garden, but too grand to be called a shed. It’s soundproofed and has every mod con and electronic gadget known to man, so he loves it devotedly. It can be hard to get him out – except when he has to go to work. I don’t know really why we have this big house. If it weren’t for visiting me, he’d probably never set foot in it.’
She talked on lightly, in a pleasant, musical voice, requiring no response from him. He knew this ploy. It was a way, which he had met before, of establishing control over a situation, usually encountered in the more mentally nimble. It came of a need not to say the wrong thing – but what the wrong thing was varied from situation to situation. He wondered what hers was.
