Killing Time by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Read Free Book Online

trousers.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    He thought honesty might reassure her. ‘It was realising that she wanted us to get back together that finally convinced me I could never do it.’
    ‘Finally? So you had been considering it?’
    ‘Well, obviously it had crossed my mind on the odd occasion.’
    ‘Which occasion?’
    ‘When you’re being unreasonable and cruel. When you’re away and I think of you frolicking in seaside towns with abandoned musicians.’
    ‘I’m never unreasonable.’
    ‘I notice you don’t say you never frolic,’ he said suspiciously.
    ‘I have to keep some mystery. How else can I allure you?’
    ‘Allure isn’t a verb,’ he objected.
    He felt her smile against his neck. ‘I miss Atherton, don’t you?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘He is going to get better?’ she asked like a child wanting reassurance. Are there bears under the bed? But Atherton was real. The best he could manage was, ‘It’ll be a long job.’
    There was a long silence. He thought she had gone to sleep, but then she said, ‘Did Irene recognise me?’
    ‘Recognise you?’ He searched the files. ‘Oh, you mean from that concert?’
    ‘You practically introduced me then.’
    ‘No, I’m sure she didn’t.’ He re-ran Irene’s words and expressions. ‘She said you weren’t Atherton’s usual type. Not glamorous enough.’
    ‘Cheeky mare,’ Joanna said sleepily. A little while later she was asleep. Slider lay wakeful for some time, his mind jumpy with the unaccustomed stimulation of being back to work. He slept at last, but fell into a nightmare in which he was stalked through the White City Estate by a sweating, knife-wielding Gilbert. If only he could get back to the station he’d be safe, but the blocks of flats proliferated all around him, identical, confusing, every door and corner a possible ambush point, and he couldn’t find his way out.

CHAPTER THREE
A Fit of Peaks
    The shout came on Wednesday, at a time when Slider, who wasn’t going in early, was still in bed.
    ‘A nice murder for you,’ said Nicholls, who was on earlies. He pronounced it
murr-durr.
    It was a dead body in a flat on the White City Estate. Listening to Nicholls’ sealskin-soft Atlantic coast accent, Slider was reminded that the Anne-Marie Austin case had begun just this way, with all its consequences to his private life. Only then, of course, it had been Irene asleep beside him, and she hadn’t woken, as Joanna just had, sitting up to look at the clock.
    But the flat in question was Busty Parnell’s, and the dead body was Jay Paloma’s. Busty had arrived home from spending the night away to find the front door open, the keeper of the Yale lock hanging loose from one screw; and inside, Jay Paloma dead in a welter of blood.
    Slider’s guilt chip had already been overworked with regard to Atherton, and now threatened to go into overload. The poor little bastard knew what he was talking about after all. He had been frightened with a cause. Slider should have done something: his guilt nagged him as he listened to Nicholls with another part of his brain. But what could he have done? Blimey, it had happened so quickly, he could hardly have got him an armed guard for his door even had he wanted to. In the time available, there was nothing he could have done, nothing the system would have let him do, to prevent this. But it didn’t change the fact that Paloma had come to tell him he was afraid for his life, and now he was dead. It was breast-beating time, whichever way you sliced it.
    ‘Are you there, Bill?’ Nicholls asked into the silence.
    ‘Oh – yes – I was just thinking. I saw him on Monday, you know. The victim. He knew it was coming.’
    ‘Chrise, no. That’s a bugger,’ Nicholls commiserated. ‘And you with your overactive glands.’
    ‘My what?’
    ‘Your compulsion to be responsible for everyone’s troubles. Global Mammy Syndrome. Ah well,’ Nicholls comforted him, ‘this’ll keep you busy for a while. Nothing like