Free Blood Never Dies by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Page B

don’t know he was going for an audition. You don’t put your hand on your heart and swear truth to a cabbie.’
    ‘No,’ said Slider, ‘but he went there, and he seemed nervous, and why else the wax and ink?’ That was what had stirred in his mind while talking to Barnes. ‘Anyway, we haven’t got a whole lot of other leads to follow. And I don’t have to remind you, detecting is like an electric kettle – you have to cover the elements.’
    ‘At least they might be able to confirm his name,’ Atherton said. ‘That would be a step forward.’
    ‘See what else you can find out about Ransom Publications,’ Slider said to Swilley.
    ‘Yes, boss,’ she said.
    ‘And the Marylebone Group.’
    Brook Green was a subsection of Hammersmith, between it and Kensington, taking its name from the open area of grass and trees also called Brook Green. There once had been a brook, too, but as London had spread westwards in the nineteenth century it had been put into a pipe, where it still ran under the Brook Green Hotel. The area was home to an elite independent girls’ school, St Paul’s, where Monica Dickens had once been a pupil. In an earlier age, Gustav Holst had been its music master, and wrote
The Planets
during his tenure there.
    Slider wondered what the school authorities thought about having Ransom House as a neighbour, but when he and Atherton arrived he concluded that it was discreet enough for them not to know about it. It was a small nineteen-thirties office block, half the ground floor of which had been rented off to a printing firm. Beside the main door a brass plaque simply had RANSOM HOUSE engraved on it, with no indication as to the nature of the business. A check with Paxman, the uniform sergeant on duty downstairs, had told him there had never been any trouble there.
    The heat was less oppressive than yesterday, and there was a pleasantly verdant smell on the air from the grass and trees. The late sun was filtering through the leaves of the plane trees in a flickering, gold-green, Hollywood sort of way, and there ought to have been swelling string music in the background signifying a romantic encounter was about to unfold. But there was only the muted roar of traffic from Hammersmith Road, and two police detectives with hot feet, and suits they’d had on all day, ringing the bell of an extremely closed-looking office door.
    There was an intercom grille in the wall, and a woman’s voice answered simply ‘Yes?’
    ‘Detective Inspector Slider of Shepherd’s Bush. I would like to speak to somebody in charge, please.’
    There was a pause, and then a buzz. They pushed in, to find themselves in a small, anonymous hall, with stairs visible straight ahead through a half-frosted door, and to the left, an open door into an office. The office was also anonymous, containing nothing that might give a clue to the nature of the business conducted here. The Crittall windows were frosted, the carpet was green, the walls cream-painted. There were two desks, filing cabinets, cupboards, computers and telephones, everything you would expect; and it was very tidy. But the one occupant – a middle-aged woman, smartly dressed and still handsome – seemed to have settled herself in comfortably, with a fleet of framed photographs on her desk, a row of plants along the windowsill and a reproduction of Monet’s ‘Poppies at Argenteuil’ on the wall. Slider got the feeling she had been there a long time.
    She looked up at them with a motherly smile. ‘May I see your identification, please?’ Having inspected their briefs thoroughly, she said, still smiling, ‘Well, what can I do for you? I hope we’re not in trouble? Not a complaint? We like to get on well with our neighbours and everything upstairs is soundproofed.’
    ‘No trouble, no complaint,’ Slider said. ‘We’re trying to find out something about a man who came here one day a couple of months ago. We think he might have worked for you.’ He offered her