Free Necrocrip by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

groaned.
    ‘Slaughter hasn’t got a car,’ McLaren pointed out.
    ‘Might be the victim’s,’ Norma said.
    ‘Might not,’ said Atherton.
    ‘Never mind,’ Slider said. ‘Bring her in and let her look at the book, see if she can pick out the model. It could be something. See if any of the other residents saw it arrive or leave. Anything else?’
    ‘We’ve still got some of the people in the other side-street to do,’ said Mackay, ‘though given it’s their gardens that back onto the alley, it seems unlikely they’ll have seen anything in the middle of the night.’
    ‘There is one thing, Guv,’ Norma said hesitantly. ‘I’ve been checking into the other helpers at the fish bar, and I haven’t been able to get hold of one of the ones who’s been doing Friday and Saturday nights.’ She looked down at her notebook. ‘He’s a Peter Leman, lives in a maisonette in Acton Lane. I’ve called and I’ve telephoned, but no luck. It might be nothing, of course, but I’ve got a sort of feeling about it—’
    ‘You think it’s worth looking into?’ Slider asked.
    ‘She can fillet in her bones,’ Atherton said.
    ‘For that,’ Slider said, ‘you can do Bent Bill’s tonight.’
    ‘I’m back,’ said Joanna.
    ‘I can tell,’ said Slider.
    ‘How?’
    ‘The receiver’s gone all damp and my trousers are too tight.’
    ‘It’s just the other way round with me.’
    ‘Where are you?’
    ‘At the airport, waiting for the baggage. I just thought I’d phone you,’ she said with a casualness which didn’t, thank heaven, fool him.
    ‘How was the tour?’
    ‘Terrible. Three people got food poisoning in a fish restaurant in San Francisco, and one of our cellos fell down some steps in Washington and broke his arm. But New York was heaven. We couldn’t get all the desks of first fiddles on the platform at the Carnegie, so Charlie and I got a day off and did the tourist bit. How’s the sleuthing business?’
    ‘We’ve got a murder.’
    ‘What, another one? Shepherd’s Bush gets more like Chicago every day.’
    ‘This is one thing you won’t get in Chicago – a dismembered body in a fish and chip shop.’
    ‘Most unhygienic.’
    ‘That’s just what I said. When am I going to see you?’
    ‘I was going to ask you that,’ she said.
    ‘I could probably manage to drop in later. I’ve got to go to South Acton. But I suppose you must be tired,’ he said wistfully. ‘You’ll want to sleep.’
    ‘I’m jetlagged to hell, so I mustn’t sleep until bedtime or I’ll never get my clock right. Come whenever you like.’
    ‘I’ve waited two weeks to hear you say that.’

CHAPTER 5
Gone to Pieces
    THE WHITE HORSE WAS OPEN all day, but that was the best thing you could say about it. It was a large 1930s building occupying a corner site, and its original individual bars had been knocked into one vast open-plan office inhabited at all hours by a muted selection of nondescript men in ready-made suits, whose precise function in life was impossible to determine. Some of them had portable phones and some of them didn’t, but all of them ought surely to have been at work, or why did they look furtively towards the door every time it opened?
    Slider could never fathom the reasoning behind building Shepherd’s Bush nick right opposite a Watney’s pub. As he said to Cameron, ‘It reminds me of the busload of American tourists travelling along the M4 past Windsor, and one says to another, “They must have been mad to build the castle so close to the airport.” ‘ He stared sadly into a half pint of Ruddles, which was the nearest thing they had to real ale in the White Horse.
    Freddie Cameron was a gold watch man, so it didn’t trouble him. He hitched his dapper little gluteus maximus into a more central position on the bar stool and asked, ‘Why is it only in London pubs that you get these things? Most uncomfortable invention. They wouldn’t stand for them up north.’
    ‘Our bottoms are different