Game Over Read Free Page B

with me.’
    Porson looked thoughtful. He knew Slider’s instincts by now and trusted him. ‘We’ll go with motiveless robbery for the time being. Keep anything else out of the news as long as we can. I’ll tell Mr Palfreyman. The last thing we want is a rabid pack of journos peculating about conspiracies.’
    Peculating was a good word for it, considering Porson’s view of the honesty of the press. ‘It’ll make life easier if we can keep it at that, sir,’ Slider said.
    ‘Oh, I think Mr Palfreyman will see it our way,’ said Porson. ‘Going back to the factory?’
    ‘If I can run the gauntlet out there.’
    ‘Just ignore them. Don’t say anything. That’s an order. And tell your firm not to speak to anyone. No comment all the way, if anyone asks.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘Meanwhile, you’d better get digging, see what dirt you can turn up. There should be plenty. This Stonax bloke wasn’t exactly a parody of virtue.’
    It was Porson’s way, in his energetic passage through life, to take a wild swing at vocabulary, hit or miss, to get his meaning across. Like the famed chemist of old, he dispensed with accuracy.

Two
    No Folk Without Mire
    O utside, Slider put his head down and scuttled for his car, blocking out the shouted questions, ignoring the eyes and open mouths massed around the barrier tape, keeping his head turned away from the rattlesnake clicking of cameras. As he reached his car and opened the door, something he saw across its roof caught his attention, but in such a subliminal way that when he looked properly, he could not see what it was. But it reminded him of the black Ford Focus again, and he made a mental note to get one of the firm to run the number plate he had taken down.
    He drove off, was let out of the roadblock, and turned on to King Street. A few minutes later his mobile rang.
    He flipped it open. ‘Slider,’ he said.
    ‘Don’t you know it’s illegal to answer the phone while you’re driving?’ said a voice. A male voice, vaguely familiar, precise, accentless. The words were spoken not as a pleasantry but with – as far as one sentence could reveal this – a kind of menace.
    ‘Who is that?’ Slider said.
    ‘Oh, you know who it is. You haven’t forgotten me, surely, Inspector Plod? The last time we met I told you you’d regret meddling in my business.’
    He knew it now. ‘Bates,’ he said.
    ‘ Mr Bates to you. Don’t forget you’re a public servant and I pay your wages.’
    Trevor Bates, alias The Needle. Wealthy businessman, property dealer, electronics expert, murderer of a prostitute called Susie Mabbot. He had stuck her full of acupuncture needles (his fetish), broken her neck and thrown her in the Thames. Slider suspected him of commissioning, if not actually committing with his own hands, other murders, and who knew what else besides? Slider had been in on the capture of The Needle, helping to trap him in his hotel room at a conference, for which Bates had vowed revenge. Slider had heeded it as little as the idle wind at the time; but Bates had not remained long in custody. He had never even gone to trial. While he was being moved to the maximum security remand facility at Woodhill, the security van was held up and he was sprung. He had been missing for over a month now, not seen or heard of by anyone in authority. Until now.
    ‘How did you get this number?’ Slider asked.
    Bates laughed. ‘Oh, come, Mr Plod. A man of my stature? I can find out anything I want to know. I know all about you. I know where you live.’
    ‘What do you want?’ Slider asked, striving to sound untroubled, though he was thinking of Joanna. He had been threatened before, many times, and he knew most threats were simply made to aggrandise the threatener. They were never carried out. But Bates was not quite in that class. He was intellectual, cold-blooded, and pathologically vain. He might just mean it.
    ‘You know what I want,’ Bates said. ‘To make you regret messing with me.