In the end, it was Maslin himself who drove me home. An officer who had the conversation skills of a mannequin escorted me out to the car. In fact, I was fairly sure, from his oddly sallow skin, that hewasa mannequin. A crash-test dummy come to life.
Maslin was waiting by the car. “I thought you were finding a uniformed officer?” I asked.
My crash-test dummy friend did too because he seemed perplexed by Maslin’s appearance, lounging on the side of the car. His enormous arms folded across his enormous chest.
“Orders from Top Dog,” Maslin said in a voice with zero inflection.
In my mind, a Top Dog was something quite different to what Maslin probably imagined. Whichever East End pub he did his womanising in was probably not to my tastes. It made me wonder if the Red Wagon on Bow Road was still around. A guy from the dodgy pub I’d worked in as a student would go there after his shift to pick up divorced women in their forties.
‘Top Dog’, I assumed, was Neuberger.Keep an eye on the Foreign Homosexual Criminal. His eyes are too close together.
Maslin gestured for me to get in the front seat, which I did. Bone tiredness overtook me the moment I sat down. Home. Feed Kenny. Sleep.
He pulled out of the car park and onto the street, speeding up quickly. I forgot that police officers, particularly plain-clothes ones, got special training for defensive driving and therefore were all speed-demon maniacs behind the wheel.
“So, you knew Patel, you said?”
The question took me by surprise. Had I not spent twenty minutes in an interview room?
“Not well.”
“But you know his fiancé better, right?”
An image of the top of Simon’s head between my legs entered my mind. “He renovated my kitchen a few months ago.”
“Did you get a feel for him?”
Yeah, about six-and-a-half inches and thick as a bedpost. “In what way do you mean?” If he was probing for insights into Simon’s psyche, I could safely tell him honestly that I hadn’t the fucking foggiest. He’d slammed the door on that pathway sharpish.
Maslin gave me a look. Suddenly, I clicked what he meant. And why he was driving me home. I’m gay – Simon’s gay – ergo we must know each other, and ergo does he strike me as the type to kill his boyfriend?
My snooping around Arabella’s murder had resulted in one statistic coming up again and again. In an overwhelming percentage of murders, it was the person’s partner who did it.
Ollie had told me this at a candlelit French restaurant in London. I could see it with said ex. He was one of the few people I’d met that I could imagine battering to death with a kitchen implement.
“Simon’s very good at controlling his temper.”
We passed through fields and intersections and turned into the narrow lane down the back of Compney that ran to Winterborne Minster. For a man who’d just moved here, Maslin sure knew the shortcuts.
“Did you ever see him and Patel fight?”
“Nope.”
“Get an uncomfortable vibe off them? Like they were mad with each other?”
“I saw them together twice. And like I said, Simon is very good at controlling his temper.”
“How do you know that?”
Shit. Whatever I said would be too much. “He was around me when the Sweet case was happening. He was … calm.”
Maslin nodded.
“I can’t see Simon killing his boyfriend. Especially can’t see him shooting him in a car park,” I said.
“Because he’s calm?”
“Because Simon isn’t a psychopath.”
