Excerpt from DEAR DEPARTD, the 10th Bill Slider mystery

There is nothing quite like knocking on a strange door for getting a policeman’s adrenalin going. Slider stood in the hotel corridor, listening to the white noise of the air conditioning and the interesting tattoo of his own heartbeat, and wondering if he was about to die.

His mouth was so dry he had to pause a moment and manufacture some spit. The kevlar vest under his shirt made him feel hot and awkward, and the tape holding the wire to his flesh was making him itch. He’d had to borrow a jacket from a larger colleague to conceal the fact that he was protected. He looked, and felt, overweight and stupid.

In front of him was an ordinary, typical hotel door, and behind the door was an extraordinary, untypical man, who, moreover, might well be armed, and had amply proved his willingness to kill. Robert Bates, alias The Needle, was being brought to book at last. He had been the subject of ongoing investigations by various CO departments of Scotland Yard, not to mention – because nobody ever did – MI5 and MI6.

Slider’s path had crossed with his during the investigation of a murder which, it turned out most disappointingly, Bates didn’t do. However, Slider had turned up a number of  things Bates did do, including the undoubted murder of a prostitute whom Bates had used, tortured, and then dispatched. Because of the involvement of higher authorities, Slider had been warned off Bates, but such disappointments were commonplace in a copper’s life. Sooner or later, he had reasoned, The Needle would get his come-uppance. Then two days ago he had been summoned to the office of the area supremo, Commander Wetherspoon.

‘Ah, Slider,’ Wetherspoon said, tilting his head back so that he could look down his nose at him, ‘someone here who wants to speak to you, Chief Superintendent Ormerod of the Serious Crime Group Liaison Team.’

Ormerod was a large and serious man, who towered over Slider and would have made two of him in bulk, and at least ten in conscious supremacy. He had a handsome, authoritative face, eyes like steel traps, and the smell of power came off him like an aura. This man was from the far, far end of policing, the place of hard deals done behind closed doors, of anonymous corridors, terse telephone calls, operations with code names and briefings with senior ministers where the senior ministers behaved quite meekly. It was as far from Slider’s place on the street as the Cabinet room of Number 10 was from the checkout at Tesco’s. Slider felt faint just breathing Ormerod’s aftershave; and when Ormerod smiled, it was even more frightening than when he didn’t.

Ormerod smiled. ‘Ah, Inspector Slider. Bill, isn’t it? I’m glad to meet you. I won’t waste time. Trevor Bates. You did some smart work on that case. I’m sorry you had to take a back seat, but very large things were at stake.’

‘I understand, sir,’ Slider said, since something seemed to be required.

‘We’ve got to the point now where we’re ready to arrest him, and we want you to be the one to do it.’

‘Me, sir?’ Slider couldn’t help it, though it made him sound like Billy Bunter.

‘Thought you’d like to be in on it,’ Ormerod said. ‘Sort of thanks for all your hard work.’

‘Consolation prize,’ Wetherspoon put in, and Slider was glad to see him quelled with a single look from Ormerod. Anyone who could quell Wetherspoon was a Big Monkey indeed.

‘Also,’ Ormerod said, ‘we think you could be useful to us.’

Ormerod explained. Bates was a high-powered criminal, and as sharp and cunning as a lorry full of foxes. It would be impossible to arrest him in his home, which was better defended than Fort Knox, and pretty hard anywhere else if they saw him coming. Bates often went armed, and usually had armed bodyguards around him.

However, the day after tomorrow he would be attending a business conference in a hotel in Birmingham, and staying overnight, and would be unlikely to be armed in such a place, especially as they had taken pains to fall back from him over the past few weeks and let him relax. He would not be expecting trouble, and though he would have an ‘assistant’ with him, for which read bodyguard, he would probably not be taking very heavy precautions.

‘All the same, we can’t take him in any of the public rooms, in case his goon gets rattled and starts loosing off,’ Ormerod said. ‘So we have to arrest him in his room at the end of the day. But we don’t want to go kicking the door in and provoking a shoot-out. We need someone to distract him. That’s where you come in. He knows you, you’ve spoken to him before, and he’s not afraid of you.’

With the rind taken off, what Ormerod was saying was that Bates thought Slider was a pathetic dickhead whom he’d already outsmarted once. He would therefore be more likely to open the door to him. Bates was also tricky, smart and strong, and had an unhealthy liking for torture, knives and needles. And guns. The words ‘tethered’ and ’goat’ had wandered through Slider’s mind, looking for something to link up with.

 Which was why Slider now regarded that anonymous hotel door with trepidation. If Bates opened it at all, it might be simply to shoot him, and he didn’t want to die. His pulse rate notched up another level as he raised his hand and rapped hard on the door. The team was all behind him, he reminded himself. They had watched Bates to his room, watched the ‘assistant’ to his adjoining one, and were waiting just out of sight, listening to everything that came over Slider’s wire, ready for his signal. He hoped the wire was still working. He hoped they weren’t being deafened by his heartbeat.

He knocked again. Bates’s voice – Slider recognised it, with a shiver - called out irritably from within. ‘Who is it?’

Slider gulped. ‘Detective Inspector Slider, sir, Shepherd’s Bush. Could I have a word, do you think?’

            ‘What?’ Bates said incredulously. ‘Slider, did you say?’ His voice came again from just behind the door, and Slider guessed he was being examined through the peephole. He held up his brief. ‘I know you,’ Bates said. ‘What are you doing here? What the hell do you want?’

            ‘I’d like to have a word with you, sir,’ Slider said stolidly, Mr Plod to the core. ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

            There was a click and a rattle and Slider’s stomach went over the edge of a cliff as the door was flung open and he waited for the hot flash and burn of a bullet or a knife in the guts. The kevlar was a comfort but it didn’t cover everything.