by Gregson, J M
As he drank the tea, he studied from the corner of his eye the man who brought it to him. He was an older officer in shirtsleeves, with greying hair and the beginnings of a paunch. Peter decided that a man like this would not feel the need to assert his superiority; then he asked him what he could expect to happen next.
‘VIP, aren’t you, lad?’ said the man. He looked Brooke up and down, as though noticing for the first time that he was more than a parcel, to be guarded and delivered in due course. ‘Not to be questioned by the likes of us. Not even by our local CID. You’re waiting for an inspector to come up from Oldford, you are. What you been up to?’ He did not seem to expect an answer, so Peter grinned into his empty mug and said nothing. But the custody sergeant was not unfriendly. He gathered up the empty mug and promised his charge some grub if his interrogator wasn’t there within the hour.
It was another two hours before Detective Inspector Christopher Rushton was ready to see him. They met in a stifling interview room, so small that its green walls were scored and pitted near the floor with the marks of chairs moved too hastily back. They sat on upright chairs at either side of a table no more than two feet square, where they could study each facial spasm, each change of inflection in speech.
They could smell each other, too. Brooke caught the sharp scent of aftershave from the inspector; Rushton had not been in the room for a minute before he caught the stale body-scent of a man who had not troubled over-much about washing in the preceding weeks. The one thing they could not do was to touch each other, despite their proximity; any hint of violence on either side would be instantly checked.
Rushton set the tape running, announcing the interview and the time of its commencement. He said, ‘You are helping us with our inquiries into the death of Laura Pritchard, which took place some ten to fourteen days ago in suspicious circumstances. Was the lady your mother?’
Brooke, who had had three hours since the police had brought him in from the underground station to consider his tactics, had decided that this had better be as straightforward as he could make it. ‘Yes. She used to be Mrs Brooke, you see, before she became Pritchard.’
‘And when did you last see her, Mr Brooke?’ Rushton always liked to get the title in at least once at the beginning of an interview: you never knew who might be listening to the tape in due course.
‘About six weeks ago, I think.’ That was what they had agreed; Peter tried to deliver the phrase with confidence.
He had been given a plate of surprisingly appetising stew while he waited. But he was not used to eating in the middle of the day, and perhaps he had eaten a little too eagerly in that depressing cell. He found he now had indigestion, and he wished this cool man in the sharp suit would not watch him quite so closely. In the squat, they came and went for days at a time without ever looking each other full in the face.
‘Did she come to see you in London?’
He smiled at the absurdity of the idea, surprising himself. The picture of his mother in the squat, with her immaculately cut clothes and carefully coiffured hair, was vividly comic to him. He put his hands on the table in front of him, noticing for the first time in days how black his nails were, thinking how distressed his mother would have been at the sight of them. He had cut them — you could not play the fiddle with your nails too long. But washing was not easy in the squat. They still had water, but the electricity had been cut off, so that they only had the cold tap, and you had to queue for that. Sometimes it didn’t seem worth queuing for it; he realized now that those times had come more often recently.
He said carefully, ‘My mother never came to see me in London. I don’t see her very often these days. When I do, it’s back in Herefordshire.’ He enunciated the name carefully, like a man who is proud of his geography. The effect was ruined by a little hiccup of wind from his indigestion: it made him sound disconcertingly like a drunk.
Rushton noted the use of the present tense, but registered it as normal. It wasn’t unusual: it took time for bereaved relatives to come to terms with death, especially when it was sudden. He said, ‘It took us some time to find you, Mr Brooke: no one seemed to have an address for you. How did you find out about your mother’s death?’
Brooke recognized the first real danger. He tried to sound calm and matter-of-fact as he said, ‘I ring my sister from time to time. Joyce Warner, of Avonlea, 24 Pangbourne Lane, Woolnorth, Gloucestershire.’ He reeled off the address, finding it helped to still the racing he felt in his mind. He was disappointed that he could not remember the postcode to finish it off.
‘We have already seen Mrs Warner. She told us about you.’ It was Rushton’s first phrase of aggression. Lambert had thought the detective inspector would be too cold and hostile, too inflexible, to get all they wanted from a man who was by all accounts a drop-out. In fact, Rushton, immaculately clean, smartly dressed, already well up the ladder of his chosen profession, felt a curious affinity with the strange figure who sat across the table from him.
The one element they had in common was loneliness. But it was so powerful a bond that it seemed for a while more important to Rushton than all the myriad differences of the two who were set as opponents in that tiny, stifling room. Rushton’s wife had left him. It was so common a happening in the police force that after the first few days it scarcely excited comment. There was understanding, even sympathy, but also an unspoken view among Chris Rushton’s colleagues that such things were only to be expected.
Yet each tragedy is an individual one, each sterility in a man’s life diminishes him in a different way. Rushton had grown used to the police system, to operating by the rule book; he had found that his temperament even enabled him to enjoy the order which that book brought to his life. The discovery that his personal life had no book of rules, that his wife acknowledged no duty to the force and its code, had not only taken him by surprise but left him with no defence. Her departure, and that of his infant daughter, had hit him hard — much harder than he could acknowledge to his colleagues. He was too proud for that. He could not even accept their sympathy; he cut it off at source.
But in the dark hours, while he lay awake in his silent house, Detective Inspector Rushton, whizz-kid of the CID and efficient bureaucrat of the Incident Room, had wept the tears about which his colleagues must never know.
Now he saw in the man opposite him the desolation he could never acknowledge in himself. Peter Brooke had that unkemptness about his cheeks which was neither a beard nor the ‘designer stubble’ which a few mistaken sports personalities and pop stars had made fashionable. He simply had not shaved for several days; on the last occasion he had done so, he had either used a very blunt blade or been in no state to control his hand, for the growth on his face was uneven and there were small scars upon his chin and upper lip, visible from a few feet away.
As he sat at the table, his shoulders were hunched like those of a much older man — an old lag, thought Rushton suddenly, though there was no criminal record of even minor offences against this man. His cuffs were not just frayed but ragged too; the collar points of his unironed shirt curled upwards around his thin neck; where the open neck exposed his throat, it was pitted with the grime of days spent busking in the hot depths of the London Underground.
But it was in his dark eyes, so deep-set that they accentuated his furtive air, that Rushton thought he saw the isolation of this man and found an unlikely fellow-sufferer. This man manifested his loneliness in self-neglect, whereas Rushton had become even more careful of his appearance, almost dapper in his masking of the anguish he could not show. Nevertheless, he felt now the bonding of a desolation which was common to both of them. For a moment, for the first time since his wife had left him, he found himself wanting to talk about his own truncated life, to reveal himself as a counterpart to the man across the table who sat waiting for him to attack.
He did not do any such thing, of course. Rushton was a natural policeman, with all the strengths and weaknesses that the calling extracts from
its followers. The CID man in him saw Brooke’s loneliness as an opportunity. This flotsam upon the heaving surface of city life would surely not hold out for long against the interrogation of a highly trained detective inspector. He shut out his own life and waited for his moment.
There was a considerable interval before Brooke said in a low voice, ‘What did Joyce tell you about me?’
Rushton smiled at him, letting uncertainty work on the man for a moment before he responded. Behind his mask, he was thinking furiously. He would not let Brooke know that he had not seen the sister himself, that his only source of information was a hasty phone call to Lambert before he began this interview. The chief fancied this man’s only close relationship might be with his sister, and the few words Peter Brooke had volunteered so far suggested that he was right. So he might want to talk about her. Rushton might let him do that in due course. But not now: he would grill him about something else — get him on the run and keep him there.
‘You didn’t like your mother, did you, Peter?’ he said suddenly.
It was an instinctive piece of aggression, which paid immediate dividends. Brooke flashed him a look in which astonishment and fear were fused. For a moment, he was prepared to deny the allegation. Then he said, ‘No, I didn’t. Sometimes I hated her. She killed my father, you know.’
For a moment, Rushton thought he had found the CID man’s dream, the discovery of a crime long buried and now instantly solved, a revelation of a murder which officers before him had only suspected. He kept his voice quite calm as he said, ‘And how was that, Peter?’
‘She walked out on him. He died within the year. They said it was cancer, and it was, of course. But he wouldn’t have had it, without what she did to him. No one will ever convince me otherwise.’ He produced the last phrase like an older man, set in his ways; he must have used it to reject consolation many times before.
‘When was this, Peter?’ Rushton’s soft, sympathetic tone needed no effort; he spoke as one who had himself been abandoned.
‘Seven years ago. All but three weeks.’
Precision can sometimes be more significant than evasion, thought his interrogator. ‘And were you living at home then?’
‘No. Except sometimes during the holidays. I expect that was why I never saw it coming.’ He put his grubby hands on the table and studied the black nails with distaste, as if they belonged to some other and more squalid man. He was back for a moment in a happier time, when the world had seemed to lie before him and his nails had never been dirty.
‘You were in college at that time?’
‘At the Royal College of Music, yes. In my third year.’ Rushton’s glance strayed automatically to the battered violin case he had brought into the room with him, shielding it as tenderly as if it had been an old dog. Brooke, intercepting that look, said, ‘I never completed the course. Dad got ill, you see, after she’d left. Took it hard, he did, her going like that.’ For a moment, the Gloucestershire accent came riding on emotion through his educated speech. Rushton knew in that moment that Brooke senior had not had much schooling, that the lapse was an unconscious tribute to his memory.
Rushton, coming from Cheltenham himself, found himself dropping responsively into the accent as he said, ‘You miss your dad still, don’t you, Peter?’
Brooke nodded, looking very tired suddenly. ‘He was the one who got me into music, see? He couldn’t play himself, but he listened all the time. He took me to concerts while I was still a nipper. Worked overtime at the shop to get me lessons. He wanted to live to see me in a symphony orchestra, but he didn’t quite make it.’ The tragedy was etched in the premature lines of the young face.
Automatically, the DI in Rushton noted this vulnerability, then sought to exploit it. ‘But you were never as close to your mother?’
‘No. Not even before she left.’
‘And once she had done that, things were never patched up, were they? They went from bad to worse.’
Brooke seemed to accept that his questioner knew all about this, whereas in reality Rushton was groping in the dark, playing by instinct in a way that might have surprised his chief. The young man stared at the table as he said harshly, ‘She couldn’t even weep at his funeral. She only left her office for an hour. I suppose she had another man by then.’ He paused, looked again at his hands, this time unseeingly, and said, ‘I hated her. I’m glad she’s dead.’
It was the second time he had spoken of his hate. Rushton reflected that this was hardly the tactic of a man out to conceal his guilt. He said, ‘That shouldn’t prevent you from helping us to find out who killed her, Peter. Murder is the worst of crimes, whoever the victim.’ He felt like a clergyman instructing a candidate for Confirmation. This man could not be very much younger than he was himself, but his air of abstracted innocence made him seem an adolescent. Rushton had seen the same demeanour once before: that man, who had killed his wife and child, was now in Broadmoor.
Brooke said wearily, ‘What do you want me to tell you?’
‘What do you know of your mother’s second husband, James Pritchard?’
‘Nothing. I’ve only seen him once. I didn’t go to the wedding, and I’ve never wanted to know him.’ His lips were set in a sullen line.
‘How much older than you is your sister?’
‘Four years.’ The dark eyes were studying him now from within their deep sockets, pondering what traps were being set for him by these sudden shifts of questioning.
‘And what did she think of her mother?’
‘Not a lot.’ Rushton said nothing, and eventually the man seemed to realize the inadequacy of his childish response. ‘She kept closer to Mother than me, after she left our dad. Tried to bring us back together, sometimes, but I wasn’t having that.’
‘Do you think Joyce might have killed Laura Pritchard?’
His hands gripped the table, so that the dirt stood out even more clearly against the white of bone beneath it. ‘Of course not. Joyce might not have liked her, but she wouldn’t kill anyone.’
‘But she probably had the opportunity, with Mr Pritchard away. And she could have called on you if she needed help.’ For a moment, the possibility of the devoted younger brother, helping a sister driven to desperate action, seemed to Rushton the likeliest scenario for this death.
Brooke shook his head stubbornly. ‘She didn’t do it. I’d have had more reason to do it than her.’
Rushton ignored that for the moment. ‘What about her husband? Mark Warner doesn’t seem to have had much more time for your mother than you did.’
‘Mark didn’t like her.’ His eyes brightened momentarily at the thought. ‘I doubt whether he killed her, though. He’s got more sense than that.’ It was an unexpected return to an adult bearing.
‘Did you kill her, Peter?’
Rushton thought that the sudden switch would throw his man once again off balance, that the suggestion might even outrage him. But he was disappointed. Brooke flashed him a quick look from the dark eyes. ‘No. I don’t think I could murder anyone. Least of all my own mother — perhaps I shouldn’t have said I hated her.’
‘No. Where were you in the week when she was killed?’ He was hamstrung like the rest of the investigating officers by the absence of a precise time of death.
‘In London. All that week.’
‘Is there anyone who can witness that for you?’
Peter Brooke smiled. A sense of irony was a luxury he had almost forgotten — he found himself enjoying its return. ‘Not unless you count a few thousand London Transport customers. I was busking on the Underground, I expect.’
Rushton was rattled. How could you expect to pin anyone down, when there was a full week to account for? He said, ‘What about the nights? There must be someone who can at least vouch for your presence in London then.’
Brooke was immediately on the defensive. ‘No. Not really. We live our own lives, you see. We don’t notice what other people are up to.’ If he brought pigs sniffing round the squa
t, he might lose his place there. None of them wanted that, and some of the people there would certainly have more to hide than he had. ‘I’ve told you all I can. I don’t know the people who’ve been around my mother during these last years.’ The appeal in his voice turned it into almost a whine.
Rushton said firmly, ‘We shall need an address for you. When we have a more definite time of death, we shall be questioning you more closely about your movements at that time. It will be in your own interest to produce someone who can vouch for those movements, if you can.’
Brooke looked past him, staring from his hunched posture at the blank wall three feet behind his interrogator. ‘I hope you get the man who killed her. You were right: murder is a foul thing. No one deserves to be garrotted to death like that.’ He sounded suddenly completely desolate; he was preparing to become Jake again.
Rushton was almost back in Gloucestershire when he fell to wondering who had told Peter Brooke just how his mother had been killed.
Chapter Twelve
The funeral director found James Pritchard an ideal customer. Where so many of the distressed bereaved were vague, he was commendably precise. Where they dithered, he was calm and decisive, entirely clear-sighted about the arrangements for his wife’s last journey.
Laura, he explained, had outlined to him the arrangements she would like, even though she had not expected to die for many years yet. She wanted none of the maudlin business with a clergyman intoning solemnly at a graveside; no relatives casting earth upon a coffin lowered into its pit. A cremation, it would be, with a few brisk words from the vicar of the church the Pritchards had visited twice a year. There would be just three verses of ‘Abide with Me’, Laura Pritchard’s favourite hymn — her husband was so confident about this that the undertaker saw no reason on this occasion to point out that some of the older mourners might see an inappropriate association with the FA Cup Final. Then the small party would move briskly away to a short reception at the Feathers: there would be no need for anything elaborate, since no one would be travelling very far.