by Gregson, J M
‘And was the move successful?’
‘No. Knowing Laura, I doubt whether it would have been, even had I managed to put the proposition to her. But she was nowhere about. The place was locked and barred. She’d gone away.’
Lambert looked at him sharply. If Everton Smith was telling them the truth, Laura Pritchard had been at the house on the following day. ‘Are you sure she wasn’t just out of the house? What makes you think she’d gone away?’
Mark Warner thought for a moment, as if checking his facts and making sure there was no danger in them for him. Then he smiled wryly. ‘I suppose I’ve no reason for saying that, except that the place looked deserted. I remember Tim saying, “Granny gone” and I suppose I just accepted it.’
He looked suitably embarrassed at this parental indulgence.
*
Bert Hook enjoyed the CID room. It was usually untidy, with men coming and going at irregular times when serious crime was afoot, as nowadays it invariably was. The room smelt of stale food and staler cigarette smoke; mugs half full of cold tea spoke of the urgent calls of modern detection.
But the place had an air of purpose, a certainty about the necessity of what the occupants were about, an agreement about the war on villains, which he knew in no other place. When there was a big hunt on — when a child had been killed, for instance — there was an atmosphere like the one people said they remembered from the war, when Hitler united a whole nation in the way in which this small specialist body of men were united now by crime.
DS Hook grumbled about his paper work and his unsocial hours like the rest, but he knew that even they were rituals he would miss if they were suddenly withdrawn from him. And he loved the banter, not realizing in his modest way how much he contributed to it, how much the collective spirit he loved was derived from long-serving men like him.
He looked for a moment at the application for a search warrant to investigate the living quarters of Everton Smith. They would get it easily enough; in the midst of a murder investigation, the sudden affluence which the black youth had refused to explain was sufficient reason to ascertain what other secrets he might be hiding in that mean little room he called home. It would be an invasion of the privacy the boy valued, but he had brought it upon himself.
Bert looked again at his notes on the interview at The Beeches and speculated uselessly upon Smith’s refusal to account for the money he seemed to have acquired so suddenly. Could he be a drug-pusher? Many men of his background were small-time purveyors of pot and cocaine, drawn into the fringe of a sleazy world where they took the biggest risks and the anonymous men at the centre took practically none and made huge profits. Most small pushers were users themselves; Smith did not seem like one, though they had after all seen him only twice.
On his way home, Bert turned his Sierra on impulse towards the shabby street where Everton Smith guarded his small island of independence. They would have the search warrant tomorrow, but he would prefer that they did not have to use it. If he could have a quiet few words with the lad now, it might save Smith from not only loss of face but the loss of his accommodation. Landlords did not always like men who brought the police to their property, especially when they arrived with search warrants. Any rights possessed by men like Everton Smith tended to be strictly theoretical.
The high brick houses which had known so much better days rose high above Hook as he turned into Jackson Terrace, as if they were turning up their noses at the dubious vehicles which lined the street and the litter which gathered ever more thickly behind the unkempt privet hedges. Hook parked fifty yards from the house where Everton had his room; though he was in plain clothes, the expert eyes round here would soon spot a policeman.
He walked past two houses where the once proud bays at the front were boarded up, another where two vehicles were jacked up on the dank earth which had once been a bright front garden. He knocked at the front door of the house where Smith had his room. A thin young face peeped at him briefly through the filthy curtain to his left, then turned away so sharply that its pigtail brushed briefly against the window. Bert reflected that when he had begun his days in the force it had been curious, harmless old ladies who surveyed him thus. Now it was youth, usually with something to hide. Sometimes, in these days of drugs and knives and casual violence, dangerous youth.
The door opened three inches and the man with the pigtail looked through the gap with an automatic suspicion. He was a little older than Hook had thought: perhaps twenty-three or -four. His features, sharpened with the sly caution of his attitude, made him look older, but the acne and a couple of pink eruptions on his forehead spoke up defiantly for his disappearing youth. He did not speak.
Hook said, ‘Police, son. Do you want to see the card?’
The face did not answer. Instead, it said, ‘We paid the council tax. Or whatever fancy name you have for it now.’
‘I don’t doubt it, son.’ Hook edged forward a little. He did not actually put his foot in the gap between the door and its frame, but he ensured that it would not now be slammed in his face. The gap widened from three to six inches. ‘It’s not you I want, lad. I want a few words with Everton Smith.’
‘The wigwog on the first floor? What’s he done, then?’ It was the first curiosity the face had exhibited. It established that Smith would not receive assistance from this quarter, if he should need it.
‘That would be telling, lad. Maybe nothing.’ Hook’s ample frame moved forward now, and the door fell open before its keeper quite realized what was happening. ‘I know where his room is.’ The burly guardian of the law glided past the man with the pigtail and ascended the staircase behind him with surprising speed and a minimum of noise. Like many big men, Hook made scarcely a sound as he climbed stairs, moving softly on the balls of his feel like a drunk trying to outwit a sleeping wife.
He rapped sharply at the scratched varnish on the dark door of Smith’s room. When there was no reply, he turned the handle. The door was locked, of course: no man would leave his room open with residents like the man behind him around the place. But at least the locking probably meant that Smith was not here and not merely refusing to answer.
Hook went down the stairs. Pigtail waited to shepherd him safely on to the street and out of his life, but he turned abruptly by the baluster at the bottom of the stairs and went down the dark and narrow hall to the door at the end of it. It was the room where Lambert and he had sat and talked to Smith on their first visit to this place, before he took them up to his own room. The sink by the cracked window was still full of crockery, as if someone had arranged it carefully for a squalid still life painting. The bowl was half full of water, with grease congealing upon the surface. Hook assumed that they were not the same pots that had been there on his last visit, but it would have needed a very accurate observation to be sure of it.
The scratched table in the centre of the room was empty. There was no sign of Smith, nor of any possession of his. ‘Do you know where he is?’ he said to the man behind him, not even bothering to look round.
‘No. Don’t tell me where ’e’s going or what ’e’s doing, the wigwog don’t.’ Hook wondered if the man was trying to be offensive. Probably not; he sounded as if he might even be looking for common ground.
‘I’m not surprised: I expect he has more sense.’ Bert Hook was suddenly enraged. The speed of his movement again caught the youth off guard; the sergeant had the thin wrist in the grip of his large hand and the sleeve concertinaed up the arm before the man realized what was happening.
Both of them stared at the revealing pinpricks in the slug-white flesh. ‘Supplies you with this, does he, the nig-nog?’ said Hook.
The thin man felt very vulnerable in the face of this sudden rage. The white arm was stretched straight and slender between the two thick-fingered paws. It looked as though it could be broken like a stick if he provoked this strange creature with the village-bobby exterior and the unpredictability of a pitbull terrier. It was worse because he
didn’t know what had so incensed his captor. Was it the drugs or the words he had used to describe the black man? He said cautiously, ‘No. Smith don’t do drugs. Not his scene, that.’
Hook glared at him for a moment longer, their eyes no more than a foot apart. Then he relinquished the arm, slowly, as if he was tempted until the last instant to break it. ‘What is his scene, lad?’
‘I — I don’t know.’ Pigtail racked his brain, searching not for information but for any sort of answer which would satisfy his inquisitor. ‘He’s…well, a bit of a loner. Goes off to various jobs — I don’t know what.’
‘You wouldn’t. He’s hardly likely to confide in someone like you.’ Hook turned in disgust and went across the dirty kitchen to the back door. He turned the knob on the Yale lock and went out into the yard, shutting the door on Pigtail without a backward glance. There was no one in the narrow yard. And no sign of the great white Honda motorcycle.
It was the moment when Hook felt for the first time that Everton Smith might be in some sort of danger.
Chapter Fifteen
Lambert’s way home led past the golf course. He thought of turning down the familiar lane and chancing that there might be someone available to play a few holes with him; now that the longer evenings were here, there were often other people like him around, seeking to unwind after a day’s work.
But he realized when the moment of decision came that he was too tired; perhaps that was another sign that the years were catching up on him. But he knew he was wearied more by his failure to break this case than by the actual hours of work. Progress brought its own adrenalin, but there had not been much of that yet.
When he saw that the parking bay by a roadside viewpoint was quite empty, he turned into it on impulse and stopped his engine. It was part of his attempt to keep his work separate from his home, to do even his thinking about the problems of detection away from the house. It did not work, of course, as his wife knew better than he. When he was immersed in a case, it occupied all of his attention; it was the exclusion of any domestic consideration which had almost broken their marriage in the early days.
The setting sun threw an almost Italian ambience over a typically English scene, gilding it with old master colours. In this part of the country, there were still miles of hedgerows and stone walls stretching in irregular lines over the tracts of green farmland. In the distance the lazy bends of the Severn ran in their great silver curves, burning crimson only at the point where the low red sun reflected like fire from the water. The only movements he caught were from the corner of his golf course in the foreground; he could see four small figures moving like ants along the sixth fairway.
He thought of another golfer on another course, James Pritchard, and of the wife he had lost. This killing could hardly now be the random act of violence by a stranger, that sequence of events urged upon him by the members of the bereaved family. Now that it was established that the body had been moved from the house in the dead woman’s own car, with no signs of a burglary, the overwhelming probability was that the murder was the work of a member of the family or a close acquaintance.
So far, Jim Pritchard was the only one who could not have done it — assuming, of course, that Everton Smith’s assurance that the victim had been alive two days after her husband left for Spain was genuine. And even then Pritchard could have employed someone to remove his wife while he was so convincingly absent: contract killings were increasing each year, as Britain continued to import only the worst habits from across the Atlantic. It was statistically unlikely, perhaps; contract killers operated mostly for gangster bosses in the cities. But by no means impossible: Pritchard had the funds to arrange this method of dispatch, and he did not seem unduly distressed by his wife’s death.
Mark Warner could certainly have done it. He had made no secret of his dislike for his mother-in-law, and his desperate need for funds to rescue his business gave him an obvious motive. And he had lied about his visit to The Beeches on the Sunday after Jim Pritchard had gone to Spain. Lambert had not decided yet whether he believed the explanation Warner had now provided for the visit — that he had taken his toddler son in an attempt to loosen the heartstrings and purse strings of Laura Pritchard at the same time. His story of finding the place locked and barred and his assertion that the dead woman had gone away hardly tallied with Everton Smith’s story of working with the dead woman on the next day. Had Warner had some kind of exchange with Laura Pritchard which he was now trying to conceal? If so, the CID could hardly quiz the two-year-old who had been the only witness to the meeting.
He still found it curious that neither of the Warners had reported the dead woman’s disappearance. It had seemed very odd at the time that the first report of a missing person should come not from the family but from the workplace, though they now knew that Sue Hendry had been much more than a colleague of Laura Pritchard.
He must have another word soon with Joyce Warner, that daughter who seemed so composed and ungrieving. He had the impression that she, like her husband, had been concealing something when he had seen her with Hook. Was she protecting her husband, or herself? Could she have killed her own mother? It was perfectly possible physically: the method by which wire or rope which had been twisted like a tourniquet into Laura Pritchard’s slim neck needed no great strength. And ruthless violence among women was not as rare as men of Lambert’s generation liked to suppose, especially where the interests of children or a cherished spouse were at stake.
Perhaps she was merely lying to protect that strange, rather pathetic younger brother of hers. If Peter Brooke had really been around at The Beeches as Everton Smith claimed on the Monday when the victim had last been alive, he became automatically a prime suspect, particularly as he had not admitted to that visit. He was the only one who had said openly that he had hated the victim, that he was glad she was dead. Whether with reason or not, he blamed his mother for the death of the father he had loved. From Rushton’s detailed account of his interview with Brooke, he had a picture of a young man who was probably disturbed enough to be unbalanced. That was a common enough profile for family murderers; their degeneration into psychopathy was often not noticed until they had killed.
This was a strange family, with undercurrents he was sure they had not yet discovered. Not one of them seemed to be stricken with grief by this death, though sometimes the bereaved in a murder case exhibited a calm exterior to outsiders which was seen as a means of protecting their private suffering. All of them were significant financial beneficiaries of this death — even her husband was now the sole owner of his substantial house.
There were also two possibilities from outside the family. Everton Smith was an obvious suspect: from his edgy bearing under questioning, he even appeared to think so himself. By his own account, he was the last person known to have seen the victim alive. And he had acquired large sums of cash from somewhere at around the time of this death. Perhaps they should have pressed him harder about that, but Lambert had felt that the search warrant, giving them the opportunity to investigate his living quarters, might throw up much more than the answer to one question. Well, they would know more of Smith tomorrow, when the search warrant was agreed by the magistrates.
And there was a lover in this case. Lovers were always of interest: where there was love, other passions were rarely far away. Sue Hendry had given them the news of her relationship with the dead woman herself, when she might well have concealed it. She had produced it with a lover’s pride and defiance. But could she have been rejected? Had the enigmatic Laura Pritchard proclaimed her intention to stay after all with her husband? It was often the moment of final commitment, in both homosexual and heterosexual relationships, which made the partner who was already in a marriage decide against the upheaval of a new life with the lover. They needed to know more of the determined and capable Sue Hendry.
*
The opportunity came to him sooner than he had expected. He ran the old Vauxhall into the garage and pau
sed to examine the burgeoning buds of the roses on his way into the house. ‘Home at last, Christine,’ he called. He did not tell her that he had nearly called in at the golf club and been two hours later. Food was never spoiled in this house: Mrs Lambert had learned at least to protect herself from that over a quarter of a century of being married to the force.
She came to meet him at the back door of the house where she knew he would enter. She was trim and efficient in jeans and a sweat-shirt; her white trainers with their sky blue trimmings were bright against the dimmer light of the room behind her. ‘You have a visitor, John,’ she whispered. ‘She insisted on waiting. I rang the CID section and they said you’d left for home.’ Lambert breathed a sigh of relief to the golfing gods that he had not indulged himself on the fairways; even the patience of a saintly spouse had its limits.
He went through into the lounge. They had not yet put on the lights, and Sue Hendry’s red hair glowed like a lamp in the twilit room. She stood up as he arrived in the room, his head almost brushing the door frame as it always did. She had on a grey skirt and a white blouse; her cardigan was over her wrist rather than around her shoulders; her court shoes had the medium heels which combine smartness with a degree of comfort. He divined that she, like him, had come here straight from work.
Perhaps not quite straight from work: maybe she — again like him — had paused to assess things. For he saw that she had been crying. Her eyes looked an even deeper green, because the puffing of the skin around them set them deeper in the cavities beneath the sandy eyebrows and the square forehead. She had stood up when she heard him coming into the room; now she moved with automatic grace towards the armchair to which he gestured. The contrast between the sturdy athleticism of her movements and her emotional uncertainty was peculiarly poignant: hockey playing women should be jolly and uncomplicated.