Richard had already showered, dressed and breakfasted. He glanced at the alarm clock by his bed before he went to clean his teeth. It was quarter past eight. He was only ten minutes’ drive from the club. He had plenty of time. He would get there by twenty to nine, change his shoes in the locker room, enjoy the greetings of ‘Good morning, Mr Captain!’ and the bluff male badinage of the locker room before he strolled out to the busy Monday morning tee and watched the ranks of senior golfers fall back obediently with their trolleys to allow his passage.
He took the tray with the pot of tea and the toast into the room of his invalid wife. ‘Might be a bit late back again, dear,’ he said, as she struggled to a sitting position and he plumped the pillows behind her. ‘You know what it’s like, being Captain. You can’t just get away when you like. You’re the servant of the members, for your year of office.’
It was a formula he had been repeating since he became Captain at the beginning of the year, but she didn’t mind. She knew he was enjoying it, and it was important for a man who didn’t get all the comforts at home — which he had once enjoyed — to relish his life outside. ‘I’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll get up in a little while, get myself a little lunch in due course. I might be able to sit in the garden later, if the sun stays out.’
She accepted his peck on the cheek, gave him an encouraging smile as he left, then sank back exhausted into the pillows. She would tackle the toast in a minute, when she’d got her strength back. The MS had got much worse, during these last twelve months: even the drugs didn’t seem to hold it at bay as effectively now as they had done in previous years.
But Richard was very kind, very patient, most of the time. Now that he was semi-retired from his accountancy business, it was good that he had the diversions of the golf club. She was sorry she didn’t feel up to attending the social occasions herself any more. But Richard seemed to be enjoying them, especially in this year of the captaincy: he was at the club on quite a lot of nights, as well as playing during the days. Perhaps he would find a new partner for himself at the golf club, when she was gone.
No use being morbid. She sat up, turned on the bedside radio, and poured herself a cup of tea.
Richard had put his bag with his change of clothes for after the game into the car and was ready to go out when the phone rang. He went quickly into his study and picked it up. ‘Richard Ellacott here. I’m afraid I haven’t much time, because I’m about to—’
‘You’ve time for this. It won’t take long.’
A neutral voice, female, he was sure, but muffled. It sent a chill racing up his spine. ‘Who is this? I told you, I—’
‘I know about Kate Wharton.’
His head reeled. He said desperately, ‘Kate who? I think you must have the wrong number, and I really haven’ t—’
‘The girl you paid to sleep with you, Richard Ellacott. Many times. Too many, as it turns out. The girl who was murdered, a week ago.’
He tried desperately to think who this might be, but he had no idea. The voice was deliberately even, deliberately deadened. He wanted to slam the receiver down, to stalk out of his house with his head held high. Instead, he found himself saying, ‘What is it you want with me?’
The voice did not immediately reply, and he wondered if the silence was itself a tactic. Then it said, ‘The police know about you and Kate, Richard. Your name was in the back of her diary.’
He felt the blood pounding in his temples. ‘I’ve no reason to fear the police. I didn’t kill Kate Wharton.’
Another pause, even more agonizing, as he waited for a reaction. He was almost certain he caught a vestige of a chuckle before the voice resumed its flatness: ‘That’s as may be. But I don’t think your wife would be happy to hear you’d been making regular visits to a prostitute. Or the people who work for you. Or your chums at the golf club, for that matter.’
He wanted to tell the voice to go to hell. Publish and be damned, the Duke of Wellington had said. But Richard wasn’t the Iron Duke, and he knew it. He could not force the outrage he intended into his voice as he demanded, ‘Who the hell are you? And what are you proposing to do?’
Another of those excruciating pauses. Then the voice said, ‘You had an — an arrangement with Kate, didn’t you, Richard?’
‘She was blackmailing me, you mean, don’t you? If you think I’m going to—’
‘A thousand pounds, last time, I think. I don’t see why that shouldn’t be continued. With a different receiver, of course.’
‘But look, I can’t afford—’
‘Oh, I think you can, Richard. With as much at stake as you have. But there’s good news for you, as well as bad. Just a one-off payment, it will be, and then you’ll be rid of this forever.’
He licked dry lips. ‘How much?’
‘Two thousand. Very reasonable, really, for a final, one-off payment.’
But it never was, was it? Blackmailers always came back for more, people said. And there were no photographic negatives he could exchange for his payment, no evidence which would not be there just as clearly as a weapon against him after this two thousand pounds had gone. He had thought the nightmare had been concluded with the death of Kate Wharton. Now he heard himself saying, ‘You promise that? One payment, and then it’s finished?’
‘Finished forever, Richard.’ The flat voice was suddenly persuasive.
He felt utterly defeated, as though his replies were now dictated for him by this voice he could not identify on the other end of the line. ‘It will take me a couple of days to get the money.’
‘Let’s say Thursday night, then. I don’t want to be unreasonable.’
‘Where?’
‘The old patch. Where you used to pick up Kate. Ten o’clock. Stop your car. I’ll be waiting.’
‘All right. This will finish it once and for all, though.’
‘Of course it will, Richard Ellacott.’ The voice had dropped its impersonal tone, now, but he still could not recognize it. It rolled his full name off its tongue, seeming to savour each syllable.
He looked at the dashboard clock as he slid into the driving seat of his car. He didn’t have plenty of time any more. But that no longer mattered. He knew as he drove to the club that he would lose this morning’s match, that the lunch-time banter would clog his distracted ears, that his joking replies would sit like ashes in his mouth.
In the phone booth in Gloucester, Tracey Boyd unwound her old tights from the mouthpiece and relaxed. She’d been right about where Kate had got that extra thousand from.
And blackmail had been easier than she had expected, in the end.
***
Roy Cook’s house was in one of the small villages on the edge of the Forest of Dean. It was the end of what had once been a terrace of council houses. Two thirds of them were now privately owned, including this one, crouched beneath the shoulder of the hill as if it were seeking shelter from the winter winds.
It was half-past nine when they got there, and this on the morning of the fourteenth of May, but the sun was only just beginning to touch the roof of the house, so abruptly did the hill rise to the north-east behind it. Oak and beech had been in leaf as they drove into the forest, but this was a high valley and the buds on the trees beside the house were only just breaking.
Cook stood in the doorway of the house before Lambert and Hook were properly out of the car, his powerful figure seeming even larger against the shadows behind him. He nodded to them without a smile as they walked up the path which bisected the long, narrow front garden. He motioned them into the house, then looked out upon the quiet scene before him and glanced along the frontage of the terrace to his left, as if he wished to convince himself that no one was taking an interest in these visitors of his.
‘Peaceful spot you’ve found for yourself here,’ Lambert remarked, as they looked out over a rear garden dominated by neat rows of potatoes, onions and newly planted brassicas.
‘I like it.’
He was tense,
waiting for them to start on the business of this visit, and Lambert, noticing this, perversely decided to prolong his tension. ‘I’m sorry if you’ve had to take a morning off work. We’d have come to see you in the woods again, you know, if that had been easier for you.’
‘They owe me. I don’t take my full holiday allowance, anyway.’ He hadn’t wanted CID coming to see him at his place of work again, not with Julie telling him what they knew about him now. There had been enough gossip about the last visit by his fellow-workers, whose featureless lives made a CID visit a matter of major interest. When you had a background like Roy Cook’s, you learned to keep such things as quiet as possible. Anyway, if he claimed a doctor’s appointment and went in as soon as these two had finished with him, he probably wouldn’t be docked for the morning. No need to tell them that.
Lambert said, ‘I expect Mrs Wharton told you about our visit to her house on Saturday.’
‘She mentioned it, yes.’ She’d been through it with him in detail, twice, and insisted on discussing what his tactics should be when they made their inevitable contact with him. He hadn’t wanted to talk about it with her. He didn’t see any point in reviving the scene which had made him leave her house, which had stopped them sleeping with each other for three months, until their lust had brought them back together again, so that their first frenzied couplings had made the separation seem almost worthwhile.
Roy felt he wasn’t a good liar, not to an intelligent woman like Julie, and he had deliberately avoided any discussion of what had happened to Kate in the years after she had left. But Julie hadn’t seemed to notice, so anxious had she been to work out with him what he should say now. She’d been disappointed when he’d refused to stay the night with her, but he had insisted on coming back to what she had taken to calling his bolt-hole, where no one was interested in the loner who made only occasional visits to the village pub.
Lambert continued: ‘We were interested in your assault upon Kate Wharton. We have to be interested in anything which concerns a relationship with a dead girl.’
‘It was four years ago. It had nothing to do with Kate’s death.’
‘Perhaps. But you chose to conceal it from us, when we spoke on Friday in the forest.’ He hadn’t disputed the word assault, Lambert noticed.
Cook shrugged his massive shoulders, dropped his dark eyes to the faded carpet between him and the two men for whom his small sofa seemed scarcely adequate. ‘It’s not something to be proud of, is it? It almost finished Julie and me, that did.’
‘Mrs Wharton said she blames herself, to some extent. Kate was an attractive girl of eighteen, in short skirts, and she should have foreseen trouble, she said.’
Rather to their surprise, he did not seize on the easy excuse, as most men would have done. ‘I should have had more sense, shouldn’t I? I should have listened when the girl said no. But like the bloody fool I am, I thought she could be persuaded. She was a prick-teaser was Kate, whether she meant to be or not. She went on the game after she’d left home, you know.’
‘We do know that, yes. But at the moment I’m more interested in the reasons she left home than what she did afterwards.’
Roy thought that was hopeful. He tried not to show it in his face. He tried to think exactly what Julie and he had agreed he should say. It wasn’t as easy as he had expected to deliver words they had carefully worked out together. Acting came into it, and he had never tried to act. ‘I’m sure there were other reasons, besides me,’ he suggested.
That was too weak, not the line they had agreed at all. He had lost his way already.
As if he divined that, Lambert said, Tut your assault was the main reason, it seems.’
‘I suppose so.’ It was all going wrong. The truth seemed to be coming out, because he found he couldn’t just parrot out the phrases Julie had prepared for him.
‘It was more than just a pass at a pretty girl, wasn’t it, Mr Cook?’
It was the very phrase Julie had told him to use, to make light of the incident. Yet he found he couldn’t bring himself to insist upon it, now. It was a phrase he had never used in his life, and he was sure that these watchful, experienced men would know that, would be amused by his clumsy attempts at deceit, if he came out with it here. He said lamely, ‘No. It was nothing much, really.’
‘It was more than nothing much, wasn’t it? A lot more, in fact.’
‘All right!’ The big fists clenched and unclenched in his anger, and this time he did make himself use one of the phrases they had agreed upon. ‘I misread the signals, that was all. Went a bit further than I should have done.’
‘Just the same as you did with Janice Brown in South London?’
He started forward on his upright chair as though he would hit his questioner, but Lambert did not move. Cook sank back again, looked at the carpet and muttered, ‘Trust the bloody pigs to bring that up. I was never bloody charged with that, you know.’
‘We do know, yes. We also know why. It was because the woman you raped lost her nerve and wouldn’t go into court to testify. Was that what happened with Kate Wharton, Mr Cook? Did she lose her nerve and—’
‘I didn’t rape Kate!’ He shouted the denial, his careful phrases flying out of his brain, his only aim to stop this man spewing his accusations. ‘I was nowhere near raping Kate!’
‘Interrupted, were you, Mr Cook? The girl’s mother came in before it could get any worse, did she?’
It was pure conjecture, but it struck home. It seemed to Roy Cook that Julie must have revealed more than she said she had, perhaps more than she believed she had, to these persistent, watchful men who were so much better with words than he was. He said, ‘It was a bit like that, I suppose. Julie came in when I — when we — were just—’
‘Kate’s mother came in just in time to stop you, didn’t she? When the girl was resisting, screaming probably, and you weren’t prepared to take no for an answer.’
‘Something like that.’ He felt relief rather than dismay that it was out at last, that he no longer had to play these word games he could not manage. He wondered if they would demand every sordid detail of a scene still vivid in his mind after this forced recollection.
But Lambert was satisfied with the admission. What Cook did not know was that this was primarily a softening-up process for what was to follow. ‘With your record, with time inside for assault upon a woman, I think you were very lucky to be interrupted when you were. You were also extraordinarily fortunate that Kate Wharton decided not to press charges of indecent assault at least.’
‘All right, all right! You’ve had what you want. There’s no need to rub my nose in it! It cost me enough at the time.’ Roy Cook was suddenly aware of what he had given away, of how far he had strayed from Julie’s careful briefing.
It was Bert Hook, looking up from his notebook, who said, as if merely seeking confirmation for the record, ‘So Kate Wharton left home as a result of this incident. And Julie Wharton threw you out of her house.’
It was so far from what he and Julie had agreed that he was reluctant to confirm it. But that secret had disappeared with the rest when he was unable to mouth the phrases they had agreed. He muttered, ‘Something like that, yes.’
‘I see.’ Hook made a careful note in his round hand, whilst the silence built in the small, sparsely furnished room. ‘And when did you next see Kate Wharton, Mr Cook?’
The bombshell was dropped so quietly that Roy Cook did not hear it for what it was at first. Before he realized that he was committing himself, he said gruffly, ‘That wasn’t for some time. Not until I’d got back with Julie. Not until I’d been back with Julie for over a year.’
His last statements were a desperate attempt to direct the exchanges back to safe ground, back to his relationship with Julie Wharton and away from her dead daughter.
But it was too late. Lambert came back in, taking up the thread of the dialogue from the sergeant, who looked so harmless, who had just trapped Roy Cook into the most damaging admissio
n he could have made. ‘So how long after your assault upon Kate Wharton did you renew acquaintance with her?’
Roy hated that last phrase, hated being patronized by these men. But he was not stupid, despite his performance today. He realized now that if he tried to bandy words with this man he would come off worse, that his best policy was to say as little as possible. Whether they had known about his dealings with Kate Wharton before they came here was beside the point — they knew now, because of his own crassness. Therefore limit the damage: pretend to be honest, but give them as little as you can.
‘Probably eighteen months after she’d left home. Maybe as long as two years. I can’t be sure. I’d been back with Julie for well over a year, but I kept this place on. I stay the night often enough there, but—’
‘And why did you visit Kate?’
He was back on dangerous ground. But at least he wasn’t inhibited by those prearranged phrases, those notions framed in words he would never have used himself. He said cautiously, ‘She was on the game by then. I’d heard about it. Seen her myself, one night. We had unfinished business.’ That was the phrase Kate had used herself, the first time he had picked her up. He didn’t realize how chilling it seemed now, coming from his uncertain lips in this quiet room.
‘You visited Kate and paid her for sex?’
‘Yes.’ He’d assumed they’d known that. Now he wasn’t sure that he needed to have given the information away so easily.
‘And Kate Wharton didn’t object to that?’
From a man who’s almost raped her, they meant. And there had been a bit of difficulty, the first time, until he’d convinced her a tart had to take everyone’s money, without picking and choosing. ‘No. She was a tart, wasn’t she?’
‘Apparently she was, yes. So she took your money like everyone else’s. How often?’
‘Not that often. Half a dozen times, perhaps, over the last couple of years.’
‘And what does her mother think about these visits?’
Death on the Eleventh Hole Page 14