Death on the Eleventh Hole

by Gregson, J. M.

  Lambert knew the way Bert’s mind worked. He didn’t want to face the fact that Joe Ashton was their likeliest suspect, wished more than anything that this death might be the result of an order from a drugs baron, even if that meant they might never secure an arrest. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said sharply. ‘But we don’t know how much Kate Wharton knew about the organization. She might have found out more about the men higher up the ranks than was good for her. Prostitutes have all sorts of clients; a lot of them know more about what’s going on in some parts of the criminal world than coppers.’

  The three men stared glumly at the computers and the phones and the accumulated detritus of the investigation, contemplating that old, obvious frustration: in a murder investigation, you could never question the central figure, the victim, to find out exactly what she had and had not known.

  The thought reminded Lambert of another fact they would never be able to query with the dead girl. ‘Any further information come in on that extra thousand pounds in Kate Wharton’s bank account?’

  Rushton shook his head. ‘Highly unlikely that she just had a good week on the game. Her takings from working the streets were paid in regularly and were always about the same amount. There’s no evidence of a sugar daddy and Joe Ashton claims to know nothing about it. Certainly he wouldn’t have had the funds to provide her with a thousand pounds unless he’d been nicking property or dealing drugs, and there’s no evidence that he did either. He was keeping his nose clean, working at Sainsbury’s, and insists that he was only upset that he couldn’t get Kate Wharton to go away with him.’

  ‘Could it have been an extra payment for her drugs dealing?’ said Hook.

  ‘That’s always possible, but it seems unlikely, since she was planning to give up pushing altogether, and did so less than a month later. Blackmail of some kind is the likeliest explanation. Toms are always in a position to bring pressure to bear on clients, but it’s a dangerous game.’

  As it may well have proved in this case. Lambert pursued this: ‘Two of our suspects, at least, are candidates. Roy Cook wouldn’t have wanted her to tell her mother that he’d been seeing her. It might even have seemed something like justice for the girl, after he’d attempted to rape her in her mother’s house.’

  ‘And Richard Ellacott,’ said Hook grimly. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted his invalid wife to find out he had a regular arrangement with a prostitute. Still less his cronies at the golf club, if you ask me.’

  ‘But we can’t pin that payment down,’ Rushton pointed out. ‘It could still be from her drug supplier, an advance payment for services which she failed to deliver, and paid the ultimate price. They don’t hold back when anyone attempts to double-cross them, those people.’

  ‘Time for coffee,’ said Lambert abruptly, and led the way across the car park and into the clubhouse.

  The steward served them assiduously in the deserted lounge. The murder on the Ross course had already given him a certain standing, and he was anxious to keep himself up to date with the case, knowing that a succession of members would be anxious for the latest news as they came to the bar during the day. He came back into the room when they had almost finished their coffee. ‘Made an arrest yet, Mr Lambert?’ he said as he set a fresh coffee-jug before them.

  ‘Our enquiries are proceeding satisfactorily. We expect developments before too long,’ intoned Lambert magisterially.

  His two companions grinned, but the steward seemed unaware of any irony in the delivery of these professional clichés. He grinned confidentially. ‘Put the wind up a few of our golfers, I can tell you, when they found they were being questioned about their whereabouts on that night!’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Lambert sourly. ‘Just the routine of a murder investigation. They weren’t the only ones.’ He wished the man would go away and leave them in peace with the second coffee-jug.

  But the steward lingered. ‘No, I heard you were questioning people at all the golf clubs in the area. Even gave Mr Ellacott from Oldford Golf Club a grilling, I hear.’ The steward grinned happily at this evidence of the golfing grapevine among golf club employees.

  Lambert glanced up at him sharply from his armchair. ‘He thought he could save us a bit of time by giving us his thoughts about his members. Mr Ellacott’s the Captain at Oldford this year.’

  The steward smirked, anxious to show how much he was in touch with golf club affairs. ‘Yes, I know. Nice chap, Mr Ellacott. He made a good speech when he was up here with their C team a couple of weeks ago. Very complimentary about the meal we served, he was.’

  ‘I’m sure he was, George. But at the moment—’

  Rushton’s mobile phone shrilled suddenly in his pocket, and he took it away to the far corner of the big lounge, speaking animatedly into the mouthpiece while the steward and his two colleagues watched him and speculated. The Detective Inspector’s urgent look as he switched off the phone brought his two colleagues swiftly out of the clubhouse with him, leaving the disappointed George to clear away the coffee cups.

  ‘That was the Drugs Squad Superintendent. One of his undercover men has just reported in. Minton was seen in Ross-on-Wye on the Sunday when Kate Wharton was killed.’

  The name rang like an alarm-bell in their ears. Derek Minton was a contract killer. The one usually used by Keith Sugden’s drugs syndicate.

  ***

  John Lambert found the bungalow empty when he popped home for lunch. He had forgotten that Christine was working again, that this was one of the days when she lunched at the school where she taught for half of the week. It seemed to emphasize the bleakness of his own impending retirement, that event he was still refusing to think about as he wrestled with the complexities of the Kate Wharton murder.

  He made himself a cheese sandwich and sat staring unseeingly at a lunch-time financial programme on BBC 2 that he had never seen before. An item on pensions said that with life expectancy continually increasing, people should plan in the expectation of living well into their eighties. It did not seem at that moment a pleasant prospect.

  He wandered into the garden with a mug of tea in his hand. The roses were coming on well, with new growth evident even since yesterday; the climbing rose ‘Breath of Life’, enjoying the warmth of the south-west facing brick wall, was already full of buds. Its name danced in front of him on its plastic tag like a taunt from nature. The peonies held fat buds above their crimson spring foliage, waiting to burst into luxuriant flower. The grass was growing extravagantly after steady rain through the night, needing another cut scarcely three days after its last one. In the wood beyond the garden, beeches were parading the impossibly fresh green of their new leaves. All around him was new, abundant life.

  He wandered through his own neat patch of this idyllic scene, forcing himself to rejoice conventionally in the abundance of growth around him, in the magical renewal of the season. He set down his mug for a moment, removed a couple of weeds from beneath the roses, wrenched the first young convolvulus from its attempt to twine itself round the pyracantha. When he picked up his mug of hot tea, it left a circle of yellowed grass which it had burnt upon the lawn.

  He stared at it for a moment, almost glad of this tiny patch of death amongst the profusion of growth. That small round of grass was dead. The healthy grass around it would expand and cover the gap, but it would take time. About three months: the time until his retirement.

  He had forgotten the television. There was an old black and white film on now, with Robert Mitchum. It had never been very good, even forty years ago, when it had been as new as the growth beyond the wide window of the sitting room. Was this how the retired spent their days, regurgitating experiences which had been second-class when they were young, gilding the mediocre with the nostalgia of recollection?

  He switched the television set off with a violence he could never recall before.

  There would be better things to watch, he told himself unconvincingly. He would enjoy the cricket and the golf he had never had the time to watch
before. Meanwhile, he still had three months of useful life left, and there was a murderer at large somewhere, a murderer it was his duty to trap. He scribbled a message for Christine, informing her that he would very likely be late home, that the investigation was developing, so that he couldn’t say with any certainty when he would return.

  There was no need for it. His wife had grown used over thirty years and more to the exigencies of his job. But writing the message seemed a defiant gesture, an assertion that he still had work to do. As he finished it, his phone rang to confirm just that.

  Rushton could not keep the excitement out of his voice. ‘They’ve spotted Minton in Edgbaston.’ Contract killing was a lucrative occupation, enabling its practitioner to live in an ivy-walled house in a quiet close of one of the country’s plushest suburbs. ‘They want to know what action they should take.’

  John Lambert hesitated for no more than a second. ‘Tell them to pull him in. I’ll be up there within ninety minutes to interview him myself.’

  Eighteen

  Joe Ashton was relieved when his van was returned to him by the police. The uniformed officers made no comment when he collected it, but the CID men seemed to have accepted his story that he had always kept the interior of the vehicle very clean. At any rate, they hadn’t come back to him with more questions about it.

  The store had had deliveries of tinned foods and of Sainsbury’s own labels on that Tuesday morning, and Joe was kept busy replenishing the shelves of the supermarket and making a series of journeys to the storerooms at the rear of the building. The trouble with this job, he decided, was that it left you too much time to think. The physical labour was steady and demanding, but once you had mastered the limited information about what went where and in what quantities, there were few demands on the brain.

  And Joe’s brain needed to be fully stretched. When it wasn’t, it kept coming back to Kate. He was coming to terms with her death now, though he grieved for her with a painful, grinding sorrow in the early part of the day, when the low sun stole unbidden through the uncurtained windows of the squat and reawakened him each morning to the realization that she was gone.

  But what he didn’t want to think about was that last, fierce argument they had endured. The pain of it did not become less sharp with the passing days. The thought of their last meeting ending like that would be with him forever, even if he was never forced to reveal the full horror of what had happened.

  The police seemed to accept his latest version of it, that he and Kate had had a furious row because she refused to come away with him and leave Gloucester and its memories behind. He hadn’t told them about the blows, about the red mist of fury she had brought to him when she had told him she must go on extracting money from men. They mustn’t ever know about the violence of those final minutes.

  Joe Ashton went on methodically replacing the tins of baked beans.

  ***

  Derek Minton did not look like a professional killer. It was true that he was wiry and thin-faced, with cold blue eyes and the mean mouth and thin lips one might have expected in a man who dealt in passionless violence. But he was also well dressed, in a grey suit more expensive than the one Lambert wore, with a discreet maroon silk tie laced with silver motifs and elegant slip-on Barker shoes. He had neatly styled brown hair and hands which were clean and strong-fingered enough to have been a pianist’s. His nails were spotless, and the watch upon his wrist was probably a Rolex.

  He put away his book unhurriedly as Lambert came into the interview room and sat down opposite him. The two studied each other wordlessly for three or four seconds, which seemed to the young PC who had come into the room with Lambert to stretch much longer.

  Then Minton said calmly, ‘I could have you for wrongful arrest, you know, if I chose.’

  ‘But you won’t. Your sort doesn’t want publicity. You won’t go into a court until we eventually put you into the dock.’

  ‘Which will be never. Because I’m an innocent citizen.’

  Lambert smiled his contempt for that thought. ‘Do you want a lawyer?’

  ‘Are you charging me with anything?’

  ‘That remains to be seen. At this point, no.’

  ‘Then I don’t want a lawyer. I don’t want anything which will enable you to prolong this farce for longer than is necessary.’

  ‘You’re a killer, Minton. It’s how you make a living.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  Lambert thought of mentioning two killings in Birmingham’s gangland that they were certain Minton had committed. But they hadn’t been able to prove it, hadn’t been able to provide the witnesses to go into court and put this suave and confident man away for life. So he said instead, ‘You were seen in Ross-on-Wye on Sunday the sixth of May.’

  ‘Nice part of the country. Nice time of the year. Enjoyed the trip.’

  ‘On that day, a twenty-two-year-old girl named Kate Wharton was strangled.’

  ‘Pity. The world needs more twenty-two-year-old girls.’

  ‘This one was a hard-drugs pusher. She worked for an organization which regularly makes use of your services. Six days earlier, she had told her supplier that she intended to give up pushing.’

  ‘Naughty little tart, wasn’t she? Some people would say she had it coming to her. Not me, of course.’

  ‘How did you know she was on the game?’

  For a moment, he looked disconcerted by this minor mistake. In the trade of killing, you planned carefully and didn’t even allow yourself minor mistakes. Then he smiled. ‘I did not mean the word literally when I spoke, Superintendent. If you’re now telling me that the girl was indeed on the game, that is no more than a happy semantic coincidence. Interesting things, semantics.’

  ‘Why were you in Ross nine days ago?’

  ‘I’m not sure I have to tell you that. But as I always like to co-operate with the police, let’s say I was visiting friends.’

  ‘And it’s just a coincidence that Kate Wharton was killed that night.’

  ‘Exactly. A most unhappy one. A more vindictive man than me might say she had it coming to her, being a prostitute and dealing in drugs. Such a person might even say that the world was well rid of such an occupant. But I don’t care to strike moral attitudes.’

  ‘Of course you don’t.’ Lambert leaned forward towards the calm face with the sardonic smile. ‘You were there to kill the girl, Minton. That was no pleasure trip.’

  Derek Minton didn’t even trouble to deny it. He merely shrugged his elegant shoulders beneath the expensive worsted. He didn’t need to defend himself. They’d nothing to go on. He’d been pulled in for questioning often enough before, had been much nearer to a murder charge than this. Did they expect him to be frightened like some kid who’d pinched a wallet?

  Minton pulled out a slim gold cigarette case, flicked it open, offered it across the desk to his would-be inquisitor. Lambert waved it away and said, ‘No smoking in here.’

  Minton raised an eyebrow, then snapped the gold case shut and put it away with a smile. The incident had ruffled the questioner more than the questioned: he was glad he had conducted this little charade from a previous era. ‘How did this girl die?’ he asked casually.

  ‘You know that. She was garrotted with a cord. Taken from behind and killed within seconds.’

  ‘Efficient, then. But not a method I would have chosen.’

  That was true enough; it had worried Lambert on the journey up the MS. The killings they knew Minton had committed but could not pin on him were all with the bullet, swift and effective, usually through the head from point-blank range. ‘You agree you have a method, then?’

  Minton wasn’t ruffled. ‘Not at all. I merely quote the method I was supposed to have used when you concocted your previous fictions.’

  ‘A professional like you is adaptable. The cord was the right method for this situation. When you pick up a torn on the streets and she slides willingly into your car, you don’t want anything as noisy as a bullet.’
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br />   Minton studied the long, lined face and the intense grey eyes for a moment. This was so near to what he had planned that he did not want to give anything away. He said slowly, without dropping his eyes from Lambert’s, ‘I bow to your superior knowledge, Superintendent.’

  ‘Who called you down there to kill the girl, Minton?’

  Derek Minton smiled. For a moment, he said nothing: he was enjoying this, but he knew that it was a dangerous enjoyment. Pleasure could catch you off your guard more easily than any other feeling. He had killed nine people now, with an increasing price for each death as his reputation for anonymous efficiency grew. In his judgement, he had come quite near to being charged on two occasions. The police had probably thought there were the makings of a case each time, but the Crown Prosecution Service had been afraid to take it on: good old CPS, scourge of petty criminals and friend of the big boys!

  The fuzz weren’t going to get him on this one, weren’t going to come anywhere near to a charge. He knew that, and they must know it as well, by now. He repeated with a bland smile, ‘I was visiting friends. Nice river, the Wye.’

  Lambert forced himself into an answering smile. He wouldn’t let the man see the frustration and revulsion which boiled within him. He pushed back his seat and stood up. ‘If you did it, we’ll be back for you. You’re living on borrowed time, Mr Minton.’

  Derek Minton raised an imaginary glass to him as he left.

  Lambert gave curt orders for Minton’s release to the custody sergeant. He hadn’t expected anything from the interview. He told himself that as he drove more slowly back down the M5, attempting to calm himself. He had known he had nothing beyond a sighting in Ross on the sixth of May to throw at Minton, had known that someone as experienced as this would not be intimidated, would offer him nothing in the way of emotional weakness. But he had hoped with his experience to be able to size up whether the man had done the killing, irrespective of whether they could bring him to book for it.