‘No. She lives out the other side of town. No reason she’d have seen anything of it, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
He seemed protective whenever Lynne Fairfax was mentioned. I shook my head. ‘Just a thought, hoping you’d got a witness.’
‘Oh, we had one of those, all right. An anonymous one. We got a phone call at the station, timed at eleven-three. A car’d gone off the road and set on fire. That’s all. The caller hung up. A man, the duty constable thought, though the voice was high and a bit hysterical. I wasn’t on duty, but they called me out, but it was all over when I got there. They’d put out the fire, but really it’d burnt itself out when the fire tender got there.’
He took a draught of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘The car was lying on its back,’ he said unemotionally. ‘It was down on the new road, a hundred yards past the lights. You could see where he’d gone through the cones — the chains weren’t there then. The skid marks were obvious. He’d been doing fine. For some reason he braked hard, and went over the edge. The car hit on its side and turned over twice before it stopped moving. Oh, I checked every mark in the morning, measurements, the lot. I think he must’ve been dead when the fire started. That’s what I tell myself. But the pathologist’s report mentioned scorch marks in the throat and smoke in the lungs. That didn’t come out at the inquest, Mr Kyle. Nobody thought that was necessary. You get my point? Maybe he’d run a red, and somebody was driving towards him. Our anonymous caller, perhaps. Does it matter? It was still a driving accident, and I can’t imagine anybody being able to force him off the road from behind, because it’s only single-lane. An accident, and I wish to Christ you’d persuade her so, then we can send her home.’
I mulled it over. ‘Her father got home that Friday evening. He was upset. He barely settled in before taking out a car he’d not driven before and driving it towards the town at a dangerous speed. It doesn’t hang together. There’s something we don’t know. D’you think I ought to try to dig it out, Sergeant?’ I asked. ‘Does that sound like a good idea to you?’
‘We closed it down.’
‘That wasn’t what I said. I’m wondering why you didn’t dig deeper.’
‘Are you, Mr Kyle?’ he asked blandly. ‘Perhaps I didn’t want to see any deeper. D’you know what? It occurred to me that Angie doesn’t want to, either.’
‘It sounded to me as though she did.’
‘Like that awful fascination some people get on the top of cliffs. They’re terrified they might go over, but they can’t keep away from the edge. Try to help ’em, and it could be just that extra touch that’ll have ’em over.’
‘She’s afraid,’ I agreed. ‘Of something.’
We both brooded quietly for a few moments. I was pleased to have met another brooder. At last I said: ‘It’s her horse, you know, not borrowed. The gelding. She bought it.’
‘Perhaps she’ll take him home when she leaves.’
‘They’re in a flat.’
He laughed, thumped his knuckles on the table and laughed, and perhaps he saw it as amusing.
‘You know what I think?’ I asked. ‘She believes her father did it on purpose, deliberately drove off that road. She doesn’t know why, but she feels she ought to know. But she’s terrified of finding out. Do you think I ought to satisfy her?’
For a moment he was angry. I could see it in the sudden whitening of his knuckles. ‘I don’t like your imagination,’ he growled. ‘I’m not sure I ought to encourage it.’
‘Risk it. Go on.’
I didn’t really need his co-operation. There’s no law that says you can’t go round asking questions, only that you can’t demand answers. But it’s as well to keep on the right side of the police, especially in a strange town. This town was as close to being Welsh as I’d wish to get, which could make it very strange indeed.
He grimaced. ‘Don’t expect me to hold your hand. What had you got in mind?’
‘There’ve been names mentioned. A brother called Paul. I’d like to meet him. A cousin of Angie’s — Neville something. This secretary woman — Lynne. I’d like to speak to them all. Addresses, perhaps, from you, that’s what I’d ask. Maybe a hint of official backing. I’ll keep it all low-key. That much I promise.’
How easy it is to make promises. You can tell the farmer it’s only a little fire you want to light in the corner of his wheat field, but then the wind changes.
Sergeant Timmis straightened his shoulders and half reached up with his right hand, as though forgetting he wasn’t wearing his peaked cap. He thrust back his chair.
‘Reckon I could show you one of them, right now. Neville Green’s in for drunk and disorderly again. We’re drying him out.’
‘I’d prefer him when he’s sober.’
‘Then you’d have to get him early in the morning. Drink up. It’s only round the corner.’
I could hardly refuse. I got to my feet. He lifted a vast, belted raincoat from the stand in the corner. I finished my drink while he said goodnight to his mates. They eyed me with quiet concern, convinced he was taking me in.
‘Thought a lot of his uncle, did Neville,’ he said, holding the door for me.
‘There’s not much point in talking to him if he’s drunk,’ I told him quietly, beginning to feel he was using this as a form of obstruction.
‘It isn’t him I want you to meet. But Lynne Fairfax should be around by now. She always comes for him and takes him home. She’s his fiancée, or something. Not actually living together, but either address can find both of them.’
The rain had stopped altogether, but the cobbles were still glistening under the streetlamps. Across the square a single-decker red bus was waiting, and farther up the bingo hall was just coming out, timing it for the bus I suppose. A group of youths came bursting out from one of the discos and ran yelling past us. Sergeant Timmis did not react. The square echoed to their feet.
‘It’s round the corner,’ he said.
The station was about the size to be run by an inspector, with possibly three sergeants and a dozen constables and back-up from HQ who’d supply any CID support as required. They’d possibly boast a single cell, more likely a room with one small window and one thick door. It had a lamp over the steps up to the front door, with a blue and white illuminated sign over it, and a grey Ford Fiesta parked outside.
A squat, vigorous woman was trying to lever a tall, angular man into the passenger’s seat.
‘Try!’ she howled at him. ‘Bend your stupid head, you drunken swine.’
‘Ah!’ said the sergeant. ‘You’re in luck. Both of them. This is Lynne Fairfax and Neville Green.’
‘Don’t stand there,’ she said to me. ‘Help me, can’t you!’
I thought she was talking to Timmis, but when I looked round he’d disappeared into his station.
So I helped her.
Chapter Four
He would have been around thirty, I thought, though he was not at that time in full control of his features. He had a decent thatch of hair and a fluffy moustache that looked as though it was stuck on, and great, long and floppy limbs that took a good deal of folding into the car. Truth to tell, Lynne did more of the work than I did. Perhaps she had the practice.
‘Do this often, do you?’ I asked.
‘Enough. Push that knee in and I’ll shut the door.’
‘What about the seat belt?’
She shouted in his left ear. ‘Can you fasten your belt?’
He fumbled around with it. He was at that stage of drunkenness when all was placid agreement and a fond attempt towards self-help. He played with the belt and finally got it to click, then he looked up at me and asked:
‘Didn’ think I’d make it, did y’?’
She slammed the door on him, and he grimaced at me in apology through the glass. Then she turned to me, solid legs planted apart and her square, strangely attractive face cocked, a knitted hat on one side of her head with hair flopping around above the other ear.
‘Well!’ she declared. ‘I swear I’ll kill him, one of these days.’
‘I was trusting the sergeant to introduce us,’ I said. ‘My name’s Kyle. I wanted a few words with you.’
She grimaced. It was a wide, straight mouth. She flapped her hands against her firm hips in their tight jeans. ‘Hardly the time, is it?’
‘About your ex-employer, Mr Griffiths.’
She stared up at me. The light was bad out there. I thought something crossed behind her eyes, but she shook her head, then looked away.
‘There’s nothing I want to say.’
‘I know it’s not convenient.’ I was about to say I’d see her another time, but she became immediately practical, and yanked open the car door again.
‘Where did you leave the car?’ she asked Neville.
He’d been asleep. She shook him awake and repeated it. He mumbled something. She demanded the keys, and patiently, slowly, he searched his pockets until he found them.
She banged them into my palm. ‘Make yourself useful. It’s a Metro, outside the Gun. Drive it round here, and then follow me. Huh? Then he’ll have it in the morning.’
‘’Sa dark blue one,’ he mumbled.
I needed directions to the Gun, which was down a side street two up on the right. I set off. ‘Don’t go away,’ I called, and she shouted after me: ‘Oh...funny!’
The Metro wasn’t exactly where she’d said. Not outside, but round the back, where the light was no more than a naked bulb over the outside gents’. There were three Metros, and the key opened two of them. It took all my detective abilities, as both were new enough to be bare of personality. As I was deciding that the one smelling of scent was probably not his, a woman said from behind me: ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’ I withdrew my head, dangled the keys, said sorry I’d got the wrong Metro, and drove away in the blue one. She shouted after me that I must be effinblind, and I had to agree. As the headlights ran across her car, I saw it was red. Some detective!
Lynne watched me coming, and was moving away before I’d started the necessary U-turn to get behind her. Timmis appeared in time to wave from the steps. I found that Neville had got the seat right back, so it just suited me, though I kept changing up too early until I got used to the high-revving engine.
She took me out of town in the generally west direction of wild Wales. We left the street lighting behind and traversed the side of a hill, then abruptly turned between two hefty beech trees, emerging beyond them onto a sweep of gravel in front of a two-storey arc of modern flats.
They were so modern that they were not really finished. I could just make out the run of foundations to one side where the garages would eventually be. The balconies at one end of the sweep of flats were not yet fixed.
They’d landscaped it to hide it in the trees.
From the road below there’d be nothing but a wooded hillside. She drew up, me neatly behind her. A bluish light over the entrance showed me that her hair was blonde and untidy, most of the rest of her matching. She was round at my window before I’d got the handbrake on and opened the door for me.
‘This is the difficult bit,’ she said. ‘He’s up on the second floor.’
Quite frankly, I’d rather have done it all myself. But she insisted on taking most of him, leaving me with the odd arm and shoulder, and her encouragement to him alternated wildly from: ‘careful there, lovey,’ to: ‘watch out, you great lump!’ at a full scream. I couldn’t make out whether she regarded him with fond affection or abject disgust. His door key was on the same ring, so I let us in.
The entrance lobby, the double marbled staircase and the absence of graffiti had given me a clue what to expect. The flat was modern and clean and indicated an unexciting personality. He had the right choice of G-plan in the approved arrangement, scatter cushions neatly tossed around and carefully selected to clash with the scatter rugs, and all the necessities of life as seen through the eyes of the young man about town who is no longer so very young, and whose town is somewhat small. Playboys were tossed onto low surfaces, record albums thrown on top of them. The hi-fi was higher than last year’s and the colour TV located as far as possible from the remote control to prove how well it worked. All that, and a row of bottles on a pale and angled sideboard. Seemed a pity he troubled to go out to get drunk, but I supposed he’d have to be one of the boys, and be encouraged to it.
She noticed my wince at the colour scheme. ‘I’ve been trying to brighten him up,’ she explained.
‘What’s he think about it?’
She laughed. ‘Said I was making his life a misery.’
We laid him out on a low divan. He groaned, then mumbled himself to sleep again. Lynne blew out her breath, fluttering her lips, then drew off the woolly hat and tossed her hair free with an angry shake of her head.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You’ve been a great help. I can handle him now.’
‘I’m free to leave?’
She stared at me. Her eyes had gone vague, opaque with worry. Pleasant, warm hazel eyes they were. I waited for it to register. We were a good mile out of town. Her eyes cleared.
‘Oh Lor’,’ she cried. ‘Aren’t I the biggest idiot!’ Then she laughed, a little tinkle of cool amusement.
‘My car’s parked in the square, and I did want to talk to you, anyway. About Gledwyn Griffiths.’
She turned away from me quickly, but not before I caught the distress in her eyes. ‘Not now.’
‘But when?’
‘I don’t know who you are and what you want.’ Then her eyes were large, and considering me innocently. ‘Are you another policeman?’
‘I’m just a friend of Angela. She’s not happy with...things.’
‘Oh...that!’ she said in disgust. ‘I’m simply fed up with hearing about it.’
Keep your eyes on them every second and they become uneasy. I took a tour of the living room. Perhaps he’d call it his lounge. He’d got a hairy bit of Welsh tweed hanging on the wall.
‘Nice place,’ I commented.
‘He works for the council.’ But she was speaking absently, impatient to hear my true business.
‘It’s a council flat?’
‘Oh no. He’s a land surveyor. Good money. Good flat.’
Did I detect a note of envy in her voice? She wouldn’t have earned much with Gledwyn Griffiths, and would now be without a job. But from what Sergeant Timmis had told me, she could probably have moved into this flat at any time.
‘What are you fed up with hearing about?’ I asked.
‘That Angie!’
‘Yes?’
‘He’s dead,’ she said fiercely, a catch in her voice. ‘A fine man, and he’s dead. And no amount of talking’s going to bring him back.’
‘Then you’re happy about the way he died?’ I examined a record sleeve.
‘Happy?’ she snapped.
‘You find it acceptable, then?’
‘He was upset, that night. Strange. I don’t know why he took the Escort out. I can’t understand it. But he did.’
‘You wouldn’t have expected him to?’
‘Never. He didn’t drive. Or why would I have had to fetch him from Blackpool?’
‘Had to? Was it an order?’
She was becoming angry, with the anger of distress. ‘No, damn it. He was due back on the Saturday. We’d arranged that — for me to fetch him then. I’d got something else on, that Friday.’
‘A date?’
‘If you like.’ She threw it at me, and walked away.
‘A date with sleeping beauty, here?’
‘Yes. No. What’s it matter? Gledwyn had given me a holiday. A week. I’ve got my own life. He phoned on the Friday morning. Just like that. I want to come home. Fetch me.’
‘Phoned you at the lab, up at Viewlands?’
‘At my place. I wasn’t at the lab. I told you, I was on holiday.’ She gestured angrily. ‘I’d better get Neville to bed. I’m not going to talk about it anymore.’
‘He’s quite happy there,’ I said, considering Neville’s lax and placid face. ‘And I’m here until you decide to drive me back. You don’t have to answer any of my questions...’
‘Then don’t ask them.’
‘You were annoyed with this fine and wonderful employer. Won’t you tell me why?’
‘At his beck and call...’
‘I’ll bet you loved it. Tell the truth, now.’
She growled in her throat, moved restlessly, and clamped her square jaw so that her mouth was a thin, straight line. ‘It wasn’t part of the job, driving him around, but I didn’t mind. Take him to Blackpool — we’d agreed to that — and fetch him back the next Saturday. Right enough. There on Sunday, back on Saturday.’
‘But he decided to come back on the Friday,’ I murmured. ‘Not Saturday.’
‘I’m telling you about the previous Sunday,’ she said firmly, nodding fiercely. ‘Part of my holiday, I reckoned it. Right?’ I nodded, a little amused at her emphasis. ‘So he’d no cause to snap at me, no cause to sulk all the way to Blackpool. If something had upset him, he could’ve told me. To me, he could’ve said it. He always did.’
I was filling my pipe. The carriage clock on the narrow mantel indicated it was nearly ten. ‘Always sulked at you?’ I asked with interest.
‘No...silly!’ She almost stamped, her sturdy body taut with impatience. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed it — would I? But on the trip to Blackpool he barely said a pleasant word. No word of thanks for the typing I’d re-done for him the night before. Stayed late for it, too. Not a thought for me! He never asked why I could hardly drive for the tears. Never even noticed I was upset myself. I shouldn’t have driven at all, that day. I knew that. But it was a Sunday, so the roads weren’t too bad. A good thing. But he never noticed.’ Then her voice softened. ‘Any other time...Oh — what’s the use!’
I had her going. It wasn’t a pleasant sight, but you have to seize the time and place because they never appear again together.
‘And why were you in tears?’ I asked softly.
‘My friend had died the night before. You know that. You know it. You’re just teasing me.’
Seeing Red Page 4