[Lambert and Hook 22] - Darkness Visible

by J M Gregson

  Their unsuspecting quarry’s voice sounded extra loud through the darkness. No doubt it was made louder by his cheerful inebriation. ‘I’ll see you on Wednesday, Denis, all being well!’ he called back to some invisible companion, as the exit door swung shut behind him. He settled himself comfortably into his voluminous sweater, feeling his head swim a little and his knees unsteady for a moment as the fresh air hit him after the warmth of the crowded room he had left. Then he smiled to himself, ducked his head a little, and moved through the car park and into the narrow street behind it.

  The two men with baseball bats knew he had not got the money. Perhaps, indeed, keyed up as they were for violence, they would have been disappointed if he had. But they went through the motions of challenge, playing out the prelude to the sordid little drama in which they were acting. ‘Last chance to pay. Barker. You owe five hundred. You’ve had your warning.’

  James Barker’s senses cleared miraculously as fear surged through his veins. ‘I haven’t got it. I told him, I’ll pay next week. By the end of the month at the very latest!’

  ‘You’ve had your warnings. Last night was the deadline. He told you that.’

  ‘I need a little more time, that’s all. Only a little. Business is picking up and—’

  They hit him then, as they had always known they were going to do. Hit him systematically, unemotionally, with brutal efficiency. He fell quickly and went into the foetal crouch with which they were familiar. They beat him about his back, his thighs, his calves and his buttocks, resisting the impulse to kick the defenceless heap beneath them, knowing that blows from the sticks were more anonymous.

  The men were practised and experienced and their work took no more than forty seconds in all. Then they were back in their car and away, leaving their victim moaning quietly behind them.

  It was at the end of the street that things went wrong for them. The police car pulled across their path as they accelerated, forcing them to halt. The four coppers were out of the car before they had left theirs, pinning them against the doors with their arms across the roof, yelling the words of arrest as they slipped the handcuffs around the men’s thick wrists.

  The two men were in the police cells within fifteen minutes.

  Twenty-Two

  On Sunday mornings, the Reverend Peter Lynch often had the equivalent of stage fright. His sermon was prepared, he knew exactly how he wanted the service to proceed. He had even planned what to say to one or two members of the congregation individually when they were leaving the church at the end of the service. Once the main business of this sunlit summer morning was under way, he would be calm and confident. But in the time before that, he was trying to feel properly appreciative of his cereals and toast.

  Then he looked at the white, strained face of his wife and felt guilty about his own preoccupations. Karen hadn’t been her normal cheerful self in the last week; it seemed that the death of this man Chivers had brought her past back vividly before her and affected the zest she usually brought to her life. ‘Things are looking up financially,’ Peter said with sudden determination.

  ‘Is your stipend going to be increased?’

  ‘I live in hope. The bishop was most encouraging about the work we’re doing here when I saw him last week.’

  ‘The work you are doing here, you mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t. We’re a partnership. You’ve got strengths that I will never have. Everyone appreciates the way you muck in and turn your hand to everything.’ He was going to mention her sterling work at the hostel with Father Ryan, then thought better of it, sensing that anything which brought that unfortunate man Chivers back into her thinking would not be a good idea.

  He looked at her anxious, abstracted face and said on impulse, ‘It’s time we got on with this family we’re going to raise.’

  ‘We can’t afford it, not yet. I thought we’d agreed on that.’

  ‘I think we should just take the plunge and put our faith in God to look after us. You’re thirty-four and your biological clock is ticking. Partly thanks to your work, more people are coming into the church than have done for years. I’m sure we’re going to have a little more money soon.’

  ‘Perhaps we should wait and see.’

  She was listless, when he would have expected her to be delighted. He knew how much she wanted children, how she normally enjoyed discussing even the possibility of them.

  He said forcefully, ‘I think we should initiate the project right away. I think we should go for lift-off tonight.’ He came round the table and stood behind her, feeling the tenseness in her neck as his fingers massaged it gently. He let his hands run down gently over the familiar breasts. ‘Stop playing hard to get, you little minx!’

  She roused herself at last. ‘Be off with you and get on with your work, you randy vicar, you!’ She stood up and smiled at him, then began to gather the dishes together on the table. She tried not to let him see her limp. Her leg always hurt most when she was under stress.

  She was relieved when he did as he was bid and left the room to get on with his public Sunday morning duties. She would not have liked him to see the tears beginning to flow.

  The centre of Gloucester was a quiet place at this time. Michelle de Vries could not recall that she had ever been there at quarter to nine on a Sunday before. Apart from a dribble of worshippers making their way towards the cathedral, there were few people on the streets.

  The CID men came promptly, even at this time, their silhouettes outlined for a moment against the eastern sun as if they were angels of death. Michelle let them into the shop and then locked the door firmly, making sure that the ‘Closed’ sign remained clearly displayed. ‘I told my husband I was coming in for a couple of hours to do a little stocktaking,’ she explained to them, picking a thread of cotton off a dark green dress that seemed altogether too elegant for the shabby storeroom behind the shop. ‘I’d be grateful if we could preserve that fiction.’

  Lambert did not comment directly. He merely said, ‘This need not delay any of us very long, if you choose to tell us the truth.’

  ‘I have already done that. Obviously I want to help you as much as I can, but—’

  ‘You told us on Wednesday that Darren Chivers had been here a fortnight earlier and that you hadn’t see him after that. You told us first that he had demanded money with menaces, then changed your story to admit that he had come here to blackmail you. You said that he had demanded money from you to remain silent about your affair with Mr Dawson, but that fortunately for you he had been killed before he came back to collect the money from you. We now have reason to believe that, apart from your admission that you were a blackmail victim, your statement is a string of lies.’

  He was suddenly impatient with her Paris dress, her hundred-pound leather shoes, her unspoken assertion that the squalid world of murder was something beneath her comprehension. She felt in him an open hostility she had not experienced for years, and it shook her.

  She said, ‘I have a husband I love, who supports this shop and will continue to do so until it is properly established. 1 am not proud of my association with Guy Dawson, which I concluded last night. Surely you can understand that I felt the need to—’

  ‘What I understand and what you should understand, Mrs de Vries, is that this is a murder inquiry. It is no place for embarrassment, especially if that embarrassment leads you into lying to those conducting the inquiry.’

  ‘I’m sorry! I didn’t kill the wretched man!’ She found herself shouting, had to make a real effort to lower her voice. ‘You don’t see things as clearly as that, when you have your own concerns. I was anxious because I didn’t want to lose a good husband and the lifestyle I have.’

  It was Bert Hook, notebook open on the table in front of him, who at this point said quietly, ‘Perhaps you should now tell us the real truth of the matter, Mrs de Vries.’

  She looked at him for two or three seconds in silence, as if finding it difficult to refocus on this very different,
less threatening face. Then she said, in a lower voice which became almost a monotone, ‘Chivers did come back here again. A week after his first visit.’

  ‘That would be on Wednesday, July the second.’ Hook’s voice was as calm and unemotional as if he were compiling a grocery list.

  ‘Yes. He came to collect the money he had demanded. I paid him two thousand pounds. He said that would be the end of it.’

  ‘But you didn’t think that would indeed be the end of it.’

  ‘I wanted to. I suppose the victims of blackmailers always want to believe it. But no, I don’t suppose I really believed him. I feared he would be back.’

  ‘And two days later he was dead.’

  ‘So you tell me. I didn’t kill him.'

  ‘But there is no one who can vouch for your whereabouts at the time of his death.’

  ‘No. I expect many innocent people have that problem.’

  It was her first and last flash of defiance in the whole of the encounter.

  Lambert stood up and said, ‘If you can think of any means of establishing where you were on the night of Friday the fourth of July or any information which might help us with this investigation, it is your duty to contact us.’

  ‘I should obviously be delighted to do that. Chief Superintendent Lambert. Unfortunately, I don’t think it is likely.’ Michelle saw them out of the shop and shut the door behind them, moving like an automaton. Then she went back into the storeroom and sat for a long time with her head in her hands.

  The two men both had previous convictions for violence. They knew the score when they were brought up from the cells. They were going to be charged with Actual Bodily Harm at the very least. They were taken to separate interview rooms and left in isolation for ten minutes to get more nervous.

  The CID decision was to allow the more experienced officers to interview the younger of the two, purely because he had appeared the more nervous when breakfast had been delivered to the cells an hour earlier. Rushton set the cassette turning and announced that Matthew Green was about to be interviewed by DI Rushton and DS Hook, with the interview commencing at 9.48 a.m. He regarded the man with undisguised hostility for a few moments before he spoke.

  ‘You’re in trouble, Green. We shall throw the book at you, unless you choose to cooperate. GBH is on the cards. You’re going inside. The only question is for how long.’

  ‘Get lost, copper.’

  The ritual defiance, as predictable as the sun rising and setting. Rushton nodded happily. ‘That’s the attitude we’d expect. I didn’t think you’d have the sense to look out for yourself.’

  ‘ Whadyermean, look out for myself?’ A glimmer of interest flickered in the narrowed eyes, despite himself.

  ‘I should have thought even you could see that. Your only chance to get off lightly is to cooperate with us, give us a few things we might like to know. We might even be able to tell the judge you’ve been a good boy, if you have the sense to do that. But I don’t expect you will.’

  ‘I don’t shop people to pigs. Never have, never will.’

  Rushton nodded. ‘I’d expect that sort of attitude from the likes of you. Can’t say I’m sorry, really. It will be good to have you off the streets and behind bars for a good few years.’

  Green said sullenly, ‘I don’t shop people, copper. I want to help myself. I’m not stupid. But I don’t shop people.’

  Bert Hook smiled at him. ‘Bit of a contradiction there. Matt, isn’t there? You want to help yourself, but you don’t want to give us any help. Nothing is for nothing. You must have learned that by now.’

  Green peered at him suspiciously whilst the irrefutable logic of this worked its way into his mind. He said slowly, ‘I wasn’t the man who set the jobs up, you know. It was Jim who was in charge.’

  ‘And it’s Jim who’s being questioned next door at this very minute, Matt. Probably straining every nerve to put the blame on you.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t rely on it. Matt. Our experience is that when people see the chance of cutting down the years in the big house, they blame anyone and everyone except themselves.’ Hook shook his head sadly. ‘It’s understandable, I suppose. If I was facing the prospect of slopping out every morning for month after month. I’d be frantic to put the blame on someone else.’

  ‘You don’t slop out. It’s been abolished.’

  ‘Really? Well, I wouldn’t rely on that either, if I were you. Matt. Which fortunately, I’m not, of course.’ Bert shook his head in slow motion, in sad recognition of the plight of the wretched man on the other side of the small, square table. ‘Our lads are round at Frank Lee’s house this morning, talking to him. Nasty piece of work, Frank Lee. There’ll be a lot of people in the town glad to see him get his comeuppance.’ The name had been dropped in casually, as if he was merely repeating something already established between them. In fact, it was an attempt to determine the name of the man who had employed these brutes to do his dirty work on the previous evening, and it worked.

  Green nodded his head slowly. ‘No one likes a loan shark. But he pays well.’

  Chris Rushton registered no emotion as he made a careful note of this. The first witness in the court case against the slippery Frank Lee, who had caused so much misery in the town with his loans at exorbitant rates, had just been established. He said sternly, ‘You realize we can charge you with much more than this one, Green. Frank Lee isn’t the only man you’ve worked for.’

  ‘He pays best!’ A ludicrous smile flitted across the coarse features.

  ‘And he’s landed you in trouble. Matt,’ Bert Hook reminded him. ‘Big trouble, as DI Rushton told you at the beginning of this interview. But maybe not the worst. The worst charge against you may come from beating up a man who was subsequently murdered. Darren Chivers, Matt. We have to ask ourselves whether his subsequent death is also down to the two men who put him in hospital nine days earlier.’

  ‘We didn’t kill Chivers!’ The eyes which had previously been hooded stretched wide in panic.

  ‘Remains to be established, that, Matt. You know how anxious we coppers are to get convictions. Well, we’ve got you banged to rights for last night’s job, and it seems to me you’ve just admitted to the assault on Chivers. You can see how tempting it would be to put the lot on you. I don’t think a couple of thugs with baseball bats are going to command a lot of sympathy in court. Do you?’

  ‘You can’t fit me up for murder! ’ But his voice thrilled with the fear that they might do just that.

  ‘Fit you up. Matt? Oh, DI Rushton and I wouldn’t want to do that. We’re honourable men, the Inspector and I. But we need something to convince us, you see, or we might be carried along by events.’

  Slyness suddenly took over the brutish face. ‘It was one of yours that set up that beating for Chivers.’

  ‘A copper, you mean?’ Hook was studiously impassive.

  ‘Ex-copper. Jim told me that.’

  ‘We’d need his name, Matt, to be convinced, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘I don’t shop people. I told you that.’ Green made a belated return to his criminal philosophy.

  ‘Well, perhaps you don’t need to, Matt. We know all about Daniel Steele.’

  ‘How’d you know that? I didn’t tell you, did I?’

  ‘Oh, we’re very interested in Dan Steele, Matt. Very interested to have confirmation that he set you up to give Darren Chivers a beating.’

  ‘But we didn’t kill him!’

  ‘Do you know, Matt, I’m rather inclined to believe that? But I think we shall need to have further discussions with Mr Steele.’

  Chris Rushton was inordinately pleased with his findings when Lambert and Hook joined him in the C1D section to review the latest state of the Darren Chivers case.

  ‘I thought Sunday morning was a good time to put our heads together, whilst the place is pretty quiet,’ said Lambert.

  ‘We made a great leap forward this morning,’ said Chris, scarc
ely able to contain his excitement. ‘Well, Bert did. He was the one who wormed the information out of the man.’ At one time, he had been so keen on promotion, so insecure with John Lambert, that he would have claimed the credit for himself. He was more relaxed at work as well as outside the station nowadays.

  ‘Joint effort,’ said Bert stolidly. ‘You set him up, I knocked him down.’

  Lambert looked at the pair quizzically for a moment. ‘Are you offering me a murderer trussed up ready for the Crown Prosecution Service?’

  Rushton was deflated. ‘Well, not quite that, no. There’s a little more work needed before we have the case ready for that lot.’

  ‘In that case, let’s review things as planned. Preferably with an open mind.’

  Rushton sighed inwardly, flicked up a file on his computer, and tried not to sound frustrated. ‘All the major suspects are blackmail victims. Robert Beckford is the first.’

  ‘Yes. Skeleton in the cupboard from his army days. Prisoner killed when he shouldn’t have been. As far as I can tell, Beckford was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most people would have been caught out as he was. Understandably, he concealed it when he applied for the post of verger at Gloucester Cathedral.’

  ‘Is it a strong enough motive for murder? I haven’t seen the man, but wouldn’t the Cathedral authorities have been sympathetic if he’d simply made a clean breast of it?’

  ‘Possibly. But the key thing is how Beckford sees this. He’s far more wrapped up in the job than he expected to be when he took it, and he really loves his little house in the cathedral close - as most people would. As far as he was concerned, Chivers was threatening his whole life. He’d already paid him one thousand pounds and he hadn’t the resources to go on paying him the bigger sums which we know would have been the pattern.’

  ‘He’s also the only one of the suspects who we know has killed before. He’d seen lots of violence in the Falklands and Iraq, so he might have been more prepared than the others to see the elimination of Chivers as a way out,’ pointed out Hook sturdily. He’d liked Rob Beckford, found himself hoping at the end of their exchanges that he wasn’t their man, but he had long since learned the danger of letting personal feelings influence professional judgements.