by J M Gregson
Rushton glanced at his monitor screen. ‘Motive and opportunity, then. He was out in his car at around the time when Chivers died. We’ve checked his story, and he took his wife’s sister back to Ross-on-Wye as he claimed, but he certainly had time to meet Chivers and dispatch him in Highnam on his way back to Gloucester.’
Chris flicked up another file, anxious to run through these people and get to the man he was increasingly certain was the one they would arrest. ‘The vicar’s wife, Karen Lynch. Can we really entertain her seriously as a suspect?’
Lambert smiled. ‘Until she is eliminated, we must do just that. If we disregard Mark Rogers, who claims to have been off his head when he dealt with Chivers, Mrs Lynch is the only one who seems to have known Chivers intimately in a previous life. She says she might even have recruited him as a dealer, when she was an addict and dealing herself.’
Hook said determinedly, ‘We’ve all seen what drug addiction can reduce you to. Karen Lynch is one of the few people who’ve come through it and made something of her life. More than something, really. The people in the parish think she’s a gem and Father Ryan at St Mary’s Hostel can’t speak too highly of the work she’s doing there with addicts and drug- users.’
‘The more complete the recovery she’s made from what she was, the more she now feels she has to lose,’ Lambert pointed out gently. ‘She’s terrified of being exposed, not just for herself, but for her husband. She feels it would destroy him and the work he’s doing in his parish.’
For a seasoned police inspector, Chris Rushton still had an appealing naivety about him at times. He said, ‘Surely it would be the Christian duty of everyone in the parish to support her, if all this came out. The sinner that repenteth, and all that.’
Lambert gave him a grim smile. ‘The kinds of things addicts do to support their addictions would be a revelation to a lot of people who have led more sheltered lives. I’m not sure they could ever bring themselves to accept a vicar’s wife who had been a thief and a prostitute to pay for heroin. But that’s irrelevant. It’s Karen Lynch’s horror at the very thought of such revelations that sets her up as a blackmail victim.’
‘But not a very promising one,’ Hook said. ‘I don’t think money is very important to the Lynches, but there plainly isn’t very much of it around. I don’t see how she would have been able to scrape up the sort of sums Chivers would have been demanding.’
‘Which could make her a more likely candidate for his death,’ Lambert insisted. ‘Her very despair in knowing she couldn’t raise the sums he wanted might prompt desperate action.’
Hook shook his head disbelievingly, whilst Rushton said,
‘We shall present you in a few minutes with a much more convincing murderer.’
‘Mark Rogers,’ said Lambert abruptly. ‘What do you make of him? Another reformed character, according to his own account.’
‘Now a dutiful family man with two charming children. That’s according to himself,’ said Hook. ‘We only have his own word for quite a lot of things. Including his whereabouts at the time of the murder.’
Rushton was looking at his screen and the new file he had flashed up for Rogers. ‘Yes. So far, we haven’t come up with anyone who sighted him in the pub where he claims to have been drinking on that Friday night. To be fair, everyone agrees that it was very crowded at the time.’
‘Even if we come up with a sighting, it won’t be conclusive,’ said Hook. ‘If I were planning murder. I’d have made sure I was briefly in the pub as I claimed to be before or after the event, to establish some sort of alibi.’
Lambert nodded. ‘For what it’s worth, Chris, I don’t think Bert and I trusted a word Mark Rogers said. When we saw him on Thursday, he gave us a cock and bull story about having bought coke from Chivers in the past; probably true, but not strong enough to leave him open to blackmail. When we saw him again last night, he wriggled a bit, then admitted that he’d falsified facts on his application form to BT. Apparently Chivers knew all about that. Rogers also admitted that he’d given him a thousand pounds, not the two hundred he’d claimed at our first meeting. Chivers would almost certainly have been back for more, and Rogers knew it.’
Rushton frowned at his monitor. ‘So he had motive and opportunity.’
Hook nodded. ‘And a hell of a lot at stake. He’s done well since he joined BT and he’s got an excellent executive post there. He also has a wife and two children of whom he’s genuinely fond. He’d almost certainly be sacked if BT found out that he had lied on his application form - and he wouldn't find it easy to get another post in those circumstances.’ Lambert smiled. ‘I didn’t take to Rogers any more than Bert did. However, it’s a big step from being a cheat and a liar to becoming a murderer. He hasn’t any previous history of violence or criminal record. But again we have to remember that desperation can lead to quite uncharacteristic violence.’
Rushton was anxious to get to the suspect who he was increasingly convinced was their man. He put up a new file and looked at it without conviction. ‘Michelle de Vries. I haven’t seen her and you two have, but on paper she doesn’t look like a killer.’
Lambert frowned. ‘One of the difficulties of this case is the man was killed with his own weapon. It’s possible, perhaps even probable, that his killer didn’t meet him with the intention of killing him. There may have been a quarrel which went wrong.’
‘But whoever killed him chose an isolated place for the meeting, where violence would go undetected - as it did, for two days and more.’
‘We mustn’t presume that it was our killer who set up this meeting. It may well have been Chivers. He’s been a drug- dealer for years, used to looking for quiet spots for his transactions. He was now a blackmailer, but that too is an activity which has to be conducted in secrecy.’
‘But he’d been beaten up and put in hospital only ten days earlier. Surely he would have been cautious about setting up meetings in isolated places?’
‘He may have been meeting someone he was confident wouldn’t be a threat. More importantly, he’d acquired a Brocock ME 38 and had it converted into a deadly weapon. He probably felt well able to protect himself.’
‘So he wouldn’t have felt in any danger from Michelle de Vries,’ admitted Rushton reluctantly.
‘He’d have felt he was calling the shots. According to what some of his victims tell us, the feeling of power was important to him.’
Hook said, ‘Michelle de Vries is one of the victims with access to large sums. Chivers must have felt she could be tapped indefinitely, in view of her husband’s riches.’
Lambert nodded. ‘I’m sure he did. But of course the whole basis of the blackmail threat was that Mrs de Vries was terrified that her husband would discover the secret of her liaison with Guy Dawson. She’d given Chivers two thousand pounds. She’s now admitted to us that she felt she couldn’t make more payments without her husband wanting to know where this money was going.’
Rushton looked at his screen. ‘This man Guy Dawson has been interviewed. He claims to have an alibi for the time of the death, which is being checked out. Frankly, he looks like a sexual con artist who persuades women he’s in things for the long term when he’s really out for a quick bit on the side. He admitted that he knew his lover was being blackmailed, but denied any connection with Chivers himself and said he was planning to call time on his affair with Mrs de Vries. He’s divorced and he certainly wouldn’t go to the wall to keep things secret. I think he just wants out of any trouble - I can’t see him committing murder to hush up his affair.’
‘But Michelle de Vries might,’ said Bert Hook. ‘She’s a cool customer and very determined to make a go of her shop. She’s completely dependent on her husband’s financial support to get the venture off the ground and intensely anxious that he shouldn’t get to know about the Dawson liaison. She also has no alibi for the night of the murder. She claims she was alone at home.’
‘All of this may be overtaken by something Bert and I heard th
is morning,’ said Rushton impatiently. He put up his file for Daniel Steele. ‘Two men were arrested for assault last night. They were giving a man a beating on the orders of a loan shark, who uses their services quite regularly. But they admitted under interrogation that they were also the pair who put Darren Chivers in hospital ten days before he was murdered. And Bert tricked one of them into revealing who employed them to do that: Daniel Steele.’
There was a pause whilst the pair looked at Lambert to assess his reaction.
Hook said quietly, ‘A bent copper who was allowed to leave the service without prosecution. He’s got form, even if it’s unofficial form.’
Lambert sighed, feeling the excitement which the others felt at the prospect of putting this one to bed, sharing their feeling that if a bent copper was belatedly brought to justice, this would be a satisfactory outcome. ‘The two crimes aren’t necessarily connected, of course. But there is a strong possibility that someone who employed his thugs to do his dirty work might escalate the violence, if his warning didn’t have the desired effect.’
‘In other words, if Chivers didn’t learn his lesson and insisted on coming back for more, Steele might have shut him up for good.’ Hook seemed to be reassuring himself that this one was nearly over.
‘I think you and I should go and see what Daniel Steele has to say for himself,’ said Lambert grimly.
Twenty-Three
They didn’t give Daniel Steele any warning that they were coming to his house. Surprise was a small weapon, and they were prepared to use every weapon they had against this man.
He lived in a neat modem detached house with a weedless front garden, which was bright with geraniums and petunias and lobelia. It was three o’clock on a warm Sunday afternoon, that hour when two thirds of the nation indulges in postprandial drowsiness, but Mrs Steele told them that her husband was working in the back garden. ‘We have some questions to ask him,’ said Lambert.
She looked at them curiously as she led them into the little room which she said was her husband’s study. ‘Not that he does much studying nowadays,’ she said nervously. ‘It’s more of a den, really, where he can lock himself away from the grandchildren and me when the house gets too noisy.’
There was a piano with music on the stand which looked as if it was regularly played, a reminder that hard men could have unexpected hobbies in their domestic lives. On top of it were photographs of a formidable-looking young Steele in rugby kit, of him standing with a slightly embarrassed smile beside his bride in front of a gothic church door, of his grandchildren at various stages of their development, of Steele himself smiling broadly and holding the silver rose bowl from the local gardening show.
The most recent picture showed him with all of his immediate family, in what was presumably the back garden where he was working now, his long arms encircling the shoulders of his two daughters, with the grandchildren holding small tools and smiling obediently in the forefront.
‘Apparently most of the most ruthless Mafia bosses are enthusiastic family men,’ said Lambert acidly.
There was not a single photograph or any other remembrance of that twenty-year police career which had ended in hasty retirement under clouds of suspicion. Lambert walked across to the small metal filing cabinet in the furthest comer of the room. It was locked, as he had expected. It would be easy enough to get a search warrant, if the man was arrested for murder.
They were sitting patiently by the time Steele came into the room. He looked at them suspiciously, then went and sat down opposite them. ‘This must be something important, to bring a chief superintendent into my home on a Sunday,’ he said. He nodded briefly at Hook, but otherwise did not acknowledge his presence. He had washed his hands and face when he came in from the garden, but he was still in a short-sleeved shirt, his powerful torso straining against the cotton.
‘We wouldn’t need to disturb your Sunday, and min ours, if you hadn’t lied to us on Friday,’ said Lambert.
Steele glared back at him steadily, pausing to let them see that he was not to be thrown by this uncompromising opening. ‘I didn’t lie. I’m ex-job, aren’t I? I’d have more sense than to lie to the great John Lambert.’ He allowed the slightest of grins to flicker across his swarthy features, to reinforce his sarcasm.
‘You will very shortly be facing serious charges. The least of these may be of causing Grievous Bodily Harm to Darren Chivers, a man who was murdered nine days later.’
A gleam of fear in the dark eyes, but no hint of it in the calm, contemptuous voice as he said, ‘You should be careful of what you say, Lambert. False accusations can lead to hefty compensation nowadays. And considerable harm to your spotless reputation. I should hate to have to sue.’
‘You won’t be doing that, Mr Steele. But you will be facing very serious charges in court. Perhaps the most serious one of all.’
‘You told me about that sod Chivers being beaten up when we spoke on Friday. I can provide you with chapter and verse about where I was at the time.’
‘And I can provide the Crown Prosecution Service with a cast iron case against you.’
‘Oh, I very much doubt that, John Lambert. And I shall enjoy—’
‘The two thugs whom you employed to beat up Darren Chivers are in the cells at this moment. They were caught red-handed delivering another beating last night and arrested.’
‘You forget that I was a copper myself for twenty years. These thugs sound like professionals to me. One of the things about people like that is that they don’t bleat about the people who employ them - they know better than to do that. Not that I’m admitting anything, of course.’
‘Oh, they’re bleating, all right, Mr Steele. Singing for all they’re worth, to try to save their miserable skins, or at least cut down their sentences. And it looks as if we shall be able to tell the judge that they have been highly cooperative. They’ve given us the name of the man who used them last night. And they’ve told us how you employed them to beat up the late Mr Chivers on the night of June the twenty-fifth.’
‘Watch my lips. I’m saying nothing, Lambert.’
The man was good at this, Lambert admitted to himself reluctantly. Steele must by now be really alarmed, and his brain must be working furiously to know what would come next. But his exterior remained calm. His face was frozen into impassivity, his dark eyes stared steadily at his questioner, and his powerful folded arms moved not an inch.
Hook, who had been recording his replies, now looked up and said, ‘Where were you on the night of Saturday, July the fifth, Mr Steele?’
For a moment, he was disconcerted. He had been concentrating all his attention and all his venom on the attack from Lambert. This question from an unexpected quarter threw him momentarily off balance. But he recovered, even allowed himself a small smile as he prepared to deliver the answer they would not want to hear.
‘I was at work, wasn’t I? I was doing nights and the weekend.
so I was at the works on that Saturday night. Make a note of that, would you, DS Hook? Ten p.m. to six a.m., I was there. You can check with the man I relieved and the man who relieved me in the morning, if you wish.’
‘We’ve already done that, sir.’
‘Then why are you pissing me about like this?’
‘Because we have reason to believe you left the premises for a period during that time. For perhaps half an hour or even a little more. It would have been easy enough for you to do so, as you were in sole charge of the premises during that night.’
This man Steele had thought he could dominate was a sturdier foe than he had anticipated. He found himself working hard to convey the derision he wanted as he said, ‘And what heinous crime am I supposed to have perpetrated during this highly theoretical absence from my duties?’
‘The residence of Darren Chivers was illicitly entered on that night, we believe at around eleven o’clock.’
‘So rather than look for a candidate among the local petty villains, you choose to harass a man who
was legitimately at work at the time. I don’t give a lot for your chances. I should think your clear-up rates are pretty grim, if this is an example of the way you go about things.’
Lambert came back at him now, his voice like ice in the warm room. ‘A man answering your description was seen entering the building by a neighbour, Mr Steele. You know as well as I do that we will have no difficulty in getting a search warrant. I should be surprised if we do not find items removed from the flat of the deceased in this room - probably in that filing cabinet over there.’
He did not take his eyes off Steele’s face to indicate the cabinet by a glance, and he was rewarded by a flash of fear on the squat features. The man’s gaze flashed rapidly, reveal- ingly, to the cabinet and back again, and Lambert knew he had scored a bull’s eye. He said quietly, ‘It’s time to come clean, Danny Boy.’
The old police nickname rang like a knell in Daniel Steele’s ears, reminding him that he could expect no quarter from these men, that the things he had done as a bent copper were stacked against him now.
He licked his lips, forced himself to speak evenly. ‘All right, I’ll admit it. The bastard had been blackmailing me. He knew some of the villains I’d dealt with during my police days, some of the drug dealers who’d given me backhanders to turn a blind eye. Chivers had the evidence in his flat and he was threatening to reveal it to my boss at Gloucester Building Supplies. I removed it, that’s all.’
‘Having removed him on the previous night.’ Lambert nodded, as if completing a complicated tale to his satisfaction.
‘No! I didn’t kill him! You’re not pinning a murder rap on me, Lambert! I told you on Friday, I was at work when he was killed.’ Steele could not disguise his fear now. He was leaning forward with his hands on his desk, his dark eyes wide with alarm, almost imploring them to believe him.