by J M Gregson
Lambert regarded him with undisguised distaste. ‘We know you had Chivers beaten up and put into hospital nine days before he died. You have just admitted that you illegally entered his flat and removed incriminating documents on the night after he died. You could have left your post at Gloucester Building Supplies for half an hour or more on Friday night, exactly as you have just admitted to doing twenty-four hours later.’
‘But I didn’t! I didn’t kill the bastard.’
‘You have lied to us consistently throughout this investigation. There is no reason why we should believe this latest lie, any more than the others.’
‘Look, I didn’t kill the sod. I want a brief.’
‘You’re going to need one, Mr Steele. You’re going to need a very good one.’ Lambert stood up, looked at the photographs on the piano, then glanced briefly out of the window at the innocent Sunday afternoon scene in the suburban street outside. ‘I suggest you put your house in order, whilst you have the chance. Don’t leave the area. You Nwill be informed of the exact nature of the charges against you very soon.’
Sometimes Lambert thought he was a better grandfather than he had been a father. When his own children were small, he had been preoccupied with his job, not so much anxious for promotion as simply to prove to himself that he could do it, could win what sometimes seemed to him a very personal battle against serious criminals and what they did to pleasant, ordinary people.
His own children had suffered as a result. It had been left to Christine to give them the love and the concern and the sheer hard work that went with parenthood. He had meant well, had usually been able to come in and do the right things in a crisis, but it was Christine who had expended the time and the relentless effort which had been the basis of the family. His two daughters both thought the world of him and he knew that - sometimes, indeed, he felt guilty that they should turn so instinctively to him when things went seriously wrong, when it was Christine who had put in the work and deserved the attention.
There was no crisis today. Caroline was chatting happily with her mother in the kitchen, whilst Lambert played with her two sons in the garden. They had a tennis ball and Lambert was patiently trying to teach them to catch it. He threw the ball a gentle five feet to the four-year-old, congratulating him extravagantly each time he managed to hang on to it, whilst the infant clutched the ball to his chest and smiled delightedly. Then he threw slightly more difficult lobs to the six-year-old, making sure that he caught his due share, well aware that no male child could afford to be upstaged by a younger sibling.
He found it no problem now to put the Chivers case completely out of his mind for an hour or two, whereas as a younger man he would have found that impossible. He took the boys to the shed and unearthed the small watering cans which had been specially purchased for them. Then they filled them from the outside tap and he watched the earnest faces, the small tongues delicately traversing the lips, as they poured the water with slow care over plants which did not need it.
But the greatest treat was still to come. His grandchildren’s urgent small hands tugged his larger ones impatiently towards the small square at the end of the vegetable plot which had been designated theirs at the beginning of the season. Six- year-old George was allowed first to admire, then to select and extract one of the lettuces which he had sown in a tiny row nine weeks earlier. Then, with much impatient advice from George and a modicum of assistance from his grand-father’s hand-fork, young Harry extracted six of ‘his’ brilliant red radishes, which had developed so marvellously since he was last here.
Christine received these trophies in suitably wide-eyed wonder in the kitchen. She explained how they would be added to the salad which she and Caroline were preparing for tea. Half an hour later, the infant faces were filled with that childish delight which has no parallel, as the adults assured them that they had never tasted lettuce and radishes of such surpassing excellence.
Lambert had enjoyed the old days, when he and his son- in-law Martin had washed the dishes together after the meal and enjoyed a little innocent male bonding. Now he urged the other three adults out into the garden to supervise the children and enjoy the sunshine, whilst he stacked the dishwasher methodically but automatically. It was this undemanding process which allowed his thoughts to turn back again to the events of the day and what they had added to the Chivers case.
It was the aural as well as the visual memory, the recall of a small, agonized face saying, ‘I'd everything at stake, DS Hook,’ which set his mind racing towards a conclusion. Bert Hook picked him up twenty minutes after his phone call.
Twenty-Four
Their route took them through Highnam. They stopped for a few minutes near the place where Darren Chivers had died nine days earlier, whilst Lambert explained his thinking to a sceptical Hook.
Then the car eased slowly, almost reluctantly forward, as he drove with excessive care through the city of Gloucester and out towards the suburb he did not want to reach. To kindly Bert Hook, the weather on this warm summer evening seemed unsuitably, almost mockingly, benign. The sun was setting behind them over the Welsh hills; it bathed this part of the city in a soft, seemingly benevolent, light. There was scarcely a breath of wind and the few white clouds were high and unmoving, so that the wide expanse of the Severn carried scarcely a ripple when they crossed it. There were few cars about, so that in places the landscape looked almost as it might have done centuries ago, when masons were raising the mighty elevations of the cathedral which still dominated the modem skyline.
They never reached the vicarage which was their intended destination. Karen Lynch was helping an elderly man in shirt sleeves and braces to tidy up a neglected grave beside the low stone wall of the churchyard. She looked up as Hook pulled up alongside her.
‘Working late,’ Bert Hook said to her, cursing himself for the cliche, uneasy as he had never been before in a situation like this.
‘I like to keep busy,’ said Karen Lynch. ‘We’ll go into the church,’ she said, looking up at the Gothic arch of the entrance and the steeple against the blue of the sky above them. ‘It’s time that it was locked up for the night, anyway.’ And they knew in that moment that she realized that it was over for her.
She walked five yards ahead of them, holding herself erect, taking care to limp only slightly, which she knew she could do if she shortened her step a little. She did not look over her shoulder to make sure they were following, nor speak to them again.
They were conscious as they followed her of the old man standing very still above the grave she had worked on with him, his gnarled hands clasped around the top of his spade.
Karen led them into the cool dimness of the church and locked the door behind them with steady hands. She said as if it were the conclusion of some arcane religious ritual, ‘We shan’t be disturbed now.’ She did not hesitate, but marched slowly down the central aisle of the church, the one where she had walked two years ago to be married to Peter Lynch. John Lambert followed dutifully behind her, sliding into the front pew of the church alongside her as if this was exactly what he had expected. Bert Hook moved with soft policeman’s tread up the side aisle, taking his place on the bench on the other side of her, as if it was perfectly natural that she should be flanked thus by the two large men who had come here to end this.
She was calling the shots, arranging the moves for this final act of the drama like some confident, experienced stage director, and they were content that she should do so. She looked straight ahead, at the altar and the carnations she had set there on the previous day, not at the instruments of justice on either side of her. ‘How did you know?’
Lambert said quietly, ‘You were the one with most to lose. You insisted on that yourself.’
‘I don’t know any of the other suspects.’
‘No. Well, all of them had a lot at stake. Any one of them might have acted desperately. But they were acting as blackmail victims usually do in the early stages. They were paying up, meeting his
demands, and hoping against hope that he would keep his word and not come back to them.’
‘That’s what happens, isn’t it? You hope you can buy him off.’
‘It never works. Blackmailers always come back for more.’
‘I suppose so. But I wasn’t able to test that out. I didn’t have the money to meet even his first demand. He wanted five hundred and I couldn’t raise that.’
‘Yes. When you told us about the five hundred yesterday, you said that you hadn’t been able to scratch together more than two hundred. We’ve heard a lot of lies and half-truths from a variety of people in the last week, but I think both if us believed that.’
‘I told Darren I could never raise the money when he first came to me. I don’t think he believed me. He thought I was still the old Karen from that other world, the woman who would have lied and thieved and done whatever was necessary to get his money. He didn’t believe I’d changed. He didn’t believe in all of this.’ She didn’t take her eyes off the altar, but they knew that she meant much more than this physical symbol, that her phrase comprehended her new husband and each minute of the working and domestic life she spent with him.
Bert Hook spoke for the first time, sounding more like a supporter than an opponent in her ears. ‘So we had to ask ourselves what the consequences of failing to raise the money would be for you, Karen.’
‘I expect you did, yes.’ She turned and looked at him for the first time. ‘I never looked at it from your point of view.’
Hook smiled, knowing her resistance was over, helping her along as willingly as if she had been an inexperienced fourteen-year-old. ‘Of course you didn’t, Karen. You had problems of your own. But you chose the wrong solution, didn’t you?’
‘I couldn’t see any solution at all.’
‘But murdering someone wasn’t the answer was it? Even when that someone was a blackmailer.’
‘I didn’t murder anyone, DS Hook.’ She spoke with a surprising, unreal calmness, even allowing herself a smile that a friendly man like this could think such things of her.
Hook frowned, then quietly insisted, ‘You killed him Karen, on that Friday night in Highnam. There’s no getting away from that.’
‘And I wouldn’t want to get away from it, DS Hook. That’s what happened all right.’ She looked back at the altar, at the brass rails she had cleaned so recently. It seemed months, not days ago, now. ‘It’s all finished, this, isn’t it?’
‘I think you’d better tell us exactly what happened, don’t you?’
‘Yes. Yes, that would be the best idea. I somehow felt you knew it all, but that can’t be so, can it?’
‘You arranged to meet him in Highnam, didn’t you? Arranged to meet him where it would be quiet, so that you could get rid of him.’
‘No, it wasn’t like that at all. You make it sound as though I set out to kill him, and I didn’t do that.’
‘Tell us how it was then, Karen. Tell us how that meeting was set up.’
‘Darren contacted me again when I was leaving St Mary’s Hostel, a week after he’d told me he wanted five hundred pounds from me. I told him that I hadn’t got the money, that I didn’t see how I’d ever get it. He said that I’d have it by Friday night, or he’d turn up at the church at the weekend and let them know about the real Karen, the Karen Burton he’d known in the old days. He said I’d get the money somehow - I think he remembered that other Karen, who’d have done anything for her next fix, and thought I’d thieve for it.’
‘So you agreed to meet him on that Friday night.’
‘Yes. It was he who suggested Highnam, and I realized that blackmailers want quiet spots for meetings just as much as their victims do. I couldn’t see how I was ever going to go there with the money, but I went because I couldn’t bear the thought of his coming here. I changed into jeans and put my trainers and my cycling gloves on and rode out there on my bike.’
'And what happened in Highnam?’
She had no hesitation. Describing the scene she had relived so many times in the hours of darkness was a relief, not an ordeal. ‘I told him that I hadn’t got the money, that I didn’t see how I could ever get it. Darren wasn’t like I remembered him in the old days.’ She was silent for a moment, recalling the nightmare world of addiction she thought she had left behind her, which Chivers had brought back to her so vividly. ‘He was truculent, enjoying the feeling of power over me that his knowledge gave him, enjoying insulting me, rubbing my face in the dirt.’
‘And you lost your temper with him.’
‘No. It wasn’t anything like that. If anything, he lost his temper with me. He told me I’d have to thieve to pay him off. That there must be money somewhere around the church that I could get my hands on. I told him that I didn’t do that sort of thing any more, that I couldn’t do it any more. He said I’d been prepared to fuck for the next fix in the old days and that he was sure the ladies of the parish would like to know all about that. I’m not sure how much I believed it, but I said that I didn’t really think he would do that. I said it would ruin my life, but it wouldn’t bring him any money.’
‘And how did he react to that?’
‘He pulled out this pistol and said that it showed he meant business. He seemed very proud of being armed. I don’t think Darren had ever had a weapon like that before. I said that I didn’t believe he’d ever use it on me, that killing people wasn’t his line. I think I believed that. I certainly tried to sound as if I did.’
‘And what did Chivers do?’
‘He told me not to push him. He held the muzzle of the pistol against the side of my head and told me not to push him.’ She moved her hand slowly up to the spot on her temple, touching it gently with the tips of her fingers. ‘I couldn’t stand that. It was something that had never happened to me before. I could only feel the steel against my head and I panicked.’
She fell silent, as if the recollection of that horror had suspended speech in her, so that Hook had to prompt her gently again. ‘What happened when you panicked, Karen?’
She stared at the altar and the high Victorian stained- glass window behind it. You could see the colours and the design more clearly now in this soft evening light than when the morning sun poured through it so dazzlingly, she thought inconsequentially. ‘I know I twisted round and flung up both my hands to get hold of that pistol. I remember wrestling with him, dragging the muzzle away from my head, putting all my strength into pointing it away from me. Then it went off.’
‘You pulled the trigger?’
‘I don’t know. I can only remember my hands on his as I screamed at him and wrenched the pistol away from my head. But it doesn’t matter, does it? I killed him, didn’t I?’
The men on each side of her knew that it mattered very much indeed, that murder had already been replaced by manslaughter, that in due course a lawyer would no doubt plead self-defence to a sympathetic court. But this was not their business. Lambert spoke again. Like the high priest concluding some solemn religious ritual, he quietly pronounced the formula of arrest, whilst the three of them listened to this ceremonial epilogue to the story.
She unlocked the door of the church and stepped outside, looking up at its high elevations, feeling the incongruous warmth and brightness of the evening sun on her back. She was a prisoner now, but she was still controlling the steps in this bizarre and tragic pavane, so that the big men on either side of her stopped with her and waited patiently for the next move. ‘It’s over, isn’t it?’ she said quietly.
‘The agony and the deceit are over,’ said Bert Hook, feeling like a father-confessor. He had liked this woman from the start; he now felt a ridiculous and totally unseemly sort of love for her. ‘But your life here isn’t. Chief Superintendent Lambert and I aren’t lawyers, but it’s my belief you’ll be back here, carrying on the work you’ve begun. Probably much sooner than you think.’ He was glad that he didn’t hear the warning cough he’d expected from John Lambert. He sensed instead an unspoken approval from
that grave, reserved figure on the other side of their prisoner.
She glanced at Hook sharply, then turned away from the church. The old man who had been working on the grave was preparing to go now, his work concluded for the day and his spade over his shoulder. He watched the trio curiously as they moved away from the church gate and towards the car which would take her to the police station and formal charges. She paused by the door of the car and said, ‘Can I have two minutes with Peter?’
They all knew it was irregular, but Lambert didn’t waste time voicing the thought. ‘Does he know?’
Karen Lynch shook her head. ‘He knows something is wrong for me, but I haven’t told him. I don’t know how much he’s guessed. It’s the first secret I’ve ever had from him.’
On that simple, banal thought, her control should have broken and the tears should have gushed, but her face remained like stone.
Lambert said, ‘We’ll have to come into the house with you, but you can have your two minutes alone.’
They sat in the front room with its cheap furniture and its conventional prints. It was warm with the full blaze of the western sun. Lambert went and opened a window and the two men stood gazing at the deserted street outside, hearing the low, continuous murmur of voices from the rear of the house.
They gave her five minutes, not two. But just when they were considering how to interrupt the pair, they appeared together in the doorway, their arms around each other’s waists, their faces unashamedly flowing with tears. Peter Lynch said, ‘She’s coming back, isn’t she? I’ve told her she’s coming back.’
‘She’ll be back,’ said John Lambert gruffly. Then, as they prised her away from him at the front door, he found himself adding, ‘I expect she’ll be back quite soon.’
They drove past that more massive and impressive religious edifice, the Cathedral of Gloucester, where Robert Beckford was no doubt going about his Sunday evening business. No words were spoken, but Bert Hook found himself hoping that this ancient, unchanging assertion of Christian faith would be some sort of comfort to the woman who sat so quietly beside Lambert in the back of the vehicle.