by J M Gregson
Lambert sighed. ‘We were told you knew the late Mr Giles better than anyone else on the staff here. Yet so far it seems that you don’t know very much about the life of your colleague and friend, Mr Yates.’
‘No. I’m afraid he was — well, quite a private sort of man, really.’ Mick had never thought of Ted like that before. He had been content with the older man’s friendship, flattered by it, indeed. Only now did he realise how much he had told Ted of his own problems with the job and his private life, and how little Ted had released about himself.
‘What about people within the school? Was he close to anyone? Did he have any enemies on the staff that you know of?’
Mick felt his pulses quickening at that thought. This was a murder inquiry. He was being asked to name people who would immediately become suspects. For a wild moment, he was tempted to name the Head of PE, who teased him so tirelessly about his Biology classes with the senior girls, but he sensed that this was not the moment for retaliatory humour. Searching desperately for something that would justify the importance he had been accorded in this case, he said, ‘I did once hear Ted having a row of some sort with Graham Reynolds.’
‘Who is?’ Hook had his ball-pen poised over the still almost empty page of his notebook.
‘Oh, yes, sorry. Graham Reynolds is our Head of the Social Studies Department.’
‘And what was the row about?’
‘I don’t know. It was behind closed doors, you see. In Ted’s Chemistry lab. I’m sorry.’
‘No need to be. You can’t report what you didn’t hear. People who add their own speculations cause us a lot of trouble. And they always make bad witnesses in court.’ No harm in reminding the punters they might end up as witnesses, Bert always thought. It sharpened their minds wonderfully on occasions. ‘So you heard what we shall call a heated exchange.’ He wrote the phrase down with satisfaction in his , playing up the village bobby image which had caught out so many villains in the past. ‘And this was behind the doors of the Chemistry laboratory. And when did this exchange take place?’
Mick cudgelled his brains desperately, anxious to offer them something of interest. ‘It would be about a fortnight ago. Yes — just over a fortnight, because I mentioned it to Ted when we had a drink in the pub that evening.’
‘And what was Ted’s reaction? Did he give you any clue as to the subject of the dispute?’
‘No. He just said Social Studies teachers shouldn’t climb on white horses — they weren’t cut out to be knights errant. I’m afraid I didn’t follow that up; I got diverted, because we had a bit of a laugh about Sociology.’
‘Yes. People do, I understand.’ Hook was grave as a rubicund Buddha. No one would have known he was about to complete an Open University degree which had included a Social Studies module. He made a note about the date of this exchange, which was almost certainly irrelevant, but which would need to be followed up in due course.
Lambert said, ‘Is there anything else you can tell us about the life of this man? What about his habits outside the routine of his school life? Did he play any sports? Was he a member of any clubs? Was there anywhere he went regularly, say every week?’
Mick Yates listened earnestly to each prompting, then shook his head sadly. He wondered if these men would think he was concealing things, when all that was becoming apparent was that he knew so little about the life of the man whom he had thought of as a friend and mentor. ‘Ted went skiing every winter. Usually over New Year, I think. But I’m pretty sure he wasn’t a member of any sports club. He played a bit of squash and tennis, but he wasn’t a member of a club.’
‘How about golf?’ said Hook hopefully. The dead man might be a fellow-sufferer; even better, his killer might be a golf club committee member.
‘No, he wasn’t interested. He said it was a game for old fogies.’
Lambert didn’t even flinch: you had to admire his professionalism, Hook thought. The Superintendent said rather wearily, ‘Habits, Mr Yates. Was there any evening or day that Ted Giles set aside for himself and his own interests?’
At first, Mick Yates looked as blank as ever. Then he brightened with a recollection. ‘Ted was never around on a Friday evening. I asked him out for a drink after school was over for the week quite a few times, but he always had some prior commitment on Fridays.’
***
Detective Inspector Rushton found he got on well with Dr Saunders, the pathologist at the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory at Chepstow.
Both men favoured facts rather than speculation; both had a liking for documentation and the logical ordering of information; both felt happier with the tabulation of facts and the scientific approach to crime than with understanding its perpetrators and its victims. Chris Rushton explained that he had come to Chepstow in an attempt to save the time that was always vital in a murder investigation rather than because he hoped to gain anything extra from a personal hearing of what would be in Cliff Saunders’ confidential report.
Once an initial stiffness between the two had evaporated, Saunders found that Rushton was genuinely interested in his findings and how they might best be incorporated into the police computer system. He felt himself being drawn into the puzzles of detection, wanting to provide the best detail he could for the man beside him, who would take his findings on into the hunt for the man or woman who had perpetrated this. ‘Everything will be in my report, which you’ll have tomorrow,’ he said, Tut if there are any key areas, we can talk about them now.’
‘Time of death,’ said Rushton without hesitation.
‘Between ten and twenty hours before he was found. You’ll find the details of body temperature and the stage of rigor mortis in my report, but I’d be prepared to say in court between four p.m. on Saturday the tenth of November and two a.m. on Sunday the eleventh.’
Rushton didn’t push him further. Mentally, he made a note that whilst Saunders would not go further than this in court, the middle of this time period was the likeliest time for their murder — say between six and twelve on the Saturday night. Not the best time — during hours of darkness and when the police themselves would have been fully engaged with the normal tedious vandalism and violence of Saturday night drinkers.
‘And where did he die?’ The three questions every young DC learned to ask first about suspicious deaths: where, when and how. Saunders had already told them how and when: Rushton already suspected that the normally straightforward ‘Where?’ was going to give them difficulty. The SOC team had indicated as much to him before he came here.
Saunders smiled grimly. ‘I can tell you where he didn’t die. In that churchyard at Broughton’s Ash.’
‘He was dumped there after death?’
‘Yes. A few hours afterwards, I’d guess.’ Cliff Saunders’ nose wrinkled in distaste above his neat mouth and carefully trimmed beard at the imprecision of this; he wasn’t a man given to guessing. ‘He’d been lying face down after death for perhaps two hours; there was discernible hypostasis on the front of the body. But he was moved before there was any rigor in the limbs.’
‘Presumably in a vehicle of some sort?’
‘Almost certainly, unless he was moved only a very short distance. But that is more your province than mine, Chris.’ Saunders had forced himself into the use of the forename, and it surprised both of them. ‘There were some scratches on the lower back which probably came from the top of that stone wall at the cemetery — as though he was levered on to it and then thrust over.’
Rushton nodded. ‘The Scene of Crime team found some fibres from his clothing on the top of the wall. And he was lying almost against it.’
‘There are faint marks at the bottom of the shoulder blades which look like finger damage — consistent with someone having lugged him out of a vehicle by gripping him under the arms. There are no similar marks on the legs. Although we can’t rule out the possibility that someone else took hold of that end without leaving marks, it seems unlikely.’
Chris Rushton
made another note to be fed into his computer within the hour: probably only one person involved in the disposal of the body after the killing. Grudgingly, he gave back a little information of his own. ‘It seems the dead man was a schoolteacher at Oldford Comprehensive. An Edward Giles. Separated from his wife. Lived on his own. Is there anything else you can tell us which might be of interest?’
Saunders pursed his lips. ‘All the detail will be in my report. There is one thing you might like to know immediately, though. Your Edward Giles had sex not long before he died.’
‘Lucky bugger!’ It was partly the automatic reaction of a policeman in a force which was still overwhelmingly male, partly the instinctive envy from a man living alone and still coming to terms with a divorce he had never wanted.
Cliff Saunders gave him a mirthless smile, still mindful of the stainless-steel dishes with their covers in the room next door, each containing organs from the body he had so recently cut up. He had left them laid out methodically, like the dishes for some nightmare banquet.
‘He doesn’t seem too lucky to me,’ he said.
Four
Ted Giles’s flat was as neat and clean as that of a houseproud woman. The fitted carpets were newly vacuumed. The bed was neatly made. Even in the bathroom, that most revealing of sanctums for curious coppers, the porcelain shone, and save for a clean brush and comb, everything was neatly stowed away in the mirror-fronted cupboard above the washbasin. In the kitchen, there was not a cup nor a spoon to be seen on the neat white sink. But for an occasional drip from the cold tap, this might have been a show flat, still to be occupied, rather than one in which a man had lived for five years.
Sergeant ‘Jack’ Johnson looked around this clinically clean residence with distaste. For police teams in search of pointers, premises like this were always the least rewarding. Filth, squalor, and sloppiness in living were the allies he and his team welcomed. You rarely found anything as helpful as the bloodstains Johnson had found on the walls and the floor of the house where he had worked last week, but that was only a straightforward ‘domestic’, where they had already made an arrest. Here, though he had his constables on hands and knees with tweezers and dishes, Johnson wasn’t hopeful even of the clothing fibres and stray hairs they expected to pick up as routine trophies. Ted Giles, successful teacher, separated from his wife, and now murder victim, seemed determined to remain otherwise anonymous, even after death.
They found no diaries, of course: Giles must have been a man who carried whatever appointments he might have in his head. There was a calendar beside the spotless electric oven with a few initials against particular dates; they would take this away in due course, but he doubted if they would be anything more than dental appointments, library book return dates, and family birthdays. Johnson already had Edward Giles down as a depressingly secretive man.
He said as much to John Lambert when the chief arrived. ‘There’s a cleaner, of course; there bloody would be! Last came in on Friday morning,’ he said gloomily. The efficient daily help was one of the banes of his life. The Superintendent nodded, then looked around him like an eager sniffer dog. A quarter of a century of CID experience, of entering deserted rooms of all shapes and sizes, with an infinite range of decor and contents, had not removed the curiosity which was an essential part of the professional detective. He walked into each of the two neat bedrooms, then the bathroom, then the kitchen, all within thirty seconds and without opening a cupboard or a drawer. You didn’t tread on the toes of the specialists, and Johnson was a specialist whom he trusted absolutely to miss nothing.
‘Too tidy, do you think, Jack?’ he said. ‘Could just be that he had something in his life to hide? Not necessarily criminal, but something he preferred to conceal from whoever came into his home.’
Johnson was unconvinced. ‘He lived alone. No wife who might go through his pockets or smell his shirts in search of other women.’
‘But we don’t know yet who he brought here. He might have preferred to conceal parts of himself from his visitors. It’s a thought for your lads and lasses. Might help to keep them going through a boring day.’
Johnson nodded dolefully. ‘We’ll bag the sheets and pillowcases and any soiled clothes, of course. Might just get DNA samples of someone if we’re lucky.’
Both of them glanced without much hope at the open door of the main bedroom. They both knew without further words what he meant: if at some further stage of the investigation they were able to prove the presence here of someone who denied having ever set foot in the flat, it could well be significant. And particularly so if the evidence of DNA suggested also an intimate relationship where none had been admitted.
Lambert sighed; such speculation was a reminder of how far away they were from any such candidates for the murderer of Ted Giles. He went out of the flat onto the landing outside. With its single long strip of carpet and its rows of shut doors, it was as clean and anonymous as a corridor in a private hospital. Lambert hesitated for a moment, then rapped sharply on the door immediately to the left of Ted Giles’s flat.
At first, he thought no one was in. Then there were muffled movements and the door opened not more than eight inches. A broad face peered at him from beneath straight, greasy black hair. ‘I don’t buy nothing at the door!’ it mouthed.
Lambert showed his warrant card, beckoned sharply to Bert Hook, who was emerging from the lift behind him, and said, ‘We need to speak to you. It won’t take long, Mr…?’
The man refused the invitation to give his name, looked for a moment as if he would slam the door in their faces, then thought better of it. He snarled, ‘I got nothing to say. Not to the likes of you. I don’t deal with pigs!’
The old attitude. Even the old words. Lambert put his face a little nearer, so that his grey eyes stared down into the watery brown ones beneath him. ‘Yes you do. Either here or at the station. When we’re investigating murder, we question whoever we want to.’
He took advantage of the shock the word ‘murder’ gave even to the most hardened to push back the door and the man behind it and walk into the flat. The place smelt faintly of stale sweat and strongly of stale cigarette smoke. It was as dirty and untidy as Giles’s flat had been clean and neat. The two big men looked round the living room unhurriedly, taking in the dirty curtains, the sofa with a hole where its innards threatened to escape, the cheap framed print of the negress askew upon the wall, the sink half-full of unwashed crockery. The man felt their gaze revolving like a film-maker’s camera, taking in each detail, coming to rest eventually upon him and staying there.
Hook smiled at him, enjoying his discomfiture, producing a notebook to add to the man’s apprehension. ‘I think we’ll have your name for a start,’ he said.
The man crossed his arms across his T-shirted chest. ‘It’s Bass,’ he said. ‘Aubrey Bass.’ He looked at them aggressively, as if he expected the first name to be a source of derision; no doubt his novelettish handle had often caused mirth in the circles he inhabited. When the name provoked no reaction in Hook, he scratched himself vigorously, first under one arm, then under the other, then under both at the same time. When both the policemen observed this action impassively and neither of them spoke, the man did not know what else to do. Realising he could not scratch forever, he dropped his right hand to his side and they saw that the lettering on his T-shirt spelled out Fulham for the Cup. The lettering was a little smeared and the originally white background was mapped with a variety of interesting stains, as though reflecting the ridiculous ambition of the slogan.
Bass thought he saw Lambert’s gaze straying to the telly, which he knew was hooky. ‘Well, waddyerwant?’ he said roughly.
‘A little information, that’s all, Aubrey,’ said Hook.
Bass looked at him suspiciously, searching for any note of mockery in the intonation of his first name. ‘I don’t give no information, not to the filth,’ he said roughly.
But it was a token response. His aggression had drained away with his ne
rve in the silences they had visited upon him. ‘You’ll help us with this, if you know what’s good for you,’ said Lambert brusquely. He looked the man full in the face, taking in his unshaven appearance, his unbrushed teeth, his face graining with sweat as his fingers began to scratch anew, this time at the tattoo on his left forearm.
‘I don’t know nothing about no murder,’ he said.
Lambert smiled, wondering whether this plethora of negatives was an unconscious attempt to emphasise his ignorance. ‘Perhaps not. We shall see. What can you tell us about your neighbour, Mr Giles?’ he said.
Bass relaxed visibly, sank into the armchair beside the empty fireplace, and gestured towards the erupting sofa. If it was that stuck-up bugger next door they were interested in, they couldn’t be here about any of his own little interests. ‘Ted Giles? I don’t see much of him.’
The answer came automatically: this man’s instinct was not to help the police. But it might well be true; Bass might be as unlike Giles as the condition of their flats indicated. They had certainly lived in very different ways. But this unattractive creature might still know things of interest about the dead man. Lambert said, ‘We need to know about whatever you’ve seen of Mr Giles in the last few months. All of it.’
Bass shrugged his heavy shoulders, scratched again, this time at his stomach with his left hand. Hook, perched on the edge of the sofa beside John Lambert, glanced nervously at the material beside him; fleas were an occupational hazard when you came into places like this. Bass said reluctantly, ‘We ‘ad a drink once —when I first came here, two years ago. But he wouldn’t go out with me again.’ While Hook reflected that this was rather in the dead man’s favour, Bass’s heavy features turned even more sullen at the recollection. Then they suddenly brightened. ‘In trouble, is he? Must be, to bring a superintendent round ‘ere. Hey, you mentioned murder. He’s never—’