Malice Aforethought

by J M Gregson

  But passion convinced more than logic, as it often will. Sue Giles looked at him with widening eyes, then dropped her gaze before the intensity of his determination. ‘All right. I accept you need to know all about Ted. I just hadn’t realised that this was going to involve so much of my own life — I thought I’d done with him. But I accept that murder makes its own rules. I shall tell you whatever I can.’

  ‘Thank you. I was asking you why you were not divorced from your husband.’

  ‘You should ask him that!’ The words flew out in temper before she could control them, and her hand flashed instinctively to her mouth. ‘I’m sorry. I wish you could ask him, though. He might give you a more cogent explanation than I can.’

  Lambert looked through the long windows of the elegant room to the garden which dropped gently away to a large pond with a fountain playing in the centre. A modern house with at least six bedrooms and a well-tended garden of around an acre. Any divorce settlement would surely have left Ted Giles a rich man. Was it the wife who had resisted it, knowing what it would cost, knowing that she might even have to move out of this opulent place? He said, ‘Are you saying there was a dispute between you over the terms of the divorce?’

  Sue Giles smiled bitterly. Not over the terms, Superintendent. Over the very idea. Ted said he didn’t believe in divorce. “To have and to hold” and all that stuff.’

  If it was true, the dead man had been depriving himself of a fortune, by the look of this place. But he couldn’t have resisted for ever against the modern divorce laws. Perhaps he had been increasing his bargaining power by holding out, refusing to make things easy until the price was right. He said, ‘But you say you had been separated for five years. Even if you thought at first that you might get back together, that is ample time to have instituted divorce proceedings.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose I thought that Ted would see reason, in the end. And although I knew our marriage was finished and would have liked to see it formally terminated, it was not a matter of great importance to me until quite recently.’

  She looked quite calm again as she said this, as if she had always known in her heart that she would be saying it. Even the words had a prepared ring to them. Lambert offered the question they invited. ‘But your own circumstances have changed?’

  ‘Indeed they have.’ She could not keep a little elation out of her voice, even in this strange context. ‘I have developed a serious attachment over the last few months. In due course, I should like to be free to marry again.’

  ‘I see. In ordinary circumstances, that would be entirely your own affair. In the present ones, you must see that we need to know the name of this man.’

  She smiled at them, looking very attractive now, her strong features softened by love, her tension gone with the release of its declaration. She studied the serious, attentive faces of the two men opposite her for a moment. ‘You really don’t know yet, do you? I thought you might have picked it up when you went into Ted’s school. My man is the Head of Social Sciences there, Graham Reynolds.’

  ***

  DI Chris Rushton and George Taylor, manager of the Oldford branch of the National Westminster Bank, enjoyed the preliminaries to the release of information about the late Edward Giles’s account. They were both men who were used to observing the formalities their work required, both men who knew the rules and were happy to play life by them.

  Taylor made his little speech about the confidentiality of the details of personal finance; Rushton responded with his speech about serious crime and the way it overrode the normal boundaries. Taylor said the crime would need to be very serious indeed to cause him to reveal the details of a client’s account; Rushton said that this was as serious as it could be, as the police were now certain that Edward Giles was a homicide victim. It was like a minuet in words, with the parties advancing and retreating with the set steps they had known for years. Without any word as brutal as murder being used, the formalities were completed and Taylor graciously revealed the details of the late teacher’s account.

  Giles’s salary from the Gloucestershire Local Education Authority came in regularly at the end of the month. There were unexceptional direct debits for payment of mortgage, gas, electricity, Council Tax and water. It was difficult to see any variations to the standard pattern which might be of interest to the police in the sheets of computer-printed figures.

  Unless you went back over three or four years, which Rushton diligently did. George Taylor watched him with patient interest, wondering how long it would be before this man who seemed as diligent as he was himself came up with the query. It took a little time, of course, for a detective inspector could not be expected to be as swift in isolating the significant pointer as a bank manager. Taylor watched the neatly cut dark hair of the head bent over the paper as indulgently as if he was testing a protégé, and was almost as pleased when the DI found the significant figures.

  ‘He’s accruing money,’ said Rushton. ‘When you look at his year-end balances, he’s a modest few hundred in the black at the year end until about two years ago, with income just about outstripping his outings. In these last two years, he’s accrued ten thousand pounds.’

  ‘Yes. I suggested to him only a month ago that he should be thinking about investments if he had no plans to spend his balance.’

  ‘Where did the extra come from? Did he get a big salary increase?’

  ‘No. The salary increments in the last two years are barely ahead of inflation. You need to look in a little more detail at those last two years.’

  Lambert and most other policemen would have demanded brusquely that the manager stopped playing games and told him the secrets he plainly already understood. But Rushton pored obediently over the sheets of the last months of Ted Giles’s financial life, enjoying the puzzle. After little more than a minute, he looked up at his mentor’s amused, indulgent face, a pupil who had found the answer and expected to be praised. ‘He’s stopped withdrawing money for everyday expenses,’ he said. ‘The incomings from his salary and the outgoings on his standard orders have risen a little in tandem, but in the last two years he has almost ceased to withdraw money for his own purposes from the account.’

  ‘Correct,’ said George Taylor delightedly.

  ‘Why?’

  The bank manager’s face fell. ‘That is not my concern. It is — was — Mr Giles’s own business.’

  ‘Well, it’s our concern,’ said Rushton. ‘Got to be, now. He had to be getting money from somewhere. Another account, do you think?’

  George Taylor looked pained. He was white-haired, immaculate, nearing retirement. It still pained him to think of his customers using other channels for their finance, even though it might be the rule rather than the exception nowadays. ‘That’s always possible, of course. Or he might be receiving cash payments from somewhere and spending them directly, rather than putting them into the bank. But that’s rare among professional men like Mr Giles. Market traders do it — they spend to dodge tax rather than depositing the money in a bank.’ Despite himself, he couldn’t prevent a tinge of old-fashioned class disapproval in his voice as he mentioned the market traders and their dubious financial practice.

  Chris Rushton had enjoyed the formalities of his little rallies across the banking net with George Taylor, but he was in the end more detective inspector than financial conformist. He relished the abnormality in the dealings of the late Ted Giles; he had established another missing piece in this jigsaw where they had to discover the pieces for themselves. ‘We shall have to find where this extra income was coming from,’ he said with satisfaction.

  ***

  It was not DI Rushton but a humble WPC who revealed the secret. A routine trawl of the list of depositors at local banks and building societies revealed a savings account in the name of the late Edward Giles at the Ross-on-Wye branch of the Halifax Building Society. It had been opened exactly two years before his death.

  The young woman who ran the desk in the small Oldford bran
ch of the society was the same age as the young policewoman; both were in their early twenties. She had none of George Taylor’s old-fashioned reservations about discussing the accounts of a dead customer. Indeed, the discovery that she had a murder victim among her customers brought its own grisly glamour to her generally dull working life. She pored over the figures on the computer sheets with WPC Jane Wiseman and volunteered her own knowledge eagerly.

  ‘I remember him well now. Good-looking chap, late thirties. Quite dishy, really, but a bit old for us. He came in regularly with cash to deposit, about once every two or three weeks. Look, you can see the dates.’

  Jane could indeed. There were sizeable sums put in, with very little taken out. There was over fourteen thousand pounds in the account. She studied the figures. ‘Very few of these deposits are in round figures, even though the sums are large.’

  Unlike George Taylor, the woman at her side did not expect her to make her own deductions: she was only too anxious to help, to play her part in a murder hunt. ‘These were all cash deposits — that’s unusual nowadays, for such large sums, except from shopkeepers and publicans. Probably he was deducting cash for himself, for his own living expenses, before he put in the money. Although the sums are irregular, they are all in pounds, with no odd pence.’ She ran her finger down the column, stopping at £620, £530, £745. ‘If you ask me, he was probably paid in round hundreds and took out whatever he needed for himself before he deposited the rest here.’

  WPC Wiseman took the information back to the murder room at Oldford CID, hugging it to herself like a lost pet. It might be that stiff bugger DI Rushton who had established that an important piece in the Ted Giles jigsaw was missing, but it was she who had found the piece itself.

  Six

  Graham Reynolds was certain of one thing. He did not want to be interviewed by the police at Oldford Comprehensive School.

  The news that he had been singled out for special attention by the police would fly round classrooms already overheated by the sensational news that a popular teacher had been found murdered at Broughton’s Ash churchyard. The papers had portrayed Giles as a man without enemies, a man dedicated to the advancement of young people, to accentuate the mystery of his brutal death. In response to Hook’s phone call to arrange a meeting, he said briskly, ‘By the time kids have taken the tale back to their parents it will have grown in the telling — I’ll be on the verge of arrest in half the homes round here. I’ve a free period at ten: I’ll come into the station.’

  Hook knew from this reaction that Reynolds had plainly been expecting the call. Sue Giles must have rung him on the Wednesday evening to tell him of the police visit to her. Only what you would have expected, DS Hook told himself, you couldn’t always have surprise on your side. Perhaps, indeed, if Reynolds was planning to hide anything, it was a good thing that he had had many hours to anticipate this meeting and develop his apprehensions about it.

  When Lambert and Hook came and sat down opposite him in the interview room, Graham Reynolds certainly did not look like a man who had spent a sleepless night of anticipation. He rose automatically to greet them, his hands steady on the small, square table in the middle of the high, windowless room. ‘First time I’ve been in one of these places. I can see how they help you to get confessions out of people!’ Reynolds glanced round at the bare walls with their lemon emulsion paint, up at the shadeless fluorescent light, as if studying a hospital operating theatre.

  Lambert smiled, remembering that this man was a sociologist, wondering if he would feel he had to reproduce certain attitudes towards police work. He said, ‘Interview rooms are built at public expense to serve a purpose. They are basic because our masters don’t believe in unnecessary expense, any more than they do in schools.’

  Reynolds gave an answering smile in response to the reference to education. He had black hair that curled tightly and plentifully against his head, and his eyes were a very dark brown. They were set in an alert, quizzical face; his skin was dark, tanned almost olive even in the middle of November. He said, ‘I don’t suppose this will take very long, because I haven’t much to tell you.’

  ‘Really? Well, you could start by telling us why it has taken you until Thursday morning to come forward, when we were in the school as early as Tuesday asking for any information available about your colleague Mr Giles.’

  If Reynolds was surprised by the abruptness of this, by the absence of any polite preamble, he gave no outward sign of it. ‘That’s easily answered. I felt I knew nothing that would be useful to you.’

  ‘Even though you had worked alongside Mr Giles for five years? Even though you are apparently planning to marry the woman who was still his wife at the time of his death?’

  Now Reynolds did seem taken aback, perhaps by the baldness of this, and Bert Hook wondered for a moment if he was quite as committed to marriage as Sue Giles had indicated. It was normal nowadays to find different degrees of enthusiasm for marriage in people who acknowledged each other readily as partners. Reynolds said evenly, ‘I knew no more and no less about Ted than most of his other teaching colleagues. Probably less than Mick Yates, whom I knew you had already seen on Tuesday morning at the school. As for my plans with Sue, they are irrelevant, since they had nothing to do with Ted’s death.’

  I wonder, thought Lambert. A cool customer this, who had measured exactly what he was going to tell them when he came here and was not easily going to be teased or intimidated into more. There would have to be some verbal fencing, until an opening presented itself. He said, ‘Tell us all about your relationship with the late Ted Giles, then. Don’t be afraid to state the obvious; bear in mind we still know very little about him.’

  ‘We taught together for five years. But there was no overlap in our subjects; I’m Head of Social Sciences and Ted taught Chemistry and Biochemistry. We met at staff meetings, liaised a little over sixth-form studies and university applications, but our professional lives were almost entirely separate.’

  ‘And your social lives?’

  ‘The same.’ Reynolds stared at the Superintendent evenly across the three feet which was all that divided them, as if challenging him to prove otherwise.

  ‘Even though you were planning to marry his wife.’

  ‘Even though that was the situation, yes. Perhaps, indeed, because of that. It is possible to be civilised about these things, Superintendent, though I don’t suppose the police come across many examples of it.’ Reynolds took out a packet of slim panatellas from his pocket and said, ‘You don’t mind if I smoke?’

  ‘On the contrary, I’d prefer that you didn’t.’ Especially while you’re being so determinedly cool and uncooperative, thought Lambert. ‘When was the last time you met Ted Giles outside school, Mr Reynolds?’

  For a moment he looked as if he would contest the smoking refusal. Then he put the panatellas slowly back into his pocket, smiled as though he were humouring a petulant child and said, ‘I can’t remember the last time. Probably with the rest of the staff on some end-of-term binge.’

  ‘I see. And when did you form your relationship with Mrs Giles?’

  ‘I’ve known Sue for years. But I suppose we began to get serious about a year ago.’

  ‘That’s when you first became lovers?’

  Reynolds looked now as if he would lose his temper. The brown eyes flashed from one to the other of the men who confronted him and the arms he had kept folded flew apart. Then, with an obvious effort, he controlled himself and said, ‘It was, yes. Look, is all this detail really necessary?’

  ‘Probably not. But you see, we have no real idea yet what will be useful and what won’t, so we have to ask about all sorts of things. We are trying to build up a picture of a dead man, who can’t tell us anything about what was important to him, what pleased him and what annoyed him. Did the fact that you were sharing his wife’s bed annoy Ted Giles, Mr Reynolds?’

  This time Graham Reynolds actually snorted with rage before he was able to suppress it. Then
he seemed to realise that this long-faced policeman with the grizzled hair would be happy enough to rile him, to catch and store some unguarded reaction. He took a deep breath and said evenly, ‘No, it didn’t. Ted knew his marriage was over long before Sue and I became an item. He was sensible enough to realise that.’

  ‘I see. And yet, human nature being what it is, it would not have been surprising if Mr Giles had shown resentment at your new relationship, would it? Not many people find it easy to accept another man enjoying the intimacies they once took for granted, in my experience.’

  Reynolds wished those unflinching grey eyes would leave his face, even for a moment. This unblinking, unembarrassed scrutiny was something he had never had to endure in his life before. He said determinedly, ‘There was no animosity between Ted Giles and me. I told you, we didn’t meet socially, and in our professional dealings we got on perfectly well.’

  ‘I see. In that case, can you explain the fierce altercation you had with Mr Giles in his Chemistry lab on Friday the twenty-sixth of October?’

  Hook, bending studiously over his notebook for most of the interview, looked up when he heard Reynolds gasp, adding the pressure of his own scrutiny to the chief’s. You had to hand it to Lambert; he’d set this complacent bugger up beautifully before he played the one real card he had in his hand. Reynolds played for time, as Bert had somehow known he would. ‘This is Mick Yates, isn’t it? Listening outside doors where he shouldn’t be! Wait till I speak to that interfering young—’

  ‘As you would expect, we cannot reveal the source of our information, Mr Reynolds. I would remind you that my team has interviewed many people at the school, including pupils. It would be as unwise of you to pursue the matter beyond this room as to utter threats within it. Meantime, I must repeat my request that you explain the source of this dispute with a man who is now dead.’