Skeleton Plot

by J M Gregson

  Lambert nodded, studying her as unemotionally as if she were a rabbit being used for research. ‘How did you come to be in a squat, Ms Clark? Neither your family background nor your previous education is typical of a squat-dweller. Any more than a career such as the one you have enjoyed in recent years normally springs from such beginnings.’

  Kate shrugged. This was safer ground and she was willing to speak more freely about it. ‘How does anyone arrive in such a place? I’d completed my degree and couldn’t get a job in the weeks that followed. Those were the years of boom and bust and I ran straight into bust when I graduated. That recession didn’t last long, but there weren’t many jobs for new, inexperienced graduates. Especially female ones. I had a big row at home and decided I couldn’t spend another night under the parental roof. Things are very black and white, when you’re twenty-one going on twenty-two. A bloke took me to the squat because he thought he’d get inside my knickers. He didn’t and he pissed off pretty smartly. Whereas I, who’d thought I’d be in the squat for a couple of nights, was there for months.’

  ‘And I believe that during those months, you were much closer to Julie Grimshaw than you have so far allowed.’

  She stared at him with open hostility for a moment, then dropped her gaze to the carpet. ‘I went with her to Lower Valley Farm when the son of the farmer invited her there. I didn’t tell you earlier because I wished to distance myself from a death with which I have no connection.’

  It sounded like a statement she had prepared for this fall-back position and it probably was. It was Hook who said to her persuasively, ‘You were friendlier with Julie than you told us you were earlier. I understand your wish to distance yourself from this, but that isn’t possible. It’s time to be frank, Kathy. I use that name because I think that’s what people called you in that squat in Fairfax Street.’

  She’d glanced up sharply at him with that ‘Kathy’, as if it had brought back a wealth of unwelcome associations. ‘I got to know Julie quite well, I suppose. As well as you get to know anyone in a squat. We looked out for each other and each other’s possessions. The women were mostly on the first floor and the men down below. We told each other which men wanted it and which ones were harmless. You’re right: the bloke who fed us drugs in drips was trying to recruit Julie to the trade. But I don’t know his name – I’m not sure I ever did. I told her to steer clear of him.’

  ‘And did she do that?’

  ‘I don’t know whether she did or not. She simply disappeared. She went out one day and never came back.’

  ‘And have you any idea where she went?’

  ‘No. You don’t ask many questions, in squats, if you know what’s good for you. But she didn’t even take her few possessions with her. That seemed odd, even at the time. Now I realize that she’d probably gone out and got herself killed.’

  Her voice didn’t break, even on that thought. For a woman involved in a murder inquiry, she was remarkably composed. Lambert felt like a man who had lost on points in a closely fought contest. He glanced through the door into the kitchen as he prepared to leave and said, ‘Do you live here alone, Ms Clark?’

  She said, with a smile which was suddenly relaxed and attractive, ‘Yes. I enjoy my independence, Mr Lambert.’ Then she followed the direction of his glance and saw the two cups and two plates on the drainer beside the sink. She frowned and added, ‘I allow myself occasional visitors. I’m not a complete workaholic.’

  She felt a quite irrational irritation when he had gone, simply because he had scored that final tiny, irrelevant point in their confrontation.

  TEN

  Michael Wallington found meetings of the town education committee the strangest of all his assignments. He was an employee, but as Chief Education Officer he was the expert here, among town councillors who varied from the well-meaning to the venal and who all had their own agendas. Some made their intentions obvious from the start. Some only declared themselves as people spoke up during the meeting. They were a strange lot, local councillors, varying from committed liberals to the rightest of right-wing fascists, but they were in most cases easy to read.

  The important thing for Michael was that they could be manipulated. They saw things in terms of headlines in the local press; by hinting at what might be printed, you could swiftly modulate their opinions. Today they were discussing music in schools. There was a shortage of properly qualified music teachers in the area and the sole independent councillor on the committee was concerned about children in primary schools being deprived of musical guidance at a vital stage in their development.

  ‘We cannot provide what we have not got,’ said Michael firmly. ‘In an era of scarce resources, we have to prioritize. The absence of music, as of certain other educational luxuries, may be seen as regrettable, but we have to remain clear-sighted. Our main duty is to provide our children with a sound basic education and to meet the demands of the national curriculum. Our head teachers are aware of this and working diligently to achieve it.’

  ‘But there is a demand for music. How do we explain our failure to provide it?’

  Michael smiled tolerantly, the professional among struggling laity. ‘That is up to you, of course. I am only here to advise. But I think we should make people aware of the virtues of our policies, rather than dwelling on any negatives. We are keeping down class sizes rather than allocating money to desirable but peripheral areas of education.’

  Councillors liked a few big words to justify their decisions. Long words and technical jargon showed the punters that they were thinking, dealing with issues which were beyond the comprehension of a mere Joe Public. Wallington watched the retired builder next to him writing down the word ‘peripheral’ and struggling with the spelling.

  The chairman nodded appreciatively. ‘And how do you think we should present this to the main council meeting, Mr Wallington? They asked us to examine the possible provision of primary school music teaching in this meeting.’

  Another deprecating smile, signifying that he was only here to serve, and in particular to serve their interests in the greater context within which they all operated. ‘You are far more experienced in such matters than I am, Mr Turner. But again, I think we can put a positive slant on this. We were asked to make economies, were we not? Told sternly to do so by the council, in fact. I think they reminded us that education was the biggest spender and that they expected us to act accordingly and make the biggest cuts – in terms of gross expenditure, not percentages, of course.’

  He waited for the nods of confirmation and then continued. ‘I think we can present the absence of specialist music teachers in our primary schools as a decision we have taken with great regret, in order to accommodate their instructions to us. We are aware of the national situation and of government directives to cut down on Council Tax. In view of these, we have taken a tough and unwelcome decision to cut out music for the present and to concentrate our attention upon the essentials of primary school achievement in the basic subjects.’

  It was Michael’s longest speech of the education committee meeting and he was pleased to notice much furious scribbling around the table. The chairman nodded his gratitude and spoke approvingly of the three Rs. They were always popular with councillors, the three Rs. Wallington never mentioned them himself, but he provided lots of opportunities for councillors to come in and nod sagely about the need for them. You couldn’t go far wrong with the three Rs, as he’d learned very early in his career in education administration.

  After the meeting several men and women congratulated Wallington on his clear-sightedness and thanked him for his help. He was pleased to see that they came from all political parties. You had to cater for swings in the vote. It was no use being a bright young man with the group which had suddenly lost power: that could actually work against you. Useful to all but servile to none was the impression he needed to give. Efficient but humble, an aid but not a threat. All councillors liked that. When he moved on from here to something bigger, t
he goodwill of councillors would be important to him. The reputation he was working so hard to establish here would go before him; people often underestimated the efficiency of the local government grapevine.

  At the end of the afternoon, Michael Wallington sat in his car and relaxed. He’d handled the meeting well, but these things took more out of you than you realized at the time. He was finding it more difficult to relax than he had done in the past. Stress of the job, perhaps; he wasn’t prepared to admit to himself that it was this other matter which was troubling him. He sat for a full five minutes before he turned on the ignition and started the BMW. It wasn’t typical of him to rest like this; his colleagues, junior and senior, thought he was hugely energetic. And they were surely right, for most of the time, he thought.

  He drove slowly home, patient in the rush-hour traffic – not that you should really even speak of a rush hour in this pleasant rural area. The news bulletin gave him the latest on what the media were now calling ‘the skeleton mystery’. The remains were those of a young woman who had now been identified. Police were anxious to speak to anyone who had lived in a squat in Fairfax Street, Gloucester, in 1995. Anyone who had known occupants of that squat, either at the time or subsequently, should also get in touch with the police and deliver whatever information they could provide.

  Michael drove the car carefully into his garage at home and sat there for a moment, listening to the shrill, carefree voices of his children on the wide lawn at the rear of the house. Then he went into the kitchen and told Debbie that he was finished for the day and at his family’s disposal. She brought them gin and tonics and sat with him whilst he unwound from the day’s tensions in the conservatory.

  They had almost finished their drinks when Michael said quietly, ‘There are things I haven’t told you about my past, darling. Things which may shock you a little.’

  It was almost seven o’clock on Thursday evening when Lambert and Hook visited the house in Fairfax Street, Gloucester, which was Julie Grimshaw’s last known abode. They had been assured by the local beat officers that the house still existed, though the whole street was scheduled for imminent demolition and replacement with modern terraced houses which would be suitable for first-time buyers.

  John Lambert wanted to see the place where the dead girl and her desperate companions had lived. There would be no traces left of them now, of course, but sometimes empty buildings carried echoes; sometimes the idiosyncrasies of construction suggested questions which might be asked. Bricks and mortar, dust and neglect, could sometimes be as evocative as music.

  Even squatters had forsaken this place many years ago. The house would have been long gone, had not the prolonged recession stemming from the sins of international bankers delayed the planned development. It is human failure which peoples squats, even more so in 2015 than twenty years previously. But not even the most desperate of outcasts would have considered using seventeen Fairfax Street now. The roof was almost completely gone; a few of its broken slates lay on the floor of what must once have been a lobby. A few scraps of flowered wallpaper were still visible, but in many places the plaster had fallen away. Not a single pane of glass remained intact in the windows. Most of the wooden frames were missing too, used long ago as fuel by the house’s final denizens. Only ragged holes were left in the walls, like the sightless eyes of some slaughtered beast.

  The two men moved cautiously through what had once been a front door and into the dirt and decomposition which were all that the grimy bricks concealed from the world. There was not enough of the staircase left for any sane attempt to climb to the first floor, but the pair gazed upwards and thought very similar thoughts. Somewhere up there, on one of the floors now dimly visible through shattered interior walls, Julie Grimshaw had walked and crouched and slept and lived the strange life of the squat.

  And incredible though it seemed as they stood here and smelt the decay, that exotic creature they had spoken with only a few hours earlier, now the Customer Services Director of a great national company, had lain beside her and offered comfort in their mutual distress. That was if Kate Clark’s account of those times was to be believed, of course. It was hard to accept that that expensively clothed human powerhouse had ever been here and fought for existence in this dim and threatening place. They had only her account of those times to go on, at present. Ms Clark had seemed so much in control of herself that she had no doubt presented the story she chose and withheld what it suited her to withhold.

  Who else had been here? Lambert kicked aside plastic bottles and flattened cartons and took a further cautious step towards what had once been a kitchen. Here pipes without taps stood jagged above the spot where there had a long time ago been a sink. Something scurried away beneath the remains of skirting board and into the blackness by the far wall. A rat, presumably, but they saw nothing. What other, human, presences had there been on this filthy ground floor two decades ago? Was there here the ghost of someone who had seen fit to remove a twenty-one-year-old woman from the face of the earth?

  Hook was glad when they stepped out of that grim place. It seemed to him a dangerous rather than a useful visit. In less than a week now, this place would be gone for ever. And good riddance, in his view. But Bert conceded that the vision of the place would add something vivid to any future interviews they might conduct with those as yet anonymous beings who had inhabited seventeen Fairfax Street two decades ago.

  At the same moment that John Lambert was standing in the Fairfax Street squat, his opponent of many years was thinking about that very place as he consumed his evening meal and tried to make conversation with his wife.

  Salmon and new potatoes and mangetout peas. Cooked to perfection; he told Hazel that. She smiled bleakly, staring down at the potatoes she had pushed to one side of her own plate. ‘Cooking was never a problem. I used to enjoy it, once. And I enjoyed eating then, as well. I don’t seem to have much of an appetite now.’

  It was an effort for her to talk and both of them knew it. Steve was grateful for that effort, but she seemed like a stranger attempting to say the polite, conventional things. And what was he? For much of the time, he felt no more than a stranger here. He had to tread carefully in his own house, with his own wife. He was treating her better now than he had ever treated her. Certainly he was far more considerate of her feelings than he had been when he was making millions and doing as he pleased. He’d been out for most of the time then and taking women as the fancy seized him.

  Yet he wanted Hazel now more than he had ever wanted her. Needed her more than he had ever needed her, perhaps. He was moving in his own home like a man treading on hot coals. His companions of the great days would laugh at him if they could see him now, behaving so carefully with a woman. It all came back to Liam, of course. The boy came between them as if he was in the next room, instead of being dead and buried these many years.

  Steve said, ‘I have to go out tonight. I won’t be very long.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  Steve willed her to ask him where he was going, what he was about. But she began piling the dishes together. In a moment she would be gone to fetch the dessert. Their first strawberries of the summer, which he’d brought back from the market in Oldford. He said quickly, ‘I’m going to see Jack Dutton.’

  ‘That’s good.’ But she’d no notion whether it was good or bad, and she didn’t care.

  ‘He’s dying, Hazel.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that. But I hardly knew him, did I?’ There was only one death which affected Hazel Williams, but that ruled her whole life.

  Steve went out and threw himself into the seat of the big maroon Jaguar. He’d enjoyed driving until recently, but tonight it was a chore, merely a method of transferring himself from point A to point B, as most journeys recently seemed to have become. He found a space easily in the hospice car park and stumped heavily into the quiet building. This was a place where people came to die. Happily, for the most part. Hospices did a wonderful job; everyone said
that, and Steve was sure that it was true.

  He hadn’t thought to bring anything with him. He couldn’t recall the last time he had visited anyone in hospital. He could still remember very vividly identifying Liam in the morgue, but that was quite different. He couldn’t recall when he’d last visited anyone in a hospital bed. And even this wasn’t a normal hospital, where people had surgery and then got better. The man he had come to see would be dead within the week.

  But dying men sometimes went in for confessions, and this one mustn’t say anything damaging in his last few days.

  Steve would scarcely have recognized Jack Dutton if he had not been directed so precisely to his bedside. The thin frame beneath the blankets must be less than half the weight of the man who had worked for him and done his bidding so unquestioningly all those years ago. Steve had to tell Dutton who he was, then watch the grey face nod without interest.

  So this was death, the universal enemy whom no one could defeat. Everything here was done to take the grimness away from the reaper, but he would come for his harvest nonetheless. ‘Doesn’t seem long since I was paying you good money, Jack,’ said Williams awkwardly.

  He couldn’t remember making conversation with a dying man before. It seemed inconceivable now that this man had been one of his ‘heavies’, employed emphatically for brawn rather than brain. It was one of the first things you did when you established yourself in the shady businesses of brothels and loan-sharking. You paid other men to do your enforcing; you didn’t do any of the rough stuff yourself. Apart from the fact that violence was risky and could land you in court and in clink as soon as it went wrong, employing other people to do your roughing up and your retributions showed that you’d made it, that you were a big player in the criminal world.

  The man dying beneath the bedclothes had shed plenty of blood and broken plenty of bones in his time. He’d done all kinds of dirty work for the ageing, bald tycoon who sat beside his bed. And he’d been paid handsomely for it. Reliable and trustworthy hard men didn’t come cheap.