Skeleton Plot

by J M Gregson

  ‘What about the boy himself?’

  ‘Andrew Burrell went off and did an arts degree at Liverpool University instead of obtaining the agricultural qualifications his parents had envisaged. He is now a lecturer at the University of Gloucester. A little precious about his work there and a little evasive about his exact relationship with Julie in 1995. That doesn’t make him a murderer, but I want to interview him again when we’ve gathered more information from other sources. He agrees that there might have been a certain amount of missionary zeal in his attempt to rescue Julie from the squat and from drug addiction. Young people on drugs are notoriously moody and unpredictable. Julie’s death could have been simply the result of a lovers’ tiff. Or Andrew might have taken it badly if Julie said she’d had enough of him and proposed to end the affair.’

  ‘Or she might have ditched him for someone else and brought the green-eyed monster into play.’

  ‘Exactly. These are all possibilities until we can eliminate them. At the moment we only have Andrew Burrell’s word for it that his girl friend simply disappeared and that he knew no more about her until her skeleton was unearthed last Saturday. We need to check whether other people who were around at the time agree with him on that.’

  ‘You have these other people available?’

  ‘Some of them. Two of the most vital are already dead: Andrew Burrell’s mother, Emily, and a boy of around Julie’s own age who had some sort of association with her, the exact nature of which has yet to be confirmed; I’ll come to him in a minute. There is also a contemporary of Andrew Burrell’s, James Simmons, who lived with him at Lower Valley Farm in 1995. He was at that time an employee of Daniel Burrell, who was still running his own farm. Simmons was favoured by Daniel when he found that his own son was not interested in taking over the farm.’

  ‘James Simmons is the man in possession at Lower Valley Farm now.’ The Chief Constable recalled the name with some satisfaction. It was always good to show your senior staff that you’d read their briefings and were on the ball. Armstrong had been blessed from childhood with a good memory and he had found it more and more valuable to him as he had advanced through the hierarchy of the police service.

  ‘Yes. In fact Jim Simmons now owns Lower Valley Farm. Daniel Burrell was happy to sell it to him, as a favoured employee who wished to carry on working the land on the lines he had been following himself. That is a considerable compliment, because the Burrells have farmed that land for well over two hundred years – since it was the home farm of the great house which disappeared along with many others in the nineteen twenties.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that this death was connected with the farm in some way? I know that land, with its uses and traditions, can be a huge force in the lives of those who live on it and work it.’ Gordon Amstrong, sharp-suited bureaucrat who thrived on the machinery of urban life and now directed the operations of four hundred police officers and numerous civilian employees, had begun life as the son of a pig and poultry farmer in Wiltshire.

  Lambert’s smile contained more frustration than humour. ‘I don’t as yet see how this death can be related to the farm, but we’re keeping open minds. Jim Simmons now lives in the farmhouse with his wife and two children. I felt he was rather anxious to parade himself as a paragon of family life when we spoke with him on Sunday, but I may be too cynical.’

  ‘You’re paid to be cynical, John. We don’t broadcast it, but cynicism is part of the CID equipment. We’re going back twenty years here. Simmons might have been a different and more irresponsible man then.’

  ‘He agreed when we questioned him that he’d had his wild moments in his youth, which more or less coincided with the days when Julie Grimshaw was around the farm. She was brought there from the squat by Andrew Burrell and she wasn’t a popular visitor with Daniel Burrell or his wife. I’m not sure how close Jim Simmons was to Julie, or what motive he might have had. Was he a rival to Andrew Burrell for her affections? Could he even have got rid of her as a favour to Daniel Burrell, his employer and the farm owner? Was the transfer of the farm to his ownership a few years later a pay-off for favours rendered? He’s now running it very efficiently and with a happy family installed there, but as you say I’m paid to accept nothing at face value.’

  ‘You said you had four other people who were of major interest to you, in addition to Katherine Clark and Michael Wallington, the two who’d been in that squat with the murdered woman. I make that three so far.’

  Lambert gave his chief another mirthless grin. ‘I suppose I’ve left Steve Williams until the last because he’s an old adversary of mine. One who’s won most of the rounds between us so far.’

  ‘We’re all aware of what Steve Williams is, John. A known villain, mostly in prostitution and gaming and loan-sharking, who’s seen off his lesser rivals in our area and surrounded himself with all the trappings of a successful crime boss, including heavies to do his dirty work and crafty lawyers who make sure nothing nasty sticks to him. The kind all coppers hate and most criminals admire and fear.’

  ‘Fear is one of our problems, sir. It’s been difficult to get anyone to give evidence against Williams and his activities. Understandably – because the only person who did so during his early years disappeared without trace and was never found. These things get around. I can hardly claim to be unbiased, where Williams is concerned. As he’ll be only too happy to point out, if we get anywhere near him.’

  ‘Let me deal with that, if it comes to it, John. But you know as well as I do that we’ll need a cast iron case before we take him to court. The Crown Prosecution Service won’t be interested in anything less than that. They’ve burned their fingers too often before with men like Williams. It’s the old story: the worst people in our society can afford the best lawyers.’

  ‘Steve Williams may of course be as guilty as hell about all kinds of things in the past and as innocent as snow in this case. I’ve no evidence as yet to connect him with Julie’s death and I can’t see it being easy to find any.’

  ‘Why do you even think there might be a connection?’

  ‘I’ve no more to throw against him at the moment than his proximity to the site. At the time when that body was buried, his was the nearest residence. The grave was at the edge of Lower Valley Farm, but the farmhouse and farm buildings are much further from the spot than Williams’s house.’

  ‘But would you choose a burial site so near to your own house?’

  ‘Not if I had the choice. But if I’d killed a woman, perhaps without prior intent, I’d be anxious to get rid of the body as quickly as possible. It’s only about two hundred yards from Williams’s house, but in every other respect it was a pretty remote spot at the time. The housing estate has been built there now, of course, but it must have seemed a safe enough site for a shallow grave at the time.’

  ‘But you’re a fair man, John – well, perhaps not where Steve Williams is concerned, because he doesn’t deserve fairness. But let’s say objective. I don’t see you pursuing Williams just because of the proximity of his house to the burial place.’

  ‘There’d be no future in doing that. He’d laugh at us. But when I talked with him on Wednesday, I sensed he wasn’t confident. He tried to be his normal truculent self, but he couldn’t carry that through. The problem for us is that there are two people we’d like to interview and can’t. One is Liam Williams, Steve’s son. He’s the lad I mentioned earlier who had some sort of relationship with Julie in the weeks before her death. But we can’t talk to him about it, because Liam was killed in a road traffic incident eight years ago. The other one is the boy’s mother, Hazel Williams. But she was so devastated by the death of her only son that she’s become a virtual recluse. Her husband doesn’t want us to talk with her and we haven’t enough material to force an interview. The Williamses are voluntarily helping us with our enquiries and if she refuses to talk we haven’t sufficient grounds for compulsion.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Try to get
more evidence. We now have a much clearer picture of the life Julie Grimshaw was living in the squat, and elsewhere, than we had six days ago. I need to see the people I’ve just discussed with you again and probe for more details. It could be that none of them is responsible for her death; women in danger of addiction are vulnerable in all sorts of areas. But I have questions which need answering.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. I know as well as you do that in complex cases the principal CID task is to establish the questions which need answering. That must be even more true when the crime was committed twenty years ago. I wish you luck with it.’

  It was only John Lambert’s second private meeting with the new Chief Constable. He had suspected when the appointment was arranged that the new man was seeking for opportunities to be rid of him, that he was regarded as a survival from an earlier age by a man surging forward on the tide of new ideas. That was probably inevitable when a man ten years younger than you was put in charge of things.

  For his part, Gordon Armstrong had feared that his most senior CID officer might be a man cocooned in the mores and practices of a previous generation, resistant to change, perhaps making sour and damaging comments to others when the newly installed CC was not around to look after himself. He had found in John Lambert only a man anxious to solve crimes, a man who wished to avoid the machinations and jockeyings for position which dominated so much of his own life. Like most chief constables, he had been a CID man himself; he understood the challenges and frustrations of detection and recognized a man who handled them both with integrity.

  Each man had been cautious. Each man left this meeting with a higher opinion of the other.

  In the early part of Friday evening, Michael Wallington was on the golf course at Ross-on-Wye. He was playing with a head teacher of about his own age whom he had helped to appoint four months earlier, in his role as Chief Education Officer.

  The pair were trying to unwind after what had been a trying week for both of them, as they had agreed in the dressing room while donning their golf shoes. Tony Proctor, the head teacher, had endured problems with the supply teacher replacing a woman on pregnancy leave, with inexperienced young teachers who were having difficulty keeping order, and with a senior member of his staff who had finally given up on her Lothario husband and was enduring the stresses of a belated divorce.

  Mike Wallington also had problems. He didn’t specify what these were to his golfing companion. He merely told him that it had been a difficult week and that he was looking forward to a relaxing few holes.

  They had perfect conditions for recreation. It was a peaceful early summer evening, with the sun still warm as the shadows lengthened and the birds bade their farewell to the day. The forest trees were in full, fresh leaf now, with multiple shades of green to delight the eye and define and individualize each hole. The course was in perfect condition and the putting surfaces were like green velvet, fast and true. An elderly foursome ahead of them called them through on the second hole, and from then on they had the green acres of the course to themselves.

  They congratulated themselves three times during the progress of the round on being exactly where they were. There were few better places to be on a June evening than in Britain in a setting like this. Mike had been playing golf for three years now. Golf in a setting like this was part of his reaction against those wild early days which he had now left far behind him, an assurance to himself as well as to others that Michael Wallington, Chief Education Officer, was not only an important and influential person but part of the respectable middle-class establishment.

  Having decided to give his time to the sport, Michael had caught the golfing bug. He was genuinely very keen on the game now. He’d had lessons and he’d been looking forward to the summer evenings, when he would be able to grab a few holes and improve his game in preparation for the greater challenges of weekend golf with the titans of the club. His handicap was coming down steadily; he felt that all he needed to do to reduce it even further was to play lots of golf.

  But tonight he couldn’t concentrate. He exchanged the usual banter with Tony Proctor as they swapped holes and moved rapidly round the course, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Proctor was too intelligent a man to miss that. He asked what was worrying Mike and offered to provide any help he could. By way of reply, he received only a weak smile of gratitude and an assurance that nothing was wrong. Wallington departed after a quick beer with a token assurance that they must do this again.

  Mike was too late to read the bedtime story to his children, to his secret relief. He congratulated his son on his gold star from school and planted a gentle kiss on the forehead of his five-year-old daughter, who was already almost asleep. He went softly down the stairs and poured a glass of white wine for Debbie, but only water for himself. They sat quietly in the conservatory and watched the sun descending to leave a crimson sky over the Welsh hills. His wife was eight years younger than he was and he was sure he was genuinely in love with her. He certainly gave more of himself to her than he had believed he would give to any woman.

  He had told her things about his past over the last few years. Not everything, but more than he had thought he would ever concede to anyone. He didn’t regret that. Honesty was part of giving, one of the things you had to practise if you wished to love and be loved. You had to reveal yourself to your partner and learn intimate things about her, if the two of you were to be close. There were moments when he’d felt tempted to tell Debbie everything, to shock her with all the details, to unburden himself completely of the guilt he felt about those days.

  But he was glad now that he’d held the worst things back. It wouldn’t have been fair to overwhelm her with that degree of knowledge about him. She was such an innocent, Debbie: that was one of the things he loved in her.

  He watched her now and smiled at her as she sipped her wine. Then he thought of the sinister figure from his past who had contacted him after the meeting at the school on Monday night and wondered again how much Debbie would discover about him in the days to come. He said quietly, ‘If the police come asking questions, you may need to be discreet. It will be much better for us if you pretend to know nothing about some of the things I have told you.’

  THIRTEEN

  Chief Superintendent John Lambert was a townsman, bred on urban life and urban ways. Not a bad thing, because the vast majority of criminals were city-based. Murderers were a special case, of course: they came from all classes and all sorts of backgrounds. They could be illiterate or highly educated, crude or sophisticated, and they might come from any one of the complex sub-divisions of the British class system.

  Detective Sergeant Hook was from a different background, which was one of the many reasons why they complemented each other so well as a detective duo. Bert as a Barnardo’s boy had been bred on communal life in a closed environment and taught to be grateful for whatever good things came to him, in an almost Victorian ethic. All his early work placements had been rural. He had grown up knowing and respecting the long hours and hard, unrelenting work of country life. And he had been a doughty minor counties pace bowler for Herefordshire, one of the most rural of English counties, for seventeen years, running in rhythmically to surprise public- school batsmen with his pace, which was always a little sharper than it looked from the pavilion.

  It was Hook who looked at the varied acres of Lower Valley Farm as the pair drove up the long lane to the stone farmhouse. It was Hook who gave the verdict on what they saw as Lambert parked his ancient Vauxhall on the cobbled farmyard. Poultry no longer roamed here as they might have done when Bert had done his very first farm stint as a wide-eyed twelve-year-old boy. Hook looked around and said, ‘This place is doing well, unlike most small farms. This man knows what he’s doing and what’s required.’

  The man in question was Jim Simmons, and he was nowhere to be seen at this moment. Nature does not work to man’s calendar; Saturday is not a day off for farmers. Jim’s wife Lisa was apologetic. ‘He knew you
were coming and he knew the time you’d agreed. He gets so wrapped up in the problems out there that he forgets all about time, sometimes. I’ll try his mobile.’ She said this last a little self-consciously, as if demonstrating that this farm was not set in the old ways; that was a perpetual theme of her husband’s. But seconds later, she had to report failure. ‘He switches it off when he’s on the tractor,’ she said. ‘I’ll get Jamie to go and fetch him for you.’

  The bright-eyed eight-year-old was dispatched to look for his father, though he would much rather have stayed and gazed with open mouth at the great detective John Lambert. His companions at school had been much impressed by his account of the previous visit of the great man, and Jamie had been looking forward to retailing every detail of a second episode to them.

  Jamie was back with them in three minutes exactly, bouncing like an ebullient monkey on the tractor beside his father, waving enthusiastically to the CID men as Simmons parked beside the old Vauxhall Senator. ‘Dad was on his way here!’ he said by way of exculpating his errant parent. ‘He forgets the time when he gets to the wheatfield.’ Like many a boy of his age, he retailed with an air of original wisdom the things he derided when his mother said them.