by J M Gregson
‘He hit her over the head with something. A bottle, I think.’
‘This is rubbish. I never—’
‘I heard him talking to his man about it afterwards. The man he usually got to do his dirty work for him.’
Hook nodded, gave her a small smile of sympathy. ‘Jack Dutton, that would be.’
Hazel looked at him as if she had forgotten his presence beside her. ‘That’s the man, yes. Jack Dutton. I think he’s dead.’
‘He is, yes, Hazel. Only last week. But our officers have been able to talk to members of his family.’
Steve Williams said dully, ‘That little slut was never going to be good enough for Liam. I was safeguarding our boy’s interests.’
It was the first time he had not attempted to deny it. It was his first acknowledgement that this was going to end as his wife had determined it would. Lambert said, ‘You can’t shut every mouth with gold, Williams. Even dead men can tell tales, when you throw blood money at their families to buy their silence. It was Jack Dutton who buried the body for you, wasn’t it?’
The big man was sixty-six. He looked abruptly much older than that. There was a long silence before he said, ‘I told that Grimshaw girl to go, but she wouldn’t leave. I wanted her out of his life for ever before Liam came home that night. But she refused. She said she was waiting for Liam, that she’d only go if he told her to go, not me. I wasn’t used to people saying no to me, in those days.’
Williams sounded suddenly, naively, puzzled. His self-control was seeping away, now that he knew he had lost this game he had thought he never could.
‘So you hit her because she would not leave your house.’
‘Because she would not leave the house and because she would not leave my Liam. I had to safeguard his interests, didn’t I?’
He seemed to have forgotten now that he was speaking to his sworn enemies, that he was asking for sympathy where he could expect none. Lambert said with unusual passion, ‘No, you did not, Williams. Not if safeguarding what you saw as his interests meant breaking the law. Not if it meant a murder you have contrived to conceal for twenty years.’
He uttered the formal words of arrest and issued the formal warning to his old enemy that he did not have to say anything but anything that he did say might be used in the court case which was to come. Williams said dully, ‘I don’t think I meant to kill her. I saw red and I just wanted rid of her.’
‘But you concealed her body. You wanted to make sure that no one knew of your crime.’
‘Jack Dutton was a good man. He never let me down. He was round in ten minutes when I rang him. We had to get rid of the corpse quickly. Liam drove in through the front gates as Jack took the Grimshaw girl out at the back. Jack found some ground at the edge of the farm which had already been disturbed and he put the body in there.’
They took Williams out to the police vehicle Lambert had arranged should be waiting. Their prisoner stopped for a moment in the doorway of his dining room, looking down at the still motionless figure of his wife at the table. ‘I didn’t know that you knew, Hazel. I wanted to protect you from it.’
Still she did not look at him. She stared instead at the table as she said evenly, ‘You didn’t know a lot of things, Stephen. You didn’t care what I thought. You behaved as if I did not exist, in those days.’
Lambert went out and saw his quarry handcuffed to a uniformed officer in the back of the police Mondeo. He wasn’t taking any chances with Steve Williams, even in this broken state. He radioed for a female officer to come and oversee the next few hours for Hazel Williams. He had given a brief nod to Bert Hook, who had stayed in the room with the stricken woman, offering her a sad smile but no words.
They drove within yards of the place where that skeleton had been discovered ten days earlier. What was left of Julie Grimshaw was to be interred under her mother’s direction in a different, more appropriate place, with a headstone to protect her memory.
It was, he supposed, a kind of closure on the life of that troubled, curiously innocent girl.