by J M Gregson
In the bottom drawer of his small sideboard, they found the two videotapes he should have ditched when Dennis Cooper first revealed his suspicions. He wanted to say something jaunty and apologetic, something which might mitigate the squalor clinging about him like a shroud. But the words stuck in his dry throat. He wanted a drink, but he felt that even a move to the tap in the kitchen would somehow be a confession.
Then they moved across to the computer and the one man who had not even looked at him so far settled himself comfortably on the chair in front of it with his back to Hugo. ‘You going to give us the password, Mr Wilkinson?’ He didn’t trouble to turn round. When there was no reply, he said in a lower voice to his colleagues, ‘Shouldn’t take long to get into this one.’
Hugo didn’t react. Perhaps if he sat like a statue it would at least delay things. But what was the use of delay? After two minutes, he announced to the ceiling, ‘The password is Henry. That was my father’s name.’
‘Thank you, sir. Cooperation is much the best policy,’ said the man at the computer. Still he did not look round.
The first images of the children came up within sixty seconds. Hugo thought they brought a slight gasp from the man in front of the monitor, but he could not be sure of that. He had no idea whether he was shocked and revolted or whether exposure to other and worse pictures had dulled his reactions to what he found here. He wanted to offer something which would mitigate his guilt, even some light-hearted phrase to break the tension. But there was no word he could say. The steamroller was advancing steadily and inexorably to crush him.
It was over sooner than Hugo had expected. He realized dully that they would examine the full range of the material later at the station. They would no doubt question him about everything in due course, as they prepared a case for the Crown Prosecution Service. The man logged off and carefully shut the computer down.
He sat looking at the empty screen for a moment. Then at last he turned to the wretched figure who lived in this place. ‘We need to take this computer away, sir. You will be given a receipt for this and everything else we remove.’
Not long afterwards, they were ready to go. DI Norman stood in front of Hugo, then took a step backwards, as if he feared that close proximity would tarnish him. ‘Thank you for your cooperation, Mr Wilkinson.’
‘What now?’
Norman hesitated, then said, ‘We shall review the evidence. I am sure that formal charges will be made in the next few days. Do not leave the area without notifying us at this number.’ He set a card down on the table beside him. ‘I understand that you are at present involved in a murder investigation on this site. We do not wish to impede it by taking you into custody at this stage.’
He looked Hugo full in the face on the last sentence, for the first time in their hour’s acquaintance.
Lorna Green presented herself at the murder room at precisely four thirty. Punctuality was a habit with her and she feared that any delay might make her seem nervous. How she presented herself was important to her; it might be additionally important when you were a suspect in a murder enquiry. She renewed her make-up, adjusted a few strands of her neat brown hair, and was prepared for her ordeal.
‘Thank you for coming here so promptly.’ Lambert studied her unhurriedly for a moment. She was a handsome woman at fifty-three, but she looked more strained than he remembered her on Tuesday. She’d given three talks today, but he fancied that it was the task of caring for her mother which was the real problem. He’d seen before how Alzheimer’s carers suffered, and the situation only ever seemed to deteriorate.
This was a woman under stress, but detectives had to be aware that people under stress sometimes took strange actions.
Lorna said, ‘I was here for most of today anyway. Coming in here at the end of it was no problem.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I don’t imagine this is going to take long.’
‘You have another appointment?’
She gave him a tired smile. ‘No other appointments, no. But I have a friend sitting with my mother and I’d like to relieve her as soon as I can. I don’t like leaving Mother on her own nowadays. Over the last few weeks, she’s become . . . rather unpredictable.’ Lorna pronounced the phrase carefully; she didn’t want to be brutal about her mother, but precision was important to her.
‘This shouldn’t take long.’
‘I can’t imagine it will. I’m ready to offer any help I can, but I think I told you all I could on Tuesday morning.’
‘We now have material which we didn’t possess then. Mr Cooper kept a secret notebook which has been passed to us. It contains his thoughts on many of his staff; there are also certain items of information which have proved valuable to us.’
Lambert and Hook were both watching her face closely to register her reaction to this. Unexpectedly, she smiled. ‘Dennis hadn’t changed much, then. He used to write down things like that twenty years and more ago.’
‘I see.’
‘He was a naturally secretive man and he enjoyed it. “Hear all, see all, say nowt!” he used to say – he was brought up in Yorkshire, you know.’
The two men opposite her nodded. Lambert thought Yorkshire origins meant nothing; Hook, who had played against a few dour Yorkshire cricketers in his time, thought it explained a lot about the man. Lambert said, ‘I believe “knowledge is power” is another such saying. Mr Cooper seems to have organized his work as leader around maxims like that.’
‘“Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est”. Usually translated as “Knowledge itself is power”. Francis Bacon, I believe.’
‘If you believe it, Ms Green, then I have not the slightest doubt that it is so.’ Lambert allowed himself the smallest of friendly smiles. ‘I have to tell you, however, that Mr Cooper made notes upon you in this small black book of his.’
‘I feel flattered that he considered me sufficiently important for that.’
‘You are the only one of the voluntary workers here who is accorded this dubious privilege. Perhaps his interest derived from his previous history with you.’
‘And again I should perhaps feel flattered that you think a long-dead affair could still be so influential.’
Lambert paused, steepled his fingers and looked quizzically at this composed woman. ‘How important is your work here to you, Ms Green?’
‘I know a lot about the history of Westbourne Park. It has been a labour of love for me to make myself acquainted with it. I think you were kind enough to say when we last spoke that I probably know as much as anyone alive about this place. But I am quite replaceable. There are other enthusiasts who know enough about these gardens and their history to give the guidance talks which are the main thing I do here.’
‘With respect, that is not what I asked. I wanted to know how important the work here is to you personally. What sort of hole would it leave in your life if it were removed from you?’
She took her time over her reply. ‘I should miss it. There’s no denying that. I love this place, love seeing the gardens in the changing seasons, and I’ve grown even more attached to Westbourne through my work here. It fits in with the present circumstances of my life. It is part-time and I can vary my days to fit in with when I can get people to sit with Mother for me. It’s highly convenient as well as highly enjoyable.’
‘Thank you for being so frank. I must now be equally frank and tell you that Dennis Cooper was planning to dispense with your services.’
‘Would he really have been so petty? I told you on Tuesday that I’d been a bit naughty and corrected him once or twice in public. But he needn’t have seen me as a threat. He’s in charge of the show and I’m an unpaid part-time worker.’
‘Perhaps the very fact that you give your services voluntarily made you a greater threat to him. People who are not in paid posts can afford to be much more independent than those who work here under the curator’s direction.’
‘Yes. I see that. And I suppose I was a little more cavalier with him than I would have been if I�
��d had a full-time job to lose. But I can’t believe he was planning to get rid of me.’
Hook said quietly, ‘I can read you the relevant passage from his notebook if you wish me to, Ms Green.’
She waved a hand briefly and dismissively. ‘That won’t be necessary.’
Lambert waited until her eyes flicked back from Hook to him. ‘You see now why I asked you how much the work here meant to you. Did you in fact care enough to remove the man who was threatening it? I’m not suggesting that you plotted his death carefully. I’m suggesting that tempers rose and an argument got out of hand. That you seized the nearest implement and used it against him.’
‘The nearest implement?’
Lambert nodded at Hook, who said evenly, ‘We now think Mr Cooper was killed by the tightening of a tree-tie upon his neck. If it was a surprise attack, possibly from behind, it would have required no great strength.’
She was silent for a moment, her head a little on one side. Then she said slowly, ‘Yes. A tree-tie would have done it very well. Particularly one of the larger ones we use on the maturing saplings.’
‘We think one was removed from a cherry tree a few yards from the scene of the death.’
‘Then I agree that it was probably the instrument of poor Dennis’s death. What I refute is that I was the person who used it.’
‘You have told us that your work here means a great deal to you. We do not always behave rationally when we are threatened with the unjust removal of something we love. I’m suggesting a quarrel which got out of hand.’
He had half-expected this highly intelligent woman to fly into a rage at his renewed suggestion. Instead she treated it quite calmly.
‘You’re saying that I was a woman under stress and a woman with a previous heavy emotional involvement with Dennis. That I already carried a heavy resentment of the way he had treated me years ago, which was reactivated by his intention to banish me from Westbourne Park.’ She paused, as if waiting for some sort of denial from him. When he said nothing, she said, ‘It’s feasible, I suppose. I’ll admit I was much more resentful than I should have been when he took me to task for correcting him in public. I can’t deny that our past history came into that. And I certainly wouldn’t have welcomed a decision to axe me from the staff here. But I’m a resourceful person. I held down quite a big job for several years and I think I could easily have got other work.’
‘I’m sure you could. Have you had any further thoughts on who could have killed Dennis Cooper?’
‘I’m afraid not. But I haven’t got the advantage of the wealth of knowledge you’ve been accumulating throughout the week.’ There was just enough sharpness in her tone to tell them that she had enjoyed saying that.
‘Clever woman, that,’ said Hook after she had left them.
‘Undoubtedly. But you obviously have something specific in mind, Bert.’
Bert grinned. ‘I was thinking how careful she was to plant the notion that she’d no idea Cooper was planning to dismiss her.’
‘Ye-es. Either that or she was genuinely unaware of it. We only know of it because of his private notes. It’s quite possible he hadn’t broached the idea to her at the time of his death.’
‘I think you’d like Lorna Green to be innocent, because of the woman she is and because she’s coping with her mother’s condition so admirably. Which would of course be highly unprofessional of you.’
‘Highly unprofessional. Just as it would be to hope that a young man who has needed to cope with the rigours of life in a Glasgow council home should not be our man.’
Hook nodded sagely. ‘Two men as professional as we are should soon come up with a solution.’
NINETEEN
The craft of detection is not characterized by sudden blinding insights. Television has encouraged the notion that the conclusion of most cases is the sudden shaft of light into a dark world, the ‘eureka’ moment when the great man clutches his brow, slaps his thigh, and says, ‘Why on earth didn’t I see this before? It’s been staring me in the face all this time and yet I’ve chosen to ignore it!’
Such things are not unknown in CID circles, but they are extremely rare. They occur much more in literature than in fact. In the duller world of real detection, a team accumulates facts steadily, without knowing which ones are going to be relevant to the solution. John Lambert was a Gradgrind about facts. If you gathered enough of them, every case was solvable, he often reminded his serious crime teams.
That was no more than a truism, of course. You never did gather every fact, but in your successful cases you gathered the ones that mattered and made your deductions from them. Lambert shut himself in his study at home on Thursday night and thought for a long time. On Friday morning, he made a long phone call and a few notes before he departed for the murder room at Westbourne Park.
There was no team briefing arranged for this morning. Hook was leaving his car as Lambert drove into the staff area. Lambert beckoned him over and the DS went and sat in the front passenger seat of the chief superintendent’s old Vauxhall. They stared at the wall of neatly cut hedge before them and had a quiet two-minute conversation about what Lambert proposed to do. At the end of it, Hook clasped both hands briefly to his face, rubbed his eyes, and said, ‘Right! Let’s do it.’
‘You sure about this, Bert? I could easily get Chris Rushton to do this one. Be good for him, in fact.’
Hook stared ahead. ‘I’ll do it. Unless you don’t think I’ll be sufficiently professional.’
Lambert grinned. ‘I’ve never seen you be unprofessional in all the years we’ve worked together, Bert. And I’ll enjoy having you beside me for this one. We can’t charge the suspect until we have a confession. There’ll be a good deal of bluff involved.’
‘I know. I’m ready for that.’
‘Good. Usual arrangement. Play it by ear and come in when you think it’s appropriate. We’ve worked it well enough in the past. If you feel up to it, I think you might start things off – he’ll open up more readily to you.’
He got out of the car stiffly and it took him a second or two to straighten. He looked ostentatiously at the gardens and not at Hook as they walked through them. It was a good time to see them, before the public were admitted, but neither man registered much of the beauty today. Lambert managed to get Jim Hartley on the phone in the head gardener’s office and he agreed to send their man to the curator’s office; Jim preferred that term to the murder room, which most of the workers on the site seemed happy to use; murder has its own grisly glamour, even in our violent age.
Hartley said, ‘The lads are in the restroom, on their morning break. We start early, to get as much work as we can done before the visitors come. I’ll send him up to you. Ten minutes?’
‘Ten minutes will be fine.’ Lambert despatched a constable to the exit gate, to make sure no one on a small motorbike was allowed to leave.
Hartley went to the door of the hut the apprentices used as a restroom and watched the young men down the last of their tea with his arrival. ‘Top brass want to see you again, Alex. Better give yourself a wash and brush up. I said you’d be there in ten minutes.’ He’d spoken as casually as he could, but the Scotsman’s exit was followed by curious glances from his colleagues, as he had expected. ‘Time to get on with your jobs, lads. I expect Alex will be back with you before long.’
Alex changed from his working boots into shoes, stripped to the waist, and gave himself a hasty but vigorous wash in the bathroom he shared in the apprentices’ cottage. He’d washed his hair in the shower only a couple of hours earlier; he ran a comb through its wiry resistance now, wondering if this energetic cleansing was a substitute for thought, a means of thrusting away the apprehension he had felt when Jim Hartley gave him the news that the CID wanted to see him for a third time about the death of Dennis Cooper.
The pair he knew from the golf club were waiting expectantly as the uniformed copper showed him into the room. They were studying him even as he entered, before he was p
repared for it. Alex realized that in Glasgow he had always waited for the police in those small, depressing interview rooms; he’d never had to make an entry under scrutiny there. He sat down carefully on the upright chair in front of the big desk, as if he felt it important to place his young limbs precisely. He felt like a boxer adopting a precise stance for a tricky opponent. To the men who had been waiting for him, his face looked very white and his hair an even fiercer red than usual.
They let him sit and sweat for what seemed a long moment. He was resisting a squirm in his legs when Hook said softly, ‘Mr Cooper would never have implemented his threats, you know.’
It was a thought which had gnawed at Alex steadily through the last few nights. He cleared his throat and said, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Wrong line, Alex.’ Hook sounded genuinely concerned by the mistake. ‘You told us yesterday how he’d threatened you with dismissal from here as a result of your misconduct in Cheltenham.’
‘He said he might have to take it into account, that’s all. If things went against me and charges were brought and I was convicted.’
‘It went a little further than that, didn’t it? We know from what he wrote in his notebook that he proposed to rule you out altogether from employment here. I think he rather enjoyed telling you that. Other people as well as you have told us how he relished power, and his knowledge about the people who worked here gave him power.’
‘That’s what got to me! I couldn’t stand how the bastard actually enjoyed telling me that I’d shot my chances here.’
Both detectives recognized the key switch, the beginnings of a confession, but neither of them even glanced at the other; that would have been a wrong move in this complex and macabre game. Instead, Hook nodded and said, ‘I’m sure you tried to reason with him, to tell him that he was overreacting.’
That was the word! How he wished he’d had it on Sunday night. ‘I did. I tried to reason with him. I saw him wandering through the gardens after the storm had passed on down the valley. Everything was quiet and I thought this was my chance to talk to him. Everything seemed fresher and greener after the rain and it seemed the time for a fresh beginning for me too. I wanted to tell him he was going too far and too soon – that he was what you said, overreacting.’ He pronounced each of the five syllables carefully, as if he were mouthing some newly discovered mantra with magical powers.