by J M Gregson
‘And Alison Watts was part of all that? No different from any other girl?’
‘They’re all different, Mr Lambert. Every kid is an individual. Educational theory insists upon it.’ The dark eyes twinkled at them, when they had expected her to be conventionally cowed by this death. ‘When they become old enough to be called students, they insist upon it themselves. But yes, Alison Watts had the same urges as most girls in late adolescence. She was as interested in boys as most of her peers. Long before you reach her age, it’s a status symbol to have a boyfriend, especially in a co-educational school. Alison had got beyond that stage: she was a young woman, old enough to vote. She’d missed a year out through a school change when she was much younger, so that she was a year older than most of her group. She knew she was pretty, that she had no difficulty in attracting boys. Even men, when she wanted them.’
Lambert looked at her sharply. ‘Men? Presumably you have some reason for saying that, Mrs Peplow?’
‘Not really. It was rather a silly thing to say. I was just emphasising that Miss Watts was a young woman, not a schoolgirl, I suppose. I have no doubt that she led quite a full life outside the school.’ But this composed, humorous woman had been disconcerted for an instant, as if conscious of her own indiscretion. It had been no more than a fleeting moment, and she had recovered herself just as quickly.
Lambert said, ‘We shall be investigating that life outside school, of course. Indeed, we have already begun to do so. But if you know of any connections this girl may have had with either men or women, it is your duty to tell us about them. I need hardly remind you that this is not a routine death; we are directing a murder investigation.’
‘Yes. I’m aware of that, but I can tell you nothing that is helpful. I didn’t teach the girl myself, though I did when she was lower down the school.’ She was tight-lipped now, suddenly careful. Then she smiled and said, ‘A Superintendent is rather a grand rank, isn’t it? I thought you’d be desk-bound at CID headquarters, like a headmaster who is so busy administrating that he has no time to teach anymore.’
It was a blatant attempt to divert him from a particular line of questioning. He wondered for a moment if there was a little resentment of her own headmaster in the comparison. But she was shrewd and correct: Lambert, in insisting on being out and about amid the suspects in any enquiry, was quite atypical of his rank. Commissioners and Chief Constables sometimes raised questions as well as eyebrows over it, but he survived because he got results. As long as he caught high-profile villains, he made other reputations as well as his own, and the hierarchy sanctioned his methods. He said gruffly, ‘I find I get the feel of a case better if I am in direct contact with those involved. Sometimes you read between the lines of what people say. Or hear between the words, I suppose I should say.’
He looked a direct challenge at her, letting her know that the thought referred to her. But the moment when she had almost speculated about the dead girl’s contacts was past. She said evenly, ‘I’ll assemble a group of her close friends for you to talk to, but it will take a little time: they’re all in different classes, you see. Could you see them at twelve o’clock? The sooner the better — this place will be rife with rumour once the kids pick up the fact that Alison was murdered.’
‘Indeed it will. We shall be as low-key as possible in our approach, but we shall also need to be as thorough as is necessary. We’ll have to question anyone in the school who seems to have had a close connection with the dead girl. Male or female. Pupils or staff.’
He hoped he might get a reaction to the last phrase, but Margaret Peplow looked thoughtfully at the rug between them on the polished floor. ‘Yes, I understand that. I’ll try to get hold of anyone who might be helpful to you in the next couple of hours. But please remember that most of the people you will see are now well into their final year of A level studies, preparing for exams which will shape the rest of their lives. It is vital that that preparation is disrupted as little as possible.’
‘It will be, I can assure you. But the way to ensure that is for people to be as frank as possible from the start. Perhaps you would be good enough to convey that thought to the people you are going to get together for us.’
She nodded, stood up as Hook shut his notebook, then realised she had anticipated the end of the interview. Her relief was transparent; Lambert studied it for a moment before he said, ‘What do you know of the girl’s relations with her parents, Mrs Peplow?’
She shrugged. ‘Mr Watts is a stepfather, I understand. I don’t think we’ve ever seen him in the school. Mrs Watts came to some of the parent-teacher meetings. The last time I saw her was a couple of years ago. She’s not particularly highly educated herself, but she seemed a caring mother, anxious to do the best possible things for her child. But you only see one dimension of parents, when you meet them to talk about their children’s progress at school. It’s a stress situation — on both sides sometimes, but in different ways.’ She smiled, happy to be on ground where she had the advantage of them.
‘You say you never saw Mr Watts. Is that unusual?’
‘No, not particularly. Lots of parents leave these meetings to one or the other: usually it’s Mum who gets the short straw. In some cases, we don’t see either of them for years. That’s trouble, particularly with younger children: it usually gets through to the child that no one is particularly interested in his or her progress and behaviour.’
‘But Alison Watts was a good student?’
‘Yes. Like almost everyone else, she had her distractions, over the years. But that’s part of growing up. We teachers often assume that kids should perform at their optimum all the time, but it’s part of human nature that they don’t.’
‘But there was no dramatic falling away in the last few months?’
‘No, I don’t think so. We only have internal exams at the end of the first year sixth, but no one said they noticed anything dreadful. She wasn’t brilliant, but she’d have made university all right, with a reasonable performance this year.’
‘And no traumas that you were aware of in her personal life?’
‘No. We asked ourselves about that when she went missing, naturally, but we didn’t turn up anything remarkable. Of course, young people of that age can be pretty clannish when it comes to concealing things. You may find them more forthcoming than they were to us, now that you’re engaged upon a murder investigation.’
Again it was a shrewd insight into their work. The worst crime of all carried with it a grisly glamour. People were fascinated by their involvement in an investigation, however peripheral. It made them more anxious to be helpful, to reveal as much as they could so as to retain their contact with the uneasy excitement of murder and violence. Lambert said, ‘We’ll see the group you think were her particular friends together, initially. We’ll give them the chance to speak to us individually afterwards, if they wish to. Did Alison have a steady boyfriend?’
‘Yes. Jamie Allen. Nice lad.’ She looked for a moment as if she might comment on the relationship, then shut her lips firmly.
‘We’ll see him on his own, after the others, if you’d be good enough to arrange it. And the same with any individual members of staff who might have a particular insight into the girl’s life.’
‘I doubt whether there are any of those.’ The denial came too quickly upon the question, as Lambert had felt it might. Then, as if she realised it and felt the need to extricate herself, Margaret Peplow said hastily, ‘I’ll ask around, of course, but I doubt whether I’ll come up with any member of staff for you.’
It left Lambert more than ever convinced that there was such a person.
*
Men are forbidden visitors to hostels for battered wives. Understandably. Lambert took a female Detective Sergeant with him and let her do the talking.
DS Ruth David was an athletic, willowy thirty-year-old who looked as if she had never been hit in her life. That didn’t endear her to the woman who opened the heavy Victorian wooden
door six inches after inspecting their warrants at the eye-hole. ‘Mrs Watts ain’t seem’ no one,’ said this squat figure. ‘And we don’t let men in here, anyway.’ She looked at Lambert as if she suspected him of fouling the doorstep.
‘Nevertheless, we need to see her,’ said Ruth David calmly. ‘You can send her out here if you like, or we’ll take her down to the station if we have to. But it would be better if we saw her inside your stronghold. I’m sure she’d feel safer there.’
The door opened another inch, so that they got the full width of the guardian’s scowl. ‘She ain’t done nothing.’
‘We don’t think she has, but we need her help.’
‘To put that bugger behind bars. That’s what you need her help for.’
‘Perhaps. If he has damaged her, and she is prepared to bring charges, we may be able to do just that.’ Ruth David was well aware that it was usually the battered woman’s reluctance to pursue matters through the courts that enabled the offender to escape justice.
Perhaps this sturdy sentry also knew about that. She opened the door another inch, then said with a nod at Lambert, ‘He can’t come in ‘ere. No way.’
‘I think he can. I understand your reservations, but on this occasion he must. Can you find us a room to talk? As near to the front door as you like, so long as it’s private.’
DS David accompanied the last sentence with her most confident smile, and the woman allowed them grudgingly to penetrate the outer recesses of her citadel. She led them into an office three yards from the thick front door and shut the door firmly upon them only when she saw Lambert safely seated, as though she was shutting in a dangerous dog. It was a room with a frayed Indian rug in the middle, a serviceable but ancient wooden desk, and three scratched filing cabinets which were obviously cast-offs from some more affluent office. Perhaps everything in this place was battered. Or perhaps, as seemed increasingly the case, a necessary and worthy enterprise was starved of funds, was dependent on voluntary contributions for its upkeep and survival.
Katherine Mary Watts came into the room within a minute. Her hair was untidy, dropping in an unintended curtain over one side of her face until she tossed it aside. She had been crying, which is what they expected: it was little more than twelve hours since she had heard the news of her daughter’s death from the WPC who had been dispatched hastily to the refuge when they heard of her presence there. Her eyes were puffed, her cheeks an unnatural, tear-washed red. But grief did not account for the ugly bruise and broken flesh on the side of her forehead, dangerously near her temple, nor the swollen, misshapen nose which she now dabbed with a fistful of tissues.
Lambert had risen when she entered, but he had more sense than to attempt any formal contact. He carefully avoided even moving forward to cut down the space between them. He sat down when the dead girl’s mother sat. He could not but be aware of the contrast between this shabby, defeated figure and the cool and unforced beauty of Ruth David in her maroon top and slate-grey pleated skirt. Life rarely seemed fair in the manifestations it offered to him. He said formally, ‘You are Katherine Watts?’
‘Yes. Kate. Everyone calls me Kate.’
‘Right. Kate it shall be.’
She looked him in the face for the first time since she had come into the room, as if she took his friendliness as some kind of challenge. ‘I’m not going to bring a complaint against him, you know. He doesn’t mean anything. Some of it’s my fault, really.’
Ruth David said quickly, ‘But it isn’t, is it, Kate? People always say things like that to us. You should consider charging him, you know.’
‘No. He doesn’t really mean anything. But when money’s tight and the drink gets to him, he forgets himself. And I expect I nag him a bit. Some of it must be my fault.’
‘You don’t really believe that, Kate, any more than I do. Did you hit him? Has he got a face knocked out of shape?’
It took another woman to be as impatient, as brutal about the results of violence, as this; Lambert would not have risked it, in this room where he felt like an interloper. Kate Watts’s hand rose unthinkingly to the damage on her head as she shook it at her questioner, fingering the swelling near her temple, estimating the disfigurement with her fingers. Perhaps she had not dared to look in the mirror that day. She said wearily, ‘Just leave it, will you? We’ll sort ourselves out. Robert’s a good man, most of the time.’
They had heard it too often for it to fill them with anything but despair. But there was nothing they could do to force the woman to face facts; far too often the Crown Prosecution Service spent days preparing an effective case in situations like this, only for it never to come to court when their chief witness withdrew at the eleventh hour. Sometimes, as it seemed to be in this case, it was through misguided loyalty, the mistaken belief in the hearts of many women that their patience and love could quell the violence in a man where others had failed. Sometimes it was merely fear that more and worse violence would result from any attempt to pursue things through the courts.
Lambert said quietly, ‘You need to consider what Detective Sergeant David is saying very carefully, Mrs Watts. But we are not here this morning to ask you for any statement about how you came to be in this place. We are here to talk to you about your daughter.’
She looked at him again now, with wide, blue, tear-washed eyes. ‘Alison was murdered, wasn’t she? I felt it from the start. I’ve become more certain with each week that’s passed since she disappeared. She’d have been in touch otherwise. She wasn’t the kind to go off without a word to her mother.’
She seemed calm, even composed, despite her grief. They were going to be able to question her, when they had feared that she would be too distraught to make much sense. Lambert said, ‘I can understand that you feared she must be dead, when the weeks went past and you didn’t hear from her. But why did you think she had been murdered, Kate?’
He had said it gently. But she looked for a moment like a cornered animal, as if she had been caught out in a mistake and now did not know where to turn. ‘I don’t know why I said that. I — I suppose I just thought she might have been getting in with the wrong sort of people. Then, when she disappeared, and I had all those long hours during the nights to think about it, I suppose I feared the worst.’ She looked at him desperately, feeling incoherent, wondering whether her words made any kind of sense, wanting this man who listened so attentively to interrupt her, to say he understood, to smooth over her fears with consoling words. Since she had entered this hostel, everyone she had spoken to had been anxious only to reassure her, to convince her that the world was not as bad a place as it had appeared during the worst times outside.
Now she was facing the first male face she had seen for three days, lined and inquisitive, the grey eyes seeming to reach into her very soul. He did not speak, when she waited for him to do so, and she went on desperately, disjointedly, ‘Girls get secretive at Alison’s age. She went out quite a lot — much more than she used to. And I didn’t always know where she was, especially at the weekends. I suppose it made me imagine all kinds of things were going on. But probably they weren’t. But Alison was almost a young woman, you know. And educated. Quite leaving her old mum behind.’
She gave them an involuntary, unexpected smile on that thought. Then tears sprang to her eyes and she dabbed again with her tissues at the red, sore cheeks beneath them. Lambert had the ruthlessness of the long-term CID man. Distress made a woman vulnerable: she might reveal things in her anguish that she would hide when she was in control of herself. He said calmly, ‘Who do you think might have killed Alison, Mrs Watts?’
‘No one. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know why I did.’
‘Because someone did. You were the one who was right in your fears when she was missing, you see. Someone had killed her. And I’m sure you are more anxious than anyone that we should bring the person who killed your daughter to justice.’
‘Yes. Yes I am. Yes, of course.’
In her distrac
tion, she spoke like one anxious to convince herself. She stared down at her shoes. They saw that her hair, which must once have been bright red, even carroty, was grey over an inch up from its roots. She must have been pretty once, in a round-faced, snub-nosed way. Carefree as a doll, thought Lambert. Now that nose was distorted and swollen, and he had been glad when she gave that fleeting smile to see that she had a full set of undamaged teeth. He said inexorably, ‘Then you must tell us about anyone who you think might have done harm to your daughter, Kate. He might not have meant to kill her: something might have gone wrong. Or he might have panicked and done more harm than he intended to her. Lots of murders come when people panic.’
He had deliberately let the killer be a male. It seemed an appropriate presumption, in this of all places, and the victim’s mother made no attempt to question it. ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so. But I can’t help you. Perhaps if you talk to her friends, they’ll be able to tell you more about the people she went about with.’
‘We’ve already arranged to see the people who were closest to her at school.’ He looked at his watch. ‘That will be in about an hour. Is there anyone else you think we should see? Think carefully, please.’
She hadn’t mentioned her husband since their opening exchanges, and he was interested to see that she didn’t consider him now. ‘No. No, I can’t think of anyone. She had a boyfriend at the school. But Jamie wouldn’t hurt anyone. He was as upset as we were when she went missing.’