by J M Gregson
‘Yes. I suppose so. Except that the first time was outdoors, under a summer sky and white clouds, with the leaves rustling high above us.’ He looked for a reaction to this picture, which he had obviously re-run many times, but received nothing more than a curt nod. ‘What I meant was that it was at that time that we fell in love — what we felt for each other went much deeper than mere sex.’ He was enough a child of his upbringing to assert that sex was merely incidental, when both of them could see how important it had been to him.
Lambert wondered what the dead girl would have said to this. Would she have seen the relationship as this intelligent but desperately callow young man was so determined to see it? The familiar regret that murder was the one crime in which you could not take the victim’s view made him sigh with quiet frustration. ‘We deal with facts, Jamie. You’re telling us that you first had sex with Alison about fifteen months ago.’
‘Fifteen months and nine days ago, actually.’ He blushed, not at the recollection, but because he realised how this precision exposed the intensity of his feelings. He was an acute young man, for all his naivety and the raw vulnerability of his emotions.
Lambert stood up, walked to the mantelpiece, picked up the photograph of Jamie Allen and Alison Watts from its position of honour in the spotlight, studied that carefree outdoor scene with the two happy, unguarded faces and the wind ruffling their hair forever. He smiled down at the upturned adolescent face which watched him so closely. ‘This was taken last summer, I suppose?’
‘Yes. At the end of August. Just before we went into the sixth form.’ He glanced again at the shut door, said, almost furtively, ‘I let the Gazette borrow the negative of that. They want to print a picture of Alison, to help you in the hunt. Mum won’t be pleased when she sees it on the front page!’ He smiled with grim satisfaction.
Lambert smiled too, but that was at the idea that the bumbling local rag might help them in their hunt for the killer of this now long dead girl. He said, ‘But the relationship had cooled, hadn’t it, Jamie, in the months before Alison disappeared?’ He watched denial spring into the boy’s face, held up his hand quickly. ‘Be as honest as possible, please, Jamie. I’m sure you are as anxious as we are to find out who has done this awful thing to Alison.’
The boy nodded, his narrow shoulders drooping beneath his sweatshirt. He had defied his mother, asserted his love for Allie, been listened to by the police when he had thought he might be reviled. But now it was time to admit what he would rather have denied: he could see that, when this man who seemed to him too old and wise to be a policeman put the matter so starkly to him. Obviously he had to let them know how much he wanted Allie’s killer to be caught. Jamie said softly, with infinite regret, ‘We weren’t as close as we had been, in the weeks before Allie went, no. But that was a temporary thing. We’d have been all right again, if — if she’d only been given time to see —’
His voice tailed away, and it seemed for a moment as if he would weep. Lambert said, ‘To see what, Jamie? There were other men in her life, as well as you, weren’t there?’
‘Who told you that?’ His flaring anger banished the tears which had threatened.
‘We talk to a lot of people, Jamie, in a murder enquiry. And our first task is to build up a picture of the victim and her last movements. We treat what people tell us as confidential. Just as we shall treat whatever you have to tell us about Alison and her friends as confidential.’
‘Friends! They were no friends of hers, the ones who came between us. Not real friends, anyway. This would never have happened, without them!’
‘Tell us about them, Jamie.’ This was Bert Hook, calmly persuasive as usual with the young, looking up with an encouraging smile over the top of his notebook.
‘I can’t!’
‘This isn’t the moment to hold anything back, Jamie. If there is anything at all you can tell us about anyone close to Alison, you must —’
‘I don’t mean I won’t. I can’t. I don’t know who they are!’
It was wrung from him like a cry of pain. It was agony for him to admit that there were people who had been closer to this girl he loved in her last days than he had. Lambert watched the anguished twistings of the young face for a moment before he said, ‘Were the people you’re so concerned about in Oldford?’
‘No. I don’t know.’ He ran both hands suddenly through his thick black hair. ‘Oh, it’s true, I didn’t see as much of Allie in those last weeks. We’d have been all right, given a bit of time, I’m sure. But pretty girls have a lot of attention, and sometimes it turns their heads a bit.’
Other men, then. The CID men had known that, all along. Perhaps Jamie Allen was having to admit it to himself for the first time. ‘Indeed it does. So who were these other men, Jamie?’
‘I don’t know. She — she went off somewhere. On Friday nights.’ He looked down at his feet, twisted the toes a little, experimentally, like a small child discovering his extremities for the first time and finding them of absorbing interest.
‘Every Friday night, Jamie?’
‘Yes, in those last months. Sometimes she went off at weekends as well, but every Friday.’ His face contorted with misery at the memory of it and the arguments it had caused between them.
‘And where did she go on those Friday nights, Jamie?’ Lambert’s steady, unemotional voice drew him on like a hypnotist’s.
But it was no good. Jamie said wretchedly, ‘I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. Threatened to finish with me altogether, when I pressed it.’
And that would have been only a matter of time, in any case, thought Lambert sadly. Age and experience removed the ridiculous illusions of youth, but sometimes life was more pleasant with a few illusions. He said, ‘You’ve no idea where she might have gone on these occasions? Or who might have been with her?’
‘No. She wouldn’t tell me. It was out of Oldford, anyway. And not with anyone I know. I’d have found out, if it had been.’
He would, too, thought Lambert. A determined young man, this, though it was probably better for him that he had been left in ignorance. But not for them. There were enough avenues for them to explore in this damned case, without bringing in sinister unidentified males to add to the possibilities.
Hook, accepting a nod from his chief, said, ‘When did you last see Alison, Jamie?’
He reddened at the question, though he had expected it, had rehearsed his answer to it. It meant he was a suspect, that they were checking when he had last been close to his lovely, slaughtered Allie. ‘I saw her at school on the Friday morning. At morning break: eleven o’clock. We broke up for the summer holidays at lunch time on that last Friday. July the twenty-third.’
It was as precise as he had been earlier. Yet somehow this assertion did not carry quite the same ringing truth. He was still staring at his feet, which had ceased to move now. Hook studied the intense face for a moment, then wrote down the time. ‘And you didn’t see Alison Watts again after eleven o’clock on that Friday?’
‘No.’
Lambert said quietly, ‘Your relationship with Alison Watts cooled over those last months, Jamie. You must have had arguments over that. Did you kill her?’
‘No! I loved her!’ The words came in a desperate shout.
‘That doesn’t mean you didn’t kill her, Jamie. We often see love turn into murderous hatred in this job, I’m afraid.’
The boy looked up at him, for the first time in minutes. ‘Je l’ai trop aime pour ne le point hair,’ he quoted with a grim nod.
‘Racine. Andromaque, isn’t it?’ He grinned at the boy’s look of astonishment. ‘ ‘I have loved him too much not to feel hate for him.’ I did French for A level as well, you see. A long time ago. But I’m often reminded of that quotation when we see passion turning into violence in our CID work.’
‘Yes, I see. But I didn’t hate Allie. We’d have got back together all right, if we’d been given time.’
‘All right. Have you any idea at all who mi
ght have killed her, then?’
‘No. I’ve thought about it often enough, God knows. But I haven’t come up with anyone.’
Lambert stood up. ‘If you have any further thoughts on the matter, please get in touch with us right away. You needn’t fear that any innocent person will suffer. Contrary to the opinion of a lot of your contemporaries, we don’t just want a conviction at any price.’
A few minutes after they had gone, Jamie left his bright warm room and went down the gloomy staircase. His mother’s heart contracted when she saw how drained he looked. She wanted to go and throw her arms round him. But because the human mind is a strange instrument, she did no such thing. She looked instead for some way to assert herself, to repay him for the hurt he had done to her in front of strangers twenty minutes earlier.
‘Did you tell them about your final meeting with that girl? About the row you had on that last Friday night?’ she said waspishly.
*
Cheltenham is one of the finest spa towns in Europe. It has a wealth of Regency houses, bordering squares, crescents, terraces and open spaces. The wide streets and tree-shaded open spaces which form the basis of its late-Georgian elegance were laid out early in the nineteenth century. Senior service personnel and professional men still find this a good place to retire. The town remains the symbol of conservative England in respectable retirement.
Nevertheless, Cheltenham is also what its publicity officers like to call ‘a lively modern community’. It is now virtually the same size as its more ancient neighbour, Gloucester, and it has the problems as well as the vibrancy of a modern industrial town. It has its modern industries as well as its festivals and spacious squares. And it has inevitably its share of serious crime, and of the villains who direct it.
On that October Friday night, whilst Lambert and Hook were talking to Jamie Allen, a man sat alone in an office at the back of a Cheltenham night club. He was a thick-set man of fifty, with huge shoulders and bushy black eyebrows beneath a thick crop of curly hair. He had a small scar on the right of his forehead, where a knife had narrowly missed his eye twenty years earlier, He was studying a copy of the very Gazette to which young Jamie Allen had been so willing to give his favourite picture of Alison Watts.
The picture was reproduced on the front page, as the young man had hoped, but Mrs Allen would not after all be scandalised by the sight of her son with his arm round the girl. Jamie had been cut out of the picture, and a blown-up version of the dead girl’s head and shoulders was all that was shown. The enlargement and the newsprint reproduction had made the focus less sharp, but Alison’s laughing face looked even younger and more attractive in this form.
‘BRUTAL MURDER OF THE LAUGHING GIRL’ ran the headline, and the copy below made play with ‘the ancient market town of Oldford’ where Alison had lived out her short life until she was ‘strangled by person or persons unknown’. After a purple passage explaining how ‘the picturesque Wye had held its grisly burden’ for so many weeks before it surrendered it, there was a short account of Superintendent Lambert and a list of his earlier murder cases, which had made him something of a local celebrity. The reporter ended by risking the thought that even ‘the formidable Jack Lambert’ was baffled by the case at this opening stage of his investigation.
The thick-set man knew John Lambert, as he knew most of the senior policemen in the area. He respected the Superintendent: he had learned a long time ago not to underestimate his opponents. His name was Eddie Hurst, and as crime had spread its tentacles through the developing town, he had grown fat upon it. He had a finger in most of the poisonous pies that fed the criminal fraternity, and he directed several of the more lucrative enterprises. He ran two legitimate if sleazy night clubs, and used this facade to hide his more profitable interests in porn, drugs and robbery with violence. He had done time, but that was for minor offences, and many years ago now. You didn’t do porridge when you were big time.
But you had to make sure they couldn’t tie you in with things like this.
Hurst scanned the sparse facts which the reporter had tried his best to expand into a story, glanced again at the picture of the smiling girl which spread over four columns above it. She looked more innocent than he remembered her — more innocent than he knew for a fact she was. Had been, rather: silly young cow. He cursed softly, automatically, mouthing his opinion of ‘fucking headmasters’ who complicated his world. There was in fact only one such irritant. He looked up the number, not in the directory, but on a single sheet that he drew from a drawer in his desk.
Then he dialled the home of Thomas Murray, MA, FRSA.
Chapter Ten
SATURDAY provided them with a perfect morning. There was not a cloud to be seen; the sun cleared away the wisps of autumn mist from the still Cotswold valleys, then shone unblinkingly down over a population staring sleepily at the weekend.
‘The kind of autumn morning people fly to Portugal for,’ said Lambert cheerfully as they drove along the deserted lanes. Hook grunted what was probably agreement. He did not approve of early morning buoyancy; moreover, he had heard this thought from his chief before. And the morning was not so fresh and new for him: with his two boisterous sons still blissfully asleep, Bert had spent two hours with his Open University studies before a hurried breakfast. ‘We’re no nearer to solving this one,’ he reminded his chief sourly.
‘But there are lies flying about,’ said Lambert gnomically. ‘And lies are always interesting to master detectives like us, aren’t they? The question is, which lies are the important ones?’ He smiled happily at a group of sheep clustered behind a gate and volunteered no further guidance as to the way his convoluted mind was working. Hook glowered at the autumn glory of the trees and refused to be drawn into further questioning. They would be at the school in a minute.
Oldford Comprehensive was a very different place at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning than on other days of the week. There was even time and space to notice the rich mahogany leaves of the lines of ornamental trees as they drove up the drive which on the five previous days had been thronged with noisy children at this time. There was no other car in the car park to the left of the school’s main entrance. Even the teams for the Saturday morning games had not yet arrived.
The caretaker introduced himself fully. Like many others involved for the first and last time in a murder enquiry, he wished to prolong his contact with melodrama; death has an eerie glamour which no other crime carries. ‘George Phillips. Caretaker. Resident on the site. My name used to be on the board at the gates, until this bugger came.’ He twitched his head at the office above him, then glanced automatically over his shoulder, to make sure that ‘this bugger’, who was obviously Thomas Murray, Headmaster, was not within earshot.
He led them into the deserted reception area of the school, through an assembly hall which looked even larger for being empty, and down a staircase to the capacious basement area of the school buildings. On this journey, he wheezed an unbroken monologue of complaint, beginning with the coke boilers and manual loadings of the fifties, which had apparently given him his bronchitis as a young man, and proceeding to a catalogue of the disciplinary shortcomings of modern education. ‘The lads give you lip as soon as look at you, and the girls wear skirts up round their bottoms.’ Phillips leered horribly at the ceiling on this last thought, convincing them that he could be persuaded of the desirability of this single educational reform. As if bringing the ship of discipline safely into harbour, he concluded with, ‘And nowadays even the bloody teachers dress as if they was going to work in the garden!’
With this crushing final demonstration of the decadence of civilisation, they stood before the long rank of steel lockers which was the purpose of their visit. ‘Hardly worthwhile for two bigwigs like you, this is, you know,’ said the caretaker confidentially, as if he hoped that his advice might save public money in the future. Lambert did not tell him that he had come here on a Saturday because he wanted to get a feel of this place without peo
ple around, without exciting the attention of children who were already full of febrile imaginings about their peers and the staff. ‘Open it, please,’ he said curtly.
Phillips produced a large bunch of keys from the capacious front pocket of his overalls. He selected the smallest one and announced that it was the skeleton key for the lockers in front of them, as if he hoped to assert a position of trust from the fact that he held it. ‘This is Alison Watts’s locker. Number thirty-seven. But you won’t find nothing.’
‘And why are you so sure of that, Mr Phillips?’ said Hook, as their guide struggled to find the right angle for the key in the gloom of the basement half-light.
‘Been through it before, ‘aven’t we?’
‘When was this?’
‘Weeks ago. During the summer holidays.’
Of course. When Alison Watts was first reported as a MISPA, some constable would have gone through the locker with a member of staff, searching dutifully for any clue as to the whereabouts of the missing girl. Hook said heavily, ‘And what did you find then, Mr Phillips?’
The caretaker shrugged, struggling still to turn this smallest of his bunch of keys in the lock. ‘Books. Bugger all else.’ He grunted his relief as the long green metal door swung open at last before them. The tall, coffin-like space was empty. A thin coating of dust had penetrated through the ventilator slits in the door. No books. No photographs. No letters. No sign of the diary so beloved of fiction.
There was a shelf at the top of the tall locker, where one might have expected to find a hat or a scarf, or even some small, significant personal belonging. But here too there was nothing to be seen. A smaller man would have had to feel the surface to be certain of that, but from his height of six feet three, Lambert could see the surface of the metal shelf as others would not have. He almost forebore to reach into the locker, because even in the near darkness of the basement he could see that it was empty. It must have been some long-forgotten thoroughness from his early days as a city constable, or some sense of desperation at arriving here so long after events, that made him reach a lean hand into the recesses of the locker. He felt without hope around its cold green metal.