by J M Gregson
Nothing, as he had expected. Then, as he was about to withdraw his hand, his middle finger touched something, felt it catch momentarily beneath the nail. He felt again, scratching with his finger tips at the topmost corner of the dark rectangle. Then he drew forth a tiny scrap of paper, grey with dust and ragged on two of its edges, where it had been torn from the corner of an exercise book or note pad. One side of it was blank. The other contained eleven figures in a neat, round hand. Five digits, then a gap, then six more. A phone number. He glanced at the first section of numbers: 01452. ‘The Gloucester code,’ he muttered to Hook.
The sergeant slipped the fragment into his notebook before the widening eyes of George Phillips. It would be checked out within the hour, once they were away from the caretaker’s curious scrutiny. They asked him for form’s sake if he could tell them anything of interest about the dead girl and her associates, though they knew he would have volunteered such information long before now if he had held it. They were almost off the premises, standing outside the caretaker’s house near the gates, when Lambert said, ‘Mr Phillips, you said that there were books and perhaps other possessions in the locker when you opened it originally. Who was it who ordered that they should be cleared? Can you remember?’
George could, and he was eager to volunteer the information; the man was no friend of his. He was wheezing a little, for the policemen had made him move faster than was his wont. But he said promptly and delightedly, ‘That was the headmaster, Mr Murray. He took the things away himself.’
It was five miles to the house of Jason Bullimore. They were silent for most of the journey, which suited Hook. Eventually Lambert said, ‘Give me the SP on this bloke again, Bert,’ and the Sergeant flicked to the meagre details he had already assembled in his notebook.
‘Mr Jason Bullimore, MA. Oxon. Aged twenty-nine. Unmarried. Head of English Department at Oldford Comprehensive. Single, but not gay, as far as we know. Probably with an eye for the girls, indeed, though in the context of his present post at Oldford that so far is little more than hearsay.’ Scarcely even that, thought Lambert. More the odd meaningful look, the occasional exchange of glances between staff or pupils at the school. But looks could convey more information than words, sometimes.
Bullimore’s house was only just off the bus route to Hereford, but tucked away at the end of a short cul-de-sac. The seclusion was emphasised by a high hedge of Leylandii at the front boundary, eight feet high, neatly clipped but uncompromisingly thick. It meant that the small detached house was only visible when one reached the gate. It was a regularly shaped, 1930s house, with a little moss on the red tiles of the roof. Square windows on each side of the oak front door made it look as if the face of the house was peering myopically at those who ventured to disturb its seclusion. There was a rectangular patch of lawn surrounded by straight borders in front of the door; the summer bedding plants had already been cleared. The neatly hoed, plantless borders seemed even on this bright autumn morning to be anticipating the winter to come.
It did not look like the house of a youngish bachelor. Such men were not usually neat gardeners who worked in advance of the seasons, in Bert Hook’s now considerable experience. He was not surprised when a woman opened the door to them. ‘Sergeant Hook and Superintendent Lambert,’ he said, as they felt hastily for the warrant cards they had not expected to need. ‘I rang last night and arranged for us to see Mr Bullimore. I’m afraid we’re a little early, but perhaps —’
‘Twenty minutes early.’ The woman surveyed them calmly for a moment from beneath broad black eyebrows. She was tall without being willowy, busty without being voluptuous. She looked as if she were in her middle thirties, but the severity of her expression perhaps made her look a little older than she was. The doorstep gave her perhaps six inches of height, but she looked straight into Lambert’s grey eyes and down upon Hook’s blue ones. She sighed softly, then said, ‘Jason is out at present: no doubt he will be back at the time you arranged. You’d better come in.’
She led them through a hall and into a sitting room that was as neat and functional as the grounds they had left outside. She gestured towards two upright armchairs. As they sat down, she said, almost as an afterthought, ‘I’m Mr Bullimore’s sister. Barbara Bullimore. We live in this house together.’
It was a curiously old-fashioned use of a young man’s formal title. Perhaps she was keeping them at a distance; they had decided already that this woman probably kept most people at a distance. Despite the sibling relationship, she seemed an unlikely companion for a philanderer to share with, if that was indeed what Bullimore proved to be. Hook was intimidated, despite himself. She reminded him a little of Mrs Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby, but it was the association with the formidable matrons of his boyhood in a Barnardo’s home rather than any literary connection which impeded him. He said unwisely, ‘You keep house for your brother, do you, Miss Bullimore?’
‘Indeed I don’t. Those days of female subservience are long gone, I’m happy to say, Sergeant.’ She made his rank sound like an obscenity. ‘I am employed full-time in the Gloucestershire Library Service. My brother and I each have our own careers, you see.’
In Lambert’s experience, there were two sorts of librarians: the ones who saw their mission as providing you with free access to the books you wanted, and the ones who thought it their duty to protect their precious volumes from the public at any price. Ms Bullimore was probably one of the latter. He had been happy to come here early because he knew that a premature arrival often threw a suspect a little off balance; now it seemed like a mistake.
Barbara Bullimore stood for a moment on the rug in front of the empty fireplace after they had sat down, as if she were reluctant to abandon this position of dominance. Then she pulled a stand chair from the wall and set it precisely opposite them before placing her formidable backside carefully upon it. She was a big woman, not fat, but with broad shoulders and hands. Her forearms looked very strong as she smoothed her tweed skirt unnecessarily over sturdy thighs. Perhaps lifting piles of books gave you arms like that, thought Bert Hook apprehensively. Those forearms cast him back again to the days of his youth, when house-mothers ruled with rods of iron and corporal punishment had not yet been outlawed from homes for noisy boys.
‘My brother had nothing to do with the death of this wretched girl, you know,’ said the librarian.
Lambert allowed his experienced eyebrows to lift the merest fraction. ‘You knew Alison Watts, Miss Bullimore?’
‘No. No, of course I didn’t. Why should you think that?’
‘Your attitude seems a little — well, a little uncharitable, if you had no reason to think ill of the girl.’
The large face opposite them reddened, though whether with anger or embarrassment it was impossible to say. ‘Perhaps you are right to pick me up on that. I know it is conventional that one does not speak ill of the dead. But what I have read of her has given me no very high opinion of this girl. One learns when one is used to studying book reviews to read between the lines, you see.’ She managed a tiny, frosty smile; irony was perhaps the nearest approach to humour which this severe woman allowed herself.
Lambert reflected that she must have read copiously between the lines on this occasion. Alison Watts had been remarkably pretty, and the press’s response to the waste of attractive young life had been predictably adulatory. A young angel had been brutally removed from the world, according to the columns beneath the photographs. This woman must have discussed the girl at length with her brother, or had known Alison Watts herself in some way; her reaction had been prompt and definite. She seemed now to realise that herself. ‘I didn’t know the girl myself, of course, but she seems to have been typical of her generation in many ways, and that is no recommendation to me.’
Barbara Bullimore folded her arms and looked the Superintendent in the eye, challenging him to dispute her assessment of the case. Instead, it was mild Bert Hook who took her up, perhaps unconsciously seeking revenge on the doze
ns of Barbara Bullimores he encountered thirty years ago when he went back to the home with his school day concluded. ‘You have very decided opinions about the way this young lady lived, Miss Bullimore. How much do you know about the way she died?’
She turned her attention to him calmly, weighing him as a foe before she spoke. ‘Nothing. Nothing, that is, beyond what I have read in the papers. I read that she was strangled with some sort of ligature and put in the River Wye, that her body remained in the river for some weeks before it was discovered. Down at Chepstow, I believe.’ She was as calm and precise in her disapproval as if she had been correcting some scatterbrained borrower at her library counter. You wouldn’t willingly face a fine from this formidable guardian of literature.
Yet Bert persisted. It was the kind of yeoman courage that won us two world wars, thought John Lambert beside him. ‘You say you read between the lines about the girl’s life, Miss Bullimore. Presumably in reading about her death you have exercised the same skills. What conclusions have you formed about who might have killed her?’
Lambert expected her either to explode with wrath or to dismiss Bert’s question with contemptuous disdain. Barbara Bullimore did neither. She looked at him for a moment which seemed to stretch into minutes, then said, ‘She was killed by a man, I should think, wouldn’t you? Either by someone who had been involved in a sexual relationship with her — and I expect you already have several possibilities there — or by some random acquaintance that she met on that Friday night. I am assuming, you see, that she was killed almost immediately after she disappeared from the community. That seems a reasonable presumption to me. I should say that the likeliest thing is that she was killed after some random meeting with a stranger.’ For the first time since they had met her, she gave a broad and genuine smile as a thought struck her. ‘If I’m right, that wouldn’t make things very easy for you, would it?’
‘Indeed it wouldn’t,’ agreed Lambert. ‘But random killings are much less common than the public thinks. Statistically the overwhelming probability is that Alison Watts was murdered by someone who had known her for some time.’
‘And that is why you’re here today. Well, you’re wasting your time, Superintendent. Jason didn’t kill that girl.’
‘But he knew her, Miss Bullimore. For a considerable period. And taught her, latterly. He may be able to tell us things which will help us. Things about her habits and her friends. Things about her personality, perhaps, the kind of girl she was.’
She sniffed. ‘He didn’t know her well. He only came to the school three years ago, you know.’
It was a curious fact to assert. In this context, three years was a long time. She seemed to be trying and failing to distance her brother from the dead girl. Interesting. But before they could pursue it, they heard the front door open and shut and footsteps move swiftly across the hall.
The young man who came into the room would never have been taken for the brother of the formidable female who had confronted them over the previous minutes. He was much more slightly built, with an open face and a ready smile which sprang to his face as he greeted them now. His light brown hair was short and neatly cut, with an attractive curl at the front which strayed a little over the right of his forehead. His blue eyes were watchful, but not hostile. They knew his age was twenty-nine, but otherwise they would have put him in his middle twenties, perhaps because his face had retained a boyish enthusiasm. They knew better than to trust appearances, but years of CID work had trained them to assess the impact of appearance on others. Their first thought was the same: here was a man who might easily have turned the head of an impressionable young girl.
Clearly Jason Bullimore had a rapport with his formidable elder sister. She agreed to leave them alone as soon as he suggested it. They heard movements in the rooms upstairs a few seconds later, as if she were confirming that a female like her would never stoop to eavesdropping on the activities of mere policemen.
Her brother threw himself carelessly into an armchair opposite them. Lambert could see him suddenly in his room at an ancient Oxford college, laughing and carefree among the privileged golden youth of his time there. There were, he knew, some men who never moved on from their heady days of breathless development at Oxbridge to the realities of the world outside. ‘Bad business, this,’ said Jason Bullimore. ‘How can I help you?’
Lambert found himself suddenly resentful of this young man’s easy social command. ‘You can be completely frank about your own relationship with Alison Watts. And you can tell us whatever you know of her dealings with other people. Staff and fellow-pupils.’
‘Students, we tend to call them, once they reach the sixth form. Makes them feel a little more grown up. Well, they are adults, aren’t they, once they reach eighteen? But you must be well aware of that. Allows you to question them on their own, doesn’t it? Give them the third degree.’
The words were delivered a little too rapidly, and the little involuntary laugh at the end confirmed that he was nervous. Lambert decided to chance his arm. ‘And Alison Watts was a little older than most of the other girls in her group. As you were no doubt aware.’
‘Was she? I’m not sure I —’
‘How long had you known her when she died, Mr Bullimore?’
‘Two years. Well, I suppose I’d seen her a little in my first year at Oldford Comp. But I only taught her regularly when she was coming up for GCSEs. I got to know her quite well in her last year, when I was teaching her for A level English in the first year sixth form.’
‘I see. And at what point did your relationship become more than that of tutor and pupil, Mr Bullimore?’
Suddenly there was electricity coursing through the atmosphere in the room. Hook could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stirring and prickling. But he did not move his hand to them; it was as if any movement in the tableau of three men might break the spell. Bullimore said, ‘I — I’ve no idea why you should make such an accusation. If you’ve been talking to the children at the school, you should certainly know better than to pay heed to their febrile imaginings.’
The students had become children again, once it seemed it might be necessary for him to refute their opinions. But he hadn’t denied the allegation. Lambert said, ‘You taught in a public school before you came to Oldford, Mr Bullimore. Why did you choose to leave?’
‘Money. Promotion. Comprehensives have more pupils and larger departments. I became Head of English here.’ The words had come quickly. He had been used to responding to this and other questions about his move to Oldford. No doubt his arguments had usually been accepted.
‘No. You didn’t become Head of the English Department until you had been at Oldford for a year. When you arrived in the school, you were on no more money than you had been in your previous post. Perhaps slightly less.’
Bullimore raised a hand, knocked away the stray curl from his right temple, as if he needed some form of physical release from the tension. ‘Is this the way the police go about things? Is something which was never proved to be thrown at me for the rest of my life?’
‘There was a sexual scandal, wasn’t there? You had a relationship with a girl.’
‘All right, yes. You dig deep, don’t you? It was a boys’ public school, but they had girls in the sixth form. There was a lot of sexual excitement suddenly flying around.’
And a young man not too long out of Oxford who couldn’t resist making his contribution to that, thought Lambert. He remembered suddenly Margaret Peplow’s jovial remark that you could almost hear the adolescent hormones bouncing about in the sixth form common room at Oldford Comprehensive. He was certain now that the young man writhing before them had been unable to resist that sexual cocktail, despite what should have been a salutary experience in his previous post. ‘So you had to leave,’ he said. ‘No doubt you were told that if you resigned quietly and took yourself somewhere else, there would be no further repercussions. Public schools don’t like scandals.’
Bullimore nodded
miserably. ‘And Tom Murray didn’t ask too many questions when he took me on at Oldford. He was glad enough to have an Oxford English graduate at the time. And I can teach, you know! I know my stuff, and I can get kids interested in literature.’
It was probably true, thought Lambert. It was always the best teachers who had the greatest hold over their pupils. And who therefore needed to behave most responsibly. He said, ‘Were there others here, as well as Alison Watts?’
For a moment, Bullimore seemed to be summoning his resources to deny the suggestion, to challenge them to prove any association with the dead girl. Then his shoulders slumped and he said hopelessly, ‘Who told you about it? Does everyone know?’
‘We can’t reveal our sources,’ said Lambert pompously. It wouldn’t do to tell the man that outrageous speculation on his own part had been the main element in extracting this particular piece of information. Far better to spread a belief in police omniscience. ‘I don’t think many people in the school know about your amours. How many have suspected them may be another matter entirely.’
‘I thought we’d been discreet,’ said Bullimore hopelessly. He had been transformed in a few moments from a confident, urbane young man into an abject figure. Did it mean that there was more to come; that he had in fact killed the girl to still her tongue? Or was he simply confronting the possibility of a promising career in ruins because of over-active loins?
‘When did this affair start?’
‘When Alison began in the sixth form. Well, that’s when we went to bed together. I’d seen her a couple of times during the summer holidays, but only for a drink. Up beyond Hereford, where we could pretend we’d met by accident if anyone saw us.’
But people always thought that no one would, thought Lambert. The naive optimism of human nature in pursuit of sex always surprised him. It upset the judgement of normally careful, even calculating men and women. ‘And where was this liaison conducted?’