Sour Grapes

by Natasha Cooper

  He laughed aloud then, but he did not say anything. After a moment, Emma went on, ‘By the way, is this weekend too soon for our trip to Willow? I’ve got to go to London anyway to see one of the cops who grilled Lutterworth and so it would all fit very neatly. Willow says she can have us—if you’d like to come.’

  ‘If you want me to be there, yes, I’d like it very much.’

  ‘Goody good.’

  ‘Do we get to share a room in her house?’ asked Jag, laughing at her nursery expression.

  ‘Probably,’ said Emma, who was not quite sure whether she wanted Willow to know that she and Jag were lovers.

  ‘Well that’s OK then. Shall we take the bike?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought. Would you if you were going on your own?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Then let’s. Unless the times don’t work for you. I’ve got to be near Knightsbridge by five thirty. Willow is expecting us to arrive in time for dinner, which in her house is always eight o’clock, and that leaves two and half hours for you to kill. Will you mind?’

  ‘No. I can always find plenty to do once I’ve dropped you off,’ said Jag. ‘I’ll pick you up at four. That should give us all the time we need. Dress warm: it gets cold on the motorway. ’ Bye for now. Work well.’

  ‘I will. Thanks, Jag.’

  Emma put down the receiver, hoping that Willow and Jag would get on well together. The thought of his breezy open-air toughness, not to speak of his stubble, leathers and clanking boots, in the highly civilised surroundings of the Mews made her doubtful. Willow could be trusted to be much less hidebound than any of Emma’s family, all of whom would be appalled by the thought that she was sleeping with a man like Jag, but there was no guarantee that she would like him. And Emma wanted them to like each other, and to understand why she should have such affection for them both.

  Jag dropped Emma at a pub on the borders of South Kensington and Knightsbridge a little before half past five. She pushed open the heavy, glazed doors, and almost stepped backwards as her ears were assaulted by the Friday-evening clamour. The small pub was already so full that all the chairs and stools were taken and people were standing in noisy groups, shedding the tension of their working week. She was not sure how she was going to be able to pick out Inspector Podley from the crowd. There were several men who seemed to be on their own and she felt absurdly shy about the idea of going up to one after the other to ask whether he was the right man.

  Several of them were looking at her. Struggling to control her idiotic wish that she had asked Jag to come in with her, she let the door swing shut behind her and walked a few steps towards the bar. At least she could order herself a drink without looking as though she were accosting potential clients. Before she had caught the bartender’s eye, a man of middle height with fading red hair and a bitterly twisted mouth slid out of one of the banquettes, leaving his coat to stop anyone else sitting in the space, and came towards her. He looked very fit indeed and rather angry.

  ‘Emma Gnatche?’ he said briskly. Even in that atmosphere she could smell the whisky and cigar smoke he had been swallowing.

  ‘Yes. You must be Inspector Podley.’

  ‘Joe. What can I get you to drink?’

  ‘Let me buy them. What would you like?’

  ‘Scotch then. Thank you.’

  Emma ordered his drink and a half of lager for herself and carried the glasses to his banquette. She noticed that there were two cigar butts in the ashtray and realised that he must have been in the pub for some time. The jukebox behind her was playing some very noisy song she did not recognise, and she had to lean forward to hear what Podley was saying.

  ‘Ben Wrexham told me that you’re interested in Andrew Lutterworth.’

  ‘That’s right. And he said you might be prepared to tell me a bit about the case.’

  Emma wished that she did not have to shout and was contemplating putting some money into the jukebox herself so that at least she could choose something that crashed and thudded less. ‘D’you remember much about it? I know it was some time ago.’

  ‘He wasn’t a man you’d forget easily. But what exactly is your interest?’

  ‘Didn’t Ben tell you?’ she asked and, seeing that he had not, proceeded to explain her thesis yet again. At the end she added as tactfully as possible, ‘And since one of my principal aims is to explore the most productive ways in which suspects can be persuaded to confess, I need to find out how you managed to get Lutterworth to do it and what you think it was that made him change his story later.’

  ‘Wrexham said I could trust you,’ said Joe Podley, looking at her over his glass. ‘Since he was right about some of the other things he said, perhaps I can believe this too.’

  A hint of hidden laughter in his thin freckled face made Emma suddenly wary.

  ‘What else did he tell you?’ she asked, determined not to be sucked into anyone else’s games.

  Podley’s mockery became even clearer as his lips relaxed and his eyes widened. He put down his drink and offered her an opened packet of cheese-and-onion crisps. Emma shook her head.

  ‘He said you were the prettiest little thing I was likely to see even in these parts in a month of Sundays and not half as stupid—or as irritating—as you sound.’

  Emma laughed. ‘Oh, I like it. Thank you for that.’

  ‘You’re not offended?’ He sounded surprised.

  ‘No, amused,’ she said. To her surprise, she realised that she meant it. Perhaps at long last she was getting over her fear of what the other criminologists said to each other about her. ‘But forget about me for the moment and tell me about Lutterworth.’

  ‘Where shall I start? What exactly do you want to know?’

  ‘I suppose first of all, whether you were absolutely certain he was guilty.’

  ‘Definitely,’ said Podley at once. His eyes narrowed again, which made him look almost dangerous. ‘Why should you doubt it?’

  ‘Well…’ said Emma, sensing power in him for the first time rather than just strength. ‘Look, I’m not trying to be difficult—or criticise you or your colleagues, but there wasn’t actually much hard evidence against him, was there?’

  ‘There was enough. His alibi was off the wall, and there was no one to back it up. Besides there was no evidence of anyone else ever having driven the car.’

  ‘Except the gloved smudges on the steering wheel, and all the hairs and fibres that didn’t match his.’

  ‘The gloved prints could just as easily have been made by him and the hairs and fibres by his passenger,’ said Podley sharply enough to make Emma think that he, too, might not have been quite as certain as he would have her believe. ‘He never claimed that he hadn’t had other people in the car at various times and we didn’t have the resources to track them all down in case there were some hairs that didn’t belong to any of them. And how could you be sure he hadn’t forgotten one? That’s what his brief would have claimed if we’d gone down that road and it would all have been for nothing. Anyway, he was guilty. If you’d been there when we were interviewing him, you’d have seen it, too.’

  ‘But how?’ she asked, trying to show none of her instinctive distaste for such unverifiable assumptions.

  ‘It’s a gut feeling you get when you’ve been in the job for as long as I have. Comes from the way they look at you—or don’t. Their eyes shift all over the place or else they fix on you and don’t move. And then there’s body language, too. And an air about them. Like I said, you can’t miss it when you know what to look for.’

  ‘What was Lutterworth like, apart from his miasma of guilt, then?’

  ‘Typical of your usual dishonest senior City man. I haven’t worked in fraud, but I’ve had friends who have, and their customers sound just like Lutterworth. They start off all arrogant: “How dare you insult me?” and all that. Then, when you’ve taken their ties, belts, braces and shoelaces and locked’em up for a couple of hours, they disintegrate in front of your eyes and spill their guts
. Particularly if you’ve searched them. And you always do with that sort. It breaks them down. And it’s useful, too. They can have documents and credit cards stuck all over their bodies under those suits of theirs.’

  ‘But Lutterworth wasn’t arrested for fraud,’ said Emma, intrigued by the insight into police work but determined to keep Podley to the point.

  ‘True. But we did search him; and forensic took his clothes.’

  ‘Even though they weren’t the ones he’d been wearing during the day—or were they?’

  Podley drank some whisky and appeared to be searching his memory.

  ‘No. You’re right. He was in jeans, by then, I think: what he’d put on when the City police picked him up for us. We got his suits later, all of them, including the one he said he’d been wearing. It was soaked through.’ He laughed. ‘Lutterworth pretended it was rainwater, but it can’t have been. Even the lining was wet; not just damp. We thought he must’ve gone into the shower wearing the suit, either to get rid of some evidence—blood probably—or else to pretend it was the one he’d been wearing in the rain so that he could conceal the destruction of the real one. But we had it examined even so.’

  ‘And was there any evidence?’

  ‘Not as such, no. And there was too much dirt in the suit and too many chemical residues to establish whether the wet in it was rain or tapwater. But he drove that car. Don’t you ever think otherwise. You should have seen him that night.’

  ‘I wish I had,’ said Emma pleasantly. ‘Take me through the whole evening. That is, if you don’t mind. From the moment he rang the station to report that his car had been stolen.’

  ‘I don’t know much about that. It was the local station near his office that took that call.’ Podley finished his whisky but refused Emma’s offer to get him some more. He lit another of the small cigars and then, belatedly, asked if she minded. Since she was a supplicant, she shook her head and smiled with all the male-soothing sweetness Anthony would have expected of her. Podley seemed to like it, too, and visibly relaxed.

  ‘It was logged at ten forty-five, as far as I can remember, and all the necessary details were recorded, but there’s no way of knowing where he was when he made the call. He used his mobile, and you can’t tell where their calls come from.’

  ‘So when did you get him?’ asked Emma, picking up her lager and trying to breathe in as little of his smoke as possible. ‘If you can remember after all this time.’

  ‘I got a mate to look up the old files when Wrexham told me what you wanted, so I should have most of the details you need. When we started interviewing Lutterworth he began by denying everything, sticking to his story about the theft of his vehicle. Oh, and we offered him a brief, of course, but he said he didn’t want one.’

  ‘Didn’t that make you think he was telling the truth?’

  ‘Why should it?’

  ‘Come on, Inspector Podley,’ said Emma with what she hoped was a friendly smile. ‘I’m not that naïve. A man like Lutterworth, who must have had plenty of money and a lot of experience of lawyers? Of course he’d have got hold of one if he’d thought he was at any kind of risk.’

  The smile was back in Podley’s eyes. Looking at him, Emma wondered if he had ever considered having his eyelashes dyed. They would have looked a great deal better for some darkening, particularly with his pale-pink skin and washed-out blue eyes.

  ‘It crossed my mind,’ he admitted. ‘But then I saw that he was so bloody arrogant he thought he’d get away with it. It wasn’t until he grasped that we weren’t going to fall for his grand manner that he realised he might be at risk.’

  ‘And that was when he confessed, was it?’ Podley nodded. ‘Did he ask for a solicitor at that point?’

  ‘Oddly enough, no. In fact it wasn’t him at all. We were interrupted soon after that by the news that his brief had arrived, and I think he was as surprised as we were.’

  Emma frowned, remembering Hal’s suggestion of an influential mistress who might have been in the car with Lutterworth at the time of the crash. ‘So who had sent for the lawyer?’

  ‘His wife, I think.’

  ‘He rang her, did he, in his one telephone call?’

  ‘Yup. Or one of our men did it. I can’t remember. But Lutterworth would have been asked who he wanted contacted and it was her.’

  ‘And when exactly did he withdraw his confession? Was it as soon as he had talked to his lawyer?’ asked Emma, and then answered the question herself. ‘No, it wasn’t, was it? You were all still expecting him to plead guilty at the trial. What happened at the committal?’

  ‘The usual. He confirmed his name and address. That’s all he was required to do. And the magistrates decided that there was a case to answer, sent him for trial at the Crown Court and set bail. All perfectly normal.’ Podley looked down at his watch.

  He had been cooperative and polite, but Emma realised that if she wanted to get anything useful out of him she would have to think up some more intelligent questions and ask them quickly.

  ‘Would it be possible for me to have a copy of the interview tapes? I imagine you must have taped it.’

  ‘Naturally we did, but we can’t go handing those out. Even to researchers like you. Sorry.’ He did not look particularly apologetic.

  ‘OK,’ she said at once, smiling to show that she was not going to press him or even try to make any kind of trouble. She realised that three-year-old tapes would not be easily available even if he had been prepared to let her have them. ‘So what do you think it was that finally made him tell you he’d done it?’

  ‘A mixture of exhaustion and the realisation that we couldn’t be bullied and weren’t going to fall for his story.’

  ‘How did you show you were too tough to be bullied?’ asked Emma, wryly amused at the suggestion that any suspect might succeed in bullying his interrogators. After what she had heard from the various men and women she had met in prison, that seemed highly unlikely.

  Podley laughed. ‘Suspects tend to use anger to defend themselves against the urge to confess. We cut off that route for Lutterworth early on when we showed that we weren’t afraid of his temper, nor impressed by his self-importance. We pointed out the various advantages a confession would bring and the heavy disadvantages of what he was doing. Eventually he believed us.’

  ‘But why? I mean what did you say exactly?’

  ‘As far as I can remember we told him to stop taking the mick. We said that, whatever he thought of the police, neither of us were fools; that he might have cleaned himself up, changed his clothes, dried his hair and beaten the breathalyser, but that was only the beginning of the scientific evidence we’d be looking for. We told him we’d take his car and flat apart if necessary and that we knew there’d be something to find. However carefully he’d washed, there’d be traces of blood or oil in the U-bend of one of his sinks in the flat. And we’d test all his clothes and shoes, not just the ones he claimed he’d been wearing. Wherever he’d hidden them, we’d find them, and there’d be evidence on them we could use. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Was all that perfectly legal?’ asked Emma, thinking of Jane’s comment about the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. ‘I’m not all that well up on the rules of PACE, but didn’t any of what you said constitute undue threats or inducements? Isn’t that what they’re called?’

  ‘We just laid out for him what our powers are. He looked distinctly sick then.’ Podley himself looked distinctly pleased at the memory. ‘If we’d had any doubts before, they went at that point. He was guilty. He wasn’t thinking up ways for his clients to get round their tax liabilities that night. He was out driving and killing that woman and her baby. If I could have proved he’d known her, I’d have gone after him for murder. At one point I even wondered if the kid had been his and he was trying to get rid of them both, but we couldn’t find any connection at all. I think it was chance. They were there at the wrong time when a maniac who couldn’t be bothered to take care tore through that village li
ke it was Brand’s Hatch.’

  ‘You sound angry.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t be? There aren’t so many crimes when the victim’s done nothing to provoke or invite trouble, but this time they hadn’t. She was a good, hardworking woman, and he was a wanker who thought his need to get home quick from whatever he’d been up to was more important than her life. He deserved everything he got and more. And if they do give him parole next week, I’ll feel sorry for his wife. He’s a cold, ruthless, selfish bastard, and I don’t imagine prison’s made him any pleasanter.’

  ‘Right,’ said Emma, for once glad of her long training in calming the anger in other people and hiding her own. ‘Perhaps I should be glad that he wouldn’t see me after all.’

  ‘You certainly should,’ said Podley, recovering his temper. ‘Anyway that’s enough of all that. What is a nice gi—woman like you doing mixed up with all this?’

  ‘Getting away from nice girls,’ said Emma with a slightly malicious smile. ‘You can’t think how deadening their lives can be. No, I don’t mean deadening, but hypocritical and constricting.’

  ‘And dealing with lying scrotes like Lutterworth is better, is it?’

  Emma’s smile wavered then. She drank some lager and when she looked back at Podley, she saw a surprising amount of understanding in his unattractive eyes and more gentleness than he had shown before.

  ‘Not exactly. But somehow I thought it might be. Not him personally, I mean, but people who aren’t caught up in the lying good manners and frilly garden-fêtery that I was afraid I’d be stuck in for the rest of my life. It’s all been rather…disillusioning actually.’ Emma could not think why she had said anything so real or so revealing to a virtual stranger, who could have had no interest in hearing it.

  Podley nodded. ‘Educational, though, I imagine?’

  ‘Very,’ she said drily. ‘Look, I am grateful to you for seeing me.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve helped much.’

  ‘As much as anyone could, I expect. I’ll tell Ben Wrexham how good you’ve been to me.’

  ‘What’s he like?’