by J M Gregson
She spoke as if there could have been nothing more obvious. He resisted the urge to type this latest fact into his machine as she watched him. He kept his voice even as he said, ‘It’s taken you a long time to come forward.’
She nodded, was about to speak when she was wracked by another bout of sobbing. ‘It – it was our secret. It was all I had left. And Peter has – had a family. I didn’t want to cause pain for his wife and children, did I?’
Chris Rushton had to resist a sudden, surprising urge to take this silly girl by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. She was probably no more than six or seven years younger than he was. Why had she chosen to complicate her life with this ageing philanderer with his family baggage, when she could have had an eager young detective inspector with no ties? He said sternly, like a father-confessor, ‘And how long had this liaison been going on?’
‘Not long. A couple of weeks. We’d only – well, we hadn’t been lovers for long at all.’ Perhaps she saw the pity in his eyes, because she suddenly shouted, ‘And I realize I wasn’t the first. I’m not stupid, you know!’
He looked hastily around. He wasn’t used to dealing with emotional young women, but fortunately there seemed to be no curious observers of their exchange. ‘Of course you’re not stupid, Liza. And you’ve done the right thing to make a clean breast of this.’ He wished he hadn’t used that particular metaphor as he watched her chest heaving impressively in front of him. ‘What we need to ascertain now is whether you can tell us anything which might help us to find out who killed Mr Logan. I’m sure you’re as anxious as we are that we should arrest the person responsible as soon as possible.’
She nodded, unable to speak, and he feared the tears would burst out again. Instead she said, the words coming all in a rush, ‘It was that woman. I thought you’d have arrested her by now.’
Rushton was at a loss. He said woodenly, ‘A woman at Greenwood School, you mean?’
‘That damned teacher! Peter was in love with me, you see, and she knew it! She told me she wasn’t going to let him get away with it. Those were her very words!’
DI Rushton knew now who she meant. He already had a file on this woman in his computer. But he wanted the accusation to come from those lips which seemed to him so red, so tender and so tremulous. So Chris said quietly, ‘And who would this be, Liza?’
‘Tamsin Phillips, of course.’
Steve Fenton was expecting the visit. He had been waiting for it since eight o’clock. By ten, he was quite nervous.
Lambert didn’t make the conventional apology for disturbing him on a Sunday morning. Fenton had forfeited his rights to courtesy by withholding information on the previous day. Perhaps he realized that, for he seemed embarrassed as he led them into the tidy sitting room and offered them coffee.
To Bert Hook’s delight, the offer was accepted. Fenton endured another five minutes of tense speculation in his kitchen before he set the tray down and handed round the cups. He was conscious of Hook flicking his notebook open ostentatiously as he munched his first bite of ginger nut. Finally Steve said, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t completely honest with you at our previous meeting.’
Lambert did not smile. ‘It would have been very much better if you had been.’
‘Yes, I can see that now. I’ve never been involved in a murder investigation before. It rather throws one’s judgement.’
‘So it would appear. It also makes investigating officers treat your subsequent statements with an extra degree of suspicion.’
‘I accept that. But you must see how we felt. The dead man’s wife and her secret lover, wondering what to do about a husband who will not countenance a divorce. It’s a classic B-movie motive for murder.’
‘Which is made all the stronger when the people involved try to conceal their association after the murder. If you had set out to make us suspect the pair of you, you could hardly have gone about things better. Where were you on Monday night, Mr Fenton?’
‘I was here. Exactly as I told you yesterday. From six thirty onwards. The only difference is that Jane Logan was with me for most of the evening.’
Hook looked up from his notebook and said tersely, ‘Times, please.’
Even this stolid, easy-going sergeant was treating him like a criminal now, thought Steve. He made himself take a sip of the coffee he did not want before he said, ‘From seven thirty until ten o’clock.’
Exactly the times Jane Logan had given them herself. But you would have expected that: they must have conferred on this, and they weren’t going to contradict each other over anything so straightforward. Lambert as usual had never taken his eyes off his man. He said, ‘So you are now giving each other an alibi for the time of the murder. Is there anyone else who could verify the fact that you were in this house for the whole of that time?’
‘No. Would you expect there to be?’
‘It would be helpful to you as well as to us if there were. All we are trying to do is to establish facts.’
‘I’m sorry. We were together for two and a half hours. I should think we spent over half of that time in bed. You wouldn’t really expect there to be any witnesses, however helpful one might be to us and to you.’
‘No one phoned you during the evening? Even a telephone conversation would prove that you at least were here.’
Steve finished the biscuit he had bitten into earlier, finding it like cinders in his dry mouth. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. But no. No one phoned me on Monday night.’ He managed a smile. ‘I might have let the answerphone record a message if anyone had, since I was otherwise engaged in more pleasurable activities.’
Lambert looked him steadily in the face, wondering if Fenton was covering himself against the fact that they might find someone who had rung an empty house on Monday evening. He said abruptly, ‘Why didn’t you tell us yesterday that you had an expertise in firearms?’
Steve was shaken, as the Superintendent had intended that he should be. But he made himself speak deliberately. ‘You didn’t ask me about it. And I didn’t see that it was relevant to your inquiry.’
‘When a man has half his head blown away with a Smith and Wesson revolver?’
‘Because of that very fact, Superintendent Lambert. No expertise is needed to place a revolver against a man’s head and blow it away.’
It was a fair enough point, and Lambert acknowledged it with a thin smile. ‘All the same, when a man is shot through the head, it seems odd not to mention that you have won prizes for shooting.’
‘Modest prizes. At a local shooting club. Not at Bisley, Superintendent.’
‘You own a revolver, I believe.’
Steve Fenton smiled. He was getting used to Lambert’s sudden enquiries, had recognized that they were a tactic. ‘I used to own one. Not any more. I gave up shooting and my membership of the rifle and small arms club when the regulations were tightened after that awful multiple shooting at Hungerford. I gave my pistol to the club: I haven’t held a licence for years now.’
‘I see. Have you had any further thoughts on who might have killed Peter Logan?’
Lambert had expected nothing, but Fenton furrowed his brow and said hesitantly, ‘The school has a drugs problem, I believe. In that, it is no different from practically any large secondary school in the land. Peter Logan was aware of it, as he was aware of practically everything which went on in the place. I just wonder if he’d found out something which it was dangerous for him to know.’
Lambert studied him for a moment before he spoke, trying to work out if this was a genuine suggestion or an attempted diversion. ‘It’s possible, of course. It’s a line of enquiry we’re pursuing, along with several others. But if Mr Logan had found anything significant, he hadn’t contacted the police in Cheltenham about it.’
‘I see. Well, that wouldn’t surprise me. He had a habit of hugging things to himself until he knew for certain, did Peter. And he was always very sensitive about anything which might damage the image of his school. He wouldn�
��t have wanted to stir up a hornets’ nest about drugs if he could possibly avoid it.’
‘There’s a possibility Logan’s death could have a drugs connection, but no more than that. My own feeling is that someone less anonymous and nearer to him killed him.’
Lambert’s exit was as abrupt as his questioning. He left on what sounded to Steve Fenton something very like a threat.
Eighteen
Even detectives on a murder case must relax. The public does not like to accept it, but all sharpness, all sense of proportion, leaves them if they do not keep in touch with the more innocent world outside murder.
Lambert decided that Hook should continue his golfing education. On a bright, serene October afternoon, when there was a pleasant warmth in the sun, Bert, still a tyro in the game despite his nineteen handicap, was taken out to partner his chief at Ross-on-Wye Golf Club. He began by topping his drive horribly down the first.
‘Shame to waste a lovely day like this on such a bloody silly game!’ said Hook. He was still missing the cricket he had played for Herefordshire for twenty years, still not reconciled to the relentless advance of the years that was condemning the doughty fast bowler to the effete game of golf.
But he was determined about one thing. He would stem the flow of his chief’s tuition at source. When he saw John Lambert advancing into the fringe of his vision to give him advice, he held up a lordly hand and delivered his prepared statement. ‘I shall conduct my game without the benefit of your tutoring today, John,’ he said. ‘We are out here to relax and enjoy ourselves, and I find your guidance prevents me from doing either of those things.’
That’s telling the old bugger, Bert thought, as he marched away to his ball. He put his second shot on to the green with a majestic six iron. Bert was surprised, but he had already learned enough about golf to behave as if this was no more than his normal game and he had expected it. From the corner of his eye, he saw John Lambert looking stupefied – whether at the rejection of his advice or the splendour of his partner’s stroke, it was impossible to say.
Bert Hook was soon distracted from such considerations by the eccentricities of the opposition. George Ollerenshaw was a tubby little man of fifty-eight who had not played any other game than golf to an acceptable standard. He attempted to make up for this omission by the seriousness he brought to the golf course in what we euphemistically call ‘middle age’ – there was mercifully little chance that George Ollerenshaw would live to be a hundred and sixteen.
He was that irritating phenomenon with which all seasoned golfers are familiar: the man who has an excuse for every bad shot. Bert Hook, still relatively inexperienced in the game, had not met anyone like this before. In Bert’s view, you approached a dead ball in your own time and hit it when you were ready. In this decadent game, you could not get a ball screaming towards your crotch at ninety miles an hour or a ridiculous lbw decision. Anything you did was patently your own fault and there could be no excuses.
George Ollerenshaw had a million excuses.
For a start, he never got a good lie, even in the middle of the fairway, though the wretchedness was never remarked upon until after he had mishit the ball. The most wretched of topped shots, the most extravagant slice, the complete foozle, were all explained in turn as the work of the malevolent devil who set down George’s ball in the wickedest places.
Men take their sport seriously. It is one thing which distinguishes them from lower forms of life. Bert Hook was a legend for his equanimity when confronted with the most foul-mouthed and blasphemous of criminals. But he was outraged by Ollerenshaw’s refusal to confront sporting reality. When the corpulent one slashed the ball extravagantly out of bounds on the sixth and claimed for the fourth time in the round that he had been in a divot hole, Bert could stand it no longer.
‘Golf,’ he observed loudly to no one in particular but to the world at large, ‘is a game in which the ball invariably lies badly and the player lies well.’
There was an embarrassed silence, whilst Bert strode forward, Ollerenshaw stared at him in outrage, and the other two men in the game looked hard at the blue sky above them.
‘He’s been studying for an Open University degree,’ Lambert eventually said apologetically. ‘I expect he’s been reading too much.’
Ollerenshaw was quiet for a while. But his trouble was endemic, and the disease surfaced again within three holes. He was affected by the mewing of a buzzard half a mile away, by the scarcely audible laughter of golfers three holes ahead, by the low sun in his eyes, by the first of the autumn leaves drifting across his vision as he addressed his ball. Lambert gave Hook a series of increasingly desperate warning glares.
When George dispatched his ball irretrievably into the middle of the pond from the twelfth tee, it gave Bert Hook immense but initially secret satisfaction. The man could surely claim nothing in mitigation this time. He had chosen his own perfect lie, had set the ball up carefully upon his tee-peg. Rank bad shot, Your Honour. Plead guilty and ask for mitigation on the grounds of incompetence.
Ollerenshaw studied the widening circle of ripples on the still, dark water. He picked up his tee-peg with a huge sigh. Then he said, ‘I should have stopped. The whiff of diesel from that tractor was quite overpowering.’ He gestured with a wide sweep of his arm towards the farmer’s fields on the left and the invisible and odourless machinery, then shook his head sadly and moved hopelessly towards his trolley.
Lambert commiserated hastily before Hook could express his outrage. ‘“The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”,’ he called vaguely but sympathetically after the waddling back.
George turned a red and uncomprehending face.
‘Hamlet,’ explained Lambert, desperately avoiding Hook beside him.
Light dawned upon Ollerenshaw. ‘The cigar advert,’ he nodded.
Bert could be restrained no longer. ‘No. The tragic Dane. Contemplating suicide at the time.’ It seemed to Bert like an excellent suggestion for George.
The light dawned. ‘Shakespeare. Never read it,’ said George, as if that dismissed the matter for ever. Then, perhaps feeling a need to emphasize his erudition in the face of this humble plod, ‘Tragedy, I think. He gets killed at the end.’
Hook nodded. ‘Most people think death is a tragedy. But I can think of cases where it would be justifiable homicide.’
Lambert and Hook won handsomely. Lambert was wondering how to handle the after-match drinks when Rushton rang him with the news of Liza Allen’s visit to the station. He seized eagerly upon the need to depart at once.
It seemed unlikely that George Ollerenshaw would ask them for a return match.
The man in black was nervous. He was pushing his team hard, because he was being pushed himself by Daniel Price.
But he wasn’t happy. When you were breaking the law, you should proceed with caution, in his view. Grow the business slowly, but surely; make certain that each operative you put in place was working effectively before you went on to further expansion. There was a lot of money in this business, but there was danger as well: you should expect that when the profit was so huge. It paid you to be very, very careful.
Daniel Price didn’t seem to appreciate that. He was trying to rake in the profits too quickly. Perhaps Price was himself being pushed by those above him. More likely he was simply greedy. But there was no one you could appeal to over his head. You simply didn’t know who was next in line above him. The big boys, the barons who made their millions out of drugs, thrived on secrecy. No one knew anything about the chains of command above them, and most people only knew one person, their immediate superior and their contact with the supply chain.
The man in black felt very vulnerable.
He was doing things against his better judgement, which is always a danger sign. He knew that he should keep as low a profile as possible, be unseen but effective. You weren’t selling the stuff yourself, so most of the time there was no need to be around. You only went to the clubs to recruit new staff or,
very occasionally, to keep your existing staff up to the mark.
Yet on the night of Sunday, the fourth of October, he found himself going again to Shakers club in the town centre. He was like a mother hen, he thought, keeping his eye on his pushers, anxious to encourage, cajole, threaten them into increasing their sales. Bloody Daniel Price!
He was beginning to wish he had never recruited young Mark Lindsay. The lad wasn’t reliable enough. He was naive. He was going to need constant supervision. But the man had needed someone to sell for him at Greenwood School: he had lost two pushers, a boy and a girl, who had moved out of the town when they left the sixth form. Young Lindsay had been both easily frightened and eager to make money. But that didn’t make him a reliable pusher.
He’d have another look at Lindsay in action tonight. He might take the pressure off him a little, discourage him from taking silly risks. Or he might dispense with him altogether, whilst there was still time.
It was a clear night, but the moon wasn’t yet up. The man in black found the blanket of darkness such a comfort that he almost turned away at the last moment. But that would have been silly, having come this far. He had to force himself to leave the night and go into the brightness of the club.
It took him quarter of an hour to be certain that Mark Lindsay wasn’t there. He circled the floor, where the noise level was already high and the temperature was rising in parallel with testosterone levels. He checked among the groups of noisy young men at the bar, then in both of the men’s toilets.
Nothing wrong with that, he told himself. Perhaps the lad was merely keeping a low profile, doing what he now planned to advise him to do. Somehow it didn’t seem likely. After all, it was only yesterday that he had been pressurizing Lindsay to sell more, putting the frighteners on him a bit. He regretted that now, and more so when the lad wasn’t here.
His mind was full of young Lindsay when he went out again into the car park and the anonymity of the night. Perhaps he wasn’t as vigilant as he would normally have been. Certainly he never saw the man, though he must have tracked him for sixty yards.