by J M Gregson
‘So what time did you go up to the hospitality suite?’
This was what he had been expecting and he had his answers ready. ‘Quarter past six. The lads had left by then and I thought the Liverpool directors would be either gone or about to go.’
‘You didn’t want to speak to them?’
A rueful grin as he recognized a situation familiar to him but foreign to the CID pair. ‘I don’t like to get involved with the other team’s supporters more than I have to. They often want to talk about referees’ decisions and key points in the match.’
‘And you don’t like discussing these things with amateurs.’
Again that doleful smile. ‘It’s no because they’re amateurs. I’ve had some pretty fierce moments with the professionals – other managers and their assistants. We’re all at the mercy of our results. We’re better paid than we used to be, but it’s an even more precarious business. When there’s so much at stake, you don’t often see things the same way as the opposition, whether you’re professionals or amateurs.’ He felt himself being lured on to familiar but dangerous ground. ‘What’s this got to do with the death of Jim Capstick?’
Peach smiled, not at all put out by the challenge. ‘Time will tell. Maybe nothing. But it’s my belief as it’s probably yours that someone in that hospitality suite on Saturday night killed Mr Capstick later in the evening. As CID officers, we come to this situation knowing nothing about the people involved in it, Mr Black. The more we can find about the way those people think and behave, the nearer we may be to perceiving how a man died. A lot of what we learn will be completely irrelevant, as you imply. But the feelings you took into that room are part of the picture, as are the very different feelings which other people took there. Tell us what happened after you arrived at six fifteen.’
‘The Liverpool people had gone. Jim Capstick had obviously been waiting for that. There was a lot of noise and a lot of pleasure over our victory. Capstick soon put a stop to that.’ Black paused, obviously waiting for a reaction, but neither Peach nor Blake spoke and he had to go on. ‘He told us he was selling the club. That put a stop to all the laughter.’
Peach gave him a curt nod. ‘I expect it did. We now need your account of people’s reactions to that news.’
‘General consternation. Mrs Capstick said she’d known nothing about it. Well, I can’t remember exactly what words she used, but that was what she wanted us to hear.’
‘Did you believe her?’
‘No. Well, I’m not sure whether I did or I didn’t, but it didn’t seem likely that she’d have no notion what her husband was up to. But I was more concerned with how it was going to affect me.’
‘So you spoke up against it?’
‘No. My mind was reeling.’
‘But this wasn’t a surprise to you. You’d known that men were in this building examining the club’s books at the beginning of the week.’
Black looked thoroughly uncomfortable at the challenge. ‘That’s true. I knew something was going on. But nothing definite. And I hadn’t realized things had moved as far as they had. I thought we’d get the chance to say what we thought if anything definite was proposed. I was expecting there would be weeks, perhaps months, before any decisions were made.’
‘I think Mr Capstick knew there was going to be speculation about a takeover in the Sunday papers. He felt he had to give you the news then so that you got it from him and not from others spreading rumours and uncertainty.’
‘So he said. It might be so, but I don’t pretend to understand these things. I’m a football man dealing with football players. I don’t believe Capstick suited anyone but himself.’
Robbie Black’s lips set in a sullen line which said that it wasn’t part of his brief to see the owner’s problems in timing his announcement. He obviously didn’t want to make any allowances for a man he had never liked. Peach let that thought hang unspoken for a moment before he suggested with a deceptively open countenance, ‘So you spoke up and let him know how you felt.’
‘No. It was Mr Lanchester who spoke up and said what we were feeling. He’s a good man, Edward Lanchester.’
‘So you remember what he said on your behalf.’
‘He said what most of us were thinking. That this might be in Jim Capstick’s best interests but not in the interests of the club.’
‘By which he meant?’
‘He meant that he thought the land which the club owns around the ground and in Brunton was of more interest than a football club with a hundred and thirty years of history. I think he said that people all over the world were interested in buying Premiership clubs either as mere status symbols or for their land assets rather than their future as football clubs.’
‘Did you speak yourself?’
‘No. There wasna any need to.’ As usual when he was animated or uncertain, he heard his speech becoming more Scottish.
‘Who else spoke?’
‘Darren Pearson asked some sort of question, I canna remember what. He received a threat about his future for his pains. Capstick told him he wouldn’t be able to recommend his services to the new owners if he didn’t toe the line. That was meant as a threat for all of us who work at the club.’
Lucy Blake looked up from her notes. ‘Didn’t you say anything, Mr Black? It seems other people think that you did.’
He smiled bitterly. ‘You trying to trip me up? I didn’t kill Jim Capstick, though I admit I felt like doing something violent to him on Saturday night.’
Peach said grimly, ‘It was almost certainly someone who felt much as you did who ended Mr Capstick’s life. You will understand that at this stage we can’t take anyone’s word at face value, Mr Black. If you are now telling us that you said nothing to Mr Capstick after his announcement, that is what we shall record. You may eventually be asked to sign a written statement to that effect.’
He was silent for a moment; whether he was genuinely reviewing those fateful minutes or merely deciding what he would reveal to them was not clear from the sallow, frowning face. ‘I did speak. I didn’t say much, but I spoke my piece. And much good it did me. Much good it did for all of us, for that matter. The man’s mind was made up.’
Lucy Blake said quietly, ‘What was it you said, Mr Black?’
Unexpectedly, as he recollected the moment he smiled and the dark eyes brightened in the grave, determined face. ‘I think I knew it was hopeless. Mr Lanchester had said everything that needed to be said and got no change out of Capstick. I only spoke up to support Debbie.’
‘And what had your wife said?’
‘I don’t recall her exact words. Something about a football club being more than a business. About its importance to a town that was already suffering in this recession. We weren’t told this at the time, but I think we all knew that it must be some Middle Eastern oil billionaire who was buying Capstick out. I think I said it wouldn’t be anyone with any knowledge of football or feel for what it meant to the town. Capstick said he didn’t give a bugger about that.’ Black shook his head and the very dark hair moved a little with the movement. ‘I don’t recall his exact words, but that was certainly what he meant.’
‘And you left it at that?’
‘There wasn’t any point in saying anything else. Capstick had already threatened Darren Pearson’s future. He made it plain that the new man would probably be bringing in his own team, so we might all be looking for jobs. Then he buggered off up to his office to carry on with the deal.’
Peach’s eyes looked even darker than Black’s, their hue probably accentuated by the whiteness of the bald pate above them. He said slowly, ‘Capstick told you this at the time, did he?’
Again that frown of concentration wrinkled the forehead above the strong-featured face. It was easy to see why this man had the reputation of a disciplinarian in an era when most managers had grown used to accommodating the whims of their millionaire players. ‘I don’t think he said that in so many words, but I for one wasn’t left in any doubt.
I think he said something about having important phone calls to make.’ He paused, then added, as if the thought had come to him for the first time. ‘I suppose that might have been just bluff, to rub salt in our wounds. I think by that time he was quite happy doing that.’
Peach nodded thoughtfully. It was through the Scotsman’s words that he had gathered for the first time some of the electric atmosphere in the hospitality suite in the minutes after Capstick’s announcement. ‘You told us a few minutes ago that you didn’t kill James Capstick. We’re certain that he was killed in his office on Saturday night. Who do you think murdered him?’
The manager didn’t flinch at the first mention of the word, as people often did. He didn’t look like a man who would flinch at anything. ‘I don’t know. You’ll have quite a few candidates.’ The grim smile said more eloquently than words that the thought gave him considerable satisfaction.
Blake said unemotionally, ‘You will understand that we need an account of your movements in those hours.’
‘Aye. We stayed together in the hospitality suite after Capstick had left, discussing what he’d said and what it meant for us.’
‘All of you?’
‘I can’t be certain of that. And I can’t tell you who left and when. We were all shattered by what we’d heard.’ He paused. ‘I think Mrs Capstick left pretty quickly after him. You’d expect that, wouldn’t you?’
Lucy Blake didn’t respond to that. Robbie thought how composed her face looked beneath the chestnut hair. When she looked up from her notes, her eyes were a remarkable dark green, seeming to him for a moment of fantasy to be able to see further into him than eyes of a more normal colour. She said softly, ‘When did you leave yourself, Mr Black?’
‘I don’t know how long it was after Capstick had gone. I wasn’t checking at the time. Perhaps twenty minutes, but I’ve really no idea.’
‘Did your wife leave with you?’
‘No. We always go to the ground in separate cars, because I have to be with the players hours before kick-off time. She didn’t have to rush away, though. The au pair was looking after the children and seeing them into their beds.’
It was the first time he had spoken of this exotic new addition to their household: he wondered if it sounded boastful. Apparently not, for Blake said without looking up, ‘And the rest of the evening?’
‘I made a phone call on my mobile. Arranged to meet Jack Cox.’
Peach nodded. ‘A fellow manager.’
‘Retired now. But a wily old bird, with lots of experience. I was assistant to Jack at Sheffield United when I stopped playing and took my coaching badges. I wanted to discuss what Capstick had said with someone like him. I arranged to meet Jack at his house at nine thirty. He suggested a pub, but I wanted somewhere more private.’ He grinned fondly at the memory of the exchange. ‘Jack Cox told me to keep my head down and await developments. Not to resign, whatever I felt. If they sack you, they have to pay up your contract.’
‘So you arrived home at what time?’
‘Probably eleven o’clock or so. Debbie might be able to tell you. She was waiting up for me.’ He looked at them with the sort of aggression he had once brought to the football field. ‘We spent another hour discussing what we’d heard from Capstick.’
SIXTEEN
The post-mortem examination report on James Capstick told the investigators little that they had not known or deduced already.
He had been strangled by means of a cord or cable. This had been dropped over his head and tightened by twisting from behind. In addition to the deep and fatal wound at the throat, the area at the back of the neck showed bruising that had been caused by the twisting of the murder implement behind the deceased’s head. Beneath the technical language and the Latinized vocabulary lay the stark truth: someone, probably taking him by surprise, had stood behind Capstick and garrotted him, twisting the life out of him within seconds.
Most of this the CID team had already deduced. The disappointment for them was the news that no great strength had been required for the killing. The supplementary information about the absence of fibres in the deep wound to the neck indicated that the most probable death instrument was some sort of electric cable. Once this had been applied to the neck, it could have been twisted and tightened from behind by the hands of a woman as easily as a man. The prospect of eliminating some of the candidates for this crime on the grounds of the brute physical strength required had disappeared.
There was no sign of the murder weapon at the scene, and little prospect of its being discovered now. It was probably a very common type of electrical cable, available to anyone. Indeed, a skip adjacent to the ground, containing the detritus from rewiring work being currently conducted there, held short lengths of this type of cable; it was quite possible but by no means certain that the murder weapon had been picked up from there.
Because the time when the last food eaten by the dead man could be pinpointed to between five and six in the hospitality suite at Grafton Park, the pathologist was able to be unusually precise in his estimate of the time of death. The degree of digestion of the food indicated that death had taken place between ninety and one hundred and fifty minutes after its consumption.
‘Between seven thirty and eight thirty,’ said DCI Peach sourly, as he surveyed the report with his team. ‘Thanks for telling us what we already bloody knew.’
‘At least we know that he died relatively early in the evening,’ said DC Brendan Murphy brightly. The big, fresh-faced Lancastrian with the entirely Irish name was given to unthinking optimism.
Peach released his frustration in a look of molten contempt. ‘Which merely brings a lot more people into this as suspects. If he hadn’t died until eleven, we could have presumed that a lone figure, probably someone who knew that labyrinth of a place intimately like Darren Pearson, had hung around until everything was quiet, then dispatched our man with no one around.’
Murphy was not at all put out. ‘Or that someone who had left the ground much earlier had stolen back to the place to see off Capstick. You wouldn’t have allowed us to rule out that possibility.’
DS Blake smiled at the male stags locking horns. ‘Capstick being killed later in the evening is an unlikely scenario anyway. Whoever wanted to get at him couldn’t rely on him being around for much longer than an hour after he’d dropped his bombshell of news and left his audience aghast in the hospitality suite. I know he said he had phone calls to make, but if I’d been planning to get rid of him, I would have felt I had to do it pretty quickly if I was to be certain of finding him in his office.’
DC Clyde Northcott was studying the last paragraph on the stomach contents. ‘He’d had a drink or two not long before he died, it says here, some time after the food he’d consumed. Not a lot, because he’d still have been just under the limit for driving. Is it possible that he’d been drinking with the person who killed him? That would strengthen the possibility that his killer was someone who knew him well, someone that Capstick might have happy to sit and drink with.’
Peach pictured the scene of crime he had visited twenty-four hours earlier. ‘It was Capstick’s whisky. Only one glass was found. Forensic found only Capstick’s prints on both bottle and glass.’
Northcott nodded. ‘Which makes sense, since no doubt he was doing the pouring. But his visitor might well have removed any second glass, which would have had his fingerprints all over it. He’d have been silly not to do that.’
‘Or she would have been silly,’ pointed out Lucy Blake, in an inverted assertion of sexual equality. ‘We can’t even be absolutely certain that it was Capstick’s announcement that he was selling the club which provoked his murder. We’re already finding that he was a man with plenty of enemies. The news of the takeover would have been a wonderful smokescreen for someone who already had a personal grudge against Capstick. Someone who already hated him enough to kill him could well have seen the chance of involving a lot of other suspects.’
DCI Percy Pe
ach looked round his team dolefully. ‘You lot really know how to cheer a bloke up.’
Debbie Black wished now that she’d told them to come to the house immediately.
When the cool, matter-of-fact voice had told her that senior CID officers wanted to talk to her in connection with the death of James Capstick on the previous Saturday, her first thought had been to give herself time to think, to prepare her replies to some of the questions she regarded as inevitable. She had arranged for them to come to see her at two o’clock, which would give her three hours to compose herself and think of the bland, straightforward answers which would send these as yet faceless people away convinced that she had nothing interesting to offer them.
It proved to be three hours of increasing tension rather than confident preparation. The children were safely at school. She gave the au pair the rest of the day off and encouraged her to go into the town centre shops: she was still not used to the luxury of employing staff and it seemed a good idea to have the place to herself whilst she prepared for the two o’clock meeting. But the empty house seemed only to increase her edginess and crank up her apprehension about what was to come in the afternoon.
At twelve fifteen, she made herself a sandwich for lunch. At one o’clock, she threw more than half of it into the waste bin and took a big beaker of tea into the sitting room, which looked even bigger than usual as she curled her legs beneath her upon a sofa and fixed her nervous hands around the china. Her normally cool brain refused to take any heed of her injunctions: she could not think about the questions and what her replies to them would be. She could not remember when her concentration had last been so poor.
For the third time, she checked her appearance in the mirror. For twenty years and more, she had been used to presenting herself at her best for interviews. During her days as a tennis star and a model, it had become second nature to glance into a mirror for no more than a few seconds, confirming that all was as she wanted it to be before she presented herself to her public. Now, all she noticed was that her dark brown hair seemed stiff, forced into place rather than falling naturally about her face, that her cheeks were surely paler than when she had last looked at them half an hour earlier.