by J M Gregson
‘This is one of the things we couldn’t do when I started this job,’ the Head Greenkeeper told him, as they completed the planting and tidied the site when the specialist tree firm had departed. ‘Until ten years or so ago, we just had to plant six-foot-high saplings and wait for them to grow. Now we can bring in sturdy young trees and watch them replace the old ones which have fallen with the minimum of delay. A young lad like you will see these fellows in full maturity before you reach retiring age.’
They stood for a moment in the March twilight, looking up at the slim, healthy young branches high above their heads against the darkening blue of the sky, marvelling at this combination of ancient nature and modern technology. Then the greenkeeper put his spade on his shoulder and said contentedly, ‘That’s enough work for one day, lad. We’ll have a brew before you go, if you’ve got the time.’
They drove the tractor back to the big greenkeepers’ shed, with its smells of oil and soil and grass, its machines which looked twice as big as they did outside when they were housed in this safe haven for the night. The other three members of the staff had already left; course workers began work early, at half-past seven each morning, to get on with as much work as possible before golfers appeared on the course, and finished correspondingly early.
They went into the familiar room at the end of the huge shed, with the battered armchairs which had been brought here when they became too shabby for the club lounge, the scratched wooden lockers, the Pirelli girlie calendar ten years out of date, the little electric stove and kettle. The Head Greenkeeper switched on the two-bar electric fire and filled the kettle. He nodded at the girl on the calendar as he waited for the water to boil. ‘Do you a bit of good, she could!’ he said, with a leer which was as much part of his unthinking male ritual as the tea.
Jim Burns had resisted all attempts to bring in more modern and daring porn to replace the Pirelli. Although he couldn’t have explained it, he considered that the old and well-thumbed calendar gave a sort of antique distinction to male lust. He had his own cottage by the clubhouse and was happily married, with three grown-up daughters. But like most people who worked with the seasons, he was a traditionalist. This grizzled, growling, kindly fifty-year-old liked to be assured that the younger men who worked for him were heterosexual and lubricious; it was part of his insulation against what he saw as the increasingly varied and dangerous world outside his work.
They chatted happily over strong, hot tea, enclosed by the cosy intimacy that drops upon men who have worked hard together for most of the day when they sit down to rest. The Head Greenkeeper took a long, appreciative pull at his mug of tea, then exhaled noisily, in a way his wife would certainly have disapproved. ‘You’re doing all right, lad,’ he said.
From Jim Burns, that was high praise, and Ben Freeman dimly understood it as such. Burns was not a man with any gift for small talk, but Ben asked him things about the history of the course and the plans for the future, and the older man was unexpectedly forthcoming. Like many taciturn men, he became quite voluble once his enthusiasm was kindled, and this was the area of both his expertise and his interest. When they eventually finished their conversation, Jim Burns found himself following the familiar route back to the cottage in near darkness, with a light, chill wind which was cool enough to remind him that it was still only late March. The clocks would go forward on Saturday; that was always the date which marked the real beginning of spring for a greenkeeper.
Ben Freeman was in a contented frame of mind as he went to the side of the long hut, unlocked the chain on his bike and switched on the lights. They were getting rather dim, but from next week on the light evenings would be here and he’d hardly need them. Maybe when he was established here he’d get himself the little motorbike which his mother was so much against.
It looked as if he was going to get away with what he had done at Marton Towers. He realized that he’d managed not to think about events up there for a full four hours this afternoon. That must be some sort of record.
As he turned on to the four hundred yards of private road which led away from the golf club and back to the public highway, Ben was glad of even the minimal light from the lamp at the front of his bike. There was no street lighting here, and no moon yet in a sky where there was now just a tiny residue of daylight in the west behind him. He pedalled steadily, searching for the rhythm which would come through his fatigue and carry him home. He was still young enough to have been considerably revived by the tea and the rest he had enjoyed during his chat with the boss.
The small van had no lights, but it did not need them on this road. Probably some chap having a quiet kip and a skive before he went back to work, Ben thought; it was a bit early for snogging. Ben realized as he moved out to pass the vehicle that its engine was switched on, but he was taken completely by surprise when the side of the van moved swiftly towards his bike.
He shouted, twisted his handlebars violently away from the wall of moving metal, stood and thrust his weight frantically on the pedals to accelerate, but it was hopeless. The van cruised alongside him, followed his movement across the lane, thrust him inexorably into darkness and thorny vegetation, as his wheels slid from the road and on to the verge.
He hadn’t a chance. He was still face down, clawing at the brambles, tasting the blood in his mouth from the scratches, when the men set about him. There were two of them, he thought, but he couldn’t even be sure of that. They had baseball bats or coshes, and they used them systematically, unemotionally, upon the body beneath them.
Ben had thought that with the arrest of the drug barons at Marton Towers he might be off the hook. But someone else must have taken over the empire, or the men lower down the hierarchy were continuing to operate the system. Now he felt that he was going to die. There was a blow to his cheek, and he flung his hands over the back of his head and buried his face in the brambles, yelling with the pain as the blows fell upon his back, his ribs, his thighs, blubbering with the thought that this was an absurd place to die, after what he had been through in the past month.
Then a voice said, ‘Just a taste of what could come to you, Freeman, if you don’t keep your mouth shut. We don’t like people who leave us without permission. We’ll be watching you and listening to you. One word about what went on at the Towers, and you’re dead.’
Ben didn’t recognize the voice, didn’t dare to turn his face in the darkness. He sensed that it would be better for him if he saw nothing of his assailants; he had a dim hope now that he might survive, if he did not move at all.
They had ceased to hit him whilst the man spoke over his victim, uttering the warning which was the real purpose of this visit. But now, just when Ben had thought it might be over, they gave him two final blows to the ribs, one on each side of the body, and pain flashed white and livid against his closed eyelids. Through the groans he scarcely recognized as sounds from him, he heard the doors slam and the van accelerate away.
It was a long time before Ben Freeman crawled, shivering with cold and shock, towards what was left of his bicycle.
Neville Holloway chose to see them in his office, even at seven o’clock in the evening. He wanted to keep them away from his wife, not just because of what her innocence might reveal to them, but because of some obscure instinct which made him reluctant to taint his domestic world with what had gone on in the mansion.
The Chief Inspector whom he feared brought with him not the consoling female presence of Detective Sergeant Blake, who had come with him last time, but a tall, muscular, unsmiling black man, who looked very tough and said nothing to revise that impression.
‘Come with me and frighten the butler!’ Percy Peach had said at Oldford nick. ‘It needs a hard bastard who’s handy with his fists to ruffle the Jeeves-like surface of the man.’
DC Clyde Northcott nodded and followed his man out of the station without argument. What Peach said went, as far as Clyde was concerned. He asked no questions, but he had no idea who this Jeeves was; Pelham G
renville Wodehouse wasn’t Northcott’s sort of reading.
Holloway began with the safe formalities. ‘Is there any news on Mr Crouch? We are all naturally interested to know when he might be back.’
Peach gave him a grim smile. ‘Probably not at all. Certainly not for several years. He’s been charged with serious drug offences, along with the rest of the gang we arrested here last Wednesday night. That’s merely an informed opinion, by the way. Drugs aren’t my concern, thank God. I’m interested in arresting a murderer. Which is why I’m here at this time of night.’ He looked with some distaste around the tidy, presently disused office. His gaze came to rest on the cabinet which the occupant had recently cleared of incriminating evidence, and Neville fought to rid himself of the idea that this disturbing man knew all about his efforts to cover his tracks.
He said, ‘I’m as anxious as you to find out who killed Neil Cartwright. But I’ve already told you what little I know of the circumstances of his death.’
‘No, Mr Holloway. Like everyone else we have seen at Marton Towers, you told us as little as you possibly could in our previous meetings, and concealed as much as you thought you could get away with.’ Peach spoke as unemotionally as if he were reading a train timetable, but the content of what he said was uncompromising.
‘I can’t think that I can possibly—’
‘You concealed the fact that a minor drug-dealing ring was centred here. That Neil Cartwright was involved in it.’ This was Clyde Northcott, as physically threatening as if he was on the other side of the law, where rules did not apply, though he made no physical move towards the man who was almost thirty years older than him.
Neville Holloway wished that he had not allowed them to sit with their backs to the single light in the large room, which fell fully upon his own face as he sat behind his desk. He could see the flash of the black man’s eyes, and the teeth beneath them as he spoke, but little else of his features. Those teeth looked very white and very large, and his office in the mansion felt very quiet and very isolated. He found himself too unnerved to challenge Northcott’s assertions. He said weakly, ‘You may be right about this. I had my suspicions, but I knew very little.’
Peach noted that weakness, even whilst he approved Northcott’s ability to make bricks with the very little straw which they possessed. He said, ‘I think you had better now tell us everything that you do know, Mr Holloway, whilst there is still time.’
Neville didn’t like the implication in that last sinister phrase. He said slowly, ‘Well, it’s true that I suspected that my employer was involved in drugs in a big way. I also suspected that the people who came here on occasions like the one you interrupted last Wednesday night were people involved in the international trafficking of drugs. But it was suspicion, and no more than that. It was made clear to me when I came here that I should keep my nose out of my employer’s business. I have tried to do that.’
It had some of the ring of a prepared statement, and that was probably what it was. Peach nodded. ‘You also made that policy clear to the people you in turn employed to work in the house and on the estate. And you recruited people who like you had been in trouble with the law before, and thus had every reason to be as unseeing, as unhearing and as silent as the three wise monkeys.’
‘I won’t deny any of that.’
‘Good. And on my side I’ll say that I can understand, if not approve, that attitude. No doubt it’s what Crouch expected of you. But this is murder I’m investigating. It’s time to come clean, Mr Holloway.’
Neville glanced nervously from the round white face to the taut and equally unsmiling black one beside it. He licked his lips and ran a hand over his immaculately parted, silvering hair. ‘You’re right. I think there was a minor drugs ring which was centred on this site. Perhaps it happened because the supply was easy. I – I want you to know that I wasn’t involved in it myself.’
‘Then who was?’
‘I think Neil Cartwright was. I think he began by dealing, then moved up a rung in the organization, so that he was running his own small ring of dealers himself.’ He looked again from one to the other of the contrasting but equally unyielding faces. ‘All this is no more than speculation, you understand. I have no definite knowledge.’
‘I understand, Mr Holloway. I understand that you can end up as a corpse in the canal if you reveal anything about the boys in this particular racket. Do you think that’s what happened to Cartwright? That he got too big for his boots and was taken out by someone in the organization?’
For a moment, Neville was tempted to nod and say he thought that is what had happened, to shrug off this killing on to the anonymous shoulders of the dangerous world of illegal drugs. But he did not know how much these men knew, and to be caught out in further deceptions might land him in very deep water. He said reluctantly, ‘No. I don’t know, but I doubt it. For one thing, I don’t think Neil Cartwright was that important. And for another, people who die like that are usually dispatched away from home, and their bodies dumped somewhere anonymous like a canal or a building site, as you suggested they might be a few minutes ago. I don’t think they would have killed Cartwright here.’
It was almost a summary of Peach’s own thoughts on the matter, which he had confirmed with the Drugs Squad earlier in the day. That meant it was almost certainly someone in Neil Cartwright’s family or someone who had worked with him on this site who had killed him. The question in Peach’s mind at the moment was whether this urbane, experienced man in front of him, who was so smoothly shrugging away his own connections with the dead man, could possibly have been the one who removed Cartwright from the scene.
It was DC Northcott who voiced that thought. ‘You know more than you’ve admitted previously about this small ring of dealers. How do we know that you weren’t involved yourself? How do we know that you didn’t kill Cartwright, either for your own purposes or on orders from above?’
Neville Holloway was not outwardly ruffled, either by the questions or Northcott’s uncompromising attitude. He had dealt with Fraud Squad detectives in the past, intelligent men who had pitted their wits against his and won. But he was confident now that these men knew very little about his own role in anything dubious at Marton Towers; they were fishing for information rather than confronting him with unpleasant facts. He said carefully, ‘You will have to take my word on these things. One cannot easily prove a negative, as I’m sure you often find in your own work.’
Clyde Northcott, who had endured a varied and difficult working life before being encouraged by Peach to join the police service, had an instinctive dislike for men like Holloway, who in his experience spoke smoothly and acted ruthlessly once you were out of the room. He said, ‘You have proved yourself untrustworthy by withholding full information from us in previous meetings. We have to keep you in the frame for this.’
‘Then so be it. In the light of your attitude, it would obviously be in my interests to point you towards the real culprit, but I have to assure you that I don’t know who killed Neil Cartwright.’
Peach received that statement with the slow smile of a predator. ‘In the light of your undoubted innocence, you won’t object to giving us a DNA sample.’
‘And why should I do that?’
‘Because you are anxious to give us hard-working coppers every assistance in this investigation. More specifically, because the dead man’s car has been found and is being given detailed forensic attention.’
‘This is blackmail. If I refuse, you’ll say that I’ve something to hide.’
Peach’s smile grew wider. ‘I said a voluntary DNA sample, so you’d be within your rights to refuse. Of course, we’d be entitled to draw our own conclusions from any such action.’
Neville Holloway was definitely ruffled. He glared at his two visitors for a moment and then said. ‘All right. You can have your sample.’
Peach’s smile became a positive beam. ‘Just a simple saliva test, Mr Holloway. And who knows, it may help to elimina
te you from our enquiries. But I wouldn’t bank on it.’
The CID men were in their car on the way back to the station when a disgruntled Northcott said, ‘That bugger still knows more than he’s telling us.’
For a long time, he didn’t think his chief was going to offer any comment. They had gone fully half a mile further towards Brunton before Peach said, ‘If a man got in his way, Holloway would certainly be cool enough and ruthless enough to dispose of him. Even your hard-man techniques didn’t break him down.’
Then he grinned. ‘The butler’s still in the frame.’
A week after the fire at Marton Towers and the grisly discovery of that charred corpse, the mother of the victim was still struggling to come to terms with the death of her only son.
Her second marriage was an unusually happy one. Before this death, Brenda and Derek Simmons had chatted happily on most evenings on all kinds of topics, and almost invariably found that their views coincided. But Neil’s murder had thrown a shadow between them, which seemed to become only darker with the passing days. Neither of them wanted to say that it was a week tonight since the fire at Marton Towers, though each of them became more aware of it as the hours dragged past.
Derek as usual was in charge of the television remote control, and their sporadic words of consultation about what they should watch were almost the only ones they exchanged during the evening. The set flickered in the corner, but most of the content of the programmes was lost on the couple, who stared at it steadily but found their thoughts equally steadily elsewhere.
At ten thirty, Brenda went into the kitchen and made two cups of tea. She felt guilty as she went automatically through the simple process: it was a welcome respite to be on her own, away from the observant eyes of her husband. She had never felt like this before, in all their years together. Her husband’s animosity towards his stepson hung between them like a tangible thing, seeming more of an obstacle now than it had been when Neil was alive. In those days, Derek had done his best with his stepson, for her sake.