by J M Gregson
‘So Faraday could have done just what you did. Collected the tickets by going down to the theatre on the morning after the performance.’ Where once Rushton might have resented Hook’s initiative, he was now delighted with it. It put Ian Faraday right back where he wanted him: at the centre of this investigation.
‘Quite easily. It was almost ten o’clock when I collected these. Faraday could have been down at the theatre before eight, if he had strolled out from the River Crescent Hotel before breakfast.’
Lambert said slowly, ‘Both Gabrielle Berridge and Faraday have been at pains to establish that they were in Stratford early in the evening, though it now appears that they were probably not there. That implies that one of them at least had a pretty accurate idea of the time of death from the start. Before we even knew ourselves.’
‘Which suggests in turn that Faraday committed this murder. And that his mistress either assisted him directly or tried to help him establish an alibi.’ Rushton was excited as things fell into place. The instinct of the hunter must be strong if a man is to be an effective detective, and the scent of a kill excites all CID men.
It was Lambert who said with a grim little smile, ‘But we have another candidate to consider. Especially in view of the information which has arrived in the last hour, I believe.’
Rushton looked round the expectant faces, human enough to savour this last moment when he held a titbit which had not been generally released. ‘We have had a call from a taxi-driver, Billy Milton. He picked up a fare within six hundred yards of Old Mead Park at about ten o’clock on the night when James Berridge was killed. He doesn’t know the name of his fare, but he has been able to give us a useful description. A blonde woman, probably in her thirties, with minor facial injuries. It sounds very like Berridge’s latest mistress, Sarah Farrell.’
Lambert took up the story, filling in with information where speculation might have taken over. ‘I interviewed Berridge himself in the presence of Sarah Farrell about four hours before he died. And I have seen her since the death. According to her, they had a major bust-up after I’d left them. Her story is that she saw him for the first time for what he was, and refused to cooperate with him. That may or may not be true. What is certain is that she was quite badly knocked about, either by Berridge or by someone else. If she was the woman picked up by this taxi, then the injuries probably occurred as she says they did. But what is interesting is that so far she has not admitted leaving her cottage on that night.’
‘What was she doing near the scene of the murder on Tuesday night if she wasn’t involved?’ This was Johnson, speaking from an objective outsider’s position; he had never seen Sarah Farrell.
Lambert said, ‘I don’t know. She rang for the taxi from the public phone near the pub, but she could easily have walked there from the flats. And she certainly concealed the fact that she had been anywhere near Old Mead Park when we interviewed her. And there is something else.’
At a nod from his chief, Rushton produced a small polythene bag. It contained something which glittered blue in the light, but it was so small that he had to define it for the men who stared at it. ‘Sergeant Johnson found this when his Scene-of-Crime team went over the car. It’s an earring. Found on the floor beneath the passenger’s seat.’ He looked back at Lambert.
The superintendent said slowly, almost reluctantly, ‘We shall need to check, of course. But I’m almost sure this is one of the earrings I saw Sarah Farrell wearing at her cottage earlier in the evening.’
***
An hour after the unofficial conference of the James Berridge murder team had broken up, a woman came to the desk at Oldford police station.
She said she wanted to see the man in charge, then sat on the bench against the wall and prepared to wait. She was sixty-nine, but she looked rather older than that. She clutched her shopping bag to her chest beneath her hunched shoulders with both her arms, as if she feared that even here it might be snatched from her. She had pinched features; wisps of straight grey hair strayed untidily across the upper part of her face as she stared ahead of her and watched the station sergeant behind his barrier.
Much sooner than she expected, the constable came back to her. She was ushered through doors which took her beyond the view of the public. The acned youth and the man who had brought in the lost dog were impressed in spite of themselves by the swift police response to this unimportant-looking figure. They had no experience of how a murder investigation speeds up even the most sluggish procedures.
The man in plain clothes stood up as the constable showed her in and gave her name. He seemed to her immensely tall, and quite young. But nowadays she found that most people seemed young, just as when she had been a girl almost all adults had seemed old. He was Superintendent Lambert, he said. She had an idea that was quite a high rank; it must surely be so, for he said next that he was in charge of this murder business. She felt a little shiver of excitement run through her at the very mention of the word: on a policeman’s lips, it seemed suddenly more real. She sat on the very edge of the stand chair in front of his desk. She smiled frostily when he asked what he could do for her; men were always so polite when they thought you were going to offer them something.
‘It’s about the murder of this prominent local businessman.’ She had read the local press carefully, as she did every week, and she produced the phrase with dutiful precision. ‘I knew James Berridge.’
Lambert said, trying to hasten her on, ‘So did several hundred other people, Miss Harding. But you know something special, perhaps.’
She leaned forward, her thin face like that of an alert bird, so that Lambert had the impression that if he made a sudden move she might peck him. ‘He used to come to see that Farrell woman.’
‘Miss Sarah Farrell? Is she a neighbour of yours?’
She was thrown out of her stride for a moment, thinking for some reason she could not pin down that they should have known these things already. ‘I live next door but one to her. Not that I speak to her much. No better than she should be, that one.’ She had still the traces of a Yorkshire accent, though she had lived in Gloucestershire for fifty years now. ‘He used to come to see her, during the day, you see.’ She leaned even further forward, so that he was acutely aware of the straggly line of dark hairs on her upper lip. ‘The bedroom curtains used to be shut, more often than not.’
Just as well, he thought, with eyes as curious as these around. ‘It isn’t against the law, you know, Miss Harding.’
‘More’s the pity.’ His visitor sniffed, as if this deficient law was wholly the responsibility of the man on the other side of the desk. ‘Anyway, I’ve come here to offer you my help, if you want it.’
‘And in what way do you think you might be able to help us, Miss Harding?’ Any policeman involved in the investigation of serious crime gets used to bizarre offerings from members of the public. Most of them are well meaning; some, of whom this woman appeared to be one, have empty lives which they seek to fill with a little excitement. The police have to listen, for the sake of the occasional gem of information which they extract from the dross.
Lambert had already decided that this woman had nothing of interest to offer. Long experience meant that he had a perception about people like Miss Harding. On this occasion, he was wrong.
She leaned back a little, then thrust her nose suddenly forward, like a bird attacking a worm. ‘He came there on the afternoon of the day he died, you know.’
‘As a matter of fact, we do know, Miss Harding.’ He wondered if this eager spectator had noted his own visit to the cottage whilst Berridge was there with his mistress, and what she had made of that.
She looked a little deflated for a moment. Then she said, ‘Well then, she’s likely to be involved in his killing, isn’t she? And your appeal said anyone who knew anything which might help should come forward. So I’ve come.’ She sat back, triumphant in her logic, clutching her shopping bag even more tightly to her bosom now that the moment for her r
evelation was at hand.
Lambert was rapidly losing patience. He said, trying to maintain an even tone through his briskness, ‘And just what is it you have seen that you think might help us?’
‘I saw her, didn’t I? In her garden, on the day after this prominent local businessman was killed. Noticed that she was out there and thought it funny. ‘Cos she’s no gardener, you see. Has old Joe Philips in to do her little patch for her, she does, normally.’ Miss Harding shook her head at such sloth and extravagance.
Lambert was interested despite himself. Any variation from the norm was of interest to a CID man; he had that at least in common with the thin column of bones and bitterness on the other side of his desk. But there was an edge of sarcasm to his voice as he said, ‘And what did Miss Farrell do that might interest us on this rare venture into horticulture?’
She did not miss his scepticism. But she quite enjoyed it, coming as it did at this moment when she was about to surprise him. ‘Tottering about on her high heels, she was, with her trowel in her hand.’ She made it seem as if the woman had been naked, with her knickers in her hand.
Miss Harding giggled at the recollection of this unsuitable footwear. As she had not giggled properly for years, the sound issued from her narrow throat as a cackle. The noise surprised her, but she bent forward, right over the desk now, fixing the man who shrank from her glittering eye. ‘She buried something, didn’t she? In the back border. Right in front of her daphne arbuscula — though I doubt if that trollop knows the name of it.’
Now Lambert was interested. ‘So she buried something. Presumably something small, if she only had a trowel. I don’t suppose you managed to see what it was, Miss Harding?’
It was her moment. She could not have arranged it better if she had been allowed to script the exchange herself. She looked at him with a broad smile, her white dentures suddenly brilliant against the yellow skin. ‘I didn’t just see it, did I, Inspector?’ She had forgotten his rank, but that must be right: they always used that on the telly. ‘I noted the spot carefully for you. And today, when she’d gone to work, I went round the back of the cottages and dug it up with my trowel.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that, Miss Harding. You were trespassing. If we’d thought it necessary to retrieve—’
‘I were safe enough. She’s at work all day.’ In her contempt for the interruption, her Yorkshire speech leapt out broadly at him across half a century. Then she thrust both hands into the recesses of the bag she had guarded so assiduously throughout their conversation. After a second, which might have been designed to heighten the effect, she held her right hand in the air between their faces. ‘This is what she buried.’
She had at least had the sense not to wash away the soil from her treasure. A little Gloucestershire loam detached itself and fell on to Lambert’s desk even as he focused on her find.
Swinging gently in front of his eyes with that gleeful witch’s face only inches behind it was what he was quite sure was the missing set of keys for James Berridge’s BMW.
20
George Lewis usually tried to get away from Old Mead Park on his day off. For one thing, people forgot that a porter was ever allowed time off, and if he was in his flat people seemed to assume that he was available to them. For another, he was aware that he needed to get away from the place if he was not to become dull and hidebound. ‘Get out of that comfortable rut you wear for yourself,’ his wife used to say, and George knew that she had been right, though he had never admitted it.
One of his problems was to find places to go. He was no great walker: not on his own, anyway, though he had explored the Forest of Dean pretty thoroughly in company in his younger days. And he had been to the cathedral and the docks in Gloucester too often for them to have any novelty left. Shops had never had much attraction for him, unless he actually wanted to buy something, and he had given up going to the cinema years ago.
But today he had no doubt where he was going. He had left his green uniform on its hanger and got out his new sports coat and trousers. He had had them five years, but they were still new to him. Certainly, they had not been much worn. He had thought at first that he would wear his best suit and his white shirt, but he had worn them for Charlie’s funeral, and it did not seem right to appear in them today: better to pretend that that painful chapter had been closed.
He almost bought flowers. Then he thought again of the funeral and the wreaths and sprays. He bought instead a pot plant, a coleus whose bright amber leaves had fimbriated green fringes. He rang the bell, then stood back a little self-consciously from the doorstep with the pot in his hand. It was a long time since he had gone a-calling upon a lady; he could not remember how long.
But she had known he was coming, and there were not many seconds before the door opened. Amy Pegg had put on her cheerful, outside-world face to answer the door. She tried to force a smile of genuine welcome for George, but it would not free itself from the glassy smoothness of the rest of her face. Instead, she said, ‘Come in, George,’ and let him into the neat little lounge which she had shared for so long with Charlie.
Neither of them had much small talk. They sat erect as children who had been warned to behave well, feeling themselves strangers, united only by the memory of a dead man neither of them could mention. They realized in those minutes that strangers were exactly what they were; George had kept things up with Charlie, but they had usually met in the pub, happy over a game of darts, echoing long-gone NAAFI days in their easy male exchanges. Each had visited the other’s house only once or twice a year, and when George’s wife had been alive the two women had mostly talked to each other.
Now there were long silences between them, in which each was conscious of the other’s desperate striving for a topic of conversation. Eventually, inevitably, they came back obliquely to the man who was their only real link. ‘I thought the funeral went off very well,’ said George.
‘I think it was as he would have wanted it,’ said Amy.
And suddenly, the awkwardness between them dropped away. Amy said it would not be easy, but she was determined not to be too dependent on her daughter, and George said that was the right attitude: he knew from his own experience. She said, ‘You must miss Eileen,’ and he admitted he did still, though it had become easier as the months and the years passed.
‘Of course, I have my work. That keeps me busy.’
‘Yes.’ She wondered what she could find to keep her busy. There was not the same interest in keeping the house nice, now that there was no Charlie to appreciate her efforts. ‘Do you have accommodation at those flats?’ She could not remember the name of the place; she realized that she had not been there in the two years since he had taken up the job.
‘Yes. I have a nice little flat. Well, not so little, really. It’s designed for a married couple, you see. Nice to have a bit of space, when my daughter comes down from Cumbria with her nipper.’ He did not say grandson. He was reminding her that he had a daughter, too, that he was not just an ageing man in search of company.
Amy did not want to discuss the details of his flat, any more than she wanted him to see beyond the lounge of the home she had shared with Charlie. She would have to offer to let him use the bathroom, she supposed, in due course. Well, he must have been there at some time before, when he had come here with Eileen. Somehow, it would seem more intimate, now that both their partners were gone. ‘I’ll make us some tea now,’ she said, and shut the door behind her as she went into the kitchen.
She put the sandwiches she had made before he came on to plates, then buttered the fresh scones. When she had made the tea and put the cosy on the pot, she pushed the little tea wagon she had not used since Charlie’s death into the lounge and shut the door carefully again upon her kitchen. Immersed in the rituals of this modest catering, she seemed to George a trim, courageous, wholly admirable figure.
The food eased the exchanges. It was a long time since George had had such daintily cut sandwiches, had tasted h
ome baking. They reminisced a little about Charlie, each telling tales that were wholly to the little man’s credit. George reminded her again of how his friend had saved his life all those years ago in Cyprus, and Amy said, ‘He never talked about it, you know.’ George had a second cup of tea, then began to wonder about how best to take his leave. He did not want to outstay his welcome, especially on this first visit.
It was at that moment that the phone, which was almost hidden behind the curtains on the wide windowsill, shrilled an interruption. Amy held it a little way from her ear and spoke into it cautiously, as if it were a live thing that might turn aggressive on her. George watched her affectionately; her diffidence with the instrument made him feel thoroughly a man of the world.
Then he saw the surprise in her face as she listened. She turned and held out the instrument towards him, as if he could reach his arm across the eight feet between them. It’s for you. Someone wanting Mr Lewis.’ She had somehow thought that everyone would call him George, as everyone had called her man Charlie.
He recognized Lambert’s voice as soon as he held the phone against his ear. ‘I gathered from the answerphone that you were off duty,’ it said. ‘I rang Mrs Pegg’s house on spec. Glad I’ve caught you. Have you any idea when you’ll be back? I’d like to see you.’
George said, ‘Well, I shall be leaving very shortly, Mr Lambert. I should be home in an hour, at the outside.’ He put the phone down, glad that the problem of how to get away had been solved for him. He said to Amy, ‘That was Superintendent Lambert, the officer who got the men who killed Charlie. I’ll have to go now, I’m afraid. He wants me back at Old Mead Park, to help him with the investigation that’s going on there.’