by Ruth Rendell
Chief Inspector Wexford did not expend more effort in seeking Martin’s killer than he would have in the hunt for any other murderer, but he felt more than usually emotionally involved. He hadn’t even particularly liked Martin, had been irritated by his earnest, humourless endeavours. ‘Plodding’ is an adjective, pejorative and scornful, often applied to policemen, and it was the first which came to mind in Martin’s case. ‘The Plod’ is even a slang term for the police force. But all this was forgotten now Martin was dead.
‘I’ve often thought,’ Wexford said to Burden, ‘what a poor piece of psychology that was on Shakespeare’s part when he said that the evil men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. Not that poor Martin was evil, but you know what I mean. It’s the good things about people that we remember, not the bad. I remember how punctilious he was and how thorough and – well, dogged. I feel quite sentimental about him when I’m not bloody angry. But God, I’m so bloody angry I can hardly see out of my eyes when I think of that kid with the spots shooting him in cold blood.’
They had begun with the most careful in-depth interviewing of Brian Prince, the manager, and Sharon Fraser and Ram Gopal, the cashiers. The customers who had been in the bank – that is, those customers who had come forward or whom they had been able to find – were seen next. No one was able to say exactly how many people had been in the bank at the time.
‘Poor old Martin would have been able to tell us,’ Burden said. ‘I’m sure of that. He knew, but he’s dead, and if he wasn’t none of it would matter.’
Brian Prince had seen nothing. The first he knew of it was when he heard the boy fire the shot that killed Martin. Ram Gopal, a member of Kingsmarkham’s very small Indian immigrant population, of the Brahmin caste from the Punjab, gave Wexford the best and fullest description of both men. With descriptions like that, Wexford said afterwards, it would be a crime not to catch them.
‘I watched them very carefully. I sat quite still, conserving my energy, and I concentrated on every detail of their appearance. I knew, you know, that there was nothing I could do but that I could do, and I did it.’
Michelle Weaver, on her way at the time to work in the travel agency two doors away, described the boy as between twenty-two and twenty-five, fair, not very tall, with bad acne. The mother of the baby, Mrs Wendy Gould, also said the boy was fair but a tall man, at least six feet. Sharon Fraser thought he was tall and fair but she had particularly noticed his eyes which were a bright pale blue. All three of the men said the boy was short or of medium height, thin, perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three. Wendy Gould said he looked ill. The remaining woman, Mrs Barbara Watkin, said the boy was dark and short with dark eyes. All agreed he had a spotty face but Barbara Watkin was doubtful about the cause being acne. More like a lot of small birthmarks, she said.
The boy’s companion was described invariably as much older then he, ten years older or, according to Mrs Watkin, twenty years older. He was dark, some said swarthy, and with hairy hands. Only Michelle Weaver said he had a mole on his left cheek. Sharon Fraser thought he was very tall but one of the men described him as ‘tiny’ and another as ‘no taller than a teenager’.
Ram Gopal’s confidence and concentration inspired belief in Wexford. He described the boy as about five feet eight, very thin, blue-eyed, fair-haired and with acnaceous spots. The boy wore blue denim jeans, a dark T-shirt or sweater and a black leather jacket. He had gloves on, a point no other witness thought to mention.
The man wore no gloves. His hands were covered in dark hairs. The hair on his head was dark, nearly black, but receding severely, giving the effect of a superlatively high forehead. He was at least thirty-five and dressed similarly to the boy except that his jeans were of some dark colour, dark grey or dark brown, and he wore some sort of brown pullover.
The boy had only spoken once, to tell Sharon Fraser to hand over the money. Sharon Fraser was unable to describe his voice. Ram Gopal gave his opinion that the accent was not cockney but not an educated voice either, probably from south London. Could it be the local accent, ‘Londonised’ as it was by the spread of the capital and by television? Ram Gopal admitted that it could be. He was unsure about English accents, which Wexford discovered by putting him to the test and finding he defined a Devon accent as Yorkshire.
So how many people were in the bank? Ram Gopal said fifteen including the staff and Sharon Fraser said sixteen. Brian Prince didn’t know. Of the customers, one said twelve and another said eighteen.
It was clear that, however many or however few there had been in the bank, not all had come forward in response to police appeals. During the time between the raiders’ departure and the arrival of the police, perhaps as many as five people had quietly left the bank while the rest concerned themselves with Martin.
As soon as they saw their opportunity, they made their escape. Who could blame them, especially if they had seen nothing relevant? Who wants to be drawn into a police investigation if they have nothing to contribute? Even if they do have something to contribute, but something small and trivial which other more observant eye-witnesses can supply?
For peace of mind and a quiet life, how much simpler to slip away and continue to work or the shops or home. Kingsmarkham Police faced the fact that four or five people had kept mum, knew something or nothing but kept silent and hidden. All the police knew was that not one of these people, four or five or perhaps only three, were known by sight to the bank staff. So far as they could remember. Neither Brian Prince, nor Ram Gopal, nor Sharon Fraser could remember a face they recognised in that queue in the roped-off area. Apart from, that is, those regular customers who had all remained inside the bank after Martin’s death.
Martin himself had of course been known to them, and Michelle Weaver and Wendy Gould among others. Sharon Fraser could say only this: she had an impression that the missing bank customers were all men.
The most sensational piece of evidence given by any of the witnesses was that of Michelle Weaver. She said she had seen the boy with acne drop his gun just before he escaped from the bank. He had thrown it on to the floor and run away.
* * * *
At first, Burden hardly believed she expected him to take this statement seriously. It seemed bizarre. The act which Mrs Weaver described he had read of somewhere, or been taught, or gleaned from some lecture. It was a classic Mafia technique. He even said to her that they must have read the same book.
Michelle Weaver insisted. She had seen the gun skid across the floor. The others had crowded round Martin but she had been the last in the line of people the gunman had directed to stand against the wall, so therefore the furthest from Martin who had been at the head of it.
Caleb Martin had dropped the gun with which he made his brave attempt. His son Kevin later identified it as his personal property, taken from him by his father in the car that morning. It was a toy, a crude copy, with several design inaccuracies, of a Smith and Wesson Model 10 Military and Police Revolver with four-inch barrel.
Several witnesses had seen Martin’s gun fall. A building contractor called Peter Kemp had been standing next to him and he said Martin dropped the gun at the moment the bullet struck him.
‘Could it have been Detective Sergeant Martin’s gun that you saw, Mrs Weaver?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Detective Sergeant Martin dropped the gun he was holding. It skidded across the floor among people’s feet. Could you be mistaken? Could it have been that gun which you saw?’
‘I saw the boy throw it down.’
‘You said you saw it skid across the floor. Martin’s gun skidded across the floor. There were two guns skidding across the floor?’
‘I don’t know. I only saw one.’
‘You saw it in the boy’s hand and then you saw it skid across the floor. Did you actually see it leave the boy’s hand?’
She was no longer sure. She thought she had seen it. Certainly she had seen it in the boy’s hand and then seen a gun on the flo
or, skating across the shiny marble among the people’s feet. An idea came that silenced her for a moment. She looked hard at Burden.
‘I wouldn’t go into court and swear I saw it,’ she said.
In the months that followed, the hunt for the men who had carried out the Kingsmarkham bank robbery became nationwide. Gradually, all the stolen banknotes turned up. One of the men bought a car for cash before the numbers of the missing notes were circulated, and paid out six thousand pounds to an unsuspecting second-hand car dealer. This was the older, darker man. The car dealer furnished a detailed description of him and gave, of course, his name. Or the name the man had given him – George Brown. After that, Kingsmarkham Police referred to him as George Brown.
Of the remaining money, just under two thousand pounds came to light wrapped in newspapers in a town waste-disposal dump. The missing six thousand was never found. It had probably been spent in dribs and drabs. There was not much risk in doing that. As Wexford said, if you give the girl on the check-out two tenners for your groceries she doesn’t do a spot-check on the numbers. All you need to do is be prudent and not go there again.
Just before Christmas Wexford went north to interview a man on remand in prison in Lancashire. It was the usual thing. If he co-operated and offered helpful information, things might go rather better for him at his trial. As it was, he was likely to go down for seven years.
His name was James Walley and he told Wexford he had done a job with George Brown, a man whose real name was George Brown. It was one of his past offences he intended to ask to be taken into consideration. Wexford saw the real George Brown at his home in Warrington. He was quite an elderly man, though probably younger than he looked, and he walked with a limp, the result of falling off a scaffold some years before when attempting to break into a block of flats.
After that, Kingsmarkham Police started talking of their wanted man as o.k.a. (otherwise known as) George Brown. Of the boy with acne there was never any sign, not a whisper. In the underworld he was unknown, he might have died for all that was heard of him.
O.k.a. George Brown surfaced again in January. He was George Thomas Lee, arrested in the course of a robbery in Leeds. This time it was Burden who went up to see him in the remand prison. He was a small, squinting man with cropped carroty hair. The tale he spun Burden was of a spotty boy he had met in a pub in Bradford who had boasted of killing a policeman somewhere in the south. He named one pub, then forgot it and named another, but he knew the boy’s full name and address. Already sure that the motive behind all this was revenge for some petty offence, Burden found the boy. He was tall and dark, an unemployed lab technician with a record as spotless as his face. The boy had no memory of meeting o.k.a. George Brown in any pub, but he did remember calling the police when he found an intruder in the last place he worked at.
Martin had been killed by a shot from a Colt Magnum .357 or .38 revolver. It was impossible to tell which, because although the cartridge was a .38, the .357 takes both .357 and .38 cartridges. Sometimes Wexford worried about that gun and once he dreamed he was in the bank watching two revolvers skating round the marble floor while the bank customers stared like spectators at some arena event. Magnums on Ice.
He went to talk to Michelle Weaver himself. She was very obliging, always willing to talk, showing no signs of impatience. But five months had gone by and the memory of what she had seen that morning when Caleb Martin died was necessarily growing dim.
‘I can’t have seen him throw it down, can I? I mean, I must have imagined that. If he’d thrown it down it would have been there and it wasn’t, only the one the policeman dropped.’
‘There was certainly only one gun when the police arrived.’ Wexford talked to her conversationally, as if they were equals in knowledge and sharers of inside information. She warmed to this, she grew confident and eager. ‘All that we found was the toy gun DS Martin took away from his son that morning. Not a copy, not a replica, a child’s toy.’
‘And was that really a toy I saw?’ She marvelled at it. ‘They make them look so real.’
Another conversational interview, this time with Barbara Watkin, revealed not much more than her obstinacy. She was tenacious about her description of the boy’s appearance.
‘I know acne when I see it. My eldest son had terrible acne. That wasn’t what the boy had. I told you, it was more like birthmarks.’
‘The scars of acne, perhaps?’
‘It wasn’t anything like that. You have to picture those strawberry marks people have, only these were the purple kind, and all blotched, dozens of them.’
Wexford asked Dr Crocker, and Crocker said no one had birthmarks of that description, so that was the end of that.
There was not much more to say, nothing left to ask. It was the end of February when he talked to Michelle Weaver and the beginning of March when Sharon Fraser came up with something she had remembered about one of the missing men among the bank customers. He had been holding a bunch of banknotes in his hand and they were green notes. There had been no green English banknotes since the pound note had been replaced by a coin several years before. She could remember nothing else about this man – did it help?
Wexford couldn’t say it did, much. But you don’t discourage that kind of public-spiritedness.
Nothing much else happened until the 999 call came on 11 March.
Chapter Three
‘They’re all dead.’ The voice was a woman’s and young, very young. She said it again. ‘They’re all dead,’ and then, ‘I’m going to bleed to death!’
The operator who had taken the call, though not new to the job, said afterwards she turned cold at those words. She had already uttered the formula of asking if the caller wanted police, the fire service or an ambulance.
‘Where are you?’ she said.
‘Help me. I’m going to bleed to death.’
‘Tell me where you are, the address . . .’
The voice started giving a phone number.
‘The address, please . . .’
‘Tancred House, Cheriton. Help me, please help me . . . Make them come quickly . . .’
The time was eight twenty-two.
* * * *
The forest covers an area of something like sixty square miles. Much of it is coniferous, man-made woods of Scots pine and larch, Norway spruce and occasionally a towering Douglas fir. But to the south of this plantation a vestige of the ancient forest of Cheriton remains, one of seven which existed in the County of Sussex in the Middle Ages, the others being Arundel, St Leonard’s, Worth, Ashdown, Waterdown and Dallington. Arundel excepted, they once all formed part of a single great forest of three-and-a-half-thousand square miles which, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, stretched from Kent to Hampshire. Deer roamed it and in the depths, wild swine.
The small area of this which remains is woodland of oak, ash, horse chestnut and sweet chestnut, birch and the wayfarer’s tree, which clothes the southern slopes and borders of a private estate. Here, where all was parkland until the early thirties, green turf on which grew Douglas firs, cedars and the rarer Wellingtonia, an occasional half-acre of mature woodland, a new forest was planted by the new owner. The roads up to the house, one of them no more than a narrow track, wind through the woods, in places between steep banks, in others through groves of rhododendron, past trees in the prime of life and here and there overshadowed by an ancient giant.
Sometimes fallow deer can be seen among the trees. Red squirrels have been sighted. The blackcock is a rarity, the Dartford warbler common, and hen harriers are winter visitors. In late spring, when the rhododendrons come out, the long vistas are rosy pink under a green mist of unfolding beech leaves. The nightingale sings. Earlier, in March, the woods are dark, yet glowing with the coming life, and underfoot the ground is a rich ginger-gold from beech mast. The beech trunks shine as if their bark were laced with silver. But at night there is darkness and silence, a deep quiet fills the woods, a forbidding hush.
The l
and is not fenced but there are gates in the boundary hedge. All are of red cedar and five-barred. Most give access only to paths, impassable except on foot, but the main gate closes off the woods from the road that turns northwards from the B 2428, linking Kingsmarkham with Cambery Ashes. There is a sign, a plain board attached to a post and bearing the words, TANCRED HOUSE. PRIVATE ROAD. PLEASE CLOSE THE GATE, which stands to the left of it. The gate is required to be kept closed, though no key, code or device is needed to open it.
On that Tuesday evening, eight fifty-one on 11 March, the gate was shut. Detective Sergeant Vine got out of the first car and opened it, though he was senior to most of the officers in the two cars. He had come to Kingsmarkham to replace Martin. There were three vehicles in the convoy, the last being the ambulance. Vine let them all through and then he closed the gate once more. It was not possible to drive very fast but once they were inside, on this private land, Pemberton went as fast as he could.
Later they were to learn, using it daily, that this road was always known as the main drive.
It was dark, sunset two hours past. The last streetlamp was a hundred yards down the B 2428 before the gate. They relied on their headlights alone, lights which showed up the mist that drifted through the woods as streamers of greenish fog. If eyes looked out of the forest the lights did not show them up. The tree trunks were colonnades of grey pillars, swathed in scarves of mist. In the depths between was impenetrable dark.
No one spoke. The last person to speak had been Barry Vine when he said he would get out and open the gate. Detective Inspector Burden said nothing. He was thinking about what they would find at Tancred House and telling himself not to anticipate, for speculation was useless. Pemberton had nothing to say and would not have considered it his place to initiate a conversation.