by Neil White
‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.
‘Let’s walk in the park,’ she said. ‘More discreet that way.’
Dobson nodded and shrugged. ‘Okay,’ he said, and strolled alongside Laura as they went under the stone arch, Thomas just behind them, listening.
‘I’m sorry about this, Mr Dobson,’ she said, ‘but we’re doing some chase-ups on cars that have been spotted driving around the red light areas.’
His smile twitched, and his cheeks flushed. He stopped walking. ‘Red light areas? I didn’t know Blackley had them.’
Laura smiled again, trying not to alienate him. ‘It’s okay, you’re not going to court, but we’re trying to advise people away from their homes, you know, to make it less embarrassing.’
‘But you went to my home,’ he said. ‘What did you say to my wife?’
Laura shook her head. ‘Nothing. Just that we wanted to speak to you.’
‘She’ll ask me what you wanted. What am I supposed to say?’
‘You’ll think of something, Mr Dobson,’ Laura said.
Dobson nodded, looking down, chewing on his lip.
‘Your wife seemed very nice,’ Laura said. ‘Why would you want to go to a prostitute?’
Dobson looked horrified, and there was a tremble to his lip. ‘I do not use prostitutes,’ he said, stressing every word, staring into Laura’s eyes.
Laura looked away and towards the road that ran alongside the park. She let her gaze climb steadily towards the houses further up, the towering grey blocks of stone. Laura could see the chimneys of Claude Gilbert’s house through the trees. Dobson didn’t follow her gaze.
‘I thought it would be nicer around here,’ she said, ‘where no one would hear us.’ She fixed him with a stern look. ‘Just call it a warning, Mr Dobson.’
Dobson stayed silent, not wanting to admit anything.
‘Although it’s a funny area around here,’ Laura added, with a half-laugh. ‘Maybe it’s not so nice.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The red light areas are at the crappy end of town,’ Laura said, ‘where people survive by stealing and dealing. But around here, someone was buried alive, just up that hill.’ And Laura pointed in the direction of Gilbert’s house.
Dobson paled and pursed his lips, then the grin came back, just a little more forced than before.
‘That was a long time ago,’ he said.
Laura raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh, so you know which murder I’m talking about?’
Dobson’s grin widened but his cheeks paled even more. ‘Everyone in Blackley knows about that,’ he said. ‘Are we finished now? I’ve got an appointment.’
Laura nodded and smiled. ‘Okay, Mr Dobson,’ she said. ‘Just be careful where you drive, or else next time we have this conversation in front of your wife.’
He turned and walked back to his car. Laura watched him as he opened the door and climbed in. As he gripped the wheel and took a couple of deep breaths, Laura knew she had the answer she needed.
‘Do you think he was going to prostitutes?’ Thomas asked.
Laura turned to him. ‘Without a doubt,’ she said. ‘Although I wonder whether he’s got a lot on his mind right now.’
With that, Laura turned to go, Thomas walking fast to keep up. Now was the time to speak to Joe Kinsella.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I sat in my car and looked at Bill Hunter’s house, a redbrick bungalow with rose bushes overgrowing the path and clematis blossoming out from the walls. I had something new with Frankie’s photographs—the internet would have made them resurface if they’d been found before—but the story was over twenty years old. How many other times had Frankie told people about the other man, the one he had seen? Tony knew about Frankie, so his obsession was well known to the local press. And I knew that there was only one person who could tell me: Bill Hunter. So I was outside his house, having guessed that he would be at home when I found his allotment plot empty.
I climbed out of my car and bent down to open the small metal gate in the middle of the low brick wall. Hunter must have seen me because as I approached the door his face appeared at the window. He opened the door quickly, took a quick furtive look along the road, and then ushered me inside.
‘You seem twitchy,’ I said, surprised by his mood. He had seemed relaxed, even jovial, when I had spoken to him at his plot. Now, he seemed jumpy.
‘I told you before, you have to be careful when you get involved with the Gilbert case,’ he replied, leading me down the hall and into a small conservatory at the back of the house, filled with green wicker furniture and plants.
‘What do you mean?’
He moved the newspaper he had been reading before I arrived and sat down. ‘People watch what you do,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. Just people,’ he said. ‘This has been my mystery for a long time, even after I retired. I’ve asked some awkward questions, and there’ve been cars outside my house, and people who I thought were helping suddenly lose interest.’
‘Are you saying that there’s some kind of conspiracy, a cover-up?’
‘Not officially,’ he said. ‘I was a police officer, and I know that official conspiracies don’t exist, because there’s always a risk that someone will break ranks. But I know something else too: that the people at the top know how to protect themselves. If mistakes were made at the start that let Gilbert get away, no one will be in a rush to uncover them. Leave it like it is, and the secrets die with Gilbert.’
‘First rule of public service, so I was told,’ I said. ‘Look after number one, because everyone else is, and they’ll give you up to the mob faster than you can clear your desk.’
He flashed me a cynical look. ‘The problem is that the mob don’t come with flaming torches these days. They come with Dictaphones and pens.’ He looked pointedly towards the voice recorder I had placed on my knee, the red light blinking.
I smiled in apology. ‘I’m just looking after number one, like you said.’
‘Just be careful,’ he replied.
I wasn’t sure what to make of him; paranoia is the first option for the deluded. But then I thought of Frankie, and of the two people he saw in the garden.
‘Have you heard of Frankie Cass?’ I said.
Hunter cracked into a smile, but there was concern in his eyes. ‘He’s tracked you down then.’
‘He’s got some interesting theories.’
‘Frankie is an attention-seeker. He came to the allotment last year and said that he knew something about Mrs Gilbert, and that if I was ever going to write a book about it, he would tell me, for a price. But why wait so long if it was worth hearing?’
‘He told me that he kept quiet because his mother told him not to get involved.’
‘He told me that too,’ he said. ‘She smothered him, was my guess, turned him into a social cripple, but I reckon she also told him about right and wrong, and letting someone get away with murder is wrong.’
‘Have you ever thought about writing a book?’ I asked.
Hunter shook his head. ‘Paul Roach beat me to that one,’ he said, and when I looked confused for a moment, he explained, ‘The other cop who dug up Nancy. It came out around ten years ago. It had been sitting on a publisher’s desk for a long time, but then a fake sighting reawakened interest, and so they rushed it out. It’s garbage, of course, but it got him a nest egg.’
‘There’s been talk of Alan Lake,’ I said. ‘Was he ever a contender?’
Hunter sighed. ‘He was, but he was shitting into a bucket at Preston prison at the time, before he was acquitted.’
‘But people like Alan Lake don’t get their hands dirty, do they?’ I said. ‘They get their thugs to do their work for them.’
Hunter nodded, conceding the point. ‘But we don’t know which thugs, and with nothing to tie him down, Lake was never in the picture.’
‘Proof and truth are different things,’ I said.
�
��You’re right, but think of this: Claude Gilbert wasn’t some baby barrister, running hopeless cases for losers. He was a big-hitter, attracting good work. So if it hadn’t been Lake’s trial that collapsed, it would have been some other big-time lowlife. Lake is just a coincidence, something else that makes the story better.’
‘But the cavity,’ I said. ‘Nancy Gilbert was found in a constructed cavity. If it had been Claude Gilbert and a crime of passion, he would have just buried her and dumped the soil on top. Making a cavity sounds like she was being given a chance. Maybe it was an ultimatum to Claude from Lake’s rival dealers, hoping to keep Alan Lake out of circulation for a while—that Claude must lose the case or Nancy dies.’
Hunter smiled and said, ‘Wait there.’ His knees cracked as he pulled himself to his feet and shuffled slowly out of the conservatory. I watched him go and then glanced around the room. Hunter was married—he played with his wedding ring when he talked about Gilbert, and his house seemed floral, from the rose-coloured swirls of the carpet to the glossy stripes in the wallpaper. But there was something not quite right. I saw a photograph frame on a shelf near the kitchen door, a grey-haired woman beaming from it.
‘That’s my wife,’ said a voice behind me. It was Hunter, holding a file of papers.
‘Is she working today?’ I asked.
His face darkened for a moment. ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘She died last year.’ He handed me a bundle of documents.
As I took them, I noticed then what was out of place. His gardening boots were in the corner of the room, mud on the edges, and there were some tools on the dining-room table. I guessed that she wouldn’t have allowed that.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to be insensitive.’
‘You weren’t,’ he replied, and then nodded towards the papers he had just handed me. ‘Read that.’
As I looked at the title page, I made a poor show of hiding my delight.
‘The autopsy report,’ I said, grinning. ‘Can I use this? I mean, it’s not secret or anything like that?’
‘Just don’t say where you got it,’ he said. ‘I copied it when I was still in the job, but you can read it and see if you can spot why Gilbert might have created the cavity.’
I flicked through the opening paragraphs, just the usual stuff about the pathologist’s qualifications and the time and date of the examination. Then I got to the guts of the report and it made me take a deep breath.
The cavity in which Nancy Gilbert was found was described as five feet long. I turned back to her description, and saw that her height was listed as five feet nine. Then the description of her fingers made me wince. The nails were bent back on five of the eight fingers, with splinters and jagged flakes of paint embedded into the wounds where she had scraped and clawed at the green boards placed over her. Her hair was matted to her head by blood, and there was a fracture to her skull. The cause of death was listed as blunt trauma, not suffocation.
Then I went to the section that dealt with the time of death. I turned a page and grimaced.
There were photographs of the body in situ, reprinted in colour. The green boards were in place on one photograph, put back just to recreate the scene as it had been, and then photographs of the hole with the boards removed. Mrs Gilbert was squeezed into the hole, on her side, naked, the pregnancy bump showing. I could see blood on her fingertips and over her face, and there was mud there too, but it wasn’t the injuries that made me think that I wished I had skipped breakfast, but the colour of the body.
The parts of Nancy Gilbert’s body against the floor were purple in colour. I knew that was gravity doing its work, the blood draining downwards, forming and clotting in the lower parts of the body. The rest of her skin had a green tinge, apart from the deep purple of her earlobes and fingertips. Her face was swollen, her distorted features nothing like the pictures I had in my bag, of the attractive young woman with long dark hair. There was blood around her nose and around her mouth, along with much more pooled around her head.
‘That’s not what you think,’ Hunter said, judging where I was in the report from the look on my face. ‘It’s not all blood, I mean.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘It’s what gets to all new police officers,’ Hunter said. ‘Your first autopsy is bad, or your first sudden death, but finding a body that’s been hanging around for a few days, well, that’s bloody awful. The stench is foul, sulphurous and fetid, like your worst ever chemistry lesson. That’s the gases forming inside the body, in the intestines, making less room for whatever was in there. It squashes the insides, so that when you move them, and sometimes even before that, it’s like stamping on a toothpaste tube. It forces shit out of the mouth.’ He pointed towards the photographs. ‘That’s what is in the photograph, not dried blood.’
I put the report down and took a deep breath. My palms had gone slick.
‘You need a bacon sandwich,’ he said, smiling, enjoying my discomfort. ‘It’s what we always did after a fatal. We went to one of those cheap roadside places and got a large bacon sandwich.’
‘Not a job for the vegetarians then,’ I said.
Hunter shook his head and then pointed towards the report. ‘The pathologist couldn’t be certain when she died, because bodies will reach the temperature of the immediate environment within around a day and a half, but it would have been quicker in this case, because she was naked and in a cool space.’
‘Her immediate environment being a small pit a couple of feet underground.’
‘Precisely, and then it becomes just guesswork after that. She had been underground for a few days, we know that, because the body had entered the putrefaction stage.’
‘What the hell is that?’ I asked.
‘The stage when the body starts to stink,’ Hunter said, grimacing. ‘When putrefaction kicks in, the body is slowly turning to mush, helped on by insects and animals on the outside, and gases on the inside. But it was slowed down because she was underground. Above ground, it’s easier to work out, and it all goes a lot quicker, but if you bury a body in soil, it takes longer. There is less air, and it is colder, and so it’s like putting the body in a fridge; it becomes all about the insects and animals and dampness.’
‘So if the availability of air is a factor,’ I said, trying to keep up with Hunter’s explanation, ‘by putting her in a cavity, she would have decayed faster than if just placed in the soil.’
‘You’ve got it,’ Hunter said, seeming pleased that I understood. ‘Buried corpses can take eight times longer to get down to bare bones, but the circulation of air around the body would speed things up.’
‘So why do you think Claude Gilbert left her like that?’ I asked.
‘Because he knew the science,’ Hunter replied. ‘He will have done enough murder cases to know that, and so I reckon he was going to leave her for a year and then dig her up and get rid of the bones. Maybe he could do it sooner if she decomposed more quickly, but then I spoiled his plan.’
‘Would he really think in such a composed way?’
‘Who else would? He was a barrister, used to quickly working out the angles, the defences. Why would Alan Lake or his rivals bother?’
‘To give him the ultimatum. Pull out or his wife dies.’
‘She was already dead when she went in,’ Hunter said.
I was confused at that. ‘But she scratched the wood and ended up with jags of paint under her nails.’
Hunter smiled at me, like a proud father might do at the awful picture his six-year-old had drawn. ‘She was as good as dead,’ he said. ‘She didn’t suffocate down there. She died of her head injury, maybe only a couple of hours after she was buried.’
‘But she scratched at the boards. Can a person really be aware enough to do that if they’ve got a life-threatening head injury?’
Hunter nodded. ‘It’s possible, when someone is whacked with some kind of cosh. It’s not unheard of that someone who died of a head injury had a few lucid h
ours before the injury kicked in.’
I sat back and sighed. ‘So, as far as you’re concerned, it is Claude Gilbert alone.’
Hunter nodded in reply.
‘But why?’
‘I don’t know, to be truthful,’ he said. ‘Perhaps one day we’ll get to ask him.’
I tried not to give anything away as I asked, ‘Did you hear any rumours that she was having an affair?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ he said, ‘and so they can’t be true.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because there’s money in this story, and so someone would have come forward with an affair, just to cash in.’
‘Maybe Frankie was trying?’ I said.
Hunter’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is that what he said?’
I decided not to tell Hunter what I knew. He was useful but, like most policemen I’d met, he had one unshakeable theory, and if a fact didn’t fit it was thrown out. My father once told me, in a moment of candour that hadn’t come along too often, that too many people had confessions beaten out of them in the seventies for that reason, and that any police officer who said it didn’t go on was a liar.
‘He didn’t say much,’ I said, and then I turned back to the autopsy report. ‘If the day of death was uncertain, why has it always been quoted as the fifteenth of May?’
‘Because that’s when Mrs Gilbert was last seen, and Claude Gilbert emptied his bank account on the sixteenth. Just straight logic, and it fitted with the guesswork.’ He smiled at me, a little patronisingly, I thought. ‘Keep trying, young man,’ he said, ‘because I hope someone does solve the mystery in the end, but Claude Gilbert killed her, and for as long as that stays the likeliest truth, you’ve nothing new.’