Stranglehold

by J M Gregson

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you kill Harriet Brown, Mr Kemp?’

  ‘No. Of course I –’

  ‘Have you any idea who did?’

  ‘No. How could I have?’

  ‘Because you keep in touch with the punters here. Because you’re a man of the people, priding yourself on your knowledge of what goes on in the Roosters. You told us so yourself.’

  Kemp acknowledged with a sullen nod that he had claimed as much. ‘All right. That doesn’t mean I killed a cheap little tart. Or that I know who did.’

  ‘Did you see her in the club last night?’

  ‘I might have.’ Something in Lambert’s eye must have warned him of the danger of such phrases, for he said hastily, ‘All right. I remember now, I did see her. I suppose it was about nine. I didn’t speak to her, though. I challenge you to find someone who says I did.’

  Lambert said, ‘And who was she with at the time?’ It was a habit of his to cloak the most important questions in his most neutral tone.

  ‘I don’t remember all of them. But she was in a group of six or eight, on one of the round tables, nearer to the end of the room where the bar is.’

  It tallied with the information they already had. So far. ‘Was she drinking much?’

  ‘No more than usual. Hetty wasn’t a drinker. She’d have one to loosen her up, perhaps another one later. But mostly she drank orange.’

  For a man who had claimed he was not certain that he even knew the girl a quarter of an hour ago, this was an admission of detailed knowledge. But there was no point in rubbing it in now. Lambert was anxious not to blow the cover of their source of information, a young officer from the drugs squad who spent most of his nights now at the club, trying to find the big men behind the pushers of coke and heroin whom he had already identified.

  ‘Did you meet Hetty Brown later in the evening?’

  ‘No. Why the hell should –’

  ‘The girl was murdered within four hours of when you last saw her in the club. You are among the last people to see her alive. Naturally we are interested in your movements during the rest of that evening.’

  Kemp said, ‘I didn’t see her again after I saw her at that table.’

  Lambert stood up, his eyes a good six inches above those of the stockier man, but no more than three feet away; Kemp had not resumed his seat after he had walked so abruptly to the window. ‘Our information is that she left the club because she had an arrangement to meet a man. Presumably not far away, since she had no transport of her own; so quite possibly in the club car park. You’re telling us that that man wasn’t you?’

  ‘No. I was up here.’

  ‘Alone.’

  ‘Yes.’ There was just enough hesitation before the word to suggest to them that he was deciding to lie.

  ‘Do you know who it was that she met?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you provide us with any suggestions? It would be in your own interests to do so.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We shall need details of the rest of your movements during the evening.’

  Kemp’s face was creased with hostility now; there could scarcely have been a greater contrast to the contrived urbanity with which he had begun the interview. ‘I had a drink downstairs. I came up here then.’

  ‘Time?’ Hook contrived to sound as though he expected a lie.

  ‘About half past nine, quarter to ten, I suppose.’

  ‘You say you were on your own up here?’

  Again there was that momentary hesitation. ‘Yes.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Perhaps a couple of hours. About that.’

  ‘And what were you doing?’

  ‘Paperwork.’ None of the three men in the room thought it was true, but Hook wrote it down.

  ‘Did you have any more to drink?’

  ‘A whisky, I think.’

  ‘So the bar staff could probably confirm your presence here, some time after Hetty Brown had left.’

  ‘No. I have my own bottle up here.

  ‘Gents?’

  Kemp shook his head. ‘Not downstairs. There’s one up here, if I need it. But I drink my whisky neat.’ For a moment, the functioning of his bladder seemed to be more important to him than murder.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I left the club.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve told you.’ He hadn’t, but they let that pass.

  ‘And where did you go then?’

  He must have been as aware as they were that this was about the time of the killing. ‘I went home.’

  ‘And arrived there when?’

  ‘I couldn’t be sure. Some time around midnight, I suppose.’

  ‘So your wife could confirm the time, presumably.’

  ‘No. She was in bed and asleep when I arrived.’

  ‘And you didn’t disturb her, of course.’ Lambert allowed his cynicism free rein.

  ‘No. We have separate bedrooms. Not that that’s any business of yours.’

  The two men were still facing each other, not a yard apart. Hook, who was recording the detail of Kemp’s replies below them, thought they were like prize-fighters squaring up to one another. Lambert looked abruptly down at the feet that were so near to his own. They were in good shoes, fashioned in better leather than his own. ‘What size of shoe do you take?’

  ‘Tens. What’s that to you?’

  ‘The Scene of Crime team found the imprint of a shoe near Hetty Brown’s body. Size nine and a half or ten, they thought: I had to get them to translate these new-fangled continental sizes for me. A city shoe, by the look of the sole, they said.’ He looked down at Kemp’s traditional Oxford leather shoes with considerable satisfaction.

  Kemp said, ‘It might not have been the murderer’s shoe. There could have been lots of footmarks in the clay round there.’

  ‘Know exactly where she was found then, do you? Interesting, that; especially as we haven’t released any of the details yet.’

  They could almost hear Kemp’s mind working in the pause which followed. ‘I – I heard where she died. On that building site, wasn’t it? You can’t hush these things up. It’s been all round the club today.’

  It was Lambert’s turn to pause, pretending to weigh this and find it unconvincing. Eventually he said quietly, ‘Did you know a girl called Julie Salmon, Mr Kemp?’ Though Hook had used it once before, it was the first time Lambert had afforded Kemp the title, and it fell from his lips with the irony of insult, much as his own Christian name had been dropped by his opponent earlier in their exchanges.

  ‘The girl who was killed a fortnight ago? She used to come in here, yes. You’re not trying to pin that one on me, surely?’ The sense of outrage he wanted did not come through in the words, but his fear did.

  ‘We may need an account of your movements on the night she died, Mr Kemp.’ They had already checked before they came here, but it would be useful to know if he thought it necessary to lie. There had been a meeting of Oldford FC Committee in the earlier part of the evening, but no one knew accurately when Julie Salmon had died, because she had not been found for two days.

  Bert Hook stood up at a nod from Lambert. ‘The forensic team will need to go over this place, and perhaps your office as well, to see if there are fibres from Harriet Brown’s clothing present.’

  ‘If you’re going to start on police persecution, perhaps –’

  ‘And of course, when we have the report on the clothing Miss Brown wore on the night of her death, we may need to check your wardrobe for any fibres that tally. We tend to be both meticulous and persistent when murder is the crime. And the magistrates tend to be sympathetic to our efforts when it comes to search warrants. No doubt you will let us know if you plan to move out of the area.’ Lambert turned abruptly on his heel and was gone, without waiting for any reply.

  Kemp poured himself one of his neat whiskies when he was sure they had left, feeling the therapeutic effect of its warm fire as it cou
rsed into his system. Then he went into his office, looked up a number in the notebook in the top drawer of his desk, and tapped out the numbers carefully on the phone.

  ‘The police have been here. About Hetty Brown. They wanted to know about what I did last night. I told them I was in the hospitality room, on my own. They didn’t believe me, but that’s the story at the moment. If they try to pin it on me, you may need to tell them you were here with me. For the moment, keep quiet about it.’

  CHAPTER 9

  Back at the Murder Room, Lambert found Don Haworth, the police surgeon. He had called in to check the latest progress on the case. Lambert was pleased to find a busy medic so interested in their work, particularly as Haworth, unlike Cyril Burgess, the pathologist, had no interest in lurid detective fiction.

  ‘No luck with Julie Salmon’s boyfriend, I believe,’ said Haworth.

  ‘Darren Pickering? Afraid not. Mind you, he’s been in trouble with the uniformed boys before, and there was no way he was going to be easily intimidated,’ said Lambert. ‘He had the duty solicitor there all the time we questioned him, and of course that helpful gentleman kept telling him not to answer leading questions.’

  Pickering, a powerful young man with a shaven head and a small earring, had been the boyfriend of Julie Salmon, the first girl killed. Or rather the former boyfriend, since she had broken with him two weeks before her death. No one, least of all Pickering, seemed certain how permanent a break it had been. He had been in a highly emotional state when they had brought him in for questioning, but that might have stemmed from shock or genuine grief at her death as easily as from fear.

  ‘Didn’t the search of his room throw up anything?’ Lambert wondered suddenly if Haworth would be interested in Burgess’s job when the old boy retired: he couldn’t have more than a couple of years to go now. He would welcome this bright, cooperative young man who seemed so interested in their investigations. Maybe, with a failed marriage behind him, he wanted to immerse himself in his work. If so, he deserved every encouragement. ‘We found lots of things to connect him with Julie Salmon, as you’d expect, but nothing to identify him definitely with the killing. We’ve sent some of his hairs off for a DNA test to compare with the sperm sample from Julie Salmon, but we won’t have the results for a day or two.’

  ‘What about the second murder?’

  ‘Pickering has no clear alibi for the time of the murder – between twelve and one, you thought – but then lots of innocent people wouldn’t have.’

  Haworth grinned. ‘Don’t hold me to that time. As I said, it was informed speculation rather than an authoritative estimate. Have you got anyone else in the frame?’

  It was Lambert’s turn to smile, at the doctor’s adoption of the police jargon. ‘One or two possibilities. Nothing more.’ He did not want to discuss Charlie Kemp with outsiders at this stage. ‘It looks as though our man might be someone who frequents the Roosters social club, but that gives us a big field. It’s a pity from our point of view that the place is so successful.’

  ‘I pop in there from time to time myself, you know. I’m the official team doctor, though they have a physio who does a lot more than I do. It’s the close season, now, but I still use the club in the evenings sometimes. One advantage of being single is that you can follow your interests, and I’ve always been a football nut.’

  ‘Do you come across Charlie Kemp much?’ Lambert changed his mind and thought that another perspective might be useful.

  ‘Not a lot. He poses as an amiable tycoon, a likeable rogue who’s been lucky enough to make a bob or two. But I should think he could be pretty ruthless if you got on the wrong side of him. The players certainly think so. I’m glad I don’t have to work for him, anyway.’

  An opinion which would be shared by all right-thinking men, thought Lambert.

  Darren Pickering would have been pleased to hear that the police had so far found nothing to incriminate him. But no one had told him that.

  He did not like the police, and they did not much like him. He was not the kind of figure which authority finds attractive. He was a large youth, much given to the wearing of T-shirts just too small to contain his heavily muscled torso without tight stretching. He considered his closely shaven head and his single earring part of a uniform of aggression, but he showed his independence by eschewing the tattoos which many of his Saturday-afternoon football companions affected.

  His massive forearms looked curiously naked as he folded them across his chest and stared glumly at his pint of special. The Roosters was filling up nicely: he didn’t like it too quiet. He stretched forward his legs in the tight jeans, wondering as he studied them whether their newness was a little too apparent, whether a little staining, perhaps a couple of small slits around the knees, might produce the effect he thought appropriate. The jeans looked to him a little too pristine above the well-worn blue and white trainers on his size ten feet.

  His companion said, ‘Leave them alone, Darren. They’ll get sullied soon enough when we have a rumble.’ It amused him to show the man beside him how easily he could follow his thoughts. He referred to Pickering, sometimes to his face, as ‘a bear of very little brain’, a description Darren accepted inexplicably as a compliment.

  Benjamin George Dexter could scarcely have been a greater contrast to the man beside him. Harrow had prepared him for Cambridge, but he had chosen instead to slum it at the London School of Economics. He worked now in the money markets at Bristol, one of those young men who spent much of his day in front of a computer screen and made a lucrative living out of moving other people’s money around.

  He had draped his jacket over the back of his chair, it seemed less for comfort than to show off the elaborate patterning of his waistcoat upon its rich purple background. The linen of his trousers was sharply creased, his Gucchi leather shoes looked surprisingly delicate upon his substantial feet. As if to underline the crudity of Pickering’s hair, his own blond locks fell in a carefully coiffured casualness over his perfect ears.

  Pickering said, ‘The pigs had me in again today. There’s been another murder, you know. That Hetty you fancied a bit, till you found she was on the game.’

  Dexter nodded. ‘I heard. Shame, that: useful bit of crumpet getting snuffed out like that.’ He was careful to show no emotion, to confine his previous connection with Hetty Brown to a little casual lust. The police hadn’t had him in about this one, so far. They had asked him about Julie Salmon, but as far as he could gather that was only because of his connection with Pickering, who was bound to be in the frame for his girlfriend’s death.

  The police fascinated Ben Dexter: he studied their workings with the fixed attention of a man who watches the movements of a dangerous snake and is unable to turn away. His father, to whom he had not spoken for over three years, had been a senior policeman when he retired. He said as casually as he could, ‘Did you find out how much they knew about Hetty’s death?’ He was anxious to know just what progress the pigs had made with their investigations into the killing of Julie Salmon; he suspected not very much. They had let his bear-like friend go after questioning, to his secret disappointment. Probably they thought Darren Pickering would simply not be bright enough to bring it off.

  As in other areas of his life, Ben Dexter’s judgement was not as sound as he thought it was. Pickering, despite the appearance he chose to affect, was not stupid. He had little in the way of formal qualifications, for he had always fought the system at school. But Julie Salmon had persuaded him to go to evening classes, and he had found himself taking at last to study, surprising both his tutor and himself by his rapid grasp of engineering concepts. He had not been to the class since Julie’s body had been found. And now there was this other death, another corpse of a girl he had seen in here.

  He said, ‘Hetty hadn’t been long dead when the police found her. That Dr Haworth who comes in here had certified her. He’s the police surgeon, you know.’

  Dexter nodded. ‘Funny bugger he is, too.’ He
knew little of Haworth, but he was feeding Pickering the appropriate reaction: anyone who chose to associate with the police must be a funny bugger.

  ‘He used to be Julie’s doctor, you know.’ Pickering threw in this apparent irrelevance with a superior air, glad to reveal any snippet of information not possessed by his companion. Ben Dexter’s unspoken assumption that he was an unthinking prole grated sometimes, even though it was only the acceptance of the image Pickering had chosen to create for himself.

  ‘Haworth could have his pick of the girls in here,’ said Dexter. ‘I’ve seen them looking at him. Silly bugger doesn’t seem interested. Wonder if he’s queer.’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. I expect he has to be a bit careful, being a doctor.’

  Dexter’s lip curled at the idea of such pusillanimous self-denial, but he said nothing more on the subject. To have done so would have been treating Pickering’s opinions as if they were as valid as his own.

  They sipped their lager for a moment without speaking. Dexter had in truth been happy to divert their conversation from the subject of Julie Salmon. He found that for reasons he preferred not to confront he was made uncomfortable by any mention of Julie from the lips of this muscular lump who had once been her boyfriend. Danger attracted him, just as violence did, but he resisted the temptation now to come back again to her violent death.

  He decided that the excitement they got from football was safer. ‘We’ll be in the Vauxhall Conference next season,’ he said, not for the first time. ‘Chance of a few rumbles when we travel with the lads. You could be glad of that Martial Arts course we did before Easter.’ He looked down at his sinewy fingers, thinking of the scientific, calculated ferocity which they could now inflict. He preferred to rely on Pickering as his minder in any confrontation, but it was as well to be prepared for all situations. There might even be more individual conflicts, where the big man was not at his side with his ready fists.

  Dexter loved organizing violence, manipulating situations and the participants. He had never been arrested himself, even in the days when he and a middle-class group like him had marshalled the battalions of travelling West Ham bother boys. There had been blood then, and even the odd knifing, but he had enjoyed it all from the wings. ‘Up the Roosters!’ he now said automatically, just as he had once said, ‘Up the Hammers!’