Stranglehold
Page 22
Rushton gave a faint, acknowledging smile. ‘I was, sir. I haven’t had much sleep lately.’ It was as much weakness as he would admit to, for they were not alone. The two sergeants, Bert Hook and ‘Jack’ Johnson, were in the Murder Room with them, deciding which items among the multitude of evidence they had accumulated would have to be kept for the court case and which could now be discarded.
Rushton said dolefully, ‘I’ll be able to get rid of all the stuff on what we thought were our leading suspects.’ It was beautifully organized – and now, it seemed, totally wasted.
Lambert shook his head. ‘Keep everything on Charlie Kemp. He was arrested early this morning,’ he said with satisfaction. It would raise morale in the CID to have the man who had cocked a snook at them for years behind bars at last. ‘Paul Williams was right when he said the drugs squad was waiting its moment to move. They arrested two of the international suppliers at Heathrow yesterday: a Greek and a Lebanese whom Interpol have been pursuing for months. Kemp had just bought a large consignment of heroin from them; Williams and the drug squad had pinned down both Kemp and his circle of retailers. Kemp was meeting some of them in his suite at the Roosters at the time when Hetty Brown was murdered. He pretended he’d been on his own because he couldn’t tell us that, but it left him without an alibi for her killing.’
The Superintendent grinned at Rushton. ‘Oldford FC will be needing a new Chairman, if you fancy the hassle.’
‘And a new official doctor for their medical certificates,’ said Rushton grimly.
‘What about Darren Pickering and Ben Dexter?’ said Bert Hook.
Lambert grinned. ‘You’ll be happy to hear that you were right about Pickering. The girl who scratched him on Saturday night has confirmed that she simply got scared and screamed the place down at the thought that he might be the Strangler. She’s quite apologetic about it today, and feeling suitably foolish. And the lad seems to have no involvement in the drugs case; he isn’t even a user.’
‘Unlike Dexter,’ said Hook sourly.
‘Dexter will be done for possession, certainly. Coke and crack, not just pot. Williams thinks he was toying with the idea of becoming a pusher, but I suspect it will be difficult to make that stick: he seems to have been biding his time on the edge of things, as usual. But at least he’ll have a record: maybe that will bring him to his senses.’
Lambert smiled wryly at his team. ‘We’ll still need a lot of the Scene of Crime findings for the court case. It’s just that we may have to re-align our sights a little to see the relevant evidence. Haworth was very clever at feeding us the information he wanted to plant, especially when we discussed the other suspects.’
‘The CC said you realized yesterday morning that it was Haworth,’ said Johnson.
Generous of him not to claim the idea for himself, thought Lambert. He decided that he approved of the new Chief Constable. ‘I put the idea to him then, yes. Fortunately, Haworth knew nothing of the plan to use Ruth David. We put a tail on him when he left the Roosters last night. But there was no case against him until then that would have stood up in court; we had to catch him in the act to clinch it.’
Bert Hook looked round at the four men clutching mugs of steaming coffee, relaxed now with success where there had been only tension forty-eight hours earlier. ‘I suppose I’m the goon who’s supposed to say, “What put you on to him, sir?”’
‘You’re a much appreciated straight man, I’m sure,’ said his chief. ‘You produced one of the pointers yourself, Bert, when you went round to talk to Julie Salmon’s parents yesterday. Haworth had been Julie’s GP; we already knew that – indeed, he mentioned it to us himself at our conference – but it hadn’t seem important. But when you put it together with this mysterious older man she’d had a relationship with, he became a candidate we should have checked out much earlier. It must be a sign of my age, but I thought of older men being about forty. Julie Salmon was nineteen: to someone of her age, anyone around thirty must have been very definitely a much older man.’
‘He could have been struck off for it,’ said Rushton. The enormity of Haworth’s professional transgression seemed for a moment as shocking to him as murder.
‘Undoubtedly he would have been, if Julie Salmon had revealed a sexual relationship with him. I think it was her knowledge of that and her loyalty to him which ensured that she would never repeal his name. We’ve found her missing handbag in his flat. I suppose he removed it in case it contained anything which might connect him with her, but it probably didn’t. No one else knew the name of the man she had associated with; that’s why we were left looking for this mysterious “older man”, who was so vague that some of us began to wonder if he even existed, outside an adolescent girl’s imagination. But it was her ending of the relationship with Haworth which sealed her death warrant. He couldn’t take that. He said as much this morning – he’s confessed to all three murders, incidentally.’
Hook said, as if reluctantly conceding credit where it was due, ‘The forensic psychologist said the rape of Julie Salmon and not the two subsequent girls suggested that there had been a relationship there.’
‘It was a power thing, as Stanley Warboys said. Haworth couldn’t take his rejection, especially in favour of someone like Darren Pickering. But there were other clues as well – small things, but cumulatively they added up to something significant. You remember how with the second murder, that of Hetty Brown, he put the time of death at between twelve and one a.m., and reminded us two or three times of it. The official time from the post-mortem gave a wider margin, of course, and she was in fact killed earlier. The twelve to one time gave him a perfect alibi, if he’d needed it. He’d planted the idea himself, but because we thought him above suspicion we accepted it for a long time. I remember being grateful to him for trying to be so precise.’
Rushton said, ‘He even reminded us several times that the twelve to one time was only an opinion, which wouldn’t stand up as medical evidence in court. That must have been to cover him if he was ever challenged by the autopsy findings.’
‘And the shoeprint we found at the scene of that murder – a city shoe. Was that his?’ asked Johnson.
‘I think we shall almost certainly find it was. He attended to certify the death in bright white training shoes, if you remember. He’d changed, of course, between the murder and his official arrival at the scene of death. The print of the city shoe became something which would have exonerated him rather than incriminated him in our minds.’
‘If we’d ever considered him seriously in the first place. The English class system is an insidious thing. I never even thought of him as a candidate,’ said Bert Hook bitterly. For a boy brought up in a Barnardo’s home, the idea that he had been blinded by middle class polish was a bitter thought.
‘It wasn’t just that,’ said Rushton defensively. ‘When a person’s job is to save life, you somehow don’t think of him as a killer. And he’d almost made himself part of our team.’
‘At least it wasn’t a policeman,’ said Johnson. For him, that would have been the worst thing of all. He would never need to admit now that he had even entertained the wild thought that the Strangler might be DI Rushton, when he had looked at him after the conference on Saturday, white, distraught, deprived of his wife, and cursing all women.
Lambert went home early for once that Monday afternoon. He made himself a mug of tea and sat in the armchair which had seen so little of him in the last week. There he waited for his wife to come home from school, wondering how to tell her the news of Don Haworth’s arrest.
He need not have worried. The news was round the staff room by lunch-time; most of them presumed that Christine would already know all the gory details, and left her feeling that her ignorance was a failure on her part.
She made quite a noise coming in, but she did not disturb John Lambert. The batsmen in the test match flickered to and fro on the television screen unwitnessed. The mug of tea was full and cold at his elbow. A curling strand
of grey hair had fallen across his forehead, as if taking advantage of the opportunity to break ranks.
The Superintendent slumbered deep and untroubled in his chair.
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