Close Call

by J M Gregson

  She had a sense of losing control, of displaying things in herself that she had planned to conceal, but she could no longer help herself. Lambert wondered a little at the depth of the emotion she could still display over this man whom she claimed so insistently was her ex-husband. He let her listen to her own breathing for a moment, allowed her to regain a measure of control, before he said, ‘We need to know the details, Mrs Holt.’

  She gave him again that acrid smile which seemed to go with the recollection of her pain. ‘At first, he just threatened to tell me. The women had all been provided secretly, you see, as if the two of them were no more than naughty schoolboys enjoying breaking the rules. But Rob Durkin had kept a record of every occasion and every woman and every squalid hotel room involved, and he waved it in front of Martin and said he was going to post it to me. Unless Martin did what he wanted him to, of course.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘He made him a dealer. Small-time. I don’t think he’d have trusted Martin with anything important, any real knowledge of what was going on: Martin wouldn’t have been reliable enough for that, by then. I’m talking about four years ago: Durkin was well-established in the drugs business at that stage, but I knew nothing about it, and Martin had no idea of the scale of his operations. I don’t think Rob particularly needed Martin. I think it just amused him to get him further involved, to give himself an even stronger hold upon him.’

  ‘That’s interesting. Because you’re right that Durkin was making big money from drugs by then. One of the questions we have to ask ourselves is what was in this for him, why he should bother with small-time blackmail against someone like your husband.’

  She nodded. It was a logical enough question, if you didn’t hate Robin Durkin with the unswerving hatred which she had felt – still felt, even with the man dead and out of her life. ‘You wouldn’t need to ask that if you had been anywhere close to Rob Durkin whilst he was alive. He enjoyed making other people vulnerable, enjoyed watching their pain and distress. And to ensure that he could watch it, he had to have a hold over them. I’m sure you’re right that Martin should have been far too petty a being to exercise Durkin’s mind, with the bigger concerns he had. But he loved being able to control people, and he loved exercising that control to make them suffer.’

  ‘You feel that it was the power he was exercising rather than any actual money he was making which was his motivation in this case?’

  ‘I know it was. I’ve met other control freaks, but never one quite like Durkin. He delighted in seeing people go off the rails and in making sure they remained there. I spoke of a dark angel, and that’s what Rob was for Martin. He was an evil man, Superintendent Lambert. He was the only man I’ve ever met who carried an aura of evil about him.’

  Lambert nodded slowly, frowned a little, said, ‘And yet you elected to go to a social gathering at his house last Saturday night. That was surely a strange decision, wasn’t it?’

  She wasn’t as thrown as she would have expected to be by the question. ‘I’ve been asking myself just that. Part of me said I couldn’t refuse to go without the other people in the close asking why. Part of me said that I found that I liked Ally Durkin, whom I’d never met before I moved in here, and didn’t want to insult her. And part of me, if I’m honest, was determined not to let that man Durkin determine where I should go and where I shouldn’t! And I think I was anxious to see how he behaved, in the context of being a neighbour. I hadn’t spoken to him for two years, at least, before I found that he was moving in alongside me here.’

  Lisa saw Lambert weighing her explanation: she found it a curious and wholly novel feeling to have a man coolly and undisguisedly estimating what you said and deciding whether it was rational and whether you were honest. Then he said, ‘And how did the evening go?’

  ‘From my point of view, better than I had expected. Rob Durkin behaved himself impeccably, as if he was anxious to go on playing the role of the good neighbour, which he had been doing in the weeks building up to the street party. Perhaps that’s the persona he intended to adopt in Gurney Close. I was guarded with him, of course, watching that I didn’t give away too much of myself and what had passed between us in the past, though I think I managed to be relaxed with the others. But I had a feeling that other people as well as me were being careful with Durkin on Saturday night.’

  ‘Which people?’

  She was ready for him this time. ‘I couldn’t really tell you that. There was nothing I could put my finger on at the time, and nothing I can recall now and pinpoint as being odd. I just felt that other people as well as me had reservations about our host. But maybe I was projecting things into the atmosphere which weren’t really there.’

  Lambert gave her a small, encouraging smile. ‘I doubt that. Who else as well as you seemed to have other concerns?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say. I was much too anxious about my own odd position to take much account of the detail of what was going on. When I think back on it, Ally Durkin herself seemed a little over-excited, a little brittle, considering that she was in her own garden and her own house. But of course I don’t know that her nervousness had anything to do with her husband, do I? That’s if it even existed: maybe it was no more than a figment of my over-active imagination.’

  Lambert thought it was probably more than that. There were too many people who had reasons to fear or resent the host for it to have been anything other than a rather odd party. Everyone maintained that they had drunk quite a lot, which would have been a natural release in such circumstances. Yet the one man they had been able to test, the dead Robin Durkin, proved to have drunk relatively little. That would tally with this woman’s description of him as a control freak, who liked to observe and manipulate those around him. But it would also have been logical if he had been anticipating a meeting with someone after the night’s jollities were over.

  Lambert said with his usual abruptness, ‘Mrs Holt, who do you think killed Mr Durkin?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not Martin, though he would have had ample reason to do so.’

  ‘You might like to know that your ex-husband has a perfect alibi. He was in the company of other people throughout the evening, some thirty miles from the scene of the crime.’

  ‘Yes, I know. And for your records, I didn’t kill Durkin, either.’

  ‘So who did?’

  ‘Someone who came in from outside, I should think. He had plenty of enemies. And he was swimming in some pretty dark pools; I imagine there were some pretty nasty fish around him.’

  It was true enough. Lambert noted again the suggestion, the wish, that it should be some anonymous villain from outside the world of Gurney Close who had killed this resident. Natural enough, perhaps, but also putting Lisa Holt herself outside the frame for the crime, if they accepted the idea. He said, ‘Jason Ritchie confirms that you were with him throughout the night.’

  ‘So neither of us could have slipped out and killed Durkin. Or both of us could have been partners in a murder.’

  He did not respond to the smile with which she suggested that this was an absurd idea. ‘Had Mr Ritchie any reason to wish him dead?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. You’ll need to ask him that yourself, though. I haven’t known Jason very long.’

  Lisa Holt was certainly cool enough to commit murder, as Bert Hook pointed out to Lambert as the superintendent drove back towards Oldford. And she had not tried to disguise the fact that she was delighted that Robin Durkin was dead.

  Fifteen

  It was like a painting, thought Bert Hook.

  Standing at the door of the room in the Intensive Care ward, he suddenly did not want to disturb the scene. Some superstition, deep-rooted in the human psyche, told him that if he disturbed this quiet tableau, there would be ill consequences for the figures in it. For Eleanor perhaps, sitting still and upright as a statue with her eyes closed and her right hand on the sheet at the head of the bed. Or perhaps, worse still, for the pathetically small shape w
hich lay so susceptible beneath that sheet.

  The only patch of skin he could see in the patient was a few inches of unnaturally white wrist, where a drip was feeding fluids into the small, ominously quiet body.

  Bert went forward and stood beside his wife, looking down at the boy, saying nothing by way of greeting because there was nothing to be said. He moved into the tableau as a third presence, standing as still and as silent as the two figures beneath him who had composed the original scene.

  Eleanor was as silent as he was, weary with her vigil, fearful that any optimism might break the spell and cast the fragile subject of all this care back into the chaos between life and death. A full minute passed before she said, ‘It’s well over the twenty-four hours now. Well on the way to the thirty-six hours they said would be crucial.’

  ‘And he’s come through it. That’s got to be a good thing.’ Bert Hook looked down at the slim shape beneath the sheet, willing it to survive, watching the slight rise and fall of the cotton which proved there was life underneath it, helpless because he could not volunteer some of his own strength to drive on those small, faltering lungs.

  Eleanor fought back her absurd fear that it was tempting fate to voice even the smallest hope. ‘He’s still in the crisis. But his temperature’s down a little, the nurse says. And his pulse is slowing.’ Illness in your children did odd things to you. She was resentful of her husband for extracting this information from her, as if he were stealing something which was hers and hers alone.

  Bert felt a sharp pang of love for her. Eleanor looked ten years older than when she had begun this vigil at their son’s bedside. There was a button on her blue shirt undone, a drop of dried, unheeded coffee on her jeans. He noticed that she had forgotten to comb her normally very tidy hair; you’d think one of the hospital people would have reminded her about that. But no doubt they had other and more pressing concerns.

  He put his hand on his wife’s shoulder, feeling the bones of it, thin and delicate under his broad fingers. He felt very helpless: nothing he said could distract either of them from the momentous event which was working itself out in the bed beside them. He said, ‘You should get some rest, love. You’ve been here a long time.’

  For a moment, she felt only more resentment at his intrusion, at the intrusion of anyone into the cocoon of suffering she was enduring. Didn’t he see that if he broke the concentration of her love, Luke would suffer for it, might even slip away, whilst her attention was diverted? She said dully, ‘I’m all right. Don’t you worry about me!’ and refused to look up at him.

  Bert reached out a hand carefully to touch his son’s forehead, as tentatively as if he were establishing contact with a tiny, injured bird, feeling that any sudden movement might damage the unconscious flesh. It felt very dry, very warm. He said, ‘Perhaps he’s turned the corner now.’

  Eleanor felt the irritation again. What right had this man to come in here from the world outside and offer his notions, when she had been here all night and had watched every nuance of her boy’s progress? What right had he to wander in off the streets and offer his banal opinions? She was the one who knew. She had been here all the time. She had sought every informed opinion, had watched the mystical electronic pulses recording the variations of heart rate and temperature. She resented his arrival from that wider world outside where he worked, which seemed to her at this moment quite remote from her. Even to think about that world, to hear the tolling of the town’s clocks in the silence of the night, the distant sounds of the traffic, now seemed to her a sort of treachery.

  Eleanor was silent for so long that Bert thought she was not going to speak. Then she said reluctantly, ‘I think he has turned the corner, yes. I just didn’t dare to say it, you see. The nurses think so: I don’t think they’re just saying things for me. They say there’s a bed for me in the family unit when I want it. I might use it tonight, Bert.’

  With the use of his name, the bond between them was reestablished. She reached out a hand in slow motion and gently removed his larger one from the boy’s brow. Then she intertwined her slim fingers with his thicker ones and made herself give him a squeeze.

  Philip Smart couldn’t stand the waiting. Once Carol had told him at midnight on Wednesday that the police wanted to speak to him, he was unable to think of anything else. When they had come to the close and gone in to see not him but Lisa Holt, it only made the tension worse. By half past eleven on Thursday morning, he could stand it no longer.

  He picked up the phone and made arrangements to go into the CID section at Oldford.

  He was quite relieved to be ushered in to see Detective Inspector Rushton. A younger man had to be easier than that battle-hardened and all-seeing superintendent. Phil went forward and held out his hand. ‘The better half said the CID wanted to see me. Thought I’d bring the mountain in to Mahomet. One volunteer is worth a dozen pressed men, eh?’

  Chris Rushton’s file on Smart told him that the man was fifty-one; Chris didn’t think he’d met anyone under seventy who spoke like this. It wasn’t just what he said, but his manner of speaking: the man was almost a caricature of the English bounder he thought had disappeared with Ealing films. Rushton, who was used to dealing with much nastier villains, found the noisy appearance of this man in his office almost refreshing.

  Smart looked at the computer winking in front of the inspector and said, ‘Nice to have a fresh view on the case. I was rather expecting to see your Superintendent Lambert and the PC Plod who takes notes for him.’

  Chris Rushton said stiffly, ‘Detective Sergeant Hook has family troubles at the moment. His son is seriously ill in hospital.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that. But I expect you’re able to spare him from the team more easily than the brainboxes of the enterprise.’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Hook is about to complete an Open University degree. With a very high honours classification, if his results in previous years are anything to go by.’ It was the first time that Chris could remember springing to the defence of Bert Hook, whose lofty refusal of promotion to inspector had always seemed to Chris an unspoken comment on his own ambition.

  ‘Oh! Well I didn’t mean to cast any nasturtiums, you know! Still waters run deep, and all that.’

  Chris was well used to clichés from a nervous public, but he found himself noticing them and being irritated by them in this man. He picked up the internal phone. ‘Mr Smart is here, sir. Interview room two is free. I thought we might see him together, if you have the time.’

  This wasn’t going as planned at all. Phil Smart found himself ushered into an intimidating square box of a room, with no windows and a single high-wattage light in the centre of the ceiling above him. He was left on his own in there for a couple of minutes, staring at the plastic chairs and the square, scratched table with its cassette recorder, which were the only furnishings in the room.

  When he came in, John Lambert said, ‘I think we’ll just record this, if you’ve no objection.’ He leaned forward, pressed a button, set the cassette turning silently and went on, ‘There’s nothing official about this, of course: you haven’t been cautioned or anything like that. It’s just that it’s useful for us to have a record of what you say. You would be surprised how often people recall things differently at a later time.’

  He sounded as if he expected Philip Smart to change his story, to be trying to wriggle off the hook in a few days’ time. That, at any rate, was how it sounded to Phil, who said weakly, ‘This is a bit over the top, you know. I can’t see that anything I have to say will be worth hearing, never mind recording.’

  ‘Really? Well, I think you’ll find you’re underestimating yourself there. What you have to say will form part of a much larger picture. We shall see whether it fits into the pattern of what we are hearing elsewhere. We try to put whatever everyone tells us together, then see if there are discrepancies in the pattern, and in people’s impressions of what happened. Then we follow up these discrepancies. It’s surprising how often the d
iscrepancies lead us to the solution in a criminal investigation.’ Lambert found that he enjoyed watching the tension mount in the face opposite him as he voiced the familiar ideas.

  ‘I’ve already told you what happened on Saturday night.’

  ‘Yes, you have. And we’ve compared it with what other people remember of the occasion.’

  ‘And found none of your “discrepancies”, I’m sure.’ Phil gave a nervous laugh, which brought no response from the two grave faces opposite him.

  Chris Rushton said stiffly, ‘I have already recorded on our computer files what you told our officers about the events of Saturday night. Do you wish to change anything?’

  Phil had already revised his opinion and decided that he preferred the rubicund Bert Hook to this unsmiling young automaton. He said, ‘There is nothing I wish to change. Nor have I recalled anything further to add to what I told the detective constable who took my statement on Monday.’ He switched his attention to John Lambert and said abruptly, ‘I understand my wife was in here yesterday. What was it she told you?’

  Now Lambert did smile at him. This was never an easy situation. ‘I’m afraid that remains confidential, Mr Smart. We never divulge what anyone tells us: it only becomes public if it becomes evidence in a murder trial.’

  ‘But we’re husband and wife.’

  ‘That is a line of argument you must take up with Mrs Smart, not with us.’ Lambert smiled again, trying to relax the tension, to suggest that nothing of great moment was involved here. ‘Similarly, whatever you have to tell us this morning will not be revealed to your wife, unless you choose to relay it to her yourself. You must surely see that this is the only way for us to proceed. People will only reveal what is potentially embarrassing to them if they know that we will respect their confidences.’