Close Call

by J M Gregson

  It was Lambert who said sharply, ‘But not always as an accountant. We know that. What were you doing in the Ross-on-Wye area on the night of Saturday the ninth of July?’

  ‘Visiting friends.’ Watson was beginning to enjoy this. He told himself sharply that he had better be careful: you couldn’t indulge in enjoyment with the fuzz. You were one man against a big organization and you had much better not forget that.

  ‘We’d better have their names.’Rushton, anxious to reassert himself, produced a notebook with a disbelieving sneer.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll give you names. I’m under no obligation to answer your questions, as you know. Unless you propose to charge me with any offence, in which case I’ll let my brief tell me what I should answer.’

  ‘You could be charged with hindering the police in the course of their enquiries.’

  Another mistake. Watson gave the younger man a bland, mirthless smile. ‘Not a charge that’s brought very often, that, is it? I think I might take a chance on it. Especially as I’ve nothing useful to tell you.’

  Chris Rushton wanted to glance sideways at Lambert, to search for advice on how to play this. But he didn’t do so: that would have been a sign of weakness. Chris didn’t have the unthinking, complementary relationship with the chief which DS Bert Hook enjoyed, despite his superior rank; not for the first time, he found himself unexpectedly envying that unremarkable-looking man.

  DI Rushton decided that he needed to play his trump card. ‘Money was paid into your bank account in connection with this visit to Herefordshire.’

  For the first time since they had begun this, Watson felt a little shaft of fear. That was a necessary thing, though, in this business, a safety-mechanism you had to have. Like pain, fear gave you a warning, reminded you that you had to give your full attention to what you were about. He broadened his smile, looked hard into the almost-unlined, intense face opposite him. ‘Invasion of privacy, I’d call that. That’s if I choose to believe you. What right have you to go prying into my affairs?’

  Lambert, sensing uncertainty for the first time in this coldly alert man, came in quickly. ‘We know about the account you use for these transactions. There was a payment of four thousand pounds into that account, five days before you ventured south for the weekend. There was a further payment of eight thousand pounds, on Wednesday last.’

  How the hell had they discovered that? He was tired of telling everyone who used him that it didn’t pay to underestimate these people. The professional thing was never to underrate your enemy, however much on top of him you might feel. But some of these gangsters were amateurs: they were making big money, while their luck held, but their carelessness would catch them out, sooner or later. They paid well, but they could put you in danger when they got too confident. You had to watch your back, whoever you worked for.

  Watson forced all the assurance he could muster into his voice as he said stuffily, ‘You’ve no right to nose your way into people’s financial affairs. And those in charge of personal finances should not give away information.’

  ‘So change your banker.’ Lambert let his antipathy for the man and his trade snap out for the first time in the contemptuous phrase. He noticed that Watson had not denied the facts they had thrown at him. ‘And in the meantime, tell us how you came by this money.’

  ‘Payment for past services rendered. Accountancy services.’

  ‘In two instalments?’

  ‘Not everyone can muster large sums at short notice. Not everyone has the salary of a chief superintendent.’ But behind the insults, his brain was working fast, asking how much more they knew, what they were going to come up with next.

  Now it was Lambert who indulged in the mirthless smile, as if wishing to mirror and return this man’s derision in the earlier part of the interview. ‘Our information is that you are unusual among contract killers, in that you do not operate upon a fifty-fifty payment basis. That you operate on a one third in advance, two thirds on completion basis. Very trusting of you, when you’re dealing with the criminals who use your services. No doubt you’re very confident that you can deliver.’

  Watson almost made the mistake of accepting the compliment, almost acceded to the idea that this was indeed a mark of his competence. But he thought before he spoke, as always, and protected himself from such a gaffe. ‘You seem to be very well informed. I would be quite impressed, if I did not know that this was an elaborate fiction.’

  ‘You deny the facts of your bank account?’

  ‘I neither confirm nor deny them, Chief Superintendent Lambert. I have no need to do so, as an innocent citizen.’

  ‘So you’re refusing to tell us the real reason for your visit to Herefordshire last weekend, and also refusing to explain the coincidence of the arrival of these large sums in your bank account.’

  ‘Of course I am. Furthermore, as an innocent citizen, I resent your unwarranted intrusion into my private affairs.’

  Watson was striving hard to conceal from them how shaken he felt by the extent of their information. They knew he had been commissioned to kill Durkin. They knew both his movements and the details of the payments he had received. It was something he had not anticipated and had never had to contend with before, but you put yourself in the hands of other people when you accepted work for them. He told himself firmly that the big thing was that they seemed to know nothing about this afternoon’s incident, that he was in the clear for that cold and ruthless killing amidst the grimy buildings of the sweltering city.

  In the last analysis, he did not fear their questioning about this week-old killing in that very different setting by the banks of the Wye. It was better to keep their attention on that. He said as casually as he could, ‘How did this man in Herefordshire, this Durkin fellow, die?’

  Lambert looked at him steadily for two long seconds. ‘I think you already know that. He was garrotted with a piece of cable, taken from behind and killed in less than half a minute.’

  ‘Not the method I’d have used. I was a fighting soldier, as you no doubt know. In the entirely hypothetical event of my killing a man, it would have been with a rifle or a pistol. Firearms are what I’m used to: I’m sure your diligent researchers have discovered that for you. I should say what I was used to, in the increasingly distant days when I lived the military life.’

  ‘You’re a professional killer. Offered a means of murder which was swift and silent, you’d have taken it.’

  ‘But I didn’t. That’s the only flaw in the beautiful little scenario you’ve constructed for yourselves. And there’s not a court in the land which would accept that I did.’

  Lambert stood up. ‘Not yet, perhaps. But one of the virtues of the police machine is persistence. Unlike you, we have to work within the law. It takes us longer to achieve our ends, but we get there in the end. When dangerous men are uncooperative, we become more determined to see justice served.’

  They left without the false courtesies of farewells on either side. During what remained of his evening, Watson spent much time reviewing his actions of the previous weekend, wondering where the police information had come from. Someone had known of his presence in Herefordshire last Saturday and Sunday; someone had followed most of his movements on those days.

  It would be ironic if he got away with what he had done this afternoon, and ended up in court for a murder he had not committed.

  Twenty-One

  Andy Lennox quite enjoyed hard physical labour. When you were a student, you took whatever work you could get during the summer holidays: there was plenty of competition for it nowadays. Stacking shelves in supermarkets wasn’t glamorous, but it paid surprisingly well, if you didn’t mind unsocial hours. At the end of an academic year when he had run up more debt than he had planned, he was glad to take all the hours they offered him, within reason.

  It kept you independent, too; it reminded Mum and Dad that you were an adult now, able to fend for yourself and make your own decisions. Andy was their only child, th
e son produced when Ron Lennox was forty-two and Rosemary was forty-one. They had been delighted, of course. For twenty years now, they had doted on him and been very good to him, but their love could sometimes be suffocating, for a young man anxious to discover his own paths through life. Andy sometimes wondered what it would be like to be part of a large family, or to have parents twenty years younger than his sensible and indulgent ones.

  When your dad was a teacher and your mum a pillar of the local community, it made you all the more anxious to kick over the establishment traces and fend for yourself. Andy was pleased to have found this job on his doorstep in Cambridge, so that he hadn’t had to move from his university digs. He had explored various methods of making money during his time as a student, and some of them had been very definite mistakes. But that was all part of the learning process, he told himself firmly, as he lifted the final carton of baked beans on to his trolley and pushed it carefully into the almost deserted store.

  It was still only seven thirty-five. Andy Lennox liked this time of the day, before the floor became thronged with shoppers and the strains of replenishing the larders and fridges of the city began to tell on the tempers of the customers. It was a little cooler this morning, with a light breeze from the west. The forecast had said that the heat wave was almost at an end. He wouldn’t be sorry about that. The sun was all very well when you were lounging with girls on the lawns of the ancient university after exams, but when you were involved in work like this, it was better to have it cooler.

  He had been working for an hour and a half already. He found the steady, physically demanding work of lifting and stacking a welcome change from being a student in what all his tutors told him confidently was the greatest university in the world. You developed a rhythm, and you didn’t have to tax your brain. After a year when your brain and the way you used it had been all that seemed to matter, manual work was a positive relief.

  And the news of that death last week had been a huge, unexpected bonus.

  There was little room for differences of opinion about how you stacked supermarket shelves. You noted where the deficiencies were on the shelves as the public denuded them, went to the stores and collected the tins and the packets which would replenish them. When you were a strong young man of six feet, with broad shoulders and a body full of energy anxious for outlets, you didn’t need to skive. And the supervisors soon got to know the skivers and the willing workers. You became quite popular with the powers that be when you were reliable.

  He’d get time and a half for this stint today, double time for the five hours he’d just agreed to take on for the morrow. Quite a lucrative return on a weekend he would otherwise have wasted. After the very different demands of revision and exams, it was a relief to have your working day planned for you by someone else. Having a supervisor who told you exactly how many packets of cereal were required was a welcome change from the challenges set for him last week by the white-haired don who had discussed his dissertation on Adam Smith. Next year, his Economics degree would get him on to the first rungs of the executive ladder. In the meantime, Andy Lennox was very content to remind himself how the other half lived.

  Andy saw the police car come into the car park, wondered idly which of the thin stream of customers had been unfortunate enough to excite the attention of the law. As he trundled his heavily-laden truck towards the spot where he would unload his unremarkable cargo, he noticed the two uniformed officers, who looked no older than he was, going into the supervisor’s office. The management had got rid of one of the temporary workers for pilfering last week, but he didn’t think the store had reported the woman to the police.

  He was surprised when the two uniformed figures came towards him, even more surprised when the woman officer said to him, ‘Are you Andrew Edward Lennox?’

  Andy said, ‘I am indeed,’ and smiled at her, to show how unthreatened he felt.

  It was the fresh-faced young man beside her who said importantly, ‘We need to ask you some questions, sir. In connection with the investigation of a serious crime in Herefordshire.’

  A hundred and fifty miles away from where Andy Lennox laboured in the supermarket store, the mother whose love he found it so difficult to cope with had problems of her own.

  Rosemary Lennox was renowned for her effectiveness. Members of half a dozen local committees could testify to that. Only this week, she had been instrumental in saving her local branch library, after it had been threatened with closure by a local authority intent upon economies. She was a doughty fighter, a polite woman who could be unexpectedly feisty and determined when a cause excited her.

  There was nothing subtle or devious about her methods. Her natural instinct was to be straightforward and honest. Subterfuges were not her natural method: Rosemary preferred to state her arguments forcibly and use the logic of them to take on the opposition face to face. It was a strategy which had worked well for her over the years: there were not many occasions when she had failed to deliver.

  But her natural integrity meant that she was not at all happy with the tactics she was having to employ today. It was not straightforward, this. She knew it was necessary, but it involved secrecy, deceit, even dishonesty, which were wholly foreign to her nature.

  Rosemary waited until she had the house to herself. Ron eventually went off to the gardening club hut to buy his fertilizers and sprays at members’ rates. Before he went, he discussed with her exactly what they should buy, what they would need to accelerate the translation of the refuse from their back garden into useful compost, exactly how much lime she thought they should apply to the thick clay of their new front garden this year. Rosemary tried to be patient, to respond to his queries with interest and her usual logic, but she ended up wanting to scream at him to make his own decisions and get out of the house.

  She told herself that it wasn’t the first time she had lost her patience with this hair-splitting perfectionist of a husband, and that it no doubt would not be the last. But a small voice at the back of Rosemary Lennox’s brain kept insisting that the issue here was far more important than any involved in the previous thirty-seven years of their marriage.

  Ron was gone, at last. She watched his car until it disappeared from Gurney Close, took a deep breath, and made herself climb the stairs deliberately, rather than race up them two at a time as she felt inclined to do. She gathered things from the drawer where she had hidden them and stowed them swiftly into the black, anonymous dustbin bag, making sure that nothing went in which could identify the source of this package. No more than five minutes after Ronald Lennox had left the close, his wife’s black Fiesta followed more swiftly after him.

  John Lambert was working hard in his very different and well established garden, anxious to do as much as he could before the sun rose too high in the sky. The soil was very dry, but there were signs of a change in the weather after the hot, dry spell. The blue sky was still unstreaked with cloud, but there was a cooling breeze from the west and a forecast that there would be rain coming in from the Atlantic later in the day.

  Christine Lambert glanced down the garden from the kitchen window, viewing her husband’s labours with a wife’s experienced eye. It told her that he was working hard and methodically, making a deliberate effort to banish thoughts of the case he was working on and the events of the previous evening. In his first, intense years in CID, when detection had become an obsession and John had shut her out of his working world completely, their marriage had almost been wrecked. The union which everyone nowadays regarded as so secure had almost foundered. The police service was an occupation which saw many relationships washed on to the rocks; those who now saw the Lamberts’ marriage as a model for others would have been amazed to hear of the problems they had fought through in those times.

  In those days, John had told her nothing of what went on, had preserved the secrets of his working life in an almost monk-like mystery, as if his efficiency would be damaged by any whisper of his activities to a wife. The chi
ldren had kept them together, but only just. Now those unconscious bonds were adults themselves, with toddlers and cares of their own.

  Christine looked at her husband’s sinewy arms beneath the short-sleeved shirt as he reached out for his mid-morning cup of coffee in the conservatory. She said, ‘Caroline’s coming over tomorrow – bringing the children.’

  He nodded. ‘I should be here. Unless something comes up in this Durkin murder case.’

  She smiled. It was as though once his daughter had been introduced, he could mention the case on which he was engaged. But that was probably just her imagination, a hangover from their troubles of years ago. She said, ‘You were late back last night. And very tired.’

  He smiled, acknowledging the marital diplomacy; Christine was really saying that he hadn’t had a word for the cat when he had arrived home in the last light of the long summer day. ‘The traffic was heavy on the M5 on the way back from Birmingham. But I was enraged rather than exhausted, if you really want to know. Contract killers have that effect on me. I usually feel they’re laughing at me, without my being able to do anything about it.’

  He picked up a ginger biscuit and bit into it with a savage energy, feeling resentment dropping upon him with the recollection of Anthony David Watson’s cool insolence on the previous evening. ‘Chris Rushton was as frustrated as I was – quite rattled by the man, in fact. But he handles it better afterwards than I do, throws it off more quickly. Chris doesn’t take it home with him as I do.’

  They were both silent for a moment, with John thinking of his deficiencies as a husband and Christine speculating on the lonely life the divorced Chris Rushton went back to in his bachelor flat. She said tentatively, still feeling she was on dangerous ground, ‘Is he your killer then, this hitman you went to see?’

  John Lambert took an unhurried pull at his coffee, forcing himself to talk, to allow her into the specialized field of his work. Even now, when he was determined to do that, he was conscious of having to make a deliberate effort. ‘No, I don’t think he is, as a matter of fact. He was playing games with us last night, and I think he’s too professional a killer to indulge in things like that if he’d really killed Durkin. We know that he was in this area at the time of the death. I think it’s quite possible that he was commissioned to kill Durkin, but that someone else got there before him. The victim was certainly a man not short of enemies.’