by J M Gregson
Lisa Holt picked up the beakers and took them back into the house. She paused at the door and bestowed upon him a look which held promise of delights to come. ‘I like a man who’s full of surprises!’ she said.
In the second house in Gurney Close, neither of the occupants was concerned with the garden.
Philip Smart was sitting in an armchair and wondering how he could convince his wife of the seriousness of his determination to reform. He was a much chastened man. Like most libertines, he had made numerous vows over the years to mend his ways. Yet he had never been so resolved upon amendment as he was on this sunny Saturday, sitting in the conservatory of the house which was still so new that it felt strange. He just hoped it wasn’t too late.
‘They think I did it, Carol,’ he said to his wife nervously. And when she said nothing, he followed up nervously with, ‘Killed our next-door neighbour, I mean. Killed Robin Durkin.’
He was looking for reassurance: Carol Smart saw that. And paradoxically, it was because she read him so well that she could not give him that reassurance. Perhaps that was part of being a wife, she thought wryly: you saw things so clearly in a long-term partner that you also saw the comfort they wanted you to offer as banal, even hypocritical. Or perhaps it was merely that when words were obvious and expected, it was not easy for you to offer them. A waspish impulse took her by surprise and she said, ‘And did you do it, Phil?’
‘No, of course I didn’t!’ He essayed a little laugh to show how ridiculous the idea was. It emerged as a strangled groan, a most peculiar sound, without a hint of hilarity in it. ‘But I wish that I hadn’t tried to conceal things from them in the first place. I feel they don’t trust anything I say now, that they feel I’m trying to deceive them even when I’m telling the truth.’
‘You’re not good at concealing things, Phil. You never were.’ Despite the harshness of the thought, she found herself speaking for the first time in hours with real affection.
They had sat up far into the night, engaging in the drama, the agonies and the reliefs of confession. Phil had wept as he had not done since he was a boy, seemingly as much at the shame of his own revelations as at the pain of hers. Now he said, ‘You saw through a lot of my lies, didn’t you, even at the time?’ His sad shake of the head took in the paucity of his efforts, the pathos of human sexual aspiration, and the feebleness of men’s attempts to conceal it.
She nodded. ‘I saw through most of them, I think.’ She had almost said ‘all of them’, but something told her that that might be a foolish and pointless boast.
‘Whereas I hadn’t a clue about you. I’d no idea you’d been carrying on with Rob Durkin.’ Phil’s comfortable, florid, fifty-one-year-old face creased anew with pain; he was not at this moment sure whether that pain came from the images of his wife rolling in bed with a hated younger man, or from the thought of his own crassness in being unaware of it.
Carol didn’t like that ‘carrying on’, but to protest that her feelings had been more serious or aspirational would only hurt him more. And she had hurt him quite enough last night. It was curious how her one serious transgression had been more shocking and much more hurtful to him than his long trail of rather desperate womanizing had been to her.
At least he had not come up with the old line about monogamy not being a natural state for men, though she had an awful feeling that she might have agreed with him if he had. Now she threw him an old line herself, realizing as she delivered it that she was anxious to get it out before Phil came up with it. ‘It’s best to have things on the table. Perhaps our marriage will be all the better for these things, in the long run.’
‘Yes.’ He paused, remembering his tears in the garden behind their house when he had gone out there alone in the small, impossibly silent, hours of the morning. So quiet had it been that he had been able to hear the movements of unseen creatures in the waters of the invisible River Wye, eighty yards away behind the high, still trees. Then he said with more conviction, ‘I really want it to work, you know. And not just because of the girls. I want you, Carol. I told you everything there was to know about my women last night.’
Carol smiled, looking unseeingly at the picture she had never really liked upon their wall. He probably thought he had made a full confession to her, though she’d stopped him from delivering the gory details of his womanizing as soon as she could. And he probably really believed now that his contrition was all that was necessary for their union to be restored to a full vigour. His naïvety was quite touching in one of his years; she felt a warmth for that quality in him, a warmth which was possibly going to be a great help in the years to come.
She was fairly confident now that there were going to be years together in their future. She had been surprised in the various crises which had beset them in the last week to find how much she cared for this venal, ridiculous figure who sat alongside her. She might even prevent him from turning into the ridiculous old roué he had promised to become and turn him into a dull and affectionate husband, if she worked hard at it. And she realized now with a little, not unpleasant, shock of self-knowledge that she wanted to work at it. She said, ‘The police suspected me too, you know. Probably still do, for that matter. I don’t think they found me fully convincing when they spoke to me at the school last night.’
‘But you didn’t do it.’
Carol hoped it was a statement, not a question. Perhaps she should have been insulted. Instead, she found herself merely anxious to reassure this blundering husband, who seemed to have learned so little about life during all his pathetic attempts to find love in strange places. ‘No, I didn’t do it, Phil. But there were times when I’d have liked to kill Rob Durkin. And when I found he was dead last Sunday, I felt no real sorrow, just an overwhelming relief.’
He smiled. That at any rate was an assurance that she had no longer felt anything for the man. ‘So did I. He won’t be here to worry us any more. So it’s up to us to pick up the pieces and get on with our lives.’
Phil wasn’t going to stop thinking and talking in clichés, Carol thought. But so long as the clichés expressed the right sentiments and were genuinely felt, she didn’t give a damn. She said as casually as she could, ‘I think you’d better move back into the main bedroom tonight, don’t you?’
Philip Smart could think of nothing to say. Eventually he managed, ‘If you want me to, I will.’
‘I do want you to. Be such a pity if you didn’t have proper access to our wonderful new en suite bathroom, you see.’
Carol Smart knew that it was up to her to produce the little joke Phil would never have managed, to pretend that the most deeply serious things in life were really quite trivial. Humour was the only way you could cope, sometimes, when the things at stake were so tremendous.
In the third house in Gurney Close, the one where Robin Durkin had died, his wife was determinedly getting on with her life.
Ally Durkin refused all invitations from others and made herself an excellent casserole, which would do for her evening meal today and tomorrow. At six o’clock, she would open a good bottle of red wine; but not before six, because there was no way she was going to run the risk of becoming an old soak.
At four o’clock, she was speaking to her sister on the phone. ‘No, I shall be staying here … Quite definitely made my mind up, yes. This was the house I wanted, the one I worked on with the builders at the planning stage, and I don’t see why Rob’s death should alter that … No, apparently I shouldn’t have any worries about money. He was a lot better off than he cared to declare to anyone, apparently … I don’t know where most of it came from – it certainly wasn’t the garage – and maybe I shouldn’t ask too much about that … Actually, I don’t need to worry about funeral arrangements for the moment. They can’t release the body for cremation yet. A nice young woman police officer came round and explained it all to me on Thursday. Apparently when they make an arrest and charge someone, the accused will have a right to a second, independent post-mortem … No, t
hat doesn’t really upset me at all. Our marriage was over and it’s a relief now to be able to admit it … I suppose I might be in shock, yes. Just a little. They told me I could have counselling, but I don’t feel I need it. I’ll come and see you though, in a week or two … I think I’ll quite enjoy it here, when everything’s calmed down again. I like my neighbours, and I’m sure we’re going to get on very well in the years to come … No, you’re not to worry about me at all. I’ll ring you in a couple of days and let you know when I can come over.’
She put the phone down and sat contentedly in her chair, looking out not at the back garden and the spot where Rob had fallen, but at the small patch in front which she would need to work on. It seemed to her impossible that any of these nice neighbours could possibly have committed murder.
That was the thought in her mind as she saw the now-familiar police car appear at the corner. It moved slowly past the three houses and turned into the drive of the single bungalow at the end of Gurney Close.
Twenty-Three
‘It’s the CID again. They say they want to speak to you, Ron.’ Rosemary Lennox did not trust herself to say any more as she led in Chief Superintendent Lambert and Detective Sergeant Hook.
Ron Lennox was in an old green leisure shirt with the top button missing. He looked up from the sports section of the Times and gestured towards the sofa opposite his armchair. ‘Do take a pew, gentlemen. And please excuse my dress: I was working in the garden earlier in the day.’
He pushed himself a little further back into his chair, anxious to convince them that he was thoroughly relaxed and unthreatened. His sparse hair was dishevelled from his efforts at clearing brambles at the back of the garden, emphasizing the high dome of his forehead and the narrowness of the head behind it. He clasped his arms across his chest and then unclasped them immediately, in a gesture which was obviously habitual and gave him comfort. Then he grasped the wood at the end of the arms of his chair firmly in his lean fingers, as if the action was necessary to immobilize his hands.
Lennox’s shabby gardening trousers had ridden up high as he sat back, so that an inch of very white leg showed between socks and trousers. The forearms which protruded too far from his short-sleeved shirt were sinewy without any great sign of strength. There was a smear of blood on the back of his left hand where a bramble had scratched him, another and fainter smear on his cheek where he had dragged that hand across it.
Despite the spurious confidence of his greeting, Ronald Lennox now looked watchful, frail and very vulnerable.
He said primly, ‘I trust you are making progress, Mr Lambert. I’m only too anxious to help, of course, but I can’t think that I can possibly be of any further help to you.’
Lambert didn’t hurry. He knew he held all the cards now. But a confession was always helpful. He said quietly, ‘Your son spoke to a CID inspector in Cambridge this morning.’
‘So I understand. The boy spoke to his mother on the telephone whilst I was in the garden. I realize that neither you nor Detective Sergeant Hook was personally involved, but I feel I must protest at his arrest. It won’t do Andrew any good with his employers you know – even if they are only supermarket executives.’ He could not conceal his distaste for his son’s choice of temporary employment. ‘An arrest is hardly appropriate treatment, you know, for a putative Cambridge graduate.’
‘Your son wasn’t arrested, Mr Lennox. He was asked to help the Cambridge police with their enquiries, which they were pursuing on our behalf.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Nevertheless, this heavy-handed—’
‘Andrew could have been arrested, however. Indeed, I’d say he’s lucky that he wasn’t both arrested and charged, in the past. Lucky not to be carrying a criminal record into the final year of his studies for his putative degree, in fact.’
‘To me, this is amazing and quite ridiculous.’ Lennox decided not to be irritated by the superintendent’s ironic repetition of his word ‘putative’. He clasped his thin hands together in his lap, wrung them against each other for a few seconds, and then returned them to the arms of his chair. ‘But I make a point of never commenting upon things which I do not understand, so I shall hold my peace.’
It was impossible to tell whether Ron Lennox was shaken or not. Lambert realized in that moment that the man had prepared this reaction for them, probably at the moment an hour or two earlier when he had learned of his son’s being questioned. ‘I’m speaking of the time when he was dealing drugs for Robin Durkin. When he was a pusher for him, a junior in the ranks of his drugs operation.’
‘You may think that you have the facts of the matter, Superintendent. I could not possibly comment.’ Ron remembered the actor Ian Richardson saying something like that, in a play on television. House of Cards, he thought it was. Not Shakespeare, by any means, but an appealing enough melodramatic trifle. People had sometimes compared him to Ian Richardson, and he was flattered by the thought, since he liked the actor. He had rather taken to imitating his thin-lipped, acerbic delivery since two or three people at school had mentioned the likeness.
It was Rosemary Lennox, sitting with drawn face on an upright chair at the back of the room, who now said, ‘Andy left all that behind him long ago. I hope no one is going to charge him with dealing at this stage of his life.’
Lambert turned his head for a moment and looked at her steadily. ‘That is out of our hands, Mrs Lennox. But I don’t think it is likely there will be charges; I gather that your son has so far been fully cooperative.’
Ron Lennox should have been relieved by this diversion. Instead, he felt a little piqued that he should not even for an instant be the centre of attention here. He said querulously, ‘I can’t see that Andrew’s evidence has anything to offer that could possibly be relevant to—’
‘Not evidence, Mr Lennox. Not as yet. Andrew has merely being cooperating with a police investigation. Helping us with our enquiries into the murder of Mr Robin Durkin.’
‘Andrew has nothing to say about this. He hadn’t even spoken to Durkin for years.’
‘Nevertheless, he is central to this case. He is the reason why you decided that you had to silence Robin Durkin.’
Lambert had expected gasps of astonishment, or shrieks of protest. Instead, there was absolute silence, so that the raucous cry of a seagull, drifting inland before the approaching rain, rang unnaturally loud through the open window. Rosemary Lennox sat as still as a well-dressed statue on her chair at the back of the room, and Lambert sensed in that moment that she already knew exactly what her husband had done. Ronald Lennox had scarcely blinked at the words from the superintendent. He sat with his knuckles whitening with the fierceness of his grip on the arms of his chair, wondering whether to accept or deny the accusation.
It was Bert Hook, sensing as usual the moment when an intervention from him would be most telling, who now said softly, ‘You hated Rob Durkin a lot more than you admitted to us, even back in his school days, didn’t you, Mr Lennox?’
Ron turned eagerly to the ruddy, experienced face, sensing a chance for self-justification rather than the invitation to incriminate himself. ‘He was disruptive and malicious throughout his time in the sixth form. He was a dreadful influence upon his peers, even then. And among the staff, he singled me out particularly for his contempt and his derision. I don’t think I would be exaggerating if I say that even all those years ago he was vicious.’
He weighed the word for a moment and nodded slowly, demonstrating to them that even in this context it was important for him to be accurate in his vocabulary. Hook nodded sympathetically, as if Lennox was now making things much clearer for him. ‘And after Durkin had left school, things only got worse, didn’t they?’
Ron nodded eagerly, careless of the implications for himself of what he was saying, anxious only to make clear the nature of the evil he had been fighting. ‘I breathed a huge sigh of relief when Rob Durkin walked through the school gates for the last time. But things got worse, rather than better. I
would see him in his car outside the school gates, smiling at me, letting me know that he was still around, still making mischief.’
Rosemary Lennox leaned forward on her chair, the first, minimal movement she had made since she had taken up her post on the edge of this dramatic tableau. ‘You don’t have to say this, Ron. You should keep quiet, you know. You should wait for a lawyer’s advice.’
‘Lawyers!’ His contempt for a whole profession was crammed into two syllables. ‘They’re no more efficient and no less grasping today than when Dickens laid into them in Bleak House. I’m not here to make fat fees for lawyers. I brought more justice to the world than a thousand lawyers when I killed Rob Durkin!’
His admission stunned all four of them for a second or two. Then Bert Hook glanced at Lambert and stepped forward to the man who sat so tense and still in the armchair. He informed Ronald Lennox calmly that he was being arrested on suspicion of the murder of Robin Durkin, that he did not need to say anything, but that it might harm his defence if he failed to mention when questioned something which he might later rely on in court.
Lennox scarcely listened to him, appearing only anxious to speak. He said right on the heels of Hook’s last word, ‘The world is well rid of Robin Durkin. I shall be proud to justify that to anyone who will listen.’
Lambert saw that Lennox was transforming himself from murderer to martyr, that this would be the image he would use to sustain him through the long years in prison. He said quietly, ‘You are an intelligent man, Mr Lennox. You know better than most that we cannot allow people to take justice into their own hands.’