Body Politic

by J M Gregson

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The first was a fag-end. Tipped. Sodden and flattened. Impossible to say how long it had been there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘By the pond, on the roadside. But it might have been there for months. It’s difficult to tell, with a cork tip. I doubt whether there’d be any possibility of DNA testing; it looked much too far gone for that. I’m sure there’d be no saliva traces or—’

  ‘And the second object?’

  ‘A wooden toggle. The kind they have on duffle coats. Quite worn. It didn’t come from the clothing of the old chap who found the body, nor from any of my team. But again, it might have been there for months, for all we could tell. It’s bagged and at the station.’

  ‘Right. Anything here?’

  Johnson hesitated. It might not be the moment for speculation, with a chief in this mood. But the normal Lambert wanted things without delay. ‘I think he was killed here, sir. I think I know where, but I’ve only just found the place myself.’ He led the superintendent along the low hall with its irregular walls, across a modernized kitchen, into the doorway of what looked as if it had once been a large walk-in pantry, where the main fuse-box for the cottage was high on the wall. There was one of the metal dishes like the ones the officers in the lounge were using on the floor, with a pair of tweezers on its edge, which Johnson had obviously been using when he heard Lambert coming into the house.

  He picked up the tray, exhibiting the few fibres upon it to the superintendent’s experienced gaze. ‘I found these woollen fibres on the floor. Spread over about two square feet. There are probably one or two more of them: I haven’t finished yet. Forensic will test them, but I’m pretty sure they’ll find a match with the sweater Keane was wearing when he was fished out of that pool. There’s a heel-mark on the plaster there, too.’ Johnson pointed to a dark indentation some eight inches from the floor. ‘It may be quite unconnected, but I think we may be able to match it with the shoes Keane was wearing when he died.’

  ‘You think Keane died here?’ Lambert looked up at the low ceiling of a room that was little more than a large box. The floor was about six feet square. A tiny place, but big enough for a man to die in. And he saw what Johnson meant about the heel-mark; if a man had been flung down roughly with a ligature about his throat, it was just the sort of mark his foot might have made on the white emulsion paint of the wall.

  Johnson said, ‘Even if he didn’t die in here, then the body must have been left lying flat in here. That’s the only way I can see those fibres getting there.’

  Lambert nodded. ‘I agree. Have you found anything here yet that might have come from anyone else?’

  It seemed ungrateful to Johnson, when he had just been so clever, that the man should merely ask for more. But he knew what Lambert meant. If Keane had been killed here, there would have been what the forensic people called ‘an exchange’ with his killer. If they could find something to link another person with this room, they might have their murderer. Johnson said, ‘There’s nothing yet, sir. Nothing definite. But it’s early days. We’re bound to find things from other people in due course. But whether—’

  ‘Whether they’ll be significant in terms of murder may be another thing. All right. Carry on.’

  He went briskly out of the cottage to his car and Johnson lowered himself carefully to his knees in the doorway of the tiny room. He was excited, in spite of his years of experience, by the notion that he might find here the evidence which would solve this case. He had his tweezers inching cautiously over the surface again when he heard Lambert’s feet re-enter the kitchen behind him.

  ‘Don’t get up, Jack. Carry on with the good work. And if I was a bit short with you just now, I’m sorry. I’ve got things on my mind at the moment.’

  *

  In the murder room at Oldford CID, Detective Inspector Rushton was methodically cataloguing the growing collection of items connected with the case. Most would end up as detritus, but a few as vital exhibits in court, and no one could yet distinguish between the two. The price of success in detection was eternal vigilance, in Rushton’s view, and far more often than not he was proved right.

  Rushton was filing reports from the house-to-house men when Lambert went into the station. There were not many residences near to Keane’s thatched cottage, and what few there were strung out along several miles of lanes. But rural folk were an observant, inquisitive lot, more likely to spot strangers and strange happenings than those who lived in Britain’s teeming urban streets. There had already been one quite interesting matter reported.

  Lambert stood behind his DI for a moment, watching the screen on the monitor as Rushton typed in information. Often there were half-humorous exchanges between the men about the value of computers to police work, as Lambert affected a contempt he did not really feel for the new technology to tease this very serious man. Today he said nothing.

  It was left to Rushton to say, ‘There is one interesting report. A woman who lives a couple of miles from Keane’s place goes past the cottage regularly on her way to work at a supermarket in Stroud. She’s seen a vehicle parked in the trees about a quarter of a mile from Keane’s house fairly often over the last couple of months. Half hidden, but she noticed it more often once she’d spotted it. Usually at weekends, she thinks. Which might mean when Keane was in residence at the cottage.’

  ‘Any description of the vehicle?’

  ‘No registration number. But she’s pretty definite that it was an older Ford van. White, with a big brown patch on one door, where it’s never been resprayed. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find. Oh, and she hasn’t seen it at all in the last ten days or so. Since about the time when we think he was killed, in other words.’

  ‘Let me know when you find that van. Is there anything else?’

  ‘Yes. Something definitely worth following up, anyway. We’ve been through the files from Keane’s constituency office,’ said Rushton. ‘Not computerized, but quite efficiently kept, in an old-fashioned filing cabinet. Most of them were one-off visits from his constituents, though that doesn’t mean one of them mightn’t be involved, of course. If our MP rubbed someone who was unbalanced up the wrong way, they might react violently after a single meeting. But we have to start somewhere. There are five people who have been to a constituency clinic either three or four times in the last year. I’ve got two men going round to see them this afternoon, or this evening if they should be out. But three of them are housewives and two are unemployed. We should have reports in by tomorrow morning at the latest.’

  ‘Good.’ Lambert reacted automatically. Rushton always liked to display his efficiency, but it was so complete in these routine matters that only a defensive man would have felt the need. His superintendent registered what was said, but was too numbed to feel his usual irritation at this demonstration of industry.

  Rushton half turned to look at Lambert, and found him staring at the plastic bags of clothes on the table beyond his desk. He said, ‘There’s one chap who saw Keane seven times in the last year, sir. I thought I might go to see him myself.’

  It was a request to conduct an interview which might be important, and Rushton half expected the chief to say he would go himself with Hook. Instead, Lambert said, ‘Good idea. Have you found out the background yet?’

  Rushton was delighted with the question. ‘I have. There isn’t much in the file, beyond repeated recordings of the name and the dates when the man attended the clinics. But I rang Keane’s election agent, and he knew all about the case.’ He looked at Lambert, waiting for some reaction, but the lean grey face merely showed impatience at his pause. ‘Apparently the man’s daughter was killed in a road accident twelve months ago. Knocked off her moped. It seems her father thinks there hasn’t been strong enough action against the culprit—assuming there is one, of course; it might have been the girl’s own fault. He pestered Keane to take up the cudgels for him, without much success, as far as I could gather from the agent’s guarded account.
The man certainly seems to have become more and more frustrated and annoyed. Whether he might have taken violent action is another matter. It’s a big step from frustration to killing. I’ll have a better idea when I’ve seen him.’

  Lambert was silent, thinking of his own daughters, of his fears when they were first out alone in adolescence, of the irrational things he might have done then if one of them had died on the roads. The love of a parent for a child is one of the strongest bonds of all, thrusting down the arguments of logic in normally reasonable men, removing that balance in conduct which is one of the requirements for human beings to live with each other without violence. He said, ‘Do you have a name for this unfortunate parent?’

  Rushton pressed a couple of buttons on the keyboard in front of him, watched with satisfaction as the information flashed up in green letters on the screen of the monitor. ‘Walsh. Joseph Walsh.’ He reeled off an address on the outskirts of Gloucester, but Lambert’s mind was already off in search of information stored somewhere at the back of his brain.

  Joe Walsh was the name the secretary at the House of Commons had given him. The man who had pursued Keane so persistently and so ineffectively there.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was very dark in the car park at Gloucester Electronics. There were only two other cars there when Lambert parked the big Vauxhall near the single light beside the windowless brick wall at the end of the building. The newer of them was a two-year-old Granada Estate, which he took to be the senior partner and managing director’s car. A good vehicle, but nothing very prestigious for a company director.

  Hampson was a tall man, rising from a tidy desk to greet them as he saw them through the open door of his office. The clear desk-top made Hook wonder if he really had been working, or merely getting more nervous as he waited for them.

  Hampson sat them in two of the armchairs at the other side of the room from his desk, and took the third one himself. They were set very symmetrically; perhaps he had pondered hard over the careful arrangement of the furniture for this meeting.

  ‘Sorry if we’ve kept you late,’ said Lambert when they had introduced themselves.

  ‘That’s all right. Six thirty in the evening quite suited me. There’s plenty to do. And I’m quite glad not to have senior policemen around when all the staff are here.’

  ‘We do set tongues wagging sometimes, I’m afraid,’ Lambert agreed. ‘But you can’t be too discreet about murder. Especially when the victim is a prominent local MP and businessman.’

  ‘More the former than the latter of late, I’m afraid,’ said Hampson. It might have been no more than a reflex action, a natural instinct to distance himself from a murder investigation, but Hook’s trained ear seemed to detect a little bitterness in the words. He looked at Hampson as he opened his notebook. He was a few years older than his partner had been, probably in his mid to late forties, Hook thought. He had deep-set grey eyes and thinning silver hair.

  And he was nervous, there was no doubt about it now. He had things to tell them, for sure, but he was waiting for the questions to prompt him. They took him through the details of the business: how he and Keane had started the firm twelve years ago; the excitement of the early days and new products; the elation of swift success, as the demand for computer software exploded with the spread of the new technology; the expansion of the workforce to twenty within five years, and his pride in that; how things were more difficult nowadays, for everyone in electronics, not just their firm.

  ‘What were the functions of the partners? Or did you both have a go at everything in a small firm like this?’

  A sour smile, then a quick glance up at both their faces in turn, to see if they had registered his disillusionment. ‘I was the technical man, responsible for most of the new products. Ray was the salesman and PR man, in the early days. It worked, too, then. I gave him good products to sell, but Ray brought the orders flooding in. He was good, when he wanted to be.’

  ‘But he didn’t always want to be?’ Lambert moved swiftly through the door Hampson had left open so obligingly.

  ‘He didn’t give the firm the time it needed, particularly in the last two or three years. Well, not since he went into parliament, really.’

  ‘Which is now five years ago. Mr Hampson, no doubt you took this issue up with your partner.’

  ‘Yes. Things had been coming to a head for some time. And I saw him twice in the week before he died about them.’ He leaned forward on the edge of his chair, anxious to state his piece, relieved rather than apprehensive that this information was out.

  ‘And were your differences resolved in these meetings?’

  This was the moment he had known must come, and he was well aware of the implications of his reply. But there was nothing he could do about it. There was a witness to the first meeting, and there were probably people in the office who had overheard some of the second. And he hadn’t troubled to disguise his own fury with his partner when Ray had left on that Friday.

  Hampson ran his tongue across his lips, said abruptly, ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ He did not wait for an answer, but produced a packet and a lighter from his left-hand pocket, extracted a tipped cigarette, flicked a flame at the end of it, inhaled deeply, and blew out a long column of white smoke. He got up and moved the two yards to his desk, returning with the large glass ashtray. If he was conscious of four professional eyes studying his every movement for signs of tension, he gave no sign of it. But perhaps his bloodstream’s call for nicotine overrode for the moment other anxieties.

  ‘Filthy habit,’ he said, ‘but I don’t seem able to rid myself of it. No, I’m afraid Ray and I didn’t come to any agreement. Rather the reverse, I suppose. I saw him on the last Sunday before Christmas, at his cottage. That girl was there. The new one. Ray was showing off to her, trying to impress her by the way he dealt with me, I think. Or refused to deal with me. But that wasn’t her fault, of course. She didn’t do anything to encourage him.’

  ‘For what it’s worth, I don’t think Miss Renwick was very impressed with the way Raymond Keane behaved on that day.’ It was irregular to reveal what other interviewees had said, but Lambert was throwing him a sprat in the hope of catching a fat mackerel. And that, as he recalled it, was Zoe Renwick’s own phrase: she was ‘not very impressed’ with what she saw of Keane on that day.

  The ploy worked. There was both surprise and pleasure on the grey, square face of the man in front of them, at this suggestion of support from a quarter where he might least have expected it. ‘I told Ray we needed his help. That times were much harder, that the orders weren’t coming in. We needed his support and his selling expertise: I told you, he was very persuasive, whenever he chose to apply himself. When he went off to Westminster, he’d promised us that he’d still make his contribution. That there’d be new and useful contacts, buyers that he’d push in our direction.’

  ‘And that hadn’t happened?’

  ‘No. He said he couldn’t be seen to be abusing his parliamentary position. But he could have helped us without doing that. Just by giving us a little more of his time and energy when things got hard. That was the basis we’d agreed when he left. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been getting half of all profits still: we’re only a small company, and with declining sales and tighter margins, we simply can’t afford to have a sleeping partner.’

  Lambert did not want to get involved in questions of ethics. He said, ‘And you did not resolve these questions when you saw him at the cottage?’

  ‘No. Things went from bad to worse, in fact. I told you, I think he was showing off to the blonde lady: playing the ruthless tycoon at my expense. I could hardly believe it; we used to be very close, when we started the business and worked all hours God sends. If she wasn’t impressed, I’m glad about that.’

  It was a little flash of gratuitous feeling, a moment of hatred for the dead man which he had not meant to reveal. Lambert let it hang in the room for a moment before he said, ‘But you saw him again, I believe.
Very shortly before his death.’

  Hampson looked Lambert full in the eye, feeling the threat in the phrase. He was no fool, this man, but they had never expected him to be. ‘He called here two days before Christmas. On the morning of Friday the twenty-third. On his way to see his mother, he said.’

  ‘Was this meeting at your insistence?’

  ‘No. I’d left in rather a temper on the previous Sunday, I admit, and with nothing resolved. He rang me on the Tuesday from his Commons office and arranged to come into the works to talk. I thought at the time that he was being conciliatory, repairing a few bridges.’

  ‘But he wasn’t?’

  ‘No. Anything but. Perhaps he intended me to think that, to put me off my guard. At any rate, he became more truculent than ever that morning. I told him we were going to have redundancies by the end of January unless there were new orders, but he just offered to come down and tell the men the bad news himself. Then we had a row over money. I told him he wouldn’t be getting any money out of his partnership this year. He said the terms of the agreement entitled him to thirty thousand and he was going to take it, whatever the state of the business. We parted on very bad terms.’

  Hampson’s grey, exhausted face had taken on a little colour as his resentment of the dead man’s conduct came bursting out. It was plainly a relief to him to express it; probably he had not been able to speak about his dispute with his partner to anyone within the troubled firm, for reasons of morale. He panted a little, expecting them to speak, becoming a little embarrassed as they waited to see if he would reveal more of himself in his anger.

  Eventually, he took a long puff at his cigarette, blew smoke violently towards the ceiling, and said, ‘That’s it, really. I realize it doesn’t sound good from my own point of view now, but that’s how it was. Oh, and I didn’t kill Ray. I’m sorry he’s dead. We got on well, in the old days, when we were working together to build this.’ He lifted his arms a little and let them drop, indicating the factory around them which had become the centre of his life. Hook, eyes cast down upon his notebook as he wrote, wondered if this place dominated his thoughts enough for him to kill for it.