by J M Gregson
Ros’s mouth was suddenly very dry. ‘What sort of information?’
‘He went back ten or twelve years. To your last days at school and your years at the art college.’
‘I got in with the wrong set.’ For the first time in her life, she found herself mouthing the phrase she had heard so often from her mother.
‘Very much the wrong set. You probably know that several of your former associates are now in prison. Two of them serving five-year sentences for GBH.’
‘I cut myself off from them. I haven’t followed their careers since then.’ She tried to be firm, even dismissive, but it sounded a weak denial even in her own ears.
‘You were guilty of some pretty wild things yourself, when you were nineteen and twenty.’
‘I was never charged with any offence.’
‘You came very near to it, even with the good lawyer your mother called in for you.’
‘It’s ten years since I was in any trouble. It’s no longer relevant.’
Bert Hook said gently, ‘It wouldn’t be, Ros, if this wasn’t a murder enquiry. We have to take into account any previous tendency to see violence as a solution to problems.’
She could think only of going into the tired clichés about once a villain always a villain and innocent until proved guilty. From being on a high from the sale of her paintings, she felt abruptly deflated and exhausted. She was back in the world of reality, which was presenting its harshest aspect to her. She repeated the same futile argument in a flat voice. ‘My life now is totally different from my life ten years ago. What I did then has no bearing on my life today.’
‘Unless your behaviour then shows character traits that persist, Ros. It doesn’t make you guilty of the crime committed last Tuesday night, but we have to take these things into account. Past experience tells us that we need to do this. The records show that people who’ve been violent once tend to be violent again, when they’re put under pressure.’
She tried to muster some sort of denial, but he made it all sound distressingly logical. And her mind was weary, too weary to resist. She nodded dumbly, not trusting her tongue. Hook spoke with a gentleness which mitigated the harshness of his message. ‘Ten years ago, you stabbed a man, Ros. By all accounts, you were lucky that he didn’t die.’
She found a voice, low but steady, resisting the instinct deep within her that her case was hopeless. ‘I was threatened. We were in a gang, fighting a rival gang. It all happened very fast. The situation was much more confused than you’re making it.’
‘You were the only woman there. Didn’t that warn you that there might be violence?’
She was silent for so long that they wondered whether she would answer. Then, with a voice that seemed to come from a long way away, she heard herself say, ‘My mum thought for years I was just a tomboy and at the time I bought into that. Drug fixes and breaking the law seemed normal, once you were in the gang. Rumbles were part of the excitement. You didn’t think much about it, until it got out of hand and everything went wrong.’
‘But wasn’t it the prospect of violence which drew you into the group? You were an intelligent girl, an intelligent young woman by then. You must have known that there were violent, aggressive men in that gang, that there was a war going on over territory at the time.’
‘I was naïve. I was very young for my age.’ Again she could hear these plaintive, futile pleas in her mother’s voice. She sought for some more genuine reason of her own. ‘I hadn’t found my own sexual identity at the time. I didn’t want boys for sex, but I wanted the other excitements of being in a gang. Perhaps I was attracted to violence – I certainly found it exciting.’
Hook switched to the present, so deftly that she did not realize at first what he was about. ‘We have the file that Peter Preston compiled on you, with the details of this and other incidents. Did he threaten you with what he had found? Did he say he would reveal these things about you?’
She wanted to deny it all, to say that she’d known nothing and been completely unaware of what Preston could do to her. But her brain was working again now. There was no way she could know what other people had told them. If they caught her out in a lie, it would make what they already knew even more damning to her. ‘Yes. I knew Peter wanted to speak to me after the last literature festival committee, but I stayed with other people, then left without speaking to him. But he rang me up at our flat. He seemed to know that Kate was out and I was on my own, but I don’t know how.’
‘When was this?’
A long pause, which seemed to her only to make her reply more damning when she produced it. ‘Last Tuesday morning.’
The day of the murder. Hook let the thought hang between them for a moment before he said quietly, ‘What did he say, Ros?’
‘He’d heard about this exhibition – seen the advanced publicity, he said. He told me that he knew about the fight and the knifing and one or two other things. He said I should resign from the festival committee and everything connected with it. Or I could stay on it, if I changed my attitude and supported him. Then he would reveal nothing of what he knew about my past and the criminals I had associated with.’
‘And if you didn’t accede to this?’
‘Then he’d turn up at a time of his choosing during this exhibition and make a public denouncement of me. He mentioned the arts correspondent of Radio Gloucester and a couple of national journalists he knew. He said he could ruin my reputation over three or four days by gradually revealing what he knew.’
‘Perhaps you should have told him there was no such thing as bad publicity, Ros.’
She smiled weakly, looked him briefly in the face before glancing down at her hands again. ‘Perhaps I should. I didn’t come up with anything like that. I couldn’t think straight – couldn’t think at all. I was so shocked that he should know these things about me that I was completely floored.’
Hook nodded, full of understanding, even regret. ‘So you couldn’t see any way out of it. You thought you had to shut him up at all costs. You went to his house on Tuesday evening and decided to silence him once and for all. Maybe you didn’t even intend to kill him when you went there. Maybe there was an argument and you reacted instinctively to his threats.’
‘No. I probably felt like killing him, when I found what he’d been doing. But in fact I did nothing. The next day, I heard that he was dead.’
Hook nodded slowly. ‘Where were you on Tuesday night, Ros?’
Now at last she spoke with a flash of spirit. ‘I told you that on Thursday. I was at home on my own. Kate was visiting her mother and her young brother. Why do you ask me again?’
Hook smiled at her in the avuncular manner he had adopted throughout. ‘I just thought I’d give you the opportunity to revise that if you wished to.’
‘And why should I do that?’
‘No reason, if it’s true.’
‘It’s true. And it’s also true that I still haven’t found anyone to prove it to you; nor have I any further ideas on who rid the world of Peter Preston.’
Hook glanced at Lambert, who plainly thought they were done here. Bert stood up beside his chief. As he followed him out, he stopped and turned round, almost treading on the toes of Ros Barker as she followed them across the small room. ‘So long as you are innocent, I shouldn’t worry too much about an alibi. It’s often the guilty who take care to have something lined up for us.’
Sue Charles worked the hoe steadily and systematically over the soil she was preparing for the antirrhinums. ‘I love the spring and the blossom all around us, but you have to keep up with it in the garden or nature will take over. George used to say that gardening wasn’t a hobby like other hobbies, because you couldn’t pick it up and put it down as you pleased. If you neglected it at certain times, it could overwhelm you.’
‘That’s very true, I suppose, Mrs Charles,’ said Brian, ‘And as you say, spring is one of those times. The weeds soon take advantage, if you’re not around.’ The gardener dumped
his final batch of weeds into the wheelbarrow and prepared to wheel it away towards the larger of the two compost barrels. He stopped to fondle Roland’s ears and smiled as the cat stretched his body indulgently and began to purr.
Sue looked at the pair fondly. ‘He used to run away from you, when you first came. He gets used to people quite quickly, really. It’s four o’clock and time you were packing up, Brian. Have you got time for a cup of tea?’
He sensed that she wanted company. It must be lonely being a widow at times, even though she had her writing to keep her busy. And she made the best flapjacks he had ever tasted. ‘I’d love to, Mrs Charles. I’ve finished for the day when I’m done here.’
He sat in the neat sitting room in the bungalow. She brought in flapjacks on a plate as he’d hoped and he leapt forward and said, ‘I’ll pour the tea, Mrs C.’ That was the most informal address he used for her, and it seemed quite daring to take the initiative with the teapot. But his wife said men should be prepared to do these things, even old-fashioned pensioner men like him; he had found over the years that Margaret usually knew what was best for him. He munched happily at his flapjack and said gallantly, ‘There’s no need for you to work with me in the garden, you know.’
‘I enjoy it, when I can muster the time. I expect the proofs of my latest book will be here for checking tomorrow; that will take all my time up for a few days. It was good of you to come on a Sunday.’
‘Makes no difference to me, Mrs C. Be able to take the missus out somewhere during the week.’ Brian didn’t speak of the project with any great eagerness. He accepted the direction to take a second flapjack and said, ‘Have they got anyone for this murder yet, Mrs Charles?’
‘I don’t think so. Perhaps they never will.’
‘I should think you might be able to help them, writing about such things all the time.’
Sue laughed. ‘The last thing the CID would want is my help, Brian. It’s a very different thing writing tales which people might enjoy reading from the real thing. I realize that and I can assure you the police do.’
‘I bet you still have your own ideas, all the same, Mrs C.,’ he said loyally.
‘They wouldn’t want me bothering them Brian. They have a big team on a murder case and they gather all sorts of information. For all I know, they may be preparing to make an arrest at this very moment.’
‘Anyway, you make the best flapjacks in Europe. No one’s going to dispute that,’ said Brian, licking his lips after the last delicious mouthful.
Whilst Sue Charles was entertaining her gardener, the woman she had comforted in this room on the morning after the murder was seated in her sitting room with very different visitors. Edwina was attempting to explain her conduct to the CID.
She said, ‘I’ve told you where I was when my husband died: in a hotel at Broadway. And I’ve explained why I was less than honest about that at first. I should like to have kept Hugh Whitfield and my relationship out of this, had that been at all possible. He has a wife who is dying of an incurable disease; surely you can see why I wouldn’t want her to know about Hugh and me?’
Lambert had refused tea. He sat beside Hook on Edwina’s sofa looking large and threatening. ‘That attempt to deceive us was understandable, though ill-advised, as was your attempt to persuade your daughter to lie on your behalf about your whereabouts on that night. Now we find that you have still not been completely honest with us. Find, indeed, that you have lied to us about what happened on that evening.’
She stared past them across the big room, looking through the window to the border beyond thirty yards of lawn, where peonies were opening to their full brief grandeur. ‘You’ve been talking to the hotel staff.’
‘We know more than that.’
She looked at them now and the grey-blue eyes beneath the neat hair widened with fear. ‘More than they can tell you? How can you?’
‘I told you that your husband was aware of your affair, that he had employed a private detective to furnish him with the details of it. He followed you out of the hotel that night. So we know that you left at eight ten p.m. and did not return until ten twenty-seven p.m. He recorded also that Mr Whitfield drove into the hotel car park at Broadway exactly seven minutes after you, at ten thirty-four.’
‘I see. No doubt Peter employed someone very efficient to do his snooping.’
‘You were away from the hotel for two and a quarter hours on that night. Where did you spend that time, Mrs Preston?’
Edwina said acidly, ‘I’m sure your very efficient private detective has given you a complete account of my movements on that night.’
‘We should like to hear from you where you went, please.’
Maybe he’d lost her after he’d followed her out of the hotel. She would surely have been aware of someone watching her at some point if he’d followed her throughout the evening. She said carefully, ‘I had a message at the hotel that Hugh wouldn’t be able to join me for dinner. The carer he’d arranged for his wife had let him down. He’d got a replacement to stay overnight, but she wouldn’t arrive until around nine thirty. That meant he wouldn’t be with me until some time between ten and eleven. I decided I couldn’t face dinner on my own in the hotel. I had a sandwich sent up to our room and then drove out. Needless to say, I didn’t realize I was being followed.’
It seemed for a moment as if she would say no more. Hook prompted her gently, ‘You turned south on to the B4632, towards your home and your husband. What happened then?’
The implication was clear. She had driven to Oldford, despatched a husband who stood between her and a happy future, and been back in Broadway in time to greet her lover. Edwina fought against the panic that seemed to be coursing through her veins. She heard herself saying, ‘I wanted time to think. I drove south to Winchcombe and turned off towards Sudeley Castle and stopped in a lay-by with the valley below me. I wanted to consider my future. Hugh and I aren’t going to marry whilst his wife is alive. But I needed to work out how I was going to – was going to divest myself of Peter.’ She smiled a little at the last phrase and the way she had fumbled for it, but did not look at her questioners. ‘I’ve no idea how long I was there, but it must have been quite a long time. I was cold by the time I started the car and got the heat back on. I had the radio tuned to Classic FM; I think most of a concert passed whilst I was up there.’
She looked at Lambert now, wondering how convincing these last details were to him. His face was as grave and unrevealing as it had been from the outset. He said only, ‘Did you kill your husband on that evening, Mrs Preston?’
‘No. I don’t deny that his death is convenient for me, but I could have got rid of him without such an extreme solution.’
TWENTY
Sam Hilton was trying to concentrate on his art. If poetry was to be your raison d’être, you should be able to concentrate, whatever was going on around you. Keats had managed it, with his girlfriend buggering him about and consumption taking over his body, so surely you should be able to cope with being a murder suspect.
He sat down resolutely with ball-pen in hand to work on ‘Die Happy’. Rather too soon for his comfort – as soon, in fact, as he had one new phrase for the third line – there was a knock at the door of his bedsit. He glanced round at the neat, functional room, at his notes on the battered table, his attempt to make a poem. That was the old word for a poet, a ‘maker’, and it was an appropriate one. People thought you just sat and waited to be inspired but you worked very hard, word by word, phrase by phrase, line by line, to make a poem. There were false starts, rejected ideas, fierce wrestlings with language to force original ideas into a framework which would make the most of them. And usually many, many rewrites before you were satisfied that it was the finished article, or at least the very best of which you were capable.
His first instinct had been to cover up work that was so personal and incomplete. On second thoughts, he left his jottings exposed. Why be ashamed of them? Let the bloody pigs see the creative pro
cess for the tortuous, agonizing thing it was.
But it was not the police at his door. It was Amy Proctor. She was not the confident, affectionately mocking, young woman she had been when she had last been with him, when she had seemed to Sam so much more mature and experienced than he was himself. She stood hesitantly in the doorway for a moment, as if fearful that she might not be welcome here. Then she moved uncertainly to the dining chair beside the one he had been using at the table and sat down. She did not look at him. When he came and sat down before his half-finished poem, she stared at the table and said, ‘I’ve let you down, Sam. What you wanted me to tell the police, I mean. I let you down.’
‘I know. It doesn’t matter.’
‘You know?’
‘The coppers came round here again – the bigwig, Chief Superintendent Lambert and his sidekick.’ It was an absurd assertion of his status as a leading suspect.
‘I’m sorry. I wanted to let you know that they’d seen through me and broken me down, but I couldn’t get here yesterday because of the family party I told you about. I picked up the phone to ring you and tell you twice, but I couldn’t explain it on the phone. I’m not sure I can explain it now that I’m here.’
‘There’s no need. I shouldn’t have asked you to lie.’
‘I’m not much good as a liar, Sam. I tried, but the fuzz could see what I was about.’
‘That’s to your credit, Amy.’ He was glad to get her name out at last. He realized now that it was that DS Hook, the one who did the soft-cop routine, who’d said that about his girl, that it was to her credit that she couldn’t lie. Because Amy was his girl. He could feel that now. He could see it in her every embarrassed, uncertain move. The strings fell away from his tongue and he said wonderingly, ‘I love you, Amy Proctor.’