Too Much of Water

by J M Gregson

  ‘Yes. Sorry. I suppose I was just trying to preserve my self-esteem. Silly, really, when the poor girl’s been killed. Well, she turned me down at that last meeting. Finally turned me down, I mean. We’d never been more than friends, even though I’d wanted it to go further. We agreed that evening that there was nothing in it for either of us, that we wouldn’t meet again. I – I’m sorry I’ve wasted your time like this.’

  The last of his involuntary giggles rang out like a bizarre epitaph on the interview.

  Nine

  ‘Denis’ was acquiring an identity. An official identity, he hoped.

  But he was more worldly-wise now than when he had come into the country from Croatia. He had money, but it had come from grinding toil in the fruit-fields of Herefordshire. He wasn’t going to give up the money he had worked so hard to earn without having something in his hands to show for it. You didn’t buy things in pubs: that was one of the first things he had learned from the people he had spoken to in this strange, exciting land.

  So he had refused to give the man with the hooded anorak even a first payment on the document. Rather to Denis’s surprise, the man had accepted that. But he said that without an advance deposit, the passport would cost four hundred rather than three hundred pounds: take it or leave it.

  Denis had taken it.

  It meant that everything he had saved so far would be gone. But he would have something to show for it. The man pulled the hood even closer about his head and agreed that he should have the passport on Friday night. Indistinguishable from the real thing, he said. Good enough to get you a work permit anywhere in the EU, he said. Denis found it difficult to take a man seriously who slid a hood over his face in that melodramatic manner, when there was so little danger around: no flying bullets, no machetes which could take off a limb with a single descending blow. Seeing the things Denis had seen gave you a real perception of danger.

  Denis wanted to tell the man to stop playing games, to point out that the way he was behaving was more likely to attract attention than to help him to pass unnoticed. But he couldn’t afford to insult him, not if the man could really provide the services he claimed to offer. They agreed a price. The man looked from side to side suspiciously along the wall of the small, deserted room at the back of the pub and said, ‘What name do you want on the passport?’

  ‘Pimbury,’ said the man from Croatia impulsively. ‘Denis Pimbury.’ The name had sprung to his lips without a conscious thought about it. He remembered that he had seen it somewhere in the newspaper, one day during the week; he read The Times in the evenings, to improve his English. He couldn’t remember the context, but the name must have appealed to him, to come straight into his mouth like that. Just occasionally, the instinctive things were the best.

  The man made him spell out the name on paper, then nodded and put it into a hidden pocket. He insisted that he would only meet Denis again after darkness had fallen: he was a creature of the night, he implied, who could not operate outside his natural environment.

  That meant that three days later, Denis was now sitting with his half of lager in a corner of the pub as the noise grew and the people around him got rowdier and rowdier on Friday night. The English with the weekend ahead of them were a revelation to Denis. There was something frantic about their enjoyment. It was as if they would be breaking some sort of rule if the laughter did not get louder and louder as the evening proceeded and their world passed into a warm summer darkness.

  After the storms at the beginning of the week, the weather had settled again and the temperatures had climbed. Denis glanced from time to time through the narrow window behind him, watching the approach of the darkness, trying to catch the first sight of the evening star which had shone upon him in those savage days of fighting in Kosovo. Eventually he could stand the waiting no longer, and went out into the yard behind the pub. He stood among the empty steel kegs, watching the sky turn from rich blue to navy, willing it towards blackness. The English darkness fell slowly, especially when you were anxious to have it drop protectively around your shoulders.

  It was warm out here, with not a breath of wind within the old brick walls which enclosed the yard. With the high elevation of the pub behind him, he could see only a tiny section of the sky, and as yet very few stars. Without any warning, the thought sprang into his mind that this was not unlike the stifling darkness of six nights earlier, when Clare’s life had been so abruptly ended.

  He went back into the small room where they had agreed to meet at the back of the pub. He had lost his seat with his absence. He stood awkwardly in the corner, but after a couple of minutes, the group which had taken over his spot made a noisy exit, and he was able to slip again behind the small round table, where he could watch the door.

  The landlord called for last orders, and people rushed to the bar in that other strange English ritual. It looked as if the man was not coming. Well, you won’t be any worse off if he doesn’t, Denis told himself. You haven’t handed over any money, this time. All the same, he felt a desolation, as if he had been made more alone and vulnerable in the world by this attempt which had failed. Then he began to wonder if he had been betrayed. He had grown used to a world of secret police, where the knock at the door at night was the most feared sound of all. Would the British police come here tonight, nodding to each other when they saw him, taking him without a word to a cell? Would this strange and exciting odyssey, which had taken him across Europe and into the lotus-land of Herefordshire orchards, end as quietly as that?

  Then he saw the man, just inside the door of the pub, with the hood still up on his anorak on this stifling night. He was so relieved that he wanted to shout a welcome. As he had done when he had arranged this transaction, he found himself wanting to tell this ridiculous figure that he was attracting attention, not escaping it, by his strange garb on a hot night at the end of June.

  Instead, Denis said nothing. Instinctively vigilant from years of experience of danger, he signalled that he had noticed the man only by the faintest nod. The man stood still for a moment, looking back behind him into the noisy pub. Then he stepped into the small room and sidled over to Denis, lowering the hood and sneaking glances around the room, like a pantomime villain. ‘You got the money?’ he asked hoarsely.

  ‘I’ve got it.’ Denis could scarcely believe that this comic-opera figure was going to produce what he needed. He told himself that this was just a go-between, that the real work, the real deception was performed by a skilful forger with a powerful lamp at his shoulder, in some quiet workshop miles from here.

  Denis fingered the money in the pocket of his jeans. At least this man seemed to be on his own. One of his fears had been that he would come up against three or four anonymous heavies, who would beat him up and take his money without even pretending to offer him the goods. He said, ‘I want to see it, before I pay.’ Then, as the man moved automatically towards the door into the yard, he said, ‘Here, not out there. Where I can examine it. See how genuine it looks.’

  This creature of the night glanced longingly at the door and the darkness, then looked him fully in the face for the first time. ‘All right!’ he said. ‘I suppose that’s fair enough.’

  In that moment, it flashed in upon Denis that this man had not done much of this trafficking before, that he was almost as inexperienced in these transactions as Denis was himself.

  The knowledge gave him confidence. ‘Listen to me,’ he said with soft menace. ‘I’m going to inspect the goods before I pay. On this table. There’s no one watching us: I’ve been here for an hour. If the work’s as good as you promised, you’ll get your money.’ He noticed how his accent came out more strongly with his excitement, how his sibilants hissed with the tension of the moment.

  The man looked round the crowded pub, took in the various groups of noisy, unheeding drinkers. He was younger than Denis had thought at their first meeting, with delicate, almost girlish hands. Denis noted them with surprise as the man produced the document like a
conjurer from the recesses of his clothing. ‘You’ll find it’s good,’ he said. ‘Let’s have the money!’

  He kept his hand on top of the envelope, and there was a slapstick moment when it seemed that neither of them trusted the other enough to make the first concession. Then Denis waved his bundle of notes briefly in front of him and the man reluctantly slid the envelope towards him across the table.

  Denis extracted the slim, dark-red booklet from the envelope and looked at it. His first reaction was that it didn’t look much for four hundred pounds. Gold capital letters spelt out ‘EUROPEAN UNION. UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND.’ Then there was a coat of arms, with Latin he did not understand, and beneath it the magic word, ‘PASSPORT.’

  Denis looked inside. There were pages of writing he did not understand. Then he turned over the page and saw the photograph he had taken of himself in the booth in Gloucester staring out at him. He should have allowed himself to smile a little in the darkness, he thought: this man looked more foreign because he was glaring so tensely at the lens. But beside the photograph it said that this man was Denis Pimbury, born in Bristol on the twentieth of December 1978. And then the magic description in capitals: ‘BRITISH CITIZEN’.

  ‘Get you anything you want, that will,’ said the man. Denis had no idea whether he was right, but by now he was looking round so nervously and theatrically that Denis feared again for their safety. The sooner this was over, the better. He slid his four hundred pounds swiftly across the small metal table and slipped the envelope carefully into the front pocket of his jeans.

  There were drunks upon the streets. He skirted a couple of groups carefully, wanting no trouble, feeling the slim package against his thigh with every step, hoping it was not as noticeable as his raging senses told him it was.

  Back in his room, he studied his costly trophy for a long time, working out the meaning of the officialese of its opening pages with a strange combination of difficulty and relish. Belatedly, he realized that he had no real idea of what a passport should look like. And now that Clare was gone, there was no one he could turn to for advice or reassurance.

  But he spent a long time staring at the page with his photograph on it, as if by doing so he could make his new identity part of his very bones. He was Denis Pimbury now, British citizen, born twenty-six and a half years ago in Bristol. He signed that name in the space beside the photograph, as the man who brought this treasure to him had told him to do.

  He would tell the farmer on Monday, make himself a proper employee. He would ‘get his feet under the table’. He hadn’t been able to comprehend that expression when someone had first used it to him, but he thought he understood it better now. It meant you were one of the tribe. One who could pass unnoticed. So long as you thought yourself properly into the role. So long as you became the person in your passport.

  Denis Pimbury, British Citizen.

  Ten

  Judith Hudson stood looking down from the doorway of the high stone house as Hook parked the car in the turning circle in front of it.

  She took them into the comfortable sitting room where Hook had come with the young woman constable to bring the first news of her daughter’s death. It had wide sash windows on two sides and a Degas reproduction on the longest wall. A tray with a coffee pot and what looked like home-made biscuits had been placed on the low coffee table in the middle of the floor.

  When Hook had introduced his chief, Mrs Hudson said, ‘I thought you’d appreciate coffee, as you’re having to work on a Saturday morning.’ She was almost like she was trying to sell them the house, thought Lambert. And she was wearing what looked to him a very expensive grey dress, as though she was trying to make the best possible impression on her visitors. Perhaps she was trying to sell herself. But he had never known a woman who had lost her daughter try to do anything like that, in the days following the death.

  He said, ‘I’m sorry to intrude at a time like this. But I’m sure you will understand that if we’re to track down the person who killed your daughter, we have to move as quickly as possible. And that means getting to know as much as we can about a girl who cannot speak for herself from those who were closest to her.’

  ‘I understand. And it goes without saying that I want to see you put the man who killed Clare behind bars as quickly as possible.’

  She was curiously controlled: unnaturally so, it seemed to Lambert, who was well used to the various manifestations of grief. And she had immediately spoken of their murderer as a man, when he had carefully left the gender of the killer open in his conventional introduction. He said, ‘There is no objection to your husband being present for this meeting, if you prefer it. Perhaps, indeed—’

  ‘He isn’t here today. Pressure of work, you know. Sometimes you have to go in on a Saturday morning, when you run your own business.’

  Yet Hook had stated when he arranged this meeting that they would need to talk to both husband and wife, that it would be quite in order for Roy Hudson to be present when they spoke with his wife. Lambert wondered which of them had taken the decision to ignore that suggestion. Was it that man who had so carefully kept them at arm’s length on the previous day, or this well-groomed woman who was now composedly pouring coffee, with no outward sign of grief for the daughter whose body she had identified on Thursday? Or had they agreed together, for some reason that he could not begin to work out, that they should be seen separately?

  He said, ‘The last time Clare was seen was apparently by her flatmate last Saturday afternoon. We are presuming that she was killed some time on the Saturday evening. We haven’t yet got the full written post-mortem report – it may be waiting for us at Oldford CID this morning – but we know that the findings support that timing. I presume you have no reason to think that she was alive after that.’

  ‘No. I hadn’t heard from her for some days before that.’

  ‘Did she seem in any way distressed or fearful when she spoke to you?’

  ‘No. I can’t even remember the details of our conversation. It was just a conventional mother–daughter exchange, I expect.’

  Many people would have broken down on that thought, with a searing regret that the last exchange had not been more meaningful, that they could not even remember the details of what had been said. Instead of that, Judith Hudson touched her well-coiffured ash-blonde hair with the back of her hand and said, like the most conventional middle-class hostess, ‘Do help yourself to the biscuits, Sergeant Hook. They’ll be wasted if you don’t eat them, you know.’

  Lambert thought of his own daughters, who were about the same age as this girl who had died so mysteriously, and how he would feel if either of them was killed. Irritation cut through his carapace of politeness as he said, ‘We need your help. You must know things about your daughter which are going to be vital in this investigation.’

  She looked at him with intelligent brown eyes and said, ‘I’m not even sure how Clare died. Was she drowned?’

  It was wrong again, unnatural. If she really didn’t know, she should have asked the question much earlier, when Hook had seen her with the woman constable to inform her about the death, or at the latest when Hook had taken her to identify the body on Thursday. ‘No, Mrs Hudson, she wasn’t drowned. She was strangled. And then someone, presumably the murderer, took her body and dumped it into the Severn.’

  He had made it as abrupt and brutal as possible, certain now that there was no real grief here. But she merely nodded quietly and said, ‘Where was that?’

  ‘We don’t know, as yet. We may never know. The corpse had been in the water for about three days when it was found at Lydney on Wednesday morning.’

  ‘Yes. Sergeant Hook here warned me that there was some damage from the water when I went to identify the body. It wasn’t as bad as I expected, not on the face, anyway.’ She sounded as if she were reporting on some minor scientific experiment.

  ‘She had not been sexually assaulted, as far as we can tell.’ He volunteered the
information most parents would have demanded in the first shocking minutes of their knowledge of the death.

  ‘That is good, I suppose.’ She spoke not spontaneously, but like one picking her words with care.

  ‘Mrs Hudson, please do not take this the wrong way, but I have to say that you seem to me unnaturally calm about this.’ Almost like one who was expecting it, Lambert thought. But of course he could not say that, not yet. Not until they had a lot more evidence against this strange woman. He was striving not to dislike her, because the code said that personal feelings should never be allowed into an interview, since they would obviously affect your objectivity. Yet in the thirty years since he had been a fresh-faced young constable he had never met a mother who seemed less affected by her daughter’s death; perhaps this was one you couldn’t play by the book.

  Judith Hudson sipped her coffee and looked at him coolly. ‘I think “unnaturally calm” is probably a fair summary. I find myself calmer than I could ever have imagined myself in the face of this week’s news. Superintendent, I think you should know that Clare and I were not as close as other mothers and daughters.’

  He wanted to say that he had seen that already, that it seemed to him patently an understatement. Instead, he said, ‘And why was that?’

  She smiled. ‘Perhaps a psychiatrist could tell you. No doubt it reflects some serious defect in my character.’

  Lambert let out a little of his irritation with this infuriatingly calm woman as he said sharply, ‘We’re trying to find who killed Clare. The least you can do is give us the fullest possible picture of her relationship with you.’

  She smiled, accepting the logic of his argument. He wondered for a disconcerting moment if this woman ever lost her control, whether she shouted her passion between the sheets with that other enigmatic figure, Roy Hudson. As he hastily banished that image, Judith Hudson said, ‘It was better when she was a child. Even then, I never seemed as close to Clare as other mothers were to their children. When I met her out of school, for instance, she never seemed to need me the way other children needed their parents.’