by J M Gregson
‘Yes, she was. Did you become lovers, Denis?’
Hook had thrown it in as if it were just another casual question, as if it were no more important than the weather all these English loved to talk about. The dark eyes flashed before Denis said in carefully controlled tones. ‘No. It was not that kind – not that kind of meeting. We were friends. We liked each other, I think. No, I know that we did. And I want you to catch the man who killed my friend.’
‘We need to know these things, you see. Need to know everything we can about Clare, if we are to find who killed her.’ Hook spoke earnestly, almost as if he had not heard the steel in Denis’s voice.
‘I understand.’
‘When was the last time you saw Clare Mills?’
‘Friday. Friday evening, before the Saturday she died.’
‘How do you know when she died, Denis?’
In that moment of terror, he thought he had made an awful error, that they would clap the handcuffs on him now and lead him away to the car and an English prison. His mind was racing as he said, ‘Was in newspaper that she died on Saturday. People talk about it. Talk here, when we eat our sandwiches.’ He waved his arm desperately over the long field and the unheeding workers.
‘Weekend was what it said in the papers, Denis. Not Saturday. We did not know for certain that Clare died on Saturday, when the news was released to the press.’
‘Saturday,’ he said stubbornly, making each syllable clear, as if by the careful repetition he could make things right. ‘I assume Saturday. I think I hear other people say Saturday, when they talk about this.’
Lambert looked at him for long, heart-stopping seconds before he took up the questioning again. ‘Tell us about that last meeting, Mr Pimbury. Tell us everything about it.’
Denis tried another shrug, found this time that his shoulders were too rigid to work themselves into the gesture. ‘Not much to tell you. We talked about Clare’s work, about the philosophy essay she had to write. I told her about my work here, about the books I was using to teach me better English.’
He couldn’t tell them the other things. Couldn’t tell them what had passed between them on that last night. Couldn’t tell them about the things he had taken away with him from that last rendezvous with Clare. He kept his dark eyes on the grey, unblinking ones of the man who towered above him, as if to drop his gaze would be an admission of guilt, as if they would clap the handcuffs upon him if he failed in this childish contest of staring the man out.
It seemed a long time before Lambert said, ‘Did you kill Clare Mills, Mr Pimbury?’
‘No. Clare was my friend.’
Lambert considered the reply for a long time. The man’s appearance was against him. He looked nervous and desperate. But if his background was what John Lambert suspected it was, if the passport he had offered so quickly was bogus, he had good reason to be nervous and desperate. He looked capable of killing, but what could Clare Mills have threatened him with, to make him take such drastic action? Or was this killing nothing to do with the man’s background? Was it the old story of seduction gone wrong, of sexual favours refused and a violent male reaction? This foreigner, deprived of sex for many months, might have mistaken friendship for something more, and if Sara Green was right about Clare Mills having opted for same-sex relationships, she would certainly have rebuffed him.
‘Then who do you think killed her?’
‘I don’t know. I would tell you if I did. I want you to get whoever did this.’ He sought desperately for something beyond this bald denial, something which might convince them of his innocence, of his desire to help them. ‘Someone at the university, I think. Something was worrying her, and it must have come from there.’
Later, when they had gone, he wondered why he had said this, whether anyone would hear of it and do him harm.
You had to keep out of things, at all costs.
Fourteen
Twelve and a half thousand miles away, as far away as you could get from the strawberry fields where Denis Pimbury worked, a man was looking out over a very different farm.
On the edge of the South Canterbury plain in New Zealand, the sheep run stretched for hundreds of acres, creeping up into the foothills of the mountains. The slopes were rolling rather than precipitous, and the man could reach most points of his ground in the Land Rover. It was winter here, but not the winter you endured in Britain. You got a little frost around this time of the year, but not the snows which buried sheep and the deep frosts which froze creatures to death in the occasional hard winters of Snowdonia or the Lake District.
This farmer, taking a little food out to his sheep to supplement the nourishment of the grass which scarcely stopped growing here, savoured the nip in the early-morning air and the clear sun which allowed you to see for miles towards the mountains in the west. Mount Cook had deep snows on its upper heights, but that was no more than a picturesque backdrop to his work, many kilometres away and many metres higher than these productive pastures. He was surprised how quickly he had grown accustomed to thinking in metrical terms, after his resistance to the idea in England.
He examined a dozen of his sheep. Their coats were good: there would be excellent shearings in the spring. And the beasts were sturdy and disease-free, a huge contrast to the rangy and tick-ridden sheep which Ian Walker herded in the Forest of Dean. This man had known sheep like that, and the memory enabled him to savour even more the health of his flock here.
There would be good profits by Christmas, and he would put them back into the farm. They would have over a thousand sheep next year, and he would take in more ground yet, in the years to come. He drove more slowly than he needed to on the way back to the farmhouse, relishing the sharp blue of this perfect winter’s day and the different greens of the land stretching away towards Christchurch beneath the rising sun. He was reluctant to tear himself away from this life that he had grown so quickly to love.
The woman had seen the Land Rover ten minutes before it reached the house. She waited for him to come into the kitchen, gave him a welcoming smile before she said, ‘You’d better get your breakfast. I got you a cheap local flight from Christchurch to Auckland. Gets you in an hour before the international flight leaves. You stop for three hours at Hong Kong before you board for London.’
‘Thanks. That’s about as quickly as you can do it.’
‘It’s a hell of a way.’ It was the nearest she would get to expressing disapproval of his going. She wanted to say that there was nothing to be gained by this huge journey, that he was cutting himself off from her, connecting again with that former life which she felt, however unreasonably, was a threat to her.
He put his arms round her, a clumsy bear of a man, too tall for her to kiss without stretching up on her toes like the young girl she had long left behind her. She pressed him harder than usual to her, saying nothing, not trusting herself to words when her small hands could knead his back.
‘I need to go,’ was all he said, and that after several seconds.
‘I know that.’
‘It’s all I can do for Clare now.’ His big frame was suddenly rent by a sob, when he thought he had done with all that. ‘She used to talk to me on the phone, you see. Told me I was the only one she could speak frankly to. Told me lots of things about the people who were close to her, the people she’d known for years and the new ones at the university. I might just be able to help the police.’
‘If they haven’t already made an arrest when you get there.’ She hadn’t meant it to be a rebuke, but it emerged like one.
He held her for long seconds before he spoke. ‘And there’s her mother, you see. The police might not understand her problems, might not be sympathetic.’ He stopped: it was sounding too much like a statement of love for the woman he had long since forsaken. He hadn’t meant it to be that.
She muttered almost inaudibly into his chest, ‘They’ll understand, when you tell them about it.’ It came again like sarcasm, when she had intended it to be a statem
ent of her love and confidence in him.
‘And there’s that woman she was planning to live with at the university. The police may not even know about that.’
‘They’ll know. It’s their business to know.’
Ken Mills held her at arm’s length, looking down into her small face with that intense seriousness which had made her love him. ‘I have to go. She’s my only child. Was my only child. I want to see whoever did this brought to justice.’
‘Of course you do. And of course you must go.’ She strove to put conviction into the words. ‘I can keep things going all right here. It’s a slack time of the year for us – well, as slack as it gets. And even if it is a long way, the world’s a small place nowadays. You’ll soon be back.’
They nodded earnestly at each other, the clichés the source of comfort that they often are in such situations.
On the other side of the world, Ian Walker was enjoying his Sunday.
He’d had a heavy Saturday night, with beer and whisky chasers and some rowdy singing. They’d had a skirmish and then very nearly a full-scale punch-up with some of the rugby-club toffs, but the police had driven up with their sirens screaming just when it was getting interesting.
Much better than the previous Saturday night. The less said about that the better. He pushed aside his thoughts about those events and got back to the safer present.
One of his mates had dropped him off last night; it must have been one or after when he got back to the caravan. But he’d slept late this morning, lying in until after eleven with a thick head and a mouth like sawdust. It had been after midday when he’d collected his News of the World and enjoyed the hair of the dog that bit him in the Rose and Crown. The Forest of Dean roads were busy with the Sunday drivers and the woods were full of picnicking families: he glared at them sourly as he came out of the pub into the sunlight.
Then he had a bit of luck. As he went back towards his caravan, a car a hundred yards in front of him hit one of the Forest’s free-roaming sheep, which ran away in agony on three legs. Not one of his, was Ian’s first thought. Stupid creatures, sheep. But tough buggers; they seemed to survive all kinds of hits. It was one of the jokes in the Forest that scarcely any of the sheep-badgers’ free-roaming sheep had four legs intact. That was an exaggeration, of course, the kind of thing they used when they wanted to have a go at irresponsible motorists and get sympathy, but it was true that a lot of the sheep hobbled around and survived. And once they’d been through the abattoir, no one could tell on a butcher’s slab which of them had been undamaged in life.
To his surprise, he saw that the car that had hit the sheep was stopping, drawing carefully into the side of the road where it broadened out a hundred yards ahead. The driver was a woman, easing herself reluctantly from the front seat of the car, looking fearfully back towards the spot where she had hit her woolly victim.
Ian Walker quickened his pace and went forward, his face suddenly full of indignation.
She wasn’t as young as he’d thought at first. Forty maybe, with a tanned face and blonde hair, a little dishevelled by her distress. Bit long in the tooth for him, perhaps, but well preserved. He wouldn’t kick her out of bed, for sure. And they said middle-class women went at it like knives when they got hold of a young bit of rough like him.
But there were more important things than fantasies, at the moment. He bristled with indignation. ‘What the bloody ’ell d’yer think yer doing? Driving through ’ere like a maniac, when there’s valuable livestock around!’
‘I’m sorry! Your sheep came out right under my wheels, without warning. I wasn’t really going very fast.’
Ian looked at the car. There was no man in it. But there were two children, about five or six, their round, fearful faces pressed against the back window of the car. This woman would want to get away as quickly as she could, before the kids got more upset. ‘Too bloody fast, you were going, or you’d never ’ave ’it my beast. You bain’t from round these parts, or you’d ’ave more sense.’
‘I’m from Bristol, visiting my old aunt in Cinderford. Look, I don’t want the poor creature to suffer. Is there anything to be done for it?’
He looked from her to the car, then over to the trees where the sheep had leapt for cover. ‘Wait ’ere. Don’t you drive away! I’ve got your number, see?’
He went away into the bracken, found the sheep licking its hind leg among its fellows. It was a spindly ram, not much meat on it. He felt the limb quickly, watched the animal bound away with an alarmed baaing beyond a copse of birches. The leg wasn’t even broken; the animal would certainly survive, with or without a limp. And anyway, it certainly wasn’t one of his.
He went back to the road with a face like thunder. ‘Poor thing’ll ’ave to be put down. In agony, ’er is. One of my best beasts too. I was looking forward to ’er lambs in the spring.’
She looked fearfully up and down the road as she stood before this angry-looking man in the stained clothes. His face seemed to be dominated by the scar on his temple. ‘I’m sorry. I really didn’t have much chance—’
‘In agony, ’er is! ’Er’ll need to be put down, right away, save ’er from further suffering.’ He looked past her towards the two round white faces. ‘You got room to take ’er in your car?’
‘No! No, I couldn’t do that! Not with the children, you see. They’d be terribly upset if they had to—’
‘Shoulda thought about that before you ran the poor beast down, shouldn’t you? I’ve lost one o’ my best sheep, and now I’m going to have a vet’s bill for putting ’er down on top of it.’ He shook his head wretchedly.
‘Look, I want to make whatever retribution I can. I haven’t got much money on me, but I’ve got my cheque book in my bag.’
He mumbled and grumbled a little to disguise his elation. They settled for a hundred pounds for the sheep and twenty for the vet’s bill to have the animal put down. He looked at the cheque doubtfully and said he’d rather have had cash, and she assured him that it wouldn’t bounce.
Ian Walker stood perfectly still at the side of the road, watching the children’s faces pressed against the rear window of the car until they passed slowly out of sight beneath the trees at the bend in the road. Then he flung a V-sign after his victim and threw his head back into a guffaw at the stupidity of city folk. He spat his satisfaction into the dusty grass beside him and turned back towards the caravan and the can of beans which would be his Sunday dinner.
The caravan smelt foetid in the hot sun. He opened the door and the one window he could still open without its falling out of its frame. The man who owned this land had told him he’d have to move on in the autumn if he couldn’t tidy up the van: said it was lowering the tone of the place. He’d explained that he’d let things go because he was expecting delivery of a new one in a couple of months. Fat chance of that! The sheep weren’t bringing in much at present. Criminal, the price of lamb was.
Still, he’d get back to his other business, as soon as this hornets’ nest over the death of Clare had died down. Trust his bloody wife to interfere with his welfare, even when she was safely out of the way.
Ian Walker took two slices of bread from the wrapper and put them into his ancient toaster. They were a bit stale, but that wouldn’t matter, when they were toasted. He put the can of beans by the pan, ready to open, then sat down with a can of lager on the chair outside in the sun. He’d let the van cool down for a bit, let the draught flow through it. Besides, he deserved another drink, to celebrate the cheque in the pocket of his shirt. He patted it contentedly and smiled again at the woman’s credulity.
He turned to the sport in the News of the World. Hereford had lost again. Daft buggers! He belched a little after a couple of swallows from the can. A pleasant, relaxed, near-silent sort of belch. You learned to enjoy the simple pleasures, when you lived as he did. His head fell forward onto his chest and the newspaper slipped to the grass beside him. A couple of minutes later, a gentle, irregular snoring overtook him.
He did not hear the visitor arrive. The man came on silent, careful feet and stood for a full minute with his shadow over Walker’s face, taking in the man and his surroundings, wondering if there was anything to be learned, any secret to be gleaned, from this squalid scene before the man at the centre of it was alerted to his presence.
The man in the flimsy garden chair was a countryman, despite his excesses, and presently the absence of the sun upon his face woke him from his doze. He started, feeling his vulnerability to the tall figure above him and so near to him. From his position near the ground, the figure against the sun looked immensely tall, black as night in its silhouette against the bright blue of the sky behind it.
As his vision slowly restored itself to something near normal, Ian realized that the shape was not black at all, but a dark blue for the most part, with the smart short-sleeved shirt a lighter shade than the sharply creased trousers below it. Ian struggled upright, setting the half-empty can down carefully upon the newspaper beside him. ‘And who the bloody ’ell are you?’ he said automatically.
The man did not move; he continued to stand very close to Walker, looking down coolly upon the dishevelled figure who presented such a contrast to his own neat appearance. Then he moved his hand unhurriedly down to his trousers, aware that a sudden movement might be misinterpreted as aggression by a man like this. ‘Detective Inspector Rushton, Oldford CID.’ He waved the warrant card swiftly across the unseeing eyes of the man in front of him. ‘Here to ask you a few questions in connection with the murder of your late wife, Clare Mills.’
‘I didn’t kill the cow,’ said Walker automatically.
‘Glad to hear it, Mr Walker. With your record, I’ll need to be convinced of that, though.’
‘You coming in?’ Walker moved automatically towards the caravan, needing to get further away from this man, whose closeness seemed to present a physical threat to him.