by J M Gregson
‘Someone did, of course. Someone sent him permanently packing, last Monday night.’
‘Yes.’
‘Someone with a real dislike of him, presumably. A hatred, even.’
‘Someone like me, you mean.’ She glowered at him, this traitor who had led her so unwittingly into these declarations. ‘Except it wasn’t me, you see.’
‘Yes. I see that you’re telling us that. Where were you on Monday night, Miss Green?’
‘I was here. I wasn’t out in the Forest of Dean, shooting Ian Walker outside his caravan.’ She could hear her voice rising towards hysteria, feel how her breathing was lurching out of control.
‘And alone, I presume?’ Hook was studiously neutral, taking care not to imply the scepticism the question might suggest.
‘Yes. And I didn’t have any phone calls. Not that I can remember. And that’s not evidence of guilt.’ Sara stared at Hook, challenging him to deny it.
Instead, it was Lambert who said quietly, ‘You must expect us to ask about these things. Especially when you have just declared your feelings about a man who was brutally murdered three days ago.’
‘Perhaps. But I didn’t shoot the damned man. The very idea is ridiculous!’
Lambert studied her unsmilingly for a few seconds. ‘No doubt you recall a young woman named Anne Redmond. Or Anne Grayson, when you knew her.’
Sara felt as if she had received a blow to her solar plexus, doubling her up, depriving her of the breath to speak. She told herself now that she should have been prepared for this. She had thought with Anne safely in Canada they would not discover it, but they must keep records of some kind, or have some sort of police grapevine which relayed things about their suspects. Because there was no doubt now that she was a suspect, that these men had come here to study her reactions. She struggled eventually into speech, managing to say, ‘What happened between Anne and me has nothing to do with either of these killings.’
‘Perhaps not. But you will see that it is bound to interest us. We know that statistically a person who has offered serious violence once is likely to do so again, particularly under the stress of extreme emotion.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Nine years. Not so very long. And you stabbed a woman of very nearly the same age as Clare Mills twice with a lethal weapon. Shortly after threatening her with a shotgun: the implement with which Ian Walker was killed. Are you surprised that we think these facts might be significant? Especially when they are things which you have carefully concealed from us.’
‘I didn’t carefully conceal them. I didn’t volunteer them, that’s all. What happened with Anne isn’t something I’m proud of, surprisingly enough.’ The man had sounded like a prosecuting counsel, she thought bitterly, twisting his new information, making it sound as bad as he could for her.
And in that moment, she almost blurted out the facts of that furious break-up she had had with Clare, two nights before her death. They must surely know about it, must surely be waiting to throw it in as the clinching argument before they took her in to the station with them. Did you ask for a lawyer at the moment of arrest, or did you wait until they detailed the charges against you and put you in a cell? It was so exactly a repeat of the break-up she had had with Anne all those years ago that they must be laughing up their sleeves at her, these two, as they waited to add the clinching details of the fracturing of her relationship with Clare.
But they did not raise it. Miraculously, they did not seem to know of it. Lambert said evenly, ‘Did you kill Clare Mills, Miss Green?’
‘No.’ Her voice was so strained that for an instant she could not believe the word had come from her.
‘Or Ian Walker?’
‘No.’
A pause. She did not dare to look up into those all-seeing grey eyes. Then he said, ‘Have you any idea who might have been involved in either of these murders?’
‘No.’
‘Please do not leave the area without giving details of your movements to Oldford CID. And please ring me immediately if you have any further thoughts on these matters.’
And then, miraculously, they were gone, and she was alone in the quiet, spotless little house, with her familiar things around her. They did not know.
Twenty-Five
Even on a murder case, policemen cannot work all the time. Senior officers like Chief Superintendent John Lambert have to have a little amusement; long-serving detective sergeants like Bert Hook are surely entitled to a little ribald laughter amidst the rigours of the job.
To provide this necessary relief, Detective Inspector Christopher Rushton was being introduced to the game of golf.
It was just after eight o’clock on a perfect English summer evening, with the motionless shadows of the oak trees at Ross-on-Wye golf course lengthening and the golden light of early July deepening into an evening amber. At this time, there was no one on the first tee. Rushton would be spared an audience for his first steps in this game, which he was assured would teach him lessons about life and provide him with much healthy exercise and friendly competition.
That is to say, he would have no audience save Lambert and Hook. The attention of the Glasgow Empire would have been a merciful alternative.
There was evidence in the dress of the three men of the way in which the game reflects character. Lambert had long held the view that it was a waste of good clothing to use it for sport. Only when garments were too old for work or respectable social settings should they be used for golf. You could usually get a good couple of years out of clothes beyond these uses before they were on the point of disintegration and you finally consigned them to gardening.
John Lambert wore what had once been a navy leisure shirt, which long hours in the Herefordshire sun at Ross had bleached to more indeterminate and varied shades of blue, above trousers which shone a little at the seat and had long since lost all but the most unplanned of creases. His golf shoes were serviceable still, but could now most charitably be described as off-white.
Hook had been introduced to the game three years earlier by Lambert, and as in professional life he followed the tenets of his mentor. He had found a use for his discarded white cricket shirts on the golf course. The snag with this splendid economy was that he had put on weight in the years since he had relinquished fast bowling. This meant that his impressive torso threatened with every movement to burst dramatically through its cotton covering.
Bert’s grey trousers fitted well enough, having been worn for work until three months previously. But they now bore indisputable evidence of Bert’s apprentice status in the game. His erratic driving took him into some strange places, and green smears were accompanied by clear evidence of hawthorn and bramble on the rear of his legwear. He wore a cap which he had acquired with some second-hand clubs, which carried prominently the legend ‘Taylor Made’. This was unfortunately the name of the headgear’s American manufacturer rather than any guide to the fit of the cap, which was so large that it tended to remain stationary when Hook turned his head violently. This produced an effect which would have pleased only a slapstick comedian.
The strictly utilitarian nature of Lambert and Hook’s apparel was emphasized by the meticulous attention given to his appearance by their pupil for the evening. Everything Christopher Rushton wore was brand new, bought specially for the occasion and this new development in his life. His tan leather shoes gleamed in the evening sun, his dark green trousers were impeccably creased. His lemon shirt fitted his slim frame perfectly, its effect in no way diminished by the Pringle logo at his breast.
The DS’s mentors exchanged glances which anyone at Oldford CID would have interpreted as ominous.
Rushton looked from his companions’ workaday shabbiness to his own peacock brilliance, sensed his first error of the evening, and said a little nervously, ‘I thought I might as well look the part!’
‘You’re sure you’re not tempting fate?’ said Lambert innocently.
‘Tiger Woods always l
ooks smart,’ said Rushton defensively.
‘Indeed!’ said Hook encouragingly. ‘And of course we hope the analogy will be carried into your playing of the game.’
Rushton was nettled into the most unwise thing he would say that year. ‘Golf surely can’t be so difficult, when you’ve played other games. You approach a dead ball, and hit it in your own time. No one gives you an impossible serve to deal with, no one bowls you an unplayable ball.’ He looked edgily at the impassive Hook. ‘You can’t even get a bad decision from an umpire or a referee.’
Rushton had been quite a good footballer and tennis player. The ones who had played other games usually came most heavily to grief in their early golfing days. Hook said with grim relish, ‘Shall we get started, then?’
Chris hadn’t thought that silence could ever be quite so intimidating. He was conscious of the intense attention of the two big men on his right as he teed up the ball. When he took his stance to hit it, he was almost sure that there were ghoulish faces in the doorway of the clubhouse, but he thought he had better not glance behind him and be certain of that.
He concentrated fiercely on the small white ball, which suddenly seemed a long way below him. He found that the precepts he had absorbed from his weekend reading of instruction manuals had fled his brain like racing pigeons. He was about to hit it when Lambert’s voice came into his ears, as from an immense distance, ‘Eye on the ball now, club slowly back.’
Chris shuffled his feet, fixed his eyes on the ball in bulging concentration, swung his driver back with easy grace, then lunged downwards in a desperate quest for the ball. He looked to see it soaring down the wide green acres of fairway, prepared to shoulder his bag and move quickly to some more private place upon the course.
‘Often happens, that.’ Bert Hook’s quiet assurance came from six feet away to his right, restoring him to the real world.
The hateful real world. It took him a moment to realize that the white ball still teed so immaculately in front of him was his, that all his effort had failed even to establish the most minimal of contacts. ‘Counts a shot, that, in golf,’ said Lambert. ‘Other sports, you get away with an air shot, but in golf they all count.’ Rushton thought darkly that he seemed to relish giving that information, in a manner which was quite unbecoming to a chief superintendent.
Chris got his club on the ball at the fourth attempt, sending it a hundred yards towards merciful oblivion and producing a ragged cheer from the clubhouse behind him. He whirled in malevolent fury, but there was not a face to be seen in either the empty doorway or the blank stretches of glass which flanked it.
They played six holes, during which his tutors displayed to him what seemed an impossible level of competence and Chris’s apparel descended steadily towards that of his companions. There were more trees than he had ever thought possible on a golf course. He emerged from each sortie into them with a new range of flies around his head. Thorns tore at his expensive attire. Brambles wrapped themselves around his shining new clubs. His beautiful lemon shirt stuck on the branch of a birch as he thrashed wildly at the ball, and the horseflies so prominent at this hour on a summer’s evening bit three times into the flesh exposed in the small of his back. He could not understand why it was so impossibly hot at this late stage of the day.
‘Perfect temperature for golf, isn’t it?’ observed Lambert, as he despatched a short iron into the very centre of the green which had just eluded Rushton. Chris wondered if a disembowelling would represent justifiable homicide.
Christine Lambert was pleased to see her husband looking much more relaxed when he came into their bungalow at ten o’clock that evening. It was a good thing that he had enjoyed an hour or two at the golf course, getting a little relaxation. It seemed to have been a particularly good break, to judge from his air of mellow content. ‘Good game?’ she asked as the kettle boiled.
‘We only played a few holes. We were introducing Chris Rushton to the game.’ John smiled like a lion digesting a particularly tender antelope.
‘That was good of you and Bert.’
He glanced sharply at her, but there seemed to be no hint of irony. His wife was an innocent soul, who didn’t play the game herself. He said contentedly, with the air of a man who had successfully addressed a problem, ‘He’s been getting a bit above himself lately, has Chris.’
Roy Hudson decided that he would be at his most urbane.
He had considered when Hook rang to make the appointment whether he should be prickly about this, should take the view that he’d offered them all the help he could and it was time they stopped coming to see him at work. But that wouldn’t serve any useful purpose. The CID had been perfectly polite so far, if a little terse on their last meeting at his house, so there was no reason why he should not observe the courtesies towards them. Better that way, in fact. Play an impeccably straight bat until they got tired of it and went away.
He didn’t realize that Bert Hook was a cricketer, who had outwitted a lot of straight bats in his time.
Hudson greeted them affably and said, ‘I can easily rustle up some coffee for you, if you think this is going to take long.’
‘No need for coffee, thank you. Too early in the morning for that. And this shouldn’t take very long, if you give us honest answers to our questions.’ Lambert as usual was watching his man closely and showing not a trace of embarrassment about doing so.
‘Of course I shall. I’m as anxious as you are that you discover who killed poor Clare. And although Ian Walker wasn’t my favourite man, we can’t let people get away with murder, can we?’
‘Where were you between eight p.m. and midnight on the night of the twenty-first of June, Mr Hudson?’
‘That’s the night when Clare was killed. I was at home with my wife. I’m sure I’ve told you that before.’
‘And Mrs Hudson has confirmed the fact. Can anyone else do so?’
He smiled, refusing to be ruffled by this more aggressive line of questioning. ‘No, I don’t think so. But the innocent don’t need cast-iron proof of things, do they?’
‘And your wife was with you throughout the evening?’
‘Yes. But you surely wouldn’t be suggesting that Judith might have been out killing her own daughter.’ He smiled at the absurdity of the suggestion. Bert Hook was thinking that this was the first woman he had met who might just have been capable of killing her only daughter.
‘And last Monday night?’
He took his time. They had caught him out in a lie here, but at least he was prepared for it. ‘I think I told you when we last met that I was at home. That wasn’t in fact the case.’
‘So why tell us it was?’
‘Because I was foolish. Because I wished to give my wife an alibi for the time when Ian Walker was killed.’
‘You’re saying that she shot him on that night?’
‘No. Of course I’m not. But she’d already told you that she sometimes felt like killing him, because of what he’d done to Clare. I wanted to protect her.’ It sounded thin, even thinner than it had when he had prepared it. But it was the best he could do. And he would do anything to protect Judith: that at least was true.
Lambert studied him dispassionately for long seconds before he said, ‘So where were you on Monday evening?’
‘I was out on business. Judith was at home on her own.’
‘We shall have to press you about your exact whereabouts between eight and ten on that evening.’
‘And if I am unable to provide you with anything more exact than I have already given you?’
‘Then we shall be unable to eliminate you from the enquiry into the murder of Mr Walker.’
‘Which is not to say that I killed him, of course.’
‘Of course. But your failure to cooperate with us in our enquiries would have to be noted.’ Lambert tried not to show his impatience with a man who seemed to be playing games with them in the course of a homicide investigation.
Roy Hudson smiled. ‘I was in Chelt
enham, Mr Lambert. And in anticipation of your next question, I shall give you a name. Mark Jolly.’
‘This is a man who can confirm your whereabouts during the hours I mentioned?’
‘Indeed he can. He was with me throughout the evening, Superintendent. In Cheltenham. I should like you to note that, DS Hook. The best part of thirty miles away from the spot where Ian Walker died.’
Hook looked up from his notebook. ‘This Mr Jolly. Is he a friend? A drinking companion, perhaps?’
‘You could probably best describe him as a business associate. But he will confirm that I was with him throughout the evening.’
‘What sort of business would that be, Mr Hudson?’
He hadn’t expected that question. He realized now that he should have done, but he tried not to let that ruffle him. He smiled and said, ‘In a small company like this, there is a need for a versatile workforce. You need salespeople, of course, but you need also someone who will keep you in touch with your suppliers. And someone who has his finger on the pulse of demand, so that one can anticipate traits. It’s a strange world, the world of office equipment. Mr Jolly is well versed in it. He is useful to me in all kinds of ways. He does a lot of running about, a lot of unglamorous but very necessary dogsbodying. I prefer to think of him as a general business associate.’
It was flannel, and he fancied they knew that as well as he did. But for some reason they did not press him about Jolly, did not follow up on exactly what kind of business he had been conducting that night. That should have reassured him, but in fact it made him more uneasy. Lambert said, ‘We shall need to speak to Mr Jolly. But no doubt you would expect that.’
He gave them the details of Jolly’s address, making a note to himself to go over what the man should say yet again as soon as they left him this morning. He was thick but reliable, Mark. He wouldn’t let him down.
But Hook was getting something out of the briefcase he had set down beside his chair. He produced a polythene envelope, extracted the contents carefully, unwrapped blue tissue paper as if he were a conjurer producing something remarkable; Hudson had a sudden shaft of irritation at the painstaking slowness of this stolid man. ‘What have you there?’