by Roy Lewis
Andrew was silent. Crow regarded him contemplatively for a little while and then said, ‘There are other things too. You might be able to give me answers, they might be genuine omissions, maybe the officer taking your statement didn’t ask the right questions. First of all, there’s the chance you might know who Lindop had been dating since he finished with Ruby Sanders.’
Andrew shrugged. ‘Several women, I imagine. He was no monk.’
Crow permitted himself a small smile. ‘So I gather. But anyone in particular? A married woman, perhaps? There’s a rumour he liked married women — no commitment, I suppose.’
Andrew heard the distant murmur of the bus that was taking Sam Dixon back to his lonely house, and he shook his head. ‘I don’t know of one,’ he lied. But he had the odd feeling that Crow sensed the lie, recognized it, felt it lying between them, and his heart lurched in his chest.
‘All right,’ Crow said quietly. ‘What about Baker?’
The question was unexpected enough almost to take Andrew’s breath away. His startled glance flickered towards Crow, darted away again. ‘Baker?’ he repeated foolishly.
‘You’ve put it about that you were made redundant in your last job. That isn’t what your ex-employer says. He gave us two pieces of information: one, you were moody and depressed, not working too well. Second, you attacked Baker, the driver with you in the loading bay, with a piece of chain.’
He waited, and after a long silence Andrew explained. A long, studied provocation that ended with one jibe too many, a sudden surge of uncontrollable violence when the provocation became physical, a piece of chain lying on the ground used part defensively, part offensively.
‘I hit him once,’ Andrew said. ‘I was in a blind rage, but I don’t think I really meant to hurt him. Mr Clarke, the manager, I think he knew really what had happened. But he wanted to give me the sack because I hadn’t been working too well — living on the site had been . . . getting on my nerves. Sara and I hadn’t been getting on too well . . . Anyway, Clarke gave me the push. I couldn’t tell Sara why it had happened. It would have made things . . . even more difficult between us. So I told her I’d been made redundant. I said I’d not been there long enough for much of a redundancy payment so I had to take the first job I could — the quarry. After that, the story was generally accepted. But you’ve got to understand, Mr Crow, that piece of violence towards Baker was an isolated thing. I’ve never on any other occasion—’
‘Never, Andrew?’
Andrew hesitated. He felt sick and weak; if he’d been standing his legs would have been shaking. It was the same sort of feeling he had experienced once before, one night months ago on the site, when he’d thought his whole world would turn upside down, and the shakiness broke through now in his voice as he said, ‘What do you mean?’
Crow studied Andrew’s face carefully, as though seeking the truth from his eyes, from the pallor of his skin, the looseness of his mouth. His deep-set eyes were sad.
‘The police don’t discover the truth from guesswork these days, not often anyway. It’s all slog, painstaking questions, moving from one place to another, one person to another, comparing statements, asking more questions . . . But often enough they are aided by science. The forensic laboratories do wonderful work, Andrew, you wouldn’t believe. Let’s take the situation where a man has been killed as a result of a struggle. The lab technicians take scrapings of skin, and of nails. They look under the dead man’s fingernails, they take fluff from his body. His clothing is subjected to minute analysis. Any stray piece of fibre on the dead man’s clothing could match up to fibre found on the man who killed him. Or it could be mud, or hair, or saliva, or blood — and in sexual cases, semen. But you get what I’m driving at, Andrew?’
‘No.’
‘You mean you don’t want to. All right, I’ll put it more plainly. You have no record of violence, apart from one occasion when you were provoked. Now let’s look at Chuck Lindop. It could be argued he provoked you too, worried you, caused you anxiety. You would have had reason to go to see him, about the receipt, the day Forsyth called. But Lindop didn’t return to the site until nine-thirty or thereabouts. You could have gone to see him at any time after his return. The question is — did you? There’s nothing about it in your statement. But what will the forensic scientists tell us? We already know there was a struggle in the van. But when the final report comes through will there be evidence that shows us you went there? Fibre, hair, skin? I don’t know. Do you? In other words, if you deny you went there, will the laboratory prove you lied?’
Andrew stared at Crow, rigid. His mind was in a turmoil as he thought back unwillingly to the night at the van. He opened his mouth but no sound came. Quietly, Crow said. ‘We know there were at least two people there in the van — Lindop and another. Two mugs were used, coffee and probably whisky. It’s likely there’ll be acceptable prints on the cups. Now think, Andrew, think!’
It could be a bluff but he couldn’t take the chance. Slowly, Andrew nodded. Crow sat up.
‘You went to see Lindop?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happened?’
‘I asked him about the receipt. He got . . . offensive. I realized I’d been . . . conned. I got angry, took a swing at him, but I missed. He was stronger than me. There wasn’t really a fight at all. He turned me around, bundled me out of the van, threw me on to the grass. And then he put on his donkey jacket to go up to look at the generator.’
‘There was no fight, more than that?’
‘No.’
Crow’s eyes seemed to bore into him. In Andrew’s mind there was the image of the dead man standing in the doorway scornfully, and his fingers twitched as he felt again the cold iron in his hand as Chuck Lindop turned away, his back to him . . .
‘What did you do then, Andrew?’
Andrew Keene dragged himself back to the present, to the sunlight, to the bird singing high above them, to the lies. ‘I went back to the van,’ he said.
‘The last you saw of Lindop he was walking towards the top of the site?’
‘Yes.’
‘The time?’
‘It was . . . I think it was about ten-fifteen, perhaps a little later, a few minutes maybe. Say five minutes after the generator was blown up. Not more than that.’
‘And you stayed with your wife then, until the ambulance came?’ Crow asked.
‘She was crying, moaning. She was getting these pains. I stayed with her till Ruby came and then I went to the Hartley place to phone the ambulance.’
Crow was silent for a while. At last he rose, brushing loose grass from his jacket and trousers. Andrew rose also; he was about the same height as Crow, but slim where Crow was skinny. Maybe when he was older he would be like the policeman. In some ways.
‘How is your wife?’ Crow asked.
‘She’s recovering well. The . . . the birth was a bit of a shock to her. Bad labour — an operation. But two weeks and she’ll be . . . they’ll both be all right.’
‘She . . . she’ll be able to corroborate what you’ve told me?’
‘She’ll know I went up to the van. The fight . . . I haven’t talked to her about it.’
‘Mmm.’ Crow hesitated. ‘You know, Andrew, I’ll have to follow this up with the laboratory people. But I’m glad you told me. It’s better you telling than me finding out. And I would have found out.’ He paused again, watching Andrew carefully. Andrew swallowed, injected innocence into his eyes, sincerity into his tone.
‘I didn’t kill Chuck Lindop,’ he said.
Crow nodded, slowly, then turned away.
The burly detective-inspector had got out of the squad car and was standing with one hand raised. As Crow drew near him Andrew heard the man’s words.
‘There’s a radio call — I think you ought to take it. Could be we’re getting closer already.’
* * *
The aspect of the Cotswolds that never failed to fascinate John Crow was the strange contrasts the area offe
red. He could stand in a broad street in which the rattle of the mail-coaches still seemed to echo on a quiet Sunday afternoon and see in the clear sky above, the vapour trail of a supersonic aircraft. It was the paradox of the Cotswolds — the Middle Ages and the Jet Age lay in close proximity. Ancient churches and mellowed stone, the Red Arrows trailing plumes of coloured smoke above Little Rissington, a nine-hundred-year-old hotel at Kingham offering a ‘small helicopter pad’ for the use of its guests, memorial brasses to the old wool merchants and jaded businessmen tasting the calm of the morning with the local hunt — it was all part of the life of the Cotswolds and yet there were times when the contrasts could jar.
This was one of them.
The town boasted a stream which had fed the mill to dye and shrink and thicken the cloth; the local pub was called the Fleece; small handicrafts shops sprouted in the main street and the nave of the church had recently been redone in Bradstone slates. But the hotel on the edge of the town was long, low, modern and ugly. It was fringed with drooping trees that had never accepted their transplanting with a glad heart, and fronted by a pink gravel car park that clashed noisily with the yellow ‘reconstructed’ stone of the external walls of the hotel. To see it was to ask how it had ever got past a planning committee; to ask the question was to guess that there were undeclared interests on the committee. It was sad and annoying, but not new. But it put Crow in an evil mood. He had been too close to the Cotswolds as a boy to be able to suffer desecration gladly. He strode across the car park with Inspector Stafford just behind him; his head was low, jutting forward, and his stride lengthened with the depth of his annoyance. It was still with him as he put out a hand one second before the electronically operated glass doors whispered away from him and he stamped into the foyer in a thoroughly bad humour.
The manager had long, carefully-dressed fair hair and a blue suit, white patterned shirt and gold tie. He was young, and nervous. He came forward displaying a length of carefully laundered cuff and gold cufflinks.
‘My name is Daly.’
‘Crow.’ Disinclined in his present humour to indulge in formalities, Crow added, ‘Now what’s this all about?’
‘I explained over the phone.’
‘Explain again. And at more length.’ As Daly was about to speak Crow held up his hand. ‘But not here. Your office, perhaps?’
Daly led the way quickly, threading past the gleaming counter and the potted plants, into the office beyond. He ushered out a girl working on some accounts, gestured Crow and Stafford to chairs and perched himself on the edge of his desk. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘when this woman turned up and asked—’
‘No,’ Crow interrupted. ‘From the beginning, please.’
It was quickly enough told. Daly had been appointed manager of the hotel a year previously. Shortly after he had arrived he had taken to spending the odd evening in the hotel lounge ‘to get to know the clientele’ and one evening had struck up an acquaintance with one of the customers who had a request which was unusual in one respect. While residents at the hotel often enough made use of the hotel safe deposit system for their valuables they always removed these valuables when they left. This request was different in that the applicant was not a resident, though he wanted to use the deposit for a while.
‘I saw nothing wrong in the matter,’ Daly explained. ‘After all, if we needed the deposit box there was no problem — we could merely tell him we couldn’t keep his papers for him any longer. And if he was prepared to trust us while he was not a resident, well, in a way that was rather flattering, don’t you think? He explained, of course, that he didn’t want to use a bank because they weren’t the safest of places — he said accountants sometimes insisted on knowing what you had in the bank before they’d make up your accounts. Well, I didn’t know about that — indeed, I didn’t want to know about it. As far as I was concerned, since he was prepared to pay for the convenience, that was all right by me.’
The arrangement had been made. The hotel kept some twenty small deposit boxes in which guests’ valuables could be placed. A key was handed to the guest, a duplicate key held by the hotel staff. Both keys had to be used to open the boxes.
‘So he paid for his key, I brought out the box, he put his stuff in it — bonds, he told me, and insurance policies — he locked it, I locked it, and into the big safe it went with the others. And that was that, really. He came in from time to time, had a drink, never went near his box, but that wasn’t my affair. He paid up three months in advance so that was okay. And then it happened.’
He had been off duty, he explained. He had spent the day in London with some friends and hadn’t seen the newspaper at all until he was actually travelling back by train. Idly, he had picked up the evening paper someone had left on the seat; thumbing through it he came across the report of a murder.
‘Well, I mean, the name leapt out at me! After all, it isn’t every day you see that someone you know has been given the chop, if I can put it like that! Of course, I was intrigued. As soon as I got back to the hotel I thought of that deposit box and I went along there, but I found that it was no longer in use. I questioned the staff, and it finally came out that the desk clerk — Frances, she’s called, a nice kid — recalled a man coming in the previous day with the key. He’d asked for the box, she’d provided our key when he showed his and gave his name. He emptied the box, left his key, went off. That was that.’
Of course, he hadn’t really known what to do. If this ‘smart, dark man’ that Frances had described had come along to empty the box that was one thing; the fact he’d come to the hotel the morning after the depositor was dead was another.
‘But what was I to do? I mean, what would you have done in my place? Gone to the police? Not at all. Look at it from my point of view. In the first place, this small dark man could have been given the key quite legitimately before the owner was killed. Secondly, he could have been the real owner — maybe he’d been acting previously through an agent. It does happen. But if I’m to be perfectly honest, and I’m trying to be, believe me, there was another important consideration in my mind. Trouble. This is my first managerial post, after all. It’s true there was nothing wrong in renting out the deposit box to a non-resident but it was certainly . . . irregular. It’s a point that would clearly have been raised by my employers. And finally, what harm had been done? How would it help matters if I came running to the local police with stories of Mr Lindop having had a deposit box here but it was now empty? I mean, there’s an awful lot of small dark men running around in England. And, well, yes, I agree, I was being defensive. After all, if the name of a murdered person gets linked in any way with the hotel, it does something to the clientele, doesn’t it?’
One could never tell what it would do, there was the chance it could increase the popularity of the hotel, but popularity by itself was not necessarily what an hotel would want. There was always the question of the class of person who would be attracted to an hotel, and there was the danger that if people came to think that the sort of person who got himself murdered frequented the hotel, they might be disinclined to patronize it further. One visit, out of curiosity perhaps, and then the goodbye kiss.
‘So I said nothing. Until today. And it’s not a long silence, is it? I mean, nothing much can have happened in the couple of days I’ve said nothing. No fleeing from the country or anything like that. But the thing is, my hand was forced. I mean, I immediately saw where my duty lay the moment this woman came into the hotel and began making enquiries about the deposit box. It’s just fortunate that there was that squad car down at the junction — I could see it from my office window — so I could send one of the waiters to fetch them quickly, while I detained the woman in the foyer. And after that, well, here you are. The woman I mentioned? Oh, she’s in room nineteen. I’ve had tea served to her, and sandwiches, while she waited there for you. I mean, we have to maintain the reputation of the hotel for service. You just never know, do you . . .?’
* * *
> The woman was about thirty-five years old. Her hair was the colour of tin and she was teasing strands of it with fingers that trembled on the edge of nervousness without quite going over — yet. She was well-built and her dress was just that little bit tight enough to suggest she might be open to offers. Her face had the puffiness of discontent, the flesh swollen by the blows that fate and drink had dealt her; her eyes were intelligent, but vulnerable, suggesting she deserved better of this life. She looked at Crow as he entered the room and he caught a brief flash of all the defeats and the disillusionments and despairs that had come her way, badly, cruelly, undeservedly. But the flash was gone in a moment, her eyes were masked, and the other shields came up, the protection that enabled her to make her woman’s way in a man’s world.
The manager, Daly, twitched at his gold tie, exposed an inch of shirtcuff. She gestured to the tea beside her elbow, untouched. ‘Thanks. Right colour. Wrong taste. But thanks, anyway.’ Daly seemed pleased. He nodded, gave a slightly nervous giggle and introduced John Crow.
The woman sat heavily in her chair, indifference scarring her glance. But there was a defensiveness about her too; she was wary and ready to expose claws that she was not averse to unsheathing.
‘I’m sorry you’ve been kept waiting like this,’ Crow said smoothly. ‘And if the officers who . . . detained you here like this were . . . insistent, once again, I’m apologetic. It simply seemed easier . . . it was easier for me and my colleagues to get here rather than have you escorted to Stowford where we have our headquarters.’
He introduced George Stafford, then waited. The woman made no reply. ‘Would you mind telling us who you are?’ Crow asked at last.
She hesitated, thought it over for a moment, then almost swallowed the words. ‘Honey Lindop,’ she said, and glanced involuntarily at the ring on her finger.
Casually, Crow half turned and reached for an upright chair. He caught Stafford’s glance; the inspector was pursing his lips in a silent whistle of surprise but Crow’s features were expressionless. He sat down and Stafford stepped back to lean against the wall behind him.