Rest Assured

by J M Gregson

  That was stupid thinking, George told himself firmly. The transfer which would take place here was but a tiny segment of the evil abroad in the world; the merest fraction of the vice that must be occurring even in a rural and thinly peopled county such as Herefordshire. He was helping to supply a demand, that was all. A demand which would be met, whether he was part of the supply chain or not.

  Thus the old arguments and the old evasions swam through his mind. They remained as unconvincing as they always were.

  The lay-by came into view precisely when he expected it, exactly one mile south of the village of Hope Under Dinmore. They were nothing if not accurate, these people. He indicated in good time, then swung carefully into the parking provided. His was the only car here; he felt very conspicuous in the bright red Focus. He should have brought a newspaper. The map-book was all he had to pore over as he waited. There was no reason why a man in a bright red Focus should not be consulting maps to find his way, but he felt very noticeable and very spurious.

  He didn’t actually wait in the lay-by for very long, but the minutes felt to the naturally active George Martindale to stretch towards hours. Seven minutes after he had cruised into the lay-by, a Mondeo Graphite drew up not more than four feet behind him. The same make of vehicle, and a single black man of about his own age at the wheel. That might have made Martindale feel easier, but it didn’t.

  The man behind him was very visible, even magnified, in George’s rear-view mirror. He was broad-shouldered. He had short, grizzled hair and he wore sunglasses with wide black lenses. They were appropriate wear for a sunny July day, but they made the man look even more threatening. That impression was not mitigated by the man’s movements, or lack of them. He sat there motionless for a full two minutes, gazing at the car in front of him and the driver at its wheel.

  When he eventually detached himself unhurriedly from his vehicle, it was almost a relief to the man awaiting his attention. George had fully opened all the windows in his vehicle whilst he waited, but the Focus still felt altogether too warm. The man was bigger and wider when he stood upright than he had appeared to be when sitting in the Mondeo.

  He had to bend quite low to put his elbows on the sill of the driver’s door of the Focus. Although he was now very close, George could still not see his eyes behind the black spheres of his sunglasses. It made people more sinister when you could not see their eyes, because it made it much more difficult to follow what they were thinking. The eyes were windows to the soul. Mary had told George that. He didn’t wish to investigate this man’s soul.

  ‘Payment up front.’ The Mondeo driver was a man of few words.

  ‘This isn’t a normal drop. This is an extra I’ve been forced to accept.’

  The merest quiver of those huge shoulders. Nothing as violent as a shrug. ‘I’ve got my orders, same as you’ve got yours. Payment up front.’

  Barbadian, George reckoned, by his accent. No help there. Those from the small island of Barbados had little sympathy for men from their bullying bigger West Indian neighbour, Jamaica. He glanced behind him, saw that the lay-by still held only their two cars, and slid a polythene package containing a bundle of notes swiftly from beside his seat into the big receiving hands. ‘There’s a grand there in tens and twenties.’

  The sunglasses dipped briefly towards it. ‘I won’t count it. You wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to cheat these people. Neither of us would.’

  For a moment, they were two men united by a mutual resentment of the anonymous and powerful forces which controlled them. Then the man outside the car stooped and produced the box which had hitherto been out of Martindale’s vision. ‘It’s good stuff. Mostly coke and horse. Make sure you make the most of it.’

  George took the box, nodded sourly and pressed the switches to raise his windows. He needed to isolate himself, to get away from here as quickly as he could. The transaction was over and the Barbadian was as anxious to be away from here as he was. He was back in the Mondeo with the engine running by the time George had stowed the box in the rear footwell of the Focus. Seconds later, he was away, swinging across the road into the stream of the northbound traffic, not troubling to wave to the man whose thousand pounds he had just collected.

  Martindale shut his eyes for a moment and took a long breath. Then he eased back into the traffic and took the first opportunity to turn round and head back towards Twin Lakes. He passed the Mondeo, now moving south, a hundred yards after he had turned. The drivers made no acknowledgement of each other.

  After he had run through Leominster and turned on to the lane which led to Twin Lakes, he stopped the car and transferred the box from the back of the car to the boot, where he hid it as well as he could under his golf waterproofs. You couldn’t be too careful, with the place alive with policemen, both uniformed and plain-clothed. He’d much rather not be taking drugs on to the site at all, but he’d been given no choice in the matter.

  Mary Martindale wondered why her normally cheerful spouse looked so worried as he parked the car outside their unit. He mustered his usual smile for her as he climbed the three steps to the elevated entrance, but she wasn’t deceived by that.

  George summoned his resources of cheerfulness. ‘We can have that picnic now, if you want it.’

  ‘It’s too late to go out. We’ll eat it here. But we’ve got visitors first. The police want to speak to us about last night.’ She glanced at the clock beside her cooker. ‘They’ll be here in ten minutes.’

  George had just enough time to wash his face and change his shirt. These were the first steps towards presenting an innocent front to the forces of the law. Its representatives arrived as they had promised at four thirty, punctual to the minute.

  He sized them up as well as he was able. There was the tall man he’d seen questioning others earlier in the day. Chief Detective Superintendent John Lambert, he said his name was. George knew a little about him already, but he didn’t acknowledge that. The solid man beside him looked less threatening. But you couldn’t trust the police, any of them. Especially if you were black: everyone knew that.

  It was the sergeant who gave him all the usual stuff about this just being part of the police routine. Maybe it was, but that wouldn’t make him any less careful with these bastards. Then Lambert said to him, ‘It was you who discovered Mr Keane’s body. We’ve read your statement about that.’

  ‘Then you’ll know that I wasn’t alone.’

  ‘We do indeed. We’ve already spoken to Mr Norrington.’

  ‘We were the only people around at six o’clock this morning. We were trying to help Debbie Keane. She couldn’t find her husband and she was in a state.’

  ‘Which proved to be well justified by subsequent events. Did you believe her when she said she hadn’t missed him earlier?’

  ‘Earlier?’

  ‘He hadn’t been in her home since last night, but she says that she only realized he was missing this morning. You accepted that?’

  ‘I’m not sure I even heard it. I arrived to find her talking to Michael Norrington and gathered that Wally had gone missing. I registered that and we said we’d look for him. I’m not sure I was aware at the time of anything except the fact that he was missing and needed to be found.’

  ‘That is understandable. It is to your credit that your first impulse was to find out where he was and what had happened to him.’

  ‘If Debbie says that she hadn’t found he was missing until the morning, that will be correct. She enjoys a bit of gossip – well, she thrives on it, to be honest. But there’s nothing vicious about Debbie. I’m sure you can trust whatever she’s told you.’

  ‘Thank you. You’ll appreciate that I know no one here, although DS Hook has met a few of the residents before and knows a little about what goes on here.’ He contrived to make that fact sound quite sinister, as if Hook knew all sorts of facts and George and Mary had better be very careful to give him the truth. ‘So you and Mr Norrington, being the only people around at six o’clock t
his morning, set out to look for Walter Keane.’

  ‘Yes. Debbie wanted us to do that.’

  ‘Whose idea was it to take the route you did, Mr Martindale?’

  George hadn’t expected that question. He thought feverishly about the implications of it. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Probably not. But the information isn’t in your statement.’

  ‘I think it was probably my idea. Michael isn’t a very practical man. I think he was glad I turned up when I did. I’m sure he was anxious to help Mrs Keane, but he didn’t seem to know what to do next. I suppose I suggested that we should look in the woods, simply because that was the most obvious hiding place for someone who was missing. We were still presuming at that stage that Wally might have chosen to hide himself away for some reason. Or of course that he might have met with some sort of accident.’

  He was choosing his words carefully; this wasn’t the time to make any kind of mistake. Lambert nodded slowly. ‘How did Mr Norrington react when you discovered the body hanging in the woods?’

  ‘How do you think he reacted? He was horrified, just as I was.’

  ‘You didn’t detect any sign that he had in some way expected this?’

  ‘No. How the hell could he have done?’

  ‘Someone on the site, and maybe more than one person, knew what you would find in those woods. It’s our job to find out who they might be. It’s a legitimate question.’ John Lambert allowed himself a mirthless smile, as though an idea had just occurred to him. ‘We might ask him the same thing about you. We have a large field of suspects and very few clues at the moment.’

  ‘Well, Mike Norrington and I were both horrified by what we found up there. That’s unless he’s a damned good actor. We assumed at the time that it was suicide. That was quite bad enough. Murder makes it worse. It probably means that someone we know has killed Wally.’

  ‘Quite. Who do you think that might be?’

  George ignored the gasp from his wife beside him, willing himself not to look at her. ‘I’ve no idea who it might be.’

  ‘And what about you, Mrs Martindale? I expect you’ve both been thinking about it all day. It’s only human to do so, don’t you think?’

  Mary glanced at George, who was staring hard at his shoes. ‘You can’t discuss anything like that when the boys are here. And the word didn’t get round that it wasn’t suicide until about lunch-time. We’ve had rather a hectic day, so George and I haven’t had much time to talk about it, really.’ She didn’t want to draw their attention to the fact that George had been off the site for over two hours this afternoon. She said almost brightly, as if the thought had just occurred to her, ‘I think you were upset and shocked by finding the body this morning, weren’t you, George?’

  She should have said that at the outset, thought Lambert, not as an afterthought. Mary Martindale might be one of life’s innocents, as her broad and innocent black face suggested. Or she might be something much more malign; you had to keep all possibilities in mind, until you could establish more facts about a death. He said calmly to her husband, ‘Why did you go out this afternoon, Mr Martindale?’

  ‘It had nothing to do with Wally’s death. Are my movements subject to police surveillance now?’

  ‘We have a record of everyone who has left the site today and how long they were away for. You are helping the police with their enquiries. You can refuse to answer, if you wish to do that.’

  He wished to do exactly that. But it would attract their attention, and that was the last thing he wanted to do. He said carefully, ‘I have a cousin in Hereford. I was delivering some paint to him. He’s going to paint the outside of his house, so he needed gallons of the stuff. Because I buy quite a lot for the council, the supplier gives me a big discount. It’s all quite above board.’

  ‘Thank you. Have you any thoughts on who might have killed Walter Keane?’

  ‘No. We know a few people here quite well, but others hardly at all. It wouldn’t be fair to speculate, even if I had any thoughts on this – which I haven’t.’

  ‘But you’ll go on thinking about Mr Keane’s death. That’s the normal human reaction. And however little you know about the people here, it’s more than we know at the moment. So if you have any thoughts, please ring the number on this card immediately. Your thoughts will be treated confidentially.’

  ‘I’ll think about who killed Wally. I’m sorry if I was touchy just now. When you’re black and you’ve grown up in a city, you get used to being stopped and searched whenever there’s trouble. It makes you anti-police. But black men have good reason to be so.’

  ‘I’m sure they do. You’ll be treated exactly the same here as everyone else who had contact with Walter Keane.’

  ‘Which is everyone around here. Everyone knew Wally; everyone knows Debbie. You can’t have a property here without doing that.’

  ‘So I gather. Solving this one isn’t going to be easy. Where were you last night, Mr Martindale?’

  ‘With my wife and children, as you’d expect. All evening. And all through the night. Until Tommy and Nicky woke me, early this morning, and I went out and discovered a body.’

  ‘And you can confirm this, Mrs Martindale?’

  ‘Yes. You may not believe me, but it’s true. The boys will confirm it, for the time they were awake.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary.’ Lambert stood up. ‘Thank you for your co-operation. We may need to see you again, when we know more about this killing.’

  Mary stood at the window of her kitchen and watched the CID men departing. She continued to look up the line between the chalets, even after they had disappeared. She was looking there and not at George as she said dully, ‘You don’t have a cousin in Hereford, George, and you don’t have a concession on paint.’

  ELEVEN

  John Lambert was up early on Sunday. He had almost finished his bowl of cereal when Christine came into the kitchen in her dressing gown.

  She looked at him and felt a sharp, protective pain at the signs of ageing in his bent shoulders. But they weren’t really old, were they? Late fifties was nothing nowadays, everyone told her. Well, everyone who was older than sixty told her. She said, ‘You need to take it easy, John. You had a long day yesterday.’

  He was on the verge of turning tetchy and impatient, as he would have done thirty years ago. It was a good thing that he had to chew and swallow before he spoke; that instant was enough to modify his reaction. He said quietly, ‘I had a good night’s sleep.’

  ‘You need to delegate. It’s time you let younger men do more of the work.’ She felt she was repeating a script she now knew by heart.

  ‘You can’t delegate in a murder enquiry. You either take charge and accept responsibility or you don’t. I’ve already delegated all I can. Chris Rushton does all the computer work. He logs everything we find and cross-references it with other crimes. He’s welcome to that and he’s good at it. I’m fortunate to have him.’

  She knew that she wasn’t going to win the argument, but it was nonetheless an exchange she needed to conduct. She came and stood behind him, kneading his shoulders, feeling the hard muscles of his neck relax as he dutifully slackened his body to take account of her efforts. ‘It’s Sunday. You should be out in your garden, enjoying the results you’ve worked hard to achieve there.’

  ‘I will be. This is the exception, not the rule. I’m usually here at weekends, nowadays.’

  ‘You should be here all the time. You’ve earned the right.’

  She hadn’t mentioned the taboo word ‘retirement’, but he did that, or came near enough to it. ‘You’re a long time on a pension, Christine, with any luck. You’re enjoying your part-time teaching. Let me go out with a bang rather than a whimper.’

  If they let me, he thought. But hadn’t the new Chief Constable told him only a couple of months ago that he wanted him to stay on for the foreseeable future? For as long as he got results, that meant. He needed results, almost as urgently as he’d needed them a qua
rter of a century ago, when he was making his way in CID. But he couldn’t tell Christine that.

  She threw in the last trump card from this hand which could not win. ‘Caroline may be round with the kids this afternoon.’

  ‘I’ll try to get home. I can’t promise anything, so don’t wait for me if you’re eating. It will depend on how the day develops.’

  So even the grandchildren couldn’t get him home. Christine said dully, ‘Don’t worry about the time. I’ll have something for you, whenever you get in.’

  She watched him go out and lever his long frame into the old Vauxhall he stubbornly refused to change. She felt more anxious for him and more tender about him than she had ever felt when he was younger. It must be another of the unwelcome effects of age.

  Sunday was not a day of rest for Mark Patmore. He had always felt more at risk on Sundays. All of his days dragged, not just Sundays. Yet all of his days were highly dangerous. When you were working undercover, you had to be alert the whole time, even when to others you seemed out of your mind on coke.

  And the police who paid your wages every few months were no use to you. To be fair, they couldn’t offer you direct help or support, without risking blowing your cover. But when they wanted something, they soon muscled in to tell you just what. A daft inspector who was desperate to up his conviction rate had almost got him killed three months ago. Too many chiefs, not enough Indians: the old complaint. Some of the sods who held your life in their hands didn’t have a bloody clue what was going on.

  Patmore had had his head shaved close, two days ago. The idea had been to make him fit in, to make him unnoticeable among the fighters and drinkers and muggers who inhabited the world around him. Now he wondered if the shaving had been done too well, whether his bare skull was too neat and perfect among the scruffier and filthier ones around him. Perhaps he should have damaged the skin a little, or made the cutting less even, more amateur. He was unusual among the people in the squat in having no major scar to parade as a badge of his belonging to this harsh and dangerous underworld.