by J M Gregson
He wondered how balanced his mind was now. It was difficult to tell, when there was no one to warn you that you were running off the rails. He hadn’t been the same since he’d broken up with Amy. He knew that, but he couldn’t be certain how much the rift had affected him. You couldn’t expect to keep a partner, when you were undercover. She’d told him that, two months before they split up. You couldn’t keep up a relationship when you saw each other once every five or six weeks, without prior notice. You shagged each other silly in the first hours after the long deprivation and hoped that sex would bring you together. It did, for a while, but you needed the small, stupid, insignificant things as well.
You weren’t good at the small things, when you worked undercover. And you became less good at them with each passing week. After two years of it, you found you were no good at all. You didn’t even know after two years quite what small things were, still less why they mattered. Amy had been right to go. He felt now that she was a stranger whom he’d hardly known at all. Perhaps he was unbalanced, as she’d said he was. Well, of course he was: you had to be unbalanced, even to consider working undercover.
Patmore was enjoying the bright Sunday-afternoon sunlight. Correction: he was enduring it, while other people were enjoying it. He heard them telling each other all around him that they were. Stupid sods. Hadn’t they anything better to think about than the damned weather? And in any case, it wasn’t a beautiful day, as they all kept saying it was. Sunlight wasn’t good, when you worked undercover. You wanted thick clouds when you were outside and shut curtains when you were inside. Instinct told you to seek whatever shield you could. That’s what working undercover was all about, though the daft sods who’d sent him here had no idea about that.
Mark opened up the Sunday paper he had picked out of the litter bin. He sat very still on the park bench as he pretended to read it. England were doing well in the Ashes, apparently. He looked at pictures of bright young men in white clothes and stupid postures. He told himself that they were older than him, even though he felt that they surely couldn’t be. There was a lot of stuff about who was going to win the Open Championship, with pictures of Tiger Woods looking very strong and very aggressive. The Tiger looked much like some of the men you worked with in this real and more deadly game. Stupid game, golf. Quite popular in the police, nowadays. Why the hell couldn’t they get real?
It was late in the afternoon and the park was less peopled now. Most of the Gloucester citizens had taken their small children home for tea, Mark supposed. He could remember tea with his Gran when he was a small boy; he could picture the table full of good things, when his wide eyes had been almost on a level with them. But the figures in that picture seemed to be from some old and outdated book, not from this world.
He listened to distant teenager shouts from somewhere behind him, but did not move his head. They were playing some sort of game, but he wasn’t going to turn and see what it was. That would be a sign of weakness; Mark wasn’t sure why, but it would. He rose, flung the newspaper violently back into the bin whence it had come, thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and walked towards the exit from the park.
He found that he was happier when he was back on streets which were a century old. The wide-open spaces of the park seemed to expose him, like a fly crawling across a window pane, and he was happier with bricks rising high on each side of him. This assignment would be over soon now, he decided. He didn’t know why he thought that, but as soon as the idea had entered his head it became as concrete as any fact. Either he would deliver what was required of him to his police paymasters, or he would be sucked into the dark recesses of the world where he was operating and disappear for ever.
He didn’t know why he was so certain that the climax was at hand. Nor was he frightened by the idea. He had lived with fear for so many months that his thought processes and his very mind were blunted by it, as if he were operating under some strange sort of anaesthetic. The bold steps he had used to leave the park did not last for long. His trainers were very worn and the wear was not even. The heels were gone almost completely on one side, so that he dropped quite naturally into the swift shuffle which was now his normal gait.
He could have afforded good trainers; the best, he supposed, if he’d wanted them. But they would have been a dead give-away, an announcement to anyone who cared to notice him that he was not what he pretended to be. You did not have new clothes or new shoes in the squat. Unless you stole them, of course. Some of them did that, but it wasn’t an option for Mark Patmore. You weren’t allowed to break the law when you were undercover. Those daft buggers who made the rules had no bloody idea.
He should have felt easier when he was back in the squat and lying in the darkness, but he felt only depressed. It would be over soon, whatever happened, he told himself. That wasn’t much of a consolation. He looked at his watch. It was one of the things he had kept as he gradually discarded all the rest. You needed to know the time, when you worked for these people. You had to be there exactly when they said you should be, if you wanted to go on working for them and go on finding out more and more about them.
Two hours yet. He lay on his back and blanked his mind. He could do that now; he could let the time swim past him whilst he lay in limbo. He wouldn’t sleep, but he would lie here for ninety minutes in some sort of self-induced trance.
He wasn’t even sure who the woman was, at first. Someone from the squat, obviously, but that could be any one of five. He had his mattress tight under the gable to guard against any attack, so that the light here was very dim. She lay for a while against him, her slim body cool despite the summer heat. Sam, she called herself, he thought, if it was the one he thought it was. She must have come up from the floor beneath this one; he hadn’t heard her on the stairs. If it was Sam, she used horse to get her kicks. She was perhaps not yet an addict, but on the way there. She hadn’t shown any interest in him before. He shifted on to his side and tried to assess whether she was drugged or not.
Presently, he felt her stretch her body against his, then slide an arm tentatively around him. Two minutes later, she moved her hand to the back of his neck and stroked the short, shaved hair there for a moment. He reached his hands experimentally to the small of her back, caressed it softly, ran his hand down to the cleft of her bottom and the softness beneath it, pressed her against him. Both of them could feel his arousal, despite the fact that he had moved only minimally since she had joined him. Seconds later, she had her legs round his thigh and his erection in her other hand.
She was reaching for the fastening of his jeans when he put a hand like steel on her thin wrist and whispered an urgent ‘No!’
‘It’s all right! I’m clean. And I won’t get pregnant.’
‘It’s no good! I have to go.’
It was brutal. Unnecessarily so. He couldn’t even be certain enough of her name to use it as he pulled her away from him. He hadn’t thought of Amy for days now: a couple of weeks probably. But an image of her face had reared itself before him when he had least required or expected it, vivid and accusing.
He needed all his strength to detach the woman as she clung to his body like a snake. ‘You bastard!’ she said as he clawed her away. ‘You rotten bloody bastard!’
He was all of that and he knew it. But his sensitivity had been blunted long ago. He knew only that he couldn’t do this, that he must detach himself now before it got worse. He grabbed a thin shoulder in each of his large hands and threw her off him. ‘Piss off, you stupid bitch! I didn’t ask for you and I don’t bloody need you!’
She was gone then, slinking away as silently as she had arrived. He lay for a long time with his eyes shut, feeling lower than ever. But not guilty. You couldn’t afford guilt or any other emotion when you were working undercover.
‘We’d prefer that you talked to us together. We’ve nothing to hide. We want this cleared up as quickly as possible.’
Richard Seagrave looked at Detective Chief Superintendent Lamb
ert steadily, refusing to let his eyes drop in the face of the older man’s scrutiny. His words sounded like a challenge.
Lambert said quietly, ‘You are helping us voluntarily with our enquiries into a serious crime, as we expect all normal citizens to do. We are quite willing to speak to you together at this stage. If at some future stage of the investigation we feel it advisable to speak to you individually, we shall arrange to do that when it is necessary.’
Vanessa Norton smiled, trying to relax the tension she felt. She was good with men and well aware of it. These were experienced policemen, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t use her influence on them. She smiled unhurriedly, swept her very blue eyes swiftly across all three of the faces, and said, ‘You would learn nothing additional by speaking to us separately. We both know exactly the same amount about this, which is very little. You will save your own time as well as ours by speaking to us together.’
Lambert was used to resisting the charms of women. This one seemed to have some of the most impressive of those charms. Early thirties, he reckoned; possibly mid-thirties. Very well preserved – but then he had reached an age where it seemed ridiculous to think of anyone in their thirties being well preserved. He wondered how important looks were to this woman. Her hair was probably genuinely blonde; there seemed to be no darkening at the roots and she had that clear light skin which appeared Nordic. There were no wrinkles apparent around her eyes or on the elegant exposed neck, two areas where he looked instinctively for the first signs of ageing.
He said abruptly, ‘We shall need your full name.’
‘Of course you will. For the records.’ She gave a calm smile with this reference to police bureaucracy. ‘My name is Vanessa Norton. I am not married to Richard, though I let some of the nosier people around here think that we are. I am not engaged.’ She watched Hook making a note. ‘You’ll have to put me down as his bit of stuff, if you need a technical designation. Or is that too old-fashioned, even for the police?’
Hook glanced up at her with the merest suggestion of a smile. ‘Spinster of this parish would probably suffice. But we’d better have a home address as well.’ He took down addresses for both of them, studiously unreactive when they were different. Vanessa felt now that she was going to enjoy this little contest, but she warned herself not to be so self-indulgent.
Lambert asked her crisply, ‘What did you think of Walter Keane?’
‘I didn’t like him. He was an interfering busybody. So was his wife, but I felt that Wally was more malicious than Debbie. I suppose convention requires me to say now that I shouldn’t be speaking ill of the dead, but I prefer to be frank.’
‘We much prefer honesty.’ He put just enough stress on the word to imply that it might be something different from what she was offering them. ‘You are the first person to confess to an active dislike of the deceased.’
‘Then I hope you will applaud my candour rather than deplore my bad taste. I’m not sure you should call it an “active” dislike. I didn’t take any action against Wally. I like to think I treated his behaviour with an amused tolerance.’
‘Vanessa was very patient with the man.’ Richard Seagrave clearly felt it was time to offer a little support to his lady. It was almost a snippet of Jane Austen, save that with his squat and scowling exterior this was no Mr Knightley.
Lambert ignored the interruption to the verbal joust he had commenced with Ms Norton. ‘In what context did Mr and Mrs Keane irritate you?’
‘Irritate is the right word, Detective Chief Superintendent.’ She articulated his title deliberately, as if emphasizing to him how few of the members of the public he spoke with got it exactly right. ‘Debbie was an amusing nuisance, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. She wanted to know all of your business, and you knew from what she said about other people on the site that whatever you said to her would be told to others, probably with further imaginative speculation from her. She pried as fully as she could into my relationship with Richard. I took some pleasure from stonewalling resolutely.’
‘And Wally?’
‘I disliked Wally much more. He wanted to control everything on the site. Jim Rawlinson, who owns this place, allowed him to help out in the office whenever they were short of staff there. I wouldn’t have done that, if I’d been Jim. Wally was cheap labour – well, free labour, I think – but I wouldn’t have wanted him anywhere near anything confidential. Wally was a control freak: he wanted to take charge of anything and everything that goes on at Twin Lakes. He and Debbie were here more than anyone else – for every day of the year that it’s possible to be here, in fact. They sometimes made the rest of us feel like intruders.’
‘You say you disliked Walter Keane much more than his wife. In what context was this?’
‘I think I’m making this sound more serious than it was. Your notion of irritation is nearer the mark, I’m sure. I’ve taken up golf since I came here, and I think I’ve made some progress.’ She smiled appreciatively at the affirmative murmurs from her partner on her left. ‘It’s only a short course here, but ideal for someone who’s hardly played the game before, like me. But Wally controlled the golf here and took it very seriously. He liked to strut about as if he was the Secretary of the Royal and Ancient at St Andrews. He gave everyone their handicaps and adjusted them regularly as he saw fit. Most of us just grinned about it behind his back and let him get on with it, because we didn’t want to be bothered with all the boring administrative stuff ourselves. But it’s only a little nine-hole course here and we play for fun: we don’t want a Gauleiter looking over our shoulders and constantly tinkering with our handicaps. You’d play one good hole on your own on the edge of dark and find Wally creeping out of the trees and telling you he’d decided what he’d seen warranted knocking another shot off your handicap. It was daft. But irritating, as you say, rather than anything more serious.’
‘Where were you on Friday night between seven and midnight?’ Lambert addressed his question to her, but his glance took in both of them.
‘That’s when he was killed, isn’t it? That’s pretty obvious, from what we’ve heard from others on the site. Things fly around, once you’ve questioned people, in a place like this. But perhaps you like to encourage speculation, at this stage, when you still don’t know much.’
There was an unspoken question in her last phrase, but Lambert did not react to it. ‘We need to know where you were on Friday night. Each of you.’
Vanessa smiled, conveying how much she was at her ease. ‘Shouldn’t you say that it’s just routine, so that we can be eliminated from your enquiries? We know that everyone on the site has been asked these questions, so we’re not going to be upset about it. But not everyone has been visited by the top brass, have they?’ She glanced at Seagrave. ‘Perhaps we are rather special, after all, Richard, though I can’t think why. Well, I’m afraid we have to disappoint you, Mr Lambert. We were both here, in this very room for much of the time. We cooked a Marks and Spencer’s meal for two. I say “we”, but Richard confined himself to opening and pouring the wine – that’s the male way, isn’t it? Not that the salmon and vegetables took a lot of cooking: it was beautifully prepared for me by the M&S chefs.’
‘Did you go out at all during the evening?’
‘No. I’m sure we didn’t. Can you confirm that for them, Richard?’
He spoke carefully, sounding curiously stilted. ‘I can indeed. I stood on the balcony outside for a couple of minutes at around half past seven, enjoying the evening sunshine whilst I opened the wine. But I didn’t leave our home. Neither of us did, throughout the evening.’
Vanessa smiled her assent to that. ‘We had a leisurely meal and a quiet evening, accompanied by an excellent bottle of New Zealand chardonnay. And then we turned in for an early night. I shall not give you a detailed account of what happened after that.’ Vanessa taunted them a little with her smile of remembrance.
Seagrave enjoyed the moment and then added, ‘So we’re each other’s alibis, yo
u see. I know the police don’t like such things, but there’s nothing you or we can do about that, as it’s the truth.’
‘The truth is what we always welcome, from everyone,’ said Lambert evenly. ‘There will be at least one person, and probably at least one couple, who were at Twin Lakes on Friday night who are not delivering the truth to us.’
‘And of course we wish you the best of luck in uncovering those people as quickly as possible,’ said Vanessa sanctimoniously.
‘Who do you think killed Wally Keane?’ This was Bert Hook, looking up from his notes and abruptly terminating this display of insouciance.
‘You’re very direct, Sergeant! But I expect I’d be the same in your position. Anxious for a quick result. After all, murder is murder. Whether I liked Wally or not, I certainly didn’t want to see the poor bugger murdered, irritating as he was. But I’m afraid neither of us can help you. We’ve discussed it for most of the weekend, as you might expect. But that’s just the problem, you see. He was an annoying bloke, Wally. He really got on Richard’s tits, didn’t he, darling? I wouldn’t use such a crude expression about myself, of course, but I’ve already been quite frank about how he infuriated me at times. But that’s what he was: irritating. I can’t see anyone caring enough about what he did to murder him. And I’m not the murdering type, and neither is Richard.’
She giggled and took her partner’s hand to reinforce that sentiment. Hook studied the two of them without emotion for a moment and then said, ‘What about you, Mr Seagrave? Can you think of anyone with a motive for murder?’
Richard pursed his lips, emphasizing that he was according the question due weight and deliberation. He hadn’t been allowed to say much, but his vanity determined that he should now convey to these senior CID men that he was an educated man, not a rich fool. ‘No. Wally Keane struck me as rather like Polonius in Hamlet. A meddling old fool who was determined to have a finger in every pie.’
