by J M Gregson
He wondered if this stolid-looking sergeant would be out of his depth here. But Hook made some sort of note and then said, ‘But Polonius meddled his way to his death, didn’t he? Perhaps Wally Keane did the same thing. Perhaps we shall have to find who was most seriously affected by his meddling. You left Twin Lakes at eleven thirty-four yesterday morning and returned at thirteen twelve. Would you tell us where you went when you were off the site?’
Richard was shaken for a moment by the precision of the figures. But he realized that he should not have been. It was easy for them to check times for anyone leaving the site, and natural that they should do so once a murder investigation was under way. He said curtly, ‘It has no relevance to your investigation. I had a business meeting in Tenbury Wells. I had arranged to speak with one of my head salesmen and he had travelled some distance to be there.’
Hook made a note but offered no further comment. He looked into their faces for a moment and said, ‘If either of you have any further thoughts on who might have committed this crime, you should get in touch with us immediately.’
Vanessa put the card he left them beside the clock in the kitchen. Richard grinned at her. ‘You promised me you were going to do most of the talking. You certainly did that.’
She answered his smile, then held his broad hand for a moment in her much more delicate one. ‘It’s what we agreed before they came, wasn’t it? You have a lot more to hide than I have.’
TWELVE
Lambert was back in time to see his daughter and his grandchildren, to exchange views with his son-in-law over the successes of the England cricket team against Australia and to indulge in the various joys of the extended family.
Yet through all of this there was a portion of John Lambert which was not present in this happy gathering, however much he wanted it to be there. Murder investigations and the people you met in the course of them had that effect on domestic life, however much you willed that it should not be so. He could not thrust from his mind the disquieting image of the menacing, almost silent Richard Seagrave and his bright and intelligent blonde partner, Vanessa Norton. His grandsons were only seven and five, but even amidst their innocent cacophony, the cadences of the earlier interview at Twin Lakes refused to leave him.
It had been routine stuff, on the surface. They had given their account of Friday night and it had been officially noted. It might be that everything they had said about those hours was entirely true. Yet he had a feeling about the exchanges that he could not dismiss. Bert Hook and he had been bested by the cool, intelligent Vanessa Norton and the watchful man who had sat beside her. The interview had been conducted on their terms, not on his. La Norton had told them exactly what she had planned in advance to tell them, whilst Richard Seagrave had contentedly overseen the process.
John Lambert would have instructed Hook and the rest of his team to assemble facts before they formed opinions. Yet, with precious few facts as yet, he was already sure in his own mind that Seagrave and Norton were a dangerous couple who had won the first round of the contest.
He arrived at Twin Lakes early on Monday morning. Jim Rawlinson had allotted them one of the unused units near the entrance as a murder room. The place was rapidly filling with materials gathered and bagged around the scene of the crime, together with pictures of the deceased and of various other objects and scenes which might have significance. DI Rushton was completing his filing of interviews conducted with everyone who had been on the site at the time of the crime. Many of them had been with not one but several people on Friday night, so that their alibis were much more convincing than those supported by just a spouse or partner. It was too early to be certain, but it seemed likely that Lambert and Hook had already conducted preliminary interviews with the people closest to this crime.
By ten thirty, they had the post-mortem report. Lambert called Chris Rushton and Bert Hook into his office to review the findings. As they had feared, these added little to what they already knew. Walter Keane had been hit fiercely on the back of his head with an object which had so far not been located. There were no traces of wood in the wound. The likeliest implements were a bottle or a section of metal piping. It seemed unlikely that even if the murder weapon was discovered it would reveal much about the assailant – it was unlikely to carry fingerprints, since the killer would almost certainly have worn gloves or wiped it clean.
This assailant might have been male or female. Walter Keane had weighed just under ten stones, or sixty-three kilograms, in the pathologist’s preferred term. As he’d pointed out before, any woman in reasonable health could have hauled his inert corpse aloft once she had secured the rope around his thin neck.
The rope on which the corpse had swung from the tree until discovered was substantial but not individual enough to offer any clues as to its user. It was the sort of strong rope often used for a variety of purposes in boatyards, and indeed three lengths of very similar rope had been found in two of the three boathouses which sheltered craft at the edge of the lake and were within eighty yards of the scene of death. The coarse surface rarely yielded decent fingerprints, and on this occasion there was no residual sweat or grit from whoever had used it to string up the corpse. All indications were that the killer had worn stout gloves for the task.
‘On a warm summer evening, that strongly suggests pre-meditation,’ said Rushton. ‘You’d hardly take gloves with you on a night-time stroll unless you intended some sort of assault on Keane.’
Lambert was studying the paragraph which carried the details of the analysis of the stomach contents. ‘Some sort of quiche, with broccoli and potatoes. Followed by apple crumble, probably consumed two to three hours before death. Recall for me what time the Keanes ate on that evening, Chris.’
Rushton did not need to consult his notes. ‘They ate at seven and finished by eight, Debbie Keane says. That puts the probable time of death at between ten and eleven. If, that is, we accept the times she’s given us. We’ve unearthed nothing so far which implies that she had any connection with her husband’s death.’
Lambert frowned. ‘The time suggests a prearranged meeting with his murderer. Debbie said he liked to walk round and check what was happening on the lakes and the golf course, but this time in the evening was much too late for that. It’s possible that his killer was waiting in the woods and surprised him, but we know that it wasn’t his habit to wander through there in the dark. I think he’d arranged a meeting with someone who either was already planning to end his life or panicked during their meeting and resorted to violence.’
It was Bert Hook who voiced the question which comes first to any experienced policeman. ‘How many people who were here at the time of this death have previous form?’
Chris Rushton frowned. Some people expected you to perform miracles; he’d spent most of his weekend organizing the collection of statements from everyone on site and filing the results. ‘I’d begun the trawl when you called me in here. I’m expecting a smaller percentage than normal with criminal histories; the people who have homes here tend to be middle-class and respectable. But there’ll be some, for sure. There always are.’ He delivered the sentiment with satisfaction. Policemen are rarely bright-eyed about the integrity of the public; they have seen too much vice to be other than cynical.
Hook smiled, thinking of his earlier visit to the site at the invitation of Lisa Ramsbottom, as well as the current high summer situation, when Twin Lakes was much busier. ‘This doesn’t strike you as a place for desperados, when you wander around it.’
Lambert said acerbically, ‘That will make it much easier for us, then. The violent man or the violent pair who strung up Wally Keane will leap out at you from the innocents all around them.’
Bert was suitably chastened. ‘I’m not saying it will be easy. I was talking about the people who find places like this attractive. But when you look beneath the surface, there are always people who strike you as different from the norm. Maybe we’ve found a few already. Richard Seagrave and
Vanessa Norton didn’t seem typical, for a start.’ Hook had clearly found the exchanges of the previous evening as unsatisfactory as had John Lambert.
‘No one is normal, once you scratch away the surface.’ Chris Rushton was surprised to find himself voicing a thought he had heard from a forensic psychologist, a beast viewed with perennial suspicion by the police service.
‘What about Keane’s PC? Do we have anything from that yet?’ asked Lambert.
‘Nothing yet. I’m hoping for something by the end of the day. Tom Jameson, the DS who’s the expert at getting into the computer stuff that people don’t want anyone else to see, is back from holiday this morning. He’s already been assigned to this as a priority. I’ve never known him beaten by a computer. Sometimes it takes him an hour to get in, sometimes two or three days, but he gets there.’
‘From what everyone tells us, Keane seems to have been an irritating busybody, but scarcely an interesting man. I expect we’ll find nothing of great interest on his computer.’
Lambert spoke with the weary pessimism of the senior detective who has in his time investigated many blind alleys. On this occasion, his views would prove quite spectacularly mistaken.
There was a tension between Jason and Lisa Ramsbottom which neither of them cared to acknowledge.
Perhaps it was only to be expected, thought Lisa, with a murder committed scarcely two hundred yards from where they now sat in the sunshine outside their unit. Especially so when the most serious of all crimes might have been committed by someone with whom you spoke daily as you moved around the site; someone with whom you had perhaps exchanged a laugh and a bit of harmless gossip. Jason had voiced that thought over breakfast.
It didn’t bear thinking about. And yet it was difficult to think of anything else. She said, ‘Freda Potts has been here two or three times with that boy, Debbie Keane says. She doesn’t think he’s Freda’s nephew at all. She said the lad doesn’t behave like a nephew.’
They should have laughed over that, but each of them gave no more than a sickly grin. Lisa wondered if Jason was seeing in his mind’s eye the same images she had, of a randy boy tumbling staid Freda Potts the schoolteacher as she begged him for more. Most unworthy and reprehensible.
Jason obviously felt the same as she did about the murder on Friday night, for he too could settle to nothing. He kept shifting his position on his chair and turning the pages of the sports section of his newspaper, but he plainly wasn’t reading much or developing any positive train of thought. Both of them were startled when his mobile phone rang. Its note sounded unnaturally loud in the rural silence.
Jason snatched it up and checked the caller. ‘It’s Ellie.’
It was a relief to both of them to hear their daughter. The fourteen-year-old was full of her own life and her own news. She translated them for the duration of her call from this doom-laden world to her more innocent one. She was thoroughly enjoying her school trip. She had tales for them of the mischief perpetrated by her daring contemporaries and of the comical discomfort of the long-suffering staff who were accompanying them. Her animation and her obvious happiness cheered her parents, despite their closing injunctions to her that she should be careful not to go over the top and seriously offend the staff in charge.
Jason seemed to settle a little more to the reports of Ashes cricket and the Tour de France, though Lisa noticed that he kept glancing at his watch. He seemed relieved when she said she must drive the mile or so to the nearest village and its store to buy provisions for the next couple of days. Probably he just wanted a little time on his own to digest what had happened and what was coming next for them in the police investigation, she thought. She was glad now that she had brought kindly, normal Bert Hook here a couple of months ago, even though Jason had said at the time that she was over-reacting and shouldn’t have bothered their neighbour. She couldn’t explain how, but that move seemed to her to have put them a little ahead of their neighbours amidst all the speculation around the site.
Jason waited until she had been gone five minutes before using his mobile. The conversation didn’t take long. It was too urgent an exchange to allow any pleasantries. He kept a wary eye on the quiet ground around him in case of unwelcome eavesdroppers. He uttered the briefest greeting, listened to the reply, then glanced once again at his watch. ‘Lisa’s gone to the shops. She won’t be long. I should be with you not later than one.’ He terminated the call immediately, then sat for a moment smiling down at the silent mobile.
Mark Patmore was trying to relax. That was a contradiction in terms, when you were a police officer working undercover: the first and greatest rule was that you should never relax. You had to live the part, to force yourself into it so completely that your previous existence was forgotten and the man you had been was just a memory.
Except that it was all crap. You weren’t allowed to observe this most vital rule of all and become the person you were pretending to be. Because every so often you were reminded vividly who you had once been, who you still were when it suited them. An officer in the police service. A sergeant in the Drug Squad, to be precise. The police liked precision. Someone today would take away the disjointed information he had to offer and turn it into a neat report. Someone with rank, some fucking Inspector. Someone who had never and would never undertake the risks Mark had run to provide him with this information.
He’d tried to apologize this morning to the woman he’d rejected so brutally last night. She’d told him bitterly to fuck off, before he had even begun an explanation. Her reaction had brought a small measure of relief to both of them. All reliefs were small, in the squat. And yet it was a refuge, the only one available for every one of the assorted misfits who occupied it.
There weren’t many windows left intact now. The wind would howl through the cracked and broken glass, when autumn and then winter came. The house might not be habitable, even when you wrapped yourself in the filthy blankets which most of them had acquired. But you didn’t think long-term, when you were in the squat. Unless you were an under-cover man. Then you were supposed to crawl patiently towards long-term intelligence about the men you never saw, the ones who controlled the dangerous and highly lucrative world of illicit drugs.
Mark was going through his ritual of silent complaint against the drug barons who controlled him here and the police barons who had sent him here. He realized what he was doing. He realized also that it was a prelude to action. It was a motivator to drive him to do what his instincts told him he no longer wished to do. He must leave the dark anonymity of the squat and move out into daylight and the world which he had left behind to come here.
Five minutes later, Patmore stood blinking resentfully in the sunlight. He moved automatically to the shady side of the street and kept as close as he could to the fronts of the derelict terraced houses, moving reluctantly away from the squat and the security that it afforded him. He dropped into his swiftly shuffling gait, with his battered trainers scarcely leaving the ground as he walked. It was the movement of a much older man. Strangely, that was a kind of defence. Many of the aggressors in this underworld were strong young men, who found it necessary to confront strength when they saw it in others.
It was quite a long way. It seemed to get a little further each time. Something over a mile, he thought. He didn’t mind that, though he hated the sense of exposure. He felt more and more defenceless now when he moved out into the open. He’d had a car, once, before he’d undertaken this assignment. That seemed a long time ago, and the man who had driven the car and been interested in other cars was a man he scarcely knew or remembered. He’d thought once that he’d get back to that Mark, but it now seemed an unrealistic goal, one in which he had little interest.
He didn’t like it when the narrow streets finished and he had to move along wider and more modern roads. The houses here were set back from the pavements and there were lots of cars parked in front of them. But there were spaces too. It was Monday morning and most people would be back at wo
rk after the weekend. Mark remembered that world.
There weren’t many people about and he liked that. A woman with a toddler’s hand in hers crossed the road to avoid him. He must look pretty sinister, with his shaven head and his unshaven face. He grinned his secret grin and did not look at her again. He was nearly there now. He couldn’t see the football posts; they should have been visible now, over the low wall to his left. They must have taken them down for the summer, to stop the kids using them. The pitch had been mown recently; the straight lines of the cutting made the grass look quite neat. He stopped near the entrance and looked around, but there was no sign of a groundsman. Probably he was employed by the council and directed to somewhere else today; that was good.
Mark Patmore knew exactly where he had to go. He shuffled across towards the long wooden building which was a cricket pavilion in summer and changing rooms for the football teams during the winter. There was no sign of life within it today. He moved to the rear of the ramshackle edifice, where the shed which housed the maintenance equipment for the playing fields was attached.
There was no padlock on the door today. That was as it should be. He opened it and slipped quietly inside. The only light was from the single small window in the side of the wooden hut. He felt at home in the dimness.
The man sitting in the chair beside the tractor did not move. He wore neatly creased fawn chino trousers and a bright yellow shirt with the Pringle logo prominent. Casual wear, but as clean and smart as Patmore was grubby and dishevelled. The man’s hair was precisely parted and as neat as if he had come here straight from a barber’s shop. Patmore sat on the wooden chair opposite him and ran both of his hands briefly over the stubble of the scalp he had shaved three days earlier. He had never seen this man before and he resented him already.
