by J M Gregson
‘It seems you did, yes.’ Hook was trying to be as quiet and neutral as a counsellor collecting the thoughts of a troubled subject. It was a strategy which would have been derided by most of his CID colleagues, who favoured the aggressive approach to interviewing, but it was a characteristic of DS Hook which Lambert found useful when he wanted suspects to talk, rather than retreat behind the blank ‘no-comment’ tactic. ‘Can you tell us how this happened?’
Norrington glanced at Tiler, received the tiniest of nods and said, ‘I’d already realized that I was gay. It was legal by then of course, had been for years, but people were much less open about it than they are now. What I hadn’t realized until I took the post was that many of the boys who were in the seminary were gay too, though some of them were still in the process of discovering that. I suppose a good proportion of the people who are attracted to the idea of the celibate life of the Roman Catholic priesthood are likely to be gay, or at least uncertain about their sexual orientation. I think even the Church is belatedly beginning to realize that, though it isn’t stated openly.’
‘And you took advantage of the uncertainties and inexperience of these boys.’
‘I didn’t see it like that. Now, almost thirty years on, I can see that I was doing just that, though I kidded myself that I was helping young men to find themselves.’ He grinned bitterly. ‘That was the popular phrase of the day: find themselves. It was the police who said I was taking advantage of kids who knew nothing about life; I think that in that at least they were right.’
‘But you avoided criminal charges and a court case. You don’t have a criminal record: that is why it has taken us a little time to discover this.’
‘I was lucky. Very lucky, in view of how stupid I’d been. I resigned my post and moved on. The clerics were glad to see me go and to avoid a scandal. Those were different times. It wouldn’t happen now. The Catholic Church is paying a heavy price for hushing things up and moving people on. I’m not a Catholic any more. I haven’t been for twenty years.’
He offered these personal details as if he were revealing himself to a psychiatrist. Hook’s low-key and personal approach was teasing out all sorts of facts about a man who remained a murder suspect. The DS prompted softly, ‘You took someone else away from the seminary with you, didn’t you, Michael?’
Norrington stared at him for a moment as if wondering how he came to be so well informed. But he did not question or dispute his statement. ‘Francis Fitzpatrick. You couldn’t have a much more Catholic name than that, could you? He always insisted on Francis, not Frank. That was his mother’s doing, I think. A lot of the boys in the seminary were very close to their mothers.’
‘And you set up house together.’
‘Yes. It was Francis who saved me from the police. He was eighteen by the time we were living together and his mother couldn’t do a thing about it.’ He gave a wan, abstracted smile at the memory. ‘He told the police that we hadn’t had sex whilst we were in the seminary, even though that wasn’t true. I think it was Francis Fitzpatrick who prevented them from bringing charges, in the end. They’d have needed him as a witness.’
‘But obviously you didn’t stay together.’
Norrington’s face twisted a little, with pain, or remorse, or some combination of the two. ‘It didn’t last six months. Francis was eighteen. I was twenty-five by this time, but scarcely more mature than he was. We weren’t suited for a permanent relationship – probably not with anyone, let alone each other.’
In re-living the anguish of those vanished years, Michael Norrington had been conscious only of Hook and Geoffrey Tiler, listening anxiously beside him to what Michael had confided to him many months ago now. But it was the fourth man in the room, John Lambert, who now struck a different and harsher note. ‘We have to ask ourselves as detectives why you chose to conceal your past from us when we spoke to you three days ago, Mr Norrington.’
The man recoiled as if he had been struck a physical blow. ‘It was private. I realize that I was lucky not to end up in court and possibly in prison for the abuse of minors. I’m not proud of it.’ He glanced sideways at the man beside him and gave him a nervous smile. ‘Geoff has been trying to persuade me that I should reveal this to you myself rather than have you fling it in my face. He was right, of course. Geoff’s right about most things.’
‘Wally Keane knew all about this, didn’t he? He was planning to make use of it.’
‘He’d already made use of it.’ These words came grimly from Tiler, not Norrington. ‘He’d already had money from me. He was threatening to contact some of those boys from the seminary, who must now be in their middle forties, and invite them to sue Michael for sexual abuse. He said that in the present climate they’d have an excellent chance of success, and he was probably right. Especially as Mike is too honest for his own good and would have admitted things.’
He did not look at his partner, but his hand stole to the edge of his armchair as if he wished to touch him. Lambert said, ‘You’re saying that Keane’s death was highly convenient for both of you.’
‘Highly convenient. I fancy that not many people mourn a blackmailer, apart perhaps from his wife. We’re both glad to have his nasty mind and his even nastier actions removed from the world. However, neither of us killed him.’
‘You obviously recognize that you are murder suspects. Can you do anything now to change that?’
‘Neither of us can add to or modify the statements we have already given to you about our movements on Friday night. We were together throughout the evening and the night, until Michael rose early and shortly afterwards accompanied George Martindale in the discovery of the corpse.’
He spoke the words like a formal declaration, as if he was reminding Michael Norrington of the form of words they’d agreed earlier.
George Martindale didn’t like the long bright evenings of summer. Not for this other life of his. Winter was better, when the nights concealed you, once you hid yourself away from the street lights. The July daylight seemed to be lingering. And he wasn’t on familiar ground here, with people he knew around him and his escape routes already clear in his mind.
He was growing more uneasy with each passing day. He needed the money and the paymasters he never saw were offering more of it. But he detested what he was doing. He was horrified at the thought of Mary and the boys discovering what he was up to when he went out in the evenings to these mysterious assignments. Drinking with his mates, he told Mary. But she was too shrewd to swallow that. She knew that he was up to something, but as yet she’d chosen not to question him about it. It could only be a matter of time. And she surely must suspect drugs.
His work for the council was a doddle compared with this. Repairing roads could be hard graft at times and the conditions unpleasant, with traffic roaring within a few feet of you. But it was honest toil. He’d laughed at that simple phrase when his teacher had used it in their last year at school, but now he appreciated what it meant and what it implied about your satisfaction with life. He liked most of the men he worked with in Kidderminster. Rough diamonds, his manager called them, but there were some real gems beneath the dirt. And now that he was a foreman, he was able to foster the good men and control the more dubious ones. He was surprised how much he enjoyed the responsibility, how ready he had found himself for it.
George had ample time to revolve these things in his racing mind as he drove south towards Bristol. He had a bad feeling about the extra assignment he had been allotted by the Barbadian in the sunglasses he had met three days earlier. He shuddered as he drove past the lay-by near Hope Under Dinmore where the Mondeo Graphite had pulled up behind him on Saturday. He wondered if he would see that man this evening. He hoped not.
Martindale didn’t know Bristol and he didn’t like big cities. His apprehension increased as he left the fields behind and drove first through suburbia and then through the higher buildings and busier streets of the conurbation. He was glad of his satnav. And yet he resented it
, as it guided him inexorably towards the meeting he did not want.
He was near the old docks now. This had been the centre of the slave trade. This is where the fate of his ancestors had been decided, as they were transported like animals to the sugar plantations in the West Indies and the tender mercies of the white men making their fortunes there. He wished he hadn’t had that thought: it seemed an ill omen for an evening that was already full of menace. A menace he could neither define nor envisage, but which he felt more strongly than much more tangible threats. He could handle personal violence, could defend himself with his fists in any fair fight. But this business was not fair, and you wouldn’t be able to solve anything with your fists.
He’d set the satnav for St Teresa’s church, as he had been instructed to do. The steeple rose against the night sky above him, its height accentuated by the increasing gloom around him and the single bright star which was visible above it. The church was deserted, locked and barred against intruders, shutting out men like him from the forgiveness of the Lord.
George could hear his long-dead mother’s voice in his ear. He was being far too imaginative.
He found the place he needed easily enough, a hundred yards further on. It was a failed garage, its petrol pumps long defunct on its forecourt. Two of the windows were broken on the frontage which had once revealed highly polished second-hand cars. ‘Awaiting development’ the sign by the road said. A block of flats, probably, delayed by this recession which seemed to be affecting everyone’s life.
He drove round the back of the derelict building and parked close to its rear wall. It was almost dark now, but the bright red Focus still seemed much too conspicuous. He had thought at first that the former garage was deserted, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom he detected a faint light behind the closely curtained windows of the only room he could see on the upper storey.
He had been told to wait and he sat very still, feeling his body grow tauter with the suspense, yet still wishing that no one would come to the car to thrust him on into the next scene in this baleful drama. He wished heartily that he’d never got involved with drugs at all. It had seemed so easy, a rapid way of raising money to give himself and his family a better life. That is the way he had sold it to himself at the time. And for a while, it had seemed just that. He had even enjoyed the sense of danger, the act of outwitting the law. And the rewards were substantial. What they hadn’t told him was that he wouldn’t be able to get out of this trade when he’d had enough. It wasn’t like overtime or an extra job on the side, where you could pocket extra funds and have them tax-free if you cared to take the risk. The men who ran this lucrative industry, the drug barons whom everyone whispered about but no one ever saw, didn’t let you give in your notice. Once you were in, you were there for as long as they cared to retain your services.
The returns were good, but you couldn’t resign. A lot of the dealers were users who had taken to selling to feed their habit: they used their gains to meet their own addictions. Once they became real junkies and thus unreliable, they were discarded. Those who knew nothing were left to suffer and often to die. Those who knew anything which might endanger the men in the chain above them received a bullet in the back of the head or drowned mysteriously. In most sectors of a man’s life, knowledge meant power. Here, knowledge too often meant death.
All this passed for the umpteenth time through George Martindale’s too-active mind as he waited to receive his allotment of drugs for this mysterious extra assignment. He lifted his arm so as to see his watch, unable to believe the evidence of the clock in the Focus, which told him that only seventeen minutes had passed since he had switched off the engine and settled down to wait. It seemed much longer and it was very quiet here. If it hadn’t been for that faint orange light behind the curtains above him, he would have hoped that no one would come and that he would be able to drive away after a decent interval.
Strange adjective to use: decent. There was nothing decent about this.
The man came with soft footfalls, but George’s hypersensitive ears heard every one of them. He still jumped when his driver’s door was flung open abruptly. A voice as dark as the night now was said, ‘Come in, Mr Martindale.’
It was the Barbadian, and he contrived to make the four simple words of the invitation sound sinister. He led George in through the back door of the building and gestured towards a chair at the bottom of a narrow staircase. He wasn’t wearing the sunglasses as he had at their meeting in the lay-by, but George could see no more of his eyes now than then. He hesitated, then sat and said, ‘Give me the drugs and tell me where I’m to go to sell them. And give me everything you can about the place. I don’t know Bristol at all.’
It sounded from his voice as if the big man was smiling as he spoke, but George couldn’t see enough to be certain of that. ‘Relax, Martindale! You’re in luck, tonight. You might be in line for promotion, if you play your cards right. Lucky old George!’
Martindale opened his mouth, then shut it again quickly. He’d almost said that he didn’t want promotion, not in this industry. But you didn’t argue with the monkey. You waited for the organ-grinder. And with the organ-grinder, he realized fearfully as he sat and squirmed, you might not be able to argue.
Sixty seconds was all the time that George had to wonder what the Barbadian’s words might mean for him. It was no more than a minute before an unseen door at the top of the stairs opened and a voice called softly, ‘Send him up now.’
Martindale climbed the flight of narrow stairs softly, almost silently, as big men almost always do, treading as if afraid that their weight might disturb others if they move clumsily. He had an overwhelming sense that his life was about to change.
He had thought he was prepared for almost anything, but he was still surprised. Two men sitting behind a desk, beneath an unshaded light bulb which could not have been more than sixty watts. He could scarcely see their faces, but the little he saw told him they were Asians. He’d never expected that. They both had beards and they both had dark and deep-set eyes. One had a broader face than the other, but both were muffled to the chin.
It was the one with the thinner face who said, ‘You’re lucky, Mr Martindale. We have watched your efforts and we like what we have seen. You sell well and you sell quickly. And you know how to keep your mouth firmly shut. You realize the importance of silence in our work. If the police of this land ever question you, you will have the sense to keep completely silent.’
It was an injunction as well as a compliment. The man spoke good English, but with the light lilt and soft consonants which betrayed his origin. George said, ‘I’m happy where I am. I’m happy to take what I get and to ask no questions. I don’t need more money and I don’t think I can handle promotion. I’m not good at authority.’
It was the best excuse he could offer at short notice. He’d tried to deliver it with a smile, but had signally failed in that. There was no smile from the stony faces opposite him. The thin face said coldly, ‘You do not have a choice. You would be very unwise to refuse this splendid offer. The man who controls us and who controls you will not be pleased if you refuse.’ He picked the words and spoke them carefully, as if he wished to be precise in a second language.
Martindale looked at him steadily, striving to reveal nothing of the fear he felt. He tried to pick his words as carefully as the Asian had. ‘I have a full-time job with the council. I have just been promoted in that. It is important that I carry on with this legitimate work, if the police are not to suspect what I do when I am away from it.’
‘I expect that is so. Legitimate work is important. But the other work you do is so much more lucrative, eh?’ The narrow features smiled a mirthless smile, denoting that he had made a kind of joke.
‘I thought I’d been doing all right. I’m shifting the stuff. I could do more coke, if you want me to. And Rohypnol. I could—’
‘Ah, Rohypnol, yes. The sex drug is always in demand, is it not?’ The man behind the
desk laughed outright at the thought, but it was not a happy sound. His voice hardened. ‘You have done well with the drugs. Now the master has in mind a more ambitious role for you. You would be most unwise to refuse it.’
George said desperately, ‘I don’t know Bristol. I wouldn’t be anything like as effective operating here as on the patch I know. I really—’
‘You will not be operating in Bristol, Mr Martindale. You have been brought here solely to be briefed on this new and exciting assignment. The people you select and groom for us will be operating in the Oxford area. But you do not need to know that area, either. You would be a supplier. You would recruit in your own area.’
‘Recruit?’ An even deeper shadow fell across George’s mind. ‘I don’t want to bring in other people to sell drugs. I wouldn’t—’
‘Not drugs, Mr Martindale.’ There was both impatience and contempt in the man’s tone. ‘There is one industry which all British men and some British women find more irresistible than drugs. Sex, George. They can’t get enough of it. So it’s up to us to supply the goods, don’t you think? We’re businessmen, aren’t we, and we must meet the demand.’
‘I don’t know anything about the sex industry. And I’d be no good working in it. I—’
‘We supply what is needed, George.’ It was as if Martindale had not spoken. ‘We give people what they want. And what they want is girls. The younger the better. They have to be prepared, of course. Grooming, it’s called. But we do most of that. You supply the goods and we’ll present them to the customers. The younger the better, George. We have more control of the young ones. We find that they do whatever we ask them to do without too many complaints.’ He looked at the broader-faced man beside him and they exchanged knowing smiles. ‘Kamar here has groomed a few in his time. Thoroughly enjoyed the process, I believe.’ This time the smiles became sniggers.
