by J M Gregson
In that moment, she willed him to do just that, to scream at her that he wanted her, wanted to live with her, that she should be rid of her rich husband and live more modestly with him for the rest of her life. It was an absurd notion, of course, and she would have probably have rejected it if he had voiced it, but it would have been wonderful to hear it.
There was not the remotest chance of that. Guy Dawson slicked back his hair in the nervous gesture she had once loved, then glanced automatically at the door to the shop, as if anxious to be done with this before they were interrupted. In that moment, the scales fell from her eyes and she saw him for what he was: a man on the make, a sexual predator with an easy, surface charm who picked up what he could and disappeared when the going got tough.
He said petulantly, ‘You’ve dragged me into the middle of this. The police came round to see me yesterday.’
‘You should have expected that.’ She was suddenly weary of his weakness. ‘Who came to see you?’
‘A detective inspector - Rushton, I think he said his name was. He had a young detective constable with him who made notes. They wanted to know where I was last Friday night when Chivers was killed.’
‘And what did you tell them?’
He looked at her sharply. ‘The truth, of course. That I was having a drink at my local, the way I often do on a Friday—’
‘You told me you were delivering a car to Birmingham, when I rang to say that Gerald was away and we could meet.’
‘I - I got back earlier than I thought I would.’
It had been a lie, then. He had been available, if he had wanted to see her. She felt not the pain and sorrow she should have felt but only an immense weariness with this shifty, craven man who was her lover. ‘Did they believe you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m not even sure I believe you. Didn’t you tell me you were going to find out about Chivers? Perhaps you did and took the opportunity to get rid of him. To preserve your precious skin from anything Gerald might do to it, if he found out about us.’ She wanted to make wilder and wilder charges, to fling anything at him which might hurt him, to punish him for not being the man she had thought him in the excesses of her stupid infatuation.
‘Don’t be silly. I didn’t kill the man. Though thanks to you, it now seems that the police think I might have done.’ He reached out and took her clumsily into his arms, as she had been willing him to do only minutes earlier. He did not even notice that for the first time ever she did not respond to him. ‘I need your help, Michelle. You mustn’t tell the police any more about me than you have. And you certainly mustn’t let Gerald know anything about us.’
She pushed him away, holding her arms against his chest for a moment before she dropped them to her sides. ‘It’s all about protecting you, isn’t it? Guy Dawson mustn’t be affected, whatever happens to anyone else. Don’t you ever think of me, of what I must be going through? It’s me the man tried to blackmail. Me the police came to first, me they had as a suspect.’ She looked at the regular, handsome face, thinking for the first time how weak the mouth looked, how those lips she had kissed so often now trembled with apprehension. ‘The people who came to see you were small fry. I had the man the papers call the “super sleuth”, Chief Superintendent John Lambert. That’s who I had to deal with!’
He gaped at her, totally taken aback to see her like this. She felt a preposterous delight that her interrogators should outrank his. He was pitiable in his fear, and she wondered suddenly if he had other things he wanted to keep away from the police. ‘Look, we’re both upset. Let’s give this some thought and discuss it more rationally when we meet on Tuesday.’
He dropped his gaze to the table, so that she was beset with contempt for him. He could not even look into her face to do this. ‘We won’t be meeting on Tuesday, Michelle. I think we should end this, before things get any worse.’
‘That’s what you came here to say, isn’t it?’
‘I think it would be best for both of us.’
‘For you, you mean.’
‘I’m sorry you’re taking it like this. Perhaps, when all this murder business is over, we can get together again.’
He was into the statements he had prepared, she thought. Trust him to think in cliches. She felt dangerously calm as she said through clenched teeth, ‘Get out, Guy! Get out now! Don’t say any more.’
‘You meant a lot to me, Michelle, I want you to know that I—’
The sound of her palm against his face was like the crack of a whip. She hadn’t known that she was going to do it, but she must have hit him hard, for she felt the angry sting of the hit in her hand, even as she saw the shock in his eyes and his fingers lifting to the weal on his cheek.
He muttered, ‘You bitch!’ as he turned away from her, stumbling in his haste to open the door and be gone.
She stood perfectly still for a few moments, then followed him through the shop, dropped the lock on the outer door, and put up the closed sign. She felt the blood pounding in her temples and sat down hastily as giddiness overtook her. She didn’t know that she was crying until she felt the first drops on the back of her hand. They were tears not of sorrow but of rage, of anger at herself that it had taken her so long to see the reality of this weak, venal creature.
She didn’t know how long she had been sitting there when the phone rang, but she felt perfectly composed when she had to speak. It was Detective Sergeant Hook, informing her that he and Lambert needed to speak to her again on the morrow. They could come to her home, or if she preferred it she could come in to the station.
Her mind worked quickly and well, she thought. She said, ‘No, I’d prefer it if you came here, I think. I can make sure that we won’t be disturbed.’
Twenty-One
Mark Rogers wanted to answer the door himself, but his wife was too quick for him. By the time he got into the hall, Samantha had opened the door and was greeting Chief Superintendent Lambert, about whom she had recently read so much in the local press.
She was being dutifully polite, waving aside the police apologies for calling at this time on a Saturday evening, gushing a little in her consciousness that she was in the presence of a strange kind of celebrity. Mark took over as quickly as he could. ‘These are the detectives I told you about the other day, dear. Mr Lambert and DS Hook. I’m trying to help them fill in some of the detail on this murder case.’ He switched his attention to the two men who were watching him so expectantly. ‘We’ll go into the dining room, I think. We shan’t be interrupted in there.’ He led them through the first door in the modem hall and shut the door on the sound of childish excitements at the rear of the house.
Mark tried not to find Lambert’s unwavering gaze disturbing as he installed the two men in the chairs he had set out before they came. ‘Working late, I see.’ He heard his nervous giggle and cursed himself for it.
‘Murder overrides the normal priorities, Mr Rogers. It doesn’t help when people try to deceive us. I hope you will see the importance - from your own point of view as much as ours - of being completely honest with us today.’ Lambert allowed himself the ghost of a smile. ‘Working at weekends may make us a little less patient than usual with any evasions.’ Mark decided to take as firm a line as he could. It wasn’t easy, in view of their years and their obvious seniority in the police hierarchy, but he tried to imagine that these people were junior employees. He said as loftily as he could, ‘I’m not aware that I was anything other than honest with you when we talked on Thursday. I told you that I had bought drugs from Darren Chivers in the past. I told you that he had extracted a blackmail payment from me because I did not want him to reveal that. I gave you an honest account of my whereabouts on the night when it appears he was killed.’
Just when he had focused all his attention on the gaunt, sceptical face opposite him, it was Bert Hook who looked up from his notebook and said, ‘If your account of the blackmail relationship was full and accurate, Mr Rogers, we would find it easier t
o believe your account of your movements on that Friday night.’
‘What I told you about that night is absolutely true. As is what I told you about Chivers and his blackmail, DS Hook.’ He put a slight emphasis on the rank, hoping thus to remind the man both of his junior status and the respect he owed to the executive whose integrity he was questioning.
Hook was distressingly unperturbed. ‘You told us on Thursday that you had made a blackmail payment to Chivers of two hundred pounds. Would you now care to revise the sum involved?’
Rogers glanced automatically at the door and the rest of the house behind it, and they knew in that second that he had told his wife nothing of this. ‘All right, I gave him more than that. I don’t see that the sum should greatly matter, but I gave the bastard a thousand pounds.’
Hook flicked to a new page of his notebook and made a note of that. It seemed to Mark that it took him a long time to do it; the silence stretched long and heavy, whilst Lambert’s grey eyes observed him steadily. It was the Chief Superintendent who then said calmly, ‘I’m glad we have established a more reasonable figure. It also seemed to us that your account of the background to this blackmail payment was frankly not credible. We don’t believe that you would have made such a payment in the hope that Chivers would not reveal your purchases of cocaine. In the present climate of opinion, we don’t think such revelations would be very damaging to you at BT. There would be many vulnerable executives in the country if past experiments with cocaine could damage them.’ He looked at his man with no sign of a smile now. ‘Perhaps I should point out to you that in a murder investigation all sorts of financial and other information which would not normally be accessible will be made available to whoever is directing the inquiry.’
‘You don’t have access to employment records?’ Mark meant it as an assertion, but it emerged as a question, and he knew as he heard himself speak that the last shreds of his deceit were being stripped away from him.
Lambert knew it too. ‘Frankly, Mr Rogers, you have made yourself a murder suspect by your earlier dishonesty. I’d say that in these circumstances, we could obtain access to whatever normally confidential records seem relevant. However, that would excite considerable interest among the people who would have to grant us such access. I should have thought it would be preferable for you to be completely honest with us this evening.’
Mark had given them two easy chairs, with himself in a third he had brought through from the sitting room. He had felt at the time that he would keep this meeting informal, hopefully with himself dictating the pace and content of it. Now he felt totally without defence, sitting in a chair with nothing but air between him and these two practised adversaries. He should have sat them on upright chairs at the table, with four feet of wood between them, and his twisting feet kept invisible beneath it. He stared at the carpet as he said dully, ‘1 was a bit imaginative when I filled in my original application form for my first job with BT.’
‘You told lies, you mean.’ Lambert let some of his dislike for the man seep into his contempt for his evasions.
Rogers shrugged hopelessly. ‘Economical with the truth. Everyone does it. Or I thought they did, at the time.’
‘Everyone puts the most favourable interpretation on what they have done.’ Lambert thought grimly of promotion boards long ago, when your every statement, as well as every comment from your superiors on the form in front of the panel, had been relentlessly picked over by fellow professionals who had seen every dodge and heard every bland cliche before. ‘But you must have done more than merely state the best case for yourself, to lay yourself open to blackmail. You must have altered certain facts.’
‘Yes. Look, is this really necessary? Even my wife doesn’t know about this, let alone anyone at the company. I’d obviously prefer to leave it that way. I’ve given you the reason why Chivers was able to blackmail me and confessed to the payment I made to him. Surely that’s enough?’
‘You made a mistake when you did not tell us all this on Thursday, Mr Rogers. I’m afraid we need to know the full details. Mr Chivers is a murder victim. We need to know the exact nature of the hold he had over you.’
Mark had known even as he made his protests that it would come to this. He said hopelessly, listlessly, T changed the class of degree I’d had. Gave myself a first where I’d actually had a third. And I said I’d had a managerial post abroad for eight months, when I’d actually been unemployed for most of that time. I’d lost a couple of jobs through drugs - I could hardly write that down, could I?’
‘And what would you have done if the company had asked you to produce evidence of your degree?’
‘I’d have given back word on the job. Resigned, if they’d asked for such things after I’d actually taken up the post. Look, it didn’t seem that serious at the time. I’ve got on well since at the company, so I must have ability, mustn’t I? That’s what really matters, isn’t it?’
‘How did Darren Chivers come to know about this?’
‘I didn’t know he did, until he stopped me coming out of the pub six weeks ago and told me I was going to have to pay him to keep his mouth shut. What I told you about his supplying me with drugs years ago was correct. What I didn’t tell you was that in those pre-BT, pre-family days, I used quite a lot of crack. I was never an addict, but I came pretty near to being dependent on it, when I look back at it now. I was off my head quite a lot of the time. Chivers was supplying me, and I must have told him what I was doing when I filled in that form. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was high and worse than high for a lot of the time. Darren Chivers is - sorry, was - a more intelligent man than you’d think. He even claimed he’d helped me to fill in that application form, but I’m not sure that he did that.’
‘At any rate, he knew enough about it to demand a thousand pounds to keep his mouth shut, as a first payment.’
‘He said it was a one-off.’
‘But you didn’t believe that. You’re by no means stupid, whatever you did all those years ago to get a job. It wasn’t as if you could pay him to return photographs or other evidence and be done with it. You must have known he’d be back.’
‘You know that, deep down. You’ve heard all about blackmail. But when you’re a victim, you just hope against hope that it will be different for you.’
‘And when that doesn’t work out and he comes back, you should go to the police and demand protection. Instead of which, you chose to meet the blackmailer and remove him with his own weapon.’
‘No! No, I didn’t do that!’
Panic eventually roused him from his submissiveness, so that he found himself shouting the denial at them. It was Bert Hook who said calmly, persuasively, ‘Maybe you didn’t go there intending to kill him. Maybe it was an argument which got out of hand when he made impossible demands.’
‘No, it wasn’t like that. I didn’t meet him. I had nothing to do with his death!’
'Maybe it was even accidental. Perhaps you didn’t even mean to kill him. You could almost certainly get away with manslaughter, if that is how it happened.’
There was the merest pause before he said, ‘No! That isn’t how it was! I didn’t even see Darren Chivers on that Friday night.’
‘Mr Rogers, our officers have checked out the pub where you claim to have been drinking at the time when Chivers died. I have to tell you that the landlord does not remember you. So far, our team has not turned up a single customer who remembers seeing you there on that Friday night.’
‘I told you, it was very crowded. I expect it always is, at that time on a Friday. It isn’t a place I visit regularly. I knew the kids were in bed and I just felt like a drink after a hard day in Birmingham.’
There was a shrill scream of childish pain from the back of the house, then a murmur of maternal consolation and laughter from the other child, as if to remind Mark of that family life which was physically so near and yet in other respects now so far from him. Lambert studied him for another moment before he said, �
�Have you anything further to add or any amendments to make to what you have told us tonight, Mr Rogers? In view of the radical revisions to what you told us two days ago, you would be most unwise to withhold anything now.’
‘No. How far will this need to go?’
‘That will depend largely upon what happens in the next few days. If you are not the killer of Darren Chivers, we will not willingly release anything, but there can be no guarantees.’
‘I can’t afford to tell them at work. Not at the present time, when everyone’s job is at risk.’
‘I can’t make decisions for you on that, Mr Rogers. Please do not leave the area without informing us of any address, other than this one.’
At ten to eleven on that Saturday night, a grey Ford Focus car pulled into a dimly lit street behind a pub in the dock area of the city of Gloucester. The pub had a car park and there were spaces vacated in there as the customers began to leave, but the driver preferred to park on the street. A swift getaway after your business was concluded was much easier from there.
Several other people left the pub in the twenty minutes which followed, calling noisy goodnights to their companions of the evening. Most of them had had enough drink to blunt their powers of observation, and none of them paid any attention to the two men sitting in the car. This wasn’t the sort of area or the time of night where you stopped to ask questions.
It was warm enough for the men in the Ford to have the windows open, so that the myriad sounds of the central city carried faintly to them over the intervening roofs. But it was the human sounds from the immediate vicinity which interested the men in the Focus. They gave more acute attention to them as the minutes passed and there were fewer people left behind the brightly lit windows of the public house.
Eventually the man in the passenger seat breathed, ‘That’s him!’ and they eased themselves silently from the car in readiness.
