by J M Gregson
‘I don’t know what you mean. We’re a bona fide agency.’
‘Really?’ Lambert regarded her steadily for a few seconds, then tired of this preliminary fencing. ‘Tell me, would you be the same Patricia Rawlings who went down for living off immoral earnings in Stafford seven years ago?’
She looked furiously from Lambert’s calm, unblinking stare to the more weather-beaten face beside him. ‘The name is a little different, but the face looks remarkably similar,’ said Hook equably. ‘A triumph of the modern cosmetic art, Pat.’
‘You bastards were just playing with me!’ She hissed her resentment, but there was nevertheless an air of resignation about her.
‘We did our homework before we came, that’s all,’ said Lambert.
‘I served my time for that. You can’t—’
‘You served a little time, it’s true. The probationary period could still be invoked, of course, if you were a naughty girl, and fell back into your old ways.’
‘And you’re saying I have.’
‘Let’s just say I don’t think you’d have got the job of managing this place with your record. Not if putting innocent singles in touch with each other was all that was involved.’
Hook added his professional smile to his chief’s. ‘Once a whore, always a whore, they tend to say in the police. Terrible cynics, most of them.’
‘Of course, the more intelligent ones tend to give up the game as they become veterans and manage the younger ones. Bit like football, really,’ said Lambert.
She was furious, yearning to fling herself like a spitting tiger on that long, complacent face, to scratch out those grey eyes which studied her so relentlessly. But she had more sense than that. She knew these men held every card that mattered. Eventually she said through gritted teeth, ‘What is it you want from me?’
‘Perhaps just some information, provided you are completely frank with us.’
She thought quickly. If they knew as much as they obviously did, and hadn’t moved in, it might just be that they meant what they said. Some police forces were prepared to let her kind of enterprise go, if it was well managed and discreet and not attached to a drugs empire. She said, ‘What information?’
‘Ted Giles. What he was really doing at Rendezvous, not what you were trying to fob us off with five minutes ago.’
She reached up and patted the curls of yellow hair, as if to reassure herself; giving information to the filth did not come easily to her. ‘All right. He didn’t come to us. We approached him. We — we run an escort service as well as the meetings agency. Edward Giles — he was always known as that to us, because the full name goes down better with the kind of ladies who pay for an escort — was on our list of unattached men who were available to squire ladies who could afford it.’
‘And no doubt his services sometimes went beyond merely escorting them for an evening out.’
‘That is nothing to do with us. We provide an escort agency. If relationships develop from it, that is the business of the people concerned, not us.’
It was the standard reply. But people like Pat Roberts, née Rawlings, knew which people wanted merely a partner for an evening at the theatre and which women were in search of sex and prepared to pay for it. And which men also, of course: that was an even more lucrative avenue. He grinned at the hard face of the woman who glared her hostility across her desk. ‘I might even buy that, if you give us a full and frank account of Ted Giles. I might tell you that we know what you were paying him. We can produce the bank statements — in court, if we need to.’
‘We paid Edward Giles to provide an escort service. You can’t prove otherwise.’
Lambert sighed. ‘We may not need to, if you cooperate fully. At the moment, I’m only interested in who killed Ted Giles. We need a list of the women you paid him to see. And your views on which if any he was seeing frequently — for whatever reason.’
Pat Roberts stared at him for a moment, as if she was weighing the possibilities of deceit. Then she said, ‘Fair enough. I’ll give you the names.’
‘That would be sensible. And don’t forget you’re helping the police with their enquiries. Ignore anyone Giles saw only once or twice two years ago, at the beginning of his time with you. The person who’s likely to interest us is someone he saw frequently, in the last few months.’
‘All right, I get the picture. I’ll tell you who Edward was seeing.’ She permitted herself her first smile in several minutes. ‘There are five or six of them, though; it will be up to you to work out which ones are important.’ That thought seemed to give Ms Roberts a lot of satisfaction.
***
John Lambert was late home that Friday night. The business of tracing the women from Rendezvous had been set in motion. The house-to-house check had now revealed that three different people in the village of Broughton’s Ash thought they had seen a white van on the lanes there on the previous Saturday evening. Two of them had been going to and from the village inn, but the third had been walking his dog in the autumn darkness when he had had to take hasty evasive action to avoid the vehicle leaving the village. All three witnesses were vague about time and model, but they did not contradict each other. If the van had been involved at all in the conveying of Giles’s body to Broughton’s Ash, it had done so between eleven and midnight.
Lambert, who had consumed nothing substantial for eight hours, now found himself too tired to eat. Then he fell asleep in front of the television set, as his wife had known he would. It was not until he was clasping his mug of tea at eleven o’clock that Christine Lambert could fulfil her promise to her daughter. ‘I went to the doctor’s yesterday.’
The man who had recently been so drowsy was instantly alert. ‘I said you’d been looking tired. What did old Cooper have to say?’
Christine poured it all out at once, not daring to draw back once she started, anxious to have it over and done with and her promise to Caroline honoured. ‘He had the results of the tests and X-rays the hospital took last week. I didn’t tell you about those at the time because I didn’t want you worrying unnecessarily. It’s a heart problem. I’m going to need a bypass operation. But Dr Cooper says we’re not to worry, because the techniques and the technology have advanced so much in the last ten years that it’s now a routine operation and—’
She found herself in his arms, her face against his chest and further explanations impossible. He held her hard, this undemonstrative man she now felt she still did not know after thirty years. She felt him kneading her shoulder blades, then stroking the back of her neck under her hair, as he had been used to do before they were married when he soothed away some real or imagined trouble. It seemed a long time before he held her away from him, still with his hands on her shoulders. His grey eyes looked down into her blue ones and he said softly, ‘You should have told me, you know, Chris.’
It was years since he had used that form of her name. Her parents, who had thought that girls should be girls and there should be no confusion about the matter, had always insisted upon the full form of her name. He had used ‘Chris’ only when they were alone during their courtship, making it their own ridiculous secret. She remembered how he had used it when he first saw her after the birth of each of their daughters, and on the awful day when the eldest of them had died in infancy. But she had always been Christine to him in front of the children, her parents’ wishes preserved into the next generation. She said lamely, ‘Yes, I should have told you. But you are an old worrier, you know, where I’m concerned.’
‘Or the children.’
‘Yes. Or the grandchildren, now, I expect.’ She reached up and ran her small fingers through his grizzled, still plentiful hair.
He held her a little further away from him, staring into her face as if he was anxious to register its every nuance of expression. ‘You’re quite sure that that’s all it is? The heart?’
Despite herself, she burst out laughing. ‘Not many people would regard a heart bypass as trivial.’ She stopped la
ughing as suddenly as she had begun as she saw the fear in his face. ‘You thought it was the cancer coming back, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. I was worried when you seemed to tire so easily. It’s not like you, and—’
‘You’re right. I should have told you everything that was going on at the time, the tests and so forth. I thought I was shielding you. But you were worrying the cancer was coming back, just like me.’ Her hand strayed instinctively to her side, crept upwards towards the breast she had had removed a year earlier. ‘You’re quite a perceptive old thing, really, Jack Lambert!’ And this time, as she used the diminutive of his name that his mother had always forbidden, it was she who put her arms round him and fell against that comfortable chest.
‘It’s my job to be.’ She felt the chest tremble a little with mirth. ‘But you always told me I hadn’t to bring the job home with me.’
When they made love twenty minutes later, she had to tell him that he need not be quite so careful of her heart, and they dissolved into giggles together at this crucial moment. It was not until they were lying on their backs in the darkness some time later that Christine said, ‘Perhaps if we both live to be ninety we shall become quite a well-adjusted couple.’
Nine
There was one woman among the list given to them by Pat Roberts who looked promising.
Bert Hook looked at the sheet of paper with the small coloured photograph in the top right-hand corner. ‘Constance Elson. Reading between the lines of this, she’s forty-six, separated, rich and desperate for sex. Looks like we should send Chris Rushton.
Lambert grinned. ‘It’s tempting. But perhaps too cruel — and certainly too important. I think I’ll send Bert Hook.’
‘Not on his own you won’t!’ said Bert. ‘I don’t want promotion. But I do want to survive.’
It was a bit of cheerful male chauvinism they would not have been brave enough to indulge in if there had been female ears pricked to hear, but there were not many people in the CID section on Saturday morning, even in the Murder Room, which was now crowded with material gathered in the Edward Giles case. In the end, as they had known they would, Lambert and Hook went to visit the lady together. ‘Safety in numbers,’ said Hook. Lambert had hoped an Open University literature course might have helped him to avoid such clichés.
But Constance Elson turned out to be something of a cliché lady, in appearance at least. She lived in a bungalow with a garden which, even in the second half of November, looked tidy enough to be in Homes and Gardens. There was not a weed to be seen in the long, neat borders; in one, wallflowers had recently replaced annuals, in a second, roses made a determined late flowering above a carpet of mulching bark, in a third, dahlias, which any night now would be cut down by the frost which had so far spared them, threw gaudy splashes of colour defiantly into the grey day. Yet Bert Hook knew as soon as he saw the lady who opened the door to them that she had never soiled a finger to achieve this.
‘I am indeed Constance Elson,’ she said huskily, extending a warm, immaculately manicured hand to each of them in turn. ‘But please call me Connie. And do come inside! I’ve got the coffee ready. I’m sure you could use a cup.’ She turned an elegant back confidently upon them and led the way into an expensively but rather floridly furnished lounge. ‘Please be seated!’ she said, waving her arm expansively at two sofas and three armchairs. Even at this hour on a Saturday morning, she wore high heels and an haute couture dress which was perhaps one size too small for her, so that her bottom waggled in compulsive animation within two feet of Hook’s nose as she turned to the kitchen.
He caught John Lambert’s eye as they stared after her beneath the twin chandeliers of the big room. She had left the door open; neither of them dared to voice a thought during the two minutes of her absence. She brought in a large tray, with a plate of flapjacks and chocolate biscuits, as well as a pot of coffee, then sat in a low chair opposite them and crossed her nyloned legs. Hook, lifting his china cup carefully and sitting opposite her, decided this was certainly a change for the better from visiting and interrogating people like Aubrey Bass, Ted Giles’s egregious neighbour.
‘I can’t imagine what I can have to say which will be of any interest to important people like superintendents,’ she said, turning what she considered her most winning smile upon Lambert. That was interesting, he thought. She must have known why they wanted to see her, must surely have expected to be contacted from the moment she knew that Ted Giles was dead. It set him wondering about exactly how much she knew about that death ‘Hell hath no fury…’ was another cliché, but one they saw illustrated often enough in their investigations into violent crimes.
‘You will be aware, I’m sure, of the murder of Ted Giles a week ago. It is my responsibility to find out who killed him.’
‘I see.’
‘As you would expect, we are contacting everyone who knew Mr Giles well. Especially anyone who had regular contact with Mr Giles in the months before his death.’
‘And I am one of those people! Well, this is really rather exciting! Am I a suspect in a murder case?’
Lambert smiled into the wide-eyed, expectant face. She was like an amateur actress simulating girlish innocence She was a little old in the tooth for the part. ‘We need to eliminate you from our enquiries. We also need to find out things about Mr Giles from you.’
‘What kind of things?’
‘Things about his way of life. About where he went and what he knew. About people who might have had some wish to see him dead.’
‘I don’t know anyone who would have wanted to harm Ted. He was a lovely man.’ She had seemed until now like someone guying herself, like a consciously overstated and slightly comic version of the femme fatale. Her assertion about the dead man was a standard line, yet with it the brittle pretence dropped away and she seemed both serious and accessible. Love, whatever its nature, however unlikely or ridiculous it might seem to outsiders, could leave anyone vulnerable.
Lambert said, ‘I’m glad you liked him. And, needless to say, we’re sorry he’s dead. We know a lot more about him now than we did at the beginning of the week. But what people felt about him is the most difficult thing for us to unearth. You thought he was a lovely man, and you saw a lot more of him than most people.’
‘I saw him pretty regularly, in the last months of his life.’ She looked for a moment as if she would weep, then bit her lip and forced her voice to right itself. ‘I first met him back in May. I am a patron of the Welsh National Opera. They sent me tickets for a gala performance of Ri goletto in Cardiff. I didn’t want to appear there unaccompanied. I phoned Rendezvous and hired an escort.’
It is surprising how much of our lives we can reveal to perceptive listeners. They knew in that moment that she had used the agency before, that she was a lonely woman. But they did not pursue these other contacts; as yet, there was no need to open up windows into the lives of men who had sold who knew what services. Lambert prompted gently, ‘So you wanted someone to accompany you to a prestige social occasion. Someone presentable in those circles, no doubt. But you say you didn’t know Mr Giles at all before last May?’
‘No. I was just relieved to find someone so suitable for the occasion. Someone who looked good in evening dress and could hold a conversation about opera was all I asked for. Edward was all of that and more. I liked him from the first and I think he liked me. That’s one of the problems, you see, divining what your partner for the evening really thinks of you. When you pay for an acceptable escort, he pretends to be enjoying himself, if he’s good at the role, but you often don’t really know whether he likes your company. Not on a first outing.’
‘I suppose not. But you say you saw a lot more of Mr Giles in the months which followed.’
‘Yes. We eventually became very close.’ She could not keep the pride out of her voice.
‘How often did you see him?’
‘After that first time, I left it about a fortnight. Then I rang Rendezvous and booked him a
gain. By the end of August, we were meeting every week, usually on a Friday night. In the last two months, we must have averaged twice a week.’
‘Thank you. That’s very helpful. And you obviously feel that Mr Giles returned your feelings.’
‘I don’t feel, Mr Lambert, I know. Edward was a bit guarded at first, and I know I’m a little older than him — five years, if you really want to know — but he wanted to be with me.’
‘Permanently?’
‘Yes. We’d discussed it, but agreed there was no need to rush things. He’d had an unhappy marriage and been hurt by it. He had certain objections to divorce — he was born a Catholic, you know — but they weren’t insuperable.’
Lambert had the familiar regret that the dead man could not be here to answer for himself. The facts argued certain reservations on his part that Connie Elson was not confronting. Both of them were unattached. There was no reason why they should not have met more than once or twice a week. Had Giles been less willing to take this further than she supposed? Had he, at worst, been a man on the make with a rich divorcee, anxious for whatever he could take from the liaison without serious commitment to it? That might mean just easy sex, or more material things like money or presents. On the other hand, he might indeed have been as committed as she claimed, cautiously increasing his meetings with her as his damaged confidence and his attachment increased. From what they had learned of him in the school and elsewhere, Giles hadn’t seemed a diffident man, but men confident in a more public context could be uncertain in the more intimate world of the emotions. The difficulty with this sort of problem was that it was difficult to find third parties who had watched from the sidelines and could offer detached opinions on the degree of the man’s commitment.
Hook said, ‘We need to know where you were on the night of Saturday the tenth of November, Mrs Elson.’
‘When Ted was killed, you mean? You want to know where I was when poor Ted was murdered?’ There was a suggestion of hysteria to her voice now, but there were few people more fitted to calm a woman on edge than the stolid Bert Hook.
