Malice Aforethought

by J M Gregson

  ‘Oh, it’s not a burglary, Aubrey. Nothing as petty as that for the new Mr Bass. We’re talking murder here.’

  Aubrey shut his eyes for a moment, trying to stop the room spinning. The walls still did not seem stable when he opened them. His voice emerged as a whine. ‘Murder? You mean Ted Giles, don’t you? I ain’t done no murder, Mr Rushton.’

  ‘You’re claiming you’re just an accessory? Penalties are still severe, Aubrey. Might as well admit the whole thing and get it over with, I’d say.’

  Aubrey Bass saw nothing except the gravely satisfied faces opposite him; male and female, they nodded gravely in unison, as if worked by the same hand. He shouted desperately, ‘I’m saying I had nothing to do with any murder! That I know nothing about it! That I never saw Ted bloody Giles last Saturday night!’

  Rushton seemed to find these denials amusing. Then he spoke in a tone which was suddenly hard as granite. ‘We found fibres from the dead man’s sweater on the floor of your van, Aubrey. Hairs, too, which I dare say forensic will prove are those of the late Edward Giles. I’d say his body was taken to the churchyard at Broughton’s Ash last Saturday night in the back of your van. And I’d say it was time you were thinking about that brief, Mr Bass.’

  Ten

  The forensics of crime are an ever-widening field. DNA testing may be the best-publicised leap forward in crime detection, but it is only part of the complex possibilities of modern technology. Almost all of the people who assist the police are civilians, and the need for specialists means that an increasing use is made of part-time expertise, bought in as and when it is necessary.

  David Browne was an example of this. He was a mild-mannered man of thirty-five, slightly old fashioned in both his dress and his opinions. A briar pipe was never far from his mouth, though more often than not it was unlit. His full-time work was with the BBC in Bristol; he was responsible for the monitoring of sound quality and volume levels in radio broadcasts, an unseen, rarely considered, but vital factor in the listening public’s enjoyment of their programmes. For most of his days, he sat, with or without his headphones, in his sound-proof booth in Bristol, listening to recordings before they were put on the air, making occasional small adjustments to ensure the audience he never saw would receive them at their best.

  And occasionally, in the evenings or at a weekend, he helped the police. David had never turned down a request for assistance from their forensic department. Most of what he did for the BBC was necessary but repetitive; what came to him through the police was both varied and interesting. He was a man always happier to be dealing with data than people, and the forensic tasks did not disturb that pattern, but he often saw a direct outcome to them, in the arrests and trials of criminals. He followed the court reportage of his cases secretly but avidly.

  This Saturday, David Browne had been presented with a task which both intrigued and excited him. The Rendezvous agency had taken to asking its new clients to record short statements about their backgrounds and requirements. The ostensible reason was to offer potential partners a sample of the voice and aspirations of the speaker. In fact, the recordings were rarely used for this purpose: the real object was to record the requirements of clients, so that they could be played back to them at a later date if the clients objected to the partners or escorts they had been offered. The procedure also ensured, of course, that the agency had a collection of tapes which could be highly embarrassing for those who had registered with Rendezvous without telling their existing spouses or partners. It was surprising how often the mere mention of the recordings served to suppress complaints about the agency’s service or charges.

  David Browne knew none of this. Nor did he receive any account of the threats and cajolery with which Bert Hook had extracted the tapes from Pat Roberts, manager of Rendezvous, a.k.a. Patricia Rawlings, sometime occupant of one of Her Majesty’s prisons. That was not his concern: his business was to listen to the tapes with his headphones on and apply his knowledge and experience to them. Repeatedly, and through a range of amplifiers and volumes. Comparing each one with the police recording of the voice of the hysterical woman who had first told the police to contact the escort agency.

  David Browne was good at his work. And he found it was of absorbing interest, repaying the intense concentration he had to give to it. Over and over again, he played and replayed the few urgent phrases on the police recording of the call from the public box:

  ‘…Ted Bloody Giles. Paper says he’s a bloody saint. You find out about his work with Rendezvous, then see if you think he’s such a fucking saint!’

  He played individual words, even individual syllables, over and over again, comparing vowels, consonants and inflection’s with those on the eight individual tapes which the police had brought to him from the agency. He eliminated five of these quite easily, then a sixth after a couple more hearings. It took him half an hour of intense concentration before he decided between the last two of the innocent-looking cassettes from Rendezvous.

  These were rough recordings, made with a poor microphone, by those with little or no experience. But that was a help rather than a hindrance to him in this work. The breathy hesitations and nervous delivery made it all the easier to isolate the peculiar variations which made each voice almost as individual as a fingerprint to this expert listener. At the end of his work, David Browne was confident enough of his findings to swear to them in court, if that should be needed at some future date. He went to the phone with real excitement: he hadn’t been told exactly what his findings might mean to the woman he had now identified, but he did know that he was involved in his first murder inquiry.

  It was a Saturday night, but he didn’t hesitate to ring. This might be vital evidence he held in his hand: he checked the name scrawled on the cassette again as the phone shrilled at the other end of the line. Superintendent Lambert answered himself, as he had hoped. David Browne said. ‘I have a name for your anonymous caller, Mr Lambert.’ He hesitated, then plunged in first with his supplementary information, unable to resist the opportunity to parade his expertise. ‘She speaks something very near Standard English — but no one does that exactly. I think you’ll find she comes from the north of England — almost certainly north Lancashire or south Cumbria. It’s surprising how the vowels flatten out under the pressure of emotion. And I’d say from the stresses and the inflections that she’s a woman who doesn’t habitually use obscenities.’

  Lambert listened with a professional patience. Then he said quietly, ‘That could be helpful. And you have a name for us, Mr Browne?’

  ‘Yes. Assuming the agency has labelled the cassette correctly, it’s a woman named Zoe Ross.’

  ***

  John Lambert was up quite early on Sunday morning, but he found that his wife had already been out to the greenhouse and cut some of his chrysanthemums. They were one of the interests he was preparing for his eventual retirement. ‘Eventual’ was his word; Christine had recently switched from ‘inevitable’ to ‘forthcoming’.

  ‘You should be resting, not up at this time on a Sunday,’ he grumbled as he began his cereal.

  Christine turned from arranging the flowers in a vase at the sink. ‘And are you going to sit around for the rest of the day, in view of your advancing age and seniority?’ she said. ‘I’m not dying, John. I’m waiting for an operation, that’s all.’

  He looked up at her round face, which was animated by its brief exposure to the cool air of early winter. It looked rosy with health beside the smooth yellow spheres of the inflexed chrysanthemum flowers. In the paradoxical way of these things, she seemed healthier and stronger since they had received the news that she needed serious surgery. He was aware that he was merely playing out the ritual of protest as he said, ‘You do need to rest, you know. To make sure your body is in the strongest possible condition for the shock of the operation.’

  ‘Ah! The way to do that is to take moderate exercise. Being up before my husband and cutting a few flowers hardly rates as that.�
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  He switched tactics. ‘Did you have the pain again last night?’

  She could not lie to him, even after all these years. ‘A little, yes. But it doesn’t worry me. Not since I found out what it was. Dr Cooper said I should expect it, when I was tired at the end of the day. It’s nothing to get very alarmed about, a bit of angina.’

  ‘Well, it alarms me. You’re too active for your own good.’

  ‘All right, lord and master, I shall obey.’ She turned towards him as he sat awkwardly at the small kitchen table with his cereal spoon in his hand and dropped into an ironic curtsey. It was one of the gestures of their youth, one of the gestures she had used then to end more serious arguments than this. She had been a lithe and graceful kitten when he first knew her. Now she was stiffer, almost losing her balance as she bent low and spread her skirt with both hands. She laughed it away, but he was suddenly seared by the passing years and the inevitable end of their human foolery.

  ‘I shall rest presently, with that fat Sunday paper, and in due course you will bring me morning coffee. If you’re going to be here, of course; resting your ageing bones; following your own counsel.’ She knew he wasn’t, he realised. He gave her a weary grin, which acknowledged that he had lost the argument; he hoped it told her also that he loved her. It was a lot to expect of that briefest of smiles, he reflected, as he drove through the lanes to collect Bert Hook. If he ever wrote his memoirs in retirement, as he was often urged to do, Christine would figure less prominently than she should.

  John Lambert knew his literature well enough to be aware how difficult it is to make virtue interesting.

  ***

  It was exactly a week since old Tom Dodds had found the body of Edward Giles in the churchyard at Broughton’s Ash. As Lambert left the village where Hook lived and drove his old Vauxhall over an ancient stone bridge, the Wye gleamed briefly beneath them, its swirling winter waters illuminated as they caught and reflected the pale lemon of the winter sun.

  He had made no apology for disturbing the woman’s Sunday. If she had complained, he would have told her more tersely than he had his wife that murder waits for no man. As they drove into the suburbs of Oldford, he was intensely aware of the statistic which asserts that half of the murder cases in which there has been no arrest within the first week remain on the files unsolved.

  Zoe Ross did not complain. Bert Hook had phoned to arrange this meeting, and she must have been watching for the car, for the door of the house was open before they could ring the bell. She was no more than thirty, and possibly even younger; with her slender figure, her pony-tailed hair and her small, delicate features, it was difficult to tell. Lambert watched her as he produced his warrant card and introduced Hook and himself. He was certain she was nervous, but that didn’t necessarily mean much.

  She said, ‘Sergeant Hook wouldn’t tell me why you wanted to speak to me. But it’s about Ted, isn’t it? You’d better come in.’ She turned abruptly and led them into a tidy sitting room where walls were covered with water colours and the Observer lay neatly folded upon a coffee table. She gestured towards a large sofa, then sat and curled her legs beneath her on the room’s single armchair by the fireplace. She moved well, but she was like a dancer following choreographed steps, playing out a dance which was meant to convey that she had nothing to fear.

  Lambert said, ‘I’ll come straight to the point. We need to know the details of your relationship with Mr Giles.’

  ‘Need to know? That’s a strong phrase, Superintendent. What right have you to demand that I reveal everything about a private relationship to strangers?’

  ‘The rights conferred by a murder inquiry.’ Lambert was suddenly impatient with this supple and alert young woman.

  Perhaps, thinking of the wife he had left so recently, he was intolerant of her very youth and energy. ‘We don’t like anonymous phone calls, Miss Ross. They cause us a lot of trouble.’

  ‘I suppose they must, but I fail to see—’

  ‘I’ll save you the embarrassment of further lying. We know that it was you who made the anonymous phone call to Oldford CID at 6.13 p.m. on Thursday last. It would have saved a lot of time and expense if you had given your name at that time.’

  If he had been looking to shake her, he had succeeded. Her slim torso recoiled against the back of her chair as if she was dodging a physical blow. ‘You can’t know that I made that call.’

  ‘Miss Ross, I can assure you that we do. It was recorded, and there are means of establishing that it was your voice. What we are interested in now is why you made it.’

  The bright, unlined face had turned pale. She reached out her hand to the table beside her, seeking for something to occupy her hands. Anything would have done, but she fixed unseeingly on the remote control for her hi-fi system. For the next few minutes of their conversation, it turned over and over between the slender fingers, un--remarked but perhaps in some small way therapeutic. She said softly, ‘I’m sorry. I was overcome with grief when I made that phone call. Anonymous letters or messages are not my normal way. It was a desperate measure: I’ve never made a call like that before.’

  ‘But it wasn’t just grief that made you ring, was it? There were other emotions involved. If I played the tape to you now, you’d understand what I mean.’

  She shuddered, as if she feared that he might actually produce the evidence and make her listen to it. ‘Yes, you’re right. I was jealous. For three days I couldn’t get my head round Ted’s death at all. And when I heard it was murder, I suppose I wanted it to be her.’

  ‘By “her” you mean Mrs Constance Elson?’

  She nodded. For a moment her voice took on the bitterness of the phone call, though not its high-pitched hysteria. ‘Connie Bloody Elson, that’s right! With her money and her clothes and her bungalow and her ever-available, all-consuming body. Connie the nymphomaniac python!’ They caught now the slight flattening of the vowels, the trace of northern accent, that David Browne had pinpointed for them in his analysis of her taped voice. She began to weep, silently but copiously, and they knew in that moment that these were phrases she had hurled unavailingly at the living Ted Giles in this very room.

  Lambert watched her silently, as objectively as a scientist with a specimen under a microscope, devoid in his professional capacity of the social promptings of embarrassment. In the silence, he was busy with his own concerns: the woman wasn’t acting this; therefore at the time of Giles’s death, she had plainly been jealous to the point of distraction; therefore she might well have been even more bitter about Ted Giles’s behaviour than that of Connie Elson; therefore she might well have been unbalanced enough to have killed the man she saw as wronging her. The measured words of Saunders, the pathologist, came back to him from the beginning of the case: ‘He was garrotted, probably taken from behind with a thin wire… With the implement used, this could easily have been done by a woman, if the victim was taken by surprise.’

  Lambert waited for the face wet with tears to lift towards him before he said, ‘So you were jealous of Mrs Elson. But you didn’t direct our attention specifically to her, did you? You told us to investigate Rendezvous.’

  ‘Yes. I wasn’t seeing things very clearly, but I thought that any of the women who had seen Ted through the agency might have been involved in his death.’ She smiled a bitter, self-deprecating smile. ‘He was a very attractive man, Ted, and I suppose I thought that anyone who felt as possessive about him as I did might have killed him.’

  He smiled back, wondering how clearly she understood that she had just stated her own case to be a suspect. ‘You were a Rendezvous client yourself, Miss Ross. We heard the tape on which you described yourself and what you wanted from the agency.’

  Her eyes widened as she looked him full in the face for the first time since they had begun to speak. ‘That’s how you found out that I had made the phone call to CID on Thursday, wasn’t it? I’d forgotten that I’d even recorded that cassette for that hard-faced bitch.’


  ‘Is that how you met Ted Giles? Through a meeting arranged by the agency?’

  For a moment she was puzzled. Then her face cleared and she looked for a moment as if she would laugh. ‘No. Of course you would think that, when you found me on their books, but it wasn’t like that at all. I met Ted over a year ago at a union meeting — I teach Art in Gloucester. We were attracted to each other immediately and we quickly began a long-term relationship. Oh, I can see from your faces that you have your doubts about that, and I can guess how things look to you now, but that’s how it was. I knew pretty quickly that Ted had been involved in working for Rendezvous as an escort. I was shocked at first, but pleased that he’d told me — it meant we were being honest with each other, I thought.’

  She stopped abruptly, clearly thinking about this moment of intimacy from many months ago. Lambert had to prompt her with, ‘But he didn’t give up the work with Rendezvous, did he?’

  ‘No. He said he was going to. Then I found two months later that it was still going on.’

  ‘Yet you didn’t finish with him there and then. If what you are telling us is true, you are asking us to believe that you are a very forbearing woman, Miss Ross.’

  Sitting still with her legs curled beneath her in the big armchair, her hair a little ruffled over a face still wet with tears but devoid of make-up, she looked pretty, vulnerable, younger than her years despite her distress. She said, as though the phrase explained everything, ‘I was a woman in love, Superintendent Lambert. And I was more clear-sighted than you might think. Ted was a man to whom money was important, and I knew that. He’d grown up in grinding poverty, with a father who was often ill and out of work. Rendezvous to him meant lots of money without much effort, and he didn’t find it as easy as I had thought it would be to turn away from that. We had a blazing row when I found he was still taking money from them.’

  But that row still hadn’t stopped his activities, whatever she thought. Lambert, using the neutral language of bureaucracy to turn the knife, said, ‘We have reason to believe that Edward Giles was still receiving payments from Rendezvous at the time of his death.’