by J M Gregson
She got not a word in response from either of the men in the car. As they drove into the Oldford Police Station car park, she said by way of hopeless amplification, ‘I thought I could frighten her into owning up!’
***
An hour after Connie Elson had been taken into Oldford Police Station, Colin Pitman rang his daughter from his office in Malvern. ‘We need to talk,’ he said tersely.
‘Dad, we agreed we’d stay apart for a little while. Just in case they’re watching us. They won’t be, but just to be on the safe side.’
‘I know what we agreed. But I think we need to go over it all once again. I told you, they were here again on Tuesday and I had to change my story.’ All his life until now, he had been the strong man in her life, offering her advice and support, guiding her actions with his experience and shrewdness. Now he felt like a weak old man, pathetically dependent upon his daughter, allowing circumstances to dictate the course of his actions when he had been used to shaping them himself.
Sue Giles heard it in his voice. He would let them down, unless they bolstered him, convinced him that they had nothing to fear but their own weakness. He had phoned her before to tell her that the police had been back to talk to him on Tuesday, given her the details of the new story he had told to account for his whereabouts on that fateful Saturday night. He seemed to have forgotten all that. He needed the physical support of a meeting with her, the reassurance of her calm presence at his side. In all truth, she didn’t feel as cool and confident as she was trying to sound for her father, but she mustn’t let him know that. ‘All right, Dad. Come over here by all means, if you think it will help. Make it in about an hour. Graham’s coming round after school. We’ll have a council of war.’ She gave an involuntary nervous laugh at the phrase as she put down the phone.
***
Sergeant ‘Jack’ Johnson had new men in his team. He was instructing them in the painstaking, boring and just occasionally rewarding techniques they had to employ. They’d already covered the area round where Aubrey Bass’s van was parked four days earlier, with little added to what they already knew. It was important that now that they were back to stake out the area around the exit, there was full attention to the task, with no weary sense of déjà vu.
Crawling around wet tarmac on a bleak November day with tweezers and a small stainless-steel dish for your findings was not a pleasant task, though at least the signing cards of dogs or cats were not evident on this particular patch. He told one new man how even a dog turd had become vital evidence on one memorable occasion in the early nineties: they had parcelled the distinctive excreta carefully into a plastic bag and some forensic genius had later been able to place a particular dog (and thus a particular owner) in a specific spot on a certain day.
The young man did not seem very impressed with this particular example of the rewards of diligence. But the message about detail obviously went home, for ten minutes later he brought his Sergeant a dish full of the tiny detritus that would only have been visible to a man on hands and knees in that draughty expanse. Though he did not say so, Johnson could see at a glance that most of the items were likely to be unhelpful in establishing the particular spot where Ted Giles had met his end. The tiny shards of broken glass did not connect with the method by which Giles had been killed. The rusting pin looked to his experienced eye as if it had lain here for far longer than eleven days.
One item, however, Sergeant Johnson thought very interesting. He always told his team to keep an open mind about what might be useful to forensic: they were to collect anything and everything, leaving it to the boffins to pick out what was relevant to a particular investigation. But whenever it was possible, he examined the clothing, and especially the outer clothing, worn by murder victims before his SOC investigations, so that he might instantly recognise anything at a scene of crime which might be significant. And on this occasion, he found much to interest him in a tiny cluster of near-black fibres which his acolyte’s tweezers had retrieved.
Ted Giles had been wearing a navy-blue V-neck sweater of pure wool when his body had been found. The Constable was able to tell Johnson exactly where he had found the fibres, ground into the rough surface of the tarmac. Very much as though a man had been flung on his back here as he fell with a wire drawn fatally tight around his neck. But that was for other, more scientific minds and their technology to decide. Sergeant Johnson measured the exact distance from the double doors of the flats and marked it carefully on the neat scale plan he had drawn of the area.
He saw the caretaker, watching their activities curiously from the hall of the flats as he pretended to sweep the tiled floor. ‘I wanted a quick word,’ Johnson said. ‘This area hasn’t been swept since the night of the tenth of November, has it?’
The man was around sixty, with thick glasses and a droopy moustache. He was immediately defensive. Not my responsibility, that. There’s a contract with a gardening firm for all outside maintenance. I pick up any bits of litter I see, keep the place tidy, like, but that’s all.’
‘Good. I’m only anxious to check that things haven’t been disturbed here since the death of Mr Giles. The outside maintenance firm hasn’t been here since then?’
‘No. We don’t see much of them once the winter comes and the grass stops growing.’
The man was prepared to enlarge upon the deficiencies of the absent contractors, but Johnson said, ‘You’ve recently replaced the bulb in this outside light, haven’t you?’
The caretaker looked at him suspiciously over his moustache. ‘Yes. How do you know that?’
‘Superintendent Lambert of Oldford CID told me. You were putting a new bulb in when he came here to look at Mr Giles’s flat on Tuesday of last week.’
The caretaker seemed impressed by this precision. ‘That’s right. I was up me ladder when he and that Sergeant came. They asked me for directions to Mr Giles’s flat.’
‘Do you happen to know when the old bulb failed? Was the light off over the previous weekend?’
The man was defensive again. ‘I couldn’t say for certain. I replaced it as soon as I was told about it. I’m not here weekends, you see. I don’t live on the premises. I only do mornings.’ He leaned forward a little to impart a confidence. ‘I’m more your part-time odd-job man, really. Cleaning of the halls and landings and minor repairs. They called it internal maintenance, at first. Then they thought it might make the place a bit more secure if people thought the block had a caretaker, so they called me that.’
That explained his presence here: Johnson hadn’t thought these flats grand or numerous enough to warrant the high maintenance charges of a resident caretaker. He said, ‘So it’s quite likely that this light was off on that Saturday night when Mr Giles died?’
‘Probably was. According to Mrs Clarkson who reported it, it had been off for the whole of the weekend.’ The caretaker leaned forward again, his sense of his own importance growing as he realised he might be assisting with a murder inquiry. ‘As a matter of fact, the bulb hadn’t just failed. It had been removed. Never happened before, that hasn’t.’
Sergeant Johnson rounded up his SOC team and took his findings back to CID. He carried the sealed plastic envelope with the navy fibres in it as carefully as if it were the crown jewels. And he had no doubt that Superintendent Lambert would be very interested to know about that missing bulb.
***
Sue Giles’s house looked as incongruously large and grand for a single occupant as it had on their first visit a week ago. Six bedrooms at least: this place should have had children in it, thought Bert Hook, contrasting it with his own modern semi, increasingly cramped as his two boys grew towards adolescence. But it was as well that the ill-starred Giles union had spawned no children.
The gardener was wheeling his cycle away from the big garden shed as they parked in front of the house in the November twilight. He looked at them curiously, then switched his lamps on and pedalled slowly away. The long neat beds had been cleared now of the las
t of the autumn’s flowers; there was not a leaf to be seen on the large areas of trimly edged green lawn. The lights were switched on in the hall and several rooms of the big modern house, making the day seem already darker than it was. Hook’s watch showed twenty-five past four.
Sue Giles opened the oak front door herself. ‘Superintendent Lambert. And Sergeant Hook. It isn’t convenient to see you just now, I’m afraid. Mr Reynolds is here, you see. And my father, whom I know you’ve met. It’s Dad’s birthday, you see, and—’
‘On the contrary, that will be most convenient for our purposes. Since all three of you are involved in this.’
She stood her ground in the doorway for a moment, blocking his entry. Because of the step, she stared straight into his hard grey eyes from no more than two feet. Then she moved aside and allowed the two big men to pass her before she slowly shut the door.
In the elegant drawing room, where Sue Giles had talked to them a week earlier about her relationship with her murdered husband, Colin Pitman and Graham Reynolds sat in armchairs on opposite sides of the fireplace. Pitman was on the edge of his and Reynolds was leaning forward, as though the haulage proprietor and the man who planned to become his son-in-law had been in animated conversation before this unwelcome interruption.
Sue Giles made a brave show at relaxation in the face of this intrusion. ‘Mr Lambert and his Sergeant have something that apparently can’t wait. Perhaps we can deal with it quickly and carry on with your birthday, Dad.’
If it was meant to convey a message to her father, it had the opposite effect from that she intended. A look of puzzlement passed across the broad face of Colin Pitman. Obviously the excuse of a birthday celebration was news to him. A long second passed before he said, ‘Yes. It really isn’t very convenient that you should come here now, Superintendent. But if you must interrupt us, please don’t take any longer than is necessary.’
He was trying to be masterful, as he was used to being in his business. It was curious how words lacked all conviction when the speaker couldn’t muster the right tone, thought Hook.
Lambert, deciding that a man who was normally direct and honest would be most easily discomfited when his lies were exposed, said, ‘I shan’t apologise. That would be absurd, when we have come here to arrest you.’
Sue Giles was the first to recover. ‘That’s ridiculous talk. After my father’s done his very best to cooperate with you, it’s—’
‘On the contrary, he’s fed us a string of lies to try to conceal his true whereabouts on the night of your husband’s murder.’ Lambert had ignored the woman, never taking his eyes from Pitman’s too-revealing face. ‘He told us he was at home on that night. When that was exposed as a lie, he tried to spin us an absurd story about spending the evening in Birmingham with a prostitute.’
Pitman found his tongue at last, knowing he couldn’t let his daughter go on defending him. ‘I was with a tart, Lambert. I told you, I drove round for an hour before I nerved myself to approach her. I’m not proud of it. Why you should come throwing it into my face in front of my daughter I don’t know, but you’d better have good reason.’ His voice was low, gravelly, like that of a mortally sick man.
‘You didn’t drive anywhere, Mr Pitman. Your Jaguar was sitting in your garage when our burglar broke into it. He assured me of that this morning.’
Lambert was almost sorry for this big man who had floundered so far out of his depth. He had subsided into the big chair, a wounded bear who needed to be put out of his misery. He didn’t even try the lame excuse of a hire car. He said dully, repeating a formula which had lost its validity even for him, ‘I was in Birmingham with a tart. You’ll have to find her.’
Lambert said shortly, ‘You were in Killarney with your daughter. Pretending to be this man.’
Graham Reynolds said, ‘I don’t know where you get your information from, Superintendent, but you’d better change your sources. I was at the Lakeside Hotel with Sue on that night. Surely you’ve checked that out.’ He moved across to her, put his arm through hers, as though both of them might gather strength from the contact.
‘Of course we have. We found adjoining rooms were booked in the names of Mrs Giles and Mr Reynolds. Unusually squeamish, that.’
‘That’s our business!’ Sue Giles’s voice was clear, but taut with tension. ‘If you’re going to say I wasn’t in Killarney on the night when Ted died, then you’re—’
‘Oh, you were there all right. But the man in the adjoining room was your father, not Graham Reynolds.’
‘Look, if you’re going to make wild accusations like that, you’d better—’
‘We have a detailed description of the man who was with you from the Irish Gardi. If it should be necessary, the man with you will be formally identified in due course.’
In the pause which followed Lambert’s calm statement, Sue Giles drew in a long breath, mustering further defiance. But before she could utter it, her father, sitting still as a carved image in his armchair, said dully, ‘Leave it, Sue, it’s over. All right, Superintendent, I was the man in Killarney with my daughter that weekend. That’s why I had to tell you such tales. I didn’t enjoy doing that. And I didn’t know Graham was going to kill Giles. And neither did Sue. She—’
‘Shut up, Dad! For Christ’s sake, shut up! Graham didn’t kill Ted. It’s a ridiculous idea!’ She was very shrill now, looking to the man who stood beside her to come in and support her. But Graham Reynolds looked briefly from her to Pitman without a word; then his wide eyes were drawn back to Lambert’s, like a rabbit hypnotised by the stoat which will finish its life. He said nothing.
Lambert looked back at him steadily. ‘It was only today that we established where the killing took place. We know now that the bulb was removed from the outside light over the exit from the flats where Giles lived. He was due to meet Miss Zoe Ross on that Saturday night. You waited outside the flats until he came out to the car park, then killed him from behind by garrotting him with a piece of wire.’
Sue Giles sank down on to a chair, her hand still clinging awkwardly to its contact with her lover as she subsided, until it fell limply to her side. She said, in a voice they could only just catch, ‘Tell him you didn’t do it, Graham.’
Reynolds remained standing. He said bleakly, ‘What’s the use? They have everything they want.’ His previously impassive face broke suddenly into an awful, mirthless smile. ‘Just as that sod Giles had everything I wanted. He made me look a fool in the school, you know. Made me look small in front of the children.’ For a moment, his bitterness made it seem as if he thought that alone was reason enough to kill a man.
Lambert said quietly, ‘I expect Giles also threatened to expose your gambling debts to the powers that be.’
‘Of course he did. When I pressed him to get on with the divorce, he threatened me with that. Said he had religious scruples about divorce because he was brought up as a Catholic. His Church didn’t allow divorce, he said. He laughed about that, said how convenient it was. When I said the law wouldn’t allow him to hold things up indefinitely, he said he’d take Sue for everything he could, that there wouldn’t be much left for me when he’d finished. It was my idea that Sue and her dad would establish an alibi for me, whilst I — whilst I dealt with Giles. They’re not guilty. They didn’t know I was going to kill him.’
A court would need some convincing of that, thought Lambert sourly. He said, ‘You planned this killing very carefully.’ With malice aforethought, in the proper legal phrase, but he wouldn’t risk stopping Reynolds from talking by using it here.
In the way of men who have lost all moral balance, Reynolds seemed for a moment to think he was being flattered. ‘Yes, I suppose I did. I didn’t want my own car to be seen anywhere in the vicinity, but I had a key which would open that scruffy bugger Bass’s old van. I’d tried it a few nights earlier — lots of keys will fit older Fords, you know, but they’ve tightened up now.’ He had almost brightened with this illustration of his ingenuity. ‘I kn
ew he was going out to see Zoe Ross that Saturday night — he’d taunted me with this younger woman when I’d tried to talk to him about Sue’s divorce earlier in the day. I removed the bulb by the back exit from the flats and just waited for him in the dark with my piano wire. It was easy.’
‘Then you left his body face down in Bass’s van for a couple of hours.’ The hypostasis on the front of the corpse was one of the first facts they had been given by forensic.
Reynolds wasn’t surprised by their knowledge: he looked as if he expected them now to know every detail. He said, as if still demonstrating his own thoughtfulness in the matter, ‘I thought at first of dumping him in the Severn. But the roads were quite busy at that time on Saturday night — it couldn’t have been later than half-past eight when I killed him. I drove around for a while, then went into a country pub and had a drink — I left him under an old curtain in the back of the van, but I locked it carefully.’
He looked around the circle of people with an awful smile at this recollection, but did not register the horror-stricken faces of Pitman and his daughter, nor the quiet, attentive eyes of the policemen. ‘I waited until after closing time, then drove to Broughton’s Ash and tipped him over the wall into the churchyard. It must have been around midnight when I got back and put Bass’s van back in the car park of the flats. I walked home from there. I don’t think that dozy sod Bass even realised his van had been taken and returned.’
He looked for a moment as if he expected to be congratulated on his planning and execution of the crime. Then the silence stretched and his face slowly darkened as the enormity of his situation finally sank in. Hook pronounced the words of arrest on the three of them whilst his chief used his radio to call up the car they had left in the road outside.
