by J M Gregson
‘What about motives, beyond the obvious one we mentioned that Jackson seemed anxious to insult everyone in public, whatever their standing in your profession?’
There was again that measured pause. Bert Hook had the sudden, unexpected thought that he wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of this woman who had been his sex symbol when he was a young copper. People didn’t smoke nowadays, but he could picture Sandra Rokeby studying the white smoke rising slowly from a cigarette as she now said coolly, ‘I suppose Ernie Clark is the one who will gain most by this. I expect he’ll take over as the producer of this hugely successful series and make his fortune.’
‘Do you know of any other reason why he would kill Samuel Jackson?’
‘No. And I must emphasize that this is entirely confidential. I’m not trying to incriminate Ernie. I hardly know him – don’t forget that Herefordshire Horrors is my first involvement in the Loxton series. Perhaps people like Martin Buttivant, who’ve been here from the start, can tell you more about the background to what happened yesterday.’
‘Who do you think killed Samuel Jackson?’
‘I don’t know. I shall be interested to see whom you eventually arrest.’
‘Please continue to keep your ears open and give the matter your full thoughts. You’re an intelligent woman, Ms Rokeby, and we shall appreciate your input on this.’
‘A little flattery never goes amiss, chief superintendent, even with a woman like me who claims by now to be immune to it. I shall do as you say.’ She rose and made an exit which was as measured and unhurried as her entry had been.
‘Not stupid, that woman!’ said Bert Hook eventually. He hoped this fairly non-committal comment would show how unaffected he had been by the formidable female presence whose perfume still hung heavily in the murder room.
‘She certainly made an impression on you, Bert.’ Lambert smiled benignly. ‘What we have to decide as suspicious coppers is whether in apparently being so forthcoming she was trying to cover anything up.’
‘I thought she was straightforward and helpful,’ said Hook steadfastly.
‘Did you, indeed? Well, she’s not stupid, then, as you said just now.’
In the privacy of her own caravan, Sandra Rokeby weighed what had happened in the last twenty minutes. She had experience of police investigations, and she knew that these men were shrewd and thorough. But she thought she’d made a decent impression. The important thing was that they hadn’t discovered what she needed to conceal.
EIGHT
Scene of crime and preliminary forensic reports did not offer much beyond what was already obvious.
Samuel Terence Jackson had died by strangulation with his own tie. He had been a strong man and would normally have been expected to offer strong resistance. Though only five feet nine inches (1.73 metres) tall, he had weighed seventeen stones and four pounds (110 kilograms) and been drastically overweight and unfit, with a heart disease of which he had already been warned. He had almost certainly been taken by surprise. His necktie had been swiftly unknotted to allow the two ends to be tightened viciously at the back of his neck. He had died within seconds and without the violent struggle which might have left behind valuable evidence as to his killer. There were neither skin tissue nor hairs beneath the nails of the hands he had no doubt raised in a futile gesture of defence.
Various soil samples had been retrieved from the carpet in the caravan and these were being analysed. Lambert was professionally pessimistic about these. They were probably from elsewhere on the site, but unless they could be tied to particular shoes and particular people they were scarcely evidence. In any case, John Watts had discovered the body and Sandra Rokeby had visited the vehicle, along with God knew how many other people they had not identified as yet. It was possible there might be significant soil residue from the murderer’s shoes, but it would be almost impossible to isolate it. In any case, he or she might by now have disposed of the footwear they had worn at the time of the killing.
Similarly, the team had collected clothing fibres from various fabrics other than those worn by the victim, but there was no guarantee that they had been left there on the morning of the murder. Since this caravan had been hardly used, it had not been cleaned for two days before the hour of Jackson’s death, so various people could have been there quite legitimately, even if the fibres could be identified.
Two blond hairs had been found on the chest of the corpse and carefully preserved; if a leading suspect was identified and a DNA sample secured, these could be tied to the person involved. But presence would only be significant if it had been previously denied. Lambert had a strong suspicion these hairs had come from the head of Sandra Rokeby, who had already told them quite willingly that she had visited a healthy Jackson in the hours before his death. She might have lied, as anyone else they spoke to might lie, but they would have to expose the lies before such things became relevant, even as supplementary evidence.
Forensic experts always emphasize that there is ‘an exchange’ between murderer and victim at a murder scene, that however careful the murderer may be, he leaves something of himself behind. This is almost invariably true, as retrieval techniques become more and more sophisticated and the most minute traces can be identified and investigated. But two of the major problems of detection are to pin the evidence to the particular person involved and the time to the moment when the crime took place. It looked as if that would be exceptionally difficult in this case.
Without Sam Jackson’s capacity for causing alarm and dissension among the people he employed, location filming went smoothly and comfortably. Such, at any rate, was the not entirely unbiased verdict of Ernie Clark, his deputy producer, and John Watts, his director. The day passed almost entirely without raised voices on the site.
They got through a full schedule of filming and were even able to catch up on some of the scenes which had perforce been aborted on the first gloomy day of location shooting. The two men congratulated each other on the progress made and on the better atmosphere they fancied now existed both among the cast and among the much larger and more varied body of technical staff which supported them.
Clark and Watts were certainly right about the major members of the cast. They were much more relaxed with each other without the tension Jackson had brought with his every visit. Now that Jackson’s threats and insults had been so abruptly removed, people found themselves reacting to each other rather than to that baleful presence. Two of his major players determined to have an evening together, a thing they would not have risked had the late producer of Herefordshire Horrors still been around.
Martin Buttivant and Sandra Rokeby had worked with each other for much longer than most of their fellow actors realized. They had known each other more intimately, too, in the past, though the experiments of youth were now well behind them. But there usually remains an indefinable closeness about former lovers, especially when they have parted on good terms, as these two had.
They were in the same hotel as the others, but they met for a drink in the bar and booked a late dinner, to make sure that their privacy would not be disturbed by the bonhomie of their colleagues. Sandra refused more than one drink in this preliminary session, then studied her companion surreptitiously as he sipped a second gin and tonic. ‘Did drink ever become a problem, Martin?’ she asked him frankly.
Martin smiled that slightly crooked smile which was his public trademark; it now came automatically to him. ‘It threatened to, for a while. There were a couple of years after we finished our liaison when it might have done. But I couldn’t honestly claim that it was the heartbreak of losing you.’
‘You wouldn’t be believed if you did. And it’s much better not to try. You were never much good at keeping secrets from me.’
He grinned affectionately now. ‘You were far too good at seeing through bullshit. That’s probably why we didn’t last. I’ve got better at bullshit since then.’
‘There were other reasons. I wasn’t as promis
cuous as the press liked to imply, but I never claimed fidelity was my strong point. I was convent-educated, as they loved to point out. I felt I had a lot of catching up to do.’
‘It didn’t do your career any harm.’
Now she grinned, not at all insulted by the implications of this. ‘You can choose your partners with discretion without being a complete tart. But you need to think hard before you jump into bed with people. Sometimes mere flirting and the promise of things to come was enough to get me what I wanted, in those days. People seem to expect more for their favours nowadays. Fortunately for me, I’m in a much stronger position to pick and choose than in my early days.’
Martin smiled at her honesty. ‘That doesn’t say much for me, does it? I was one of your early choices.’
‘You were one of my prehistoric choices, my love. You belong to those innocent days before calculation entered into bedding decisions.’
‘I expect Sam Jackson was still anxious to bed you, even when he took you on for this.’ The mention of that name spelled a return to the real business of the evening, understood but not voiced so far by either of them.
‘He was. He got the politest brush-off I could give him.’
‘I expect he told you that you wouldn’t be getting more money or more work from him.’
Sandra knew when he said that that he’d had the same threats as her. They went into dinner now, taking their time over their orders for starters and main course, each thinking furiously about what they would say to a former lover. Both of them thought nostalgically of that time which now seemed to belong to another life, where they had thought only of each other and the physical ecstasy their bodies brought to each other. A vanished innocence which could never be recovered. But with innocence there had been vulnerability and other forms of damage. Both of them had needed to acquire a carapace of experience and calculation quickly, in order to survive in this glamorous but ruthless world of stage and television.
It was only as a part of fencing for position, of playing for time, that Martin said with casual vehemence, ‘Sam was a bastard.’
‘An absolute bastard.’ She moved a fork beside her plate half an inch left and said as quietly as if it had been a comment on the food, ‘I’m glad he’s gone.’ She glanced up into the suddenly anxious face on the other side of the table and said, ‘He knew all about us, didn’t he?’
‘He knew about our early affair, yes.’ Even now, Martin wanted to be absolutely certain before he committed himself absolutely.
‘He knew more than that, didn’t he? He knew exactly how we met and what we did.’ There was a trace of irritation in Sandra’s voice; Martin was not being as frank as she felt she had already been with him.
‘Yes, he did. He knew all about our first professional engagement. Well, mine, anyway. You were already earning good money by then.’
Sandra smiled wryly. ‘Good Page Three money. Good top-shelf, girlie magazine money. I wanted to get into acting and I wasn’t RADA-trained like you.’
Was there a hint of resentment there, he wondered, an assertion that she hadn’t had the chances he had and was therefore less guilty in what they had done? After all this time, they had much better be frank with each other. ‘Sam knew about the soft-porn movie, yes.’
He’d voiced it at last, where she would have been prepared to talk about it twenty minutes ago, if she’d only received an answering frankness. But he had more to lose than she had, she acknowledged to herself now. He was a bigger star than her, with a different image. If it became public, people would say they would have half-expected it of her, but were shocked that Martin Buttivant should be involved in something like that. The public could be quite startlingly naïve at times. She said comfortingly, ‘We used completely different names and we were paid a pittance. The sex was simulated for the most part, wasn’t it? Compared with the hard-porn stuff that’s openly retailed now, it was almost innocent.’
‘All true. And all irrelevant, as far as Sam Jackson was concerned. He knew what the release of the facts would do to our images.’
‘And he made it quite clear to me that he would release the facts whenever it suited him.’ Sandra’s face set in unwontedly hard lines at the memory.
‘Me too. He’d no intention of doing anything immediately, because the Ben Loxton series was making him a fortune and he wanted me to feature in it for as long as it was successful. But he was already blackmailing me, in effect. He’d made it clear there would be no rise in salary, however successful the series. If I contested that, he would be happy to release what he called “our little scandal” to the right people at the time of maximum damage for me.’
They changed the subject then, having confirmed what both of them had long suspected, Jackson’s knowledge of that enterprise and intention to use it against them when it suited him. They made happier conversation through the rest of their dinner, recalling past times, exchanging humorous stage anecdotes, laughing over some of the many outlandish characters with which their profession was peppered. They relaxed more thoroughly than either of them would have thought possible, though questions and conjectures about the future crowded their minds, and the death which had provoked this meeting was never far from their thoughts.
They were indoor creatures, both of them, used to crowded green rooms and frenzied exchanges within them. But tonight they felt a need for fresh air, for the freer reaches of the natural world outside the restaurant. It was a comfortable hotel on a fine site, as was fitting for the leading cast members in a successful series. It afforded privacy and it was in a secluded place, looking over one of the country’s most picturesque rivers, the Wye.
The river was sixty feet beneath them now as they wandered for a quarter of a mile along the deserted lane beside it. It was a still and warm late-spring night; the soft air was welcome on their faces after the heat of the restaurant. Martin took Sandra’s hand, then after a hundred yards slid his arm round her waist. ‘Like old times!’ he murmured softly.
Yet each of them knew that it was not. Too much water had flowed under too many bridges since they had been young and foolish together. They were older and wiser now, necessarily so. But in these magic moments beneath the stars, they regretted the passing of that innocence which they had relinquished together so readily all those years ago. It was so still here that they could clearly hear the noise of the river, running softly over the stones beneath them. As their eyes grew ever more accustomed to the night, the clear crescent moon and the stars threw up the white of the foam beneath them as the water surged over the occasional protruding stone. The waters from Monday’s prolonged downpour were still pouring down here from the Welsh hills and the river was flowing surprisingly swiftly on this calm, warm night.
‘Do you think Sam would really have done that to us?’ asked Martin Buttivant suddenly. It was the first time they had spoken of the man in two hours.
‘You know he would,’ said Sandra Rokeby softly. Men were always less clear-sighted than women, she thought. Or was that just this man and this woman? ‘Jackson was a bastard. Once he had no further use for us, he’d have delighted in humiliating us like that, even if there was no monetary gain in it for him. He enjoyed spoiling other people’s lives. It emphasized his power; he was prepared to do anything to show the power he had.’
Martin squeezed her waist, wishing he could lighten things again. It didn’t seem right to be exploring such evil in these wonderful surroundings. He turned her gently and they set off back towards the hotel, walking even more slowly in an attempt to prolong the magic of the setting. Both of them knew that this evening wouldn’t go any further, that they would separate when they reached the entrance to the hotel. This part of their lives had ended a long time ago.
But each of them felt an enormous relief that Samuel Terence Jackson had now been dispatched from those lives.
Lambert and Hook were in the murder room early on Thursday morning, well before any location filming had begun at the Herefordshire site. Detecti
ve Inspector Chris Rushton was there even earlier. He had collated all the statements acquired on the previous day and provided the chief and his bagman with all the background information he could on the two major players they had yet to see.
They elected to interview David Deeney before Sir Bradley Morton, since they were told that he was likely to be the busier of the two actors during the day to come. Deeney paused in the doorway to assess his opponents and the set-up in this room, weighing them coolly and without embarrassment, pausing a little before he took the chair they indicated, as if it were he and not they who was arranging the physical set-up of this meeting. This was what actors called stage presence, Bert Hook supposed, that intangible but essential part of a stage performer’s equipment.
It was a little disconcerting, almost a reversal of the normal order of things as far as senior CID personnel were concerned. They were used to ordinary members of the public being a little overawed by the processes of detection, a little disconcerted by the fact the Lambert and Hook studied them without reservation, watching their every move and their every reaction. Middle-class members of the public, in particular, were accustomed to different social mores; they did not expect their every twitch to be monitored and recorded. In their everyday lives, that was hardly good manners. And it was surely rude to stare.
There was none of this social sensitivity with actors. They studied you and made no secret of attempting to divine what you were thinking and where you intended to go. And David Deeney, a quiet-looking man with a neat, conventional hairstyle and brown, unblinking eyes, a physically unstriking man, was no exception. He was assessing them as coolly as they were weighing him. Or at least that was how it appeared to Lambert: it might have been no more than the actor’s habit.
