Skeleton Plot

by J M Gregson

  ‘Sounds almost like a threat to a police officer, that, Steve. We’ll overlook it, because you seem to be getting quite overwrought. But we need to ask these things, because we know that Liam was quite a violent lad when he was twenty, don’t we? Given to outbursts of violence – fact, that is, not an attempt to sully his memory. Several brushes with the police at that time, hadn’t he? Several episodes of violence with other young men of his age and persuasion. The police in Gloucester and surrounding areas have them well documented.’

  ‘It wasn’t Liam who killed the girl.’ Steve forced himself to keep his lips tight and offer them no more than a simple denial.

  Hook smiled at him, as if he knew the processes of his mind and was amused by them. ‘There were two lads of the same age at the neighbouring farm, weren’t there, Steve? And we know that at least one and possibly both of them were rather keen on Julie Grimshaw. Source of conflict with Liam, that would be. Young, red-blooded men with pricks ruling their brains, and a predilection to solve things with fists or bottles or knives. Recipe for disaster, that can be. Certainly was, in Julie’s case.’

  ‘Julie Grimshaw wasn’t killed with a knife.’

  Hook raised his eyebrows elaborately. ‘Know that, do you, Steve? Well, it’s most interesting for us to discover that you’re aware of the killer’s modus operandi.’ The police press release hadn’t detailed the method by which the victim had died. There’d been speculation in the popular press about blows to the head with a blunt instrument, but Bert wasn’t going to concede that.

  Williams remained tight-lipped while they studied his reaction in detail. Eventually he repeated his mantra doggedly. ‘Liam didn’t do this.’

  Hook glanced at Lambert. ‘I suppose that if we stretch our credulity to its outer limits, sir, we could consider it possible that Liam killed the girl without his dear old dad knowing anything about it. Perhaps the girl gave him his marching orders and he didn’t take kindly to it. Perhaps he reacted violently to something not going his way, as we know from several other incidents he could do. Perhaps his dad and his mum knew nothing about it at the time.’

  Lambert weighed the possibility and pursed his lips. ‘Doesn’t seem likely though, DS Hook, does it? It’s very possible that Liam killed the girl as you suggest, but hardly likely that his criminal father wouldn’t have known about it.’

  Williams could stand the taunting speculation no longer. ‘Liam didn’t kill the fucking girl! And neither did I, you fucking bastards!’

  ‘This man’s losing his head a little now, wouldn’t you say, DS Hook? Deterioration in language usually means that a guilty man is losing it, in my experience.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of this!’ The big man levered himself clumsily to his feet. ‘You can fucking well—’

  ‘Sit down, Williams!’ Lambert’s command was like the crack of a whip in the quiet, claustrophobic room. ‘We haven’t finished with you yet. You walk out of here and we’ll record the exact circumstances in which you left. With your record, it won’t look good. It might almost be a confession of guilt. We’d like that.’

  Williams lowered himself back on to the seat in slow motion, his look of steady hatred fixed on Lambert. ‘You’re going to force me to bring in my brief.’

  An empty threat, and all three of them knew it. He hadn’t been charged with any offence, and he was experienced enough to keep quiet if he felt threatened without the need for a lawyer to tell him. Lambert positively beamed at him, genuinely enjoying the discomfort of a man who had given him much grief over the years. ‘You’re free to bring in your brief whenever you feel you need him, Williams. I’m no legal expert, but it strikes me that you might need legal advice very soon now.’ His expression changed to hostility in a single second. ‘You visited your old heavy Jack Dutton last week.’

  Williams was shaken, despite his knowledge of the police machine. Had they put a tail on him? He didn’t think so, but it was disconcerting to find that they knew so much about his movements. ‘The poor bugger was dying. Are you saying I’m not allowed to visit an old mate on his deathbed?’

  ‘You are allowed to move freely, at the moment. Hospice visiting and charitable impulses haven’t been your things in the past, though, have they? Any change of habit at your time of life is likely to excite police interest. That’s one of the penalties of being a criminal celebrity, Steve.’

  ‘Jack’s dead now. Let him rest in peace.’

  ‘Yes. Died the day after you saw him, didn’t he? Before he could be questioned about the reason for your visit.’

  ‘I like to look after my employees, when they’ve given good service. Jack had done that for many years.’

  ‘Yes. He’d beaten up a lot of people in his time, hadn’t he? And supervised the beatings of many more, when you put him in charge of your muscle. One or two deaths over those years, which we never managed to pin on him. Loan sharks like you rely a lot on muscle, don’t you, Steve?’

  ‘Piss off, Lambert.’

  ‘But you’re not well known as a visitor of the sick. Acts of mercy aren’t part of your repertoire. It makes curious CID men wonder, when you break your normal routine. When we find you racing to offer financial support to Steve’s widow, it makes us even more curious. Suspicious, in fact.’

  ‘None of your bloody business what I do with my bloody money.’ Williams snarled a token defiance.

  ‘There’s a lot of blood smearing your money, Steve. But you don’t normally throw it at former employees and their families. That makes us wonder whether you’re trying to ensure that mouths remain shut. And our particular concern is whether mouths are remaining shut when they might be telling us things about the death and burial of Julie Grimshaw.’

  ‘I look after the people who work for me.’

  ‘But you don’t, you see, Steve. This is a very notable exception to your usual practice. As such, it merits our full and diligent attention.’

  ‘I come in here to offer you my full and voluntary cooperation and this is the thanks I get! This is the last—’

  ‘No! You came here to prevent us visiting you at home, Williams! But be assured, if you have any connection with this death, we’re going to find the evidence which will convince any court in the land. You’ve got away with murder in the past – literally. You won’t get away with this one.’

  Bert Hook thought that he had never seen John Lambert breathing quite so heavily.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘I think I could get quite interested in churches, if I had the time to study them.’

  It wasn’t a line Kate Clark had ever envisaged uttering to Harry Purcell. She had breathed all sorts of passionate things into his ears, revealed all sorts of intimate secrets about herself, when they had held each other hard during the long nights of sex. But she had never thought that she would reveal to him this conventional, middle-class interest of hers in churches and cathedrals.

  His reply was just as unforeseen. He smiled at her and said, ‘I could probably teach you a little, if you promise not to be over-critical. I’m not too hot on dates, but I know a little about the development of church architecture. My dad was a vicar, you know.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know. You have hidden depths, Harry Purcell.’ She reached up and took his arm, giving it an affectionate squeeze as they walked round the back of the fourteenth-century church and through its ancient graveyard. ‘There are all sorts of things I don’t know about you – and you about me, I suppose. We neither of us reveal much about ourselves, except when we’re …’

  ‘Except when we’re rogering each other like there’s no tomorrow, you mean?’ said Harry. He gave her a small, affectionate peck on top of her well-groomed head as they moved among the moss-covered gravestones.

  Kate was a little shocked by his language, out here in broad daylight and in this innocent setting. But she liked his affectionate little peck and she liked the strange softness and innocence of the day they were enjoying together. Without considering the implications she found
herself saying, ‘We should get to know each other much better.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ said Harry. It was equally spontaneous. He’d been content to hold much of himself back until now and also to leave much of this interesting and powerful woman unexplored. It was part of modern life, he supposed: you knew the intimate recesses of each other’s bodies before you’d troubled to explore the recesses of the minds which operated them. It had been exactly the opposite for the dead father he had just mentioned and the mother who was now stricken with Alzheimer’s and did not recognize him. He hadn’t been born until they were forty-one and his parents had always seemed to him to inhabit an earlier and very different world.

  He and Kate had agreed a month earlier that they’d take this Monday off work and have a day together. It had seemed a good idea when they were snatching a hurried breakfast after a night together. It had been an unspoken recognition that there should be more than sex in their relationship, a mutual agreement that they wanted to know more of each other. In the weeks which followed that hasty early-morning decision each of them had had second thoughts about the arrangement to spend this day together. But how did you call it off, without implying that you had doubts about the relationship?

  Now both were glad that they’d carried it through. For two workaholics, they were making quite a fair shot at a day of leisure. They’d forbidden the word ‘unwinding’ after both of them had used it during the first hour of this strange day. The church had been a good idea. They’d just seen it as they were driving past and Harry had swung the Audi into the deserted parking area. They’d been able to get in and look round, because a woman had been cleaning the altar brasses. She’d told them a little about the history of church and village, becoming shyly proud of her knowledge as Kate asked her a couple of intelligent questions about Reformation priests and Victorian architectural alterations. She turned to look back at the weathered stones above them as they reached the wicket gate. She looked up at Harry and said, ‘I’m glad we stopped here.’

  ‘It wasn’t planned. It was just an impulse as we were driving past.’

  It sounded almost like an apology, she thought. It was as if he was diffident about involving a woman of her stature and influence in anything as petty as an unscheduled visit to a quiet country church. Was that how he thought of her, she wondered? As some kind of empress who should not have to suffer the distractions of ordinary life? As a woman who dropped her inhibitions and became a mating animal in bed, but must otherwise be respected, not loved?

  Kate Clark felt suddenly very lonely. The isolation she normally cherished and preserved for herself seemed now not a claim to privacy but a sort of imprisonment. She wanted someone to talk to about the trials of work, the petty day-to- day conflicts, the small triumphs and the occasional defeats. Above all, she wanted to have someone to confide in about the events of the last week; about the police and the way they were pressing her; about those half-forgotten days in the squat; about the girl who had slept beside her and was now dead.

  Kate glanced at Harry Purcell. He was looking at her speculatively as he fastened his seat belt. He was probably wondering what she was thinking. If he only knew, he might be looking to dump her at the first opportunity! She said, ‘I know a nice pub by the river for lunch, if I can still find it.’

  The country lanes gave her a little difficulty, but she managed to direct him to it. It was a few miles above Ross-on-Wye, beside a secluded stretch of one of Britain’s loveliest rivers. It was warm enough to sit outside and look over this wide, quiet reach of the Wye. They had soup and home-made rolls and continued the unwinding they weren’t allowed to mention. She’d asked for bitter beer and he’d ordered her a pint, like his, and then said she looked very small behind it.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a pint before!’ Kate said. She took a large pull at it and tried to belch like a man, but couldn’t quite manage it. They both dissolved into laughter and as that subsided she found that he’d stretched his arm across the table and taken her hand in his. She looked into the deep brown of his pupils and said, ‘You have nice eyes, Harry. I’ve never really studied them before.’

  He looked at her but didn’t say anything. He was searching for words which would not come to him. He looked down at the river beneath them, feeling privileged to have this spot to themselves at this quiet Monday lunchtime. Save for a tiny eddy near a bend a hundred yards above them you could hardly detect movement on the surface. Eventually he said, ‘There’s something reassuring about water, don’t you think? This stretch of river we can see was here long before we came, and will be here long after we have gone. That puts our petty concerns into proportion.’

  ‘We need to talk, Harry.’

  ‘That sounds ominous. Are you telling me you’re going to ditch me?’ But he didn’t sound threatened.

  She smiled, looking, like him, at the river and thinking of his words. ‘No. I don’t want to ditch you. And I hope you don’t want to ditch me. Rather the reverse, if anything.’ She was grateful for the reassuring squeeze from his hand. ‘When I say we should talk, I suppose I really mean I should talk. There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, Harry.’

  ‘And a lot you don’t know about me. Is this going to be confession time?’

  He was joking, but confession time was exactly what she’d been thinking about. She felt the need for someone to talk to about her and Julie and what had happened to them, even more desperately than she had earlier. Before it was too late. She’d never thought of it like that before. She might need the help and support and love of someone as the police closed in upon her. And Harry was not just the only person available, but the one she now knew she wanted as her confidant. She said, with a tremor she could hear in her voice, ‘I did things a long time ago which will shock you, Harry. I think I’m ready to talk about them, if you can endure hearing what I have to say.’

  ‘Is this where we get the bit about the shoplifting? Was it lollipops or lipsticks or meat pies?’ He was trying hard to make a joke of this, because it was the only reaction he could think of. But he knew even as he spoke that it was the wrong reaction. ‘Sorry! If this is about other men, I shan’t be shocked. And I’ll tell you all about my other women, if you really want to hear about them.’

  ‘This isn’t about previous partners, Harry. We’re neither of us angels, but those kinds of things won’t shock us. This will.’

  He felt a small dark cloud descending upon his bright day. ‘How long ago was this?’

  ‘Twenty years ago.’ She was glad of the question, leading her into what she needed to say. There was no going back now.

  He said very quietly, ‘That’s when that girl died. The skeleton that they discovered last weekend.’

  ‘Yes. It’s about that. Julie, she was called. We were in a squat together. In Gloucester. We were friends. We were as close as it gets, in squats.’

  She spat out the phrases, each one a fact which she had previously suppressed, each sibilant hissing the squalor she had previously concealed. She felt curiously detached, as if she was hearing someone else say these things. She was going to tell Harry everything now. They would know each other much better, after she had told him. She wondered quite how shocked he was going to be.

  Andrew Burrell had chosen to meet the CID men in his flat. He didn’t want them coming to see him again at the university. That would invite gossip at best, and speculation and suspicion among colleagues and students at worst. ‘I’m free from three o’clock on Monday. I’d prefer to see you at home rather than at my place of work.’ He gave them the address and cursed himself for sounding defensive as he did so.

  He arrived home with just ten minutes to spare before they were due to arrive. He raced round the place trying to remove all traces of Clare Sutton and the fact that she had spent the night here. Even as he did so he told himself that he was being ridiculously defensive. His private life was no concern of theirs and they wouldn’t and shouldn’t be interested in it. Yet he f
elt that when they’d seen him six days ago they’d been interested in everything about him, and every extra fact they’d discovered about him had seemed to weaken his position in their eyes. He put the picture of the two children he scarcely saw since his divorce prominently on top of the television as his badge of respectability.

  In 1995 he’d been the close friend and would-be partner of a girl who’d lived in a squat and who’d been the subject of dispute between him and his parents, between him and Jim Simmons, between him and others of whom he hoped they still knew nothing. And all that was left of Julie Grimshaw, that girl whom twenty years ago he had thought he loved, were the bones they had dug up last week. The girl he had thought was out of his life for ever had re-entered it forcefully. He tried not to picture what her head must have looked like when it had come out of the earth at what had once been Lower Valley Farm.

  It was Lambert and Hook again, the senior men. He must be a leading suspect. Of course he must, he told himself firmly. It was only natural that they should consider him such when he had been so close to Julie at the time of her death. Nothing to wonder at in that. He wondered who else they had in the frame for this. Who and how many? But they wouldn’t tell him that. They’d let him think he was their only suspect, the bastards.

  Police had always been bastards, in those days twenty years ago. They’d always been the opposition when he was a young man, the enemy who regarded everything you did with suspicion. But they hadn’t discovered that Julie had been murdered, had they? Not until some gardener turned the evidence up and set it before them. The bastards weren’t as clever as they’d always pretended they were. Andrew Burrell determined to keep that idea in his head when he talked to them today.

  His resolution didn’t hold for very long. It ebbed away from the moment when Lambert stood in his doorway, almost touching the top of it, and said, ‘We know a lot more now than when we spoke to you last Tuesday, Mr Burrell.’ It was voiced like an accusation, Andrew thought.