More Than Meets the Eye

by J M Gregson

  At this moment of collective professional dejection, there was a discreet knock at the door. A young woman DC entered uncertainly, as if she expected to be castigated for her interruption. ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir, but we thought you should have this. It was left at the entrance office, where the post is delivered. But it wasn’t part of the post.’

  A small white envelope, with the words ‘CID OFFICER IN CHARGE’, in carefully printed capitals. Lambert slit it open and extracted an innocent-looking, soft-backed black notebook. Inside the cover, he read the neatly penned words. ‘Strictly Private. Property of Dennis Cooper.’

  She’d never rung him at work before. That was something they’d agreed as part of a policy of secrecy. But Peter was free, without a partner to deceive, as she had.

  Alison Cooper realized with a profound sense of shock that she was now in the same position as Peter Nayland: she no longer needed to lie to a partner. It was surely a wonderful thing to be free to acknowledge openly her relationship with Peter. But she mustn’t do that yet. She must wait until this huge fuss over Dennis’s death was over and the police went away. No sense in attracting their attention, when they were searching for a killer.

  Twice she picked up the phone and put it down again without dialling. She was nervous when it came to the point. Yet she felt an overwhelming need to speak to the man with whom she now planned to spend the rest of her life. That is what she wanted to do. She was sure of it now and she needed Peter to know that. She also needed to hear him declare again that he also wanted it.

  She succeeded in tapping in the number at her third attempt. The phone was answered immediately and she told the strange voice firmly that she wished to speak to Mr Nayland.

  The PA’s voice was professionally alert, not bored as it might have been after doing this hundreds of times before. ‘I’m afraid Mr Nayland is in a meeting. May I take a message?’

  ‘No, I need to speak to him personally.’

  ‘As I say, that isn’t possible at the moment. May I tell him who called?’

  ‘Tell him it’s Alison. It’s – it’s a family matter.’ Ally smiled nervously in the privacy of her room. Let the woman think she was a sister.

  Peter Nayland rang back within five minutes. ‘How’d it go?’

  She pictured him at his big desk, issuing orders and receiving bulletins from the staff she had never seen and probably never would see, in that business world which both of them had found convenient to leave very vague. ‘The police thing? It went all right, I think. I played the grieving widow as we agreed. They were quite sympathetic.’

  ‘Good. They didn’t know anything about me?’

  ‘No. I’m sure they’d have raised it, if they had.’

  ‘Good. Let’s keep it that way. It’s better for all concerned that we keep the police out of our affairs.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘No suppose about it.’ He spoke sharply. ‘I’ve found over the years that the less the police know about things, the better. They poke their noses into all kinds of things, once they find an excuse.’

  She tried to make this lighter. ‘But you’ve never been involved in a murder investigation before, have you, my darling?’

  ‘Do you think they’ve finished with you now?’

  She had hoped for comfort, perhaps for a little laughter together, but he was forcing her to confront the death she had been trying to put aside. ‘Perhaps not. They did say they might want to speak to me again. When they’d interviewed other people and knew more about this crime, I think they said.’

  ‘Just keep quiet, then. Keep your eyes and your ears open and your mouth shut. Pick up whatever you can, but keep a low profile.’

  He spoke almost as though he knew she was guilty. Alison said, ‘I need to see you, Peter.’

  ‘Better not, for the moment.’

  His answer had been immediate and firm. She said, ‘I feel very lonely here.’

  ‘I can appreciate that. But it’s much better that we don’t meet for a while.’

  ‘So that you can stay out of it altogether, you mean?’ It was almost an accusation. They were arguing, when she had rung him for reassurance, for a scrap of the love which would enable her to get through this.

  ‘I thought we’d agreed on that. I thought we’d agreed that it was much better that the police knew nothing at all about us. I can’t afford to become a suspect, Ally.’

  She wondered for a moment why that should be. But at least he’d used her name for the first time. She said reluctantly, ‘I know you’re right. It makes sense. But I feel hemmed in here. I needed to hear your voice, my darling.’

  There was a silence, long enough for her to think for an awful moment that the line had gone dead. Then he said, ‘And it’s good to hear you, Ally. And I’m longing to see you, my love. Believe me, I’m missing you and looking forward to holding you in my arms, once the time is right.’

  ‘And when will that be?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, Ally. It’s out of our hands. Perhaps when they’ve arrested someone else for Dennis’s murder. Perhaps when they’ve given up hope and gone away.’

  ‘I need you, Peter. More than I ever thought I would.’ Perhaps an independent woman shouldn’t be saying that, but she didn’t give a damn.

  ‘And I need you, Ally. But once this is over, we’ll have the rest of our lives together. Let’s not do anything to jeopardize that.’

  She made herself smile, forced herself to say, ‘I expect you’re right, as usual. In fact I know you are, really.’

  ‘I am about this, my darling. It’s best not to start any gossip, believe me. The police pick up on things like that. And it’s best that you don’t ring me here. I’ll ring you, during the evening. In two or three days.’

  ‘Promise?’

  She tried to make it sound light, even girlish. It was only after she’d put the phone down that she thought Peter Nayland seemed to know an awful lot about police procedures.

  He’d had a leisurely shower before putting on the clean clothes he sorely needed. He looked in the mirror before he went to meet them. Alex Fraser was shocked by the face he saw there. It looked very white and drawn beneath the familiar fiery red of his newly washed hair.

  They were the two pigs he’d played golf with at Ross-on-Wye. Alex wasn’t surprised, as he’d heard they were heading the murder team. He’d seen them about the place before his hasty departure from Westbourne.

  Rather to his surprise, it was the burly detective sergeant rather than the chief super who began the exchanges. ‘You didn’t do yourself any good, lad, disappearing like that.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I needed to talk to a friend.’

  ‘And you haven’t any friends here?’

  ‘Not friends like Ken. Ken dragged me out of the swamp. Ken believes in me. Ken got me the job here. I trust him.’

  ‘You were in care, weren’t you, Alex?’

  This must be the good-cop bad-cop act. He knew what they were up to, didn’t he? They wouldn’t fool him. But the broad, tanned face seemed genuinely interested in his tale. ‘I was in a council home from the age of thirteen. And in trouble. Petty thieving, bits of fighting. Ken Jackson stuck with me. Ken got me the job with the Glasgow Parks Department.’

  ‘And from that you got your job here.’

  ‘Yes. Ken Jackson helped me with that, too. He wrote me a reference. I think he spoke on the phone to the people who gave me the apprenticeship.’

  ‘I see. Do you like your job here, Alex?’

  He’d tried to guess what they would ask him, but he’d never thought it would be this. There surely couldn’t be any trap for him here. ‘I love it. I’m desperate to keep it. I want to stay on here at the end of the year, if there’s a vacancy. But they usually only keep one of the apprentices, Mr Hartley says.’

  ‘And if you’re not that one, will you stay in horticulture?’

  ‘Yes. It’s what I want to do. I didn’t know that. When I first went to the parks dep
artment in Glasgow, it was just a job. But then I got interested in plants and how things grow. Now I know how the different soils work and how to propagate plants. I want to go on learning. I want to make it my life’s work, if I can.’

  He was earnest, even slightly ridiculous, in his desire to convince them. His enthusiasm seemed inappropriate in this raw product of a great city, who spoke still with the quick, harsh accent of Glasgow. Lambert couldn’t remember when he had last heard a young man so impassioned about horticulture. Another first, even at this late stage in his detective career.

  He spoke for the first time. ‘Golf and gardening. Two unusual ways for a young man to seek a way out of his troubles.’

  Fraser was immediately cautious. This was the hard-cop bit. They’d softened him up, made him expose his weakness with this unexpected talk about his work. Now the old bugger would go for him. He’d quite liked them both in the clubhouse at Ross, where they hadn’t seemed like filth at all. But golf clubhouses were odd places; real life was suspended there. They’d show their real faces here, in this room everyone on the site was now calling the murder room.

  Alex said carefully, ‘I’ve been lucky. Lucky to find a sport I’m good at and work I like. Lucky because I had Ken Jackson on my side.’

  ‘Indeed. I agree with all of that. What I find difficult to comprehend is why you should risk all this by reverting to violence.’

  For an awful moment, Alex thought they were accusing him of murder. Then he told himself that they couldn’t be speaking of that, that it would be foolish of him even to show that he had thought they might be. He said woodenly, repeating the phrases he’d used to the police in Cheltenham, ‘You mean that rumble last week. I didn’t start that. I was drawn into it. We were attacked by another gang when we came out of the pub. We’d have gone home quietly without that.’

  ‘Home in your case being here.’

  ‘Yes. We had a taxi laid on. I’d only gone to the rave because two of my mates here asked me to. It was just a twenty-first birthday party. In no way were we looking for trouble.’

  ‘Yet you went fully prepared for it. You armed yourself with illegal weaponry.’

  Alex Fraser sighed. ‘The knuckledusters. It always comes back to that with you lot, doesn’t it?’ He was suddenly transformed from the horticultural zealot of a moment ago to a whining old lag, his thin features contorted with the weight of the wrongs visited upon him by an uncaring society.

  Lambert said sharply, ‘Not just us lot, Mr Fraser. The rest of the world will require an answer. Premeditated violence, the lawyers and the rest of us will say. Why else arm yourself with knuckledusters for a night out?’

  It was the question he’d been asking himself ever since that fateful night. There was no convincing answer to it, of course. ‘It was just habit. A bad habit, I admit. When ye went out into the Gorbals or any other part of Glasgow ye went prepared to defend yourself. I did the same thing in Cheltenham.’

  ‘And inflicted serious injuries on two men there.’

  ‘Two buggers who attacked me. They were the ones who premeditated violence.’

  ‘And you’re the one with the history of it. Nearly killed a lad of sixteen.’

  ‘That was in the old days. I was sixteen myself and ye were well used to violence. Ye didn’t give a lot of thought to it. It was the survival of the fittest. That’s what Ken Jackson said when he spoke for me in court.’

  It was a tale they’d heard often enough before. A man handy with his fists who claimed he had to be. A man prepared to use any means to come out on top in a rough world, where only the quickest and most ruthless survived. Lambert looked at the now animated features steadily for a moment. ‘Did you kill Dennis Cooper, Alex?’

  He gasped. It was the first time the older man had used his forename, and the sudden switch to the reason why he was here took him by surprise. ‘No! Why would I have done that?’

  ‘I was hoping you would tell us that, Alex. Because he was the man who held your future in his hands, perhaps? The man who had the power to deny you this future in the gardening world which you’ve just told us you passionately want? Had Mr Cooper said that in view of what had happened in Cheltenham you wouldn’t be offered permanent work here?’

  ‘No. There was none of that.’

  ‘Then why sneak away from here like a thief in the night before we could question you? Why attract attention to yourself?? Wouldn’t the normal action have been to keep your head down and get on with your work here?’

  Fraser had kept his hands scrupulously still throughout. He was a veteran of police interrogation at the age of twenty, and one of his briefs had told him years ago that it was a good thing to control your hands. It showed them you were calm and unruffled, whatever you were really feeling on the inside. Now his control suddenly broke and he thrust both hands upwards, over the prickles of his short red hair. ‘I needed someone I could talk to. Someone I could trust. There was no one like that round here. I needed Ken Jackson.’

  ‘So you shot off from here during the night, without a word to anyone. What advice did Mr Jackson have to offer you?’

  ‘He said the things you’ve been saying – that it would look bad and I shouldn’t have gone up there. So I had a few hours sleep and then came straight back. Arrived here at four o’clock. The bike did well.’

  With this touching but irrelevant tribute to his machine, he looked suddenly completely exhausted. Lambert nodded to Hook, who said, ‘Where were you on Sunday night, Alex?’

  ‘Sunday?’ He looked totally bewildered. He had lost all sense of time with his hours of racing through the summer darkness on two wheels. ‘Oh, that’s when it happened, isn’t it? When Cooper was killed. I was in my room. Reading, I think. I’d played golf at Ross, earlier in the day, before the rain came.’

  ‘Is there anyone who can confirm your whereabouts on Sunday night for us?’

  ‘You don’t believe what I’ve told you, do you? That’s because of what I’ve done in the past, not what I am now.’

  Hook said with a professional weariness, ‘We’ve asked everyone the same question, Alex. It’s routine.’

  Fraser looked at him suspiciously, then said sullenly, ‘I was on my own. It was pissing with rain most of the time. I never thought of going out.’

  ‘So who do you think killed the man in charge here?’

  ‘I don’t know. If I did, I’d have come and told you, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Would you, though? You’re not a man to give much help to the police, are you?’

  ‘Ye don’t trust the filth, where I come from.’ It was automatic. And it was true enough – it was part of the city culture in which boys in care were reared. Hook leaned forward and said quietly, ‘I understand that attitude, Alex. I was a Barnardo’s boy myself. I know what it’s like to be without a close relative you can trust and turn to in a crisis. But you should realize that this isn’t a rumble between gangs. It’s more serious than anything you’ve been involved in before. Give it some thought. If you come up with anything which might help us, it’s in your own interest to let us have it immediately. You should go and get some sleep now.’

  Alex Fraser looked at him hard, then decided he could take what this copper said at face value. ‘No. I’m going back to work. I’ll be all right once I’m in the fresh air. There’ll be time to sleep tonight.’

  John Lambert looked at Hook when the young man had left them. He’d had a certain presence, despite his youth and his impetuosity in bolting to Scotland. ‘He’s got violence in him, that lad. Not too far beneath the surface.’

  Hook nodded slowly. ‘He’s needed to be violent, with his background. It’s dog eat dog in a lot of council homes. He’s trying to make a go of it, to make something of himself. I can understand why he fled to the only man whose advice he trusted. I hope they find him a job here. I reckon he’ll give them damn good value in the years to come.’

  FOURTEEN

  Sometimes things drop into your lap from unexpected sour
ces. The source in this case was one of the voluntary guides at Westbourne, who came in only once or twice a week as required. When she was interviewed, she gave the facts to the most junior DC on the team. He promptly passed them on to DI Rushton and was praised for recognizing their importance.

  Alison Cooper was not the grieving widow she had presented to them, or at least not only that. She had been conducting an affair with another man at the time of her husband’s death. More importantly, she had concealed this from them when she had spoken to them about her relationship with Dennis Cooper.

  ‘We’ll see them simultaneously, Chris,’ Lambert decided. ‘You take Ruth David with you and see Nayland in his office. Let us know when you’re ready to go in and Bert Hook and I will interview her at exactly the same time. It will prevent them from comparing notes.’

  Two hours later, Rushton parked his car outside the modest office block in Birmingham which housed the headquarters of the businesses run by Peter Nayland. ‘We’re ready to go in now, sir,’ he told Lambert on his phone. He tried not to look at the alert face of the woman beside him. The cloak-and-dagger phone call made him feel slightly ridiculous, rather as if he had got himself involved in one of the American TV crime series for which he professed such derision.

  Nayland’s PA was predictably obstructive. ‘Mr Nayland has appointments throughout the morning. I might be able to fit you in later today, but you will need to tell me the nature of your business.’

  Rushton flashed his warrant card. ‘We’re police officers pursuing a serious crime investigation. Mr Nayland will see us immediately.’ He ignored her protests and was at the door of the inner office before she could intervene. Rushton was conscious not only of her opposition but of the need to display his mastery of the situation to his colleague.

  Peter Nayland was sitting alone in the room behind his desk. He looked both surprised and annoyed when the pair burst into the room with his PA still protesting ineffectually behind them. Chris Rushton waved his warrant card and said, ‘I’m Detective Inspector Rushton and this is Detective Sergeant David. We need to speak with you in connection with the death of Dennis Cooper.’