by J M Gregson
Hugo Wilkinson nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and left them without another word. The two experienced men left in the room looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then Hook said, ‘What will you tell the team tomorrow morning?’
Lambert smiled grimly. ‘I’ll remind them of their professional duties. I’ll tell them that however much we’d all like to see a paedophile arrested for murder we mustn’t assume anything. We now know this man had a strong motive and the opportunity for murder. We have as yet no compelling evidence of his guilt. We must pursue our investigation of everyone else involved in this as assiduously as if Hugo Wilkinson did not exist.’
In the room where he had endured his meeting with the CID during the morning, Peter Nayland prepared himself for very different visitors in the late afternoon.
They were due to arrive at five fifteen. At five o’clock, he went into the adjoining office where his PA sat. ‘You can go now, Anne. Give yourself the rest of the day off – what little of it is left.’
‘I was just going to finish these letters, Mr Nayland.’
‘They’re not urgent. They’ll keep till tomorrow. You put in plenty of extra time, when you need to. Give yourself half an hour.’
Anne’s tidy mind told her that she would rather finish the day’s work and begin with a clean desk on Thursday. But she knew her employer well enough to recognize that this concession was in effect a command. She wondered who might be coming in to see him and what their business might be, but she knew that the sensible thing to do was to pretend she had no knowledge of them. ‘Thank you, sir. I’ll give my husband a surprise, then – hopefully a pleasant one!’
Each of them smiled at her little joke, each of them waited whilst she gathered her handbag and short summer coat and made the quickest exit she could.
The two men came ten minutes after she had left. They were stocky, swarthy and strong: good Welsh mining stock, as the one who had grown up in the Rhondha Valley was prone to say. He wondered sometimes whether he might have been at the pit-face rather than the crime-face, if Thatcher and her crew hadn’t seen off the mining industry in the eighties. ‘Alternative employment’ they’d said he should seek. Get on yer bike and find it. Well, he’d certainly found it.
Peter Nayland was different from the other men who had used him. Not many people who used muscle to further their business careers ever met the hard men whose violence they purchased. Perhaps they were able to persuade themselves they were not using such methods, so long as they did not have to set eyes upon the instruments involved. Perhaps they found it easier to deny all knowledge of illegal acts, so long as their orders had been relayed by others.
Peter Nayland had always been a businessman who boasted about his ‘hands-on’ methods. He liked to see the people he employed, to let them know that he was aware of what they were doing and that he expected the highest standards from them. Efficiency was demanded, even when brutality was the task. And he’d always thought it best not to put orders in writing, when directing men like this.
These men certainly looked as if they would be efficient. They sat uneasily in front of his desk, making the upright chairs look too small for the weight allotted to them. Nayland looked them up and down, gave them the briefest of smiles. ‘Have you dealt with the Atwal situation?’
Atwal was a hardworking Asian retailer who had built up a chain of shops in Smethwick; he had lately seen fit to expand daringly beyond the unofficial borders of his area into Nayland territory. He had even been bold enough to open a rival betting shop. He had failed to respond to verbal warnings and thus invited something more physical.
It was the Welshman Griffith who took it upon himself to answer the boss’s questions. The two men were paid the same, but he had recruited his henchman and it seemed that longer service gave him seniority. He said, ‘We’ve done what you suggested. Knocked his stock about and emptied the till in the newest three of his shops.’ He wasn’t going to claim success, not yet. They could be stubborn buggers, these Pakis. Personally, he’d have gone in on the man himself, from the start; no sense in half-measures, in his view.
‘Will he report it to the police?’
‘No. He’s got more sense. He knows we’ll be round to the rest of his shops if he does that. Once things have quietened down, of course.’ He added the last phrase to show the boss that they weren’t just muscle men, but professionals who recognized the need for caution. Griffith wasn’t stupid. Men who grew fast like Nayland always needed more violence, not less, as they expanded. You might end up in charge of his enforcement section, if you stayed with it and played your cards right.
The man behind the big desk nodded, stroking his moustache briefly as he ticked off the first item on his list. ‘Did you attend to Williams?’
‘Thursday night. We knocked him about a bit, as per your orders.’
Nayland looked at him hard. ‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s in hospital. Four ribs, a broken arm, pelvic damage.’ He reeled the injuries off as accurately and dispassionately as if he were announcing football scores. ‘He’s got the message.’
‘And what’s he told the police?’
‘Nothing. He was half-pissed at the time. We took his wallet and made it look like a mugging. The police seem to have it down as that: they haven’t given it much priority.’
‘And hopefully Williams will have got the message. What about Jean Calhoun?’
Calhoun was as hard as any man. She owned a casino and was planning more. She had her own muscle, though so far they had been used only against small people who got in her way and not in direct conflict with the thugs employed by her rivals. Nayland was old-fashioned in one respect at least: he was reluctant to use direct physical violence against a woman. But he knew it might come to that, if she continued to extend the boundaries of her empire. Griffith said with a pride he could hardly conceal, ‘We knifed her dog in the woods. She came round the corner and found him dying on the path. Golden retriever. Never uttered a whimper.’ It was not clear whether he regarded this as evidence of cowardice in the dog or skill in its dispatcher.
‘Will she get the message?’
‘Should do. She was very attached to that dog. She’ll know why it was killed. Good method of getting at her, we thought, since you said we weren’t to touch her.’ He could no longer conceal his pride in the subtlety of his thinking and the swift proficiency of its execution.
‘Has she reported it?’
‘She’s told the police. It won’t get any priority. The RSPCA will have a bleat in the local press, but that won’t have any effect. There are plenty of dog haters as well as dog lovers in this country.’ He delivered this view as if it were evidence of a virile nation.
‘What’s the latest on Mowbray?’ He’d left his biggest concern until the last.
‘Not much to report. His new lap-dancing club is supposed to be doing well. More upmarket, less sleazy. Word is he’s been boasting about taking over some of your assets next year. It’s difficult to get near Mowbray. He’s got his own muscle. Perhaps it’s time to take him out.’
It was a daring suggestion for Griffith. The boss made his own decisions, you implemented them. You didn’t put forward your own solutions. Nayland glanced at him sharply. ‘Not yet. I’ve told you, killing a man is the last resort. It gets the fuzz interested big-time. We monitor the situation. If and when I decide we need to liquidate Mowbray, I’ll bring in a specialist. Understood?’
Griffith shrugged, glanced quickly at the man beside him. ‘Understood. We’ll monitor the situation.’ He dwelt a little on the phrase, as if committing it to memory. ‘Then we’ll report to you.’
Nayland nodded, mentally ticking off the fourth and last item on his list. He gave them two other names for attention in the coming weeks, arranged to see them again in a month, and dismissed them back into the summer evening which seemed so inappropriate a cover for them. He felt a contempt for them and their violence, even though he was the man employing it
. Like Macbeth’s contempt for the men he hired to murder Banquo, he thought wryly. He’d been quite well educated at his private school; he was glad of that when he was with the woman he planned to make his wife.
He locked the office and left, feeling his spirits lift as he slipped into his other and more welcome role of suitor. He was a different and a better man with Ally. Perhaps in due course, when he’d made enough money, he’d give up the seamier side of his life and concentrate on legitimate business.
He kept a close eye on his rear mirror as he drove out of Birmingham at the tail end of the rush hour. He didn’t think he was under police surveillance. He doubted if they had the manpower for that. In any case, he’d nothing to fear if they saw him meeting Ally. He’d told them all about his feelings for the woman he was going to marry.
He’d only been in ‘their’ pub in Broadway for two minutes when she arrived. That was one of the many things he liked about her: she didn’t keep you waiting as a policy, as lots of women did. He rose and kissed her lightly on the lips when she arrived, then settled her comfortably into her seat beside the gin and tonic he had already ordered for her. He enjoyed squiring his lady; his careful politeness might seem a little silly in a man of fifty-six, but to him it seemed all part of this other and more admirable life he was embarking upon with Ally.
She smiled at him, ran a manicured finger round the top of her glass, glanced round the large, thinly peopled room. ‘This is where we were spotted, you know.’
‘Yes. I suppose it was inevitable, sooner or later.’
‘It was one of the voluntary workers at Westbourne, the people who come in to give talks and act as guides. I don’t even know some of them. She recognized me, but I might not recognize her.’
He put his hand on top of hers, feeling how tense she was. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it? The police know all about us now. We can handle it.’
‘You might be able to. You’re used to it.’ She looked at him resentfully, feeling Dennis’s death between them, dividing them like a physical barrier.
‘Did the police give you a hard time?’
She found she didn’t want to tell him about it. For an instant, she wanted to hug her humiliation close to herself. But she shouldn’t have secrets from Peter, not if she was going to be with him for the rest of her life. ‘They made it a big thing that I hadn’t told them about you when they saw me on Monday. Gave me the impression that anything else I now have to say will be treated with suspicion.’
‘They were bound to do that. They use anything which will give them the edge, when they’re questioning you.’
‘You know a lot more about their methods than I do.’ It sounded like an accusation. She took a gulp of her gin and tonic, refusing to look at him.
‘I know a little more, yes.’
‘I don’t know how you make your money, you know. I used to feel it was none of my business. I suppose it is, now.’
‘It’s pretty dull stuff. You’ll gradually get to know more, as we go along. Meantime, we’ve got more interesting things to do.’ He willed Ally to look at him, with her head on one side and the dark-blonde hair above the very blue eyes. That was the way he always pictured her, when she wasn’t with him. When she eventually did look up, she gave him a rather bleak smile which made her seem very vulnerable. He said carefully, ‘I’ll introduce you to some of the better stuff when you’re ready. I don’t think you’ll find it very interesting.’
Alison wondered about the other stuff, the stuff which wasn’t for her. ‘They said you had an alibi for Sunday night, for the time when Dennis was killed.’
He tried to smile it away, but she wouldn’t look at him. ‘I’m not sure we should be talking about “alibis”, should we? But yes, I was playing poker with some of my friends. I was nowhere near the scene of the crime.’
‘Whereas I have no such proof. And now they know that I lied to them on the day Dennis’s body was discovered.’
‘I’m sure they don’t suspect you.’
‘They pointed out how convenient Dennis’s death is for both of us. They implied you’d been pretty near to arrest before, but too wily to be caught.’
He found himself flattered by that word ‘wily’, in spite of himself. ‘I expect they’re prepared to blacken people, if it helps to put pressure on the person they’re talking to.’
Alison sighed. A long, dismissive sigh. She said determinedly, ‘I think we’ve talked enough about the police. Tell me about the rest of our lives.’
‘That’s better. Let’s plan our wedding. We haven’t talked about it yet. No more talk about Dennis’s death.’
After all, as he’d told Griffith a couple of hours earlier, you only killed people when it was absolutely necessary.
SIXTEEN
Julie Hartley chose to see them in her own house. She hadn’t enjoyed venturing into the murder room, which she had always known as the curator’s office, for her meeting on Tuesday. Perhaps the CID men wouldn’t make her so nervous if she met them in her own familiar sitting room.
She quickly found that the room mattered hardly at all. It was their line of questioning which discomforted her.
It was true that Lambert and Hook both looked round the room she had carefully prepared for them with interest. She had made a few changes, setting things up to give the air of a quiet, unremarkable, family room. She’d brought out the wedding photograph which had been relegated to the spare room for the last few months and put it on top of the television. Jim looked even more awkward in his morning dress than she remembered, smiling shyly but proudly at the camera with his new wife on his arm, waiting patiently for the photographer to release them.
She’d put the pictures of the children and their grandparents on the mantelpiece above the brick fireplace, alongside the picture of Jim with the Rose Bowl he had won at their first flower show, long before they had come to Westbourne. She had been aiming at a happy jumble of domesticity, to support what she had told them about her life two days earlier. The three-piece lounge suite fitted well into the low-ceilinged cottage. It was of decent quality but moderately worn, as innocent, respectable family use determined it should be. The coloured photographs of Kew Gardens in spring, summer and autumn reinforced that impression. Jim had served his apprenticeship at Kew.
She had selected a dark-blue shirt and navy trousers, combed her long dark hair, and prepared herself to play the dutiful housewife and mother, the roles she had declared to the CID on Tuesday.
Lambert’s first words shattered her preparations and her calm. ‘We know a lot more about you than we did, Mrs Hartley. It would have been much better for all of us if you had spoken frankly when we saw you on Tuesday.’
‘I – I told you everything you needed to know.’
‘You told us what you had decided to tell us. You concealed information. That was at best unwise, at worst sinister.’
She felt first fear, then an overwhelming relief that she was going to be able to speak about her new life; it was a strange sequence and it threatened to unbalance her judgement. She could not think what she should be telling them now. Eventually she managed to say, ‘You know about Sarah.’
Lambert watched her closely and said in a carefully neutral voice, ‘I think you had better give us your own version of this.’
‘It’s a mess. And I am the person responsible for the mess. But I don’t see how it could have been avoided. The whole of my sheltered upbringing, the whole of my schooling and the people I knew then, told me that the thing to do was to get married and get myself a family. Oh, I know you’re allowed to have a career as well nowadays, but family life is the norm. Even politicians are now trying to tell us that.’
Lambert had heard enough of this. He didn’t want her to develop this well-rehearsed apologia for her situation. He said tersely, ‘We’re not here to take moral stances. We’re interested in whatever bears upon the murder of Dennis Cooper. When you lied about your situation, it excited our attention.’
‘T
hen I apologize. I concealed my feelings for Sarah Goodwin from you; I didn’t want her dragged into this because she has nothing to do with it.’
‘Dennis Cooper knew about the relationship and was trying to disrupt it. That makes it highly relevant.’
‘He wouldn’t have succeeded.’
Julie was concentrating all her efforts on trying to convince Lambert, but it was the stolid DS Hook who unexpectedly said, ‘Where were you on Sunday night, Mrs Hartley?’
‘I told you that on Tuesday.’
‘You told us then that you were at home with your husband and the boys. Do you now wish to revise that?’
This was like a card game where you were trying to make the most of a poor hand. They knew far more than she did and would take the trick if she blundered. She couldn’t look the man in his annoyingly placid face as she said dully, ‘I was at home with Jim and the boys for part of the evening, as I said. But I did go out. We had a row, you see, Jim and I. A row about Sarah Goodwin. And it was her I went to see.’
Hook looked hard at her. ‘Times, please.’
‘I can’t be certain. I think I stormed out at about nine. I didn’t get back until after midnight. I wanted to be sure Jim was in bed.’ She paused, watching him record the times with irritating slowness. ‘That takes away my alibi, I suppose.’
‘And your husband’s.’
‘Jim didn’t kill Cooper. I’m sure of that.’ She felt a surge of loyalty for the man she had hurt so much.
Lambert said crisply, ‘How can you be sure? Do you know who did this?’ She shook her head dumbly. ‘Did you kill him yourself??’
