by J M Gregson
Just when you had convinced yourself that things were picking up, life had a habit of hitting you with a sock full of wet sand.
Alex Fraser told himself that he had always known that. You didn’t survive for years in a Glasgow council home without learning that disaster usually followed hard upon delight. And this wasn’t disaster, he told himself firmly. Provided he kept his mind clear and gave them nothing, he could surely come to no harm. He should be able to do that; hadn’t he spent most of his teenage years giving the filth nothing during their frequent questionings?
These reflections were prompted by an instruction to attend the murder room for further questioning at two o’clock. He had read the letter telling him that no further action was planned over the Cheltenham fracas several times during his lunch break. Indeed, he had taken it into the bog and locked the door firmly to ensure that he could spend as long as he wished relishing the formal phrases which had set his heart singing. Now he had better forget his relief and give his mind fully to the matter of Dennis Cooper’s death.
Once that was out of the way, he could enjoy his work here and his leisure hours to the full. A telephone message from the secretary of the golf club had informed him at lunchtime that he had been selected to appear in the county second team in ten days’ time. He’d work that news in, if he could, to try to impress the CID. Bloody bourgeois! This lot were nothing like the rough-trade coppers who’d been the enemy throughout his Glasgow years. He felt something near to affection for those hard-faced Glaswegians now.
The plain-clothes man who had come to inform him of the renewed CID interest swept his warrant card swiftly across Fraser’s vision to establish that he was official police. Alex grabbed his wrist and read the rank, as most people did not. ‘Detective Inspector. Top brass to send after an innocent gardening apprentice.’
Chris Rushton smiled, his gaze flitting from the sharp blue eyes to the extraordinary red hair above them. ‘I saw you passing, lad: you’re easily spotted. Thought I’d take the chance to examine the suspect who has the most serious record of violence.’
This pig had a handsome face, Alex conceded to himself sardonically. Dark-haired, keen-eyed, tall. Some English rose would probably find him attractive. Before he could stop himself, Alex said, ‘I’ve no case to answer for that business in Cheltenham. Even the bloody filth have had to accept that we were set upon. We were the innocent parties.’
‘Really. I’d like to say I was pleased for you, but I’m not a hypocrite. And purely for your information, I was thinking about your record of violence over the years in Glasgow, not the renewal of it in this area.’
Alex was shaken. He hadn’t expected this man he’d never seen before to go immediately on to the attack. But then he was a pig, wasn’t he? He also seemed to be a distressingly well-informed pig. Alex turned surly. ‘Why do they want to see me? I’ve told them everything I know about Mr Cooper.’
DI Rushton shook his head happily. ‘Ours not to reason why, Mr Fraser. Two o’clock at the murder room, please.’
Alex didn’t like that ‘Mr Fraser’. The filth only got formal when they were planning to charge you with something. He scrubbed every speck of soil from his nails, washed his face carefully, and presented himself at the curator’s office two minutes before the appointed hour.
They left him waiting for a while, getting steadily more nervous. At three minutes past two, DS Hook ushered him into the big, stark room and sat him down opposite Lambert, who had the curator’s big desk in front of him. Alex felt very exposed. Once, when he’d been in the home, he’d been ‘volunteered’ to be the fall guy at a church fete. People – almost all of them belligerent men and youths – had been invited to fling wooden balls at a target, whilst he had sat on a swing over a kiddies’ paddling pool. When anyone had hit the bullseye, it had released the catch on his seat and dumped him into two feet of water, to roars of delighted applause. He’d had to grin and bear it; what he hadn’t liked was the sign the stallholder had put over his head. Its uneven red capitals had invited the public to ‘DUMP CARROT-TOP INTO THE DRINK’.
He’d almost forgotten about that day, but it came back to him now, as he sat on his chair and felt very exposed in front of a chief superintendent. Lambert looked at him keenly for a moment whilst he waited for Hook to come in from the outer office. Then he said unexpectedly, ‘I hear you’ve been selected for the county golf team. Congratulations!’
‘Thank you. It’s only the second team, but it’s a start.’ Alex didn’t question how the tall man knew. He was quite used to the police knowing all kinds of surprising things about him.
As Hook sat down with his notebook, Lambert said without any change of tone, ‘Mr Fraser, have you come up with anyone who can confirm for us that you were not out and about on the site on Sunday evening?’
‘Not down at the bottom of the Wilderness, you mean? Not down there killing Mr Cooper. No, I haven’t.’
‘I see. Pity, that. It would have enabled us to eliminate you from a murder enquiry. I’m sure that would have been even more of a relief for you than for us.’
‘Yes, it would. But I can’t produce witnesses out of thin air. The other apprentices go home at weekends and don’t usually come back until late on Sunday nights. They live much nearer to Westbourne than I do.’
‘Or much further away. From information given to DI Rushton, I gather you do not have a permanent address, apart from Westbourne Park.’
‘No. I don’t have family. I had a mother and a younger sister, but I haven’t seen them for years. Not since I was taken into care at fourteen.’
It might have been an attempt to court sympathy in some twenty-year-olds, but it emerged only as a statement of a key fact of his life, repeated with the weary indifference of one who had delivered it many times before. Lambert nodded without comment and said, ‘Matt Garton was back here quite early on Sunday. Back in the apprentice cottages by half past seven, he says.’
It sounded like a challenge, so Alex was immediately wary. ‘If he says that, it’s true. But I didn’t see him.’
‘Nor he you, according to his statement. So we can’t eliminate either of you.’ Lambert studied Fraser for a moment, as if inviting a comment. ‘Wouldn’t it have been natural for you as fellow apprentices who spend many working hours together to get in touch with each other? I know you have separate rooms, but you were in the same building. There must have been no more than a single wall between you.’
It was disconcerting to find how thoroughly they knew the layout of the cottages and where everyone lived. Alex licked his lips and conceded, ‘We might have done that, a week or two earlier. But we were a wee bit cautious with each other after that rumble in Cheltenham.’
‘And why would that be? You fought on the same side.’ Lambert smiled grimly. ‘Indeed, I suppose you could say that without you and your knuckledusters the battle might have been lost.’
Alex was uneasy. It was only this morning that he’d heard officially that the Cheltenham evening was dismissed, out of his life for ever. And here he was with the filth, being forced to live it all over again. But he couldn’t see any way out of it. He explained sullenly, ‘I grassed him up, didn’t I? I told the rozzers in Cheltenham that he was receiving a package of illegal drugs from his supplier.’
‘But you’d no alternative. You couldn’t allow the interrogating officers to think the drugs had been meant for you. And especially not with charges of carrying an offensive weapon and grievous bodily harm in prospect.’
‘That’s how it was for me. You can’t expect Matt Garton to see it like that, when he’s been grassed up by his mate.’
Lambert sighed. ‘Did you hear him come in on Sunday night?’
‘I might have done. I might have heard him moving about. I can’t remember now – and that’s the honest truth, copper!’ The little spurt of aggression made him feel better, as if he was in some way holding his own. ‘I wasn’t going to go looking for him. If he wanted to make peace, he’d ha
ve come in and seen me, wouldn’t he?’
‘And has he made peace since then?’
Alex really wasn’t quite sure. In the arcane, often non-verbal gestures of sympathy between twenty-year-old males, it took time for wounds to heal and trust to be re-established. ‘We get on all right. I expect things will be better when we’ve worked together on something for a day or two.’
‘I expect they will, yes. And you’d other things on your mind on Sunday night, no doubt. Were you very resentful of Mr Cooper’s attitude to the Cheltenham episode?’
He was shocked by this sudden change of ground. Typical bloody filth! He wondered if the whole elaborate investigation of his whereabouts on Sunday night and his relationship with Matt Garton had been a deliberate prelude to throw him off his guard for this. He tried to play for time. ‘What do you mean, his attitude? We hadn’t even spoken about Cheltenham. Mr Cooper was much too grand to bother himself with apprentices. He dealt with us through Mr Hartley.’
Bert Hook looked hard at him in the silence which followed. He said quietly, ‘I shan’t make a note of that, Alex. I’ll wait until you tell us the real facts of the matter.’
‘What d’ye mean? I never—’
‘Mr Cooper kept notes on what he knew, Alex. He also recorded some of his opinions, on you and on others who worked here. We have now had the opportunity to study his thoughts about you in his notebook. It’s one of his last entries. He speculates about your future here.’
Fraser looked from Hook’s broad, earnest face to the keen grey eyes of Lambert behind the desk, then down at the floor. He said slackly, ‘Wednesday of last week. That was when he saw me.’
Hook nodded. ‘Four days before he died.’
Fraser glanced at him sharply. ‘I didn’t kill him, ye know.’
‘Mr Cooper recorded what he thought about you after you’d spoken with him. Don’t you think you’d better let us have your version of that conversation?’
Fraser smiled bitterly. ‘It wasn’t much of a conversation. More like a sermon on my sins. I’ve heard a few of those in my time.’
‘I expect you have, yes. We used to get regular directions on being upright citizens from the governors in the home where I grew up. But you’re involved in a murder case now. This is your chance to tell us exactly what happened last week.’
‘He said I’d let him down and let Westbourne Park down and let myself down when I got involved in street conflict. That’s the phrase he used for it. He hissed it out like an old lady chasing cats away from the birds. But I was prepared to stand there and take it and eat humble pie when he finished. I’ve done that often enough before.’
‘I expect you have. It’s the only way, sometimes.’
‘Then he said the business in Cheltenham would affect my future. He’d have to tell the National Trust administrators about it and it was only fair to warn me that he thought it would affect my prospects of permanent employment at the end of the year. They were usually only able to retain one of the apprentices and he didn’t think he’d be able to recommend me.’
‘And you just stood and took it?’
‘No. I found my tongue when he threatened me with that. I said nothing was proved yet, that the other apprentices were involved with me and that we’d had to defend ourselves.’
Hook nodded, anxious to keep him talking. ‘You weren’t the aggressors. The police in Cheltenham have now recognized that. It’s the major reason why you aren’t facing serious charges.’
‘Yes. I’d have been able to go to him today and tell him he shouldn’t blacken me with the Trust, now that the police were taking no further action. That’s if he hadn’t been dead.’
He looked at neither of them now. Instead, he gazed at the window and the outside world and the infinite possibilities which lay there.
Lambert was silent for a few moments after Fraser had left them. Hook, who felt a bond of sympathy with the young man which derived from his own teenage years, had more sense than to voice it now.
Lambert glanced at the very blue sky which was all he could see through the window. Then he stood up, and said, ‘We’ve a couple of hours before we see Lorna Green. Let’s drag Chris Rushton away from his computer and revisit the scene of the crime.’
It was one of the paradoxes of this death that violence had been delivered not only in one of the great gardens of Britain but in the most innocent-seeming section of it. Even the more adventurous and energetic members of the public rarely moved beyond the area known as the Middle Stream Garden to the lowest and furthest portion of the estate which had been designated the Wilderness.
It was not a wilderness at all of course, but carefully designed to simulate a natural landscape. It had groups of trees deliberately planted to look informal. The bulbs which burst into flower in spring were invisible beneath the warm earth on this day of high summer. The furthest portion of the area was still cordoned off as a scene of crime, though the SOCO team had long since finished its work of gathering anything which might be significant.
Far from being reluctant to leave his computer and his records, DI Rushton was anxious to hear his chief’s thoughts on the state of the investigation, and in particular on the fiery-haired young man they had most recently seen. ‘What did you make of young Fraser?’
Lambert nodded at Hook, who said carefully, ‘He acquitted himself well. Once he realized we had access to Cooper’s notebook, he was quite frank about what they’d said to each other.’
‘He was either quite frank or he contrived to give Bert the impression of being so,’ corrected Lambert automatically.
‘Fraser’s the one with the history of violence,’ said Rushton eagerly. ‘He’d seriously injured a man in a street fight not long before Cooper’s death. He’s got a long history of violent behaviour on the streets of Glasgow before he came here.’
Hook frowned. ‘I’m sure you’d find most of his male companions in that home had similar histories, if you cared to investigate them. It’s a tough world when you haven’t a family to fall back on. And if we’re talking about serious violence, Fraser isn’t in the same league as the man who now intends to marry the victim’s widow.’
‘Peter Nayland? I agree, but we may not be able to pin this one on him, convenient as it is for him to have his mistress now free of a husband. His poker game alibi for last Sunday evening checks out.’
Lambert grimaced. ‘You’d expect that. Nayland is the sort of villain who employs a hitman to do his serious damage. We know he’s done that before, though no one is prepared to go into court and declare it. So far, we’ve turned up no evidence that he paid anyone to kill Cooper.’
Rushton nodded. ‘What about the widow herself?? Alison Cooper was on the spot and lied about it. She obviously knew her husband’s movements better than anyone. We’ve agreed a woman could have done this: whatever ligature was used to throttle Cooper, it required no great strength, especially if he was taken by surprise.’
Lambert said suddenly, ‘I need to see Alison Cooper again. She may give us a little more, with luck.’ He nodded gnomically, but volunteered nothing further. His two companions knew him too well to press him for what he did not volunteer. He said eventually, ‘Bearing in mind the possibility of a woman, we can’t forget Julie Hartley. She’s very determined she’s going to set up house with Sarah Goodwin. And we know that Cooper was being obstructive – threatening her with all kinds of consequences for her family if she persisted in leaving her husband.’
Rushton frowned. ‘But surely he couldn’t prevent her from setting up house with whoever she chose? This is the twenty-first century.’
‘Apparently he thought he could do just that. He was threatening to damage her husband and her children, if she left. If Julie Hartley believed him, she might have done something desperate. People in the grip of passion aren’t always logical.’
They were silent for a moment, reviewing examples of this from their own professional experience. Then Rushton said, ‘That argument would a
pply to her husband as well as Julie. He’s spent the whole of his adult life working to achieve the position he holds here. If he felt that Cooper was threatening to take away that at the same time as his family was disintegrating, he might well have turned to violence.’
Lambert, whilst listening to their thoughts, had moved a little to one side. He was staring thoughtfully at a newly planted tree which was about ten feet tall. He now said, ‘You mustn’t rule out Lorna Green, whom we’re seeing again at four thirty today. She had what seems to have been a pretty passionate affair with Dennis Cooper many years ago. She had a successful business career with British Gas, but she never married. She’d always been interested in Westbourne Park and when she took early retirement, she chose to work here. It gave her access to Cooper, who became the curator shortly afterwards.’
Rushton had never met the lady, but he remembered the detailed information he had fed into his computer. ‘She’s reckoned to know as much as anyone living about this place and its history. She was maybe just following her interests when she offered her services as a guide.’
‘Probably she was, because she was already working here when Cooper took up his post. But we can’t ignore the fact that she increased her workload after he came, which brought her close to a man who is now a murder victim. She knows this place intimately. She’s one of the few outsiders who might arrange a meeting in a remote spot at the edge of the gardens like this.’
Hook found it difficult to see the educated, respectable Ms Green as a candidate for this killing. He said reluctantly, ‘She says she was at home on Sunday night, but she hasn’t a reliable witness to support that. Her mother has quite advanced Alzheimer’s and doesn’t remember days or times. It must be a hell of a strain for Lorna looking after her.’
Rushton nodded. ‘People under strain often act irrationally. Ms Green might have been looking at her life bitterly and blaming Cooper for the major disaster in it. We know from his notebook that they’d met not long before he died and had a pretty brisk exchange about the way she was correcting him in public.’
