by J M Gregson
Tamsin Phillips was waiting nervously for them in the reception area of the school. She gave them the briefest of greetings before turning briskly upon her heel and leading them down a long corridor and into the History Resources Room, the small room at the back of a classroom where they had conducted their first interview with her.
She was plainly ill at ease, but if anything it improved her dark good looks. Her agitation flushed her face a little beneath the curls of shining black hair, the retroussé nose making her look younger than her thirty-three years and in need of protection. This woman could play the damsel in distress card to great effect, if she should need to, thought Lambert. It was easy to see why that strange, vulnerable, former partner of hers, Darcy Simpson, still felt drawn to her all these years after she had taken a knife to him.
She waited until they were sitting on the hard upright chairs before she said, ‘I asked you to come here. I suppose I should take the initiative and tell you why.’
She gave them a winning smile, switching it from one to the other as she sought for a response. She got nothing from Hook and only the curtest of nods from Lambert. They weren’t about to make a nervous woman less nervous.
She had anticipated questions, wondered now quite where she should start. She said uncertainly, ‘Well, after our last meeting, I took some legal advice from a friend of mine.’
‘And he no doubt told you that you should be telling the whole truth. Unless you killed Peter Logan, of course.’ Lambert stared evenly into her pretty face.
It was so nearly exactly what her friend had told her that she was thoroughly disconcerted. ‘I didn’t kill Peter. It’s because I want you to get whoever did kill him that I’ve asked you to come and see me now. However, the legal advice was much as you suggest.’
‘I’m sure you were told that you should tell us the truth and hold nothing back. I hope you are planning to do that now. I would remind you that this is our third meeting with you. It is high time that we had the complete story.’
She flushed even more deeply, in a mixture of embarrassment and anger. She had thought the days of being rebuked like a naughty child were long over. But this infuriating man would no doubt tell her that she had behaved like a child. Tamsin Phillips looked fiercely at the dusty table in the middle of the room, as if it were necessary to her concentration. ‘You’ve already had it. Everything I told you yesterday was true.’
‘But incomplete. You said you had more information to give when you asked us to come here today.’
‘Yes. I didn’t realize at the time that it might have been important. It now seems to me that it might be.’
‘So let’s have it. With nothing held back and no embellishments, please.’
She looked from the stern-faced superintendent to the rounder face at his side, but found no relief in Hook’s impassive countenance. ‘I told you yesterday that I was aware that Peter was seeing Liza Allen. I think I lost my head a little and called her a little tart. I’m sorry about that.’
‘No doubt Ms Allen will survive it.’ Lambert was impatient to hear whatever new thing she had to tell them.
‘You suggested that I knew Peter’s habits. That I would know what he would do after his day at the Birmingham conference. It’s true enough: I knew his habits well enough from his months with me. I knew that he would be likely to take advantage of a day’s absence from school to visit a lover in the evening before he went home. What I didn’t tell you yesterday was that I tried to confront him when he made that visit.’
Lambert tried hard not to show his excitement. ‘You had better tell us what happened when you did that.’
She nodded, determined now to complete the tale and rid herself of the burden of concealment. ‘I’d have told you yesterday if I’d thought this had any bearing on the case. At the time I couldn’t see that it did. Probably it doesn’t, but I want you to know the full story.’
‘And why didn’t you want us to have that yesterday?’
‘I wasn’t proud of myself and the way it would look. The discarded mistress, waiting around the door of the new one to cause a scene and try to claim her man back. It’s not a very edifying scene, is it? Especially for a liberated woman like Tamsin Phillips!’ The self-contempt in the last phrase seemed almost physically painful for her.
‘This is a murder inquiry, Miss Phillips. Let’s make sure we have everything this time. It’s the third time of asking.’
‘That’s the only thing I didn’t tell you yesterday. That I tried to intercept Peter Logan as he went to visit his latest conquest! I found Liza Allen’s address from the school records. I went and parked at the end of her road in Leckhampton and waited for Peter to arrive. I knew he probably wouldn’t park right outside her door because he was cautious like that. Careful of his reputation as the divine headmaster!’ She struggled for a moment to control her bitterness.
‘What time did you go there?’
She controlled her emotions, then resumed in a lower, almost matter-of-fact voice. ‘Around seven o’clock. I was there for over an hour, because obviously I didn’t know exactly when he would come. I played CDs in my car; I didn’t want to put the light on to read in case it made me conspicuous. Eventually I decided that Peter wasn’t coming, after all. So I gave up and drove off. I suppose I took the route alongside the park because I realized that that was the sort of quiet place where he’d park. That’s when I saw his car.’
‘And was there any sign of the driver?’
‘No. I got out and looked. There was no sign of Peter.’
‘Did you go into the park?’
‘No!’ She looked both startled and terrified by that suggestion. ‘My first thought was that he must have only just left the car, that he must be on his way to Liza Allen’s flat by a different route than the one I’d driven. So I turned back and drove quickly round there, hoping to intercept him at her door. But there was no sign of Peter. I waited a couple of minutes, then decided that I’d missed him and he was probably inside the flat with Liza. I drove back to his car – there was still no sign of him, so I went home.’
It was flat and anticlimactic, not the way a story like this should end. Lambert said, ‘Did you see anyone else around his car?’
‘No. It’s a quiet road and it was deserted.’
‘That’s a pity. Because it was around this time that—’
‘I did the first time, though. The first time I spotted Peter’s car.’ The large dark eyes were wide with the recollection, full of a desire to convince them that this time at last she was telling the complete truth. ‘I saw a man coming out of the park. I think he went to a car further down the road. I couldn’t be sure of that, though, because I scarcely noticed him. I was looking for Peter at the time. It’s only since I’ve gone over that night in my mind that I’ve remembered this man.’
Lambert wondered if that was true, wondered whether this emotional, inconsistent woman was even now providing another diversion for them. He said brusquely, ‘Describe this man for us, please.’
‘I can’t! That’s the trouble, you see, I didn’t give him any attention at the time. I wasn’t looking for anyone except Peter.’
‘Was he tall or short? Thickset or slight?’
‘I don’t know.’ She sought desperately for something which would convince them that the man existed at all outside her imagination. ‘It was dark and I didn’t give him any real attention.’ She furrowed her brow, staring not at her interlocutors but at the table. ‘He wasn’t particularly tall or I’d remember it. I have an impression that he was slight rather than broad.’ She suddenly became very animated. ‘And I think he was wearing a tracksuit. Yes, I’m sure he was, because I think I presumed at the time that he’d been out jogging. But he wasn’t running at the time. I think he just came out of the park and went down the road to his car.’
‘Do you recall anything about that car. Large or small? Even the colour might be some help.’
She shook her head in frustration. ‘I never
even looked at it. I just have the impression that there was another car, fifty yards or so behind Peter’s Rover 75. A car which was there the first time I went there and not there at all when I drove past again about five minutes later. I don’t even know that this man got into it, but I’m fairly sure the car was gone when I came back to the spot the second time.’
Hook leaned forward, gave her the first smile she had collected from either of them. ‘Concentrate, Tamsin. This may be the man who killed Peter Logan. Think very hard. Try to see if even now you can recall some detail about him which might help us.’
He had spoken quietly and earnestly, but by now she had caught some of the excitement of two men whose job was to hunt people down. She screwed up her closed eyes with the effort of her concentration. After a couple of seconds, those dark, expressive circles opened very wide. ‘He walked awkwardly, somehow. I think he had a limp. Yes, I’m sure he had! He was going the opposite way along the street to me, but I caught him in my headlamps for a second as I drove past him. He was hurrying along with his head down, and I remember his right shoulder kept dropping as he moved.’
Twenty-Four
Phone-tapping is a sensitive subject. It is an ongoing matter of friction between those who strive to ensure that the law of the land is obeyed and the Civil Liberties lobby. It is right that it should be so, for phone-tapping needs to be sparingly used: it has overtones of the police state.
But some crimes are potentially a greater attack upon liberty than the measures taken to combat them. One of these is paedophilia, which brings a vast range of horrors to those in society who are least able to defend themselves. The full details of the membership of the paedophile ring attended by Martin Sheene became clearer after he had been followed to their meeting place.
There were some high-profile members, including a circuit judge, a high-ranking civil servant from GCHQ in Cheltenham, and the Chief Executive Officer of a large insurance company. Martin had only been admitted because he worked with children; there was an unvoiced thought that he might at some future stage provide them with a new range of the vicious pleasures they sought.
The request for phones to be tapped had to go through several stages, but Douglas Gibson was grim and determined and red tape was mercifully absent. Within less than twenty-four hours, the Chief Constable had obtained his permission from the Home Office and the taps were in place.
The man who had so frightened Martin Sheene was Clive Boby. He made phone contact with the man from GCHQ late on the night of Tuesday, 6th October, seven hours after DC Cox had reported his exit from Sheene’s house. In doing so, he confirmed both his own identity and the position of the man he rang.
Clive Boby was a man who retailed his deadly services to a variety of criminal groups. A professional killer, that most elusive of villains for the police to pin down.
The man he phoned was Geoffrey Lawson, a senior civil servant at GCHQ in Cheltenham. The content of the call confirmed him as both the man who gave Boby his orders and the unofficial secretary of the paedophile group.
Lambert listened to the tape of their conversation twice before nine o’clock the next morning. Then he rang the National Paedophile Unit in London and set in motion a complex police exercise which would climax in the simultaneous arrest of the ten members of the paedophile ring. The operation involved nearly a hundred officers, but the police machine is very efficient in these large-scale swoops: within two hours the various nets were ready to close on the still unsuspecting prey.
Amidst all this, John Lambert was concerned only with the arrest of a murderer, Clive Boby. At three twenty on that Wednesday afternoon, ten minutes before the hour designated for the mass arrests of the paedophile ring, Lambert and Hook drove into a quiet suburb on the northern side of Hereford.
It was a broad road, wide enough to accommodate mature trees on the edge of its pavements. Large nineteen-thirties detached houses stood well back from the road on spacious plots. Most of the trees still held a full clothing of leaves, which had only the beginnings of the autumn colour which would make this such a handsome avenue in November. There was a mature chestnut where he parked, however, which had already turned an opulent orange. The road around it was strewn with its fallen leaves, covering the squashed shells of the nuts which had fallen many weeks ago. Not many children lived round here to gather conkers.
Lambert parked his ageing Vauxhall Senator near this tree, some thirty yards from the gates of the house he proposed to enter. He made no move until two other unmarked police vehicles drew up quietly behind him.
At precisely three twenty-seven, Lambert and Hook walked up to the door of a big house, which had the thick boughs of a well-established wisteria trained over the porch and climbing roses still blooming bravely against the warm bricks of the front wall. It was a far grander house than either of them could ever have aspired to from the right side of the law.
Lambert gave the bell one short push. Then, after a few seconds with no response, a longer, more insistent one. They could hear only the sound of the bell inside the empty house: it is curious how a house can seem empty, just because the ring of a bell brings no answering response of movement from within. But this house was not empty. There was no sound of footsteps upon its solid floorboards, but the wide oak front door was eventually opened by a wiry man of about thirty-five.
He was in shirtsleeves. Lambert inspected him for a couple of seconds. ‘Are you Clive Boby?’
The man nodded, then inspected their warrants unhurriedly and with no visible reaction, though the presence on his doorstep of a detective chief superintendent and a detective sergeant must surely have set his pulses racing. He said, ‘I can’t think what you want, but you’d better come in. I was in the snooker room, potting a few balls on my own.’
He led them through a dining room which looked as if it were seldom used to an extension behind the house, where thick curtains shut out the bright afternoon and fluorescent lights shone brightly over the variously coloured balls on a full-sized snooker table. He picked up a cue and potted balls as they talked. Bert Hook watched him warily, wondering if he would use the cue as a weapon if he felt cornered.
But Clive Boby was a professional killer, who calculated the odds with a clear mind: if he saw that things were hopeless for him, he probably wouldn’t move into desperate, useless action. It seemed now that he just wished to demonstrate the steadiness of his nerve, for his hands remained perfectly still as the conversation proceeded while he addressed and potted a series of reds and colours.
A snooker table is twelve feet long and six feet wide. It needs a large room to accommodate one: a room at least twenty-two feet long and sixteen feet wide, to allow a player to cue properly. Clive Boby was moving considerable distances between some of his shots.
And as he moved, he limped slightly, dropping his right shoulder to accommodate the movement.
Boby potted a long red and kept his head absolutely still for a moment as he watched the cue-ball roll into perfect position on the black. ‘I want you to note that I’ve been cooperative. I can’t imagine why you’ve come here, but I’ve invited you freely into my house and I shall answer to the best of my ability whatever questions you wish to put to me.’
Lambert watched as the black ball crept towards the pocket and dropped in with its last roll. Then he said quietly, ‘How much did you get for killing Peter Logan?’
Boby smiled quietly but didn’t look at him. ‘Wasn’t me, Lambert. There are one or two headmasters I’d like to have shot, years ago, but the Cheltenham one wasn’t down to me.’
‘We have a warrant to search these premises. I think that among other things we’ll find the Smith and Wesson pistol which killed Mr Logan. There are powder burns on what’s left of the neck of Peter Logan, and most of the point of entry of the bullet is still intact. I expect the forensic boys will tie up your weapon with the wound: they’re very ingenious nowadays.’
A red disappeared precisely into the centre of the middl
e pocket. Boby said, ‘I was elsewhere at the time. You won’t tie me up with that one.’ Hook thought that his voice seemed minimally less confident, but he couldn’t be sure.
Lambert watched his man as he moved round the table. ‘We shall see. There was a hair on the shoulder of the body which didn’t come from Peter Logan. And a saliva sample from the back of Logan’s car coat. We’ll have a DNA sample from you, once you’re safely under lock and key. I should be surprised if we don’t get a match. Clever people, these DNA boys.’
Boby attempted a long blue into the bottom pocket, watched it wriggle in the jaws and stay out, mumbled a low curse. He slammed a red hard into the green pocket, as if he needed that precision to restore his assurance. ‘Can’t help you on Logan’s killing, I’m afraid. Like to be of assistance to the police whenever I can, of course, but what you don’t know you can’t tell.’
‘We don’t need a confession, though I expect you’ll give us one when it becomes inevitable. We have a tape of your conversation with Geoffrey Lawson last night, you see. That’s every bit as good as a confession, in its own way.’
This time Hook was sure there was a reaction from the man. Boby had his back to them, crouching over a pot on the pink, but there was a definite stiffening in his body. He potted the pink all right, but the white he had meant to stop dead shot forward and almost followed the pink into the pocket. Two or three seconds went by before Boby said, ‘Don’t even know the man. You must have a tape of some other poor sod. Good try, but no cigar today, men! Now go and persecute some other bugger, Lambert!’
‘We’re in the right place, Boby. The sound boys at forensic will have no difficulty proving it’s your voice on that tape.’ Lambert looked at his watch, aware that by now he had the attention of the man pretending so studiously to ignore him. ‘Geoffrey Lawson’s been arrested in the last five minutes: I don’t see him keeping quiet to save your skin.’
