Death of a Nobody

by J M Gregson

  James Berridge was flushed and breathing heavily. He had scarcely troubled to disguise the fact that he had been in bed with the woman who had admitted Lambert. His tie was still unfastened, his hair a little tousled. The flush on his face no doubt came as much from the pleasures which had been interrupted as from the annoyance he felt at this untimely presence. Lambert was reminded of his first gaffer in London a quarter of a century earlier, who had believed in bursting in to catch villains between the blankets whenever possible. ‘A man who’s bollock-naked never feels in a position to argue,’ had been his dictum. ‘Take ‘em on the nest and keep ‘em away from their pants until the tarts are well into their knickers!’ Those had been cruder days, with simpler criminals than this. Now he had unwittingly brought the old man’s precepts into play with this subtler and greater villain. Well, there was no harm in that.

  James Berridge was a powerful man, capitulating a little to the thin layer of fat which descends so easily upon affluence, but with the build and upper-body strength of a wrestler. He paused inside the door, setting himself in balance upon his powerful legs, as though he might spring at any moment upon this unwelcome visitor. He was very angry, but he was too practised in his dealings with the police to let anger take him over. Exasperation could upset the judgement, could lead a man into intemperate action. It was intensely annoying that this tiresome enemy should have tracked him here, but no more than that. His traces were well covered; this man could be no threat, if he kept his head. And he never had difficulty in doing that, nowadays.

  He said, ‘You’ve got a hell of a cheek! Who told you I was here?’

  ‘We have our methods.’ Lambert did not think it would take James Berridge long to find out who had given him the name of Sarah Farrell, but he would not help him. Perhaps Ian Faraday would have his excuses ready. ‘We take a little trouble, when there is a serious crime involved.’

  ‘If your methods were more efficient, you wouldn’t waste time interrupting the lives of honest businessmen.’ Berridge knew it was no more than the preliminary fencing, but he went through the ritual, as if he might lose face by not observing it, like some Japanese tycoon. He had not seen Lambert for over two years, since he had last shrugged off his accusations and got the better of him. He thought the man was looking older. There was a greater grizzling of grey amidst the plentiful crop of hair, and more lines around the grey eyes which studied him so steadily. Perhaps there was a hint of the tall man’s stoop as he stood not more than five feet away. This evidence of frailty gave Berridge a sense of superiority.

  Lambert said, ‘A man who worked for you has been killed.’

  ‘I’m not aware that any of my employees have not appeared today.’ He liked the formality of that; it enabled him to mock without appearing to do so. He was aware of Sarah behind the superintendent, watching the exchange: it made him careful to be even calmer.

  ‘A man called Charles Pegg. He worked in your flat at Old Mead Park. Doing work for you and your wife.’ Lambert had his eyes fixed on the small patch of skin and chest hair he could see where Berridge had missed a button on the front of his shirt.

  Berridge smiled, taking care not even to glance at Sarah Farrell. ‘No doubt he was retained by Gabrielle to construct certain additions to the furnishings. I tend to leave these things to her.’

  ‘Pegg knew quite a lot about you. Damaging things.’

  ‘Which he no doubt failed to communicate to you, as you show no signs of producing them. And now he’s dead. Look, Lambert, I’ve heard quite enough of your fairy tales before. If you’ve nothing better to offer me than this, then I suggest ‘

  ‘Where were you last night, Mr Berridge?’

  ‘It’s none of your business. But I’ll indulge you, if it will get rid of you more quickly. I was in London. You can check it out easily enough.’

  ‘I expect we shall. But I have no doubt you were where you say. You always did take care to be well out of the way when the dirty work went on.’

  It’s a trick I learned from the police, I expect. What is your detection rate for burglaries in the last year, Lambert?’

  ‘What was your business in London?’ Berridge had not expected this. He had been prepared to brazen out questioning about the mean little street where Pegg had been struck down, to enjoy baiting this flatfoot from the strength of a cast-iron alibi. He said, ‘That’s my affair. I have no intention of discussing my business concerns with you.’

  Sarah Farrell said suddenly, ‘I think I shall go and make some tea,’ and moved towards the door into the kitchen.

  Without detaching his eyes from Lambert, Berridge said, ‘Don’t do that. We’ll get rid of this pig first. Then we can take the tea back to bed.’ Through his mirthless smile, Lambert detected the first faint signs of worry. Like many careful planners, Berridge was disconcerted when events did not follow the course he had envisaged.

  ‘They’ve arrested a man in London, you see. One of a chain of drug dealers. He’s begun to talk about the people who employ him. About those who set up the big deals. Some interesting names have come up. Not unexpected, but interesting.’

  ‘And no doubt they include mine. They would, if you were involved.’

  ‘Oh, you know I couldn’t tell you that. Not at this stage.’ Lambert had gone as far as he dared. It was a phone call from the drug squad that morning which had both given him information and authorized him to dangle this much in front of Berridge. There were men already under surveillance in Bristol whom Berridge would surely have to contact, if he was worried about his drug deals. If he did, they would be pulled in. And in view of what was now known about their activities, they would surely talk.

  Berridge fell into a bravado he would not have attempted before he was rattled. ‘Of course you won’t tell me, because there is nothing to tell. You’ve made the mistake of making allegations in front of a third party this time.’ For the first time since he had entered the room, he glanced at the blonde woman beyond his adversary, as if reassuring himself about her support. ‘I’m sure my lawyers would be very interested to—’

  ‘Your lawyers will soon be fully occupied with your defence, I think. In the meantime, I am concerned with a murder investigation. Will you tell me what orders you issued yesterday to two men called Jones and Sturley?’

  ‘None at all. I give those men no orders. They are under the control of the manager of my club in Bristol.’

  ‘Yes. It’s surprising that you even recognize their names so promptly.’

  Berridge’s brain was racing, not with this, but with the suggestion that the police had information about his drug deals. ‘I know nothing about the way Pegg died. I expect he had it coming to him, if he went about prying into the affairs of his betters and grassing on them.’ There had been no suggestion until now that that was the reason for his death. It was an admission, a minor mistake, but again not one which would be worth anything in the hands of the Crown Prosecution Service.

  Lambert said, ‘Sturley and Jones will talk, once we have them pinned down. They might even save themselves a few years in a high-security nick, once they reveal who gave them their orders to kill little Charlie Pegg.’

  He turned for a moment to Sarah Farrell, whose blue eyes were open wide as they caught the light from the standard lamp. ‘I’m sorry I had to come into your house like this. Perhaps you should be more careful of the company you keep.’ He opened the door himself, then passed out through it without a further glance at the man he had come to see.

  Berridge stared at the inside of the door for a full half minute, as if its dark wood could reveal the full extent of the knowledge possessed by his tormentor. The woman behind him said eventually, ‘I’ll get that tea now, and we’ll go back upstairs, as you said. If you’d like to—’

  ‘Forget it!’ Berridge said harshly. ‘Go into the kitchen and make us a snack. Put the radio on. And shut the door.’

  She looked for a moment as though she might disobey him, her face whitening with fury. Then s
he snatched at the brass handle of the door and went out of the room, slamming it fiercely behind her.

  When the music blared out from the transistor in the kitchen, Berridge reached for the phone. At least the instrument here would not be tapped. For the first time in years, he felt the stirrings of panic.

  11

  Christine Lambert watched her husband’s head beginning to nod in front of the television set. Soon his chin would drop on to his chest and he would be well away. If he woke in less than half an hour, he would protest that he had never really been asleep, that he had merely taken refuge from ‘this rubbish’. With that, his gesture towards the technicolour blinkings from the corner of the room would suggest that it was she who had introduced these banalities into their living space, whereas it was he who had switched on automatically before he slumped into his chair for the evening. John could be reassuringly male at times.

  She had better strike before he subsided. ‘You haven’t forgotten that Caroline and the family are here for the weekend?’ she said.

  ‘Of course I haven’t,’ he said. It had merely slipped his mind: he hadn’t really forgotten it. He stirred his defensive mechanisms into action. ‘I may have to go to the golf club on Saturday, though. We’ve to play the next round in the knockout, and I think our opponents can only play then.’

  Christine smiled, recognizing the tactical withdrawal she had often heard before. ‘That won’t be a problem. So long as you make sure to be your normal sunny self when you come back.’

  ‘When did you know me any other way? I’ll make polite conversation with my son-in-law; I’ll wash up; I’ll even read to the children. Probably Winnie the Pooh again, I expect. They seem to want to hear it over and over.’ He tutted in deprecation, though secretly he looked forward to laughing conspiratorially over Eeyore and Piglet again with the youngsters on his knee. He had taken to grandfatherhood with unexpected delight, though he made the protests expected of him about a full and noisy house.

  ‘You’ll know it by heart soon,’ agreed Christine. Tut you’ll survive. I expect you may even need to play golf on Sunday morning, if the going gets rough.’ He grunted, apparently suddenly interested in the television programme he had just despised: there was no point in acknowledging how thoroughly she understood and indulged him nowadays.

  She knew he was on a murder case, that she could prod him into talking a little about it, if she chose. The days when he had hugged the job to himself, had used his home as no more than a sleeping place, an unwelcome interruption to the intensity of his hunting of men, were long gone now. She found it difficult sometimes to understand how near she had come to leaving him, to taking her small daughters and herself to somewhere, anywhere, away from the mysteries of police work and its exclusive camaraderie of thief-takers.

  Nowadays, she accepted that he would work fourteen-hour days when the job demanded it of him. She saw the adrenaline rise in him when the quarry was near, and found herself glad to see such energy and intensity still. But because she accepted these things, she was the more jealous of his leisure; she guarded his periods of regeneration away from the job, watching them as carefully as if she was protecting an invalid, instead of a man whose work-rate sometimes left younger CID officers protesting in his wake.

  On that evening, he dozed a little longer in front of the television set. But at three in the morning, he was wide awake. She lay wordless beside his long body, aware without a word from him that he must feel himself close to an important arrest.

  ***

  Policemen like to pretend to outsiders that they exist in a world of routine, where there are occasional dangers but few real excitements. It is a myth, of course; in part a reaction to the image of police work which the public has assembled for itself from the distortions of cinema and television over the years.

  On that Thursday morning in Oldford, the CID room was more animated than Bert Hook could ever remember seeing it. He was reminded of those scenes in the war films of his youth, in which information poured into a tense operations room and the picture of triumph or disaster gradually emerged over the hours. Normally, police work produced results over weeks, even months, of painstaking routine. Just occasionally, as this morning, the results of that work came together, the different strands began to interweave, and the pace quickened towards a result.

  Every few minutes, there seemed to be some new small item which built towards the outcome they all wanted, so that the cumulative effect of the efforts of different sectors gave an air of inevitability to the downfall of James Berridge. There was a phone call from Forensic about some fibres of cotton found on the body of Charlie Pegg, a sighting of William Sturley in the Star and Garter in the hours before Pegg’s murder, news from the drug squad of a most interesting meeting later in the day between two of the barons of that evil industry.

  Everything suggested that they would be able to arrest James Berridge before the day was over.

  To understand the excitement in the CID section, one would have had to have been a party to the unsuccessful attempts to bag Berridge over the preceding years. Most of the men who gathered round Rushton’s computer screen on that morning had been involved. Two years ago, they had almost had him. Then a key witness had refused to testify, and two others had disappeared. Berridge had enjoyed their frustration. And none of those involved had forgotten that enjoyment.

  By eleven o’clock there was enough information to bring in William Sturley and Walter Jones for further questioning about the murder of Charlie Pegg; Rushton began setting up an identity parade for Sturley. The two hard men were picked up as they arrived at the Curvy Cats. By midday, Lambert was equipped with search warrants for the business and domestic premises of James Albert Berridge.

  There was one snag. No one knew exactly where Berridge was. The grey-haired personal assistant at the Bristol offices was today more directly helpful: Berridge had been expected at the office, but had not arrived. That was unusual, but what was without precedent, she insisted, was that he had not phoned in to announce any change of plans. Like many major crooks, Berridge was punctilious about the etiquette of regular business practice.

  He was not at the Bristol club. The anxious voice of the manager of the Curvy Cats, John Murray, assured them of that. He was not in London. There was no reply from his home number in Old Mead Park. Nor, on this occasion, was there any reply from the mews cottage on the outskirts of Gloucester which Sarah Farrell had so grudgingly allowed John Lambert to enter nineteen hours earlier.

  There was muttered speculation among those on the fringe of the hunt that the bird had flown. Two of the younger detective constables were nodding to each other and exchanging defeatist whispers about Marbella and the Costa Crime when Rushton descended angrily upon their inexperience. They had not known until now that the detective inspector’s invective could be so inventive and colourful, nor that his passion could run so high when the morale of his team was at stake. ‘In any case,’ he concluded his tirade, ‘you should be aware that for drugs offences we would get him back, even from Spain. Of course, you might have a limited interest in that, if you were back on the beat by then.’

  Lambert chafed at this last delay when he was so close to his prey. Eventually, he left Rushton with instructions to contact him on the car phone with news of any developments and took Hook out with him to the old Vauxhall. He did not understand this: if Berridge had moved far from home, he should have been picked up.

  It was quiet in the middle of the day as they drove up the wide black tarmac drive of Old Mead Park. In the trimly kept communal gardens of the residences, pink and red camellias were still in full flower, and the bright blaze of the first Japanese azaleas lit up the front of the beds as the sun was hazed by high clouds. The birds sang of burgeoning spring and the gardens of diligent horticultural effort, but there was no visible human presence on the wide green lawns. High above them, as they got out of the old car in the deserted car park, the wide spans of the double glazing of the penthouse f
lat gleamed out over the landscape. It was impossible to tell from below whether any unseen observer had noted their arrival.

  The place was eerily quiet. It was almost a relief when George Lewis came out from his porter’s office to meet them. ‘Good morning, Superintendent Lambert,’ he said. Not many people recalled a detective’s name after a single meeting. Lambert reflected that a memory for names was probably a useful part of Lewis’s working equipment.

  At least he could reciprocate. ‘Have you seen Mr Berridge go out this morning, George?’ He made no reference to their conversation about Berridge on the previous day, sensing that Lewis would be a little flattered if he thought it was a secret between them.

  The porter shook his head. ‘Haven’t seen anyone from the penthouse today. He usually goes out early, if he’s here. Of course, I don’t see all the comings and goings. I have other duties as well.’ But his slight smile indicated that he was confident he saw most of the daylight activity. Certainly, the square window of his office commanded a comprehensive view of the drive which all must use for arrivals and departures, as well as a side view of many of the garage doors which were discreetly screened by rows of shrubs in the basement storey of the exclusive block.

  Lambert said, ‘We need to get into the penthouse flat. There is no need for you to alarm the rest of the residents with this, George, though the news will get round quickly enough. We are here to arrest James Berridge.’

  Lewis’s reaction amused Bert Hook. It was that of the trained butler rather than the porter. His eyes opened a little wider, but his features remained otherwise impassive, as if it was a professional challenge not to register shock or emotion. He did not say, ‘Indeed, sir,’ as Hook half-expected from the rest of his bearing. Instead, he turned quietly and unlocked the steel cupboard behind him which resembled a small safe. ‘You won’t mind if I accompany you into the flat, gentlemen?’ he said, producing a bright metal key. ‘The Residents’ Committee would prefer it, I think.’ His bearing announced that if there was to be any melodrama, it would be even more important that the etiquette of the occasion was properly observed. George Lewis put on his smart green porter’s jacket and straightened the knot of his tie.