by J M Gregson
She could see why Chief Superintendent Lambert had made his reputation and got results, why he was a man to be feared in her situation. She could even see now in retrospect how that stolid Sergeant Hook complemented his more intense chief, how that man with the weather-beaten countenance should not be underestimated. She frowned at the thought. She had done well, but they would still have her down as a suspect. It would be well to proceed carefully.
In the car making its way back to Oldford CID, Lambert was reflecting on one indication of her innocence which she had curiously failed to stress.
Fourteen
Detective Inspector Rushton switched off his computer with some relief.
He enjoyed collating the various strands of a murder inquiry, building up the files and looking for significant similarities and discrepancies in the accounts people gave. Cross-referencing was the thing: several times in the last three years he had managed to throw up anomalies in the statements witnesses had given which had been the keys to solving the crime involved. He was quite content to let that old dinosaur Lambert go out and question people, to pick and probe a crime until he came up with interesting facts and dishonesties.
In most CID sections the chief superintendent would have been sitting behind a desk and coordinating whilst his inspectors and sergeants and DCs were out at the crime-face. But each to his own strength was a good rule, if one which the police service rarely acknowledged. Chris was prepared to admit that John Lambert was a more subtle and imaginative assessor of people and of what they said than he was. Perhaps in turn he was more competent at the business of collecting and regulating the mass of information which a murder hunt throws up than his chief: certainly John Lambert and Bert Hook assured him that he was.
Yet on this particular Wednesday evening, Chris Rushton was glad to switch off his computer and leave the confusing case of Richard Cullis behind. He had worked for nine hours at classifying and recording the numerous statements which had come pouring in from the people who had been present at that fatal dinner. The staff of the Belmont Golf and Country Club, as well as the laboratory workers at Gloucester Chemicals, had provided him with a welter of material, much of it repetitive; most of it would no doubt prove to be irrelevant, but no one could be certain yet just what was important. Enough was enough. It was no use becoming obsessive, as he had sometimes been in danger of doing in the last few years. Switch off your mind and come back refreshed to the task tomorrow morning.
This was an eminently sensible attitude. Whether it had anything to do with the fact that Christopher Rushton now had a social life was another matter entirely, which Chris did not want to discuss with himself.
To whit, a lady almost ten years younger than himself called Anne Jackson. Whether she would have been flattered to be described as a social life is another matter, but one Chris fortunately did not have to debate with her.
He was later home than he had expected, so that Anne was waiting for him in his neat little flat. It had been an important stage in the rituals of intimacy when he had offered her the key to his rather sterile little home and she had solemnly accepted it with a chaste kiss upon his brow. One of the things both of them liked about the relationship was that he was never quite sure when Anne was teasing him and when she was absolutely serious.
She had a gin and tonic waiting for him. ‘Rest your old bones whilst I cook,’ she said as he subsided on to the sofa. Chris was thirty-two.
‘I should be doing that.’ He made the ritual protest, but remained sitting.
‘It’s highly demanding stuff, this.’ She read the instructions on the packet and switched on the microwave. ‘It will be ready in ten minutes. I thought we’d both worked hard enough for one day, so I popped into Tesco’s like the slut I am and did the easy thing.’
Anne Jackson was in her first year in teaching. She finished exhausted but happy on most nights. ‘It’s half term next week. We could go away together for a day or two if you can manage it.’ She busied herself with the clatter of plates and the tinkle of cutlery. They had been sleeping together for two months now, but it would be the first time they had been away together, and thus another step towards longterm involvement. She was determinedly casual about this suggestion, shy enough to think she might blush if she looked at him.
He was silent for so long that she had completed the settings for two on his neat little kitchen table before he spoke. ‘I’d like to. Of course I’d like to. That goes without saying.’ Chris cursed himself for his stiffness. ‘But this murder case we’ve just started on looks set to run for some time. I can’t be certain it will be over with by next week. ’
‘That’s all right! It was only a thought.’ Her answer came almost before he had finished speaking, showing her that she was much more nervous than she had thought she would be.
He came up and stood behind her, clasping his hands round her waist, holding her against him, in the simple, spontaneous movement which he would have found difficult only a few weeks ago. ‘I’m sorry, Anne. I’d love to go away with you. But I don’t want to say yes and then have to let you down. ’
‘It doesn’t matter. Really it doesn’t. We’ll still be able to spend some time together. Perhaps we could play golf again, if you can drag John Lambert and Bert Hook away from the job for a few hours.’
He was irrationally pleased that she should remember their names. She had played golf with them two months earlier, when she had surprised the older men with the standard of her game and Chris had been immensely proud of her. He had originally met her when she was one of the innocent people involved in a previous murder investigation. Now he said impulsively, ‘You don’t seem to mind the job. It was one of the things which broke up ex-Anne and me.’
One of the things a divorced man should never do is to find a new woman with the same name as his ex-wife. Lambert and Hook would have backed DI Rushton to do it, and sure enough Chris had achieved the unlikely feat. The new lady and he had fixed upon ‘ex-Anne’ for the vanished former wife, managed to laugh about the unfortunate coincidence, and were now easy with the idea.
Anne Jackson was careful not to show the curiosity she inevitably felt about this woman she had never seen, but she was grateful now for the opportunity to assert an advantage over her. She shrugged extravagantly. ‘Everyone has to work. Your particular job makes its own demands: that’s all right by me. You’ll have to accept that my job makes its own demands as well. Like being far too tired to go out tonight, when you want to go out clubbing.’ She yawned extravagantly, then scrambled to her feet as the bell on the cooker timer summoned her to inspect the progress of their food.
Chris was delighted. There was nothing he wanted more than a quiet night in, but he always feared that a twenty-two-year-old must be anxious to be out on the town. When he voiced this thought, Anne said that he had no idea of the amount of energy expended in a day with thirty eight-year-olds. They discussed the murder which had taken place twenty-four hours earlier in general terms. She was wary of treading on delicate ground and knew he could not discuss confidential details of the case, but the death of what the press called a ‘prominent industrialist’ in front of over eighty witnesses was already established as a local sensation.
Chris told her that ricin was suspected as the instrument of death, since he knew that the press officer had released this information to the media an hour ago. ‘It’s apparently one of the swiftest and most deadly poisons known to man,’ he said, hoping she would be as impressed as he had been by that information. ‘Unfortunately, it looks as though almost everyone who was at Richard Cullis’s table was a research chemist with access to ricin, so I can’t see this being a straightforward arrest. That’s why I’m doubtful about getting away next week.’
It was still early enough in their relationship for Anne Jackson to feel careful about upstaging him, but she still enjoyed giving him little shocks. ‘Yes. I know the son of someone who was at that table. A boy called Young - he seems quite upset. Do you want ice cr
eam with your strawberries?’
Chris had never had any problem in thrusting aside his private life once he entered the station at Oldford and became Detective Inspector Rushton.
According to ex-Anne, that was one of the reasons for their marriage break-up. Chris had been so wrapped up in his job and his successive promotions that they had taken precedence over other and more important things. The familiar complaint of the policeman’s wife. The concentration which had twenty years earlier threatened to destroy even the marriage of that CID elder statesman John Lambert, whose marriage was now seen as the rock-solid product of an earlier era by the younger members of his team.
The delights of the previous evening with Anne Jackson were instantly and automatically dismissed as DI Rushton turned to the problems of the morning. There was more information coming in from the murder team assigned to the Richard Cullis investigation, but there was another task to be undertaken before he could get back to his computer and the problems of cross-referencing his files. It was a very necessary problem, Chris told himself firmly. It might even in the end prove to have a connection with the Cullis case.
Scott Kennedy had to be interviewed.
The hunt saboteur had got away with his attempts to disrupt Lord Elton’s hunt. Much to Chris’s disgust, there were to be no charges. But in the last stages of his questioning in connection with that skirmish he had revealed something much more serious and much more interesting. Bert Hook had trapped Kennedy into an admission that he had been responsible for the abduction of Richard Cullis a few weeks before his murder. Now DS Hook was to assist DI Rushton with the interview with Scott Kennedy, in the presence of his lawyer.
Like all policemen and a goodly proportion of the public they served, DI Rushton did not like lawyers. They were an obstruction to justice, not a protection for innocence, in Chris’s heavily biased view. The aggressive newly qualified man who accompanied Kennedy this morning seemed to him a particularly obnoxious specimen of the species.
Tim Cohen was smartly dressed in suit and tie and had encouraged his client to present himself similarly. Scott Kennedy claimed he didn’t possess a suit, but he had discarded his jeans for trousers and wore a light blue leisure shirt with a neat collar. In the warm little box of interview room number two at Oldford police station, he was the only one who looked comfortable. He was perky and alert as he came into the room and accepted the seat offered to him beside his lawyer. Only the way that he suddenly ran a hand through brown hair which was too short to need such attention showed that he was nervous.
‘Let’s have this over with quickly, pigs, and let me get on my way. I don’t like the smell round here.’ He looked aggressively at the cool, clear-cut features of Rushton, found no reaction there, tried a little contempt on the less threatening face of Hook, and was equally unsuccessful.
Rushton gave him an acid smile. ‘I think we’d like to have whatever you say here on record, Mr Kennedy.’ He switched on the cassette tape recorder, announced that it was nine twelve a.m., and gave the names of the officers who were about to interview Scott Alfred Kennedy in the presence of his lawyer.
Tim Cohen raised a hand to prevent his too-impulsive client from speaking and said with his most winning smile, ‘I hope there is room for compromise here. You have already indicated that you do not intend to proffer any charges against my client in connection with our disruption of the local hunt. We recognize that you have to enforce the law, however mistaken that may seem to those of us with the interests of helpless creatures at heart. In turn, we hope that you recognize that we have conscientious concerns of our own.’
Rushton kept his attention upon Scott Kennedy as he answered his lawyer. ‘Conscientious concerns are one thing, Mr Cohen. Serious criminal actions are quite another.’
Kennedy was now plainly nervous. He folded his arms, then unfolded them again quickly, finding he could not keep as still as the men on the other side of the small square table. He licked his lips and made a final attempt at bravado. ‘Let’s have this over and get us all out of here. I don’t suppose you enjoy wasting time any more than I do.’
‘You may not be going anywhere, Mr Kennedy. What you admitted to DS Hook in a previous interview is a very serious offence. Far more serious than inciting violence at a drag-hunt meeting.’
Cohen raised his slim hand again within Kennedy’s peripheral vision. ‘My client is admitting nothing. It is our belief that you do not have the evidence to warrant a prosecution against him.’
Bert Hook inched himself three inches nearer to the edgy young man in front of him. ‘Mr Kennedy has already admitted in a formal interview with PC Stanley and myself that he abducted a citizen, using an offensive weapon. Unless he proposes to tell us that he was lying and provide us with—’
‘I wasn’t lying!’ Kennedy spat out the denial before he considered any consequences.
Hook’s experienced, revealing features creased into a smile. ‘Good! Then we’ll get on with this quickly, as you suggest.’
This time the lawyer’s restraining hand had no effect on his overexcited client. ‘All right. I admit I took Cullis away and we told him what we thought of him and his firm’s activities. It wasn’t personal. He was the Director of Research and Development, the man in charge of those laboratories where they torture innocent creatures and claim it’s for our benefit! The man who could stop the experiments and the tests on animals at Gloucester Chemicals.’ Rushton said coldly, ‘That is how you see it, Mr Kennedy. It is our job to enforce the law and the law sees your actions quite differently. You abducted an innocent citizen by threatening him with a lethal instrument, namely a knife, and made him drive his own car to a point determined by you, where you met your accomplices in this crime. In the course of this episode, you held a knife at his throat and repeatedly threatened to injure him.’
‘So get on with it and charge me. I’ll pay your bloody fine.’
This time it was Rushton who smiled, his more intense features now matching the satisfaction of Hook beside him. ‘Not a fine, Mr Kennedy. You are facing very serious charges. Mr Cohen here knows much more than me about the law, but I know quite enough to tell you that you are facing a custodial sentence here. Probably rather a substantial one.’ He nodded happily.
Kennedy glanced apprehensively at his brief, then immediately regretted this obvious gesture of weakness. He said sullenly, ‘We were trying to protect innocent creatures. We’d nothing against Cullis personally. You make it sound much worse than it was.’
‘I recount the facts. And you do not seem to be disputing them, Mr Kennedy. You would be most unwise to do so, if they are correct.’
Tim Cohen knew that as a lawyer he should not sound desperate, though it was difficult not to do so with this young fool seemingly intent on self-destruction. ‘Mr Kennedy has admitted more than I would have advised him to do, as his lawyer. I hope you will not now penalize him for his honesty.’ He knew that his words were no more than a rhetorical flourish. He was driven to playing a card he had planned to keep in reserve. ‘You will in my opinion have the greatest difficulty in preparing a case against him, in the absence of your chief witness.’ Rushton said drily, ‘The judge will no doubt wish to take Mr Kennedy’s honesty into account when it comes to passing sentence. Along with his repeated threats of violence and even death to his victim. I do not think you should rely on the unfortunate death of that victim to extricate your client from charges. Mr Richard Cullis was interviewed by our officers about this incident on the day after it occurred and made a detailed statement. I think you’ll find that the CPS feel they have quite enough evidence to bring this to court.’
Bert Hook had not taken his eyes from Kennedy’s pale, apprehensive face during Rushton’s exchanges with the lawyer. He now said abruptly, ‘So what do you know about Mr Cullis’s death, Scott?’
‘Nothing. I didn’t kill him.’
‘I didn’t accuse you of that, Scott. I suggested that you might know something which could help us to fin
d his killer.’
Kennedy’s chastened face now set into a mask. ‘I don’t know anything that could help you. I don’t know why you—’
‘You would be most unwise to conceal anything, Scott. You are already facing very serious charges. If you add concealing evidence in a murder inquiry to those offences, you might be banged up for a very long time indeed.’
Tim Cohen spoke quickly, anxious to prevent the impulsive young man at his side from further incriminating himself. ‘My client is not concealing anything. I agree with you that it would be most unwise to do so, but he has no connection with this murder.’ He tried to recover a little lost ground. ‘In my opinion, you would be most unwise to suggest that he does.’ Still Hook did not look at the lawyer, did not take his steady gaze from the face of Cohen’s young client. Kennedy was in his view a fool rather than a genuine villain, a young man whose mistaken principles were going to land him in even deeper trouble if someone did not show him the error of his ways. But there was a murder to be solved and anything this young fool knew must be out in the open. ‘You told Mr Cullis that your group All God’s Creatures had someone working in the laboratories at Gloucester Chemicals. In view of the sudden death of Mr Cullis, this person is obviously going to be investigated.’
Cohen said immediately, ‘I need a few minutes to confer with my client. I am making a formal request to that effect. ’
Rushton silently cursed all lawyers. He gave the pair on the other side of the table the briefest of nods, then announced, ‘Interview suspended at nine twenty-eight,’ and switched off the cassette recorder.
Left alone in the windowless box of the interview room, Cohen watched the door close behind their questioners and said, ‘I told you before we came in here to let me do the talking. Keep quiet and give them nothing was supposed to be the tactic. If in doubt, leave it to your brief. That’s what I’m here for.’
