Just Desserts

by J M Gregson

  He was raking over the remnants of yesterday’s fire, making sure that there was nothing to see but a few innocent twigs which had not burned, when he heard the police car coming up the unpaved track to the big shed where the course machinery was housed. He left the charred earth hastily and went back to the gang mowers, which lay in pieces on the concrete floor. He was wiping his hands on an oily rag and preparing to sharpen the blades when the two CID men came into the shed.

  The one who was introduced to him as Detective Sergeant Hook said, ‘We need to ask you a few questions. Is there somewhere where we could sit down in privacy for a few minutes?’

  He took them to the familiar room at the end of the shed, where the electric fire still burned, and pulled up a third, rarely used armchair from the edge of the space. His offer of tea was refused; the two big men folded themselves comfortably into the shabby armchairs and looked at him steadily, in a way which he was already finding disconcerting. This place which was so familiar suddenly seemed alien to him, transformed by a police presence it had never endured before.

  Hook seemed to be trying to put him at his ease as he said, ‘Merchant Navy man, weren’t you, Mr Fitch?’

  He wondered how they knew that. He was sure he hadn’t said anything about it in the brief statements they’d all been required to make on Wednesday night after the murder. Perhaps they’d been studying the employment files in the Camellia Park office; they surely wouldn’t have deduced it merely from the tattoos on his forearms. He found the idea that they might have prepared themselves for this talk more thoroughly than he had was disconcerting to him.

  His voice sounded gruff and forced as he said, ‘That’s right. Eighteen years I did. Seems like a different world, now.’ That was a comment he often made to people; why then should it sound so false in his own ears now?

  ‘Almost joined the service myself once – probably a few years after you’d gone to sea, it would be. I was a Barnardo’s boy, you see. The Merchant Navy was one of the careers they always urged us to consider, in those days.’ Hook was trying to encourage a man not normally required to be articulate to speak freely.

  ‘It was a good life, a lot of the time. Made me grow up quickly, it did. But I told you, it seems a long way behind me, now.’

  ‘Saw quite a bit of violence, I should think, in those days.’ Hook obstinately stuck with a subject the man wanted to leave.

  ‘Learned to look after myself, to know whom I could trust. You looked out for each other, once you knew who your friends were.’

  ‘I expect you did. And I expect these things stay with you. I should think that even when you were back on land, you knew how to look after yourself. Learned not to take any nonsense from anyone, I should think.’

  ‘I keep myself to myself, most of the time,’ said Alan Fitch cautiously. He didn’t have to use words much nowadays to get the things he wanted. He was desperate to change the subject now, but he didn’t know how to do it subtly. He said bluntly, ‘This is a waste of time, isn’t it? You’ve come here to talk about what happened on Wednesday night, not about what I did in the distant past.’

  ‘It may or may not be a waste of time, Mr Fitch.’ Lambert came in so promptly that he caught his man by surprise. Alan wondered for a moment if the two were working together, had set things up to catch him out before they came into his shed. It made him feel yet more uneasy, even as he repeated to himself what he had said a hundred times before they came, that he must keep calm, that there was nothing they could uncover if he kept his nerve. He just needed a few seconds to gather his resources.

  But Lambert was going on. ‘Until we know otherwise, everyone eating with Mr Nayland on Wednesday night has to be a suspect. Once you have accepted that, I’m sure you will see that the more we know about all of you, the better it will be for our investigation.’

  Alan did see. He wanted to argue, but all he did was to say woodenly, ‘I didn’t kill Mr Nayland.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. In that case, the sooner we can eliminate you from suspicion, the better it will be for all of us. My advice to you if you are innocent is to be as frank and straightforward as possible with us.’

  ‘That’s what I always meant to be.’ That sounded better, Alan thought, a little more defiant.

  ‘So you can start by being frank about that violent past which Detective Sergeant Hook was exploring with you.’

  They knew, he thought. They’d done their homework before coming here. He should have expected it, but somehow he hadn’t.

  The shock made him do the wrong thing. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. There were times when the fists flew a bit, in foreign ports, as I’ve already said. Nothing serious. Nothing which makes me a candidate for killing Nayland.’ He’d dropped the ‘Mr’ in his excitement. Somehow his hatred seemed to him to ring out far too clearly with his simple omission of the title.

  ‘Nothing serious, you say. You wouldn’t call a conviction for causing an affray something serious?’

  Alan fought against a rising panic, telling himself that he should have known they’d turn this up, that it made no difference to the present situation, however it might look. He tried to banish the dryness from his mouth. ‘I only got a suspended sentence.’

  ‘But you were guilty. Your captain spoke for your previous good conduct. The impression from reading about the court proceedings is that he didn’t want to sail with a crew one short.’

  He hadn’t bargained for this. Not for them knowing all the details, as they seemed to do. He’d almost forgotten about the conviction himself, over the years: the probationary sentence had come in his own mind to seem almost like a ‘Not Guilty’ verdict. But it wasn’t; if it had been, they wouldn’t have been able to look up the details and come at him like this with it. ‘It was a long time ago. A silly seamen’s fight in a bar. I didn’t even start it. It was something and nothing. I’ve put it aside and forgotten about it.’

  ‘Very wise, Mr Fitch. In that case, I may need to remind you that you were extremely fortunate to escape a much more serious charge of Grievous Bodily Harm.’

  ‘There was no evidence for that.’ Alan spoke like one in a dream; his own voice seemed to come from far away.

  ‘That’s not how they remember it in Cardiff, Mr Fitch. DS Hook spoke to CID records down there. It was only because they couldn’t get the man you injured to bear witness that you didn’t face the charge, and a probable prison sentence.’

  ‘He was as guilty as I was.’

  ‘Never tested, that, was it?’

  ‘No. But he was. He knew he—’

  ‘You attacked him with a knife, I believe.’

  His mind reeled. He had never in his worst moments thought they would get as far as that. He shut his eyes, trying fiercely to concentrate. ‘I had a knife, yes. I didn’t hurt him with it. Not seriously.’

  Lambert let the seconds stretch, making the most of his advantage. When the brown eyes in the weatherbeaten, experienced face opposite him opened, fear filled them like a tangible, liquid presence. He said, ‘You realize how this looks, in view of the way Patrick Nayland was killed.’

  ‘I – I haven’t carried a knife for years. Not since that night in Cardiff. Even when I was still on the ships, I didn’t—’

  ‘You haven’t got a knife around here, have you?’ Lambert looked slowly round the room, then at the dark oblong of the doorway, which led into the recesses of the huge shed beyond it.

  ‘No. Well, of course, there must be the odd knife about, in a place like this. We do a lot of our own repairs to vehicles and the other course equipment, and—’

  ‘We haven’t found the murder weapon, you see. Not yet. We’re satisfied that it’s not been left anywhere near the scene of the crime.’

  ‘It’s not here.’ Alan knew he should say something else, should deny any connection with the knife that had killed Nayland. But his tongue was suddenly too big and too dry for his mouth, and words would not come. And just when Alan wanted him to sp
eak, this long-faced inquisitor, who had recently been so eager to interrupt him, chose to remain silent and study him with those grey, unblinking, pitiless eyes.

  Lambert next ran those eyes thoughtfully round the room, letting them rest for a moment on the battered old cupboard in the corner. Alan panicked for a moment, trying desperately to go through the contents of that innocent container in his mind. Was there anything still in there which he would find hard to explain? He wondered if they needed a search warrant to go through this private working domain of his. Did they need a warrant just for your home? Could they move methodically through this place, examining things at their leisure? For a moment, he thought Lambert was going to ease his long frame out of the sagging armchair and stroll over to the cupboard.

  Instead, the Superintendent returned the scrutiny of those clear grey eyes to his man’s face and said quietly, ‘Did you kill Patrick Nayland, Mr Fitch?’

  ‘No.’ He wanted to shout more words, to say the very idea was absurd, but all he could manage was the blank monosyllable. It seemed to him far too small to refute a monstrous charge like this.

  ‘You see why we have to consider the matter, don’t you? He was killed with a knife, possibly applied with some skill and knowledge of human anatomy, the post-mortem report tells us. You are the only one of the people in that restaurant who has a previous history of knife crime.’

  The man was throwing all these long words at him, as if to point out the inadequacy of his one-word denial. Alan sought again for the phrases which would cascade out in anger, reinforcing his outrage, flooding away the calm logic which seemed to be rising like a tide to engulf him. Nothing would come. He shook his head dumbly in a hopeless, inadequate denial.

  His fear had come as a surprise to him. He had expected this meeting would be taxing, but he had never thought he would lose his nerve like this. He was Alan Fitch, the reliable, unflappable guardian of the golf course, the man whose competence was evidenced in the acres where he plied his trade, the man whose calm answers and assurances about what he was doing and what he proposed to do were accepted without question by those who surrounded him. He had acquired a reputation for calmness and unflappability, an image he had begun to believe in himself. He had never expected to find the blood pounding in his temples like this, to find the capacity for rational thought slinking away from him, like a faithless dog.

  They were asking him now about the events of Wednesday evening, with the Sergeant recording everything he said. He had expected this, and he had the answers ready. He was relieved when they came automatically to his lips. Yes, he’d been down to the toilets earlier in the evening, had been surprised by the bawdy pictures in there, had enjoyed a bit of a laugh with the others when he came back upstairs. He couldn’t say how long that was before Nayland died. He didn’t know how long the host had been missing before his death was discovered. So far as he could remember, he hadn’t spoken to him during the evening.

  He faltered a little when they asked him if he knew of anyone who had any reason to kill Patrick Nayland. Some small, troublesome part of his reeling brain told him that this was a chance to divert suspicion from himself, to tilt the scales a little against that damned knife from all those years ago, which they had discovered and thrown into the balance against him.

  But he was in no condition to pit his mind against these calm, ruthless adversaries. He confined himself to as few words as possible, to being unhelpful rather than actually trying to mislead them. And surprisingly quickly, it was all over, and they were telling him to get in touch if he thought of anything which might be helpful, and not to leave the area without giving them an address.

  They went out with him into the cold of the world outside, where there was a light wind from the north beneath a deceptively blue sky. It was over, he thought, wishing them into their car and off the premises. They moved with irritating slowness, and he had to moderate his pace to theirs, so that he could pretend that there was nothing here to hide, that he was as relaxed now as they were.

  They strolled past the dead embers of the fire he had lit yesterday, then stopped together, as though they were puppets operated by a single string. The Sergeant with the countryman’s face stared at the ground, then stirred the ashes with the toe of his shoe, neglectful of the high shine he was impairing. He watched the white dust float away on the breeze, then sniffed the air like an inquisitive Labrador. ‘Quite recent, this, isn’t it?’

  ‘The fire? Yesterday. I burned some old timber which had too much rot in it to be any use again. And some brambles we’d cleared from the course. And some broken chairs from the dining room in the clubhouse. And some old rags we’d used to clean the tractor and the mowers.’

  His tongue was suddenly working again: he had relaxed when he had thought that the ordeal was over. He was now saying too much, as if by cataloguing the ingredients of the fire he could make it a more innocent blaze.

  The two CID men stared down at the black circle with its grey remnants, and Alan had to resist a ridiculous impulse to leap forward and cover the evidence from their scrutiny. There was nothing here to see. He had checked it earlier himself. But some weird and mischievous goblin tried to convince him that the eyesight of these predators was more than human, that they would swoop upon the scorched earth and hold aloft triumphantly some incriminating thing he had thought consumed for ever by the flames.

  He said stupidly, ‘It was a good day for a bonfire, yesterday. I was glad of the warmth.’

  ‘You were alone when you lit the fire?’ This was the Superintendent, seizing on the singular pronoun as if it were the final piece in some obscure jigsaw which would send Alan into a cell. He had almost thought ‘send him to the gallows’, his mind springing in fear back to the recesses of some childish nightmare.

  Alan said, ‘I think I was alone when I lit it, yes.’ That was stupid: they would realize that he knew perfectly well whether he was alone or not. And if they were interested in the matter, as it seemed now they surely were, they would check it out with other people. ‘I lit it first thing yesterday. Barry didn’t come in until later.’

  ‘First thing yesterday. Only a few hours after you’d left Soutters Restaurant and the body of Mr Nayland, then.’

  ‘Yes. I couldn’t sleep. I came in early.’ He wondered how they contrived to make every question seem like an accusation, whether they did that with everyone they interviewed. He had a moment of inspiration. ‘The fire was one of the things I could do on my own, you see.’

  ‘I see,’ said Lambert. He took a step forward and stirred the grey-black ashes, as Hook had done before him. He looked into Alan Fitch’s face again, as intently as he had done for twenty minutes inside his shed. He nodded a couple of times, gave him a brief smile, and said, ‘We must be on our way.’

  It was the first conventional, meaningless phrase Alan had heard from him during their meeting. He stood and watched them drive down the unpaved track and back to the main road, watched the police car until its roof disappeared between the hedges, oblivious of the keenness of the north wind.

  They had come with the knowledge of his violence of years ago, and disconcerted him with that knowledge. And when he had thought they had done with him, just when he was relaxing, they had found the remnants of his fire and challenged him on that.

  But they hadn’t discovered anything, and they couldn’t reverse the process of destruction. They could think what they liked about the fire, but it had done its work.

  Nine

  Barry Hooper had only had the Ducati 620 for six weeks. It wasn’t new, of course – he could never have afforded that – but it was in splendid condition. When he had finished polishing it, you would never have thought that it was three years old.

  The bike was still an exciting novelty rather than a mere means of transport to Barry. He loved the sensation of the engine roaring into life between his knees, delighted each time anew in the sudden surge of power as he eased the bike on to the road and away from the kerb.
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br />   He even enjoyed getting ready to go out on it, the donning of the leathers, the careful fastening of the helmet strap beneath his chin, the slow pulling on of the big gauntlets, which seemed to make his slim hands so much more powerful than they had been without them. Two years ago, he had been riding a moped, a late developer among bikers, the centre of friendly laughter among the boys he met at nights. Now he had moved swiftly from youth into manhood. Now he was the subject of envy among his peers, not derision.

  When he was riding the Ducati, it took all of his concentration. Once astride the Ducati, he could forget the dramatic events of the last few days, could thrust away for a time the apprehension which had beset him since the death of Nayland.

  But it seemed that on this day he was not going to be allowed to forget. He rode carefully along the road into Gloucester, slowing obediently to thirty miles an hour as he went through the village of Highnam, where everyone knew the cameras would get you if you did not crawl along. He had almost reached the junction with the A40 when he saw the police car.

  They passed each other slowly enough for him to see the occupants, a driver with a rather florid face and a tall, grave-faced man, who seemed to Barry’s young eyes quite elderly, though he was probably only in his fifties.

  In that moment, Barry Hooper knew as certainly as if someone had whispered the information into his ear that these men were plain-clothes detectives, driving to Camellia Park, investigating the death of Nayland. Very probably they were going up to the familiar greenkeeper’s shed to interview Alan Fitch. They hadn’t interviewed him yet, and though his boss had said nothing, Barry knew that he was anticipating a visit from the fuzz. He even knew that Alan Fitch was nervous about it; Barry wasn’t as dim or as inexperienced as the older man thought he was.