Stranglehold

by J M Gregson

  ‘Did you have a pillion passenger?’

  Pickering looked puzzled. ‘No. I was alone.’

  ‘Then you have no witness to your movements in the later part of the evening?’ Rushton tried to keep the satisfaction out of his voice.

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘What time did you go out?’

  ‘About nine o’clock, I suppose.’

  ‘You’d better tell us where you went.’

  ‘A48, A38 up to Tewkesbury, M50 down to Ross, and back home.’

  Pickering rapped out the numbers as though they were a challenge, folding his arms and resting them on the small table so that his brown forearms faced his questioners. Rushton wondered if the road numbers came too pat, like a prepared statement. Then he pictured the route on the map, and had to control his excitement. ‘You went to Gloucester.’

  ‘Round it, yes. Why?’

  Rushton studied him for a long moment before he spoke, watching the anxiety grow in the twenty-year-old face. ‘Do you know a woman called Amy Coleford?’

  Fear flooded now into those too-revealing blue eyes. Pickering said unexpectedly, ‘Yes. I’ve seen her at the Roosters. Why? Has she –’

  ‘She was strangled last night. In Gloucester. At the time for which you can give no convincing account of your whereabouts.’ Rushton enunciated the three staccato facts with satisfaction. ‘Now, stop pissing us about and tell us what you were really doing in Gloucester last night.’

  Pickering was shaken, but he knew enough to say little and stick to his story. ‘I didn’t even stop the bike in Gloucester. I went on up to Tewkesbury.’ And then he had done the ton down the M50. He had thought he would need to conceal that from the fuzz; it was curious that it should now seem so unimportant.

  ‘Witnesses?’

  ‘No. Why should there be?’

  ‘To preserve your delicate skin, Pickering. Think about that. We’re going to leave you for a while, now. You would be well advised to consider your position.’

  Rushton announced to the recording machine that the interview was suspended and swept from the room before Pickering could say any more. They would leave him for half an hour or so. Then DC Muirhead could try his luck with the softer, friendlier approach, offering fags and sympathy, emphasizing the advantages of confession.

  Detective-Inspector Rushton was increasingly persuaded that he could pin this one on Darren Pickering.

  Vic Knowles was preparing to leave his hotel in Gloucester when he was told that the police wanted to see him.

  The eyes of the chambermaid who brought the news were wide with speculation, for the news of the corpse which had sat dead through the night beside the docks had already raced around the old town. Visits from the CID would be attended now by even more than normal interest.

  The two large men who came quickly into the small reception area did not disappoint the staff. With their sluggish imaginations urgently stirred, they saw Superintendent Lambert and Sergeant Hook as menacing presences, surely about to arrest a psychopath who had spent a night under their roof. Headlines leapt luridly into a dozen minds; minds which were already beginning to exaggerate their proximity to the monster who had dwelt unsuspected in their midst.

  They were disappointed when Lambert elected to see Mr Knowles in his room. The hotel was less than half full, and he had been given a double room. The detectives sat carefully on bedroom chairs that were patently too small for them, looking to Knowles like birds of prey on rickety perches. He positioned his buttocks experimentally on the edge of the double bed, like a man who feared that an old-fashioned hospital sister would denounce him at any moment for the liberty.

  There was a battered suitcase with a strap round it behind him on the bed; in another ten minutes, he would have been gone. But he had risen and breakfasted late. For a moment, he regretted his tardiness: then the voice of reason told him that he would have been sought out a hundred miles away within a few hours, when the case was as serious as this one.

  ‘Is it about the strangling by the docks? I’m sure I can’t tell you anything that will help you.’ The girl who had served him at breakfast had brought news of the crime with his bacon, setting his nervous stomach churning and spoiling a meal he usually enjoyed.

  ‘She was strangled, yes. We haven’t yet released that detail.’ Lambert dwelt heavily on the words. He had only read the reports of Rushton’s interview with Knowles about the earlier killings; this was the first time he had seen him.

  ‘The girl must have told me. The whole place seems alive with this murder.’ Knowles wondered why his explanations seemed so guilty.

  ‘That is good to hear. If the town is so interested, no doubt we shall soon turn up someone who saw the man who killed this young woman.’ Lambert had no great confidence about that, but it did no harm if suspects thought that the police machinery was infallible. ‘We shall need to know about your movements last night, Mr Knowles.’

  ‘I – I was with Charlie Kemp. The Chairman of Oldford Football Club.’ He leant forward, trying to give his announcement some of the import it would have had when he was playing and managing in the First Division. ‘I’m going to be their new manager. It’s going to be officially announced later today.’

  If he had hoped to impress them, he could not have been more disappointed. Hook wrote carefully, then said, I thought Trevor Jameson was the manager at Oldford.’ It was impossible to tell from his expression if he was trying to be provocative.

  Knowles said, ‘Trevor’s been in football long enough to know the score. I understand from Mr Kemp that he’s now been told that he is out of a job. It was nothing to do with me, of course.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Lambert drily; his eyes had not left his man’s thin, too-mobile face since they had come into the room. ‘Are you telling us that you were with Charlie Kemp for the whole evening?’

  ‘Depends what you mean by the whole evening, doesn’t it?’ For a moment, Knowles recaptured the buoyancy of ten years ago, when he was often interviewed on television and never at a loss for a word. ‘The Max Miller of football’, one of the tabloids had dubbed him, and for three years he had tried to live up to the image, with a series of check jackets and quips that were never quite as good as he thought they were. There had been a lot of experience since then, most of it bad.

  He saw now that these men were not seeking to be amused, that he had struck the wrong note already. ‘Charlie Kemp and I had a meal together and discussed the way we saw things at Oldford.’ At least he needn’t tell them that the meal had been largely a monologue from Kemp about the way his new servant would do his job; that he had been made to crawl for an advance to clear his debts in the Midlands before he moved south.

  ‘Where was this?’ Lambert decided that it would be better if Knowles did not realize that they had already seen Kemp.

  ‘At the Dog and Partridge.’

  ‘And how long were you there?’

  ‘From about seven-thirty to nine-thirty.’

  They noted the slight difference in timing from what Kemp had given them. ‘Did you spend the rest of the evening with Kemp?’

  ‘No. He went off in his Merc.’ They caught the whiff of envy and resentment. Oldford FC was going to be run by a pretty uneasy partnership – if other events allowed it to come to fruition.

  ‘And you came straight back here?’

  They watched his too-revealing face as he wrestled with the temptation to lie. Lambert said, ‘No doubt if you did we can find someone in the hotel to confirm it.’ He had not the time to spend on exposing false stories.

  Knowles said dully, ‘No, I didn’t come straight back. It was probably after eleven-thirty by the time I got in here.’

  He looked at the bed behind him, remembering how he had tossed through the night in one of his periodic bouts of self-disgust. ‘I went for a drink. In a pub in Southgate Street.’

  Hook looked up from his notes. ‘Down near the docks then.’

  ‘Is it? I don’t kn
ow Gloucester well.’

  Lambert said, ‘So you were in this pub for approximately an hour and a half. Are there any witnesses to that?’

  Knowles hesitated, then said, ‘No, I don’t think so. The bar staff might remember me, but the place was pretty crowded.’

  Lambert said wearily, ‘We’re talking about the time when a girl was being brutally murdered, within a few hundred yards of where you’ve admitted you were. Later today, we expect to have the results of the forensic tests on materials found in your car after another, similar murder. We now have three killings, almost certainly by the same man. You appear to have been in the areas of all three of them at the relevant times. If you had anyone with you last night, you had much better tell us now.’

  The words had been delivered in a rapid monotone, which Knowles found the more unnerving because it was dispassionate. He switched his eyes from Lambert to the cheap Turner reproduction on the wall behind him and said dully, ‘I talked to a woman for a while.’

  ‘Name?’

  His shoulders dropped hopelessly. ‘I don’t know. She was on her own. I think she’d arranged to meet someone who didn’t turn up. I – I tried to get her to come back here with me, but she wouldn’t.’

  ‘You’d better give us her name.’

  Knowles’s lined face looked back to them. Hook, who was within four feet of him in the cramped bedroom, caught a whiff of stale breath. Probably he had drunk too much last night in the moment of his rejection. Or in preparation for the latest of his killings. ‘I didn’t get a full name. She called herself Rose. I wouldn’t be certain even of that – certain that it was her real name, I mean. I think she was a married woman.’

  They got a rather vague description from him, then went over the details of his divorce and his situation back in Sutton Coldfield. As he lost confidence in himself, he became ever more frank with them. On his own admission, he, who had once been able to pick and choose his conquests, had not had much success with women lately.

  By the time they left him, he had shown his abhorrence of his own conduct as well as his resentment against unresponsive women. It could be the background of a man with a grudge against a whole sex.

  If Knowles was a man on the way down, everything about Ben Dexter proclaimed that he was rising steadily.

  To his colleagues in Bristol, he gave the impression that he welcomed the CID as simply one more excitement in a life that was crowded with incident. The young men wore their uniform of braces and shirtsleeves as they crouched in front of their computer screens, studying the movements of the money markets around the world, making an excellent living not by producing goods but by moving other people’s money around. When they were not speaking rapidly into the phones at their sides, they would occasionally put their feet up on their desks, not to relax but to demonstrate to their colleagues and rivals how simple the whole business was.

  Intruders into this strange world were treated as being of a different and lower species. And most of these young men thought policemen so far behind them in their speed of thought that they must be positively retarded.

  ‘A couple of PC Plods to see you, Ben,’ said one of Dexter’s acolytes. He took them into the small outer office which was reserved for those members of the public who were tiresome and thick-skinned enough to penetrate thus far into this strange world.

  ‘And what can a simple lad like me do to assist our guardians of the law?’ said Ben Dexter. He poured himself a coffee from the Pyrex jug on the hotplate, then, as an insulting afterthought, gestured an invitation at them with the jug. Then he sat on the edge of the big desk, sipping his coffee, his every gesture proclaiming that they were lucky to have a little of his time and that they must not presume too far upon his goodwill.

  He was either very confident of his innocence, or had that manic presumption of superiority which often characterizes the criminally insane.

  ‘We require a detailed account of your movements last night,’ said Lambert, made more formal by the insolence of this gilded young man. ‘Take your time, because it’s important, to you as well as to us.’

  Dexter glanced down at his Rolex. ‘I may not have much time to spare.’

  ‘You will have as much as is necessary. We’ll do this at the station, if that proves more appropriate. No doubt you are aware that you can have a lawyer present while we question you, if you consider that that would be appropriate.’ The deflation of this creature promised to give John Lambert his first moments of pleasure in a trying day.

  ‘Hoity-toity,’ said Dexter, as though he was delivering a good-natured rebuke to fractious children. But he was already a little shaken. His fingers crept up unconsciously to entwine themselves in his carefully cut blond hair where it caressed his delicate ears. He kept a smile resolutely upon his wide mouth, but he was consciously acting a part now. ‘I expect there’s been another of these murders that you can’t solve, hasn’t there?’

  ‘We shall get the man responsible. However secure he affects to feel himself at this moment.’ Lambert looked steadily into the blue eyes, until they blinked and looked briefly away from him to Hook.

  ‘Cleverer than he is, are you?’

  Hook looked up from his notebook in time to catch the derision in the young face. He said, ‘Cleverer than you, lad, anyway. And much better organized. Where were you last night?’

  ‘There’s been another one, hasn’t there? And you lot haven’t –’

  ‘Answer the question!’ Hook rapped out the order so loudly that it could be heard in the big room on the other side of the wall, where the young men in front of their flickering monitors were speculating on what that mysterious Ben Dexter had been doing to excite the CID. Hook, who had never hit a suspect in his twenty-two years as a policeman, gave the impression that he might hit this one at any moment.

  Dexter was thrown by the aggression concealed beneath this village-bobby exterior. He did not realize what Lambert had learned long ago, that Bert Hook was an unexpectedly good actor when interrogating, perfectly prepared to simulate whatever emotion he thought most useful. He said sullenly, ‘I was at the Roosters. I usually am in the evenings. Do you –’

  ‘With Darren Pickering?’

  ‘No. I’m not his keeper, you know. Perhaps you’d better tell me what that bear of very little brain has been doing.’

  ‘Were you in the Roosters club until closing time?’

  ‘No.’ Dexter turned back to Lambert, suddenly conciliatory in tone, the educated young man conversing with his intellectual equal. He was well aware of this man’s exalted rank: it was almost that attained by Ben’s rejected father. He said, guying himself like a man in a bad stage thriller, ‘Perhaps you had better tell me what this is all about, Superintendent.’

  Lambert studied the young face for a moment before he said, ‘No doubt you knew a girl called Amy Coleford.’

  ‘I know Amy, yes. Husband’s left her, silly bugger. She’s a useful little number, Amy. Been putting it about a bit since he left her, too.’ He stopped suddenly then, as if the Superintendent’s use of the past tense had only just struck him: he brought off the effect quite well. ‘Look, you’re not telling me something’s happened to Amy now? I –’

  ‘Amy was strangled last night. Just as Julie Salmon and Harriet Brown, whom you also knew, had been strangled before her. What time did you leave the Roosters last night?’

  Dexter’s hands ran quickly up and down his bright red braces. It was not the affectation it might have been a few minutes earlier. He was nervous now, for his fingers would not stay still, even when he dropped them down on to his thighs. He wished after all that he had sat more normally behind the desk, which would at least have afforded him some concealment; perched absurdly against the front of it, he suddenly felt very much exposed. ‘I left about nine o’clock, I think. It might have been a little later.’

  ‘And why did you leave at that time? Our information is that you usually stay until last orders are called.’ Lambert blessed again the g
ood fortune which had given them a drugs squad officer working at the Roosters. The background material which Paul Williams had been able to provide on their suspects was one of the few bright spots in the present darkness.

  Dexter was shaken by the extent of their knowledge. ‘I just felt like an early night. It was too quiet in the Roosters’ He was not going to tell them, indeed could hardly admit to himself, that the place had seemed empty without the considerable physical presence of Darren Pickering.

  Lambert paused to study Dexter’s right foot, with its highly polished Gucchi shoe. It was big enough to have made the print they had found near the body of Hetty Brown. The foot was swinging backwards and forwards in what had begun as a casual gesture, but had now lost its rhythm and become a series of irregular jerks. ‘And where did you go then?’

  He put the query so quietly that it seemed invested with nuances of suggestion beyond its simple form. Perhaps it was these which made Dexter’s reply sound even in his own ears like a lie. ‘I – I went home. Back to my flat.’

  ‘You share a flat?’

  ‘No. I live alone.’

  It was Hook, taking it upon himself to deliver the final blow to this golden-haired young Apollo gone decadent, who said, ‘Is there anyone in the building where you live who could confirm the time when you arrived there last night?’

  ‘No. I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Pity, that. We shall ask, though. It’s surprising what people see or hear sometimes. Even late at night.’

  Lambert said, ‘You have a blue Porsche motor car. Registration J143 FCV.’

  ‘Yes.’ Dexter was shaken anew by the extent of their knowledge. He did not know that it was one of the cars which had been reported parked within half a mile of the place where Hetty Brown had been killed three nights earlier.

  ‘How long would it have taken you to drive from the Roosters club to Gloucester in that car last night?’

  At the beginning of the interview, Dexter would have ridiculed the question. Now, he moistened dry lips before he said, ‘No more than a quarter of an hour at that time, I suppose.’