Close Call

by J M Gregson

  No one wanted to be the first to move, to break up the atmosphere which felt so relaxed and so right. Robin Durkin burrowed into a cardboard box he and Ally had still not unpacked and found balloon brandy glasses. ‘Time for a nightcap,’ he said, and went round the company with the cognac bottle. The last remaining signs of the caution some of his guests had displayed towards him seemed to drop away with the brandy. The talk grew more quiet and sporadic, the thoughts expressed more sentimental than they would have been in daylight and sobriety.

  The warmth of the night and the effects of alcohol meant that no one felt cold. It was almost another hour before the woman who had suggested this party drew it to a close. ‘Time us oldies were in bed,’ Rosemary Lennox said with a smile, and stood up with a resolution which none of the others could muster.

  Her husband took the hand she held out to help him and levered himself rather stiffly and reluctantly to his feet. ‘It’s been great!’ he said, untypically enthusiastic. ‘Perhaps we should agree now to make this an annual event.’

  There was general assent to that. But with two of the company on their feet, everyone suddenly realized that it was now almost one o’clock and time to break up the party. There were token offers to help with tidying up, an assurance from Ally Durkin that she would leave everything until the morning, when those who wished could come and help to clear the tables of debris.

  There was a final burst of animation as they all took leave of each other, much self-congratulation and laughter about the shortness of the journey home for all of them. The Lennoxes picked up their garden chairs and the remnants of the bowl of strawberries which Rosemary had prepared for the feast, and stepped away into the darkness. Phil Smart put his arm loyally around the shoulders of his wife and held her lightly against him in readiness for the thirty-yard journey to their front door; brandy was having a considerable, if temporary, effect upon him. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought Lisa Holt showed a fleeting embarrassment as she departed quietly with Jason Ritchie to the first house in the close.

  Lights flashed on in the four homes of the new settlement, and at one a.m. the place seemed a blaze of light compared with what it had been a little earlier. But within half an hour, all was in darkness, and silence reigned, more profound after the boisterous conviviality which had preceded it.

  The dawn chorus of the birds began at four thirty on a perfect summer’s day, and was exuberant and sustained. But there was no human sound to intrude upon the avian exultation. It was another three hours before that came.

  The screaming was piercing and prolonged. No one could have slept through it for more than a second or two. They stumbled from their houses in their dressing gowns, all drowsiness banished by the urgency and agony in the voice. They hurried to the house they had left so happily a few hours earlier, then to the back garden whence came this imperative and primitive clamour.

  Ally Durkin stood screaming at the empty sky, surrounded by the pathetic debris of the party. The women went and put arms round her, turned her forcibly away from the sight which had set her shrieking so frantically, pulled her back into the house and away from what had been her husband.

  Robin Durkin lay on his back, with his legs splayed and one arm crushed unnaturally beneath him. The cord had cut so deeply into his bull-like neck that it was almost invisible. His eyes bulged out so far that it seemed they would leave his face at any moment. They stared glassily at the sun as it climbed the eastern sky. But those eyes would never see light again.

  Four

  Gurney Close was suddenly full of vehicles. Scarcely a square foot of its newly laid tarmac was visible when Superintendent John Lambert drove his ageing Vauxhall Senator into the tiny cul-de-sac. It was twenty past nine on the morning of Sunday, the tenth of July.

  He had been about to start a round of golf at Ross Golf Club when the call had come through to him. He had made the ritual noises of resentment about pleasure interrupted, but in truth his pulses had quickened and his senses been made more alert by this news of what seemed almost certainly a murder. John Lambert was in his fifties now, heavy with achievement and reputation. He was familiar with the slightly guilty excitement he felt now. The hunting instinct always takes over the CID man when there is the prospect of a serious crime to be solved. As he crossed the River Wye and drove through the lanes to the crime scene, Lambert was metaphorically sniffing the air and anticipating the challenges to come.

  There was no mistaking the house he wanted. The blue and white ribbons defining the limits of the crime scene were already in place, the uniformed constable already looking bored at the prospect of long hours of policing a quiet area with no interlopers in sight. But the unwelcome sightseers would come, no doubt, even to this quiet place, when the sensational news got around. There were always those who wanted to get as close as they could to the scenes of shocking events. And even in an age which was far more violent than the one Lambert had entered as a policeman thirty years ago, murder retained its unique, grisly glamour.

  The police surgeon had already been and gone, fulfilling his formal function of confirming that there was no life remaining in the body of Robin Arthur Durkin. But the pathologist was still on site, moving among the civilians who nowadays made up most of the Scene of Crime team. Lambert pulled the plastic bags over his shoes and slipped the thin white overalls reluctantly over his clothes; the day was already hot, and growing hotter by the minute under a cloudless sky. He picked his way carefully between the female photographer and the fingerprint man and watched the pathologist recording the reading from his thermometer.

  The medical man glanced at the Chief Investigating Officer: he knew him quite well after several meetings over the last few years. ‘I’ve only taken the ambient temperature. I won’t disturb the clothing until he’s in the mortuary and the forensic boys have taken the clothing.’

  Lambert nodded, glancing at the big windows of the new house’s sitting room, scarcely ten yards behind him. Someone had drawn the curtains, shutting away the sight of what was going on out here from the widow inside. She would have to get used to that word: at thirty-two, she could scarcely have expected to carry the label of widow for many years yet. Unless, of course, this Mrs Durkin was the one who had committed or engineered this death: Lambert made the CID officer’s automatic caveat to himself. The spouse was always the leading suspect until he or she could be eliminated from the enquiry.

  He went and stared down impassively at the grossly distorted face, with its darkening flesh and bulging eyes. He was glad the curtains had shut it away from the widow, but he had seen much worse sights among murder victims. ‘Time of death?’ he said, without taking his eyes away from the face.

  ‘Several hours ago. The flesh is cold.’

  ‘Last night, then.’He was thinking aloud rather than looking for information; the pathologist wouldn’t give him anything more accurate without rectal temperatures and some estimation of the extent of rigor mortis. He picked his way carefully along the line the Scene of Crime Officer indicated until he reached the small gate in the fence at the back of the new garden, then looked out to where the grass had been trodden outside. One of the team was working his way alongside the tracks in the grass made by human feet, searching for any tiny clue which might have fallen from someone fleeing this way after the killing.

  The SOCA investigation is by far the most important part of the early investigation of any murder. The theory is that there is always an ‘exchange’ between the murderer and his or her victim at the scene of the death. However carefully the killer plans his crime, however warily he covers his tracks, he will leave behind something of himself. With a sex crime, it will be something obvious: semen or saliva. With a killing like this, it might be something as tiny and unnoticed as a falling hair or a fibre from clothing. The man on his hands and knees already had a collection of small items in the plastic container beside him; only time and forensic examination would tell whether they had come from some entirely innocent source,
or from the killer of the man who lay on his back behind them.

  Lambert watched the man use his tweezers to lift the tipped end of a cigarette from amongst the blades of grass. Now that so many fewer people smoked, at least among the middle classes, tobacco evidence was more easy to pin down to a suspect than it had once been. But this particular item, squashed flat and grubby, looked as if it had probably been here for some time – perhaps since the builders had erected the fence beside it to mark the boundary of the property.

  The civilian head of the SOCA team came over and stood by Lambert, watching his man working his way methodically along the ground towards the oak trees outside the fence. ‘This gate was open when we got here,’ he said.

  ‘So our man might have come in this way. Or left this way. Or both.’ The perpetrator of violence was always male until there was definite evidence to the contrary. The superintendent was not surprised, but certainly not pleased. This entrance and the tracks beyond it introduced the possibility of the wide world outside to the list of suspects, which might otherwise have been confined to the tight little world of Gurney Close. They might have hoped for a result within a few hours, with the killer emerging from within the family, as it did in sixty per cent of cases.

  The man on all fours looked up. ‘There’s been someone along here quite recently. More than one person, though.’

  Lambert nodded. The dew from a still, warm dawn was still present out here, where the tall oaks threw their shade over the open area outside the new garden fences. No one save the SOCA member, picking his way carefully alongside the previous flattening of the grass, had passed this way since the morning dew. He looked back towards the raw brick of the new houses, catching the twitch of a curtain at an upstairs window as someone observed the police activity. Someone who would need to be questioned, in due course.

  In the small back garden where the corpse lay, the photographs had all been taken, the evidence from the immediate vicinity gathered. The body was being carefully rolled on to the sheet of polythene and wrapped to contain all remaining evidence for examination by the forensic scientists. The van police officers call the ‘meat wagon’ had reversed into the drive; its rear doors were open, and the plastic ‘shell’ inside was ready to receive the corpse.

  Lambert waited until the van had eased its way quietly, almost apologetically, out of the close. Then he went and knocked at the front door of the house. A squat woman with a drawn face opened the door and he said ‘Mrs Durkin?’

  ‘No. I’m her sister. She’s not fit to talk to anyone. Not at the moment.’

  He caught a glimpse of a ravaged, tear-stained face before the door of the kitchen shut at the other end of the hall. ‘I understand that. But I’ll need to speak to her. Just a brief preliminary interview to confirm a few of the facts of the case. We need to get our investigation under way quickly, if we’re going to find out who did this terrible thing.’

  Sentiments he had voiced dozens of times before, but the fact that this was routine for him didn’t make things any less harrowing for the recipients of his demands. For a moment he thought she was going to refuse him, to shout at him for his insensitivity. But all she said was ‘When?’

  ‘Some time later today would be best. This afternoon, perhaps.’

  ‘All right. I’ll tell her. She’ll understand, will Ally. She’ll want to nail the bastard who did this.’

  John Lambert nodded and went back round the back of the house to check whether the SOCA team had turned up anything they thought significant.

  In the first house of Gurney Close, Jason Ritchie had been watching the activity of the last two hours with increasing apprehension. Now he watched the tall figure of the superintendent disappearing round the back of the murder house and took his decision. He moved swiftly out to the battered white van in the drive. It started at the second turn of the ignition switch and he revved the engine fiercely, then lurched out of the drive and away from the place. He felt the relief growing with each yard he put between himself and the place where Robin Durkin had fallen.

  Five

  Detective Sergeant Bert Hook was enjoying Sunday lunch with his wife Eleanor and his two boisterous sons when the call came.

  ‘How much golf did you get in?’ asked Lambert.

  ‘A full round. I was off early. I heard you’d been called away without ever getting on to the course when I got back to the clubhouse.’

  ‘All right for some! We have a murder on our hands, Bert.’ Lambert rapped out the bare essentials of what had happened at Gurney Close as rapidly and dispassionately as if he had been delivering a railway timetable. They were professionals to the bone, these two, in their very different ways. They had worked together for over ten years, and each knew and respected the other’s strengths.

  Hook’s sturdy common sense was a counterpoint to Lambert’s intensity, his impatience to find a solution to even the most impenetrable of crimes. Each relied on the other to provide the necessary counterbalance when interviews became tricky, when the strains of police bureaucracy or the cynicism of the public at large became particularly trying. Their understanding, both of each other and the criminal world they fought against, was such that much was left unsaid between them which would have had to be voiced between officers less confident of each other.

  ‘You’ll want to see the victim’s wife. Have we heard anything about how she’s taking it?’ said Hook. He did not need to voice the thought that until they knew otherwise the widow, however grief-stricken she might appear, was a leading suspect.

  ‘I spoke to her sister this morning. She says Alison Durkin is upset, but will see the need to get on with the investigation as fast as we can. We’ll see her later this afternoon, if you can make it.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’ And Hook had a name, now. The first small step in making human sense of what seemed at first a lurid, unbelievable story.

  Bert watched his boys getting out their cricket gear. He had been a doughty Minor Counties cricketer himself for many years, a pillar of the Herefordshire side, opening the bowling at a brisk military medium and providing big hitting lower down the batting order. ‘Finished your homework, have you?’ It was the parent’s reflex check on a thirteen-year-old. Bert had married relatively late for a copper, at twenty-nine, and very happily.

  ‘Finished mine. What about yours?’ Jack grinned up cheekily at his father. Bert was nearing the completion of an Open University degree, which had given him much satisfaction, but been difficult to squeeze in amidst the irregular hours of CID work. The boy put his bat and his gloves into the battered bag his father had once carried around the dressing rooms of the area.

  ‘Where’s Luke?’

  ‘I don’t know. He usually can’t wait to get out.’

  The younger boy came into the room as he spoke. He was normally the noisier and cheekier of the two, but today he scarcely managed a grin. ‘You’d better go on your own, Jack. I don’t feel so good.’

  He looked very white. He had had his hair cut on the previous day, and his scalp seemed to show through, making his head look out of proportion to his body.

  Bert looked at the white face. ‘You sound as if you might have a bug. You’d better get yourself some paracetamol and lie down for a while. Your mum will know where the tablets are.’

  At the time, Bert Hook thought no more about it than that. He had other, more professional concerns on that Sunday afternoon.

  Alison Durkin looked bad. The carefully informal hairstyle she had chosen for last night’s celebration had disintegrated into turmoil. Her black hair now hung lank and disordered, like that of a swimmer emerging from dank water. There was a button undone on her white shirt. Her face was without make-up and channelled with weeping; despite her relative youth, she looked haggard.

  Lambert and Hook noted it all, even as they prepared themselves to be as tactful as the situation would allow them to be. CID work demands a professional cynicism, a capacity to assess how far grief is genuine in those closest
to a suspicious death. But they would not place too much reliance on appearances. Even those who have committed violent crimes can be in genuine rather than simulated shock, as the consequences of what they have perpetrated in a moment of madness become clear to them.

  Lambert made his ritual noises about the necessity of their intrusion at a time like this, and she nodded, almost impatiently, saying before he had quite finished, ‘What is it you need to know?’

  Lambert gave her a small smile, a tiny token of his recognition of the awful situation in which she found herself. ‘I understand that it was you who found the body of your husband.’

  ‘Yes. He was just lying there. But I could tell by the way he had fallen that there was something wrong. And then I saw his face. And I knew that – that someone had …’ Her voice tailed away. There were no words for the image of that face, which was with her still.

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Just after twenty to eight this morning. Seven forty-one.’ She gave a little, unexpected, bitter smile, as if amused by the irony of this precision. ‘I’d looked at the clock beside the bed before I went out, you see.’

  ‘And you got out of bed and went straight out into the garden?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And why was that?’

  ‘Because I knew that something was wrong. Because Robin never came to bed last night.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Yes. His side of the bed hadn’t been disturbed. He’s an untidy sleeper, Rob. He messes the sheets up.’ She had got her tenses wrong, as the newly bereaved often do, and the tears sprang anew to her cheeks at the realization of it.

  ‘This is a help to us, you see. Because the first indications are that your husband died last night. The first step towards finding who did something like this is usually establishing the exact time of death.’