Close Call

by J M Gregson

  Chris Rushton was not only highly efficient in this work. He got great satisfaction from it. He saw himself as the champion of modern technology against older reactionaries such as Lambert and Hook. The pair played up willingly enough to his image of them, pretending to more ignorance of electronic technology than was in fact the case, gently teasing the slightly humourless Rushton about his preference for machines over people.

  But Rushton’s task was important, and Lambert knew that better than anyone. If computer technology had been fully available at the time of the Yorkshire Ripper, and Christopher Rushton had been in charge of it, the lives of many of the man’s later victims would have been saved.

  Even at five o’clock on a sweltering Sunday afternoon, in an almost deserted CID section at Oldford police station, Chris Rushton had already set to work with his usual enthusiasm. Already he had an extensive file system on the Robin Durkin murder and those involved in it. And he had news for Lambert and Hook, when they came into the station after their meeting with Alison Durkin.

  ‘We’ll have the full post-mortem findings some time tomorrow,’ he said to Lambert as they came into CID.

  ‘It won’t tell us much beyond what we know now,’ said Lambert, a little sourly.

  ‘And what did you make of the grieving widow?’ Chris Rushton asked.

  Lambert glanced at Bert Hook, who said, ‘Genuinely affected and shocked by this death, as far as we could tell. If she’s acting, she’s in the Judi Dench class. But even if she’d killed him, she’d be in deep shock now, perhaps. However, it was useful seeing her today: she gave us a pretty cogent account of what happened last night, before the killing. We’ll need to check it against other people’s impressions, of course, but her version of the party they had in the close before this murder rang true, to me.’

  ‘In that case, you’ll be interested in the first entry I’ve made into her file,’ said Rushton. He was trying not to sound too pleased with himself. And failing.

  He looked as if he was about to produce a print-out for them, but Lambert said a little wearily, ‘Just tell us, Chris. Has Mrs Alison Durkin got a history as a multiple poisoner?’

  Chris frowned at this levity. John Lambert had a record second to none as a taker of villains: that is why the Home Office had recently extended his service by two years, in response to the Chief Constable’s special request. But as well as being slow to recognize the importance of the new technology, he sometimes displayed too much levity for Chris’s taste. ‘I’ve nothing as dramatic as that to report. I merely thought you might be interested to know that the dead man’s widow has a criminal record.’

  ‘For petty thieving?’

  ‘For criminal violence. For Actual Bodily Harm. For attacking her partner with an offensive weapon: to whit, scissors. Sounds as if she was lucky it wasn’t an even more serious charge.’ Chris Rushton tried not to sound self-satisfied about his information. And failed again.

  It was almost seven o’clock by the time Bert Hook got home. The house seemed unnaturally quiet.

  Eleanor was preparing a salad in the kitchen. Salad was always a good bet for police wives in hot weather; you could never be sure when your man would come home, and salad didn’t deteriorate as quickly as other things.

  Bert watched her busy, expert hands slicing cucumber and hard-boiled eggs and preparing dressings. He marvelled again at the casual dexterity and the versatility of the female of his species. ‘Jack not back yet?’

  His wife smiled. ‘No. He rang on his mobile between the innings, though. He got forty-one. And a dodgy lbw decision, he said.’

  Bert grinned, trying not to look too proud, even here, where showing pride wouldn’t matter. ‘That’s batsmen for you. They never ever get a good lbw decision, even when it would have knocked all three stumps over. It’s a good score, that, though. Forty-one’s a lot, for a thirteen-year-old.’

  ‘Jack seemed to think so. He was trying hard not to sound too excited about his score to his ignorant mum. He was trying to be blasé, but thirteen-year-olds can’t do blasé very well.’

  ‘Where’s Luke?’

  ‘He’s in bed, I think. He’s not very well. He had a bit of a temperature, so I gave him paracetamol and suggested he went to bed for a while. He actually went, without any argument, so he must be feeling rough. Have a look in at him, but don’t disturb him if he’s asleep.’

  Bert went up to their bedroom and changed into shorts and a tee shirt: it was still hot and airless. He went along the landing and cautiously opened the door into his younger son’s room.

  He was back in the kitchen with Eleanor within thirty seconds. ‘Luke’s got a fever of some kind. I think we need a doctor.’

  Seventy miles north of Gurney Close, in a leafy suburb of Birmingham, there was even less breeze than in Herefordshire. Even at ten o’clock on that Sunday night, with darkness dropping in fast over the second city in the land, the temperature was still in the seventies. Or to be more modern and precise, it was exactly twenty-three degrees centigrade.

  This man prided himself on his precision. And he was certainly a modern man, if modernity can be measured by occupation. He had the windows open tonight, as he tried to engineer a small, cooling current of air and get it to blow through the flat. He didn’t favour open windows, as a rule. They made him uneasy. He was intensely conscious of security. He also felt much safer when the windows and doors around him were locked and barred.

  He was an inch above what the latest surveys said was now the height of the average Briton. He wore dark-blue trousers and a lighter blue leisure shirt, with grey suede slip-on shoes. He had his hair cut short, but not shaved to the scalp in the way some men affected. He would be forty next month, but with his lean figure and his thin, rather intense, face he looked rather younger than that. He had a small scar on his left temple, which he still inspected from time to time in the mirror; it had grown shallower and less white with the passing years, but was still quite noticeable in photographs.

  This man did not care to be noticeable. Every adjustment he made to his appearance was designed to make him more average, more unremarkable in the world in which he moved.

  He looked at the electronic clock on top of his television set. Ten fourteen. Another sixteen minutes before he could ring. He had never enjoyed waiting. Not like this. He should have been used to it by now, he told himself wryly. His life contained a lot of waiting; it was ironic that when everyone thought of you as a man of action, you should do so much more waiting than acting.

  He found himself thinking unexpectedly of his wife and his two children. He wasn’t mawkish. It was only very rarely that he indulged his emotions at all, so it must have been the waiting that turned his thoughts this way now. He hadn’t seen either his wife or his children for seven years, and he didn’t miss them. He had never cared much for children, and never met a woman who didn’t want commitment from him. Well, there were plenty of women available for money; women who were there when you wanted them, not when they wanted you. Much better that way.

  He much preferred a life without complications. It enabled him to concentrate. And concentration was an absolute necessity in the occupation he had chosen for himself. Or which had chosen him: he was never quite sure how he had arrived here.

  He enjoyed a good book. Never went anywhere without one. There were plenty of hours to kill, plenty of time for reading, in his work. People found it strange that he always had a book with him among the tools of his trade, but it seemed to him perfectly logical. Time which could have been extremely boring passed much more quickly if you had a good book.

  But tonight he hadn’t been able to read. It was perhaps just the excessive heat, but he thought it was more likely the unexpected complication which had cropped up in his work. One of those complications which upset him, which disturbed the beautiful simplicity of his schedule; it was a thing you couldn’t possibly have foreseen.

  He’d never been one for television. He switched off the film he’d long sinc
e ceased to follow. The time was almost at hand. He would phone precisely at the moment arranged, timing it to the very second. Precision. Probably the man waiting for his call couldn’t care less about absolute precision, and any time around ten thirty would have been acceptable to him. But precision mattered a lot to the man waiting by the open window in the Birmingham flat.

  He had to nerve himself to use the agreed sentence. He could see the necessity for it: you never knew who was listening to phone conversations these days. But the phrasing seemed ridiculous: probably the man who had arranged the call had a taste for the melodramatic. Whereas to his mind, melodrama was best avoided. The more cold and clinical you could be, the less you allowed any sort of emotion into your life, the more efficient you were likely to be. And efficiency was a sine qua non. Without it, you wouldn’t survive a week in this game.

  Game! His lips wrinkled in silent derision at the absurdity of that word. But it was coming up to ten thirty. He walked over to the phone as he watched the seconds tick towards the half hour. Then he tapped in the number and took a deep breath, preparing himself to voice the absurd mantra in a flat voice, without the inflexion which might convey his disdain for such tactics.

  The phone was picked up at the other end of the line. He said with perfect clarity, ‘The River Wye is a beautiful river.’

  He heard breathing at the other end of the line, but no words of acknowledgement came back to him. There was a clink, which might have been glass, or might have been something else entirely. Then there was a sharp click, as the phone was replaced and the contact was broken.

  Seven

  Carol Smart said, ‘We should really agree what we’re going to say before we talk to them, you know.’

  Her husband was immersed as usual in the morning paper. Philip Smart said absently, ‘Yes, I suppose we should.’ Then what she had said got through to his brain and he looked up at her over the top of his Telegraph. ‘Why do you say that?’

  Carol turned away from him, fiddling with the flex of the toaster, trying to sound casual. ‘I don’t know, really. I was just thinking that neither of us is used to dealing with the police. So it would be sensible for us to be careful about it, wouldn’t it?’

  Philip laid his paper down on the table and looked at her seriously. ‘Got things to hide from the fuzz, have you, darling?’ He decided that he would tease her a little about this. Too often the boot was on the other foot in their marital dealings, with him defending himself after some sexual peccadillo. No sense of proportion, women. Well, wives, anyway.

  ‘Of course I haven’t got things to hide!’ She had come in too vehemently. She realized that immediately. What chance was she going to have with the police, if she couldn’t even carry things off with Phil? ‘If you’re not going to be serious, there’s no point in us talking about this.’

  Phil thought how attractive Carol was when she was a little flushed. She was eight years younger than him, pleasantly plump rather than running to fat. She looked to him wholly bedworthy this morning in the pink blouse and filmy scarf she had adopted for the police. Sometimes, as in moments of sudden tenderness like this, Philip Smart knew what a fool he was for playing the field as he did.

  He said a little ponderously, ‘But I am serious. Perfectly serious, my dear. Each of us is quite innocent in this, so neither of us has anything to worry about, surely? Unless you’re about to tell me that you slung a cord around Robin’s neck and throttled the life out of him!’ Phil laughed, knowing that was in bad taste. He never meant to show bad taste, but his tongue often ran away with him.

  ‘How do you know that he died like that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was talking to Ron Lennox and Lisa this morning, whilst we were all still so shocked. When all those police cars were around. One of them must have told me. I expect Ally Durkin’s sister must have told them: I think they’d been talking to her before I spoke to them. What a funny question to ask me, Carol Smart!’

  He used her full name when he was trying to make jokes with her, as if by invoking that formula he could go back to the early, happy days of their marriage. She brushed a strand of fair hair which had fallen across her face angrily away, as if like him it was trying to divert her. ‘It’s not a funny question at all! It’s the kind of question the police will ask, isn’t it? They wouldn’t have asked us to put off going on to work if they didn’t think we were important, would they? You’re very naïve at times, Phil.’

  ‘I don’t believe we live in a police state, if that’s what you mean. I don’t believe we’ll be woken in the middle of the night and dragged away to prison!’ Phil looked out at the golden morning in Gurney Close and smiled a superior smile at the absurdity of the thought.

  ‘And we don’t live in some Peter Pan Never-Never land either.’ That’s what he was, her husband. The worst kind of Peter Pan, who never grew up and recognized his responsibilities as an adult. Who thought he could chase any woman in sight without there being any consequences for him. A man with a stupid, superior smile above a white polo necked shirt which emphasized his florid complexion and was surely too young for him. A tiresome fifty-one-year-old who hadn’t the sense of some twenty-year-olds.

  Carol Smart tried to control her irritation with him. It might be important to get her point across to Phil. ‘Let’s consider this from the police point of view. Let’s assume for the moment that they don’t know who did this, any more than we do.’ She glanced up at him to see what he made of that, but he was still looking at her with that amused, superior expression. At least she had his attention. ‘They’re going to be looking for a culprit. If we make silly mistakes – if we say things like you just said about the way Robin died, for instance – they’ll be on to it right away. And they’ll be looking for someone to pin this crime on. We could land ourselves in a lot of trouble if we don’t give a little thought to what we’re doing.’

  Phil looked at her, still with the little smile at the corners of his mouth which he knew was annoying her. He didn’t disagree with what she was saying. Indeed, he might have been counselling her on similar lines himself, if his dear wife hadn’t got in first. But he was enjoying feeling superior. And in the long series of conversational skirmishes which was their marriage, he couldn’t easily let that feeling go. ‘You really think they’re going to arrest us for a brutal murder when we haven’t done anything?’

  She stood opposite his comfortably-seated figure, gripping the back of the chair, recognizing the sense of what he was saying. ‘You’re right, I suppose. I suppose I’m over-reacting because I’m not used to the police and they make me nervous. No, I don’t believe these policemen will want to arrest and convict innocent people, once I stop to think about it. But I do believe that they could cause us a lot of embarrassment if we’re careless in what we say to them. I do believe that it behoves us to be careful.’

  ‘Behoves! I like that word. It has a solemn and archaic ring to it, don’t you think, dear?’Phil made a show of changing from his humorous mode to his earnest and caring mode, as he dropped his smile and gave her a grave little frown. ‘But you’re right, my dear, of course you are. As you usually are, if I’m honest. We shall be careful, as you suggest. Now, what exactly is it that you advise?’

  But it was too late. The grey Ford Focus was turning into their drive. The tall, gaunt man was levering himself rather stiffly from the passenger seat, whilst the driver was locking the car and turning to gaze at the front of their house. Carol Smart felt a blazing resentment at her husband’s nonsense, a fury out of all proportion to his failings.

  It was his mistaken humour and ponderous teasing which had taken away the chance for them to prepare themselves for this meeting.

  Ten miles further down the River Wye, just over the border into Wales, Jason Ritchie was building a fence in the pleasant little town of Monmouth. The flimsy panels the builder had put up when he built these houses ten years earlier had finally disintegrated. Jason was putting in new concrete posts and much stouter wooden
panels between them.

  ‘I’d have done it myself at one time, you know.’ The elderly man gave him a smile and shook his head, as though he were apologizing for employing him. Old people were always saying things like that, Jason thought. Telling you they’d been as strong as you, as skilful as you, in their heyday. Always looking back to the years which were gone.

  The old were almost a closed book to Jason. When his parents had divorced, it had meant that grandparents had disappeared from his life whilst he was still quite small. And he was as yet too young to have any conception of how quickly life would pass, how close this youth they kept talking about still seemed to the elderly. Nor had he any old people close enough to him to remind him with unamusing persistence about that idea.

  ‘Be finished this afternoon,’ he said. He lifted one of the heavy concrete posts and dropped it into the hole he had made for it, exulting in his physical strength, delighted with the little gasp of admiration the performance elicited from his elderly patron. He shovelled some of the concrete he had just mixed into the hole and reached for his spirit level to check that the pole was vertical: best to show the old codger that there was skill and craftsmanship in this, and not just brute strength. That would help to justify his price. It was a fair one, as the old man had no doubt found out when he got other quotations for the job, but old people never kept up with inflation. They always thought that labour should cost less than it did.

  ‘I’ll get this border back into some sort of order when you’ve finished the fence,’ said the old man.

  Jason looked at the scrubby perennials and shrubs, covered with dust after the hot weather and his efforts with the fence. There were seedlings of ash and sycamore growing among the lesser weeds. ‘Take a bit of shifting, that lot. I’ll give you a bit of help, if you like. Get the rough work out of the way for you. Turn it over and leave it ready for planting.’