by J M Gregson
‘Clever old Martin.’ She was realizing anew why the marriage would never have worked, why it was such a relief to be rid of him. ‘Well, I’m glad, in view of your previous associations with Durkin, that you can prove you’re in the clear.’ She paused, making herself take a sip of her gin and tonic, trying to avoid wrinkling her lips at the sourness of it in her mouth. ‘You could have employed a contract killer, I suppose.’
‘With what you’ve left me after the divorce? You must be joking!’
She felt the bitterness coming at her across the small round table. In this ridiculous setting, in this small room at the back of the pub in the early evening, they would soon be hurling insults at each other, the way they had in that tiny, claustrophobic kitchen at midnight and beyond. She wondered how the concern which she had felt a few minutes ago for this man who had shared her life could have dissipated so quickly and completely. She tried to keep the irritation out of her voice as she repeated her question. ‘Why did you want to see me?’
‘I wanted to know what was happening. Whether they’d arrested anyone yet for killing the bastard. How my child came to be involved in such a traumatic situation.’
‘George wasn’t there. He was away for the weekend with his grandparents, as you should know.’ She made herself speak evenly: he wasn’t going to have the satisfaction of seeing her losing control. ‘And as far as I know, the police haven’t made an arrest yet.’
‘Pity, that. From your point of view, I mean. You must be one of their suspects. Being on the spot, with your toy boy.’
She didn’t know that he’d found out about Jason. She should have expected it, she realized. Martin had always had a capacity for intrigue, for finding out the things you didn’t want him to know. She said, ‘That’s ridiculous! I lived near Durkin, that’s all. The police have no reason to treat me as a suspect.’
‘Told them that you’d known him for years, have you?’
‘What I’ve told them is no longer your concern, I’m happy to say.’
‘Not quite true, that. Not when my only child is in your tender care. I’ve a right to be concerned, as long as there’s still the chance that you’re a murderess.’ This time he took a longer pull at his beer, emptying the glass and setting it down with a little sigh of satisfaction. ‘Keep me posted on what happens, won’t you? I don’t think I’d like to be in your shoes, when they find out the full facts about you and Robin Durkin.’
He departed as abruptly as he had arrived, leaving her sitting alone in the pub again.
Twelve
At nine o’clock on the morning of Wednesday the thirteenth of July, Superintendent Lambert had an unexpected visitor.
Like many people who have never been in trouble with the law, Carol Smart was diffident, even apprehensive, about entering a police station. The Oldford one was a busy place at this time of the morning, with the latest duty rosters being implemented and John Lambert concluding his briefing to his murder team on the latest developments in the Robin Durkin case. But as soon as she told the station sergeant why she had come, Mrs Smart was shown straight through into the office of the superintendent.
‘How can I help you?’ Lambert was all smiling urbanity; it wasn’t often that suspects in a murder case came voluntarily into the lion’s den.
‘I felt that there was something you ought to know. Something I’d kept from you previously. Something you were probably going to find out for yourselves, which might look bad for me.’ The ideas came tumbling out in a rush, and she could feel that she was speaking too quickly. Now that she had finally come here, she felt foolish, as if she had been caught out in some naïve overreaction to events.
‘Always a good policy, to be frank with the police, when you’re an innocent party.’ Superintendent Lambert was civilized, reassuring, relaxed, not at all the intense figure she remembered from that earlier meeting they had had, when her husband had prattled so idiotically at her side and she had taken the wrong decision about concealing things.
For his part, Lambert saw an attractive woman in her early forties, probably a little plumper than modern fashions would approve. Comely, or buxom, the Elizabethans would have called her. Bedworthy, when he was an impressionable young constable thirty years ago. Shaggable, they’d say now. Language, like standards, seemed to deteriorate with the years. God, he was getting old! He’d been shocked when he heard a young woman PC using that word ‘shaggable’ about a new male recruit in the canteen the other day. It really was time to think about retirement.
Carol wondered where that stolid detective sergeant who had sat beside his chief had gone. She had somehow thought of making her confession to him, had assumed that he would always be sitting at his senior’s side, ready to be understanding and forgiving of human weakness. She found herself saying absurdly, ‘Is your sergeant not here today? The one with the notebook, I mean. A local man, I think.’ What an absurd thing to say! As if an intelligent woman like her would find it easier to talk to a man with a Herefordshire accent! It just showed how nervous she was.
Lambert said, ‘DS Hook isn’t here at the moment. I’m afraid one of his sons is very ill. Suspected meningitis. Hopefully the hospital is pulling him through.’ He smiled and picked up the pen on his desk. ‘I’m not as reliable as Bert Hook, but I can make the odd note when I have to. What is it you wanted to tell me, Mrs Smart?’
Now that the moment had come, she wished that she was anywhere but here, sitting like a guilty teenager in front of the man’s big desk. She had to force herself to speak, when she wanted to get up and run. ‘I said I didn’t know Robin Durkin before we moved into Gurney Close. That wasn’t true. I’m sorry I concealed the fact.’
Lambert nodded understandingly. ‘Not a good idea, concealing things. But just as well that you’ve now decided to put things right. Do I gather that this is easier without your husband at your side?’
‘Yes. I don’t want Phil to know anything about this.’
‘There can be no guarantees, if it proves to be information relevant to a murder enquiry. But we respect confidences, whenever that is possible. Which is more often than not.’
She nodded, scarcely hearing him, preparing herself for what she must say now, trying to recall the words which had seemed so apposite when she had rehearsed them at home. ‘I did know Robin in the past. Ten years ago, I had an affair with him.’
After all the careful, mitigating phrases she had prepared, she had blurted it out, just like that guilty teenager she had felt herself to be, in this quiet room, with this attentive, schoolmasterly man. He didn’t even raise an eyebrow. He sounded sympathetic, almost conspiratorial, as he said, ‘I can see why you didn’t feel that you could tell me this in front of your husband. We’ll need a few more details, I’m afraid.’
‘There isn’t much to tell. I blame myself for any pain that it caused me. I should have known better. I’m ten years older than Robin, and I think I represented the novelty of the experienced older woman for him when he was twenty-three. He certainly wasn’t struggling for partners, but I think I was the first older woman he’d got involved with. Possibly at that time the first middle-class housewife, as well: he always said that he was my bit of rough on the side.’ Her contempt for herself grew with each phrase of her account.
Lambert was used to the familiar feeling of being an intruder into another person’s life, of hearing intimacies he would never have heard without the committing of a murder. He could no longer see the carefully made-up eyes which had looked so directly at him when she had come into the room. He studied the well-groomed fair hair on the head which had dropped forward in front of him and said gently, ‘All this will only be of interest to us if it has a connection with a murder. How many other people know about it?’
‘As far as I am aware, no one.’
‘You think that not even Mrs Durkin knows about it?’
Carol considered the question she had often asked herself. It was tempting to suggest that Ally Durkin had probably known about
this: it would make her a suspect, as a betrayed wife, and divert attention from herself. Instead, Carol said, ‘I don’t think so. He was a secretive man, Robin; he enjoyed having information, but not sharing it. I don’t see him telling Ally things like that, even during marital pillow talk.’
‘But you aren’t sure of that?’
She took her time, trying to show him that she was quite objective, was taking this in her stride, was not at all the sort of woman who would commit murder because of some old, half-forgotten wound. ‘These things took place a long time ago now and I don’t think they meant very much to Robin. From what I’ve seen of him in the last few weeks, I’m sure they didn’t. I’ve noticed nothing in Ally’s behaviour to suggest that she knows. I’m not suggesting I’m very experienced in these things, but I feel that I would know if she was aware that I’d been to bed with her husband.’
Lambert was studying her, quite unembarrassed that she should be aware of his close observation. She wondered if he was going to draw attention to the fact that this made her more of a suspect in this case. Instead, he said quietly, ‘Are you sure that your husband knows nothing about this liaison?’
‘I am. Phil isn’t the most perceptive of individuals.’ For a moment she sounded almost affectionate; perhaps she was merely grateful for his blindness in these things. ‘But he’s been a good father to our two daughters: surprisingly good, some people might say. He’s eight years older than I am: I think he couldn’t believe his luck when I said I’d marry him. But I doubt whether he’s capable of monogamy. He thinks I don’t know about his affairs, whereas I’m usually well aware of what he is about. But despite his philanderings, Phil can be positively naïve about those closest to him: it doesn’t even seem to occur to him that I might occasionally fancy a fling myself.’
‘Do you know of any other relationships which Robin Durkin had? More recent ones, possibly?’
‘No. I wasn’t in touch with him. It gave me quite a shock when I found out that the Durkins were to be our new neighbours.’
‘It has emerged since his death that Mr Durkin seems to have had some eccentric sources of income. Do you know anything about where his money came from?’
She smiled, apparently perfectly at ease now that her confession was over. ‘Eccentric! I like that word. Police euphemism for crooked, is it? No, I don’t know how he came by his money, just that he always seemed to have plenty of it. And it doesn’t surprise me to hear that he was using shady means to acquire it. But I’m afraid I can’t help you with any detail.’
She felt quite buoyant as she left the police station which she had been so hesitant to enter. This must be how Catholics felt after listing their sins for the priest, she thought. She had never before been able to understand why they felt that confession was such a relief.
And the great boon for her was that she had told the superintendent in charge of the case only as much as she wanted to tell him.
Chris Rushton came in as soon as Mrs Smart left Lambert. He tried not to look too pleased with himself as he said, ‘Some information has just come in. I thought you’d want to hear it right away.’
‘Let’s have it.’ Lambert in his turn tried not to be irritated by his younger colleague’s smugness.
‘We haven’t had a lot of success yet in checking where Robin Durkin’s extra money came from. But we’ve been checking his outgoings, to see where he was spending. And we’ve come up with an interesting payment to the Westview Private Hospital.’
An abortion clinic. Familiar territory to the police, and others like them, who deal with the various forms of human distress. ‘For some young woman he got pregnant, no doubt. The convenient way out.’
This time Rushton could not conceal his pleasure. ‘Not quite. This payment was for a termination, all right. Just over three years ago. But the patient was one Alison Durkin.’
‘Jack’s here for his lunch,’ said Christine Lambert to her husband as he came into the house. With a wife’s sensitivity to these things, she picked up his look of incomprehension and elucidated. ‘Jack Hook. Bert’s boy. I told Eleanor to drop him off here, while they’re at the hospital. He’s out in the garden, I think. He doesn’t know what to do with himself.’
Lambert went into the long garden at the rear of the house and saw the boy at the end of it, smelling roses, a thing he had possibly never done before in his life. John Lambert said, ‘There’s not much grass here for games, is there, Jack? My children have grown up and left home, now, so we don’t need the lawn for games much any more. They were girls, anyway, so they wouldn’t have made good use of grass, like us.’
He tried to make it sound as if they were partners in the great male conspiracy against the fripperies of female relaxation. ‘Test match starts tomorrow,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Your Dad tells me your cricket’s coming on well, now.’
‘I’ll never be as good as he was, Mr Lambert,’ said Jack dolefully. He would not normally have confessed to anything so humiliating: Lambert supposed it must show how this totally unexpected business of his brother’s illness was affecting him.
‘Nonsense!’ said Lambert breezily. ‘He was a good bowler, your dad, one of the best. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be as good as him and better, if you put your back into it and keep practising.’ Already I’m sounding like the dusty schoolmaster, he thought, with exhortations to duty and the rewards of the manly virtues. I’ll be telling the lad to take cold showers and runs before breakfast next.
His own children had both been girls: he found that he didn’t quite know how you talked to thirteen-year-old boys. They were always gauche and ill at ease, and Jack was as good an example of that as anyone. The boy said awkwardly, ‘It’s very good of you to have me here. I know you’re very busy with this murder in Gurney Close.’ He’d read eagerly every fact the local papers printed about the killing, as he did always when his father was involved in a case.
‘Not as busy as you’d think. I let my team get on with the real donkey work. I expect your dad’s told you what an old fraud I am!’
‘He says you’re the best there is. That the Home Office must recognize that, or they wouldn’t have given you an extension of service. Not that I’m saying you’re old.’ The boy was suddenly blushing furiously at his imagined gaffe, the blood rising red and full in his long, pubescent neck.
Lambert grinned at him. ‘I’m old all right, Jack. Ancient, in your terms. Have to make my brain work to save my legs, now.
’There was an awkward silence, which the boy felt more keenly than the tall man beside him. He stooped to a deep crimson rose, sniffed deeply at its heady bouquet, recoiled in surprise at the strength of it. Then he said suddenly, ‘Will Luke be all right, do you think?’
Lambert said woodenly, ‘I’m sure he will.’ He wanted to put an arm round the slim young shoulders; he would have done so instinctively with his daughters, but he didn’t know whether a thirteen-year-old boy, poised so agonizingly between childhood and adolescence, would resent the gesture.
‘But you don’t know, do you?’
‘No, I don’t know, Jack. But I know that he’s in the best place. That people who know far more than either of us are fighting with all their skills and all their energies to make sure that he’ll recover.’
The boy nodded slowly, weighing the logic of this and apparently finding it convincing. ‘People fob you off with things all the time when you’re young. When you’re a child, it’s all right, because you believe them. But when you’re as old as I am now, you don’t know what to believe and what to reject.’
Lambert felt a tug at his tough old heartstrings from this confused, ungainly, honest boy. He put his arm round him this time, and felt the boy hugging him back, like the child he still wanted to be at this moment. ‘I won’t fob you off, Jack. Luke’s very seriously ill, or your mum and dad wouldn’t be at the hospital like this. But it’s my honest belief that he’ll be back home with you by this time next week, and well on his way to being a thorn in
your side again.’
There was a tiny shudder from the face against his chest, which might have been an involuntary giggle or a sob of pain. Then a muffled voice said, ‘I should have been kinder to him.’
Lambert turned the small, narrow face away from his chest and back towards the world. ‘I’m sure you’ve treated him just as well as a younger brother deserves to be treated. They’re irritating creatures, aren’t they, when you’re trying to get on with more important things?’
‘It’s his first year at the comp, you know. I should have made things easier for him.’
‘I expect you did what you could. And we all have to learn to stand on our own feet, don’t we?’
Jack began to shake his head unhappily, but fortunately at that moment Christine called down from the house to say that lunch was ready. ‘It’s just sandwiches and fruit and a bit of cake, I’m afraid. We have our main meal at night, as you do, Jack,’ she said.
The insistent appetite of a thirteen-year-old took over, and the clearly distressed Jack demolished a substantial allocation of sandwiches, seemingly without registering the fact of their disappearance. Christine, who was much in demand as a part-time teacher herself, chatted knowledgeably to him about his progress and his problems at school.
John Lambert found it a relief to listen to the two of them, to have the responsibility for this awkward, touching, alien presence in his household taken away from him. It allowed his thoughts to stray back inevitably to the killing in Gurney Close.
In retrospect, Lambert thought that it was during that strange hour of lunch with a suffering schoolboy that the first glimmerings of a solution came to him.
Thirteen
Ronald Lennox watched the police car parking in his drive with what seemed to him agonizing precision. He wanted them in the house, questioning him, getting this over and going on their way.
‘I thought we’d talk in the conservatory. We’ve been rearranging things in the rest of the house – you can never fit everything in, can you, when you get rid of a bigger house? We’re still unpacking boxes and moving pictures about. The sun’s moved round. The conservatory won’t be too hot at this time in the afternoon.’
