Close Call

by J M Gregson

  Little escapades. They weren’t anything more glamorous or exciting than that, if he was honest with himself. He had assured himself for years that monogamy wasn’t a natural state, that free spirits like his would always need to break the monotony of it. But he couldn’t deceive himself any more that there was anything glamorous in his pursuit of women, or in the beds he nowadays dwelt in so briefly.

  He had left it late to go out, and he thought that that in itself might have excited Carol’s interest. But she did no more than nod at him and go back to her book, nettling him illogically by her indifference to his activities. He needed to leave it late at this time of the year, because he had a prejudice about going to these liaisons in broad daylight. They should be secret, even furtive. It was that clandestine element which contributed to the excitement which he found it increasingly difficult to conjure up.

  The woman gave him a drink, then draped herself languorously over the sofa, which was new since his last visit. He knew that he would be expected to comment on this addition to the room’s furnishings and he duly did so. But it was but another feature of a conversation that felt to him increasingly stilted and artificial, even though the woman seemed to find the exchanges natural enough, as she sipped her gin and watched the level in his own glass going steadily down. Her neckline was a little low for her declining bust, but he knew that it was adopted for him, so such thoughts were churlish.

  She seemed to be listening to the meaningless things he said, putting in her own conventional and rather vapid responses at the appropriate moments. At least he wasn’t being hurried, he told himself; at least she was maintaining the semblance of affection, of a relationship which went beyond the sheets. He wondered as they spoke how often she had said these or similar words before, how many other men had sat upon this new couch and said similarly meaningless things as their preludes to sex.

  She topped up his glass, measuring the gin carefully before she poured in the tonic. She shouldn’t be wearing that sleeveless dress: her upper arms were running a little to flab. Phil noticed that she gave herself only tonic, caught her glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. His observation seemed to be at its most acute when he required it to be least so.

  And the coupling when it came was curiously unsatisfying, though Phil could not have said why. Her expensive perfume was heavy upon the pillows, but he found himself wondering whether it was there to disguise the scent of other males who had been there before him. When she opened her legs and received him, he thrust away like a younger man, trying to put out of his mind the comparisons with those other men she must have rolled with here, the men who might have had more urgent and thus more satisfactory comings than his. She seemed willing, even grateful, in her responses to him, but perhaps that was merely an aspect of her professionalism.

  She shouted the rough words that she knew excited men, arched her back and groaned and moaned as his own cries became more urgent, told him when it was over and they lay together on their backs that he had the energy of a much younger man. But how much was genuine; how much was part of the flattery which was one of the tools of her calling?

  Because that was what this was, for sure. She wasn’t a common prostitute, trawling the streets of a city in search of trade. This was a pleasant, discreet suburb of Cheltenham, where the innocent would never suspect that such things went on, that such transactions took place. But Philip Smart could not delude himself that this was anything other than that: a sexual transaction. A discreetly managed and scarcely acknowledged transaction, but a piece of well-paid business, nonetheless, as far as the female partner was concerned.

  He put the bank notes on the mantelpiece beside the clock as usual, saying nothing, checking from her quick smile that the price was correct, that nothing had changed since his last visit six weeks ago. He stood for a second looking at the money, feeling the surge of revulsion pulsing through him like a physical thing. It was coming to something, when you had to pay for it! All the things he had said in his youth about the sad old men who bought their women, all the cruel jibes about the pathetic randiness of men who had to pay for sex, came surging back into his head when he least wanted to hear them.

  He left as quickly as he could, conscious that the woman too wanted him out of her house quickly, now that she had endured his clumsy tumbling and had secured his money. She came with him to the door, and he noticed lines in her face that he had not seen before, a tiredness, perhaps even a desperation about her eyes, as she told him to come again whenever he fancied a visit.

  He felt a sudden, belated pity for her as well as himself, for her desperate attempt to retain her fading looks, for the uncertainty which she must feel about the future. His feet dragged a little as he walked back towards the car, which he had left a discreet two hundred yards away in a pub car park. It was difficult to walk brisk and erect when you had lost all pride in yourself. His mind fled back to childhood, to his long-dead father’s warning that his soul would be damaged if he did things with women which would make him ashamed. That old-fashioned man had always refused to answer his questions about the detail of these things, but he knew for certain now that this was one of them.

  He drove around for a little while, trying unsuccessfully to dispel the feeling of misery which had dropped so heavily upon his shoulders as he walked back to the car. At this moment, it did not seem long since those days when the father he had almost forgotten had warned him so vaguely about the dangers of sex. Where had all those years fled to so quickly, and why had he descended into such a useless life?

  It was ten to twelve when Philip Smart eased the car into the new garage at Gurney Close. He was surprised that the light was still on in the sitting room: he had hoped that Carol would have gone to bed. He sat for a moment in the driving seat after he had turned off the ignition, trying to muster the bright, false, cheerful face which he felt his re-entry into the house now demanded.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, dear,’ he said. ‘I got dragged into a last frame of snooker with the lads, and it went on a bit.’

  Carol Smart was in her dressing gown, clutching an empty beaker. She was without make-up after her bath, and she looked to her husband curiously young and vulnerable. She glanced at him for a moment. He thought he caught contempt in her face, but it might have been no more than the reflection of his own guilt and self-loathing.

  Then she said acidly, ‘That Superintendent Lambert wants to see you in the morning. On your own, his sergeant said. I hope you’ve nothing you want to hide!’

  Philip Smart endured a very disturbed night. As he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling in the first light of the early summer dawn, he told himself that he had nothing to fear from the police, that they could not possibly know what had passed between him and Robin Durkin. Once he heard his wife snoring softly in the adjoining room, and was filled with envy. Carol seemed to him to be sleeping the undisturbed sleep of the innocent.

  But when Lambert’s big old Vauxhall turned slowly into Gurney Close the next morning, it eased itself into the drive of the house next door to the Smarts. Lambert climbed out stiffly, glanced for a moment at the azure of the sky, then looked unhurriedly at the four newly erected residences in the tiny close. The superintendent said a few words to the burly man at his side before he went into the house of Lisa Holt.

  Lisa glanced briefly along the close towards the window where Philip Smart stood before she shut the front door, almost as if she expected the older man to be watching her. He drew back instinctively a little further into the room, even though he knew that she could not see him.

  The two big men sat down in the seats she had intended for them in her sitting room, leaving her with her back to the light, as she had envisaged it. That at any rate had gone according to plan. Lisa said, ‘Thank you for coming to see me here. I thought people might begin to gossip if we talked again at work. It can’t be good publicity for a solicitors’ office, if the police make a habit of interviewing murder suspects there!’

 
She followed her little joke with a nervous laugh, which elicited no more than a quiet smile from Lambert. He looked at her for a couple of seconds before he said, ‘Is that what you feel you are? A murder suspect?’

  She had expected him to deny the idea, to tell her it was ridiculous but normal, to reassure her that everyone who was questioned felt like that. She drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. ‘I suppose everyone feels threatened. I’m not paranoid enough to think it’s just me. I’ve noticed the tension, even in a quiet place like this. Even in the close, I mean. We all seem to be looking at each other with a new sort of reserve. It’s as if we think it preposterous that anyone here could have done anything like that, and yet we still have the thought at the back of our minds that there might just have been someone among us who committed a murder.’

  She felt she was saying too much, that he should have defused the tension with some relaxing dismissal of the notion before now, but he said nothing. Indeed, he listened as if her thoughts were of surpassing interest to him, and she was left to try to dismiss the idea for herself. ‘But I expect that’s how most people feel when they’re involved in something like this.’

  ‘When a murder occurs in a closed community, it’s not unusual for people to look at each other with suspicion, yes.’

  He was much less sympathetic than she had anticipated. He had not said that the notion was ridiculous, as she’d expected him to. Lisa said rather desperately, ‘But we’re not a convent or a hospital. We don’t work together. It’s just an accident of life that we happen to live our separate lives in this little cul-de-sac. And you’re talking as though the murderer lives in one of these houses.’

  ‘You don’t think he does? Or she does?’ There was a ghost of a smile about Lambert’s lips as he added the gender qualification.

  ‘No, I don’t. I find it a ridiculous idea, if you want the truth!’

  ‘Oh, we want that, Mrs Holt. There have been far too many attempts to conceal the truth.’

  She ignored the challenge in his words. ‘And you think that it might have been someone in the close who killed Robin Durkin? Even though it would have been perfectly possible for someone to get into his garden from the path by the River Wye behind it?’

  ‘We are keeping an open mind. It has not been possible to rule out many possibilities when we have been told so many lies. They tend to induce suspicion, do lies.’

  It was the second time he had thrown the gauntlet at her. This time she felt she had to pick it up. But she felt she was making but a feeble response as she said, ‘I hope you’re not suggesting that I concealed things from you when we spoke in the office on Monday.’

  Lambert said evenly, ‘I’m suggesting rather more than that, Mrs Holt. I’m asserting that you did not merely attempt to conceal things from us but told us outright lies. That you attempted to deceive the police in the course of a murder investigation.’

  She felt her mind reeling; told herself that she should have been ready for this; that she should not have been taken by surprise by it. She said stupidly, ‘If anything I said gave you a wrong impression, I can assure you that there was certainly no deliberate attempt to—’

  ‘You implied that you had no acquaintance with Robin Durkin before you moved into Gurney Close. That you had known him for no more than four or five weeks. That he was a name on a garage to you and nothing more than that. This was not a simple misunderstanding. You were attempting to deceive us.’

  ‘All right. You make it sound more sinister than it was.’

  ‘What we now have to ask ourselves is why you did this.’ Lambert went on as if she had never spoken. ‘I’m not sure how serious you were when you said that you felt you were now a suspect in a murder investigation. I have to tell you that it is you who have placed yourself in that position. And that as the person directing this investigation I regard it very seriously indeed.’ He spoke as though it was a situation which gave him considerable satisfaction.

  Lisa was beginning to hate this quiet, implacable man, with the lined face and the intense concentration upon a single issue. She wondered if the fear she felt showed in her face. She said lamely, ‘If I lied to you, it wasn’t in an attempt to conceal a murder.’

  ‘You will need to convince us of that, Mrs Holt. I’m sure you can see that for yourself.’

  ‘I don’t know where to start.’ It was true: she felt more helpless than she had done for years. She did not know how much they knew, how much she could still hope to conceal.

  Just when she had focussed all her resources upon Lambert, on the contest she felt herself fighting against him, it was the less threatening presence beside him who now said, ‘Perhaps you should tell us all about your previous acquaintance with the murder victim. And then tell us why it was that you chose to attempt to conceal it from us.’ Bert Hook’s tone was quiet, even friendly, and accompanied by an encouraging smile. But there was no evading the directness of his suggestions.

  ‘I’d known Robin for years.’ The flat, defeated voice seemed to come from someone else.

  ‘Yes. Since when?’ Hook’s quiet acceptance implied that she was merely about to confirm for them what they already knew, that she had better now be completely frank, if she wished to restore even a measure of credibility to her battered reputation for honesty.

  ‘Seven years. Just over seven years.’ She was suddenly very precise, as if she hoped that this might compensate for her earlier deceptions.

  ‘And what is your opinion of him? The truth now, please. You should know that we already know a lot more about Robin Durkin and what went on in his life than we did when we spoke with you on Monday.’

  Lisa took a long breath, forced herself to take her time. She was thinking on her feet now, discarding the evasions she had planned, determining how much she needed to reveal of herself and her dealings with the dead man. ‘Rob was into drugs, I think. Dealing, I mean, not using. In a big way, by the time he died.’ She forced the staccato phrases out, waiting for them to intervene, to help her with their confirmation, to signify that what she was saying was accepted now as the truth. Neither of the men opposite her said anything; they continued to watch her with that unwavering, unnerving intensity. She said unwillingly, ‘And he made it his business to know about people. To know – well, things that they didn’t want him to know.’

  They were as inscrutable as medieval torturers. She could not tell whether or not she had surprised them. Then Bert Hook said quietly, ‘And he knew things about you, didn’t he? Knew things which he could use for his own purposes. To blackmail you.’

  The word was out, the word she had feared to use. She said in a hurry, ‘Not me. My husband. The man I have now divorced.’ She wanted to pour out her hatred of the man who had ruined her marriage, had ruined the proud, optimistic man who had taken her to the altar and fathered her child.

  It was another scorching day, and she had put on shorts and a sleeveless blouse for this meeting, had come to it barefoot and with minimal make-up; she had wanted to show these CID men how unconcerned she was. Now she regretted her boldness: she gazed down at her bare feet and felt naked, stripped of the disguises and the defences which more formal clothing might have given to her.

  A voice within Lisa said that showing her hatred was not a good idea, that revealing the full extent of her detestation of Robin Durkin would not be a sensible tactic when she was speaking to the men charged with the investigation of his death. That voice lost out. She could not keep the repugnance out of her tone as she said, ‘Durkin supplied Martin with what he wanted. At a price. Then he used his knowledge to drive him into a breakdown.’

  She was almost in tears at the recollection. The composure which normally came naturally to her, which she had thought it would be so easy to maintain with these strangers, was in tatters now. She had seemed younger than her thirty-nine years when they had spoken to her on Monday. Now she seemed older and more careworn. It was Lambert who said softly, ‘Officers in our team spoke with your husband
on Monday, Mrs Holt. We already know something of his dealings with Robin Durkin.’

  It was at once reassuring and disturbing, a confirmation that she was not on her own in this, but a reminder of the resources they were applying to discovering things about the people involved in the case. She tried to be as dispassionate as if she were speaking about some stranger as she said carefully, ‘He supplied Martin with what he wanted. Drugs: just pot at first, then coke. I’m not sure what else. And women: there was always a ready supply of nubile girls ready to meet a young man’s needs.’

  Lambert nodded, then said dryly, ‘Your husband was an adult and a married man. He must have been a willing partner in this.’

  She gave him a bitter smile. ‘That is why he is my ex-husband, Superintendent. He may have been easily led, but he was a man in his thirties: he has to take responsibility for his own actions. This is a conversation Martin and I had many times over the years. But unless you were involved, it would be difficult for you to appreciate the part played by Rob Durkin in the process of his disintegration. Oh, Rob pretended it was just lads in the pub together at first. That he was merely indulging the high spirits which were natural in Martin, that what my husband wanted was not vicious or illegal, but perfectly natural in an intelligent man who liked to “experiment” and “live life to the full”. He used phrases like that a lot, did Rob Durkin. My mother used to talk about people having dark angels in their lives. I thought it was all romantic nonsense, until Martin met his.’

  ‘Are you sure that Mr Durkin was any more than an undesirable companion for your husband?’

  ‘I’m very sure indeed. He knew exactly what he was doing. He took a delight in seeing my husband going downhill. And when Martin had reached a certain stage, when his destiny was moving out of his own control, Rob didn’t just turn his back on him: nothing as simply despicable as that. Oh no! That would have been far too simple for Rob. He used what he knew to blackmail Martin, did the admirable Mr Durkin!’