Body Politic

by J M Gregson

  Eventually Sangster said, ‘I ran over to look at the new centre we’ve just opened at Stroud. The two indoor tennis courts are already in use, but the builders are still working on the squash complex and the bar/lounge area. With the place empty, it was a good opportunity for me to check on the progress of their work. I made myself a sandwich and a coffee over there, as a matter of fact. Must have spent a good hour in the place.’

  ‘With no observer to record your presence,’ said Lambert drily.

  ‘No. Innocent people don’t consider it necessary to have their every move witnessed, you see.’ Despite his smile, he was a little rattled.

  ‘Nor do the guilty, sir. Where did you go after you’d been to Stroud?’

  ‘Back to my own flat. I had a shower and changed before I went down for a drink with my neighbour. Without witnesses, surprisingly enough.’

  ‘Do you smoke, Mr Sangster?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I never have done.’

  No more than you drink, thought Lambert. ‘Do you have a duffle coat?’

  ‘I might have, somewhere at the back of a wardrobe. If I still have it, I haven’t worn it for years.’

  ‘We may ask you to show it to us, in due course, nevertheless. Do you have a key to Mr Keane’s cottage?’

  ‘No. Why the hell should I? I’ve never been there.’

  But he could have got hold of a key easily enough from his adored Miss Yates, thought Lambert grimly; in all probability she still had one. They checked on his movements on Boxing Day, though Lambert was increasingly convinced that the thirty-six hours from around three thirty on December 24th were the important ones. They left him with the usual injunction to let Oldford CID know if he proposed to travel outside the area.

  ‘A cool customer,’ said Hook as they drove away.

  ‘Except where Moira Yates is concerned. He’d kill for her, if she asked him.’

  Back in his office, Gerald Sangster watched the old Senator drive carefully off his premises, then dialled the number he knew so well. ‘Dermot? They’ve just gone ... No, I don’t think so. Listen, did you tell them I drank a lot on Christmas Day? ... Good ... Yes, they’re going to have their forensic team look at my car, too. I think they don’t know anything, really. Long may it remain that way, I say!’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘How is Mrs Lambert, sir?’ Chris Rushton was proud that he remembered to ask this as soon as he saw the super. It might seem a small thing, but there were those in the CID division who thought of him as not just single-minded but unhealthily blinkered about his work. He’d remembered to get the right question in first today.

  ‘She’s doing as well as can be expected, I think they say, Chris. Or used to say. Nowadays they say “comfortable”, when usually the patient is anything but.’

  ‘I can bring you up to date on the various lines of enquiry fairly quickly, if you like, sir.’ With his social obligations fulfilled, Rushton was positively eager to return to the job, and it showed. He was like a puppy quivering with a stick in front of its master.

  ‘That’s what we’re here for,’ said Lambert sardonically.

  ‘Forensic have confirmed what you thought about the dumping of the body. There were ten degrees of frost at six a.m. on Boxing Day. They say it’s “highly probable” that the pond would have been too highly frozen by Boxing Day morning for anyone to dump a body without breaking the ice. And there was no sign of that.’

  ‘Any more sightings of Keane?’

  ‘No. The same observant soul who told us about the van which had been parked in the woods down the road from the cottage thinks she saw Keane’s Jaguar at his cottage at about seven on Christmas Eve, but of course he could have been dead or alive at that time. She can’t remember whether there were any lights visible in the cottage.’

  ‘So what time do we think Keane got there on Christmas Eve?’

  ‘Assuming he didn’t hurry after leaving his mother’s house, we think probably four to four thirty. It’s about forty miles, most of it on winding B roads or unclassified lanes.’

  ‘And have forensic or the postmortem report offered any further thoughts about how long the body lay before it was moved?’

  ‘They say that judging by the lividity on the back, buttocks and calves, it was probably at least a day. But the body had been in the water for a week: they warn that an expert witness called by the defence could soon emphasize that this was nothing more than an opinion.’ Rushton as usual had the key facts in his mind. He had not so far referred to the computer, where this was but a tiny fraction of what he had stored over the last few days.

  ‘Let’s accept for the moment that the corpse lay at the cottage or somewhere else for at least a day. If we assume that it was dumped some time during the night of twenty-fifth to twenty-sixth December, that means Keane was killed on the night of twenty-fourth to twenty-fifth. In all probability, within say six hours after his arrival.’

  With a corpse not discovered until ten days after death, it was a more accurate pinpointing of the time of death than they could have expected. But Rushton now put it in context. ‘Nothing else has turned up from the SOC team’s findings around that pond. That’s the other aspect of that week of hard frost: it has helped to pinpoint the time he was dumped, but it also ensured that there was no easy trace of the culprit. There isn’t a tyre mark or a footprint that has any relevance; the few marks left there have been eliminated as postdating the find.’

  ‘Nothing from the fag-end?’

  ‘Nothing useful. No chance of DNA material from it, apparently. You can test bones after hundreds of years, but any saliva traces have disappeared from this with the damp and the frost. And they can’t date the cork tip, which is really all there is left. Sometime during the last six months is all they’ll say. It’s a Benson and Hedges Silk Cut, which is apparently one of the most popular brands.’

  Lambert nodded philosophically. In the ‘golden age’ detective stories which Burgess the pathologist favoured, cigarettes were usually from some exotic Turkish or French brand which immediately identified the smoker. ‘Among those close to the deceased, there seems so far to be only one regular smoker. Christopher Hampson.’

  Rushton made a note on his pad. He would feed that extra fact about the late Raymond Keane’s partner into the appropriate computer file as soon as he was left alone. He said, ‘There wasn’t much at Keane’s cottage. Some fibres from a woollen of some sort. Some blonde hairs, in bedroom and lounge. Both belonging to Zoe Renwick: she allowed us to check. But you’d expect to find those. She’s been there regularly over the last few months. Unfortunately, Keane had a woman who went in to clean each Thursday. She went in on the Thursday between Christmas and New Year, the twenty-ninth December. As it seemed to her that Keane hadn’t been there since the previous Thursday, she vacuumed the place right through.’

  And possibly neatly removed vital evidence. Cleanliness was next to vandalism, not godliness, as far as Scene-of-Crime teams were concerned. Thank goodness her zeal hadn’t extended to that pantry where the SOC team had found the fibres from Keane’s sweater. Lambert said, ‘So there was no evidence of Keane’s being there on Christmas Eve? No crockery in the sink, nor unpacking in the bedroom?’

  ‘Nothing that the cleaning lady noticed.

  ‘There was a wardrobe full of clothes that he obviously kept there. A holdall was still in his Jaguar when we checked it. Incidentally, forensic are certain that the body wasn’t moved in his own car.’

  So everything pointed to the fact that he hadn’t been in the house very long. And Burgess’s notes from the postmortem confirmed that the stomach contents showed well-digested food: probably the lunch eaten at his mother’s. When Keane had been garrotted in that pantry off the kitchen, he had almost certainly not been in the house for very long. It looked more and more as if his murderer had been waiting for him to come into the cottage.

  Lambert said, ‘Anything interesting from forensic yet on the other cars?’

  ‘
Nothing positive.’ Again DI Rushton did not need to flash up the information on his screen; he had anticipated Lambert’s questions, like the experienced CID man he was. ‘Christopher Hampson’s Granada Estate is the ideal car for transporting corpses; perhaps Ford might think of making an advertising feature of that, in the States.’

  A rare flash of humour, a glimpse of that younger and happier Rushton who was now almost lost, even to himself. He went on quickly, as if he feared being rebuked for his frivolity, ‘But there was nothing to connect the car with Keane’s body. Mind you, Hampson had an old blanket spread over the extensive boot area. He’s a family man, of course. He says he transports a lot of kids and two dogs over short distances, and there was plenty of mud and hair on the blanket to support that story. But nothing helpful to us. Of course, he could simply have covered the floor with a different blanket, and disposed of it afterwards. The murderer had at least twenty-four hours to plan the disposal of the corpse, after he’d done the deed.

  ‘Forensic have just phoned in some more findings. They’ve been over to the Yates household since you were there this morning. Moira Yates’s car hasn’t been moved from the garage for at least three months: they can tell that by the state of the tyres, apparently. Dermot Yates’s hatchback is more interesting, but only in a negative way. He had it completely valeted between Christmas and New Year. It’s spotless inside and thus completely useless to us, the scientific boys say. They’re taking it in to examine it, but they don’t expect to find anything significant.’

  ‘Does Yates usually have his car cleaned so thoroughly?’

  ‘Not known. He says it was due for its first MOT by the beginning of the year, so he put it in for a full service and thought he might as well have the car valeted at the same time. Apparently the garage offers a deal combining the two and an MOT and he thought he was behaving as a responsible citizen should.’

  Yates hadn’t seemed to Lambert the sort of man to have his car valeted, but these special offers could lead to out-of-character decisions, as he knew from his own disastrous impulse buying in supermarkets. ‘Get a search done on all the local car-hire firms, will you? It’s unlikely they’d be open for hiring on Christmas Day, but this looks like a crime planned well in advance.’

  Rushton nodded, a little irritated with himself for not having offered the suggestion, or even implemented it off his own initiative. A hire vehicle was the obvious way to protect oneself against forensic investigation. He said, ‘There’s one extra piece of information for you on vehicles. We’ve identified the owner of that van with the damaged door which was seen so often near Keane’s cottage in the weeks before his death. It was only a matter of time, with a vehicle as distinctive as that.’

  Lambert noted that with a proper sense of drama Rushton had left the most important finding until the last, feeding in before it the evidence of his diligence in routine matters. But a man tied to a desk deserved to be indulged, at times like this. He said patiently, ‘And who is it?’

  ‘The same man who had been pestering Keane for the last year at the Commons and in his constituency surgeries. Joseph Walsh.’

  *

  The psychiatrist looked a little mad. He had hair as unruly as a clown’s, hands which refused to stay still for longer than a second and eyes which grew and declined according to the angle of the thick-lensed spectacles which sat precariously on the end of his flattened nose. But he spoke with reassuring sanity about the condition which affected Moira Yates.

  ‘Three times as common in women as men. The essential problem is a fear of something awful happening. Panic attacks occur when sufferers feel that something awful is about to happen to them—usually asphyxia, heart attack or some other means of dying. They may be aware, especially if they’re long-term sufferers, that these disasters aren’t likely to happen. But whilst they accept that intellectually, fear will override logic—hence the condition.’

  ‘Could it be brought on by some disastrous occurrence in the life of the patient?’

  ‘Yes. In practice, it usually is. A death of someone close, a serious accident at work or on the road, a broken love affair. These things make people subject to irrational fears. They feel that there is now no reason why one unpredictable disaster should not be followed by another one. The mind may react to such fears in a variety of ways. In the case of agoraphobics, it is a retreat into environments which are familiar. Sometimes they are all right in their own cars, as if they are travelling in a capsule which is part of their homes. In extreme cases, they feel unable to leave their houses; occasionally they even confine themselves to one or two rooms in their homes.’

  ‘Is it treatable with drugs?’

  The specialist’s uncoordinated hands fluttered in front of him like escaping pigeons. ‘Drugs are certainly resorted to. Self-prescribed alcohol is one of the things doctors need to watch out for: people confining themselves to their homes have their own hideaways for bottles, and can become dependent without anyone realizing it until it’s too late. The most commonly prescribed drugs would be benzodiazepines, like diazepam—our old friend valium.’

  ‘And could an effect of such drugs be a kind of heightened awareness, a sort of unnatural confidence in social exchanges?’ Lambert was thinking of the strangely brilliant Moira Yates and the way she had seemed to be positively enjoying their exchanges. Zoe Renwick had described what seemed to be a similar effect when she had spoken of her visit to the house with Keane on December 18th.

  ‘Certainly. Indeed, the condition itself can sometimes lead to short-term effects like that. When panic threatens, it brings an excess of adrenaline surging into the system. That can bang about and have all kinds of effects; the commonest are dizziness and physical sickness, but a surface confidence couldn’t be ruled out as an effect. But valium could certainly lead to a brilliant but artificial performance: artificial in the sense that it is drug related. Was the subject warned in advance of these meetings?’

  ‘Yes. In both cases, I think.’

  ‘Then if she was anxious, she probably took medication immediately before these meetings. Even overdosed mildly, perhaps, if she perceived them as important or threatening. These things are not always predictable, of course. But what you have postulated to me so far is a classic case of agoraphobia.’

  ‘One more query, then you’re rid of me. Would someone suffering from agoraphobia be able to use drugs to build up to a supreme effort to overcome the condition? For a special occasion. Let’s say to go into the town on her own after not leaving the house for months.’

  ‘No. Almost certainly not, in my experience. If the drug was as effective as that, there would hardly be a problem in the first place, would there?’ The psychiatrist, who had been addressing the ceiling as an aid to thought, switched his wild eyes back to Lambert’s face disconcertingly. ‘If the agoraphobia was as intense as you describe, she wouldn’t get further than the garden gate. She’d be looking for support, for a start. And even then she wouldn’t be able to do it, unless she was so drugged as to be almost insensible.’

  In which condition, thought Lambert, Moira Yates would certainly not have been capable of the violent physical action involved in the murder of Raymond Keane.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Joe Walsh was talking to his daughter. An observer would have seen only a man in scruffy garb muttering over a headstone, but Joe knew what he was about.

  ‘The police haven’t been to see me yet, but they will, Debbie. But don’t worry, they won’t be able to do anything to me. Lack of evidence, they call it. You remember that, don’t you? Lack of evidence. That’s what Keane said. Well, he’s dead now. And they won’t get me for it, because of lack of evidence.’

  He laughed a little, listened for a while to her reply, looked round the deserted cemetery, thrust his cold hands deep into the thick woollen pockets of his duffle coat. ‘I went to the inquest, you know. But don’t worry, I sat at the back. No one saw me. Murder by person or persons unknown, they said. Well, we could h
ave told them that, couldn’t we? Raymond High-and-Mighty Keane’s going to have a burial, not a cremation. Over at the family vault, near Chipping Sodbury. Next Tuesday, it is. I might go and see him put into the earth. Finish the thing off.’

  He stood up, looked round again at the rows of stones, the mostly neglected graves. ‘Bit warmer today. No frost now. I might be able to bring you a little plant tomorrow. Brighten the place up a bit. ’Bye, Debs.’ He walked briskly away from the grave, with its fading flowers beneath the glass dome, waved cheerfully from the gate, and got into the van with the big patch of brown on the door.

  He felt better than he had for months. Hungry, even. He pulled into the car park at Sainsbury’s and walked into the brightly lit interior, cringing a little at the prospect of moving among people, though to most eyes the store was quiet with an early-afternoon hiatus. In another hour, the place would be crowded with young mothers and their clamorous children, newly released from school. But to Joe Walsh, unused for so long to any form of contact, this seemed a very public place.

  He filled his basket quickly, impulsively, snatching at whatever caught his eye on the brightly lit shelves. Cereals, tins, eggs, milk, bread, potatoes. He had no list and there was nothing systematic about his selection. He was a curious, scarecrow figure, even to the checkout girl, who had trained herself to look at purchases rather than purchasers. But he produced two new ten-pound notes to pay, which was all that really concerned her. She plucked the notes fastidiously from his dirty fingers, provided him with plastic bags as his goods accumulated beyond the till, and turned a professionally blank face to the next customer.

  Joe Walsh found he was beginning to notice things again. True, he hardly registered the streets of terraced houses and allotments between the store and his council house. But when he turned the van between the drunken gates of his council house, he saw the uneven row of sprouts in the garden at the side, the grey-green tufts of January grass on the lawn that should have been mown in the summer and autumn, the peeling light-blue paint on the front door as he inserted his key. Things to do. He had not thought of things to do for a long time now.