Body Politic

by J M Gregson

  Lambert said, ‘Was the cottage empty when you got there?’

  ‘Yes. Rather to my surprise, it was. I hadn’t expected the opportunity to fall into my hands as easily as it did. I took my car down the road and parked it under some trees, where it was invisible from the house. There had been vehicles there before; you could see the tyre marks.’

  Not vehicles, thought Hook, but a vehicle. Joe Walsh’s van. Strange how these two people who had never met each other had made up a combination of which neither of them had been aware. Speaking for the first time, he said, as if merely checking the details of a minor burglary, ‘What time would this be, Miss Yates?’

  ‘About quarter past four, I should think. It was a bright frosty day, but already going dark. I let myself in with the key I’d taken with me. It was curious being back in there. Nothing much seemed to have changed. I looked into the lounge and the dining room. Listened to the messages on his answerphone, as a matter of fact, then wiped it. The kitchen was neat and tidy—I expect Mrs Brownlow, the cleaning lady, had been in on the Thursday, just as she used to do in the old days.’

  For a moment, she seemed to have been stopped by the memory of those old, contented days, when she had thought that Raymond Keane and she were going to live happily ever after. Then she said harshly, ‘I didn’t go upstairs, though. I expect the new woman’s night things might have been in the bedroom we used to use. If she wore any.’

  Lambert said, ‘Did you take the cord with you?’

  ‘Yes. I’d made it up weeks earlier, with the wooden bits at the end to tighten it. I kept it in the underwear drawer in my bedroom upstairs. I used to practise with it in front of the mirror up there sometimes, when Dermot was out.’ She turned to the armchair beside her, saw her brother weeping silently in the face of this awful image, reached out her hand to touch his temple as gently as if to a baby, and said, ‘Sorry. Don’t cry, brother.’

  ‘And you decided to wait for him in the pantry,’ Lambert prodded her forward relentlessly.

  ‘Not really. I mean, it wasn’t as planned as that. I heard his car coming. That big Jaguar. For a moment I lost my nerve—I thought I’d just scream abuse at him, tell him just what I thought of him, and run away. Like a hysterical female. Then I could hear him using that very phrase, and I hid. I found myself in the old pantry, looking up at the fuse-box. And it seemed like a sign again, as if events were conspiring with me, you see.’

  ‘You just stood in there and waited?’

  ‘Waited until it went dark, yes. It was already almost dark in the pantry. As it was designed to preserve food in the days before fridges, it’s on a north wall, and there’s only one tiny high window. I just shut the pantry door and waited behind it. I heard him come into the kitchen and put on the central-heating boiler. I watched the circle on the meter begin to revolve as the pump started. Then I heard him walk down the hall and into the lounge and switch on the big standard lamp. It was just like the old days. I could almost see him reading his paper in his big armchair by the fireplace, as he used to do.’

  But this cosy domestic scene had induced no mercy in the woman who pictured it, thought Hook. Lambert said, ‘How long was it before you made your move, Moira?’ It was the first time he had ever used her first name: they were united now by this oldest, most primitive of crimes.

  ‘I don’t know. It seemed a long time to me as I waited, but it probably wasn’t more than ten minutes. I watched the little window at the top of the wall beside me until it seemed quite dark outside. Then I reached up and put off the main electricity switch. I heard Raymond curse, then come stumbling down the hall and into the kitchen. I could hear his breathing as he fumbled for the handle of the pantry door. My eyes were quite accustomed to the darkness, and his weren’t. I stayed behind the door as he opened it, then slipped the cord round his neck, as he reached up to the fuse-box.’

  She paused, looked at them as if to see whether they had any questions, then went calmly on. ‘I was surprised how easy it was to kill someone like that, how quickly he died as I twisted the wooden handles at the end of the cord. I had my gloves on, of course, and it didn’t even seem to need as much pressure as I’d expected. I don’t think he ever knew who it was who was killing him.’

  It was not clear from her even, matter-of-fact tone whether or not she would have preferred Keane to know who it was who was twisting away his life. Moira Yates stared straight ahead of her, recreating in her mind’s eye the last moments of the man she had once loved. When they thought she had ceased to speak, she said reflectively, ‘It’s strange how easily and how completely love can turn to hate.’

  It was as though she was commenting on someone else’s story, drawing generalizations from particular events from which she was now detached. Lambert drew her quietly back to the tale she had almost concluded, the tale which would see her locked away for years. ‘What did you do next, Moira?’

  ‘I checked he was dead, that there was no pulse in the carotid artery. I put the power back on. Then I went and switched off the central heating boiler and the lights he’d switched on in the lounge. I had a last look at him before I left the house, but I didn’t touch him again. I went out of the front door and pulled it to behind me. There was still no one around. I drove home as quickly as I could in Dermot’s Cavalier. I thought with a bit of luck he’d still be at the Humes’ and no one would have known that I’d even been out, but that wasn’t to be.’

  She seemed entirely philosophical about that now. And had her luck held and her absence from Dermot Yates’s house not been spotted, she would probably have got away with it. It was Dermot Yates’s discovery of her absence, his subsequent realization of what she might have done, which had set him and Gerald Sangster off on their series of deceits and diversions. As they had sought to deflect suspicion away from Moira and on to themselves, they had created tracks which in the end would always have led nowhere for the CID.

  Lambert recalled Gerald Sangster’s pride in the woman he had loved for so long as he described her to them two days earlier: ‘Moira can be very determined: she’s capable of anything, if she puts her mind to it.’ All strong emotions are dangerous, and love perhaps more so than any; it can often be more revealing than any malice. He wondered if it was these words, from someone so anxious to protect Moira, which had first set his mind thinking on the possibilities of her involvement.

  Now, with her tale almost complete, it was Moira Yates who asked a question. ‘Why wasn’t he found more quickly? I locked the place up and left it, hoping that he wouldn’t be found immediately, but I couldn’t think it would be longer than a day or so. Then we heard that Raymond had become a “missing person”. I couldn’t understand why no one had discovered his body at the cottage. Then I read that he wasn’t found there at all.’

  He owed her an explanation at least, after the way she had condemned herself. ‘Someone else had the same idea as you. That the body shouldn’t be discovered easily, I mean. Someone you’ve never even met, I think. He took the corpse away in his van, more than a day after you’d killed Mr Keane. Dumped it in a pool in the woods, as you probably heard.’

  He had thought there might be some reaction now, some tears, some sense of the awfulness of what she had done. Instead, she said, ‘You might not have found him yet, if he had weighted the limbs.’ Her hatred of Keane had apparently not been mitigated a jot by his death.

  And she was right; Keane could well not have been found for months, if the careful, unbalanced Joe Walsh had thought of this one more detail. And if that had happened, this woman would almost certainly have got away with her crime. He stepped forward and arrested her. With the formal warning that she was not obliged to say anything but that it might prejudice her defence if she kept silent about issues she intended to raise in court, she nodded gravely and stood up. ‘I’ve packed a small bag,’ she said. ‘I left it in the hall.’

  It was as clear-sighted as she had been throughout. She had expected this, then, from the moment when she
heard this morning that they were coming again to the house. When she got to the door of the lounge, she looked with a smile at the two ashen-faced men who had wanted so desperately to save her from this. ‘I want you to know, Superintendent, that neither Dermot nor Gerry knew what I had done. They knew that I had taken Dermot’s car and been out for a while, but nothing more. They may have suspected all kinds of things, but I never told them what I had done: they have heard the story for the first time just now, with you.’

  Her coolness even now, as they led her to the car, was striking, even shocking. She rode beside Hook in the back with her handsome dark head held high, a slight smile still on her wide lips. She was as serene as any bride.

  *

  An hour later, Lambert, easing himself stiffly from the same driver’s seat, tried to dismiss the disturbing image of that calmness and give the whole of his attention to his wife.

  He took Christine’s case and led the way into the house. She followed him, walking a little gingerly, as if she scarcely trusted her legs. The raw air felt bitterly cold to her; it was the first time she had been outside since her operation. Less than a week, but it felt much longer.

  ‘Daffodils!’ she said delightedly when she got into the lounge and saw the splash of gold in the fireplace.

  ‘There wasn’t much else available, in January,’ said Lambert awkwardly. ‘I’ll go and make us some tea.’

  ‘Come here a minute, John,’ she said. She put her arms round him and he held her, feeling the warmth of her body through her clothes, stroking the shoulders which had never before seemed so fragile, banishing the image of that other woman he had just seen locked away.

  ‘Welcome home, love,’ he said at length.

  Then, when they sat with their cups steaming and she was telling him about the others at the hospital, he looked at his watch. ‘I’ll have to be off in a minute. Just for a while.’

  Christine sighed. ‘The demands of crime are incessant,’ she said without rancour.

  Lambert shook his head. ‘It’s Bert Hook. He’s having his first golf lesson, with the pro at the municipal course. He thinks I don’t know. If I’m quick, I’ll catch him in the act.’

  If you enjoyed Body Politic by J M Gregson, you might be interested in Full Fury by Roger Ormerod, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Full Fury by Roger Ormerod

  CHAPTER ONE

  Perhaps there was something wrong with my smile. The thing called Troy levered his shoulders away from my wall and moved down on me. I didn’t have time to shift from the desk as the cigar came stabbing down at my fingers. I fanned them, and a square inch of plastic top was permanently scarred.

  And all I’d said to Finn was: ‘What d’you do to make it talk?’

  ‘There’s an ashtray,’ I said mildly, indicating a couple of pounds of glass, and Troy flicked it to the floor with one of the three fingers on his left hand.

  That was just about the end of the visit, the closing pleasantries, you might say. Carter Finn’s true business had been gracefully skirted. He stood up and called off his hired support with a movement of his eyes, and they moved to the door.

  ‘Oh,’ said Finn, ‘to start you on your new career…’ And he tossed the briefcase over. I caught it. ‘An enquiry agent needs a briefcase.’

  I stood at the window and watched them go. Troy glanced up for a moment and the day lost its charm. The car, I decided, was a big Rover.

  It was a bad omen that my first client should have been Finn. If you could call him that. My office door had been open for a fortnight, and nobody had shown any interest. Then that morning I’d climbed the last of the stairs, opened the door, and there he was in the outer office. I don’t think I registered shock; I simply led the way through.

  I might have guessed Finn wouldn’t be alone, but I hadn’t spotted his goon, standing in the corner. Then somehow, by the time I’d got to my desk, he was easing apart two of my walls with his shoulders.

  Finn looked round with contempt, then took the only chair I’d got in there. It creaked a little. He’s a big man, broad with it. He smelt faintly of an after-shave that could have been deadly nightshade.

  ‘I heard they finally threw you out,’ he said patiently.

  ‘You could say it was mutual.’

  ‘Not what I heard.’

  He was greying a little, I thought. How old would he be—fifty? But still aggressively active.

  ‘A man in your position,’ I told him, ‘hears what people think you want to hear.’

  He made the shishing noise that Finn used for a laugh. ‘Oh come on, Mr Mallin. Would I be pleased that they’d pitched you out of the force?’

  Would he? We’d never directly clashed, but there’d been some edgy moments.

  ‘We found we didn’t think on the same lines,’ I told him.

  ‘And now you’ve gone private?’

  ‘I’m going.’

  ‘But not busy?’

  ‘Not busy,’ I agreed.

  There was a buzzer connected to the outer door, but I’d never yet heard it. There was a phone that I knew was working but it never rang for me.

  ‘You ought to advertise,’ he said placidly.

  ‘I do.’

  What the hell did he want from me? Anything I had to offer did not fit in with his background of clubs and gaming houses. Yet there was that new pigskin briefcase on his plump lap, and a keen, searching gleam in his eyes.

  He said it was mild for March—you could almost smell the Spring in the air. I got up to look out of the dirty window. There was no sign of Spring on the asphalt below, but almost opposite was parked a big grey car that was probably Finn’s. Something ugly was behind the wheel and had a pink paper spread over it. I agreed it was very mild for March.

  ‘What you want to do,’ he said, ‘is let me have some of your visiting cards. I meet a lot of people.’

  ‘I can’t see your friends bringing me anything legal.’

  Finn smiled. He had one of those soft, smooth faces that simply shine when they’re pressed to it. There was talcum in the wrinkles spreading from his eyes. He was trying to be friendly, and nearly succeeded in hiding his viciousness. But he owed me no favours, and I certainly owed him none.

  The smile was so surprising that I glanced at his nurse-maid to gauge the effect. He was smoking a small cigar, making no show-off attempt to appear bored, but calmly watching me. He knew his job. He’d remember me. A good lad. I looked away, feeling uneasy.

  But in fact it was all too easy to toss insults at a man like Finn. You didn’t have to worry about hurting him, and as he said from time to time, he couldn’t lash back. Always calm and precise, Carter Finn. Always walking a legal tightrope.

  ‘So you haven’t got work for me.’ I paused, but he didn’t say he had. ‘Then why have you come?’

  He lifted his hands a few inches and spread them in appeal. ‘Why else but to wish you luck?’

  ‘I don’t need your sort of luck.’

  The lad in the corner moved and a shoe creaked. I looked across in time to catch a frown, though whether at me or at his shoe I couldn’t tell.

  ‘I was driving past,’ said Finn blandly, ‘and I thought I’d drop in on David Mallin. They lost a good man when you resigned…’

  ‘Resigned?’ So he’d known.

  ‘You should look us up, Mallin. Usually I’m at The Beeches. You’re an honorary member. Did you know?’

  I was not sure I wanted any connection with Finn’s clubs, but I couldn’t have said exactly why. When I’d been in the police we’d kept a sharp eye on him, but there’d never been anything we could put a finger on.

  ‘I may look you up.’ I tried it again. ‘But no work?’

  ‘I’ve got all the staff I need.’

  All right, I nearly shouted, then why don’t you go? He looked around at my filing cabinet and my desk. The cabinet was new, full of empty folders to take my case records. The desk was old. The drawers held my new pipe and a tin of tobac
co, and a paperback I couldn’t wait to get back to. There was a fancy calendar on the wall.

  ‘You’re in business on your own now,’ he said. ‘So brighten the place up. Look big, Mallin. Make a show. They want to give money to those who’ve already got plenty.’

  His philosophy. With him it had certainly worked. A lot of money circulated round Carter Finn, and a good deal of it drifted into his bank accounts. That was a very expensive suit he was wearing. The pin in his silk tie would have kept me eating for a year.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ I agreed readily. I nodded towards his helper. ‘One you’re breaking in?’

  Finn looked at his protégé with affection. ‘He’s a likely lad. We call him Troy.’

  We both stared at him. The square shoulders moved with what might have been embarrassment. Not more than twenty, I thought, slim and fast. He was wearing a large-checked jacket in mustard and brown over a cream shirt with a red and gold tie, knotted large. Hair not too long, a wide brow with hard, dark and straight eyebrows, and tiny eyes, grey I thought, though he didn’t show me much of them. If he’d smiled he might have been handsome. His mouth did something, but it didn’t turn out as a smile. He moved his right hand across his lips, perhaps annoyed that they had done something, and there was a gold chain round his wrist.

  I turned back to Finn. ‘What d’you do to make it talk?’ And that was when Troy decided he’d had enough of the cigar.

  I turned away from the window and went to have a look at my wall calendar. It usually comforted me. March. A snow scene—the pessimists! A magpie on a low gate, with the fence shadows pink across the snow bank. But now it chilled me. I shivered, and decided there was nothing wrong with the calendar. It was me.

  There was nothing you could definitely level against Carter Finn. He ran a number of successful and rather smart clubs on a strictly legal basis. Where he had gaming tables, they were rigidly honest. There was nothing wrong. So why the hell did he need so many ex-cons and crooks in his establishments?