Die Happy

by J M Gregson

  Lambert’s eyes had never left Hilton’s face, even though it had been Hook who had done all the questioning in the last few minutes. He studied the young man for a few seconds more, then levered himself rather stiffly to his feet. ‘Keep thinking, Mr Hilton. It’s very much in your own interests as well as ours that you do so.’

  They were almost back at the station before he said, ‘You think Hilton’s innocent of this, don’t you, Bert?’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t know who else we should suspect.’

  ‘I think you do.’

  Hook didn’t take his eyes off the road, but allowed a smile to infuse his rugged features. ‘You think one of the people who’s received a letter could be the perpetrator of this? It would be the obvious thing to do to divert suspicion, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Indeed it would. I think we should pay another visit to the self-regarding Mr Preston.’

  It was just eleven o’clock when they drove into the tree-lined avenue where Peter Preston lived.

  Building land had been readily available in the nineteen thirties, when these tall, mock-Tudor houses had been built, so that the plots were spacious enough to show each house to its best advantage. The gardens had matured around them over the years, so that each residence had acquired the privacy from its neighbours which had always been envisaged. In May, the foliage and the late spring blossom were at their most abundant, so that the front elevation of the house was not visible until Hook had swung the car between the high gateposts and into the drive.

  They had not phoned ahead to arrange a meeting, as was their usual practice. Lambert had preferred to surprise this patronizing self-appointed guardian of culture, in the hope of shaking his self-confidence. There was no reply when Hook pressed the bell, which they could hear ringing faintly in the interior of the big house. He knocked hard on the oak door, but the place sounded very empty. With a habit bred by years of police work, they walked to the side of the house to look for any sign of a human presence. There was a garage at the rear of the house, but the ageing Ford Granada stood outside it. A man’s car, almost certainly Preston’s; they did not need to voice the thought.

  ‘There’s a window open upstairs,’ said Lambert. ‘He shouldn’t be far away.’

  They walked to the rear of the house. A long garden, with an unkempt lawn but carefully tended borders with a variety of shrubs and perennials, ran away for forty yards of level ground to a rose bed where the stems were swelling with promising buds. The nearest grass was carpeted with the pink blossom which had fallen from a flowering cherry. A blackbird shrilled its song and blue tits shot in and out of a nesting box in the bole of a tree. There was no sign of a human presence.

  They took in this pleasant vista for a moment, then looked up at the rear elevation of the house. There was another window open on the upper storey. ‘Some people invite burglary, then complain when we don’t catch the culprits,’ said Hook. He walked automatically to the back door of the house and turned the handle.

  The door opened easily to his touch.

  They glanced at each other, then moved softly into the house. Lambert called, ‘Mr Preston, are you there? It’s Chief Superintendent Lambert.’

  There was no reply. He went into the lofty hall and called out again, looking up the stairs. The echoing house sounded very empty. He looked at Hook, who was sniffing the air. ‘His study’s upstairs somewhere. He went up to it to bring his letter down when we were here yesterday. Probably one of the rooms with a window open. You have a look round down here.’ Lambert climbed the stairs. It was obvious which room was the study because its door was wide open. It was empty, with the chair at the desk pushed back as if the occupant had just left it. He went across and shut the window. He was looking at the old-fashioned metal filing cabinet in the corner when Hook called softly up the stairs. ‘You’d better come and look at this, John.’

  His voice carried easily in the silent house, but his tone was quiet, almost reverential. Lambert descended swiftly and followed him into the room at the front of the house where they had talked to Preston yesterday.

  They stopped abruptly just inside the door of the room. You didn’t contaminate a crime scene. There was no need to feel for carotid arteries in this case. Peter Preston lay on his back, with his legs slightly apart, in front of the easy chair where he had sat whilst they had perched incongruously upon the elegant chaise longue. His eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling. His features had relaxed in death into an expression of surprise rather than horror.

  The dark crimson patch around the wound in the middle of his chest was almost black at its centre. The lips which had been so active would patronize no more.

  ELEVEN

  Three hours later, Edwina Preston drove home slowly. It was only thirty miles, thirty-five at the most, so there was no need to hurry. She had no wish to get home quickly; she preferred to reflect on her experiences overnight.

  It had been a good time, as usual. Once again it had underlined how inadequate her relationship with Peter was. She hated him again for refusing to talk to her about it. She drove slowly through Oldford. She had always liked the town and the area, but now the very thought of Peter and his airs and graces seemed to be discolouring it for her. She needed time to prepare herself for what she would find at home. She was moving from a new and exciting world to a familiar and depressing one.

  Her little Citroen seemed to have a will of its own, however. Every traffic light she slowed for changed obligingly in her favour, every heavy vehicle that might have slowed her pulled obligingly into a parking lay-by to facilitate her progress. All too soon, she was turning into the wide avenue with its tall trees that she had liked so much when they had moved in sixteen years ago.

  It was because of the trees that she did not see the policeman until she swung into the drive. He looked very young and quite disconcerted as she indicated and turned. He held up his hand before her like an old-fashioned traffic cop. ‘Mrs Preston?’

  ‘I am she, yes.’ She cursed herself for adopting the phrase her pedantic husband had always insisted upon.

  The young policeman looked even more disturbed. ‘I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Mrs Preston.’ He looked behind him desperately and she glimpsed blue and white plastic ribbons between hastily erected stakes. His uniform was very new and beautifully pressed; she wondered how long he had been wearing it. He called towards the open door of the big house, ‘Would you ask PC Jeffries to come out here, please? Tell her it’s urgent.’

  Edwina said dully, ‘What is going on here? Why are these people in my house?’

  He said nothing, but the relief on his face was palpable as a woman police officer, who was only a little older than he was, came reluctantly down the drive. She smiled nervously at Edwina and said, ‘I am PC Alison Jeffries. Would you switch your engine off please?’ She looked back at the big house and decided that there was no way in which she could allow the woman who was now a widow to breach the scene of crime barriers. ‘I’m afraid I’m the bearer of bad news, Mrs Preston. Could you let me into your car for a few minutes, please?’

  When you’re nineteen, you may not have a clear view of reality. The distinction between the possible and the impossible may be clear to you, but the line between the possible and the unlikely is much less clear. Cloudy judgement leads to bad decisions. Bad decisions can have all kinds of unforeseen repercussions.

  Wayne Johnson was nineteen. Last night he had made a bad decision. He was now at Oldford police station, enduring the unforeseen repercussions.

  Wayne was one of the young petty criminals who loomed larger by the year in the crime statistics. His school career had been dominated by truancy. He had been designated an under-achiever until he was twelve; from then on his continual absences had determined he should be reclassified as a non-achiever. He had acquired a certain grudging admiration from his peers as a successful shoplifter, the most experienced and gifted amongst his group. He had been absent far more than present in his last year at s
chool, so that the end of his educational career was welcomed by his teachers almost as heartily as it was received by the young man himself.

  There was no employment for him, of course. He joined the swelling ranks of those ‘on the social’ with a weary resignation which should have been alien to a sixteen-year-old. He graduated from shoplifting to petty burglary. Like many adolescents of his background, Wayne had no very clear idea of right and wrong. It was definitely not done to torture babies and old ladies, and young men shouldn’t hit women – well, not unless they’d done something really bad to deserve it, anyway. Beyond that, moral distinctions were very hazy. If people were foolish enough to leave things lying around, then they were really very silly; it was only sensible that you should remove such things. It would teach them a lesson; you were rendering them a service, really.

  It was a short step from removing things left lying around to searching for such things, and another short step to making your own opportunities. That was the initiative they’d said he didn’t have at school, wasn’t it? And with the recession deepening and these bloody Poles taking all the jobs round here, you had to do something to survive, didn’t you? He had always been quite a nimble lad – could have been a good gymnast, the PE teachers said, if he’d only been at school more often. If people left windows open, they deserved to suffer and Wayne was just the man to ensure they did.

  Success made him bolder. He moved on to better streets and bigger houses. He learned what to take and what to ignore. Money was the best, and after that jewellery. Then silver, particularly if it was fairly portable; he learned to distinguish at a glance between the hallmarked article and the EPNS versions which were hardly worth removing. He knew where to dispose of stuff quickly and profitably; you didn’t get anything like the retail value, but you had to extract a realistic price from crooked dealers for stolen goods.

  Boldness can be a valuable quality for felons. It can also be highly dangerous, if it leads them to overreach themselves. Wayne Johnson had passed his driving test at the first attempt. It was the only examination success he had ever had and for a full day it lifted his spirits. He acquired an old van to carry away his booty and moved on to fresh fields and richer pickings. He could go miles from home now, out to the rich suburbs and the last roads before town finally gave way to country.

  The road where he had been last night was simply and grandly called The Avenue. Big gardens, with lots of cover for people doing what he did; big houses, with lots of lovely loot for the deserving and resourceful man like him. But possessions made people suspicious, and success had made Wayne careless.

  He had watched the elderly couple leave the first big house at the end of the road. There was no burglar alarm visible on the outside of the house and no bell blared when Wayne gained access. The downstairs windows were the original leaded lights from the thirties. They were certainly picturesque, but no match for a strong young man with the heavy old chisel he had found so effective a tool. You had to force entry without much noise. He was into the room at the rear of the house within three minutes, scarcely able to believe his luck that there should be no effective security in a place this size. No need to hurry; the big Merc had plainly been on its way out for the evening.

  He took his time assessing this Aladdin’s cave of trophies. His eyes gleamed when his torch flicked over a display cabinet. The silver tea service was solid and a good weight. Regency, probably, his now experienced eye told him. He didn’t bother with the china. It was too fragile to travel easily, and you got disappointingly little for it. But there was a collection of gold and silver snuff boxes on the top shelf. Twelve in all; he put them carefully into the shopping bag he had found behind the kitchen door.

  The bottom drawer in the bedroom was where he found the money. Tens and twenties, maybe with the odd fifty among them – there must be hundreds here – all beneath several pairs of neatly folded knickers. The woman must have been concealing this from her husband. Naughty old bag! He resisted the urge to count the notes and moved up the drawers to the top one.

  That was where he had his real windfall. A jewellery box, with everything neatly assembled for the discriminating intruder to remove. How very obliging! Diamonds, emeralds, what looked to his experienced but uneducated eye like rubies and sapphires. Genuine stones, he was pretty sure of that. Rings and earrings and three or four brooches. Silly old trout! Some people only learned a lesson the hard way, didn’t they?

  There weren’t many dog walkers in the tight little houses in the centre of the town where Wayne Johnson lived. That was probably what made him omit them from his calculations. But The Avenue was a very different place. It was a man walking his Labrador through the scented spring darkness that saw the battered white van in the drive of the solicitor’s house. An odd thing, that, as the house itself seemed to be in darkness. When he heard the sound of the rear door of the van being stealthily opened, the dog walker didn’t intervene; he was observant, not foolhardy. He stilled the soft growl of the Labrador and hastened homewards as fast as his ageing legs would carry him.

  He was lucky. And Wayne was unlucky. When the 999 call came through to the police at Oldford, there was a patrol car within half a mile. They arrested Johnson as he eased the van out of the driveway of the big detached house. Caught red-handed, with the evidence neatly stowed behind him in the back of van. Charged, relieved of his laces and his belt and the contents of his pockets, and given a night in the cells to meditate upon the error of his ways. A result, in police terms. Something to throw in the faces of those who said burglary wasn’t taken seriously, in these days of drugs and terrorism.

  Wayne Johnson didn’t sleep much. The face of the mother who had warned him against his descent into crime ever since his last days at school kept swimming before him, and his scornful dismissal of her fears kept ringing in his ears. They’d be round to tell her he was in the nick for the night and why. He felt an odd emotion he had not endured since childhood. It took him a little while to recognize it as guilt. In the morning, he managed to down half a piece of bread and most of the mug of strong tea that was brought to him.

  The two uniformed cops who interviewed him were truculent. The case was sewn up, whatever attitude this suddenly pitiful creature chose to adopt. Even the cautious boys of the Crown Prosecution Service couldn’t reject this. Plead guilty and throw yourself on the magistrate’s mercy, lad, there’s no other course open to you.

  Offer them nothing, Wayne’s previous brushes with the law told him. He couldn’t see any way out of this, but he’d make it as difficult for them as he could, on principle. He knew he was entitled to a brief, and was disappointed when they announced that. No chance of claiming that he’d been deprived of his rights, then. He knew he was going to plead guilty, but told himself stubbornly that a brief might turn up some mitigating circumstance which he couldn’t see for himself. These bloody lawyers cost enough, didn’t they? If the state was stupid enough to pay their exorbitant bills, let them earn their bloody money.

  They couldn’t find a lawyer for him, not immediately. One should be available in a couple of hours. He was returned to his cell until then, wondering darkly about some cunning police ploy. The delay was genuine enough, but it was this chance occurrence that delivered him into the hands of the CID.

  When he was taken back to the interview room, a keen-looking dark-haired pig said he was Detective Inspector Rushton. He introduced the burly PC Plod-type beside him as Detective Sergeant Hook. After this, they both looked at Wayne for several seconds without words, as though he were a specimen under a microscope that might reward careful study. It was quite unnerving, especially as he was also wondering why simple burglary should interest top brass like this.

  Rushton’s opening words did nothing to slow his racing pulses. ‘We’re not interested in the breaking and entering; that’s an open and shut case. You’re going to plead guilty once your brief arrives. We’re interested in you for something much more serious.’ He paused to study Wayne a
gain with that unsmiling, unblinking stare, as if he expected some guilty start to reward him for his attention.

  Wayne found it difficult to summon up resistance. ‘You might think you have me banged to rights for breaking and entering. Remains to be seen, that. And you’ll get me to admit to bugger-all else, so don’t think you can build up your clearance figures by pinning some other thing on me.’

  ‘Which you’ll claim you know nothing about.’

  ‘Which I’ve already told you I know nothing about.’

  ‘Correction, Mr Johnson. You denied responsibility for this major crime. You didn’t say you knew nothing about it.’

  ‘Well, I’m saying it now.’ Again they studied him without comment, letting the silence stretch until he found himself compelled to break it. ‘What is this crime you’re trying to pin on me, anyway?’

  ‘We’re talking about the biggest one of all, Mr Johnson. Capital murder.’

  The words had a ring he couldn’t escape in this increasingly claustrophobic place. His throat felt very dry as he said, ‘I know nothing about that.’

  Rushton raised his eyebrows and turned his face towards the older man next to him. DS Hook didn’t take his eyes off their subject of study, but took up the questioning. ‘Two houses away from the place where you were apprehended last night, on the same side of the road, a man was shot dead. As far as we can tell at the moment, at about the time you were in the area, Mr Johnson. You can see why we’re interested in what you have to say about it.’

  It was suddenly vitally important to Wayne that he should convince them of his innocence. The pigs would frame you for anything they could. But surely the law wouldn’t allow them to pin something like this on him? ‘I didn’t do it. It’s not my style.’ He wanted his denial to carry more conviction, but his voice sounded thin and frail. ‘I’m a breaker and enterer, if you want, but not a murderer. I wouldn’t do that.’