Die Happy

by J M Gregson

  He was seventy now; he had been ten years older than his wife and forty-eight years old when Kate was born. She sometimes wondered whether living alone had made him more conservative. He seemed to her older than his years, not so much in body as in mind. Her mother and he had always argued; their angry raised voices had been the recurrent chorus of her childhood. Kate hadn’t really been surprised when her mother had gone off to live in Durham with a younger man six years ago; Dad and Mum had been chalk and cheese. With all the accumulated wisdom of her twenty-two years, Kate had pronounced it a good thing. Now she was not quite so sure. Dad seemed to be ageing more rapidly than he should be.

  He gave her coffee in a cup and saucer, then vigorously stirred his own in the beaker he had used for as long as she could remember. They talked a little about her infancy and the small, precocious things she had done. Kate smiled and answered a little absently, but he was too occupied with his delighted reminiscences to notice that. She was wondering how she could broach the subject she had come here to introduce. She couldn’t leave him in the dark for ever, whatever his reaction. That would be behaving as if she was somehow ashamed of herself.

  She talked at some length about the exhibition in Cheltenham, about how good it was for Ros Barker, and how it proved that she was a serious artist, who was going to make a good living out of her painting.

  Walter said, ‘She’s a talented girl, your friend. I’ve heard that from other people as well as you. I don’t understand much about art myself. I like a good Constable or Turner, but I don’t pretend to know much. I’ll go to that exhibition, though. Be good if you were able to come with me and guide me around it.’

  ‘Of course I will. I’ll be in there a lot of the time. I said I’d be in the gallery as much as I could.’

  She hoped he’d take that up, or at least raise an eyebrow, but he merely smiled at his coffee. She was compelled to say as lightly as she could, ‘You might be a little shocked by some of the paintings, Dad. Well, by one of them in particular. One of them with me in it.’

  He looked up eagerly. ‘Ros has done a painting of you? That’s a nice thing, isn’t it? Quite a compliment, I’d have thought.’

  ‘Several of them have me in. One might shock you, though, Dad.’

  ‘Take a bit to do that, girl.’

  ‘It’s a nude, Dad.’ She looked out of the window at the familiar small, neat garden, watching him out of the corner of her eye.

  He didn’t say anything for several seconds. ‘I’m glad you told me, Kate. I need to be prepared. I suppose I haven’t seen you like that since you were about eight.’

  ‘It’s not highly realistic – it’s part of a larger painting. You might not even recognize me, but I thought I should tell you.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m glad you did. You said you’d acted as a model for your friend, but I didn’t really think that she might want to paint you in the altogether. I suppose I should have done.’

  ‘No reason why you should. But no reason why I shouldn’t do it, is there?’

  ‘No reason at all. You need to spread your wings, as you told me when you moved out of here.’ He looked out of the window and she sensed that he was going to change the subject and talk about his vegetables. Sure enough, before she could think of what to say, he said, ‘You must take some of those carrots with you when you go. They’re young and tender. And I’ll get you a cauliflower and a lettuce. There’s far too much for me – I give most of the stuff away.’

  He was moving the talk steadily away from her, as if he understood her purpose and was out to frustrate it. She said desperately, ‘The thing is, Dad, Ros and I live together.’

  ‘I know that. Very sensible to share; you don’t earn enough to rent a place of your own.’

  ‘I mean we really live together. We’re partners. Like man and wife, if you like. We love each other, Dad.’

  He gazed at her very seriously for what seemed to her a very long time. Then his face cracked into the broad, familiar smile she remembered so well. ‘I wondered when you’d get round to telling me.’

  The mouth beneath the pert little nose he loved dropped open. Then she gulped and said, ‘You knew about it? About Ros and me?’

  ‘Of course I did. I was born in the twentieth century, not the nineteenth, you twerp. I saw the way you were with boyfriends and I wondered then. But you had to make your own way, find these things out for yourself.’

  ‘And you’re all right with it?’

  He stood up and held out his arms to her. She flung herself delightedly against his chest and he kissed her, then held her as tightly as he ever had in his life. He looked fondly down at the familiar head with its short blonde hair, then away down his garden to the rows of vegetables at the end. ‘Not many people find happiness in love, girl. You grab it and hold on to it. I was never much for grandchildren, anyway. It’s women who want them.’

  She was weeping softly with her joy. He held her more gently for a few seconds, then sat her down again and resumed his own seat. Eventually she leaned across and punched his knee. ‘You old fraud! You knew all the time! And I’ve been so worried about telling you.’

  ‘We people with bus passes know a lot more about life than you give us credit for. Experience, we generally call it.’

  They took a chance on Sam Hilton being at home. It was possible that he wouldn’t be there at eleven thirty on a Saturday morning, but Lambert wanted to surprise him.

  Sam wasn’t bleary-eyed or half dressed, as they had half-expected he would be. He had been working on the poem prompted by his grandfather’s decline into Alzheimer’s, trying to force his ideas into some sort of framework.

  ‘Die happy, old man. Go content into

  The welcoming darkness. The slow limbs

  Struggle. The brain is fractured, faltering

  Towards death. Remember him as laughing,

  Young limbs flying fast in games . . .’

  There was something here, something he thought was worth developing. He’d bring in the lasses from the old man’s youth – he always called them that, rather than girls. Perhaps he could work in a reference to the curls he’d had as a young man, because that might be both touching and a little humorous. He might close with a reference to Dylan Thomas’s dying of the light. This poem needed a lot of work yet, but he felt it might repay the effort. He’d been very fond of his granddad and it would be nice to salute him, to pin his memory down for others in print.

  The sharp rapping at his door made him almost leap in the air with shock; he had been concentrating hard.

  Sam looked carefully around the familiar room, as if that would restore him to the real world, then opened the door. The surprise they saw in his eyes turning quickly to fear. He made his ritual, unthinking gesture towards resistance as he led them into the bedsit. ‘It’s only yesterday that you dragged me into the station for a grilling. This is police harassment.’

  It wasn’t worthy of a reply and Lambert didn’t give it one. He looked unhurriedly round the very tidy room and at the small table with the single sheet where Sam had been wrestling with the elegy for his granddad. ‘New information has come to light since yesterday, Mr Hilton. You are not yet under caution, but I would advise you to think very carefully about what you say to us this morning. You would be most unwise to lie or to attempt to conceal information.’

  Sam wanted to scream at them, to deny what they were implying and challenge them to prove it. But it was too vague to challenge. And when it came to it he didn’t fancy demanding a specific accusation from a chief superintendent who clearly meant business. Instead and to his dismay, his voice became a whine, which sounded even in his own too-intelligent ears like that of the habitual cornered offender. ‘It’s once a criminal always a criminal, for you lot, isn’t it? Pinch a bloke for a bit of dealing and you think you can pin a bloody murder on him next! Typical bloody pigs!’

  ‘Mr Preston kept a filing cabinet in his study. What do you know about the contents?’

 
‘I’ve never been in Preston’s bloody study.’

  ‘That’s not an answer to my question, Mr Hilton.’

  Very few people had addressed Sam as ‘Mr’ so far in his young life. He was again finding Lambert’s repetition of the formal title disconcerting. Was it a prelude to the formal charges this grave elder of the CID had already hinted at? He said sullenly, ‘I knew the bastard kept notes on people. What does it matter where he kept them?’

  ‘It matters to us, now, because that cabinet has preserved a record not only of his thoughts about other people but of things in their past they wouldn’t wish us to be aware of.’

  Sam needed to know how much they knew, but he could hardly ask them that. He said obliquely, ‘I’m not surprised he put everything down in writing. I can see him poring over things and hugging himself, the prissy bastard!’

  The last phrase rasped with hate. Lambert recalled Sue Charles’s thought that writers and artists were most wounded when you attacked their work, however bravely they tried to shrug such things off. He nodded to Hook, who said immediately, ‘Preston emerges from what we’ve read in his files as a most unpleasant man, Sam. There are several people as well as you with ample reason to dislike him. However, he is now a murder victim. I think we shall discover within the next day or two who killed him.’

  Sam hadn’t thought it was going to be as rapid as this. He wondered how much they knew and found himself fighting against a rising panic. ‘Preston deserved to die. But I don’t know who killed him.’

  Hook carried on as if he hadn’t heard the pointless words. ‘He had a file on you, Sam. You’d be surprised how much he’d managed to gather on you.’

  ‘Like you lot! Like the bloody police.’

  ‘Oh, much worse than the police, Sam. We’re only allowed to retain what’s been proved, even when you’ve got a record. Peter Preston had no scruples and no rules.’

  ‘So what he wrote about me might all have been lies.’

  ‘He did write things down, Sam, yes. Very malicious things. His writing gives us an insight into the man himself which we wouldn’t have had otherwise. He didn’t think much of you.’

  ‘I know that. He called one of my poems an undisciplined rant. He said I should get myself a job and forget about writing poetry. He said what wasn’t doggerel was second-hand ideas from a second-rate mind.’ He reeled off phrases which had obviously hit him hard, however much he had pretended otherwise.

  ‘You’d be surprised how much he knew about you. We don’t know who he used to help him discover things, but he gleefully recorded whatever he learned.’

  ‘Knew things? What sort of things?’ Sam felt the question drawn from him, even though he then knew immediately that he shouldn’t have asked it.

  ‘He knew all about your dealing, for a start. Well before it was drawn to our attention. He’s got times and places where you dealt coke and horse. Shortly after you became a regular user, he reckoned.’

  ‘You can’t use this. Even you bloody pigs can’t call a dead man into court.’

  Hook smiled into the defiant young face. ‘We could offer the evidence, if we chose to. Or we could use the dates and names he has noted as starting points for further investigations of our own. The Drug Squad may well find some of the names useful, though I fancy they’re already well aware of them. We have not the slightest interest in that today; today we’re going to arrest someone for murder, Sam.’

  ‘Not me you’re bloody not.’

  ‘Remains to be seen, that does, Sam. You’ve not done yourself many favours, so far. We’ll come to that in a minute.’ Hook watched fear replace defiance in the young features. ‘Preston’s been quite useful to us, in your case. We didn’t know about your use of firearms in the past, until we found it documented with date and victim in his notes.’

  ‘It wasn’t a firearm. It was only a bloody air pistol.’ His fury meant that the denial flashed out before he realized that he should not have spoken.

  ‘An air pistol waved six inches from the face of an enemy by a sixteen-year-old. Might not have killed him, but might well have cost him an eye. Not very reliable, sixteen-year-olds, when driven beyond endurance.’

  Hook’s last phrase was an invitation, and Hilton accepted it eagerly. ‘I was being bullied by four of them. I had to stop it.’

  Hook frowned and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Possibly. Maybe that’s why the boy’s father agreed not to involve the police. You showed a tendency to react violently, though, which has to interest us. You showed panic when driven into a corner; the same sort of panic which might have overcome the person who shot Peter Preston.’

  ‘I didn’t kill him. I was at home when he died.’

  He didn’t see any sign pass between the experienced pair, but it was Lambert who said ominously. ‘So you say. You’ve admitted he was your enemy and a very serious one. That’s the other thing we need to talk to you about: your whereabouts at the time of his death.’

  ‘I was at home. Nothing more to be said.’

  ‘Lots more to be said, Mr Hilton. Perhaps lots more to be said in court, in due course.’

  ‘You’ll never make Preston’s stuff stand up in court.’

  ‘Maybe not. But we probably won’t even try. When we can prove that you told lies about the night of the crime, other evidence will be of minor importance.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But the energy he had been trying to maintain had left his voice when he most needed it.

  ‘I think you do, Mr Hilton. You have tried to get a young woman to lie on your behalf. To make her an accessory after the fact.’

  That formal title again. And what sounded like a formal charge. Sam stared dully at the threadbare carpet between them, noting that the rug he had used to cover the worst patch when Amy had been here had moved itself sideways again. ‘Amy can’t be that. I didn’t commit any crime.’

  They waited to see if he would say more, but he remained silent, staring at the carpet, as dull and expressionless as a punch-drunk boxer. It was Hook who said with the gentle firmness he had used throughout, ‘You’ll need to convince us of that, Sam. Amy Proctor did her best to support you, but the officer who was taking her statement could see she wasn’t happy so he got her to tell the truth. I’d say she’s a girl who isn’t used to lying.’

  He’d found Hilton’s weak spot. The young man who spent his days trying to force words to do his bidding, to find new language for old, profound ideas, now said with abject simplicity, ‘I shouldn’t have asked her to lie for me.’

  ‘Indeed you shouldn’t, Sam. From your point of view, as well as from hers. You’d better put that right with us, if you can. Then you can think about what you’re going to say to her.’

  ‘I was here that night. Amy wasn’t.’

  ‘Then why tell us she was? Why try to get her to lie for you?’

  ‘Because otherwise you were going to get me for this. I’ve admitted I was dealing drugs and you’ve got me banged to rights for that. And you’ve dug up all this stuff that Peter Preston had on me. When you pin murder on me, what court is going to listen to me?’

  Lambert’s irritation was barely under control as he snapped, ‘We’ve never pinned a crime on anyone, Mr Hilton. You’re an intelligent man. Come out of your cheap fantasies and confront reality. If you killed Preston, we’ll be back very shortly to arrest you and charge you. If you didn’t, stick to what you know about and don’t try to manufacture evidence. And if you didn’t kill the man, give us any thoughts you have on who else might have gone to his house and shot him.’

  ‘I don’t know who did it.’ And I’m too shaken to give you my thoughts on any other possibility, was the sub-text of that. Sam often delighted in suggesting sub-texts, beneath the compressed phrases of his verse, but he wished now that there wasn’t one here.

  Lambert studied him hard for another long moment, then rose and said, ‘Don’t leave the area without informing us of your intended destination, Mr Hilton.’

&n
bsp; Sam Hilton stayed very still in his chair for a long time after they had left. He wished as deeply as he had ever wished anything in his life that he’d never laid eyes on Peter Preston.

  The last match of the season at Hereford United. A big crowd on a breezy day of blue sky and high, racing clouds. Big crowd for Hereford, that is. The ancient town is not one of the great citadels of British football like the Theatre of Dreams at Old Trafford or the luxurious new Emirates stadium where Arsenal weave their complex patterns over perfect turf. Six thousand is a big gate at Hereford.

  But at least you could arrive at ten to three and still be in your seat for kick off. And to a ten-year-old attending his first match, the wonder of it all was enough to make his blue eyes widen and his breath catch in his throat as his team strode out and the crowd roared. A small and eminently civilized roar – this was Hereford – and the crowd today little more than five thousand.

  Detective Inspector Chris Rushton was not a regular supporter of the Bulls. It was seven years since he had last attended a match. That had been at the Bulls’ old ground by the river, prone to flooding and a mudheap through most of the winter. He was impressed by the green sward of the new ground at Edgar Street, but he was only here today because he was fulfilling a promise to his fiancée to bring her youngest brother to a match. Anne was ten years younger than Chris, and in his view intensely beautiful; he could scarcely believe his luck that she was willing to take on a divorced man whom she must surely see as very dull. Chris had willingly volunteered to bring young Thomas here. He was pleasantly surprised by how much he was enjoying the experience.

  One of the advantages of a small, tight ground is that you are very close to the players. You may even hear the odd frustrated expletive from them, which is not good for young ears. But the young men on the pitch positively glowed with health and fitness, even at the end of a long season where they had played forty-six league matches and various other ties in the knock-out cups. There were one or two grizzled veterans, shaven of head and stern of visage, who guided and occasionally rebuked their younger colleagues. But a team like Hereford United cannot afford huge wages, so that nine of today’s team were under twenty-two. They showed the bright, fierce effort as well as the occasional naivety which was appropriate to their youth.