by J M Gregson
‘No one is really ordinary, you know. For a start, Clare was older than the average undergraduate student, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes. She was twenty-five.’
‘And was she a good student?’
‘Yes. She was very conscientious. And bright, too, though she said she wasn’t. She’d got excellent grades in all her assignments. We’re only halfway through our course, but we all thought Clare was in line for a first.’
Lambert gave her his first smile. ‘There you are, then. She wasn’t ordinary at all! Where do you think she went on Saturday?’
The sudden switch, the abrupt question, disconcerted her. She should be grieving for her friend, if what they feared was true, and yet she felt as though she had to watch what she was saying all the time. ‘I’ve no idea. Really I haven’t!’ She wondered if she was blushing; it felt as if she was. ‘I didn’t think anything about it at the time. I suppose I thought she’d gone to visit her family – I’ve never met them, but they live not far away from here, in the Forest of Dean. It was only when she didn’t come back that I began to worry. When she wasn’t back by Wednesday and I hadn’t heard anything from her, I went to see our personal tutor, Mr Shadwell, about it.’
Lambert took his gaze from her face for the first time in several minutes to gaze round the room. ‘If she’s dead, as we now believe her to be, we’ll need to send a team in here to conduct a systematic search.’
Anne forced a smile, tried to thrust confidence into her voice. ‘That won’t be a problem. The landlord will let you in, if I’m not here. He lives on the premises.’
‘Miss Mills had her own bedroom?’
‘Yes. We shared this room, and the kitchen and bathroom, but we each had our own small bedroom.’
Lambert nodded thoughtfully, studying her again in that disconcerting manner which seemed to imply that she was holding things back from him. Then he stood up and walked into each of the rooms in turn, as if he wanted to commit the layout of the place to his mind. He did not touch anything, did not open any of the drawers, as she had feared he might. Inspector Rushton gave her a small, sympathetic smile, as if in apology for his chief’s brusqueness. He had a nice smile. She wouldn’t mind getting to know Inspector Rushton properly, but she didn’t suppose she ever would.
Lambert stood for a long moment looking into Clare’s bedroom, as if the neat, narrow bed could tell him something about the woman who had spent her nights there. He said, ‘Have you tidied the room? Did she leave it like this?’
‘No, I haven’t touched it. Clare always made her bed before she went out in the morning, even when she had an early lecture.’ This time Anne was sure she was blushing. She looked not at Lambert but at the window and the white clouds in the blue sky beyond it. She told herself that she would burst into tears for her friend when he had gone. In the meantime, she would be careful about what she said.
‘Rather a good flat this, for students.’
‘We had our loans. And my mother gives me a little, when she can. She says she’d rather I lived in a decent place than a slum.’
‘And Clare?’
‘We didn’t discuss money. She may have had some savings before she began her course. I told you, she was a mature student.’ She wondered if it rang true, if she was talking too much. Her explanation sounded odd in her own ears.
‘Was Clare Mills meeting a man on Saturday?’
‘No! Well, I don’t know, do I? I don’t know where she went. I don’t know what her plans were.’ She was suddenly annoyed by his persistence. She was sure it showed, and there was a reaction from Rushton, but her discomfort didn’t seem to have the slightest effect on the older man.
‘If this proves to be a murder investigation, as I’m sure it will, we’ll need to know about all her acquaintances over the last few months. Please give the matter detailed thought. As Clare’s flatmate, you may have key information.’
‘I didn’t know her all that well, you know. She was four years older than me and she kept herself to herself a lot of the time.’ It sounded defensive, as if she had something to hide, but it suddenly seemed important to convince them that she wasn’t going to be of any great help to them.
‘Nevertheless, you may know things which seem to you insignificant, but which may supplement what we learn elsewhere and prove to be vital. We have to begin somewhere, and the sooner the better. If Clare Mills is dead, I’m taking it for granted that you will want to see the person who has harmed your friend brought to justice.’
‘Of course. That goes without saying.’ Yet she’d given him the chance to say it, hadn’t she? She’d been sounding deliberately unhelpful. He’d nettled her, and made her reveal things about herself that she hadn’t wished to show them. She turned deliberately to Inspector Rushton. ‘I’ll certainly give proper thought to the matter, and I hope that I come up with something which might be useful to you.’
He smiled at her as he shut his notebook, as if apologizing for Lambert’s attitude. ‘I’m sure you will, Miss Jackson. And you really can be quite helpful to us, you know. Trivial things may turn out to be quite important, as we begin to put all our findings together.’
DI Rushton had driven a mile before Lambert said to him, ‘I think you made a hit there, Chris. Could be a promising liaison there for you. Once all this is over, of course.’
Rushton had been divorced for two years now, but hadn’t found new relationships easy. He did not respond to the suggestion. He found it difficult to be certain when the super was teasing him about these things; it was even worse when the man got together with Bert Hook, the officer who had been his CID sergeant for ten years and more: the two older men were always twitting him about his sexual attractiveness and his exotic – and unfortunately imaginary – love life.
Chris Rushton gazed resolutely at the road ahead and said stiffly, ‘She seemed a typical student to me, sir. I’m sure she thought me much too old for her. And she seemed anxious to help us find her friend’s killer. I hope the search of the girl’s room turns up something useful.’
He thought he had managed to turn the conversation away from the pretty Miss Jackson. Until Lambert said after another half a mile, ‘I wonder what it was that the girl was trying to conceal from us.’
The young woman constable tried her best to put Judith Hudson at her ease as she sat beside her in the police Mondeo on their journey to the mortuary at Chepstow. But she was not herself comfortable in the situation, and the woman beside her spoke more to Hook, who was driving, than to her. Perhaps it was the experience of the older man which gave him the empathy for a situation like this.
The staff at the morgue tried to warn Mrs Hudson about the condition of the body, but she nodded curtly and seemed anxious to have this over with. At her request, Hook accompanied her into the identification room to view the corpse which he had lately seen mutilated at the post-mortem.
He was always pleasantly surprised by how much of their work the pathologist and his assistants managed to conceal from the relatives. The girl’s plentiful hair covered what had been done to the skull. The sheet would mercifully conceal the stitching at the front of the body. He stood at the back of the room behind Mrs Hudson and watched her steeling herself for the moment of truth. Then she nodded to the assistant.
Hook listened for the familiar gasp of emotion from the parent as the still, lineless young face was revealed. This time he did not hear it. Two long seconds passed before Judith Hudson said in a low voice, ‘That’s her. That’s my daughter. That’s Clare Mills.’
They gave her a cup of tea before they took her out to the car for the journey back to that high, isolated house in the Forest. She seemed very composed, but Hook, accustomed to seeing grief in many forms, deduced nothing from that. He didn’t attempt to make conversation. That would have been banal, even tasteless.
He was trying to think what it was that had been unusual about this particular identification. Something small, but something definite. They were driving through Cind
erford, turning onto the road which led to Mrs Hudson’s village, before he realized what had struck him as different. It was the manner of the identification. Normally parents, however affected, gave just the forename of their child: ‘That’s James’ or ‘That’s Debbie’.
This one had given the child’s full name. ‘That’s Clare Mills,’ she had said. He’d never heard a parent do it like that before.
Six
Ian Walker was a sheep-badger in the Forest of Dean.
It is a local term, a definition of those people who have no farm of their own but make a living by grazing sheep through ‘commoners’ rights’ in the Forest of Dean. It is one of the ancient rights of people who live in the Forest that they are allowed to graze sheep without charge on certain tracts of it. Most people think the privilege derives from a medieval ruling by the monarch, although few are certain of the origin or the detail of the statute.
Others claim that what are now usually called the commoners’ rights were originally given to a group of gypsies with the splendidly inappropriate name of DuBunny, and were granted by the then Prince Edward to make this group self-sufficient. Modern sheep-badgers claim descent from this group, though most of them could not trace the lineage to save their lives.
The rights of free grazing related to the woods of the Forest of Dean, with no mention of roads, for the simple reason that the tracery of modern roads which runs through the Forest did not exist, except as ancient tracks and bridle paths. According to opinion, the modern sheep-badgers, ‘hefting’ their sheep amidst the woods and open spaces, are either practitioners of an ancient custom, who should be treasured as part of England’s heritage, or unscrupulous opportunists, taking advantage of loopholes in the nation’s law to live rent-free and make a quick buck at the expense of more conventional citizens. Both opinions are fiercely expressed by those who live in the Forest, and sometimes, less pardonably, by those who live outside its boundaries.
Ian Walker would not have denied the charge that he lived by his wits. He would probably even have been prepared to boast that he did so, when he was in the right company. He was swarthy and dark-haired, with a scar on his temple which might have been a symbol of the way he had lived. Whereas aristocratic Germans used to carry duelling scars as a badge of honour, Walker’s injury denoted a life of casual violence, an inclination to solve every dispute with his fists, a succession of brawls in the pubs and back streets of Gloucestershire towns.
He had convictions for burglary in his teens, cautions for his part in an affray and for assault, a ban for driving without tax or insurance. He had never received a custodial sentence, though it had taken a good brief and a lenient court to give him the benefit of the doubt and save him on a couple of occasions.
It didn’t look on paper like the background of a murderer.
But John Lambert was studying the man from a hundred yards away with the dispassionate gaze of a man who took nothing for granted. And Bert Hook was telling himself that murder was the one crime where you could not rely on criminal records. That anyone who had shown a predilection for casual violence could easily let that impulse spill over into something more serious.
The sheep-badger had his back to them. He cursed his flock roundly as he herded them away from the road with a stick hewn from the nearby trees. It is always difficult to tell with people who live life in the open air, but he seemed unconscious of the presence of the two big men behind him as they left the unmarked car and moved closer to him.
They were within three yards of him before Lambert said evenly, ‘Are you Ian Walker?’
‘What’s it to you?’ He whirled on them, answering question with question, his voice almost a snarl, his immediate reaction aggression.
Lambert moved even closer, almost a foot taller than this stocky, powerful man. He flashed his police card briefly beneath the dark eyes. ‘It’s a matter of considerable interest to us, as a matter of fact. Important enough for us to take you in to the station to question you, if you are not cooperative.’
Walker glanced past the two men in shirtsleeves to the houses visible beneath the canopy of foliage five hundred yards away. ‘That Johnson bugger been fuckin’ complainin’ again, ’as ’e? Needs to mind ’is own fuckin’ business and keep out of my way. I’ve every right to ’ave my sheep ’ere and ’e knows it. Needs to fence ’is garden off properly if ’e wants to protect ’is bloody plants, don’t ’e?’
‘This isn’t about what you let your sheep get up to, Mr Walker. If there are complaints, uniformed officers will deal with that.’
Ian Walker looked at them with undiminished hostility. He’d known they wouldn’t send a superintendent after him, not for a few harsh words and the threats he had offered over his sheep. He dropped into the sudden, automatic denial he had practised for ten years with policemen. ‘I ain’t pinched nothing. You’re wasting your time coming after me. You got the wrong man.’
‘Are you the husband of a woman we know as Clare Mills?’
‘No. I fucking was though, once. She divorced me. Stuck-up bitch. And if she wants maintenance, tell ’er I can’t fucking afford it!’
Both of them studied him unhurriedly, watching him breathing hard, savouring his frustration as his language failed to make any impression. Then Bert Hook said, ‘She’s dead, Ian.’
‘Dead?’ It was a low-key reaction. Neither of them could be sure whether or not this was news to him.
‘Dead. And we’re here to find out what you know about it.’
He looked from one to the other of the two faces, from Bert Hook’s weather-beaten countryman’s visage to John Lambert’s longer and more lined features. Both were equally serious, equally observant. He dropped his eyes in the face of their unrelenting scrutiny. ‘I know nothing about it. It’s news to me that she’s dead.’
He had dropped his obscenities; perhaps it was the nearest he could come to recognizing the solemnity of death. But he didn’t remove the stained baseball cap, which let his dark hair escape untidily at its edges. Nor did he ask how the woman who had once been his wife had died. Bert Hook, trying hard to put himself inside the mind of this alien maverick, thought that Walker should have done that. Unless, of course, he already knew how Clare Mills had perished.
‘Were you still in touch with her, Ian?’
‘No. Hadn’t seen her for ages.’ The denial came perhaps too promptly, too automatically. But this man’s urge would no doubt be to dissociate himself from death, whether or not he had any connection with it. He looked full into Hook’s face and said, ‘I hadn’t seen Clare for a long time.’ Walker produced the name clumsily, as if he was belatedly conscious of the need to show some sort of respect.
Bert studied the swarthy face. There was defiance in the set of the chin, but apprehension in the dark eyes. Bert said, ‘You may wish to think about that statement, Ian. You haven’t asked us yet how she died.’
He had made a mistake, then, and they were letting him know it. Ian said sullenly, ‘Well, how was it, then?’ And then, with desperate invention, he added, ‘Car accident, was it?’
He stood breathing heavily, clutching his long stick as if he planned to use it if things did not go his way, waiting for Hook to reply. Instead, it was Lambert who said quietly, ‘She was murdered, Mr Walker.’
‘Murdered?’ His jaw fell stupidly. It seemed that the word carried its normal overtones of awe and fear, even for this man.
‘Murdered, Mr Walker. We are investigating a serious crime. The most serious one of all.’
So that’s why he had plain-clothes men here plaguing him. That’s why he had a superintendent and a DS, more rank than he had ever been accorded before. He said with automatic denial, ‘Well, I didn’t kill her, did I?’
‘That’s one of the things we’re here to find out. The nearest relative is always a suspect, Mr Walker. But I expect you know that.’ Lambert checked himself: he mustn’t allow himself too much enjoyment in the spectacle of this boorish creature squirming.
‘Course I know it. But I didn’t kill Clare, did I?’ Almost as an afterthought, he repeated his earlier statement. ‘I ’adn’t seen her for months, ’ad I?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Walker. I have to accept what you tell me. Of course, it will be checked against what other people have to tell me, in due course.’
‘You threatening me?’
‘I’m providing you with information about how a murder investigation operates, Mr Walker. You should be aware that any untruths, any information you withhold from us, will come out eventually. Deceiving us now would be regarded very seriously.’
Ian Walker told himself that he had heard this sort of thing before, that this was the way the police always behaved, throwing their weight about, trying to make people like him lose their nerve. Well, they wouldn’t succeed. ‘I don’t know nothing about this. You can’t pin this on me, copper.’
Bert Hook said, ‘No one wants to pin anything on you, Ian. Nothing you didn’t do, anyway. We need your help, if we’re to find who killed Clare. Surely you want us to find out who killed her?’
He wasn’t going to be caught out by this softer approach. The cop with the weather-beaten face spoke in an accent like his. Perhaps he was trying to make out they had something in common. Well, it wouldn’t work. ‘I haven’t seen Clare for months. Didn’t want to see ’er. I know bugger all about this.’
He smiled, not at them but towards his sheep, pretending with the return of his accustomed swearing that confidence was back with him. Lambert said, ‘How long is it since you were divorced from Clare, Mr Walker?’
Walker looked at him as if he thought it was a trick question. He thought for long seconds before he decided it was something he had to answer. ‘Nigh on two year. We’d been separated well before that, mind.’
‘On good terms, were you?’
‘I told you, we was divorced.’
