by J M Gregson
The broker looked at the unshaven man suspiciously as he entered the narrow office. The soiled baseball cap, with the greasy black hair protruding untidily from its edges, and the scar on the temple didn’t inspire confidence. Walker, who was used to working outdoors, looked round uneasily within the confines of this cramped little room, as if he feared someone might spring out on him from behind the filing cabinet. But he presented exactly the right money, in a variety of dog-eared notes. The broker counted it carefully and handed over the certificate. Any claims would be a matter for direct negotiation between the client and the insurance company, he explained. He wasn’t going to be a middle-man for this very dubious customer.
Ian Walker accepted that information with scarcely a nod of acknowledgement. He was busy checking the certificate: he didn’t have to do a lot of reading nowadays. But he was literate enough, when it was needed. He filled in the form in the post office, explaining that he had only just acquired the vehicle which he had actually been driving for the last four months. Then he posted it off, with his cheque for six months’ tax and the MOT and the new insurance certificate, to the DVLC at Swansea.
He scrawled a ‘Tax in Post’ message on a scrap of paper and put it over the out-of-date tax disc. If the police were coming calling, you’d better be legal. There was nothing the pigs liked better than catching you out like that.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have told that snotty superintendent that he didn’t have a vehicle; it had been his natural instinct to deny it when he knew it wasn’t taxed or insured. When he was back in the Forest of Dean, he’d throw a couple of the sheep in the back for an hour or two, let them piss on the bit of old carpet, if they wanted to.
No one would be able to tell that he’d scrubbed the van out on Sunday, once they’d been there.
Eight
Martin Carter thought he was in the clear.
It had all seemed to go quite well when the uniformed constables had taken his statement about Clare Mills. They had been a man and a woman, both younger than him, and he had moved from being stiff and nervous to being quite relaxed. He had made a few jokes with them about how the university was detached from real life, about how these people in uniform were working away at the crime face whilst he did research, studying crime from the outside and making portentous pronouncements about trends and possible solutions.
He confided to them that he had even considered entering the police through the graduate-recruitment scheme at one time, but had then recognized that he could neither take the discipline nor join in the team work that was required of people in the modern police force. ‘So I became a postgraduate student instead,’ he had concluded wryly. ‘Put off entering the real world for a little longer, as you might say!’
He had explained to his visitors that he was researching ‘Recidivism in the Modern Criminal’. He had planned further self-deprecatory remarks about the advantages of studying crime from the elevation of an ivory tower, but they hadn’t shown much interest. You couldn’t expect PC Plods to show much imagination or sense of humour, he supposed.
They’d made notes on what he had to say about Clare Mills, without asking him anything very searching about it. They had seemed to accept his story, but they must have been suspicious of something in it. Because now these two older blokes in plain clothes were here to see him. So that was one up to the PC Plods.
Lambert and Hook saw a diffident young man with dark red hair and a thin, watchful face. Unusually in this university setting, he wore a conventional shirt and a tie on a sweltering day at the end of June. He had also assumed small-lensed glasses, which sat rather ridiculously halfway down his nose, as if he wished to accentuate the impression of the egghead postgraduate student. The suspicion that the spectacles were not strictly necessary for him was reinforced by the way he took them off and studied them thoughtfully as he made his replies to their questions.
‘We won’t be disturbed in here on Friday afternoon,’ he assured the two big men. He shut the door carefully behind them as they entered the room. It was the book-lined study of one of the tutors in the department, the kind of accommodation Martin hoped to attain for himself if he ever got a permanent appointment in this or another university. He decided against opening the north-facing window, despite the heat, feeling an instinctive need to close this meeting off from the ears of the world.
Martin sat down behind the tutor’s desk, trying to look at home there, resisting the temptation to send up his own aspirations, which was his reaction to nervousness. ‘I’m happy to give any assistance I can with your investigation into poor Clare Mills’s death, though I can’t think I can possibly offer anything more than you already know. I saw very little of Clare.’
‘Really?’ Lambert managed to inject a scepticism into his delivery of the single word which was quite remarkable. He paused for a moment as if gathering his thoughts, though he knew quite well where he was going. Silences always made edgy men more edgy, and he had noted already that Martin Carter was apprehensive. ‘We are here to follow up one or two queries which have arisen as a result of statements taken here yesterday by junior members of our team. And to check whether you have recalled anything which you did not tell them yesterday.’
Experience counted for something: Lambert managed to make the routine introduction sound heavy with menace.
Martin had that too-revealing complexion which often goes with red hair. The light skin of his face coloured now as he said, ‘Really, I scarcely knew the girl. I was devastated to hear of her death, of course, as we all were, but—’
‘You seem to have conducted rather more meetings with Clare than you recalled to our officers, Mr Carter.’
Martin didn’t like that word ‘conducted’. It made it sound as if he had been controlling things. He said, ‘I’m sure I told your uniformed officers everything I could.’ He could feel his face hot from the blood beneath the skin. ‘Perhaps you’re not aware of the set-up here. I’m a postgraduate student, doing my own research, using the libraries of this and other universities. Clare was a second-year undergraduate. In the ordinary course of events, we might never have met at all.’
‘Nevertheless, in this case you did. And for Clare Mills, life did not follow “the ordinary course of events” or she would not have ended up murdered and thrown into the Severn.’
‘No. But I didn’t put her there.’ He regretted that ridiculous thought as soon as he had voiced it: it seemed to put him closer to the death.
‘I’m glad to hear it. Let me explain why we are here.’ Lambert stretched his long legs out in front of him as he sat on the upright chair, perfectly at ease as the tension grew in the young man behind the desk. ‘Let me explain what happens in a murder investigation of this sort, Mr Carter. We take initial statements from as many people as possible who were in contact with the victim. Where it appears that there are discrepancies or omissions in the statements of individuals, more senior officers return to follow up these interesting anomalies.’
He made it sound as though he were outlining the procedures from a lectern to an audience of interested students, and Martin nodded, as if playing his part in the exchange. Lambert said weightily, ‘Sometimes people quite innocently fail to mention certain things, either because they have forgotten them or because they do not consider them relevant.’
Martin Carter waited for him to go on, to add the logical conclusion to his argument, that sometimes people withheld information from more sinister motives, that sometimes people wished to deceive the police. But Lambert said nothing, merely continuing to examine his man’s face with that steady, unrelenting stare which Martin was already finding disturbing. He said unwillingly, ‘And you’re saying that I forgot to tell you something.’
Lambert gave him a small smile. ‘I’m saying that there are discrepancies between what you have told our officers and the information we have collected from other people who knew Clare here.’
He had carefully failed to say that these were innocent discr
epancies, and Martin was aware of it. ‘If I have forgotten anything, I apologize. I can’t at this moment think what it might be.’
In his concentration on the long, watchful face of the superintendent, he had almost forgotten the more easy-going presence at his side. DS Bert Hook now opened his notebook, looked at a page of notes he had there, and said, ‘You say there was no reason why you and Clare Mills should have come across each other at all in the ordinary course of events. So how did you come to meet?’
Martin forced himself to be calm. They couldn’t really know anything, not anything that mattered. ‘It is part of the postgraduate ethos in this university to be available to help more junior students.’ He was aware that this sounded pompous, and he heard himself give a small involuntary giggle as he added, ‘Clare came to ask me about a subject she was considering for her dissertation next year. I believe her tutor suggested that she consult me.’
Hook nodded. ‘This was on the fourth of March, I believe. Was that your first meeting with Ms Mills?’
Martin was shaken by the precision of this. That was part of the police method, he supposed. You’d expect them to be good on detail; they’d have to be, with court cases and the like to consider. ‘Yes. I couldn’t have given you the date, but I’m sure you’re right.’ Again that incongruous giggle came trilling in on the end of his words, when he least expected it and least wanted it.
‘She came to see you about her work.’
‘Yes. Not that I was able to help her much. I just told her to narrow the scale down, for a dissertation. You don’t want anything too wide, or you can’t handle it, when you only have twenty thousand words. People begin by wondering how they’re ever going to write so much, and end up by having far too much material to deal with in the space available.’ He knew he was going on too much, wanting to enlarge upon this safe area where there could be no traps for him.
‘But Clare appreciated that?’
‘Immediately.’ He nodded his head several times in emphasis, as if praising a good pupil to her parents. ‘She was a bright girl, who saw the point immediately.’
‘So why did she need to see you so often subsequently?’
They’d trapped him, after all. He’d thought this slightly overweight man with the weather-beaten countryman’s face would be easy after the gaunt, intense one, but he’d led him straight into this. Martin told himself to be careful, to say as little as possible. ‘She didn’t. See me very often, I mean.’ He felt as though his brain was coming apart with his syntax.
Hook looked down at his notes. ‘That’s not what other people tell us, Mr Carter. Are you saying they’re wrong?’ He ran a finger down the page in front of him, and for an awful moment, Martin thought he was going to reel off a series of dates, giving chapter and verse to the lies he had told.
‘I – I may have forgotten one or two meetings, I suppose. I wasn’t counting, at the time!’ Again that awful giggle came in on the end of his words.
‘And not all the meetings were in the university, were they?’ This was Lambert, back in again, giving him the impression that he was being attacked from all sides, that nothing he said would now be trusted.
‘No.’ He wondered if he could get away with telling them that they’d met informally to talk about her work, that these meetings had just been a continuation and extension of the first one. But he’d already told them that he’d offered all the advice she needed at that first meeting. And he’d shot himself in the foot when he tried to enlarge on what had seemed the safe area of work. He took the plunge and said, ‘Look, you might as well know, I fancied her. Clare was a pretty girl. And she was the same age as I am, because she was a mature student, you see. Twenty-five.’
He wondered if he had the air of a man eagerly enlarging upon an idea which had just occurred to him. That fear was reinforced when Lambert said acidly, ‘So why conceal this from us? Why pretend you’d hardly seen a girl with whom you were trying to establish some sort of relationship?’
‘The authorities wouldn’t approve. They couldn’t do anything about it, we’re neither of us married. But it would be frowned upon for a postgraduate student to be dating a second-year undergraduate. The older men who control the appointments in the university would think I was taking advantage of my academic status to start a thing with a young student.’
It was thin, desperately thin, and it sounded so even in his own ears as he said it. Lambert said quietly, like a man being as kind as he could to a dumb animal, ‘But you were the same age. You just told us that.’
‘Yes. I doubt if the men I’m talking about would see that, though. And they’re important to me, you see, those people. I’m hoping to get a permanent appointment in the university, after I’ve completed my Ph.D.’ He wondered if professors in the faculty would refute the idea that an appointment to work alongside them was such a prize. Probably not: academics always had exaggerated ideas of the standing of their own university.
But Lambert said inexorably, ‘But why conceal it from us? Why lie to police officers who were conducting a murder enquiry?’
The giggle came out this time before he had said anything. ‘I wouldn’t say I lied, exactly. I might have been a little economical with the truth!’
He managed a weak smile, but it drew no answering smile from the men sitting on the upright chairs on the other side of the desk. He wished suddenly, inconsequentially, that he had not chosen to come into this room here for this meeting, had not attempted to play the academic in his book-lined study.
Lambert said, ‘Oh no, Mr Carter, you lied to our officers. You said specifically that you had seen Clare Mills “only once or twice” and not at all in the recent past. It’s never a wise thing to start with a string of lies when talking to police officers, and when they’re pursuing a murder enquiry, it’s positively stupid.’
‘Yes. I see that now. I suppose—’
‘It immediately makes us wonder not only what the actual facts are, but why someone is lying to us. The reason for lying is usually even more interesting to us than the lies themselves. It often puts people behind bars.’ It was time to turn the screw on this strange young man, to get what they could from him whilst he was on the defensive.
‘I was a fool. I can see that now.’
‘Can you, Mr Carter? I hope so.’ Lambert found himself playing the heavy schoolmaster to this penitent young man, who looked suddenly younger and more vulnerable.
Martin turned the steel-rimmed spectacles between his fingers, then folded them and put them down on the desk, as if recognizing with that gesture the course of action he should have taken originally. ‘I’m sorry for wasting police time. The truth is that I fancied her, as I say. But it turned out Clare Mills didn’t fancy me. We had a couple of meetings – you couldn’t even call them dates, I suppose. She let me take her for a drink in a pub during the evening.’
‘You had meetings during the day in the university and the town, too.’ It was a statement, not a question.
Martin forced a laugh, hoping that it came out better than that wretched giggle. ‘Yes. Clare and I met seven or eight times altogether. At first I pretended I could give her more help with her work than I could, and got two or three meetings that way. But she was too bright to need much help from me with her second-year studies, and both of us realized that pretty quickly. We stayed friends and had the odd coffee together. I suppose that when it came to the questioning, I was too vain to want to document the story of my failure to your officers.’
Martin felt himself blushing again, but it was surely natural enough for him to be embarrassed over this confession. Then the giggle came, falling into a silence which seemed suddenly profound in that small room, with its books from floor to ceiling and its isolation from the real world outside.
Neither Lambert nor Hook afforded him the smile which might have eased his embarrassment, which might have signified that the account of his foolishness in concealing the real facts of his relationship with Clare Mills had now been
accepted. Instead, Hook made a new entry into his notebook with a sceptical air, while Lambert regarded the face of the man opposite him with an unblinking gravity. Then the superintendent said quietly, ‘When did you last see Clare Mills, Mr Carter?’
‘Thursday of last week.’ Martin stared at the desk in front of him, hoping that the precision of this would convince them that he was hiding nothing from them now.
‘Two days before she died.’ Lambert answered with a matching precision, watching his man as if he expected a false move at any moment. ‘And where did this meeting take place?’
‘In the Lamb and Flag hotel.’ Martin found that his brain seemed to be working again. He told himself that for all their experience, there was nothing these men could do, if he kept it simple.
Lambert watched a group of students, newly released from an exam, comparing notes and talking in excited relief on the lawn outside. They were no more than forty yards away, but through the double-glazed windows they could not be heard, and the mime show reinforced the impression that they were cut off here, playing out a drama which was quite divorced from and altogether more serious than the action on the sunlit grass outside. He made his question heavy with import as he said, ‘And exactly what took place at this last meeting between the two of you?’
‘Nothing of moment.’ Martin froze his features into a mask, but he was thinking furiously.
Hook looked up from his notes. ‘That won’t do, Mr Carter. This is a murder investigation. And you met the victim two days before she died.’
