by J M Gregson
Chris Rushton said, ‘As I told you just now, you’ve done the right thing in bringing this to us. I think I can assure you that there won’t be any recriminations from John Lambert for your forgetting to mention it on Thursday.’
He’d said ‘forgetting’ when both of them knew that she hadn’t forgotten it at all on Thursday. She was grateful to him for that, was still thinking how human and understanding Inspector Rushton had been when she was back in the bright sun outside the police station. She had a feeling that she might see him again.
Inside the CID section Chris Rushton was so affected that he sat looking at the wide blue sky beyond his window for a moment. You couldn’t get too friendly with people who might be involved, however peripherally, as witnesses in a murder case, he told himself. Anne wouldn’t even know that he found her attractive, he thought bleakly. And he hadn’t even managed to give her his first name.
Roy Hudson was waiting for the call. The phone hardly rang before he had the receiver in his hand.
‘They’ve gone.’ His wife’s voice was quite calm; he felt the contrast in his own racing pulses.
‘Only just gone? I’ve been expecting you to phone for the last half-hour. They must have given you quite a grilling, then.’
‘They’ve been gone ten minutes now. I wanted to make sure they weren’t coming back before I rang you. You said we had to be careful.’ She looked at the clock in her kitchen, noted that it was two minutes slow. Perhaps the battery was running down. She felt almost unnaturally calm.
He should have been grateful for that calm; he had counselled her towards it, after all. Instead, he found it infuriating. ‘What did they talk to you about?’
‘Nothing much, really. I gave them coffee and biscuits to lower the tension, as you suggested. They raised the things we’d thought they’d raise. How I’d felt about Clare. How close we were to her.’
‘So what did you say?’
‘What we’d agreed. That I hadn’t seen a lot of her recently. That we’d kept in touch by phone.’
‘And they believed you?’ He tried to keep the anxiety out of his voice.
‘I think so.’ Like many people who are detached and self-contained, she was not good at estimating other people’s reactions to her.
‘Why do you think so?’ His impatience leapt into the question.
‘Well, they didn’t question me too much about it. I made it a sort of concession, you see, to tell them that she’d only been phoning me. They’d thought Clare was still coming home regularly, and I said, no, she wasn’t, that we were only in touch by phone. And they didn’t have to trip me up to make me say it. I volunteered the information. That’s what we agreed, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s what we agreed. We thought they’d be bound to find out from someone else that she hadn’t been coming home. From her flatmate, or someone else at the university.’ It was almost like recalling it to a stranger.
‘Yes. They didn’t seem to have found that out, though. They seemed to think she had been coming home. So I’m sure they thought I was being completely honest with them when I disabused them of that notion.’
She was so perfectly cool. He envied her that. And yet he knew that it was a dangerous coolness; her disconnection from ordinary feelings helped her to play out situations cleverly, but made her insensitive to what others were feeling about her. ‘Did they ask about me?’
‘Yes. I told them you had an excellent relationship with Clare. That was what we agreed, wasn’t it?’ It was her first touch of uncertainty. She was pathetically anxious to please him.
‘Yes. Insofar as I had a relationship with her at all. I’d not been in touch with her in the months before her death, don’t forget.’
‘No. I told them that.’
‘Did they talk about Walker?’
‘Yes. I said neither of us liked him. Said he’d been a disaster for Clare. They said he’d been in some sort of contact with her, quite recently. I got the impression they think he might have killed her.’
He was suddenly impatient with her. ‘Of course they do. A husband is always a suspect. And a husband like him even more so.’
‘Perhaps he did kill her.’
‘It’s my bet he did, Judith.’ He tried to put all his old affection into the name. ‘Let’s hope they soon arrest him.’
He looked at the phone thoughtfully for a moment when he had rung off. It was terrible when a husband and wife couldn’t trust each other.
Twelve
Sara Green strode around the cottage for the third time since she had received the phone call. She knew by now that there was nothing they could find suspicious, but she could not sit still. Movement was release of a kind; even feverish and repetitive movement like this.
They came precisely at one fifteen, just as she had suggested. She had the one-day cricket on when they arrived, flannelled fools flitting to and fro in a green scene which seemed a world away from the one into which she had put herself. She hastened to switch it off, but they appeared in no hurry, seemed for a moment to be almost like normal visitors.
‘Sergeant Hook was a doughty practitioner at that game,’ said Superintendent Lambert with a smile. ‘Seam bowler, who’s made a few good batsmen hop about a bit, in his time.’
‘I know. One of the linch-pins of Herefordshire cricket for fifteen years and more.’ She found that she was absurdly pleased to be able to produce this snippet of information, which one of her male colleagues at the university had retailed to her.
‘Other times, other places,’ said Hook with a dismissive smile. But he was obviously male enough to be pleased to have his prowess recognized. Sara wondered whether to tell them that she had once been quite good at the great game herself, that she had played women’s cricket to county level. But something told her that there was a limit to how matey you could get with such people, that this was a business visit for them and she should give her full attention to that.
And sure enough, Lambert said at that moment, ‘Let me explain why we wanted to see you, Miss Green. At the beginning of a murder investigation, our team gathers in a huge amount of information, from all sorts of different sources. When this has been digested and cross-referenced, we follow up any small contradictions which present themselves. It’s as simple as that.’
‘And that’s why you’ve come to see me on a Saturday afternoon.’
He smiled again. ‘Yes. How well did you know Clare Mills?’
After the polite preliminaries, the question fell like an accusation into the comfortable room, with its low, beamed ceiling and its cottage suite. Sara swallowed, her throat suddenly very dry. ‘I knew her as a good student. As an able woman, who was going to get a good degree and sort out her life.’
Lambert studied the serious, unlined face beneath the neat black hair for a moment before he said slowly, ‘That is what you told our officers when they made the original enquiries.’
‘Yes.’
‘But other people have indicated to us that your relationship with Clare was rather closer than that.’
The gossips. Malignant as usual, doing all the harm they could to you, as they had when Clare had been alive. The people with trivial, boring lives, who lived out their small, petty excitements through studying the behaviour of other, more daring and original spirits.
Sara forced an acerbic smile, then said, ‘Some people like to speculate about such things. I said Clare was a good student. We had interests in common. I suppose you could say we became friends. I wasn’t going to claim that. Some people claim friendship very easily. I like to think it goes a little deeper than the number of times we spoke, when I assert that someone is a friend.’
‘Commendable, I’m sure. But that’s a different matter from claiming that you hardly knew a girl who is now dead. Especially when she is a murder victim. I should have thought you would want to be as frank as possible, to assist in the hunt for her killer. Unless, of course, you had something to hide from us.’
He was s
taring at her steadily, unnervingly. She was not used to it, and it upset her. She felt she should show that his insinuation infuriated her. But all she did was to say limply, ‘I don’t know why you should think that.’
His grey eyes seemed to look into her very soul in the pause which followed. Then he said quietly, ‘I think it is time you told us the truth, Miss Green.’
She wanted to do just that, wanted to have the relief of confession, like a child bursting into tears and revealing all. But she was not a child; she was a responsible adult in her thirties, with all the restrictions that put upon your conduct. When you had embarked upon deception, you could not let it drop away from you like a child shedding a coat. She knew the situation was hopeless now, but she struggled on, as if having her pretences stripped away was part of some elaborate ritual. ‘I’m surprised you listen to gossip and mischief-making like this, Superintendent. Perhaps you are not aware that academics can be as petty as anyone else. Perhaps more so, in some circumstances.’
‘And what about the other evidence? Are you prepared to deny what we found in Clare Mills’s flat?’
‘What did you find there?’ The question was out before she was aware of framing it, as if it came from someone else.
Lambert nodded to Hook, who bent over his briefcase and began to search methodically within it. Everything seemed now to be in slow motion; Sara wanted to scream at this stolid man to speed up his movements. Detective Sergeant Hook produced a small folder, said with irritating deliberation, ‘These are some of the items removed from Clare Mills’s bedroom by the Scenes of Crime team. They are copies, of course, not the originals.’
He handed her three photographs.
Sara’s pulses seemed to stop for a moment as she held the pictures in her hand. There was one of herself in profile, looking towards the ceiling in that silly Hollywood film-star pose which they had laughed at together. There was one of her in shorts, on the balcony of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford, overlooking the river. And there was the one the passer-by had taken for them outside the cathedral in Worcester, with their arms shyly around each other’s waists, smiling boldly and defiantly at the camera together.
That was the one she had kept on her own dressing table in the bedroom, the one she had swept away into the drawer of the sideboard when she had known these men would be coming. She looked automatically now at that tightly closed drawer, and the gaze of that hateful man Lambert followed the movement of her head. For an awful moment, she thought he would rise and walk over to the sideboard. That he would pull open the drawer and reveal the dozen small intimacies she had stowed so hastily away from their view.
Instead, he said quietly, almost sympathetically, ‘It’s time you told us everything you have to tell, don’t you think?’
She said defensively, as if she were defending herself to her professor, ‘Clare was twenty-five. And she wasn’t a student of mine. There was nothing improper in our association. Certainly nothing illegal.’
Lambert gave her his first smile. They all knew she was going to talk now: he was interested only in encouraging her. ‘Of course not. But I urge you now to be completely open about this.’
‘Well, I liked Clare from the first. And I think she liked me. We became firm friends quite quickly.’ She nodded a little to herself, as if she was checking her recollection, and finding it a true and acceptable one.
‘And as time passed, you became a little more than friends.’ John Lambert’s grey eyes were as observant of her as ever, but his tone was patient, understanding.
Sara Green glanced at him sharply. She had been expecting the condemnation she felt among her peers, the so-called enlightened intelligentsia of the university, the people who sniggered behind hands and shook their heads in judgement. She had almost been wishing to meet that condemnation of her actions, she now realized: you could feed off opposition, use your resentment to fight. Now she must guard against being too relaxed, too accommodating to this man who had transformed himself so easily from interrogator to sympathetic listener. She said with an attempt at defiance, ‘We became lovers, Superintendent. Does that shock you?’
His smile was genuine. She lived in a narrow world, this one, despite the supposed freedoms of university life. ‘If I were shocked by things like that, I would long since have ceased to be a CID officer.’ He looked for a moment at the photographs she still held in her hand and his tone hardened. ‘What shocks me is that people lie to us during a murder investigation. You have done that, Miss Green. If you want us to believe the answers you are now going to give us, you must take pains to be wholly honest with us.’
‘I understand that. Fire away!’ She felt suddenly buoyant. It would be a relief to be open, to talk about Clare as she had not done to anyone before.
‘Was Clare Mills bisexual?’
She was shocked despite herself by the abruptness of that question. They didn’t mess about, these men. Didn’t bother with the tactful lead-ins of normal conversations. ‘No. I don’t believe she was. But she’s dead now. Is her sexual orientation of interest any more?’
‘Of extreme interest. We are trying to build up the fullest possible picture of someone who cannot speak for herself. Of her likes and dislikes. Of her passions, indeed. They may be even more relevant.’
‘It seems prurient, you see. As one who loved her, I am upset to see her private life being turned over like this.’
That seemed obtuse, when you were a CID man. But it was a normal enough reaction, Lambert knew. His mind flew back as it usually did in this situation to Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, in which a peasant woman lamented that a dead woman’s small private secrets were exposed, her drawers turned out and all her tiny, private intimacies brought out for strangers. It was a normal enough reaction, in those who had loved a dead one: Hardy had got that right.
But any detective had to remind himself that it was also the reaction of someone who feared that such trawling would reveal something about not just the dead one but herself. And perhaps about her own part in that death. He said quietly. ‘We don’t know who killed Clare Mills. We haven’t even got what we usually call a prime suspect yet. It’s by following up the secrets of her private life that we shall arrive at that prime suspect.’
‘All right. The answer to your question is that I don’t think that Clare was bisexual. I know she’d had heterosexual relationships – she’d been married, for God’s sake! – but I believe she found herself sexually with me. She was only going to be interested in same-sex relationships for the rest of her life.’
Her voice caught on the last phrase. Lambert waited for a moment for her to compose herself before he said, ‘Are you saying that you think the two of you would have lived together?’
‘We were planning to do that. Who knows what would have happened, when she died so young? I believe that we might have spent the rest of our lives together.’ She felt a tear, let it run unchecked down her left cheek. It was a moment of pride, as well as grief; she had never been able to make this assertion whilst Clare was alive.
It was only when the burly man beside Lambert spoke that she realized he had been making notes of her replies. Hook said simply, ‘And do you think that Clare Mills believed that too?’
‘I don’t know. Life is a long time, and Clare was still young. Eight years younger than me.’ She spoke as if it was a gap she had considered many times. ‘We hadn’t discussed plans for the rest of our lives. There didn’t seem to be any need for that. All I know is that she was serious about us. She kept the photographs in a position of honour in her room, didn’t she?’ That sounded to her like a rather childish assertion of her importance to Clare, but she had needed to make it. Sara pulled out a handkerchief and wiped away her tears.
‘And when did you last see her?’ Hook was so quiet and understanding that he gave the impression it was no more than a dull routine enquiry, rather than a key question in a murder investigation.
‘Thursday night. Three days before she died
.’ There was a defiant pride in the precision.
‘And you parted on friendly terms.’
She coloured, and for a moment Hook thought she was going to show her anger at the suggestion it might not have been so. But she controlled herself and gave him a tight-lipped, ‘Of course.’
Lambert took up the questioning again. ‘Did Clare seem to be upset about anything when you last saw her?’
‘Not really. I’ve thought about it a lot since she died, as you’d expect, but I couldn’t say she was seriously upset about anything. Certainly not in fear for her life. She wasn’t happy about her parents, but that was nothing new.’
‘Yes. Tell us about her relationship with her parents.’
She looked at them sharply, as if she had not considered the extra horror of one of the Hudsons being involved in the killing until now. ‘Her mother was an odd fish, by all accounts. I haven’t met her, but she never seems to have been very close to her daughter. I know they fell out over Clare’s marriage. That was understandable enough, from what Clare told me about Ian Walker. I met him once, about a month ago, at Clare’s place. He was a nasty piece of work.’
‘Do you think he was capable of killing Clare?’
She pursed her lips. ‘I’m trying to be fair, because I don’t like the man. I think he’s a rogue, but probably a small-time rogue. I can’t imagine him planning a murder, but I can see him losing his temper and killing someone during an argument. But if he had, I should think you’d have him under lock and key by now.’
It was a fair summary of what Lambert himself thought about Walker. She was a shrewd woman this. And a likeable, no-nonsense one. He had to remind himself that she’d lied to them at first, that she was still a suspect in this baffling case. ‘What about Roy Hudson?’
