by J M Gregson
Chris Rushton’s look took in the sordid scene he could see through the open door, with the slices of curling bread peeping from the toaster and the can of beans upon the tiny stove. ‘I don’t think so, Mr Walker. I wouldn’t want to interfere with your domestic arrangements.’
‘Suit yourself. I’ve nothing to tell you about bloody Clare, anyway. I’ve said everything I ’ave to say about ’er.’
‘Not quite, Mr Walker. Not by a long chalk, perhaps. You’ve been telling us lies. Not a wise thing to do, that.’
Ian glared at him sullenly, wanting to hit him, knowing he mustn’t. ‘I told you what I knew. Told it all to those other buggers I saw on Friday. I ’adn’t spoken to the bloody cow for six months.’
Rushton looked at him with undisguised distaste now, hating his lack of grace, despising a man who could speak like this about a murdered wife, however fractured their relationship had been. He savoured the blow he was now going to deliver to him. ‘That’s not what her mobile phone says, Mr Walker.’
Ian’s glance flicked automatically towards the door of the van and his own mobile in the jacket within it. ‘Whad’yer mean?’
‘When Superintendent Lambert and Detective Sergeant Hook spoke to you we didn’t have Clare’s mobile phone. We have it now. It shows that you rang her on the night before she died.’
‘I didn’t speak to her. Didn’t get through.’
‘Her phone has a memo option. You are listed under “Received Calls”. You got through to Clare all right. What did you say to her?’
He glowered at this cool adversary, cursing modern technology and his own ignorance of it. Probably they even knew what he’d said. Probably this smug sod was just letting him tie himself in knots. ‘I asked her to meet me.’
Rushton was too old a fox now to show in his face how excited he was. ‘When?’
‘Saturday night.’
‘The night she died.’
‘Yes. Except I didn’t meet ’er, see?’
‘And why not?’
‘She wouldn’t see me. Said she didn’t want to meet me. That we’d nothing to say to each other.’
At least that last phrase sounded like one the dead woman rather than this lout might have used. But of course it might have been on any one of numerous previous occasions, not as a rejection of his request to meet her on that fateful Saturday. Rushton smiled grimly. ‘But you saw her nonetheless. Saw her and killed her on that Saturday.’
‘No! She wouldn’t see me, like I told you!’ Ian sought desperately for something which would deny the man’s statement, and found nothing.
Rushton looked at the sheep-badger, this man whose life was such a contrast to his own carefully ordered existence, and did not trouble now to disguise his distaste. ‘You have a vehicle.’
Ian tried to force his racing mind to work properly. He’d told the other two pigs, the lanky superintendent and his country-bumpkin sergeant, that he didn’t have a vehicle, but this clever sod seemed to know he did. Better not deny it, then; at least the van was taxed and insured now. ‘Yeah. I got a van. You need a van, to move your sheep about. People thinks we just take advantage of the free grazing, but there’s—’
‘I want to look at that van. Now.’
Well, you won’t find anything, if you do, smart-ass. Not now. Aloud, Ian said, ‘Invasion of privacy, this is.’
‘Maybe it is, Walker. So sue me, if you like. You going to show me this vehicle?’
‘It’s down there. Behind the house.’ Ian gestured with his head, then turned and walked out from where the caravan was parked among the birches. He led the way down the slope to the van, parked a hundred yards away, behind the house by the lane. Rushton looked from the scrawled note on the windscreen which said that the tax was in the post to the apprehensive face beside him. Ian Walker said, ‘Tax disc will come tomorrow, I expect. I got the insurance certificate and the MOT in the caravan, if you want to see them.’ Technically, it wasn’t taxed at all, yet. He’d asked for the tax to run from the first of July, day after tomorrow; it hadn’t seemed worth paying a month’s tax for a couple of days. Good job the tax hadn’t come yet, then: this pernickety sod would no doubt have picked him up on a little detail like that.
Rushton walked all round the van. It was white, or it had been, an ageing Fiesta diesel with a thick covering of grime and lines of rust around its seams. He touched the front offside tyre with the toe of his immaculate shoe. ‘Surprised you got an MOT, with a tyre as bald as that.’
Ian looked at the dust around the wheels of the van and said nothing. Both of them knew that this was no more than a prologue, part of the initial softening-up process, prior to the inspection of the inside of the van which was the point of this visit.
Rushton said, ‘Open the rear doors of the vehicle, please.’
Ian did that unhurriedly, trying not to smirk with the confidence he felt about this.
Chris Rushton peered into the interior of the van, shielding his eyes against the sun. It could hardly have presented a greater contrast with the exterior. It was spotlessly clean, its white metal gleaming softly, mockingly, in the shadows. There was not even a rug or a rag on the metal floor of the carrying space; they were a hundred yards away under the caravan, where Ian had carefully placed them with the brushes when he had finished the scouring.
‘You’ve cleaned this out. Recently,’ said Rushton. It was the nearest he could muster to an accusation.
‘Couple of days ago, I should think. That was the last time.’ Ian nodded, trying not to sound too truculent. He’d made the copper look a fool, but they could come back at you, these buggers.
‘And why did you do that?’
‘Routine procedure,’ said Ian airily. He enjoyed that phrase: might have come from a pig itself, that might have.
‘Not like the outside,’ said Rushton.
‘Outside don’t matter. Inside’s what matters, when you’re moving sheep about,’ said Walker, with the air of one educating a child.
‘Smells of carbolic,’ said Rushton, as if that in itself was a charge.
‘Strong carbolic,’ agreed Ian. ‘Hygiene, you see. You need strong disinfectant, case of any diseases among your sheep. Don’t ’spect you’d know about that.’
‘You’d need to clean it out if you’d had a body in there, too. If you’d been transporting a body to dump in the Severn.’
‘’Ere, you’d better watch what you’re saying, you know. Can’t go round accusing people without evidence, even when they’re ’umble sheep-badgers like me.’ Ian knew he mustn’t enjoy the moment too much, but he couldn’t resist taunting this smug sod, who’d so obviously expected to catch him out.
‘And how do you clean it?’ asked Rushton.
Ian felt a spurt of alarm. Best be careful here. ‘Plenty of disinfectant and a good stiff brush. Then I mops it out with old rags.’
‘I’ll need to take those away for analysis. Our forensic laboratory will be most interested to examine them in detail.’
‘Rags have gone. Straight into a dustbin bag and away with the collection. Gone yesterday. Only use things that are ready for the rubbish tip, see. And I ’aven’t got the brush: borrowed it from a mate, other side of Coleford. Don’t know where it would be now. But it will have been used again since I cleaned the van. He works in the abattoir, see? Be all kinds of other things on it, I expect. But they put them under the ’osepipe, when they’ve finished, I should think.’
He enjoyed piling on the detail. The stiff brush was lying underneath his caravan, but this man couldn’t know that.
DI Rushton was looking for a way to get out without too much loss of face. He still thought this man had killed Clare Mills, but it might need a search warrant before they could get into that stinking caravan and go through it the way he wanted to. In the meantime, he’d better not put this ruffian too much on his guard.
‘I think that will do, for the moment,’ he said stiffly. ‘It may be that I or other members of the team allotted to
this investigation will be back to speak to you again.’
But he’d got nothing, thought the sheep-badger, as he watched Rushton drive away. He went back to the News of the World and his baked beans feeling pretty secure.
It was another example of how wrong Ian Walker’s judgements could be.
Fifteen
Judith Hudson looked exactly the same as when they had seen her two days earlier. From her impeccable ash-blonde hair to the tray with coffee and biscuits in the comfortable sitting room, everything seemed the same on this Monday morning as it had on Saturday. It was as if they had walked onto a film set after the continuity girl had been busy making sure everything matched.
‘Have you found out who killed Clare?’ Mrs Hudson might have been checking on the weather forecast, so scant was the animation behind the enquiry. They were back in the presence of the oddest mother of a murder victim whom either of them had ever encountered.
‘No. I’m afraid we do not have any dramatic news for you, Mrs Hudson. But certain discrepancies have appeared in the information we have gathered. That is why we are here.’ John Lambert looked in vain for some sign of apprehension in the woman. Indeed, any emotion would at that moment have been welcome.
She merely raised an eyebrow interrogatively at him, as if they were discussing some interesting puzzle from a newspaper. Lambert said, ‘We are now in possession of your daughter’s mobile phone. As there was no access to a phone line in the building where she lived, we can presume that most of her calls were made on her mobile.’
‘Yes, I think that would be so. She made most of her calls to me on her mobile, and that was the only number I had for her.’ She poured two cups of coffee for them from the tall pot, as if demonstrating how perfectly steady her hand was, how she was affected not at all by this visit.
Lambert tried not to show his irritation; however odd her behaviour, this was after all the mother of a girl struck down at twenty-five, with the world in front of her. ‘The phone is a modern one with a call register. The memory option on that provides us with a record of the calls Clare made and received in the days before her death.’
‘Really? I’m afraid the mysteries of modern technology leave me baffled. I’m sure these devices are very clever, but—’
‘The memory option shows us several interesting things, which we are following up. That is why we are here this morning. The call register of Clare’s phone shows that you have been lying to us.’
That was pitching it pretty strongly. Normally he would have started by talking of misunderstandings which needed to be cleared up. But this abnormally calm woman’s version of the perfect hostess was getting to him.
‘Lied to you?’ She looked bewildered, as if this was a concept she found it difficult to deal with.
Lambert kept his temper, spoke calmly, as if outlining to a child how things stood. ‘You said that she hadn’t made her usual phone call home in the week before her death. That you hadn’t spoken to her in that time. The “Dialled Numbers” section in her call register shows that she spoke to you on Thursday the nineteenth of June, at seven forty-five p.m. A mere two days before her death.’
If he had hoped to shake her, he was disappointed. She nodded slowly a couple of times, seeming to digest the information calmly before she said with just a trace of resentment, ‘And does this call register tell you the content of our exchanges? Is that too recorded for posterity?’
He was tempted to let her think that it did, that they knew everything she was trying to conceal. Except that the woman seemed to have no burning desire to conceal anything, no great apprehension that she had been caught out in this. Lambert said, ‘No, Mrs Hudson, we do not know what you and your daughter said to each other in that call. We are relying on you to tell us that now.’
She nodded thoughtfully, apparently quite unabashed to have been discovered lying during a murder investigation. ‘It was nothing of great moment, Superintendent. I suggested that she might come home and see us. I think I also mentioned that she should try to cooperate with her stepfather.’
‘Cooperate? In what respect would that be?’
For the first time, she looked a little ruffled, when he seized upon that word. But she did not hurry her response. ‘That is probably the wrong expression to have used. I wanted the two of them to get on together. I wanted my new husband to be accepted by my daughter. That is what you would expect, isn’t it?’
But even the tone of this was wrong. It sounded like a genuine enquiry, as if she was uncertain of it, rather than an assertion of her natural feelings as a mother and wife. Lambert studied her for a moment before he said, ‘I suppose it is, yes. What was Clare’s reaction to this suggestion?’
‘She said that she would think about it. That there were other issues, issues which I did not understand.’
‘And what do you think these issues were?’
‘I have no idea.’ Her ignorance seemed to give her great satisfaction.
‘These issues, as you call them, might have a bearing on your daughter’s death.’
‘I suppose they might. But I cannot imagine what they might have been. I’m sorry about that.’
But she didn’t look very sorry. Bert Hook looked up from his notes and said, ‘Do you think Clare was thinking about her relationship with your husband, Mrs Hudson?’
She looked at him as if she was reassessing his function in these exchanges, then took away his empty coffee cup and put it carefully on the tray. ‘I don’t know. I’m not much good at analysing relationships, I’m afraid.’
We can certainly agree with that, thought Lambert.
It was a relief to get out into the bright sun of the last day of June, to glide beneath the dappled shade of the Forest of Dean as they drove slowly away from that chilling presence.
For the first time in their many years of experience of murder enquiries, they were confronting the possibility that the mother of a victim might be their killer.
Martin Carter was worried. Those detectives had been expert at concealing what they were really thinking when they had interviewed him; he supposed that that was part of their technique, a skill they had acquired over the years. But Martin had had the impression that they hadn’t really believed him, that they had known that he was holding something back.
And now this. He could definitely have done without this.
‘The boss isn’t pleased with you.’ The man who had burst into this quiet room without warning was big. He was older than Martin, and perhaps a little overweight, but he wasn’t so much older or fatter that he wouldn’t be fit enough to beat Martin up. The research assistant had no doubt at all about that. The man folded his arms, slid his buttocks insolently onto the edge of Martin’s desk, and looked at his man with undisguised contempt.
They were all the same, these intellectuals: out of touch with the real world. Out of touch with the way you made money and got yourself on in life. Out of touch with the things you needed to do to make a living. Out of touch with the very idea that life was about the survival of the fittest, that you screwed people before they could screw you, thumped them before they could thump you. Living in ivory towers, thinking that the world owed them a living.
He looked at the weedy individual he had been sent to frighten and decided that this turd was typical of the breed. Dark red hair which should have been cut shorter, small-lensed glasses on the bridge of his thin, vulnerable nose, shirt clean and pressed, bright blue jeans which had never seen real work, room lined with more books than any bugger could ever read, nose stuck in some obscure article whilst other people were getting on with the real business of life.
What a fucking wimp!
He looked the puny frame up and down with contempt. ‘You’re a fucking wimp!’ he said with conviction.
‘If you’ve just come here to be gratuitously insulting, I don’t think there’s any further purpose in—’
‘Shut it, mother’s boy! Send you back home with a thick ear and a few broken ribs,
if you don’t!’ Like most bullies, the big man grew more truculent when he smelt fear upon a victim.
Martin Carter made a belated attempt to assert himself. ‘I’ve a student coming to see me in five minutes. You shouldn’t really be seen here, you know. Be difficult for me to explain your presence – you must see that. I’m sure our employer wouldn’t like it if he thought you were acquiring a high profile here.’
The man with his buttocks on the edge of the desk wanted to mock this natural victim, to repeat his own phrases menacingly back into his face while holding it two inches from his own, to feel the weak body trembling with fear in his grasp. But what this tosser said was true. The boss didn’t want him hanging about here. In and out quickly, he’d said. Frighten him all you need to, but don’t rough him up. Don’t lay a finger on him, in fact. Not yet. He’d been quite clear about that. And you didn’t take chances with the boss.
The enforcer fumbled for the phrases he’d been told to use. ‘You got to increase your turnover, see? Otherwise he’ll get in someone who will. And you’ll be redundant. And you can’t afford to be redundant in this trade, see.’
‘No. I understand that, but will you tell him that—’
‘You don’t get severance pay when you’re redundant, not in this game. You’d be too dangerous to leave around, see, the things you know. Boss wouldn’t want you here when the pigs come snuffling, not with the things you know about the business. So anyone redundant is liquidated.’ He pronounced the word carefully, syllable by syllable, producing it with the leer he had practised ever since he had seen The Godfather for the first of several times.
Martin tried desperately to be amused by this Hollywood heavy, this caricature of violence. In a film, you would have shrugged him off, used your superior brainpower to send him on his way with a sardonic dismissal in his ears. But it was different in real life, when you could smell the sweat beneath the massive arms and the bad breath from the curling lips, when this heavy man was sitting on the edge of your desk, twisting his fingers into fists, awaiting the excuse to use them as hammers. And Martin had an uncomfortable feeling that what this thug had said about eliminating surplus employees might be true. Martin had never felt himself to be that important before, but perhaps what the man said was correct. Perhaps he did know things about the organization which they wouldn’t want him to reveal. Things which those anonymous men might see as a death warrant for him.
