by J M Gregson
Martin Carter licked his lips and said, ‘Tell the boss that things aren’t easy at the moment. That I have to tread carefully after the murder of this girl Clare Mills. There’s been police all over the campus for days now, and—’
‘Bump ’er off yourself, did you? That tart who died last week? Understand you being shit-scared if you—’
‘No! No, of course I didn’t!’ Martin could hear the panic rising towards a scream in his own voice. He’d got by with the police, even the senior ones who were directing the investigation. And now here was this thug accusing him of killing Clare! ‘All I’m saying is that we have to go carefully. I really feel that you must tell the boss that at this moment he must trust my judgement about the local situation.’
‘“Trust my judgement about the local situation”.’ This time the big man was able to repeat the phrase, delivering it sneeringly in a ridiculous, high-pitched voice. ‘I’m not here to run messages for you, wimp! I’m here to tell you the boss isn’t pleased. That you’d better improve your performance, or it will be the worse for you.’ He leaned towards Martin, was encouraged when the slim frame instinctively flinched away from his belligerence.
The big man eased himself off the edge of the desk, reached out and grabbed a handful of shirt and tie, enjoying the tightening of the strip of fabric around the thin neck beneath the terrified face, looking straight into the bulging eyes behind the glasses. ‘You’d better listen, Carter, and listen well. The boss ain’t pleased, and that ain’t good for you. I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes, not one bit I wouldn’t.’ He looked down at the sandals Carter was wearing and sniggered, as if recognizing how inadequate such footwear was to protect this cowering victim from the situation he was in now. ‘You got to increase your turnover, and increase it damned quick, see?’
He gave the man a final shake, then flung him backwards with a contemptuous gesture, so that Martin staggered a little and then sat down heavily and involuntarily in the chair beside the desk. The man gave him a final leer of contempt and then was gone, slamming the door behind him as his derisive farewell to this strange and feeble academic world.
Martin Carter loosened his tie and straightened his shirt, trying desperately to readdress himself towards the world of research and the student who would be coming to him for guidance any second now. He looked out on the calm, sunlit world of the campus beyond his window, with its carefree students strolling around and its dedication to the pursuit of knowledge.
It seemed a totally different world from the squalid and devious one in which he had involved himself, the world of dubious money and shady deals and terrifying enforcers, like the man who had so lately sat upon the edge of his desk and threatened him. Yet he knew that those two worlds were connected, that he had thought that he could straddle them and make easy money. It had been an illusion, but it was too late for him now to retreat and extricate himself.
For the hundredth time in the last few days, Martin Carter wished that he had never met the man who had sent this thug to frighten him. He needed something to calm his nerves now, even though he was trying to cut down. He slid open the bottom drawer of his desk and felt for the tablet of cocaine.
Sixteen
On this breathless Monday afternoon, Superintendent Lambert’s room was one of the quieter places in Oldford police station. It was at the end of the building, with a window looking out over the new estates at the edge of the compact town to the country beyond it.
He had the window open on such a sweltering day, and the sounds of children in a school playground drifted up to them, an innocent, inappropriate accompaniment to murder. With the rest of the team checking leads in various parts of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, DI Rushton and DS Hook met with the chief to digest the latest findings and pick each other’s brains.
Chris Rushton had been exploring the avenues suggested by the call register on the dead woman’s mobile phone. He was well aware of Lambert’s insistence that they must concentrate always upon facts rather than speculation: the chief acknowledged freely that he could be a positive Gradgrind when it came to the assembling of facts. DI Rushton wasn’t quite sure who Gradgrind was – someone out of Dickens, he’d been told – but he had got the message that you needed solid evidence to underpin any suggestions you might make.
‘There are still a couple of people to be questioned about the call register, but I thought you’d want to see them yourself, John.’ Rushton forced himself to use the forename which Lambert insisted upon, even though ‘Sir’ or ‘Guv’ would have come much more easily to him.
Lambert nodded. ‘We saw Judith Hudson this morning. She didn’t seem at all put out when we confronted her with a call she hadn’t admitted to earlier. She claimed she was trying to persuade Clare to come home and see her, to re-establish some sort of relationship with her daughter.’
‘And did you believe that?’
Lambert shrugged and looked at Hook, who was still shaken by the cold detachment of the woman they had recently left, who might from her attitude have lost a distant cousin rather than her only daughter. Bert said, ‘Who knows what to believe with that woman? I’ve met her four times now, and I’m no nearer to decoding what makes her tick. She seems determined to set herself up as a possible suspect for the murder of her own daughter. I can’t decide whether she’s totally unbalanced, or very clever and having a quiet laugh at us when we’ve gone.’
Lambert nodded his agreement. ‘We meet a lot of odd people in CID work, but I don’t think I’ve ever met the mother of a murder victim who’s odd in quite this way. Judith Hudson is either genuinely unbalanced or a consummate actress. I’m inclined to think the former. Which of course makes her more rather than less likely to have killed Clare Mills. There might be a diminished responsibility plea if it ever came to court, but that wouldn’t make her less of a killer.’
Rushton nodded, trying to absorb this account of a woman he had never met. ‘And what about her husband?’
‘Roy Hudson’s almost as much of an enigma as his wife, but in a different way. He’s much more aware of the effects of the things he does and the things he says, but he’s consciously keeping us at arm’s length. He hasn’t given us more than the sketchiest outline of his relationship with Clare Mills. I’m sure there’s more to be learned about Mr Hudson, but I’m equally sure that he won’t give it up easily.’
‘He was trying to get hold of Clare in the days before she died. His name and number are listed under “Missed Calls” on her mobile register on both the Thursday and the Friday before her death. The ones from Roy Hudson are in fact the only missed calls on that register.’
‘Which raises the possibility that Clare might have been refusing to take them, once she realized who the caller was. As she was available for all the other calls, that’s quite likely.’ Lambert watched Hook making a preparatory note in his round, clear hand before he said grimly, ‘We’ll need to have an account from the elusive Mr Hudson of what he intended to say in those calls.’
Rushton nodded, trying to conceal his impatience to get on to the one remaining relative of the dead woman. ‘I went out to see Ian Walker yesterday afternoon, as we agreed. A thoroughly nasty piece of work.’
Lambert and Hook grimaced their agreement and the superintendent said, ‘Ex-husbands are almost always in the frame, in a case like this. And Ian Walker seems determined to leave himself right there. He’s an unsavoury character all right. But has he the guts to be a murderer?’
Rushton said firmly, ‘I think so. He tried to arrange a meeting with her on the Saturday night when she died. He says that he never saw her, that she refused to meet him. But I think that he met her and killed her. Perhaps he didn’t mean to. Perhaps they had some sort of argument and he lost his temper. Perhaps he demanded money and she couldn’t or wouldn’t give it to him. Perhaps she threw her lesbian liaison with Sara Green into his face. But I believe he met her and strangled her on that night, before dumping the body in the Severn.’
&n
bsp; ‘But he denied that?’
‘Of course he did. Said he was out drinking with his mates, the way he does most Saturdays. So far, we haven’t found anyone to confirm that.’ Rushton tried not to sound too satisfied as he reported this.
‘Have we any idea yet where the body was put into the river?’
‘No. And we may never find that out, unless we eventually get a confession. The team has looked at various possible places around Gloucester, but there are far too many possibilities. And if the corpse was dumped before the weather broke, the ground was bone hard at the end of a dry spell, so it’s unlikely there’d be any footprints. And of course the thunder rain on that Saturday night probably removed even any vestigial traces.’
‘So what else did you get out of our sheep-badger?’ Lambert knew his inspector well enough by this time to deduce from his scarcely suppressed excitement that there was more to come.
‘He told you and Bert that he didn’t have a vehicle. In fact, he does. A battered Ford Fiesta van. Grimy white with rust trimmings.’ This time Chris could not disguise his satisfaction. The chief had been deceived; his vigilant inspector had established the true situation.
‘Which you plainly think he used to transport Clare Mills’s body to the banks of the Severn on that Saturday night.’
‘I do. But I recognize that we shall have to prove it.’ Rushton tried to temper his smugness with realism.
‘Did you inspect the interior of this van?’
‘I did. It positively stank of carbolic. It had been very thoroughly cleaned out.’
‘When?’
‘Last Thursday, by Walker’s own account. Five days after it was used to transport the body of Clare Mills to the river.’
‘Five days after you think it was used for that purpose. Because I don’t suppose Ian Walker has admitted any such thing.’
‘No, of course he hasn’t. Says he uses the van to transport his sheep. Says he regularly cleans it out, so that diseases won’t be passed around among his flock. That’s crap, in my view. I don’t believe he regularly cleans the van at all. He cleaned it, probably much earlier than last Thursday, because he thought forensic might come looking at it.’ DI Rushton was trying unsuccessfully not to sound prickly in the face of what he saw as Lambert’s scepticism.
‘Did you collect the brushes he used for the forensic boys?’
‘No. He claims he borrowed stiff bushes from the abattoir, that they’ll have been used there for lots of other purposes since. He also says that he dried out the interior with old rags, which had been conveniently removed by the refuse collectors by the time I got there. I certainly couldn’t see any sign of cleaning implements in the caravan where he lives. The boys and girls from the lab are having a look at the white van this afternoon, but I haven’t any great hopes that they’ll find anything useful. I think Walker’s done too thorough a job for that.’
Hook said quietly, ‘Denis Pimbury’s an interesting possibility.’
‘The man you think is probably an illegal immigrant.’ Rushton, clearly reluctant to relinquish the discussion of Ian Walker, flicked up Pimbury’s file on his laptop.
‘He obviously had some kind of relationship with Clare Mills. Perhaps a much closer one than he is admitting to at the moment.’ Bert Hook, the Barnardo’s boy who had rather warmed to the hard-working man in the strawberry fields of an alien country, was determined to be objective about him.
Lambert smiled. ‘He says she was helping him with the language. That it was a non-sexual relationship between the two of them. We haven’t found anyone else who can confirm or deny that. It’s one of those instances where only the dead girl could give us the true picture.’
Rushton frowned. ‘I thought we’d accepted that the girl was a lesbian.’
Lambert smiled. ‘It’s touching to meet such naivety in an experienced officer, Chris. Clare Mills could easily have been bisexual. She’d been married, however much we’re told that it was a mistake, and Martin Carter claims that he thought he was in with a chance of establishing a relationship with her. We only have Sara Green’s assertion that Clare was perfectly happy with a same-sex pairing.’
Bert Hook said, ‘The girl’s sexual orientation is emerging as very important. We all know sexual jealousy is a prime cause of sudden, unpremeditated violence. So this death may well be one that was completely unplanned. Sexual rejection might have prompted any one of Denis Pimbury, Martin Carter or Sara Green into a red mist of anger. And the sheep-badger, Ian Walker, talks as if he no longer cared for his ex-wife, but we only have his word for that.’
Lambert said, ‘I’m quite sure we need to know more about the people who worked in the university. I’m not convinced that there wasn’t more between Martin Carter and the dead girl than he’s so far admitted. And because the affair between Sara Green and Clare was kept secret, no one has been able to confirm or deny whether it was as serious and long-term as Sara claims it was.’
Rushton said, ‘Both of those two were in contact by phone with Clare in the days before her death. Clare made two calls to Sara Green: they’re listed under the “Dialled Numbers” in the memory. Martin Carter is among the “Received Calls”, so it was he who took the initiative and phoned her.’
‘Thanks, Chris. Bert and I will be speaking to both of them in the next day or so.’
At that moment the phone shrilled suddenly on Lambert’s desk.
The switchboard constable was apologetic. ‘I know you said you weren’t to be disturbed until four, sir. But Dr Cocker from the forensic laboratory is on the line. He says it’s very urgent, and he wants to speak to you.’
‘Put him through.’
All of them knew that this must be important. Inspector and sergeant, two very different men who were united now by their eagerness for new information, watched Lambert’s lined grey face, searching it for any clue as to the content of the message he was receiving.
He paused for a second or two after he had put down the phone, not to heighten the tension, but to digest the import of what he had heard. ‘It’s those hairs we sent them from the body. The ones we thought wouldn’t produce anything useful. They aren’t human at all. They’re sheep hairs. Cocker says it looks as if the body has rested on a surface where sheep had been carried.’
There was that moment of tremulous, silent excitement which always comes to CID men when there is a breakthrough in an investigation. Then John Lambert said to Rushton, ‘It looks as if you were right about Ian Walker, Chris.’
Seventeen
The move to arrest Ian Walker was carefully organized.
Lambert wanted to confront the man himself. The evidence was strong, but still circumstantial. The whole of CID might be privately convinced that the body of Clare Mills had been transported to the Severn in the back of the sheep-badger’s van, but some sort of confession when Lambert and Hook had confronted and cautioned Walker would still be useful.
Two other cars with uniformed officers in them drove quietly behind Lambert’s old Vauxhall Senator into the Forest of Dean as the long summer’s day stretched towards its close. Walker was a man capable of violence, likely to become desperate when confronted with the reality of arrest. They would let him see that resistance to arrest was useless, that he had much better come quietly and wait to see what a lawyer could do for him at the station.
There was not a breath of wind as the sun disappeared in a blaze of fire beyond the western hills. The little convoy of cars moved past a lake which shone still as a mirror beneath the deepening blue of the sky. The newly burgeoned foliage on the Forest trees hung heavy and green in the heat. The sheep grazed on the common as if they had been carefully and formally distributed there to be part of a landscape painting.
A mission to arrest a murderer seemed totally out of place here.
There was as little sign of movement around the shabby caravan where Walker lived as there was in the houses below it. The scene seemed to be hanging around them as they arrived at the place, waitin
g for them to stir it into movement. Lambert motioned to the police cars behind him to stop whilst they were still hidden from the caravan by the houses on the road. Then he eased the big Vauxhall almost silently over the last few yards to the spot where he planned to park, on the flat patch of grass twenty yards from the road. Beside the small, shabby white van which had taken Clare Mills on her last journey to the Severn.
He stood for a moment beside the rear wheels of the van. Rushton was right about the carbolic and the way the man had used disinfectant to wipe away the evidence of what had been carried. They could smell it clearly enough in the still, warm air, even with the back doors of the van shut.
There was still no movement from the caravan, which was now no more than eighty yards away from them. As he and Hook moved slowly up the gentle slope, John Lambert found himself willing their quarry to come through the door of his decrepit residence and meet them. An arrest in the open air suddenly seemed more attractive than one within the cramped metal confines of the caravan, where he would scarcely be able to stand upright.
They called Walker’s name through the door, received no answer, tried it and found it open. Climbing stiffly up the steps and dipping his head to get through the door, Lambert half expected to be assaulted as he entered the caravan, so that he thrust his arms out in front of him and called a warning through the aperture, anticipating an invisible assailant.
There was no hostile presence within. A solitary fly, hovering above a half-open packet of sliced bread on the side of the sink, was the only movement in the oppressive heat of the caravan’s interior. Yet the door had been unlocked, and the single window at the end of the battered residence was propped drunkenly open, stretched as wide as it would stretch by the use of a cardboard box.
