by J M Gregson
Martin did not think of the misery this array could usher into the world, of the lives he would never see ruined by this lethal array. He thought not of the victims but of the man who had threatened him, of Roy Hudson and the warnings he had issued so unequivocally.
Fear is always the worst, most dangerous motivation.
His new recruit bent to examine the wares, noting each of the drugs but saying nothing as Martin conducted his sales pitch. The words came more easily now. He was gathering the confidence he needed at last. Perhaps, as Hudson had implied, it was just a matter of perseverance. Perhaps in a few months’ time he would be grateful to the man whom he had begun to hate.
And then, as if he spoke from some echoing cave, the man beside him was pronouncing the formal words of arrest, telling Martin that he had no need to say anything but that it might prejudice his defence if he did not state facts which he would later rely upon for his defence in court.
Martin found a second man at his elbow, restraining him gently, even though he could not summon into his limbs the faintest impulse to escape. He was led past the white-faced student who had said he wanted out, through a pub lined with curious faces, outside to a police car whose blue light winked silently, mockingly at him as he approached.
Martin had never been in a police car before. He sat on the rear seat, needlessly handcuffed to the plain-clothes officer beside him, seeing but scarcely hearing the city as they drove slowly through it. A car horn seemed to sound from some remote distance; it took him a long time to realize that the faint, melancholy sound he could hear was a church clock tolling eleven.
They made him sign for the few pounds he had in his pockets and the torch, as well as the drugs. Then they took away the shoelaces from his trainers and sent him shuffling to the cells.
The first sound which Martin Carter had heard clearly since he had been arrested was the harsh clang of the steel door of the cell closing upon him.
Twenty-Three
Geoff Harrison, the farmer who employed Denis Pimbury, was not at ease with the police.
He had been in trouble in earlier years for employing illegal immigrants, for not checking closely enough on the backgrounds of his workers. Now, when a chief superintendent and a detective sergeant asked to see him in private, he was shrewd and experienced enough to realize that something serious was in hand.
‘You people just don’t recognize the difficulties of recruiting seasonal labour,’ he grumbled automatically. ‘You can’t just go into the job centres and recruit a hundred people to pick fruit for a month, you know.’
Lambert said dryly, ‘We try to make sure the law is observed, Mr Harrison. That’s what a police service has to do.’ He had some sympathy for Harrison, but didn’t want to get into arguments about casual labour when he had bigger fish to fry.
‘Sometimes I think some of these busybodies would rather watch good food rot in the ground than see it picked and taken to market. I pay the proper rates and provide the proper breaks, unlike some I could name. No one seems to take any account of that!’ Harrison looked out over his sheds and the long, impeccably straight rows of strawberries and raspberries, nodding his resentment.
‘We’re not here to check on the details of your working practices,’ said Lambert stiffly. He wanted to say that they were here in pursuit of something much more important: a murder enquiry. But the man they wanted to question already had enough things stacked against him in life. If in the end he proved not to be a murderer, he could do without the residual slur of being an alien suspected of the worst crime of all. Lambert said to Harrison, ‘We need to speak to you in confidence about one of your workers, Denis Pimbury.’
‘I’ve offered Denis a permanent job. He’s a bona-fide worker, with his card properly stamped.’ Harrison’s mind was immediately on his own situation, not that of the man working outside beneath the baking sun.
Bert Hook smiled at the farmer, his countryman’s face pulsing with sympathy for rural industry, festooned with red tape by bureaucrats in city offices. ‘Good worker, is he, your Mr Pimbury?’
‘Excellent worker. I wouldn’t have offered him permanent employment otherwise. As a matter of fact, I’m thinking of putting him in charge of a gang when it comes to apple-picking later in the year.’
‘Honest, then, I expect.’
‘Honest as the day is long.’ Harrison wasn’t a man who threw out compliments lightly; not many farmers do. But it was a relief to be talking about someone else, to find that his own employment practices did not seem to be the issue here. ‘You’ll understand that with a casual workforce recruited from a lot of different backgrounds, I have to give a lot of attention to these things.’ He spoke a little portentously, delivering a sentence he had prepared for officious councillors: you hadn’t to mention foreigners, or some of them would accuse you of prejudice. ‘Denis not only won’t rob his fellow-workers, he won’t rob his employer. You can leave him to work on his own, without coming back to find that he’s been slacking.’ Finding that he was enjoying the unaccustomed pleasure of praising one of his workers like this, he allowed himself to be carried even further than he had intended. ‘I’d trust him with my life, Denis.’
So the ring and the brooch the man had taken to the pawnshop hadn’t been acquired round here. Lambert said heavily, ‘Thank you for being so frank with us, Mr Harrison. And please don’t allow any of this discussion to reach your other workers. Now, if you’ll be kind enough to allow us the use of this room, we’ll see Mr Pimbury in here immediately, please.’
The man who had told them he was Denis Pimbury came into the room with his normal sharp-eyed air of suspicion and sat uncomfortably on the wooden chair in front of Harrison’s battered and paper-strewn desk. He had never been into the boss’s office before, but he had eyes not for his surroundings but only for the two men who had brought him into the room for questioning. The dark, deep-set eyes watched them unblinkingly; when his lank black hair dropped momentarily over his forehead, he brushed it angrily aside, as if it was affecting his vision when it needed to be at its sharpest.
He said, ‘I know nothing. Nothing which can be of any use to you. What is it that you want me to tell you?’ He folded his thin arms resolutely across his chest, as if stilling his too mobile body by a fierce effort of will.
‘You could start by telling us your real name.’ Lambert’s tone was friendly, not hostile. He knew that he held all the cards in the strange game he had to play against this nervous opponent.
‘My name is Denis Pimbury.’ He pronounced it carefully, throwing all the conviction he could muster behind each syllable.
Lambert remained amiable as he said firmly, ‘Whatever your name is, it isn’t Pimbury. You made an unwise choice there.’
‘I do not understand what you mean. I have passport. My name is Denis Pimbury.’ He reiterated the words slowly, like a mantra, as if with sufficient repetition he could make them into the truth.
‘No, Denis. We shall call you Denis, if you wish it: it suits us to call you something. But we shall not call you Pimbury. The only living holder of that name was seventy-three last month. That is such a curious fact that it was reported in the newspapers – on the front page of The Times, to be precise. I don’t know how you picked up the name, but it was a most unfortunate choice. I hope you did not pay too much for that bogus passport.’
Denis saw his world disintegrating before his eyes, glimpsed his ruin in the calm, compassionate face of this senior policeman, who spoke so quietly and sympathetically to him. He said woodenly, ‘I am British. My mother lived abroad since I was infant. I come back here to work. To make a living. To make my life here.’ He could feel hysteria rising in his voice on the successive phrases. Perhaps that did not matter now. Perhaps it was all over. As suddenly as this. When he had thought that things were coming right at last, were falling into place for him.
Lambert glanced at Bert Hook, who said, ‘Maybe that is still possible. Maybe you can still make a life here.’
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‘But you do not believe me. You say passport no good.’ He did not trust these strange policemen who came in ordinary clothes and offered false hopes. Policemen were not like this. At worst they were instruments of darkness, who snuffed out your life and went on their way. At best, they were harsh figures, instruments of government, who cast you into prison and left you there to rot without trial whilst the world forgot you. These men must have their own agenda, must be playing him like a fish on the end of a line for their own ends.
Hook saw the desperation in the narrow features and understood most of the fear behind them. He said, ‘I’m afraid that passport won’t be much use to you, as you say. But Superintendent Lambert and I aren’t concerned with illegal immigration into the country. Someone else will be following that up, in due course. But Mr Harrison says that you have been a model worker here, Denis. He is willing to offer you permanent employment, if your entry into this country can be regularized.’
Denis had a facility for languages, and he had picked up English very quickly. But now, with his world crashing about his ears and his mind reeling, he understood little of Hook’s formal, guarded language, and trusted even less. He repeated blankly, ‘I good worker. I give no trouble here. Mr Harrison will speak for me.’
Lambert said quietly, ‘We need to ask you some questions about another matter altogether. We are CID officers, investigating murder.’
So that was it. They had been softening him up with all the illegal-immigrant stuff, telling him that he had no hope, that he might as well confess and get it over with. Denis looked into the long, lined face and mustered all the conviction he could summon into this strange new language as he said, ‘I not kill anyone.’
‘Perhaps not. But you’ll need to convince us of that. There are certain factors which are not in your favour.’ What a stupid, roundabout phrase that was, Lambert thought, what a pitiful substitute for direct accusation. He realized that his desire to study this man and his reactions had taken over, when bluntness would be more effective on both sides. He said, ‘You took certain items to a pawnshop in Gloucester. A brooch and a ring, both of considerable value.’
He had accepted too little for them. He knew even at the time that he should have demanded more, but he had been able to think only of getting out of that claustrophobic shop and away from that calm, assessing woman, who had seemed to read his every thought. Denis spoke softly, trying to pick his words and avoid other things they could use against him. ‘They were mine, those things. I thought I should have the money from them. I had no one to give them to.’
There was a whole world of heartbreak in that last pathetic confession. Lambert nodded his acceptance of the logic of this disposal, studied the tortured young face for a second or two before he said, ‘A valuable diamond ring and an emerald brooch. Where did you get these things, Denis?’
He wondered whether to say they had come from his mother, that mythical mother who had taken him abroad as an infant. But they had already told him that they did not believe the myth; probably they knew exactly where these things had come from and were just trying to trap him into lies. He said in a voice they could scarcely hear, ‘I got them from Clare.’
‘From Clare Mills?’
‘Yes.’
‘After she had been killed.’
‘No. Clare gave them to me.’
‘That doesn’t ring true, Denis. You removed the ring and the brooch from Clare Mills’s body after she had been killed, didn’t you?’
‘No. She gave them to me.’ He wanted to say that she had given them to him when she had been a living, affectionate, smiling girl, that she had wanted him to have them. But all he could produce was this stubborn denial, these few poor monosyllables which sat like ashes on his tongue, and told these men whose task was to be suspicious that he had killed Clare.
Bert Hook said gently, almost cajolingly, ‘You’ll need to convince us of that, Denis. You must see how it looks, to anyone viewing the situation from outside.’
Denis stared at him, trying to work out why he was offering him such understanding, thinking that this man with the earnest, weather-beaten face was so unlike any other policeman he had met. ‘I didn’t want to take them. You not believe that, but it is true. Clare said that she did not want them, that there were reasons why she did not want them.’
‘And can you tell us what these reasons were?’
Denis wanted to thank Hook for not dismissing his protestations out of hand, wanted to come up with a convincing reason why Clare had given him such an unlikely gift. But his English wasn’t up to delivering the invention, even if his racing mind could have produced one. ‘No. I not ask her. I think Clare did not want to talk about it.’
Lambert thought that Bert Hook had offered too much sympathy to this man who was in the frame for murder, that he should have gone hard for him, been cynical, forced him into whatever justification of his conduct he could offer. But he had worked with Hook for a long time now, and he had seen him successful so often in drawing out unlikely facts that he trusted his intuition, trusted him to build bridges when he knew that he himself would have been altogether more harsh. Lambert now said sceptically, ‘You’re asking us to believe that Clare Mills gave these valuable items to you whilst she was still alive, and without any pressure from you?’
‘Yes. Is the truth.’ His Eastern European accent came out strongly, more guttural than he had heard it for months, telling him that the strain of his sudden downfall was getting to him.
‘And why would she do that?’
‘I not know. She just did.’ He had held himself rigid with tension, but on this simple, hopeless statement he forced a shrug, and he was so little in control of his body that the sudden violent movement of his shoulders threw him off balance and almost deposited him in a heap on the floor. He had to clutch the wood beneath his knees to preserve his position upon the edge of the wooden chair.
Lambert thrust in the steel which Hook had eschewed. ‘You must see that the logical conclusion for us as CID men is that you killed the girl, then removed the jewellery from her body before consigning the corpse to the river. You deny that this is what actually happened, but you provide us with no reasons to believe you.’
Denis stared at him, his deep-set eyes widening in their sockets. Were they really prepared to listen to him? Or was it all an elaborate charade, inviting him to condemn himself from his own mouth? He said, ‘Clare did not tell me why she wanted to be rid of those two things. I do not think she wanted me to ask her about that.’ He paused, searching for words which would not come to him. ‘She said I would need money, if I was to stay here.’
‘Because of the way you had come here, you mean? Clare knew that you were an illegal immigrant?’
He sought desperately for a way out, but could see none. They had told him they knew all about this, that the elaborate precautions he had taken to establish himself here had all been torn away like so much highly expensive tissue paper. ‘Yes, Clare knew that. But she was sympathetic. She wanted to help me. She said she had no use for these two pieces of jewellery, that I should have them to help me to make a proper life for myself here.’
It was just possible, Lambert supposed, but desperately thin. ‘When did she give you the ring and the brooch?’
‘On the tenth of June.’
Surprisingly precise. He wouldn’t speculate about the reasons for the precision, at the moment. ‘So why didn’t you take them and sell them immediately? You say that she invited you to do that.’
‘I didn’t want to take them. I kept trying to give them back to her.’ He scratched at his brain for anything which would add substance to this unlikely thought, could come up only with a pathetic, ‘Clare was my friend.’
‘But you took them to the pawnshop on Tuesday, ten days after Clare Mills was killed.’
‘Yes. Clare wasn’t here any more to take them back. Those things reminded me of my dead friend, the first person in England who really tried to help me.
I didn’t want to see them in my room for any longer.’
‘What did you want the money for? What were you planning to buy with it? Because you weren’t planning to redeem the goods from that pawnshop, were you?’
‘No.’ The reasons he had to give were so vague, so unlikely, that he wondered if he should even begin the struggle to put them into words. ‘In my own country, before the war in Kosovo, I was medical student. I was going to be doctor. I talked to Clare about her mother, about what I knew about autism and Asperger’s syndrome. I thought when I was established here, I would see if I could try again to be doctor.’
He stared at the floor, unwilling to look into his questioner’s eyes after this bizarre suggestion. Lambert let long seconds drag by before he said, ‘Did you know Ian Walker?’
‘Yes. Clare’s husband. Ex-husband. He not nice man.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘He threaten Clare. He try to get money from her, when she did not have money to give him. Walker bad man.’
‘He’s dead now, Denis.’
‘I know. I’m not sorry.’
‘Did you kill him?’
‘No.’ But he did not seem at all surprised at the suggestion.
‘He died on Monday night.’
‘Yes. I read about it. He was shot.’
‘Did you shoot him, Denis?’
‘No.’
‘Where were you on Monday evening?’
‘At home. At my room in Gloucester.’
‘On your own?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t go out during the evening?’
‘No.’
Lambert nodded, watching Hook make notes in his round, clear hand. ‘You come to work here on a bicycle each day, I believe.’
‘Yes. That is correct.’
‘So you could easily have ridden out into the Forest of Dean on that evening and killed Ian Walker. It’s only half the distance you ride to come to this farm each day.’
