Too Much of Water

by J M Gregson

  Mark Jolly licked his lips, searching for the clever rejoinder which would not come. It was better to say nothing, let the pigs make the running, he decided belatedly.

  Lambert regarded him with undisguised distaste. ‘I’d rather expect a rat like you to desert the sinking ship, save as much as you could of your miserable skin. But perhaps you’re not bright enough for that. And we’ll be quite happy to put you away. Don’t have any illusions about that.’

  The man who had been determined to say nothing found that he had to fill the silence. ‘I ain’t done nothing. I’ve just done whatever the boss asked me to do. Odd jobs around the place and—’

  ‘Driving, you said. You do a bit of driving for Hudson, when called upon.’

  ‘I have done, yes.’ He glared suspiciously at his tormentors, a great bull of a man waiting for the picador’s next dart.

  ‘Different vehicles, I should think. I expect you’re quite versatile, when it comes to driving.’

  ‘I do what I’m ordered to do.’

  ‘Without asking many questions about it, I’m sure.’

  ‘Not my job to ask questions. I’m paid to—’

  ‘Driven old white Ford vans in your time, I should think. Bit of a comedown after the boss’s Merc, but all in a day’s work, I expect.’

  He felt the colour draining from his bloated face as he stared at them. He couldn’t work out how they’d led him to this. And he knew now that he was going to talk.

  Twenty-Eight

  They drove for a little way by the Severn, not far above the spot where the body of Clare Mills had been discovered ten days earlier. The river was sluggish here, wide and unruffled between its low banks, still as a lake in the low evening sun, as if even the water was feeling the heat. It was nine o’clock now, but the temperature had scarcely dropped from its afternoon peak and there was not a breath of wind. Nature itself seemed to be waiting for something to happen.

  Hook glanced occasionally at the grim profile beside him, but spoke not a word. After a little while, Lambert turned the old Vauxhall away from the road by the river, into the Forest of Dean. There were few other cars about as they moved beneath trees heavy with leaf, through the silent village and up to the house where this had all begun.

  It was Roy Hudson who opened the front door of the high stone house with the immaculate gardens. There was no sign of his wife, and he chose not to explain her absence to them. He offered them no clue as to whether he had sent his strange partner out of the way, whether he considered Judith Hudson’s affliction an advantage or a danger to him. Right to the end, they were not to see this strangely assorted couple together.

  Hudson took them through into the room which looked down the long rear garden. Not a leaf moved on the full-leaved hawthorns at the end of it. The blazing roses and the first bright blooms of the dahlias looked especially vivid on this perfect July evening, their colours enhanced by the special light of the warm dusk. As the sun set in a blaze of red over the Bristol Channel, twenty miles beyond the trees of the ancient Forest, the sky over the hills beyond the end of the garden was shading from a brilliant crimson into purple.

  Hook found himself filling with a reluctant admiration for the nerve of the man. Hudson must have known by now that the police were on to his drugs operation, and maybe more, but he had chosen to stay and brazen it out, not to flee. He had no real alternative, of course: his movements had been tracked for the last two days. But he could not know that, and there was courage of a sort in his choosing to face them here, in this refuge he had built from his profits.

  He looked scarcely shaken. His hair was still becomingly silvered at the temples, his tan as deep as ever, a defiant statement of his physical health amidst his collapsing world. The brown, deep-set eyes were as watchful as they had been the first time they had interviewed him, but there was no evidence of panic in them, no paling of the slightly florid cheeks.

  Hudson said, ‘Have you arrested that illegal immigrant for Clare’s murder yet? The one who stole her jewellery and pawned it?’ There was the first suspicion of anxiety in the way he had opened the conversation, but he cloaked it with the appearance of a challenge to them.

  Lambert said, ‘The man who called himself Denis Pimbury has been investigated. He didn’t kill your stepdaughter.’

  ‘I’m surprised you feel as confident about it as that.’

  ‘Oh, we do, Mr Hudson. How he got into the country is another matter. It seems that he came in through an illegal-immigrants ring, but he is more a victim than a criminal. It’s the people who are organizing the entry of such people who are causing misery and making millions. A lot of the crime bosses involved in the sale of illegal drugs are beginning to develop unsavoury sidelines with people desperate to get into Britain at any cost. Drug operators like you, in fact.’

  He let his distaste for the man in front of him come out in the last phrase, perfectly content to provoke him into indiscretions if that were possible. And Hudson, visibly rattled for the first time, resorted to bluster. ‘You’d better be careful what you say, Chief Superintendent. I’ve been very patient with you all the way through this business, but I have lawyers who would be interested in what you’re saying.’

  ‘I’m sure you have. And the time for lawyers is certainly at hand.’

  ‘You should really be much more confident of your facts before you begin making allegations.’

  ‘And you should really be much more selective in the workers you employ and the tactics you use. Fear only silences people up to a certain point.’

  ‘I haven’t even an inkling as to what you might be getting at.’ It was meaningless and Hudson knew it: weak, where he wanted to be aggressive. He forced a contemptuous smile, but he knew now that this was not going to work, that his lawyer would be at work before the day was out. The only question now was what charges he would be confronting. He did not like the confidence of this grave senior policeman and the stolid, unsmiling acolyte at his side.

  Lambert said like a man concluding the preliminaries, ‘We know that Hudson Office Supplies is a loss-making business.’

  ‘Bloody Chris Tillcock.’ The words were out before he could stop himself, the thought springing to his lips even as it entered his brain.

  Lambert smiled at his mistake. ‘Mr Tillcock offered us certain accounting facts, as a good citizen should. And even banks begin to release information, once they know that murder charges are in prospect.’

  It was the first mention of the word, and with it Hudson’s eyes darted past them to the closed door behind them. But they surely couldn’t have anything to support the charge. Roy kept his voice calm as he said, ‘It’s not a crime to have a struggling business, is it? I’ll admit we were short of capital for a time, but once Judith had put her money into the firm we soon—’

  ‘Married her to get your hands on that money, did you?’ Lambert was gratuitously insulting now, watching his man like a predatory cat, pawing him to provoke him into further indiscretions.

  ‘Of course I didn’t!’ For the first time, and perhaps when they had least expected it, his voice rose towards a shout. ‘I married Judith because I cared for her, because we were in love.’ Suddenly, ridiculously, it was important to him that he should convince these two hostile strangers of the truth of that.

  ‘But you didn’t pour her money into Hudson Office Supplies. You used it to develop a business which was much more sinister.’

  ‘The office supplies stuff was always a loser.’ He offered that in a low voice, almost like an afterthought. He did not seem to realize that he was now tacitly accepting what Lambert said, reinforcing his arguments.

  But it was Bert Hook who now said softly, ‘But you couldn’t frighten Clare Mills, could you?’ From the harmless-looking village-bobby face, the words emerged as a fact, not a question. It was so accurate that Roy Hudson wondered for an instant of panic how on earth the man could know such things.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I had a good
relationship with my stepdaughter. There were a few problems at first, as you might expect when a mother remarries, but—’

  ‘No wonder Clare gave that brooch and ring to Denis Pimbury to sell. She didn’t want them, because they came from you. They were the first things she thought of when she wanted to raise money for him.’

  ‘All right. I suppose the jewellery might have been a mistake. She never wanted gifts of any value from me, but—’

  ‘You wanted her to work for you, I suppose. Wanted her to set up a drugs operation in the university, once she became a student there. That would have tied her to you for life, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘She could have had everything I had, eventually. She could have taken over the lot. Her mother wanted us to be close.’ It sounded pathetic, but it was the key to everything, Roy thought. Your love made you vulnerable, made you do foolish things. He would never have involved himself with that damned girl, if his wife hadn’t said she wanted them to be close, to be a family. And the irony was that Judith herself couldn’t seem to conjure up maternal feelings for the girl, couldn’t forgive Clare when she rejected her stepfather.

  ‘But Clare resisted. Kept turning you down when you tried to involve her. But that was no reason to kill her.’ Hook’s voice, with its soft Herefordshire burr, went on as softly and calmly as if he had been discussing their next meal.

  Roy Hudson could not understand how this harmless-looking figure seemed to know all this, how he could be so certain about it. He said desperately, ‘I didn’t kill Clare Mills. You haven’t a shred of proof. That bloody husband of hers killed her. Ian Walker killed her. Drove her body to the river in that old van of his. Dumped her in the Severn and drove away.’ He worked his brain furiously, wondering what other particulars he could summon; he had a sudden impulse to pile up the detail, as if that alone could convince them of the dead man’s guilt.

  Hook smiled at him now, looking straight into those deep-set eyes for the first time. ‘Clare’s body was driven there in that van all right. But not by the man who cleaned out the vehicle so thoroughly afterwards. Not by Ian Walker.’

  ‘You’ve no grounds for saying that. And certainly no grounds for saying that I—’

  ‘Mark Jolly drove the van on that Saturday night. Took away the body that you had strangled and dumped it like a dead kitten in the Severn.’ Hook allowed the first surge of passion into his voice, his anger a homage to the dead woman.

  ‘Prove it!’ It was no more than desperate, unthinking defiance.

  ‘We have a statement from Mark Jolly to that effect. As we said, you should have chosen your staff more carefully. But then, only a fool would hold back the truth when he’s an accessory to murder.’

  Hudson said doggedly, hopelessly, ‘Ian Walker killed Clare. And then killed himself with his own shotgun, when he knew you were on to him.’

  ‘No, Mr Hudson. It was you who discharged that shotgun last Monday night.’

  ‘I have a perfectly good alibi for both these killings. I was with my wife when Clare was murdered. And as for Monday night, I can prove that my car was parked in Cheltenham throughout the evening. And you’ve already been told that—’

  ‘Mr Jolly has already told us where you were on the Saturday night. Helping him to load the body of Clare Mills into the van owned by Ian Walker. Directing him to the spot on the river where it would be slid into the water.’

  The game was up. There was a kind of relief when you abandoned the resistance that you had always known would be pointless. Roy Hudson, speaking it seemed as much to himself as to his adversaries, said dully, ‘Clare was going to the police. She wouldn’t join in the work, whatever incentives I offered her. She was going to tell them everything she knew about the enterprise and the people involved in it. I couldn’t let her do that.’ He spoke almost regretfully, as if once they understood the full situation they would see the logic of his actions.

  ‘And Ian Walker was in no position to prevent you from using his van.’

  He nodded, all defiance gone now. ‘Walker was working for me. Pushing a few drugs around his dubious friends. He was in Gloucester on that night. I paid him a hundred pounds for the use of his van and he jumped at it. All he had to do was to clean it thoroughly afterwards.’ He smiled mirthlessly at the cheapness with which the man had been bought. That Saturday seemed a long time ago now.

  ‘But Walker wasn’t the kind of man you could trust.’ Lambert sounded almost sympathetic now as he led his man on into the familiar territory of violence breeding more violence.

  ‘He wasn’t up to much, Ian Walker.’ Hudson sounded regretful, not for the man who was dead, but for his own foolishness in involving him. ‘He’d have let me down once you began to press him. He’d have panicked and tried to save his own skin as soon as he felt you were on to him.’

  ‘So he had to be removed.’

  He nodded, as if the whole thing was perfectly rational. He was at this moment as devoid of any moral sense as that strange wife of his, without the mental problem which overlaid and explained her deficiencies. ‘We had to get rid of him, and quickly, or he’d have told you the truth about Clare’s death.’

  Lambert sighed softly. ‘So on Monday night, the man who you claimed was with you in Cheltenham, Mark Jolly, drove you out to Walker’s caravan in his car. He’s now admitted to that, by the way.’

  But Hudson had no intention of prevaricating now. He merely nodded. ‘I thought of using a taxi, but you could have traced that. It seemed safer at the time to use my own man.’ He smiled bitterly at the irony of that thought. ‘I was intending to garrotte Walker, like Clare, take him from behind when he wasn’t expecting it. But he had his own shotgun in the caravan. It occurred to me that I could make it look like suicide, give you a murderer for Clare Mills.’ Again he had that slight, acerbic smile, as if he scarcely credited that what had seemed so logical could go so wrong.

  Hook stepped forward and pronounced the words of arrest. Roy Hudson nodded slowly, all resistance gone. He said, ‘Will someone look after Judith? I sent her out when I knew you were coming.’ He was suddenly weary with guilt. ‘She had nothing to do with this, you know. She knew nothing about any of it.’

  It wouldn’t be true of most wives. But with the strange, detached Judith Hudson it probably was. And it seemed that a genuine love for his wife was the one decent quality present in this man who had caused such suffering. Lambert said stiffly, ‘Mrs Hudson will be told what has happened in due course. A woman police officer will explain things to her.’

  It was over. They took him out to the police car which had eased into the drive behind them. Hudson rode in the back, handcuffed between two grim-faced uniformed officers, as the car followed Lambert’s big Vauxhall back through the Forest to Oldford police station and the cells. It was a strange little procession which moved steadily through the warm summer darkness of woods in full leaf.

  In Shakespeare, nature would have echoed momentous events in the world of man, with a storm shattering the heavy days of heat. But on this night, the world sweltered on, with no end yet to the heat wave which gripped the country. Perhaps the murderer of poor, innocent Clare Mills and the less worthy Ian Walker did not merit any momentous tribute from the elements.

  Perhaps only Lambert and Hook and Rushton would sleep more easily, with the squalid little tale concluded.