Authors: J.M. Gregson
Rushton
said, ‘Oh, but you are, you know. Even if you killed him yourself.’ He glared at the dishevelled figure, willing him to look into his eyes, to realize his danger.
‘
Did you kill him yourself, Joe?’ Hook, speaking for the first time, was very quiet, speaking in the way he spoke to his sons when he caught them out in their childhood sins, as if he might agree to forget the crime once it was admitted.
‘
No. I thought I was going to, but I didn’t. I don’t think I could have done it really. Not even for Debs.’ He said it reluctantly, as if it was a failing in him, turning the normal moral canons on their heads.
Rushton
was watching him intensely. He said, ‘That’s what you said yesterday, Joe. It won’t wash, you know.’
Walsh
shook his head, his regret now manifest. ‘I didn’t kill him,’ he said again.
At
a nod from Lambert, Rushton put the polythene bag with the wooden toggle from the duffle coat on the table between them. Walsh stared at it for a moment, then looked up at the expectant faces opposite him. For the first time there was fear in the brown eyes. Rushton said, ‘Don’t touch it, Joe. It is yours, Joe, isn’t it? The one that’s missing from your coat.’
‘
It could be. How did—?’ Suddenly he was aware of what Rushton had done on the previous evening, of the look the DI had snatched at the coat in the hall whilst he had been getting the disinfectant from the kitchen. His voice was harsh as he said, ‘Where did you get that?’
‘
Wondered where you’d lost it, did you, Joe?’ Rushton could not keep the excitement out of his voice as he scented a triumph. ‘And well you might. This fastener was found by the pool where we recovered the body of Raymond Keane.’
Walsh
looked desperately into Rushton’s hungry, triumphant face; looked from there to the other faces alongside him, searching for a denial that this was so, for some phrase of consolation. ‘It might not be mine. How do you know it’s mine? Mine’s been missing for a long time!’ His voice rose in panic on each phrase, until it came near to hysteria. His breath stank now as it came at them in gusts.
It
was Lambert who said quietly, ‘But it is yours, Joe. Don’t be under any illusions: the men in our forensic laboratories will have it all matched up with the other toggles on your coat by the time the case comes to court.’
‘
Court? But I didn’t do it. I keep telling you. Honest, I didn’t do it!’ For the first time, it seemed important to him that he should convince them of that.
Lambert
leaned back, relaxing the pressure a fraction, anxious to keep the pathetic figure talking when it seemed he might degenerate into sobbing at any moment. ‘You know more than you’ve told us, Mr Walsh. If you want us to believe you, it’s time to be more honest.’
The
trembling figure had been almost on his feet, his frame rising with his panic. Now he sank back again on to the hard upright chair, his small chin nodding a little, as if to convince himself, as he stared at the table. ‘I was there on Christmas Eve. You said my van had been seen.’
‘
Why, Joe?’
‘
I—I don’t know. I think I felt that as long as I was watching him, as long as I knew what he was doing, and he couldn’t see me, I had him in my power.’
‘
All right.’ Lambert had heard psychopaths talk like that in prison cells. This man had not their air of excitement at the mention of violence, but there were many gradations of madness. And something within him said that there was madness in this crime somewhere. ‘Did you see Mr Keane arrive, Joe?’
‘
No. He was there when I drove past, though. I saw his Jaguar.’
‘
And you parked in your usual place?’
‘
Yes. Under the trees, a hundred yards on. I could see the cottage from there.’
‘
And what did you see?’
‘
Nothing. I was expecting the blonde woman to arrive, but she didn’t. She might have already been there, though. There’s parking round the back. There were no lights in the cottage, not that I could see. I decided eventually that they must have gone out. It was bloody cold that night. I went home as soon as I decided that he wasn’t there.’
There
was silence in the room. Lambert looked at the sweating, exhausted figure who held the key to this case and said, ‘See if you can rustle us up some tea, Bert, will you?’
It
was a relief to have the door open for a moment, for all of them. Rushton announced the suspension of the interview, then leaned over and stopped the tape recorder turning. The slight figure watched the silent machine balefully, as if it were a living thing, as if it and not the human tormentors opposite him were the source of his danger. All that he said while Hook was away was, ‘I didn’t kill him!’ muttering the words in a low voice, as if it were necessary to convince himself of it.
Hook
was back surprisingly quickly with four steaming mugs. He pushed the largest across the table to Walsh. ‘Hot and sweet, lad. Standard police issue,’ he said, not unkindly.
Walsh
nodded absently, folded his fingers around the beaker, lifted it with two unsteady hands, took a cautious sip. He watched Rushton’s hand move to set the tape in motion again, then, without waiting to be prompted, said, ‘I was there on the Sunday as well, you know. Christmas Day. In the morning.’
They
didn’t know. No one had seen him. A bonus for them, at last. Lambert said, like a man floating a fly past a nervous trout, ‘And what did you see, Joe?’
‘
I saw the blonde woman come, didn’t I? Come and go, as a matter of fact.’
‘
Miss Renwick, Joe. That’s her name. Do you know what car she drives?’
‘
Yes. A Fiesta Sport. A black one. That’s how I knew it was her, when she came. But I saw her get out and go into the house, as well.’
‘
What time was this, Joe?’
‘
Quite early. There was no traffic about, on Christmas morning, when I drove there. She must have arrived at about half past nine, I think.’
‘
And how long was she in there, Joe?’
‘
I don’t know. Not very long, though. Perhaps ten minutes or quarter of an hour. She came out in a hell of a hurry, I can tell you!’ He took a long, reminiscent pull at his tea, seeing that moment with the distraught woman fleeing from the cottage, thinking she was unobserved.
‘
You thought she was upset, did you, Joe?’
‘
She came out of there like a bat out of hell.’ For once, the cliché seemed an appropriate one, considering what Zoe Renwick must have left behind her in the cottage.
Zoe Renwick’s Cheltenham flat was within four hundred yards of the hospital where she was a sister. When Hook rang her on the ward, she showed no surprise that the CID should want to see her again. She said, ‘I shall be off duty at two. I think it better that we meet away from here this time. I’ll see you at home.’
She
had sounded composed and in control on the phone, as she had meant to do. As she walked through the tree-lined streets to her flat, huddled in her thick coat against the rawness of the January day, she felt much less assured. How much did these quiet, relentless men know now? How long could one woman stand up against the massive, impersonal police machine that was operating in pursuit of Raymond’s killer?
Zoe
felt very much alone. She was used to that, but she felt her isolation more keenly than she ever had before. Despite the cold, she walked slowly, trying unsuccessfully to prepare her thoughts and her tactics for the meeting ahead. How could you prepare for a battle when you had no idea of the enemy’s strength?
From
behind the double glazing of her first-floor apartment, she watched the blue Senator turn silently into the car park and come to rest beside her own Fiesta Sport. The superintendent, whose name she could not remember, levered himself a little stiffly from the driver’s seat. Sergeant Hook checked the number plate of her car, then studied the interior curiously for an instant before he turned towards the communal entrance doors of the flats. In that moment, she realized somehow that they knew she had lied to them.
She
had hoped that things might be more relaxed if they saw her at home. And if it came to an arrest, at least she wouldn’t be ushered past the curious eyes of the hospital’s corridors and reception areas. An arrest? Was she being melodramatic? But didn’t deceiving the police in an enquiry make you something called an accessory after the fact? She realized how ignorant she was of the law and of her rights.
Lambert
was brisk, even abrupt. This woman had now forsaken her right to the courtesy he had afforded her in his previous interview at the hospital. He said, ‘We have heard statements from others involved which conflict with your earlier account of events, Miss Renwick. We are here to establish the truth in these matters. I should warn you that any further attempts to deceive us would be very ill advised.’
She
had been intending to offer them tea or coffee. Now she knew that it would be refused; they barely accepted her invitation to sit down in the elegant lounge. With its Georgian silver tea service on top of the china cabinet, its gold-framed etchings of Bath and old Bristol on the high walls, its period armchairs upon the Persian carpet, this room seemed to her as well as to them a curious setting for what must now transpire.
She
said, more calmly than she felt, ‘I told you. I had nothing to do with the murder of Raymond Keane.’
It
was the first time she had produced the full name of the man she had once intended to marry, as if she sought by the use to distance herself from the events of his death. With her blonde hair dropping almost to her shoulders, her bright blue eyes trained observantly upon their faces, her slim form perched gracefully on the edge of her tapestried armchair, she presented a much changed appearance from the efficient professional they had seen in her sister’s uniform at the hospital.
Yet
she was just as careful, just as intelligent, thought Lambert. Only her clothes were different. He stared back at her for a moment before he said, ‘You had more to do with it than you pretended when we saw you two days ago, Miss Renwick.’
‘
In what way?’
He
was suddenly impatient with her prevarications. ‘I could take you through your statement line by line and expose its falsehoods. But we haven’t time for that. You told us earlier that you hadn’t been near the cottage since a week before Christmas, that you did not go to meet Mr Keane as you had arranged to do. But we know now that your car has been there, on one or more occasions.’
‘
On one. Only on one!’ There was fear in the way she spat the words from between her pale lips. In that one moment of vehemence, she had admitted her earlier lies. Lambert, who had backed the tale of the dishevelled, half-crazy Joe Walsh against the account of this cool-looking woman, breathed a huge but entirely inward sigh of relief.
They
glared at each other for a moment, realizing the implications of her words, each of them measuring the strength of the adversary. Then Lambert said, ‘If you expect us to believe you this time, you had better not try to hold anything back.’
She
nodded. It was almost a relief to have it out, without further attempts to disguise it. She had known from the moment she received Hook’s phone call that it must come to this, she told herself, so she had lost nothing so far. She said carefully, ‘I didn’t go there on Christmas Eve. What I told you was correct, apart from one omission.’
‘
A very important omission.’
She
frowned impatiently at him. The comment was a distraction, a mere underlining of what she had already admitted. If the wretched man would only shut up, she would tell him. ‘I rang on Christmas Eve, to tell Raymond I wasn’t going to arrive as he expected. I put off the call until about eight o’clock, because I wasn’t looking forward to it. I thought he’d have rung me by then, but he hadn’t, so I had to take the initiative. When I’d screwed myself up to tell him we were finished, there was no reply.’
She
paused, allowing them to picture the scene she was now putting to them, with the phone ringing in the silent cottage and the man it was intended for lying dead a few yards away. They said nothing, and she found their silence chilling: even a question would have been somehow a comfort, an assurance that at least they were taking her latest story seriously. She said, ‘I was deflated. I’d expected to have to give an account of myself, to confess that I wasn’t going to marry him anymore. I expected an argument; I was going to suggest that he came over to discuss things with me on the next day. Instead, there was nothing. I couldn’t even leave a message on his answerphone, telling him to ring me; it wasn’t switched on. I didn’t go there.’
‘B
ut you went on the next day. Christmas Day.’
‘
Yes. I drove over there in the morning.’