Authors: J.M. Gregson
They
were the words Lambert had wanted to hear, but his tone never wavered with his excitement as he said, ‘You went back there, didn’t you, Joe? Back to the cottage.’
‘
Yes.’ Walsh’s voice was scarcely audible now, even in that small room where the three men listened so tensely. ‘I thought, “If I move his body, nobody need ever know what happened. He might not be found for years.”’
And
if you’d thought to weight him down, you’d have been right, thought Lambert. The body might have been at the bottom of that pond for years. He said gently, ‘What time did you go back there, Joe?’
‘
Late. Very late. The television had finished. I knew it would be quiet then, you see. It must have been about two in the morning, I think.’
‘
So you put your duffle coat on and went out to your van.’
‘
Yes. I had to scrape the frost off the windscreen and the wing mirrors. It was cold. Bloody cold!’ Debbie wouldn’t mind him saying that, he was sure; bloody wasn’t very strong, not nowadays.
‘B
ut you got the van started and drove over to Keane’s cottage. Did anyone see you?’
‘
No. There was no one about. It was a clear night, but very frosty. But it was two o’clock on Boxing Day morning. There was scarcely a light on in the houses I passed. Those who were still up weren’t going to be driving, I reckoned.’
‘
So no one saw what you did at the cottage?’
‘
No. There wasn’t a soul about. If there had been, I’d just have driven past without stopping.’ He grinned slyly; for just an instant, he was proud of his cleverness.
‘
All right, Joe. What did you do?’
He
looked up at Lambert, for the first time in minutes. For a moment, it looked as if at this key point he was going to deny that he had entered that sinister, silent house. Then he said, ‘I parked round the back. Keane’s Jaguar was still there, with frost all over it, like a dusting of snow. I tried the back door of the cottage. It was still open.’
‘
And was anything different from the way you had left it in the morning, Joe? Had anything been moved?’
He
looked startled by these questions, which he had not expected. ‘I don’t think so. I only had a torch, because I didn’t want to put on any lights in the place. I didn’t go into the lounge, but everything in the kitchen looked just as I’d seen it in the morning.’
‘
And the body hadn’t been moved?’
‘
No. I’m certain of that, because his head was twisted a little to one side, resting on the skirting board. His—his eyes were open, you know.’ He was stilled for a moment by the memory of the staring eyes of the man he had hated, glinting wide and unseeing in the spotlight of his torch beam.
‘
So what did you do with him, Joe?’ It was curious that a voice as quiet as Lambert’s could seem quite so relentless.
‘
I thought for a minute that I might just leave him there, after all. Then I remembered how he had treated me and Debbie, how he had refused even to see me, even to consider the new evidence I was bringing him. So I pulled his legs into the kitchen, to give myself more room to pick him up. I got him over my shoulder and took him out in a fireman’s lift. He was heavy, but I knew I could do it.’ He looked as though he expected to be praised for the huge effort he had made.
‘
Was he easy to move, Joe? He hadn’t stiffened up in the time he had been lying there?’
‘
No. I didn’t notice anything. His face might have been a bit set, but I got him over my shoulder without too much difficulty. And he straightened out again when I threw him into the back of the van.’ Like fresh dead meat, they thought. Which was how Walsh had been treating him.
‘
And then you drove to the place where you dumped the body.’
‘
Yes. I drove very carefully. It was frosty, and there were patches of ice where the road was damp under the trees. But there was no one about, and I made myself take my time.’
Despite
your grim cargo, they thought. It took nerve, even in a man as unbalanced as Walsh was, to drive carefully, with those staring eyes waiting to be discovered behind your shoulders. Lambert’s voice, prompting like the psychiatrist who would surely be assessing this man’s state of mind in the next few days, said, ‘And you knew just where you were taking the body.’
‘
Yes. I’d walked past the pool with Debbie, in the old days, when we used to take picnics out. It seemed, well—appropriate. I’d driven out to check the place exactly during the day. The ground between the pond and the lane was more overgrown than I remembered it. But that seemed a good thing. I found it easily enough that night. There was almost a full moon, you know.’
‘
Yes.’ Lambert remembered Gerald Sangster telling them the same thing about his walk home from the Yates house. ‘Did you leave your van on the road, Joe?’
‘
No. I drove it under the trees, through what had once been a gateway to a track. I didn’t think I could drag him all the way from the lane to the pond. And it meant that if any cars came past, they wouldn’t see my van, under the trees and thirty yards from the road. But nothing did come past while I was there.’
‘
Did it take you long, Joe?’
‘
No. I reversed almost to the edge of the pool, so that the water was below me. Then I pulled him out by his shoulders. I dragged him to the edge of the pond by his feet and flung him as far as I could over the ice.’
Walsh,
who had been all intensity as he lived again through that macabre journey, was now suddenly shaken by silent laughter, until they thought he would dissolve into hysterics. But the internal, silent giggling passed as abruptly as it had arrived. A small smile remained on the pinched face, as it stared at the cassette turning silently in the machine at the side of the square table.
‘
What is it, Joe?’ said Lambert.
‘
He nearly didn’t go into that pond at all, you know. It was frozen and he slid across the surface a little, then stopped there. I thought it was frozen too thick for him to sink. But then it cracked. Like pistol shots, it was, in the quiet of those woods. I watched him disappear. Then I stood for a few minutes, until the patches of ice stopped rocking and came together again, and everything was still.’
They
didn’t remind him about the toggle from his duffle coat. There was no need now. There was a pause before Lambert said, ‘Did you drive straight home from there, Joe?’
He
looked up at them, reluctant for a few seconds to leave that scene he had recreated so vividly in his own mind. ‘Yes. I didn’t see a single vehicle on the way. I remember thinking, “Well, they won’t find Mr Bloody Keane in a hurry now, will they? You’ve done your bit, Joe Walsh.”’
At nine o’clock the next morning, the forensic laboratory rang through with unexpected news. The bristles on the stiff brushes used by Joe Walsh to clean the inside of his van had retained minute fibres. These appeared to be from the sweater taken from Raymond Keane’s body. Chris Rushton received the news philosophically. Ironically, this unexpected bonus finding scarcely mattered, now that that tatterdemalion figure had confirmed the details of Keane’s last journey in his van.
It
was while Lambert was driving the old Vauxhall through the intermittent mists of a still, cold morning that he told Hook who had killed Keane.
The
DS said nothing for a full minute, an interval that was enlivened by his chief’s narrow failure to hit an unkempt sheep, which had heard about the free grazing afforded by the common land in these parts but not about motor cars. ‘Sheep were here before cars were!’ said Bert smugly in response to Lambert’s relieved expletive. Then, as another sheep appeared through the mist on top of a stone wall like the monarch of the glen, he said, ‘Can you prove it?’
Lambert
mused on this, visualizing the actions and reactions of that old CID bugbear, the wily counsel for the defence in a British law court. ‘No, not yet. But I don’t think proof will be necessary, after this morning. I rang from home: they’re expecting us. I shall need your judicious help, as usual, of course.’
The
chief was hoping for a confession, then, thought Hook. Well, they certainly wouldn’t have needed proof with Joe Walsh, if he had done it: he had spilled the beans about his role as accessory quite completely, in the end. But he was a special case, an obsessive excited by the death he had yearned for months to encompass. Hardly your typical murderer.
They
were losing height now, as they passed Robinswood Hill and the road wound along gentle Cotswold slopes. Then the sun burst suddenly upon them, illuminating a huge patch of blue sky which seemed the more brilliant after the previous grey gloom. As the car turned a bend, they caught a glimpse of one of the Severn’s wide, still curves, motionless as blue glass and brilliantly clear. Hook could see the markings on the herd of Herefords that were unexpectedly present on the field which rose steeply to the farm on the far bank.
Unusual
for cattle to be out this early in the year. The farmer must be expecting a mild spell; Bert retained from boyhood a faith in the absolute reliability of farmers where weather was concerned. His mind was reeling from what Lambert had said; as always, he tried to steady it by a contemplation of the natural world, which had so often represented a working release for him during his teenage days in the home, when puberty had added its insistent distractions to the problems of finding out who he was.
There
were few obvious signs of activity in this village which had become a distant suburb of Gloucester: it was that hiatus time when people had gone to work and the children had been safely delivered to school, and the rows of respectable, gardened houses paused to catch their breaths before getting on with the rest of the day’s business. There was no human presence visible as they turned into the cul-de-sac and drove carefully to the house which still had its secrets to reveal.
There
was, however, a large red Mercedes parked in the drive behind the blue Vauxhall Cavalier, Lambert noted with satisfaction. The news of their coming had brought out the third musketeer.
Standing
slightly above them on the stone step of his house, his right hand still on the catch of the door he held half open before them, Dermot Yates affected to be pleased to see them. Bert Hook did not think the pleasure extended to the wide brown eyes, which were within two feet of him; perhaps eyes were, as the romantics said, the windows of the soul.
‘
You’d better come in,’ Yates said. He led them reluctantly through the neat modern hall and into the long lounge, with its three-piece suite and extra armchairs. Gerald Sangster was here, as they had expected when they saw his car, sitting well back in one of the wide, heavy chairs of the suite, smiling a welcome he did not feel, trying to look at ease and unworried by this visit.
Dermot
went to the foot of the stairs and called up to his sister, ‘The policemen are here again, Moira,’ though all of them felt that the invisible woman was well aware that they had arrived. Dermot followed them into the room and sat down, opposite the two supplementary armchairs which were already occupied by the CID. There was an awkward silence. No one wanted to begin without Moira present.
Within
a few seconds, that lady was with them, moving gracefully and unhesitatingly down the length of the room, settling herself elegantly on one side of the settee, composing her long legs and shapely arms without haste, turning her brilliant dark eyes fully towards them only when she was ready. In every sense, she had made an entry.
Her
brother made an attempt to take back the initiative she had seized from him without speaking a word. ‘What can we do for you, Superintendent?’ he said quickly.
‘
I think you can help us to complete our enquiries into the murder of Raymond Arthur Keane,’ said Lambert calmly. ‘If, that is, you are all prepared to be more frank with us than you have been previously. I advise you to be honest this time; we shall arrive at the truth, you see, with or without your assistance. If you do not cooperate, it will merely take a little longer.’
Gerald
Sangster said smoothly, ‘I’m sure no one here has deceived you, Mr Lambert. Not willingly, certainly. It may be that in having to recall events from—’
‘
No!’ Lambert’s monosyllable came like a pistol shot. ‘All three of you have lied, in a deliberate attempt to frustrate the course of justice. If you now plan to continue that policy, you can do it at the station, with your lawyers present if necessary.’
Moira
smiled brilliantly at them from the settee. ‘I’m sure this can all be resolved quite easily. What is it we have said that is troubling you, Superintendent?’
Dermot
Yates flicked up a nervous hand as he attempted to stop her. ‘You can have no quarrel with my sister, surely, gentlemen. And I must remind you that she is still a sick woman, in no condition to be upset by needless arguments.’