Death on the Eleventh Hole (13 page)

For the first time, she showed the anger he had been looking to provoke. ‘Yes, I know about the rape accusation. As it happens, we don’t have secrets from each other. What is this, character assassination?’

Lambert shrugged, as impassive now as she had been when she talked so coolly about her dead daughter. ‘You might not have known. Most women would be anxious to hear the truth about a man they intended to marry. But I’m glad the man has been honest, in this case.’

‘He came back here and made a new beginning. Got himself a job with the Forestry Commission, worked hard, held it down. Roy turned over a new leaf. That’s what people are supposed to do when they’ve been in stir, isn’t it?’

‘Indeed it is, Mrs Wharton. And I’m glad he’s been so frank with you. I’m sure you’re a great help in keeping him to his new way of life.’

She looked at him suspiciously, her face flushed within the neat frame of short dark hair. She thought she had caught a note of irony, but there was no smile on the long, watchful face. ‘We get on well, Roy and I. He makes no secret of the fact that he was a rough diamond when he was younger.’

Lambert thought that the things he had done made him a little more than that. But love in early middle age, whilst it may not have the blindness of youth, will yet turn a blind eye to things it wishes to ignore. ‘So as far as you know, Mr Cook has had no trouble with women since he came back to this area?’

Julie Wharton had recovered her composure now. She could think clearly, and she realized they wouldn’t be questioning her like this unless they had Roy in the frame for Kate’s murder. Just like the police, to go for the man with the previous record! Take the easy way, whether or not it was the correct way. This was the moment when she must support her man.

She wished at this moment that Roy was here, sitting by her side, that he could hear the conviction she put into her voice as she said, ‘Superintendent Lambert, Roy’s learned his lesson; he’s a changed man. He doesn’t look at women, apart from me. You won’t see him in court again.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. We’re always glad to hear of the reformed sinner, believe it or not.’ This time he did smile. Then he cleared his throat and said, ‘Why did he move out of this house four years ago?’

She was shocked by the suddenness of this, as he had intended she should be. She forced herself to think rather than reply in anger. She didn’t know exactly what Roy had already conceded to them. She could make something up, but these two had caught her out in a lie last time they had been here, and lies only attracted attention to the very areas you wanted to conceal. She bought herself a little time by replying stiffly, ‘I don’t think this is any of your business.’

‘Even if it has a bearing on your daughter’s death?’

‘It has no connection with that. But since you seem determined to ferret it out, Roy made a pass at Kate.’ There, she had said it. If Roy had already let out this to them, they couldn’t trip her up.

There was a heavy silence, during which she was conscious of both men studying her flushed face whilst she tried to look unconcerned. ‘A serious pass, obviously, if you flung him out of your house for it,’ Lambert commented.

Julie was glad to find she could think so clearly, in this crisis. Kate wasn’t here to give her version of that awful day, and Roy was sure to play it down, if the police confronted him with it. She would tell Roy exactly what she’d said, as soon as she got the chance — before these jackals got to him, certainly. She said calmly, ‘Looking back at it, it was something and nothing. I overreacted.’

‘That doesn’t seem characteristic of you, if I may say so. Anyone who took someone who had beaten up and raped other women into her bed would hardly be likely to overreact.’

‘Well, I did. Women in love do strange and illogical things, as you may know — or haven’t either of you ever been in love?’

‘So you flung him out for some minor assault on your daughter’s virtue. Stole a kiss, did he?’

‘Not much more than that.’ She tried not to hear Kate’s long, anguished scream, not to picture the scene when she herself had come back into the house on that day. ‘Kate was a pretty young girl of eighteen with developing curves, who favoured short skirts. Roy is a red-blooded male. I should have seen that he would be tempted. It was something and nothing, really. Kate overreacted, and so did I.’

For the hundredth time since this death, Julie found herself asking forgiveness from the shade of her dead daughter. She had to say these things, to protect the man she loved.

Lambert’s eyes had never left her face. ‘I see. So on the strength of what you describe as a minor incident, you flung him out of your house.’

It was the second time he had used that phrase, as if he was determined to provoke her. She couldn’t explain it by saying that this minor incident came from a man who had raped and assaulted different women before: she had played that down a few minutes earlier. She said, ‘We wouldn’t have got back together if it had been anything very serious, would we?’

Except, of course, that she could not do without the feeling of Roy inside her, couldn’t do without the violent, almost vicious, sex he had brought to her, the thing which brought her alive, made it impossible for her to think of him in some other woman’s bed. But they wouldn’t divine that, would they, these sluggish men, with their passions under tight control?

Lambert’s continuous, unembarrassed study of her face made her feel that he saw everything, that he read her every thought, even though she knew that was impossible. ‘Is that why Kate left home?’ he asked.

They had come back to this again. She must pretend again that Kate meant nothing to her, as she had done from the start. ‘No. It was about that time, but it was a variety of things. She wanted the freedom of being on her own, as young people do. It was nothing to do with Roy’s forgetting himself for a moment.’

Forgive me, dead daughter, I have to do this. This is the man I love, God help me.

‘I see. The timing was just a coincidence. Better make a note of that, Sergeant Hook.’

This time she was sure as she watched Hook’s clear, round hand that Lambert was taunting her. But whatever they thought, she didn’t see how they could get any other version of events, with Kate gone; Roy would certainly play it down as much as she had done.

They rose to go, and she relaxed. Then Lambert, using a favourite tactic of throwing in a key question when his subject thought the exchanges were over, said casually, ‘Did Mr Cook see Kate again, after she’d left home?’

‘No, of course he didn’t. Once a young woman has made an absurd fuss over a playful gesture, you steer well clear, don’t you?’

‘I expect you do, if you’ve any sense, yes. Goodbye for the present, Mrs Wharton.’

Julie was glad she’d given Roy her mobile phone. She was able to ring him as soon as the police car turned out of the close.

Sitting in the passenger seat of Lambert’s old Vauxhall, Bert Hook put the hair carefully into a small plastic bag. This hair from Roy Cook’s armchair would go to forensic, like the hair he had taken from Joe Ashton’s mattress. You had to help the law along a little, at times. If there was no DNA match with the tissue samples taken from beneath the dead girl’s fingernails, it might help to eliminate innocent men from the investigation. If there was, it would bring them back very swiftly to know the reason for the match.

***

Malcolm Flynn had no idea that he had been connected in police minds with the death of Kate Wharton.

He had not seen her again after their argument in the pub near Gloucester docks on the night of Monday 30th April, when she announced that she was no longer dealing in drugs and proposed to cut her associations with the trade. He had read the accounts of her death with interest, and had speculated privately about how that death had come about.

That was as far as he had allowed his curiosity to run. In his dark trade, you didn’t speculate publicly about how the small people at the fringe of the industry might have met their ends.

On this Saturday night, twelve days after he had last seen Kate Wharton, he had more important work in hand. Two of his dealers were collecting their supplies. You didn’t do this kind of thing around pubs: you might meet people there, might negotiate with individuals, but when you were carrying large quantities of illegal drugs, you needed quieter places, where you could more easily forecast the numbers and the types of people around.

This depot for wholesale building supplies was neither derelict nor disused, like some of the other places they used. But as a dropping zone for drugs, it had two big advantages. First, it was not in a cul de sac: dead ends allowed you to be trapped with no escape by the police, in the unlikely event of a tip-off. Malcolm could drive slowly past the deserted entrance to this building and, if he saw anything amiss, any vehicle which should not have been there, he could simply continue upon his way like an innocent citizen. Secondly, the fact that this yard was a busy centre of activity all week meant that it was not considered a likely rendezvous for more dubious dealings, whereas some of the derelict warehouses in industrial wastelands had been exciting the interest of the Drugs Squad of late. This place was quiet as the tomb on a Saturday night, but not thought of as deserted by the police and the public at large. He had used it at irregular intervals for almost a year now.

Malcolm turned his van slowly into the wide street between the high buildings. This was the time of high danger for him: if you were stopped with illegal narcotics with a street value of over a hundred thousand pounds in the back of your van, you were in trouble, whatever story you might come up with. The risk/return ratio was what had drawn him into this trade: you took what you saw as a small amount of risk in return for lucrative pickings. But these were the times when you took the risk. He would have every nerve attuned for the next fifteen minutes or so.

Everything was as he had expected. He stopped for a moment, inspecting the street ahead, checking his watch. Through the quiet air above the old city, he caught the sound of a church clock striking eleven. The hour when the pubs would be emptying; when the police would be occupied with noisy Saturday-night revellers and drunken brawls; the hour arranged for his drop. He eased the van gently forward.

The deserted street was inadequately lit, and the lamp nearest to the entrance to the building supplies centre was conveniently inoperative. The wide entrance to the yard, set back from the road to allow entry for the heavy lorries which moved in and out continually through the week, was almost in darkness.

He switched off the power and freewheeled the van the last few feet into this semi-circle of shadow. This moment with the handbrake on and the van at rest was always the worst, when you felt absolutely helpless and the seconds stretched like minutes.

The muffled knock on the side of the van came in less than a minute. It was a tiny rap, but it blared like the trumpet of doom in the ears of a man who had once been a God-fearing child. Malcolm, although he had been waiting for the sound, although he was in fact relieved by it, started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons. He had read that, some time long ago; the phrase he thought he had forgotten came thudding into his mind as he struggled out of the driver’s door.

The others were more frightened than he was, and that, in a curious, illogical way helped to calm him. He was the senior man here, the man who controlled their destinies: he had better show some composure, some grasp of the situation.

There was only one man there when he slid out from the driver’s seat, but a second figure, then a third materialized from the shadows before he had opened the rear doors. They wore dark clothing, and hooded their faces like conspirators, but he checked each of the white faces in turn. Two males and a female. They were the ones he had expected. It was going according to plan, as he assured them at each meeting that it would.

The words exchanged were kept to a minimum. No one wanted to be kept at this point of exchange, the most dangerous one of all, for any longer than he or she could help. They conversed in hoarse, urgent whispers. Ecstasy, cocaine, crack, heroin: the stable products of this dark industry. And the new ‘date-rape’ drug, Rohypnol, swift in its effects and undetectable a few hours later, was much in demand: each of the four wanted more than he could supply.

He had cleared almost everything from his van and the group was about to split up as silently as it had assembled when all hell was let loose.

The tall gates of the yard, which they had thought securely padlocked as usual for the weekend, swung suddenly open, and there was a single yell of ‘Armed police! Stay exactly where you are and raise your hands!’ followed by a confusion of other shouts as dark-clad cops swarmed like black bees from the offices which had seemed empty. The manic wail of sirens tore the quiet night apart, and two police vehicles arrived from each end of the street they had thought was safely deserted.

Malcolm Flynn, splayed like an obscene starfish over the warm bonnet of his van, felt hands running up the inside of his thighs and beneath his arms to make sure he carried no weapon. He turned when he was bidden, saw in the harsh white of the police headlamps the microphone which had been recording his whispered dealings, high on the gate above him.

The risk ratio did not seem so favourable now. Malcolm Flynn wondered as he sat between two impassive constables on the back seat of a police car how many years inside his easy pickings would cost him.