Death on the Eleventh Hole (5 page)

He had not expected anything, of course. Perhaps the police would never even come to see him. He drove home to his wife with a dozen greenhouse carnations, and gave her conversation more than his usual attention.

Six

Chris Rushton locked his car carefully outside St Anne’s House in Gloucester. The big, shabby house was in the red-light district and he was glad that it was daylight now. He was relieved also as he went into the place that he was in plain clothes. The people he saw moving about in the place were the sort who would have shown instant hostility to a police uniform.

It was easy enough to distinguish the voluntary helpers from the clients the place was trying to help. An elderly woman was listening patiently to a white-faced, shifty-looking man who was almost six feet tall and looked as if he weighed less than nine stones. She directed Rushton to Father Gillespie’s room without a curious glance and turned back to the man who looked as if he would not live out the year.

The inspector found the priest kneeling in prayer with an emaciated girl, who was probably eighteen but looked fourteen. Rushton stood awkwardly outside the open door until they had finished. Father Gillespie must have been aware of him, but he did not divert his attention from the girl. He said as they stood up, ‘You were fine today, Annie. You ate enough to keep body and soul together. And we’ve just given a little food to your soul, haven’t we? I think you’ll find Eileen downstairs. Have a talk with her and see what she feels about things.’

The girl nodded, then retreated through the door without a word, keeping her front towards the priest like one retreating from a royal personage. She would have backed into Rushton if he had not stepped quickly aside. Once in the passageway, she turned without looking at the inspector and moved away in a rapid shuffle, with the heels of her slippers never leaving the ground.

The priest was small and wiry. He wore baggy, stained trousers and was in shirt sleeves; a dog collar sat oddly above an old sleeveless pullover. He looked at the girl’s retreating back for a moment, then shook his shoulders and made a visible effort to change roles and speak to Rushton. ‘Jason Gillespie.’ He held out his hand. ‘Father Jason Gillespie, as you can see from the dog collar. I tried to do without it, when we started this place, but our guests like it. They like a clergyman to wear his badge, so that they know where they stand. It’s saved me from being thumped, more than once. Old habits die hard, even when life gets desperate.’

Chris Rushton accepted the firm handshake, already after the briefest of views filled with admiration for a man doing good work he knew he could never have done. ‘You said you had something to tell me,’ he prompted awkwardly. ‘Something connected with the murder of Kate Wharton.’

‘That’s her name, is it? Poor girl.’ There was something more than conventional regret in the phrase.

The priest was probably about forty, but he looked older because, despite a determinedly cheerful face and bearing, there was an infinite sadness for the fallibility of human nature in his wide brown eyes. He said, ‘I’ll need to tell you a little about the way we operate here, so bear with me. We aim to get our visitors off the streets and into eventual detoxification. We provide accommodation, a meal together at one o’clock each day, a day-centre for those who want to visit but not stay here. We tend to get people who haven’t any sense of belonging — most of them from adolescence onwards. We try to give them the family environment they don’t have, a feeling of trust and respect.’

‘Are most of your clients — sorry, visitors — young people?’

‘About half and half. We try to separate young people from older users. They are more reclaimable. But we measure success in a different way from the world at large. If someone this week has only taken cocaine three times instead of seven, that is an achievement we applaud. If someone accepts a detoxification programme and sticks to it, that is a triumph.’

‘So most of your visitors are drug addicts.’

‘Most, but not all. Some are young people who’ve spent virtually all their lives in the care of the social services, others are no longer in contact with their families. They tend already to be petty criminals. But some are just unable to cope with the deal life has given them. Annie, whom you saw leaving just now, nearly died from anorexia. Someone carried her here from a squat.’

The priest’s enthusiasm rose as he spoke about the work of the centre, but Chris Rushton had a feeling of moving further and further out of his depth. He was full of admiration for people who did work like this, but he had joined the police force because he had a passion for order. All policemen had to play things by the book, and Chris found that an advantage, not a restriction. Lambert had spotted a strength in him when he put him in charge of the administration of serious crime cases: Rushton felt most at home filing information and cross-referencing on his computer.

Now, looking at the work of St Anne’s House, he felt the panic all of us feel when we contemplate good work we could not possibly achieve ourselves. He took a deep breath and said, ‘And you feel that one of your visitors might have strangled Kate Wharton and dumped her body on the golf course?’

The old-young, experienced face above the dog-collar clouded. ‘I’m not sure I’d put it as strongly as that. It’s more that I don’t know what to think. Let me explain. The boy I’m talking about is Joe. I don’t even know if that is his real name: it was the one he gave us and stuck to, and we never pry. Joe was an addict. Cocaine first and then heroin. I think he’d have been dead before he was thirty, if the progress of his addiction hadn’t been arrested.’

‘But it was.’

Father Gillespie nodded, his face brightening a little at the recollection. ‘We can’t claim all the credit. He says there was a girl involved.’

‘Kate Wharton.’

‘I don’t know. I think it might have been.’

‘Father, you have to understand, this is a murder inquiry. You must tell me all you know, even if it comes from within the confessional.’

The priest almost laughed aloud. ‘There was nothing like that involved. We don’t even ask about religion, here. If the question is raised, it comes from our guests. Joe never raised it.’

‘So give me the full story.’

The priest sat down and put his hands together; even the act of sitting still seemed to be an effort for this constantly active man. He nodded three or four times, but not at DI Rushton; it was as though he was convincing himself once again that he should speak about this. ‘Joe presented himself here about two years ago. He was brought in by another boy. He was tooting — smoking heroin — every day, and sometimes snorting and injecting as well. He was stealing to support the habit and spiralling rapidly downwards. He stayed here for a little while.’

‘And you were able to get him off the heroin?’

Jason Gillespie smiled at the drastic over-simplification of six fraught months in a young man’s life. ‘Not completely. And not me. I put him with people who were already kicking the habit, people who had gone through the sickness and diarrhoea and all the other humiliations of reform, and come back here to help others. Eventually Joe listened. He registered as an addict and got his supplies at the medical centre. The first and the biggest step towards getting rid of addiction.’

Chris Rushton tried not to show his impatience with this earnest elf of a man. This Joe might be the murderer they sought, revealed by Detective Inspector Rushton on the first real day of the investigation, without any help from the vast police machine of a murder hunt, without the famous intuition of bloody John Lambert. ‘So where is Joe now, Father?’

‘I don’t know. He stopped coming here about a year ago. At first I thought he might have slipped back into his old ways, but other lads who came in here said he hadn’t. He came in once more about six months ago, told me he’d got a girl, that he was going to take the cure course, that he was going to be all right. He looked a lot better, but we take nothing for granted; we’ve seen too many people slip back to the depths.’

‘But something must have happened since then, or you wouldn’t have rung me this morning.’

‘Yes. Joe turned up here unexpectedly last Monday afternoon. He was in a bad state. He’d been on the heroin again. I think it was a one-off. I think he’s kicked the habit, but under stress he’d smoked a bit of horse again.’

Chris tried not to show his impatience. Father Gillespie might be concerned about the reversion of an addict he thought he had reclaimed, but this sounded more and more like his man. Whether the violent little sod had kicked back into heroin was a minor matter, in the face of a murder charge. ‘What did he say to you which made you suspicious, Father?’

‘Nothing, at the time. I didn’t know about the death of this young girl, then. Joe was raving about the row he’d had with his girl, about the awful mistake he’d made. He wasn’t very coherent, because of his emotion and the horse he’d smoked. I didn’t press him for information, just tried to calm him. But when I read about the discovery of this body, I had awful thoughts about Joe. He shouted the girl’s name at me when he was in tears. I’m sure it was Kate.’

They stood staring at each other across the shabby room, the priest aghast at the revelation he had finally prised from himself, the inspector trying not to show his rising excitement. Chris kept his voice even as he said, ‘Where is Joe now, Father?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since Monday. I wanted him to stay for a meal, but he disappeared and—’

‘What’s his address?’

‘I don’t know. It’s one of our rules that we never press the people who come here for information. They have to trust us. If they choose to—’

‘Is there anyone around who would know where he is now?’

Jason Gillespie thought furiously for a moment, weighing his role as priest and the man in charge of this refuge for derelict lives against a crime more serious than anything even he had come across before. Murder won, as it had to in these circumstances. He produced an unexpected grin as he said to Chris Rushton, ‘How are you with washing up, Inspector?’

‘Well used to it. I live on my own.’ For just an instant, the divorced and lonely man felt the attraction he would never admit to of a place like this, with its offers of casual camaraderie, of support without commitment.

‘Come with me, then.’ The priest was suddenly back on his own ground and confident again. He bustled out of the room and down two flights of stairs, to a large, stone-flagged kitchen with a huge earthenware sink and long wooden draining boards on either side of it. Rushton realized that this must be the original kitchen of the Victorian house, where a head cook had once presided and the servants had gathered to eat and relax.

A man with a string vest above paint-smeared denims was washing crockery and piling it along the draining boards, more quickly than the peroxide blonde woman of about thirty could dry them and stack them on the table behind her. The youth at the sink had the puncture marks on his inner arms and the woman had the livid bruising of her forearms that spoke of drug injections. Father Gillespie said, ‘You need help with that, Ally,’ picked up a pot towel himself and handed another one to Rushton, who hung his jacket carefully behind the door and donned a glassy smile.

They wiped plates and dishes assiduously for a few moments. Then the priest said, ‘Chris is a copper.’

Both of the drug users glanced sharply at the inspector in his immaculate white shirtsleeves, but they plainly trusted Jason Gillespie, who said with a grin, ‘The way you two go on, you could do with a friend at the nick!’

Nothing was said for a few minutes. Rushton had the sense not to try to ingratiate himself. He said nothing and waited for the priest to make the next move. Father Gillespie polished a plate assiduously, set it on top of a pile on the table, and said, ‘Ally knew poor Kate Wharton, didn’t you, Ally?’

The woman glanced at Rushton from watery blue eyes. ‘She was a good kid, Kate. It wasn’t her fault she had to earn her living the way she did. Going to get the bastard who did for her, are you? Or do toms not count as victims?’

So the dead girl had been a prostitute. It didn’t surprise Rushton, but he registered it as another fact in the dossier they were building about the dead girl. An important one, in all probability. ‘We’ll get whoever did this,’ he said, ‘however long it takes, Ally.’

He meant it, and his voice must have carried conviction, for the peroxided woman, who was obviously herself a prostitute, gave a nod of satisfaction and went back to her drying. Priest and inspector found themselves spinning out the task to allow the conversation to continue, assessing the diminishing piles of crockery on the draining boards to allow themselves time for the exchanges they needed. After another couple of minutes, Father Gillespie said, ‘Joe Ashton was in here on Monday. Did either of you see him?’

The young man and the older woman both said promptly and with some relief that they hadn’t been at St Anne’s House on Monday afternoon. There was a further interval before the priest said, ‘Does either of you know where Joe’s living, now?’

Both of them turned abruptly to look at him. They didn’t like questions, about themselves or other people like them, and this was a direct one, with a copper standing there beside the questioner. But the trust the priest had built up over the months held. He looked the woman steadily in the face and said, ‘This is murder, Ally. We need to give people like Chris our help if they’re to find out who killed Kate.’

She looked at him white-faced, then gave the briefest of nods and went back to her drying. It was the man with his back to them and his hands in the grey and greasy water of the sink who spoke. ‘The last I heard, Joe Ashton was in a squat in the city. Sebastopol Terrace, I think it was.’