Death on the Eleventh Hole (7 page)

He turned and smiled at her. ‘No, it’s not very different. But I suppose I was putting off my thinking about retirement until the last months before I was sixty. It’s just been thrust upon me before I was ready for it.’

‘And you’ve been told to go, rather than waiting for what you thought of as the natural time.’

‘Yes.’ As usual, he was surprised by her perception, though he should have expected it by now. ‘I feel I’ve been declared redundant, identified as surplus to requirements, instead of going in my own time.’

‘You shouldn’t feel that. I thought you said the CC said it was very much against his own wishes.’

‘Yes. And I believed him. It was a central directive, he said.’

‘So he had no choice.’

‘No. And it happens to people every day. People in much worse situations than me. I know that. It should alter the feeling of rejection, but it doesn’t.’

Christine was surprised by their closeness now, by his willingness to talk about this. For years when he was younger, he had shut her out from his work, so that they had almost split up because of his fierce, single-minded dedication to it. She slipped her arm through his. ‘You helped me through the mastectomy and the heart bypass. I’ll just have to help you through this.’

John Lambert was suddenly ashamed of himself. ‘There’s no comparison, is there? Those were much more serious things. Matters of life and death.’

‘You certainly behaved as though they were, at the time, you old softie! But it was a big help to me that you wanted me to survive so much.’ She squeezed his arm. ‘Come on, show me round our garden. Tell me what’s happening.’

He showed her the sea of promising buds on the roses, found for her the two that were already showing colour. They looked at the branches he had layered from their two choice rhododendrons, and decided together that they had rooted. He would need to spray for greenfly some time during the next week, he said, when the exigencies of this Kate Wharton murder case allowed the time.

Once she had him thinking again about the future, she was content to let him lead her from the cool twilight into the warmth of the bungalow. He had the tall man’s slight stoop, the stiffness in his movements that she had only noticed in the last year or two. He had a lot of life to live yet, she hoped, but he was ready for retirement. But you couldn’t expect him to see that.

She observed his grey head over the
Times
crossword when he thought she was watching television, took care not to be too assiduous in her attentions when she made a drink at ten thirty. They grinned at each other as they left the lounge, and he said, ‘I’m lucky really, aren’t I, old girl?’

He knew that it was a title she hated, and they giggled as she punched at his ribs in the darkness. An hour later, after they had made love, Christine muttered sleepily into his ear, ‘You’re right, you old fool, you’re lucky. But perhaps I am, as well.’ Then she fell quickly asleep.

At half past three, John Lambert was staring at the invisible ceiling, contemplating the empty years ahead with something like panic, and wondering when the dawn would come.

Eight

The post-mortem report on Kate Wharton gave a few new facts, but mainly confirmed what the leaders of the police team already suspected.

Hook had discovered the body on the golf course at 6.30 on the evening of Monday 7th of May. Death had taken place around twenty-four hours earlier — possibly a little less, but the dumping of the body face upwards in a ditch, with the back of both the torso and the lower limbs in two inches of water, made the progress of rigor mortis a difficult factor to compute.

This made the likeliest time for dumping the body the night before it was found, but so far no one had come forward to record the sighting of a suspicious vehicle on the lane which passed the ditch on the eleventh. This ran through the hamlet of Kempley and connected the Newent-Hereford B road with the village of Dymock. It was a quiet, winding lane, which carried little traffic save at the beginning and end of the normal working day.

Kate Wharton had not been killed where her body was discovered. She had been lifted after death; slight blackening around the left armpit and on the back of the left thigh indicated that the lifting had probably been done by one person, though there was no certainty about that.

She had been killed by the application of a ligature around her neck. This was almost certainly a smooth cord or wire rather than a coarse rope, since no fibres had been found on the throat. The wire had been vigorously applied, probably from the rear, and death would have occurred within seconds. This had probably been preceded by a struggle, since there were tiny skin samples and a single hair under the girl’s fingernails, which had been retained for DNA sampling in the event of an arrest.

Hook, listening gravely with Rushton as Lambert took them through the report, said, ‘It wasn’t premeditated, then. Not if they had a fight beforehand.’

‘Maybe she just saw the wire and realized what he had in mind,’ said Lambert. ‘Or perhaps he didn’t originally intend to kill her, but found she wouldn’t agree to what he wanted. He had a wire or cord conveniently at hand to kill her with. Maybe that was his last resort.’

‘What he wanted probably wasn’t sex,’ said Hook. Looking further down his photocopy of the PM report, he found a few baldly stated facts which no doubt summarized years of emotional encounters. There was no evidence of recent sexual intercourse. The girl was not pregnant, and never had been. But the organs indicated that she had had considerable sexual experience.

Rushton nodded at that point. ‘She was on the game, apparently,’ he said. He gave his account of what the peroxided prostitute had told him on the previous afternoon, as they dried dishes together in the kitchen of St Anne’s House.

Lambert regarded him curiously for a moment, then commended his initiative in visiting the refuge run by Father Gillespie. He knew St Anne’s House himself, as did Hook, and wondered what the rather strait-laced, straight-thinking Rushton had made of the place and its occupants. He asked, ‘Have we confirmed the address for Kate Wharton?’

‘Yes. It’s the one Mrs Eastham gave us on Tuesday. Matthew Street, Gloucester. There’s a Scene of Crime team in there now.’

Lambert nodded. ‘There’s something odd there. The girl old Ma Eastham said she shared the flat with hasn’t come forward.’

Rushton pressed a couple of buttons on his computer. ‘Tracey Boyd. Yes, she should have been the first one to notice any absence. But she still hasn’t been in touch with us. And Kate Wharton’s name is carried in all the papers this morning. It was probably in the
Gloucester
Citizen
and on the television news last night. We released it at noon yesterday, after her mother had made the official identification.’

Lambert made a note of Tracey Boyd’s name and the number of the house in Matthew Street. ‘There may be some simple, innocent explanation for that: she might just have been away for a long weekend, or thought that Kate Wharton was away. But Bert and I will need to have a word with Miss Boyd.’

Bert Hook said, ‘The mother needs investigating. I’ve seen her twice, though not for questioning: the first time was to inform her of the death, the second was to take her for the identification, so I couldn’t press her much. Either she masks her feelings exceptionally well, or she’s very little affected by this death. I can’t make up my mind which.’

Lambert looked at him gravely. It was very unusual for the stolid but surprisingly perceptive Hook to be baffled like this. ‘Obviously you couldn’t probe much, in those circumstances. But we’ll need to get to the bottom of how she feels and how much she knows about this death.’

Bert said diffidently, ‘There is one thing I noticed. There was no man around on either of the occasions I visited her house: that’s hardly surprising, since each time it was during the day. However, she gave me the impression she lived alone, and there was nothing in her living room to suggest a man. But when I went to collect her yesterday morning, there were men’s clothes drying on the washing line.’

Lambert nodded slowly. ‘There’s no surprise that there should be a man around a youngish widow’s skirts, whether permanently or temporarily. But as you say, the fact that she seems to be trying to conceal it may have some interest for us. We’ll need to check he had no connection with the murder, whether Mrs Wharton likes it or not.’

‘Kate Wharton had a boyfriend,’ said Chris Rushton suddenly.

Lambert raised his eyebrows. ‘And who told us that?’

His DI almost blushed as he explained how he had convinced Father Gillespie that the police must have whatever information they could get from his guests. ‘It was the prostitute who told me Kate had been on the game. It was a lad who was washing the dishes, a drug-user, who told me about the boyfriend. Joe Ashton, he calls himself. According to the lad who told me, he lives in a squat in Sebastopol Terrace in Gloucester.’

‘Did you check that out?’

‘I tried to. I went round to the house, but there was no one there at all. But it is in use as a squat.’

‘Perhaps I should leave you in charge more often, Chris. You seem to have brought information tumbling in. Anything else?’

Chris Rushton tried to look modest. ‘There is, actually. But it’s not necessarily going to be helpful. Not in making an arrest, I mean.’

Lambert thought he had an inkling of what was coming. ‘Let’s have it, Chris.’

‘When I got back from Gloucester, a pal of mine from years back came in here. He’s a sergeant in the Drugs Squad now.’

‘And he said Kate Wharton was a user.’

‘A user and a dealer. And he said she had a row with her supplier. He doesn’t know what it was about, but thought it looked serious.’

‘When was this?’

‘On the night of Monday the 30th April. In a pub near the docks in Gloucester. Six days before she was killed.’

‘Who’s the supplier?’

‘Bloke called Malcolm Flynn. But there’s the usual Drugs Squad proviso. We mustn’t approach Flynn without prior consultation.’

Lambert smiled grimly. ‘We can’t jeopardize your mate’s cover. We mustn’t even risk doing that. But somehow someone’s going to have to follow this up, unless we find that this death definitely isn’t drug-related. But leave that with me: it’s my problem.’

Rushton tried not to look too relieved. ‘If some drug baron thinks that Kate Wharton threatened the security of his organization, it won’t be much use talking to Malcolm Flynn. He might not even know who killed her, if they brought in a contract killer.’

‘But we shall almost certainly need to speak to Flynn, to establish whether that’s what happened. If he passed a report upstairs about her, that could have set the process in motion.’ John Lambert pursed his lips. ‘The time interval between Monday and Sunday is about right, for them to bring in a contract killer and him to size up her situation and his opportunity.’

They were silent for a moment, each of them hoping this was not the method by which Kate Wharton had died, knowing that the possibility of an arrest was slim, if this was one of the anonymous deaths perpetrated by the black industry of illegal narcotics.

They were beginning the process of finding out about the life the dead girl had led, the life she could never tell them about herself. In twenty-four hours, they would know a lot more about Kate Wharton, but she was already emerging as an isolated, vulnerable figure.

***

Joe Ashton put his head under the cold tap in the old wash-house at the back of the building. It was the only water they had in the squat. When the house itself had been cut off, the water-board engineers had overlooked this long-disused supply, with a pipe coming in directly from the mains. Probably it was too ancient to appear on any of their charts.

His mouth felt like sandpaper and his head throbbed. He shouldn’t have tooted that heroin last night, not when he had kicked the stuff into touch for good. But already he could feel the craving again in his brain, sense the throbbing insistence of his veins for more of the same. He knew the score, knew what lay ahead of him if he went after the horse again. You didn’t go through the humiliations of the cure without reaching rock-bottom, without learning how terrifyingly easy it was to slip back to that nadir.

Trouble was, half of him wanted to do that. To kill himself with the stuff, if it came to it — and it would. More than half of him wanted out, now. Since Kate, he wanted to cripple his intelligence, to swamp a mind which had returned to logic and reason with a new derangement.

That small part of his mind that was still functioning normally recalled the sickness, diarrhoea and humiliation of his reclamation, the cold sweats as he ground his forehead into the carpet. He knew that he should do something to save himself, put his fate into other hands than his own destructive ones. But where? And what could he do? He had tried going to see Father Gillespie, who had helped him before, who had brought him out of the sewer of despair without once mentioning God. But how could he stay at St Anne’s, after Kate? How could he accept help, after Kate? Sooner or later, someone would start asking questions, someone would seek him out and demand to know what had happened.

He heard a sound at the front of the house. Someone was there. A user of the squat, like himself? He didn’t know all of them. He had been here for months now, but people came and went. No one asked any questions, which was why he had come here, why he had been allowed to stay.

There was the sound again. Footsteps. You could hear them, because there were no internal doors left in the place. They had all been burned for warmth, during the winter. He wondered how long that presence had been in the house. Perhaps for many minutes, before he caught the sound; his hearing, like his other faculties, was affected by the drugs. He knew more about what coke and horse did to you than most addicts. He had taken the cure, hadn’t he?

Perhaps if he stayed out here they would think there was no one in the place and go away, like that smart bloke in the suit had done yesterday. He found himself cowering in the cobwebbed corner of the old wash-house, his buttocks on the damp flagged floor and his head between his bony knees. He clasped his arms across his chest, tried to pull down the tiny sleeve of his T-shirt over the bruising on his arms. The goose-pimples on his forearms reared before his eyes in hideous close-up two inches from his eyes, the hairs rising from them like the limbless trees of a First World War battlefield.

He hadn’t felt that the May morning was cold when he came out here. Now he could not control the violent shivering which had taken him over.

If they didn’t come into this little brick outhouse, they would scarcely see him through the single window, which was so filthy that it let in very little light. There wasn’t much of the door left — most of it had gone for firewood —but that made the place look more derelict from the outside.

Then Joe heard something which chilled his racing, corrupted blood. It was the sound of his own name, called softly through the big, three-storeyed house across the yard.

They were going to find him, he was certain. He heard the name being called up the rickety staircase, then the sound of cautious steps ascending. There was more than one of them. He thought he heard his name again, more distant, echoing from the high ceilings of the upper rooms of the old house.

He could run for it now, while they were up there. He must run for it. He could be over the back wall, through the house in the terrace behind which was also a squat, away into the centre of the city, burying himself if necessary among the other derelicts there. There was safety in numbers, for someone like him.

But when he tried to lever himself up, his right leg gave way like a stick. He tried again, but all he got from both of his legs was a ridiculous, exaggerated, trembling: they were like the legs of a sleeping dog, which were moved only by dreams. He sank back, feeling the damp again on his bottom, shutting his eyes against the nightmare vision of the goose-pimples on the arms he clasped across his chest.

Perhaps they wouldn’t notice him, after all. He lost his sense of time. It seemed to Joe, with his head thrust deep into his chest and his arms over his eyes, that it was a long, long time since he had first heard the noises in the house. Perhaps they had gone now. But he mustn’t move yet. He must stay here and not move at all, not even a muscle, until he was sure that it was safe. But he felt his limbs trembling, felt that they were moving out of his control. His head was raging and his thirst seemed to be not just in his mouth, but in his throat, reaching downwards into his chest, beginning to dry out his whole body.