Malice Aforethought (14 page)

It should have been a confession of weakness, but he said it almost proudly. Lambert said, ‘The tom you picked up in Birmingham. Why so far from home?’

‘Because I wanted to be a long way from where anyone might know me. Anyone who might spot Colin Pitman picking up a tart!’ The self-loathing again; there was a fascination with his own weakness as well as a hatred of that part of himself. ‘Anyway, I can be in Birmingham in less than an hour from my house.’

‘Was this a regular arrangement?’

‘No. Of course it wasn’t. Once in a while, I get lonely. Lonely and randy, if you want it all. I should have thought that much was obvious from what I’ve said.’

‘I see. It’s just that if it had been a regular arrangement with the same girl, it would have made it easier for us to check your story out. We shall still have to do that, you know. A man was murdered during the hours we’re speaking of, a man you told us quite openly you hated.’

Pitman shrugged his huge shoulders, then allowed them to slump forward. It was as though the act of confession had exhausted him.

Hook wanted to tell him that they came across greater weaknesses and much greater evils than this. Instead, they took the details of the prostitute and the time he had spent with her. It had been drizzling with rain as he cruised the streets of the sprawling industrial city. The woman was probably in her early thirties, with longish dark hair. She had a room with a gas fire and a single bed. And a picture of the Queen on the wall above the bed, surveying the actions of this obscure subject of hers. It was the only original detail Pitman offered them. He gave the impression that once he had made his concession to the persistent demands of his loins, he hadn’t noticed a great deal about his partner or her surroundings while taking his dubious pleasure.

Perhaps he hadn’t, but it wouldn’t make it easy to find the woman who might give him an alibi for that November night.

When they had gone, Colin Pitman sat and looked at the wall for a long time. He didn’t trust the police to keep the secret of what he had just told them. Even if they tried, it would have to come out sooner or later, as they tested one person’s story against another. It was a murder investigation, as they kept reminding him. He picked up the phone, made sure that he had an outside line, that no one in the outer office was listening. The phone rang so long that he thought Sue was not in. Then, just when he was wondering why she had not put the answerphone on, his daughter picked up the phone. She must have come from a distance; he could hear her breathlessness as she gave her name.

He said tersely, ‘It’s Dad, Sue. The police have been here again. They’ve rumbled that I wasn’t here on that Saturday night. You’d better hear what I’ve had to tell them.’

***

The notice over the bed said in red capital letters NIL BY MOUTH. As if she were an animal, not able to speak for herself, thought John Lambert. The letters seemed to grow larger as he sat by the bed, until they vibrated with a life of their own, depriving him of the power of speech and the ability to think rationally.

‘There’s plenty of bread in the freezer,’ said Christine, desperately terminating a long pause, ‘but don’t you go living on just toast, the way you tend to do. There’s plenty of ham and cheese in the fridge, and I bought half a dozen of those complete meals for one.’ She looked down at his long hand laid on top of her small one on the blankets. Both of them had wanted some intimacy at this last meeting before her operation, but neither of them was easy with even this small gesture, with other people around. She felt that all the other women in the ward must be watching this new arrival, studying her relationship with the man whom some of them probably knew: Superintendent Lambert was by now something of a local celebrity, and the young nurse had asked her loudly as she took away her suitcase of clothes whether she was the wife of
the
Mr Lambert.

He said, ‘I expect I shall have Caroline and Jacky fussing round me, as though I was helpless!’ He remembered vividly that he had mouthed all these clichés last time she had been here for surgery, when she had had the mastectomy. Why was memory so selective, throwing up in stark detail all the trivial things which merely left you embarrassed, but failing to recall all the deep, philosophical things he had thought of to say at this time?

He wanted to say it had been a good marriage, that he was glad they hadn’t separated in those early years when it had seemed that his job and his fierce preoccupation with it might divide them. But that would seem like an epitaph, would sound as if he didn’t expect that she would come out of this alive. He sought desperately for something to say, could only come up with the thought that nurses, like policemen, looked younger with each passing year.

Christine studied the lined, anxious face with its troubled grey eyes. She felt a searing sympathy for this normally so articulate man, which she supposed must be love. She said, ‘How’s the case going? Have you found out who killed our schoolteacher yet?’

‘No. He doesn’t seem to have been quite your usual schoolteacher. Whatever that might be!’ He found guiltily that he wanted to talk about the case. His brain felt freed with her question, began to work almost normally again. ‘He had been involved with at least three women; two of them loved him — the third one, who didn’t, was once his wife.’

Christine grinned. ‘It was probably the wife who did it. You always said they’re the likeliest candidates. There were one or two occasions when I might have done you in, if you’d only been there at the time.’

He grinned back, gave a little squeeze to the hand he was surprised to find still beneath his. ‘This wife seems to have been in the clear, though. She was in Ireland at the time. We’ve had the Irish police check it out for us.’

‘One of the other two women, then?’

‘Perhaps. We haven’t been able to clear either of them, as yet. We’re not being sexist about it: there are a couple of men in the frame as well.’ Three, if you include that health hazard Aubrey Bass, he thought. He somehow couldn’t see Aubrey as a killer.

‘Hope it comes right for you, John.’ She answered his squeeze. And in that moment a thought came to him which had escaped him until now, when it should have been obvious. He stood up, awkwardly relinquishing her hand. ‘Better be on my way, I suppose. Before they come and throw me out.’ He looked hopefully for the advent of a stern sister, but there was no sign.

It was as usual Christine who had to help him out. ‘Off you go, then. Give me a chance of a rest and a read. I’ve been looking forward to that.’

He embraced her clumsily, feeling that they were the centre of attention for the whole ward, though it was not so. ‘It’ll be all right, you know!’ she whispered in his ear.

‘Of course it will! You’re a tough little bugger you are, underneath!’ he said. Underneath what, he thought.

They left it like that, each pretending not to harbour the thought that this might be the last they saw of each other, each pretending that this profoundly serious moment was really rather trivial. They waved at each other shyly as he reached the exit.

It was another milestone reached in life’s dark comedy.

Fourteen

Job titles have become more high-flown with each passing year. Where the dustbin-men would once spot a rat and send for the rat-catcher, the refuse disposal operatives now report the matter to their senior deployment officer, who may, if the latest cuts have left such services unimpaired, sanction the utilisation of the council rodent operatives.

Occasionally, a new title is well justified. Zoe Ross, who a decade earlier might have been called a secretary, was now Personal Assistant to the Chief Executive. It was an accurate description of her role in the firm, for the man she assisted would certainly have been lost without her. She did far more than type, and occasionally improve, his letters. She discussed his week’s schedule, arranged his appointments, booked his first-class tickets for his monthly flights across the Atlantic, diverted people who wanted to see him to other and more appropriate executives of the firm. She was an integral part of her boss’s success, and he was shrewd enough to realise it. He even tried to ensure that her holidays coincided with his. On one occasion, though he admitted it to no one, he had hastily rearranged his family fortnight in Tuscany to coincide with Zoe’s choice of break.

On the morning of Wednesday, November 21st, Zoe was her usual efficient self. She put through a call to Zurich to question the interest on the loan that was financing a Swiss development, briefed her man on the background of a raw materials supplier who was coming to see him in the afternoon, contacted the chef to discuss the menu for the board lunch on the morrow, and can-celled a booking on the British Airways shuttle to Glasgow in the following week which was now no longer necessary. She was contemplating a well-earned coffee when the personal call came through to her.

It was a man’s voice, harsh but indistinct — the speaker had put a pair of tights over the phone, but Zoe had no knowledge of such contrivances. It said, ‘You had better listen carefully, Ms Ross. I know all about the murder of Ted Giles. I know all about your part in it.’

She said, trying to use her most official and neutral voice, ‘Who is that? I had no part in Ted’s murder. If you’re trying to threaten me, you ought to know that—’

‘Don’t talk, listen. You don’t have a choice. Be at the Hare and Hounds hotel on the A438 tonight. You know it?’

‘I think so. Between Ledbury and Hereford? But—’

‘That’s it. Be there at seven thirty.’

‘Look, if you think I’m going to go out there without even knowing who I’m meeting or what this is about, you’re very much—’

‘You don’t have a choice. Seven thirty. Don’t be late.’

The voice had spoken throughout in a harsh, unemotional monotone. It was that unwavering, muffled tone which made it so chilling, Zoe thought. She dialled 1471, but the altogether more pleasant voice there told her that the caller had withheld their number.

She wasn’t walking into that one, she told herself for the rest of the day. She wasn’t going to be silly enough to go out to an assignation with an unknown man at night. Whatever that odious speaker might know about the way Ted had been killed.

***

John Lambert knew that the best way to shut out the thoughts of his wife under the surgeon’s knife was to concentrate on his work. He was a little disconcerted by how easily that concentration came to him, once he was in his morning conference with DI Rushton and DS Hook.

Somewhere at the back of the Superintendent’s mind there was a solution to this case. He had made sense of another piece of it as he talked with Christine in the hospital last night, but as he had tossed through an almost sleepless night in his lonely bed, he had been unable to fit this piece into a pattern of the whole case. The connections which might draw the various sections together into a picture were still absent. He was glad to have the tangible distraction of this meeting and the scraps of new evidence it would offer him.

Chris Rushton, looking as spruce and alert as always in the morning, was full of the small triumph he had engineered. Trying hard to look modest, and in Bert Hook’s view succeeding only in looking like a duck preening its feathers, he said, ‘I arranged for surveillance on our malodorous friend Aubrey Bass when he left us.’ Lambert knew that, for he had had to sanction the overtime, but he didn’t interrupt his Inspector. ‘Well, it paid off. I never believed Bass’s tale that he knew nothing about the use of his van. Even if he wasn’t directly involved himself, I reckon he knew his van was being used to move that body. He went straight back to his flat from here when we released him. And within half an hour, he was visited by Zoe Ross.’

He was like a conjurer producing a rabbit from an immaculate black top hat. It was Bert Hook, willing to be impressed, but wanting to know exactly what they had acquired through Rushton’s initiative, who asked, ‘Why?’

Lambert stepped in, taking responsibility. ‘We don’t know, as yet. Bass has given us nothing worthwhile about it — he told Chris last night that she just wanted to know about his van and how far we’d got towards the truth — and I’ve told Chris not to approach Zoe Ross as yet. I don’t think anyone else is likely to be killed and I’d like to know just what she’s up to. We’ve transferred the surveillance from Bass to her. We’ll give it another day; if she’s done nothing very revealing by then, we’ll have to see her and find out just what she was up to when she met Aubrey Bass.’

Rushton said, ‘I’ve done some digging into the backgrounds of our suspects, as you asked me to, John.’ It was an embarrassment for him to use his chief’s first name, as Lambert demanded, and he actually blushed as he forced himself to do it now. Hook was much amused: blushing was a phenomenon not common among policemen, and surely unique among detective inspectors. ‘None of them has a record, as you might expect, but they’ve all lived in the area for at least ten years, so the boys on the ground have been able to piece together quite a lot. Some of it’s no more than gossip or rumour, so I couldn’t say how reliable it is.’

‘Let’s have it, then. Take the men first, on this occasion.’

‘Right. Colin Pitman. Yorkshireman. But been in this area for over thirty years. Originally a motor mechanic. Bought his own lorry, built up a prosperous business from scratch. Blunt and direct, but people say he’s a fair man. Everyone seems to think that; it’s unusual, in the case of a successful businessman — usually he has enemies, if it’s only from jealousy. Even the man he bought out of the yard he operates from in Malvern thinks he’s Honest Colin.’

‘And yet he lied to us. At least once, and maybe twice, for all we know as yet. No trace of the tom he picked up on that Saturday night, is there, Chris?’

‘None yet. Perhaps never will be. Finding the right hooker in Birmingham is looking for a needle in a haystack.’

‘Anyway, we now know he lied to us the first time, when he said he’d been at home that night. What could have made an honest man do that?’

‘Unnerved when he found himself involved in a murder inquiry?’ suggested Hook. They had seen that often enough: people who were perfectly innocent but who found themselves without an alibi tended to panic and invent one for themselves.

‘Pitman didn’t seem the type to lose his nerve, if he had nothing to hide,’ said Lambert, ‘though he’s certainly old fashioned enough to be ashamed about resorting to prostitutes and apprehensive about being humiliated if all was revealed.’

‘Especially if his daughter were to find out,’ said Hook. ‘He dotes on her and doesn’t trouble to disguise it.’

Lambert nodded. ‘Ironic that it should take a burglar to expose a normally honest man. Where is Tommy Brick at the moment, Chris?’

Rushton tapped out an entry into a computer file. ‘He was bailed to appear at the Crown Court next month. He’s pleading guilty and asking now for five other offences to be taken into account — one of them theft from Colin Pitman’s garage.’

‘I might have a word with him about his activities at Pitman’s house today or tomorrow. What about Graham Reynolds?’

‘We’ve been able to firm up his motive. He’s planning to marry Sue Giles and wed himself to a fortune. She’s affluent enough already — her mother left her money — and must have high expectations from her doting father: she’s the only child. Ted Giles was being sticky about the divorce, but he couldn’t have held out for ever. Of course, he’d have come out of it with a handsome settlement — perhaps that is what he was really holding out for. Sue Giles might well have had to sell that beautiful house of hers to pay him off. All that is now preserved for the new husband.’

Hook said, ‘But we knew about that the day after the murder. You said you’d found something new.’

‘We have. Graham Reynolds is a successful teacher. Most of the parents think well of him. But he’s a bit fond of the gee-gees. The wrong ones, it seems, when it comes to picking winners. He’s seven thousand in debt, and being pressed to settle. It wouldn’t do him any good in the educational profession, if that came out. It’s quite convenient for him that he won’t have to wait for a long lawyers’ wrangle over the Gileses’ divorce, apart from the money this death has preserved for him.’

Lambert shrugged. ‘Motive’s all very well, but what about opportunity?’

‘That’s the snag. There seems no doubt he was in Ireland with Sue Giles on the night of the murder. Booked into adjoining rooms with a connecting door. We’ve had the Garda check it out. That lets both of them out.’

‘Very neatly. It doesn’t prevent them employing someone else to do the dirty work while they sat on the shores of Lake Killarney with a cast-iron alibi,’ Hook pointed out. He hadn’t particularly liked either Ted Giles’s widow or the man she planned to marry; if this crime had to be down to one of the five or six people they were investigating, he would have preferred it to be one of them.

‘That’s perfectly true, of course,’ said Rushton, ‘but it’s equally true that any one of our suspects could have used a contract killer to get rid of Giles. Some of them are more likely to have the right contacts than others. In that respect, Constance Elson looks interesting. She’s a pillar of bourgeois respectability now; she pays her taxes and supports her charities. But it was her husband who made the fortune, and he seems to have used some pretty dubious methods in his early days. His employees were twice involved in GBH cases. There was a prosecution planned for one of them on a demanding money with menaces charge in Birmingham, twenty-three years ago; the CPS eventually dropped it on the grounds of lack of evidence. The same thing happened a year or so later when they tried to get Archie Elson himself for fraud. Connie was married to him then — she’d be about twenty-three or twenty-four, I think. She may not have known much about what he was up to — wives often don’t, as we know. And Archie Elson was straight for a good fifteen years before he died. But I suppose it’s just possible that his widow retained one or two links with that murky past.’

Lambert nodded, thinking of the intense woman he had interviewed rather than the one Hook had reported weeping at the funeral. ‘She was certainly very much infatuated with Ted Giles. She thought he was going to marry her when he was eventually divorced, but I believe he had other plans altogether. If she had rumbled him, she might well have been jealous enough to want him dead. She could have killed him herself, of course. We’ve known from the outset that a woman could certainly have drawn that wire around Giles’s neck — no great strength needed, once he was surprised by someone behind him.’

Rushton nodded. ‘That applies to Zoe Ross as well. She seems to have been equally taken with Ted Giles. She’s a highly competent young woman — her firm is very anxious to keep her, apparently. I can’t see her taking kindly to any deception or rejection from Giles. It will be interesting to hear what she has to say about her connection with Aubrey Bass: forensic are quite certain now that his van was used for the disposal of the body.’

The three of them broke up then. Lambert looked at his watch as soon as he was alone. Too early to ring the hospital yet. Something was again nagging at his mind about this case though; he was sure there were more details somewhere that he had not yet weighted with their full importance.

Ten minutes later, he picked up the phone. ‘Get me a call through to the Garda station in Killarney,’ he said.

***

At two thirty, there was still no news from the hospital. ‘Mrs Lambert is still down in theatre,’ said the ward sister’s voice with practised, professional neutrality. ‘I don’t think we shall have anything to tell you for some time yet.’

It was that kind of day, it seemed. The man Lambert needed in Killarney was off duty all day; they would ring back in the morning. Hook, looking at the long, lined face, decided that the only way to distract the chief during this limbo in both his professional and private lives was to make the ultimate sacrifice. He swallowed hard and made the plunge, forcing the lie he knew would be swallowed eagerly. ‘If there’s nothing more we can do here for the time being, we could steal an hour and you could give me a golf lesson,’ he said with a sickly smile.

Bert knew the weather could not save him. It was a day of hard blue sky and little cloud. There would be a frost before the night was over, but it was a pleasant autumn day, dry and crisp in the hour before the early twilight.

‘Get your feet and shoulders lined up with these,’ said Lambert. He set two of Bert’s clubs on parallel lines at his feet. ‘Imagine they’re railway lines and you’re going to send your ball away along them, straight and true.’