Malice Aforethought (18 page)

The man was defensive again. ‘I couldn’t say for certain. I replaced it as soon as I was told about it. I’m not here weekends, you see. I don’t live on the premises. I only do mornings.’ He leaned forward a little to impart a confidence. ‘I’m more your part-time odd-job man, really. Cleaning of the halls and landings and minor repairs. They called it internal maintenance, at first. Then they thought it might make the place a bit more secure if people thought the block had a caretaker, so they called me that.’

That explained his presence here: Johnson hadn’t thought these flats grand or numerous enough to warrant the high maintenance charges of a resident caretaker. He said, ‘So it’s quite likely that this light was off on that Saturday night when Mr Giles died?’

‘Probably was. According to Mrs Clarkson who reported it, it had been off for the whole of the weekend.’ The caretaker leaned forward again, his sense of his own importance growing as he realised he might be assisting with a murder inquiry. ‘As a matter of fact, the bulb hadn’t just failed. It had been removed. Never happened before, that hasn’t.’

Sergeant Johnson rounded up his SOC team and took his findings back to CID. He carried the sealed plastic envelope with the navy fibres in it as carefully as if it were the crown jewels. And he had no doubt that Superintendent Lambert would be very interested to know about that missing bulb.

***

Sue Giles’s house looked as incongruously large and grand for a single occupant as it had on their first visit a week ago. Six bedrooms at least: this place should have had children in it, thought Bert Hook, contrasting it with his own modern semi, increasingly cramped as his two boys grew towards adolescence. But it was as well that the ill-starred Giles union had spawned no children.

The gardener was wheeling his cycle away from the big garden shed as they parked in front of the house in the November twilight. He looked at them curiously, then switched his lamps on and pedalled slowly away. The long neat beds had been cleared now of the last of the autumn’s flowers; there was not a leaf to be seen on the large areas of trimly edged green lawn. The lights were switched on in the hall and several rooms of the big modern house, making the day seem already darker than it was. Hook’s watch showed twenty-five past four.

Sue Giles opened the oak front door herself. ‘Superintendent Lambert. And Sergeant Hook. It isn’t convenient to see you just now, I’m afraid. Mr Reynolds is here, you see. And my father, whom I know you’ve met. It’s Dad’s birthday, you see, and—’

‘On the contrary, that will be most convenient for our purposes. Since all three of you are involved in this.’

She stood her ground in the doorway for a moment, blocking his entry. Because of the step, she stared straight into his hard grey eyes from no more than two feet. Then she moved aside and allowed the two big men to pass her before she slowly shut the door.

In the elegant drawing room, where Sue Giles had talked to them a week earlier about her relationship with her murdered husband, Colin Pitman and Graham Reynolds sat in armchairs on opposite sides of the fireplace. Pitman was on the edge of his and Reynolds was leaning forward, as though the haulage proprietor and the man who planned to become his son-in-law had been in animated conversation before this unwelcome interruption.

Sue Giles made a brave show at relaxation in the face of this intrusion. ‘Mr Lambert and his Sergeant have something that apparently can’t wait. Perhaps we can deal with it quickly and carry on with your birthday, Dad.’

If it was meant to convey a message to her father, it had the opposite effect from that she intended. A look of puzzlement passed across the broad face of Colin Pitman. Obviously the excuse of a birthday celebration was news to him. A long second passed before he said, ‘Yes. It really isn’t very convenient that you should come here now, Superintendent. But if you must interrupt us, please don’t take any longer than is necessary.’

He was trying to be masterful, as he was used to being in his business. It was curious how words lacked all conviction when the speaker couldn’t muster the right tone, thought Hook.

Lambert, deciding that a man who was normally direct and honest would be most easily discomfited when his lies were exposed, said, ‘I shan’t apologise. That would be absurd, when we have come here to arrest you.’

Sue Giles was the first to recover. ‘That’s ridiculous talk. After my father’s done his very best to cooperate with you, it’s—’

‘On the contrary, he’s fed us a string of lies to try to conceal his true whereabouts on the night of your husband’s murder.’ Lambert had ignored the woman, never taking his eyes from Pitman’s too-revealing face. ‘He told us he was at home on that night. When that was exposed as a lie, he tried to spin us an absurd story about spending the evening in Birmingham with a prostitute.’

Pitman found his tongue at last, knowing he couldn’t let his daughter go on defending him. ‘I was with a tart, Lambert. I told you, I drove round for an hour before I nerved myself to approach her. I’m not proud of it. Why you should come throwing it into my face in front of my daughter I don’t know, but you’d better have good reason.’ His voice was low, gravelly, like that of a mortally sick man.

‘You didn’t drive anywhere, Mr Pitman. Your Jaguar was sitting in your garage when our burglar broke into it. He assured me of that this morning.’

Lambert was almost sorry for this big man who had floundered so far out of his depth. He had subsided into the big chair, a wounded bear who needed to be put out of his misery. He didn’t even try the lame excuse of a hire car. He said dully, repeating a formula which had lost its validity even for him, ‘I was in Birmingham with a tart. You’ll have to find her.’

Lambert said shortly, ‘You were in Killarney with your daughter. Pretending to be this man.’

Graham Reynolds said, ‘I don’t know where you get your information from, Superintendent, but you’d better change your sources. I was at the Lakeside Hotel with Sue on that night. Surely you’ve checked that out.’ He moved across to her, put his arm through hers, as though both of them might gather strength from the contact.

‘Of course we have. We found adjoining rooms were booked in the names of Mrs Giles and Mr Reynolds. Unusually squeamish, that.’

‘That’s our business!’ Sue Giles’s voice was clear, but taut with tension. ‘If you’re going to say I wasn’t in Killarney on the night when Ted died, then you’re—’

‘Oh, you were there all right. But the man in the adjoining room was your father, not Graham Reynolds.’

‘Look, if you’re going to make wild accusations like that, you’d better—’

‘We have a detailed description of the man who was with you from the Irish Gardi. If it should be necessary, the man with you will be formally identified in due course.’

In the pause which followed Lambert’s calm statement, Sue Giles drew in a long breath, mustering further defiance. But before she could utter it, her father, sitting still as a carved image in his armchair, said dully, ‘Leave it, Sue, it’s over. All right, Superintendent, I was the man in Killarney with my daughter that weekend. That’s why I had to tell you such tales. I didn’t enjoy doing that. And I didn’t know Graham was going to kill Giles. And neither did Sue. She—’

‘Shut up, Dad! For Christ’s sake, shut up! Graham didn’t kill Ted. It’s a ridiculous idea!’ She was very shrill now, looking to the man who stood beside her to come in and support her. But Graham Reynolds looked briefly from her to Pitman without a word; then his wide eyes were drawn back to Lambert’s, like a rabbit hypnotised by the stoat which will finish its life. He said nothing.

Lambert looked back at him steadily. ‘It was only today that we established where the killing took place. We know now that the bulb was removed from the outside light over the exit from the flats where Giles lived. He was due to meet Miss Zoe Ross on that Saturday night. You waited outside the flats until he came out to the car park, then killed him from behind by garrotting him with a piece of wire.’

Sue Giles sank down on to a chair, her hand still clinging awkwardly to its contact with her lover as she subsided, until it fell limply to her side. She said, in a voice they could only just catch, ‘Tell him you didn’t do it, Graham.’

Reynolds remained standing. He said bleakly, ‘What’s the use? They have everything they want.’ His previously impassive face broke suddenly into an awful, mirthless smile. ‘Just as that sod Giles had everything I wanted. He made me look a fool in the school, you know. Made me look small in front of the children.’ For a moment, his bitterness made it seem as if he thought that alone was reason enough to kill a man.

Lambert said quietly, ‘I expect Giles also threatened to expose your gambling debts to the powers that be.’

‘Of course he did. When I pressed him to get on with the divorce, he threatened me with that. Said he had religious scruples about divorce because he was brought up as a Catholic. His Church didn’t allow divorce, he said. He laughed about that, said how convenient it was. When I said the law wouldn’t allow him to hold things up indefinitely, he said he’d take Sue for everything he could, that there wouldn’t be much left for me when he’d finished. It was my idea that Sue and her dad would establish an alibi for me, whilst I — whilst I dealt with Giles. They’re not guilty. They didn’t know I was going to kill him.’

A court would need some convincing of that, thought Lambert sourly. He said, ‘You planned this killing very carefully.’ With malice aforethought, in the proper legal phrase, but he wouldn’t risk stopping Reynolds from talking by using it here.

In the way of men who have lost all moral balance, Reynolds seemed for a moment to think he was being flattered. ‘Yes, I suppose I did. I didn’t want my own car to be seen anywhere in the vicinity, but I had a key which would open that scruffy bugger Bass’s old van. I’d tried it a few nights earlier — lots of keys will fit older Fords, you know, but they’ve tightened up now.’ He had almost brightened with this illustration of his ingenuity. ‘I knew he was going out to see Zoe Ross that Saturday night — he’d taunted me with this younger woman when I’d tried to talk to him about Sue’s divorce earlier in the day. I removed the bulb by the back exit from the flats and just waited for him in the dark with my piano wire. It was easy.’

‘Then you left his body face down in Bass’s van for a couple of hours.’ The hypostasis on the front of the corpse was one of the first facts they had been given by forensic.

Reynolds wasn’t surprised by their knowledge: he looked as if he expected them now to know every detail. He said, as if still demonstrating his own thoughtfulness in the matter, ‘I thought at first of dumping him in the Severn. But the roads were quite busy at that time on Saturday night — it couldn’t have been later than half-past eight when I killed him. I drove around for a while, then went into a country pub and had a drink — I left him under an old curtain in the back of the van, but I locked it carefully.’

He looked around the circle of people with an awful smile at this recollection, but did not register the horror-stricken faces of Pitman and his daughter, nor the quiet, attentive eyes of the policemen. ‘I waited until after closing time, then drove to Broughton’s Ash and tipped him over the wall into the churchyard. It must have been around midnight when I got back and put Bass’s van back in the car park of the flats. I walked home from there. I don’t think that dozy sod Bass even realised his van had been taken and returned.’

He looked for a moment as if he expected to be congratulated on his planning and execution of the crime. Then the silence stretched and his face slowly darkened as the enormity of his situation finally sank in. Hook pronounced the words of arrest on the three of them whilst his chief used his radio to call up the car they had left in the road outside.

Sue Giles and Graham Reynolds were handcuffed and led to that car by three burly policemen. Pitman sat with Lambert in the back of the other car while Hook drove. The big man stared unbelievingly back at the house he had bought for his daughter and her ill-fated husband, then at the familiar countryside he had grown to love as he built his business.

There was no word spoken, but, as sometimes happens when the game is over between criminal and detective, between hunted and hunter, there was a kind of kinship between the two big men in the back of the car. The detective who knew now that the wife he relied upon was coming back to him from hospital and the man who had made himself an accessory to murder because he had so lacked the guidance of the wife he had lost.

If you enjoyed reading
Malice Aforethought
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Body Politic
by J. M. Gregson, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
Body Politic
by J. M. Gregson