Close Call (10 page)

Lennox was patently nervous. John Lambert watched him with interest. He did not speak, did not oil the wheels of social exchange as the man expected him to do. It was an unfortunate effect of CID experience that you enjoyed nervousness in people you were interviewing. Anxiety made your opponents more vulnerable in the bizarre games you had to play. Bizarre because ninety per cent of the time people were innocent, but had to be treated with suspicion until this innocence was proved.

Rosemary Lennox saw what was happening. She said coolly, ‘We want to offer you all the help we can, Superintendent. That goes without saying. But I can't think we can add anything to what you already know.' She was wearing a dark-blue cotton dress with a pattern of small white flowers. The flowers in her dress and her white sandals picked up the silvery threads in her grey hair, which was surprisingly becoming above her neat, intelligent face. It was cut short and tidy, but with a wave over her forehead which took away any severity. She looked very comfortable on this very warm day, in contrast to her husband. Ronald Lennox sat sweltering in the suit and tie he had donned when he heard that the superintendent in charge of the case was coming to see him.

Lambert said, ‘I'm sure you want this business cleared up as quickly as we do. Normally, I would have Detective Sergeant Hook with me to take notes, but he can't be here today. This morning's meeting may prove to be no more than a formality, but I must ask you to give it full concentration. Small things sometimes emerge which turn out to be highly significant at a later stage.'

‘What sort of things?' Ronald Lennox was in almost before his visitor had completed his sentence.

‘Little discrepancies in the way people remember things. You'd be amazed how much people's recollections differ, even when they're recounting events which occurred very recently. Even the recall of totally innocent people is sometimes quite varied.' Lambert gave Lennox a smile which did nothing to allay his nervousness.

Rosemary took over in her efficient, matter-of-fact way and gave him their story of Saturday night's events. Lambert listened without interruption to her lucid, economical account, watching her husband's reactions to what she told him. Then he said, ‘And whose idea was this gathering? A street party, I think you called it.'

Rosemary smiled. ‘It was mine. And it wasn't really a street party. I called it that when I suggested a gathering because I remembered sitting at a table in the street at the end of the war in 1945, when I was only three. We had sandwiches and home-made cakes and lemonade. It must have made quite an impression on me, because I can still recall it quite vividly.'

‘So you suggested a street party for the new residents of Gurney Close.'

‘Yes. I think because we were a group of disparate people drawn together by the accident of residence. All we really had in common was that we'd become occupants of these new houses at more or less the same time.'

‘Or in our case, a bungalow. The only one in the close,' said Ronald Lennox pedantically.

‘But the party was your idea, Mrs Lennox?'

‘Yes. I dare say someone else would have suggested a get-together of some kind, even if I hadn't.'

Ronald Lennox bristled, suddenly and unexpectedly. ‘They certainly would have done just that. Are you trying to suggest that Rosemary set this thing up deliberately, just so that someone could have the opportunity of killing Robin Durkin? That's ridiculous!'

Lambert smiled, not at all displeased to find the man losing his sense of proportion. ‘I'm suggesting nothing, Mr Lennox. One of the things we have to establish in a case like this is who set up the situation. It is simply a fact to be determined, like any other fact. When we have all the facts, some will emerge as highly significant. Neither I nor anyone else is yet in a position to say which ones those will be.'

‘Of course you aren't! And I can see that there is nothing sinister in your enquiry.' Rosemary Lennox tried to be as calm and equable in her answers as this polite but determined superintendent was in his questions. But she noticed that he hadn't refuted her husband's suggestion about the meeting being set up as a possible prologue to murder.

‘There is one other thing I wanted to clarify about the evening and your impressions of it. Both of you can help here. You have confirmed what other people have told us, that a fair amount of drink was consumed. I know it's difficult to be accurate about these things, but how drunk would you say people were, at the end of the evening?'

Ronald Lennox responded promptly to the invitation, as Lambert had somehow known that he would. ‘Oh, we'd all had quite a lot over five hours or so. And none of us had to worry about driving home. I remember us congratulating ourselves on that, at the time.'

‘Repeatedly,' said his wife, with a touch of acid.

‘I'd say that no one was blind drunk and reeling about, but we were all pleasantly pissed, if you'll pardon the modernism,' said Ron.

‘Yes. That tallies with what Mrs Durkin and Mrs Holt have told us,' said Lambert thoughtfully. ‘And how drunk would you say Mr Durkin was? In the same state as everyone else?'

Ronald Lewis's thin face cracked into an indulgent smile. ‘Oh, Robin was pretty far gone. We'd been drinking for hours, remember, and you usually drink rather more than you think you're taking, in circumstances like that, don't you? I know I realized that the next morning, when I had the biggest hangover I've had in years. Wasn't fit for anything on Sunday, was I, Rosemary?'

‘You certainly weren't. And of course, we had to contend with the news of Robin's death, before we were far into the day.'

Lennox grinned ruefully. ‘I must have drunk a lot more than usual on Saturday night, because Rosemary had some difficulty waking me to give me the sad news. But to answer your question, I'm sure Robin was as merry as anyone at the end of the evening. I remember him going round with the brandy bottle, giving everyone a nightcap. And I'm sure he didn't miss himself out.'

‘That's interesting,' said Lambert tersely.

‘May we ask why?' said Rosemary Lennox quietly.

There was no reason why they should not know. ‘The postmortem report shows that Robin Durkin had drunk only a moderate amount last Saturday night.'

They both looked surprised. Ron Lennox said, ‘He didn't give either of us that impression. Perhaps habitually he didn't drink as much as we would have thought he did. Or perhaps he was one of those men who get drunk quite easily, so that you assume they've drunk more than they have.'

‘That is a possibility, of course.'

Rosemary looked at him sharply. ‘But you obviously don't consider that the likely explanation.'

‘From what you and other people have told us, it doesn't seem likely, no. His wife, for instance, thinks he usually let himself go on occasions like Saturday night. She says that he was no drunkard, but she thought like you that he had drunk quite a lot during Saturday evening.'

‘But why would it be important?'

Lambert thought from Mrs Lennox's shrewdly intelligent features that she had already guessed why. ‘We don't know for certain that it has anything to do with this crime. But one explanation could be that Robin Durkin knew that he had an assignation coming up when your party was over. A meeting with someone, for which he wanted to keep his brain sharp, and unfuddled by too much alcohol.'

Ron Lennox frowned. ‘I can see what you mean. But surely this chap who came into his garden and killed him took him completely by surprise? I can't think that Robin was anticipating a meeting. Not by the way he behaved with us in that last hour.'

Lambert shrugged. ‘I offered that as a possible explanation. It's not the only one. I'm confident that we shall know a lot more about this by the end of the week.' It was always as well to give the public the impression that you were in confident control and that things were moving steadily forward. Especially when there was a possibility, however remote, that the killer of Robin Durkin might be one of the two people confronting him so earnestly in this comfortable room.

He said, ‘Thank you for your time. We may need to see you separately at a later stage of the enquiry. Am I right to presume that neither of you knew Mr Durkin before you moved into Gurney Close?'

Rosemary Lennox smiled. ‘That is correct. One of the interesting things is how a disparate group of people can be brought together by the common problems of moving into a new neighbourhood. Hence my suggestion for the street party. I remember thinking on Saturday night how good it was that such different people should be enjoying themselves together. And then this happened.' She looked past Lambert and out of the big window of her sitting room at the dangerous world outside, and shook her head sadly.

It was her husband who broke the silence which followed. He said quietly, ‘I knew Robin before we moved in here.'

They both turned to look at him, more because of his tone than because what he said was particularly startling. He forced a smile to disperse their solemnity. ‘There's nothing sinister about it. I know him for the same reason that I know hundreds of other people in the local community, Superintendent. I taught him, years ago.'

‘How many years ago, Mr Lennox?'

‘Sixteen, seventeen years ago. Something like that. We could check the dates in the school records, if it's important.'

‘And is it, Mr Lennox?'

He smiled, as if he were pleased to have thrown his little surprise into the exchanges. ‘Of no importance at all, in my opinion. A matter of supreme irrelevance, as one of my colleagues used to say.'

Lambert answered his smile. ‘What kind of a pupil was he?'

Ron Lennox grinned at the recollection, and his lined face looked suddenly more attractive with mirth. ‘Bit of a nuisance, if you want to know. In fact, I'm aware of the convention that one shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but Rob Durkin was a right little bugger when he was at school!'

‘In what way?'

‘Oh, nothing vicious, you know. High-spirited adolescence, you'd call it. But high-spirited adolescence can be a pain in the arse when you have to deal with it. Especially without the sanctions you used to have when I started teaching forty years ago!'

Rosemary was surprised to hear her normally fastidious husband describe the vanished schoolboy as both ‘a little bugger' and ‘a pain in the arse'. She sensed that a familiar diatribe about modern discipline was in the offing. She said hastily, ‘You never said you'd taught Robin, Ron. Not even on Saturday night, when everyone was being relaxed and indiscreet.'

‘Professional discretion, Rosemary. Robin never acknowledged that I'd taught him, so I thought he might not wish to have those days recalled. Perhaps he wasn't proud of the way he behaved at school: I think some of the other teachers had more trouble with him than I had. I'd have been perfectly prepared to have a laugh with him about the peccadillos of his youth, but I didn't think it was up to me to raise the matter.'

‘And his school career was the only contact you had with him until the last few weeks of his life?' asked Lambert.

‘Indeed it was. And I wouldn't like you to go away with the idea that the young Rob Durkin was anything more than a high-spirited boy. There was nothing vicious at all about him. He was the same as hundreds of other boys with a lot of energy and a little mischief in them.'

‘Nevertheless, thank you for recalling those days.'

‘Not at all. I only mentioned them because I felt I must be strictly accurate in answering your questions. We don't want to be hauled into the police station and given the third degree because of some small omission at this stage, do we, Rosemary?' Ron laughed at his little witticism, a high, startling sound in the quiet room.

Lambert took an amicable leave of them then. And Mrs Lennox was left wondering why her husband had never mentioned this previous acquaintance with Robin Lennox, even to her.

The man was surly, tight-lipped, cautious. Police officers are used to dealing with such attitudes, but DS Liz Brown had problems of her own to contend with.

As a newly promoted CID sergeant, she was anxious not to make mistakes. She had been thrilled to be assigned to the team of Chief Superintendent John Lambert, who had acquired almost mythical powers in local police folklore, through a combination of longevity and sustained success as a villain-taker. But now that she was actually working as part of his murder team, excitement had turned to trepidation. The old dinosaur would surely eat her for breakfast if she made mistakes.

And here was this surly man putting up the barriers against her and making her life difficult. She glanced at the gawky uniformed constable who was standing expectantly beside her in the airless office which had been assigned to them for this interview. No help there. He looked scarcely more than a boy to Liz, and he was watching her expectantly, as if he expected to learn things.

They were in the rambling buildings of the Ford main dealers in Gloucester, where Mark Gregory was a sales manager. He looked at his watch and said, ‘I hope this won't take much longer. I've a busy schedule to cope with.'

‘It will take as long as it needs, Mr Gregory. This is a murder investigation.' Liz spoke with a firmness she did not feel, and got a tiny crumb of comfort from the sight of her acned colleague nodding his support.

‘And I've already told you I know nothing about this crime. I've even offered to prove to you that I was out of the area at the time.'

‘No one has suggested that you killed Mr Durkin.' At this moment, I'd like to suggest it, you sullen sod, but I can't. ‘We need to find out all we can about the murder victim. And we expect the public to cooperate with us.'

‘Which I'm doing.' Mark Gregory became suddenly all sweetness and reason. No point in alienating the forces of the law, especially when they came to you in this unthreatening guise. And he didn't want them prying too closely into the past.