Close Call (21 page)

Rushton said stiffly, ‘I wasn't taking a moral stand. I was simply searching for anything which would make either of the pair vulnerable to a man like Robin Durkin. And thus candidates for his murder.'

‘Fair enough. Lisa Holt's already admitted that Durkin ruined her marriage and almost killed her ex-husband. She makes no bones about the fact that she hated him. And if Jason Ritchie was as drunk as they both say he was after the street party, she could have sneaked out of her house to meet Durkin without lover boy being aware that she was gone.'

‘And vice versa,' said Rushton, stubbornly reluctant to let his chief suspect get away with anything.

Bert Hook grinned. ‘So it seems that you haven't managed to eliminate anyone whilst I've been preoccupied with Luke. Any one of the six residents of Gurney Close – or seven if we include Jason Ritchie in that number – could have killed Robin Durkin. His wife, the Lennoxes, the Smarts, Ms Holt and her lover, could all have done this.'

Lambert nodded ruefully. ‘I'd say there are varying degrees of probability among that lot, but I can't claim that we've ruled out any one of them whilst you've been preoccupied with more important things at the hospital, Bert.'

Rushton added gloomily, ‘And there's still the strong possibility that Durkin was eliminated by an outside agency. By a contract killer, retained by one of his rivals or former partners in the drugs trade.'

Bert Hook sighed theatrically. ‘It seems that it's just as well that I'm now back to throw my mighty intellect on to the side of justice.'

A
lison Durkin seemed perfectly calm. She didn't ask about the progress of the investigation. When a rather weary-looking John Lambert apologized for arriving at six thirty in the evening, at a time when she might have been planning to eat, she said, ‘It doesn't matter. I don't eat early. I don't have young children to consider, like some other people.'

It was a lead-in to the most important question he needed to ask of her, but it seemed too abrupt to pitch it at her now, almost before they were in her house. Lambert let her take them into the sitting room which looked on to the lawn where the body of her husband had been found, then seat them in the chairs she had planned for them, as if they were more conventional visitors. She said, ‘I've made a pot of tea. I thought you might be ready for a cup. I could certainly use one.'

Then she poured tea into three cups very deliberately, as if demonstrating the steadiness of her hand and the extent of her recovery. Her rather white, almost translucent skin looked less drawn than when they had seen her in this room on Tuesday, and her whole bearing was quite different from when they had seen her in shock on Sunday. Her dark, straight hair seemed more lustrous and healthy than it had been in the aftermath of this sudden death. Her every move proclaimed that, a mere five days after the violent event which might have shattered her life, she was coming to terms with life as a young widow.

As if she read this thought in them, Mrs Durkin said, ‘It's a good thing there are no children who have lost a father in this house. That's the kind of thing people say after a divorce, isn't it? Well, I feel this is like a divorce, in some respects.'

Hook nodded, took a sip of his tea, tried to dismiss the thought of his own son fighting for his life. He said quietly, ‘But you still have to come to terms with it, Ally. And you don't have to put on a show of bravery, as you would have to do if you had children to consider.'

He had remembered that she had asked him on Tuesday to call her Ally. She found that she was absurdly pleased about that. She took a deep breath and said, ‘You said when we last spoke that you were finding things out about Rob. Things which wouldn't please me. No doubt you have gone on digging, and continued to unearth unpleasant facts.'

She had clearly planned this recognition of realities, this acknowledgement that her husband had been a villain and that she was prepared to hear about it. Lambert wondered whether it could possibly be also an assertion that what she had done to him on Saturday night was justified. He said gravely, ‘I'm afraid that we have to go on digging, as you put it. It is our duty to find who killed Robin. To discover that we need to know all about the life he lived. You helped us yourself, when you told us on Tuesday that you thought he had been blackmailing people.'

‘Yes. You've no doubt unearthed some of his victims.'

‘We have, yes. We are continuing to discover things about his activities in that field.'

‘He liked to have a hold over people, you know. He didn't open up very often, even to me, but once or twice I heard him positively gloating about something he knew. Usually it was when he thought it would give him an opportunity to pay off old scores.' She offered first sugar and then a plate of ginger biscuits, for all the world as if she were discussing the weather and this were a normal social occasion.

‘Have you thought of any people who might be victims? As you imply, blackmail victims often become desperate.'

‘And turn into murderers, you mean. I see that, but I'm afraid I can't offer you any names. I kept out of that area of his life. Or he kept me out of it. Either way, you could say I was prepared to enjoy the affluence which came from his behaviour, without wishing to dirty my hands with the knowledge of it.' For an instant, the hint of a private trauma of self-loathing threatened her control.

Lambert said, ‘I don't think he raised substantial sums from blackmail; you're probably right that he enjoyed having a hold over people and the feeling of power which that gave him. We think the majority of his money came from trafficking in illegal drugs.'

‘I suspected as much. I suppose I didn't want to know for certain.' She fingered the top of her arm, winced a little, said bitterly, ‘I'm now having to confront the things which I wouldn't acknowledge to myself when Rob was alive.'

‘Yes. I'm sorry about that. But I'm sure you want us to find out who murdered him.'

‘Are you? I'm not certain I want to know who killed Rob. Not certain that I want you to know.' She voiced the daring, outrageous thought and hid the lower half of her face behind her cup as she drained it, then set the cup back on its saucer and said, ‘More tea, Superintendent Lambert?'

For the first time, there seemed something brittle about her control. But she had almost invited him to take up the issue of her own life, and Lambert said quietly, ‘In the course of routine enquiries, we have turned up things about you, Mrs Durkin. Things which we have to raise now.'

‘Then go ahead.' She tried to think what these things might be, but her mind was blank when she most wanted it to be active.

‘Our records show that you attacked a previous partner. That you have a conviction for occasioning Actual Bodily Harm.'

‘It's irrelevant.'

‘You should have told us about it.'

Alison Durkin felt curiously calm. She had expected this. ‘Of course I should. You only had to check your records to find it. But it's something I've long ago put behind me. The habit of concealment dies hard, I suppose.'

‘You took an offensive weapon to a man you were living with.'

‘That sounds very dramatic. You make it sound premeditated, which it wasn't. I picked up the nearest weapon to defend myself, from the table behind me, when I was being attacked myself. My hand fell on a pair of kitchen scissors. I did the man no lasting damage.'

‘But you pleaded guilty to a serious charge.'

‘The legal advice was that it would be technically difficult to do otherwise. And it could have been more serious, couldn't it? It could have been GBH. But I was given only a conditional sentence, which I understand is a rarity with an assault charge.'

‘It is. Did your husband know about the case?'

She smiled a bitter smile. ‘Of course he did. He taunted me with it whenever it suited him. But I never took scissors or anything else to him, even though there were times when it would have been very satisfying.'

Lambert found her confidence about this violence she had concealed unusual and a little disturbing. He said, ‘We have found out something else about you in the course of our enquiries, Mrs Durkin.'

‘And what might that be?' Alison found that her confidence over the way she had handled the assault issue made her truculent now.

‘We discovered that you were a patient in Westview Private Hospital just over three years ago.'

Her confidence drained away as the shock hit her like a physical blow. She had not expected this, had made no plans to deal with it. Her face froze into a mask. ‘In April 2002, yes. In the abortion unit. I had a termination, yes.'

‘Forgive me, Mrs Durkin. But in a murder investigation, we have no alternative but to pry. We need to know how this event affected your relationship with your husband.'

She wanted to tell this quiet, insistent man, who was almost old enough to be her father, to go and hang himself from the nearest tree. Instead, she heard herself saying, ‘Yes. Because it could turn me into a murder suspect, this, couldn't it? Or enhance my status in that respect: I suppose I was already a suspect.'

Hook said, ‘This isn't easy, Ally, for any of us. Did you have the termination on medical advice?'

‘No! On Rob Durkin's bloody advice, that's all! He said we didn't want children, not at that moment. In a year or two, he said, but not then. He even said that we needed my income! I must have been even more stupid then than I am now!'

Hook said, ‘It's probably as well that you haven't got a toddler who had to be told about a father's death this week. You said that yourself, a few minutes ago.'

She looked at him as if he had thrown a new and revolutionary idea at her, rather than merely recalled her own platitude. It was suddenly important to her to make the degree of her suffering clearer to this kindly, avuncular figure. ‘I wanted that child. But I persuaded myself that I had come to terms with the abortion, for the sake of my marriage. Then I found a year later that Rob had a child by another woman. A child that he was supporting.'

Hook nodded, as quietly as if he was about to record a car registration number. ‘We'll need the details of this woman, if you have them.'

‘She's dead. I think she was on drugs. One of Rob's pushers. She became an addict; the child was taken away from her. I suspect she committed suicide. I only found out about the child because I ferreted out a paternity order in Rob's bureau. He wasn't pleased about that.' It might have been the first time he had hit her, but she was no longer sure about things like that. She found herself fingering the cotton which covered the bruising at the top of her arm again, as she recollected that moment when she had discovered that another child had been born, almost on the day of her termination. It seemed now to belong to another and darker life.

Hook waited a moment, thinking of the child he had left in the hospital, before he said, ‘Were you planning to have children at some future time?'

She left it so long before she answered that they thought she was going to ignore the question. Then she said very quietly, ‘I think that it was that abortion which marked the real end of our marriage. I didn't see it at the time, but when I look at things now, I'm sure that I should have known then that it was time to get out.'

Hook knew that his role now was not to question but merely to prompt, to keep this revelation going. He said, ‘But you didn't leave him. You bought a new house together.'

Ally Durkin smiled the disillusioned smile which should have come from a much older woman. ‘I'd loved Rob Durkin since I was fifteen, when he was a high-spirited boy. You don't give up when you love someone, even when you should. You don't see things clearly. You turn a blind eye to things you should see as significant. Above all, you hope. Hope that you can change things. Hope that people will change, that they will see things as wrong which you see as wrong.'

It was a bleak summary of dreams turning to ashes, of scales dropping away too late from innocent eyes, of aspiration turning to despair. She shook herself a little, as though she felt a cool draught on this sweltering evening. ‘I'm sorry. You're meant to be detectives, not therapists.'

Hook gave her a smile, acknowledging that she was reestablishing contact with them after the revelation of her private nightmare. ‘It's not our job to sort out the messes people make of each others' lives, Ally. But I now need to ask you formally whether you killed your husband.'

Ally nodded slowly. This hadn't gone at all the way she had expected it to, but she was prepared for the question. She found herself in fact much calmer than she had expected to be. She would deny murder, of course. But she had a need to convince them that Rob had deserved to die.

Instead of answering immediately, she slowly rolled up the sleeve of her blouse, revealing the yellow and green of the healing bruise below her shoulder. ‘That's my last souvenir of the man I loved. I didn't kill him. But someone did me a favour on Saturday night.'

It was after eight o'clock when Bert Hook finally contrived his return to the hospital.

Visiting ended at eight, and he moved against an ebb-tide of departing vehicles as he manoeuvred the silver Focus into the car park. The staff on this ward were familiar with him now. No one tried to prevent him from entering the Intensive Care Unit.

He was into the single room which had grown so familiar before he realized that something was wrong. The bed was empty. It was neatly, even severely, tidy, with crisp new sheets turned sharply back and the single pillow exactly in place at its head. The chair where Eleanor had sat for days like a watchful statue was gone. The multitude of tubes and machines which had been connected to the tiny, inert shape of his son stood quietly in the corner, yards from the bed where they had functioned.