Close Call (6 page)

Ron said, ‘They'll have given her quite a grilling, I expect, even though she's in shock. Come to think of it, they were probably glad to get to her whilst she was still in shock. The wife is always a leading suspect when there's a violent death like this, you know.'

‘I do, actually, yes.' Rosemary was always resentful of her husband when he went into his instructional vein. She looked at him curiously. He was still staring at the blank windows of the Durkin house, forty yards away. ‘If I didn't think it a shocking idea, I'd say you were actually quite enjoying this.'

Ron Lennox dragged his gaze away from the front door of the new house and back to his wife, forcing an ironic little smile at himself and his weaknesses. He said impishly, ‘Well, it is a new experience for us, isn't it? Being involved in a murder enquiry, I mean. You have to treasure new experiences when you get to our age. All the articles about retirement tell you that.'

‘A murder enquiry? Are you sure it's that?'

‘Suspicious death, they said on Radio Gloucester. That means they think it wasn't natural causes and it wasn't suicide. Murder, it means.'

She had never known Ron listen to local radio before: she was surprised that he even knew where the wavelength was on the tuning dial. And now he was gazing at the Durkin house again, as if he had only to look hard enough for the areas of raw new brick to reveal their secrets.

His curiosity was understandable, she supposed. As a teacher for forty years, Ron had no doubt had his highs and lows, and various crises to deal with. He hadn't usually brought his troubles home with him, and she was grateful for that. When their son Andy had been at the comprehensive, she'd learned more about what happened in the school from him than she'd ever picked up from her husband. But Ron certainly hadn't had much melodrama in his life, so it was probably natural enough that he should be fascinated when it hit him like this.

All the same, Rosemary Lennox wasn't certain that her husband's interest in this was entirely healthy.

Detective Inspector Christopher Rushton was a meticulous man. He liked order in his life. In the world of crime, chaos often seems to be the predominating force; Chris Rushton regarded it as a challenge to impose some sort of order on the police reactions to it.

He delighted in keeping himself up to date with the latest technology. He was an enthusiast for computers and everything which went with the digital age. And somewhat unusually in the modern police service, DI Rushton had found himself a job niche which exactly suited him.

Most twenty-first century superintendents ran murder and other serious crime investigations from behind their desks, deploying their extensive teams without leaving headquarters very often themselves. Superintendent John Lambert was a determined exception to the rule, a self-confessed dinosaur among senior CID officers. He insisted upon conducting many interviews himself, on maintaining direct contact with the prominent figures in any investigation as it evolved. It was undoubtedly eccentric, but he got results. And in the police service, if your ‘clear-up rates' are good, you are given latitude.

The man left in the CID section to co-ordinate the vast amount of information gathered by the team of around thirty officers assigned to most murder cases was DI Rushton. He willingly undertook the filing and cross-referencing of the welter of information gathered from house-to-house enquiries, in-depth follow-up interviews by senior officers, information volunteered by members of the public, data from previous crimes which might or might not be relevant, and the host of miscellaneous contributions which characterize any prolonged serious crime investigation.

Chris Rushton was not only highly efficient in this work. He got great satisfaction from it. He saw himself as the champion of modern technology against older reactionaries such as Lambert and Hook. The pair played up willingly enough to his image of them, pretending to more ignorance of electronic technology than was in fact the case, gently teasing the slightly humourless Rushton about his preference for machines over people.

But Rushton's task was important, and Lambert knew that better than anyone. If computer technology had been fully available at the time of the Yorkshire Ripper, and Christopher Rushton had been in charge of it, the lives of many of the man's later victims would have been saved.

Even at five o'clock on a sweltering Sunday afternoon, in an almost deserted CID section at Oldford police station, Chris Rushton had already set to work with his usual enthusiasm. Already he had an extensive file system on the Robin Durkin murder and those involved in it. And he had news for Lambert and Hook, when they came into the station after their meeting with Alison Durkin.

‘We'll have the full post-mortem findings some time tomorrow,' he said to Lambert as they came into CID.

‘It won't tell us much beyond what we know now,' said Lambert, a little sourly.

‘And what did you make of the grieving widow?' Chris Rushton asked.

Lambert glanced at Bert Hook, who said, ‘Genuinely affected and shocked by this death, as far as we could tell. If she's acting, she's in the Judi Dench class. But even if she'd killed him, she'd be in deep shock now, perhaps. However, it was useful seeing her today: she gave us a pretty cogent account of what happened last night, before the killing. We'll need to check it against other people's impressions, of course, but her version of the party they had in the close before this murder rang true, to me.'

‘In that case, you'll be interested in the first entry I've made into her file,' said Rushton. He was trying not to sound too pleased with himself. And failing.

He looked as if he was about to produce a print-out for them, but Lambert said a little wearily, ‘Just tell us, Chris. Has Mrs Alison Durkin got a history as a multiple poisoner?'

Chris frowned at this levity. John Lambert had a record second to none as a taker of villains: that is why the Home Office had recently extended his service by two years, in response to the Chief Constable's special request. But as well as being slow to recognize the importance of the new technology, he sometimes displayed too much levity for Chris's taste. ‘I've nothing as dramatic as that to report. I merely thought you might be interested to know that the dead man's widow has a criminal record.'

‘For petty thieving?'

‘For criminal violence. For Actual Bodily Harm. For attacking her partner with an offensive weapon: to whit, scissors. Sounds as if she was lucky it wasn't an even more serious charge.' Chris Rushton tried not to sound self-satisfied about his information. And failed again.

It was almost seven o'clock by the time Bert Hook got home. The house seemed unnaturally quiet.

Eleanor was preparing a salad in the kitchen. Salad was always a good bet for police wives in hot weather; you could never be sure when your man would come home, and salad didn't deteriorate as quickly as other things.

Bert watched her busy, expert hands slicing cucumber and hard-boiled eggs and preparing dressings. He marvelled again at the casual dexterity and the versatility of the female of his species. ‘Jack not back yet?'

His wife smiled. ‘No. He rang on his mobile between the innings, though. He got forty-one. And a dodgy lbw decision, he said.'

Bert grinned, trying not to look too proud, even here, where showing pride wouldn't matter. ‘That's batsmen for you. They never ever get a good lbw decision, even when it would have knocked all three stumps over. It's a good score, that, though. Forty-one's a lot, for a thirteen-year-old.'

‘Jack seemed to think so. He was trying hard not to sound too excited about his score to his ignorant mum. He was trying to be blasé, but thirteen-year-olds can't do blasé very well.'

‘Where's Luke?'

‘He's in bed, I think. He's not very well. He had a bit of a temperature, so I gave him paracetamol and suggested he went to bed for a while. He actually went, without any argument, so he must be feeling rough. Have a look in at him, but don't disturb him if he's asleep.'

Bert went up to their bedroom and changed into shorts and a tee shirt: it was still hot and airless. He went along the landing and cautiously opened the door into his younger son's room.

He was back in the kitchen with Eleanor within thirty seconds. ‘Luke's got a fever of some kind. I think we need a doctor.'

Seventy miles north of Gurney Close, in a leafy suburb of Birmingham, there was even less breeze than in Herefordshire. Even at ten o'clock on that Sunday night, with darkness dropping in fast over the second city in the land, the temperature was still in the seventies. Or to be more modern and precise, it was exactly twenty-three degrees centigrade.

This man prided himself on his precision. And he was certainly a modern man, if modernity can be measured by occupation. He had the windows open tonight, as he tried to engineer a small, cooling current of air and get it to blow through the flat. He didn't favour open windows, as a rule. They made him uneasy. He was intensely conscious of security. He also felt much safer when the windows and doors around him were locked and barred.

He was an inch above what the latest surveys said was now the height of the average Briton. He wore dark-blue trousers and a lighter blue leisure shirt, with grey suede slip-on shoes. He had his hair cut short, but not shaved to the scalp in the way some men affected. He would be forty next month, but with his lean figure and his thin, rather intense, face he looked rather younger than that. He had a small scar on his left temple, which he still inspected from time to time in the mirror; it had grown shallower and less white with the passing years, but was still quite noticeable in photographs.

This man did not care to be noticeable. Every adjustment he made to his appearance was designed to make him more average, more unremarkable in the world in which he moved.

He looked at the electronic clock on top of his television set. Ten fourteen. Another sixteen minutes before he could ring. He had never enjoyed waiting. Not like this. He should have been used to it by now, he told himself wryly. His life contained a lot of waiting; it was ironic that when everyone thought of you as a man of action, you should do so much more waiting than acting.

He found himself thinking unexpectedly of his wife and his two children. He wasn't mawkish. It was only very rarely that he indulged his emotions at all, so it must have been the waiting that turned his thoughts this way now. He hadn't seen either his wife or his children for seven years, and he didn't miss them. He had never cared much for children, and never met a woman who didn't want commitment from him. Well, there were plenty of women available for money; women who were there when you wanted them, not when they wanted you. Much better that way.

He much preferred a life without complications. It enabled him to concentrate. And concentration was an absolute necessity in the occupation he had chosen for himself. Or which had chosen him: he was never quite sure how he had arrived here.

He enjoyed a good book. Never went anywhere without one. There were plenty of hours to kill, plenty of time for reading, in his work. People found it strange that he always had a book with him among the tools of his trade, but it seemed to him perfectly logical. Time which could have been extremely boring passed much more quickly if you had a good book.

But tonight he hadn't been able to read. It was perhaps just the excessive heat, but he thought it was more likely the unexpected complication which had cropped up in his work. One of those complications which upset him, which disturbed the beautiful simplicity of his schedule; it was a thing you couldn't possibly have foreseen.

He'd never been one for television. He switched off the film he'd long since ceased to follow. The time was almost at hand. He would phone precisely at the moment arranged, timing it to the very second. Precision. Probably the man waiting for his call couldn't care less about absolute precision, and any time around ten thirty would have been acceptable to him. But precision mattered a lot to the man waiting by the open window in the Birmingham flat.

He had to nerve himself to use the agreed sentence. He could see the necessity for it: you never knew who was listening to phone conversations these days. But the phrasing seemed ridiculous: probably the man who had arranged the call had a taste for the melodramatic. Whereas to his mind, melodrama was best avoided. The more cold and clinical you could be, the less you allowed any sort of emotion into your life, the more efficient you were likely to be. And efficiency was a
sine qua non
. Without it, you wouldn't survive a week in this game.

Game! His lips wrinkled in silent derision at the absurdity of that word. But it was coming up to ten thirty. He walked over to the phone as he watched the seconds tick towards the half hour. Then he tapped in the number and took a deep breath, preparing himself to voice the absurd mantra in a flat voice, without the inflexion which might convey his disdain for such tactics.

The phone was picked up at the other end of the line. He said with perfect clarity, ‘The River Wye is a beautiful river.'

He heard breathing at the other end of the line, but no words of acknowledgement came back to him. There was a clink, which might have been glass, or might have been something else entirely. Then there was a sharp click, as the phone was replaced and the contact was broken.

C
arol Smart said, ‘We should really agree what we're going to say before we talk to them, you know.'

Her husband was immersed as usual in the morning paper. Philip Smart said absently, ‘Yes, I suppose we should.' Then what she had said got through to his brain and he looked up at her over the top of his
Telegraph
. ‘Why do you say that?'

Carol turned away from him, fiddling with the flex of the toaster, trying to sound casual. ‘I don't know, really. I was just thinking that neither of us is used to dealing with the police. So it would be sensible for us to be careful about it, wouldn't it?'