Malice Aforethought (17 page)

‘I only went there because I heard in a pub that you’d taken him into the station for questioning. I knew Aubrey Bass, just about. I knew he lived next door to Ted, because he’d ogled me once or twice when I’d been visiting. I wanted to know if Bass knew who had killed Ted — you didn’t seem to be getting very far at the time. He said he knew nothing about it, but if I needed someone to take care of me, he could be the man.’ The mouth, which was the only recognisable part of her face, smiled wryly at the recollection. Without the accompaniment of the rest of her features, it made a bizarre effect.

‘I can believe that, now. You must see that it looked pretty suspicious at the time.’

‘I suppose so. It looks as though I should be grateful that police help was so close at hand last night, whatever the reason.’

‘You shouldn’t have tried to play the amateur detective. Look where it’s landed you.’

That miraculously untouched mouth grinned at its owner’s naivety. ‘Are you any nearer to arresting the person who killed Ted?’

‘I think we are, yes. It’s a matter of putting the various pieces of the jigsaw together, and we’re nearly there.’ Beyond her bed, he could see the formidable Sister in the doorway, looking fierce disapproval and gesturing at her watch. He said, ‘I’m glad that your injuries are no worse. There’s one final thing. If we’re right about the man who attacked you, he didn’t even know you. He’s a man who sells his services to anyone who will pay handsomely. Can you think of anyone who might have hired him to attack you like that?’

The two dark, glistening pupils which were all he could see of her eyes fixed on his face for a moment, and he thought she was going to give him a name. Then she said softly, ‘No. I can’t think of anyone who would want this done to me. Perhaps you’ll discover that if you find the man.’

He stood up, ‘Yes, I think we will.’

But as he thanked her for her help and took his leave, he thought he already knew who had paid her attacker.

Sixteen

Aubrey Bass looked out of his window at the car park behind the block of flats. He didn’t like what he saw. His van was back in its usual position, which was good. He had looked anxiously over his shoulder into its interior, the first couple of times he had used it, not liking the thought that the body of his late neighbour, Ted Giles, had been carried there on its last journey to Broughton’s Ash churchyard. But he had carried a big load of lead to the scrapyard in it yesterday, and disposed of it for a good price without too many questions being asked. That made him feel that things were back to normal now, as if that more usual load had exorcised the old van of the lingering traces of a murder victim.

What Aubrey saw when he peered blearily towards his vehicle did not please him, however. The pigs were back. He knew Sergeant ‘Jack’ Johnson. The man had done his stint as station sergeant on the front desk of Oldford Police Station for several years, and anyone in that post had inevitably come into contact with Aubrey Bass and his life of indolence and venial crime. He was down in the car park now with another uniformed man and a couple of civilians. Aubrey, opening his window furtively and, craning his neck, could see that they were examining the ground round the rear exit from the block. They seemed to be taking measurements, as well as scanning the tarmac intently. Probably nothing to do with him, but he didn’t like having the filth around the place, all the same.

He shut the window, switched on his kettle, and scratched himself comprehensively. Nosy bastards! Just as well he’d got rid of that lead yesterday.

***

In their different ways, three otherwise hard-headed women had behaved stupidly. And all of them for love of men who weren’t worth it, thought Lambert. If it was love: for him, the difference between love and infatuation remained as difficult to define as ever, even after so many years of studying it at first hand. Passion, then. Whatever the emotion, it hadn’t brought any of these three women what they desired: one of them lay in hospital and the other two were likely to end up in prison.

The dahlias which had flowered so bravely in Connie Elson’s garden when Lambert and Hook had last visited the place had been cut down now by frost. They were sodden brown sticks, rearing into the air like miniature versions of the shattered trees of the Somme battlefield. Nor was the woman of the house immediately at the door to greet them, as she had been on their previous visit. The bell rang loud in the silent bungalow, and it seemed for a minute and more as if the occupant might have fled.

When she eventually opened the door, Connie Elson looked white and tense, despite the wide smile she had put on for them in the hall. This time, Lambert dispensed with the formalities of greeting. ‘We need to talk, Mrs Elson,’ he said curtly, and walked past her without being invited into the lounge where they had sat to enjoy coffee and flapjacks on their previous visit.

She ignored his attitude, making a last attempt at conventional hospitality. ‘Do sit down, Superintendent. And you too — it’s Sergeant Hook, isn’t it?’

Lambert remained standing. ‘I’ve come here from the bedside of Miss Zoe Ross.’

‘That woman! I thought you’d have arrested her by now. She killed poor Ted, you know, whatever she says.’

‘She didn’t kill Ted Giles, Mrs Elson. And now she’s in hospital. I notice you don’t look very surprised at that. I’m here because I think you put her there.’

She abandoned her decision to sit down, drew herself instead to her full height, tried desperately to rise to this challenge she told herself she had half-expected. ‘Now look, Mr Lambert, you should know better than to come here making accusations like that. I haven’t been out of this place in the last twenty-four hours, so—’

‘I didn’t say you’d attacked her yourself! Nothing so straightforward and risky as that!’ Lambert, who had intended to heather out, to let her condemn herself by over-elaboration, found himself shouting. He was suddenly weary of this woman, with her designer clothes, her expensive jewellery and her elaborate coiffure; she was at once pathetic and dangerous. Yet the brain works with amazing speed: even in his anger, he had time to wonder if he would have been so furious with the woman if her victim had been a man and not an attractive younger woman. He went on in more measured tones, ‘You put her in hospital as surely as if you had attacked her yourself. More surely, because the man you employed was a professional. He threw a bag over her head and beat her face without mercy; it will be a miracle if she isn’t permanently scarred.’

‘But I didn’t want—’ Her hand flew to her mouth, the jewelled rings flashing as they caught the afternoon sun through the big window.

‘You didn’t want her hurt as badly as that? Think you can dole out violence in controlled doses, do you, like money? Well, men like Wally Smith aren’t that easy to control, you see, when they have someone helpless to hit.’

‘You’ve got Wally?’

He felt a surge of triumph with that short phrase. She’d as good as admitted she’d used Smith. He might deny it all, but with her evidence they’d put him away for a long stretch. ‘We’ll have him before the day’s out. And you’ll go to prison for employing him, I’m glad to say. Arrest her, Bert, and let’s be out of here. We haven’t any more time to waste on Mrs Elson!’

Hook pronounced the formal words of her arrest in connection with an assault on Zoe Ross. She appeared to take notice of the warning that whatever she said might later be used in evidence, for at first she said nothing. Only when she sat weeping beside Hook in the back of the car on the way to the station did she speak. Three times she said between sobs, as if it didn’t just explain her conduct but excused it as well, ‘But I thought she’d killed Ted, you see. I knew she’d found out about Ted and me, and she must have known he was going to marry me.’

She got not a word in response from either of the men in the car. As they drove into the Oldford Police Station car park, she said by way of hopeless amplification, ‘I thought I could frighten her into owning up!’

***

An hour after Connie Elson had been taken into Oldford Police Station, Colin Pitman rang his daughter from his office in Malvern. ‘We need to talk,’ he said tersely.

‘Dad, we agreed we’d stay apart for a little while. Just in case they’re watching us. They won’t be, but just to be on the safe side.’

‘I know what we agreed. But I think we need to go over it all once again. I told you, they were here again on Tuesday and I had to change my story.’ All his life until now, he had been the strong man in her life, offering her advice and support, guiding her actions with his experience and shrewdness. Now he felt like a weak old man, pathetically dependent upon his daughter, allowing circumstances to dictate the course of his actions when he had been used to shaping them himself.

Sue Giles heard it in his voice. He would let them down, unless they bolstered him, convinced him that they had nothing to fear but their own weakness. He had phoned her before to tell her that the police had been back to talk to him on Tuesday, given her the details of the new story he had told to account for his whereabouts on that fateful Saturday night. He seemed to have forgotten all that. He needed the physical support of a meeting with her, the reassurance of her calm presence at his side. In all truth, she didn’t feel as cool and confident as she was trying to sound for her father, but she mustn’t let him know that. ‘All right, Dad. Come over here by all means, if you think it will help. Make it in about an hour. Graham’s coming round after school. We’ll have a council of war.’ She gave an involuntary nervous laugh at the phrase as she put down the phone.

***

Sergeant ‘Jack’ Johnson had new men in his team. He was instructing them in the painstaking, boring and just occasionally rewarding techniques they had to employ. They’d already covered the area round where Aubrey Bass’s van was parked four days earlier, with little added to what they already knew. It was important that now that they were back to stake out the area around the exit, there was full attention to the task, with no weary sense of
déjà vu
.

Crawling around wet tarmac on a bleak November day with tweezers and a small stainless-steel dish for your findings was not a pleasant task, though at least the signing cards of dogs or cats were not evident on this particular patch. He told one new man how even a dog turd had become vital evidence on one memorable occasion in the early nineties: they had parcelled the distinctive excreta carefully into a plastic bag and some forensic genius had later been able to place a particular dog (and thus a particular owner) in a specific spot on a certain day.

The young man did not seem very impressed with this particular example of the rewards of diligence. But the message about detail obviously went home, for ten minutes later he brought his Sergeant a dish full of the tiny detritus that would only have been visible to a man on hands and knees in that draughty expanse. Though he did not say so, Johnson could see at a glance that most of the items were likely to be unhelpful in establishing the particular spot where Ted Giles had met his end. The tiny shards of broken glass did not connect with the method by which Giles had been killed. The rusting pin looked to his experienced eye as if it had lain here for far longer than eleven days.

One item, however, Sergeant Johnson thought very interesting. He always told his team to keep an open mind about what might be useful to forensic: they were to collect anything and everything, leaving it to the boffins to pick out what was relevant to a particular investigation. But whenever it was possible, he examined the clothing, and especially the outer clothing, worn by murder victims before his SOC investigations, so that he might instantly recognise anything at a scene of crime which might be significant. And on this occasion, he found much to interest him in a tiny cluster of near-black fibres which his acolyte’s tweezers had retrieved.

Ted Giles had been wearing a navy-blue V-neck sweater of pure wool when his body had been found. The Constable was able to tell Johnson exactly where he had found the fibres, ground into the rough surface of the tarmac. Very much as though a man had been flung on his back here as he fell with a wire drawn fatally tight around his neck. But that was for other, more scientific minds and their technology to decide. Sergeant Johnson measured the exact distance from the double doors of the flats and marked it carefully on the neat scale plan he had drawn of the area.

He saw the caretaker, watching their activities curiously from the hall of the flats as he pretended to sweep the tiled floor. ‘I wanted a quick word,’ Johnson said. ‘This area hasn’t been swept since the night of the tenth of November, has it?’

The man was around sixty, with thick glasses and a droopy moustache. He was immediately defensive. Not my responsibility, that. There’s a contract with a gardening firm for all outside maintenance. I pick up any bits of litter I see, keep the place tidy, like, but that’s all.’

‘Good. I’m only anxious to check that things haven’t been disturbed here since the death of Mr Giles. The outside maintenance firm hasn’t been here since then?’

‘No. We don’t see much of them once the winter comes and the grass stops growing.’

The man was prepared to enlarge upon the deficiencies of the absent contractors, but Johnson said, ‘You’ve recently replaced the bulb in this outside light, haven’t you?’

The caretaker looked at him suspiciously over his moustache. ‘Yes. How do you know that?’

‘Superintendent Lambert of Oldford CID told me. You were putting a new bulb in when he came here to look at Mr Giles’s flat on Tuesday of last week.’

The caretaker seemed impressed by this precision. ‘That’s right. I was up me ladder when he and that Sergeant came. They asked me for directions to Mr Giles’s flat.’

‘Do you happen to know when the old bulb failed? Was the light off over the previous weekend?’