More Than Meets the Eye (19 page)

Lambert nodded and said with heavy irony, ‘Not every serious crime matches your exacting standards, Chris. Murder in particular can be either very straightforward or very untidy. This is one of the untidy ones. A lot of people interviewed by the team are hardly suspects at all – they're seen just because they might have important information, perhaps without even recognizing it.'

Hook said with a trace of satisfaction, ‘You're not quite right about all residents having been interviewed, Chris. There's one resident we haven't seen as yet. That should be remedied today. The Scots lad who went missing. He should be back on site by now.'

‘Alex Fraser.' Chris Rushton was annoyed that he'd forgotten him. ‘A man with a history of violence, who was involved in a serious gang fight less than a fortnight ago. A leading suspect, I'd say. I've already got a file with the details of his past. The sooner I get your input the better.'

‘You shall have it by the end of the day,' promised Lambert with a smile. ‘I hope our input will help to make your parameters clearer.'

Rushton, who was thirty-two, was aware that the older men enjoyed taking the piss. Or in his terms, treating serious issues as lightweight items. He said gloomily, ‘The post-mortem report doesn't tell us much. I didn't think it would.'

The three men looked down at the copies which had lately arrived in front of them. Lambert said, ‘Any signs that the victim put up a struggle?'

‘Nothing obvious. No skin under the nails or anything useful like that. There are indications that he made a desperate attempt to claw whatever was throttling him away from his neck.'

Lambert nodded, looking at the sheet. ‘A few scratches on the front of his neck from his own nails. It looks to me as if he was taken by surprise, possibly as he turned away from whoever killed him. Still no murder weapon?'

‘No. Probably something wider than a rope or a wire, because it didn't cut into the neck. Perhaps a belt from trousers or a dress. I don't suppose we'll ever see it.'

Hook pointed out, ‘We now have a time of death, for what it's worth. The pathologist thinks he consumed a major meal two to three hours before death. His wife says they ate at about seven and took around forty minutes. Which means that he probably died between nine and eleven.'

Lambert concluded his perusal of the report. ‘What hasn't emerged is any trace of that “exchange” we're always told is inevitable at a murder scene. The killer is supposed to leave something of himself behind; some fibres from his clothes, some hair from his head. Neither the PM or forensic have come up with anything. It rained heavily during the night after the death; that can't have helped.' Killers are always ‘he' to CID men. That is no more than statistics; women murderers are simply much less common than male ones.

At this moment of collective professional dejection, there was a discreet knock at the door. A young woman DC entered uncertainly, as if she expected to be castigated for her interruption. ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir, but we thought you should have this. It was left at the entrance office, where the post is delivered. But it wasn't part of the post.'

A small white envelope, with the words ‘CID OFFICER IN CHARGE', in carefully printed capitals. Lambert slit it open and extracted an innocent-looking, soft-backed black notebook. Inside the cover, he read the neatly penned words. ‘Strictly Private. Property of Dennis Cooper.'

She'd never rung him at work before. That was something they'd agreed as part of a policy of secrecy. But Peter was free, without a partner to deceive, as she had.

Alison Cooper realized with a profound sense of shock that she was now in the same position as Peter Nayland: she no longer needed to lie to a partner. It was surely a wonderful thing to be free to acknowledge openly her relationship with Peter. But she mustn't do that yet. She must wait until this huge fuss over Dennis's death was over and the police went away. No sense in attracting their attention, when they were searching for a killer.

Twice she picked up the phone and put it down again without dialling. She was nervous when it came to the point. Yet she felt an overwhelming need to speak to the man with whom she now planned to spend the rest of her life. That is what she wanted to do. She was sure of it now and she needed Peter to know that. She also needed to hear him declare again that he also wanted it.

She succeeded in tapping in the number at her third attempt. The phone was answered immediately and she told the strange voice firmly that she wished to speak to Mr Nayland.

The PA's voice was professionally alert, not bored as it might have been after doing this hundreds of times before. ‘I'm afraid Mr Nayland is in a meeting. May I take a message?'

‘No, I need to speak to him personally.'

‘As I say, that isn't possible at the moment. May I tell him who called?'

‘Tell him it's Alison. It's – it's a family matter.' Ally smiled nervously in the privacy of her room. Let the woman think she was a sister.

Peter Nayland rang back within five minutes. ‘How'd it go?'

She pictured him at his big desk, issuing orders and receiving bulletins from the staff she had never seen and probably never would see, in that business world which both of them had found convenient to leave very vague. ‘The police thing? It went all right, I think. I played the grieving widow as we agreed. They were quite sympathetic.'

‘Good. They didn't know anything about me?'

‘No. I'm sure they'd have raised it, if they had.'

‘Good. Let's keep it that way. It's better for all concerned that we keep the police out of our affairs.'

‘Yes, I suppose so.'

‘No suppose about it.' He spoke sharply. ‘I've found over the years that the less the police know about things, the better. They poke their noses into all kinds of things, once they find an excuse.'

She tried to make this lighter. ‘But you've never been involved in a murder investigation before, have you, my darling?'

‘Do you think they've finished with you now?'

She had hoped for comfort, perhaps for a little laughter together, but he was forcing her to confront the death she had been trying to put aside. ‘Perhaps not. They did say they might want to speak to me again. When they'd interviewed other people and knew more about this crime, I think they said.'

‘Just keep quiet, then. Keep your eyes and your ears open and your mouth shut. Pick up whatever you can, but keep a low profile.'

He spoke almost as though he knew she was guilty. Alison said, ‘I need to see you, Peter.'

‘Better not, for the moment.'

His answer had been immediate and firm. She said, ‘I feel very lonely here.'

‘I can appreciate that. But it's much better that we don't meet for a while.'

‘So that you can stay out of it altogether, you mean?' It was almost an accusation. They were arguing, when she had rung him for reassurance, for a scrap of the love which would enable her to get through this.

‘I thought we'd agreed on that. I thought we'd agreed that it was much better that the police knew nothing at all about us. I can't afford to become a suspect, Ally.'

She wondered for a moment why that should be. But at least he'd used her name for the first time. She said reluctantly, ‘I know you're right. It makes sense. But I feel hemmed in here. I needed to hear your voice, my darling.'

There was a silence, long enough for her to think for an awful moment that the line had gone dead. Then he said, ‘And it's good to hear you, Ally. And I'm longing to see you, my love. Believe me, I'm missing you and looking forward to holding you in my arms, once the time is right.'

‘And when will that be?'

‘I can't tell you that, Ally. It's out of our hands. Perhaps when they've arrested someone else for Dennis's murder. Perhaps when they've given up hope and gone away.'

‘I need you, Peter. More than I ever thought I would.' Perhaps an independent woman shouldn't be saying that, but she didn't give a damn.

‘And I need you, Ally. But once this is over, we'll have the rest of our lives together. Let's not do anything to jeopardize that.'

She made herself smile, forced herself to say, ‘I expect you're right, as usual. In fact I know you are, really.'

‘I am about this, my darling. It's best not to start any gossip, believe me. The police pick up on things like that. And it's best that you don't ring me here. I'll ring you, during the evening. In two or three days.'

‘Promise?'

She tried to make it sound light, even girlish. It was only after she'd put the phone down that she thought Peter Nayland seemed to know an awful lot about police procedures.

He'd had a leisurely shower before putting on the clean clothes he sorely needed. He looked in the mirror before he went to meet them. Alex Fraser was shocked by the face he saw there. It looked very white and drawn beneath the familiar fiery red of his newly washed hair.

They were the two pigs he'd played golf with at Ross-on-Wye. Alex wasn't surprised, as he'd heard they were heading the murder team. He'd seen them about the place before his hasty departure from Westbourne.

Rather to his surprise, it was the burly detective sergeant rather than the chief super who began the exchanges. ‘You didn't do yourself any good, lad, disappearing like that.'

‘I'm sorry. I needed to talk to a friend.'

‘And you haven't any friends here?'

‘Not friends like Ken. Ken dragged me out of the swamp. Ken believes in me. Ken got me the job here. I trust him.'

‘You were in care, weren't you, Alex?'

This must be the good-cop bad-cop act. He knew what they were up to, didn't he? They wouldn't fool him. But the broad, tanned face seemed genuinely interested in his tale. ‘I was in a council home from the age of thirteen. And in trouble. Petty thieving, bits of fighting. Ken Jackson stuck with me. Ken got me the job with the Glasgow Parks Department.'

‘And from that you got your job here.'

‘Yes. Ken Jackson helped me with that, too. He wrote me a reference. I think he spoke on the phone to the people who gave me the apprenticeship.'

‘I see. Do you like your job here, Alex?'

He'd tried to guess what they would ask him, but he'd never thought it would be this. There surely couldn't be any trap for him here. ‘I love it. I'm desperate to keep it. I want to stay on here at the end of the year, if there's a vacancy. But they usually only keep one of the apprentices, Mr Hartley says.'

‘And if you're not that one, will you stay in horticulture?'

‘Yes. It's what I want to do. I didn't know that. When I first went to the parks department in Glasgow, it was just a job. But then I got interested in plants and how things grow. Now I know how the different soils work and how to propagate plants. I want to go on learning. I want to make it my life's work, if I can.'

He was earnest, even slightly ridiculous, in his desire to convince them. His enthusiasm seemed inappropriate in this raw product of a great city, who spoke still with the quick, harsh accent of Glasgow. Lambert couldn't remember when he had last heard a young man so impassioned about horticulture. Another first, even at this late stage in his detective career.

He spoke for the first time. ‘Golf and gardening. Two unusual ways for a young man to seek a way out of his troubles.'

Fraser was immediately cautious. This was the hard-cop bit. They'd softened him up, made him expose his weakness with this unexpected talk about his work. Now the old bugger would go for him. He'd quite liked them both in the clubhouse at Ross, where they hadn't seemed like filth at all. But golf clubhouses were odd places; real life was suspended there. They'd show their real faces here, in this room everyone on the site was now calling the murder room.

Alex said carefully, ‘I've been lucky. Lucky to find a sport I'm good at and work I like. Lucky because I had Ken Jackson on my side.'

‘Indeed. I agree with all of that. What I find difficult to comprehend is why you should risk all this by reverting to violence.'

For an awful moment, Alex thought they were accusing him of murder. Then he told himself that they couldn't be speaking of that, that it would be foolish of him even to show that he had thought they might be. He said woodenly, repeating the phrases he'd used to the police in Cheltenham, ‘You mean that rumble last week. I didn't start that. I was drawn into it. We were attacked by another gang when we came out of the pub. We'd have gone home quietly without that.'

‘Home in your case being here.'

‘Yes. We had a taxi laid on. I'd only gone to the rave because two of my mates here asked me to. It was just a twenty-first birthday party. In no way were we looking for trouble.'

‘Yet you went fully prepared for it. You armed yourself with illegal weaponry.'

Alex Fraser sighed. ‘The knuckledusters. It always comes back to that with you lot, doesn't it?' He was suddenly transformed from the horticultural zealot of a moment ago to a whining old lag, his thin features contorted with the weight of the wrongs visited upon him by an uncaring society.

Lambert said sharply, ‘Not just us lot, Mr Fraser. The rest of the world will require an answer. Premeditated violence, the lawyers and the rest of us will say. Why else arm yourself with knuckledusters for a night out?'

It was the question he'd been asking himself ever since that fateful night. There was no convincing answer to it, of course. ‘It was just habit. A bad habit, I admit. When ye went out into the Gorbals or any other part of Glasgow ye went prepared to defend yourself. I did the same thing in Cheltenham.'

‘And inflicted serious injuries on two men there.'

‘Two buggers who attacked me. They were the ones who premeditated violence.'