More Than Meets the Eye (29 page)

‘I'm sure you could. Have you had any further thoughts on who could have killed Dennis Cooper?'

‘I'm afraid not. But I haven't got the advantage of the wealth of knowledge you've been accumulating throughout the week.' There was just enough sharpness in her tone to tell them that she had enjoyed saying that.

‘Clever woman, that,' said Hook after she had left them.

‘Undoubtedly. But you obviously have something specific in mind, Bert.'

Bert grinned. ‘I was thinking how careful she was to plant the notion that she'd no idea Cooper was planning to dismiss her.'

‘Ye-es. Either that or she was genuinely unaware of it. We only know of it because of his private notes. It's quite possible he hadn't broached the idea to her at the time of his death.'

‘I think you'd like Lorna Green to be innocent, because of the woman she is and because she's coping with her mother's condition so admirably. Which would of course be highly unprofessional of you.'

‘Highly unprofessional. Just as it would be to hope that a young man who has needed to cope with the rigours of life in a Glasgow council home should not be our man.'

Hook nodded sagely. ‘Two men as professional as we are should soon come up with a solution.'

T
he craft of detection is not characterized by sudden blinding insights. Television has encouraged the notion that the conclusion of most cases is the sudden shaft of light into a dark world, the ‘eureka' moment when the great man clutches his brow, slaps his thigh, and says, ‘Why on earth didn't I see this before? It's been staring me in the face all this time and yet I've chosen to ignore it!'

Such things are not unknown in CID circles, but they are extremely rare. They occur much more in literature than in fact. In the duller world of real detection, a team accumulates facts steadily, without knowing which ones are going to be relevant to the solution. John Lambert was a Gradgrind about facts. If you gathered enough of them, every case was solvable, he often reminded his serious crime teams.

That was no more than a truism, of course. You never did gather every fact, but in your successful cases you gathered the ones that mattered and made your deductions from them. Lambert shut himself in his study at home on Thursday night and thought for a long time. On Friday morning, he made a long phone call and a few notes before he departed for the murder room at Westbourne Park.

There was no team briefing arranged for this morning. Hook was leaving his car as Lambert drove into the staff area. Lambert beckoned him over and the DS went and sat in the front passenger seat of the chief superintendent's old Vauxhall. They stared at the wall of neatly cut hedge before them and had a quiet two-minute conversation about what Lambert proposed to do. At the end of it, Hook clasped both hands briefly to his face, rubbed his eyes, and said, ‘Right! Let's do it.'

‘You sure about this, Bert? I could easily get Chris Rushton to do this one. Be good for him, in fact.'

Hook stared ahead. ‘I'll do it. Unless you don't think I'll be sufficiently professional.'

Lambert grinned. ‘I've never seen you be unprofessional in all the years we've worked together, Bert. And I'll enjoy having you beside me for this one. We can't charge the suspect until we have a confession. There'll be a good deal of bluff involved.'

‘I know. I'm ready for that.'

‘Good. Usual arrangement. Play it by ear and come in when you think it's appropriate. We've worked it well enough in the past. If you feel up to it, I think you might start things off – he'll open up more readily to you.'

He got out of the car stiffly and it took him a second or two to straighten. He looked ostentatiously at the gardens and not at Hook as they walked through them. It was a good time to see them, before the public were admitted, but neither man registered much of the beauty today. Lambert managed to get Jim Hartley on the phone in the head gardener's office and he agreed to send their man to the curator's office; Jim preferred that term to the murder room, which most of the workers on the site seemed happy to use; murder has its own grisly glamour, even in our violent age.

Hartley said, ‘The lads are in the restroom, on their morning break. We start early, to get as much work as we can done before the visitors come. I'll send him up to you. Ten minutes?'

‘Ten minutes will be fine.' Lambert despatched a constable to the exit gate, to make sure no one on a small motorbike was allowed to leave.

Hartley went to the door of the hut the apprentices used as a restroom and watched the young men down the last of their tea with his arrival. ‘Top brass want to see you again, Alex. Better give yourself a wash and brush up. I said you'd be there in ten minutes.' He'd spoken as casually as he could, but the Scotsman's exit was followed by curious glances from his colleagues, as he had expected. ‘Time to get on with your jobs, lads. I expect Alex will be back with you before long.'

Alex changed from his working boots into shoes, stripped to the waist, and gave himself a hasty but vigorous wash in the bathroom he shared in the apprentices' cottage. He'd washed his hair in the shower only a couple of hours earlier; he ran a comb through its wiry resistance now, wondering if this energetic cleansing was a substitute for thought, a means of thrusting away the apprehension he had felt when Jim Hartley gave him the news that the CID wanted to see him for a third time about the death of Dennis Cooper.

The pair he knew from the golf club were waiting expectantly as the uniformed copper showed him into the room. They were studying him even as he entered, before he was prepared for it. Alex realized that in Glasgow he had always waited for the police in those small, depressing interview rooms; he'd never had to make an entry under scrutiny there. He sat down carefully on the upright chair in front of the big desk, as if he felt it important to place his young limbs precisely. He felt like a boxer adopting a precise stance for a tricky opponent. To the men who had been waiting for him, his face looked very white and his hair an even fiercer red than usual.

They let him sit and sweat for what seemed a long moment. He was resisting a squirm in his legs when Hook said softly, ‘Mr Cooper would never have implemented his threats, you know.'

It was a thought which had gnawed at Alex steadily through the last few nights. He cleared his throat and said, ‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘Wrong line, Alex.' Hook sounded genuinely concerned by the mistake. ‘You told us yesterday how he'd threatened you with dismissal from here as a result of your misconduct in Cheltenham.'

‘He said he might have to take it into account, that's all. If things went against me and charges were brought and I was convicted.'

‘It went a little further than that, didn't it? We know from what he wrote in his notebook that he proposed to rule you out altogether from employment here. I think he rather enjoyed telling you that. Other people as well as you have told us how he relished power, and his knowledge about the people who worked here gave him power.'

‘That's what got to me! I couldn't stand how the bastard actually enjoyed telling me that I'd shot my chances here.'

Both detectives recognized the key switch, the beginnings of a confession, but neither of them even glanced at the other; that would have been a wrong move in this complex and macabre game. Instead, Hook nodded and said, ‘I'm sure you tried to reason with him, to tell him that he was overreacting.'

That was the word! How he wished he'd had it on Sunday night. ‘I did. I tried to reason with him. I saw him wandering through the gardens after the storm had passed on down the valley. Everything was quiet and I thought this was my chance to talk to him. Everything seemed fresher and greener after the rain and it seemed the time for a fresh beginning for me too. I wanted to tell him he was going too far and too soon – that he was what you said, overreacting.' He pronounced each of the five syllables carefully, as if he were mouthing some newly discovered mantra with magical powers.

‘But you followed him with a weapon, didn't you, Alex, in case it turned out that he wasn't a man prepared to listen to reason?'

Fraser looked genuinely puzzled. ‘A weapon? No, I didn't have a weapon.' Then his hand flashed briefly to his mouth; they saw in that instant how tightly his fingers were clasped. ‘Oh, you mean the tree-tie, I suppose. I found that in the pocket of my old anorak. It was there from months ago, when we'd been securing young trees against the spring gales. It was quite cool after the thunderstorm, so I grabbed the anorak as I went out.'

Better for him than if he'd deliberately removed it from the tree near the scene of death as they'd thought, Hook decided. A minimal difference, but one a skilful defence counsel might make something of. Just as a prosecuting counsel would imply that he'd picked up the murder instrument deliberately rather than found it by chance in his pocket. Bert prompted, ‘So you put your arguments to him, Alex?'

It looked for a moment as if he would refuse to go on. His lips set into a dark, ultra-thin line. But then it seemed hopeless. The police always seemed able to collect information you didn't think they'd have, to know far more than you were prepared for them to know. Eventually Alex said dully, ‘I told him that I hadn't started the rumble in Cheltenham, that I'd had no choice about fighting. He said that the police didn't think that and that I would shortly be charged with causing an affray and GBH. He said he would have no alternative but to inform the Trust and recommend that they dispensed with my services, either immediately or at the end of my apprenticeship here.'

He fell silent, his face a picture of recollected despair. Hook said, ‘That seems a very premature reaction. I expect you told him that.'

Alex stared at him. If only he'd had this man or Ken Jackson at his side to argue for him. It was only when words failed him that he sprang into desperate and calamitous action. But that was a stupid idea; this man was filth. He shook his head, as if trying to clear it. ‘I told him that no court had convicted me, that we didn't even know yet if the police were going to bring charges, but he laughed at that. I think it was the laughing that really got to me. It was my whole life that the bastard was laughing away.'

‘Was that when you attacked him?'

‘No. No, I tried to go on arguing, but I felt my words getting feebler after he'd laughed in my face. I think I told him that he should take my work here into account, that Mr Hartley would tell him I was one of the best workers. Perhaps even the best. That I was surely still innocent of anything in Cheltenham until a court of law proved otherwise. He said he'd think about it, but he really couldn't see much sense in prolonging the agony for me.' He stopped, stared gloomily at the floor for a moment and said hopelessly, ‘I don't think he would have sacked me, not when he found that no charges were being brought about the Cheltenham business. I think he was just enjoying the feeling of power you talked about.'

He was silent for so long that he prompted the first words from John Lambert. ‘Was that when frustration took over and you attacked him, Alex?'

He bridled for an instant at the different voice. But Lambert's long, lined face seemed as sympathetic as Hook's as he turned to confront it. Defiance turned to helplessness and Fraser said quietly, ‘No, it wasn't then. Not quite. He said some stuff about the quality of my work here being now irrelevant and said we'd talked long enough. He was smiling as he turned away from me. I think that was what did it.'

Hook said quietly, ‘Yes, you should tell us exactly how it happened, Alex. It might be important.'

All three men knew that he had gone too far now to fling the suggestion back into the rubicund face. Fraser looked straight ahead and spoke as if he were supplying the commentary to a video film running in his mind. ‘He was grinning, like I told you. And I realized I'd been gripping the tree-tie in my pocket for five minutes at least. I used both hands to throw it round his neck as he turned his back. Then I twisted it tight. I didn't mean to kill him. I just wanted him to shut up and stop laughing and listen to what I had to say. But he wouldn't listen and eventually I felt him go limp. I put him on the ground and tried to get some air into him. But I didn't know what to do and I knew I mustn't leave prints. So I panicked and left him, hoping that he'd recover with just the fresh air. It wasn't until early on Monday that I heard how Matt Garton had found him dead.'

Hook moved the short distance forward, put his hand on the wiry shoulder, and quietly pronounced the words of arrest. Alex Fraser heard the familiar phrases about not needing to speak and not concealing evidence he might wish to rely on at a later date in court as if they were phrases in some familiar religious litany, to which he should provide the appropriate responses.

He said dully, ‘What put you on to me?'

It was Lambert who said quietly, ‘Once we realized that a tree-tie had been used for the killing, it was always likely to be one of the gardening staff. Only one of them had panicked and fled the scene on the day the murder was discovered. It's all circumstantial evidence, but it adds up.'

‘And I'm the one with the history of violence.'

‘You've tried to solve your problems with violence over the years, yes. And you were in the habit of arming yourself with some sort of weapon when you went to meetings. We couldn't simply ignore that.'

They only realized quite how perfectly erect Alex Fraser normally held his slim frame when they saw how slumped his shoulders were as he was led from the room. Hook said, ‘There are things you can do when you're locked up, Alex. You can get yourself qualifications. Horticultural ones, if you want to.'

The white young face looked at him uncomprehendingly. Then Fraser thrust his hands out to the uniformed officer in the anteroom who held the handcuffs. ‘Too early, Bert,' muttered Lambert as he led him back into the murder room.