Skeleton Plot (17 page)

‘Secrets don’t usually help marriages, Mr Wallington. But it’s your business how much you tell your wife of this. It will remain your secret, unless the happenings at Fairfax Street become the background for a murder trial. Have you anything further to offer to us?’

‘No. I don’t know how Julie died. It wasn’t in the squat.’

The children came out to see the detectives depart. The boy and the girl beside him waved hard as the car drove away, dancing a little with the excitement, too small and too innocent to have any understanding of a world which dealt in drugs and violent death.

‘I hope I’m not intruding, Mrs Dutton.’ Steve Williams stood awkwardly at the doorstep of the small semi-detached house.

The widow looked at him suspiciously for a moment. Then her face cleared as she recognized him. ‘It’s Mr Williams, isn’t it? Come in, please. Jack said I was to listen to whatever you had to say to me.’

She was a small woman with grey hair and a slight limp. He wasn’t sure as she led him into a living room with slightly old-fashioned and well-worn furniture whether the limp was permanent or temporary. She offered him the best armchair and he sat down carefully on its lumpy and lopsided seat. ‘I was very sorry to hear that Jack had gone.’

‘It was the best thing for him. Best thing for all of us, really. None of us wanted him to go on suffering, once there was no hope.’ Jack Dutton had not been dead for long, but she had got used to saying these words to people who offered their condolences. It was a formula she recited to get her and her well-wishers through the awkward early moments of sympathy. ‘I’ve had quite a few letters. Some from family, some from friends. I didn’t know Jack was so highly thought of.’

‘That must be a consolation for you, at a sad time like this.’ Steve wasn’t good at sympathy. He’d danced on a few graves in his time, told plenty of people that they’d had it coming. But he hadn’t felt the need to offer consolation very often. He found now that he wasn’t comfortable with it. ‘I visited him in hospital, you know, not long before he went.’

‘The day before he died. He told me you’d been. Said I was to contact you, if I needed anything. Said you’d look after me.’

‘Yes. I’m glad he did that. That’s why I’m here. Disturbing your Sunday morning when you want to be quiet with your grief.’ He gave a laugh which was a little too loud, then stopped it abruptly, realizing that laughter was not appropriate in this house of mourning.

‘That’s all right. Jack worked for you, didn’t he?’

‘Yes. He worked for me for a long time.’ Dutton obviously hadn’t spoken about his work at home, any more than Steve had spoken about his businesses to Hazel. ‘We got on well. He was a reliable man, your Jack.’

‘Yes. He was a good husband. Do you want tea? I can soon—’

‘No. Please don’t bother. You’ve got quite enough to do at the moment, Mrs Dutton.’

‘Beth, they call me. Funeral’s Wednesday. Church at ten o’clock, then the cemetery.’

‘I’ll do my very best to be there, Beth. But I came here because I want to offer you real help, not just sympathy.’ He looked round at the room and its shabby furniture, stopped himself just in time from offering what he realized would be taken as an insult. ‘I’d like to provide you with some financial help, Beth.’

The lined grey face looked at him suspiciously. ‘That’s good of you, Mr Williams. But we’re all right. The house is paid for and I have the pension. And there’s money coming in from insurance: I think you told Jack to take the policy out, to supplement our pensions. The funeral’s going to cost more than I thought, but the insurance money will see to that, when it comes in.’

‘I’d like to pay for Jack’s funeral, Beth. It would be my last gesture to a man who was a good worker and a good friend.’ Dutton had never been a friend. Williams didn’t have friends, certainly not among the people who’d worked for him.

But he was relying on the fact that this woman wouldn’t know that, and he was right. Beth Dutton said uncertainly, ‘Well, if you’re sure, it would certainly be a help – I don’t know how long it will be until the insurance pays out. But do you realize how much funerals cost nowadays, Mr Williams?’

‘I do and it’s all right, Beth. Just make sure all the bills are sent to me at this address.’ Steve didn’t have cards. You didn’t commit things to print, in the businesses he’d operated. He scribbled his address on the back of an envelope and put it by the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘Now you’ll make sure you do that, won’t you?’

He picked up a picture of a young woman which was a few inches to the right of the clock. ‘Is this your daughter, Beth?’

‘Yes. That’s Ros. She’s ten years younger than the youngest of the boys. Bit of an afterthought, Jack used to say she was.’ Beth looked embarrassed, wondering if she should have said that to the man who had been Jack’s boss for twenty years and more.

Steve was relieved that he’d said ‘daughter’ and not the ‘granddaughter’ he’d almost used. He put the picture down and said, ‘Very pretty girl, isn’t she, Beth? Takes after her mother, not her father, for looks.’ He was rather pleased with that, as a man not used to delivering compliments or making jokes.

‘She’s twenty-four now. She’s giving up her job and going off to university. Bristol, she’s going to. Going to cost her a packet in student loans, but she’s very determined, is Ros, when she gets an idea into her head.’

‘I’d like to help her with that, Beth. I’ll pay her fees. It will be my final gift to Jack, my remembrance of him. Better than a slab of marble.’

‘And a lot more expensive. Do you realize how many thousands are involved?’

Steve took a deep breath. ‘I do realize, Beth, but I’d like to do it. It would be a kind of memorial to my own son, Liam, you see. He never went to university.’

Beth found herself crying again. She’d wept a lot over the last few days, so that she hardly noticed it now. There was something frightening about this big man with the bald head, even though he had employed Jack and paid him well and was now offering her wonderful things. She dabbed at her face with her handkerchief and said, ‘You lost your son, didn’t you? It’s coming back to me now.’

‘Yes. He died in a road accident. His mum can’t let go of him, even though he’s been gone for eight years now.’ He hadn’t meant to say that. He didn’t know why he’d mentioned Hazel. And he hadn’t meant to bring Liam into this, to sully his memory by involving him in this squalid manoeuvre, this attempt to make sure that the dark things Jack Dutton had done on his behalf went to the grave with him.

Grief loosened Beth Dutton’s tongue. She said suddenly, ‘Why are you doing this, Mr Williams? There’s no need, you know. No one here is going to talk to the police.’

Steve was shocked by that. But it was good really, he told himself. This woman he had believed knew nothing was sharper than he had thought. She knew the score – knew that it was essential that she said nothing if the filth came sniffing around. He said firmly, ‘I’ll see to Ros’s fees at Bristol. I owe that to Jack.’

She looked hard at him. Her eyes still brimmed with tears and her cheeks were wet with them. She said only, ‘Aye. Maybe you do.’

This was over the top, Steve thought as he drove away. He was offering too much for it to be just a favour to an old friend who was dead. No one would believe it was merely that. Throwing thousands of pounds away wasn’t the sort of thing Steve Williams did. But he felt a kind of cleansing in his offer. He was finished now with all the bad things he had done when he was operating his business empire. Sponsoring the studies of this innocent girl would purge him of some of the sins he had committed in the past.

And it would ensure that the evil things Jack Dutton had done on his behalf were buried with him.

A
ndrew Burrell decided that the flat was a good investment after all. He’d wondered at the time of his purchase, because of the price. He’d paid a considerable sum for it, putting down his deposit long before the new block was completed. He’d got what he considered the prime site by doing that.

This flat was on the top floor and had been sold as a ‘penthouse apartment’. It had two luxurious bedrooms, a splendidly fitted bathroom and kitchen and a sitting room with views over the Severn. The rooms were unusually spacious for a modern development and this was now one of the most fashionable areas of Gloucester. It was just below the old docks, where in medieval days sailing ships had delivered precious cargoes into the ancient cathedral city.

On this warm June evening, the balcony which had figured large in the estate agent’s literature was proving a splendid appendage. It looked west over the river, towards May Hill, that modest Gloucestershire height from which you could view many counties. Andrew had a young woman with him to enjoy this splendid setting. She was delighted with the balcony, and he was hoping she would explore other features of his new residence in due course.

Andrew was almost sure that Clare Sutton would be appointed as a research assistant in the Faculty of Arts at his university in the next few days. In the meantime, it was surely his duty to discover as much as he could about the qualities of the woman who was to become a junior colleague. If that research could extend to the joys of her body, so much the better. You couldn’t be too thorough when you were assessing new appointments.

Clare had been a bright student who had worked hard and deserved the distinction she had been awarded in her MA degree. She had declared an hour earlier that she hadn’t much of a head for drink, which Andrew had ticked off as another point in her favour. She was now on her third gin and tonic and finding the view from the balcony even more splendid than when he had first introduced her to it. Andrew had complied with her request for plenty of tonic and a generous slice of lemon. But he had been generous with the gin too: you surely shouldn’t be stingy when you were serving a prospective colleague.

His conversation had become more racy as the sun had sunk in the west and the gin had loosened their tongues. Clare for her part had been determined when she came here that she wouldn’t mention her prospects of appointment to the post she wanted so much. It wouldn’t be seemly, and she was a seemly girl – well, for most of the time she was a seemly girl. But Andrew had been very friendly and she felt quite close to him now. He was an older man and an experienced academic, and he surely wouldn’t tell her anything about the job which it was not fitting for her to know. He was an attractive mature man, and he hadn’t got commitments to any other woman, as far as she knew – but that was surely irrelevant to the question of the new research assistant post.

Her thoughts were abruptly interrupted by his sitting down next to her and throwing his arm casually round her shoulders. His hand seemed quite large and his fingers were lean and strong. It was rather pleasant, really. She lifted her drink carefully from the glass-topped table in front of her, then took a sip which turned out to be almost a swig. ‘So what do you think of my chances of becoming the new research assistant?’ she said soberly. She thought it was soberly, but the excited little laugh shouldn’t really have followed the question.

‘I think you have the most splendid tits I’ve seen on any research assistant,’ said Andrew confidently. He shifted his hand to make a more tactile assessment of the right-hand one. ‘Yes, quite the most splendid and intellectually satisfying tits I’ve seen. No other candidate can rival them.’

‘That’s sexist!’ said Clare. But the impact of her reaction was diminished by the giggle which accompanied it and by the fact that she was quite enjoying being stroked.

‘It is, isn’t it?’ said Andrew shamelessly. ‘But it’s a fact of life. You can’t remove attractive tits just by ignoring them. And it seems to me only right that I should pay them due attention. It wouldn’t be right not to show my appreciation, on a private and intimate occasion like this.’

She shifted a little, but didn’t move his hand. ‘We seem to be moving on rather quickly. Perhaps we should—’

‘“Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime …”’ Andrew stroked a little more, then turned his blond head to beam at her. ‘He knew a thing or two, old Andrew Marvell, don’t you think?’

She knew the poem well, knew that there was no real answer to ‘Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near’. She wondered for a moment how many other girls he had used that poem with, how many others had been seduced by its arguments. In the warmth of the summer evening, with the curve of the great river running dark and tranquil beneath them and the greenery stretching away towards the hills beyond it, it didn’t seem to matter to Clare that she might be one of several, even one of many. Through a pleasant alcoholic filter the world seemed a benign place and all things seemed possible.

Clare Sutton was a very attractive girl, Andrew thought. Bright, too, though he was aware by now that his assessment of female capabilities was radically affected by a pretty face and prominent curves. He sipped his gin and tonic and sighed appreciatively, which encouraged his companion to follow suit. He felt less anxious now than he had been all week about those bones back at the farm and the police who were nosing into his affairs. With a scene like this in front of you and a girl like this beside you, the world was a much less threatening place. He shifted himself a little closer to his companion and let his hand stray a little down her side. ‘There isn’t much beneath this top,’ he said speculatively into her ear.

In her slightly confused state, Clare thought this a rather splendid chat-up line. ‘You never know, you might find out just how much later,’ she said. She considered that such brilliant repartee that she dissolved into laughter on it.

Andrew hoped that he hadn’t overdone the drink. There was no real fun with a drunken woman: they lost control of their movements and couldn’t respond properly. Not much better than paying for it really, if you had to make a woman blind drunk before she climbed into bed with you. But Clare wasn’t anything like as bad as that. He was glad to hear her returning to the theme of her possible employment in the university. She wasn’t entirely coherent, but she conveyed her anxiety, ending with the slightly maudlin assurance, ‘It’s very important to me, you see. I want to go on working with you all. And ’specially you, Andrew, ’specially you.’ She finished her drink, started a little as the slice of lemon rested against her nose, set her glass down on the table and stared at it with a dazed smile.

‘You’ll get the job all right,’ said Andrew. ‘They only pay peanuts.’

He realized too late that this was rather insulting, but Clare didn’t seem to notice. ‘Pay peanuts, get monkeys.’ She giggled at what seemed to her a notable witticism. Then she turned to Andrew and kissed him enthusiastically and without warning full on the lips. He put his arms round her and let his tongue savour the delightful taste of gin, tonic and eager young woman. Eventually she broke away and belatedly resumed the conversation with a gentle whisper. ‘So long as I get it, Andrew.’

‘You’ll get it all right, my dear.’ He kissed her extensively again, running his hands daringly down her back to the cleft of her delicious backside. ‘And it won’t be the only thing you get tonight!’

With which robust assurance he proffered his hand and led her gently indoors towards the intimacies of the bedroom. She was not wildly drunk, but she tottered a little on her elegant legs. ‘Must have a pee,’ she told him unromantically, waving her hand dramatically above her head as she disappeared towards the bathroom. Two minutes later she made no resistance as he led her into his bedroom, showed no false modesty as she removed her clothes. There wasn’t much underneath the top and the trousers, as he’d remarked earlier. She slid beneath his silk sheets and breathed a contented sigh. ‘I’m not pissed, you know,’ she assured him seriously. ‘I’m just tight enough to be pleasantly randy.’

Andrew’s need was urgent by this time. He gave no reply but hastened to give her an opportunity to prove her claim. Their coupling was vigorous, rather noisy and entirely satisfactory. ‘You’ll be a great addition to the academic staff,’ he assured her rather breathlessly. It seemed to have gone dark outside very quickly. He lay on his back and stared dreamily at the ceiling. ‘Do you want another drink?’

‘No. Well, perhaps coffee, eventually. What I do want is another fuck!’ She giggled delightedly at the sharpness of her wit. The line was certainly enough to amuse and arouse Andrew Burrell, who hastened to comply energetically with the lady’s request.

Clare left early on Monday morning, explaining that she must go home for a change of clothes before appearing demurely at the university. That suited Andrew, who had been planning to explain that there was no way they could arrive together on the campus. He took a leisurely breakfast and checked his phone messages before he left.

The important one had been there for fifteen hours now. It told him that Chief Superintendent Lambert and Detective Sergeant Hook would like to speak with him again on Monday about the murder of Julie Grimshaw.

It was a long time since Steve Williams had been in a police station interview room. He was surprised how ill at ease he felt. He told himself firmly that he’d outsmarted the pigs in the past and he’d do it again. It had been his choice, not theirs, that he should come here. He’d taken the initiative and he could retain it.

It didn’t feel like that as he stared at the blank green windowless walls and glanced up at the single strong light above him. The place smelt of disinfectant; he wondered what squalor had been enacted here by the weekend yobbos. Maybe this was just the normal treatment for interview rooms on a Monday morning? Probably they were swabbed out with disinfectant as a routine precaution. It felt like a blow to his status as a major player to be waiting for the attention of the filth in a place like this.

They left him on his own for a good five minutes; he felt now that they’d always planned to do that. People get nervous while they sit and wait to be interrogated in interview rooms, even people as experienced as Steve Williams. He was determined that he would not allow that to happen. Yet he didn’t succeed. He felt very much on edge by the time Lambert and Hook appeared and sat down unhurriedly on the steel and canvas chairs on the other side of the small square table.

Hook looked a question at Lambert, who shook his head. ‘No need for us to record this, Bert. This is just an informal chat to further our enquiries. Mr Williams is acting as a good citizen in coming here to help us. That may seem strange to you, but no doubt it feels much stranger to him. Probably unique, if he does actually plan to help us rather than obstruct us.’

‘You won’t rile me, Lambert! If I choose to meet the pigs in their own sty, that’s my business.’

‘Indeed it is, Mr Williams. Let’s hope you continue to control your own destiny, shall we?’

‘I’ve come here because I don’t want your kind of shit polluting my house. So get on with it and let me get back there.’

Lambert showed no inclination to do that. ‘Why didn’t you want us to come to your house again, Steve? Afraid that Hazel might speak to us and reveal things you wish to conceal, were you?’

The mention of his wife pierced the carapace of indifference Williams had been trying to develop around himself to deflect police questioning. He reacted immediately, whereas he’d been merely conventionally hostile to Lambert’s opening barbs. ‘Leave Hazel out of this! You upset her on Wednesday when you came round to the house with your ignorant questions.’

‘Really? Well, I’m sorry about that. You might care to tell her when you return home that we’re less ignorant now than we were on Wednesday.’

Williams glanced around the bare, cell-like room. ‘I haven’t come here because I like these places. What is it you want of me, Lambert? The sooner this is over, the better for all of us.’

He wasn’t comfortable, despite his attempted truculence. Last time they had met he had insisted on calling his old enemy ‘John’, to the great man’s ill-concealed irritation. Now he was on edge, despite the contempt he was trying to summon for these two old adversaries. Lambert seemed to know this as he said earnestly, ‘We really do know a lot more about the part you and your family played in this business than when we spoke on Wednesday.’

Williams was immediately defensive. ‘Well, you must leave Hazel out of this. She has nothing to tell you. You’ll only upset her if you come bothering her. She’s not a well woman. That’s why I’ve chosen to come to this place today: I don’t want Hazel disturbed by your great pigs’ trotters tramping round our place.’

Lambert smiled, relishing the advantage which had come to him with Williams’s discomfort. ‘We shall speak to Mrs Williams if we feel that we need to do so. This is a murder inquiry and sometimes we need to upset people. Sometimes upsetting people can be a positive advantage, when they’re trying to hide the truth.’

‘Well, it won’t be in this case. You just keep away from Hazel.’ Williams’s single eye stared hard into Lambert’s impassive face and he looked abruptly vulnerable. ‘Common charity should keep you away from a woman who isn’t fit to face your questions and can only be upset by them.’

Lambert knew all about Hazel Williams and the way she had been shattered by her son’s unexpected death. Her husband was probably right when he claimed that a visit from them would seriously upset her, and he would not undertake it lightly. But Steve Williams was a villain, a serious one, who had got away with breaking the law and with various violent crimes over a lengthy period. If there was a chance of putting him away, consideration for Hazel wasn’t going to stop the law taking its course.

Lambert was first and foremost a taker of villains; he was human enough to hope that there might here be a belated chance of revenge on this man who had thwarted his efforts and escaped justice for the best part of thirty years. He said tersely, ‘We’ll do what we have to do, Williams. If you’ve any connection with this death, you won’t be allowed to shelter behind Hazel. We shall do whatever we have to do to lock you away for life, if that’s what’s appropriate.’