Skeleton Plot (8 page)

‘You really do have most of the answers Mike. You’re nothing like as cynical as you present yourself.’

But he didn’t present himself like that at all, and he knew it. Not to the public. He mouthed all the correct and conventional education maxims, even when they were quite different from last year’s magic formulas. When he’d begun his personal education odyssey, older education gurus were still talking about integrating the children of immigrants into the English way of life. Nowadays you had to be enthusiastically multi-cultural; the safe thing was to be a zealot for variety. Variety in dress, in religion, in cultural inheritance. Well, so be it. No use swimming against the tide, or against any other of the clichés which passed for enlightened thinking.

Michael Wallington, Chief Education Officer, must be at the forefront of progress.

He was greeted as a VIP at the parents’ evening at the comprehensive which was the most important school in his largely rural area of responsibility. He was becoming used to this status now and he found it rather enjoyable. People deferred unthinkingly to your ideas, where they would once have argued. He pretended to find that frustrating, but it was really rather pleasant and undemanding. He found that the ‘undemanding’ was increasingly to his taste. There were enough problems in his office each day, with the economies imposed upon him by the idiocies of local councillors, without looking for them elsewhere.

He gave a brisk opening address to the group of parents impatiently waiting to quiz the teachers who were lined up behind him: the headmaster, his deputy head and the senior teaching staff. They were all in this together, he told everyone. They were steering young people on the ship of education through the rough waters of teenagedom and into the even rougher and more challenging waters of adolescence. Teachers needed their support and understanding. (It always paid to keep in with the staff whom you directed and appointed and occasionally disciplined. You needed them on your side. The poor sods who slaved at the chalk face were the foundation of all this.)

His audience applauded dutifully – some of them, Michael thought, even enthusiastically. Those would be the naive and enthusiastic parents who were attending one of these sessions for the first time. There were probably even one or two young teachers here who believed in his dynamism and in the creed he advocated. That wouldn’t last long: experience in education brought cynicism, in his view. His own was a healthy cynicism, of course, the kind which asked questions to ensure that ratepayers and governments got value for money from the funds they poured in.

Some of the teachers developed a scepticism which questioned everything and achieved nothing. It would be better for all if these people left the profession and ceased to damage the young with their defeatist philosophy. Michael Wallington expressed that view forcefully in other places, such as council committees, where teachers or their union representatives were not present. His contributions there maintained his reputation for honesty and realism and ensured that he would go far. Local greybeards nodded in agreement, whilst he smiled modestly and shrugged his elegantly suited shoulders, in that gesture which acknowledged that whatever would be would be.

When the initial speeches of welcome were over, he circulated and smiled among the parents and teachers. He was delighted to hear one parent say how gratifying it was to see the Chief Education Officer here and taking an interest on an occasion like this, and to see others nodding their sage affirmation of that view. He spoke to the deputy head, a fifty-five-year-old woman with whom he had started his teaching career in a much smaller school, a professional for whom he retained a lasting respect. She was conscientious, efficient and absolutely honest. She was in fact the kind of practitioner who made him feel a little shabby as he played the system and made his way towards the top. Yet he told himself that he would make life better and more rewarding for teachers like Barbara Moss, once he had satisfied his ambition and was in control of a large authority.

Barbara retained an affection for the man whom she had assisted through the trials of his probationary year as a new teacher. Tonight she took him on one side and they discussed how they might rid themselves of a particularly lazy and inefficient teacher. ‘He’s letting down his colleagues,’ Barbara said. ‘They’re the ones who have to cover for him every time he calls in sick when he isn’t sick at all.’

‘You know the problem,’ said Michael. ‘You’ve been around a lot longer than I have, Barbara. Unless this fellow touches little boys or the dinner money, it’s very difficult to get rid of him.’

She nodded a reluctant agreement. ‘And meanwhile the school’s reputation and the children he deals with suffer. It’s the kids who lose out at the end of all this. We can’t give him examination classes, which means that the younger children he gets are missing out on the groundwork they should be building. And the unions spring into action to defend anyone who’s a member, irrespective of their efficiency. They mouth off about standards and then defend people like him who don’t have them.’

‘I know. Look, you know the form better than most, Barbara. Document everything you can, give him a formal warning when it’s warranted and then pass all the evidence on to me. Then the next time that he steps out of line or we get a formal complaint from a parent, I’ll have him in to the education office in the town hall and give him an official bollocking. I’ll suggest he considers a different career. I’ll even push him towards early retirement, if all else fails.’

‘He’s thick-skinned as well as idle. You won’t find it easy to embarrass him.’

‘No, and I can’t promise anything. But I’ll have a go. I’m quite used to dealing with the thick-skinned and the idle. And I’m quite a good bluffer. If I can convince him that we’re contemplating a serious attempt to sack him, he might take the easier option to avoid the publicity and the disgrace. I’ll do my best.’

Barbara Moss went home from the parent–teachers’ evening with her spirits a little lifted. She’d called in a favour from the man whom she had helped through his first year in teaching, called upon the man who was now a high flyer to do his bit for the classroom he had left far behind. And for his part, Michael Wallington too felt himself unexpectedly lifted by the exchange. He wasn’t all cynicism and self-promotion, after all. He was still doing his bit for the children and the people who slaved away at the chalk face.

He had a quick word with the headmaster, who thanked him profusely for his attendance at the evening ‘above and beyond the call of duty’. Then he slipped quietly out of the school. The evening would go on for a good ninety minutes yet, but the seventy-five minutes he had stayed seemed quite long enough to the new Chief Education Officer. He had seen and been seen, and the occasion had no more to offer him. Away home to his family then, and a little belated attention for his wife and his children.

He had his hand on the door of the BMW when he heard behind him first the footsteps and then the voice. ‘We need to talk.’

He turned and peered at the face beneath the hood. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh, but we do.’

‘Whatever we had to say to each other was said a long time ago.’ He flung open the door of his car, then felt the urgent fingers upon his arm.

‘They’ve got an identification. Her mother has been in to Oldford police station. She’s spoken to that John Lambert, the one the papers call the “super-sleuth”. She’s been to the morgue. Viewed what’s left. Said it’s Julie. We need to talk, mate.’

Michael grimaced at that word mouthed in the darkness, which was dropping in early beneath the heavily clouded skies. He glanced like a hunted man to his right and his left in the school car park. ‘Where?’

‘We’ll go to the pub. You can buy me a drink.’

A snigger beneath the hood, a reminder to Michael of how much he had disliked this man, how much he had needed to shake him off. ‘Not here. I can’t be seen with you here. It will have to be the Coach and Horses.’

It was a run-down pub in the town centre. It was almost two centuries since it had been the coaching inn which had given it its name. Nowadays, it was a gathering place for the human detritus which accumulated around any industrial centre. Wallington told the man he had hoped he would never see again to sit in the back of the BMW. He drove as if he had been plunged into the centre of a very bad dream. Thirteen tense and silent minutes later, they left the car and slid like conspirators into the small, shabby room beside the main bar of the Coach and Horses.

Michael Wallington forgot about his family and began a conversation which he had persuaded himself he would never need to have.

A
ndrew Burrell was a very different man from his father. Even at the age of eighty-four and in the care home, Daniel Burrell had looked like a man used to hard physical labour, a man who had worked outdoors and lived willingly with the land and the seasons which visited it.

Andrew Burrell looked on the other hand like a man who lived by his brain, who worked indoors and would be scarcely conscious of what the weather was doing outside. He had narrow shoulders and a long, thin body which draped itself naturally into the armchair he chose to sit in for this exchange. He said, ‘I’m happy to see you and give whatever help I can. But I can’t even think what this would be about.’

Lambert looked at him sceptically, happily letting the tension stretch with the seconds, allowing the man to see how flabby this first reaction must appear in these circumstances. Finally he said, ‘Really, Mr Burrell? I find that hard to believe. You have surely read about the skeleton which was discovered near the boundary of what was once your father’s farm. The papers have been filled with the news of this discovery over the last few days.’

‘I don’t give much attention to the popular press. I find it unreliable and sensationalist.’

‘As do most policemen, Mr Burrell. But it is difficult to be unaware of it. Are you claiming not to have heard about the discovery of these bones?’

‘No. I am well aware of it. I have heard about it on both radio and television.’

‘But you didn’t expect that anyone would come to talk to you about it?’

‘I hadn’t given the matter much thought, to tell you the truth.’

‘Do tell us the truth, Mr Burrell. It will make things much simpler for all of us. For instance, I find it very difficult to believe that you have not been giving this matter quite intense thought in the last twenty-four hours.’

Andrew stretched his long legs out in front of him and studied his slip-on brown shoes, anxious to give them the impression that he felt no tension. He glanced at the unthreatening face of Bert Hook and said rather dismissively, ‘We academics tend to live in ivory towers, I’m afraid. It’s one of the dangers of the intellectual life.’

They were sitting in his ground-floor tutorial room, one of the most spacious in the new block which linked the university library and its largest lecture theatre. Lambert was already irritated by this pretentious man. He looked out at the students calling to each other on the neighbouring path and at the largely industrial landscape beyond them. ‘It’s hardly the dreaming spires, though, is it?’

‘The University of Gloucester has its advantages, Chief Superintendent. They might not be immediately apparent to busy policemen.’

‘Not to me, perhaps. DS Hook has a degree which is at least the equivalent of your own, Mr Burrell. He would be able to offer a more informed opinion than I can.’

Andrew Burrell drew in his feet and folded his arms. He was shaken by what this tall CID man had said about the colleague who looked to him like PC Plod, but he didn’t think it was a joke; neither of these two large men was smiling. He said stiffly, ‘You’re right, as a matter of fact. I have given the matter of your skeleton some thought over the last day or two.’

‘More your skeleton than ours,’ said Bert Hook thoughtfully. ‘You were around at the time when that body was buried. I’d have been giving intense thought to those bones myself, if I’d been in your place.’

‘But you surely can’t think that I have anything to do with this, whoever the man might be.’

The introduction of the sex of the corpse was a mistake. It was so obviously contrived that its awkwardness lingered as the policemen let the words die in the quiet room. Then Hook said, ‘You will need to convince us of that, sir. You will understand that, in what is now a murder investigation, we cannot accept anyone’s word at face value.’ He produced a ball-pen and a notebook, which he opened at a new page with obvious relish.

‘And why should I have anything at all to do with this?’

Lambert was already tired of his evasions. ‘Because you were around at the time of this death and interment, Mr Burrell. Because you very possibly had a connection with this murdered woman.’

Burrell started elaborately at the first mention of a female victim. ‘This was a woman? The bulletins spoke only of a skeleton. I had assumed that it was a man – possibly a vagrant.’

‘And why should you think that, sir? Had you an identity in mind for this vagrant? Someone you had seen around the farm or on your father’s land, perhaps?’

‘No. No, I don’t know why I thought that. I – I suppose I hadn’t given the matter much rational thought at all.’

‘It seems not, sir. Let me now help you to be more rational. We have an identity for these remains. We now know that these bones are those of a Julie Grimshaw.’

Another, smaller start. Less theatrical, more genuine. Lambert thought that this strange man was possibly really shocked by this information. And frightened by it, maybe. It was possible that he had been fearing just this name. ‘You knew this person, sir.’ He made it a statement, rather than a question. ‘She was a young woman when you were a young man, Mr Burrell. Almost certainly at the time when you were living at Lower Valley Farm. You would be most unwise to deny that you knew her unless that is in fact the case.’

All the confidence Burrell had exuded when they arrived, all the derision he had accorded to them as mere policemen in this place of learning, were suddenly gone. He ran a hand swiftly through his carefully parted yellow hair and looked hard at the carpet between him and his visitors, as if he feared now to meet their gaze and reveal what he felt in his heart. ‘I knew Julie Grimshaw, yes.’

Probably his physical appearance derived from the mother who was now dead. He could scarcely have looked more different from the sturdy octogenarian they had spoken with in the care home two days ago. Almost as though he was sharing this line of thought with them, he said now, ‘I wasn’t born until my parents were almost forty. They were in their sixties by the time I knew Julie.’

Lambert studied the pale, drawn face for a few seconds before he said, ‘And what is the relevance of that to what you are going to tell us now?’

Burrell glanced up at that, but he didn’t query the assumption that he was going to tell them things about Julie Grimshaw. ‘There isn’t much relevance, I suppose, really. I just felt that if they had been younger they might have understood things a little better. I’m probably wrong. I don’t think Dad would have behaved any differently if he’d been ten or even twenty years younger. And Mum wasn’t unreasonable about it. Not really, when I look back on it. Now that I’ve got kids of my own, I can understand how she felt and some of the things she said to me. My twins are only nine years old, but you want to protect them, don’t you? I can understand now how Mum and Dad felt about Julie.’

Lambert wondered whether the man was brandishing his own children as a badge of respectability. He said tersely, ‘You’re divorced, aren’t you, Mr Burrell?’

‘Yes. I can’t see that my divorce has anything to do with this.’

‘Neither can I, at the moment. But we like to know everything we can about people involved in a murder investigation. You’d be surprised how often bits of people’s private lives suddenly suggest things to us.’

‘My divorce had nothing to do with Julie Grimshaw.’

‘I see. Well, you appear to be suggesting to us that you’ve long since left behind the life you were living twenty years ago. We need you now to revisit it and tell us all about it.’

‘I’m forty-four now. I wasn’t exactly a kid twenty years ago, was I?’

‘So how does that affect what you are now going to tell us?’

‘It doesn’t. I’m just saying that I wasn’t a helpless adolescent when my parents were trying to control my life.’ A little of the resentment of events long gone crept into the thin, pale, too-revealing face.

Lambert said with his first sign of real impatience, ‘Tell us about your dealings with Miss Grimshaw, please. And take care to leave nothing out. We shall be talking to other people who knew her at that time, as you would anticipate. It would be most unwise of you to attempt to conceal anything.’

Andrew Burrell’s arms were no longer folded. He lifted them a little, then let his hands drop heavily back on to his thighs. ‘This is all a long time ago now. It feels like part of another life.’ He looked for a moment into John Lambert’s implacable face. ‘I expect you often hear people saying things like that.’

‘We do. But they are usually able to recall that other life quite vividly.’

He nodded slowly, accepting what Lambert said rather than resisting it. ‘Perhaps I should tell you what I know about Julie first, and then go on to outline what I felt about her.’ He sounded as though he was planning his approach to an article in an academic journal.

‘Do that. And while doing so, remember that as yet we know almost nothing about Miss Grimshaw, beyond the very little her mother has been able to give us.’

‘I never knew Julie’s mother. I can’t recall her ever speaking of her mother.’ He sighed and glanced at Hook and his open notebook, then spoke in a low, even voice. ‘Julie was living in a squat in Gloucester when I first encountered her. When I look back now, I feel that gave her a certain grisly glamour for me. It wasn’t very long after Fred and Rose West had been exposed. The details of their killings of drifters like Julie had become public and were much discussed in the area. I expect I felt that I was rescuing Julie from that dangerous sort of life; when you’re twenty-three or twenty-four, you still think you can rescue people from moral and physical danger. I might even have been doing that, I suppose.’

‘Except that in the end this girl wasn’t protected or rescued. She was killed and hastily buried in a shallow grave. Not so very different from many of the Wests’ victims, wouldn’t you say?’ Lambert spoke harshly, hoping to provoke some significant reaction.

‘No, I suppose not. You must remember that I’ve only just heard about this. I’m still in shock. I’m still coming to terms with it.’

‘Unless, of course, you knew all about it and are merely simulating surprise. It’s a possibility we have to consider, Mr Burrell. CID officers are paid to be suspicious about what they hear. In the next few days, someone who knows all about how Julie Grimshaw died is going to tell us a pack of lies. If we can establish that you are not that person, it will help us as well as you.’

Apparently Burrell accepted their logic. He clasped his hands together and nodded twice, though still he could not bring himself to meet the gaze of either of them for longer than a couple of seconds. He said in a low voice, ‘I met Julie in a pub in Gloucester.’

‘Were you in search of illegal drugs at the time?’

‘No! That’s a ridiculous suggestion.’

‘On the contrary, it’s an entirely reasonable query. We know from the forensic reports on her remains that Miss Grimshaw had been a serious user in the months before her death. I can tell you that we are not interested in charging you with drugs offences from twenty or more years ago, even if we could assemble the evidence to do that. We are concerned only with the person or persons who killed her and buried her at Lower Valley Farm, where you were living at the time.’

‘I dabbled a little with drugs. Most people did at the time. When you’re young, you’re curious and often rather stupid. It was mostly pot, but a little coke from time to time. I was never a dependent user. I never came close to being an addict.’

‘And what about Julie Grimshaw?’

‘Julie was a user. I thought she was in danger of becoming an addict. That was one of her attractions for me, I suppose. She was two years younger than me when I first knew her and I thought I could save her from dependency. When you’re twenty-three, you think that the world is there for the taking and that you can work miracles.’

‘Was she your girl friend?’

He looked as if he would like to deny it for a moment, then gave the slightest shrug of his shoulders, as if recognizing that he had no choice now in the matter. ‘I made a date with her in the pub that night. Within a couple of weeks, I took her home with me to meet Mum. I was quite close to Mum, you know. I thought she’d understand. I thought she’d support me against Dad, if it came to it.’

‘What was your relationship with your father at this time?’

He studied his fingers, watching them twine and untwine as if someone else was in control of them. ‘Strained. That is the politest word I can think of. He’d sent me off to agricultural college and hoped I’d come back full of ideas and thrilled with the prospect of taking over the farm – he was planning to transfer responsibility gradually to me over the next few years. I came back knowing that farming wasn’t for me and determined to pursue a different sort of degree and a different sort of career.’

‘And your father didn’t take kindly to that?’

For the first time in minutes, Burrell looked into the long, lined face of John Lambert. ‘Dad was in his early sixties by this time. It must have come as a great disappointment to him to find his only son turning aside from the family inheritance. And when you’re not much more than twenty yourself, you’re not very sensitive to older people’s feelings. Perhaps that’s especially so when they’re close family: your own emotions prevent you from thinking as clearly and as sensitively with family as you would do with others at a greater distance from you.’

Andrew Burrell spoke with feeling and a note of appeal. He really wanted to convince them of this, to make them see the way it had been at that time for him and for his parents. It was essentially a selfish thrust which was driving him. He felt in danger here, with these two experienced men studying him so dispassionately and weighing his every reaction to their questions.

Lambert now nodded his apparent acceptance of Burrell’s latest thoughts and insisted, ‘Our concern is with justice for Julie Grimshaw. Tell us how the situation in your home affected your dealings with her, please.’

‘Dealings.’ Andrew weighed the word and found it distasteful, but did not reject it. ‘For my parents, Julie was just another sign that I was going off the rails. They found out about the drugs and thought she was a junkie. She wasn’t – she was a user and I thought she was in danger of becoming dependent, but she hadn’t got to that stage. I wanted to rescue her from dependence and bring her back to live a normal life with me. I can see now that the missionary aspect added to my zeal in the relationship. I didn’t see that at the time.’