Too Much of Water (11 page)

‘I couldn't be precise. Our Scenes of Crime team will have taken away whatever they think might eventually be significant.'

‘What sort of things?' She was showing more interest than at any time since they had arrived in that high, comfortable room.

‘Photographs. Letters, if there are any. A diary, if we're exceptionally lucky. But I understand there was no diary or list of engagements, in this case.'

He had thrown that fragment he would normally have concealed at her to see what reaction it would bring. It was difficult to be certain of anything with this unnaturally composed woman.

But he thought he caught a fleeting glimpse of relief in her face.

D
etective Inspector Christopher Rushton enjoyed being in CID on a Saturday morning.

There were people around, of course, but nothing like the same buzz of activity as on weekday mornings. Crime does not shut down for the weekend, but policemen, like other workers, only work on Saturdays and Sundays if the rotas demand it. Chris Rushton appreciated the time to check through his computer files, to make sure that everything had been recorded as it should be, and, most importantly, to do the cross-referencing that sometimes threw up significant connections and led eventually to arrests.

You could only make these complex connections and use the modern technology to its full potential if you had time to yourself, in Chris's view. That old reactionary Lambert and his faithful dog Hook were out seeing Clare Mills's mother this morning. That would allow the inspector, who was coordinating the documentation of the case at Oldford police station, the opportunity to concentrate and do his own thinking. He was relishing the time at his computer when the duty sergeant made a call from the reception desk to say that there was a young woman who wanted to see him, who had indeed asked for him by name.

The sergeant plainly thought this a matter for levity, but Chris ordered him brusquely to send the lady through to see him.

She was a pretty, dark-haired girl of around twenty, he thought. She announced herself as Anne Jackson, and it took him a moment to remember that she was the student who had been the flatmate of the dead woman, Clare Mills. That she was in fact the girl they had talked to when he had visited that flat with Superintendent Lambert only two days earlier.

He was annoyed with himself for not recognizing her immediately: it should be part of a CID man's mental equipment to remember faces and pin names upon them immediately, in his view. But she had jettisoned the ubiquitous student's dress of jeans and T-shirt and put on a very pleasant green cotton dress and make-up. And Chris, who was no expert in these things, thought that she had acquired a new hair-style in the last forty-eight hours.

These things couldn't possibly be for his benefit. It was probably that like many people she was nervous about venturing into a police station, and had responded by putting on her best clothes and her best appearance. He tried not to read anything flattering into the fact that she had asked for Inspector Rushton by name. She must simply have remembered it from their meeting on Thursday.

He tried not to sound like the older generation as he said, ‘And what can I do for you, Miss Jackson?'

‘It's a bit embarrassing, really.' She blushed. It went very prettily with the green dress. ‘There's something I should have told you, when you came with your superintendent to see me at the flat the other day.'

Rushton, who was normally both very stern about such omissions and completely devoid of small-talk, heard himself saying, ‘I'm sure it can't be anything very serious, in your case.' He followed that unwarranted assumption with an encouraging smile.

Anne smiled back at him. He was really rather attractive to look at, and he seemed quite nice, when you got through his grave manner. ‘Anyway, I'm glad I've been able to get you and not Superintendent Lambert. He frightened me to death!'

‘John Lambert?' He enjoyed using the superintendent's Christian name. Normally, with his exaggerated consciousness of rank, he found that difficult, but this morning he was happy to show his familiarity with the great man to this pretty girl. ‘Oh, John's bark's much worse than his bite. He comes from the old school, you know. His methods may be a little antiquated, but he gets results.' He wondered what the chief would think if he heard his inspector being so patronizingly magnanimous about him.

‘Yes. Well, I've never been involved in anything like this before, and I got a bit confused, I think. I was thrown by the way he kept looking at me all the time. He never seemed to blink, and he seemed to be weighing up everything I said and wondering whether it was really the truth.'

Chris smiled encouragingly. ‘Well, fortunately, I've never been on the wrong end of John Lambert's interrogations. I think I see what you mean, but I can assure you he can be much fiercer than that, when he feels that anyone is really trying to conceal things from him.'

But he was thinking back to Thursday and Lambert's remark as they drove away from her flat: ‘I wonder what it was that the girl was trying to conceal from us.' He hadn't noticed anything himself, had thought at the time that the chief was just being fanciful, trying to give himself mystique. But it seemed the old bugger had been right.

Chris Rushton said, ‘I think you'd better put things right, then. Let's hear all about this terrible thing you were confused into concealing.' He couldn't really believe he was playing this so lightly, when he would normally have been as stern as a Victorian parent. It surely couldn't be anything to do with Anne Jackson's large, attentive eyes. They were a very dark, very intriguing blue, he thought.

Anne smiled at him again, to show him how grateful she was for his sympathy. You'd never have thought he was a policeman, really, not in his powder-blue sweater and his neatly creased navy trousers. He didn't seem to have a single grey hair. He must surely be very bright, to have become an inspector when he was still so young. She fumbled in the big leather shoulder bag she had brought with her, finding it surprisingly difficult to take her eyes from Inspector Rushton's face and concentrate upon the contents of the bag.

Anne said, ‘It's this, you see.' And she held up a mobile phone in her small hand, as dramatically as if she had produced a knife dripping with blood.

‘Yours?' said Rushton.

‘No. It belonged to Clare Mills.' The name of the dead woman dropped between them like a barrier, and she wondered if he was going to rebuke her, to tell her that she had been concealing evidence, or something of that sort. Then she rushed on with an explanation, feeling herself blushing furiously as she changed tack during it. ‘I forgot all about it at the time. Well, no, that's not strictly true. I knew that Clare had just put some money on it, and I thought I might as well use the calls up and save myself a bit of cash.' It came out all in a rush; she felt she should be standing like a naughty schoolgirl and pleading for mercy, not sitting comfortably opposite this attractive man.

Chris said as harshly as he could, ‘We really should have had this at the time we saw you, you know. It might give us some leads.'

‘I know. I realize that now. I'm sorry.' She wanted to say again how glad she was that she'd got him and not that horrid Lambert, but she'd done that one already.

‘You should have given it to the Scenes of Crime team when they examined the flat and took away some of Clare's belongings.'

‘Yes. But I wasn't there when they searched the place, you see. I was at the uni. The landlord let them in.'

‘Well, at least you've brought it here now. And I suppose it's less than two days since we saw you.'

‘Yes. And I haven't used it at all. I've scarcely touched it. Everything that was on there when Clare left should still be there now.'

He was suddenly torn by conflicting emotions. The CID man in him was desperate to conclude the formalities and see her gone, to examine the phone and find what it could tell him about the contacts the dead woman had made in the last days, perhaps the last hours, of her life. But another part of him, asserting itself surprisingly and startlingly, wanted to prolong his exchanges with this girl, who grew more attractive with each minute of her embarrassment, who seemed so grateful for the understanding he was according her.

Chris Rushton said, ‘As I told you just now, you've done the right thing in bringing this to us. I think I can assure you that there won't be any recriminations from John Lambert for your forgetting to mention it on Thursday.'

He'd said ‘forgetting' when both of them knew that she hadn't forgotten it at all on Thursday. She was grateful to him for that, was still thinking how human and understanding Inspector Rushton had been when she was back in the bright sun outside the police station. She had a feeling that she might see him again.

Inside the CID section Chris Rushton was so affected that he sat looking at the wide blue sky beyond his window for a moment. You couldn't get too friendly with people who might be involved, however peripherally, as witnesses in a murder case, he told himself. Anne wouldn't even know that he found her attractive, he thought bleakly. And he hadn't even managed to give her his first name.

Roy Hudson was waiting for the call. The phone hardly rang before he had the receiver in his hand.

‘They've gone.' His wife's voice was quite calm; he felt the contrast in his own racing pulses.

‘Only just gone? I've been expecting you to phone for the last half-hour. They must have given you quite a grilling, then.'

‘They've been gone ten minutes now. I wanted to make sure they weren't coming back before I rang you. You said we had to be careful.' She looked at the clock in her kitchen, noted that it was two minutes slow. Perhaps the battery was running down. She felt almost unnaturally calm.

He should have been grateful for that calm; he had counselled her towards it, after all. Instead, he found it infuriating. ‘What did they talk to you about?'

‘Nothing much, really. I gave them coffee and biscuits to lower the tension, as you suggested. They raised the things we'd thought they'd raise. How I'd felt about Clare. How close we were to her.'

‘So what did you say?'

‘What we'd agreed. That I hadn't seen a lot of her recently. That we'd kept in touch by phone.'

‘And they believed you?' He tried to keep the anxiety out of his voice.

‘I think so.' Like many people who are detached and self-contained, she was not good at estimating other people's reactions to her.

‘Why do you think so?' His impatience leapt into the question.

‘Well, they didn't question me too much about it. I made it a sort of concession, you see, to tell them that she'd only been phoning me. They'd thought Clare was still coming home regularly, and I said, no, she wasn't, that we were only in touch by phone. And they didn't have to trip me up to make me say it. I volunteered the information. That's what we agreed, isn't it?'

‘Yes, that's what we agreed. We thought they'd be bound to find out from someone else that she hadn't been coming home. From her flatmate, or someone else at the university.' It was almost like recalling it to a stranger.

‘Yes. They didn't seem to have found that out, though. They seemed to think she had been coming home. So I'm sure they thought I was being completely honest with them when I disabused them of that notion.'

She was so perfectly cool. He envied her that. And yet he knew that it was a dangerous coolness; her disconnection from ordinary feelings helped her to play out situations cleverly, but made her insensitive to what others were feeling about her. ‘Did they ask about me?'

‘Yes. I told them you had an excellent relationship with Clare. That was what we agreed, wasn't it?' It was her first touch of uncertainty. She was pathetically anxious to please him.

‘Yes. Insofar as I had a relationship with her at all. I'd not been in touch with her in the months before her death, don't forget.'

‘No. I told them that.'

‘Did they talk about Walker?'

‘Yes. I said neither of us liked him. Said he'd been a disaster for Clare. They said he'd been in some sort of contact with her, quite recently. I got the impression they think he might have killed her.'

He was suddenly impatient with her. ‘Of course they do. A husband is always a suspect. And a husband like him even more so.'

‘Perhaps he did kill her.'

‘It's my bet he did, Judith.' He tried to put all his old affection into the name. ‘Let's hope they soon arrest him.'

He looked at the phone thoughtfully for a moment when he had rung off. It was terrible when a husband and wife couldn't trust each other.

S
ara Green strode around the cottage for the third time since she had received the phone call. She knew by now that there was nothing they could find suspicious, but she could not sit still. Movement was release of a kind; even feverish and repetitive movement like this.

They came precisely at one fifteen, just as she had suggested. She had the one-day cricket on when they arrived, flannelled fools flitting to and fro in a green scene which seemed a world away from the one into which she had put herself. She hastened to switch it off, but they appeared in no hurry, seemed for a moment to be almost like normal visitors.

‘Sergeant Hook was a doughty practitioner at that game,' said Superintendent Lambert with a smile. ‘Seam bowler, who's made a few good batsmen hop about a bit, in his time.'

‘I know. One of the linch-pins of Herefordshire cricket for fifteen years and more.' She found that she was absurdly pleased to be able to produce this snippet of information, which one of her male colleagues at the university had retailed to her.

‘Other times, other places,' said Hook with a dismissive smile. But he was obviously male enough to be pleased to have his prowess recognized. Sara wondered whether to tell them that she had once been quite good at the great game herself, that she had played women's cricket to county level. But something told her that there was a limit to how matey you could get with such people, that this was a business visit for them and she should give her full attention to that.