Too Much of Water (14 page)

‘You met in pubs?'

‘Yes. Every time in pubs. Every time but one in the same pub. I was there first, waiting for her. She said is not good for English ladies to go into pubs on their own, wanted me to be there when she got there.'

That tallied with the information the uniformed men had brought in. It was touchingly old-fashioned in a woman of twenty-five to feel that way about going into pubs, if it was true. But the pubs in question had been pretty rough ones, in the toughest part of Gloucester. And no one had been able to tell the police anything about what had passed between this strangely assorted pair. The people who had noted them had sniggered about them or shrugged their shoulders, but no one had heard anything significant in their conversation. Hook nodded understandingly, then said as casually as he could, ‘And what did you talk about?'

‘All sort of thing. She always asked me how I was getting on, how I was settling in. And she talked to me about her studies.' He wanted to tell them how they had laughed about some of her lecturers, how he too had been a student once and had told her about life in his university in Croatia. But he was determined to keep off that, to say as little as possible about his life before he came here. He did not want to be forced to talk about the English father he had claimed, this mysterious Mr Pimbury, nor about the mother who had taken him off to her homeland in his infancy. When you were lying, the less you had to say the better.

‘And what did she say about her life at the university?'

He shrugged, feeling the tenseness in his shoulders as he did so, willing it to drop away with the gesture. ‘We discussed psychology.' He articulated each syllable carefully, as if it were a completely new word for him. He wouldn't tell them of their lively exchanges, of how he had been able to help Clare, to give her one or two ideas from his own studies which she had not met before.

Instead, he said, ‘Psychology is very difficult subject, I think. But we talked about Clare's mother, about the problems they had getting along with each other. And I think Clare was good student. Very intelligent. She was doing well at the university, getting good marks.'

‘Yes, she was. Did you become lovers, Denis?'

Hook had thrown it in as if it were just another casual question, as if it were no more important than the weather all these English loved to talk about. The dark eyes flashed before Denis said in carefully controlled tones. ‘No. It was not that kind – not that kind of meeting. We were friends. We liked each other, I think. No, I know that we did. And I want you to catch the man who killed my friend.'

‘We need to know these things, you see. Need to know everything we can about Clare, if we are to find who killed her.' Hook spoke earnestly, almost as if he had not heard the steel in Denis's voice.

‘I understand.'

‘When was the last time you saw Clare Mills?'

‘Friday. Friday evening, before the Saturday she died.'

‘How do you know when she died, Denis?'

In that moment of terror, he thought he had made an awful error, that they would clap the handcuffs on him now and lead him away to the car and an English prison. His mind was racing as he said, ‘Was in newspaper that she died on Saturday. People talk about it. Talk here, when we eat our sandwiches.' He waved his arm desperately over the long field and the unheeding workers.

‘Weekend was what it said in the papers, Denis. Not Saturday. We did not know for certain that Clare died on Saturday, when the news was released to the press.'

‘Saturday,' he said stubbornly, making each syllable clear, as if by the careful repetition he could make things right. ‘I assume Saturday. I think I hear other people say Saturday, when they talk about this.'

Lambert looked at him for long, heart-stopping seconds before he took up the questioning again. ‘Tell us about that last meeting, Mr Pimbury. Tell us everything about it.'

Denis tried another shrug, found this time that his shoulders were too rigid to work themselves into the gesture. ‘Not much to tell you. We talked about Clare's work, about the philosophy essay she had to write. I told her about my work here, about the books I was using to teach me better English.'

He couldn't tell them the other things. Couldn't tell them what had passed between them on that last night. Couldn't tell them about the things he had taken away with him from that last rendezvous with Clare. He kept his dark eyes on the grey, unblinking ones of the man who towered above him, as if to drop his gaze would be an admission of guilt, as if they would clap the handcuffs upon him if he failed in this childish contest of staring the man out.

It seemed a long time before Lambert said, ‘Did you kill Clare Mills, Mr Pimbury?'

‘No. Clare was my friend.'

Lambert considered the reply for a long time. The man's appearance was against him. He looked nervous and desperate. But if his background was what John Lambert suspected it was, if the passport he had offered so quickly was bogus, he had good reason to be nervous and desperate. He looked capable of killing, but what could Clare Mills have threatened him with, to make him take such drastic action? Or was this killing nothing to do with the man's background? Was it the old story of seduction gone wrong, of sexual favours refused and a violent male reaction? This foreigner, deprived of sex for many months, might have mistaken friendship for something more, and if Sara Green was right about Clare Mills having opted for same-sex relationships, she would certainly have rebuffed him.

‘Then who do you think killed her?'

‘I don't know. I would tell you if I did. I want you to get whoever did this.' He sought desperately for something beyond this bald denial, something which might convince them of his innocence, of his desire to help them. ‘Someone at the university, I think. Something was worrying her, and it must have come from there.'

Later, when they had gone, he wondered why he had said this, whether anyone would hear of it and do him harm.

You had to keep out of things, at all costs.

T
welve and a half thousand miles away, as far away as you could get from the strawberry fields where Denis Pimbury worked, a man was looking out over a very different farm.

On the edge of the South Canterbury plain in New Zealand, the sheep run stretched for hundreds of acres, creeping up into the foothills of the mountains. The slopes were rolling rather than precipitous, and the man could reach most points of his ground in the Land Rover. It was winter here, but not the winter you endured in Britain. You got a little frost around this time of the year, but not the snows which buried sheep and the deep frosts which froze creatures to death in the occasional hard winters of Snowdonia or the Lake District.

This farmer, taking a little food out to his sheep to supplement the nourishment of the grass which scarcely stopped growing here, savoured the nip in the early-morning air and the clear sun which allowed you to see for miles towards the mountains in the west. Mount Cook had deep snows on its upper heights, but that was no more than a picturesque backdrop to his work, many kilometres away and many metres higher than these productive pastures. He was surprised how quickly he had grown accustomed to thinking in metrical terms, after his resistance to the idea in England.

He examined a dozen of his sheep. Their coats were good: there would be excellent shearings in the spring. And the beasts were sturdy and disease-free, a huge contrast to the rangy and tick-ridden sheep which Ian Walker herded in the Forest of Dean. This man had known sheep like that, and the memory enabled him to savour even more the health of his flock here.

There would be good profits by Christmas, and he would put them back into the farm. They would have over a thousand sheep next year, and he would take in more ground yet, in the years to come. He drove more slowly than he needed to on the way back to the farmhouse, relishing the sharp blue of this perfect winter's day and the different greens of the land stretching away towards Christchurch beneath the rising sun. He was reluctant to tear himself away from this life that he had grown so quickly to love.

The woman had seen the Land Rover ten minutes before it reached the house. She waited for him to come into the kitchen, gave him a welcoming smile before she said, ‘You'd better get your breakfast. I got you a cheap local flight from Christchurch to Auckland. Gets you in an hour before the international flight leaves. You stop for three hours at Hong Kong before you board for London.'

‘Thanks. That's about as quickly as you can do it.'

‘It's a hell of a way.' It was the nearest she would get to expressing disapproval of his going. She wanted to say that there was nothing to be gained by this huge journey, that he was cutting himself off from her, connecting again with that former life which she felt, however unreasonably, was a threat to her.

He put his arms round her, a clumsy bear of a man, too tall for her to kiss without stretching up on her toes like the young girl she had long left behind her. She pressed him harder than usual to her, saying nothing, not trusting herself to words when her small hands could knead his back.

‘I need to go,' was all he said, and that after several seconds.

‘I know that.'

‘It's all I can do for Clare now.' His big frame was suddenly rent by a sob, when he thought he had done with all that. ‘She used to talk to me on the phone, you see. Told me I was the only one she could speak frankly to. Told me lots of things about the people who were close to her, the people she'd known for years and the new ones at the university. I might just be able to help the police.'

‘If they haven't already made an arrest when you get there.' She hadn't meant it to be a rebuke, but it emerged like one.

He held her for long seconds before he spoke. ‘And there's her mother, you see. The police might not understand her problems, might not be sympathetic.' He stopped: it was sounding too much like a statement of love for the woman he had long since forsaken. He hadn't meant it to be that.

She muttered almost inaudibly into his chest, ‘They'll understand, when you tell them about it.' It came again like sarcasm, when she had intended it to be a statement of her love and confidence in him.

‘And there's that woman she was planning to live with at the university. The police may not even know about that.'

‘They'll know. It's their business to know.'

Ken Mills held her at arm's length, looking down into her small face with that intense seriousness which had made her love him. ‘I have to go. She's my only child. Was my only child. I want to see whoever did this brought to justice.'

‘Of course you do. And of course you must go.' She strove to put conviction into the words. ‘I can keep things going all right here. It's a slack time of the year for us – well, as slack as it gets. And even if it is a long way, the world's a small place nowadays. You'll soon be back.'

They nodded earnestly at each other, the clichés the source of comfort that they often are in such situations.

On the other side of the world, Ian Walker was enjoying his Sunday.

He'd had a heavy Saturday night, with beer and whisky chasers and some rowdy singing. They'd had a skirmish and then very nearly a full-scale punch-up with some of the rugby-club toffs, but the police had driven up with their sirens screaming just when it was getting interesting.

Much better than the previous Saturday night. The less said about that the better. He pushed aside his thoughts about those events and got back to the safer present.

One of his mates had dropped him off last night; it must have been one or after when he got back to the caravan. But he'd slept late this morning, lying in until after eleven with a thick head and a mouth like sawdust. It had been after midday when he'd collected his
News of the World
and enjoyed the hair of the dog that bit him in the Rose and Crown. The Forest of Dean roads were busy with the Sunday drivers and the woods were full of picnicking families: he glared at them sourly as he came out of the pub into the sunlight.

Then he had a bit of luck. As he went back towards his caravan, a car a hundred yards in front of him hit one of the Forest's free-roaming sheep, which ran away in agony on three legs. Not one of his, was Ian's first thought. Stupid creatures, sheep. But tough buggers; they seemed to survive all kinds of hits. It was one of the jokes in the Forest that scarcely any of the sheep-badgers' free-roaming sheep had four legs intact. That was an exaggeration, of course, the kind of thing they used when they wanted to have a go at irresponsible motorists and get sympathy, but it was true that a lot of the sheep hobbled around and survived. And once they'd been through the abattoir, no one could tell on a butcher's slab which of them had been undamaged in life.

To his surprise, he saw that the car that had hit the sheep was stopping, drawing carefully into the side of the road where it broadened out a hundred yards ahead. The driver was a woman, easing herself reluctantly from the front seat of the car, looking fearfully back towards the spot where she had hit her woolly victim.

Ian Walker quickened his pace and went forward, his face suddenly full of indignation.

She wasn't as young as he'd thought at first. Forty maybe, with a tanned face and blonde hair, a little dishevelled by her distress. Bit long in the tooth for him, perhaps, but well preserved. He wouldn't kick her out of bed, for sure. And they said middle-class women went at it like knives when they got hold of a young bit of rough like him.

But there were more important things than fantasies, at the moment. He bristled with indignation. ‘What the bloody 'ell d'yer think yer doing? Driving through 'ere like a maniac, when there's valuable livestock around!'

‘I'm sorry! Your sheep came out right under my wheels, without warning. I wasn't really going very fast.'