Too Much of Water (29 page)

‘You told us when we spoke to you last week that you fancied Clare. That you were hoping at one time to develop a relationship with her.'

A nod, scarcely perceptible. No words.

‘That wasn't true, was it? Or perhaps I should say it wasn't the whole story.'

A pause, when it seemed as if he might deny it. Then another, more definite nod.

‘I think we know why you contacted her so persistently in the months before her death. But I'd like you to tell us about it, Martin. I hope you can see that your best policy now is to be completely frank with us.'

He had looked up for the first time on the mention of his forename. ‘Yes. I've nothing left to hide, have I? I was trying to recruit her to sell drugs for me. Trying to build up my sales network.' He delivered the last phrase with a bitter irony, so that they knew that it was not his own.

‘That wasn't your idea, though, was it? Someone else was pressing you to recruit Clare into the organization.'

He should deny it. He knew that well enough. It had been drilled into him from the start. You didn't give anything away about the people above you, if you wanted to stay alive. But it was too late for that: he'd told everything he knew to those persistent drugs detectives, who had seemed to know so much already. ‘Yes. They wanted Clare in. I'm not quite sure why.'

‘And that is why you kept arranging meetings with her.'

He nodded his acceptance of that and then, as if snatching at the last shreds of his integrity, added, ‘I did fancy Clare Mills, though. I'd like to have been her boyfriend, if she'd have had me.'

He stared at the slowly turning cassette in the tape recorder, not looking up at them, fearing the mockery he would see in their eyes. It was Bert Hook who pointed out gently, ‘But she was in a lesbian relationship, Martin.'

‘Yes. I didn't know that at first. But she told me. To stop me making a fool of myself, she said. She told me that was in strict confidence and I hadn't to talk about it to others. And I didn't; I kept her secret.' A tiny morsel of pride stirred in him at that thought.

‘And kept your feelings alive for her, I expect. In spite of the sexual preferences she told you about.'

‘Yes. I even thought we might get together, after she'd walked out on Sara Green.'

They were disciplined by long years of CID questioning. Neither of them showed the slightest reaction to this; neither of them suggested that they were hearing this news for the first time. Hook said in the same even, sympathetic tone, ‘And when was this, Martin?'

‘Two days before she died, wasn't it? I saw her on the day she died. Tried to say I'd support her, be a shoulder to cry on. I should have left it at that, let her recover a bit before I tried to get together with her, but I was silly enough to let Clare know that I wanted to be her lover.' His lips curled in a bitter contempt for his own naivety, but still he did not look up at them.

‘And what did she tell you about her break-up with Sara Green?'

‘Just that it was final. That they'd had a tremendous bust-up, on that Thursday night before she died. That she'd made a great mistake in planning to live with Sara. That she wasn't a lesbian at all.'

Hook glanced across the bowed head of Carter at Lambert. They had only the word of this exhausted, defeated man that this was an accurate report. He might be putting his own slant on what had happened between the two women. Even if he was being honest, he might be remembering the situation in the way he had wanted to see it rather than recounting what the dead woman had actually said.

But if even the bare facts of what he said were true, this gave Sara Green a motive for murder. Sexual jealousy is perhaps the commonest of all causes of domestic killings, and that is essentially what this would have been. This fracturing of the relationship had occurred just two days before the woman leaving it had been murdered. And the most significant fact of all was that Sara Green had deliberately concealed this break-up from them.

‘She wouldn't have me.' Oblivious of the thoughts of the two men who were interrogating him, the man with his head bowed over the small square table continued his account of his own agony.

‘What did she say to you, Martin?' Hook prompted gently.

‘She was polite enough. She said she didn't want to get into another relationship immediately. Of any kind.'

‘And did she give you any hope for the future?'

This time the pause was so long that they thought he was not going to reply at all. But at length he said, ‘No. She said that she couldn't see herself having a one-to-one relationship with me. That she hoped we could always be friends!' He looked up sharply on that last phrase, as if he expected to catch them laughing at his misery. ‘They always say that, don't they? That they want to be bloody friends with you!'

‘Only when they want to be kind, Martin. I doubt if Clare would have said it unless she really wanted you as a friend.' Hook watched the abject figure in front of them, well aware that he too was a murder suspect, that this latest development increased rather than decreased the chances that he might have killed Clare Mills. He said quietly, ‘Did you try to get her to sell drugs again?'

‘No. I didn't get the chance. She brought the matter up herself. She warned me that I should get out of the trade, should stop dealing before it was too late.'

‘And why do you think she raised that?'

‘I don't know.' A huge, racking sigh shuddered through the slim body. ‘I wish to hell I'd listened to her.'

As if in answer to this movement, Lambert's harder voice rang again in his ears. ‘How did you react when she turned you down, Mr Carter? Because that is in effect what happened, isn't it?'

He nodded, his wan face cast down again towards the scratched surface of the table. He said abjectly, ‘I accepted it, didn't I? That's what I do, accept things.'

This was more than self-pity. This man was looking at himself and what he had come to, and loathing what he saw. Lambert said, ‘Are you sure that there wasn't a more violent reaction?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Here was a girl who had repeatedly refused to work for you, who was now refusing point-blank to have any emotional dealings with you. Did your temper snap at this point? Did you in fact strangle Clare Mills?'

‘No. I didn't kill her. I don't know who did.' But he had no energy left to add vehemence to his denials. He sounded as if he did not expect them to believe him.

Lambert let the seconds stretch out agonizingly in the quiet little box of a room, but Carter said no more. Eventually the chief superintendent said, ‘You knew Ian Walker, didn't you?'

‘Yes. I didn't like him. He was nothing but trouble for Clare.'

‘And he'd been in her bed, hadn't he? The place you wanted to be, but were being refused access to.'

‘Yes. Walker kept coming back and bothering her. He wouldn't get out of her life.'

‘And he'd have come back again, once he knew she'd finished with Sara Green, wouldn't he?'

Another pause. And then, ‘I expect he would. He wasn't one to miss an opportunity.'

‘He might even have got some sort of relationship going with Clare Mills again, don't you think? She still had some feelings for him, from what we hear from other people.'

‘He'd have tried.' His voice was so low that they could only just hear it above the quiet whirring of the tape machine.

‘Did you shoot Ian Walker last Monday night, after you'd got rid of Clare?'

He glanced up at them again, looking from one to the other. ‘No. I don't do that sort of thing, do I? I'm not man enough for that.'

There was a curious combination of self-contempt and challenge in the statement. He was in a state of near-collapse as he was taken back to his cell. Lambert and Hook said nothing to each other. But each of them knew enough about weak personalities to realize that they could be dangerous.

A man like Martin Carter could kill, if he was driven to the point of desperation.

The man wore a dark suit, of good quality but well worn, fraying a little at the cuffs. He looked round him nervously in the police station, as if he felt that this was not where he should be. The station sergeant had seen this sort of unease too often before to take any particular account of it. But when the man came to the desk and said he wanted to see the officer in charge of the Clare Mills murder investigation, he was fast-tracked through to Lambert's office.

‘It may be nothing,' he said nervously. ‘Probably is nothing, in fact.' He grinned apologetically for his presence here.

Lambert had seen such diffidence too often to be surprised or irritated by it. ‘You've done the right thing coming here. We're grateful for any information. Don't you worry about the relevance: it's our job to see where it fits into the general picture. First of all, you'd better give Detective Sergeant Hook your name, please.'

‘Tillcock. Chris Tillcock. I used to work for Roy Hudson.' He looked at the long, lined face of the chief superintendent for any sign of excitement at that news, but Lambert was too old a hand to offer him more than a nod of recognition. ‘I was in the accounts department. I am a certified accountant.' He offered the information nervously, as if he expected the fact that he was not chartered to be queried.

Instead, Lambert said, ‘You say you used to work for Mr Hudson. How long ago was this?'

‘My employment was terminated three years ago.'

‘By Mr Hudson?'

A hesitation. ‘Yes. You could almost say by mutual consent, I suppose. But he got rid of me all right. Paid me my redundancy money and sent me on my way.'

They watched him without speaking for a moment. This might be just a man with a grudge against an employer who had fired him. Tillcock might be a man who was legitimately sent on his way for inefficiency, who now wanted to get a little of his own back on a former employer.

Lambert said carefully, ‘But you asked to see the officer in charge of a murder enquiry. So you believe you have some information which could be of interest to us.'

‘Yes. But you may already be in possession of it, for all I know.' His confidence was draining with each passing minute.

‘Let's have it, shall we? It will go no further, if it has no bearing on the case. You needn't fear that you'll be embarrassed.'

‘His business was making a loss!' He'd blurted it out suddenly, in the end, reddening as he did so.

Lambert smiled at him, not wanting to discourage him when he had made the effort to come in and do his duty. ‘Let's have a few more details, shall we, Mr Tillcock? Hudson Office Supplies wouldn't be the first business to struggle, but you obviously feel there are some suspicious circumstances about these particular financial difficulties.'

‘Yes. It was making a loss when he married Judith. He took her money and poured it in to keep the firm going.'

Lambert shrugged. ‘So he used his wife's money to turn a struggling business into a prosperous one. It's not the first time that's happened. You could even say that it reflects credit on him, shows how as an entrepreneur he just needed capital to realize the potential of his ideas.'

He was trying to provoke Tillcock into a reaction, and he succeeded. ‘Hudson didn't revive the firm as he claims. He frittered away his wife's money. It was still making a loss when that was gone. He wanted me to disguise it, to cook the figures for the auditors. I said I couldn't continue to do that. So he got rid of me.'

This was undoubtedly a bitter man. Everything he said and did now bore witness to that. But if there was substance in what he said, it might still have a connection with a murder or murders three years later. Lambert said, ‘You're sure of this? Sure that business did not pick up after you'd left?'

‘I'm absolutely sure. It's a small firm. I've kept in touch with what's happening there. Most of the people who work there don't want to ask too many questions about the viability of the concern. So long as their pay cheques arrive on time and there's no threat of redundancy, that's good enough. That's understandable, but it's helping to hide what's really going on there.'

‘Which is what?'

Chris Tillcock leaned forward. Now that he was animated and assured of an audience, he seemed a much more incisive man. His small brown eyes glistened with excitement, his hands clasped together in a gesture of urgency. ‘It's my belief that he's running Hudson Office Supplies as a front for something more sinister.'

‘Using a loss-making firm as a money-laundering agency, you mean?'

He nodded eagerly, delighted that a senior policeman had put into words the accusation that as an accountant he had hesitated to make. ‘That's exactly it. I'm sure he's involved in something much more sinister, making money he could not legitimately disclose. Big money.'

Drugs. Tillcock didn't want to say the word, but that's what he meant. And they already knew from talking to Martin Carter and others that he was probably right. Lambert said quietly, ‘Can you substantiate what you say about the finances of the firm?'

‘I can up to the time when I left it. I've kept my records from then, and I can provide detailed chapter and verse. It's vaguer after that, but I can still give you pointers: his bank credits will represent far more than is being generated through Hudson Office Supplies.'

Lambert nodded. ‘Keep this information and these views strictly to yourself at present.'

‘Yes. I won't give him the chance to plan any cover-ups beyond what he's done already.'

Lambert hadn't been thinking of that, but of Tillcock's personal safety. It was probably better not to emphasize that. Roy Hudson was becoming a more unsavoury character with every new fact they learned about him.

But was there a direct link with the deaths of Clare Mills and Ian Walker?