Too Much of Water (6 page)

‘This isn't about what you let your sheep get up to, Mr Walker. If there are complaints, uniformed officers will deal with that.'

Ian Walker looked at them with undiminished hostility. He'd known they wouldn't send a superintendent after him, not for a few harsh words and the threats he had offered over his sheep. He dropped into the sudden, automatic denial he had practised for ten years with policemen. ‘I ain't pinched nothing. You're wasting your time coming after me. You got the wrong man.'

‘Are you the husband of a woman we know as Clare Mills?'

‘No. I fucking was though, once. She divorced me. Stuck-up bitch. And if she wants maintenance, tell 'er I can't fucking afford it!'

Both of them studied him unhurriedly, watching him breathing hard, savouring his frustration as his language failed to make any impression. Then Bert Hook said, ‘She's dead, Ian.'

‘Dead?' It was a low-key reaction. Neither of them could be sure whether or not this was news to him.

‘Dead. And we're here to find out what you know about it.'

He looked from one to the other of the two faces, from Bert Hook's weather-beaten countryman's visage to John Lambert's longer and more lined features. Both were equally serious, equally observant. He dropped his eyes in the face of their unrelenting scrutiny. ‘I know nothing about it. It's news to me that she's dead.'

He had dropped his obscenities; perhaps it was the nearest he could come to recognizing the solemnity of death. But he didn't remove the stained baseball cap, which let his dark hair escape untidily at its edges. Nor did he ask how the woman who had once been his wife had died. Bert Hook, trying hard to put himself inside the mind of this alien maverick, thought that Walker should have done that. Unless, of course, he already knew how Clare Mills had perished.

‘Were you still in touch with her, Ian?'

‘No. Hadn't seen her for ages.' The denial came perhaps too promptly, too automatically. But this man's urge would no doubt be to dissociate himself from death, whether or not he had any connection with it. He looked full into Hook's face and said, ‘I hadn't seen Clare for a long time.' Walker produced the name clumsily, as if he was belatedly conscious of the need to show some sort of respect.

Bert studied the swarthy face. There was defiance in the set of the chin, but apprehension in the dark eyes. Bert said, ‘You may wish to think about that statement, Ian. You haven't asked us yet how she died.'

He had made a mistake, then, and they were letting him know it. Ian said sullenly, ‘Well, how was it, then?' And then, with desperate invention, he added, ‘Car accident, was it?'

He stood breathing heavily, clutching his long stick as if he planned to use it if things did not go his way, waiting for Hook to reply. Instead, it was Lambert who said quietly, ‘She was murdered, Mr Walker.'

‘Murdered?' His jaw fell stupidly. It seemed that the word carried its normal overtones of awe and fear, even for this man.

‘Murdered, Mr Walker. We are investigating a serious crime. The most serious one of all.'

So that's why he had plain-clothes men here plaguing him. That's why he had a superintendent and a DS, more rank than he had ever been accorded before. He said with automatic denial, ‘Well, I didn't kill her, did I?'

‘That's one of the things we're here to find out. The nearest relative is always a suspect, Mr Walker. But I expect you know that.' Lambert checked himself: he mustn't allow himself too much enjoyment in the spectacle of this boorish creature squirming.

‘Course I know it. But I didn't kill Clare, did I?' Almost as an afterthought, he repeated his earlier statement. ‘I 'adn't seen her for months, 'ad I?'

‘I don't know, Mr Walker. I have to accept what you tell me. Of course, it will be checked against what other people have to tell me, in due course.'

‘You threatening me?'

‘I'm providing you with information about how a murder investigation operates, Mr Walker. You should be aware that any untruths, any information you withhold from us, will come out eventually. Deceiving us now would be regarded very seriously.'

Ian Walker told himself that he had heard this sort of thing before, that this was the way the police always behaved, throwing their weight about, trying to make people like him lose their nerve. Well, they wouldn't succeed. ‘I don't know nothing about this. You can't pin this on me, copper.'

Bert Hook said, ‘No one wants to pin anything on you, Ian. Nothing you didn't do, anyway. We need your help, if we're to find who killed Clare. Surely you want us to find out who killed her?'

He wasn't going to be caught out by this softer approach. The cop with the weather-beaten face spoke in an accent like his. Perhaps he was trying to make out they had something in common. Well, it wouldn't work. ‘I haven't seen Clare for months. Didn't want to see 'er. I know bugger all about this.'

He smiled, not at them but towards his sheep, pretending with the return of his accustomed swearing that confidence was back with him. Lambert said, ‘How long is it since you were divorced from Clare, Mr Walker?'

Walker looked at him as if he thought it was a trick question. He thought for long seconds before he decided it was something he had to answer. ‘Nigh on two year. We'd been separated well before that, mind.'

‘On good terms, were you?'

‘I told you, we was divorced.'

Lambert allowed himself a sour smile. ‘Some people manage to be divorced and remain friends, Mr Walker.'

He looked as if he was considering a strange idea. ‘She were a stuck-up bitch, were Clare. She seemed to think—'

‘Why were you divorced?'

‘In-com-pat-i-ble. That's what the papers said.' He pronounced each syllable as if it were a separate word. ‘That's how the snobby cow wanted it. Said that was the easiest way.'

‘Knock her about, did you?'

‘Who told you—?' He stopped quickly, though not before he had incriminated himself. Then he glared suspiciously at his questioner and said, ‘Course I didn't. We should never have got wed, that's what it was.'

‘Hit women a lot, do you, Mr Walker?'

‘You've no reason to bloody say that.' He glanced from side to side, like a cornered animal looking for a path of escape. Then he fell back on a phrase from his youth. ‘This is victimization, this is.'

‘This is the police pursuing enquiries, Mr Walker. I doubt if you'd recognize victimization if it rode in here on a bicycle with a label round its neck.' Lambert let his contempt flow over the man for a moment. ‘So we know you hit Clare Mills during the brief period when she was Mrs Walker. What we have to decide is whether you killed her last Saturday.'

‘I didn't. Didn't go near the snobby cow.' But he wasn't looking at them. He kicked a tussock of grass viciously in his frustration, and the sheep started away from him, gathering fifteen yards away, keeping a nervous eye upon him as they resumed their nibbling of the sparse grass around the base of a tree.

Lambert nodded to Hook, who resumed the questioning. ‘When did you last see Clare, Ian?'

‘Dunno. Months ago, must be.' He dragged his toe across the dust of the bare patch of earth where he stood, as if seeking to draw some sort of line on the conversation.

‘But you've seen her since you were divorced.'

‘Dunno. Might have.' His face set like that of a sulking child.

Hook controlled his anger, made himself pause before he said quietly, ‘It's a murder enquiry, Ian. Be best if you cooperate, won't it?'

‘All right, I've seen her since we were divorced. Can't be expected to remember when, can I? Not just like that.'

‘You'll need to work on that, then, force your memory into action. Why did you see her, Ian?'

‘Can't recall, can I? Not just like that.'

But he immediately looked even more shifty, and they knew it hadn't been a chance meeting. ‘Trying to get money out of her, were you, Ian?'

Walker looked across to his sheep, then down the valley towards the distant houses. ‘It's not all profit, this game, you know. People think it's easy money, sheep-badgering, but there's expenses.'

Hook was almost drawn into asking him what they were. Instead, he said, ‘Did you get money from Clare, Ian?'

‘Did I bloody 'eckers like! She said she'd given up her job and become a student now. Another bloody parasite!' He thrust his resentment into the insult he had heard in the pub, though he'd no real idea what a parasite was.

‘And when did this meeting take place?'

‘Dunno. Months ago. Six months, mebbe.'

He stood breathing heavily, watching the toes of his trainers, refusing still to look at the CID men, even through the pause which they let stretch beneath the warm sun. Lambert said, ‘Do you have a vehicle, Mr Walker?'

‘No.' He turned his back upon them for a moment to look at his sheep, straggling away in groups beneath the trees of the Forest of Dean. ‘I don't need wheels to heft sheep, do I? I borrows a van from a mate, when I needs one.'

They left him then, walking stiffly away like the townies he took them for. Their car was a hundred yards away. They sat watching him for a couple of minutes, whilst he shouted some guttural commands to his unheeding sheep and tried to look purposeful. Then they drove slowly away, with the burly sergeant watching him until they passed out of sight.

You kept the fuzz in the dark on principle, lied whenever you could. They surely couldn't know which were the important lies.

S
ara Green watched the police team working its way around the Social Studies department at the university and tried hard to keep calm.

They had said they planned to be unobtrusive, to disturb the work of the faculty as little as possible. But the dark uniforms stood out against the jeans and T-shirts of the student community at exam-time: they had as much chance of being unnoticed as Martians. Sara was surprised how many officers there were: half a dozen at least, she thought, maybe even more. And you were always being told that the police were overstretched, that there weren't enough of them to go round. It certainly seemed like that, when you had a burglary at your house or someone went joy-riding in your car. They hadn't done more than go through the motions when her mother's house had been broken into last year, just told her that she could tell her insurance people that the police had been informed.

But this was a murder investigation, and that seemed to pull in the resources. A team of fifty altogether, the reporter had said on television last night. They seemed to be talking to as many of the students as they could get hold of, as well as the academic staff. Sara wondered if they were asking everyone the same questions. It was routine, she told herself. There was nothing to get worried about.

She was wearing her usual dark blue trousers and flat shoes. She had thought last night that she might wear jeans and trainers; she could still pass for a student when she wanted to. After all, Clare Mills had been a student, and Sara was only eight years older than her. But in the end, she had chosen to look her age, to blend as easily as she could into the role of tutor which sometimes felt so alien to her. She had put on her best green silk blouse, which she knew made the most of her small but definite breasts.

With its delicate tracery of embroidery around the neck, it made her look very feminine. She had already had a few compliments on her appearance, so that she wondered if she was attracting attention rather than the anonymity she craved. But it was the male staff who had been most fulsome about her attractiveness today, and men were suggestible creatures at the best of times.

Sara wondered if it would be a male police officer who came to question her, when they finally got round to her. Whoever it was would surely put the same set of queries to her which were being put to everyone else. She would give them an equally dull set of replies and send them on their way. There was no reason why they should be more interested in her than anyone else. She was just someone who lectured in psychology. Just one of the many lecturers whom Clare Mills had come across in the course of her studies. Neither more nor less important than a dozen other people.

Sara Green wondered if she would have to sign a statement. It would be important not to let them see that she was nervous.

They were ushered straight through by the PA in the outer office. It was a luxuriously carpeted room, with expensive prints of the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains on the walls and two deep armchairs in front of the big desk, but a room which was curiously without a distinctive character or atmosphere.

The first words of the man after the introductions had been made were equally inscrutable. ‘She was a lovely girl. I can't think of anyone who could possibly have wished her any harm.'

It was a conventional enough thought, one they had heard voiced many times before in murder cases. And Lambert's practised reply was equally conventional. ‘We're sorry to have to intrude at a time like this, Mr Hudson, but I'm sure you'll appreciate that we need to gather as much information as we can about a murder victim, as quickly as we can.'

‘I still can't believe that Clare was murdered. Why would anyone want to do a thing like that?'

Another platitude. It was impossible to tell how genuine people were, when they spoke in grief or in shock. It was not even possible to tell which of these two emotions predominated. ‘We have to begin with those who were closest to the victim. We need to know as much as possible about her friends and her habits.'

‘I was her stepfather, not her father, of course. But you'll have deduced that from the name.'

‘Indeed. Were you close to Clare?'

‘Yes, of course I was.'

‘There's no “of course” about it, Mr Hudson. Stepdaughters often find a new man in their mother's bed hard to accept.'