Too Much of Water (7 page)

Roy Hudson looked for a moment as if he would bridle at the directness of this. He was a little older than his wife, probably around fifty, with deep-set, watchful brown eyes in a tanned face. He was a handsome man, greying at the temples but still with a good crop of dark hair. He had the slightly florid complexion which often comes from a comfortable lifestyle and a surfeit of good food and wine, but there was no sign of the corpulence which might have accompanied such indulgence. He controlled himself and asserted tersely, ‘Clare and I had a good relationship.'

‘But she chose to keep the name of her real father.'

‘That was her prerogative. I believe it is not unusual in these circumstances.' They were fencing with each other already, two naturally combative men who had dropped into a contest. Lambert wondered how it had happened, why it was that this successful man was behaving as if he had territory to protect.

‘How old was Clare when you came upon the scene, Mr Hudson?'

‘Sixteen. She was eighteen when I married Judith. Is this relevant?'

‘It may or it may not be. We shall only know when we have a much fuller picture of the life led by a girl who cannot speak for herself.'

Lambert wasn't averse to ruffling a man who struck him as a smooth operator; people who were angry usually revealed more of themselves than they intended. He was wondering why Hudson had chosen to see them here in his luxuriously appointed office rather than at his home. Did he for some reason not want his wife, the girl's mother, to overhear these exchanges? Lambert said, ‘Clare must have lived under the same roof as you for a number of years.'

‘She came with her mother when I married her.' He made her sound like a family pet which had to be accommodated as part of a deal. ‘There was plenty of room in the house for her. She wasn't with us for very long. She chose to get married herself.' The words tripped out without any hesitations, almost like part of a statement he had prepared in advance. But there might be nothing sinister in that: there was no reason why he should not anticipate their questions and prepare his answers.

But the nature of their work turns CID men into suspicious creatures; prepared statements suggest to them that the speaker may have something to hide. ‘So how long did you live in the same house as your stepdaughter?'

‘Six months or so. She made a hasty marriage, against our advice. Marry in haste and repent at leisure, they say. It was certainly so in Clare's case.' Perhaps Roy Hudson thought he sounded too satisfied that it had turned out so, for he added lamely, ‘It was a great pity for her, a great sorrow for us.'

Lambert wondered if Roy Hudson was anxious to turn the talk away from his own relationship with the dead girl to that of Ian Walker's. ‘Would you say that Clare Mills and you had a happy relationship during those six months when you lived in the same house?'

‘Yes. Excellent.'

‘Forgive me for saying so, but that would be unusual, in our experience. There are usually problems of the kind I have suggested when teenagers have to accept a new head of the family. We need you to be quite frank with us.'

Hudson pursed his rather thin lips. ‘I wouldn't say there were major problems. As a matter of fact, Judith had more trouble with her daughter than I had. I think Clare blamed her for the break-up of her first marriage. I never met Clare's father. He was off the scene before I even met Judith. He's in New Zealand now.'

Hook looked up at this point from the notes he had been making. ‘So how would you summarize your own relationship with Clare Mills, Mr Hudson?'

‘Close and friendly.' Again there was the sense that this was an emollient phrase he had prepared for this very question.

Hook nodded. ‘We were given access this morning to Clare's bank and building society accounts. That is quite normal in the case of a murder victim.'

‘Yes?' The man behind the big desk could not see where this was going.

‘She had quite a large student loan. No larger perhaps than that of many students at her stage of a degree, but quite substantial.'

‘So?'

‘Nothing, really. But it's surprising how often a murder victim's financial situation tells us significant things about their life. I just thought that in view of the fact that you enjoyed a close and friendly relationship with her, you might have chosen to supplement her income whilst she was at university.' He put the thought apologetically, where Lambert might have made it confrontational. Then he looked round the conventional affluence of the office rather than at the man at the centre of it. Bert Hook did rather a good line in innocent speculation.

Roy Hudson controlled himself with difficulty and said icily, ‘Clare was an independent young woman. She wouldn't have accepted charity from me.'

‘I see. Did you offer to help her?'

Hudson paused to consider his reply. These men and their team were going to talk to many other people, to unearth much more about Clare than they knew at present, a lot more than he was going to offer them. ‘I knew her well enough to know that financial support from me would not have been welcome. I told you, we had an excellent relationship.' His manner rather than his words told them that this was a man not used to being challenged, a man who ran a highly successful small business, whose word was law during his working day.

‘When did you last see Clare Mills?'

He took his time, suspecting now that they might be happy to irritate him, accepting the rules of the game and playing to win. ‘Three months ago, approximately. I couldn't be precise. I didn't expect to be quizzed about it by policemen.' He allowed himself a small, mirthless smile on that thought.

Lambert answered this thought he had heard hundreds of times before with a wry smile of his own. ‘But we believe that Clare went home regularly to visit her mother. Does this mean that you did not see her on those visits?'

‘If she visited the house during those last three months, I didn't see her. I assure you there is nothing sinister in that fact. Hudson Plastics is a prosperous business, but it doesn't run itself.'

‘Did Clare communicate any sort of anxiety to you or to her mother?'

‘None whatsoever. Though as I say, it is some time since I saw her. But I'm sure Judith would have mentioned anything which was worrying her daughter to me, if she thought it serious.'

‘Was Clare in any sort of trouble?'

‘No. As far as I know, her studies were going well.'

‘Yes. The university confirms that she was an excellent student. Both her tutors and her fellow-students were expecting her to get a good degree. And yet someone chose to kill her.'

‘Couldn't this have been something quite random, quite unconnected with her normal life?'

People, even totally innocent people, always wanted this. They found some unpredictable violence easier to take than a planned murder, involving someone who had been close to the victim. Lambert said, ‘It's possible, of course. But even in today's world, such deaths are rarer than the public thinks. We normally find that someone has secured some advantage from a death. For what it's worth, the post-mortem did not reveal any sign of a sexual attack upon your stepdaughter.'

He would have expected the man to have asked about that at the beginning of the interview: people close to the victim usually wanted to be reassured that there had not been a rape before a strangling.

As if he recognized the omission, Roy Hudson said hastily, ‘That's something at any rate, I suppose. I hope Clare suffered as little as possible.'

Lambert was irked by his urbanity, by his lack of any obvious emotion about a girl he claimed he had been close to. He said abruptly, ‘So who do you think killed Clare Mills, Mr Hudson?'

‘I haven't the faintest idea. If I did, I'd be offering you my thoughts, obviously.'

Not so obviously, thought Lambert. You're concealing something, but until I know more about you and this strange murder victim, I can't begin to conjecture what it might be. He said as he stood up, ‘If you think of anything at all which might be helpful, please contact me or Detective Inspector Rushton at Oldford CID immediately. We shall no doubt wish to speak to you again in due course.'

He made that sound as much like a threat as he could.

Bert Hook hoped to complete an Open University degree within the next year. But, having been a doughty Minor Counties seam bowler with Herefordshire for fifteen years, he still tended to think in cricketing metaphors. To his mind, Roy Hudson had played a straight bat to fairly standard bowling. Bert looked forward to making him hop about a bit on the back foot, when they got him on a stickier wicket.

The insurance broker gave him a price which was cheaper than anything else he'd had. It was probably from a dodgy company, but it would make him legal, which was all that mattered.

Ian Walker said, ‘I only want third party, fire and theft, mind. You sure that's the lowest you can do?'

‘You won't beat that price. And you're sure the vehicle is garaged every night?'

‘Oh, yes. Locked and barred, with the keys removed.' He remembered the lies you had to tell. Probably the man on the other end of the line didn't even believe him, but that wouldn't matter.

‘Once we've cleared your cheque, we'll send you the certificate by the next post, Mr …?' The broker was anxious to get on to more important things; there wasn't much commission in third-party insurance on an old van.

‘I'm paying cash. I'll be there in an hour. Have the certificate ready and I'll pick it up.'

In the circles in which Ian Walker moved, cash was still king. You trusted that and very little else. He pulled the tin out from its hiding place under the stained sink and extracted the grubby notes he needed. He took a blank cheque too from the scarcely used book and put it and the money carefully into the pocket of his jeans. Then he reversed the old white van out from the grass beneath the trees and drove into Gloucester, more carefully than usual. He parked in his usual place near the cattle market and went to collect the insurance certificate. There was still a month left on the van's MOT, so that was all right.

The broker looked at the unshaven man suspiciously as he entered the narrow office. The soiled baseball cap, with the greasy black hair protruding untidily from its edges, and the scar on the temple didn't inspire confidence. Walker, who was used to working outdoors, looked round uneasily within the confines of this cramped little room, as if he feared someone might spring out on him from behind the filing cabinet. But he presented exactly the right money, in a variety of dog-eared notes. The broker counted it carefully and handed over the certificate. Any claims would be a matter for direct negotiation between the client and the insurance company, he explained. He wasn't going to be a middle-man for this very dubious customer.

Ian Walker accepted that information with scarcely a nod of acknowledgement. He was busy checking the certificate: he didn't have to do a lot of reading nowadays. But he was literate enough, when it was needed. He filled in the form in the post office, explaining that he had only just acquired the vehicle which he had actually been driving for the last four months. Then he posted it off, with his cheque for six months' tax and the MOT and the new insurance certificate, to the DVLC at Swansea.

He scrawled a ‘Tax in Post' message on a scrap of paper and put it over the out-of-date tax disc. If the police were coming calling, you'd better be legal. There was nothing the pigs liked better than catching you out like that.

Perhaps he shouldn't have told that snotty superintendent that he didn't have a vehicle; it had been his natural instinct to deny it when he knew it wasn't taxed or insured. When he was back in the Forest of Dean, he'd throw a couple of the sheep in the back for an hour or two, let them piss on the bit of old carpet, if they wanted to.

No one would be able to tell that he'd scrubbed the van out on Sunday, once they'd been there.

M
artin Carter thought he was in the clear.

It had all seemed to go quite well when the uniformed constables had taken his statement about Clare Mills. They had been a man and a woman, both younger than him, and he had moved from being stiff and nervous to being quite relaxed. He had made a few jokes with them about how the university was detached from real life, about how these people in uniform were working away at the crime face whilst he did research, studying crime from the outside and making portentous pronouncements about trends and possible solutions.

He confided to them that he had even considered entering the police through the graduate-recruitment scheme at one time, but had then recognized that he could neither take the discipline nor join in the team work that was required of people in the modern police force. ‘So I became a postgraduate student instead,' he had concluded wryly. ‘Put off entering the real world for a little longer, as you might say!'

He had explained to his visitors that he was researching ‘Recidivism in the Modern Criminal'. He had planned further self-deprecatory remarks about the advantages of studying crime from the elevation of an ivory tower, but they hadn't shown much interest. You couldn't expect PC Plods to show much imagination or sense of humour, he supposed.

They'd made notes on what he had to say about Clare Mills, without asking him anything very searching about it. They had seemed to accept his story, but they must have been suspicious of something in it. Because now these two older blokes in plain clothes were here to see him. So that was one up to the PC Plods.

Lambert and Hook saw a diffident young man with dark red hair and a thin, watchful face. Unusually in this university setting, he wore a conventional shirt and a tie on a sweltering day at the end of June. He had also assumed small-lensed glasses, which sat rather ridiculously halfway down his nose, as if he wished to accentuate the impression of the egghead postgraduate student. The suspicion that the spectacles were not strictly necessary for him was reinforced by the way he took them off and studied them thoughtfully as he made his replies to their questions.