Death on the Eleventh Hole (15 page)

Lambert studied him for a moment, enjoying the trapped look on his face. ‘You knew her all right. She was one of your dealers. We can bring witnesses to that, whenever we need them.’

Malcolm thought quickly. Perhaps those three they had arrested with him last night had talked. Or perhaps the girl herself had been to the police, between the row when she had walked out of the system and her death. Concede it then, but give them as little as possible. ‘All right, I did know her,’ he admitted. ‘She dealt a bit for me. But it’s a long time since I saw her.’

Lambert smiled again. ‘That’s better, Flynn. But not a lot better. You’re still being distinctly economical with the truth. It’s less than a fortnight since you saw Kate Wharton, isn’t it?’

Of course, they must have been on to him long before they arrested him last night: they had known all about last night’s drop with his three dealers, had let him walk into a trap. They must have been watching him for weeks. For months, probably. As the knowledge tumbled suddenly in upon him, he said dully, ‘I don’t remember. I was sure it was longer than that.’

‘Let’s stop playing games, shall we? You were seen with Kate Wharton in a pub near the Gloucester docks, on the night of Monday, 30th April. You were seen to have a fierce argument with her, in fact. We believe that she was refusing to deal, refusing to have anything further to do with your operation.’

Malcolm wondered how much more they knew, how much more this man was going to release to him in dribs and drabs. ‘She did refuse to deal,’ he concurred. ‘That was the last time I saw her.’

‘Except for when you killed her, of course.’

‘I didn’t!’ His shout was so loud that the constable started forward automatically, as if to defend his superintendent. Lambert held up a hand without taking his eyes from his opponent’s face as Flynn continued urgently, ‘I’ve never killed anyone in my life. Never even been involved in violence.’

Lambert studied the flat-featured, terrified face for a moment before he said, ‘Not personally, perhaps. But we know the way your organization operates as well as you do. Perhaps better. You pass the information up the hierarchy. People who want to leave don’t have that option: they are simply eliminated. Usually by a contract killer — nothing so crude as you having to do the job yourself. It’s kept impersonal and efficient. But when you passed the information upstairs, you knew you were killing Kate Wharton, as certainly as if you had tightened that cord around her neck yourself.’

‘I didn’t kill the girl! All right, I passed on the information that she wanted out, but that was as far as it went. I didn’t know what would happen to her. And I’d no choice in the matter — I had to report that she was trying to opt out!’

Lambert watched the frightened man with distaste. He had no pity for him; Flynn was intelligent enough to know the effects of the evil goods he purveyed. But what he said was true enough. The drugs system operated rather like Stalin’s secret police: if you withheld any information, if you did not pass it upwards immediately, you were likely to be liquidated yourself, as unreliable. ‘When did you tell your immediate superior about Kate Wharton?’ he asked.

‘Wednesday night. It was the first opportunity I had.’

Lambert didn’t press him for names. Possibly Flynn himself didn’t know even the name of the man above him, in the massive secrecy which cloaked the higher echelons of the organization. That was Drugs Squad business, for tomorrow. ‘What happened then?’

‘I’ve no idea. The next thing I heard about Kate Wharton was when I read in the papers that she was dead.’

‘I advise you to tell the truth for once, as you’ve conspicuously avoided doing whenever you could. You don’t wish to change your story about Wednesday night? You’re certain that’s when you passed on the information?’

‘Yes. And the last time I saw the girl was two nights before that.’ He was desperately anxious now to be believed, desperate to convince them.

Lambert thought for a moment, without taking his eyes off his quarry’s face. It made sense. If Flynn had passed the information upwards on Wednesday night, the timing was about right. The organization would have brought in a contract killer, who would have sized up his designated victim and the right opportunity to dispatch her. Four days was about right for this, enabling the anonymous killer to isolate his victim and dump her body on the Sunday night.

He stood up. ‘If you come up with anything else, pass it on immediately. There’s a murder rap waiting here, for someone. Try to make sure it’s not you, if you really didn’t do it.’

Malcolm Flynn was not bored that evening. He was too troubled for that. His unexpected visitor left him tossing miserably from side to side throughout the night on the unyielding bunk in the cell.

Fourteen

Richard Ellacott enjoyed Monday mornings. He thought it was the best time of the week for the Captain of Oldford Golf Club.

He played with the seniors on Mondays, all men over sixty, most of them over seventy, and with a good sprinkling of sprightly octogenarians. At sixty-two, he was a youngster, and he enjoyed that. He had his own tee-off time at nine o’clock, and the tradition was that members fell back and allowed the Captain precedence, on the course and off it. If his match caught up with another one, he must never be kept waiting, but waved through, while the players in the match in front of him stood back and smiled. It was a harmless piece of deference, to emphasize that the Captain of the club was in charge of all golfing matters, that he was king for a year before he retreated back to the ranks, like other men before him.

Richard shrugged away this half-serious veneration of his office, pretended to be a little embarrassed by it. But you couldn’t help liking it, really, he told his mirror, as he brushed his grey but still plentiful hair and combed his moustache. Many of these seniors had fought in the 1939-45 War, whereas Richard was just young enough to have missed even National Service. And here were these heroes deferring to him on the golf course!

He was playing a challenge match with the pro today against two members, one of a series the Captain traditionally undertook throughout his year. The match would be keenly contested, but the result did not really matter that much. There would be much cheerful banter in the bar afterwards, when the losers would be ribbed by the rest of the seniors. Monday morning at Oldford was largely an all-male preserve, with hearty men’s laughter, broad humour, little malice, and an indulgence of the schoolboy that is still close to the surface in most healthy men.

Richard had already showered, dressed and breakfasted. He glanced at the alarm clock by his bed before he went to clean his teeth. It was quarter past eight. He was only ten minutes’ drive from the club. He had plenty of time. He would get there by twenty to nine, change his shoes in the locker room, enjoy the greetings of ‘Good morning, Mr Captain!’ and the bluff male badinage of the locker room before he strolled out to the busy Monday morning tee and watched the ranks of senior golfers fall back obediently with their trolleys to allow his passage.

He took the tray with the pot of tea and the toast into the room of his invalid wife. ‘Might be a bit late back again, dear,’ he said, as she struggled to a sitting position and he plumped the pillows behind her. ‘You know what it’s like, being Captain. You can’t just get away when you like. You’re the servant of the members, for your year of office.’

It was a formula he had been repeating since he became Captain at the beginning of the year, but she didn’t mind. She knew he was enjoying it, and it was important for a man who didn’t get all the comforts at home — which he had once enjoyed — to relish his life outside. ‘I’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll get up in a little while, get myself a little lunch in due course. I might be able to sit in the garden later, if the sun stays out.’

She accepted his peck on the cheek, gave him an encouraging smile as he left, then sank back exhausted into the pillows. She would tackle the toast in a minute, when she’d got her strength back. The MS had got much worse, during these last twelve months: even the drugs didn’t seem to hold it at bay as effectively now as they had done in previous years.

But Richard was very kind, very patient, most of the time. Now that he was semi-retired from his accountancy business, it was good that he had the diversions of the golf club. She was sorry she didn’t feel up to attending the social occasions herself any more. But Richard seemed to be enjoying them, especially in this year of the captaincy: he was at the club on quite a lot of nights, as well as playing during the days. Perhaps he would find a new partner for himself at the golf club, when she was gone.

No use being morbid. She sat up, turned on the bedside radio, and poured herself a cup of tea.

Richard had put his bag with his change of clothes for after the game into the car and was ready to go out when the phone rang. He went quickly into his study and picked it up. ‘Richard Ellacott here. I’m afraid I haven’t much time, because I’m about to—’

‘You’ve time for this. It won’t take long.’

A neutral voice, female, he was sure, but muffled. It sent a chill racing up his spine. ‘Who is this? I told you, I—’

‘I know about Kate Wharton.’

His head reeled. He said desperately, ‘Kate who? I think you must have the wrong number, and I really haven’ t—’

‘The girl you paid to sleep with you, Richard Ellacott. Many times. Too many, as it turns out. The girl who was murdered, a week ago.’

He tried desperately to think who this might be, but he had no idea. The voice was deliberately even, deliberately deadened. He wanted to slam the receiver down, to stalk out of his house with his head held high. Instead, he found himself saying, ‘What is it you want with me?’

The voice did not immediately reply, and he wondered if the silence was itself a tactic. Then it said, ‘The police know about you and Kate, Richard. Your name was in the back of her diary.’

He felt the blood pounding in his temples. ‘I’ve no reason to fear the police. I didn’t kill Kate Wharton.’

Another pause, even more agonizing, as he waited for a reaction. He was almost certain he caught a vestige of a chuckle before the voice resumed its flatness: ‘That’s as may be. But I don’t think your wife would be happy to hear you’d been making regular visits to a prostitute. Or the people who work for you. Or your chums at the golf club, for that matter.’

He wanted to tell the voice to go to hell. Publish and be damned, the Duke of Wellington had said. But Richard wasn’t the Iron Duke, and he knew it. He could not force the outrage he intended into his voice as he demanded, ‘Who the hell are you? And what are you proposing to do?’

Another of those excruciating pauses. Then the voice said, ‘You had an — an arrangement with Kate, didn’t you, Richard?’

‘She was blackmailing me, you mean, don’t you? If you think I’m going to—’

‘A thousand pounds, last time, I think. I don’t see why that shouldn’t be continued. With a different receiver, of course.’

‘But look, I can’t afford—’

‘Oh, I think you can, Richard. With as much at stake as you have. But there’s good news for you, as well as bad. Just a one-off payment, it will be, and then you’ll be rid of this forever.’

He licked dry lips. ‘How much?’

‘Two thousand. Very reasonable, really, for a final, one-off payment.’

But it never was, was it? Blackmailers always came back for more, people said. And there were no photographic negatives he could exchange for his payment, no evidence which would not be there just as clearly as a weapon against him after this two thousand pounds had gone. He had thought the nightmare had been concluded with the death of Kate Wharton. Now he heard himself saying, ‘You promise that? One payment, and then it’s finished?’

‘Finished forever, Richard.’ The flat voice was suddenly persuasive.

He felt utterly defeated, as though his replies were now dictated for him by this voice he could not identify on the other end of the line. ‘It will take me a couple of days to get the money.’

‘Let’s say Thursday night, then. I don’t want to be unreasonable.’

‘Where?’

‘The old patch. Where you used to pick up Kate. Ten o’clock. Stop your car. I’ll be waiting.’

‘All right. This will finish it once and for all, though.’

‘Of course it will, Richard Ellacott.’ The voice had dropped its impersonal tone, now, but he still could not recognize it. It rolled his full name off its tongue, seeming to savour each syllable.

He looked at the dashboard clock as he slid into the driving seat of his car. He didn’t have plenty of time any more. But that no longer mattered. He knew as he drove to the club that he would lose this morning’s match, that the lunch-time banter would clog his distracted ears, that his joking replies would sit like ashes in his mouth.

In the phone booth in Gloucester, Tracey Boyd unwound her old tights from the mouthpiece and relaxed. She’d been right about where Kate had got that extra thousand from.

And blackmail had been easier than she had expected, in the end.

***

Roy Cook’s house was in one of the small villages on the edge of the Forest of Dean. It was the end of what had once been a terrace of council houses. Two thirds of them were now privately owned, including this one, crouched beneath the shoulder of the hill as if it were seeking shelter from the winter winds.

It was half-past nine when they got there, and this on the morning of the fourteenth of May, but the sun was only just beginning to touch the roof of the house, so abruptly did the hill rise to the north-east behind it. Oak and beech had been in leaf as they drove into the forest, but this was a high valley and the buds on the trees beside the house were only just breaking.

Cook stood in the doorway of the house before Lambert and Hook were properly out of the car, his powerful figure seeming even larger against the shadows behind him. He nodded to them without a smile as they walked up the path which bisected the long, narrow front garden. He motioned them into the house, then looked out upon the quiet scene before him and glanced along the frontage of the terrace to his left, as if he wished to convince himself that no one was taking an interest in these visitors of his.

‘Peaceful spot you’ve found for yourself here,’ Lambert remarked, as they looked out over a rear garden dominated by neat rows of potatoes, onions and newly planted brassicas.

‘I like it.’

He was tense, waiting for them to start on the business of this visit, and Lambert, noticing this, perversely decided to prolong his tension. ‘I’m sorry if you’ve had to take a morning off work. We’d have come to see you in the woods again, you know, if that had been easier for you.’

‘They owe me. I don’t take my full holiday allowance, anyway.’ He hadn’t wanted CID coming to see him at his place of work again, not with Julie telling him what they knew about him now. There had been enough gossip about the last visit by his fellow-workers, whose featureless lives made a CID visit a matter of major interest. When you had a background like Roy Cook’s, you learned to keep such things as quiet as possible. Anyway, if he claimed a doctor’s appointment and went in as soon as these two had finished with him, he probably wouldn’t be docked for the morning. No need to tell them that.

Lambert said, ‘I expect Mrs Wharton told you about our visit to her house on Saturday.’

‘She mentioned it, yes.’ She’d been through it with him in detail, twice, and insisted on discussing what his tactics should be when they made their inevitable contact with him. He hadn’t wanted to talk about it with her. He didn’t see any point in reviving the scene which had made him leave her house, which had stopped them sleeping with each other for three months, until their lust had brought them back together again, so that their first frenzied couplings had made the separation seem almost worthwhile.

Roy felt he wasn’t a good liar, not to an intelligent woman like Julie, and he had deliberately avoided any discussion of what had happened to Kate in the years after she had left. But Julie hadn’t seemed to notice, so anxious had she been to work out with him what he should say now. She’d been disappointed when he’d refused to stay the night with her, but he had insisted on coming back to what she had taken to calling his bolt-hole, where no one was interested in the loner who made only occasional visits to the village pub.

Lambert continued: ‘We were interested in your assault upon Kate Wharton. We have to be interested in anything which concerns a relationship with a dead girl.’

‘It was four years ago. It had nothing to do with Kate’s death.’

‘Perhaps. But you chose to conceal it from us, when we spoke on Friday in the forest.’ He hadn’t disputed the word assault, Lambert noticed.

Cook shrugged his massive shoulders, dropped his dark eyes to the faded carpet between him and the two men for whom his small sofa seemed scarcely adequate. ‘It’s not something to be proud of, is it? It almost finished Julie and me, that did.’

‘Mrs Wharton said she blames herself, to some extent. Kate was an attractive girl of eighteen, in short skirts, and she should have foreseen trouble, she said.’

Rather to their surprise, he did not seize on the easy excuse, as most men would have done. ‘I should have had more sense, shouldn’t I? I should have listened when the girl said no. But like the bloody fool I am, I thought she could be persuaded. She was a prick-teaser was Kate, whether she meant to be or not. She went on the game after she’d left home, you know.’

‘We do know that, yes. But at the moment I’m more interested in the reasons she left home than what she did afterwards.’

Roy thought that was hopeful. He tried not to show it in his face. He tried to think exactly what Julie and he had agreed he should say. It wasn’t as easy as he had expected to deliver words they had carefully worked out together. Acting came into it, and he had never tried to act. ‘I’m sure there were other reasons, besides me,’ he suggested.

That was too weak, not the line they had agreed at all. He had lost his way already.