Death on the Eleventh Hole (17 page)

‘Well, it wasn’t from me, I’m glad to say.’

Lambert and Hook stood up, as if operated by the same mechanism. ‘That seems to be it, then. Have you any idea how Kate Wharton might have died, Mr Ellacott?’

‘None at all, I’m afraid. I’ve been cudgelling my brains about it ever since I heard the news, of course, but I haven’t come up with anything. I should have thought it was the drugs people, myself, but you obviously haven’t been able to pin it on anyone from that dubious industry, or you wouldn’t be here now.’

Richard thought he had acted it out quite well, really. He went outside and saw them off, stood watching the Mondeo wind its way out of the car park, nodding to a couple of members by the first tee as he felt his world returning to normal. He felt the presence of the Secretary at his side.

‘Routine stuff,’ he said, in response to the unspoken question. ‘Quite boring, really, but at least I was able to take it off your shoulders. I think I convinced them it couldn’t have been one of our members who killed that girl. They seem pretty baffled, I’m afraid.’

***

Roy Cook was shaken by his own weakness. He should have been able to deal with those CID men better. He had been interrogated by police in the past, had always succeeded in giving little away. The situation had been more straightforward then, and he had done little more than maintain a sullen silence, but the fuzz had always had to work hard for anything they got from Roy Cook.

This time it had been different. These men had come to him in his own house, had somehow succeeded in persuading him that they knew more than they did. They had made no bones about the fact that he had become a suspect in a murder case, and he had never had to contend with that before. It had all seemed rather odd to him: not like the police grillings he had endured in London, where nothing he said had been accepted, but more like a normal conversation. Perhaps he was just out of touch: it was a long time since he had had any trouble with the police. He had a regular job and a good woman, and he didn’t want to lose either of those.

When he got home from his work in the forest that night, he decided he wouldn’t go over to Julie’s place. He really couldn’t face her today, after what he’d told the police about Kate. He would ring her and tell her he was too tired, in a little while, when he had composed himself and got the words ready.

But his phone was ringing as he opened the front door of the small house, and he went and answered it without thinking of the consequences. It was Julie, as a moment’s thought might have told him it would be, anxious to know how his meeting with the CID had gone.

‘All right, I think,’ he said. It had been anything but all right, but the last thing he wanted to tell her was that they had wormed out of him the fact that he had been visiting her daughter. ‘They still don’t seem to have any idea who killed Kate,’ he told her, with some satisfaction. Then he realized that he was speaking to the mother of a murdered girl, and added lamely, ‘I expect they’ll get the man who did it in the end, won’t they?’

There was a silence at the other end of the line. Then Julie said, ‘Did they accept what we’d agreed about Kate? That it wasn’t anything much, the incident in this house? Did they accept the idea that it was something very minor, that she’d left home for a whole variety of reasons?’

He stared at the phone for a moment, appalled by how much further he had gone than that with the quiet, persuasive Lambert. He wondered how much he could get away with concealing from Julie. ‘No, m’dear. They didn’t buy that, I don’t think. They didn’t seem to accept that I’d just made a bit of a pass at her.’ He had managed to produce the phrase at last, when it was no good, when all he was doing was relaying it back to the woman who had devised it for him in the first place.

‘So you told them you’d made a full-scale rape attempt on Kate.’

He could hear the anger in her voice. ‘I didn’t tell them that, no, love. Not in so many words. It was just that they seemed to know all about it already, before they spoke to me. Perhaps you gave away a bit more than you thought to them.’

‘I didn’t. You should have just stonewalled, as we agreed.’ She could see him, the great, stupid, loveable bear of a man, stumbling over the replies they had agreed, becoming ever more confused with those clever pigs. ‘Anyway, they can’t make anything of it, if you don’t let them. You haven’t seen her for four years, and that’s too long a time for a straightforward man like you to be plotting revenge.’

‘Yes. They seem to have me in the frame for it, though.’ He wondered how he was ever going to conceal from her the fact that he had seen Kate in those last four years. Seen her the week before last, in fact, just before she died. ‘They threw my previous record at me,’ he explained.

‘Of course they did. We knew that was coming. It’s the only reason why they’d be interested in you, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ But he knew it wasn’t. And the police knew, now.

‘Anyway, you can tell me the full story, when you get here. What time do you expect to be over?’

‘I was going to tell you. I’m knackered, so I thought I wouldn’t come over tonight. I’ll come straight there from work tomorrow, instead. I wouldn’t be much use in the sack to a demanding woman like you tonight!’

It was a heavy-handed attempt at humour, and it didn’t bring the chuckle he had hoped for from the anxious woman at the other end of the line. ‘It’s not just about sex, is it, Roy?’ she said quietly. ‘We’re more to each other than that. We should be together, at a time like this.’

It was true, and for a moment he was tempted. Then the thought of having to conceal his visits to Kate came back, and he replied heavily, ‘Not tonight, m’dear. I told you, I’m knackered. Must have taken more out of me than I thought, seeing those CID men. And I been on heavy work all afternoon, handling the chain saw. I just don’t fancy the drive, tonight. And I got things to do here.’

Julie Wharton put the phone down thoughtfully after their final endearments. What things? she wondered. And Roy had never made the drive an excuse for not coming over before.

Sixteen

Joe Ashton had got his job back at Sainsbury’s. He had
J
got a fierce bollocking from Mr Harding, the store manager, about disappearing for a week without letting anyone know why. Joe stood like a schoolboy with his thin arms at his sides and his head cast down, until the torrent of words subsided.

Harding had expected the boy to argue back: he was used to feeding off opposition, and when it didn’t come, he found it difficult to sustain his tide of anger. Anyway, he had already made up his mind to have the boy back, after that strange priest from St Anne’s had rung through and spoken for him. Shelf-stackers who were honest, who didn’t try to pinch the goods and would work steadily without supervision, weren’t all that easy to come by, and this lad had filled the bill well for several months. Harding looked at the scrawny, penitent figure. ‘I can see from the look of you that you’ve been ill, Joe, but you should have let someone here know. Make sure you do that, if it happens again. You can start again on Monday morning.’

Monday had seemed to Joe to last an awful long time. He reported in at seven to stack the shelves after the weekend, and was tired out by the end of his shift at three. Then he was ‘offered’ three hours overtime, which he took because he could see they needed him, with two others off sick. The money would come in useful, too. He had had a long talk with Father Gillespie on Sunday afternoon, and agreed that he should get himself out of the squat and into some proper accommodation as soon as he had the money to do it.

But the three extra hours were hard, even with the extra tea break old Harding told him to take at half-past four. He watched the fingers of the big electric clock creep round towards six and thought he had never seen them move so slowly. His arms felt as if they would drop off with the lifting. It was an effort even to raise the cold water from the washbasin to his face in the staff changing room.

He didn’t remember until he walked out into the bright light of the car park that he hadn’t got his old van. It had been vandalized outside the squat, sometime last week when he was off his head on horse. When he had the money, he’d go out to the big breaker’s yard and get himself a new headlamp. He turned wearily to walk the mile or so back to the squat.

‘Fancy a lift, Joe? You look as if you need it!’ He didn’t know where the voice had come from, at first.

Then he saw the big old Vauxhall Senator, with the passenger window wound down and the weatherbeaten face of that sergeant who had come to see him at the squat smiling up at him. He hesitated a moment, then opened the back door and slid into the capacious leather seat. He had expected the car to move off then, but the sergeant came round to the other side of the car and slid heavily on to the back seat beside him. In the driver’s seat, Superintendent Lambert turned his body rather stiffly, so that he could stare across the car’s interior diagonally and study Joe Ashton’s face.

Joe felt trapped. He should have known that nothing was for nothing, especially from the police. And yet his exhaustion made him feel that this was a comfortable trap, if trap it was. Almost anything was worthwhile, if they dropped him at the door of the squat at the end of it.

‘We hoped we’d find you here,’ Hook said. ‘We wanted another word with you, you see, now that you’re not shooting up.’ He wouldn’t tell him that they had rung the store that afternoon, had found just when he would be finishing his work for the day, had come to the car park at five to six to wait for him.

And Joe Ashton was in no state to work such things out for himself. He said wearily, ‘Have you found out who killed my Kate yet?’ That was how he thought of her still, when he was on his own; in his fatigue, it had slipped out to strangers.

‘Not yet, Joe, but we will.’ Hook watched for the boy’s reaction, but learned nothing from it.

Joe said dully, ‘You’re no nearer to finding the man who killed her, are you?’

‘Yes, we are, Joe. We’ll be nearer still, if you can help us. We said we’d be back, that we’d need to talk to you when you weren’t high on drugs. That’s why we’ve come now.’

‘I haven’t shot up for days, now. I went to see Father Gillespie.’ His eyes widened as he remembered. ‘It was you who told me to do that.’

Hook smiled at him. ‘Yes. It was good advice, and you took it. Not many people listen to good advice.’

‘He was good to me, Father was. He’s helping me get back on my feet. It was he who sent me back here, to get my job back.’ He looked up at the high blank wall of the rear of Sainsbury’s store above him and said as if he could not quite believe it, ‘I started work again today. I’ve been here since seven.’

‘Very good, that, Joe. And I can see you’re very tired. We needn’t keep you here long. Then we’ll drop you off at the squat. You should get out of there, you know, as soon as you can.’

He nodded. ‘Father Gillespie said that.’ He looked from Hook’s encouraging smile to Lambert’s long, watchful face in sudden alarm. ‘He’s not been talking to you, has he. Father Gillespie?’

‘No, he hasn’t, Joe. I expect he thought you’d have the good sense to tell us everything yourself.’ Hook’s tones were calm and persuasive, the more so to a man sunk in fatigue, feeling the comfort of the seat beneath him, having now to fight against shutting his eyes and drifting away completely.

Yet a small part of Joe’s brain insisted that he must still be careful. He said slowly, ‘There’s nothing to tell, is there? I must have told you everything I knew when you saw me at the squat.’

‘Not everything, Joe. Not much at all, really.’ Hook smiled into the face grey with exhaustion. ‘You weren’t in any fit state to talk to anyone then, with the amount of horse you had in your veins.’

Joe Ashton gave him a small, answering, almost conspiratorial smile. ‘I was high, then, wasn’t I? But not now. You couldn’t even have me for possession, now. It’s all gone.’

‘That’s good. So you’ll be able to talk to us about Kate.’

‘What is it you want to know?’

‘When did you last see Kate, Joe?’

He was vaguely aware that they’d asked him that before, when they had caught him off his head on horse in the squat. But he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said. It must have been a lie, because he couldn’t have told them the truth, could he? You needed to keep a careful note of any lies you told, so that you could repeat them when necessary: it was a bit late for him to realize that now. He said uncertainly, ‘It would be on the Saturday before she died, I suppose.’

Hook felt a strange mixture of elation and disappointment. He felt the delight any CID officer feels when someone is caught out in a lie; yet he knew he didn’t want this stumbling, diffident boy who had struggled back from the abyss of drug addiction to be a killer. He knew that the first rule in the detection book was ‘Never get involved’, but he knew also that he wasn’t good at that, found it impossible to observe on occasions. He looked hard into the uncertain face. ‘That’s not what you told us on Thursday, Joe.’

John Lambert spoke for the first time. ‘You had much better tell us the truth, Joe. It’s not sensible to tie yourself in knots with more lies. We might start getting suspicious.’

They were ganging up on him now. And he had made a mistake. He felt curtains of fatigue descending across his vision. It would be so much easier to tell the truth, so long as he could keep back the ultimate facts. ‘When you saw me at the flat, when did I say I last saw Kate?’

Hook glanced at Lambert, then back into the boy’s troubled face. ‘Let’s just have the real story, Joe, shall we? Before you get yourself into any more trouble.’

Joe nodded several times, with his eyes almost shut, convincing himself of what he must do rather than agreeing with Hook. I saw her on the Sunday.’

‘The Sunday when she died?’

‘Yes.’ Joe’s eyes were shut now. His face was a mask of pain, as recollection pushed into his fatigue.

‘What time, Joe?’

Hook spoke very quietly, but something of his tension must have come through, because Joe opened dark blue eyes and looked at him earnestly. ‘In the evening. About eight o’clock, I think. Perhaps a bit later.’

‘And what happened, Joe?’

‘We were going to be an item, you know, Kate and me.’

Bert Hook resisted a sudden ridiculous impulse to correct his grammar. ‘Yes. You said that on Thursday, Joe. Did Kate think that, as well?’

‘Oh yes. We weren’t arguing about that. That was agreed. We were arguing about when.’

He seemed content to stop there, and Hook had to prompt him with, ‘You argued then, on that last evening together.’

‘Yes. But it was only about when she was coming away with me.’

‘She wouldn’t go immediately?’

‘No. But she should have, shouldn’t she? Everything would have been all right, if we’d gone straight off. Once she’d given up dealing drugs, we needed to be somewhere else, fast.’

He was right in that, thought both his hearers. Once Malcolm Flynn had reported upwards in the chain, a girl refusing to deal would have been in mortal danger. But what had this boy done to her, when she had refused to go away with him? ‘But Kate didn’t want to go,’ Hook prompted. ‘Refused to go with you, did she, that last Sunday night?’

‘Yes. We — we had a row about it. Quite a bust-up, we had.’ He wanted to cry at the memory, but in his exhaustion, his eyes seemed to have forgotten how to shed tears, his brain how to issue the command to weep. ‘I wanted us to go away quickly, that night, if she would. She said that wasn’t practical. We needed more money. Another couple of months, she said, and then we’d have the money to set up somewhere else and live a proper life. She kept saying that: “a proper life”.’

‘But you didn’t want to wait for that.’

‘No. She said — she said she’d have thousands more, in a couple of months, if I’d just be patient. I got very angry then. I couldn’t bear to think of her, in bed with other men, building up this treasure chest, as she called it.’

‘No, I’d have found that difficult, too, if I’d loved a girl.’ Ironically enough, it seemed that Kate Wharton had been planning to make swift thousands from blackmailing some person or persons, rather than through prostitution, but this sad figure before them hadn’t known that. Hook asked, almost reluctantly, ‘Fierce row, was it, Joe? Harsh words exchanged?’

He nodded, eyes almost shut again now. ‘It went on a long time. It was dark when I left the flat.’

Hook waited for several seconds, in case a murder confession should fall out of those jaded lips. Then he pressed him: ‘Came to blows, did you, in this argument?’

At the back of Joe’s mind, some danger signal was suddenly activated. This is where it must stop. He couldn’t possibly tell them the rest. His eyes were suddenly wide open. ‘No! No, we had the most terrible row, but it didn’t come to blows. I wouldn’t hit her. Not my Kate, would I’?’

He sounded as if he was shouting to convince himself. Hook quietly pointed out: ‘We don’t know, do we, Joe? We weren’t there. That’s why we have to ask you about these things.’ He watched the boy’s thin neck slump slack as a rag doll’s as he nodded agreement. ‘Did you kill Kate that night, Joe? Not meaning to, of course, but finding you’d killed her before you knew what you were doing? Take her body out to your van and dump it afterwards, did you?’

‘No! No, I didn’t kill Kate. You mustn’t think that, really you mustn’t.’ But his face was in his hands. And at last the tears came, as he sobbed soundlessly into his fingers. They were almost a relief.

They dropped him off at the end of Sebastopol Terrace. When you lived in a squat, it wasn’t sensible to have the police dropping you off at your door, even in an unmarked car. He had stuck to his story that he hadn’t killed the girl, nodded dumbly and handed over the keys when Hook said that the forensic team would need to examine his van.

They watched him as he walked, reeling with fatigue, to the door of the squat. ‘I hope the silly sod didn’t do it!’ said Hook, his voice gruff with emotion.

***

Roy Cook knew now what he had to do. He went to the old wardrobe in his room, looked for a moment at the clothes which lay at the bottom of it, then pushed them carefully into the polythene bag he had brought up with him. The shirt he had only worn twice, the maroon sweater which Julie liked, the trousers he had worn as his best. It was a pity, but all of them had better go; it was the only safe way. He stuffed underpants and socks into the top of the bag, thought about his shoes, decided they would be all right with a good vigorous clean with plenty of polish. Like most people who sought to cover their tracks, he did not realize that footwear was the most revealing item of all, the one from which the police most often got significant information.

Roy looked briefly along the terrace of houses and down the deserted road to check that no one was around. Swallows swooped and rose among the trees by the stream, at the bottom of the tiny valley, but there was no human being in sight. He went out into the back garden, climbed the slope to the back of it, and built a swift wigwam of twigs over rolled-up sheets of the
Ross
Gazette
.

This was the place where he always built his fires to dispose of garden refuse, and the sticks, fallen from the trees in winter, were dead and dry. The flames licked eagerly round them as the newspapers caught fire. There was but the gentlest of breezes, away from the houses, carrying the smoke away over the hill in the last of the sun. He watched with satisfaction as his wigwam fell inwards and the base of his fire was established. Then he piled other, thicker branches on top to consolidate the blaze.