Death on the Eleventh Hole (18 page)

Although he had worked with wood in the forest for years now, kindling a small fire of his own like this still fascinated him, still gave him a primitive, caveman’s pleasure. He watched the centre of his blaze glowing red now beneath the flames, felt the heat, surprisingly intense against his legs. He put the underpants and socks into the fire first, then the shirt and the sweater, placing them in the very centre, watching the smoke thicken and blacken as the flames enveloped the wool.

‘What are you doing, Roy?’

He leapt like a startled deer. His concentration upon his task had been so intense, his sense of satisfaction so complete, that he had heard nothing of his visitor’s arrival.

It was Julie. It could have been no one else, for she was the only one who had a key to his front door. She called out, ‘I knocked, but you couldn’t hear me,’ and came smiling up the long, narrow garden.

She hadn’t realized. Perhaps there was still time. Roy pushed the shirt with its tell-tale pattern further into the heart of the blaze, put the trousers, the last of the garments, hastily on top of the rest. But it was no good. His fire wasn’t big enough, not to swallow and destroy the evidence in the few seconds he had left.

Julie was at his side in a moment, her smile turning to bafflement, and then to something much worse. ‘What are you doing’?’ she said in a distant voice.

‘Just burning a few old things.’ He knew he couldn’t lie effectively to her, knew that his explanation was ridiculous, but he could think of nothing else. ‘I had the fire going well, and I just thought—’

‘Those aren’t old things.’ Her voice was like ice. ‘Those trousers are practically new. And that’s the shirt I gave you at Christmas. What’s going on, Roy?’

‘Nothing, really. I just—’

‘You don’t burn new things. You couldn’t care less about fashion, but you don’t waste money on clothes. Why are you burning things that are practically new?’

He had an inspiration. ‘Well, I didn’t want to tell you this, but I never really fancied that shirt. I’m a bit more fashion-conscious than you thought, you see! I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, though, so I thought that if I just quietly disposed of it, along with a few other—’

‘You’re lying, Roy. You liked that shirt, insofar as you get excited by anything you put on your back. And why burn new trousers and a good sweater, which you chose yourself?’

She stood facing him, hands moving to her hips, her joy on her arrival here dismissed as completely as if it was now weeks, not minutes, behind her. Roy could think of nothing else to say that would not make the situation worse. He turned back to the fire with his stick, turning the garments she had mentioned, pushing them further into the centre of the fire. He could hear her breathing fiercely behind him, but he would not, could not, turn to face her. The smoke rose slowly in front of him, the clothes obstinately refusing to disappear with the speed he had hoped for.

Eventually, she addressed his back, in a flat voice which frightened him more than more obvious fury. ‘You were seeing Kate, weren’t you?’

Still he could not turn. ‘Yes, I saw her. Four or five times in the last two years, that’s all.’

‘You fucked her, didn’t you?’ The harsh word, the word she used only as a command in the extremes of their love-making, came like a bolt between his shoulders, making him wince, crippling him with his shame.

‘Yes. Not the first time I saw her. But the other times, yes. I — I don’t know why.’

‘Good shag, was she? Better than her mother, I expect.’

He turned at last with this second brutal word, feeling her pain, wanting to stop the tide of abuse he knew would go on and on, not knowing how to do it. ‘No, Julie, no one is better than you. You should know that. I’m sorry I ever went near her. We have something—’

The words of apology broke the dam, and she flung herself upon him, mouthing obscenities, tearing at the flesh of his arms with her nails, trying to scratch, even to bite, the face she had thought she loved. He hooped her in his strong arms, held her tight against him to stop her from striking at him, held her there for a moment until she was breathless, then carried her indoors as if she were a child’s doll.

She was tense against him still, and he relaxed his hold upon her, but cautiously, lest she tear again at his flesh. He held her still, only letting her lean back a fraction, so that her face was still within a foot of his own anguished features. ‘You bloody, bloody bastard!’ she cursed. ‘I lied for you! Lied for you to the police, about my own daughter. Said you’d only snatched a kiss, when I found you with her knickers torn half off and the girl screaming! Told the pigs you’d only made a pass at her, would have got you off the hook, if you hadn’t blabbed it all out when you spoke to them!’

‘I know, I know.’ He spoke like one soothing a child, attempted cautiously to stroke her head, but she shook his great paw angrily away. ‘I don’t know why I had to see Kate again,’ he muttered. ‘I wanted to apologize, to put right what I’d done two years earlier. Then when I found she was on the game…’

He tailed away hopelessly, recognizing the impossibility of explaining this, and she had to complete his sentence for him. ‘When you found she was on the game, you thought you’d have a quick shag! Compare mother with daughter, see if what she had between her legs was fresher!’

She was yelling the words into his face, and they were so near to the truth that he had no answer to them, no phrase he could produce to mitigate her pain and convey the measure of his regret. He pushed his mouth down on to hers, sought her tongue with his, breathed her name repeatedly into her ear, ran his hands up and down the familiar contours of her back, over the tense shoulder blades at the top, over the softer buttocks at the base.

They stood clasped like that for a long time, until her words subsided and she clung to him, answering his caresses with more urgent ones of her own, running her nails down his back until she broke the flesh, even through the thick material of his shirt. He carried her upstairs then, set her down gingerly upon his bed, stripped away her clothes and his own as she lay with eyes shut, whimpering softly, and made love to her. Gently, tenderly, at first, then with increasing fierceness, until they cried out with the raw passion of the coupling and came together as fiercely as they had ever done in happier times.

They lay for a long time entwined after their climax, minutes in which Roy wondered how safe it was to let her go, whether the woman who had spent herself so unashamedly in passion would still have the will and the strength to attack him as he lay naked beside her. He rolled away from her eventually without a word, and they lay on their backs beside each other, eyes closed, each wondering what thoughts were passing through the other’s brain.

Eventually, without opening her eyes, she said in little more than a whisper, ‘Why, Roy?’

‘I don’t know why. If I could turn the clock back, I would.’

‘When? When was the first time?’

‘Two years ago. Two years after she’d left your house.’

‘She was on the game by then?’ It was a question, not a statement.

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Either she was or she wasn’t. Be honest with me, at least.’

‘Yes, she was on the game. I saw her walking the street, looking for custom. It gave me a shock, that first time. A week later I went back. I — I felt we had unfinished business.’ He used Kate’s phrase, but without the bitterness with which she had flung it at him. ‘I’d been brutal when she was at home, tried to force myself upon her. I wanted to try to put that right.’

‘As if you could ever put something like that right. Oh, you fool, you great, lumbering fool, Roy Cook!’

For the first time, he heard affection beneath the exasperation. ‘Kate wouldn’t speak to me, not that first time. But I apologized, tried to put things right.’

‘And then the second time, you told her that now she was charging for it, you’d buy a bit. That a tom wasn’t allowed to discriminate among her clients.’

Again she was so near to the truth that he had no words to answer. ‘Something like that, yes.’

‘How many times, Roy?’

He wondered whether to lie, found that he no longer wanted to. ‘Four, five. Maybe six. Spread over the last two years.’

‘To spice up what you were getting from me, was it? God, you must have thought I was such a fool!’

He wondered for a moment whether she was preparing herself to spring at him again. But whatever the racing tensions of her mind, her body remained perfectly relaxed beside him. ‘It was me who was the fool,’ he said, ‘not appreciating what I’d got!’ He allowed his hand to steal tenderly over hers, wondering if it would be flung angrily aside.

‘Did she threaten to tell me?’

He was a long time before he replied, as he tried to analyse the oblique words of Kate Wharton at their last meeting. ‘No. But I was afraid she might. I realized what I’d got with you, what a fool I’d be to risk damage to it.’

‘You were burning the clothes you wore to visit Kate, weren’t you?’

‘Yes. The last time. It’s silly, I’m sure they couldn’t connect me with her, but I wanted to be rid of them.’

He didn’t dare to move, because he feared to fracture the bond of intimacy that held between them, despite what he had done, despite her questioning. But when the silence had stretched through two long minutes, he said, ‘I’m going to get us a cup of tea, now,’ and levered himself clumsily off the bed.

Julie Wharton lay quiet for minutes on end after he had gone, listening to Roy Cook’s movements in the kitchen of his small, quiet house. When she finally opened her eyes, she felt she was taking stock of the rest of her life.

She turned on to her side, studied the fresh green leaves of the trees beyond the rectangle of window. As she watched, a thin funnel of smoke drifted slowly across the motionless trees, reminding her of the one question she had not dared to ask.

Had Roy been burning the clothes he wore to kill her daughter?

Seventeen

In the incident room at Ross Golf Club, early on Tuesday morning, DI Rushton sat with Superintendent Lambert and DS Hook. They were the only three people in the big temporary building, exchanging notes at the beginning of the day, bringing each other up to date on the information produced and checked by the rest of the thirty-man team and the forensic laboratories.

‘What about the cars?’ said Lambert. The vehicles belonging to people who had even a peripheral connection with the crime were being checked for any traces of the dead girl’s body or clothes, but Chris Rushton knew just which ones his chief was most interested in.

‘Negative, I’m afraid,’ he said, flicking up the relevant page on his computer. ‘Roy Cook has an old Granada hatchback. It was cleaned comprehensively by him, inside and out, on the day after the murder was discovered. That’s his story, at any rate.’ DI Rushton, who had not confronted any of the leading suspects, naturally inclined towards the man with a previous record of violence towards women as his killer.

Bert Hook put in: ‘He didn’t strike me as a car cleaner, Roy Cook. Not a man to be interested in showing his vehicle off to the neighbours on a Sunday morning in middle-class suburbia.’

Rushton nodded. ‘According to what he told our uniformed boys, he was intending to take Julie Wharton away for the weekend. The car was in a mess, he said, and he cleaned it thoroughly in readiness for a dirty weekend on the night of Tuesday 8th May.’

Lambert raised his eyebrows. Neither Cook nor the dead girl’s mother had said anything about going away. ‘Which weekend was this?’

‘The one after the murder. They didn’t go, of course, once Kate Wharton had been murdered. It’s obvious enough that they wouldn’t. But there is no hotel booking anywhere to confirm the story. For what it’s worth, Julie Wharton supports her man: she says they were planning a weekend away. Cook said they were intending to just drive off on Friday if the weather was nice and book accommodation where they fancied it.’

‘You’d be able to do that in early May, I suppose,’ said Lambert reluctantly.

‘Nothing from Julie Wharton’s Citroen Saxa. It hadn’t been cleaned recently, and there were no traces of anything suspicious. And nothing from Malcolm Flynn’s BMW. Plenty of traces of Class A drugs, as you might expect, but nothing which would suggest a body had been carried. We hadn’t expected anything useful, of course: if this death is drugs-related, it’s highly unlikely that Flynn would have killed the girl himself.’

‘Anything from Richard Ellacott’s vehicle?’ This was Bert Hook, who, having been brought up in a Barnardo’s home and been patronized in his time by many a man such as Ellacott, always found it satisfying to find a murderer among their number. Besides, Ellacott was a golfer, a captain of a club no less, and Bert’s love-hate relationship with the game still inclined him to suspect villainy amongst its practitioners.

Rushton was already shaking his head. ‘Ellacott had his Mercedes booked in for a full service on Monday of last week — the day the body was discovered, and the morning after it was dumped. The garage offers a valeting service, and the car’s exterior was thoroughly washed and its interior was valeted before he collected it. Apparently he always has these things done with the full service, once a year.’

Lambert said, ‘It’s hellish convenient for him, on the day after the body was dumped.’

‘We checked with the garage: Ellacott takes the car in at about this time every year for a full service, MOT and valeting. It would be a very convenient happening for a murderer, as you say, but the timing seems genuine.’

‘What about Joe Ashton’s old van? Don’t tell me that’s been in for a valet service!’

Rushton smiled grimly. ‘No. But the interior is surprisingly clean. It’s fourteen years old but he’s only had it for the last few months, and it’s as clean as a new pin inside.’

‘Suspiciously so?’

Rushton shrugged. ‘The lad says he’s always kept it clean. Forensic say that may very well be the truth: they couldn’t find any signs of neglect followed by a violent spring-clean. They did find a few fibres from the sweater Kate Wharton was wearing when she died.’

Rushton had a habit of delivering his most dramatic snippets very casually. It was Bert Hook who said sharply, ‘Where?’

‘On the front passenger seat, I’m afraid. They were caught on a frayed bit of piping on the back of the seat.’

Where a girlfriend might often have sat when she was alive, then. Fibres from the clothing of a corpse would almost certainly have been somewhere in the carrying space of the van, or on the rear doors, through which the body would probably have been thrust and extracted in some haste. Bert Hook sighed. In a CID man, it should have been a sigh of professional disappointment or frustration. This one sounded suspiciously like relief.

‘Has Malcolm Flynn volunteered anything useful?’ Rushton asked. ‘To me, this killing still seems likely to be drugs-related. Kate Wharton refused to go on dealing for Flynn on Monday night, and died the following Sunday. The timing is exactly right for them to have brought in a contract killer.’

Lambert nodded grimly. ‘I agree. The Drugs Squad have had a go at Flynn on this, as well as me. He’s admitted that he reported to his superior on the Tuesday after that Monday night meeting that Kate Wharton was refusing to continue as a pusher. But he’s stuck to his story throughout — that he knows nothing beyond that point, that he didn’t kill her himself and has no idea whether the organization regarded her defection as serious enough to warrant her elimination. I don’t think we’re going to get any more out of him, for the simple reason that he’s probably telling the truth. He certainly wouldn’t be called upon to kill the girl himself, and once he’d passed the information upwards, the situation would be assessed and dealt with by someone much further up the hierarchy.’

‘Keith Sugden?’ Rushton mentioned the name of the biggest drugs-baron in the Midlands, who lived in a large house by the Severn, with wonderful original furniture and decor from the Arts and Crafts movement of William Morris and his followers. Sugden was a man they had never been able to bring to court, despite the expenditure over the last decade of huge police resources.

Lambert shrugged. ‘It could have been. Or someone just below him in the pecking order. The probability is that we shall never know. At the moment, we don’t even know for certain that this death was drugs-related.’

Bert Hook said slowly, almost reluctantly, ‘That’s what I’ve been wondering about. Kate Wharton was well down the hierarchy. Would the defection of a simple pusher warrant a murder?’

Lambert knew the way Bert’s mind worked. He didn’t want to face the fact that Joe Ashton was their likeliest suspect, wished more than anything that this death might be the result of an order from a drugs baron, even if that meant they might never secure an arrest. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said sharply. ‘But we don’t know how much Kate Wharton knew about the organization. She might have found out more about the men higher up the ranks than was good for her. Prostitutes have all sorts of clients; a lot of them know more about what’s going on in some parts of the criminal world than coppers.’

The three men stared glumly at the computers and the phones and the accumulated detritus of the investigation, contemplating that old, obvious frustration: in a murder investigation, you could never question the central figure, the victim, to find out exactly what she had and had not known.

The thought reminded Lambert of another fact they would never be able to query with the dead girl. ‘Any further information come in on that extra thousand pounds in Kate Wharton’s bank account?’

Rushton shook his head. ‘Highly unlikely that she just had a good week on the game. Her takings from working the streets were paid in regularly and were always about the same amount. There’s no evidence of a sugar daddy and Joe Ashton claims to know nothing about it. Certainly he wouldn’t have had the funds to provide her with a thousand pounds unless he’d been nicking property or dealing drugs, and there’s no evidence that he did either. He was keeping his nose clean, working at Sainsbury’s, and insists that he was only upset that he couldn’t get Kate Wharton to go away with him.’

‘Could it have been an extra payment for her drugs dealing?’ said Hook.

‘That’s always possible, but it seems unlikely, since she was planning to give up pushing altogether, and did so less than a month later. Blackmail of some kind is the likeliest explanation. Toms are always in a position to bring pressure to bear on clients, but it’s a dangerous game.’

As it may well have proved in this case. Lambert pursued this: ‘Two of our suspects, at least, are candidates. Roy Cook wouldn’t have wanted her to tell her mother that he’d been seeing her. It might even have seemed something like justice for the girl, after he’d attempted to rape her in her mother’s house.’

‘And Richard Ellacott,’ said Hook grimly. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted his invalid wife to find out he had a regular arrangement with a prostitute. Still less his cronies at the golf club, if you ask me.’

‘But we can’t pin that payment down,’ Rushton pointed out. ‘It could still be from her drug supplier, an advance payment for services which she failed to deliver, and paid the ultimate price. They don’t hold back when anyone attempts to double-cross them, those people.’

‘Time for coffee,’ said Lambert abruptly, and led the way across the car park and into the clubhouse.

The steward served them assiduously in the deserted lounge. The murder on the Ross course had already given him a certain standing, and he was anxious to keep himself up to date with the case, knowing that a succession of members would be anxious for the latest news as they came to the bar during the day. He came back into the room when they had almost finished their coffee. ‘Made an arrest yet, Mr Lambert?’ he said as he set a fresh coffee-jug before them.

‘Our enquiries are proceeding satisfactorily. We expect developments before too long,’ intoned Lambert magisterially.

His two companions grinned, but the steward seemed unaware of any irony in the delivery of these professional clichés. He grinned confidentially. ‘Put the wind up a few of our golfers, I can tell you, when they found they were being questioned about their whereabouts on that night!’

‘I can imagine,’ said Lambert sourly. ‘Just the routine of a murder investigation. They weren’t the only ones.’ He wished the man would go away and leave them in peace with the second coffee-jug.

But the steward lingered. ‘No, I heard you were questioning people at all the golf clubs in the area. Even gave Mr Ellacott from Oldford Golf Club a grilling, I hear.’ The steward grinned happily at this evidence of the golfing grapevine among golf club employees.

Lambert glanced up at him sharply from his armchair. ‘He thought he could save us a bit of time by giving us his thoughts about his members. Mr Ellacott’s the Captain at Oldford this year.’

The steward smirked, anxious to show how much he was in touch with golf club affairs. ‘Yes, I know. Nice chap, Mr Ellacott. He made a good speech when he was up here with their C team a couple of weeks ago. Very complimentary about the meal we served, he was.’

‘I’m sure he was, George. But at the moment—’

Rushton’s mobile phone shrilled suddenly in his pocket, and he took it away to the far corner of the big lounge, speaking animatedly into the mouthpiece while the steward and his two colleagues watched him and speculated. The Detective Inspector’s urgent look as he switched off the phone brought his two colleagues swiftly out of the clubhouse with him, leaving the disappointed George to clear away the coffee cups.

‘That was the Drugs Squad Superintendent. One of his undercover men has just reported in. Minton was seen in Ross-on-Wye on the Sunday when Kate Wharton was killed.’

The name rang like an alarm-bell in their ears. Derek Minton was a contract killer. The one usually used by Keith Sugden’s drugs syndicate.

***

John Lambert found the bungalow empty when he popped home for lunch. He had forgotten that Christine was working again, that this was one of the days when she lunched at the school where she taught for half of the week. It seemed to emphasize the bleakness of his own impending retirement, that event he was still refusing to think about as he wrestled with the complexities of the Kate Wharton murder.

He made himself a cheese sandwich and sat staring unseeingly at a lunch-time financial programme on BBC 2 that he had never seen before. An item on pensions said that with life expectancy continually increasing, people should plan in the expectation of living well into their eighties. It did not seem at that moment a pleasant prospect.

He wandered into the garden with a mug of tea in his hand. The roses were coming on well, with new growth evident even since yesterday; the climbing rose ‘Breath of Life’, enjoying the warmth of the south-west facing brick wall, was already full of buds. Its name danced in front of him on its plastic tag like a taunt from nature. The peonies held fat buds above their crimson spring foliage, waiting to burst into luxuriant flower. The grass was growing extravagantly after steady rain through the night, needing another cut scarcely three days after its last one. In the wood beyond the garden, beeches were parading the impossibly fresh green of their new leaves. All around him was new, abundant life.

He wandered through his own neat patch of this idyllic scene, forcing himself to rejoice conventionally in the abundance of growth around him, in the magical renewal of the season. He set down his mug for a moment, removed a couple of weeds from beneath the roses, wrenched the first young convolvulus from its attempt to twine itself round the pyracantha. When he picked up his mug of hot tea, it left a circle of yellowed grass which it had burnt upon the lawn.