Death on the Eleventh Hole (20 page)

She introduced the subject without preamble, moving in directly to the core of it as he might have done himself. ‘Why did you burn those clothes, Roy? You said you hadn’t seen Kate for days before she died.’

He didn’t refuse to talk about it, as she had thought he might. Rather it was as if he had been waiting for her to speak. ‘I just felt there might be something of Kate upon them, that’s all. With my record, that might have been all they needed, especially when I’d denied seeing her at all at first.’

Julie thrust aside the image of Kate in his arms, pressed tight against him, leaving evidence of herself on his trousers, on his sweater, on the shirt she had bought for him herself. ‘But if you hadn’t seen her for several days before she was killed, you had nothing to fear.’

‘No. And I’d no need to burn them. I could have had them cleaned, couldn’t I? But I wasn’t acting rationally. I just wanted to destroy anything that might connect me with Kate, and the fire seemed the most final solution.’

It was that all right, she thought. And if I hadn’t come upon you doing it, no one would have been any the wiser. Roy was no actor. He had delivered these last words to her like a prepared statement, one he had been thinking about during the day. No wonder he had been unable to deceive the police. Something struck her now with the force of a revelation. ‘You saw her later than you said, didn’t you?’

He looked directly at her for the first time since this had started, and there was fear in his dark eyes. He nodded.

‘When?’

‘On the Sunday. In the afternoon.’

She looked down, saw knuckles white with tension on the table, realized with a shock that they were her own. ‘So you went round there and shagged my daughter, then came to me in the evening.’ The harshness of the obscenity was a release, a tiny safety valve for the pressure she felt would burst her body.

‘No. We didn’t — we didn’t do that. She’d said she was planning to go away, to make a fresh start somewhere else with Joe. That was her boyfriend.’

‘So you went round there for a final fuck.’ She tried to put all her anger into the alliteration.

‘No. We didn’t — didn’t make love. I told you. She wouldn’t.’

What a great fool he was, she thought in the midst of her rage. He was even admitting that it was only Kate’s refusal that had prevented it happening. It made him defenceless, this stumbling, unwilling honesty. It was like hitting a man who would not raise his hands. She said dully, ‘You killed Kate, didn’t you? That’s why you were burning your clothes!’

‘No. I wanted her to stay, and she wouldn’t. She held me, kissed me goodbye, that was all. I felt the smell of her was on those clothes.’

And probably it was, she thought. And other things as well, like fibres. And other, more personal things, if he was not telling the truth, if he had done more with her daughter on that last day than he said.

He came round the table and put his hands on her shoulders, but she shook him angrily away. She would not let him clasp her tonight, would not let him confuse her mind with passion, as he had done at his own house. She sent him back there to sleep alone, hoping he would have the disturbed night she knew lay ahead of her.

At three o’clock the next morning sleep had still not come to Julie Wharton. She looked at her bedside clock and wondered for the twentieth time whether the man with whom she was planning to spend the rest of her life had killed her only child.

Nineteen

Lambert stared at the cereal packet, wondering what it was that nagged at the fringes of his mind, trying to isolate the one fact among a thousand which had struck a jarring note. The thought had come to him again during the night that he had missed something, some connection he should have made.

Then an urgent phone call from DI Rushton sent Lambert leaping from the breakfast table, leaving his cereals, his wife and his house like an eager young constable.

Bert Hook was already there when he got to the incident room, standing grim-faced at the shoulder of Chris Rushton as the younger man sat at his computer. The latter glanced round to make sure they were unobserved; he ran his life strictly by the book, and it worried him when other people did not do the same. He knew Bert Hook was as straight as they came, that he had only done what any efficient detective would have done, that all CID men bent the rules a little from time to time, but he was nonetheless uneasy when confronted directly with the results of this.

But those results were in this case spectacular. Bert Hook’s habit of collecting samples from any leading suspect for DNA testing were not officially allowed: unless the subjects volunteered, you were supposed to make an arrest before you took DNA samples and compared them with evidence collected at the scene of a crime. What Hook’s initiative had now thrown up for them could not be produced as evidence in court. But that scarcely mattered: once they had their man under lock and key, other, more official DNA samples could be taken. Those would be the ones quoted in any subsequent court case.

Meanwhile, Rushton’s information was terse and to the point. ‘Forensic have come up with a match,’ he said. ‘The skin samples taken from under Kate Wharton’s nails match up with one of the hair samples DS Hook sent in for analysis.’

‘I gathered that when you rang me at home!’ said Lambert impatiently. ‘We’ll go straight out and get him. Which one is it?’

He felt he already knew the answer an instant before the DI said brusquely, ‘Joe Ashton.’

Richard Ellacott was waiting by the phone in his study when it rang. He snatched it up on the first ring.

The voice said in an even, slightly muffled tone, ‘You’ve got the money?’

For a moment, it sounded more like a statement than a question in his fearful ears, and he had the nightmare vision of being watched as he went into the bank, of being observed like a fly in a web as he struggled to free himself. Then the words were repeated and he answered dully, ‘Yes, I’ve got it.’

‘Tomorrow night, then.’

‘All right. Where exactly?’

Tracey Boyd put her mouth a little nearer to the tights she had wrapped round the mouthpiece and said softly, ‘The road where you picked up Kate, the first time.’

This mysterious, anonymous voice seemed to know everything about him. He licked his lips. ‘All right. What do—’

‘Have the cash in a plastic bag. And don’t be silly enough to let anyone else know what you’re doing.’

‘No. I won’t do that. But you did say this was the final demand you’d make on me. I don’t want—’

‘Of course. The one and only demand. Two thousand. Cheap, for keeping quiet about what I know.’

‘Just so long as it’s understood that—’

But the phone had gone dead. Richard stared at it dumbly for a few moments after he had put it down. As he walked slowly into the hall, his wife’s frail voice from above asked him who had rung.

‘Wrong number, dear,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It took me a little time to convince them that they’d got the wrong person, that’s all.’

***

Joe Ashton was not at the squat. There was no sign of him or his treasured van. But they found that tell-tale vehicle parked outside the high stone walls of St Anne’s House in Gloucester.

Father Jason Gillespie appeared as if by some psychic agency on the top step of the building as they approached. He was plainly out to defend this particular resident. He stood small and foursquare as they approached, with his legs a little apart, like the bare-fisted pugilists who had fought when this nineteenth-century building was in its heyday. Grey-haired and with his face prematurely lined, he should have been a ridiculous figure as he set himself against the forces of the law, but his determination gave him a kind of dignity.

The two CID men stopped respectfully before him. Lambert’s eyes were nearly level with the priest’s, though he stood two steps below him, as Gillespie said, ‘He’s a guest here, gentlemen. I know this isn’t a church, but I try to afford my guests a form of sanctuary.’

It was Bert Hook who put him straight. ‘We can’t accept that, I’m afraid, Father. It’s gone beyond that. Joe Ashton has lied to us about his part in a murder. We have to speak to him. He’ll get justice: we can’t promise any more than that.’

The priest looked for a moment as if he would resist them. Then he saw that Hook’s face looked even more troubled than his own and stood wordlessly aside to let them into the hall. He said from behind them, ‘You’ll find him in the dormitory, I expect. He’s not due at work until twelve, today. You can take him into my office if you need privacy.’

The priest came to the bottom of the stairs as Hook plodded heavily after his chief and called at the broad retreating back, ‘If you arrest him, I’d like to come to the station with him. He hasn’t anyone else.’ Bert paused in his stride for a moment, looked down at Gillespie with a sympathetic smile, and nodded.

Joe Ashton was not in fact in the dormitory, but in the big bathroom ten yards down the landing, cleaning the second of a row of four washbasins. He looked up in surprise as they came into the room. Surprise was followed by the look Bert Hook least wanted to see, one of apprehension moving towards panic.

‘We need words with you, Joe Ashton,’ Lambert told him. ‘Let’s have you in Father Gillespie’s room, now.’

He sat behind the priest’s big desk, leaving Hook to sit nearer to Ashton, only half-facing him. The youth’s slim frame had scarcely touched the upright wooden chair before Lambert said, ‘You lied to us about Kate Wharton, Joe. We want to know why. And this time I advise you to come up with the truth.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told you, I loved Kate. I want you to arrest whoever it was who—’

‘Then tell us the truth, and stop buggering us about!’ There was no mistaking Lambert’s fury, and Ashton quivered before it.

‘What — what is it you want to know?’

Bert Hook spoke more quietly but no less urgently; he was no more than three feet from the young man’s right ear. ‘Your last meeting with Kate, Joe. What really happened?’

The already frightened face seemed to turn still whiter. told you. ‘We had a terrible row. I wanted her to come away with me—’

‘And she wouldn’t. We’ve heard all that, Joe. Heard about this terrible row. Now tell us how you killed her. How you dumped the body in the back of your van and hid it in that ditch on the golf course.’ Lambert’s voice was harsh with frustration, as he reversed the compassion he had felt earlier for this confused boy, who had fought back from drug addiction and then plunged himself into the nightmare world of murder.

‘But I didn’t! I didn’t kill Kate. I never wanted to hurt her, let alone kill her.’

Hook’s voice came again from his right, calm, persuasive, even sympathetic. ‘Maybe you didn’t intend to kill her, Joe. If you didn’t, you might get away with a manslaughter charge.’

The face which turned to Hook was a boy’s face, stripped of artifice, filled only with a desperate fear. ‘But I didn’t kill her! We had a row, but I didn’t kill her! I don’t know why you should think that I would ever have—’

‘She fought with you, Joe!’ Lambert’s harsh voice tore the boy from his despairing attempt to convince Hook. ‘We know that. We know that you didn’t just fling words at each other. It went beyond that. Fragments of your skin and your hair were found beneath her nails!’

Ashton’s eyes, widening in horror until it seemed for a moment as if they would never shut again, turned back to Hook. It’s true, Joe,’ Bert said quietly. ‘Part of the procedure when anyone dies from violence is to take samples from beneath the nails of the corpse, which are then analysed in the forensic laboratories. There were definite traces of material matching your DNA beneath Kate’s nails.’

Joe didn’t question where they had got the DNA sample for the match. The police to him were now omniscient. He told them dully, ‘We quarrelled, like I said. We fought with each other — I didn’t tell you that. But I didn’t kill her.’

Hook said softly, insistently, ‘You’ll need to convince us of that, Joe.’

Ashton turned slowly until he stared full into the Detective Sergeant’s face, as if he hoped to find sympathy here that he could not expect from the iron-faced superintendent. ‘We did quarrel, the way I told you on Monday. But it was worse than I said. I called her a slag, because she wouldn’t come away with me, because she wanted to go on taking money from men. And she flew at me.’

‘So you fought each other. And before you realized what was happening, you’d killed her.’

‘No!’ His voice rose to a yell, telling them that hysteria was not far away. ‘I didn’t even hit her! Not really. I just tried to protect myself when she flew at me. She marked me. It’s almost better now.’ He pulled down the neck of his T-shirt, showing a scratch at the base of his neck that had almost gone, and then a longer, more livid laceration across his chest, which was also healing. They sensed that he had preserved these last traces of the dead girl as long as possible, the relics of a lost love.

There was a long pause before Lambert asked, ‘Have you anything to add to that? Any variation to your latest version of what happened?’

He tried to keep the harshness in his voice, to invest the words with a savage irony. But the boy seemed to sense that there was a chance after all that he might be believed. He said quietly, ‘No. I’ve told you everything I know this time.’

‘And why not earlier? You say you want Kate’s killer arrested. Why not tell us the truth in the first place. If it is the truth, that is.’

‘I was scared. You must see that. Scared shitless.’ He glanced up like a guilty schoolboy who fears his language will bring fresh retribution. ‘A druggy going with a girl on the game. I didn’t think you’d look any further.’

Lambert stood up. ‘We’ll need a statement from you in due course. We’ll expect to find you here, when we need you. If you go anywhere else, let someone know at Oldford CID.’ When he met Father Gillespie on the stairs, he managed his first smile since Rushton had told him of the DNA samples. ‘You don’t need to come to the station, Father, not for the moment. He’ll tell you what he’s told us. If he adds anything more, it’s your duty to get in touch with us.’ He was out of the building and into the clear sunlight of the May morning before the priest could express either relief or co-operation.

Hook had driven for five minutes before his chief stated: ‘If he killed her, it wasn’t manslaughter, Bert. The girl was garrotted with a cord round her neck. It was a deliberate act: cold-blooded murder.’

‘I know that. I was trying to get him to talk. He seemed terrified enough to confess to anything at the time.’

They went another half-mile before Lambert said, ‘There were no bruises on the body. No real marks, apart from that one awful wound round the neck.’

It was an acknowledgement that the boy’s story was probably true, a recognition that Hook had been right in encouraging him to give his account of that last meeting. Bert knew his chief well enough to recognize that, without it being put into words.

And for his part, John Lambert had just recognized what it was that had been irritating the edge of his mind for the last twenty-four hours.