Just Desserts (7 page)

Having shaken herself, Joanne forced a smile at herself in the mirror, rehearsing the part she must play, telling herself that her years in amateur dramatics must give her an advantage. Perhaps the whole untidy collection of parts she had played had been a preparation for this real one which had been so abruptly thrust upon her. On with the motley. Let the clown smile. Let the tears be kept for private release; their public display was an indulgence she could not afford.

She took a black plastic dustbin bag from the cupboard under the sink and went rapidly through the flat. She was surprised when it came to it how well her brain worked. It was as if action eased her mind into its normal efficiency, and she gathered items as if she carried an unwritten list within her brain.

She had not been conscious of any such list earlier, but now she knew exactly the items she needed, and she moved through the rooms as methodically as a cleaner following a weekly routine. She moved the photographs and the two other items which were on display first. Then she went to the drawers and cupboards, treating each room methodically, surprising herself with her knowledge of exactly the items she wanted to remove.

Joanne was pleased with the way her mind worked: she might be moving like an automaton, but it was an automaton directed by a cool brain. It was only when her task was almost complete, when she was retracing her steps through the five rooms of the flat and trying desperately to think of items she might have forgotten, that panic burst suddenly upon her hyperactive mind. She began to listen for the ring of the bell, to run her eyes frantically along shelves and table and kitchen units to search out the one object she must have overlooked.

This was like being in a Kafka novel, waiting for the faceless forces of the state to intrude upon her small and private world, to discover the small, intimate, forgotten things which would tell the bureaucracy of the state more about her life than she wanted it to know.

But there was no ring at the bell, no watching eyes as she peered right and left from the door before taking her dustbin bag of evidence out to the car. How small and light it felt. How slight were the remembrances of emotions which had been so fierce, which had changed the pattern of her life.

Joanne's plan was simple enough. She knew the area of Gloucester where the bin men operated on Thursdays, for she had lived there herself before she bought her flat. She would simply drive around until she saw the Biffa lorry, with its steel jaws at the rear, which ground whatever was fed into them into merciful oblivion. She would then drop her own small dustbin bag into those jaws and watch a section of her life disappear for ever.

The finality of that would be satisfying, in its own way: she knew she needed to reassure herself by witnessing the physical destruction of the evidence. If she merely dumped the bag for collection, she would be afraid that someone would investigate it and discover her secrets, even at the eleventh hour.

There was an interlude of black comedy, in which she drove round street after suburban street without locating the familiar lorry. She began to wonder if the rotas had been changed, or if the men had started early and already finished for the day. But they couldn't start so early, not at this time of the year when there was not full daylight until eight o'clock. A kind of panic began to gnaw at her, as vista after quiet vista revealed no Biffa lorry.

Then, just when she was ready to give up, when she was wondering where she could most safely leave the bag she certainly couldn't take home with her, she saw the shiny black bags piled at the corner of the street ahead, twenty or more of them. She almost laughed aloud like a child at the sight, her elation reminding her again just how much on edge she was. The men had collected the bags from individual residences and piled them there; the lorry could not be far away.

She saw it when she reached the corner, moving slowly along the road within a foot of the kerb, the powerful motor of the destructive mechanism at its rear drowning the noise of its engine. She drove past it carefully as it came towards her, parked her car on the opposite side of the road, and slid from the driving seat with the black plastic bag in her hand.

She would wait for her moment, wait until the men feeding the bags into the maw of the monster at the rear of the lorry went off to collect another pile of bags in the next street, and then fling her own small contribution into extinction. She wanted to disguise herself in some way from any observers, was tempted for a moment to adopt a limp. Then she remembered a production of
Oh
What
a
Lovely
War!
she had been in years ago, where the boys had been asked to simulate wounds as they came away from the front in the 1914–18 war. They had all decided to limp with the right foot; their ragged company had even limped in step with each other, and the rehearsal had collapsed into hilarity. She grinned at the remembrance of it, and decided she had much better walk naturally.

‘Get rid of that for you, m'dear!'

She started like a guilty thing, feeling her heart leap into her mouth, unable because of that to frame the words of a reply.

He was a large, cheerful black man, the Gloucestershire accent falling oddly from his broad lips. He smiled at her, his broad white teeth seeming suddenly to fill the whole of his face. She became aware that he was holding his hand out to take her small burden from her.

She found her voice at last. ‘It's all right, thanks. I can chuck it in myself. It's – it's an unofficial one really. I'm not from round here.' She was telling him things, when she wanted to withhold information, not spread it. He was surely harmless, with his broad and innocent black face, his cheery helpfulness. But other, more sinister, people might talk to him, other people might wheedle from him any information she volunteered now.

‘Not allowed, that, m'dear. Public not to feed our mechanical dog, in case they injure themselves.' He laughed at the absurdity of that notion. His chuckles seemed to Joanne to echo up and down the street, calling attention to the strange couple, the powerful black man with the boxer's build and the slim middle-class Englishwoman with the dustbin bag held incongruously in her hand behind her.

He reached forward, took the bag gently but insistently from her. For an awful moment, she thought he was going to investigate the contents. But he merely turned and walked to the corner. When he was a good ten yards from the pile of bags, she caught her breath as he flung her own slight contribution onto the top of the pile with practised expertise.

He looked back at her with a reassuring smile, and Joanne Moss lifted her hand briefly in acknowledgement of his service. She sat in her car and watched the slow progress of the Biffa lorry, knowing she could not leave without the physical evidence of the destruction of her past.

Two young men who seemed little more than boys flung the pile of bags into the steadily churning steel jaws at the back of the lorry, moving with such sudden swiftness that she was not sure which was hers in the hail of bags which suddenly peppered the machine. Two minutes later, the Biffa lorry drove past her stationary car, its steel machinery still turning steadily at the rear, though everything fed into it at the corner of the street had now disappeared.

It was done. A section of her life had been suddenly obliterated. A section which had held much happiness before the final brutal sadness which had shattered it.

Joanne Moss felt drained and empty rather than relieved.

T
hey were going to have another cold night. Bert Hook could see the frost crystals forming on the hedges already as they drove through the lanes towards Cheltenham. It was seven o'clock on Thursday evening, exactly twenty-four hours since the guests had assembled in Soutters Restaurant for their fatal celebration.

Chris Pearson looked slightly nervous when he opened the solid door of the house in the old village and faced them. There was nothing remarkable about that: murder investigations made even the most innocent of people nervous. It would be the only time in this exchange when he showed any trace of apprehension.

He looked at them for a moment, their faces lit by the light from the hall behind him, and said, ‘You'd better come in.' Then, as if he realized that sounded grudging and ungracious, he added as he led them through the hall and into a dining room at the front of the house, ‘You're working late on the case.'

Lambert smiled as he took the chair Pearson indicated to him in the small, neat, room. It had prints of Middle Eastern scenes upon the wall, possibly reflecting Pearson's Army service, though there were no pictures of the South Atlantic. It had the air of a room little used, with its neatly set dining-room furniture, its sideboard with family photographs, its display cabinet of china and cut glass. The Superintendent said, ‘We work all kinds of hours when we're on a murder case. It makes its own rules, murder. And even chief constables tend to forget about the overtime budget, when the media get excited about a murder case.'

Pearson nodded. ‘Has to be solved quickly, doesn't it? I seem to remember some statistic about most successful murder investigations being concluded within seven days.'

‘Statistics can be misleading at times. That one is a little warped by the number of domestic killings, where we usually have a confession within a few hours. Still, we like to interview the people who were close to a murder as soon as possible after the death, whilst their memories of what happened remain clear and vivid.'

‘Physically close, in this case. I suppose I wasn't more than a few yards from where Pat Nayland was killed, but I haven't a clue why anyone should have wanted to kill him.' His voice was calm, his suntanned skin seemed odd amidst the pale faces of December. His deep-set eyes were at once watchful and unrevealing.

Bert Hook flicked his notebook to a new page and said, ‘You will understand that everyone we have seen so far has expressed similar sentiments, Mr Pearson, and I have no doubt we shall hear the same thing from all who were at last night's meal. But one of the people at least will be lying. One of them is a murderer.'

Chris Pearson looked from one to the other of the earnest faces confronting him. ‘I suppose there can be no doubt of that?'

‘None whatsoever,' said Lambert quietly.

‘It's just that it seems so incredible.'

‘You find it so? I was hoping you might have some ideas which would help us. We know almost nothing about the victim, as yet, whereas you had worked closely with him for ten years.'

Pearson looked for a moment as if he was about to take offence. Then, as if recognizing the logic of the thought, he said slowly, ‘I suppose I did know Pat pretty well. Probably as well as anyone outside his family.'

‘Then you can help us. You're the first person outside the family that we've spoken to.'

‘Apart from the questioning conducted last night by Detective Inspector Rushton and his officers.'

‘Apart from those short formal exchanges, yes.' They noted the precision of his correction, the fact that he remembered the name of Rushton, even from the chaos following last night's sensational discovery. Lambert, switching his ground suddenly in the hope of discomforting this citadel of calm, said, ‘You were a regular Army officer, I believe, before you took up your present post.'

‘No. I served in the Royal Artillery, but I wasn't commissioned. I was a warrant officer.'

‘And you served with distinction, it seems. You were commended for your actions in the Falklands War.'

‘It was a strange war, that. I'm not sure how history will pronounce upon it. At the time, you did what you had to do, as a serving soldier.'

‘Did you come across Patrick Nayland during your service?'

‘No.' Then, as if trying to mitigate the bluntness of this prompt negative, Pearson said by way of explanation, ‘The Army is a big organization, even in these days of cutbacks. Unless you're in the same regiment, you're not likely to meet other individuals.'

‘When was the first time you met Patrick Nayland?'

‘When I responded to his advertisement for a Manager of the new golfing enterprise he'd started with his Army gratuity. It was not then known as Camellia Park. We began with two large fields and a bulldozer. We decided on the name about six months later. The post was on offer at the right time, in the last month of my Army service, when I was wondering what to do with the rest of my life. It was a modest enough development, and financially I could have done better. But the idea of being in on the ground floor, of helping to create something new, appealed to me.'

He had given them far more than he had been asked for, had sounded faintly defensive about applying for the job as Nayland's right-hand man. Lambert wondered if he had wanted to distract attention from his Army service. But he had no reason for returning to that, having been told that Pearson had never met the dead man in those years. He said, ‘How would you describe your relationship with Patrick Nayland?'

Pearson looked him straight in the eye, recognizing the challenge in the question. He gave the tiniest shrug of his broad shoulders before he said, ‘Excellent. I've no means of comparing it with similar situations, since this is my only important civilian job. But it was a small enterprise, and we worked closely together. There haven't been many things we've disagreed on over the last ten years; when we did, Patrick's view prevailed: it was his money which was financing things after all.'

‘Can you give us an example of such a disagreement?'

Anger flashed briefly across the weatherbeaten features, suggesting in that instant that Chris Pearson would not be a good enemy to make. But his face was impassive again in an instant, his voice perfectly calm as he said, ‘You're barking up the wrong tree if you're looking for bitterness between Pat and me, Superintendent. The most radical divergence in our views came about eighteen months ago, when I felt that we should be looking to add a further nine holes to the course, to give ourselves an eighteen-hole layout. Pat thought we should concentrate on improving what we had, on making the most of what he called the “cheap and cheerful” golf market.'