Malice Aforethought (2 page)

PC Jones stopped for a moment to watch the girls playing hockey, checking that the pavements for three hundred yards to either side of him were deserted. Mind you, perverts were as likely to be watching the boys playing football these days, he reflected, from the wisdom and experience of his twenty-two years. No accounting for tastes, there wasn’t. Now that full-chested girl who had just burst through and scored a goal, she’d be a right cracker in two or three years, mind…

PC Jones thought suddenly of his mother and the Bethesda Chapel Sunday School, and drove hastily away.

He returned just before the bell ended afternoon school at four o’clock. There were many cars now in the street that had been deserted; he parked the police car as unobtrusively as he could at the end of the line, then strolled down to the ragged crowd of mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers who stood outside the school gates on that pleasantly warm autumn afternoon. It was impossible not to be noticed in uniform, of course. Bryn Jones, who had dreams of a transfer to CID in due course, imagined himself blending discreetly with this polyglot assembly of humanity, picking up vital information about serious crime as he passed among them.

Instead, his uniform brought him curious glances, nervous nods of acknowledgement, even a series of giggles from some of the women in conversation on the periphery of the mass. He was sure he was the centre of their hilarity, though he could not imagine why. He felt the blush he always feared would undermine his authority creeping from his collar up into his cheeks.

He was relieved when the children poured in a raucous tide of blue uniforms from the school and distracted attention from him. He resumed his task of looking for any odd man who was submerging himself among the crowd of parents and grandparents, hoping to pass unnoticed and wait here to prey upon unaccompanied children as they walked away from the school into the November dusk. He found nothing suspicious; either the call had been a false alarm from an overheated imagination, or the mysterious man had been warned off by the police presence. Or it might be that this was an elderly man who simply liked children, in a perfectly innocent way; that was much more common than an uncharitable society which fed upon sensationalism cared to admit.

The children shrilled their goodbyes to each other as they went their separate ways. Jones gathered bits of school news, most of it unintelligible to him. But one piece of information he heard three times. Old Gilesy was off — they’d had mayhem for one lesson because no one had realised at first that he was missing. Apparently Old Murray had been livid about it. Bryn Jones was near enough to his own school days to remember that every teacher was ‘old’ to his young charges. And he knew that ‘Old Murray’ was the man in charge of this establishment, for a board not five yards to his right proclaimed in gold lettering that T. H. Murray, MA, was the Head Teacher of Oldford County Secondary School.

Bryn Jones had no idea who Old Gilesy was, but the fact that he was missing caught his attention. And the fact that no one seemed to know why made him very interested indeed. For PC Bryn Jones had heard at the station that the MISPA files had been trawled unsuccessfully in search of the identity of the body discovered after the Remembrance Day service in Broughton’s Ash churchyard. It was a long shot, but you never knew…

There is much to be said for youthful enthusiasm. PC Jones marched with determination into the school, ignoring the derisive remarks from the older boys behind him. He was told by the Head’s secretary that Mr Murray was conducting a short meeting with three of his senior staff and must not be disturbed, but PC Jones announced loftily that this was urgent police business and must take precedence. He was through the outer office and rapping on the Head Teacher’s door before the outraged dragon who guarded it could prevent him. He surprised himself sometimes, did Bryn.

Thomas Murray, MA, seemed more disturbed to see a policeman than a headmaster should, and Bryn had his questions ready. ‘I understand that you have a Mr Giles on your staff.’

‘Yes. Edward Giles. He teaches Chemistry. When he’s here.’

‘I see. But he has not been here today?’

‘No. It was very inconvenient, in fact. The laboratories, you see. They’re not like ordinary classrooms. You can’t just let children—’

‘Do you know where Mr Giles is, Mr Murray?’ Bryn tried to keep the rising excitement out of his voice.

‘No. That’s what was so inconsiderate. Normally people ring in if they’re ill, or at least—’

‘You haven’t heard from him all day?’ PC Jones tried to keep it impersonal, but he knew he had spoken abruptly. The answer to this could mean a real feather in his cap. The mysterious, exciting world of CID beckoned beguilingly.

‘No. It’s a real nuisance, I don’t mind telling you. I’ve just spoken to my Deputy Head, and we don’t know whether to cover his classes for tomorrow or not. If only—’

‘I think I must ask you to come to the station with me, Mr Murray. Immediately, please.’

This time PC Jones made no attempt to disguise his satisfaction.

***

It was two hours later that Bert Hook took a shaken and embarrassed Thomas Murray to the Murder Room which had been hastily set up in Oldford police station. The headmaster had not enjoyed his meeting with his old adversary Superintendent John Lambert. This grave inquisitor with the long face and the steel-grey hair knew things about Murray that neither his staff nor his governors knew. Although on this occasion Tom Murray had nothing to hide, he felt that his answers were being weighed and found wanting, as though he was an unreliable witness. It was a relief to be led away from Lambert’s office by the bluff and solid Sergeant Hook.

‘We shall need a formal identification of the corpse by a near relative in due course,’ explained Hook. ‘It isn’t even available for inspection at the moment, but we do have a photograph of the dead man’s face, taken by our Scene of Crime photographer. It would be helpful if you could either confirm it as Mr Giles, or eliminate him from our enquiries.’

Tom Murray, who was anxious only to have the matter done with and be away from there, could nevertheless not prevent a start of horror as he stared at the shut eyes and sallow features of the face he had seen so often in animated life. His breath came in uneven gasps as he said, ‘That’s him all right. That’s Ted Giles.’

The murder investigation had a focus.

Three

Mick Yates tried to keep a low profile in the school. He wasn’t used to being summoned to the Head’s office. When he was asked to go there immediately after school assembly on the morning of Tuesday, 13th November, he wondered what on earth he could have done wrong. After five minutes of wracking his pessimistic brain in the outer office, he found that the explanation was more outlandish than anything he had imagined.

Tom Murray came out of his office with two large men at his heels. His face filled with relief when he saw Mick. He said to the men, ‘This is Michael Yates. Superintendent Lambert and Sergeant Hook, Michael. They need to ask a few questions about one of our colleagues and I said you were the man best equipped to help them. You can use my office — I’ll go and see to your class.’

Murray bustled away, scarcely troubling to disguise his relief, and Mick, after hesitating for a moment, led the men back into the holy of holies that was the Head Teacher’s office. He had been in there only once before. He could not bring himself to take the head’s seat, the big swivel chair behind the green leather top of the desk. Instead, he pulled a stand chair from the wall and sat upon it awkwardly, like a pupil who had been brought in here for a lecture. In the end, no one took the head’s seat. The two detectives pulled armchairs round to face him, Mick realised now that he had left himself facing the light, whilst his interrogators had their backs to it; perhaps he had read too many thrillers.

Lambert gave him a small, encouraging smile. ‘Do you know why we’re here, Mr Yates?’

‘No. I’ve no idea.’ He couldn’t think of anything he’d done. Nothing to bring out top brass like Superintendents, anyway. They didn’t send people like that to chase up overdue MOTs: he knew that much about the police.

‘You know that a colleague of yours, Edward Giles, has been missing?’

Mick had never heard him called anything but Ted before, just as no one in the school had called him Michael until the head had introduced him to these two. This formality seemed somehow ominous. ‘I know Ted wasn’t in yesterday. I covered one of his classes for him. I’m a biologist and he’s a biochemist, really, but we both teach Life Sciences as well as our own specialisms.’ He felt himself talking too much, as if trying to postpone the real issues. Their next words confirmed the thought.

It was the muscular, slightly overweight one, the Sergeant, who said quietly, ‘When did you last see Mr Giles, Michael?’

Mick thought furiously. The Sergeant seemed friendly, had used his first name. But wasn’t there some kind of system they used, when working in pairs — hard cop, friendly cop, or something like that? You mustn’t let them trick you into a mistake. And perhaps Ted was in some kind of trouble. ‘Friday, it would be, after school.’

‘Did he give you any idea of how he proposed to spend the weekend?’

‘No. I don’t think we even spoke. I was anxious to get away quickly that night: the ninth is my wife’s birthday.’ He found himself bursting into a nervous smile, revelling in the display of a perfectly innocent fact to the Superintendent, whose grey eyes had never left his face since he sat down.

It was Lambert who now gave him the information which stunned him, coldly, evenly, studying him for the effect it might have. ‘I have to tell you that your colleague was found dead in Broughton’s Ash churchyard on Sunday morning, Mr Yates. The circumstances of his death were suspicious. That’s why we’re here this morning. We need to piece together a picture of Ted Giles’s last hours. We’re told that you are the person in the school who knew him best.’

As Mick’s mind reeled, his first impulse was to distance himself from this. Murder, they meant. The very word pushed him so far out of his depth that he was floundering. ‘Oh, no! Well, I suppose it might be true — that I knew him best of the staff in the school, I mean. But you see, no one knew him very well. He kept himself pretty much to himself.’

Lambert wondered why this open-faced young man was so defensive. Could this young innocent possibly have anything to hide? But his reaction, while irrational if he was guiltless, was not so uncommon. People still shied away from the oldest and gravest crime of all. He said, ‘How long had you known Ted Giles, Mr Yates?’

Already the past tense, Mick noted. He gathered his resources. He had nothing to fear, surely; he must help these earnest professionals to find out who had done this to Ted. ‘Since I came to the school, three years ago in September. He showed me the ropes, told me how to handle — well, how to behave with senior staff. There was some overlap in our teaching, as I’ve said, and he helped me with the exam syllabuses.’

‘And what about your lives outside the school? Did you meet much socially?’

‘Not really. Ted was separated from his wife. We used to go for a drink together sometimes — usually after a parent-teacher evening or a staff meeting, things like that. We didn’t have a regular night.’

Hook took up the questioning again. He had a notebook in front of him now. ‘We need to know as much as we can about the victim when there’s a murder. I’m sure you understand that, Michael.’

‘It’s Mick. Everyone calls me Mick.’ It suddenly seemed important, as though it would have been dishonest to let them go on calling him Michael when Ted Giles never had.

‘Mick, then. We know practically nothing yet about Ted Giles, so anything you can tell us will be valuable at this stage. He was a little older than you, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes. I’m thirty-two now. Ted was nearly forty, I think. He was a good teacher, firm with the kids, but easy with it. He was quite popular with them.’ He said it wistfully, so that Hook wondered irrelevantly whether he found discipline as easy and unforced as the dead man had. ‘He was a good-looking man, I suppose.’ He said it as though it had struck him for the first time. He was accustomed, particularly in school, to assess people first and foremost in terms of teaching ability.

‘And what were his sexual preferences?’

For an instant, Mick did not know what Hook meant. Then he said with a smile, ‘Women! Definitely. He might have lived on his own, but Ted certainly wasn’t gay.’ He looked for a moment as if he was about to enlarge on that theme, with examples, but then thought better of it.

‘Bit of a lady’s man, was he?’ asked Lambert gloomily. He didn’t want to hear that the dead man had been a Lothario, with a long string of conquests, some of them jealous of their successors. The recluse with few contacts made the ideal murder victim, from the biased viewpoint of the CID.

‘I wouldn’t say that exactly. But he was a free agent; he’d been separated for a long time. I never met his wife.’ He added the last sentence as an afterthought, as if it had only just struck him that his friend had had a life before him.

Hook said heavily, ‘You’d better give us a list of the ladies involved.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. I don’t know them, you see. There are girls on the staff here who would have gone out with him, I’m sure, but Ted preferred to keep his working life separate from his social life. Business and pleasure didn’t mix, he always said.’ Actually he’d usually put it in the form of advice to his less experienced colleague. ‘Don’t shit on your own doorstep!’ he’d often told a wistful Mick when the conversation in the pub turned to sex. But Mick didn’t want to put it in those terms when a police officer was taking notes; that would have seemed unfair to his dead friend, somehow. A breach of his confidence, perhaps.

Lambert sighed. ‘We were told you knew the late Mr Giles better than anyone else on the staff here. Yet so far it seems that you don’t know very much about the life of your colleague and friend, Mr Yates.’

‘No. I’m afraid he was — well, quite a private sort of man, really.’ Mick had never thought of Ted like that before. He had been content with the older man’s friendship, flattered by it, indeed. Only now did he realise how much he had told Ted of his own problems with the job and his private life, and how little Ted had released about himself.

‘What about people within the school? Was he close to anyone? Did he have any enemies on the staff that you know of?’

Mick felt his pulses quickening at that thought. This was a murder inquiry. He was being asked to name people who would immediately become suspects. For a wild moment, he was tempted to name the Head of PE, who teased him so tirelessly about his Biology classes with the senior girls, but he sensed that this was not the moment for retaliatory humour. Searching desperately for something that would justify the importance he had been accorded in this case, he said, ‘I did once hear Ted having a row of some sort with Graham Reynolds.’

‘Who is?’ Hook had his ball-pen poised over the still almost empty page of his notebook.

‘Oh, yes, sorry. Graham Reynolds is our Head of the Social Studies Department.’

‘And what was the row about?’

‘I don’t know. It was behind closed doors, you see. In Ted’s Chemistry lab. I’m sorry.’

‘No need to be. You can’t report what you didn’t hear. People who add their own speculations cause us a lot of trouble. And they always make bad witnesses in court.’ No harm in reminding the punters they might end up as witnesses, Bert always thought. It sharpened their minds wonderfully on occasions. ‘So you heard what we shall call a heated exchange.’ He wrote the phrase down with satisfaction in his , playing up the village bobby image which had caught out so many villains in the past. ‘And this was behind the doors of the Chemistry laboratory. And when did this exchange take place?’

Mick cudgelled his brains desperately, anxious to offer them something of interest. ‘It would be about a fortnight ago. Yes — just over a fortnight, because I mentioned it to Ted when we had a drink in the pub that evening.’

‘And what was Ted’s reaction? Did he give you any clue as to the subject of the dispute?’

‘No. He just said Social Studies teachers shouldn’t climb on white horses — they weren’t cut out to be knights errant. I’m afraid I didn’t follow that up; I got diverted, because we had a bit of a laugh about Sociology.’

‘Yes. People do, I understand.’ Hook was grave as a rubicund Buddha. No one would have known he was about to complete an Open University degree which had included a Social Studies module. He made a note about the date of this exchange, which was almost certainly irrelevant, but which would need to be followed up in due course.

Lambert said, ‘Is there anything else you can tell us about the life of this man? What about his habits outside the routine of his school life? Did he play any sports? Was he a member of any clubs? Was there anywhere he went regularly, say every week?’

Mick Yates listened earnestly to each prompting, then shook his head sadly. He wondered if these men would think he was concealing things, when all that was becoming apparent was that he knew so little about the life of the man whom he had thought of as a friend and mentor. ‘Ted went skiing every winter. Usually over New Year, I think. But I’m pretty sure he wasn’t a member of any sports club. He played a bit of squash and tennis, but he wasn’t a member of a club.’

‘How about golf?’ said Hook hopefully. The dead man might be a fellow-sufferer; even better, his killer might be a golf club committee member.

‘No, he wasn’t interested. He said it was a game for old fogies.’

Lambert didn’t even flinch: you had to admire his professionalism, Hook thought. The Superintendent said rather wearily, ‘Habits, Mr Yates. Was there any evening or day that Ted Giles set aside for himself and his own interests?’

At first, Mick Yates looked as blank as ever. Then he brightened with a recollection. ‘Ted was never around on a Friday evening. I asked him out for a drink after school was over for the week quite a few times, but he always had some prior commitment on Fridays.’

***

Detective Inspector Rushton found he got on well with Dr Saunders, the pathologist at the Home Office Forensic Science Laboratory at Chepstow.

Both men favoured facts rather than speculation; both had a liking for documentation and the logical ordering of information; both felt happier with the tabulation of facts and the scientific approach to crime than with understanding its perpetrators and its victims. Chris Rushton explained that he had come to Chepstow in an attempt to save the time that was always vital in a murder investigation rather than because he hoped to gain anything extra from a personal hearing of what would be in Cliff Saunders’ confidential report.

Once an initial stiffness between the two had evaporated, Saunders found that Rushton was genuinely interested in his findings and how they might best be incorporated into the police computer system. He felt himself being drawn into the puzzles of detection, wanting to provide the best detail he could for the man beside him, who would take his findings on into the hunt for the man or woman who had perpetrated this. ‘Everything will be in my report, which you’ll have tomorrow,’ he said, Tut if there are any key areas, we can talk about them now.’

‘Time of death,’ said Rushton without hesitation.

‘Between ten and twenty hours before he was found. You’ll find the details of body temperature and the stage of rigor mortis in my report, but I’d be prepared to say in court between four p.m. on Saturday the tenth of November and two a.m. on Sunday the eleventh.’

Rushton didn’t push him further. Mentally, he made a note that whilst Saunders would not go further than this in court, the middle of this time period was the likeliest time for their murder — say between six and twelve on the Saturday night. Not the best time — during hours of darkness and when the police themselves would have been fully engaged with the normal tedious vandalism and violence of Saturday night drinkers.