Malice Aforethought (3 page)

‘And where did he die?’ The three questions every young DC learned to ask first about suspicious deaths: where, when and how. Saunders had already told them how and when: Rushton already suspected that the normally straightforward ‘Where?’ was going to give them difficulty. The SOC team had indicated as much to him before he came here.

Saunders smiled grimly. ‘I can tell you where he didn’t die. In that churchyard at Broughton’s Ash.’

‘He was dumped there after death?’

‘Yes. A few hours afterwards, I’d guess.’ Cliff Saunders’ nose wrinkled in distaste above his neat mouth and carefully trimmed beard at the imprecision of this; he wasn’t a man given to guessing. ‘He’d been lying face down after death for perhaps two hours; there was discernible hypostasis on the front of the body. But he was moved before there was any rigor in the limbs.’

‘Presumably in a vehicle of some sort?’

‘Almost certainly, unless he was moved only a very short distance. But that is more your province than mine, Chris.’ Saunders had forced himself into the use of the forename, and it surprised both of them. ‘There were some scratches on the lower back which probably came from the top of that stone wall at the cemetery — as though he was levered on to it and then thrust over.’

Rushton nodded. ‘The Scene of Crime team found some fibres from his clothing on the top of the wall. And he was lying almost against it.’

‘There are faint marks at the bottom of the shoulder blades which look like finger damage — consistent with someone having lugged him out of a vehicle by gripping him under the arms. There are no similar marks on the legs. Although we can’t rule out the possibility that someone else took hold of that end without leaving marks, it seems unlikely.’

Chris Rushton made another note to be fed into his computer within the hour: probably only one person involved in the disposal of the body after the killing. Grudgingly, he gave back a little information of his own. ‘It seems the dead man was a schoolteacher at Oldford Comprehensive. An Edward Giles. Separated from his wife. Lived on his own. Is there anything else you can tell us which might be of interest?’

Saunders pursed his lips. ‘All the detail will be in my report. There is one thing you might like to know immediately, though. Your Edward Giles had sex not long before he died.’

‘Lucky bugger!’ It was partly the automatic reaction of a policeman in a force which was still overwhelmingly male, partly the instinctive envy from a man living alone and still coming to terms with a divorce he had never wanted.

Cliff Saunders gave him a mirthless smile, still mindful of the stainless-steel dishes with their covers in the room next door, each containing organs from the body he had so recently cut up. He had left them laid out methodically, like the dishes for some nightmare banquet.

‘He doesn’t seem too lucky to me,’ he said.

Four

Ted Giles’s flat was as neat and clean as that of a houseproud woman. The fitted carpets were newly vacuumed. The bed was neatly made. Even in the bathroom, that most revealing of sanctums for curious coppers, the porcelain shone, and save for a clean brush and comb, everything was neatly stowed away in the mirror-fronted cupboard above the washbasin. In the kitchen, there was not a cup nor a spoon to be seen on the neat white sink. But for an occasional drip from the cold tap, this might have been a show flat, still to be occupied, rather than one in which a man had lived for five years.

Sergeant ‘Jack’ Johnson looked around this clinically clean residence with distaste. For police teams in search of pointers, premises like this were always the least rewarding. Filth, squalor, and sloppiness in living were the allies he and his team welcomed. You rarely found anything as helpful as the bloodstains Johnson had found on the walls and the floor of the house where he had worked last week, but that was only a straightforward ‘domestic’, where they had already made an arrest. Here, though he had his constables on hands and knees with tweezers and dishes, Johnson wasn’t hopeful even of the clothing fibres and stray hairs they expected to pick up as routine trophies. Ted Giles, successful teacher, separated from his wife, and now murder victim, seemed determined to remain otherwise anonymous, even after death.

They found no diaries, of course: Giles must have been a man who carried whatever appointments he might have in his head. There was a calendar beside the spotless electric oven with a few initials against particular dates; they would take this away in due course, but he doubted if they would be anything more than dental appointments, library book return dates, and family birthdays. Johnson already had Edward Giles down as a depressingly secretive man.

He said as much to John Lambert when the chief arrived. ‘There’s a cleaner, of course; there bloody would be! Last came in on Friday morning,’ he said gloomily. The efficient daily help was one of the banes of his life. The Superintendent nodded, then looked around him like an eager sniffer dog. A quarter of a century of CID experience, of entering deserted rooms of all shapes and sizes, with an infinite range of decor and contents, had not removed the curiosity which was an essential part of the professional detective. He walked into each of the two neat bedrooms, then the bathroom, then the kitchen, all within thirty seconds and without opening a cupboard or a drawer. You didn’t tread on the toes of the specialists, and Johnson was a specialist whom he trusted absolutely to miss nothing.

‘
Too
tidy, do you think, Jack?’ he said. ‘Could just be that he had something in his life to hide? Not necessarily criminal, but something he preferred to conceal from whoever came into his home.’

Johnson was unconvinced. ‘He lived alone. No wife who might go through his pockets or smell his shirts in search of other women.’

‘But we don’t know yet who he brought here. He might have preferred to conceal parts of himself from his visitors. It’s a thought for your lads and lasses. Might help to keep them going through a boring day.’

Johnson nodded dolefully. ‘We’ll bag the sheets and pillowcases and any soiled clothes, of course. Might just get DNA samples of someone if we’re lucky.’

Both of them glanced without much hope at the open door of the main bedroom. They both knew without further words what he meant: if at some further stage of the investigation they were able to prove the presence here of someone who denied having ever set foot in the flat, it could well be significant. And particularly so if the evidence of DNA suggested also an intimate relationship where none had been admitted.

Lambert sighed; such speculation was a reminder of how far away they were from any such candidates for the murderer of Ted Giles. He went out of the flat onto the landing outside. With its single long strip of carpet and its rows of shut doors, it was as clean and anonymous as a corridor in a private hospital. Lambert hesitated for a moment, then rapped sharply on the door immediately to the left of Ted Giles’s flat.

At first, he thought no one was in. Then there were muffled movements and the door opened not more than eight inches. A broad face peered at him from beneath straight, greasy black hair. ‘I don’t buy nothing at the door!’ it mouthed.

Lambert showed his warrant card, beckoned sharply to Bert Hook, who was emerging from the lift behind him, and said, ‘We need to speak to you. It won’t take long, Mr…?’

The man refused the invitation to give his name, looked for a moment as if he would slam the door in their faces, then thought better of it. He snarled, ‘I got nothing to say. Not to the likes of you. I don’t deal with pigs!’

The old attitude. Even the old words. Lambert put his face a little nearer, so that his grey eyes stared down into the watery brown ones beneath him. ‘Yes you do. Either here or at the station. When we’re investigating murder, we question whoever we want to.’

He took advantage of the shock the word ‘murder’ gave even to the most hardened to push back the door and the man behind it and walk into the flat. The place smelt faintly of stale sweat and strongly of stale cigarette smoke. It was as dirty and untidy as Giles’s flat had been clean and neat. The two big men looked round the living room unhurriedly, taking in the dirty curtains, the sofa with a hole where its innards threatened to escape, the cheap framed print of the negress askew upon the wall, the sink half-full of unwashed crockery. The man felt their gaze revolving like a film-maker’s camera, taking in each detail, coming to rest eventually upon him and staying there.

Hook smiled at him, enjoying his discomfiture, producing a notebook to add to the man’s apprehension. ‘I think we’ll have your name for a start,’ he said.

The man crossed his arms across his T-shirted chest. ‘It’s Bass,’ he said. ‘Aubrey Bass.’ He looked at them aggressively, as if he expected the first name to be a source of derision; no doubt his novelettish handle had often caused mirth in the circles he inhabited. When the name provoked no reaction in Hook, he scratched himself vigorously, first under one arm, then under the other, then under both at the same time. When both the policemen observed this action impassively and neither of them spoke, the man did not know what else to do. Realising he could not scratch forever, he dropped his right hand to his side and they saw that the lettering on his T-shirt spelled out
Fulham for the Cup
. The lettering was a little smeared and the originally white background was mapped with a variety of interesting stains, as though reflecting the ridiculous ambition of the slogan.

Bass thought he saw Lambert’s gaze straying to the telly, which he knew was hooky. ‘Well, waddyerwant?’ he said roughly.

‘A little information, that’s all, Aubrey,’ said Hook.

Bass looked at him suspiciously, searching for any note of mockery in the intonation of his first name. ‘I don’t give no information, not to the filth,’ he said roughly.

But it was a token response. His aggression had drained away with his nerve in the silences they had visited upon him. ‘You’ll help us with this, if you know what’s good for you,’ said Lambert brusquely. He looked the man full in the face, taking in his unshaven appearance, his unbrushed teeth, his face graining with sweat as his fingers began to scratch anew, this time at the tattoo on his left forearm.

‘I don’t know nothing about no murder,’ he said.

Lambert smiled, wondering whether this plethora of negatives was an unconscious attempt to emphasise his ignorance. ‘Perhaps not. We shall see. What can you tell us about your neighbour, Mr Giles?’ he said.

Bass relaxed visibly, sank into the armchair beside the empty fireplace, and gestured towards the erupting sofa. If it was that stuck-up bugger next door they were interested in, they couldn’t be here about any of his own little interests. ‘Ted Giles? I don’t see much of him.’

The answer came automatically: this man’s instinct was not to help the police. But it might well be true; Bass might be as unlike Giles as the condition of their flats indicated. They had certainly lived in very different ways. But this unattractive creature might still know things of interest about the dead man. Lambert said, ‘We need to know about whatever you’ve seen of Mr Giles in the last few months. All of it.’

Bass shrugged his heavy shoulders, scratched again, this time at his stomach with his left hand. Hook, perched on the edge of the sofa beside John Lambert, glanced nervously at the material beside him; fleas were an occupational hazard when you came into places like this. Bass said reluctantly, ‘We ‘ad a drink once —when I first came here, two years ago. But he wouldn’t go out with me again.’ While Hook reflected that this was rather in the dead man’s favour, Bass’s heavy features turned even more sullen at the recollection. Then they suddenly brightened. ‘In trouble, is he? Must be, to bring a superintendent round ‘ere. Hey, you mentioned murder. He’s never—’

‘Mr Giles is the victim, not the criminal. We’re questioning everyone who was close to him.’

Aubrey Bass would never have made a success of serious villainy. He was far too transparent. His jaw dropped. ‘Young Giles is dead? And you’re… ‘Ere, you can’t possibly think I ‘ad anything to do with—’

‘Where were you on Saturday night, Aubrey?’ Hook let a little contempt seep into the name this time. He didn’t seriously think this small-time loser would be involved in murder, but there was no harm in frightening him into cooperation.

Panic filled the widening, bloodshot eyes. ‘Round at a friend’s. We went to a couple of pubs first, then back to his place. We had a bevvy, a few laughs, a game of cards.’

‘Good. You can give us the exact times and the place. And the names of your friends. I’m sure they’ll be only too anxious to help the police.’ Hook made an entry in his notebook and beamed down at it with satisfaction. Now, tell us everything you know about the late Ted Giles, your ex-neighbour.’

‘Well, there isn’t much to tell, honestly there isn’t. I was only in his flat once. Went to see if ‘e ‘ad a few cans of lager, when we’d run out, but ‘e ‘adn’t.’

‘And did Mr Giles come in here much?’ said Lambert.

‘Never.’

That was probably true, they thought. A man who kept his living space as clinically tidy as Giles was not going to step into this tip unless he had to. ‘But you must know something about his way of life, living as close as you did,’ said Hook, a little desperately.

‘He was a teacher. At Oldford Comprehensive, I think.’ Bass brightened at this, even ceased scratching for a moment. It was so eminently safe.

Lambert sighed. ‘We know that. We also know his height, his weight and his age. We know that he lived here alone. We also know how he died. But nothing else. You must at least know something of his comings and goings.’

‘Not much. These walls are pretty thick, for modern places. You’d be surprised.’

Thrusting away an image of this monument to hygiene crouching with his ear to a glass against the bedroom wall, Hook leaned forward a little further on the edge of the sofa. ‘Never mind the estate agent bit, Aubrey. Tell us whatever you know about Ted Giles. Without any more buggering about.’

‘Well, there isn’t much I can tell you — ‘onest there isn’t. But ‘e did ‘ave a few visitors.’

‘That’s more like it. What kind of visitors?’

This time it was Bass who leaned forward, confidentially. He had a full range of scratches, thought Lambert; this one, cross-handed to each side of his ample belly, was positively lecherous. ‘‘E were a bit of a lad, you know, were Ted. ‘E ‘ad women in there. Quite often.’

Lambert leaned forward, resisting a sudden temptation to send up Bass’s leer with an even more extravagant one. ‘The same woman, do you think? Or more than one?’

‘Oh, more than one, I’m sure. Several.’ Aubrey Bass dwelt on that word with satisfaction, as though it was the height of linguistic sophistication, as for him it possibly was. Then he slipped back into phrases which were more familiar to him. ‘‘E put it about a bit, did Ted, I can tell you! Not arf!’ He confirmed the information with an even more extravagant leer, which almost culminated in a wink. ‘I spoke to one of them a couple of times. Young, slim piece. Could ‘ave done ‘er a bit of good, if she’d let me, I can tell you!’

Lambert stood up quickly, anxious that Bass’s nudge in the ribs should remain merely metaphorical. ‘Can you give us any names?’

He couldn’t, of course. Even Hook’s mixture of cajolery and threats could draw no more out of him, and eventually they were certain that this little was all he knew. He stood at the door as they left, scratching his chest with satisfaction. ‘Be able to clean up a bit now!’ he said unconvincingly, as though they had held him back from the work.

Hook turned back to him. ‘There’s about as much chance of that, Aubrey Bass, as of Fulham winning the Cup!’ he said magisterially.

They had got little from this deplorable neighbour, and that little was depressing. Lambert and Hook, like most policemen, strove for a neutral moral stance. People who ‘put it about a bit’ must look after their own consciences.

But they invariably made difficult corpses for CID men.

***

At Oldford School, the Head of the Social Sciences Department dismissed his last class of the day and looked out of the window at a school drive swarming with the noisy exuberance of children released.