Malice Aforethought (7 page)

Lambert decided they had allowed themselves enough light relief. ‘Perhaps we’ll just have to go round there ourselves. Confront them directly, if we’ve no one up to the deceptions needed.’

‘Muddle our way through as usual,’ agreed Hook dolefully.

And the two grizzled veterans turned away to the meeting they had always planned, leaving behind them a handsome young inspector who had been stripped of all his usual confidence.

Christine Lambert was preoccupied with much more serious matters. Her daughter Caroline was giving her advice she did not want to hear.

‘You’ll have to tell Dad, you know,’ she said. ‘And quickly. You should have told him already, before me and Jacky.’

‘He’s busy with his own concerns. He’s got quite enough on his plate — he’s in charge of the investigation of that schoolteacher’s murder.’

‘You used to complain about that in the old days, when we were kids. Said he shut you out of his life for his job. Now you’re trying to shut him out.’

She was right on both counts, thought Christine. How much children knew, when you thought you were concealing things! And how little they said! She had thought in those dark years when she and John had almost split up because of his intense in-volvement in his work that their late-night quarrels had escaped the sleeping girls. Now the humorous, alert blue eyes which stared so steadily into her own seemed more adult, more knowledgeable about life, than she felt herself. She added another lame cliché to those she had offered already to her daughter. ‘I — I’m still coming to terms with it myself, you see.’

Caroline smiled at the worried, ageing face she knew so well. ‘Tell him, Mum. Tell him you thought it was the cancer back again, that you thought it was the end. Tell him that a heart bypass operation is a relief, not a blow. But tell him quickly. Don’t let him think he’s been kept in the dark, while Jacky and I knew all about it.’

‘All right. Let me choose my moment, that’s all.’

‘Of course. Just so long as that isn’t an excuse for more delay.’

‘No. I’ll tell him in the next few days, I promise.’

‘In the next twenty-four hours. It’s not fair to us to expect us to keep the secret.’

‘All right. By tomorrow night, then.’

‘Right. And don’t build up the problem for yourself in anticipation. He’s a good listener, Dad is. And good in a crisis.’

It was true; Christine Lambert knew it was. But it gave her an unexpected comfort to hear her daughter saying it. She grinned at the younger woman, as they sat in their armchairs with their cups of tea almost forgotten at their sides. ‘You didn’t always think that when you were battling with him in your teenage days!’

‘I did really, you know, even though I wouldn’t always acknowledge it. And Jacky and I never doubted he loved us, however much he ranted at us. And he loves you, Mum. He’ll be very hurt if he thinks you’ve kept things from him.’

‘All right, it’s agreed. Don’t go on at a sick woman!’ Christine stood up and ruffled her daughter’s soft brown hair, as she had been used to do when she was a young girl. Where had those twenty years gone so quickly? Another cliché, but nonetheless true for that, Christine Lambert thought, as she prepared to face a future which suddenly seemed quite brief.

On the other side of Oldford, another daughter was reassuring another parent. ‘We’ll be okay, Dad, I told you. Whoever killed Ted, they can’t possibly suspect me. Or Graham. We were in Ireland at the time. And you were at home all that night. If you’d had a convenient witness to that, it would have looked quite suspicious — a departure from your normal routine. The police are going through the motions. It’s routine procedure.’

Colin Pitman knew it was true really, that he could have worked all that out for himself without ringing his daughter. It’s just that they seemed to be looking right through me. To know so much more already than I did.’

‘I know. They gave me the same feeling when they came here. I expect it’s an impression they always try to create.’

‘Yes. They did say they had a lot of other people to see.’

‘And they will have. Ted had all kinds of contacts in these last few years. Trust me, they’ll be much more interested in them than in my old dad.’

‘I expect you’re right. And not so much of the old, young lady!’ He tried to summon his usual warmth, but it rang hollow in his own ears. He wished she was there in front of him, warm and convincing, instead of invisible at the other end of the phone line.

‘See you soon, then, Dad.’ She rang off before he could pin her down to a time. She did not want to confront that caring, anxious face for a few days yet.

Eight

Gloucester is a compact city. The town grew up around the ancient cathedral, and the medieval cross formed by the thoroughfares of Eastgate, Westgate, Northgate and Southgate still dominates the central shopping area. The modern commercial citadels of Sainsbury’s, B & Q and their rivals sprawl far outside the environs of the old town beside the Severn, but most people still think of Gloucester as the area within the line of the old city walls.

People seeking to establish small businesses look for premises in this central area: the worshippers of God and Mammon come together in a way which would have been comfortable enough for those crafty medieval friars who built the cathedral around the bones of the assassinated King Edward II, knowing it would bring interested pilgrims to them.

So the headquarters of the introduction agency Rendezvous stood, incongruously to modern eyes, within the long winter shadow of the massive stone walls of the cathedral which had dominated the area for six centuries. But there was no winter sun on the bleak afternoon of the 16th of November, when Lambert and Hook visited the place. The rain slanted down from cloud which was so low that it seemed already night, though it was no more than three thirty. Though they knew well enough of the place’s existence, neither man had been here before. But there was no difficulty in finding it: the letters of Rendezvous in garish green neon lighting blazed out brazenly from the gloom.

The young woman who came forward assumed they were prospective clients and turned upon them her most encouraging smile. ‘Do come in and sit down!’ she said, as if they were lingering diffidently in the doorway, instead of standing already within a yard of her neat desk. She went straight into her standard opening spiel. ‘There’s no need to be shy. You’d be surprised how many busy people find that their social lives are a little undeveloped. That’s what we’re here for and—’

‘We’re not customers,’ said Lambert, hastily flashing a warrant card before the girl could get any deeper into her routine patter. ‘Detective Sergeant Hook and I are here on police business — rather serious business, as a matter of fact.’

As the girl’s jaw dropped, the door behind her desk opened and an older woman appeared. She had dark blue eyes beneath yellow hair, which might or might not have been naturally blonde, for there was no hint of darkness at the roots. The hair was a little too tightly and regularly curled for contemporary tastes, and the eyes assessed them shrewdly, recognising them immediately as plainclothes policemen, as the girl in front of her had not. ‘I think you’d better come through to my office,’ the woman said.

She wore a dark green suit and leather shoes which exactly matched it. The jacket fell open as she sat down and revealed a lambswool sweater that clung tight over the well-supported breasts beneath it. ‘Pat Roberts,’ she said after Lambert had given her their names. They did not shake hands. Her eyes studied them unhurriedly, trying to assess the seriousness of their visit from her point of view. Just when they thought they would have to make the first move, she said, ‘We run a business that is perfectly above board, Superintendent. There are a lot of lonely people in the world today. We introduce some of them to each other.’

Lambert smiled. ‘Yes. It says so in your brochure. It also indicates your price for doing so. It must be a profitable enterprise.’

Pat Roberts smiled back, but there was no humour in her face. Despite her careful make-up, they saw now that she was older than she had appeared at first: probably around fifty. ‘We provide more than introductions. We try to match like with like. And if at first they don’t succeed, we enable them to try and try again.’ There was just a suggestion of contempt for the clients who brought the profits, but the implication was that she could afford to be candid with policemen, who saw life for what it was.

Lambert saw a hard woman, a woman who would be not just clear-sighted but ruthless whenever she felt it was necessary. No doubt most of the clients of the agency, encouraged along by those bright young faces at the reception desks in the outer office, never met this woman. He said, ‘I think you know why we’re here, Ms Roberts. We are interested in one of your customers.’

‘Edward Giles?’

‘You did know.’

‘I guessed correctly. I read my papers. And I know it must be serious, to bring the top brass in here.’

‘So why did you not come to us? There’s been an appeal out, for four days now. No doubt you read that as well.’

‘Our files are confidential. It’s one of the things our customers expect; one of the reasons they pay the fees you just said were so extravagant.’

‘I see. Well, you will be aware that this is a murder inquiry, so that your normal rules of confidentiality will be waived.’

She shrugged. ‘You can look at Edward Giles’s file, if you like. It’s sparse and uninteresting. He joined us just over two years ago. He hasn’t been back since a couple of early meetings. We never take the initiative in contacting our clients: we assume that we have met their requirements and are well satisfied with our service if they do not continue to use the facilities for which they enrolled.’

‘Fair enough. And lucrative enough, no doubt, when people pay a hefty year’s subscription in advance and then don’t bother you. I have no doubt you have a thin, blameless file on Ted Giles, possibly compiled in the last few days with this very meeting in mind. That is of no interest to us.’

She looked for a moment as if she would respond to the insult with interest. Then she said coldly, ‘Then I don’t think we can be of any further service to you.’

‘Oh, but you can. Of course, if you don’t choose to cooperate, we may need to investigate the business behind the business. The services beyond the ones detailed in your attractive brochure.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. We’re a bona fide agency.’

‘Really?’ Lambert regarded her steadily for a few seconds, then tired of this preliminary fencing. ‘Tell me, would you be the same Patricia Rawlings who went down for living off immoral earnings in Stafford seven years ago?’

She looked furiously from Lambert’s calm, unblinking stare to the more weather-beaten face beside him. ‘The name is a little different, but the face looks remarkably similar,’ said Hook equably. ‘A triumph of the modern cosmetic art, Pat.’

‘You bastards were just playing with me!’ She hissed her resentment, but there was nevertheless an air of resignation about her.

‘We did our homework before we came, that’s all,’ said Lambert.

‘I served my time for that. You can’t—’

‘You served a little time, it’s true. The probationary period could still be invoked, of course, if you were a naughty girl, and fell back into your old ways.’

‘And you’re saying I have.’

‘Let’s just say I don’t think you’d have got the job of managing this place with your record. Not if putting innocent singles in touch with each other was all that was involved.’

Hook added his professional smile to his chief’s. ‘Once a whore, always a whore, they tend to say in the police. Terrible cynics, most of them.’

‘Of course, the more intelligent ones tend to give up the game as they become veterans and manage the younger ones. Bit like football, really,’ said Lambert.

She was furious, yearning to fling herself like a spitting tiger on that long, complacent face, to scratch out those grey eyes which studied her so relentlessly. But she had more sense than that. She knew these men held every card that mattered. Eventually she said through gritted teeth, ‘What is it you want from me?’

‘Perhaps just some information, provided you are completely frank with us.’

She thought quickly. If they knew as much as they obviously did, and hadn’t moved in, it might just be that they meant what they said. Some police forces were prepared to let her kind of enterprise go, if it was well managed and discreet and not attached to a drugs empire. She said, ‘What information?’

‘Ted Giles. What he was really doing at Rendezvous, not what you were trying to fob us off with five minutes ago.’

She reached up and patted the curls of yellow hair, as if to reassure herself; giving information to the filth did not come easily to her. ‘All right. He didn’t come to us. We approached him. We — we run an escort service as well as the meetings agency. Edward Giles — he was always known as that to us, because the full name goes down better with the kind of ladies who pay for an escort — was on our list of unattached men who were available to squire ladies who could afford it.’

‘And no doubt his services sometimes went beyond merely escorting them for an evening out.’

‘That is nothing to do with us. We provide an escort agency. If relationships develop from it, that is the business of the people concerned, not us.’

It was the standard reply. But people like Pat Roberts, née Rawlings, knew which people wanted merely a partner for an evening at the theatre and which women were in search of sex and prepared to pay for it. And which men also, of course: that was an even more lucrative avenue. He grinned at the hard face of the woman who glared her hostility across her desk. ‘I might even buy that, if you give us a full and frank account of Ted Giles. I might tell you that we know what you were paying him. We can produce the bank statements — in court, if we need to.’

‘We paid Edward Giles to provide an escort service. You can’t prove otherwise.’

Lambert sighed. ‘We may not need to, if you cooperate fully. At the moment, I’m only interested in who killed Ted Giles. We need a list of the women you paid him to see. And your views on which if any he was seeing frequently — for whatever reason.’

Pat Roberts stared at him for a moment, as if she was weighing the possibilities of deceit. Then she said, ‘Fair enough. I’ll give you the names.’

‘That would be sensible. And don’t forget you’re helping the police with their enquiries. Ignore anyone Giles saw only once or twice two years ago, at the beginning of his time with you. The person who’s likely to interest us is someone he saw frequently, in the last few months.’

‘All right, I get the picture. I’ll tell you who Edward was seeing.’ She permitted herself her first smile in several minutes. ‘There are five or six of them, though; it will be up to you to work out which ones are important.’ That thought seemed to give Ms Roberts a lot of satisfaction.

***

John Lambert was late home that Friday night. The business of tracing the women from Rendezvous had been set in motion. The house-to-house check had now revealed that three different people in the village of Broughton’s Ash thought they had seen a white van on the lanes there on the previous Saturday evening. Two of them had been going to and from the village inn, but the third had been walking his dog in the autumn darkness when he had had to take hasty evasive action to avoid the vehicle leaving the village. All three witnesses were vague about time and model, but they did not contradict each other. If the van had been involved at all in the conveying of Giles’s body to Broughton’s Ash, it had done so between eleven and midnight.

Lambert, who had consumed nothing substantial for eight hours, now found himself too tired to eat. Then he fell asleep in front of the television set, as his wife had known he would. It was not until he was clasping his mug of tea at eleven o’clock that Christine Lambert could fulfil her promise to her daughter. ‘I went to the doctor’s yesterday.’

The man who had recently been so drowsy was instantly alert. ‘I said you’d been looking tired. What did old Cooper have to say?’

Christine poured it all out at once, not daring to draw back once she started, anxious to have it over and done with and her promise to Caroline honoured. ‘He had the results of the tests and X-rays the hospital took last week. I didn’t tell you about those at the time because I didn’t want you worrying unnecessarily. It’s a heart problem. I’m going to need a bypass operation. But Dr Cooper says we’re not to worry, because the techniques and the technology have advanced so much in the last ten years that it’s now a routine operation and—’

She found herself in his arms, her face against his chest and further explanations impossible. He held her hard, this undemonstrative man she now felt she still did not know after thirty years. She felt him kneading her shoulder blades, then stroking the back of her neck under her hair, as he had been used to do before they were married when he soothed away some real or imagined trouble. It seemed a long time before he held her away from him, still with his hands on her shoulders. His grey eyes looked down into her blue ones and he said softly, ‘You should have told me, you know, Chris.’

It was years since he had used that form of her name. Her parents, who had thought that girls should be girls and there should be no confusion about the matter, had always insisted upon the full form of her name. He had used ‘Chris’ only when they were alone during their courtship, making it their own ridiculous secret. She remembered how he had used it when he first saw her after the birth of each of their daughters, and on the awful day when the eldest of them had died in infancy. But she had always been Christine to him in front of the children, her parents’ wishes preserved into the next generation. She said lamely, ‘Yes, I should have told you. But you are an old worrier, you know, where I’m concerned.’

‘Or the children.’

‘Yes. Or the grandchildren, now, I expect.’ She reached up and ran her small fingers through his grizzled, still plentiful hair.