Malice Aforethought (9 page)

He had got no further than the three thirty at the first meeting when there was an insistent knocking at his door. Aubrey always ignored the first two attempts to disturb him: unless he was expecting someone specific, it was a principle of his to do so. When the third round of knocking proved even more prolonged and insistent, he sighed, muttered a curse, and went to the door.

It was the police, for the second time in four days. This time two youngish men in uniforms stood on the landing. ‘Bloody ‘ell,’ said Aubrey Bass sourly. ‘Can’t a man even enjoy ‘is weekends in peace now?’

The uniforms even knew his nickname. ‘Morning, Alfie,’ said the elder constable. He pushed the door, widening the gap from the few reluctant inches Bass had accorded him, and strolled into the flat. His younger, fresh-faced colleague followed him, unconsciously imitating his movements. They looked with distaste round the living room Aubrey thought he had cleaned. ‘Enjoying your Saturday after a hard week’s work, were you? Well, we have to disrupt your well-earned rest, I’m afraid. Our instructions are to take you down to the station, you see. You’ve strayed a bit out of your depth this time, Alfie. It’s in connection with a homicide last Saturday night, I believe.’

***

By three o’clock on that November afternoon, the morning sun which had lit up the dahlias in Connie Elson’s garden was long gone. Low cloud had settled heavily over the Oldford golf course and no birds sang, save for the occasional discordant cawing of an invisible rook.

To Bert Hook, it mattered not a jot. In his heart, the sun filtered its brilliant gold through the tops of the trees, a million small birds sang their intricate harmonies, and he walked through a Garden of Eden. For he was beating John Lambert at golf. He walked very softly on his large policeman’s feet, as if he feared that any careless footfall might shatter the eggshell of his lead.

It was Lambert who had suggested the foray into this fantasy world. ‘It will clear our minds,’ he explained to a Hook who pretended reluctance. ‘We can’t do anything more at the moment. We’ll go into the Murder Room later and see if anything’s turned up. After all, it is Saturday!’ And with this conclusive British thought, he had turned the car away from the Oldford Police Station, back past Connie Elson’s opulent bungalow and into the green acres of the golf club.

At two o’clock the first tee had been deserted, since all the four-balls intending to play eighteen holes had been off by one o’clock to beat the early twilight. ‘We should get thirteen in,’ Lambert had said, once again affording his sergeant the benefit of his years of experience in the ancient game. He did not know that Bert Hook had been practising with plastic aeroflight balls on the back lawn of his garden, dedicating his few spare daylight moments to this game he affected to despise.

Now that self-sacrifice was paying off, and Bert was determined that they should play the full eighteen holes. He hurried between his shots, waited impatiently while his chief, who was by no means a slow player, took what seemed to Bert an age over each stroke. On a deserted course, they had completed eight holes rapidly and he was two up. Off the course, there was no greater admirer of John Lambert than this man who had been his detective sergeant and acolyte for ten years. Here, in this eerily quiet theatre of war between the tall oaks, he was determined to thrash the pompous bastard out of sight.

Lambert eventually dispatched his ball with the 5-iron over which he had fidgeted for so long. It cleared the greenside bunker by a foot, bounced off the back of it, and ran across the green towards the flag. ‘Judged that rather well,’ said John Lambert, with what he imagined was becoming modesty.

‘Jammy bugger!’ growled Bert Hook, with infinitely greater feeling.

Lambert just missed his three; his putt lipped the hole before finishing two feet past it. He looked expectantly at Hook, waiting for the formality of a concession, and found his sergeant staring ostentatiously at the autumn colour of a beech tree. Lambert shrugged tolerantly, smiled at the pettiness of his opponent, and nonchalantly addressed this tiddler. Too nonchalantly, perhaps. The ball lipped the hole and stayed obstinately on the edge. ‘That’s a half, then!’ snapped Hook, almost before the ball had ceased to move. He was away to the next tee at a brisk military medium, so that Lambert’s reaction was wasted upon a broad and oblivious back.

Lambert was still two down after the thirteen holes he had suggested, whereupon he proposed that they should stop at that point. ‘It’s what we agreed,’ he said mildly.

‘No, it isn’t!’ said his opponent vehemently. ‘It’s what
you
agreed. I never agreed to it.’ He stopped for a moment, puzzled by the semantics of this: could one man on his own agree anything? Then he said, ‘Anyway, there’s plenty of light yet!’ and strode conclusively towards the fourteenth tee.

In truth, the darkness was settling fast. When they reached the sixteenth, the ridge of the Malvern Hills which was usually so appealing from the tee was completely invisible. There was no way they would be able to complete eighteen holes. But Bert Hook had seen a way to make eighteen unnecessary. If he could get three holes ahead by the end of the sixteenth, he would have won. He was still two up, and he now produced a bright yellow ball which would be more easily spotted. He dispatched it into the gloom below them from the elevated tee. Lambert affected not to see it, which his opponent thought thoroughly unsporting. But it was straight, and they found it on the fairway, five yards behind Lambert’s grubby white ball.

Peering fiercely at the back of his ball in the gloom, Hook dispatched it towards the green, having instructed his companion to watch it closely this time. ‘You thinned the bugger!’ Lambert informed him with relish.

‘I thinned the bugger straight!’ came the grim rejoinder.

With much grumbling about miners’ lamps and police torches, Lambert addressed his barely visible ball with infinite care. To Hook’s mind, he shuffled his feet interminably on the damp ground. But eventually he had to hit it, and when he did, his opponent had to report dutifully on the result. ‘High and wide,’ he said, trying unsuccessfully to keep the satisfaction out of his voice. ‘Probably in the right-hand bunker.’

Hook was twenty yards ahead of Lambert by the time they reached the bottom of the slope. His bright yellow ball smiled at him from the green, no more than fourteen feet from the hole. From his right, he heard Lambert say loftily, ‘You were wrong, Bert. I’m not in the bunker.’

‘Not yet!’ returned Bert, grimly and unsportingly.

It was a prophetic thought. In the near-darkness, with much muttering about the impossibility of playing any shot in these conditions, Lambert topped his ball into the sand. The Superintendent was a mild-mannered man who never swore in a working environment where there was much lurid language. He now addressed his ball as an intimate female orifice to which it bore no obvious resemblance.

Bert Hook’s heart sang. Two minutes later, he holed a second putt his opponent made him take from under a foot, to secure his victory. There was no need now for the Stygian darkness of the last two holes.

It was very quiet in the car on the way back to Oldford.

***

Aubrey Bass had now been helping the police with their enquiries for six hours. He was certain that was what he was doing, because every time he embarked on one of his ritual grumbles they told him so.

For five of those hours, he had sat in a cell. He had muttered about wrongful arrest, but without any great conviction, because he knew he was responsible for so many things which could lead to rightful arrest. And he talked occasionally to the Station Sergeant about bringing in a brief, but his words were always attached to a nasal moan asserting, ‘I ain’t done nothing and you can’t fit me up with nothing.’ In view of this constant assertion of his innocence, it didn’t seem to him natural to demand legal assistance. Let them come up with a proper charge, and then he’d think about it. He didn’t trust lawyers anyway, and the ones you got on legal aid least of all.

When he was taken back into the interview room for a second session, he was surprised to find another odour impinging on the close and fetid atmosphere of that box of stale air. Perfume. A woman, tall and willowy in jeans and a dark blue top, with a striking oval face and long dark hair. Now in other circumstances… Steady, Aubrey old lad, he told himself. This was still a cop shop.

As if to reinforce that thought, Rushton, the Inspector who had grilled him when they first brought him in, now set the cassette of the tape-recorder turning, and told it that Detective Sergeant Ruth David was to be present with them at this interview. DS David sat down behind Rushton, in a corner of the small room, and Aubrey dragged his eyes from her bust to the stern face of the man on the other side of the small, square table. From no more than three feet away, DI Chris Rushton was looking at him with an undisguised, wholly professional, contempt.

‘Now then. You are Alfie Bass, small-time crook. Receiving and disposing of stolen goods. Break-ins and burglaries and general buggering about. Failure a speciality.’

Aubrey said nothing. For once, he hadn’t done much. Not recently. So let them make the running. He scratched his left shoulder with the fingers of his right hand, lowered the corners of his broad lips in disapproval as he shook his head, looked up at the corner of the ceiling to show his boredom. Let them make the running.

They did, in a way that set Aubrey’s lazy heart pounding. ‘You own a white Escort van, registration number F829 GHR.’

‘You know I do. You asked me about it earlier. A lot bloody earlier, now.’

‘Yes. Well, we’ve had the forensic lads look at it, while you’ve been enjoying our hospitality here. Just a preliminary glance —those lads don’t work as hard as us at the weekend. But it was very interesting, Alfie.’

‘It’s Aubrey.’

‘All right, Aubrey. If you’re moving into the serious criminal league, we might as well give you a serious name. So Aubrey Algernon Bass, if you like.’

This cold sod seemed to be enjoying himself. And he was confident; Aubrey didn’t like that. ‘Ain’t done nothing,’ he repeated obstinately, as he had been doing since he was a snub-nosed ten-year-old forty years ago.

Rushton smiled. He looked to Aubrey like the police Alsatian which had once apprehended him at the back of Woolworths in Monmouth. He said, ‘Where was your van on the night of the tenth of November, Aubrey?’

Aubrey swallowed, tried to allow himself time to think, then tried to stop his pulses as they began to race. November the tenth was last Saturday. The night when that stuck-up bugger from next door, Ted Giles, had been murdered. The night those two plainclothes blokes had spoken to him about, last Tuesday morning. Bloody hell! Bloody, bloody hell! ‘My van was parked behind the flats, I expect, as usual.’ He knew very well where it had been, but it was instinctive in him to be vague or dishonest when speaking to the police.

‘And where were you?’

Aubrey peered at Rushton suspiciously, then glanced at the equally unrevealing face of the woman behind him. ‘What time you talking about?’

‘Let’s say between eight and twelve.’

‘I was in the pub, wasn’t I? I always am on a Saturday night. Always have a bit of a bevvy, we do, on Saturdays.’

‘Usually, Aubrey, not always. Sometimes you have work to do on a Saturday night. Breaking into warehouses, that sort of thing.’ Rushton had done his homework on Bass’s criminal record before he had him brought up from the cells.

Bass glared at him sullenly. ‘Well, I was in the pub last Saturday night. The Red Lion, most of the time, but I think we finished up in the White Hart. Good night we had, too. A lot of beer and a few laughs.’

‘Really. There’ll be people who can confirm this for us, will there? People who will be willing to swear in court that you were with them for all of those four hours? People willing to put their own heads on the block to tell us that you didn’t slip away for half an hour or so?’

Aubrey licked his lips at the mention of a court of law. He didn’t like the way this was moving. The police were always truculent with people like him. But this bastard Rushton spoke like a man with four aces in his hand. And suddenly his own friends seemed not friends at all, but blokes he met up with to drink and thieve. They wouldn’t take kindly to being involved with the police on his behalf, however much he needed them. He scratched himself vigorously under both arms. ‘Wasn’t with the same set of mates all night, was I? People came and went.’ He realised with a sinking heart that it was actually true. The floor seemed to be dropping away beneath his feet. He looked for succour to the woman behind the aggressive Rushton. She was smiling at him in exactly the same way as her Inspector. Even in Aubrey’s broadly cast imaginings, Sergeant Ruth David no longer looked a good lay.

She said calmly, as though it was a piece of good advice which had just occurred to her, ‘Well, it seems you’d better find someone, Mr Bass. Someone who can speak reliably about your movements on that Saturday night.’

Aubrey tried desperately to get some conviction into his voice. ‘I told you. I was in the pub all that night. Well, till closing time. Then we went on to a bloke’s house.’

Rushton’s grin became a derisive leer. ‘Pubs, you said just now.’

‘Pubs, then. But that’s where I was, whether there’s anyone to say so or not. You can’t fit me up with any burglary. You’ll have to find some other poor bastard.’

‘Oh, it’s not a burglary, Aubrey. Nothing as petty as that for the new Mr Bass. We’re talking murder here.’

Aubrey shut his eyes for a moment, trying to stop the room spinning. The walls still did not seem stable when he opened them. His voice emerged as a whine. ‘Murder? You mean Ted Giles, don’t you? I ain’t done no murder, Mr Rushton.’

‘You’re claiming you’re just an accessory? Penalties are still severe, Aubrey. Might as well admit the whole thing and get it over with, I’d say.’