Close Call (12 page)

Lambert ignored his reaction and said, ‘You don't seem to have spoken much directly to Mr Durkin during the evening. Perhaps not at all. Was there a reason for that?' No one had reported that directly to him: it was something he had deduced from the various accounts, including the one Ritchie himself had just given to them.

Jason did not refute the idea. He said gruffly, ‘I was there on sufferance, the only one who wasn't a resident of Gurney Close. I was watching myself a bit, making sure I didn't step out of line. All the men were older than I am. I hadn't a lot in common with them.' It sounded a little desperate; he hadn't expected to be pressed on this.

‘Robin Durkin was the nearest in age to you among the men. One might expect that you would have found it easier to talk to him than to the others.'

‘I didn't. I don't know why.'

‘Even when drink had relaxed you and everyone else? I would have thought that might have loosened your tongue.' Lambert had no idea where this was going, but he had located a weakness, almost by chance, and his instinct was to go for it.

‘We were all quite relaxed by the end of the evening. I kept close to Lisa, because I was only there because of her. But the others were friendly enough, once we'd had a few drinks.'

‘But not so friendly in Robin Durkin's case that you felt able to talk to him. Did you see him again after you had left his house with Mrs Holt at the end of the party?'

‘No. I've already told you that I didn't.'

‘You hadn't, actually. Never mind, you've answered the question for us now. So tell us what happened after the party broke up.'

‘I spent the night with Lisa.' Jason wondered whether to enlarge upon the delights of this, but decided against it.

Lambert looked at him keenly. ‘Did you know Mr Durkin before you met him in Gurney Close during those last weeks of his life?'

How abrupt the man was. How quickly he switched from one area to another, just when you felt you were getting to grips with him. ‘No. I'd passed his garage, like other people. I didn't recognize that this man was the Durkin who owned the garage until I met him when we were doing the gardens.'

‘So you hadn't had a relationship of any kind with him before that.'

‘No. I've told you I didn't. Why should it be of any interest to you if I had?' He wished as soon as he'd said it that he hadn't asked that question, that he'd left them merely with a blank negative.

Lambert smiled, as if he too recognized the error. ‘We've got to be interested in any previous dealings people had with someone who is now a murder victim. Particularly when one of them has a previous history of violence.'

So they had come to it, as he told himself now that he had known they would. He forced himself to appear calm, to take a long breath before he responded to them. He tried to speak evenly, but found his voice rising as he said, ‘This is always the way with pigs, isn't it? Once a villain, always a villain. You don't look any further than someone with a record, when you want to pin a crime on someone. I told Lisa you'd be after me. I knew it would be like this.'

Lambert waited for the torrent of protest to dissipate itself. ‘We bear in mind what has happened before. That is no more than common sense.'

‘Then bear in mind that I've never killed anyone. Take your blinkers off and look at the facts.'

‘One of which is that you have a conviction for Grievous Bodily Harm. Another of which is that you could easily have been facing a murder charge on that occasion, if the cards had fallen slightly differently for you. Facts we need to bear in mind, as you indicate, when we are looking for the perpetrator of another violent crime.'

‘Not my style, Lambert. This man was garrotted with a piece of cable. I've never attacked anyone like that in my life.'

‘But you attacked someone with a knife. Stabbed him three times. Nearly killed him.'

‘Self-defence.'

‘The man attacked you with his fists. You took a knife to him. Very nearly killed him.'

‘He was a violent man. Attacking me outside a back street pub, with other violent men. They were wearing boots, and they'd have used them, if they'd got me down. Very likely kicked me to death.'

‘Not what the coppers who arrested you thought.'

Jason allowed himself a small smile. ‘It's what the court thought though, isn't it? What my brief told them and what they accepted. British justice triumphant against lying PC Plods. And thank the Lord for it.'

Lambert permitted himself a mirthless answering smile. He wasn't going to get involved in mudslinging over a battle which had been lost long ago. ‘I hope you did thank the Lord. Or at least thanked a persuasive brief. A suspended sentence for taking a knife to someone must have sent you away laughing at the law.'

‘Learned my lesson, though, didn't I? That po-faced woman judge told me to go away and keep my nose clean, and I've done just that. For five years, now. A triumph for British justice and the liberal ideal, that's Jason Ritchie.' He found to his amazement that he was enjoying this, that winning the argument with this senior policeman was giving him a kick. ‘So don't think you can breeze into my home and arrest me for something I didn't do. British justice won't allow it, see? Police harassment, they'd call it, in my view. I'd go for the brief I had last time.' He nodded a couple of times, trying to control his excitement as the adrenaline pumped in his veins.

Bert Hook looked up from his notebook, avuncular and concerned. ‘So you're thinking in terms of briefs already, Jason? Not a good move, that. Might have suspicious coppers believing you had something to hide. Might make them think they were on to something, wouldn't you say?'

Jason Ritchie was thrown by this sudden intervention, when all his hostility had been concentrated on the gaunt superintendent. ‘I'm not hiding anything. I know the way cops try to trip you up, that's all.'

Hook nodded. ‘Very wise, that. Not hiding anything, I mean. I've seen a lot of people get into trouble, over the years, when they've tried to hide things. You're sure that you hadn't met Mr Durkin before you encountered him in Gurney Close, are you?'

It was slipped in almost casually, as if Hook were acting in the interests of the excited young man who sat on the other side of the table in the cramped little caravan. Almost as if he were a brief for the defence, thought Jason. ‘No. I've already said I didn't know him.'

Hook nodded. He looked as if he were about to make another note, but then thought better of it. He said almost casually, ‘So who do you think killed Robin Durkin, Jason?'

The query which set the pulses racing in Jason's temple had been uttered so quietly that it seemed paradoxically to be more significant, more menacing. He found himself wishing that it was still Lambert who was putting things like this to him: it seemed easier to fight a man who was more openly aggressive. ‘I don't know. Someone who came in from outside, I should think, after we'd all gone.'

‘And why do you think that, Jason?'

The quiet repetition of his forename was ringing like a taunt in his ears, an intimacy he didn't want to hear but could not avoid. ‘I – I can't think that anyone who was drinking and eating with him on Saturday night would have killed him. We were all getting on so well together!'

It sounded lame, even to him. Hook nodded quietly a couple of times, as if weighing that idea. Then he said, almost reluctantly, as if it pained him to recall it, ‘Except for you, Jason. Who didn't speak directly to Mr Durkin at all during the five hours of eating and drinking and laughter, on your own admission.'

He wondered how they had prised out this, who among those there on Saturday night had been observant enough to watch how he was behaving towards their host. He was not experienced enough to realize that these two were experts in making bricks with very little straw, in picking up some small admission he had made and exploiting it as a weakness. He said rather desperately, ‘You asked me what I thought, and I'm telling you, aren't I? I think someone came in from the path by the bank of the river, after we'd all gone. Perhaps he'd been waiting there for hours, watching for his opportunity.'

‘It's a possibility. But you'd all been out there, through the gate at the back of the Durkins's garden, wandering down to the banks of the Wye, we're told. Surely you'd have seen anyone lurking there with malicious intent, wouldn't you? Still, we're considering every possibility, however unlikely.'

They left him then, with the injunction that he must not move out of the district without giving them a new address. This familiar environment of his, what he thought of as his little private castle in the woods, seemed sullied by their visit. Jason sat for twenty minutes, motionless in the neat and spotless interior of the old caravan, recovering his composure, telling himself that, however he had felt, they hadn't prised anything out of him that he hadn't been expecting to give them.

Lambert drove slowly back towards Oldford, through a Forest of Dean which was heavy with fresh new leaf, as if the pace of his driving could be an encouragement to measured thought. It was several miles before he said, ‘It was good having you with me in there. But you don't have to do this, you know.'

‘I told you, I'm better working. It occupies the mind. Some of the time, anyway. And I thought you weren't going to raise it again.' Hook stared out of the window at the forest sheep, scampering away beneath the trees, as if they were of surpassing interest to him.

Two more miles passed before he said, ‘I wonder what exactly it was that Jason Ritchie was concealing from us.'

Bert Hook felt as if he was watching a scene in someone else's life, not his, as he paused for a moment at the door of the hospital room.

The woman sitting by the bed, looking down at the too-tiny conformation beneath the sheets, was surely some other woman, not his wife. That grave and grey-faced female was ten years too old to be his smiling Eleanor, who played like a fellow-child with her boys, who united with them in their teasing of their staid and anxious father.

And that slight, amorphous shape beneath the sheets could surely not be his ebullient, noisy Luke, the exhausting embodiment of perpetual mobility that he had so often called upon to be still. This must surely be some other, private drama, in someone else's life. Not his.

Bert had visited hospitals often enough, in his younger days, following up road accidents and serious incidents of assault, waiting for statements from victims, statements which sometimes never came. He had witnessed far too often the moment when life was pronounced extinct, when the relatives were escorted from the scene and the curtains were drawn around the bed by the professionals.

People had told him then that you never believed that it was happening to you.

He shook his head and went forward, divesting himself of the conceit that this was tragedy being played out in some other family. Eleanor looked up at him, and he saw the blankness in her eyes which told him that she was so involved with the closed world within three feet of her that he, too, was an interloper.

She spoke reluctantly and very slowly, as if she were loth to admit anyone else into her private drama. She said dully, ‘He's holding his own, they say. It's still on a knife-edge.'

In the leafy suburb of Birmingham, the man was perfectly relaxed.

It was part of the training: when you were not on a job, you relaxed. Not that there was any training available for the work he did; he was thinking merely of the training he had devised for himself and steadily imposed upon himself as he became a specialist. You could scarcely think of it as a calling, and he did not do so. But he knew he was working in one of the most exclusive of occupations.

Even in a more violent age than the country had ever known, there were still very few contract killers.

His commissions were sporadic, though they had increased steadily over the five years in which he had operated. But he was never impatient. He knew now that other jobs would come along before too long: his efficiency and his anonymity had ensured that for him. And he had no problems with money: liquidation was expensive. His remuneration was such that he could afford to be patient between jobs.

The people who used him knew his rates and his terms of business; the word got around quickly along the dubious grapevines of the underworld. A third up front when he was commissioned, two thirds when the death was achieved, safely and anonymously. Watson knew that some of his rivals operated on a half and half basis, but he thought it showed his confidence in his abilities that he only asked for a third in advance.

And one of the benefits of working in a dangerous field was that the people who used your services were always reliable. You didn't have to worry about credit ratings with people like this: Watson's thin lips widened into one of his rare smiles on that thought. He never pressed for payment, because he knew that it would come.

The e-mail had been in his in-box for several hours before he read it. It said simply, ‘The River Wye has reached the sea.' He looked at it for a few seconds, then deleted the simple seven words of code.

The money was now in his account. It had never come to him more easily.

L
ambert was glad to have Bert Hook back at his side as they visited Gurney Close in the early evening.

Pressing a bereaved widow for information is never easy. It is vital to establish facts as early as possible in an investigation, but families often feel that police officers are being crass and insensitive during what, for them, is an agonizing period.

At least there were no children involved here. And Alison Durkin appeared to be perfectly composed as they made their apologies for intruding at such a time. ‘You have your job to do. I understand that. I hope to get back to my own job later this week. They told me to take the week off, but I think the best remedy for brooding is to get back to work. And I've no funeral to organize. Not for the moment: not until you are able to release the body.'