Close Call (15 page)

His own children had both been girls: he found that he didn't quite know how you talked to thirteen-year-old boys. They were always gauche and ill at ease, and Jack was as good an example of that as anyone. The boy said awkwardly, ‘It's very good of you to have me here. I know you're very busy with this murder in Gurney Close.' He'd read eagerly every fact the local papers printed about the killing, as he did always when his father was involved in a case.

‘Not as busy as you'd think. I let my team get on with the real donkey work. I expect your dad's told you what an old fraud I am!'

‘He says you're the best there is. That the Home Office must recognize that, or they wouldn't have given you an extension of service. Not that I'm saying you're old.' The boy was suddenly blushing furiously at his imagined gaffe, the blood rising red and full in his long, pubescent neck.

Lambert grinned at him. ‘I'm old all right, Jack. Ancient, in your terms. Have to make my brain work to save my legs, now.

'There was an awkward silence, which the boy felt more keenly than the tall man beside him. He stooped to a deep crimson rose, sniffed deeply at its heady bouquet, recoiled in surprise at the strength of it. Then he said suddenly, ‘Will Luke be all right, do you think?'

Lambert said woodenly, ‘I'm sure he will.' He wanted to put an arm round the slim young shoulders; he would have done so instinctively with his daughters, but he didn't know whether a thirteen-year-old boy, poised so agonizingly between childhood and adolescence, would resent the gesture.

‘But you don't know, do you?'

‘No, I don't know, Jack. But I know that he's in the best place. That people who know far more than either of us are fighting with all their skills and all their energies to make sure that he'll recover.'

The boy nodded slowly, weighing the logic of this and apparently finding it convincing. ‘People fob you off with things all the time when you're young. When you're a child, it's all right, because you believe them. But when you're as old as I am now, you don't know what to believe and what to reject.'

Lambert felt a tug at his tough old heartstrings from this confused, ungainly, honest boy. He put his arm round him this time, and felt the boy hugging him back, like the child he still wanted to be at this moment. ‘I won't fob you off, Jack. Luke's very seriously ill, or your mum and dad wouldn't be at the hospital like this. But it's my honest belief that he'll be back home with you by this time next week, and well on his way to being a thorn in your side again.'

There was a tiny shudder from the face against his chest, which might have been an involuntary giggle or a sob of pain. Then a muffled voice said, ‘I should have been kinder to him.'

Lambert turned the small, narrow face away from his chest and back towards the world. ‘I'm sure you've treated him just as well as a younger brother deserves to be treated. They're irritating creatures, aren't they, when you're trying to get on with more important things?'

‘It's his first year at the comp, you know. I should have made things easier for him.'

‘I expect you did what you could. And we all have to learn to stand on our own feet, don't we?'

Jack began to shake his head unhappily, but fortunately at that moment Christine called down from the house to say that lunch was ready. ‘It's just sandwiches and fruit and a bit of cake, I'm afraid. We have our main meal at night, as you do, Jack,' she said.

The insistent appetite of a thirteen-year-old took over, and the clearly distressed Jack demolished a substantial allocation of sandwiches, seemingly without registering the fact of their disappearance. Christine, who was much in demand as a part-time teacher herself, chatted knowledgeably to him about his progress and his problems at school.

John Lambert found it a relief to listen to the two of them, to have the responsibility for this awkward, touching, alien presence in his household taken away from him. It allowed his thoughts to stray back inevitably to the killing in Gurney Close.

In retrospect, Lambert thought that it was during that strange hour of lunch with a suffering schoolboy that the first glimmerings of a solution came to him.

R
onald Lennox watched the police car parking in his drive with what seemed to him agonizing precision. He wanted them in the house, questioning him, getting this over and going on their way.

‘I thought we'd talk in the conservatory. We've been rearranging things in the rest of the house – you can never fit everything in, can you, when you get rid of a bigger house? We're still unpacking boxes and moving pictures about. The sun's moved round. The conservatory won't be too hot at this time in the afternoon.'

Ron was aware that he was talking inconsequentially, unnecessarily, as he took them through a sitting room which had lost its flowers and its photographs on the mantelpiece, and now seemed like any other new lounge in the close. He led them into the light, pleasant conservatory and invited them to sit in the wickerwork chairs. ‘We won't be disturbed. Rosemary is at the Red Cross centre. She does voluntary work there on a Wednesday.' He knew he was sounding nervous, knew that these experienced men would have picked that up, wondered what they were making of it.

‘We wanted a few more words with you about Robin Durkin,' said Lambert, his economy with words underlining Lennox's unnecessary loquacity.

‘At your service,' said Ron expansively as he sat down. ‘Though I'm sure I can't tell you any more about him than you already know.'

‘Let's see, shall we?'Lambert's manner was not unpleasant, but his words sounded to Ron like a threat. ‘We now know quite a bit more about the murder victim than when we last spoke with you, so whatever we learn from you today will be fitted into a fuller context.'

Was that a warning to him not to lie? Ron said apprehensively, ‘One doesn't like to speak ill of the dead, but …' He had lifted his hands as he began the statement, but they dropped limply back on to the arms of his chair as the words ran out for him. They were bony hands, sticking out a little too far from the cuffs of the cardigan he had selected to emphasize how relaxed and unthreatened he would feel.

Hook flicked open a new page on his notebook and looked at his man earnestly. ‘Tell it how it was. That's much the best policy, Mr Lennox. Especially when it's a murder that we're investigating. Any attempt at concealment only leads to complications.'

Ron looked gratefully at the weather-beaten, honest face. ‘All right. Robin Durkin wasn't a very nice man. Rosemary and I like what we've seen of his wife, Alison, and when we spoke to you yesterday we didn't want to say too much about him because of her. And of course we didn't want any trouble with our new neighbours. But I happen to know that Rob Durkin was a nasty piece of work. Rosemary and I didn't plan to have any more to do with him than was strictly necessary.'

‘But you were quite willing to go to a party at his house last Saturday night.'

Ron smiled. He was ready for this. ‘As was everyone else in the close. It was my wife who had suggested the street party; when it turned out that the venue was to be at the Durkins's house, we could hardly make a sudden withdrawal. I think you'll find if you question them closely that others as well as me had reservations about the man. But perhaps you already have.'

Lennox was speaking in a curious, rather pedantic manner, as if he were outlining the obvious for someone rather dense. Perhaps it was a habit acquired in his schoolteaching days. Or perhaps he had prepared these words carefully before their arrival. Lambert said with a twinge of irritation, ‘You'd better tell us exactly what you knew about Robin Durkin.'

‘It's nothing tangible. Nothing I'd care to swear to on oath in a court of law. But then I won't have to do that, will I?' A little nervous laugh escaped him before he could suppress it.

‘Anything is possible, in a murder case. That's why we need the full story from you now.' Lambert was getting impatient. ‘If it will help to loosen your tongue and remove your inhibitions, Mr Lennox, I can tell you that we have already discovered quite a lot of things about Mr Durkin.'

‘Hah!' Ron heard the breathy monosyllable exploding into the bright room an instant before he realized that it had come from himself. ‘That I can well believe! If your investigative techniques are as efficient as I am sure they are, Superintendent, you will have discovered by now what an unsavoury character Rob Durkin was.'

‘We are in the process of getting a fuller picture. And you are in the process of helping us,' said Lambert tersely.

‘Yes. Right. Well, Durkin was a blackmailer, you know, among other things.'

‘What other things?'

Ron was sure the blood was rushing to his face. It was an unfamiliar and disconcerting feeling. He had expected to talk about blackmail, to deliver the sentences he had prepared on that, not to have the ground switched so abruptly to this. He looked down at his brilliantly polished brown toecaps and decided that city shoes were inappropriate footwear to go with the informal dress he had donned for these exchanges. ‘Well, I'm sure he had some pretty unsavoury business dealings. Cut plenty of corners in his working methods, from what I heard. Have you talked to his partner in the garage?'

‘We have, yes. What he said rather confirms what you are telling us now.'

‘Well, there you are, then. An unsavoury man, and it's not just I who think so!'

That seemed to give Lennox great satisfaction; Lambert noted with interest how important it seemed to him. ‘Mr Durkin had accrued a very large sum of money, seemingly not by legitimate means. Have you any views on how he might have come by such a fortune?'

Ron pretended for a moment to be struggling with his scruples. Then he said, ‘In my view he was involved in supplying illegal drugs. That's a lucrative business, they tell me. The kind of thing where you can quickly accumulate money, if you're the kind of man he was.'

‘Indeed it is. And what kind of man was he?'

‘I've already told you that. The worst kind. A man who did not operate by the moral canons which the rest of us use to regulate our lives.'

There was a curious combination of passion and fastidiousness in this man, as if he sought to control his emotions by the precision of his words, to disguise a real hatred for the dead man by meticulous vocabulary. Lambert strove for a wavelength which would encourage him to cooperate. ‘It's true that if we left now we should be in no doubt about how you felt about our murder victim. But as an intelligent man, you will appreciate that we need rather more chapter and verse about this. We can't simply take your strong feelings as establishing the worthlessness of the man.'

Lennox pursed his lips, thought for a moment, nodded slowly. ‘I see that. You mean that, in a court of law, some clever defence counsel would say I was just voicing an opinion.'

Lambert smiled. ‘We're not talking about courts of law. We're a long way from that yet. I'm asking you to support what you're telling me with something more tangible than your own dislike for Robin Durkin.'

‘Well, I wouldn't normally go around exchanging gossip.' The eagerness in his face made Lambert doubt that. ‘But one picks up quite a lot, around a secondary school, you know, if one keeps one's ears open. People think we educationists exist in ivory towers, but we certainly don't. Not these days. I used to listen to the sixth formers talking and pick up quite a lot about what young people were up to.'

Lambert leaned forward conspiratorially and said, ‘And you asked a few pertinent questions, too, I'm sure.'

‘On occasions I did, yes.' Ron rocked back and forward a little on his chair, folding his arms and hugging his thin chest. This was better: they were treating him now as a valuable source of information. This was a chance to put the boot in on that awful man who had died on Saturday night. ‘Within two years of leaving school, Rob Durkin was dealing in drugs in quite a big way. I'm certain of that. We had one or two cases of drug abuse in the school – all schools do, nowadays, they tell me. And of course they had to be followed up. Where possible, we kept the police out of it. But Rob Durkin's name came up every time. He was an ex-pupil who was exploiting his contacts with the school. Anything but an alumnus, you'd have to say!'

His little cackle of laughter at his bon mot flew oddly round the glass walls of the conservatory. Lambert said, ‘We have been made aware of these activities over the last two days. But Durkin was a clever man. He seems at that time to have established a network of dealers, without direct involvement in selling drugs himself. He was never charged with offences because the CPs didn't think there was enough evidence.'

‘That's him exactly! That's just what he'd do. Let others take the risks, and keep his own back well covered.' The vehemence of Lennox's feelings overcame his air of objectivity. ‘I don't know any more about it than that, as far as hard evidence is concerned. If I had known, I'd have reported it to you at the time, as a responsible citizen who wanted to see the law upheld. But I'm sure he went on to bigger things, that he wasn't involved just in dealings at the school gates any more.'

‘We think you're right, Mr Lennox.' Lambert smiled encouragingly. He didn't often flatter people, but he would use whatever was necessary to hurry on his investigation. ‘So let's agree off the record that Mr Durkin was a thoroughly unsavoury character. What else can you tell us about the way he made his money?'

Ron nodded sagely. He liked this. They were fellow-professionals now, in the pursuit of a villain. A dead villain, but then villains were better dead. ‘I'm pretty sure he was a blackmailer. The worst sort of crime, wouldn't you say, blackmail?'

‘Apart from murder, of course!' Lambert and Lennox had a little dual smile about that. ‘Most policemen find blackmailers pretty despicable, yes. And when they turn into murder victims, they are often the worst sort of victims, too, for us. They usually prove to have a lot of enemies, you see.'