Mortal Taste (25 page)

Chris knew it was true, but he was riled by the other man's dismissal. ‘You never know what you might turn up. Even if we could eliminate him from the inquiry, it would be a help.'

The old CID excuse for sticking big feet in where you did not want them. But it was an argument to which there was no real answer. The superintendent said reluctantly, ‘I suppose it might. But we'd need to be absolutely certain you weren't using any information which might blow the cover of any of my officers.'

Chris Rushton said, ‘You'd have that guarantee, of course, sir. I might even undertake to interview Derek Minton myself, if Chief Superintendent Lambert sanctions it.'

He had thrown Lambert in at the end to outrank that sardonic voice from the Drugs Squad. It was not until several hours later, when he was driving up the M5 towards Birmingham, that DI Rushton thought this might not be such a good idea after all.

Steve Fenton drew up chairs for his visitors and positioned them carefully where he wanted them. He felt as though he was moving pawns in a game of chess which was rapidly running against him.

Lambert said, ‘I wanted to check that you hadn't thought of anyone who could vouch for your whereabouts on the Monday night when Peter Logan was killed.'

‘No. Except for Jane Logan, of course.'

Lambert gave him a thin smile. ‘You didn't have any phone calls during the evening?'

‘None that I answered, no.'

Hook coughed discreetly. He had not taken his eyes off Fenton since they came into the comfortable office, with its prints of Tewkesbury Abbey and Gloucester Cathedral on the walls, its sepia photographs of a frowning W. G. Grace and a smiling Wally Hammond. He said, ‘There is a weapon unaccounted for, Mr Fenton. You admitted to possession of a Smith and Wesson revolver, of the type we are now certain was used in this killing.'

‘I don't think I told you the make of pistol. But it
was
a Smith and Wesson, as a matter of fact. I think I did tell you, however, that I haven't had such a weapon for several years now.'

‘That is correct, sir.' Hook nodded, as though very contented to see things falling into place. ‘You told us you had given the weapon to the Cheltenham Small Arms Club.'

‘Yes. I wasn't shooting any more, even at the club. When the regulations were tightened up after those terrible shootings at Hungerford, I thought I'd get rid of it rather than keep paying to renew a licence I didn't need.'

‘Yes, sir. That's what needs clearing up, you see. The club has no record of receiving such a gift from you.'

Hook had spoken so quietly, adopted so thoroughly the pose of a man fulfilling a dull routine, that his bombshell left a silence on its heels which seemed the more profound. In the pause which followed his statement, they could hear voices from the rooms outside, a shout from the street beyond them, a sudden burst of laughter from somewhere along a corridor. Eventually Steve Fenton said very quietly, ‘You think I used that pistol to kill Peter Logan, don't you?'

‘And did you, Mr Fenton?' This was Lambert, as brisk and direct as Hook had been measured.

‘No.'

‘So where is that weapon now?'

‘I don't know. I – I haven't seen it for years. I thought I'd given it to the shooting club.'

A murderer needs to lie better than that, thought Lambert. This man isn't a natural killer. But then not many murders are committed by natural killers. The majority of killings are committed by ordinary people who find themselves in a desperate situation. He said, ‘You'll have to give us a better explanation than that. Peter Logan was shot through the back of his head with a Smith and Wesson.'

Fenton shook his head hopelessly. ‘I didn't kill him. I haven't seen that pistol for years.'

They probed a little more, received nothing from him, then left him sitting dejectedly at his desk. He was well aware that they didn't believe him about the pistol.

It is boring work, keeping a man under surveillance. And cold, once it gets into October. DC Cox was glad of the pale autumn sun which shone fitfully on the windscreen of the Rover, warming the little box which was his prison for most of his eight hours of duty.

Martin Sheene wasn't going to go out again, that seemed pretty clear. Not in the daylight hours, anyway. Just his luck that the bloody man should go out last night half an hour after his shift was over. The murder team seemed quite excited by what they'd found when they'd followed him. Not that they bothered to tell DC Cox about their findings, of course: the blokes who hung around all day and did the weary work of surveillance were the last to be told what was going on.

Just when he had slumped into his seat and thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket, there was action. Limited action, but definitely better than nothing. Sheene had a visitor. A man with the collar of his car coat turned up; a man who looked to right and left along the road before he went up to the door of Sheene's place; a man who gave every sign of being up to no good. DC Cox noted the time of his entry as

14.13 precisely.

Martin was glad when the man announced that he was from the group. He didn't need to say which group; a friendly face from people who shared his interests was just what Martin needed.

But when he had taken his caller inside and invited him to sit down, Martin Sheene found that this man was anything but friendly. He ignored the seat suggested, then cut through Martin's nervous remark about the weather and said, ‘You shouldn't have come last night. You were told not to come.'

‘I know. But I needed the company. Needed someone to talk to. My mind was reeling. I'm suspended from Greenwood School. I've probably lost the only job I'm any good at. The only one I really want to do. I needed someone who'd—'

‘You shouldn't have come. I'm here to tell you that. I'm also here to tell you that you're out. No one wants you there again.'

Martin Sheene could not believe that the group was shutting him out. He felt the last planks of his rickety refuge splintering about his ears. ‘Who are you? What authority have you to—?'

‘Every authority. I'm employed by the group. Employed among other things to see that little turds like you get the message. You're not wanted, Sheene.'

Martin felt the panic he'd always felt in the face of physical violence, whether real or threatened. He tried hard to assert himself. ‘Now look here, you can't just come into my house and—'

‘But I have done, haven't I? And unless you cooperate with me, things could get a good deal worse for you, Mister Sheene.'

He lingered contemptuously over the three syllables of the name, hissing the sibilants with a curl of his thin lips, and Martin was suddenly back in the world of the playground bully, fighting against the panic he felt hammering at his temples. He said faintly, ‘Who are you?'

The man gave his first smile. It was not a pleasant one. ‘Never you mind that, Martin. Just give me the fullest possible answers to my questions, or things could turn quite nasty for you.'

Martin was unable to look into his tormentor's face. He became conscious of the man's hand, clenching and unclenching in a tight black leather glove. ‘What – what is it you want to know?'

‘What did Logan know, sunshine?' The man's eyes glittered an icy blue; they were within a foot of Martin's.

‘He knew about me. He'd caught me taking a couple of boys into the junior science lab, and he said—'

‘Said what a naughty lad you were, yes. We know that. And what did you tell him?'

‘Nothing.' Martin was suddenly afraid that this wolfish man was going to hit him, hard and repeatedly. He could not take his eyes off that black fist as it clenched and unclenched.

‘You told him about the ring, didn't you?'

Martin had never heard it called a ring before. They'd always referred to themselves as a group. ‘Ring' seemed somehow much worse. ‘He knew about it. Or at least he gave me the impression he knew.' Martin was suddenly aware of how Peter Logan had made bricks with very little straw, how he had pretended he knew much more than he did. By this means he had trapped Martin into admitting more than he ever should have done. ‘I – I said there were a group of us, yes. He gave me the impression he knew already, and I only realized later that—'

‘You've been a silly man, Martin. A very silly man. You're going the right way to finish up like Logan.'

The visitor was looking hard into Sheene's face. He brought a second black-gloved hand up to join the one which riveted Martin's gaze, and rubbed the two slowly together. They were acquiring a life of their own, those hands, in Martin's sickly imaginings.

He licked his lips and said, ‘Peter Logan phoned the National Paedophile Unit about us, you know, after he'd spoken to me.'

‘Yes. You didn't do yourself any good with Peter Logan, did you?'

‘No.'

‘And you didn't do yourself any good with the ring, not when you went grassing on your friends to your head teacher.'

‘It wasn't like that. Peter seemed to know all about it already, the way he talked.' Martin felt the flesh on the back of his neck beginning to creep. Was it because of him that Peter Logan had died? Had those fists which curled and uncurled beneath his horrified gaze placed the pistol against the head of a man who knew too much for his own safety?

Those hands now came slowly up towards his face, then held each side of his head in a vice-like grip, forcing him to open his eyes and look into the man's face as he tried to cringe away. ‘Last warning, Sheene. You don't go near the ring again. You're out. And when the police come sniffing around, you know nothing. You give them a single name and you're dead meat. Right?'

‘Right.'

The fingers and thumbs which were grasping his cheeks and his ears relaxed slowly, as if reluctant to release their hold. Even when the man lowered the hands slowly to his sides, those hard blue eyes still looked into his face, as if fixing its image in their retinas for future use.

As he shut the door behind this sinister visitor, Martin Sheene felt floods of relief coursing upwards to his brain. His head swam. He forced himself to move to a window to make sure that the man was really leaving.

The man who had loomed so large in the low-ceilinged room seemed a normal size as he moved down the path and away from the house. He was not as tall as he had seemed during his threats, a little round-shouldered, and he walked with a slight limp which Martin had not noticed until now. Almost a diminutive figure, in fact. He did not look back towards the house.

But as he shut the garden gate behind him, Martin caught a last glimpse of those hands, strong as steel beneath the thin black leather.

DC Cox recorded the time of the man's departure as 14.24 hours. He relayed this information to Oldford CID, along with his description of Sheene's visitor.

Jane Logan was back at work in the florist's shop she managed so efficiently. The owner was glad to see her calm presence and direction back in place. The two girls who worked in the shop had made some embarrassing mistakes in the week when they had operated without supervision.

It was there, amidst the heady and incongruous scents of roses and chrysanthemums, that Lambert and Hook conducted their last interview with Jane Logan. It was the first time they had seen her wearing make-up, which she had donned to resume her working role. With her blue eyes and blonde hair, her strong features and air of command, she looked here a busy and attractive working woman rather than a grieving widow.

She took them into a small room behind the displays of flowers in the shop; they sat on upright chairs around a scarred wooden table which had seen much service. Lambert said, ‘We saw Mr Fenton about half an hour ago. I expect he's spoken to you since then.'

‘No. He may have tried to get through, but the line's been occupied. We've four funerals on Thursday and Friday. I've been talking to the bereaved about the floral arrangements.'

It was probably true, Lambert decided: this was an intelligent woman, who'd been caught concealing information from them already. She wasn't going to lie when there was little point in doing so. He said, ‘We were talking to Mr Fenton about a Smith and Wesson revolver we know was in his possession. And in particular about the way in which he disposed of it.'

For a brief moment, there was panic in the light blue eyes. Then she said, ‘I didn't want it around, that was all. Not once you'd said it was the kind of pistol which had been used to kill Peter.'

‘So you disposed of it.' Lambert nodded slowly, seizing avidly upon the morsel she had offered him while giving her the impression that Fenton had already revealed all this.

She nodded, still unaware that she was offering them anything new. ‘I said I'd get rid of it for him. It seemed safer that way. I drove out and dumped it in the Severn on Sunday night. I was glad to see it go. I've always hated guns.'

‘Why did you dispose of it like that, Mrs Logan?'

‘I told you. We'd heard that Peter had been killed with a pistol of that make or something very similar. It didn't seem sensible for you to find it at Steve's house.'

‘Indeed. You were anticipating a police search of his residence at some stage, were you?'

She looked hard into the long, lined face. Perhaps she was realizing now that she had given away more than was necessary. ‘I don't know the rules about search warrants. For all I know, you were likely to search Steve's house and mine at any moment.'

Without taking his eyes off her face, Lambert allowed himself a faint smile at such naivety. ‘Did you kill your husband with that pistol, Mrs Logan?'

‘No, of course I didn't.'

‘Did Mr Fenton shoot him through the back of the head with that weapon? Is that why you were so anxious to see the last of it?'