Rest Assured (16 page)

‘You didn't detect any sign that he had in some way expected this?'

‘No. How the hell could he have done?'

‘Someone on the site, and maybe more than one person, knew what you would find in those woods. It's our job to find out who they might be. It's a legitimate question.' John Lambert allowed himself a mirthless smile, as though an idea had just occurred to him. ‘We might ask him the same thing about you. We have a large field of suspects and very few clues at the moment.'

‘Well, Mike Norrington and I were both horrified by what we found up there. That's unless he's a damned good actor. We assumed at the time that it was suicide. That was quite bad enough. Murder makes it worse. It probably means that someone we know has killed Wally.'

‘Quite. Who do you think that might be?'

George ignored the gasp from his wife beside him, willing himself not to look at her. ‘I've no idea who it might be.'

‘And what about you, Mrs Martindale? I expect you've both been thinking about it all day. It's only human to do so, don't you think?'

Mary glanced at George, who was staring hard at his shoes. ‘You can't discuss anything like that when the boys are here. And the word didn't get round that it wasn't suicide until about lunch-time. We've had rather a hectic day, so George and I haven't had much time to talk about it, really.' She didn't want to draw their attention to the fact that George had been off the site for over two hours this afternoon. She said almost brightly, as if the thought had just occurred to her, ‘I think you were upset and shocked by finding the body this morning, weren't you, George?'

She should have said that at the outset, thought Lambert, not as an afterthought. Mary Martindale might be one of life's innocents, as her broad and innocent black face suggested. Or she might be something much more malign; you had to keep all possibilities in mind, until you could establish more facts about a death. He said calmly to her husband, ‘Why did you go out this afternoon, Mr Martindale?'

‘It had nothing to do with Wally's death. Are my movements subject to police surveillance now?'

‘We have a record of everyone who has left the site today and how long they were away for. You are helping the police with their enquiries. You can refuse to answer, if you wish to do that.'

He wished to do exactly that. But it would attract their attention, and that was the last thing he wanted to do. He said carefully, ‘I have a cousin in Hereford. I was delivering some paint to him. He's going to paint the outside of his house, so he needed gallons of the stuff. Because I buy quite a lot for the council, the supplier gives me a big discount. It's all quite above board.'

‘Thank you. Have you any thoughts on who might have killed Walter Keane?'

‘No. We know a few people here quite well, but others hardly at all. It wouldn't be fair to speculate, even if I had any thoughts on this – which I haven't.'

‘But you'll go on thinking about Mr Keane's death. That's the normal human reaction. And however little you know about the people here, it's more than we know at the moment. So if you have any thoughts, please ring the number on this card immediately. Your thoughts will be treated confidentially.'

‘I'll think about who killed Wally. I'm sorry if I was touchy just now. When you're black and you've grown up in a city, you get used to being stopped and searched whenever there's trouble. It makes you anti-police. But black men have good reason to be so.'

‘I'm sure they do. You'll be treated exactly the same here as everyone else who had contact with Walter Keane.'

‘Which is everyone around here. Everyone knew Wally; everyone knows Debbie. You can't have a property here without doing that.'

‘So I gather. Solving this one isn't going to be easy. Where were you last night, Mr Martindale?'

‘With my wife and children, as you'd expect. All evening. And all through the night. Until Tommy and Nicky woke me, early this morning, and I went out and discovered a body.'

‘And you can confirm this, Mrs Martindale?'

‘Yes. You may not believe me, but it's true. The boys will confirm it, for the time they were awake.'

‘That won't be necessary.' Lambert stood up. ‘Thank you for your co-operation. We may need to see you again, when we know more about this killing.'

Mary stood at the window of her kitchen and watched the CID men departing. She continued to look up the line between the chalets, even after they had disappeared. She was looking there and not at George as she said dully, ‘You don't have a cousin in Hereford, George, and you don't have a concession on paint.'

J
ohn Lambert was up early on Sunday. He had almost finished his bowl of cereal when Christine came into the kitchen in her dressing gown.

She looked at him and felt a sharp, protective pain at the signs of ageing in his bent shoulders. But they weren't really old, were they? Late fifties was nothing nowadays, everyone told her. Well, everyone who was older than sixty told her. She said, ‘You need to take it easy, John. You had a long day yesterday.'

He was on the verge of turning tetchy and impatient, as he would have done thirty years ago. It was a good thing that he had to chew and swallow before he spoke; that instant was enough to modify his reaction. He said quietly, ‘I had a good night's sleep.'

‘You need to delegate. It's time you let younger men do more of the work.' She felt she was repeating a script she now knew by heart.

‘You can't delegate in a murder enquiry. You either take charge and accept responsibility or you don't. I've already delegated all I can. Chris Rushton does all the computer work. He logs everything we find and cross-references it with other crimes. He's welcome to that and he's good at it. I'm fortunate to have him.'

She knew that she wasn't going to win the argument, but it was nonetheless an exchange she needed to conduct. She came and stood behind him, kneading his shoulders, feeling the hard muscles of his neck relax as he dutifully slackened his body to take account of her efforts. ‘It's Sunday. You should be out in your garden, enjoying the results you've worked hard to achieve there.'

‘I will be. This is the exception, not the rule. I'm usually here at weekends, nowadays.'

‘You should be here all the time. You've earned the right.'

She hadn't mentioned the taboo word ‘retirement', but he did that, or came near enough to it. ‘You're a long time on a pension, Christine, with any luck. You're enjoying your part-time teaching. Let me go out with a bang rather than a whimper.'

If they let me, he thought. But hadn't the new Chief Constable told him only a couple of months ago that he wanted him to stay on for the foreseeable future? For as long as he got results, that meant. He needed results, almost as urgently as he'd needed them a quarter of a century ago, when he was making his way in CID. But he couldn't tell Christine that.

She threw in the last trump card from this hand which could not win. ‘Caroline may be round with the kids this afternoon.'

‘I'll try to get home. I can't promise anything, so don't wait for me if you're eating. It will depend on how the day develops.'

So even the grandchildren couldn't get him home. Christine said dully, ‘Don't worry about the time. I'll have something for you, whenever you get in.'

She watched him go out and lever his long frame into the old Vauxhall he stubbornly refused to change. She felt more anxious for him and more tender about him than she had ever felt when he was younger. It must be another of the unwelcome effects of age.

Sunday was not a day of rest for Mark Patmore. He had always felt more at risk on Sundays. All of his days dragged, not just Sundays. Yet all of his days were highly dangerous. When you were working undercover, you had to be alert the whole time, even when to others you seemed out of your mind on coke.

And the police who paid your wages every few months were no use to you. To be fair, they couldn't offer you direct help or support, without risking blowing your cover. But when they wanted something, they soon muscled in to tell you just what. A daft inspector who was desperate to up his conviction rate had almost got him killed three months ago. Too many chiefs, not enough Indians: the old complaint. Some of the sods who held your life in their hands didn't have a bloody clue what was going on.

Patmore had had his head shaved close, two days ago. The idea had been to make him fit in, to make him unnoticeable among the fighters and drinkers and muggers who inhabited the world around him. Now he wondered if the shaving had been done too well, whether his bare skull was too neat and perfect among the scruffier and filthier ones around him. Perhaps he should have damaged the skin a little, or made the cutting less even, more amateur. He was unusual among the people in the squat in having no major scar to parade as a badge of his belonging to this harsh and dangerous underworld.

He wondered how balanced his mind was now. It was difficult to tell, when there was no one to warn you that you were running off the rails. He hadn't been the same since he'd broken up with Amy. He knew that, but he couldn't be certain how much the rift had affected him. You couldn't expect to keep a partner, when you were undercover. She'd told him that, two months before they split up. You couldn't keep up a relationship when you saw each other once every five or six weeks, without prior notice. You shagged each other silly in the first hours after the long deprivation and hoped that sex would bring you together. It did, for a while, but you needed the small, stupid, insignificant things as well.

You weren't good at the small things, when you worked undercover. And you became less good at them with each passing week. After two years of it, you found you were no good at all. You didn't even know after two years quite what small things were, still less why they mattered. Amy had been right to go. He felt now that she was a stranger whom he'd hardly known at all. Perhaps he was unbalanced, as she'd said he was. Well, of course he was: you had to be unbalanced, even to consider working undercover.

Patmore was enjoying the bright Sunday-afternoon sunlight. Correction: he was enduring it, while other people were enjoying it. He heard them telling each other all around him that they were. Stupid sods. Hadn't they anything better to think about than the damned weather? And in any case, it wasn't a beautiful day, as they all kept saying it was. Sunlight wasn't good, when you worked undercover. You wanted thick clouds when you were outside and shut curtains when you were inside. Instinct told you to seek whatever shield you could. That's what working undercover was all about, though the daft sods who'd sent him here had no idea about that.

Mark opened up the Sunday paper he had picked out of the litter bin. He sat very still on the park bench as he pretended to read it. England were doing well in the Ashes, apparently. He looked at pictures of bright young men in white clothes and stupid postures. He told himself that they were older than him, even though he felt that they surely couldn't be. There was a lot of stuff about who was going to win the Open Championship, with pictures of Tiger Woods looking very strong and very aggressive. The Tiger looked much like some of the men you worked with in this real and more deadly game. Stupid game, golf. Quite popular in the police, nowadays. Why the hell couldn't they get real?

It was late in the afternoon and the park was less peopled now. Most of the Gloucester citizens had taken their small children home for tea, Mark supposed. He could remember tea with his Gran when he was a small boy; he could picture the table full of good things, when his wide eyes had been almost on a level with them. But the figures in that picture seemed to be from some old and outdated book, not from this world.

He listened to distant teenager shouts from somewhere behind him, but did not move his head. They were playing some sort of game, but he wasn't going to turn and see what it was. That would be a sign of weakness; Mark wasn't sure why, but it would. He rose, flung the newspaper violently back into the bin whence it had come, thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and walked towards the exit from the park.

He found that he was happier when he was back on streets which were a century old. The wide-open spaces of the park seemed to expose him, like a fly crawling across a window pane, and he was happier with bricks rising high on each side of him. This assignment would be over soon now, he decided. He didn't know why he thought that, but as soon as the idea had entered his head it became as concrete as any fact. Either he would deliver what was required of him to his police paymasters, or he would be sucked into the dark recesses of the world where he was operating and disappear for ever.

He didn't know why he was so certain that the climax was at hand. Nor was he frightened by the idea. He had lived with fear for so many months that his thought processes and his very mind were blunted by it, as if he were operating under some strange sort of anaesthetic. The bold steps he had used to leave the park did not last for long. His trainers were very worn and the wear was not even. The heels were gone almost completely on one side, so that he dropped quite naturally into the swift shuffle which was now his normal gait.

He could have afforded good trainers; the best, he supposed, if he'd wanted them. But they would have been a dead give-away, an announcement to anyone who cared to notice him that he was not what he pretended to be. You did not have new clothes or new shoes in the squat. Unless you stole them, of course. Some of them did that, but it wasn't an option for Mark Patmore. You weren't allowed to break the law when you were undercover. Those daft buggers who made the rules had no bloody idea.

He should have felt easier when he was back in the squat and lying in the darkness, but he felt only depressed. It would be over soon, whatever happened, he told himself. That wasn't much of a consolation. He looked at his watch. It was one of the things he had kept as he gradually discarded all the rest. You needed to know the time, when you worked for these people. You had to be there exactly when they said you should be, if you wanted to go on working for them and go on finding out more and more about them.