The Fox in the Forest (10 page)

Bert Hook, who had so far written nothing in the notebook he had opened expectantly, said to the younger woman who sat primly in the big chair, “We need to know where you were, love. It’s standard practice when there is a death like this, you see.”

Lambert did not think that quoting the requirements of bureaucracy would have any effect, but he was wrong. Perhaps Hook’s reassuring Gloucestershire tones were more important than the words he used. She looked at him, studied the ballpoint poised over the pad as if she had never seen such an implement before, and said, “I see. What exactly would you like to know, then?”

Hook took over the questioning without a glance at his chief. “When exactly did you leave home?”

“On Monday. I didn’t come back until yesterday.”

So she had been away for two days and two nights. She did not seem to realize, and he must not tell her, that the movements of a spouse were always of great interest in cases of violent death. He said, “Did you go by car?”

“Yes. I took the Escort. I should have left it for Peter: he wouldn’t have been walking through the woods then.” There were no tears after this calm assertion. They would come later, no doubt.

Hook said, “You couldn’t know that at the time, though. You mustn’t blame yourself — you didn’t kill him.”

“No. But I feel as though I did. Have you any idea who did it, yet?”

There was a childlike simplicity about her, even now as they approached the key facts. He felt as though he were taking advantage of her, like an unscrupulous hypnotist abusing the trance he induces. But whatever her confusions, she seemed anxious to help them. She had even pointed out in her naivety how the removal of the car had left her husband vulnerable to a murderer who knew of his habits. Hook said, “Where were you in those days, love. We need to know.”

She shook her head. “I can’t tell you that.”

“I’m sorry, you’re going to have to. You see, when there is a serious crime like this, we check the movements of everyone involved, and we get the people they were with to confirm those facts. In that way, we can eliminate them from our inquiries.” He was glad to be able to feed in the jargon phrase; it made him feel a little less as though he were taking advantage of a child.

She looked at him, serious and unblinking. The brilliant blue eyes were very round in the unlined face. Framed in the corn-coloured hair, her features looked more than ever like those of an expensive Christmas doll. She said, “You mean, I have to have an alibi?”

He smiled at her, smoothing away the harshness of the thought. “If you like, yes. We never use the term. But it does help us if we can eliminate people from all suspicion. It saves us a lot of time, and we can then devote our energies to the people we have left.” He was talking desperately now, trying to preserve them for a little longer from the curtain they felt she must surely ring down between them.

She nodded, digesting this. “Yes, I see…It’s awkward for me, you see. He didn’t want me to tell you.”

They tried not to show the spurt of excitement her simple words shot through each of them. Lambert, sensing his colleague’s desperation, said, “But I’m sure that when he said that he didn’t realize how important it would be to us. We’re going to find who killed Peter, you know. We’re already making progress. But we need the help of those who were closest to him. Can you give us the name of anyone who can confirm your movements in the time you were away, Mrs Barton?”

For the first time, she dropped her eyes; it came as a considerable relief to them. Then she said, perfectly clearly but in a lowered voice, “I was with a man.”

Lambert put all his energies into maintaining the same even, unhurried tone. “Was this for the whole of the time you were away?”

“Almost all, yes. We spent the nights together.”

Hook said, “We need his name, I’m afraid, as we said.”

“He’s married. He doesn’t want our affair made public. I was only a bit of fun for him, anyway.” It was the first time she had been prepared to admit it to herself. The scales that might have clouded her eyes for months had dropped away in minutes with Peter’s death.

Lambert said firmly, “We’ll have to have his name, please. This is a murder inquiry.” The formality of the reminder was a relief after the perilous empathy into which she had drawn them.

She nodded, a responsible rather than a frivolous child again now. “His name’s Michael. Michael Crawley.”

She gave them his address, assured them that she knew of no one who would have wanted to kill her husband — apparently she did not even consider Crawley as a candidate — and offered them her sister’s address as the place where they could contact her if she was not here. As they rose and took an awkward leave of her, she looked round the stark room and said, “Barbara seems to have taken down my Christmas decorations. Perhaps she thought they might upset me now.” She looked towards the corner of the room. “She’s moved the book I bought for Peter, too. There was no need, really.”

They were in the hall, thanking the sister for her efforts and the tea, when they heard the first sobs from behind the closed door. The three of them were arrested for a moment by that ancient, intimate sound. It came as a relief to all four people in the house.

14

The English village still has a romantic image. Town dwellers muse fondly on the scents of summer hedgerows, thrushes in joyous song, and the sound of willow on leather on the village green.

It is not entirely a false image, even today, though it ignores the ubiquitous internal combustion engine and the malicious translation of rural cottages into city-dwellers’ weekend residences. But it is essentially a summer image. Winter is different: only those who live in the country know how different. And even countrymen have mercifully little experience of the changes wrought when violent death clamps itself upon a village community.

Woodford had its village green. In summer, they even played cricket upon it. But on Boxing Day morning the grass here looked grey rather than green; after the brief and sunless mildness of Christmas, the frost was on its way back. The green was deserted, unkempt, unloved.

Lambert and Hook looked across the green for a moment without speaking, towards the churchyard where the bishop with whom Peter Barton had argued so fiercely would presently murmur conventional obsequies over the vicar’s mortal remains. Then they turned the other way and went round the back of the Crown to seek out the house they wanted.

Council houses do not generally age well. The four properties here had been erected in optimistic postwar days by a council determined to do right by the virtuous underprivileged. They were showing their age now. They had been neglected for twenty years; their stuccoed walls were grey with dirt and veined with scores of tiny cracks, the blue of their paintwork was peeling where the summer sun had blistered its surface. These residences had none of the raddled dignity of Victorian houses in decay, none of those echoes of architectural exuberance which sounded still in the buildings of earlier eras. They waited like crippled beasts for some stronger outside will to revive them or despatch them.

The only concessions the designer of these houses had made to anything beyond utility were the small red-tiled porches which hooded the front entrances of each of them. Some of the tiles were cracked now, but the little pitched roofs over each door remained the one tiny flamboyance in these exteriors, as though ageing harlots had dashed on a hasty lipstick in an attempt to perpetuate attractions now long gone.

The porch was so small that the two large men in dark suits almost filled it. To Charlie Webb as he opened the door the sky seemed to have darkened with their presence. Lambert looked him up and down for a second before he said, “Mr Webb? We need to ask you a few questions.”

They had to wait for a moment of stupefaction to pass from Charlie before he said, “You’d better come inside.” He peered past them at the other houses and the back of the Crown, trying to see who might have observed their arrival here.

The old woman in the rocking-chair looked them up and down, then split her narrow face into a delighted grin, full of the mischief of the girl everyone but her had long forgotten. “It’s the fuzz, Samuel!” she told the black and white cat. It stretched itself on the window-sill in deference to this new presence, putting the tinselled artificial Christmas tree in grave danger as it did so. Granny Webb held her wrists out together and said, “I’ll come quietly, governor. Put the bracelets on.” Then she cackled heartily at the excellence of her wit, while Lambert sighed inwardly about the side effects of television crime series.

Charlie said wearily, “Behave yourself, Gran,” like a parent struggling with a hyperactive child. He was unable to keep the affection out of his tone, and for an instant only, the anxiety left his face. He tickled the cat beneath its chin and it rubbed the side of its head luxuriously against his thin arm.

“What you been doin’ then, young Charlie?” said the old woman. Virtually housebound nowadays, she was delighted to have a little drama brought into her house with the advent of these men. It must be harmless excitement, because Charlie was a good lad. So she might as well have a bit of fun out of it. Pity old Margery next door but one had gone last year: she’d have no one to tell now about this. “Don’t you go framin’ ‘im. I’ve heard all about bent coppers, you know.” She grinned with satisfaction at this demonstration of her grasp of the underworld patois.

Then she clasped her arms across the place where her waist had once been and laughed again, to show it was a joke. Coppers who framed the innocent were part of that fictional world she now found more attractive than the real one. She could not believe that any real policeman would behave other than honourably; her sole experience of the species was in the form of the village bobby of an age that was gone. “Ask the fuzz to sit down, then,” she called to her grandson, waving loftily towards the single armchair on the other side of the hearth.

Bert Hook grinned back at her, almost conspiratorially. Then, looking at her grandson for the first time since they had come into the crowded living-room, he said, “Like to show us your bedroom, son?”

The boy led the way gratefully upstairs, while the old lady remained in her chair and cursed her arthritis and the ineffectiveness of modern medicine. The bedroom was surprisingly spacious. These had been designed as family houses, and this had been the main bedroom, designed to afford parents the privacy and status which was still thought appropriate in the families of the late ‘forties. There were two windows, and Charlie’s four-foot bed and single bedroom suite left plenty of floor space. He had been able to install a table, an upright chair and two bulbous old leather armchairs without overcrowding the floor.

If the dimensions of the room were surprising, its tidiness was even more so, in view of its occupant. There were no clothes on the floor, no washing awaiting removal from the furniture. A pop group poster with a lean, earnest blonde girl in the forefront was attached with Blu-Tack to the back of the door. A coloured photograph of a rider cornering in a motorcycle race, knee almost touching the tarmac, helmet and goggles making him anonymous as a spaceman, filled the space between the dressing-table mirror and the corner of the room.

This was not just a bedroom, then. It was a den to which the boy could retire when the generations stretched too dangerously between him and that suffocating compound of love and bewilderment downstairs. An insulation against the battered pensioner syndrome which was the kind of ‘domestic’ the police were called to ever more frequently in the ‘nineties. A place where he might occasionally bring a friend to listen to the records stacked neatly by the player on top of the chest of drawers. They were finding out a little more with each minute about this young man and his way of life.

Lambert said, “We know some things already. You’re Charles Webb. Aged twenty. You live here with just your gran. And you work shifts at the Electricity Works.”

The implication was that they knew much more than that, but were not going to waste time airing the full extent of their knowledge. Charlie, who had things he wished to conceal, gulped and nodded. He wondered if he looked quite as pale as he felt at that moment.

The two men sat in the armchairs and motioned him to sit on the upright chair by the table. He found that he was facing the morning light as it fell upon him from the window, and wondered if this positioning was deliberate or accidental. His face felt as exposed as if it had been beneath a spotlight. Lambert said, “You know why we’ve come here, I’m sure. We’re investigating the murder of the Reverend Peter Barton on Tuesday last.”

“I guessed it must be that. But I don’t think I can —”

“We’re questioning everyone in the village, as you might expect. But your movements interest us more than most.”

They watched Charlie as he licked his lips. Investigations were always urgent, and yet within that urgency there were moments when one had to behave as though there was no earthly reason to hurry. Moments when time was on the side of the investigators, and silence could be allowed to stretch until it became unbearable.

The small purple eruptions of Charlie Webb’s spots became more noticeable as the sallow skin around them seemed to whiten and stretch. He said, “I can’t think of any reason why my —”

“You go into the forest regularly. Past the spot where a man was shot. You can think of reasons why: you’re not stupid, lad. Neither are we.”

“Just because I use that track sometimes doesn’t mean —”

“You were there on Tuesday?”

“Yes. I went to work that way.” He didn’t make any pretence of having to think about it, as he had planned to do. His nerve hadn’t held for very long. He hadn’t thought it would be like this. Lambert’s grey eyes seemed to be looking right into his brain, and discovering a grim amusement in what they saw there.

“On your motorbike,” said this omniscient tormentor. Webb nodded and the Superintendent said, “We found the tracks, near the body. Someone will need to match your tyres with them presently. In case they’re needed in evidence.”

He was too well used to working with Hook to need to give him any sign, so that he was able to keep his gaze steadily upon the unlined, adolescent face as Hook said, “Time?”

For a moment Webb looked uncomprehendingly at the point to which the attack had been switched. He saw the Sergeant with ballpoint poised impassively above the page of his notebook and understood. “It would be about twenty to four. I was on at four o’clock.” Watching the pen moving rhythmically over the paper in Hook’s round, precise hand, he was drawn into further words by a compulsion to fill the silence with which these men seemed so much at ease. “The shift is six to two, you see, but I was doing two hours of overtime. So I was at work well before the vicar was shot.”

He knew he had made a mistake as soon as the words were out, but they seemed in no hurry to exploit it. Lambert allowed two rooks outside the window to conclude a raucous duet before he said, “And how would you know what time that was, Mr Webb?”

Charlie looked at the heels of the ‘trainers’ he could see peeping from beneath the bedspread where it just failed to reach the carpet. He felt he would never again look into the faces of his tormentors. “I — I thought everyone knew when he was killed.”

“It took us a post-mortem examination and a lot of interviews to establish the time of death with reasonable certainty. Yet you seem very confident about it.”

“I heard he was shot on the way home from Ashbridge — I can’t remember where.” Charlie Webb’s voice sounded very surly as the confidence seeped from him.

Lambert said, “Are you telling us that you weren’t around at the time this killing took place?”

“I was at work. I’ve already told you.”

“Indeed you have…What kind of work do you do, Mr Webb?”

Charlie glanced at him suspiciously, forgetting his resolve to keep his eyes on the carpet. “General maintenance, they call it. Sweeping round machines. Checking from the dials that they’re working as they should be.” He preferred to be vague, even here when it was in his interests to be precise. He was reluctant to admit to anyone that the job wasn’t much more than cleaning. It had been supposed to be a route to better, more skilled things when he took it on, but he had never got round to taking the exams. Had never worked for them properly, in fact. He made a resolve to begin studying systematically in the new year. When all this was over.

“The kind of work that allows you to nip out for an hour when things are quiet, is it, Mr Webb?”

Charlie thought he was going to faint. He gripped the table beside him hard to stop the room from moving. They couldn’t know, surely? If they were trying to trap him, there was still a chance, if he kept calm. When he spoke, the voice seemed for a moment to come from another person, behind a screen to his left. “I was there all the time on that night. I don’t know what you’re on about. Ask —ask anyone at work.”

An outsider would not even have noticed the tiny nod with which Lambert indicated that his sergeant should take over the questioning. Hook said quietly, “We did ask, Charlie. That’s how we know you were missing from work for over an hour. At about the time when you’ve just told us that Peter Barton was murdered.”

Webb’s voice was so low that they could scarcely hear him as he said, “Dave Jackson told you. He said he wouldn’t.” His face set like that of a small boy whose parent has broken a promise.

“Dave Jackson did no more than his duty, Charlie. He’d have been in big trouble if he hadn’t. He wasn’t sneaking on you to a teacher. He was assisting the police in a murder inquiry.”

Webb said dully, “I’ll lose my job.”

“You’ll lose more than that, Charlie, if you’re not careful. A man has been brutally killed, and we haven’t arrested anyone for it yet.”

Hook was reasoning with him as if he were no more than a difficult child. Lambert would have been much harsher in these circumstances, but he knew Bert had a way of getting results with lads like this. Hook’s own background as a Barnardo’s boy made him effective with lads like Webb who had lost their parents. Sometimes he could be too sympathetic, but that could be adjusted in due course, if necessary. He spoke almost like a father as he said, “Where were you, Charlie? We need to know: you can see that, now.”

Webb nodded miserably. He said, “I went out to meet a girl. It’s difficult here, you see, with Gran. I only meant to be about twenty minutes, but we had an argument.” He seemed to be rehearsing his explanation to the Works Manager, still unaware of the seriousness of his position.

Hook said, “All right. We’ll need her name, Charlie.”