The Fox in the Forest (11 page)

Webb looked up suddenly. “No. I can’t do that. Her parents don’t know, you see. I can’t drag her into this, not even to save me.”

Hook said, “You can and will, Charlie.” He was very quiet, very persuasive. Lambert would have snarled at the lad: the last thing he needed at this stage was a pimply youth going quixotic upon him.

But Hook’s way won. Webb gave them the name and address quietly enough a moment later. They were on their way out, ducking under the chains of coloured paper which were strung diagonally across the room downstairs, before Lambert spoke again. They had taken their leave of Granny Webb when he turned back to Charlie and asked, “By the way, do you happen to have a shotgun, Mr Webb?”

The old woman, who had been disappointed to see them departing, was highly amused. “‘Course he has. Spends all morning, sometimes, just cleaning it. Keeps it in the shed down the garden, don’t you, love? With his motorbike, it is.”

Her cackle came to Charlie like a cracked bell tolling his doom.

15

Douglas ‘Robbie’ Robertson, if that was his real name, should have been cowed by captivity. Instead, he was in truculent mood.

Perhaps living rough inverts men’s normal standards. Certainly he was not impressed when he was confronted again by the top brass in a murder investigation, Superintendent John Lambert and Detective-inspector Christopher Rushton. He called them that himself when he came into the interview room; they were struck again by his familiarity with police ranks and his refusal to be unnerved by the cramped harshness of the cheerless room with its bare, windowless walls.

His acquaintance with their methods suggested an old lag, though he had not that air of prison darkness about him which most CID men think they can detect in such men, and the newly computerized fingerprint records had produced nothing. They had persuaded him to shave, and then set two young detective-constables to work on the books of mug shots, to see if they could turn him up as a criminal. The exercise had produced nothing. The files of British Steel had thrown up two Douglas Robertsons who had worked at the Corby plant before its shutdown over a decade earlier, but there were no details extant, and, of course, no photographs.

They were going to have to release him, unless they could unearth something quickly. Or bluff him. Rushton, who was more and more convinced of his guilt, was determined to try that. In answer to Robertson’s softly voiced opinion that it was time for him to be moving on, he snapped, “Don’t think you’re going anywhere until we’re ready to release you!”

“Oh, I think I am, you know.” The man seemed positively to relish the moment. “I enjoyed my Christmas dinner, and your cells feel quite well heated after the forest in winter. Because of that, I’ve been content to let you hold me for considerably more than twenty-four hours without charging me. But it’s time to be off now, I think. Unless you think you can arrange a magistrate’s order on Boxing Day to hold me.” He smiled at them blandly, challengingly.

Lambert thought him so confident of his ground that he might go on talking, perhaps giving away unwittingly what he had so carefully guarded during formal interrogation, but the man was too shrewd for that. His brown eyes became wary as the older man tried to lead him towards revelations. He looked younger than they had thought him at first, for he had allowed his long, unkempt hair to be trimmed short at the same time as he shaved off his beard. His appearance now reinforced the feeling Lambert had had all along that this was a man playing the part of a tramp, rather than the genuine article.

Rushton acknowledged for the first time that they were going to have to observe the due procedures and let Rushton go. “We’ll need to know your whereabouts,” he said, “and you’ll need to inform us if you leave the area.”

Robertson’s brown eyes twinkled. “I am ‘of no fixed abode’, I’m afraid, Mr Rushton. Makes it difficult for me to give you an address. And we knights of the road are men of sudden decisions, not possible for ordinary citizens like you. We’re creatures of impulse, moving about the country as the fancy takes us.” He looked steadily at Rushton and folded his arms, contriving to make it seem a gesture of insolence.

Lambert looked at the squat frame, the powerful forearms clasped before him as though presented for inspection. Whatever his background, this man had kept himself in prime physical condition, well nourished but not overweight, hard, confident, observant. When Lambert had hoped a few moments ago that the man might overplay his hand, Robertson had been instantly aware of the danger. He wore up to date clothing and boots, well chosen for his way of life; there was not an article about him that was a cast-off from a more affluent society. He did not seem a man to spend a week in the forest without some definite objective.

Yet they could not hold him. He knew that, had indeed just told them how thoroughly he knew it. And they had turned up no hard evidence to take to a magistrate, even if a court had been available to them. Lambert told him as much, grudgingly.

Robertson afforded him another of his humourless smiles. “That’s because there’s nothing to find, Superintendent.” He managed to invest his pronunciation of that rank with something like contempt.

It was probably that which made Lambert think of a new tack when the man had gone back to his cell. “That fellow must know something, whether or not he was involved himself. And he certainly knows all about us and the way we operate, Chris.”

“But we haven’t turned up a record for him. I doubt whether he’s been inside for any length of time.” Rushton searched feverishly for an idea which would demonstrate his mettle to Lambert. Even as a DI, he still felt the need to prove himself to the older man: it was a strain in him which irritated both of them. “Do you suppose he’s ever been a JP? Or a lawyer of some kind?”

It was a desperate suggestion. Neither of them entertained it seriously, but Lambert could not dismiss it as summarily as he would have done had it come from someone like Bert Hook. There was a stiff politeness between these two which got in the way of his normal style. “Not a JP. He’s hardly old enough, for one thing. I suppose it’s possible he had a dose of legal training somewhere along the way. Quite a few jobs give a smattering of that. I think you might be right that we’ve been chasing the wrong hare in assuming a criminal record. What if he was on the right side of the law in this mysterious previous existence?”

Rushton nodded slowly. “It’s a possibility, I suppose. We tend to assume that potential murderers have always been bad lads. But if he wasn’t a wrong ‘un, where do we look? Especially at this time of the year, when all the records offices are either closed or operating on skeleton staffs.”

“Closer to home. Let’s have a look at ex-coppers.”

Rushton grimaced. “There’s a hell of a lot of coppers leave the force, sir, as we know only too well. If we’re going back ten years and more —”

“But the number who are actually officially discharged rather than being persuaded to resign is much smaller. And recorded carefully, in case such men are ever tempted to try to rejoin the force. Let’s start with them. It’s a long shot, but worth trying. If it turns up nothing, we might try Army records: the Services dispense with a number of psychopaths each year; injured policemen in various parts of the country can testify to that.”

“I’ll set the wheels in motion.” For once, as he watched Rushton making a note on his pad, Lambert was glad to have this man behind him; there was no more efficient or diligent officer in following through this kind of task.

For the moment, he could dismiss Douglas ‘Robbie’ Robertson from his mind, just as he would shortly have to lose him physically from his sight: the machine was doing all they could think of to check on him and his past. Lambert said a little wearily, “What else have we turned up, Chris?”

“Not a lot that seems significant at the moment, sir. The Scene of Crime team have found nothing very helpful. A couple of twelve-bore cartridge cases, almost certainly the ones discharged at Barton. Fibres on the corpse’s clothing which tally with a sweater worn by Arthur Comstock on the day of the murder. Sounds exciting, until you remember that Barton travelled in Comstock’s car only a couple of hours before he was killed.”

“Have we checked out Comstock’s account on his whereabouts at the time of the death?”

“I saw his sister myself, sir.” Rushton was faintly pained that his Superintendent could even entertain the idea that such an obvious procedure might not yet have been implemented. “She confirms that he picked her up in Cheltenham — had to wait for her there, because her coach was half an hour late — and took her back to his cottage. I’ve checked that with the bus company, and it’s correct. Unless we presume conspiracy between the two of them, there doesn’t seem any easy way he could have been back in the forest at the time of the shooting. But he did take the car down to the village shop as soon as they got into the cottage. He could have gone into the woods instead, or afterwards, I suppose. I’ll check with the shopkeeper myself to see just what time he was there.”

“Man called Farr. Doesn’t like the police and keeps a Doberman.” Lambert grinned at Rushton’s wry face.

“There was a slip of paper with Comstock’s telephone number on it in Barton’s pocket. He said he gave it to Barton in case he wanted to ring for a lift home from Ashbridge.”

Lambert said thoughtfully, “He’s the only person we’ve located so far who knew for certain that Barton would be coming along that track.”

“And at that particular time.”

Lambert said, “I suppose there was no joy with young Charlie Webb’s shotgun?” Rifle-shootings often left evidence as strong as a fingerprint; shotguns were much less distinctive, as well as much more widespread.

“Nothing very useful. It could have been the weapon, and it’s probably been fired recently. That’s as far as the ballistics boys will go. It’s a twelve-bore, like the murder weapon, but there are plenty of those around as well as Charlie’s. Mind you, we haven’t found any other young men who were absent from work at exactly the time of the killing.”

“But only people on shift work, like Charlie, would have been noticed. Most other people could simply have left work a few minutes early. There aren’t too many large works with clocking off systems round here. What about Webb’s girlfriend?”

“We found her easily enough. These liaisons aren’t as secret as young people like to think. She’s a typist in an estate agent’s office; he met her when she’d finished work. She bears out his story, more or less. She’s vague about the time they met and how long they were together. No doubt it would have been possible for Webb to ride his motorbike into the forest and shoot the vicar, then see her to establish an alibi of sorts.”

It didn’t seem likely to either of them. Compared with the man who had sat defiantly opposite them in the interview room a few moments earlier, Charlie Webb seemed a slight candidate for homicide. But panic or desperation can lead to violence in the most unlikely people, as the annals of murder document in awful detail. It is such individual, ‘one-off’ crimes which can be the most difficult to solve.

“Have you turned up anyone else who might have been in the forest at the time?”

“The house-to-house hasn’t turned up much, so far. There are a couple of Forestry Commission people who were working in the woods all week, as you would expect. One of them lives in Ashbridge, one of them in a village five miles further on. They left the woods at about four on the day of the murder. They could have gone back, of course: they know their way about the forest at night much better than most. One of them says he was in his house on his own at the time: his wife was away for the day. But God knows why either of them would want to kill Barton.” Rushton shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. He knew the Chief did not like to discuss motive until opportunity had been established, but the absence of it worried him more than usual this time.

“Anyone else from Woodford or Ashbridge known to have been in the forest at the time?” Lambert was aware that he was beginning to sound desperate: any other possibilities they were able to discuss sounded very thin when contrasted with the massive, sinister presence of the man the station sergeant was at this moment releasing.

Rushton said, “No one is known to have been there. Almost anyone could have been, of course, particularly from Woodford. The place is less than twenty minutes’ walk from the village, and most of them know the tracks through the woods well. Tommy Farr had shut the village shop by the time of the killing, and he goes into the woods every day. Webb and the foresters we’ve already talked about.” Rushton counted them off on his fingers as he spoke. “We’ve seen Michael Crawley, Clare Barton’s lover. He certainly wasn’t anywhere near here at the time of the killing: there are witnesses to that. He could have hired someone to remove the husband, of course.”

“And do we think that’s likely?” Lambert took a small, malicious pleasure in putting Rushton on the spot. He was unlikely to have interviewed a man who lived sixty miles away himself.

“I haven’t seen him myself, sir, as you’ll appreciate. The officer who saw him thought not. He seems to be a married man who saw his chance of a bit on the side and took it. He’s appalled to find himself drawn into a murder case and devastated by the thought that he might have to give evidence in court. It might all be a front, of course. I told Bath CID that if further evidence emerged you might want to see Crawley yourself in due course.”

Lambert noted that the tables had been turned neatly on him in that last sentence. Rushton had not made detective-inspector at thirty without learning much about the intricacies of working relationships. The Superintendent said, “There is, of course, Mrs Barton. With a lover in the background, she has more of a motive to kill her husband than we’ve unearthed so far for anyone else.”

The thought of that pathetic, doll-like figure waiting in the darkness of the forest to release the barrels of a shotgun upon her innocent spouse was chilling, even for a man habituated now to the depths of human evil. But there was no need for such melodrama. Like Crawley, she could have hired someone to fire the shotgun and made sure she was miles away herself at the time. Or she could have colluded with her lover. Sex was the most frequent element of violent murders, and Clare Barton had almost volunteered its presence to them in this case.

Lambert said heavily, “Has anything emerged from the people who were with the vicar on his last afternoon?”

“No. At least, we have only negative findings. Barton did not seem at all nervous or upset. There is no evidence at all that he entertained the idea that anyone might be trying to kill him. On the contrary, if we believe what Arthur Comstock says, Peter Barton insisted on walking home alone through the forest in the dark when he need not have done so; it’s difficult to believe that any man who had had even a hint that his life was in danger would have done that.”