The Fox in the Forest (20 page)

Hook said, “Comstock is an ex-serviceman. Have we turned up any previous connection with Sharpe?”

Rushton said, “No. We’re still waiting for some of the information you asked for from military records. They had to get security clearance, and the holiday period delayed things as usual. Comstock’s service seems straightforward enough, though we should get the full details in the next twenty-four hours. Sharpe’s past is pretty murky, though, with his aliases and the kind of dubious activity he was involved in. I suppose it’s not impossible they could have met before.”

Lambert said, “Chris, you’ve been filing all the documentation on this case. What about the house-to-house inquiries? Have you thrown up anyone else, whether from the area or outside, that you would put in the frame for either of the killings?”

Rushton was immediate and definite. “No. We’ve checked out several that looked likely, but eliminated each one in turn. We didn’t find anyone beyond the people we’ve been discussing who was in the woods at around the time of Barton’s murder. Those who weren’t still at work were generally speaking at home with their families, so we’d have to assume conspiracies in unlikely places. On the morning when Sharpe died, we found two men who were at least in the vicinity of the woods at the right time, but we’ve interrogated them and we’re satisfied they had nothing to do with it.”

Lambert said, “Right, we’ll be off and see what we can get from Rachel Davidson and Arthur Comstock. By the way, Chris, you might like to listen to the tape of the interview we recorded with Johnny Pickering before you came in today. He should patently be under supervision, but you’ll find he had nothing to do with these killings. But I’ve a feeling I can’t pin down which says he has something to tell us about the case; I’m going to listen to what he said again myself later.”

As they buttoned up their coats and made ready for the freezing world outside, Rushton said a little desperately, “Any other thoughts before you go?”

Lambert paused in the doorway. “Just one. Not from me, but from the admirable Sergeant Hook.” Modest Bert looked suitably surprised. “It was Bert who suggested when we last exchanged notes that these killings might not be by the same person. It’s an interesting thought.”

28

The service cottage where Arthur Comstock lived was spotlessly clean and almost excessively tidy. Comstock was sawing logs in the small yard at the rear of the place when Lambert and Hook arrived. He directed them indoors and stood framed against the daylight in the rear doorway for a moment, his tall frame stooping a little to pass beneath the lintel. He inspected his dress, picked a few stray fragments of sawdust from his navy anorak, and dropped them on the flags outside; the habits of neatness built in over twenty-two years of service life were second nature to him now.

He did not offer them tea, and for a minute or so they all remained standing. He was not used to visitors, whether on business or pleasure. They observed his bearing, as their training had taught them to do. This man was stiff, watchful, cautious. But perhaps that was his normal attitude: they had not seen him in other situations, and were not likely to.

He did not inquire as most people did about the progress of the case. They wondered if he knew rather than surmised that they could not have made much headway; that might be significant. Belatedly, he asked them to sit down, and the two large men perched themselves side by side on the two-seater settee of the cottage suite, in front of the single long, low window of the room.

Before he sat down, Comstock looked round the small parlour, with its two neatly framed prints and its few carefully placed china ornaments, as if checking that all was in order. His dark hair was slicked straight back in the manner of an earlier generation, his small black moustache looked as if it had just been trimmed. It was bitterly cold in the room, but he did not seem to notice; after his exertions with the saw, he was warm enough, though he did not take off his anorak. All his behaviour implied that this need not take long, if they all behaved as sensible men.

Lambert said conventionally, “I know that you have been asked about these things before, but we need to go over some details again, now that we have a fuller picture of everyone’s movements at the time of the two murders.” Comstock nodded curtly, but made no other rejoinder. He did not appear particularly nervous. Perhaps he was a man without small talk; Lambert warmed to him a little as a kindred spirit. Then he nodded to Hook, who had his notebook open on his knee.

Bert said, “We want to check the details of your movements at the time of the Reverend Barton’s murder first of all. You said that you dropped him off in Ashbridge, drove to Cheltenham to pick up your sister, and returned here. Did you then remain in this house for the rest of the evening?”

Comstock looked at him as if he were trying to set a trap. “No. I went out again, briefly. I drove down to the village stores to pick up an order that Tommy Farr had made up ready for me. I’ve told your people that.”

Hook said, “Could you tell us exactly when this was?”

Comstock looked a little nettled, for the first time. “No, I couldn’t. I suppose it must have been some time around half past five. I thought Tommy might be closed, but I knew he’d open up for me. Is it important?”

Lambert said, “It could be. Peter Barton was killed at about that time.”

Arthur Comstock looked genuinely shocked at the implication. He said, “But I thought you’d decided that —”

He stopped abruptly, making no attempt to complete his sentence even in the painfully prolonged pause which they allowed to follow.

“Decided what, Mr Comstock?”

“Nothing. I must have been mistaken.”

Had he been under arrest, they would never have let it go that easily. As it was, he was merely voluntarily helping the police with their inquiries, so that they could not risk him refusing to cooperate. Lambert said, “The fact that you drove to the village store is also important. To put it bluntly, it means that you would have had time to reach the spot in the wood where the vicar was killed and return home afterwards without being away from here for more than twenty to thirty minutes. That is about the length of time your sister says that you were away.”

Comstock did not look as shocked at the fact that his sister had been questioned up in Yorkshire as Lambert had hoped. Probably she had been in touch with her brother by phone since yesterday and told him about it. Almost everyone had access to phones now: that was one of the differences from when he had started as a constable on the beat. It made it more difficult to surprise them with information like this. He said, “Your employer tells us that your instructions on that day were to leave the car with the vicar in Ashbridge and walk home through the woods yourself.”

Comstock looked thunderous at the mention of his employer, as if he fancied that Harry Davidson might have been trying to implicate him in this death. But he carefully avoided any mention of the Colonel as he said stiffly, “That is correct. It was the vicar who suggested the rearrangement.” He sounded like the NCO he had once been, making his report to the Orderly Officer.

Lambert nodded. “You realize that we have only your word for that? I’m not saying we don’t believe you. I’m saying that as policemen it is our job to check every statement we have against the accounts of other people, whenever that is possible. That is how we proceed: when discrepancies arise, they are often significant, you see.”

Comstock nodded, stretching his long forearms towards them as he closed his fingers over the wooden arms of the chair. “Nevertheless, that is what happened. I argued quite hard with the vicar, but once he found that I had been planning to pick up my sister from the bus station, he was quite insistent. He was very good about things like that, the Reverend Barton. He said he had intended walking both ways to Ashbridge at the beginning of the afternoon, so that I had already saved him one journey.” He sounded as if he had already been over their conversation many times, as a conscientious man might in the light of the death which had followed.

“Quite. And nothing has occurred to you in the days which have passed since to suggest who might have killed Peter Barton?”

“I thought you —”Again he stopped. This time he said quickly, “It doesn’t matter. You know more about it than I do, with the number of men you have working on it.”

Lambert said gently, “It might be useful to us to hear your ideas. It might even be your duty as a citizen to share your thoughts with us, Mr Comstock. Two men have died. There may be more to come.”

He looked up at them abruptly with the suggestion that there might be more killing yet, searching their faces for what they knew. Hook felt ridiculous on the small sofa, sitting up against his chief, like a fowl perched close to its neighbour for warmth; the small room had the temperature of a fridge. Comstock was too agitated to see anything ludicrous in the picture. He said, “It’s just — well, I thought — I thought the man in the woods might have killed the vicar. The man who was killed himself a few days later.”

“The tramp, you mean. You think a tramp might have killed Peter Barton?” Lambert was at his blandest.

“Not if that’s all he was. I thought…he might be something more than that. Perhaps I was mistaken.” Comstock looked as though he bitterly regretted getting into this, but could see no way out of it. He was no expert in bending words to his own purposes, having spent most of his adult life in a system too rigidly defined to leave much room for flexibility of that kind.

Lambert leaned forward, studying the gaunt, troubled face intently. “You were not mistaken. The man in the forest was not a simple tramp. He was a professional killer. We know that now, because of information stored in police computers all over the country. What interests me, Mr Comstock, is how you managed to deduce that for yourself, without any of our advantages.”

“I — I don’t know. It’s just that he was the only man around at the time, as far as I could tell, so I thought he might be involved.”

“It’s a big step from thinking he was the only man around which he patently wasn’t, by the way to deducing that he was a trained killer.”

Comstock hadn’t deduced anything like as much as that, but he did not trouble to defend himself against the charge. He might have said that he knew the police had taken the man in for questioning after the murder of Barton: that at any rate must have been common knowledge around the village. Instead, he said wretchedly, “I must have read things in the papers, put two and two together, I suppose.”

“There has been nothing in any of the papers to suggest that Ian Sharpe was anything other than a simple tramp. We’ve taken care to see that there wasn’t.” Lambert thought he got a reaction when he threw in the name, but Comstock committed himself to no more words. He gave a slight, helpless shrug of his square shoulders and stared at the carpet.

“It’s interesting to us that you should have assumed that a man who was apparently a tramp should have shot Peter Barton. There were other people around at the time who had the opportunity to kill him, despite what you said a moment ago. You, for one.”

“I didn’t kill him, whatever you think,” he said sullenly.

“But he was found with your telephone number in his pocket.”

“I’ve already explained how that came to be there. I gave it to the vicar in case he changed his mind about walking home from Ashbridge.”

Lambert regarded him evenly. “What clothes were you wearing that day, Mr Comstock?”

He looked from one impassive face to the other with real fear for a moment. Perhaps he thought they were closing the net upon him. “It was cold. I think I was wearing this anorak. I don’t have many clothes.” The last sentence fell almost comically into this serious context, and he gave a half-smile of apology, though he was not quite sure why.

“I see. Where were you at the time when Ian Sharpe was killed, Mr Comstock?”

It was another abrupt change of gear, and like his previous ones it threw his man for a moment. “I don’t know just when he was killed,” he said cautiously; again he spoke as though he was negotiating a trap.

“Oh, I think you do, Mr Comstock. But I’ll rephrase the question, if you like. Let us ask where you were on the morning of 27th December?”

“I was here. I told your people that, already.”

“Here for the whole of the morning?”

In the pause which followed the question, a tabby cat came and stood for a moment in the doorway and inspected these rare visitors to its house with baleful yellow eyes. Apparently it did not approve of them, for it gave a leisurely swish of its tail, then disappeared as silently as it had come. Comstock said, “I think I was here for the whole of the morning, yes.”

Hook looked up from his notebook to say, “That is what you said originally. We thought you might perhaps have remembered some excursion during the morning.”

“No. I didn’t go out.” After his momentary uncertainty, his denial now was vehement enough to sound suspicious.

Perhaps even he thought so, for he shifted his feet upon the patterned carpet. They almost touched Bert Hook’s substantial black toecaps, so close were the three men to each other in the tiny room.

Lambert said, “Is there anyone who could confirm to us that you were here for the whole or part of that morning?”

This time Comstock answered not too quickly but too slowly, so that they were made acutely aware of the deliberation which preceded his reply. Eventually, looking over their heads to where a robin hopped along a branch of the cherry tree in his garden, he said, “No. I didn’t see anyone.”

He could hardly see them with their heads against the only light coming into the low room, but they could study the strain on his gaunt face as he looked beyond them, his brown eyes fixing unblinkingly on the world outside. Lambert said, his tone now that of counsellor rather than inquisitor, “It is in your interest to be perfectly frank with us, Mr Comstock. You are one of the few people we have questioned who had the opportunity to commit both these brutal crimes.”

He looked at them now, and there was consternation in his face. For a moment, he looked as though he might suggest some other name to them. Then he looked down at the carpet again and said, “Mrs Davidson came across here on that morning.”

He sounded as though he was breaking a confidence. Bert Hook as he noted the statement wondered if they were uncovering an unlikely affair between the lady of that imposing edifice a hundred yards south of them and the chauffeur-handyman in the service cottage, the stuff of a hundred leery music hall jokes. He said in a carefully neutral voice, without looking up, “At what time was this?”

“I’m not absolutely sure. I think about ten o’clock.”

“And how long did Mrs Davidson spend here?”

“I suppose about twenty minutes.” Comstock sounded as though they were drawing teeth.

Lambert said, “That would account for at least part of the morning.” For two people, he was thinking. Whatever they were doing. “What was this meeting, Mr Comstock?”

“Purpose?” He looked at them for a moment as though he did not comprehend.

“Yes. What did you talk about?”

The lean face set obstinately. “I don’t wish to talk about that. It — it hadn’t anything to do with these killings.”

Lambert thought quickly. They would get it out of him if they had to, in due course. And they were going to interview Rachel Davidson, very shortly. It would be interesting to see what she had to say about his meeting, if meeting there had been. He said, “You didn’t have transport that morning, did you?”