Remains to be Seen (20 page)

Neville Holloway had more immediate concerns. He looked out at the reflection of the trees in the still waters of the lakes beside the deserted driveway, saw no sign of a human presence and locked the door of his office. Then he set the shredder to work on the documents he had selected over the last two hours.

With the police about and prying into everyone's business, it was time to cover your tracks.

The secretary of the golf club looked at his new employee curiously, then said, ‘These two officers would like to have a word with you. You can use the Committee Room: you won't be disturbed in there.'

Ben Freeman looked round uneasily at this big room with the huge table in the middle of it, where he had never been before. When invited to sit down, he set his buttocks uneasily on the edge of a chair with arms, which seemed hugely above his status. Feeling a need to break the heavy silence, he blurted out nervously and meaninglessly, ‘I haven't done anything, you know.'

‘Then you won't have anything to fear from us,' said the woman with dark-red hair, who had made him self-conscious by watching his every movement. ‘I'm Detective Sergeant Blake, of Brunton CID, and this is Detective Constable Northcott.'

A tall, unsmiling black man who looked as if he was made of ebony; a man you wouldn't want to tangle with. Ben looked at the contrasting pair and tried unsuccessfully to muster a little aggression as he said, ‘Well, what is this about, then?'

‘Murder, Mr Freeman.' DS Blake looked him calmly in the face, searching for a reaction, using the single word of the worst and most ancient of crimes as a weapon to frighten this young, open-faced man, who had looked so apprehensive from the outset. She was watchful but perfectly calm, delivering the sinister word as coolly as if it had been an item on a shopping list. ‘Arson as well, perhaps, but let's all concentrate our attention on murder, for the moment.'

‘You're talking about Marton Towers. I've left there.' Ben was stalling, buying himself time. But he found he couldn't use that precious time: his brain was racing out of control and refusing to perform, at this moment when he most needed it.

‘Yes. Very interesting, that. We shall want to know the reason for your sudden departure, in due course. The important thing at the moment is that you were around at the time when Neil Cartwright died.'

He felt like throwing in the towel at the start. He had never been good with words, and they were going to out-smart him, whatever he said. The teachers at school had always been able to reduce him to a helpless silence, because they were so much better with words than he was. But this was much, much more serious than anything at school. He said helplessly, ‘Neil Cartwright was my boss.'

‘Yes. So you knew him well. How did you get on with him, Mr Freeman?'

Ben wished she wouldn't keep giving him the title. No one else spoke to him like that, and it unnerved him. ‘Well enough.' He knew he needed to give them something more than that, if they weren't to come after him like dogs cornering a cat. ‘I liked Neil. We worked together a lot, around the estate. And he taught me things, things that I didn't know before. Mainly things about gardening.' He forced out the phrases. Nothing came naturally or sounded right, even to him, who was producing these words.

‘But you probably had disagreements with him. Most people who work closely together have those, from time to time.'

How pretty and persuasive she was, when she smiled, this woman who was only a few years older than him but who seemed to know so much more about the world. He had to resist again the temptation simply to agree with her, to give them what they wanted and have it over with. ‘We didn't fall out with each other. Neil was my boss, but we got on well. I learned things from him, and he told me I was doing well.'

Again that smile, bathing him in warmth, assuring him that much the best policy was cooperation. ‘Then why did you leave, Ben? Why throw up a good job at the Towers, when you felt you were doing well and your employers were quite pleased with your efforts?'

‘Fancied the job here more.' He'd tried to prepare an argument on these lines, but he couldn't produce anything which sounded right to him now that the moment was at hand.

‘And why would that be?'

‘Better prospects.' He'd had more than that to say, when he'd rehearsed it last night, but now the words wouldn't come.

‘Assistant Greenkeeper, the secretary here told us. On probation, at the lowest wages. Better prospects in that than in being Deputy Estate Manager at Marton Towers?'

He wanted to tell her that he had never had that title, that the job hadn't been anything like as grand as that. But he was beguiled by the thought of it, by the importance it seemed to give to what he had been doing up at the Towers. And she was right, of course she was: he'd loved the work up there, the variety of it, the sense that all the time he was learning and improving himself. If it hadn't been for bloody Neil Cartwright …

But he couldn't admit these things, however much this woman made it sound as if they already knew them. Ben Freeman said desperately, ‘I've always wanted to work at a golf club. To work outdoors and make the grass as good as you can possibly make it.' Someone had told him to say that when he went for interview at the golf club, and he'd duly delivered the phrases at interview, though the people who had spoken with him then hadn't seemed very impressed by them. He tried hard to convince DS Blake by the earnestness he forced into his face now.

But just when he had focused all his attention and efforts upon her, it was the unsmiling, hard-as-granite black man who spoke. ‘Why'd you leave the Towers, Ben?'

‘I told you, I—'

‘You did, and we didn't buy it. So cut the crap and tell us why, boy.'

‘All right. I'd had a bust-up with Cartwright. He told me to go. Said to get my arse out of the place and find myself another job.' Suddenly and surprisingly, Ben found it easier to speak.

‘Big bust-up, was it?'

‘Quite big, yes. I was glad to get out, in the end. And I've found a job here that—'

‘Did you kill Neil Cartwright, Ben?'

‘No! No, of course I didn't.' Ben strove to convince them with the vehemence of his tone, to find words which would make it apparent that this was a ridiculous notion. He failed in both attempts.

‘Because the facts suggest that, don't they? You've just told us you had a big row with Cartwright, as a result of which he kicked you out of a job you liked. It seems very likely that as a consequence of that, you lost your temper and attacked him.'

‘No!'

‘Perhaps you'd no intention of killing him, when it happened. Perhaps things just got out of hand. Perhaps you were even in fear for your own life, when you grabbed that piece of cable or whatever it was that killed Cartwright. You might even get away with manslaughter, if you get a good brief on it and tell him it was like that.'

‘But it wasn't! I didn't do it!' Ben Freeman heard the panic rising in his own voice and could do nothing about it.

‘So who did, Ben?'

‘I don't know. I was scared, when I heard about it. That was the reason I got out.'

Clyde Northcott shook his closely shaven head, gave his first small, mirthless grin at the sorry creature in front of him. ‘Not true, that, Ben. You'd been here asking after this job before the news of this murder was ever released to press and radio.'

‘I don't remember. I'm sure—'

‘We can remind you, then. The news of the fire and the murder became public on Thursday last. The secretary here tells us that you came here after a job three days earlier than that. On the Monday, in fact. You're telling us that isn't correct?'

‘No. If he—'

‘Because those days are significant, to simple people like us, who have to try to piece together what happened last week. They mean that you were out of Marton Towers before the police raid and the fire on Wednesday night, but you left
after
the murder of Neil Cartwright, who was probably killed on the Sunday. Doesn't look good, does it?'

‘It may not look good, but—'

‘It all supports a view of events which goes something like this. Ben Freeman has a row with his boss, Neil Cartwright. A serious row, which results in a fight, in which Ben kills Cartwright and hides the body in a place where he knows it won't be found, for a few days at least. He gets out of Marton Towers, as fast as his panic-stricken legs will carry him, and hot-foots it to begin a new life at Brunton Golf Club. Whether he starts Wednesday night's fire in the stable block himself, as seems overwhelmingly probable, or whether fate or some other person intervenes to help him, remains to be seen. As do a lot of other things in this case. But frankly, if we have an arrest for murder, all of that is secondary.'

‘But I didn't do it,' said Ben dully, sounding almost resigned to his fate.

Lucy Blake considered his bowed head for a moment before she said softly, ‘Then who did, Ben?'

‘I don't know. One of the resident staff at the Towers, I should think. Or maybe that Mr Simmons, Neil's stepfather. They didn't get on at all, you know: Neil told me that.'

‘Which one of these, Ben?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Come on, you must have some ideas. That's if DC Northcott is wrong and you didn't do it yourself.'

‘I didn't! And I don't know who did. I don't know much about them, apart from Neil. I only went in each day to work there, you know. And I was outside all day, working on the gardens or in the grounds. I hardly saw anyone, apart from Neil.'

He looked exhausted, and Lucy Blake was almost willing to let it go at that. She glanced at the relentless black face beside her and received the slightest of nods. Clyde Northcott said, suddenly gentle, ‘Would you turn out your pockets for us, please, Ben?'

At the beginning of the exchanges, Ben Freeman might have refused, but all resistance was gone now. He pulled out the pockets of his jeans without a word and put the contents on the table in front of him. The keys for the lock with which he chained his bike and the front door of the house where he lived with his mother. Three strips of chewing gum. Two pounds and fourteen pence in coins. A credit card. A torn Riverside Stand ticket for last Saturday's Rovers game. Nothing remarkable. He stared at the two officers, trying to muster a little defiance in the face of this innocent collection.

Northcott gestured towards the garment Ben had put carefully on the back of a chair when he came into this warm room. ‘The anorak as well, please.'

Ben cast his eyes down to the dark green carpet beneath his feet. But not before they had caught the glint of fear in the dark-blue irises. He fumbled in the side pockets of the garment, produced two empty sweet papers, a used tissue, an even dirtier handkerchief, and added them to the pathetic collection on the table in front of him. They were grubby but innocent, his belongings: Ben wanted to muster some truculent defiance to throw into the faces of these CID torturers, but no words would come to him.

Instead, Clyde Northcott reached unhurriedly across to the inside pocket of the anorak, the one with the zip across the top of it, which most people forgot. He unzipped the pocket, produced the small white rock from within it, looked steadily at Freeman as he said, ‘Coke, Ben. You're in possession of a Class C illegal drug. That leaves you with a little explaining to do, doesn't it?'

D
CI Peach looked up and down the narrow terraced street before he got out of his car. There were places where it wasn't wise to leave a car unattended nowadays, in this part of Brunton. But this street looked respectable enough. The houses were well kept, with clean curtains and newly painted doors. No one bothered to rub the doorsteps every week with the yellow or white stone, as his mother had still done when he was a lad in the early seventies, but everywhere was clean and tidy.

The door opened almost before he had finished knocking. The man looked at him apprehensively, asked him in reluctantly, told him as such people always did that he didn't see how he could be of any help. But within two minutes they were sitting opposite each other in well-worn, comfortable armchairs.

Derek Simmons cleared his throat and said, ‘We won't be disturbed. Brenda's gone round to her sister's. She needs a bit of company.' He wouldn't tell this sharply dressed observant man that he himself was no company at all for Neil Cartwright's grieving mother, because he hadn't got on with the dead man; or that this death had dropped like a wall between a husband and wife who had never had secrets from each other; or that he'd worked very hard indeed to get Brenda out of the house for this meeting.

Peach looked round for a moment, quite content to let a man who was patently nervous become even more so. Like a lot of these small terraced houses, this one was unexpectedly comfortable inside. The walls had been stripped of the paper they had carried for years and painted in an off-white emulsion, to make a small room look bigger. The three-piece suite was comfortable and of excellent quality, and the oval mirror in its heavy Victorian frame sat comfortably on the wall opposite the fireplace.

Peach eventually said, ‘Routine, this is. Or at least I hope that's all it is.'

‘I hope so too. Brenda and I said everything we could say to the constable who took our statements on Friday.'

Peach gave him a bland smile. ‘That's why we're here, sir. When there are discrepancies in people's statements, we follow them up and clarify things. That's the routine I mentioned.'

‘Discrepancies?'

‘That's the thing, sir. Discrepancies. To be precise, we're interested in what happened on the Sunday night, which is almost certainly the time when your stepson was killed.'

Derek determined to keep calm. ‘That's straightforward, as far as I can see. I was at the snooker club for the whole of the evening. Brenda was here. You're surely not suggesting that the lad's mother's been lying to you?'