Skeleton Plot (14 page)

‘You’re paid to be cynical, John. We don’t broadcast it, but cynicism is part of the CID equipment. We’re going back twenty years here. Simmons might have been a different and more irresponsible man then.’

‘He agreed when we questioned him that he’d had his wild moments in his youth, which more or less coincided with the days when Julie Grimshaw was around the farm. She was brought there from the squat by Andrew Burrell and she wasn’t a popular visitor with Daniel Burrell or his wife. I’m not sure how close Jim Simmons was to Julie, or what motive he might have had. Was he a rival to Andrew Burrell for her affections? Could he even have got rid of her as a favour to Daniel Burrell, his employer and the farm owner? Was the transfer of the farm to his ownership a few years later a pay-off for favours rendered? He’s now running it very efficiently and with a happy family installed there, but as you say I’m paid to accept nothing at face value.’

‘You said you had four other people who were of major interest to you, in addition to Katherine Clark and Michael Wallington, the two who’d been in that squat with the murdered woman. I make that three so far.’

Lambert gave his chief another mirthless grin. ‘I suppose I’ve left Steve Williams until the last because he’s an old adversary of mine. One who’s won most of the rounds between us so far.’

‘We’re all aware of what Steve Williams is, John. A known villain, mostly in prostitution and gaming and loan-sharking, who’s seen off his lesser rivals in our area and surrounded himself with all the trappings of a successful crime boss, including heavies to do his dirty work and crafty lawyers who make sure nothing nasty sticks to him. The kind all coppers hate and most criminals admire and fear.’

‘Fear is one of our problems, sir. It’s been difficult to get anyone to give evidence against Williams and his activities. Understandably – because the only person who did so during his early years disappeared without trace and was never found. These things get around. I can hardly claim to be unbiased, where Williams is concerned. As he’ll be only too happy to point out, if we get anywhere near him.’

‘Let me deal with that, if it comes to it, John. But you know as well as I do that we’ll need a cast iron case before we take him to court. The Crown Prosecution Service won’t be interested in anything less than that. They’ve burned their fingers too often before with men like Williams. It’s the old story: the worst people in our society can afford the best lawyers.’

‘Steve Williams may of course be as guilty as hell about all kinds of things in the past and as innocent as snow in this case. I’ve no evidence as yet to connect him with Julie’s death and I can’t see it being easy to find any.’

‘Why do you even think there might be a connection?’

‘I’ve no more to throw against him at the moment than his proximity to the site. At the time when that body was buried, his was the nearest residence. The grave was at the edge of Lower Valley Farm, but the farmhouse and farm buildings are much further from the spot than Williams’s house.’

‘But would you choose a burial site so near to your own house?’

‘Not if I had the choice. But if I’d killed a woman, perhaps without prior intent, I’d be anxious to get rid of the body as quickly as possible. It’s only about two hundred yards from Williams’s house, but in every other respect it was a pretty remote spot at the time. The housing estate has been built there now, of course, but it must have seemed a safe enough site for a shallow grave at the time.’

‘But you’re a fair man, John – well, perhaps not where Steve Williams is concerned, because he doesn’t deserve fairness. But let’s say objective. I don’t see you pursuing Williams just because of the proximity of his house to the burial place.’

‘There’d be no future in doing that. He’d laugh at us. But when I talked with him on Wednesday, I sensed he wasn’t confident. He tried to be his normal truculent self, but he couldn’t carry that through. The problem for us is that there are two people we’d like to interview and can’t. One is Liam Williams, Steve’s son. He’s the lad I mentioned earlier who had some sort of relationship with Julie in the weeks before her death. But we can’t talk to him about it, because Liam was killed in a road traffic incident eight years ago. The other one is the boy’s mother, Hazel Williams. But she was so devastated by the death of her only son that she’s become a virtual recluse. Her husband doesn’t want us to talk with her and we haven’t enough material to force an interview. The Williamses are voluntarily helping us with our enquiries and if she refuses to talk we haven’t sufficient grounds for compulsion.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘Try to get more evidence. We now have a much clearer picture of the life Julie Grimshaw was living in the squat, and elsewhere, than we had six days ago. I need to see the people I’ve just discussed with you again and probe for more details. It could be that none of them is responsible for her death; women in danger of addiction are vulnerable in all sorts of areas. But I have questions which need answering.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. I know as well as you do that in complex cases the principal CID task is to establish the questions which need answering. That must be even more true when the crime was committed twenty years ago. I wish you luck with it.’

It was only John Lambert’s second private meeting with the new Chief Constable. He had suspected when the appointment was arranged that the new man was seeking for opportunities to be rid of him, that he was regarded as a survival from an earlier age by a man surging forward on the tide of new ideas. That was probably inevitable when a man ten years younger than you was put in charge of things.

For his part, Gordon Armstrong had feared that his most senior CID officer might be a man cocooned in the mores and practices of a previous generation, resistant to change, perhaps making sour and damaging comments to others when the newly installed CC was not around to look after himself. He had found in John Lambert only a man anxious to solve crimes, a man who wished to avoid the machinations and jockeyings for position which dominated so much of his own life. Like most chief constables, he had been a CID man himself; he understood the challenges and frustrations of detection and recognized a man who handled them both with integrity.

Each man had been cautious. Each man left this meeting with a higher opinion of the other.

In the early part of Friday evening, Michael Wallington was on the golf course at Ross-on-Wye. He was playing with a head teacher of about his own age whom he had helped to appoint four months earlier, in his role as Chief Education Officer.

The pair were trying to unwind after what had been a trying week for both of them, as they had agreed in the dressing room while donning their golf shoes. Tony Proctor, the head teacher, had endured problems with the supply teacher replacing a woman on pregnancy leave, with inexperienced young teachers who were having difficulty keeping order, and with a senior member of his staff who had finally given up on her Lothario husband and was enduring the stresses of a belated divorce.

Mike Wallington also had problems. He didn’t specify what these were to his golfing companion. He merely told him that it had been a difficult week and that he was looking forward to a relaxing few holes.

They had perfect conditions for recreation. It was a peaceful early summer evening, with the sun still warm as the shadows lengthened and the birds bade their farewell to the day. The forest trees were in full, fresh leaf now, with multiple shades of green to delight the eye and define and individualize each hole. The course was in perfect condition and the putting surfaces were like green velvet, fast and true. An elderly foursome ahead of them called them through on the second hole, and from then on they had the green acres of the course to themselves.

They congratulated themselves three times during the progress of the round on being exactly where they were. There were few better places to be on a June evening than in Britain in a setting like this. Mike had been playing golf for three years now. Golf in a setting like this was part of his reaction against those wild early days which he had now left far behind him, an assurance to himself as well as to others that Michael Wallington, Chief Education Officer, was not only an important and influential person but part of the respectable middle-class establishment.

Having decided to give his time to the sport, Michael had caught the golfing bug. He was genuinely very keen on the game now. He’d had lessons and he’d been looking forward to the summer evenings, when he would be able to grab a few holes and improve his game in preparation for the greater challenges of weekend golf with the titans of the club. His handicap was coming down steadily; he felt that all he needed to do to reduce it even further was to play lots of golf.

But tonight he couldn’t concentrate. He exchanged the usual banter with Tony Proctor as they swapped holes and moved rapidly round the course, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Proctor was too intelligent a man to miss that. He asked what was worrying Mike and offered to provide any help he could. By way of reply, he received only a weak smile of gratitude and an assurance that nothing was wrong. Wallington departed after a quick beer with a token assurance that they must do this again.

Mike was too late to read the bedtime story to his children, to his secret relief. He congratulated his son on his gold star from school and planted a gentle kiss on the forehead of his five-year-old daughter, who was already almost asleep. He went softly down the stairs and poured a glass of white wine for Debbie, but only water for himself. They sat quietly in the conservatory and watched the sun descending to leave a crimson sky over the Welsh hills. His wife was eight years younger than he was and he was sure he was genuinely in love with her. He certainly gave more of himself to her than he had believed he would give to any woman.

He had told her things about his past over the last few years. Not everything, but more than he had thought he would ever concede to anyone. He didn’t regret that. Honesty was part of giving, one of the things you had to practise if you wished to love and be loved. You had to reveal yourself to your partner and learn intimate things about her, if the two of you were to be close. There were moments when he’d felt tempted to tell Debbie everything, to shock her with all the details, to unburden himself completely of the guilt he felt about those days.

But he was glad now that he’d held the worst things back. It wouldn’t have been fair to overwhelm her with that degree of knowledge about him. She was such an innocent, Debbie: that was one of the things he loved in her.

He watched her now and smiled at her as she sipped her wine. Then he thought of the sinister figure from his past who had contacted him after the meeting at the school on Monday night and wondered again how much Debbie would discover about him in the days to come. He said quietly, ‘If the police come asking questions, you may need to be discreet. It will be much better for us if you pretend to know nothing about some of the things I have told you.’

C
hief Superintendent John Lambert was a townsman, bred on urban life and urban ways. Not a bad thing, because the vast majority of criminals were city-based. Murderers were a special case, of course: they came from all classes and all sorts of backgrounds. They could be illiterate or highly educated, crude or sophisticated, and they might come from any one of the complex sub-divisions of the British class system.

Detective Sergeant Hook was from a different background, which was one of the many reasons why they complemented each other so well as a detective duo. Bert as a Barnardo’s boy had been bred on communal life in a closed environment and taught to be grateful for whatever good things came to him, in an almost Victorian ethic. All his early work placements had been rural. He had grown up knowing and respecting the long hours and hard, unrelenting work of country life. And he had been a doughty minor counties pace bowler for Herefordshire, one of the most rural of English counties, for seventeen years, running in rhythmically to surprise public- school batsmen with his pace, which was always a little sharper than it looked from the pavilion.

It was Hook who looked at the varied acres of Lower Valley Farm as the pair drove up the long lane to the stone farmhouse. It was Hook who gave the verdict on what they saw as Lambert parked his ancient Vauxhall on the cobbled farmyard. Poultry no longer roamed here as they might have done when Bert had done his very first farm stint as a wide-eyed twelve-year-old boy. Hook looked around and said, ‘This place is doing well, unlike most small farms. This man knows what he’s doing and what’s required.’

The man in question was Jim Simmons, and he was nowhere to be seen at this moment. Nature does not work to man’s calendar; Saturday is not a day off for farmers. Jim’s wife Lisa was apologetic. ‘He knew you were coming and he knew the time you’d agreed. He gets so wrapped up in the problems out there that he forgets all about time, sometimes. I’ll try his mobile.’ She said this last a little self-consciously, as if demonstrating that this farm was not set in the old ways; that was a perpetual theme of her husband’s. But seconds later, she had to report failure. ‘He switches it off when he’s on the tractor,’ she said. ‘I’ll get Jamie to go and fetch him for you.’

The bright-eyed eight-year-old was dispatched to look for his father, though he would much rather have stayed and gazed with open mouth at the great detective John Lambert. His companions at school had been much impressed by his account of the previous visit of the great man, and Jamie had been looking forward to retailing every detail of a second episode to them.

Jamie was back with them in three minutes exactly, bouncing like an ebullient monkey on the tractor beside his father, waving enthusiastically to the CID men as Simmons parked beside the old Vauxhall Senator. ‘Dad was on his way here!’ he said by way of exculpating his errant parent. ‘He forgets the time when he gets to the wheatfield.’ Like many a boy of his age, he retailed with an air of original wisdom the things he derided when his mother said them.

Lambert wondered as Jim Simmons led them into a quiet room at the front of the house whether this little cameo had again been designed to present the farmer as a pillar of happy family life, a man who could not possibly have been responsible for dark deeds twenty years earlier. As he had agreed with his chief constable on the previous afternoon, it was part of his job to be cynical, wasn’t it?

He smiled away Simmons’s apologies for keeping them waiting and said, ‘We need a further talk with you about the body buried on your land in 1995. After talking to a variety of people who were around at that time, we now know a lot more than when we spoke with you six days ago.’

He made it sound like a warning, as though they had spent the entire six days since they had last seen him assembling material which would prove him a liar and thus the leading suspect for this crime. Jim Simmons said defensively, ‘It wasn’t my land in 1995. And it wasn’t my land when those remains were dug up last week.’

‘Technically correct. Does that matter to you? Let’s agree that the body of a healthy young woman, Julie Grimshaw, was buried just inside the boundary of this farm almost exactly twenty years ago. Is that satisfactory?’

Jim wondered whether to query the assertion that Julie had been a healthy young woman, on the grounds that at the time of her death she had been seriously into drugs and in danger of sinking into addiction. But that would argue more detailed knowledge of her condition and habits than he cared to admit to here. He said carefully, ‘I think I told you everything I knew about this matter when you were here last. I was hoping that you were now close to an arrest.’

‘Were you, indeed? Well we aren’t, I’m afraid. We wouldn’t be here seeking further information if we were close to an arrest, Mr Simmons.’

‘I’m sorry about that. I hope Julie is avenged, if that’s the right expression. We had our differences, but she should never have died like that.’

‘Those differences interest us, Mr Simmons. We’d like you to enlarge upon them. We’d like you to add to what other people have now told us. We need to hear your side of the story.’

Jim glanced instinctively at the door he had shut so carefully when they came into this small, quiet room. How much did they know? What had other people told them about him and Julie? It was a police tactic, this exploitation of your ignorance, this making you tense by playing on your fear of what other people might already have told them. You might need to defend yourself against what they had said, or you might be better saying nothing – but then you might seem evasive, and that wouldn’t help you if, as they said, they were searching desperately for someone to arrest for this crime long gone. Dead and buried, that crime had been, he thought grimly, but it had now returned to disturb the lives of those who had shared those months with Julie Grimshaw in 1995. He said carefully, ‘I knew Julie quite well for a short period.’

‘No, Mr Simmons. You can do better than that. I believe you can remember more than you told us on the day after her bones had been discovered. Let’s say that more details have probably come back to you during the six days since we last spoke with you.’

It was delivered in firm but superficially polite tones. It said, come clean with us now whilst there is still time, so that we do not need to treat you as a hostile witness. Jim wasn’t in court, but he felt at this moment very much as if Lambert were a prosecuting counsel. He said, ‘You were vague yourselves when you were questioning me about the skeleton on Sunday. We were all shocked.’

‘Perhaps. But you knew more than we did. We didn’t even know the identity of the victim. You pretended to be as ignorant as we were about how the body had come to be in the ground on your territory. It’s my belief that you must at least have suspected who this woman was.’

Jim forced himself to take his time. He wasn’t used to dealing with words; he didn’t have to use them very often, nowadays. But he knew he wasn’t bad with words when he needed them – just a little out of practice, perhaps. ‘I suppose I thought that skeleton might have been Julie’s – feared might be a better word. The thought hit me as soon as I heard about the discovery of bones there. That wasn’t because I knew anything about how they came to be there. It was because I knew a young woman who had disappeared suddenly at that time. When you hear that remains have been discovered all these years later, your thoughts naturally fly to who was around here at that time and who it might have been. Julie Grimshaw vanished from our lives during the summer of 1995. It was natural that my thoughts should fly to her.’

‘But you didn’t see fit to communicate her name to us last Sunday. We would have waited much longer for an identification if her distraught mother had not come to see us on Monday and provided us with a DNA sample for comparison.’

‘I’m sorry about that. But it was less than twenty-four hours after the skeleton had been unearthed when you spoke with me on Sunday. My mind was reeling with the shock of finding out that a body had been buried near the boundary of this farm. And there were others who knew her, as well as me. I didn’t want to implicate them and open a can of worms. It was still possible then that the skeleton might have been that of a complete stranger, unknown to any of us.’

Hook had established an easier relationship with this man than Lambert had achieved, at their previous meeting. They had similar backgrounds, with Hook having been a Barnardo’s boy and Simmons having been in care from twelve to sixteen. Bert now looked up from his notes and said, ‘Your initial instinct on Sunday was one of self-preservation, was it not, Jim?’

Simmons looked at Hook’s rugged outdoor face suspiciously, then softened a little as he remembered their previous exchanges. ‘I told you I had a wild youth. I told you I’d got into fights and all sorts of scrapes at that time. I told you I’d had my share of girls and treated a lot of them badly. If a dead girl had been buried on our land at that time, I felt you were going to have me down as a leading suspect. Don’t you think it understandable that I would tell you as little as possible?’

Hook allowed himself a relaxed, avuncular smile. ‘Understandable, perhaps, but ill-advised nonetheless, Jim. Withholding information leads to far more suspicion than revealing it, for the innocent. You are innocent in this, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, of course I am.’

‘Then convince us of that by giving us all the help you can.’

‘I want to do that. Believe me I do.’

‘We’re policemen, Jim. We’re here as professionals. You need to make us believe you. Tell us about your own relationship with Julie Grimshaw. Tell us about how Andrew Burrell felt about her and treated her.’

He looked up sharply with the mention of his contemporary; his wide brown eyes showed his alarm. ‘It was Andrew who brought her here. He had a thing going with her, for a while. I’m not quite sure how serious it was.’

‘But his parents thought it was serious, didn’t they? And they didn’t like it.’

‘No, they didn’t approve of Julie. We thought they were out of touch and didn’t understand youth, at the time.’ He shook his head and ran a hand briefly over his rather untidy brown hair. ‘Now that I’ve got kids of my own, I can imagine how they felt. You want to protect your kids, don’t you? Andrew was a young man by then and wanting to assert himself. But your kids are always kids to you, aren’t they? You feel the need to protect them, whatever age they are.’

Hook reflected that this was a boy who had been placed in council care between the ages of twelve and sixteen and then left to make his own way in the world. Not much parental care there. But that probably made him even more anxious to do his best for his own children. Bert, the Barnardo’s boy who had fought his way through to his present professional position and a happy marriage, certainly felt extremely protective of his own two boys, now in their early teens. He knew he’d have to relax the bonds of love as they got older, but he knew also that he wasn’t going to find that easy, that he’d find Eleanor telling him firmly that he must let go. He felt suddenly quite close to this successful farmer of almost his own age. He was unprofessional enough to hope deeply for a moment that they wouldn’t conclude the case with an arrest of Jim Simmons. He said quietly, ‘So the Burrells didn’t approve of Julie. Tell us all about that, please.’

‘I think they’d have been quite prepared to help her, if Julie had been prepared to accept help. Emily in particular was a very kind woman, and not at all the old fuddy-duddy we thought her at the time. And Daniel Burrell knew the score, far more clearly than we thought he did. There’s an arrogance about youth, isn’t there? It’s one of its least attractive qualities. I read that the other day and I agree with it, when I look back at those times.’

‘Tell us about Julie. She’s a murder victim and we need to know all we can about her. You knew her in the weeks before her death. There will be something which happened in those days which is directly linked to her killing.’

Simmons looked shaken, as if he was confronting this thought for the first time. ‘I’d dabbled with drugs myself, like most of my set. I knew enough about them to realize immediately that Julie Grimshaw was a user. Not pot, like me, but coke or heroin. There was one day when she was completely out of it. I think Emily must have seen her on an occasion like that. From being sympathetic to a girl living in a squat and struggling with life, she turned right against her. I think she was frightened of what she saw and what might follow if things got worse. She’d never done drugs herself and the thought of horse and scag terrified her. She didn’t want Julie under her roof any more. I remember Emily using exactly that phrase.’

‘But it wasn’t solely the drugs, was it? Daniel and Emily were worried about Andrew’s relationship with Julie.’

‘Yes. I think for Andrew there was something romantic about Julie’s circumstances. He liked the idea of lifting her out of the squat and rescuing her from drugs and making her a pretty and successful young woman. There was a certain missionary zeal about his attitude when he brought her here. That’s another annoying thing about youth: you think you can work miracles where others have failed.’

‘But his parents didn’t want this?’

Jim Simmons frowned. He didn’t want to denigrate Daniel and Emily, both of whom had been very good to him. ‘They wanted to help Julie. But she didn’t seem prepared to help herself. She turned up here completely stoned once, and I think they saw that as a direct challenge to them. Daniel wasn’t going to stand for that, for a start. Farmers are very proprietorial on their own patch, you know. They’re used to ruling the roost and not being challenged. It’s probably something to do with the place where you work also being the place where you live.’ He grinned suddenly at Hook, recognizing the implications of this for himself. ‘But the thing which really mattered to Dan and Emily was Andrew’s relationship with Julie. They didn’t want their son lining himself up with a druggie – a girl who might even become an addict. I could see their position at the time. I can sympathize with it a lot more now, when I have kids of my own.’