Skeleton Plot (16 page)

This time Kate did not shrug but shuddered. ‘It might have been. Everything you say is correct. It’s a possibility that those people killed her. I didn’t see anything to support that theory of her death, but then I wouldn’t have done, would I? The drug people are careful as well as fearsome. That’s one reason why I never got into horse or coke. It’s why I wanted Julie to finish with drugs. But I can’t provide you with evidence that those people killed her.’

Kate was conscious of no exchange between the two, but DS Hook now looked up from his notes and took over the questioning. ‘You reminded us a moment ago that you went to Lower Valley Farm with Julie. As you know, that’s where her body was buried. Tell us what you remember about the people there, please.’

She managed a smile into the rubicund face of this less threatening figure. ‘That’s rather a wide brief, because there were a lot of people there, as I remember it. But I’ll do my best. The old people who owned the place were quite kind to us, at first. I think Andrew had told them about how he was rescuing these girls from the squat in Fairfax Street, because they seemed quite sorry for us. I didn’t go as often as Julie did and they still seemed to be sympathetic towards me. But when they realized that Andrew was serious about Julie and wanted to take it further, they turned against her. And Julie told me she’d gone there stoned and done unpardonable things. I wasn’t with her on that day, but when we went there together again I could see that the older Burrells didn’t want her around any more.’

‘Emily Burrell isn’t here for us to question: she died three years ago. Daniel Burrell, Andrew’s father, is now eighty-four and in a care home. But he and his wife were vigorous sixty-four-year-olds at the time of Julie’s death. They were very protective of their only son. Do you feel that either or both of them might have been involved in Julie’s murder?’

‘No. I never got to know them well, but I don’t think either of them would have been involved in murder.’

‘Or manslaughter? We don’t know that the blow which killed Julie was meant to be fatal. It might have been the culmination of some altercation which strayed into violence.’

‘I obviously can’t discount that possibility. But you asked me what I felt. And I feel that the Burrells weren’t the kind of people who would have done this and buried the body in secret at the edge of their land.’

‘Thank you.’ Hook glanced at his chief. ‘It seems unlikely to us also, but we have to take every possibility into consideration. What did you make of Andrew Burrell in those days?’

It was said very casually, but Kate was well aware that she was being asked to assess a murder suspect. She was one herself, so this was competitive. She’d enjoyed competition as she’d risen through the ranks of industry – thrived upon it, in fact. But this was a life and death competition; she felt her pulses racing at that thought. ‘I didn’t see Andrew that often. I wasn’t at Lower Valley Farm as often as Julie.’

‘But you had time to form an impression. And Julie was your friend. She must have talked to you about him.’

Kate wanted to remind them yet again of how long ago this was. But that would have seemed defensive. It would have sounded as if she had something to hide. ‘I thought him a bit of a wimp, I think. He even objected to being called Andy. Remember that I was living in a squat, so perhaps I despised anyone who seemed to be taking the safe option. He’d got himself a place at university and was going off to it in the autumn. Somewhere in the north, I think.’

‘Liverpool.’

‘Was it?’ She was shaken by the reminder that they’d already spoken to Andrew and to others and knew all sorts of things that she did not. Was Hook reminding her that she needed to tell them the truth? ‘Andrew seemed very taken with Julie, at first. She was a pretty girl, when she chose to show it, so that wasn’t surprising. But I think he was attracted to the idea of saving her from the squat and from drugs; you get romantic notions when you’re as wet behind the ears as Andrew was at that time. And when his parents disapproved, he dug his toes in all the harder, as young men do.’ Kate Clark was happy to give the impression that she hadn’t a lot of time for young men.

‘Why did he and Julie break up?’

‘I don’t know that. I thought that for him the novelty had worn off. I warned her that his university place was the important thing for Andrew and that he was going to ditch her when he went off to take it up. But that was just my view. I don’t know what actually happened. It might have been Julie who ditched him.’

‘Do you think they had a major row of some kind? Or did they part on good terms?’

He was cleverer than he looked, this detective sergeant. He made you offer your opinions; he encouraged you to speculate and reveal more than you’d intended. More than you’d intended about yourself too, perhaps. Kate determined to be careful. ‘I’ve no idea. I just assumed they’d split up, when she went off so suddenly. Now we know that she hadn’t gone off at all, that someone had killed her. Perhaps they didn’t split up. But I thought that all wasn’t well between them, from the few things Julie let out to me when we were trying to get to sleep in Fairfax Street.’

‘I see.’ Hook made a brief note and she wondered what he was writing. ‘What about Jim Simmons, who was living on the site and working full-time on the farm?’

It was an abrupt switch, perhaps designed to catch her off guard, to make her reveal more than she’d intended to about Simmons. But she’d prepared what she would say about him before they came. ‘He was polite enough, but he didn’t seem very interested in Julie. Or me, for that matter. He was a good-looking man who didn’t find it difficult to get girls. Perhaps he thought he could do better for himself than girls living in a squat. Julie and I and Andrew and Jim were all about the same age, but Jim was probably the most mature one among us.’

‘Too mature to have got himself involved in murder, do you think?’

It was a competitive situation, this, as she’d already decided. Kate was reluctant to discard Simmons as a suspect; that might throw more suspicion on to herself. ‘From what Andrew said, I gathered that Jim could be quite violent. He’d already been involved in one or two serious fights. When Julie turned up stoned and was very rude to Mrs Burrell, Jim Simmons took her by the shoulders and shook her very roughly.’ She paused, wishing to give the impression that she was anxious to be fair. ‘But that’s very different from saying he was capable of murder or manslaughter, isn’t it? He was very attached to the Burrells; he said they’d been very good to him. I gather that Simmons is now the owner of the farm. Perhaps he was playing his cards very carefully in 1995, with Andrew off to university and plainly uninterested in farming.’

Hook nodded slowly, as if he hoped that his agreement might lure more revelations from her. ‘Was there anyone else around at the time who showed any interest in Julie Grimshaw?’

‘There was Liam, of course, the boy from the house which was nearest to the farm.’

Kate Clark’s face was open but unrevealing beneath the neat dark hair. There was no indication in her bearing that she knew that she’d just delivered a bombshell.

Jim Simmons was the visitor whom Daniel Burrell liked most of all. Jim took him out into the gardens of the care home whenever the weather allowed it, so that Dan could feel the sun on his face and the breeze around his ageing body.

But there was more than that to his enjoyment. They never had awkward pauses and desperate searches for things to talk about, as he had with most of his visitors, however well-meaning they were. He could talk to Jim about Lower Valley Farm, about the problems of cultivation and livestock, about the impact of the changing seasons, about the things which had preoccupied him and his predecessors for at least the last two centuries, since the boundaries of the farm had been defined.

They were sitting on this Saturday evening on a seat facing west, watching the vivid crimson over the Welsh hills which guaranteed them a fine day for the morrow. The corn was looking very good indeed, Jim reported, knowing how it had been a perennial concern of the well-wrapped old man beside him. He was hopeful of a record crop if they got good weather for the harvest. Prices as usual would be in other, more anonymous, non-rural hands, and prices would determine the degree of profit. The two had the ritual grumble over that which they had regularly exchanged when Dan had been in control of the farm and Jim had been his increasingly trusted acolyte.

Then they sat in a comfortable silence for a few minutes, watching crimson turn to purple over the scene, seeing the detail disappear as the mountains became silhouettes against the dying light, sharing the thought which neither of them voiced that this scene had not changed in many centuries. Eventually, Daniel said, ‘It’s not a bad place, this. Everything’s laid on for you and the girls are kind.’ Every female under sixty was a girl for Dan. ‘But you miss things; they can’t help that. You miss sitting down after a hard day’s graft and knowing you’ve achieved something.’

‘Aye. You’ve always been an active man, Dan. But you have to slow down sometime.’

Another pause, whilst the old man nodded slowly, resentfully. ‘You can’t do owt about age. No bugger can.’

‘No. I expect you miss Emily, too. I know I do.’

Dan Burrell was more grateful than he could have imagined for the mention of his dead wife. People skirted around it, thought it would upset you when it wouldn’t. He wanted to tell people how much he’d loved Emily, how much she’d meant to him. But men didn’t go on about things like that, did they? Not his generation of men. He’d never have found the right words. Now he simply said, ‘She was a good woman, Emily. Good to everyone, not just to me.’

‘She was, Dan. Good to everyone. I still remember how kind she was to me, when I was a daft lad still looking to make my way in farming.’

Dan smiled. ‘It was Em who said you should have the farm, you know, when it turned out Andrew didn’t want it. Persuaded me that you’d keep it going and make a job of it.’

‘I think I knew that. I’ll always be grateful to her.’

‘She was a wise woman as well as a kind woman, my Em. It was she who told me to let Andrew go without throwing him out of our lives.’

‘She was right, you know. Andrew didn’t want to fall out with you. He’s just different from us. He doesn’t feel the same way as we do about the land.’

‘He’s different, all right.’ For a moment, an old resentment clouded Daniel’s face. ‘He comes to see me, sometimes. Not as often as he should, perhaps. But I don’t blame him, because we don’t have much to talk about. Not like you and me.’

‘Thanks for letting me know that the fuzz had been to see you about that skeleton.’

‘I didn’t tell them much. Well, I couldn’t.’

‘It was Julie, you know, the skeleton. That lass Andrew brought home.’

‘Yes. They didn’t know that, when they came to see me.’

‘Probably best you don’t tell them anything more than you have to about Andrew and Julie. Or me and Julie, for that matter.’

‘Aye. Probably best. But I don’t remember anything, do I?’ The old man smiled enigmatically towards the outline of the hills. ‘Best go in now, I think. It’s getting quite dark.’

Hazel Williams usually came to the cemetery at this time. Saturday evening on the edge of dark was the quietest time of all. A lot of people visited the graves during the day. There were fresh flowers on many of them and she enjoyed the freshness and the colours. But in the evening she had the place to herself.

She could still feel very close to Liam here, though she had to work at it more than in the early days. It was eight years now; people who cared for her sometimes reminded her of that. She knew that he wasn’t really here, that the real Liam had left her and left this world some time ago now. But when she sat here on a silent June evening like this, she could forget that. She could convince herself that he was still here, still speaking to her, living on with her in this strange world which only she knew and which she did not want to leave.

‘It’s peaceful here, isn’t it?’

She leapt as if the words had been pins stuck into her lean body. She hadn’t known that there was anyone there, hadn’t heard the footfall of any approach. But it was only Steve. Hazel didn’t know why she thought ‘only’. She didn’t want him here, any more than she wanted anyone else. Less than she wanted anyone else, now that she thought about it. She said, as though he was a stranger, ‘Why have you come here?’

‘Because I want to remember our son too. Because I want to be with you.’

Both eminently reasonable things to say. And both ideas she wanted to reject. Liam was hers and this place was hers. She didn’t want anyone coming here and interfering with that. Least of all Steve.

He reached out his hand and put it on top of hers. She stared at it for a moment and let it lie there. As soon as she felt she could, she slid her hand out from under his. She didn’t want him next to her, didn’t want the smell of him, didn’t want to hear the sound of his steady breathing beside her.

Hazel wasn’t sure how many minutes passed before she said, ‘This is my place. Mine and Liam’s.’

Steve Williams said, ‘You’ve got to let me in.’

Another long pause while she calmly reviewed that claim. Then, ‘I don’t have to do anything, Steve.’

‘I want to look after you. I want to protect you. I don’t want those damned coppers disturbing you.’

‘I don’t need your protection, Steve. I’m not afraid of the police.’

They were simple statements. But they sounded to both of them like the most damning things she had ever said.

M
ike Wallington’s study was at the front of the detached modern house, insulated from the family noise of kitchen and playroom at the rear. He took the two CID men in there and shut the door carefully behind him. Everything was pleasingly ordered in here, with his computer containing the information which would once have been in a filing cabinet and the few paper files he needed stacked neatly upright on the bottom level of the well-stocked bookshelves. Mike had grown used to feeling safe in here, away from the shrill voices of children and the small, recurrent crises of family life.

He didn’t feel safe now. He said, ‘We shan’t be disturbed in here,’ and gave a small giggle which showed him and them how nervous he felt.

Lambert looked unhurriedly round the room, letting the silence stretch as he and Hook seated themselves carefully upon the upright chairs in front of Wallington’s desk. He said, ‘I trust you’ve now remembered some of the things you couldn’t recall when we spoke on Friday, Mr Wallington.’

‘It’s a long time since 1995. A lot of things have happened in the world and to me since then. I’ve been determined to put that time in the squat behind me. That means that I’ve deliberately thrust those days out of my mind as thoroughly as possible.’

‘I see. Other people who were in seventeen Fairfax Street at that time have put the same argument to us. But they’ve remembered a surprising amount, once they’ve put their minds to it and received a few reminders from me and the rest of our murder team.’

Michael forced a smile he did not feel. ‘May I ask who these people are who have such eminent powers of recall?’

‘You may not, Mr Wallington. Information revealed in the course of our enquiries is confidential. I’m sure you will find that reassuring, in the light of what you are going to tell us this morning.’

Michael looked hard into Lambert’s cool grey eyes, wondering exactly what his rights were here. The detective was being offensive, in his controlled, laid-back way, but Mike didn’t feel that he could respond aggressively. He knew that he was a private citizen voluntarily helping the police with their enquiries; in theory, he could withdraw his cooperation at any moment. But that wasn’t really an option. It would make him look guilty and encourage them to concentrate their enquiries around him. With the things he needed to hide, he couldn’t afford that. He said grudgingly, ‘I’ll help you all I can. But I don’t feel that my recall of events twenty years ago will be either comprehensive or completely reliable.’

‘I see. Well, we have established that some of the information you gave us a couple of days ago was not reliable. In the light of that I feel you should be aware that we have now spoken to other people who were in the squat, other people who knew Julie and met her outside the squat, and some of our officers who were policing the Fairfax Street area in 1995. You would be most unwise to conceal anything which might help us, and still more unwise to offer us deliberate lies. The law takes a very dim view of people who obstruct the proper conduct of a murder investigation.’

Wallington tried hard to show no reaction to this. He said as impassively as he could, ‘What is it you want to know?’

‘You need to tell us everything you can about Julie Grimshaw and her activities both inside and outside seventeen Fairfax Street. You need to tell us everything you can remember about the other members of that squat and their activities. You need to explain your own presence there and give us an account of the things you did there.’

‘I can’t add much to what I told you about Julie on Friday. She was a drug taker. Not an addict, I think, but I have no expertise in such matters.’ He glanced at them to see if there was any reaction to this, but learned nothing. ‘She had a friend, Kathy, whom I mentioned to you on Friday. I don’t think there was any sexual association between them, as there was between some women in squats, because as far as I could see both of them were straight. But I didn’t see a great deal of either of them, because the women spent most of their time on the first floor and the men on the ground floor in that house.’

‘What do you know about the people Julie met outside the squat?’

It was a chance to spread the web of suspicion, to draw others into it as well as himself. He’d anticipated this, but he’d need to go carefully – he didn’t know what they’d already picked up from the array of other people Lambert had mentioned. ‘She was meeting a man. That was at the farm where she was eventually killed and buried, I think.’

‘Where she was buried, Mr Wallington. We haven’t established yet where Julie Grimshaw was killed.’

‘No. I suppose you have to be careful about these things. But when all this is over and the facts are established I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t turn out that she was killed very near where the skeleton was found last week.’

‘Will you, indeed? Well, perhaps you are better placed than we are to have an opinion on that. We shall need to keep open minds until we have more facts available. I suspect you know more about her life outside the squat than you have so far revealed to us. Tell us about the people she met away from Fairfax Street.’

‘There was the farmer’s son. I don’t remember his name; I don’t think I ever knew it. He fancied her and he bedded her, but I’m not sure whether they were ever an item – that was the term we used, I think. You’d need to ask him about that.’

‘We already have, Mr Wallington. And we’ve asked others as well. There was certainly a close relationship between them.’

‘Well, there you are then. A close relationship, some sort of bust-up, and death for the girl. She was unstable because she was on drugs; she might have done things to bring about her own death if she involved herself in a violent row. But that’s your business, not mine. I don’t envy you trying to establish the truth, at this distance in time.’

‘It isn’t easy, as you say. But we’re lucky to have many of the leading players still around. Including you, Mr Wallington. Do you think your friend Kate or Kathy was involved in any way in Julie’s death?’

He decided to ignore their description of her as a friend. Perhaps she’d told them things about him, if they’d managed to locate her. That wouldn’t have been easy, surely – but they’d found him, hadn’t they, so why not Kathy? ‘I don’t know. They were quite close in the squat and they went off to that farm together and saw men there. I don’t know what men, beyond the fact that one of them was the farmer’s son and that Julie was shagging him at the time.’ He glanced up to check their reaction to the word. He found them again quite impassive.

Bert Hook, who hadn’t spoken at all thus far, said, as if he was merely confirming something they already knew, ‘You were trying to get between the sheets with Kathy yourself, weren’t you, Mike?’

He forced a smile. ‘Sheets were in short supply in the squat. But I suppose you’re right. Things were pretty free and easy in places like that. You grabbed what you could where you could and when you could. So long as you didn’t think you’d get the clap, you had a go at most women. Sometimes you got no further than a quick grope and a knee in the balls. But quite often you got a surprisingly good fuck.’ He threw in another four-letter word; he had an obscure feeling that the most basic terms would make them think he was being more honest. ‘I think I had a go at Kathy, yes. But she turned me down. Pity, really: I think she’d have been a very satisfying shag. And both Kathy and Julie scrubbed up well, when they chose to. But you can never tell with these things, can you – I expect you’ve found that yourself.’ He grinned a little in appreciation of his own wit as he raised his eyebrows at the sturdy Hook.

‘When was it that you asked Julie Grimshaw to sell drugs for you, Mike?’ Hook threw the question in as if it were the next stage in a casual conversation.

‘Now look here! I asked you to come here so that I could offer my full cooperation as a responsible citizen who holds a key post in our community. If I’d thought that you were going to make these—’

‘You didn’t invite us here, Mike, and you’ve so far shown very few of the qualities of a responsible citizen. You were selling drugs both in the squat and in at least two pubs in the Gloucester area. We know that and we have the evidence to bring charges if we choose to, even at this distance in time. Whether or not we decide to pursue the matter will probably depend on the degree of cooperation and assistance you offer us in the course of a murder inquiry. Your conduct so far would indicate anything but innocence. We have not cleared you of involvement in the death of Julie Grimshaw. In fact, your evasions are exciting our interest in you as a suspect. We know that you were the Mick who was selling drugs around Gloucester and that you were trying to recruit people to sell them. Julie was one of those people, wasn’t she?’

Hook spoke with such conviction that Michael felt the man was very sure of his ground. They had unearthed other people in the squat, as well as members of the filth who’d patrolled the area, so they probably knew all these things for certain. He licked his lips and said, ‘I’ve a hell of a lot to lose here, you know.’

Hook nodded. ‘You have indeed. And you’re going the right way about losing it at the moment.’ He shook his head a couple of times. ‘You may or may not be a good Chief Education Officer in 2015. That is quite irrelevant to this matter. Did you or did you not approach Julie Grimshaw to sell drugs at seventeen Fairfax Street, Gloucester, in 1995?’

Mike wanted to deny his involvement, but he didn’t know how much others had already told them about him. He said heavily, ‘Yes. Julie was a heavy user and she hadn’t the money to sustain the habit. That was the sort of person we recruited – when I say “we” I mean the people higher up the chain than me. I didn’t have much choice in the matter.’

‘Except that it was you who identified Julie as a suitable recruit to an evil trade. Give us the details.’

‘I offered to provide her with her own supplies in exchange for her services as a seller. That’s what you did. You found people who were heavy users, but preferably not addicts. Addicts are totally dependent on you for their supplies, but they’re unreliable. They might try to sell while they’re stoned and get reckless.’ He was for a moment back in his world of twenty years ago, confident of his own expertise and the judgements he was able to make on potential recruits to the staff. ‘I put the deal to Julie because she wasn’t stupid and I thought she’d be careful.’

‘And did she accept?’

Michael licked his lips, realizing that he was getting in deeper, becoming more reliant on their clemency, with each of these successive admissions. ‘She neither accepted nor refused. I made her the offer. She disappeared the next day. Went out and never came back.’ He looked hard at Hook and at the relentless Lambert, desperately wanting to be believed.

Hook’s voice softened persuasively. ‘Think hard about your answer to these next two questions, Mike. Much better to tell us now and get marks for cooperation, if the answers should be yes. Did Julie refuse your offer to become your dealer? And did you or other people who were directing you decide to eliminate her because of that refusal?’

‘No! It was exactly as I just told you it was. She went out and never came back. I thought she’d just moved on, probably to some other squat. And she knew nothing about the people higher up the drugs chain, so they wouldn’t have harmed her. I knew precious little about them myself, and Julie knew nothing.’ He was wide-eyed with fear now, desperately anxious to convince them.

‘Did you simply accept her disappearance? Didn’t you ask around the other people in the squat and attempt to find out what had happened to her?’

He was quiet for a moment, wondering what he should say to this. ‘I asked Kathy what had happened to Julie – well, I think she asked me, actually. We were each a little suspicious of the other. It’s like that in squats: no one really trusts anyone else. It doesn’t pay to ask too many questions about anything.’

That at any rate rang true, whatever they made of the rest of his answers. Hook glanced at Lambert, who immediately resumed the questioning. ‘When did you decide to change your name, Mr Wallington?’

He glanced apprehensively at the door he had shut so firmly upon his family, and they knew in that moment that his wife knew nothing of this, probably nothing of his time in the squat. ‘Two years after I’d left the squat. It was when I began my first teaching job. You don’t want people to know you’ve lived like that when you’re going to be shaping the lives of young people. I’d been Mick Warner in the squat, but I wanted to put all that and everything it meant behind me.’

‘Especially as you’d been dealing in drugs. I can’t see that being a big attraction when head teachers were considering your applications.’

‘I said I’d been working abroad for a year, broadening my experience. I’d certainly been doing that, hadn’t I?’

‘Yes. You’d also been breaking the laws of the land. Not only selling drugs but recruiting others to do the same. I don’t suppose Julie Grimshaw was the only one you approached.’

He didn’t trouble to deny that. Anything was preferable to the accusation of murder they’d been dangling before him minutes earlier. ‘I’m not proud of what I did in those months. It could ruin my career if it came out now – you can imagine what the tabloids would make of it.’ He paused for a moment, but Lambert offered him no reassurance. ‘I got rid of Mick Warner, became Michael Wallington.’

Just as the Kathy of the squat had become Kate Clark, board member of a great national utility company, thought Lambert. There were skeletons in the cupboard from that squat, as well as the one very real skeleton which had started all this and brought them here on this bright Sunday morning. ‘Did you make the change official?’

‘Yes. It was all done by deed poll. I became Michael Wallington. I buried Mick Warner and everything that went with him for ever.’

‘Or at least until the discovery of the remains of a woman who had lived with Warner at Fairfax Street brought him back into your life.’

‘Until this, yes.’ He glanced again at the door. ‘Please don’t bring Mick Warner back into my family life. Debbie and the children don’t deserve this.’