Skeleton Plot (9 page)

‘Were you lovers?’

A bitter smile settled upon the wide, pale lips. ‘Yes. She was a very attractive girl. I should have told you that at the start, I suppose. She was even more attractive when she wasn’t taking horse. I think it was because I saw that, because I saw what she had been and might still be, that I was so attracted to her. I thought I wanted to marry her, at the time.’

‘But your parents didn’t want that. What did they do to prevent it?’

He shrugged. ‘Everything they could, as far as I can remember. Dad wouldn’t listen to any of my arguments. Mum wasn’t quite as bad as that. I think she understood some of my feelings and sympathized with my motives, but her main concern was to safeguard her only son. Now that I have kids of my own, I can understand that. Mum thought it was all very well offering comfort to lost souls, but she drew the line against setting one up with her son. And she was even more terrified of drugs than Dad was. She was fearful that Julie would drag me down with her into that world.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I made the mistake of taking Julie to the farm when she’d just injected. It was obvious she was drugged and abnormal, even to someone as innocent as Mum. Julie behaved badly. She couldn’t sit at the table properly and she spilled her tea. She said stupid things. Mum and Dad said they didn’t want her in the house again and forbade me to associate with her. I said that I was over twenty-one and I could do as I liked. Not in their house I couldn’t, Dad said. It was the usual kind of family row, I suppose, but when you’re in the middle of it, it seems worse than that. I got myself a place on a history degree at Liverpool University and left the area. I hardly visited Lower Valley Farm after that; I came home for the odd weekend and for a week or so during the summer holidays. I made my peace with Mum before she died and patched things up with Dad. I wouldn’t say it’s any better than that – we still treat each other like strangers when I visit him in the care home.’

Bert Hook looked up from his notes. ‘I need to ask you this and to record your reply. Did you kill Julie Grimshaw?’

Burrell seemed neither surprised nor outraged by the question. It was almost as if he had prepared himself for it. He said quietly, almost formally, ‘No. I had nothing to do with her disappearance or her death.’

‘And have you any thoughts on who might have killed her?’

‘No. She simply disappeared. I feared something might have happened to her, but assumed that if it had it would have been after she had left us. I think I assumed at first that she’d moved on to get away from me.’

‘But the place where the body was found implies a connection with Lower Valley Farm and the people who were in the area at that time.’

‘Yes, I can see that. That is why it was such a shock to me to hear that a body had been found there.’

‘When did you last see Julie Grimshaw, Mr Burrell?’

A long pause. Then a weary ‘Does it matter?’

‘It does to us, Andrew. And it does to you, if you wish to see her killer apprehended. We need to establish a time of death. Then we shall interview anyone who was around and close to her at that time.

He nodded, a long strand of yellow hair falling over his left eye. ‘I couldn’t be precise. She disappeared, as I said. I went into Gloucester to look for her, thinking she might have gone back to the squat. I couldn’t find her. After a month, I accepted that she’d gone and wasn’t going to come back.’

Hook was in his persuasive, understanding mode now. His gentle tones suggested that it would be far easier and healthier to tell him everything you knew than to attempt to deceive him. ‘How could you be certain of that, Andrew? Squats are strange, enclosed places. They don’t welcome outsiders. How could you be certain that she wasn’t somewhere in this underworld labyrinth, that she wasn’t just refusing to see you or to have any further dealings with you?’

The blue eyes looked hard at Hook, then glanced for a moment at the watchful Lambert. Burrell looked in that moment like a hunted man, wondering how much he could get away with before these two observant, experienced men. He decided that he had better be honest in this at least. ‘I told you I was doing drugs a little at this time. I got my coke in the form of rocks from a dealer in Gloucester. I saw him, bought from him, and then asked him about Julie. I knew that he’d been trying to make a dealer of her – offering to deliver her own supplies to her free, so long as she sold whatever he chose to allocate to her. It’s how they get new dealers, and for Julie it would have been another step along the road to addiction. But I expect you know that.’

‘And was this man able to tell you where she’d gone?’

‘No. He convinced me that she wasn’t still around, though. He said that she’d left the squat without saying anything to the people there. In fact, she’d apparently not taken away even the few pathetic things she possessed. Her coat was still there, he said. Nothing else – anything of any value would have been snatched up by the others in the squat – but I don’t think Julie had much. I didn’t go into the squat myself. They’re not safe places for those who don’t live there.’

‘What was the name of the man who sold you drugs and was trying to recruit Julie to become a dealer?’

‘I don’t know. I never knew. You didn’t ask for names, if you knew what was good for you.’

Burrell looked drained. This venture into the past he thought he had left for ever had left him physically shaken. Hook allowed him a few seconds of respite before he said, ‘Can you give us the names of any other people who were in the squat at that time? We shall obviously make every effort to contact them and question them. We have means at our disposal to discover the present whereabouts of people who have long since moved on to other places and to other modes of life.’

Andrew Burrell shook his head miserably. Then, unexpectedly, he said in a low voice, ‘There was Kathy, of course. I never found out her second name. People in squats don’t care for anyone who pries.’ He smiled grimly at the recollection, then said suddenly, ‘It might have been Clark. I think I heard Julie call her Kathy Clark. But I couldn’t be certain. And a lot of people in squats didn’t use their own names anyway.’

‘You said, “There was Kathy, of course” as if this was someone you knew quite well, whereas you can’t identify for us any of the other members of that squat. Can you explain yourself, please?’

Another pause, then a sad shake of the head. ‘She was a friend of Julie’s – not that you could have normal friends, when you were in the squat and on drugs, as I think both of them were at the time. Kathy came along with Julie when I first dated her – I suppose that was a sort of insurance. I didn’t see her much after that, but Julie Grimshaw often spoke of her. It was Kathy who came out of the squat and told me that Julie had left without speaking to her and without taking her belongings. I’ve no idea where Kathy is now, or even whether she’s alive.’

Hook made a note of the name, then stared hard into the anxious face. ‘We’ve had to drag this information out of you, haven’t we? Exactly what else are you concealing, Andrew?’

‘Nothing. I’ve told you everything now.’

‘What was the state of your relationship with Julie Grimshaw when you last saw her?’

This time it was Burrell who paused, recognizing the seriousness of the query and the response he would make to it. ‘We knew by then that we weren’t long-term. I was still keen on her, but she’d rejected the idea of marriage as ridiculous and she said that any protracted relationship was impossible. The way my parents felt didn’t help that.’

‘It seems odd that you didn’t make further efforts to trace her when you found she’d disappeared from the area. It’s almost as if you knew that she had in fact disappeared from this earth.’

Burrell gave a little gasp, but didn’t rush into any denials. He said only, ‘No, that isn’t true. I realized that our relationship had run its course. I went off to Liverpool and completed the degree I’d always wanted to do and began another life.’ He lifted his hands palms upwards and then dropped them again, as if he wished to indicate the academic world in which he now existed and cite it in his favour.

‘Who else do you know who was close to her in the weeks before her death?’

He shook his head hopelessly. ‘There were the people in the squat with her. But I didn’t know them. And there was Jim Simmons. He knew her.’ His lips set for a moment in a tight line, but he said nothing further about the man who now controlled the farm which had once been destined for him. And he offered them no other names. ‘That time seems to me now like part of another life, as I said. I can remember Julie vividly, but not much else. I suppose I’ve spent most of the time since then opening the door on a new life and closing the door on that one.’

Andrew Burrell sat very still for what seemed to him a long time after his CID visitors had gone, staring unseeingly at the telephone number on the card John Lambert had left with him. Then he opened the top drawer of his desk and extracted a pile of student essays. He began reading them resolutely, writing the occasional comment vigorously into the margins. He strove hard to concentrate, forcing himself back into this world which was now his real place, and away from that world where a girl no older than many of his students had died twenty years ago.

S
teve Williams was anxious. He didn’t let anyone know that. It wasn’t his way and it would have been bad strategy to acknowledge to anyone that he had anything to fear. But as the days dragged past, he felt more on edge than he had done for many years. He thought that he had perhaps lost his capacity to deal with danger; he would never have been as tense as this in the old days.

The fact that he was sixty-six now didn’t help, he supposed. The police had come to the house within thirty-six hours of the skeleton being discovered. Just a couple of uniforms, doing the standard house-to-house stuff. Nothing to be worried about there, just the expected questions. Did he or Hazel remember anything about a young woman around these parts twenty years ago? They’d had a son at that time, hadn’t they? A lad who must have been about the same age as the girl who had died.

The uniforms, one male and one female, had been young and studiously polite. He’d explained to them about Liam being killed in a road accident and being no longer with them. He told them that it would be better if they stuck with him and didn’t question the boy’s mother. He could tell them everything they wanted to know, answer all the standard questions they had on their sheet, and it would upset his wife terribly if she had to talk about Liam to them. She’d never really accepted that he’d gone, you see, not completely. Liam’s room was still preserved as a shrine, with the same posters of footballers and sports cars he’d stuck on the walls before he’d gone out and been killed in the accident. Hazel didn’t allow anyone else in there to clean: even he had to tiptoe around and touch nothing, on the rare occasions when he insisted on going into the room.

The plods had been very understanding. They’d nodded sympathetically and made a note of the date of Liam’s death. They’d put a series of ticks and crosses on their sheets, added notes to two of Steve’s replies and said that they were sure they had everything they needed. It might be that more senior officers would need to come and speak to him in a day or two, but that would depend on how the investigation progressed and what information they gathered from other sources. Just following normal routine, the plods assured him at least three times.

It was two days now since they’d told him that and nothing had happened. It was the very absence of action which was making him nervous. Steve Williams was a man used to controlling his own life, to dictating to others what would happen in the coming days. He didn’t like being passive and waiting for things to happen at the behest of others.

Moreover, he knew quite a lot about police procedures. He knew that there would be furious activity in the days following the discovery of that skeleton two hundred yards from his door. There was nothing in the papers or on the television beyond the initial statement about the discovery of remains and the fact that it was being treated as a suspicious death. But the fuzz would be like swans, cruising about with their feet working frantically under the water. There were lots of things going on; all kinds of information was being gathered, and none of it was available to him. Steve didn’t like that.

On Wednesday morning, he took the dog out again. Dogs always made you look innocent: he’d realized that years ago. Especially if you took your polythene bag with you as a poop scoop and behaved like a responsible citizen. There was no better badge of respectability than a dog. Not a pit bull, of course. Even he didn’t approve of pit bulls and still less of the young thugs at the other end of their chains.

But Ben was a Labrador. Always cheerful and everyone’s friend. Mischievous, of course, and likely to mount anything in sight on one of his energetic days, but people quite liked that. The dog-lovers in the woods and on the sports ground where Steve walked him liked Ben, anyway. They were a tolerant and long-suffering lot, dog-lovers, with a good sense of humour where canines were involved. An unsuspicious, mainly elderly, group, who exchanged harmless thoughts about the weather and the latest inanities of celebrities and politicians. Lately, of course, they’d swapped thoughts about the sensational discovery of the skeleton beyond the edge of the sports ground. Steve had listened to whatever they had said, but he hadn’t picked up any more information about what the police were doing at present. It was all speculation, and less informed speculation than he would have been able to offer himself, if he had chosen to comment on the matter.

He put Ben on the lead and took his leave of his fellow dog-walkers. The way home took him past the spot where the bones had been discovered. He walked as close as he could to it and looked across at it for a moment. The ribbons and screens which denoted a scene of crime were still there, but he doubted whether much was going on behind them this morning. The police and the pathologist would have reassembled the skeleton during the hours after the discovery at the weekend. He had no doubt that they would have recovered almost everything, but he didn’t know how much they would have been able to discover from things which had been hidden from the world for twenty years. It was that uncertainty which disturbed him.

They had a lot of resources, the police; more than he’d ever been able to employ, even in his heyday. They operated on a wider front than he had done, of course, so they needed those resources. But they weren’t inefficient, as a lot of the criminal fraternity chose to think they were. It didn’t pay to underestimate the pigs. He knew a lot of people who’d done that and were now locked away.

The filth gave it everything when they got their teeth into a murder. It was a matter of professional pride to them that fewer murders went unsolved in Britain than anywhere else in the world. An increasing number of gangland killings went undetected, as you’d expect. But the police, although they wouldn’t say so, weren’t too worried about those. That was villains killing villains, as far as the filth were concerned, and leaving that many fewer bad buggers in the world.

This wasn’t one of those deaths. They’d be on the case in a big way, sniffing hard after scents which had long gone cold. Steve wondered what success they were having and found his ignorance disturbing. He shifted his cap a little on his bald head, tugged Ben away from the fence and went back to his house.

Hazel was finishing the breakfast washing up, setting the dishes carefully on the drainer in the pattern she always followed. He gave her his ritual, ‘You should have left that for me. I have time for these things, now that I’m retired.’

‘Semi-retired, you said.’

He smiled at her. ‘I have to keep one hand on the tiller. You wouldn’t like it if the money stopped coming in. But there’s no reason why we shouldn’t take holidays, now. You only have to say the word and we’ll be away. This country or abroad, it’s your choice. The world is your oyster. You only have to speak.’

‘I don’t want to go away. Any more than I want to move house. I’ve told you that often enough.’

‘It might be good for you to get away. I’m sure you’d enjoy it, once you’d made the effort. You used to enjoy holidays, in the old days.’

The old days. They were skirting round Liam, as they always did. He didn’t know whether Hazel wanted that, or whether she just didn’t want to talk about it with him. He didn’t know a lot of things about her nowadays. It was true what they said, those anonymous and annoying millions who made up ‘they’. Money didn’t necessarily bring happiness. Perhaps he didn’t deserve happiness. But he’d never accepted that what you deserved had much to do with what you did in this life.

He watched Hazel hang up her apron, then went across to her impulsively and stood close behind her. She stood still and stared ahead of her, awaiting his next move. He slid his arms gently around her waist, stroking the top of her stomach, feeling against his body the curves which had excited him as a young man. He kissed the top of her head softly and whispered into her ear, ‘It would do us good to get away from here for a while, my love.’

She detached his hands from her waist and said firmly, without turning to look at him, ‘I don’t want that.’

He said impulsively and unwisely, ‘I can get other women, you know.’

She didn’t turn to look at him as she said, ‘I know that. You always could. You always did.’ Then she went out of the kitchen and shut the door behind her.

He hadn’t known that she’d been aware of those things when he’d done them. It was the first time that she had ever acknowledged that she’d known. But of course she’d known: she wasn’t stupid, Hazel. He realized suddenly how much he wanted her to love him. And in the same instant, he realized that she was now never going to do that.

He went into the room which he called his study and tried to read the newspaper. He had a phone in here, but he let Hazel answer in the sitting room when it rang. He could hear her calm, unemotional tones, but not the words she said. She came and spoke to him through the open door of his study, without entering the room.

The police now knew the identity of the skeleton they’d dug up at the weekend. The man in charge of the case would like to speak to Mr Williams. He would come here with another officer at two thirty this afternoon.

‘Our Customer Services Director will see you in two minutes. The cancellation of an appointment has left her with a fifteen-minute gap in her schedule. You are fortunate to be able to see her at such short notice, Detective Inspector Rushton.’

The PA stared disapprovingly at the handsome, dark-haired policeman with the document case in his hands. Disapproval was part of her job. She built up the status of her boss by being the dragon at the desk in the ante-room outside her office, a formidable sentry guarding the entrance to that holy of holies. She was more zealous than she had ever been about this aspect of her work, because Ms Katherine Clark was a woman, the first female boss she had ever had. The sorority must stick together; men underestimated abler women like Katherine, so anything her PA could do to compensate for that must be done.

She eyed the soberly clad policeman with an automatic disapproval. It was a good thing he had at least come here in plain clothes: it wouldn’t do to have policemen marching about the place in uniform and sparking off all sorts of speculation. He had his job to do, she supposed, but she couldn’t think what possible business he could have with a board member of Severn Trent. Meanwhile, he should be made properly aware of how privileged he was to gain such a swift audience with a senior executive of one of the great national utility firms.

Kate Clark welcomed Rushton with a warm smile, reserving her position, ready to turn on the charm with a man perhaps ten years younger than her if that seemed the best tactic. This was probably some police inquiry into the conduct of a company employee. She would sacrifice him – or her – if they were junior and unimportant. If this was about the misdeed of a more senior employee, she might need to exercise her full diplomatic skills to plead for leniency. In the complex power games which were played out behind the doors of the boardroom, it never did you any harm to have senior colleagues owing you favours.

Kate gave him a broad, frank smile and threw out her hand. ‘Detective Inspector Rushton, I believe. And I’m Kate Clark. No time for coffee, I’m afraid: you’ve been pushed into a very small window in my day, in the interests of urgency. Now what can I do for you? Is this the peccadillo of one of our many hundreds of employees? Not speeding, I’m sure, because that wouldn’t warrant the presence in my office of as senior an officer as yourself.’

‘No. It’s not speeding. Nor driving without licence and insurance. We should be taking direct action against the individual in the case of traffic offences. But I’m CID, not traffic.’

She caught his slight wince of discomfort that she should consider it a possibility that he might be traffic and said, ‘Of course. A senior CID officer implies something much more serious, though I find it difficult to see how I might be the person to help you. But of course I shall do whatever I can. If this concerns some offence by a senior colleague, I can assure you that we speak here in strict confidence. Anything you say will not be repeated outside these four walls without your approval.’

‘We wish this to go no further, at this stage. That is why I have come here in person to speak to you.’ Chris Rushton had been determined not to be overawed by authority, but he found himself speaking stiffly and formally. Despite his resolve he was awed by the easy manner of this attractive, supremely confident and successful woman.

Kate glanced at her watch. ‘We had better get on with this,’ she said briskly.

Rushton was much more at home with briskness than with charm. ‘This concerns you, Ms Clark. And I should say at the outset that you are not accused of any crime.’

‘It’s Kate. And that’s a relief.’ Her smile gave him the full benefit of some very expensive dental work. It also masked her first twinge of apprehension.

‘This is nothing to do with the past few weeks or even the past few months. I’m here to enquire about your whereabouts in 1995.’

She’d been preparing to sit down opposite him in the comfortable armchairs which dominated one end of the large room. Now she sat down abruptly behind her desk with the window behind her. ‘That cannot possibly be of interest to you. I was not engaged in any criminal activity.’

Chris’s assurance increased with the decline of hers. ‘No one has so far suggested that you might have been. But we are investigating what we now know is a very serious crime. We need your cooperation.’

‘I’ve already offered that. What is it you want of me?’

‘Last Saturday, a skeleton was discovered in a shallow grave in Herefordshire. You may have read about that.’

Kate was sure that her face had gone white. She hoped that with the light behind her he wouldn’t see that. ‘I don’t read about crime in the papers. I’m too busy, for one thing. And the details sometimes upset me. But I heard the police bulletins on the radio when I was in my car.’

Rushton nodded. ‘We now know that this woman died about twenty years ago. It’s our job to find out exactly how she died. To do that, we need to discover as much as we can about the life she lived in the weeks immediately before her death. We think you may be able to assist us with that.’