Skeleton Plot Read online

  ‘I’m trying desperately to remember what I can of that squat. It’s difficult for me, because I’ve spent the best part of twenty years trying to forget about that section of my life.’ He looked at Lambert for a word of sympathy, but the man stared hard at him and said nothing. ‘People came and went. I can’t remember those who merely passed through and were only there for a day or two. There was another girl, I think. A friend of Julie’s. I didn’t see too much of them because they were on the first floor. The men mostly stayed on the ground floor.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘I can’t remember that. She was rather pretty, I think. She had darker skin and darker hair than Julie, who was almost blonde – I don’t know whether that was her natural colour or not, though. This other girl had long dark hair at first, but not later. She cut it off herself while she was in the squat, I think. What was her name?’ His brow furrowed again and he stared at the floor. ‘Kathy, I think. I’m pretty sure we called her Kathy. I don’t know her other name; as I told you, we didn’t indulge in those.’

  Hook gave him the encouraging smile which Lambert had denied him. ‘Clark, would it be? Could she have been Kathy Clark?’

  Michael’s features were studiously blank. He wasn’t going to give them any more. Even if they knew more and were trying to trap him, he couldn’t see what they could do if he blanked them resolutely from here on. He’d given them a little, and they surely couldn’t prove that he remembered more, whatever they suspected. ‘She might have been called Clark. But I wouldn’t have known if she was, any more than she’d have known my name.’

  Lambert said suddenly, ‘Were you supplying the drugs in that place?’

  ‘No! That’s an outrageous suggestion. I wasn’t a user and I don’t know where the horse and coke and ecstasy which changed hands in the squat came from.’

  ‘I see. We had to ask that, just as I now have to ask you whether you killed Julie Grimshaw.’

  ‘No! Again, the suggestion is outrageous and I must register my—’

  ‘Do you have any idea who might have killed her?’

  ‘No. There were all kinds of people in there. It might have been one of them who killed Julie, I suppose, but I have no idea which one.’

  ‘Give it some urgent thought, please. You are the nearest we have to a first-hand witness of the events leading up to the death of Miss Grimshaw. Any further recollections of your companions at seventeen Fairfax Street will be gratefully received.’

  Then, abruptly, they were gone. Michael Wallington stared at the empty coffee cups and the biscuits, but did not call in Mrs Barrett to remove them. He felt unprepared for any kind of human contact. He might give away far more of himself than he could afford to reveal, even in this office which was so emphatically his own preserve. He was the strong man here, the ruler of his own small empire, and that situation must at all costs be preserved.

  He tried to review his clash with the CID rationally – for clash it had undoubtedly been. It had felt during the latter stages of the confrontation as if they held all the weapons, as if he was hopelessly beaten. But when he reviewed the exchanges more coolly now, Michael decided that he had come out of it quite well – certainly as well as could be expected, in this dramatic and difficult situation.

  He’d told them what he had to tell them. He’d admitted to knowing Julie Grimshaw and her friend Kathy, but he’d surely managed to convince them that he remembered a lot less about events at seventeen Fairfax Street than he did. Or he hoped he had done that.

  Andrew Burrell searched the newspapers and watched the television anxiously. There seemed to be nothing new being revealed about the Julie Grimshaw murder.

  On Friday morning he conducted a seminar with a group of third-year degree students, insisting that they came up with their own opinions rather than waiting for him to lead them, forcing himself to concentrate on the mores of the seventeenth century rather than those of the twenty-first which had so dominated his thoughts during a troubled night. His colleagues noticed his tenseness. They thought it was worries about work which were disturbing his sleep; he had been happy to foster that delusion.

  At lunchtime he refused an invitation to eat in the refectory with his fellow tutors and sat brooding alone in his room. Eventually he pulled out his mobile phone and dialled a number. This would be the time to get Jim Simmons. He would be eating with his wife in the farmhouse. You were a creature of habit when you worked on a farm; the nature of the work determined that you had to be.

  Jim Simmons was clearly surprised to hear his voice. The academic had to identify himself. ‘It’s Andrew, Jim. Andrew Burrell. Long time no see. Or hear, for that matter. I should have been in touch, but time slips away, what with work and divorce.’

  ‘Yes.’ Jim paused, staring at the phone, wondering what this could be about. ‘Is it your dad? He was fine, when I saw him last week. I’m sure he’d appreciate a visit from you, though.’

  ‘No, this is not about Dad. But you’re right, it’s time I went to see him. I’m very busy here, but I must make the time. I wanted a word about this skeleton someone’s dug up on your land.’

  ‘Not my land, Andrew. It’s someone’s garden now. It was sold off some time ago.’

  ‘And at a very good price, from what I heard.’ Andrew almost bit his tongue off; he hadn’t rung up to offer barbs like that, to revive old animosities. He needed Jim Simmons’s cooperation, not his resistance. ‘Sorry. That’s nothing to do with me. Good luck to you, I say, if you can get people to pay you good money to extend their gardens. It’s just that I was wondering what the police had been saying to you, about Julie Grimshaw.’

  It was a clumsy change of gear. He could almost hear the cogs grating. Simmons must surely have caught his anxiety. But how could you even pretend to be casual about something like this? He could picture Simmons in the farmhouse at this moment, taking his time, weighing this query in his measured, deceptively intelligent way. That had always been one of the irritating things about Jim: he was much sharper and more perceptive about people than farmers were supposed to be. But then the modern farmer had to deal with all sorts of government ‘initiatives’ which had not been around in his father’s day.

  After a few seconds Simmons said, ‘They wanted to find out everything they could about Julie. They didn’t even mention her name, but that was their concern. I told them she’d been here. Not much more than that.’

  ‘And what did you tell them about me?’ Andrew Burrell felt feeble in showing his anxiety, but he needed to ask that.

  ‘Virtually nothing. They were more interested in me. I told them I’d been wild, got into a few fights at that time, dabbled a little in drugs. They were interested in what I might have done and in my dealings with Julie, not yours. I think I was the first one the senior men had spoken with at any length. They probably know a lot more now than they did then.’ Jim rather enjoyed saying that.

  ‘Yes. They gave me the impression that they knew quite a lot when they spoke to me on Tuesday. That’s one of the problems when they’re questioning you, isn’t it? You don’t know how much they already know.’

  ‘Not a problem if you’ve nothing to hide, is it?’ Jim was both asserting his own innocence and turning the knife a little in the man who had lived here with him when they were both young.

  Andrew wished he hadn’t treated him loftily as the hired hand so often in those days. He forced himself to ask the question he needed to ask. ‘Did they mention Liam?’

  ‘No. And I didn’t mention him either.’

  ‘That’s good. No need to raise all that stuff if we don’t have to, is there?’

  Simmons didn’t comment directly on that. He could hear his old enemy breathing heavily into his phone. Jim said slowly, ‘Well, Liam Williams isn’t here to speak for himself, is he? That must make it difficult for the CID. But they don’t give up easily, do they? Not when they get their teeth into a murder.’

  TWELVE

  Lambert got the message he had been
expecting from the Chief Constable late on Friday morning. By two o’clock in the afternoon he was sitting in front of the CC’s desk, feeling a little like a head prefect called into the headmaster’s study.

  One thing felt odd for a start. All his previous chief constables had been older than him, but Gordon Armstrong was a good ten years younger. And to Lambert, Armstrong, with his sharp suits and short, perfectly cut brown hair, looked even younger. Armstrong had been gracious and studiously polite towards him so far, but Lambert couldn’t help feeling that the CC would like the older man out of his way, would like to make his imprint on CID by appointing his own man to head it.

  Armstrong waited for him to refuse any refreshment, then said breezily, ‘I thought we should have a quick word about this “skeleton mystery”, as the media have decided to call it, John. I’m getting a lot of queries about our progress, as you can imagine.’

  ‘I can, sir. I’m grateful to you for keeping the press at bay. I don’t enjoy their bloodlust as they look for a sensational quote.’

  Armstrong grinned at him and for a moment they were companions, united against the feckless media, allies who understood each other’s problems in the face of the amateur and irresponsible world outside. ‘I’ve given them all the usual guff. Enquiries are proceeding satisfactorily. We have several possibilities in view, and all are being thoroughly investigated. Various people are helping us with our enquiries. No, we do not yet have a leading suspect and no one has been taken into custody. But I can only fend them off with such things for so long, as you know. If I can’t give them something to bite on in the next few days, it will be “Police baffled” and “What are our overpaid flatfoots doing to earn their money?”’

  And you’re new here and anxious to appear on the ball with the Fourth Estate: quite understandable and one of the reasons why I wouldn’t sit in your seat for the biggest pension in the land. Lambert didn’t like the way pensions were intruding so often nowadays into his thoughts and vocabulary. He said, ‘It’s more difficult than usual, sir, with a corpse that disappeared twenty years ago and a crime committed at that time.’

  ‘I know that and you know that, John. Even the hacks with the tabloids know it, but sympathy and patience are not notable press virtues. The time lapse is the next line I plan to use, but I’m sure they’ll treat it as an evasion – they might even be right, I suppose. Meanwhile, whatever I reveal to them, I need to be kept absolutely up to date on the case. DI Rushton has fed me everything he’s filing, but I thought I’d like to have the latest from you – including your private thoughts and speculations, which can’t be filed.’

  At that Armstrong gave him a conspiratorial smile and Lambert responded with a weaker one of his own. ‘I’ve been involved in a lot of murders over my CID career, sir. This is the first one where I’ve been involved in a case which began with remains buried twenty years ago.’

  ‘I appreciate that, John. But I can hardly feed your inexperience to the press. They’ve spent the last few years fostering the impression that their “super-sleuth” knows everything and is prepared for anything.’

  ‘You asked me to be frank, sir. I’ll tell you privately that I felt for a couple of days that we were really floundering. If I look at the case as dispassionately as I can, I suppose we have made decent progress over six days. I can’t say we’re on the verge of a solution. We’ve turned up a number of suspects who need further investigation. I’m not sure we’ve even got a comprehensive list of those; we may still add to the number.’

  ‘I think you should give me your thoughts on whatever you have. You must rely on me to decide what might be released to the media vultures.’

  ‘Probably very little at the moment, sir, if we don’t want suits for defamation of character. There are some quite powerful people involved, most of whom will no doubt prove to be quite innocent of murder.’

  Armstrong sighed. That was exactly what he had feared. But such things came with the job. ‘Start with the victim and what she was doing at the time of her death. Then pinpoint a few suspects and give me your thoughts.’

  ‘We had an identification as early as Monday morning, sir. Thanks to a grieving mother and DNA confirmation we didn’t need to trawl dental records. The victim was Julie Grimshaw, aged twenty-one. Her last known residence was a squat in Gloucester: seventeen Fairfax Street. The place is about to be demolished. I visited it with DS Hook on Thursday evening, but as you’d expect at this distance of time there was nothing to be learned there.’

  ‘Can you be certain that this was her last residence? Mightn’t she have moved on to some other, perhaps similar, place?’

  ‘We can’t yet rule that out. But it’s my opinion that she was murdered whilst still living in that squat. She disappeared abruptly. That isn’t unusual for squat-dwellers, but she didn’t take any of her very few belongings with her. Even her coat was left behind; I think that’s significant, because warmth is always a prime consideration for those living on the edge of existence in squats.’

  ‘How many of the people living with her in the squat have you located?’

  ‘Two so far. As you know, there is a constantly shifting population in squats. These were two of the few who seem to have been there for a lengthy period. Both of them were around at the time when Julie Grimshaw disappeared and died.’

  ‘So both of them are suspects?’

  ‘Until we can clear them, yes. Both deny guilt, as you would expect, and both claim to have no knowledge of how Julie died.’

  She sounded more like a real girl who had lived and loved and died when Lambert called her just Julie, thought Gordon Armstrong. Policemen became attached to victims if they spent long enough on a case, and it sounded from his tone of voice as if the grizzled and hugely experienced Lambert was developing an attachment to this one. That was no bad thing, because it made you more determined that her death would be avenged and her killer put away. ‘These are the two that DI Rushton itemized for me. Remind me please of their backgrounds, John.’

  Lambert smiled grimly. These weren’t going to be welcome details for a chief constable. People in high places often had influential friends. Diplomatically, it would be much easier for Armstrong if these two were clerks or artisans. ‘The female is Katherine Clark, MBE. She is the Director with responsibility for Customer Services at Severn Trent Water. She has left seventeen Fairfax Street a very long way behind her. She is one of the new breed of female executives. She’s riding the tide of female emancipation in senior management circles and I expect she is also highly efficient. I suspect she has aspirations to chair a major company. Not surprisingly, she is very anxious that her way of life in her early twenties does not become public knowledge.’

  ‘You described her as highly efficient. Would her efficiency include a certain ruthlessness?’

  ‘Almost certainly. I can’t see how she could have risen as quickly as she has to the board of Severn Trent without that quality. You’re asking me whether she would have had the nerve to kill Julie Grimshaw if the girl had stood in her way. I would say yes. I have as yet no evidence to support such a theory.’

  The Chief Constable smiled wryly. ‘This is why I needed to confer with you, John. I spend a good four fifths of my life listening to what people think it is safe to say. DI Rushton gives me all the facts. I need your opinions and speculations to flesh them out.’

  ‘Kate Clark – she will tell you to call her that, if you have occasion to speak with her – was Julie’s friend in the squat. She claims to have been surprised and baffled by her disappearance. We’ve no reason as yet to doubt her statement on that. What our second squat occupant has told us tends rather to confirm it, though he claims to remember very little. I think it suits him to do that. He has so far shown a very selective recall of his experiences at seventeen Fairfax Street.’

  ‘You’re speaking of this man Michael Wallington.’

  ‘Chief Education Officer of Stainford in Worcestershire, sir. An able man, no doubt. Perhaps he jus
t rubbed me up the wrong way, but I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. For what it’s worth, DS Hook, who normally tends to be more charitable than I am, thought exactly the same. But as I say, Wallington is probably very able.’

  Armstrong frowned. ‘Not a good combination, that, from our point of view. Able and unscrupulous.’

  ‘And highly rated in Stainford, sir, which makes things even worse, in terms of PR. If we have to say anything to besmirch Mr Wallington’s reputation, we’d better be very sure of our ground.’

  ‘Thank you for the warning,’ said Armstrong. ‘What else can you tell me about him?’

  ‘Not a great deal, as yet. We’ve got the local police in Gloucester on the case, but twenty years can be a surprisingly long time when it comes to bobbies on the beat. And I’m afraid the habit then was usually to ignore squats as far as possible, unless property owners made things hot. Neither Ms Clark nor Mr Wallington has any criminal record, which is probably a good thing from our point of view: we don’t need to embarrass them with official records of past crimes. But it makes it difficult to find out exactly what they were doing in that squat, beyond what they choose to tell us.’

  Armstrong nodded philosophically. ‘“We’ve unearthed several promising lines of enquiry and these are being thoroughly explored.” I can probably fob the press boys off with that and similar well-worn phrases for another day or two. Who else do you have in the frame?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure they’re in the frame yet, sir. But we have four other people who will remain suspects in my mind until they can be eliminated. The most obvious one is the man who owned the farm where Julie Grimshaw was buried in 1995. Daniel Burrell is now eighty-four and in a care home. He has suffered some physical decline, but he is still fully alert mentally.’

  ‘Motive?’

  ‘His son brought Julie Grimshaw home as his girl friend. Father and son were already at loggerheads because Andrew, the son, had been lined up to take over the farm and had decided by 1995 that he no longer wanted to do that. Julie was into hard drugs and perhaps in danger of becoming an addict at the time of her death. Andrew’s mother – now dead, which is unfortunate for us – and father were solidly against the liaison and they put pressure on Andrew to finish it. Old Daniel Burrell is salt of the earth and solid English yeoman stock, but he was used to getting his own way on his farm. Parents do strange and sometimes violent things in defence of their children and what they see as their children’s interests. Miss Grimshaw seems to have died from a blow to the left temple, so it’s possible that her killer acted in a fit of temper and didn’t intend to kill her at the time. The forensic pronouncements on wounds inflicted twenty years ago are obviously not as precise as they would be on wounds inflicted last week.’