The Killing of Katie Steelstock (27 page)

“Then we drove back to Streatley Common and parked there for a bit. Johnno was writing up his notes. He’d brought his battery-powered record player with him. He usually carried it round in the back of the car. The kids liked playing it.”

“So you had a pop concert and he wrote his article for the paper?”

“That’s right,” said Peter. Easier now.

“And this lasted how long?”

Tension again. “I think it must have been an hour. Perhaps a bit more.”

“Well, that takes us to around a quarter past twelve. What happened then?”

“Then we drove back to a telephone box. It was quite funny actually, because soon after he’d started a woman came out of one of the houses and she wanted to use the phone and she got absolutely furious and started hammering on the glass and Johnno took no notice at all.”

“You’d be able to identify the house this woman came out of?”

“Yes. I think I could. I think it was the one opposite the telephone box, on the other side of the road.”

“Did she see you?”

Peter thought about this one. He said, “I’m not sure. I was sitting quietly in the car. I think perhaps she didn’t see me. She was concentrating on getting angry with Johnno.”

“What then?”

“Then we put on a few more records and talked for a bit and drove home.”

“How long was the second session?”

“I can’t remember exactly. I was pretty sleepy by then.”

“It’s important, so let’s see if we can work it out. We know Johnno got home at a quarter to two. He’d have dropped you a few minutes before. Right? That would get you home sometime after half past one. I suppose everyone was in bed.”

“There was a light on in Mother’s room. I wondered why. Of course, I didn’t know—”

“Of course not. Let’s say twenty minutes for the drive back. That means you’d have left Streatley at one fifteen, near enough. How long was Johnno on the telephone?”

The question seemed to jerk Peter back from some secret place into which his thoughts had wandered. He said, “How long? Well . . . I don’t know. I don’t think it can have been much more than ten minutes. I expect it seemed much longer to the lady.”

“I expect it did. That would mean that your second session was a bit shorter than the first one. Half past twelve to a quarter past one. Say, three-quarters of an hour.”

“Yes, I should think that would be about it.”

McCourt was planning his strategy carefully. He said, “You’re fond of Johnno, aren’t you, Peter?”

“Yes, I am.” A touch of defiance.

“And I guess he’s fond of you.”

“You’d know soon enough if Johnno
wasn’t
fond of you.”

“Not a man to hide his feelings, I agree,” said McCourt with a smile. “I suppose you first got to know him when he taught at Coverdales.”

“He didn’t teach the form I was in. But he ran a sort of unofficial music club. A pop group, really. I was a member of that. The boys all liked him. He didn’t get along too well with some of the masters, though.”

“And then you saw more of him, of course, when you were at home.”

“He came round here a good deal.”

“To see Katie.”

“To see both of us, I guess. Mother froze him out after a bit. She didn’t approve of him at all.”

“Different generations, different points of view,” said McCourt easily. He was coming to the point now and he had to tread with care. There was a question that must be asked. He knew it and he fancied Peter knew it too. Chief Superintendent Knott would have had no doubts and no hesitation. He would have banged the boy over the head with it and gone on banging until he had got the answer he wanted. Looking at Peter’s flushed but obstinate face, he thought that a slow approach might be more productive than brutality.

He said, “I’ll tell you frankly what’s worrying me, Peter. You’re a great friend of Johnno’s. In fact you’re one of his fan club. Like all the boys round here, as far as I can make out. Everyone will know that. If you come forward now with this story, people are going to ask two obvious questions. First, if your account is correct, why is it totally different from Johnno’s own account?”

Peter said, “Is it?” It was either good acting or his astonishment was genuine.

“It certainly is. You won’t expect me to go into details, but really your account doesn’t tie up anywhere at all with his. But the second question is even more important.
Why
haven’t you said something before?
You know – everyone’s known – for the last ten days what Johnno’s accused of doing and when he was supposed to have done it. Why didn’t you come forward at once? Why didn’t you say, ‘He couldn’t have done it. He was with me the whole time’?”

Peter said nothing.

“Don’t you see, it makes what you’re doing now look like a last-minute effort to save Johnno’s skin.”

Peter still said nothing. He seemed to be enmeshed in his own thoughtWith genuine compassion in his voice, McCourt said, “I expect I oughtn’t to be saying this, but I will. If you want to go back on what you’ve told me, now’s the time to do it. Before you get involved to a point where you
can’t
go back.”

Peter seemed to be nerving himself. McCourt waited patiently as the seconds ticked by in silence. Then Peter said, “Unless I can answer both those questions, you’re not going to believe what I’ve told you. No one’s going to believe it. Is that right?”

McCourt said, “Aye. That’s about the strength of it.”

“The answer to both questions is the same. Johnno wouldn’t tell you and I couldn’t. Because of what went on in the car.”

For a long moment McCourt didn’t seem to understand him. Then he said, in a voice suddenly hard, “Be careful what you say now.”

“You wanted the truth. I’m going to give it to you. I’ve always been in love with Johnno and I think he’s always been in love with me.”

“Love?” said McCourt. The single syllable spat out like a small explosion.

“Yes, love. Why shouldn’t he love me? What’s wrong with it?”

McCourt said nothing.

“People thought he came round to our house to see Katie. It wasn’t true. He came to see me. I don’t think I realised how far it had gone. I mean, he hadn’t actually done anything to me before. Being together there in the car that night, it just happened. He put one arm round me and started to kiss me. I kissed him back.”

“Was that all?”

“No, it wasn’t all.”

“Did he undress you?”

“Yes.”

“And you let him do that?”

“I didn’t let him do it. I helped him.” The defiance was back in Peter’s voice.

“I don’t think we need the details right now,” said McCourt. He put a hand into his jacket pocket and switched off the tape recorder. Then he got up and said, “You called it love. I call it filth.”

He walked across to the door and went out, leaving Peter sitting on the end of the bed with fat tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Well,”
said Mavor, “and what do you make of that?”

Shilling had departed for London and the Superintendent was alone with Mavor. McCourt’s tape recorder stood on the table between them.

“I’d been expecting something of the sort,” said Knott. “When a case stirs up a lot of local feeling, you’re always liable to get it. Someone comes forward with a last-minute alibi.”

“Then you don’t believe the boy’s story?”

“Not a word of it.”

“You realise it can’t have been a last-minute effort. They must have concocted it together, before you pulled Limbery in. Otherwise Peter couldn’t have known about the episode at the telephone box.”

“At first sight that was a convincing touch,” agreed Knott. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean they concocted the story together. I think what happened was that Limbery told Peter about the woman wanting to use the telephone box and dancing with rage and banging on the glass. Told it to him as a good story, maybe they had a private laugh over it. When Peter had to invent his version he fitted in that bit. Limbery couldn’t use it himself. He needed a story which kept him at the fire much longer. Well past the time of the murder. And he stretched it a bit further with that snack at the motel – where no one seems to have remembered him, incidentally.”

“Friday night crowd. Quite possible.”

“Perfectly possible. And if he hadn’t come back, by bad luck, across the wrong bridge we might never have been able to shoot his story down at all.”

Mavor thought about it. He said, “There was one point in Peter’s version that I found almost totally incredible. Did you notice?
He said that he didn’t get out of the car when they arrived at the fire.
Can you believe it? Sparks flying, timbers falling, men rushing about. Damn it all, he’d come out to see the fire. Can you imagine any boy staying shut up in the car?”

“Exactly,” said Knott. “You find me a single independent witness who saw the boy at the fire, or anywhere else that night, and I might pay some attention to it.”

“We shall have to give it to the defence,” said Mavor.

“Even if we’re not going to use it?”

“Unless you want to go into the Court of Criminal Appeal and come out on your ear. It’s an alibi defence. Normally it comes the other way round. This time we’ve got it first. Certainly it goes to them. And if you feel inclined for a bet, I’ll give you two to one in pounds that they don’t use it.”

Knott considered this generous offer, but said, “No. I’ve a feeling you’re right. It’s a messy enough case as it is. They won’t risk messing it up further.”

Inspector Dandridge at that moment was saying the same thing, in different words, to McCourt. “It’s a nasty case,” he said. “You don’t want to make it any nastier by being too clever. Our job’s to put one side of it. The prosecution side. We play that straight down the middle. Sure there are alternative solutions and little bits that don’t fit. That’s a job for the defence. They’ll produce them quick enough, don’t you worry.”

McCourt, who had been unusually silent since his return from the Manor, said he would bear this advice in mind.

It was past nine when Sergeant Shilling reached London, and the dusk of a late-August day was clouding over with a threat of more rain. As he parked his car a flurry of drops blew along the street. He turned up the collar of his raincoat and trudged back along the pavement to Ruoff’s front door. A hammering with the bull’s-head knocker produced no answer.

In the silence which followed, he thought he heard a very faint sound inside the house. It was an indeterminate noise which might have been made by feet going up or down stairs.

He hammered once again on the knocker. This time the silence was complete. He tried the door handle. The door swung open.

Shilling was conscious of a prickle of apprehension, a capillary reaction to a situation which was abnormal and might be dangerous. Normal householders do not leave their front doors on the latch after dark. Nor do they retreat upstairs when a visitor announces himself. The street was a quiet one, one of London’s backwaters, with a privacy and a seclusion that must have suited Ruoff’s dubious trade.

No point in hanging about, said Shilling to himself. He went in, but left the front door ajar, giving himself enough light to see the foot of the stairs and the photograph of the giant hand pointing upward.

“Excelsior,” said Shilling. He climbed the stairs and paused on the first landing to listen again. In the silence he heard a single very faint creak, as though someone had shifted his weight from one foot to the other, trying to make no noise as he did so. The fact that it was so cautious encouraged Shilling. The man who was ahead of him had as little right in the house as he had. Less, possibly. Shilling climbed the next flight. He was now on the bedroom floor. The door on his left was wide open. Shilling looked in.

This was the master bedroom. The blinds were drawn, but enough light from the streetlamp outside filtered in around the edges for him to see the outlines of the room: the row of white painted cupboards along one wall, the big double bed, a table by the bed and an omate brass lamp on it.

He saw something else, too. A bundle lying on the bed, a shapeless inanimate bundle. Sergeant Shilling knew what it was and cursed under his breath. Then he stepped up to the bed, felt for the switch and turned on the light.

The man was dressed in vivid orange and green pyjamas. His hands had been tied, his wrists lashed together with a dressing-gown cord and pulled up into the middle of his back. His ankles had been hobbled with a second cord which was attached to the rail at the foot of the bed. He was lying half on his side, with his face turned away.

Shilling walked around to the other side of the bed. He had known the truth before he saw the engorged face and staring dead eyes. Whatever secrets Rodney Ruoff had possessed, they were not going to learn them from him now.

A noise made him look up.

Three men had come into the room.

Shilling knew one of them, a man with close-cropped grey hair and a red face, who said, “Good God, Bob, what the hell are you doing here?”

“I came to ask him some questions,” said Shilling, looking down at what lay on the bed.

“Too late now,” said the grey-haired man, who was Detective Chief Superintendent Forster. “I suppose it was something to do with what’s happening down in Berkshire. It was Charlie Knott who put us onto watching this place.”

“What happened to
him?”

“No mystery about that. One of his boyfriends did it. Kid called Billy. Real age eighteen, mental age eight. Like I said, we had the place under observation. Sergeant Lillee here saw the kid leaving late last night.”

“Early this morning,” said Sergeant Lillee.

“We knew all about Rod’s little games, so there was nothing unusual about it. However, when there was no sign of life, no one going in or out all day, blinds still drawn, we began to wonder what was going on and we went in to look. The Sergeant found him about half an hour before you arrived. He left young Parrish in charge and came for me.”

“So it was you pussyfooting about on the stairs, was it?” said Shilling.

“That’s right,” said Parrish. “Tell you the truth, I thought at first it was Billy, come back to have a look. Mind you,” he added hastily, “it was pretty dark.”