Close Call (28 page)

She told herself that it wasn't the first time she had lost her patience with this hair-splitting perfectionist of a husband, and that it no doubt would not be the last. But a small voice at the back of Rosemary Lennox's brain kept insisting that the issue here was far more important than any involved in the previous thirty-seven years of their marriage.

Ron was gone, at last. She watched his car until it disappeared from Gurney Close, took a deep breath, and made herself climb the stairs deliberately, rather than race up them two at a time as she felt inclined to do. She gathered things from the drawer where she had hidden them and stowed them swiftly into the black, anonymous dustbin bag, making sure that nothing went in which could identify the source of this package. No more than five minutes after Ronald Lennox had left the close, his wife's black Fiesta followed more swiftly after him.

John Lambert was working hard in his very different and well established garden, anxious to do as much as he could before the sun rose too high in the sky. The soil was very dry, but there were signs of a change in the weather after the hot, dry spell. The blue sky was still unstreaked with cloud, but there was a cooling breeze from the west and a forecast that there would be rain coming in from the Atlantic later in the day.

Christine Lambert glanced down the garden from the kitchen window, viewing her husband's labours with a wife's experienced eye. It told her that he was working hard and methodically, making a deliberate effort to banish thoughts of the case he was working on and the events of the previous evening. In his first, intense years in CID, when detection had become an obsession and John had shut her out of his working world completely, their marriage had almost been wrecked. The union which everyone nowadays regarded as so secure had almost foundered. The police service was an occupation which saw many relationships washed on to the rocks; those who now saw the Lamberts' marriage as a model for others would have been amazed to hear of the problems they had fought through in those times.

In those days, John had told her nothing of what went on, had preserved the secrets of his working life in an almost monk-like mystery, as if his efficiency would be damaged by any whisper of his activities to a wife. The children had kept them together, but only just. Now those unconscious bonds were adults themselves, with toddlers and cares of their own.

Christine looked at her husband's sinewy arms beneath the short-sleeved shirt as he reached out for his mid-morning cup of coffee in the conservatory. She said, ‘Caroline's coming over tomorrow – bringing the children.'

He nodded. ‘I should be here. Unless something comes up in this Durkin murder case.'

She smiled. It was as though once his daughter had been introduced, he could mention the case on which he was engaged. But that was probably just her imagination, a hangover from their troubles of years ago. She said, ‘You were late back last night. And very tired.'

He smiled, acknowledging the marital diplomacy; Christine was really saying that he hadn't had a word for the cat when he had arrived home in the last light of the long summer day. ‘The traffic was heavy on the M5 on the way back from Birmingham. But I was enraged rather than exhausted, if you really want to know. Contract killers have that effect on me. I usually feel they're laughing at me, without my being able to do anything about it.'

He picked up a ginger biscuit and bit into it with a savage energy, feeling resentment dropping upon him with the recollection of Anthony David Watson's cool insolence on the previous evening. ‘Chris Rushton was as frustrated as I was – quite rattled by the man, in fact. But he handles it better afterwards than I do, throws it off more quickly. Chris doesn't take it home with him as I do.'

They were both silent for a moment, with John thinking of his deficiencies as a husband and Christine speculating on the lonely life the divorced Chris Rushton went back to in his bachelor flat. She said tentatively, still feeling she was on dangerous ground, ‘Is he your killer then, this hitman you went to see?'

John Lambert took an unhurried pull at his coffee, forcing himself to talk, to allow her into the specialized field of his work. Even now, when he was determined to do that, he was conscious of having to make a deliberate effort. ‘No, I don't think he is, as a matter of fact. He was playing games with us last night, and I think he's too professional a killer to indulge in things like that if he'd really killed Durkin. We know that he was in this area at the time of the death. I think it's quite possible that he was commissioned to kill Durkin, but that someone else got there before him. The victim was certainly a man not short of enemies.'

She refilled his cup and tried not to sound too eager. ‘So let's hear about the other candidates.'

He smiled. They both knew what was going on here, knew that he was being tested. But they both knew also that their tensions over stuff like this were far behind them, that whether or not he revealed his thinking to her now was not crucial to their relationship any more. He was deliberately low-key as he said, ‘The wife's always a suspect, of course. Just remember that when you plan to dispatch me. This one had used scissors on a previous partner. Ally Durkin also had ample reason to wish her man in hell. He'd pressurized her into an abortion, at the same time as he was supporting a child he'd fathered by another woman. He'd also had an affair ten years earlier with a woman who had just moved into the house beside them: we're still not sure whether his wife knew about that or not.'

‘He sounds a real charmer.'

‘You haven't heard the half of it. He was involved in illegal drugs in quite a big way. We've found getting on for a million pounds in accounts deriving from that. He was probably getting a bit too big for his boots and treading on the toes of the real barons of the drug trade.' Lambert found himself rattling off the clichés, as he strove against his nature to discuss this with Christine.

‘Hence the contract killer.'

‘We think so. But, as I said, my own feeling is that it wasn't the hired man who took him out. In some respects, it would be simpler for us if it had been.'

‘So who else is involved, then, apart from the wife?' Absurdly, Christine found herself avoiding the phrase ‘in the frame', since that seemed to her a police expression, and thus off limits for her.

‘There's the woman who organized the party at which he was killed.'

‘And thus set up the situation where he died.' Christine said it slowly, unconsciously emphasizing her role as an amateur looking in on this from the outside.

‘Yes. Rosemary Lennox is a pillar of the local community. But we questioned her son this morning and found that Durkin had recruited him as a pusher in the drugs trade. The parents must have known about it, but neither of them has mentioned it to us. The boy's a student, about to enter his final year at Cambridge. The Drugs Squad are satisfied that he only worked for Durkin for a short time. But he had a lot to lose if Durkin had chosen to drop the information that he'd been involved.'

‘And was he the sort of man to do that?'

‘He certainly was. Durkin was a blackmailer at the same time as he was developing a drugs empire. And like a lot of blackmailers, he enjoyed having a hold over people as much as or even more than the money it brought him. So Rosemary Lennox probably wasn't paying money to Durkin, but as the boy's mother she must certainly have been aware of the damage he could do to her only son whenever he chose to. Durkin might even have taunted her with that thought.'

‘She somehow doesn't sound like a likely candidate for murder.'

‘No. Rosemary Lennox is a woman in her early sixties, with an unblemished reputation as an unpaid force for good in a lot of local enterprises. But people become desperate and act out of character when blackmailers threaten them. And women do extraordinary things when they're seeking to protect their children.'

Christine smiled, preferring not to recall some of the embarrassing things she'd done in her time to defend her daughters against a hostile world. ‘Presumably the lady has a husband?'

‘She does indeed. A man who is amusing and irritating by turns. Ronald Lennox has just retired as a teacher. He taught Robin Durkin at the comprehensive and didn't like him, even then. He initially gave us the impression that Durkin was little more than a high-spirited, mischievous lad who had to be controlled. But I thought at the time that his antipathy went further than that, and he's now admitted it. Lennox is the man who first told us about both Durkin's reputation as a blackmailer and his first steps into supplying illegal drugs. He's rather drip-fed us the information over the last few days. Lennox is both a pedant and a gossip: rather a ridiculous figure in many respects. But I'm certain his dislike of Durkin runs deeper than he cares to admit. And I'm sure he's the kind of man who will be immensely proud of his son's being at Cambridge. He might be prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to preserve it.'

‘What a can of worms you've opened in a quiet close of new houses!'

‘Oh, there's more to come yet. Much more! I mentioned that Durkin's mistress of ten years ago, Carol Smart, had moved into the close beside him. Her own husband is a man who apparently finds it difficult to keep his wedding tackle in his trousers for very long, but Carol seems genuinely, touchingly, fond of him. The Smarts have daughters of eighteen and twenty, both working in Yorkshire. Carol was quite desperate that neither they nor Phil Smart should find out anything about her affair with Robin Durkin.'

‘So she might have shut him up for good.'

‘It's possible. Durkin was enjoying the secret, and it's difficult to think that a man like him wouldn't have used it to hurt someone, sooner or later.'

‘What about this woman's husband?'

‘Phil Smart? He's a serial philanderer who yet seems genuinely fond of his wife, as she does of him. He was also one of Durkin's blackmail victims. He'd done something irregular at work years ago – transferred some sales figures to himself from someone who'd left the firm – and Durkin found out about it. Durkin had screwed a certain amount of money from this knowledge, but by the time of his death he seems to have preferred just to taunt Smart with the knowledge that he could expose and disgrace him at any time.'

‘This Phil Smart sounds like a man desperate enough to commit murder.' To Christine Lambert, he sounded the most likely suspect so far, but she was too intelligent a woman to voice the thought.

Lambert smiled grimly. ‘So do a couple of other people. There's a very personable divorcee of thirty-nine in the first house in the close. Lisa Holt, a woman whose then husband was ruined by Robin Durkin, according to her, a process which also finished what she claims had been a happy marriage.'

‘Does she have children?'

‘A son of nine. She has also recently acquired a toy boy. I don't know how serious their relationship is, but he was close enough to her to be invited as her partner to the party which was the prelude to Robin Durkin's death. He's a gardener and small builder. We also know now that he was involved in dealing drugs for Durkin a few years ago. He concealed it at first – naturally enough, as it could lead to criminal charges.'

‘What sort of a man is he?'

Lambert paused, striving to be objective. ‘Jason Ritchie is tough. And no angel: you can see how he got involved with Durkin in some pretty unsavoury stuff a few years ago. He also has a conviction for Grievous Bodily Harm, which could easily have been manslaughter or even murder, if the cards had fallen differently and he'd done more damage with the knife he was carrying. He claims he'd have been kicked to death in a brawl outside a pub if he hadn't drawn the knife in self-defence. He seems to have kept out of trouble over the last few years, but he clearly has a capacity for violence. He's also more intelligent than this background would suggest.'

Christine Lambert's innate feeling for the underdog had her wishing fervently that this young man, who sounded to her both an interesting character and the police favourite for this crime, hadn't committed the murder. The lad didn't seem to have a lot going for him amongst these largely middle-class people. She couldn't dismiss the thought that if an older woman hadn't taken him into her bed, Jason Ritchie wouldn't have been a leading suspect in this case at all. But she had far too much common sense to voice any such unobjective views.

Almost as if he was reading her thoughts, John said, ‘Chris Rushton thinks Jason Ritchie is the likeliest killer. The copper's instinct is always to go for people with a bit of previous. And very often that instinct proves correct.'

Christine said rather waspishly, ‘You said the wife had a bit of previous, as well as this young man.'

‘Indeed. Ally Durkin is very much in our thoughts. Remember that, when you are tempted to garrotte me, will you?'

John Lambert stood up, anxious to get back to his labours in the garden. He couldn't remember giving as much detail to his wife about any case he'd been involved in before. But as he picked up his fork and went to the vegetable plot, he decided it must have helped to clarify his own thoughts.

For the first time, he thought he probably knew who had killed Robin Durkin.

I
t was something Jack Hook had never had to tackle before.

When you were a thirteen-year-old, every week brought some new experience, but Jack hadn't realized this yet. As the elder of the two, he was used to playing the worldly-wise and experienced mentor to his tiresome younger brother. To have to greet this vexatious creature home from hospital after a near-death experience was something Jack had never envisaged.

He had not seen his brother for almost a week, and he was astonished how white and frail he looked when he walked into the house from their Dad's car. His mum seemed to think there was nothing wrong with Luke, even to be pleased to find him walking in like this. Jack couldn't understand how she could be so unobservant: the boy was patently very sick, to his mind.