Lambert rose and said, ‘Any further thoughts you have on this crime will be treated in the strictest confidence. Please contact us on this number if you think of anything, however trivial. Sometimes small details can be very significant when we put them together with data being collected from other people.’
She nodded as she led them across the big room. She turned to Lambert in the doorway. ‘Good luck with your enquiries. If I don’t see you before then, I’ll look forward to hearing your views on crime writing at the literary festival.’
A second reminder. Hook kept his face studiously straight until he had turned the police Mondeo and driven out of the Dooks’ drive. Then he said, ‘Perhaps I’d better come along to that session at the festival. It sounds more interesting each time I hear it mentioned.’
FIFTEEN
DI Rushton was eager to see the chief. He checked that Lambert was to interview Sam Hilton at nine thirty on Friday morning. He was waiting for the chief superintendent when he came into the CID section. ‘There’s stuff from forensics.’
‘What sort of stuff?’
‘Stuff from the filing cabinet in Preston’s study. He was an old-fashioned man. He stored things away in files in a cabinet, rather than use his computer.’
Lambert grinned. ‘Such people do exist, Chris. What did Preston record in such an outdated way? Anything more than gossip?’
‘Much more than gossip, from the little I’ve seen so far. Things about people you’ve already seen. I can summarize it and put it on the computer, but that will take time. It’s more than we expected. I think you might want to look at it yourself.’
Lambert tried not to be too optimistic. He failed. This might be the thing that answered the question everyone, including himself, had been asking: how could dislike and irritation transform itself into the sort of hate that led to murder? He said as evenly as he could, ‘I’ll look at it as soon as we’ve finished with young Mr Hilton.’
Sam Hilton looked rather bleary-eyed as he gazed around interview room number one in Oldford police station. The delights of Amy Proctor had been numerous and prolonged, but they hadn’t left a lot of time for sleep. He was also beginning to think he was in love, which was causing confusion in his mind when it most needed to be clear.
The small, square, windowless room did not offer him much relief. The walls were painted in a bilious green, frequently renewed to conceal the coarse graffiti of the army of the unfortunate who had waited here to be grilled. There was a single white light in the ceiling above him; Sam gazed up at its harshness for a few seconds and then wished that he hadn’t. He could feel the blood hammering in his head. And the police hadn’t even put in an appearance yet.
He was left on his own in the room for precisely ten minutes after DI Rushton had shut the door upon him. Ten minutes to muse upon the unfairness of life, and himself at the centre of that unfairness. It seemed much longer. He tried hard to think about the poem about his grandfather he was working on. Die Happy, it was called — a sort of reaction to Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’. He wanted to say that when Alzheimer’s was taking over, there was no real life left, so that you should welcome death whilst you could still remember the real person who had lived. But this was not the place to make a poem.
Bert Hook studied him coolly for a moment when he arrived before he said, ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Hook and this is Detective Chief Superintendent Lambert. You’ll remember us from two days ago.’
The big cheese again. Bloody John Lambert, the man the press had endowed with an almost mythical capacity for solving violent crimes. He and Sam eyed each other cautiously, wonderingly. It didn’t seem to Sam as if this was going to be an equal contest. He felt as if he were about twelve; as if this grave, unsmiling elder could see everything he had done wrong in the whole of his young life.
Before the thought had properly formulated itself in his mind, he was saying desperately to Hook, ‘I’ve given up dealing. I’ve taken notice of what you and that inspector told me about the drugs.’
‘Good for you, lad. We’ll be watching you in the coming months, to make sure you keep to that. That’s unless you’re banged up for murder, of course.’
‘That won’t happen. Unless you lot frame me for it.’ Sam tried a flash of defiance — and found that it didn’t work. His words sounded ridiculous in his own ears, as if he were spouting cliches in a television scene, rather than being up to his neck in the real thing.
Lambert had been studying the young man as dispassionately as if he were a specimen in a laboratory. He now said with quiet menace, ‘You didn’t like Peter Preston, did you, Mr Hilton?’
‘He didn’t like me.’
Lambert nodded slowly, as if that were entirely understandable. ‘Not what I asked you, is it? Would you answer my question, please?’
Sam wondered whether the man was biased against his youth or whether he was like this with everyone. ‘All right, I didn’t like Preston. In fact, I found him insufferable.’ Take that, you bastard! You might have caught me dealing drugs, but I can do the big words. ‘But that isn’t significant. Lots of people found Preston insufferable.’
Lambert nodded even more slowly. ‘Interesting choice of word, that. If you found him insufferable, you had to do something about it. Perhaps you couldn’t go on suffering his insults any longer.’
‘No. Well, yes, in a way, I suppose. But I didn’t kill him.’
‘Where were you on Tuesday night, Mr Hilton?’
He hated that iteration of his name and title. It made all this sound as if it was merely a preliminary to charging him. ‘I was at home in my flat. In the bedsit where you saw me on Wednesday morning.’
‘Yes. You were rather disturbed then. Was that because you’d shot Mr Preston on the previous night?’
‘No! Of course it wasn’t!’ He tried to make the idea sound ridiculous, but all he could hear in his voice was fear. ‘I was at home on Tuesday night. I didn’t go out at all. I rang Bob Crompton and had a talk with him about his visit to the literary festival at Oldford.’ He and Bob had enjoyed a few laughs, said some pretty insulting things about the old fogies who were likely to attend the Manchester poet’s readings in Oldford. For no reason he could think of, it seemed to Sam Hilton that the game would be up if he revealed any of this to the men in front of him.
It was DS Hook who now looked up from his notebook and said, ‘What time was this phone call made, Sam?’
His first name, at last. Even a measure of sympathy in the tone from this man — or had he imagined that? He wanted to say he had spoken to Bob later in the evening, but they could trace the time on mobiles, couldn’t they? ‘About half past seven, I think.’
Hook shook his head sadly. ‘Too early to help you, I’m afraid. Is there anyone who can confirm to us that you were at home throughout the evening?’
Sam’s mind was racing as fast as the pulse in his temple. ‘My girlfriend was with me.’
Hook studied him for a moment before he said, ‘Name?’
‘Amy Proctor.’ Sam watched Hook record that in his notebook. Time seemed to be suspended in that claustrophobic room; the squat hand clutching the ball-pen seemed to move with impossible deliberation. Next Hook wrote down Amy’s address with equal care. Sam said he couldn’t remember her phone number. He couldn’t think what had made him volunteer the name; panic, he supposed. Amy hadn’t agreed to his request to say she had been with him on Tuesday. Passion had prevented that and he’d not asked her a second time. But she hadn’t refused, had she? He wasn’t even sure that she’d agree to being described as his girlfriend.
As if from a long way away, he heard Hook saying, ‘Was she with you overnight, Sam?’
‘No. She left at about midnight, I suppose. Maybe just before.’ He wondered why he hadn’t claimed she’d been with him all night, as she had last night. Perhaps because it made the lie seem a little less complete. He’d have to get back to Amy, to check that she was prepared to support him. He’d do it for her.