There was something here, something he thought was worth developing. He’d bring in the lasses from the old man’s youth — he always called them that, rather than girls. Perhaps he could work in a reference to the curls he’d had as a young man, because that might be both touching and a little humorous. He might close with a reference to Dylan Thomas’s dying of the light. This poem needed a lot of work yet, but he felt it might repay the effort. He’d been very fond of his granddad and it would be nice to salute him, to pin his memory down for others in print.
The sharp rapping at his door made him almost leap in the air with shock; he had been concentrating hard.
Sam looked carefully around the familiar room, as if that would restore him to the real world, then opened the door. The surprise they saw in his eyes turning quickly to fear. He made his ritual, unthinking gesture towards resistance as he led them into the bedsit. ‘It’s only yesterday that you dragged me into the station for a grilling. This is police harassment.’
It wasn’t worthy of a reply and Lambert didn’t give it one. He looked unhurriedly round the very tidy room and at the small table with the single sheet where Sam had been wrestling with the elegy for his granddad. ‘New information has come to light since yesterday, Mr Hilton. You are not yet under caution, but I would advise you to think very carefully about what you say to us this morning. You would be most unwise to lie or to attempt to conceal information.’
Sam wanted to scream at them, to deny what they were implying and challenge them to prove it. But it was too vague to challenge. And when it came to it he didn’t fancy demanding a specific accusation from a chief superintendent who clearly meant business. Instead and to his dismay, his voice became a whine, which sounded even in his own too-intelligent ears like that of the habitual cornered offender. ‘It’s once a criminal always a criminal, for you lot, isn’t it? Pinch a bloke for a bit of dealing and you think you can pin a bloody murder on him next! Typical bloody pigs!’
‘Mr Preston kept a filing cabinet in his study. What do you know about the contents?’
‘I’ve never been in Preston’s bloody study.’
‘That’s not an answer to my question, Mr Hilton.’
Very few people had addressed Sam as ‘Mr’ so far in his young life. He was again finding Lambert’s repetition of the formal title disconcerting. Was it a prelude to the formal charges this grave elder of the CID had already hinted at? He said sullenly, ‘I knew the bastard kept notes on people. What does it matter where he kept them?’
‘It matters to us, now, because that cabinet has preserved a record not only of his thoughts about other people but of things in their past they wouldn’t wish us to be aware of.’
Sam needed to know how much they knew, but he could hardly ask them that. He said obliquely, ‘I’m not surprised he put everything down in writing. I can see him poring over things and hugging himself, the prissy bastard!’
The last phrase rasped with hate. Lambert recalled Sue Charles’s thought that writers and artists were most wounded when you attacked their work, however bravely they tried to shrug such things off. He nodded to Hook, who said immediately, ‘Preston emerges from what we’ve read in his files as a most unpleasant man, Sam. There are several people as well as you with ample reason to dislike him. However, he is now a murder victim. I think we shall discover within the next day or two who killed him.’
Sam hadn’t thought it was going to be as rapid as this. He wondered how much they knew and found himself fighting against a rising panic. ‘Preston deserved to die. But I don’t know who killed him.’
Hook carried on as if he hadn’t heard the pointless words. ‘He had a file on you, Sam. You’d be surprised how much he’d managed to gather on you.’
‘Like you lot! Like the bloody police.’
‘Oh, much worse than the police, Sam. We’re only allowed to retain what’s been proved, even when you’ve got a record. Peter Preston had no scruples and no rules.’
‘So what he wrote about me might all have been lies.’
‘He did write things down, Sam, yes. Very malicious things. His writing gives us an insight into the man himself which we wouldn’t have had otherwise. He didn’t think much of you.’
‘I know that. He called one of my poems an undisciplined rant. He said I should get myself a job and forget about writing poetry. He said what wasn’t doggerel was second-hand ideas from a second-rate mind.’ He reeled off phrases which had obviously hit him hard, however much he had pretended otherwise.
‘You’d be surprised how much he knew about you. We don’t know who he used to help him discover things, but he gleefully recorded whatever he learned.’
‘Knew things? What sort of things?’ Sam felt the question drawn from him, even though he then knew immediately that he shouldn’t have asked it.
‘He knew all about your dealing, for a start. Well before it was drawn to our attention. He’s got times and places where you dealt coke and horse. Shortly after you became a regular user, he reckoned.’
‘You can’t use this. Even you bloody pigs can’t call a dead man into court.’
Hook smiled into the defiant young face. ‘We could offer the evidence, if we chose to. Or we could use the dates and names he has noted as starting points for further investigations of our own. The Drug Squad may well find some of the names useful, though I fancy they’re already well aware of them. We have not the slightest interest in that today; today we’re going to arrest someone for murder, Sam.’
‘Not me you’re bloody not.’
‘Remains to be seen, that does, Sam. You’ve not done yourself many favours, so far. We’ll come to that in a minute.’ Hook watched fear replace defiance in the young features. ‘Preston’s been quite useful to us, in your case. We didn’t know about your use of firearms in the past, until we found it documented with date and victim in his notes.’
‘It wasn’t a firearm. It was only a bloody air pistol.’ His fury meant that the denial flashed out before he realized that he should not have spoken.
‘An air pistol waved six inches from the face of an enemy by a sixteen-year-old. Might not have killed him, but might well have cost him an eye. Not very reliable, sixteen-year-olds, when driven beyond endurance.’
Hook’s last phrase was an invitation, and Hilton accepted it eagerly. ‘I was being bullied by four of them. I had to stop it.’
Hook frowned and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Possibly. Maybe that’s why the boy’s father agreed not to involve the police. You showed a tendency to react violently, though, which has to interest us. You showed panic when driven into a corner; the same sort of panic which might have overcome the person who shot Peter Preston.’
‘I didn’t kill him. I was at home when he died.’
He didn’t see any sign pass between the experienced pair, but it was Lambert who said ominously. ‘So you say. You’ve admitted he was your enemy and a very serious one. That’s the other thing we need to talk to you about: your whereabouts at the time of his death.’
‘I was at home. Nothing more to be said.’
‘Lots more to be said, Mr Hilton. Perhaps lots more to be said in court, in due course.’
‘You’ll never make Preston’s stuff stand up in court.’
‘Maybe not. But we probably won’t even try. When we can prove that you told lies about the night of the crime, other evidence will be of minor importance.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But the energy he had been trying to maintain had left his voice when he most needed it.
‘I think you do, Mr Hilton. You have tried to get a young woman to lie on your behalf. To make her an accessory after the fact.’
That formal title again. And what sounded like a formal charge. Sam stared dully at the threadbare carpet between them, noting that the rug he had used to cover the worst patch when Amy had been here had moved itself sideways again. ‘Amy can’t be that. I didn’t commit any crime.’
They waited to see if he would say more, but he remained silent, staring at the carpet, as dull and expressionless as a punch-drunk boxer. It was Hook who said with the gentle firmness he had used throughout, ‘You’ll need to convince us of that, Sam. Amy Proctor did her best to support you, but the officer who was taking her statement could see she wasn’t happy so he got her to tell the truth. I’d say she’s a girl who isn’t used to lying.’