‘No. I don’t deny that his death is convenient for me, but I could have got rid of him without such an extreme solution.’
TWENTY
Sam Hilton was trying to concentrate on his art. If poetry was to be your raison d’etre, you should be able to concentrate, whatever was going on around you. Keats had managed it, with his girlfriend buggering him about and consumption taking over his body, so surely you should be able to cope with being a murder suspect.
He sat down resolutely with ball-pen in hand to work on ‘Die Happy’. Rather too soon for his comfort — as soon, in fact, as he had one new phrase for the third line — there was a knock at the door of his bedsit. He glanced round at the neat, functional room, at his notes on the battered table, his attempt to make a poem. That was the old word for a poet, a ‘maker’, and it was an appropriate one. People thought you just sat and waited to be inspired but you worked very hard, word by word, phrase by phrase, line by line, to make a poem. There were false starts, rejected ideas, fierce wrestlings with language to force original ideas into a framework which would make the most of them. And usually many, many rewrites before you were satisfied that it was the finished article, or at least the very best of which you were capable.
His first instinct had been to cover up work that was so personal and incomplete. On second thoughts, he left his jottings exposed. Why be ashamed of them? Let the bloody pigs see the creative process for the tortuous, agonizing thing it was.
But it was not the police at his door. It was Amy Proctor. She was not the confident, affectionately mocking, young woman she had been when she had last been with him, when she had seemed to Sam so much more mature and experienced than he was himself. She stood hesitantly in the doorway for a moment, as if fearful that she might not be welcome here. Then she moved uncertainly to the dining chair beside the one he had been using at the table and sat down. She did not look at him. When he came and sat down before his half-finished poem, she stared at the table and said, ‘I’ve let you down, Sam. What you wanted me to tell the police, I mean. I let you down.’
‘I know. It doesn’t matter.’
‘You know?’
‘The coppers came round here again — the bigwig, Chief Superintendent Lambert and his sidekick.’ It was an absurd assertion of his status as a leading suspect.
‘I’m sorry. I wanted to let you know that they’d seen through me and broken me down, but I couldn’t get here yesterday because of the family party I told you about. I picked up the phone to ring you and tell you twice, but I couldn’t explain it on the phone. I’m not sure I can explain it now that I’m here.’
‘There’s no need. I shouldn’t have asked you to lie.’
‘I’m not much good as a liar, Sam. I tried, but the fuzz could see what I was about.’
‘That’s to your credit, Amy.’ He was glad to get her name out at last. He realized now that it was that DS Hook, the one who did the soft-cop routine, who’d said that about his girl, that it was to her credit that she couldn’t lie. Because Amy was his girl. He could feel that now. He could see it in her every embarrassed, uncertain move. The strings fell away from his tongue and he said wonderingly, ‘I love you, Amy Proctor.’
She smiled at him as if she had known it all along. But only for a moment. The notion which had crept into her mind two days ago had taken it over until she could think of nothing else. It could now be denied no longer. Her forehead twisted into the frown which in other circumstances he had found so attractive. She said as if the words caused her physical pain, ‘Why did you want me to say I was with you when I wasn’t, Sam? Was it you who shot Peter Preston?’
Monday morning was the time to bring everyone up to date. Lambert had already briefed the large team working on the Preston case about the events of Saturday and Sunday. Most of the DCs and the uniformed men had been off duty at the weekend; the house to house enquiries and the routine checks were complete. The newer officers in the enquiry were secretly surprised at the amount of work Lambert, Hook and Rushton had conducted on Saturday and Sunday. The experienced ones knew all about Lambert’s habit of worrying at a case until it released its secrets. And every police officer was aware of the statistic that success rates in murder crimes declined sharply after the first week of investigation.
Later in the morning, John Lambert exchanged thoughts with DI Rushton and DS Hook in the chief superintendent’s office. He opened the discussion by saying, ‘I’m satisfied now that the killer is going to come from the immediate circle of Preston’s acquaintances, that is to say his wife and the people who were on the literature festival committee with him. These are the people on whom he has compiled his most recent and most vitriolic files — the information and opinions we found in that innocent-looking filing cabinet.’
Chris Rushton was encouraged. Experience told him that this case was moving fast towards a conclusion. That old fox Lambert usually emphasized the need to consider every possible solution and not to exclude even the most unlikely; this time he was narrowing the field. Rushton felt the quickening of the pulse which is natural for a CID man as a serious crime is cracked. He couldn’t help emphasizing his own, possibly crucial, link with this. ‘I’m glad the private eye who contacted me after the match on Saturday proved useful.’
Lambert smiled. ‘Clive Bond. Not a man with a prepossessing appearance, but I’d say a highly competent operator in a difficult trade. Not one I’d ever contemplate myself. I couldn’t envisage operating without the police machine supporting me at every turn. And Bond knew when to come to us with information, which not everyone in his trade does. Perhaps he feels a certain loyalty to Preston, who must have paid him a lot of money over the last year or two.’
‘I believe Bond had new material for us on Preston’s wife.’
‘Indeed he did, Chris. With times, places and personnel efficiently detailed. Edwina Preston has a lover, Hugh Whitfield, whom she met on the night of Preston’s death. We already knew that. What we didn’t know and what Bond was able to tell us was that neither she nor Whitfield took dinner in the hotel, as we’d previously thought. Edwina Preston drove out of the hotel at ten past eight and returned at ten twenty-seven. She turned towards home but Bond lost her quite quickly. She says she parked for a long time near Sudeley Castle and considered her future — principally how she was going to divest herself of her husband so that she could marry Whitfield when his mortally ill wife dies in the near future.’
Rushton made a note of the times to add to his computer file on the widow. ‘That leaves her ample time to have driven to her home, dispatched Preston, and returned to the hotel.’
‘Yes. She looked duly shaken when we pointed that out. She agreed that his death was very convenient for her.’
‘Would she have had access to a pistol such as the one that killed Preston?’
‘That is a problem with most of the candidates for this crime. It’s possible of course that Peter Preston kept a weapon like that in his study. It would accord with his taste for secrecy and intrigue. In which case, Edwina Preston would almost certainly have known about it.’
Hook said, ‘We can’t discount the possibility of a contract killer, can we? Marjorie Dooks or Edwina Preston certainly had the money to employ one.’
Lambert grinned at him. The empathy they had built over the years was such that Bert knew immediately that the chief had divined what was behind this reminder: Hook didn’t want Sam Hilton or Ros Barker to be guilty of this. But Lambert didn’t reject the suggestion. He said, ‘We should bear that in mind, and possibly add Sue Charles to that list as well, though I would query whether any of these ladies had the underworld connections to know how to contact a hitman.’