Too Much of Water (21 page)

Cases took more out of him these days. There were times when she wished the Home Office hadn't allowed the chief constable's special request to have John's service extended. But she knew that he got his kicks from taking villains, and there were other times when she wondered what on earth he would do when he was suddenly deprived of the adrenaline which coursed through his veins when he fought serious crime. He liked his garden, but she couldn't see the roses which were the traditional policeman's retirement pastime being enough for John Lambert.

At least he didn't shut her out of his life nowadays. When he was a young inspector in CID, he had worked eighteen-hour days without her knowing when he was coming home, without ever letting her know his movements or his slightest thoughts on a particular case. Those were the days when she had almost walked out with her two young daughters and ended this marriage, which now seemed so solid to his younger colleagues.

She looked at the lined, intense face beneath the still plentiful but now grizzled hair, wondering what effect the strain he had never felt as a young man was having upon him now. Bert Hook assured her that John worked as hard as ever and was as effective as he had always been in their CID work. But good old Bert (who was in fact five years younger than John) was biased, and she wasn't in touch with any other of her husband's colleagues, these days.

She did not think he was conscious of her attention, but he said suddenly, without looking away from the television screen, ‘We're very lucky with our kids, Christine. And it's all down to you!'

‘We are lucky, yes. They're both good girls. And very fond of you, for some reason I can't fathom.'

It drew the ghost of a smile. ‘You were the one who was there when they were growing up. You were the one who shaped them.'

‘I did my best. You were busy at work. You didn't have much option.' She could say that now, could give him the benefit of the doubt. She hadn't felt it at the time, when she had been dealing with childish and adolescent tantrums on her own, after the strains of teaching during the day.

‘You've always been my prop.' Still he didn't look at her. Still he stared steadily at the play he was not watching on the television screen. ‘I never really appreciated you properly, until I thought I might lose you.'

It was a reference to the heart bypass she had needed eighteen months ago. ‘Perhaps I didn't appreciate you either. Perhaps I didn't know how much you cared for us, even when you weren't there.'

This was quite absurd. They both knew it, but neither of them felt confident enough to break out of it. They had been brought up not to show physical passion, to believe that public demonstration of affection was not just in bad taste but a sign of weakness. If she went over and put her arms round him now, it might break the spell, and the simple statements which were coded declarations of love between them might dry up. And Christine didn't want that to happen.

She said softly, ‘I worry about you, you know. Much more than I used to. Worry that the job will be too much for you, sometimes.'

His smile this time was of genuine pleasure, though still he did not look at her. ‘I'll be all right. I've got young, keen blokes like Chris Rushton to run about after me and organize the leg work.'

‘You make sure you do, then. Age catches up with all of us eventually. Even you.'

She thought the cliché had ended the little exchange of affection. Then, after several minutes, he said, ‘She was the same generation as our two, that girl whose body was dumped in the Severn last week.'

‘I know. It makes you thankful that ours are so well adjusted, so safe. Well, as safe as anyone is, these days.' She made that instinctive maternal qualification, as if it would invite disaster if she did not recite that small, automatic caveat.

‘And now the sheep-badger's been killed. The one who was married to her once. The one everyone seemed to think was our prime suspect for the girl's killing.'

She wanted to tell him that she knew how that increased the pressure on him, that she knew how a second murder with the first one still unresolved brought unwelcome publicity, much of it critical. Already one or two of the papers had begun the familiar mutterings about police bafflement. But she knew he didn't want her to voice her sympathy. It wouldn't be snarled away, as it might have been in the bad old years, but it would be seen as pointless and unwelcome.

Five minutes later, long after she thought the exchange was closed, he said, ‘There's a tutor at the university who claims to have had a lesbian relationship with Clare Mills. How jealous do you think people like that get?'

It was a confession of failure. He knew the answer to his own question, but weariness was making him uncertain, was making him seek reassurance for his thoughts. Christine said gently, ‘Homosexuals can be as unbalanced and extreme as heterosexuals, when love is at stake. It depends on the individual whether she becomes deranged. You can't rule out a violent reaction.'

He nodded, still looking at the television screen, not the wife who was his sounding board. ‘No. Any more than I can rule out violence from the male research student who claims to have had a thing about our dead girl. Or the illegal immigrant whom she befriended. Or the stepfather who claimed he wasn't in touch with her when he was.'

His voice rose as he catalogued his suspects, until he concluded in a quiet fury of irritation. It was as if he was accusing the wife who had never seen these people of adding to his frustration. She understood perfectly that she was an Aunt Sally for his impotence, even secretly rejoiced in this strange and bitter closeness between them, where once she would have been shut out.

Again she thought the strange conversation was concluded. And again after several minutes he said, ‘You must have taught children with various degrees of autism, in your time in schools.'

It sounded inconsequential, but she knew it could not be. She said slowly, ‘One or two. Asperger's syndrome was the most we had to deal with.' She thought immediately of the most extreme case, a boy who had needed to be watched in the playground and the laboratories, who had needed to be supervised throughout the day, because his actions and reactions were not those of other children. She said, simply because she knew he needed her to say something, ‘It's a difficult thing to handle. In extreme cases, people like that need constant supervision.'

He nodded, staring fixedly at the television screen, whose flickering messages he had long since ceased to register. ‘And would you say a person like that would be capable of murder?'

She wanted to say that she had no idea, that it would need a specialist to answer such questions. But she knew that that was not the answer that he wanted, that this exchange was about trying to bring a kind of order into his own thoughts, not a straightforward quest for information. ‘Yes, I think he would. He would probably be deemed to have diminished responsibility, as soon as a psychiatrist was brought in, because people like that exist in an isolated world, where they don't operate by normal moral standards.'

He nodded, then looked at her and smiled for the first time, acknowledging the bond between them. She couldn't know, of course, that he had been thinking about a woman and a mother.

Martin Carter had rehearsed the words and the phrases he needed many times. It had seemed easy, then. He had been both coherent and firm, when he had planned these things in the privacy of his own flat.

Now, in the older man's formidable physical presence, everything was much more difficult. Roy Hudson was tanned, urbane, experienced. Martin Carter was pale, uncertain and naive, and at this moment he felt acutely conscious of all these things. He said, ‘It's been difficult, these last few months. In all truth, I have to say that I've found that I'm not really cut out for this.' He forced a wan smile, running a nervous hand through his dark red hair.

He had spent a sleepless night after that gorilla of a man had threatened him with such relish in his room at the university yesterday. The thug must have reported back his unhappiness to the hierarchy, for he had been summoned tonight to this rendezvous with the man who had recruited him, paid him and directed him. The man who seemed so effortlessly to control his destiny. Martin felt that the velvet glove might at any moment be removed from the iron hand.

They were in a high-roomed Victorian house on the outskirts of Cheltenham, a place where he had never been before. A place where Roy Hudson felt comfortable and Martin Carter emphatically did not. This room at the front of the house was fully furnished and yet curiously anonymous, as if no one actually lived here. There were no ornaments, and just a single undistinguished picture on the longest wall. Martin wondered what part this house played in the organization.

But he could not afford irrelevant speculations like that.

There were just the two of them in the room. Hudson sat in a deep armchair with his legs crossed, whilst Martin sat on the edge of an upright chair eight feet from him, trying and conspicuously failing to look relaxed. He knew that he had been summoned here because Hudson chose not to be seen anywhere more public with him, because he wanted their association kept secret.

Martin wanted that too. But most of all he wanted to be out of it all.

Yet this was the moment when he realized what he had always known subconsciously but hadn't dared to acknowledge to himself: he wasn't going to be allowed to go. He tried to keep the panic out of his voice as he said, ‘It was my mistake that I ever got involved. I haven't the personality or the—'

‘Forget it.' Hudson didn't even accord him the status of annoyance. The older man was perfectly calm, almost avuncular, as he said, ‘You should have thought about this much earlier, Martin. There's no going back now, I'm afraid. Not for you. You know too much.'

That flat final statement, with its four hammering monosyllables, would reverberate in Martin's mind long after he had left this place. He looked desperately at the heavy blue curtains which masked the window. ‘I'm just not very good at this business, am I? I need to face the fact that I'm an academic, pure and simple. I might even become quite a respectable academic. I'll work away at my books, do a little research, get it published, and make my way as a university teacher. I should have stuck to that in the first place, instead of thinking I could be a capitalist.'

He had pressed on, becoming ever more inconsequential, expecting with every second to be interrupted, wanting to be interrupted, in the end. Instead, Roy Hudson had let this drivel run its course, until it came to a halt with a nervous giggle from the younger man. Now he said with cold menace, ‘You don't seem to be listening, Martin. I said leaving our organization is not an option. Improving your efficiency is the only option you have.'

‘But I thought I'd made it clear that—'

‘And I thought my representative had made it clear to you yesterday that you needed to do better. When he visited you in your ivory tower. Where you should have felt at home, in the middle of your customer base.' Hudson threw in the last phrase with his lips curling in contempt, flinging the bit of jargon at his man like a dart.

‘But I'm sure you'll agree that if I'm not very good at this you're better without me.' Martin conjured up a sickly smile from somewhere, but it was not answered by the man sitting in the armchair.

‘I thought you were an intelligent man. The message doesn't seem to be getting through to you. Perhaps the messenger I sent yesterday wasn't direct enough for you. Perhaps I should have let him rough you up a little. He'd have liked that, and he's quite good at it.'

Martin thrust a hand through his bright red hair. ‘Look, Mr Hudson, isn't there room for some sort of compromise here? I should never have got myself into this, and I'm sorry that I haven't done more for you than I have.'

He looked up to see if this was too sycophantic, but Hudson's expression hadn't changed one iota, and Martin found that more chilling than anger would have been. He licked lips that were like paper and plunged on. ‘I'm not much use to you, but I'm perfectly trustworthy. I'm sure you'll agree that you've no reason to doubt me when I say that.'

‘Trust isn't a thing we go in for. You know too much, Carter.'

Martin noticed the switch to his surname, the sudden hardening of the tone, and tried to ignore them. ‘I know very little, really.'

‘You know me. That's enough. As well as certain other things. And you know the rules, Carter: you don't quit. We don't leave people who quit around to tell tales. It's quite simple, really.' He smiled, but it wasn't a smile anyone would respond to.

Martin said desperately, ‘My lips are sealed. I've more sense than to talk, haven't I? And I'll hand over whatever contacts I have to whoever it is you send to take over from me. And he or she will be welcome to the little knowledge of the patch that I've picked up over the last few months, and—'

‘You don't seem to be listening to me. You'd better start listening very hard now.' Hudson spoke slowly, as if delivering instructions to a child. ‘You go away from here and you set about increasing your turnover. The police have left the campus now and the rumpus over the Clare Mills murder is over. Things are getting back to normal.'

Martin tried not to notice that this man spoke of the dead woman who had been his stepdaughter as if he had never known her, tried to concentrate fiercely upon his own situation. ‘The students are going off for the summer vacation. There won't be many around for the next three months. It's not the time for expansion.'

‘Good local base of students round here, though. And others will be coming home for the summer from other universities. Looking for the exciting range of products we can supply.' Hudson smiled; he enjoyed throwing these orthodox retail phrases in, enjoyed the ironic ring they gave to his pronouncements. ‘And no one said you had to confine yourself to students. We're very liberal about these things.'