Gurney Close was suddenly full of vehicles. Scarcely a square foot of its newly laid tarmac was visible when Superintendent John Lambert drove his ageing Vauxhall Senator into the tiny cul-de-sac. It was twenty past nine on the morning of Sunday, the tenth of July.
He had been about to start a round of golf at Ross Golf Club when the call had come through to him. He had made the ritual noises of resentment about pleasure interrupted, but in truth his pulses had quickened and his senses been made more alert by this news of what seemed almost certainly a murder. John Lambert was in his fifties now, heavy with achievement and reputation. He was familiar with the slightly guilty excitement he felt now. The hunting instinct always takes over the CID man when there is the prospect of a serious crime to be solved. As he crossed the River Wye and drove through the lanes to the crime scene, Lambert was metaphorically sniffing the air and anticipating the challenges to come.
There was no mistaking the house he wanted. The blue and white ribbons defining the limits of the crime scene were already in place, the uniformed constable already looking bored at the prospect of long hours of policing a quiet area with no interlopers in sight. But the unwelcome sightseers would come, no doubt, even to this quiet place, when the sensational news got around. There were always those who wanted to get as close as they could to the scenes of shocking events. And even in an age which was far more violent than the one Lambert had entered as a policeman thirty years ago, murder retained its unique, grisly glamour.
The police surgeon had already been and gone, fulfilling his formal function of confirming that there was no life remaining in the body of Robin Arthur Durkin. But the pathologist was still on site, moving among the civilians who nowadays made up most of the Scene of Crime team. Lambert pulled the plastic bags over his shoes and slipped the thin white overalls reluctantly over his clothes; the day was already hot, and growing hotter by the minute under a cloudless sky. He picked his way carefully between the female photographer and the fingerprint man and watched the pathologist recording the reading from his thermometer.
The medical man glanced at the Chief Investigating Officer: he knew him quite well after several meetings over the last few years. ‘I’ve only taken the ambient temperature. I won’t disturb the clothing until he’s in the mortuary and the forensic boys have taken the clothing.’
Lambert nodded, glancing at the big windows of the new house’s sitting room, scarcely ten yards behind him. Someone had drawn the curtains, shutting away the sight of what was going on out here from the widow inside. She would have to get used to that word: at thirty-two, she could scarcely have expected to carry the label of widow for many years yet. Unless, of course, this Mrs Durkin was the one who had committed or engineered this death: Lambert made the CID officer’s automatic caveat to himself. The spouse was always the leading suspect until he or she could be eliminated from the enquiry.
He went and stared down impassively at the grossly distorted face, with its darkening flesh and bulging eyes. He was glad the curtains had shut it away from the widow, but he had seen much worse sights among murder victims. ‘Time of death?’ he said, without taking his eyes away from the face.
‘Several hours ago. The flesh is cold.’
‘Last night, then.’He was thinking aloud rather than looking for information; the pathologist wouldn’t give him anything more accurate without rectal temperatures and some estimation of the extent of rigor mortis. He picked his way carefully along the line the Scene of Crime Officer indicated until he reached the small gate in the fence at the back of the new garden, then looked out to where the grass had been trodden outside. One of the team was working his way alongside the tracks in the grass made by human feet, searching for any tiny clue which might have fallen from someone fleeing this way after the killing.
The SOCA investigation is by far the most important part of the early investigation of any murder. The theory is that there is always an ‘exchange’ between the murderer and his or her victim at the scene of the death. However carefully the killer plans his crime, however warily he covers his tracks, he will leave behind something of himself. With a sex crime, it will be something obvious: semen or saliva. With a killing like this, it might be something as tiny and unnoticed as a falling hair or a fibre from clothing. The man on his hands and knees already had a collection of small items in the plastic container beside him; only time and forensic examination would tell whether they had come from some entirely innocent source, or from the killer of the man who lay on his back behind them.
Lambert watched the man use his tweezers to lift the tipped end of a cigarette from amongst the blades of grass. Now that so many fewer people smoked, at least among the middle classes, tobacco evidence was more easy to pin down to a suspect than it had once been. But this particular item, squashed flat and grubby, looked as if it had probably been here for some time – perhaps since the builders had erected the fence beside it to mark the boundary of the property.
The civilian head of the SOCA team came over and stood by Lambert, watching his man working his way methodically along the ground towards the oak trees outside the fence. ‘This gate was open when we got here,’ he said.
‘So our man might have come in this way. Or left this way. Or both.’ The perpetrator of violence was always male until there was definite evidence to the contrary. The superintendent was not surprised, but certainly not pleased. This entrance and the tracks beyond it introduced the possibility of the wide world outside to the list of suspects, which might otherwise have been confined to the tight little world of Gurney Close. They might have hoped for a result within a few hours, with the killer emerging from within the family, as it did in sixty per cent of cases.
The man on all fours looked up. ‘There’s been someone along here quite recently. More than one person, though.’
Lambert nodded. The dew from a still, warm dawn was still present out here, where the tall oaks threw their shade over the open area outside the new garden fences. No one save the SOCA member, picking his way carefully alongside the previous flattening of the grass, had passed this way since the morning dew. He looked back towards the raw brick of the new houses, catching the twitch of a curtain at an upstairs window as someone observed the police activity. Someone who would need to be questioned, in due course.
In the small back garden where the corpse lay, the photographs had all been taken, the evidence from the immediate vicinity gathered. The body was being carefully rolled on to the sheet of polythene and wrapped to contain all remaining evidence for examination by the forensic scientists. The van police officers call the ‘meat wagon’ had reversed into the drive; its rear doors were open, and the plastic ‘shell’ inside was ready to receive the corpse.
Lambert waited until the van had eased its way quietly, almost apologetically, out of the close. Then he went and knocked at the front door of the house. A squat woman with a drawn face opened the door and he said ‘Mrs Durkin?’
‘No. I’m her sister. She’s not fit to talk to anyone. Not at the moment.’
He caught a glimpse of a ravaged, tear-stained face before the door of the kitchen shut at the other end of the hall. ‘I understand that. But I’ll need to speak to her. Just a brief preliminary interview to confirm a few of the facts of the case. We need to get our investigation under way quickly, if we’re going to find out who did this terrible thing.’
Sentiments he had voiced dozens of times before, but the fact that this was routine for him didn’t make things any less harrowing for the recipients of his demands. For a moment he thought she was going to refuse him, to shout at him for his insensitivity. But all she said was ‘When?’
‘Some time later today would be best. This afternoon, perhaps.’
‘All right. I’ll tell her. She’ll understand, will Ally. She’ll want to nail the bastard who did this.’
John Lambert nodded and went back round the back of the house to check whether the SOCA team had turned up anything they thought significant.
In the first house of Gurney Close, Jason Ritchie had been watching the activity of the last two hours with increasing apprehension. Now he watched the tall figure of the superintendent disappearing round the back of the murder house and took his decision. He moved swiftly out to the battered white van in the drive. It started at the second turn of the ignition switch and he revved the engine fiercely, then lurched out of the drive and away from the place. He felt the relief growing with each yard he put between himself and the place where Robin Durkin had fallen.