Death of a Perfect Mother (21 page)

‘Oh, that was what you were planning, was it? Just as well I stepped in. Well, get this into your crazy skull: your little black Sambo's gone from Todmarsh for good. Before the end of the week he should be on his way back to Baboon land or where the hell he comes from. If he's not up on a charge of murder.'

‘They can't send him back home. They've no right—he's studying here.'

‘They've every right. There's immigration laws in this country, thank God, and they apply to students and all. There's other laws too—like about seducing a minor, for instance.'

‘Oh, don't talk rot, Gordon. He didn't seduce me.'

‘According to the law he did, or it'll be the same as if he did. I've been into all that. When they've finished going over him they'll put him on the first plane home. Got that? They'll deport him.'

As the idea got through to Debbie she let out suddenly a howl of rage and pain. ‘They can't. Who's doing this? Is it that damned policeman?'

‘Yes, it is. After I tipped him the wink.'

Screaming with anger and frustration, Debbie suddenly threw her book at his head and sprang at him herself in its wake. ‘You beast! You bastard! I'll get you for this! I'll kill you!'

Sobbing and screaming she grabbed his hair and started clawing his face. Glad the thing had become a full-scale fight, fully confident at last, Gordon grabbed hold of her arms and started bending them back behind
her. ‘You bitch. You vile little bitch. You've met your match, little sister . . .' As her arms started to go limp and her face twisted in physical pain, Gordon relaxed, and still bending them back and up towards her shoulder-blades, he started talking more softly: ‘You're going to be grateful to me for this, you know. Later. When you know a bit more about life. You're going to see I was right . . .'

Now Debbie was sobbing with pain, and Brian said: ‘Give over, Gordon. That's enough.' Slowly Gordon relaxed the pressure and Debbie collapsed on the floor in a racked, snuffling heap.

‘You can't do this to me,' she gasped. ‘I'm going to see that policeman.'

‘Don't you try it, kid,' said Gordon, standing over her in gladiatorial triumph. Quick as a flash Debbie seized one of his ankles and half-toppled him over one of the easy chairs. Then, on her feet in an instant, she made for the door. Gordon, righting himself, caught her just as she was going out of the front door, dragged her back into the hall and banged her head against the wall.

‘Oh, little sister,' he shouted, ‘you've got so much to learn. Do you want to learn it the hard way?'

Next door, with Guy Fawcett squirming and twisting on the end of his inquisitorial line, Inspector McHale heard the shouting and the banging on the wall from the Hodsden house. He raised his eyebrows imperceptibly. The happy Hodsden family . . . He hadn't expected them to break out like this. Perhaps he ought to go and investigate.

But that very moment there came through from the Station the 'phone call that was to change the whole course of the investigation.

It was what McHale had half expected all along. In fact it was what he had hoped for. He had alerted his colleagues in the Cumbledon police, and they had contacted him immediately it had come up.

The boy sat in the charge-room, a heavy lad of nineteen or so, his manner poised between bluster and terror. If his body—incipiently mountainous and ugly—might arouse fear, his face could only arouse contempt: large-headed, dim, inarticulate, his mouth always in danger of falling open, he was the typical rural lout who in this urban age finds himself a place among the dregs of the towns. His face was spotty and pockmarked, his eyes shifty and wet; he wore a cheap plasticated leather jerkin, zipped to the throat and sewn over with incomprehensible badges, and filthy jeans. He smelt. Even as McHale entered the room he involuntarily wrinkled his nostrils. A sensitive policeman, McHale.

‘Well, you've landed yourself right in it,' he said.

‘I ain't done nothing,' muttered the boy feebly.

But what he had done was all-too-well attested to. Earlier that evening, at dusk—he had not even had the wit to wait until it was completely dark, so keen was he to pick up a few pounds and buy himself a drink, and perhaps a piece of skirt—he had attacked an old lady limping home along one of the back alleys of Cumbledon. Watched from behind the curtains of one of the little cottages that lined the alley, he had grabbed the woman's handbag and hit her efficiently with a homemade cosh. But the old lady was fragile, and when she was found two
minutes later she was dead. And when this boy was picked up ten minutes later he was scrabbling in her purse, which he threw away under the eyes of the police patrol that took him. Scrumpled in his hand was £1.75. When told that the old lady was dead, he said: ‘She can't be. I didn't hit her hard.' He was a boy who seemed destined from birth to a lifetime of shorter or longer jail sentences. By bad luck he was likely to start with a stiff one.

McHale settled himself, comfortably yet intimidatingly, on another upright chair on the boy's side of the desk.

‘What's your name?'

‘Jack Cobbett. I told the other one.'

‘It's me you're dealing with now. Where do you live?'

‘Furmety Lane.' It was a tatty, slummy district in East Cumbledon that even the coming of university people to the town (which had transformed many undesirable areas into estate agents' dreams) had failed to make habitable except by those who couldn't help it.

‘What does your father do?'

‘He's with the Council. On the roads.'

‘Mother?'

‘Yer.'

‘Does your mother work?'

‘On and off. Cleaning and that. When she can't get anything better. She won't care.'

‘So I gather. She's been informed.'

‘Coulder told you she wouldn't care. She never has. Ran off with a bloke when I was thirteen.'

‘Ah. You hold it against her?'

‘Wish she'd never bloody come back.'

‘You've got a grudge against your mother?'

‘No . . . Just can't stand the sight of her.'

‘Interesting. Well, what she actually said when she was told was: “I seen it coming. He can stew in his own juice.” '

The boy was silent, his face impassive. ‘What am I supposed to do? Cry?'

‘I'm interested. Why do you attack women? Are you getting your own back for being deserted?'

‘Don't be bloody daft,' muttered Jack Cobbett.

‘There must be some reason why you choose women . . .'

‘Women are bloody weaker—' burst out Jack. ‘Don't be f—daft.'

‘Older women too, not younger. There was the one tonight, and then the one in Todmarsh: she was nearly fifty. About your mother's age.'

‘What the bleeding hell do you mean? Todmarsh.'

‘Nearly fifty. Not unlike your mother too, I'd guess.'

‘I never been near Todmarsh.'

‘Never been there? Are you really telling me that? Todmarsh on the coast, and Cumbledon being inland?'

‘Well, I been there . . . in my time.'

‘Of course you have. Silly to tell unnecessary lies. You were there last Thursday, for example.'

‘The hell I was.'

‘Where were you last Thursday then? Thursday night.'

‘Thursday night? How would I know? One night's like any other.'

‘Not this night. You'd better think carefully.'

The boy, sweating now, cradled his big head in his hands. The long, thick, strong fingers picked convulsively at his dirty, lifeless hair. McHale looked at him, looked at the hands. Strangler's hands, he thought.

‘I was at the flicks with a bird,' said Jack Cobbett at last. ‘One I picked up. Casual.'

‘What did you see?'

‘Don't remember . . .
The Stud.'

‘The Stud
was on the week before last. You were in Todmarsh Thursday evening, weren't you?'

‘Sod off. I told you. I haven't been there for years.'

‘You were there last week. And you wanted the odd
pound for a drink, didn't you? Just like tonight.'

‘I didn't do nothing tonight.'

‘You were caught with the money on you so don't try giving me that stuff. You were seen to throw away the dead woman's purse. You had a receipt with her name on when we picked you up.'

The boy was near to blubbering: ‘It's a bloody frame-up. I didn't have no receipt.'

‘What's more, you were seen from the house when you attacked the poor old creature. By someone who knew you. It's an open-and-shut case. Hardly worth the bother of a trial. They're just getting the details of the charge ready out there.'

Jack Cobbett choked and spluttered. ‘It's a frame-up. I never . . .' His big shoulders began to heave with fear and nausea. ‘I didn't know . . .'

‘You didn't know your own bloody strength, is that it? I'm not so sure about that. You'd enough practice. Did you go for an OAP this time because you wanted an easy victim? You had more of a struggle last time, eh?'

‘There wasn't no last time, I tell you.'

‘She wasn't so weak, that one, was she? A real tough bird I should think.'

‘You're bloody making this up. You'll be saying I did the Great Train Robbery next.'

‘No, just another mugging, like this one. You had us fooled for a bit there, Jack. Quite a neat job. How much did you get out of that one?'

‘You're talking a load of balls.'

‘More than one seventy-five, I bet. And then there was the brooch.'

‘What brooch? What are you talking about?'

‘The brooch you took off her dress. What did you do with it, eh? Get anybody to take it off you? Did you give it to a bird? Or did you throw it away? Pity if you did that. It was a valuable little piece.'

He looked for signs of disappointment, but saw nothing but bullish vacancy.

‘Either way,' he said flatteringly, ‘you managed that little job better than the one tonight, didn't you? Nice dark little patch you found. No one to see you. And Mrs Hodsden trotting down the road. Did she remind you of your mum? She's got bright red hair. What colour's your mum's hair?'

‘She's a bleeding blonde.'

‘Dyed, I suppose. Out of a bottle?'

‘What do you think? She's no bleeding Swede.'

‘Just like Lill Hodsden. Bit of the tart there, eh? And you'd got your bit of wire there, hadn't you? Nice little instrument, I'd guess . . . with handles all prepared, eh? Just wanted to frighten her, didn't you?'

‘I don't know what you're talking about,' said the boy, still half way between a snarl and a whimper.

‘But when you got it round her neck you found you wanted to go on, didn't you? You found you liked it, that was it, wasn't it? Enjoyed it. Did you have an erection while you were doing it, eh, Jack?'

‘Here—'

‘And before you knew where you were, she was on the ground dead, wasn't she? What did you do with the wire, Jack?'

Jack was breathing hard, and sweating, and snivelling on and off. ‘You're talking in bloody riddles,' he whined.

‘Oh, I'm not. You know what I mean, don't you? You took her purse, didn't you? And the brooch. And then you made off. What did you do with the wire? Did you go and throw it in the sea? Or have you still got it at home? Ready for next time?'

‘You go and look. I ain't got nothing there.'

‘Because there would have been a next time, wouldn't there? You got such a kick out of that little job. It felt as if it was someone else's neck in that wire, didn't it?'

‘Give over—'

‘Someone you wanted very much to do in, and didn't dare, eh?' McHale leant his face very close to the boy's crouching figure and his panting, distorted face: ‘Why don't you admit it? Come clean. It'll help you in the long run.'

The boy whimpered miserably. ‘Oh, all right. I did it. That job tonight. I didn't mean her to snuff it. God's truth.'

‘Oh, we all know about that business tonight. No mystery about that. What I'm interested in is the Todmarsh one.'

‘There wasn't one. I didn't—'

‘Oh yes you did. Last Thursday. What did you think when you saw her, walking down the road? There was you in this dark little recess, and there was this woman, walking down the road. Big, sexy woman she was, wasn't she? Reminded you of your mother . . .'

‘What's my bleeding mother got to do with it?'

‘Quite a lot, Jack. Quite a lot. I don't suppose you intended much harm when you put the wire round her neck, did you? That's what you can say at the trial, anyway, and we won't go against that, not if you cooperate. We're not against you, Jack. We just want to clear this thing up.'

Jack was whining noisily all the time now. ‘You've got it in for me . . .'

‘We haven't, Jack. We just want to know how it happened. You tightened the wire, didn't you? You're a strong lad, Jack. Tighter and tighter—'

‘No!'

‘And she was gasping, and choking, wasn't she?—'

‘No! No!'

‘Tighter and tighter. And you could feel her body under you go limp. And still you kept pulling it, tighter and tighter—'

‘No! Yes! No! Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .'

And that was the end of the Hodsden case. As a case. And it had all worked out as McHale had prophesied—and publicly prophesied at that. He drew Inspector Haggart's attention to the fact when he cleared up his things at the Todmarsh Police Station.

‘You remember I said as much at the time,' he said, congratulating himself with the air of pinning a medal on to someone else. ‘It's often the way: these casual muggings lead to killings, and they're the very devil to clear up. Can't do much more than wait for the bastard to do it again.'