Bring Forth Your Dead (12 page)

13

Interview rooms in police stations are not designed to please the eye. They are at best functional, at worst cold and ugly. The one on the outskirts of Bristol to which Andrew Lewis
was brought to confront the CID was about average. It was not cold: the four-year-old building enjoyed the benefits of a modern heating system. It did not have the gloss paint over bare brick which brought the air of the public lavatory to many city centre interview rooms. But it was not designed to reassure its non-police occupants, and in that respect the design succeeded admirably.

The room was very small; when it was occupied by two large policemen and the man they had come eighty miles to see, it was quite claustrophobic. Perhaps because of its smallness, the primrose yellow with which some daring innovator had emulsioned the walls was marked in many places with the scuff marks of chairs and clothing. The fluorescent light which was positioned in the exact centre of the ceiling was not particularly powerful, but in that tiny, windowless space its white glare seemed at first quite blinding, reinforcing the impression that this was a room where it would be futile to attempt to hide things.

Furniture, as one would expect in such a place, was cut to the irreducible minimum: a single chair on each side of the small square table which stood beneath the light. Here questioner and questioned could confront each other with their eyes no more than three feet apart and every change of feature mercilessly illumined by the shadowless light. Lambert called for an extra chair and positioned it so that neither he nor Hook should dominate their side of the table; the effect for the man who was now brought to sit opposite them was no doubt of an increase in the forces ranged against him rather than a diminution of the intensity. It was a situation designed to discourage truculence.

Andrew Lewis had no truculence. Still in his torn jeans and oil-stained shirt, with one lace broken in his trainers, he almost cringed as he was brought in and ordered to sit down. He had his mother’s ash-blonde hair and blue eyes; the first was dishevelled, the second full of the unfocused fear of a child in a world of hostile adults. He had not asked for a wash, so that he had not been offered one: the uniformed branch did not see putting young tearaways at their ease as part of their brief.

Lewis was no tearaway. His thin, hunched shoulders trembled as he waited to be questioned. The grubby stains which ran in irregular smears beneath the eyes only emphasised the youth in the fresh, unlined face. At this moment, it was easy to see why Margaret Lewis might feel the need to defend this vulnerable creature with all the resources at her command. Biology was a powerful force. And Lambert had a sense of fair play that was increasingly old-fashioned: he felt an illogical annoyance against the men who had tried to help him by sending a suspect in like this. He called for the only alleviation the system had to offer. In three minutes, a constable brought in three steaming mugs of tea, setting the smallest one before Lewis with the fraction of a second’s unconscious hesitation which was all his sense of discipline allowed to his resentment.

Lambert, who had lately given up all sweetening, tried not to watch Bert Hook’s large hands struggling incongruously to drop sweeteners from his plastic dispenser into his tea. He said to the apprehensive man opposite to them, ‘How old are you?’ They knew the answer from the growing pile of material which was being assembled for them in the murder room at Oldford, but it was a neutral way of beginning with a subject who was full of distrust.

‘Twenty-two.’

‘Have you been in trouble with the police before?’ He regretted that ‘before’ immediately, with its implication that Lewis was up against the system and all its resources.

‘You people know all about that.’ The young face stared at the table between them, face blank as a sheet of grubby notepaper. Like a child who has done wrong and knows it, he was lapsing into a trance-like sullenness, defying a reaction to an adult world seeking a sign of remorse.

Lambert, aware of his colleague beside him studying those tight-shut features, took a quick decision. Without a word, he motioned Hook to take on the questioning.

The Sergeant allowed himself a swift flash of surprise, no more. He took over the central role with the slightest nod of acceptance. Then he said nothing for what seemed a very long time. The seconds stretched out slowly, painfully, until the silence in that tiny, stifling room seemed like a tangible thing.

Eventually, as Hook knew must happen, the youth’s eyes were drawn upwards, slowly, painfully, as if by some agency outside himself. The Sergeant gave him a small, slow smile; Lewis looked down again, but both of them knew now that there was a kind of contact, neither friendly nor hostile. Bert said, ‘We’d rather hear it from you, lad.’

The youth lifted a hand to his hair, moving it slowly back from where it hung over his left eye, stroking it over his scalp into a semblance of order. It was the first movement he had made since he had been ordered to sit on the chair. He said dully, as if speaking against his inclination, ‘Where do you want me to begin?’

This time the silence was not a tactic. Hook was thinking furiously. ‘Have the people here told you why you were brought in?’

‘No. I ran away.’ He sounded as though he were explaining why the people who had locked him in a cell were not at fault. Perhaps he thought that if there was any misunderstanding, he would be the ultimate sufferer.

‘So I heard. Led them quite a dance. Naughty lad.’ Perhaps Lewis caught a friendly rather than a threatening note in the words, for he glanced quickly up at Hook, then across at the impassive Lambert. Hook said formally, ‘Your mother was housekeeper to a certain Mr Edmund Craven, who died just over a year ago. We now know that what was originally registered as a death from natural causes was in fact a murder. Did you know that?’

Lewis licked his lips. ‘Yes.’ Plainly he wondered what was coming next. Hook, indulging his natural inclination, took his time. And all the while he watched the young man opposite him.

‘Do you know how?’

Lewis shook his head, as though he did not trust himself to speak. His interlocutors studied him, wondering whether his ignorance was genuine. This time his eyes did not twitch upwards to theirs. He did not see the affirmation Lambert gave to Hook before the Sergeant gave the detail. ‘He was poisoned. In fact he was given several dosages of arsenic over a period of months. Someone planned this murder very carefully and carried it through very ruthlessly.’

Now Lewis did look at them. And the blue, revealing eyes were full of fear. Whether it was the horror which descends upon the innocent in face of the evidence of evil, or the alarm of the killer who sees that his methods are revealed, it was impossible to say. Presently he looked between them, towards the door of the room, not as if he expected any release from there, but rather as if he expected it to open new and even grimmer revelations. Perhaps he decided eventually that Hook was the nearest thing to a friend for him in this place. He said directly to the Sergeant, securing for the moment a brittle calm, ‘That is horrible. But I didn’t do it, and I don’t know who did.’

‘Perhaps not, lad. But perhaps you know more than you realise. In any case, we need to clear you of suspicion. We think that from what we know of the murder, it was probably committed by someone who had regular access to the victim in the three months or so before he died.’

Andrew Lewis glanced sharply from one to the other. ‘I was there then,’ he said, through lips that were so nearly shut that even in that small room they could barely hear him.

‘Exactly,’ said Hook calmly. ‘And that’s why we’re here now. We need to clear you if we can, and also find what you know about any of the other people involved.’

By putting the emphasis on clearing the young man rather than the seriousness of his position as a suspect, Hook kept him talking instead of lapsing back into the sullen panic where he had begun. Lewis said, ‘I was there. I didn’t see much. I kept out of Craven’s way as much as I could.’

‘Why was that?’

‘He didn’t like me. I didn’t like him much. But I didn’t know he was—dying.’ The recollection of opportunities missed and things which would have been better left unsaid passed across his face. It was probably the first time this youth had felt the irrevocability of death; for the men
opposite him, it was a look they had seen too often before.

‘Had you given him reason to dislike you?’

Lewis sighed. He was relaxed enough now to permit himself a tiny rueful smile, recognising that he was going to volunteer the information he had been denying them at the beginning of the interview. ‘Yes, I suppose so. He didn’t like younger people much anyway—you should ask his daughter and her husband about that. Once I got in trouble with the police, he didn’t even want me in the house.’

‘That is not an unusual attitude. How did you get into trouble?’

A sour little smile again. ‘My mother would tell you that I got into the wrong company. It’s true, but it’s too easy an excuse.’ Andrew Lewis was more intelligent than the frightened weakling he had appeared to be at the beginning of the interview. Lambert’s first, irritated reaction was that this did not necessarily make things less complicated: it might bring him back into focus as a possible murderer or accomplice. His thin lips were framing words carefully now, as he begun the story he had thought to deny them. ‘When I left school, I had six O-levels, but the area was in the grip of the ‘eighties recession. Things are a lot better now for school-leavers. I got various small jobs in supermarkets, most of them temporary. Then I went to an engineering firm on a YTS scheme. I did quite well, but at the end of six months the employer got rid of me, at the point where he would have had to pay proper wages.’

‘You found you were just cheap labour, and when you ceased to be cheap he dispensed with you and looked for another government trainee.’ Hook sounded quite resentful himself, and it was not a response he simulated to encourage confidence in the man opposite him: he had seen too much abuse of the scheme to distrust what Andrew Lewis was telling him now.

‘I’d always been quite good with engines, which had won me friends among older boys after I left school. After the YTS fiasco, I was feeling pretty bitter and I didn’t even look for proper employment. I spent my time repairing motor-bikes and old cars for the lads I knew. I didn’t always get paid what I had been promised.’

Hook nodded. It was the start of a pilgrim’s progress of life’s disillusionments. Perhaps the boy would have gone less far along this road if he had had a father to advise him: Bert liked him better for not offering the absence as a mitigation of his conduct. He said, ‘And it was at this time that you first came before the courts?’

‘It was stupid, really. After a Christmas party I gave someone a lift on the back of someone else’s moped—I don’t drink, you see, or scarcely, anyway. It was a week before I was due to take my test. Of course, the police caught me. Eventually, I was done not just for carrying an unauthorised pillion passenger but for taking a vehicle away without the owner’s consent. I hadn’t done that, but I think the bloke thought he’d get away with things more easily himself if he said I had.’

‘You got a fine?’

‘Two hundred quid. And a ban. And six penalty points on my licence.’

If Hook thought it harsh, he gave no sign. ‘That was the beginning of your troubles.’ He could understand young, keen constables wanting a conviction. No youngster ever beat the system, unless he had more money and influence than young Andrew Lewis. He did not at this moment agree with Angela Harrison’s description of him, as ‘a lout’.

Lewis was in more of a dilemma than he cared to show. ‘Never trust a policeman’ was a dictum that had been quoted to him often in his short life, and all his previous experience had confirmed it. Now, in what he had thought his greatest crisis, he had to decide how far to trust this equable, understanding man in plain clothes. He wanted to, and perhaps in truth he had not very much choice in the matter. He said, ‘I suppose it was the real beginning of disaster for me, yes. I thought the magistrates had thrown the book at me, and all my friends encouraged me to be bitter. The case made the local papers: there had been cannabis at the party, though I wasn’t involved in that. I couldn’t get any permanent work, and I was too bitter to listen to the right people.’

‘Like your mother,’ said Hook quietly.

Lewis looked up at him quickly, suspecting some attempt to trap him. But his confidence held. He gave a small shrug of his thin shoulders and said, ‘Yes, Mum was about the only one giving sensible advice, but most boys of seventeen think they know more than their mothers. I was still repairing cars for the wrong people. And when I was asked, I drove one of those cars on the wrong occasion.’

He paused, and Hook said, ‘Did you know where you were going?’

Lewis looked at him for several seconds before he replied, ‘No. But perhaps I should have done. It was a Jaguar and I think I was so anxious to drive it that I didn’t ask too many questions.’ He said apologetically, ‘I’m keen on cars, and I think I can drive a bit.’ It was the first thing that he said that even approached a boast.

‘So I hear,’ said Hook rather grimly. ‘I believe you can handle a Lotus when you’re given the chance.’

It reminded Lewis of the trouble he was in. He looked cast down again. He was looking down at the table when he went on in a monotone, ‘It turned out that my companions were holding up a little general shop run by a Pakistani. They’d got me because I could handle the car for a quick getaway: I’d just tuned it up. I got out of the car to see what was going on and walked straight into a major incident. My passenger was threatening the shopkeeper with a knife. He’d never have used it, but—’