Too Much of Water (20 page)

‘Since you've taken the trouble to come from the other side of the world to offer us your thoughts, I feel I owe it to you to be completely honest. I have to tell you that we'll be grateful for any help you can give us.'

The big tanned figure in the chair opposite him nodded. ‘You're not getting much help from the immediate family.' It was more a statement of fact than a question.

Lambert raised his eyebrows. ‘You expected that?'

Ken Mills frowned. ‘I suppose I did, for a variety of reasons. That's why I'm here. The New Zealand police said they'd relay whatever I had to say to you, but I felt I wanted to be personally involved in this. I owe it to Clare to see that whoever did this to her is brought to justice.'

Beneath his surface health, he was taut with anxiety. No doubt it owed something to the long flight and the time change, but both John Lambert and Bert Hook thought that there was something more than that, that he wanted to deliver himself of something which was troubling him. Lambert said quietly, ‘You had better tell us why you think that those who were closest to your daughter are not likely to be very helpful to us.'

He sighed. ‘I've had hours to think about it on the plane. The words came to me easily, when I was just sitting and thinking on my own. Now that I'm here, I feel much more confused.'

‘Your daughter is dead, Mr Mills, and I've just virtually admitted to you that ten days later, we aren't even close to an arrest. This is no time for being squeamish about voicing your thoughts. We shall certainly respect any confidences you offer to us.'

‘All right. Let's begin with the easy one. That wretched husband of Clare's. Ex-husband, I suppose I should say. The sheep-badger, or whatever he calls himself now. I expect you've talked to him and formed your own impressions. He's no good, Superintendent. He was a disaster as a husband and from what I was able to gather from Clare he's been a disaster ever since.'

Lambert nodded at Hook, who said quietly, ‘Ian Walker is dead, Mr Mills. He died last night.'

Ken Mills's brown eyes opened wide in horror. ‘Strewth! Look, I didn't like the bloke, and I'm not back-tracking on that. But I'd no idea that—'

‘He was murdered, Mr Mills. Killed beside his caravan with his own shotgun.'

Both CID men were watching their man intently. They had no idea of Mills's background, whether he was the kind of man who would have had the inclination and the knowledge to employ a contract killer, if he thought the man he had just confessed to hating had killed his daughter.

Mills's surprise at the news of this second death seemed complete and genuine. He seemed quite dazed as he said, ‘And you think this second death is connected with my Clare's?'

Lambert said, ‘We don't know that for certain, as yet. I should be very surprised if there wasn't any sort of connection.'

Mills stared unseeingly at Lambert's desk. This world of murderous intrigue and secret hates was as far removed from his new life in the wide spaces of New Zealand as it was possible to get. For a moment, he wondered why he was here. He wanted to throw off this tight Gloucester world of his youth and his failed first marriage, to stand up and storm out of this claustrophobic police station and into the open air.

Yet he owed it to his daughter to stay here, to do whatever he could to pin down her killer. He dragged his thoughts back to another of the people he had been directed to talk about and said dully, ‘Roy Hudson. He didn't feel anything for Clare. Didn't want her in the house.'

There was a pause before Bert Hook looked up from the note he was making and said, ‘How well do you know Roy Hudson, Mr Mills?'

Mills gave a short, mirthless laugh, which emerged as almost a bark. It was the first audible evidence of the strain he was feeling. ‘You wouldn't expect me to be objective, would you? Not about the man who crept into my bed and took over my family.'

Hook smiled, trying to take the tension out of the air. ‘I don't think we would anticipate a balanced view, certainly. Nevertheless, your thoughts would be interesting for us to hear.'

‘I'm not as bitter as you might imagine. My marriage was finished long before Roy Hudson came along. If you want the truth, I think that at the time I was quite glad to have someone to take the responsibility for Judith off my hands. I still felt a duty towards her, you see.'

‘But you weren't happy about Mr Hudson's relationship with your daughter.'

‘No. I don't think he wanted to make a home for her.' He paused, looking out towards the park, hearing for the first time the shrill voices of the distant children through the open window of the superintendent's office. ‘No doubt there were faults on both sides. Clare was an adolescent at the time, with everything that goes with that. And she was still very attached to me. She'd always been closer to me than to her mother.'

His voice cracked a little on that thought, and it seemed for a moment as if this tough outdoor man would dissolve into tears. Then he gathered himself together and spoke evenly. ‘I felt Hudson wanted Clare out of the house. I only got Clare's side of things, of course – I was still in this country in the early years of Judith's remarriage. But I don't think Roy Hudson offered her much sympathy or understanding, or even tried to keep going any sort of relationship between Clare and her mother. Rightly or wrongly, I felt he was to blame for Clare's marriage to Ian Walker. Everyone from the outside could see that it was going to be a disaster, but I think she wanted more than anything to get out of the house and establish a new life for herself.'

‘How well did Roy Hudson know Ian Walker?' Lambert slipped the question in as unobtrusively as he could. Mills had come round the world to talk about his daughter's death, but they had a second murder on their hands, a second network of relationships to establish and investigate.

‘I don't know. I was still here for Clare's marriage to Walker, but I left for New Zealand a fortnight later. I've married again out there, quite unexpectedly. We're very happy.'

For a moment, they had a glimpse of his very different Antipodean world, of the effort it had taken him to turn back the clock and come here as a last duty to the dead daughter he had loved. Lambert said very quietly, ‘Do you have any reason to think Roy Hudson might have killed Clare?'

‘No. I can't pretend to like the bloke, and I think he could have been a better stepfather and friend to my daughter than he was. But that's very different from saying I think he killed her. I can't see any reason why he would do that.'

‘Or why he should kill Ian Walker?'

‘No.' He gave a sour smile. ‘I said I didn't wish that man dead. But I can't grieve much for him. He made Clare's life a misery for a couple of years, and even after they were divorced he was trying to sponge off her. I recognize that you have to try to catch his killer, but I shan't be losing much sleep over his death. It's Clare's murderer I want you to arrest.'

‘I can understand that, but as we've already indicated, it's highly probable that the same person killed both of them.'

Ken Mills looked at Lambert for a moment, weighing that notion. Then he nodded and said, ‘You say “person”. Does that mean that you think a woman might have killed Clare?'

‘She was strangled before her body was put into the Severn: probably with a ligature. That means no great strength was necessary and it would have been perfectly possible for a woman to be our killer. And Ian Walker was killed with his own shotgun; again it is quite feasible that it was a woman who pulled the trigger.'

Mills nodded his acceptance of the logic of this, then said suddenly, ‘I wanted to talk to you about Judith.'

‘I wish you would. I don't mind admitting to you that your ex-wife is one of the enigmas of the case so far. Mrs Hudson is proving the strangest mother of a murder victim I have come across in a quarter of a century of murder investigations.'

Mills nodded, seemingly not at all surprised by this frank declaration. ‘I struggled with that personality for fifteen years before I gave up on her. Clare has struggled with it throughout her life. I suppose it was even more difficult for a daughter than a husband. When Clare was a child, she simply didn't understand it. She saw other mothers continually demonstrating their affection for their children, when hers didn't seem to care for her. It must have been very hard.'

‘Are you saying that there was a psychological basis for this situation?' Like almost all policemen, Lambert distrusted psychologists and psychiatrists, who seemed too often to provide the let-out for criminals whom it had taken many man-hours to outwit and arrest.

Ken Mills sighed. ‘I'm saying I'm not certain how responsible she is for her own actions. I never was and never will be. It's the reason why our marriage broke up. Perhaps we should never have tried. I'd be interested to know what Roy Hudson thinks about his marriage, after a few years with her. You think this might have a bearing on Clare's death?'

Lambert smiled ruefully. ‘I've no idea what's relevant and what isn't at the moment. We shan't know much more about that until we have a murderer under lock and key. That's always the case when we have no obvious suspect immediately after a murder. We have to gather every scrap of information we can and pool our knowledge. With luck and a little expertise, significant connections will emerge.' He wondered if he sounded as tired as he felt as he offered this familiar explanation.

Ken Mills decided that he liked this intelligent, rather intense man, who was so unlike any policeman he had previously met. He would trust him to find out who had killed Clare. He said, ‘It's difficult to know where to begin with Judith. You've heard of autism?'

A grim smile, a quick glance at Bert Hook. ‘We've heard of it, yes. Come up against it, sometimes. But we're strictly amateurs. You're saying that your ex-wife is autistic?'

Mills shook his head sharply from side to side in a flash of irritation at the oversimplification he had met so often over the years. ‘As with every sort of psychological condition, there are infinite shades of affliction. At the time I married Judith, we hoped that she would be able to lead a normal life. Whatever that might be.'

He smiled bitterly at the treetops beyond the window and uncomplicated world outside. ‘Autism derives from the Greek word for self. But that doesn't mean that autists are selfish. Their sense of self is almost as rudimentary as their sense of other people. Judith didn't put her desires in front of those of other people; she simply didn't understand that other people had desires.'

He spoke like one in a dream, voicing ideas which were once familiar, but which he thought he had long since put behind him. ‘When autism was first identified in the nineteen-forties, it was described as “extreme aloneness”. That still seems to me the simplest description of it.'

Bert Hook, struggling to relate these generalities to the woman who was a suspect in a murder investigation, said with a feeling of inadequacy, ‘You think your wife is lonely?'

Mills smiled wearily at the familiar mistake. ‘No. Alone, not lonely. She feels no need to make the kind of connections which help the rest of us to make sense of the world. Asperger's syndrome, the medics suggested. She's highly intelligent, but incapable of an unthinking, altruistic act. The kind of instinctive love and concern which would come naturally for most mothers. That made life very difficult for Clare.' Again that bitter smile, that unspoken recollection of past sufferings and frustrations.

‘And difficult for you as well.' Hook was suddenly full of sympathy for this man struggling to bare his soul in the interests of his murdered child.

‘I coped all right at first. We coped, I should say. Sex wasn't a problem. Many autists live through their senses. Judith sometimes seemed to exist in the here and now, to have no sense of past or future. But I was prepared for that; the diagnosis when she was twenty was that her severest problems might be over. Unfortunately, when she had a child, the problems really set in again. My wife didn't see herself as a member of a family, as a mother of a daughter who needed her affection. She didn't even understand what affection was.'

Bert Hook, struggling to relate all this to his own boisterous pubescent boys and their very sane and loving mother, Eleanor, said, ‘This must have made your married life a struggle. It sounds as if you gave her every support you could.'

Mills carried on almost as if he had not heard Hook. ‘Judith didn't seek comfort. She never turned to me or to anyone else near her for solace or support. Autists lack the instinct to do that.'

Lambert said, ‘I'm sure this hasn't been easy for you. But it's very valuable for us. It helps us to see a woman and a situation more clearly, within this case. I'll be as frank with you as you've tried to be with us: Judith Hudson was baffling us by her non-involvement, by her failure to grieve for her daughter. I'm sure we understand her behaviour a lot better now.'

‘Is she a suspect for either of these killings?'

‘I can't comment on that.'

‘Which means you haven't ruled her out.'

‘We haven't been able to eliminate her from the enquiry yet. That's a bit of jargon. In this case, it means no more and no less than it says.'

Ken Mills was gazing past them into the middle distance outside the window again. He said slowly, ‘There's an innocence about autistics. Everyone says that. There is also a lack of moral responsibility. They don't feel guilt and other emotions in the way ordinary people do.'

It was a sentence which kept coming back to John Lambert during the long hours of his evening at home. It was an accurate description of several murderers he had known in the past.

C
hristine Lambert watched her husband secretly, glancing at his face only when she was sure that he was watching the television.