Malice Aforethought Read Free Page A

early call hadn’t taken them much further forward. But there were a few more details to ink in on the picture of their mystery man. He was well nourished, and had thought enough of his appearance to have his hair expensively cut and shaped. Not a vagrant, then: no need at present to trawl the meths drinkers and other dropouts who lived precariously in the twilight world of the homeless.
    ***
    Lambert hated this quiet period, with a murder team and its machinery in place, routine enquiries begun, and yet no clear focus for the work. It was like a phoney war, where everyone waited for the real battles to commence in a state of uneasy mental excitement. For John Lambert admitted that he was excited: he was too old a hand now to feel any guilt about the zest for the hunt which was a part of any CID man’s temperament.
    Because there was nothing more to be done yet, he went home for lunch. Christine made him a sandwich with her usual speed and dexterity, but she looked grey with fatigue. She had to force the smile she gave him when she caught him studying her over the sports section of the paper. ‘I’ve been hoeing the front garden — last time before the winter, I expect,’ she said.
    She had volunteered the explanation for her tiredness before he had voiced the question. It wasn’t like her even to admit to physical weakness. It meant that she must feel as exhausted as she looked, he reflected. He watched her knuckles whiten with the effort of raising herself from the armchair as she levered her frame into action. She taught part-time now in the local primary school a mile from their door, having volunteered to give up her full-time post when falling rolls in the schools determined that some teachers must go.
    As he watched her reverse her small car carefully between the gateposts, he was glad again that she had agreed to cut down the work she had always loved to a part-time commitment. It was clearly enough for her now. Well, neither of them was getting any younger; he tried to console himself with the meaningless cliché he remembered his own parents voicing a generation ago. But even as he smiled sourly at that recollection, he knew that there was more to it than that.
    He examined the heavy clay soil of the front garden as he went back to his car. The area of soil newly disturbed by hoeing was pitifully small.
    ***
    PC Bryn Jones made a routine check on the school at two thirty, driving slowly past in his patrol car. A visible presence, they called it. As far as he was concerned, it was as important to be noticed by the old busybody who had reported the suspicious presence as by the man himself. There wasn’t much kudos to be gained by bringing in paedophiles, anyway. But of this one, real or imagined, there was no sign.
    PC Jones stopped for a moment to watch the girls playing hockey, checking that the pavements for three hundred yards to either side of him were deserted. Mind you, perverts were as likely to be watching the boys playing football these days, he reflected, from the wisdom and experience of his twenty-two years. No accounting for tastes, there wasn’t. Now that full-chested girl who had just burst through and scored a goal, she’d be a right cracker in two or three years, mind…
    PC Jones thought suddenly of his mother and the Bethesda Chapel Sunday School, and drove hastily away.
    He returned just before the bell ended afternoon school at four o’clock. There were many cars now in the street that had been deserted; he parked the police car as unobtrusively as he could at the end of the line, then strolled down to the ragged crowd of mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers who stood outside the school gates on that pleasantly warm autumn afternoon. It was impossible not to be noticed in uniform, of course. Bryn Jones, who had dreams of a transfer to CID in due course, imagined himself blending discreetly with this polyglot assembly of humanity, picking up vital information about serious crime as he