Common Murder

“Can you get a message to him, please? Will you tell him that Lindsay Gordon rang and needs to talk to him urgently? I’m just setting off to drive to Fordham now, and I’ll be at the police station in about an hour and a half; say five o’clock. If he’s not back by then, I’ll hang on. Got that?”

The woman on the switchboard seemed slightly bemused by Lindsay’s bulldozer tactics, but she dutifully repeated the message and promised it would be passed on over the radio. Taking the original cassette tape out of the machine and stuffing it in her pocket, Lindsay left the house, completely forgetting the flashing answering machine and her promise to Cordelia.

She walked round to the mews garage where she kept the car and was soon weaving through the traffic, seeing every gap in the cars ahead as a potential opportunity for queue jumping. Excited as she was by the new shape her thoughts had taken, she forced herself not to think about murder and its motives while she negotiated the busy roads leading to the M4.

She arrived at Fordham police station ten minutes ahead of schedule. The elderly constable on reception desk duty told her Rigano was due back within the next half hour and that he was expecting her. She was taken through to a small anteroom near his office and a matronly policewoman brought her a cup of tea, freshly brewed but strong. Lindsay found it hard to sit still and chain-smoked through the twenty minutes she was kept waiting. She looked at one cigarette ruefully as she blew smoke at the ceiling. No matter how hard she tried to give up or cut down, at the first crisis she leapt for the nicotine with the desperate fixation of the alcoholic for the bottle.

Rigano himself came to escort her to his room. More cheerful now, there was no sign that he resented her demand to see him. But he seemed determined to keep a distance between them. In his office, there was no sign of his sergeant or any of the other officers to take notes of the interview. Lindsay was disconcerted by that, but nevertheless relieved. What she had to say didn’t need a big audience. And if some hard things were going to be said on both sides, it was probably just as well that they should go unrecorded.

“Well,” he said, indicating a chair to her as he walked round his desk to sit down. “You seem in a big rush to talk to me now, when you could barely spare me a sentence earlier on. What’s caused the big thaw? Surely not my overwhelming charm.”

“Partly it’s fear,” she replied. “I said to you earlier that I’d be a fool if I knew who had killed Crabtree and tried to kill Deborah and persisted in keeping my mouth shut. Well, I think that now I know, and I’m ready to talk.”

If she expected him to show signs of amazement or shock, she was disappointed. His eyebrows twitched slightly and he simply said, “That’s assuming the two incidents are directly related.”

Lindsay was puzzled. “But of course they are. You can’t seriously expect anyone to believe that there are two homicidal maniacs ru

“The attack on Deborah Patterson could have been a random attack on one of the peace women by someone who’s got a grudge against the camp,” he argued mildly.

Lindsay shook her head. “No way. If anyone was going to do that, they’d pick a spot much nearer the road, where they could make a quick getaway. The woods are really dense around where Debs was attacked. That was someone watching and waiting and biding his time, someone who knows enough about the way things work round here to know where to keep his eyes open.”

Rigano smiled. He almost seemed to be enjoying their sparring. “All right,” he conceded. “I’ll grant you the assumption for now that the incidents were co

“Do you want the hypothesis or the evidence?”

“I’ll have the evidence, then you can give me the theory.”

“Item one. A cassette tape. It was among Rupert Crabtree’s papers in the RABD files. It’s not what it says on the label-it’s a recording of signals traffic on computer that would be of interest both to this country’s allies and our enemies.” She put the tape on his desk. He picked it up, studied it, and put it down again. He nodded encouragingly.

“Item two. Debs thinks she’s being haunted by the ghost of Rupert Crabtree. She thinks she saw him walking the dog after he was dead, and she’s convinced it was Crabtree who attacked her.

“Item three. There is someone around, the guy you called Mr. Stone, who is taking an interest in what’s going on. He’s not CID. You tell me he’s not SB. That means, given the contents of this tape, that he’s MI5 or 6. I imagine from what little I know about intelligence that he’s MI6 K Branch. They’re the ones who keep track of Soviet and satellite state agents, aren’t they?”

A trace of the lighter side of his personality flickered across Rigano’s face as he smiled and said, “You seem to know what you’re talking about.”

Lindsay immediately bristled. She was determined not to grant him any rights where she was concerned. “Please don’t patronize me. I’m not a little woman who needs patting on the head because she can play the big boys’ game.”

The shutters came down over his eyes again. “That wasn’t my intention,” he replied coolly. “Is that the extent of your evidence?”

“There’s one more thing. But it’s conjecture rather than hard fact. What if Rupert Crabtree’s gun was being carried not for defense but for attack?”

For the first time, Rigano looked truly alert, as if she was telling him something he did not know, or something he did not want her to know. “Why should he?” he demanded.

“If I can explain my idea about what really happened, you’ll see why he should,” Lindsay replied. “Are you prepared to hear me out?”

He glanced at his watch. It was almost half past five. “I’ve got half an hour,” he said. “Will it take longer that that?”

Lindsay shook her head. “It’s not a long story. It’s not a very edifying one either. Treachery and greed, that’s what we’re into here, Jack.” He nodded and sat back, attentive.

“Simon Crabtree is a computer prodigy. He’s one of those people who reads a program like you or I read a page in the newspaper. And he’s a hacker. Even when he was at school, they commented on his rare skill at busting into other people’s private programs. No one had any doubt that he should be looking at a future in computers. No one, that is, except his father, who was conservative enough to be determined that his only son should be properly qualified in something. So he refused to help Simon set up his software business.

“I’ve seen inside that lock-up, and, while I don’t know too much about computers, I’d say that the equipment in there must run into several thousands of pounds, easily. Maybe even five figures. Now, he wouldn’t have got that kind of money from a bank, so where did it come from?

“It’s my belief that it came from a foreign power. Almost inevitably the Soviets or an East European Soviet satellite. That cassette you’ve got there contains a recording of signals traffic from a U.S. military base. I don’t know enough about these things to swear that it comes from Brownlow, but the chances are that it does, given that I found it among Rupert Crabtree’s papers. What I think happened was this. I think that either Simon was scouted by the Soviets, who learned about his hacking skills and his need for capital, or he approached them with the revelation that he had the key to hack into the base’s signals computer. I don’t think it’s been going on too long, if that’s any consolation, because he’s only had the business up and ru

“I’m a bit hazy about what happened to put Rupert Crabtree on to the trail. I’d guess that maybe he saw his son behaving suspiciously or saw him with someone he shouldn’t have been with. Either way, he got hold of this tape. I’m still guessing here, but I think he probably did what I did-took it to someone who knows how to crack computer codes and discovered just what I did-that it’s top-secret signals traffic. Only, for him, the discovery must have been utterly devastating. Here he is, a pillar of the community, a man in the vanguard of an anti-left-wing campaign, and his son’s spying for the Ruskies. Also, to be fair, I think from what I’ve learned about him that it wouldn’t just have been the personal disgrace that would have upset him.