Free Death on the Eleventh Hole by J. M. Gregson Page B

not.’
    ‘Kate Wharton had a boyfriend,’ said Chris Rushton suddenly.
    Lambert raised his eyebrows. ‘And who told us that?’
    His DI almost blushed as he explained how he had convinced Father Gillespie that the police must have whatever information they could get from his guests. ‘It was the prostitute who told me Kate had been on the game. It was a lad who was washing the dishes, a drug-user, who told me about the boyfriend. Joe Ashton, he calls himself. According to the lad who told me, he lives in a squat in Sebastopol Terrace in Gloucester.’
    ‘Did you check that out?’
    ‘I tried to. I went round to the house, but there was no one there at all. But it is in use as a squat.’
    ‘Perhaps I should leave you in charge more often, Chris. You seem to have brought information tumbling in. Anything else?’
    Chris Rushton tried to look modest. ‘There is, actually. But it’s not necessarily going to be helpful. Not in making an arrest, I mean.’
    Lambert thought he had an inkling of what was coming. ‘Let’s have it, Chris.’
    ‘When I got back from Gloucester, a pal of mine from years back came in here. He’s a sergeant in the Drugs Squad now.’
    ‘And he said Kate Wharton was a user.’
    ‘A user and a dealer. And he said she had a row with her supplier. He doesn’t know what it was about, but thought it looked serious.’
    ‘When was this?’
    ‘On the night of Monday the 30th April. In a pub near the docks in Gloucester. Six days before she was killed.’
    ‘Who’s the supplier?’
    ‘Bloke called Malcolm Flynn. But there’s the usual Drugs Squad proviso. We mustn’t approach Flynn without prior consultation.’
    Lambert smiled grimly. ‘We can’t jeopardize your mate’s cover. We mustn’t even risk doing that. But somehow someone’s going to have to follow this up, unless we find that this death definitely isn’t drug-related. But leave that with me: it’s my problem.’
    Rushton tried not to look too relieved. ‘If some drug baron thinks that Kate Wharton threatened the security of his organization, it won’t be much use talking to Malcolm Flynn. He might not even know who killed her, if they brought in a contract killer.’
    ‘But we shall almost certainly need to speak to Flynn, to establish whether that’s what happened. If he passed a report upstairs about her, that could have set the process in motion.’ John Lambert pursed his lips. ‘The time interval between Monday and Sunday is about right, for them to bring in a contract killer and him to size up her situation and his opportunity.’
    They were silent for a moment, each of them hoping this was not the method by which Kate Wharton had died, knowing that the possibility of an arrest was slim, if this was one of the anonymous deaths perpetrated by the black industry of illegal narcotics.
    They were beginning the process of finding out about the life the dead girl had led, the life she could never tell them about herself. In twenty-four hours, they would know a lot more about Kate Wharton, but she was already emerging as an isolated, vulnerable figure.
    ***
    Joe Ashton put his head under the cold tap in the old wash-house at the back of the building. It was the only water they had in the squat. When the house itself had been cut off, the water-board engineers had overlooked this long-disused supply, with a pipe coming in directly from the mains. Probably it was too ancient to appear on any of their charts.
    His mouth felt like sandpaper and his head throbbed. He shouldn’t have tooted that heroin last night, not when he had kicked the stuff into touch for good. But already he could feel the craving again in his brain, sense the throbbing insistence of his veins for more of the same. He knew the score, knew what lay ahead of him if he went after the horse again. You didn’t go through the humiliations of the cure without reaching rock-bottom, without learning how terrifyingly easy it was to slip back to that