by Gregson, J M
Moreover, there would be ample profit, without the tiresome exertions sometimes compelled upon funeral directors by the indecisions of less reliable mourners. There would be only one official car behind the hearse, but that was quite usual in these days of universal motoring. And Mr Pritchard had chosen the most expensive casket and fittings, without even pausing to compare prices. There would not be many visitors to the Chapel of Rest at the funeral parlour: when the body was eventually released by the police, it was not to be available for viewing. The funeral director was privately much relieved; it was what he would have advised, had his advice been sought. It would have challenged even his skilled embalmers to have made that shattered corpse fit for a dignified inspection by those who came to grieve. Much better to screw down the casket lid and leave any visitors who came to meditate among the lilies and the soft electronic music.
The undertaker recorded these arrangements in the hard-backed black book he brought with him on these occasions. Write everything down immediately: that was the first precept he impressed upon his staff. People who were upset often forgot what they had ordered, especially when the time came to present the bills. It was as well to have your own complete record of everything they had agreed with the benefit of expert advice.
He did not think there would be problems of that kind here — James Pritchard was so very definite. Shutting his book and returning his fountain pen to the inside pocket of his dark suit, the funeral director did not venture to wonder how deep was the grief of this man for his wife. That would have been quite unprofessional.
*
The presence of the funeral director meant that Lambert and Hook had to wait for a few minutes to see Jim Pritchard. They could hear Pritchard’s clipped, almost military tones and the undertaker’s deferential, reverent replies, without distinguishing a word of either through the thick oak door of the sitting-room.
Lambert, not caring to be thought an eavesdropper, eventually strode out on to the drive and began to inspect the outside of the house. They had made an appointment to see Pritchard at this time; it was irritating to find him otherwise engaged when they arrived, even if funeral arrangements were a regrettable necessity. The unworthy thought that Pritchard might be deliberately playing the situation for sympathy slipped into his mind. If he was, it wouldn’t work.
On a day like this, The Beeches emphasized the qualities for which British gardens are famous. The sun blazed from a cloudless sky; the huge ‘Pink Pearl’ rhododendron near the gate was a twenty-foot high mound of exotic flowers; the lawns curved away in emerald swathes among the weedless beds. Everton Smith might have aroused the ire of the formidable lady of this house on one occasion, but no one could fault his diligence or his work rate, if one was to judge by the present state of the gardens. Unless, of course, this was the work of the dead woman herself, who was known to be an enthusiast for her garden.
As if he picked up the thought, Hook said, ‘Laura Pritchard couldn’t have given this lawn its latest mowing, nor cut that hedge. She’s been dead for a fortnight now.’
They were silent for a moment, considering how nature, even organized, disciplined nature like this, emphasized the transience of man and his efforts. Blackbirds and thrushes sang their delight in the pleasant warmth, the water lilies were out on the pond beside them, the tops of the firs at the end of the garden were absolutely motionless in the gathering heat. This seemed more than ever a strange place for violent death to originate.
Then death’s representative emerged in his dark suit through the wide front doorway of the house, as if to emphasize that the lady who had once ruled this dominion so forcefully would appear here no more. The funeral director regarded them for a moment with the mournful curiosity of a Dickensian mute, then climbed into his car and crunched away cautiously over the gravel. He used a speed in keeping with his calling while he remained within the boundaries of this house of bereavement; then they heard him accelerate away on the more anonymous roads beyond the gate.
When the policemen turned back to the house, they found the man who had brought them here regarding them steadily from the open doorway. James Pritchard seemed perfectly at ease.
When they had given him the news of his wife’s death at the airport, they had interviewed him in a small, windowless room, studying his reactions at close quarters, as if he were a specimen under a microscope. On his own ground, he seemed determined to prove that it was he who was in control of the situation. ‘Do come inside, gentlemen,’ he called. ‘We can talk in my study.’ Bert Hook felt as though he were about to be interviewed for a job.
Lambert always expected studies to be lined with books. He found that increasingly they were not. This one had the seemingly obligatory computer and printer dominating the leather-topped desk. There was an angled metal study lamp between the printer and the monitor screen. The books were confined to a single two-foot shelf on the wall beside the desk; there was a concise Oxford dictionary, a thesaurus, three more reference volumes and a cluster of technical journals. The room, with its polished panelling extending to half the height of the high walls, had been designed for an earlier age, when carriages trundled over the gravel outside its window to the stable which was now a garage.
There were expensive hi-fi speakers on either side of the window, with the radio and CD player stacked in the hearth where no fire had burned in many years. Lambert wondered if this was one of those rooms where a man played at being busy, rather than did much actual work. But the chairs they were invited to sit in were comfortable enough, and the room, being on the north side of the house, was cool, despite the sun outside.
Pritchard waited until they had taken the armchairs he offered before pulling out his desk chair to face them. As he sat down, he said, ‘May I ask if you have made much progress in finding my wife’s murderer?’
It was as unemotional as a man inquiring about the sale of a house. Lambert said, ‘We’ve narrowed the field of the investigation.’
Pritchard’s eyes tightened very slightly; his faint smile beneath the two inches of black moustache did not diminish. ‘I take that to mean that you are not yet near an arrest. Does it also mean that you’ve discarded the idea that this was a random killing by someone who had no previous connection with Laura?’
Lambert, determinedly unruffled by this calm detachment in a bereaved spouse, smiled back. ‘I thought I was supposed to ask the questions. But I’ll be quite honest with you, Mr Pritchard. We have not yet eliminated the possibility of an unplanned murder on the lines you suggest. My own opinion is that our man or woman will come from the small circle of people who knew your wife well.’
‘Really. Someone in her employ, or someone who had enjoyed her confidence for years, perhaps.’
‘Or a relative.’
Pritchard’s knuckles tightened on the arms of his leather swivel chair, then visibly relaxed again, as if accepting his brain’s message that they must do so. ‘That is possible, I suppose. I hope that you are wrong.’ It was an oblique, perhaps unconscious, way of telling them that he did not regard himself as one of their possibilities among relatives.
Lambert thought it was time to disturb this irritating calm. ‘You told us that your wife was an active member of the Cathedral Choir, Mr Pritchard. I think you thought that she was attending their meetings at least once and sometimes more than once in each week.’
‘Yes. Have you investigated her contacts there?’
‘We have indeed. Would it surprise you to know that she has not been to a choir meeting for well over a year?’
Pritchard certainly looked surprised. He said stupidly, ‘Are — are you sure of that?’ in a wholly convincing manner.
Lambert ignored the question. ‘Now that you know that, have you any idea where she could have been on those occasions?’ He knew himself that she had been with the brisk and capable Sue Hendry, but he wanted to know if Jim Pritchard also suspected that that was where his wife had been.
A darkening of what might have
been anger passed across the man’s round, bronzed face; it was so fleeting that it was impossible to be certain what emotion had prompted it. His voice was suddenly harsh as he said, ‘Are you suggesting that Laura was seeing another man?’
‘I’m asking if you can think of any reason why she should have chosen to deceive you in this way.’
‘You mean another man, though. That’s the most usual reason for women lying to their husbands, isn’t it? You lot must see plenty of that!’ He gave them a smile which was at once bitter and aggressive, as if they were in some way responsible for the frailties of humanity which they turned up during an investigation. It was a reaction they met often enough.
‘It’s a common reason, certainly — the most common one, as you suggest. But there are others.’ Lambert wondered whether to suggest to this conventional man in his comfortable bourgeois house that the source of his wife’s secret passion might be a woman. ‘Forgive me for asking my next question, but I hope you will see that it is inevitable. Has your own marriage been a happy one in the last year or so?’
‘Happy enough, yes. I told you that when you met me at the airport.’ Pritchard’s features set into a sullen mask and he looked at the carpet, not at his questioner.
‘That is not a very informative phrase. Was the marriage happy enough for you to feel now that your wife was not looking for some kind of relationship outside it?’
For a moment as Pritchard looked up, they saw the man he had sought to hide from them. His lips flared suddenly like a dog’s when it snarls, his teeth flashed white against the blackness of the moustache above them. ‘You mean was it good in bed, don’t you? Why not come straight out with it? Well, it was all right. I told you that before. Sex wasn’t as good or as frequent as it had been at first, but that’s marriage, isn’t it? Neither of us was a teenager; I suppose we expected it to cool a bit as the years went on.’
Lambert reflected that he was talking like a long-married man, when this marriage had lasted scarcely four years. He wanted to learn everything he could about this man’s sex life, not from any prurient interest, but because it might have a bearing on the way his wife’s death had come about. But he could not probe it in any more detail, not at this stage. He said, ‘I’m sure you want us to arrest your wife’s murderer as quickly as possible. You must see that it is vital that we know who, if anyone, she was meeting on those occasions when she chose to deceive you about her whereabouts.’
Pritchard paused, giving every appearance of according a painful matter his full consideration. Then he said, ‘No, I’m sorry. If she was meeting someone, I don’t know who it was.’
In the quiet, high room Pritchard’s uneven breathing was the only discernible sound. It was Hook who looked up from his notebook to say, ‘What do you know about the people who worked for your wife?’
Again there was a sharp flicker of emotion across Pritchard’s bronzed face. It did not look like fear. It might have been shock, but this was surely a question the man should have expected. Perhaps he was surprised by the sudden switch of questioner rather than by this new subject — he had almost forgotten Hook’s presence. He said slowly, ‘I know very little. I have only been to her office once, or perhaps twice. Secretarial services are something I hire, as I need them in my own business, but otherwise know very little about. Laura knew what she needed in her staff at Worcester — I didn’t see it as my function to intervene.’
Lambert looked hard for a double meaning in these last sentiments. He sought to catch a trace of irony in the words, but he could detect none. He said, ‘But you would know Mrs Pritchard’s manager, Sue Hendry?’
‘I wouldn’t say know her. I think I was introduced to her when I visited the place.’ For the first time, there was just a hint of disgust; it came in the way he delivered that phrase ‘the place’. Lambert reflected that Jim Pritchard must almost certainly recollect the brisk Miss Hendry more vividly than he pretended to. With her red hair and green eyes, her sturdy figure and her slightly aggressive air, she was no neutral, quickly forgotten figure.
‘But your wife seems to have had a close working and social relationship with Miss Hendry.’ It was as far as he was prepared to push it at the moment, though he despised his carefully chosen words even as he delivered them.
‘I suppose you would expect that in a small firm. But we didn’t discuss our work much at home. There was an unspoken agreement between us that we didn’t bring our problems into the house.’ Perhaps the man knew no more than he was showing; perhaps on the other hand he knew very much more. Everything he said seemed to be designed to keep them at arm’s length, to protect his own feelings from their intrusions. He was like an expert fencer, watching the ground beneath his feet, measuring his defence, assessing his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses.
And it was indeed possible he knew nothing of the relationship or the woman involved. Sue Hendry had certainly not suggested that she knew much of the third side of the unusual eternal triangle in which she had become involved. Lambert said, ‘We need your help. You must know your wife’s movements, the places she visited often, better than we do. Have you any idea where she might have been killed?’
Pritchard looked a little surprised, perhaps a little relieved, as if he thought this was safer ground. ‘No. I’ve thought about that, but I can’t suggest anywhere. Is it important?’
‘Oh, yes. When an attack on someone takes place, there is almost invariably what police jargon calls “an exchange” between the attacker and the victim and the surrounding terrain. Something significant will be left behind for our forensic people. It can be hair, skin, clothing, blood, or even just indents in the earth.’ Usually, he would have withheld such detail from a bereaved spouse. This time there seemed no need to protect this man who seemed so little affected by his wife’s death from the facts of a murder investigation.
‘Yes, I see that. But there isn’t anywhere I can suggest as a possible place for murder. You obviously didn’t find anything significant near Laura’s body?’
‘There was nothing near the part of the river where she was found, no. But the corpse had been in the water for some days, and had almost certainly drifted down the river in that time. In any case, we know that your wife was dead long before she went into the water. She was taken there after she had been killed. That is why, as you will be aware, we have been examining the vehicles of anyone who we know was connected with your late wife. Including your own Jaguar and your wife’s car.’
Pritchard was thoroughly composed again now. Lambert was searching for any signs of distress or alarm in the dark brown eyes as he delivered these facts, but he saw none. Pritchard said with a sardonic smile, ‘I could hardly not be aware. My Jaguar was the first car you cleared.’ That showed his confidence: no one as yet had informed him officially that the Jaguar was in fact clean, but in fact nothing incriminating had been found within it.
Lambert said abruptly, ‘What can you tell us about your wife’s first husband, Mr Pritchard?’
It was another sudden switch, and this time his man did look disconcerted. ‘Very little. Laura’s marriage was effectively at an end before I arrived on the scene.’ It was a familiar disclaimer, which might or might not be true; even at the end of this turbulent century, few people liked to admit to being agents in the disruption of a marriage. Second spouses always preferred to see themselves as picking up the pieces rather than smashing the fragile human porcelain. ‘Brooke died a year after Laura left him. We didn’t marry until two years after that.’ He folded his arms with the air of a man who had disposed of a topic of conversation.
‘Yet your late wife’s son seems to have resented her conduct.’
Pritchard shrugged. ‘Peter is an odd chap, by all accounts. I hardly know him: I refused to get involved in any arguments between him and Laura. As a stepfather, you can’t win.’
That at any rate was almost certainly true. Lambert decided to reveal a little of their findings, in the hope of a reaction. ‘Peter Bro
oke was still very bitter against his mother at the time of her death. He has admitted as much to one of my officers.’
‘He was very attached to his father, I believe: always closer to him than to his mother, according to Laura. David Brooke died of cancer six years ago. I think Peter still held Laura responsible for that death, just as he blamed her for everything that went wrong for his father. Over the last year or two, he’s been living as a real drop-out in London. We didn’t even know his address for most of the time — not that that bothered me.’
Pritchard, who must have known that Peter Brooke was an obvious murder suspect, had made no real attempt to suggest his guilt, though Lambert had offered him the possibility as something of a trap. He said, ‘When was the last time that Peter Brooke was with his mother? Do you know?’
Pritchard pursed his lips; his air that of a man trying to be as helpful as he could. ‘I think he came to see her in the week before I went on my golfing holiday. I don’t know what about.’
If that was correct, it could be very significant. Both Brooke and his sister had told them that his last meeting with his mother had been weeks earlier. Lambert, as studiously unconcerned as Pritchard appeared to be, said, ‘Could you recall exactly which day that was, for Sergeant Hook’s record?’
Pritchard furrowed the brow which seemed loftier beneath his receding hair. The sun had burnt the tender area around his hairline on his Spanish holiday, and the skin was peeling a little; he raised a hand and rubbed it, as though this was an aid to thought. ‘No, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t be precise about the day. Thursday or Friday before I left on the Saturday, I think. Perhaps Lau — perhaps his sister, Joyce, could tell you. I wasn’t around when he came here.’ He looked suddenly more animated. ‘That puts it only a few days before the murder, doesn’t it? I can see why you would find it interesting, but I’m afraid I can’t pinpoint the actual time for you.’
