by Gregson, J M
Sue Hendry was no longer a girl: in her distress, her forty years showed up as they often did not. She had expected this tall man with the experienced face and the grey-flecked hair to speak first in his own house. When he said nothing she said automatically, ‘I — I’m sorry for coming here. To your house, I mean. I shouldn’t have done that. I realize it now.’
‘Who gave you this address?’ His first reaction had been that of annoyance; already he could feel curiosity overriding it as the instincts of the crime-hunter asserted themselves.
‘You gave me your name when you came to the office. My receptionist thought she had been to a WEA history class taught by your wife; she remembered that the tutor’s husband was a senior policeman and the village where she lived. I took a chance and rang. A bit of detective work, you might say.’ She tried to twist his tail with a laugh at his expense, but it turned without warning into a breathless little sob.
It must have been over ten years since that class: Christine had left an impression, as usual. He fought down the pride in her that he knew was irrelevant to this. ‘But she didn’t invite you here.’ He knew his wife never did that.
‘No. She confirmed that this was your home, that’s all. And when I came, she didn’t turn me away but put me in here and offered me a cup of tea. I’m grateful to her for that.’
He said stiffly, ‘And why did you think it necessary to come here, Miss Hendry? You could have gone to the station at Oldford, or I would have come to see you again at your office or your home.’ It was the last piece of a ritual protest, a concession to the part of him that said his home was sacrosanct. He would delay their business no longer.
‘I was frightened. Someone killed Laura. At first that was all I could think of; my grief stopped me from thinking it through. Now I think that they might kill me.’ She delivered the melodramatic phrases as though they were a grocery list, as though the perfect logic of her argument must be obvious to anyone who heard it.
Lambert thought it unlikely that she was in danger, but he did not dismiss the idea out of hand. Fear was the most potent weapon he had to prise information from people. An ordinary member of the public would immediately have tried to reassure a distressed woman; he sought to use her apprehension as a tool. ‘Do you think the person who killed Mrs Pritchard hates you?’
She shook her head, puzzled that he should even suggest it. ‘No. Why should he?’
Lambert could think of a reason, but he did not suggest it. ‘And do you think he — you seem to be assuming that our killer is a man — has anything material to gain from your death?’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘Then you can only be in danger if he sees you as a threat to him. If you have some special piece of knowledge about him. Something you have so far not revealed to us.’
If she noticed the rebuke in that, it did not register in her features. She was watching him with her head a little on one side, like a trusting schoolgirl; she reminded him in that moment of his own daughters when they were no more than eight or nine. She took in a long breath, its evenness disturbed by the emotion that was still lurking where she thought she had got it under control. ‘There are — things which might be significant. Things I’ve only thought about since I saw you. I was still coming to terms with the fact that Laura had been murdered then. It’s — it’s been a great shock to me, you see.’
Now, when she least wanted it, the tears began to flow again. She pulled a handkerchief from the black bag at her side and bludgeoned her face with it, angry that this weakness should assert itself when she was so anxious to be calm and lucid. Lambert walked across to the corner cupboard and took out a whisky bottle and a glass. He poured her a stiff measure and she shook her head, then reached for it tentatively as he urged it wordlessly upon her. She gulped at it in a way which proved that she was no spirit drinker; coughed; pulled a medicinal face; felt the comfort of the warm fire as it ran through her throat.
Lambert said nothing, knowing that she wanted to speak, was striving only for control. Eventually she said, ‘I broke down when you saw me in the office, as well. You must think I do nothing but cry. That I’m a stupid, emotional little woman.’
He said, ‘Certainly not stupid. And we all have our emotions. For what it’s worth, I’ve seen men cry, much more often than you would think. Tears are nothing to be ashamed of.’
She looked up at him to see if he was patronizing her, then nodded twice. ‘I told you Laura and I were lovers, that we had been so for almost two years. You were well enough trained not to look astonished, for which I thank you. Well, there was a little more to it than that. We were supposed to be going away together for a few days during the time while Jim Pritchard was away in Spain.’
Lambert nodded, remembering the notes for the cleaner, the cancelling of the milk. This seemed to establish not only that those directions from the dead woman were genuine, but the nature of the trip she had proposed during that week. ‘What day were you going away together?’
‘Tuesday. We needed to spend Monday in the office to make sure everything was set up smoothly for the week. We’d been away together before when the opportunity arose.’
‘How many times?’
She looked momentarily annoyed at this prying into her affairs; then she accepted that it was not mere prurience. ‘Four or five. All of them in the last year. There was a difference this time. When Jim Pritchard came home, Laura was going to tell him that she was leaving.’
‘Did he know about your affair?’
‘It was more than an affair, Superintendent.’ She was defending all she had left of what had meant so much to her. ‘He knew about our relationship, yes. Laura was too honest to conceal such things for very long. It — it took her a while to come to terms with her own sexuality. I was the first and the only woman that she loved, you see.’
Her pride in that was pathetic, much more touching than it would have been had the sentiment come from a teenager. Nothing makes us so vulnerable as love, he thought.
‘Who else in the family knew of the — relationship?’
This time it was he who had hesitated for a word, and she acknowledged the fact with a bleak little smile. ‘No one else, as far as I know. I don’t know whether Jim Pritchard kept the knowledge to himself, of course — Laura said he was so outraged that he would be too ashamed to tell anyone, but I don’t know that he didn’t. And I don’t know whether any of them found out after I’d last seen Laura on that Friday, do I?’
‘Do you think she was in contact with her children in the days before her death?’ He wondered how much she knew of the puzzling Joyce Warner and Peter Brooke.
She nodded, ‘She didn’t leave me in the office on that Friday afternoon, as I told you when you came to see me. I went back to the house with her. Jim had her Astra, because his Jaguar was being serviced, so I dropped her off. It was the last time I saw her.’ He expected that recollection to fracture her precarious composure, but she was full of the fact she wanted to give him. ‘As I was driving away, I saw Peter Brooke walking up the lane.’
‘You know him?’
‘I’ve seen him once, at a distance. I’ve also seen pictures of him. And he had his violin case in his hand.’
It was almost Brooke’s trademark, that case. Two people had identified him by it now. If he had been around The Beeches on both the Friday and then again on the Monday, as Everton Smith claimed, he had some explaining to do. Especially as he had denied being near the place for weeks.
‘What do you know about him?’
‘Only that he bitterly resented the break-up of Laura’s first marriage. She said he blamed her for his father’s physical decline and death after she left. Laura was fond of him, but she never found it easy to show her deeper feelings, even to her children. She wanted to help him, but he wouldn’t believe that. I think she was hoping he would complete his music course and look for a job with a symphony orchestra. That had always been his ambition, you see.’
‘Wa
s she expecting him on that Friday?’
‘No. I’m sure she wasn’t. She’d have mentioned it to me.’
‘Presumably he saw his mother. Do you know how long he was at The Beeches?’
‘No. I thought of ringing that night, but I was afraid of Jim answering the phone. That would have been too embarrassing. I rang again on the Saturday evening, after he had gone off abroad, but there was no reply.’
‘How many times did you ring?’
The square brow puckered; a line of concentration furrowed the space between the sandy eyebrows. She was conjecturing about the purpose of his question rather than the answer to it. ‘Twice. At seven o’clock and nine-forty.’ Only a lover would remember so precisely those attempted contacts.
‘So you concluded no doubt that she was out. Do you know of any friends that she might have been visiting? We’re trying to piece together a picture of her movements in those last days, but we haven’t had a great deal of success so far.’ He saw no need to tell her of Everton Smith’s having seen the dead woman alive and apparently normal on the Monday after this — at present their latest reported sighting.
‘No. She had friends, of course. She kept up with some of the people from the choir, for instance, although she no longer sang with them. But I think she would have told me if she had been planning to visit them on the Saturday. We didn’t have secrets from each other, you see.’
She spoke again with the shy pride of passion; Lambert had seen such views shattered hundreds of times, seen the most appalling deceptions and betrayals of people who had shown similar trust. But there was no point in telling her that; nor that their inquiries had also shown that none of her friends among the choir had been in contact with Laura Pritchard in the last month of her life. He said, ‘Did you make any attempt to contact her on the Sunday?’
‘Yes. I rang again on the Sunday morning. When there was no reply, I drove round to The Beeches — I was getting anxious by this time, you see.’
‘And did you find her?’
‘No. The place was locked and barred.’ Exactly the same phrase that Mark Warner had used, he recalled. She looked desperately miserable. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot since. Perhaps Laura was lying dead inside.’ A small tear dropped suddenly on to the back of her hand: she looked at it sadly, as though it had come too late to join its fellows. There was no sob this time.
Lambert found her infinitely moving. With no sexual complication between them to weaken his judgement, none of his automatic caution against a pretty face, he felt a huge pity for her suffering, her isolation, her determination that the killer of her lover should be brought to justice, whatever the cost to her privacy. He almost told her that Smith had seen Laura Pritchard alive and cheerful on the Monday. Then he reminded himself sternly that this resolute red-haired creature might after all be a murderer. There was no call to give her information which might be useful.
Instead he said, ‘I think it most unlikely that she was in the house at that time. It is overwhelmingly probable that her killer took the body to the river immediately after she died.’ He did not tell her that Laura Pritchard had almost certainly died at her own house; nor did he torment her with the details of rigor mortis and the difficulties of transferring a corpse which had stiffened.
She did not find much consolation in his statement, but he had not expected her to. She looked him full in the face for a moment, her green eyes glistening with tears in their puffed-up sockets; then she said, ‘Do you think she was dead by then?’
‘If she was, someone is lying. Did you try all the doors?’
‘Yes. I walked right round the house. I peered in at the downstairs windows. I told you: I was worried about Laura by then.’
‘Did you see any sort of note left around?’
‘Note?’ She looked as blank as if he had made some deeply mysterious suggestion.
‘Yes. You said she was planning to go away with you. We know that she cancelled the milk and told her cleaning lady that she would be away. I wondered if the notes which she wrote were visible to you on the Sunday. Under a stone, perhaps, near the front or the back door?’
She thought for a moment. ‘No. There was nothing there. I’m sure I’d have seen it, because I was anxious for any sign of her by then. But we weren’t going until the Tuesday, so she wouldn’t have put a note out so early, would she?’
‘Probably not.’ He hoped she would not work out the possibility that her lover might have changed her mind and gone away earlier to avoid her; even if she regarded that as impossible, it was something the police had to take into account. If she was speaking the truth now, it meant that Laura Pritchard had probably been alive after that Sunday, as Everton Smith had told them. He looked at her face, tear-stained and emotionally exhausted, but still earnest with information. She had something more to tell him yet.
He said, ‘What did you do after you had walked round the house?’
‘I sat for ten minutes in my car on the drive, wondering where she could be, hoping against hope that she would come back while I was there. Then I drove away. As I went through the village, I saw Laura’s son-in-law. He passed me in his car.’
‘Mark Warner. Was there anyone with him?’
‘I didn’t see anyone. But he was almost past me before I realized it was him. I haven’t seen him for years, except in photographs Laura had of her grandchildren. But he used our agency to get temporary staff, when his business was doing better.’
Lambert nodded. It was possible, even probable, that she could have missed a toddler in the back of the car. That was almost Warner’s guarantee of good intent, though it was still possible that he had used his son to cover some more malicious purpose. ‘What did you do then?’
‘I parked by the village church: there were several other vehicles there. I knew that Laura didn’t like her son-in-law, and by this time I was very worried about her. I was there about half an hour — perhaps a little less than that, if anything. Then Mark Warner came back.’
‘Did he see you?’
‘No. I doubt whether he’d have recognized me, anyway, but I was parked on the other side of the green. He drove straight along the road and out of the village.’
‘Still alone?’
‘Yes. As far as I’m aware. I wasn’t looking for anyone else.’
‘Did you follow him?’
‘No. There was no reason why I should.’
‘Of course not.’ But the road he had taken could have led to the river, as well as towards his home. It was not impossible that he had picked up the body from the house, despite the reassurance Lambert had tried to give to Sue Hendry. But it would have meant that Everton Smith as well as Warner would have to be lying; they seemed an unlikely partnership. He said, ‘You didn’t see anything more of Peter Brooke on that Sunday?’
‘No. I must admit he was in my mind, after I’d seen him on the Friday. But I didn’t find any trace of him, either around the house or in the village. I went into the pub on the green. It was full of locals and I listened to the gossip, but I didn’t hear anything which seemed significant.’
He said, ‘You might make a good detective with a little training,’ and the square open face lit up for a moment with a grin which showed the lively woman she must be in more normal circumstances.
She refused the offer of police protection, saying she felt safer for having talked to him. He saw her off the premises, but she insisted on calling her thanks through to the discreetly absent Christine. She paused for a moment after she had buckled on her car safety belt, looking up at him; then she said with fierce intensity, ‘You must get the one who killed Laura, John Lambert. And keep him away from me, when you do!’ Then she drove away without another look at him or the house.
He stood looking after the car in the near-darkness. The evening was so still that he could hear its high-revving engine for almost a mile. Then he went back into the house, reflecting on what his visitor had said, determined to be objective in his assessments.
He reminded himself again that it was Sue Hendry who had first reported the disappearance of Laura Pritchard.
But that was not until later in the week, when the body had been in the Severn for some time and the trail was already cold.
Chapter Sixteen
Joe Brooking was that rare animal, a farmer satisfied with the weather. Perhaps he should have been stuffed and mounted and set in some museum of agricultural curiosities.
After a wet April, the long days of sun were just what was needed for the eight-acre meadow and the pasture fields which sloped gently down to the river. If such days continued for another week, he would be looking anxiously at the skies and shaking his head with his fellows, but for the moment he acknowledged that the elements were behaving with unusual complicity.
Now there was a lull in the hectic progress of his year. Townsmen did not think of late spring as a slack time for farmers, because they thought in terms of gardens, not farming: he permitted himself a superior smile at the thought of such urban naivety. After the year’s hectic early months of lambing, these weeks felt like a holiday to Joe. The sheep and the cattle were out to pasture, and the pasture this year was good; the weeks in late autumn when the Severn had climbed its banks and turned six acres of his fields into a shallow lake seemed but a distant memory as the offending river flowed placidly within its emerald confines.
Soon there would be sheep to shear, and a little while later the hay to cut, but for the moment there was a lull in the pace, on this particular farm, at least. It was a good time for mending fences; good fences were supposed to make good neighbours, according to one of the poets of Joe Brooking’s youth. He was on his way to inspect the northern boundaries of his property, the point furthest away from the long low house of Cotswold stone which was the centre of his green little corner of industry. But he had time to pause for a moment to lean on the gate between two of his fields: when he was unobserved, Joe still liked to indulge the joy of possession: he had worked for twenty years to get his own farm.
