Who Saw Him Die? (Inspector Peach Series Book 1)

by Gregson, J. M.

Tom gripped the arms of his old armchair, allowing himself to be filled with gratitude for his grandchildren. In this harsh, increasingly frenetic world, one had to remind oneself of such things. Perhaps tomorrow he would pop into church to express his thanks more formally.

  He liked to think of himself as a self-made man, but he had been a day boy at a Jesuit grammar school half a century and more ago. He had been a devout Catholic then, even toyed like most adolescents with the idea of the priesthood. The Jesuits take a strong hold upon the minds of the young, so that it had taken fifty years of gradual cooling for him to lose that faith. Now it was dead, apart from unexpected stirrings like this.

  People had told him at the time of his wife’s death that his religion would be a consolation, and he had half-expected it would be so himself. Instead, that death had killed his old beliefs for ever. He had felt no workings of Providence, nothing but evil, in the cruel cancer which had eaten her before his eyes, until his only prayers had been for her release. After her death, there had been only a sullen hatred of the God who had cheated him, who had dominated his youth with the lies he recognised only now.

  Immersed in this rare self-assessment, he was taken by surprise when his daughter-in-law came suddenly back into the room. Ros stood stiffly by the door for a moment. She took a quick breath, then hesitated again. It was that pause which made her message seem less casual, more invested with menace, than she had intended.

  “Trevor would like a word with you after dinner, if you’ve time. I — I think he has plans for the house that he’d like to discuss with you.”

  Chapter Three

  There were seven of them for dinner. The children were always fed earlier and separately. At least they did not have to mingle with these people, thought Tom. But for how long?

  Tom’s son Trevor sat at the head of the table. At first he had insisted on taking a random place with the rest, trying to vary his position each night, but the men had always felt uneasy with the arrangement. This had resulted in a ridiculous rush for seats, in which they tried to get in first and leave him the seat at the head of the table, so that the first communal move of the evening resembled an undignified version of musical chairs.

  In the end, he had accepted that he would always sit at the end of the big walnut table; it might have been different if they had had a round table, but to import one for this purpose alone would have been stupid. He tried to compensate for his pre-eminence in placing by the excessive informality of his dress.

  Tonight as usual he wore a roll-neck sweater and jeans; it was not a style that suited his long, spare build. His neck reared itself a little too far above the dark green wool of his sweater, like that of a water-bird caught out of its element on land. His dark beard jutted forward, accentuating the length of his face like a caricaturist’s device. His wrists poked whitely from sleeves which were just too short as he reached for the vegetables. “Silly young bugger!” thought Tom Harrison to himself. Trevor was forty, but to parents, children are always young and usually foolish.

  For the only hour of the day when he fraternised with ex-convicts, Tom had made a point as usual of putting on a jacket and tie, like a major keeping up appearances before the men. Exactly what these men had been imprisoned for was a perpetual source of conjecture to Tom, for his son made a great point of their privacy. “No one but my wife and I will ever be told from my lips what you have done: regard it as a chapter in a closed book,” he told the succession of newly released offenders to whom he gave the shelter of his roof.

  Most of them were not impressed, even when they made the effort to understand him. They had heard too many pious sentiments already as the time of their release approached. And as they had to reveal the detail of their pasts to the very people from whom they would have most liked to conceal it, prospective employers, Trevor’s assurance seemed little more than evidence of his good faith.

  Fred Hogan helped Ros Harrison to serve the meal, as he usually did. He was neat, efficient and unobtrusive, a genuine help where she had expected him only to go through the motions. Yet he was the only man in the room who had a definite prison shadow upon him. Fred was fifty; in the last twenty years he had spent more time in prison than out of it, so that now when he left, even the Governor no longer thought it worthwhile to direct him towards rectitude, and he and the screws said a resigned au revoir rather than goodbye.

  “Any work yet, Fred?” said Tom Harrison, as he watched the neat hands place the casserole carefully on its mat in the centre of the table. He knew the answer; he asked only in an unsuccessful attempt to annoy Hogan.

  “Not yet, I’m afraid, Mr Harrison,” said Fred. It was an exchange they repeated word for word at least once a week. Fred did not in fact try very hard to get a job; he attended the employment centre for the necessary interviews, so that no authority figure could descend upon him to claim he had not fulfilled his obligations, but he knew that there was little prospect of regular employment, and after so long without it he was probably now unfitted for it. “Times is hard all round, with the unemployment figures still climbing,” he said. The thought appeared to give him a gloomy satisfaction.

  Tom did not know that his son was in fact officially employing Hogan “for a week or two”, stamping his card so that he might eventually qualify for unemployment benefit and the other social-service supports which might prevent him from regressing. Hogan was surprisingly useful about the house, helping as directed in the kitchen, making the impact on the large gardens that Tom had noticed earlier, co-operating with one of his fellows over the last month in painting the outside woodwork of the high old house.

  But Trevor was uneasy about the arrangement. Hogan seemed to regard it as the sort of “trusty” job he had worked for in the nick, an alternative to work rather than a springboard to long-term employment elsewhere.

  Dick Courtney was the man who had helped Hogan paint the house. He was the youngest man in the room. With his good looks and intelligence, he should never have been a criminal; it puzzled Tom Harrison, who had not succeeded in working out the kind of crime he had perpetrated. There was probably a woman at the bottom of it, he thought darkly, and conventionally.

  In fact, Courtney had driven the getaway car in an armed robbery. He had not known that guns were being carried, but no one had believed him in court. He had been only twenty at the time, but his air of worldly wisdom had gone against him in the crisis. And on legal aid, he had not had the best of briefs. For four years, amidst the real hard men of a top security prison, he had kept his head down and his nose clean. And he had learned a variety of things he proposed to use in the world outside.

  Prison had not entirely removed his air of jaunty self-confidence, but it had had its effect nonetheless. His composure was still brittle, his control not yet proof against pressure. He had had one violent outburst against Fred Hogan during their work on the exterior painting, which had made the old lag back off at speed. Fred had reported it to nobody: that would have been “grassing” by his simple code. But he treated Dick Courtney now with the experienced caution of a man who had shared cells with psychopaths and survived, calculating the time when the younger man might move on and take his threat of unpredictable violence with him.

  Tom Harrison, savouring his daughter-in-law’s casserole, knew none of this. His resentment of Courtney was scarcely more than that he would have felt for any personable young male who brought the threat of his raw energy into Tom’s house. In this case of course, he could rationalise that feeling; this man had done time, had proved himself a bad lot already. The boy should get out and get himself a job, secure his own survival, not swan around here, a parasite upon his son and the family.

  The man who now smiled at Tom across the table as he passed the salt at least had a job. Michael Ashby was the only other man in the room who wore a tie. His suit was well cut, although it was now quite worn. He went out to a clerking job each day. Tom found it difficult to understand how he had got into trouble. With his nicely turne
d speech, his ready smile, his receding hair giving a rather becoming baldness to his high-domed face, he did not seem like a criminal to Tom. As if to confirm his integrity, he said now, “Golf today, Mr Harrison? Lovely day for it.”

  “I did indeed. And it was, as you say, most enjoyable. It’s the first day when I’ve felt that spring was really here.” It came out stiffly, although this time he was making a genuine effort to be pleasant. “How was your day?”

  “Oh, much as expected. Still playing myself in, you know, but agreeable enough.” Ashby did not say that it was excruciatingly boring, that he wondered how long he was going to be able to stand it. Ashby was that increasingly common offender of the nineties, the chartered accountant gone wrong. He had formed his own company, expanded at the wrong time, been ruined in a few months by bad debts and crushing interest rates.

  Then he had committed the unpardonable sin of trading as a declared bankrupt, been lured into fraud as he floundered into deeper financial waters, and been duly punished. He had lost his wife and his child, and knew he could never again go back to the south-coast town and the people he had deceived. As the occupant of an open prison, he had found it easier than most ex-cons to get a job.

  But he did not enjoy that job — the post of clerk in a small company which had been presented to him as a boon for which he should be duly grateful. Once installed there, he was more efficient than any of the other three in the crowded office; they knew it as well as he did, and resented his presence the more as a result. The owner, his clothes reeking of stale cigarette smoke, leaned over him at the close of each day, checking his work for any hint of peculation. He wondered how much longer he would bite his lip and keep quiet: the boss scorned to disguise his distrust, seemed indeed to revel in the power he held over his new employee.

  Michael Ashby saw and heard now the same kind of caution in Tom Harrison that he felt at work, and had to stare down at the table and concentrate on his food to control himself. He had the most impeccable table manners in the room. In a moment, he was able to make small talk again.

  Tom turned to the only one of the four with whom he felt at ease. Meeting him once unexpectedly in the high old Edwardian conservatory, Tom had broken his rule and chatted to him for a while. Perhaps he had been softened by the discovery of a mutual interest in chrysanths. Tom had found himself treating the man almost as a friend.

  Harry Bradshaw was a diffident, slightly withdrawn Northerner, but Tom had elicited from him the fact that he had once been a grammar school teacher. And he knew things about golf: he had even been drawn into an analysis of Tom’s rather arthritic swing on the lawn.

  Tom now said affably, “You were right about swinging the clubhead slowly. Whenever I remembered to do it this afternoon, I hit a good shot.”

  “That’s good,” said Harry, “but I’m sure I was only reminding you of something you knew perfectly well for yourself.” It was an effort for him to respond to the old man’s comment; he had grown used to keeping his own counsel. And he was feeling very low today.

  “Perhaps it’s no wonder you can provide good tips. There was a famous golfer when I was a lad called Harry Bradshaw. Irishman: no relation, I suppose?”

  “Afraid not.” Bradshaw allowed himself a small smile at the thought.

  “He should have won the Open once. Would have done, but for the bottle.”

  Fred Hogan dipped his bread roll in the last of his gravy and said suddenly, “Ah, the drink has been the ruin of many sportsmen, Mr Harrison. Especially Irishmen.” He shook his head sadly at the thought.

  Tom Harrison was puzzled for a moment. When he understood the comment, he looked suspiciously at Hogan, who had now taken his seat at the table, but the little man was giving full attention to his food. Tom decided no joke at his expense had been intended. He said with a smile, “Not that kind of bottle. Harry Bradshaw found his ball in a beer bottle at Sandwich during the Open Championship. He could have taken it out and dropped it, but he didn’t know that.”

  “There weren’t the officials about in 1949 that there are now, or he could have got a ruling,” said Bradshaw. He had spoken before he thought, revealed more of himself than he had intended — that he played and read about golf, for instance. He had schooled himself in the company he had kept for the last five years to keep his enthusiasms to himself, to say nothing that those around him might use against him.

  Harry was scarcely forty, but he looked older now. It would have surprised Tom Harrison immensely to know that this gentle, retiring man, with his grey sweaters and slightly unruly hair, was a murderer.

  He had killed his wife in a fit of anger, but his brief had failed to secure the manslaughter verdict which everyone had expected. Harry had had to serve his time with men to whom violence was a way of life. For some of them, indeed, it was the only language they understood and dealt in. Until his last days in the prison library, silence had seemed the only safe strategy for Bradshaw. But it had marked him. The gregarious man he had once been had become the determined loner he felt he must now be for the rest of his life.

  Tom Harrison was still with that other, more innocent Harry Bradshaw, the Irishman who might have won the Open Championship. “Was it as long ago as 1949?” said Tom. “I can remember the pictures of that bottle quite clearly. I don’t think I was even playing golf then.”

  “You were too busy making money, Dad,” said Tom from the head of the table. He had intended it as a compliment, but it did not emerge like one. He went on hastily, “Building up a business, I mean. Providing employment for others. Piling up the money which bought this house. Funny to think none of us would be sitting here now without your industry then.” He piled the phrases too quickly upon each other, so that he sounded desperate to please.

  Tom thought of how happy he had been at Westhaven when his wife was alive and the children were younger. He loved the house, even now. If he were sharing it with Barbara and her family, it might still be the happy, noisy home he had always envisaged. He thrust that thought away, as he had done a thousand times before. It was both unproductive and unfair.

  Tom was not insensitive to his son’s impulses to please, even when he was irritated. He said, “There wasn’t much time for golf then, as you say. And I was young and fit; I expect I thought it rather an effete game, played by the over privileged. I think it probably was, in some places.” He was uncomfortably aware that some of the people round this table probably thought it still was. For a moment, he had attempted to communicate with the company at large. Now he wondered ill-humouredly why the opinions of people he affected to despise should worry him at all.

  Ros said as they gathered the plates together, “It’s gooseberry crumble for dessert tonight, Mr Harrison. Your favourite.”

  She spoke as she might have done to the children, ignoring the rest of the table, humouring him like an old man. “Am I reduced already to the status of a geriatric? I’m only sixty-nine, and in my own home,” Tom said to himself. Yet he knew she meant well, in her clumsy way, and he held his peace. During the rest of the meal, he did not speak more than a monosyllable.

  He was wondering what plans his son had in store for this house. And for him.

  Chapter Four

  Tom read a bedtime story to his two grandchildren. As always, they wanted more than the one chapter he had stipulated, so that Ros had to come and rescue him by insisting it was time Tim and Lisa were asleep. Left to himself, he would have read another complete chapter, and they all knew it.

  Perhaps he was merely postponing being alone. Back in his own quarters, the bleak isolation he felt returned immediately. He told himself it was ridiculous: he was in his own house, with his family around him. If he was not as close to his son as some fathers, they had few open disagreements; his daughter-in-law was kind; his grandchildren were a delight to him.

  He found himself wishing once again that his daughter Barbara was not so far away in New Zealand. Their relationship was the kind they never even had to think about, so
natural and spontaneous was their love for each other. After his wife’s death, it had grown deeper, with even less needing to be expressed in words, even more that was intuitively understood.

  He would ring her as usual tomorrow night for their weekly chat. He wished it was tonight, but he made it a discipline never to ring her before the appointed time; to have anticipated the day would have been an admission of how much their conversations meant to him, a small act of treachery to Trevor and Ros and the real world in which he had to live. Had chosen to live, he corrected himself: he must not pretend he had no control over his own destiny.

  He sat in his den and tried to read a book. It was a small, pleasant room lined with bookshelves, with a leather-topped desk, an armchair and a television set in the corner. It had been formed by dividing the huge bedroom alongside it. Ros had planned to give him an en-suite bathroom as well as this den, and the space was still there unused on the other side of the wall. His innate resistance to all change in the old house had made him refuse that, on the grounds that the bathroom along the landing was rarely used by anyone else in any case.

  The den was a successful addition, he had to admit, though he had been lukewarm about it at the time. Only the high ceilings of the new rooms destroyed the pleasing proportions of what had been created. Ros kept trying to persuade him to have a wooden grid put in to make a false ceiling at about eight feet above the floor, but he rejected what he saw as no more than expensive designer cosmetics.

  In the artificial light by which he now read, the old ceiling with its Edwardian frieze was completely invisible above the electric light, so that the dark shadows up there contributed an area of menace to what should have been a cosy room. There was almost a sense of listening ears in the darkness above, as though conversations here were not as private as they should have been.

  It was an illusion of course, but Tom wished it had not suggested itself as he waited for his son to arrive. It was almost nine o’clock when Trevor came, knocking timidly at the door of his father’s study as he had when ten years old. He came awkwardly into the room and sat on the straight chair by the desk; there was only the one armchair in the small room.