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

by Gregson, J. M.

  “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, Dad. Give Trevor’s ideas a chance. He’s not a bad lad, you know.” She chose the muted phrase he used himself as high praise, teasing him even at this most serious of moments.

  A moment later, their conversation was stilled for another week. Tom Harrison was left with the bleak feeling of isolation he felt almost always after their phone links. He thought for the thousandth time how like her mother his daughter was, how much less certain he felt without the comforting presence of either of them at his side.

  And in the privacy of her bedroom, Ros Harrison waited for the click which signalled the breaking of the line to New Zealand. Then she carefully put down the extension phone.

  Chapter Six

  Tom played golf again on the next day.

  It was Wednesday, early closing day in the area, and there were more people about than on other midweek days. But Tom and his group were well used to that. By teeing off at midday, they avoided the peak time and got the course virtually to themselves. He played with his usual group, felt again through the afternoon the easy massage of his self-esteem, the assurance from his peers that his prejudices were merely the sound common sense of experienced men. There was much more divergence of thought among these men than a listener would have thought, but they chose to keep to safe topics: they had not come here to argue.

  It was still not half past four when he got back to Westhaven. The morning had been cloudy, and there had been a heavy shower at eleven. Now the sun was warm, as if determined to make up for its tardy arrival, and the house was basking in the early stages of a perfect spring evening.

  He parked the Rover carefully in his section of the big high garage which Trevor wanted to convert, and sat for a moment in the comfortable leather driving seat. He decided to walk around the area of garden his son wanted to take into the new development. He would try to keep the open mind which Barbara had advised.

  It was a good time to be walking round any garden. Spring was everywhere: in the low mounds of colour which were Japanese azaleas; in the bright range of polyanthus blooms, almost startling in the light shade of the tall old house; in the first bursting buds of wallflowers in the long border by the gravel path.

  At the other end of this border, Fred Hogan was hoeing industriously between the wallflower plants, stooping occasionally to pick out the weeds which were too close to the stems for him to remove safely with the hoe. Tom decided that the gesture he was making in walking this ground need not extend to fraternising with the man who was for him the least attractive of Trevor’s present flock of lame ducks. He turned sharply to his right and went into the conservatory. Neither of the men had acknowledged the other’s presence, though each was aware he was no longer alone.

  The conservatory was in the style now being revived as “Victorian”, though it had actually been built with the house, three years after the old queen’s death. Tom had spent many hours in here with his gardener in the years after he had bought the house; recently he had hardly come here at all. The place was not crowded with plants as it had been then, though he noticed that someone had pruned and revived the long-neglected vine: it would have grapes on it again this year. If, of course, it was allowed to survive so long, he reminded himself.

  The wickerwork armchair in which he had been used to read his morning paper before Tom brought his ex-convicts to the house was still here. The old curtain with which it had been covered for the winter smelt musty; he put it on the flagged floor behind the chair. It was warm in here in the last of the sun; at least the 70 degrees that his daughter was enjoying in New Zealand. He almost admitted to himself that he was enjoying this experience.

  He took off his jacket and hung it on the hook by the door, as he had done so often long ago. The old chair creaked a little, but seemed to fold itself about him as it took his thirteen stones; it was as comfortable as ever. The fresh air and exercise of the golf course, the modest two halves of bitter with which he had followed them, had their effect. He thought drowsily that he would look properly at Trevor’s plans, give them the detailed consideration of the fair-minded man he was. Barbara was applying her healing balm to the family from the other side of the world; the idea appealed to him. He felt perfectly relaxed. In three minutes, he was sound asleep.

  No one disturbed him. Ros and his grandchildren were not far away in the kitchen of the old house, but none of them knew he was here. Had the door of the old conservatory not been open, he might have dozed there for hours. But as the sun sank behind the surrounding buildings, a light, chill draught through the doorway dropped the temperature, reminding the world that this was still an English April.

  Tom Harrison stirred, shivered, opened his eyes, wondered for a moment where he was. Through the slightly distorting glass beside him, he caught the narrow features of Fred Hogan, studying him surreptitiously to see if he was awake. His thin face, twisted by the fault in the glass, looked more villainous than ever, like that of a goblin in a children’s story. Catching Tom’s blue eyes suddenly upon him, he jumped back immediately to his hoeing.

  Tom got a spurt of satisfaction from catching the little crook off-guard. He wondered how long he had been asleep. It did not seem more than a minute or two, but the sun which had filled the conservatory had disappeared completely. He stretched his wrist to see the time.

  His wristwatch was not there: for a moment he stared stupidly at the white band of skin where it should have been. Then he remembered: if needed a new strap. He had taken it off and put it in his pocket when he was leaving the golf club. It had been Barbara’s parting gift to him, and he was not going to risk damaging or losing it.

  He stood up, staggered a little before he got his balance, and went over to get his jacket from the hook by the door. He was glad to put it on, for he had grown quite cold before he was fully awake. He buttoned it tight over his woollen jumper and felt in the pocket for his watch. It was not there. Rapidly, he tried his other pockets, though he knew the search would be fruitless: it had been in his right-hand jacket pocket.

  Someone had taken it, then. And there could be no doubt who that someone was. His old resentment against the men his son brought here rushed back as readily as the blood rose to his face.

  He leapt out on to the gravel path, clutching at the frame of the conservatory door with his right hand to retain his balance. He could not see Hogan; he knew he must find him with the watch upon him, before he hid the evidence. Such an experienced thief would cover his tracks if he got half a chance.

  Then he spotted the man. He was pretending to put his tools away in the old potting shed with the bulging roof. “Hey you. Hogan!” he shouted. “Come back here!”

  Fred Hogan looked across the forty yards of lawn at the elderly man shaking with fury. He shut the door of the potting shed and went obediently back towards him. He went round the gravel path, like a child forbidden to step on the grass in a public garden. And as he moved his shoulders drooped into the submissive hump he had trained himself over many years to adopt when challenged by authority.

  His circuitous progress added to Tom Harrison’s rage, as if it were an act of dumb insolence for the man not to approach his retribution by the most direct route. “You’ve taken my watch, you little crook!” He was shouting so loudly that it took him an instant to realise that the sound came from himself. “You’re going to regret doing that, I can tell you! Give it back at once.” He held out his hand, palm upwards; both of them stared at it, watching how much it trembled.

  “I haven’t got it, Mr Harrison, honest.” Hogan had denied many things over the years, most of them things he had been guilty of. The whine he fell into from habit did not sound convincing even in his own ears. Like most men to whom words do not come easily, he became less persuasive as he was driven into using more of them. “You must be mistaken. Perhaps it’s still in the conservatory. Come on, I’ll help you look.” He tried to push past the older man as he stood in the doorway.

  “Don’t y
ou dare, you little thief!” Tom thrust him roughly backwards, so that his heel caught on the edge of the lawn and he fell backwards on to the turf. Hogan saw a furious assailant standing above him. He threw his arms around his head and squirmed into the foetal position which gave maximum protection to his vitals. He had found the posture in the playgrounds of schools, where his peers were always more powerful than he was; through forty years of association with criminals, in and out of prison, he had adopted the same posture when threatened with violence.

  He lay there wailing apprehensively, wondering when rather than why he would be kicked. Tom Harrison was sorely tempted. “Get up, you scum!” he shouted at the writhing figure.

  “What on earth is going on?”

  Tom was so enraged that it took him a moment to recognise the familiar voice of his son. He turned slowly, aware for the first time how heavily and unevenly he was breathing. He saw the fingers which Hogan held over his face part, allowing a small brown eye to assess this new intervention. Like a rat watching its opportunity to escape, he thought.

  “This little thief you brought into the house has stolen my watch,” he said. He saw Ros standing behind her husband, her face as deadly serious as Trevor’s. There was no sign of the children.

  Trevor looked from his father’s flushed face to the prone figure on the lawn, who was absolutely motionless, awaiting further orders. “Get up, Fred,” he said quietly.

  The use of the forename infuriated Tom. “Never mind ‘Fred’,” he said heavily. “Tell the little shyster to give me back my watch and send him packing.”

  Ros Harrison stepped forward beside her husband. She knew Hogan better than anyone in the house; he took his daily rota of tasks from her, drank cups of tea with her, helped her in the kitchen. She was the first woman he had begun to trust since his mother had walked out when he was thirteen, though she was not aware of that. She said to him, “Have you got Mr Harrison’s watch, Fred?”

  “No, Mrs Harrison.”

  “The truth now, Fred.”

  “I haven’t, Mrs Harrison, really. I’ve not been anywhere near him. He was asleep in the conservatory and —”

  Tom Harrison felt it was time to assert himself: they were talking about him as if he were not even here. “He’s lying. I don’t know why you should expect him to do anything else. It’s a way of life with these people.” In the doorway of the house, he had seen the curious faces of Dick Courtney and Michael Ashby, and was glad to include them in his comment.

  He turned back to the cringing figure before him. Hogan’s nose was faintly stained with green where he had ground it into the lawn in his paroxysm of submission. Tom was angered anew that so ridiculous a figure should dare to deny him. “Turn out your pockets, you little thief, and give me back my property.”

  Trevor Harrison made a move forward to spare the man this humiliation, wondering how he might best intervene. But he was too slow. Fred Hogan, long accustomed to humiliation as a fact of his existence, saw only advantages in complying. He wore corduroy trousers and a thick cotton working shirt. Three pockets in all, two at the sides and one at the rear of his trousers.

  He pulled each one forth, leaving the lining flapping in the light, cold breeze of sundown. Apart from an extremely grubby handkerchief, the exercise revealed nothing. He plucked out the final pocket, the right hand one in his trousers, with a satisfaction that was almost that of the professional conjuror; it was a gesture that was very nearly insolent.

  Tom glared at him, then took a step towards him that made Hogan flinch and Trevor put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “What have you done with it?” Tom shouted. “I know you’ve hidden it somewhere!” He was aware of becoming less convincing to the audience, more desperate to demonstrate his certainty that the abject figure before him was in the wrong.

  Perhaps Ros was anxious to protect Hogan, or perhaps she felt intuitively that only a woman would be able to restrain her father-in-law now. She stepped forward and took Tom’s arm firmly. “That’s enough of this,” she said decisively. “We’ll get to the bottom of it, I promise you, Mr Harrison. Come away in now.” In the crisis, she had dropped back unconsciously into the idiom of the Scottish grandmother who had been dead twenty years.

  Feeling the firm touch of both her hands on his upper arm, Tom allowed himself to be led away. He cast a final look of hatred over his shoulder at Hogan as he went, but the little man had the sense not to react. The faces of Dick Courtney and Michael Ashby disappeared abruptly from the window as the little cameo by the conservatory broke up.

  Tom did not come down to dinner, despite his son’s pleas. Ros sent him a tray up to his room, where he seethed in private, trying to keep his anger simmering at a constant heat. His son had the sense to keep away from him for the rest of that night.

  It was not until almost nine that the call came through from the golf club steward. “Mr Harrison? I didn’t ring earlier because I thought you might come back for it. I thought you’d like to know that you left your watch on the bar this afternoon. We have it safe here.”

  Chapter Seven

  Ros Harrison was not proud of her weaknesses.

  In fact, she was aghast that she should listen to her father-in-law’s phone conversations with his daughter. It was a concession to a part of her nature she had almost quelled, the part that had made her as a schoolgirl read the bundle of love letters she had found tied with red ribbon in her mother’s bureau. Trevor would have been appalled to hear of her weakness.

  Each week she determined not to do it. Yet each Tuesday she found herself again crouched in her bedroom, listening in clammy guilt to the tender exchanges between the old man and his far-off daughter. Other women drank their secret sherries, or took lovers. Her fault was harmless by comparison, but the latest instance of it troubled her still, two days after the event.

  Yet without that weakness, she would not have known that Tom was proposing to sell the house. Their house.

  She stood by the window in the living room, looking again at the area they proposed to develop as a new unit for the men, wondering for the twentieth time whether they would now be permitted to do it. It had become more vital to her that they should be allowed to proceed even as the possibility that they might be denied grew clearer.

  Fred Hogan was working in the garden, planting out a tray of cabbage plants he had reared in the little greenhouse he seemed to prefer to the conservatory. Perhaps he found it more in scale with his aspirations, she thought with a smile. He seemed none the worse for that absurd bit of melodrama with Tom last night. Indeed, Fred had seemed quite chirpy when she had taken her coffee to drink it with him this morning. Perhaps it was a long time since he had been accused of anything and so manifestly proved not guilty.

  She heard movements in the lounge the men had for their own use. Michael Ashby, probably: he had taken to coming home for a little while at lunch. She suspected he was not as happy as he pretended to be in the rather grubby office where they had found him work, and was glad that it was near enough for him to walk here for a break in his lunch hour.

  Perhaps she could broach the business of Tom’s plans to Michael. He was, after all, a chartered accountant — or had been: she was not sure whether accountants were unfrocked, or struck off, or whatever was the appropriate term, when they were found guilty of fraud. At least he had financial knowledge, whereas she and Trevor were babes in arms in that respect; he might have ideas about how they could go ahead with the project, even against the wishes of her father-in-law. She need not tell him how she knew of Tom’s intentions. She certainly could not tell Trevor.

  Michael Ashby was sitting glumly at the table at one end of the big lounge. A cup of tea steamed beside the unopened pack of sandwiches in front of him; he made no move to touch either food or drink. He looked up at her as she came into the room after a quiet tap at the door. “It’s a long time since anyone knocked before coming into a room because I was there,” he said.

  He was quite good-looking when
he smiled, she thought. She found the fact that his suit was well-worn curiously touching. She had never been attracted by expensive clothes on men, and the straining towards respectability she saw in the shiny cloth and threadbare cuffs was a point in Michael’s favour as far as she was concerned.

  Plausible, Tom Harrison would have called him, no doubt: she could see how Michael had been able to deceive people and make them part with their savings. She corrected herself quickly; it was not her policy to think of the past with these men. They must be directed briskly to their future, however tricky that might appear in the early stages of their life outside prison. “Enjoying a little break from work?” she said lamely.

  “I am indeed, Ros,” he said, assuming an automatic cheerfulness. He felt a need to confide in someone: preferably a woman. “It’s not a lot of fun at Colley’s Office Equipment. Oh, I know I shouldn’t grumble — I’m lucky to have a job at all. It’s just that when you’re reminded of that fact all day by someone who doesn’t really know what he’s doing, it wears a bit thin after a while.” He had risen when she came in. Now he smiled down at her. His small, regular teeth looked very white at this darker end of the room.

  She wondered what to say in the way of consolation: the man seemed too intelligent to be taken in by the old bromides. “You’re only proving yourself there,” she said. “Getting ready to move on to better things in due course.” For the first time, she wondered how many men with his kind of background actually fell back into crime. She had assumed that education and a professional training helped them through; now she began to realise the kind of difficulties and frustrations they faced.

  He smiled ruefully, leaning his hand on the wood of the sash window as he watched Hogan working in the kitchen garden. “The theory is that you move on to something better. In practice, you’re dependent on a reference from the very man you’re trying to get away from.”