He moved swiftly to another, narrower staircase, whose dimensions emphasised the social divisions of that vanished Edwardian age in which the house had originated. On the top floor of the house were those small rooms which had been occupied by the plentiful servants of that era. The quarters which had for years been used only for storage had been useful to Trevor when he conceived his grand design of helping prisoners back into society. It meant that men who for years had been used to a shared occupancy of cells and the denial of all privacy had been able to have their own rooms.
Humble, uncomfortable rooms, by the standards of those who had lived downstairs, for they were unheated, narrow, and dark, as though the architect had begrudged even the light which entered through the small dormer windows. Because of the design, that light scarcely extended the full length of the rooms, to where the dark brown doors joined them to the narrow landing and the world of the house below. But these rooms allowed the men who came here to reassert the individuality which had been denied to them in prison. They welcomed that, even when without women they had often little idea how to make the rooms distinctively their own.
That did not apply to Dick Courtney. Trevor, meeting him upon the passage outside his open door, registered even in this moment of crisis the glimpse of the private world he had begun to create. Courtney had installed a small, ornate mirror of his own above the chest of drawers. Beneath the window at the far end of the room was a single Victorian chair, upholstered in rich burgundy velvet; Trevor thought he remembered seeing it in dusty disuse in the storeroom at the end of this landing where they had piled disregarded furniture when they cleared these rooms for occupancy. There was an Alpine landscape on one long wall. A pop group leader, stripped to the waist, glared at him from the poster on the opposite one over the bed.
Nothing in the room was as striking as the gold silk pyjamas worn by its occupant. Trevor, his long feet white and awkward in the narrow doorway, was wondering where Dick had acquired such exotic nightwear when Courtney said coolly, “What’s up, then?” and recalled him abruptly to the tragedy he had fled. Dick spoke in so offhand a manner that Trevor suspected he already knew what had happened.
“It’s my father,” he said. “He’s fallen down the stairs. I — I think he’s dead.” He heard his voice catch for the first time, was almost glad to find in himself this evidence of normal emotion.
“So that was what the crash was.” Courtney nodded, as though a puzzle had been satisfactorily solved. He did not trouble to make the pretence of offering sympathy to the bereaved son. “Hell of a bang. Surprised that bugger could sleep through it.”
He nodded towards the end of the corridor, and Trevor became for the first time aware of a sound he would normally have noticed as soon as he reached this floor of the house. A steady snoring came from the end room. He looked a question at Courtney.
“Michael Ashby,” said that young man, affording the sleeper his full name as though he were a stranger. The corners of his mouth rose in a smile that implied his own superiority in the face of this oafish sloth. “You’d almost think he didn’t want to get involved.” Satisfied with the effect he had made, Courtney now donned a green quilted dressing gown which had been hanging on the back of the door.
A cistern flushed in the bathroom at the other end of the corridor. Harry Bradshaw emerged, clad in a heavy woollen dressing gown which must have been at least ten years old and the slippers he had brought here with him from prison. He took in Courtney’s more ornate garb at a glance, and gave his attention to Trevor. “I know what’s happened — I heard you phoning. Is there anything we can do?”
“I don’t think so. The ambulance should be on its way by now. I don’t think it will be any good; Dad — seems to be dead. I think Fred’s making some tea for everyone.” Trevor, obscurely aware now that he had taken flight up here, was wondering what evidence of grief he should be showing to these men. He could observe himself from the outside, behaving normally in conditions which cried upon him to howl, disturbing his residents by his absence of a proper reaction. He would have recognised in others the effects of the shock which he was unable to allow in himself.
Dick Courtney had opened the door at the end of the corridor without knocking, as if he planned to detect the occupant in some revealing deception. Now Michael Ashby emerged yawning behind him; it was not clear whether or not Dick had woken him. Ashby seemed genuinely a heavy sleeper: he scratched himself like one not yet awake enough to gauge the reactions of others, and seemed at first scarcely to register what he was told of the tragedy two floors beneath him.
The four of them stood for a moment like conspirators in the narrow corridor, shivering a little in their nightwear, for these rooms were set into the roof and the central heating had never been extended up here. They spoke like conspirators, the dawning sense of what lay below them hushing their voices to terse whisperings. When each of them had gathered his thoughts, they went down to drink Fred Hogan’s tea in the intimacy of the huge old kitchen.
The ambulance men were quiet, adroit, sympathetic. Their experience told them immediately that this was a “Dead on Arrival”, but they shepherded the relatives expertly to one side and lifted the corpse, anonymous on their red-blanketed stretcher, swiftly into their vehicle. Trevor stood with his wife and watched the ambulance pull quietly away over the gravel, taking his father for the last time from the house he had loved so much. For the first time, he began to realise his loss. He grasped his wife’s slender fingers in a hand he suddenly realised was icy cold; they watched the red rear lights until they disappeared into the clear night.
The death was confirmed when they rang the hospital as they had been bidden. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing we could do,” said the practised, concerned voice. Then after a pause, “Had Mr Harrison been attended by a doctor in the last fourteen days? … In that case, I’m afraid there will have to be a post-mortem.”
Trevor put down the phone and stared at it. To his own surprise, he began to sob at the thought of the outrage which would be done to the old man’s body. Ros held him then, glad to feel the lean torso racked with emotion in her arms, running her fingers firmly through the thick dark hair on the back of the long head.
She tried not to think how convenient this death would be for all of them in this house.
Chapter Eleven
Breakfast on the morning after Tom Harrison’s death was a strange meal for all the occupants of Westhaven.
Ros gave herself to the children who had lost their grandfather; they were the only people in the house with feelings of uncomplicated grief. Trevor ate with his four lame ducks. No one cared to look at the others much across the table; no one knew quite what to say. Sounds which would normally have been unremarked rang unnaturally loud in the heavy silences which dominated the meal. Cereal wrappers crackled like gunfire; Fred Hogan’s sniffing with the last remnants of his cold rang round the room.
Dick Courtney felt no grief at all. The old fool had stood in their way: now his death suited all of them. For Dick, it was no more than that. He planned to stay here for a little while, until he was established in a job and could find somewhere — or someone — else more to his taste. Tom Harrison’s desire to be rid of the place might have interfered with that design, so that it was as well that he was now removed. But he had felt no hatred for the old man, when he was alive. Now he felt neither exultation nor distress in his death.
He glanced at Trevor Harrison, speculating on what was going on behind that gaunt, priest-like mask. Trevor pushed sodden cereals backwards and forwards with his spoon, apparently unaware that he had been doing this for several minutes. For once he had hardly spoken. His thoughts were turned inwards upon himself, and that self-contemplation he usually avoided in his concern for the men he thought of as his responsibility had taken him over. In the phrase he derided as a conscientious atheist, he found himself looking into his soul.
He was confused by what he found there. Grief there was, certainly. But he
was not sure at this moment how far his sorrow extended beyond the accumulated nostalgia of four decades of life with the man who had been his father. The pictures teemed upon each other in bewildering emotional succession. Of the incredibly strong figure who had swung him laughing above his head when he could scarcely walk. Of the man running through fields behind their spaniel, with Trevor’s and Barbara’s hands clutched in his, while the clouds raced above them in skies that seemed for ever summer. Of the man first persuading and then directing him to stay on at school when he went half-heartedly through the adolescent’s rejection of book-learning at sixteen. Of his father standing in a little group with his mother and Barbara as his son collected his degree, self-consciously proud and self-effacing.
And last but most insistently, of his father six days earlier, stubborn with cold anger over the plans for the extension to his house, closing his mind to all arguments even as he closed his face. Trevor, gazing unseeingly at the table in front of him, oblivious for once of the reactions of his flock, was filled with pity for that recalcitrant figure. At the same time his mind kept insisting that the one major obstacle to the development which had turned into an obsession had been removed. It was a recipe for what his social training told him was the most useless and least productive of emotions: old-fashioned guilt.
“Eat up, Mr ’arrison. Life has to go on, you know. You’ll need your strength today.” It was Fred Hogan who spoke as he collected the cereal plates from the others, piling the clichés upon one another as solicitously as any mother. He was in his shirt sleeves, his cuffs rolled back ready for work, as if indicating to the others the way in which they should behave to support their leader. “I’ll see to all the washing up and that. Mrs ’arrison will be busy enough with the children, I’m sure.”
It was a gentle nudge towards action, whether he intended it or not, and Trevor managed a bleak smile of acknowledgement as he pushed aside his cereal. He rose, looked around the table for a moment as if seeing his companions for the first time, and left the room. Then he reappeared briefly at the door and said with an effort, “Don’t let this affect your day, chaps; carry on as normal in whatever you have to do. We have to look to the future.” He shook his head, as though he had failed to convince himself of his argument, and disappeared more permanently.
Dick Courtney reflected that it was only the most ineffective of prison visitors and one silly cow on the parole board who had called them chaps. Trevor had never done so before. Dick watched Fred Hogan bustling busily in and out of the room, determined that action should be a substitute for unwelcome thoughts. Fred had had that bust-up with the old man over the watch he had never stolen. There is no one more bitter than the habitual thief when he is wrongfully accused. Dick was already revolving the idea that this death had been no accident.
Fred watched the others surreptitiously as he moved, like the runt of the litter which knows that craft must compensate for physical inequalities. Dick said to the small hands as they removed the fork he had not used, “So the old bugger’s gone then. I bet you aren’t sorry about that.”
It was a remark designed purely to test him, and Fred did not know how to react. For a tell-tale instant, the hands Dick Courtney watched so carefully froze over the plates. Then they resumed their task of piling one upon another. But now they were fractionally more clumsy, so that the crockery crashed instead of slid into a pile, and the noise rang loud round the silent table. Fred said carefully, “I had no reason to wish old Mister Harrison gone.” With the solemnity of death to consider, he had recovered his aspirates.
“Oh, come off it, Fred. You’ve more to gain from it than the rest of us.” Courtney’s dark eyes glanced quickly at the closed door; he lowered his voice as he said, “We all know you plan to stay here as long as you can, whereas the rest of us will go as soon as we get a decent chance. Good billet for you, this is, so long as you keep Trevor and Ros sweet.”
“They’ve been good to me. They’re good to you, and don’t you forget it, lad.” Fred was betrayed by his feelings into a flash of spirit. As if he realised the danger of any revelation of emotion, his voice immediately degenerated almost to a whine. “I just try to make myself useful where there’s work to be done and —”
“Just like you did for the screws. Just like you’ll do for the rest of your life. Oh, you can dance their tune all right: ‘Yes, Mrs ’arrison; No, Mrs ’arrison; Three bags full, Mrs ’arrison. Powder your arse if you give me ’alf a chance Mrs ’arrison!’” Courtney stopped abruptly. His contempt was revealing more of himself than he had intended.
Hogan paused at the door, hugging the pile of dishes he had gathered as if it were a living, precious thing. His thin face was white with anger. With an effort, he controlled himself, aware that he must not get into an argument with the younger man because he could not use words so well, conscious with a petty criminal’s instinct of the violence that hung about this predatory figure. He grasped the door handle at the second attempt and lurched out of the room with the dishes.
Michael Ashby and Harry Bradshaw had been aware of Courtney’s baiting of Hogan without attempting to interfere. Each of them was too recently out of captivity for prison habits to have been loosened. When others disagreed, one kept one’s head down and congratulated oneself upon the tactic: there were too many undercurrents behind apparently straightforward issues for neutrals to risk involvement.
Ashby, though he would not dream of admitting it, was hugely relieved by the death of old Tom Harrison. The man had been shrewd, educated, experienced in the financial ways of the world. Ashby had always felt, quite wrongly, that old Harrison saw straight through him, and disapproved thoroughly of what he saw. Although Trevor insisted to them that he never revealed the details of criminal records to his deprecating father, Ashby was too used to false assurances to believe this genuine one. Like most deceivers, he detected dishonesty in others which did not exist. He had always felt that Tom Harrison knew and despised him for the fraudster he had been branded.
And that embarrassing moment when he had been caught making a pass at Ros was still fresh in his mind. The old man’s death was very convenient. “When will the funeral be?” he said to Bradshaw. He assumed that the educated man would know the answers, even about practical things: it was another of the prison assumptions. He was wondering if they would be expected to stand at a graveside.
“Don’t know. There’ll be a post mortem, I suppose.” Bradshaw wished immediately he hadn’t made the comment: he had no wish to set himself up as an expert on sudden deaths. He was certain the other men here knew about his killing of his wife: prisoners’ curiosity about their fellows and the efficiency of underworld grapevines would have seen to that. He was equally sure that Tom Harrison had not known: the old man would never have offered that mitigation of his stiffness that was the first softening towards friendship if he had known the enormity of his offence.
He was glad the old boy had died in ignorance. Neither of them would have enjoyed the moment of discovery. And they would have clashed, in any case, over the business of these building plans. Trevor Harrison was a decent man, however much he was exploited. He was trying to fill a gap which the Britain of the 1990s had still failed to plug, for all the new liberalism about custodial care which was abroad.
Trevor should be helped, not obstructed, and his father had been mistaken in opposing the extension of his work. Harry Bradshaw regretted the passing of the old man, but he was quite clear-sighted about his satisfaction that the plans for development could now go ahead. Harry was a frustrated idealist, and no species is more prone to extreme action under pressure.
“Will you go to work as usual?” he asked Ashby, searching for something neutral which might lead them away from this death.
“I suppose so. They wouldn’t be very understanding about any absence on my part. Ex-cons lose any right to feelings. If you’re not there, you’re skiving. Anyway, I’ll be better out of this place. It gets to you after a while.” He was uncom
fortable, smoothing his receding hair unnecessarily over his balding pate as he spoke, licking his lips between sentences.
Bradshaw wondered whether it was the house itself or last night’s death which oppressed Ashby. Death, even in an innocent guise, had made them all uneasy today. It was one of the effects of a criminal record that you felt guilty, felt that other people thought you were guilty, even in circumstances where no criminal offence had been detected. Especially if you had killed already.
“Who found the body?” Ashby tried to infuse his voice with genuine enquiry. To Harry Bradshaw, it sounded as if he were trying to distance himself from the moment of death, but it was probably quite innocent. He remembered the man’s heavy snoring when the body of Tom Harrison was discovered. Was it habitual? He could not remember hearing much nocturnal noise from him before; his room was next door to Ashby’s.
“Ros, I think. He made quite a noise falling, poor devil. It woke me, but I didn’t know what it was at first.”
Ashby said unnecessarily, “When you’ve been in clink, your natural reaction is to lie doggo when there is any unusual sound. Let someone else find out what’s going on.” It sounded like a defence of his own conduct.
“Not much else you can do when you’re in a cell, is there?” said Harry with a grim smile. Too late, he remembered that this man had had the benefit of an open prison. Were men still banged up at nights in such places?
“Anyway, the house won’t be sold over our heads now. I think I’ll remind Trevor on the way out that he should cancel the agent’s visit.” Michael Ashby said it with relish, as though he were announcing checkmate after a lengthy struggle with the dead man.
Who Saw Him Die? (Inspector Peach Series Book 1) Page 7
