[Lambert and Hook 20] - Something Is Rotten

by J M Gregson

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ She wanted to muster some of the spirit and indignation which the normal Mrs Dalrymple would have shown on the phrase, but it would not come. She waited for Lambert to go on, but just when for the first time she wanted words from him, he did not speak. He watched her with his head just slightly tilted, through those grey eyes which never seemed to blink.

  Maggie felt compelled to speak, to fill the silence which seemed to be gathering about her like a tangible thing as she sat at the big deal table. ‘This removes Andrew’s alibi for the time of the death, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It does, yes.’ He sighed, then gave her the standard bromide phrases. ‘Until we find conclusive proof that he was elsewhere when Mr Logan died, we cannot eliminate him from our inquiries.’

  ‘Andrew didn’t kill Terry.’

  Lambert didn’t react to that. Instead, with a small, mirthless smile, he said, ‘The fact that your husband was not here when you returned means also that we have no witness to your own whereabouts at the time of this murder, Mrs Dalrymple.’

  Michael Carey had been up since seven. At nine, he took the tray into the bedroom, smiled at the face which emerged reluctantly from beneath the bedclothes, and said brightly, ‘Breakfast is served, Tom.’ He was only two years older than the twenty-two- year-old in the bed, but he decided to enjoy the role of middle-aged mentor to the young reprobate.

  The young man in the bed levered himself up and ran a hand through his tightly curled black hair. ‘Do you have to be so damned cheerful at this hour?’ he grumbled, surveying the cereals and toast without any obvious enthusiasm.

  ‘It’s a sunny autumn morning and you’re wasting it,’ said Michael. ‘I’ve already been for a brisk run. The autumn colour in the woods around here is something else! I can see why they call this part of the country the Heart of England.’

  Tom Baldwin groaned at such animation and enthusiasm. Michael was only two years older than him, but there were times when he seemed to be much more than that. Tom poured the milk on to his cereal and took a first spoonful, as a healthy appetite asserted itself. He munched milk and muesli with full concentration for a moment, then mustered his first grin of the day. ‘I don’t know how you have the energy to run about the countryside like that after last night,’ he said, stretching his limbs luxuriantly beneath the sheets at the memory. ‘Personally, I’m still recharging my batteries for the rest of the weekend.’

  Michael frowned for a moment. Time for a switch of roles to the concerned but regretful lover. ‘There’s a snag with that, I’m afraid. I’ll have to leave by lunchtime.’

  Tom’s face clouded. His lips set into the sullen pout of the frustrated child. ‘But we agreed we’d have the full weekend together. I’ve cancelled other things to be with you.’

  ‘Something’s come up,’ said Michael. ‘And no, it’s not that, you dirty young sod. Not this time. I’ve had a phone call from the CID, back in Oldford.’ He tried not to sound too important; this must surely make him a more intriguing figure to the man in bed, who had led such a sheltered life himself.

  ‘I thought you’d given them everything they wanted.’

  He certainly hadn’t done that. But there was no reason to take Tom fully into his confidence. Some day perhaps, if things worked out and this was all over ... But in his heart, he knew that he would meet other and more exciting people at drama school and in the theatre. He felt with that knowledge a sudden, overwhelming tenderness towards the slim young figure in the bed, who was now preparing to tackle the toast and marmalade.

  He tried to sound unconcerned as he said, ‘It’s this murder they’re investigating. The death of the man who was directing me as the Prince in Hamlet. They say they want to ask me some further questions, in the light of what they’ve now learned from other people.’

  Tom tried to pretend he cared less than he did about this departure. He said as lightly as he could, ‘They’ll have you under lock and key if you’re not careful.’

  Michael Carey sat down on the bed and laughed aloud at such a preposterous idea. ‘I expect the plods would like to have the opinion of a man like me on the crime. They offered to come to Warwick, said they’d drive up here to talk to me here, but I thought I’d rather deal with them on my own patch.’

  ‘It’s not that far, as they say. You could come back again, after you’ve spoken with the police.’ Tom tried not to sound too desperate.

  ‘I might just do that, if I can get them out of the way quickly enough.’ Michael knew even as he spoke that he wouldn’t.

  ‘You should have let them come here, then.’

  ‘I’d rather deal with this down there. I don’t want your place to have any connection with the sordid business of murder.’

  He had improvised the argument to pacify Tom, who didn’t know anything about how close he had once been to the murder victim. But as he drove the old Fiesta out of the car park by the flats and waved cheerfully at the wan face beneath Tom’s black curls, he realized that it was true.

  Michael Carey didn’t want what had happened in Gloucestershire to soil the delights of his liaison with Tom Baldwin in Warwick.

  ‘We’ll see them together, I think,’ said Lambert. ‘We can always take up any issues with them separately later, if we should think it necessary.’

  Becky Clegg and Jack Dawes were brought up from the separate cells where they had spent most of the night and the entire Saturday morning. Once they were arrested, they had had no opportunity to confer about tactics. They looked shyly at each other in the soulless little cube of the interview room, almost as if they were strangers. Each of them was wondering how much the other had already been questioned about the previous night’s fiasco.

  Becky was hoping that Bert Hook, whom she now regarded as something of a father- figure, would be questioning them. Instead, she was confronted by Chief Superintendent Lambert and a younger, good-looking, very intense man, who was announced to the cassette tape recorder as Inspector Rushton.

  Lambert surveyed the two youngsters impassively for a moment whilst they waited expectantly. Then he gave a world-weary shrug of his shoulders and said, ‘We can charge you with breaking and entering, of course. Attempting to steal the property of a dead man: opportunism of the most cynical kind. I can see the magistrates taking a dim view of that. As you’ve both got criminal records, you might well get custodial sentences.’

  It was part of the softening-up process, a preparation for the questions he really wanted to ask them. Perhaps Jack Dawes divined something of that. He said sullenly, ‘We didn’t do much damage. It was a big oak front door with only a Yale lock. The security system wasn’t operating.’ He made it sound as if that was unfair, as if the forces of law hadn’t been playing by their own rules.

  The system hadn’t been set because no one knew the code for it; that secret had died with Logan. ‘There was a police presence in the house,’ Chris Rushton said. ‘Less stupid people than you would have expected that.’ Jack Dawes considered the notion that they had walked into a police trap which had been deliberately set for them. He didn’t like the idea that he had been both predictable and foolish; the young are thinner-skinned about these things than more practised criminals.

  ‘We didn’t steal anything from the house.’

  ‘No. You were surprised before you got to the items you wanted.’

  ‘Or perhaps the items we wanted weren’t there.’

  Lambert was on to that very quickly. ‘What were you looking for in a murder victim’s house, Mr Dawes?’

  ‘Papers, that’s all. Nothing of value. There was good stuff in there, but we weren’t even going to touch it.’ He glanced sideways at the white-faced Becky Clegg, who gave an eager confirmatory nod, as if grateful for even this minor acknowledgement of her presence beside him.

  ‘So, what were you after? What was it that was so important to you that you landed yourselves in this mess?’

  ‘Logan kept records. We wanted to get those. To destroy them.’ Dawe
s stared hard at the small square table and the recording machine bearing a cassette which was turning slowly and silently.

  ‘What sort of records, Jack?’

  He glanced up sharply at Lambert with this first and unexpected use of his forename. ‘Records of what he’d done in the past. Dates and that sort of thing. Logan kept all kinds of details. He had a filing cabinet.’

  ‘And why do you think Mr Logan did that?’

  ‘It gave him a hold over people, didn’t it? All kinds of people.’

  ‘You’re saying he used it to blackmail people?’

  ‘No. Not for money, anyway. It gave him a hold over people.’ He glanced sideways at Becky again and seemed to be reassured by her quick nod of approval. ‘He didn’t need money, he had plenty of that. But he loved having power. He could make you do what he wanted you to, because he knew things that you wouldn’t want revealed.’

  ‘But you didn’t find what you were looking for last night?’

  ‘No. We hadn’t even found the filing cabinet when your lot sprang the trap on us.’ Chris Rushton couldn’t resist an intervention. ‘You wouldn’t have found it if you’d had the whole night, Mr Dawes. We had already removed that cabinet. It has been in the CID section for the last two days. We are still analysing and documenting its contents.’

  This time Jack Dawes and Becky Clegg looked each other fully in the face. Becky had told him that it would be so, but she wasn’t going to remind him of that now. She turned back to the two observant men opposite them and said quietly, ‘You know what we were trying to conceal, then.’

  Chris Rushton repeated stiffly, ‘We have recovered a mass of material from Mr Logan’s house. We are still processing and recording it.’

  ‘Logan kept all kinds of stuff. He said you never knew when it might come in useful.’ She tried to imitate the threatening, derisive tone in which the dead man had used the phrase, but in this soulless place she could not summon it up.

  ‘You are telling us that Mr Logan was a blackmailer then.’ Rushton sounded as sceptical as he intended.

  ‘No. Not if you mean he used these things for money. Jack told you, he didn’t need money, Terry Logan.’

  Jack Dawes heard the bitterness in her voice and came in to support her. ‘He kept records of the things he had done himself and the people he had slept with. He was obsessive about it. Like Becky said, he used to say you never knew when these things might come in useful.’

  He caught Logan’s taunting inflection on the phrase, as Becky had not been able to do. It fell as an eerie echo of the dead man into the quiet, claustrophobic setting of the interview room. There was a little pause before Lambert continued. ‘He couldn’t use this stuff against you when he was dead. So why risk breaking into his house to steal it?’ Becky glanced quickly at the face of Dawes. ‘He liked having power over people, did Logan. Knowledge is power, he used to say, as if that were some sort of joke. He kept stuff from when we were at school. Stuff we didn’t even know he had, until he told us about it after we’d left. He also kept tabs on us years later. He knew - well, he knew all about who I was with and what I’d been doing. He knew more than you lot do about me and the people I was with. He knew I’d cut a girl with a blade. He said he could put me behind bars if he wanted to. That was one of his favourite expressions.’

  She stopped abruptly on that. She could see the exact look on Terry Logan’s face, his quiet smile turning slowly into a leer, as he mouthed the phrase. She wished again that Bert Hook was here; he would surely have understood her pain at being at Logan’s mercy, as these two unsympathetic pigs would never do. She said unwillingly, as if it were a confession of weakness rather than something in her favour. ‘I’ve just got myself a decent job. I want to keep it, to go on from here. I didn’t want what Logan had in his files destroying all that.’

  Jack Dawes glanced sideways at her, then decided to make his own admission of weakness. He said abruptly, ‘He had things about my mother in his files. Things I didn’t want anyone to see.’

  Lambert hadn’t yet had a chance to see the papers the team had recovered from the dead man’s house. ‘You were trying to take away stuff he had recorded about your mother?’ he said wonderingly.

  Dawes bristled with anger. ‘You pigs think my ma’s just a slag, don’t you? Well, she’s better than that. She doesn’t deserve the kind of things a bastard like Logan would write about her.’

  ‘The two of them had an association?’

  He nodded. ‘When I was in the school play. Mum was quite a looker then. Logan pretended to be interested in me to get close to her - said that I had talent, that he could help me with my career. It was all rubbish, as we found out later, but it helped him to get my mum into bed. She got a lot of men excited in those days. Logan wasn’t the only one who wanted to get inside her knickers, I can tell you!’ It was patently important to Dawes to convince them of his mother’s voluptuous charms in her youth, as if he was acutely conscious of her present rapidly fading attributes. He made a curiously touching figure in his distress.

  Lambert said with unexpected gentleness, cSo you wanted to remove whatever he might have recorded about your mother.’

  ‘I didn’t want her to have to face whatever he’d written about her. She was quite taken with him at the time, thought it was going to be a long-term thing. He laughed at her when he’d finished with her, asked her how she could ever have thought that a man like him would consider anything serious with a cheap tart like her. I could guess the kinds of things he would have put on paper about her. I didn’t want to see things like that coming out in public and Mum having to face it.’ He stared fixedly at the small square table, as if he were detailing some vice instead of a praiseworthy desire to protect his mother.

  Becky Clegg understood better than anyone in the room how a young tough like Jack Dawes, with a reputation to keep up among his set, would see this as a weakness in himself. By way of additional explanation, she added, ‘Terry Logan told us he had things about both of us on file. Things about how we’d broken the law. Taking an interest in his former pupils, he called it. He knew things about Jack and drugs, as well as a couple of rucks he’d been in. I don’t know how he found out about some of the stuff, but he did. We didn’t want you lot to get hold of any of that.’

  DI Rushton stared at the young pair with distaste. Both of them had criminal records, which in his book meant you didn’t take anything they said at face value. ‘If Mr Logan was such a monster, why on earth did you get involved with him in this production of Hamlet?’

  Becky Clegg glanced sideways at Jack again, and found him still staring down at the table. She said, ‘He was a good director. The best.’

  That again. They all said that. To Chris Rushton, with no experience of amateur dramatics, it was both tiresome and irrelevant. He said impatiently, ‘Good enough for you to tangle with him again, in spite of what you thought of him?’ He sounded his disbelief in every syllable.

  Becky heard it and sighed. She disliked this eager young copper even more than the old bloke. ‘I was trying to make a new start in life. I’d been good at drama at school. Good at school generally in those days, though you probably wouldn’t believe it now.’ She spoke like a weary fifty-year-old, rather than a young woman who was only twenty-one. ‘Taking a part in a play, with the different set of people who would be involved, was part of my resolution to change my ways, if you must know.’ She glanced up into Rushton’s clean-cut, sceptical face. ‘Detective Sergeant Hook understood that. I think it was the same for Jack as well. We were both trying to make a break with the recent past, the way you pigs are always telling us to do.’

  Becky thought Jack Dawes would never admit to this, might even spring forward with a denial of anything so preposterous and wimpish. Instead, still staring at the table, he said, ‘Drama was something we knew about, something which was supposed to be respectable. Something we’d been good at and felt we could do again.’ He looked up for the first time in minutes, stared round
the confines of the small, square, green-walled room and said unexpectedly, ‘Where’s Bert Hook? He was going to be good in Hamlet. He’d understand what Becky’s trying to tell you.’

  Lambert said gruffly, ‘Perhaps as a fellow thespian he felt too much involved with you to be objective. If he was here, he’d have been listening to you giving us a clear account of a murder motive. He’d have heard you detailing the reasons why you hated the man who died on Wednesday night.’

  Becky Clegg flashed a look of hatred at the lined face which was within two feet of her own. ‘He’d have heard us trying to be honest.’ She glanced from one to the other of the two very different but equally impassive faces opposite her. ‘You lot are always telling us to “mend our ways” and “be decent citizens”, but when we try, what help do we get from you?’

  Rushton looked hard into the animated, attractive features. ‘Your last act, the one which brought the pair of you into the cells here, was breaking and entering at the home of a murder victim. You’re hardly in a position to ask for the benefit of the doubt, Ms Clegg.’

  Lambert looked at Jack Dawes, wondering inconsequentially that this thin, striking young face could still contain the wariness that he had seen in the features of many an old lag. He said softly, inconsequentially, ‘What time did you really get in on Wednesday night, Mr Dawes?’

  Jack’s brain had been racing with the effort of trying to convince the most senior fuzz he had ever dealt with that he was trying to mend his ways, as Becky had told them he was. He was completely unprepared for this sudden and dangerous switch of ground. Had the police talked again to his mother, whilst he was here in the cells? He knew they’d have been round to see her, to let her know where he was and why. There was no knowing what she would have said, especially if they’d got to her when she’d had a few drinks. He couldn’t get his brain to work as well or as fast as he wanted to. He said limply, ‘It was later than I said.’

  ‘How much later, Jack?’

  The first name again: the come-on; the assurance that we were all on the same side, that what you said here was safe enough whatever it was because you were talking to friends. Did the old bugger think he was a fool?