[Lambert and Hook 20] - Something Is Rotten

by J M Gregson

  After a restless night in the cells and this grilling here, he hadn’t the resources to put up a proper resistance. He’d make mistakes if he tried to lie; he might make the case they already had against him even stronger. ‘Much later. It was almost midnight, I think.’ He was dimly aware that his mother had been too befuddled on Wednesday night to know what time it had been, that even if she had thought she was being honest, she might have told them a different time. He added rather desperately, ‘Becky can confirm that!’ and felt her nodding vigorously beside him.

  ‘So what made you lie when you spoke to us on Thursday?’

  ‘Obvious, innit? You’d have one of us in the frame for Logan’s murder, as soon as look at us, if we gave you the chance.’ It was a return to his normal truculence with the police, but he couldn’t give it his usual energy or confidence.

  ‘So you lied about it and put yourself in even deeper. Not very clever, I’d say, Jack. What were you doing until that time?’

  ‘I was still in the village hall for quite a long time after the rehearsal was over. I was talking to bloody Logan, wasn’t I? Telling him to lay off my mum, telling him not to use the stuff he said he had against me.’

  ‘And what did he say to that?’

  ‘He laughed at me. Said we’d see how the play went. Said he needed to know all about the private lives of his cast, if he was to bring everything they could offer out of them.’

  ‘So you waited until he came out and slit his throat.’

  ‘No! It ... it took me a few minutes to find Becky when I came out.’

  He glanced speculatively sideways, and his companion came in eagerly to support him. ‘I’d got tired of waiting for Jack. It was cold out there in that car park. I wandered off towards the centre of the village, where I could see lights. I was trying to keep warm by stamping my feet and moving about. I knew it was going to be cold on the way home, on the back of Jack’s bike.’

  Jack grinned, for the first time since they had come into the room. ‘I shouted for Becky from the edge of the car park. She was back with me pretty quickly and we shot straight off on the Yahama. I dropped Becky at her place and was home before twelve.’ Becky thought about the three minutes of breathless, excited, confused kissing in the darkness outside her shabby flat, which she thought had taken both of them by surprise. Jack had certainly been excited by something: at the time she had taken it to be the ride through the night on his powerful motorbike. Well, there was certainly no need to tell these two about that: some things were best left to the admittedly limited police imagination. She said, ‘Terry Logan was still inside the place with the lights on when we left.’

  Rushton glanced at his chief. ‘We shall decide in the next hour or two whether to charge you with breaking and entering,’ he said stiffly. ‘We shall have to make a decision in due course on whether to charge you with much more serious offences.’

  Becky Clegg wondered as she and Jack Dawes were taken back to their separate cells just how much of what they had said would be believed.

  Nineteen

  Chris Rushton had feared all week that the weather would break on Sunday. It would be just his luck, he thought, if there was steady rain and the golf had to be abandoned.

  He need not have feared. The morning of Sunday, November the nineteenth, saw a bright sun climbing bravely above the splendid autumn colours of the trees of the Forest of Dean, and the forecast assured him that the weather was set fair for the day. Perhaps his luck was changing.

  The presence of Anne Jackson at his breakfast table reinforced that thought. She looked very young and very pretty in his blue silk dressing gown, with a pink knee peeping alluringly from its folds as she munched her cereal like a dutiful schoolgirl. Chris had to remind himself once again that Anne, with her hair dropping so appealingly over her left eye, was less than ten years younger than him, that he shouldn’t be worried about the Lolita syndrome because this was a mature young woman who knew exactly what she was doing.

  It was the first time she’d stayed with him overnight. Both of them had been a little surprised when she agreed to do so. Breakfast together was another new experience. Anne refused to have anything cooked. She looked round the small, neat modern kitchen and voiced the thought she had never meant to declare to him. ‘I expect you’ve done a lot of this sort of thing. I haven’t, so I don’t know what you’re supposed to say on the morning afterwards.’ She smiled up at his intensely serious face. ‘Thank you for having me, I expect.’

  Chris grinned, but kept his attention upon the steaming pan and his scrambled eggs; men weren’t supposed to be good at multitasking. He heard himself saying, ‘I haven’t done much of it either. Not much at all. We both need more experience of these things in my view.’ That was very daring for him. He rather spoiled it by adding hurriedly, ‘With each other, of course!’

  She felt very tender towards him. But she said briskly, ‘What time’s the golf?’

  ‘One o’clock. They said we might just get eighteen in, before the light goes, if it’s a clear afternoon.’

  ‘I must be on my way soon. I’ve got to collect my clubs and change into my golf gear. Are these friends of yours good players?’

  ‘Quite good, I think. John Lambert’s played for a long time, but Bert Hook’s almost as new to the game as I am. Bert’s about eighteen handicap, but John’s a single figure man.’

  ‘Nothing too fearsome, then.’ Anne Jackson stretched her legs luxuriously, exposing a tantalizing glimpse of thigh, and decapitated her egg with a decisive blow from her knife.

  Chris Rushton was more impressed than he could ever tell her by this casual dismissal of his chief’s golfing prowess.

  He smiled an exquisite, anticipatory smile.

  An hour later, Michael Carey opened the door of his flat to the two senior CID men he had met two days earlier. ‘Chief Superintendent Lambert, isn’t it?’ he said cordially, pleased with himself for remembering the full title of this local detective legend. ‘And you again, Bert, whom I remember from our brief hour of glory upon the boards. It had better be DS Hook, in this context, I suppose!’ He gave them his most dazzling smile and led them into the long, low-ceilinged room with the Beardsley prints and the portraits of Kean and Irving. He had given them his gauche young juvenile lead last time they were here; he wondered what he should do for them on this sunny autumn morning.

  As they sat down on the red velvet Victorian sofa where he had positioned them, Lambert studied this exotic creature shamelessly - and found that the man was not at all embarrassed by his attention. Michael Carey was almost too handsome, he decided, though there was probably an element of envy in that. His clean-cut, regular features looked only more elegant under his light, unlined skin. His fair hair looked only more attractive for being just a little out of place. His fawn sweater and light grey trousers hung perfectly upon his slim limbs, without any suggestion of tailoring. His suede loafers sat as comfortably as slippers upon his neat feet. You catch me in an informal moment, Michael Carey’s whole appearance declared, I do not fear you, and the world has patently nothing to fear from me.

  Lambert was anxious to trap this exotic butterfly. He said tersely, ‘You lied to us last time we were here, Mr Carey.’

  Michael looked concerned. His role was decided for him, then. He must play the penitent young man, whose inexperience of life had betrayed him on that previous occasion. He looked suitably apologetic as he said, ‘If I deceived you in any way, it must have been an unwitting deception, I’m sure.’

  ‘And I’m equally sure it was not, so let’s cut out the fripperies. You lied to us about your relationship with a murder victim.’

  ‘Terry Logan and I—’

  ‘We asked how well you had known Terry Logan and DS Hook took notes of your reply. You said, “Not well at all. We had a mutual love of the theatre and enjoyed chatting about any production we’d both seen. We hadn’t much else in common.” We now know that this is quite untrue.’

  Michael took
his time. He had always known in his heart that it would come to this. You shouldn’t underestimate the police machine; they had obviously talked to other people, found out the reality of things. But he wasn’t nervous: on the contrary, he found that he had that heightened awareness of what he was doing and the effect it would have on others, which usually only came to him on stage. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have kept things back. It was foolish of me.’

  ‘It was more than foolish, Mr Carey. We have to ask ourselves why you did such a thing.’

  ‘I’m gay, Mr Lambert. Perhaps you knew that. I’ve found it pays me to conceal that, in some contexts. I’ve no great experience of dealing with the police. Some of my friends tell me that there is a high incidence of homophobia among male police officers.’

  ‘You’re out of date, Mr Carey. You’re also intelligent. You must have realized that lying during a murder investigation could only bring suspicion on you. I’m forced to conclude that you had a greater reason for your dishonesty. Whatever it was, you’re now a murder suspect.’

  ‘I was always that. You made that clear enough to me on Friday. I was unable to provide you with an alibi then, because I live alone here. You questioned me about my actions on the night when Terry Logan was killed and I had no one to back up my story that I came back here and stayed here from about nine thirty onwards. I panicked a little and kept my mouth shut about how well I knew Terry. It may not be praiseworthy in me, but it is surely understandable.’

  Lambert tried not to be nettled by the young man’s coolness under fire. ‘You didn’t merely keep your mouth shut. You deliberately lied to us, Mr Carey. You’d better give us the full details of your dealings with Mr Logan.’

  ‘I lived with him for almost a year when I was twenty.’ After his previous evasions, the directness of this was dramatic, as he had intended it to be. He could never resist extracting the maximum impact from a situation. He acknowledged that to himself now with a wry smile. ‘That should be honest enough for you, Chief Superintendent, if a little belated.’

  ‘You lived with him in the house he was occupying at the time of his death?’ Lambert felt as if he had finally netted this exotic butterfly. Now he had to pin him down.

  ‘I did. We were fairly discreet about it, but I did. He said at the time that discretion was necessary because of his teaching job at the comprehensive. I later came to the conclusion that the secrecy was because he wanted to indulge in other, more random and casual, liaisons.’ Michael was proud of the even, balanced way he delivered that, without any evidence of the pain which this dawning knowledge had brought to him at the time.

  ‘How did this affair end?’

  ‘It wasn’t an affair, Mr Lambert. We were both of us free agents, conducting a partnership. Or so I thought at the time.’ He looked at the faces in front of him, then at his perfectly groomed nails, as if to emphasize the calmness he was acting out. ‘It ended in the way I suppose most of these things do; with mutual recriminations and much bitterness, on my side at least. When I look at Terry Logan more dispassionately now, I’m not sure that he was capable of deep feelings or real passion, so perhaps he wasn’t as bitter as I was.’

  ‘And yet, despite this admitted bitterness, you were anxious to get together with this man again. It doesn’t make sense, does it?’

  Michael allowed himself a small, rueful smile: he mustn’t allow himself any real mirth or it would detract from his role as the penitent. ‘It does, actually, if you understand the theatre. Terry Logan was the best director I’ve ever worked with. He was also offering me the chance to play the lead in Hamlet.

  That was a combination which stronger characters than mine would have found it difficult to resist.’

  John Lambert frowned. It was preposterous reasoning, he told himself: if you hated a man, you didn’t agree to work with him again in some tinpot amateur Shakespeare production. But even as he told himself this, it was his own argument which sounded ridiculous, and Carey’s which sounded convincing. The handsome young man sat there with that self-deprecating, slightly apologetic air, and convinced them that he would have made almost any concession for the chance of playing the gloomy Dane. Perhaps his argument rang true simply because he so obviously believed it himself.

  ‘The more obvious explanation is that you took the opportunity of getting near to Terry Logan to give yourself the chance of revenge,’ Lambert said sourly. ‘A theatrical enterprise was obviously your best and perhaps your only opportunity of achieving that.’

  Michael gave a slow, puzzled smile, then nodded, minimally and slowly, as if accepting a line of reasoning he had never considered before. He brought it off very well, he thought. He told himself not to overplay, not to enjoy what he was doing too much. He might be playing a game with these two much older men, but it was a deadlv serious game. ‘I can see the logic of that, now that you put it to me. The trouble is that I don’t think like a policeman, you see. I might not have got myself into this situation if I had managed to do that.’

  Bert Hook had seen how brilliant the young man was on stage. He had missed no dramatic opportunity in his lines or his movements, even in that first rehearsal, where others had been stumbling. It struck him now that good actors were opportunists, that this might be an opportunist’s murder.

  Bert said bluntly, ‘I can’t see how you would get a better chance of revenge than by taking part in a play which Terry Logan was directing.’

  ‘And Hamlet is a revenge play, isn’t it?’ Here was the occasion to show a little of his knowledge about drama to these lumpen policemen. ‘It’s a classic example of Shakespeare taking a crude formula and using it to produce something much more than that.’ Michael seemed to be genuinely excited by the coincidence.

  Bert watched him brush his hand through his mass of fair hair as the animation of the parallel took him over, and tried not to be swayed by the brilliance of the performance. He said calmly, sticking resolutely to his point, ‘And no doubt a young man like you would subscribe also to the notion that “Revenge is a kind of wild justice”.’

  Michael grinned: a genuine, winning grin this time. ‘A policeman who quotes the Bard. I shall spread this abroad.’

  ‘It’s Francis Bacon actually, not Shakespeare.’ Bert Hook tried not to sound smug - and failed. That thought about revenge was dredged up from the old Barnardo’s days, not the Open University. They’d been strong on moralist essays, in the home and the school he’d attended. ‘I think you’ll find that Bacon goes on to say that the law must be supreme and must control such urges in men. That’s where policemen come in. I was with you until around nine o’clock on Wednesday evening. Tell us again what you did after you left me and the others in Mettlesham Village Hall.’

  ‘I told you that on Friday.’

  ‘And on Friday you also denied any previous close connections with the dead man. You’ve now totally revised that section of your story and told us that you lived with Mr Logan for almost a year. I’m giving you the opportunity to revise your account of your movements on the evening of his death.’ Michael looked at Bert Hook more in sorrow than in anger, the way the ghost looked at Hamlet in the play. He was trying to convey the thought that he would have expected more consideration from a fellow acting enthusiast. ‘I drove back here in my faithful old black Fiesta.’ He liked to mention the car whenever he could: it showed that even a man with his exotic intellect had no pretensions to flashy material things. ‘I remained here alone for the rest of the evening. I have no witness to that. I am sorry for my sake and for yours that it should be so - more for mine than for yours, needless to say - but I cannot make it otherwise.’ He gave them an apologetic but reasonable smile.

  Bert resisted the impulse to answer with a smile of his own: this was altogether too winning a young man. ‘So who do you think killed this man whom you have confessed to hating?’

  Michael pursed his lips and frowned, as if wondering whether to contest this notion of hate before he answered the question. He carefully avoi
ded any suggestion of insolence as he said apologetically, ‘I’ve really no idea. I’ve thought about it a lot since Wednesday night, of course, as is only natural. One of the cast, I should think, wouldn’t you?’

  Lambert stood up and looked at the draft of an advertising poster which Carey was working on at the far end of the room. It had been placed on the desk there almost like a stage prop, as if to demonstrate that this man had other skills as well as the stage ones which everyone recognized. Lambert wanted to say that hands as meticulous and skilful as this could easily have been the ones which slit Logan’s throat so precisely. Instead, he said acerbically, ‘Mr Casey, you’ve radically altered your story, as DS Hook has just pointed out. If there are any further changes or any further thoughts on who killed the man you hated, no doubt you will get in touch with us immediately.’

  ‘Of course I will, Chief Superintendent Lambert. And apologies once again for my foolish attempts at deception.’ Michael Carey gave them the modest smile of the penitent as he held open the door for them.

  Lambert and Hook were unusually well-dressed for golf.

  New sweaters had come out. Trousers were freshly laundered and had creases: they had lost that distinctive soiling around the turnups which comes from muddy autumn golf. Lambert had even chosen the occasion to launch his new waterproof winter golf shoes, which were of a white so dazzling and uncharacteristic that friends of his pretended to shield their eyes in the changing room. Hook was resplendent in the expensive woollen sweater which had been given him for his last birthday, which he had hitherto designated as far too good for golf.

  Playing with a young woman was a new experience for them.

  Chris Rushton was his usual smart self. Rushton was an example, Hook thought darkly, of life’s inherent unfairness. With his slim, lithe frame and chiselled features, Chris was a man upon whom clothes invariably chose to sit well, whereas on him even expensive garments soon looked untidy, as if they took exception to the burly figure allotted to them for their display.