[Lambert and Hook 20] - Something Is Rotten

by J M Gregson

  ‘Did you kill him?’

  The simple, shocking question surprised the speaker as well as Jack. Becky had been conscious of no intention to ask it. She added weakly, ‘Before you came looking for me, I mean.’

  ‘No.’The monosyllable was barely audible. He stretched his slim right leg out in front of him, watched her smaller foot follow his; any sort of movement was welcome to release their joint tension. ‘Did you?’

  ‘No.’ A stronger and more determined denial than his had been.

  ‘You could have done, you know. You were carrying a blade.’

  She didn’t know that he’d been aware of that. She wondered if the shape had shown under her tight jeans or whether he had felt the knife when she pressed herself hard against him on the pillion of the Yamaha. She said limply, ‘I didn’t use it, though.’

  Jack went on as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘You could simply have waited there whilst I went off looking for you, and killed him as he came out to his car. It didn’t need any great strength. Anyone who took him by surprise from behind could have slit that wanker’s throat.’

  ‘I suppose so. I didn’t.’ She felt nothing at all, as if she was listening to someone else’s denial.

  Each of them felt the other’s limbs relaxing on the shabby, lumpy sofa; each of them wondered in the silence how much they believed the other’s denial.

  Jack Dawes tried to force conviction into his voice as he said, ‘Well, that’s all right, then.’

  Ian Proudfoot didn’t want to talk about the death of Terry Logan, but his mind was drawn back to it constantly. As he washed the dishes at the sink after their evening meal, he felt Angela’s presence in the kitchen behind him. He didn’t turn round but continued with the methodical, mindless work, as if innocent actions could reflect an innocent mind.

  ‘You changed your story to the police when they came here on Friday.’ Her voice was sour, recriminatory. She’d already had a go at him for bringing the squalor of a murder investigation into her innocent house.

  He didn’t turn round, didn’t cease his careful stacking of the plates in the drainage rack. ‘I had to change it, Angela. I’d tried to conceal that embarrassing episode when he threw Sophie out of the school play, but they’d found out about that. They’ve found out a lot of things over the last few days.’

  ‘If you ask me, you should never have been in that damned Hamlet. I said so at the time.’

  ‘Yes, you did. Repeatedly. And as it’s turned out, you were probably right. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.’

  He should have known by now that irony was not the best tactic with Angela. She studied his stooped back at the sink and said waspishly, ‘What time did you actually get in on Wednesday night?’

  He stopped dead for a moment, watching the white foam slide slowly down the back of his hands. Then he forced himself to resume, to treat this most important thing as a careless trifle, as Kipling had taught him to do in his far-off schooldays. But he was almost at the end of his task, and when he had set the last dish on the drainer, he had to turn and face his truculent wife. As evenly as he could, he said, ‘What do you mean, Angela?’

  ‘It’s a straightforward enough question, surely. You were stupid enough to lie to nosy coppers in the first place. You tried to conceal the complaints we’d made to the school about his treatment of Sophie in the play and the trouble Logan had given you at the bank by way of reprisal.’

  ‘You were as upset as me about Logan at the time. I just didn’t want our dirty linen washed in public. That might have been stupid, but it was understandable.’

  Her expression of contempt for him did not change. She went on as if he had never spoken. ‘Apparently you told them at your first meeting that you’d been back here at half past nine, and expected me to support you in that lie. On Friday, when they exposed you and produced a witness who’d seen you in the pub at Calford, you then told them that you’d left there at around half past ten and been back here before eleven.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But you weren’t back at that time, were you? Perhaps you just lie all the time now and your wife is the last one to notice. They say that that is often the case, don’t they?’

  ‘Angela, I don’t lie to you. I don’t know why you should think that—’

  ‘I’m asking you a simple enough question. What time did you actually get back to this house on Wednesday night?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t watching the clock at the time, was I? Probably at about the time I told the police I got here.’

  ‘Oh, no. I’m not having that. I went to bed at eleven o’clock, and there was no sign of you then.’ She smiled at him vindictively, as he stood in front of her, a ridiculous figure with his back to the sink, his glasses sliding down his nose, and his sleeves rolled up over his thin, sinewy, pathetic arms. She couldn’t see what she had ever seen in him that was desirable. How had she rolled in bed with this balding, apprehensive figure and produced four children? She said spitefully, ‘You’re not used to having to account for yourself, are you? You don’t have to do it at the bank - or when you’re posturing about the stage in those plays.’

  ‘Angela, don’t.’ For a moment, he saw only the petulant hatred of him in her face, and he was beset by a wild temptation to tell her that he was the murderer of Terry Logan, that he would now have to silence her too if she was not going to be more cooperative. He did nothing of the sort, of course. He said quietly, ‘Angela, does it have to be like this?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. I’m simply trying to get an explanation of—’

  ‘I don’t know what time I left that pub. There’s no reason why I should have checked my watch as I left, is there? If I was a little later back here than I said, there’s surely nothing very sinister in that, is there?’

  She wanted to tell him that if he was much later than he’d said, he could have killed off the man she knew he hated, that if that was what had happened and he wanted her to lie for him, he should come straight out with it and be done with it. But her tongue, which had previously been so active, was suddenly stilled. She didn’t want to voice any more questions, didn’t want to hear any more answers.

  Angela Proudfoot was the victim of a sudden, startling, frightening tenderness. She said limply, ‘You’ve been very foolish, haven’t you, Ian?’

  Michael Carey didn’t think of himself as dishonest.

  He knew more about himself now than he had done a few years ago, but he saw himself as a loner most of the time, a man who liked to watch the world around him and keep his own counsel about what he saw. When you were gay, he felt it paid to be cautious about your private life, even amidst the supposed enlightenment of the twenty-first century. That in turn tended to make him a little ruthless, perhaps rather cavalier about the emotions of those who lived their lives around him.

  He knew now that there were times when you had to act and it was best then to act decisively.

  Nevertheless, he was not always fair to people, Michael decided, as he drove back to Warwick. It was his conscience that had prompted his return. He hadn’t meant to go back there after he had spoken to the fuzz, but the memory of Tom Baldwin’s white, vulnerable face, sad as a chastened puppy’s, as he drove away, had popped up in his mind’s eye for the rest of the day. It wasn’t so far to drive back, after all. Moreover, the stirrings of sexual excitement which he had felt after the danger of his interview had disturbed him for the rest of the day. By dusk, he was springing into his car and heading cheerfully north-east, towards Shakespeare country and the comely young man who awaited him in Warwick.

  Tom was delighted to see him, as Michael had known he would be: his face lit up as he opened the door of his flat and saw that his lover had returned. It was always delightful to feel genuinely welcome, and Michael set himself out to be accommodating and pleasant. He had no idea how long this latest relationship would last, but you owed a certain amount of honesty to a partner.

  For Michael Carey, that w
as a novel concept.

  He moved restlessly about the neat, modern flat which was so different from his own residence, firing off witty, brilliant phrases, watching Tom Baldwin’s delight at his fertile vocabulary and his easy dismissal of life’s tribulations. Then he realized abruptly that he was doing what he loved to do, what he did for most of his life, often without even realizing that he was doing it.

  He was determining a role for himself and acting it out; playing a part rather than being himself. Everyone did it, he knew; everyone needed to conceal a little of his real self from the world around him. But he did it more than most. Perhaps that was because he did it better than most: he tried to prick the bubble of vanity which contained that thought, and failed.

  Role-playing might be all right for the world at large, but you owed those who were close to you something of yourself. A lot of yourself, even; certainly more than he had previously been prepared to give to Tom. Michael Carey stopped moving, sat down with uncharacteristic heaviness upon the leather sofa, ran a hand through his hair with sudden weariness and dropped his bitter, brilliant gibes about the police. He said, ‘Actually, Tom, it wasn’t fun. It was no fun at all.’

  Tom Baldwin’s smile dropped away as suddenly as Michael’s mood had changed. ‘But the police surely can’t think that you killed this man Logan.’

  ‘Who knows what they think, young Tom? Who knows what anyone thinks, most of the time? I’ll tell you one thing, my inexperienced young friend: don’t underestimate the CID. I think I did, to be honest.’ Not a phrase he used very often, Michael thought in sour self-knowledge.

  ‘But it was all right, wasn’t it? You gave them what help you could and left them to it, surely?’

  Michael was tempted to go off on one of his dazzling, brittle, philosophical discourses in the face of such naivety. Tom, he knew, would be a receptive and rewarding audience. He rejected the temptation and said with abrupt simplicity, ‘I lived with that man Logan for almost a year.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘No. That’s why I’m telling you now. And you can wipe that hurt rabbit look off your face, Tom. It had nothing to do with us.’

  The wide, hurt, infinitely vulnerable eyes looked into his. ‘How can you say that? You kept something from me.’

  ‘It was four years ago. Long before I’d ever met you. In another life. When I was a very different person.’ All of that was true: Michael ticked off the phrases to check that he was being honest. ‘Terry Logan knew a lot about the theatre. I think I was bowled over by that. When he said he fancied me, he had something going with a woman nearer to his own age - a married woman. He ditched her like a shot and laughed in her face. I should have divined something from that. Logan didn’t give a damn for her or for anyone else except himself.’

  ‘You sound very bitter.’

  ‘I am. Or I was at the time.’ Michael grinned at himself for this caution where it was not needed. ‘There are lots of people around my neck of the woods who hated Terry Logan.’

  ‘But the police think you killed him.’

  The high, brittle sound of Michael’s laughter rang curiously in the low-ceilinged modern flat. ‘I don’t know what the fuzz think, Tom. I gave a good account of myself, to judge by the way they reacted. Told them I’d been too embarrassed to talk about living with Logan when they first saw me. Poured it all out in a rush this morning and played the penitent, inexperienced young man for them. Rather successfully, I think, although I say it myself.’

  Tom Baldwin waited for what seemed to him a long time to see if Michael would say anything else. Then he said slowly, ‘You play a lot of parts, don’t you, Michael? Spend a lot of your life acting the roles you decide to play for the people who are with you at the time.’

  It was so precisely his own criticism of himself as he had driven here in the car that Michael Carey was shocked. Shocked by the perception of this inexperienced partner as much as by the accusation. It was ironic that it had come just at the time when he had determined to be honest. But life seemed to be increasingly full of ironies. One of the worst ones was that it should have been necessary for Terry Logan to die just when he had offered him the part of the Prince in Hamlet. A part to kill for, in the ordinary order of things: another irony there.

  Michael said, ‘I suppose I do choose to play certain roles at certain times. Everyone does, don’t they? But perhaps I do it more than most, because I’m so interested in acting, you see. But I wonder if that might even be something I should indulge in myself, now that I’m going to RADA.’ He wrinkled his brow on that thought. Just when he was trying to be honest with innocent Tom Baldwin, he was accused of acting. Just when he honestly accepted the claim, here he was asserting that perhaps it was something he needed to do.

  Tom said, as if it were another accusation, ‘I don’t really know you at all, do I?’

  ‘Which of us knows everything about anyone, Tom? We all have our little secrets, even from those closest to us. Perhaps we need a degree of privacy. I sometimes think that some of us have secrets even from ourselves, in that we do not acknowledge the darker parts of our psyches.’

  ‘Feelings are just a theme for philosophical discussion to you, aren’t they, Michael? Not a source of emotional turmoil.’

  ‘Let’s leave it, shall we, Tom? I’ve had quite enough questioning for one day. I don’t fancy any more examination, even if it’s self- examination.’

  They had what on the surface was a relaxed evening, though the conversation between them was sporadic and trivial. At eight o’clock, Michael said, ‘I’ll stay the night. I can get up early and drive back in not much more than an hour.’

  It was the first time that Tom Baldwin had not been delighted by such an offer. At two o’clock in the morning he was still awake. Things kept passing through his brain as if on a looped tape. Tom was reviewing all the little cruelties, enumerating the thoughtless acts of violence, which he had seen in the man who lay soundly asleep beside him.

  You could be very intimate with someone, and yet know nothing about the dangerous side of him.

  Twenty-One

  One of the facts which the murder investigation had established beyond all reasonable doubt was that the murder victim had not been an admirable human being. He had been a talented director of theatrical productions, but this was excellence in a congested industry. For the rest, an overcrowded planet might well be better off without the likes of Terence Charles Logan. But the law had to take its course, and the law said that the hunt for Logan’s killer should be pursued as vigorously as if he had been a saint.

  Two unlikely sufferers from this death emerged in the Bert Hook household. Jack and Luke found it difficult to confront the idea that their father’s promising dramatic career might have been nipped in the bud by this untimely death. ‘You surely can’t give up now. Dad,’ said eleven-vear-old Luke. ‘Not when you’re on the verge of stardom.’

  ‘Playing Polonius in an amateur production of Hamlet does not represent even a hint of stardom,’ said Hook firmly.

  ‘I read the other day that Sir Ian McKellen says he’s too old to play Hamlet now, but thinks he could still make a good hand of Polonius.’

  ‘I expect he could, too,’ said Bert, rather relishing the idea of the eminent theatrical knight in the role which had escaped him.

  ‘Shows what a triumph you’d have had in the part, that does! You’ve an enormous amount in common with Sir Ian, haven’t you, Dad? Both off and on the stage.’ Jack Hook shone a wide, enthusiastic smile towards his father’s bewildered face, then studied the back of the cereal packet as if it had acquired a compelling interest for him.

  Bert decided that he would not pursue these comparisons. ‘My impulse to tread the boards will have to be regretfully abandoned.’ He was amazed to find that the regret was genuine: he had eventually been filled with anticipation as well as trepidation by his minimal involvement in the now aborted Hamlet. He thought back to the time when the formidable Mrs Dalrymple had come
to the house to persuade him that his participation was necessary for the success of the enterprise, remembered how he had fought hard but ineffectively to resist the tide of her persuasion. It couldn’t be much more than two weeks since that contest; it seemed now to belong to a different era.

  ‘You could play a character in a soap, Dad,’ said Luke, reluctant to leave this fertile breakfast theme. ‘A drunk, perhaps. I could see you being good as a drunk - you’ve got the build for it. You could even corner the market in drunks, if you got yourself a good agent.’

  Eleanor Hook, listening from the next room, decided that she could not enter the kitchen because she would never be able to keep her face straight. Her boys were growing up remarkably fast. That was sad in many ways, but it had its compensations.

  Jack Hook now said thoughtfully, ‘Mr Williams from school says that our church in the village needs what he calls a “robust baritone”. That could be you, Dad. Then you could go on to do musicals. Dance about with all those girls in tights and strike poses.’ He threw himself on one knee with arms outstretched and mimed a top-note finish to a show hit.

  ‘You watch too much television,’ said Bert severely. ‘And if you’re not ready for off in two minutes, you can walk to school.’

  Twenty minutes later, he watched the boys leap from the car and run eagerly towards their fellows. Bert marvelled as he often did at this point about the contrast between their boisterous joy in youth at home and school and the more muted existence of his own youth, as a boy who went back to the institution at the end of each school day.

  He drove steadily on towards Oldford Police Station, reviewing the process of his reluctant involvement in Hamlet and the surprising sadness he felt at being deprived of the experience. In retrospect, he decided that it was something which stirred in his subconscious mind at this point which gave him the ultimate clue to the case.