Bring Forth Your Dead

by Gregson, J. M.

  ‘All right. Let me lock this car up.’ The thin shoulders dropped, the spanner was placed on the floor of the car and PC Davies half-turned towards his own vehicle. He had won the little contest of machismo he had set up for himself. The youth leaned across the car towards the far door, with a gleam of contempt in the eyes PC Davies could no longer see. This policeman who had been so anxious to throw his weight about was not as clever as he pretended: he had not even realised that the modern Lotus was bound to have central locking.

  The engine roared into life in the same instant that the driver’s door slammed shut. By the time the constable realised what was happening, his prey had almost escaped. The throaty roar of the Lotus’s sports engine jeered at his astonished face as the coupe leapt smoothly away. By the time his hasty, clumsy fingers had turned the key of the Fiesta, the low black shape had rounded the corner a hundred yards away. By the time he turned that corner himself, the Lotus was almost out of sight. His man was gone. Reluctantly, he radioed the news and turned back towards the Station. Another bloody rollicking.

  Not many drivers are foolish enough to take on the traffic police. They are among the best drivers in the land, in vehicles tuned and serviced to guarantee safe handling at high speeds. But fear makes people behave foolishly, and the young man in the Lotus was now filled with that rising, irrational fear which sharpens reflexes but makes the normal processes of reason cease to function. As the police Rover turned on its siren and eased on to the road behind him, he gunned the accelerator pedal and panicked. Very foolish.

  He turned on to the coast road, where the black ribbon of tarmac ran straight for long patches and the turbo-charged 2.2 litres might tell in his favour. And for a time it did. His acceleration was superior to the Rover’s; he wound it up quickly and watched the white car and its blue flashing light growing smaller in his mirror. It was a good thing he had finished servicing the car before his unwelcome visitor arrived. He wondered grimly if the owner would approve of the road test now in progress. He passed a middle-aged man in a red Sierra as if he were stationary, catching a sideways glimpse of the driver’s face, vivid with astonished outrage.

  The sergeant strapped firmly into the passenger seat of the police Rover watched their quarry as the needle crept past the hundred mark and their speed reached the point where the siren seemed to be behind rather than above them. ‘That kid can drive,’ he said, with the reluctant admiration of one expert for another. It was true, and it was a relief. Too many of the men they chased—it was always men, and often in stolen vehicles—drove like madmen once they knew they were pursued by the police. The constant nightmare was a chase ending in a crash in which innocent lives would be lost through the criminal negligence of the quarry. It was a nightmare which occasionally came true, resulting in official inquiries, where the implication could be that the police pursuers had harried the guilty driver into his reckless actions.

  This pursuit did not seem likely to end like that. When the bends began to occur on this coastal road, which ran without hedges or fences along its undulating route, the youth used the full width of the road, often almost touching the verge on his right to minimize the degree of curve. But he did so only when the contours permitted him to see that there was no vehicle coming towards him in the other direction. And he used his gears like a champion rally driver, making sure that his speed never slackened more than it had to. The driver of the police vehicle had experience on his side, and all the advantages of a system with huge resources. So long as he kept the Lotus in sight, they would get him eventually. There was no need for heroics, with the risks they involved. He was twelve years older than PC Davies, and felt no need to prove himself. His companion radioed to his colleagues in the traffic police for help, while he strove only to keep within range of the flying Lotus.

  The youth was a strange mixture of absolute concentration and blind terror. As always when he drove fast in a car like this, there was the feeling of man and machine operating as one, of moving in a more rarefied world than the tawdry one he existed in for the rest of his life, of a misery of this better world and its rules. Yet he knew he should not have fled. The sight of the uniform, of the arrogance it gave to a face not much older than his own, had upset his judgement and made him forget the promises he had made to himself and others.

  And he knew he would not succeed. He was not even sure what he was trying to do. His flight had been the reaction of a frightened animal. He had no idea of where he was going, no goal which would represent safety for him. And he was not stupid: he knew that the resources ranged against him would have to win in the end. Today would shatter the life he had been building. The human brain works with astonishing speed in a crisis, but inconsequently. As the youth’s speed approached two miles a minute on the last long straight stretch of the road above the sea, he was wondering how to explain to the man who had trusted him to service this beautiful car exactly why he had used it as he had.

  They were coming now to the outskirts of Weston-Super-Mare. At this speed, the first houses leapt at them with startling speed, as if they had an independent motion of their own. The youth saw an identical police Rover coming out from the town with flashing lights to meet him, and knew in that moment that the pack would hunt him down in the labyrinth of streets they knew so much better than he. He swung away from the sea and the approaching car on a left fork in the road, the only way he could take. Already they were controlling his movements: the world of high speed, where he had felt in control, was behind him now. As if to reinforce the notion, the first red-circled 40 signs flashed past him and red brick walls closed out the sky.

  The Rover which had followed him from the start closed up behind him on this road, its siren clearing a safe path for it through the thin traffic. The sergeant radioed the details of their position and movements to his colleagues; his eyes never left the tail of the black Lotus. Both he and the driver knew that the only way their prey could escape them now was to double back somehow on to the way he had come.

  The youth knew it too. He was looking for a turning which might allow him to rejoin the coast road by following a rough square. His mind raced ahead to where he could then go if he was successful. Not back to his own place, obviously. He began to evolve a vague, crazy plan to take the Lotus back to its owner and ask for his protection against the persecution of the law.

  Disaster on the roads often comes from the most unexpected quarter. The traffic police were aware of that. They looked upon old ladies in Morris Minors with different eyes from other men. Perhaps they would have been just marginally more prepared for the actions of this one than the youth. She came out of the drive of a big house on his right, hidden by high privet hedges until she was almost on the road. And when she approached that road, she looked only briefly to her right, towards the centre of the town, where she was used to seeing vehicles. Not at all to her left, where the youth and his police pursuers were bearing down upon her at a speed she had never approached in her life. Slowly, inexorably, she pulled across the road and into the path of the Lotus.

  The police driver was still a hundred yards behind the black coupe when these events began to unfold in apparent slow motion before him. Unusually in modern policemen under thirty, he was a regular churchgoer, but he snarled an involuntary ‘Jesus Christ!’ as he drove his right foot on to the brake pedal.

  The youth had just spotted a turning he thought might offer possibilities when the wall of light green metal moved into his vision on his right. The Lotus had brakes befitting a car of its performance, and his reaction could not have been faster. But there was no question of his stopping in the distance between the two cars. he stood on the brakes, felt his weight thrown fully on to that desperate right foot as the car responded instantly and his body continued forward, even had time as he went into the skid to regret that he had never had the chance to fasten his safety-belt.

  Still the small green car came on, and still the tiny white-haired figure did not look at the car hurtling to
wards her. The youth, gripping the steering-wheel with a strength he had not known he possessed, turned the car automatically into the skid as the tyres screamed agonisingly and the tired old eyes, turning belatedly upon him, seemed to widen until they filled the whole face. The Lotus slid up to the green metal wall, like a ship coming too rapidly to berth. Then, miraculously, as the Morris straightened on to its appointed path along the road, the black coupe, wheels still locked, responded to the efforts of the man at the wheel and swung away, up on to the deserted pavement, passing between the old green Morris and a low garden wall with three inches to spare on each side, as if it were an arrow shot from a bow instead of a car that was still not under control.

  As the elderly driver of the Morris slewed her car sideways into an appropriately geriatric emergency stop, the Lotus rocked crazily between its front bumper and a concrete lamp standard and was back on the road. In almost the same instant, the police Rover passed the green Morris more conventionally on the right and dropped in behind its quarry.

  The youth turned left, and the sergeant in the passenger seat of the Rover shouted ‘Gotcha, mate!’ through lips that were still dry. For the driver of the Lotus, still bringing his crazily bucking charge under control, had had no chance to see the red bar that denoted a cul-de-sac on the sign above him.

  It would in truth have made little difference if he had. For the youth, with mind reeling from the carnage that should have been, was in no condition to elude them now. He was too good a driver to deceive himself that skill alone had saved him and the woman he might have killed; he knew that luck had been heavily on his side. And the knowledge shook him. He drove down the lane watching his own hands trembling on the wheel. When he came to the great slab of the factory wall and found that there was no way out, it was almost a relief.

  When the traffic policemen opened the driver’s door of the Lotus and ordered him out, he found that his legs would hardly support him. They spread him against the side of the Rover, with his arms splayed thinly across the roof, to search him: he had, after all, fled from the police, and they did not know why he was required by the CID of a neighbouring force. He might just have a weapon, or drugs. And the adrenalin was high in them too, from the chase and the crash that had seemed inevitable.

  When they found nothing in the pockets of the tight, thin jeans, the sergeant said, ‘Right lad, you’re nicked. Get into the back of the car.’ He did not speak too roughly, for he was still full of the relief of the accident avoided and the skill this boy had shown at the wheel. And their quarry no longer held any threat; he was going to go quietly, in the phrase they heard so often since the advent of TV cops.

  The sergeant, who had seen far too much drama and tragedy on the roads, knew as the youth did not that it was a normal enough reaction to shock. As they took Andrew Lewis back past the Morris Minor he had so nearly hit, he was silently weeping.

  11

  For a woman who had recently inherited four hundred thousand pounds, Angela Harrison lived in modest circumstances.

  The semi-detached ‘thirties house was too close to its neighbour to have a garage; a parking-space had been paved in front of its cream front door. There was more privacy at the back of the house; it had a narrow rear garden which ran down to a disused canal that was covered in emerald weed. Hook surveyed this garden from the living-room window, estimating with an expert’s eye the lines of Brussels sprouts and spring cabbage which dominated the vegetable plot in this winter season. It occupied over half of the land behind the house: the Sergeant approved this evidence of husbandry in an age he found frivolous in its preference for the herbaceous border.

  It was a quiet place in the late morning, with children at school and many of the houses shut against the world. After the lofty remoteness of Edmund Craven’s Edwardian mansion and the confident comfort of Walter Miller’s older village house, this was a meaner place, with its cramped hall and through lounge. Yet a comfortable enough place a better spot than most people could choose to settle, even in England, Hook reminded himself automatically. Such thoughts came unprompted to a man who had been a Barnardo’s boy, who still congratulated himself each night upon the privacy and independence afforded him by his own modest modern house. To Bert, his mortgage was not the millstone that he heard his neighbours talk about, but a talisman of his success in a world where these things had to be won.

  Lambert would not have recognised Craven’s daughter from the photographs of her in childhood and adolescence which they had seen at Tall Timbers. The records which Hook and the team in the murder room at CID had begun to compile for him told him that she was thirty-six: he would have taken her for a year or two older than that. Her face had the strong, regular bone-structure which recalled the handsome young woman of those aging photographs. And with the thought came the knowledge of why he had probed Walter Miller about Edmund Craven’s relationship with his grandchildren: nowhere in Craven’s house had he seen a picture which included those children, or even his daughter after she became a mother. Unusual, curious even, though his detective’s mind made the reservation that such things might always have been removed by some other, unknown hand after the old man’s death.

  Angela Harrison had unusual grey-green eyes; her face was framed by dark brown hair. Lambert thought inconsequentially that she must once have been as blond as his own daughter, and he saw for an instant the happy laughter of early childhood and lost innocence upon the sober features before him. The vertical lines which ran between her eyes and down from the corners of her mouth were etched a little more deeply than they should have been. But the face was vigorous, not defeated; if it held a certain wary vigilance, Lambert could see her in a different context from this as a striking woman, dominating the company. Striking, not beautiful, just as in her youth she had been handsome rather than pretty; did the words represent anything more than a male presumption, and an individual one at that?

  ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ he said to Bert Hook as his Sergeant contemplated the vegetable plot; Angela Harrison had gone into the hall to answer a phone call before they could even begin.

  ‘No, sir?’ said Bert. He wondered what Shakespeare would have made of photofit pictures: he had never seen anyone but the blackest villains in those. ‘Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ He did not know that his cliché was a quotation, or he might have avoided it. The only quotation he really approved was the one embracing detection’s code words of observation and deduction, and that only because Holmes had been immortalised for him by his boyhood reading in the Barnardo’s library. Even the derision of the CID for fictional amateurs had not been able to eliminate the watchwords of the old junkie for his loyal adherent; were they not the very raison d’être of the CID?

  So Bert and his chief looked round now at the room hastily tidied for their visit, noting the children’s books in the corner, the old typewriter upon the scratched oak table, the sideboard with its crowded collection of family photographs, the tiled fireplace which might be in demand for its rarity if its ‘thirties design of three blending shades of green could be preserved for a few more years. John Lambert, looking at the paraphernalia of a busy, unexceptional life that was everywhere revealed, thought how little the poor, which these days included the struggling genteel, could conceal of themselves.

  There was little trace here of the man of this house: he wondered whether he had one of the small bedrooms upstairs to stow the materials of his life, or whether he kept them at his place of work. He recalled Walter Miller’s speculation that the struggling professional artist might have been envious of old Craven’s spacious studio facilities. For the rest, much of the life of this small family was on show here, as it would not have been in a larger house where they had room to spread themselves and conceal the evidence from curious eyes like his.

  Bert Hook looked at the swimming certificates, the cut-down golf clubs, the books on birds and football, the old mongrel dog with its chin obstinately
in his hand, and thought that there could be happiness in a place like this. Not more than in a place like Tall Timbers; Bert, who had endured a superfluity of such sentiments from a series of well-meaning house-mothers in two homes, was sturdily resistant to such Victorian platitudes, which he saw as designed to keep upwardly mobile individuals like him in his place. He had only learned two days ago that that was what he was; he was waiting for the moment of maximum effect to visit the phrase upon his chief, in the secure knowledge that the Superintendent would be duly appalled by it.

  ‘I’m sorry about that. Do sit down.’ Angela Harrison was back with them, tall and slim, with a natural poise which made her dominate the narrow room, striving to seem at her ease in a situation where it would hardly be natural for her to be so. She had dressed to receive them, in a formal grey suit which was beautifully pressed, but sufficiently out of fashion for even a Superintendent with the sketchiest knowledge of such things to realise that it must be some years old. She sat opposite them on the suite with its fading loose covers, skirt pulled demurely over the knees of her long legs. ‘I know now about my father. It seems incredible, but I have to accept it.’ She looked at him unblinkingly, a small smile fixed upon the wide lips. Her expression made Lambert think for a reason he could not define that this still-young face had seen much suffering, and came through it. He wondered how much pain her father’s death and its present ramifications had brought to her.

  ‘You understand, then, that we have to be interested initially in those people who had regular access to your father during the last six months or so of his life.’

  ‘Yes. Five of us.’ He thought wryly that he should have come to her first: she would not have allowed him to overlook Andrew Lewis. He was still embarrassed about that. ‘I know all of them quite well. I have to face the fact that one of them killed my father.’