‘I doubt it, sir. He still seems to be watching us over his shoulder: almost skulking about on his own patch, if you know what I mean.’
Lambert thought this quite a vivid description from a lad which was how he thought of twenty-three-year-olds nowadays—on his first CID assignment. It was Rushton, not noted for a psychological approach to crime, who now said, ‘Has David Craven the nerve to carry through a murder like this? Watching an old man—a parent in his case—die a protracted death, which he could presumably have called off at any stage?’
Lambert said immediately, ‘That’s certainly a point to bear in mind.’ He was glad to have something to praise from his immediate subordinate, for he felt he was becoming less than objective about Rushton. ‘I agree it doesn’t seem his kind of murder, but there are two things we should remember. First there are plenty of instances of men in desperate situations behaving out of character when driven into a corner of some kind. Secondly, this kind of killing often turns out to be a matter of collusion between two or more of the parties involved; if that were the case, I certainly wouldn’t rule out David Craven.’
Dr Burgess, who had kept quiet for what was for him an inordinately long time in deference to his dubious status in the meeting, said, ‘Oh, I’m so glad. If it has to be one of your five, I’m with Sergeant Hook: I do hope it’s David Craven.’ If Lambert’s look of high disdain was meant to abash him, it was totally ineffective.
Lambert made a single note about David Craven before he said, ‘What did you all make of Angela Harrison?’
This time no one seemed prepared to begin. It was Rushton who eventually said, striving to deal with the facts he had known this infuriating Superintendent to insist upon in the past. ‘She had ample opportunity, certainly. She was in and out of the house almost every day in those last weeks; she often took in her father’s food, and she seems to have been keener than any one that he should not miss the medicine he was taking for his heart condition. But according to what she and everyone else says, she had a great affection for the old man.’
‘Odi et amo?’ said Dr Burgess. His rather old-fashioned reading tastes led him to expect that the Great Detective would welcome a quotation from Catullus at about this stage. He was quite cast down by the blank silence which greeted his contribution.
Lambert, passing through the state education system a generation behind Burgess, had dropped Latin early in life, thus ensuring his first great flaw as a master investigator in the doctor’s assessment. He struggled for a moment before he was able to say to his colleagues, ‘I think Dr Burgess is putting the view that love and hate, the supreme passions, are never very far apart. Racine in my view puts it more cogently, but the idea is the important thing for us.’
Burgess, far from being put down, had his faith in detection restored by Lambert’s indulgence in referring to the French classicist. He said soberly, ‘I’ve known Angela Craven—Angela Harrison as she is—now for many years. I can certainly confirm that she was very close to her father. Edmund upset her when she was a child by his harsh treatment of her mother. He was very difficult over her husband, whom he dismissed as a ne’er-do-well, and even over her children, but it never seemed to stop Angela from loving him. She’s a very forthright lady, who’s always gone her own way. Great sportswoman in her youth: county tennis and badminton player. She was on the way to becoming a great golfer, but she hardly seems to play at all now.’ He stared glumly towards the high window and the great outdoors, sad at this great talent going to waste in a game he struggled ineffectively to master.
Hook thought of the picture of uncomplaining poverty he had absorbed at Angela Harrison’s rather shabby home. He was glad she had not rushed into conspicuous display of her newly inherited wealth, just as he was glad she had not hastened back into that toffee-nosed game which he fancied had become too expensive for her. He said, ‘She’s fiercely devoted to her husband and her children, I think. It must have been hard for her with her father getting more and more difficult about them as he aged, but as Dr Burgess says, she seems never to have lost her affection for him.’
Rushton had never seen Angela Harrison. With the objectivity of the outsider, he said, ‘If Craven had changed his will to cut her and his grandchildren out, it would give her every reason to remove from the scene both the draft of the new will and the father who proposed to make it.’ Burgess bridled a little at such a suggestion about a champion golfer, but he found it difficult to undermine its logic.
‘This revised will worries me,’ said Lambert. ‘It’s too elusive. I can accept, perhaps, that it was never made: that is probably why Craven was killed when he was. But it seems strange that the old man didn’t discuss it with anyone. I think at least one person would have been taken into his confidence. From everything we hear, including what Dr Burgess has just told us to confirm our own impressions, Angela Harrison would seem the most likely recipient of his thoughts. Would you agree with that, Dr Burgess? You’re the only one present who knew both father and daughter over a lengthy period.’
‘Certainly I would. And I wouldn’t rule out David Craven also as a confidant: his father had a soft spot for the prodigal son, even after all their disagreements. But it’s not impossible that Edmund was planning a new will without consultation. Old people can be very secretive about these things as they become mistrustful of those around them. And often they feel the control of their estate is the only real power left to them.’
Lambert nodded. ‘It’s also quite possible that Craven would ask for views on his new will from someone not directly concerned. He obviously came to rely more and more on Margaret Lewis as he became weaker; and he had known Walter Miller for so many years that he might have thought it appropriate to consult an old friend, who could be detached because he was not heavily involved in either the old or the new wills. I just have the feeling as I question people that one person, and perhaps more than one, knows the dispositions in the new will that was never made.’
Rushton was becoming worried about concealing his information. He had expected they would turn to the person he thought it concerned long before this. He said rather desperately, ‘What about Mrs Lewis, sir?’
Lambert shrugged. ‘In the context of our murder investigation, she remains a puzzle. She seems to have cared very conscientiously, indeed to have had a real affection, for the dead man, even when he became tetchy and difficult.’ He looked interrogatively at Burgess, who confirmed this with a nod. ‘She also had the best and most continuous access of all to the victim. And her son told me this afternoon that she was threatened by Craven with the withdrawal of the house at Burnham-on-Sea on the new will, as a result of his conduct. So she may well have had a strong motive: even the possibility of the withdrawal of the house would be a tremendous blow to someone like her. It would mean the loss of the independence afforded to a woman in her position by having her own roof over her head. I think Margaret Lewis is a woman to whom independence is important.’
Rushton said, ‘She has a nursing background, which could be significant to this case, in the light of what Dr Burgess said earlier about the acquisition and administration of arsenic.’
Bert Hook spoke up as though he were having a tooth drawn. He did not wish to denigrate the buxom Mrs Lewis, who had appealed inordinately to his staid but vulnerable heart. ‘She did conceal from us the presence in the house at the time which matters of her son, Andrew. That might be no more than foolishness: not many people are very balanced when their children are concerned.’ He thought for a moment of his own children, still both below the age of ten, and the things he might do to protect them.
‘With a son with his record, perhaps it was only to be expected,’ said Rushton harshly. He pressed on before Hook could marshal any defence of Andrew Lewis, for he had more urgent things to say. He addressed himself directly to Lambert. ‘The scene of crime team has been most meticulous, sir. Most of the materials they have come up with have been merely routine findings: mainly hairs and clothing fi
bres which confirm the presence in the house of the five people I called our inner ring of suspects. But they discovered two things which are bound to be significant.’
Rushton was not a man with a strong sense of theatre, but now he paused automatically, preparing the way for his revelation as stagily as that old ham Burgess might have done. The small white jar he held up, already inside its plastic bag in preparation for its role in court as Exhibit A, looked unremarkable enough: Instead of explaining its importance, Rushton took a second bagged exhibit from the drawer of the filing cabinet whence he had produced the bottle. For policemen, who in these days see much of drugs and their consequences, it had more sinister associations than the jar. It was a hypodermic syringe, its needle glinting brightly as it caught the light.
Rushton, suddenly aware of the silence in the room, was embarrassed now by the theatricality he had contrived almost by accident. He said, ‘The significance of these two objects is that, while they appear empty, they both contain residues of pure arsenic.’
Even for the experienced men there, there was a sense of melodrama as they gazed at the containers. By this time Lambert was feeling, as Rushton had feared, that these findings should have been revealed much earlier. Controlling himself in front of the constables, he said, ‘I presume there were no prints, or you would have told us.’
‘No, sir,’ said Rushton. He wondered for an instant why Lambert should presume that, but he was given no time to dwell upon it.
The Superintendent said heavily, ‘And where were they found?’
Rushton was eager again now; even if he had mistimed this, his information must surely be central to the case. ‘The syringe was in the bathroom cabinet adjacent to Edmund Craven’s bedroom, where the medicines for his heart and blood pressure were kept. According to both Mrs Lewis and Mrs Harrison, that bathroom has been scarcely used since Craven’s death.’
‘And the bottle?’
‘The jar was found in the room adjacent to the kitchen used by Margaret Lewis.’
16
Hook took the wheel of the Vauxhall as he was bidden. It was usually a sign that his chief was deep in thought.
As though in deference to this, the Sergeant eased the car through the quiet streets in a careful silence. In fact, he was doing some thinking himself. It was a full five minutes before he said, rather reluctantly, ‘That bottle and syringe have got to be significant.’ He received a grunt of assent, no more. They went another half-mile before he ventured, ‘Surprising, too, after all these months.’
He thought that this time he was not getting a reply at all. It was a full minute before Lambert said gnomically, ‘Perhaps the significance may be in that surprise.’
The leaves that had given a transient autumn glory to the wide, unpaved avenue where Edmund Craven had lived were now mostly fallen. Small flakes of snow were etching the skeletons of the great trees with a different kind of beauty, more remote, less friendly to the world of men. The ivy which climbed over the Edwardian walls of Tall Timbers had caught the snow which barely covered the ground, so that the fall looked greater here than anywhere else around, as though the elements themselves were closing in upon the house whose owner had been murdered, in full knowledge that his son had no use for it.
As if to echo that fanciful thought, a strip proclaiming ‘Sold, Subject to Contract’ had been set at an angle across the estate agent’s sale board by the gate. Where on their previous visit there had been trim order around the long approach to the house, rotting leaves now lay in drifts across the lawns, taking on strange, surreal shapes as the snow began to disguise them. There was no point now in gardeners working here: soon the bulldozers would take over.
Sheltered by its canopy at the top of its three stone steps, the wide oak front door still looked polished and cared for. It opened almost as soon as they rang. Margaret Lewis this time looked white and strained. She had on a grey two-piece suit; to Hook, still troubled by the revelations of the conference in the Murder Room on the previous evening, she seemed dressed to give an impression of respectability in the dock. She nodded a curt response to Lambert’s greeting and led them silently to a dining-room they had not seen before. Hook had not told her what they wished to speak to her about when he made the appointment. But she knew: she had seen the jar and the syringe taken away by the scene of crime officer.
Lambert asked her about them without preamble, and she answered him mostly in monosyllables. He watched her closely as he told her that both bottle and syringe had been found to contain traces of arsenic: this had to be the first time she had been told of the laboratory findings. The blue eyes seemed to darken a little as they widened in horror; they caught a quick intake of breath before the lips shut tight and thin, as if closing down on this sign of weakness. They permitted her a single, almost soundless ‘Oh!’ but that was all. She stared bleakly over the polished oak dining table and the rush-seated chairs to the small segment of leaden sky and back garden which was all she could see from this room. The small, slender fingers of her right hand played abstractedly with the single silver bracelet on her left wrist. It was clear that her mind was active; they would have given a good deal to know the subject of her thoughts.
Lambert was forced to say, ‘Mrs Lewis, I have to ask you what you know about these items.’
She looked at him bleakly, wondering if she had any chance of being believed. ‘Nothing.’ The ash-blonde hair, so neat and attractive on their previous visit, was sufficiently out of place to show her dismay; Lambert wondered whether so attractive a woman would deliberately contrive such an effect.
‘Did either of them belong to you?’
‘The jar might have.’
‘It is a jar which once contained a well-known make of cold cream. I understand a similar jar was found on your dressing-table.’
‘Yes.’ She spoke almost before he had concluded his question. Then she looked into his face and struggled to qualify the admission; it was perhaps the first moment when she thought there was any real prospect that she might be believed. ‘I use that brand regularly; so do thousands of other women. Ask your wife.’
He already had. ‘Had you seen that particular jar before?’
‘Who knows?’ There was a little contempt for the question he had had to ask. ‘It could be one of mine. In case you should think it worth asking, I certainly didn’t use it to store arsenic.’
‘What about the hypodermic?’
‘I used to be a nurse, so I’ve seen thousands of hypodermics—I must have handled hundreds of that type myself at one time. I suppose it’s just possible that I’ve seen that very one at some time in the past. But never here; and certainly never where it was found, Superintendent.’ Suddenly, after her zombie-like reception of them into the house, she was anxious to convince.
Lambert looked at her closely; now that there was again some sort of exchange between them, she might reveal more than she knew. The brooch at the centre of the white silk blouse beneath the grey jacket gleamed brightly in the prevailing dullness of the high, north-facing room. The nylons and the maroon leather shoes beneath the grey skirt were still and demure, as if reinforcing the calmness she had dressed to convey. The contrast with her bearing on their first visit came from her hands, which twisted and untwisted despite herself, fingers moving from the bracelet to the rings on her left hand and back again. But the dark blue eyes looked at him steadily enough; he could not tell from them whether her nervousness derived from guilt or from a situation she could not understand. He said to her, ‘Will you show us exactly where they were found, please?’
She rose almost eagerly, as if even to be asked was a suggestion that their minds were still open. In the slight stiffness of her first steps, there was a glimpse of the middle age that none can escape, a reminder of her forty-six years. In this house so redolent of the tastes of a bygone age, with the hand of its dead master everywhere apparent, they had tended to think of this trim, chic representative of the modern era as being younger than he
r years. And her unconscious concession to a different view was but momentary: she moved thereafter as gracefully as ever as she led them through the spacious hall and up the wide staircase. Plodding behind her, Bert Hook appreciated the rounded calves and tried not to compute that he was younger than Craven’s elegant housekeeper.
The Edwardians were prodigal of space, in an era that had less need to be cost-conscious. A long landing with a strip of Persian carpet at its centre ran the full length of the house on the first floor. She led them to the first of two adjacent doors at the end of this and opened it without hesitation. The bathroom within was like the rest of the house; there was ample floor space between the gleaming porcelain of bath, lavatory and washbasin, and a wide panelled door beside the last of these. ‘Does that lead to Mr Craven’s bedroom?’ asked Lambert. It was the first murder he had ever investigated where he had not even bothered to visit the place of the death, preferring after the lapse of all this time to leave the routine stuff to the scene of crime team. Now, it seemed, he was proved wrong.
She nodded and quietly opened the door. They looked through at a double bed which was now stripped and draped with a dust cover. The inlaid mahogany of the massive bedroom suite and the heavy curtains were here more than ever suggestive of the man who had breathed his last in this room well over a year ago. As if to echo the thought, Margaret Lewis said behind them, ‘Mr Craven hardly left the room in those last months.’ Occasionally in their work they went into those sad rooms preserved by grieving parents as a sort of shrine to deceased offspring, often those who had died suddenly in road accidents. This reminded Hook of one of those rooms, with almost nothing changed from the moment its occupant died. But the reason here was only that no one had any more use for the place; soon it would crash in rubble amid the rest of these solidly built walls; Hook felt an illogical resentment against the man he still obstinately hoped was the perpetrator of this death, David Craven.
Bring Forth Your Dead Page 14
