‘But it’s quite certainly the thing you were hit with. And—’
‘I’m sure it was the thing I was hit with. The question is, who hit me.’ He stared at the fields rising in a gentle slope beyond the building works. The frost had disappeared during the day, but the leafless trees were still as sculptures. The sheep on the skyline looked larger than usual against the darkening blue of the afternoon sky. He tried to think of the invisible Severn flowing slowly through the next valley, but no clear picture would come before his mind’s eye. It was surprising how quickly one became hospitalised; the world out there seemed remote from the warm cocoon of his existence here, where meals came on time and the day’s landmarks were tablets and injections.
A resolution was forming in the Superintendent’s mind, a determination which seemed to wax strong on the misapprehensions of others. He said, ‘When does Craven go into court?’
‘Tomorrow morning in Oldford. He’ll be remanded to the Crown Court, of course.’
‘He mustn’t go. Drop the charges.’ Lambert was looking past Hook, giving his orders without explanation, like a not very benevolent despot.
Hook was not offended. He realised now that recovery in this case was slower than had been thought at first. Lambert would be his equable self again in due course, but it would take more time than they had been anticipating. He said, ‘That’s out of my hands, sir.’ It was the first time he could remember using the title in years, save on certain public occasions. He realised he was trying to make the denial of a sick person’s whim more easy for himself; he wanted this to be the decision of a huge and impersonal machine rather than of the Sergeant who had followed this frail-looking figure so unquestioningly for so long. ‘I don’t think the Chief Constable would sanction us drawing back at this stage. Unless—’
‘Unless we had someone else to charge. Someone who might even plead guilty.’
Lambert’s tone made Hook look hard at him, wondering whether there might after all be more in this than the effects of severe concussion upon an active mind. The very doubt was a tribute to what he had seen this unlikely figure in winceyette pyjamas achieve in the past. Lambert’s head had been shaved around the wound, to allow the medication team free access to it. The flesh there looked curiously pink and naked, the blue veins now exposed more vulnerable without their cover. The elaborate dressing looked as though it should itself be protected, as if only this small assembly of lint and gauze stood between the brain itself and a world full of menace. Even Lambert’s wrist, bandaged as a precaution to assist the sprain, made him look like a cripple in the bed. Hook thought he had never seen the chief look so old. Yet he did not look at all light-headed. And in the circumstances, that was depressing.
The idea that the eyes are mirrors of the soul is a romantic concept which should not be tested on policemen. By training and experience, they have learned to suppress such nebulous propositions; their enemies, indeed, would deny them souls. On the other hand, it is often possible to follow the workings of a policeman’s brain through studying his eyes. Now, when Lambert’s eyes looked carefully around the ward without any movement of his head, the Sergeant divined his thought processes immediately. And the divination filled him with instant alarm.
Lambert looked thoughtfully at the curtains surrounding the bed at the end of the ward, where the nurses were working unseen on a patient recently returned from theatre. Then he eased his legs thoughtfully over the edge of the bed. ‘Those curtains are an excellent idea, Bert. Just pull ours around us: my clothes are in the locker.’
Hook agreed as though under hypnosis. Lambert dressed gingerly, while his sergeant tried like one in a nightmare to speak words which would not come. He found his hands moving unbidden to fasten the Superintendent’s shoelaces, while Lambert sat above him on the bed, holding his feet obediently forward like a sickly but determined child. By the time Hook stuttered into a half-formed protest, it was too late. Lambert, finger upon his lips to call for silence, poked his invalid head for a moment between the curtains to ascertain whether the coast was clear, then drew them back with a stage magician’s elaborate gesture to reveal himself fully clothed to an uncaring ward.
There was a brief but embarrassing scene in sister’s office at the end of the ward. While Lambert insisted calmly upon his right to discharge himself, the guardian of medical standards turned to vent her frustration upon the innocent Hook, as if he were the instigator rather than the victim of this outrageous breach of protocol.
Lambert affected not to notice the proffered arm as he walked unaided to the lift, wondering if the massive concentration this seemed to necessitate was obvious to observers. By the time he had covered the hundred and fifty yards of tarmac to Hook’s car, he looked exhausted. He allowed the Sergeant to stow him carefully into the passenger seat like an octogenarian, even allowed himself the luxury of a few seconds with eyes closed as Hook went round the car to the driver’s door.
But by the time Hook had started the Orion’s engine and looked questioningly at him, he was able to speak with something near his old authority. He settled himself back into his seat and looked straight ahead through the windscreen at the winter afternoon, as if savouring the familiar professional mantle he had resumed so irregularly. After the warmth of the hospital, he shivered a little.
Then he said, ‘Let’s go to Angela Harrison’s house.’
26
It was snowing steadily on their way to the outskirts of the town where Angela Harrison lived. There might yet be a white Christmas, though there were still four days to go.
Hook felt the wheels slide a little as he turned on to the new snow which covered the surface of the cul-de-sac, with its rows of closely set houses. On this higher ground there were already two inches of snow, but the sun came through as they parked, and the flakes thinned to a slow descent of fine particles that was merely picturesque. Lambert sat for a full minute watching it through the windscreen, until Hook wondered whether his physical fragility was making him more than usually sensitive to the winter beauty which had descended even upon this suburban dullness. The events of the half-hour which followed made him realise how his chief had been gathering his depleted resources for the ordeal ahead.
The sound of children’s voices seemed to break Lambert’s trance. When they arrived at the house, they found Angela Harrison flushed and happy, organising the building of a snowman in the rear garden. Her own two children, a boy and a girl of about six and seven, were left under the supervision of a slightly older neighbour’s child while their mother came back indoors to talk to the detectives.
If Edmund Craven’s daughter was at all disconcerted to find them at her door, she gave no sign of it. As she ushered them into the lounge at the back of the house, she seemed no more than a little surprised to be receiving them unannounced. The Christmas tree in the corner of the room had been decorated in the last hour: the last of the shiny baubles lay in the box beside it. Hook pictured how his own children also would be distracted by the magic of snow from even this Christmas task. There was a fire in the hearth today, as if to welcome the season; even with the wire of the fire-guard in front of it, Angela’s golf and tennis cups on the sideboard glinted cheerfully with the reflected flames.
Lambert had been sufficiently disoriented by the hospital routine to forget that the schools would now be closed for Christmas; he had not reckoned on conducting this with children around. There was no sign of Michael Harrison, though they felt the husband’s presence strongly in the house. The policemen sat on the edges of the comfortable, shabby armchairs; in retrospect, Hook thought he was probably the only one of the three who did not know what was about to happen.
He got an inkling from his chief’s reaction to Angela Harrison’s opening inquiry. She said politely, ‘How is the head, Superintendent? I heard you’d been attacked.’ The grey-green eyes seemed to belie the conventional inquiry after his health: they stared glassily at the huge dressing on the side of his head.
La
mbert looked at her coldly and totally ignored the query. He said heavily, ‘I suppose you know why we are here?
Her disarming smile did not extend to her eyes as she said, ‘I know my brother is in custody. Indeed, I have been to see him… Superintendent Lambert, I hope you are not expecting me to give evidence against my brother.’ She used his title sternly, like a teacher disciplining a child with his full name.
Lambert’s answering smile was as without humour as hers had been. ‘On the contrary, I expect that when we leave here we shall be in a position to release him immediately.’ He turned his head to Hook, without taking his eyes off the woman opposite them. ‘Sergeant, charge Mrs Harrison with the murder of her father, please.’
The pause was not long, though it seemed agonisingly so to Hook. His brain worked more swiftly than he would have believed possible, weighing the possibilities of Lambert’s mind being unbalanced by fever and medication, of the embarrassment that might be caused to all by the arrest of this smiling mother in front of her children. He cursed his chief for not warning him of this, for the sense of theatre which always seemed to beset him on such occasions. And with that curse came the blind faith in his man which made him know he was going to follow his instruction. The whole process was completed in two seconds.
‘Angela Harrison, you are charged with the murder of Edmund George Craven. You are not obliged to say anything, but anything you do say will be taken down and may be used in evidence…’ Hook could scarcely believe his own ears as he intoned the familiar words.
He thought he was prepared for any reaction from the handsome woman opposite: anger, outrage, contempt, even laughter. Anything, in fact, but for the quiet monotone in which she said, ‘He always preferred David to me, even when we were children. However badly he behaved, Dad was always prepared to laugh it off. It was all right while Mother was alive.’ She was staring into the fire, as though long-dead memories glowed there. She said in a tone of surprise, as though she were discovering the fact for the first time in herself, ‘I loved him, but I never forgave him for the way he treated Mum.’
Lambert was aware of his head throbbing, but he felt no pain. The effect of adrenaline on a head still tender from the savage blow he had received was strange. As he watched his sergeant writing down the words of a murderess, he felt so thoroughly in control that he could time the exchanges to make sure Hook’s record was accurate. He said, ‘It was the will that drove you to kill, wasn’t it?’
She did not even transfer her gaze from the fire. ‘Yes. He showed me the draft he had made. It cut me and the children out entirely, and gave virtually everything to David. I couldn’t forgive Dad for doing that to his grandchildren.’
Through the double-glazed window, Lambert could see but not hear the children, laughing excitedly as the three of them strove to roll even further the huge snowball that was to be the snowman’s body. He hoped they would never realise that they had been the innocent provocation for murder; there would be horror enough for them without that. Their mother said, ‘People made the assumption that it was David who was to be cut out of the new will. It was easy enough for me to foster that impression.’ For the first time, they caught the contempt for the ordinary run of humanity characteristic of the psychopath.
Lambert said softly, ‘We never found that draft.’
Still she looked into the fire, but now she smiled the knowing smile of the human being losing touch with her kind. ‘I took it away on the night I gave my father the final dose of arsenic. I burned it in this very grate.’ Then, for the first time since she had been charged, she looked at Lambert, almost as though she was surprised to find that it was he who was there. With the air of one delighting in her own acumen, she said slyly, ‘What evidence have you got against me? All the evidence points to Margaret Lewis, or Andrew Lewis, or Walter Miller. Or at my precious brother, David—you’ve already arrested him.’ She closed her arms across her breasts and hugged herself a little: even as she spoke of others she was preoccupied with herself, in the way of the severely disturbed.
Lambert thought she had given them all they needed in the past few minutes, but he said, ‘That evidence was much too easy for us to come by, Angela.’ The first name slipped out before he knew it: already he was addressing the criminal as a Broadmoor case. ‘The cold cream jar in Margaret Lewis’s scullery, the syringe in the bathroom: it was inconceivable that any murderer would have left such things there for over a year after the crime. It made the people you were trying to incriminate less likely suspects, in my mind. And there were no fingerprints on either of them: there should have been, particularly on the cold cream jar.’
Angela Harrison gave no signs of having heard or understood, though he knew she had. She rocked backwards and forwards a little on the edge of her chair, like a child preoccupied with her own thoughts. Her voice seemed to come from a long way off as she said, ‘And what made you suspect me?’
‘I didn’t particularly, at first. But one files away certain facts as one proceeds. The killer had to have a supply of arsenic, though it need not have been acquired recently, since it keeps a long time without noticeable deterioration. So anyone might have taken the opportunity over the years. But you were the likeliest source, in view of the locum work you have done quite recently in pharmacies.’
She said, ‘Dad would never let me train properly. He didn’t believe in higher education for girls—David could waste as much time and money as he wanted, but not me. Well, I learned enough to kill him in the end.’ She gave a small, horrid giggle of satisfaction at the neatness of the retribution. Her face shone, almost luminous in the firelight. The lines and the years seemed to be dropping away now. Straight-backed and without care, she glowed with an impenetrable, old-master serenity, transcending the squalid values of the world she saw around her.
Lambert saw this effect, and pressed hastily on, ‘You had better access to the victim in the crucial period than anyone else except Margaret Lewis, whom you more or less excluded by your clumsy attempt to implicate her with the cold cream jar. You were the one who fed your father each time Mrs Lewis had her weekly day off, which gave you the ideal opportunity.’
She nodded slowly, like one accepting a satisfactory solution to an intellectual puzzle. She stared again into the fire, as if that detached her from the reality of her situation in the quiet room. Outside, the snowman was having his head lifted carefully into position; the mongrel dog barked excitedly around the base, tail wagging furiously. She said, ‘I thought for a year that I had succeeded. I had to improvise when you dug him up.’ She was as brutal and direct with the phrase as a child. ‘The cold cream jar was the obvious thing for Margaret Lewis. I put the hypodermic syringe in for that smug bastard Walter Miller, who did nothing about his wife when she wronged Mum all those years ago with Dad.’ So she had found out about that, though she could have been only a small child at the time: the catalogue of hate against the father everyone had thought she cherished had been building all the time.
Lambert, anxious to keep her talking, to wrap up the whole of this nightmare in one session, said, ‘Sergeant Hook talked to the Reverend Allcock while I was in hospital.’
‘Randy Roger we used to call him, in the old days at the tennis club.’ Her voice was harsh, her giggle edged with hysteria. ‘Backs to the walls and hands on ha’pennies, girls!’ She held her hands aloft as she chanted the mock-slogan. Then, with the abrupt change of mood characteristic of her condition, she said, ‘And what did he have to tell you about me?’
Hook was glad she ignored him and addressed her question to Lambert: he would not have trusted himself to give any coherent explanation. The Superintendent said, ‘We talked to him about the funeral arrangements you made for your father.’
She smiled a smile of superior wisdom at the fire. ‘“Interment at Oldfield Parish Church at three p.m. No flowers, by request; donations to The British Heart Foundation.” Nice touch, I thought.’
‘I suppose you did. But I thought your fa
ther might have favoured a cremation, especially in view of his feelings against the Roman Catholic Church. I’m well aware that Rome has now sanctioned cremation, but the overwhelming majority of Catholics are still buried rather than cremated, especially those of your father’s generation. So I checked out the details of the funeral arrangements made for your late father. Walter Miller told me that you made all the arrangements for the funeral. Then I found that all the arguments for a burial came from you, though you convinced other people that it was your father’s wish.’
‘“Daddy always wanted a burial. He was a great traditionalist.”’ She mimed a young girl’s naïvety; the impersonation sat horribly upon her. ‘That’s what I told them, and they believed easily enough. It meant I only needed one doctor’s signature for the death certificate. That was easy enough from old Dr Carroll. A cremation would have destroyed the evidence for ever, but it would have meant a confirmation of the cause of death from a second doctor, and I couldn’t risk that. I had to insist quite strongly on the interment at the time, but memories blur easily, I find. I’ve almost convinced most people by now that it was David who insisted on a burial rather than a cremation.’ She smiled her contentment at her cleverness; perhaps she had already forgotten her situation.
‘Yes. Why did you go to so much trouble to implicate David in the last few days?’
The grey-green eyes flashed a sudden wild look at Lambert, as though she would at any moment spring at him. The effect was the more terrifying after her previous detachment. But her hatred was not of him, but of the brother he had brought relentlessly before her consciousness. ‘David deserved all he got. Dad forgave everything he did, over thirty years and more. Whatever scrapes he got into, he was forgiven. He didn’t give a damn about Dad or his wishes—he was even going to allow Tall Timbers to be pulled down. It was easy enough for me to convince David that the will change he never saw was designed to cut out him, not me. I told him you had indicated to me that he was your chief suspect, and he swallowed it all; I’d protected him for so many years from the worst of his silliness that he thought I was trying to help him now. He was never very bright.’ She smiled into the fire at the thought, looking like a priggish schoolgirl asserting her superiority to a lumpish older brother.
Bring Forth Your Dead Page 22
