An Academic Death (Lambert and Hook Mysteries Book 14)

by J M Gregson

  A tiny hesitation. ‘No, I don’t.’

  Lambert let the pause stretch out into long, quiet seconds as they studied him. There was a grandfather clock at the other end of the old, low-ceilinged room and they could hear its slow tick as they waited. He said quietly, ‘We haven’t had the results of the post-mortem yet, but I think you can take it that you are part of a murder investigation, Mr Taggart. In these circumstances, I need hardly remind you that it is your duty to give us all the help you can. If you are aware of any close relationships which involved Matthew Upson at the time of his death, you must tell us about them. It is not you but we and our colleagues who must decide whether they are relevant to this case.’

  Taggart nodded slowly, looking past them at the empty armchairs on the other side of the comfortable room. He said dully, ‘There was Clare, of course.’

  ‘Clare who?’

  ‘Clare Booth.’

  ‘A student?’

  Charlie smiled. ‘No. A colleague here. She teaches economic history, I believe.’

  No, thought Lambert, you don’t believe, you know. You’re trying to distance yourself a little from it, that’s all. ‘You’d better tell us everything you know about this.’

  Charlie nodded his acceptance of that, then sighed heavily. ‘She was younger that Matt. She came here four years ago, I think. She and Matt had a thing going. A serious thing, for a while.’

  ‘Is she married?’ Already Lambert was thinking of the difficulties of questioning her, of arousing the suspicions of a cuckolded husband who might still be in blissful ignorance of his state.

  ‘No. I think — well, I think she believed at one time that Matt was going to marry her.’

  ‘But she was deceived in that?’

  ‘I don’t think Matt ever — look, you’ll need to question her yourself about that, won’t you?’

  ‘Indeed we shall. But the looker-on often sees more of the game than those involved, when it comes to affairs of the heart, as I’m sure you’ll agree.’

  Taggart looked at them sharply, then said, ‘I never spoke to Matt directly about it, but he never gave me the impression that he regarded Clare as long term. I’m — well, I’m not even sure they were still together at the time he disappeared.’

  ‘Well, that is something we shall have to ascertain, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Now, are you aware of any other close liaisons Mr Upson had been conducting, inside or outside the university?’

  Charlie gave an involuntary grin at the word. He still hadn’t got used to the institution they used to call ‘Kamo’s College’ being referred to seriously as a university. ‘No. But I wasn’t aware of all his activities, of course. We were friends, but not what I’d call close friends; I didn’t share many of his confidences.’

  Was there a disclaimer here, an attempt to distance himself from some part of the dead man’s life which would reflect no credit on him? Lambert looked at Taggart unblinkingly for a moment, then switched his tack. ‘You say you asked him to go for a drink with you on that Friday, but he told you he couldn’t. Did he say why he couldn’t?’

  Charlie Taggart frowned his concentration as he tried to remember, as if he were anxious to convince these two large men who studied him so unnervingly that he appreciated the importance of the question, that he was giving it due care and attention. ‘He didn’t say. Or if he did, I can’t remember, which probably means it was something trivial. I know he was going to see this problem student, Jamie Lawson, just after we’d spoken, but that wouldn’t have taken him long, so we could still have gone for a drink.’

  Lambert stood up, then paused, as if struck by a sudden thought. It was an old ploy of his: when a person relaxed, thinking that an interview was at an end, he was often at his most unguarded. ‘What would you say was the state of Matthew Upson’s marriage, Mr Taggart?’

  ‘I’d say not very good.’ Taggart was immediately and noticeably guarded. ‘But I can’t give you any details. Matt didn’t talk about it a lot, and his wife wasn’t one for coming into the college much — or the university, as I suppose I should say now.’

  Bert Hook looked up from his notes. ‘You needn’t think you’re breaking any confidences. It was Mrs Upson who reported her husband missing a week ago. She didn’t make any bones about her dislike for him. She said she wouldn’t care if she didn’t see him again.’ He leaned his experienced face a little closer to the younger and paler one opposite him. ‘As a matter of fact, she described him repeatedly as “an arsehole”.’

  Charlie smiled involuntarily. ‘That sounds like Liz! Not one for mincing her words, when it came to Matt and his failings! All right, I knew that their marriage wasn’t all it might be. You’re saying that Liz thought it was considerably worse than that — that it was as good as over, in fact. I can’t say that that surprises me.’

  Lambert said, ‘People aren’t always agreed on these things. Do you think Matthew Upson was as resigned to the view that his marriage was finished as his wife?’

  ‘I don’t know. We didn’t speak of it. I told you, we weren’t bosom pals. I wouldn’t have talked to him about the state of his marriage unless he’d raised the subject himself.’

  ‘Which he didn’t.’

  ‘No. Not that I can recall, anyway. I didn’t expect to be trying to remember the details of fairly casual conversations for the benefit of the law.’

  It was a sentiment they heard all too often, and a fair enough protestation. Yet Taggart had been ready enough to recognise the attitude of a wife he scarcely knew, while asserting that he had learned nothing from a man he saw nearly every day. But sometimes people you saw but rarely left an abiding impression. Perhaps Liz Upson’s forthright attitude had impressed itself upon Charlie Taggart as firmly as upon Bert Hook.

  They reminded him once again that it was his duty to tell them of anything, however apparently insignificant it might be, which might have a bearing on the death of Matthew Upson, but he said he could not help them any more. If he saw any reaction among students or staff which might offer a pointer, he would get in touch with Oldford CID as suggested.

  Charlie Taggart stood at the window of the deserted Senior Common Room and watched the police vehicle ease out of the car park and down the tree-lined drive to the exit of the campus. It hadn’t been too bad. They hadn’t pressed him hard in the areas where he had thought they might. He watched the brake lights come on as the car paused briefly before turning back into the road and the real world outside this academic island.

  With a bit of luck, that might be the last he saw of the police.

  Five

  Liz Upson didn’t normally drink alone, but she decided that this night must be an exception. Once the children were safely in bed, she poured herself a stiff gin and tonic, installed herself in her favourite armchair, and prepared to sip it slowly while she reviewed the tensions of the day.

  Taken as a whole, it had not been as bad as she had expected. Identifying the body had been a bad moment, but she had always known that it would be. The headmistress had been full of understanding and sympathy when she had gone into the school to talk about the children and how they would react. The head had been divorced herself in the previous year, and Liz had eventually talked to her quite frankly about the state of her marriage with Matt at the time of his disappearance. She was surprised how much of a relief that had been.

  They had agreed that unless the children were totally devastated by the news of their father’s death they were better at school; following an established routine would itself provide a kind of therapy. Their form teachers would keep a special eye on them and report back on any reactions which seemed significant.

  The worst part had been breaking the news of the death to the children when they came home from school. Yet even that had been worse in the anticipation than in the execution. They had not seen a lot of their father in these last two troubled years. There had been a few tears from both, some surprisingly percipient questions from ten-year-old Beth about how the
y would carry on without their father’s earnings, some snippets of reminiscence from eight-year-old Mark about football on the lawn and a visit to a pantomime.

  Such good things would go on, she assured them, as she took them both into her arms. They would pull together and get through this. All her clichés of consolation came new-minted to them, so that they seemed to be comforted. It was much easier than she had thought it would be. Perhaps their father’s disappearance and the inference she had drawn for them that he was not going to be around much in the future had prepared the way for this death, so that it came to them only as the brutal but logical culmination of a process which had started eleven days earlier.

  She had done a thing she had not done for at least a year and read them a chapter of a favourite book, whilst they sat one on each side of her on the sofa in their pyjamas. They had been wide-eyed, earnest, concentrating hard on Harry Potter and his escapades, to the exclusion of their own situation. She had looked into their rooms an hour after they had gone to bed and found each of them sound asleep, with that unlined serenity in rest which only children’s faces can show.

  She realised as she sat in the chair how tired she was; tension brings its own exhaustion. And yet the day seemed curiously incomplete. She could not for the moment think why.

  The phone shrilled suddenly at her elbow and she started from her reverie. It was the call she had expected. She gave her news, told the tale of the children’s acceptance of their father’s death, accepted the sympathy about the awful moment when she had seen Mark’s damaged face at the mortuary.

  ‘It was bad, but I didn’t let it get to me,’ she said. ‘I got through it much better than I’d feared I would… No, that stolid police sergeant drove me there, the one I saw when I reported Matt missing last week… Well, we didn’t say much, scarcely anything in fact. But he didn’t seem to be suspicious… I need to see you… No, I know, but — … Well, let’s make it as soon as we can, eh? … No, they haven’t, but I’m sure they will. Of course I’ll be careful — if it’s just that lumpish sergeant who went with me today, I can handle him… Yes, I suppose so… I love you and need you, darling… Goodnight, my love.’

  She sat very still in her chair after she had put down the phone. She found herself suddenly very wide awake. And she knew now what it was that had been missing from this eventful day. No one from the CID had yet been here to question her about Matt’s death.

  *

  Lambert awoke with the dawn chorus, thought about the day to come, and dozed only fitfully in the following hours. He had that pain again, down the left side of his chest, not agonising, but sharp enough to make him clench his teeth with the pain. He held his hand against it, felt the pulsing of the muscle from his heart, tried hard to convince himself this was nothing serious.

  By seven thirty he was wandering among his roses, removing the occasional dead head, savouring the scents as the sun burned away the summer dew from his lawn and a blackbird watched his every movement with eyes as bright as polished beads. The pain was still there, but less sharp now. He tried to forget it: he had enough problems without hypochondria.

  Christine watched him through the window of the bungalow and knew from his body language, from his abstracted air even in the garden he loved, that he was fretting about a case. Probably it was that lecturer who had been found with a bullet through his head on Monday night in the Malverns. Where once she would have been resentful that he was bringing the horrors of his job even into this peaceful place, she now felt only a protective sympathy for that tall, slightly stooped figure, with the lined face and the still plentiful but increasingly grizzled hair.

  She brought him in and insisted he had some breakfast. She even bore his ritual protests about the absence of the bacon and egg and fried bread he claimed to miss so much. She pretended not to notice how anxious he was to be away to face the challenge that death always brought into his life.

  It was surprising how thirty years of marriage turned resentment into a sort of irritated love.

  At eight thirty. Lambert was pacing restlessly round the Murder Room set up at Oldford CID, watching DI Christopher Rushton collating the information that was accruing from house-to-house and other enquiries. One of the problems with a body discovered so long after death was that no one could as yet be precise about the time of that death. The last recorded sighting of Matthew Upson seemed so far to be Charlie Taggart’s casual encounter in the university Senior Common Room on the Friday afternoon of his disappearance. But it was still early days, and the uniformed men assigned to the task were having difficulty collecting information from Upson’s students, since the normal teaching timetable had been suspended for the year-end examinations.

  John Lambert was a dinosaur among modern superintendents, in that he refused to direct a murder investigation from behind a desk. He preferred to be out interviewing and assessing suspects, allowing Rushton to organise the information and the filing on the computer he loved back at Oldford police station. And Lambert could not stand this period of what he called ‘the phoney war’, where, in a case without an obvious suspect, the investigating officers had to wait for leads. He quizzed DS Hook about the wife in the case, and almost bit Bert’s head off when he reserved his position on that enigmatic woman.

  By nine thirty, he could stand the waiting no longer. He was assured in response to his urgent phone call that the post-mortem report would be typed and delivered to him by the end of the day, but he snapped that hours could be vital with a victim who had already been dead for so long, and strode out to his ageing Vauxhall Senator and a journey to see the pathologist.

  His old acquaintance Cyril Burgess, MB, Ch.B., sat him down in an armchair in his office and had coffee served in fine china, as if they had all the time in the world to chat. Burgess had a taste for detective fiction as well as a propensity for quoting poetry, and he was delighted to have the break from the dull routine of corpse dismemberment which was afforded him by a suspicious death.

  ‘Good clean death, this one,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Good clean corpse it would have been, too, if you’d got it to me a week earlier.’

  ‘I apologise for the omission, but I can’t take personal responsibility for it,’ said Lambert drily.

  ‘Late thirties, probably not a manual worker, by the state of his hands,’ said Burgess.

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but we know exactly who he is: Matthew John Upson, aged thirty-seven, Lecturer in Modern History at the new University of Gloucestershire.’ Lambert bit with satisfaction into a ginger biscuit as Burgess’s face fell with the dismissal of his detective flourishes.

  ‘Well, at least he didn’t have his head blown away with a shotgun. Not much skull left for me to examine, on that one you sent in last month.’ It had been a family murder, with a son shooting a brutal father after a dispute on a farm and an arrest within three hours, but Burgess spoke as if he held Lambert personally responsible for the messy state of the corpse.

  ‘He’ll get away with manslaughter if he gets the right lawyer,’ said Lambert impatiently. ‘Tell me about Mr Upson, please.’

  Burgess licked his lips. ‘He was killed with a .22 bullet. I have the little chap right here.’ He picked up a flattened piece of metal from a small labelled box on his desk with a pair of tweezers, looking at that moment like the consultant surgeon he might have been, if he had not preferred the certainties of dead bodies to the uncertainties of live tissue. ‘It entered the head at the right temple and lodged in the skull, conveniently for us, whose job is to find who put it there.’

  Lambert noticed that he had now allied himself with the forces of detection. He wouldn’t cavil at that, if it made the pathologist more helpful. ‘Did Upson put it there himself?’

  Burgess beamed his delight. ‘No. You can forget suicide, in my opinion. Your man was shot with a pistol, at close quarters — he’d have to be, for a .22 bullet to kill him, and to be fired with this accuracy. I’d say it was discharged from no more than a foot. Th
ere were clear powder burns around the wound. Probably more like three to six inches, if you want an opinion rather than the safe margins I’ll have to specify in my official report.’

  ‘Thank you. But in that case, why shouldn’t he have done it himself?’

  ‘Because he’d have had to be a double-jointed contortionist to hold the gun at the angle from which the shot was fired. The bullet entered his head at the right temple and very nearly emerged through the left forehead. It was almost certainly fired by someone standing behind him, who raised a pistol and cold-bloodedly dispatched an unsuspecting victim.’

  ‘Unsuspecting?’

  ‘He’d have turned, wouldn’t he, if he’d known? Thrown up a hand maybe, or ducked. He certainly wouldn’t have been shot from that angle if he’d known what was happening. I’m prepared to put that in my report and stand by it in the coroner’s court, if it should be necessary.’

  Lambert nodded. ‘We didn’t find a firearm anywhere near the body.’

  ‘Ah! Murder, by person or persons unknown, then. The plot thickens. The spine begins to tingle!’ Cyril Burgess gave his impression of a man with a tingling spine. The shiver went oddly with his immaculate dark blue suit and silk tie. ‘A pistol. A derringer, say, or a Beretta. Light and attractive enough to appeal to a woman. Some femme fatale from the Riviera, perhaps, who will be left a million in his recently amended will!’

  ‘You’re stuck in the nineteen-thirties, Cyril. And the fictional nineteen-thirties, at that. Anyway, I don’t see a university lecturer having a million to leave to anyone.’

  ‘Academic intrigue, then! The Death of a Don.’ Burgess spoke the words like a headline; his relish was if anything increased. ‘If only Dorothy L. Sayers was around to report your solving of the crime, you’d become a national celebrity, John.’ Burgess gazed into the middle distance and shook his head sadly.

  Lambert didn’t think that the university he had visited on the previous day had much in common with the Oxford colleges of Harriet Vane, nor this murder much similarity with the puzzles she had explored with Lord Peter Wimsey. He said tersely, ‘The corpse you have just cut up was discovered in the Malvern Hills. There is nothing as yet to connect the death with this so-called university where the man worked.’