An Academic Death (Lambert and Hook Mysteries Book 14)

by J M Gregson

  ‘Nine thirty? I can’t rely on a babysitter for much later than that.’

  ‘All right. Nine thirty it is. By that small lake. There are plenty of benches round there. Sit down somewhere quiet and I’ll find you.’

  ‘All right. I can’t wait to see you, my darling!’

  But he had put the phone down before she got to the endearment.

  *

  Clare Booth was marking examination papers. They should have been a distraction from her other problems; students’ futures hung on her judgements here, and that normally made concentration easy for her. She was a good tutor, effective in her teaching and highly respected by her students for her integrity. But today she just couldn’t settle to her task; she found herself reading the same page of script over and over again. It was almost a relief when the doorbell rang and she saw the dark shapes of Lambert and Hook behind the frosted glass.

  They came briskly into the cottage, seeming larger than ever among the delicate antique furniture, scarcely acknowledging her greeting and her invitation to sit down. And there was no ambiguity in Lambert’s opening. He said with unusual aggression, ‘You probably guessed why we needed to see you this morning. You’ve been caught out in a lie. A deliberate attempt to pervert the course of our investigation.’

  She had thought he was going to say ‘to pervert the course of justice’. But that was a legal charge, wasn’t it? Perhaps that would come later. For the twentieth time, she regretted the impulsive action she had taken in asking Sharon Webster to help her to deceive them. It wasn’t fair to the girl. But she knew she should be thinking about her own position now, not Sharon’s. She did not know how to respond to Lambert’s accusation, where to begin her defence.

  Perhaps Lambert took her silence for denial, for he went on impatiently into an explanation, an assurance that persistence in the lie was useless. ‘We have a young detective constable, Mark Whitwell, operating on the site at the university at the moment. He questioned a student called Sharon Webster yesterday, and found that you had asked her to lie on your behalf.’

  Clare said dully, ‘I should never have involved Sharon.’

  ‘You should never have involved anyone, Miss Booth. It only concentrates our attention upon the very area you were trying to conceal. Why did you try to set up this clumsy deception?’

  Clare thought furiously, desperately trying to cudgel a brain which was refusing to work into some sort of action. In that moment of agonised quiet, Henry, the Burmese cat, strolled unhurriedly across the room, stretched luxuriously, and leapt gracefully onto Bert Hook’s ample lap. He nuzzled the knuckles beneath the open notebook, yawned with shut eyes, and set up a purring which sounded unnaturally loud in the heavy silence.

  Despite her situation, Clare smiled with an automatic fondness at the mound of luxurious fawn fur. It was Henry and this reaction to him which enabled her to speak, when she had begun to think her tongue was paralysed with fear. ‘I was a fool to think I could ever deceive you, wasn’t I?’

  Lambert was here to ask questions, not answer them. ‘Why did you concoct this story? We’ll have the truth, please, this time.’

  ‘I — I felt threatened. I was the last person to see Matt alive, wasn’t I?’

  There was not a flicker on John Lambert’s lined, attentive face. No need to give away information when ignorance might be more productive. ‘So? Why should you feel the need to lie about it?’

  ‘Well, the last persons to see murder victims are always suspect, aren’t they? And I’d already told you that we’d split up — that Matt wasn’t going to marry me when I’d been counting on it. And, well, to tell you the truth, we had a hell of a row that last morning. I thought we must have been overheard, that someone was bound to tell you about it. And —’

  ‘And you thought the best solution was to tell a pack of lies. To enlist a young woman to support one of the most ham-fisted attempts at deception that I’ve come across in years!’

  ‘I panicked! I’ve sat here for night after night with only Henry to talk to, wondering what was happening, knowing how I’d lied to you when I said I’d last seen Matt on the Wednesday before he disappeared. I felt you must find out at any minute that I’d seen Matt that Friday morning, that I’d been the last one known to have seen him alive.’

  He didn’t tell her that there’d been other sightings of the dead man, hours later. It was better to keep her on the back foot. ‘So you’re now telling us that your first lie led to another, more elaborate one. And of course, we have to decide whether we should believe you now about what happened at that last meeting. And if it was indeed the last one.’

  Henry was purring more loudly than ever. He stretched his paws, drove his claws a little into Hook’s ample thigh, establishing territorial rights. Clare reached a hand towards him, then let it drop helplessly to her side. ‘He likes you, Sergeant Hook,’ she said inconsequentially.

  Bert looked up from his notebook, ignoring the sharp pinpricks in his thigh, feeling the cat’s small, warm head respond as he stroked its ears, smiling a little to encourage a belated honesty in the lithe woman who sat opposite him. He said, ‘You say you had an argument with Mr Upson on that Friday morning. What was that argument about?’

  ‘I made some remark about a student. Probably a bitchy remark, but I thought he was behaving irresponsibly.’

  ‘Kerry Rees?’

  ‘Yes. You know about her?’

  Hook gave her the briefest nod; probably by now they knew more than she did.

  ‘Well, I suppose it wasn’t just pastoral care which prompted me. I was as jealous as hell, as I realised once I’d raised the matter. Matt told me it was no longer any of my business what he did, and I flew off the handle. I yelled at him about the way he’d treated me, and he ended up by shouting back at me.’

  ‘Where did this take place?’

  ‘In my tutorial room. I checked afterwards that there was no one in the room on either side of mine, because I was embarrassed, but I thought someone must have heard, even much further away than that. It was quite a row we had.’

  Lambert nodded. He did not tell her whether they had already known about this or not. In fact, either no one had heard the altercation, or whoever had heard it had chosen to remain silent about it, probably out of loyalty to this feisty woman with her rangy, athletic body and her attractive, intense face. All their enquiries had thrown up was that she was very popular with her colleagues, who had thought her worthy of someone better than Matthew Upson. He said, ‘What time was it when this argument took place?’

  ‘About half-past nine, or perhaps just a little after that. Matt stormed out of my room before ten.’ She looked shamefaced again. ‘That’s why I asked Sharon to say she was with me between ten and eleven. So that people wouldn’t think it was me who had taken Matt off to kill him.’

  ‘What makes you so sure that someone “took him off to kill him”, Miss Booth? You’re suggesting someone took him out to the Malverns in a car and killed him there, I presume.’ Lambert was quiet but incisive, a surgeon lifting skin with a scalpel.

  ‘Yes. Isn’t that what happened?’

  The grey eyes stared hard into hers. ‘We think it is. yes. But we have never made that information public.’

  Her dark eyes widened a little as the implication hit her. ‘Matt must have said… Yes, I remember now that he said at the opening of our conversation that he’d been dropped off that day. because his car was in for servicing.’

  Lambert paused a little, waiting to see if she would go on, give more detail, make the explanation more elaborate, and less convincing. They often did, when they were lying to get off the hook. Then he said, ‘I hope you’re now telling us the truth. If you are, you were very foolish to try to set up that deception with Miss Webster. The evidence against you is strong, but at present only circumstantial. We shall need more than that, if we are going to arrest and convict you. But we shall find that evidence, if it exists.’

  He stood up, and Bert Hoo
k detached himself with some difficulty from Henry and stood beside him. Clare realised that the tall man’s last words had been both a reassurance and a threat.

  Perhaps that is exactly what he had intended, she thought, as she watched the police car edge out of the courtyard behind the little row of stone cottages.

  Seventeen

  Clare Booth would have been less convinced of police omniscience if she had heard John Lambert at Oldford CID an hour later.

  He looked and sounded tired, even gloomy, as he spoke to Rushton, Hook and other officers who had been gathering material in the investigation. ‘I don’t think we’re going to find a lot that is new at this stage. The trail is getting colder with each passing day. Scene of Crime and Forensics have given us all they can and aren’t likely to come up with anything dramatic at this stage.’

  Rushton nodded. ‘There’s only a dribble of information coming in now. Nothing which seems very significant, really, since we found out that Harold Rees was in the area for most of the day on which Upson died.’ He tried — and failed — to avoid looking smug as he allowed them to recall that it was him who had brought Harold Rees to their notice as a suspect.

  Perhaps it was because he looked too much like a cat with the cream that Bert Hook felt compelled to point out, ‘There’s no way that we can connect Rees with the murder of Jamie Lawson. Unless we assume that the two murders aren’t connected, that lets him out for the first one too.’

  Lambert said, ‘We still haven’t found any definite connection between the two killings. Perhaps they are quite separate crimes, with different motives and personnel.’

  DC Mark Whitwell was pleased to be involved in the deliberations of the hierarchy, to feel that his own views might be asked for and heeded. It emboldened him to say, ‘Having roamed around that campus for nearly a week and got the feel of the place, I must say that I’m sure the two killings are connected in some way. It would be a remarkable coincidence, to have murders of two people from the same university campus, both involved in illegal drugs, and to find that there wasn’t a connection. Especially as we know that Jamie Lawson was taught by Matthew Upson and was working for him as a pusher. Surely the likeliest thing is that it’s one of the drugs barons who’s ordered both killings. If they were carried out by a contract killer, that would explain why we don’t seem to be getting any closer.’

  Lambert nodded slowly, seeing the logic but reluctant to accept Whitwell’s conclusion, which would make an arrest much less probable. ‘Everything points that way, I agree, and Matthew Upson’s death has many of the marks of a contract killing: a shooting, miles from anywhere, with no sign of a weapon and the body not found until well after the event. But there are things about Jamie Lawson’s death which are too elaborate for a contract killer. The bullet through the head is far more usual than hanging as a method, for a start. And most contract killers are swift and anonymous: they’d regard the rather clumsy attempt which was made to simulate suicide in Lawson’s case as an unnecessary, amateurish diversion, a pointless risk, because they normally leave the scene of any killing as swiftly as possible. They don’t care that it looks like murder from the start, so long as they leave nothing of themselves at the scene.’

  Rushton nodded. ‘I agree with that. But I still think we’ll find that the two deaths are connected.’

  Lambert shook his head like a man plagued by a persistent fly. ‘There’s something here which is escaping us, I’m sure. Some simple little thing that we’ve missed. Maybe some lie or deception from someone which we’ve accepted a little too easily, because it seemed logical at the time. The only connection we have between the two deaths at the moment is the drugs one, and I agree it’s the likeliest link. But it’s not the only possible one. Let’s all go over all the facts of the case in our own minds and try to see whether we have indeed accepted something too readily, something which has perhaps thrown us off course in the rest of our thinking. Unless anything new comes up today, we’ll meet first thing in the morning and see if we have any new thoughts.’

  He wondered as he went out to his car whether this sounded to his colleagues like a counsel of despair from a superintendent who was feeling baffled.

  *

  In the small, neat stone house in Ossett, Kerry Rees was fretting. She had recognised from the start that her pregnancy was going to change her life. She had only just begun to realise quite how radical those changes were going to be.

  She had already suspended for a year the course she had been so much enjoying at the University of Gloucestershire. Now she had been forced to relinquish the holiday job she had secured for herself at the local supermarket. Her mother had found her lifting cartons containing tins of baked beans when she came into the store to buy the family’s weekly order, and been appalled. Kerry had played down the danger, but in truth had found herself increasingly tired at the end of the days of steady manual labour. At the end of a week she had acceded to her parents’ views that she should give up the work, and been secretly glad to do so.

  Now she was confined to walks, reading and helping her mother about the house. She didn’t mind that at all, but there were limits to what you could do in a small terraced house. She decided to clean her father’s den whilst he was out at the working men’s club playing snooker.

  His absence would give her a good two hours without interruption, and she knew the place needed tidying and vacuuming. Her mother was forbidden to go into this small cell of male monopoly in the house, but Kerry knew her indulgent father would not take offence if she cleaned it. He would grumble in general terms about women and tidiness, but he was far too fond of Kerry to take any real offence at her efforts.

  She stood for a moment just inside the door of the small room, savouring the strangeness of it, feeling the thrill of the illicit in her entry into a male preserve. It was really no more than a small third bedroom, but it had been given to her father as his own when they came here after his enforced retirement from the mine. He would have scorned to call it a study: that was a middle-class word, not for the likes of stern toilers at the coalface like Harold Rees. For a long time, it had just been his room, but he had finally accepted the term ‘den’ which his wife had bestowed on the place from the start.

  It was a room crowded with her father’s knick-knacks, things which Kerry’s mother had eagerly banished from the rest of the house and her father had been perfectly happy to accommodate here. There were trophies for darts and snooker, small cups which her father had set proud and polished on the small mantelpiece, over the fireplace which had never been used since they came here. There was a faded black and white photograph of her father in a miners’ football team, powerful men sitting with their muscular arms folded, staring at the camera as if they thought smiles might be a sign of weakness. She looked fondly for a moment at his father in his 1964 prime, with a shock of jet-black hair cut very short at the sides and a health which seemed to leap out at her even from that dingy picture.

  Kerry lifted each of the trophies in turn and dusted the narrow shelf beneath them. He was captain of the Veterans’ snooker team at the club now; perhaps at the end of the year there might be another trophy to add to the collection. She vacuumed the floor, moving her father’s upright chair away from the desk to allow her to get at the carpet. In truth, Harold Rees didn’t need the desk very much; he had little occasion to write, apart from his infrequent letters to his sisters in Wales — he held obstinately to the old-fashioned view that a letter was better than a phone call, because it took more of his time and trouble.

  His daughter took a full minute over her dusting of the desktop, still savouring with a small girl’s relish the feeling of being in a room which she would not normally have been allowed to penetrate. There were a few paper clips which her father, never one for waste, had detached from official letters, and four ball-pens on the desk. Kerry opened the wide, shallow top drawer of the desk to put them away and leave the surface clear for dusting.

  It was then tha
t she saw the letter.

  It had the familiar logo of the University of Gloucestershire at its head. That, she decided later, was what made her pick it up and read it. That and the signature of Matt Upson at the bottom of the page. She realised wryly that she had never actually seen that signature before: Matt had been far too wily to commit himself to paper in their short relationship.

  She could no more have put it down unread than torn away her hands. It read:

  Dear Mr Rees,

  Thank you for your letter of 1st June.

  I am sorry that you feel the way you do about the situation. In my view it is unfortunate, but by no means as desperate as you seem to feel. It would not have occurred if your daughter had taken the elementary precaution of putting herself on the pill before venturing upon sexual encounters.

  Despite what you say, students are adults from the day when they reach the age of eighteen, and are expected to behave as such. The obvious solution to the problem is a termination. I have offered to finance this and to make all the necessary arrangements. Your daughter has seen fit to reject this suggestion.

  I am still prepared to finance this simple and safe solution, if you can persuade Kerry to change her mind and behave sensibly; that would enable her to continue her course here without interruption. It is much the most sensible way out of her difficulties, for I am happy to say that she is a gifted and diligent student, who should in due course obtain an excellent degree.

  I cannot accede to your suggestion of a meeting. It would in my view serve no useful purpose, since the situation is the one I have set out above.

  Yours sincerely,

  Matthew Upson

  The words swam before Kerry’s eyes. She sat down heavily on the chair she had moved, then read them again. Even now, with her eyes fully open, she found the formal, uncompromising tone shocking, from the man who had whispered endearments into her ears.

  But it was not Matt Upson’s phrases but her father’s reaction to them which concerned her now. She read the last sentence several times, hoping it would change its meaning, knowing all the time that it wouldn’t.